In order to fight it, you have to know who and what you're fighting. — Rochelle Taub, Undercover Patriot
On a weekday evening in lower Manhattan, Rochelle Taub walked into a storefront office for what the Democratic Socialists of America calls a “DSA 101” meeting. She was not there to join. She was there to see, with her own eyes, what this organization is actually telling people behind closed doors.
What she found is the subject of the premiere episode of The Red Threat, a new Proud American Studios podcast hosted by former intelligence professional D.W. Wilber. Taub’s firsthand account offers a ground-level look at how the DSA recruits, what it teaches, and what it really stands for.
Who Is Rochelle Taub?
Rochelle Taub is a creative consultant with twenty years of experience working on branding and messaging for major companies. She has studied how the right words and imagery can influence decision-making, and she understands how advertising shapes culture. She is also a mother of three, a lifelong New Yorker, and the daughter of legal immigrants who came to the United States from India, Morocco, and Argentina in the 1960s and 1970s.
It was that combination of professional training and personal conviction that drove her to investigate the DSA on her own terms.
“I really wanted to hear the DSA from their own mouths versus through the lens of the media,”
Taub said during the episode. “In order to fight it, you have to know who and what you’re fighting.”
What She Walked Into
The meeting took place in a storefront office in lower Manhattan. Taub described an environment saturated with political messaging from the moment she entered the room. Palestinian flags hung on the walls. The Wi-Fi password incorporated the phrase “seize the means.” A whiteboard displayed the slogan “babies over billionaires.”
The presenters were polished and welcoming. Attendees were instructed not to interrupt one another, told that everyone came from different backgrounds, and encouraged to feel comfortable. On the surface, it felt inclusive.
“They present themselves as very approachable, very nice, overly politically correct, overly apologetic,” Taub said. “But really, when you get down into the nitty-gritty and they start their presentation, it’s the opposite of that.”
The People in the Room
Taub described the attendees as predominantly white, college-educated millennials. Many had recently relocated to New York City from other parts of the country, including Chicago, Vermont, and New Jersey. Several said they were looking for community and a sense of belonging.
Among the attendees, one was a teacher. Another was an architect. The presenters spoke in a tone Taub compared to a college lecture, assuming a baseline familiarity with socialist ideology. The overall atmosphere, she said, was more academic seminar than political rally.
“My feeling is that a lot of them have moved into New York City, are sort of lost,” Taub said. “They want to find community, find people who have similar goals and similar ideology.”
Host D.W. Wilber, drawing on decades of experience in intelligence work, noted a pattern.
“They often live empty lives and they’re looking for that bright shiny object that’ll give them some self-worth and self-value,” -D.W. Wilber, Host
Marxism, Stated Plainly
The DSA did not conceal its ideology at the meeting. According to Taub, presenters openly described the organization as Marxist. They laid out a class framework in which anyone who owns a business, no matter how small, is considered an adversary, and anyone who works for wages is the person the DSA claims to fight for.
The example Taub recalled was revealing: a hardworking farmer who owns and works their own land was cast as the enemy, while a Starbucks barista was held up as the person the movement exists to liberate.
“They’ve been brainwashed almost to think that anybody who owns something, who creates something from scratch, is the enemy,” Taub said. “If you open your own business, no matter how hard you worked for that, you’re then the oppressor. That’s totally ridiculous.”
Wilber connected the rhetoric to historical precedent, pointing to the failures of Soviet collectivism. “We know how well collectivism fed the Russian people back when the Soviet Union was controlling things,” he said.
The Palestinian Solidarity Thread
One of the most striking elements Taub described was the prominence of Palestinian solidarity messaging throughout the meeting. Beyond the flags on the walls, the lead presenter wore a necklace symbolizing Palestine and carried a matching tote bag. Attendees wore keffiyehs.
The meeting took place the day after a candidate Taub identified as Abdul El Sayed won a primary in Michigan. DSA leaders at the meeting celebrated the result. According to Taub, one presenter had been in Michigan the previous day canvassing for the candidate. The room’s reaction was enthusiastic.
“They were excited specifically because they say it helps prove that a candidate can win on an anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian message,” Taub said. “And that seemed to be a goal of theirs, which is very troubling.”
The DSA also discussed an internal “anti-war” working group focused on opposing U.S. foreign policy, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Cuba embargo. Taub said presenters made claims such as the United States sending weapons on commercial airlines out of JFK to Israel, without providing specifics or evidence.
Social Clubs as Entry Points
Taub described a broad network of social activities the DSA uses to draw in new members: reading groups, running clubs, coffee meetups, and theater outings. Once inside these groups, the conversations shift toward ideology.
“In those clubs, the conversations that are taking place are anti-American,” Taub said. “How we can change the current political system within the U.S., abolish the Senate, all of these kinds of things.”
Taub drew a direct comparison to the social clubs that preceded the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, where sports groups and cultural gatherings served as recruitment pipelines for political radicalization.
“All it takes is people to keep joining, little by little, getting their comrades on the ground, and destroying America as we know it,” she said.
A Former Intelligence Officer’s Perspective
Wilber brought a career’s worth of context to the conversation. He described standing on a viewing platform in West Berlin during the Cold War, looking over the Berlin Wall into East Germany: the minefields, the barbed wire, the guard towers manned by soldiers trained to shoot to kill.
Along the western side of the wall, he recalled, small memorials marked the spots where East German citizens had been killed trying to escape to freedom.
“I wish every single American could stand where I was standing at that time and see what I was seeing,” Wilber said. “They would have a much better appreciation for the freedoms that we cherish in this country.”
He also noted that the DSA’s tactics mirror the covert influence operations he studied and encountered during his intelligence career, where messaging is carefully crafted to reshape how populations perceive political and national security issues.
A Mother’s Warning
For Taub, the stakes are personal. She described growing up in a New York where, as she put it, “everybody got along.” Today, her daughters attend school with security guards outside. Armed guards stand watch at her synagogue.
“This is not the world that my kids grew up in,” she said. “A lot of this is troubling because of this ideology that’s being pushed by the DSA, where they’re all about community and community programs. But really, through this community program, they’re pushing a lot of this hate.”
Taub said she brought her experience to Proud American Studios because she believes the information needs to reach the public without the filter of traditional media.
“What’s being presented as community and organizing is going to end up hurting the little people, no matter who you are, from any walk of life,” she said. “Socialism, Marxism, communism can affect you down the line.”
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