Investigative Report - Wanted: A Director of Anti-Extremism. The Targets Are the Democrats' Own People

In Washington, the think tank Third Way is advertising for a "Director, Anti-Extremism." Third Way is the think tank of Washington's wealthy, business-friendly Democratic establishment. It fights left-wing reforms and backs policies that favor major donors and corporations. You might think this was one of those government agencies keeping an eye on bombers and insurrectionists. The truth is more mundane, and that makes it worse. The targets are Democrats who stand farther to the left than the people at the top are willing to tolerate.

An internal email dated July 23, which we have in full and which was written by Lanae Erickson, a senior vice president at Third Way, lays out the plan. For more than a year now, it says, "extreme left-wing voices" have been gaining ground, a sharp break with the tradition of the American left, radical and "illiberal," embodied by people like Zohran Mamdani and moving toward a system modeled on authoritarian Cuba. When people hear socialism, they think of Scandinavia, but what the activists behind the DSA want, the email argues, is much closer to Cuba. Cuba. The author goes even further. Wherever these forces come to power, she says, they govern badly and leave behind the very working and middle classes they claim to speak for. There is a kind of surrender built into that logic: You take your opponent's smear and use it yourself first, just to beat him to it.

Here is the striking part: Third Way attacks the Trump administration in harsh terms while at the same time talking exactly like it. The memo went out just days before a State Department report that claimed to detect Cuban influence on the American left and somehow singled out Ben Cohen, the founder of an ice cream company, as a dangerous subversive, along with Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. That same month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio had led an international summit against "political terrorism" and brought along a fresh phrase, "far-left terrorism." That produces a rare alliance across the divide. The right-wing secretary of state and the centrist think tank speak the same language and are gearing up against the same handful of socialists. They fear the authoritarian, reach for his tools, and in doing so move closer to him than anyone should be comfortable with.

The internal email comes from Lanae Erickson, a leading Third Way figure on social policy, education and politics. Under the subject line "Formalizing our efforts to combat extremism," she says Third Way wants to intensify its fight against positions within Democratic ranks that it considers extreme. The "MAGA right" is explicitly named, but so are parts of the American left and the orbit of the Democratic Socialists of America. Among other things, Third Way announces that it will hire a Director of Anti-Extremism and says the goal is to keep the Democratic Party in the political center while also finding a way to defeat MAGA in the 2028 elections and beyond.

The campaign is not aimed at Trump and not at the Republicans they are supposed to beat in 2028. Nor is it about disinformation or foreign interference, yesterday's favorite alarms, or antisemitism, or the effects of social media, and certainly not the guns flooding the country. It is aimed at other Democrats, more precisely at the socialists, and at whatever Third Way decides to call "extremism." This is how the federal police usually talks, not an organization that describes itself as the defender of the reasonable center. You read its description of moderate politics and the vital center, then look at the job posting for an extremism hunter, and the two only fit together if you define the center as whatever is left after everyone else has been sorted out. A spot on the top bunk in the reeducation camp, and the joke writes itself.

This is not just barroom talk landing in an inbox. Erickson announces an organized, permanent effort, a strategy to warn the party about these dangers, along with the hiring of that director, whose job will be to rebut "harmful ideas" and recruit allies. The goal, she says, is to build a counterweight to forces pushing more and more Democrats toward "extreme and illiberal" ideas. President Jonathan Cowan was more explicit last week, talking about $15 million to discredit democratic socialism by 2028. "We're gearing up for the next war," he said. The position is supposed to work with leadership and the communications team, recruit allies and build a counterweight. In the language of government agencies, that would be a task force against a threat. Here, the threat is their own youth.

Shown here is a job posting from the U.S. think tank Third Way for a "Director, Anti-Extremism." Third Way describes itself as a national centrist think tank and advocacy organization that has fought political extremism since 2005 and supports a business-friendly, moderate course within the Democratic Party. The new position is explicitly supposed to organize the fight against political extremes.

Everything hangs on one word, "extremist," and even more on what is missing from it. In the past, every administration, whether under Bush or Obama, put an adjective in front of it: "violent extremism." It was violence, threatened or carried out, that turned a citizen into a suspect. Federal police files carried the same wording: "racially motivated violent extremism," "anti-government violent extremism," ugly labels that at least pretended there had to be a threat of physical harm. Third Way drops the adjective, just as the Trump administration does. The wrong beliefs are enough, wrong as measured by the party apparatus in Washington. Once, the word was reserved for American Muslims and would-be revolutionaries. Today it can hit any citizen who strays from the party line. A word like that works ahead of the facts. It does less to describe an act than to prepare what comes next by pushing the person it labels outside the circle of people you still bother arguing with. Once you call someone an extremist, you no longer have to rebut them. You only have to fight them.

Asked how Third Way defines this extremism, spokesperson Kate DeGruyter said it was aimed at the DSA itself, the Democratic Socialists of America, the largest socialist organization in the United States, not at liberal Democrats, while leaving open the question of who still qualifies as a liberal Democrat. She would not say who was providing the $15 million, saying the money was still being raised. A campaign that cannot clearly define its enemy and does not want to name its donors has one advantage: It can be expanded almost without limit. The blurrier the line, the more people end up on the wrong side of it when in doubt. A label with no fixed boundary, a pot of money with no names attached - there are few easier ways to wage politics against your own people.

Because the DSA itself is too small a target, Third Way proceeds the way the federal police would and widens the category. The target is anyone who belongs to the DSA or repeats its talking points. And because even that is too narrow, soon enough it is enough to embrace "toxic ideas and offensive rhetoric." Abdul El-Sayed felt it before he won Michigan's Democratic primary for a U.S. Senate seat. Cowan wrote an open letter attacking him as an alleged DSA man, even though El-Sayed has never been a member and explicitly calls himself a "capitalist." Since his victory, Third Way supports him, of course. The reversal gives away the method. Once somebody wins, the label disappears, because it was never really about conviction. It was always about usefulness.

Three members of Congress openly identify with democratic socialism, Senator Bernie Sanders along with Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, plus the mayor of the country's largest city, Zohran Mamdani. Everyone knows the names. Their political current is exactly what the new department is supposed to fight.

Third Way showed what that looks like in practice this week with Francesca Hong, who is running for the Democratic nomination for governor of Wisconsin. "She's not a real person," Senior Fellow Yemisi Egbewole, a former Biden White House official, told host Mark Halperin, then followed it with an insinuation of mental illness: Hong was "deeply unwell" and should work through some of her beliefs in therapy. The label "extremist" pushes the dissenter beyond merely foolish and into the realm of the insane. Declaring people who disagree with you crazy is an old move by those in power, and it usually ends with a nurse telling the patient to calm down. The standard is convenient: What would make it onto cable television counts as healthy, anything beyond that becomes a case for a professional. That is how the boundary of what may be said moves from the ballot box into the therapist's office. There have been plenty of regimes that sent their critics to clinics instead of arguing with them, and none of them is remembered today as a model of freedom.

Third Way is practically an arm of the Democratic Party, run by former government officials. Cowan served under Bill Clinton as chief of staff at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The organization supplies the party leadership with the words that become the talking points elected Democrats use to describe the country and their own voters. Founded in 2005, it promotes the "vital center" across seven areas, from climate policy to social policy, and now that very center is declaring everything outside itself an emergency. A center that defines itself only by its enemies has stopped being a place and become a boundary drawn to keep other people out.

Our investigation shows how deep the split now runs through the party itself. Ahead of the midterms, when every vote counts, Third Way is spending millions to fight the left wing and turn its best-known figures into the problem. In doing so, the establishment is forging the very weapons Republicans will be happy to use against Democrats on the campaign trail. A fight over direction and personnel is turning into a war inside the party, at the very moment when Democrats should be fighting together for control of Congress. A movement that drives out its own flank makes itself smaller, and on Election Day every vote matters that it managed to alienate beforehand.

Erickson writes that they want to be a "big tent," but that sometimes a big tent needs red lines, for the future of the party and democracy in America. So the big tent gets a dividing wall, with a bunk behind it. A party that begins its defense of democracy by declaring half of its own base the enemy has already crossed the line into what it claims to be fighting.