MORNING GLORY: We're living through the Summer of the DSA (and Hasan Piker)

1967’s "Summer of Love" kicked off the American habit of defining a summer season with a phrase.

Some phrases stick.

Some do not.

1968’s "Summer of Rage" tagline stuck.

The "Summer of Watergate" could be 1973 and the Senate Select Committee’s hearings would have stuck, but President Richard Nixon survived those and would have survived the summer of 1974 but for the release of the tapes.

MORNING GLORY: HASAN PIKER’S RADICAL RHETORIC IS BECOMING DEMOCRATS’ 2026 BRAND The Bicentennial Summer was as memorable as this summer’s celebration of the 250th birthday of the United States — but those months are defined by a day, not months.

1977’s Summer of Sam, 1994’s Summer of O.J. and 2020’s Summer of George Floyd are not fixtures of the language, but do serve as reference points.

With a week left in this summer, the touchpoints seem likely to be the rise of Democratic Socialists of America ("DSA") and the meteoric rise in awareness among the general public of Hasan Piker, an online Twitch streamer whose toxic combination of radical politics, profanity, vulgarity, anti-Israel and hate-filled rhetoric merged with the DSA’s march through the Democratic primaries to make it appear to "normal" Americans from the center-left to the center-right as though the Democratic Party had become unhinged and taken over by a cult-like group of crazed anti-American extremists.

The "Summer of the DSA and Hasan Piker" is unwieldy, but accurate.

Shorthand will probably reduce it to the "Summer of the DSA," and even though Piker is closely ideologically aligned with DSA, appearing at DSA events and rallies, Piker does not appear to be a dues-paying DSAer.

Still, the "Summer of DSA" will catch him up even as it includes the primary election victories of Chris Rabb in Pennsylvania, Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier and Brad Lander in New York (Lander is a former DSA member but left in 2023), and Democratic Senate nominees Angie Nixon in Florida and Troy Jackson in Maine who are DSA-endorsed candidates.

Hard-left "progressive" Democrats running for Senate like Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota, Sherrod Brown in Ohio and James Talarico in Texas have not been formally endorsed by their state DSAs or the national group, but their ascendancy compliments rather than contradicts the enormous shift to the left of the Democrats in the wake of President Trump’s re-election in 2024.

DSA’S GROWING GRIP ON DEM PARTY HITS NEW TERRITORY AS ESTABLISHMENT FALLS IN LINE Will the "Summer of DSA" define the actual midterms ahead? Many in legacy media want to define the fall’s voting, which culminates on November 3, as a referendum on President Trump but that’s not what is unfolding.