Three self-identified Democratic socialist candidates won their New York primary races on Tuesday, June 23. CNN senior political commentator Van Jones watched the results come in and said what cable news hosts usually have the discipline to keep private: "The revolution is being televised."
He wasn't warning about it. He was announcing it like a product launch.
"The Democratic socialists are an insurgency in this party," Jones continued on Kaitlan Collins's show "The Source." "The left is on the march." Among the night's results: Brad Lander, running as an open socialist, defeated two-term incumbent Dan Goldman in the NY-13 congressional race. Goldman, who led the Trump impeachment effort, wasn't liberal enough to survive his own primary. The candidates who won campaigned on anti-Zionism, police abolition, and socialist economic policies, with the backing of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
James Waterman at NewsBusters catalogued what happened on the CNN set that night, and the transcript reads less like news coverage than a rally speech. Collins hosted the segment. Jones provided the thesis. California Congressman Ro Khanna supplied the justification: "This is fundamentally about Gaza. Young people saw on their phones for two years the genocide." No follow-up question. No challenge to the characterization. Just a sitting congressman calling American foreign policy "genocide" on live television with a nod from the anchor.
To CNN's credit, they did have a Republican in the room. Strategist Shermichael Singleton offered what should have been the segment's lead: "I see an iteration of the Democratic Party that does not believe in capitalism." It landed like a footnote. Collins didn't explore it. Jones didn't engage it. The conversation moved on, because the segment wasn't structured as a debate. It was structured as a celebration with a token dissenter.
The distinction matters. News networks cover election results all the time. Anchors express surprise, analysts offer context, and the audience forms its own conclusions. What happened on "The Source" on June 23 was different. The framing — "revolution," "insurgency," "on the march" — was borrowed from movement language, not journalistic language. When a commentator says "the revolution is being televised" and the host doesn't push back, the network has taken a position.
The policy platform these candidates ran on is worth stating plainly. Police abolition is not police reform. Anti-Zionism, in the form presented during these campaigns, is not a nuanced foreign policy position. Socialist economics is not progressive taxation. These are specific, radical positions that a majority of American voters — including a majority of registered Democrats in national polling — do not support. CNN presented them as an exciting new chapter.
Dan Goldman won his seat by leading the impeachment case against Donald Trump. In Democratic politics circa 2024, that was a golden credential. Two years later, it wasn't enough to survive a primary against a candidate who thinks capitalism is the problem. That's not an insurgency within the Democratic Party. That is the Democratic Party telling you what it's becoming.
Van Jones called it a revolution. Shermichael Singleton called it a party that no longer believes in capitalism. One of them was celebrating. The other was diagnosing. CNN aired both — and only one of them got a follow-up question.