On America's 250th Birthday, the Democratic Party Is Running Candidates Who Hate America

On Tuesday, a woman named Melat Kiros won a Democratic congressional primary in Colorado. She has publicly stated that the United States made the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center inevitable.

Let that land for a moment.

Nearly 3,000 Americans were murdered on that September morning. Firefighters climbed into burning skyscrapers and didn't come back. Office workers called their families from 100 floors up to say goodbye. The country watched in real time as the towers fell.

And a person who just won a Democratic Party primary thinks we had it coming.

What did Democratic leadership say about this? Senator John Hickenlooper of Colorado said he "believes in a big tent." That's it. No condemnation. No demand for a retraction. Just a big tent. When your big tent includes people who blame America for al-Qaeda murdering civilians, you don't have a coalition. You have a problem.

And she's not alone. In Pennsylvania, a man named Chris Rabb just won his Democratic primary in the 3rd Congressional District. He called the United States "a nation born on stolen land and stolen labor." He's not some fringe figure who wandered in from the internet. He won. The party nominated him.

This is happening on the eve of America's 250th birthday.

Think about what that actually means. While the rest of the country is planning fireworks and barbecues, celebrating two and a half centuries of self-governance, the Democratic Party is producing nominees who think this country was illegitimate at its founding and engineered its own terrorist attacks.

The timing is not subtle. It is not accidental. It is a window into what a significant portion of the American left actually believes.

Ask yourself why nobody stopped them. Democratic primaries aren't secret. The things these candidates said were publicly available before election day. The party establishment knew who they were. They chose not to act.

They didn't act because they can't. The base of the Democratic Party increasingly believes these things. Maura Healey in Massachusetts burned through a billion dollars a year on migrant housing and called it compassion. Zohran Mamdani became mayor of New York City. Kamala Harris is reportedly calling Mamdani to shore up support for a 2028 presidential run. These aren't outliers getting through the cracks. This is the direction of the party.

That means something for the country. A healthy republic requires two serious political parties. Not parties that agree on everything — they shouldn't. But parties that agree on the basic legitimacy of the nation itself. When one party cannot field candidates who believe the country deserved to exist in 1776 or didn't deserve to be attacked in 2001, something fundamental has broken.

Nobody will say this directly, but the question isn't whether these candidates are extreme. It's whether the party they belong to has any center left to appeal to. The answer, based on Tuesday night, looks like no.

AOC endorsed Abdul el Sayed in Michigan. Progressive PACs are running ads turning Mike Johnson's attack on their socialist platform into campaign commercials — because they're proud of it. The establishment isn't fighting back. The establishment is accommodating.

John Hickenlooper called it a big tent. On the 250th birthday of the United States, a Democratic senator could not find the language to condemn someone who blamed America for 9/11.

Big tent. Remember that phrase. That is the Democratic Party's official answer to this moment.

America turns 250 tomorrow. The people who just won Democratic primaries don't think it should have been born.

That is where we are. And one of our two major parties is either too frightened or too sympathetic to say otherwise.