Former Boston DSA Board Member Says Group Defends Maduro, Treats America as “Unique Evil”

Jake Altman, a former executive board member of the Democratic Socialists of America’s Boston chapter, told Fox News Digital the organization he once joined as a pragmatic economic-left alternative now sounds like the “extreme groups on the left” he wanted to avoid. The interview was published Saturday. Fox said it sought comment from the DSA and did not immediately receive a response.

Altman said he came out of local union work looking for a “more pragmatic and thoughtful option on the left that was focused on economic policy.” Instead, he said, “DSA was beginning to sound more and more like those extreme groups on the left that I, you know, certainly didn’t want anything to do with.” He described the group’s current posture as an effort to “force their agenda down other people’s throats.”

He pointed to the 2017 election of Austin activist Danny Fetonte to DSA’s National Political Committee. The organization later found Fetonte had worked for the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas, a police union. Fetonte resigned. Altman called that record “troubling.”

In 2019, after a DSA statement he characterized as defending or apologizing for Nicolás Maduro’s government in Venezuela, Altman said he argued the group should denounce Maduro. “The democratic socialists and social Democrats in Venezuela are in the opposition. There should be free and fair elections,” he said. “The person disagreed with me and defended, you know, essentially defended the Maduro regime.”

He said that pattern has hardened. “Flash forward to today … you have DSA members saying, ‘Bernie Sanders, AOC, they’re not socialists.’” He added, “They’re willing to fall over themselves apologizing for any regime that opposes the United States, simply because it opposes the United States.”

Altman described the current mix inside the organization as “a marriage between more traditional Marxist utopianism and what you might call third worldism.” “Boiling it down,” he said, it is “this view that America is a unique evil in the world and that its enemies have a point.”

He said dissident voices have been silenced or have left. “My advice would be [to] leave.”

Altman has given Fox similar accounts earlier this year, including a July interview in which he said communists had “captured” the group and that its executive board was filled with “extremist caucuses,” and a September interview from Michigan in which he criticized Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. The Saturday piece focused on the Boston board years, the Fetonte episode, the Venezuela fight, and his warning that the DSA now treats anti-American regimes as allies by default.