The University of Michigan rally had all the usual trappings — a fired-up crowd, a microphone, and a Democratic congresswoman ready to tell working Americans exactly who they should hate next.
Rep. Summer Lee of Pennsylvania took the stage in Ann Arbor to stump for Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, and she didn’t waste time with pleasantries. She went straight for the class warfare playbook — the one that’s been dog-eared and coffee-stained since Bernie Sanders first dusted it off in 2015.
“I see other people who are fighting like hell to make you feel like your enemy is sitting next to you,” Lee told the crowd.
“That your enemy is somebody who worships differently than you are, or looks differently than you are, comes from a different socioeconomic background than you, unless they are the upper class.”
Read that again. A sitting United States congresswoman just stood on a stage and designated an entire economic class as “the enemy.” Not a foreign adversary. Not a criminal cartel. Americans. People who built businesses, earned degrees, took risks, made payroll. Those are the villains now.
Karl Marx is blushing somewhere.
The Envy Engine
This isn’t new. It’s just getting louder. The modern Democratic Party has built a political engine that runs on one fuel: resentment. Bernie Sanders laid the pipeline. Elizabeth Warren welded the joints. The Squad turned the ignition. And now every ambitious lefty candidate from coast to coast is flooring the gas pedal because — and here’s the ugly truth — it works.
Abdul El-Sayed is running for Senate in Michigan with the full backing of Sanders and the Squad’s blessing. Rashida Tlaib was in the audience. This wasn’t some rogue appearance. This was the party’s rising wing, showing its whole hand to a cheering crowd.
And here’s where it gets stupid. Lee didn’t stop at the class warfare bit. She kept going.
“They only have the politics of fear and division and destruction and disruption. They need us to keep our focus away from the people who have participated in the biggest sex trafficking ring in our country.”
So in a single breath, she accused the upper class of being the enemy, then pivoted to a Jeffrey Epstein reference like she was dealing cards at a conspiracy poker table. Fear and division? Ma’am, you just told a crowd of college kids to treat successful Americans like hostile combatants. That is the politics of fear and division. You didn’t call it out — you performed it, live, with applause.
The Zohran Effect
What makes this genuinely dangerous isn’t one rally in Michigan. It’s the trend. Candidates like Zohran Mamdani are winning elections on this exact platform. The radical left sees those victories and thinks, “That’s the recipe.” Demonize success. Promise redistribution. Wrap it in social justice language. Win.
Every cycle, the window shifts further left. What was considered fringe socialism five years ago is now the mainstream pitch at a major university rally headlined by sitting members of Congress. JFK asked what you could do for your country. These people want to know what your country can confiscate from your neighbor.
The Trump Contrast
This is exactly why Trump’s economic message keeps landing. He doesn’t tell Americans to resent the guy down the street who drives a nicer truck. He tells them the system got rigged by politicians and bureaucrats — and then he actually goes after the bureaucrats. There’s a difference between “your successful neighbor is the enemy” and “the government that made it harder for you to succeed is the problem.” One is communism with a campaign logo. The other is common sense.
Trump didn’t build his coalition on envy. He built it on aspiration. That’s a distinction the Summer Lees of the world will never understand, because aspiration doesn’t fill rally seats the way rage does.
Where This Goes
The Squad wing isn’t slowing down. They’re recruiting. They’re fundraising. They’re winning primaries. Until voters in places like Michigan start rejecting this “eat the rich” theater, the Democratic Party will keep sliding toward a philosophy that has failed in every country where it’s been tried — and left a body count in most of them.
Summer Lee called the upper class the enemy. What she really did was admit, out loud, that her party’s entire strategy is to make Americans hate each other — just along the lines they get to draw.
That’s not democracy. That’s a revolution cosplaying as a campaign rally.