About five decades ago, the world witnessed the passing of humanity’s catastrophic experiments in socialism. From 1978, post-Mao China began restoring capitalist practices in their core economic sectors. Then in 1989, Soviet communism – backward and bankrupt – finally collapsed. And across northern Europe, the Scandinavian countries abandoned their limited flirtation with socialism.

And yet today, America’s Democratic party is sprinting straight toward the socialist rabbit hole. What in the world is going on here? Especially in light of socialism’s unbroken history of ruinous policy failures, why is this now happening? And is this trend permanent or reversible?

This essay attempts to answer those vexing questions in three parts: first by documenting the extent of the Democrats’ ideological transformation; then by identifying what drives this phenomenon; and finally, by assessing whether, and if so how, this ideological shift may be reversible.

The Hard Left Turn of the Democrats

The scale of the Democrats’ leftward turn is illuminated by a somewhat circuitous thought experiment, namely: If asked to draft a 2028 party platform for the MAGA Republicans, what kind of language would you include? Here is an unusually fitting set of declarations – drawn from actual platform documents:

  • “[T]ake power . . . from entrenched bureaucracies . . . in Washington and put it back in the hands of ordinary people.”
  • “[R]estor[e] America’s economic greatness. . .”
  • “[R]estor[e] the basic American values that . . . always make [America] great: personal responsibility, individual liberty, tolerance, faith, family and hard work.”
  • “[R]eject . . . the big government theory that says we can hamstring business and tax and spend our way to prosperity.”
  • “[T]ackle spending . . . eliminate nonproductive programs; achieve defense savings; reform entitlement programs . . . [and] cut federal administrative costs …”
  • “[T]o restore order in our cities . . . put more police on the streets.”
  • “America is the world’s strongest military power and we must remain so.”

Now here’s what makes this so interesting: every sentence above comes from the actual 1992 platform of the Democratic party. Some might question whether this is a misleading set of curated excerpts – but it is not. In their 1992 platform, Bill Clinton’s Democrats echoed several core positions of the contemporary MAGA agenda.

Take the most polarizing issue from the MAGA agenda, namely, reversing and ending illegal immigration. Thirty years ago, sounding much like MAGA, Bill Clinton declared that “American jobs belong to America’s legal workers.” Once in office, Clinton initiated a comprehensive crackdown on illegal immigration. In his own words:

Our immigration policy is focused in four areas: first, strengthening border control; second, protecting American jobs by enforcing laws against illegal immigrants at the workplace; third, deporting criminal and deportable aliens; fourth, . . . denying illegal aliens benefits for public services or welfare.

Clinton also pledged to “triple the number of criminal and other deportable aliens deported,” and praised the immigration authorities for “deporting 110 illegal aliens every day. That’s almost 40,000 a year. And we’re going to do even better.”

This position was far from anomalous among 1990s Democrats. Texas Rep. Barbara Jordan, as Chair of a National Commission on Immigration Reform, demanded action to curb illegal immigration. She  emphasized the harms suffered by “the most vulnerable parts of our labor force” from “import[ing] lesser-skilled and unskilled workers to compete” with low-skilled American workers.

Immigration is far from the only issue on which 1990s Democrats align with 2020s Republicans. Welfare reform is another. In 1992 Bill Clinton campaigned on an explicit promise to “end welfare as we know it,” and in 1996 won passage of the most substantial welfare reform bill in decades. Within ten years, the caseload of the former AFDC program  (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) was reduced by 60 percent, with many former recipients having found long-term employment. The 1996 reforms are now viewed as a model and precursor for President Trump’s 2025 Medicaid reforms.

Crime prevention policy reflects a similar alignment. As the literal opposite of “defund the police” advocates, President Clinton campaigned for and then passed a major crime bill that gave federal funding for localities to hire and deploy 100,000 more police officers on the streets.  The bill also enacted a new federal “three strikes” law, mandating life sentences for all offenders found guilty of three violent felonies.

Against those policy benchmarks, the Democrats of the 2020s look like an entirely different party. Their mainstream policy agenda maps far to the left of the Clinton policy mix. And even that agenda is at risk of being eclipsed by a rising generation of party leaders, who now advocate a Marxist-socialist program.

On immigration policy, the Biden administration was the literal opposite of the Clinton administration. As  documented by the House Committee on Homeland Security, President Biden “ended numerous, effective border-security policies and replaced them with an agenda of open borders.” Biden refused to enforce the laws requiring detention and removal of illegal entrants, thus allowing over 10 million non-citizens to cross the border and stay here. His abandoning border enforcement also allowed cartels and notorious gangs like MS-13 and Tren de Aragua to seize control of the border. Among other harms, this allowed a devastating surge of illegal fentanyl imports, causing at least 200,000 American overdose deaths from 2021 through 2023.

Several of the party’s most popular leaders today still embrace the Biden immigration agenda, including Kamela Harris, Gavin Newsom, Pete Buttieieg, and Tim Walz. Two other prominent Democrats, Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have actually denounced Biden’s immigration policies for being too harsh. Harris, Warren, and Buttigieg also have gone so far as to urge de-criminalizing the act of illegal border crossing.

A parallel trend is evident regarding welfare policy. The positions of several leading Democrats effectively repudiate the Clinton welfare reform approach. Newsom, Harris, Ocasio-Cortez and Buttigieg all call for massive expansions in social welfare programs. Against President Clinton’s emphasis on “[f]irst and foremost . . . moving people from welfare to work,” both Newsom and Harris have sought to introduce Universal Basic Income (UBI) programs, that is, a taxpayer-funded basic income for all those who simply choose not to work.

The Democrats’ criminal justice positions reflect a similar leftward shift. In stark contrast to the Clinton-era deployment of 100,000 more police on the streets, contemporary Democratic leaders routinely seek to reduce both the volume and the severity of policing and prosecution.

Specifically, during the 2020 summer of anti-police riots, Kamela Harris explicitly rejected Clinton’s policy of more-police-for-safer-communities. She denounced as “old, tired, wrong, status quo thinking . . . [that] you get more safety by putting more police officers on the street,” and instead urged “redirecting resources” into social services, “to truly support communities to be healthy and therefore safe.” Also, amid the riots, Harris published a Twitter call for people to “chip in now . . . to help post bail for those protesting [and rioting] on the ground in Minnesota.”

Along similar lines, Ocasio-Cortez called for “defunding a $6 billion NYPD budget” and spending policing funds instead on education and housing needs.

Gavin Newsom publicly opposed a California referendum known as Proposition 36, which sought to restore felony penalties for store thefts under $950. The Proposition sought to reverse a prior referendum that had reclassified those thefts as misdemeanors, thus triggering a massive wave of smash-and-grab store thefts. That crime wave drove many retail stores out of business, especially in low-income communities. The subsequent Proposition 36 referendum passed – but then Newsom refused to fully fund the costs of implementing it.

Pete Buttigieg regularly – and falsely – accuses the criminal justice system of systemic racism, based on the higher proportion of Black Americans serving prison time. But in fact, as several statistical studies have demonstrated “racial differences in offending account for the disproportionate representation of blacks in prison” – i.e., racism is simply not a factor in those disparities. Buttigieg nonetheless seeks to reduce the number of incarcerated Americans by 50 percent – which would vastly increase the number of demonstrably dangerous offenders sent back onto the streets.

In sum, many leading 2020s Democrats promote policies that fall far to the left of the 1990s Clinton Democrats. Some observers nonetheless discount such concerns as just the usual swing of the pendulum, which supposedly always returns to the center. But signs of such a rebalancing are nowhere to be seen. On the contrary, the rising generation of Democratic leaders (which prominently includes Ocasio-Cortez) leans even harder toward the left. In fact, they make the older, left-leaning progressives look almost moderate by comparison.

The rising generation of harder-left leaning Democrats first gained prominence in 2018, with the election to Congress of the so-called “Squad” members: Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA). Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib are full-on members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), while their colleagues Omar and Pressley share many of the same issue positions. All four have called for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which would wholly open America’s borders to millions of un-vetted immigrants from around the world. All four favor nationalizing health insurance under a “Medicare for All” program, which would eliminate or greatly scale back private health insurance options. And they all favor the cancellation of student loan debt, a give-away to college graduates that would cost taxpayers up to a trillion dollars over ten years.

The Squad also seeks to break the Democrats long-established support for Israel’s existence and self-defense, having proposed so-called “Nakba” legislation, which effectively (and falsely) brands Israel’s founding as a genocidal act against Palestinian Arabs. Reps. Omar, Tlaib, and Pressley also voted to end “Iron Dome” aid to Israel, that is, funds for Israel’s purely defensive interceptions of incoming missiles – which missiles have been stockpiled en masse by both Iran and its regional terror proxies, all of whom repeatedly declare their goal of Israel’s complete annihilation.

The Democrats’ Left turn continued after 2018 and has become especially pronounced in 2026. The strength of this trend is indicated by the surge of officeholders and candidates now aligned with the three organizations advocating a socialist/left makeover of the Democratic party: the DSA, the Working Families Party (WFP) and the Justice Democrats (JD). The number of Democratic incumbents and candidates who are either members or endorsees of one or more such organizations include:

  • At least 19 Congressional incumbents.
  • At least 18 more Congressional candidates.
  • Two US Senate candidates.
  • One gubernatorial candidate (New Mexico).
  • Two major city Mayors (New York and Seattle).
  • Three more major city mayoral candidates (Washington DC, Los Angeles CA, and Jersey City NJ).

Some, including Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, dismiss dire warnings of socialist policy catastrophe, claiming that “democratic socialism” is just European social democracy – that is, a more expansive welfare state with higher taxes. But – and leaving aside the EU social democracies’ relative economic stagnation and industrial decline – America’s DSA seeks far more than higher taxes and welfare.

In fact, the DSA’s new 2026 platform has a lot more in common with Communism than social democracy. Its eye-popping list of Utopian policy pledges – including making most living costs “free” – would bankrupt the country even while imposing confiscatory levels of taxation; would nationalize all major industries (which wherever enacted, has brought devastating economic ruin – and an ever-shrinking tax base); promises to abolish police, prisons, immigration controls, and the entire military; pledges to fully open the borders and grant instant citizenship and voting rights to all comers; and proposes to abolish the Electoral College, the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the Presidency, thereby creating an unchecked dictatorship of the legislative majority – in effect, a 21st century do-over of the French Revolution’s Jacobin tyranny (hopefully, sans guillotine this time around).

Lest this sound like exaggeration, DSA members themselves acknowledge that “communist caucuses now hold the majority on the [DSA’s] National Political Committee.” But don’t just rely on others’ characterizations. Read the actual Platform, just adopted this summer by the DSA National Political Committee and generously quoted here:

  • Provide “universal health care at no cost to individuals” and “make all medical education and training public and free.”
  • “Build new, publicly owned social housing, . . . [and] establish universal rent control.”
  • “Enact [slavery] reparations.”
  • “Establish . . . a 32-hour work week with full pay and benefits …”
  • “Establish public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries …”
  • “Enact aggressive wealth taxes on the richest individuals and corporations to spend on public goods and infrastructure.”
  • Take “steps towards fully abolishing the police and prison system.”
  • Enact the “Green New Deal” and “[p]hase out the use of fossil fuels.”
  • “Defund the Department of War . . . and close overseas military bases.”
  • “End all military and economic aid to Israel” and “[r]ecognize the . . . Palestinian people[’s] . . . right of return” [i.e., to eliminate and replace Israel with a majority Palestinian state].
  • “Abolish ICE … End ICE detention and deportations … Legalize migration, grant amnesty for all immigrants regardless of status, . . . [and] [e]xtend full voting rights to all permanent U.S. residents.”
  • “Abolish the Electoral College. Replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress . . . and abolish the Senate.”

Notably, by defunding the American military and facilitating the annihilation of Israel, this DSA agenda would give free reign for rogue nations like Iran to amass nuclear arsenals. It also would surrender control over global security and trade flows to the China-Russia-Iran alliance – ceding them exclusive power over all offshore oil, gas, and rare earth minerals, and Taiwan’s industry-leading computer chips.

In sum, the DSA’s publicly declared agenda presents an existential threat to America’s continued existence in anything like its present form and does so on two fronts: domestically by dismantling the Constitution; and globally by subordinating America to the rule of its fiercest totalitarian adversaries.

DSA leaders have made no secret of their intent to capture the Democratic party and use it to install a fully socialist government. For instance, New York’s DSA/Democrat Mayor Zorhan Mamdani in 2021 urged a DSA youth conference, “We have to continue to elect more socialists, and we have to ensure that we are unapologetic about our socialism.” But he also urged fellow socialists to publicly emphasize less radical bread-and-butter issues like student debt and Medicare, while still pursuing “the end goal of seizing the means of production …”

The extremism of DSA Democrats is evidenced not just by the DSA’s platform, but also by the radical company that they keep. Several DSA-aligned candidates have welcomed and campaigned with media influencer Hasan Piker. Piker, who famously declared that “America deserved 9/11,” is likely the country’s most widely followed disseminator of hateful lies about America and Israel – with 3 million followers on his “Twitch” livestream. Journalist Eli Lake well sums up Piker’s venomous hatreds:

In January Piker posted on X that Hamas, the authors of the October 7, 2023, pogrom in Israel during which at least 43 Americans perished, “is a thousand times better than the fascist settler colonial apartheid state [of Israel].” In April he [declared] . . . that the Republican Party was “the biggest terrorist internationally.” At a debate at Yale University later that month he crowed that “the American empire” was “in the process of dying.” In July he praised the late Chinese tyrant Mao Zedong, a man responsible for tens of millions of deaths, as “one of the great leaders of this world.” Earlier this year, Piker traveled to the Communist states of Cuba and China and gushed like a tourist visiting the Louvre for the first time.

In that same essay, Lake made a profound observation on what Piker’s lofty status reveals about the state of our political discourse today. Lake first noted how in 2008, then-Presidential candidate Barack Obama had to save his campaign from likely collapse by thoroughly denouncing his former church minister, friend, and advisor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright – whose America-loathing sermons had just come to light in the media. Today, by contrast, far left Democratic candidates are winning endorsements, elections, and public accolades – all while openly allying themselves with Hasan Piker’s viciously anti-American and anti-Israel rantings.

How far we have fallen. Which invites the question: Why? What factors made hard left socialism, America-loathing, and Israel-eliminationism into popular, winning campaign strategies – which strategies not long ago would have been deemed pathways to political suicide?

The Source of the Hard Left Turn

Making sense of the hard left’s resurgence might well start by addressing the question: Just who are the people voting for all of this?

Demographic analyses of DSA candidate wins have found that “[y]oung and college-educated voters in denser urban areas formed a core bloc for many candidates aligned with the socialist left . . . while lower-income and non-college educated voters typically supported their opponents.”

Statistician Nate Silver confirms that this pattern has been repeatedly manifested in elections all across the country. His research shows that the strongest support for both Democrats and DSA candidates comes from “voters with postgraduate degrees but lower-to-middle household incomes of $30K to $60K per year.”

Silver explains this phenomenon by referencing social scientist Peter Turchin, proponent of the “elite overproduction” thesis. This thesis holds that:

America is producing “too many” college graduates relative to the number of high-prestige, well-paying jobs available to them. People . . . in this situation often carry heavy student loan burdens or other sorts of debt. Even if their material situation is objectively “just fine,” it’s rarely great. They’re gloomy about their own financial prospects and feel aggrieved about the state of the country.

This explanation accords with the so-called “affordability crisis,” which as covered in the media, emphasizes young college graduates settling in high-cost cities. In this framing, young people “don’t want to move to Venezuela or Cuba, but they want price controls in everything. They want to freeze the rent, they want free rides in buses, [and] they want to make sure that groceries are . . . price controlled somehow.”

But per Turchin and others, the underlying issue is not just living costs, but also status and a sense of foreclosed prospects. A recent New Yorker essay compellingly made that case, summed up by its title, “Subaru Socialists and the Great Disappointed.” The essay focused on

young people who did everything they were asked to do but still found themselves working at a Starbucks or in an Amazon warehouse. Their discontent . . . is what happens when people with degrees realize that what they thought was a temporary postgraduate job will almost certainly become their career. There is no dream job coming …

But this analysis invites the foundational question, why then turn to socialism – especially given the abundant evidence of how socialism always worsens the very problems that drive these young adults’ discontents? E.g.: Rent control, which always reduces the housing supply and hence worsens access; Government grocery stores, which end up stocking low-quality goods along half-empty shelves; And government health care systems, which force ever longer waits for doctor visits and surgeries, and fall ever farther behind state-of-the-art treatment offerings. As one observer astutely put it: “Socialistic programs caused the affordability crisis. [Now t]he DSA wants to double down [on that].”

The answer to this seemingly baffling question follows from the demographic evidence noted above, namely, that the shift toward socialism is strongest among young college graduates. And although obvious, this relevant fact merits emphasis: what most distinguishes college graduates from the rest of the population is exposure to four years of college education. Herein lies much of the answer to the riddle of resurgent socialism: In contemporary America, what most distinguishes college education from the rest of the country is its almost total liberal-left bias. No other segment of the American population has been marinated in such all-enveloping leftism – for at least four continuous years – like recent college graduates have been.

College faculty surveys demonstrate that progressive leftism is now the dominant mindset among America’s professors, and that it largely crowds out any dissenting political views. A 2022 study of Harvard faculty disclosed that over 80 percent self-identify as either “liberal” or “very liberal,” while just one percent self-identified as “conservative.” Not one identified as “very conservative.” More broadly, from among 51 top-rated American universities in the 2017 U.S. News & World Report rankings, 39 percent had zero registered Republicans on their full-time faculty. At the other 61 percent, Republican registration was just “slightly more than zero percent …” The sample set included 8,688 tenure track Ph.D.–holding professors. Among all academic departments at those 51 colleges, 78.2 percent had “either zero Republicans, or so few as to make no difference.”

Even more alarming, a 2007 survey of 1,417 full-time professors at 927 colleges and universities found that across the social sciences, 17.6 percent of professors identified as Marxists, while 24 percent identified as Radicals. Across the Humanities, 5 percent of professors identified as Marxists, while 19 percent identified as Radicals. Little wonder then that Political Science Prof. Sam Abrams at Sarah Lawrence College reported in 2020, that on contemporary college campuses, “dissent from the progressive stance is treated as treason …”

Also consistent with contemporary hard left ideology, an extensive ADL survey of college faculties across the country found pervasive anti-Israel bias and frequent antisemitic conduct. This bias is real and impactful. A 2025 Hillel survey found that “43% of Jewish college students avoided expressing their views about Israel on campus or to classmates because of fears of antisemitism.”

As Demographer Joel Kotkin explains, the leftist monoculture’s capture of academia is highly influential:

Professors have become powerful politically – they are the core of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, and they predictably hold Leftist views… [They] are shaping generations, sending youth into the world spouting the standard progressive script and displaying proud ignorance of the achievements of Western Civilization. Virtually no major job category is more uniform in ideology.

As a result, “students coming to class, particularly in the liberal arts, are deficient in knowledge of such things as the failure of socialism in the USSR or the repressive nature of contemporary China. After all, socialism’s lethal failures are inconvenient facts for Marxist professors …”

In other words, socialism’s catastrophic failures, along with the millions of innocents slaughtered “for the greater good” by socialist dictatorships, now receive scant attention at American universities. Consequently, as Kotkin notes, “[p]rogressives would rather accuse Israelis, Americans, and Britons of genocide, while ignoring the fact that the greatest mass murderers in history did so under the Red banner.”

These college faculty data go a long way toward explaining the surge in socialist sentiment among recent college graduates. They align closely with a 2025 Axios poll of over 1,500 college students nationwide, which found that

67 percent of students surveyed held a positive or neutral opinion of the word ‘socialism,’ compared with only 40 percent of respondents holding the same opinion regarding ‘capitalism.’ Negative views of capitalism outweigh negative views of socialism by an even greater difference: 53% v. 23%.

To be clear, few large-scale social phenomena have just one cause, and the professoriate is not the sole driver of students’ leftist ideology. Social media also play a significant role, especially online foreign influence campaigns from adversaries like Russia, China, and Iran. The latter aggressively “seek to undermine democracy,” by curating and fostering negative views of America, its institutions, and its alliances. They also promote discord by inciting hatred of Israel and Jews. But those influences would likely have far less impact if young Americans were not already primed to embrace them, from their prolonged campus immersion in leftism and anti-Israelism.

In sum, America’s college campuses are now the principal breeding grounds for the leftism and anti-Israelism that is capturing the Democratic party.

Is This Permanent or Reversible?

The DSA and its ideological fellow-travelers have effectively launched a war for the soul of the Democratic party. The above analysis suggests that whether the party, and ultimately the country, succumbs to this hard left ideology depends, firstly, on developments within the country’s leading idea-shaping institutions, and then secondly, on the balance of power across the political/policy arena. This implicates at least four decisive arenas of discourse and influence: academia; the media; the national security space; and the Democratic party itself.

  1. The Academic Arena. In the long run, academia arguably wields the most impactful influence over the country’s ideological future – as the above-cited statistics indicate. The reason is, our universities play the central role in shaping the conceptual worldview of each rising generation of leaders, and hence over the future shape of political discourse. And as documented above, most university faculties now comprise a closed, intolerant monoculture of leftist ideology. There are two models of change for breaking open that monoculture. One is to build anew from the ground up – as has been done by the founders of the recently-launched University of Austin. The second is to reform from within, both by hiring intellectually diverse faculty, and by founding viewpoint-diverse teaching centers on campus, like Princeton’s James Madison program. But because most campuses’ ideological field of play is so heavily weighted in just one direction, change will come only from influences outside or above the faculty level, namely: (1) alumni/donors; (2) University Trustees; and/or (3) Federal and state regulators.
  1. The Media/Influencer Arena. Thanks to dozens of excellent authors, the catastrophic history of socialism is abundantly and accessibly documented: Solzhenitsyn, Stéphane Courtois, Robert Conquest, Varlam Shalamov, Frank Dikotter, and Sean McMeekin, just to name a few. But because academia and large swaths of the media manifest such a pervasive liberal-left bias, those authors and the facts they document are greatly underrepresented in public discourse. Hence the dispositive question is whether alternative media platforms can reach a sufficiently wide audience to make those facts more widely known to the broader public. The actual story deserves telling, namely: Socialism always promises Utopia, but always brings dystopia. And this is far more than some arcane dispute over the fine points of economic policy – although economics does play a major role in that story. Importantly and more viscerally, it is also a story of the mass murder of over 100 million innocent civilians across the past century – all perpetrated by socialist governments that claimed to be acting solely “for the people”.
  1. The National Security Arena. As also noted above, foreign-sourced disinformation promoting both socialism and anti-Israelism further contributes to America’s ideological divide, especially among impressionable young people. Addressing this hostile information stream presents unique challenges under the First Amendment. But at the very least, government regulators can and should seek to publicly identify the sources of such propaganda (China? Russia? Qater? Etc.) and its nature (State actors? Bot farms? Etc.). Such media streams should be blocked from public schools’ online portals; and where such blocking is legally or technically impossible, it lawfully may be and should be visibly tagged with information that reveals the source(s) and nature of the content’s origin.
  1. The Political Arena. Like it or not, Democratic candidates, operatives, and fundraisers are on the front lines of the socialists’ war for the party. The dispositive question is, which pathway the party leadership will take. One option is appeasement, by welcoming the socialists into the party as “allies,” rationalized under the rubric of the “big tent.” The other path is to confront and exclude DSA candidates from party endorsements, thereby reclaiming the Democrats’ long tradition of non-socialist liberalism. Such an effort would echo similar battles fought by American labor leaders in the 1940s, as when United Auto Workers leader Walter Reuther led a movement to expel communists from UAW membership, and Screen Actors Guild leader Ronald Reagan led a similar movement to expel communists from the SAG. Only time will tell which path the Democratic party chooses.

It bears noting that these questions matter not just for conservatives. As happened in the 1930s and 1940s, liberalism is under frontal assault by socialism – and as long as socialism rules the Democratic party, America will be utterly lacking a healthy, and necessary, liberal opposition. Hence this issue should raise equally profound concerns among both liberals and conservatives – just as it did 70 years ago, for both liberal union leader Walter Reuther and conservative union leader Ronald Reagan. The stakes are as high as could be – they are no less than, in Benjamin Franklin’s sage words, “A republic – if you can keep it.”

This monthly series is presented by George Violin

Henry Kopel is a former U.S. federal prosecutor and the author of the book War on Hate: How to Stop Genocide, Fight Terrorism, and Defend Freedom. Kopel is an honors graduate of Brandeis University, Oxford University, and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and is an annual guest lecturer on prosecuting hate crimes at the University of Connecticut Law School. He serves on the global advisory board for the Abraham Global Peace Initiative.