How ‘watermelon’ radicals made Democrats the party of appeasement

The case for a military strike in Iran is stronger than any we’ve seen in decades.  

The ethnonationalist, imperial regime in Tehran enslaves and murders its own by the tens of thousands, threatens genocide on infidels throughout the region and promises death to the United States. 

Yet the Democratic Party is pulling out all stops to block President Donald Trump from continuing this war of liberation.  

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer calls the attack “unpopular, immoral and illegal.” 

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries says it “will end in failure” — ignoring its unprecedented initial success in decapitating Iran’s leadership and destroying its defenses. 

California Gov. Gavin Newsom calls it “illegal” and “dangerous.” 

The hyperbolic rhetoric seems unschooled and unhinged, as well as factually wrong and legally dubious.

It’s likely to remind already skeptical voters that Democrats cannot be trusted on national security matters.

How has the bold internationalist party of Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy become so small, petulant and inward-looking in the face of an undeniable global threat?

That question makes Democrats like me and, I suspect, Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman feel like strangers in a foreign land inside our party.

To be sure, some of this reaction is raw reflexive opposition to everything Trump. 

If the president found a cure for cancer tomorrow, Democrats would likely oppose it. 

Part of the pathology, too, is due to the Democratic Party’s intellectual capture by a left-leaning “diplomatic class” that believes even terrorists can be persuaded, through more “process” and cash payments, to abide by the international “rules-based order.” 

That delusion led us to the ill-fated JCPOA nuclear deal, whereby Tehran played us as chumps.

But another explanation can be found in a growing extremist movement inside the Democrats’ activist base — a radical cadre of socialists and Islamists that’s being mainlined by the party’s elected representatives. 

Somalia-born writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali calls it the “watermelon coalition” (red for socialism, green for radical Islam).

This movement, she writes, finds common cause in anti-Westernism: Radical Islam seeks to destroy the West, while socialism aims to “flatten its hierarchies in the name of equity.”

The class-warfare ideology of American socialists has never had much popular appeal, nor has the colonialism lie of the radical Islamists. 

But together they have managed to construct a coalition that appeals to a downwardly-mobile, spiritually lost podcast class more interested in government handouts than in building a future. 

Activists in both camps link arms with the help of funding from hard-left NGOs and “philanthropies” and, most likely, foreign sources.  

That’s how the Defund the Police movement in Atlanta quickly transformed itself in 2024 to lead violent pro-Hamas protests on local college campuses, for example.

In Minnesota, pro-Hamas groups linked with the open-borders progressive left to organize street mobs that attacked federal law enforcement.  

Federal and state Democratic politicians fell in line, parroting the revolutionary language of the pitchforks. 

When Gov. Tim Walz referred to federal officers as the “Gestapo,” it seemed the inmates were running the asylum.

Meanwhile, members of Congress like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pay no price for openly embracing a student group that advocates for the destruction of the West — one that posted “Death to America” after Saturday’s strikes on Iran.

The “watermelon” infection is taking hold in progressive circles worldwide: Last week the UK’s Green Party won an upset election in a district long controlled by the Labour Party, a victory not based on climate policy, but because they promised Muslim voters — 30% of the local electorate — retribution against Israeli Jews. 

The Greens suppressed their historic pro-LGBTQ positions to pander to those who oppose such rights, Hirsi Ali noted.

And here, fear of the Watermelons is why more Democrats won’t rise up to defend the democratic hopes of Iranians and the security interests of the West.

Instead of doing the right thing in the face of Iran’s otherwise unstoppable threat, they just do what the pols in Minnesota did — go along with extremist positions that run contrary to democratic principles and the long-term security of the West.  

And a party that once led the global fight against totalitarianism transforms itself into the party of appeasement. 

Democrats maintain the smug conceit that they’re “on the right side of history.” 

But except for Fetterman, they seem clearly on the wrong side now.   

Julian Epstein is the former chief counsel for the House Judiciary Democrats and the former staff director of the House Oversight Committee.