Frances Gill sits on the Democratic Socialists of America's National Political Committee — the organization's highest governing body between conventions. She's serving a 2025-2027 term. And on camera, captured by the watchdog group Canary Mission, she laid out the DSA's mission statement with a clarity most politicians spend careers avoiding: "take that empire down from within."

The empire she's talking about is the United States of America.

Gill wasn't freelancing. Fellow DSA member Ahmed Husain, an engineer and member of DSA's Springs of Revolution faction, put the same idea in slightly different words at a June 2025 event: "We're inside the home of empire, we're inside the house. It is our job." He also described America as a "decaying fascist empire." Another NPC member, Amy Wilhelm, called openly for overthrowing "our own empire" — meaning, again, the country she lives in. Hazel Williams, also on the National Political Committee, declared that "U.S. imperialism has to be overthrown through revolutionary struggle."

These aren't random activists holding signs at an intersection. These are elected leaders of the DSA's national governing board, the people setting strategy and endorsing candidates.

And the candidates they're endorsing are winning.

NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a DSA member, used his America 250 speech on July 3rd — the eve of the nation's 250th birthday — to describe the United States as an "arena of supremacy where only a select few are allowed freedom." He delivered those words sitting behind George Washington's desk. The DSA is now pushing hard into August primaries in Michigan and Wisconsin, backing Abdul El-Sayed for the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination in Michigan and Francesca Hong for governor of Wisconsin.

Hong, for her part, has publicly stated that "police exist to uphold white supremacy." She wants to run a state.

The organizational language matters here. This isn't the usual progressive wish list of free college and Medicare expansion. The DSA's own elected officials are using words like "overthrow," "revolutionary struggle," and "take down." They're describing the constitutional republic as an empire to be dismantled — and they're doing it on camera, repeatedly, across multiple leaders, in language that would make a 1950s HUAC investigator say "I told you so."

The standard response from the broader Democratic Party has been silence, or the vague suggestion that DSA represents a fringe. But Mamdani runs the largest city in the country. El-Sayed and Hong are competitive in major-state primaries. Far-left streamer Hasan Piker — who once said on air, "kill those motherfuckers and murder those motherfuckers in the streets. Let the streets soak in their fucking red capitalist blood" — functions as a de facto media arm for the movement.

That's not a fringe. That's a faction with electoral infrastructure, a media pipeline, and a governing foothold in America's biggest city.

The Canary Mission footage puts the DSA's internal language on the public record in a way that's difficult to memory-hole. These aren't leaked DMs or out-of-context clips. These are national committee members, on camera, using the word "overthrow" the way most people use the word "lunch."

The DSA's position is that American institutions aren't worth reforming — they're worth destroying. Their candidates are running for office not to govern within the system but to use the system as a vehicle for something else entirely. Husain said the quiet part: "We're inside the house."

When someone tells you they're inside your house and it's their job to bring it down, the reasonable next question isn't whether they mean it. It's why the door was left open.