By David Cooke (guest post)

It's finally 2016 and the big day is going to be here before you know it. The Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary are set to take place in early February in what has become a tight race between Democratic frontrunners Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

A statement by the YDS Coordinating Committee, drafted by Kayla Pace.

History has shown us that fear-mongering and hatred towards certain minority groups is nothing new when it comes to political elections. Various societies over different periods of time have shown this to be true. A notable example is the hatred directed towards the Jewish community by the Nazis in Germany. Unfortunately, this year has proven that fear-mongering tactics are not for the history books but something we, as Democratic Socialists, need to fight in our current political climate. 

A statement by the YDS Coordinating Committee, drafted by Jack Suria Linares.

Over the last few weeks, student activism across the country has generated a successful wave of protests over the continuation of micro-aggressions, global White Supremacy, and student debt.  The first protests at the University of Missouri ignited when University President Timothy Wolfe presented no action against the racial incidents occurring on their campus, including a swastika drawn on the wall with human feces. Following this, protests at Yale sparked as a result of email threads debating the effects and outcomes of cultural appropriation. At Harvard Law School, students woke up to hate crimes and defacing the portraits of tenured black professors.  In addition students, including members of Young Democratic Socialists (YDS), across the country at Ithaca College, the City College of New York, Hamilton College, William Paterson University, UC Riverside and UC Davis among others held demonstrations in solidarity with the racial justice protests occurring, but also to demand an end to student debt. Alongside the student protests, political violence has emerged all over the country in an attempt to impose fear.  In Minneapolis, five BLM organizers were targeted and shot by white supremacists. We live in a time of great crisis.

By Matt Skeens

I have been following the case of Tamir Rice, the 12 year old Cleveland boy who was shot by police officers, for some months now. This incident of a black citizen being killed by law enforcement affected me very strongly for two reasons. The first one is the young age of the victim. The second, however, is that it hits close to home for me: I'm a 25 year old white male from the mountains of Central Appalachia, but I felt like Tamir more than anyone. I had more than one "BB", or pellet, gun growing up. They always looked like the real thing; the more that they did, the more I liked them. Even before I acquired my beloved BB guns, I was partial to cap guns found in our local dollar stores. I'd take them home and either try to remove or at least obscure the orange tip the best I could. The guns and I were inseparable; I took them everywhere.

By Cade Olmstead

“Wealth is a social creation and should be controlled by society as a whole,” is a quote from Toward Freedom: Democratic Socialist Theory and Practice, a piece written by DSA members Joseph Schwartz and Jason Schulman. This was the defining statement that set me on a path towards left politics and socialism.