Fact-check: Ted Cruz's "communist and Islamist takeover" of the Democratic Party

Claim: Sen. Ted Cruz, guesting on the P.A.S. Report ("Ted Cruz on Clarence Thomas, Socialism, and the Midterm Warning Republicans Can't Ignore," 3 Sep 2026, at 17:05), said: "We are witnessing, literally, a communist takeover of the Democrat Party and an Islamist takeover of the Democrat Party."

Verdict: mostly-false (truth score 0.20, confidence 0.80). The direction is real. The tense is false. And the two halves of the sentence are not equally supported.

The case for the claim is stronger than the score suggests, so we start there. The 2026 DSA program really does call for abolishing the Senate and for an executive and judiciary "chosen by and subordinate to Congress." DSA membership went from 50,713 in October 2024 to more than 120,000 by July 2026. Explicitly communist caucuses hold real institutional power inside DSA, and the 2025 convention repealed its ban on democratic centralism. And Democratic voters' favorable views of socialism have risen.

But "takeover" says the thing has already happened. Brookings counted 282 DSA-endorsed candidates in 2026. They won well under 1% of Democratic nominations, mostly in seats rated D+10 or safer. Bernie Sanders, Mark Kelly, Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker all rejected the abolish-the-Senate plank on the record. The "Islamist" half rests on identity, not ideology. PolitiFact rated the claim that Mamdani is "bringing Sharia law to America" Pants on Fire, and both the New York Post editorial board and Cato argued against the "Islamist" framing. The host's figure of "20 fold" DSA growth is off by roughly an order of magnitude; the real multiple is about 2.4x.

We also trace where the compound phrase comes from. It runs from Taguieff's "islamo-gauchisme" to the American "red-green alliance" to the Center for Security Policy, whose analyst Cruz seated as a witness at his 5 August Muslim Brotherhood hearing. Cruz sat alone on the dais at that hearing. We also look at why welding two weak accusations into one noun phrase makes the result hard to rebut.

What we still don't know: whether DSA's internal communist turn changes what its candidates run on or win on, how November's competitive races turn out, and how to reconcile Democrats' favorable view of socialism with their stated preference for a more moderate party.