1967s “Summer of Love” kicked off the American habit of defining a summer season with a phrase. Some phrases stick. Some do not.
1968s “Summer of Rage” tagline stuck.
The “Summer of Watergate” could be 1973 and the Senate Select Committees hearings would have stuck, but President Richard Nixon survived those and would have survived the summer of 1974 but for the release of the tapes.
MORNING GLORY: HASAN PIKERS RADICAL RHETORIC IS BECOMING DEMOCRATS 2026 BRAND
The Bicentennial Summer was as memorable as this summers celebration of the 250th birthday of the United States â but those months are defined by a day, not months. 1977s Summer of Sam, 1994s Summer of O.J. and 2020s Summer of George Floyd are not fixtures of the language, but do serve as reference points.
With a week left in this summer, the touchpoints seem likely to be the rise of Democratic Socialists of America (“DSA”) and the meteoric rise in awareness among the general public of Hasan Piker, an online Twitch streamer whose toxic combination of radical politics, profanity, vulgarity, anti-Israel and hate-filled rhetoric merged with the DSAs march through the Democratic primaries to make it appear to “normal” Americans from the center-left to the center-right as though the Democratic Party had become unhinged and taken over by a cult-like group of crazed anti-American extremists.
The “Summer of the DSA and Hasan Piker” is unwieldy, but accurate. Shorthand will probably reduce it to the “Summer of the DSA,” and even though Piker is closely ideologically aligned with DSA, appearing at DSA events and rallies, Piker does not appear to be a dues-paying DSAer.
Still, the “Summer of DSA” will catch him up even as it includes the primary election victories of Chris Rabb in Pennsylvania, Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier and Brad Lander in New York (Lander is a former DSA member but left in 2023), and Democratic Senate nominees Angie Nixon in Florida and Troy Jackson in Maine who are DSA-endorsed candidates. Hard-left “progressive” Democrats running for Senate like Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota, Sherrod Brown in Ohio and James Talarico in Texas have not been formally endorsed by their state DSAs or the national group, but their ascendancy compliments rather than contradicts the enormous shift to the left of the Democrats in the wake of President Trumps re-election in 2024.
DSAS GROWING GRIP ON DEM PARTY HITS NEW TERRITORY AS ESTABLISHMENT FALLS IN LINE
Will the “Summer of DSA” define the actual midterms ahead? Many in legacy media want to define the falls voting, which culminates on November 3, as a referendum on President Trump but thats not what is unfolding. The rise of the DSA and unhinged rantings like those of Piker as well as numerous “co-chairs” of the DSA has muddied what would typically be a “referendum” election, turning it in many if not most statewide or Congressional district races into a “choice election” of the sort Republicans are hoping for.
Because the DSA, Piker, candidates like <a href="https://foxnews.com/politics/2026-midterms-state-of-play-key-races-unfold-stev
