A lifelong Democrat who once ran oversight for his party in Congress is publicly walking away — and backing a Republican — because, as he put it, "the lunatics are in charge of the asylum." Working Americans who've watched the Democratic Party abandon them just got confirmation from the people who built the machine.
Julian Epstein isn't some casual voter. He was chief counsel of the House Judiciary Committee and staff director of the House Oversight Committee for the Democrats. He was CEO of the consulting firm LMG, which represented Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. This is a man who spent his career inside the apparatus — and he's done.
In a piece published in the New York Post, Epstein announced he is supporting Republican Mike Rogers in the Michigan Senate race. His reasoning was blunt: "I think the party has gone way too far left, but I think the party has also lost its moral center."
Epstein laid out the boundaries that no longer exist in his former party. He said there's no room for people who want to destroy the Constitution, align with radical Islam, align with antisemitism, or tear down the free market — which he called "the most effective anti-poverty liberation machine that human beings have ever invented."
"If this is where the party's going, this is not a party I want to have anything to do with," Epstein said.
The timing is telling. While Epstein is walking out the front door, the party's remaining leaders are busy fighting each other. In San Francisco, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi just attacked her own party's state senator, Scott Wiener, as a sexist and a racist — over a parody AI chatbot. Wiener, running to replace Pelosi in Congress, launched a chatbot mocking his primary opponent Connie Chan, whom Pelosi endorsed. The bot was labeled parody and mocked Chan's reputation as a progressive NIMBY who opposes housing. Pelosi called it a "gross misuse of technology" that "erases women's agency" and claimed the harms "compound with racial stereotypes" because Chan is a non-white woman. Wiener called it "classic deflection" but pulled the chatbot down anyway, conceding it had become a distraction.
The Chan campaign's response was equally revealing: "Scott Wiener can rightly take down his bigotry bot, but he can't erase the concerns it raised among San Franciscans about his character and judgment." A parody chatbot is now the standard for "bigotry" in the party Epstein left.
The establishment press will bury Epstein's defection because it confirms what half the country already knows: the Democratic Party has been seized by people who have no interest in building anything — only in tearing down what others created and redistributing what others earned. When the man who ran oversight for House Democrats says the lunatics are in charge, the question isn't whether he's right. The question is how many more will follow him out the door.