A growing rift between Democrats and their growing socialist wing is threatening to alienate the very voters the party needs to win elections — including people who have lived under communist regimes.
On Mark Halperin’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3slvFfBLJY&amp;t=2914s">The Morning Meeting platform</a>, a Puerto Rican-born voter with Cuban heritage living in Florida sounded the alarm Monday over the Democrats’ far-left drift and announced a permanent breakup with the party he used to support. 
“I&#8217;m a pretty open-minded guy. I voted Democrat many times. I was a big supporter of Hillary Clinton. I thought she was great, but the way this Democratic Party is going now, I don&#8217;t even want to hear it,” the voter named Gary said. “I&#8217;m just a Republican going forward. I can&#8217;t have it. I can&#8217;t have it. It&#8217;s just insulting to me the fact that the Democratic Party has allowed these parasites… into the party.” 
“It&#8217;s offensive. I&#8217;ve had uncles that have been imprisoned in Cuba for just being part of a Baptist church,” he added. 
Since President Donald Trump’s re-election, the Democratic establishment has watched its leftist wing barnstorm the country, racking up one victory after another. Socialist Zohran Mamdani’s upset in New York City’s mayoral primary kicked off the movement’s breakthrough, followed by <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/mamdanis-socialists-upset-incumbent-dems-in-house-primary-sweep">three Democratic Socialists of America-backed leftists</a> ousting longtime Democratic representatives. The socialist-aligned Left also steamrolled its way through <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/trump-trashes-the-socialist-poised-to-be-next-mayor-of-d-c">Washington, D.C.</a> and <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/socialist-hot-streak-continues-as-radical-leftist-unseats-15-term-democrat?author=Brecca+Stoll&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=undefined&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=Socialist+Hot+Streak+Continues+As+Radical+Leftist+Unseats+15-Term+Democrat">Denver</a>, then succeeded in nominating <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/platner-caves-suspends-senate-campaign">Graham Platner</a> for the U.S. Senate in Maine before he dropped out of the race following a rape allegation.
The movement scored another huge win earlier this month when Michigan Democrats nominated Abdul El-Sayed for U.S. Senate, delivering a humiliating blow to the party establishment, which failed to stop him from advancing to a pivotal November showdown with Trump-endorsed Republican Mike Rogers. Results showed El-Sayed won younger and more educated voters, while his establishment-backed rival, Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI), performed strongest among black and working-class voters, highlighting the DSA disconnect with traditionally faithful Democratic voting blocs. 
“What would you like to see the Democratic Party do?” Halperin asked Gary, who responded, “I don’t know.” 
“I think it&#8217;s part of an indoctrination of a lot of upper-class white young kids that are clueless. I think that&#8217;s really the base of the DSA. It&#8217;s not the working class. It&#8217;s just not. I don&#8217;t know the answer. I don&#8217;t care,” Gary said. 
Most Latinos living in the U.S. have a favorable view of capitalism, with 82% of Cubans reporting negative views towards socialism, <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2022/09/29/hispanics-and-their-views-on-social-issues/">according to a 2022 Pew Research Center survey.</a> On top of that, the DSA membership is <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/new-data-proves-exactly-who-the-new-radical-democratic-base-is">overwhelmingly white</a> and has long struggled to recruit a more racially diverse group of organizers. 
Anti-socialist and anti-communist messaging has long resonated with Florida’s Latino voters, who made up nearly a quarter of the state’s 2024 electorate and backed Trump, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/election/2024/exit-polls/florida/general/president/0">according to exit polls.</a> At the first-of-its-kind Republican midterm convention in Dallas, GOP leaders plan to take that message nationwide, framing November’s election as a choice between “common sense and crazy,” <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/inside-the-rncs-biggest-convention-in-a-decade?author=Jacob+Wheeler&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=Inside+The+RNC%E2%80%99s+Biggest+Convention+In+A+Decade">The Daily Wire reported.</a>
A Republican source told The Daily Wire that the convention will spotlight the socialist’s movement’s most fringe positions on gender, policing, efforts to cancel Thanksgiving, as well as the growing electoral influence of leftist streamer Hasan Piker, who has <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/flashback-hasan-piker-admitted-to-colluding-with-cuban-regime-a-year-before-feds-investigated">admitted</a> to colluding with Cuba’s communist regime. 
Failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is also worried that Republicans’ “anti-communist” messaging could sink socialist candidates and jeopardize the party’s chances of retaking control of Congress. During a podcast appearance with liberal tech journalist Kara Swisher, Clinton <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hillary-clinton-warns-socialists-about-label-that-could-haunt-them?author=Jacob+Wheeler&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=15&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=Hillary+Clinton+Warns+Socialists+About+Label+That+Could+Haunt+Them">raised concerns </a>about the electability of El-Sayed and other DSA-backed candidates. 
“You’re not going to convince Republican voters in Michigan, and the real fight will be how do we make sure that people who voted for Haley feel comfortable voting for Abdul El-Sayed, and how do we get independents to feel comfortable?” Clinton asked. “And you can see that it’s not just about Michigan, but the Republican messaging is communist, socialist. It’s going to be a very effective attack.”

Socialist Revolution, Marxist pamplets, International Workers Day, United Against Union Busting March and Rally, Union Square, New York City

‘Parasites’: Puerto Rican-Born Man Torches Dems’ Socialist Takeover

2026 elections

Capitalism

Cubans

Democratic Socialists Of America

Democrats

Elections

Florida

Hispanics

Immigrants

Midterms

News

Politics

Socialists

A nearly eight-year-old clip of Charlie Kirk ripping Left-wing streamer Hasan Piker&#8217;s communist dream went viral on social media again this week.
In the exchange, which took place during a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RIKm-cOdh0">Politicon debate</a> in Los Angeles on October 20, 2018 — the pair&#8217;s second meeting at the convention — Kirk asked Piker why he doesn&#8217;t live by the communist vision he calls for America to embrace.
&#8220;Why don&#8217;t you give 95% of your money away and go live on a commune?&#8221; Kirk asked the America-hating communist streamer.
&#8220;Do you really think that that&#8217;s how it works?&#8221; Piker replied.
&#8220;Why not? Go live what you preach,&#8221; Kirk said as Piker attempted to interrupt the Turning Point USA founder.
&#8220;I live what I practice,&#8221; Kirk added. &#8220;I am a free-market capitalist, I employ people, I took a risk, I have my own start-up business. Every single day, I practice what I preach. He wants other people to contribute to what he considers to be a good idea, what he considers will make the world a better place.&#8221;
&#8220;You have the freedom to go live as a socialist. Go do it, Hasan. What&#8217;s stopping you?&#8221;
Piker called the exchange &#8220;absolutely preposterous.&#8221; &#8220;If I gave away the measly earnings that I had and gave away 95% of that,&#8221; he began — before Kirk cut in to ask, &#8220;How much do you make, Hasan?&#8221; — &#8220;that wouldn&#8217;t necessarily even push the needle.&#8221;
&#8220;I will be very honest, it&#8217;s really embarrassing especially because my boss is sitting right there, I make $60,000 a year, okay? And that&#8217;s a really good salary.&#8221;
The exchange devolved when Cenk Uygur — Piker&#8217;s uncle and, at the time, his boss at The Young Turks — began shouting at Kirk from the audience, demanding to know Kirk&#8217;s own salary.
&#8220;I live like a capitalist every single day, Cenk,&#8221; Kirk said. &#8220;I practice what I preach. You do not practice what you preach.&#8221;
Pressed on his own pay, Kirk answered: &#8220;Less than Hasan, so you can check it yourself.&#8221;
The debate was just one of many examples of how Kirk stood for conservative principles in some of the most radical leftist environments.
On September 10, 2025, Kirk was assassinated while speaking on the campus of Utah Valley University. The Turning Point USA founder was shot while taking a question about transgender mass shooters. According to charging documents, the suspected gunman texted his roommate and trans-identifying lover afterward: &#8220;I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can&#8217;t be negotiated out.&#8221;
Since the debate with Kirk in 2018, Piker has gained fame among the far-Left, and he has even been embraced by some in the Democratic Party, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). This year, Piker has campaigned with Democratic House and Senate candidates in New York and Michigan, including Michigan Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed, who is hoping to become the first Muslim U.S. senator.
Piker&#8217;s earnings have grown considerably since. Fox Business host Charles Payne <a href="https://www.foxbusiness.com/video/6403267383112">put his net worth at $35</a> million on air Wednesday, though public estimates vary widely, with Celebrity Net Worth listing roughly $8 million. What isn&#8217;t in dispute is the $2.7 million West Hollywood home — a long way from the commune.
In an April New York Times podcast, Piker <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/socialists-have-made-a-new-crime-into-a-form-of-protest">said</a> he&#8217;s &#8220;pro stealing from big corporations, because they steal quite a bit more from their own workers,&#8221; and added that while he doesn&#8217;t shoplift himself, &#8220;if someone needs the food, they should absolutely steal it.&#8221;
Piker has praised murderous Chinese communist dictator Mao Zedong and has argued that America &#8220;deserved 9/11.&#8221; In March 2025, Piker was temporarily suspended from the streaming platform Twitch — his fifth suspension from the site — after saying that if Republicans cared about entitlement fraud, &#8220;you would kill Rick Scott.&#8221;

Politicon 2018 – Day 1

FLASHBACK: Watch Charlie Kirk Expose Absurdity Of Hasan Piker’s Communist Dream

Cenk Uygur

Charlie Kirk

Communism

Hasan Piker

Leftists

The Young Turks

Let’s talk about the actual American Dream, what it is, what it means, and what it most certainly isn&#8217;t.
I spent yesterday in New York, talking business with some of the most successful and brilliant businesspeople in America. You know what my main takeaway was? America kicks ass. America is great. This is a great country.
I know, we are all supposed to be demoralized and upset, and we&#8217;re all supposed to believe and claim that no one has any shot at getting ahead in America anymore, that the American Dream is dead, and that we need something brand-new –  by which most people mean some idea that was tried centuries ago and then failed over and over again.
Most of those bad ideas revolve around a basic failed idea to which people are addicted,;that there ought to be a special cadre of elite people who direct the economy toward their specific ends; that your individual freedoms are actually destructive; that you ought to have your choices circumscribed so that they can build whatever it is they want to build for us.
You&#8217;re constantly hearing the American Dream is the house and the white picket fence and the dog and the 2.2 children.
That&#8217;s not what the American Dream is. The American Dream is a process. It is not an outcome.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-show-ep-2485?elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
That process says there is a relationship between cause and effect: that you make good, virtuous, smart decisions; that if you perform dutiful, smart things throughout your life, you will end up better off than your parents were. And then, if you pass those values on to your kids and they do the same, they will be better off than you.
That is the American Dream. It is not that you will instantaneously go from being the poorest person in America to the richest person in America. That might happen to some people, but that&#8217;s not the American Dream.
The American Dream says that your talents and abilities should be able to take you as far as possible, and that you will be better off if you do all those things because the process is what matters. As long as you protect the process, you get your shot.
When my great-great-grandparents arrived in America at the beginning of the 20th century, they came here without a dollar to their name. They only knew Yiddish. And then they did those things – made smart decisions, used their talents and abilities, performed dutifully and with virtue throughout their lives – and they weren&#8217;t rich. Their kids did better than they did, and they weren&#8217;t precisely rich. And my parents did better than my grandparents.
But they weren&#8217;t rich. But I became wealthy. It&#8217;s an intergenerational process. Very often this is true for all Americans. And that process, in order to work, has to include certain preconditions, and there are certain conditions that make the process work: Free markets. Private property. You own your labor. You own the products, goods, and services that you produce. Your innovation is your own; you can trade it with others and rent it if you want. That&#8217;s what wage labor is.
You can build businesses.
We also need things like equal justice before the law. We need a law that is equally applied, not “There&#8217;s justice for my friends and just beat down for my enemies.” That is not equal justice. And it doesn&#8217;t protect the process, because that&#8217;s not a process; that is just the friend-enemy distinction.
We need freedom of mind, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion so we can think things through and debate them out, so we can actually pursue that process.
And of course we need a social fabric that promotes virtue. You need people doing good things. You need to know what a good decision looks like and what a moral decision looks like.
Those are all the preconditions for the American Dream and free markets. Free minds. Equal justice before law. Social virtue. Those are the preconditions.
And when you have that, and a government that protects those things and the process, that&#8217;s when the American Dream happens.
The process not only protects and promotes freedom but also has the happy effect of fostering unprecedented human prosperity. That’s because the best path to innovation and competition is to access the diverse knowledge and opinions of all of humanity, which free people use to innovate and compete. Free people can access each other&#8217;s knowledge levels; they can aggregate those levels.
Free markets mean that everyone can prioritize what they want on a material level. You get to make your own decisions about what makes your life better. You get to decide whether you wish to trade your labor for X number of dollars, or whether you wish to trade X number of dollars for a lottery ticket or for a share of stock.
You get to decide what you are willing to do. That&#8217;s what the free market pricing system is. It is a set of aggregated choices by millions upon millions of individual consumers.
This is the process we have to preserve. It is not an outcome. And that&#8217;s exciting because the American Dream, a process that is reliant on your freedom, makes it your adventure. It&#8217;s your journey. You make the decisions about your life. You make the decisions about what you think is important. You make the decisions about what you think things are worth, or what you are willing to trade for, what or which profession to go into.
Do you understand how rare that is in human history? For most of human history, people were just told what to do all the time.
The American Dream isn&#8217;t that. 
I want the shot to make the choice. I think that&#8217;s what we all want. We want the process protected. And guess what? That process still works.
There are people who lie to you, and they say the process doesn&#8217;t work.
It does, and we must protect it.

IMG_5988

The Lie That Could Destroy The American Dream

American Dream

Ben Shapiro

Free Markets

Opinion

Capitalism is under heavy fire today.
It is perfectly obvious that we are in the middle of an all-out assault on free markets. It&#8217;s coming predominantly from the Left, but not just from the Left. A large segment of the Right is very anti-free markets now.
A chart of global average GDP per capita starting in roughly 1600 through 2025 shows that people had zero GDP per capita essentially all the way through the early 19th century. And then free markets happened, catalyzing the exponential explosion of GDP per capita.
That was not because of government centralization of resources, which had been practiced throughout human history. It wasn’t because of vast thickets of bureaucratic regulations.
It came from a very simple proposition: You own your own labor and the product of your labor. You own your own innovation and the products of that innovation, and you should be free to sell, rent, or trade them.
Period.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-show-ep-2484?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
There are now a variety of arguments being leveled against capitalism. They come down to basically two arguments in the end.
The first: Capitalism creates inequality.
You might say to yourself, “Hold up. If capitalism creates inequality, but everybody&#8217;s wealthier, isn&#8217;t that still better than the alternative?”
The answer is yes, but not according to Bernie Sanders, who wrote:
<blockquote>The economic system with its excessive corporate greed and concentration of ownership and power destroys anything that gets in its way of the pursuit of profits. It destroys the environment. It destroys our health. It destroys our democracy. It discards human beings without a second thought.</blockquote>
Says the millionaire with the lake house.
From Zohran Mamdani:
<blockquote>We see the wealthiest country in the history of the world, one where children go to sleep hungry while the world&#8217;s first trillionaire hungers for more. We see monopolies that dominate every industry and oligarchs who buy elections. We see masked agents terrorizing our streets, eating food cooked by our undocumented neighbors before spiriting them away in unmarked vans. We see a nation whose immense wealth has been built by those with calloused, dirt-streaked hands, those who toil on factory floors and chisel into stone. And we see a nation that has allowed so much of that wealth to be held instead in the soft hands.</blockquote>
It&#8217;s all about the poor versus the rich. It&#8217;s inequality, it&#8217;s cruelty, and it&#8217;s monopoly.
And of course, this is not just from Mamdani; it&#8217;s also from Tucker Carlson, who does not understand how economics works and doesn&#8217;t care to understand how economics works. He says it&#8217;s unfair that people in finance make more than wage earners.
That, of course, is putting aside the fact that people in finance are the ones who actually bear the risk, while wage earners earn a wage guaranteed by someone else.
Carlson: 
<blockquote>So if you have a tax code, for example, just to name one example, if you have a tax code that taxes wage earners at more than twice the percentage it taxes investors, what are you saying? Well, you&#8217;re saying it&#8217;s twice as virtuous to invest money or to inherit money and keep it in the markets as it is to go to work in the morning. Really? Of course, that&#8217;s what you&#8217;re saying. Because any tax code penalizes the impious acts, the bad things, the vices. Cigarettes cost $18 a pack because we&#8217;re against smoking. So if being an ordinary wage earner, driving in from the suburbs to make 80 grand a year, if that&#8217;s taxed at twice the rate of being a private equity baron, what are we saying? That it&#8217;s twice as virtuous to be a private equity baron and to inherit money.</blockquote>
That&#8217;s just stupid. There are plenty of taxes that you pay that are not a tax on vice. There are taxes on property. Is it a vice to own property in the United States? There&#8217;s a tax on death. There&#8217;s an estate tax. Is it a vice to die?
The reason why capital gains are taxed at a lower rate, for example, than wages, is because they&#8217;ve mostly already been taxed.
Carlson believes that capitalism is also evil because capitalism somehow empties you of your soul, as he told the New York Times.
That&#8217;s argument one. Capitalism causes inequality.
Argument number two is that capitalism is not spiritually fulfilling. It&#8217;s not providing you your meaning in life. Carlson, 2019: “Republican leaders will have to acknowledge that market capitalism is not a religion. Market capitalism is a tool like a staple gun or a toaster. You&#8217;d have to be a fool to worship it. Our system was created by human beings for the benefit of human beings. We do not exist to serve markets, just the opposite. Any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society.”
The idea that capitalism weakens and destroys families and undermines religion is not new. Tucker is not the only one who has said this historically. Here is a quote. Guess who said it?
<blockquote>The Western way of life founded, in effect, on practical and technical knowledge, discovery, invention and the flooding of world markets with mechanical products has remained incapable of offering to men&#8217;s minds a flicker of light, a ray of hope, a grain of faith, or of writing anxious persons the smallest path toward rest and tranquility. Man is not simply an instrument, among others. Naturally, he has grown tired of purely material conditions and seeks spiritual comfort. But the materialistic life of the West could only offer him as reassurance a new materialism of sin, passion, drink, women, noisy gatherings and showy attractions which he has come to enjoy.</blockquote>
It sounds like Tucker Carlson, but actually it is Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, who called for an international armed struggle against colonial rule by Muslims and argued for full-scale jihad.
This is where we are right now: a gigantic coalition of people who despise capitalism. People who find it spiritually unfulfilling, who claim that it robs us of our individuality, or say that it is what creates inequality. They are all uniting. They are their own unique party. Everyone from communists to post-liberal integralists to quasi-fascists to radical Muslims.
Why?
Because in essence, capitalism makes two arguments. One: You are an individual created in the image of God with individual desires, wants, needs, and capabilities. Two: As long as those desires, wants, needs, and capabilities do not harm anyone else and do not violate basic morality, they ought to remain in your control.
The new red-green-brown anti-capitalist party believes that&#8217;s not true.
They believe the same thing that the French revolutionaries believed: that the collective vision of man is paramount. Private property and free markets run counter to that vision.
These folks can&#8217;t build utopia without destroying that vision. They promise Utopia, either a communist utopia with government-owned grocery stores like Zohran Mamdani, the “warmth of collectivism,” or an Islamic utopia with the Caliphate at the head, or the agrarian utopia run by kind-hearted feudal lords.
It&#8217;s all garbage. So why are people believing it?
There are a few reasons. First, ingratitude. Human life in its natural state is nasty, brutish, and short. On a material level, pretty much everything was awful for all of human history until property rights, contract law, and credit were invented and turned large swathes of the world, including places difficult to live in, into semi-bearable places for the first time ever.
Here&#8217;s the truth: Most people living in the West right now have never spent time in truly poor places that lack the things we think of as vital. When you start thinking that human life in its natural state is a microwave, a central AC, a car, two TVs, a cell phone, a furnished apartment, or a house, you start comparing yourself to what could be in a Utopia.
This is why, when you hear Gavin Newsom, a very, very wealthy man, say capitalism does not work — I don&#8217;t believe him.
People have incredibly short memories. There are a lot of other models that have been tried elsewhere and are still being tried, yet they still fail, but we keep bringing them back.
Why not try centralized government with price controls? Because we&#8217;ve done that a thousand times and it&#8217;s crap.
Why not try a religious theocracy? A lot of countries did that for several centuries, and there are still some places on Earth trying to do it, and it&#8217;s really garbage.
Why not try economic fascism with the bureaucratic government that picks winners and losers? We&#8217;ve tried that too, and it&#8217;s terrible.
We have just not yet felt the consequences of all this interventionism. We are trying a bunch of these experiments right now, and they are going to fail. We are going to crash and burn.
But when you jump from a burning building, the first few stories are fine. It&#8217;s the last one that&#8217;s a doozy.
So what should we do differently?
It may be worth conceding that a lot of young voters with a predilection for the DSA haven&#8217;t ever had a positive case made to them about capitalism; many of them have been living with the political effects of the 2008 financial crash and the stagnation of Obama and the subsequent bailout and how it was perceived by the public, and then COVID.
It’s time to teach them.

IMG_5925

The Economic Experiment America Will Regret

Woke Right

Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed invited a sex educator on a 2021 podcast and argued that &#8220;capitalism has become the thief of sex,&#8221; saying modern work culture and pornography undermine healthy relationships. 
During the episode of his &#8220;America Dissected&#8221; podcast, titled &#8220;Talkin&#8217; Nerdy About Gettin&#8217; Dirty,&#8221; El-Sayed said that capitalism negatively affects people’s sex lives in two ways. 
&#8220;Subordinating that most natural human act to the tyranny of our ever-so-busy lives, it&#8217;s just one way capitalism steals our sex from us,&#8221; he said. He also argued that pornography keeps people from &#8220;embracing the sex we actually have.&#8221;
“It’s a productized version of the thing, not the real thing you have with a real partner built on a real relationship, warts and all,&#8221; he said, adding that &#8220;capitalism has become the thief of sex.&#8221;
&#8220;Sex positivity isn’t about being exposed to the highlight reel picked and pruned version of sex that is so ubiquitous on our screens,&#8221; he continued. &#8220;It’s about embracing the sex we actually have.”
In another episode, El-Sayed also complained about the prevalence of adult content on Instagram, blaming the platform&#8217;s algorithm for showing him an &#8220;OnlyFans model&#8221; every third video.
At the beginning of the podcast, El-Sayed described what he called the &#8220;duality&#8221; of sex, saying it is viewed as both a &#8220;shameful, dirty act&#8221; and &#8220;the physical act of showing love.&#8221; He also cited research showing that the average adult is having about 13% less sex than in the late 1990s.
“Mostly millennials like me, often in loving, committed, long-term relationships, many with kids,” he said. “Life gets hectic between work commitments, the struggle to keep up with various chores inside and outside the house, and the absolute libido killer that is the existence of children in your home.”
Throughout the episode, El-Sayed asked sex educator and author Emily Nagoski about why millennials are having less sex. Nagoski agreed with El-Sayed&#8217;s argument that capitalism contributes to the decline.
El-Sayed has built much of his political message around criticism of corporate capitalism, particularly in healthcare, arguing corporate interests drive up prescription drug prices and limit access to care.  
His anti-corporate message, combined with a focus on affordability, helped him defeat Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) in Tuesday’s Democratic primary. 
Backed by leftist leaders including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), El-Sayed will face Republican Mike Rogers in November in one of the nation’s most competitive Senate races.

Democratic Senate Candidate Abdul El-Sayed Holds Primary Night Event In Detroit

Abdul El-Sayed Says Capitalism Is ‘The Thief Of Sex’

Abdul El-Sayed

Michigan

Podcast

Senate

Everyone says you can’t get ahead these days.
That’s a lie that’s been told for 300 years. It wasn’t true then. It’s even less true now. Getting ahead is easier than ever.
Notice, I did not say “Everyone can get ahead.” That is not true. I said you. Doing what it takes requires less, pays out more, and the payments last longer than at any time in history. You, however, must be willing to do all those Go Ahead things that actually worked when others won’t. Take the right risks, and the odds are ridiculously in your favor.
The good old days sucked, no matter when those days were. Do you have a fondness for Colonial Williamsburg and scrappy immigrants with rap skills? Great. Me too. But early America was a terribly hard place to get ahead.
American colonists were pretty grumpy about how hard it was to Go Ahead. The governor of Virginia could barely sleep at night. “Oh how miserable is that man who must govern a people who six parts of seven are poor, in debt, discontented, and armed!” Armed indeed. They burned his colonial capital to the ground 100 years before the Revolution. Americans were angry about not getting ahead from the very beginning.
You could take risks, but if they didn’t work out, you might find yourself in jail. Yes, jail. People went to prison for being broke in the 1700s, and this happened regularly. Worse, if a man went bust, his wife and kids were imprisoned, too. They forgot to put that in Hamilton.
Or maybe you prefer your nostalgia from the 1800s? In 1870, food, rent, and clothing took 91 cents of every dollar made (today it’s under 40 cents). The typical American owned just one and a half shirts. That is an actual historical statistic. To make money to buy this expensive food and the other half of that shirt, the typical man worked sixty hours per week. Women worked more. And the dollars in which people were paid could lose their value overnight, making them no more stable than cryptocurrency today.
If you could find work, that is. Newspapers regularly proclaimed the death of American opportunity in the 24 recessions that century. One in four years was bad, and some were really bad. Until late in the century, there was very little insurance to cover losses. If your bank collapsed, house burned, crops failed, or spouse died, you just lost everything.
Since the 1970s, the median income has risen by around 50% (yes, adjusted for inflation). Even left-leaning groups admit wages are up at minimum 29%. But working-class wages went down, right? No. The median weekly earnings of high-school graduates (no college degree) are up since the mid-1990s. In my birth state (North Carolina, which lost all those furniture and tobacco jobs), the bottom 10% of earners make 33% more than they did 20 years ago. It’s up in every other state, too.
By some estimates, about half of Americans were poor during the Roaring Twenties, which was before the Great Depression. By 1950 it was nearly a third. Today it’s barely over one in 10.
You can make more money, working fewer hours, spending less to survive, while buying more luxuries than any one of your ancestors. You can marry whomever you want. As we’ll see, that’s a big deal; marriage is one of the largest predictors of financial success. Side hustle platforms are everywhere. Your savings are safe. Mortgages don’t involve questions about your sex life (they used to), and you don’t have to pay them off in five years. Debtors’ prisons are abolished, bankruptcy laws give second chances, and Social Security offers a built-in retirement annuity. You’ve got it harder than “back then”? Puh-leeze!
Starting in the 1970s, a cottage industry of academics published research bemoaning the lack of real “get aheadism” in the so-called land of opportunity. The basic summation of those scholars is as follows: despite our national myths, most people stay in the same income class as their parents. Born poor, die poor. Born middle class, die middle class. Born wealthy, die in a Tahoe skiing accident. This line of reasoning has been absorbed into a media narrative feedback loop, especially on social media. Nearly 60% of young people today say the American Dream is no longer possible.
Our culture swallowed a pessimism pill, and it isn’t doing you any good. If you scream at people that their lives are terrible for five decades, they may start to believe you. There is real — and really persistent — wealth inequality in America. But remember this: the question is not what type of economy you would build, but what you will build in this economy.
For everyday people, the goalposts are set where they are, and it’s best to get the ball moving. The clock is twice as long as it used to be, but it is ticking.
PEOPLE REALLY DID GET AHEAD, AND YOU CAN, TOO
Perhaps you’ve heard that nobody can get ahead anymore. That capitalism is broken. That only the rich get richer.
Anything bad you’ve believed about capitalism, I’ve believed it more. Finding myself as a happy warrior for Go Ahead America was not just a strange personal trip; it was also family heresy and professional suicide.
Most people don’t know this about the South, but we once had a budding communist party. When I was a kid, my dad periodically voted for communists for president. The only mainstream candidate he ever genuinely liked was Bernie Sanders.
Let me tell you what I believed before I tell you why I no longer believe it. There is a Despair Industrial Complex of academics, activists, and journalists convinced that capitalism is a system of exploitation keeping people down rather than offering a path up. I call them Big Woe, because every hot take is either “Woe to Them!” or “Woe is Me!” Inside Big Woe, the fight is against “War Capitalism”: governments and businesses just helping each other win the game of power and coercion like two brother lions who’ve always had each other’s back.
Big Woe’s message is working. Anti-capitalism is culturally everywhere, especially on campus. Want to impress your Netflix &amp; chill partner? Next time you’re watching a crime drama, proclaim, “It’s the CEO!” It is important to do this early. You will get less credit if you wait. Businessmen (and women) are evil in American culture. A study of nearly 1,000 shows found that businesspeople commit more television crime than any other characters, even than career criminals. You will know this intuitively if you’ve ever binged Law &amp; Order. To cap it off, seemingly the only thing that MSNBC and Fox News agree on is that someone screwed the working class.
We arrive at this lunacy: nobody can get ahead anymore, which is funny because no one used to get ahead, either. A robust body of prestigious people say Americans were locked in place for the 1700s, 1800s, 1900s, and they’re still stuck in neutral today.
If something can’t be true, it probably isn’t. Everyday Americans long believed people got ahead because they saw people getting ahead. Today, despite a chorus of voices saying you can’t, you can. You probably know someone who has. The truth is messier. It was hard. It still is hard, just not as hard as before. Challenging and doable are not mutually exclusive.
Don’t blame capitalism, blame your city council. Zoning laws, rules that say you can’t build here or, if you do, only so much, create housing scarcity. The land you are allowed to build on costs more than ever before. Local politics (not red versus blue, but us versus ourselves) is pricing people out of home ownership, not capitalism. Some dilemmas are genuinely political, and that is one of them.
So what happens at the top? If you can’t get to the front, surely it is because someone else is holding their spot in line. Not true. In the United States, 64% of those born at the top fall out in their lifetime, precisely the same percentage as in Denmark. Most Americans (and Danes) who make it to the top didn’t start there, and those born there don’t stay.
Of those born in the bottom financial fifth of the United States, six in 10 get out. That’s not perfect (eight in 10), but it’s a better-than-average shot. Four in 10 become middle class, upper middle class, or rich. Nearly one in 10 make it all the way to the top.
Go Ahead is there for the taking. If I told your ancestors, from India to Ireland, that you would live in a time where kids born at the bottom had a better than 50% shot at a good life, and one of every 10 born poor became rich, they would call me crazy or praise their gods. Probably both.
If only one in 10 born at the bottom makes it all the way to the top, then damn it, be the one.
BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU BELIEVE
At some point, someone thought it would be a great idea to destroy everyday people’s faith in the American Dream. Incentives matter, and for those doing the bashing, they’ve been well rewarded with tenure on the Left and political power on the Right.
I implore you to believe they might all be wrong. Believe that this system has worked for others and it will work for you, because it has and it will. Is it perfect? Of course not. Neither is our version of football, where you throw the ball with your hands, but we love it anyway.
It is easy to scoff at the idea that “outlook,” “mindset,” “optimism,” or whatever other self-help mantra people preach holds the secret to success. But outlook is crucial. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found, to everyone’s surprise, that income was slightly negatively correlated to financial well-being. The strongest indicator was “a positive attitude” and “the habit of saving.” In a follow-up study, behavior (again, greater than income) was the greatest predictor of well-being. If you say this in learned circles, you are “poor shaming” — blaming failure on the individuals when it is the system’s fault. But these results, in another study of nearly 150,000 people, are strongest for the poor. Hopeful views for the future significantly predicted long-term savings. Yes, systems matter. So does the faith in yourself the myth busters gleefully seek to destroy.
They’re not just wrong. They’re hurting people.
To see how far you’ve come, you must look back at where you started. If you want to gaze off at distant utopia, fine by me. Looking back, though, it feels like we’re awfully close to where previous generations strived to Go Ahead to. If we lose our sense of awe and wonder at how different our world is from the past, and if we lose our bearings on how hard it was to get this far, we will abandon the process of getting ahead. That is a mistake.
Don’t buy from Big Woe. You don’t have to give your DNA to a genealogy company to discover this; just call your grandmother and ask: How many generations removed are you from your family’s first indoor, flush toilet?
***
Excerpted from “How to Get Rich in American History: 300 Years of Financial Advice That Worked (and Didn&#8217;t)” by Joseph S. Moore, Ph.D. Copyright © 2026 by Joseph S. Moore. Reprinted here with permission from Harper Business, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Dr. Joseph S. Moore is a historian, investor, and author.

Family Dinner

‘Big Woe’ Wants You To Believe The American Dream Is Dead

American History

DW Opinion

This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
***
Vladimir Lenin <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch05.htm">quoted</a> Karl Marx as saying, “The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.” When the modern oppressed looked deep inside themselves, much as the Ghostbusters <a href="https://youtu.be/2zhDfUAQSbs?si=wSyhYDRhh6Tbft9x&amp;t=101">did</a>, they tried to do good and instead failed, choosing <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/20/style/grown-up-theater-kids.html?unlocked_article_code=1.llA.kN9_.Oc99OV8afaU3&amp;smid=url-share">theater kids</a> rather than the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. And if there’s one thing theater kids are going to do, it’s theater, which sometimes involves making films.
“I Love Boosters” is such a film, one <a href="https://x.com/alexchristy17/status/2055314091938390107">described</a> by “The Daily Show’s” Jordan Klepper as “&#8217;Pee-wee’s Big Adventure&#8217; if it were directed by Karl Marx with a bunch of Molly in the background.” It plunges you into a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1xZegSgN8w" target="_blank" rel="noopener">surreal world</a> centered on a group of boosters (people who steal clothes and resell them at a price significantly lower than retail) and their leader’s infatuation with fashion designer Christie Smith (Demi Moore). 
The Velvet Gang, as the group of boosters is known, regularly steals massive amounts of clothing from Smith’s stores. Then, the gang’s leader Corvette (Keke Palmer) along with henchwomen Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige) sell the wares in apartments redesigned as shops and on the street, helping the less successful among us stay fashion forward. In that way, they’re like the Robin Hoods of haute couture, or at least that’s what the message seems to be. 
What I have just described boasts a <a href="https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/i_love_boosters#critics-reviews">92%</a> average from film critics on Rotten Tomatoes, though it only scores a <a href="https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/i_love_boosters/reviews/all-audience">72%</a> average with the actual audience. That’s impressive for a movie that leaves most people saying “huh?” when you tell them you went to see “I Love Boosters.” It’s so disjointed that even people who wanted to see it can barely get it out of C- territory. (As verified reviewer Ben wrote, “No idea what I just watched. A waste of time. I should have walked out of the movie and stared at a puddle of water instead, would have been more entertaining.&#8221;)
When your anti-capitalist/pro-communist film is only hitting with the bourgeoisie and not the proletariat, well, congratulations, I suppose, because that’s usually the target audience for communism. Though the bourgeoisie in “I Love Boosters” solely consists of billionaire Smith, with everyone else being part of the proletariat, except for a group of people who wear literal skin suits and a demon who sucks the souls from people in a manner that I will not be describing here. Suffice it to say, though, that the literal demon is a good guy, somehow. 
There’s also Jianhu (<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-miseducation-of-poppy-liu" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Poppy Liu</a>), a rival booster from a Chinese sweatshop where Smith’s clothing is made, though she’s not trying to sell fast fashion to the victims of the Chinese Communist regime, but instead lobbies for better pay and labor practices inside the sweatshop. This, of course, is also a very American communist bourgeoisie approach to Chinese atrocities, except actually they tend to lobby for <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/29/business/economy/nike-coca-cola-xinjiang-forced-labor-bill.html?unlocked_article_code=1.llA.bu6i.W5tmRya7K4xZ&amp;smid=url-share">continued atrocities</a>. Not that the pro-communist leanings of the movie are any more obvious while watching it than they would be while staring at a puddle of water. 
Mostly, it’s just a film that centers on Corvette’s anger with Smith, who refers to the Velvet Gang as “low class, urban b*tches,” which, okay? I’m not a communist, so perhaps I’m missing something, but theft isn’t something I associate with the middle or upper classes. 
If I were a communist, though, I could argue that the Velvet Gang members are merely victims of the capitalist system of oppression that prevents them from rising up into the ranks of the professional managerial class and stealing from the proletariat, and also that “urban” is just thinly veiled racism. (Fair, just don’t ask the modern communists why identity politics is <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/01/elite-identity-politics-professional-class">actually bad for the cause</a>, comrade.) 
Also, Corvette is aggrieved because she failed to become a famous fashion designer, mostly because she’s afraid to give it a shot, other than posting some designs on Instagram, one of which Smith may have stolen. This is the most unintentional and hilariously revealing insight into the modern American theater kid’s envious rage against capitalism that the film offers, and would strike a blow to its premise if theater kids had any conception of irony. 
In any case, Corvette continues along, planning one final giant heist with her fellow gang members plus Jianhu, who has a teleporter/deconstructor/accelerator machine (don’t ask). They succeed. Chinese factory workers go on strike, win their concessions from the Chinese Communist Party, and get improved pay and working conditions in their sweatshop instead of being murdered for going against the paramount leader. This inspires global protests, the theater kids’ primary mode of communication. Presumably, there’s a glorious uprising that happens sometime after the movie ends. 
There may have been a post-credits Easter egg detailing the final five-year plan, but I wouldn’t know, as I didn’t stay for the full credits to roll. Granted, I am not the target audience for “I Love Boosters.” Critics are known for loving hot garbage, so they get a pass, but there are four- and five-star audience reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. There is praise for the anti-capitalist message. Several reviews mention love for the cast. Some people seem to genuinely love the rollicking, disjointed, confusing “plot.” That’s fine. We’re a pluralist country, and I used to pretend to like “Eraserhead.” I’m not totally innocent here. 
But as an anti-capitalist commentary, does it work? This is where I am sad to report that yes, it does, at least partly, and not in its intended way. Because if this is the type of art that capitalists, albeit the faux communist flavor of capitalists, are funding, then it may be time to eviscerate the bourgeoisie theater kids and bring forth a glorious uprising of whatever class it is that would rather stare into a puddle of water.
***
Rich Cromwell is a writer living in Northwest Arkansas. He produces the Cookin’ Up a Story podcast, which you can listen to <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cookin-up-a-story/id1624969096" target="_blank" rel="noopener">here</a>. You can also follow him on X: <a href="https://x.com/rcromwell4">@rcromwell4</a>.

“I Love Boosters” New York Special Screening

Leftist Hollywood Critics Drool Over Bizarre Anti-Capitalist Movie. Audiences Aren’t Buying It.

Culture

Hollywood

Movies

Upstream

It&#8217;s time to say a bunch of stuff that&#8217;s going to get me in trouble in the too-online sphere right now; people on the Left who live in mansions, who hate capitalism, and also people on the Woke Right, the New Left, who also live in mansions, who also hate capitalism but like to pretend that they like capitalism.
Here we go.
I&#8217;m going to defend private property and free markets and basic common sense, because these are the things that allow you to succeed economically in life. It is good to make more money by providing people with better goods and services. It is good to be fiscally responsible. It is good to make smart decisions about your money.
Most Americans know all that stuff.
But a lot of Americans are being lied to these days. They&#8217;re being told a bunch of garbage that makes their lives actively worse. And increasingly — particularly if they are young and too online — Americans believe those things.
The Left and the Woke Right are going to get angry when I say you shouldn&#8217;t spend too much money eating at a restaurant if you&#8217;re unable to pay your rent. They&#8217;ll say that I&#8217;m saying that because I don&#8217;t care about people.
(You see, it&#8217;s better to be poorer and also keep eating at Wolfgang&#8217;s Steakhouse.)
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-show-ep-2431?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
They will get angry when I say that Amazon makes your life better and cheaper. They&#8217;ll say it&#8217;s better to yell at Amazon, try to shut down their business, and tax them more because “Jeff Bezos is bald and rich and has a yacht!” or something similar. They&#8217;ll get angry when I say that billionaires aren&#8217;t inherently bad because they&#8217;re billionaires, and that instead, genuinely immoral people are bad and moral people are good. Tax returns have nothing at all to do with any of that.
The billionaires are typically billionaires, not because they are stealing from the poor — spoiler alert: the poor don&#8217;t have much money to take — but because they make a lot of people&#8217;s lives better. They make goods and services for cheaper.
So get ready. Here comes the blowback. It comes every time I talk about this stuff.
Remember that time I said young people who couldn&#8217;t afford to live in New York City might think about moving if policies don&#8217;t change because it&#8217;s more productive to search outside of New York City and find some success than to sit there in your expensive apartment with your two roommates and pizza?
People got super-duper mad.
Remember that time I said that Social Security needs to kick in later in life — especially for people who are currently 40 and under — because people are now living 20 years longer, and then Social Security kicks in, which is really expensive and is bankrupting the country? And also that when you hit retirement age, sure, you can retire, especially if you&#8217;re working a backbreaking job, but you should continue to do productive things in your community because it&#8217;s good for you on both a mental and spiritual level?
People got super-mad again.
Well, here&#8217;s the thing. I don&#8217;t really give a crap about how people feel about reality. And here is the reality: the only way your life gets more affordable is 1: You make more money; 2: Your expenses get lower, and 3: Products and services get more plentiful and better and cheaper.
All of these rely on free markets and common sense.
When Americans don&#8217;t feel good about the economy in general, they tend to think that things are “unfair.” “Unfair” is just a substitute for “I don&#8217;t feel good about things.”
This is human nature. It applies to us. It applies to our children. Whenever something happens that my kids don&#8217;t like, it&#8217;s unfair, right? They deserved something, and it didn&#8217;t happen.
It’s possible for two things to be true: The economy is not doing what it should be doing right now, and there are problems in the economy; regulatory problems, subsidy problems, market distortions, etc.
But generally speaking, the economic system in this country is mostly fair.
It is fair because you have property rights in this country. You have the equal rule of law in this country, as opposed to the vast majority of other countries around the Earth and in all of human history.
Politicians love lying to you. It is their favorite thing to do because the way that you win votes is by appealing to the lizard part of the brain, the part that says, “A bad thing happened and it&#8217;s unfair. It&#8217;s the system,” as opposed to, “A bad thing happened. Life is full of bad things.”
How do you solve poverty? The answer for most politicians is to yell at rich people and pretend the rich people got rich by causing poverty, which is untrue.
Poverty is the natural state of all mankind; for all of human history, everyone was poor. The question is not why there are poor people and rich people; the question is why even the poor people in the United States are, by any historical marker, very, very rich. That is the real question.
We now live in a world where, if you give basic financial advice, like “Move elsewhere if you can’t get a job in your area,” if you say things that reflect reality, people get mad, especially if there is a group of people telling them they don&#8217;t need to live in the world of reality.
Is Jeff Bezos the bad guy? Amazon directly employs 1.6 million people globally. People who use Amazon to sell products account for another 2 million jobs. Elon Musk’s global workforce consists of 150,000 people. Mark Zuckerberg&#8217;s Meta has 70,000 employees.
The notion that you kill private property and modern finance and somehow the economy gets better is absolute stupidity. But it is part and parcel of a lie that is being sold to you; that if only you had more power to centralize government, if you gave more power to Bernie Sanders or Tucker Carlson or people who want control over the economy, they would bring you back to some placid, agrarian past in which you can fish in the evening and write poetry in the morning.
It&#8217;s just trash. It&#8217;s stupid, and it does not comport with reality.
And as I’ve been saying for decades: in the end, reality always wins.

Why Reality Keeps Crashing Into America’s Economic Debate

Economics

wealth

A Chinese immigrant escapes one of history&#8217;s most brutal communist regimes, crosses the Pacific, lands in America, collects a multi-million dollar net worth, and then steps in front of a red carpet microphone to <a href="https://x.com/EndWokeness/status/2056115103926252025">declare</a> that capitalism is &#8220;the greatest evil in the world.&#8221;
That is exactly what Hacks star and professional they/them progressive Poppy Liu said at a recent premiere, before adding, generously, that she would &#8220;be okay with [capitalism]&#8221; if fewer people lived under oppression. A noble sentiment. A historically illiterate one (because capitalism leads to <a href="https://www.cato.org/commentary/capitalisms-triumph">less oppression</a>) and coming from her specifically, one of the most spectacular acts of self-unawareness in Hollywood this week.
How do we know? Because last year, Poppy sat down with the L.A. Times to <a href="https://www.latimes.com/travel/story/2025-02-21/sunday-funday-poppy-liu-best-things-to-do-los-angeles">share</a> her ideal Los Angeles Sunday. The schedule: 10:30 a.m personal training session. 11:30 acupuncture recovery. A quick bite at Amara Cafe. An afternoon trek to Koreatown for fresh fruit. Dinner at Levant Bistro. Movie night. And then, naturally, some late-night TikTok couch rot to wind down, after she put “they” to sleep. (The toddler is <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/Cus5xghr8PN/">nongender</a>.)
Every single stop on that itinerary was brought to her by the economic system she&#8217;d like to dismantle.
The irony is again richer than a 12-course tasting menu.
Let&#8217;s briefly audit what capitalism actually provided for Poppy&#8217;s American dream. The personal trainer hustling clients in a free market. The acupuncturist running a private practice. The cafe, the restaurant, the movie theater: all private enterprises, all paying wages, all generating profit, all apparently evil. The phone she used to post about it all? Designed by a company, assembled across a global supply chain, powered by semiconductors and lithium batteries that exist because competitive markets incentivized someone to invent them.
Her career? Funded by capitalist studios and streaming giants. Her designer wardrobe and <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DYWgo0vgQ0Z/?hl=en">thousand</a>-dollar couture dress? It operates through international trade and global capitalist markets. Her immigration story? The electric car with GPS and safety features that brought her to the vanity show? All market-driven. All only possible because she landed in a country built on economic freedom rather than state control.
China, where she spent much of her youth, tried the alternative. It killed tens of millions of people through the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, and fostered state-managed famine on an industrial scale.
She made it out, made it to America, made millions, and her takeaway is that capitalism is the problem.
This deranged mentality that she and other elites are projecting is going to slowly kill America, if we let it.
It’s nothing new, however. Hating the merchant class is one of the oldest political tricks in human history. <a href="https://heartland.org/opinion/economic-ideas-plato-aristotle-and-the-ancient-greeks-part-2/">Ancient</a> Greeks viewed private trade as disruptive. Medieval Europeans were <a href="https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1301/trade-in-medieval-europe/">suspicious</a> of commerce. For centuries, aristocrats <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourgeoisie">rallied</a> against anyone who threatened the established order of wealth. The resentment predates Marx by millennia. He just gave it a pamphlet.
What <a href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/marx-exploitation-abc-unequal-world/">Marx</a> actually did was shift the target. Before Marx, people resented wealth. After Marx, they were taught to resent the wealthy. To hate the person, not just the gap. To see every successful entrepreneur as a thief, every profit as exploitation, every billionaire as a threat to democracy. Modern progressives didn’t invent this; they just introduced it to the youth on TikTok.
And it’s working. Only 54% of Americans now view capitalism <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/694835/image-capitalism-slips.aspx">positively</a>. The lowest number in 15 years. This ought to terrify you.
As I “Sunday Scrolled” on Instagram, I came across a viral <a href="https://www.instagram.com/reels/DWjaRWeiF5X/">video</a> that inaccurately reframed the entire economic debate between Capitalism and communism as a father asking his daughter: if another kid doesn’t have a lunch, do you share yours? She says yes. Dad says, “Then you’re a little commie.” The implication was that capitalism means hoarding your sandwich while your classmate starves. It was emotional, clever, and completely wrong.
A child voluntarily sharing her lunch is not communism. That’s private property plus individual charity. Americans donate over $590 billion <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=Americans+donate+over+%24500+billion+annually%2C&amp;oq=Americans+donate+over+%24500+billion+annually%2C&amp;gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOdIBBzcwOWowajeoAgCwAgA&amp;sourceid=chrome&amp;ie=UTF-8">annually</a>, the highest charitable giving rate on earth. Communism isn&#8217;t the sweet kid at the lunch table. Communism is the government seizing the cafeteria, mismanaging the food supply, and leaving everyone hungry. Ask Venezuela. Ask the Soviet Union. Ask the 45 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward">million</a> people who died in Mao&#8217;s Great Leap Forward.
The video had 5.6 million views. The comments had a collective IQ of 80. The indoctrination is working.
Nobody is arguing that capitalism is perfect. It is flawed, but obviously the best option we’ve got. Under it, global extreme poverty cratered from 42% to under 9% since 1990. Lifespans doubled over the last century. The smartphone in your pocket contains more computing power than NASA used to land astronauts on the moon, and you can buy one for a few hundred dollars. This happened because markets reward innovation, competition drives down costs, and human ingenuity is allowed to function.
Every alternative has delivered something else. Stagnation. Poverty. Body Counts.
Even <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-ep-2426-memberblock">Sweden</a>, long the Left’s favorite argument for socialism, is embracing capitalism wholesale: free markets, private enterprise, lower taxes, and strong property rights. And of course, it’s working. The country has seen massive increases in innovation and Initial Public Offerings, so much so that the small country of 11 million is far outpacing Germany, France, and the Netherlands.
What the Poppys of the world are selling is not a better system. It is envy dressed in the language of compassion, packaged by people wealthy enough to never feel the consequences of the ideas they promote. They hate billionaires from their million-dollar homes. They hate corporations on the devices that those corporations made. They perform poverty from penthouses and call it solidarity. They fight “oppression” over oat-milk matchas.
Poppy Liu immigrated from a country that starved its own people in the name of economic equality, built a career in a country that rewards talent and ambition, accumulated real wealth, and concluded that the problem is capitalism.
She is welcome to her opinion. She is welcome to donate her sequined couture, her L.A. restaurant tabs, her streaming residuals, and her personal training sessions to the revolution. We&#8217;ll take the million-dollar home too, since she&#8217;s offering.
For the rest of us: you are not a bad person for believing in free markets. You are not greedy for wanting to keep what you earn. You are not heartless for understanding that a system rewarding innovation and competition has done more to lift human beings out of poverty than any government program in history.
The greatest evil of all time did not build the modern world. Capitalism did.
Don&#8217;t let the millionaire tell you otherwise.

“I Love Boosters” Los Angeles Premiere

The Miseducation Of Poppy Liu

Communist China

Poppy Liu

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is being absolutely trashed online for saying that no one can legitimately become a billionaire.
“You can’t earn a billion dollars. You just can’t earn that,” the democratic socialist congresswoman <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTZzXzRCA50">told</a> comedian Ilana Glazer on an episode of the “It’s Open” podcast. 
“You can get market power, you can break rules, you can do all sorts of things,&#8221; AOC said. “You can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth. But you can’t earn that, right? And so you have to create a myth that — since you didn’t earn that, you have to create a myth of earning it.&#8221; 
<div style="max-width: 728px; margin: 0 auto;">  <iframe style="aspect-ratio: 9/16; max-width: 220px; display: flex; justify-content: center; width: 100%; margin: 20px auto 5px; border: 0;" src="https://player.mux.com/01HjTo301q9Gmv2K8j7iu5VdYnqXalvDSA?metadata-video-content-type=short&amp;metadata-video-id=182bada4-4c01-424a-a259-324f705f7c95&amp;metadata-video-stream-type=on-demand&amp;metadata-video-title=All%20lies.&amp;poster=https%3A%2F%2Fdailywireplus-v2.imgix.net%2Fimages%2Fshorts%2F2a2a5153-958e-4fbd-83ef-6ac563cbc73e.png&amp;autoplay=false&amp;accent-color=%23DB3D3B&amp;primary-color=%23ffffff&amp;secondary-color=%23000000" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></div>
The Democrat seemed laser focused on billionaires in business without commenting on billionaire entertainers like Taylor Swift. When the critics started calling her out, AOC doubled down in an X post she <a href="https://x.com/AOC/status/2052529622655402174">shared</a> Thursday evening.
“The single largest form of theft in America is wage theft. $50 billion a year are stolen from American workers,” she wrote. 
“Some people get enraged that I draw attention to this. That’s on them. Let them call me shrill, dumb, inexperienced, girly, uneducated – these folks will say anything to distract from or undercut the truth that working people are getting screwed, and giving people a fair shake means we must have a grown conversation about reigning in abuse of power.”
Commenters with common sense pointed out the multiple flaws in her argument.
“Lies. Billionaires get rich by innovating and risk-taking, offering new and better goods and services at prices people are willing to pay. Government makes cash through confiscation. AOC&#8217;s conspiratorial, envious view of the world leads to impoverishment and tyranny,” Ben Shapiro, the editor emeritus of The Daily Wire, <a href="https://x.com/benshapiro/status/2052576063738269819">wrote</a>. 
“Socialists don’t run businesses,” author Helen Raleigh <a href="https://x.com/HRaleighspeaks/status/2052521924090097961">wrote</a>. “They produce nothing valuable or desirable that others want. They enrich themselves only by taking from others by force. Therefore, they don’t understand how entrepreneurs can be so wildly successful in a free market simply by providing goods or services many people want and are willing to pay for.”
“What a naive and wrong point of view. So much of leftist politics and thinking these days is about justifying envy,” entrepreneur and venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale <a href="https://x.com/JTLonsdale/status/2052452637245657095">agreed</a>. “I’ve co-founded six different multi-billion dollar companies, with more on the way. AOC perhaps isn’t bright enough to make a lot of money without massive grift &#8211; sure. But 10000’s who worked with me are rich; some are also billionaires!”
He added, “Our innovation sector is the best in the world, solving problems and growing the pie with US talent for a brighter future for all. I’m aligned against cronyism. But demonizing success is totally unAmerican.”

Did AOC Just Spark Bad Blood With Taylor Swift?

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

America

Billionaire

Business

Money

Envy, as we all know, is one of the seven deadly sins. 
And yet, if you are a Democrat these days, it may be the only virtue. 
For tens of thousands of years, the natural state of human beings was poverty, misery, and death.
Then came private property, along with governments that formed to protect it, as well as free markets formed to trade, invest, and expand that private property.
We all live better now than the richest man on earth did just 100 years ago, or 80 years ago, or even 60 years ago — by far.
But for the Democrats, that system of free markets is evil and immoral and wrong, not because free markets have produced poverty or misery, far from it, but because there are a lot of people who envy those who create wealth. They envy the people who innovate, compete, and win.
I&#8217;ve called these envious people “scavengers.”
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-ep-2422?elementPosition=2&amp;row=5&amp;rowHeadline=Latest+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
The virus of socialist envy never, ever dies. The not-so-brilliant Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was on a podcast with a woman named Ilana Glazer, where she made the rather incredible statement that it is not possible to earn $1 billion. 
Here was the exchange:
<blockquote>Ocasio-Cortez: You can&#8217;t earn a billion dollars.
Glazer: That&#8217;s right.  
Ocasio-Cortez: You just can&#8217;t earn that.  
Glazer: That&#8217;s exactly correct.  
Ocasio-Cortez: You can get market power. You can break rules. You can do all sorts of things. You can abuse labor laws.   
Glazer: Yup.  
Ocasio-Cortez: You can pay people less than what they&#8217;re worth.
Glazer: Yup. 
Ocasio-Cortez: But you can&#8217;t earn that, right?   
Glazer: That&#8217;s right.  
Ocasio-Cortez: And so you have to create a myth that — since you didn&#8217;t earn that, you have to create a myth of earning it.</blockquote>
The amount of brainpower in that room could toast a piece of bread — lightly. Absolute oatmeal for brains there.
Of course, you can earn $1 billion. The way that you earn $1 billion in the private sector is by providing goods and services to millions of people who want to pay for them.
That is how you earn $1 billion. You innovate a new product. Lots of people want it, and then they pay you for it. That is how you make money.
But this sort of stupidity has become de rigueur for the Left. Ocasio-Cortez then pushed this further on X, writing, “The single largest form of theft in America is wage theft. $50 billion a year are (sic) stolen from American workers.&#8221;
She&#8217;s not talking here about the wage theft of the government coming in and literally confiscating a giant chunk of your paycheck every month. She thinks it is wage theft for companies not to pay wages that she thinks they should pay.
Ocasio-Cortez is shrill, dumb, inexperienced, and uneducated.
It has always been a Marxist lie that capitalism impoverishes the worker. It is not true. It has never been true.
Every prediction Marx ever made about the future state of the world was wrong. All of them. Which is why, in order to achieve his vision, governments eventually had to kill tens of millions of human beings.
He projected that there would be a gigantic class struggle: never happened. He predicted that capitalism would impoverish everyone: it didn’t.
All that Marxism is really rooted in, in the end, is pure, unadulterated envy. Ocasio-Cortez cited Bernie Sanders as the founder of the movement, saying, “In a lot of ways, we&#8217;re all kind of Bernie&#8217;s successor.”
There is no one who&#8217;s been a bigger leech on the ass of American society than Bernie Sanders. The man has not held a productive job for literally 80 years. For 80 years, he has lived and sponged off the taxpayer.
Sanders is now targeting Sergey Brin for the great crime of founding Google, <a href="https://x.com/BernieSanders/status/2052478807525794280?s=20">saying</a> on X, “Google founder Sergey Brin&#8217;s wealth has DOUBLED to $311 billion since Trump&#8217;s election. Now he’s spending $57M to oppose a 5% billionaires&#8217; wealth tax in California. He’d rather millions lose healthcare than pay his fair share in taxes. This kind of arrogance is unacceptable.”
According to whom? You&#8217;re a tyrant. And by the way, it is you who are arrogant because you believe you are entitled to Sergey Brin&#8217;s wealth. 
Kamala Harris has implied she should be able to basically dictate wages, imagining a world “where if you work a 40-hour week, you can afford your rent and food on the table and maybe a vacation from time to time, not scraping to get by, praying you can get through the end of the month.”
That is so vague as to be utterly worthless. First of all, the vast majority of people in the United States who work a 40-hour week can afford rent. They&#8217;re not living on the streets. They&#8217;re affording rent. It may be too expensive; they may not like it, but the vast majority of them are not homeless, and they can afford food because starvation in the United States is at zero. No one is starving to death in the United States.
Socialists and people who hate free markets posit that if you work 40 hours a week in the United States, you should be able to afford all sorts of things, and the only thing stopping you is this system they don&#8217;t like.
It&#8217;s just crap. It&#8217;s just nonsense.
It’s important to note that places like California that have decided to follow the AOC-Bernie Sanders path — wealth is terrible, and innovation is awful — are losing people. They are losing income.
So the question is, why do the Democrats keep doing this?
It can only be envy.
The promise of Marxism is not a better future. The promise of Marxism is a better human being. That was always the promise of Marxism.
It is a lie. It is untrue.
Human beings are human beings wherever you go. Human nature is human nature wherever you go. The idea that you&#8217;re a better person if you believe in redistributionism is a lie.
Free markets are good. Free markets are based on a simple principle: You, as an individual, have creative power in the universe. You&#8217;re made in the image of God. You have control over your autonomy. You have the ability to control your labor. Your innovation is your own, and you ought to own it.
There are time machines on planet Earth. They&#8217;re called airplanes. Take an airplane to a third-world country that does not protect private property, that does not believe in equal rights before the law. See how it works out for you. It&#8217;s terrible. It&#8217;s awful.
Meanwhile, you&#8217;re living here in the United States, the greatest country in the history of mankind, and you have a magical device you carry in your pocket every day, filled with more technology than the tech used to put a man on the moon.
You&#8217;re carrying that around every day, and you have a button on that phone that will magically deliver a product to you without any effort on your part, other than hitting the button. That product will have been sourced from 80 different countries, and you&#8217;ll never know about it.
That&#8217;s the power of free markets, which is rooted in your specific priorities.
You&#8217;re not a victim in the system. You get to decide what you want to buy. You get to decide what you want to sell. You get to decide how much you&#8217;re going to spend on a thing, or whether you don&#8217;t want to spend that much money on a thing.
The idea that you, as an individual, get to decide what a thing is worth to you is the basis for free-market economics, meaning that it is the most individualistic system that has ever been conceived of by mankind.
That&#8217;s what price systems do. We aggregate the value over time, and then we figure out what the average person is willing to pay.
You innovate; you compete; things get better. It is not just a utilitarian case. It is a moral case.
The Left hates that moral case. They want something completely different.
They are driven by envy.
And that’s a sin.

Comrade AOC 2

The Argument AOC Is Making About Success In America

Marxism

There is a current tendency to blame free markets and technology for dyspepsia with the economy, as if there is a nefarious group of people destroying your way of life.
People are literally trying to attack data centers.
As David Friedberg noted on the “<a href="https://x.com/theallinpod/status/2046280245758787914">All-In Podcast</a>”:
<blockquote>Most people in America are starting to really hate rich people. And there&#8217;s no physical space that better represents the wealth in America, the wealth creation that&#8217;s happened that a lot of people feel left behind from, than the data center. It is the temple of the wealthy. It is the way that the rich, elite, tech, kind of political, connected billionaires that we&#8217;re obviously all attached to are taking from the poor, getting themselves ahead, shooting themselves to space, leaving everyone else behind, and the data center, I think, is the representation of their progress. And it is a representation of the progress that others don&#8217;t feel.
For a consumer&#8217;s life to actually be altered in a meaningfully positive way, most people don&#8217;t feel that yet. The best thing they see is some medical advice they&#8217;re getting on ChatGPT or something, and that&#8217;s kind of the end of it for them. So I think there&#8217;s a lot of this populism that&#8217;s swollen and that&#8217;s taken over, not just the US, but probably a good chunk of the West. And the data center is the target.</blockquote>
David Friedberg&#8217;s explanation is exactly right. This is the way that economic populists have been pushing.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-ep-2410?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-large wp-image-974957 aligncenter" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp" alt="DailyWire+" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-300x50.webp 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-768x128.webp 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1536x256.webp 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-2048x341.webp 2048w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
Let’s differentiate between moral and economic populism. Moral populism was exemplified by William F. Buckley back in the 1960s when he stated that he would trust the first 100 names in the Harvard phone book on matters of public policy more than he would trust 100 Harvard professors.
The idea was that the common man in the United States — shaped as he or she was by the institutions of church and family and community — had a better moral compass, on average, than the elites.
I totally agree with that, because elites very often believe that they have been freed from these systems of morality.
However, when it comes to the economy, economic populism is virtually the inverse. Economic populism assumes that there should be some sort of centralized control placed into the hands of that central power by “the people,” and centralized control should overwhelm the disseminated knowledge that is implicit in free markets and capital markets.
The basic principle of capitalism is that disparate views on things lead to better outcomes, that differential knowledge and the diffusion of knowledge are actually significantly more effective than one guy at the top with a stick beating people into submission.
But economic populism says that free markets are bad if the product of the free market is something I don&#8217;t like, therefore, we should take power away from the free market to destroy it.
Whenever there is economic unease, people tend to attack free market capitalism, or what they see as the symbols of free market capitalism, and they tend to blame people who are wealthy.
The great lie is that people in the United States are wealthy because they&#8217;re stealing from the poor. It is a full-scale lie. It is not true.
The only places in the world where people are rich because they steal from the poor are communist countries and other forms of tyranny. The reason people get rich in a free market economy is because they are providing products and services at a price people are willing to pay. People want that product or service.
But if you can somehow recast the economy of the United States as “rigged” on behalf of the wealthy and go after the means of production, you target data centers.
What you are going to end up doing, in this view, is overthrow the capitalist system.
The outcome of that will be quite dire.
There is a grievance-based, horseshoe-theory economic Right that is also wildly upset about artificial intelligence data centers because they&#8217;re big and ugly.
You know what else is big and ugly? Walmart — but it’s wonderful for the vast majority of consumers.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman&#8217;s home was allegedly targeted in the second attack in just two days; a shot was even fired. This is part and parcel of a broader movement that is targeting technology more generally, including technologies that are required for the United States to win wars.
City Journal <a href="https://www.city-journal.org/article/palantir-protests-ice-national-security?utm_source=virtuous&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=cjdaily">reported</a> there is a campaign against the military contractor Palantir — which generates extraordinary technologies in terms of intelligence gathering, capacity to target, and much of the actual technology that goes into the machines that we use.
This crosses paths with all of America&#8217;s enemies. America&#8217;s enemies are delighted to watch us destroy ourselves by taking down the technologies that allow us to win.
If you buy into this entire shtick — the idea that AI as a technology must be destroyed — it won&#8217;t be destroyed.
We&#8217;ll just lose.
If you think that China is going to forgo AI, you&#8217;re a fool. They won’t.
If the United States were to heavily restrict AI, not just in terms of preventing its gravest harms, but restricting the development of AI, or if there were to be a political party that attempts to prevent the building of data centers, not for any sort of understandable economic reason — like, for example, make the data centers pay their fair share of electricity production, which I think is a fair argument — if there&#8217;s a broad scale movement to destroy the AI industry out of either misplaced agrarianism or a deep and abiding hatred for capitalism or the generalized belief that capitalism rots the human soul, we will lose.
If the United States heavily restricts AI, not just by preventing its gravest harms but by restricting its development, we will lose. If a political party tries to stop the construction of data centers, we will lose. That is different from making data centers pay their fair share for electricity production, which I think is a fair argument. But if there is a broad-based movement to destroy the AI industry out of misplaced agrarianism, a deep and abiding hatred of capitalism, or a generalized belief that capitalism rots the human soul, we will lose.
China wins.
This is not a vacuum. It is not as though if the United States forgoes AI magically, we would continue to have a burgeoning, wealthy economy, and China goes weapons down.
When it comes to AI, indeed, there are problems, there are dangers — and we should all recognize those dangers, not whistling past the graveyard — but at the same time, it is a tremendous opportunity.
A China in a dominant AI position means a China in a dominant military position. The amount of AI that is being used right now by the United States military in the conflict in Iran and in the operation in Venezuela is tremendous and growing.
If China outpaces us in AI development, that means their military is now superior to ours. If their military is superior to ours, that means they can not only effectuate change in their region, it means they can also spread that technology throughout the world and make other countries dependent on the receipt of that technology.
It means that many, many other countries all over planet Earth would suddenly become dependent on China.
That is a huge problem, and it also leaves China in a dominant economic position, because AI means more productivity. If productivity goes up for China but remains stagnant for the United States, they will outcompete us. If they outcompete us, one of two things happens: Either we block off our economy and become backward and protectionist — meaning we don&#8217;t have any of the best goods and products and services at the best price, we&#8217;re all poorer and we slide into poverty and stagnation — or we have to be dependent on Chinese products, our kids work for Chinese companies, and China is able to spread its influence.
When it comes to the game of economics, you must win.
When it comes to the game of military dominance, you must win.
And when it comes to the technological game, you must win.
The economic populism that&#8217;s been rising says that we ought to tariff our way out of all our problems, that we ought to attack technological development, that it would be great to have an economy based on t-shirts — none of this is going to solve the bigger problem.
Attacking tech CEOs or healthcare CEOs or burning up Teslas and attacking Tesla showrooms or shooting Charlie Kirk or attempting to shoot President Trump — all of these are the most extreme manifestations of an ideology.
That ideology says that you are a victim of American society and therefore you get to do bad things. On a broader political level, you are a victim of American society, and therefore you ought to get together with the other victims, take over the government, and use centralized, tyrannical power r to cram down your view of the world.

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