The White House ripped into Democrats after a near-unanimous vote Tuesday night in defense of socialism, calling the vote the latest illustration of &#8220;how extreme their party has become.&#8221;
The vote turned contentious, with only eight Democrat members of the House crossing the aisle to vote with Republicans on the resolution to denounce &#8220;socialism in all its forms.&#8221; It passed 220-192, with all the votes against the condemnation coming from Democrats. Two Democrats refused to pick a side and simply voted present.
The White House is using the vote to tear into Democrats, suggesting that the party has been lost to its most radical elements.
&#8220;Yet again, the Democrats prove how extreme their party has become,&#8221; White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis told The Daily Wire. &#8220;They support radical socialism, defunding federal law enforcement, and non-citizens voting in American elections.&#8221;
The vote was far closer than last November, when a <a href="https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/11/21/congress/house-denounces-horrors-of-socialism-00664412">similar resolution</a> condemning the &#8220;horrors of socialism&#8221; passed with support from 86 Democrats. The shift comes as the Democrat Socialists of America <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/who-is-behind-the-rapid-rise-of-the-dsa">grows its influence</a> on the political Left, with many of the most prominent party figures in the country proudly embracing the socialist label.
Highlighting this radical shift will be central to the Republican strategy in the rapidly approaching midterm elections, which, especially in House elections, will play out with electorates far less open to socialism than the Democrat base. In some key elections that will determine control of the U.S. Senate, however, the Democrat candidates who prevailed in primaries are on the far-Left.
Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico, for example, <a href="https://texasscorecard.com/decisiontexas/talarico-said-capitalism-is-an-oppressive-system-that-must-be-dismantled/">called</a> capitalism an &#8220;<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/talarico-attacked-capitalism-wait-until-you-see-who-was-helping-pay-his-bills">oppressive system</a>&#8221; that needs to be &#8220;dismantled.&#8221; Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan, has attempted to distance himself from the socialist but has regularly reached out to the far-Left wing of the party — including by campaigning with America-hating communist streamer <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/el-sayed-defends-alliance-with-hasan-piker-in-newly-circulated-video">Hasan Piker</a>.
The White House is pledging that Republicans will continue to focus on President Donald Trump&#8217;s &#8220;commonsense agenda.&#8221;
&#8220;President Trump and Republicans will continue to deliver on his commonsense agenda that includes tax cuts for American families, border security, and record low prices for prescription drugs,&#8221; Bis told The Daily Wire.
Using resolutions to force Democrats to expose their radical positions has been part of the Republican strategy in Congress, and Democrats continue to step right into the trap. Earlier this year, <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/53-dems-vote-against-declaring-iran-state-sponsor-terror?msockid=2ac6c3f27a1c60101941d5cb7b3161f3">53 Democrats voted against</a> declaring Iran a state-sponsor of terror — an undeniable fact, unless you don&#8217;t recognize groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis as terrorists.
Democrats, however, are fearful of repercussions from the radical base that doesn&#8217;t want to see it side with Republicans on anything. Two Democrats who crossed the aisle to help Republicans get the resolution to a final House vote were lambasted by party leadership for doing so.
&#8220;The decision by two of our colleagues to blindside the entire House Democratic Caucus and join with the Republican majority to pass a procedural rule on the brink of failing represents a significant breach of trust,&#8221; said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), in reference to Jared Golden of Maine and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington, who both voted for the resolution.

US-POLITICS-VOTE-NEW YORK-MAYOR

White House Tears Into Democrats After Near-Unanimous Vote Defending Socialism

democratic socialists of america

hakeem jeffries

house of representatives

politics

socialism

white house

Texas Democrat James Talarico has wanted to blow up the American economy, but he couldn’t even untie himself from his mother’s apron strings.
Resurfaced video from a 2020 Sierra Club virtual forum shows the radical Senate candidate going full-blown socialist, branding free-market capitalism an “oppressive system” right alongside white supremacy and climate change. Swooning over far-Left youth activists, Talarico declared, “Young activists have really drawn the link between climate change and white supremacy and capitalism in our country. And I think only ending the ways that all three of those oppressive systems work together are we going to be able to begin the process of dismantling them.”
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
In a private Zoom meeting with Austin Sierra Club activists, James talarico says capitalism is an oppressive system he wants to dismantle:
&quot;I&#39;m &#8230; thankful that young activists have really drawn the link between climate change and white supremacy and capitalism in our country.… <a href="https://t.co/sPDDXg6l5q">pic.twitter.com/sPDDXg6l5q</a>
&mdash; Lone Star Liberty PAC (@LoneStar_PAC) <a href="https://x.com/LoneStar_PAC/status/2094742199170736395?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 1, 2026</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.x.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
While Talarico was busy bashing the free market and accusing everyone else of stealing, how was he managing his own finances?
By letting Mom handle the checkbook.
According to his official 2026 Senate personal financial disclosures, as The Washington Free Beacon <a href="https://freebeacon.com/democrats/texass-james-talarico-37-shares-his-only-checking-account-with-his-mom/">reported</a>, Talarico relied heavily on his parents. Talarico’s financial disclosures listed just one checking account: a Wells Fargo account containing between $15,000 and $50,000 that he shares with his mother, according to the Free Beacon. No other checking account appeared anywhere on his filing.
In 2021, Talarico’s parents pumped $5,000 each into his campaign for state representative. That same year, when Talarico was 32 years old, campaign records show his parents gave an &#8220;in-kind&#8221; $1,437.84 contribution to pay for his &#8220;moving expenses.”
To top it all off, state disclosures from 2024 and 2025 reveal Talarico listed his parents&#8217; home address as his place of business for his self-employed &#8220;Education Consultant&#8221; gig. This was despite him buying a three-bedroom Austin home for over $400,000 back in 2022. Why is a sitting lawmaker using his parents&#8217; address for his private business?
Fast forward to his 2026 Senate campaign launch, and the woke wonderkid was still railing against the system that made America great. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdQAacvvIv8">Speaking</a> at a rally in Arlington, Talarico whipped up the crowd by attacking pro-growth policies as a &#8220;false gospel&#8221; and throwing around the Left&#8217;s favorite dirty phrase: “trickle-down economics.”
“Trickle-down economics is not a theory. It is theft,” Talarico sneered.
The term &#8220;trickle-down&#8221; is nothing more than a leftist slur used by economic illiterates to attack supply-side economics, a system that works. Supply-side economics is built on the basic logic that when you cut taxes and red tape, you make it cheaper for businesses and entrepreneurs to invest and produce. When businesses grow, they hire more workers, create better products, and expand the entire economic pie. A booming, rising economy lifts all boats, putting more money in the pockets of everyday working families.
It’s easy to preach about &#8220;dismantling capitalism&#8221; when you’ve got a family safety net catching your every fall.

James Talarico Campaigns For Senate In Kerrville, Texas

Talarico Attacked Capitalism. Wait Until You See Who Was Helping Pay His Bills.

Mama’s Boy Talarico Bashed Capitalism While Relying On Parents

2026 midterm election

capitalism

james talarico

texas

New York City Democratic Socialists of America leader Gustavo Gordillo has repeatedly presented his family’s rise in America as a classic immigrant success story — but newly surfaced records are raising questions about just how humble those beginnings really were.
“My parents came here, they had nothing,” Gordillo, 38, told the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/09/us/politics/gustavo-gordillo-democratic-socialists.html">New York Times</a> earlier this month. He has offered a similar account elsewhere, including during a July appearance on Fox News, where he said his father’s first job in the United States was at Wendy’s and his mother worked as a house cleaner.
The story of Gordillo’s family, however, appears considerably more complicated. A <a href="https://www.buschcares.com/obituaries/Manuel-E-Gordillo-MD?obId=27361200">2021 obituary</a> for Gordillo’s paternal grandfather, Manuel Gordillo, identifies him as the first member of the family to immigrate to the United States. Manuel earned a medical degree from San Marcos University in Lima, Peru, before coming to the United States in 1958 as a medical resident.
He became a U.S. citizen in 1964 and went on to build a long career as a psychiatrist in the Cleveland area, according to the obituary. He ultimately retired at 87. Manuel and his wife, Ruth, had nine children, including Gordillo’s father, also named Gustavo. Public records, reviewed by the <a href="https://nypost.com/2026/08/29/us-news/nyc-dsa-boss-gustavo-gordillos-roots-in-us-may-go-back-to-grandfather/">New York Post</a>, indicate that Gordillo&#8217;s father went on to found DraftPros, a telecommunications engineering firm that reportedly generates some $90 million a year from clients including AT&amp;T and Verizon.
The discrepancy is particularly notable because Gordillo has made working-class identity a central part of his political persona. The Yale-educated socialist is the co-chair of NYC-DSA and has presented himself as a union electrician while advocating an aggressively anti-capitalist agenda.
However, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 3 said Gordillo was <a href="https://nypost.com/2026/08/19/us-news/privileged-dsa-leader-got-fired-for-not-showing-up-to-electrician-gig-then-got-95k-party-salary/">terminated</a> from its apprenticeship program in March after a “prolonged absence from and failure to participate in required work and classes.” Gordillo therefore never completed the apprenticeship required to become a fully credentialed electrician. His <a href="https://x.com/unionGustavo">X profile</a> nevertheless continues to identify him as a “union electrician.”
After leaving the apprenticeship, Gordillo and fellow DSA co-chair Grace Mausser successfully pushed the organization to provide each of them with a $95,000 annual salary and benefits.
That decision came as Gordillo described the demands of his work and political activism to DSA members, according to the Post.
His personal housing situation has also raised questions about the image he has cultivated.
Gordillo lives in a nearly 2,000-square-foot Bedford-Stuyvesant row house that his parents purchased in 2019 through an LLC for just under $1 million. The property is now valued at roughly $1.5 million and has undergone an estimated $1.4 million in renovations, according to <a href="https://nypost.com/2026/08/18/us-news/dsa-leader-gustavo-gordillo-lives-in-1-5-million-brooklyn-pad-paid-for-by-millionaire-parents/">reporting by the Post</a>. The home was purchased for Gordillo and his brother, according to his father.
Gordillo has simultaneously faced a separate housing dispute in Brooklyn. A former landlord sued him after alleging he failed to pay $5,000 in rent on a Crown Heights apartment where he was living while the family-owned townhouse underwent renovations. The case remains pending, and no judgment has been issued.
The controversies have put New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a fellow socialist and political ally of Gordillo, <a href="https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/politics/2026/08/26/mamdani-stands-by-dsa-leader-amid-controversy-over-lifestyle-and-work-history">on the defensive</a>. Mamdani has declined to call for Gordillo’s resignation, instead saying that the DSA is responsible for choosing its own leaders. “The D in DSA stands for Democratic,” Mamdani said. “I leave it up to the organization in its own voting who it’s electing as its leaders.”
For Gordillo, however, the questions are increasingly centered on the gap between the life he appears to have lived and the working-class biography he has presented to the public. The available records tell the story of a family whose first American immigrant was a highly educated physician who built a successful medical career, followed by a son who became an engineer and wealthy businessman.

Untitled design (10)

Socialist Leader’s Immigrant Sob Story Keeps Getting Harder To Believe

gustavo gordillo

new york city

zohran mamdani

Portrait Of Dolly Parton

Why We Can’t Let The Left Make Dolly Their Socialist Mascot

black lives matter

dolly parton

feminism

opinion

Piker Propaganda

Who Is Behind The Rapid Rise Of The DSA?

alexandria ocasio-cortez

hasan piker

I do not oppose the Islamic caliphate because it is Islamic. Yes, I left Islam and believe it is the most destructive ideology that has ever existed, but my objection to the caliphate is political. An Islamic government would never treat all men as equal citizens under a common law. It sorts people by religion and by sex, elevates religious law above private conscience, and gives the state enormous power over belief, family, law, and public life. Systems built this way shape people to be slaves, train them to obey, and eventually produce subjects who celebrate their submission as virtue.
But Islam did not invent this system. Throughout human history, this was simply the political order, the human default, not the exception. From the pharaohs to the kings of Mesopotamia to the Roman emperors, rulers repeatedly wrapped political authority in divinity, and European monarchs later claimed that their thrones rested on God’s appointment. When the modern world began pushing God out of politics, totalitarian movements kept the same structure and changed only the source of authority. The Party took God’s place, or the revolution, or the race, or the leader.
Under all of these systems, ordinary people were never truly free, never equal before the law, and never collectively prosperous. Rights, where they existed at all, were distributed according to class, religion, sex, caste, tribe, or proximity to power. Discrimination was built into the political order, dissent could be punished as disloyalty or heresy, and the individual possessed few protections against the ruler. Wealth might accumulate around courts, temples, armies, party elites, or ruling families, but the population as a whole remained politically subordinate, economically vulnerable, and dependent on those above them. Some empires were rich, some were powerful, and some produced great art, architecture, and learning, but none produced the combination of individual rights, equality before the law, religious liberty, political participation, social mobility, widespread prosperity, and longevity that emerged under the American constitutional order.
Every political system has defects, including America’s, but measured against the alternatives human beings have tried, the American experiment has produced fewer political defects and more shared human flourishing than any previous, or current, model of government.
American Exceptionalism
Every other political order in history failed to deliver what the American political order delivered. Monarchies concentrated power in dynasties. Aristocracies made political privilege hereditary. Theocracies subordinated citizenship to religious status. Empires divided conqueror from conquered. Communist regimes abolished private concentrations of wealth only to create political elites with vastly greater power. Fascist regimes subordinated the individual to the state and murdered millions in the process. Even Europe’s liberal democracies did not grant their people the degree of political and religious freedom Americans enjoy. The French Revolution itself followed the American Revolution and drew on its language and ideals.
America became the largest economy in the world by the end of the nineteenth century and then the dominant industrial power of the twentieth. It became the destination of tens of millions of immigrants. It produced unprecedented levels of mass homeownership, consumer abundance, technological innovation, private philanthropy, higher education, and upward mobility. It created enough wealth not merely for kings or merchants, but for ordinary workers, forms of material abundance that would have been unimaginable luxuries throughout human history and that remain beyond the reach of much of the world today.
America’s superiority is not only economic. It is also political, legal, and personal. Americans enjoy protections for freedom of speech, religious liberty, political dissent, private association, due process, and protection from arbitrary government that are not found even in the other developed democracies.
In England and Wales, more than 12,000 people were arrested in 2023 under communications laws covering allegedly offensive or malicious speech.
America is a country where a citizen can insult the government, mock religion, denounce the president, start a movement, open a business, lose everything, fail publicly, and rise again. That freedom creates a kind of human dignity that cannot be measured by GDP alone. America built something people across the world still aspire to join. It is the envy of the world not only because of its wealth, but because of the kind of person its political order builds: free. Those of us who came here as immigrants understand this more than people who were born into it. We know what it is to live outside this order and then to be received into it, shaped by it, and made one of its own. For those who truly escaped to America both physically and culturally, that creates a debt of gratitude that lasts a lifetime.
A Brief Desperation
In 1929, the American economy began to fall apart. By 1933, millions of Americans had lost jobs, savings, homes, farms, or businesses. For a generation raised to believe in the basic tenets of the American political order, individual freedom, limited government, private property, free enterprise, personal responsibility, and the idea that people should largely be free to build their own lives, the Depression was more than an economic catastrophe. It shook their confidence in the system itself. For the first time, millions of Americans began to wonder whether the political and economic order that had produced so much freedom and prosperity could still keep its promises.
By the early 1930s, the Soviet Union was already showing the brutality of forced collectivization, repression, famine, and political terror. But the full historical record had not yet accumulated. Stalin’s purges, the Gulag on its later scale, Mao’s Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and decades of economic failure were still ahead. To an unemployed American worker in 1932, socialism could still be sold as a glamorous promise.
That crisis of confidence became the central issue of the 1932 presidential election. The incumbent Republican president, Herbert Hoover, still believed that the American system could recover without permanently transforming the role of the federal government. His Democratic challenger, Franklin D. Roosevelt, argued that the scale of the collapse demanded a far more aggressive response from Washington, and proposed a much larger federal role in banking, labor, welfare, agriculture, and economic regulation.
Hoover described the election as something larger than a choice between two candidates; he called it a contest between “two philosophies of government.” What frightened him was the possibility that economic desperation would persuade Americans to surrender powers to Washington that would never fully be returned. He feared that once citizens began looking to the federal government for economic security, the relationship between the individual and the state would be permanently altered.
Roosevelt won overwhelmingly, and once in office he began expanding the federal government on a scale Americans had never seen before. Social Security created a permanent federal role in retirement security. Washington became more deeply involved in banking, financial markets, labor relations, unemployment relief, and agriculture. Even after the immediate crisis passed, much of this new machinery remained. To Hoover and many conservatives, this confirmed exactly what they had feared: measures introduced as emergency responses were becoming permanent institutions, moving responsibility away from individuals, families, communities, and states and toward Washington.
What Roosevelt called necessary reform, his opponents saw as the beginning of dependence on the federal government and a dangerous movement toward socialism that could eventually threaten the liberty the American system had been built to protect.
Roosevelt saw the danger differently. He understood that if millions of Americans came to believe that capitalism meant nothing more than the freedom to lose everything, socialism would become harder and harder to resist. You could not protect the American system simply by telling desperate people to trust it. You had to show that the system could correct itself. That is what Roosevelt tried to do. He was willing to experiment with policies that many conservatives considered socialist, but he never embraced the socialist project itself. He did not abolish private property, nationalize American industry, replace elections with one-party rule, or hand the economy over to central planners. He looked at the grievances that made socialism attractive and asked which of them were legitimate.
If an elderly man could work his whole life and still end up destitute, perhaps some form of old-age insurance made sense. If millions of men were unemployed because the entire economy had collapsed, perhaps unemployment was not always a moral failure. If a bank could gamble recklessly and wipe out the savings of thousands of families, perhaps banking needed rules strong enough to restore public trust.
Roosevelt took from socialism what could strengthen the American system and rejected what would destroy it.
Roosevelt was playing with fire, and Hoover was right to warn that fire can spread. But Roosevelt was also a product of the political order he was trying to save. The divide in America at that moment was not between one camp that loved America and another that saw America itself as evil. Roosevelt did not believe the Constitution had to be replaced, that the American founding was fundamentally illegitimate, or that capitalism had to be destroyed and replaced with a new political order. He believed America was great and worth preserving, and his reforms were intended to preserve it. That made experimentation with ideas drawn from another political order far less dangerous.
The Desperation of the Prosperous
Nearly a century later, America is again living through a crisis of confidence. But this crisis comes after generations of Americans have lived within an economic order that made levels of comfort once reserved for kings available to ordinary people. Entire generations have come to regard that abundance not as a historical miracle, but as the normal starting point of life when a society has been prosperous for long enough, even a setback can feel like total failure, because people compare their lives not with the rest of human history, or even with most of the world today, but with the unusually favorable conditions enjoyed by the generation immediately before them.
***
This is reprinted with permission from the author. The original can be found <a href="https://www.danburmawi.com/p/the-christian-caliphate-the-conservative">here</a>.
Danny Burmawi is an author, political commentator, and founder of the Ideological Defense Institute. His book, &#8220;ISLAM, ISRAEL AND THE WEST: A Former Muslim&#8217;s Analysis,&#8221; can be ordered <a href="https://a.co/d/0hFHZSaY">here</a>. Subscribe to his newsletter <a href="https://www.danburmawi.com/">here</a>.

Lady Justice and American Politics

Sovereign Gods, Free Men: American Exceptionalism Against The Caliphate

american exceptionalism

franklin d roosevelt

great depression

islamic caliphate

Gen Z has a socialism problem. In recent months, that cohort of voters has helped secure victory for openly socialist and communist candidates in major American cities.
Growing numbers of American youth are embracing the same radical ideologies that once devastated Europe and have claimed over 100 million victims worldwide.
They don’t seem aware of the atrocities these ideologies historically produced. Some even think that these ideologies — and the nations that perpetuate them — are simply misunderstood.
A <a href="https://protect.checkpoint.com/v2/r01/___https:/defendinged.org/investigations/little-red-classrooms-young-envoys-scholarship-program/___.YXAzOmNyY2E6YzpvZmZpY2UzNjVfZW1haWxzX2F0dGFjaG1lbnQ6NWY5NTFkY2U2NWZmZTIyMmZiZDBjOTc3YzJhYmFlZjI6Nzo5NWI5OjJmMmU3N2FjZTUxMjQxMGYwODdjYjE3Mzc2ZjE1ZjEwN2EzYjUwNzRiYzkyZWMzOGU4OTk1ZDMxNTE0NjhiYWE6cDpUOkY">new report from Defending Education</a> suggests that this trend could be, in part, a repercussion of the cognitive warfare of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in American classrooms.
The report investigated China’s Young Envoys Scholarship (YES) program, a study-abroad opportunity for American youth that Chinese President Xi Jinping established in 2024 to promote a “mutual understanding between young generations of China and the U.S.”
In reality, the program is a not-so-covert attempt to persuade American youth to support China’s totalitarian and anti-American agendas.
The YES program sounds incredible in theory. It enables American students to enjoy sponsored trips to China and expand their cultural knowledge. Since 2024, at least 83 American universities and 26 K-12 schools across 30 states have participated in the program.
So what’s the catch?
The organization that oversees YES — the China Education Association for International Exchange (CEAIE) — openly advertises that it is guided by “Marxism-Leninism” and Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism on its Chinese-language website. CEAIE’s website literally says that it will “always adhere to the leadership of the [Communist] Party and integrate the Party’s work into the entire process of the association’s operation and development.”
How Orwellian. A closer look into YES’s specific programming increases suspicions that the program seeks to create a biased impression of China among American youth.
For example, in 2025, YES sponsored <a href="https://protect.checkpoint.com/v2/r01/___https:/en.ceaie.edu.cn/uploads/attached/file/20251110/B10680668988217.pdf___.YXAzOmNyY2E6YzpvZmZpY2UzNjVfZW1haWxzX2F0dGFjaG1lbnQ6MDFhZTc4N2M1YzQ4ZTJlMWE0YjQ1ZGUyMjk0MzQ2OTU6Nzo4ZDVlOmRkOWQzNWE2MTY5YWE1OTkzZmI3NjYyMTNkMzFjMGQ2OWNkZGY4YTMwN2EyZWJkNjEwN2QyNmQ1NzIzNzE3MWE6cDpUOkY">a Chicago high schoolers’ trip</a> for 27 students and teachers to the <a href="https://protect.checkpoint.com/v2/r01/___https:/www.foxnews.com/world/report-details-rising-pressure-underground-catholics-china-denies-crackdown___.YXAzOmNyY2E6YzpvZmZpY2UzNjVfZW1haWxzX2F0dGFjaG1lbnQ6MDFhZTc4N2M1YzQ4ZTJlMWE0YjQ1ZGUyMjk0MzQ2OTU6Nzo0YTdhOmFjMDc4ZGVhZmE5NGY4YTc0MTNjNTQyMTJhMTAxZmQyM2FkNTg0MjJjZWRlYzRlMGQ0OGExNGI2Y2E5M2NhMWQ6cDpUOkY">Xinjiang region of China</a>. Students learned Chinese calligraphy and Tai Chi, took dance classes, and enjoyed the beautiful scenery. Their cultural tour of the region notably left out what Xinjiang is actually known for. The U.S. government has formally designated China&#8217;s campaign against Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang region as a genocide, and human rights organizations have documented mass internment camps, forced labor, and forced sterilization across the region.
Similarly, in January 2024, the Muscatine Community School District in Iowa <a href="https://protect.checkpoint.com/v2/r01/___https:/www.muscatine.k12.ia.us/news/2024/01/muscatine-high-school-china-exchange/___.YXAzOmNyY2E6YzpvZmZpY2UzNjVfZW1haWxzX2F0dGFjaG1lbnQ6NWY5NTFkY2U2NWZmZTIyMmZiZDBjOTc3YzJhYmFlZjI6NzpjMTg2OjdlOGQ5MjJlZjZjY2I4MGU1YWI0MzIzYTlkMDRlNTkwNmQ3MzhmNjQ4YzM1YjU2NjMwOTRkMTJhY2I4NTg1ZjE6cDpUOkY">announced</a> that a group of 24 students and four educators would travel to China as guests of China’s minister of education. The Chinese government fully funded the trip.
Coverage by the Chinese Embassy on the trip detailed how the students had given gifts to President Xi, including a “school flag with Chinese characters ‘Grandpa Xi, Here We Are’” (Referring to President Xi Jinping). The embassy added, “After the visit, the students of the delegation wrote a letter to President Xi, sharing their joy and happiness during the visit and thanking him for inviting them to China.”
These students would have an increased sympathy for any CCP propaganda based on these testimonials about their trip. Especially if they came from “Grandpa Xi.”
In March 2024, 10 students from Tacoma Public Schools in Washington state <a href="https://protect.checkpoint.com/v2/r01/___https:/english.news.cn/northamerica/20240203/239fae7b1a3e4fd6ac78c7c8af8092e6/c.html___.YXAzOmNyY2E6YzpvZmZpY2UzNjVfZW1haWxzX2F0dGFjaG1lbnQ6NWY5NTFkY2U2NWZmZTIyMmZiZDBjOTc3YzJhYmFlZjI6Nzo0Mzc5OjA2MTFkNjMwYWM5YTBjZDI0NmM1NjlhNTE3YWY2NDNlYTQ5NzNhZDA5Zjc5NTcwNWQ2OGQyNTcxZTcwNjYwZDU6cDpUOkY">visited</a> China through the YES program. Chinese media <a href="https://protect.checkpoint.com/v2/r01/___https:/english.news.cn/northamerica/20240203/239fae7b1a3e4fd6ac78c7c8af8092e6/c.html___.YXAzOmNyY2E6YzpvZmZpY2UzNjVfZW1haWxzX2F0dGFjaG1lbnQ6NWY5NTFkY2U2NWZmZTIyMmZiZDBjOTc3YzJhYmFlZjI6Nzo0Mzc5OjA2MTFkNjMwYWM5YTBjZDI0NmM1NjlhNTE3YWY2NDNlYTQ5NzNhZDA5Zjc5NTcwNWQ2OGQyNTcxZTcwNjYwZDU6cDpUOkY">reported</a> that students said, “If I could say anything to President Xi, I’d really just want to thank him for planting the seed of relation[s] between Tacoma and China.”
The YES program <a href="https://protect.checkpoint.com/v2/r01/___https:/yes.ceaie.edu.cn/upload/file/2024-08/1725002571242.pdf___.YXAzOmNyY2E6YzpvZmZpY2UzNjVfZW1haWxzX2F0dGFjaG1lbnQ6NWY5NTFkY2U2NWZmZTIyMmZiZDBjOTc3YzJhYmFlZjI6Nzo1MmQ2OjA2MWY0Y2Q3NWY2ZTI5ZTBiZWI5NTc5ZDE1MmMxMjUyOTM2ODNmMzFlZDNmZTg3YjkxYjQ2YmE4OWUwNjk4N2I6cDpUOkY">has even quoted</a> Lincoln High School students praising the Chinese government, including “President Xi Jinping’s message is very heartwarming” and “I am a China fan.”
It’s easy to see how such misconceptions could blend into support for U.S. politicians and candidates who spew socialist and communist rhetoric. Without context, American students are being taught that the man behind the genocide of Uyghur Muslims, and who runs a country that imprisons citizens for their speech or religion, is “very heartwarming.”
They aren’t seeing the human consequences of Xi Jinping&#8217;s ideology in action — like Catholic businessman and pro-democracy activist Jimmy Lai, who will die in a Chinese prison. They won’t see the millions of Uyghurs who have been rounded up and abused, sterilized, and tortured for their religious beliefs. They won’t recognize the similarities between the CCP’s totalitarian oppression and that of other socialist and communist countries. Their tours of China obscure the reality of Chinese oppression entirely.
There’s nothing wrong with appreciating the good parts of Chinese culture, like its art or expression. And for many Americans, a free trip to China sounds like an incredible opportunity.
However, Americans should be incredibly wary of the impetus behind these “free” trips. They should recognize that YES is using American children as propaganda tools for a communist regime that seeks to destabilize the U.S. with its atheistic, genocidal, and totalitarian ideology.
This isn’t an abstract concern. Socialist and communist candidates are already gaining power across America, buoyed by young voters. A generation raised to see Xi Jinping as “heartwarming” isn’t just misinformed about China — it&#8217;s primed to embrace the same ideologies at home.
Parents and educators need to see YES for what it is before it grows any further. Our future generations and our national security depend on it.
If these trips are not followed up with pro-democracy, pro-capitalism, and pro-Western values lessons, then America will continue reaping the consequences.
***
<div dir="ltr">Paul Runko, Senior Director of Strategic Initiatives for Defending Education.</div>

China Daily Life

How CCP ‘Study Abroad’ Trips Are Influencing American Youth

chinese communist party

education

propaganda

world

xi jinping

Independent Women’s Voice, a nonprofit advocacy group, is warning about socialism’s potential impact on America with an ad aimed at one of the movement’s largest voter blocs: young women. 
“I hate it here, just get me to the future,” a young woman <a href="https://x.com/IWV/status/2090537863976792489">says</a> in the video, wishing socialism had already taken over. A mad scientist resembling Doc Brown from Back to the Future then appears outside her bedroom window and says, “I’ll take you, let&#8217;s go.” 
The pair travel to 2050, where the ad depicts a socialist version of the young woman’s hometown. 
“Housing is guaranteed now. Everyone gets a home of their own now,” the scientist says. The young woman asks to live near the beach but is informed that she doesn’t have a choice about where she lives. 
She is then taken to a government-run grocery store. At first, she is excited that the government now pays for groceries, but she soon learns she only gets a $100 coupon while eggs cost $40. When someone robs the grocery store, she suggests calling the police, only to find out that the police no longer exist.
Finally, she goes to the hospital because she doesn’t feel well. Although healthcare is free, she learns that the wait to see a doctor is 72 days.
The video ends with the young woman ripping down her Democratic Socialists of America poster as an ominous message appears: “Beware of the gap between promises and reality.”
Democratic Socialists of America and politicians aligned with the movement have advocated for some of the policies referenced in the video, including government-run grocery stores and universal healthcare.
New York City Democratic Mayor Zohran Mamdani has already selected the site for his first government-run grocery store, which he says will offer a basket of goods at prices 30% below competitors. He has also promised “fast and free” buses.
Democratic socialist-backed Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is running on Medicare for All. El-Sayed claims his plan will not “ban additional private insurance through unions or employers” but “should make those choices redundant and unnecessary.”
In its “Social and Economic Bill of Rights,” DSA advocates for policies that go beyond those depicted in the video. The organization supports free or minimal cost education beyond high school for anyone who wants it, arguing that free public education can reduce economic inequality and poverty.
The organization also supports the “right to leisure time.”
“Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what we will,&#8221; DSA says. &#8220;A truly participatory democracy requires that every citizen have adequate leisure time, in which to fully develop intellectually, culturally, politically and spiritually in the manner of their own choosing.&#8221;
DSA argues that capitalism’s “pursuit of profits” prevents Americans from having adequate “leisure time.”
The Democratic Socialists of America did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether the America depicted in the ad reflects the organization’s view of what the country would look like under socialism in 2050.

Screenshot 2026-08-20 at 7.24.54 PM

See The ‘Back to the Future’ Scenario Warning Americans About Socialism

abdul el-sayed

independent women's voice

Let’s check in on the People’s Republic of New York City.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
演出现场见!<a href="https://t.co/3aEqbt0cp5">https://t.co/3aEqbt0cp5</a> <a href="https://t.co/tuBi2oDn5E">https://t.co/tuBi2oDn5E</a> <a href="https://t.co/qtIAMIMVlQ">pic.twitter.com/qtIAMIMVlQ</a>
— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@NYCMayor) <a href="https://x.com/NYCMayor/status/2088794669673050489?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 16, 2026</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.x.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Oh. An announcement of 2,000 free Broadway tickets for NYC public high school students, delivered in Mandarin. How thoughtful. How necessary. Never mind that our commander-in-chief signed an executive order making English the official language of these United States!
No need for the subtitles, Mr. Mayor. Maybe just get the kids a free Duolingo subscription instead. To each according to his needs.
The communist, terror-sympathizing tyrant of New York City will wave this off as a cute, harmless, inclusive gesture for the children, of course. But it&#8217;s more nefarious than that; it&#8217;s one more brick in his anti-American crusade to subvert every ideal this country was built on.
These &#8220;free&#8221; tickets, donated seats from producers who already sell out to tourists anyway, are just Mamdani&#8217;s latest chance to redistribute what he didn&#8217;t earn and call it &#8220;justice for the theater kids.&#8221; Every New Yorker should be able to afford Broadway, he says. Should they? I didn&#8217;t realize a night at the theater was a constitutional right. I thought I had a right to work hard, keep what I earn, and spend it how I choose, but apparently that one&#8217;s negotiable now.
This is peak Mamdani: a cutesy social post papering over a very expensive habit. Nothing he hands out is actually free.
His &#8220;free buses&#8221; would run the city $1.1 billion a year, and fares have gone up anyway. His &#8220;free childcare&#8221; plan is pegged at $6 billion, with outside estimates already creeping toward $9 billion, because they always do. (But trust him, sending your pride and joy off with a government employee to a park is so worth the tax hike.) His &#8220;free housing&#8221; push is set to produce 180 &#8220;affordable&#8221; units, for a finished price tag of $22 billion. (Somebody remind me why rent just hit a record $6,655 a month?) And don&#8217;t forget the pending Delivery Protection <a href="https://x.com/NYCMayor/status/2086883269610541325">Act</a>, which punishes Amazon subcontractors for the crime of subcontracting. Enjoy the higher delivery fee, Bezos Baddies.
The theater, the bus, the rent, the children — the mayoralty has deemed them a right and bequeathed you a bill.
Some may think I’m being too cynical about the Broadway Bash, but that’s because I know it’s bread and circuses. He has a plan, and he’s following it to the letter. He’s <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/gotham-citys-bane-is-every-dsa-candidates-final-form">Bane</a> with a <a href="https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/03/nyc-mayor-zohran-mamdani-takes-124649047.jpg?resize=681,1024&amp;quality=75&amp;strip=all">bow tie</a>. At a 2021 Young Democratic Socialists of America conference, then-Assemblyman Mamdani was explicit: student debt cancellation was fine to campaign on, but socialists also need to organize around the less popular causes, like Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) — the campaign that would love to see Israel wiped off the map — and &#8220;the end goal of seizing the means of production.&#8221;
Where have I heard that one before…
The network around this Marxist mayor makes the rhetoric a lot less abstract. Neville Roy Singham, the Shanghai-based billionaire Marxist, has poured hundreds of millions into left-wing nonprofits that reliably echo Chinese Communist Party talking points, and his family has done campaign work for Mamdani. Singham himself, like plenty of Mamdani&#8217;s other allies, invokes Mao, calls Western capitalism &#8220;fascism,&#8221; and pushes a &#8220;new world order&#8221; narrative that quietly erases America&#8217;s role in defeating actual fascism in World War II.
Which is why a Marxist delivering a speech in Mandarin should unsettle you: China&#8217;s communist history is not abstract; it&#8217;s tangibly terrifying. The Great Leap Forward produced the deadliest famine on record. The Cultural Revolution delivered mass persecution and economic ruin. One-party rule continues today. Soft-power language outreach and redistributionist policy deserve a little more scrutiny when they&#8217;re coming from Maoists and more broadly from America-haters.
Mamdani speaks Mandarin to signal that you don&#8217;t need to assimilate to this oppressive, colonizing country! Stay as un-American as possible, in fact. He sure is. The Ugandan native released a video slamming America as a &#8220;nation of contradictions&#8221; on her birthday, from behind George Washington&#8217;s desk. He published a &#8220;target list&#8221; naming and addressing New York&#8217;s &#8220;100 worst landlords&#8221; alongside thousands of New Yorkers who own second homes in the city. He said the boots of the NYPD are laced by the IDF. His father wrote a book blaming 9/11 on the United States. He&#8217;s been photographed with an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 WTC bombing. And families of 9/11 victims have made clear they don&#8217;t want him anywhere near this year&#8217;s 25th anniversary ceremony.
He does not like it here, and he is trying to tear it down with a Marxist sandwich: promise something good, then say and do things that quietly wreck the place underneath it. 
To be fair, the champagne socialist also posted the ticket announcement in Spanish. They say he speaks seven languages. He must have picked that up somewhere between the $70,000-a-year progressive private school on the Upper West Side and the $50,000-plus-a-year liberal arts college in Maine. Thank goodness all that education is finally paying off in the public sector, where he does nothing but lecture, pose for photos, and redistribute other people&#8217;s money in the name of social welfare.
The polished videos, the permanent Joker smile, the quiet confidence that no one will connect the multilingual theater giveaways to the man who once called seizing the means of production an end goal.
Welcome to the CCP of NYC.

image_d5e72cd1

Welcome To The CCP Of NYC

broadway

china

<div>
A DSA national leader <a href="https://x.com/nataliegwinters/status/2089327354724388899">welcomed</a> a Chinese Communist Party delegation at an event in New York City and laid out the group’s goals in plain terms: “We try to push socialism into the masses of America,” and “China is an incredible positive vision of socialism for everyone around the world.”
Ahmed Husain, who is a prominent member of the Democratic Socialists of America’s National Political Committee, described the organization as the largest socialist group in the country, with more than 200 chapters across most states. He said it works to build up the DSA in the United States through different sites of struggle — housing, labor unions, and elections. The stated objective is to push socialism into the masses and build a positive vision for it. China, he said, offers that vision to people in the U.S. and other countries.
Husain is the same DSA leader who <a href="https://nypost.com/2026/03/07/us-news/dsa-calls-for-ending-us-empire-mourns-iranian-ayatollahs-extrajudicial/">spoke</a> on the group’s “Hands Off Iran” mass video call in early March. Nearly 1,000 people joined that Wednesday night meeting, which opened with a remake of Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War.” Speakers on the call framed Iran’s 1979 revolution as throwing off American and Israeli influence. One participant from the National Iranian American Council spoke of deep mourning over the “extrajudicial killing of the supreme leader.”
On that call, Husain told participants the fight would not end with a rally or a vote. “This is going to end with a mass movement to put an end to the war machine,” he said. “We have to create a real cost for the warmongers.” He added that he did not believe the movement was where it needed to be to stop the war: “I don’t care if it’s your neighbor, your co-worker, your dad, your mom, your job is to get them to act. The DSA needs to act on every single front.”
He went on to say the work is cumulative and aimed at building a movement that can change the terrain permanently so the &#8220;war machine&#8221; can no longer function. “We can end the US empire here in America.”
Husain, an immigrant from Bahrain, has previously written on social media about destroying the “decaying fascist American empire” and stated that “Israel never had the right to exist.”
The same DSA national leader who called for ending the U.S. empire in March is now the one presenting China as the positive vision of socialism while welcoming a Chinese Communist Party delegation in New York.
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<section></section>
<div></div>

NYC-DSA holds a rally to tax the rich

DSA Leader Welcomes Chinese Communists, Reveals What He Wants To Push Across America

ahmed husain

iran

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

turning point usa

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.

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The Economic Experiment America Will Regret

bernie sanders

tucker carlson

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