The Artful Dilettante is a native of Pittsburgh, PA, and a graduate of Penn State University. He is a lover of liberty and a lifelong and passionate student of the same. He is voracious reader of books on the Enlightenment and the American colonial and revolutionary periods. He is a student of libertarian and Objectivist philosophies. He collects revolutionary war and period currency, books, and newspapers. He is married and the father of one teenage son. He is kind, witty, generous to a fault, and unjustifiably proud of himself. He is the life of the party and an unparalleled raconteur.
Much is being written about how leftism is really a religion since its adherents cling to their dogma in spite of the obvious contradictions constantly being presented by the real world. This was really brought to mind in the chapter about the Communist Second International (1889) in Sean McMeekin’s To Overthrow the World. At that time, Eduard Bernstein, who had been Karl Marx’s protégé while they both lived in exile in London, had by the mid-1890s broken from the pack.
Bernstein eventually saw through the web of deception that was Marxism. Rather than resulting from the proposed seizure and authoritarian micromanagement of the means of production, prosperity was already being expanded all across the population by nothing more complicated than improved productivity due to advances in technology.
Years ago, I personally experienced this phenomenon when we invested in new printing presses that vastly improved our shop’s productivity. Although much more expensive than the presses we had been using, the increased efficiency vastly added to the company’s profitability. This also increased the value of the time being spent by the trained staff — making personnel turnover even less desirable. In addition to increased pay, we helped retain our workers by providing them with health insurance, paid vacations, and holidays, and the increased profitability remained substantial.
Two other experiences that showed me how committed leftists strive to tune out reality when it challenges their faith in collectivist dogma happened while chatting with friends. The first happened when visiting my best friend’s parents. All along, I knew they were “fellow travelers,” though we were still very good friends. At some point in the conversation, they insisted that I broaden my perspective and familiarize myself with the people struggling in the lower strata of society. My response went sort of like this: “I live in blue-collar Oakland. I live with and work with people from marginal backgrounds. Meanwhile, you live in this solidly upper-upper-middle-class neighborhood [where I also just happened to grow up] that has zero people on the margins.” Their next-door neighbor was a CBS on-air legal expert and still is.
The other occurred while visiting an old college chum and his wife. Both just happened to have MBAs, and the wife grew up with both parents being upper-echelon members of the U.S. State Department under Roosevelt and Truman. There was a bit of a recession going on back then, and they suggested to me that adopting a four-day work week would do a lot to knock down the rate of unemployment. “Hmmm,” I said — “would you both be willing to take a 20% cut in your pay for this to happen?” They looked at each other and blurted out, “Of course not!” I guess arithmetic is forbidden knowledge.
The term “magical thinking” comes to mind. It’s kind of an assumed faith that allows us to wait optimistically for the impossible to happen. Throwing zillions of dollars at providing subsidized housing for drug-addicted vagrants is an obvious example. As a result, the taxpayers have less money for themselves, and even more vagrants are squatting wherever they want. Addiction therapists use the term “enabling” to describe what the magical thinkers are doing: making it even easier to survive as a drug-addicted vagrant.
It is certainly possible for former “true believers” to drop out of the program — just like how Eduard Bernstein abandoned Marxism when he witnessed significant improvements in the standard of living of ordinary workers, as advances in technology made their time more valuable and also lowered the cost of the goods they needed to purchase — without any authoritarian seizure of the means of production.
Another canard of the left that still clings to the minds of the faithful is that crime is mostly caused by poverty rather than by the reasonable expectation of not getting punished for committing a criminal act — hence, the broad espousal of “defund the police” as a valid public policy. Though hunger may compel someone to steal food, some murky statistics kind of show that, during the profound poverty of the Great Depression, Prohibition was the main driver of criminal activity — that is, until its repeal at the end of 1933.
And, relying on the loyal faithfulness of true believers, the complicit lapdog media continue to describe federal workers as being compelled to work without pay during the political stunt we call the government shutdown. Reality: Federal workers, who have not been struck from the rolls are continuing to earn their pay. Only the issuance of their paychecks is being delayed. Credit cards, savings, and sympathetic retailers and landlords are helping to smooth over the interim.
The intent of this deception has been to generate more animus against President Trump. But, since the Democrats have blood all over their hands from this manufactured pause, they have to continue staring into the abyss.
Zohran Mamdani, the leading candidate for mayor of New York, is an out in the open Communist. He wants city government to take over all grocery stores and run them with bureaucrats out of city offices. Command-and-control food distribution — Soviet-style.
Just like Venezuela. And Cuba. Lovely!
He’s also seeking a $30/hr. minimum wage, which will essentially shut down all businesses requiring humans to work.
Starvation, despair, and black market — here we come.
Will this smiling totalitarian allow Gotham residents to order food from Amazon.com?
Or only from the city government?
Maybe he’ll erect a wall around the city, so citizens can’t escape?
Sound familiar?
And silly us, we thought this all ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
If this seems like classic conspiracy theory or an overreaction, simply open any history book (yes please, avoid the ones edited by woke federal bureaucrats).
We all thought communism never could reach America. It’s quite possibly just weeks or days away from New York City, when the election results are in.
It makes sense.
Beginning with the election and presidency of Barack H. Obama, the Democratic Party has radicalized. This means, if you vote Democratic anywhere, some form of communism will eventually head your way, perhaps even coming for you.
Red states are not immune, because the Democrats are now radicalized everywhere.
Check out Democrat-run Memphis, Tennessee and Louisville, Kentucky — especially their skyrocketing crime rates.
New York City’s potential next mayor strongly supports hormonal experiments on children, coerced by a totalitarian school system. He wants the government, not parents, to decide if their children will have gender-altering treatments.
This is beyond being genuinely dystopian.
This same future mayor supports Palestinian terrorists and Iran’s mullahs — some of the most violent and explicit advocates of death for non-Muslims, gays, non-conforming women, and anyone else Islam views as infidels.
How in the world can left-wing, LGBTQ+ Democrats swooning over Mamdani as the coolest thing since Barack Obama, reconcile this?!
Can they really be that ignorant and self-destructive?
Is it all absurdly innocent stupidity or something far more sinister?
Socialism and Communism increasingly sell among the nation’s youth.
Many young people look at our corrupt fusion of corporations and government as the definition of free market capitalism.
They see woke Communist rulers as a refreshing alternative to the corruption we have found with mostly left-leaning corporate leaders aligned with Big Government.
Wrong, wrong, wrong!
We are already a hybrid of socialism and government controls mixed with semi-free, overly regulated markets.
If these young, naïve New York Communist supporters think that all-out, unhampered Communism is the alternative to the status quo, based on precisely the same Communist principles that govern our present “Uniparty” Establishment, they will experience the greatest trauma in human history when an open Marxist-terrorist takes over New York City.
Because the fall from America to Soviet-Mao Zedong command-and-control collectivism will be much harder than the adjustment to Communism people in already poor, miserable countries (e.g., Venezuela and Cuba) had to make.
Many of us are trying to warn them.
But in places like New York City, they might not be listening.
Some Jewish Democrats are finally waking up and sounding the alarm on Mamdani, pointing to his refusal to condemn the phrase “Globalize the Intifada” or recognize Israel as a Jewish state, especially at a time when antisemitism is on the rise in the United States.
For those of you on the left, sorry, it’s too late. These are your comrades.
You wholly brought it all on yourselves. If you really wish to save New York City and America, you should join President Trump’s (MAGA) movement.
It’s your — and our — only hope.
Mamdani, a Ugandan-born state assemblyman from the New York City borough of Queens, proposes eliminating fares to ride New York City’s vast bus system, making CUNY (City University of New York) “tuition-free,” freezing rents on municipal housing, offering “free childcare” for children up to age five, all in addition to setting up government-run grocery stores.
Why not just make everything free?
Why hasn’t anyone ever thought of this before? How blessed New York City residents are. Their lives are about to become effortless, carefree.
Utopia is coming. All this and sharia law too — almost too much joy to contain.
America has never had this high profile a Communist ruler – not ever. And rest assured Mamdani is a well-funded one.
Communists love money in their own hands; just not yours or mine.
Best of luck, New York City!
You were once humankind’s greatest city.
Saying good-bye to the fabled Big Apple will be hard.
Former US Vice-President Kamala Harris has told the BBC she may run again for the White House.
In her first UK interview, Harris said she would “possibly” be president one day and was confident there will be a woman in the White House in future.
Making her strongest suggestion to date that she will make another presidential bid in 2028 after losing to Donald Trump last year, Harris dismissed polls that put her as an outsider to become the Democrats’ pick for the next election.
Speaking to Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Harris also turned her fire on her former rival, branding Trump a “tyrant”, and said warnings she made about him on the campaign trail had been proved right.
As the Democratic party searches for answers about Republican Donald Trump’s decisive victory one year ago, much of the blame has been directed at former President Joe Biden for not standing down sooner.
But there have also been questions raised about whether Harris could have run a better campaign and set out a clearer message on the number one issue, the economy.
In the BBC interview Harris entertained the prospect of another run at the White House, saying her grandnieces would, “in their lifetime, for sure”, see a female president.
Asked if it would be her, she said, “possibly”, confirming she is considering another run at the top job.
Harris said she had not yet made a decision, but underlined that she still sees herself as having a future in politics.
“I am not done,” the former vice-president said. “I have lived my entire career as a life of service and it’s in my bones.”
Under fascism, the means of production are nominally owned by private individuals or corporations, but the state exercises ultimate control over their use and disposal, effectively subordinating private ownership to the national interest as defined by the regime. This system is often described as “capitalism with a capitalist veneer” or a “state-private partnership,” where private property exists in form but not in substance, as the state retains the power to dictate production, pricing, wages, and investment. The state achieves this control through mechanisms like official cartels, mandatory industry-wide planning boards, and the suppression of independent labor unions and market competition.
While private ownership is preserved, the ruling class under fascism remains the capitalist class, as the fundamental economic relations of capitalism—such as the production of surplus value and the drive for capital accumulation—persist. However, the state centralizes economic control, suppresses conflicts between different branches of capital, and pools risks to serve the goals of national strength and militarism. This results in a “steered economy” (gesteuerte Wirtschaft), where individual capitalists must subordinate themselves to a unified national policy.
Fascism does not abolish private property in the way socialism does, but it transforms ownership into a state-granted privilege contingent on loyalty to the regime. The state may nationalize certain industries directly, but more commonly, it controls private owners through political authority, licensing, and the threat of force. This system is not a rejection of capitalism but a response to its crises, designed to preserve the capitalist system by eliminating class conflict through state-enforced “class collaboration” and the suppression of socialist movements. As such, fascism is seen by some as “capitalism in decay,” where the state intervenes to protect the capitalist order when it is threatened by revolutionary movements.
The business incentives driving consumer AI development remain fundamentally misaligned with reducing hallucinations.” —The Singularity Hub on “X”
Which is to say, there is Reality, and then there is every other cockamamie aggregate of simulation pretending to represent Reality, i.e. garbage. How many millions among us already subscribe to the latter? Apparently, lots, and they are not evenly distributed these days. You surely know where to look for the un-Reality. The party of men can get pregnant, and all the rest. . . .
Enter A-I to make things worse. Probably a lot worse. We have failed to learn the chief lesson of the computer age, which is that the virtual is not an acceptable substitute for the authentic. So, we plunge deeper into realms of the un-real and the inauthentic. This turns into a quest to get something-for-nothing, and the unfortunate result of that old dodge is that you will end up with nothing, and that is exactly why we are at such a hazardous pass in the human project.
I apologize if the above seems too metaphysical. But that’s the scenery en route when a civilization flies up its own wazoo. Novelist Cory Doctorow has nicely labeled this the enshitification of daily life.
First of all, get this: A-I has already quit operating as-advertised. It has lost the “I” part. A-I does its thing by rapidly combing through the Internet to evaluate and seize information that you request. Increasingly, A-I colonizes the Internet with second-hand, third-hand, and so forth A-I-generated information. The more territory A-I seizes on the Web, and the more it trains itself on recursive feedbacks of its own garbage, the more distorted the output gets. As that occurs, A-I becomes increasingly abstracted from Reality, which is exactly what happens when a person goes insane. So, expect an exponential rise in incorrect content that would, in theory, become a pretty serious problem when you ask A-I to run things like systems we depend on, the electric grid, harvesting crops, warfare. . . .
Secondly, as that process runs, and probably before it gets very far, A-I looks like it will wreck the financial system, which, in turn, would crater the economy of everyday life — the ability of people to earn a living, buy stuff, support children, get food, and stay out of the rain. Zillions of dollars are being invested in A-I now and lately it is mainly what drives the capital markets. So far, alas, return on that investment is scant — actually, negative. The situation might never improve, and as the recognition hits, look out below. The only question is whether that happens before the central banks destroy the world’s currencies with money-printing.
One A-I application, robotaxi services such as Waymo, have never turned a profit. Will they ever? Doesn’t look good. Notice, too, that the elimination of cab-drivers means X-number fewer humans making a living to buy stuff (presumably made by other people in other jobs soon to be replaced by robots). Of course, that’s the self-replicating problem with all applied A-I in every field of employment. The more jobs eliminated, the fewer customers for anything. Please don’t tell me that guaranteed basic income fixes that problem.
In desperation — and due to certain weaknesses of human nature — another early attempt to monetize applied A-I turns out to be pornography: create your own personalized sex fantasy to-order. Companies are already producing the first rudimentary A-I sex robots, which, let’s face it, amounts to a masturbation industry. Why bother cultivating a real-live girlfriend when you can fall into the pre-heated silicone embrace of a Jennifer Lawrence simulation that will never talk back or ask for anything? You can easily see how that would result in a whole lot less human reproduction — of which there is already a signal shortage in Western Civ — meaning even fewer people to work at anything or buy anything or do anything, or simply be here in the pageant of Planet Earth.
The A-I pioneers managed to make the situation worse from the get-go. The Open A-I company’s Chat GPT, Google’s Gemini and Bard A-Is, and Facebook’s Meta A-I are all trained-up to be politically Woke-to-the-max, meaning on any given issue in the public arena their output is one patent absurdity or another. Note: last April, conservative activist Robby Starbuck sued Facebook when its chatbot reported out falsely that he had been on-the-scene for the Jan 6, 2021 US Capitol protest (he was in Tennessee that day). Facebook’s parent company, Meta, settled the case with Starbuck in August, 2025, for undisclosed terms and the company apologized publicly.
Two days ago, Mr. Starbuck sued Google for defamation (with malice and negligence) when it’s Bard A-I output alleged that he was a “child rapist,” a “serial sexual abuser,” that he abused and stalked his ex-wife (Starbuck states in his lawsuit that he has no ex-wife). It accused him further of fraud, embezzlement, drug charges, stalking business partners, and being a “shooter” or “person of interest” in a 1991 murder case (Starbuck was two years old at the time), of appearing in Jeffrey Epstein’s flight logs (untrue), working as a porn actor, and voicing support for the Ku Klux Klan.
The A-I cited non-existent news articles from outlets such as Newsweek, The New York Post, Rolling Stone, Mediaite, The Daily Beast, and Salon, along with fake URLs and headlines (e.g., “Robby Starbuck Responds to Murder Accusations”). Starbuck demonstrated this in a podcast episode on October 22–23, 2025, where he queried the A-I live.
Google spokesman José Castañeda attributed the issues to its A-I “hallucinating” — which tells you that the recursive feedback of garbage content in A-I is already well-advanced. Prepare for ever more interesting mischief, while you watch your portfolio of index stocks go up in a vapor.
Going back 250 years, the enemies of America thought long and hard about how to destroy the fledgling experiment of a democratic republic that our Founding Fathers had envisioned. It was and continues to be clear to them that America’s strength is a function of three phenomena:
A fervent belief in the God Who makes miracles happen, for just one example the crushing defeat of the thunderously powerful English Empire’s armies by blazing patriots like General George Washington and his ragtag army of American heroes.
An equally ardent belief in and passion for the concept of freedom. Men who knew they were going to die, and their wives who believed their deaths were for the noble cause of freedom, all sacrificed to bring about our victory over the monarchy that wanted to continue to rule us.
The most passionate was the embrace, belief in, and allegiance to family — its sanctity, its strength, its ability to weather all storms and overcome all obstacles.
If they could destroy all three, our enemies reasoned, the masses they considered essentially stupid would be forced to rely exclusively on Big Government. And so, to this day, the socialists-cum-communists among us are employing — as their predecessors did — every malevolent, criminal, and vicious tactic they can muster to actualize that goal.
Still, the family remains their most desired — yet maddeningly elusive — target.
Help along the way
That effort was generously helped — perhaps, at first, innocently — by the theories of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the Austrian neurologist-cum-psychiatrist who was wildly successful in convincing the relatively new and free-thinking American public that the genesis of neuroses, phobias, anxieties, obsessions, depression, psychosis, and general psychological malfunction not only took place in the first few years of life, but were to be blamed on the mothers. Later therapists, like the sadistic psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim, blamed “cold” mothers for their children’s autism.
Cancel
Mission #1 Accomplished: Mothers are not good for children.
These psychological theories prevailed throughout the 20th century and up to today, embraced by generations of psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and psychotherapists until 1998, when they were thoroughly debunked by Judith Rich Harris in The Nurture Assumption, where the Harvard-educated psychologist and editor of most of the psychology texts used in colleges and medical schools in America argued persuasively that a person’s peer group is the major influence of thought, feelings, and behavior throughout life.
In 1960, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the most world-changing medication in history, developed by Dr. John Rock, a Harvard professor and obstetrician-gynecologist with five children — along with Drs. Gregory Pincus, C.M. Phang, and Selzo Garcia. Their creation was the birth control pill, AKA The Pill. For the first time in world history, the narrative goes, women had control over their reproduction.
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For millions of women, it was their own Declaration of Independence, and a huge relief not to have to worry every month about getting pregnant.
Mission #2 Accomplished: Now we can be just like men, some women reasoned, and have as much sex as we want without worrying about getting pregnant. Thus was the Free Sex movement born, ushering in a complete redefinition of traditional morality.
Get out of the house!
Three years after The Pill, in 1963, a book by Betty Friedan, a housewife with three children from Queens, N.Y., shot to the top of every bestseller list. In essence, The Feminine Mystiquetold women that they were simply too smart, too creative, too intrinsically or at least potentially powerful to be spending their time, actually wasting their time, changing diapers, folding laundry, and — the most colossal waste of time of all — raising children.
Friedan’s book resonated!
Mission #3 Accomplished: Multimillions of young women abandoned the once desired goal of early marriage and motherhood and instead enrolled in colleges and universities, where they pursued professional careers ranging from medicine and law and architecture to jobs like telephone linewomen to military combatants to firefighters to hedge fund managers to business executives, et al.
Coincidentally, ahem, an economy that once allowed men to work outside the home and support a wife and put children through college magically became an economy that only two working parents could afford. It’s kind of like an economy that was completely energy-independent in 2020 under President Trump but quite magically became one in which President Biden had to beg foreign countries to sell him oil in 2021.
Reality sets in
The ’60s also ushered in the historically unprecedented rash of violent assassinations — live on TV — of
U.S. President John F. Kennedy in 1963 (age 46),
firebrand black activist Malcolm X in 1965 (age 39),
Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968 (age 39), and
former attorney general and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 (age 42).
All of a sudden, the idealized world of the newly emancipated women was shattered. The world is out of control, they realized. Is it any wonder that so many of them enthusiastically embraced (or attended) the 1969 Woodstock Music Festival, with not only free sex, but a geyser of drugs for the smoking and snorting and injecting?
Mission #4 Accomplished: Many of these college-educated women congratulated themselves on avoiding marriage and especially motherhood, asking themselves, “Who wants to bring a child into this world?”
Only a few years later
In 1971, Gloria Steinem — “We are becoming the men we wanted to marry” — and editor Letty Cottin Pogrebin founded the first national feminist magazine, Ms.
Mission #5 Accomplished: The traditional nuclear family was being dismantled by a new generation of women who bought in to the notion that making money is infinitely more satisfying, meaningful, and important than raising children.
Marriage out — now babies out!
On January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court issued a 7–2 decision in Roe v. Wade that all women have a “right” to an abortion. To this day, that decision is the Holy Grail of millions of women who believe that “my body, my choice” starts after they’ve had sex and gotten pregnant with a baby they don’t want.
In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and sent the decision for abortion back to each individual state. Today, every woman in the United States who wants an abortion can get one, although some may have to endure the inconvenience of traveling to another state. Forget about the inconvenience their embryos face of a death sentence!
Mission #6 Accomplished: The once most cherished accomplishment of both men and women — to be the parent of a newborn baby — was effectively reduced to ending that baby’s life in utero. Today, in some states, abortion exists right up to the moment a full-term baby is delivered — and in California, believe it or not, even up to the time a healthy thriving baby is 28 days old! I believe that is called infanticide!
The ticking clock
Uh-oh. After graduating from college and laboring in the workforce for over a decade, millions of women realized that this money-making thing wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. But looking for a good man — after stepping on their necks on the way up the ladder — was even more problematic.
Nevertheless, the new social phenomenon of women marrying in their mid-thirties and older took hold, and not coincidentally gave rise to a booming in vitro fertilization industry, as millions of these new brides learned that conceiving and carrying a child after the age of 35 is both a “high-risk” and extremely pricey enterprise.
Mission #7 Accomplished: Take the joy out of intimacy and sex, make it a mechanical act, and further erode both marriage and the family at the same time.
But what about my career?
Modern women have been told by the influencers of the day that they can “have it all” — marriage, children, and career. Since they wanted it all, they bought it!
Some women were lucky to have their mothers or mothers-in-law or even young grandmothers volunteer to raise their children, and a rare few could afford expensive nannies.
But most women had to rely on another industry that boomed like no other: the daycare business, where mothers dropped off their infants, babies, toddlers, and preschoolers to paid workers who tended up to 20 or more children at a time, making sure those children were safe and fed, but not necessarily held, loved, comforted, taught, or nurtured.
This allowed the mothers to brag that the hour or so they spent with their child at the end of a day — in which both mother and child were exhausted — was, ahem, “quality time.”
Mission #8 Accomplished: Women out of the home, children being raised by strangers, the American family being dismantled piece by piece.
The genius Steve factor
There were two geniuses: Steve Case, the founding CEO of America Online (AOL) in 1983 (which really took off in the ’90s), and Steve Jobs, who invented, created, introduced the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010.
No need to elaborate on the degree to which these geniuses eliminated face-to-face communication and succeeded in riveting both parents and children to all the tantalizing distractions on these electronic devices that separate people and depersonalize intimate relationships, especially meaningful communication between parents and children.
Mission #9 Accomplished: Family concerns take a backseat to beeping texts, sexy emojis, Facebook invitations, Instagram images, Hollywood gossip, and horrifically graphic porn sites, which even savvy eight-year-olds can access with ease.
Worse, this has given rise to an entire generation of sociopaths who, understandably, have little or no human empathy, given the largely robotic care they’ve received.
And now we have an ad — since removed and eliminated from every search engine — that shows a child laughing and sharing an experience with her clearly delighted mother. Both are on iPads communicating long distance. The ad ends with a voice telling the mother, “You don’t have to be there.”
Right. The mother doesn’t have to be there to raise and love and comfort and teach and tuck her child in at night, and the father doesn’t have to be there, either. Only Big Government should raise their child to be a good little obedient communist. That’s the message!
Mission #10 Accomplished: Father never mentioned, mother out of the picture, the actual premeditated murder of the American family.
And the crashing failure of the feminist movement.
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“What do you expect when you sue the president?” Hearing that comment, some people may guess the comment was made by someone addressing one of President Trump’s political opponents who has been targeted for federal prosecution. That quote, though, is much older. It is from an IRS agent addressing officials of a conservative organization that was being audited during Bill Clinton’s presidency. This illustrates that the use of federal agencies to punish presidents’ enemies did not start with President Trump.
The administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt used tax investigations against political opponents. Targeted individuals included publishers of newspapers that were highly critical of Roosevelt’s domestic and foreign policies.
President John F. Kennedy used the IRS and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to drive his conservative critics off the radio. President Lyndon Johnson also used the IRS and the FCC to silence conservative critics. One tool that was used to silence conservatives was to accuse broadcasters of violating the “fairness doctrine” by favoring conservative commentators.
President Richard Nixon used the IRS to target political enemies. The Nixon administration also threatened television and radio companies with revocation of their broadcast licenses unless they provided favorable coverage of the administration.
During the Clinton administration, the IRS not only targeted conservative and libertarian organizations it audited Paula Jones after she sued President Clinton for sexual harassment.
During the George W. Bush years, the IRS targeted organizations critical of the Iraq War. When Barack Obama assumed the presidency, the tax agency turned its attention back to conservative and libertarian groups, with a focus on organizations associated with the Tea Party. The Department of Homeland Security also issued a warning that those with pro-liberty bumper stickers — including supporting the Libertarian Party or my presidential campaign — might be violent extremists.
During the Biden administration, many Americans received harsh sentences for being present at the Capitol on January 6 even if they did not commit any violent acts.
Federal agencies can also target presidents’ political enemies without a presidential order to do so being issued. Some ambitious and unscrupulous individuals will target a president’s enemies believing that this is an effective way to curry favor with the president or high-level administration officials. Others will use the power of the government against the president’s political enemies or those involved with political movements seeking to change the direction of the government out of a belief that these people or groups constitute a threat to the federal government that justifies violating constitutional rights.
This history suggests that abuse of power is an inevitable feature of the modern welfare-warfare-regulatory state. Therefore, instead of focusing just on electing the “right” president, we should focus on shrinking the size and scope of the federal government to its constitutional limitations. This will ensure that Americans can exercise their right to criticize the government without fear of reprisal. As Thomas Jefferson said, “in questions of power then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution.”
As Bill Maher once laid bare, “For Millennials, the word socialism doesn’t conjure up images of Stalin and Castro, it conjures up images of naked Danish people on a month-long paid vacation…it’s not such a jarring proposition when socialism comes along and says you are entitled to free stuff.”
That casual humor hides a grave reality: a growing portion of Democrats embrace an ideology they do not truly understand, mistaking state control and economic tyranny for harmless perks. This misunderstanding has transformed socialism into a seductive fantasy rather than the system of central planning and bureaucratic dominance it actually is, and the implications for America are profound, multi-generational, and deeply worrisome.
The recent “No Kings” rallies underscore the danger of this ideological drift. The Communist Party USA openly co-sponsored the protest, aligning with other groups to oppose President Donald Trump. In New York, the CPUSA’s hammer-and-sickle insignia was featured on official “No Kings” literature. That’s a brazen signal of how far-leftism is being mainstreamed under the guise of righteous protest.
Prominent Democrats like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Democrat Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar, and Senator Cory Booker marched. Indeed, “No Kings” was broadly supported by Democrats at all levels of government, activism, and media.
For many Americans, the rallies were more than a spectacle—they were a revelation. What the left presents as “resistance” is, in reality, a Trojan horse for subversive forces bent on undermining capitalism and personal liberty. This is not abstract theory. Polling confirms a seismic shift within the Democrat base: a Gallup survey shows 66% now view socialism positively, outstripping the 42% who support the capitalist principles that have generated American prosperity.
Another survey from Data for Progress indicates 53% of Democrat voters prefer far-left figures like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over moderates, signaling an ideological takeover that threatens the entrepreneurial spirit and economic growth that millions rely on daily.
The peril lies not only in enthusiasm but in ignorance. Only 34% of Democrats correctly identify socialism as state ownership and central planning, while nearly half equate it with free healthcare, education, and other government handouts. Gallup data further reveal that 60% of Democrats see socialism positively for its promise of “free” services, blind to the suffocating control it imposes over work, innovation, and wealth creation.
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The result is a populace eager for handouts, unaware that each perceived benefit comes at the cost of opportunity, productivity, and personal freedom.
History offers stark warnings. Nations that flirted with socialism as an experiment have endured catastrophic consequences. Venezuela’s GDP has contracted nearly 25% since 2013 under socialist rule, paired with hyperinflation and mass shortages. Greece, after embracing socialist economic policies post-2008, saw GDP plummet by over 25% and unemployment surge above 27%.
These are not abstract lessons. They are vivid illustrations of what happens when good intentions collide with the harsh realities of centralized economic control. Yet the Democrat embrace of socialism persists, driven by a base lulled into believing generosity equates to freedom.
“The point is if you add up all the free things that the under-40 crowd is used to getting from…being able to sit in Starbucks all day for the price of a scone, from music to wi-fi to birth control—it’s not such a jarring proposition when socialism comes along and says you are entitled to free stuff,” Bill Maher observed, concluding that what’s desired is “not really socialism” but “Santa-ism.”
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That was almost a decade ago. His words ring true today, and their echo amplifies with every passing election cycle. To many, socialism offers the illusion of manna falling from the sky, while the rivers flow with milk and honey. In reality, socialism spells the end of America’s first world economy. Dependence replaces initiative, government replaces community, and freedom is subordinated to bureaucracy.
The stakes are not partisan. They are generational. America’s prosperity, built on the principles of capitalism and the protection of private enterprise, faces a credible threat from policies designed to redistribute, control, and centralize wealth. Socialism is not merely a policy preference. It is a long-term strategy to crush standards of living so despots can rule over ruins.
If left unchecked, it shall leave future generations with diminished opportunity, stunted economic growth, and an entrenched government class controlling the levers of daily life.
For those who care about sustaining the American Dream, the warning is clear: the Democrat party’s embrace of socialism is more than a political quirk. It is a deliberate pivot toward an economic ideology that history shows inevitably fails, a fantasy of free services that hides the harsh reality of governmental oppression, and a gamble with the nation’s multi-generational prosperity.
Understanding socialism is not optional. It is essential to defending the freedoms, innovation, and opportunity that have made America extraordinary.
Dr. Joseph Ford Cotto is the creator, host, and producer of News Sight, delivering sharp insights on the news that shapes everyday life. He also provides affordable, results-driven consulting for business, management, media, politics, and the economy. During the 2024 presidential race, he developed the Five-Point Forecast, which accurately predicted Donald Trump’s national victory and correctly called every swing state. Cotto holds a doctorate in business administration and is a Lean Six Sigma Certified Black Belt.
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When the long march through the institutions gives destructive and ridiculous people control of the institutions, the institutions become destructive and ridiculous, and then they become destroyed and ridiculous.
The law professor Glenn Reynolds has talked for years about the premise, in public policy, that people can be brought into the middle class if you give them the markers of middle-class status. Having a college degree is middle class, so make it easier to get a college degree. Owning a house is middle class, so lower the barriers to homeownership. 1.) Make it all much easier. 2.) Give people way more free stuff. 3.) Larger middle class!
“But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class,” he writes. “Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.”
Mistaking the markers for the substance, for the things that cause the creation of the desired thing, gives us this: [X post at link]
The idea behind the “long march through the institutions” is that the capture of the symbols of cultural authority is the same thing as the capture of cultural authority. The markers are the substance. See, people listen to their ministers and their professors, so if we get jobs as ministers and professors, people will listen to us. The job title is the authority. “As your minister, I advise you to embrace socialism and get a lot of abortions, and I direct you to notice that I am wearing a clerical collar, so.”
This language is ubiquitous in 21st-century America. It’s status markers all the way down. Experts say. Officials say. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is dismantling the CDC, and that’s very dangerous, because our health authorities are the experts. A lot of very important professors are telling you to do [insert thing here]. You can’t advise your child against gender transition — you don’t even have the right credentials.
Antonio Gramsci, and the New Left activists who followed him, looked at institutions like churches and universities and concluded that they had authority because they were churches and universities. They looked like authority, they performed the symbols of authority, they made authority noises, and so people followed.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 
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