“Why anybody would want to be known as a socialist today, I have no idea. Look it up, y’all. ” That’s the line that started it all for me. I’ve been watching this shift happen for years, and I’m at the point where I just have to talk about it.
We’re at an inflection point as a nation, and for the first time in a long while, the far left is having its moment in the sun. I’m not going to pretend I agree with much of what they’re pushing, but I’m all for open democracy. Let them say what they believe, let us debate it, and then let the American people vote. That’s how this is supposed to work.
So I sat down to watch the latest round of debates and interviews, and I have to tell you, I was both fascinated and horrified. It started with a candidate in Wisconsin, someone calling herself a Democratic socialist. The moderator pressed her on the Green Bay Packers—the only publicly owned NFL team in the country. She was proud of that.
But then the question came: should big corporations in the state also be publicly owned? She hesitated. She said it depends on the type of mega corporation. The moderator pushed harder: “Would you be able to recruit corporations to come to Wisconsin if they knew they’d be taken over by the state?
” And she finally admitted, no, she didn’t think it would be responsible for the state to run a mega corporation. I just sat there shaking my head. That’s not a solution. That’s a platitude.
She wants to talk about putting working class people first, but she doesn’t have a workable economic model behind it. Businesses have to produce. They have to be profitable. They have to return to their investors and shareholders or they won’t stick around, and then what happens to those working class people she claims to care about?
You can’t just promise the world without explaining how you’re going to pay for it. Then came the harder questions. The moderator brought up defunding the police. She had said it four times.
She wanted to defund the police as a first step toward abolishing them entirely. And on top of that, she wanted to abolish ICE, no matter how long someone had been in the country. I mean, no police, no prisons, no deportation even for people who commit rape or murder. These are terrible ideas.
I don’t care how progressive you are. There’s no world where that keeps people safe. But here’s the part that really got under my skin. When they asked her about the checks and balances in our system—the Senate, the Supreme Court—she didn’t just disagree with them.
She wanted to get rid of them. She wanted to remove every obstacle standing between her agenda and the law of the land. That’s not reform. That’s authoritarianism.
They call it dismantling systems of oppression, but what it really is, is removing the brakes on their own power. And look, I’m not saying the right has all the answers. I don’t think they do. But the far left is losing people even on their own side.
There’s a commentator named Mark, and he pointed out that if the far left lost someone like Van Jones—a guy who’s been sympathetic to them—they might actually have a problem. But they aren’t interested in keeping allies. They’re interested in purity. And the first thing they do with that purity is go after Israel, go after Jewish people.
Bill Maher’s been warning them about the anti-Semitism for years, and they just keep doubling down. It’s the same impulse again: get rid of anyone who disagrees, no matter how loyal they’ve been. Even AOC is starting to feel the heat. She’s been in Congress for a while now, and she wants to keep playing the fresh-faced outsider routine.
But you can’t be the fresh face for six terms. And I think she’s frustrated that Kamala Harris is polling at 30% in the primaries. And that’s the thing—when they ask these candidates simple questions about foreign policy, they freeze. I’m not exaggerating.
Unless you’re having a baby, a heart attack, or an aneurysm right at that moment, you should not stare into the camera and be unable to answer whether Venezuela is south or north of the equator. That’s basic stuff. That’s not some gotcha trick. You want to run the country?
You should know where countries are. Still, I’m glad I get to see all of this play out in public. I’m glad these ideas are being debated out in the open where we can all hear them. Because either they’re going to survive that scrutiny, or they’re not.
And I suspect they won’t. But that’s not for me to decide. It’s for you. It’s for every voter out there.
So I’ll leave it to you: do you think this is a genuine shift toward a better society, or is it just a feudal and ultimately vain attempt to reshape America into something it was never meant to be? Let me know what you think.
