It used to be pathetic.
Now it’s something else.
Democrats are running this year on the final push for single-payer health care, promising at long last to give our central government full power over your body and a fifth of the economy.
As Platner does here, they always link free child care to free health care, so add the cost of that “free” program to the cost of “free” health care. Let a million Quality Learing Centers bloom.
Controlling medicine and child care, Democrats also plan to control other major industries. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the moral and intellectual leader of the party in a moment when all the national politicians are as smart as Mazie Hirono or as appealing as Amy Klobuchar, has said explicitly that his goal is “seizing the means of production.”
They’re not kidding. One of Mamdani’s allies, the congressional candidate Claire Valdez, wants to “nationalize the airline industry,” turning United and Delta and American and JetBlue and Southwest into Federal Government Airways.
Acting on the opposition to private property controlled by its owners, Mamdani has instituted a rent freeze in New York City, “covering both one-year and two-year leases for people living in about 1 million rent-stabilized apartments, which make up about 27% of the overall housing stock across New York City’s five boroughs.” Housing prices are to be set by government. Where you live and how much you pay for it should be a government program.
This transition to government-managed housing will intensify in a hurry. Mamdani’s detailed housing plan centers on the promise of “putting the public sector in the driver’s seat.”
Opposing private industry, Democrats oppose the private wealth it produces. In the People’s Republic of California, a proposed tax on the net worth of billionaires is quickly drifting downward. A July 2 essay from California Rep. Ro Khanna, a spectacularly cynical Silicon Valley Democrat, called for a dramatic expansion of federal welfare programs on the back of a federal tax that “has to reach all fortunes $50 million and up.” Wealth is for government. It has to be transferred into the hands of centralized power, to give the masses their “free” programs.
In his disgusting speech for Independence Day, Mamdani depicted an America defined by terror, oppression, and oligarchic theft: “We see the wealthiest country in the history of the world, one where children go to sleep hungry while the world’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.”
None of this means anything at all. Monopolies “dominate every industry?” How many airlines can you choose from? How many competing companies offer you gas for your car? How many kinds of breakfast cereal can you buy, from how many different stores?
Mamdani wasn’t trying to describe America. He was trying to demonize and demagogue, to depict a nation of private industry as something dark, cruel, and dangerous. He was trying to sell massive government power as kindness, fixing all the faked-up plutocratic domination.
This is where Democrats are. They’re all-in on giant government, and entirely opposed to private property, private enterprise, and private lives. They’ve embraced state power like a jealous lover.
It’s a dismal gang of brutally stupid adult children who have made a living as shameless grifters by warning you that Donald Trump is an aspiring dictator who yearns to implement authoritarianism. They keep inventing fake panics to sell that idiocy, while Trump eliminates whole government agencies and sharply reduces the size of the federal workforce.
Trump’s not going far enough, and congressional Republicans are trailblazers in the art of uselessness. Federal deficits persist, and the crisis of federal debt is getting worse. But Trump is the only president in your lifetime or mine who has worked to make the federal government smaller and less powerful in any practical way, and only idiots and con artists pretend to think he’s an authoritarian.
You can have Trump or you can have Mamdani-era Democrats who explicitly intend to confiscate private wealth, seize the means of production, and run society directly and forcefully through the instrument of government power. The fools who warn that you have to vote for Democrats to save us from Trump’s authoritarianism are trying to herd you into real authoritarianism.
Anyone who’s still pretending that this isn’t the actual choice has now transitioned from being a shameful clown to being a real danger. The tediousness of Bulwark Never-Trumpism and David French’s infantile socialist-worshipping coprophilia is becoming something else entirely. It’s time to choose, and it’s time to remember the choices that other people make.
