We shouldn’t be surprised at the recent electoral gains of communists who identify as members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). If you’ve been paying attention to the social and cultural landscape in America over the past many decades, you know this has been a long time coming.
The more important question is this: How did so many Americans, particularly youth, come to tell pollsters they approve of a system that has proven beyond a doubt to be unworkable, tyrannical, cruel, and murderous?
Socialism is actually slavery, as I recently wrote at the Federalist. It’s the peak form of slavery because it subjects entire populations to the whims of an inner circle of very few masters with no accountability, who have an eye towards global enforcement of their slave state.
The fact that socialism always amounts to slavery is perhaps the best kept secret of the wannabe slave holders in the DSA leadership. In their system, you are Dred Scott wandering off their plantation. Anything you own — whether it’s land or money or your children — are considered fair game and the property of the state. How did we get to this place? And what was the timeline that led us here?
We Got Here Mainly Because Of Fear Of Ostracism
The short answer is that we got here because too many people were fearful of the ridicule they would receive if they spoke out against the tyranny embedded in socialism. That whole phenomenon is something I call the weaponization of loneliness.
We tend to comply with malicious orders and stupid ideas if we view the alternative as being ostracized. I wrote a book about it because I believe this process shapes just about everything in human affairs. It’s a social contagion that affects what we say, what we think, what we do, and with whom we associate. If we give in to this fear too much, we eventually allow the slavery of socialism to gain power over us.
The media and Hollywood has long worked overtime to cultivate mass derision towards anyone who even mentions concerns about communism or socialist agendas. Are you a red baiter? Are you one of those McCarthyites, responsible for the “red scare?” How silly to talk of a “red menace.” In short, “Have you no decency?” They made up words that are the equivalent of “transphobe” today — meant to cut off discussion.
It worked. People simply stopped talking about the mass murders that are such a dependable feature of communism. And the propaganda press is still pushing its ostracism trick. They tell us that our concerns about becoming enslaved and murdered by a system historically guaranteed to end in slavery and murder are just a bunch of “old tropes” against socialism.
The propaganda machine and the institutions they took over had that much power over us because we gave it to them inch by inch over the years as we self-censored. When people hear no other narrative, they end up fearing social rejection if they don’t play along. This fear is the primal fuel that keeps the lies of propaganda alive.
The challenge is that this fear of speaking out against socialism needs to be stopped immediately. Yet it’s more difficult to turn back after it’s been allowed to fester for so many decades.
But there is hope. One way to challenge the narrative is to repeat a more accurate narrative that more people can understand: Socialism is slavery. Socialism controls what you are allowed to own, where you are allowed to live, what you’re allowed to eat, with whom you’re allowed to associate, whether you’re allowed to buy or sell, what you can say or read or write, and it takes away the fruit of your hard labor. It polices your thoughts. All exactly like slavery.
Yet as we see in the case of transmania, when a few brave people like author J.K. Rowling, swimmer Riley Gaines, and WNBA star Sophie Cunningham are willing to expose the trans cult for what it is, the whole trans narrative falls apart like a house of cards. How about that? Indeed, the emperor has no clothes. That should tell us something extraordinary about how self-censorship can lead to tyranny and how speaking out is the best way to help others speak out and to preserve freedom.
Now consider polling of youth who say they like socialism. We shouldn’t suppose for a minute that they really believe that stuff. Maybe some of them do. But socialism has become trendy, like a fashion accessory. Oppose it and you’re a dork. Hence, many youth feel more accepted among their peers if they are “socialist.” And so the propaganda media and the cool kids at high-end college campuses say socialism is really groovy.
Timeline Of The Rise Of Socialism In The Democrat Party
How else did we get here? The longer answer is that we got here after a century of critical theory pushed in the academic world, beginning with the Frankfurt School in 1930s America. Those left-wing academics, including Herbert Marcuse and a host of others, eventually spawned political correctness, identity politics with a focus on DEI, and the agitation of mobs such as Antifa and Black Lives Matter.
But to succeed, communists also knew they needed to latch onto an effective and practical vehicle. Hence, the long march through the Democrat Party started. But it couldn’t be the party of someone like Harry Truman or John F. Kennedy or Hubert Humphrey, who still held allegiance to American values. Socialists had to change the Democrat Party from within.
Enter the Chicago Seven, Marxists who rioted in an attempt to take over the Democrat Party at the 1968 Democrat Convention, under the guise of opposition to the Vietnam War. Just four years later, the Democrats nominated far-Left George McGovern to run for president at the 1972 Democrat Convention. Since then, there were fits and starts in the left’s takeover timeline. These included Jimmy Carter’s air of “decency” after Watergate and Bill Clinton’s famous “triangulation” or shift to the center.
Despite a penchant for planting bombs in government buildings, including the Pentagon during the 1970s, Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and wife Bernadine Dohrn were soon free to continue promoting communist agendas from their base in Chicago. Ayers was instrumental in the leftist takeover of K-12 education, while Dohrn focused on family law. In 1995 they helped launch Barack Obama’s run for the Illinois Senate, likely with an eye on the presidency and the “fundamental transformation of America” into a socialist state.
By 2016, after eight years of the Obama presidency, the communist left came “close, but no cigar.” So Trump’s 2016 upset defeat of Hillary Clinton resulted in more leftist machinations, including Covid, Black Lives Matter and Antifa riots, the weirdness of the 2020 election, endless lawfare, house raids, and multiple assassination attempts, all to prevent Trump from running again.
By some extraordinary stroke of fate in November 2024, the Democrats knew they would have to contend with Trump 2.0. So the masks came off entirely. Fast forward to 2026, and they’ve gained some ground with communist Zohran Mamdani elected mayor in New York, and the DSA’s ouster of several Democrat incumbents in their primaries.
Today the DSA is the loudest voice of the “progressives” in America. Its recently released platform — to abolish the presidency, the U.S. Senate, the Supreme Court, and ultimately the U.S. Constitution — is nothing more than the reframing of Congress as a sort of Supreme Soviet, a body meant to rubber-stamp whatever the inner circle or “Politburo” of the DSA decides in terms of how you may or may not live your life, once they own you like the slave they consider you to be. At that point America is no longer America.
As the American founders knew, tyranny cannot bear individual freedom of speech. That’s why free speech comes first in our Bill of Rights. Use it or lose it. So keep saying loud and clear: Socialism is slavery! To shut up about this — especially in the face of attempts to humiliate you — is to accept communism’s classification of you as a slave. So keep talking about it. You have nothing to lose but your chains.
