Democratic Socialism Is Totalitarianism | ZeroHedge

Authored by William Anderson via The Epoch Times,

After writing about the upset election win of socialist Zohran Mamdani in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary, a reader sent me an angry email, telling me that Mamdani was a “democratic socialist,” and that Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez were “social democrats.” The sender apparently wanted me to believe that all they wanted was to make New York and the United States into Denmark.

After all, isn’t Denmark one of the world’s happiest countries? Doesn’t it have a $22 minimum wage? (Actually, it has no federal minimum wage). Doesn’t it have wonderful welfare benefits along with lots of personal freedom? So, if we can just elect the kind of politicians that want to turn the US into Denmark, then we should do it.

There are some issues, of course.

For one, Denmark is far from a socialist country and it certainly does not have a socialist planned economy. This is an important point, because AOC, Sanders, and Mamdani all have called for substantial government planning and ownership and Mamdani has gone even further. The socialist online magazine Jacobin recently praised Mamdani precisely because he does call for the full socialist economy:

No one should be surprised that Zohran Mamdani supports democratic control over the economy, the end goal of socialism. But he won because he combined socialist politics with practical solutions to the cost-of-living crisis facing working people.

At a 2021 conference of the Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA), Zohran Mamdani discussed various short-term reforms favored by the organization. But alongside offering his thoughts on the groups’ immediate aims, he also had something to say about “end goal” of socialist politics: “seizing the means of production.”

In the last week, the clip resurfaced on right-wing social media, where it’s been treated as a damning discovery about Mamdani, who just won a primary to become the Democratic nominee for mayor in New York City.

National Review ran a brief item on the clip under the headline “Uh, That’s Literal Communism!” On CNN, Scott Jennings concurred, saying that Mamdani was “using the language of the Bolsheviks.” Congresswoman Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) said that this was “the scariest thing Mamdani has said” and that it was “straight out of Karl Marx’s Communist playbook.”

It’s unclear why these remarks about the end goal of socialist politics are supposed to be shocking.

There is much to process in this short passage, and it speaks volumes about so-called democratic socialists. For that matter, that socialists would want to identify with the Jacobins speaks volumes to their intentions, given that the Jacobins were the first political party to organize and carry out political terror complete with mass executions during the French Revolution. Second, by claiming that “democratic control over the economy” means the state “seizing the means of production,” they speak to the totalitarian and violent nature of their “democratic” beliefs. One does not “seize” anything without coercion. As Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara bragged in a recent interview, “We were not trying to hide Marxism.”

Lest anyone doubt the coercive and violent nature of American socialists, the recent Socialism 2025 conference in Chicago featured speaker after speaker calling for outright totalitarian control of all of American life. Among the proposals from speakers and delegates (all of whom were required to wear N-95 or K95 masks as part of the uniform) were taken from “democratic” socialist movements like the Bolshevik Revolution and Pol Pot’s Cambodian terror, and included:

• Replacing the family unit with communes (reminiscent of a scene from “The Killing Fields” in which the Khmer Rouge overseers show their subjects a drawing with a family X’d out);
• Using public schools to “radicalize” young people before they get to college;
• Continue to use higher education as a tool to undermine the universities and society;
• Dismantle the current United States but replace it with a “democratic socialist,” centralized entity where the state has complete control over everything.

As David Sypher, Jr., writes:

The overarching belief is clear: America’s systems – capitalism, policing, meritocracy, marriage – are all inherently oppressive and must be torn down and replaced with something “equitable.”

Although Mamdani has not publicly commented on the recent Socialism conference, he himself has called for ending private home ownership and replacing private dwellings with communal living. He also claims that private ownership of housing and profit-seeking by home builders is the main cause of homelessness. (One is reminded of the scene in the 1965 film “Dr. Zhivago” where Yuri comes home from the war after the Revolution to a house that has been divided up for different families).

Since Mamdani has openly called for the state to seize the methods of production along with private housing, there is little if any difference between his worldview and that of the most radical collectivists. That Bernie Sanders and AOC have endorsed him also speaks volumes about their own beliefs. We are supposed to believe that all they want to do is to make the US a little more like Denmark. One should wonder if the people cheering at their “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies understand just how their lives would change—and not for the better—if Sanders, Mamdani, and AOC get the “Democratic Socialism” that they want.

But what about the rest of the Democratic Party that doesn’t support Mamdani and so-called Democratic Socialism? To a certain extent, many of them are dependent upon a system of intervention that allows them to gain personal wealth from regulated capitalism and they realize that they would be left in the cold if the US really were to go fully socialist, as the left wing of the Democratic Party would like to do. Thus, we understand their resistance to the Mamdani campaign.

The Democrats were in this same place more than 90 years ago. The socialist writer Upton Sinclair in a huge electoral upset won the California Democratic Party primary for governor in 1934, running on a platform to “abolish poverty.” As Steven F. Hayward wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal:

Sinclair ran on a radical platform known by the acronym EPIC, for End Poverty in California. EPIC proposed universal old-age pensions (before Social Security), Soviet-style collective farms, state-run industries that would “produce for use, not for profit,” and perhaps property confiscation.

(Note that Mamdani has not called for the creation of collective farms in New York, which should not be surprising, given there are no farms in the city. However, in 1934, many Americans were enamored by the so-called Soviet Experiment in communism, which was much more highly regarded in the US than it would be later during the Cold War.)

President Franklin Roosevelt was not pleased with the result, as he worried that Sinclair’s radical campaign might turn people against his New Deal plans. While incumbent Republican Gov. Frank Merriam was unpopular, many Democrats and Republicans looked to run an “independent” candidate, Raymond Haight, as a foil to the other candidates.

Ultimately, Hollywood (which at that time had not been politically radicalized) turned up the rhetorical and broadcasting heat against Sinclair, and that proved to be the difference. Merriam won the election, and the socialists had to look elsewhere for electoral success.

Like the Mamdani platform and the socialist “vision” given in Chicago, Sinclair’s political promises could only be accomplished through coercion and propaganda. As Ludwig von Mises wrote more than a century ago in Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, socialism cannot work the way its promoters claim. As we have seen from the Bolshevik Revolution to modern times, socialists had absolute power to direct both labor and resources to whatever purposes they wished, yet their attempts failed miserably.

However, socialists continue to press on and now they seem to be enjoying political success. And while they throw in the word “democratic” to soften the blow, one cannot implement socialism without violence and threats of violence, since it requires confiscation of the property of others and seizes resources to change economic outcomes. In the end, it becomes yet another form of totalitarianism.

Source: Democratic Socialism Is Totalitarianism

The Most Dramatic Narrative Shift in Modern History | The Daily Declaration

The post-lockdown world has witnessed a narrative shift, exposing government corruption, corporate collusion, and a growing grassroots demand for accountability.

The most dramatic narrative shift in this post-lockdown period has been the flip in the perceptions of government itself. For decades and even centuries, government was seen as the essential bulwark to defend the poor, empower the marginalized, realize justice, even the playing field in commerce, and guarantee rights to all.

Government was the wise manager, curbing the excess of populist enthusiasm, blunting the impact of ferocious market dynamics, guaranteeing the safety of products, breaking up dangerous pockets of wealth accumulation, and protecting the rights of minority populations. That was the ethos and the perception.

Taxation itself was sold to the population for centuries as the price we pay for civilization, a slogan emblazoned in marble at the DC headquarters of the IRS and attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who said this in 1904, ten years before the federal income tax was even legal in the US.

This claim was not just about a method of funding; it was a commentary on the perceived merit of the whole of the public sector.

Yes, this view had challengers on the right and left but their radical critiques rarely took hold of the public mind in a sustained way.

A strange thing happened in 2020.

Most governments at all levels across the globe turned on their people. It was a shock because governments had never before attempted anything this audacious. It claimed to be exercising mastery over the whole of the microbial kingdom, the world over. It would prove this implausible mission as a valid one with the release of a magic potion made and distributed with its industrial partners who were fully indemnified against liability claims.

Suffice it to say that the potion did not work. Everyone got Covid anyway. Most everyone shook it off. Those who died were often denied common therapeutics to make way for a shot that clocked the highest rate of injury and death on public record. A worse fiasco would be hard to invent outside dystopian fiction.

Participating in this grand crusade were all the commanding heights. That included mass media, academia, the medical industry, the information systems, and science itself. After all, the very notion of “public health” itself implies a “whole of government” and a “whole of society” effort. Indeed, science – with its high status earned from many centuries of achievement – led the way.

The politicians – the people for whom the public votes and who form the one real connection that the people have with the regimes under which they live – went along but did not seem to be in the driver’s seat. Nor did the courts seem to have much role. They were closed along with small businesses, schools, and houses of worship.

The controlling forces in every nation traced to something else we did not normally think of as government. It was the administrators who occupied agencies that were deemed independent of public awareness or control. They worked closely with their industrial partners in tech, pharma, banking, and corporate life.

The Constitution did not matter. Neither did the long tradition of rights, liberty, and law. The workforce was divided between essential and nonessential in order to survive the great emergency. The essential people were the ruling class plus the workers who serve them. Everyone else was deemed unessential to social functioning.

It was supposed to be for our health – government merely looking after us – but this claim lost credibility quickly, as mental and physical health plummeted. Desperate loneliness replaced community. Loved ones were forcibly separated. The aged died alone with digital funerals. Weddings and worship were cancelled. Gyms were closed and then opened later only for the masked and the vaxxed. The arts died. Substance abuse skyrocketed because while everything else was closed the liquor stores and pot shops were open for business.

Here was when perceptions dramatically changed. Government was not what we thought. It is something else. It does not serve the public. It serves its own interests. Those interests are deeply woven into the fabric of industry and civil society. The agencies are captured. The largesse flows mainly to the well-connected.

The bills are paid by the people who had been deemed nonessential and who were now being compensated for the troubles with direct payments that were created by a printing press. Within a year, this showed up in the form of inflation that dramatically reduced real income during an economic crisis.

This huge experiment in pharmacological planning ended up flipping the rubrical narrative that had largely covered public affairs for everyone’s lifetimes. The terrible reality was being broadcast to the whole population in ways no one had ever before experienced. Centuries of philosophy and rhetoric were being shredded before our eyes, as whole populations came face-to-face with the unthinkable: government had become a grand scam or even criminal enterprise, a machinery that served only elite plans and elite institutions.

As it turns out, generations of ideological philosophizing had been chasing fictional rabbits. This is true for all the main debates about socialism and capitalism but also the side debates about religion, demographics, climate change, and so much more. Nearly everyone had been distracted from seeing the things that matter by hunting for things that did not actually matter.

This realization transversed typical partisan and ideological boundaries. Those who did not like to think about issues of class conflict had to face the ways in which the whole system was serving one class at the expense of everyone else. The cheerleaders of government beneficence faced the unthinkable: their true love had become malevolent. The champions of private enterprise had to deal with the ways in which private corporations participated and benefited from the entire fiasco. All major political parties and their journalistic backers participated.

No one’s ideological priors were confirmed in the course of events, and everyone was forced to realize that the world worked in a very different way from what we had been told. Most governments in the world had come to be controlled by people no one elected and these administrative forces were loyal not to voters but to industrial interests in media and pharma, while the intellectuals we had long trusted to say what is true went along with even the craziest of claims, while condemning dissent.

Making matters more confusing, no one in charge of this disaster would admit error or even explain their thinking. The burning questions were and are so voluminous as to be impossible to list in full. In the US, there was supposed to be a Covid commission but it never formed. Why? Because the critics far outweighed the apologists, and a public commission proved too risky.

Too much truth could get out, and then what would happen? Behind the public health rationale for the destruction, there was a hidden hand: national security interests rooted in the bioweapons industry that has long lived under a classified cover. This is likely what accounts for the strange taboo concerning this whole topic. Those who know cannot say while the rest of us who have been researching this for years are left with more questions than answers.

While we wait for a full accounting of how it is that rights and liberties were crushed worldwide – what Javier Milei has called a “crime against humanity” – there is no denying the reality on the ground. There was certain to be a blowback, the ferocity of which would only intensify the longer justice is delayed.

For several years, the world had awaited the political, economic, cultural, and intellectual fallout, while the perpetrators held on hoping that the whole subject would just go away. Forget about Covid, they kept saying to us, and yet the sheer size and scale of the calamity would not go away.

We live in the midst of that now, with minute-by-minute revelations of where the money went and who precisely was involved. Multiple trillions were squandered as the people’s standard of living took a dive, and now top among the burning questions is: who got the money? Careers are being wrecked as famous anti-corporate crusaders like Bernie Sanders turn out to be the US Senate’s largest single beneficiary of pharma largesse, exposed for the world.

The Sanders story is just one data point of millions. The news of the sheer number of rackets is spilling out like an avalanche minute-by-minute. The newspapers we thought were chronicling public life turned out to be on the take. The fact-checkers were always working for the blob. The censors were only protecting themselves. The inspectors we believed were keeping an eye out were always in on the game. The courts keeping tabs on government overreach were enabling it. The bureaucracies tagged to implement legislation were unchecked and unelected legislatures in themselves.

The shift is beautifully illustrated by USAID, a $50 billion agency that claimed to be doing humanitarian work but which was really a slush fund for regime change, deep-state operations, censorship, and NGO graft on a scale never before seen. Now we have the receipts. The entire agency, lording over the globe like an unchecked colossus for decades, seems destined for the trash heap.

And so on it goes.

Frequently overlooked in all the commentary on our times is how the second Trump administration is Republican in name only but mostly consists of refugees from the other party. Tick through the names (Trump, Vance, Musk, Kennedy, Gabbard, and so on) and you find people who only a few years ago were associated with the Democratic Party.

Which is to say that this aggressive rooting out of the deep state is being achieved by what is a de facto third party aimed at overthrowing the establishments of the legacy ones. And this is not just in the US: the same dynamic is taking shape throughout the industrialized world.

The entire system of government – properly conceived of not as a democratically elected conduit of the peoples’ interest but instead a complicated and unelected network of unfathomable industrial racketeering with a ruling class at the controls – seems to be unraveling before our eyes.

It’s like the old episodes of Scooby-Doo when the scary ghost or mysterious specter has the mask removed and it is the town mayor all along, who then proclaims that he would have gotten away with it but for these meddling kids.

The meddling kids now include vast swaths of the world’s population, burning with a passionate desire to clean up the public sector, expose the industrial scams, unearth all the secrets that have been kept for decades, put power back into the hands of the people as the liberal age promised long ago, while seeking justice for all the wrongdoing of these last hellish five years.

The Covid operation was an audacious global attempt to deploy all the power of government – in all the directions from and to which it flowed – in service of a goal never before attempted in history. To say that it failed is the understatement of the century. What it did was unleash fires of fury the world over, and whole legacy systems are in the process of burning down.

How deep is the corruption? There are no words to describe its breadth and depth.

Who is regretting this? It’s the legacy news media, the legacy academic establishment, the legacy corporate establishment, the legacy public-sector agencies, the legacy everything, and this regret knows no partisan or ideological bounds.

And who is celebrating this or, at least, enjoying the upheaval and cheering it on? It’s the independent media, the genuine grassroots, the deplorables and nonessentials, the pillaged and oppressed, the workers and peasants who were forced to serve the elites for years, those who have been truly marginalized through decades of exclusion from public life.

No one can be sure where this ends up – and no revolution or counterrevolution in history is without cost or complication – but this much is true: public life will never be the same for generations to come.

___

Republished with thanks to Brownstone Institute. Image courtesy of Unsplash.

The post The Most Dramatic Narrative Shift in Modern History appeared first on The Daily Declaration.

SOCIALISM: A Christian Response (Part 3) | VCY

 SOCIALISM: A Christian Response (Part 3)

Welcome!

. I’m Bub Kuns, and today we’re talking about a Christian response to socialism.

Socialism is growing in popularity in America — especially among young people. But it’s capitalism — not socialism — that best reflects the Bible’s teaching on work and economics.

For example, the Bible teaches that those who work deserve to keep what they earn. In Luke 10:7, Jesus Himself tells us that “the laborer deserves his wages” (ESV). This idea runs counter to socialism, where the government takes a large percentage — sometimes everything — a worker earns in order to financially support the socialist state. In fact, socialists would say that “the GOVERNMENT deserves YOUR wages!”

Although the Bible clearly states that governments have a right to tax citizens, the redistribution of wealth in socialist nations is really a violation of the Eighth Commandment — “THOU SHALT NOT STEAL!” — since it takes what rightfully belongs to the laborer — his wages.

And how else should Christians respond to socialism? We’ll discuss that another time.

For more information go to http://www.hopetools.net.  Stay Bold!

Bub Kuns is (at heart) a storyteller. He is a director, producer, writer, performer and editor. Bub’s life mission is to help and guide people to love God with all their “heart, soul, mind and strength.” Part of how he does that is by providing truth-filled, accessible, captivating content that packs a little punch. Bub produces content that inspires, challenges and activates believers to use their talents and voices to make a difference in their communities and in the world for the cause of Christ.