For many of us who were raised in liberal, Democratic families, the infusion of socialist, anti-free-speech, and anti-Semitic elements into the party has been alarming. The party was always in favor of social welfare programs but remained ardently committed to free markets and free speech. Now, we have CNN anchors openly questioning whether candidates are too Jewish-looking for the Democratic base as socialists sweep away establishment candidates. A recent poll reaffirmed that trend with a vast majority of Democrats saying that they are prepared to support the socialists.
A recent Economist/YouGov survey asked respondents, “Would you ever vote for a candidate who identified as a “Democratic Socialist?”
While 85 percent of Republicans and 40 percent of independents said that they would not vote for socialists, 62 percent of Democrats said that they would. Among self-described liberals, the percent of support for socialism soars to 73 percent.
For Kamala Harris supporters, 64 percent would support socialists.
Even more alarming is the preference of Democrats for socialism over capitalism. Some 34 percent choose socialism while only 22 percent choose capitalism. Overall, 58 percent of Democrats view socialism in general “favorably.”
It is not surprising that socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders went on YouTube this week to proclaim that “we are on the verge of the political revolution” that they have long sought to fundamentally change our system.
In Rage and the Republic, I discuss this shift toward socialism:
“Much of the anti-capitalist movement is composed of young people who have never lived under a socialist or communist government. Popular politicians like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) have made socialism chic, alongside wealthy celebrity adherents such as Lawrence O’Donnell, Susan Sarandon, Michael Moore, and Sarah Silverman. There is a superficiality to many in this movement of wealthy celebrities wearing socialism on their designer sleeves. In one of the most glaring disconnects, Ocasio-Cortez attended the ritzy Met Gala (where tickets cost tens of thousands of dollars) wearing a designer dress with ‘Tax the Rich’ in large letters. It perfectly captured America’s armchair socialists, a commitment that often seems more performative than philosophical.”
Democratic establishment figures are maneuvering to stay ahead of the mob, many offering the far left the Supreme Court as bona fide. Others are staying silent as anti-Semitic figures fill their ranks.
Some politicians are struggling to curry support with the growing socialist movement. Rep. Dan Goldman, who inherited a massive fortune as a trust baby, unwisely promised to help subsidize his campaign from his family fortune. With the addition of three homes, Goldman looked like the Richie Rich of the Democratic Party and lost by over 30 points.
Others are trying to downplay their wealth, from Rep. Ro Khanna, who reportedly has half a billion dollars from his wife’s inheritance, to Gov. Jay Robert “J.B.” Pritzker, who also inherited his fortune. Pritzker assured the mob that he is a different kind of billionaire, pointing at Trump billionaires as the rightful targets (not him with $4.3 billion).
Notably, votes for socialists are not coming from blue-collar workers but from young, college-educated voters. These younger voters never experienced or watched the collapse of socialist systems in the last century. For them, the promise of the Mamdani’s “warmth of collectivism.”
Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the New York Times best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”
Government has a necessary role in preventing monopolistic interference with the free market.
For basic commodities such as healthcare, housing, and communication, the free market has had an abysmal record of lowering quality and engaging in price-fixing. Failure to correct abuses amounts to a transfer of government responsibility to Big Business and Big Oligarchs.
The passage of massive fortunes to generations unborn is leading to creation of a class of Great Barons similar to those post-Norman Conquest England. DIsmantling of democracy and restitution of feudal classes of citizens are visibly occurring before our eyes. Political leaders do not directly experience the rising challenges to daily life created by the uncontrolled incursion on both commodities and basic goods and services by Private Equity.
Leanings towards both fascist and socialist responses are being nurtured by these economic dislocations.
Strictly speaking, democratic socialism advocates for collective ownership of the means of production achieved through democratic processes, whereas social democracy operates within a capitalist framework but uses strong welfare states to promote social justice.
There are no countries in the world today that fully meet the academic definition of a Democratic Socialist State
Shabbat shalom everyone 🍾💥🎁🎈🥂🍷🍞
Have a peaceful sabbath, except for the fireworks of course 😉
Thank you and I’ll do my best to hide under the covers during fireworks time.
TGIF.
Free markets encourage innovation, trade, and economic development through allocating societal resources to their highest and best uses. Socialism suppresses all three and impoverishes. Just ask people who lived through the Cold War in eastern Europe, or who lived through state socialism in Venezuela, or who currently live in North Korea.
Free trade also helps prevent conflict beceause even if you dislike someone, you are aware that your economic wellbeing depends on trading with that person. That kind of restraint is built into free market capitalism, but not socialism.
Yes, absolutely free markets bereft of antitrust “laws,” as if they have a legal basis in the Constitution.
So free, that when a monopoly forms, it must be allowed to persist until sufficient competition breaks it up naturally.
People must suffer until they organize themselves and then organize effective competition.
Competition!
That is the natural and God-given right, that is the natural and God-given mandate, and that is the natural and God-given solution.
The excuse that a monopoly has cornered a market cannot stand.
The free market is the antidote to monopolies. If the market really is free, meaning the large incumbent players have not captured the regulatory apparatus, monopolies cannot form and last. The only exception is natural monopolies like electricity distribution, which are always highly regulated.
About free markets, Oldman. I have always found the discussion of monopolies troublesome. You make the discussion easier by providing examples that you call natural monopolies, which many free marketers agree should be highly regulated. But what are natural monopolies? If I had to guess, it would be those necessary things with high fixed costs to create and low marginal costs to provide.
My problem is that I do not know if that is true. As an example, you use electricity distribution. That is similar to cable, and I have more than one set of cables at my house, and technology has made it so that I might not even need them.
But as I write, this is a tough subject because part of my brain says there is no such thing as a natural monopoly because even large groups of people can get together to produce the needed element, a co-op.
Sometimes I incorporate the lifespan of a human being and say that we can wait for the free market to fix things, but on the other hand, if a person lives 80 years, shouldn’t at some time in his life he receive those rewards that can be made available to everyone if a regulated monopoly were permitted?
Large incumbent players have always bought the upstarts or used their monopolies to undercut them on price until they die. By regulator apparatus do you mean the interventions that stops bread makers from adding wood dust to the dough or drug makers from lying about the contents and the effects?
PG&E is highly regulated. PG&E didn’t bother to maintain their electrical distribution system. PG&E burned down a few towns. PG&E declared bankruptcy to avoid paying for the fire damage. PG&E is still in business and highly regulated. I doubt PG&E is doing anything different about maintaining their electrical distribution system.
Free markets also condemn those at the bottom to suffering and slow death. Which is a great result per psychopaths who believe in free market pressure.
However free markets also don’t produce things like the federal highway system or fire and ambulance services available to everyone – that’s the suffering part. They don’t have police as much as private armies.
In free markets a major player can strangle entire towns, as Walmart has done, by first undercutting existing businesses, forcing them out of business, then underpaying the former employees of those existing businesses, and then cutting the quality of the product that are sold there. In those places where the next nearest town of notable size is an hour or more away, there becomes almost no alternative to Walmart. They can’t easily leave because who wants to buy a house in a strangled town?
Mainly the free market transfers wealth from the poor to those who are rich.
“Free markets also condemn those at the bottom to suffering and slow death.”
Really?
The poor in America are far richer that any king at any time in human history.
Young Go-Getters In The News
Donald Trump Jr. has a stake in a company that stands to profit massively from a potential federal rule change by the Trump administration to allow guns to be sold entirely over the internet, The Washington Post reported on Thursday.
The issue involves the company GrabAGun, an online firearms retailer that has billed itself as “the Amazon of Guns,” and seeks to dominate the firearms retail space.
Trump Jr., who owns a 1.1 percent stake in GrabAGun, “was present at the New York Stock Exchange in July 2025 when the company went public, with photos showing him making a gesture like holding a gun to celebrate the moment as he helped ring the bell,” said the report. And he “stands to prosper if the company fulfills its goal of being a dominant seller of firearms online.”
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-jr-2677152020/
………………………………………..
Key Passage Above:
“A company that stands to profit massively from a potential federal rule change by the Trump administration”.
* * * * * *
Now here’s an enterprising youth who believes in capitalism. Don Junior should be an inspiration to every boy. And boy, we could use a business like mail order guns. Forget Lee Harvey Oswald and that mail order rifle of ‘his’. We can be sure that only sportsmen will utilize this service.
^ The Chinese Communist Party bot never takes a day off ^
Tomorro, July 4, it’ll be telling us that communism and dictatorship are better than freedom and capitalism.
Good thing communism is unconstitutional and cannot be found anywhere in Article 1, Section 8, or the Amendments, presuming the judicial branch, including the Supreme Court, does its sworn-oath duty to support the Constitution. Having said that, America has quite a few constitutional anomalies to correct.
No kidding, what a load of Mao crap! What does a governor on an engine do? It regultes how much fuel the carburetor receives before choking out or revving out. Corruption of the governor is the problem, not the capitalist system. The free market did indeed create the federal highway system, it created the asphalt, the earth moving machines, the base material mine and most importantly the tax dollars that funded it. Had the market truly been able to work, it would have been built for a third of the cost. Why perhaps Davis Bacon would not even exist.
Maduro – incapacitated
Ali Khamenei – gone
Kamala – a joke
Hillary – an even worse joke
Walz – an equally bad joke
Starmer – gone
Biden – advanced alzheimers
Castro – neutered
Putin – severely weakened
Trump – on top of the world
WINNING!
Adolf Hitler was in a similar position at a similar point in his political career as Donald Trump is now.
And Trump is building a bunker.
When is the final step?
Right Get a grip.
Trump is a two term 80 year old President. Comparing him to Hitler is absurd. Get some help, we are praying for you.
The Democratic Socialists of America are the direct and mortal enemies of the American thesis of freedom and self-reliance, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, actual Americans, and America.
____________
“Nobody ever defended anything successfully, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.”
“A good plan violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.”
– General George S. Patton Jr.
There is no such thing as Socialism.
Socialism is a ruse.
______________________
“The goal of Socialism is Communism.”
-Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
_________________________
AI Overview
Vladimir Lenin articulated this concept in his seminal 1917 political work, The State and Revolution. He defined socialism as the “lower phase” of communism—a transitional society where the state continues to exist while class exploitation is abolished—with the ultimate and inevitable goal being the establishment of full, stateless communism.
“The party was always in favor of social welfare programs but remained ardently committed to free markets and free speech.”
– Professor Turley
_____________________
What the professor means to say is that the Democratic Party is antithetical and un-American and its programs are unconstitutional communism.
So true.
Social welfare programs enjoy no legal basis in the Constitution. Congress has the power to tax for only debt, defense, and “general Welfare” (i.e. all, well, proceed). Social Security and Medicare address merely 18.7% of the population, meaning those communist redistribution programs are irrefutably unconstitutional. Congress has no power to regulate the financial services industry and no mandate to provide retirement or healthcare plans. Congress has no power to “claim or exercise” dominion over private property in any aspect or facet or to any degree.
The entire Democrat Party communist welfare state is unconstitutional.
The singular American failure is the judicial branch, with emphasis on the Supreme Court.
Of course Professor Turley did not mean what you claim.
Professor Turley is my hero. Taking license, I stated what he should have said were he to agree with me and take a text-only position on fundamental law. I apologize for any confusion.
A note to all, including the good professor and his family.
(1) Get a bag of those GIANT marshmallows (smaller than a softball but much larger than a baseball, a good 3+ inches).
(2) LIGHTLY spray them with some neon paint in a spray can, like the kind surveyors use to spray on grass) or two different colors for two teams). (yellow, green, orange)
(3) get them out in the sun to dry out.
(4) In the dark tonite or tomorrow nite, play tag target games, won’t stain clothing but lots of fun. The powder sugar or whatever they are coated in seems to keep the stick off! (don’t forget to count them and clean up, -we don’t want to hurt curious critters).
(the second time we played it, I painted some regular-sized marshmallows and tried to give them to the other team- told them we deflated them and the pump was broken).
Lin
Should the opposing team be Democrats, be sure to tell them that they can eat the sugar fodder after they lose the game.
Socialists “Versus” Democratic Socialists
American socialists (Sanders, Mamdani, AOC, and their ilk) are trying to con you with with a phony distinction between “socialism” and “democratic socialism.”
Their hope is this: Americans love democracy. So let’s sell [the poison] of socialism by wrapping it in the feel-good word “democratic.”
In theory and in practice, there is in fact no distinction between those two. The *only* differences are the techniques used to enslave a country. They are both based on collectivism and reject American individualism. They both operate on the premise that the individual’s life belongs to the state. They both cause poverty, deprivation, suffering. They are both a slave pen.
Marx was adamantly in favor of voting and democracy. That gave rise to “Soviet democracy” — aka “democratic socialism.” Castro, by contrast, imposed socialism on Cuba via an armed revolution — which then became a Soviet ally. Why? Because in the end there is no difference between the two types of socialist tyranny.
BTW, there are American socialists agitating for the Castro method of imposing socialism. Why? It’s quicker. Then there’s the thorny issue of those recalcitrant Americans, and the Red states.
Thank YOu to the good professor for taking the time to give us all food for thought this holiday weekend, although I am sure he is veddy veddy busy, he took the time.
Thank you to all who viewed and contributed comments these last few days; I feel much enriched feeling the pulse of the nation.
A great holiday to all,! and we remain mindful of the firm terra cotta of foundational beliefs beneath our feet. Let us not lose our footing.
I feel like I’m now living in Hitler’s Nazi Germany–the one my dad & his brothers fought against in WWII; one of whom lost his life in that war! This is a slap in the face to Americans who love our nation & have either served in the military or have worked so hard to live good lives that benefit the citizens of the US! I fear we’re on the verge of another Civil War; one that Communist China is funding! They’d love to own the US!
I don’t believe you have any clue what living in Hitler’s Nazi Germany was like if you think America is like that. If you need a dose of reality, checkout Iran where Christians and Jews (yes, they are in Iran) are subjugated and persecuted. Where women are truly oppressed. Where being gay is a capital offense. Like I said, you need a dose of reality.
How many times did Turley write about Hunter Biden allegedly doing influence peddling when Joe Biden was president? I lost count, but it was a lot. Republicans dug deep, but came up with nothing criminal or anything tying Joe Biden to any influence peddling. Now, we have Trump and his worthless sons getting billions in government contracts via a company in which they have major ownership. Turley has nothing to say. We have Trump openly soliciting the luxury flying palace from the Qataris, and getting it gifted, while we taxpayers pay to refurbish it, and Trump is planning to keep it for himself once he stops stinking up the White House. Turley has nothing to say about that. We have Trump grifting to the tune of billions of dollars by selling worthless cryptocurrency bearing his fat face and trading on the presidency he lied to get, mostly purchased by overseas billionaires who are getting sensitive, advanced AI chips that are not supposd to leave the US because they can be used to spy on us and create a competitve advantage, using our own technology. The non-billionaires who invested in this worthless commodity lost their shirts. Turley has nothing to say about this, either. The grift and corruption of the Trumps is overwhelming. USAID dollars that went to feed starving people in Africa were cut off, while Trump gives massive tax breaks to billionaires, blows through millions in vanity projects no one wants, like the ballroom, the Trump arch. Hundreds of thousands of African children and adults have died because they relied on the peanut paste formulated here in the State of Georgia and Trump cancelled the contract. How about the no-bid contracts awarded to Trump campaign donors, and trying to blame the olympic canoeist for damaging the reflecting pool after Trump drove through it with a motorcade, which pulled apart seams and junctions that had been repaired and which are now leaking again. Circulation pumps were turned off for 2 days for that stupid cage match on the White House lawn, which helped along the algae bloom that Trump lies about being caused by vandals. The work was done by another Trump campaign donor with no experience in such matters. Turley has nothing to say about this, either. It’s obvious that when Turley can’t defend Trump, his failures and his grift and corruption, he attacks Democrats. And, the war with Iran that Trump started has not ended.
But, the disciples need affirmation when every single day the news has stories of Trump’s failures—the unmitigated flop called the Great American State Fair that has very sparse attendance, with cancelled performances, stages falling down, Trump’s arch falling apart, power outages resulting in the ferris wheel not working, ice cream melting, and air conditioning not working. MAGA media keeps trying to tout this fiasco as a success–that’s just laughable.
Gigi is laughable!!
K: when is Dr. Ford going to start cashing in on her notoriety because she testified against Brett Kavanaugh– like you predicted? Last I heard, she and her family were still in hiding.
I predicted??? HUH? What a moron!!
Yeah, riiiight.
ANON IS FOS!!
Hunter could peddle all he wanted. Joe didn’t deliver because Joe wasn’t part of the peddling.
In the case of Trump, he’s giving specific information in advance to his children; they may even plan this sort of activity in advance – telling Trump to attack Iran on some particular day knowing they can short certain stocks and ride others on the way up when investors respond to this action.
More lies as usual
USAID dollars that went to feed starving people in Africa were cut off, while Trump gives massive tax breaks
Look, it’s getting time we started planning for the excision of these abject losers. If you could go back in time, before Idi Amin took power, or Stalin, would you stop them? Time to make some examples before it gets messy, not that I mind messy.
The term “socialism” seems to have become rather popular in the US, except that apparently most people who use it carelessly do not know what it means. They seem to think of “socialism” as the equivalent of the European “social democratic” or the American “progressive”. Neither of the two has anything to do with “socialism”. The key elements of true socialism are: (a) collective ownership of the means of production, by the state or by the workers; (b) production for use (not for profit) such as:
satisfying human needs; resources are directed toward providing essentials like healthcare, education, housing, and food to everyone, regardless of their ability to pay; (c) socialism relies on varying degrees of conscious economic planning and not on market forces; (d) classless society; (e) robust social welfare systems. The way I remember the American DNA (having lived there 23 years), only point (e) might have a chance in America (robust social welfare systems). Everything else of socialism is so contrary to the American DNA that it is inconceivable to me that Americans might ever become “socialists”.
Sorry, but the modern DNC can’t pretend they were not equally totalitarian or reprehensible globalists before the word ‘socialist’ attached. Those of you waiting for the return of JFK can stop holding your breath. We got him. His name is Trump, and if you can’t see that you have utterly lost the plot over the years or kept up with the average Joe, particularly with your outdated views of ‘minorities’ whom you still seem to think eat cat food because it’s all they can afford. Your compassion became prejudice.
” AOC, Lawrence O’Donnell, Susan Sarandon, Michael Moore, Sarah Silverman, … Mamdani ” -JT
Fashionada-Socialist for living large in the digital-age lifestyle.
OT. I heard a good one —>
As long as we agree with SCOTUS that there are 8 billion undocumented Americans we’ll be just fine.
😂
Citizenship simply means, cannot be deported. The next hurdle is Citizenship for parents and grandparents via next of kin, sanguinas. Then fix naturalized and natural born inequality. All citizens are citizens, delete natural born from presidential qualified. Delete ICE, HS, border patrol. Come if you want, leave when you want, come back meh.
Citizen = cannot deport. Anyone can vote or not.
Who are the people turning out and voting for these Communists in primaries? It is mostly disgruntled college graduates with gargantuan student debts who find out they aren’t qualified for jobs that pay better than barista or bartender. And who is the next D incumbent to be ousted? I would watch VA-8. It is the only contest in VA where a D incumbent has a same-party challenge, and one of Beyer’s 4 challengers has DSA positions on all issues. Primary day is Aug 4, and early voting is now.
Who are they?
They are invading communist parasites who should never have been allowed in.
The laws must change drastically in this once-great country, or there will be none.
In 1967, Polish mercenary Rafal Ganowicz was asked by a journalist what it felt like to take human life. His answer: “I wouldn’t know, I’ve only ever killed Communists”