Tag: socialism

Campaign aide to socialist contender to become mayor of New York sympathized with Luigi Mangione in warped tribute

A campaign aide to socialist New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani showed sympathy for alleged United Healthcare CEO killer Luigi Mangione in posts online, the Daily Mail has learned.

Mamdani’s political director, Julian Gerson, posted on December 29th of 2024 on Facebook that he was ‘looking forward to driving down Mangione Avenue a few decades from now.’

In social media posts obtained by the Daily Mail, Gerson made the remark replying to a comment after he shared a personal essay on the impact Mangione was having on public discourse in the weeks after he allegedly murdered United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City.

In his essay, Gerson concluded that Manginone ‘is adored not only because he dared to target a leader of one of the most vile, self-enriching industries darkening our society today, but because he dared to defy the stasis of nihilistic rejection.’

‘The question is not whether he was right or wrong. It’s how many others he has shaken loose,’ Gerson concluded.

Per Gerson’s LinkedIn page, which bears the same profile photograph as his Facebook profile, he has worked for Mamdani’s mayoral campaign since March.

Mamdani’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment from the Daily Mail about Gerson’s post.

Mangione became a global phenomena due to the fascination around his privileged background and Hollywood good looks. For many on the left, he morphed into a vessel for radical rebellion against a system of economic injustice. 

Mangione remains in custody and federal prosecutors have chosen to seek the death penalty if he’s convicted.

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Falling For Socialism

Across college campuses, on TikTok feeds, and in everyday conversations, a familiar narrative is gaining steam: capitalism is broken.

Rising rents and stagnant wages fuel the claim among some young people that free markets have failed an entire generation. According to a 2024 poll by the Institute of Economic Affairs, more than 60 percent of young Britons now view socialism favorably. In the United States, the trend is similar, with Generation Z increasingly skeptical of capitalism’s promises.

But much of this idealism is rooted in distance—many of the young people romanticizing socialism have never lived through the economic dysfunction or political repression it often brings. For those who experienced Soviet shortages, Venezuelan collapse, or East Germany’s surveillance, the word socialism doesn’t suggest fairness or opportunity—it suggests fear, failure, and control. There’s a reason so many fled those systems to come to freer countries. What sounds utopian in theory has too often turned dystopian in practice.

But blaming capitalism misses the mark. The real culprit is cronyism, the unholy alliance between big government and big business that twists markets, blocks competition, and rewards political connections over genuine innovation.

The Myth of Market Failure

Capitalism, in its true form, is based on voluntary exchange. It rewards businesses that meet people’s needs and wants, with consumers deciding what succeeds and what fails. Competition drives improvement, innovation, and lower prices. No one is forced to buy or sell anything; choice reigns.

Cronyism is a different beast altogether. In a crony system, businesses succeed not by serving customers but by lobbying politicians. Profits come through subsidies, bailouts, and regulations designed to crush competition.

The 2008 financial crisis, often cited as proof of capitalism’s failures, actually showcased what happens when markets are rigged. Reckless banks, instead of collapsing as they deserved, were bailed out with taxpayer money. Ordinary people lost jobs and homes, while the politically connected survived and thrived.

This wasn’t free enterprise. It was cronyism.

The COVID-19 pandemic provided a grim sequel. Small businesses were forced to shut their doors under government mandates. Meanwhile, corporate giants like Amazon, able to operate under looser restrictions or pivot online, soared to record profits. Policies, written in the name of public health, often privileged the biggest players while leaving Main Street devastated.

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WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Socialist NYC Mayoral Candidate Wants City-Owned Grocery Stores

New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is a far left socialist and he wants the Big Apple to have government owned grocery stores.

This idea has been tried before and it failed miserably. Anyone who knows history remembers the images of bare shelves in government owned grocery stores in the former Soviet Union.

Mamdani recently shared a survey on Twitter/X showing that New Yorkers support his idea.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson also pushed this terrible idea.

From City Journal:

One of his more curious proposals, about which he is buoyant, is to open city-owned and city-managed grocery stores. His campaign literature explains that these municipal stores will be “focused on keeping prices low, not making a profit. Without having to pay rent or property taxes, they will reduce overhead and pass on savings to shoppers. They will buy and sell at wholesale prices, centralize warehousing and distribution, and partner with local neighborhoods on products and sourcing.”

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German Socialists Want to Use Citizen’s Own Money to Propagandize Them

The German socialists (SPD) are desperately seeking new ways to improve their standing after the electorate roundly rejected their political agenda—especially relating to mass migration—in the February elections.

An outright ban on the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) opposition is, of course, one option. Another is funnelling taxpayer cash into the coffers of media organisations that can be trusted to put a positive spin on the SPD’s flaws.

Such considerations appear now to have made their way into ongoing coalition talks, in which Friedrich Merz’s CDU has already proved happy to ‘cede ground’ further to the left.

Die Stimme Berlins reports that the SPD is calling for a new “media innovation fund” which would provide state support to what the paper described as “reliable” and “trustworthy” publications. That is, reliable and trustworthy according to the state.

AfD Bundestag member Götz Frömming said this, in effect, would mean papers that are “loyal to the [governing] party line,” while journalist Henning Rosenbusch added that ‘reliable’ translated in this case to “preemptively obedient government propaganda.”

Reports also note that the fund would be intended to support these selected media companies while they improve their digital arms—which, of course, is where influencing can today take place most effectively—as well as to combat ‘disinformation.’

This closely follows a slew of criticism surrounding accusations that the main U.S. aid agency’s (USAID) funds were used to deliver particular political outcomes in Europe, as well as calls by leftist Brussels officials for taxpayers to fund, effectively, pro-European Union propaganda.

Apollo News claims that the SPD demand is currently being met with “displeasure” from CDU negotiators. But with Merz, the chancellor-in-waiting, hoping to forge a coalition by April 20th, it is not at all difficult to imagine the ‘conservatives’ backing down.

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The Many Disguises of Socialism

In his book, Socialism, Ludwig von Mises warns about the threat posed by socialism to peaceful co-existence and to Western civilization. He highlights the “disastrous wars and revolutions, heinous mass murders and frightful catastrophes” that have been caused by socialist policies, a warning that was also sounded by Friedrich von Hayek in The Road to Serfdom.

Mises goes beyond warning about the destructive nature of socialism, going further to draw attention to what he considers “the main issue,” which he describes as “the desperate struggle of lovers of freedom, prosperity and civilization against the rising tide of totalitarian barbarism.” Socialism is destructive in itself, but more than that it fuels the “rising tide of totalitarian barbarism” through its many disguises. There is a persistent belief that socialism is an ideal worth pursuing if we could only work out just the right form that it should take. Part of Mises’s goal in Socialism is to explain the dangers of socialism and help readers to recognize socialism when they see it.

Among its many disguises, socialism cloaks itself in the mantle of ideals that many people value such as the ideals of justice and equality before the law. Speaking of the anthropomorphism that ascribes “justice” to the distribution of wealth that results from market interactions, Hayek in his essay “‘Social’ or Distributive Justice,” warns:

I believe that “social justice” will ultimately be recognized as a will-o’-the-wisp which has lured men to abandon many of the values which in the past have inspired the development of civilization.

Thus, the problem is not simply that many people are beguiled by socialism, but that this causes them to abandon the ideals which civilized societies once held. As Hayek writes in “The Origins and Effects of Our Morals”:

[I]t is no exaggeration to say that the central aim of socialism is to discredit those traditional morals which keep us alive.

The traditional principles of morality to which he refers, such as the concept of honesty, are associated with the cultural values of classical liberalism which are now under threat: freedom of contract, freedom of association, free speech, and the right to private property. By undermining these ideals, socialism undermines the very foundations of civilization.

In the contemporary context, the primary disguise of socialism is the ideal of equality. Thomas Sowell describes the tenets of socialism as “make believe equality”—the idea that we should create laws and policies that ensure we are, in fact, all equal—even though, as Murray Rothbard explains in Egalitarianism as a Revolt against Nature, seeking to make all people, in fact, equal would be a sinister Procrustean goal. As Sowell famously said, “No one is equal to anything. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days.” Yet the concept of “equality” now provides cover for many socialist policies. Most notorious is the concept of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” DEI is based on theories of racial polylogism, which are explicated by reference to explicitly Marxist concepts. Indeed, this is one of the main methods by which Marxist ideals now proliferate—by being subsumed within the intellectual foundations of the latest iteration of socialism.

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Hillary-Trained Socialists Countrywide

On the day of Donald Trump’s first inauguration in 2017, Hillary Clinton used some of her former staffers and started a nationwide organization to train young socialists to run for positions in state politics, to take those “down ballot races”. To spread communism at the “ground level”. THAT is why we must care.

Her organization is called “Run For Something”, (RFS). RFS solicits, trains, and pays for bringing young progressives (aka, Marxists) into public office. As Wikipedia says,

“Run for Something is a progressive American political organization dedicated to recruiting and supporting young candidates running for down-ballot office. Its mission is to get young progressive candidates from non-traditional backgrounds to run for and win state and local offices, and create a next generation slate of political candidates that will seek higher office” in the years ahead.

I did a deep dig into this years ago, and their training unabashedly includes teaching their young people to lie. A young woman running for Chattanooga TN school board in 2018 had signs all over town claiming that she was a Republican. Fortunately she lost, but she spoke openly about the trained scam, but all units of local governance were not that lucky.

The first year that the young commies were out there running for office, they won over 600 races around the country. They fought against even other Democrats who were considered too “old school Democrat”, i.e., not Leftist enough. Judgeships, School Board seats, city council chairs, and even state legislatures were filled with Hillary’s young Communists.

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Kamala Harris’s top economic adviser is a socialist with a longtime passion for seizing & redistributing Americans’ hard-earned wealth

Meet Bharat Ramamurti. He has never run a business, nor has he ever worked for one.

Yet he’s the top economic adviser for the Kamala Harris campaign, and a not-so-covert socialist ideologue who intends to cripple the American economy through ruthlessly “progressive” taxation.

He may have first appeared on your radar Wednesday afternoon after his appearance on CNBC, during which he advocated for the campaign’s 25 percent unrealized gains tax proposal. 

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The Politics of Envy

Socialists and other leftwingers support taxation of the income and wealth of the well off. They say that they want to promote “equality” and “social justice,” but in fact they are motivated by envy. They want what others have. They can’t stand the thought of other people’s having more money than they do.

Here is what Rob Larson, an economics professor at Tacoma Community College, says about certain very expensive apartments: “Besides the return of in-city mansions for the affluent and their cars, New York and London have also seen the growth of ‘poor doors.’ These are entrances to new luxury buildings, erected with a city requirement to include some affordable housing units for regular working people, in addition to ‘market rate’ units that sell for seven figures and up. The Guardian describes a luxury London development where the main door opens to luxury marble tiling and plush doors, and a sign on the wall alerts residents to the fact that the concierge is available. Round the back, the entrance to the affordable homes is a cream corridor, decorated only with grey mailboxes and a poster warning tenants that they are on CCTV and will be prosecuted if they cause any damage.

To me, this is an amazing passage. In Larson’s example, some “regular working people” are housed in some of the most luxurious apartments in the world. But Larson still objects because these people don’t get to use the fancier entrances made for the superrich who pay market rates. As you read Larson, you can feel his seething hatred for the rich: he would like to pull them down, just because they are able to afford things others cannot. He offers no evidence that the working people in the apartments are dissatisfied. If I had to guess, I would imagine them to be happy to be getting the windfall that results from the government’s interference with the free market on their behalf; but whether I am right does not in the present context matter. The point is simply to expose Larson’s emotion for what it is. As an analogy, consider someone who resents first-class air travel, not because he finds coach class uncomfortable, but just because others travel under better conditions than he does. And the case that envy and hatred are involved in Larson’s example is stronger than for the air travel case. Except for the entrance, the working people are getting the luxury good—but this is not enough for Larson.

A much more prominent economist than Larson illustrates the same attitude. Thomas Piketty’s central idea is that inequality is the supreme social sin and must be radically curtailed. He doesn’t deny that capitalism results in economic growth and an enhanced standard of living, but the income and wealth of the rich have grown far faster than those of the poor. You might ask why this matters, even granting his dubious statistics: Don’t people care about how well they are doing, much more than they resent the rich, if in fact they resent them at all?

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Harris’s Price Control Plan is Worse Than You Think

The Myth of the Eternal Return is the title of a 1954 tome by the Romanian historian Mircea Eliade, although many other deep thinkers, from Pythagoras to Nietszche, have voyaged into the same poetic and philosophic recesses. 

My task is much shallower: To show how old, bad, ideas keep recurring in American politics. Yes, I bear witness to The Truth of Infernal Return. As with bad pennies and bad breath, it’s no myth that our politics are infested with nefarious ideas that never die and eternal lie. As with some Lovecraftian daemon, they await their infernal comeback. 

Case in point: Kamala Harris’s August 16 announcement of her plan for price controls—that being a fair way to describe federal monitoring of “price gouging.” Harris has revived one of the worst ideas from the stagflationary (stagnation + inflation) 1970s. More on that later, but let’s recall other bad ideas that have lamentably rebounded: 

First, unnecessary foreign war. Into this Baby Boomer, memories of the bloody futility of the Vietnam War are seared. So when the North Vietnamese finally conquered South Vietnam in 1975, my teenage self said, “Well, at least the U.S. will never make that mistake again.” Which only proves I had a lot to learn. As we all know, less than three decades later, the U.S. invaded Iraq, a military operation that made the Vietnam War look prudential. 

Today, 21 years after George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished”—the most grimly hilarious pronunciamento since Vietnam’s “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it”—we still have troops in Iraq, which is now dominated, of course, by Iran. So what, now, are those Americans doing there? They aren’t looking for WMDs, and they aren’t building democracy. Instead, they are fighting Al Qaeda, ISIS, Daesh—or whatever new bogeyman emerges from the Middle East’s tireless terror-meme generator. 

According to reports, the U.S. has 3,400 troops in Iraq and adjacent Syria, but only a fool would vouch for the accuracy of that number, given officialdom’s history of fibbing, the slippery X-factor of contractors—and perhaps some other number-hiding shell-game that we’ll learn about only in the next investigative scoop. 

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Socialism, Not US Sanctions, Ruined the Venezuelan Economy

US sanctions against Venezuela are barbaric and immoral. But, they are not responsible for the economic collapse that has transpired in Venezuela over the past twenty years. Yes, the sanctions have further reduced the standard of living in Venezuela, and the burden of relative impoverishment caused by the sanctions has fallen hardest on those at the lowest end of the socio-economic ladder.

However, the effects of these US-imposed sanctions have not been nearly broad enough to be responsible for the general collapse of economic conditions that we now see in that country.

It is important to make this distinction because defenders of Venezuela’s socialist economic policies have repeatedly attempted to claim that sanctions are the primary reason for the country’s economic collapse.

Why do the socialist apologists claim this? It’s so they can make the case—as socialists are always eager to do—that socialism would be a boon for everyone’s standard of living if only it weren’t for the interference of foreign states like the US.

The truth, however, is that socialist policies like those practiced in Venezuela—widespread expropriation of private businesses coupled with vast wealth redistribution and government dominance of major industry sectors—are more than enough to destroy any polity’s economy. It is not necessary for Washington to intervene.

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