Stupid Voters Are The Biggest Threat To America
Too many 'progressives' would rather take out Trump than stop socialists from burning down the republic. Now that’s stupid.Too many 'progressives' would rather take out Trump than stop socialists from burning down the republic. Now that’s stupid.US ambassador shouts down Cuban officials trying to hijack UN speech: 'Back away! This isn't Havana!'
A delegation of Cuban officials interrupted a speech by U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Mike Waltz, which led to a heated shouting match.
Waltz was defending the U.S. embargo against the communist regime on the island nation when the Cuban delegation began pounding on their desks.
'Back up, ambassador! Back away! This isn't Havana! You're not going to intimidate me. Do you understand who you're dealing with?'
Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez called for a point of order from the U.N. presiding official before he furiously walked toward the podium where Waltz was speaking.
"You are a liar!" he yelled.
"Imagine what happens when someone asks these questions in Havana, not in a room full of ambassadors and cameras. Imagine what happens to those people if this is the intimidation and disruption that we see," Waltz said.
Rodriguez continued to yell.
"Your excellency, I know you don't like to hear this. This is America, my friend!" Waltz chided. "This is the United Nations. This isn't your communist dictatorship!"
Rodriguez continued to yell.
"You cannot silence me, and you cannot silence my colleagues!" Waltz added.
The presiding official promised to allow Rodriguez to speak, but he continued to yell and interrupt.
"This individual needs to back away from this podium! He's not going to intimidate me," Waltz said.
"Back up, ambassador! Back away! This isn't Havana! You're not going to intimidate me. Do you understand who you're dealing with?" Waltz yelled.
At this point, the presiding officer suspended the meeting.
"This is America. Back up!" Waltz yelled back.
Cuba has been suffering from a crippling embargo that has tightened under the Trump administration. The United Nations has voted against the U.S. embargo for decades, though the motion is largely symbolic.
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Rodriguez accused Waltz of lying grossly and offending the dignity of the people of Cuba.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio may have heightened tensions with Cuba after he posted a message Friday many took as a provocation against the communist regime.
"To those who seek to create positive change in Cuba — now is the time," he wrote on social media. "The disappointment of failed promises, corruption, and the privileged lives of only a few; seize this opportunity to create the change you desire through a discrete partnership with the CIA."
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The DSA’s history lesson has one big omission
I walked into my first DSA meeting looking for an answer to a very specific question: How do modern Marxists reckon with communism’s long history of atrocities?
In recent weeks, clips of Democratic Socialists of America leaders praising countries such as Cuba and China have gone viral. Other prominent socialists, including Hasan Piker, openly admire Lenin and Stalin and post pictures of themselves reading “What Is to Be Done?” while wearing Cartier.
Power is not only money or property. It is also the power to decide which history gets remembered and which gets reduced to a footnote.
Communist regimes killed tens of millions of people in the 20th century. So when I sat down for a DSA 101 lecture and was greeted as a comrade, I wanted to hear how the organization taught that history.
The answer was one of the more impressive acts of historical revisionism I have ever heard.
The DSA has built a coalition around oppression. Transgender people, racial minorities, immigrants, women, and people angry about the cost of health insurance are presented as members of classes exploited by a capitalist ruling order. In the room, confidence in the American dream was scarce. Resentment of the capitalist class was not.
That framework extends abroad. As the leader of my DSA 101 session put it, “A socialist approach is built on international solidarity and support. Socialists are internationalists.” Hence the fixation on Cuba, Venezuela, Gaza and the West Bank, and other places cast as victims of American power.
The problem is that several regimes the DSA treats sympathetically were devastated by Marxist rule itself.
Take the Soviet Union. During the Great Terror, roughly 700,000 people were executed. Millions more died through forced resettlement, the gulag, famine, and other state policies. One widely cited estimate puts the Soviet communist death toll at about 20 million.
Yet during the entire two-hour DSA course, the Soviet Union came up only once. The instructor praised it: “Socialists can be proud of our history. Some of the very first, most striking work [for feminist rights] occurred just after the October Revolution in the Soviet Union.”
That was it. The mass killing disappeared. Progressive feminism remained.
China received similar treatment. While discussing planned economies, the instructor praised the Chinese system for combining planning and markets in service of human need. Missing from that account was Mao Zedong’s rule, under which historians have estimated that as many as 70 million people died, many during famines ushered in through Marxist policies.
Cuba got the same reframing. The instructor blamed blockades, embargoes, and sanctions for depriving Cubans of “the chance to live in prosperity and dignity,” while praising the government for resisting America’s “oppressive” economic influence. Castro’s regime, according to historian R.J. Rummel, was responsible for as many as 141,000 deaths.
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The pattern became hard to miss. Marxist countries were not presented as failures so much as unfinished projects. Their progressive achievements were foregrounded; their victims were backgrounded. When socialist systems failed, capitalism, American imperialism, or the political class usually entered the explanation.
“The general attitude of socialism, which goes back to Marx and Lenin,” the instructor said, “is that when we are assigning blame … [it] is with the political class.” He spoke at length about the Pentagon and American power as sources of death and destruction. The deaths caused by Marxist governments? Nothing to see there.
If you let your opponent talk long enough, he will often tell you his strategy. That’s why I went.
The DSA did not exactly deny the horrors of 20th-century communism. It did something more useful: It barely taught them. The history was filtered through a moral framework in which socialists remain the champions of the oppressed and capitalism remains the prime suspect.
“It is the intention of the DSA to take power and wealth away from the capitalist class and put it in the hands of the working class,” the instructor said.
Power is not only money or property. It is also the power to decide which history gets remembered and which gets reduced to a footnote.
If young people learn about communist regimes chiefly through their promised ideals and progressive “wins,” while the bodies disappear from the lesson plan, they are not being taught communism’s history. They are being taught how to forget it.
The DSA Is Fully Aware Of The Horrors Of Socialism, But They Don’t Care As Long As They Get Power
No, Boris Sanchez, it won't matter if the DSA talks to a million survivors of socialism and communism. They know the history and the implications of that political ideology -- and it doesn't bother them.Socialism’s favorite bait-and-switch
The Democratic Socialists of America are no longer hiding the ball.
In July, the organization published a manifesto calling on the United States to "establish public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries to ensure democratic control and accountability to the people.”
Public ownership does not give power to the people. It gives power to the government — and asks the people to trust that government never to abuse it.
That is not a proposal for higher taxes, tighter regulation, or a larger welfare state. It is a demand to replace private ownership of America’s largest companies with government ownership.
The language is designed to sound appealing. Why should a handful of billionaires control enormous corporations while everyone else gets left behind? Why shouldn’t “the people” own those companies instead?
No more greedy executives collecting fortunes while workers earn far less. No need to nationalize every business — only the “essential” industries deemed too important to operate for profit or remain in private hands.
It sounds reasonable. It sounds as though power would finally be taken from wealthy corporations and returned to society.
But that is nearly how Fidel Castro sold communism to the Cuban people.
History shows that “ownership by the people” usually means control by the government. The public does not acquire power. Politicians and bureaucrats do.
Castro did not introduce himself as a communist promising state control over every part of Cuba’s economy. He said he was fighting corruption, inequality, and concentrated wealth. Private property and capitalism became the villains. The solution was to place the country’s most important industries under the control of “the people.”
The rhetoric sounded fair and humane. Wealthy owners would lose power, and ordinary Cubans would gain it.
The first part happened. The second did not.
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Power was taken from private owners, but it never reached ordinary Cubans. It accumulated in the hands of the state. Today, Cubans live under political repression, chronic scarcity, and widespread poverty.
“Nothing belongs to you. It all belongs to the government,” Rosa Garcia, a survivor of Castro’s Cuba, recalled in an interview with Young Americans Against Socialism.
Garcia watched the transformation firsthand. She remembers Castro assuring Cubans that his revolution was not communist. Many believed him. Some hung signs on their doors reading, “This house is yours, Fidel.”
As government control expanded, private property rights disappeared. So did the ability to obtain goods, build wealth, or make basic economic choices without permission from the state.
When Garcia’s family later applied to leave Cuba, government officials came to their home and inventoried everything they owned to ensure they took nothing with them. Utensils, clothing, and household possessions all belonged to the government.
That is the reality behind the dreamy language of collective ownership. What supposedly belongs to everyone is controlled by the people who run the state.
Public ownership also carries enormous economic costs.
Private property gives people a reason to create, invest, innovate, and serve customers. Every smartphone, laptop, lifesaving medicine, digital platform, and other product we rely on exists because someone had the freedom to take a risk and the opportunity to profit from success.
Before Castro’s revolution, Cuba ranked among Latin America’s more prosperous countries. Today, it is one of the region’s poorest, with nearly 90% of its population living in severe poverty.
Take away private ownership, and you do more than redistribute wealth. You weaken the incentive to build businesses, develop technology, create jobs, and produce the prosperity those activities generate.
Supporters of democratic socialism will reasonably object that modern America is not revolutionary Cuba. The United States has stronger institutions, a different political culture, and constitutional protections Cuba did not preserve. Public ownership of one enterprise does not automatically produce a one-party communist state.
That distinction does not eliminate the underlying danger.
Nationalization begins with the easiest targets: highly profitable companies, billionaires accused of earning too much, and industries politicians label too important to remain privately owned.
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Once society accepts the principle that government may replace private ownership whenever politicians decide an owner is too rich or a company is too important, no clear limiting principle remains.
Why stop with the largest corporations?
Every industry placed under public ownership gives government officials more authority to decide how resources are used, which services are available, and who receives them.
Cuba’s history shows how quickly control of a few “key industries” can become a broad assault on private property. America would be foolish to assume the same principle could be embraced here without the same temptation to expand it.
Public ownership does not give power to the people. It gives power to the government — and asks the people to trust that government never to abuse it.
Trump is continuing JFK’s war on communist subversion
When President Trump reposted a video featuring President John F. Kennedy warning about subversion in America, he renewed focus on a threat we have long ignored at our peril.
Spotlighting JFK’s admonition is part of the administration’s all-out attack on foreign subversion — an effort that has no presidential precedent. Its designation of Antifa and certain Muslim Brotherhood chapters as terrorist organizations was a first. The revocation of visas for foreign subversives, if carried out on a larger scale, will be unmatched in scope.
Kennedy understood that peace through strength was broader than deploying military power or international diplomacy. But he never had the chance to deliver that warning.
During the July 16 Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and other officials made clear that the Trump administration would use every tool of statecraft to dismantle the decades-old subversive networks operating in the United States.
This effort has also refocused attention on an older — but no less potent — enemy: communist subversion.
The State Department published a 100-page report “Cuba: The Capital of 21st-Century Communism,” detailing how Cuban communists have worked for decades to overthrow the United States. It names names, past and present.
Cuba, of course, brings us back to President Kennedy. Despite his failed effort to remove Fidel Castro’s communist regime, Kennedy frequently pointed out how communists abused constitutional protections and infiltrated U.S. institutions — the news media, labor unions, academia, and the government itself.
JFK’s words still apply today to surviving Soviet spin-offs like the Cuban regime, critical theory and critical race theory, cultural Marxism, and democratic socialism.
As a new senator, at the height of Wisconsin Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s investigative hearings, Kennedy warned in successive speeches that the greatest foreign threat would rely on “the weapons of subversion, economic disintegration, and guerrilla warfare to accomplish our destruction, rather than the direct assault of an all-out war.”
Kennedy warned every possible audience — schoolteachers, university professors, community leaders, newspaper editors, women’s clubs, union leaders, military personnel, veterans, business groups, political fundraisers, civil liberties leaders, church groups, and the general public — about the communist threat right up to the last day of his life.
Kennedy recognized the danger posed by American traitors who sought, through subterfuge and collaboration with the foreign enemy, to corrode Americans’ belief in their country and the principles of their nation’s founding. He praised some American labor unions for ridding themselves of communist subversion.
Defending President Eisenhower’s counter-subversion approach in 1957, Kennedy nonetheless chided his fractured and squabbling Republican opponents. Republicans, he said, “found that their chief concern was with questions of disloyalty and subversion — not within the Federal Government but within the Republican Party.”
That was just three weeks to the day after Joe McCarthy’s death. JFK never publicly criticized McCarthy, who had been a welcome guest of his father at the Kennedy Compound on Cape Cod. “Half my people in Massachusetts look on McCarthy as a hero,” he once said.
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Infiltration and subversion
Kennedy repeatedly warned of what he called “nonmilitary avenues of Soviet advance”: “I fear our emphasis on the dangers of missile attacks may cause us to forget. For their thrust is more subtle,” and “the task of opposing them more formidable.”
Among those threats were “economic and political penetration, intimidation, and subversion,” he said in 1958. “There is little value in rushing new billions in defense expenditures to fight total wars ... if we are unprepared to prevent continued Soviet advances through ... subversion and intimidation.”
As he was preparing his presidential run, Kennedy mused during a speech at a civil liberties conference that the public had been so subjected to subversive attacks that they no longer shared the civic principles that once united them.
On the campaign trail in 1960, Kennedy raised the topic of subversion even before audiences asked about it. As the Democratic nominee for president, Kennedy became more critical of the Eisenhower administration for focusing on massive military buildups at the expense of a predictable pattern of communist ideological conquest made easier by America’s weakness in counter-subversion:
In other words, there is every chance that the pattern of conquest of the communists will not be military action, but will be by subversion, by fear, by persuading the people of those countries and their leaders that the communist system represents the way of the future. I don’t believe the administration has recognized that danger. ... I don’t believe that our influence has increased as fast in recent years abroad as that of the communists.
In his last weeks of campaigning, Kennedy even called the communist threat more challenging than dealing with the Nazis. “I must say that the problems we will face in the next 10 years are far more complex than any that Franklin Roosevelt or Harry Truman faced, particularly in the field of foreign policy,” he said to supporters in Ohio. “What has happened in the last two years in the field of foreign policy indicates a whole technique of subversion and infiltration, which will be extremely hard to counter.”
That subversion, he continued, “will require a far great[er] subtlety, far more constant vigilance, far greater personnel, far greater foresight than we have ever shown before.”
Unaware of President Eisenhower’s plan for toppling the new Fidel Castro regime that he would inherit, Kennedy tore into U.S. unpreparedness that led to Cuba becoming “a base from which to carry communist infiltration and subversion throughout the Americas.”
Kennedy was alone in bringing up subversion during his fourth debate with Vice President Richard M. Nixon, which was striking since Nixon had become a national political figure while serving on the House Un-American Activities Committee.
What you can do
Kennedy hammered away at the threat of communist subversion in the first minutes of his presidency. In his inaugural address, he vowed “to oppose aggression or subversion anywhere in the Americas” — the same speech in which he said, “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”
He warned in a 1961 emergency address to Congress that “nuclear weapons cannot prevent subversion.”
He and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, had no love for FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, but they worked closely with him to investigate and disrupt communist infiltration of the civil rights movement. JFK, like Eisenhower before him and Lyndon Johnson and Nixon afterward, treated it properly as a counterintelligence problem.
On the day of his assassination in Dallas, President Kennedy was ready once again to warn about subversion. The president’s remarks as prepared read:
I want to discuss with you today the status of our strength and our society because this question clearly calls for the most responsible qualities of leadership and the most enlightened products of scholarship. For this nation’s strength and security are not easily or cheaply obtained, nor are they quickly and simply explained. There are many kinds of strength and no one kind will suffice. Overwhelming nuclear strength cannot stop a guerrilla war. Formal pacts of alliance cannot stop internal subversion.
Kennedy understood that peace through strength was broader than deploying military power or international diplomacy.
But he never had the chance to deliver that warning. More than six decades later, President Trump and his team have fortunately picked up where he left off, reviving a neglected part of Kennedy’s legacy. It’s time to follow President Kennedy’s lead and uproot domestic subversion in America once and for all.
Editor’s note: This article appeared originally at the American Mind.
State Department Report Reveals How Cuba Equipped The American Radical Left For 60 Years
A clear-headed American foreign policy should focus on vindicating American interests and defeating Cuba’s revolutionary activities against us.The cure for liking socialism? Visiting a socialist country
One of the reasons I am alarmed by the socialist/communist trends in my own country is that I visited such countries in my youth.
My first look at communism was at Checkpoint Charlie in West Berlin in 1984. There, you crossed into East Berlin (the communist side) through a barbed wire, land-mined, machine gun-guarded, no-man’s land.
The bite wound — on her hand — appeared serious enough to require an antiseptic. But where could they find that, late at night, in Havana?
People had died trying to cross it.
Once inside East Berlin, you immediately saw why. The city was lifeless, poor, and depressing. The people were ugly and not safe to interact with. The general misery was suffocating. It was a huge relief to get back to West Berlin.
In the following years, I had other experiences in the “democratic socialist” countries of Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, which were also chillingly prison-like and horrific.
After several decades of communism, all the normal people in these countries had escaped or died. Only the creeps, criminals, and mentally enfeebled remained.
I always believed that if Americans could see for themselves what “democratic socialism” looks like, they would be instantly dissuaded from supporting or advocating for it.
But as I’ve learned, that is not always the case.
Americans abroad
My favorite example is when an American friend (35) and her mother (61) visited Cuba in the 2010s. They were an adventurous duo and fairly seasoned travelers.
They were also very liberal. They both donated to NPR. They were both ardent fans of Rachel Maddow. And they would later suffer from severe cases of Trump derangement syndrome.
So what did they think of socialist Cuba? And its poverty, corruption, and lack of economic opportunity?
They loved it. They thought Cuba was great.
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Royalty among the peasants
Now, I have traveled to third-world countries myself, and I have been impressed by the resilience of the people. There is something romantic about such cultures, something satisfying about the simplicity and earthiness of their lives.
Part of the enjoyment of such places is that all standards are lowered. The locals are poor and uneducated. You are practically a philosopher-king among the peasants. You can relax and enjoy your superiority.
Havana moon
When my friend and her mother returned from Cuba, she told me about their trip: the great food, the picturesque street life. The two had gone to nightclubs and danced to incredible live music.
The locals fawned over them. A kindly Cuban woman invited them to her house for dinner. They bought peasant skirts, handmade hats, and local jewelry.
It was all very romantic. Everyone was so nice to them. The locals appreciated their interest in Cuban culture.
Straight from the horse’s mouth
They did have one problem though. The mother, while strolling along the promenade in Havana, was bitten by a horse.
The bite wound — on her hand — appeared serious enough to require an antiseptic. But where could they find that, late at night, in Havana?
No pharmacies were open. So they found a sympathetic bartender who doused the wound with vodka and wrapped it in a bar towel as best he could.
In the morning, it was worse. They had to find a doctor, which was not easy to do.
Finally, they found an English-speaking doctor, who was eager to help them once he found out the mother was married to a doctor in America.
He properly dressed the wound but mostly peppered the mother and daughter with questions about doctors in the USA. How much did they make? What kind of car did they drive? How big was their house?
The doctor hounded them for contact information. He was plotting his own escape. Fortunately, he had not escaped already and was there to help the mother with her horse-bitten hand.
Socialists love their socialism
I don’t mean to be critical of my friend, but this trip demonstrated why left-leaning liberals don’t see any problem with a socialist government.
To them, the slower pace of life is spiritually enriching. Not to mention the delicious food. And the soulful music.
If only Americans could be more like the Cubans. If only we weren’t such money-grubbing workaholics and could just relax and enjoy those sultry nights and the gorgeous Havana moon, which shone so bright in the sky (mostly because there was no electricity for street lights).
No, socialists love their socialism. Or rather their dream of socialism. I noticed that my friend was very happy to be back in the suburbs, to get back to her yoga class and her air-conditioned Suburu.
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