The Big Truth, Part 6
The corrupt radical left Marxist Socialist Communist woke mob of mutant traitors hate America.
About This Series
I am not a Democrat. Haven’t been since 1980. If I had a political affiliation, it would be Despising the GOP, which has become the American Fascist Party. As such, I have, for practical purposes, come to rely on Democratic victories to save the republic from Nazis, demagogues and the Christian Taliban.
Which is why for years I’ve been utterly infuriated by the Democrats’ inability to communicate the stakes (and the truth), while the opposing Party of Lies endlessly dwells in thirst traps of reactionary unreality.
Why the Dems refuse to message systematically until the cusp of Election Day is an ongoing mystery, though they have often claimed the voters care only about pocketbook issues — and now, finally, abortion rights — versus the jagged noise of the 24-hour campaign. There may be truth in that, but the upshot is ceding the Great Political Message Board to the GOP, which beams a steady flow of disinformation into a near-total vacuum of dis-disinformation.
That’s insane. First of all, policy and legislation do not wait for the three months before the polls open every two years. Secondly, while the Democrats sit on their hands, repugnant lies take hold. As we saw in the debt-ceiling clusterfuck, once again the GOP held hostage the full faith and credit of the United States while blaming the administration for the crisis, when objectively the opposite was true.
And so, for what little it matters, I’m stepping in. This will be the sixth of eight columns examining crucial issues long since clouded by laughably dishonest Republican propaganda in the service of authoritarianism, racism, toxic antisemitism, anti-secularism, nationalism and pandering-to-the-stupidism. My mission: to distill GOP depravity to its essence, one spurious lie at a time.
You know who was a radical leftist? Fidel Castro.
His 1959 overthrow of Cuba’s corrupt Fulgencio Batista military dictatorship was advertised as delivering social and economic justice to the tiny Caribbean country’s oppressed poor. But the Cuban revolution itself quickly turned to repression, even further loss of political freedom, a shambles of a Marxist economy and grinding poverty that endures to this day. (On the plus side, the cocktails are quite good.)
Pol Pot was a radical leftist, with his own catastrophic agrarian “reform” in Cambodia that claimed 2 million souls along its bloody way. Vladimir Lenin, the first dictator of the Soviet Union, was the founding father of radical leftism, a guiding light for Mao Zedong, Hugo Chavez and other brutal autocrats who believed ruthless measures were required for the salvation of the proletariat. History, it turns out, has not been on their side. Not only because they were evil, but because they abysmally failed to construct working societies, much less ideal ones.
So their awful memories live forever on the radical left of infamy. Nicolae Ceaușescu. Kim Il-Sung. Sean Penn. It’s historically bad company.
Kidding, Sean. Kidding. By contrast, the Red Army Faction — aka, the Baader-Meinhof Gang — was deadly serious in the form of bombings, armed robberies, kidnappings and assassinations in Germany from 1970 to 1998. In Italy, their fellow travelers, the Red Brigades terrorist mob, spent the 70s perpetrating similar outrages to liberate the country from the yoke of capitalism. Their righteous ideological struggle left a trail of blood, including the abduction and murder of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro.
In general, the radical left is defined by three political goals: 1) to dismantle capitalism; 2) to redistribute land and other wealth to the masses and minimize private ownership; and 3) to end imperialism in any form, including the globalism that has at least partially created economic opportunity throughout the developing world. Needless to say, these measures require wholesale eradication of any political or economic elite — which means mass violence and, inevitably, repression.
So, what I’m trying to say, no matter what Tucker Carlson tells you, the billionaire capitalist pro-democracy philanthropist George Soros is not a radical leftist, waging “political, social and demographic war on the West.” No matter what accused-felon Donald Trump tells you, Atlanta District Attorney Fani Willis is a career prosecutor of all manner of crimes against citizens of Fulton County, notably jailing organized street gangsters and the perps in the notorious Atlanta Public School test-scores scandal. So no, first-ever ex-president to be charged with federal crimes, she is not a “lunatic Marxist” — any more than Vice President Kamala Harris, former California Attorney General, is a “Communist.” (He also called her “a monster.” I have no data on that.) After his latest indictment, he posted this:
I think I speak for mutants everywhere when I say, “You’re welcome.” But if you love ignoramus invective, how about this Hillbilly Trilogy?
– U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) calling Democrats “the Communist Party of the United States of America.”
– Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Kentucky) warning Taylor Swift that right after gun confiscation, the Democrats will target country music: “If we have a socialistic government, if we have Marxism, you are going to be the first ones who will be cut off because the state would have to approve your music.”
– Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama) demonstrating his keen understanding of Soviet history: Putin invaded Ukraine, he says, because Russia is “a communist country, so he can’t feed his people, so they need more farmland.” He gets things a little mixed up sometimes: “I tell people, my dad fought 76 years ago in Europe to free Europe of socialism.” Oh, Tommy. See, Hitler was … oh, never mind.
But that’s the Republicans’ story, and they’re sticking to it. Way back when Trump was running unsuccessfully for president in 2020, he said, “A vote for any Democrat in 2020 is a vote for the rise of radical socialism,” and a Biden win would turn America into “a large Venezuela.” Just this week, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) claimed that the prophecy has come true.
Venezuela. Hold that thought. Meanwhile, if you like to keep up to date with the unofficial medium-of-record for the GOP’s 8 Biggest Lies, I commend you to American Thinker, a daily online magazine whose stable of contributors ranges from the ideologically monomaniacal to the delusional. If you like to monitor reactionary “thought,” it’s one-stop shopping. Famous for being forced into an abject apology for its Stop the Steal accusations against Dominion Voting Systems (“completely false and have no basis in fact”), and for its 2015 puff piece of white supremacist Jared Taylor, quoting him as calling rainbow-colored Doritos a “gateway snack to introduce children to the joys of homosexuality,” it is also unafraid to criticize Republicans who fail to fiercely toe the hardest of hard lines. Such as this recent headline:
Too many Republicans cave to radical leftist policies because they crave temporary adulation from the media and other Democrats
If Republicans told the truth that there is absolutely no scientific data to show that our use of coal, oil, and other products increases temperatures and that the climate has always changed cyclically and naturally, they appear to be afraid that they would be called names.
They don’t want to be called climate change “deniers,” “anti-science,” or stupid. The actual anti-science people are those pretending to be climate scientists, thought leaders, journalists, and other Democrats. No matter how wrong their previous dire predictions have been, they just repeat the talking point that “the science is settled.” Facts have never interfered with the leftist agenda to destroy or remake America. Isn’t it stupid to repeat talking points when there are no facts to support them?
A rhetorical question, and they couldn’t have said it better. In this article, of course, the “radical leftist policies” are those that seek to reduce dependence on fossil fuels and the environmental catastrophe they wreak, as demonstrated by an overwhelming accumulation of climate data and just looking outside.
Mind you, there is nothing new about Red-baiting, which traces at least as far back as the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. His New Deal was reviled by Republicans for introducing suspiciously socialist measures to protect the workforce from the Great Depression. By any rational standard, FDR’s policies saved the nation and the world from economic collapse, even if they adopted some of the central planning, unprecedented regulation of private industry and vast public labor force that reminded critics of Soviet Russia. In fact, the critics weren’t even all Republicans. FDR’s Democratic rival, Al Smith, at a meeting of the bi-partisan anti-New Deal organization The American Liberty League, couched the issue as a stark choice between good and evil.
“There can be only one Capital — Washington or Moscow,” he declared. “There can be only one flag, the Stars and Stripes, or the red flag of the godless union of the Soviet. There can be only one national anthem, the Star Spangled Banner or the Internationale.”
To Smith’s way of thinking, Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act, minimum wage and child-labor laws were the spear tips of Stalinism. According to historian Kevin Kruse, as quoted by Ian Millhiser in Think Progress, the post-WW2 Red Scare yielded a fusillade of similar rhetoric about the scourge of “Socialized Medicine.” Millhiser’s piece lays out the whole history, presidential administration by presidential administration. For instance, when Harry S. Truman unveiled a national healthcare insurance plan — an early iteration of the Medicare-for-all concept — his proposal was savaged by the American Medical Association, which called Truman’s health advisors “followers of the Moscow party line.”
“Health providers,” wrote Millhiser, “distributed 55 million pamphlets featuring a fabricated quote attributed to Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin: ‘Socialized medicine is the keystone to the arch of the Socialist State.’”
The Republican beat resonated with the Commie-fearing public, and leftward-creep accusations became the party line to the point that Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, Oveta Culp Hobby, denounced a Democratic plan for free polio vaccines as a “back door” for socialized medicine.
As a conservative political activist in the 60s, eventual President Ronald Reagan trashed the nascent Medicare by warning that “one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.” And House Speaker Newt Gingrich dubbed Bill Clinton’s healthcare plan “socialism now or later.” By the time President Barack Obama introduced the Affordable Care Act, it should have come as no surprise that Republicans called it a “government takeover,” creating a vast central bureaucracy with the dictatorial power to make your medical decisions for you. You know … tyranny. Except, by then, Communism had collapsed. The Marxist bogeyman was dead. The free market reigned worldwide.
How do you play the Red Menace card if there are no Reds left to rob you of your freedoms?
Well, here’s how:
With their emphasis on social welfare, workers’ rights, higher marginal tax rates, more equitable taxation, expanded healthcare opportunity, fighting poverty and generally protecting the most vulnerable, the Democrats have very slowly edged toward the Northern European model embraced after WW2 — i.e., a hybrid capitalist/welfare state. No candidate has campaigned on Make America Denmark, but as far back as Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society,” meat-and-potatoes Democratic policy came with a side order of lutefisk.
The furthest left among today’s elected pols — the likes of Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez at the outer flank of their party — call themselves Democratic Socialists. By this, they very much embrace the Scandinavian model, or Canadian. They don’t espouse collectivism or confiscation or authoritarianism — merely a better regulated capitalist system with higher marginal tax rates in service of urgent climate action and political and economic justice for all. In so doing, however, they say the S-word aloud, an identity American politicians assume at their own peril. In their Congressional debuts, Ocasio-Cortez and three other freshman members of the House formed a lefty mini-caucus that they themselves called “The Squad.” For some skeptics, the squad moniker evoked “firing.” Hence, a perfect target for the GOP and, naturally, a flood of death threats.
Frank Luntz. The Republican pollster and communications consultant famously crafted simple, potent language for his clients aimed at getting the blood boiling in the base. Most famously of all, he insisted Republicans rechristen the federal “estate tax” as the “Death Tax,” conjuring images of IRS agents terrorizing you to the grave and beyond. He also is the author of the phrase “government takeover” for Democratic healthcare reform. In 2004, at the height of his career, he told PBS Frontline that “80 percent of our life is emotion, and only 20 percent is intellect. I am much more interested in how you feel than how you think.” The GOP has long since taken this strategy to heart. It concerns itself little with science, data, evidence, ethics, justice or facts, but they know a hot button when they see one, and they press, and they press, and they press. I mean, have you heard the word “woke” lately?
“Socialist,” as we’ve seen, is tried and true — so pejorative in the public’s mind they forget that, when not framed as a foreign evil and tyrannical theft of our Way of Life, they kind of like socialism. Like public schools, public roads, libraries, Social Security, Medicare, Obamacare(!), agriculture subsidies, corporate tax rebates and literally every government program and service managed and funded by the central government. That would include food-safety inspections, disaster relief, NASA, the National Weather Service, the National Institutes of Health and the … whaddya call it … military.
But Red-baiting is as Red-state as you can get, which is why the Republicans keep ratcheting up the slurs. “Radical leftist.” “Communist.” “Marxist.” (Not to mention, via Trump, now “mutant.”) And it works across the whole spectrum of our catastrophically divided politics. U.S. Rep. Mike Johnson says “radical leftists” are poisoning our schools and destroying our values. Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota was appalled when Democrats Jon Ossof and Raphael Warnock defeated Republican incumbents for seats in the United States Senate, writing, “The idea that Georgia, of all places, could elect two communists to the United States Senate was ridiculous.”
And remember that publication I mentioned, the gloriously misnamed American Thinker? They found another smoking gun of Marxist evil. Or, I suppose, smoking (not)-gun: This from 2022:
The Democrats Are Turning America into the New Venezuela
Today, the Venezuelan people are starving to death. Millions are out of work. Buildings are deteriorating. Violence erupts in the streets. The shelves are empty. Inflation is through the roof. Their votes do not count anymore. Freedom of speech has been criminalized. Their right to own property without worrying that the government can take it any minute is ever-present. They do not have the right to defend themselves under the socialist government, and the future of the Venezuelan children is looking bleak.
Why? Because the repressive socialist government confiscated their guns.
It sounds like Venezuela’s just a little further down the path Democrat-run cities across America are on, doesn’t it?
The Maduro regime called for a gun-free Venezuela, but what the people got was a prison. That’s something that the American people must consider when they foolishly give up their rights, whether it’s the right to freedom of speech or the right to keep and bear arms. Once you give up your rights, there is no turning back without bloodshed.
Guns and socialism — two of the GOP’s bedrock issues, which in a rational world are utterly unrelated. But in the conspiracy-minded, paranoic, delusional world of the contemporary GOP, they go together (as the old Sinatra song goes) “like a horse and carriage.”
But it’s a runaway horse, and momentarily the carriage will be overturned in a ditch leaving no survivors.