OPINION:
As COVID-19 continues, as America’s free market languishes, as America’s entrepreneurial spirit withers away, as Americans’ private businesses fall into bankruptcy and outright close — the Democratic Socialists of America are, quietly, behind closed doors, cheering.
They smell opportunity.
Out of crisis, here they come. And there are scores of Democrats in Congress riding the same COVID-19 train as the socialists.
This is red-flag-waving, alarm-call-clanging, sound-the-troops-and-play-the-trumpet warning time for freedom-loving Americans. The chance for socialism to spread its rot, using COVID-19 as cause, is real.
“Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change,” the Democratic Socialists of America wrote in an early May dispatch posted on the organization’s website. “We knew well before COVID-19 that capitalism was killing us.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders may have gone the way of failed presidential candidates — again. But the DSA hasn’t disappeared.
They’re like vultures, scouring for death. They’re like buzzards, circling for easy prey. They see the desperate 35 million unemployed as opportunity.
“Our job as socialists,” the DSA wrote, “[is] to build a new world on the ashes of the old. … We must organize ourselves and fight.”
It’s interesting the DSA would outright label its members “socialists;” after all, many DSA members, most notably, Sanders, have gone out of their way to insist democratic-socialism is not socialism and democratic-socialists are not socialists. Apparently, the distinction — which never was a real distinction — is no longer necessary. The cloak’s off; secret’s out: DSA admits what most freedom-loving Americans already knew — democratic socialists are one and the same as socialists.
Which is pretty much one and the same as communists.
Potatoes, potahtoes — it’s all collectivism, and it’s all in stark defiance of America’s system of rugged individualism, as defined by the nation’s founders in the concept of God-given rights, not government-granted privileges.
COVID-19’s dark economic times are giving these socialists an open door. Americans need to slam it shut before the damage done to freedom is irreversible.
“In the wake of this devastation,” said socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in recent remarks reported by the Queens Eagle, “our goal should not be to make things as they were. Our goal should be to rebuild in a way that is just and makes things better for people.”
In her mind, that means big government spending. Big government spending for Medicare for All, healthcare for all.
“[A]usterity does not create prosperity. We cannot cut our way to growth,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
Democrats in Congress agree.
The HEROES Act, as Democrats have dubbed it, would take roughly $1 trillion of tax dollars and give them to state and local governments — ostensibly, so these state and local government officials wouldn’t have to make the hard decision of reopening for business, amid coronavirus. They could keep private businesses shut but still collect revenues to keep government in operation.
Sayonara, free market.
The Heroes Act also calls for an addition $200 billion for essential worker pay; $75 billion for COVID-19 testing and contact tracing; and enough stimulus funds to pay Americans $6,000 per household.
In other words: Stay home. Stay away from work. Let the government provide.
Let the government be the god.
That’s socialism; that’s collectivism; that’s communism. It’s all one and the same, tightly wound, one leading to the other. Leftists will deny, and hope semantics will give them the tools they need to duck and dodge and confuse Americans as to their radical redesign plans for the country.
But make no mistake about it: Socialists are using COVID-19 to reshape, reform and rebuild the country.
That is, they’re trying to destroy America from within — and the only solution is for this country to get back on its free market path, and quick.
If Americans aren’t allowed to take care of themselves, the socialists will quickly create a system where Americans have to rely on government for sustenance. And that will be a hard, if not impossible, system of dependency to break.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter by clicking HERE.
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