OPINION:
President Donald Trump said in a campaign rally from Florida — a state with a large population of people who fled dictatorial Cuba — that this election, this November, is about keeping America free of the “socialists and communists” the prior Barack Obama administration oh-so-blithely embraced.
It’s a showdown, alrighty.
To the left stand Black Lives Matter and Antifa brick throwers, angry Democrats making angry demands, globalists with their collectivist designs and far leftist radicals bent on destroying everything on which America was founded — including Judeo-Christian principles. To the right: Freedom. Individualism. Self-sufficiency and rugged independence. Breathing room to create and produce at will. Capitalism, the Constitution and the country’s core greatest asset, the one that tells, nay commands, government to step aside — that here in America, rights are granted by God at birth. That we don’t need no stinkin’ government, save for the very limited, very minimal causes and concerns set forth in the few, oh-so-few and easily readable pages of the Constitution.
“My opponent,” Trump said from Florida, of Joe Biden, “stands with socialists and communists. I stand with the proud people of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela in their righteous struggle for freedom.”
And it’s not for nothing Trump’s making that stand. People are noticing. People in the know about the evils of socialism and communism and collectivism are definitely noticing.
From NPR: “Federico Arango, who is 30, voted twice for Obama. Like a lot of young people of color, he says the Democratic Party’s message of change appealed to them. But he says they’ve since been exposed to new perspectives. And growing up in Miami, they see the effects of socialism and communism from family and friends.”
And it ain’t pretty.
Remember the empty store shelves, the runs on common supplies like toilet paper, the inability to buy fresh meat or Clorox bleach or hand sanitizer just a few months ago? That’s socialism for ya. The empty shelves, the limited supply of even the most necessary of goods — it wasn’t socialism that brought those hard economic times to America’s soil; it was the coronavirus.
But Americans can take a memo just the same. Those empty stores are commonplace in socialist countries.
Ask someone with a background in socialist government and see.
And sadly, this is what today’s modern Democratic Party, with the face of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as its pinup, brings: empty stores, a defeated and despondent free market, government run economies and government picks of winners and losers.
“We see the parallels between things that are happening in those other countries, in those places with the left, and the Democratic Party,” Arango said, in NPR. “And we see the Trump administration standing up for and implementing policies that would fight against those things.”
Well said, Arango.
That’s the vote this November: Freedom — or not.
• 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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