Today I am sharing more on socialism and communism. I realize that The Observations has been focused on this topic quite a bit recently, and there is a reason for this focus. Because it is here. In this country. The United States of America, a nation historically opposed to communism abroad, a nation who defeated the Soviet Union in The Cold War, liberating all of Eastern Europe without firing a shot, and a nation founded on the concepts of God given liberties and freedom, is entertaining the evils of collectivism.
The nation’s oldest political party–the Democrat Party–is effectively run by Communists. Bernie Sanders, Zohran Mamdani, Puddin’head, Elizabeth “Lieawatha” Warren are all communists. They are NOT Democratic Socialists. There is no such thing as Democratic Socialism. It is a euphemism for an ideology that has brought nothing but misery, poverty, failure, and death to those who have had it imposed upon them.
Well, it is no big deal, we can always vote them out. Really? Can you?
Benito Mussolini and Adolph Hitler were voted into office, and it took a world war to take them out. The Soviets initially had elections. How many Soviet leaders were voted out, before elections were cancelled for good. Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua announced that there would be no more elections. Cuba does not have elections. Neither do North Korea and China.
Well, these communists in New York, Maine, California, Michigan, and Minnesota, they are only a small number of elected officials. Well, yes.
But the Nazis were a minority party when Hitler became Chancellor. The same with Mussolini. Lenin did not rise to power as a leader of the majority of the Russian people. Mao Tse Tung led a guerilla operation, which represented but a small portion of the Chinese people.
And there is the example of our own founding. At the time of the American Revolution, less than 1/3 of the colonists favored independence from England. Forty percent (40%) opposed independence, and a little more than 1/3 did not care. Our own country was established with significantly less than a majority in favor of it.
So I write. Not because I am a doomsayer, or a conspiracy theorist, or the reincarnation of Joseph McCarthy. I write to warn. Because everyone needs to be informed. Because everyone needs to act, before it is too late.
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The Smithsonian reeks of communist ideologies that our Founding Fathers would be ashamed of
BY: Miranda Devine, The New York Post (July 22, 2026).
If you wondered how communism has grabbed a foothold in the United States of America of all places, look no further than the Smithsonian Institution.
The world’s largest and most influential museum has been hijacked by Marxist ideology to teach self-loathing anti-American woke propaganda to its 20 million annual visitors plus 20 million students a year.
The Smithsonian teaches that “politeness,” “punctuality,” “objectivity” and “hard work” is white supremacy, and that Mickey Mouse is a form of blackface, while devoting not one major exhibit to George Washington or any of the Founding Fathers.
It does teach that Benjamin Franklin was a vile slave owner who owed his discoveries to his slaves and that Christopher Columbus was a psychopathic killer and racist and that we live on stolen land.
Meanwhile, it celebrates transgenderism, bondage and sadomasochism in various sexually explicit exhibits. It says illegal migrants deserve the right to vote.
During the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020, the Smithsonian’s woke Secretary Lonnie Bunch sent curators onto the streets to collect trash left behind by arsonists, vandals, looters and useful idiots as “historical artifacts that need to be collected and saved for posterity,” according to the Heritage Foundation, which has been chronicling the downfall of a once-great 179-year-old institution.
Generations of American children have been brought up to revere the Smithsonian.
Yet it abuses its $1.3 billion annual budget — 62% from the taxpayer — to persuade impressionable minds that everything about America is irredeemably racist and evil and must be dismantled.
‘Tool of social justice’
And the supercilious congressional testimony this week of Smithsonian boss Anthea Hartig shows that she has no intention of changing a thing.
A California transplant who once described herself as “propped up . . . by the cushions of whiteness and the pillows of the bourgeoisie” has described history as a “prime tool of social justice” and noted how “we work to reframe the traditional celebratory narrative of U.S. history for visitors.”
Grilled by Texas Republican Rep. Brandon Gill Tuesday, she dripped with arrogance, defiance and elitist contempt.
“Is Mickey Mouse racist?” Gill asked her.
“Mickey Mouse is not racist,” she replied.
“According to . . . one of your exhibits, Mickey Mouse represents ‘vestiges of long-standing traditions of blackface minstrelsy.’ Would you describe that as racist?” Gill asked.
Hartig then launched into a waffling mini-dissertation of Mickey’s “historical trajectory” to avoid the question before Gill forced her into admitting she believes that the beloved mouse is “rooted in minstrelsy [with] certain obvious racial overtones.”
There was a lot more.
“Is it important to be polite?” Gill asked her silkily.
“Yes, sir.”
“Your organization . . . references politeness as a defining characteristic of white-supremacy culture. Ma’am, are you a white supremacist?”
“Hmmm. No, sir,” she said snootily, as if his question were absurd, when it is her museum that she has turned into an expensive laughingstock.
“Would you say the goal of history is to be objective?” Gill asked.
Hartig waffled about “many goals of history.”
Gill then quoted from “a white-supremacy document your organization has promoted for many years under your leadership [that] references objectivity as a defining characteristic of white-supremacy culture.”
Hartig tried to feign ignorance about the document, despite the fact that the Smithsonian has adopted and promoted the MASS Action Toolkit in staff development and educational material since the start of her tenure in 2019.
The screed was developed by a left-wing activist coalition, Museums as Sites for Social Action, that is dedicated to using museums as platforms for social justice, “anti-racism” and “equity” and funded by the DEI-obsessed Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, among others. Smithsonian staffers were even involved in its inception.
Top of Form
Bottom of Form
Reeking of DEI
“It’s not our toolkit,” Hartig said.
Gill pressed her.
“We did not come up with the toolkit.”
Finally she admitted the document has been “used as a reference.”
It doesn’t get much more disingenuous than Hartig’s feigned surprise, unless she has the memory of a goldfish.
In July 2020, it was big news when she was excoriated by the first Trump White House for a Smithsonian exhibit that listed the evils of “whiteness” as “rugged individualism, self-reliance, hard work, objectivity, the nuclear family, progress, respect for authority, delayed gratification” and so on.
The nuclear family “father, mother, 2.3 children is another dreadful symptom of “whiteness.”
As is the “Scientific Method: Objective, rational linear thinking.”
Whiteness also holds that “Christianity is the norm” and “anything other than Judeo-Christian tradition is foreign.”
You get the drift.
And of course, the unspoken goal is that “whiteness” must be eradicated.
A more depressing or demoralizing message you could not imagine.
Poor James Smithson — the British scientist and 18th-century creature of the Enligthenment who bequeathed his fortune to the US to establish the Smithsonian Institution — must be rolling in his grave.
His instructions were that it be “an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.” How Hartig and pals must hate that motto.
President Lyndon Johnson later expanded the Smithsonian to include the National Museum of American History in 1964 to focus on American achievement and patriotism.
Today it does the opposite.
Radical ideology
The Trump White House Domestic Policy Council issued a 162-page report saying the Smithsonian had been captured by a “radical, activist ideology that is fundamentally opposed to telling the noble, honest story of” America.
Hartig’s leadership was blamed for forcing Smithsonian exhibits to be all about “race/identity, gender/sexuality, climate change, immigration/migrations, economic inequality, technological change and nationalism/globalism.”
But nothing was done, and during the Biden years the Smithsonian only further entrenched its sick wokery.
It’s beyond time that Congress defunds the Smithsonian unless it reverts to its founding principles.
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Democrats are completely blind to the DSA’s brazen party coup — so the rest of us must step up
BY: Karol Marcowicz, The New York Post (July 21, 2026).
Communists are taking over the Democratic Party, openly and swiftly — and the Democrats are letting it happen.
The Democratic Socialists of America’s newly posted platform starts with the idea of taking a day off.
Who could oppose a vacation day? Only capitalist monsters!
But it quickly pivots, turning the idea of a paid vacation day into a means of displacing capitalism — the most successful system ever devised for lifting people out of poverty — in favor of communism, which has failed every time it’s been tried.
“Imagine taking a day off from work in a future without capitalism,” the party writes.
And don’t worry about paying your bills, the DSA assures their gullible followers, because — you won’t have bills anymore!
Everything is paid for, your health insurance, housing, transportation, energy, retirement. All of it.
‘Abolish the Senate’
But why stop at bills?
Why not free Coachella for everyone?
Why not free (all-inclusive, obviously) vacations?
Who’s giving us a skincare and makeup budget at Sephora?
What kind of human rights are these!
The fact is the DSA has veered past socialism and gone straight for communism.
Leftists often herald Sweden as an example of the policies they want, but Sweden is a capitalist society; Swedes have bills.
It’s North Koreans who have subsidized rent and utilities.
They also have to eat grass and tree bark when the state fails to provide.
We have to call this madness for what it is.
A week ago, DSA co-chair Ashik Siddique openly declared, “Let’s start with abolishing the Senate.”
“We do believe that government should be proportional to the population,” he said. “We just don’t see the point of the Senate.”
Siddique didn’t say this during a rousing speech in the heat of the moment; he said it dryly on CSPAN’s “Washington Journal.”
In fact, the DSA’s latest platform shows its members don’t think there’s a “point” to much of the American system at all.
It’s not just the Senate; they want to get rid of the Electoral College and the Supreme Court, too — and, of course, American capitalism writ large.
DSA thought leaders include Hasan Piker, who on Saturday dressed up like Chairman Mao to deliver a speech to the 2026 Convention of College Democrats.
It isn’t subtle.
It’s not just the aesthetics they love, either.
“Mao Zedong is one of the great leaders of this world, a man who changed this entire universe,” Piker said on a stream last year.
Yes: changed it for the worse.
Mao Zedong murdered more people than Adolf Hitler and ushered in an era of misery and poverty from which China has yet to recover.
Yet every 2028 Democrat will undoubtedly be clamoring to appear on Piker’s livestream.
Where’s the line?
Fight back, Dems
Democrats have been far too weak in the face of this communist threat within their ranks.
No, they’re just riding the wave, foolishly hoping the shark won’t eat them.
These kids have enthusiasm that’s badly lacking in the party, and Democrats are hoping to harness that hype to boost their own election prospects.
Even though the DSA platform proclaims “both [parties] are funded by the same criminal class of billionaires and war profiteers.”
Top of Form
Bottom of Form
Even though Piker last week openly talked about pushing out Democrats who won’t toe his communist line.
Someone has to be first up against the wall when their revolution comes — and it’s going to be the same Democrats who are refusing now to fight back.
It’s way past the time for Democrats to say: These are bad ideas that have harmed millions of people, and we won’t stand for them in our party.
The rest of us can’t wait around and watch them try communism just one more time because the Democrats are scared to come off as uncool.
These people need to be pushed back, hard — and if Democrats can’t do it, the rest of us must.
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Fight communism now — or buy a parrot
If America fails, who will rescue us?
BY: Don Feder, The Washington Times (July 19, 2026).
When I was a conservative student in the 1960s, I thought the war with communism was thousands of miles away in Southeast Asia and 90 miles off the coast in Cuba.
I was wrong.
The real war was here all along, in the strongholds of the New Left, especially in academia.
Now it has infected every aspect of American life and is on the verge of taking over what was once the party of Presidents Truman and Kennedy.
Precision of language is crucial. We are not fighting socialism. This is a war with communism. We had better wake up to that reality fast before we become the Russians, the Chinese or the Cubans of the 21st century.
The way to fight American communism is by exposing it and explaining it.
Talk about the platform of the Democratic Socialists of America, which just won a slew of congressional primaries in districts in New York and Colorado, where winning a Democratic primary is tantamount to election. DSA commies also are or soon will be the mayors of New York, the District of Columbia, Seattle and Los Angeles.
In January, a communist contingent will be heading to Congress, including Darializa Avita Chevalier, a 32-year-old professional student who won the Democratic nomination in a deep-blue New York district.
Ms. Chevalier wants to abolish police and prisons, “literally demolish the border,” seize rental property and nationalize corporations. In past social media posts, Ms. Chevalier called the works of Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin “essential must-reads.”
The DSA platform calls for replacing the Senate, president and Supreme Court with “an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.” Illegal aliens will vote, further entrenching communist control.
Instead of a separation of powers, power will be concentrated in a single body.
This is a prescription for one-party rule. There were elections in the Soviet Union, and that is the type of sham voting we would have here.
We must expose what the DSA’s comrades have done in Cuba, Russia, North Korea and Red China.
At the time of the 1959 Castro revolution, Cuba was the most developed country in Latin America. Today, it has little fuel and is experiencing rolling blackouts. Garbage piles up in the streets. Cuban workers get half a pound of chicken and 10 to 12 eggs every two weeks. Workers of the world, eat hearty.
Havana says that although it would welcome aid, it will never compromise on communism.
Communism is by its very nature expansionist. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian President Vladimir Putin has fought five wars, including those in Georgia, Chechnya and Ukraine. In the Russia-Ukraine war, both sides have sustained more than 2 million casualties over the course of 4½ years. Talk about forever wars.
Besides Mr. Putin’s attempts to re-create the Soviet empire, China is planning to seize Taiwan. North Korea is waiting for the chance to send its army — the fourth-largest in the world — marching south.
We also need to explain the symbiotic relationship between communism and Islamism — the red-green alliance. These ideologies are drawn together by a fanatical hatred of Western civilization. Ms. Chevalier is both a Marxist and a convert to Islam.
There is no communist country or party that does not support the so-called Palestinians. Iran’s nuclear reactors were built with the help of Russia and China.
Knowledge can stop a revolution. At least Americans cannot say that we were not warned.
When I was in Cuba in 1998, I met with Gustavo Arcos Bergnes, who fought with Fidel Castro’s guerrilla army. When Castro came to power, he was rewarded with the ambassadorship to Belgium. When he saw the betrayal of his homeland, Arcos became disillusioned, was recalled from his post and was eventually imprisoned for his dissent.
Did he not know that Castro was a communist before he came to power? I asked. “Of course not,” Arcos replied. “When we were with him in the Sierra Maestra, he wore a crucifix.”
The DSA leaders don’t feign religion. They are far more open about their goals than Castro was before he came to power.
When I interviewed Arcos, he was living in a one-room apartment with his parrot, Michael Jackson. “The bird is freer than me,” he lamented. That is what the DSA’s future commissars have in mind for us after the revolution.
During the Cold War, America stopped the spread of communism in Europe and Asia. If America fails, no one will be left to rescue us.
Fight communism now — fight with everything you’ve got — or buy a parrot.
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The Democratic Socialists of America flexes its muscles in the Democratic Party
DSA can bamboozle useful idiots because of ignorance
BY: Robert Knight, The Washington Times (July 19, 2026).
The Democratic Socialists of America, riding high from primary victories in several Democratic-run states, have unveiled a “Workers Deserve More” platform.
It aims to dismantle the American republic, starting with the abolition of the U.S. Senate, the Electoral College and our national borders, and the subordination of the president and the Supreme Court to Congress.
Then there is universal ranked choice voting, public ownership of large companies, free childcare, “Medicare for All,” cancellation of student loans (to be paid by taxpayers), the transgender agenda and more benefits for the growing “free stuff” army. How do we pay for all this?
Who cares? Hit up the billionaires.
The DSA now claims 120,000 members and dozens of public offices. It is no wonder that so many young people are buying into the DSA and socialism in general. The public “education” system does not share the shocking, real-world track record of socialism and communism.
This makes young voters sitting ducks for a pitch like this one on the DSA’s website: “Imagine taking a day off from work in a future without capitalism. … You have no debt. You don’t need health insurance. You don’t pay a mortgage or have a landlord, because comfortable housing is a human right. Your retirement is publicly funded. Food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses; they are common goods and utilities.”
Bottom line: You do not have to grow up or take responsibility for anything. Mommy government will do it all.
The DSA’s pixie dust masks class warfare straight out of the bloody French and Bolshevik revolutions. To understand what is going on, it is helpful to revisit an extraordinary essay drafted 176 years ago in Mugron, France.
In 1850, Frederic Bastiat published “The Law,” a slam-dunk refutation of “The Communist Manifesto” by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It is a surprisingly accessible read.
Unlike Marx and Engels, who were atheists, Bastiat agreed with America’s Founders, who said rights come from God, not government. “Three gifts from God precede all human legislation,” Bastiat wrote, citing individuality, liberty and property — all protected by law.
In a free republic, people cede some liberties to government in return for law and order and protection of life and property. When a government fails to do this and instead takes money from Peter to pay Paul, it engages in a form of theft that Bastiat labels “plunder.”
A grasping government plunders as much wealth as it can and redistributes it to increase the power and wealth of those doing the transferring, he wrote.
I thought about this when watching Virginia Democrats take over Richmond in January. The fake “moderate” Gov. Abigail Spanberger immediately signed a measure to send consumers’ electric bills soaring. Democratic legislators, meanwhile, voted themselves a $32,000 salary increase, nearly tripling their pay in the name of “the people.”
Bastiat writes that despite socialism’s flowery promises, it is all about “naked greed” and “misconceived philanthropy.”
Gad Saad, a scholar at the University of Mississippi’s Declaration of Independence Center and professor of marketing at Concordia University, calls the latter “suicidal empathy,” a compassion so excessive that it harms the person, group or society engaging in it.
A prime example would be the Great Society welfare state’s destruction of the Black family.
Another would be the Biden administration’s importation of millions of unvetted immigrants, some of whom are now working to destroy America by advocating socialism or Islamism.
Each of these movements, which overlap to form a red-green axis, is using America’s constitutional liberties to attain power. If they get enough of it, they will tear up that document and replace it with their creed of choice.
Like communism, Shariah cannot be squared with the Constitution, especially the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious liberty. Under it, converts from Islam can be punished with death, as can those convicted of blasphemy. Women have few or no rights. This conflicts with the 14th Amendment’s equal protection guarantee and the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote.
Criminal punishments can include amputation or flogging, which would violate the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
Not all Muslim-majority countries impose Shariah, but in countries such as Iran, run by Islamists, women are forced to wear hijabs or even more concealment in public — or face beatings. How many college students who run around with signs backing Hamas and Iran while trashing Israel are aware of any of this?
The DSA is stoking hatred of Jews. Its platform calls for “a free Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital” and to “end all military and economic aid to Israel.”
On Wednesday, 103 — nearly half of 212 Democrats — voted yes on a failed House measure to end military aid to Israel. Only one Republican, bill sponsor Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, voted yes as the measure failed on a 104-314 vote.
The DSA has a Red Star Caucus, whose members vow to destroy America’s free market economics and impose communism. Its heroes are New York City’s Islamist/communist Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Sen. Bernard Sanders, Vermont independent, a lifelong communist.
The DSA’s Red Star Caucus, of which DSA National Co-Chair Megan Romer is a member, states in its published platform: “We do not believe that capitalism can be reformed into socialism. It must be overthrown and replaced.”
Republicans must educate American voters before it is too late. They need to offer a positive agenda and remind people of the bad old Biden days of $5 gas and open borders.
They need to make clear that if the Democrats do not expel the DSA, then voting
Democratic at any level is enabling a growing red-green axis that threatens American liberty and prosperity.
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Sliced White Bread And The American Dream
The Founders gave us a system that allowed us to create our own futures, but the Progressive federal government gave it away in 1913.
BY: M.E. Boyd, The American Thinker (July 24, 2026).
Many respected national political commentators are breathless in their assessment of Marxism in all its forms as a national governing system. “It doesn’t work!” they say. When words fail, the mocking quips begin. The problem is, none of these commentators ever answer the logical question—“Why doesn’t socialism or communism, work?”
Perhaps it is because the answer is complex. The answer requires a sophisticated understanding of human nature, including its odd affinity for attaining the best and then substituting it for the worst. Fortunately for America, the Founders did tackle deep questions. About human nature, they concluded that: human beings are both good and evil; human beings respond to authority closest to their existence; and human beings require time to develop their full potential.
Though relatively young, many of the Founders were well educated in ancient, medieval, and then-modern governance systems and were determined to avoid mistakes made by civilizations that eventually declined. The chief error, they concluded, was a misunderstanding of the nature of man. The Founders, therefore, created a defensive system of diffused bottom-up power that they hoped would help lessen human evil and incentivize human good. Put another way, instead of simply controlling human beings through homogenization and brute force, the system the Founders created grants human beings a conditional “Liberty to Become.”
A socialistic or communist system, for instance, would not have the patience or the interest in an Otto Frederick Rohwedder (1880-1960).
Otto was the son of German immigrants to America and grew up in Iowa. He went to public schools and enjoyed the normal Midwest family life. Otto apprenticed to become a jeweler, got married, had a family, and eventually owned three jewelry stores in Missouri. He was very financially successful. Yet Otto had a dream. Having watched his mother and his wife buy and slice loaves of bread, he decided he wanted to engineer a bread-slicing machine. He was middle-aged by this time. Selling his jewelry stores to fund his idea, Otto spent years initiating various experiments developing his machine.
Then the unthinkable occurred. The warehouse with all Otto’s blueprints and prototypes burned to the ground. Nothing could be saved. He started over. In 1927, he finally completed his slicing/wrapping machine and sold it to a Missouri bakery. By 1930, Wonder Bread was introduced and America, with thanks, turned to sliced white bread. It takes time and sometimes initial failure for many individuals to reach their full potential. America’s system provides the stable social order, liberty, and room to help make it happen for those willing to take risks.
The bottom line is that socialism and communism do not work because these systems eventually relegate the individual to dependency and the state to tyranny. Promises of material security represent mere bribes, wrapped in baubles of verbal glitter, meant to lure the unsuspecting into a life of controlled subsistence ruled over by an elite few with lethal weapons and cringy prisons.
Why then, with proof positive over 100 years of the failure of socialist and communist systems, are some Americans willing to scrap liberty for slavery and prosperity for poverty?
The Founders would say it is the inexplicable vagaries of human nature. While human beings are both good and evil, respond to local authority, and need room to develop, they are also at times irrational, ungrateful, and easily manipulated. What may be unknown to many Americans is that the citizens rejected the Founding system in 1913. The following timeline helps explain.
America signed on to global central banking in 1913. No audit of our central bank is allowed. Global bankers insisted America enter WWI to secure their war loans. Prior to 1913, America had rejected central banking as a transfer of financial authority and a weakening of national sovereignty. The political arm of global central banking is the United Nations.
Wall Street supported the Bolshevik revolution in Russia with many American academics romanticizing the communist system. Prominent international intellectuals wrote about subverting Western culture. The Soviet Union was recognized by the United States in 1933. America succumbed to Stalin’s war aims in an unnecessary WWII; Eastern Europe was enslaved.
Files released by the Soviet Union after its fall in 1992, the Venona files, reveal widespread communist influence in major arms of our federal government. America allowed China to become a communist state in 1949.
Communist Korea attacked the south in 1950. 36,000 Americans died. The Cold War became serious, but academic America began to slowly turn its intellectual power toward Marxist concepts, and today, the Founding system and its philosophical underpinnings are taught in only a few schools of higher education. Public primary and secondary education is now an indoctrination, not an education system.
In a final blow, Islamism was allowed to recover from WWI and is now attempting to subvert America from within and militarily control her allies from without. The solid institutions of American culture—the family, the church, the schools—that at one time kept the social order stable for the likes of an Otto Rohwedder have now been perverted, and the final stages of the Revolution of 1913 are upon us with otherwise sensible Americans voting for their own demise.
Why do human beings have an odd affinity for attaining the best and then substituting it for the worst? No one knows. What the Founders would say is that it is better to take a chance on the human ability to “figure it out and fast” even if humans don’t, than to deprive them of that chance. We came up with “sliced white bread” at the Constitutional Convention of 1787—if we can keep it.
GFK
Observations From The Fifth Estate 
Thank you, Glen, for writing and informing us of sooo many truths. It is because you care for, and love America and it’s citizens. I appreciate your historical perspectives. And, yes, your warnings are welcome! May God continue to richly bless you and yours, Jim
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