In a pique of performative bullcrap, corrupt Florida Republican Rick Scott has launched a Senate decision tackling the best existential menace to our Republic: socialism. (I’ll pause for everybody to correctly gasp.)
“As far-left politicians like Zohran Mamdani in New York openly embrace socialist ideologies, Senator Scott’s resolution serves as a blunt warning that socialism is not just misguided policy, it is a proven path to tyranny, starvation, and death, as has been proven time and time again, and has no place in America,” his press launch says.
As I’ve written, I’m skeptical of a few of Mamdani’s options and his skill to hold them out, however his agenda is actually “make shit cheaper, yo.” It’s nice politics, which is why Republicans are dropping their minds over it. And socialist Scandinavia, with its happiness and well being care and social companies and excessive per-capita GDP, would love a phrase on the evils of socialism.
Democrat mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani speaks throughout a rally.
However Scott’s press launch is hilariously an indictment of a lot of what President Donald Trump is doing.
“Socialism is a failed ideology — it has destroyed countries, crushed economies, and robbed millions of their basic human rights,” Scott claims. “Just look at Cuba and Venezuela, or talk to any of the thousands of families in my state of Florida who fled those regimes after evil dictators stripped them of every opportunity.”
Can be good to ask a few of these Cubans and Venezuelans … however they’re being deported again to these international locations by Trump, exactly as a result of the administration argues these international locations aren’t really so unhealthy in any case.
“Time and time again, socialism has led to the same, inevitable outcomes: misery, poverty, and oppression,” Scott continues.
Once more, Scandinavia—and different superior socialist international locations—would beg to vary. However such distinctions are a lot too nuanced for Scott’s political ambitions.
“It’s despicable to see far-left radicals villainizing capitalism – a system that has helped billions of American [sic] achieve their dreams – and try to tear down our country and rebuild it in their woke, radical image through socialist policies,” he says.
Given deep distress and consternation over the price of residing, I’m unsure People are feeling very hot and fuzzy about our capitalistic system proper now. Heck, even Trump’s strongest MAGA sycophants are economically drowning and might’t faux in any other case. In reality, they’re begging the federal government to intervene with an increasing number of help. Pandemic-era checks have been wildly fashionable, and let’s not overlook, Trump received large on his promise to “lower prices on Day 1.”
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However right here’s the large twist: Scott’s fortress-of-capitalism rhetoric collapses the second you study Trump’s financial playbook.
The person who claims to be the savior of capitalism has been busy steering the economic system with a heavy hand. He’s demanded corporations purge DEI applications; he’s publicly bullied executives from Apple, Goldman Sachs, Walmart, and JPMorgan; and he has gone as far as to leverage federal subsidies into an possession stake in Intel—with guarantees to develop the mannequin to different corporations.
The libertarians at Cato, hardly sympathetic to socialist experiments, name this “a dangerous hybrid between socialism and capitalism,” warning that Trump’s strategy is “state capitalism with American characteristics.”
By Rick Scott’s personal definition, that’s the federal government crushing economies and robbing folks of their fundamental rights. Solely this time, it isn’t Cuba or Venezuela; it’s the USA beneath Trump. If Scott have been trustworthy, he’d admit that the socialism he rails in opposition to is alive and effectively in MAGA-land—with Trump’s identify plastered throughout it.
