Hello Reader,
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In 1945, as Winston Churchill delivered one of history's most prophetic warnings to the House of Commons, America's own Vice President was working to advance Soviet interests from within the highest levels of government.
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"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries," Churchill thundered to Parliament.
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Months earlier, Henry Wallace had returned from his guided tour of Soviet Siberia, breathlessly praising Stalin's "achievements" while millions of his prisoners wasted away in gulags.
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Wallace came within a hair's breadth of becoming President when FDR died just months later. Only last-minute party machinations replaced him with Harry Truman on the 1944 ticket. Wallace wasn't alone in his Soviet sympathies. Walter Duranty, the New York Times' Pulitzer Prize-winning Moscow correspondent, deliberately concealed Stalin's mass murder of millions of Ukrainians. Prominent scientists like J. Robert Oppenheimer, influential intellectuals, and popular-front politicians all fell under socialism's spell during the 1930s and 1940s.

Socialism's Enduring Allure

Today, that same seduction is conquering a new generation. A devastating 2025 Cato/YouGov survey reveals that 62% of Americans under 30 hold favorable views of socialism, while 34% support communism. If extrapolated, this means roughly 32 million young Americans embrace socialism and 18 million support an ideology that killed 100 million people in the 20th century.
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But the most shocking proof came last week when Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old self-described democratic socialist, stunned the political establishment by winning New York City's Democratic mayoral primary with 56% of the vote. Powered by young voters who flocked to his campaign, Mamdani's enticing promise was simple: free buses, free childcare, free everything—all funded by someone else.

Generational Amnesia

What forged this generational amnesia? The post-recession generation has been crushed by forces beyond their control. They watched the 2008 financial collapse destroy their parents' savings while bankers got bailouts. They're drowning in student debt for degrees that offered prosperity but delivered poverty wages. They see housing costs skyrocket beyond reach while corporate profits explode. Meanwhile, a higher education system dominated by professors hostile to free markets feeds them a steady diet of anti-capitalist ideology. To them, capitalism feels rigged—and socialism promises rescue.
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Yet their embrace of "socialism" reveals profound confusion. When pressed, these young Americans still support free markets for innovation (70%), the distribution of wealth based on merit rather than government redistribution (61%), and market-determined wages (53%). They're not demanding Marx's revolution—they're crying out for European-style social democracy, mistaking expanded welfare for economic transformation. Some European social programs have indeed improved outcomes, but Europe's high-tax, high-regulation model comes at a steep price: chronic unemployment, stagnant growth, and economic sclerosis that has left the continent dependent on American innovation and military protection for decades.

History's Brutal Lessons

As politicians and educators fail to acknowledge these downsides, young people also lack the collective memory of how quickly democratic socialism evolves into tyranny. History's lessons are brutal and consistent. Mao's seizure of farmland during the Great Leap Forward killed up to 45 million people in four years. Peasants were forced to melt down their farming tools to meet steel production quotas, leaving them with no way to grow food. In Venezuela, Hugo Chávez's socialist revolution destroyed what was once Latin America's wealthiest nation. Today, Venezuelan mothers watch their children starve while their government prints worthless money.
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Whether you call it socialism, communism, or fascism, all collectivist systems follow the same trajectory: they offer equality but deliver tyranny. They claim to serve the people while concentrating power in the hands of a few. Stalin starved millions of Ukrainians not despite being a socialist, but because socialism requires the state to dominate everything—including who lives and who dies.
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While Mamdani’s public campaign emphasized practical concerns like transit access and affordable childcare, his past rhetoric told a different story. Mamdani urged audiences in 2021 not to compromise on goals like "seizing the means of production"—the very policy that created these historical catastrophes.

A Path Forward

Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises understood that socialist policies create a cascade of failures. Each intervention creates new problems that demand more intervention. The process continues until the state dominates everything and individuals possess nothing. It's not a bug in the socialist system—it's the inevitable feature that transforms even well-intentioned programs into authoritarian control.
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The antidote to this generational crisis is education—teaching young Americans that free markets, despite their flaws, remain humanity's only proven escape from poverty and oppression. Universities must stop indoctrinating students with one-sided economics and start teaching competing schools of thought—both Keynesian and Austrian approaches—so students can make informed decisions about economic policy.
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The young Americans supporting Mamdani genuinely want more equal outcomes—a noble instinct—but one as flawed now as it was when Churchill rose in the House of Commons.
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As Milton Friedman warned: "The battle for freedom must be won over and over again." Today, freedom is losing. Our young people stand at the crossroads, seduced by promises of paradise but walking toward the abyss. History is screaming its warnings. The question is whether anyone is listening.
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Gaffes, Corrections, and Utter Humiliations

Earlier this week, I called the Dalai Lama’s request to “suck the tongue” of a young boy “deeply disturbing.” As my man John Romano pointed out, I missed the cultural context—Tibetans sometimes offer their tongue as a playful gesture of affection. More intriguingly, some believe the viral clip was boosted by Chinese Communist Party-linked channels to discredit him. I often rail against Chinese propaganda… and may have just unwittingly spread it. Oof.

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