Triggered

  If you weren’t in the Communist Party, things were harder. My grandfather refused to join the Party and got away with it only because of his expertise as an electrician. Because of their non-Party status, my grandparents were always last in line for everything. The government issued tickets for food, but by the time my grandmother got her turn, there would be nothing left. My grandfather once waited eight hours for an orange. My grandmother made all of my mother’s dresses by hand because the store shelves were empty when she was allowed to shop.

  On my visits to the country, I experienced the bread lines and the poverty myself. When I talk about why socialism is bad, it’s not because I’ve read articles about it or seen people talking about it on Twitter. I’ve been there, and I know why no one who’s actually lived under these systems ever advocates for them.

  Because my grandfather wasn’t in the Party, he and my grandmother felt the stifling grip of communism even more than most. The whole time Czechoslovakia was a Soviet state, they were under constant surveillance. I’m sure if you look back in the Party archives, you’d find a file about each of them. If my grandparents came to see us in the United States, they would always be questioned extensively upon returning home to Czechoslovakia.

  So, I guess it’s not just me and my father. People in my family have been getting spied on by governments for generations!

  Stepping off the plane that first time, I came face-to-face—well, face-to-hand, really—with life behind the Iron Curtain. The line for customs was long and moved slowly; the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia was about as easily offended in those days as your average American liberal is today. Customs agents, dressed more like soldiers, searched everything. If they found anything offensive on your person, you were either arrested or, in my case, reprimanded.

  At the time, I had a favorite jacket that had blue and white stars on the back like the American flag. Though I can’t remember, I would imagine my mother had bought it for me. When it was my turn, the customs agent glared down at me as though I were a tiny spy (I guess there’s something about the way I look).

  “You can’t wear that here,” he said, pointing at my jacket.

  Though I understood the guard’s Czech, I didn’t realize what I had done wrong. I didn’t know that the jacket was too American for a Communist country.

  I remember looking around the room and seeing how afraid all the Czech citizens were on my behalf. I’m sure they had seen similar scenarios play out much differently, especially when the offender wasn’t a five-year-old kid. My grandfather told me to take the jacket off, and then he talked to the guard. Whatever he said, it was enough to appease the agent, and we made our way through. In the car, on the way to my grandparents’ apartment, I asked my grandfather why the man didn’t like my jacket.

  “Things are different here,” he said.

  As much as I look back fondly on all the time I spent with my grandparents in Czechoslovakia, that incident with the jacket remains one of my earliest childhood memories. I think it’s because of how serious things got all of a sudden. Even after all the fun memories fade away, I’m sure I’ll still have the feeling of what it was like under the stare of that customs officer.

  It didn’t take me long to notice how dull and similar everything in Czechoslovakia was. Compared to the view from the roof of Trump Tower, where I went many times as a kid, New York City was an IMAX movie while Czechoslovakia was a black-and-white photograph.

  Every new building was made of the same gray concrete. All the clothes were the same colors and the same styles. Even the appliances in my grandmother’s kitchen looked as though they had rolled off the same drab assembly line. There were only two channels on television—one cartoon for kids called “Vechernczrk,” which aired every night around dinner time, for a total of ten minutes and another news station for adults.

  Soon I began to see the dichotomy between the two countries. I could sense that there was something underneath all those tall buildings and twinkling lights in Manhattan that was absent in the Soviet Union. The engine that made it all run. Later, I would learn that the engine was called the market and the missing piece was called capitalism.

  I was eleven years old in 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell and the Communist government of the Soviet Union started to crumble. The change came rapidly to my grandparents’ hometown. By 1992, Czechoslovakia was being called the Czech Republic. The government embraced the principles of democracy and capitalism. Suddenly it was time for the Czech people to work hard and build an economy that could compete on the world stage. It was a tall order, and not everyone was happy.

  My friends in the Czech Republic would tell me how hard it was to make the transition from a command economy, where the state makes the rules and requires the bare minimum of its citizens, to a market economy, where citizens get only what they work for and government handouts are slimmer. Much like people who depend on welfare in the United States, many had gotten used to not working and getting everything for free. Teaching them to start businesses and earn money for themselves was more difficult than anyone had expected—although for those with the ability and the willingness to work, the possibilities were endless.

  Though it wasn’t an easy transition to make, it was a good one. As long as a country is continually moving away from socialism, away from free rides and handouts from the state, and toward the free market, that country will always be better off.

  The story of the Democrat Party is the exact opposite of Czechoslovakia’s. Instead of embracing capitalism, they’ve descended into socialism. This would be bad enough if the people who were pushing socialist policies had any idea what socialism is or how horrible it is for people who have to live under it, but it’s much worse that they don’t. Maybe Bernie Sanders and his acolytes in Congress do but don’t care. That makes their actions even worse.

  Socialists have taken advantage of every crisis to promote their policies and spend millions of dollars on marketing (oh, the irony) to convince young people that socialism can take care of everything for them. Bernie Sanders alone has three houses. He’s made millions of dollars under capitalism while preaching like a crazy person for its opposite. Let’s call him the “Commie Capitalist.” People like him say that socialism can pay off student loans, provide a universal basic income, even provide free college and health care. In 2016, a YouGov poll found that 44 percent of young people between the ages of sixteen and twenty-nine would rather live in a socialist country than a capitalist one like the United States. As if that weren’t scary enough, only 33 percent of the people could even describe with any accuracy what the word socialism means. This is precisely the way Bernie Sanders has wanted it all along: push lies for years until you make a majority of the population ignorant enough to believe those lies.

  I have to admit that for a socialist, he’s come up with a pretty good business model.

  If Democrats had taken some action to rein in their craziest member a few years ago, they might have been able to fix their problem and regain some degree of sanity. Today, the chances of that happening are about as good as the chances of Bernie ringing the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange. The midterm elections of 2018—which, by the way, were unfairly influenced by the baseless Russia collusion investigation—was a turning point. As soon as the new class of freshman socialists rolled into the Capitol building (once they found it), any hope of reconciliation went out the window.

  Now the Democrat Party has tilted so far left that it threatens to collapse any day. Just look at what remains of the party’s presidential hopefuls. Elizabeth Warren wants to arm the IRS (not literally but with more pencils) to punish the wealthiest people in the country. It doesn’t matter to her if they made their money by working hard, then creating jobs. She believes that the money belongs to the government. Of course, that didn’t stop her from making almost $500,000 a year from teaching one class at Harvard. It’s no wonder why college tuition is through the roof!

  Kamala Harris wants to get r
id of all private health care and replace it with a single-payer government-issued model. The fact that the US government owes $122 trillion in unfunded liabilities such as Social Security and Medicare doesn’t even faze her. Just dump more debt on the pile, and let our children figure out how to pay for it.

  Then there are the future leaders of the Socialist, I mean, Democrat, Party. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley, or “the Squad,” as they’re commonly known, stand somewhere left of Chairman Mao. Their radical beliefs have real-world consequences.

  As you might remember, a few years back, Amazon, the world’s largest internet retailer, announced it was beginning a search for a new headquarters. The announcement was big news and caused quite a stir. Nearly every major city in the country wanted to be picked, with most offering Amazon billions of dollars in tax breaks and subsidies. One smaller city even promised to change its name to Amazon and proclaim Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos its king—a little excessive, if you ask me, but you really couldn’t blame it. After all, the proposed headquarters promised to be one of the largest corporate investments in US history, creating fifty thousand high-paying tech jobs.

  After a fourteen-month search, Amazon decided on two sites instead of one. The lucky winners were northern Virginia and a neighborhood in Queens, New York, called Long Island City. There was a lot of disappointment across the country, but for Queens and New York City, it was like hitting the lottery. Not only did it mean twenty-five thousand high-paying jobs—six-figure jobs in a city that badly needed the revenue—but also union construction jobs, service industry jobs, and a massive infusion of cash into the local economy. Any way you looked at it, it was a good deal—at least to people who know what a good deal looks like.

  Obviously, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not one of those people. Here’s what the princess of the socialist Democrat Party had to say: “Frankly, if we were willing to give away $3 billion for this deal, we could invest those $3 billion in our district ourselves if we wanted to. We could hire out more teachers. We can fix our subways.”

  Apparently, AOC was under the impression that New York City was going to write Amazon a check for $3 billion. She had no idea what a tax incentive is or what it does. The $3 billion Amazon would save in taxes would go toward construction and salaries that would, in turn, be taxed, creating nearly $30 billion in revenue for the city and community by some estimates. When Amazon saw the socialist stink that AOC and others put up, the company backed out of the deal quicker than Bernie Sanders can comb his hair. Uh-uh, the folks there thought, no way are we going to build in Queens, not when two hundred other cities are lining up to give us tax breaks. On February 14, 2019, Amazon officially pulled out of the deal. Although it didn’t mention AOC by name in the announcement, it was pretty clear who it was talking about. It read in part: “a number of state and local politicians [who] have made it clear that they oppose our presence and will not work with us to build the type of relationships that are required to go forward with the project we and many others envisioned in Long Island City.”

  Now, I’m not saying that Amazon was an innocent bystander in the collapse of the deal. It is a ruthless corporation that has practices that you don’t have to be socialist to dislike. It turned their back on the people of Queens without giving it so much as a second thought. Jeff Bezos, the supposed champion of the free press, had about as much compassion for the people of Queens as a Mafia hit man.

  The main villain, however, was the freshman member of Congress who couldn’t name the three branches of government when she was elected and didn’t know the basic economics of a tax break.

  People who think socialists who shut down deals like the Amazon one in Queens are working for the greater good have it backward; AOC is working against the interests of the people she represents. Nearly single-handedly, she ruined a deal that would have brought tens of thousands of jobs to her neighboring district, tens of billions of dollars to the city she represents, and the headquarters of one of the biggest tech companies in the world to Queens.

  She was only getting started.

  The idea for the Green New Deal began with a group called the Sunrise Movement, started by recent college graduate environmental activists who drew inspiration from Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. Some even say their roots can be traced back to Saul Alinsky, the gift to the right who keeps on giving. Alinsky, as you might remember, wrote a book back in 1971 called Rules for Radicals in which he cited Lucifer as the father of the radical movement. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both idolized Alinsky.

  The Sunrise Movement started to get notoriety when some of its members staged a sit-in in Nancy Pelosi’s office. It is also the group responsible for the famous YouTube video in which Senator Dianne Feinstein scolds a bunch of children as young as seven. The children were recruited by the movement as a publicity stunt and to put pressure on the senator to back the Green New Deal.

  “You know better than I do, so I think one day you should run for the Senate and then you do it your way,” Ms. Feinstein told one of the girls.

  “Great,” she replied. “I will.”

  But it was when AOC joined forces with Sunrise that the group’s Green New Deal really gained momentum. Along with her cosponsor in the Senate, Edward J. Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, AOC introduced the ridiculous resolution to Congress.

  If you’re not familiar with the details of the proposal, allow me to give you some of the high points. First off, it would cost US taxpayers almost $100 trillion dollars—$93 trillion to be precise, since I’ve stumped a lot on it. That’s trillion with a t. To put that number into perspective, the US government has annual revenues of about $6 trillion. So AOC and her socialist pals want to spend what would be the equivalent of about fifteen years of the US government’s revenue to stop cows from farting, eliminate air travel, build an underground tunnel from California to Hawaii, and fund people who don’t want to work.

  If we spent nothing on the military, nothing on entitlements, and nothing on education and focused only on farting cows, in fifteen years we might be able to pay for AOC’s Green New Deal. In the meantime, we would wreck the US economy and actually do little to clean up the environment. The proposal calls for covering hundreds of thousands of acres of land with windmills and solar panels, which would do irreparable damage to land on which wildlife is protected by federal statutes. It also addresses only the United States’ carbon emissions and gives countries like China and India a pass for a decade. I’m no scientist, but I’m pretty sure we can’t keep China’s dirty air from sneaking into the atmosphere over the United States. I am pretty good at economics, though, and economists have a term for that type of thinking: freaking stupid. AOC once said that people her age should reconsider having children because of global warming. Can you imagine? I think the best answer to that ridiculous statement was by my friend, Jerry Falwell, Jr., “People her age should reconsider having children if people like AOC ever get to be in charge of this country.”

  Still, just about every Democrat presidential candidate jumped on board the AOC crazy train because they were unwilling to take on a freshman congresswoman who was elected in a district that Nancy Pelosi said a glass of water with a “D” on it could win—and who, after being sworn in, could not name the three branches of government. This is who they wouldn’t stand up to? There needs to be an adult in the room, but there isn’t.

  Of course, they had ulterior motives, as most career politicians do. The Green New Deal is less about the reduction of fossil fuel and more a progressives’ letter to Santa with a list of all the gifts the liberals want for Christmas. If they couldn’t stand up to AOC, good luck with standing up to China and North Korea.

  In an article she wrote for the Intercept, Naomi Klein, an author, anti-Trump feminist, and AOC supporter (and Canadian, by the way), explained the reach a select committee steering the deal would have: “By giving the committee a mandate that connects the dots between energy, transp
ortation, housing and construction, as well as health care, living wages, a jobs guarantee, and the urgent imperative to battle racial and gender injustice, the Green New Deal plan would be mapping precisely that kind of far-reaching change.”

  Did she mention everything? Let’s see: Medicare for all? Check. Minimum wage? Check. Police reform, voting rights, pay equality regardless of merit? Check, check, and check. Economic security for all those who are unable or unwilling to work? A big, fat check!

  When you strip away the naiveté of a freshman congresswoman from the proposal, what’s left of the Green New Deal is a Hollywood-fueled publicity stunt. As Saul Alinsky wrote: “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.” Mitch McConnell exposed the sham when he said, okay, sure, let’s bring the Green New Deal proposal to the floor of the Senate for a vote. When he did, the only ones who would go on the record with a vote were Democrats Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, and Doug Jones of Alabama, together with Angus King of Maine, an independent, and all of them voted against the resolution. McConnell was accused of participating in “political theater” for doing his job and bringing the bill to a vote. Imagine! Allowing them to vote on their own bill was political theater!

  It seems that for Democrats, knowing what they’re talking about is not as important as looking as though they know what they’re talking about. Sometimes they don’t even care about looking good.

  With all her talk about saving the planet, AOC has put a new spin on the phrase “limousine liberal.” According to a story in the New York Post, she runs up Uber tabs like crazy. It wouldn’t be so bad if she had no other way to get around. But her congressional district, which includes parts of Queens and the Bronx, has about five or six subway lines.