Only in America do you find a kid wearing $150+ tennis shoes, drinking a $5 cup of “coffee,” while typing on his $1,000 cell phone and complaining on social media that he is oppressed and that capitalism has failed him. The battle isn’t really between nations, it may appear that way but it is really […]
Only in America
New York City is baking under a brutal heat wave, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s answer was not more power, it was less use of the power you already pay for.
The self-described socialist mayor took to X and asked New Yorkers to set their thermostats to 78 degrees, shut off lights and electronics, and unplug what they can, so the grid does not buckle under demand.
To be fair, it is a request, not a rule. Nobody gets arrested for running their AC at 68. But listen to how the mayor framed it. City buildings are already locked to 78 degrees. Private partners are being asked to fall in line. Nonessential equipment is being powered down by City Hall itself.
That is the pattern. When socialism does not have the votes or the legal authority to force compliance, it leans on moral pressure instead. New Yorkers are being told that keeping their own homes livable in triple digit heat is somehow selfish, unless they voluntarily suffer a little for the common good.
Conservatives from Ted Cruz to Nikki Haley to Vivek Ramaswamy piled on within hours, and even a City Council Republican, Vickie Paladino, warned this is exactly how it starts. First the suggestion, then the shaming, then the higher prices, then the regulation. Europe already lived this story.
The Founders built a government meant to secure liberty, not manage a thermostat. The Federalist Papers warned again and again about power that grows through small, reasonable sounding steps. A polite request today has a way of becoming policy tomorrow, especially from a mayor who just days earlier called socialism the future of his party.
New Yorkers do not need a mayor micromanaging their comfort. They need a grid that can handle a hot summer without asking citizens to sweat for the cause. – Federalist Papers
I don’t know who Abbie Conant is but she posted this cartoon to praise socialism and own the cons. She seems a bit prickly, ending the post with:
“It appears that Facebook manipulated the distribution of the post to include hundreds of people who are not my friends and who have rather ignorant, rightwing views. At any rate, their comments provide an interesting view of the USA and the bizarre narrowness of its political spectrum.”
Being an ignorant right-winger, I felt her statement was invitation to inject a little non-ignorance to the discussion, so I tagged her.
Here goes.
The cartoon is clever, but it rests on an assumption that falls apart the moment you spend thirty seconds thinking about it.
It invites the viewer to look at Paris—Notre-Dame, the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Arc de Triomphe—and conclude that socialism must be responsible because France today has a large socialist influence in its government. That is like pointing at the Golden Gate Bridge and arguing that Medicare built it because both exist at the same time.
Almost everything that makes Paris instantly recognizable predates modern socialism by centuries. Notre-Dame was built by the Catholic Church beginning in the twelfth century. The Louvre began life as a royal fortress under the French monarchy. The Arc de Triomphe was commissioned by Napoleon. The grand boulevards of Paris were carved through the city under Napoleon III. Even the Eiffel Tower—the youngest landmark in the cartoon—was built by Gustave Eiffel’s private engineering company for the 1889 World’s Fair, decades before democratic socialism became a meaningful political force in France.
Socialists did not build Paris. They inherited it.
More importantly, they inherited the wealth that made Paris possible. The city’s monuments, museums, churches, bridges, and boulevards were financed by centuries of commerce, manufacturing, private enterprise, skilled craftsmen, merchants, engineers, architects, religious institutions, and, yes, governments taxing an increasingly productive economy. Whether one admires monarchies or not, the wealth that produced these works was created long before the modern welfare state existed.
This illustrates a common rhetorical sleight of hand. Advocates of socialism frequently point to prosperous Western nations with generous welfare systems as evidence that socialism works, while quietly overlooking the fact that those societies became wealthy before they dramatically expanded redistribution. The prosperity came first. The welfare state came later.
That does not prove that every social program is bad. It does expose the dishonesty of claiming credit for a civilization that others built. There is a profound difference between creating wealth and redistributing wealth that has already been created. The meme intentionally blurs that distinction.
If someone wants to argue that modern France is better because of its social policies, make that argument. But don’t pretend socialism built Notre-Dame, the Eiffel Tower, or the Louvre. History simply will not cooperate.
Paris is not a monument to socialism. It is a monument to nearly a thousand years of religion, private enterprise, engineering, commerce, art, and accumulated civilization. Socialists didn’t build that city any more than Medicare built the Golden Gate Bridge. They simply arrived after it was already standing.
Just a reminder of what she was saying then. A very accurate statement.
After a week in hiding, Joe was fully prepared for the debate by his handlers. Or so they thought.
Joe Enters Debate Stage
And on the second anniversary of that debate debacle, he embarrassed America again with his stumbling, bumbling incoherency.
A psychiatrist has related that many, if not most, affected “can be traced to an individual’s low self-esteem.
They resent the masculinity, success, and confidence that they themselves can never achieve.”
Of course there is a lot more in that study but the gist of it seems that the “participation trophy recepients” never learned self-responsibility.
After a week in hiding, they thought he was ready for that debate.
Dear socialists,
When you get a minute, and that shouldn’t be hard considering most of you don’t have jobs, pop in to South Florida and find a Cuban cafe. Make sure to tell everyone there sipping their coffee how great socialism is.
Let us know how it goes.
Thanks!
What I love about Clarence Thomas is that he actually understands the Constitution instead of trying to twist it into whatever political fantasy the loudest people want. Every time he writes an opinion, you can feel the clarity — the man knows the law, he knows the limits of federal power, and he knows exactly what this country is dealing with right now.
And let’s be honest:
We are dealing with a border disaster.
We are dealing with chaos that never should’ve been allowed to happen.
And we are dealing with politicians who act like enforcing the border is some kind of crime.
So of course the people who created this mess are furious at Clarence Thomas. Of course they’re angry that someone on the Court isn’t playing along with their narrative. They don’t want clarity — they want confusion. They don’t want law — they want loopholes. They don’t want order — they want a system they can bend whenever it benefits them.
Meanwhile, the rest of us are sitting here watching our country get pushed to the edge while the people in charge pretend everything is fine. It’s not fine. It hasn’t been fine for a long time. And the fact that anyone is angry at a Supreme Court justice for simply stating what the Constitution actually says tells you everything about where we are right now.
People need to pay attention.
Because once you let chaos become normal, once you let the government stop enforcing its own laws, once you let political games replace basic national security — it’s very hard to pull the country back from that.
Thank God there are still a few people in power who actually understand the job they’re supposed to be doing.
pastorwardclinton 