By Linda Genzel
August 2 | Opinion
For roughly fifteen of the last eighteen years, our Republic has been battered from within without mercy. So too have our bedrock Constitutional Principles and Values—God, Country, and Family—that for 250 years have served as the marrow and lifeblood of our Liberties, Freedoms, and Unalienable Rights.
The enemy? An increasingly brazen authoritarian Democrat Party, now enthralled by Progressive ideologues who masquerade as divine Social Justice Warriors here to rescue mankind—tails cocked and heads held high, brandishing their Democrat-Socialist banner while living by the unwritten gospel: You’ll have nothing, and you’ll like it.
That is the Left’s delightfully twisted notion of freedom—a nation of serfs with nothing left to lose, nothing left to fight for, and nothing left to defend. How generous of them . . . not!
Democrats market this dystopian grift as liberation from the burden of self-reliance.
Progressive career politicians—who have never built a thing, turned a profit, or created a single job—expect you to trust them as daddy, nanny, doctor, and warden while they amass multi-millionaire fortunes on modest government salaries.
This Progressive grift, already deeply rooted in Blue States, is now metastasizing into Red States. It fuels government dependency through punitive taxes and regulations that drive businesses into bankruptcy and kill jobs—precisely because dependency equals control, and control equals permanent power.
What Democrat-Socialists conveniently forget to tell their base is that “Socialism is not for the Socialists.”
A centralized government controlled by modern-day Bolsheviks who want to control healthcare, housing, energy, education, banking, food supplies, and the means of production—while punishing hard work and success and rewarding the entitled—is an authoritarian Party.
Exchanging your freedoms for government freebies is not freedom; it’s tyranny.
Freedom is the right to make your own decisions, keep what you have earned, and answer to your Maker and your conscience rather than to some two-bit career politician like Ro Khanna.
If you hand over your decision-making power to the government, you have chosen serfdom over freedom. Friedrich Hayek warned us in The Road to Serfdom that the promise of security through central planning is the high road to servitude.
The only freedoms the self-anointed Party of Freedom actually protects are:
1. The freedom to kill the unborn.
2. The freedom of grown men to dress like females, invade women’s private spaces, and erase the rights of actual women.
3. The freedom to chemically and surgically alter vulnerable, confused children in the name of gender affirmation.
How positively progressive. How utterly perverse.
On the questions that actually determine whether people remain free—private property, the ability to make an honest living, and the capacity to provide for one’s family—the Democrats’ agenda remains brutally consistent. It asks not how to grow what you have earned, but how much of it the government can seize and redistribute.
As Thomas Sowell documented, every grand experiment in forced redistribution has ended in shared poverty.
Progressive politicians who declare that we “earn too much” and therefore must be penalized and forced to relinquish the rewards of our labor are not practicing compassion. They are practicing tyranny with a smile.
If Democrats had their way, the government would dictate where you live, what car you drive, whether your small business survives, and if your children are permitted to inherit what you built.
Reagan warned us: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m the government, and I’m here to help.’”
America was not founded on mediocrity and government-managed security purchased at the price of liberty. It was forged by bold souls who risked everything for the right to pursue their dreams—not Marxist ideology.
Look at the contrast: the federal government has run NASA since the 1950s, yet Elon Musk has made more progress in space travel in a decade than the bureaucracy managed in seven.
Isn’t it interesting that, by all outward appearances, Democrats seem to seethe with boundless hatred for Elon Musk—the genius on the cusp of curing blindness, paralysis, and going into the far reaches of space—yet if you’re Taylor Swift who makes hundreds of millions singing pop songs, you’re brilliant and your money is yours to keep. Of course, Swift has every right to her success, but ask yourself, in twenty-five years, what problems will her music have solved? None. Conversely, Musk’s legacy looks far different: lives restored, blindness and paralysis potentially cured, perhaps a colony on Mars. That happens because of extraordinary visionaries who labor tirelessly at the intersection of genius and grit—not career politicians or pop stars.
In late June, during an episode of the Progressive podcast I’ve Had It, Congressman Ro Khanna not only smugly slammed Musk for exposing waste, fraud, and abuse at USAID through his service at DOGE but also for the unforgivable sin of becoming the world’s richest man—demanding Musk cough up a punitive tax on his unrealized gains to fund universal childcare and student debt forgiveness. Adding to that, Khanna descended into demagoguery, suggesting Musk possibly sentenced” 4.5 million children to death by dismantling USAID—insisting Musk “needs to answer for that” and be investigated as though he had committed mass genocide. Of course, all while posing as one of Congress’s leading stock-trading reformers. Yet financial disclosures show his household—primarily through a trust held by his wife, Ritu Khanna—has logged over $630 million in trading volume and tens of thousands of individual trades since 2017, per multiple independent trackers.
Consider the trillions in taxpayer aid USAID has poured into Africa. Have conditions improved? No. Whose fault is that—politicians like Ro Khanna or Elon Musk?
Why is it the American taxpayer’s or Elon Musk’s endless responsibility to keep funding this broken system? And here’s a better question: why hasn’t Ro Khanna, in all his righteous bloviating, cut a check for $50 million or so from the hundreds of millions in disclosed trading volume flowing through his family’s trust and saved some lives in Africa?
The answer is simple: he is a Democrat-Socialist, and Socialism is not for the Socialists.
Khanna thought he could vilify Elon Musk because Musk dares to dream, innovate, and produce on a scale that exposes the Democrats failures. They do not celebrate those who create wealth and opportunity. They attack the productive, tear down the successful, and punish anyone who refuses to bow to their vision of equal misery.
Khanna demands accountability and greater public dependence and trust in Washington’s expanding reach over Americans wealth and achievements. His financial disclosures provide an excellent starting point, and a compelling argument why that trust is undeserved.
Linda Genzel
Editor @WECU News
Opinion