Communists in America have taken their masks off. Under the old code word “Democratic Socialists of America” (DSA), they recently announced their new platform, which amounts to a blatant communist agenda. For starters, it calls for the fundamental transformation of America by erasing the Senate, the Supreme Court, the presidency, and essentially all the checks and balances in the Constitution itself.

When President Trump was asked recently about his warnings on communism, he replied that it’s an evil system that causes you to live in “squalor” and “die a horrible death” in squalor. That’s a good start, but I don’t think Trump went far enough.

Communism is slavery. That’s what we need to say, over and over. All of communism’s companion terms — socialism, Democratic Socialism, collectivism, Marxism, etc. — are weasel words for slavery. Socialist regimes always insist on controlling speech, confiscating property, undermining self-defense, disrespecting the rule of law, and invading private life — all via centralized and unchecked power. 

One of the biggest jokes in the DSA’s platform is that it calls for reparations for slavery while it incorporates all the features of a slave state, including unchecked power for the rulers and no guarantee of individual rights. It’s now clear that socialism adds up to a bait-and-switch scheme to establish slavery and injustice for all. So why don’t we hear this point expressed more frequently? I’ve said it before, and so have several others, including Turning Point USA. 

Equating socialism with slavery is far more effective than trying to engage in pointless debates with communists. Because even schoolchildren know what slavery is. But few Americans understand the theoretical gibberish behind the terms communism, socialism, Marxism, etc. 

Best of all, calling out socialism as slavery forces propagandists who have so much invested in rhetoric against slavery to defend the slavery that is at the very root of communism. 

At the same time, we should note that socialism always fails and has directly led to the murder of more than a hundred million people. Yet younger generations — along with ignorant and pliable masses produced by teachers’ unions and increasingly stupid public school curricula with the help of media talking heads and brain-dead celebrities — continue to tell pollsters that socialism is a good thing. Hence, it’s urgent to tell them socialism is slavery.

If this point ever sinks in, then we’re forced to ask: Who profits from socialism? The usual suspects: wealthy power-hungry mobsters like New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, California Governor Gavin Newsom, and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who all have in common megalomania and hate of America. Ironically, those who espouse socialism are the biggest capitalists of all because they drool over the prospect of controlling all wealth and the lives of others. 

How Exactly is Socialism Slavery?

Slavery/socialism exists wherever there is abject dependence on those who mete out your survival. It embraces Maoist-style social credit systems whereby your right to subsistence depends upon your compliance with the regime’s demands. It cultivates widespread ignorance about our heritage of freedom. It rejects ideals of virtue and the nuclear family, preferring that people live in isolation, immorality, and distrust of others. 

Therefore, those who would run mass, socialist governments are the biggest slave-owners of all. Let’s elaborate a bit more.

Just like slavery, socialism puts too much power in the hands of very few people. It requires unchecked centralized power, and it always rejects decentralized local control. Sometimes socialists will tell you that total control is the only way to get socialism to “work.” Or as Barack Obama said early on, “Everybody in, nobody out.” 

The goal is total control over everyone in perpetuity. As former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi once proclaimed in an interview, she sought “awesome power.” The kind of power she means, and to which she has alluded in the past, is to attain a permanent majority of Democrats. This permanence means there is no way out. By design. As with Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot, and all other socialists before and since, there is zero accountability.

Free stuff is the bait before the communist switch. The free stuff might even look new and shiny at first. But socialist housing eventually amounts to little more than the squalid slave quarters that the plantation owners afforded their unpaid laborers. They’ll burn down the neighborhood and replace it with “affordable” housing. Because once the masses are stacked and packed with densified housing — a communist specialty — they are riper for social engineering and control. And more easily surveilled.

Free food means shortages and rationing. Education eventually amounts to mind rape where a brilliant child has his potential knocked out of him and becomes an Antifa — or “Trantifa” — thug. Employment is a dog-eat-dog brown-nosing affair that has nothing to do with merit, but only with one’s willingness to prop up the socialist/slave culture. The bureaucratic state bloats with apparatchiks who just follow orders from above. 

Perhaps Dwight Eisenhower said it best in 1949 when he suggested that if we want security without effort — housing, food, health care, etc. — we can just “go to prison.”

What about free health care? Check our socialist friends in Canada, where they might end up euthanizing you if you say you’re depressed and lonely. Many Canadians have said they’d come to the United States for health care amid high wait times and physician shortages in their own country. And what if you have a personal opinion that goes against the narrative? Sorry, there may not be a spot for you on the waiting list for a kidney transplant. In the United Kingdom’s state-run health care system, judges can easily rule that your child should die rather than being sent elsewhere for health care. “Everybody in, Nobody out.” Just like slavery.

Socialism requires isolation and atomization. Slave-holders had no qualms about separating children from their mothers, outlawing marriage, or preventing friendships with freemen and even with other slaves. Isolation breeds social distrust, which breeds more isolation. 

There is nothing more demoralizing than this induced isolation — along with anti-family agendas — as a feature of socialism. The current trend of going “no contact” with family and friends who don’t support agendas like DEI, BLM, and ESG testifies that atomizing people is essential to socialism. Socialists always talk a good talk about how “it takes a village,” but their definition of community means choosing between abject compliance or excommunication.

Mass ignorance is essential to socialism. In the slave-holding South, it was a crime to teach slaves how to read. Indeed, knowledge is power, as former slave Frederick Douglass attested in his autobiography. True knowledge allows the imagination and innovation to flourish, which breeds success in individuals. When we are cut off from learning, we become tools of the powerful. 

In that same vein, socialists are also masters of censorship and propaganda. They reject knowledge about American history. They are into “disinformation governance boards” and social credit systems. They enforce propaganda with cancel culture that threatens to cut people off from family and friends if they stray from narratives, such as by pointing out vaccine injuries or calling out “trans women” as men. 

The above are just a few of the totalitarian features of socialism. It allows no freedom of speech or association or mobility as you live at the mercy of those who run a centralized state. DSA recruits likely come from among the very ignorant. The pickings are good thanks to the communist indoctrination that’s been going on in public schools for decades now.

In short, socialists consider your life, your body, your mind, and your personal relationships to be property of the of the state. Obviously, that’s slavery on steroids. If we don’t want to be slaves, we must voice this fact much more often, every chance we get.

Stella Morabito is a senior contributor at The Federalist. She is author of "The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer." Her essays have appeared in various publications, including the Washington Examiner, American Greatness, Townhall, Public Discourse, and The Human Life Review. In her previous work as an intelligence analyst, Morabito focused on various aspects of Russian and Soviet politics, including communist media and propaganda. Follow Stella on Twitter.