(This article was written by Peter Huessy and appeared in the Gatestone Institute. Democratic Socialists of America: The Secret Stooges)

The country is debating whether the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is the new face of the Democrat Party. There are two impediments, however, to accurately discussing what the DSA is all about.

The first is that Americans are learning about DSA through the lens of the dominant media — what Rush Limbaugh often called “the drive-by media.” Largely missing is a balanced media source despite the almost universal use of the term “mainstream media” to describe the current collection of highly partisan and slanted journalists from whom most Americans get their news. While “mainstream” implies balanced and informative, most of the dominant media of today are neither.

The second impediment is an assumption that advocates of the DSA are simply against a “capitalist” system they associate with greed, and instead favor of what they consider a benign, compassionate “socialist” economy where stuff is largely free. Who doesn’t like free stuff? Capitalism, however, is not the villain. Without capital (funding), there would be no economy, free or state-run. The alternative is to go back to a barter system: I’ll paint your apartment, you give me wood for heating my house.

The issue, therefore, is not between capitalism and socialism. It is between free enterprise and economic liberty on the one hand and a state-run, often totalitarian, market on the other.

Capitalism is not synonymous with free enterprise or economic liberty. The 1776 economic manifesto The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith never used the word. It was Karl Marx who used “capitalism” as a highly pejorative description of the economies of the affluent West. North Korea and Cuba also use capital. Both are, in a way, state capitalisms: the state has all the money; the citizens are the oppressed serfs. The state provides for them, to an extent, but is careful to do so as stingily as possible.

The socialist or communist state’s first concern will not be delivering services; it will be cutting costs. As the money that comes in becomes scarcer — who is making money, the state? The first casualty invariably ends up being quality. Yes, there is free healthcare — if you can wait months for an operation, and if you qualify for it under the state’s cost-cutting rationing. Are you too old or too sick, or too medically compromised in some other way, and is someone younger and healthier more worthy of receiving the care than you?

Yes, you receive free housing, but who will guarantee that there will be sufficient heat in the winter, clean running water, that the garbage will be collected, that there will be no vermin, or that the elevator will work.

Under communism, land belongs only to the state. The price is immaterial. Ask the “kulaks,” peasant farmers in Ukraine whose land and grain were stolen by Stalin’s Soviet Union during the Holodomor in 1932-33, with the result that five million people in Ukraine starved to death.

The DSA candidates do not describe themselves as communists. What does that mean, however, when many of the DSA’s official policies are the essence of communism?:

• “[C]ollectively own the key economic drivers that dominate our lives, such as energy production and transportation…” (source)
• “[N]ationalize and socialize (through worker and community ownership and control) institutions of monetary policy, insurance, real estate, and finance…” (source)
• “Social housing must first be a redistribution of land from landowners to the landless… Social housing must expropriate property from capitalists and deliver it to the working class…” (source)

Members of the DSA, while not precisely following what communist enemies of the USA want to see happen in America, are nevertheless stooges — dupes — of our communist enemies — what during the Cold War were known as “useful idiots.” Walter Duranty of the New York Times wrote from the Soviet Union in the 1930s that “no actual starvation or deaths from starvation” in Ukraine and “there is no famine,” and he treated the Moscow Trials as justified and credible. Prior to this, shamefully, Duranty had won the 1932 Pulitzer Prize, still unrevoked, for his reporting of fabrications from the Soviet Union.

Unlike the DSA, communist leaders from Lenin to Mao to Castro did not aspire to abolish the police, the military or the border patrol. If anything, these totalitarian rulers expanded the police, the prisons, and the military. They were more than happy to put millions in prison or the gulags while widening the powers of the police and security forces, whether the KGB, MININT or MMS. Certainly, they all markedly enlarged their military and security forces. How else could communist nations have killed some 120 million of their own people, just to secure and sustain power?

What is being overlooked at the moment is that the current communist rulers from Cuba to China would love the DSA to abolish the police and border patrol in America, empty the prisons, open the borders, and shut down oil and gas production. Those moves would thoroughly cripple the United States and significantly weaken its ability to defend itself — both internally and externally. No self-respecting communist government would ever adopt such crazy policies.

Supporters of the DSA appear to think that mob violence — such as was used in the summer of 2020 and currently characterizes the assault on immigration law enforcement — will enable them to seize control of the House of Representatives, then the Senate, then the presidency itself. If the Supreme Court is a barrier to the totalitarian plans of the DSA — whose plans would be so easy to implement if all that were needed was a simple majority vote in the House — the logical plan is to abolish the checks and balances of in the US constitution to fundamentally transform the US.

The DSA appears impatient with the world. Their utopia cannot wait. A thoughtful discussion of America’s future or reasonable analysis of the DSA’s objectives will not happen. Any such debate would leave these candidates in the ditch. They argue for abolishing the police on Monday, they deny they said it on Tuesday. No discussion of ramifications. The drive-by media remain complicit in the rise of the DSA by ignoring or covering for them.

What can we expect? Commentator Ryan Mauro notes that New York City’s DSA Mayor Zohran Mamdani and “chaos” funder George Soros both admire Slavoj Zizek, whose In Defence of Lost Causes calls for the return of the French Revolution’s guillotine and what he calls “emancipatory terror.” The goal, it seems, is the destruction of the West, to be replaced with Stalinist communism. Apart from their projected multiple trillions of dollars in new government spending that they cannot pay for, the DSA foreign policy agenda is also scary. The DSA seems to be pushing a global intifada, an embrace of Hamas terrorism, a wholesale rejection of Israel, and on top of all that, “defunding” the US Department of Defense.

The goals of the former Soviet Union are still being pursued — not by the KGB or the Red Army but by DSA hucksters who sadly are nothing but suckers promising a false utopia to be built on the ruins of America.

Peter Huessy is a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C. based foreign policy and defense think tank.

Dear Alaska – please stop trying to stand out in all the wrong ways

Some people can’t sit back and suffer under ordinary conditions. The grind of monotony to these people is another form of torture, and until this is understood, it can lead to some undesirable outcomes – like self-sabotage. Those are the most extreme cases. In other cases, sitting at an airport for 9 hours waiting to see if the weather will clear up enough to take your weekend trip is a no-go.

That’s what happened with me and Rachel in December 2024 when she wanted to see New York City for the first time. We landed in Chicago and were beelining it to our connecting gate, only to find out the flight was delayed. We exercised a little tactical patience, only to find out it was delayed again. We looked at the weather and immediately knew what to do.

We rented a car one-way and covered the 800 miles to New York City in about 18 hours, including sleep. As such, we saw everything we wanted to see. Turns out we would have gotten there by air before we pulled into Newark to drop the car off – but there would have been no adventure and no story if we’d have stuck it out in Chicago with the risk of never getting to the Big Apple.

All of these things are great when talking about interesting and quirky life decisions. They ensure dullness never takes hold of one’s life, and besides, how many of you have slept in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, for five hours? Making on-the-fly crazy decisions is not great when you’re talking about the operation of a functioning, healthy state that appears to have a fixation on making itself different and unique just for fun.

Which brings me once again to Alaska – The Last Frontier. I once served a tour of duty there in 2012-13 as a Captain, and it is where I was stationed when I put in my papers to leave Active Duty. I have been back twice as a tourist and will most definitely take Rachel there as I did to New York City. I just have little confidence that when I go, I’ll be taking her to a reliably red state as we have known it.

Alaska is run by idiots, plain and simple. It is one of the few states in which the wear and tear should be blamed on Republicans instead of Democrats. Arizona, with its McCainite Uniparty, and Texas, with its Bushies who keep inviting techies to bloat the urban cores and foreigners to push everyone else out to the countryside, are in the same boat – but not at the scale of Alaska with its tiny population and very few populated areas.

Years ago, when these virtual pages were in their infancy and Captain K’s Corner was just another voice in the wilderness, I wrote a satirical column that 14 people liked in which I wrote about what it would be like if California took every political action possible to turn itself into a red state.

I eventually revealed that I was writing about red Alaska taking every measure possible to ensure it becomes first competitive, then blue:

The Last Frontier, Alaska, is operating as the fictitious California above, taking extreme measures to legally turn itself “blue,” likely within the next decade. Here is some of the idiocy legally instituted in Alaska’s impotent legislature:

1) Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) automatic registration – On November 8, 2016, the same night Donald Trump was elected, Alaska’s voters approved Ballot Measure 1 (15PFVR), which automatically registers applicants for the PFD. The damage will be unveiled later in this article.

2) Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) – approved in 2020, and the first election using it will be run later in 2022 for the vacant U.S. House seat left behind by the deceased Don Young. Ranked Choice Voting allows a pathway for extreme candidates to supplant candidates who are most likely to be elected with strong pluralities, and practically entrenches incumbents in Democrat strongholds.

3) Experimentation with mail-in voting – as with RCV, mail-in voting will be the method for the U.S. House race coming later in 2022. With Alaska’s hostile climate and influence from west coast neighbors, it is only a matter of time until a full-on blitz begins to entrench mail-in voting.

This is not hyperbole. Alaska has many of the key ingredients in place to become another Colorado or Oregon. It has 80% of its population packed into the five most populated boroughs (county equivalents), a large Alaska Native population, no real adherence to standard Protestant Deep South style “conservatism” (although they love guns), and most importantly, new laws on the books that allow for stupid election outcomes like this one from 2022, when the Democrat Mary Peltola prevailed in a special election for U.S. House (which she sealed in the General Election months later):

You read that right. Republican candidates Nick Begich, the current Congressman from the Alaska At Large seat, and Sarah Palin took almost 3 of every 5 votes, but didn’t win because Alaska now has Ranked Choice Voting to redistribute votes and essentially elect Democrats. Can you think of any blue state in which this system of voting (operated municipally in places other than Alaska and Maine) accidentally elects Republicans instead of Democrats? Yeah, me neither.

Those who keep up with politics as a way of life realize Ranked Choice Voting was put into place to save Lisa Murkowski’s hide. I’m not sure it will save her the next time, but she also may be waiting, alongside Peltola, to see what happens this November in what has now become a must-watch Senate race thanks to the aforementioned GOP idiocy and the corruption of the state’s courts.

Enter Dan Sullivan. No, not the United States Senator. This Dan Sullivan:

Daniel J. Sullivan, a retired schoolteacher from Petersburg.

Oh, you haven’t heard of him in GOP circles? There’s a good reason why. He wasn’t officially a Republican until he decided to wade into this year’s Senate race. Here is the receipt from KTUU:

On his Republican affiliation — a central question in the state’s investigation — Sullivan has said he registered with the Alaskan Independence Party when he moved to Alaska in 1980, and switched to Republican after the party disbanded earlier this year.

“When I decided to run for office, I chose to do so as a Republican,” Sullivan wrote in his response to Dahlstrom. “My father and grandfather were both Republicans and raised me to believe in compassionate conservatism.”

Everyone knows the decoy Sullivan, who fraudulently even tried to list himself on the ballot with the middle initial of S, like incumbent Senator Dan Sullivan, is a phony. Reasons like this are why the Division of Elections torpedoed his candidacy in June, citing lack of “good faith” and an effort to mislead voters:

This all changed when yet another tyrant in a robe, Superior Court Judge Thomas Matthews, ruled that the Division of Elections doesn’t have the authority to separate “good faith” from “bad faith” and overruled their decision to omit his name from the ballot. This is clearly an operation spearheaded by the traitorous American left and condoned by Peltola, who at least has enough wherewithal to reject Kamala Harris endorsements and act like she gives a rat’s ass about something other than sitting in a position of power.

Peltola is essentially the only viable statewide Democrat in Alaska. The GOP is poised to hold the governorship and Begich, thanks to Peltola’s play for the Senate instead of the House, appears to be among the most likely Republicans to win a decisive race according to my rankings. Peltola cleared a majority of the vote in the open primary in 2024, but still lost her seat to Begich (albeit in a year Trump won the state by more than 13 points), so don’t read too much into this:

It is unclear how much of the phony Sullivan’s support is from Democrats who wanted to make sure he made it into the top four, and thereby into the scam Ranked Choice election in November, and how much may be from people who are too stupid to read about the candidates and recognize the attempted theft of their Senate seat.

The fake Sullivan – for all his protests over the legitimacy of his campaign – has very little discernible difference in the way he presents his campaign. Here are the logos from each man’s website:

The phony’s is on the bottom. Local sources point out that there are no legitimate efforts for voter outreach, even in his hometown on July 4, or in terms of fundraising activities necessary to win such a contested seat. What the phony Sullivan’s clear purpose is looks like this:

Prevent Senator Sullivan from reaching a majority of the vote on the first ballot (he cleared 54% in his 2020 reelection and ran ahead of President Trump).

Seek to finish third in the first round, allowing the fourth-place Democrat eliminated to have his votes go primarily to Peltola.

Be eliminated in the third round of voting and have his votes go to Peltola.

CONCLUSION

Democrats do everything in their power to ensure laws allow for pro-Democrat election outcomes. I do not support abusing law to ensure Republican political victories, but I don’t think that it is beyond expectation for GOP-run states to avoid embracing practices and laws that essentially guarantee their states fall prey to Democrat takeovers as the morons in Alaska have done by introducing Automatic Voter Registration, expanding mail-in balloting, and installing Ranked Choice Voting.

Once these factors meet judicial corruption, all bets are off, and thanks to this perfect storm, there is a race for the Alaska Senate seat that has no business being front and center anywhere. Everyone should be pulling for the DOJ to get to the bottom of this and force the phony Sullivan out before Democrats pull a successful end-around using the rope the GOP wants to hang itself with.

Seth Keshel, MBA is a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy and a retired Army Captain. He publishes Captain K’s Corner on Substack.