It’s not often the White House highlights a Newsweek cover, but if you go to the official White House site, that’s where you’ll find the October 23 cover for the legacy magazine. It depicts, in Soviet design style, the following figures in full communist attire and gray uniforms: New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, and his BFF, America hater Hasan Piker. Piker, by the way, often wears that exact same communist uniform in real life.

For most Americans born before Sept. 11, 2001, appearing on a Newsweek cover like this would not only be damning, but would also signal that the magazine and the rest of the country don’t want your side to win any elections. But it’s not quite like that in 2026.

A whole generation that’s come of age since that time has no concept of how dehumanizing and destructive socialism is when it’s in power.

Normally, a single magazine cover is nothing to get overly concerned about, but the White House is rightly taking this very seriously, because this is about more than one magazine cover. That cover is a leading indicator that Americans are taking the threat of socialism too lightly.

A coordinated campaign is underway to sanitize, normalize, and romanticize one of history’s most dangerous and lethal ideologies. Newsweek is currently running a ‘little red test’ that asks about oat milk, shorter workweeks, and tote bags — then scores readers on how ready they are for an ‘American socialist revolution,’” the White House’s landing page says under a banner headline that reads: “It’s Not a ‘Socialist Revolution.’ It’s Misery, Starvation, and Death.

If you went to public school any time after 2000, you may not have even taken a history class. If you did, it’s highly unlikely that the lefties who taught you covered how many Soviet citizens died under Josef Stalin.

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Under Stalin, roughly 1.7 million Soviet citizens died in gulags from 1930 to 1953. That doesn’t include the roughly 5 million to 7 million who died from famine as a result of socialist policies.

Yale historian Timothy Snyder has estimated that Stalin’s regime deliberately murdered about 6 million Soviet citizens.

As leftists often tell us any time we point out the failures of socialism, “That’s because it’s never been tried the right way before.”

Let’s see whether the leader of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) got it right. Mao Zedong’s kill numbers are from the low “tens of millions” to upward of 80 million.  All were his own people. No one can get a very accurate count for how many he killed, because the best possible sources were killed.

As with Russia, Mao’s weapon of choice was famine – letting people starve to death.

Historians say that under Mao, his people suffered from the deadliest famine in recorded history. They blame “collectivization,” falsified food production data and reports, suppression (censorship) of accurate information, and general mismanagement.

The people behind the White House website got it right. Socialism kills. It kills intentionally, and it kills unintentionally. Either way, when socialist leaders do things that end up killing millions, one thing that never changes is that they don’t care. They don’t care that it happened. They don’t care who died. They don’t care about the lies or empty promises they made to secure power.

And so, when the common people start to drop dead because of failed socialist policies, and leaders make no real attempt to keep their promises, those same psychopaths just look the other way.

Young Americans who make up Generation Z cannot comprehend that the socialists they love and support would ever not care about them. After all, they promised a better world. They promised that once capitalism is defeated, America would become a utopia.

Of course, young Americans aren’t the only ones placing such blind trust in socialism. Leftist women in general, and wine moms specifically, see it the same way. But wait, there are more! Throw in other members of the left’s victimhood coalition—transgender people, gay people, Black people, Hispanics, the disabled, prisoners, ex-cons, etc.—and you have a real patchwork of people counting on socialism to work.

What none of them see coming is that when socialism fails, and it always does, the leaders already know whom to blame: conservatives and Republicans, all because they resisted the socialist wave and made it difficult to actually execute socialism the right way.

What’s truly scary is that the Democrats aren’t even hiding it anymore. Candidates are running as members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). They’re no longer hiding behind a climate change agenda to backdoor socialist policies that take away constitutional freedoms and drive up the cost of everything.

Anyone who is on Medicare, or anyone who has helped a family member who is on Medicare, knows that the “Medicare for All” campaign promise from El-Sayed is full of holes (and full of something else, too). Medicare doesn’t come close to the standard of health insurance you’re used to. If you’re on Medicare and want quality care and want to avoid the poorhouse when you get sick or end up in the hospital, you need to pay for supplemental insurance.

El-Sayed is counting on voters to remain clueless on this issue so that they can believe he’s going to get them free health care that’s no different from what they now have.

This is much more than a numbers issue, but still, according to the White House, “A new report from the Council of Economic Advisers puts the ten-year cost of the socialist agenda at $49 trillion, or as much as $400,000 per American household.” The Trump administration then added, “Mortgage rates would soar past 12%, millions of jobs would vanish, and productivity would collapse as empty shelves, rationed care, and the slow grind of state control replace the abundance of American exceptionalism.”

Those are the numbers, but the reality is much more grave, particularly for young people who could end up living more of their lives under socialist policies than under our current, largely democratic and capitalist systems.

When you enact communist policies, you remove any incentive for people to treat other people more humanely. In the very beginning, it starts with poor customer service, because no one is paid to care. Imagine every establishment you enter operating just like the DMV or the post office.

Ultimately, it ends with a society that has devalued human life to the point where the most common treatment you’ll get at the doctor’s office is a denial of care. When you go to the grocery store, you’ll find a scarcity of food, empty shelves, a dollar that’s worthless, and skyrocketing prices. You won’t be able to afford a house or kids, and certainly not a vacation or a new car.

If you know someone who’s considering a vote for one of these rabid DSA members, we’re quickly getting past the live-and-let-vote phase. It’s time to find the fad voters in your life and make it clear to them what’s different this time around.

Socialism cannot work in a free society. And it doesn’t work in an unfree society, because human nature takes over. Once you’ve submitted yourself completely to the state, as socialism demands, a handful of people at the top will declare themselves rulers over you. No longer are you a free citizen. Now you are a comrade, which is a nice way of calling you a “subject.” And you will have no choice but to trust people who cannot be trusted.

Worst of all, you will have no recourse. You voted all of that away when you voted for socialism, and now you have to obey your leaders and accept the consequences.