The Tea Party Wanted Freedom. The DSA Wants a Babysitter.
This is gonna be a long one, but it's critically important – especially for youngsters whose public school indoctrination has left them ignorant of our founding history and reality.
So grab a big cup of coffee or tall lemonade and settle in.
I've been in the political trenches for over 30 years. I've seen a lot of movements come and go.
One of them changed everything: the Tea Party, on the right, a decade and a half ago.
Now there's a new one rising on the left, the DSA, and it hasn't remade the Democrat Party yet.
But make no mistake, it's building fast, and if it does take hold the way the Tea Party did, it will be very dangerous for this country.
I didn't just watch the Tea Party from the sidelines. I was there at the very beginning.
I served as master of ceremonies for the first Tea Party rally in Nevada, out at Sunset Park in Las Vegas, with Herman Cain as our keynote speaker.
I remember the crowd that day. Regular people. Small business owners. Retirees. Moms with kids on their shoulders.
Nobody paid them to show up. They came because they were fed up.
So when people ask me if the Tea Party and the DSA are the same thing – just two angry mobs, one red and one blue – I can tell you from firsthand experience: they are not the same.
Not even close.
The Tea Party Wanted to Be Left Alone
Remember how the Tea Party started?
Regular folks got mad. Not because Republicans in Washington disagreed with them. They got mad because Republicans wouldn’t fight for what they claimed they believed in.
Mitt Romney lost in 2012 running a soft, cautious campaign. Conservatives watched a winnable election slip away because their own party wouldn't throw a punch. That frustration built and built.
Then Donald Trump showed up and did something nobody in the GOP had done in years. He fought back. Against Democrats. Against the media. Against his own party's leadership when he had to.
That's what the Tea Party was really about. Not a 40-point policy paper. It was a gut check. Stop apologizing and start fighting. Get government out of our hair, out of our wallets, and out of our lives.
Lower taxes. Less spending. Secure the border. Enforce the law.
Grover Norquist, who backed the Tea Party from day one, wrote a whole book about this called “Leave Us Alone.”
That's the title. That's the message. Millions of Americans don't want government's help. They just want government to get out of the way.
The DSA Wants Government to Know Best
Now look at the DSA. Their wish list reads like a different country's constitution, not ours.
Government-run healthcare. Free college for everyone. Rent control on your apartment. Abolish ICE. Abolish prisons. Abolish the Senate. Abolish the Supreme Court.
Read that list again. That's not a policy platform. That's a demolition plan for the country our founders built.
Our whole system was designed around one idea. Power corrupts, no matter who holds it.
So the founders built walls around government power. Checks and balances. Separate branches. A Bill of Rights that's really just a list of things government isn't allowed to do to you.
The DSA doesn't want to work inside those walls. They want to tear them down.
They think the problem isn't government power. It's that the wrong people have it. Give it to us instead, they say, and everything will be fine.
Folks, that's the same promise every failed experiment in the last hundred years has made. And it NEVER ends with everybody equal and happy. It ends with somebody else deciding what you're allowed to have.
Here's the part conservatives need to understand.
Plenty of Democrat candidates running today won't call themselves DSA. Some of them know good and well that “abolish the Senate” or “abolish the Supreme Court” is too radical to say out loud in a general election.
So they don't say it. They keep their distance from the label.
But listen to what they actually believe, not what they call themselves. They believe government, not you, should make the big decisions about your money and your life.
And they're more than happy to run on class warfare, rich versus poor, landlord versus renter, “your fair share” versus “greed,” even while they keep the DSA name at arm's length.
The label is optional. The mindset isn't.
That's who Nevada conservatives are actually up against in this year’s races, whether the candidate wears the DSA badge proudly – like Democrat Assembly District 41 candidate Vinny Spotleson – or hides it – like Democrat Assembly District 9 candidate Ryan Hampton.
Exhibit A: “Check Your Mailbox”
You don't have to take my word for any of this. Just look at what's happening in New York City right now, under socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
This week, Mamdani took to social media to gloat about a brand new “pied-à-terre” tax hitting anyone who owns a second home in the city worth more than $5 million.
Here's exactly what he posted, word for word:
“If you have a second home in New York City worth more than $5M, check your mailbox when you're back in the five boroughs, because you've got mail. Today, we sent notification letters to property owners, letting them know that our new pied-à-terre tax is coming soon. The best city in the world deserves the best parks, libraries, and schools in the world. That's only possible when we all pay our fair share.”
If you have a second home in New York City worth more than $5M, check your mailbox when you’re back in the five boroughs — because you've got mail.
Today, we sent notification letters to property owners, letting them know that our new pied-à-terre tax is coming soon.
The best…
— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@NYCMayor) July 23, 2026
Read that again.
A sitting mayor, mailing out tax notices like they're gotcha letters, and bragging about it publicly, gleefully, like he just won a game.
That's not policy. That's class warfare with a smile on it.
And it's exactly the mindset I've been talking about this whole column. Government decides what's “fair.” Government decides who's paying “their share.”
You don't get a vote in either decision. You just get the letter.
This isn't some hypothetical, either. It's happening right now, in America's biggest city, run by a mayor the DSA is proud to claim as their own.
The Village People Want More Than Your Taxes
You've heard the phrase before. Hillary Clinton wrote a whole book about it back in 1996 called “It Takes a Village.”
Sounds warm and fuzzy on a bumper sticker. But strip away the flowery language and here's what it really means.
Your family isn't enough. Your church isn't enough. Your own two hands aren't enough.
You need the government “village” to raise your kids, run your healthcare, and manage your money for you.
That's not a new idea, either. It's a very old one.
Karl Marx put it plainer than anybody, well over a century ago: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”
Government decides what you're able to give. Government decides what you're allowed to need. You just show up and do what you're told.
That's the DSA platform, dressed up in modern language for people who've never had to live under it.
“Free” Always Has a Price Tag – They Just Don't Put Your Name On It
Here's the sales pitch. Free healthcare. Free college. Higher wages for everyone. Sounds great, right?
Nothing is free. Somebody always pays. Here's how it really works.
Back in 1990, Congress slapped a big tax on yachts to “soak the rich.”
Guess what happened. Rich people just stopped buying yachts.
The people who lost their jobs weren't rich. They were boat builders. Regular guys with tool belts, welding torches and mortgages. Thousands of them got laid off.
Congress had to repeal the tax a few years later because it wrecked a whole industry and barely raised any money.
That's the pattern. Every. Single. Time.
Tax the rich, and the rich change their behavior. The bill lands on somebody else. Usually somebody who can least afford it.
Same story with a lot of the “living wage” mandates you hear pushed today.
Force labor costs up fast enough, and businesses don't just eat the cost quietly. They raise prices. They cut hours. They install a kiosk instead of hiring a teenager for his first job.
Go into a fast food place today and count how many registers are actual humans versus touchscreens. That didn't happen by accident.
Every DSA promise works the same way. Somebody, somewhere, pays for “free.” The DSA just doesn't tell you who.
We've Already Run This Experiment – More Than Once
This isn't a guess. We don't have to wonder what happens when government owns the factories and sets the prices. We've watched it happen, over and over, in country after country.
Empty shelves. Long lines. Capital and talent fleeing for the exits.
And eventually, government has to force people to stay and comply, because the system stops working on its own.
Compare that to what free people and free markets have built right here.
The highest standard of living in human history, built by regular people chasing opportunity, not by bureaucrats handing out government permission slips.
DSA supporters will tell you they're not talking about Cuba or Venezuela. They'll point to places like Sweden or Denmark instead. Here's what they don't mention.
Those countries pair their generous benefits with free markets, low taxes on business, and no government-mandated minimum wage at all.
That's not the DSA platform. That's closer to the opposite of it.
America's First Socialist Experiment Nearly Starved Settlers to Death
Here's a piece of American history our kids don't get taught anymore, and they need to hear it. It's the real story behind the very first Thanksgiving.
When the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth in 1620, they didn't start with private farms. They started with a communal system.
Everybody worked the land together. Everybody's crops went into a common storehouse. Everybody got an equal share, whether they worked hard or barely worked at all.
Sound familiar?
It nearly killed them.
Governor William Bradford wrote it down himself in his own journal.
The system bred “confusion and discontent.” Able-bodied men resented working hard while others coasted on the same rations. Crops came up short. People starved. For three straight years.
So in 1623, Bradford scrapped it. He gave every family its own plot of land. Work it yourself, keep what you grow.
Bradford wrote that the change “had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious.”
Suddenly there was more corn than the colony knew what to do with. That harvest is the reason we celebrate Thanksgiving today.
Not communal farming. Private property.
Four hundred years later, the DSA wants us to try the first three years all over again.
“You Eventually Run Out of Other People's Money”
Nobody ever explained the whole problem with socialism better than Margaret Thatcher did back in 1976, in a British TV interview, years before she became Prime Minister.
Her exact words: “The trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money.”
That's it. That's the whole flaw, in one sentence.
Every socialist promise, free healthcare, free college, guaranteed income, sounds wonderful right up until the bill comes due. And the bill always comes due.
You can tax the rich, you can tax businesses, you can print money and call it something else.
But eventually, there's nobody left to squeeze, and the whole scheme collapses on top of the people it promised to help the most.
Two Different Bets on Human Nature
Here's the real difference, boiled all the way down.
The Tea Party bet that free people, left alone, will build something great, same as those Pilgrim families did the minute they got their own land to work.
The DSA is betting that if you just hand government enough power and put the “right” people in charge, this time it'll work out differently from every other time in history.
History says otherwise. Every time.
The Tea Party wanted to hold politicians accountable to the Constitution we already have.
The DSA wants to rewrite it, or just get rid of the parts that are inconvenient.
I stood on that stage at Sunset Park all those years ago because I believed regular people, left alone by their government, will always build something better than any bureaucrat could plan for them.
I still believe it today.
Leave Us Alone? Or Government Knows Best? That's the real choice in front of America.
One movement asked for your freedom back. The other is asking you to trade it in, a little at a time, always with a good excuse, always with someone else's money.
I know which side of that trade I'm on.
Our kids need to hear this history.
Decades of public schools skipping over the failures of socialism, and skipping straight to how “unfair” capitalism supposedly is, have left a whole generation of young voters defenseless against a very old, very bad idea wearing new clothes.
It's on us to tell them the truth – before the DSA tells them a fairy tale instead.
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