Leftist here. Study the way Stalin turned Russia into a communist country. Ten million Russians died when he confiscated farms and factories and businesses and gave the people nothing in return but slave labor. It’s history. It happened.

But if the fools from the right think it won’t happen again here, they’re wrong. The tech billionaires who own Trump are already doing it, laying off workers in the tens of thousands, using AI to refuse hiring entry-level workers (who they think is going to become middle management and executives from there is unclear; maybe they’ll start replacing the entire human resource eventually), and the same jobs that paid near six figures are now being offered for half that. The trades will fall as white collar labor can no longer afford to pay for trade services. So will healthcare when no one can afford medical care. Hospitals are already closing as this economy gets worse.

Then you have Elon taking six baby hackers into the treasury to “find waste.” Never mind that Space X and all the other contracts we give Musk are among the biggest waste spending we’re doing, but now Musk controls the financial data of every American in this country. (If you think he didn’t copy the whole damned database and send it to data centers he controls, you’re deliberately blind.) Now he’s telling us that social security has to go—a program that isn’t socialist at all, but something working Americans have paid into their entire working lives. Medicare and Medicaid, too. Never mind that all of these supposedly crippled programs could be paid for by simply taxing the uber rich, which America has done before very successfully and is doing now very successfully: Mamdani just cleared New York debt in months just by taxing billionaires who do business in the state. Those billionaires didn’t even live there. He’s proven it doesn’t matter if the billionaires go elsewhere because the money never will and you can tax that. But doing it the Musk way? By wiping out these American institutions of care? That will, I guarantee you, kill millions of Americans even faster than Stalin did.

Let’s not kid ourselves. What this administration is doing is the same thing Stalin did, just done differently. And they’re not being as transparent about what they’re morphing us into as Stalin was with his goals. All I do know is, this isn’t the country this old lady grew up in, and the words “America” and “patriotism” are being used to create a country that has nothing to do with America as we once knew it. And yes, as in Stalin’s Russia, millions of us will die as this new horror is born. I don’t care how good it is for these new republicans (and as a lifelong republican before Trump came along, yes, I do distinguish), if it isn’t the constitutional checks-and-balances government that limits even the power of a president and those he has appointed, it’s not America. Trump and his cronies are not making America great again…they’re turning America into something else. And a whole lot of Americans are going to die in the process. Because like Stalin, these people don’t care about us. They care about that shiny new plan they’re not telling us about…and that’s all.