I’m not a communist. Not at all. But, boy, do I find it intriguing as shit to learn from evil people who I know have learned from us. Just as the Nazis educated themselves with the theories of some of America’s most heinous scientists and eugenics-supporting fascists, I, too, look at others to learn from them, learning about the bad stuff, not to replicate them, but to identify that in our society. To identify is to work towards their elimination, not like the social justice warriors that GOP-MAGA-types disparage, but to protect civilization from the worst of us. Coincidently GOP-MAGA types.

I endeavored this adventure to take a quick look at Cuba, which I found is not in fact a communist country at all in spite of being run by a party with the word communist in it. As I’ve discovered over the past few years, words in titles are utterly meaningless if used by a politician or an attorney. The best example of that to date is the Trumpstein administration’s Big Beautiful Bill. It was big but beautiful it was not. Quite the opposite. It turned out to be the Big Fugly Bill, one that helped our wealth hoarders the most, and the one that the majority of GOP-MAGA supported. The same is true for the Patriot Act, Citizens United, and many of our other new laws and fascist actions taken since 9/11/01. We now know that Cuba is not the scary commie country that our leaders are portraying yet we continue to let the Republicans leading this nation these days to portray them as savages with some epic need to be lassoed. They are not.

There is a difference, a big difference, between socialism and communism. Cuba is considered a socialist republic. We in America are a constitutional republic. Two very different paths to the same ideal, respectively: the first being based on the equitable distribution of assets that contribute to societal values, while the other is based on a written document that is amended as needed and is supposed to represent the best of societal values. While these are simplistic descriptions of complex political terms, one must start with basics to understand complexities in these systems, complexities such as nuance.

Unlike what GOP-MAGA Speaker Mike Johnson said, no, these subjects are not “all in the same camp.” Socialism and communism are not the same. Now, really MAGA Johnson, did you fail political science?

The upshot is that we can learn from the best of their systems to improve ours. So, what are the basic differences between a socialist republic (Cuba), a constitutional republic (USA), actual communism (China) and, while we’re at it, democratic socialism (DSA), and fascism (Trump)? Let’s start first with that largest of the islands at the head of the Caribbean’s string of isles and every wealth hoarder’s dream of controlling, Cuba.

The Socialist Republic of Cuba

With all our seeming hate towards Cubans in Cuba (because we don’t seem to hate `em in Miami), I wondered: In spite of our repeated, abusive bullying of those poor people over the years, how have they been able to last so long? Do you hear of terrible political problems there anymore? No more regime changes. No more coup d’états. A world-class medical system. A stable economy, that is, unless Americans block them with fiendish abuses. That’s not to say that former president John Kennedy did not have good reason to go after them when he did. What I’m saying is that we don’t have a reason anymore to attack them.

According to a YouTube video released by BreakThrough News, it was the people of Cuba who won their fight against the American-supported, dictatorial Batista regime. They, the Cubans, gave their power to Fidel Castro, who the people believed was far more trustworthy than any American. In retrospect, they were right. Castro committed a coup d’état in his country to overthrow a coup d’état.

Today, Cuba has a new leader, yet us greedy imperialist Americans continue to want to destroy them. Clean your ears, folks in DC. Castro’s gone ya’ll’s!!!

It’s a new day. Cuba has a new leader, one molded by the Castro family to be sure, but one who moved up the ranks in their system of meritocracy, something we once had in the USA. And, yes, authoritarianism is there too. Why is that the problem of Americans? It isn’t. Because that’s what our oligarchs want. It’s the problem of Cubans in Cuba.

Religion & Unity are Oxymoronic

I interject here to bring you good news from above. To all those who enjoy what-aboutisms, here, here!

What about religion!? Religion unites. Right?

Actually …. “In his 1980 book, Journey to Nowhere: A New World Tragedy, the author Shiva Naipaul …” argues that the mass suicide that occurred in Jonestown, South America, for example, “wasn’t just the work of only one man … it was also the product of a morally corrupted environment …. Naipaul first came to understand how ‘the language of religion could be transformed into the language of politics’ in his native Trinidad, where he once saw supporters of a future prime minister holding placards that declared him the Messiah.” GOP-MAGA are doing exactly that with their various AI-generated depictions of Trumpstein as God and all sorts of other messianic images.

Religion by itself, unites itself, but it has never had the ability to unite all, especially after the advent of science. In short, first came religion, because animals choose comfort, comforting religion, was the way, the truth, and the light of the future. Religion’s dogmatic style, however, also served to birth the methodical systems found in all fields of science.

Over the centuries, religion, got a lot right and wrong. For example, what they got right: Ashes to ashes, dust to dust …. While science is often nowhere near as comforting as religion, like religion, science does assure us of an eventual return back from whence we came, that is, back into our universe. (Christians call it heaven.) In the end, none of us need a god anymore because we in the 21^st century know the truth. We arrived at this truth — actually many truths — via science.

As I see it, religion was what man created when we were not yet smart enough to understand anything else. Then came some smarty pants. They were folks who came up with some fuckin’ theories and whom the dogmatic, mostly religious types, eventually persecuted. Religion is what the ancients created to explain their universe. Science is what the maturity of mankind created to explain our universe, that is, without the need for faith. Now, may I direct you to 1 Corinthians 13:11?

When we talk about uniting, it means all of us. No exclusions for any reason. That means, by its very nature and the advent of science in general, religion is no longer able and, in the end, no longer powerful enough to unite us all.

Their own sects? Yes. All of us? No.

Now, there may be an exception for what are called nondenominational sects. And, as for MLK Jr.-type peaceful protests, that can still work with one handicap. Given their track record, we longer live in an age where religious leaders are trusted. This occasion in our history calls for a political leader, an honest political leader, and maybe having the GOP-MAGA out of power for, let’s say, about three, four, five decades. That should be enough time for them to figure out what ethics, morals, honesty, and the US Constitution mean.

Our Constitutional Republic

Many Americans enjoy punching down on others via endless attempts to impose their belief that we were born a Christian nation. Nothing could be further from the truth. We operate under a constitutional republic which means that our constitution is our rule book, not the Bible, nor any other religious book on this planet. It’s purpose was and is — until recently — to protect individual rights and limit government power. It seemed like it was working okay, then came former President Ronald Reagan, the Southern Strategy, Trickle Down Theory, the Tea Party, and eventually GOP-MAGA and their corporate leader. (Oh my! Could it be the ever elusive Q?)

Communism

Communism was a philosophical idea that became an economic ideology that turned into a political theory then into a number of wars. It advocates for a classless society that is accomplished by having all property publicly owned. Classless except for, you know, the richest. Exactly like the oligarchs who run America today!

Communism is mostly associated with heinous leaders in history, the Red Scare, and the McCarthy era. GOP-MAGA-types use this word to mean hellishly evil, which I have yet to find in any fuckin’ dictionary, but anyhoo … They now love flinging this new word, communists, at peeps they used to call libtards.

Don’t hear `em using the word libral anymore. Now, do ja? We be communists now.

Democratic Socialism

I had the recent honor of correcting Florida gubernatorial candidate David Jolly about democratic socialism in Florida after he said something like: They’re inconsequential here. Oh, indeedy, Mr. Jolly? Apparently he did not know that, yes, the party called the Democratic Socialists of America are in fact in Florida. I tell you what, ya’ll’s, he knows that now! Right, Jolly!?

Fascism & Capitalist Dictatorship

Have you ever wondered why it is said that there is no such thing as democracy at work? Employers don’t ask for your vote on projects, hires, policy changes, nor workplace improvements. Then, when their workers unionize, because that is how democracy works, corps kill them.

Fascism is back, folks! This time, however, it has been busy expanding under the radar for the past 45 years, getting organized and getting ready to impose itself and themselves on the rest of us. This time fascism has returned to its roots, an association with corporatism, such as what was present in Benito Mussolini’s day. Today fascism means capitalist dictatorship, courtesy of Mr. Peter Thiel.

Now, please. Don’t underestimate the immense power of the 1%, the wealth hoarders, the psychopathically greedy fucks who keep us feudalistically divided with their polarizing words and actions. We were founded on No Kings, yet here we are, ruled by today’s equivalent, the oligarchs, the ones vying for a modern version of medieval failures. Think Lord & Serf. Today corporations call it the employer/employee relationship.

Our Deteriorating Constitution

“The Constitution we live under is the second attempt at a framework for government. The first, the Articles of Confederation, kept the federal government weaker and the individual states stronger. It quickly became clear that having such a weak central government — i.e., less unity — wasn’t effective for the new country, leading to the Constitution.” (AP, ‘Out of many, one,’ says a US national motto. What does that push for unity mean today?, 4/16/26.)

The word unite does not appear in the Constitution. Instead, it is implied in various phrases, such as its opening line, We the People. The nuance of unity in the Constitution lies in its ability to bring together diverse interests and perspectives. But our Constitution, a living document, is one that is deteriorating due to changing meanings, terribly inaccurate legal interpretations especially by Supreme Court justices, and a significantly less educated American public than what our forefathers foresaw.

A living document is one in which needed changes are periodically used to update the original. For example, policies and procedures manuals are usually considered living as it is necessary to keep them up to date. In our Constitution, those are amendments.

Amendments don’t create problems as do our players with bad faith and the average attorney. For example, when our fearful and excessively religious ancestors allowed our federal government to change our motto from e pluribus unum to In God We Trust in 1956, they gave religion a place in our politics, which our Constitution firmly confutes in the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses. We allowed our “law and order” representatives in Congress to violate the unity on which we were built, the Constitution and the motto on which we were founded.

But don’t believe for a second that our representatives don’t change the meaning of words. Instead, they use legal “interpretations” to change the meaning of those words or even to eliminate whole phrases. Take for example, the NRA, and what they did, directly and indirectly, to our Second Amendment. They took that amendment and completely eliminated the existence of the very first clause, “A well regulated Militia …” This was done not by a making any change to this amendment. It was done by legal interpretation. (This happened in my community of Davenport, Florida, where our attorney changed the meaning of an entire section of our City Charter.)

The slashing of our Constitution is not limited to just the First and Second, the Fourteenth Amendment, too, is under attack as are others. Birth-right citizenship would be no more if the Diddler in Chief had his way. Our GOP-MAGA representatives are working way hard to shred our Constitution: defeating voting rights, calling peaceful protests “terrorist riots,” and relying on Fox’s alternative-facts experts to show them the way.

The worst part is that this changing of the meaning of plain English words has happened so many times in American history, that it appears we have lost the basic intentions of our Founding Fathers starting with the very First Amendment. That includes the sustained violation of the separation of church and state by elected officials from the tippy top of the American hierarchy to the catfish bottom of the Bible Belt. Like the various invaders, pythons and eels, of the Everglades, religion has invaded our Pledge of Allegiance, our public meetings, and our education system all the way up to the tippy top. All we can count on now is a return — not to originalism which revisionist history discombobulates with the contemporary needs of the public — but to a logical, plain English, and common sensical return to reading the Constitution without prejudice.

The Confederacy’s Last Breath

In a fiery hearing, a Louisiana man was heard on video saying, “MAGA is the last breath of the Confederacy.” Amen to that, sir! Abraham Lincoln was the Republican Party’s last great leader, because today’s Grand Ole Party is little more than a cover for Brown Shirts, incels, and GOP sycophants who ignore the fascism existent in their own party.

After the Civil War, the only thing we did wrong was not convict and punish every one of those Confederate traitors, the Lost Causers. They wouldn’t be here today, spouting their stupid conspiracies, had we done something back then. But that was yesterday. Good news is on our horizon.

I’ve been watching the MAGA statistics and they are clearly falling, imperceptibly slow but, over months, the pattern-development is undeniable. House speaker Mike Johnson recently moaned in a publoc confession that if Democrats win this November, half of them hoodlums are going to jail. Awww. poor, pobrecito MAGA men.

Corporate Fascism Begins

It seemed like our Constitution was working for quite some time, then came a Hollywood actor who became a president. Those who voted for him had no idea that he was a gullible old squirt, at least for the most part. He was a reflection of his time, an ignorant, “welfare queen” racist. One positive about his character, though: While naivety of world affairs was apparent, Reagan was nonetheless sincerely interested in improving it.

His total error was on imposing the Trickle Down Theory on American society that self-serving economists insisted he implement. Instead of forcing those bastards to prove that their stupid theory could even work, he gave them a green light to experiment on all of us. That action proved to be the beginning of America’s downfall on the world stage, an experiment that must end now. It was not Trickle Down, as its title suggested in plain English, it was actually Trickle Up, one lie among millions they have told all of us since then. Surely, an attorney was involved in coming up with that name somewhere.

This whole imposing a theory on Americans was repulsive from the start. It was the capitalists’ way of moving our country towards the fascism we are seeing today. Reagan allowed the corporatists to take control of our future because Mr. Gullible was tricked into thinking, then telling the rest of us, that “government is the problem.” He, the leader of government, basically said that he was the problem. Yeah, he did!

To explain, the President of the United States is government. Our elected leaders, from top to catfish bottom, represent their part of our government in every way, exactly like CEO’s and managers represent their companies. Government is by the authority of the people. So, when our elected officials get it wrong, it always impacts us. Under Trumpstein, all of the branches of our government are getting it wrong. That’s not something Americans have ever seen before, except in fiction. I suspect Reagan and his GOP acolytes read 1984 then said, “Hey! Let’s do that.”

Widespread Polarization Begins, Again

Eileen Cheng, a professor of history at Sarah Lawrence College once said, “This polarization, people talk about it like it’s a new thing. But I think it’s really a return back to the way that we were at the beginning of the country.” Now, what were we back then? Hmmmm… History tells us that, back then, it was bad for almost everyone except for the majority of white folks. Just look it up: the indigenous stories, slavery stories, Italians even, and the Poles too. This iteration of our polarization took 45 years to conspire, that is, starting with Ronald Reagan, to become what it is today under our Project 2025 administration.

The cure? “Oftentimes, it’s about stripping back language that clearly triggers reactions in one camp or another. When you really clear that out and talk to people, it’s amazing how much people have in common.” reported Silvia Foster-Frau, Washington Post. Nonetheless, it’s hard, very hard not to eventually punch back when the bullies, the GOP-MAGA types, are actively hunting for people. GOP-MAGA is like the Great White that keeps coming back for you, over and over, but instead of fangs, they bite you with lies, conspiracy theories, alternative facts, and purposely malicious disinformation.

I think one good smack over the head with a giant Constitutional club. Bam! One for each GOP-MAGA idiot. That should do the trick.

Legacy Media’s Aiding & Abetting

Except for ABC, which is now suing the FCC over the First Amendment, the legacy press plays into Trumpstein’s antics. Unfortunately for the rest of us, while the media has been busy stoking and misdirecting our attention, the federal government has been busy riding roughshod over states’ and individuals’ rights. A new, independent media has noticed, has access, and is now actively reporting to us what is actually going on.

When I rub my genie-in-a-bottle, I ask that our new kids on the block, a new branch of the Fourth Estate, strip back their use of words that polarize, as Cheng suggested. These should start with left, right, liberal, conservative, and other overly simplistic categorizations of complex points of view. It wouldn’t be self-censorship by the press. It would be improving their professionalism by not participating in the small-town language of rednecks, gossipers, and the uneducated.

For far too long, these are the people who have ruled our America: the religious right, the dogma mamas, the pious poors giving their pittances to wealth hoarders, then other wealth hoarders taking from them via wage theft, and the Reagan delicious-religious trying to impose their Christian thinking on the rest of us, starting with the concept that we were founded on their god. With the media’s mighty cooperation and numerous appeasements to our Bully in Chief, we could face that sort of a future too, a theocracy, just like Iran, where rights are taken away to appease one religion’s god.

Legacy media can do something to avert this end from happening. They can start educating the public. Not just news but background information by competent and objective, non-polarizing newscasters. American legacy media needs to do better, much better, lest the independents take over with Truth, leaving legacy gone forever.

What Now?

First, what you don’t do: Don’t do what the Prairieland Nine did. Don’t shoot your guns, especially not at police officers, don’t light explosive substances like Molotov cocktails and fireworks, don’t dress in AntiFa-black, and don’t pretend for even one second that you are part of that mythical group the GOP-MAGA recently named a terrorist organization. Americans, like the Prairieland Nine, are getting sentenced for 30 and 100 years for their so-called association to an organization that the conspiracy theorists of GOP-MAGA made-up, specifically to lock-up folks who are anti-fascist.

Americans! We need to stop accusing GOP-MAGA individuals and telling them just how bad they are. I suspect they know that by now. What we need to do is ask them questions when something doesn’t make sense to us. Question relentlessly. Patriotic Americans suspend judgement on our fellow idiots, because every human being demands, nay, deserves respect ….

…. except for pedophiles. But seriously.

We don’t have a Fidel Castro to help us win over the corporate powers that have taken control over all aspects of normal American life. We lost the power to stop and punish all who attempted a coup d’état on January 6, 2021, what they now call nothing more than an insurrection because of something we didn’t do a long time ago. (Reference: The Confederacy’s Last Breath above.)

But we have many Americans who are interested in leading us out of this chaos, many who’d be willing to lead us into a victory against the wealth hoarders and epic criminals in the GOP-MAGA party. Some leaders come to mind: AOC, Kamala, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Gavin Newsome and the upcoming POTUS hopefuls, like Jasmine Crockett and The New on Stage Lady Angie Nixon. A law-abiding Nixon? History correcting a bad, white man yesterday with a good, black woman today?

While we may want a leader, we really don’t need one. Why? Because we have the Constitution. It applies to all of us. Like the First Amendment protests during the Vietnam War that helped to bring an end to that war, that application of the Constitution’s plain English language has united us in the past. It can again.

In an MS Now ad, Rachel Maddow mentions the nuance of our Constitution in this respect. She says that we will win via our democratic principles. Those are located in our Constitution.

The greatest nuance of our Constitution is that we can use it to save our republic, to save ourselves. I say, Let’s do that!