Newsweek
Op-Ed: Sen. Rick Scott
May 14, 2021

Over his first 100 days, Joe Biden embarked on a mission to fundamentally change America. He discarded the carefully cultivated image of a moderate dealmaker that he campaigned on and embodied for most of his 50-year career in politics, and embraced a newfound persona as the next FDR.

He's received plaudits from socialist Bernie Sanders, "squad" member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Elizabeth Warren, who recently said that we're so close to enacting the socialist agenda she's long advocated for that she can "taste it."

Unfortunately for the American people, Biden's "new New Deal" is taking our country down a path all too familiar to those who study history. While Democrats talk incessantly about supposed "systemic racism" lurking around every corner, the real enemy we face is the systemic socialism that Joe Biden and his Democratic allies on Capitol Hill and in state capitols around the country are foisting upon us.

Joe Biden has proposed more than $6 trillion in new spending this year alone, funded by trillions of dollars in new taxes and trillions added to the national debt. It's redistribution of wealth, pure and simple. His plan is to create a system in which some Americans are forced to surrender half of their income to the government, where taxes are levied not simply on income, but also on investments, transactions, capital gains and of course death.

Democrats want to punish success, taking more money from high earners and—don't fool yourself—middle class families, as well as large and small businesses, to fund a massive expansion of the welfare state, making more and more Americans dependent on government assistance in various forms. Oh, and their favorite special interests get a cut, too. Federal bureaucracies, liberal politicians, Silicon Valley, big unions—they're all benefiting from the Democrats' largesse.

Joe Biden and the Democrats are also attacking the First and Second Amendment rights of Americans. Socialists worldwide always cancel free speech and take away guns from their citizens. They're working with woke CEOs, Hollywood, Silicon Valley and academia to tell us what we can say and even believe. They see themselves as the new arbiters of truth. No longer is the family, the church or the community at the center of our culture. Democrats and their allies are creating a new town square where they know what's best, and there's no room for the values that made America the world's greatest superpower and the envy of all nations.

Redistribution of wealth, loss of free speech, disarming the population, attacking religion and religious freedom—this is systemic socialism. It's what Joe Biden and the Democrats are trying to implement right out in the open.

Joe Biden doesn't call what he's doing "socialism" because he knows it would be unpopular. Democrats and their media partners also reject that moniker, noting that socialism has historically been defined as collective ownership (usually spearheaded by the government) of the means of production. And that's not what Democrats are doing.

Isn't it? What does collective ownership of the means of production mean in the information age, rather than the industrial age when European nations tried and failed to implement a socialist utopia?

The political party that controls the White House and both houses of Congress is proposing redistributing wealth to create a massive cradle-to-the-grave welfare state. It's working with allies in government, corporate America, unions, Hollywood and academia to tell every American what they can say, think and believe. Together they're inciting mobs to "cancel" people who disagree with them or who dare speak up against the cultural and economic values that they espouse. They're redefining language to fit the demands of a cultural agenda that rejects the biology of males and females, defines everyone by their race, gender or sexual orientation and demeans faith and the nuclear family.

If that's not owning the means of production in the information age, I don't know what is.

This is the Biden agenda. This is systemic socialism, and none of it should come as any surprise. Kamala Harris said so, in slightly more nuanced words. She said our goal should no longer be equal opportunity for all, as this great American experiment has always promoted. No, the goal should now be "equality of outcome."

The words sound nice, but it's just a fancier way of saying what Margaret Thatcher warned more than 30 years ago was the true goal of socialists. They would "rather that the poor were poorer, provided that the rich were less rich."

Make no mistake; if we allow Democrats to take us down this path, the American people will suffer, just as people have in every socialist experiment.

We have to fight Joe Biden's systemic socialism with everything we've got.

Rick Scott, a Republican, is the junior U.S. senator from Florida.

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