In one of the most ironic editorials I’ve ever read, the editors at the Chicago Tribune are warning the residents of New York City not to elect Zohran Mamdani because as they say, they’ve “seen this movie before” and “the ending isn’t pretty.”

The “no s**t Sherlock” expression comes to mind.

The Tribune editors offered a “learn from our mistakes” perspective, specifically warning fellow progressives about the danger of installing socialists with too-good-to-be-true promises as they’ve already been there and done that when they elected Brandon Johnson to office—Johnson has been an absolute cluster for the city and its people.

Again, no s**t, this has always been the case with socialism, and that’s not hyperbole.

They want to talk about having “seen this movie before” as if we haven’t been saying that exact thing the entire time.

We’ve been forced to watch this movie for more than 150 years, because progressive idiots both refuse to listen to our warnings, and are incapable of connecting the past with the present. We told them not to elect Brandon Johnson too, but with their heads full of nothing and an air of pseudo-superiority, they did it anyway.

Here’s a quick rundown of how many times we’ve seen this movie:

Abraham Lincoln and his full-blown support for what we now call corporate welfare? When Lincoln first ran for the state legislature, the first thing he addressed in his introductory speech was federal subsidies for “internal improvements.” Around five years later, with Lincoln leading the campaign, Illinois set aside $12 million for these projects, which Lincoln’s own law partner, William Herndon, described as “reckless and unwise.” The program was a massive failure. Here’s how Lincoln’s lawyer colleagues, who eventually served as personal secretaries to the White House, described the boondoggle: “a load of debt that crippled for many years the energy of the people, a few miles of embankments that the grass hastened to cover….” Herndon summed it all up when he recorded that Lincoln’s socialist visions collided with reality and left nothing but “enormous debt and an empty treasury.” Sounds about right.

What about Joseph Stalin? His socialist sins are much more well-known than Lincoln’s, because Stalin’s resulted in the gory and brutal deaths of millions, whether by starvation or by state murder.

Hugo Chávez?

Che Guevara? Fidel Castro? I just started reading a book by Humberto Fontova about the “real” Che, and the horrors of the socialist-Marxist regime had me in tears in the first few pages—I had to switch to a romantasy to pull myself out of the pit of despair into which Fontova’s book threw me.

There’s something called reality, a place that progressive ideologies have clearly never trod, and it’s the missing link between socialist ideas and why they always fail: eventually you run out of other people’s money…policies built on theft will not usher in prosperity…stealing from the producers to pay for parasites will never enrich the working class…and on and on and on.

Will they ever listen? Because Mamdani has “surging support” in the race, and has pulled ahead of Andrew Cuomo.

Image: Bingjiefu He, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, unaltered.