October 29, 2026 (Cover Image Credit: Gem State Chronicle)

By: Gem State Chronicle Publisher Brian Almon

Seven minutes after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was declared the winner of Brazil’s presidential election, a corrupt judge ordered the seizure of right-wing challenger Flávio Bolsonaro’s passport. Under socialist governments, losing an election often means losing your freedom, as Bolsonaro’s father Jair learned after Lula ousted him in 2022. The elder Bolsonaro remains under house arrest right now, but his son has seemingly avoided that fate, escaping first to Argentina with his family, then flying to the United States in an operation apparently coordinated with the U.S. State Department and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Democrats in America celebrated Lula’s victory and condemned Bolsonaro’s request for asylum. Congressman Ro Khanna of California characterized Lula’s victory as “fighting back against extremism” and the opposition as “authoritarian leaders” who “always attack democracy.” Congressman Joaquin Castro of Texas tweeted that “losing an election is not grounds for asylum.” Flávio Bolsonaro is apparently the only person in the Southern Hemisphere that Democrats don’t think should be allowed into the United States.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York said that “Brazil showed the world that the will of the people is stronger than the authoritarians who try to suppress it.” Notice how, from the socialist’s perspective, “the people” are always on their side, and anyone who opposes them is “authoritarian,” despite the fact that Lula’s regime is authoritarian by definition: censoring free speech, exerting government power against private enterprise, and arresting political opponents. Socialists must always maintain an external enemy who is to blame for everything that inevitably goes wrong with socialist countries.

American Democrats play the same game. Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois recently claimed that he rebuilt his state “after years of GOP dysfunction,” despite the fact that Democrats have been in control of Illinois for more than two decades. Republican Bruce Rauner was in office for four years in the 2010s, but Democrats still controlled both chambers of the Legislature during each of those years.

George Orwell explained the strategy in Nineteen Eighty-Four, showing how the Party maintained the fiction of the evil Emmanuel Goldstein, always lurking just out of reach and sabotaging everything good the Party was trying to do. Socialist leaders like Lula can blame all of their country’s problems on opponents like Bolsonaro and use their control of the government to persecute their political opponents. Consider how the Biden Administration used the January 6th protests at the Capitol as a pretext to go after not only those who were present that day, but also President Donald Trump, his attorneys, and many others connected to the Trump Administration. Democrats used every possible lever to prosecute Trump, hoping to put him in prison for the rest of his life, while Democratic officials attempted to remove his name from the ballot in states under their control.

Those attempts failed in the United States, but could they succeed in the future?

There’s a saying on the right that you can vote your way into communism, but you can’t vote your way out. Once leftists, socialists, and communists have power, they rarely give it up willingly. Their typical strategy is to subvert as many democratic institutions as possible, including the judiciary, in such a way as to force the right to break constitutional norms to stop them. Indeed, it was Lula’s former attorney, now on the Brazilian Supreme Court, who ordered polling places to stay open an extra two hours, despite locations in Bolsonaro-heavy regions having already shut down. It was a judge who ordered Bolsonaro to be detained following the election.

Here in America, we’ve had judges—many of whom are foreign-born—issue injunctions meant to stop the president from enforcing immigration law or fighting violent crime in our biggest cities. Conservatives who believe in the institutions of our republic find themselves caught in a state of cognitive dissonance as those institutions are slowly and inexorably turned against the republic itself.

Liberal history records men like Francisco Franco of Spain and Augusto Pinochet of Chile as villains in the same category as Adolf Hitler because they engaged in revolutions against communists who managed to take control of their countries. Sen. Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin is also labeled a villain, with his very name becoming a synonym for a baseless witch hunt, because he recognized that communists were busy infiltrating the United States as well.

Lula’s victory, whether legitimate or not, is the exception to the last two years of right-wing wins in Latin America. One theory I’ve seen is that the shutdown of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) stopped the flow of American tax dollars that was propping up these Latin American socialist dictatorships. Obviously, the Trump Administration has also been proactive in shutting them down—see the black-bagging of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro—but it’s a striking theory. When Lula defeated Jair Bolsonaro in 2022, there were many claims of election irregularities, but the Biden Administration came down firmly on Lula’s side and refused any support for Bolsonaro’s challenge. What a difference a new president can make.

Wouldn’t it be something if it turned out that socialism in the Western Hemisphere only survived this long due to money funneled from American taxpayers?

Consider Cuba, which is the definition of a failed state. Following Fidel Castro’s revolution in 1959, Cuba became a leading supporter of socialist dictatorships throughout the world, with figures like Che Guevara exporting revolution to other countries. Yet by the end of the 20th century, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, Cuba had drifted listlessly into poverty and impotence. This week, an independent journalist submitted an op-ed accusing Sen. Jim Risch, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, of abdicating his duty to the people of Idaho and America by refusing to fight against the policies of President Trump and Secretary Rubio regarding Cuba:

Whatever Risch thinks of Cuba’s government, punishing an entire population doesn’t serve Idaho or this country. As I’ve argued in The American Conservative, our policy fuels migration, undermines anti-drug cooperation, pushes Cuba closer to Russia and China, denies opportunities to American businesses and wastes taxpayer dollars.

I agreed to publish it in the name of open discourse, but I want to be clear that I disagree with the conclusion. The best thing for the people of Cuba—and America—is for the communist regime to be toppled and replaced by an open and republican form of government. I support the approach being taken by President Trump, Secretary Rubio, and Sen. Risch in squeezing the life out of the corrupt communists who have exploited the people of Cuba for generations. The Castro regime—first under Fidel, then under his brother Raúl, who is technically retired—has shown itself incapable of providing for the people it claims to champion. Even The Atlantic—very much a left-wing outlet—published an article this week about how the Cuban regime has all but collapsed:

No one can say when or how that transition will happen. Donald Trump may or may not have “the honor of taking Cuba,” as he boasted after imposing an oil blockade on the island earlier this year. The Cuban regime has stifled any viable domestic opposition. But the withering of the state—a process that has been under way for decades—has accelerated, and is shocking to see up close. The ration cards that used to guarantee basic foodstuffs for every Cuban had been blank for weeks when I visited in August. Police and soldiers were once ubiquitous throughout the country, but I saw hardly any.

The author, Robert Worth, points out that, contrary to claims that the embargo is to blame for Cuba’s impoverishment, the Trump Administration sent $100 million to the island on the condition that it be administered and distributed by churches, not the socialist government. Worth also says that the Cubans he met don’t blame Trump or America for their woes, but lay the blame on their own government:

During nine days of travel around the island, I did not meet a single person who blamed Donald Trump or the United States for their situation. I sometimes reminded them about the blockade Trump had started earlier this year, cutting Cubans off from the cheap oil that Venezuela had been supplying before the U.S. military captured Nicolás Maduro in January. Hadn’t things gotten worse since then?

“I don’t see any change since January,” a retired engineer named Guillermo Almeida told me. “That oil from Venezuela wasn’t reaching the people anyway.” He and others said that the more important turning point was the coronavirus pandemic, which destroyed Cuba’s tourism industry and shrank the value of remittances from family members abroad that many Cubans depend on, exposing more fully a state that had long been depleted. Another man put it differently: “It seems to us that the real embargo is inside of Cuba.”

Cuba and Brazil are warning signs for America. Socialism does not lead to prosperity, but to tyranny, poverty, and despair. Earlier this year, I wrote about the dangers of hyperbole, and how politicians who constantly warn that socialism is just around the corner can damage their own credibility. It’s true—we’re not going to transform into Soviet Russia tomorrow if we don’t immediately abolish public schools, welfare, and the grocery tax. However, we must still remain cognizant of the specter on the horizon.

In 1910, Theodore Roosevelt spoke to French students at the Sorbonne, explaining how a functioning republic required virtuous citizens. Seven years before the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, Roosevelt warned about the effect of socialism on nations:

The deadening effect on any race of the adoption of a logical and extreme socialistic system could not be overstated; it would spell sheer destruction; it would produce grosser wrong and outrage, fouler immorality, than any existing system.

In 2026, we have the benefit of more than a century of socialist experiments throughout the world. Socialism and communism have brought misery and death to countless millions, from Russia to North Korea to Cuba to Venezuela, yet we still have Democratic candidates espousing socialism in America. They promise everything, but once in power, deliver nothing but death and destruction. Socialism doesn’t work, which means socialist leaders must continue cracking down on real or imagined enemies to maintain their own power.

The modern Democratic Party has embraced socialism in a way that would make John F. Kennedy and Frank Church roll in their graves. Voting for Democrats today is voting to send Idaho and America down the path of the totalitarianism of Communist China, the tyranny playing out before our eyes in Brazil today, or the misery experienced by the people of Cuba for generations. Avoiding that future is as simple as casting your vote.

About Brian Almon

Brian Almon is the Editor of the Gem State Chronicle. He also serves as Chairman of the District 14 Republican Party and is a trustee of the Eagle Public Library Board. He lives with his wife and five children in Eagle.

Editor’s note:  This article originally appeared in the Gem State Chronicle.  I encourage our readers to visit their website and consider subscribing.  Find this and other informative articles at the Gem State Chronicle here: About – Gem State Chronicle