American Chavismo: Lets recall the real existential threats of The Cold War. Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy’s assassination, duck-and-cover drills, “Socialist” dictatorships in our hemisphere. These were not threats of actual socialism but from actual totalitarianism. Nightmarish.

The collective PTSD from that era is real and the association of the word “socialist” with totalitarianism and dictatorship will not be broken. Now, we are still being told repeatedly by Trump pundits that all dems are totalitarian socialists. It’s a hackneyed lie, but it works.

My own Venezuelan mother watched her country get destroyed by Chavez. He incited rage from the poor and uneducated, attacked the press, challenged and removed the checks on his power, used inflammatory language, dominated airwaves, discredited South America’s oldest elections...

...all in the name of “Socialism”. It’s wasn’t socialism. It was a heist. But she’s shook now, because it tore families including hers apart. Now she is convinced mainstream media is “run by a bunch of democrats” who ALL want socialism, and that socialism is the death of freedom.

It is REFLEX. We have to realize what reason and logic are up against: real, decades-long cultural trauma. To many on the far-right, the mask is a symbol of oppression, and that our Democracy is tilted toward that oppression. China is surging. We’re in danger. They see ghosts.

Trumpism uses fear like Chavismo used fear in Venezuela. It worked. The playbook is open for all of us to read. We have to understand it to defeat it and move on. Many Trumpists are legit afraid, and the specter of the USSR is still out there. It’s being conjured for a new heist.

We cannot dismiss the inherent and systemic racism that has been easily weaponized by Trumpists in the application of the Chavez playbook, as was class and racial tension in Venezuela.

To be clear, I’m not defending pure socialism here. Mine is only an attempt to illuminate how this counter-intuition and fear from recent historical trauma along with racism is being weaponized, and ultimately, monetized...

...including Chavismo itself. Trumpists use the specter of Chavez to show the dangers of Leftism, while themselves engaging in its totalitarian behaviors. Ironically, Trump is more like Chavez than any actual socialist is. The flags are different. The ends and means are the same.