Not all socialists are scammers. Many are just deluded.

But in practice socialism is everywhere and always a scam.

I was reminded of this over the weekend by the story of Stacy Davis Gates, the current head of the Chicago Teachers’ Union.

Gates is many things, most of them awful. A BLM admirer, an “anti-racist” and anti-capitalist activist, and a die-hard opponent of school choice who argues that people send their kids to private schools because they are fascists trying to escape the Black and Brown people around them.

Karen wrote a great piece over the weekend on the story, hitting most of the high points. Others have had their say as well.

The hypocrisy is stunning, of course. There is something particularly striking about a person who claims to be a moral exemplar beclowning themself in this way. Gates has invited ridicule and richly deserves it.

Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates has called school choice racist and made it her mission to kill an Illinois scholarship program for low-income children. So how did Ms. Gates explain enrolling her son in Catholic school?
. https://t.co/N4gSrrQ1cM via @WSJopinion

— Kyle Smith (@rkylesmith) September 11, 2023

It would be a mistake to consider that Gates is simply a hypocrite, because she and her allies are in fact much much worse than that.

She and her compatriots have self-consciously chosen to sacrifice the children of Chicago for their own gain, just as has been the case of every leader of a successful socialist movement has since its inception. Gates has power and money only because she is an effective advocate for socialism, and a particularly vicious opponent of people pushing to free the children of Chicago from the cesspool of the Chicago Public Schools.

She knows that. She knows it well enough that she won’t subject her own child to the deprivation she demands others be subject to.

Gates, who insists that people who demand options for the children of Chicago, excuses her own decision to reject the public schools for her son:

In her defense of the decision, Davis Gates criticized school choice, blaming such policies for the lack of resources at Chicago’s public schools.

“It was a very difficult decision for us because there is not a lot to offer black youth who are entering high school” in Chicago, Davis Gates told WBEZ.

“In many of our schools on the South Side and the West Side, the course offerings are very marginal and limited,” she said. “Then the other thing, and it was a very strong priority, was his ability to participate in co-curricular and extracurricular activities, which quite frankly, don’t exist in many of the schools, high schools in particular.”

One of the most striking features of socialist insitutions is that the leaders always make a big show of being one of the workers of the world, laboring to improve the lives of the average person. Yet these leaders always have the best food, the best cars, the best schools…the best of everything, all paid for by the sweat of the brows of the working people.

Socialism isn’t an economic system, and revolutionaries aren’t selling a better life for everyone. They are scam artists selling a dream of a better life to people who are desperate for a savior.

Gates is quite clear, when pressed, that the Chicago Public Schools don’t serve the students of the city well. In fact, she grossly underplays just how awful they are.

*School choice* was actually the choice of racists. It was created to avoid integrating schools with Black children. Now it’s the civil rights struggle of our generation? #BoyBye https://t.co/jYbiKV48aJ

— Stacy —We Deserve OUR Humanity—#BLM (@stacydavisgates) August 27, 2022

The Chicago Public Schools did more than almost any other system to beat down its students during the pandemic, and its students are among the least prepared in the country to succeed.

Gates knows that. It’s why she put her son in a private school.

She just needs to live in a world where others don’t have the choices she demands for her own family. Her power and wealth require that others suffer so that she and her family prosper. Just as Castro did in Cuba, and the old Soviet premiers did. They drove around in their fancy ZIL limousines looking out on the depressing streets of Moscow, zipping from the Kremlin to their dachas.

What makes this worse than garden-variety hypocrisy is that she doesn’t just exhort others to sacrifice while she fails to; it is that others’ sacrifices are necessary in order to make her own comfort and choices possible.

Socialists don’t call others to a virtue they cannot always themselves attain; rather, they call others to sacrifice for no reason other than to prop up the comforts of the Elite. Hypocrites are fallen human beings. Scam artists are predators.

Stacy Davis Gates is a predator. A wolf in sheep’s clothing. As are all socialist leaders.