Former Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares is sounding the alarm on what he calls a growing socialist agenda in Congress, pointing to 32 bills he says are ripped straight from the economic playbook that destroyed Cuba.
Miyares, who recently became honorary chairman of the American Free Enterprise Chamber of Commerce, sat down with Fox News Digital to announce the conservative trade group's new "Socialism Watch" initiative, an online tracker cataloguing more than two dozen pieces of legislation the organization describes as socialist or neo-Marxist in design. The bills span healthcare, energy, labor, housing, and taxation, and the group argues they would collectively push the federal government deeper into private markets than anything attempted in a generation.
For Miyares, the fight is personal. His mother, Miriam, fled Fidel Castro's communist regime in 1965 at age 19, leaving nearly everything behind. His uncle, an opponent of Castro, was arrested following the Bay of Pigs invasion and subjected to what Miyares described as a mock execution. Those family scars inform his blunt assessment of the bills now sitting before Congress.
The "Socialism Watch" tracker, hosted at the American Free Enterprise Chamber of Commerce's website, identifies proposals that would reshape entire sectors of the American economy. Among the most expensive: the "Housing is a Human Right Act," a $300 billion bill that would declare shelter a government-guaranteed right and fund what it calls "social housing." The group warns the legislation is designed to push private landlords out of the market.
Another proposal on the list, a $1.6 trillion "Green New Deal for Public Schools", would, according to the group, hand control of local school district operations to the federal government. A third would create a quasi-governmental "National Infrastructure Bank" to fund what the tracker describes as politically favored state projects.
On energy, the tracker flags legislation that would ban fracking nationwide beginning in 2029, prohibit greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants, and restrict new liquefied natural gas infrastructure along with most U.S. oil and natural gas exports. On healthcare, there is a bill to replace private health insurance entirely with a national Medicare for All program. On labor, legislation would create government-backed job-guarantee programs offering employment to qualifying applicants. And on taxation, a bill would impose annual taxes on accumulated wealth, including unrealized gains, meaning the government would tax assets that have not been sold.
Bill sponsors and bill numbers were not identified in the initiative's public rollout.
Miyares did not mince words about where he believes these proposals lead. In his interview, he offered a GDP comparison to illustrate what communist economics did to Cuba:
"The year Fidel Castro took power in Cuba, Cuba had the same GDP as Greece. The year that he died, too bad the same GDP as Sudan."
Those figures are Miyares' own characterization, not independently verified in the interview. But the broader point he pressed was not about Cuba alone, it was about a pattern he sees repeating in Washington.
"Socialism doesn't work. It impoverishes every country that embraces it."
He aimed particular concern at younger Americans who he said have lost touch with the historical record. Miyares told Fox News Digital that too many young people are drawn to socialist ideas by good intentions without examining outcomes:
"These young people are embracing socialism thinking that it leads to helping those that are poor, disadvantaged. The reality is it does the opposite."
"It actually hurts the very people that it wants to help."
He added that a generation has failed to learn the lessons history already taught:
"So many young people have forgotten really, really painful lessons of history that you cannot judge a bill or an economic system based on intentions, you have to judge it on results."
"What we've seen time and time again is socialism fails everywhere it's been tried."
What stands out about the "Socialism Watch" list is not just the scale of spending, nearly $2 trillion across just two of the named proposals, but the breadth of federal control each bill would require. Banning an entire extraction industry by a date certain. Replacing every private health insurance plan in the country. Taxing wealth Americans have not yet realized as income. Guaranteeing government jobs to anyone who applies. Each proposal, taken individually, would represent a massive expansion of federal authority. Taken together, the group argues, they form a coherent ideological program.
Miyares referenced Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, identified only as "AOC" in his remarks, to frame the trajectory. He said she had "joked that woke one was crazy," then added his own assessment of where things have moved since:
"Well, it's clear that woke two should belong in an insane asylum because it's a full-blown embrace of Marxism and socialism."
The specific meaning of "woke one" and "woke two" in Miyares' framing was not elaborated on in the interview.
None of the 32 bills identified by the initiative have been reported as passing, advancing to a vote, or clearing committee. The tracker, at this stage, functions as a cataloguing and public-awareness tool, a way to put names and dollar figures on proposals that might otherwise move through Congress without broad public scrutiny.
The American Free Enterprise Chamber of Commerce describes itself as a conservative trade organization representing American businesses. Miyares' appointment as honorary chairman and the simultaneous launch of the tracker suggest the group intends to make socialist-leaning legislation a sustained campaign issue rather than a one-off press release.
Open questions remain. Which lawmakers introduced these 32 bills? Which chambers are they sitting in? Who co-sponsored them, and how many colleagues signed on? The initiative's public materials do not yet answer those questions, and those details matter, because a bill with two co-sponsors and a bill with sixty tell very different stories about where Congress actually stands.
Still, the raw policy ambitions on display are worth cataloguing in plain sight. A country that cannot name the proposals being filed in its own legislature cannot hold the people filing them accountable, and accountability, not intentions, is the only measure that counts.
