By JR Robinson, CEO/Co-Founder, JustMy & JustMyMemphis

Someone in a local group chat asked if a candidate for TN-97 was "a socialist." I joked back that I'd lost track of which insult was in fashion this week — communist, socialist, "anti-Epstein" (whatever that's supposed to mean as a slur). Then someone sent me a screenshot of Google's definition of "socialist," and I actually sat with it for a minute.

Because here's the thing: I read the definition, and I wasn't sure it was actually an insult.

That bothered me enough to write this. Not to defend any candidate, not to attack anyone, and not to tell you what to believe. Just to ask: when we throw a label at someone, do we know what it means? And when we find out what it means, does it still land the way we intended?

What "Socialist" Actually Means

Strip away the tone people use when they say it, and the dictionary definition breaks down into three core ideas:

• Collective ownership — the belief that major resources, large businesses, and factories should be owned publicly, cooperatively, or by the state, rather than by private individuals or corporations.
• Focus on human need — the belief that economic activity should exist to meet public needs and reduce poverty, rather than to generate private profit.
• Reduction of inequality — the belief that wealth and resources should be distributed more fairly so people have something closer to equal opportunity.

Read those three lines again, slowly, without the word "socialist" attached to them. On their own, none of them describe a monster. They describe a set of priorities — priorities that show up, in some form, in almost every American institution we don't argue about: public schools, the fire department, interstate highways, Social Security, Medicare, the postal service, public libraries. Every one of those is "the community owning and running something for the shared benefit of people" instead of leaving it purely to private profit. Nobody's calling the fire department un-American.

So is "socialist" describing something evil, or is it describing a degree — how much of the economy should work that way, and how much should be left to private markets? That's a real, serious, adult debate. It's the debate this country has actually been having since the New Deal. It is not, on its own, a synonym for tyranny.

Is Any of That Actually Bad?

Let's be fair and hold each idea up to the light instead of just accepting or rejecting the label wholesale.

Collective ownership can mean healthy things — cooperatively owned utilities, community land trusts, credit unions — or it can mean a government with too much control and not enough accountability, which real countries have lived through and suffered for. The idea isn't automatically good or automatically bad; it depends entirely on scale, accountability, and whether the "collective" doing the owning is actually accountable to the people in it.

Focus on human need over profit sounds admirable until you ask who decides what "need" is and who pays for it. Profit motive, for all its flaws, is also the thing that got a vaccine developed in under a year and put a computer in every pocket in America. Removing profit as an incentive can remove waste — or it can remove the reason anyone innovates at all.

Reducing inequality is popular in theory almost everywhere on the political spectrum — the disagreement is entirely about method. Do you reduce inequality by growing opportunity (education, access to capital, fair markets) or by redistributing what already exists? That's the actual fight. It's not "equality: yes or no."

None of these are simple. That's the point — they don't deserve to be flattened into a slur.

What's the Opposite?

If we're going to examine the label, we should examine its mirror image with the same honesty.

The opposite of those three qualities would be: private ownership concentrated in individuals and corporations, economic activity organized around profit rather than public need, and inequality treated as an acceptable — even necessary — byproduct of a free market.

Said plainly, without spin: that's closer to laissez-faire capitalism. And just like "socialist," that label has real strengths and real weaknesses depending on how far you take it. Concentrated private ownership drives competition, innovation, and personal freedom to build something of your own — ask any entrepreneur, including me. Taken to its extreme, unaddressed, it can also mean monopoly power, no safety net, and a wealth gap wide enough to swallow whole neighborhoods — including ones like Orange Mound, where I'm from.

The honest answer is that basically every functioning democracy on earth, including the United States, is a blend of both of these ideas in different proportions. The argument is about the mix, not about which one is "the good one." Anyone selling you a pure version of either, as a moral absolute, is selling you something.

Why the Label Gets Weaponized

Calling someone "a socialist" as an insult only works if the listener has never actually read what the word means — if it's functioning as a scary sound instead of a political position. That's worth noticing. Words that get used as weapons usually have their meaning removed first, so they can't be examined, only feared.

That cuts every direction politically. Both "socialist" and "fascist" get thrown around today mostly as ammunition rather than description. The moment either one is used that way, it stops being a political argument and starts being a way to end one.

The Bigger Question I Actually Want to Ask

Here's where I'll be careful, because I'm not trying to tell anyone what to conclude — I'm trying to ask the question out loud.

We're watching a moment where official economic data has become politically contested — in 2025, a sitting president fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after a weak jobs report and accused the agency of manipulating the numbers, without offering public evidence for that claim. Reasonable people disagree hard on what that means: some see it as a president holding an unaccountable bureaucracy responsible for bad data; others see it as a president punishing an independent agency for reporting something politically inconvenient, which is a very different thing. Both readings deserve to be said out loud, because the truth of which one is happening matters enormously.

At the same time, we've seen government officials publicly threaten media outlets over unfavorable coverage — license challenges, lawsuits, and rhetoric framing accurate reporting as "fake" simply because it's unflattering. Supporters of this posture argue the media has earned distrust and deserves pushback. Critics argue that a free press reporting uncomfortable facts, including battlefield failures or economic downturns, is not the same as a hostile press, and that the difference matters enormously in a democracy — because a country where inconvenient facts can't be reported isn't really being told the truth about itself, regardless of which party is in charge when it happens.

So I'll ask it plainly, not as an accusation but as a question every one of us should be sitting with: when the data becomes political, when uncomfortable news becomes forbidden news, and when questioning any of it gets you labeled with a scary word instead of answered with an argument — is that democracy under normal strain, or is that democracy leaning into something else? I genuinely don't think the answer is obvious, and I don't think it's the same answer for everyone reading this. I think that's exactly why we have to keep asking it instead of assuming we already know.

Where That Leaves Us

I'm not writing this to defend a candidate or condemn one. I'm writing it because I think we've gotten lazy with our labels, and lazy labels make lazy citizens. "Socialist" isn't automatically an insult. "Capitalist" isn't automatically a compliment. Both words describe real trade-offs that deserve real thought, not a reflex.

Before you use a label on someone — or accept one used on you — it might be worth doing what that Google search did for me: actually reading what the word means, sitting with it, and asking what it says about the person using it as a weapon, as much as the person it's aimed at.

That's not a political position. That's just paying attention.

— JR Robinson CEO/Co-Founder, JustMy & JustMyMemphis