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"We can’t even raise the minimum wage. Do Republicans really think this stuff is going to happen?"
Republican fearmongering that communism is on its way to the United States is a perennial feature of US political discourse—despite the fact that their warnings proved wrong in the 1930s when President Franklin Roosevelt passed Social Security and other New Deal programs and recently when Mayor Zohran Mamdani neglected to usher in a communist era in New York City, even as he moved forward with plans for universal childcare and a network of city-run grocery stores.
On Thursday, progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) mocked the GOP's latest claims that Democratic politicians who support Medicare for All and other broadly popular universal proposals are putting the US on what House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) recently called a "dark road of death to communism."
"We can’t even raise the minimum wage. Do Republicans really think this stuff is going to happen?" Ocasio-Cortez told a reporter on Capitol Hill after they'd asked whether the recent victories of democratic socialists and other progressives could end up "as full-blown communism."
Reporter: Isn’t there concern that this slippery slope to socialism inevitably ends up as full-blown communism?
AOC: I mean, no. I think that’s very silly. We can’t even raise the minimum wage. Do they really think communism is going to happen? No. They’re trying to scare people… pic.twitter.com/RiFhqpwd6T
— Acyn (@Acyn) July 23, 2026
With 78% of Democratic voters supporting an expansion of the Medicare program to everyone in the US—which would end healthcare's treatment as a for-profit endeavor in the US and put the medical system on equal footing with those in other wealthy countries—a number of Democratic House candidates who support the proposal have won primary races in recent months, including Melat Kiros in Colorado, Claire Valdez in New York, and Adam Hamawy in New Jersey. In Michigan, US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, a Medicare for All advocate, has polled ahead of his centrist opponent Rep. Haley Stevens in numerous recent surveys.
As Republicans aim to maintain control of the Senate and House in the midterm elections—having ripped nutrition assistance and Medicaid away from millions of Americans, driven up healthcare costs for people who have insurance through the Affordable Care Act, supported the invasion of Iran as it has sent gas prices soaring, backed billions of dollars in Pentagon spending and military aid for Israel as Americans struggle to afford essentials, and supported a president who says he doesn't "think about Americans’ financial situation"—they've attempted to revive old claims that the new crop of progressive Democrats "are a danger to you and your family," as Johnson said this week.
The House speaker called the progressive primary winners "crazy little mini-Mamdanis who are popping up all around the country," while House Republican Conference Chair Lisa McClain (R-Mich.) warned that "the radical left feels they need to hide what their policies are... Let’s call it what it is: It’s communism.”
Ocasio-Cortez, who is said to be a potential 2028 presidential or Senate candidate, called the warnings "very silly" and suggested they came from lawmakers who are dead-set against healthcare being treated as a right in the US instead of a profit-making business.
"They’re trying to scare people because they don’t want us talking about the fact that we all have a right to healthcare," said the congresswoman. "So they want to call everything they don’t like communist because if people actually wake up to the fact that their elected officials are screwing them over when they get here, then they’re going to realize they deserve better and that healthcare as a right isn’t crazy, it isn't pie-in-the-sky."
"They want to call this stuff communist because they don’t want us to realize that the rest of the developed world has guaranteed healthcare," she added. "So they want to call it communist because they don’t want you to know that Germany, Italy, the UK, Canada—everybody else—has it better than us, and we spend the most money for the worst care in the modern, developed world."
In another interview Thursday, Ocasio-Cortez expanded on her condemnation of Republicans' healthcare policies.
"This administration is killing Americans," she said. "They are killing people by taking away their healthcare. They are killing women by having them bleed out in parking lots. They are killing seniors by imposing cuts to Medicaid and to Medicare recipients... The fact of the matter is they are for UnitedHealth. They are for Big Pharma. They are for these corporations, and they are cutting your healthcare."
It’s not godless communists who are walking around, arresting and sometimes killing Americans, it’s the Trump Gestapo, also known as ICE.
“These are not social Dumocrats, these are hardcore, godless communists.” And they will “attack all religions, but in particular, Christianity. They always do..."
“It's like crazy. They will close your churches in this country... They will kill your people, and that's what they're about. They want to end religion. They have to end religion because their ideology doesn't work if you have strong religion... This is the greatest threat to our country since its founding, in my opinion, 250 years ago, what's happening right now.”
This is our Dear Leader speaking, of course, ripping our seriously problematic political system to shreds and turning it into a cult, with Donald Trump as the cult leader, of course. Only he can save us, and by “us” I mean real Americans: the true believers in virtually nothing except what they’re told to believe, also known as MAGA,
“Donald Trump is a desperate man,” writes Elliott Negin at the LA Progressive. “With the midterms on the horizon and his approval ratings under water, he doesn’t want to talk about affordability. Nor does he want to talk about his war with Iran. And he certainly doesn’t want to talk about Jeffrey Epstein.”
Trump’s fearmongering is just a cover for his administration’s fear creating.
What he wants to—needs to—do is offer his followers, which in good times may amount to about half the country’s voters, an enemy so terrifying it takes their minds off Epstein, Iran, et al. Even the “white replacement” invasion by immigrants isn’t enough right now. He has decided to return to the Cold War, when nuclear annihilation was a possibility that everyone thought about, and bring back the godless commies. Oh my God, they’re back under our beds! But they’re Americans now: Democratic socialists. And somehow they’re on the rise politically.
Welcome to what’s starting to look like the end of actual democracy. If Trump succeeds, that’s what it may well be. Candidates will base their campaigns on vicious insults, not policies of any sort. Every last breath of reality could get squeezed out of our elections. Watch out, the commies are coming!
And they want to kill you. Here’s the truly unbearable irony of Trump’s words. It takes one to know one. Trump’s fearmongering is just a cover for his administration’s fear creating. It’s not godless communists who are walking around, arresting and sometimes killing Americans, it’s the Trump Gestapo, also known as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Eleven people, for instance, have been killed by ICE or Customs and Border Patrol, agents during the second Trump administration, including two men in the past week: Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, age 52, was shot while driving to work in Houston, Texas on July 7; and Joan Sebastian Guerrero, age 26, was shot in Biddleford, Maine on July 13. He was also driving to work.
In both incidents, federal officials claimed that the victims had attacked the agents with their vehicles and were killed in self-defense. The agents were not wearing body cameras and no evidence supports this claim. But in both cases, witnesses say that’s not what happened. The vehicles were not “weaponized,” and the men were shot for no reason (except, perhaps, racism).
And both victims were husbands and dads, and their families have been tossed into horrific shock and grief. Guerrero, for instance, had a 3-year-old daughter. His wife posted a photo of him on social media a day after his killing and wrote: “I love you. I have no words for this pain, my life, my love, watch over me, help me to have strength, I love you, stay with me always—don’t leave me alone, I beg you, my love.”
Yeah, better blame this—and so many other deaths—on the godless commies. So far there have been 11 killings by Homeland Security agents this year, along with 21 deaths in immigrant detention centers. Not to mention multi-thousands of arrests, with many detainees essentially disappeared from their loved ones’ lives.
And then there are the wars, the trillion-dollar military budget... on and on and on. I certainly don’t blame this solely on Trump. He's only making the best (by which I mean the worst) of the system he inherited.
Trump has threatened to deploy the military against the "enemy within" and has recently promoted the idea that "democratic socialism must be criminalized."
As he pushed for Congress to approve $350 billion in new spending requested by the Pentagon, House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested Tuesday that some of the funds were needed for "fighting communism on our own shores," an ominous notion in light of President Donald Trump's threats to deploy the US military against his domestic enemies.
In addition to the already record-breaking $1.1 trillion military spending bill that was approved last month by the House Appropriations Committee, the Pentagon has requested a separate $350 billion package to be passed through a separate GOP-led spending bill known as "Reconciliation 3.0," which can pass without Democratic support.
Johnson (La.) has faced pushback from some GOP senators, including Sens. Susan Collins (Maine) and the hospitalized Sen. Mitch McConnell (Ky.), as he's sought additional spending. During a press conference on Tuesday, Johnson made his case for Republicans to back the reconciliation proposal.
The speaker argued that the package included "transformational funding that will help us change the dynamic of the Department of War and make it more efficient and effective," including Trump's request to "effectively double the funding for national defense."
"Look, we live in dangerous times," Johnson said. "We're fighting communism on our own shores, and we're fighting evil terrorists and tyrants around the world, and we have to be able to protect our national security."
In the weeks following a series of Democratic primary victories by progressive and democratic socialist candidates in New York, Colorado, Kentucky, Ohio, Texas, and elsewhere, Trump and his allies in the GOP have relentlessly hammered on the idea that the nation was under siege by "godless Communists" who want to “completely destroy the traditional American way of life,” rhetoric that echoed McCarthy era red-baiting to many critics.
In just two weeks since those primaries on June 23, Reuters found that Trump had invoked "communism" at least 81 times to demonize candidates and officials like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and others, who have promoted policies like Medicare for All, higher taxes on the wealthy, the expansion of public utilities, the abolition of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, cutting off aid to Israel, and other policies supported by large numbers of Democratic voters.
Trump's recent rhetoric has indicated that opposing "communism" goes beyond simply voting to keep these candidates out of power. He's referred to the so-called communists as "animals," as a "cancer" that needs to be "cut out fast."
He said during a July 3 speech outside Mount Rushmore that "communists" cannot be "loyal" to America and he will “send them into exile... send them quickly away.”
On Sunday, Trump reposted a video from the right-wing radio host Michael Savage with the title "DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM MUST BE CRIMINALIZED; LEADERS DEPORTED."
Johnson echoed Trump's rhetoric on Tuesday, continuing to describe passing the military spending proposal as part of the existential fight against internal communist enemies.
"THE BARBARIANS ARE INSIDE THE GATE!" Johnson posted to social media alongside a video of himself promoting the bill.
"We are fighting right now in Congress over whether we're going to maintain our status as a constitutional republic OR trade that in, dismantle the foundations and GO DOWN THIS DARK ROAD OF DEATH TO COMMUNISM," he continued. "THAT is the question."
With these comments, Johnson was explicitly tying increased military funding to Trump's fight against communism, though it's unclear which aspect of the budget proposal would be directed toward those ends.
Federal troops are generally barred from domestic law enforcement, though the president can deploy them in cases of domestic insurrection and violence that ordinary law enforcement cannot handle.
Trump has deployed active duty Marines to US cities like Los Angeles and ordered the National Guard to deploy to many others, including Portland, Memphis, and Chicago, which courts have said violated the law.
He has also suggested using armed forces to target his ideological enemies. During a speech to generals last year, he said cities should be used as “training grounds for our military" as they fight an "enemy within," which has included immigrants, the "radical left" and protest movements that have mobilized in opposition to his administration.
Trump and the GOP are betting that calling Democrats “communists” will matter to enough voters to overshadow their concerns about the cost of food, gasoline, housing and healthcare.
President Donald Trump is a desperate man. With the midterms on the horizon and his approval ratings under water, he doesn’t want to talk about affordability. Nor does he want to talk about his war with Iran. And he certainly doesn’t want to talk about Jeffrey Epstein.
What does he want to talk about? Communists.
Over the last two weeks, Trump has ratcheted up his overheated rhetoric in response to democratic socialists’ victories in primary elections in Colorado, New York, Washington, DC, and elsewhere.
During a speech to Christian conservatives at a Faith and Freedom Coalition convention in Washington on June 26, he called democratic socialists “animals” and said, “We have to stop this horrible threat of cancer that’s permeating our country called communism.” He went on to say that the “godless” communists in the Democratic Party pose a particular risk for Christians. “They will close your churches in this country,” he warned. “They will kill your people. And that’s what they’re about.”
It’s not as if Trump and his fellow Republicans haven’t hurled the communist epithet before, but over the past six months they have upped the ante.
Heading into the 250th birthday celebration on the National Mall, Trump continued his tirade. Speaking at Mount Rushmore on July 3, he not only besmirched Democrats, but immigrants as well. “There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success,” he said. “...You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.” He made no secret that he is trying to salvage Republican candidates’ chances in November. “America will never be a communist country,” he said. “We can only lose the midterms if we allow ourselves to lose the midterms if we are foolish, stupid, and unwise.”
Trump was only slightly more restrained on July 4 at the National Mall. After introducing a handful of World War II veterans and lauding them for their heroism, Trump ahistorically declared: “Our warriors did not fight communism on battlefields across the world, only to have that menace rear its ugly head right back here in America. We’re not going to let it happen.” (In fact, American troops, along with troops from Great Britain and communist Soviet Union, defeated fascism in World War II.)
It’s not as if Trump and his fellow Republicans haven’t hurled the communist epithet before, but over the past six months they have upped the ante. According to a recent Washington Post analysis of statements, social media posts, and podcasts, from January to June, they applied the word “communist” or “communism” to Democrats an average of 626 times per week, 43% more than during the same time frame in 2025.
Right-wing pundits have entered the fray, too. Megan McArdle, a self-described “right-leaning libertarian” columnist at The Washington Post, recently wrote that democratic socialist victories represent “a heady moment for the left, because socialism’s tainted brand has recovered from the vivid failures of the Soviet Union.”
Likewise, historian Arthur Herman, writing for Fox News, disingenuously equated democratic socialists’ policy agenda with that of the Soviet Union in a July 3 column. “In June, Marxist radicals calling themselves democratic socialists swept the New York City primaries...” he wrote. “...Communist-style socialism has brought poverty, mass starvation, and subsistence misery to tens of millions worldwide.”
Such attacks are nothing new. Republicans denounced Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal as “socialism” and even “communism.” In 1961, then General Electric spokesman Ronald Reagan warned that government health insurance would lead to socialism. Over the following decades, however, Republicans largely abandoned that mantra in favor of attacks on “big government” and the welfare state.
Trump is a throwback to an earlier time. In his 2020 State of the Union address, Trump attacked socialism, claiming it “destroys nations.” Like Reagan before him, he specifically denounced a “Medicare for All” proposal endorsed by Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and 130 other members of Congress at the time, calling it a “socialist takeover of our healthcare system.”
During the last election, Trump often called Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris a “Marxist,” tying her to her father’s economic perspective on markets and inequality. More recently, he labeled New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, a “communist,” and dubbed Janeese Lewis George, a democratic socialist who won last month’s Washington, DC, Democratic mayoral primary, a “Communist adherent.”
Democratic socialists in the Democratic Party are not communists. If they are a member of any organization, it likely would be the Democratic Socialists of America, which does not function as a party. Communist organizations still exist in the United States, but they are politically marginal and have no representation in Congress or in any state legislature.
Likewise, democratic socialism is not synonymous with Soviet communism, which fell apart 35 years ago. The countries that democratic socialists in America hold up as models can be found in Western Europe. They are multiparty democracies with market economies, strong unions, and robust social safety programs that include universal healthcare. Their economic models are nothing like the one-party command economy of the Soviet Union and, as I pointed out in detail in a December 2025 essay, they do a much better job of ensuring their citizens live long, healthy, and prosperous lives than the United States does.
While only about 17% of Americans have a favorable view of democratic socialist politicians, their policies are quite popular. For example:
Perhaps what is holding democratic socialists back is how they identify themselves. The term “socialist” just may have too much baggage. After all, many Americans still associate the word with the Soviet Union, whose official name was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, even though it was a communist dictatorship.
New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a democratic socialist, told The Washington Post earlier this week that political labels should not be an issue. “What matters is the legislation, your proposals, the ideas before us,” she said. “How a person identifies in their economic view of the world is less important to people than if we’re making their groceries more affordable.”
Maybe. But Trump and the GOP are betting that calling Democrats “communists” will matter to enough voters to overshadow their concerns about the cost of food, gasoline, housing and healthcare. November will reveal whether that Cold War strategy still works.
This article first appeared at the Money Trail blog and is reposted here at Common Dreams with permission.
Of course advocating for core progressive issues like universal healthcare is not being a commie, but the president is throwing the commie label at the wall to if it sticks.
Trump has run out of cards to play in the midterm elections, which is why he’s now talking about the “communist menace.”
He can’t talk about the economy, because prices continue to rise faster than wages, which means most Americans are getting poorer. He can’t talk about foreign policy, because his war in Iran has been a debacle, his tariffs are an utter failure, and he obviously hasn’t settled the war in Ukraine on “Day 1.” He can’t talk about immigration, because his raids and mass deportations have become so unpopular.
So, facing the midterm elections, what’s left?
He’s resorting to the oldest of right-wing tropes — accusing Democrats (especially a rising generation of new, young, vigorous Democratic politicians) of being commies.
He kicked off America’s 250th anniversary celebrations on Friday with a speech at Mount Rushmore extolling American culture and warning of a resurgence of the “communist menace.” With the granite faces of four of his predecessors behind him, Trump took aim at what he called “radicals” and “extremists.”
“There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success. You can be a communist, or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.”
Oh, please.
For years, Trump has been trying to scare Americans about progressive Dems who advocate Medicare for All, universal childcare, free public higher education, and higher taxes on the super-wealthy to pay for them (all of which the rising young Democrats are advocating).
But he hasn’t gotten anywhere because these initiatives are supported by most Americans.
So now he’s throwing the commie label at the wall and seeing if it sticks.
Communism was the scare word used by right-wingers after World Wars I and II to crack the whip on the left. It provoked witch hunts and ruined careers.
It made former Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy a one-man bomb squad in the early 1950s, when he ridiculed the “pitiful squealing” of “those egg-sucking phony liberals” who “would hold sacrosanct those Communists and queers,” and forced American citizens to “name names.”
McCarthyism was a by-product of the Republican Party’s postwar effort to eradicate the New Deal. The GOP had portrayed the midterm election of 1946 as a “battle between Republicanism and communism,” and the Republican National Committee chairman claimed that the federal bureaucracy was filled with “pink puppets.”
Southern segregationist Democrats joined in the red-baiting. Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo, a Klansman who filibustered to block anti-lynching legislation, described multiracial labor unions’ advocacy for civil rights as the work of “northern communists.” Representative John Elliott Rankin, a racist and antisemitic Mississippi Democrat who helped establish the House Committee on Un-American Activities, called labor unions’ Southern organizing campaign “a communist plot,” fearing it would result in more Black people voting. “We’re asleep at the switch,” he warned. “They’re taking over this country; we’ve got to stop them if we want this country.”
The red-baiting was temporarily successful. In the 1946 midterms, Democrats lost control of both chambers of Congress. Wisconsin sent Joe McCarthy to the Senate. California sent to the House a young Republican lawyer who had already figured out how to use red-baiting as a political tool: Richard Nixon. Four years later it sent Nixon to the Senate.
It’s likely that Trump’s earliest political memories are of Joe McCarthy’s red scare. Trump and I are the same age, and those are among my earliest memories.
On June 9, 1954, I sat at my father’s side on our living room couch watching the Army-McCarthy hearings. McCarthy had accused the U.S. Army of having poor security at a top-secret facility, hinting at communist subversion. He charged that one of the young attorneys on the staff of Joseph Welch, who was representing the Army, was a communist. The charge could destroy the young man’s career.
“Son-of-a-bitch!” my father shouted at McCarthy on television. I hid my head.
As McCarthy continued his attack on the young attorney, Welch broke in: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.”
I was only 8 years old, but I was spellbound.
McCarthy didn’t stop attacking the young attorney.
“Son-of-a-bitch!” my father shouted, even louder.
At this point, Welch demanded that McCarthy listen to him. “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator,” he said. “You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?”
Almost overnight, McCarthy imploded. Welch had aroused the decency of the American people. McCarthy’s national popularity evaporated. Three years later, censured by his Senate colleagues, ostracized by his party, and ignored by the press, McCarthy drank himself to death, a broken man at the age of 48.
During those hearings, McCarthy’s chief counsel was Roy Cohn, who had gained prominence as the Department of Justice attorney who successfully prosecuted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage, leading to their executions in 1953.
After McCarthy’s downfall, Cohn reinvented himself as a power broker in New York who survived scandals, indictments, and accusations of tax evasion, bribery, and theft — eventually to become Trump’s mentor.
So of course Trump would reach for the communist scare card when he has no other cards left to play.
The problem for Trump is that the new stars of the Democratic Party whom Trump wants to defile have nothing whatsoever to do with communism. They barely have anything to do with socialism.
New York’s Zohran Mamdani, AOC, Seattle’s Katie Wilson, Colorado’s Melat Kiros, and dozens of others — including many who have won recent primaries — are popular because they’re taking on corporate America, attacking political corruption by big money, and dealing with the real problems of ordinary Americans.
Labels are becoming irrelevant, anyway. In an Axios-Generation Lab poll of young Americans, 67 percent say they have a positive or neutral association with the word “socialism” compared with 40 percent who are positive or neutral toward “capitalism.” A new national survey from the Cato Institute finds Zoomers more supportive of socialism (53 percent) than capitalism (45 percent).
I can understand Gen Z’s growing disillusionment with capitalism. They can’t afford a home of their own. They struggle to afford health insurance. The job market is horrendous. They can’t afford to start a family. In many ways, capitalism — or whatever you want to call our current system — has failed them. And they’re the future of America.
So I doubt Trump’s resurgent red-baiting is going to help Republicans in the midterms.
To the extent Americans are thinking about the American system as a whole, they seem more concerned about Trump’s self-dealing than about socialism or communism. That same new Cato poll finds 56 percent of Americans worried that the U.S. could stop being a free country within the next 50 years because of corruption and abuses of power at the highest reaches of government.
Trump himself has no ideology, of course. He doesn’t give a fig about capitalism, and he’s not worried about communism or socialism. He’s a fanatical practitioner of narcissism, of the especially malignant variety.
Time and again revolutions, independence movements, and reformist democratic governments have been so harshly attacked and manhandled by the US that the likelihood of the regime emerging from it being what was originally desired was rendered almost nil.
More than any revolutionaries in history, America's revolutionaries got what they wanted. The government the United States ended up creating and sustaining was, adjusting for 250 years of changes, very similar to the government that the American revolutionaries had sought to create.
Why? What was it that led to Americans getting the government they had fought for, when so many other revolutionaries and independence movements, both historical and more recent, did not?
The common answer is to attribute this success to the wisdom of America’s Founding Fathers, and there’s certainly some truth to that. But for the past century, the biggest reason revolutionaries in foreign countries didn’t get what they fought for, as the Americans did, has been… the Americans.
Time and again revolutions, independence movements, and reformist democratic governments have been so harshly attacked and manhandled by the US that the likelihood of the regime emerging from it being what was originally desired was rendered almost nil.
The phenomenon of a revolution, even a very democratic-spirited one, ending in dictatorship after harsh foreign intervention predates both communism and American interventionism.
In China, Nicaragua, Cuba, and others, the US armed opponents of the new revolutionary regimes, imposed economic embargoes, and more in attempts to strangle them.
After General MacArthur had provoked China into the Korean War, China lost over 200,000 men fighting the US. Nicaragua faced US-created and armed terrorists and saboteurs—the contras—who operated from safe havens in nearby Honduras. Cuba’s revolutionary government faced a US-backed invasion, numerous terrorist attacks, assassination attempts, as well as widespread economic damage from America’s Operation Mongoose sabotage campaign.
In Vietnam and Korea, the US waged wars against communist-led independence movements. Devastating bombing killed millions of civilians and laid waste to both countries. During the Korean War, US Air Force General Curtis LeMay explained, “[W]e killed off…20% of the population… We… burned down every town in North Korea.”
After the Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917, the US joined Britain, France, and nearly a dozen others in invading the newly-formed Soviet Union and aiding the White Armies against the Reds (Bolsheviks) during the Russian Civil War. This was what influential British leader Winston Churchill, then the British secretary of state for war and air, called "strangl[ing] Bolshevism in its cradle."
By the time the Reds had won, Russia had been at war for eight years, and the country the communists inherited was so poor, wrecked, and starved that cannibalism was widespread. According to United Nations data, in 1920 Russian life expectancy was a mere 20.5 years, as compared with 55.4 years in the US.
In other cases, the US targeted socialists or reformers who had gained power and sought egalitarian change through democratic systems. In Chile, Guatemala, and Iran, the US instigated and backed coups which overthrew democratically elected leaders—Salvador Allende in Chile, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran—and installed murderous dictatorships.
In Indonesia, the US conspired to overthrow President Sukarno, who had led Indonesia to independence, and eliminate his communist supporters. In The Jakarta Method…the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World, journalist Vincent Bevins explains:
In 1965, the Indonesian military killed as many as 1 million of their own countrymen, destroying the third-largest communist party in the world and taking with it pretty much anyone seen as having left-wing tendencies (as well as hundreds of thousands who had nothing to do with anything).
The US Embassy prepared lists of the names of thousands of communists and suspected communists, and, Bevins says, “handed them over to the army, so that these people could be murdered and ‘checked off’ the list.”
The phenomenon of a revolution, even a very democratic-spirited one, ending in dictatorship after harsh foreign intervention predates both communism and American interventionism. For example, after the French Revolution in 1789, armies from Great Britain, Austria, Prussia, Russia, and others, aided by a revolt in Western France led by the Catholic Church, fought to destroy the revolutionary government and reinstitute the monarchy.
With the support of and extreme sacrifices from the French people, the Revolutionaries managed to beat all of them back, but were unable to return to the democratic system the Revolution had originally established. The Revolution ended with Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1799 coup, establishing a dictatorship.
America’s Founding Fathers were brilliant, but in establishing a new government they had a huge advantage that few revolutionaries of the past century have had—they didn’t have to fight America’s attempts to destroy it.
"If we terminate the filibuster as we should do and immediately vote for the SAVE America Act then we will not lose an election for a hundred years," the president said.
President Donald Trump spent his address to the United States the night before its 250th birthday fearmongering about the "communist menace" and suggesting that his Republican Party should govern the nation for a century.
"America will never be a communist country," he said from Mount Rushmore, South Dakota Friday night. "We can only lose the midterms if we allow ourselves to lose the midterms, if we are foolish, stupid, and unwise. But if we terminate the filibuster as we should do and immediately vote for the SAVE America Act then we will not lose an election for a hundred years."
His remarks clearly implied a false link between communism and the Democratic Party and promoted a bill that critics say will make it harder for millions of eligible voters to participate in elections. The SAVE America Act claims to address the documented non-problem of noncitizen voting by requiring voters to show documents such as passports and birth certificates, which can be expensive and difficult to obtain, especially for low-income voters. Such requirements would also impose added burdens on rural voters and married women who have changed their names.
Melanie D’Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, wrote on social media that with his remarks, Trump was "clearly defining the effects of voter suppression bills."
Trump clearly defining the effects of voter suppression bills. https://t.co/vKOytLxdm0
— Melanie D'Arrigo (@DarrigoMelanie) July 4, 2026
"What message could be more unifying on the nation’s 250th birthday weekend than touting one-party rule?" writer Michael Freeman posted on social media.
California state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-11) wrote: "The thing about Trump is he tells us what he wants & what he intends to do. He wants to end democracy. Freeze MAGA in power forever. Have zero accountability to the people. Just seize power & keep it. We are so close to true authoritarianism. We must use every ounce of power & leverage we have to stop them."
Before arguing for 100 years of Republican rule, Trump continued the exaggerated anti-communist rhetoric he has employed in the weeks since progressive and Democratic-Socialist candidates won a series of Democratic primary victories.
"There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success," Trump said on Friday. "These are not mere political disagreements like differences over taxes or regulations. Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty. It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, or even 9/11."
In fact, the Democratic Socialists who won primary elections in New York City last month ran on a platform of affordable housing, Medicare for All, stronger unions, and an end to US military support for Israel's genocide in Gaza, policies backed by large numbers of ordinary Americans.
Trump doubled down on an opposition between communism and US values and also linked his anti-communist to his anti-immigrant stance, threatening to send communists into "exile."
"You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both," Trump said in a quote later posted from the White House X account.
Apparently, you can be a rapist and an alleged pedophile and become President. https://t.co/aYAMCJQOPO
— Wajahat Ali (@WajahatAli) July 4, 2026
"This July 4th, the Trump regime is pushing a new Red Scare. This is an actual White House post. The regime is pretending that communism is a serious threat to America," Tom Joscelyn, who served as a senior professional staffer on the January 6 Committee, responded on social media.
MeidasNews editor in chief Ron Filipkowski argued that Trump was leaning on anti-communism to divert attention from his own disastrous policies.
"Trump fucks up the economy with his tariffs, raises gas prices for every American with his foolish war, piles on to the national debt with his budget & wasteful spending on vanity projects, covers up Epstein, makes billions for himself, then starts yelling about communism to distract," he wrote on social media.
Journalist Mark Chadbourn agreed, writing on social media that the speech reflected Trump's "new strategy."
"Now he’s failed completely abroad, he’s looking to the Enemy Within to create new Hate Figures to unite his wavering followers," Chadbourn said. "Can’t stop Iran’s threat so let’s have a 2026 Red Scare to turn neighbour against neighbour. A new HUAC on the way? Very dangerous."
Trump's July 3 remarks contrasted with those of New York Democratic Socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani earlier that day, who uplifted the country's immigrant heritage, decried greed and racial supremacy, and argued that “time and again, including 250 years ago, those forces of division have been vanquished by the forces of progress.”
The democratic socialists are fighting the battles the Democratic Party have refused to wage. This is the way.
Maybe you’ve heard the phrase means of production and maybe you haven’t. It basically means the tools, land, factories, machines, infrastructure, and systems a society uses to make the material stuff of life. Who owns those means, who controls them, and who benefits from them is one of the oldest fights in politics.
The communists, at their extreme, think the state should own and control all of it. The capitalists, at their extreme, think it should be completely in private hands. Socialists like me think there ought to be a blend of public and private ownership, that capitalism and socialism work best when paired. The neoliberals, which is mostly what we’ve got now, think our future should be in private control but paid for by the people, maybe with a guardrail or two set up between the people and the private sector’s insatiable desire for profit.
We fought about this hard in the early 1900s. There was a big movement around labor and organizers and workers, and a lot of those folks were actual communists. The communists were fighting for the means of production and the capitalists were fighting for it too, and they fought tooth and nail. The workers were unionizing and fighting for better rights and better conditions, and these were actual fights, with guns and sticks and knives, and people got killed, mostly workers. They fought for more rights. They fought for the 40-hour week. They fought for overtime. They fought for working conditions that were safe and not deadly, and in a lot of cases they won. They won those fights with blood. They won those fights with effort. They won those fights by putting things on the line.
You might have heard of something called the weekend. Not the singer, though I love him. The idea that Monday through Friday is the work week and the weekend is for your life. You might have heard of the eight-hour day, that anything over eight hours is overtime. Both of those were brought to you by the labor movement, a labor movement that at one point was empowered not to fight for the members of its own labor union but empowered to fight for people who worked for a living. That was their mantra. That was their goal.
Then came the New Deal in the 30s, the people injecting themselves into the production of the things we needed to rebuild the country after the Great Depression. We did it through the Civilian Conservation Corps. We trained workers, we provided health care, and during the war we even created daycare centers so women could go into the factories. It was a real rebalancing of our economy between capital and labor, with the state taking part of the means of production, engineers and scientists doing the work for the people, paid for by the people, and then used by the people. Corporations got brought to heel for a while.
Then we beat the fascists, the Nazis in Germany and Italy and the imperialists in Japan, and right after that the Americans decided the biggest scourge, the biggest fear they had, was communism and socialism. Because we’d gotten a taste through the New Deal and the Arsenal of Democracy of what it was like to share in the growth, to share in the fruits of our own labor, and there was a fear that if we kept tasting it we’d decide we too deserved more, and that would mean the Vanderbilts and the railroad tycoons and the shipping barons and the oilmen would have less and the people who did the work would have more. So we fought it. We fought it through the McCarthy era, with propaganda, with all sorts of ideological battles. The idea of socialism and the idea of communism both lost. And the Democratic Party started moving away from its socialist roots and its socialist ideas toward what would ultimately become neoliberalism, the system we’ve got now.
We went through all of those fights, the prisons, the violations of the Constitution. We perverted ourselves in order to fight off socialism, to keep the means of production in the hands of the capitalists, because they alone were able to properly guide our system. And then what did they do with our productive capacity? What did they do with it through the 70s and 80s and 90s and 2000s and right up to today? They shipped it off to Mexico and China and Brazil. They gave away the very thing we fought over. And why? Because it was cheaper, more profitable, and they figured they could do it with impunity.
But when you take away people’s means of production, you also take away their means of making a living, their power and their value in life, economically and socially and every other way, and then you’ve got people fighting over what little is left, and it turns ugly and it turns dirty. Look at January 6th. Look at the riots and the protests during the Black Lives Matter movement. What you end up with is a police force that has to oppress, and private prisons that have to fill up, and a military-industrial complex that doesn’t care whether it’s participating in a genocide or not, because it’s about money and power. And ultimately what you end up with is a country that can’t defend itself or provide for itself, a giant welfare state leaning on the Chinese to make our goods and to buy our debt. A nation that no longer holds its own means of production, no longer holds its own means of making a living, no longer holds its independence, not in energy production, not in the ability to build housing or infrastructure or the things that make our lives better. We import all of it, because all we need is money, we can just make more money.
And that only works as long as the money stays in the hands of a few. All that money creation, all that expansion of wealth, would lead to massive inflation if it weren’t held by a few, and you can already see what it does, because it’s caused massive inflation in indexes and in asset prices. Bitcoin and Apple and the stock market have risen to unreasonable heights, heights that are detached from any reality. Tesla is worth more than the next 30 car companies combined, even though it doesn’t produce as much as any of the top ten and doesn’t make more profit than any of the top ten, and yet somehow it’s worth more. Why? Because the money that’s been created has caused that inflation, and the inflation stays at the top. It makes trillionaires and centibillionaires. If that same money had been shared with the rest of America without creating more productive capacity, without the ability to build more housing or train more doctors or build more hospitals, it would create massive inflation everywhere, because you’d have more money chasing fewer goods in a system that can’t produce the things anymore and just imports them. The inflation is real. It just stays at the top, in asset prices, instead of showing up at the grocery store.
So the means of production was a fight that working people lost and the capitalists won. And then the winners gave away the spoils of their own victory to other nations, because they aren’t patriots and they aren’t citizens of this country. They’re citizens of the world. They’re detached and untethered, private jets and private islands and private security forces, and at that level of wealth they don’t need this country to succeed.
But here’s the thing. The elite, for now, do need us more than we need them. We’re the ones propping them up right now.
The question with AI and robotics is not whether the machines will be powerful. They will be. The question is whether they become another offshore factory, another private island, another asset owned by people who do not need us, or whether they become part of a shared American capacity again.
We lost the last fight over the means of production, and then the winners gave it away. We should not let them do it twice.
History tells us, over and over again, that once you give the government the power to disappear people for what they read, write, believe, or advocate that power never stays trained just on the original targets.
Republicans are at it again, and it’s hard to overstate how chilling this is and what it tells you about the direction people in this Party want to take America.
Texas Congressman Chip Roy is preparing to introduce legislation he’s calling the “MAMDANI Act,” named after Zohran Mamdani, the recently elected democratic socialist mayor of New York City, that would let the federal government bar entry to, deport, and strip naturalized citizenship from any person who advocates for or is “affiliated with” what Roy calls “totalitarian” movements. The list includes, from Rep. Roy’s webpage:
“[A] socialist party, a communist party, the Chinese Communist Party, or Islamic fundamentalist party, or advocates for socialism, communism, Marxism, or Islamic fundamentalism.”
The bill targets people who “write, distribute, circulate, print, display, possess, or publish” material supporting socialism or any of those other ideas.
“Possess?” That single word means that owning a copy of Marx’s Das Kapital, or a pamphlet from a Palestinian solidarity group, or a battered paperback of Howard Zinn — or maybe even one of my books on the New Deal — would be enough to make a green-card holder or a naturalized citizen “inadmissible or deportable.”
“Affiliated with?” That would prevent anybody who’s ever affiliated themselves with the Democratic Socialist Party in New York that Mamdami ran on behalf of (along with the normal Democratic Party; New York has fusion voting so you can run on two parties simultaneously) from staying in America. Gone to a meeting, rally, or put yourself on their mailing list? You’re toast.
“Write?” That means they’re coming for me, and for you if you’ve ever echoed in writing the kind of sentiments that Republicans call socialism, including food stamps and school lunches, free college, public libraries, a national healthcare system, police and fire, and highways that don’t have tolls. (When billionaire David Koch ran for vice president in 1980 on an antisocialism agenda, he called for the end of all these forms of “socialism”.)
“Distribute?” And they’d be coming for Substack, too, it appears. Along with your local bookstore or library.
We haven’t seen anything this sweeping since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, when then-President John Adams had roughly 30 newspaper editors and publishers thrown in prison for attacking him. Ben Franklin’s grandson was arrested for publishing an op-ed calling the president “old, querulous, Bald, blind, crippled, Toothless Adams.” A town drunk in New Jersey was arrested for criticizing him while imbibing in a bar. Adams’ overreach lost him the election of 1800 to his then-political enemy Thomas Jefferson, who openly opposed the Acts.
But here we are again, and here’s another dangerous overreach on the GOP’s part in this legislation: Roy’s bill explicitly forbids judicial review of any inadmissibility, deportation, or denaturalization decision made under it.
In other words, if this law passes then no court can stop or second-guess the government: no habeas corpus, no meaningful appeals; just an order from the Attorney General or some twit at ICE or Homeland Security and you’re on a plane or stuck in a hellhole “detention facility,” possibly for the rest of your life.
That’s not immigration policy, that’s the architecture of a police state, and it’s modeled on how the Nazis stripped citizenship from German Jews and political dissidents in 1935 under the Reich Citizenship Laws.
I’ve walked through Berlin’s Topography of Terror museum, and the documents on display tell the horrific story of how that the lawyers who drafted those Nazi laws studied America’s own racial and political exclusion laws for inspiration.
Now Republican Chip Roy wants to bring them back to America as Republicans try to reinvent or country in the image of Trump’s mentor Putin’s Russia or — as the authors of Project 2025 openly suggest — Orbán’s Hungary.
The bill’s namesake, Mayor Mamdani, became a U.S. citizen in 2018 after moving here from Uganda as a child. He hasn’t been credibly accused of any crime, and as the Brennan Center for Justice meticulously documents, the Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected the use of stripping people of their citizenship as a political weapon like Putin now routinely does and Trump loves to threaten.
That goes all the way back to trying to overturn the 1943 Schneiderman Supreme Court ruling, which held the government must prove “lack of attachment” to the Constitution by “clear, unequivocal, and convincing” evidence. Disagreeing with someone’s politics doesn’t cut it by a long shot. But Roy and his allies aren’t interested in the existing jurisprudence; they want to write new laws that nullify that decision (and common decency) altogether.
Roy told Breitbart his target is what he calls a “Red-Green Alliance” of socialists and Islamists, and a summary from his office goes further, claiming current immigration policies — echoing Clarence Thomas‘ recent speech that I wrote about yesterday — have produced “dangerous levels of opposition to classical American political doctrines, like free-market capitalism.”
That’s an extraordinary admission, because Roy isn’t proposing to deport people who commit crimes, or who support terrorism, or even who lied on their citizenship applications. He wants, instead, to strip of citizenship and then deport people who don’t sufficiently believe in the unregulated, low-tax version of the so-called free market capitalism advocated by the rightwing billionaires who now own the GOP.
This is a loyalty test for an ideology rather than a country, and, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, it’s the kind of legislation the robber barons of the 1920s and the John Birchers and McCarthy movement of the 1950s dreamed of but could never ram through Congress and neither Taft nor Eisenhower would ever have signed.
We’ve actually run a smaller, more local version of this experiment before, and it ended in disgrace. The Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920 saw roughly 10,000 immigrants rounded up without warrants and 556 of them deported, including the anarchist Emma Goldman, all for the crime of holding the wrong politics.
The Communist Control Act of 1954 put into law by Republicans at the height of McCarthyism, was eventually declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1973 and most of its provisions repealed. Each time we’ve tried this sort of neofascist thing the country looked back in shame, having relearned that the First Amendment doesn’t have an exception for people who say we should tax the morbidly rich to build and support a middle class.
History tells us, over and over again, that once you give the government the power to disappear people for what they read, write, believe, or advocate that power never stays trained just on the original targets.
There are nearly 25 million naturalized citizens and 12.8 million green-card holders living in the United States today, and every single one of them would, under Roy’s bill, be subject to having their citizenship reviewed and potentially revoked based on some rightwinger complaining about them to a federal bureaucrat or police agency or the discovery of a book in their house.
It would threaten millions of legal permanent residents and visa holders working in our hospitals, building our houses, teaching our children, designing our electronics, and even farming our food. The fear alone is the point: if you’re a naturalized citizen or green-card or visa holder and you want to attend a Free Palestine rally, a labor union meeting, or a tenants’ rights organizing session, you’d now have to ask yourself whether some aide in Stephen Miller’s office might decide that constitutes “advocacy for socialism.”
And it’s one of dozens of similar laws that have been proposed by Republicans in recent years.
Presumably, this is the sort of thing that the billionaire who funded JD Vance’s rise to the Senate and vice presidency meant when he famously said, “I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible.” That’s the billionaire whose company now compiles information on Americans on behalf of the Trump regime.
Call your member of Congress through the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and tell them you oppose the MAMDANI Act and any legislation that creates thought, publishing, and speech crimes, then use the ACLU’s action tool to make sure your senators hear from you, too.
Support the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which has been on the front lines fighting Roy’s earlier “Sharia-Free America Act,” and back the American Immigration Council as it readies the inevitable legal challenges. Get involved with Indivisible and your local Democratic Party to make sure the 2026 midterms send Roy and every co-sponsor of this bill back home permanently.
The Constitution doesn’t defend itself and neither does freedom; that work belongs to us, and the time to engage with it is right now.
Being a good Cuban American means to support the people, and to fight for what's right and just for them, not for the government; American or Cuban.
What does it mean to be a good Cuban American? If you'd have asked me that question six years ago my answer would have been the standardized one, because it was an answer that had been etched into my mind since I was young.
To be a good Cuban-American I had to:
Those were the three basic pillars for being a good Cuban-American, and they were not optional. They still aren't. At least, that's what the loud Cuban-American voices in Miami and South Florida want you and me to believe.
For me, being a good Cuban American means stopping the embargo. Stop suffocating my people.
I was born in Cuba a few years before their “periodo especial,” which lasted from about 1991 to 2000. Essentially, it was an economic crisis that was highlighted by extreme reductions of already rationed foods and severe energy shortages (apagones). For the duration of my childhood and young adult life, I was taught that these burdens that Cuba felt were the sole fault of Fidel Castro and his government. That it was communism's fault, and that Che Guevara was the main architect of Cuba's torture. As a result, I grew up the way most Cubans who live in the USA do, with a severe mistrust of anything socialist or communist, fully believing that the embargo was choking the Cuban government, and having the lowest possible opinion of Castro and Che.
When I started college, I got involved in activism, and worked very closely with right-wing ideological organizations. Although at the time, I didn’t realize their beliefs were right-wing, I just felt that it was the only way to think and act as a Cuban. I was taught a lot by them, and of course, deep within all of those lessons were the continued lessons on hatred of communism and socialism, Castro and co., and supporting the embargo. This went on for many years, and I eventually became president of a local university-aligned organization. One day, I had a conversation with someone who had also been heavily involved with dissident work. We began discussing trips to Cuba; he'd said it would be his fifth trip over to the island, and I mentioned I hadn't been back since I left back in 1994. He questioned why.
I began listing all of the reasons that had been so eloquently placed into my psyche for the past 20 years: traveling to Cuba was dangerous, it only benefited the Cuban government, my money would never reach the people of Cuba, I would be blacklisted here in the USA because I would be seen as a communist sympathizer, and so forth.
He looked me right in the eyes and said all of the reasons I'd mentioned were American propaganda, and served no other purpose than to instill fear into people who would otherwise see a situation for what it truly was—cruel and unusual. A situation that only hurt the people of Cuba. A situation that was orchestrated by the American government under the guise of hurting the Cuban government, but the real objective was to obtain control of the small sovereign nation.
Over the last five years or so, I have done a lot of unlearning, and while I still feel very strongly about the Cuban government and their crimes toward the Cuban people who oppose them, I do not believe the issue of Cuba is as black and white as the loud voices in South Florida want you and me to believe. The one thing, however, that is very black and white is that the embargo does nothing but hurt the people of Cuba. The embargo does nothing else but cut off an already limited supply of items, medicines, and tools that the Cuban people need to survive.
If you ask me now what it means to be a good Cuban American, my answer is simple, yet in true Cuban fashion also very complex. Being a good Cuban American means to support the people, and to fight for what's right and just for them, not for the government; American or Cuban. Being a good Cuban American means to call for an end to the decades-long embargo that has done nothing but strangle an already struggling country. Being a good Cuban American means recognizing that NO government is without flaw, but understanding that at times when you are pushed into a corner, there are only a handful of ways to stay alive.
For me, being a good Cuban American means stopping the embargo. Stop suffocating my people. Stop oppressing my people, and stop using their suffering as the excuse to blame another government. Not in my name.
End the embargo. Help the Cuban people. If this calls to you, please join Cuban Americans for Cuba. We have poured our hearts into an open letter against the current US policies toward Cuba (CubanAmericansForCuba.Org/Letter), which is a call to our fellow Cubans to stand with us and show the world who we truly are and what we truly stand for.
Our movement is a blend of members across the United States who don't all think alike, but who share one unshakable conviction: that the future of Cuba belongs to the Cuban people, and to them alone, free from American interference and manipulation.