Axios wants you to know that Republicans have dug down far in the “phobia” playbook and trotted out the ridiculous claim that communism is bad, just as they did when communists were stealing the secrets to making an atomic bomb and handing them over to a country with the avowed purpose of destroying us.
Everyone should be terrified that many Democrats are openly embracing a broken and economically illiterate ideology that destroyed countless countries and led to the death of over 100 million people in the 20th century. https://t.co/UQWYij5RpU
— AG (@AGHamilton29) June 30, 2026
It’s ridiculous, I know. Why should anybody be unhappy with the rapid rise of a revolutionary movement that celebrates murdering people, stealing people’s property, and wants to upend our Constitution?
That’s as dangerous as being worried that Muslims will commit terrorist acts, bring child marriage and genital mutilation to our country, and vow to replace liberal democracy with Sharia law.
70 years after the Red Scare and 35 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, President Trump and Republicans are trying to re-introduce a national fear of “godless communists” ahead of the critical midterms.
Why it matters: A wave of resounding victories by Democratic Socialists has the GOP trotting out a message that last worked when most of those candidates weren’t even born.
- It’s too soon to know if the message is working — but Trump and Republican strategists see an opening with voters old enough to remember Soviet-era nuclear drills and spy dramas.
The big picture: Former Trump aide Steve Bannon has argued for years that former Wisconsin Sen. Joe McCarthy was right about communism’s widespread infiltration into the U.S. government.
- On Sunday, Trump called communism “the Greatest Threat to our Country since World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, or 9/11!”
- Once a fringe view, now right-wing voices seem to be calling for a McCarthyism revival.
What they’re saying: “It’s a common electoral strategy for conservatives to attack liberals, progressives, democratic socialists as communists, and imply therefore that they are much more extreme than they actually are,” Kathryn Olmsted, a U.C. Davis distinguished professor of history, tells Axios.
- But, she adds, “we’re definitely reaching a new fever pitch.”
“Red Scare” is one of those cultural touchstones for liberals in particular. It is based on the idea that hunting down communists in government was based on an irrational fear and that it was only rubes who worried that there were spies planted throughout our government.
You know what? There were communist spies planted throughout our government, and we were facing an existential threat from an ideological movement that had enslaved half a continent, and which, by the time it was defeated in the USSR, had killed 100 million people there and in China.
Oh, big deal. You gotta break some eggs to make an omelet.
The Democrats are running candidates who OPENLY embrace communism, and even more who give it a wink and a nod. Hasan Piker, their favorite campaign proxy, nearly had an orgasm when gifted a first edition of Mao’s Little Red Book, and puts pictures of himself reading Lenin’s “What Is to Be Done?”
Even Democrats are sounding the alarm, but Axios wants you to know that it is totally irrational to worry. Sure, candidates are running on platforms of completely upending America and taking over entire markets, but really, would that be so bad?
Pravda was state-subsidized, and propagandists had job security, you know.
Unfortunately, McCarthy’s legacy was to discredit anti-communism, with the help of his enemies, of course. An entire mythology has developed around the so-called “Red Scare” in which the American communists were the good guys and their opponents the bad ones.
The DSA doesn’t hide its love affair with communism. Its governing board is filled with communists. Its favorite candidates are openly communist, or have been trying to hide the fact by deleting their X feeds where they say they are. Mamdani’s “tenant advocate” says “elect more communists,” as she explains her plan to expropriate the property of landlords.
These people are communists, although Trump is wrong that they are “Godless.” Most of them are Islamists as well.
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