By Emma Goldman
Dialectical Materialism Editor
With the world in flames (thanks to him) and the American economy in tatters (ditto), the Mad King has nothing to offer America except fear over the supposedly dreaded specter of Communism, last seen in 1989:
“A generation after we fought and won the cold war against the menace of communism, 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 in a speech at Mount Rushmore on 3 July, on the eve of the US’s 250th birthday.
He vowed to “vanquish communists quickly” and “send them into exile”.
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| He tried to warn us about Communism! |
Wow, this sounds really bad. But those of you under 40 may have no idea what the f*** he's talking about (like the Mad King himself). So as a public service before the Spy, like the Congress, takes an entirely undeserved vacation, we thought we'd give you a little primer on the Red Menace.
What's so bad about Communism? So many things!
1. Absolute power vested in a tyrant who rules by force and terror.
The essence of Communism is a totalitarian dictatorship. What does that mean for the poor subjects of such a regime?
That was fashionista and lifetime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover explaining it all to his fellow Americans on page of 44 of his tome called Masters of Deceit. We'll cite this primer simply as Hoover.
A wannabe Communist dictator seeks power by overthrowing the legitimate institutions of government by force and violence:
President Trump had summoned a mob, including armed extremists and conspiracy theorists, to Washington, DC on the day the joint session of Congress was to meet. He then told that same mob to march on the U.S. Capitol and “fight.” They clearly got the message.
2. The rule of law is replaced by the whim of the dictator.
Under communism, a tiny minority, perhaps ten to twenty men, would rule the United States....The Constitution, and all our laws, would be abolished.
Hoover at 7.
A Communist dictator would ignore our laws and the Constitution, by, for example, trying to repeal a core provision of our Constitution by Executive fiat, Trump v. Barbera, No. 25.-365 (U.S. June 30, 2026), or imposing onerous new taxes without the required Act of Congress, Learning Resources v. Trump, No. 24-1287 (U.S. Feb. 20, 2026).
Such a dictator could, hard as it may be to believe, assume the power to demolish our most cherished buildings and memorials for his own pleasure without lawful authority.
3. Destruction of free and open inquiry.
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| Communists try to overthrow democracies by force |
No wonder communism can operate only in the glow of book burnings. No opposite view can be tolerated. “Down with non-party writers!” Lenin demanded. ...Shifts in the Party line also cause book burnings. One New England headquarters, caught in a Party shift, destroyed three barrels of literature. What is “true” today in the Party may not be “true” tomorrow. Hoover at 157.
The [Communist] Party, in the final analysis, has an interpretation for the whole of human life. Nothing is untouched: science, psychology, sex, love, care of children, literature, history, the origin and end of life. Everything must be absorbed. Communism is a unitary, all-embracing, and absolute system. Hoover at 161.
A Communist dictatorship tries to destroy free and open inquiry by using its powers to destroy its great institutions of higher learning on transparently flimsy or false pretexts. For example, a major university with an observant Jewish President was sued by Communist functionaries on the order of the dictator on the absurd ground, quickly dismissed, that it fostered a climate of antisemitism. That same university had been targeted by losing all federal grants because of its supposed opposition to the Communist regime.
Like the ruthless totalitarians they are, the Communists have made it clear that they will continue to attack universities and other citadels of free inquiry:
The administration and the Justice Department seem to have “focused on Harvard as the major private school target, but a number of other private and some public schools have been, and seem to remain, in D.O.J.’s cross hairs,” he said.
But Samuel Bagenstos, a University of Michigan law professor, said the ruling “eliminates any realistic chance that the Trump administration can use a Title VI investigation to coerce Harvard.”
The government has proved “very creative” in devising ways to pressure the university, he said, though “at some point, the folks in the Trump administration will surely realize that they look as ridiculous as Wile E. Coyote trying to catch the Road Runner.”
Even small colleges in distant places can be crushed for failure to toe the party line. In Florida, for example, one school was destroyed by the Communist regime and books displeasing to that regime were chucked into a dumpster.
The New College of Florida is under fire after what appears to be hundreds of books that have been wiped from its collection and discarded on the street....[A] New College student who reported seeing what they believed was up to "thousands" of books being "shoved into a dumpster" behind the college's library.
... "There were Bibles, there were stories of Black authors, of Latin authors, female stories, there were LGBTQ+ and queer stories, or trans stories, all thrown into a dumpster. It sends the message that New College of Florida wants to send stories of gender and diversity to the dump, and it was so heartbreaking and also very frustrating."
Those same apparatchiks have banned a total of 700 books from the public schools in that backward state.
4. Replacing honest government with a corrupt cabal of friends, relatives, and flunkies chosen for their ability to fawn over and flatter a dictator.
Another mark of a Communist dictatorship is that the Communist tyrant replaces competent government officials with fawning toadies who must constantly suck up to him to survive.
In Stalin's Russia, it was a crime to be the first one to stop clapping at a Stalin speech:
An explosion of enthusiastic applause for Joseph Stalin followed a Communist Party conference in 1937.
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| The dictator must always be fawned over by his flunkies |
The ovation went on for three minutes, four, five…
Palms were getting sore, arms were aching, and the older members of the audience were panting with exhaustion.
According to dissident author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the clapping continued for 11 minutes. "It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin. However, who would dare be the first to stop?" he wrote in The Gulag Archipelago.
"With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers!"
Fun fact: the first to stop applauding was in fact sent to the Gulag.
Today Communist dictators insist on the same level of fawning from their flunkies, enforced by fear:
During Tuesday's marathon 3-hour and 16-minute Cabinet meeting at the White House, Special Envoy Steve Witkoff offered a masterclass in sycophancy. One real estate developer sucking up to another.
"Mr. President, working for this government, for you, is the greatest honor of my life," he told his golfing buddy. "I tell it to everybody, and I really do feel that way, and I thank you because it's a privilege to go out there and represent you in your humanitarian effort, in your goals of solving conflicts all over the world."
Israel had just killed 20 people, including journalists, at a Gaza hospital, and Trump was deploying U.S. troops to crack down on Americans in their own capital. But the irony of casting the president as a peacemaker was entirely lost on Witkoff.
As a result, the Communist tyrant's flunkies and enablers live in fear of losing favor with the absolute ruler:
President Donald Trump said Tuesday he had not yet made a determination about whether Jeanine Pirro's job is safe in his strongest public comments yet on her future as U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia.
The remarks came after Trump told reporters on Monday in the Oval Office that Pirro "choked" and "folded like an umbrella" in dropping the charges against former Olympian David Hearn, who was accused of damaging the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
Pirro then showed up to the White House on Monday afternoon with a banker's box in tow full of evidence as she prepared to defend her decision to the president, according to sources familiar with the meeting.
Which is why a Communist regime drives out anyone who is competent to carry out the work of government and replaces them with otherwise-unemployable suck-ups.
5. The use of tools of terror, like murder, torture, and imprisonment of non-criminals in Gulags
Stalin [the Communist dictator of the old USSR, for you Gen Z'ers] acted not through persuasion, explanation, and patient cooperation with people, but by imposing his concepts and demanding absolute submission to his opinion. Whoever opposed this concept or tried to prove his viewpoint, and the correctness of his position—was doomed to ... subsequent moral and physical annihilation. Hoover at 44
It is a hallmark of Communist regimes to build vast shadowy detention facilities where men, women, and even children can be held without criminal conviction on flimsy or no grounds. In these gruesome network of prison camps, helpless detainees are regularly mistreated and denied medical care and palatable food and water. Too often, the miserable wretches die in custody from their mistreatment and neglect:
At just one Communist-run Gulag in the wilds of the Texas desert,
Dozens of people held at a sprawling Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Texas say they were either beaten by guards or witnessed others being beaten, according to a new report issued by legal and human rights advocates.
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| Dreaded internal security czar poses at Gulag |
The 84-page report issued jointly Wednesday by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union also says men and women held at Camp East Montana, located at the U.S. Army’s Fort Bliss in El Paso, recounted being denied necessary medical care, forced to live in filthy conditions and fed inedible meals. Detainees also said they were prevented from contacting their lawyers or family members.
Of the 71 detainees contacted over a five month period, 64 — about 90% of those interviewed — said they had either personally been assaulted by the staff or had seen others physically abused, according to the report.
And Communist regimes are known for instilling terror by gloating about the torture and mistreatment they impose with impunity. Even today, in Communist states, the armed secret police are now authorized to impose painful electric shocks by wearing special gloves. One of the advantages of these torture devices is said to be they leave no marks on the victims.
Some of the most extreme Red regimes even enlist the Communist International to build huge torture centers and then move their own people hundreds of miles in chains to be held forever without trial in such infernal dungeons. The apparatchiks who devise such cruelty enjoy posing in front of their victims.
6. State ownership of the means of production.
A central tenet of totalitarian Communism is:
All property used in production would be confiscated, thus leading ultimately to total communization, meaning state ownership. Hoover at 7
It should be obvious that allowing a corrupt Communist tyrant to acquires private enterprises transforms what should be an efficient free economy into a twisted command economy, in which all enterprises respond to the whims of the dictator rather than the interests of consumers.
The concentration of ownership in the hands of a Communist elite also provides them with an immense power that they can use for their own nefarious ends:
The Trump administration has taken direct stakes in companies on a scale rarely seen in the U.S. outside wartime or economic crisis, ...
Japan’s Nippon Steel agreed to give President Donald Trump a “golden share” in U.S. Steel as a condition for the two companies’ controversial merger. Trump now personally wields sweeping veto power over major business decisions made by the nation’s third-largest steel producer.
“You know who has the golden share? I do,” Trump said at a summit on artificial intelligence and energy in Pittsburgh on July 15.
....But the Trump administration demonstrated earlier this month that it is also willing to buy directly into publicly traded corporations. The Department of Defense agreed to purchase a $400 million equity stake in rare-earth miner MP Materials, making the Pentagon the company’s largest shareholder.
....Trump’s unique hold over the Republican Party gives him the ability to intervene in companies on a scale that would be difficult politically for a Democratic president,[ who]... would have been accused of being a communist ....
7. Use of war to keep the masses focused on an external enemy
In his classic work 1984, George Orwell noted that a totalitarian regime such as Communism uses constant war to oppress the people and amass even more unaccountable power.
Today Communist dictators use wars of aggression to distract from the grotesque sex crimes committed by those dictators and to amass even more wealth and power for themselves and a small clique of family members and other hangers-on:
Despite the administration’s denials, it’s hard to avoid the perception that Kushner is leveraging his influence over US policy – and his proximity to the president – to drum up new business for his company. It’s also clear that Kushner is raising money for his personal benefit as Trump has plunged the US into a war against Iran, which has caused immense destruction across the Middle East and global disruption in energy prices and supply.
What could be more un-American?
8. The belief that the leader is infallible:
You should have seen Stalin’s fury! How could it be admitted that he, Stalin, had not been right! He is after all a “genius,” and a genius cannot help but be right! Everyone can err, but Stalin considered that he never erred, that he was always right. He never acknowledged to anyone that he made any mistake, large or small, despite the fact that he made not a few mistakes in the matter of theory and in his practical activity. Hoover at 45.
The belief in the infallibility of a dictator, now matter how compromised or even demented he is, is a hallmark of Communist totalitarianism. No democracy could survive when Communist stooges in positions of power make statements like these:
[South Carolina Republican Senator Darlene Graham] said, "I realize the price of gas is a little high right now, but I think President Trump is gonna get us through this and the price of gas will eventually come down . . . I believe in him when it comes to dealing with Iran."
And when a Communist dictator tried to repeal the U.S. Constitution by decree, one of his strongest supporters, supposedly a well-educated lawyer, toed the illegal party line:
And the drivel put out by the talking heads of Communist propaganda outlets is if anything more outrageous:
I think what the president has done militarily and economically is historic. I think our military has been spectacular. I think cutting off the strait was genius. And we have the enemy exactly where we want them.
Source: Media Matters for America.
Of course, having to mouth Party lies destroys the reputation of the former journalists who now kowtow to the Red Nightmare:
[Fox “News” host Maria] Bartiromo has fallen far—from a business journalist to a right-wing propaganda machine—as was exposed in Dominion Voting Systems’ massive defamation lawsuit against Fox News. The looking glass has been shattered for Bartiromo, who now spends her days spinning falsehoods about Trump’s ties to Epstein and denying climate change.
We could go on, and on, and on, but you catch our drift: Communist dictatorship is truly a nightmare. Just anyone who's living through it.
