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Adolph Hitler was something of a piker compared to Mao, the greatest mass murderer in mankind’s history. It’s impossible to measure the misery, destitution, and death inflicted by the communist dictator. Was it 20, 30, 40 million dead? We don’t really know.
For the sake of moral clarity, however, let’s concede that celebrating Mao is as grotesque as celebrating Hitler. No decent human being would do it. No decent society would normalize it.
Yet here we are. This week, streamer Hasan Piker delivered a speech at the College Democrats convention, donning a Mao-style suit, calling for the purging of centrist bourgeois elements from the Democratic Party to great applause.
In the past, Piker has said he “never would and never will criticize Mao Zedong, he is one of the great leaders of this world.” He’s broadcast in front of Mao’s portrait at Tiananmen Square, holding a Chicom flag, claiming, “I don’t have any kind of patriotism in my heart for America.” A fan of Islamic terrorism who believes America deserved 9/11, Piker likes to share cringy pictures of himself pretending to read Lenin’s “What Can Be Done?”
In any reasonable era, someone of Piker’s moral and intellectual disabilities would be ostracized, branded an unhinged lunatic, and compelled to live on the fringes of society like George Lincoln Rockwell or the Unabomber. Piker, though, is a power broker on the modern American Left.
Even a few years ago, accusing a Democrat of Marxist leanings would have sparked great indignation. Today? Democrats campaign with Piker. Once-respected institutions invite him to pontificate on history. Leading progressive media outlets such as Pod Save America and The Bulwark treat him as a normal political operative, never grilling him on his support for an ideology that’s put tens of millions of people into the ground.
Many more elected Democrats have welcomed Hasan-style “democratic socialists” — the preferred euphemism of modern communists — into their “big tent” than criticized them.
They do so because polls find young people increasingly prefer the red-green alliance of Islamist and communists to anything resembling traditional American political coalitions. Theoretically, at least, they prefer collectivism to markets. They prefer protest and “action” to debate and governing. They prefer violent theocratic regimes such as Hamas to free capitalistic nations such as Israel. The Overton Window is in warp drive.
When President Donald Trump stood at Mount Rushmore on the eve of the nation’s 250th anniversary, delivering an unapologetically patriotic speech, he threw in a few words to denounce this rise of communism as “a mortal threat to American liberty.”
This greatly offended many in the media. “GOP reboots the Red Scare as young Democrats embrace socialism,” an Axios headline read. “Red scare revived as Trump leads push to attack Democrats as ‘communists,’” says the Guardian. “Trump is trying to start a new Red Scare,” says MSNow. “Why does Trump keep talking about ‘communism’?” asks CNN.
Streamer Hasan Piker hands his energy drink to producer Mauricio Miranda before going on stage to speak at a campaign event for Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive candidate in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in Michigan, Tuesday, April 7, 2026, at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Mich. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
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Streamer Hasan Piker hands his energy drink to producer Mauricio Miranda before going on stage to speak at a campaign event for Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive candidate in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in Michigan, Tuesday, April 7, 2026, at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Mich. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
MS Now commentator Michael Steele accused Trump of smearing “democratic socialists who want to do things like expand Medicare and start city-run grocery stores in needy areas, not seize the means of production.” Which is as nonsensical as arguing that fascists merely seek to improve infrastructure.
Steele compared Trump’s words to Joe McCarthy’s famous 1950 “enemies from within” speech to the Ohio County Women’s Republican Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, which cast “routine political disagreement as an existential crisis.”
The Democratic Socialists of America — the organization that most Piker-endorsed candidates were once members of, affiliated with, or endorsed by — calls for the elimination of the Senate, the Electoral College, the presidency, and the Supreme Court. Are calls “to transform society” and drafting a new constitution that would institute a “democratic socialist republic” routine?
Perhaps Steele believes that it’s routine to support slavery reparations, unlimited free abortion paid for by the state, the abolishment of the police, open borders and full voting rights for illegal immigrants, and the nationalizing of all industry. That’s not my reading of history. And all of that is in the DSA platform.
The other day, prominent DSA member and Islamist Linda Sarsour, for example, called for getting rid of the Declaration of Independence. Darializa Avila Chevalier, one of the new Democratic Party congressional nominees from New York City, was co-founder of a group that called for “nothing short of the total collapse” of the “American empire” with the goal to “eradicate America” and “Western civilization.”
So, yes, a Red Scare would be useful.
McCarthyism, ask any left-winger, was perhaps the greatest crime ever visited upon our nation. Steele contends it was “long considered a stain on American history.” We have been subjected to endless cultural depictions decrying the paranoiac horrors of the Red Scare. Who will think of the communist screenwriter forced to ply his trade under a pseudonym, after all?
This depiction of the Red Scare has always been ahistorical. Take perhaps the most famous moment of the era, reenacted in numerous movies, which finds State Department lawyer Joseph Welch dramatically confronting Joe McCarthy by asking him: “Have you no sense of decency?”
What popular depictions always conveniently leave out is that communists had infiltrated the State Department, as well as many other of our institutions. And journalists, intellectuals, and politicians often helped them do it.
Many intellectuals who came of age in the 1920s and 1930s were supportive of the Soviet Union. Many worked to help it. Everyone remembers the excesses of McCarthyism. But when Soviet archives were opened in the 1990s, we found out that Richard Nixon, who had first made his name as congressman on the House Un-American Activities Committee to the anger of the smart set, was right about Alger Hiss. He was a communist spy. As were other government officials, such as Laurence Duggan, Lauchlin Currie, William Remington, Maurice Halperin, and numerous others.
Julius Rosenberg was guilty. The Manhattan Project was likely teeming with Soviet spies. In their book, Sacred Secrets, Jerrold and Leona Schecter produce a Soviet document sent to Stalin’s henchman, Lavrentiy Beria, claiming that J. Robert Oppenheimer was a facilitator of espionage. FDR’s pro-Soviet Treasury official, Harry Dexter White, let a nest of spies work under his nose, as well.
McCarthy came a lot closer to the truth than most of his detractors.
In the 20th century, the Soviet Comintern secretly bribed and worked with ideological allies across the world. We will never have a full accounting of how many communists operated within the U.S. Today, though, the Chicoms and Qatari Islamists openly flood our institutions with tens of billions of dollars in funding that corrode our educational system and help create hordes of half-literate, brainwashed anti-American pro-Islamist “activists.”
Democrats, who run around accusing anyone they disagree with of being “fascists,” get incredibly pedantic when it comes to the distinction between “socialism” and “communism.” Ideologically speaking, Piker and his friends are far closer to the latter than the former.
I’ve also been assured that “democratic socialists” won’t have much power, anyway. I was told that when four representatives were in “the Squad.” There are likely to be more than a dozen of them in Congress next year, not counting Trotskyite ringleader Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
LEFTWARD, HO! HOW SOCIALISTS WOULD SHAPE A NEW DEMOCRATIC MAJORITY
Of course, simply because contemporary Marxists lack the ability to instill their preferred system immediately doesn’t change the treacherous nature of their ideas or motivations. And just because socialists modulate their rhetoric to win elections doesn’t change their long-term goals.
Now, one could quibble that “Red Scare” isn’t exactly the right term. After all, is it really a “scare” when we can see it’s plainly true and happening in the open? Maybe not. But whatever you call it, we should be highly anxious about the plague of “democratic socialism,” not whitewashing its anti-American radicalism.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
