September 25 Friday roundup

The latest podcast episode uses the recent report acknowledging there was a solitary confinement device at the Everglades camp known as Alligator Alcatraz—”the box.” I wrote about around the world, across history, there is always a “box.” You can watch it on YouTube or listen on Apple, Spotify, and elsewhere. If you’d like to check out the links in the written version, you can read Tuesday’s post.

There’s a topic I’ve been pondering writing about, debating whether to cover it or not. I was thinking maybe today would be a good day for it, but still wasn’t sure. Then, walking my dog and a guest dog at our house this morning, I came across a sign in a neighbor’s yard not far from my house. It read, “SAY NO TO COMMUNISM!!! VOTE REPUBLICAN!”

Though I hadn’t been looking for a sign from that universe, it had sent me a Bat-signal of a message in the form of a literal sign. So today I want to write about rhetoric around capital-C Communism (not about the substance of Communism itself).

Scare tactics referencing Communism on the right have taken off in recent weeks, and not just on yard signs. There are two key examples of this surge (online and off) of deploring the threat of Communism in the U.S. One is among MAGA Republicans, the other is among their opponents.

First, As Trump’s mid-September rally for the MAGA faithful in Dallas showed, the Republican strategy right now is to label every Democrat a communist. Faced with displeasure over the condition of the country after two years of a Republican trifecta (House, Senate, presidency), along with the collapse of the anti-immigrant hatred they had nursed so successfully for so long, Trump and his allies have resorted to shouting “COMMUNIST” at every turn.

The U.S. is no more in danger of turning Communist than I am of playing in the NFL. Which means this talk is, in part, a lazy strategy due to simple desperation. But it’s also a sign of the advanced age of much of Republican leadership.

For those who grew up during the Cold War, the Communist bogeyman was a theme of life. It was the fallback smear used to disparage domestic foes. The basic suggestion was that—due to fifth-column traitors inside the country collaborating with Soviet agents to destroy free markets, Christianity, and freedom itself—the U.S. was on the brink of succumbing to Communism.

It was a dishonest assertion, and a nasty way to transform examples of governance that had killed millions and led to the creation of police states around the globe into a jump-scare accusation that harmed careers and ruined lives here in the U.S. The use of the term today by Republicans terrified of losing the midterms is a flashback to the mercenary appeals to fear and ignorance under McCarthyism, and all the harm that hysteria trailed in its wake.

But another use of the word Communism as a epithet has also been on the rise recently. This use takes place most often in online battles between people who’ve never met—though, depending on the company you keep, you could encounter this argument cropping up in real life as well.

You may be blissfully unaware that there is a group of people who make it a habit to defend or dismiss the nastiest exploits of Joseph Stalin or Mao Zedong, despite the toll in lives and suffering that the rule of both men took on the countries they led. Pressed on the matter, rather than address authoritarians’ crimes, they will point to U.S. brutality and militarism, as well as racism and the cruelties endured by the poorest citizens in many capitalist democracies. These defenders are commonly referred to as “tankies,” a pejorative that sometimes also gets arbitrarily applied more broadly than it should.

Lately, Mao in particular has been appearing in online discourse, and it reminds me of something that comes up intermittently. In this age of vice signaling, wherein the party currently in power continually signals how much harm they are willing to do to vulnerable people, I do think virtue signaling has a role. It’s worthwhile to promote decency, humanity, kindness and accountability.

And sure, if you want to remind people that you’re personally against Stalin and Mao, or that you’re opposed to communism, go for it. There are certainly people out there doing the opposite—trying to move the Overton window with arguments supporting the governing philosophies of any number of history’s monsters.

But there’s one thing I also see that I want to point out, because my sense is that it’s just not useful. I see people posting snippets on Bluesky asserting the utter evil of Mao, or of global Communism, using the same weird kind of bogeyman rhetoric that the McCarthyites used. It’s as if Mao were the Marvel villain in the movie about 21st-century America, or as if Communism were a powerful force lurking behind every door and about to destroy the U.S. And then they have little else to say.

And of course the tankies scream over this. But I also see reasonable people squirming, and I sometimes count myself among them.

You do not, in any event, have to hand it to Stalin or Mao. At the same time, it’s not productive to keep posting about them for no reason except to denounce someone else for talking about them if you don’t have any real knowledge of the history involved and can’t effectively rebut the arguments made by tankies or other sympathizers.

Mao and Stalin and other communist leaders gained power in different ways in different eras. Marxists in Latin America or Africa had their own methods and motivations, which sometimes overlapped with or received support from those flagship communist states. If all you can say is that Communism is evil, and you keep inserting yourself in the discourse, you just start to sound like my mother’s third husband (RIP), who believed that Nancy Pelosi was an actual demon under Satan’s control. You’re expressing an article of faith, not making a historical argument.

People are allowed to have articles of faith—it’s a free country. And there are many reasons to state your values in this era of mercenary murder. Values are important signposts now, when the current leaders of the United States of America are causing the deaths of some million people around the globe through USAID cuts, assassinating civilians on boats at sea, and running an expanding concentration camp system at home. But you do not help your own cause when you show up to an argument with little or nothing in the way of receipts.

For the record, I absolutely think global history is worth studying. I’ve spent a lot of years doing it myself. And what I found researching a history of concentration camps around the world was that every ideology was vulnerable to authoritarianism. And detainees had some common experiences worldwide, but those experiences were very much shaped by the local culture and history.

Yet it was also true that civic institutions built under the governing ideology could sometimes play a role in stopping the expansion of camps at an earlier point or undoing the authoritarian threat. So I’ve become a big fan of panoramic awareness of authoritarian systems—what’s unfolding on a global level—but also the ways that a country’s history shapes what happens. It is often on the weird and local margins that we see systems begin to crumble

So whatever your political beliefs, if you’re spending a lot of time talking about the threat of Communism or Mao’s crimes as part of discourse about U.S. politics in 2026, you are likely taking the spotlight off what’s going on right here, now, today.

Mao is dead, and a few Democratic Socialists have been elected to office. But they are not storming the halls of Congress. There is no Bolshevik Revolution underway.

What has grown out of America’s historical weaknesses instead is the coup of January 6, 2021—an event slower to secure power, but one with just as many ramifications, and perhaps as many risks, as any other revolution or tyrant whose legacy you might care to debate. And the history unfolding in this moment is the only trajectory you can act to change.

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