The USA is going through yet another Red Scare — its third in barely a century — according to the paranoid, hyperbolic statements made by the Deranged Dictator Donald Trump in his speech, July 4. Trump’s comments were made at his failed “Freedom 250” event, which he hosted to replace the celebration of the USA’s 250th birthday. That change was appropriate, given the USA ceased to be a democracy in its 249th year, and has been a fascist autocracy since Trump’s re-election.

On the surface, at least if you are gullible, lack the ability for critical thinking, or are one of his sycophants, it may appear Dictator Trump is sparking a third Red Scare, looking to oust the followers of the politics of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Castro, and Xi Jingping. But that is merely a canard meant to mask his call for another civil war, warring against his political opponents Democrats, liberals, the media, late-night show hosts, comedians, protestors, imaginary villains, people of colour, and anyone criticizes him or who does not bend the knee and touch their forelock to him.*

Anyone who actually knows history or politics is aware of the checkered history of communism in the USA and the previous two Red Scares. And is probably well aware of the general lack of knowledge most Americans have towards communism and other forms of governance (including their own). I would be surprised if more than one American in a ten thousand had ever read Marx’s Communist Manifesto, and less than one in a hundred thousand his dauntingly dense Das Kapital. And the number who have read subsequent communist works by Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, or Stalin? Maybe one in a million.

Do Americans learn the history of the Soviet Union and the rise and inevitable fall of communism? Or what the system actually stands for? I doubt it’s taught in American schools outside a very few specialized university courses. Courses that would no doubt attract the attention of the administration and its secret police (or the not-so-secret Brownshirts in ICE).

In fact, given the abuse of the term by demagogues like Trump and his cabal, and seen or heard in online posts, videos, and other social media supporting the Dictator, I have long argued most Americans don’t have even the vaguest idea what terms like communist, socialist, or liberal actually mean as references to political systems. They simply use them and insults and invectives, much like a four-year-old who repeats words like “fuck” that they heard from someone else in the playground. My own experience online suggests that precious few Americans even know the difference between Karl and Groucho Marx.

The first Red Scare came in 1919-1920, two years after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Rightwing media and government officials stirred the populace into a frenzy, fearing a communist takeover was imminent. US Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer launched a series of police raids targeting suspected (alleged) radicals, communists, and anarchists. Political viewers today would recognize how the Palmer Raids turned out like Trump’s ICE raids: “Thousands of individuals were arrested, and many were deported without proper legal procedures, often purely based on suspect affiliations rather than concrete evidence. The government’s actions were criticized for violating civil liberties and due process, yet they reflected the intense fear-driven drive to protect America from what was perceived as a looming ideological and physical threat.”

You have to keep in mind that this “scare” was years before the USSR itself was officially formed (1922). It was during the Russian Civil War, when the victory of the Reds was far from assured. Even after they won, they had a country in ruins. Russia had surrendered to Germany in 1917 shortly after the Revolution began, and was in such chaos and internal struggles that they were no threat to the international order, and would not be for another decade, after Stalin became leader following Lenin’s death and cemented his power and control.

In April 1920 at the peak of the first Red Scare, FBI head J. Edgar Hoover warned Americans to prepare for “a bloody uprising on May Day.” Across the country, alarm was raised. In preparation for an uprising, police and militias prepared for the worst, but that May Day passed without event. Public opinion and, more significantly, the courts, turned against Palmer and Hoover. The first Red Scare, and Palmer’s raids, ended. Americans stopped being afraid of (and believing) the propaganda and started enjoying the prosperity of the Roaring Twenties. Until, of course, the Depression and the Dust Bowl interfered with their partying.

Red Scare number two started in the late 1940s just after WWII (during which the USSR was an ally) and exploded through the early-to-mid 1950s under ambitious-but-paranoid headline grabber, US Senator Joe McCarthy and his buddy, J. Edgar Hoover. McCarthyism, as it became known, featured “the accusation and investigation of left-wing individuals of communist and Soviet influence on American institutions and of Soviet espionage in the United States.”

This was during the final years of Stalin’s regime (he died in 1953) and continued through the interregnum and post-Stalin power struggle, until after Nikita Khrushchev had taken control of the party and the USSR (1955-64). The US Red Scare shared a lot in common with Stalin’s purges of the 1930s, albeit without the torture and murder.

Running in parallel with McCarthy’s claims was the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), chaired by Congressman Martin Dies Jr. HUAC’s role was to,

… investigate alleged disloyalty and subversive activities on the part of private citizens, public employees, and those organizations suspected of having communist ties. It became a standing (permanent) committee in 1946.

Or, more bluntly, to engage in a witch hunt against perceived opponents, enemies, free-thinkers, and dissenters. The most recognizable action of HUAC was the infamous Hollywood Blacklist, and the subsequent graylist, both of which peaked in 1956, and demonized people in the movie industry as well as anyone related to them in the USA who dared express their belief in free speech. Jobs and careers ended, and lives were shattered by the committee’s accusations. As the Harvard Crimson noted:

In the fifties, the most effective sanction was terror. Almost any publicity from HUAC meant the ‘blacklist’. Without a chance to clear his name, a witness would suddenly find himself without friends and without a job.

While former President Harry S. Truman denounced HUAC in 1959 as the “most un-American thing in the country today” and the public turned against it, the increasingly less-effective committee actually lasted another decade, until 1969. Then it changed its name to the Internal Security Committee and continued to operate, although with even lower influence and respect. Its functions became part of the House Judiciary Committee, which still operates.**

In both of these “scares,” J. Edgar Hoover was behind the curtain pulling the strings, sowing fear and distrust among Americans towards their own neighbours, co-workers, and family. But in neither scare was the president of the US a key motivator for the events and purges that followed. Until now.

The third Red Scare,*** as mentioned earlier, was launched July 4, 2026, by the Deranged Dictator in a speech at Mount Rushmore in which he claimed, without any evidence to back up his accusations that Communism  was spreading, and was a “cancer that needs to be cut out fast.” Trump made the unhinged statement:

You can be a communist, or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both. As for those who peddle Marxist lies about our heritage, tell our children that we live on stolen land or that our heroes were oppressors. They’re doing something much worse than slandering our past. They are slandering and attacking our future. We’re not going to let that happen.

Ironic, considering that his heroes include three actual Communists he has befriended and openly praised: Vladimir Putin, Xi Jingping, and Kim Jong Il. Given that all of these Communist leaders are absolute autocrats who rule over a totalitarian state, Trump was probably expressing wishful thinking that he could be one of them. And he almost is. But to be clear: yes, the USA was founded on stolen land, yes, some of the “heroes” like the racist Confederate leaders, were oppressors who fought for the right to own and abuse other humans. Truth is not slander.

And only a few days earlier, Trump bizarrely claimed he would make “the greatest Communist in history” in a speech to the far-right pseudo-Christian “Faith and Freedom Coalition Policy Conference.” In that same speech, Trump was very specific about identifying New York Democrats as “communists,” even though none identify themselves as such. Of course, Trump lying about opponents and accusing them of things they haven’t done or don’t believe is hardly new. He does it daily.

“As you saw with the communists elected in New York City recently, they’re communists. They’re not social democrats,” Trump said in his speech to the Faith and Freedom Coalition Policy Conference on Friday. “They want to completely destroy the traditional American way of life. Communism is very easy to sell. It destroys everything, but it’s very easy.”
“I’ll be honest, I think I’d be the greatest communist in history,” the Republican president added.

Communism as a political threat to the USA today is akin to mosquitoes being a threat to a grown elephant. I doubt if there enough self-identifying Communists in the entire USA to fill even a small sports areana.

In his 250th anniversary speech Trump also lied about the current state of the USA in his regime, saying, “we have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, equal justice under the law.” Trump himself is the proof that any last vestige of the “rule of law” no longer applies in the USA, at least not to him, his family, his oligarch supporters, his donors, and his insurgent supporters. He added “we are all made in the image of one almighty God, and a communist will never say that, that’s for sure.” Pandering, of course, to his pseudo-Christian (aka Talibangelist) base.

And to top it all off, at the USA’s 250th birthday bash in Washington DC, hundreds of Trump’s far-right extremists and neo-Nazi supporters staged a march, covering their cowardly faces, of course, to avoid the backlash that usually comes when racists and thugs get outed on social media. According to the Guardian,

Members chanted “Life, liberty, victory!” and “Reclaim America!” during the Saturday demonstration, according to video posted on social media…
Patriot Front was founded in 2017 following the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The neo-fascist hate group has gained visibility over the years as those connected to white supremacy organizations have been widely embraced by the Trump administration.

The White House noticeably did not condemn the march or the marchers.

Trump’s Red Scare is really a call for his sycophants, brownshirts, and insurrectionists — like the Patriot Front — to target his political opponents and critics with violence and, likely, murder. It’s a call for a new civil war with the goal of cementing Trump’s power and authority as the lifetime autocrat.****

Notes:

* As Bishop Carlisle said, in Shakespeare’s Richard II:

O, if you raise this house against this house,
It will the woefullest division prove
That ever fell upon this cursèd earth!
Prevent it, resist it, let it not be so,
Lest child, child’s children, cry against you woe!

** Joseph McCarthy himself (as a U.S. senator) had “no direct involvement with the House committee (HUAC). McCarthy was the chairman of the Government Operations Committee and its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the U.S. Senate, not the House. Still, as its icon, his name has stuck on the era.

*** The Committee on the Present Danger has been accused of starting a third Red Scare, but it is an independent foreign policy interest group, established in early 2019, and not an official outlet for a government agency or official. Its source of paranoia derives from conspiracy wingnut Frank Gaffney and MAGA extremist Steve Bannon. “David Skidmore, writing for The Diplomat, saw this attempt to drum up a Red Scare as another instance of “adolescent hysteria” in American diplomacy, as another of the “fevered crusades [which] have produced some of the costliest mistakes in American foreign policy”.

**** Make no mistake: historically Communism has been a failure. Every communist nation has become a police state, with secret police paired with military control. Economically it has proven disastrous, which is why China under Deng Xiaoping had to lift some of the restrictions and open the country up to some forms of free enterprise. Cuba has not done so, and is facing economic collapse (also in large part to the ongoing US blockade and sanctions). Russia mostly gave up economic communism to allow oligarchs to thrive, but retained its political control through the police and military. But predatory and unrestricted capitalism has proven itself equally toxic to nations, as can be seen in the rise of income inequality in the USA and others where profits are put before people, and billionaires are allowed to exist. Democratic socialism remains the only sane, logical, and humane political and economic system.

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