The commies are coming...
There’s an old truism that the only things guaranteed in life are death and taxes. But when it comes to Republicans looking to win elections by tarring their opponents, you can add one more: a good old-fashioned Red Scare.
Aided and abetted by a legacy media so afraid of being cast as “liberal” that they quickly falls back to their favorite trope: “Dems in Disarray.”
Take Florida, er, Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville, conflating primary election results in New York, the painfully slow California vote count and Donald Trump’s refusal to sign a bipartisan housing bill until the Senate passes his voter-suppression SAVE America Act — which “Coach,” speaking for the American public — claims has wide bipartisan support:
“They want fair elections. We just saw the nonsense in California, and we’re seeing the nonsense of these Communists taking over our country, and they’re not Socialists, they are Communists,” he said. And so President Trump was exactly right. I’m proud of what he did today. He spoke up. He called people out. They had a very good conversation back and forth. People need to be called out if you’re not going to vote for this country, my God folks, we are in trouble, and President Trump needs help, and we’re not giving him 100% help that he needs.”
Fact check: it doesn’t have enough support to overcome a Senate filibuster.
The source of this latest round of red-baiting is the primary election victories of three Democratic challengers — two members of the Democratic Socialists of America — in New York City.
A thousand miles away from Tuberville’s Alabama. The home of the United Klans of America. A fact overlooked in stories about his screed.
Whole political science classes are taught explaining the difference between democratic socialists, social democrats and communists. The strains are defined by how they would deal with capitalism, a subject that has taken on more significance in a nation where the world’s first trillionaire took a “chain saw” to government.
None of Tuesday’s New York primary winners are calling for the proletariat to throw off its chains as espoused by Karl Marx. And the brand of communism, Marxism-Leninism, proved to be an abysmal failure in the Soviet Union has, if anything, transformed into state capitalism.
One New York primary winner, Darializa Avila Chevalier, has a social media profile mirroring that of a certain former New York City resident now splitting his time between Washington and Palm Beach, Florida. You know, this guy:
“America the Beautiful will NEVER be a Communist Country!!!” Trump wrote on social media early Wednesday, calling the three Democrats who prevailed in New York — two of whom identify as democratic socialists — “3 solid Communists.”
Another winner, Claire Valdez, who will represent a district known as “The Commie Corridor” — because it includes neighborhoods filled with young, college-educated voters — appears to be more closely aligned with the “sewer socialism” of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Not to mention Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders or current New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Yet that’s more than enough for Republicans, so fearful of a midterm blowout that they want to upend a constitutional mandate that states control elections, to um, dive deeper in the rhetorical sewer.
Listen to House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Trump Toady, the man left over after MAGA Republicans dumped former Speaker Kevin McCarthy for the sin of actually standing up to Donald Trump’s attempted January 6th coup. At least for a “New York Minute.”
“The insurgent left is on the rise,” Johnson proclaimed gleefully at a news conference at the party headquarters in Washington, where he faulted Democrats for failing to defend against “the Marxist march around the country.”
But heck, read the election postmortems in legacy media and we are back into “Dems in Disarray.”
“These victories showed how competing forces are pressing on Democrats as they seek a path back to power. As was the case with a frustrated GOP rank-and-file who turned to Donald Trump in 2016, many of their voters are rejecting an establishment they believe has failed to fight the other side and deliver on issues they care most about. But the far-left candidates who are gaining ground and visibility could undermine their efforts to win in the more centrist areas where the 2026 election will be decided.”
In bemoaning the ideological differences within the Democratic Party the pundits failed to deliver some basic journalism — background and context. These analyses failed to even mention the GOP meltdown taking place the same day. For that you had to look elsewhere:
“President Trump plunged Congress into chaos on Wednesday as he abruptly canceled the signing of a celebrated bipartisan housing measure and issued new demands that Republicans pass legislation imposing voting restrictions despite their protests that the votes don’t exist to do so.”
And of course none of the analyses take into account the widespread dissatisfaction with Trump’s handling of the economy, his failed war on Iran, the massive corruption, not to mention The Strait of Warm Ooze.
From the days of Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy, up to the fall of the Soviet Union, “the communist menace” was a key section of the GOP campaign playbook. As the New York results show, it doesn’t carry the same punch as it used to as younger voters look at the affordability mess capitalism has created.
Not to mention what works in New York doesn’t work in Alabama or Iowa. And vice versa. No matter how hard Republicans try to change the subject from their own failures.
Is it too much to ask political reporters to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time?