A Desperate MAGA Invents a Communist Conspiracy

Using the old playbook of Communist threat to justify a crackdown

Some of you asked to see the video of my July 17 American Federation of Teachers panel with former Attorney General Eric Holder, resistance expert Erica Chenoweth, and civic education authority Danielle Allen, moderated by AFT President Randi Weingarten. She asked us what concerns us and what gives us hope. Here it is.

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“WE WILL STOP COMMUNISM,” House Republicans posted on X a few days ago. Just in time for the midterms, as President Donald Trump and MAGA flail around looking for something, anything, to stop their free fall (tanking poll numbers, the Iran War, daily revelations of corruption, brutality, and incompetency, the Epstein files, economic downturns) they have come up with a new Party Line and Historic Mission.

Apparatchiks and operatives have their orders: conjure a Communist threat inside America, associating with it the entire Democratic Party, to prepare people to accept whatever authoritarian crackdown the administration and the Republican Party may be planning to stop free and fair elections from handing them a defeat.

Autocrats fear the exercise of popular will as expressed at the ballot box. As a recent Journal of Democracy essay by Javier Corrales and Susan Stokes finds, elections are how many autocrats end up having to exit from power. This is why I always tell people to never give up on elections.

We need to take this threat to our freedoms and our democracy seriously. When autocrats are facing a challenge to their continued power, they will use every means possible to defeat the adversary. Heather Cox Richardson and Gil Duran have recently reported on this turn to anti-Communism and why mass murderer Francisco Franco is being rehabilitated.

Communism, as the political system of dictatorships in the Soviet Union, Cambodia, China, Cuba, and many other countries, is responsible for many dozens of millions of deaths, as well as famines, torture and violence, economic collapses, and more. All Communist regimes operating today are highly repressive societies that should be shunned, denounced, and exposed for their violence and corruption.

Opposing Communist tyranny abroad is quite different than supporting an invented Communist threat at home to gain support for an authoritarian consolidation. That is what is happening here.

This is an old playbook. My book Strongmen covers a century of right-wing counter-revolutions against real or invented leftist adversaries. Even if you read it before, you may find the discussions on Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, Augusto Pinochet, and the first Trump administration newly relevant.

This essay introduces some of the propaganda techniques that are being used to get Americans to believe in this invented threat. It’s also a prelude to a series of essays I will be writing for you on Mussolini as anti-Communist icon in the U.S.; Franco’s innovation of bringing colonial anti-insurgency into Europe to exterminate leftists; Pinochet and the Operation Condor terror and psychological warfare consortium; and more.

A Sharper Propaganda Formulation: From “Radical Left” to Communists

MAGA has been smearing Democrats for years, calling them “the radical left,” and the second Trump administration has been trying to make a concrete enemy out of “Antifa,” but now they seem to have settled on Communism as a sharper formulation that has lots of history in America and globally.

There is the interwar American support for Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, Cold War McCarthyism, and the rehabilitation of anti-Communist dictators such as Franco and Pinochet. All of this can flow into today’s efforts to circulate the conspiracy theory of Communists stealing our freedom while helping today’s global allies in Brazil, Argentina, and elsewhere rewrite the history of dictatorship and defeat democracy globally.

Steve Bannon, who makes use of Joseph Goebbels’ tactic of circulating extremist ideas to bring them into the realm of the possible, stated on a recent War Room podcast that Communists corrupting U.S. elections to take over the government would constitute a “national security emergency” that requires “immediate action” through a White House executive order. Here is a summation of that argument from Bannon’s War Room site.

Today’s anti-Communist delirium also builds on the successful “Stop the Steal” campaign that was used to mobilize thugs for the January 6, 2021 violence. This, too, is an element of effective propaganda: you take narratives that have already worked and repurpose them, keeping the elements of maximum emotional appeal. In this case it is “stealing” freedom from Americans, but the agent of that theft must now be Communists.

Anti-Communism provides a big tent for those concerned about secularization (“godless Commies”), shadowy foreign influence on our institutions, violence, dissolution of hierarchies of class and gender, worker empowerment, anti-capitalism, and so on. This Cold War-era image of the many tentacles of Communist infiltration plays to those diffuse fears. The reader was instructed to “keep this pamphlet moving” for maximum circulation of the message.

The Enemy is All Around Us: Linking Domestic and Foreign Threats

Authoritarians also know that the most effective propaganda links internal enemies to external threats. That is why we are hearing now about a transnational left-wing terrorist network that must also be defeated. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and White House advisor Stephen Miller recently convened a Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism, with officials from over 60 countries present for discussions on cross-border investigation and intelligence sharing. It sounds to me like a plan for enhanced counter-insurgency warfare at home and increased transnational repression.

Significantly, Rubio labelled the targets of this operation as “enemies of civilization.” This civilizational discourse, which dates back to Fascist anti-Communist ideology, is dear to Rubio, Miller, Elon Musk, and others who pursue population engineering goals as part of an ambition to turn our multiracial democracy into an autocratic White Christian ethnostate. This civilizational discourse now influences national security and foreign policy as well. Communists join immigrants, people of color, LGBTQ+ populations, and other “usual suspects” of authoritarians.

When White Racial Rescue Becomes a Foreign Policy and National Security Priority

What the administration lacked was a catalyst to a crackdown, and prospects of electoral defeat required a new enemy and a new narrative. That’s what the Communist threat is supposed to provide. So, look for Communists to be blamed for every offense and menace to decency and freedom, and wait for them to be billed as an existential threat to America.

Trump is a skillful propagandist who has surrounded himself with other skillful propagandists with long histories of television and media performances on Fox and elsewhere. Watch how their language and slogans align and how Communist threats to elections become the drum they beat as we head into the midterms.

Understanding how propaganda works helps us to see through it and to help others to do the same.