Communism is an evil philosophy. Communist regimes have killed hundreds of millions of people and made millions more live in a police state. But somehow, speaking ill of communism alarms the same journalists who constantly suggest democracy is in peril under President Donald Trump. Authoritarianism is bad—unless it's communist.
Trump denounced communism in a July 3 speech underneath Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. A three-person team at Associated Press—Steven Stone, Steve Peoples, and Michelle Price—penned a story headlined: "Trump hails U.S. exceptionalism before veering into darkly political speech to usher in America 250."
AP began by claiming Trump offered "soaring rhetoric about American exceptionalism before veering into a darkly political speech with warnings about a sinister threat of communism that evoked one of the country's ugliest chapters."
Trump said communism was a "mortal threat to American liberty." That's considered "darkly political," even if it's factual. American liberty and Soviet communism were polar opposites in the Cold War: democracy and tyranny. Somehow, reporters don't like "dark" words about Stalin and Mao and Castro and Pol Pot. They were somehow never a "sinister threat" to anyone.
As for the ugliest chapter? The AP trio lectured: "Indeed, Trump's language evoked the Red Scare of the 1950s, when alleged communists were persecuted and blacklisted from jobs across America, from Washington to Hollywood."
This is a mind-boggling sentence. They're still saying "alleged communists"? Every journalist should have taken the time to learn that there were communist spies in the federal government and there were communists in powerful positions in Hollywood. Leftist journalists spent decades claiming Alger Hiss wasn't a Soviet spy, but post-Soviet records clearly established he was. There is a shelf of books underlining the evidence, including "Blacklisted by History" by M. Stanton Evans.
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As for the entertainment world, Allan Ryskind, whose father was a Hollywood screenwriter, wrote an engrossing book that came out in 2015 called "Hollywood Traitors" about the communists who infiltrated the movie business. Sen. Joseph McCarthy might have gotten the number of Soviet spies wrong, but journalists have spent decades ridiculously pretending the number was zero.
It's a little humorous that this anti-anti-communist story was picked up online by both NPR and PBS. NPR's headline was "In Mount Rushmore speech, Trump veers from U.S. exceptionalism to warnings about communism." The PBS headline put communist "threat" in quote marks, like it was crazy talk.
Right after their "Red Scare" laments, the AP scribes uncritically added "Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, delivered his own address that cast America as a nation of contradictions, 'working each day towards the perfection in which it was conceived.'" That's their only Mamdani speech quote in this piece.
Mamdani has openly spoken of seizing the "means of production," but that would only make him an "alleged communist." Graham Platner identified himself as a communist on Reddit, and Darializa Avila Chevalier spoke warmly of Marx and communist dictators on her X account "Darializabonet," until she took it down. But an AP Fact Check genius wrote an article objecting to anyone claiming there are communists in the Democratic Party, because none of them were actually members of the Communist Party. They missed the obvious point: They're pro-communist members of the Democratic Party.
Journalists who constantly smear President Trump and his supporters as "fascists" (with no fuss from the "fact checkers") find it "darkly political" when someone does a version of what they do—except conservatives have the actual facts on their side.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org.
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