Who’s Afraid of the Big Red Scare?
Midterm Madness
Senator Joseph McCarthy confers with his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, during the Army-McCarthy hearings, 1954. The Red Scare had found its most audacious young lawyer.
McCarthy became a synonym for paranoia. The problem is, he was right about the threat, and the Communists were real. Soviet espionage and Communist penetration had reached into the American government. Decades later, Venona and the opening of Soviet archives exposed what history had buried beneath the excesses of McCarthyism: beneath the hysteria lay a genuine threat.
On September 21, 1950, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) issued its Report on the National Lawyers Guild: Legal Bulwark of the Communist Party.
The committee found:
“The National Lawyers Guild is the legal bulwark of the Communist Party, its front organizations, and controlled unions." The innocuous name itself belied the organization described by Congress, an almost perfect exercise in the “banality of evil."
And later:
“The National Lawyers Guild constituted itself an agent of a foreign principal hostile to the interests of the United States."
The report also accused the Guild of defending Communist Party members and alleged spies, opposing anti-Communist legislation, attacking government investigations and affiliating with the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, which the committee called an international Communist front. The Guild evolved from old-line Communism into a New Left legal organization embracing civil rights, antiwar and today’s racial, economic, immigration and international causes. Yet one institutional thread survived: the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, cited in the 1950 congressional report, still lists the NLG among its American members.
Guild attorneys represented Black Panthers, Weather Underground members and other revolutionary defendants and later championed convicted figures including Mumia Abu-Jamal, Assata Shakur and Leonard Peltier. NLG member Lynne Stewart represented Weather Underground participant David Gilbert and Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman before being convicted herself on terrorism-related charges.
Representing an accused murderer or terrorist isn't evidence that a lawyer endorses the crime. Everyone is entitled to counsel.
But the NLG went beyond representation, organizationally championing individuals and revolutionary movements associated with heinous acts.
Assata Shakur and Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman reveal another tactical convergence, between the revolutionary Left and radical Islamism. NLG member Lynne Stewart represented Abdel-Rahman, the “Blind Sheikh," and was later convicted of providing material support to terrorism after violating restrictions on her communications with him.
The warning had already come. El Sayyid Nosair assassinated Rabbi Meir Kahane in New York in 1990. Evidence recovered from his home pointed toward a larger terrorist network. According to the Department of Justice, Nosair became part of the Abdel-Rahman organization whose members carried out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and plotted attacks on the United Nations, 26 Federal Plaza, the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels and the George Washington Bridge. Nosair was later convicted in the broader seditious conspiracy.
The road to hell:
Revolutionary Left → defense and organizational support for revolutionary actors → radical Islamist intersection → Kahane assassination → Abdel-Rahman/Nosair network → 1993 WTC bombing → a developing international jihadist milieu → al-Qaeda and 9/11.
That history preceded 9/11. The 1993 WTC conspirators were an early al-Qaeda cell and a genuine jihadist connections existed: bomber Ramzi Yousef trained in Afghanistan, and his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed later became the principal architect of 9/11.
Islamism and Communism have incompatible endgames but can cooperate against a common enemy. So did Nazis and Communists in 1931-32 Germany, acting at critical moments against the existing democratic order. A shared enemy can forge a temporary alliance without a shared destination. The point is tactical convergence, not ideological similarity.
Dark forces infiltrate every breach in the West, widening them through chaos, migration and party infiltration until power concentrates in the hands of a few and there is no way back to the gardens of nationalism that grew each country’s distinct beauty. Nationalism broke the strains of autocratic nobility, expanded education, opened opportunity and created upward mobility. Pride in country became pride in what it produced and exported, building relationships abroad through products and capital markets.
Americans have long imagined themselves immune to Communism. Growing up in New York, you mostly met people who had fled the dead-end, bare existence of totalitarian regimes, along with the occasional quack or someone simply not very well versed in history who picked up a fascination with an ideology they scarcely understood.
Yet with some 25 million Americans now looking favorably upon Communism, the fashions of Europe have crossed the Atlantic. Just how far behind are we?
Trace the institutional continuity from the old Communist/New Left infrastructure into organizations operating today. The DSA is an indirectly lethal ideological pathogen incubating within the Democratic Party.
At its 2025 convention, the Democratic Socialists of America allowed self-defined “democratic-centralist organizations." SDS removed its anti-Communist clause in 1965.
Communists, Maoists and the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) poured in. By 1969, SDS ousted PLP because it wasn't Communist enough: “PLP attacked Ho Chi Minh, the NLF, the revolutionary government of Cuba, all leaders of the people’s struggles for freedom against U.S. imperialism." Communist factions fought over which was more revolutionary.
PLP lost to the Weather Underground, which emerged in charge of SDS and turned to bombings against the American political order.
From the wreckage came the New American Movement (NAM), interlaced with the New Communist Movement and its own Marxist-Leninist Caucus. Its publication Moving On declared, “the New American Movement combines a Marxist analysis with careful attention to the current realities of American politics." Basic Marxism: What It Is & How to Use It drew upon Marx, Lenin and Gramsci.
The term MoveOn became a slogan during the Clinton era, when Republicans held both houses of Congress. Which begs the question: why would the Democratic Left invite into its vocabulary a slogan that mirrored an earlier socialist organization?
Was it coincidence, or a foreshadowing of the communist spawn entering the womb of the American political system? A scary thought when we consider the extent of the inroads made into our government.
The political catchphrase caught many by surprise when it became reality. NAM moved on. It merged with the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee to create DSA, carrying its ideology, organization and even its assets forward. So complete was the continuity that a $5 million bequest intended for NAM ultimately passed to DSA.
NAM integrated into DSA. DSA is integrating into the Democratic Party.
The Democratic Party now calls itself a big tent. But who invites into the tent those determined to tear it down and burn it to the ground?
Who’s Guarding the Republic? Faces of Midterm Madness
There has been so much collusion that the purging of DNC comrades is best described by the phrase Trump popularized: draining the swamp.
Obama insinuated himself into Chicago’s Black political infrastructure, moving through community organizing, Jeremiah Wright’s Black liberation theology and a progressive establishment where Weather Underground revolutionaries Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn were no longer fugitives on the fringe but respectable insiders, working unabashedly in the open to move once-radical ideas into the mainstream. Obama chaired the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which distributed millions for school reform.
The revolutionaries had entered the institution, and the future president entered politics within that same liberal milieu.
“We have made falsehood our refuge, and in deception have we hidden ourselves." - Isaiah 28:15
“Some of Obama’s many 'accomplishments'."
Obama promised to “fundamentally transform the United States of America" and quickly changed posture toward the Muslim world, widening inroads for Islamist influence while creating opportunities for the expanding socialist Left.
Alan Keyes, who ran against Obama for the U.S. Senate in Illinois in 2004, warned in 2009 that Obama was a “radical communist" who would “destroy this country" unless stopped. His warning may have sounded hysterical to many Americans then. By 2012, what became increasingly clear to me was that he was an Islamist, or at least a twisted sympathizer. Obama told Mubarak: step down, Morsi: step up, and al-Sisi: step back. All to keep an associate of the Muslim Brotherhood in power. Under Morsi, Copts were brutalized, their preadolescent girls raped amid cries of “Allahu Akbar." Then came ISIS, and Obama infamously evaluated the gathering threat as “JV," junior varsity, even as ISIS burned infidels alive in cages, decapitated Yazidis, nailed Christians to crosses, and sold women and young girls as sex slaves.
It was the first coup of the DNC, as players in Congress and the Senate applauded expanding federal power that increasingly encroached upon the First and Second Amendments.
Then came a remarkable procession of firsts: first, Arafat’s successor Mahmoud Abbas among Obama’s earliest foreign calls; first, Al Arabiya for his presidential interview with an Arab network; first, Muslim Brotherhood figures invited to the Cairo audience; then the “New Beginning" speech itself, preaching to the Sharia choir while condemning Israeli settlement in the biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria. Another first: direct communication between U.S. and Iranian presidents since 1979, followed by a nuclear deal that unlocked enormous Iranian assets and sanctions relief while leaving a pathway to an eventual nuclear threshold for a regime whose leaders threatened Israel and America. And one final first, a kick in Israel’s hindquarters on his way out of the Oval Office: Obama withheld the American veto, allowing U.N. Resolution 2334 to pass, declaring Jewish settlement beyond the 1967 lines, including East Jerusalem, without legal validity.
The road to hell:
Weather Underground → Ayers and Dohrn enter the progressive establishment → Chicago political infrastructure → Obama → Black liberation theology → Annenberg education reform → White House → outreach to the Extreme Muslim world → expanding socialist Left → DNC.
The supervillains entered stage left, self-assured in their massive funding seeping in from every dark subversive entity that shared the same agenda, Their untoward civil agenda and padded voter-roll confidence. Until, from stage right, a star shot from the cannon of the Red Scare era. McCarthy saw a genuine Communist threat but became overzealous.
Roy Cohn a personal bridge between the anti-Communist era and Trump. Cohn was McCarthy's chief counsel, later became Trump's lawyer and mentor in New York: outrageous, contemptuous of convention, audacious and spoiling for the fight. That bravado would later become unmistakable and unquestionably influenced Trump's combative approach: counterattack, never concede, dominate the confrontation. Trump's own descriptions of Cohn make that influence difficult to miss. It would appear Cohn schooled Trump in audaciousness, confrontation and the instinct never to retreat before an enemy. Decades later, 9/11 left its own indelible mark on Trump’s psyche.
“Repairer of the breach, restorer of paths for habitation." - Isaiah 58:12
The Trump Doctrine: Restoring American strength, stability and prosperity through unapologetic American interests.
The apprentice had been fitted with his armor long before the supervillains assembled. President Trump has walked a fine line, keeping America safe and growing the economy in the face of cutthroat partisan entrapments. He is feared because if he is right, the cancer of Communism has already metastasized and only we the People have the ability to reroute our course.
The intervention required at home is matched by abrupt change abroad, away from placating global players and toward defending American interests. Trump has the superhero quality: confronting evil despite the danger to his own life, with the courage to preserve America and return it to a more cohesive, wholesome time.
The “supervillain" is the convergence of forces exploiting breaches in Western societies, cooperating tactically despite incompatible endgames. The task is larger than one election. There is only one party prepared to defend the Constitution, restore our values and preserve our pride and belief in the American way.
The people are misled by those who proclaim “Peace!" when there is no peace, building a weak wall that the prophets cover with whitewash. - Ezekiel 13:10
Fitting though it is, “drain the swamp" is more than a campaign slogan. The swamp has a long history of corruption, entrenched politicians clinging to power with the zeal of ayatollahs. Its tributaries ran through Communist fronts, revolutionary movements, radical legal organizations, foundations, universities and government programs, spilling into a media that largely acted as Obama and Biden press secretaries, swearing to Russian collusion, the irrelevance of Hunter’s laptop, the Islamist threat and the implausibility of a stolen election. The chief protagonists obscured reality with optics and hysteria, with less accuracy than Pravda. Republicans were disparaged and their favored American ally, Israel, demonized. Words like “genocide" and “starvation" were passed around like Heinz 57, as if substantiated, dulling the gravity of charged words and equating a people who navigated centuries of diaspora without conquest with the oppressive regimes and Nazi atrocities they themselves survived.
Media outlets across the globe hopped on Israel’s back for embracing the intolerable curse of nationalism, even as miraculous events shaped a tiny, unassuming sliver of land into an indisputable buttress of the West.
Israel stands in defiance of that progression. Its nationalism did not imprison its genius. It released it, resurrecting Scriptural values, holding life sacred and defending its borders.
America once understood the same truth. Nationalism broke the strains of autocratic nobility, expanded education, opened upward mobility and transformed pride of country into products, inventions and capital that built relationships throughout the world. Nations need not surrender themselves to cooperate.
The garden is beautiful because every flower does not look the same. France need not become Italy; Italy need not become Britain; America need not become either.
Each civilization grows something distinct. International exchange brings the fruits of separate gardens together rather than tearing down the walls until only one field remains.
Communist penetration of parts of the U.S. government is more real now than ever. There is no present-day congressional equivalent with HUAC's specific mandate to investigate “un-American activities."
“Seize for us the foxes, the little foxes that ruin the vineyards…" - Song of Songs 2:15
It is time to hold accountable the purveyors of inimical ideologies who have been gluttonously enriched by the very system they seek to dismantle, a Republic designed for a people capable of governing themselves under G-d.
John Adams warned us:
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
I leave you with this solemn thought at this juncture in our nation.
Be careful with your vote this midterm. Preserve the Republic.
It is the only way back to the garden.