After the Democratic primaries in New York last week, the Big Apple is looking a little more red. The Democratic Socialists of America, a rising faction within leftist politics, had a particularly good night.
Darializa Avila Chevalier, a radical’s radical in the DSA, unseated five-term incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat in the 13th Congressional District. Brad Lander beat incumbent Dan Goldman for the 10th District’s nomination, and DSA member Claire Valdez won the nomination for an open seat in the 7th District. Each also had the endorsement of Islamo-Marxist Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
The appellation of socialist, and “democratic socialist” at that, might put some people (read: fools) at relative ease. “At least they aren’t communists,” some might say, after huffing a generous amount of cope.
Except, they are, and they’re very open about it.
Case in point, MS Now’s Ali Velshi warned Chevalier, “You’re going to appear in all sorts of people’s ads. All sorts of Republicans’ ads that say, ‘This is what you’re gonna get if you vote for the Democrats: a communist.’”
In near-perfect academic doublespeak, no doubt thanks to pursuing a doctorate in, checks notes, sociology, Chevalier responded with, “For far too long, this reactive conversation of what we should be afraid of has prevented us from being able to have a politics … Democrats can actually identify with.”
For those following along at home, she basically said, “Yeah, I am. But I can’t plainly say that because the word ‘communist’ makes people uneasy. But have no fear, once I’m in office I’ll enact policies to the left of Lenin and Mao.”
They believe that if they tack on “democratic” in front of “socialism,” it’ll fool gullible people into relinquishing their private property and personal agency to the state. So far, that strategy has worked out relatively well in places like New York City. But her policy positions speak for themselves. Most of them are the usual leftist drivel: “Tax the rich to the hilt. Abolish ICE. Free stuff for everyone. Every Third Worlder who hops the border should automatically be a citizen. Free Palestine.” You know, the usual stuff.
But Chevalier in particular said the quiet part out loud through an organization she helped found on Columbia’s campus, the CU Apartheid Divest (CUAD). It repeated the popular Iranian slogan “Death to America” and declared, “We are Westerners fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization. … As the fascism ingrained in the American consciousness becomes ever more explicit and irrefutable, we seek community and instruction from militants in the Global South.”
Not exactly subtle.
When extremists tell you what they believe and what they want to do to this country, believe them. Popular streamer and infamous dog torturer (don’t worry, cruelty to animals is a cultural thing) Hasan Piker perhaps laid out their plan best in the wake of the DSA’s victories.
There was a time not so long ago when such rabid anti-American zealots had to hide their insane beliefs from the public and work in the shadows to enact their scheme to topple this nation. And there was a time when we had both the ability and the will to root them out.
Enter Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wis. In 1950, McCarthy gave a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, warning, “Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity. The modern champions of communism have selected this as the time. And, ladies and gentlemen, the chips are down — they are truly down.” He alleged that the State Department had been infested by communists, saying, “While I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of 205.” (The actual number that McCarthy cited is a matter of dispute. Some sources say 205, some say 57.)
From this speech sprang a series of investigations by both the Senate, most notably through the Subcommittee on the Investigation of Loyalty of State Department Employees. The House, most infamously through the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), also engaged in its own investigations into communist activity in America, but HUAC had no formal ties to McCarthy.
The perjury conviction of Alger Hiss, who had been accused of spying for the Soviet Union while an official at the State Department, gave some validity to McCarthy’s charges. He then led a years-long crusade to investigate communists in the government. A concerted campaign against McCarthy’s investigations by his fellow senators and the media (most notably Edward R. Murrow) succeeded in discrediting McCarthy, and his investigations petered out by 1954.
Thus, largely thanks to the media, McCarthyism became a byword for cynical witch hunts and needless censorship, while McCarthy himself has since been regarded as a paranoid crank at best or a power-hungry opportunist at worst. But he was right.
The Communist Party USA had more than 37,000 members in 1950, and it received a generous subsidy directly from the Soviet Union. New members swore loyalty to the USSR and pledged that they would “insure the triumph of Soviet Power in the United States.”
The Venona project, a counter-intelligence operation run by the National Security Agency from 1943 to 1980, found the communists had indeed infiltrated the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. The communications intercepted by the project showed that top officials in multiple departments, such as Treasury official Harry Dexter White, were in regular contact with the Soviet government. They passed along intelligence to Soviet agents, sabotaged America’s diplomatic efforts, and advocated for policies that would weaken America and strengthen the Soviet Union’s position in the Cold War.
Several scientists, including Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall, who had worked on the Manhattan Project, steadily fed atomic secrets to the Russians, allowing them to break America’s atomic monopoly and usher in the era of mutually assured destruction that we still live under. Additionally, hundreds of Soviet spies operated directly on U.S. soil, and the KGB maintained extensive links to CPUSA. And keep in mind, those are only the ones that Venona identified.
For his foresight, McCarthy’s reputation has been systematically smeared for the last 60 years, while the communists he warned about slowly but surely crept their way into and came to dominate the nation’s institutions. “The long march through the institutions” ended in a total victory for the communists, and that victory has facilitated the absolute insanity we see in today’s media, academia, and politics. Their victory has been so complete that they no longer need to hide in the shadows — they can openly campaign for office and openly boast about their plans to dismantle America.
The current wave of openly communist candidates attaining real political power in the public square shows that not only was McCarthy right that communist elements were operating within the United States, but also that his efforts to root them out did not go far enough, allowing the leftist cancer to fester within the American body politic. Communist politicians need to be removed from office, the financiers of the ongoing communist revolution must be defanged, and the malcontents within our bureaucracy, academia, and media need to be purged.
A complete scorched-earth campaign is the only viable way to excise the communist threat — a threat that is closer to destroying America than the Soviet Union ever dreamed of.
