Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) warns that America is drifting toward authoritarianism whenever President Donald Trump cuts an agency, enforces an immigration law, or challenges the federal establishment.
Sanders speaks as though tyranny arrived in Washington with a red tie and a Republican voter registration.
Long before Sanders discovered autocracy, people across the world warned about communism. Many had watched it imprison neighbors, starve families, crush churches, and turn ordinary speech into a crime.
The legacy media and the left, I know I've repeated myself, ridiculed Donald Trump's declaration about the dangers of communism, just like the Germans laughed at him about a gas pipeline bringing product from Russia.
Remind me again who was right?
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published “The Communist Manifesto” in 1848. Critics soon recognized where its demand to abolish private property and concentrate power could lead. Ten famous witnesses kept sounding the alarm across the next century.
George Orwell fought alongside socialists in Spain before Soviet-backed communists hunted their political rivals. Animal Farm and 1984 showed how revolutionary promises become lies, surveillance, and obedience.
Whittaker Chambers joined the Communist underground, served as a Soviet courier, and later exposed an espionage network inside the U.S. government. His testimony against State Department official Alger Hiss cost him friends and nearly destroyed his reputation.
History vindicated much of his warning.
Winston Churchill declared in 1946 that an iron curtain had descended across Europe. Moscow's influence already stretched from Poland to Bulgaria as Soviet-backed regimes tightened their grip.
President Harry Truman went before Congress in 1947 and asked America to support free peoples resisting armed minorities and outside pressure. The Truman Doctrine recognized that communist expansion wouldn't stop because democratic nations wished it away.
Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) made the loudest warning in 1950. His numbers shifted, his accusations sometimes outran his evidence, and his methods damaged innocent people.
Still, the larger threat was real. Soviet agents had penetrated the White House, State Department, Treasury Department, wartime intelligence services, and the Manhattan Project.
President John Kennedy stood in West Berlin in 1963 and challenged anyone who believed communism represented progress to visit the divided city. A wall, armed guards, and people risking death to escape told the story better than any economic lecture.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn survived Soviet labor camps and revealed the Gulag's cruelty to the world. He understood that communism didn't fail because the wrong officials took charge. Its contempt for truth and individual dignity produced the camps.
Saint Pope John Paul II returned to communist Poland in 1979 and reminded millions that the state didn't own their souls. His faith and courage helped give Solidarity the strength to challenge a regime built on fear.
Margaret Thatcher treated Soviet communism as a moral and strategic enemy. She defended private property, free markets, and national strength while many Western intellectuals still regarded socialism as fashionable.
President Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an evil empire in 1983. Critics mocked his language as reckless. Six years later, the Berlin Wall fell. Two years after that, the Soviet Union disappeared.
McCarthy wasn't alone, and anti-communism wasn't paranoia invented in Wisconsin. Defectors, novelists, presidents, prime ministers, prisoners, and a pope saw the same danger.
Sanders has spent a lifetime praising socialist ideas while warning Americans about Donald Trump. The greater historical warning came from people who learned what concentrated government power does after its leaders decided they owned the economy, the truth, and the individual.
President Trump's warning is different from all the others because it isn't about an enemy across the ocean. Churchill looked east, Reagan confronted Moscow, Solzhenitsyn survived the Gulag, McCarthy searched for Soviet influence inside the government.
Trump argues the greatest threat now comes from an American bureaucracy, political institutions, and cultural elites willing to use government power against their own people.
History will decide whether he's right, but ignoring the warning simply because it's uncomfortable has never been a habit that serves a free nation well.
We've been warned for generations; maybe we should stop pretending nobody knew.
Support fearless conservative reporting through PJ Media VIP. Save 60% with promo code FIGHT and help us keep challenging the ideas Washington would rather leave unexamined.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member