Fight Communism With Capitalism

I’m never going to complain about growing up as a Latter Cold War kid.

The threat of nuclear annihilation — which we’d find out later came quite close in 1983 — tended to focus the mind, even the mind of a middle- and high-schooler like I was back then.

Having a forceful and moral leader like President Ronald Reagan tended to focus the heart and soul, too.

Reagan, following those four disastrous years of Jimmy Carter that I was just old enough to be aware of, was a revelation.

Reagan didn’t put the Soviet Union on the ash heap of history by launching wars of aggression or by mimicking Soviet central planning. He did it by helping America get back to being what it was always meant to be: prosperous, powerful, peaceful.

I watched Reagan help turn this country around. I delighted watching him do it with that good humor and sunny disposition that drove the Left nuts. I still do.

Long story short — too late, right? — Reagan fought communism with capitalism.

So of course, it worked.

Communism can only win by default when its victims are too brutalized or too uncaring or sometimes just too ignorant to resist.

A perfect example of that premise is East Germany. Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev let the reins slip just a tiny bit and before you knew it, East Germans were hacking away at the Berlin Wall with whatever tools were at hand.

That spark of freedom was always there. Sometimes it doesn’t take much for that spark to light a flame.

Our country over the last two decades or so has taken a dark turn into what we might call “soft Communism.”

No walls, no barbed wire, no minefields keeping us locked in, but something even more insidious.

Wokeness, cancel culture, domestic spying, and social-credit-type controls from Big Tech and even the banking system …

… these things are the communism of my adulthood, just like the military might and propaganda efforts of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact were the communism of my formative years.

I spent my teens — no kidding — studying NATO and Warsaw Pact orders of battle. I knew all about nuclear missile throw weights, circular errors probable, second-strike vs. first-strike capabilities, and all the rest.

I spend my middle years studying, sharing, writing about much more insidious threats. If you’re reading these words, you’re probably aware of just how insidious they are and just how much (and for how long) I write about them — and everyone else here at PJ Media, too.

But you can’t fight communism, whatever form it takes, with nothing but good wishes and some personal perseverance. You’ve got to fight communism with capitalism, just like Reagan taught me all those years ago — and that means first and foremost having a sustainable business model.

That’s what PJ Media’s member-supported VIP content is all about: Providing even more anti-communist “intellectual ammunition” to our most dedicated and persevering readers.

The VIP paywall — yes, it’s a paywall — might not generate all the clickbaity headlines, but it does mean information and analysis that flies under the radar of the cancel culture warriors and the social-credit nannies and gets in the hands of those who want to read it.

All of us here at PJ Media work hard at supplying that intellectual ammunition for our VIP members, and if that sounds like the kind of content you’d be willing, with your hard-earned dollars, to help us create, then we’d love to have you on board.

I’ve been in this fight for 20 years now, and with help from people like you, God willing, I’ll be at it for 20 more.

Sign up to be a PJ Media VIP today, and use the code FIGHTBACK for 25% off the already low price.