In This Moment: A Rabbi's Notebook
Communism, schmommunism. THIS is the greatest threat to democracy: Masked fascist haters from Charlottesville’s infamous 2017 “Unite the Right” march, celebrated a white July Fourth with white masks and Confederate flags in Washington last weekend. They are the chief threat. Not the commies.
Jewish groups have expressed deep alarm. But Interior Secretary Doug Burgum tossed it off as “free speech.”
That’s because in Trumpville there was a bigger fish to fry. Donald Trump wasted our time over the holiday week ranting about communism like a man speaking out of a time capsule from another era, like an animatronic slicked-back Nixon at Disney. Any child who managed to stay awake could be seen tugging at a parent’s sleeve and heard asking, “What’s a communist, Daddy?”
And unless Daddy was in ‘Nam, he probably had no idea.
George Santayana’s line, “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it," has never been more apt than in the Trump administration. This movement is so based on nostalgia because it is completely devoid of original ideas. It imagines no future because it has none. Nothing is new. There is no creativity. Every exercise in subjugating the masses has been tried before, every demagogic tool, including nativism and attacks on immigrants using a private goon-army, the grift, the Big Lies, the racism, the religious hate, and the romantic nostalgia for more racist times.1 It’s all been done, and mostly by more capable fascists.
And now, bless his heart, after trying and failing to ignite hatred of a nonentity he dubbed “Antifa,” and fresh off his reprise of Father Coughlin’s antisemitic, isolationist “America First” movement of the 1930s, Trump is trying to conjure up a 1950’s vintage Red Scare, replete with its own conspiracy-mongered antisemitism.
Let’s send in the commies!
NOT COMICS! I said COMMIES!
(Yes, Americans read those things - and gobbled up all the anti-commie comics they could get their hands on)
Red Scares are tried and true, having terrified America in the insecure days after both World Wars. So why not try beating us over the head with a communist threat before the midterms? Trump tried selling an enemy invasion with the caravan narrative before the 2018 midterms and it fell flat on its face when a MAGA-friendly right winger shot up a Pittsburgh synagogue just days before the election.
The post war Red Scares are responsible for ruining thousands of lives, with collateral damage reaching far beyond. Think of the over three hundred whose careers were derailed by the Hollywood blacklist alone, plus the suppression of civil rights and free speech and the chilling effect on dissent. Educators, labor leaders, journalists, and academics lost jobs and licenses and were silenced in the face of the greatest threat of the Red Menace era, which was McCarthy himself.
Trump is trying to give us a bigger and better, new and improved McCarthy, now run out of the White House and with the entire government at his command. But his enemy is, let’s be honest, lacking. McCarthy had an entire wartime propaganda machine behind him and formidable enemies, both manufactured and real. All Trump’s got to attack are a few Bernie Sanders acolytes who have said some impolitic things (some of which I’ve found personally offensive) - but unlike the 1940’s, these embodiments of “communist” evil have hardly delivered classified secrets to the Russians. No, that’s been done by Trump himself (and on camera yet)! And - small detail - they’re not nor have ever been members of the communist party.
I mean, THIS is the enemy?
Which is why Trump’s commie gambit will fail. He’ll try to gin it up for a few weeks, rinse and repeat, lie and repeat, repeat, repeat and repeat - until someone tells him it’s not playing in Peoria. He’ll still keep doing it and FIFA will give him another trophy. And then he’ll move on to the next made-up enemy. My guess is it will be someone Jewish - most likely he’ll recycle George Soros, who is no longer useful to Viktor Orban and must be feeling really neglected these days.
Or Bibi.
Historian Wendy Wall summarizes the dramatic denouement of the McCarthy’s Red Scare:
The Army-McCarthy hearings dominated national television for three months and exposed McCarthy’s bullying tactics. Much of the credit for this goes to Joseph Welch, the feisty and folksy Boston lawyer hired by the Army. When McCarthy red-baited one of Welch’s young associates, Welch responded: "Until this moment, Senator, I think I had never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. . . . Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"
The question resonated with Americans. A few months later the Senate voted overwhelmingly to censure McCarthy and his influence evaporated. The worst of the Red Scare was over.
No need for Joseph Welch to be summoned from the dead to battle Roy Cohn’s protege. We already know that Trump has no decency. But we also know that he has no creativity. And in bringing back the specter of communism when there isn’t a commie in sight, at a time when Trumpist fascism is by far the greatest immediate danger our democracy faces, he’s simply barking up the wrong lynching tree.
Trump doesn’t know a true Red Scare from a Red Card. And right now communism poses no (that’s zero) threat to our way of life.
To repeat: It is not the American left that marched with masks in Washington on July 4. No, it was hundreds of masked members of the white supremacist hate group Patriot Front.
See Thom Hartman’s posting, They’re Shocked We Won’t Pretend Anymore, explains why many Americans are no longer able to tolerate those friends and family members who voted for an American fascist, knowing full-well his agenda. What Trumpers call “Derangement” on the part of their opponents is actually something else. It’s called conscience, Hartman writes, adding:
So what they got is exactly the hate and racism they voted for, and now, seventeen months into the second Trump administration, more than 675,000 people have been deported, the ICE detention population has swelled to over 68,000 — a 70 percent increase over where it stood at the end of the Biden years — and people are dying inside those facilities at a rate this country has never seen before.
The Kaiser Family Foundation tracked 46 deaths in ICE custody between January 2025 and March 2026, with annual deaths roughly tripling from the eleven recorded in 2024 to thirty-three in 2025, and 2026 already on pace to exceed even that.
The ACLU now estimates someone is dying in immigration detention roughly every six days, and a CNN investigation a few weeks ago found that at least a dozen of those deaths were directly attributable to medical neglect, understaffing, and the cascading failures that happen when for-profit concentration camp operations double the detained population without doubling the doctors.
Three of the six deaths in a single recent month were suicides. The administration’s response has been to point out that the death rate, expressed as a percentage of the swollen detained population, comes to 0.009 percent, which is the sort of statistic you cite when you’ve already decided the people doing the dying aren’t quite people.
And Miller isn’t slowing down. He’s spoken openly about a vision of removing as many as 100 million people from the United States, a number that mathematically can’t just describe the undocumented, because there aren’t 100 million undocumented people in this country and there never have been.
That number describes naturalized citizens, mixed-status families, the U.S.-born children of immigrants, and anyone whose skin is dark enough that their presence Miller and his ideological allies consider an affront to what they keep calling “Heritage Americans,” aka “white people.”
Since the law changed in 1965 and we ended racial immigration quotas, the majority of immigrants to America have not been white, but white people (from South Africa, for G-d’s sake) are all the Trump administration now encourages to come into the US.
Too many Black and Brown people have already arrived from “shithole countries,” they say, and it’s time for them to leave. Stephen Miller’s white supremacist project to ethnically re-engineer the country runs faster every week.
If you’re a white person who voted for this administration and you’re now telling your gay nephew or your Korean-American daughter-in-law or your Mexican-American grandkids that you don’t see what the big deal is, you’re asking them to make peace with the fact that the people running the country have, on the record, in their own voices, described a future in which they don’t exist here.
675,000 people deported in a year and a half. Millions taken off of health care. 750,000 dead because of budget cuts to US aid. And someone’s worried about a few self-proclaimed socialists who believe health care is a right? And the megalomaniac is railing about communism in America as if he’s facing off against Nikita Khrushchev at the Kitchen Debate?
We know that Trump has no sense of decency. We also know he will deflect and divide with accusations of rampant “communism” as if he is the second coming of McCarthy himself, with his old mentor Roy Cohn whispering in his ear. He hijacked our 250th and he’s trying to hijack our World Cup2. But we aren’t buying it. We’re not stupid. The American people will not be conned again.
Right?
Here’s what Trump said last week:
"Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty... It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, or even 9/11….It's death, tyranny, and the pursuit of evil.”
Every word is true. If you just change the word “communism” to “Trump.”
I recently came across this romanticized documentary of the Jim Crow south that was used in schools (!) in the 1940s. This is precisely the America Trumpism wants to return us to. Call me Woke if you wish, but this is reprehensible. I can’t believe this was my country. Come to think of it, in another 80 years people will be saying the same thing about us.
My Substack note on the Balogun red card mess. BTW, the Hebrew word for mess IS Balogun:
Trump can’t even allow the US team and the country to feel good about its success without smudging and “rigging” things. Now even a US victory will feel tainted. The transcript of his call with FIFA should be released. The red card was probably excessive but rules are rules. It’s amazing to consider that Trump has found someone just as corrupt as he is - and FIFA keeps on besmirching their own beautiful game. I wonder if Trump knows that Balogun is, I believe, a birthright baby, born in NYC when his Nigerian parents were not able to return to London during the latter stages of his mother’s pregnancy. So the joke’s on him. But that won’t stop him from taking victory laps even if/when the US loses (or as they say in soccarese, the US “lose”). If I were the US team officials, I would seriously consider keeping Balogun out of the game tomorrow, now that the corruption of his reinstatement has been revealed. Americans will appreciate some fair play and love this team all the more. Our soccer players deserve to win in the right way.
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