A familiar spectre is haunting the nation—that of communism. Or so one might conclude from the Republican Party’s increasingly frantic rhetoric.

Following a string of wins by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in congressional primaries from New York to Colorado to Michigan, even reaching as far as Florida, the GOP is dusting off an old refrain.

“Communism is on the ballot this November,” warned House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) at a press conference. President Donald Trump has gone further still, calling communism “the biggest threat to our nation there is, maybe since our founding.”

At first glance, this reads like little more than election-year theatrics. The candidates provoking such alarm are, on the whole, hardly the revolutionaries their critics imagine.

But, try as they might, no amount of fearmongering, surveillance, or censorship will dampen the working person’s dream for a more dignified life, one where their labor is compensated fairly, their dollar stretches further, and their children inherit a secure future.

Many of the policies promoted by today’s democratic socialists fall comfortably within the lineage of the New Deal: strengthening labor protections, expanding access to healthcare, greater investment in public infrastructure, and so on.

That House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) would liken their ascendance to “a nightmare… a trail to certain death,” ought to strike any person of sound mind as patently absurd.

Yet dismissing such a frenzied reaction as mere campaign-season hyperbole risks overlooking what it actually reveals: staggering insecurity.

If the political establishment had any real confidence in their track record, they wouldn’t need to manufacture so much anxiety around their opposition.

It is precisely because they can feel their grip on the public’s trust slipping that they have resorted to reviving the McCarthyist witch hunts of yesteryear—an effort that extends well beyond incendiary speeches.

Last year, President Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), directing federal agencies to expand policing of social movements linked to “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity,” among other ideological strains, ostensibly to “identify and prevent potential violent activity.”

NSPM-7 has, in turn, become the legal backbone for an aggressive crackdown on dissent, seen in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issuing “warning notices” to those who have criticized the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), whether that be through social media posts or email correspondence.

Recent reporting even uncovered a sweeping probe, dubbed “Operation Puppet Master” by DHS, into a number of left-wing groups in Minnesota after the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti by ICE and Border Patrol agents, respectively, earlier this year.

The probe included, among other things, the subpoenaing of financial records from various labor unions and nonprofits, as well as “spying operations conducted by undercover agents who posed as activists and surveilled community activities.”

It is little wonder that such egregious actions have since been compared to COINTELPRO, J Edgar Hoover’s illegal pet project designed to infiltrate, surveil, and discredit civil rights and anti-war activists who caught the ire of the federal government.

This, paired with the White House creating its own blacklist of journalists and influencers on its official “Media Offenders” page, many of whom are cited for such severe transgressions as “Left-Wing Lunacy,” suggests that the hysterical talking points GOP leadership have taken to heart are the vehicle for a broader crusade of political repression.

Such heavy-handed surveillance is undoubtedly born out of a deep-seated panic among those in power. This latest Red Scare is, at its core, a reaction to the working-class rightfully demanding its fair share of the economic pie.

The rise of the DSA, and of the left-wing ideas it propagates, owes much to the fact that its members speak plainly about the financial woes of the everyday person.

Take, for instance, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has striven to take an honest accounting of the financial hardship faced by New Yorkers, and in turn offer tangible remedies like free childcare and a rent freeze.

In contrast, Trump administration officials are desperate to pull the wool over the eyes of the people, with Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, recently claiming that the economy “looks amazing,” despite nearly 80% of voters feeling otherwise.

In fact, public confidence in capitalism broadly has fallen to 54%, according to Gallup polling released last year, the lowest level since the organization began tracking the question. At the same time, socialism commands comparatively steady support, especially among Democratic voters, roughly two-thirds of whom view it favorably.

The generational divide is even more striking. A survey conducted by YouGov and the Cato Institute found that 62% of Americans under 30 hold a favorable view of socialism, while 34% say the same of communism. Of course, each of these labels mean different things to different respondents, but the overarching trend is difficult to ignore.

For many Americans, especially those on the younger side, capitalism is synonymous with constraint, and it’s not hard to see why.

While billionaires’ assets have surged to preposterous heights, the cascading inflationary shocks of war have steadily eroded workers’ purchasing power.

Cornerstones of the American Dream have been priced out of reach for working families, with 62% of Americans now viewing homeownership as unrealistic.

Meanwhile, more than 40% of American households have persistently struggled to cover the cost of basic necessities on their current income.

Yet, rather than confronting the economic frustrations driving millions of Americans to question the status quo, the Trump administration has chosen to paint a target on the backs of those who offer the public a meaningful alternative.

And it is for this reason that yet another Red Scare is an altogether futile, albeit dangerous, distraction meant to blind us to the real struggle of our time: the fight against a rigged economy.

If those in power must conjure ghosts to terrify the people, it is surely because their earthly defenses are failing.

---

A.J. Schumann is a former Henry Wallace fellow working on the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

 

Sachs is pointing out that a tiny number of billionaires have enormous political influence. Many of the same ultra-wealthy people control major information platforms, including news outlets and social media, and their narratives and algorithms are shaped to protect the future these billionaires want to create. Political power and information power reinforce each other.

This is why some form of plutocracy or oligarchy has been a reality in the US for many, many decades. It's only now being talked about because many are starting to realize it.

Democracy is not much more than a pacifying illusion at this point in time.

What Sachs points out has been going on for a long time, impacting both parties in the US. When a populace doesn't have access to legitimate media, their vote is not worth much, as they aren't accurately informed about what is going on in their world. Very few well funded media outlets are informing citizens well.

One of the biggest challenges facing media today is it has to be profitable. Once this becomes reality, they now have to maintain a paying audience. This usually traps them into having to push narratives to "hold onto" their audience. They become captured by that audience and can't change or they face losing their subscribers. How can media outlets in that environment truly thrive?

Having been in media for 17 years, trust me, you either have to play the game and mislead people or lose your paying audience over time.

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A new 10-year study from France is challenging one of the biggest assumptions in modern agriculture.

Can farms produce food without pesticides?

According to researchers, the answer can be yes, under the right conditions.

The study, coordinated by France’s National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE), followed nine different pesticide-free cropping systems across nine locations in France.

The goal was ambitious: grow crops without using any pesticides, including chemical treatments and seed treatments.

Instead, researchers relied on longer and more diverse crop rotations, plant diversity, healthy soils, prevention techniques and other agroecological methods to reduce weeds, pests and diseases. Synthetic mineral fertilizers were still allowed.

The results showed that going pesticide-free does not automatically mean giving up competitive yields.

Yields were often lower than conventional systems using chemical pesticides, but in some situations they reached similar levels or even exceeded them. Crop damage from pests and diseases also did not significantly increase over the 10-year period.

The economic results were also encouraging.

Across the four conventional arable systems where economic performance could be calculated, estimated income was between one and two times the French minimum wage in 20% of cases, between two and three times in 45%, and more than three times in 35% of the years studied.

But the researchers are not saying every farm can immediately eliminate pesticides.

Weed control remained difficult in some situations, and certain systems required ploughing to manage persistent weeds. The researchers also say that successful pesticide-free agriculture requires diversified crop rotations, suitable markets and ways to give added economic value to the products.

What the study does show is that agriculture does not necessarily have to choose between conventional farming and organic farming.

There may be another path: carefully designed farming systems that produce competitive harvests while eliminating pesticides.

The challenge now is figuring out where, how and at what scale those systems can work in the real world.

The sudden disappearance of copper from our swimming pools and its replacement with chlorine remains a closely guarded secret. We are told harsh chemicals are the only way to keep waters clean, but history reveals a deliberate shift away from a naturally powerful element.

Throughout the 1900s, it was standard practice to line swimming pools with pure copper. This beautiful metal wasn't chosen for aesthetics, but because society fundamentally understood its profound natural capabilities.

It was common knowledge that copper is intrinsically antibacterial, acting as a relentless, natural purifier. Swimmers enjoyed perfectly sterile, crystal-clear water without ever exposing themselves to toxic, volatile chemicals like chlorine.

The benefits extended far beyond basic sanitation, transforming the pool into a dynamic, energized environment. Microscopic copper ions continuously dissolved, transferring a distinct and palpable electrical charge directly into the surrounding water.

As people swam through these conductive waters, their bodies actively engaged with the charged environment. These powerful copper ions were seamlessly absorbed straight through the skin, penetrating deep into the tissues of everyone submerged.

Because the human body fundamentally operates on electrical currents, this biological absorption provided a profound restorative effect. Swimmers experiencing this conductive transfer found themselves instantaneously healed, essentially recharging their natural batteries through the energized water.

This accessible source of autonomous healing was quickly identified as a threat to modern industries. Once the societal elites fully realized the undeniable power of these charged pools, they orchestrated a massive campaign to strip copper from public use entirely, replacing it with toxic chlorine to keep the population disconnected from this extraordinary natural vitality.

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 Mark Featherstone AI Content

The Aussie’s are the latest to slap Trump in an explosive declaration of STFU.

This Australian's reply to Trump's rant about “NATO not being there for America” is perfect.

"Mate. You run a country with 600,000 homeless people sleeping on the street tonight. A country where 40% of adults can't cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money. A country where insulin costs more than a car payment and people are rationing it to survive. A country where medical debt is the number 1 cause of bankruptcy. A country where women are dying in hospital car parks because doctors are too scared of abortion laws to treat a miscarriage.

You lock up more of your own citizens than any nation on earth. More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea. The land of the free has 2 million people in cages, and a quarter of them haven't even been convicted of anything. They're just too poor to make bail.

Your life expectancy is going backwards. You're the only developed nation where that's happening. Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba's. Your kids do active shooter drills between maths and English while you sell the gunmaker's stock to your mates.

Your minimum wage hasn't moved in 15 years. You've got teachers working 2 jobs and veterans sleeping under bridges and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that didn't attack you.

And you’ve got a convicted felon, adjudicating raping, paedophile protecting, porn star shagging insurrectionist running the biggest dumpster fire war campaign since the Taliban in Afghanistan thanked you very much for losing again.

And you're calling Greenland poorly run?

Greenland has universal healthcare. Free education. One of the lowest incarceration rates in the world. Nobody goes bankrupt there because they got sick. Nobody dies in a waiting room because their insurance said no.

'NATO wasn't there when we needed them." When exactly was that, champ? September 11? Because NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in history FOR YOU. Soldiers from dozens of countries deployed, fought, bled, and died in Afghanistan FOR YOU. Australia wasn't even in NATO and we still showed up. For 20 years.

And you pulled out at 2am without telling anyone and left them to deal with the mess.

So maybe before you start calling other countries poorly run, have a look at your own backyard, you spray-tanned aluminium siding salesman. The only thing poorly run in this picture is your f----- mouth."

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Corporate America Took the Money. Then They Called Giving It Back Socialism.

By Tony Pentimalli

Americans keep getting told there is something confusing about why everybody is so pissed off. The economy is growing, the stock market is booming, corporations are making money, so supposedly we should all be walking around grateful. Meanwhile, corporate profits from current production hit an annualized $4.827 trillion in the second quarter of 2026, nearly 18 percent of national income, while the share going to workers through wages and benefits has fallen toward levels we have not seen since the 1950s. The Bureau of Labor Statistics tells the same story from another angle: labor’s share of nonfarm business output fell to 52.9 percent, the lowest level since the government started keeping that series in 1947. Those are different measurements, but they are telling us the same damn thing. Corporate America is taking a bigger piece of the pie, and working people are getting a smaller one.

And nobody gets to tell me workers somehow stopped earning their share. Since 1979, productivity has increased about 93 percent, while hourly compensation for typical workers increased only about 34 percent. Workers became dramatically more productive, companies produced more wealth, and the economy got much bigger, but the people doing the work did not get anything close to their fair share of those gains. For decades after World War II, when workers produced more, their pay generally rose with it. Then that relationship broke. The wealth kept growing, but more and more of it started flowing somewhere else.

Where did it go? Look at who owns the assets. S&P 500 companies spent nearly $1 trillion buying back their own stock in the twelve months ending June 2025. Federal Reserve data show that the richest 10 percent of American households own roughly 87 percent of corporate equities and mutual-fund shares, while the entire bottom half owns about 1 percent. So spare me the speeches about how a booming stock market proves everybody is doing great. A booming stock market is fantastic when you own most of the damn stock. For everybody else, watching rich people’s portfolios explode does not pay the rent, buy the groceries or cover the insurance bill.

This did not happen because capitalism came down from the mountain with these numbers carved into stone. We changed the rules. We stripped workers of power and handed more of it to capital. In 1983, more than 20 percent of wage and salary workers belonged to unions. Today it is about 10 percent, and in the private sector it is just 5.9 percent. The federal minimum wage is still $7.25 an hour, exactly where it has been since 2009, even as prices, productivity, executive pay and corporate profits kept climbing. Corporate consolidation gave giant employers more leverage while workers lost the power to bargain back. And no, I am not talking about your neighborhood plumber or the family restaurant down the street. I am talking about concentrated corporate and financial power. America does not have a wealth-creation problem. America has a wealth-distribution problem.

Republicans spent decades pushing the hardest version of this bullshit, attacking unions, cutting taxes at the top, weakening regulation and promising that if corporations and wealthy investors got rich enough, some of it would eventually trickle down to everybody else. But Democrats do not get to show up now pretending they had nothing to do with it. Too many Democratic leaders accepted huge parts of the same system, chased Wall Street money, tolerated corporate consolidation and watched organized labor get weaker year after year. For forty years, Republicans kept dragging the economic playing field toward corporations and the wealthy while too many Democrats spent their time proving they were reasonable enough to keep playing on it.

Then came the scam that protects the whole arrangement. Every time somebody proposes shifting meaningful economic power back toward working people, somebody screams socialism. Raise wages, strengthen unions or ask billionaires to pay more and suddenly we are told America is lurching toward some dangerous ideology. A corporation can spend a billion dollars buying back its own stock and we call it smart financial management. A billionaire gets another tax break and we call it encouraging investment. But give a cashier healthcare she cannot lose when she loses her job and suddenly somebody wants to drag Karl Marx onto cable news. The great political trick of the last forty years was convincing Americans that transferring wealth upward is economics while transferring power back to workers is socialism.

Mainstream political media has been far too willing to help sell that lie, not because every reporter is secretly working for corporate America, but because the language itself is rigged. Corporate tax cuts are called incentives. Deregulation is called competitiveness. Stock buybacks are called shareholder returns. But policies aimed at shifting economic security back toward ordinary people are treated as ideological departures from some supposedly neutral system. Imagine if they covered the other side the same way. Imagine a Sunday morning host asking whether allowing the richest 10 percent to own almost nine-tenths of corporate stock is economic extremism. Imagine reporters demanding that CEOs explain how they plan to pay for another trillion dollars in stock buybacks. We almost never hear those questions because the system we already have gets treated like nature instead of what it really is: a political and economic choice that overwhelmingly benefits the people at the top.

That is also how justified economic anger gets pointed in the wrong direction. Take people who know damn well they are falling behind and make sure they never look upward long enough to ask who is actually walking away with the money. Tell them the immigrant took their job. Tell them the person on SNAP took their taxes. Tell them somebody on Medicaid is bankrupting the country. Tell them the student whose debt was forgiven cheated them. Tell them the public employee has too good a pension. Tell them some poor mother bought something at the grocery store she did not deserve. Keep working people fighting over the scraps and nobody asks who took the meal. The people making out like bandits have convinced the people getting squeezed to turn around and kick somebody who has even less.

Fixing this does not require abolishing capitalism. It requires making capitalism work for more than the people who already own everything. Workers need bargaining power again. Unions need room to organize without companies crushing them. The federal minimum wage needs to rise and stay tied to economic reality. Antitrust laws need real teeth. Healthcare should not be a chain tying workers to employers because they are terrified of losing coverage. Tax policy should stop treating wealth made by owning assets as more sacred than money earned by actually working for a living. And when workers become more productive and create more wealth, they should get a meaningful share of what they created. That is not socialism. That is a middle class.

They spent forty years taking more of the wealth and calling every attempt to give working people their share socialism.

The anger isn’t the mystery. The mystery is why anyone expected working people not to notice.

*Tony Pentimalli is a political analyst and commentator fighting for democracy, economic justice, and social equity. Follow him for sharp analysis and hard-hitting critiques on Facebook and BlueSky @tonywriteshere.bsky.social.

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