Daily Kos84%
Why the GOP loves to use ‘communism’ as an attack 98%
By Oliver Willis95%
7/18/2026, 11:00:00 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 34 faulty reasoning types, including Biased Writer Voice, Politically Left Leaning Bias, and Appeal to Emotion, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 65.2% saturation with 547 hits. Analysis detected 3,530 faulty-reasoning hits from 839 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 97.7% and a BS Rank of 98% (404 of 18,228 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 97.80% of the article peer group.
Speaker Mike Johnson released an urgent warning to Americans on Tuesday: The communists are coming.
“We’re fighting right now in Congress over whether we’re going to maintain our status as a constitutional republic or we’re going to trade that in, dismantle the foundations and go down this dark road of death to communism.
That is the question on the ballot this fall,” Johnson ominously warned.
Now of course, if people are really worried about the government taking control of industries, pushing to limit freedom of expression, or engaging in the dismantling of long-held institutions, the guilty party is the Republican majority of which Johnson is a key member.
But Republicans are harping on the communist threat.
Casual viewers of the party’s quasi-official media mouthpiece, Fox News, are now being fed a steady diet of propaganda insisting that Democrats are the hammer-and-sickle party.
The right will claim that the election of Zohran Mamdani to be New York City mayor last year and the surprise wins of candidates affiliated with democratic socialism in Democratic primaries this year are evidence of looming red behavior.
But that’s not it.
Republicans are all abuzz about socialism because the party’s political prospects look dire this fall.
President Donald Trump’s approval ratings are in the thirties, Americans are experiencing surging energy prices, and Trump and other Republicans are engaged in open corruption while cutting vital government programs.
They need something, and in a pinch, socialism has always been a big, giant emergency button for the right to push.
They love to push the emergency button in the months before an election.
The right has for years whipped up panic ahead of elections, gambling that exaggerating one threat or another, and associating the problem in the public’s mind with the Democrats, will pay dividends.
Back in 2002, while the country was still reeling from the 9/11 attacks, Republicans began the drumbeat that would lead to eventual war with Iraq.
Under then-President George W.
Bush, Republicans kept up a steady argument that if Democrats expressed skepticism about an Iraq War, they were on the side of the al-Qaida terrorists who attacked the country.
Of course, there was no connection between al-Qaida and Iraq, and Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction, but before all of that was laid bare, Republicans held on to power and bucked historical trends—keeping control of Congress in that year’s election.
In 2014, President Barack Obama was well into the final phase of his second term, and Republicans needed something to get the troops whipped up before the midterm races.
Fearmongering about an outbreak of Ebola virus and the Obama administration’s efforts to help an American afflicted by the ailment hit a fever pitch.
For added effect that year, Republicans and the affiliated conservative movement also argued that Obama was not doing enough to fight the terror group ISIS.
An example of how far-reaching this meme became showed up in the official magazine for the pro-gun zealots at the NRA.
While ISIS operated in the Middle East and concerned itself largely with issues in that region of the world, the NRA told supporters they had to worry about ISIS hanging outside their homes and they had to “vote your guns” by backing Republicans that fall.
Four years later, with Trump in the White House in 2018, Republicans needed a shiny object to distract the public from the many ways Trump was failing in the presidency (this should sound familiar).
That year, Trump led the way in promoting the notion that a caravan of migrants was rocketing toward the U.S-Mexico border, and Republicans needed to get the vote to stop the caravan.
It didn’t exist, and Republicans got a thumping at the polls.
By 2020, Trump was facing rising public anger about police brutality following the killing of George Floyd.
Responding to protests for racial justice and the likely rebuke of Trump, who explicitly endorsed racist police abuse, Republicans tried to argue that they were for “law and order” as the Democrats purportedly embraced anarchy.
The tactic didn’t work and by the time Congress was ready to certify the results of that year’s election, Republicans showed off how little they cared for “law and order” when Trump incited the riot at the Capitol, meant to overturn a Democratic election.
In 2022 and 2024, Republicans (with a mighty assist from Fox News) tried to argue that traditional values were under constant assault from the mere existence of transgender people.
The party argued that Democrats were in the throes of promoting radical social change via the party’s acceptance of transgender equality, and Republicans successfully got voters to turn out in opposition to a crusade that wasn’t happening.
This is why the communism gambit sounds so familiar.
The playbook is well worn and dog-eared by this point in history.
All signs are that the tactic won’t work this year, but that never stopped the right from building itself up into a frenzy over something that isn’t happening.
Analysis
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