On July 3 at Mount Rushmore, in preparation for America’s big 250^th anniversary celebrations, President Trump said:

You must love our country. There has never been anything like us anywhere on earth and we are not going to let anyone take that away. Yet as we approach this magnificent anniversary, we see our American identity under a renewed attack, a generation after we fought and won the Cold War against the menace of communism.

There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success. These are not mere political disagreements like differences over taxes or regulations. 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. Uh, we’re not gonna let this happen to us. Believe me, we’re not letting it happen. Because communism is the enemy of free people everywhere, everywhere in the world. Never works. It’s the enemy of the Constitution.

Following his speech, on July 4, the Associated Press published a report headlined, “Trump hails U.S. exceptionalism before veering into darkly political speech to usher in America 250.” According to AP, Trump:

swerved from the typically apolitical, unifying speeches past presidents like Gerald Ford or Ronald Reagan have delivered during earlier high-profile Independence Day celebrations. Indeed, Trump’s language evoked the Red Scare of the 1950s, when alleged communists were persecuted and blacklisted from jobs across America, from Washington to Hollywood.

These AP writers apparently did not know and had not bothered to notice that the “alleged communists,” in fact, were member of the Communist Party USA, founded, funded and ruled by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

“The Communist movement was psychologically a movement of political colonists determined to place the world, or as much of it as possible, country by country, under the sway of their government in Moscow,” wrote Benjamin Gitlow, a former Communist turned conservative, in his 1940 memoirs. Gitlow, who ran for vice president as a Communist in 1924 and 1928, continued, “We were volunteer members of a militarized colonial service, pledged to carry out the decisions of our supreme rulers resident in Moscow anywhere in the world but particularly in the land we were colonizing for Communism, the United States.” Indeed, many CPUSA members secured jobs in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration and worked to advance the New Deal.

Even actor Robert Vaughn, star of Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Bullitt, who wrote a book in 2004 decrying the blacklisting of alleged Communists and fellow-travelers in Hollywood, admitted that it was well known that Communists had infiltrated the government. “The curiosity is not that there were undoubtedly many Reds that made government their vocation, but that the entire Communist Party was not on the federal payroll.”

For Eugene Lyons, another former Party member, Vaughn’s assessment is not much of an exaggeration. “Never before—or since—had all areas of American society been so deeply penetrated by a foreign nation and a foreign ideology,” Lyons wrote in his 1970 book The Red Decade. “Never before had the country’s thinking, official policies, education, arts, and moral attitudes been so profoundly affected by the agents, sympathizers and unwitting puppets of a distant dictatorship.”

Communists gained considerable influence in the Hollywood guilds and back-lot unions, to the point that, as Budd Schulberg (of What Makes Sammy Run? and On the Waterfront fame) noted, the Party was “the only game in town.” As I show in my book Hollywood Party: Stalinist Adventures in the American Movie Industry, the Communists liked to wreck the careers of those who opposed them. So, what the AP calls a “Red Scare” was a time when there was ample evidence that Soviet agents had infiltrated both the federal government and Hollywood.

During World War II, Communist spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg stole secrets of the atomic bomb and gave them to Stalin. After the war, Stalin turned against the USSR’s wartime allies, remained in control of Eastern Europe, and ramped up persecution of writers and artists. Stalin also revived anti-Semitism in Russia and the captive territories, branding Jews “rootless cosmopolitans.”

In 1956, Soviet boss Nikita Khrushchev revealed Stalin’s crimes but the Communist Party continued to run candidates in American elections. In 1976, future CIA director John Brennan voted for the Stalinist Gus Hall, the American presidential candidate of the CPUSA. In 1979, Angela Davis won the Lenin Peace Prize. In 1980 and 1984, Davis ran for president on the Communist Party ticket with Gus Hall. Davis avoided jail time for her role in a courthouse gun battle and gained a teaching position at the University of California, so it’s hard to see how this avowed Communist was ever persecuted. Indeed, Davis remains a force within today’s Democratic Party, where “democratic socialists” appear to be taking control.

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) types seem willfully ignorant of the CPUSA’s long history in America and the realities of Communism in the Soviet motherland, the “German Democratic Republic” (East Germany), “Democratic Kampuchea,” Cuba, and other totalitarian dictatorships.  The Black Book of Communism totals the casualties, but the DSA types look the other way.

When President Trump notes that Communism “never works,” the AP responds with fathomless ignorance. Americans have long stopped trusting the so-called mainstream media, and if they start describing Bernie Sanders as a Rip Van Winkle communist it would be hard to blame them.