There’s no point in holding it back: The left is glad that Renee Good and Alex Pretti have died.

These two protesters had fatal encounters with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, enshrining their status as martyrs for the left. While no credible person on the right is expressing happiness about this senseless loss of life, it is pretty evident that, in their hearts, many on the left are glad to have a bloody shirt to wave. From fundraising pitches to posts designed to rile up the base on Bluesky and cable news, these deaths have been exploited in an almost mechanical fashion. 

For those of us old enough to remember it, this kind of mind-numbing obsession we’re seeing from the left’s street fighters cannot fail to remind us of the devotion that once gripped members of the Communist Party—both here and abroad.

That’s why this fall, with the co-sponsorship of the Center for Renewing America and the Victims of Communism Foundation, I’m holding an Anti-Communist Film Festival. The timing is good. One thing that becomes clear while screening some of these classic anti-communist movies is how accurate their depictions of leftist behavior were and how little things have changed today. These films still speak to us today and feel downright predictive.

There’s no doubt that right now, executives and screenwriters in Hollywood are preparing scripts for films and TV shows about the “Uprising in Minneapolis,” and that anything that gets close to telling the truth about the dynamics at work will be spiked. People interested in the truth about what moves the left will just have to rely on older films.

Take the great 1955 movie Trial. The film is more relevant in 2026 than anything coming out of Hollywood. It depicts communists as wretched, dark people who are willing to obstruct justice if it means a payday for the cause and promises to create a martyr. 

Trial follows a new attorney named David Blake (Glenn Ford), who is hired to help represent Angel Chavez, a 17-year-old Hispanic kid accused of killing a white girl. Chavez is innocent, but it soon becomes clear that the communists want Chavez convicted—purely as a money-making martyr for the cause. Blake tries to save Angel’s life while attorney Barney Castle, a hard-core communist, plans to let the boy hang so he can use his death as a fundraising tool.

Adapted by Don M. Mankiewicz from his prize-winning novel, Trial, in the words of critic Clyde Gilmour, is “a hard-hitting realistic drama which shows with disturbing clarity how political racketeers skilled in the black arts of showmanship can flourish under the protection of the very laws they despise.” Minneapolis, anyone?

Then there is I Was a Communist for the FBI, in which an FBI agent infiltrates the Communist Party in Pittsburgh. He learns of a plan to create “a hellbrew of hate” with urban riots intended to “divide and conquer” by pitting the races against one another and causing so much mayhem that the left will be able to summon Stalin to establish order—and make big profits as a result of  court cases, something outlined in the Norm Eisen “color revolution” playbook. Another scene reveals a character who is working for the party as a high school teacher: “What better place to serve the party than in a high school?” she says.

Another fascinating film is My Son John. Starring Helen Hayes and Van Heflin. It tells the story of a family discovering that their son, who works in Washington, is in fact a communist spy. When John the communist tells his mother that “there are more important things than a mother’s love for her son,” it reveals the goal of replacing the family with the state.

The centerpiece of the festival, the 2006 German film and Oscar winner The Lives of Others, is a harrowing tale about the East German Stasi. Directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, it is, as critic Peter Bradshaw wrote, “an indictment of the sinister brutalities of the Stasi, the GDR’s secret police, whose network of informers was so vast that fully 2% of the entire civilian population was on the payroll—a network of fear and shame worthy of George Orwell’s 1984.”

The Lives of Others tells the story of a playwright in mid-1980s East Berlin, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch). He is in a relationship with his leading lady, Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck). Dreyman is targeted for surveillance by a Stasi functionary, Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), who, in seeing the love and artistic freedom of Dreyman and Sieland, slowly starts to question his assumptions about totalitarianism.

A central theme of communism, and a tool that worked masterfully for the Stasi, is and was shame. Journalist Laura Williams describes it perfectly:

If someone looked like he might challenge the Communist Party’s legitimacy or control, the Stasi systematically destroyed his life. They used blackmail, social shame, threats, and torture. Careers, reputations, relationships, and lives were exploded to destabilize and delegitimize a critic. Some forms of harassment were almost comical: agents spread rumors about their targets, flooded their mailboxes with pornography, moved things around in their apartments, or deflated their bicycle tires day after day. Others were life-altering: Individuals labeled as subversives were banned from higher education, forced into unemployment, and forcibly committed to asylums. Many suffered long-term psychological trauma, loss of earnings, and intense social shame as a result of Stasi lies.

In an academic paper on The Lives of Others, Hans Lofgren explores the deep power of shame to alter our lives.

Stare long enough into the eyes of a dog who does not know you, and he will begin to bark. Many animals, human beings among them, experience the stare as threatening aggression. But, unlike other animals, human beings can feel shame at being exposed to an unwavering look, a look which threatens the private self that is only shared in deeply trusting relationships.

To their shame the present “antifascist” government of Germany has absorbed high-ranking East German communists, including suspected Stasi-informers.

The Anti-Communist Film Festival will do what Hollywood and the captive legacy media will not: reveal the cynical Marxist death cult that is behind the actions in Minneapolis and other American cities. The first step to changing the culture is to invite Americans to understand this force that, naïvely perhaps, too many of us thought we had already escaped.