In the summer of 2026, the Overton window (what's acceptable in public discourse) shifted.
Speaker Mike Johnson warned on Fox News that the Democratic Party has been infiltrated by Marxists. "They are saying it out loud," Johnson said. "They want to abolish all borders. They want to abolish all prisons. They want to defund the police. They want to abolish the US Senate. They want to pack the Supreme Court. They want the government to take over control over all production."
Two days later, President Donald Trump used his Fourth of July address to declare that "the communist system is the opposite of the American system" and warned of a "resurgence of the communist menace in our land."
The media response was predictable. The president was playing politics. He was branding progressives as communists. The charges were overblown.
Here is the problem with that dismissal: they are doing the admitting themselves.
DSA is Communist: The Quiet Part, Said Out Loud
On July 7, 2026, Rep. Pramila Jayapal told CNN that Trump was calling Democrats communists "because he knows socialism is really popular." The "Pat Gray Unleashed" show on BlazeTV caught the implication immediately. If Trump uses "communism" because "socialism" polls better, what is Jayapal doing when she uses "socialism" instead of "communism"?
The answer came from David Jenkins of the Democratic Socialists of America. On video, Jenkins stated flatly: "Our goal is liberation. Our goal is communism."
He did not stutter. He did not qualify. He said it.
Jenkins sits on the DSA's National Political Committee. He ought to know.
Pat Gray asked the obvious question: "Since when has communism ever liberated anybody?"
Johnson's warning list is not rhetoric. It is documentation.
The DSA published its platform in writing. Megan Romer, the group's national co-chair, sat with Fox News host Shannon Bream and confirmed it position by position: abolishing the Senate, replacing the presidency and the Supreme Court, eliminating ICE, ending the borders, granting amnesty to illegal immigrants, defunding the Pentagon, abolishing prisons as a long-term goal, and placing most large corporations under government or public ownership. RNC Research clipped the exchange and posted it.
Item for item, it is Johnson's list. Borders. Prisons. Police. The Senate. The Supreme Court. Control of production.
Days earlier, another DSA co-chair was pressed on the same subject. Asked whether she wants to abolish the United States Senate, she answered that the Senate "should be reformed." A "more democratic government system," she called it. "That's a long-term change that we're seeking."
The Chinese Communist Connection
The China connection is not a theory. Friends of Socialist China, a London-based group, touts 952 signatories to a pledge to "support the People's Republic of China and to promote understanding of Chinese socialism." The New York Post found eleven self-described DSA or DSA International Committee members among them. They "resolve to support, defend and build understanding of Chinese socialism." The pledge argues that "the global advance to socialism is indispensable if humanity is to survive and to flourish."
The DSA is not a fringe group operating from a basement. As of July 2026, it is winning high-profile primary races across the country. Claire Valdez won New York's 7th District. Melat Kiros knocked off Rep. Diana DeGette in Colorado, a seat DeGette had held for decades. Politico reports the organization is now shifting resources toward Michigan and Wisconsin. (That should tell you something about the states that have already fallen.) DSA-backed candidates are competing for Senate seats and governorships. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, and far-left streamer Hasan Piker are being deployed to energize supporters.
Democrats Locked in a Power Struggle
The Democratic Party is now facing what multiple sources describe as a massive internal power struggle. Years of allowing socialists and Marxists into the coalition have produced consequences.
Hasan Piker, who serves as the unofficial DSA spokesperson, called on his followers to
"kill capitalists." His words: "Yeah kill them! Kill those motherf--ers and murder those motherf--ers in the streets. Let the streets soak in their f--ing red capitalist blood."
Democrats are campaigning with him.
Mark Penn, the former chief White House pollster and strategic advisor to President Bill Clinton, wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled "The Socialist Threat Is Real." Penn warned that far-left radicals are hijacking the Democratic Party. He called for immediate investigations into whether the DSA is "being funded by foreign governments and interests."
A Bill Clinton insider saying this is notable. This is not a conservative conspiracy theory. This is a man who spent six years in the White House watching the data.
Penn described the revolution as driven "not by the working class but by the urban professional class that is willing to support candidates who celebrate 9/11, cheer at the massacre of 1,000 Israeli and American kids, would defund the police, abolish prisons, end private property and open the borders."
Federal officials are investigating whether elements of the far-left activist NGO sphere have been influenced by foreign-linked networks. Reports indicate the investigations are focused on China and Cuba. The DOJ has empaneled a grand jury to probe Neville Roy Singham's Marxist NGO empire. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has sanctioned a Cuban influence network tied to U.S. left-wing NGOs.
A July 18 essay gave the pattern a name: "When Socialists Tell You Who They Are, Believe Them."
Jenkins told us who they are. Romer confirmed the platform. Eleven members pledged allegiance to a foreign communist power. The question is no longer whether there is a communist movement in America. The question is whether Americans will recognize what is happening while there is still time to stop it.
Communists Exiled A Pope! - The Church That Saw It Coming
The Catholic Church did not stumble into its opposition to communism. It was there from the beginning.
On December 8, 1849, Pope Pius IX issued an encyclical called Nostis et Nobiscum. He wrote it from exile in Naples. Just months earlier, revolutionaries had driven him out of Rome. He had seen what they did when they seized power. They cast "divine and human affairs into confusion." They deprived dying men of the sacraments and "compelled them to breathe their last in the arms of a wanton prostitute."
Pius IX did not mince words about what the revolutionaries were selling. He called socialism and communism
"wicked theories that aim to overthrow the entire order of human affairs."
He described their method: they use the terms "liberty" and "equality" to mislead. They excite workers with "the promise of a happier condition."
They prepare them for "plundering, stealing, and usurping first the Church's and then everyone's property."
He warned that the end result would be catastrophic:
"some few, enriched by the plunder of many, will seize supreme control to the ruin of all."
This was 1849. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had published The Communist Manifesto just one year earlier. Pius IX was already sounding the alarm - from exile!
Fast forward exactly 100 years. The year is 1949. The Cold War is in its early stages. Soviet communism controls Eastern Europe. China is about to fall.
On July 1, 1949, the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office, approved by Pope Pius XII (a different Pope), issued a decree. It came in the form of four questions and four answers. The document was blunt.
Question one: Is it lawful to join communist parties or to favor them? Answer: No. Communism is "materialistic and anti-Christian." Communist leaders, even when they profess not to attack religion, show by their doctrine and action that they are "seriously offended against God and true religion."
Question two: Is it lawful to publish, propagate, or read books and periodicals that defend communist doctrine? Answer: No. They are forbidden by law itself.
Question three: May Christians who commit these acts be admitted to the sacraments? Answer: No.
Question four: Do Christians who profess and defend materialistic communist doctrine incur excommunication? Answer: Yes. And the penalty is "reserved in a special way to the Apostolic See," meaning only the Pope himself can lift it.
The Church recognized communism as apostasy. Not a political disagreement. Not a difference of opinion on economic policy. Apostasy. The abandonment of the Christian faith itself. They were to be excommunicated.
This is the same institution that has survived for two millennia. It has faced emperors and barbarians. It has outlasted dictators. It has never been shy about identifying its enemies. Pius IX wrote from exile, driven out by revolutionaries. Pius XII wrote as communist regimes were consolidating power across Europe. Both saw the same thing: a doctrine fundamentally incompatible with human freedom and divine truth.
The Church grounded its opposition in something deeper than politics. It held that private property is a natural right, rooted in the human person. It held that the family preexists the state and must not be absorbed by it. It held that there is a moral order that no government has the authority to override.
Communism denies all three.
The Church's century-long warning is still on the books. The decree of 1949 has never been rescinded. Any Catholic who professes communist doctrine remains, by the Church's own rules, excommunicated.
The Founders Designed Against This - Equal Branches of Government
The American Founders did not write about communism. They died before Marx was born. But they wrote about the problem that communism represents: concentrated power in the hands of a faction that claims to speak for the people.
James Madison tackled this directly in Federalist No. 10. He defined a faction as
"a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community."
Two methods exist to cure the mischief of faction, Madison wrote. One is to remove its causes. The other is to control its effects.
Removing the causes requires either destroying liberty or giving every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests. Madison dismissed the first remedy as "worse than the disease." Liberty is to faction "what air is to fire." Abolishing liberty to eliminate faction is like "wishing the annihilation of air" to prevent fires.
The second remedy, control its effects, uniformity of opinion and interest, is "as impracticable as the first would be unwise." As long as human reason is fallible and people are free to exercise it, different opinions will form. Different talents produce different property. Different property produces different interests.
People are going to fight for property. It's human nature.
"So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities," Madison wrote, "that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions."
He identified the most common source of faction as "the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society."
Communist Linguistic Trap - No One has Anything
Communism attempts to solve this by abolishing the distinction. It eliminates private property and imposes uniformity by force. Madison would have recognized this as the second, unwise remedy. He warned that it requires the destruction of liberty to achieve.
Federalist No. 51 took the argument further. "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition," Madison wrote. "If men were angels, no government would be necessary." The Founders designed a system where power is distributed across branches, where each branch has both the means and the motive to resist encroachment by the others.
This design is the opposite of communism. Communism concentrates all power — economic, political, social — in a single party. The Founders diffused power across multiple centers, each watching the others.
George Washington's Farewell Address warned about the same dangers in different terms. He urged Americans to
"frown upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our Country from the rest." He warned that "combinations and associations" with the "real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities" would become "potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the Power of the People and to usurp for themselves the reins of Government."
Washington also warned about party spirit. He called it "the worst enemy" of popular government.
"The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism."
He warned that this leads to permanent despotism.
"The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an Individual. And sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty."
Washington identified the mechanism by which communist revolutions have succeeded for a century. Create disorder. Blame the existing system. Promise order through centralized control. Seize power. Destroy the institutions that stood in the way.
He also identified the only real defense: religion and morality.
"Of all the dispositions and habits, which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports," he wrote. "Let it simply be asked where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in Courts of Justice?"
John Adams put it even more directly. In his Defense of the Constitutions of Government, he wrote that "power is always abused when unlimited and unbalanced." He argued that the only remedy is a mixed government with three independent branches. The one, the few, and the many. Each checking the others.
Adams saw the danger of pure democracy. "The majority has eternally, and without one exception, usurped over the rights of the minority," he wrote. "No wise man will trust either with an opportunity."
Thomas Jefferson, in the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, warned against consolidation of power. "Confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism," he wrote. "Free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence. It is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power."
Jefferson's phrase captures the Founders' design. They trusted no single faction or party. They built a system of distributed power because they knew human nature would produce factions, and that every concentration of power would be abused.
Communism is the logical endpoint of that abuse.
The enemy has a written playbook, and it is not secret. W. Cleon Skousen's 'Communism's 45 Goals for America' — published in 1961, read into the Congressional Record in 1963 — reads like a checklist of everything happening in 2026, a story we tell in seven parts in a forthcoming series.
The Three Threads Converge
The Founders designed for distributed power and conscience. They separated powers and enumerated rights. No single faction was trusted with control.
The Church recognized communism as its irreconcilable enemy. Pius IX saw the revolutionaries in Rome. Pius XII saw the gulags in the Soviet Union. Both said the same thing: this doctrine is apostasy.
The modern left has now embraced what both warned against.
The DSA says its goal is communism. Candidates who hold that view are winning Democratic primaries. The party that once stood for labor unions and civil rights is now openly hostile to the Constitution, to private property, to the family, and to religious liberty.
Mike Johnson put it in stark terms. "We were saying common sense versus crazy," he said. "Now it's common sense versus communism."
The Founders' warnings are in writing. Federalist No. 10 has been in continuous publication since 1787. The Farewell Address is read aloud in the Senate every year. Jefferson's Kentucky Resolutions are in every constitutional law textbook.
The Church's warnings are in writing. The decree of 1849 and the decree of 1949 are both still in effect. The DSA's admissions are on video. Jenkins said "our goal is communism." Piker called for killing capitalists. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani used the July 4 weekend to attack America from the speaker's podium.
There is no mystery here. No conspiracy theory. The evidence is public and verifiable.
Washington warned that "the disorders and miseries" of faction would "incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an Individual." The Soviet Union lasted 74 years. Mao's China killed tens of millions. North Korea and Cuba still exist.
The same ideology is now operating inside the United States. It is not hiding. It is running for office.
The Word Is Being Spoken
Bill Maher says the DSA is communist. "When he says the Democratic Socialists of America are actually communist," Maher said, "that's not one of them." Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a House Intelligence Committee Democrat, calls the socialist wing "anti-American" and says DSA members are "not welcome in the Democratic Party." Mike Rowe watched the same primaries and posted: "They are literally quoting Karl Marx." Sen. John Fetterman, asked why his party's silence is so deafening, answered: "They're afraid of them, honestly."
Even the party that hosted them is now saying the word. Fear gave them the foothold — and the fear is breaking.
Sources
Document No. 2039 — "DSA Platform Includes Abolishing Prisons, Supreme Court, And Presidency," ZeroHedge, July 28, 2026
Document No. 2009 — "DSA Co-Chair Tells Fox News They Want To Abolish The Senate" (transcript), July 22, 2026
Document No. 2073 — "Members of the DSA Have Pledged to 'Support and Defend' China," The Gateway Pundit / New York Post, July 31, 2026
Document No. 1942 — "When Socialists Tell You Who They Are, Believe Them," ZeroHedge, July 18, 2026
Document No. 1934 — "Communism's 45 Goals for America," 1776history.com, June 1, 2022 (W. Cleon Skousen, 1961; read into the Congressional Record, January 10, 1963)
Document No. 2113 — "Bill Maher Says DSA Is Communist" (transcript), July 31, 2026
Document No. 2105 — "Top House Democrat Blasts Party's Surging Socialist Wing, 'Anti-American'," Slay News, August 2026
Document No. 2112 — "Mike Rowe's Anti-Communism Message on Twitter/X Goes Viral: 'They Are Literally Quoting Karl Marx'," The Gateway Pundit, August 4, 2026
Document No. 2138 — "John Fetterman Says Other Democrats Won't Call Out DSA Radicals Because 'They're Afraid of Them'," The Gateway Pundit, August 2026
Document No. 1831 — "Why Trump Is Right to Warn Americans About Communism," The Epoch Times (via ZeroHedge), July 10, 2026
Document No. 1810 — "Democrats Admitting Goal Is Communism," Pat Gray Unleashed / BlazeTV, July 8, 2026
Document No. 1793 — "DSA Says Quiet Part Out Loud About Destroying America," ZeroHedge, July 7, 2026
Document No. 1800 — "Bill Clinton Insider Warns of Socialist Takeover, Calls for Probe Into Possible DSA Foreign Ties," ZeroHedge, July 8, 2026
Document No. 1774 — "Mike Johnson Warns of the Rise of Communism in the US," The Gateway Pundit, July 5, 2026
Document No. 1885 — Pope Pius IX, Nostis et Nobiscum, Encyclical on Communism, December 8, 1849
Document No. 1884 — Pope Pius XII, Decree Against Communism (Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office), July 1, 1949
Federalist No. 10 — James Madison, "The Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection," November 22, 1787
Federalist No. 51 — James Madison, "The Structure of the Government Must Furnish the Proper Checks and Balances Between the Different Departments," February 6, 1788
Washington's Farewell Address — George Washington, September 17, 1796 (Writings of George Washington, Volume 13)
Defence of the Constitutions of Government — John Adams, 1787 (Works of John Adams, Volume 6)
Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 — Thomas Jefferson (Works of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 9)