The Communists Are Coming!

An Old Favorite From The Catalog Of Imaginary Demons

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Fourteen times at Mount Rushmore, the president warned that communism is the gravest threat this country has ever faced. Worse than World War I. Worse than World War II. Worse than Pearl Harbor. Worse than 9/11. He said it standing under the granite faces of four presidents, none of whom would abide the low character of the man delivering the speech.

Because here is what communism actually is, stripped of the cartoon: the state owns and controls the commanding heights of the economy, and a single leader decides which enterprises rise and which ones die. By that definition, the loudest anti-communist in America is running the most centrally planned economy since FDR.

Count the holdings. Roughly 10% of Intel was converted to U.S. government ownership through CHIPS Act grants. Fifteen percent of MP Materials, courtesy of the Pentagon. Ten percent of Lithium Americas. Ten percent of Trilogy Metals. A “golden share” in U.S. Steel that lets the government veto where the company builds, what it’s called, and whether it can shut a plant, a power the administration has already used.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick muses openly about buying into the defense primes, noting that a firm like Lockheed is “basically an arm of the U.S. government” already. His words, not mine.

Lenin had a phrase for this. He called it “seizing the commanding heights.” He would have found the Intel deal familiar. He would have found the loyalty tests, the personal enrichment, and the demand that private companies kneel and pay tribute even more familiar.

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A Word From Our Sponsor — And Yes, You Should Notice What Half The Press Just Missed

Read that last section again. Ten percent of Intel. Fifteen percent of MP Materials. Ten percent of Lithium Americas. Ten percent of Trilogy Metals. A golden share in U.S. Steel. Open musing about buying into Lockheed, Northrop, and General Dynamics. A federal equity portfolio that would have made Leonid Brezhnev raise an eyebrow.

Quick pop quiz. Did you learn any of that from Fox News this week? Did the podcast bros bring it up? Did your MAGA uncle catch it on Newsmax? Did the “communism is coming!” chorus that filled the airwaves after Rushmore stop for one commercial break to note that the man screaming about socialism just took a ten percent stake in America’s largest semiconductor manufacturer?

Of course not. Because the story doesn’t fit the script. So on the half of the American media ecosystem where the script is the point, the story does not exist. It is being actively, deliberately, professionally disappeared in real time.

This is exactly why I read Ground News every single morning before I write a word.

Ground News pulls the same news event together from across the political spectrum — left, center, right, foreign press — and lays it out side by side. Who is covering it. Who is not. How they are framing it. What facts each outlet is leaving on the cutting room floor.

Their Blindspot feature is the killer app. It surfaces the stories one half of the political media is essentially refusing to cover. The Intel equity stake. The MP Materials arrangement. The Lutnick musings about the defense primes. The crypto scam pardons. The pay-to-play pardon economy. You can see, in cold, clean visualizations, exactly which outlets are silent and which are screaming.

For a recovering Republican strategist who built campaigns out of message discipline — and now spends his life dismantling the disinformation machine I helped construct — Ground News is not a luxury. It is a defense system. It is how I make sure I am not the one being played by the exact misdirection I’m about to walk you through.

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The misdirection only works if you never see the other half of the story. Ground News is how you see it.

Now, back to the commanding heights.

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That’s the part the Rushmore speech left out. It isn’t only the equity stakes. It’s the also the family balance sheet fattening off corrupt deals, the same kind of deals in Soviet times would see the children of senior party officials in Moscow living a very different life from Pavel the farmer in Minsk.

The crypto scam that turns cash into bitcoin and bitcoin into access, the pay-to-play pardons to the agencies bent on punishing enemies and rewarding friends, is a system anyone in the nomenklatura from 1917 to 1989 would recognize. In the post-Soviet Putin kleptocracy, communism is gone, but the corrupt control of every aspect of the economy remains.

In the CCCP days, a position granted power. Those in position in 1991 during the final Soviet collapse, the siloviki became the oligarchs who bought up London and Miami and discovered that wealth granted power. That system lasted until Putin inverted the Yeltsin deal with the oligarchs around 2003 with the Khodorkovsky prosecution: under Yeltsin, wealth bought power; under Putin, power grants wealth, revocably.

Which is, in its way, the most nomenklatura thing about the whole system, and one easily recognizable today.

A system where the leader’s whim, not the law, decides who prospers. There’s a word for economies run that way, and it isn’t capitalism.

So when he points at Zohran Mamdani and screams Stalin, the misdirection is the whole act. Mamdani wants a rent freeze and higher taxes on the rich, which is standard European social democracy, the stuff of Copenhagen and a hundred city councils. Trump wants the government to hold the shares, name the winners, and collect the tribute. One of these men is describing a policy agenda. The other is describing himself.

America will never be a communist country, he promised.

Relax.

He’s already building something older and uglier than that.

This post was brought to you by Ground News. The misdirection only works if you don’t see the other half of the story. Get 40% off the Vantage plan here or scan the QR code below, and start seeing it.