How Marxism Subverted America

This video essay was originally published in print on

Konstantin Kisin

’s Substack. The essay did very well, and so Kisin asked me to record it in video format. When he published the video earlier today, he wrote in the description, “With the outbreak of anti-American sentiment on US college campuses, it’s essential to understand that none of this is an accident or misunderstanding. This is why I asked journalist and recent TRIGGERnometry guest, David Josef Volodzko, to give us the history of how we got here.

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I sometimes joke that Marxism is like a vampire. It never dies, it feeds off the public, and it often turns victims into coven members.

Also like a vampire, Marxism doesn’t enter the home unless you invite it in. But sadly, Americans have freely opened the door. We should have known better. After all, as I recently wrote in the essay, “America’s Best Test of Truth,” this wasn’t our first encounter:

We remember America’s two red scares as periods of hysterical scapegoating, but they were also responses to real danger. The Russian and German Revolutions had just taken place and communists were already subverting America, race riots had broken out in over 30 cities, anarchists sent 36 mail bombs to journalists and officials, and strikes were conducted by Boston police, thousands of New York tenants, almost 400,000 coal workers, and half the steel industry.

Despite this, what came next was a disaster. We convinced ourselves that the excesses of Joseph McCarthy represented the second Red Scare as a whole. We told ourselves vampires were never real. Republicans had falsely accused many of their political opponents of being communists, so Americans wrongly concluded the accusation should not be taken seriously. But this dismissive attitude has only allowed the threat the grow. And grow it has.

Freedom and democracy require an informed public, yet our two greatest sources of information, news outlets and universities, have now become overrun by Marxists. We see the result of this in the Stalinist nature of cancel culture, the way news reports on a broad variety of issues are forced through the lens of woke ideology, and the disturbing protests on campuses nationwide.

In this video, I tell the story of how Marxism subverted America, how the West’s proudest country came to hate itself, and what we can do to drive a stake through the heart of this enemy. I hope you will enjoy.