Your Anti-Communism Problem—and Mine

Charisse Burden-Stelly, PhD

17 Dec 2025

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‘Anti-Communism Week’ is a legal blueprint for crushing dissent. By labeling social justice activism as terrorism and empowering a new national task force, the state is preparing for the most intense domestic political crackdown in decades.

On November 7, 2025, Donald J. Trump declared Anti-Communism Week 2025 as “a solemn remembrance of the devastation caused by one of history’s most destructive ideologies.” He proclaimed that communism was a story of “blood and sorrow” and amounted to nothing more than servitude. The following statement is particularly noteworthy: “New voices now repeat old lies, cloaking them in the language of ‘social justice’ and ‘democratic socialism,’ yet their message remains the same: give up your freedom, place your trust in the power of the government, and trade the promise of prosperity for the empty comfort of control.” This conflation of “social justice,” “democratic socialism,” and “communism” is an effort to discredit, and ultimately criminalize, all efforts to fight against the deluge of domestic attacks against oppressed populations and U.S. imperialist brutality spanning the globe. This includes the rhetorical demonization of Somali immigrants coupled with the U.S. viciously bombing Somalia; Immigration and Customs Enforcement kidnapping and extraordinary rendition of migrants coinciding with the thuggish aggression against Venezuela and avaricious occupation of Haiti; the crackdown on support for Palestinian liberation while the war-intensified genocide in Gaza continues under the guise of a “ceasefire”; and the federal government’s full court press against poor, working, and racialized people as the United States, its Western allies, and its vassal states neuter the United Nations of even a pretense of respect for international law and human rights.

The condemnation of social justice and democratic socialism as species of communism means, for example, that a stop cop city protestor, a supporter of Zorhan Mamdani, and a member of the Communist Party of China are identical purveyors of an “evil doctrine” fundamentally incompatible with “the will and conscious of a free people.” In the context of 1950s McCarthyism, Bernard Jaffe, a lawyer for W.E.B. Du Bois when he and his Peace Information Center comrades were indicted as agents of a foreign power, explained a concept called “parallelism” that clarifies the danger of antiradical forces making these linkages. He explained, “Somebody would be declared to be a Communist because the policies that he carried out were similar to those that were being advocated by Communists, and once you established that[,] one became a ‘follower,’ a ‘fellow traveler,’ or whatever it was, and just as guilty as a Communist himself. So you established the evil of Communism; once you established that evil of Communism, anyone who parallels the principles which are espoused by that evil spirit are themselves guilty.” Thus, the endemic hostility of the US government to communism is being superimposed onto organizing and politics that challenge the status quo, irrespective of how radical and counterhegemonic they actually are. The guilt by “established” association is enough to systematically crush dissent.

Perhaps on its own, the use of parallelism in the Anti-Communist Week proclamation could be dismissed as the Tangerine Tyrant’s callow and cartoonish machinations. However, in light of the presidential memorandum titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” it becomes much more sinister. Published on September 25, 2025, the memo announced the formation of the National Joint Terrorism Taskforce targeting organizations, individuals, and funders engaging in “violent conduct” animated by “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity.” The latter, along with “extremism on migration, race, and gender” and “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality,” are considered as egregious as—or even akin to—supporting the overthrow of the United States government. Here we see more parallelism, this time between violence against the government, the rejection of draconian immigration policy, racial oppression, and transphobia, and a critique of conservatism. These parallels have been used to legitimate the dismantling of higher education, the defunding of progressive knowledge production, and generalized anti-intellectualism.

Equally alarming, the memo presents anti-fascism as a “lie” that undergirds terroristic acts, assault on democratic institutions, and encouragement of violent revolution. Further, it effectively claims that those who understand the United States as fascistic are extremists and political assassins in waiting. Thus, individuals, organizations, entities, and networks engaging in constitutionally protected freedoms like protesting, organizing, and speaking freely, but who support ideas deemed threatening to the United States, will be “investigated,” “disrupted,” “uprooted,” and “disbanded” by law enforcement. Tellingly, no such offensive will be carried out against the real purveyors of unbridled terror, including rightwing forces invading Black communities and menacing historically Black colleges and universities; school shooters; and murderous police. Instead, the U.S. Attorney General will prioritize “organized doxing campaigns, swatting, rioting, looting, trespass, assault, destruction of property, threats of violence, and civil disorder”—actions often associated with urban, Black, and radical uprisings like the Long Hot Summer of 1967, and those in Ferguson in 2014, Portland in 2016, and across the nation in 2020—as key indicators of domestic terrorism. Relatedly, law enforcement is instructed to focus on “behaviors, fact patterns, and recurrent motivations,” not concrete actions, as key indicators of potential violent activity. It would be fair to assume that racial profiling and racist stereotyping will be normalized as investigative tools. Moreover, reminiscent of the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations inaugurated during the Harry S. Truman Administration, the U.S. Attorney General is empowered to characterize as a “domestic terrorist organization” any group or entity that includes a member engaged in activities deemed “domestic terrorism” and to make a list of these organizations to turn over to the President.

The September 2025 memo sets the stage for another round of witch hunts, government harassment, state surveillance, and law enforcement violence aimed at political dissent. Anti-Communism Week is thus much more than the petulant pet project of the Trump regime. It is the codification of violent and racially specified Red Scare insurgency in this conjuncture of frenzied warmaking at home and abroad, rabid wealth hoarding by a tiny monopoly class, white supremacist consolidation, and the rapid decline and decay of imperial hegemony. Under these conditions, the stakes are an organized fightback for collective existence or anti-communist capitulation to “poor butchered half-lives.”

Charisse Burden-Stelly is an associate professor of African American Studies at Wayne State University and a member of the Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective.

McCarthyism

Anti-Communism

Red Scare

domestic terrorism

protest

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