Today, Explained - The communist comeback

Episode Date: August 5, 2026

There's a new Red Scare bubbling up in politics. Just how real is the communist threat? This episode was produced by Dustin DeSoto, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by Patrick Boyd and David Tatasciore, and hosted by Noel King. "Are you a Communist?" poster in Forest Hills, New York City. Photo by Lindsey Nicholson/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Lenin. Democratic socialists keep winning primary races. In Michigan, Abdul al-Said, not in the DSA, but endorsed by them just won a fiercely fought Senate primary. President Trump appears worried enough about the DSA to have started conflating some things. I would be the greatest communist in history. I'd be right of free rent for the rest of your life. What they don't say is that you'll be living in squalor in 12 months.

The Trump administration has raised the specter of the far left in various ways. during Trump's second term. But the recent arrest of an American communist in Spain, what year is it, at the request of the American government, is a more concrete step. Coming up on today, explained from Vox, real communist threat or new red scare. Support of the show comes from BetterHelp,

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Oh, what it's doing, what it's done, what it's about to do, so you stay in control. To put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. This is Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. The Trump administration has been threatening to go after the far left since Charlie Kirk was killed, but it hasn't always been clear who they mean by that. Then, last month, the U.S. government requested the extradition from Spain of a wealthy American citizen and professed communist named Fergie Chambers. He's a former heir to the Cox Media Fortune, who accepted about $250 million from his family to more or less leave them alone. He now funds leftist causes. He's given around a million dollars to humanitarian groups in Gaza. The U.S. claims he provided material support for terrorism by sending some of that money to Hamas. Paisner, a journalist in Atlanta, profiled Fergie Chambers for Rolling Stone.

David, how's this rich kid become a communist? Well, I mean, he grew up in mostly New York City and grew up in Sconson in a certain amount of privilege. I came from a very prominent and wealthy U.S. family, and I ended up having a very different perception of the world than they do. He sort of describes his, you know, kind of political education or his political awakening happening as early as really kind of middle schoolish years when a teacher, he was going to St. Anne's School, I think it's called, which is, you know, a sort of, as Stella Schnabel, his wife put it to me, it's for famous people's children. Yeah, it's about right. But a teacher there had given him Howard Zins

of people's history of the United States. There were a few kind of big ideological influences. There was a history teacher I had who was kind of a Marxist. And really sort of challenged him on his family's kind of role in kind of propping up the system we have. Everything I've ever benefited from

comes off the backs of the workers of the country broadly especially of colonized people, whether they came from Africa or whether they came from a million other countries or whether they lived here in the first place. And he took it to heart. He was young then, and I think between then and when he really starts getting going with his own sort of activism, which maybe you can date to about a decade ago from now or maybe a little longer. But he was at Standing Rock, which I guess is what, about 2015, 2016. A protest in North Dakota against a major oil pipeline continues to grow.

Standing Rock is home now. That's how much it means to me. It's home. This is where everybody has come together to say enough is enough. And I think coming out of that, he was really charged with like a new sense of purpose. The comforts I have in life and the researchers I had, they are what they are. exist, but there's a responsibility to do something about that. And it goes beyond kind of like simple charity. And since then, he's had a series of what he calls land projects, where he would

have, you know, sort of like-minded friends and comrades, you know, working together. None of these land projects really, I mean, most have ended up in sort of somewhere between disaster and just failure. What's he like as a person? Wow. He's prickly. He is a very confident. He is very smart. He is probably confident to the point of arrogant. And he can be kind of difficult to get along with. Kind of a dick, your words. You said, okay, to be fair to you, you wrote he can be kind of a dick. Yes, I guess I can't argue with you quoting me back to myself. Yeah, I mean, he can be. And I mean, you know, it's like he definitely walks around with the feeling that he's right about just about everything.

Obviously, he's grown up in a milieu where he has more money than everyone else in the room. And you can't avoid kind of coming to a conclusion that that money has given him probably some unearned confidence. in his own opinions. How about his claims that he is a communist? How do you understand what he wants? What does he want the world to look like? I'm pretty confident in saying what he envisions is revolution. Ah.

You know, the sort of Marxist revolution, you know, that Karl Marx and Lenin envisioned. You know, what his version of communism is very distinct and, almost at odds with what sort of gets called communism by the right being the sort of DSA and, you know, Bernie Sanders and Mamdani. Fergie hates those guys. I mean, I don't know if it hates his maybe a strong word, but he's not at all a supporter of Bernie Sanders' version of socialism or the DSA's version of socialism. You know, those people are working within the system and he wants, you know, to completely overturn the system. Now, what is the system. You can kind of go down a rabbit hole with that. But I think he said it over and over,

you know, he wants to see the U.S. fall. All right. So a communist with maybe a quarter of a billion running around the world doing what exactly? Why does the U.S. government want to extradite him? What's he accused of? The U.S. government is accusing him of essentially funneling money to Hamas. But I don't think, I think it's important to put that in context. I mean, I don't want to really legitimize what the U.S. government is trying to do here, which is clearly part of a larger campaign to go after ideological opponents to chill dissent. Fergie is a interesting character. He's got a lot of flaws.

But I don't want those. flaws to sort of overshadow the larger point that I don't think that there's a whole lot of legitimacy to what the U.S. is trying to do here. Okay, so the U.S. says you are supporting Hamas. You are using your money to do it. You're telling me there is no evidence to suggest that. I can't say that there's no evidence to suggest that I haven't seen the indictment. The indictment is sealed. Ah, okay.

All that said, I mean, you know, Fergie funds a lot of within the U.S., things like there's a lot of leftist media projects, relatively small and some are very local, pretty far left media projects, publications, things like that. You know, he's put money into bail funds. He's put money into, there's a group here in Atlanta called Community Movement Builders, which is like a black-led sort of community organizing group, abolitionist, you know, prison abolitionist groups.

Then, and the money that I think that the U.S. government claims to be most interested in is the money of his that's sort of going to causes in the Middle East, specifically in Gaza, groups that support children in Gaza, that support political prisoners, you know, Palestinian political prisoners, whether some of that money ended up with an organization that might have ties to Hamas, I have no idea. David, you know that we have been hearing a lot in the United States about the threat of communism. This is something that the Trump administration wants us to take seriously. And I think the knee-jerk response from a lot of people is, yes, the DSA, the socialists might be ascendant in certain parts of the country. But communism, come on. Are you kidding me? Do you think Fergie Chambers is evidence that there is a meaningful communist resurgence in this country? Or is this a. very wealthy outlier doing what very wealthy outliers have done since time immemorial?

Well, I think Fergie and I would disagree on this. I think Fergie would say that it is a sign that there's some sort of communist resurgence. I just, I don't see it. First of all, I think that especially in the U.S., I mean, yes, the Trump administration has been ramping up this rhetoric against communism against anti-fascism. But the campaign against communism is at least a century old. You know, I mean, certainly post-World War II. As somebody who was born in 1973, you know, I grew up with like the communists are our enemy.

You know, this is the Cold War. There's very little education around like what is communism versus what is socialism? Like the DSA is very, very different. from like what Fergie believes. I mean, these are wildly different, you know, a true communist believes in revolution, okay, believes in that this whole system needs to be overturned. So I think, you know, is socialism on the rise?

Yeah, maybe. But communism, like what Fergie believes, what diehard Marxist-Lennonists believe, I mean, I think that they're just so much further from mainstream, kind of belief, you know, then it's certainly made out by the Trump administration. David Paisner is a journalist living in Atlanta. When we return, is the DSA full of communists?

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with ideas and judgment, and you know, a pulse. To learn how to put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. Today, and what it means? This is Today Explained. My name is Morris Iserman, and I'm professor of history at Hamilton College, and I've written a number of books about the history of the American left, including a biography of DSA. his founder, Michael Harrington.

Define communism for me? Communism began as a split off from the socialist movement. It was inspired by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917, and it is in favor of a total transformation of capitalist society with the government, the state, owning and operating what communists would call the means of production, factories, transportation, and so forth. It also believes in one party rule. So for 75 years or so, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union allowed no competing parties to exist within that country. Okay, so this is not nibbling around the edges. This is not Medicare for all. This is an actual huge, huge transformation of a society.

Speaker Mike Johnson recently said... 35 years ago, Republicans and Democrats in Congress, when I was coming up and, you know, the Reaganers, they were fighting communism on a distant shore. Now it's here. Before we get to whether or not you agree with him, why don't we begin with the fact that there have been communists in the United States of America before?

What is their history in this country? Yeah, the American Communist Party was founded in 1919, so right after the First World War. And it was, again, inspired by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, which at a time a great disillusionment for socialists around the world because here the workers of the world were fighting each other. French workers were fighting German workers and so forth. It seemed to point to a way out.

The Bolsheviks came to power, remained in power. And so communists or would be communists in the United States, in Europe, elsewhere, said, well, if they can do it, we can do it too. So an American Communist Party was founded in 1919, small, isolated, mostly immigrants. But it gained strength in the course of the 1930s during the Great Depression. Oh, I think I have a guess as to why, but you tell me why. Well, because capitalism seemed to be failing and communism seemed to be the wave of the future. The other factor leading to the increase in communist influence was that fascism was rising in Italy, in the 1920s, in Germany, in the early 1930s.

And it seemed as if there was a stark choice facing the world, either fascism or communism. And many people in 1930s said, well, let's support the communists to beat back the threat of fascism. All right. So Americans are drawn to communism after the Great Depression, and that makes complete sense. I wonder how powerful the draw was, and maybe the best way of determining that is by asking, did elected communists get anything done in the United States? Well, there were very few elected communists, if you mean elected to public office. Yeah.

In the 1940s, there were two communist members of the New York City Council. But that was about it in terms of open communists being elected to office. Their influence was seen more behind the scenes in the labor movement in organizing the big new industrial unions of the 1930s and organizing so-called front groups, anti-fascist groups, anti-racist groups, and so forth. And the party was never huge at its height at the end of the 30s. It had perhaps 75,000 members in a country then with a population of 130 million. Wow. Now, its influence extended beyond its own membership, but it was still very much a minor party, growing, but minor. Growing.

And yet here we are in 2026. In the first half of the show, we profiled a young American who calls himself a communist. It is clear that he is an outlier. And so it seems as if communism has ultimately failed in the United States. You can correct me if I'm wrong. But if it did fail, why did it fail? Well, it failed for two reasons. One reason was that it was repressed by the government pretty much throughout its existence in the first red scare immediately after the First World War.

And then again, in the second Red Scare, which we commonly refer to as the McCarthy era in the late 40s and three. the 1950s. We've got to dig and root out the communists and the crooks and those were bad for America. Communists were sent to jail for advocacy for simply saying that they

favored communism. In recognizing a communist, physical appearance counts for nothing. If a person consistently reads and advocates the views expressed in a communist publication, he may be a communist. But it also failed because of its rather slavish obedience to the dictates of

Soviet leaders. When the Soviet foreign policy changed from anti-fascism, anti-Hittlerism in the mid to late 30s to kind of de facto alliance with Hitler from 1939 to 1941, the American Communist Party obediently followed that line. Then again, Hitler and Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 and the Soviet Union swung back to anti-fascism. Well, they made that turn too. But all of those turns gave the communists a reputation as an organization that did not really exist to serve American interests, but rather to serve Soviet interests. We know from reporting that's been done that there are people within the DSA who identify as communists. Can you help us understand?

understand who these folks are within the organization and what they actually believe? Yeah. Well, there are a number of left-wing factions. There's a group called Red Star. There's another one called the Marxist Unity Group. There's three or four of them that work in coalition. They're rivals, but they also work in coalition to control by a narrow, margin, the national leadership. One of the members of Red Star is a co-chair of the organization. Now, these people make no bones about their belief. I mean, they're not secret communist infiltrating. They describe themselves as being inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution or being inspired by Maoist China or they call themselves Marxist Leninists. Red Star put out a call, I think it was in

2024 in their online newsletter saying, you know, all communists in the United States should join DSA. So they're quite open about it. And that comes out of a different political tradition, an antithetical tradition to Democratic socialism. And they have a different ultimate strategy in mind, which is not to work within the Democratic Party, as AOC is committed to do, as Zoron and Mondami is committed to do, but rather they want to split and start an independent revolutionary socialist party, which will run against both Democrats and Republicans, which is a strategy that has been tried an infinite number of times in the past by various groups of leftists. Okay, so how worried about these people should we be? And let me draw your attention to something that the Trump administration has been happy to

draw our attention to, which is you have people like Hassan Piker on the left praising Mao Zedong, famously a guy who did a lot of very, very bad things. And so that opens a door to be able to say the left are all extreme. You know, Hassan Piker is willing to praise Mao Zedong. This should be of concern to you, ordinary American citizen. Most American citizens are somewhere in the middle. Is this a red scare or is there something to be scared about here? Well, it's definitely a red scare. Okay. Trump and his allies don't have a lot going for them in this election cycle.

They've got an unwinnable war going on. They've got gasoline prices skyrocketing. Trump is even underwater on immigration, his signature issue. So what do you do in that situation? you create a boogeyman or try to. And the difference is that most Americans under the age of 45, say, have no memory whatsoever of the existence of the Soviet Union as a threat to the United States. When you launch a red scare in 1919, well, there's communist Russia. When you launch a red scare in the 1940s and 50s, well, there's the Soviet Union.

There's a real threat. I mean, they have missiles and so forth. Who's supposed to be the foreign threat today controlling the actions of these American communists? Cuba can't even keep the lights on for its own people. It doesn't have missiles. It's not going to invade the United States or its allies. So I think, yeah, I think this is an attempt to launch a red scare using DSA as kind of a boogeyman. But DSA, again, is not one thing.

It has left wing of the possible Democratic Socialists, who I would say include such figures as Zoran Mondami and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And then it has, unfortunately, some would-be Bolsheviks. So it's really a question of, you know, which DSA is going to prevail in the long run. Which one do you think will prevail in a long run? I'm a historian. I'm very good at predicting the past and I'm terrible at predicting the future. Morris Isserman teaches history at Hamilton College and writes books about the American Left. Dustin DeSoto produced today's show.

Amina El Sadi was our editor. David Tadishore and Patrick Boyd engineered and Gabriel Donutub checked the facts. I'm Noelle King. It's today explained. Are you a pet owner? Every six seconds. A pet owner in the U.S. gets hit with the vet bill over $1,000. Always an unwelcome surprise.

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