'Reds Under the Bed' - My Latest Hot Type column for Byline Times
In today's Hot Type column in the Byline Times, I report on the ‘Freudian projection’ of Trump’s latest boogeyman – the ‘Communist’
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I am really proud of today’s Hot Type column in Byline Times. It’s always tricky when you cover the propaganda words being detonated by autocrats, but I think I hit the right tone with this:
I got the idea for the theme at the end of our Happy Hour with Craig Unger, when I asked him why he thinks Trump’s ginning up the Red Menace.
Take a look at the column, which I am cross-posting below. If you think it’s worthy of a share, please share the original report from Byline Times and thank you as always for your support of the Byline team and my work here at Bette.
Hot Type: Reds Under the Bed
Political columnist Heidi Siegmund Cuda reports on the ‘Freudian projection’ of Trump’s latest boogeyman – the ‘Communist’
Published originally in the Byline Times and Byline Supplement magazine, July 25, 2026.
Disinformation is the system. And that’s the trick.
How to investigate the tropes being put out by the fascist regime in America without furthering their cause.
The latest boogeyman – the “communist” – has entered stage left, as “antifa” failed to serve the purpose of its masters.
Independent reporters worked overtime to ensure even the most MAGA-drenched brains understood that “antifa” – like Big Foot, chupacabras, and Bat Boy – simply does not exist in any substantial form in America.
So taking a page from Trump’s mentor, OG red-scare tactician Roy Cohn, the universally loathed liar-provocateurs of the Cell of Jerks in the White House are staying on message. Now, it’s all communism! All the time!
“Communist! Communist! Communist!”
Between June 23 and July 8, Trump referenced communism 81 times. In recent days, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise are behaving like burbling apparatchiks – spouting anti-communist rhetoric with such great frequency they appear to have a form of Tourette’s Syndrome.
“The United States doesn’t want to be a communist country. We’re never going to be a communist country. We’re not going to allow communist influences to undermine our politics or our society.” – Marco Rubio, 22 July 2026
“The Bolshevik takeover of the Democratic Party is in full swing, and communism is on the ballot this November.” – Steve Scalise, 22 July 2026
It would appear they’re hoping to scare the olds at the polls in yet another front in the attack on truth.
“It’s Freudian projection,” Dr Marci Shore told Byline Times. “What was horrifying about Bolshevism was not universal health care. It was arbitrary violence and terror. This is what the Trump regime is employing.”
Shore, the chair in European Intellectual History at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, reminded us to look at the latest acts of violence executed and condoned by Trump’s brownshirts in immigration enforcement.
In the recent weeks, there were two more fatal killings. In Texas, a 52-year-old man driving to work in Houston, Texas, was murdered by an ICE agent who shot at him through his passenger side window. Just six days later, in Maine, ICE agents murdered a 26-year-old in his car. According to a database tracking these murders, the Gun Violence Data Hub, there have been 30 deaths by immigration officers since Trump returned to the White House last year. Among the murdered include Renee Good and Alex Pretti – US citizens killed by ICE agents in Minnesota — and 22 people have died in ICE custody this year.
Investigative reporter Craig Unger told Byline Times he sees another reason for the GOP’s new-old communist obsession.
“The trigger was the election of Mamdani, the mayor of New York City,” said Unger. “He is a member of the Democratic Socialist Alliance. And since his election, three people, three candidates he endorsed, won the Democratic nomination for office.”
Unger noted that out of the 48 countries in the recent World Cup competition, the US is the only high-income country without universal health care.
“That puts us in the same league as DR Congo and Haiti,” he said.
It also helps explain why the Mayor Zohran Mamdani-backed candidates swept the New York primaries – two are democratic socialists. This fact prompted Trump Inc messaging to go for the low-hanging fruit of “reds under the bed.”
I was gifted that phrase in an interview I did with Russia watcher Keir Giles in January 2023, during a podcast about his book, Russia’s War On Everybody.
What will get obscured in this new Red Scare is the fact that, yes, Russia is at war with the West, but unfortunately, the Trump regime is on Russia’s side.
In that 2023 interview with Giles, he said:
“For so long, Russia was not recognized as the problem and people like me were saying, ‘Well actually, we do have a problem. And it will bite us very hard in the tender parts before long.’ We were called the cranks, we were called the conspiracy theorists, who saw reds under the bed where there were none. That presents a very deep-seated attitude, against which you have to push back. But that’s the reason why the book is dedicated to Vladimir Putin, because he’s done more for us than anybody has in proving that actually, yes, the world really does have a Russia problem.”
Fear-baiting communist rhetoric to the contrary, I predicted five days after the 2024 election in my Byline Times report, Welcome to West Russia, that Trump 2.0 would behave very like Russia in the ‘90s – the violence, the staggering thieving, oligarchs running politicians – and tragically, I was right, as I wrote:
“Democracy was just murdered to thunderous applause, and those who saw it coming were called alarmist, but they were also the people who read history books or have lived experience — who know struggle from their unique perspectives or had fled authoritarian countries.”
And it’s that knowing of history that also gnaws at me.
Red Menace
It was fear of communism among middle-class voters and rural communities in Germany during the 1930s that led to support for the Nazi party. That fear was drilled into people by Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, who consistently and with great repetition deployed aggressive rhetoric against communism. They created the anti-communist fear – the Red Menace – dressing it up with anti-semitism, to then use it to justify eliminating their political opponents, and then eliminating democracy.
And that same old fear is being ginned up by Trump’s Reality TV fascism scriptwriters, who continually use tired tropes to bang away at their deletion of democracy, now making it appear as if our only choice is fascism or communism. As if.
Situational Morality
Trump’s mentor Roy Cohn taught Trump a lot. The New York lawyer was regarded as the king of situational morality. Cohn taught Trump to never admit defeat, always counter-attack, and always claim victory.
Explaining Cohn a decade ago, investigative reporter Wayne Barrett for the Village Voice told Democracy Now!:
“Roy is incandescent evil… the Satanic feeling that he would give you… He was the weirdest guy. He was into the strangest stuff. He was a chicken hawk after little boys, and yet he was the most virulently anti-gay guy you could imagine. And so, that was Donald’s mentor and constant sidekick, who represented all five of the organized crime families in the City of New York.”
Cohn’s cousin David L. Marcus said Cohn “became chief counsel to Senator Joe McCarthy, who led witch hunts against people suspected of being Communists; in 1973, Cohn met Donald Trump and began grooming him to become a national figure.”
So witch-hunting communists has likely been in Trump’s bloodstream since the early days of his relationship with Cohn, who before his death in 1986 to AIDS, bragged that Trump called him 15 to 20 times a day.
Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, also appears to have received the witch-hunting memo, as he called people with left-wing beliefs “enemies of civilization,” in what can only be described as a fascist speech on July 16 in Washington, DC, that clearly mimicked Joe McCarthy’s infamous 1950 “enemies from within” speech.
State of Emergency
“That Americans would be vulnerable to the Trump administration’s attempt to conjure up a new ‘Red Scare’ reflects a lack of understanding of the whole Soviet project,” Dr Marci Shore explained. “Communism as it was carried out in the Soviet Union and the satellite states was a radical social engineering experiment, which, needless to say, involved much more than cutting the edges off of capitalism and guaranteeing healthcare, education, and housing. On the contrary: postwar West European states instituted social welfare measures precisely as a defense against communism, rightly grasping that universal healthcare and strong public education were politically stabilizing and in fact in the whole society’s interest.
“Now the Trump administration is trying to create a state of emergency around a communist menace in response to calls by people like Mamdani, AOC and Bernie Sanders for universal healthcare and affordable housing. There is more than just a little bit of Freudian projection here: as I noted, what was horrifying about Bolshevism was not universal healthcare. It was universal terror. Communist regimes created states of emergency, moments of the ‘intensification of the class struggle,’ as pretexts for the suspension of any rule of law. They made use of the politics of ‘provocation’ – provoking violence so as to justify more repression. They instituted mass surveillance and encouraged a culture of denunciations. They invoked the specter of ‘enemies of the people’ as a pretext for arbitrary violence and terror. This is increasingly how the Trump administration behaves.”
Vienna-based disinformation analyst Dietmar Pichler added: “What is dangerous and wrong is a discourse that equates social policies like universal healthcare with communism. It not only distorts reality, it also downplays the totalitarian character of real communist regimes.”
Even a cursory knowledge of the writings of Vaćlav Havel and Aleksandr Solzhenitsynwould reveal that Soviet rule was a brutal combination of communist totalitarianism, and no Democrat on the horizon is trying to bring that back.
No Democrat is publicly doing fascist Nazi salutes. That is reserved for members of the Trump regime, with all its brutality and connivance.
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More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter/producer, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.
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