I don't make a habit of agreeing with the White House.
It doesn't much matter who's living there, either. I've watched enough administrations from enough parties to keep a healthy distance from whatever the government is posting on a given afternoon, and I'd tell you to do the same.
But the President is right.
Of course there are dozens of mortal threats to American liberty. War, the Fed, the Department of Education, activist judges, most of so-called higher education; the list is so long I wrote a book about it.
Still, the fact that in the year of our Lord 2026, somebody had to say that communism is bad is a sign of very bad things.
There was a time (and it wasn't even that long ago) when that sentence would've gotten roughly the same reaction as "fire is hot." Everybody knew it. You didn't have to argue it because there was no one to argue with. Your grandfather could've told you, and so could the guy who fixed his car, and so could every teacher in every school in the country. It was just something Americans understood down in their bones.
So what happened?
How does a country go from all of us knowing to the point where the government has to remind us?
A survey last year from the Cato Institute found that 62 percent of Americans between 18 and 29 have a favorable view of socialism. And 34 percent of them (a third!!!) said the same about communism. Communism.
What?
Before everyone in Gen X and older gives in to total despair, there’s something worth thinking about that changes things a bit.
Most of the young people saying they like socialism can't really tell you what it is. The pollsters have noticed this for years. When asked follow-up questions, "socialism" turns out to mean something like "the government should help people more," or "I want it to be like Sweden." It does not, in their heads, mean the government owning everything, or the secret police, or the food lines, or people lined up against a wall. They're not looking at the gulag and giving it a thumbs up—they've just never been taught that socialism has anything to do with a gulag at all.
So I guess that’s good. At least it means that the rising generation didn’t look abject evil in the face and shrug because they wanted free stuff. It's more that they were handed a word with all the history scrubbed off it.
Of course the history is not subtle—it's one of the most thoroughly documented catastrophes in the human record. The historians who tallied it up in The Black Book of Communism put the death toll somewhere around 100 million people in the last century. That’s not people killed in wars, it’s people killed by their own governments, in peacetime, in the name of the very system a third of our young people now say they favor.
The Soviet famines, Mao's Great Leap Forward (which starved tens of millions), The Cambodian killing fields—every time, the same promise of fairness and equality on the front end, and the same result on the back end.
It is the single most reliable machine for producing mass graves that human beings have ever built.
The people who understood this best weren't just politicians. They were serious thinkers who watched it happen in real time. Ayn Rand, who grew up under the Russian Revolution and got out, wrote back in 1944 that "Fascism, Nazism, Communism, and Socialism are only superficial variations of the same monstrous theme—collectivism." She'd seen it with her own eyes. She knew the family resemblance between all these systems wasn't a coincidence.
Friedrich Hayek said the same thing from the other side of the war in The Road to Serfdom. His warning was that these things don't announce themselves as tyranny. They arrive gently, promising to take care of you, promising to make things fair, and the loss of freedom comes one reasonable-sounding step at a time until one day it's gone and you can't quite remember when things started going wrong. He wrote that the rise of fascism wasn't a reaction against socialism but "a necessary outcome of those tendencies."
Same root. Different branches.
Here's what I keep coming back to. None of those men and women thought the danger was that people would wake up one morning and choose evil on purpose. The danger was always that people would forget—that the memory would fade, one generation at a time, until the warning labels wore off and somebody picked the bottle back up because they'd forgotten what was in it.
That's not a political problem. You can't fix it with an election, or a tweet, even a true one. It's a memory problem. And memory has to be handed down by people who know, because it can’t survive on its own. The generation that beat the Nazis and stared down the Soviets is nearly gone now. When the last of them goes, everything they knew goes with them.
Unless someone steps in.
We’ve spent the last decade building resources to fill the gaps.
For grade school kids, we wrote The Tuttle Twins and the Road to Surfdom, which takes Hayek's warning—the gentle-sounding road that leads somewhere terrible—and turns it into a story a seven-year-old can follow and actually enjoy. Our America's History series gives them the real account of where this country came from and what it was built to stand against, the good parts and the hard parts both.
For teenagers, we created a set of Guidebooks to help them navigate some of the tougher things they’ll encounter as they continue to grow. The Tuttle Twins Guide to the World's Worst Ideas walks straight through the ideas that keep coming back no matter how many times they fail (socialism is included, of course) and lays out plainly what they promised, what they actually did, and why they keep getting resurrected by people who never learned what happened the last time (or worse by people who know exactly where it leads but depend on an uneducated populace to bring them and their murderous ideology to power). Basically, it's the warning label put back on the bottle in a format a fifteen-year-old will actually read.
That White House tweet was true. Communism is a mortal threat to liberty.
But the thing that actually protects a country from an evil it's forgetting is a generation that knows. And people only know what they are taught. So we have to tell them the real story—the things our grandfathers knew.
The good news is that it wasn't ever the government’s job to teach our kids to begin with. It’s up to parents and grandparents who have lived long enough to see bad ideas presented as new, and equip the rising generation with the tools they need to reject and combat them.
We make resources to help in the civilization-saving work you’re doing.
— Connor
