This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

“Our country is going communist!” warned Donald Trump recently. “It's going Marxist, it's going really bad. And the people of our country aren't that way – but the people running it are.”

Hold on. America “is going communist”?

Is this just election-season bluster and hyperbole, or can the utterly unthinkable actually be true?

Unthinkable because, after all, America sacrificed hundreds of thousands of young lives fighting communism in countries across the globe – from Korea and China to Vietnam and Cambodia and Cuba and many others, and was instrumental in forming NATO to “contain” the spread of communism. Then came the showdown with the nuclear-armed Soviet Union, when America’s 40th president, Ronald Reagan, leading a militarily and economically stronger superpower, urged Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” And not only did the hated Berlin Wall come down, but along with it the entire U.S.S.R.

How is it possible, then, just a few decades later, that the 45th president, Donald Trump, can state out loud what so many Americans have suspected but dared not say? That the greatest, freest and most successful nation in world history is in the throes of a full-scale communist revolution.

Here’s how author and commentator Mark Levin describes it in “American Marxism”:

The counterrevolution to the American Revolution is in full force. And it can no longer be dismissed or ignored, for it is devouring our society and culture, swirling around our everyday lives, and ubiquitous in our politics, schools, media and entertainment. Once a mostly unrelatable, fringe and subterranean movement, it is here – it is everywhere. You, your children and your grandchildren are now immersed in it, and it threatens to destroy the greatest nation ever established, along with your freedom, family and security.

“In America,” Levin explains, “many Marxists cloak themselves in phrases like ‘progressives,’ ‘Democratic Socialists,’ ‘social activists,’ ‘community activists,’ etc., as most Americans remain openly hostile to the name Marxism.” (Marxism, of course, is the ideology, while communism is the implementation of that ideology.) Adds Levin:

They operate under myriad newly minted organizational or identifying nomenclatures, such as “Black Lives Matter” (BLM), “Antifa” and “The Squad.” And they claim to promote “economic justice,” “environmental justice,” “racial equity,” “gender equity,” etc. ... They claim “the dominant culture” and capitalist system are unjust and inequitable, racist and sexist, colonialist and imperialist, materialistic and destructive of the environment.

“Of course,” he concludes, the real purpose of this multi-faceted rebellion “is to tear down and tear apart the nation for a thousand reasons and in a thousand ways, thereby dispiriting and demoralizing the public; undermining the citizenry’s confidence in the nation’s institutions, traditions and customs; creating one calamity after another; weakening the nation from within; and ultimately, destroying what we know as American republicanism and capitalism.”

Not your father’s Democratic Party

In 2023 America, the Democratic Party – its agendas, its core values, its wall-to-wall dishonesty, and its audacious and utterly ruthless methods – are virtually indistinguishable from those of modern-day communists. Compare the Communist Party USA’s website (CPUSA.org) with the Democratic National Committee’s website (Democrats.org) and try to discern any truly substantive difference. Since the Communist Party USA was long funded by the Soviet Union and traditionally very pro-Moscow, one might expect to encounter on its website classic party slogans like “Workers of the world, unite!” alongside photos of Marx, Lenin and other famous communists. Instead, the CPUSA’s No. 1 top-of-the-page issue is, believe it or not – as the site’s screaming headline declares it – “TRANS RIGHTS.”

“The demonization of transgender people in the United States is today a focal point of the far right’s campaign for political and economic domination,” begins the CPUSA’s feature story, which condemns the “fascist” Republican Party for its “oppression of people of color, immigrants, women and LGBTQ people.”

In fact, bemoans the article:

The year 2021 saw a record number of anti-trans legislative proposals put forward by Republicans and Evangelical Christian legislators across the country. No fewer than 110 bills in at least 37 states were filed. From Hawaii to Florida, Texas to Maine, Republicans went on a full-court press to target trans people – especially trans female student athletes. …

Rousing his base with his usual recipe of hatred, former White House occupant Donald Trump has eagerly inserted himself into the rush to villainize trans people and their supporters as well, claiming, “Joe Biden and the Democrats are pushing policies that would destroy women’s sports.”

Big question: How did card-carrying communists – who for generations have bitterly decried the “evil capitalist oppressors” exploiting and abusing the “working class” – mysteriously become preoccupied instead with insane “woke” gender ideology? Why is today’s Communist Party USA obsessed, as are today’s Democrats, with the radical LGBT agenda and the demonization of everyone – especially Christians – who stand in opposition to it? Even more fundamentally, what do severely mentally ill men who insist they are women and who destroy women’s athletics have to do with communism?

Investigative journalist and researcher Christopher Rufo illuminates the stunning transformation of communism from the Cold War era to today in “The New Face of Marxism.”

Essentially, explains Rufo, while Soviet, Chinese and other 20th century versions of communism were based on the concept of class struggle between the downtrodden working class and capitalist overlords, America’s huge and largely contented middle class, with its unparalleled freedom and economic stability, made the “old face” of Marxism unworkable here. Thus, new oppression paradigms for Marxism in America had to be concocted, starting with race – the “oppressed” comprising all “people of color” and the “oppressors” being all white people.

It was natural, then, for homosexuals and transsexuals to jump onto the same “oppressed minority” bandwagon. After all, the powerful and well-financed LGBT movement strategically modeled itself after the successful 1960s civil rights movement, casting its members as part of an aggrieved, long-victimized minority. Then came illegal aliens (recently re-christened “undocumented immigrants”) as the next “oppressed minority” for today’s communists – and Democrats – to defend, recruit and weaponize as part of America’s new Marxist coalition.

Since today’s communists are obsessed with embedding their ideology and agenda deeply into the next generation, straight-up Chinese communist-style brainwashing is occurring daily in public school classrooms across America. Explains Rufo:

They’re implementing critical race theory in K-12 education, for example, dividing children by race to two sides of the room, telling children of European descent: “You should feel guilt. You should feel shame. You should feel responsible for historical crimes committed by people who look like you.” And telling the other side of the room: “You should feel anger. You should feel rage, you should feel a spirit of vengeance for the crimes perpetrated against people who looked like you in the past, by people who looked like your classmates on the other side of the room.”

In this way, many of the essential attitudes and emotions for embracing Marxism/communism – including envy, hatred of society’s so-called “oppressor” class, a sense of personal grievance, a feeling of moral righteousness as a member of a persecuted “victim” class, and an abiding desire for revenge and revolution – are being implanted in the next generation of Americans.