For too long, students have been kept in the dark about communism and are now falling for it all over again.
Page A9From§Eachthe coffee break edition — 31 August 2026
Same week op-eds warn of a Soviet takeover, one report prices democratic socialism at $200 trillion.
As it ran on the front
Watch the calendar, not the content. On the same run of days, one outlet ran a piece calling college activists 'useful idiots' for a 'dead Soviet empire.' Another ran a piece arguing every state needs to teach kids about 'communism's terrors,' holding up Florida as the model to copy. A third ran a report claiming democratic socialism could cost the country two hundred trillion dollars, dressed up with a line comparing it to 'Soviet-style communism.' Three different bylines, three different outlets, one word doing all the heavy lifting across every single one of them.
That's not a coincidence you need a conspiracy board to explain. That's a talking point that got mailed out and three different desks ran with it on schedule, the way local news all runs the same weather graphic because one company owns the weather graphic. Nobody had to conspire in a room. They just all subscribed to the same wire.…
…(cont) Here's what the panic accomplishes, stated plainly and without any motive attached, just counting what's in front of us: a two-hundred-trillion-dollar number gets published without anybody checking what assumptions built it, a curriculum mandate gets held up as a model without anybody asking what it costs a district to implement, and college kids get called foreign agents for showing up to a rally. Three stories, same week, same word, and not one dollar figure in any of them attached to who profits from Americans staying scared of a country that broke apart when most of today's college students' parents were kids.
The scare's cheap to produce and expensive to argue against, because arguing against 'they're teaching your kids to hate America' takes longer than the headline that started it, and by the time you've made your case the wire's already moved three more of these out the door. That's the business model. It was the business model decades ago too, if anybody remembers what that era cost the people who got named in front of a committee for it.
“Three different outlets ran communism scare copy the same week, like it was assigned in the group chat, right when a report drops a $200 trillion price tag on 'democratic socialism' with a straight face. That is not journalism, that is a talking point wearing a trench coat. Nobody's fact-checking the number, they're just running the headline.”
“These are independent editorial decisions made by independent newsrooms, there's absolutely no coordination, we just all happen to think about Soviet collapse metaphors on the same Tuesday. And the $200 trillion figure comes from a report, a very serious report, I haven't actually read the report, but it's a very serious number.”
The receipts
The Democratic Socialists of America are pushing for a federal government spending spree that could top $200 trillion over the next decade.
If you walk into the quad of any elite Western university today, you will be deafened by a very specific vocabulary. You will hear endless lectures on “settler colonialism,” “genocide,” “apartheid,” “from the river to the sea,”…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.