[ponygirl]

Things are different now. Propaganda is very effective and threats of job loss and/or doxxing are very real. In communist countries, a very small number of the population is able to control the majority merely by threatening their very means of existence. I spent time in a formerly communist country after the wall came down. The people I met there would tell me stories of how neighbors would disappear in the middle of the night and no one would even mention it the next day because they knew better than to ask questions.

Read Kafka, Orwell, Rand or Kundera to get an idea of what it was like to live in a communist country. Read Whittaker Chambers' "Witness" to learn how compromised we were by Soviet subversives in the 1930s. And then when you realize how they were able to roll that back and continue with their subversion after they shut down the McCarthy hearings... it will chill you. And we are experiencing the outcome of that subversion now.

[dfwgator]

There’s a scene in The Lives of Others, where the Stasi are installing bugs in the apartment. One of the neighbors witnesses what is happening, and the Stasi agent notices her and tells her, that in no uncertain terms, if she says anything, her daughter (and he uses her name, so he obviously knows who the woman is), will never go to University.

[meadsjn]

Things are different now. Propaganda is very effective and threats of job loss and/or doxxing are very real. In communist countries, a very small number of the population is able to control the majority merely by threatening their very means of existence

You are correct. The CCP is only 6 percent of the Chinese population, 90 million out of 2.5 billion population.

The communist population of the USA is probably less than 20 million out of a 340 million population. Those commies are concentrated in government jobs, academia, media, and corporate management.

Biden couldn't get a rally of two dozen people anywhere in the USA, and Kamala had several rallies where only the media showed up.

Trump easily got more than 80% of the vote (real live people).

[grey_whiskers]

+1