Many people have pointed out the obvious flaw — that there were no witches, whereas there were certainly communists. For one thing, they were gobbling up a lot of real estate: they seized Poland in 1945, Bulgaria in ’46, Hungary and Romania in ’47, Czechoslavakia in ’48, China in ’49; they very nearly grabbed Greece and Italy; they were the main influence on the nationalist movements of Africa and Asia. Imagine the Massachusetts witch trials if the witches were running Virginia, New York and New Hampshire, and you might have a working allegory.It is rare that I have anything critical to say about Steyn, but he missed the mark here. The relevant analogy is not whether there were witches in NY and communists in Romania. The relevent analogy is that there were not witches in MA, and there were Communists in Washington.