Why Is Communism Making A Comeback In America? (Mike Rowe with Bill Whittle)

The Way I heard It Wight Mike Rowe ^ | 8/12/2026 | Mike Rowe/Bill Whittle

[rlmorel]

LINK: Why Is Communism Making A Comeback In America? (From: The Way I Heard it with Mike Rowe)

This is an hour and a half of discussion with the peerless Bill Whittle who is, in my opinion, the best communicator of Conservatism and its values in this country today. Mike Rowe makes the statements that Leftists would mouth and acts largely as a willing foil for Bill Whittle.

In the context of current events, this is the best hour and a half you can spend. Watch this instead of a movie or a baseball game and pass it along! It is worth every second.

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TOPICS:
KEYWORDS: billwhittle; communism; mikerowe; socialism

[rlmorel]

Bill Whittle can get quite fiery in this video, at least for people who watch him. His arguments and analogies are directly to the point, honest, and accurate.

I have been following him for more than a decade now, and in communicating concepts like socialism, communism, fascism, and capitalism to everyday people, I believe there are very few if any people who match him in this.

Also, I started a thread recently on the completion of the last audiobook I dictated for free download:

LINK TO FR THREAD: Free Audiobook Available for Download: "The Naked Communist" by W. Cleon Skousen

This audiobook is an excellent one, the most rewarding and, the most informative one I have dictated so far (out of eight audiobooks). This is a wholly relevant subject, and while I expect Bill Whittle will be singing to the choir on, the way which he does it is remarkable.

Sadly, I do believe we are now entering the fight for our Republic. It would be better if we didn't have to, but we have to. Communists and Socialists of all stripes are coming out into the open because they feel emboldened to do so. There is no difference between socialism ("democratic" or otherwise). Socialism is tyrannical by nature, and always, Always, ALWAYS has a terminus in Communism.

Always.

[MayflowerMadam]

Does Bill Whittle have a regular podcast?

I’ve been a fan for about 10 years, too, but only seem to catch him on a hit-or-miss basis. His show used to be something like “Afterburner”, IIRC.

[blackdog]

Student Loans, and the want to default on them with no consequences. Ban the FAFSA.

[PeterPrinciple]

Is communism actually making a comeback or is that just the media telling us so?

there is a difference.

[proust]

where have they been?

Grok, how many students in America are on the free lunch program?

---

About 21.3 million students received free lunches on an average day in fiscal year (FY) 2025 through the National School Lunch Program (NSLP), according to preliminary USDA data.

[anton]

What a stupid question. Communism appeals to persons with no future. Losers. Parasites. Dependents. And, leadership by power hungry oppressors, sociopaths and ideological zealots.

Any study of history shows that.

[Jonty30]

Socialism is a preservation type economy. Modern socialism has its roots in Thomas Malthus, whom believed that we were at risk of running out of food because food production was only increasing arithmetically, but people were increasing their population geometrically.

The modern day communist is almost always the child of rich and well established parents, just like Karl Marx was, and they believe that they are losing their economic advantages. So, they can’t stop that, but they want to preserve their place in society. So, that is why communism attracts them.

[discostu]

Because capitalism has entered a toxic phase of super rich scumbags and constant layoffs. This decade’s version of capitalism is a great advertisement for anything except that.

[rlmorel]

Bill makes an interesting contrast in this exchange below.

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BILL WHITTLE: You mentioned earlier that it's one thing if you get called a Nazi and it's another thing if you get called a communist. And the reason that it's not reprehensible to be called a communist is because there's no photos. It's just just that, photos. We have photos and we have films of what the Nazis did to people. We have films from the death camps. We have films of bulldozers piling up bodies like cordwood dumping them into a pit. We have photos of all these things. We have Auschwitz. We have evidence. We have a lot of evidence.

There's a place in in the Soviet Union called Kolyma (known as KMA). Kolyma was one of the gulags. There were 430 of these uh work working to death camps. Nobody's taken any pictures in Kolyma, but the number of people killed in Kolyma is somewhat disputed, but generally the low estimate is probably around 750,000 and the high estimate might be as high as one and a half, two, maybe even two million people worked to death in this gulag.

Now, if the high number is true, that means that Kola is a deadlier place than Auschwitz. But if the low number is true, it means Kola is the second deadliest place in the world. The communists killed the second largest number of people. The Nazis killed the most people at Awitz. Then came the communists at Kolyma. Then came the Germans again at Trebinka. Right? So these two philosophies are both identical. And I might point out to the people who who are big big fans of socialism that the Nazis and the Communists both named themselves very carefully for a reason. The Nazis, Nazi is an acronym and it's an acronym for the National Socialist German Workers Party. When you call somebody a Nazi, you are calling them a socialist worker. National Socialist German Workers Party. NAZI stood for. So they called themselves Socialists because they wanted to they wanted to grease their road to power and authority and ambition with words that sounded friendly.

Now let's look at the communists.

What was that country called? It was the USSR. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. They didn't call themselves the Union of Soviet Communist Republics because communism has a bit of a bad flavor to it. Now, I didn't name the USSR and I didn't name the National Socialist German Workers Party. Adolf Hitler and Lenin did that. They did it because they knew that it had a nice sound to it. It sounded fair. But that's never what the intention was. The intention was always absolute power over other people's lives. The Nazis never had a majority. The Communists, the Bolevixs, I should say, before they became known as the Communists. Lenin's party never got more than 30% of the vote. And the second they got 30% of the vote, they outlawed all the other political parties, shut down all of the other uh newspapers and basically shot anybody who decided to get in their way. And the the Nazis did the same thing. These people use the word socialism to cover their totalitarianism. It's not like communism and and socia.



I don't who was it might have been Jonah Goldberg, I think, who said this. He said the difference between the Nazis and the Communists is is the difference between Coke and Pepsi. They're both totalitarian states. They're they're both colas. They both believe in a single leader. They both had secret police. They both had extermination camps. They both had all of these things because you cannot force people into something as unnatural as getting up to work for other people without murdering several million of them. When you get to the communists, you end up in a world where where the power is is everything.

It's the worship of power

There are people that have this genetic defect of having to tell other people what to do. These people used to be known as aristocrats. They would be poshes or they'd be sultans or they'd be amirs or they'd be kings or earls or dukes or barons or counts or whatever the case may be. 250 years ago, here comes this country where all of a sudden we're going to try letting individuals run their own lives. See how that works. We produce more wealth and more and more health and more happiness than in the history of the world. And we've produced so much happiness, so much wealth, so much success, so much so much ease and leisure.

And we are so far away from the wolf at the door that we can now speculate about what it would be like to make something better. Because the thing about socialists and communists is they always compare societies to perfection. They never compare them to other Perfection where everybody works as hard for the collective as as they work for themselves. Perfection where all of the leaders are absolutely uncorruptible. Perfection where everybody is equally happy equally.

No. The world doesn't look like that. That's why they can never produce an example that works. I've heard people say many times and so have you, well, they didn't do communism the right way. That's the problem with communism just didn't do it the right way. Well, my answer to that is this. I've studied communism. I know communism very well. It's not that they did communism the right way. It's not that they did comm communism the wrong way.

They did it the only way.

And the only way to do communism is to enforce your will on the people by being ruthless enough to murder enough of them so that the rest of them will do whatever you tell them to do

And you don't get to go to another government. You don't get to do any of that. You live in a state of perpetual fear. And the communists in Russia killed 20 million of their own people. The communists in China killed 50 million of their own people. Starved them to death on purpose. What are they going to do? They going to go get another government? They're going to walk down to the corner and and try a new government? You don't get to try a new government. You don't get to go to if you don't like what your the prices are at Macy's, you can you can go to Marshalls, right? When when you have onegovernment that has all of the power, there's no escape. It's you versus them.

Somebody asked Stalin was trying to break a guy. He was trying to break a guy who was resisting torture and and they couldn't get a confession out of him. And Stalin said, "What does the Soviet Union weigh?" Well, what do you mean, comrade? What does it weigh? What does the Soviet Union weigh? Well, it's immeasurable. Well, then why is it that the weight of the Soviet Union cannot break this man? Get back to work.

So, they beat him to death.

And these bodies are there. The bodies are there. In downtown Moscow, there is a place called the Lubyanka. The Lubyanka is right next to a toy store. It's a bright yellow building, very cheery looking. There's a toy store 20 yards away. Kids paradise. in the basement of the Lubianca. They said the Lubyanka is the tallest building in the world because you can see Siberia from the basement.

But the Lubyanka for 40 years or so would start at sunset and they would bring people in and they would be six of them. They'd strip them of all their clothes. They'd line them up against wooden doors. They gave them hope that they were just going to go through some sort of doors.

But the wooden doors didn't lead anywhere. They didn't open. They didn't even have hinges. The wooden doors were there to stop ricocheting bullets from coming back from the people that were doing the shooting. Six Checkists, that was the first name of the secret police. They changed their names six or seven times, bang, bang, bang, bang, six people dead. They go down into the ground. There's water on the ground. Other checks come and put them on a trolley. There's a little mini rail set up in there. Put them on a trolley, haul them to the back. Somebody's pulling them up on ropes, putting them in a truck. Six more naked, crying, weeping people come in. Bang, bang, bang, in the back of the head.

You're an enemy of the state. We can't take chances. We don't know whether you're guilty or not

When Stalin launched the Great Terror, he said, "There must be 70,000 people in Murmansk who are who are enemies of the state." So, I want 70,000 people in Murmansk killed. He didn't say find the enemies of the state. He said kill 70,000 people in Murmansk because that's what we think the number of enemies of the state in Murmansk is.

And so, you know what happened?

The people who are executing the people in Murmansk don't want to be executed themselves. So they write a letter back to Stalin. They say, "Come Stalin, you won't believe it. We didn't find 70,000 people. We found 320,000 people in Mer and we executed all of them, too. Aren't we doing a great job?"

And this is how entire populations were eliminated.

People would have family photographs and as time went on in the Soviet Union, you would see their faces disappear. They would literally take apencil eraser and they would erase the face of an enemy of the state because they didn't want anybody coming into their apartment thinking they still cared about this person. Oh god, no, no, no, no. We we we knew he was a bad egg from the beginning.

And of all the the clearest to me just because it's the one that's easiest to imagine was that in these apartment complexes, the secret police would come in at about 2 or 3 in the morning at your at your at your biological low, right when you're at your most emotionally vulnerable and most likely to be asleep.

So around 2 or 3:00 in the morning, these black Maras, these black police vans with bars on the on the windows would pull up outside the building and then you'd hear the front door and then you hear the footsteps below and then this creaky creaky old elevator and you'd hear it start coming up and you were lying in bed every single night of your life. You were shivering in terror. It's getting louder and louder and louder and louder.

And then maybe it would pass your floor and keep going and keep going and keep going and then stop and then you could sleep for 3 or 4 hours until 6:00 when you had to get up and work for the for the motherland again.

But these people would find out who had been killed that night because they would find out what apartments were available. Hey, a new apartment opened up. It's nicer one than I have. Let's move over there. We've got one bathroom for the entire floor. News spreads quickly.

But that sound, that image of lying in bed with your wife and your kids in the next room and wondering if that elevator is going to stop on your floor and take you and maybe your family away, never to be seen again. You're going to end up in the basement of the Lubyanka or maybe you'll go to Leforto or whatever. They're all buried in Moscow, by the way. They've got parks in Moscow where there's 60,000 people buried in this in this park.

Show me the man. I'll show you the crime

[rlmorel]

It is indisputable that there are people coming flat out in the open, running for public office and saying they are Socialists, and in some cases, even saying they are Communist.

And no doubt it is being pumped up by the media. Be we do have them feeling emboldened to come out into the open.

Keep in mind, anyone saying they are "Socialist" does not understand (and this is fully how Marx, Engles, and Lenin, and Stalin all understood this perfectly wall and on many occasions stated it aloud that "Socialism" was just an expected waypoint to Communism. And that, as F.A. Hayek pointed out in his seminal book The Road to Serfdom Socialism ALWAYS ends in tyranny, whether that be Communism or Fascism.

Always and without exception.

[Danie_2023]

“”Sadly, I do believe we are now entering the fight for our Republic. It would be better if we didn’t have to, but we have to. Communists and Socialists of all stripes are coming out into the open because they feel emboldened to do so. There is no difference between socialism (”democratic” or otherwise). Socialism is tyrannical by nature, and always, Always, ALWAYS has a terminus in Communism.””

***

They’ve been creeping up on us incrementally decades before Al Gore invented the internet. Is it any wonder that they have made leaps and bounds with the advent of anti-American cretins elected to office like Obama and most of the Democrats?

Also, when I click on the link it comes up with “Communism for Dummies”... instead of “Why Is Communism Making A Comeback In America?”. Is there two different vids or is Communism for Dummies” the correct one to watch?

[Sequoyah101]

Why? Because self-government without self-discipline will not work.

Not everything someone can do is a thing he should do and that goes for all of us from poor to rich to filthy rich.

[Zathras]

I started hearing about it back in the early 90’s in colleges.
20 years later, colleges had energized a new generation of radical socialists.

[chopperk]

Poor teachers.

[rlmorel]

It is not a “stupid question” in any way, Anton.

It is a rhetorical question. What you say is also true. But the two aspects of that issue are not in any way mutually exclusive.

That question was asked to facilitate the dialogue. You apparently understand this, but there are tens of millions of Americans who don’t.

[bak3r]

This is how I see it too. I don’t even think there is a big “socialist” or “communist” movement. The majority of younger people just see a system not working for them and there are no political parties with a pro “capitalist” message.

[bray]

They live in the best economic system in history and they want to destroy it for virtue points.

[quantim]

“Communists and Socialists of all stripes are coming out into the open because they feel emboldened to do so.”

Yes, because the RINOs, Uniparty enabled them the last two generations along with the MSM and making the $42,000,000,000,000 debt basically invisible to the masses. The commies are the result.

Mileage will vary considerably on what or who is considered responsible. Blame whoever, but Congress is the entity that spends the money per the Constitution, that’s your enemy.

[Celerity]

To date I’m the only one on FR that seems to get it.

People don’t want to work. Well, they don’t want to work for someone else. I’m one of them. Even when my bank account is at 0 I won’t apply for a job.

Is communism making sense for people? It better because we are almost complete with the idea today. This country is more communist than capitalist. Capitalism died in the 90s.

We all make the same amount today that we did in the 90s. More money is being spent but employees make none of it it goes to the stockholders and executives. Even working at a restaurant can be disheartening because the small restauranteur still buys 100,000 dollar trucks and lives in a mansion. Employees need rides to work.

Then talk from politicians and economists of basic universal income. The richest man in the world is telling people that soon they won’t have to work. I watched “American graffiti” with my daughter and one of her comments was “wait.. all of those students have cars?”

Yes communism is on the horizon. And it’s going to win and I know exactly why. Communism will win because a few people destroyed the beauties of capitalism.

[Danie_2023]

“”Is communism actually making a comeback or is that just the media telling us so?

there is a difference.””

***

And the difference is... communism is ‘trying’ to make a comeback because the left is desperate to defeat MAGA and Trump... and the media is helping them try because the media IS the communist left. They’ve lost most of their gravy train thanks to Trump’s agenda of exposing and ending their scams and grift activities. And... they mean what they say re: that “by any means necessary”.