Did the Cold War Ever End? China, Communism and America

Who can forget the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union?

Apparently, far too many.

Communism has made a comeback, and though our history books say that the United States won the Cold War…did we? We defeated the 20^th-Century’s foremost bastion of communism, the Soviet Union, but the ideology simply mutated and grew to flourish in other hosts, including in the United States.

Bradley Thayer, author of the new book, America’s Hundred Years War: How to Win the War Against Communism, worked under the first Trump administration as a special employee of the DHS Office of Strategy, specializing in the threat from China.

“We defeated the Soviet Union in the Cold War” Thayer told host of Dangerous Laughter, A.J. Rice, “at terrific cost. We made a lot of sacrifices, during the Cold War, in the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and serving to contain the Soviet Union during that time. But we didn’t defeat the ideology. The ideology was birthed in 1917 with the Bolshevik Revolution, and Lenin’s intent was to spread communism to every country. and he did spread it, obviously to Russia, which became the Soviet Union, but to China, and he exported it to the United States. So, we’ve defeated communism in Russia, we haven’t defeated communism in China [or] in the United States.”

Steve Bannon, who wrote a foreword in Thayer’s new book agreed in a recent War Room interview, “That ideology is alive and well in the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing. It’s also alive and well in the Democratic Party in the United States, as well as other groups operating in the United States.”

Credited with wiping out over 100 million people since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Communism is a failed ideology that unfortunately refuses to die. That’s such a vast number of people that if you laid the bodies end to end, they would circle the earth more than four times. Yet Vladimir Lenin’s vision to destroy Western Civilization and destroy the United States and free nations of the world has found new life in the American Democrat party, specifically through the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

“As we’re moving into the ’26 election, and as we see on the horizon 2028, we know what the Democrats will be running, and how they’re running and the arguments they’re making,” according to Thayer. “This is a revolutionary time. We can either stay and work to preserve the United States as a constitutional republic, or we can fall into the abyss of totalitarian communism. It’s a stark choice, but that’s where we are today.”

The strategy expressed by George Orwell is the same today: “If I control the present, I control the past, and if I control the past, I control the future.” And that’s why the Marxists took control of our education system from kindergarten to our universities—even our museums, our think tanks and, obviously, our media.

“They are erasing Western civilization and American history so that 1776, for example, is not honored, and the Founding Fathers are not honored, but we celebrate instead 1619… A new history is being introduced; the West is being erased in every, aspect of it,” Thayer points out.

A chilling recent example came when New York’s socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani said in a July 3 speech that Independence Day is “whatever you want it to be,” which Thayer calls a communist tactic to seize the holidays and erase them, so July 4^th is no longer a celebration of American independence.

At his inauguration, Mamdani let his communist cards show when he flashed his Ugandan Nile crocodile smile and vowed to draw the city closer together: “We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”

The nation seems to be finally rousing from a long slumber and realizing that communism is not only alive and well, but also a serious threat. “It’s operating within the United States, and it’s operating with great dispatch, great energy, and direction,” warns Thayer. “They know what they’re doing, [and] we have been feckless for too long.”

“They’re here,” says Rice, while asking Thayer if he believes there are politicians that understand the threat.

“President Trump does,” Thayer affirms to Rice, “He’s been on the communist threat since May. talking about it explicitly, saying communism does not belong in the United States, it is anti-American, as indeed it is. and Americans can either be patriots or they can be communists, but you can’t be both.”

Thayer’s the most shocking warning of the interview is a realistic assessment about how the communists can and will quickly do what was unthinkable after the Cold War if we don’t stop them:

President Trump gets it, and I think a lot of good people around President Trump get it, but too many do not understand that we’re in a fight for our lives. This is a revolutionary time…and it goes the wrong way…on the afternoon of January 20th, 2029, the Democrats—should they be in office—will sign executive orders, within three minutes of taking the oath of office. That whether it’s Gavin Newsom or AOC or—you pick—are going to sign executive orders to pack the Supreme Court, to abolish the filibuster, to abolish maybe the Senate, to have [the] Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, District of Columbia become states; they’re going to ensure that they never leave power again, to say nothing about the persecution which is going to come…this isn’t 20 years down the road, this isn’t 10 years down the road, this is a couple years down the road. And we’re going to see in November of 2026, the midterms, that’s going to take the temperature, if you will, of the American people. So, I wrote the book to energize folks, you know, it’s a five-alarm fire…folks have got to come out and get involved and defeat communism once and for all.

But why has the most murderous ideology in modern history brought us to this moment of crisis, after we thought we had defeated it? “Because a lot of people are frustrated with the way things are,” asserts Thayer, “and they want change to the way things are, and communism offers them change.”

Communism promises change to people who feel frustrated, slighted or oppressed through equality and material security, conveniently failing to mention that party elites use those promises to gain power. Tragically, some supporters believe previous failures do not count because the ideology has never truly been tried.

So, how can such an immediate and serious threat be stopped, and how do we save our Republic from this horrific and demonic despotism?

As I detailed in my FreedomTalk article, “When Communism Bowed to the Cross,” Pope John Paul II helped the Polish people confront communism by reminding them who they were. He insisted that a human being was more than a unit of labor or a tool of the state: each person possessed God-given dignity. During his 1979 visit to Poland, his call to “be not afraid” gave people courage to stand together, while his prayer that God would “renew the face of the earth and this land” gave voice to their hope for freedom. That renewal of faith helped inspire the peaceful solidarity that challenged communist rule in Poland and hastened the fall of the Iron Curtain.

The most powerful weapon wielded by this legendary scholar-pope named Karol Wojtyła,—embraced by Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Lech Wałęsa—was neither political office nor military force, but a people who had recovered their faith, their identity, and their courage.

Thayer’s advice rings in harmony with this spirit that came to Poland and the world, a zeitgeist diametrically opposite the “Specter of Communism,” reinforcing that defeating 21^st-Century communism will require the same faith, courage and spirit it took to defeat it in the 20^th.

“American national identity is rooted, of course, in the fact we have a spirit. We are a unique place. We are unique people at a unique time. We have a unique political ideology, and that’s folded into Western civilization. And these things give us the antidote to communism. So, embracing Americanism, again, is absolutely essential because the stronger American identity is, the weaker communism, which is why they attack American identity constantly.

As Pope John Paul II told the world from Warsaw on June 2, 1979: “I am asking that you would take this entire spiritual inheritance…once again receive it with faith, hope and love…that you would not, by yourself, cut off the roots that we came from.”

America, remember your roots; hold fast to the trunk of the Tree of Liberty; be strong and courageous and this nation may yet defeat the scourge of communism through God’s grace.