I honestly didn’t intend to return to the subject, but so long “Allen West, Communist Hunter,” is still out there digging, we might as well follow to see how low he’ll go.
Last week, the right-wing Florida congressman insisted that all 80 or so members of House Progressive Caucus are secretly “members of the Communist Party.” This week, he doubled down, saying that his colleagues really are communists, while adding, “I think that if you would take the time to study the political spectrum of ideologies, you’d understand that at the turn of the [20th] century, American Communists renamed themselves as progressives. If you study the Woodrow Wilson administration, people referred to the Woodrow Wilson administration as a progressive administration.”
This morning, West appeared on CNN, and after offering some support for Ted Nugent’s violent rhetoric, he went back to talking about the communists in his midst.
The whole clip is worth watching, but here’s the quote that stood out for me:
“I’ve had to give quite a few people a little tutorial about the political spectrum of ideologies, and there’s been separation. And at the turn of the century here in the United States of America, American communists renamed themselves progressive, but the strategy and the tactics and the ideology still remains the same.” For what it’s worth, there was a progressive movement in this country at the turn of the 20th century, and one of its most prominent leaders was Theodore Roosevelt, who formed the Progressive Party in 1912 and even ran as its presidential nominee. (All of this, by the way, predated the Russian revolution by several years.) With that in mind, just so we’re clear, Allen West is so far gone that in his mind, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and nearly half of the Democrats currently in Congress are all communists. Sure, they didn’t call themselves “communists,” but Allen West knows the secret truth — and he’s willing to give us “little tutorials” about it. As best as I can tell, no one in the Republican Party has a problem with any of this, and West hasn’t been denounced as a loon by anyone in his party.
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