The God That Failed—and Will Fail Again: More Than 150 Million Lives Later, the Shadows of Communism, Cultural Marxism, and Socialism That Lie Waiting Beyond Trump in 2026

By Judd Dunning

We are seeing a new Iron Curtain waiting to fall after Trump’s term if conservatives lose control of this country. We must study history to know the truth. There is no healthy face of communism. Communism is evil and repressive, and its sister ideology, socialism, carries the same false promise whenever it seeks to replace individual liberty, private ownership and the sovereignty of the citizen with centralized government control.

This is not fearmongering. The socialistic, communistic, non-America-first and anti-sovereignty politics we have seen threaten the central principle of conservative populism: that the citizen is the true ruler and owner of the country.

Look at the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America. Look at the reactionary and historically uneducated alignment of those frightened by the rough-and-tumble American politics of Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, George Washington and the founders of our country. Two hundred and fifty years is not a long time.

America rose from World War II as the leading power of the free world. But after an estimated 70 million to 85 million people had died, the peace that should have followed instead delivered another form of darkness.

The Soviet Union lost approximately 26 million to 27 million people, military and civilian. Approximately six million Jews were systematically murdered in the Holocaust. China suffered an estimated 15 million to 20 million deaths. Poland lost approximately 5.6 million to 5.8 million people. Germany lost approximately six million to nine million, Japan approximately 2.5 million to three million, and more than 400,000 American military personnel died.

Those figures cannot simply be added together because the categories overlap. The exact estimates vary, but the magnitude does not: World War II destroyed roughly 3 percent of the world’s population.

After the European war ended in May 1945 and Japan formally surrendered in September 1945, America and the world anticipated a peaceful future. Instead, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, East Germany and other nations of Central and Eastern Europe were pulled behind the Soviet sphere of domination. The Baltic states had already been forcibly absorbed into the Soviet Union, and an Iron Curtain fell across Europe.

At the moment when global unity should have been inevitable—through the practice of the Golden Rule, the kindness of Judeo-Christian ethics, the freedom of free markets and the liberation of people—the world turned in a radically different direction, and the killing did not end when the war ended.

In the decades after 1945, communist governments caused tens of millions of additional deathsthrough executions, forced labor, deportations, political imprisonment, state-created or state-aggravated famines and organized campaigns of terror.

Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward alone is commonly estimated to have caused approximately 30 million to 45 million deaths. The Khmer Rouge killed approximately 1.5 million to two million people in Cambodia. Millions more died under communist repression in China, the Soviet Union, North Korea, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Eastern Europe and elsewhere.

The exact worldwide total remains debated because historians use different definitions and because communist governments concealed, manipulated or destroyed their own records. The Black Book of Communism placed the total at more than 94 million, including deaths before and after World War II. Other historians have challenged parts of that methodology and proposed lower totals, but the strongest defensible conclusion is still devastating: governments ruling in the name of communism caused many tens of millions of deaths.

Seventy million or more people died in the war, and then tens of millions more died beneath the systems that rose from its ashes.

President Harry Truman saw what was happening. In his March 12, 1947, address to Congress, Truman described the difference between two competing ways of life. One was based upon the will of the majority and distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections and freedom from political oppression. The other was based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority and relied upon terror and oppression, a controlled press, fixed elections and the suppression of personal freedoms.

Then Truman gave America its responsibility:

“I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”

He continued:

“I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.”

That is the American principle: support free people, not control them; help them work out their own destinies; defend sovereignty, not surrender it.

Truman understood that totalitarian systems do not remain quietly behind their own borders. They expand through fear, propaganda, infiltration, political pressure and force.

The forces that backed the Obama and Biden eras, and that seek to regain control of our government beyond Trump, are now coming into clearer view. Those with communist, socialist and cultural-Marxist fantasies always claim to speak for the oppressed, yet those systems repeatedly lead to elites living their own distinct and privileged lives over an enslaved, homogenized and flattened people created to serve their needs.

Karl Marx gave the communist promise its most famous expression: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” It sounds compassionate, but it ends in coercion.

Someone must decide what each person is capable of producing. Someone must decide what each person needs. Someone must collect the product of one person’s ability and determine how much another person receives, and that someone is the state.

Behind the promise of perfect equality stands an official, a committee, a bureaucracy, a tribunal, a political police force or an elite class empowered to decide who receives what and who must surrender it.

The nanny state begins with the false promise that anyone who is not equal in outcome must have been victimized by a privileged class, and that government must therefore take what others have and redistribute it. That is not the risky, powerful and dynamic American way. It is not the alchemy of the American soul.

American success comes from risk. Some people rise, and some people fall. Failure is an inherent part of success, and no one can be protected from every natural process of life. A just society must provide equal treatment under the law and equal opportunity, not a government guarantee of equal outcomes.

The false promise of equal outcomes always leads toward enslavement because the government must become increasingly powerful to impose them. The only way to create a perfectly equal outcome is to flatten all the peaks and valleys that create the American Dream.

To accomplish that, the revolutionaries must remove God, deconstruct the family, deconstruct gender, deconstruct the success of others, and confiscate or redistribute by force. They must replace God, family, citizenship and self-government with a false god: an elite group that claims it will rule and care for everyone else. The citizens are no longer sovereign; they become dependents.

America does not guarantee parity of talent, income, accomplishment, happiness or outcome. “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” is not a promise that everyone will arrive at the same destination. It is a guarantee of the freedom and opportunity to pursue one.

We have now seen the rise of socialism, cultural Marxism and hard-left reactionaries who work from feelings rather than facts, and from ideology rather than history. They are preparing for the time beyond Trump and portraying conservative populism and the Make America Great Again movement as a false, repressive specter that will create injustice, when actually the opposite is true.

The American environment creates dynamic outcomes for those who work hard, live lives of integrity and practice the Golden Rule. It allows the child born into poverty to become prosperous, the immigrant to create a business, the employee to become an owner, and failure to become the foundation of future success.

That freedom necessarily produces different outcomes because people make different choices, take different risks, possess different abilities and travel different paths. Equality before the law is justice. Government-mandated equality of outcome is control.

Yet the opposition to the American system is rising in Hollywood, among our elites, throughout our universities and inside the progressive left. It waits in the darkness to pounce in 2026, in 2028 and in the era beyond Donald Trump.

Despotism cannot manufacture equal outcomes without political police, secret trials, tribunals, confiscation, controlled distribution of assets, censorship and repression. The power of cultural Marxism, socialism and communism eventually lies in the hands of new oppressors—government officials, political operatives, oligarchs and ideological enforcers who become rich and powerful by working the system they claim was created to establish fairness.

We see versions of this among the elites in Hollywood, our universities, the progressive left and the political class that uses government programs as vehicles for money, influence, fraud and control.

Corruption flourishes when government becomes so large, distant and unaccountable that entire political structures can live from it. The larger the state becomes, the more valuable controlling the state becomes.

We must not be naïve. It was only 81 years ago that America emerged from World War II and discovered that victory had not produced a permanently peaceful world. Almost immediately, an Iron Curtain divided Europe and created a second world system. That system never fully went away; it remained alive in the darkness.

Communist China is rising. Russia remains controlled by a leader who has perpetually extended his time in power. Repressive Islamist regimes continue to keep their people living under theocracies, monarchies and dictatorships.

Military buildups and a hypersonic race for weapons capable of evading traditional detection have restarted the arms race. Artificial intelligence, cyberwarfare, drones, satellites, nuclear weapons and technocratic surveillance are changing the balance of power. These forces lie in the shadows, waiting for the era beyond Donald Trump.

Trump is a deconstructionist and a revolutionary of sorts. He has been demonized for saying things that are uncomfortable. He has been targeted for removal, impeached, prosecuted and nearly assassinated because he makes people uncomfortable by stating truths that the ruling class does not want spoken.

He has exposed the degree to which America has been sold out to globalism, global technocrats, multinational corporations and elites operating beyond our borders. For decades, they have offered the false hope of a future utopia in which nations surrender their sovereignty, experts manage human affairs and the world finally gets along.

But the world map is as tense as it has ever been, and America still stands in the fragile balance between good and evil.

We must remain vigilant. We must think beyond Trump. We must expose our enemies and expose fraud. We must continue moving the great American Dream back to the people and away from corrupted corporations, corrupted politicians, corrupted elites and wealthy forces committed to a future in which one class of Americans stands permanently above another.

We must not be naïve about artificial intelligence and technocracy, nor can we ignore the ongoing economic, cyber and military confrontation with communist China. We must not ignore extremist leaders in Islamist states who keep their people living under theocracies and dictatorships, the communist Chinese threat, or the socialist autocracies of South America. These systems represent what America was founded to resist.

The Democratic Socialists of America are not alone. Their published program calls for public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries, while the organization openly states that capitalism must be replaced with democratic socialism.

Alongside the DSA are other organizations and channels openly working to advance socialist or communist ideas, or to extend foreign authoritarian influence inside the United States. They include 1. the Communist Party USA, whose program describes a path to socialism through struggle, reform and revolution; 2. the Party for Socialism and Liberation, which says it exists to carry out the struggle for socialism inside the United States; 3. Socialist Alternative, which describes itself as fighting for a socialist world; 4. the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, a national revolutionary organization fighting for socialism; 5. the Workers World Party, which publicly identifies with Marxism; and 6. the Revolutionary Communists of America, which declares itself committed to the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a workers’ government.

They also include documented foreign-authoritarian channels: 7. Chinese Communist Party influence operations directed at American lawmakers and public opinion; 8. United Front-linked political and community influence networks; 9. Chinese state-backed cyber and intellectual-property operations targeting American businesses, universities and critical institutions; and 10. transnational-repression operations that track, intimidate or threaten dissidents and critics living inside the United States.

These organizations and channels are not identical, and it would be inaccurate to claim they all coordinate with one another. But the ideological and foreign-authoritarian pressure is real.

Communist China is tracking people. Our voters are being targeted. Our airwaves and digital information systems are being contaminated by propaganda, disinformation and foreign influence. Multiple regimes seek the deconstruction of the power of America because American power rests upon something they cannot safely permit their own people to possess: individual sovereignty.

The Ten Commandments threatened a world that had lived outside of justice and truth by placing a moral law above the ruler. They established that neither a king nor a government stands above God’s judgment. Our Constitution took that principle further at the perfect time in history by placing lawful political power in the hands of the individual citizen.

These groups, blind to the reality of the human condition and its ability to prosper when supported by God, opportunity and true freedom, must continue to seek the end of the American Dream if they are to rise in power and wealth.

Just as we would not send our children alone into a dangerous neighborhood, we must not place our national future in the hands of a new band of thieves, thugs and political mobsters who believe their vision is more important than the vision that created the miracle of America 250 years ago.

Eighty-one years after the end of the greatest war in human history, an axis of authoritarian powers still exists. There is still a global desire to deconstruct America because a sovereign, prosperous, God-fearing and self-governing American people stand in the way of a world managed by technocrats, communists, socialists, oligarchs and international elites.

The Truman Doctrine still speaks directly to us. America must support free peoples resisting subjugation and allow them to determine their own destinies in their own way. We must extend the same principle to ourselves: the American people must remain free to work out our own destiny in our own way.

We must not take the future lightly. I am pleased to say that I now have a new book off to publishers: 12½ Steps to Save America: Why Conservative Populism Must Win Beyond Trump.

It is the follow-up to my first book, 13½ Reasons Why Not to Be a Liberal—and How to Enlighten Others. The new book is about how the conservative-populist movement can preserve what Trump awakened, correct what must be corrected, build what has not yet been built and win beyond Trump, because this cannot end with one man, one administration or one election.

We must make communism, cultural Marxism and socialism evil again and treat them with moral absolutism. There is nothing good about them. Every legitimate humanitarian goal they claim to own can be achieved through a free and caring society without confiscation, compulsion, political repression or the destruction of individual sovereignty.

History must be studied. Plans must be made. This war must be addressed for what it is: a war for the soul and future of America.

We must not be naïve about the shadows waiting in the darkness beyond Trump in 2026. We must be fierce, supportive and willing to become uncomfortable. We cannot de-risk America through the false promises of cultural Marxism, socialism or communism. We cannot surrender to any ideology that deconstructs our family, our faith, our heritage, our sovereignty and our great country.

We must put America first. We must stomp out cultural Marxism, socialism and the growing fascination with communism through the light of history, moral clarity and boldness, because America still holds the future of the civilized world. We must start thinking and acting now… Beyond Trump.

Judd Dunning is a nationally syndicated Newsmax Insider columnist and creator of Bullet Point Nation. He is the bestselling author of 13½ Reasons Why Not to Be a Liberal and has completed a new book, 12½ Steps to Save America: Why Conservative Populism Must Win Beyond Trump, now with publishers.

He is also launching a new political commentary program, If I Were President with Judd Dunning, focused on practical conservative-populist solutions to America’s most urgent challenges.