Everyone in this comment thread is correct. Yes we have been building toward authoritarianism since the Cold War. Yes Communism is evil and should be stopped. No we should not become our enemy in order to defeat our enemy. Enough with the squabbles, you guys are on the same side nobody wants authoritarianism or facism or communism, so why are we letting it happen??? Instead were wasting time stroking our egos over who has the moral high ground. Stand up for what you care about in your cities, target your local public officials, form organized communities, speak up before before the right to do so is pulled out from under you! The media is not going to protect your rights, you have to do it for yourselves! As long as they're getting paid nobody gives a rat's ass about the impending consequences of our current predicament. We can sit around talking crap about each other or we can try to improve the shitstorm we find ourselves in before its too late!

Don't down play suffering of millions by calling communists boogeyman. They are real at should be opposed at every possible juncture.

The "communist boogeyman" is objective, observable fact.

Communism led to the death of over 100M people. Communists operated at a high level in the US government. Communists are burning American cities right now, in 2020.

Every single attempt at implementing communism has led to violence and oppression at a massive scale.

You may not like it. You may desperately want to deflect. You may employ whataboutism, a term literally coined to describe the behavior of communist mouthpieces, to cast blame elsewhere. But that's just how it is.

If "reactionaries" are the only people offering substantive resistance to communism, then we need a hell of a lot more of them.