THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

While the "Oh, God, all is LOST!" crowd concentrates on people who come and go, someone who is familiar with REAL politics sees the numbers in an entirely different light.

In the 1950s there were about 25,000 members of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA).

Conventional wisdom faced two problems here:

1) Obviously, those 25,000 represented only a fraction of the real Communists in America. Even Henry Wallace later admitted that his Progressive Party in 1948 was run by them.

BUT:

2) McCarthyism said there was a legion of closet Communists in the government and that it dominated the media and other power elites.

So they settled on saying that, for each CPUSA member, there were ten closet Communists.

Then came the 1960s, when Commie was Cool. The media proudly reported college games between Communists and Anarchists. Opposition to the Vietnam War became marches of hundreds of thousands sporting Viet Cong flags.

Phone banks were set up to call families of soldiers and tell them falsely that their son had been killed.

The media now nostalgically calls this The Love Generation.

Extrapolating from KGB files, there were 25,000 closet Communists in the Federal Government alone.

I can confirm this. When I worked at the Voice of America, every attack on the Ideological Homeland, the USSR, was met with a flood of anonymous attacks on the bulletin boards. Those who smuggled in letters to VOA from behind the Iron Curtain found the police at their door.

Have you ever tried to get someone to get on Stormfront? Even the most outspoken will not even write a note here, much less JOIN.

History's Communist multiplier of ten was a gross and purposeful understatement.

So is Stormfront membership.