Joseph Sabino Mistick: Tired of the taunting used to dodge truth

As his legal problems mount, Donald Trump and his loyalists are falling back on some decades-old smears and insults to attack those who they want us to believe are behind Trump’s troubles. As reported in the Tribune-­Review last week, they are calling President Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats “communists” and “Marxists.”

After his federal criminal arraignment for national security violations, Trump said Biden, “together with a band of his closest thugs, misfits and Marxists, tried to destroy American democracy. If the communists get away with this, it won’t stop with me.” Other Republicans say the Justice Department is “communist controlled” and the nation is being threatened by “cultural Marxism.”

It is pathetic talk, also laughable. If Biden is a “communist,” he’s a really lousy one. Biden’s American Rescue Plan created billions of dollars in assistance for small businesses. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act provides hundreds of billions for big business and industry for improvements to our power grid, transportation network and drinking water.

The CHIPS and Science Act commits $280 billion to strengthen our technology manufacturing ability. It includes research and development support for robotics, computing and artificial intelligence. And, through funding and tax credits, it encourages the domestic development of the computer chip industry, which is vital to our economic growth and national security.

There was a time when being called a communist or a Marxist could ruin your reputation and your career. In the early 1950s, red-baiting Sen. Joe McCarthy destroyed people’s lives by falsely accusing them of being Communists — members of the international Communist Party. McCarthy, eventually exposed as a fraud for using his false claims for political gain, fell from grace and died in disgrace.

But, during McCarthy’s time, there actually were some communists here; they just weren’t where McCarthy often said they were. For decades, they tried to gain a foothold in American institutions, and they made a strong effort to gain control of some industrial trade unions. And many were accused — rightly or wrongly — of being a communist.

At the Great Valley Bowling Lanes on a winter night in the mid-1960s, a group of high school kids were shooting pool when a fight broke out on one of the lanes. Two men — fathers of two of our classmates — were wrestling and swinging at each other, one shouting “commie” and the other shouting “fascist.” Whatever set them off, their lingering anger was the result of a struggle in the Turtle Creek Valley between two competing factions of workers and their unions over a decade earlier.

The difference between then and now is that we knew, even as kids, what they were fighting about. The struggle for control of our labor unions was talked about around our supper tables because facts mattered, issues mattered. But you would be hard-pressed to find many folks today who can talk about Marxism or take seriously the accusation of being a Marxist.

Americans should be getting very tired of this schoolyard taunting and sloganeering by now. Most of us recognize that those recycled barbs are the tactics of people with little of substance to say, hoping to distract us from the truth. And they are not acting in the best interest of America.