I’ve been writing a series of articles for Hot Air about the Anti-Communist Film Festival, which is being planned for the fall of 2026.
One thing that is important about the festival is the reality that some of the greatest anti-Communists have been flawed human beings. Of course, we don’t want to celebrate bad behavior - we have the left to do that - but conservatives can sometimes wall themselves off from the rest of the world with a clean, Holy Roller image that doesn’t get its hands dirty. The fact that many freedom-loving people have had experience with the darker side of life and with the enemies of freedom can make them great strategists. Such street smarts can prevent things like the recent killing of Charlie Kirk.
In his great book The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books That Shaped the Cold War, the Princeton scholar John Fleming notes that some of the great anti-communists of the 20th century were not saints. “The moral relationship between an author’s life and work is a question with a troubled history going back at least to Plato,” Fleming writes. “All four of the authors dealt with in this book attract my full attention, but only at best my partial admiration. The life experience of each, which included that special form of purgatorial fire Communism orchestrated for its apostates, would have been enough to test even the strongest character.”
Fleming then talks about Arthur Koestler, the author of the classic Darkness at Noon, as “a modern genius” who could nonetheless be boorish towards women. Jan Valtin, author of the huge bestseller Out of the Night, “was by his own testimony a professional thug for half his adult life.” Fleming adds that Valtin “was probably a murderer, though his time spent in San Quentin was only for attempted murder.” Like many former Soviet citizens, Victor Kravchenko, author of I Choose Freedom, “never entirely succeeded in leaving behind him the evidence of dishonest servility and self-preserving self-centeredness that the experience of the 1930s required of so many Soviet bureaucrats. Even Whittaker Chambers, well-educated journalist and the author of the classic Witness, “has to have been among the most divisively controversial Americans of the twentieth century” and “lacked any kind of public graciousness that might counteract the fierce attacks and smears unleashed upon him. He combined, unpleasingly, an unconvincing Quaker meekness with the grumpiness of the prophet without honor in his own land.”
In recent decades conservatives and anti-communists have sometimes come across as, well, somewhat naive. They sometimes forget the ruthlessness of the enemy we are facing. After my own experience with the American Stasi, I used to feel a spike of fear when I would see fellow conservatives openly challenging left-wing crowds without the proper security. One of these people was Charlie Kirk. For over five years, I have been warning anyone who would listen that if they were a popular conservative and didn’t have street smarts and enough security for a small nation, they might accidentally put themselves in a dangerous situation. I put it bluntly on a radio show I was on earlier this year: “We are dealing with an American Stasi that doesn’t care if you live or die.”
In his powerful book Out of the Night, Jan Valtin writes this: “A man lives his life only when he is marching, I thought, when he keeps marching onwards at any price. When he stops marching onwards, he decays. The joy of life is the joy of the experience that comes from feeling one's own strength.” Valtin also calls his former communist comrades "the unflinching prisoners of a grandiose make-believe.”
Conservatives themselves can be the victims of a grandiose make-believe - the make-believe that the left isn’t violent. Conservatism has been lucrative for many young people who attract a large audience denouncing wokeness on YouTube. Charlie Kirk was one of these people, and his security failed him. I wish Kirk had asked me what I thought before he went to Utah Valley University, where he was shot and killed. Kirk defended me in 2018, when the American left came for my head during the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court battle. There is a video of Kirk defending me and Kavanaugh to a group of screaming crazies on Capitol Hill, hollering that Kavanaugh was guilty and that I deserved no due process. I also recall getting texts from people notifying me that “Charlie Kirk just posted your GoFundMe.” I’ll never forget seeing a comment in social media during the entire craziness: “Someone is going to get shot before this is over."
When too many establishment conservatives were staying away from me or believing the nonsense that the media was selling about my high school years, Charlie did me a solid. He showed guts while Conservatism Inc was hiding. Perhaps unsurprisingly, people who did reach out to me were not necessarily conservatives, but bartenders, construction workers, and even former strippers I had known when I worked in bars -- real people who, like the authors of the anticommunist manifestos, have lived. One of the crazies screaming about me and Kavanaugh eventually came to try and assassinate Brett, and just got off with a ridiculously light sentence after retreating into the defense that he’s now a transgender woman. These are communists, criminals, and psychotic people.
For the past several years, I have written many articles on the deadliness of the American Stasi, warning conservatives to “stay alert, stay alive.” We are dealing with a cunning, tireless and ruthless enemy. I am not as famous and beloved as Charlie Kirk. My time in the spotlight was a brief flash several years ago. Yet if a university invited me to speak on campus and placed me in the same spot as Charlie Kirk, my first question would have been about security. I would have asked about the perimeter and the parking lots in the distance. Jan Valtin or Whittaker Chambers, men often shunned as too eccentric, dangerous, or controversial even by the right, would have done the same.
Editor's note: We now have the room to run outside commentary by some of our favorite and most provocative thinkers on the Right. That only happens because of the support of our readers, who ensure that we have the resources to keep providing an independent platform and independent voices in a sea of Protection Racket Media domination.
Help us maintain that fight! Use promo code POTUS47 to get 74% off your VIP membership!
Join the conversation as a VIP Member