May Day demonstrations have spread across the United States, increasingly serving as vehicles for hostility toward American institutions and values. Those who celebrate these demonstrations should confront the lived reality of people from former communist countries—individuals who were not free participants but were forced each May 1, like prodded cattle, to march with their children in orchestrated displays of loyalty to party power. Refusal was not dissent; it was a punishable offense that could cost one’s livelihood, freedom, or even life.
Last week, the sign outside the Victims of Communism (“VOC”) Museum in Washington, D.C., was vandalized by a radical mob celebrating May Day and embracing communist ideology—an incident documented by the VOC Memorial Foundation, which shared photographic evidence on its official social media channels. This act was disgraceful—but not surprising. The VOC LinkedIn announcement states: “The VOC Museum teaches the violent truth about communism. That’s why we are never surprised when Marxists threaten us and vandalize our schoolhouse—they want to stop our mission.”
The Museum exists for a singular purpose: to present the documented truth about communism—its repression, its violence, and its catastrophic human toll. Those who still romanticize this ideology do so by denying or suppressing that record. Vandalism of this kind is not random mischief; it is a deliberate attempt to intimidate, to erase memory, and to silence any accounting of communism’s victims.
Despite an overwhelming historical record of failure and brutality, communist ideology has not disappeared. It has been adapted and rebranded anew. Today, it persists in the West—particularly on college campuses and within broader cultural institutions—under new intellectual packaging. Its latest iteration is intersectionality, which expands the familiar “oppressor–oppressed” framework into an ever-proliferating set of categories: race, gender, sexuality, class, immigration status, religion, and now even constructs such as digital access and climate vulnerability.
What remains unchanged is the underlying logic: the reduction of individuals into rigid categories, the elevation of group grievance over individual liberty, and the justification of coercion in the name of “justice.” History shows where such thinking leads. It does not end in equality; it ends in starvation and death.
A society that ignores these lessons does so at its peril. We must recognize this ideology for what it is—an evolving but fundamentally unchanged worldview with a proven record of human suffering. If the West is to endure, it must resolutely reaffirm the principles of the American founding: individual liberty, equality before the law, and the inherent dignity of every person. These are not abstract ideals; they are the hard-won safeguards against the forces of civilizational annihilation now resurfacing in new forms.
Silence and complacency are not neutral. They are concessions. And history has already shown the cost of such concessions.
Nora D. Clinton is a Research Scholar at the Legal Insurrection Foundation. She was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria. She holds a PhD in Classics and has published extensively on ancient documents on stone. In 2020, she authored the popular memoir Quarantine Reflections Across Two Worlds. Nora is a co-founder of two partner charities dedicated to academic cooperation and American values. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and son.
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