That's, of course, what the current brouhaha about Russia is all about. It's really a replay of the Cold War decades, when Americans were made to believe that the Reds were coming to get them, take over the federal government and the public schools, and indoctrinate everyone into loving communism and socialism. 

In those Cold War years, Americans citizens were so scared of the Reds that they were willing to ignore — or even support — the dark-side powers that were being wielded and exercised by the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA, which are the three principal components of the national-security establishment. The idea was that if the U..S. government failed to adopt the same dark-side totalitarian-type powers, such as assassination and torture, that the Soviet Union and Red China were wielding and exercising, the United States would end up falling to the Reds and becoming communist.

The Cold War notion was that there was an international communist conspiracy to take over the world that was supposedly based in Moscow — yes, the same Moscow that is now being used, once again, to scare the dickens out of the American people. 

Ironically, however, the American right wing, which was the leader of America's anti-communist crusade during the Cold War, was teaching that socialism was an inherently defective paradigm. They would cite free-market economists like Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman to show that socialism was doomed to fail.