Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation who fled communist Cuba in the 1970s, is sounding the alarm over what he calls a dangerous political shift accelerating across the United States.
Gonzalez told Fox News Digital that the socialist “threat is real now,” arguing that the trend represents a fundamental transformation of American political life.
He described the movement as “a takeover of a host body, the Democratic Party,” warning that “it’s being taken over by body snatchers and they’re not able to mount any defense of it whatsoever even if they wanted to.”
Gonzalez predicted that under the current political environment, “We’re going to get communists in double digits in the House of Representatives at least, there’s no doubt of that.”
The warning comes as socialist-aligned candidates have scored a string of high-profile electoral victories across the country in recent months.
New York City elected a socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, while three of his endorsed candidates, Brad Lander, Claire Valdez, and Darializa Avila Chevalier, defeated establishment Democrats, including two incumbents.
Seattle elected a socialist mayor in Katie Wilson, and Colorado congressional candidate Melat Kiros defeated 15-term Democratic incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette, further demonstrating socialists’ capacity to topple entrenched party figures.
Gonzalez argued that the distinction between socialism and communism is largely semantic, noting that to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “there was no difference between socialism and communism, they were interchangeable.”
“These people are communists, and when you catch them unawares, they actually say, ‘Oh, yeah, I know we want communism,'” he said.
Gonzalez attributed the electoral rise of socialist candidates to several overlapping factors, including a breakdown in immigrant assimilation, growing anti-American sentiment, and a severe affordability crisis in major cities.
“A very important component of this and one that conservatives sometimes forget is that a lot of these votes are White votes, White young kids who have come in from the suburbs, who feel guilty about a number of things,” he explained.
He pointed to Ivy League-educated young professionals struggling to afford life in cities like New York as a particularly receptive audience for socialist economic promises, including free tuition, free bus fares, and publicly run grocery stores.
“So, they end up voting for this. This is a very bad vicious cycle that is taking place and that is going to produce communism in this country if we’re not careful,” Gonzalez said.
Neetu Arnold, a policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute and a naturalized U.S. citizen, echoed those concerns, stressing that the trend extends well beyond New York and is reshaping politics at a national level.
“The rise in the socialism in America, it’s going to shape our politics. I think it’s going to make things more extreme,” Arnold said.
Arnold acknowledged that socialist candidates have successfully channeled genuine economic frustrations, but cautioned that their proposed remedies move in the wrong direction.
“What the socialist candidates have tapped into are real frustrations and grievances, but the solutions that they’re offering is essentially more government involvement rather than trying to address the underlying problems,” she explained.
She pointed to housing costs, student debt, and unstable employment as the core anxieties driving younger voters toward socialist platforms, arguing that expanded government intervention will not resolve these underlying conditions.
Arnold, drawing on her own experience as an immigrant, said she hopes lawmakers across the political spectrum recognize that “socialist policies are a threat to the American way of life.”
“In this country we value merit, we value wealth, and the ability to move upward in this society,” she said, crediting free markets for the opportunities she and her family were able to access after coming to the United States.
“Socialist policies essentially restrict what we are able to do,” Arnold concluded. “So, I do take it seriously and I hope that Democrats, Republicans, they all take the rise of socialism seriously.”
