Johnson launches website to teach young voters about socialism and communism ahead of midterm elections

A website is a pretty low-tech answer to what Johnson's own party keeps calling an existential threat, but fine, let's take it at face value. The idea is to show young voters what socialism and communism actually did in the countries that tried them, as opposed to the Instagram-filtered version some Democratic candidates are running on. That's not a crazy project. Most high schools spend more time on the Dust Bowl than on the Holodomor, and plenty of twenty-somethings can recite Bernie Sanders talking points without knowing what a bread line was.

The "common sense vs. crazy" framing is the kind of line that plays great at a rally and does nothing for anyone trying to actually persuade a skeptical 24-year-old renting a one-bedroom he can't afford. If Republicans want this to land with young voters instead of just their own base, it has to be more than a branded landing page dropped a year out from the midterms. It needs actual economic arguments about why their affordability, housing, and jobs problems aren't going to be solved by price controls and government ownership, delivered somewhere other than a campaign tour bus.

Still, there's something honest about naming the trend instead of pretending it isn't happening. Socialism went from a fringe label Democrats avoided to something candidates campaign on openly, and pretending that shift is imaginary would be worse than a clunky website. Whether this particular effort moves a single vote is a fair question. Whether the underlying concern is real is not.