When things aren’t going well for President Donald J. Trump Fox News has a few tools in its arsenal to keep its viewers terrified, paranoid and glued to their television sets. One of the network’s biggest propaganda weapons of mass distraction is the fear of a communist revolution in the United States.

So far this year the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) endorsed 150 candidates in primary elections for federal, state and local offices banking 38 wins. Last week in New York City nine of the ten candidates backed by the DSA won their races in deeply blue districts.

Although the DSA is further to the left the Democratic Party on many issues it would be a stretch to call the political organization communist. There’s nothing in the political movement’s platform that would indicate the DSA is planning to seize the means of production or outlaw private property rights.

Fox News has seized on the DSA’s use of the term ‘socialist’ as an indication that the organization is secretly plotting to topple the largest free market economy in the world and replace it with a totalitarian Soviet style managed economy.

This would be quite the feat in a country with 33 million small businesses, a high rate of home ownership (65.2%), and where roughly 156 million Americans own publicly traded stocks.

Americans also love to buy a lot of products and services as over 70% of the U.S. economy is based on consumer spending. The United States is about as far away as a communist economic model as an any economy could be but that is not going to stop Fox News from manipulating and terrifying its viewers.

The network is desperate to distract its audience from the reality of Trump’s failed conflict in the Middle East, high gas prices, rising inflation and the president’s obsession with his building projects.