<To be honest, I have met maybe half a dozen people since college who hold the kind of extreme views you describe, and even in college not many. It was a Catholic school...

You might have had a different experience had you gone to a major university, which seem to attract radical leftist faculty like flies. There are sure a hell of a lot of them at Stanford and the University of Minnesota, which are the only two schools I have spent much time at. Obviously, they are always greatly outnumbered by students with more moderate views, but the moderates aren't the ones making noise and forcing policy issues.

There are people out there who believe that Marx will eventually be proved correct; there are also people who believe that Left Behind is not fiction, but prophecy, and the sooner the better. Ask me which group scares me more.

I know which group should scare you more.

Which group is represented more widely in the media, the entertainment industry, the cultural elite, and on college campuses, teaching their views?

Which group has obliterated dozens of nations and murdered over eighty million people? You might be able to count radical Islamism as part of the fundamentalist movement, and point to the damage they have done, but it is still nowhere close to what Marxism has done in the past century. And frankly, in the past 100 years, how many people have died as a result of organized Christian fundamentalist movements? How many Christian dictatorships have we seen in the past century? The past two centuries?

This web site is quite useful for getting estimates of the damage that has been done by different groups through the ages.

This particular section discusses communism, as a part of the larger evil of totalitarianism.