re: "McDonalds and the gulag as moral equivalents?"
All I know is that when someone describes the history of communism over the past century, its methods, and its spread, and you immediately draw an equivalent with the United States, you had better bring some intellectual ammunition to the table.
Many of the free countries on this planet are free because the U.S. dropped "thousand pound bombs" and worse on things.
Or is the idea of "free" so obsured with fog in our modern discourse that I shouldn't even bring it up?