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“Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live!”

That was the first line in my Soviet textbooks when I was a little girl growing up in the USSR. Does that line sound familiar? Maybe too familiar. Think back to the Bible. Depending on the translation, the line reads something like this: Christ died, Christ is risen, Christ shall come again. The similarity is intentional. Communists came to power over Christians in Soviet Russia. They knew that they needed to replace the Christian beliefs with something familiar to the people, to ease the transition. So they replaced Jesus with Lenin.

It is thus not a surprise that communists in the United States similarly discourage Christianity, and similarly use the Bible and Jesus as political ploys to attempt to persuade Christians to align with communist beliefs. Over Christmas, America’s darling socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted, “For all the anti-immigrant pundits uncomfortable with and denying that Christ’s family were refugees, too” and cited a magazine article for the premise that Jesus, Mary and Joseph were a family of … migrants. Yes, you read that right.

Assuming that the poor woman is uneducated about the history of Jesus and Israel, many concerned Christians chimed in, responding to Ocasio-Cortez’s tweet with points of education about Jesus’s Jewish family, the Roman rule in the Jewish homeland, the family having to travel to be counted for purposes of taxation as required by the Romans. The Christians made it clear to Ocasio-Cortez that Jesus’s family members were not immigrants, and that they did not like Ocasio-Cortez manipulating the Christian religion to push a political agenda. One kind Christian even offered to host Ocasio-Cortez for a meal, in a seemingly benevolent attempt to try and convince the communist that her knowledge has some holes in it.

But Ocasio-Cortez knew what she was doing. She wasn’t concerned with factual correctness. She was intent on manipulating the masses, so she doubled down on the comparison by posting a drawing of a Hispanic family with halos around their heads, with their little boy depicted as Jesus, migrating into the U.S. It was feelings, not facts, that Ocasio-Cortez was arguing. Jesus was but a means to a communist end for the congresswoman-elect.

Christianity as political craft is on the rise overall with the radical left. MSNBC “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough, just a day after Ocasio-Cortez's tweets, attempted to manipulate Christians into the same leftist political agenda by playing the line “What would Jesus do?” He answered his own question by explaining that Jesus would not support Donald Trump and would aid and abet illegal entry into the U.S.

This is on the heels of leftist Sens. Kamala Harris and Mazie Hirono, the two women who chose feelings over facts during the Justice Kavanaugh fiasco, attempting to shame new judicial candidates for their Christian faith during the District Court nomination interviews in December. The senators accused Catholic nominees of belonging to Catholic charity organizations that support marriage only between a man and a woman — a radical concept, apparently. The judicial hopefuls assured the liberal senators that the law is what they intend to follow, not feelings. Would devout Muslim judges equally face religious loyalty questions from these same senators, is an interesting issue to ponder.

Again, none of this is surprising from the socialist-puppeted left. Recall that the practice of Christianity (together with Judaism and every other religion) was forcefully discouraged by the Communist Party in the USSR. And by “forcefully discouraged,” I mean only 1 percent of Russian churches remained open by 1939, after the commies settled in — as clergy and churchgoers were shot or sent to labor camps. To maintain a consistent hatred of religion, the Communist regime “confiscated church property, ridiculed religion, harassed believers, and propagated atheism in the schools,” according to the Library of Congress. History, simply, repeats itself.

The only difference between the commies of yesteryear and the commies of today are the designer suits and Manolo Blahnik shoes, purchased on the Capitalist market at Capitalist prices. The ideas, the strategies, and the propaganda remain the same.