At the last Republican presidential debate, most candidates took a hard line against the Chinese Communist Party. The growing consensus among GOP contenders reflects a similar consensus on Capitol Hill among Republicans and Democrats when it comes to the China threat. Even left-wing Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) has recently expressed concerns about the CCP’s aggression toward the West.

Most people seem to agree that China is a top geopolitical threat. Everyone, that is, except the legacy media. Politico’s Energywire newsletter, for example, wrote after the debate that “GOP candidates seize[d] on anti-China rhetoric to attack climate policy.” Similarly, Washington Post columnist Philip Bump published an egregious article describing the term “Chinese Communist Party” as a right-wing “pejorative” because it “pits America against communism.”

Conservatives have long lamented that liberal journalists seem to take any opportunity they can to portray the GOP as a collection of sophists, extremists, and hicks. But in this case, left-wing media bias is particularly dangerous because it could drive exactly the kind of negative polarization the United States needs to avoid.

Most in Washington will acknowledge the threat from China is fast becoming an emergency. Conservatives such as Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) and liberals such as Fetterman both understand that, and Congress is taking steps to prepare the U.S. for possible conflict. Although critics are certainly correct that these changes are not big enough, nor are they happening fast enough, people should be encouraged to know their representatives are at least trying to work together.

The media’s politicization of China policy risks shattering the fragile bipartisan consensus. Left-wing columnists such as Bump would rather advance their liberal agenda than face the reality of threats to national security. They are simply trying to find new excuses for slamming Republicans. This kind of screed puts pressure on Democratic politicians to leave their Republican partners out in the cold.

At the same time, Chinese President Xi Jinping is consolidating Chinese society around his unique take on Marxism-Leninism. Open-source intelligence analysts with groups such as the Center for Strategic Translation have been doing important work exposing the ideological crusade at the heart of the CCP’s geostrategy. Xi’s global ambitions are fueled by the same revolutionary spirit that inspired tyrants such as Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. Communist ideology is deadly serious in China, and American observers should take note.

Thousands are dying as the CCP pursues this revolutionary vision. The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation has painstakingly documented the horrific crimes of both the Soviet Union and the modern-day CCP. The director of China studies, Adrian Zenz , has published several gut-wrenching articles on the Uyghur genocide in the Xinjiang province that prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the “reeducation camps” established by the CCP are no different than the old Soviet gulags. Communist ideology is leading to the suffering and deaths of thousands — America cannot remain blind to this tragedy.

Whittaker Chambers, an ex-communist spy who became a hero of the early conservative movement, attacked Soviet ideology with a moral clarity many in the left-wing media of his own day lacked. In his beautiful memoir Witness , Chambers said the echoes of the screams of souls tortured in the gulags convinced him to abandon communist ideology. Every communist must accept “the fact that terror is an instrument of policy,” Chambers wrote. The evils of the Soviet gulag and the CCP’s “reeducation camps” are inherent to the ideology the regimes attempted to spread.

Republicans and Democrats concerned about the rise of China should remind the legacy media of a simple truth: Communism is an evil ideology. In his conclusion to Witness, Chambers wrote that “evil is not something that can be condescended to, waved aside, or smiled away. … Evil can only be fought.”

America will need, above all, moral strength and national unity to overcome the struggle with the CCP. Political leaders should ignore the media’s attempts to divide the people and frustrate the new anticommunist consensus.

Michael Lucchese is the founder of Pipe Creek Consulting , a communications firm based in Washington, D.C., and a visiting scholar at the Liberty Fund . Previously, he was a communications aide for U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse. He graduated from Hillsdale College in 2018 and was a Hudson Institute Political Studies fellow in 2017.