Our society is not without faults. Our domestic and foreign policies are also often flawed. To correct failings, we need people who point them out, however unpopular that may be. We should be enabling a wide framework of public discourse, not seeking to silence people. To date, we haven’t quite reached the level of hysteria of 1950s McCarthyism, but we are perhaps coming close.
Any talk of communism is a “red” herring when it comes to this topic. Russia isn’t in any way officially, notionally, or superficially communist.
People still be calling Russia communist even though the Soviet Union famously fell under Boris Yeltsin
… and people calling themselves communist still leaping to its defence, for some inexplicable reason.