"A Few Communists": The Helicopter Joke and the Arithmetic It Erases

On July 28, 2026, at 56:34 in the episode "Jon Stewart's Kaitlin Collins Interview Will Piss You Off," Louder with Crowder host Steven Crowder said of Pinochet's Chile: "Sure, you had a few communists who went for helicopter rides and we never saw them again. But if you weren't a communist, you weren't at great risk." We rate that mostly-false — truth score 0.12, confidence 0.90.

The first half is true, and Crowder does say he isn't justifying "the fascist response." The death flights are documented: the Chilean armed forces admitted to the Supreme Court in 2001 that detainees were thrown into the sea, and a 2003 judicial investigation concluded at least 400 of the disappeared were dumped there, many bound to rail track.

The safe-harbor half is where it fails. Chile's own post-dictatorship state ran two truth commissions. Rettig (1991) counted 2,279 killed and about 1,200 disappeared. Valech (2004/05, expanded 2011) counted 27,255 political prisoners, revised upward to 38,254, roughly 94% of them tortured. In 1977 the junta banned every political party, including the Christian Democrats who had backed the coup. DINA shot Christian Democrat co-founder Bernardo Leighton in Rome and car-bombed Socialist Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C., killing Ronni Karpen Moffitt, a 25-year-old American riding with him. Two teenagers were set on fire by an army patrol at a 1986 protest. About 200,000 people, roughly 2% of the population, went into exile.

Not being a communist lowered your risk. It did not make you safe.

Sources are listed in the full brief.