That Hideous Strength:
Satan is a Democrat,
It is the Blue States that are Red, &
The Evil Empire Strikes Back

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West....
No rays from holy Heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town;
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently....
While from a Proud Tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.

Edgar Allan Poe, "The City in the Sea" [provides the title for The Proud Tower, by Barbara Tuchman, 1966]

The shadow of that Hyddeous Strength
sax myle and more it is of length.

Sir David Lyndsay [c.1490–c.1555]; from Ane Dialog betwix Experience and ane Courteour [1555], describing the Tower of Babel [as quoted by C.S. Lewis, title page of That Hideous Strength, 1945]


When Republicans call something a lie, Democrats object that this is the sort of incivility that leads to political violence and terrorism. When Democrats call something a lie, this may well mean that Republicans have been accurately quoting Democrats, often extensively.

Ἐγκλινοβάραγγος (Enklinobarangus)


There's an inceasing sense in our political life that in both parties politicians call themselves public servants but act like bosses who think that voters work for them. Physicians who routinely help the needy and the uninsured do not call themselves servants. They get to be called the 1%. Politicians who jerk around doctors, nurses and health systems call themselves servants, when of course they look more like little kings and queens instructing the grudging peasants in how to arrange their affairs.

Peggy Noonan, "Our Selfish 'Public Servants'," The Wall Street Journal, Saturday/Sunday, January 18-19, 2014, A13


Vade Retro Satana, Nunquam Suade Mihi Vana;
Sunt Mala Quae Libas, Ipse Venena Bibas.

Get thee behind me Satan!
Never tempt me with your vanities!
What you offer me is evil.
Drink the poison yourself!

Medal of St. Benedict

I've decided that American politics is now hopeless. In the '90's I hoped that the Libertarian Party could succeed the Republicans or Democrats as a real electoral alternative. That didn't happen, and, considering what the Libertarian Party is like, I'm beginning to doubt that this is either possible or even desirable. In 2012, the Democrats are still busy trying to turn the United States into a basket case like Greece, if not Cuba; and they have minds, if such can still be called that, that are absolutely closed to any evidence of history, even current history, or even the evidence of their own recent claims and statements. Democrat politics is utterly dependent on loss of memory. It is the politics of senile dementia, and of audacious and astounding sophistry. Meanwhile, the Republicans are still unable to articulate some of the simplest economic truths; they react to their own faux pas by trying to out-socialize the Democrats (it can't be done); and they are still diverted into social conservative issues that are irrelevant to the current situation. There were particularly egregious examples Democrat lies and of the self-inflicted wounds of socially conservative Republicans in the 2012 election. There will truly be Hell to pay if the electorate is deceived into returning the Democrats to full power. My objections to these parties as well as the Libertarians are as follows.

No one seems as certain that they know what the Republicans need to do to win presidential elections as those Republicans who have lost presidential elections, such as Mitt Romney, John McCain, and Bob Dole. Moreover, people take them seriously, and seem not to notice that what the losers advocate is the opposite of what won Ronald Reagan two landslide election victories.

Thomas Sowell, "Random thoughts on the passing scene," 26 November 2013

The RINO Hall of Shame, 2022, 2023

On December 22, 2022, the U.S. Senate voted to pass a $1.66 trillion "omnibus" spending bill. This had previously been passed by the Democrat controlled House of Representatives, and it was full of spending for Democrat pet projects and other pork. Republicans did not need to vote for this. A "continuing resolution" would have funded the government, without adding a lot of new spending, until January 2023, when the Republicans would take control of the House and send along a more sensible spending bill.

Nevertheless, 18 Republican Sentors voted for the "omnibus" bill, ensuring its passage. This was a "fuck you" vote to the coming Republican House, and to all Republican voters. Among the number of these traitors are familiar RINO's, like Mitt Romney. Mitch McConnell, with some good moves to his credit, nevertheless is often suspiciously in harmony with the Democrats. Others, it is less clear what they thought they were doing; and I am surprised that Tom Cotton went along with this. We mostly did not get explanations.

  1. Mitch McConnell (Kentucky)
  2. Mitt Romney (Utah)
  3. Susan Collins (Maine)
  4. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska)
  5. John Cornyn (Texas)
  6. Lindsey Graham (South Carolina)
  7. Richard Shelby (Alabama)
  8. Jim Inhofe (Oklahoma)
  9. Roy Blunt (Missouri)
  10. John Boozman (Arkansas)
  11. Shelley Capito (West Virginia)
  12. Jerry Moran (Kansas)
  13. Rob Portman (Ohio)
  14. Mike Rounds (South Dakota)
  15. John Thune (South Dakota)
  16. Roger Wicker (Mississippi)
  17. Todd Young (Indiana)
  18. Tom Cotton (Arkansas)

Further evidence of Republican disloyalty came on March 6, 2023, when Tucker Carlson on Fox News ran examples of security videos from January 6, 2021, released to him by Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy. The videos shown contradicted the narrative of the "insurrection" that had been promoted by the Democrats and the Media since 2021. For instance we saw that the "QAon Shaman," Jake Angeli, did not represent any kind of threat, riot, or "attack" on the Capitol -- he was quietly escorted around by the Capitol Police themselves -- or that Senator Josh Hawley was running away in panic from the rioters he had instigated -- he was part of a group of Senators being evacuated by the Capitol Police -- they were all running. Selective editing, without releasing the full video, made it look like he was alone.

Nevertheless, the release of the videos, which may provide exculpatory evidence, illegally withheld by prosecutors, for many people being persecuted for their "mostly peaceful protest" on January 6th, which sent Democrats and the Media into paroxisms, was also criticized by some Republicans. These included Senators Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, and Thom Tillis (North Carolina). To Carlson, this exposed their unity of interest with the Democrats. Indeed, we have just seen McConnell and Romney betraying their voters to vote for the "omnibus" spending bill. Romney has often done nothing but betray Utah voters.

Republican voters know that they are frequently betrayed by their representatives, much more than Democrats are betrayed by theirs. It is hard to know what they can do about it. John Cornyn of Texas has also gone over to the Democrats to erode Second Amendment rights, which Texans in particular hold rather dear. Senators, of course, can be called to account only every six years, when they may be running against Democrat communists. What kind of choice do Republicans have? Occasionally there is justice. The repellent and despicable Lynn Cheney was fortunately bounced out of the House by Wyoming voters in the Republican primary in 2022. But Representatives at least come up for judgment every two years. Sometimes even that is too late, as with Cheney, for the damage they have managed to do.

Part of legislation passed by the Democrats in the 117th Congress, the falsely and absurdly named "Inflation Reduction Act," was to hire 87,000 new IRS agents, allowing for many more audits of tax returns. This was said to give the IRS new power through which they would “only target the rich.” It was going to "make our tax code fairer by cracking down on millionaires, billionaires, and corporations that evade their obligations."

However, anyone following the practices of the IRS -- the "IRS' long and ugly history of targeting low-income Americans" -- would know this was unlikely. The "rich" and large corporations are protected by their own accountants and lawyers. They are hard targets for the IRS. So, as we already know from Congressional testimony, the IRS deliberately targets taxpayers, including small businesses, that cannot afford a lot of accountants and lawyers. They are soft targets for anything the IRS wants to throw at them. And since there are a lot of them, unlike the "rich," the IRS can round up a lot of new money, with assessments that are unfair or fraudulent.

Thus, as we might have expected, the first thing we heard from the IRS about what it was going to do with its new muscle:

...overhaul existing programs that track tips earned by service sector workers. The new Service Industry Tip Compliance Agreement (SITCA) program will "take advantage of advancements in point-of-sale, time and attendance systems, and electronic payment settlement methods to improve tip reporting compliance," according to the IRS.

So, rather than "millionaires, billionaires, and corporations that evade their obligations," the IRS will go “after waitresses’ tips.” Surprise, surprise. Just what we should have expected. People who work for peanuts, stand on their feet all day, and make some of their best money off the generosity of customers, are now Enemies of the State. As in so much of Democratic Party politics. People who "earn more than $20 in monthly tips" are obviously cheating the Ruling Class. There has got to be "$1.6 billion in unreported tips" out there which poor people are criminally protecting from bloated bureaucrats and the other parasites on Uncle Sugar's gravy train.

Fortunately, despite the crimes of the RINO's, the new Republican House has voted to repeal the budget provisions for the new IRS agents. The Democrats in the Senate may stand up for their thieving, predatory government, but maybe the Republicans will learn some hardball, for a change, and demand this provision.

Be My Neighbor Yard Signs

The Democrats

Return to Top of Page

The Ruling Class, or the Real One Percent

The Age of Reagan, 1980-2008

Anti-American Americans

The Practical Rules of Bureaucracy

The Post-Modern Left

Six Kinds of United States Paper Currency

Political Economy

Home Page

Copyright (c) 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!.."

The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

Lewis Carroll, "Jabberwocky," 1872


There is little doubt that the Democrats have sewn-up the anti-American and the "blame America first" vote, and that, as Ann Coulter has said, they have made the "treason lobby" feel at home. They should, of course, be ashamed of this; and since they are not, we should realize that this says a lot about them. Fawning visits to the Castros by Democrat politicians, culminating in Obama's "normalization" of relations with Cuba, only provide more evidence. Liberal guilt grows into liberal self-hatred, and this grows into the hatred of America that is now part of school curricula all over the country. The United States may become the first country in history to destroy itself over lies told about it by its own elites, embodied in a political party, the Democrats, who actually have this purpose.

Τηλεπατητικός (Telepateticus)


That government of the government, by the government, for the government, shall not perish from the earth.

Democratic Party, effective motto and agenda


[29] And Jacob sod pottage: and Esau came from the field, and he was faint:
[30] And Esau said to Jacob, Feed me, I pray thee, with that same red pottage; for I am faint: therefore was his name called Edom.
[31] And Jacob said, Sell me this day thy birthright.
[32] And Esau said, Behold, I am at the point to die: and what profit shall this birthright do to me?
[33] And Jacob said, Swear to me this day; and he sware unto him: and he sold his birthright unto Jacob.
[34] Then Jacob gave Esau bread and pottage of lentiles; and he did eat and drink, and rose up, and went his way: thus Esau despised his birthright.

Genesis 25:29-34, color added; the whole of Democrat politics


A government with all this mass of favours to give or to withhold, however free in name, wields a power of bribery scarcely surpassed by an avowed autocracy, rendering it master of the elections in almost any circumstances but those of rare and extraordinary public excitement.

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)


The Democrats supported and defended slavery. They created, supported, and defended Segregation. And they created, support, and defend the Welfare State. Frankly, I don't see much difference.

Ἐγκλινοβάραγγος (Enklinobarangus)


The essence of modern Democratic progressivism is:  "You will participate in what we have created for you, and you will comply with the law's demands"...

American progressivism is politics by cramdown.

Daniel Henninger, "Progressive Government Fails," The Wall Street Journal, Thursday, October 31, 2013, A13


I hear all this, you know, "Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever." No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody. You built a factory out there -- good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us [!] paid for. You hired workers the rest of us [!] paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us [!] paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea — God bless. Keep a big hunk [?] of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that [?] and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

Elizabeth Warren (CP-MA), transcribed from video, house party campaign appearance, Andover, MA, August, 2011 [note], ἀνάξιος


This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO [Congressional Budget Office] did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. Okay, so it’s written to do that. In terms of risk rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in -- you made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money -- it would not have passed... Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really really critical for the thing to pass... Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.

Jonathan Gruber, Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, $400,000 consultant on the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare), speaking at the 2013 Annual Health Economists’ Conference (AHEC), October 17-18, 2013, University of Pennsylvania, color added


But our bill brings down rates. I don't know if you have seen Jonathan Gruber of MIT's analysis of what the comparison is to the status quo, versus what will happen in our bill for those who seek insurance within the exchange. And our bill takes down those costs, even from now, and much less preventing the upward spiral. [5 November 2009, color added]...

So I don't know who he is. He didn't help write our bill. [speaking of Jonathan Gruber, 13 November 2014, color added]

Nancy Pelosi, House Minority Leader, denying knowledge of the embarrassing Jonathan Gruber, whom she cited as a supporter in 2009, ἀνάξιος


In the Corona Virus epidemic of 2020, Democrat authorities in many American communities have been releasing criminals from prison and arresting Christians, having prohibited people from attending church. This is heaven for them. They have always wanted to do this anyway.

Τηλεπατητικός (Telepateticus)

To summarize:

That's it in a nutshell.

The Ruling Class, or the Real One Percent

The Age of Reagan, 1980-2008

Anti-American Americans

The Practical Rules of Bureaucracy

The Post-Modern Left

Six Kinds of United States Paper Currency

Political Economy

Home Page

Copyright (c) 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2020, 2021, 2023 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved

Satan is a Democrat, or
It is the Blue States that are Red, Note 1;
"McCarthyism" Practiced against Joe McCarthy

I see another example of Conservatives ritually willing to trash Joseph McCarthy in an August 6, 2009, column by Paul Greenberg, who says, "Joe McCarthy remained on the prowl for non-existent Communists in government, which meant the real ones might be overlooked." What is this even supposed to mean? If there were "real ones" in the government, who "might be overlooked," then there were real Communists, and not just "non-existent" ones, for McCarthy to look for. Doesn't Greenberg know that there were real Communists and spies? Greenberg is apparently assuming, ambiguously, the Democrat canard that there weren't any Communists and that anti-Communists were on a "witch-hunt" for non-existent witches.

This reminds me of one of the first things I remember hearing about McCarthy, when a high school teacher of mine said that McCarthy gave a speech where he waved a blank piece of paper and claimed it was a list of Communists in the State Department. This must have been a reference to McCarthy's Wheeling, West Virginia, speech in February 1950, which began McCarthy's career of public controversy; and the implication the teacher was conveying was that, not just that McCarthy may not have had the list with him, but that there was no such list -- and that McCarthy was blindly claiming that there were Communists when he really knew of none.

While McCarthy in fact did not have a list with him, this was not quite the nature of the controversy at the time. There was indeed a list, indeed two of them, and more. And they were not McCarthy's own lists.

The first list of security risks in the State Department was compiled in 1946 by a State Department official named Samuel Klaus. This included suspected Soviet agents and Communists -- thirty-three of them -- together with "suspects" and "sympathizers" -- more than ninety of them. Alger Hiss was already on the list. For years, little was done about any of these people, even though, at the time, the Cold War was well under way.

The number of Communists and others that McCarthy was accused of using in his Wheeling speech derived from a letter from Secretary of State James Byrnes to Congressman Adolph Sabath in 1946. Byrnes said that 284 persons in the State Department had been found "unfit for permanent employment" and then 79 of them had left (retired or allowed to resign). The difference produced the number 205 that McCarthy had written in the original draft of his speech and that got out to the press at the time. Byrnes did not provide a list, so these numbers were called "statistics" by McCarthy and others.

However, McCarthy knew of a list, more recent list than that of Klaus, prepared by the House Appropriations Committee in 1947/1948, which had been obtained by the Washington Times-Herald reporter Ed Nellor from House staffer Robert Lee -- hence the "Lee List." The House Committee identified 108 security risks in the State Department, of whom 57 were still there. This was the number McCarthy said he actually used in the Wheeling speech, and that he certainly used in subsequent speeches. Since the Wheeling speech had been broadcast but not permanently recorded, Democrats decided to make an issue of whether McCarthy had used the 205 number or the 57 number.

Democrats liked to dismiss the Lee List as dated, and that everyone on it had been cleared by the previous, Republican controlled, 80th Congress. That was an audacious lie. Also, McCarthy's staff had already tracked down most of the people on the list, to see if they were still in the State Department, or even had just moved to other Federal employment. So McCarthy's information was mostly up to date -- and some new names had been added to the list already.

All of these lists or reports of Communists or "fellow travelers" in the State Department most importantly included the group of "China hands," people like John Stewart Service (1909-1999), who spent World War II passing along Communist propaganda and working to discredit or sabotage the Nationalist government of China. This continued after the War and substantially contributed to the Communist victory in 1949, something that was fresh in everyone's mind when Joseph McCarthy spoke out in 1950. They surrounded George C. Marshall (1880-1959) when he was a "special envoy" to China, 1945-1947, and filled him with lies about the respective conditions and intentions of the Communists and Nationalists.

They succeeded in getting Marshall to impose ceasefires on the conflict, which only benefited the Communists, and at times actually got Marshall to cut off military and financial aid to the Nationalists -- while the Soviet Union fully supplied the Communists. Even when the Nationalists were supposed to receive military and financial aid, its delivery was continually obstructed, indicating a conspiracy in depth. One of their more successful lies was the myth that, during the War, the Communists had been fighting the Japanese while the Nationalists had been collaborating. This was the opposite of the truth. Similar lies and sabotage enabled Tito, with British and American support, to annihilate the anti-Nazi and anti-Communist nationalists in Yugoslavia.

Far from McCarthy destroying the lives of these blushing innocent diplomats, they almost entirely got away with it -- apart from the ones who revealed themselves by defecting to Communist China after its victory -- like Solomon Adler (1909-1994). John Stewart Service, like Alger Hiss, never admitted, until his dying day, to what extent and in what ways he helped the Communists come to power. We are still dealing with the appalling consequences of the Communist takeover of China, while its agents, like Service, are celebrated as "victims" of Joe McCarthy.

It really doesn't matter which number McCarthy used in West Virginia. There were security risks in the State Department, and McCarthy wanted to know why they were still there and what was being done about them. The centerpiece of McCarthy's speech was actually an attack on Secretary of State Dean Acheson -- a man who had advised President Truman to abandon Taiwan and South Korea and recognize Communist China -- who, even as Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury in January 1950, expressed his support for him -- "I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss." It is still part of leftist mythology that Hiss was neither a Communist nor a spy. Harry Truman himself later expressed some certainty about Hiss's innocence. Yet the evidence against him at the time was decisive and damning, as it still is.

One might wonder even today about the judgment and motives of anyone defending Hiss. The Democrats, including Truman, just did not like the political embarrassment; but it was not absurd for someone like McCarthy to wonder at the time if the protection of security threats and Communists was as much a matter of sympathy as of ass-covering. There is no doubt that someone like Acheson, ironically, felt a class connection with Hiss, sharing Northeastern and Ivy League backgrounds -- the beefy and brawling Whittaker Chambers (physically much like CPUSA Presidential candidate Gus Hall, or, for that matter, "sympathizer" actor Ed Asner) was just declassé -- attitudes we still get from the Modern Democrats, vacationing on Martha's Vineyard -- "Marxist Vineyard" -- and sneering at "fly-over country," i.e. the Heartland.

Something of the sort had already happened in 1939. When Whittaker Chambers left the Communist Party, he quietly went on with his life -- although prudently saving some incriminating documents in case they became necessary. After the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939, however, when the Communists became allies of those they had always claimed were their greatest enemies, Nazi Germany, Chambers became alarmed enough to tell his story at the State Department. This included information about Hiss's espionage and membership in the Party. The story got all the way to President Roosevelt, who literally laughed it off. Joe Stalin would not be spying on us, and certainly not through such a fine upstanding man as Alger Hiss. Communists then (and now) must have had a good laugh that the class solidarity of the well-born, privileged, and wealthy protected a man who worked to destroy them.

This disconnect from reality evident in my high school teacher's statement continues today in what ought to be better informed and more conscientious venues. Thus, in 2016, the Smithsonian Channel aired a two hour documentary on Joseph McCarthy. It did not address the question of whether McCarthy talked about 205 or 57 State Department personnel in his Wheeling speech. Instead, it said that McCarthy accused the State Department of harboring 205 Communists. This was not true. The documentary also said that McCarthy "named names" and identified the Communists. This is also not true. Curiously, the documentary interviewed a former KGB officer who happily admitted that the Soviets did indeed have agents in the State Department, just not anything like the 205 in McCarthy's absurd accusation. He said it was more like 49.

The documentary thus entirely misrepresented the situation. Rather than acknowledge that McCarthy's concerns were valid, and that 49 agents was damn close to the 57 number that McCarthy subsequently used, the documentary construed the presentation to continue the narrative that McCarthy was just throwing around wild accusations. Also, the documentary never acknowledged that McCarthy did not name names, explicitly because State Department personnel about whom there were questions of security did not deserve to be exposed in public. Names, however, were required by the Democrat controlled Senate at the time. The Democrats accused McCarthy of not really having any names (the "blank paper" canard), and demanded that he release them. When he did, the Democrats then accused him, as they still do, of smearing innocent people with unfounded (or unproven) accusations of Communist connections. This was obviously entirely dishonest behavior, never mentioned by the documentary.

The documentary also never mentioned that until 1953 the Senate was controlled by the Democrats and that Joseph McCarthy actually did not have the power to do anything but talk. While interviewing a victim of prosecution for Contempt of Congress, the documentary did not bother to mention that McCarthy had no power to bring charges of Contempt of Congress and that the "victim" therefore had been charged by a Democrat Congress (both Houses of Congress must agree to such charges) and prosecuted by the Democrat Administration of Harry Truman. He could not have been charged or prosecuted on the basis of anything that Joe McCarthy said or wanted.

Instead, one would never know from the documentary that all the Congressional investigations at the time were directed at rather than by Joseph McCarthy. The Democrats were protecting themselves from the embarrassment of McCarthy's substantially true charges. One could gather from the documentary that the later Army-McCarthy Hearings, allowed by both Republicans and President Eisenhower, were about accusations of favoritism by Roy Cohn for a friend (& lover?) of his in the Army. Whatever the merits of those accusations, McCarthy himself had nothing to do with them, and neither the contents nor the results of the hearings were related to the trumped-up charges for which McCarthy was then Censured by the Senate. Yet those Hearings are generally taken to damn and discredit McCarthy, despite proving nothing. See more about this as follows.

Thus, the Smithsonian Channel in 2016 has perpetuated lies, distortions, and smears as the historical record of Joseph McCarthy. The documentary featured a couple of people who could have spoken up and corrected the record, but they were not allowed any say in the matter and were entirely ignored once the tale of McCarthy's misdeeds got going. The documentary even featured M. Stanton Evans (1934-2015), whose 2007 book, Blacklisted by History, the Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy [Crown Forum, Crown Publishing Group, Random House] got into all these issues; but they didn't bother asking him about any of the false or deceptive statements in the documentary. It is a shameful business; but Democrats, and even quite a few clueless Republicans, are still engaged in covering up the presence of Communists and Soviet spies in the American government, even when, oddly enough, they admit, incongruously and by the way, that there were such people.

The phenomenon of clueless Conservatives accepting the premises of Leftist political narratives continued in 2012. A column by Theodore Olson, "Obama's Enemies List," appears in the February 1 Wall Street Journal. Olson, a lawyer who represents Koch Industries, writes about the Obama Administration targeting David and Charles Koch as part of President Obama's reelection campaign. Since the theme of the campaign is How Evil are the Rich, the Koch brothers, who contribute to various conservative and libertarian causes and think tanks, have been openly attacked. The cutest example is that the Democrats wanted to call the Koches to testify before Congress about the Keystone XL oil pipeline, whose building Obama had recently cancelled to curry favor with the "back to the Pleistocene" environmentalists, even though the Koches had nothing to do with the pipeline.

Nevertheless, Olson can't resist calling the Democrat practices the equivalent of "McCarthyism":

When Joseph McCarthy engaged in comparable bullying, oppression and slander from his powerful position in the Senate, he was censured by his colleagues and died in disgrace. "McCarthyism," defined by Webster's as the "use of unfair investigative and accusatory methods to suppress opposition," will forever be synonymous with un-Americanism. Army counsel Joseph Welsh's "Have you no sense of decency?" are words that evoke the McCarthy era and diminish the reputations of his colleagues who did nothing to stand up to him.

Lies about Joe McCarthy will indeed "forver be synonymous with un-Americanism" as long as people who should know better, like Mr. Olson, continue repeating them. Olson may need to be reminded that McCarthy held no "powerful position in the Senate" from 1950, when he entered the public eye, until 1953, when the Republicans took over the Senate. He then only had a year to conduct his investigations. What were the examples of "bullying, oppression and slander" from that year? Most of the inquiries involving Joe McCarthy, before 1953, and then in the "Army-McCarthy Hearings," when Joseph Welsh -- in the middle of his own "bullying" questioning of Roy Cohn -- voiced his grandstand-for-the-cameras reproach to McCarthy, were directed at Joe McCarthy, first by Democrats and then in the end with the cooperation of the Eisenhower Administration and the Republicans in the Senate, who were very far from doing "nothing to stand up to him."

Even worse is the implication that McCarthy was censured for "McCarthyism," as so defined. But this is now a familiar political technique of misrepresentation. Martha Stewart was not convicted of insider trading, although most people probably think so. Scooter Libby was not convicted of "outing" Valerie Plame, although the Democrats got their Hollywood friends to even make a movie saying so. And Joe McCarthy was not censured for accusing innocent blushing liberals of being Communists; yet Theodore Olson presupposes that this is something that "everyone knows" to be the case. Indeed, the Army-McCarthy Hearings of 1954, which we are given to understand discredited McCarthy, where not only directed at him, instead of by him, but also resulted in clearing him of the charges at issue (which involved favoritism for a friend, and possible gay lover, of Roy Cohn).

And what "opposition" was being "suppressed" by McCarthy? Certainly not the Democrats, who never shut up, any more than they do now. Communists? Well perhaps that should be stated openly:  "McCarthy inconvenienced people who were spies and agents for the Soviet Union." We can't have that. Like the famous rhetorical question of Joseph Welsh, the context of "McCarthyism" makes its whole presentation, by Academics, the Press, Leftists, Liberals, Democrats, and now Mr. Olson, a lie. They are the ones lacking any sense of decency -- like Democrat National Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, in January 2012, still repeating the canard that the lunatic Jared Loughner shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords because of the "incivility" of Conservative political rhetoric. But as a supposed Conservative, Olson has no excuse. He should be aware of several recent books setting the record straight about McCarthy. No, like Paul Greenberg, he is pandering to an audience that is going to hate him anyway and is just going to use his endorsement of the McCarthy myth to help perpetuate it.

We are still getting this sort of thing in 2014. In book review of A Very Principled Boy, by Mark A. Bradley, about Soviet spy Duncan Lee ("Hiding in Plain Sight," The Wall Street Journal, April 26-27, 2014, C7), Michael O'Donnell discusses the consequences of the failure of the U.S. Government to prosecute Lee, even though he was exposed by Elizabeth Bentley and his guilt confirmed by the Venona decryptions -- the Government wanted to keep the Venona information secret, even though, as we know now, other Soviet spies had already passed on reports about the program, rendering secrecy about its very existence pointless.

O'Donnell says:

Domestically, his [Lee's] case helped pave the way for McCarthyism and HUAC's witch hunts. As Mr. Bradley nicely puts it:  "The existence of real spies in the 1940s had created life-like mirages of them by the early 1950s."

This is an astonishing statement, assuming as it does the entire Leftist narrative and slander about "witch hunts," i.e. that no Soviet spies existed to be found after the 1940s (or, since the Left never admitted that there had ever been Soviet spies, before). From Soviet records themselves, when they were available, we now know that there were over 300 agents acting for the Soviet Union in the United States (Bentley had named 150), only about half of whom (Bentley's number!) were ever identified or caught.

All that Mr. Bradley "nicely puts" is the standard anti-anti-Communist line, whose perpetuation by people in The Wall Street Journal is a disgrace -- not to mention its occurrence in a book about someone who was never actually convicted of being a Communist or a spy, and who, like Alger Hiss, maintained his innocence until his dying day. This is a candidate for Progressive victimhood -- a Martyr in the face of an exposé targeting him with the disapprobation of the world after his death.

Bradley and O'Donnell should be ashamed of practicing this kind of McCarthyism (!?) against someone who can't even defend himself. Perhaps it is their unease at such an accusation -- made all too characteristically -- that moves them defensively to condemn the "real" McCarthyism. After all, they wouldn't want to be associated with the execution of people after show trials, or all of those worked to death in labor camps... oh. That would be Joe Stalin, not Joe McCarthy, who did those things. Never mind.

Some faculty and students at Middlebury College, Vermont, invited quixotic libertarian Charles Murray to speak at the college on March 2, 2017. As has now become common, radical students mobbed the event and shouted down Murray. The college, somewhat to its credit, had Murray deliver his talk anyway, on video. The students, of course, shouted down the video feeds. As Murray was leaving campus, his group was mobbed and assaulted by students, who actually injured one of the faculty sponsors of the event, Allison Stanger, sending her to the hospital. It is not clear if video is available of the assault. Some of the participants were said to be masked, like the now familiar Anarchists of other "progressive" riots. Whether there is video or not, the students involved should be identified, arrested, charged, and expelled from the school. It is not clear that any attempt has been made to do any of this. The students who merely distrupted the event and shouted down Murray should be disciplined or suspended from school. There is no word that this has been done. This is not at all to the credit of the college.

Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger commented on this in a piece from March 9, 2017. This was titled "McCarthyism at Middlebury"; and in it, unfortunately, he went out of his way to associate the behavior of the students (and their faculty enablers, of course) with Joseph McCarthy, misrepresenting McCarthy's history and not even correctly using "McCarthyism" in the way the enemies of McCarthy and anti-Communism use it themselves.

The violence committed against Charles Murray and others at Middlebury College is a significant event in the annals of free speech.

Since the day the Founding Fathers planted the three words, "freedom of speech," in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, Americans and their institutions have had to contend with attempts to suppress speech.

The right to speak freely has survived not merely because of many eloquent Supreme Court decisions but also because America’s political and institutional leadership, whatever else their differences, has stood together to defend this right.

But maybe not any longer.

America’s campuses have been in the grip of a creeping McCarthyism for years. McCarthyism, the word, stands for the extreme repression of ideas and for silencing speech.

This is all fine until the last paragraph. Joseph McCarthy had nothing to with "repression of ideas" or "silencing speech." The "ideas" he was against, of course, where those of Communism, as advocated at the time by the living and breathing Joseph Stalin (1950-1953). These ideas were openly defended by some, like I.F. Stone, who wrote a book in 1952, The Hidden History of the Korean War, defending the Communist invasion of South Korea. I am not aware that anyone ever silenced Mr. Stone, although we now know he had dealings, apparently short of actual espionage, with the Russian KGB.

The problem was not innocent Communists being silenced. It was hidden Communists, members of the "underground" Party, who concealed and dissimulated their loyalties and convictions, while covertly promoting Communist ideas and even engaging in espionage for the Soviet Union. Sometimes such Communists, or their supporters, claimed they were martyrs to the First Amendment; but they didn't take advantage of Free Speech by candidly voicing their loyalties and convictions, and they actually didn't believe in Free Speech or the First Amendment. Uncle Joe Stalin certainly didn't.

People who ended up on the Blacklist of the Hollywood movie producers generally just refused to "name names," i.e. identify people that they knew as Communist Party members or "fellow travelers." They justified their silence by saying they did not believe in "ratting out" friends or people they knew. Their appeal, therefore, was to the ethics of the playground or of gangsters.

Although refusing to "inform" on friends and colleagues was held up as the highest of high moral principles by those who refused to do it, the irony is that in their beloved Soviet Union it was a civic virtue, and a duty, to inform on anyone suspected of subversive opinions or actions. It didn't matter if it was neighbors, fellow workers, family members, or even parents. A whole Communist cult was built around a 13-year-old boy, Pavel Morozov (Pavlik), who informed on his father (who died in a labor camp) and who was then killed by his family for doing so. It turned out that this story was mostly fiction, but the ethic of spying and informing was certainly lauded by the Soviet Union, as it continues to be in Communist Cuba and China.

Thus, Hollywood Communists and sympathizers who refused on principle to "inform" about Communists they knew, actually didn't really believe in any such principle -- any more than they believed in the First Amendment or the Fifth Amendment (Russians were required to testify against themselves). It was all a lie and a deception, and yet they obviously enjoyed and relished signaling their playground virtue by despising "tattle tales," all while invoking the freedoms and rights they were intent on destroying.

Americans who did what in the Soviet Union would have been their duty, and "named names" of Communists they knew, have never been forgiven by the Left. One of those was director Elia Kazan, Ἠλίας Καζαντζόγλου (1909-2003 -- his name ends with a Turkish patronymic).

Kazan's own answer to his critics was the classic movie On the Waterfront [1954], about a washed-up boxer, played by Marlon Brando ("I coulda' been a contenda"), who must decide whether to testify against the gangsters who run his longshoreman's union. He does testify, after the gangsters murdered his brother, who worked for them.

When Kazan was awarded a lifetime achievement Oscar at the 71st Academy Awards on March 21, 1999, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in the Los Angeles Music Center, actual Communists showed up to picket and protest the event. I know, because I was there. An organization of Ayn Rand enthusiasts organized a counter-demonstration. I joined them.

It is about the only political demonstration like that, the kind likely to be on the news, in which I have ever participated. I don't know how much did make it to the news. At Wikipedia, the demonstration, but not the counter-demonstration, is mentioned. Without the detail that the demonstators were Communists. Typical.

I had been attending many libertarian events in Los Angeles for several years, and it was curious that the "Objectivists" in the demonstration were entirely unknown to me. I figured that, while many libertarians like Ayn Rand, a lot of Rand devotees don't much like the libertarians. Rand had accused libertarians of "stealing" her ideas, as though she had copyrighted capitalism.

I did miss out on the group photo, because, after some time, it didn't seem like much more was going to happen. I walked down to a hotel and got a taxi back to the Beverly Center, where the participants had parked before taking a bus downtown. I wasn't looking forward to another bus ride like that. So if anyone comes up with the group photo from that event, I won't be there.

At the actual Oscar ceremony, Leftist actors like Nick Nolte and Ed Harris refused to applaud for Kazan, while other actors joined in a standing ovation. I wonder if Nolte and Harris later went out to give a pep talk to the Communists, about how great they were. And, not to worry, the Democrats would see about restoring Communism, bye and bye.

Although I knew a couple members of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) back in the 1970's, I would not be comfortable if pulled before a Congressional Committee and asked to identify them. Not caring for the Soviet Union, I actually don't believe in the civic virtue and duty of informating on others, unless they've committed actual criminal acts. But then, you see, to Communists, political disagreements are criminal acts. Whether I answered about people I knew might depend on the level of threat I saw in the Party. The CPUSA was no threat to the United States in 1977, although the Soviet Union was still a threat overseas. Ironically, communists are more of a threat to America in 2021 than they were in 1977.

At the same time, the CP was a real threat in 1950, when Stalin green-lighted the invasion of South Korea (partially because he then had the Bomb, after its plans had been stolen by his spies, i.e. people like the Rosenbergs), and at least until 1956, when the "De-Stalinization" of Nikita Khrushchev disillusioned many members, whether they supported Stalin or were genuinely surprised (!) at Khrushchev's revelations. Some who refused to "name names," like Zero Mostel, left Hollywood for Broadway, evidently without much complaint. Others wrote for Hollywood movies under pseudonyms, with the cooperation of friends. Some of these, like Dalton Trumbo, thought this was funny. In the end, "liberal" opinion regarded them as martyrs to anti-Communism, when, if they had gotten their way, we would all have been executed or sent to the GULAG. That's how Joe Stalin ran things.

The actual accusation against Joe McCarthy was that he falsely accused innocent people of being Communists, a practice generalized into the Red Scare "Witch Hunt" of spreading false accusations and pursuing Communist suspects, when actually hidden Communists didn't exist, and the beloved, peaceful, and free Soviet Union was engaged in no espionage or subversion against the United States. The truth was that anti-Communists, long before Joe McCarthy, were largely able to target real Communists, whose own principal narrative, of course, was this fairy tale about the peaceful and benevolent Soviet Union, who wasn't using people like them to spy on the United States.

Now, the rioting students and activists at Middlebury and elsewhere have been running around accusing people, like Charles Murray, of being Fascists and Nazis, but this doesn't amount to quite the same thing. They cannot and have not been accused of being members of self-identified Fascist or Nazis Parties, and they can hardly be agents of Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy, both of which ceased to exist in 1945. Republicans have been accused of supporting the Ku Klux Klan, which does exist, and perhaps this amounts to "McCarthyism"; but mostly the charges leveled by the Left are just lies and smears, unpacked from Leftist demonology, which to most Americans would sound preposterous or unintelligible. As George Orwell said, some things are so absurd that only an intellectual would believe them; but that is what a college education buys you (dearly) these days.

The notion that Joseph McCarthy himself possessed a comparable anti-Communist fantasy demonology requires that the realities of Communism be ignored or whitewashed. But that is, of course, the agenda of the Left. And this means that Daniel Henninger has misidentifed the ideology and the nature of the misconduct of the students at Middlebury. They are not McCarthyites. They are Stalinists. That is the ideology that denies Free Speech. That is the ideology that physically attacks political opponents. That is the ideology that would send us all to the GULAG, if it could, or have us shot. Since Joseph McCarthy didn't sent anyone to the GULAG, or have anyone shot, the beginning of wisdom is to realize that Joe Stalin, not Joe McCarthy, was the real enemy of democracy, humanity, and civilization.

In the 1950s, Republican Sen. Joe McCarthy turned his name into a word of generalized disrepute by using the threat of communism, which was real, to ruin innocent individuals’ careers and reputations.

As noted, E. Stanton Evans likes to ask audiences, "Name one." Like Shepard Smith, Daniel Hennigen just assumes that McCarthy was running around ruining "innocent individuals' careers and reputations." This is nonsense. He barely had the time or position to do anything of the sort. To be sure, people had gone to jail, but this had all been because of Contempt of Congress and perjury convictions, usually in relation to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, as prosecuted by the Justice Department of the Administration of Harry S Truman. The Rosenbergs had been convicted of espionage and would be executed after Dwight Eisenhower became President. By the time actual Communists, like Dashiell Hammett, testified before McCarthy's Senate committee, they had wised up and were taking the Fifth Amendment. Hammett had already been to jail. McCarthy's Senate Committee, in 1953 and 1954, did recommend some people to the Justice Department on perjury charges, but the Eisenhower Administration mysteriously never pursued the cases. Mostly McCarthy just wanted people who were security risks removed from sensitive positions, but those he got the Administation to actually remove were usually quietly restored (for a while) after McCarthy, not his "victims," had been destroyed.

Questions remain about a few people, like John Stewart Service at the State Department, who was identified by McCarthy as a security risk, and who had been caught red handed, long before McCarthy, passing secret documents to the Communist Front magazine Amerasia. During the War in China, Service roomed with Chi Chao-ting, a Communist agent who had infiltrated the Kuomintang, and Solomon Adler, a Treasury official who, in league with Soviet Agent and Assistant Treasury Secretary in Washington, Harry Dexter White, was engaged in sabotaging a $200 million loan of gold to the Nationalist government to help stabilize its currency. Both Chi and Adler revealed their true colors by later defecting to the People's Republic of China, but Service, who was arrested by the FBI in 1945, never admitted that he had anything to do with his roommates, although reports he wrote about the Nationalist Government passed on the same Communist propaganda and was being created by Chi and Adler.

The prosecution of Service was quashed, as we now know from recently released FBI files, by a high level cover-up and conspiracy to obstruct justice, orchestrated by Soviet agents like White House assistant Lauchlin Currie. Although Service would be publicly exposed (again) by McCarthy, and J. Edgar Hoover knew everything that had been going on, the Eisenhower Administration, for its own obscure reasons -- part of which may actually have been that Hoover and Eisenhower did not want the Soviets to know how much they actually knew -- silenced McCarthy and allowed Service to continue with a quiet but harmless career. This strategy, unfortunately, allowed the essentially pro-Communist narrative of the Democrats to become the "public record." So today, people like Daniel Henninger can remember McCarthy as the villain in the business, not people like Service, Adler, White, or Currie.

Today, polite liberals -- in politics, academia and the media arts -- watch in silent assent as McCarythyist radicals hound, repress and attack conservatives like Charles Murray for what they think, write and say.

One of the first politicians to speak against this mood in 1950 was Republican Sen. Margaret Chase Smith of Maine. In her speech, "Declaration of Conscience" [June 1, 1950], Sen. Smith said: "The American people are sick and tired of being afraid to speak their minds lest they be politically smeared as 'Communists' or 'Fascists' by their opponents. Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America. It has been so abused by some that it is not exercised by others."

Since no one had heard of Joe McCarthy before February, 1950, while the Democrats controlled Congress and Senator McCarthy had no power, and she didn't name McCarthy, what was Margaret Chase Smith talking about? McCarthy could make accusations, but nobody would have paid any attention to them if there had not already been a history of Communist spying and subversion. Alger Hiss had just been convicted of perjury (January 21, 1950). The Korean War would begin on June 25th.

Nobody was being smeared as a Communist because they were speaking their mind. If Communists had been speaking their minds, no accusations would have been necessary. It was precisely because Communists concealed their beliefs and loyalties that accusations were necessary. Meanwhile, the Left, then and now, has shown no reluctance to accuse anyone, from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump, of being Fascists -- yet, despite Smith's nod in that direction, the complaints have really all been about anti-Communists, not about those who style themselves "anti-Fascists" -- realistically kind of a dead letter in 1950.

I begin to wonder if Smith was a RINO-before-her-time, currying liberal favor, and mainly complaining at that point about the rather long history of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), so that people who had no worries (or worse) about Communism would think well of her. But the Korean War started less than a month after Smith's speech; and it was McCarthy, not Smith, who helped elect Eisenhower in 1952.

Three years later, in 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower gave a famous commencement speech at Dartmouth College. "Don’t join the book burners," Ike told the students. Even if others "think ideas that are contrary to ours, their right to say them, their right to record them, and their right to have them at places where they are accessible to others is unquestioned, or it isn’t America."

So what was Eisenhower talking about? One of McCarthy's investigations, after the Republicans took control of the Senate in 1953, was why Communist authors were featured in so many American Information Libraries overseas. Americans had no trouble reading these books in the United States, but why would the United States Government be furthering Communist propaganda through its own agencies -- especially given the purpose of the libraries, to fight Communism, according to the law, sponsored by a Democrat, that authorized them?

Note, McCarthy wasn't burning books, or proposing that they be banned, but asking why the ostensively anti-Communist U.S. Government was promoting Communist authors. In his round-about way, was Eisenhower objecting to this inquiry? Actually, books that were removed from the libraries were "disposed of," in ways that sometimes may actually have involved burning. But this had nothing to do with Joe McCarthy. It was the work of Dwight Eisenhower's own Admiminstration, i.e. himself.

Yet someone got to Eisenhower and told him that McCarthy was burning books. He seems to have believed it, or was willing to use the lie to smear McCarthy. None of that reflects well on Eisenhower, regardless of what Daniel Henninger thinks about his Dartmouth speech. As it happens, not many years ago our communist friends at Berkeley actually were burning books, under the banner "Fight Fascist Censorship!" The irony of their acts escaped them.

Today, the smear is common for conservative speakers and thinkers. Prior to Mr. Murray’s scheduled talk at Middlebury, a student petition, signed by hundreds of faculty and alumni, sought to rescind the invitation because "we believe that Murray’s ideas have no place in rigorous scholarly conversation." Such "disinvitations" have become routine.

It is not clear to me what "smear" Mr. Henninger is talking about. But the action of the Middlebury faculty is clear enough. They don't want to hear "Murray's ideas," which to them are beyond the pale. But where anti-Communists wanted Communists to candidly confess their loyalty and profess their ideas; the modern Left wants people silenced and shut out. Whatever Joe McCarthy was doing, that wasn't it. It's what Joe Stalin did. So, again, it is Stalinism at Middlebury, not "McCarthyism."

So let us plainly ask: Why hasn’t one Democrat stood in the well of the Senate or House to denounce, or even criticize, what the Middlebury mob did to Charles Murray and the faculty who asked him to speak? Have any of them ever come out against the silencing of speech they don’t like?

Democrats, as partisans of the Left, naturally have no objection to silencing their opponents. Their most recent strategy has been to use "campaign finance reform" to do it.

Let’s recognize that the failure to oppose McCarthyist creep from the left is also consuming liberal reputations.

But "let's recognize" that Daniel Henninger has cluelessly accepted the Democrat and Leftist narrative about "McCarthyism" and has failed to recognize Leftist ideology for what it is:  Socialist, totalitarian, and Stalinist. This is admitted quite openly on college campuses like Middlebury, but somehow Henninger has missed the memo. Indeed, the Communist tactic of dissimulation and concealment continues; and when embarrassing statements by radical professors become public, most of the outrage is not about their content, but about how such accurately reported statements by professors have been allowed to become public. They have the right, you see, to maintain the secrecy of their (publicly funded and presented) teaching, and even of their posts on public media -- i.e. we don't have the right to know about anything they say. Because we might find out what they mean and intend.

The rest of Henninger's column is salutary, as would be the whole thing without his misuse of "McCarthyism." But, as I have been examining, it is not unusual for Republicans, conservatives, and libertarians to accept Leftist narratives about Communism and anti-Communism and to, in effect, participate in the cover-up of Soviet spying and subversion and the whitewash of Americans who accepted Soviet ideology and who planned, planned, on turning the United States into a totalitarian police-state. You see, they are still at it, and in the same way as before.

What is it about the Wall Street Journal? Does it have a style code that requires disparaging references to Joseph McCarthy? On March 22, 2017, we have a column from Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. entitled "Leakgate Finds Its Joe McCarthy." At least Jenkins used "McCarthyism" in the dictionary defined and politically correct way, saying of California Democrat Congressman Adam Schiff:

A congressman with a modest profile, Mr. Schiff has been working hard ever since to become the public face -- not to say the Joe McCarthy -- of this witch hunt.

Now, what Schiff is engaged in is the Democrat strategy of contending that Donald Trump won the election in 2016 in collusion with Vladimir Putin of Russia. After the Democrats realized they couldn't win the election by recounts (although they recruited Green Party candidate Jill Stein to ask for the recounts for them, although she really didn't have any grounds to do so anywhere), and that accusing Trump of winning because of "fake news" meant that he could accuse them with greater justice of using "fake news" (so that reporters began bleating that the accusation of "fake news" was like using the "N word"), they settled on a permanent strategy of portraying Trump as a creature of the Russians. With Schiff carrying water for this, Jenkins associating it with Joe McCarthy is rich, since it relies on the Democrat narrative and the conventional wisdom that McCarthy never identified any Communists, that there were none for him to find, and so the whole business was a "witch hunt" for non-existent, or falsely accused, witches.

Since Joe McCarthy accused people of being agents for Russia, perhaps there is a parallel with the Democrats now accusing Donald Trump of being an agent for Russia. Although why he would be is a little obscure, since Trump has no ideological commitment to Putin's dictatorship (it's the Democrats who like dictatorship) and he has no real business interests in Russia. But Trump laid himself open to such charges by saying kind things about Putin during the Presidential campaign. But whatever sort of appeasement or accommodation Trump might seek with Putin, the Obama Administration had already beat him to it.

This is one of the great ironies of the Democrat narrative, since Barack Obama and John Kerry did very little to block Putin's conquests and encroachments. At one point Kerry seemed to be doing no more than begging Putin not to conquer any more land from the Ukraine, and Obama himself was caught on an open mike telling Dmitry Medvedev (President, as a place-holder for Putin, 2008-2012) that after the 2012 election he could be more accommodating. Obama and Kerry invited Russia into Syria, rather than doing anything about Obama's "Red Line" ultimatum about the use of chemical weapons, and they could only sputter in mortification when Putin went on to support the Assad dictatorship and bomb rebels who were actual allies of the United States. The rebels, who had held on grimly in Aleppo, were finally driven out, with the help of the Russians bombing things like hospitals. Meanwhile, the Obama Administration, no more than the Trump Administration agenda, ever provided the Ukraine with even the weaponry to defend itself. This has allowed Russian infiltration and low level combat to continue, which somehow has been fine with both Presidents.

So if "McCarthyism" means making political hay with false accusations of innocent people, the Democrats are probably guilty of it. Just not Joseph McCarthy. And it is a little late in the day for Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. to still be buying the Democrat and anti-anti-Communist narrative and using the term in the politically correct way. But that is one of the biggest problems with Republicans, as I have been detailing on this page. They are continually displaying their bona fides as dupes and suckers of the Democrats.

Prior to the column by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. just examined, The Wall Street Journal ran a review by Thomas Mallon, entitled "The President Fells a Demagogue" [March 18-19, 2017, p.C7], on the book Ike and McCarthy by David A. Nichols [Simon & Schuster]. The "demagogue" of the article is, of course, Senator Joseph McCarthy, and the "president" is Dwight Eisenhower, who, keeping a low profile at the time, is now more generally recognized as behind the destruction of McCarthy.

Indeed, at a time when the Republicans controlled the U.S. Senate, it should have always been obvious that this could not have been done to McCarthy without the consent and direction of the President. Why Eisenhower did this is properly one of the great stories of the age. It is also the story of a near mortal blow suffered by the Republican Party. While the Republicans had at times controlled the House and Senate in the years after World War II, in the election of 1954, despite a popular Einsenhower in the White House, Republicans lost control of both houses of Congress until the Reagan Administration, and did not again hold control of both until the election of 1994.

When Eisenhower was elected in 1952, there had been Democrat Administrations for twenty years; but then from 1954 forty years would pass before voters gave Bill Clinton a fully Republican Congress. Did the destruction of Joe McCarthy have something to do with this? I think so. And this means that Dwight Eisenhower was in great measure responsible. The first Republican President after the New Deal was no boon to the Republican Party.

First, I should note some things about the review. Whatever Mr. Mallon knows, or has gotten from the book by Mr. Nichols, it isn't enough. A key statement is "Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and a close presidential adivsor, believed that McCarthy decided to go after the Army because of Eisenhower's indelible identification with it..." However, McCarthy did not decide to "go after the Army." He never went "after the Army." He was tipped off that there were security problems at Fort Monmouth in New Jersey, were a great deal of secret work was done, at various scattered locations, in technology and communications. The commander of the post, Major General Kirke B. Lawton, agreed about the problems and testified that people who had been removed from sensitive positions because of obvious security problems, i.e. they had Communist associations, were being reinstated by a review board at the Pentagon, without explanation.

For his testimony, the Army destroyed the career of General Lawton -- something Mr. Mallon doesn't bother mentioning, although we hear that McCarthy "humiliated" General Ralph Zwicker, who actually was scheduled as a friendly witness, until he apparently was visited and threatened by people from the Pentagon -- specifically by Army counsel John Adams. Then he became uncooperative, ultimately to be richy rewarded by the Army.

But Mallon trivializes these issues by reducing the problem to "an Army dentist with onetime leftist affiliation" (i.e. Communist Party membership), which happened to be the specific case involving Zwicker -- ignoring everything else. And this was at Camp Kilmer, not the main scene of scandal at the laboratories of Ft. Monmouth. So the case involving Zwicker was a kind of sideshow -- except for what it revealed, in the treatment of the two Generals, about the practices of the Pentagon.

So Mallon doesn't seem to know what the problems were at Fort Monmouth. But, without pause, he does continue that "the senator and Roy Cohn had been risibly at war with the service for months." This is nonsense. Since the people in New Jersey were alert to the security problems, McCarthy simply wanted to know why the review board at the Pentagon kept reversing the decisions of the competent authorities, especially General Lawton, on the spot. We have literally never learned why. McCarthy was stopped, and the people involved, and their motivations, have never seen the light of day -- just as we still don't know, as McCarthy asked, who had moved the Communist Party member Annie Lee Moss from the lunch room to the code room. When things like this are still mysteries, more than sixty years later, any disinterested observer would say that something very peculiar was, and is, going on.

Mallon continues that McCarthy staffer and Cohn friend:

David Schine had been drafted in November 1953 and the thought of his golden boy peeling potatoes on KP inspired more fury in Cohn than any pinko with a security clearance. He repeatedly demanded that the secretary of the Army, Robert Stevens, and its legal counsel, John Adams, secure passes and privileges for Schine.

This is a biased, hostile, and distorted representation. Schine had already been in the Army but then was passed over with a 4F deferment because of a slipped disk in his back -- not a trivial injury. In 1953 he was at the upper limit of draft elegible age and ordinarily would never have been considered for any more service. However, the Army had a history of drafting Congressional staffers to hold, essentially, as hostages when the Army didn't like what a Congressional Committee was doing.

This had been done with Robert Stripling, who was the chief intestigator for the House Un-American Acitivites Committee. In 1944, the Roosevent Administration didn't like the Committee's anti-Communist acitivities and wanted to shut it down. That failed, but they decided to inflict some damage on the Committee by drafting Stripling, who was 31 years old, married and a father, with a draft exemption from the Legislative Deferment Committee of Congress. Men like Stripling were not being drafted in 1944, and certainly not with Congressional exemptions. But they did it anyway, and so Stripling was probably doing something like peeling potatoes for a year and a half, before returning to the Committee anyway. This sort of malicious and vindicative practice is what we see continuing in the McCarthy years. It is also what we see in the FBI and the Justice Department in the present day, many of whose arrests and prosecutions are obviously selective and political; yet its viciousness is rarely noted by the political forces that use it.

As it happened, the "secure passes and privileges" for David Schine were a concession to McCarthy for Schine to complete his work for the Senate Committee. However, this was all a trick. The Army and Eisenhower Administration would then accuse Cohn and McCarthy of threatening the Army to get unwarranted privileges and favored treatment for Schine -- even though the whole buisness was an attempt to stop the Congressional investigation of the security practices of the Pentagon.

This Army conspiracy was the basis of the Army-McCarthy hearings, which then investigated Cohn and McCarthy for the Army charges against them. Of course, Schine should not have been in the Army anyway, and the whole business now looks like a fraud and a set-up, designed to distract McCarthy from his investigations. Which it did.

The hearings, televised, were designed to make McCarthy look bad, which in great measure they did; but nothing actually came of it. The Army could not prove that Cohn or McCarthy had ever really done anything improper; and when information began to come out that the whole thing was a political plot against McCarthy, Eisenhower cut off witnesses and documents with a novel claim of "Executive Privilege." McCarthy had wanted to subpoena members of the Pentagon review board that had been overruling General Lawton; but this never happened.

Mallon at least admits that this principle, of "Executive Privilege," praised by all at the time, was dropped like a hot potato when Richard Nixon tried the same claim -- a claim simply repeated by him from his years as Eisenhower's Vice President. The famous Nixon White House tapes were exactly the kind of records that Eisenhower had refused to turn over to Congress. At the same time, the supposedly damning Army-McCarthy hearings had nothing to do with the subsequent censure vote against McCarthy, yet the impression of post hoc ergo propter hoc remains.

Looking at it now, the secrecy of orders of both President Eisenhower and, previously, of President Truman were illegal:

It so happened that, on the subject being by addressed by McCarthy, there was some very definite statute law, which had been on the books for decades, most recently reenacted, at the time of the Army hearings, in 1948. This was the Civil Service Act, a law whose terms were quite familiar to McCarthy. In relevant part this statute said: "The right of persons employed in the Civil Service of the United States, either individually or collectively, to petition Congress, or any member thereof, or to furnish information to either House of Congress, or to any committee or members thereof, shall not be denied or interfered with." (Emphasis added.) [Blacklisted by History, The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies, by M. Stanton Evans, Three Rivers Press, New York, 2007, p.579]

The practice of the Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower Administrations was indeed to deny or "interfer with" information that those in the Civil Service of the United States might supply to Congress. We are left with Stanton's rhetorical question, "whether a presidential order can nullify a statute." While, "In our system, the theoretial answer to this is 'no,' but the de facto answer at the time was 'yes'" [ibid.]. Yet the whole history of Congress, and not just Joseph McCarthy, trying to find out about security problems in the State Department, Army, etc., continued for years with violations of this statutory law. During the Censure investigation of the committee chaired by Arthur Watkins (R-UT), McCarthy actually brought this up; but Watkins simply dismissed it, as he often did with anything, however relevant or cogent, that stood in the way of condemning McCarthy.

If Mr. Mallon's treatment faithfully represents the level of Mr. Nichols' book, then I think we can expect that the book is no more than another contribution to the anti-anti-Communist propaganda that is too typical of Cold War and Joseph McCarthy scholarship. Another cute bit is Mallon saying, "McCarthy went after the Voice of America's supposedly slack anti-communism and sent Cohn and Schine on a sort of honeymoon hunt for subversive literature in U.S.-run libraries abroad." I have discussed some of this business above. The "subversive literature" means, of course, the books by Communists that by law should not have been in U.S. information libraries at taxpayer expense, whose purpose, by law, was to fight Communism. If Mr. Mallon does not know that from the Nichols book, then we have a good clue about its honesty and value.

Similarly, the problem at the Voice of America were people who had broadcast pro-Soviet propaganda during World War II, when this was excused for an Ally against Germany, but who maintained the same line when things had become very different after the War. Mallon can say things like "slack anti-communism" when he doesn't need to give us any details of what was going on.

Almost approaching a bit of honesty is Mallon admitting that Joseph Welch's famous rebuke of McCarthy -- "Have you no sense of decency, sir..." -- was something that "he had dilgently prepared to be ouraged at just the right moment." Mallon does not give us the context, however. In an aside from Welch's badgering of Roy Cohn, the ostensible witness, Welch solicited from McCarthy an example of someone with subversive associations, to which McCarthy answered with the example of one of Welch's own lawyers, Frederick Fisher, who had belonged to the National Lawyer's Guild, which had been identified as a Communist Front organization by the Attorney General (it still exists and is still reliably radical in its Leftism). Welch was self-righteously indignant over the "cruelty" and "wrecklessness" of McCarthy naming this young man, who thus "shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you."

Unfortunately for the myth, Fisher had already been exposed, in an article published in the New York Times, by none other than Joseph Welch, who stated that Fisher would not be on his legal team at the hearings precisely because of his association with the National Lawyers Guild. So Welch knew about Fisher, and McCarthy was telling him something that he not only knew about already, but that he had acted on, in full publicity. Which was why Fisher was not at his side in Washington.

So the whole performance, so famous, and so commonly cited as the ultimate shaming and condemnation of Joseph McCarthy, was precisely that, a performance -- a fraudulent, dishonest, act -- that was staged for no reason than the effect it would have on television. It continues to deceive, as it would still deceive anyone reading Mallon's article, despite the limited admission it features.

This merits some reflection. Joseph Welch deliberately, consciously, and with forethought acted out a lie and a fraud. Yet he continues to be celebrated as a hero for exposing the morally debased character of Joseph McCarthy, when the facts of the case do exactly the opposite and instead expose Welch as an unprincipled and dishonest opportunist, with accomplices among the press and historians who continue the deception even now. Every time someone runs the sound bite of "Have you no sense of decency, sir...," the lie is repeated. Often enough, this may be done by people who don't know any better; but it can be exposed in the easiest way, by showing the page of the New York Times with the story about Welch disqualifying Fisher from his team. When this is not done, we see the result of a decades long effort to conceal the full story, for which the number of guilty increases steadily, obviously including David A. Nichols.

Why would Eisenhower allow and promote such a circus? Why would Eisenhower do something that, in effect, would discredit the Republican Party for decades? My God, the Party of Joseph McCarthy, the man who falsely accused people of being Communists and ruined countless lives! This is still used in what is essentially Communist propaganda in American "education," politics, and the press. As with the book by Nichols and the review by Mallon. So what was Eisenhower's problem? Well, perhaps he wasn't that much of a Republican. The military prided itself on being above politics, but Eisenhower had made his name working for Democrat Presidents, FDR and Truman. He had friends. And Joe McCarthy had complaints about a lot them, since they had done little about Soviet penetration of the U.S. Government and had helped deliver Eastern Europe and China to Communist forces -- including George C. Marshall, a personal friend of Eisenhower. So Eisenhower personally disliked McCarthy. Also, Eisenhower openly declined to undo any of the destruction of the Constitution effected by the New Deal. We still live under this lawless regime.

We can still wonder why Truman was so tolerant of Communists and Soviet agents in the U.S. Government. One suggestion is that Omar Bradley had never given him the Venona transcripts, which had been decoded from Soviet cable traffic and that detailed much about Soviet espionage in the United States. However, Truman does seem to have received this information, and also everything that the FBI knew about Soviet espionage and Communist Party activity, which was considerable. Some of it Truman simply does not seem to have believed. He never accepted the guilt of Alger Hiss, despite the damning evidence against him. So part of that may have been self-deception and wishful thinking, qualities that are usually not otherwise attributed to Harry Truman -- but are the most charitable interpretation.

There never were more than two reasonable motives for obstructing security inquiries and timely action against Communists and Soviet agents. Either the Democrat Administrations were actively protecting Communists and Soviet agents, or they wanted to hush it up and cover it up to avoid the political embarrassment that would follow. If Joe McCarthy accomplished anything, it was to blow the lid off the cover-up. Which helped get Eisenhower elected (although Mallon says that McCarthy was on Eisenhower's "coattails," although that doesn't explain the defeat of McCarthy's Congressional enemies -- including Senator Millard Tydings [D-MD], who had already been defeated in 1950, and who was such a sore loser that he wanted to blame McCarthy, legeally, for his defeat). But then Eisenhower didn't want to embarrass his friends and mentors, so in effect the hush-up and cover-up continued. Anti-Communism was OK, as long as it was quiet and unembarrassing. But there was a price for this, for the Republicans at the time and for an honest history of the Cold War now, when the Left is just as active as ever, with all the same goals, regardless of whether they call themselves Communists, or perhaps something else, like "Democratic Socialists."

Let's see some final indications of the quality of scholarship that we are dealing with in Mr. Mallon. He says, "The chairmanship [of his Senate subcommittee] allowed the Wisconsin senator to hire as the subcommittee's counsel the cunning Roy Cohn, along with G. David Schine, the Tab Hunter-ish object of Cohn's affections." Notice the contemputous language here, and the implication that Schine was Cohn's lover. But more important than the scorn and implications is the omission. McCarthy also hired a young, admiring attorney, the later sainted and martyred Robert F. Kennedy. But was Kennedy "cunning" like Cohn? We don't know, since he isn't mentioned.

Kennedy did not get along with Cohn (perhaps because he was Jewish and a homosexual -- prejudices that Kennedy had that are not generally included in the Kennedy Mythos) and later left the team, but McCarthy remained close to the Kennedies. McCarthy became the godfather of Robert's first child, Kathleen Hartington Kennedy, later Townsend, who was named after his tragic sister, Kathleen Agnes Kennedy. Kathleen had become the Marchioness of Hartington by marrying William, Marquess of Hartington, the equally tragic heir to the Dukes of Devonshire.

They all died young, as would indeed Bobby Kennedy. And as would Joseph McCarthy. As would John F. Kennedy, who carefully absented himself from the Senate on the day of the Censure vote against Joseph McCarthy -- and who may have owed his Senate seat to McCarthy standing aside when Kennedy unseated Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (whom we have seen as a subsequent member of the Eisenhower Administration) -- perhaps the only case of McCarthy, if only by inaction, favoring a Democrat over a Republican. Bobby quietly attended McCarthy's funeral; and in later years, when reporters tried to solicit anti-McCarthy remarks from him, Kennedy refused to take the bait.

This is one of the great ironies of the McCarthy story. No one is more hated by "liberals" than McCarthy, or more loved than the Kennedies. Yet the Kennedies would not turn on him, as so many others did, as members of his own Party did (but not Barry Goldwater or Evertt Dirksen, who voted against Censure), and as his own President did. In the end, it was McCarthy's enemies who generally had "no sense of decency." They also seemed to be protecting Communists and Soviet agents.

Last but not least, although at the beginning of the article, we have Mr. Mallon referring to McCarthy's "demagogic and spectacularly ineffective hunting of communists in government (of which, yes, there were some)." This is nonsense, although part of the canard promoted by the anti-anti-Communist Left. In 1950, McCarthy eventually produced the names of 100 individuals, both from the inherited lists and the work of McCarthy's own researches, who were in or had been in the State Department, who were either Soviet agents, Communists, or sympathizers and "fellow travelers."

His information initially was from the FBI or from previous Congressional invesigations, and none of them was falsely accused, although this is what their defenders and "liberal" opinion claimed then and often continue to claim now. Also, McCarthy did not want to make the names public, since he did not want to expose people who might turn out to be innocent. The Democrats forced him to make the names public -- obviously so that they could subsequently smear him as exposing innocent people -- a strategy conducted simultaneously with the accusation that he had no names in the first place. That, indeed, was the level of game played by the Democrats -- an exercise in dishonesty and cynicism that staggers the mind. If Mr. Mallon is not aware of this, and of the results of McCarthy's later invesitigations, he has no business writing about these things. Is this the same kind of partisan dishonesty and cynicism? Has he no sense of decency?

We just keep getting more of this stuff from The Wall Street Journal. On September 11, 2017, we have a column by Philip Terzian, an editor at the presumptively conservative Weekly Standard, called "I Guess We're All McCarthyites Now" [p.A15].

Terzian's initial focus is Democrat Congressman Luis Gutiérrez of Illinois. Gutiérrez seems to have felt betrayed by General John Kelly, whom he understood to be favorable to legalizing children who arrived in the United States illegally. But Kelly then went along with Donald Trump's notice that the program of (illegally) tolerating these children would be discontinued in six months. Of course, Trump simply told Congress to write actual law that would legalize the program, so the accusation that he was eager to deport the children, who usually have no memory of living anywhere else, was not true. But Gutiérrez was livid, and he denounced General Kelly as "a hypocrite who is a disgrace to the uniform he used to wear... He has no honor and should be drummed out of the White House, along with the other white supremacists and those enabling the president's actions by 'just following orders.'"

Of course, Gutiérrez is simply a Democrat eager to invoke the lies and smears of recent Leftist politics. The idea that enforcing immigration law, which the Democrats left in place in 2013, is a matter of "white supremacy" is part of the typical libel and hyperbole of anti-American people in Congress, who now often happen to act like they represent Mexico or Central America rather than their American constituents. Somehow Trump's determination to do his Constitutional duty, by seeing that the laws are "faithfully executed," is something not to be "enabled."

The rest of the piece by Mr. Terzian follows from what it is that Mr. Gutiérrez's words remind him of. And that is, of course, Joseph McCarthy, who had nothing to say about immigration but who is, as we know, a whipping boy for all sorts of irrlevant issues.

In the early 1950s, an Army dentist named Irving Peress refused to complete forms asking about his poliitcal background.

Already Terzian has made a mistake. The dentist did complete loyalty forms, when he joined the Army, but later refused to certify his lack of Communist connections on similar forms. This raised the question of perjury on the original forms. Testiying before McCarthy's committee, Peress took the Fifth Amendment in response to questions about all this -- Terzian only says that the dentist was "defiant and evasive," which is typical of Communists but isn't quite the whole story. Nevertheless, Peress was going to receive an Honorable discharge.

McCarthy then summoned the commanding officer at the base where Peress worked to explain why the dentist -- who McCarthy [actually, the FBI] believed was a communist -- had been promoted and discharged. Patiently and, presumably, very carefully, Brig. Gen. Ralph Zwicker explained that he had followed the recommendations of subordinates and Army protocol. McCarthy raged: "Any man who has been given the honor of being promoted to general and who says 'I will protect another general who protects Communists' is not fit to wear that uniform."

What Terzian leaves out is that McCarthy did not just "summon" General Zwicker. The General had interviewed and cooperated with McCarthy's Committee staffers, going over what his testimony would be. He was expected to be a friendly witness. Instead, he double-crossed the Committee and, "patiently and, presumably, very carefully," acted to protect the Pentagon and cover up what had been done. McCarthy, naturally, was furious. But Zwicker had been threatened. We still don't really know by whom -- point man for the Pentagon against McCarthy, Army counsel John Adams, looks like the perpetrator -- but it must have included the people who all along had been obstructing McCarthy's investigation into the irregularities in security at Ft. Monmouth and elsewhere in New Jersey. The "the base" that Terzian mentions, Camp Kilmer, is where the FBI, not just McCarthy, "believed" that Peress was a Communist.

With all this, course, we are a long way from Luis Gutiérrez and immigration policy.

The Peress case led directly to the Army-McCarthy hearings and the senator's descent into oblivion.

Since the Army-McCarthy hearings had nothing to do with the Peress case, and also nothing to do with the issues for which McCarthy was dishonestly censured by the Senate, Terzian can only say that one "led directly to" the other in terms of the "fake news" that was generated by the Democrats and by the people who actually were, apparently, in the business of protecting Soviet spies at Ft. Monmouth -- about whom we later learned more from Soviet archives.

But the funniest part of Terzian's comment may be about McCarthy's "descent into oblivion." Not much oblivion if Philip Terzian is still talking about him.

Terzian then gives us some details about how Zwicker was "an honorable officer." As it happens, the Pentagon repaid Zwicker hansomely, while the previous commander at Ft. Monmouth, Major General Kirke B. Lawton, who had cooperated with McCarthy, and who had many complaints about how the Pentagon was handling security at the base, found his career ruined in vindictive retaliation. Mr. Terzian doesn't mention that, of course. It might raise questions, as McCarthy did, about what was going on.

So we might wonder. Who gets attacked more by Philip Terzian? Luis Gutiérrez? Or Joe McCarthy? We could do a word count. But, either way, this is a lot of (incomplete, deceptive, redacted) information about McCarthy just to accuse Luis Gutiérrez of being a dishonest politician. And the whole business is a long way from demonstrating that "We're All McCarthyites Now." So Philip Terzian is a "McCarthyite" too? If a dishonest portrayal of Joseph McCarthy is "McCarthyism," perhaps he is. But it is as though there is a standing order, obeyed by Terzian, to take a swipe at McCarthy, and perpeduate the lying narrative about him, whenever possible. It is almost as though there is a vast conspiracy...

Michael Blechman, at 26 years old, worked for Robert Kennedy in 1968. He says that he was in the "honor guard" at Kennedy's funeral. He has, he says, remained a liberal Democrat ever since. However, in a Wall Street Journal column, "Liberalism Isn't What It Used to Be" [June 21, 2019, A15], Blechman expresses dismay at what the "progressives" of the Party are now becoming. Along the way, he compares such progressives to Joseph McCarthy, which is what caught my attention. So Blechman is not one of the Republicans or Conservatives trying to appease Democrats or the Press with disparagements of McCarthy, as I have been considering above. He is, perhaps, one of the people that those Republicans or Conservatives are trying to appease. Thus, his own disparagements of McCarthy are the paradigm followed by appeasers and RINO's. So it is nice to examine what the paradigm is.

The points where Blechman now disagrees with the progressives are:

  1. The replacemnt of equal opportunity, judging by merit and character, with racical preferences. Blechman, however, does not mention that, just as there were quotas for Jews (like Blechman) at American universities before World War II, there are now obviously quotas for Asians (which literally does cover everyone from Arab to Japanese students, with Indians, Thais, and everyone, like Chinese and Koreans, in between) at the same universities, which now amounts to illegal discrimination against Asians. This is a lot worse than just preferential policies. There is a big lawsuit pending against Harvard for this, where the judgment seems to be delayed as the judge tries to think up sophistries to avoid ruling in favor of the Asian plaintiffs.

  2. The replacement of due process and the presumption of innocence with Obama Administration instructions "to make it easier to discipline students accused of sexual assault," where "many students were stripped of their rights to counsel, cross-examination of their accusers and discovery of the evidence against them." In the course of laying this out, we get Blechman's first reference to McCarthy, "who sought to ruin the career of anyone he accused of being a Communist or fellow traveler." And this is then compared to the Salem witch trials. As we have seen above, McCarthy wasn't in the business seeking to "ruin the career" of anyone. If so, he certainly failed to ruin the career of John Stewart Service, who should have been fired and prosecuted for leaking classifed material to the Communist front magazine Amerasia. There was a cover-up of the scandal by the Truman Administration until McCarthy raised the issue again, pointing out that Service's dispatches from China had all been Communist propaganda, while his roommates in China were both Communist agents, including an American who later defected to the Communists -- Solomon Adler (1909-1994). Stewart was dismissed but later reinstated, and he continues to be defended by those concerned with preserving the bona fides of "Commie Martyrs." Hardly the Salem witch trials. But Blechman is probably trying to invoke the Hollywood Black List, which was a product of Hollywood movie producers and had nothing to do with Joseph McCarthy. Dalton Trumbo, an undoubted Communist, and black listed, but later rehabilitated, is the paradigmatic "Commie Martyr" in that respect. Blechman gives no specifics of how McCarthy violated "due process" because, of course, there are no specifics. Judging security risks is not a judicial or adversarial process, and much of the evidence is necessarily based on secret intelligence. But what John Stewart Service did is now on the public record, and the cover-up that protected him, guided by Soviet agents in the Truman Administration, is also now on the public record.

  3. Then we get, as Blechman puts it, the principle "'women deserve to be heard' transformed into 'women deserve to be believed'." This was a reference to the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, where an accusation of an aborted sexual assault, thirty some years earlier, could not be backed up with information about where it was, when it was, or who else was there to substantiate, not just the accusation, but whether the venue of the incident, the "party," even took place. The friend called by the accuser for corroration denied ever having met Kavanaugh -- but did say that she had received threats because she wouldn't support the accusation. While it is this that sounds like the Salem witch trials, Blechman skips the Salem or McCarthy references in this case.

  4. Blechmen then cites the case of the (black) lawyer and law professor Ronald Sullivan being dismissed, with his wife, from posts by Harvard University because he was (briefly) on the defense team of accused Hollywood Mogul Harvey Weinstein. The "progressive" principle now is that unpopular defendants do not have a right to counsel, and that lawyers defending them share in their predetermined guilt.

  5. Finally, Blechman cites free speech, which modern universities, faculty, and students no longer believe in. Views contrary to "progressive" orthodoxy are shut out of academia, and increasing off of "social media" platforms. We also get another swipe at Joseph McCarthy: "In the McCarthy era, one often heard of professors and screen-writers being forced out of their jobs for expressing far left views." While the implication is that McCarthy had something to do with this, the Hollywood Black List existed well before anyone had heard of Joseph McCarthy, who also had nothing to do with the hiring or firing of professors. The major distortion, however, is that it was rarely an issue of "expressing far left views." People were on the Black List for having been found in Contempt of Congress or for other legal trouble involved in the investigations of Soviet agents or Communist Party members. I.F. Stone (1907-1989), after becoming an apologist for the North Korean invasion of South Korea, did have trouble finding work; but he then just started his own magazine. Subsequent revelations of his dealings with Soviet intelligence have thrown all this in a harsher light, although he does not seem to have been an actual Soviet agent. But if the "McCarthy era" silenced "far left views," it wasn't very effective with Stone, or many others. Even Alger Hiss, convicted of perjury, got out of prison and joined the celebrated ranks of "Commie Martyrs," denying, unbelievably, for the rest of his life that he had ever been a Communist or Soviet agent.

Apart from perpetuating the bogus McCarthy narrative, there are some curious things about Blechman's column. One is his failure to note that all of the problems he identifies are nothing new. There have always been people who did not believe in equal opportunity based on merit or character, or due process, or in the presumption of innocence, or in the right to counsel, or in free speech. There was a name for such people. They were called "Communists"; and the "tenured radicals" who now dominate American education are simply the New Left ideologues who set out to achieve power back in the 60's. But calling them what they are, "Communists," and what the ideology at American universities now is, i.e. "Communism," cannot be spoken, because that would be "McCarthyism." So the impression that Blechman gives, that the turning away from liberal ideals, is something new, is not true. It has a long history. It is just that part of that history is to smear and falsify anti-Communism. Indeed, we can imagine how essential that is to the whole process. It is certainly effective with Michael Blechman.

Another curious thing about Blechman's column is, of course, Robert F. Kennedy, whose face beams out from the midst of the Wall Street Journal page. But Blechman doesn't mention that Robert Kennedy worked for Joseph McCarthy, who was a family friend of all the Kennedies. McCarthy was the godfather of Robert Kennedy's eldest child. Jack Kennedy, whom McCarthy had supported against the Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, deliberately missed the censure vote against McCarthy. And Robert quietly attended McCarthy's funeral. The press could not get Kennedy to say anything disparaging about McCarthy, at whose knee, we might say, Robert learned how to prosecute and convict Jimmy Hoffa.

So Michael Blechman's lament about the totalitarianism of the "progressives" in his own party is missing a critical element, namely the history of this kind of business. "Democratic Socialism" means East Germany -- where Berthold Brecht (1898-1956), one step ahead of Contempt of Congress, settled down to Soviet Block celebrity, safe with his Austrian passport, his West German publishers, and his Swiss bank accounts. The Progressive Niravna for yet another "Commie Martyr."

If The Wall Street Journal has a policy to smear Joseph McCarthy for things that had nothing to do with him at every opportunity, the New York Post may have a similar rule. Thus, on February 23, 2020, we find a column by Kevin D. Williamson called "Crush and Bern, The Bernie Bros have turned McCarthy with their terrifying witch hunts" [p.30]. Williamson definitely gives us a heads-up with both "McCarthy" and "witch hunts" in the subtitle of his piece.

So let's review. A "witch hunt" is an investigation for something that doesn't exist. There were no real witches in Salem. Instead, a "witch hunt" is in the business of accusing people of being something that they are not, and that, in fact, doesn't exist. This is just for the purpose of smearing such people, and discrediting their politics, or their character. Innocent people were killed in the Salem witch trials, based on "spectral evidence," which meant the testimony of young girls who had seen in their dreams defendants communing with the Devil. This was taken seriously, for a time, with shameful consequences.

Kevin D. Williamson mentions both Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee in association with "witch hunts." Since both were investigating Communists and agents of the Soviet Union, categories that significantly overlapped, if not coincided, this would mean there actually were no Communists or agents of the Soviet Union to be investigated. This is nonsense.

To summarize, first, Joseph McCarthy mainly wanted to know why security risks in the State Department, identified by Congressional investigators and the FBI, were still there. And, later, he wanted to know why security risks at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, who had been dismissed by the Commanding Officer, were being reinstated by anonymous authorities at the Pentagon. For his investigation into the latter, McCarthy was thrown under the bus by President Eisenhower and the Senate Republicans. We have literally never learned who was overruling the CO of Ft. Monmouth, which was a complex of secret research facilities. The Russians later boasted that they knew all about what was done at Ft. Monmouth.

Second, the Democrats, to this day, have never forgiven the House Un-American Activities Committee for exposing Alger Hiss as a Communist and a Soviet agent. The extent of the damage that Hiss did to the national interest of the United States, and indeed of civilization and humanity, in working for the Russians has yet to be fully revealed. There are still books written white-washing the betrayal and deceptions perpetrated at the Yalta Conference in 1945, which condemned Poland and Eastern Europe to decades and tyranny, poverty, and murder. Sometimes the role of Hiss there isn't even mentioned.

What Williamson's article is mainly about is the desire of supporters of Bernie Sanders to "blacklist" people, especially Democrats, who didn't support Bernie. I count the word "blacklist" and its verbal reflexes no less than seven times, and I may have missed some. But the infamous anti-Communist "blacklist" was no creation of either Joseph McCarthy or the House Un-American Activities Committee. It was used by the Hollywood Producers Association to keep people out of their industry who had not co-operated with Congressional investigations of Communists, etc. When Ronald Reagan was the President of the Screen Actors Guild, he just wanted to be sure that no one was being falsely accused of being a Communist. Some people, of course, like Zero Mostel (1915-1977), got blacklisted because they refused to "name names" of Communists they knew. This violated their playground ethos of not "ratting" people out, even people who were the moral equivalent of Nazis. Mostel then moved to work on Broadway, where there was no blacklist.

So let's review. Conservatives or others on the Right who adopt the narratives, paradigms, and terminology of the Left, without challenging their premises or presuppositions, are fools. The confusions and stupidities involved can go pretty deep. Thus, Williamson has an illustration of Bernie Sanders wearing a T-shirt with what, I gather, is supposed to be an image of Joe McCarthy on it. This is captioned, "Some of Bernie Sanders' fans sound more like proponents of anti-communist Joseph McCarthy than college-campus icon Che Guevara." No, Kevin. It's Che. And that is because (1) Joseph McCarthy was not responsible for the Hollywood Blacklist, and (2) the practice of the "Sanderistas" is precisely the Stalinism enforced by Joseph Stalin, Chairman Mao, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and countless universities in the United States. This is where the term "politically correct" comes from, and where it is applied, which is why, for a whle, the Left furiously denied that there was such a thing as "political correctness." Now they don't bother.

Kevin D. Williamson does not mention Joseph Stalin, or the practices of Communist regimes, or even politicaly correctness, even once. This makes it more likely that the supporters of Bernie Sanders will get the Communist regime that they hope and work for. We already know that some Bernie staffers -- not just supporters, staffers -- are looking forward to having concentration camps to "reducate" Americans, adding that Stalin's GULAG was kind and loving. But if Mr. Williamson actually called the "Bernie Bros" Communists or Stalinists, we know that that would be, well, "McCarthyism." So he doesn't -- just like Angela Davis, who more than once was the candidate for Vice-President of the United States for the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), is never called a "Communist." That would be "McCarthyism." Indeed, what we must take away from all this is that "McCarthyism" means to accurately accuse someone of being something that they actually are. While, of course, calling Donald Trump a racist, "white supremacist," or anti-Semitic, all smears, is just good politics.

The Wall Street Journal of July 11-12, 2020 [pp.C7-8], features a book review, "Bully's Pulpit," by Duncan White, who is identified as "associate director of Studies in History & Literature at Harvard University," and as the author of Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War [2019]. Thus, while we might think that White is an actual Cold War historian, he may really be more in literature rather than history. Not that it makes much difference. This sickness of "English Department Marxism" now infects academic history as much as literature. His review exposes him as biased and either ill informed or deliberately deceptive in these matters.

The book White reviews is Demagogue, a biography of Joseph McCarthy, by Larry Tye. Tye is a journalist and biographer. Of special interest in this case is his 2016 biography of Robert Kennedy. From the title of Tye's book, "Demagogue," and the word "Bully" in the title of White's review, we can see that neither of them much likes or respects Joseph McCarthy. We are tipped off. Given the association of Robert Kennedy (and, really, all the Kennedies) with McCarthy, we might wonder whether that even comes up in either Tye's Kennedy or his McCarthy books. It certainly doesn't come up in White's review, a fact that contributes to the impression of bias and deception we find in it.

White doesn't mention that Kennedy quietly attended McCarthy's funeral, or that he would not disparage him to the press. What we do get, however, is that Roy Cohn later taught his evil ways to, guess who, Donald Trump -- without mentioning that Robert Kennedy had learned his techniques as a prosecutor, which bagged Jimmy Hoffa, from Joseph McCarthy himself. This leaves one wondering, not just about Tye's treatment of McCarthy, but whether his biography of Kennedy was a fawning apologia. It would be surprising if the hostility and animus for Trump evident in White's review does not reflect that in Tye's book, if not his other book also.

It still intrigues me that in treatments of a man who is typically accused of lying, and White is explicit about that, we find one false statement after another about him, even apart from the half-truths and distortions. A good example is this:

[In his Feburary 9, 1950 Wheeling, West Virginia, speech McCarthy] announced... that he had a list of 206 communists working in the State Department, he pursued with indiscriminate mendacity the "subversives and spies" who had supposedly infilitrated America's institutions.

For a quote that includes the word "mendacity," this statement itself contains a serious lie. McCarthy had a list, not of communists, but of "security risks," who might be Communists, Soviet agents, or "fellow travelers," in the State Department. It wasn't his list. It was a list compiled by Congressional investigators and the FBI. In fact, as I have examined above, there was more than one list, and a pointless controversy developed over what list McCarthy was referring to in the Wheeling speech.

But White relies, not on actual information about the speech, but on the sort of fairy tale that my high school teacher invoked when he said that McCarthy had waved a blank piece of paper -- meaning he had no list at all. McCarthy simply wanted to know what was being done about the remaining security risks in the State Department. Congressional Democrats required that McCarthy reveal the names of the people on his list, which he did; and then, of course, the Democrats accused him of smearing people who might be innocent, which is what McCarthy had said himself. The dishonesty of all that is characteristic of almost all references to Joseph McCarthy ever since.

White follows up one lie with another. He says:

It is estimated that more than 10,000 Americans lost their jobs as a consequent of his witch hunt, some 200 spent time in jail, and, as Mr. Tye demonstrates, the experience of being pursued by McCarthy contributed to a number of suicides.

McCarthy only had the power to "pursue" anyone from January 1953, when the Republicans took control of the Senate, until McCarthy's censure in December, 1954. Since much of the time in the previous months had been taken up dealing with investigations of him by the Senate, McCarthy had little time for his own investigations in much of 1954. White says that McCarthy's "act would run for four years," yet little of that was when McCarthy had any power to do anything. Instead, Democrats, as long as they controlled Congress, went after McCarthy himself with continuing investigations, including fruitless and unwarranted inquiries into the finances of his relatives, which White doesn't mention.

So how did "10,000 Americans" lose their jobs over that? How did Joseph McCarthy put anyone in jail, by running a Senate sub-committee for a year or so? Of course, Americans lost jobs because of the "loyalty oath" program of the Truman Administation, or the "Black List" of the Hollywood Producers Association. McCarthy had nothing to do with those things. And it was the Truman Administration that had been putting people in jail for Contempt of Congress, perjury, and other crimes. White implies that the "some 200" who "spent time in jail" were victims of McCarthy, when he had no such power and no such role. There were suicides in the course of the investiation of communists by Congress, but that was before anyone had heard of Joe McCarthy.

So White has committed a common sophistry, smearing all of anti-Communism as a "witch hunt" and attributed its supposed excesses to Joseph McCarthy. The "witch hunt" was "McCarthyism." White then does mention that House Committee on Un-American Activities had already long existed, and that "eleven high-ranking members of the Communist Party USA were imprisoned in the fall of 1949," but without clarifying that many others were prosecuted for other crimes, none of which had anything to do with McCarthy.

White goes on to tell us:

By the time he began his crusade, the Soviet spy networks, which had hitherto penetrated the Manhattan Project, the Treasury and the Office of Strategic Services, had been all but wiped out.

If we wanted to regard Duncan White as a proper Cold War historian, this tears it. We know from Russian Sources, before Putin shut things down, that only about half the Soviet spies were ever caught. White is clearly trying to split the difference between the old Leftist denial that there were any spies, and the truth that spies and communist influence continued through the 1950's. No, he wants to say, there were no spies left by the time McCarthy got going, so all of his accusations and investigations were bogus.

We see a response to this sort of claim, that the spies had all been caught, here:

An added example of this outlook is the oft-stated view that the internal Communist problem had in essence been eliminated by 1948, when the Truman administration was conducting an alleged crackdown on Red agents via the President's loyality program and indictment of the leaders of the Communist Party. But, as seen in preceding chapters, this portrayal is far off the mark. The Amerasia cover-up, the manipulation of the subsequent grand jury that let the Elizabeth Bentley suspects walk, the routine dismissal of FBI reports about such matters, and the administration's effort to go after [Whittaker] Chambers all tell a different story. [Stalin's Secret Agents, The Subversion of Roosevelt's Government, by M. Staton Evans and Herbert Romerstein, Threshold Editions, 2012, p.252]

Nevertheless, White admits that McCarthy got some some communists, but "those genuine communists McCarthy did expose were, as Mr. Tye puts it, 'small-time union organizers or low-level bureaucrats'." OK, so they just weren't important enough.

But they were. The "China hands" who condemned millions of Chinese to tyranny and murder simply got away with it. Many were still in positions of respect and influence in 1950. More importantly, the people at Ft. Monmouth who were passing military secrets to the Russians in 1954, well, as far as we know, they were never stopped and never brought to justice. General Lawton knew who a lot of them were. But because the Army stopped Joseph McCarthy and destroyed him, nothing was ever really done about it -- except that many who were removed, were then afterwards restored to their positions.

When it comes to what McCarthy did actually investigate, we get no illuminating details. He says:

McCarthy went after the Voice of America, the overseas library program, the U.S. Government Printing Office an the Army Signal Corps at Fort Monmouth.

How these limited, focused investigations would then put "10,000 Americans" out of work is a little mysterious. However, White's dismissal of "the Army Signal Corps at Fort Monmouth" is a deception that evades the issues involved. He says, "the evidence of spies at Fort Monmouth was thin," but that was not the primary issue. McCarthy wanted to know why security risks at Fort Monmouth, which had been removed by the commanding officer, were being reinstated by anonymous powers at the Pentagon. And White doesn't mention why this was important. Fort Monmouth, although perhaps no big deal as part of the "Army Signal Corps," was actually a string of research facilities of serious military importance.

Why was the commanding officer being overruled? And whether the "evidence of spies... was thin" or not, we know from Soviet records that the facilities were heavily pentrated by Soviet intelligence. There were spies. And we never found out who all they were. We know from Soviet sources and defectors that the Ft. Monmouth facilities leaked like a sieve and that the Russians had volumes of stolen documents. It is not clear that anything was ever done about this by the Army.

McCarthy never found out who was overruling the commanding officer. And, even decades later, we have never found out. If White were a real Cold War historian, he might be curious about that. But, of course, he isn't; and it sounds like he may not even be aware of the actual issue, for which Mr. Tye presumably has been no help. Why no one seems curious is about as curious as "the curious case of the dog in the night." The Pentagon keeps its secrets, even now; and the work of people like Tye and White makes sure of it. A properly paranoid conspiracy theoriest might wonder, "Are they actually getting paid off by the Pentagon?"

White doesn't mention that the Army-McCarthy hearings were of McCarthy, not by him, although we might get the drift from his other comments, for instance that "the army counterattacked by revealing the pressure Cohn and McCarthy had applied in trying to get [G. David Shine] Shine out of military service and, when that failed, to ensure that his time here was cushy." Both of these claims are false or deceptive, without, say, mentioning Shine's 4F draft status.

White also goes out of his way to characterize Shine as an "heir to a hotel fortune," unlike, say Robert Kennedy, who was only heir to the Wall Street and rum running fortune of old Joe Kennedy. As I have discussed above, Shine had already had a medical exemption from the draft and was already too old for the ordinary course of such things. The "pressure" is what was applied by the Army itself, which used the draft as a way of threatening people in Congress, depriving them of key staffers. They did draft David Shine, but the "cushy" service McCarthy negotiated was to allow Shine to finish the work he was doing for the Congressional committee. But that was a set-up just to make accusations against McCarthy and Cohn.

The Army-McCarthy hearings were then the investigation into whether McCarthy or Cohn used undue influence in all of this. They had not, and the hearings came to nothing -- which we wouldn't know from what White says -- except for the drama that was visible on television. The high point of that, of course, was the grandstanding Joseph Welch proclaiming, "Have you no sense of decency, sir?" As we know now, this was all a fraud. White does not enlighten us.

Instead, he says, "McCarthy [was] claiming one of Welch's colleagues had links to a communist group." As it happens, Welch himself had previously admitted, to the press, that this staffer did have "links" to a communist front organization, which is why Welch had not brought him along down to Washington. At the time, McCarthy was perplexed how Welch could make is issue out of something he knew full well was true. But it made good television, good propaganda -- "McCarthy's reputation never recovered" -- and a good element in the fairy tale that Duncan White continues to mendaciously perpetrate on the pages of the Wall Street Journal.

And, of course, White doesn't mention that McCarthy and Cohn were exonerated by the Army-McCarthy hearings, as McCarthy had been cleared in all the other "witch hunt" investigations of him. If they were going to get McCarthy for something, they would need to come up with some other sophistry, which they did.

Why does anti-anti-Communist propaganda continue to be promoted in our own time? The reason may be more clear now than it has been for many years. Bernie Sanders says he is a "democratic socialist"; but if we attach his socialism to the fascist totalitarianism evident at American universities, in the American media, and increasingly even in American business, it is obvious what this adds up to:  Communism. Sanders himself fell in the Democrat primaries when he made comments a little too flattering about Cuba. Since he has been a fan of Cuba and the Soviet Union his whole life, the pieces may have fallen into place.

However, you cannot call Sanders a "communist," because that would be "McCarthyism." Angela Davis, who was the Vice-Presidential Candidate of the actual Communist Party USA, cannot be called a "communist," because that would be "McCarthyism." Thus, the enemies of freedom, of America, and of civilization cannot be identified for what they are because the continuing demonization of Joseph McCarthy puts the proper terminology out of polite discourse. And Republicans, being the passive cowards that they are, go along with it, as we have seen with many examples on this page.

That did not happen right away. The censure of Joseph McCarthy was not for the cause of his falsely accusing people of being communists. Duncan White doesn't mention what McCarthy was censured for. It was for being rude to a Congressional committee, the committee of Senator Guy Gilette (D-IA), which exceeded its powers to investigate the finances, not just of McCarthy since he had been elected, as had been ordered by the Senate, but the finances of McCarthy and his entire family for their whole lives. This was pure political harrassment, and McCarthy was justified in refusing to cooperate for things the Committee had no business doing. And the committee came up with nothing anyway.

Censuring McCarthy for this, when the Committee was in the previous Congress, was a sanction unprecedented in American history. But this is part of the deception that McCarthy was censured for accusing people for being communists, i.e. for "McCarthyism." But if McCarthy wasn't censured for "McCarthyism," then what was the point?

Well we see the point. By obscuring the true business, the Left has been able to slowly discredit anti-Communism itself, as though McCarthy were actually censured, not even for "McCarthyism," but for anti-Communism. It was all a "witch hunt." Which, as White says, put those 10,000 Americans out of work, and others in jail, probably with Joe McCarthy personally and gleefully turning the key.

The result we are left with is that communism must have been innocent and good. And since the word "communism" is banned from public discourse, we are left with a majority of ignorant and foolish youth believing that socialism is innocent and good. America could be destroyed because this long running strategy.

But there is more. The political side of the work of Tye and White is exposed by the attack on Donald Trump in White's review. Roy Cohn taught McCarthyism to Trump, therefore Trump, and his voters, are just as bad as Joseph McCarthy. The bien pensants know that it is all of a piece with the evil of America:

McCarthyism was also an attack on the legacy of Roosevelt, on the Washington establishment, on the East Coast elite, on homosexuals, Jews and African-Americans.

Heaven forbid that anyone should "attack" the "Washington establishment" or the "East Coast elite." I don't know about Joe McCarthy, but these are certainly targets of Donald Trump, or of all Americans who are tired of their government being stolen from them by a hostile ruling class. As for "Jews," perhaps White has not noticed that "Cohn" () is a Jewish name. He certainly enjoys repeating charges that Cohn was a homosexual. Why would that still have traction now? Who cares about that anymore?

And perhaps White has not noticed that the attempt of Democrats to disprove the Communist Party membership of Annie Lee Moss, who was black, consisted of arguments that black people are too stupid to be communists. That from a Democratic Party that at the time was still four-square for Segregation. As for the "legacy of Roosevelt," the downfall of McCarthy now looks like betrayal by Dwight Eisenhower, who didn't want to discredit colleagues from the Roosevelt years. This caused profound damage, not only to the Republican Party, but to the United States, that persists, and worsens, even until now.

As an example of how everyone foolishly accepts Leftist narratives, we have a column in the Wall Street Journal the Monday following the piece by Duncan White. This was "The Ideological Corruption of Science," where the physicist Lawrence Krauss points out that science departments are now infected with the "anti-racism" (i.e. anti-capitalist) ideology of the radical Left. This includes the "cancel culture" where physicist Stephen Hsu, the vice presient for research at Michigan State University, was forced to resign because they didn't like his research on genetics, and because of his "support" for research that showed no racial bias in police shootings. Of course, the existence of racial bias in police shootings is an unquesionable postulate and dogma of all Leftist politics. Thus we see how research is required to conform to political narratives, not only that can be falsified, but have been falsified. Everyone involved must be silenced.

Krauss has come in for notice in these pages for his endorsement of the atheism of George H. Smith. We have also seen some evidence that Krauss is not well informed on the history of astronomy.

Whether or not these problems make Krauss unreliable, his concern about the politicization of science is serious and well taken. But he falls prey to Leftist narratives:

Whenever science has been corrupted by falling prey to ideology, scientific progress sufferings. This was the case of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union -- and in the U.S. in the 19th century when racist views dominated biology, and during the McCarthy era, when prominent scientists like Robert Oppenheimer were ostracized for their political views. [July 13, 2020, p.A19]

For one thing, Krauss might explain why, when Louis Agassiz (1807-1873), who definitively showed that there had been "Ice Ages," and who previously had been against racism, came to accept it, this was all due to "bias" and not to evidence that he regarded as important. Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002), to his great credit, resisted simplistic characterizations of such historical figures. Krauss should read him. But, of course, Krauss is repeating a political catechism to try and establish some kind of "progressive" credibiltiy even while he promotes heresy. He should know that never works.

My concern here, however, is Krauss's final comment, which continues the catechism. Robert Oppenheimer lost his security clearance in December 1953. It was not because of the science he had been doing, or for his "political views." It was over policy issues, such as the development of the hydrogen bomb (which the Soviet Union would build whatever we did), with lingering suspicions of Oppenheimer's communist (i.e. Soviet) connections, to some of which he admitted. Krauss must explain how his loss of a security clearance damaged Oppenheimer's research. It is not clear that Oppenheimer had actually been doing any research in years. He had been an administrator, with the Manhattan Project, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Atomic Energy Commission, etc. Krauss would also need to explain exactly by whom Oppenheimer was "ostracized," when his clash with Cold Warrior physicsts like Edward Teller (1908-2003) made him a hero and a martyr to many. And, of course, Oppenheimer's career and troubles had nothing to do with Joseph McCarthy.

So, as we have seen above, Krauss reaches for "McCarthyism," and accepts a Leftist narrative, when he is actually dealing with practices and ideologues that are Stalinist in both form, practice, and inspiration, by people who are totalitarian socialists, who might reasonably and honestly be called "communists." But we know why he can't go there, even if he wanted to.

The Wall Street Journal of December 19-20, 2020 [A13] featured a column, "The Monday When America Came Back," by Peggy Noonan, who was a speech writer for Ronald Reagan and has been a columnist and author since. Noonan has been favorably quoted on these pages but turned into a dangerous RINO during the Trump Administration. Her column in this case angered me, and I wrote a letter to the Journal:

Dear Sirs:

Peggy Noonan laments the way that America’s elites have been destroying small business and the lives of working people, and that the elites not only don’t seem to care, they don’t even try to appear to care.  Noonan reminds us that she has been writing about this for years.  Which is true.  However, she has begun her column by celebrating the election of Joe Biden, an absolute creation of the elites, whose election was arguably engineered, if not stolen, by them.  And Noonan helped them.  As much as she could.

She has said that Donald Trump is a “bad man” and “half-crazy.”  But we have known for a while that Biden is a bad man, and senile dementia is also arguably worse than whatever Noonan thinks is Trump’s craziness.  So her column doesn’t make any sense.  And certainly America did not “come back” when the elites, in hock to China, have no care for working people, and not even for America’s national interest.  Trump manifestly cared about both.  Noonan’s incoherence makes her seem more than a little “half-crazy” herself.

Noonan had written a previous column, "Who'll Be 2020's Margaret Chase Smith?" in the Journal on December 5-6, 2020 [p.A15]. In that column, Noonan celebrated the late Senator Margaret Chase Smith (1897-1995), who gave a speech against Joseph McCarthy in June 1950. This makes it relevant to the issues I have been discussing here, and I have already mentioned Senator Smith above. Noonan's idea for writing column was to compare President Trump to McCarthy:

If your McCarthy is saying a whole national election was rigged, an entire system corrupted, you'd recognize such baseless charges damage democracy itself.

Noonan, indeed, has become very good at repeating Democrat talking points, as any good RINO should. That she is apparently unconcerned about election fraud, and how the Democrats were able to corrupt "an entire system" in many States, with the expressed intention of doing the same on the national level if elected, now exposes her as a prime enabler of the destruction of the Nation.

Over the years, the Democrats have been pursuing their strategy quite openly, since everything they've done about the election laws has made election fraud easier, and their opposition to voter ID laws has only one purpose -- so that fraudulent votes can be cast for the dead, for aliens, for people who are not who they say they are, and for others not qualified to vote in a particular election. When it is possible to register cats and dogs to vote, we know what is going on.

But we also have the phenomenon that the more open and obvious the strategy of fraud and lies, the easier somehow it is for the partisan liars to repeat slogans like "baseless charges." As Noonan has done here. The actions of Democrats and election officials in Pennsylvania, especially, were so blatant that no conscientious person can possibly say that there was no prima facie crime and misconduct involved. Thus, Noonan has left the ranks of conscientious commentators.

That Noonan writes a column comparing Donald Trump to Joseph McCarthy is, of course, a smear against Trump, even as it continues smears against McCarthy. The question in the title, "Who'll Be 2020's Margaret Chase Smith?" apparently is soliciting Republicans in Congress, like Mitt Romney, I suppose, to denounce Trump the way that Smith denounced McCarthy. This is both vicious and pathetic. Meanwhile, with the Democrats and their ideological minions denouncing everyone as racists, and America as racist, for all its history, Noonan doesn't seem to be looking for anyone to denounce that. This is especially eggregious when, defeated, Trump is no longer a threat to whatever it is that Noonan holds dear, but the Democrats and their companion totalitarian ideologues are a threat, a very grave one. If Noonan does eventually come around to noticing that, I wonder if she will even admit the guilt of her complicity.

Donald Trump conducted a barnstorming Presidential campaign, with up to five rallies a day, in different States, with thousands of enthusiastic people attending. Joe Biden spent the campaign, mostly, in his basement. To Peggy Noonan, Trump supporters apparently were the "deplorables" referenced by Hillary Clinton. They certainly get no notice or respect from Noonan, even though they are the very people despised by the elites whom Noonan supposedly opposes. Instead, they voted for Trump because they were voting against the elites. I don't think Noonan cared, or even tried to looked like she cared. The very sins Noonan identifies in those elites. It just means that now she is one of them. She does get to work from home, unlike all the people who have lost their job, or their business, with the draconian "lockdown" of restaurants and other small businesses.

But if Noonan now wants Trump, and his voters, denounced like Joseph McCarthy, she illustrates this by invoking the speech of Margaret Chase Smith against McCarthy in 1950. The timing of that speech was awkward. She was responding, on June 1st, to a speech that McCarthy had only given previously on February 9th. The dust had barely settled from her speech when North Korea invaded South Korea, on June 25th, raising the temperature considerably for Anti-Communism. Noonan protests that Smith was Anti-Communist herself; but let's see what Noonan has to say about her speech.

In February he'd made his speech in Wheeling, W.Va., charging communists had infiltrated the U.S. government at the highest levels. He claimed to have 205 names of known communists; in later statements he put the number at 57 and 81.

Noonan exposes herself as not knowing much about this issue, which is not unusual, as we've seen, with people who write about it. As a matter of fact, Communists and Soviet agents had "infiltrated the U.S. government at the highest levels"; but McCarthy himself, at that point, was only talking about the State Department. And he did not have a list of "known communists," only people, according to others, who were security risks because, like John Stewart Service, they might be Communists or Soviet or Chinese agents. And, as we have seen above, more than one list was involved, none of them compiled by McCarthy -- hence the confusion about the number of names on the list. Noonan's use of "claimed" is characteristic of this kind of rhetoric. Later, McCarthy's staffers were able to refine a list and add extra names. The names on the list were only publicly disclosed at the demand of Senate Democrats, who wanted to "claim" that there was no list at all. McCarthy didn't think that the names should be made public because those involved were only suspected, not proven, to be disloyal. This is the opposite of the reputation that has been fixed on McCarthy.

Noonan awkwardly asserts, on behalf of Smith, that, in the face of Communism, "you don't defeat it with lies." Unfortunately, the lies so far in her column seem to be her own, or those she repeats from the pro-Communist apologetics that have been current ever since.

She always listened closely when McCarthy spoke. Once he said he was holding in his hand "a photostatic copy" of the names of communists. She asked to see it. It proved nothing. Her misgivings increased.

Well, of course it proved nothing, at least not about the subjects of the list. It did prove that McCarthy had a list, which some later, as I have noted, wanted to claim that he didn't. This must have been before the Democrats, who, of course, controlled the Senate at the time, and who were going to investigate McCarthy, not Communists, demanded be made public.

That is the last we hear from Noonan, or Smith, about actual Soviet espionage. Instead, Noonan quotes some of Smith's defense of free speech, which was totally irrelevant to the issues at hand.

The Constitution "speaks not only of the freedom of speech but also of trial by jury instead of trial by accusation." Those "who shout the loudest about Americanism" are ignoring "some of the basic prinicples of Americanism," including the right to hold unpopular beliefs and to independent thought. Exercising those rights "should not cost one single American citizen his reputation or his right to his livelihood, no should he be in danger of losing his reputation or livelihood merely because he happens to know someone who holds unpopular beliefs. Who of us does not? Otherwise none of us could call our souls our own."

People are tired ot "being afraid of speaking their mind lest they be politially smeared as 'Communists' or 'Fascists.'... Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in American."

She took on both parties, accusing the Democrats of showing laxness and "complacency" toward "the threat of communism here at home" and the Republicans of allowing innocent people to be smeared.

Much of this actually had nothing to do with Joseph McCarthy. Who was this, by the way, who had lost "his right to his livelihood"? People on the Hollywood Producers' Black List? They got there, usually, for Contempt of Congress; and anyone who "happens to know someone who holds unpopular beliefs" would only be in trouble if those "unpopular beliefs" happened to be Communism, or Fascism, and they were asked out them, under Oath, under subpoena. If the issue was "freedom of speech," why were people concealing their beliefs, or those of other people they knew, and not forthrightly expressing them? There was nothing illegal about even being a Communist. All that was going on long before anyone had heard of Joseph McCarthy.

If it was true that the Democrats were "showing laxness and 'complacency' toward 'the threat of communism here at home'," how was one supposed to do anything about that without being smeared with "McCarthyism"?

Noonan's column would be more honest and relevant if, instead of an attack on Donald Trump and his voters, it was an attack on the way that now anyone can be and are being fired and lose "his reputation or his right to his livelihood" for saying things like, "All lives matter," or that the Marxist group "Black Lives Matter" doesn't care about the "black lives" lost to crime and gang shootings. But Noonan continues the distortions of the polemics of Democrats against McCarthy and Anti-Communism, in great measure by failing to identify the sickness at American universities, now spreading to government and business, not as "McCarthyism" but as Stalinism. The actual Communists are back, but, of course, they can't be called that; because that would be "McCarthyism." People who do not believe in free speech cannot be criticized because that would be "attacking," what, free speech?!

Along the way, we learn from Noonan that Margaret Chase Smith "supported Social Security and Medicare." This is, of course, the ultimate problem. Post-War Republicans made their peace with the New Deal, despite its destruction of Constitutional Government. In those terms, they are all RINO's, and there really is no true Opposition Party to the Democrats. But some, as we see, are more RINO than others. Noonan has become one of the worst ones. Her lipservice protests against the Ruling Class are meaningless when all her actions and rhetoric, for years now, have enabled those intent on destroying America. And she continues to promote what we might see as a kind of RINO "Original Sin," among several, of accepting the Democrat narrative about Joseph McCarthy, which they use to conceal their own commitments and intentions. Democrats don't want free speech, first because they don't honestly take advantage of it, concealing their beliefs with lies and evasions, second because they want to silence opposition and dissent -- like good Stalinists do. And Noonan, like her Democrat and RINO friends, says that Donald Trump is the one to "damage democracy itself"? It is a very terrible joke.

The Wall Street Journal of July 20, 2021 [A17] featured a column, "The Hedgehogs of Critical Race Theory," by Lance Morrow, of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Unlike some discussions of Critical Race Theory, Morrow addresses the Marxist roots of "Theory" and Critical Race Theory. I just read a piece at Fox News that didn't bother to do that, so Morrow gets some minor kudos. However, my only concern here is that Morrow, apparently following the style guide of The Wall Street Journal, throws in a standard dismissive reference to Joe McCarthy:

It was said in the era of Joe McCarthy that he and his followers saw a communist under every bed.

Of course, as we have seen, McCarthy wasn't looking under "every bed." From 1950 until the Republicans assumed control of Congress in 1953, McCarthy's targets, and the public controversies, almost exclusively involved the people in the State Department who had worked to sabotage Nationalist China and thus helped the Communists come to power in China. We are still living with the terrible consequences of that business, and most of the people responsible, like John Steward Service (d.1999), got away with it, in part because of the successful destruction of McCarthy, betrayed by his own Republican President.

Thus, those who "said" that McCarthy "saw a communist under every bed," were actually the communists, and those who made it their business to protect them. Morrow should know that. We also might wonder who Lance Morrow thinks "his followers" were. That would include, of course, subsequent anti-Communists, like John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan. We have seen McCarthy's ties to the Kennedy family and Robert Kennedy's job working with McCarthy's Senate committee.

While Reagan was finally able to defeat the Soviet Union, the Left had nevertheless mostly succeeded in discrediting all anti-Communism as "McCarthyism." In polite company or public discourse, no one can even call Angela Davis a "Communist," even though she had been the Vice-Presidental Candidate of the actual Communist Party USA. If you in fact openly belong to the Communsit Party, I think it is reasonable to assume that you are a Communist, and equally reasonable to call you one.

When Reagan said that the Soviet Union was the "Evil Empire," the ruling class never got over giggling about it, or exhibiting all their indignation and self-righteousness -- until, that is, the Soviet Union collapsed. Then they were quiet for a few years, preparing, of course, for a new era of attacks on America and capitalism -- about which Lance Morrow writes pretty well, if only he were better informed about the time when Communists and Soviet agents had infiltrated the United States Government.

The Wall Street Journal of Septemer 6, 2022 [A17] featured a column, "The Left Gets Fascism Backward," by Lance Morrow, who we have just seen above.

In a generally good column, which appropriately reverses the common accusations of "Fascism" by the Left onto the Left itself, Morrow nevertheless could not resist trotting out the Leftist narrative about Joseph McCarthy, again:

Mr. Trump, the canniest showman in the White House since Franklin D. Roosevelt, introduced into 21st-century politics what seemed to be new idioms of hatred, a freestyle candor of the id. Doing so, he provoked his enemies -- and finally Mr. Biden -- to respond in kind: a big mistake. In the early 1950s, when Sen. Joseph McCarthy was loose in the land, and roughly half the country supported his anticommunist inquisition, President Eisenhower wisely decided, “I will not get into the gutter with this guy.” It took a while for McCarthy to implode.

McCarthy, of course, did not "implode." He was sabotaged -- by President Eisenhower. Nor was he "loose in the land." All of his investigations were narrow and focused, however often he needed to reply to other critics, like Edward R. Morrow.

What did him in, as we have seen, were his questions why the security risks at Ft. Monmouth, New Jersey, which had been removed by the commanding officer there, were quietly replaced, without explanation, by someone at the Pentagon. McCarthy simply wanted to know who was doing that, and why.

We now know, of course, that Ft. Monmouth, with its military research facilities, was a particular target of Soviet espionage. Because Eisenhower turned against him, and because of the bogus charges voted on for a Censure by the Senate, McCarthy never found out who was reinstating those security risks. Sixty-eight years later, we still do not know. It remains one of the principal secrets and mysteries of Cold War history, and we must face the fact that President Eisenhower himself apparently did not want the answer known, ever.

Thanks to the mythology now still perpetuated by Lance Morrow, and so many others, that key question still never even gets asked. If Ft. Monmouth even comes up in public discourse, the whole problem is dismissed as involving just one Communist dentist -- and McCarthy's whole investigation mischaracterised as "an attack on the Army" -- all the better to turn Americans against him. The Russians could not have planned it better. Perhaps they did.

The February 10, 2023, New York Post, featured a column, "Twitter Censorship is the Modern-Day Red Scare," by Jonathan Turley.

It begins with this:

“The Democratic Party [is] the bedfellow of international communism.” Those words from Sen. Joe McCarthy captured the gist of the Red Scare and the use of blacklists and personal attacks to silence critics. The Democrats this week appear to have taken up the same cudgel in labeling opponents and critics Russian sympathizers and fellow travelers in opposing government involvement in a massive censorship system.

The Red Scare is back and it is going blue.

If the Democrats were using all their powers to conceal and protect communists in the United States government, as they were, then one might reasonably say that they were "the bedfellow of international communism." Why they were doing that would be something else, whether it was just ass-covering, or something more sinister. Why the Eisenhower Administration protected security risks at Ft. Monmouth would be another question. If President Eisenhower's anti-communist bona fides are above reproach, it would still be nice to know, decades later, who in the Pentagon was protecting those risks, and why that was tolerated -- let alone why we still do not know.

Otherwise, the rest of Turley's statement includes more than one serious distortion of the historical record. First of all, the "Red Scare" usually means events after World War I, not after World War II -- although I see that the former can be called the "First Red Scare," and anti-communism later the "Second." I think this is an innovation, perhaps to try and discredit any concern about radicals.

There wasn't much organized communism in the United States in 1919, but there were radicals and anarchists whose many bombings, usually sent by mail, did alarm the nation. One bombing led to the prominence of J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972) and then to the creation of the FBI, whose recent misconduct is actually the topic of Turley's article.

Rather than the actual, original "Red Scare," Turley wants to invoke "McCarthyism," which he defines as "the use of blacklists and personal attacks to silence critics." The problem there is that the infamous Hollywood "blacklist" had nothing to do with Joseph McCarthy, or even with anyone in government. It was the Hollywood Producers Association condemning people who had refused to cooperate in Congressional investigations into communism, many of whom were found guilty of Contempt of Congress. They were thus, strictly speaking, criminals.

At the same time, done of this was very effective in any effort to "silence critics." Critics of the House Committee on Un-American Activities had been at it for years; and as soon as Joseph McCarthy, in 1950, began to complain about security risks in the State Department, Democrats unloaded on him and kept at it constantly from then on. So I'm wondering exactly who was "silenced" by "McCarthyism"? Actually, in the end, it was McCarthy who was silenced.

Communists, of course, usually silenced themselves, since much of the problem was their failure to frankly admit their own loyalties, commitments, and goals.

From McCarthy's original prominence in 1950, most Congressional investigations in the matter, right down to the "Army-McCarthy hearings" (April–June 1954), were invesigations of McCarthy, not by McCarthy, trying to discredit him. None of this did; but the Senate censured him anyway, just, indeed, to silence him.

In recent years, we discover that the FBI, and other federal agencies, have been engaged in censorship of Republicans, conservatives, and others by instructing tech companies, like Twitter, Google, and Facebook, to remove people from their services, or in other ways hamper their ability to communicate through the services ("shadow banning," etc.). This was illegal, since government agencies cannot contract out to private agents actions that would violate civil rights if done by the government directly. Censorship violates the First Amendment. For some reason, the courts have been slow to sanction these practices, despite very clear case law and evidence in the matter. The bias of many judges, in supporting Democrats, is obvious. When Elon Musk bought Twitter and began releasing e-mail communications between Twitter and the government agencies, the extent of the problem became obvious. FBI whistle-blowers will also be testifying to Congress about it.

Turley is a professor at George Washington University Law School, and he has appeared before Congress:

I testified this week in Congress on the Twitter Files and how they suggest what I have called “censorship by surrogate” or proxy.

The files show dozens of FBI and government employees actively seeking the censorship of citizens and others for their viewpoints. In my testimony, I warned that this was reminiscent of the McCarthy period where the FBI played a role in the establishment of blacklists for socialist, communists, and others. I encouraged Congress not to repeat its failures from the 1950s by turning a blind eye to such abuse.

Since the FBI had been investigating communists for years, well before anyone had heard of Joseph McCarthy, Turley's reference to "the McCarthy period" would seem to apply to all sorts of things, and all sorts of times, that had nothing to do with Joseph McCarthy. Was McCarthy instructing he FBI to compile "blacklists"? No, he wasn't. And he didn't have the authority to do so anyway. Did the FBI compile "blacklists," or, more to the point, the Hollywood blacklist? No it didn't. Does Turley mean to say that the "failures from the 1950s" include the failure of the FBI to identify about half of the Soviet agents who we now know were working in the United States? It doesn't sound like it.

The Department of Justice of the United States, under Democrat Administrations, did release lists of Communist Front Organizations. One of those was the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), which still exists and is still as radical and, essentially, pro-communist as it ever was. Indeed, on March 5, 2023, 23 rioters, with Antifa associations, were arrested in Atlanta, Georgia, while attacking a police and fire training center, which was under construction.

The rioters used firebombs, fireworks, bricks, etc. to attack police and set equipment on fire. They were arrested and charged as "domestic terrorists." One of them was a fellow named Tom Jurgens, who was a lawyer for the radical Southern Poverty Law Center and also, of all things, for the National Lawyers Guild. These worthies claimed that the terrorist rioters were just "demonstrators" and that Jurgens was no more than an "observer" trying to protect their "rights" as they violently attacked police and vandalized the facility.

Now we know that NLG "observers" are actually spotters for Antifa, reporting to them on the movements of police or the presence of under-cover officers, who might be filming the riots. This, of course, would result in attacks on the officers. Antifa doesn't like being filmed, since they don't want people to know about their real behavior. This is why they've brutally attacked Andy Ngo more than once -- calling for his death -- since he reports on them.

The rioters, in line with Antifa tactics, had arrived as ostensive participants in a nearby music festival and then broke away to make their attack. Leftists groups, consequently, charged that the police were indiscriminately arresting attendees at the music festival. Only two of the 23 arrested were even residents of Georgia, and two were even aliens. This was also consistent with Antifa tactics of drawing soldiers from all over the country, usually white, privileged, college graduates, which indeed looked to be the background of the arrestees.

As we have seen, on June 9, 1954, when Democrat lawyer Joseph Welch challenged McCarthy to name someone associated with Communists, McCarthy named one of Welsh's own lawyers, Fred Fisher, who had been a member of the National Lawyers Guild. Welch famously rebuked McCarthy, "Have you no sense of decency?" Yet Welch knew about Fisher's background; and he had already told the New York Times that this was why Fisher was not going to Washington with him. He was tainted.

So Welch knew that McCarthy was right, and he simply put on an act for the televison cameras, knowing that it was a fraud: A very effective fraud, since it is still "common knowledge" that this rebuke discredited and destroyed McCarthy.

So Jonathan Turley is still deceived by the fraud perpetrated by a totally dishonest Joseph Welch, even as we see the muddle and confusion he perpetuates about the whole "McCarthy period." He is still promoting the mythology of Joseph McCarthy cultivated by the Democratic Party since 1950. In many ways, it is worse that it has ever been. Democrats, many of whom have openly praised and supported the Cuban dictatorship for years, must smile to see their distortions and propaganda repeated by Republicans and "conservatives." Doesn't anyone, indeed, have a sense of decency about this?

The March 18-19, 2023, Wall Street Journal, contained a review of the book Crooked, by Nathan Masters, "How Teapot Dome Boiled Over" [p.C9]. This was about the corrupt Attorney General, Harry Daugherty, and the attendant Teapot Dome Scandal. The review was written by Lindsay M. Chervinsky, identified as a "presidental historian."

Much of the review is about Senator Burton Kendall Wheeler (1882-1975), whose attacks from the Senate helped drive the investigation into Teapot Dome and into the corruption of Harry Daugherty. But Chervinsky decides that not all of this was necessarily for the best:

Wheeler’s crusade also helped change how American politics was practiced. On one hand, Wheeler’s bold approach was understandable: Eventually his investigations did uncover evidence of extensive wrongdoing. On the other hand, his tactics laid the groundwork for more unscrupulous characters to use the same methods for unsavory purposes in the future. A few decades later, Mr. Masters argues, another junior senator, this time from Wisconsin, “weaponized scandal and command congressional hearings in a way that distinctly recalled Wheeler’s performance three decades prior.” Unlike Wheeler, Sen. Joe McCarthy failed to find damning evidence, and his search for a sweeping communist plot infiltrating the highest branches of government destroyed the lives of thousands of innocent people.

Where above we have seen Shepard Smith say that McCarthy had "ruined the lives of hundreds of people," Chervinsky has now upped the ante to "thousands of innocent people." And again, for the brief period when McCarthy had any real power (1953-1954), we must ask, "Can you name one?" And, of course, Chervinsky, practicing the "McCarthyism" she is ostensively condemning, doesn't name anyone.

Since Chervinsky can assume that "everyone knows" what McCarthy did, this continues to help conceal what he actually did do, and what was done against him. The "congressional hearings" of the actual McCarthy era were mostly against him, not by him. His own investigations, as into the security risks reinstated at Ft. Monmouth, New Jersey, by anonymous actors in the Pentagon, are now safely forgotten, or misrepresented; and we still do not know who was overriding the Commanding Officer of Ft. Monmouth, whose own career was "ruined," not by McCarthy, but by the same anonymous Pentagon actors. And we still do not know who moved Communist Party member Annie Lee Moss "from the lunch room to the code room," as McCarthy asked in a flim clip that is actually often shown.

So, with Lindsay M. Chervinsky, as with so many others here, we are left to wonder if she is simply clueless, or if she knows that she is continuing a cover-up of bad actors who even now remain anonymous. One might wonder if this was indeed some sort of "sweeping communist plot."

The July 8-9, 2023, Wall Street Journal, contained a review of the book Under the Eye of Power, by Colin Dickey, "All the Secret Histories" [p.C9], which is a book about conspiracy theories. The review was written by Alex Beam, who we have already seen in these pages writing about the architect Mies van der Rohe.

"You have to be able to see American history as a series of panics," he writes highlighting the Salem witch trials and Sen. Joseph McCarthy's Cold War anti-Communist crusade. "These who events, held up as outliers and anomalies, were just two points on a straight line composed of a dozen similar points."

Of course, that idea that there weren't Communists or Soviet spies in the United States government was not the denial of a "conspiracy theory." It was Communist propaganda. And, at the same time, the pursuit of Communists long antedated Joseph McCarthy, which is why people confuse him with the House Un-Amerian Activities Committee; and it would continue down to the person of President John F. Kennedy. Mr. Beam and Mr. Dickey both seem to rely on the surviving lies of pro-Communist propaganda, which is a living problem in American politics.

Further in the review we get:

Even the phrase "I have a list" rings down through the ages. In 1799 Jedidiah Morse, attemtping to link Thomas Jefferson with the quasi-mythological Illuminati, claimed to possess "an official, authenticated list" of the society's officers and members. "Anticipating Joseph McCarthy by over 150 years."

This seems to invoke the canard that McCarthy did not have a list of security risks in the State Department. This is what I heard from my High School teacher, who said that McCarthy waved a blank piece of paper. As I have noted, McCarthy actually had two lists, which weren't even his, although his staff added to them. So this means that Mr. Beam and Mr. Dickey have no idea what they are talking about. They are relying on no more than hearsay, relying on ignorance and bias, from sources friendly to the Democratic Party of the time, or to Communists.

So this is the quality of the Cold War history that we often get. People who don't know what they are talking about but repeat the "spin" of apologists for Communism. Joseph McCarthy is just collateral damage. He was too much of a threat.

The Essential Anti-Communist Bibliography

Return to Text

Reviews

Political Economy

Satan is a Democrat, or
It is the Blue States that are Red, Note 2:
Elizabeth Warren's Rant Against Business

The infamous rant of Elizabeth Warren (ἀνάξιος ) against business merits some careful consideration. While the diatribe is sometimes said to be against the rich (which would include Warren herself), it is actually against all business, from Microsoft and Bill Gates all the way down to PJ's Pancake House in Princeton, NJ. And its bite seems most particularly directed at the most entrepreneurial. No one would think of a Harvard MBA who is hired to manage a corporation that they had built it. So the "you didn't build that" sentiment, as formulated by Barack Obama, only applies to people who start small and make something of their own business. Since Warren turns on those "who got rich," her sights are set on the successful, like Bill Gates himself, a college drop-out who started with nothing. The blast of her animus, and her big government avarice, is thus bound to catch all small businesses, which are struggling just to survive, with no more than a rare chance that the owners can get rich. This is less "class warfare" than it is simple envy and resentment.

Warren's basic implication, examining what she actually says, is that businesses are parasites. They contribute no good to us or to society, and we therefore allow them to exist and prosper just out of the condescending goodness of our hearts. They can keep a "big hunk" of their profits as along as we take our "hunk," since we are doing a bunch of stuff for them, like roads and police, which evidently we aren't already doing for ourselves and to which they make no contribution. Since this "hunk" is mostly going to be extracted from small businesses with people who are never going to get rich, Warren's antipathy, in Marxist terms, is directed at the "petty bourgeoisie" rather than proper capitalists. It all can be summed up in one demand:  "Hey, creeps, you owe us a lot of money."

There is no sense in any of this that businesses provide any goods to the public. The only services mentioned by Warren are those provided by government, i.e. roads, schools, and police. Does Warren even know that people obtain necessary and desirable goods and services from businesses (like pancakes), and that this is usually
I hear all this, you know, "Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever." No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody. You built a factory out there -- good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea — God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

Elizabeth Warren (CP-MA), transcribed from video (available on YouTube), house party campaign appearance, Andover, MA, August, 2011

done in a cheaper, more convenient, more effective, and even friendlier way than government provides its services? Nor do we get a sense that public goods, like roads or police, benefit everyone, including "the rest of us," equally, or that businesses pay for them just as much as anyone else does -- if not more so.

Apart from providing goods and services to the public, businesses also employ most of the labor force of the country. Indeed, listening to "progressive" politicians, one might often think that the principal purpose of business is to provide employment, even if the product of the business is worthless. When Margaret Thatcher planned to close coal mines that cost more to operate than their coal was worth, British coal miner unions rather openly contended that the worth of the mines was the jobs, not the coal. But any version of the value of business for employment seems to have escaped the notice of Elizabeth Warren; and it is inconceivable that she might appreciate the wisdom expressed by the late Democratic Senator and presidential candidate Paul Tsongas (d.1997) when he said, "You cannot be pro-jobs and anti-business." Warren seems to be anti-business, and the jobs be damned. Or, we might suspect, she simply wants everyone employed by the government, and private jobs are so worthless as to properly be beneath her notice -- although she herself is a millionaire off of her own private legal practice.

The strongest implication of the parasitism of business in Warren's rant is that the "rest of us" have paid for the roads, schools, and police that businesses use as "free-riders" to exploit the rest of us and make their ill gotten profits. That businesses are taypayers themselves, and have already paid along with the "rest of us," seems to have escaped her notice. Not only that, but over half the population of the United States doesn't even pay income taxes, while the profits of business are usually taxed twice, first by a corporate income tax, and then second by taxes on the income of the people to whom corporate profits make their way (with this usually duplicated at the State level). Since the federal corporate income tax is 35%, which is the highest in the industrialized world and is close to the top marginal rate even for individual incomes taxes, it is very hard to say that businesses are not paying their "fair share." Indeed, from what Warren says, one might guess that business doesn't pay taxes at all.

And it is not as though Warren wants to tax businesses more to pay for roads or police that they are not paying for already. Since they are, she clearly wants the tax money for something else. So her whole approach is dishonest. The notion that "infrastructure" needs more funding is itself a lie, since federal gasoline taxes, which are supposed to pay for roads and bridges, are diverted to other, politically conspicuous projects, like "light rail" or Jerry Brown's "high speed" train, which are projects that never pay for themselves and must be subsidized in perpetuity. Similarly, tolls from bridges to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey are diverted from the upkeep of the bridges where the tolls are collected, which consequently can be seen covered with rust. Eventually, even President Obama admitted that the "stimulus package" of 2009, which was supposed to be for "shovel ready jobs," was almost entirely spent on other things (i.e. paying off government employee labor unions). No, Elizabeth Warren wants more money to buy votes and to fund the welfare state and other leftist projects of social engineering and government domination. In other words, she wants largess for the gravy train of the ruling class, of which she is herself a conspicuous part. She has no concern for the effect on the economy or for the welfare of most people with regular jobs.

The ultimate sentiment of someone like Warren is that the government owns all business, all property, and indeed all the citizens. As Hegel originally thought, we are slaves or minions of the state (the source of the "Freedom is Slavery" motto in George Orwell); and indeed we are metaphysically unreal apart from it. While usually not openly stated, this principle lurks behind almost all the policies and assertions of the Left -- where we should be aware that statements about "collective action" or "collective social action," as from Barack Obama, mean that political minorities, especially dissenting conservative or libertarian groups, are illegitimate, if not criminal. "Solidarity" requires unanimity, and those who reject the "collective" consensus are outside both the political and the moral pale.

Also, while we get public statements about things like "abortion rights" from the Left, the Left actually doesn't believe in individual rights. What we call "rights" are privileges temporarily granted by the state for its own, perhaps transient, purposes. Civil Rights law, which was originally supposed to limit government and protect citizens, now has become a way of the government telling people what to do, what to say, and even what to think. Thus, "Civil Rights" become the means to creating a government of absolute and totalitarian power.

This blast of hatred for business from Elizabeth Warren was soon echoed by the infamous statement of Barack Obama:  "If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen" [13 July 2012, Roanoke, Virginia]. Among other things, this seems to confuse necessary and sufficient conditions, or material and efficient causes. While conditions might exist for Henry Ford to build the Model T, it was the man himself who "made that happen" (the efficient cause) and not anyone else from whom Ford may have drawn assistance or materials in doing it. People like Obama say things like this, not only because they want everyone to be helplessly dependent on government, but because they pursue policies that will bring about that condition. Thus, in the current economic regime [2015] of poor growth and poor employment, this is fine because it puts more people on food stamps and other government assistance, which actually makes it less necessary for them to find private jobs. Thus, in 2012, Obama said, "The private sector is doing fine," when in fact growth and job growth were dismal and people were leaving the labor force. His point was, as it always is, that governments need more money, because "weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government," which have experienced budget cuts.

Thus, both Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama think that economic prosperity is mainly a matter of government spending and ownership. This is why Warren doesn't notice that businesses provide goods and jobs for the public and why she apparently thinks that the rest of us are doing business a favor by allowing it to exist. I have little doubt that both Warren and Obama think that the provision of all services would be better if the government did it. Also, both Warren and Obama have adopted "income inequality" as their defining issue, even though inequality has increased because of Obama's policies and equality is actually greater in Texas, under the closest thing to laissez-faire capitalism that we've got, than in those fevered hotbeds of leftist politics, New York, Massachusetts, and California. The State with the least income inequality at the moment is conservative, Mormon dominated Utah. The facts, however, are unlikely to inhibit the Left from demonizing Texas, or perhaps even Utah, as safe havens for the callous and oppressive rich.

In 2014, Warren is now the darling of the Left and will probably run for President in 2016, with the support of Obama against others like Hillary Clinton or Vice-President Joe Biden. Since the pretty openly pro-Communist William de Blasio was elected Mayor of New York, I have no confidence that a vicious leftist like Warren is not automatically disqualified in public opinion. Yet Warren is a hostile and repellent person, whose animus towards the productive people and institutions of America has never been more openly on display than it was in this talk from 2011. Any vote for her is a stab in the heart of both freedom and prosperity.

Political Economy

Return to Text

Satan is a Democrat, or
It is the Blue States that are Red,
Note 3

On July 30, 2015, on "Hardball" with Chris Matthews, our favorite pathological liar, Democrat Party Chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz [ἀνάξιος], was asked by Matthews, himself a leftist sympathizer, "What is the difference between a Democrat and a socialist?" Wasserman Schultz did not answered the question but evaded it by trying to talk about Republicans. Matthews pressed her, saying, "I used to think there is a big difference. What do you think it is?" He never got an answer.

We might think that this was because Wasserman Schultz has never thought much about socialism and perhaps doesn't know what it means. If that was the case, anyone would expect her to read up or get briefed on the matter and be ready with an answer should the question come up again. Not quite. She was asked again, by Chuck Todd on "Meet The Press":  "What is the difference," he asked, between the platform of the Democratic Party and socialism, "Can you explain the difference?" She still couldn't. This leaves the possibility that she didn't answer the questions because she is a socialist, and doesn't want to admit it, or because she knows that enough Democrats are socialists that she doesn't want to alienate them by making it sound like the Party is at odds with them.

This is the alarming degree to which corruption, ignorance, and folly have entered American life. The dishonesty and stupidity of Debbie Wasserman Schultz is now the paradigm of political action and is not troubling in the least to the elites and interest groups who support the agenda of the Democratic Party.

The code word for "socialist" in Democrat rhetoric is "liberal." This is part of the dissimulation and misdirection that is practiced in Democrat politics. In Europe, "liberal" still means support for individual rights, limited government, and the free market. Democrats, indeed, don't believe in any of these things. The proper meaning of the word begins to emerge when we travel further into Leftist discourse. There, "liberalism" or "neo-liberalism" means the revival of free market economics after Ronald Reagan. On the hard Left, mainstream Democrats are contemptuously called "liberals," very much as the word might be used by Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh, however, is aware that mainstream Democrats, as Fabian Socialists, only use the word to disguise their ultimate goals, which are not much different from those of the hard Left. The dissimulation of Democrats is so effective that it even fools Communists (people who otherwise only became "good liberals" when they were exposed and confronted with their treasonous allegiance and obedience to the Soviet Union).

"Fabian" refers to the tactics of Quintus Fabius Maximus, who dealt with Hannibal by avoiding open battle. He became know as Cunctator, the "Delayer." Fabian tactics, as adopted by Fabian Socialists, were thus to avoid open battle but achieve victory by small incremental advances. Medicare and Medicaid, although disappointing to those who wanted socialized medicine immediately, nevertheless were steps in that direction, inevitably leading to big pushes for full socialism, as in 2009. Since Medicare and Medicaid are bankrupt and have helped push up the costs of medicine, these outcomes can actually be used, ironically, to promote more socialism.

Americans who want to reclaim the proper use of "liberal," and help expose the Democrats as socialists, may use the term "Classical Liberal" for their views. Otherwise, "libertarian" is available, although this then does not contest the use of "liberal" and also implies the stranger and more radical libertarianism, as we have seen, of Rand and Rothbard. All these varieties of views are examined by way of the diamond quiz.

By 2013, we are hearing the term "progressive" more often, instead of "liberal." While the Progressives of the Era of Teddy Roosevelt continue to be remembered fondly by the Left, my association of the word "progressive" is with its use by members of the Communist Party USA whom I knew back in the 1970's. This gives me no confidence that people self-identified as "progressives" today do not actually share the goals and methods of the CP, as I think they do.

Return to Text

Satan is a Democrat, or
It is the Blue States that are Red, Note 4;
Joe the Plumber

The pure vindictiveness of the Democrats and the Left is often astounding. The best example of this may be the case of "Joe the Plumber" Wurzelbacher. In October 2008, Barack Obama walked through Joe's Ohio neighborhood as part of his political campaign. Joe was in his front yard and asked Obama about his tax plans. Joe wanted to have his own plumbing business and was concerned that the tax increases that Obama was talking about would hit his business just as it might get going. Obama admitted that his tax increase might affect Joe's plumbing business (raising rates from 36 to 39%). Explaining this, Obama finished by saying, "I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody."

Republicans and Democrats immediately saw this as a potentially embarrassing and damaging statement. It made Obama sound like a "redistributionist," who thinks that income in capitalism is "distributed" unfairly and that it is the job of the government to take from the rich (and from business) and give it to the poor. This is a popular idea among the Cargo Cult economic thinkers of the Left. Thus, we can't allow Joe's plumbing business to do too well, because obviously this can only come from exploitation of the workers. So part of the fruit of Joe's success would be better spent by the government. The idea that capital and private investment create wealth for all is a principle foreign to this ideology.

The reaction of the Democrats to this tells us so much about them. There is no doubt that they think this way, and Obama too. Their anger therefore was simply at being exposed as thinking what they actually believe. They always walk a fine line there. They want their core supporters to hear the radicalism of their ideology straight but then don't want that to get out to the public. The most damaging admissions are thus often statements to private groups that may get informally recorded on cell-phones and then released to the Press. Thus Obama, speaking to a private group in California in April 2008, said of Pennsylvania voters losing jobs in old industrial towns (because of Democrat anti-business policies, of course), "They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." This was immediately seen as condescending and disparaging of people who believe in gun rights, religion, and only legal immigration -- and are probably racists (while the Obama Administration itself has policies that are increasingly protectionist and anti-trade). The Democrats, of course, see guns as Fascism (unless, ironically, in the hands of the police), religion as the "opium of the masses," illegal immigrants as Democrat voters, and job losses in the Rust Belt as due to greedy capitalists.

To Democrats, a "smear" against them is to honestly represent their views and policies, even with direct quotes (which can be denied, as we saw with Barney Frank). To Democrats, "suppressing free speech" directed at them means any speech that simply contradicts what they say, or actually believe. Violence against conservative speakers, which may literally prevent them from speaking, on the other hand, is "free speech." This is all the Orwellian Double-Think of the Marxist politics of Herbert Marcuse, now part of the Democrat playbook.

But nothing is more remarkable than what happened to Joe the Plumber. Eliciting an embarrassing statement from Obama made Joe an enemy. Democrats and the Left immediately went after Joe. So we learned that "Joe" wasn't his real name (he is Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, obviously using his middle name for dishonest purposes). He wasn't a licensed plumber (he worked for one). He owed some back taxes (like several people nominated to be in the Obama Adminstration). Some Democrat Ohio bureaucrats even began (illegal) investigations, to try and find anything else to discredit him. The pointlessness and infantile vindictiveness of this is just astonishing. In fact, it doesn't matter if Joe the Plumber turned out to be Charles Manson. The issue is what Obama said, and what it said about him. Joe himself was irrelevant. Yet many Democrats figured that there was something suitable and useful about discrediting or smearing Joe. He had done something that could result in hurt or embarrassment to them, so it made him, however senselessly, a target. Even if there were nothing else about the attitudes or actions of the Democrats, this reveals them, or at least their public agents and representatives, as morally vile and despicable people.

Return to Text

Satan is a Democrat, or
It is the Blue States that are Red,
Note 5

Another good example of incoherent falsehoods, and not just from these individuals, is the Democrat slogan, "Bush lied; people died." The idea there is that because George Bush said that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (chemical, biological, or nuclear), and no such weapons were found after the invasion of Iraq, Bush therefore had lied. Since the ordinary meaning of a "lie" is to utter an intentional falsehood, one might wonder how the slogan chanters know that Bush was uttering an intentional falsehood. Oh, that's easy, we can leave out the "intentional" part. If there were no WMD's in Iraq, then Bush ipso facto lied. I kid you not. I actually saw Michael Moore argue in an interview with Bill O'Reilly that it was a lie simply because it was false. This is something worse than just sophistry. It is an infantile petulance. But we get a lot of it from the Democrats.

As it happens, before the Iraq war, I saw Tony Blair at a meeting of European leaders challenge them to deny that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He said, "You all know" that he has them, because their intelligence services all had the same information. Now, if "Bush lied," not only was Tony Blair lying also, but the leaders of France, Germany, etc., who never helped out in Iraq, must have been so deceived by all these lies that they didn't even have the gumption to stand up and call them lies to Tony Blair's face. Indeed, one of the other "lies" attributed to Bush, that Iraq had been seeking uranium from Chad, was information supplied by British intelligence. We went through a period of denials that Iraq had done this (the absurd and dishonest Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame controversy), but in the end it looks like the British were correct. Even if we don't need intentionality for lying, Bush would not have been lying. The Democrats, however, are never so honest as to remember Tony Blair or his challenge to Europe -- much less admit that Saddam Hussein was someone who deserved to be deposed, WMD's or not. See the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize Winner, the former President of Finland, Martti Ahtisaari, for his thoughts about Saddam's WMD's.

Meanwhile, the European Left likes the idea that Blair was "hoodwinked" by Bush into participating in the war. That doesn't square very well with the idea that the British supplied false intelligence to Bush.

Return to Text

Satan is a Democrat, or
It is the Blue States that are Red,
Note 6

Incredibly, there is now a government agency in Britain whose acronym actually is "NICE," the "National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence." Since it looks like the acronym should really be "NIHCE," somebody has gone out of their way to go for "NICE," perhaps without being aware of its use and meaning in That Hideous Strength.

In August 2009, the London Telegraph reported that NICE "intends to slash by 95 percent the number of steroid injections, such as cortisone, given to people who suffer severe and chronic back pain." This is, of course, the kind of rationing and degradation of care that is characteristic of socialized medicine. Similar provisions in the Democrat's 2009 health care "reform" bill are what led Sarah Palin to brilliantly dub the envisioned "end of life" services "death panels," to the fury and indignation of the Democrats. NICE, whether in C.S. Lewis or in modern reality, is a "death panel."

Return to Text