"Enemies of civilization"

[Opinion. Despicable then, despicable now. Lock up anyone who doesn't agree with you.]

McCarthyism has returned to the United States – and this time it’s even more dangerous

Trump’s campaign of repression echoes the red scare. But now the government has bigger ambitions and more powerful tools

Judith Levine

The Guardian: 31 Jul 2026

SOURCE: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/31/mccarthyism-trump-surveillance-red-scare

There are many parallels between the first McCarthy era, roughly 1946 to 1956, and Trump’s campaign of political repression, his own updated McCarthyism.

Both regimes crafted a monster of quasi-facts and innuendo and fed it with fear: an enemy within, well-organized and financed, secretive and violent, allied with evil foreigners and bent on overthrowing capitalism, democracy and Christian morality. Both used flagrantly unconstitutional means to cleanse the nation of the spectral menace.

Each time, federal employees were targeted first. President Harry S Truman’s Federal Loyalty Program screened 5 million workers for communist affiliation; 2,700 lost their jobs, 12,000 resigned. Schools, unions and Hollywood fell in line; blacklists outlasted their makers. The Trump administration purged the federal agencies of his equivalent of the cold war communist, the “woke”. Applicants for civil service jobs were asked to identify their favorite administration policies and explain how they would advance them if hired. The federal employees’ union correctly called this request a “loyalty question”.

Law firms quailed, media companies capitulated, universities collaborated. Artists and performers – Zero Mostel, Jimmy Kimmel – were exiled from film and television. In the 1940s and 50s, the attorney general compiled lists of supposedly subversive organizations, which, along with communists and socialists, included groups from the National Negro League to the Nature Friends of America. Trump’s justice department is investigating progressive non-profits, including ActBlue, a chief funding source for Democratic candidates, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Open Society Foundations, funded by George Soros, best known for supporting democracy movements in the former Soviet Union.

McCarthy and his more powerful and enduring co-conspirator, the FBI director J Edgar Hoover, ruined countless lives and crippled progressive movements. But the scope of this administration’s ambitions; its armies of enforcers inside a gargantuan carceral state; the technological and legal tools at its disposal; and the dearth of principled government actors to obstruct it make this McCarthyism far more dangerous.

On 22 September 2025, Trump issued an executive order designating the non-organization “antifa” a “domestic terrorist organization”. Three days later it issued National Security Presidential Memo-7 on “countering domestic terrorism and organized political violence”.