#Denaturalization is a tactic that was heavily used during the #McCarthy era of the late 1940's & the early 1950's & one that was expanded during the #Obama admin & grew further during #Trump's first term. It's meant to strip #citizenship from those who may have lied about their #criminal convictions or membership in illegal groups like the #Nazi party, or #communists during #McCarthyism, on their citizenship applications.
Analysis: "What went by 'McCarthyism' was not just one man or one party, it was the bipartisan consensus of our rulers."
Eg, The Smith Act, making membership in the Communist & Socialist Parties a crime, "was a 1940 product of FDR."
"The new McCarthy Era, like the old, has seen brazenly illegal jailings and deportations, false accusations with no evidence, & the destruction of professional careers."
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/06/13/the-new-mccarthyism-and-the-old/
#McCarthyism #Fascism #Racism #USPol #Trump #BipartisanRepression .
Analysis: "What went by 'McCarthyism' was not just one man or one party, it was the bipartisan consensus of our rulers."
Eg, The Smith Act, making membership in the Communist & Socialist Parties a crime, "was a 1940 product of FDR."
"The new McCarthy Era, like the old, has seen brazenly illegal jailings and deportations, false accusations with no evidence, & the destruction of professional careers."
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/06/13/the-new-mccarthyism-and-the-old/
#McCarthyism #Fascism #Racism #USPol #Trump #BipartisanRepression .
Analysis: "What went by 'McCarthyism' was not just one man or one party, it was the bipartisan consensus of our rulers."
Eg, The Smith Act, making membership in the Communist & Socialist Parties a crime, "was a 1940 product of FDR."
"The new McCarthy Era, like the old, has seen brazenly illegal jailings and deportations, false accusations with no evidence, & the destruction of professional careers."
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/06/13/the-new-mccarthyism-and-the-old/
#McCarthyism #Fascism #Racism #USPol #Trump #BipartisanRepression .
Analysis: "What went by 'McCarthyism' was not just one man or one party, it was the bipartisan consensus of our rulers."
"The new McCarthy Era, like the old, has seen brazenly illegal jailings and deportations, false accusations with no evidence, & the destruction of professional careers — this time magnified many times over."
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/06/13/the-new-mccarthyism-and-the-old/
it was axed when she appeared before the house un-american activities committee because she'd been a vocal opponent of mccarthyism & of racial segregation. 'to hell with this', she said (or, perhaps, something saltier), & she moved to paris until 1967.
#paris #hazelScott #HUAC #mcCarthyism #illustration
Even as the Trump regime appears poised to ultimately lose a number of cases revolving around instant visa revocations for anti-genocide foreign student protestors, Downmarket Mussolini's purse dog at State, Marco Rubio, is looking to expand the tactic to target Chinese foreign students; and the ominous context of this move suggests to me that we might be in for a bumpy ride if this really is going in the direction I think it's headed.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/china-us-revoke-visas-international-students
'This Will Hurt Us As Much As It Hurts Them': Trump Admin Says It Will Revoke Visas of Chinese Students
"The U.S. State Department announced on Wednesday that it is working with the Department of Homeland Security to "aggressively revoke" visas that have been issued to Chinese students—sparking a rebuke from China's government and anxiety among Chinese students.
The Trump administration is endeavoring to revoke visas for students that hail from China, "including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields," according to a short statement from the State Department. "We will also revise visa criteria to enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications from the People's Republic of China and Hong Kong."
Even taken at face value, this policy shift is authoritarian, racist, and alarming. The power Rubio is attempting to exert here is about protecting American national security in the event of a crisis on par with an impeding war; it's not intended as a method for the Trump regime to get back at China for criticism over Downmarket Mussolini's unhinged trade policies. Even under the most benign interpretation of Rubio's actions here, this is still Trump repurposing the apparatus of the American state to prosecute his personal grievances.
Of course, we as observers who just watched the Pork Reich use this exact same process to justify kidnapping and attempting to deport foreign student anti-genocide protestors as part of a larger authoritarian plot to use "fighting antisemitism" as a justification for installing a new McCarthyism, have no reason to assume the most benign scenario here. Are we to expect the US government to begin kidnapping Chinese students and shipping them to ICE private detention hellholes now? If that happens, how do you figure the Chinese government is going to feel about it? Regardless of what you think about Palestine and Hamas, they don't have nukes and international economic power; China does. Does anyone know what the phrase "critical fields," means in this context and does it bother you that it's so vague? Are we worried about Chinese students stealing our crappier AI technology or some bullshit? Does it seem rational to anyone who isn't a Sinophobe nazi to kick a hornet's nest like this one, because Trump had some feel bads about social media posts from Chinese officials?
While I wish I could stop there, in a Project Esther world every bit of repressive policy based on foreign relations and winger anticommunism is a possible vector for ideological policing and the elimination of what the nazis classify broadly as "the radical American left" - a group that includes Democrat politicians and apparently, the hosts of The View. The sleight of hand the regime is employing to conflate anti-Zinonism and opposition to a genocide with anti-Americanism and material support for our "enemies," can be just as easily applied to China and a very broad, Bircher definition of "communism." In fact, I'd argue decades of American anticommunist rhetoric would make that application even easier and more effective in the public discourse. If you take a look at what the folks behind the 1776 Commission, and Project 2025 define as "communism" there's an unreasonable argument that anyone advocating for racial, gender, or social equality is a communist. Ditto for folks advocating for regulations on capitalism, labor rights, or even the separation of church and state; the possibilities are pretty endless given what these folks call "communism." From there it's only a short little hop to "China is communism, therefore communism is China" and you've got a whole new application of Project Esther techniques to work with in your quest to crush all political opposition to the Trump regime.
Are these nazis really prepared to repurpose a global trade struggle with China to install a martial law-style police state? Who knows; but if you listen to guys like Stephen Miller talk for about five minutes, you'll realize why I think assuming they *don't* intend to go the full nine yards, is a very bad idea indeed.
Yesterday, I spent a little time on this account writing about the Trump regime, Project Esther, and the fascist American right's plan to use anti-terrorism laws to crush their political opposition. Unfortunately, I ran out of room to say everything I wanted to say so last night I expanded my thoughts over on NIDC and did the sourcing legwork.
https://www.ninaillingworth.com/2025/05/27/nina-bytes-trumps-cointelpro-looms-into-focus/
Nina-Bytes: Trump’s COINTELPRO Looms Into Focus
"This then brings us to the ominous reality so very few observers in the media seem to be grasping, namely that targeting the anti-genocide, pro-Palestine movement is merely the tip of the fascist spear in the Trump regime’s war on dissent and political opposition. The rhetoric, suppression techniques, and legal arguments that are being deployed against foreign anti-genocide student protestors as we speak are easy to replicate while targeting more or less the entire oppositional left in America, including milquetoast NGOs, aid groups, and likely even “liberal” political organizations like the Democratic Party. The broad and extremely vague nature of our terrorism laws leaves room for the Trump regime to label almost anyone a member of a terrorist organization, and define material support for that organization in any way they please. The authors of Project Esther are very clear that they consider opposition to capitalism, or the American state as embodied by the Trump administration, to be valid targets for those designations. If anti-genocide protest is “materially supporting Hamas,” then funding migrant support work is probably “materially supporting narco-terrorist gangs,” and speaking out against the US government can be “materially supporting” any group of “bad guys” around the globe that do the same. The possibilities for targeted, legalized repression are quite literally endless."
While I think anyone still arguing that the Trump regime is not fundamentally fascist in nature is engaging in one form of motivated reasoning or another, I still believe it's important to remember that this particular fascist movement remains firmly grounded in American historical, ideological, and cultural experiences at its core. Indeed, almost every aspect of Downmarket Mussolini's fascist agenda and the methods by which the regime is attempting to conduct it, has an administrative precedent in US political history; although that precedent will almost always come from the most reactionary and objectively shameful activities our government has ever engaged in. You don't have to take my word for it: Trump regime minions on your TV and Justice Department lawyers in court openly admit as much regularly.
There can be no doubt that Trump minions like Stephen Miller and Pam Bondi, are cribbing from America's white supremacist, anti-labor, anti-civil rights history; with a particular focus on the Second Red Scare, the Nixon administration's war on Civil Rights activists and student protestors, and the Bush administration's War on Terror. This synthesis of reaction, oppression, and executive overreach has allowed the Trump regime to create what many identify as a "new form of McCarthyism" empowered by the legalist logic and nativist, white supremacist sentiments underpinning America's "counterterrorism" apparatus, mass surveillance systems, and the national security state; by freely applying the almost legally meaningless "terrorist" label to protestors, student activists, and undocumented migrants, this administration has sought to render the judiciary and even the entire US Constitution, irrelevant.
Of course, none of this is happening in a vacuum, and a fascist Trump regime seeking to enshrine an executive branch dictatorship is fully aware that civil society will eventually understand what they're doing, and fight back. To prevent this they need a skeleton key to enable the active suppression and criminalization of dissidents, opposition groups, and civil rights activists the fascist right broadly classifies as "the radical left." Unfortunately if recent work to connect the dots in the second Trump era are any indication, the regime has already found that key in legally conflating opposing a genocide, with supporting Hamas; and its doing so by design in yet another scheme brought to you by the architects of Project 2025. If the opening salvos of Trump's war on American civil society can be describes as a "new McCarthyism" then I think it's fair to say that the Heritage Foundation's "Project Esther" can be best understood as the Trump regime's "new COINTELPRO."
Project Esther Is a McCarthy-Era Blueprint for Crushing the American Left
"Mainstream coverage of Project Esther has largely framed the document as an effort to crush the pro-Palestinian movement. It’s important to emphasize, however, that the threat Project Esther poses to the left more broadly is not a byproduct — it’s part of the plan’s core design. The text lays bare the McCarthyist nature of this political moment and underscores the urgent need for the left to mount a multipronged, coalitional defense.
At the center of Project Esther’s crosshairs are the people and organizations it dubs the “Hamas Support Network,” or HSN, though there’s no evidence that the entities it’s targeting actually support Hamas, or that they are even organized in any sort of a network. The playbook proposes a slew of recommendations for dismantling this fictional network, including deporting international students, purging pro-Palestine faculty from educational institutions, defunding organizations, increasing criminalization and promoting social ostracization of people that speak out in support of Palestinian rights. “Within the United States, the HSN receives the indispensable support of a vast network of activists and funders with a much more ambitious, insidious goal — the destruction of capitalism and democracy,” Project Esther claims."
Folks, after four months of watching the Trump regime pretend we're at war with a gang and opposing genocide is "materially supporting terrorism," I think we're past the point of pretending these guys aren't serious about the plans they wrote down and are clearly enacting now that Trump is president. Project Esther is the logical extension of every argument ghouls like Stephen Miller, Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, Tom Homan, and Seb Gorka have been making on your TV for weeks. They want to use FARA and RICO Act prosecutions to dismantle every aspect of organized resistance to Trump's fascist agenda under the guise of fighting "terrorism," and they are being quite clear that they consider opposition to capitalism and the American state to be fair game under that rubric.
#Communism is normal and you can talk to your friends about it.
Don’t let #McCarthyism from 100 years ago scare you into silence. People’s minds can be changed. Just don’t like, do stupid shit.
#palestine
#Zionists #repression #McCarthyism
@palestine
"Project Esther isn’t just about Palestine. Crafted by the Heritage Foundation, the same far right organization behind Project 2025, the playbook purports to provide a “national strategy to combat antisemitism" But by "antisemitism" they mean criticism of Israel or anti-Zionism.
"At the center of Project Esther’s crosshairs are the people and organizations it dubs the “Hamas Support Network”" all made up stuff
If only it weren't so darn dangerous to #Democracy, I'd say: yawn.
Same old, same old:
#TheRedScare and #McCarthyism are back.
Today in Labor History May 22, 1968: New York police broke through the barricades at Columbia University, busting the student occupations there. As a result, 998 were arrested and over 200 injured. Students were demanding a black studies program and an end to military recruitment and ROTC on campus. Sound familiar? However, today’s student protests are bringing back the worst of 1960s-‘70s police brutality and university intolerance for Free Speech along with McCarthy era firing, blacklisting and doxing of academics for the crime of criticizing the Israeli government, under bogus claims of antisemitism.
Today in Labor History May 13, 1960: San Francisco Police violently attacked university students who were nonviolently protesting HUAC (House Un-American Committee) hearings. After protesters were denied entrance to the meeting, police attacked and swept them out of City Hall's rotunda and down the stairs with fire hoses. 12 people hospitalized (including eight police, mostly from exhaustion). 64 were arrested. Charges were dropped against all but one, who was acquitted in a jury trial. The hearings were led by the infamous Joe McCarthy. They would come into union towns like Chicago, San Francisco and Seattle, and issue subpoenas to all the progressives and radicals in the town, especially union leaders, many of whom were communists, or had communist ties. The only defense was to take the Fifth Amendment. The consequence of that was that you would usually lose your job, your name would be plastered in the papers, and your kids would be mistreated in school. Alternatively, you could take the First, like the Hollywood Ten did. For that, you’d be held in contempt of court sent to prison.
Continuing to push a manufactured moral crisis about "antisemitism on college campuses" to justify the Trump regime's war on higher education, free speech, and protest rights, the fascist GOP are holding another round of HUAC-style "antisemitism" hearings; this time targeting the presidents of Haverford College, DePaul University, and California Polytechnic State University. In response to this latest perverse appropriation of Jewish identity and anti-hate activism to justify a genocide, ideological policing, and fascist repression of student activists, Congressional Democrats, free speech advocates, and Jewish peace activists are all speaking out against the conflation of anti-genocide activism with antisemitism, and these clownshow McCarthyite hearings as a whole.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/house-antisemitism-hearing
Jewish Voices for Palestine and Free Speech Slam House GOP 'Kangaroo Hearing' on Antisemitism
"Tali Beckwith-Cohen, a Jewish senior at Columbia-affiliated Barnard College, argued: "The Trump regime is using false allegations of antisemitism to disappear our friends, punish student protestors, and dismantle higher education. What we are seeing has nothing to do with keeping Jews safe, and everything to do with crushing dissent."
"Thousands of Jews on campuses across the country have spoken out in solidarity with the people of Gaza and we will not be silent," Beckwith-Cohen vowed.
JVPA political director Beth Miller contended that "the far-right does not care about Jewish safety."
"Trump and his allies in Congress are platforming neo-Nazis and Christian nationalists, all while pretending to care about antisemitism in order to take a hatchet to our communities and most basic freedoms," Miller added. "This is intended to silence the Palestinian rights movement, sow chaos, and sharpen authoritarian tools that will then be used to dismantle civil liberties and democracy itself."
Alright there's a lot of absolutely wild shit going on here, all of which contribute to the stunning DARVO-esque fascist unreality being created by this spectacle; so we've got to go through it all.
- Yes multiple GOP members sitting on this commission are either racists or antisemites themselves; including the chair, Michigan's own Tim Walberg who suggested during a recorded town hall that Israel should nuke Gaza like "Hiroshima and Nagasaki" after October 7th. Using an expansive definition of antisemitism that conflates opposition to Zionism and Israeli crimes against Palestine with antisemitism, the Republicans managed to extract groveling apologies from the University Presidents, who supported Republican lies and threw the free speech rights of their students and faculty to the wolves without too much provocation.
- Numerous Jewish students and anti-genocide activists accused the GOP members of the committee of appropriating Jewish pain and identity to justify a campaign of ideological policing, authoritarian repression, and illegal kidnapping of student protestors. This matters because while the Trump regime and pro-genocide mainstream media outlets have worked very hard to portray anti-genocide student protests as inherently antisemitic, the fact is that Jewish Americans are massively overrepresented in the anti-genocide protest movement on college campuses. Their voices are consistently erased from the discourse by an establishment working hard to manufacture consent for a US-backed genocide being conducted by Israel against Palestinians in Gaza.
- As former ACLU national legal director David Cole pointed out, anti-Israel advocacy and even actual antisemitic speech are still protected under the First Amendment; although obviously hate crimes and threats are not. Professor Cole also mentioned the disturbing parallels between this hearing and the House Un-American Activities Committee sessions from the days of McCarthyism. Finally, Cole drew the obvious connection between the GOP member's arguments and the Trump regimes larger authoritarian attempt to ideologically police and take academic control of American universities.
- Democrat Congresswoman Ilhan Omar also pointed out the direct connection between the committee's activities and the Trump regime's ongoing campaign of kidnapping, detainment, and attempted deportation of noncitizen activists to suppress anti-genocide protest and speech. Additionally *multiple* other Democrat politicians on the committee expressed disbelief that the clearly-cynical "party of 'very fine people on both sides' or ' Jewish space lasers' does not give a damn about stopping antisemitism," particularly while openly and disdainfully neglecting to bright forth literally any other type of civil rights investigation or legal case against marginalized people being victimized anywhere else in American life.
“US: Zio-McCarthyism, a 21st century political purge that has dangerous overtones”
by Omar Suleiman in Middle East Eye
“Zio-McCarthyism is not just about Palestine. It is about what kind of country the United States is becoming”
https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/us-zio-mccarthyism-21st-century-political-purge
In what may well be one of the most shameful episodes in American legal history since the abolition of chattel slavery, a Louisiana immigration judge has ruled that the Trump regime can continue its blatantly unconstitutional deportation of a lawful permanent US resident and political prisoner, Mahmoud Khalil, pretty much because Marco Rubio says so:
https://www.commondreams.org/news/mahmoud-khalil-deportable
'Very Dark Stuff': Judge Rules Palestine Activist Mahmoud Khalil Can Be Deported
"A U.S. immigration judge in Louisiana on Friday ruled that Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent U.S. resident and former Columbia University graduate student arrested last month after protesting Israel's genocidal assault on Gaza, can be deported, a decision that came despite the Trump administration admitting the imminently expecting father committed no crime and was being targeted solely for constitutionally protected speech.
Assistant Chief Immigration Judge Jamee Comans said that she lacked the legal authority to question the determination by Secretary of State Marco Rubio that Khalil was deportable. Earlier this week, Comans gave the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) until Friday to produce evidence that Khalil is eligible for deportation.
No such evidence was provided other than Rubio's assertion that he reserves the right to order Khalil's expulsion under the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which empowers the secretary of state to expel noncitizens whose presence in the United States is deemed detrimental to U.S. foreign policy interests."
As the article itself notes, this isn't a final victory for the Trump administration; Khalil can and will continue to fight this, and most legal experts seem pretty confident this is all going to end up in front of the Supreme Court before the government can actually deport him; although why the court's 6-3 fascist high composition gives anyone confidence that they'll stop the regime's fascist and blatantly unconstitutional ideological policing and repression, is somewhat beyond me. As horrifying as this decision is, a random immigration judge doesn't get to say "surprise, fascism is legal now" even if that's more or less what this ruling is pointing to.
With that having been noted however, I need folks to understand what the regime's successful (for now) argument is here, because if you don't get that, it's impossible to grasp just how far these nazis clearly mean to go with this. The government is admitting that Mahmoud Khalil had a legal right to be in the United States, and committed no crime whatsoever. They are expressly stating that he's being targeted for deportation because of his political beliefs, and opposition to the US-back genocide being conducted by Israel, against Palestinians in Gaza as we speak; which they have chosen to define as antisemitism for political and propaganda reasons. This is a fundamental denial of Khalil's First Amendment rights which regardless of what you heard on Fox News, apply to everyone in the United States, not just people born there.
Despite this however, the regime is arguing that they have the right to deport Khalil because the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 gives the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, the right to unilaterally, even unconstitutionally, order Khalil's expulsion; citing that the Act empowers him "to expel noncitizens whose presence in the United States is deemed detrimental to U.S. foreign policy interests." Who decides what US foreign policy interests are, has a right to to declare those decisions state secrets, and can change those potentially secret objectives at a whim? The Trump regime. Who decides which actions are "detrimental" to U.S. foreign policy decisions and who should be deported for them? Well the regime's argument is that it's Marco Rubio or whoever happens to be Trump's Secretary of State, and that he can do it by a whim, without explaining or justifying his decisions whatsoever.
So you caught that right? The regime can violate the constitutional rights of even a lawful US resident, because Marco Rubio feels a way, and he's not required to provide any more proof than "I said so." And yesterday, a U.S. immigration judge agreed with that logic. All of which now begs the question, what, or who, will Little Marco decide is "detrimental to U.S. foreign policy decisions" tomorrow?
In an early March announcement that was underreported at the time (but just became a lot more relevant in early April) the Trump regime revealed its intention to collect and presumably monitor social media handles of folks applying to legally work and reside in the United States:
https://theintercept.com/2025/03/23/trump-immigrants-social-media-citizenship-green-card/
Trump Wants Immigrants on U.S. Soil to Hand Over Social Media Accounts to Apply for Citizenship
"Collecting social media information, according to the USCIS proposal first posted March 5, is necessary “for the enhanced identity verification, vetting and national security screening.”
The proposal specifically cites Trump’s January 20 executive order, which advocates have warned goes well beyond the Muslim travel ban from Trump’s first term, which targeted people living abroad.
The new executive order stated that “the United States must ensure that admitted aliens and aliens otherwise already present in the United States do not bear hostile attitudes toward its citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles, and do not advocate for, aid, or support designated foreign terrorists and other threats to our national security.”
USCIS said the social media handles it collects would be used to determine if people applying for a variety of immigration statuses pose a “security or public-safety threat.”"
Of course, observers immediately noted the connection between this proposed policy and Trump's ideological policing, kidnaping, and attempted deportation of foreign students who participated in anti-Genocide protests and/or oppose the Trump regime:
"In light of Columbia University protester Mahmoud Khalil’s ongoing detention, one official from a Muslim civil rights group said the new policy poses special danger for critics of Israel and the Trump administration.
“This policy would disparately impact Muslim and Arab applicants seeking U.S. citizenship that have voiced support for Palestinian human rights,” said Robert McCaw, director of government affairs at the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “Collecting the social media identifiers of any potential green card applicants or citizens is the means to silencing their lawful speech.”
Furthermore, as a representative of the EFF presciently observed, there are few if any limits on the scope of what the government can do with this data if they get it, and modern AI technology allows for the regime to ideologically police and target a terrifying number of people who oppose our fascist overlords. It's also, strictly speaking, a violation of Constitutional rights:
"The policy proposal does not sketch out limits on how USCIS can use its newly acquired data, according to Saira Hussain, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Hussain said she was particularly concerned that the government might use artificial intelligence or other automated tools to punish speech it dislikes, pointing to a news report that the State Department is using AI to revoke the visas of people who allegedly express “pro-Hamas” sentiments.
Hussain said she feared a chilling effect, where people applying for a change in status refrain from speaking about potentially controversial issues.
“Anybody who is within the bounds of the United States has First Amendment rights,” she said. “The Constitution applies whether you are somebody who is a citizen or somebody who is a green card holder who is here in the United States. I think that this administration is trying to chip away at that notion, but that is very much what First Amendment jurisprudence has been under the courts.”
Finally, it should be pointed out that the regime's proposal gives no indication whatsoever of when the government would stop recording and monitoring the social media activities of the people it's targeting:
"CAIR’s McCaw said he worried that the policy could be used to continue tracking people’s activity on social media even after they become naturalized citizens.
“There’s no clear sign on when this intrusion into our electronics and communications will end,” he said."
For an example (both good, and bad) of the type of analysis I'm talking about, take a look at this March 30th piece by Kenan Malik in The Guardian:
Just like McCarthy, Trump spreads fear everywhere before picking off his targets
"Seventy years on from McCarthyism, America seems to be entering such a moment. Over the past month, we have seen the mass deportation to a notorious foreign jail of hundreds of people declared to be illegal immigrants and gang members, without evidence or due process; the arrest, detention and threatened deportation of foreign students, including Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Momodou Taal and Yunseo Chung, for protesting about the war in Gaza; the blacklisting of law firms representing clients of whom Donald Trump does not approve; the mass sackings of federal workers.
Fear works here in two ways. The targets of repression are groups about whom it is easier to create fear, and so easier to deprive of rights and due process. Doing so then creates a wider climate of fear in which people become less willing to speak out, and not just about Palestine. Already, “whole segments of American society [are] running scared”, as one observer put it.
Institutions such as universities, Schrecker concluded about the 1950s, “did not fight McCarthyism” but “contributed to it”, not only through dismissals and blacklists but also through accepting “the legitimacy of what the congressional committees and other official investigators were doing”, thereby conferring “respectability upon the most repressive elements” of the process.
It’s a process repeating itself today. Earlier this month, after cancelling $400m (£310m) in federal grants and contracts, Trump made a series of demands of Columbia University, including that it change its disciplinary rules, place the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies department under “academic receivership” and adopt the contested International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism that its own lead drafter, Kenneth Stern, condemns as having been “weaponised” into “a blunt instrument to label anyone an antisemite” and to “go after pro-Palestinian speech”. Last week, Columbia capitulated."
On some levels, this is great analysis; Malik's examination of the role fear and "anticipatory obedience" had in both the Red Scare and the installation of Trump's would-be fascist dictatorship, is spot on. He's absolutely right to suggest that Trump's attempts to transform society and seize control of its institutions to shape them in his (fascist) vision is well in line with the effects of McCarthyism, and that the capitulation of the establishment was presaged by the exact same thing during the Red Scare. By that same measure however, do a quick page search for "fascism" or "dictatorship" and you won't find either word in this article. There's nothing wrong with giving readers a historical analogy to get a handle on what is happening in our society, but without the additional context of where this new (old) brand of Trumpian McCarthyism is going and what purpose it serves, all you're really accomplishing is telling readers to relax and remain calm because "we've been here before."
