Today Stephen Kruiser, a conservative gadfly, began his daily with “The GOP Midterm Theme Should Be ‘Joe McCarthy Was Right'” and later writes, “Democrats and their flying monkeys in the mainstream media are… still badmouthing Joe McCarthy after seven decades and he was right about everything.”
That is offensive and ignorant. Ann Coulter has made similar claims over the years. Joe McCarthy was right about just one thing: there were Communists and communist sympathizers in the U.S. government then and there probably are now. He was wrong in his methods, he was dishonest in his tactics, he was hostile to freedom of speech and freedom of thought, he was an anti-Semite and an anti-gay bigot, he weaponized guilt by association, and his response to criticism or opposition was exactly the same as so many minority politicians and women like Kamala Harris, Jasmine Crockett and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reflexively respond to opposition today. They cry “Racist!” or “Sexist!” Joe cried “Communist sympathizer!” It’s the same tactic.
Senator McCarthy waved papers in the air that he said contained confirmed Communists, but never revealed the names. The consensus is that the papers were probably blank. He wanted all homosexuals fired from sensitive positions because they were, he said, vulnerable to blackmail by Communist agents seeking to recruit them to undermine the United States. (So was being an alcoholic, like Joe.) He cynically exploited Cold War tensions to build his political influence and power, and aligned himself with the same forces in the nation that created blacklists.
McCarthy was the epitome of the patriotic demagogue. “McCarthyism,” which denotes the practice of wielding unsubstantiated accusations and the defamation of political opponents through calculated fear-mongering, was a fair description of the Senator’s methods, and is a perfect description of what the Left’s Axis of Unethical Conduct has been practicing since 2016. You know, like…
Extolling Joe McCarthy, an all-time Ethics Villain and a blight on our political history, is as repulsive as defending Graham Platner, Tim Walz or New York’s Mayor Mamdani. It is historically and ethically ignorant.
Post Script: As much as I view “iconic” Washington Post cartoonist Herb Block as an over-rated partisan hack, he certainly had Joe McCarthy pegged early on. “Herblock” habitually portrayed McCarthy with a bucket of tar and a dripping paint brush, a vivid image of his methods.
Ethics Alarms 
Amen and amen. I saw these types of posts yesterday and was astonished that people would think that McCarthy was any kind of hero just because he was right in general.
Joe McCarthy was right about just one thing: there were Communists and communist sympathizers in the U.S. government then and there probably are now.
Would that every article about Tail Gunner Joe began with that preface. I’d delete “just,” but I won’t quibble.
He was much closer to right than his detractors assert. He was just closer to wrong than his supporters assert.
Academia and journalism and and entire political party aren’t completely overrun with communists because the threat was as tiny as Joe McCarthy detractors claim.
Oh, the threat was and is real. What Joe and his defenders choose to ignore is that WrongThink and having unpopular, offensive, un-American or otherwise threatening beliefs and opinions can’t be stopped by the government directly or indirectly. “The Constitution isn’t a suicide pact” is a great line, but it was also in a SCOTUS dissent. The Citizens United opinion that the Hawaiian Supreme Court judge denigrated stands as another monument to our holding free speech above the threats it sometimes creates.