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.
I feel that you need to add that Communists and Communist sympathizers were in the government, they control academia, they are rife in the media. I went to public schools in 4 different states and was told in all of them by the teachers and the textbooks that Joe McCarthy was wrong, there were no Communists in any of those institutions. I was also taught by the teachers and the textbooks that the Rosenbaums were innocent and only executed because Republicans were bigoted against immigrants.
When I got to college, I found that my state university had student groups for the Marxists, the Trotskyists, the Stalinists, and the Maoists (as well as a PLO student affiliate!). Capitalism was considered evil and claiming it wasn’t could get you disciplined. Our DEI policies, intersectionality, and postmodernism are Communist at their core. Our psychology field seems to define everything in Communistic terms (neurodivergent was coined to bring intersectionality to neuroscience, for example). Everything that categorizes people into oppressors and oppressed is rooted in Communism. I found that McCarthy was right that Communists and Communist sympathizers are everywhere and they want to destroy American culture and society.
McCarthy was a villain, but so were his opponents.
I heard all those things, too, but they were based on incomplete information and, certainly, bias against conservatives. I don’t know how old you are, Michael, but the collapse of the U.S.S.R in late 1991 brought to light the number of Communists in the government, as well as clarifying information on the Rosenbergs.
Prior to that, those on the Left had 35 years to tie McCarthy’s accuracy to his methods and deny.
I know what Michael’s saying. At least I think I do: Joe McCarthy was right about the threat and wrong in the way he handled it. What AM Golden is saying, however, I’m not sure. Golden seems to be disagreeing with Michael, but on what exactly — who knows. I guess that’s Golden’s clever way of challenging his readers to find their own meaning in the universe…
AM golden looks to me like he agreed and offered additional perspective.
Great. I agree with you too.