Reds Under the Bed

Joe McCarthy was right. Contemporary Democrats prove it.

Ever think about what America would look like if Joe McCarthy hadn't been portrayed as a kook and a pariah by Democrats and their allies in the media?

I do.

I recently came across an interesting article published in the Washington Post in 1996 by Nicholas von Hoffman, one of the prominent critics of Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy and those who fought against communist infiltration in both public and private sectors. There's absolutely no chance that Hoffman's article, headlined "Was McCarthy Right About the Left?" (still available on the Post's website), would be published today, especially considering how the Post and the New York Times have become the American equivalents of Izvestiya and Pravda.

Hoffman didn't mince words:

"Where the dominant form of polite liberalism thrived, the accusers who had named names and pointed out communist spies were scorned as despicable vermin... They were dismissed as adventurers, opportunists, cat's paws of reaction, psychos, creeps, blackmailers... But in the last year, as though from a buried, toxic waste dump, poisons, moving with the slow capillary action of history long hidden, are hiccupping up a different truth."

He continued:

"The materials that first made their way to the surface in the early 1990s... provided proof past peradventure that the Communist Party of the United States was subsidized by the Soviet government and used as a base for extensive espionage... The Age of McCarthyism, it turns out, was not the simple witch hunt of the innocent by the malevolent as two generations of high school and college students have been taught."

Make that four or five generations of students by 2024, including even grade school.

Long story short, ole Tailgunner Joe was right. And the evidence he was right is all around us today - in our government, academia, healthcare, business, our supposedly free press, and most certainly in our politics. There were Reds under the beds all along.

He might not have been explicitly and specifically right (having all the right people and their numbers in government completely accurate), but he was certainly directionally correct. The Left used each mistake to scream, "Look! The Senator is crazy! He made a mistake, and you must ignore him! He must be shunned!"

What McCarthy didn't truly grasp is that the issue wasn't just individual infiltrators; it was the communist ideology being spread and mainstreamed in small bites by radicals, academics, activists, community organizers, and even high school teachers. The Summer of Love in Haight-Ashbury was more like the Summer of Stalin.

The various proponents of Critical Theory, anti-capitalist anarchists, and communists haven't quite conquered America yet, though they are making ground (metaphorically speaking like Nazis marching on Paris), but their "going around" strategy is certainly effective. Instead of attacking American institutions and the Constitution directly, they've waged an insurgency, taking their lead from what's often referred to as Antonio Gramsci's "long march through the institutions" (although it was actually Alfred Willi Rudolf "Rudi" Dutschke, a radical West German sociologist and communist activist, who popularized this concept).

Over the years, teaching Western Civilization (when it was taught at all) has been replaced with a pedagogy of hatred towards the West, focusing solely on the negatives, and when the demand exceeded the supply of negatives, additional negatives were invented.

Now, communism is accepted as normal when it should be treated as the crime against nature it is.

Joe McCarthy was right, and America would be a very different place if people had listened.