Spoon feed a kid socialism from infancy and you’re going to end up with a grown up socialist. Baby boomers get a bad rap on this. We did not invent socialism. It existed in this country in abundance before we ever came along. I think the failure of McCarthy to root out communism was the final nail in the coffin. After the “have you no decency” speech, democrats and their fellow travelers in Hollywood and the media began the brainwashing in earnest and it turned a lot of us into libs, me included. When you’re ten-years-old, you’re susceptible to it.
McCarthy was bushwhacked. Communists had already infiltrated the media from movies to radio and they gang raped him in the press. His own personal weaknesses attributed to his fall and to the continuing deception regarding the Red Scare, something that was real, but started before the Roosevelt Administration.
McCarthy came to a machine gun fight with a rubber knife. They were ready for him.