Free Republic

'I am tempted to start my talk by saying: “I have here in my hands a list of names.” That, of course, was the phrase made famous by Senator Joseph McCarthy, who built his political career in the early 1950s, the history books tell us, on exaggerating the extent of Communist subversion of American life. He also gave his name to a phenomenon that has become a term of opprobrium in American political life. To accuse someone of McCarthyism or to label a person a McCarthyite is not to issue a compliment. The implication is that a person so named...

Out of the public eye and far from the daily headlines, a fierce verbal battle is currently being waged about the course of American policy in the long death struggle with Moscow that we call the Cold War. At ground zero of this new dispute is author Diana West, whose recent book, American Betrayal (St. Martin's), is a hard- hitting critique of the strategy toward the Soviet Union pursued in the 1940s by President Franklin Roosevelt, his top assistant Harry Hopkins, and various of their colleagues. Ms. West in particular stresses the infiltration of the government of that era by...

Syndicated columnist Diana West says the ultimate conclusion of her new book shocked even her. “Americans have been betrayed … by our leaders going back to FDR’s administration in the 1930s because we were penetrated by Soviet agents to such an extent that our policies and, indeed I argue, our character as a nation was subverted,” she explained in an interview with The Daily Caller’s Ginni Thomas about her book, “American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character.” “I don’t believe we won World War II,” West added. “I believe that we were actually carrying out Soviet strategy due...

Freshman Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas is just the latest in a long series of public figures to be reviled for "McCarthyism" following his recent questioning of Chuck Hagel, President Obama's nominee for secretary of defense. The response? Conservatives have rushed to defend their own against the charge. To understate the case, that's not enough. It's time to debunk McCarthyism itself. No matter how much evidence vindicating the late Sen. Joe McCarthy comes out, what we call McCarthyism remains anathema in American life. Simply to utter the word is to deep-freeze debate, even thought itself. Even as we...

The truth is quite different. Six weeks earlier, Welch himself was quoted in the New York Times, confirming that Fisher had belonged to the communist front and that, as a result, Welch himself had “relieved (Fisher) from duty.” Welch’s hearing-room histrionics, in other words, were a lot of hot air. But they worked. To this day, the truth remains lost to most people, while this thinnest fiction is immortal...

“Senator Cruz’s substantive point was absolutely correct: in the mid-1990s, the Harvard Law School faculty included numerous self-described proponents of ‘critical legal studies’ — a school of thought explicitly derived from Marxism – and they far outnumbered Republicans.”

Most Europeans are unlikely to be familiar with the facts behind the American term “McCarthyism.” They probably know it describes something very bad in American politics—the “Communist witch hunts” of more than half a century ago. They may also know that simply uttering the term, like casting a spell, stops all debate cold by associating someone with the eponymous Joseph McCarthy. As the story goes, he was himself very bad. After all, he conducted those long ago “Communist witch hunts,” ruining his name in perpetuity. This probably exhausts general knowledge. But here’s a secret: Most Americans know little more than...

Rep. Allen West (R-FL) overstated the case when he recently declared “I believe there is about 78 to 81 members of the Democratic Party that are members of the Communist Party.” He clarified his assertion by stating that he was actually referring to members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus which, he contended, were Marxist in their orientation. At least on that point he was absolutely right. The Congressional Progressive Caucus which, as Rep. Allen West claimed, includes about 78 members of Congress, maintains a direct affiliation with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) which is the American branch of Socialist...

Likud MK Ofir Akunis, who sponsored the bill to limit foreign funding to Israeli human rights organization, stood behind Senator Joseph's McCarthy's actions in the 1950s. Speaking on Sunday on the "London and Kirshenbaum" television show on Channel 10, Akunis said McCarthy – who in the 1950s presided over a committee that investigated Americans suspected of harboring Communist views – said "was right in every word, the fact is - there were Soviet agents."

Rachel Maddow has engaged in a strange--sinister?--irony. On her MSNBC show last night, one moment Maddow was condemning the late Senator Joe McCarthy for encouraging people to "turn in their friends" in the entertainment industry. The next moment, Maddow was urging her viewers to . . . turn in someone in the entertainment industry--the animator of Mike Huckabee's history series for kids. View video here.

In the late 1940s; Russian spies infiltrated the deepest levels of the US government, including the Rosenbergs who had stolen the plans to the nuclear bomb. America was threatened by a ruthless enemy in Soviet Communism that would not stop until the world was enslaved. When Senator Joseph McCarthy learned of the Russian infiltration of Washington, DC, he was determined to take the evidence public to the American people. In his famous speech on February 9th, 1950, McCarthy brought public a list of 57 known communists working for the state department. These revelations took the American public by storm. Out...

....Mr. Walker’s conduct has provoked a level of divisiveness and bitter partisan hostility the likes of which have not been seen in this state since at least the Vietnam War. Many citizens are furious at their governor and his party, not only because of profound policy differences, but because these particular Republicans have exercised power in abusively nontransparent ways that represent such a radical break from the state’s tradition of open government. ..as a centrist and a lifelong independent — I have found myself returning...to the question posed by the lawyer Joseph N. Welch during the hearings that finally helped...

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) isn't alone in having trouble understanding how the government is organized. In a Sunday article posted on the Chicago Sun-Times's Web site, staff reporter Mary Houlihan credits the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) with running the House Committee on Un-American Activities. That would have been quite an accomplishment, given the fact McCarthy never served in the House of Representatives. Houlihan writes of photographer Milton Rogovin, who died last month. After military service during World War II, Rogovin "organized a chapter of the optometrists’ union and served as librarian for the Communist Party of Buffalo." "Then the...

It's apparent that the recent media attacks on Sarah Palin have, for the first time, actually drawn blood. Palin's negatives have shot up substantially, rising 7 points from 49% to 56%. The proximate cause is held to be the fact that she defended herself against the charge of complicity in murder in the Tucson shootings, along with engaging in some unclear variety of anti-Semitism by using the term "blood libel." It's safe to say that no other current politician would ever be held to such standards. This slump is surely temporary -- no more permanent than Obama's miniscule "leap" in...

AFL-CIO thug, Richard Trumka has compared Sarah Palin to Joseph McCarthy–and that’s supposed to be a bad thing. "AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, speaking to the Alaska AFL-CIO in Anchorage today, will take a swipe at Palin for her employment of the term ‘union thugs,’ according to prepared remarks." "Palin, he said, has come ‘close to calling for violence,” and will ‘go down in history like McCarthy.’" No she won’t. We now have the internet and citizen journalists. Palin won’t have to wait fifty years to be vindicated as the late senator did. Liberals, evidently, have not yet been brought up...

Glenn Beck has beseeched us not to compare him to McCarthy. He accused Anthony Weiner of using Joe McCarthy “tactics” when Weiner launched his unsuccessful and short lived smear campaign against Beck’s sponsor, Goldline. Beck, like too many commentators who ought to know better, has long spewed the entirely false narrative about Senator Joe McCarthy. Until his recent McCarthy Awakening. Liberals have been embarrassing themselves for decades with this McCarthy business. Point out an unsavory association, and they squeal like stuck pigs about the scourge of McCarthyism. In the mind of the liberal, Senator McCarthy was a deranged conservative finding...

Paul Krugman made a stupid argument to the effect that Republican leaders were encouraging political violence. Actually I called the argument idiotic. Krugman's evidence consisted entirely of the most ordinary sorts of political metaphors. Krugman himself was guilty of the same, and it turns out that President Obama was as well. That looks to me like self-defeating rhetoric. Now we see the same from MSNBC clown Chris Matthews. By his own argument, Matthews is worse than Joe McCarthy. What this shows, of course, is that more than one liberal intellectual has rendered himself incoherent. Liberals are searching for evidence that...

WASHINGTON -- The spirit of Christmas seems to have escaped Congress, maybe even the country. Have you ever encountered such mean spiritedness and political conniving as are now on display on Capitol Hill? In the past, we have had great philosophical divisions in the struggle for civil rights, especially when southern legislators ran the show. In praise of democracy, fortunately they lost. And of course there also was the "red scare" fomented by Sen. Joe McCarthy, R-Wis., in the 1950s when he led the commie-hunting movement that ended up victimizing government officials, academia and Hollywood. We recovered from that, too....

Our topic this week concerns enemy tactics against the United States and the urgent necessity to fight back. The occasion is the re-release of Blacklisted by History. Therein, author M. Stanton Evans — whose focus is Senator Joseph McCarthy — gives us a fascinating tutorial on the Soviet effort to undermine our country before, during, and after the "McCarthy era," and some lessons that can be learned as today we face an alliance of the hard left and the Islamofascist threat. At a private discussion late last year, the topic of internal security arose with a focus on the "political...

On the day I born, June 9th, 1954, Senator Joseph McCarthy was asked the famous question; “Have you no sense of decency sir?”. Some members of the media who saw an opening, pounced on the opportunity, and never looked back. This would become the beginning of the end of the anti-communist mood in America. It would be the birth of terms like McCarthyism, Redbaiting, and Blacklisting. The heirs of this movement are much more numerous today than in 1954, and the true journalists have been replaced by mere actors, playing the part of journalists. We have gone from a nation...