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#McCarthyism

2 posts2 participants0 posts today
James M Branum - יעקב מתתיהו ☮<p><a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/dhs-task-force-scouring-foreign-students-social-media-rcna198532" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">nbcnews.com/politics/national-</span><span class="invisible">security/dhs-task-force-scouring-foreign-students-social-media-rcna198532</span></a></p><p><a href="https://c.im/tags/Fascism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Fascism</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/McCarthyism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>McCarthyism</span></a></p>
AnarchoNinaAnalyzes<p>In an early March announcement that was underreported at the time (but just became a lot more relevant in early April) the Trump regime revealed its intention to collect and presumably monitor social media handles of folks applying to legally work and reside in the United States:</p><p><a href="https://theintercept.com/2025/03/23/trump-immigrants-social-media-citizenship-green-card/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">theintercept.com/2025/03/23/tr</span><span class="invisible">ump-immigrants-social-media-citizenship-green-card/</span></a></p><p>Trump Wants Immigrants on U.S. Soil to Hand Over Social Media Accounts to Apply for Citizenship</p><p>"Collecting social media information, according to the USCIS proposal first posted March 5, is necessary “for the enhanced identity verification, vetting and national security screening.”</p><p>The proposal specifically cites Trump’s January 20 executive order, which advocates have warned goes well beyond the Muslim travel ban from Trump’s first term, which targeted people living abroad.</p><p>The new executive order stated that “the United States must ensure that admitted aliens and aliens otherwise already present in the United States do not bear hostile attitudes toward its citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles, and do not advocate for, aid, or support designated foreign terrorists and other threats to our national security.”</p><p>USCIS said the social media handles it collects would be used to determine if people applying for a variety of immigration statuses pose a “security or public-safety threat.”"</p><p>Of course, observers immediately noted the connection between this proposed policy and Trump's ideological policing, kidnaping, and attempted deportation of foreign students who participated in anti-Genocide protests and/or oppose the Trump regime:</p><p>"In light of Columbia University protester Mahmoud Khalil’s ongoing detention, one official from a Muslim civil rights group said the new policy poses special danger for critics of Israel and the Trump administration.</p><p>“This policy would disparately impact Muslim and Arab applicants seeking U.S. citizenship that have voiced support for Palestinian human rights,” said Robert McCaw, director of government affairs at the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “Collecting the social media identifiers of any potential green card applicants or citizens is the means to silencing their lawful speech.”</p><p>Furthermore, as a representative of the EFF presciently observed, there are few if any limits on the scope of what the government can do with this data if they get it, and modern AI technology allows for the regime to ideologically police and target a terrifying number of people who oppose our fascist overlords. It's also, strictly speaking, a violation of Constitutional rights:</p><p>"The policy proposal does not sketch out limits on how USCIS can use its newly acquired data, according to Saira Hussain, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.</p><p>Hussain said she was particularly concerned that the government might use artificial intelligence or other automated tools to punish speech it dislikes, pointing to a news report that the State Department is using AI to revoke the visas of people who allegedly express “pro-Hamas” sentiments.</p><p>Hussain said she feared a chilling effect, where people applying for a change in status refrain from speaking about potentially controversial issues.</p><p>“Anybody who is within the bounds of the United States has First Amendment rights,” she said. “The Constitution applies whether you are somebody who is a citizen or somebody who is a green card holder who is here in the United States. I think that this administration is trying to chip away at that notion, but that is very much what First Amendment jurisprudence has been under the courts.”</p><p>Finally, it should be pointed out that the regime's proposal gives no indication whatsoever of when the government would stop recording and monitoring the social media activities of the people it's targeting:</p><p>"CAIR’s McCaw said he worried that the policy could be used to continue tracking people’s activity on social media even after they become naturalized citizens.</p><p>“There’s no clear sign on when this intrusion into our electronics and communications will end,” he said."</p><p><a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/Fascism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Fascism</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/DHS" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>DHS</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/ICE" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ICE</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/Trump" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Trump</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/AI" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>AI</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/WhiteNationalism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WhiteNationalism</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/SocialMedia" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>SocialMedia</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/OnlineSurveillance" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>OnlineSurveillance</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/Immigration" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Immigration</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/MigrantRights" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>MigrantRights</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/Islamophoba" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Islamophoba</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/Palestine" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Palestine</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/Genocide" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Genocide</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/PoliceState" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>PoliceState</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/McCarthyism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>McCarthyism</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/USCIS" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>USCIS</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/Nativism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Nativism</span></a></p>
AnarchoNinaAnalyzes<p>For an example (both good, and bad) of the type of analysis I'm talking about, take a look at this March 30th piece by Kenan Malik in The Guardian:</p><p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/30/just-like-mccarthy-trump-spreads-fear-everywhere-before-picking-off-his-targets" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">theguardian.com/commentisfree/</span><span class="invisible">2025/mar/30/just-like-mccarthy-trump-spreads-fear-everywhere-before-picking-off-his-targets</span></a></p><p>Just like McCarthy, Trump spreads fear everywhere before picking off his targets</p><p>"Seventy years on from McCarthyism, America seems to be entering such a moment. Over the past month, we have seen the mass deportation to a notorious foreign jail of hundreds of people declared to be illegal immigrants and gang members, without evidence or due process; the arrest, detention and threatened deportation of foreign students, including Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Momodou Taal and Yunseo Chung, for protesting about the war in Gaza; the blacklisting of law firms representing clients of whom Donald Trump does not approve; the mass sackings of federal workers.</p><p>Fear works here in two ways. The targets of repression are groups about whom it is easier to create fear, and so easier to deprive of rights and due process. Doing so then creates a wider climate of fear in which people become less willing to speak out, and not just about Palestine. Already, “whole segments of American society [are] running scared”, as one observer put it.</p><p>Institutions such as universities, Schrecker concluded about the 1950s, “did not fight McCarthyism” but “contributed to it”, not only through dismissals and blacklists but also through accepting “the legitimacy of what the congressional committees and other official investigators were doing”, thereby conferring “respectability upon the most repressive elements” of the process.</p><p>It’s a process repeating itself today. Earlier this month, after cancelling $400m (£310m) in federal grants and contracts, Trump made a series of demands of Columbia University, including that it change its disciplinary rules, place the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies department under “academic receivership” and adopt the contested International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism that its own lead drafter, Kenneth Stern, condemns as having been “weaponised” into “a blunt instrument to label anyone an antisemite” and to “go after pro-Palestinian speech”. Last week, Columbia capitulated."</p><p>On some levels, this is great analysis; Malik's examination of the role fear and "anticipatory obedience" had in both the Red Scare and the installation of Trump's would-be fascist dictatorship, is spot on. He's absolutely right to suggest that Trump's attempts to transform society and seize control of its institutions to shape them in his (fascist) vision is well in line with the effects of McCarthyism, and that the capitulation of the establishment was presaged by the exact same thing during the Red Scare. By that same measure however, do a quick page search for "fascism" or "dictatorship" and you won't find either word in this article. There's nothing wrong with giving readers a historical analogy to get a handle on what is happening in our society, but without the additional context of where this new (old) brand of Trumpian McCarthyism is going and what purpose it serves, all you're really accomplishing is telling readers to relax and remain calm because "we've been here before." </p><p><a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/Trump" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Trump</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/Fascism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Fascism</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/McCarthyism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>McCarthyism</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/Collaboration" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Collaboration</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/RedScare" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>RedScare</span></a></p>
AnarchoNinaAnalyzes<p>Recently, a number of media analysts who seem to have forgotten fascism is a word, have looked towards the dark days of McCarthyism in the US to find historical comparisons for the Trump regime's fascist attempts to transform American society into a white ethnostate dictatorship. There are valid reasons to use this comparison as there *are* eerie parallels to be found between the McCarthyist American right's ever expanding war against made up "communist infiltrators" and both Trump's actions, and the responses to it from a mainstream establishment far more committed to profit than civil rights; including the weaponization of fear to silence objections and quell dissent, the pre-marking of folks ideologically opposed to fascism for reprisal, and the willing capitulation in advance of much of the US establishment to a fascist agenda. Placed in the proper context, which includes noting that the Trump regime is merely installing a fascist dictatorship through a new type of McCarthyism, the analogy is quite useful for getting people to understand how the regime is operating, and how its methods might be countered.</p><p>The problem of course is that context is often missing. Few if any of the folks referencing McCarthyism would be willing to admit that even McCarthyism was just another fascist takeover project designed to eradicate dissent under the guise of "anti-communism." Hell, you can still find articles about Senator Joe McCarthy using conspiracy theories to defend Nazi war criminals who slaughtered American soldiers on the Smithsonian website (<a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/senator-mccarthys-nazi-problem-180975174/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">smithsonianmag.com/history/sen</span><span class="invisible">ator-mccarthys-nazi-problem-180975174/</span></a>) - at least until Trump deletes them. In that context, the use of McCarthyism as a more genteel accusation than fascism, which is how a lot of folks writing in mainstream sources appear to be using it, is nonsensical; McCarthyism was just a project to install fascism in America.</p><p>How successful that project was depends a lot of whether or not you think it ended with McCarthy's fall, the defeat of Goldwater in the 1964 US presidential election, the implosion of Nixon, or basically never; speaking for myself I'd say you don't get Trumpism without the US War on Terror, which in turn doesn't happen without the legacy of Vietnam and the COINTELPRO program, which ultimately spawned out of McCarthyism and the Cold War struggle against "communism." In that context, it's probably better to understand the modern American fascist movement as a descendent of McCarthyism, rather than a totally novel expression of it.</p><p>Furthermore, while the repressive tactics and ideological policing of the Trump regime patterns well with America's fifties-era Red Scare, it's important to understand that Trumpism has already moved beyond many of the goals the McCarthyists were trying to accomplish. While anti-communism often stood in for white nationalism, and supremacist power structures, it ostensibly focused on ideological policing; the Trump regime however is already targeting people for who, or what they are, not just what they believe; the anti trans pogrom, the bipartisan war on migrants, and War on Terror style Islamophobia have already paved the way for eliminationist policies in a way McCarthyism existed to accomplish. </p><p>Given the term's ability to both heighten awareness of, and still minimize the threat posed by the Trump regime's project to install a fascist dictatorship, I'm going to proceed cautiously with sharing articles adopting McCarthyism as a framework to explain the actions of Trump, and his apparent Secretary of Nazi Shit, Stephen Miller. In doing so however, I'm begging readers to keep in mind that Trumpism, is definitely a fascist project, and the fact that during the installation phase the regime's activities pattern match so closely with the 1950's US Red Scare says a lot more about how fascist this country already was, than it does about why there's a meaningful difference between McCarthyism and fascism in general. </p><p><a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/Fascism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Fascism</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/Trump" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Trump</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/McCarthyism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>McCarthyism</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/StephenMiller" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>StephenMiller</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/USHistory" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>USHistory</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/HistoricalModels" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>HistoricalModels</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/ColdWar" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ColdWar</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/JoeMcCarthy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>JoeMcCarthy</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/RedScare" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>RedScare</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/CivilRights" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>CivilRights</span></a></p>
Bongolian<p>Norman Eisen:<br>"The televised hearings began seventy one years ago, in April 1954. After weeks of Welch’s steadfast defense, McCarthy decided to target one of Welch’s young associates by name for purported Communist associations. Welch’s visceral response: “Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”<br>…<br>"Oh, and Welch’s firm that took the case? Hale &amp; Dorr, the predecessor firm of Wilmer Hale."</p><p><a href="https://mstdn.social/tags/law" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>law</span></a> <a href="https://mstdn.social/tags/WilmerHale" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WilmerHale</span></a> <a href="https://mstdn.social/tags/McCarthyism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>McCarthyism</span></a> <a href="https://mstdn.social/tags/trump" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>trump</span></a><br><a href="https://contrarian.substack.com/p/publishers-roundup-11" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">contrarian.substack.com/p/publ</span><span class="invisible">ishers-roundup-11</span></a></p>
The Progressive<p>Donald Trump is using decades-old laws to expel critics and opponents. <a href="https://federated.press/tags/immigration" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>immigration</span></a> <a href="https://federated.press/tags/mahmoudkhalil" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>mahmoudkhalil</span></a> <a href="https://federated.press/tags/McCarthyism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>McCarthyism</span></a></p><p><a href="https://progressive.org/latest/the-dark-mccarthyist-history-of-deporting-activists-chen-20250321/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">progressive.org/latest/the-dar</span><span class="invisible">k-mccarthyist-history-of-deporting-activists-chen-20250321/</span></a></p>
Replied in thread

"unparalleled attack on the rule of law" not seen "since the days of McCarthyism,"

The United States has been added to the Civicus Monitor Watchlist, which identifies countries experiencing rapid decline in civic freedoms. The US joins the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Italy, Pakistan and Serbia on the first watchlist of 2025.

H/t @adirtyhippie

#Trump’s #AntiTrans policies mirror the #LavenderScare, when thousands of #LGBTQ+ #federal employees were purged from the government (the 1940s-60s). 🚨 Fueled by #McCarthyism and #MoralPanic, it destroyed careers and lives, leading to suicides but also sparking a civil rights movement. Now, Trump bans #trans people from the #military, rolls back #healthcare, and fuels fear for political gain, echoing history’s worst #injustices.

Read more from LGBTQ Nation (@(@LGBTQNation@flipboard.com), a leading source for LGBTQ+ news: https://rb.gy/9n8ck3

#LGBTQRights #TransRightsAreHumanRights #LavenderScare

I did it! I'm an official card-carrying #Socialist! If I'm going to be rounded up and sent away with everyone else, I want to make sure TPTB know which side I'm on (as if there was any doubt). I always figured if I were alive during #McCarthyism, I'd be targeted for being a "Commie pinko weirdo", so fuck it!

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthy
#MaineDSA #DemocraticSocialist #DSA #CommiePinko #CommiePinkoWeirdo #WeirdAndProud

en.wikipedia.orgMcCarthyism - Wikipedia

The #FarRight Group Building a List of Pro-Palestine Activists to Deport

#BetarUS said it has shared with the Trump administration a list of the “names of hundreds of terror supporters.”

"This conflation of speech critical to #Israel with #antisemitism or support of Hamas will do little to protect Jews in the United States from hate, said #JonahRubin, with #JewishVoiceForPeace, a progressive #JewishAmerican group that advocates for #Palestinian #HumanRights."

Jonah Valdez
February 6 2025

"The premise behind Trump’s more recent order is rooted in #ProjectEsther: a treatise by the authors of #Project2025. The document was billed as 'a blueprint to counter antisemitism' and offered strategies to target and silence critics of Israel, including deportation. A fact sheet about the executive order related by the Trump administration mirrored language from Project Esther and laid bare the order’s intent to 'cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses,' vowing to deport 'all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests.'

"Such ideas are increasingly gaining purchase in conservative discourse. Pledges to deport supporters of Palestinian rights were a key part of the Republican Party’s platform. A congressional bill introduced last May called for similar measures.

"#Academia is a key focus of Project Esther and Trump’s executive orders. While the most recent order instructs all agencies within the executive branch to take part in the crackdown, it encourages #surveillance in specific areas, such as #universities and even K-12 schools, where administrators are being told to monitor and report #InternationalStudents for possible deportation.

"On Monday, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights launched investigations into five schools — #ColumbiaUniversity; #UCLABerkley; #NorthwesternUniversity; #UniversityOfMinnesota, Twin Cities; and #PortlandStateUniversity — for #antisemitism, the first use of the executive order.

"'Americans and college students that visit the United States should be able to protest the #Israeli government’s human rights violations in the same way that the United United Nations, the International Criminal Court [#ICC], #AmnestyInternational, #HumanRightsWatch, and other respected institutions have for the past several years, without fear of retaliation,' said Robert McCaw, a leader with the Council on American-Islamic Relations who heads the government affairs department. He decried the order’s fact sheet of peddling anti-Muslim terms such as 'pro-Jihad.'"

"Trump’s efforts have inspired a grassroots campaign to identify possible targets for deportation. On #SocialMedia, groups such as #MothersAgainstCollegeAntisemitism and the #ChicagoJewishAlliance have shared links to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement tip line and called on people to report 'foreign students and faculty who support Hamas' and 'students on visas who are suspected of engaging in pro-terror activities,' respectively."

Read more:
theintercept.com/2025/02/06/be

Archived version:
archive.ph/fCZve
#McCarthyism #HumanRightsAreNeverWrong #DontSnitch #ICE #ICERaids #ICEArrests #Deportation #CollegeStudents #FreeSpeech #Censorship #Fascism #AuthoritarianRule #authoritarianism #USPol

The Intercept · The Far-Right Group Building a List of Pro-Palestine Activists to DeportBy Jonah Valdez

Rep. Melanie Stansbury:

So..WELCOME, to the new House Committee on Un-American Affairs & to the new #McCarthyism. Bc we've arrived here today w this bill

Rando #MAGA:

Will the gentlelady yield? [Rep. Stansbury talks right over both his attempts to ask her to "yield"]

youtube.com/watch?v=1yBc9GPy3P #news #politics #press #media #socialmedia #ukraine #russia #podcast #video #usa #us #humor #nato