The New McCarthyism

An immediate consequence of Joe Biden's ascendancy to the US presidency in November of this year has been the increasingly strident demand for retribution against those who are perceived to have been supporters of outgoing President, Donald Trump. This is particularly chilling because this sentiment is not just one that has emanated from the fringes of the Democrat party, so called Progressives and the like, but has been taken up by mainstream members of the party, including the likes of Robert Reich, who served in the administrations of Presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton and was a member of President Obama's economic transition advisory board. Reich posited that Trump supporters should be subjected to "Truth and Reconciliation" proceedings, akin to those imposed on white South Africans on the demise of the Apartheid system. The arbiters of the "truth," in this instance, would, of course, be the Democrat party.

The similarities between this notion and the infamous witch hunts conducted by Senator Joe McCarthy during the early 1950's, during

which McCarthy sought to destroy the reputations and rights to employment, on the basis of largely unfounded allegations that they were communists, spies and homosexuals, of people in academia, government and the film industry, are striking and even pale by comparison. McCarthy's assault further extended into First Amendment protections by advocating for banning books and other written material he deemed subversive, as well as inserting censorship into school and university curricula. If all of this sounds familiar, in the context of more recent events, then you are not mistaken. Only the present inquisition, as was its predecessor in Catholicism, is far more insidious than McCarthyism in that the parameters have been broadened and it is systemic, rather than the handiwork of one individual and a few cronies. Whereas McCarthy targeted "communists" and "homosexuals," the present assault on ideas is aimed at the disenfranchisement and, indeed, the demonization of all views that run contrary to those held by Progressives, Wokes, Anti-historians, White Privilege Hysterics, Antifas, and others of their ilk, who are tenured in academia, government and, ironically enough, Hollywood. And now, of course, we have progressed to the latest trend; punishing those who oppose the Democrat Party.

Trump supporters, or those who voted for Trump, a sufficient sin, are vilified as racists, ignorant, uneducated, hicks, hillbillies and so on. 

And, of course, supporters of Biden and Harris are characterized as the "enlightened. " Scant attention is paid to to the root causes of the Trump dynamic or indeed, the rising popularity of so-called Progressives. There are several dynamics at work here. The first is that the middle class has been utterly marginalized, and here I include small and medium sized business owners. Cost of living increases have denuded the ability of the majority of Americans, poor and so-called middle class, to meet their needs. Corruption in politics has become blatantly overt. The privacy interests of Americans exist in name only. And the onset of Covid, has served to exponentially increase the wealth of the very few, a little needed propellant, such as Jeff Bezos of Amazon. Throughout, the mainstream media, in addition to undermining public trust in its reliability, due to clear cut partisanship, has also labored intensively to subvert American trust in public institutions. The sum of these, particularly as they have been most effected, has begun to erode the cohesiveness of the middle class which, traditionally, has tended towards middle of the road politics in order to maintain economic stability. There being no glue to bind them, other than economic security, its constituents have begun to polarize, trending towards left and right wing support. Rather than viewing these circumstances as wounds in need of healing, opportunists, particularly on the left, and some with foreign funding, have capitalized thereon by creating further societal divisions, on racial grounds, that have created a blame game and fueled hatred among races, who are now bereft of any understanding that all are, by and large, in the same boat, and should be focused on a common enemy: the ineptness of our politicians and the moral decline of government. And with this, the emergence of an existential crisis for American democracy that is only heightened by the Democrat party position that almost one-half of the voting population must be punished in some fashion.

Aggravating this condition, and dwarfing the implications of McCarthyism, is the role of Big Tech; Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft,

TikTok and Google, to name the major players. These companies have allied themselves with the foregoing agendas, whose proponents, in blissful ignorance, believe that the alliance between they and big tech is borne of altruism. It is not. Each and every one of these companies is bereft of any social conscience. Their sole ambition is to make more money. In their world view, more data on citizens, politicians and small companies translates into more power which, in and of itself, produces more money. Their intentions are to convert people into more than mere consumers. They seek to employ us as commodities. To achieve this, in its ultimate form, the ideal vision of the future for these behemoths is one in which they achieve monopoly and everyone works for large corporations, such as themselves, governments or is a dependent on the largesse of the State. The next logical step, once this is realized, would the replacement of cash with digital credits. This truly dystopian ambition would result in the creation of an elite in technology, a second tier elite in politicians, albeit one that could ultimately be replaced with alleged Artificial Intelligence, and a common class of drones comprised of the rest of the population; a captive commodity group. A social credit card system, much as the one devised for the CCP of the People's Republic of China by Amazon, would be used to algorythmatically determine the extent of any liberty interest, such as travel, that could be exercised by any individual. This is beyond the scope of anything McCarthy could have wished for. 

Yet, as have his antecedents, McCarthy would have employed the tools of the technology companies without a thought to the longer term 

consequences. Oblivious to the true intentions of their erstwhile comrades, the Democrats take glee in the censorship imposed upon their opponents by social media and will undoubtedly avail themselves of the data collected by the tech companies, and the governments very own version thereof, in form of the National Security Agency, to collect the information necessary to bring their retaliatory agenda into fruition. Coupled with its pronouncements that the Constitution is archaic, as indeed it has become through the assaults upon its protections by the Democrats and Republicans, under the guise of "national security," the utter decimation of the First Amendment will soon ensue. Make no mistake, while the Democrats are the present architects of this travesty, Republicans of the modern age are no less inclined and, if given the chance, would certainly employ the same tactics once the genie has been let from the bottle. Hence, we can assume that once half of our population has been thusly subjugated, the remainder will soon follow, if not at the hands of the other party when it gains power, then certainly at the hands of the tech industry.

Through all of this we will eventually arrive at a Techno-Totalitarian State; differentiated only from its kin, North Korea, the

Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela, Nazi Germany and even the CCP of the PRC, by its abilities to impose irreversible draconian measures through total surveillance, absolute control over finances and blanket data collection, that will ensure its longevity. In this, one would hope, Americans of all political persuasions and regardless of their differences, racial and otherwise, will see a basis for uniting against the very real and looming common threat; the absolute extinction of our liberty interests, both individual and collective.