Trump has been talking about "radical left lunatics," as if he thinks this kind of scaremongering resonates. As if this were 1970 and there were still enough of those to matter -- as if the Weather Underground or the Symbionese Liberation Army were still around.
What kind of time warp is he living in?! These days, and for some decades past now, the only acts of terrorism are done by RWs. And that includes the Islamists.
It all takes one back -- not only to the 1960s, but further, to the 1950s.
In hindsight, the Red Scare of the 1950s was a complete waste of time -- even from an anti-Communist POV. If there had been no Smith Act Trials, no McCarthy Hearings, no House Un-American Activities Committee, no John Birch Society, no Hollywood blacklists -- if none of that had ever happened, the course of the Cold War would have gone no differently.
The problem was that the things the red-baiters feared were imaginary. There was the Communist Party USA with its negligible membership; there were some artists and intellectuals -- and working-class people -- who were Communist sympathizers to varying degrees but never joined the party; and that was all. There was no SECRET, UNDERGROUND Communist movement in the U.S. McCarthy claimed to have a list of Communists in the State Department, but he never published it, and in fact he never identified a single crypto-Communist. (There HAD been Communists in the State Department, but the Truman Administration purged them before anybody outside Wisconsin ever heard of McCarthy.)
Oh, there were Soviet agents in the U.S. -- but they were only spies looking for information. They were not political agents trying to stir up a Communist revolution in America -- the Soviet government never, at any time in its existence, perceived any serious possibility of that. (That lack was a serious puzzle to them -- Marxist theory would predict that a country so highly industrialized should at least have a politically relevant Communist movement like in Western Europe.)
And those Soviet agents certainly were NOT plotting to undermine America's moral fiber through sex or drugs or rock n' roll -- nor through race-mixing, which the white American imagination of the time tended to associate with the first three. I've seen a photo of a crowd of segregationists all holding signs saying "RACE-MIXING IS COMMUNISM" -- and as late as the 1980s, I personally witnessed a Klan rally protesting the naming of a street after MLK, on the stated grounds that King was a Communist. Come to think of it, that was actually a point Jesse Helms raised in the Senate, when a King holiday was being debated.
What kind of time warp is he living in?! These days, and for some decades past now, the only acts of terrorism are done by RWs. And that includes the Islamists.
It all takes one back -- not only to the 1960s, but further, to the 1950s.
In hindsight, the Red Scare of the 1950s was a complete waste of time -- even from an anti-Communist POV. If there had been no Smith Act Trials, no McCarthy Hearings, no House Un-American Activities Committee, no John Birch Society, no Hollywood blacklists -- if none of that had ever happened, the course of the Cold War would have gone no differently.
The problem was that the things the red-baiters feared were imaginary. There was the Communist Party USA with its negligible membership; there were some artists and intellectuals -- and working-class people -- who were Communist sympathizers to varying degrees but never joined the party; and that was all. There was no SECRET, UNDERGROUND Communist movement in the U.S. McCarthy claimed to have a list of Communists in the State Department, but he never published it, and in fact he never identified a single crypto-Communist. (There HAD been Communists in the State Department, but the Truman Administration purged them before anybody outside Wisconsin ever heard of McCarthy.)
Oh, there were Soviet agents in the U.S. -- but they were only spies looking for information. They were not political agents trying to stir up a Communist revolution in America -- the Soviet government never, at any time in its existence, perceived any serious possibility of that. (That lack was a serious puzzle to them -- Marxist theory would predict that a country so highly industrialized should at least have a politically relevant Communist movement like in Western Europe.)
And those Soviet agents certainly were NOT plotting to undermine America's moral fiber through sex or drugs or rock n' roll -- nor through race-mixing, which the white American imagination of the time tended to associate with the first three. I've seen a photo of a crowd of segregationists all holding signs saying "RACE-MIXING IS COMMUNISM" -- and as late as the 1980s, I personally witnessed a Klan rally protesting the naming of a street after MLK, on the stated grounds that King was a Communist. Come to think of it, that was actually a point Jesse Helms raised in the Senate, when a King holiday was being debated.
