Editorial

Is Trump the next Joe McCarthy?

Posted

In the mid-1950s, the U.S. was a nation terrorized not by extremist jihadists, but by the threat of nuclear annihilation. The Cold War, an often deadly geopolitical game of chess played by the U.S. and the USSR, was fully engaged, with each side seeking to one-up the other in the race toward mutually assured destruction.

Schools held fallout drills in which children crouched on the floor in the vain hope that, if a bomb were dropped, somehow their little wooden desks would shield them from the radioactive blast.

Into the fray came the junior Republican senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, spewing anti-communist venom at every turn, falsely accusing innocent Americans of sympathizing with the Soviet enemy, and destroying lives, even whole families, in the process. McCarthy, a fear-monger of the highest order, quickly gained immense power. No one knew quite how to stop him.

Then along came Edward R. Murrow, the great CBS News correspondent who had covered the London bombings during World War II. Murrow, a national hero, realized that he couldn’t sit by quietly while McCarthy eviscerated the constitutionally guaranteed freedoms that Americans had enjoyed since the nation’s founding. So he did what he knew how to do best –– he took to the airwaves to speak out against McCarthy. His two-minute “No Fear” commentary, broadcast in March 1954, gave a tired and frightened nation permission to reject McCarthyism.

“We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason,” Murrow said, “if we dig deep into our history and our doctrine and remember that we are not descended from fearful men –– not from men who feared to write, to associate, to speak, and to defend the causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.”

Today Donald Trump is attempting to usher in the next McCarthy era, with his bombast directed not at falsely suspected communists, but at falsely suspected Muslims. Trump appears to blame the entirety of Islam for the terrorist attacks carried out by a small minority of jihadists. He forgets that, worldwide, there are more than 1.6 billion Muslims, and the overwhelming majority are decent people who want nothing more than to care for their families and live out their lives.

Trump’s call to ban all Muslim immigration to the U.S. is the height of fear-mongering. It stands against every principle on which this nation was founded. It is reprehensible.

As Americans, we must stand united against Trump’s hateful proposals and speak out at the top of our lungs against them. We do not need or want another “Red scare.” Trump is McCarthy incarnate, and he must be stopped now, before it’s too late.