Modern Day McCarthyism

“The real Joe McCarthy has vanished into the midst of fable and recycled error, so that it takes the equivalent of a dragnet search to find him.” – Blacklisted by History

In November 2025, President Trump was forced to sign into law a bill requiring that his Department of Justice release the full government file on the sexcapades and potential blackmail of famous and wealthy individuals who ran in Jeffrey Epstein’s circle.  As the files slowly made their way to public view, the names of the men involved came to light.  Whether their proximity to Epstein is a sign of criminal activity remains to be determined. 

Leading the charge is Congressman Thomas Massie, one of the few Republicans willing to risk his reputation against his party’s president.  Since Epstein’s initial arrest in 2005, every elected administration has ignored this story like the plague, due to the high-profile nature of him and his friends.  It was Donald Trump's 2015 campaign that first promised to end the cover-up.  That is, until Trump's name inconveniently sprang up in the files seemingly thousands of times.   

In M. Stanton Evans' 2007 book, “Blacklisted by History”, Evans tells the story of Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy and his battle to identify Soviet sympathizers within the Federal government, particularly the State Department.  From the beginning, his efforts were met with stonewalling, lost documents, and selective disclosure.  Subsequent hearings devolved into ad hominem attacks on McCarthy by Democrats and Republicans alike, over claims that he was smearing innocent people.  McCarthy’s investigations into the US government culminated in a censure vote that publicly condemned his actions. 

At the end of World War II, the Cold War began as the Soviet Union captured land and installed pro-Soviet governments in what would come to be known as the Eastern Bloc.  As a result, in 1947, the Truman Doctrine would offer military aid and economic assistance to any nation threatened by communism, initially Greece and Turkey.  In the United States, also in 1947, Truman would establish a Loyalty Program to identify and root out any communist influence within the federal government.  Truman’s Loyalty Program subjected federal employees to questionnaires, background checks, and investigations, resulting in nearly 3,000 firings and 12,000 resignations. 

By 1949, the establishment of NATO would further divide the Western bloc from the Eastern bloc, initiating a second Red Scare, with widespread fear of espionage by high-ranking government officials sympathetic to the communist cause. 

Senator Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist campaign began in 1950 with a series of speeches that revealed that hundreds of federal employees within the federal government had either Soviet ties or sympathies.   With fears that they were not only influencing policies but also stealing American secrets, creating security threats, and spreading Soviet propaganda, McCarthy began naming names, which led to a series of hearings. 

Within weeks, the Tydings hearings began as a means to inquire into McCarthy’s enemies list, name by name.  But what began as an investigation against potential threats to the United States ended up as an investigation against McCarthy himself, mostly attacks on his own character.  The resulting determination found that McCarthy’s claims were unprovable and that the implicated individuals had suffered unfair reputational damage.  The chair of the Tydings hearings, Senator Millard Tydings, called McCarthy’s claims of Soviet infiltration in the federal government “a fraud and a hoax”. 

By 1954, televised hearings following McCarthy's accusations against the Army for harboring communists led to a decline in his popularity and eventually his censure by the Senate later that year.  McCarthy died just two years later, having never repaired his reputation before his death.  The censure, in fact, contributed to the rise of an eponymous expression, McCarthyism, a term that came to mean unsubstantiated accusations and fearmongering.

After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, declassified documents, including the Venona Project cables and FBI files, along with intelligence reports, began exonerating McCarthy of his activities during the 1950s, confirming substantial Soviet spy activity in and around the federal government.  Yet, despite his reputational restoration, the term McCarthyism still serves as a template to denigrate anyone who speaks out of line.

By 2025, President Trump and his administration would claim that the Epstein files were also a hoax, a Trump trap, seemingly to unearth unflattering files about Trump into the public sphere.   

But Thomas Massie, like Joe McCarthy before him, is unlikely to succumb to threats and fear.  Because,  like McCarthy, his crusade was to expose the names of enemies in and out of government, and like McCarthy, disreputable forces are working to remove him from office for his principled stance.    

As the story is still being written, its outcome is yet unknown.  Whatever the conclusion, Massie, like McCarthy, will also be exonerated for simply doing the right thing.