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northern_sentinel's avatar

(proper civil, not Republican civil)

I'm curious... what is the distinction?

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Petunia Cat's avatar

History Corner: McCarthy either deliberately (I think deliberately) or just because he embraced some bugfuck crazy ideology went after labour movement people and liberal types. It wasn’t just people who had some relationship to “communism“ or the Communist Party. The fundamental McCarthy thing was to ask somebody who he knew was not a communist Are you now or have you ever been a communist? On TV. And because of the craziness afoot in the land people just believed these people were. The fact they denied it was taken as evidence it was true. 🤦🏻‍♀️ Calling someone a racist without adequate proof is not McCarthyism. The thing the person is accused of has to be something that the whole of society goes absolutely fucking apeshit about. And you would lose your job, be blacklisted so you couldn’t get another one. All the employers just went along with this, no one was making them. Also there were either non- or really crappy laws about having to have a good reason to fire somebody. Last bit: the “or ever were“ bit in McCarthy’s question was because it was the 50s, middle-age people had been young during the fight against Hitler and some of them joined the Communist Party because of that. Did nothing and quit a couple years later. He was trying to hoover up all of them.

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