Biden began recent government-assisted censorship but Trump’s unleashed a return of full-blown McCarthyism in which “communism” is again the greatest menace — as criticism of Iran and Ukraine policy is stifled. Watch the replay.
Guests: Patrick Henningsen and Scott Ritter. Host: Joe Lauria. Producer: Cathy Vogan.
By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium New
We don’t often talk about U.S. domestic politics on this show. But we did tonight, as it has a strong connections to international affairs.
What the Trump administration has been saying this week was already a vast exaggeration in the 1950s. It is borderline insane now.
Harry Truman, who started the Cold War, wrote about McCarthyism:
“The demagogues, crackpots and professional patriots had a field day pumping fear into the American people. Many good people actually believed that we were in imminent danger of being taken over by the Communists and that our government in Washington was Communist riddled. So widespread was this campaign that it seemed no one would be safe from attack. This was the tragedy and shame of our time.”
Richard Nixon once said: “At least the communists talk about the problems. Too often we talk only about the communists.”
Yet here we are again. Thirty-five years after the end of the Cold War, the Red Scare is back. History is definitely repeating itself this time as farce. And yet it can have deadly serious consequences.
Do Trump people really believe communism is a serious threat to America, that Cuba is running a network to undermine the United States, that non-profit media need to be investigated for ties to foreign powers? Or is this just more hype to give cover to a campaign to silence Trump’s critics. Are they just trying to armor-proof criticism of their Middle East and Ukraine policy?
In the past ten days, the White House announced it has launched “an unprecedented global offensive against the transnational threat of Radical Left terrorism,” under which “far-left extremism will be treated with the same seriousness and ferocity the world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism.”
Caitlin Johnstone writes:
“The move is premised on a White House memo known as NSPM-7, a directive that critics have been warning about for months due to its dangerously authoritarian implications and lack of congressional approval. In the words of Trump advisor Stephen Miller, NSPM-7 ‘directs, for the first time in American history, all of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies to work together to disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest, and prosecute these political terrorists that are operating in our country.’
This line strongly echoes the language of a 1967 F.B.I. memo describing the goals of the J Edgar Hoover program COINTELPRO to ‘expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist hate-type organizations and groupings.’ […]
It seems the United States is looking at a reinvigorated COINTELPRO for the 2020s, this time with police drones and AI-assisted mass surveillance. As Americans become more and more hostile toward U.S. warmongering, more and more fed up with the state of Israel, more and more convinced that their government doesn’t care about them, and more and more discontented with what unbridled capitalism is doing to their bank accounts, their society, and their world, their rulers are responding with the iron fist of tyranny.”
Then there was the State Dept. report on Cuba. Naming several activist organizations, the report says:
“The association of extreme-left lawyers and radical street activists has played a key role in a disproportionate share of the far-left terror and violence that has plagued the United States from the 1960s up to today.
Throughout its history, it has maintained intimate ties to Cuba and other communist regimes and has explicitly sought to advance the causes of the international far left, including by working to defend and facilitate terrorism and extremist violence — from the Weather Underground of the 1970s to the violent BLM militants and Antifa terror cells of today.”
In the U.S. House of Representatives, a committee has begun investigating independent, non-profit media organizations for alleged foreign influence peddling if official U.S. foreign policy is questioned.
These neo-McCarthyite attacks are tied to international affairs to silence criticism of U.S. foreign policy and to smear its critics.
This started in the Biden administration with the anti-disinformation cottage industry born of the fraudulent Russiagate scandal to enforce orthodoxy. A government disinformation governance board was shut down after an outcry, but government censorship by private proxy continued.
Now we are moving into direct government intervention that is McCarthyism perhaps on steroids.
Talking about this and the latest developments in the Middle East and Ukraine — that the government prefers we not talk about — are journalist Patrick Henningsen, editor of 21st Century Wire and Scott Ritter, former USMC counterintelligence officer, U.N. weapons inspector, author and pundit. The latest news on Iran is that Trump has followed his advisers’ counsel not to conduct a massive strike at this time because the U.S. does not have enough interceptor missiles and because of a realization that Iran’s retaliation would cause a global economic catastrophe.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News.
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Over the 20th Century, Bernays turned managed propaganda into public relations to manipulate “democratic” populations. He succeeded!
Fear, always more fear, and poverty if necessary, were his main tools. Repetitions, evenly divided factions kept the masses from voting for their interests in good education, health care, viable environment, and a livable wage (instead of profit for a few). He viewed his work as neutral which could be used either way. Maybe so, or maybe we’re just stupid collectively. It’s still in play, and TBD.
The world is so weird when dissidents have to take refuge in mainland China and in Russia, as authoritarianism resurrects nearly everywhere, save, perhaps, in certain bubbles in the Sahel.
Lots of food for thought. Mostly not good. But you all are absolutely correct about the west having no idea about Islam and its people. I lived in 5 different countries in west asia (israel not one of them.) over a period of 25 years. Compared to europe they were the best years. But this was a time before 9/11, which for me solidified the hatred the west has for muslims and the beginning of the “terrorist” rhetoric. All those countries in which i lived are now dangerous, war-torn places, thanks to the USA and other western european countries. As far as Iran goes, i have never visited but learned a lot from watching Iranian films with english subtitles. The older black and white ones are the most poignant. Set in the Iranian countryside they are wonderful stories of village dwellers and their daily lives. Simple tales of people helping each other with acts of kindness. Not like some of the violent, bloodthirsty, scary, evil trash coming out of Hollywood. Thankyou all for a most enjoyable and sometimes enlightening discussion. (I also had quite a few laughs in places.)
Before WWI and the fear of communism to western religious world dominance there was the TR/Lodge wars to save Cuba and the Philippines to replace indigenous rebellion with a US religious paternalism.
Then after WWII it is save western religious control of Cuba and Vietnam for the colonial minority rule.
Then when we turned risk to oil we envisioned weaponization of religion against the USSR that bit us in Iran like our original hope of Castro replacing the dictator. Our weapons can embarrass us often because we think we can control them.
I believe the time has arrived to stop referring to elected U.S governments as Administrations, ie., The Trump Administration, The Biden Administration etc.
The U.S is now in the realm of being a regime… The Trump Regime, the former Biden Regime… neo-fascist regimes
Part of the mass media population mind control agenda.
Tehran is always referred to as ‘The IRANIAN REGIME’. Washington is always called, for want of a better name, ‘The Good Guys’.
A unprovoked Pearl Harbor type attack during formal negotiations to stop following through on its threat to ‘bomb Iran back to the Stone Age’, and at the same time assassinating its leader and his family tells you all you need to know.
I completely agree… and perhaps a name change as well.
The United Zionist States of Greater Israel – UZSGI
From McCarthyism to McDonaldsism to McCommunism.
None of em real.
It’s reached the UK now:
“Journalists are self-censoring their reporting on rightwing protests, Donald Trump’s administration and trans issues because of growing concerns about their personal safety, with newsrooms accused of “normalising” the risks they face.
Hundreds of journalists from across the UK have anonymously disclosed increasing nervousness over their security. Some have reported avoiding or altering coverage on certain topics due to intimidation, leading to self-censorship and “a narrowing of the public conversation”.”
Xxxx://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jul/26/uk-journalists-changed-how-what-report-fears-safety
thank you for yet another enlightening exchange
that tells me, among other things: i’m not alone in
my way of thinking and assessing current affairs.
my two cents regarding:
“they don’t know anything about this,
they don’t even try to know …”
my take is: they don’t CARE *), so they don’t need to know.
their only plan follows their ABC, and that is all they know:
‘always, and barbarically, create chaos, devastate, exploit. for all time.’
turn whole countries into s…hole countries. so they’ll never rise to rival
the hegemon, yet yield resources, raw materials, eternal opportuniti€$.
and always, there’s impunity, alas!
re. iran: the rich!, century-old civilization is one thing.
yet, today, sizable amounts of the population are not happy,
given unemployment, sky-high inflation rates, corruption,
harsh crackdowns on, and executions of, opponents, for
over four decades now.
________________________________
*) isn’t that what washington’s D.C. stands for: “Don’t Care”?
The thought crossed my mind recently as well that U.S. empire managers, aware that the U.S. was the only industrialized society left standing after WWII, might well have decided to demolish every other economy on Earth to recreate the halcyon days of undisputed U.S. supremacy.
The problem, of course — and this epitomizes the delusional irrationality of these maniacs — is that during WWII the U.S. was the manufacturing epicenter of the world, analogous though by no means equivalent to the Chinese economy today.
The U.S. having thoroughly deindustrialized and financialized itself since the 1970s, if it destroyed every other economy to leave only itself standing today, nothing will be left.
What will actually occur from here forward is impossible to predict.
What is certain, though, is that the U.S. has been at war with the entire world at least since 1991, and WWIII has heated up now to the point where the empire is fighting increasingly openly in Eastern Europe and West Asia, always with an eye to opening yet another front in East Asia, none of which it is capable of dominating conventionally anymore.
In the ’50s blackmail consisted of knowing someone was gay or was committing adultery, today it is knowing someone is having sex with “live boys or dead girls”. As if the Russians (communists! although most are now Christian Orthodox) were using blackmail to turn a significant number of Americans into spies. In general, the “Epstein Class” is unaccountable for whatever they do anyway.
We have to remember how pervasive the “Communist Threat” was used for political purposes. Even the Kennedys were close allies of McCarthy and worked closely with Roy Cohn (a Democrat). JFK gave lip service to national sovereignty of third world nations EXCEPT Vietnam, which was the projected domino to fall to Communism. Or any other country that dared deviate from American capitalism.
Free Speech is gone in America. It is a result of concerted bipartisan attack (and Trump’s revenge for Russiagate– which many Americans still believe). Biden’s proud Patriot Act took 9/11 to pass under W Bush. Obama’s “modernization” (abolition) of Smith Mundt and his Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act of 2016 (to advance Russiagate) has resulted in Official Narratives with no dissent allowed (even for Covid).
Once the US and Israel are merged, who will be the untermenschen that must be destroyed? White supremacist bogeymen? The Poor Black and white underclass? The vile methodologies the CIA gets away with abroad always come home.
From the end of WWI on the religious critique of western civilization and it’s God favored wars predominated over even the economic warfare over the planet. Now it is the exact same witch hunts for male dominance threatened by anti-war efforts and women and racial justice.
Western civilization is out of balance by addiction war profit motives as a world protection racket and fear of a sexually balanced ecosystem.
To understand this move properly, it is necessary to mention the Biden admin’s lawfare against the Uhuru 3 for making statements in favour in the interests of African Americans, as it had been doing for decades….which the admin claimed was suddenly illegal because this happened to coincide with messaging favourable to the Russian govenment’s narrative at that time.
And prior to that both Biden and Obama admins had made up a “Russiagate” in which actual facts that the Dems were rigging their primaries, were construed as treasonous mainly because they revealed a story that certainly the Russians would find convenient.
In other words, continuity of agenda. The current admin is simply explanding path of thought and action, following a guide hole pre-drilled by the predecessors. Same as the Pivot to Asia and the maidan coup.
True, But the same is true for the new discovered rise in “anti-Semitism. The finding new definitions of anti-Semitism has become a cottage industry in America. Anyone who questions what Israel has done to the Palestinians is denounced as an anti-Semite.