Resegregation and the new McCarthyism
Hello Dear Readers!
We’re on break from season one of the podcast, so if you haven’t had time for a listen, head on over and binge the first ten episodes. In the meantime, we’re back to our everything old is new again monthly check-in.
Last month, we looked at some major public health crises that were very retro (measles is still getting worse, tuberculosis is still running around Kansas, and while the dysentery spike seems to have stopped it’s still a problem in Oregon). But here in the Dark Timeline, political news moves fast. This month’s history’s worst repeats looks like good old-fashioned bigotry and paranoia: McCarthyism, segregation, and American internment.
A Return of Cold War Hysteria
If you ever looked back at the old Cold War paranoia and though, “I’m so glad we’re no longer a panicky, easily enraged people who can be propagandized through obviously fake rumors and fear-mongering,” I have bad news for you.
Cold War hysteria has returned in a big way. We’ve got laws targeting trans children and people are already dying from the Doge-Trump effect. Given Robert “Lesser Son of Greater Sires” Kennedy Jr.’s tenure as Secretary of Health and Human Services, we’re basically all on borrowed time as this wholly incompetent, conspiracy spouting, measles supporting, jackass continues to eliminate vital offices from the CDC. So, naturally our government has dedicated its efforts to addressing these real concerns and straightening themselves out.
I’m just kidding, they are definitely not doing that. Best they can do is fight “antisemitism.”
What’s brilliant about the new McCarthyism is that antisemitism is real. What’s less brilliant is that real antisemitism is not what the government is targeting. Trump has decided to target people who protested the genocide in Gaza (which is exactly what he said he would do during the 2024 election, though apparently Never Harris people didn’t think he was serious or were just more concerned with keeping their own hands clean than fighting).
Look, antisemitism is real. Attacking Jewish people for being Jewish is antisemitism, and if you do it, you suck. Criticizing a government for perpetrating or supporting the murder of children, however, is not antisemitism.
As I tell my students: who you can’t criticize, that’s who owns you. I can criticize any government in the world, including my own (for the moment), and run no risk of being fired. I criticize the Israeli government, and I could lose my job. That’s insane.
I’m not called Islamophobic when I criticize Iran. I’m not anti-Russian when I criticize Putin. I’m not anti-Black if I criticize Burundi. But I’m antisemitic when I criticize Israel? Come on. There’s been decades of scholarship telling us that the weaponization of antisemitism is just a smoke screen to hide criticism of Israel. And I can’t believe we’re still falling for this nonsense.
But today, it’s our new Red Scare hysteria because American can’t go too long without a social panic.
Anti-DEI as Re-Segregation
Along with McCarthyism, we’re apparently shooting for resegregation. The Anti-DEI crusade was never about jobs. If MAGA cared about qualifications, we wouldn’t have Secretary Defense and fascism enthusiast Pete Hegseth out here accidentally texting a journalist war plans (they’re illegally using Signal to bypass any historic record, due to Trump’s fights with the Archivists when he wouldn’t return stolen documents). Then there’s the president implementing a tariff policy possibly written by AI and likely based on a made up economist and book his son read on Amazon, and it’s clear that they’re not sending their best and their brightest. They’re sending criminals; they’re sending rapists… oh, wait, that’s a different story. Regardless, it’s not about a lack of qualified white guys getting jobs, otherwise, they’d have found some qualified white guys and they didn’t.
From the removal of Jackie Robinson from the Pentagon history page to Maya Angelou books from the Naval Academy library that it isn’t about hiring and jobs and how DEI lets some people “cut the line.” This is about erasing everyone who is not white or male from public life and bringing America “back” to the christofascist ethnostate. Christina Greer says it best in her latest piece, “Black People are not surprised.”
Deporting “Enemies”
Then there’s the new version of American-Japanese internment targeting people who are in this country legally. Plain clothed ICE agents throwing Fulbright scholars into unmarked vans is terrifying but true. The trafficking occurs when the Administration moved people around the US and even to other countries despite judge’s orders.
But don’t worry, the Supreme Court says that this lack of Due Process is entirely cool. We’ve heard that before and it resulted in about 120,000 people interred, so what could go wrong? Oh, yeah, the Trump Administration said they’re considering deporting US citizens because as obviously-a-good-guy Saruman says, “we have only to remove those who oppose us.”
What’s next?
As we look forward to next month and whatever shape the latest incarnation of evil takes, I’m suspiciously optimistic because the yo-yo of history between justice and injustice always swings back. Injustice lasts less time and on the other side more people are included in the rebuilding. These last death throes of the angry men desperately clinging to late-stage capitalism because nothing else loves them are going to hurt. But at every stage the people oppose them. Millions turned out in the Hands-Off protest—and not a Capitol Building stormed—because we believe in a better world. And whether they like it or not, there are more of us than there are of them.
I talked to a Czech survivor of Soviet rule, and he pointed out that the biggest barrier the US must face is that we think fascism can’t happen here even when it has. Hopefully, the reminder that it is happening here will bring us back to the true spirit of freedom that reminds us when the wealthy establishment try to destroy us, we throw their tea in the harbor, set fire to their ships, and revolt.
