Trump and the Heritage Foundation Are Hell-Bent on Inflicting a New McCarthy Era on Us

by | Aug 1, 2024 | Opinions & Commentary

Image: The Hartmann Report

Trump and the Heritage Foundation Are Hell-Bent on Inflicting a New McCarthy Era on Us

by | Aug 1, 2024 | Opinions & Commentary

Image: The Hartmann Report

It’s been around 70 years since the McCarthy era. And most Americans today have no direct memory of its excesses and the damage done, both to families targeted and to Americans’ trust in our institutions of government.

Republished with permission from Thom Hartmann

It appears that groups aligned with Donald Trump and JD Vance are preparing to reboot an American version of the old East German Stasi, this time with government workers in their crosshairs.

I remember the Stasi well.

Louise and I (and our 3 kids) lived in Germany back in the 1980s and spent part of that time in a rural house just a few hundred feet from the East/West German border; our back-yard was a double set of 20-foot-tall (as I recall) razor-wire-topped fences with guard towers and machine gunners every few hundred yards.

In the spring, as the ground thawed in the mornings, the land mines in the sand-covered no-man’s area between the two fences would sometimes spontaneously explode; nothing gets you out of bed like a bomb going off next to your house.

Most interesting to me, though, was East German radio. I was learning German and listening to the radio, both in the car and at home (we didn’t have a TV during the years our kids were growing up), was great practice.

An elderly German friend who’d grown up before WWII told me how during the 1930s and the war years the government sponsored call-in radio programs where people would denounce their neighbors for being insufficiently “patriotic.” He told me that in the 1970s the East Germans had revived the practice, although I was never able to catch such a program when I’d occasionally tune in.

Keep in mind, this was a country where East German school teachers were required to ask children to draw symbols and objects they’d seen on TV; if they drew the logo for West German TV (a distinctive clock), the family would soon get a visit from the infamous secret police, the Stasi. (The 2006 movie The Lives of Others is an amazing and powerful look into life in that East German police state when it was run by Vladimir Putin.)  

I was reminded of those times when I learned that the Heritage Foundation has funded a new group, the American Accountability Foundation, that has staffed up and is now “investigating” the lives and social media accounts of federal government workers, searching for people a second Trump administration should fire (or even prosecute?) for disloyalty.

It’s headed up by Tom Jones, a former staffer to Senators Ted Cruz, Ron Johnson, and Jim DeMint who has longtime ties to both Heritage and the Conservative Policy Institute, another Project 2025 contributor.

The Associated Press recently reported they’ve hit the ground running:

“With six researchers, Jones’ team operates remotely across the country, poring over the information about federal workers within Homeland Security, the State Department and other agencies that deal with immigration and border issues.”

AP’s reporters found that one of American Accountability’s goals was to alert Congress “and the American people to the presence of anti-American bad actors burrowed into the administrative state and ensure appropriate action is taken.”

Heritage President Kevin Roberts, the guy who said their “second American Revolution” would be “bloodless if the left allows it to be”, justified the grant because of what he called the “weaponization of the federal government” by the “deep state of entrenched Leftist bureaucrats.”

Georgia election workers Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman learned what it’s like when Republicans target you as being part of the deep state that they’re so paranoid about: Both were driven from their homes and jobs by armed rightwingers, had to change their phone numbers, and, fearing for their lives, basically went underground for over a year.

The last time Americans saw witch hunts against average Americans on an industrial basis like this, though, was in the 1950s during Joe McCarthy’s various demagogic smears of state department workers and Army enlistees.

Hundreds of lives were destroyed, families broken up, a United States senator committed suicide, and America spent several years locked in a state of political fear as so well documented by Rachel Maddow in her Ultra podcast series.

Similarly, Jones says his goal is to identify workers in government agencies who he and American Accountability believe aren’t sufficiently loyal to Trump and his ideology; he told the AP, “You don’t get to make policy and then say, ‘Hey, don’t scrutinize me.’” The Guardian wrote they are “planning to publicly name and shame career government employees that they consider hostile to Donald Trump.”

Given that Project 2025 and Trump’s people say they want to fire at least 50,000 people across the top levels of the Civil Service in virtually every federal agency (particularly the FBI, DOJ, SEC, FTC, FEC, and EPA), Jones has a big job. Heritage is reportedly already taking applications from Trump loyalists eager to replace the career civil servants Jones destroys.

Senator Joe McCarthy—who in 1956 popularized the old meme that Republicans should never refer to the Democratic Party by its real name but, instead, always call it, “The Democrat Party, with an emphasis on the ‘rat’!”—had finally destroyed the lives and families of hundreds of workers in the State Department and Army: Americans ultimately rejected him and his tactics.

It’s been around 70 years since that era, though, and most Americans alive today have no direct memory of McCarthy’s excesses and the damage they did, both to those families he targeted and to Americans’ trust in our institutions of government.

How long will it take us to reject this new McCarthy era that Trump, Vance and their allies are hell-bent on inflicting on us?

We’ll find out this November.

Thom Hartmann

Thom Hartmann

Thom Hartmann, one of America’s leading public intellectuals and the country’s #1 progressive talk show host, writes fresh content six days a week. The Monday-Friday “Daily Take” articles are free to all, while paid subscribers receive a Saturday summary of the week’s news and, on Sunday, a chapter excerpt from one of his books.

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