We Defeated McCarthyism Before. We Can Do It Again.
It’s easy to feel despair about what looks like a new age of government censorship. But being around for 160 years gives you perspective.
After 160 years of suffering the slings and arrows of official objection to this publication’s mission of speaking truth to power, it’s easy to get jaded about attacks from politicians. Yet we were still surprised when Vice President JD Vance used a mid-September podcast from his vice-presidential office to go after The Nation.
We appreciated that Vance described The Nation as a “well-respected magazine whose publishing history goes back to the American Civil War.” We were less appreciative, however, of his clumsy critique of our coverage of the death of Charlie Kirk, which elided the fact that our columnists condemned the political violence that took the conservative activist’s life while pointedly criticizing his record. And we wish the vice president had gotten his facts straight before inaccurately painting The Nation as a tool of “George Soros’s Open Society Foundation…and many other wealthy titans of the American progressive movement.” We respect Soros’s efforts on behalf of democracy, but he’s not funding our reporting and analysis of the Trump-Vance regime. The essential support for this magazine comes from readers who value our independent journalism, our commitment to economic and social and racial justice, our relentless advocacy for taxing “wealthy titans,” and our determination to expose and thwart this president’s crude authoritarianism.
If Vance’s attack were an isolated incident, or simply the latest expression of a prickly administration’s discomfort with a dissenting publication, we’d move on to the next issue. Unfortunately, destroying press freedom is a core focus of the Trump administration’s agenda. In the same week that Vance attacked The Nation, President Trump called The New York Times “one of the worst and most degenerate newspapers in the History of our Country,” while his lawyers filed a $15 billion suit against the newspaper for publishing articles that documented the president’s “lifetime of scandals” and inclination to “rule like a dictator.” A Florida federal judge immediately rejected the suit as “decidedly improper and impermissible”—not to mention “tedious and burdensome.”
But that was just the beginning. Enraged that ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel had dared to comment on the crude politicization of Kirk’s death by Republicans, FCC chair Brendan Carr threatened ABC in language that was the stuff of Hollywood cliché: “We can do this the easy way, or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” Unsettled by the prospect that the licenses of network affiliates could be revoked and that regulatory negotiations with the vindictive Trump administration could go awry, ABC opted for the “easy way”—announcing Kimmel’s indefinite suspension.
That made Kimmel the most public target of the astonishing assault on free expression that was carried out by Trump’s MAGA devotees in the days following Kirk’s murder. Journalists were fired, teachers dismissed, and students expelled, merely for exercising their First Amendment rights. Trump declared that news reports he considered “bad” were “no longer free speech” and advocated for the firing of late-night hosts whose comedy offended his delicate sensibilities.
Few Republicans dared challenge the authoritarian overreach—until Kimmel was actually knocked off the air. Suddenly, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul was decrying Carr’s comments as “absolutely inappropriate,” while Texas Senator Ted Cruz compared them to something “right out of Goodfellas. That’s right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, ‘Nice bar you have here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.’”
Americans agreed with Cruz that the Trump administration’s attempts to silence Kimmel were “dangerous as hell.” Within days, Kimmel was back on the air. And as Trump presided over a shutdown of the federal government, Kimmel got the last laugh—telling his newly expanded TV audience, “I was recently the victim of a government shutdown. They are reversible.”
Kimmel won that round. But the First Amendment is still in danger, and it still needs defending—especially by those of us who know that a robust, free, and independent press forms the vital underpinning of democracy. Decades of media consolidation, cost cutting, and layoffs have obliterated much of this country’s local journalism. Social media delivers a slurry of disinformation. Cable-channel talking heads offer scant insight and even less diversity of opinion—as has been agonizingly demonstrated by the failure of so many outlets to entertain even basic debates about Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Once-bold news networks are now owned by multinational corporations that are inclined to cut backroom deals with a president who has a history of dismissing the press as “the enemy of the people.” No wonder Trump and Vance think they can make the American media amenable to autocracy.
But we’ve seen their kind before. During the anti-communist Red Scare of the 1940s and ’50s, American dissenters were blacklisted, fired, censored, and deported. The damage done by McCarthyism extends to this day. Victor Navasky, the longtime editor and publisher of The Nation, warned that “stigmatizing people with the red brush had deprived the rest of us of interaction with people…whose advocacy, intelligence, passion, and information might have brought us to an improved understanding of the political and cultural situation, and perhaps even have transformed it.”
It’s easy to feel despair about what looks like a new age of McCarthyism. But being around for 160 years gives you perspective. This magazine is old enough to have fought McCarthyism the first time, alongside great journalists such as the CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow, who counseled Americans not to be “driven by fear into an age of unreason.”
We were on the side that won that fight. We know from experience that America’s witch-hunt fever has been broken before—and we proudly take the side of muckraking journalists, constitutional lawyers, and undaunted jurists, of the artists and actors who are fighting for their creative freedom, and above all, of the Constitution-defending citizens who will not yield until Trump, Vance, and Brendan Carr are consigned to the same dustbin of history that Joe McCarthy so ignobly occupies.
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Onward,
Katrina vanden Huevel
Editor and Publisher, The Nation
