“Today, we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communist atheism and Christianity,” So echos the mid-twentieth century words of Joseph McCarthy, as the divide between Democrats and Republicans grows ever more strained in 2025.
In the aftermath of World War II, the American public became alarmed that they now had an internal infiltration in the midst of their own government. In February of 1950, Senator McCarthy claimed that he had a list of 205 Communists that invaded the United States Government. His accusations, while never verified, attracted national attention and caused the escalation of the second Red Scare to cause temporary or permanent blacklisting, public shaming, and even deportation.
Mr. Murray, a U.S History teacher at Eleanor Roosevelt offered his insight on the potential resurgence of such tactics, expressed that, “The idea of show trials is abhorrent, but we’ve seen this recently with the trials of Trump and now the retribution with Comely, and Letitia James, etc. It is true that no one is above the law and Lady Justice should be blind, but we can’t help but note the ‘show’ which is made out of these things, and both sides of the political spectrum are contributing to this.”
The individuals who were put in question stretched from Government officials to well-known celebrities such as Lucille Ball and Charlie Chaplin, and regular civilians that belonged to Unions, said the wrong word at the wrong time, or just had a rumor spread about them. This era of political repression was given the name of McCarthyism, and had several laws enacted in order to prevent Soviet espionage. While these legislations were passed around 70 or so years ago, are still being used against individuals expressing their political rights today.
Mahmoud Kahlil, a Palestinian activist, was arrested without a warrant in his home by the U.S Immigration and Custom services in March of 2025 due to his prominent role in pro-Palestinian campus protests at Columbia University. His detention was initiated due to the rarely invoked Immigration and Nationality act of 1952 and was accused of harboring supportive sentiments of Hamas as well as claiming the protests were antisemitic. The Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, also argued that Kahlil’s continuous presence in the US would pose “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences,” due to the accusations, despite both him and his lawyers’ denial, and that his activism was protected under his right of free speech. After spending 104 days in custody, Kahlil was released in June 2025 under the orders of a Federal Judge after finding the government’s justification for detaining him likely unconstitutional.
Despite Kahlil’s eventual release, his unlawful detention would likely have not occurred so easily had in not been for a law passed during a very specific time, for very specific reasons, and as a result sparked mass outrage throughout the nation.
Mrs. Walker, an Advanced Placement U.S History teacher stated that, “One of the problems of putting those kinds of laws into action today is that our world is so different, and the people that are immigrating, are so different. Back in the 1950s, the largest group of that were coming into the United States were primarily still coming from Western European countries, today our largest immigrant groups are coming from Asia and are coming from Latin America. So, the intent of what that law was made for doesn’t apply to the current groups, and I think it is a little dangerous for us to use outdated laws to try and match modern issues just because they often times are more aggressive and have harsher punishments then what we would find acceptable today.”
Due to the fact that these laws are still now being placed into action in certain cases, it is not far off to assume that the beliefs of the Red Scare still monger among the public people and government beliefs and policies. While in the 1950s it was the USSR that America was mainly concerned with, The Diplomat also pointed a notable comparison to the current rivalry the US now has with China, a similarly declared “Socialist” society, as well as the second-largest economy in the world. The article also points out how Chinese scholars in America have been targeted as potentially connected to the Chinese government, as Eastern Europeans were viewed in a somewhat similar manner, for both similar and different reasons. Mr. Murray also described the treatment of European Immigrants as “. . . often seen as potential spies. Although there were some spies as this era of history is full of espionage on both sides.”
In 2018, the Department of Justice launched the “China Initiative” to combat economic espionage by the Chinese government. Some, such as Kevin Mallory, Xuehua (Edward) Peng, and Jinchao Wei were found and convicted of similar crimes involving spying and acting as illegal agents for the Chinese government. However, the program also led to the unfair targeting of Chinese academics, scholars, and scientists, as well as those only of Asian descent, not specifically from China. The investigators focused on individuals with personal connects to the country, resulting in many failed prosecutions and/or dropped charges, and caused significant damage to reputation on false accusations.
While the suspicion was not a direct resurgence of Cold War anti-communist paranoid, and more so driven as a form of ethnic-profiling against Asians and political tensions between America and China, it is worth noting how similar the treatment of Eastern Europeans in the 1950s and Chinese individuals in America in 2025, as well as how they tie-together with the targeting of immigrants, such as with Mahmoud Kahlil.
The most recent Red Scare, despite occurring more than seven decades ago, still holds a shadow over the American politics and views of today, although fearmongering now mostly consists of the two political parties pointing fingers at one another, referring to the counterpart as the most extreme of the right or left. The era of McCarthyism was both simple and complex, with the reasoning behind the outright hysteria being understandable from the 1950’s American point of view, since no public masses enjoy conspirators spying and infiltrating the government for another country, while at the same time it is incredibly easy today to the pick the side of the ones being prosecuted and targeted, on essentially baseless claims that ruined or haunted the lives of many innocent civilians.
