75 Years Ago Tonight Joe McCarthy Used the Playbook of Wild Lying that Trump & Musk Are Following
McCarthy's outrageous lies frightened Republicans and they went along with him for political advantage. Sound Familiar?
On the evening of February 9, 1950, seventy-five years ago today, Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph R. McCarthy made a Lincoln Day speech to the Ohio County Republican Women in Wheeling, West Virginia. It was about as far from Abraham Lincoln as the leaders of the party that still calls itself “Republican” are three-quarters of a century later
The speech became an immediate sensation and is among the most infamous in American history. McCarthy asserted that the United States Department of State under President Harry S Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson was not only riddled with Communists, but that the Democratic administration knew it and was doing nothing about it. It catapulted McCarthy into the position of drum major at the head of a parade started a few years earlier by Richard Nixon and others
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“Today,” the senator said, “we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity. … “the chips are down—they are truly down.”” The tactic of associating Christianity with rightwing politics will, of course, be all-too-familiar to readers today.
Here’s something else McCarthy said that applies today:
As one of our outstanding historical figures once said, "When a great democracy is destroyed, it will not be because of enemies from without but rather because of enemies from within." The truth of this statement is becoming terrifyingly clear as we see this country each day losing on every front.
He was talking about the dangers of communists infiltrating the United States. The huge danger in 2025 is from authoritarians of the right who are in control of the government.
Like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and the other men who now have the United States on the brink of total collapse, McCarthy was plagued by the psychological disorder I call Acute Masculine Insecurity Disorder (AMID). He was always trying to show his “manhood” by bullying others. He liked to see himself as a “man’s man.” And he frequently talked, as Gen. Jack D. Ripper would later in Dr. Strangelove, of “impotence.” “The reason why we find ourselves in a position of impotency,” McCarthy said, is “because of the traitorous actions of those who have been treated so well by this nation.”
That, obviously, also applies to Trump, Musk, and the others who are acting as traitors today.
The lines that caused the speech to become a national sensation were these:
In my opinion the State Department, which is one of the most important government departments, is thoroughly infested with communists.
I have in my hand 57 cases of individuals who would appear to be either card-carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist Party, but who nevertheless are still helping to shape our foreign policy.”
Within days, “McCarthyism” was a nationwide sensation. McCarthy couldn’t remember how many “known Communists” he had said were in the State Department. In later days and weeks, he said the number was 205, 81… whatever number popped into his alcoholic mind. He never made the supposed list he waved at the Wheeling speech public.
Joe McCarthy loved publicity and he was soon making stunning charges that various public figures were communists. These allegations were huge headlines in newspapers. When they were disproven, it would be a small story in the back pages, while some new allegation by McCarthy was on the front page.
Soon most Republican politicians were terrified of being attacked by McCarthy and, as long as a Democrat was in the White House, they saw his lies as useful to them. The one exception was freshman Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, the only woman in the upper chamber at the time. I’ll discuss her courageous speech against McCarthy, which she made on the Senate floor on June 1, 1950, in a later essay.
Whether or not he was fully aware of the fact, McCarthy was using the tactics developed by Adolf Hitler: the Big Lie and the multiple lie. The idea was that people will more readily believe a huge lie than a small one, because most people would never tell a whopper, but might fib a little. The multiple lie technique is to tell so many lies in such a short time that it overwhelms the media. They can’t track them all down and disprove them. And just keep repeating the lies over and over and over and people will think they are true.
All of this is exactly what Trump and Musk are doing today. Musk fires out a steady barrage of misinformation on his X account and it creates an atmosphere in which people will believe, to take one example, that “BILLIONS OF DOLLARS HAVE BEEN STOLLEN [sic]” by USAID, as Trump charged on Truth Social (itself an example of calling something the opposite of what it is). “THE BIGGEST SCANDAL OF THEM ALL.” It is 100 percent, unadulterated bullshit.
Here’s a stunning example of how completely untethered to the world of fact they are. Trump said, “We identified and stopped $50m being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas. They used them as a method of making bombs. How about that?” Trump later raised the number (a la Joe McCarthy) to $100 million.
How about that, indeed. It is utterly absurd. USAID purchases condoms for distribution in areas of Africa ravaged by HIV/AIDS. It pays 50 cents apiece for them. So $50 million equals a billion condoms and $100 million would be two billion condoms.
Yet millions of people believe such nonsense.
At Wheeling 75 years ago tonight, Joe McCarthy also said,
one of the important reasons for the graft, the corruption, the dishonesty, the disloyalty, the treason in high government positions—one of the most important reasons why this continues—is a lack of moral uprising on the part of the 140 million American people.
Indeed. It is high time in February 2025 for a moral uprising against “the graft, the corruption, the dishonesty, the disloyalty, the treason in high government positions”—and one who does not have any government position but is burning it all down.
Referring to Dean Acheson, McCarthy closed his Wheeling speech saying,
He has lighted the spark which is resulting in a moral uprising and will end only when the whole sorry mess of twisted warped thinkers are swept from the national scene so that we may have a new birth of national honesty and decency in government.
We must make the antecedent of he Elon Musk and sweep from the national scene today “he whole sorry mess of twisted warped thinkers” that Donald Trump has brought into the federal government “so that we may have a new birth of national honesty and decency in government.
That would be a fitting tribute to Lincoln.