The FBI chief is and has always been highly political. J Edgar Hoover was a extreme anti-communist and was investigating suspected communists, infiltrating CPUSA and creating blacklists at the exact same time that McCarthy was conducting his hearings.
In fact the McCarthyism acticle on Wikipedia has a whole section about the FBI. The FBI was deeply involved in McCarthyism.
McCarthyism was primarily a political thing by politicians.
The FBI chief being discussed here, Wray, is a political appointment but not an elected politician so hopefully the appointment shields them from politics. Nevermind that the DoJ tries pretty hard to be independent of the President. But beyond that, this particular chief was appointed during the previous administration of a different party. And has served in both party's administrations.
I have no position on TikTok, but Wray saying this is not really comparable to McCarthy.
McCarthy didn't spy on anyone. He was a Senator not an intel agent. Additionally, McCarthy has been proven right. His estimate was that there were around 20 Soviet agents that had infiltrated the US government at the highest levels. Once the USSR fell and their documents became public it was proven they had well over 200. McCarthy was right but people still tarnish his name out of spite.
Hoover was an SOB far worse than McCarthy ever could have been but is still revered by many in the intel services. His name still adorns the FBI HQ building and other than accusations of cross dressing, no ones dug in to truly uncover the evil things that man did.
I'm going to guess the downvotes are from people who don't know the history of people like McCarthy or Hoover's FBI and why someone who was lived through that era might be sensitive to and have opinions about topics of privacy[0][1]?
McCarthy was fiercely anti-communist, but so were most other people at that time. He became famous for alleging large scale infiltration of the US government by communist agents. He couldn't prove it, there are some historians who believe McCarthy was largely correct about the scale of the Soviet activity in the US government. They argue he was effectively 'cancelled' as a consequence of being dangerously correct, and that declassified decrypts released by the NSA decades later prove it. An example of this argument is:
"Cancel culture" is what right-wingers complain about when they've realized left-wingers have rifled through their rhetorical toolbox
Can you give some examples. At least from the perspective of a British person, I cannot recall right wing people ever engaging in "cancel culture" during my life time. Are you thinking of religious people in the USA?
The HUAC wasn’t McCarthy, of course; they are just sort of bound up in the same Red Scare history. It is routine for people outside the USA to conflate these things because of how they are presented in dramatisations; as a Brit I didn’t realise until recently.
McCarthy might have been a pivotal figure in McCarthyism (obviously ;-) but he had nothing directly to do with the HUAC because he was a senator.
He sat on what is now the Senate committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. It was the Senate Committee on Government Operations then, which had an enormously broad remit and gave him his ability to harass and persecute anyone who worked for the US federal government. He was also more able to resist pressure because of it.
McCarthy is a pretty unique figure in US history in that he was infamous for propagating the second "red scare" in the US. That's not to discredit these reports by any means, but it's not like he was do-gooder either. He was a vicious politician that didn't hesitate to accuse his enemies of being communist, which sometimes resulted in arrest and prosecution. [0]"McCarthyist" anti-communist (i.e. opposition political organization) laws were passed that were later struck down by the Supreme Court.
His ability to accumulate power this way made him a major political target, which isn't quite the same as someone just trying to reel in the 3 letter agencies.
The committee McCarthy chaired at the time of his notorious anti-Communist crusade was the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which still exists.
You may be thinking of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which also spent some time doing similar anti-Communist witch hunts, which existed until being renamed as the House Internal Security Committee in 1969, and was abolished with it's functions transferred to the House Judiciary Committee in 1975.
> One man isn’t an apparatus in lockstep seeking to perpetuate its power for its own sake.
From the linked Wikipedia page: "Historians have suggested since the 1980s that as McCarthy's involvement was less central than that of others, a different and more accurate term should be used instead that more accurately conveys the breadth of the phenomenon, and that the term McCarthyism is now outdated. Ellen Schrecker has suggested that Hooverism after FBI Head J. Edgar Hoover is more appropriate."
Was he blackballed as a result of being accused of treason by the government? If not, it’s not “literal McCarthyism”. It may be inspired by McCarthyist tactics, though.
The government at the time saw communism everywhere and Hoover's FBI was eager to paint any dissenter as a communist. The civil rights movement and racial relations in the US themselves were used for propaganda purposes by the Soviet Union. The evidence of MLK's 'communist leanings' of any significance is pretty weak.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr.#Allega...
The idea that Hoover's FBI was somehow 'executing the will of the people' rather than the will of J. Edgar Hoover seems pretty tenuous.
Didn't McCarthyism rely on or expand domestic spying? And didn't they extend suspicions and charges against far more people than the evidentiary basis would have supported? According to Wikipedia, the FBI's ranks nearly doubled in size to accommodate all the new investigations being pursued.
The term probably shouldn't mean that since there actually was a wealth of communist spies, sympathizers, etc. Ie, it was not a witch hunt. McCarthy's problem was using the Congress in an executive role.
In fact the McCarthyism acticle on Wikipedia has a whole section about the FBI. The FBI was deeply involved in McCarthyism.
reply