Was McCarthy Right All Along?

This is generally a solid YT channel for balanced evidenced based discussions on various topics. Here he covers McCarthy and whether he was more right than wrong about going after communists among us. Red scare or red BS?

I can remember a sign for the John Birch Society, now this is pre-1970; I asked my Mom about it and She said “Don’t worry about it their a Bunch of Nuts.”.
I had to remind her that those “Nuts” were right.
MaCarthy was correct we had Reds everywhere,

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Without watching that video first, YES McCarthy was right :sweat_smile:. But I will watch it later.

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I didn’t watch the vid either. But just my $0.02, McCarthy was spot on about the threat. Where I fault him is on his execution. His methods were overzealous, made a lot of enemies he didn’t have to, and in the long run were counterproductive to his intended goals.

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After the Cold War was over and all of the names had been named, it turned out MCCarthy wasn’t so wrong afterall.
The Big thing is Truman was a Democrat and they had run everything for nearly 20 years, so people could believe the Commies had not only infiltraited but had worked in to the highest relms of the Administration. Eisenhower took over and everyone felt like the Greatest WWII had it all under control.
The thing is some of these Guys were in until the 1970’s.

Probably not far off.

https://www.yaas.org/articles/what-mccarthy-got-right-about-communism
Since McCarthy’s death in 1957, new evidence has been found in the Venona Project - a project spanning from 1943-1980- that there were a large number of Soviet spies who were indeed infiltrating the United States government. The Venona Project was able to intercept and decrypt messages from the Soviet Union and thus the United States government was able to determine the spies who had been undercover in America. The findings of this project confirmed the suspicions that McCarthy had all along.

When McCarthy first made the announcement that there were “enemies from within”, many had doubts that this was actually true, and thought McCarthy was simply trying to make a name for himself by playing a political game. We do not know if McCarthy’s personal list of names was one hundred percent accurate, but what we do know today is that he was not wrong in the slightest about the amount of influence the Soviets had on the United States.
Being an anti-communist drew much ire from those on the Left who felt like the entire thing was being blown out of proportion. During the period of the second World War, one of the biggest threats from the Soviets seemed was making and using an atomic bomb as well as selling American secrets that could lead to the United States losing the war.

Looking back, we can see how not only did the Soviets have people in place to do these exact things, but they also left behind a stain of communist ideology that has impacted America to this day.

Look up operation Venona, That was one code, one effort and gathered 3000 messages comming in to the United States.
Lots of documents and later copies of Stalin’s old diarys came out after the Cold War ended.
When you look at those documents you can see the Soviets had infiltriated our Government ipretty deeply in the 1930’s-1940’s.
Harry Dexter White who sat at the very top of the Treasury Department. Lockland Curry, The Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss all of those papers convicted those People.

Don’t forget the Mitrokhin Archive of KGB records. We can only imagine how much GRU and others were doing that he DIDN’T catch to preserve…

Yes, he was totally right.

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Communists have been entrenched here since the mid 19th century.