You know how in the age of Trump, people on the right point fingers and shrieked “Antifa!,” proclaiming it a terrorist group responsible for all types of fuckery, despite a dearth of evidence? That shit happened before. In the 1950s, “McCarthyism” was all about government repression by means of baseless accusations of communism.
--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: June 9, 1954--
Republican senator Joseph McCarthy was, among many things, a piece of shit. To his credit, he could have gotten a waiver for World War II because he was a judge, but he volunteered for the Pacific theater. He was an intelligence REMF (rear-echelon motherfucker) for a dive-bomber squadron but did volunteer for a dozen gunner/observer combat missions, followed by doing the uncool thing of giving himself the nickname “Tail-Gunner Joe.” You’re never supposed to give yourself a nickname. That’s not how it works. Anyway, he later lied and said he flew thirty-two missions so he could qualify for a Distinguished Flying Cross, adding stolen valor to his list of douchebaggery.
After the war he was elected senator of Wisconsin and became an even bigger cocknocker by spreading fear of communism into every corner of American life.
It was a tense time. The Soviets tested their first nuke in 1949, and in 1950 Korea became a staging ground for war with Communist China. Then a senior official in the State Department was convicted in an espionage case, and McCarthy milked that for career advancement by saying he had a list of commies working in the State Department. Suddenly, he was thrust into the national spotlight as the Communism Inquisitor Numero Uno, saying they’d infiltrated the government, armed forces, universities, and film industry.
His unsubstantiated smears and accusations of treason became ever more ridiculous, and McCarthyism reached a tipping point on June 9, 1954. Joseph Welch, who was chief legal counsel for the U.S. Army while it was under investigation for alleged communist activities, clapped back against McCarthy’s laughable accusations against one of his colleagues, calling McCarthy cruel and reckless. Then Welch directed these fateful words to McCarthy in front of a national TV audience.
“Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
McCarthy tried to continue his attack, but Welch shut him down and basically said, “We’re fucking done here” and the crowd broke into applause. And that brief exchange transformed history right there. It was a sudden shift where people rapidly began to come to their senses, and McCarthy’s witch hunt lost steam. Joe McCarthy died three years later at age forty-eight.
NOTE: This piece was researched and written by a human, not some bullshit "ai" plagiarism software.
Those who cannot remember the past need a history teacher who says “fuck” a lot. Get both volumes of ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY SH!T WENT DOWN at JamesFell.com/books.
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