The Right Wants a New McCarthyism. That Is How You Know It Is Losing.

A democratic socialist runs New York. His candidates just swept the primaries. The conservative media machine is calling for the blacklist, and Matt Walsh is only the loudest of them.

“McCarthy was right. McCarthyism was fully justified. And we need a new wave of it.”

That is Matt Walsh, on camera, in 2026.

He was not improvising, and he was not alone. A democratic socialist named Zohran Mamdani runs New York City, and this week the socialist candidates he backed swept their primaries, beating establishment incumbents in the largest media market in the country. The president called them three solid Communists. The cable hosts ran their segments. And Matt Walsh, called for the government to start destroying people again.

Walsh is the loudest of them, not the only one.

Here is what has them this frightened. Not a revolution. People starting to talk about one. A mayor who wants to freeze the rent, a few socialists winning local races, and a generation that has started saying the word out loud. The Democratic Socialists of America grew from about 6k members in 2015 to over 100k this year. That is the entire emergency.

The answer from the right is not an argument. It is the blacklist

They want people to believe McCarthyism was about Soviet spies. It was not. Its targets were organizers. The Taft-Hartley Act forced union leaders to sign anti-communist loyalty oaths, and the unions gutted under it were the most militant in the country: the electrical workers, the longshoremen, the mine and smelter workers. The people who built American industrial unionism were driven out of public life and ruined. The movement moved right, dropped political organizing, and never recovered.

That is what Walsh calls fully justified.

It helps to know who signs the checks. Walsh works for The Daily Wire, launched in 2015 with a 4.7 million dollar investment from Farris Wilks. Farris and his brother Dan made their fortune fracking, sold Frac Tech in 2011 for 3.5 billion dollars, and each pocketed 1.4 billion. Walsh is no independent thinker wrestling with ideas. He is the spearhead, the useful idiot the oil oligarchs point at their own workforce, and he is proud of the job.

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Here is the part worth saying plainly.

When capital is winning the argument, it does not need the police. It lets the debate happen, because it expects to win. McCarthyism was not confidence. It was panic, the ruling class deciding the only way to stop working people from organizing was to ruin their lives.

They are panicking now for the same reason. The argument is already lost. Nobody calls for blacklists while they are winning. A generation did not turn toward socialism because a foreign government tricked them. They turned because they looked at their rent, their student debt, their medical bills, and their bosses’ second homes, and drew the obvious conclusion.

You know what? If you really want to spend time catching real criminals, how about putting more effort into the Epstein files? It is full of criminals. Instead of trying to crush some union workers, people who are basically just asking for a decent life, go for the real criminals.

So who are these communists they want crushed? They are Amazon warehouse workers trying to form a union. They are the baristas at the Starbucks on the corner. They are nurses fighting for safe staffing so their patients do not die. They are graduate students and teachers and tenants who got tired of asking nicely.

None of them are trying to seize anything. The socialists winning these races are reformists. They work inside the system. They want healthcare, housing, a union, a wage that covers the rent. They are asking capitalism for a better deal, not for its end.

That modest ask is enough to make the right scream for the blacklist. This is the mild version. If demands this small frighten them now, they should think about what happens when people stop asking nicely.

Walsh has one more rule. If you are not American, he says, American politics is none of your concern.

That is a rich thing to say from the center of an empire. American bombs fall on people who never got a vote. American sanctions starve countries that never appeared on a US ballot. When American foreign policy kills a schoolgirl overseas, her family did not get to weigh in on the election that built the missile. The empire reaches into every corner of the planet and then tells the planet to mind its own business.

So here is a thought for everyone now demanding a sequel to the blacklist. Go ahead. Try it.

The last time America did this, it deported a scientist named Qian Xuesen. He had co-founded what became NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The witch hunt stripped his clearance on no evidence and shipped him to China in 1955. He went home and built China’s missile program. The carrier-killer missiles now aimed at the US Navy trace directly to the man America threw away. The Navy Secretary at the time called it the stupidest thing the country ever did.

This is what McCarthyism is. Not the defense of a nation. A tool the rich use when they can no longer win with words.

They are not afraid of foreign agents. They are afraid of nurses and warehouse workers comparing notes. They are afraid that working people will stop fighting each other and start getting orgnized.

They should be afraid.

The blacklist is not strength. It is what a ruling class does when it has lost the argument and has nothing left but force.

Let them try.