#OnThisDay, June 9, 1954 was the turning point for Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist crusade, when Army counsel Joseph Welch asked him, “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” (depicted in Tail Gunner Joe, 1977)
Academic and commentator Juan Cole on being targeted by the bigoted far right republican representatives Virginia Palmieri Foxx and Tim Walker.
"Foxx and her MAGA colleagues are much more concerned about cracking the heads of principled undergraduates than about the 15,000 dead children in Gaza"
Juan Cole annihilates Walker and quite rightly so. Walker is the fuckwit who advocated for a nuclear bomb to be dropped on Gaza.
Today in Labor History May 22, 1968: New York police broke through the barricades at Columbia University, busting the student occupations there. As a result, 998 were arrested and over 200 injured. Students were demanding a black studies program and an end to military recruitment and ROTC on campus. Sound familiar? However, today’s student protests are bringing back the worst of 1960s-‘70s police brutality and university intolerance for Free Speech along with McCarthy era firing, blacklisting and doxing of academics for the crime of criticizing the Israeli government, under bogus claims of antisemitism.
Today in Labor History May 13, 1960: San Francisco Police violently attacked university students who were nonviolently protesting HUAC (House Un-American Committee) hearings. After protesters were denied entrance to the meeting, police attacked and swept them out of City Hall's rotunda and down the stairs with fire hoses. 12 people hospitalized (including eight police, mostly from exhaustion). 64 were arrested. Charges were dropped against all but one, who was acquitted in a jury trial. The hearings were led by the infamous Joe McCarthy. They would come into union towns like Chicago, San Francisco and Seattle, and issue subpoenas to all the progressives and radicals in the town, especially union leaders, many of whom were communists, or had communist ties. The only defense was to take the Fifth Amendment. The consequence of that was that you would usually lose your job, your name would be plastered in the papers, and your kids would be mistreated in school. Alternatively, you could take the First, like the Hollywood Ten did. For that, you’d be held in contempt of court sent to prison.
Said’s legacy reads today as a scathing condemnation of the hypocrisy of U.S. liberal institutions, their moral corruption, and the hollowness of the very values that they profess to teach.
It seems McCarthyism is alive and well and targeting folks in the tech world who speak out against Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people.
Let me tell you this: it only makes me want to shout louder.
You will not silence us. We will not sit idly by and watch a genocide unfold before our very eyes. And history will judge you harshly even if our crumbling, hypocritical, two-tier system of so-called international law does not.