‘Worse Than The McCarthy Era’: Professor Warns MSNBC Democracy Has Never Been More Under Siege

A philosophy professor and author shocked MSNBC’s Ali Velshi on Sunday when he said that American democracy has never been more under siege than it is today during a discussion of the Red Scare perpetuated by Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) in the 1950s,

Jason Stanley, chair in American studies at the University of Toronto, told Velshi, “I want to take a little issue with your comparison to the McCarthy era. Forty academics were dismissed over their posts about Charlie Kirk. I’m not aware of such a rapid mass firing of academics in…the McCarthy era.”

“Wow,” Velshi exclaimed.

“So, I think to some extent this is much worse than the McCarthy era,” Stanley said. “We’ve had…countless people fired across countless industries. We had The Washington Post fire Karen Attiah, their only Black columnist, opinion columnists, remaining, for utterly innocuous posts claiming it was over Charlie Kirk. Basically, people are targeting anyone whose political opinions they don’t like…So, that’s what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to take this as any excuse to target people whose political orientations, whose truth telling really does not fit their narrative.”

Stanley continued:

And I think that they’re throwing everything at this. This is more than McCarthy. What this is, it’s an attempt to invoke the Insurrection Act, as you said. So, what they’re trying to do, there’s two historical antecedents to pay attention to here…And the first is the Reichstag fire, when…allegedly a communist burned down the German Reichstag and Hitler…flooded the streets with…his sort of official thugs, which is sort of equivalent to, analogous to, what it looks like is happening with ICE.

And then extreme voter intimidation happened. And then after the election, [Hitler] passed the Enabling Act to take full power. So, that seems to be a very clear antecedent here. And the other, of course, is, is Kristallnacht, when a German diplomat was assassinated in Paris by a Polish Jew and they called for the targeting of jewish shops and synagogues.

Stanley said that so far, President Donald Trump’s administration has “not successfully convincing the public” that its heavy-handedness is justified.

“They’re saying they have this incredibly broad net of who counts as a terrorist, of who counts as an extremist, and they’re going to use that to justify it, but they’re going to try to do it whether or not the public is going along with it,” Stanley added.

Watch the clip above via MSNBC.