Middle-aged people grew up hearing that the Red Scare and McCarthyism were the worst things ever, the ultimate modern American sin, almost on par with racism or slavery. Hollywood made a zillion movies about the Red Scare, well into the 2010s.
It might be a while before you see another Red Scare movie, because now the Left is running its own hysterical McCarthyite campaign, and nobody in Hollywood would want to inadvertently draw attention to the uncomfortable parallels.
It turns out the Left was really just taking notes and getting ready for their own turn at bat as inquisitors. They're doing literally everything they spent the past 50 years excoriating the Red hunters for doing - hysterical overreactions, blacklists, politicized accusations.
"Irony" may not be the word for it. A sizable chunk of the academic Left might really have grown up thinking Red Scares are the way a dominant political force protects itself from ideological subversion. Right methods, but "wrong" target the first time around.
For decades the Left portrayed itself as the righteous victims of unreasonable blacklists, a martyrdom routine Hollywood actors are still eager to perform, like the left-wing version of a passion play. But they were also thinking: "Wow, blacklists really WORK."
It turns out they were just itching for their chance to be the ones writing the blacklists. They've been doing it in Hollywood for years - ask any conservative actor or director. As with campus cancel culture, it was a plague brewing in a petri dish, waiting to be unleashed.
The Left never really had any moral or principled objection to McCarthyism or blacklisting. They attacked it because it was effective against them - there really were a disturbing number of Communists loyal to the Soviet Union running around - not because it was immoral.
And knowing McCarthyism was effective, they couldn't wait to impose their brand of it. They know exactly how subversion works, and they're not going to allow the techniques they employed to undermine American society be used against THEIR new totalitarian regime.
Notice how aggressively the Left cracked down on humor and satire, which they used during their ascendancy to make the culture they despised look foolish and retrograde. Notice how "irreverent" and "provocative" are suddenly curse words, not high praise for comedians or actors.
All my life, until about a decade ago, I heard "speech codes" denounced as the worst of sins against artistic freedom. Hollywood's Golden Age codes, the Comics Code - what absurd nonsense they were! How could anyone have supported such close-minded censorship!
But suddenly in that last decade, speech codes became VERY COOL. Speech codes were essential to protecting and transmitting the new dominant culture, you see. And the new codes were an order of magnitude more arbitrary and complex than anything Fredric Wertham dreamed up.
Good luck trying to get a "subversive" comic book or movie made at one of the major established studios. The new speech codes are enforced far more rigorously than the old, and the enforcers require ACTIVE political conformity, not just technical compliance with clear rules.
Left-wing subversives were able to cleverly inject their preferred themes into material that technically obeyed the clearly written rules, but the new censors are very much on guard against that. You can't get published by following the rules but subverting their ideology.
The new speech codes aren't usually written down in their entirety, and even when they are, they change all the time. The perpetually nervous subjects of the totalitarian Left must actively seek to flatter its ideology at all times, to avoid "mistaken" transgressions.
This is all by design, because the Left knows the "rules for radicals" very well, and it works aggressively to prevent any of them from being used against its own totalitarian regime. McCarthyism 2.0 was extensively patched to fix all the exploits and bugs in the original code.
The mobs running riot in the streets, silencing dissidents, and destroying the lives of ideological enemies are a nightmare inversion and evolution of everything the Left thought 50s and early 60s America was. They are The Man, and you won't be allowed to stick it to THEM. /end
