Ellen Schrecker on the New McCarthyism

This week on CounterSpin: The “what could possibly go wrong?” meme might be overused, but it’s hard not to think it, watching the government create new tools and powers for countering “disinformation” that will be handed to a president-elect who calls journalists “the lowest form of life.” Donald Trump didn’t create the present terrain, however, and pretending that fearmongering and watchlists and looking the other way are all newly minted will not serve us. In fact, we can look to history to help us understand what’s happening, and what we can do to resist it.

We’ll talk history with Ellen Schrecker. She’s a retired professor of American history at Yeshiva University and the author of a number of books, including Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America and No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism in the Universities.

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Our quick look back at recent press includes the reluctance to accurately label presidential lies, the desperate search for pro-Trump columnists and the racist record of NBC‘s latest hire.

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