Ross Douthat — the outgoing New York Times opinion columnist and incoming “60 Minutes” correspondent — penned a farewell column for “The Gray Lady” this week that neatly encapsulated a certain vibe surrounding the respectable right’s dilemma regarding President Donald Trump’s lawless, corrupt and deeply unpopular second administration. Both sides have bad qualities, but nothing’s worse than wokeness, so we’ll default to siding with Trump.
I’ve enjoyed reading (and mostly disagreeing with) Douthat’s commentary for a long time, but one line in his final column struck me as particularly risible, in light of the second Trump administration’s myriad abuses: “I lived through the years of peak woke, and it was a McCarthyite experience.”
I also lived through “peak woke” — as a reporter, editor and eventually opinion columnist. I have heterodox politics that would be rather hard to characterize as “woke” — and this isn’t remotely a “both sides” situation. During the period that Douthat likens to the Red Scare, I criticized antisemitism in left-wing activism; the mealy-mouthed excuses for rioting from some liberals; the waves of zero-tolerance cancellations for nonpublic figures; unnecessarily long Covid school closures; corporations, schools and government agencies adopting simplistic racial essentialism clumsily masquerading as groundbreaking anti-bigotry philosophy; and the culture of “well-meaning” censorship on college campuses. I could go on, but the point is I criticized the left’s (and establishment’s) excesses in mainstream publications and didn’t get fired for it. Just like Douthat didn’t.
Mind you, I find attempts by the likes of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and others seeking to retcon the excesses of “woke one” as “crazy” but harmless to be both annoying and insulting. Seemingly none of the left’s political and intellectual thought leaders are willing to say the magic words “I was wrong about that” or even acknowledge that the general public’s deep antipathy to many aspects of Woke 1.0 contributed heavily to the rise of Trump 2.0. (I’m reminded of the progressive comedian Marc Maron asking his audience in 2025, “You do realize we annoyed the average American into fascism, right?”)
But for all wokeness hath wrought, I still wouldn’t liken Woke 1.0 to McCarthyism, especially since Trump 2.0 fits the bill much more suitably.
Don’t take my word for it. The president’s personal MAGA loyalty enforcer, the self-described “pro-white nationalism” conspiracy theorist influencer Laura Loomer, explicitly stated last year: “Joe McCarthy was right. We need to make McCarthy great again.”
There are far more examples of Trump and his allies executing politically motivated, censorious, guilt-by-association witch hunts than this column has the space to fully document.
Among the Trump administration’s unabashedly McCarthyite moves since returning to power in January 2025: asking applicants for high-ranking defense and intelligence positions if they believe in Trump’s big lie about the 2020 election being stolen; requiring federal government job applicants to pledge their political loyalty to the president in a series of short essays; purging the Justice Department and FBI of staffers who worked on cases prosecuting Trump or his allies; bogus prosecutions against perceived enemies; firing people for once having associations with DEI offices (you can almost hear McCarthy’s ghost asking, “Are you or have you ever been a member of a DEI office?”); arresting and attempting to deport green card holders for expressing protected speech that offends Trump and his political movement; shaking down universities for payouts and withholding government research grants as political retribution; the Department of Homeland Security spying on Americans’ social media accounts and threatening them with prosecution for criticizing the agency online, which has unsurprisingly led to speech-chilling self-censorship. (Kinda sounds like McCarthyism!)
On that last point, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are showing up at people’s homes and workplaces, trying to compel them to sign a self-incriminating document related to their social media posts. And the Federal Communication Commission — when it isn’t acting as the talk show and comedy police — has tried to intimidate broadcasters into running stories falsely claiming Trump’s failed war of choice on Iran is going well. Just this week, Trump reportedly pushed the DOJ to conjure up more charges against a person they know is innocent of the nonexistent crime of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. (McCarthyism was big on scapegoats!)
There are far more examples of Trump and his allies executing politically motivated, censorious, guilt-by-association witch hunts than this column has the space to fully document, but I’m comfortable assessing that Woke 1.0 didn’t remotely scratch this level of direct political intimidation by the federal government.
Still, as Douthat moves from one high-profile legacy media job to another — having supposedly survived an era of unmatched, grave intolerance — hopefully this abridged list of MAGA McCarthyism helps him land on an answer to the question posed in the headline of his last Times column: “Who Are the Good Guys and the Bad Guys? I’m No Longer Sure.” There might not be a neat binary between the two, but neither is there a rational reason to believe both sides are equally bad when it comes to trampling on Americans’ civil liberties with government-led political inquisitions.
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