Trump Is Building the Blue Scare

In the hours and days after Charlie Kirk's murder, there was discussion on social media about whether this would be America's Reichstag fire. A reference to the fire that was part of, that was a rationale for Hitler's crackdown on political freedom in Germany. Many of us were worried hearing that, and I think what we've seen since suggests the fears were right, but the analogy the analogy was wrong. We should have been looking closer to home. This isn't a Reichstag fire. This is more like the Red Scare. We often think of the Red Scare in terms of McCarthyism, named for Joseph McCarthy, its most enthusiastic and effective practitioner. But it was a lot more than that. The Red Scare's basic structure was to define a political enemy that could not be compromised with. The point was to use that charge that this enemy was everywhere, that it posed an existential threat to America, that its tentacles had to be chopped off everywhere they could be found, to go after a very wide swath of your political opponents, to do so using state power, to do so using cultural power, to do so by intimidating employers. What we are seeing now is a blue scare. In this, the Trump administration is not even being remotely subtle about what it intends, how wide a net they want the blue scare to cast. Just listen to vice president JD Vance. We're trying to figure out how to prevent this festering violence that you see on the far left from becoming even more and more mainstream. A lot of people are very worried about how we got here in the first place. And you have the crazies on the far left who are saying, oh, Stephen Miller and JD Vance, they're gonna go after constitutionally protected speech. And then we're gonna go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates, and engages in violence. But the Red Scare took decades to build. It had at its heart a genuine foreign adversary and real domestic espionage. The Blue Scare isn't being built with the same care or attention or effort at creating political consensus. The Trump administration, as it often does, is speed running the project. It took them mere days to get to Jimmy Kimmel. Jimmy Kimmel. But to see where they might go, to see what they might try to do, we need to look at where America, not all that long ago, was. Corey Robin is a political theorist at Brooklyn College. He is an expert on McCarthyism, as well as the author of the book The Reactionary Mind, which is, in my opinion, one of the most insightful books you can read on the Trumpist, right, and what is behind it. As always, my email is reclineshow@nytimes.com. Corey Robin, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Let's begin here. What was the Red Scare? There were actually two Red Scares in America. The first one was in 1919, …