The

The 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 that 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 J.D. 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 J.D. Vance, they're going to go after constitutionally protected speech.

And no, no, we're going to go after the NGO network that fomence, 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.

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