AS THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE took to the streets of Los Angeles to defend their communities against state-sanctioned abductions of immigrants this June, the Senate Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism (SSCC) put three organizations—Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA), and the independent political organization Unión del Barrio (UdB)—on notice. Led by Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, the SSCC normally oversees anti-terrorism enforcement and policy, and directs the work of the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Justice Department Criminal Division. But in a letter dated June 11th, the SSCC accused the three leftist organizations of supporting “coordinated protests and riots” against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal law enforcement agencies. The letter called the LA uprisings “lawless mob actions,” and demanded the organizations “cease and desist” any further actions “aiding and abetting” the “criminal” protests. Even more notably, the three groups were instructed to preserve all communications and contractual, financial, travel, and strategy information related to their role in “planning, coordinating, or funding” the protests; failure to do so could result in a criminal investigation.
On the surface, the SSCC letter appeared to home in on a grassroots resistance campaign against the Trump regime’s escalation of the U.S.’s already draconian immigration policies. However, the commitment of government resources to criminalize, harass, and intimidate social justice organizations, and the express intent to seize their communications, signals a broader campaign of anti-radical repression—one that has historically been known by the name “red scare.” Though “red scare” is commonly used to refer to discrete historical moments of anti-left attack, most notably the periods of 1919-1920 and 1950-1954, historian Robbie Lieberman has argued that the term can be used more broadly to characterize any campaign of “attack on civil liberties in the name of Americanism aimed at undermining movements for justice and equality.” This broader definition illuminates how red scares have been an enduring feature of 20th and 21st century U.S. politics, and clarifies the outlines of the iteration that is developing in our own time.
Historically, red scares arise to suppress protest movements that emerge at the intersection of war, economic turmoil, and racialized violence. The red scare of 1919-1920, for instance, took place in the aftermath of World War I and amidst U.S. intervention in Russia against the Bolsheviks in 1918, in a period also characterized by high inflation and the “Red Summer” of anti-Black riots across the U.S. in 1919. At the time, organizations including the Socialist Party, the Industrial Workers of the World, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, and the African Blood Brotherhood arose to challenge U.S. imperialism, racism, and capitalist exploitation, drawing the ire of the government and triggering a red scare. Similarly, in 1950-1954, another red scare emerged as the Korean and Cold Wars took off alongside a fierce capitalist class assault on unions and rampant state and societal violence against African Americans that the 1951 “We Charge Genocide” petition described as constituting genocide. Once again, movements for peace, racial justice, economic redistribution, and international solidarity emerged, only to find themselves facing a protracted campaign of anti-radical repression.
The resulting red scares routinely codified militant challenges to U.S. racial capitalism as foreign-inspired or otherwise un-American. In the 1919-1920 red scare, for example, the Overman Committee, a subsidiary of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was created to investigate un-American activities and the influence of Bolshevism in the U.S. In the 1950-1954 red scare, the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations, a compilation of primarily leftwing organizations deemed threatening to the order and stability of the United States, identified groups for censure. These efforts launched congressional hearings meant to discredit dissident organizations, leading to left groups being blacklisted, their members barred from participation in other groups and institutions, hounded by the FBI, and worse. (Indeed, as evident in the case of the Peekskill Riot in 1949—where civil society, police, and the New York governor colluded to violently attack accused communists, leading to attempted lynchings and thousands of injuries from knives, rocks, and fists—such red scares could even legitimate the use of armed force to crush radical protest.) Through the use of such anti-left committees and a range of other repressive measures—the convergence of all three branches of government in curtailing freedom of speech, assembly, and association; the central role of the corporate media in demonizing “enemies”; bans on “heretical” literature; and anti-intellectualism and attacks on the university—past red scares wreaked havoc on progressive politics in the U.S. They encouraged the expulsion of accused communists, who were some of the left’s most effective organizers, from mainstream organizations. They also led to the narrowing of the struggle for racial justice by removing its internationalist focus; created the groundwork for a repeated misconstruing of domestic peace protest as abetting the enemies of the U.S.; and generally cultivated an atmosphere of fear and suspicion that discouraged militancy over the decades.
Today, we are in another such red scare conjuncture. The U.S. is the enthusiastic partner of Zionist aggression across historic Palestine and the region more broadly, including the genocide in Gaza, the savage bombing of Lebanon and Syria, and most recently, the “12-Day War” between Israel and Iran. The U.S. has also used bombing as a key instrument of foreign policy, launching more than 500 airstrikes in 249 locations, from Somalia to Yemen, in the past seven months; imposing and maintaining brutal and deadly sanctions on more than two dozen countries, including Cuba, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe; and most recently, taking aim at international institutions like the United Nations and the International Criminal Court in an effort to illegitimize them. Domestically, meanwhile, the government has eroded almost all social safety nets; promoted deregulation and corporate price gouging, leading to inflation and widespread economic suffering; engaged in mass firings and layoffs; and escalated its bid to weaken a resurgent labor movement. All this has been accompanied by escalating government and vigilante white supremacist assaults on racialized minorities, including migrants (documented and undocumented), Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, and Black people.
As in the past, the violence and dehumanization of U.S. imperialism has not gone uncontested. There have been mass mobilizations, like those in LA, against ICE; rebellion against the construction of “cop cities,” most prominently in Atlanta; and nationwide student encampments and grassroots campaigns fighting for Palestinian liberation. Black and brown people have confronted white nationalist vigilantism; women and LGBTQ+ folks have established national networks to protect their rights and bodies; and workers and labor unions have launched strikes for better wages and conditions. Unsurprisingly, another red scare has emerged that aims to degrade and demoralize these movements with well-worn tactics of red-baiting, charges of conspiracy, targeted harassment, criminalization, deportation, and other repressive measures. As this anti-radical campaign escalates, it becomes important to look back into how these tactics have been deployed in the past. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.
RED SCARES RECAST legitimate political thought and action as threats and conspiracies. Speaking in 1949 before the House Committee on Foreign Relations, W.E.B. Du Bois, the Black intellectual and co-chair of the Council on African Affairs (CAA), referred to this practice of mischaracterization as the invention of “witchwords.” “If in 1850 an American disliked slavery, the word of exorcism was ‘abolitionist.’ He was a ‘nigger lover.’ He believed in free love and murder of kind slave masters. He ought to be lynched and mobbed,” Du Bois said.
Today the word is ‘communist’. . . If anybody questions the power of wealth, wants to build more [Tennessee Valley Authorities], or advocates civil rights for Negroes, he is a communist, a revolutionist, a scoundrel, and is liable to lose his job or land in jail.
In the red scare moments after World War I, in the midst of the Great Depression, during the early Cold War, at the start of the civil rights movement, and beyond, such witchwords have allowed the state to circumscribe the rights and privileges of its critics. That trend continues into the present, with today’s witchwords including diversity, equity, and inclusion, or “DEI,” aimed at crushing any modicum of power, privilege, or access gained by minoritized people, particularly Black women; “antisemitism,” bastardized to mean any criticism of Israel or Zionism; “wokeness,” meant to denigrate racialized people generally, and Black people particularly, who challenge racial domination; and “domestic terrorism,” applied to any number of militant protestors, from those who reject cop cities to those who support Palestinian liberation. Prior to the June 2025 LA uprising, PSL had already been accused of antisemitism by mainstream media outlets for its pro-Palestine positions, demonstrating the way that witchwords help establish narratives of subversiveness that red scares can later capitalize on.
In addition to using witchwords, red scares justify crackdowns against left militancy by casting it as a pre-eminent threat to the law and its enforcement. Starting in 1919, J. Edgar Hoover, the founding and longest-serving director of the FBI (formerly the Bureau of Investigation) who worked closely with various anti-radical Congressional committees, continually asserted that it was the violent criminal elements that believed in and proffered radical doctrines like communism. “Disrespect for law and order is a fundamental cornerstone of communist tactics,” Hoover asserted. “Charges of ‘police brutality,’ ‘illegal arrest,’ and ‘persecution’ have long echoed in the Party press. These false communist charges, unfortunately, have been taken up by other groups whose basic purpose is to destroy law and order and to create chaos.” In its June letter, the SSCC employed the same line of argumentation, casting anti-ICE protests as “lawless mob action” and “criminal conduct,” and construing protestors as a danger to law enforcement—despite the latter maintaining a monopoly on force and violence.
Alongside the witchwords and accusations of lawlessness used to vilify radicals, red scares are marked by the deployment of Congressional committees to harass, humiliate, and discredit radicals through vicious, biased interrogations intent on establishing their “un-Americanness.” Examples of such committees abound. The 1918 Overman Committee was organized to investigate “pro-German” and “Bolshevik” elements in the United States. The 1930 Special Committee to Investigate Communist Activities in the United States, also known as the Fish Committee, was convened at the urging of American Federation of Labor leader Matthew Woll to investigate radicals accused of being funded by the Soviet Union. In 1934, the McCormack-Dickenstein Committee was formed to investigate Nazi propaganda in the United States but quickly turned its attention to the “dangers” of communism. There was the 1938 Dies Committee, which was a select committee organized to investigate “subversive” and “un-American” activity and was later transformed into the permanent House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in 1945, perhaps the most notorious and damaging of the anti-radical committees. The Subversive Activities Control Board (SACB) was formed as a result of the passage of the McCarran Act of 1950, and required communist and communist “front” organizations to register with the government or face five years imprisonment and a $10,000 fine. The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee was created in 1951 to oversee the enforcement of the McCarran Act and to investigate subversive activities including espionage, sabotage, and infiltration by those under the control of a foreign government or organization. The list goes on.
Congressional committees continue to be used to anti-radical ends today. In addition to the SSCC, the House Counterterrorism and Intelligence Subcommittee, which oversees the Department of Homeland Security’s effectiveness in fulfilling domestic security and counterterrorism measures, recently held a hearing on “The Rise of Anti-Israel Extremist Groups and Their Threat to U.S. National Security,” which conflated advocacy for Palestinian liberation with antisemitism and support for terrorism. Likewise, the Committee on Education and the Workforce, charged with overseeing an array of programs and policies related to legislation such as the National Labor Relations Act, the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act, and the Higher Education Act, convened the hostile show hearings investigating “antisemitism” on college campuses, in addition to the hearing “Examining the Policies and Priorities of the Department of Labor,” which aimed to further curtail the power of unions and to root out the “radical DEI agenda” from the workforce. Taken together, these committees continue what American Studies scholar Michael Paul Rogin called a “countersubversive political tradition” aimed at creating, stigmatizing, and revoking the rights of critics of the U.S. government.
Throughout the 20th century, the dissidents who most interested red scare committees were those organizing on behalf of racialized groups. For instance, W. Alphaeus Hunton (dubbed the “unsung valiant” by his wife and biographer Dorothy Hunton), who worked alongside the likes of famed singer and activist Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois from the 1930s to the1960s in movements on behalf of Black equality, workers’ rights, and African decolonization, faced more than two decades of government attack in his role as the chairman of the labor committee of the Washington, DC, chapter of the National Negro Congress (NNC), trustee of the Civil Rights Bail Fund, and educational director of the CAA. In particular, during World War II, Hunton was branded a communist and a subversive by the Fish Committee because of his instrumental role in organizing Black workers in a campaign against the Glen Martin Aircraft Factory for refusing to hire them. The NNC was accused of attempting to sabotage the defense industry by infiltrating the factory with Black communist workers, leading Hunton to later note that “the history of all the congressional investigating committees from Martin Dies on down to the present McCarthy and Velde committees has been one of victimizing the fighters against Jim Crow.” Hunton’s assessment can be just as easily applied to today’s SSCC, which seeks to intimidate and discipline PSL, CHIRLA, and UdB for opposing the United States’ racist, imperialist immigration policy and the cruel and unusual tactics being used to enforce it.
Red scare committees used a variety of tactics to subdue their radical foes. The Fish Committee, for instance, did not call Hunton to testify, but it nonetheless spread “slanderous testimony without making the slightest effort to corroborate facts,” in the words of Dorothy Hunton; it was only when Hunton insisted that he had the right to face his accusers that he was told he had been “exonerated” of charges of subversion and disloyalty. More aggressive techniques were also used: In 1951, Hunton was imprisoned for contempt for six months for refusing to “name names” during a HUAC hearing. Specifically, he would not disclose the names of those who donated to the Civil Rights Bail Fund, which had been organized in 1946 to aid in the legal defense of those radicals who were rejected by private bond companies because of their politics. Here, HUAC not only turned Hunton’s activism into a crime, but also reframed the right to confidentiality into a threat to national security as it sought to expose radical groups’ donors to potential harassment and persecution. In demanding the same type of information from PSL, CHIRLA, and UdB on pain of a criminal investigation, the SSCC is similarly poised to cast a pall of criminality on radical organizations and their associates alike.
Indeed, compelling troves of data from radical movements has long been a core red scare tactic. The purpose of this is twofold. First, access to these records allows investigative committees to establish guilt by association to criminalize not only direct targets, but also anyone affiliated with the organization, however loosely, through donations, sympathy, indirect engagement (such as being on a mailing list), and so forth. Second, demanding an astronomical amount of information allows red scare committees to drain left organizations of resources, time, and manpower; to distract them from important organizing work; and to open them up to penalty for non-compliance. An example of the effectiveness of this tactic is the Subversive Activities Control Board’s demand for all correspondence between Hunton’s CAA and the African National Congress and the South African Indian Congress. The committee demanded all communications and materials published and circulated from 1946 to 1955, and all records of funds sent internationally; it later accused the CAA of potentially violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act in order to gain access to the organization’s records. The resulting pressure was so insurmountable that in 1955, on Hunton’s recommendation, the CAA closed down after 18 years because ongoing government harassment had made it “difficult if not impossible to function.” Read in this context, it becomes clear that the SSCC’s attempt to strongarm sensitive information from a handful of left organizations portends a much broader strategy aimed at creating a wide dragnet to extirpate today’s radical movements.
The cumulative effect of these red scare tactics has been devastating for the U.S. left. As a result of these anti-radical campaigns, some of the ablest organizers in the U.S.’s long civil rights movement were ostracized and abandoned; the Black struggle for human rights was diluted to narrowly focus on civil rights; the peace movement was sidelined by charges of Soviet inspiration; and anti-colonialism became tolerable only when it was framed as a means of combatting communist influence in the Global South. It became commonplace for the threats of incarceration, deportation, passport suspension, and financial ruin to stalk those who levied militant challenges to the status quo, and these threats routinely discouraged everyday citizens from taking on political views that could be construed as “un-American” or subversive (or, in today’s parlance, “woke”). The aim of red scares, past and present, has been to get the public to become quiescent in the face of interlinked crises; it is a goal at which the government has too often succeeded.
But government success is not totalizing, especially when the oppressed fight back. One relevant lesson would be a willingness to work together across sectarian differences in order to combat state repression. In Hunton’s time, progressive groups such as the NAACP and the International Labor Defense worked together despite stark ideological differences to combat white supremacy. We should continue that practice today; the collaboration of PSL, CHIARA, and UdB during the anti-ICE protests demonstrates its efficacy. Secondly, mid-century radicals knew that in the face of government repression, the left needed to mount a defensive front. To that end, they organized defense committees and bail funds, mobilized the grassroots, and cultivated national and international allies in the cause of mutual protection. Collectivized resources, people power, and knowledge sharing are our best hope for effectively combatting U.S. government attacks.
Finally, Hunton and his comrades recognized that no matter the witchwords used to claim otherwise, the fight against rising racial fascism in the United States was inextricable from an end to racialized and colonial oppression everywhere. As the “We Charge Genocide” petition put it, “The lyncher and the atom bomber are related. The first cannot murder unpunished and unrebuked without so encouraging the latter that the peace of the world and the lives of millions are endangered.” The struggle against today’s “lyncher and atom bomber” includes, for example, linking the genocide in Gaza with ICE raids at home; the ongoing Western occupation of Haiti with the colonization of our neighborhoods by cop cities. All forms of resistance—from organizing protests and circulating petitions to supporting liberation struggles and engaging in self-defense—should be pursued with a mind toward rejecting the false distinction between domestic and foreign policy, expanding our cartography of struggle, and tapping into the global majority who suffer under Western imperialism. These strategies and more are necessary to fortify ourselves against current and future red scares, especially as the American descent from authoritarianism to fascism proceeds apace.