Red-baiting

Red-baiting (or in the Philippines) is a notorious bullshitting tactic used almost exclusively by the right wing. It consists of making a false and/or groundless accusation that some person is a communist or fellow traveler, often with the aim of discrediting them or destroying their reputation. Essentially, everything that certain people dislike is to be considered Communist plots. As such, red-baiting is a form of guilt by association, a fallacy which Stalin himself used to justify some of his crimes.For example, in relation to the debacle. See: 
Republicans, known for red-baiting when Joseph McCarthy attained the political spotlight, once opposed repressive policies spawned from hyper-fearmongering. Senators and Henry Cabot Lodge opposed the signed by President Woodrow Wilson.The New York Times, "SENATE ACCEPTS SEDITION BILL; Conference Report Adopted, 48 to 26, and Now Goes to House for Action. FRANCE AMENDMENT OUT Persons Speaking Truth for Good Ends Not Exempt from Punishment. SEE BLOW AT FREE SPEECH Hiram Johnson and Lodge Criticise Provisions--House Passes Flood Passport Bill. What the Bill Provides. Details of the Vote. Airplane Engine Not Tested. Spy, but Not Even Interned. ADOPTS PASSPORT BILL. House Sends Measure Aimed at Spies to Senate for Action."
==History==
Red-baiting was a very popular tactic during the American beginning with the in the aftermath of World War One when the recent Russian Revolution combined with growing demands for workers' rights and opposition to American imperialism and militarism connected with the recent war. This made American society's more conservative members fearful of communist revolution. During the war, a series of draconian laws were implemented that restricted civil liberties, including the 1917 Espionage Act and the Sedition Act and Immigration Act in 1918. January 1919 saw a general strike in Seattle, the first of several major strikes across the country through the year. including the on May Day, there was violence in Boston, Cleveland, and elsewhere between leftists, police, and far-right "patriot" organisations. There were also race riots in cities from Chicago to Arizona. A series of anarchist bombings targeted business leaders and government officials. In response, at the end of the year were the two in which 10,000 alleged subversives were rounded up; this led to the foundation of the American Civil Liberties Union. In 1920, tensions dissipated. J. Edgar Hoover, then boss of the General Intelligence Division, and attorney general Mitchell Palmer made dire predictions of an imminent communist revolution that conspicuously failed to come to pass. The AFL labor union tried to discourage police strikes, and a series of court cases released agitators. Warren G. Harding, elected at the end of the year, struck a conciliatory note amid a general sense that things had got a bit crazy and released many imprisoned radicals on Christmas Day in 1921.
The most famous instance was the Second Red Scare in the 1950s; its most notorious practitioner was Republican senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, for whom McCarthyism is named. It was less bloody than 1919, largely focused on a series of dramatically-staged hearings into alleged communism followed by the sacking of anyone suspected of communist sympathies, most famously the Hollywood blacklist. The broadcast hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and other congressional committees whipped up paranoia about communists subverting American institutions, which led to Harry Truman's "Federal Employees Loyalty Program" under and several state loyalty acts, as well as restrictions in civil liberties by the of 1950. But more importantly, the tactic was successful in dividing American liberals from those to their ideological left in subsequent decades. Thus, Democratic Wisconsin Congressman Robert Kastenmeier instructed his staffers in the 1960s to avoid contact with student activists at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.Cathy Wilkerson. 2007. Flying Too Close to the Sun. Seven Stories Press. ISBN 9781583227718. pp. 91-92 Madison was in his constituency, and the likely result of this de-linking was that the students were even more radicalized. 
White segregationists commonly held signs that said "Race-mixing is communism" and held views which agreed.Wade, Lisa, “Race Mixing Is Communism” - Protesters in Little Rock, Arkansas, (1959), posted 10.10.09. The smoking gun between "race-mixing" and communism is supposed to be "The Jews". "The Jews" invented both to weaken or destroy "The White Master Race" ergo the mongrelization of white society CASE CLOSED. This sort of horseshit also serves to discourage similar dissent.
A variety of wingnuts also exploited the Red Scares by using red-baiting to claim that their opponents were all commies, thus handily pushing their own agendas. A notable example is the Mormon and John Birch Society member W. Cleon Skousen, who published a book entitled The Naked Communist. This book outlined a 45-point "communist" program including such planks as the legalization of homosexuality (in reality, communist countries were not known for being "gay Meccas"), expansion of civil rights (again, communist countries were not known for being bastions of freedom), and an increased role for psychiatrists (we're not going to say it a third time). Skousen and his books have been a major inspiration for Glenn Beck.Telling.
It was employed to political ends in apartheid-era South Africa, where the "" (red danger) was used as a means to keep the white population afraid of the looming communist menace just waiting to take over the country. This threat proved to be mythical when the African National Congress happily scrapped its socialist economic program as part of a compromise to legally take power.
Red-baiting has also been employed by right-wing anti-science and denialist movements to tar scientists who made ideologically-inconvenient discoveries as dirty commies. This tactic was seen prominently in the anti-relativity, anti-water fluoridation, and anti-vaccination movements (see image) as well as global warming deniers.The Socialist Haunted World: Relativity, Fluoridation, and Climate Change as a Socialist Plot
==Fallacious use==
When McCarthy and other anti-communist figures in the U.S. government went after lefties in the Hollywood movie industry, it resulted in the harassment of some people who were in a position to make quite a bit of noise. A great many allegorical works, written in opposition to Red-baiting, poured out of Hollywood and Broadway during that time, including Arthur Miller's play Stanley Kramer and Carl Foreman's film High Noon, and play and film versions of Inherit the Wind, the latter of which caused a tempest in a teapot when creationists mistook its allegory for flat factual claims.
These efforts, as well as the reckless and paranoid behavior of McCarthy, saw a sort of stigma settle over emphatically anti-communist views. With this state of affairs, the term "red-baiting" has itself seen some fallacious use, mostly as an attempt to ridicule criticisms of communism in which no false accusations are actually made.
For example, the term is occasionally used with regard to the affair of the "Hollywood Ten", screenwriters who were brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 to testify concerning their political activities.'Red-baiting' denouement in Hollywood, The Guardian This, however, ignores that (1) the Hollywood Ten actually were communists, and (2) they were arrested only when they refused to answer questions of whether they were. The charge was contempt of Congress; they were not prosecuted for being communists, which was not a crime.Seven years later, however, membership in the Communist Party USA was criminalized, when it was determined that that organization was exclusively a front for Soviet espionage; by that time, very few of the U.S.'s communists were actually in the party, which contained more FBI informants than actual members. Communist party leaders were already convicted of sedition in 1949. The US Supreme Court later quashed both of these measures.
Another use of the term is in response to any suggestion that the Soviet Union was attempting to infiltrate and influence non-communist governments during its flourishing period (also satirized using the phrase "Reds under the bed"), equating these with far-out conspiracy theories such as those of the JBS. But it is a historical fact that there were a number of Soviet infiltrators working in non-communist countries, especially in the UK and USA. Some well-known examples:
*Soviet nuclear weapons were developed partially with information stolen from the U.S. atomic bomb project; German-born Briton Klaus Fuchs appears to have been the primary conduit for such information. (Note, however, that great powers spy on one another as a normal practice. Had the two post-war superpowers both been democratic or communist or one democratic and the other fascist, they would still have spied on one another's nuclear weapons programs.) 
*George Orwell had great difficulty publishing his anti-Stalinist satiric fable Animal Farm. It was later revealed that a Soviet infiltrator in the British government had put pressure on publishers in this regard.
*Alger Hiss was a rather high-level American lawyer who ended up basically laying out the silverware at the Yalta Conference and chaired the founding of the United Nations in San Francisco, all while being a mole for Moscow. In 1948, Richard Nixon would create the Red Scare, with his antics pulling secret documents out of pumpkins and laying all the groundwork for McCarthy to go bananas. The American left, for the most part, was duped into thinking Hiss was innocent, making themselves look absolutely idiotic for a couple of years.Jacoby, Susan, Alger Hiss and the Battle for History. Yale University Press, 2009. Jacoby herself says she is 98% certain that Hiss was guilty because he was simply not a good liar and slipped up in public. Hiss denied it to his death, though. 
*The Cambridge Five were a group of spies who worked their way up various posts in the British upper echelons, sending intelligence to the Reds. The four identified agents were Kim Philby (cryptonym: Stanley), Donald Duart Maclean (cryptonym: Homer), Guy Burgess (cryptonym: Hicks), and Anthony Blunt (cryptonym: Johnson). They met at Cambridge University in the 1930s and became involved with left-wing groups in opposition to a noticeable pro-Hitler trend from some of the Royal Family members that wasn't too digestible. Also, two of the four were gay in a time when the left was the only real center of gay culture. Philby ended up in the right-wing papers, reporting from Guernica. At one point, the Spanish Communists got him close enough to Francisco Franco for a quick murder-suicide, but Philby chickened out. He later nearly became the head of MI6 (British intelligence), which would have been an incalculable disaster. Even so, they did great damage before being found out and escaping into exile in the USSR.
Ergo, it's important to make the distinction.
==Present day==
 
Even in the present day, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and China's tacit abandonment of communism, Red-baiting is still popular among the American right wing. Glenn Beck and various talk radio figures liberally (ahem) use such terms as "communist" and "Marxist" to refer to anything they dislike. 
Popular targets have included former U.S. President Barack Obama, who was said to be a crypto-communist pushing "Obamunism," and the Democratic Party; in 2009, the Republican National Committee was pressured to adopt a plank stating that the Democrats are a socialist party.They eventually instead adopted a resolution stating that the Dems were restructuring the US along "socialist ideals" in order to ditch the soundbite while still tossing red bait towards... someone. Pope Francis has often been attacked as a Marxist by American wingnuts because of the Catholic Church's rejuvenated attention to poverty and social justice issues,Pope Francis addresses communist whispers AP despite the fact that the Catholic Church continues to be reactionary in regards to transgender rights and abortion. In the late 2010s, with the ongoing trade war and deterioration in relations between the US and China, the latter has become the go-to boogeyman for the right again, with even Joe Biden being accused of a Chinese asset or "soft on China", simply because his son Hunter Biden has done business there, even though the senior Biden kept much of Trump's tariffs.Biden finalizes increases to some of Trump’s China tariffs Katie Lobosco. CNN, September 13, 2024. Right-wing culture warriors even have a habit of associating climate change activism and LGBT acceptance with...Chinese communism, simply because some corporations like BlackRock and Disney virtue signal about social justice at home but still do business with the Chinese government.Scoop: GOP's "existential" attack plan on ESG Hans Nichols. Axios, March 8, 2023 
Former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn was also a frequent target of red-baiting attacks from the media and commentators, usually attacking him (and/or his supporters) as being Marxist or indeed communist or, at the very least, making some very clear coded attacks on this basis. This is based on a very profound, and almost certainly deliberate, misreading of Corbyn's views — while he's undeniably less apologetic about being on the left than most other recent Labour leaders, he is most certainly not a communist or even all that far left in the scheme of things.Aside from him apparently never being a member of any party other than the Labour Party, and outright stating at points that he hasn't even read all that much Marx, Corbyn axiomatically cannot be a communist or a Marxist since he does not appear to believe in the collectivization of the means of production, the complete abolition of capitalism, revolution as a means of obtaining political change, or the abolition/melting away of the state. The reality — as actual communists will tell you, to their great displeasure — is that Corbyn is a Labour Party man through and through, and is only really "left wing" relative to the rest of Labour. The interesting thing here is that in addition to being red-baited from a critical perspective, quite a few of his supporters also liked to imagine him as being further left than he was too, which certainly didn't help sway the people who were receptive to the aforementioned treatment.While one could make an argument that he is further left than he chooses to let on, the counterpoint is that Corbyn hasn't exactly been shy about expressing controversial/widely disliked political viewpoints in the past, so why would he conceal one that's fundamental to his entire worldview?
There is at least one known example of the form of *ahem* argument, though not in keeping with the original intent, being used by people further to the left than the target. During a teachers' strike in Chicago against mayor Rahm Emanuel (previously a major participant in the aforementioned Obamunism), protesters were observed carrying signs exhorting the public to "Fight Rahmunism!"
Of course, even the far right has started to realize that accusations of "communism" don't sound as credible (or threatening) as they used to since the fall of the Iron Curtain, so they've started shifting to "socialism" (which included communism) in particular and "leftism" in general — while, of course, heavily conflating social democracy with communist countries like North Korea and failed socialist dictatorships such as Venezuela.
Despite the Italian Communist Party being the largest communist party in the Western world before its dissolution in 1991, since then red-baiting has been used several times by the right-wing, most notably by Silvio Berlusconi (who used the expression red robes to refer to the judges who sentenced him in and said the iconic phrase: "You are still today, and as always, poor communists").
==Gallery==
Thomas Nast communist skeleton cartoon 1880.png|1880 political cartoon depicting the Constitution of the State of California as an anarchist, communist, free-loving skeleton.
Step by step greene.jpg|Comic from 1919, during the First Red Scare.
Smash the Red Wreckers and Save Australia.jpg|Red-baiting poster from the 1931 Australian federal election by what was now the Liberal Party of Australia.
==See also==
*Joseph McCarthy
*Roy Cohn — McCarthy's chief legal counsel
*Godwin's Law, often used conjointly
*Green-baiting and watermelon — The anti-environmentalist versions of red-baiting.
*Jonanism
*Pink-baiting
*Terrorism-baiting
==Notes==
==References==
Category:Communism
Category:Conservative deceit
Category:Fallacious arguments
Category:Informal fallacies
Category:Moral panics
Category:Scapegoating