The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
"Two recent op-ed articles in the Washington Times and their accompanying illustrations manifest a troubling habit of modern conservatives — all too often, they accept and help promote the conventional liberal version of history in a futile effort to lend respectability to their views. In doing so, some modern conservatives unwittingly cede the moral high ground to their philosophical opponents while simultaneously adding their imprimatur to conventional liberal historical “truths.”
"In the Aug. 9 issue of the Washington Times, D.C. lawyer Gerard Leval rightly warned against “the fervor of those who vociferously seek to purge anyone and anything which is not in keeping with the new morality.” Leval condemned the efforts of the philosophical Left to erase from history “many of the pillars of Western society.” He decried the “current intolerance” of those who would try to “purge our society of so much of our past.” It is, he explains, an example of modern-day “McCarthyism.”
"Indeed, most of Leval’s article is a mindless recitation of the conventional liberal view of Sen. Joe McCarthy, who he claims presided over “one of the worst episodes in [our] history.” McCarthy, he writes, was guilty of “wide-spread and unsubstantiated accusations” of communist infiltration into our government and society. “Cascading fear and a belief that America was being betrayed by domestic spies deeply embedded in our society,” he wrote, “accelerated the paranoia and hysteria.” He mentions that writers, actors, and others in Hollywood suffered from “employment termination, social ostracism and worse” at McCarthy’s hands — yet the Hollywood Ten appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, not before the Senate Committee on which McCarthy served. And McCarthy’s investigations of domestic communism began three years later, in 1950.". . .
