Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert cancelled. Journalists fired by right-wing media oligarchs. A president — and the institutions that support him — silencing political dissent. The US has indeed returned to the 1950s, when McCarthyism became a nationwide witch hunt for communists and “subversive” ideology.

And it’s catching: the Red Scare-esque hysteria over political speech is evident in Australia, with campaigns against critics of Israel, climate activists and progressive voices supported by government crackdowns.

Crikey’s reporter-at-large Charlie Lewis joins the podcast to explain the striking parallels between McCarthyism and the fraught political discourse of 2025.

Read more:

• Welcome to the New McCarthyism
• Always partisan, the Supreme Court has contorted itself into the shape dictated by Donald Trump
• How the authoritarian playbook creates a far-right media for the Five Eyes world
• Paul Robeson, the ‘Last Tour’ and Australia’s lost history
• Charlie Kirk’s martyrdom in the US is to be expected. Here, it’s baffling
• Segal’s antisemitism plan would be the deepest intervention in Australian universities since Federation

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