Around 1950, Republican US senator Joseph R. McCarthy was facing a tough reelection in his home state of Wisconsin. This was also a tough time for America witnessing the CCP’s takeover of Mainland China and the Soviet Union’s catching up as the second nuclear power.

Opportunistically, McCarthy campaigned to regain his political fortune by blanketing America with Red Scare. Richard Nixon, a Republican young turk, followed McCarthy closely and rewardingly advanced his political career. Nixon was not alone.

McCarthyists' witch hunt for Communist sympathizers led to the detention and deportation of US-trained Qian Xuesen, later known as the Father of Chinese Rocketry. Cases of witch-hunt victims kept piling up until McCarthyism peaked four years shy of McCarthy’s death in 1957.

For the record, it was Owen Lattimore, himself a witch-hunt victim, who coined McCarthyism in his book titled "Ordeal by Slander" which I highly recommend for your reading pleasure, if pleasure is the right word here. (It is also worth mentioning that Lattimore was truly an American expert on pre-1949 Mongolia and Manchuria, as attested by his published works.)

The far right gave America their McCarthyism in the 1950s. Today the far left is giving America their McCarthyism too, which is fashionably known as Woke that comes with Cancel Culture. Zealots on both sides, though being disagreeable to each other, are actually no different from each other as zero-sum game players. We voters need to put them in their place.

--- by Lingyang Jiang