Steven Crowder's argument is direct. In a YouTube video titled 'McCarthyism Is NOT What the Left Wants You to Think,' he poses it as a question with an implied answer: 'What if this whole myth of the red scare, what if it was never a myth? What if it was concrete fact and you're living the results right now?' [1] The claim is that Senator Joseph McCarthy has been slandered by history, and that the present vindicates him.
That is an opinion about how to read the past, and it deserves to be met with the record rather than a verdict. Here is the record.
On December 2, 1954, the United States Senate censured McCarthy by a vote of 67 to 22 [2]. The resolution did not concern whether communism was a threat or whether Soviet agents operated in the United States. It named his conduct. The Senate cited 'abuse and noncooperation with the Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections' and 'abuse of the Select Committee to Study Censure' [2]. The body was ruling on how McCarthy behaved as a senator, on his methods and his treatment of the committees examining them, not on the existence of an enemy abroad.
The arithmetic is worth stating plainly, because a censure carries weight in proportion to who joined it. Sixty-seven senators voted for it and twenty-two against, which is 89 of the 100 members casting a vote; the remaining 11 did not vote [2]. A margin that lopsided in a chamber McCarthy's own party then controlled is not a partisan ambush. It is a bipartisan judgment on the man's conduct.
Crowder is not wrong that the underlying threat was real. Soviet espionage against the United States did occur, and the standard documentary evidence for it, the VENONA decrypts of intercepted Soviet cables, is not in serious dispute. A steel-man of his position starts there: the fear had a factual core, and dismissing every anti-communist concern of the era as hysteria flattens real history.
The record beside that concession is where the clip strains. Whether the espionage threat was real is one question. Whether McCarthy's specific tactics were vindicated is a separate one. On the second question the Senate left its own answer, and it was 67 to 22 against his methods. Crowder's framing elides the seam between the two questions, so that a real threat is made to carry a discredited method across on its back. A reader can hold both facts at once: the danger existed, and the man the Senate rebuked earned the rebuke for how he pursued it.
That merger is not incidental to the argument; it is the argument. To say the red scare was 'concrete fact' and that we are 'living the results right now' [1] is to invite the tactics back under cover of the threat's reality. What gets rehabilitated is not the accurate premise that spies existed. It is the machinery of accusation without proof, guilt by association, and the ruined names left behind, the very conduct the Senate voted to condemn. The people McCarthy smeared without evidence do not become guilty in retrospect because some other people, elsewhere, were.
The distinction the Senate drew in 1954 is the one worth keeping. It did not declare the fear of communism a fantasy. It declared that a senator had abused his power and the committees that checked it, and 67 members put their names to that. The concern was one thing. The method was another. The record keeps them apart, and any account that collapses them is arguing past what the Senate actually voted on.
