I think that conflating concern about Putin’s influence with McCarthyism is a bit of a stretch.
It honestly reads like the author dismisses the potential of foreign influence affecting both domestic actors and politics outright without proof. There’s ample evidence that Russian state-affiliated actors have worked with social media influencers to foment outrage, for example. That’s not a “new red scare”, that’s straight up proof of intelligence operations designed to undermine Russia’s geopolitical opponents.
Is there any truth to the allegations? Beats me, but seeing the possibility dismissed as as a preposterous notion that can only be part of a “New Red Scare” does not decrease my estimation of the chances of it.
Russian ties, if present, are indeed dangerous. Laying unsupported claims to “russian connection” is just as bad as any other libel or damaging unsupported claim. Should we spend time eradicating russian influence - absolutely. How do we do it without turning it into a witch hunt? I don’t know how.
Russians are not ethnically communist
Russians are not ethnically communist
Nor are they actually communist, despite claims they might have made to operating under that ideology.
Russia is fascist authoritarianism.
My opinion is that no government was truly communist for long as it depends too much on people’s altruism, of which there is little. Any government that claims to be communist isn’t.
Communism will always be an unstable political system, it always decays into some sort of corrupt authoritarianism due to humans’ self-serving nature.
I do agree that red scare rhetoric is increasing but buy in large it’s directed at China and Xi. Anti-communist tropes do show up in popular discourse on Russia but in my experience it’s less so in discussions on influence campaigns but in talk of Russia’s territorial ambitions (understandable considering the place of Soviet symbolism in Russian nationalism and war propaganda).
