Our society is not without faults. Our domestic and foreign policies are also often flawed. To correct failings, we need people who point them out, however unpopular that may be. We should be enabling a wide framework of public discourse, not seeking to silence people. To date, we haven’t quite reached the level of hysteria of 1950s McCarthyism, but we are perhaps coming close.
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.