Ann Coulter

Liberals’ secret weapon: Republicans who don’t read

Ann Coulter Political Commentator
Font Size:

Fifty years from now, everyone will agree that Karl Rove committed treason by revealing the identity of CIA “spy” Valerie Plame, tea partiers shouted the N-word at a black congressman and Duke lacrosse players gang-raped a stripper.

Liberals tell whopping lies, and most conservatives can’t be bothered to learn history.

In the last few days, we’ve heard both George Will and Charles Krauthammer, otherwise intelligent people, repeating bogus Democratic talking points about how Joe McCarthy allegedly smeared innocents with false allegations.

These two, and many lesser lights, have invoked the standard liberal calumnies against McCarthy in order to ridicule Sen. Harry Reid for making a Birther-like accusation against Mitt Romney, saying that the “word is out” that Romney didn’t pay taxes for a decade.

This, it is claimed, is comparable to Sen. Joe McCarthy’s “famous speech” in 1950, in which he allegedly said he had a list of 205 communists at the State Department — but then he never produced that list!

No, the idea that McCarthy threw out unsubstantiated charges and switched numbers, from 57 to 205, were the wild-eyed allegations of McCarthy haters, which, on closer examination, turned out to be completely false, just like the accusations against Rove, the tea partiers and the Duke lacrosse players.

It was proved false at the time — not just decades later, when McCarthy was vindicated with a whoop when Soviet archives and cables were revealed to the world.

I was hoping to write about my smash best-seller Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America — out in paperback this week! — but now I guess I’ll have to recap parts of my smash best-seller Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism.

McCarthy said he had the names of 57 communists or communist sympathizers working in the State Department who needed to be investigated. Separately, he cited a 1946 letter from former Secretary of State James Byrnes to Congress stating that there were 205 known security risks still working there.

His point, misconstrued by Democrats at the time and since, was not to accuse specific individuals, but rather to indict the Democrats for turning a blind eye to ridiculous security risks in important government jobs, even after Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Alger Hiss. (Sorry, Nation magazine, they’re still guilty.)

McCarthy gave his Wheeling, W.Va., speech two weeks after Secretary of State Dean Acheson had defended celebrity communist spy Hiss on Jan. 25, 1950 — the day of Hiss’ criminal conviction for denying under oath that he was a Soviet spy.

Even after Whittaker Chambers had produced documents proving that Hiss was working for the Soviet Union while advising President Roosevelt, the Democrats were still defending a traitor. Chambers said of Acheson’s disgusting defense of Hiss, “You will look in vain in history for anything comparable to it.”

As Democrats always do when they are caught red-handed harming the country, they obsessed on some small, technical error of a Republican.

They claimed that McCarthy had said in his Wheeling speech that he had the names of 205 card-carrying members of the Communist Party — not 57. (Having only 57 communists in the State Department was apparently considered a great success for a Democratic administration.)

In fact, McCarthy had mentioned the 205 number only in citing Byrne’s letter to Congress a few years earlier saying that was the number of known security risks still employed at the State Department.

As Soviet spies were honeycombed throughout the government, influencing U.S. policy to the benefit of the Soviet Union, the Democratic-controlled Senate convened panels to determine exactly what Joe McCarthy had said to a meeting of Republican women in West Virginia. To wit: Had he said he had the names of 57 specific security risks at the State Department, or 205?

After dedicating months of investigation to this crucial question — with Senate investigators actually flying to West Virginia to interview everyone who attended the speech — it turned out McCarthy was right.

The Senate committee that was determined to censure McCarthy ended up having to drop the matter of McCarthy’s Wheeling speech entirely. A fact-filled memo detailing the committee’s findings concluded that McCarthy had said he had the names of 57 security risks, not 205.

The truth about McCarthy’s Wheeling speech, including the committee’s memo finding that McCarthy was telling the truth, and a newspaper article reprinting the speech before it became a object of obsession by Democrats, is given in M. Stanton Evans’ monumental book, Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies.

Moreover, contrary to the nonsense about McCarthy not being able to name the 57 specific individuals, the very day he got back to Washington, he gave a six-hour speech on the Senate floor, providing details about the problematic State Department employees, chapter and verse. He did not “name names” because that was not his point.

As McCarthy said, some State Department employees with communist associations might be innocent. His point was: The Democrats were still refusing to take Soviet espionage seriously by investigating these preposterous risks on the government payroll.

Far from recklessly smearing people, McCarthy described each employee as a “case” and cited such evidence as their being identified as Soviet spies in FBI reports, by fellow spies and by the State Department itself. He reported their connections to known agents, attendance at “Youth International” meetings in Russia and repeated contacts with known Soviet espionage groups.

These were not baseless charges. And as we now know, they were absolutely true.

Sensible people knew it at the time, but the disgorging of Soviet archives as well as Soviet cables decrypted by the top-secret Venona project proved beyond a doubt that McCarthy was right about the individuals he named. None of them should have been allowed anywhere near a government office.

The claims of Will and Krauthammer are as true as liberal slanders about Karl Rove outing a CIA agent, tea partiers calling a black congressman the N-word and Duke lacrosse players raping a stripper. Even at the time, liberals had to back down from their lies about McCarthy saying he had a list of “205” communists. But liberals write the history and conservatives don’t read.

Ann Coulter is an author and political commentator.

PREMIUM ARTICLE: Subscribe To Keep Reading

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign Up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
BENEFITS READERS PASS PATRIOTS FOUNDERS
Daily and Breaking Newsletters
Daily Caller Shows
Ad Free Experience
Exclusive Articles
Custom Newsletters
Editor Daily Rundown
Behind The Scenes Coverage
Award Winning Documentaries
Patriot War Room
Patriot Live Chat
Exclusive Events
Gold Membership Card
Tucker Mug

What does Founders Club include?

Tucker Mug and Membership Card
Founders

Readers,

Instead of sucking up to the political and corporate powers that dominate America, The Daily Caller is fighting for you — our readers. We humbly ask you to consider joining us in this fight.

Now that millions of readers are rejecting the increasingly biased and even corrupt corporate media and joining us daily, there are powerful forces lined up to stop us: the old guard of the news media hopes to marginalize us; the big corporate ad agencies want to deprive us of revenue and put us out of business; senators threaten to have our reporters arrested for asking simple questions; the big tech platforms want to limit our ability to communicate with you; and the political party establishments feel threatened by our independence.

We don't complain -- we can't stand complainers -- but we do call it how we see it. We have a fight on our hands, and it's intense. We need your help to smash through the big tech, big media and big government blockade.

We're the insurgent outsiders for a reason: our deep-dive investigations hold the powerful to account. Our original videos undermine their narratives on a daily basis. Even our insistence on having fun infuriates them -- because we won’t bend the knee to political correctness.

One reason we stand apart is because we are not afraid to say we love America. We love her with every fiber of our being, and we think she's worth saving from today’s craziness.

Help us save her.

A second reason we stand out is the sheer number of honest responsible reporters we have helped train. We have trained so many solid reporters that they now hold prominent positions at publications across the political spectrum. Hear a rare reasonable voice at a place like CNN? There’s a good chance they were trained at Daily Caller. Same goes for the numerous Daily Caller alumni dominating the news coverage at outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, Daily Wire and many others.

Simply put, America needs solid reporters fighting to tell the truth or we will never have honest elections or a fair system. We are working tirelessly to make that happen and we are making a difference.

Since 2010, The Daily Caller has grown immensely. We're in the halls of Congress. We're in the Oval Office. And we're in up to 20 million homes every single month. That's 20 million Americans like you who are impossible to ignore.

We can overcome the forces lined up against all of us. This is an important mission but we can’t do it unless you — the everyday Americans forgotten by the establishment — have our back.

Please consider becoming a Daily Caller Patriot today, and help us keep doing work that holds politicians, corporations and other leaders accountable. Help us thumb our noses at political correctness. Help us train a new generation of news reporters who will actually tell the truth. And help us remind Americans everywhere that there are millions of us who remain clear-eyed about our country's greatness.

In return for membership, Daily Caller Patriots will be able to read The Daily Caller without any of the ads that we have long used to support our mission. We know the ads drive you crazy. They drive us crazy too. But we need revenue to keep the fight going. If you join us, we will cut out the ads for you and put every Lincoln-headed cent we earn into amplifying our voice, training even more solid reporters, and giving you the ad-free experience and lightning fast website you deserve.

Patriots will also be eligible for Patriots Only content, newsletters, chats and live events with our reporters and editors. It's simple: welcome us into your lives, and we'll welcome you into ours.

We can save America together.

Become a Daily Caller Patriot today.

Signature

Neil Patel