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By Alexis Coe
Presidential Historian
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Speaker Mike Johnson recently called protesting—one of the most American acts imaginable—un-American. He said this weekend's “No Kings” demonstration will be a “hate America rally” led by “the pro-Hamas wing and antifa people.” House Majority Whip Tom Emmer went further, calling it a rally for the “terrorist wing of their [Democratic] Party.” Senator Roger Marshall warned the National Guard might be needed to keep the George Soros “agitators” in line. It’s a chorus of accusation without evidence by the GOP, a maneuver that has worked well in America—long enough to ruin lives.
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Between 1950 and 1954, Senator Joseph McCarthy's lists of communists were actually just targets.
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Roughly 12,000 Americans lost jobs or careers for alleged “disloyalty.” The point wasn’t proof; it was fear. Like Johnson’s “pro-Hamas” accusation, McCarthy’s “Red" erased context, flattened motive, and cast suspicion as patriotism. Johnson delivers his attacks like sermons, swaddled in Scripture, while Emmer, the Whip, repeats the “terrorist wing” line with managerial calm. Their innovation is to replace the demagogue’s roar with the bureaucrat’s moral superiority. It sounds measured; it hits harder. The effect is to launder panic through respectability—to make propaganda look procedural.
When power feels cornered, it polices. In a 1967 memo, the FBI’s COINTELPRO program labeled civil-rights groups “Black hate organizations” and ordered agents to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” them. Martin Luther King Jr. was called a threat to national security; Malcolm X’s associates were blackmailed or jailed.
The same impulse resurfaced in 2020, when DHS whistleblower Brian Murphy alleged that Trump-era appointees pressured him to inflate reports of “left-wing extremism” and downplay white-supremacist violence. That summer, more than 14,000 people were arrested during racial-justice protests—mostly for curfew violations, not violence. The labels always come first; the justification follows.
In America, the next phase is usually bureaucratic. After the 1919 Red Scare, the Palmer Raids began with warrants written in batches—10,000 arrests in a single winter, most without charges. During the McCarthy era, firings came by memo, not trial. In 1968, the Chicago Police Department’s “Red Squad” compiled files on 200,000 civilians—clergy, teachers, and social workers—in the name of “national security.” And in the post-9/11 era, surveillance expanded through the FBI’s Guardian database, logging over 100,000 “suspicious activity reports” a year, the vast majority targeting Arab and Muslim
Americans.
Each system began with rhetoric almost identical to what Johnson and Emmer are rehearsing now: the insistence that ordinary dissent masks danger. Once the idea takes root that protest equals subversion, the state doesn’t need to outlaw assembly—it only needs to redefine it. Permits get denied. Funding dries up. Insurance won’t cover “high-risk” events. Fear does the policing.
These cycles take years to reverse. The Palmer Raids gave way to the ACLU, McCarthyism to Edward R. Murrow’s broadcast, COINTELPRO to the Church Committee hearings—each reform born from exposure, not repentance. The lesson is consistent: The abuse stops only when it becomes embarrassing to sustain. The surest defense against soft fascism is presence—to show up, visibly, and refuse the framing. Because once peaceful protest is accepted as terrorism, every crowd becomes a potential battlefield and every citizen a suspect.
History’s rhythm is steady—accusation, repression, regret. What varies is how long we let the middle part last.
Alexis Coe is a presidential historian, senior fellow at New America, and the author of, most recently, You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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