“Are You Still a Marxist?”: Republican Senator Goes Full McCarthy

Louisiana Senator John Kennedy resurrected the Red Scare on Thursday, reminding everyone that McCarthyism never really died—just fell into a bit of a coma.

Republican lawmakers spent the better part of a Senate Judiciary hearing grilling Biden judicial nominee Melissa Dubose, but few more than Kennedy, who outright demanded to know if she was “still a Marxist.”

“I am not, nor have ever been, a Marxist,” replied DuBose.

But Kennedy wasn’t satisfied with that, instead citing a 2000 interview she gave to the “feminist press” Women’s Studies Quarterly, in which she told the interviewer that shortly after graduating Providence College, she began working at Little Connie’s, a local coffee shop, where she said students from a private, progressive high school had her “in a Marxist phase.”

“I had no idea that that interview was something that was going to be published,” DuBose said. “When I graduated from college, I immersed myself in a ton of political theory. I read Hobbes, I read Locke, I read Rousseau, I read Marx. I went through a phase where I was into Eastern religion—where I read the Tao Te Ching and The Analects of Confucius.”

“So I suspect, and I don’t know that the quote in the article, I don’t know if she was referring to what I was studying at the time, but as a political science major and as a theorist, and as someone who was considering teaching a course in political theory, I had immersed myself,” she continued.

But Kennedy persisted.

“You didn’t say ‘I’m in my Hobbesian phase,’” he continued. “You didn’t say ‘I’m in my Rousseau phase,’ you said, ‘I was in my Marxist phase.’”

Senator Dick Durbin, however, was nonplussed by the line of attack, brushing it off as a routine element of judiciary hearings.

“That is a frequent question,” the Judiciary Committee chair said to reporters after the hearing, according to Courthouse News Service. “If someone said something in college, or even high school, that mentioned Marx in any context—or even alluded to Marxism —they are bound to be questioned by this committee.”

A Michigan lawmaker posted an overtly racist image on Tuesday, using his office’s official account to elevate a white supremacist conspiracy theory on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

The image, which depicts Black silhouettes covering much of the world, with white silhouettes straddling small portions of Canada, Northern Europe, and Australia, was captioned, “The great replacement!” referring to a white nationalist far-right conspiracy theory that baselessly purports that nonwhite people, especially from Arab countries, are demographically replacing white populations.

Right-wing pundit Jack Posobiec initially posted the image, but Michigan state Representative Josh Schriver quickly reshared it, adding an emoji of a chart in decline.

Groups within his district weren’t happy about the apparent endorsement.

An independent support group of the Detroit City Football Club declared that Schriver was “not welcome” at their clubs.

“Absolutely go fuck yourself, Josh,” posted the account for the Northern Guard Supporters. “Your wife plays for our club with players from all ethnic backgrounds in a high minority population city and you’re pushing white supremacist propaganda.”

“We want to be extremely clear on this: you are not welcome at Keyworth or in DCFC,” they added.

Schriver continued to make questionable posts into Wednesday, claiming that he doesn’t “believe God is a racist but He does love the races.”

The freshman lawmaker took office in 2022, winning Michigan’s 66th House district—which has voted red since 1993—by a margin of nearly 30 percent over Democratic candidate Emily Busch.

Two different chapters of Moms for Liberty faced stinging losses this week in two strongholds, the latest events in the once powerful organization’s steady decline.

Moms for Liberty experienced a meteoric rise at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, as local chapters sprang up to push back against coronavirus restrictions in schools. The organization soon expanded to pushing book bans and opposing discussion of LGBTQ issues and race and diversity in classrooms, prompting the Southern Poverty Law Center to categorize Moms for Liberty as an extremist hate group.

But on Tuesday, the local chapter in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, shut down due to lack of interest. The chapter had 200 members when it first formed in 2021, but just three showed up at a diner in Allentown to vote to dissolve the group, The Daily Beast reported.

Members had begun drifting away after Covid-19 mandates were lifted nationwide, but the biggest blow came in November when the chapter’s preferred candidate in a school district board election lost badly. Attendance at chapter events nose-dived, with just 20 people showing up to the holiday party.

“I guess there wasn’t as much willingness to do the work that’s required to propel the movement forward,” the chapter founder, Janine Vicalvi, told the Beast in a story published Wednesday.

Participation also appears to be flagging for a key Moms for Liberty chapter in Florida. The Brevard County chapter was the national organization’s first chapter. A local group was already in action against Covid-19 regulations in schools when Tina Descovich, Tiffany Justice, and Bridget Ziegler founded Moms for Liberty in Florida. Descovich approached the Brevard County group about merging with Moms for Liberty, and the local group agreed.

But on Wednesday, the Brevard County school board held a meeting, in part to discuss a challenge to the books The Kite Runner and Slaughterhouse-Five. Only one Moms for Liberty member showed up.

All the other attendees spoke in favor of keeping the books on the shelves—and heavily criticized the parental rights organization. One attendee compared “the growth of the Taliban and its repressive autocracy in the name of religious nationalism” in The Kite Runner to “the rise of parental rights groups that want to limit what students learn.”

The Moms for Liberty member did not speak and eventually snuck out of the room. The books were not banned.

The national Moms for Liberty organization still holds a lot of influence among politicians, with many Republican primary candidates speaking at the group’s annual summit last year. But Moms for Liberty has started to see its power wane in the past year, as the group was rocked by a sexual assault scandal.

Moms for Liberty endorsed 130 candidates for school boards nationwide during the 2023 elections. The vast majority of them lost. Meanwhile, Ziegler was ousted from the organization after she and her husband admitted they had had a consensual sexual relationship with another woman.

That woman accused Ziegler’s husband, Christian Ziegler, of assaulting her on a separate occasion. Christian Ziegler was voted out as Florida Republican Party chairman in January over the allegations.

Steps away from where a Donald Trump–backed mob attempted to thwart the 2020 presidential election results, in Washington, D.C., fans of the former president set up chairs and stood by in anticipation of a U.S. Supreme Court hearing that would decide whether Colorado could ban Trump from appearing on the state’s presidential primary ticket.

Crowds grew from a couple dozen people to more than 100 overnight, with protesters braving frigid temperatures in order to show up, even though Trump himself was not expected to make an appearance.

Some mega pro-Trump fans drove from hundreds of miles away in order to attend, like Aranda Maher and her husband, who “left their children with grandparents and drove about 350 miles to Washington,” reported The New York Times.

“It was kind of spur of the moment,” Maher, 24, told the outlet, dressed in Ugg boots and pajamas.

Others made the trek more deliberately.

“My hope is that the Supreme Court has the courage to read the Constitution as it’s written, and not torture the text in defense of Trump,” Richard Zipper, a retired software engineer from Crofton, Maryland, told Politico.

Counterprotesters also made their mark outside the halls of the country’s highest judiciary, insisting that Trump be held accountable for his role in the January 6 riot.

“We’d like to see the Supreme Court uphold justice and read the law,” Jennifer Hobbs, a lawyer who drove down from New York, told Politico.

Trump, meanwhile, appeared optimistic about the proceedings, in an appearance outside his Florida estate.

“I thought the presentation today was a very good one. I think it was well received—I hope it was well received,” Trump told a gaggle of reporters outside Mar-a-Lago.

In December, Colorado’s Supreme Court issued a historic ruling removing Trump from the ballot on the basis that Trump had been involved in an “insurrection,” thereby violating the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment.

Rudy Giuliani, who is so low on cash he filed for bankruptcy, says that Donald Trump owes him about $2 million in unpaid legal fees for helping try to overturn the 2020 election.

Giuliani filed for bankruptcy in December, faced with insurmountable debt after he was found liable for defaming two Georgia state election workers. During a hearing on Wednesday, Giuliani told a Manhattan federal bankruptcy court that Trump had asked the former mayor to take over his campaign’s legal team in November 2020.

At the time, Trump’s lawyers and Trump-aligned lawyers were working to overturn the presidential election results. Courts across the country threw out every single one of the dozens of cases that Trump’s allies filed.

Giuliani said Wednesday that when he took over the Trump campaign’s legal staff, “it was my understanding that I would be paid by the campaign for my legal work and my expenses to be paid.”

“When we submitted the invoice for payment, they just paid the expenses. Not all but most. They never paid the legal fees,” Giuliani said. He added that he never calculated how much Trump still owes him, but he estimated it was about $2 million.

Giuliani was hurting financially even before the defamation ruling against him. He listed his Manhattan apartment for sale in July and began representing himself in court to save on legal fees. In August, after he was indicted in Georgia, Giuliani asked his social media followers to donate to his defense fund.

He also flew to Mar-a-Lago to beg Trump to pay his legal fees. That didn’t work, but Trump did host a fundraiser dinner for Giuliani in September. Entry cost $100,000 a plate.

When Giuliani declared bankruptcy in December, the filing showed that Giuliani owes as much as $500 million in debt but has only up to $10 million in assets. His biggest debt is to Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. Giuliani owes the pair $148 million in damages for defaming them.

He owes money to Hunter Biden, electronic voting machine companies Smartmatic and Dominion, and an accounting firm. Giuliani is also in debt to his former associate Noelle Dunphy. Dunphy sued Giuliani in May, accusing him of promising to pay her a $1 million annual salary but instead sexually harassing and abusing her over two years.

Ironically, the man once affectionately known as “America’s mayor” owes money to multiple law firms for unpaid legal fees. Several of Giuliani’s former lawyers, including his longtime attorney Robert Costello, have sued Giuliani for failing to pay their legal fees.