My point is that conflating McCarthyism with the Hollywood Blacklist unhelpful because it is essentially the same error that people make when claiming that Reddit or Twitter are inferering with free speech when they ban or constrain people on their platforms. What private industry does is not the same thing as what politicians do and not subject to the same legal issues. I also think (especially having relatives who suffered and died under puppet regimes created by Stalin) that it is important not to romanticize Western Communists who aided and abetted Stalin’s reign just as Western Fascists aided Hitler.
