A Trump Presidency Could Mean A Third Red Scare

By Branko Marcetic, Jacobin

This election season has been a tumultuous and widely debated one for the Left, on both moral and strategic terms. But strangely absent from these discussions have been the explicit promises and detailed plans from Donald Trump and his team to kick off a third Red Scare and destroy the organized left if they win.

Just this month, on the anniversary of October 7, the same Heritage Foundation that brought us Trump’s Project 2025 released “Project Esther,” their “blueprint to counter antisemitism in the United States.” On the basis that the American pro-Palestinian movement is “part of a global Hamas Support Network” that is “supported by activists and funders dedicated to destroying capitalism and democracy” and gets the “the support and training of America’s overseas enemies,” Project Esther lays out a strategy to “dismantle” this movement within one to two years and “level a decisive blow against both antisemitism and anti-Americanism.”

President Donald Trump with a serious look as he delivers a speech at a campaign rally held at the Mohegan Sun Arena.

That strategy envisions a whole-of-government campaign of intimidation, slander, and “lawfare,” at both the federal and state levels and working with private organizations, to crush pro-Palestinian activists’ First Amendment rights and carry out a wave of repression. The stated end goal is to make it impossible for activists to organize while turning the public against the movement.

The document suggests using the anti-racketeering RICO Act — originally created to take on the mafia, and more recently used to bring trumped-up charges against “Stop Cop City” protesters in Georgia — along with “counterterrorism, hate speech, and immigration laws,” as well as audits, propaganda campaigns, investigations, and public shaming. It self-consciously takes as its model the 1930s anti-fascist “Brown Scare,” whose tactics and tools weren’t just the prototype for, but directly evolved into, the very same ones used against the Left during Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare of the 1950s — including by the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

As per the document, the hoped-for goals and outcomes of this campaign are the same ones that came out of that shameful historical episode, as well as the earlier Red Scare of the 1920s, including: schools purged of both teachers and material that Trump’s people ideologically disagree with; prosecutions and imprisonment; ideologically undesirable foreigners deported or pushed to “voluntarily” leave the country; and a witch hunt that will intimidate sympathizers into cutting ties with, denouncing, and marginalizing the Left.