By John J. Duncan Jr.

Sen. Joseph McCarthy died in 1957, but the term associated with his name – McCarthyism – has lived on.

Since the 1950s, this term has generally been used by those on the left to mean an untrue or greatly exaggerated charge of communism or socialism made by someone on the right.

It has almost always been used to try to make even moderately conservative people appear to be on the far right and thus guilty of McCarthyism.

Today there is a very dangerous reverse McCarthyism going on against conservatives.

This past weekend NPR had a leftist radical on expressing his hope that big business would stop advertising on the Fox Network so it would have to go off the air.

There are already many liberals urging that Tucker Carlson be taken off because he has been so outspoken against high tech, left-wing billionaires.

Lou Dobbs lost his program making it very obvious that many liberals do not really believe in free speech.

Many have said that if you truly believe in free speech, you have to allow even speech that you hate or speech with which you strongly disagree.

Glenn Greenwald, a liberal investigative journalist, said recently that Democrats today “believe that they are the party of science and rationality and the only way to disagree with them is you are either a deranged conspiracy theorist or exhibitionist, someone who is engaged in criminal conduct or terrorism.”

Speaking of terrorism, Mark Steyn, guest hosting on the Rush Limbaugh program, said the left has “invented a domestic terrorism threat that does not exist but is breathtaking in its audacity.”

Glenn Greenwald, on Tucker Carlson’s program, agreed saying that Democrats believe “that if you disagree with their orthodoxies and their consensus, you are a threat and a danger.”

He added that they are trying to “silence everyone that disagrees with them, the very hallmark, the epitome of the fascism they claim to be fighting but in reality, they embody.”

Professor Bradley Hart of California State University, writing about Germany after the Nazis took over, said “open discussion of politics, unless obviously supportive of the regime, was dangerous if not out of the question.”

In the last several weeks, almost 6,000 lawyers, law professors, and law students demanded that Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, graduates of Yale and Harvard Law Schools, be disbarred simply for questioning the presidential election.

Sen. Hawley even had a book contract cancelled by one of the largest book publishers, and 1,000 who work for the book industry demanded that no books by any Trump administration officials be published.

Untold thousands have had their accounts cancelled, restricted, or temporarily banned, and Parlor destroyed, by the billionaire owner-rulers of Twitter, Facebook, and Google.

Columnists in several very large newspapers have urged that former Trump officials not be hired by major corporations, the modern-day blacklists.

Many people have said for years that there is less free speech on college and university campuses than in any other part of society.

Sen. McCarthy had almost no real power. Much of what he said about communism was true, but many of his specific charges could not be proven.

He was censored by a 67-22 vote in a Democratic Senate on Dec. 4, 1954. He died, a broken man, of alcoholism, 2 ½ years later at the age of 48.

Unlike McCarthy, the big tech, big media, big government combine of today has very real power.

The left-wing McCarthyism going on now is very dangerous to every freedom we have always held dear in this country.