Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and others in MAGA media have recently praised disgraced Sen. Joe McCarthy and his blacklists, a tactic that Project 2025 partner organization the American Accountability Foundation is attempting to bring to the White House should Donald Trump win in November.

According to The Associated Press, AAF is planning to create and publicly post a list of “100 names of government workers to a website this summer to show a potential new administration who might be … ripe for scrutiny, reclassifications, reassignments or firings,” with a focus on “those in senior executive positions who could put up roadblocks to Trump’s plans for tighter borders and more deportations.”

The plan is reportedly underwritten by a $100,000 grant from conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation as part of Project 2025, its far-reaching and extreme effort to provide policy and personnel recommendations for a potential second Trump administration. One of Project 2025’s top priorities is the implementation of “Schedule F,” a scheme to remove job protections from federal workers by reclassifying career staffers as political appointees — a direct attack on federal unions that could be used to fire civil servants deemed insufficiently pro-Trump.

AAF is one of more than 100 conservative organizations on Project 2025’s advisory board, and its initiative — synergistically dubbed Project Sovereignty 2025 — is the latest broadside against the 2.2 million people who work for the federal government. The AP article notes that the group’s list of what Heritage referred to as “anti-American bad actors” echoes the blacklist era of McCarthy, the disgraced anti-communist crusader whose name became synonymous with one of the most repressive periods in U.S. history.

Notably, MAGA media have been attempting to rehabilitate McCarthy’s illiberal tactics and goals using rhetoric that often dovetails with justifications for AAF’s project.

• In October, Bannon said that McCarthy “was dead spot on and quite frankly didn't go far enough.”
• In a December interview, British outlet The Telegraph asked Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts: “Was McCarthy right?” Roberts responded: “On the whole, yeah,” adding, “Especially in hindsight, I think he was spot on."
• A month later, Roberts doubled down on defending McCarthy, explaining to The New York Times: “I was referring to his motivation, and his motivation was, as you know, that real Communists, like capital-C Communists, had infiltrated the federal government, which we learned in hindsight he was right about. Obviously, at least some of his tactics were terrible, but what he got right was the motivation.”
• In March, right-wing media figure and neo-Nazi collaborator Jack Posobiec promoted his anti-communist book on his Thoughtcrime show with Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, praising McCarthy — as well as Spanish dictator Francisco Franco — as figures “who have fought Marxists … over the years and actually done something about it.” (Franco’s regime is believed to have killed between 160,000 and 200,000 people during a period known as the White Terror.)
• A week later, Trump ally and self-identified Islamophobe Laura Loomer repeatedly referred to mainstream reporters as “communists,” adding: “It honestly makes me think that Joseph McCarthy was right, honestly. Really. Honestly. Maybe there was something to it, about rounding up all these communists.” She then repeated, “Maybe Joseph McCarthy was right."
• Bannon returned to the subject in May, telling his audience, “Sen. McCarthy did a fantastic job.” He’d earlier said, “The reason they hated Nixon, because Nixon, even more than McCarthy, really went after the communists.”
• Later that month, Posobiec appeared on former Trump adviser Roger Stone’s show to promote his book and again praised McCarthy. “We do talk about the man whose name is to not be spoken anywhere in American politics,” Posobiec said. “Yes, of course, I'm talking about one of my favorite Catholic senators of all time — Joseph McCarthy. There’s a fantastic section in there about how Joseph McCarthy tried to warn us, and we didn't listen.”

Project 2025’s Schedule F and AAF’s proposed blacklist are clear, direct descendants of the literal McCarthyism that MAGA media figures are so quick to praise. The McCarthy era saw massive purges of left-wing federal employees as part of the Cold War’s rightward shift in national politics, halting the potential for American social democracy and helping to plant the seeds for the neoliberal turn of the 1970s and the ensuing rise in inequality that accompanied it.

McCarthy and fellow anti-communists like FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover also directed their oppressive tactics toward gay people — and those suspected or accused of being gay — who worked for the federal government during a period known as the Lavender Scare. McCarthy “directly linked homosexuality and Communism,” depicting gay people working in government as a national security threat. Historians estimate that between 5,000 and 10,000 federal workers were forced to resign during this period, often behind closed doors for fear of their gay identity — real or perceived — becoming public.

McCarthyist attacks on workers extended far beyond federal government employees. The broader Red Scare was disastrous for unions and the working class, hollowing out organized labor’s power and setting the stage for the wage stagnation and exploding wealth inequality that have defined the United States since the early 1980s. As leading historian of McCarthyism Ellen Schrecker writes, “labor's declining percentage of the workforce” had its “roots in that grim moment."

MAGA media’s celebration of that “grim moment” for workers further highlights the superficial rhetoric of right-wing populism.

Now, Project 2025 has taken up the mantle of targeting the federal workforce — and the working class at large— with effects that could be just as long lasting. As Roberts told Bannon in June, “What we're doing here is building not just for 2025, Steve, but for the next century in the United States."