Meet America’s New Un-Americans… the DSA
From HUAC to today’s Democratic Socialists: A history of ideology, allegiance, and subversion.
by Paul Kengor
August 6, 2026, 10:04 PM
An all-time favorite whipping boy of the American Left is the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Most readers wouldn’t recognize the group by its proper acronym — HCUAA — but they certainly know the Left’s reordered, twisted acronym: the dread “HUAC.” That translates to the “House Un-American Committee.” Improperly rendered, yes, but the label has stuck. You can succeed at such propaganda when your ideology pervades the media, Hollywood, academia, the culture — what we at The American Spectator have long called the Kultursmog.
Note the cynical repackaging of the committee and its mission: The Left, and especially far-left communist organs such as the Daily Worker, attempted to recast this important committee of the U.S. House of Representatives as un-American itself. That was a rather audacious move by the comrades, given who they were, and what the committee was not. The fact is that HCUAA had been run by Democrats and Republicans alike throughout its existence — by solid, bipartisan congressmen. The Democrat chairs of the House Committee on Un-American Activities ran from Rep. Martin Dies (D-TX) in the 1930s, to Rep. Francis Walter (D-PA), to Rep. Richard Ichord (D-MO) in the 1970s.
No, dear progressive snowflake, “HUAC” wasn’t run by villainous Republican Joe McCarthy. Senator McCarthy was, uh, in the Senate — where, incidentally, he was often joined by stalwart anti-communist Democrats like John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, Pat McCarran of Nevada, James Eastland of Mississippi, and Thomas Dodd of Connecticut, the latter two being anti-communist pillars on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and chair and vice chair of the outstanding Subcommittee on Internal Security. Those guys exposed countless self-proclaimed “progressives” as in fact closet communists. For this, they have never been forgiven by the Left and forever vilified by liberal historians.
Nonetheless, the task of “HUAC” was a noble one. It was charged with investigating extremist elements within the United States, whether they be fascists, communists, American sympathizers of Nazis (the German-American Bund), or American Bolsheviks. The committee members were tasked with defending America, and they thus wanted to know whether certain fifth-column elements were working to subvert the system from within. The American Left, of course, had no problem when the reviled “HUAC” was investigating closet Nazis, but as soon as the committee set its sights on Soviet supporters, well — hell’s bells — that was downright un-American!
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https://spectator.org/paul-kengor-meet-americas-new-un-americans-the-dsa/
