An old writer friend of mine called the other day to say that he had been advised by a senior editor at the New Republic not to have anything to do with my partner Peter Collier and me because we were "Nazis." The reason? We had organized a fund to defend Matt Drudge, the Internet gadfly who told the world about Newsweek magazine's Monica Lewinsky story before Newsweek did and is being sued by White House aide Sidney Blumenthal, one of the architects of Hillary Rodham Clinton's "vast right-wing conspiracy" scenario. Every day, I get calls from the press about my connections to two names on the White House chart of right-wing conspirators, as reported in this week's Newsweek: Drudge and philanthropist Richard Scaife. In this week's edition of the leftist the Nation, I am also listed on the chart (in a box with Drudge and Rush Limbaugh) for a sentence I wrote in a Salon article referring to President Clinton's sojourn in Russia during the Cold War. So, how does it feel to be a target of this latter-day witch hunt? Actually, it feels quite familiar. I grew up in the Cold War '50s in a family of American Communists. The FBI used to hang around our neighborhood, charting people's comings and goings. My parents lost their jobs as high school teachers because they would not answer the question, "Are you now, or have you ever been," etc. Once in a junior high school auditorium, when I was 13, a gang of toughs put a drape cord around my neck and started shouting, "String him up, he's a red!" Unfair as the treatment of my family and our Communist friends was during the McCarthy era, there was an element of truth in the conspiracy charges then. My parents, both Communists, were willing enlistees in a highly disciplined and secretive movement dedicated to overthrowing American democracy, a movement that took its orders (and its money) from Moscow with the express purpose of undermining this country's security vis-á-vis the Soviet Union. Yet most people agree, and I am one of them, that McCarthy's campaign was a reckless witch hunt that injured people who had no connection to the actual Communist conspiracy, and those who, while they believed in the cause, were innocent of any criminal and/or subversive deeds. McCarthy's true targets were not Communists, whom the FBI already had under surveillance, but his political opponents in the Democratic party. Why then the seeming tolerance for the current White House witch hunt, whose purpose is to smear and destroy its political critics? There is no conspiracy behind the events that prompted the first lady's accusations. There is no subversive party of the right with secret codes and ruthless discipline that gives orders to go out and destroy people. If Monica Lewinsky was planted in the White House, she was planted by Democrats, beginning with a big party donor and ending with the president himself. It was Newsweek -- hardly a conservative rag -- that worked on the story for a full year. Yes, Richard Scaife, one of the conspiracists' villains-in-chief, bankrolled private investigations into the suicide of Vincent Foster, in the belief that something more sinister occurred. (So what, isn't that what freedom of inquiry entails?) Kenneth Starr, the billionaire's supposed right-wing pawn, refuted the speculations that Scaife was pushing and supported the original suicide finding. What kind of a conspiracy is this? As for my minuscule role in the plot, I was barely aware of Drudge's existence when I first heard of the Blumenthal suit. I offered to introduce Drudge to a lawyer, Manny Klausner, a well-known civil liberties advocate with deep (and very public) ties to the Libertarian Party. The Center for the Study of Popular Culture has long been interested in free speech issues and has defended feminists and Afro-centrists as well as conservatives on First Amendment issues. We spearheaded the battle against speech codes on college campuses some years ago. We even attained some humorous notoriety when we forced a vice chancellor at the University of California to undergo First Amendment "sensitivity training" when he banned a fraternity from distributing a T-shirt the campus PC crowd didn't like. We were even criticized by George Will, who clearly didn't get the joke. We do get funds from the Scaife foundations in addition to 20 other foundations and 15,000 individuals. So why is Scaife, whom I have met and talked to twice in my life, being demonized as though he were the mastermind of a coup d'état against the president? Why is the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, which has sought only to defend a journalist from what it perceives as a punitive and chilling legal attack, being dragged into the "conspiracy"? The answer is obvious from witch hunts of the past. It is to deflect attention away from the real issues. It is to conjure fantasy demons in order to smear and then cripple real opponents. The question that should be asked is: Why, given what Americans know about witch hunts, are they so tolerant of this latest outbreak?

An old writer friend of mine called the other day to say that he had been advised by a senior editor at the New Republic not to have anything to do with my partner Peter Collier and me because we were "Nazis." The reason? We had organized a fund to defend Matt Drudge, the Internet gadfly who told the world about Newsweek magazine's Monica Lewinsky story before Newsweek did and is being sued by White House aide Sidney Blumenthal, one of the architects of Hillary Rodham Clinton's "vast right-wing conspiracy" scenario. Every day, I get calls from the press about my connections to two names on the White House chart of right-wing conspirators, as reported in this week's Newsweek: Drudge and philanthropist Richard Scaife. In this week's edition of the leftist the Nation, I am also listed on the chart (in a box with Drudge and Rush Limbaugh) for a sentence I wrote in a Salon article referring to President Clinton's sojourn in Russia during the Cold War. So, how does it feel to be a target of this latter-day witch hunt? Actually, it feels quite familiar. I grew up in the Cold War '50s in a family of American Communists. The FBI used to hang around our neighborhood, charting people's comings and goings. My parents lost their jobs as high school teachers because they would not answer the question, "Are you now, or have you ever been," etc. Once in a junior high school auditorium, when I was 13, a gang of toughs put a drape cord around my neck and started shouting, "String him up, he's a red!" Unfair as the treatment of my family and our Communist friends was during the McCarthy era, there was an element of truth in the conspiracy charges then. My parents, both Communists, were willing enlistees in a highly disciplined and secretive movement dedicated to overthrowing American democracy, a movement that took its orders (and its money) from Moscow with the express purpose of undermining this country's security vis-á-vis the Soviet Union. Yet most people agree, and I am one of them, that McCarthy's campaign was a reckless witch hunt that injured people who had no connection to the actual Communist conspiracy, and those who, while they believed in the cause, were innocent of any criminal and/or subversive deeds. McCarthy's true targets were not Communists, whom the FBI already had under surveillance, but his political opponents in the Democratic party. Why then the seeming tolerance for the current White House witch hunt, whose purpose is to smear and destroy its political critics? There is no conspiracy behind the events that prompted the first lady's accusations. There is no subversive party of the right with secret codes and ruthless discipline that gives orders to go out and destroy people. If Monica Lewinsky was planted in the White House, she was planted by Democrats, beginning with a big party donor and ending with the president himself. It was Newsweek -- hardly a conservative rag -- that worked on the story for a full year. Yes, Richard Scaife, one of the conspiracists' villains-in-chief, bankrolled private investigations into the suicide of Vincent Foster, in the belief that something more sinister occurred. (So what, isn't that what freedom of inquiry entails?) Kenneth Starr, the billionaire's supposed right-wing pawn, refuted the speculations that Scaife was pushing and supported the original suicide finding. What kind of a conspiracy is this? As for my minuscule role in the plot, I was barely aware of Drudge's existence when I first heard of the Blumenthal suit. I offered to introduce Drudge to a lawyer, Manny Klausner, a well-known civil liberties advocate with deep (and very public) ties to the Libertarian Party. The Center for the Study of Popular Culture has long been interested in free speech issues and has defended feminists and Afro-centrists as well as conservatives on First Amendment issues. We spearheaded the battle against speech codes on college campuses some years ago. We even attained some humorous notoriety when we forced a vice chancellor at the University of California to undergo First Amendment "sensitivity training" when he banned a fraternity from distributing a T-shirt the campus PC crowd didn't like. We were even criticized by George Will, who clearly didn't get the joke. We do get funds from the Scaife foundations in addition to 20 other foundations and 15,000 individuals. So why is Scaife, whom I have met and talked to twice in my life, being demonized as though he were the mastermind of a coup d'état against the president? Why is the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, which has sought only to defend a journalist from what it perceives as a punitive and chilling legal attack, being dragged into the "conspiracy"? The answer is obvious from witch hunts of the past. It is to deflect attention away from the real issues. It is to conjure fantasy demons in order to smear and then cripple real opponents. The question that should be asked is: Why, given what Americans know about witch hunts, are they so tolerant of this latest outbreak?