McCarthyisn was a paranoid response to World War II (PTSD) the Roswell Crash and the Hydrogen Bomb that Russia and China now had too

 If you were alive then like me (I was 9 in 1957) and told I would die as a soldier in a nuclear war and likely everyone on earth was going to die.

This was the basic Idea of the level of paranoia around in the U.S. then.

Another thing that my father completely believed in was "Better Dead than Red".

In other words it was better to be dead than to be a communist or under communist rule.

You really had to be there to know just how incredibly scary this time was on earth just after World War II less than 10 or 12 years before with people still dying from PTSD from that war both men and women every single day. We lost 900,000 people in World War II mostly civilians by the way here in the U.S.

Russia lost 20 million people! If you can even imagine how freaked out everyone was then I don't think you really could unless you were there then.

So, McCarthyism was this paranoia in action destroying and in some cases actually killing innocent people who mostly were American citizens too.

Much like today where Government employees are laid off with no way to survive (no golden parachutes) (no severance plans approved by Congress) just lives completely destroyed that may never recover.

Then you have innocent American Citizens whose relatives might be from Central or South America sent to God knows where that are guilty of absolutely nothing to starve and die there with no relatives there anymore or any real way to financially or physically survive at all. So, they go crazy and die wherever they are sent.