If this is the case, then why has the strange investigation into Russia’s alleged hacking of the 2016 elections fallen so flat? Hypocrisy has always closely stalked the politics of persecution.įrom Watergate to Iran/Contra, every decade or so the country seems eager for a national bloodletting of its politicians, as if a public lancing of a few black pustules might heal the body politic. This witch hunt became known, rather quaintly, as the Lavender Scare.
Cohn (a closeted gay at the time) even went so far as to claim that Soviet spies were blackmailing American homosexuals to act as a Communist agents. In the 1950s, Cohn acted as Joseph McCarthy’s hatchet man during the congressional hearings into the “Red Peril” of the 1950s. The congressional inquisition has become a ritual of American politics, a ritual whose rites of interrogation and humiliation were largely scripted by Donald Trump’s life coach Roy Cohn. The fewer words you have to waste on this
