The New McCarthyism: UC Berkeley Just Handed Over the Names of 160 Students and Faculty to the Trump Admin
ANGLO AMERICA, 22 Sep 2025
Viet Thanh Nguyen | Zeteo - TRANSCEND Media Service
Students and faculty gather at the pro-Palestinian encampment at UC Berkeley on Thu, 2 May 2024.
Photo by Jane Tyska/Digital First Media/East Bay Times via Getty Images
I’m beyond disturbed that my alma mater is wiling to destroy its reputation as the birthplace of the 1960s Free Speech Movement and put students in danger in the process.
18 Sep 2025 – The University of California, Berkeley, famous for its Free Speech Movement of the 1960s, included the names of 160 faculty, students, and staff in documents it recently turned over to the Trump administration as part of an antisemitism probe. It’s yet another worrying sign in the federal government’s efforts to use allegations of antisemitism to discipline academia and suppress resistance to its agenda, including its support for Israel.
As a graduate of UC Berkeley and as someone who was a student activist there in the 1990s, I was particularly disturbed that the university named names to the government.
Naming names was one of the hallmarks of the paranoid era of the 1950s in the United States, when Americans were hauled before Senator Joe McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee and interrogated about their political beliefs and suspected allegiance to communism. For those under the anti-communist spotlight, naming the names of other people was one way to avoid being blacklisted or otherwise punished for their real or alleged political beliefs. The spectacle of McCarthyist shaming and persecution signaled to the rest of American society to religiously embrace anti-communism, a legacy that is still strong today.
The most prominent known name that Berkeley included is Judith Butler, the philosopher who made their reputation through interventions into gender and queer theory, and who also happens to be Jewish and anti-Zionist. In response, Butler wrote:
“Antisemitism must be unequivocally opposed along with every other form of racism, but there are campus protocols for investigating such allegations that ensure fairness and which, in this instance, were suspended by the administration. Moreover, it is important to consider which definition of antisemitism is at work. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which the Trump administration accepts, is overbroad, often equating criticism of Israel with antisemitism. It acts as a cudgel against freedom of expression and dissent.”
During the McCarthy era, the targeting of suspected communists and sympathizers was inseparable from a general atmosphere of enforced domestic conformity, from patriarchal gender roles to segregation and anti-Blackness. Anti-communist politics also went hand-in-hand with the nation’s post-World War II transformation into the “military-industrial complex” that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of in his 1961 farewell speech. The combination of anti-communist paranoia and an expanding American global hegemony culminated in the American war in Viet Nam (and Laos and Cambodia) in the 1960s and 1970s, waged to stop the spread of communism. The war was a disaster for Southeast Asians and for Americans, with over 58,000 Americans dead and approximately 3 million Vietnamese and hundreds of thousands of Lao, Hmong, and Cambodians killed.
The imperial and murderous excesses of American power generated the antiwar movement and the countercultural movement, while the concurrent suppression of American minorities led to the rise of domestic uprisings by Black Americans, Asian Americans, Chicanos, and Native Americans, along with a vigorous resurgence of feminism and a militantly visible movement of queer liberation. The schism within the United States was a civil war in the American soul, which subsided after the end of the war in Viet Nam into 50 years of cultural and political struggle over the meaning of the United States, both for its own citizens and residents, as well as those people of other countries affected by American power.
Butler has been involved with both the domestic and international dimensions of American power. While they became influential with their writing on queer and trans politics, they also spoke out against American wars of the post 9/11 era. The Manichean view of the Cold War, where communists were the enemy, had simply been extended to the Arab and Muslim world, with a fear of “radical Islam” conflating Arabs and Muslims with terrorists. Butler asked a basic question: why do some lives, like those of Americans, Western Europeans, and white people, seem more deserving of grief in Western society than those of Arabs, Muslims, and nonwhite people? That same question could have been asked about Southeast Asian lives during the American war in Viet Nam, and Butler has asked it about Palestinian lives in their condemnation of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
That genocide, and the American support for it, has heightened the political and cultural divisions within American society to a pitch not seen since the era of McCarthyism and the American war in Viet Nam. While we remember some of the more famous names who were named in the 1950s, like screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, many more were targeted who were less well-known. So it is with Butler and the 159 others whose names have not yet been revealed, some of whom were included due to anonymous allegations. Their perils are real, as Butler writes: “Will those of us on the list be branded by the government as ‘terrorist sympathizers?’ Will our travel be restricted? Will our email be surveilled? Students on the list are now potentially exposed to abduction, deportation, termination of employment, expulsion from the university, harassment, and detention by a government that has already shown its willingness to do all of the above.”
By naming names, UC Berkeley has eroded its reputation as a stronghold of intellectual independence, cultural nonconformity, and political protest. Its submission is neither inevitable nor rewarding, since every sign of submission has been interpreted by the Trump administration as evidence of weakness that can be further exploited. In the face of this institutional complicity, which stems from the vulnerability of UC Berkeley and many other institutions of higher education to political domination due to their funding being intertwined with the military-industrial complex, the historian Robin D.G. Kelley writes, “We need to create a new university.”
That kind of daring imagination is what Berkeley was supposed to be famous for. But while academic institutions can be and have been corrupted, the ideals that drive certain scholars, from famous philosophers to inquisitive first-year students, still remain. Those ideals include a commitment to recognizing the humanity of those that our society has deemed the enemy, as well as the acknowledgment that our side is as capable of the inhuman behavior with which we charge our enemy. This commitment to mutual humanity, and this troubling understanding of our own inhumanity, reminds us that what we should name in the face of abusive power is not our fellow citizens and residents but the acts of injustice that harm others and – for those of us who remain silent – ourselves.
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Pulitzer-Prize Prize-winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen is the author of several books. His latest is To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other. He is also the co-editor of the anthology The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora.
Tags: Anglo America, Education, Freedom of Speech, New McCarthyism, Structural violence, USA
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