Cruz Adviser: Joe McCarthy Was Right!

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Clare Lopez, a national security adviser to Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) presidential campaign, earlier this month said the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) was “spot on” about communists infiltrating the United States government in the 1950s.

Lopez, a vice president at anti-Muslim activist Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy, made the comments during an interview with South Carolina radio host Vince Coakley, where she warned of the Muslim Brotherhood’s “infiltration at the highest levels of our national security,” according to audio posted by Right Wing Watch on Monday.

“Brotherhood affiliates and associates and those connected to it are the go-to advisers, if not appointees, for the top levels of our national security in our government, in this administration for sure, but going back many decades, really, is the program of this Brotherhood,” she said.

She then compared Americans’ reactions to the Muslim Brotherhood to how “unprepared” the U.S. was for communists during the Cold War.

“We can go all the way back, of course, to the time of the Cold War and back to the 1920s, ‘30s, ‘40s when communists, you know, the KGB, infiltrated our government at the very highest levels. And then, like now, we were unprepared and in large measure unaware of what was going on, at least until the House Un-American Activities got rolling in the 1950s with Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who absolutely was spot-on in just about everything he said about the levels of infiltration,” she said. “So we have precedent for this where we were not fully aware of the infiltration occurring at the time.”

Gaffney has also pushed claims that members of the Muslim Brotherhood have infiltrated the U.S. government, and he has specifically targeted Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin.

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