During Monday’s Congressional Democrats’ briefing, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) discussed the Trump Administration's push against the press and universities and compared it to McCarthyism.
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NewsTranscript
00:00I want to thank all of our witnesses for testifying today.
00:06Everyone in this room grew up in a period since World War II where we were used to seeing a world that was ever increasing in its freedoms.
00:15We saw walls come down. We saw new nations born.
00:20We saw the ever greater ability to express ourselves, to practice our faith, to associate with whom we would.
00:28And we came to believe it was inexorable. We came to believe that it was like the laws of gravity.
00:34Or it was, as Martin Luther King said, the moral arc of the universe always bending towards justice.
00:40Until all of a sudden it wasn't bending towards justice.
00:44And we've come to realize, much to our shock, that there's nothing inevitable about this.
00:50There's nothing inevitable about democracy or democratization.
00:54That this experiment in this country, this great experiment, self-governance,
01:00now two and a half centuries old, is not inevitable.
01:03It was improbable at its start.
01:06And we've witnessed something we never would have imagined in this country.
01:09We have witnessed with incredible rapidity the creation of a climate of fear by this administration.
01:17We see universities afraid to speak out, to defend their own students, to defend their own academic freedom.
01:30You see universities rushing to make deals with the administration.
01:34You see universities cowed into silence, not stepping up to defend other universities.
01:40You see members of the press excluded from public events because they don't use the administration's favored parlance.
01:49And you don't see other members of the press in solidarity with them.
01:54You see law firms rush to cut separate deals.
01:59You see lawyers purged from the Department of Justice.
02:04You see FBI agents purged from the Bureau.
02:07You see scientists purged from their agencies.
02:09a wholesale effort to weed out and drive out anyone of independent thinking,
02:18anyone who will stand up and defend the rule of law or science or the freedom of thought or expression,
02:27right down to ordinary citizens who are now afraid.
02:32If the government of the United States can pluck a man off the street and send him to a prison in El Salvador,
02:39without any kind of due process or any process whatsoever,
02:46then no one is safe.
02:48And if the government's response to that is to discipline a lawyer who dares to speak the truth to a court,
02:56then no one is safe.
02:59And the answer to this climate of fear there really is only one answer and you're seeing it today and that is courage.
03:10We must demonstrate courage in the face of this fear.
03:13In this very committee room or one like it.
03:19Joseph McCarthy and his allies made the country afraid
03:22and caused people to inform on each other and betray each other,
03:30allowed people to be driven out of the government and to be persecuted.
03:36And we wondered how that could be.
03:41We wondered how could so many people be complicit.
03:46Well, now we know.
03:48Now we know.
03:49Now we have witnessed it in our own time.
03:51But I will say this of the brave witnesses who have come and testified today.
04:01All of the rest of us have to ask ourselves, looking back at the McCarthy era,
04:06what would we have done?
04:08What would we have done?
04:11If we were faced with the loss of our jobs,
04:13if we were faced with the loss of our livelihood,
04:16if we were faced with the loss of our position,
04:19what would we have done?
04:20Well, you don't have to ask that question.
04:25Your being here is all the answer anyone could demand.
04:30And we are deeply, deeply grateful to you.