To most Americans, HUAC is the sound someone makes when they vomit. This weekend, the *resident dusted off the bones of Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon. It's time to launch a new generation of Yippies in response.

This weekend, the *resident took a break from trying to taunt North Korea into war, calling for the termination of employment of professional athletes who- stupid, overpaid boys!- thought freedom of speech is a cornerstone of democracy.

He went to Alabama Friday to gin up support for a right-wing nut seeking the GOP Senate nomination against a more right-wing nut tomorrow, and in aid of the cause laid into NFL players protesting America's race-based legal system.

Senator Luther Strange, the *resident's preferred nut, burbled to Fox News on Sunday that the *resident's attacks will be just the thing to put him over the top in the Tuesday primary. Wrapping oneself in the flag is always good for ginning up the animal spirits, after all.

The *resident was born in 1946- the annus horibilis that also gave America Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush (June 14, July 9 and August 19).

His formative years were the 1950s, and it is back to his past he wants to lead America.

So dusting off the worship of the graven images of American civic religion makes perfect sense, and fanning outrage over their imagined profanation makes as much sense as uninviting Steph Curry to The White House while giving Tom Brady a free pass for skipping his chance to visit DC and kiss the *resident's ring.

Back when little Donald was beating up his grade school teachers,  HUAC stood for the House Un-American Activities Committee. It ran a sporadic, bipartisan reign of terror against Americans over things like disrespecting the US flag and national anthem for three decades after World War II.

HUAC got its start in World War I, and- like so many other ills- with a politician from North Carolina.

Lee S. Overman (1854-1930), who sat in the Senate for 27 years, wrote the 1918 Overman Act, the Patriot Act of the age. It gave the President sweeping powers to deal with pretty much whatever the President wanted for the period America was in World War I.

That out of the way, Overman started looking into pro-German sentiment in the beer industry; when the war ended and that petered out, he found a new shiny object worrying over the Bolsheviks and laid the groundwork for decades of Communist scares to come.

Overman spent his last years leading filibusters against anti-lynching laws, which he considered Republican plots to solidify their monopoly support by African-Americans (as the opera parodist Anna Russell always assured her audiences, "I'm not making this up").

Though various House committees rang the changes of the Red Menace through the interwar years, it took until 1945 for Congress to make the investigation of Americans over loyalty and patriotism permanent.

HUAC launched the career of more than one demagogue, but none rode it so far as Richard Nixon (who was elected to Congress in 1946), and Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy. McCarthy amped up the volume, destroying hundreds of reputations and careers with flim-flam, fake news, and #AltFacts ginned up by his chief aide, a New York lawyer called Roy Cohn.

Cohn survived the implosion of McCarthy's witchhunts and went on to become a first-rate smear merchant and influence peddler- and attorney for Donald Trump. Cohn died in 1986, insisting to his last AIDS-plagued breath that he was not gay. He despised gays.

In due time he was replaced by a Nixon Dirty Tricks operative- Roger Stone- who oozes in and out of The Trump White House, a large bust of the Watergate president tattooed to his back.

The Vietnam War lit a new fire under HUAC's sleepy members. As Wikipedia reports,

HUAC subpoenaed Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman of the Yippies in 1967, and again in the aftermath of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The Yippies used the media attention to make a mockery of the proceedings. Rubin came to one session dressed as a United States Revolutionary War soldier and passed out copies of the United States Declaration of Independence to people in attendance. Rubin then "blew giant gum bubbles while his co-witnesses taunted the committee with Nazi salutes." Hoffman attended a session dressed as Santa Claus. On another occasion, police stopped Hoffman at the building entrance and arrested him for wearing the United States flag. Hoffman quipped to the press, "I regret that I have but one shirt to give for my country," paraphrasing the last words of revolutionary patriot Nathan Hale; Rubin, who was wearing a matching Viet Cong flag, shouted that the police were communists for not arresting him also.

 

HUAC renamed itself the House Internal Security Committee in 1969 and was shut down- finally- in 1975.

Also last week, the *resident gave high marks to the work of the dictator of Turkey, who, he said, "has become a good friend." President Erdogan is still rooting out the organizers of a 2016 attempt. So far he has found- and jailed or ruined- 150,000 people. Mr Trump admires mass, forced movements of people. He thinks bigly- and small-y- all at once.