CRY ME A RIVER.

What conservative is being oppressed today? Steven Hayward of Power Line. A Congressman is investigating the financial ties between major climate-change deniers and oil and gas tycoons -- I know! I was surprised to hear about it, too! -- and to this end asked Hayward's employer Pepperdine for the skinny on Hayward's funding. Hayward announces this outrage under the title,

ARE YOU NOW OR HAVE YOU EVER BEEN A CLIMATE SKEPTIC?

Hayward also calls the Congressman and his colleagues "McCarthyite witch hunters." He's the victim of a blacklist, see, except he's still working, and all the people who are likely to employ him consider him a hero. Other than that it's Red Channels all over again.

But what does Hayward think about Joe McCarthy himself? From a 2011 Hayward post about Eugene McCarthy:

Following a speech to the Manchester Kiwanis Club, for example, Gene McCarthy was presented the customary service club thank-you plaque with an inscription expressing “appreciation to Senator Joseph McCarthy.” (Emphasis added.) If only.

Elsewhere you can find Hayward praising M. Stanton Evans' Blacklisting History, "by far the most serious defense of McCarthy since the Buckley-Bozell book in the 1950s," and looking forward to an upcoming Evans opus containing "new details about Alger Hiss, Elizabeth Bentley, Owen Lattimore, Harry Dexter White, Eleanor Roosevelt, and especially Harry Hopkins." (Possibly just to debunk it, though!)

As for modern-day witch-hunters, Hayward's attitude toward them changes depending on the identity of the witch -- from a 2012 AP story on people who think Obama's a socialist:

Steven Hayward, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of a two-volume biography of Ronald Reagan, said Obama is not a socialist under the strict definitions of that term – central economic planning and government control of production. 

"However, socialism has a secondary meaning that is harder to explain – government regulations, supervision of the private economy," Hayward said. "The problem now with Obama is, 'What does he really think?'"

I'm constantly being asked if I hold the Voltaire defend-to-the-death position on people I disagree with, but I am seldom offered a for-instance where the subject isn't just entirely full of shit.