It's so interesting despite the condemnation of Joseph McCarthy, red-baiting still goes on.
I knew a lot of people on the Left pretty closely and the idea of their being subjected to KGB interrogations is risible. We know that the Right Wing dumped on the folk singers as being "communists" when many of the ones I knew had a short stint with CP because many thought it too doctrinaire. Most of the folkies that I knew had never read Das Kapital or any Marx. I personally never saw a KGB agent or any Soviet agent who attempted to sway me in a political direction. This paranoia is with us today even when the Soviet Union, a failed government,
was dissolved.

Associating folk singers with Soviet ties is nonsense. Folkies that I knew were largely unaware of Stalin's atrocities. Many may have been naive about "Uncle Joe" but I think the ones I knew
were sophisticated enough to finally realize that they were mistaken about him.

The movie "Reds" shows what happened when Jack Reed went to Russia. He was attempting to
defend the CPUSA and the Soviet government dissed him. Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger were disillusioned by the Soviet Union and have stated so publicly. To try to paint them as brainwashed is insulting. This smear tactic about Lefty folkies is endemic to the Right-Wing proto-fascist movement which is on the rise throughout the world today.

The new smear tactic reminds me of an old song, "Roll it on the ground, spread it all around, dig it with hoe, it'll make your flowers grow".