erful, someone who believed that America was composed only of two kinds of people--communists and right-thinking souls like themselves--was working to silence them.

We tell our kids that America learned from McCarthyism, but a new version of the Red Scare is being born in this new century. Powerbrokers connected to what Hillary Clinton clumsily called the "vast right-wing conspiracy"--the Bush-Cheney's neoconservative war profiteers, the Christian Right and their media allies at Fox News and Clear Channel Communications--operate out in the open. Their goal: to crush personalities whose influence and eloquence threatens their plan to recast the United States in their white, heterosexual, pro-business image.

Ironically two of the hard right's recent high-profile speech martyrs, Bill Maher and Howard Stern, are libertarians--a group whose distrust of big government traditionally prompts them to vote Republican. ABC, a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company--a major political contributor to Bush's 2000 presidential campaign and other Republicans--canceled Maher's "Politically Incorrect" TV show after 9/11.

Now, over on AM radio, the Bush-controlled Federal Communications Commission has targeted Howard Stern for trumped-up decency violations. In a classic tag-team move, Clear Channel Communications, the thousand-station-plus behemoth so closely allied with the White House that it organized pro-Bush "Rallies for America" during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, declared Stern in violation of a brand-new "zero tolerance" policy for on-air indecency. "Clear Channel drew a line in the sand today with regard to protecting our listeners from indecent content, and Howard Stern's show blew right through it," Clear Channel Radio president John Hogan said before dropping Stern's popular syndicated program--Clear Channel is willing to lose money to promote its political agenda--from its stations.

Citing three separate FCC sources, Stern says he expects to be hit by a huge fine--then fired. "It's over for me as a broadcaster," he said last week. "I'm checkmated. All they gotta do is fine [Infinity Broadcasting, Stern's employer] and then we're gone. And there's nothing we can do about it." On March 5, he added: "I'm guessing that sometime next week will be my last show on this station. There's a cultural war going on. The religious right is winning. We're losing."

If Clear Channel truly had a true zero tolerance policy on decency, Stern points out, it wouldn't have hired foul-mouthed right-wing Republican Michael Savage at its KPRC-AM in Houston. (Savage infamously shouted that homosexuals should "get AIDS and die" on MSNBC.) The real reason he's being attacked, Stern says, is that he dared criticize George W. Bush.

"If you don' t think me going after Bush got me thrown off those stations, you got another thing coming," says the "shock jock." "My days here are numbered because I dared to speak out against the Bush administration and say that the religious agenda of George W. Bush concerning stem cell research and gay marriage is wrong. And that what he is doing with the FCC is pushing this religious agenda. And also the fact that the guy takes more vacation than any President ever...I don't think we can stop it, short of me calling up President Bush and saying 'Look man, I'm going to support you, so don't do this.'"

The New McCarthyism doesn't always flow from the top down. The New York Times, which has published my editorial cartoons for 13 years through three presidents, suddenly excised them from its website on March 1--leaving a Soviet-style hole on its comics page. In an Orwellian twist, it even deleted the archives.

"After two years [sic] of monitoring cartoons by Ted Rall we decided that, while he often does good work, we found some of his humor was not in keeping with the tone we try to set for NYTimes.com," stammered a Times Digital spokesperson to Editor & Publisher magazine when anti-censorship complaints began coming in. "We...recognize an obligation to assure our users that what we publish...does not offend the reasonable sensibilities of our audience."

To his credit, the paper's ombudsman wrote that he disagreed with the decision.

Those "reasonable sensibilities," a Times insider tells me, have less to do with tone than political content: as the most liberal cartoonist in a group of ten, my work drew a disproportionate number of emails from annoyed Republicans--adding to an already short-staffed department's workload. "It wasn't tone. [Times Digital] were sick of the hassle," my source says. "They kept other cartoons that were far more objectionable."

Cowardice, meet laziness. Time magazine was so afraid of the possibility of right-wing hate mail that it stopped running political cartoons after 9/11.

The Internet has become the tool of choice for the previously powerless. Email forwarding, hyperlinks and blogs--a genre dominated by right-wingers--allow anyone with a used Gateway computer and a dial-up connection to rally hundreds of likeminded individuals to point and click, instantly firing off fiery letters to the bosses of radio talk show hosts, cartoonists and columnists who offend their sensibilities.

"Here's the feedback form for Yahoo!'s opinion syndicate," a blog called "The Agitator" suggests. "Write and tell them it's time to drop Ted Rall's column." "No paper should ever run Rall again," howls Andrew Sullivan, a Time magazine columnist who also writes the country's most prominent extreme-right blog. "I urge all of our readers to write to the NY Times," urges another hate site. "Here is their Contact page. I wrote to the publisher this morning."

A few liberals try to censor conservatives, but most opponents of the First Amendment reside on the right.

Unlike Congressional staffers accustomed to the phenomenon of mass letter-writing campaigns, aging editors at old-school print outlets like the Times don't comprehend that they're being fooled and manipulated by fringe interest groups--most of whose members don't even buy their newspaper--into believing these orchestrated correspondence campaigns reflect genuine reader outrage. And so the bullies get their way.

The Right is running scared. Their wars and economic schemes are revealed to be as fraudulent as their fake president, whose poll numbers are plummeting as he turns to face uncharacteristically unified Democrats. Because they have no record worth defending and no ideas anyone will believe, the new McCarthyites have only one line of defense left: censoring their opponents. The question this time is, will anyone stand up for free speech?

(Ted Rall is the author of "Wake Up, You're Liberal: How We Can Take America Back From the Right," coming in April. Ordering information is available at amazon.com.)

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