Trump is bringing back a 1950s American form of persecution

President Donald Trump is reviving the Lavender Scare, an infamous period in American history that began in the 1950s and led to the widespread persecution of members of the LGBTQ community.

“A defining feature of the mid-20th century was the government-wide panic over communism, anarchism, and other leftist beliefs known as the Red Scare,” wrote ACLU Social Editor Hanna Stolzer on Tuesday. “However what many don’t know is that an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 government employees were fired or forced to resign during that same time period, solely because they were suspected or confirmed to be queer. This purge of queer people from government jobs further instilled distrust of the LGBTQ community by the general public under the guise of protecting national security. It’s called the Lavender Scare.”

Stolzer elaborated on how, much as Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) persecuted left-wingers and other political dissidents as communists, he also led a panic against homosexuals by arguing that LGBTQ people would be susceptible to blackmail by the Soviet Union. Ordinary citizens were encouraged to report displays of supposedly “homosexual behavior,” often following procedures pioneered by a McCarthyist senator from the other party, Sen. Charley E. Johns (D-FL).

Now Trump is following the same path trod in the 1950s by the likes of McCarthy and Johns.

“Taking a page from the Johns Committee playbook 70 years later,the FBI opened a tip line in June 2025 and requested people report teachers who ‘promote gender ideology’ and providers of gender-affirming care,” Holzer wrote. “And just last month, the Department of Justice attempted to force health care providers to hand over the identities and sensitive information of transgender youth who have received gender-affirming care. This is a blatant violation of the trans youth and their families’ right to privacy. The ACLU is suing the Trump administration to block this effort in court.”

He added, “These directives have far-reaching effects: They turn neighbor against neighbor, incentivize people to surveil children, and normalize the restriction of safe and critical health care. States across the country support this agenda by introducing laws that criminalize or push health care out of reach for many trans kids. Along with our affiliates, the ACLU is fighting these attacks.”

The ACLU scholar elaborated that Trump has focused on pushing LGBTQ people out of the Armed Services and public education.

“Today, the Trump administration consistently suggests ‘gender ideology’ is a threat to children and his idealized vision of the nuclear family, claiming ‘the evil and backwards lies of gender insanity are robbing our children of their happiness, health, and freedom, while imposing unimaginable heartbreak on parents and families,’” Holzer wrote. “They’ve censored doctors, researchers, educators, artists, and government workers from even mentioning the existence of transgender people, all while restricting the freedom of families with transgender youth. It is not a particularly new or novel strategy to disguise fear of LGBTQ people as coming from a need to ‘protect children,’ often bolstered by dangerous lies about the LGBTQ community.”

Speaking with this journalist for Salon in 2023, Dr. Gillian Frank, who studies religion, sexuality and gender at Princeton University, explained that Trump and his supporters spread misinformation falsely accusing LGBTQ people of being disproportionately prone to being child molesters in order to smear them and validate persecuting them.

“A few things happen if we deploy this idea that our opponents are out to sexually harm children, to sexually molest and violently assault them,” Frank told Salon. It associates LGBTQ people with a terrible evil, triggers parental instincts to protect their children and deflects from legitimate questions about social justice.

“One of the things we need to understand about this smear is the ways in which it is deployed to not talk about the issues of social equality, economic equality, the status of people’s citizenship and recognition, their right to privacy or protection,” Frank said. “We’re shifting it away from all those things — rights of women, equal rights of black people, which promoted the idea that there was a sexual danger to children by virtue of granting civil rights — has been this long-standing trope.”