“It turns out our friends at #RedForEd are more red than many people know,” wrote Arizona Republican state representative Maria Syms in an op-ed last week, as tens of thousands of Arizona educators prepared to strike. Teachers in Arizona joined those in Colorado and followed in the wake of teachers in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Oklahoma in withholding their labor to demand better pay and working conditions.

Attempting to undermine the wildly popular teachers’ strike, which began last Thursday, Syms named two teacher-organizers who she claimed were “political operatives who moved here within the last two years to use teachers and our children to carry out their socialist movement.” She presented social-media evidence that these organizers intended “more harm than good by politicizing Arizona education in pursuit of their self-proclaimed agenda — a national socialist revolution.”

Syms’s condemnation is reminiscent of the red-baiting that drove radicals out of the labor movement in the mid-twentieth century. Back then, the strategic intent was to sever the ties between socialism and the labor movement. With that task more or less complete today, the purpose of a comment like Syms’s is more modest — namely to turn the tide of public sentiment against workers by connecting their strike action to an unpopular ideology.