The trouble with McCarthyism is that once it gets going, it has a habit of ensnaring figures who were not meant to be its original targets. We’re seeing this with the Donald Trump administration’s (and broader right-wing) crackdown on speech criticizing Israel, which yesterday was used to fire one of the administration’s own foreign policy picks.

Yesterday the news that Lt. Col. Daniel Davis had been dropped from his planned appointment as a deputy director of national intelligence (DNI) came as swiftly as the news that he had been offered and accepted the job in the first place. Davis — a senior fellow at Defense Priorities and a prominent conservative commentator on the pro-restraint side of the foreign policy divide — came under attack by pro-Israel voices as soon as the news of his hiring went public, focusing on his record of criticism of Israel’s war on Gaza.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an organization whose mission is meant to be combating antisemitism, warned that Davis’s appointment would be “extremely dangerous” but pointed only to his views on Iran policy and US support for the war on Gaza — not anything antisemitic.