This month, trans activist and whistle-blower Chelsea Manning filed to run for senate in her home state of Maryland. Instead of support however, she has faced yet more liberals accusing her of trying to destroy the country.

This isn’t the first time Democrats have turned on left-leaning minorities. In the 1950s, Senator Joe McCarthy led an anti-Communist witch hunt across America. Even more harsh and punishing was the hunt against LGBT people and civil rights activists who called attention to minority struggles. By silencing queer leftists and black activists, the Resistance is poised to repeat history, and doom their movement and any meaningful fight against Trump’s agenda.

Since forming themselves in response to Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, the Resistance’s key efforts have been about exposing Trump’s ties to Russian oligarchs and Vladimir Putin. With that goal, however, has come a frustrating tendency to accuse left-leaning minority activists of treason.

This is Molly Mckew, a Politico writer and one of the top resistance activists on Twitter making the accusation that senate candidate Chelsea Manning has ulterior motives in her bid.

She makes the unsubstantiated claim that Chelsea Manning was coerced through emotional distress into leaking the private documents that ultimately saw her imprisoned, and throughout this accusation, seems to be allergic to using Chelsea’s actual pronouns. This undermines Chelsea’s activism, and not only erases her identity as a trans woman, but also her agency, in favor of pushing a conspiracy that she was acting at the behest of a foreign power.

Compare Mckew’s accusations to that of the Senate’s investigation in Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government,

The social stigma attached to sex perversion is so great that many perverts go to great lengths to conceal their perverted tendencies. This situation is evidenced by the fact that perverts are frequently victimized by blackmailers who threaten to expose their sexual deviations.

The justification behind what would be later dubbed as the Lavender Scare, is that through their marginalization, queer people can become vulnerable to exploitation by foreign powers and turned against the United States. It’s a paternalistic attitude that suggests that our marginalization makes us unfit to speak for ourselves. This idea has been brought up multiple times within the Resistance to justify the erasure of minority activists by portraying their work as some seedy Russian plot.

Furthermore, even when minority activists make mistakes, or poor choices, such as last week when Chelsea Manning was revealed having socialized with alt-right conservative sympathizers, instead of getting the benefit of the doubt, this only confirms the worst suspicions cishet people have about trans people.

However no such scrutiny or accusations were levied at the liberal journalists who were also attending the party and drinking and socializing with fascist sympathizers who reported Manning’s attendance at the Cernovich-hosted event. These same journalists also failed to accurately report on the transphobic nature of many of the speeches at the event.

The entire handling of the story from most major liberal-leaning media outlets, but notably Buzzfeed was remarkably poor, rushed, and left out key facts. Chelsea was accused by the very same journalists of having cosigned the event, without so much as an interview from her to grab a statement. It’s much easier to sell a juicy story that destroys a trans woman’s reputation rather than commit to accurate and fair reporting.

Chelsea Manning isn’t the only left-leaning minority activist who has seen herself accused of Russian infiltration.

Last year, one of the most popular members of the Resistance, Louise Mensch, accused the Ferguson riots and Black Lives Matter of having been instigated by Russian officials. There is absolutely no base of fact to this claim, and yet it did not stop the accusations there. It was picked up later again by other verified Resistance accounts like Eric Garland.

When leftist thought is being purged from political discourse, black civil rights activists are often the first targeted and accused of un-American thought. This is what happened when civil rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois was arrested and faced trial based on his socialist leanings. When his organization, the PIC, sent out a letter calling for a ban on nuclear weapons, the Secretary of State, a Democrat, called the petition a soviet propaganda trick.

These accusations against left-leaning minorities have consequences. W. E. B. Du Bois’ trial was dropped, but it forever ruined his career, and he eventually saw his citizenship revoked. When minority activists are erased and shut out from the left, it leaves them and their movements vulnerable to right-winged attacks, such as what happened with football player Colin Kaepernick, when he took to protesting the treatment of black Americans.

Amidst multiple accusations of literally being Un-American, Kaepernick, while still being upheld as a civil rights hero, has had his career completely destroyed. It is quite possible that he will never play again. Just as they did in the McCarthy era, liberals happily demonized black resistance movements, unwittingly handing the keys over to the right in order to destroy the careers of activists and intimidate them into silence.

The common thread between these activist minorities who have faced persecution from both Democrats and Republicans, is that their rhetoric and actions have made cishet white people in both parties uncomfortable. By erasing their agency and accusing their activism of being an insidious foreign plot, it allows progressives to feel comfortable in their complacency. They can sit back and eat sheet-cake, and anyone who criticizes them is simply a foreign agent.

This is what happened to openly gay journalist Glenn Greenwald, when he commented on the very same McCarthyist tactics being deployed by Resistance-types to root out leftist thought.

He was quickly attacked by popular resistance conspiracy-theorist Eric Garland, who made a point to try and distance himself from the homophobia of accusing a gay man of sedition.

I have my own criticisms of Glenn Greenwald, but unwittingly, Eric Garland is still playing into Lavendar Scare rhetoric. Senator Joe Wheeler, made a note in his speech to remind the senate that not every homosexual was seeking to destroy America.

“You can hardly separate homosexuals from subversives. Mind you, I don’t say every homosexual is a subversive, and I don’t say every subversive is a homosexual.”

There was a clear purpose here to denote the difference between good and bad homosexuals, between good and bad minorities. It allows the accuser a sense of cognitive dissonance so they can continue to root out and persecute minorities that step out of line without themselves looking like a bigot. Compare this to former Newt Gingrich staffer, Sally Albright’s post about queer activists who opposed Hillary Clinton’s support for DOMA and DADT:

She downplays the loss of livelihoods and spikes in LGBT suicide rates under the regressive policies of the Defense of Marriage Act and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. Worse than that, she actively erases the efforts of queer activists in seeing these policies repealed, instead giving the credit to straight white kids. For Sally Albright, the valuable LGBT people are the ones “working their asses off” for Hillary Clinton, while those who criticized her support for those policies are erased from the narrative entirely.

It’s not that minorities are unwelcome in the resistance, it’s that they must toe the line. A queer activist or journalist who raises criticism of bigoted policies or points out the McCarthyist tactics is quickly accused of being a traitor, of being un-American.

However, while shutting out leftist minorities may provide a temporary security to political power for centrists, this will ultimately cripple any reforms they may try to make. Minority activists are the core base of any meaningful resistance against oppression. It’s the equivalent of shooting out the leg of a stool that you’re standing on. When minority activism and leftist thought is purged, then there is nothing left to hold onto.

This happened in the wake of the McCarthy era. Ellen Schrecker, an expert on the Red Scare, notes in her book The Age of McCarthyism

The destruction of the front groups and the left-led unions may well have had a more deleterious impact on American politics than the decline of the party itself. With their demise, the nation lost the institutional network that had created a public space where serious alternatives to the status quo could be presented. Moreover, with the disappearance of a vigorous movement on their left, moderate reform groups were more exposed to right-wing attacks and thus rendered less effective.

When we frame black activist struggles as one of Putin’s evil plots, it makes it easy for white liberals to comfort themselves in a racist myth that America is already perfect and there is no need for systemic change. When we accuse queer voices who criticize us for our homophobic bigotry and rhetoric as seditious treason, we can continue to pretend to be LGBT allies. It’s easy to ignore minority voices that make us uncomfortable when we can throw them under a giant red blanket and pretend it’s just another evil Soviet plot.

By demonizing minority activism, and actively erasing their efforts, we are left fighting a battle on two fronts: from the liberals who would see our movements crippled, and from republicans who would see our civil rights destroyed completely. Thus the energy is robbed from progressive movements, and the right continues to win.

The Resistance would do well to stand with minority activists. Who would know more about resisting than a trans woman who faced imprisonment for uncovering US war crimes? Who would better know the flaws of unchecked authority and systemic abuses than black abolitionists?

These are questions that the Resistance must come to terms with, otherwise the only thing they are resisting, is progressive change itself.

Dorian Dawes is the author of the queer horror anthology Harbinger Island. Their non-fiction work has been published in the Huffington Post, Your Tango, Gay Pop Buzz, and Bitch Media. You can support their writing over at patreon.com/doriandawes