He was right in the same way a dice can add 2+2. He was a bad person, who exploited that the US government was infiltrated for personal gain. He had no evidence that such infiltration existed, he was just lucky enough that there were commies in the US government. He is one of the worst Americans, one who exploited a national problem for his own gain, making America worse in the process.
I think you're ascribing more to him than he was. Joe McCarthy wasn't an evil person or a bad man, he was a drunken idiot who saw a problem, saw problem solvers and blundered his way into the clusterfuck and inserted himself as the lead problem solver.
Leigh was a maniac who believed Jesus Christ (Loeopoldo Galtieri also believed this, but he was a hardcore Alchy like McCarthy) put him on earth to kill communists by lighting them on fire.
Both had inverse batting average from each other in that for every innocent person Leigh had tortured to death, he BBQ'd 7 actual leftwing terrorists..where Shithouse Joe fucked over seven randos for every genuine commie he bowled over.
The other guy you mention? He is literally the opposite. He knew that there were SDS types that he wanted to target. If he was like McCarthy, it would be more like him grabbing random people, claiming they were SDS with no evidence, burning them to distract the masses and raise his popularity, then by accident getting some right.
Except that McCarthy
wasn't wrong alll the time. It's a modern fiction to say all of the blacklist victims perpetrated by McCarthy himself and the McCarthyists going after hollywood were innocent. They actually got a lot of scumbags...The guys independent of the Drunk had a better average to boot.
He was wrong something like 70% of the time..which was his problem.
Leigh was
correct 70% of the time..wrong the other 30.
Both suffered from serious debilitating issues that made their involvement a double edged sword and resulted in the disgrace of both and the exile of one and the premature death of the other.
I don't even know if Joe was genuinely chasing influence, he might have just been too fucked up to even see what he was doing. Hence why I compared the two. It isn't a defense it's an explanation..when you have a serious social ill that genuinely needs to be addressed and addressed swiftly and intensely..the last thing you need is for crazy or drunk or both to be conducting the purge.
Basically, if a gunman fires into a crowd randomly, and kills a bunch of people, and some (by accident) were terrorists, he did something bad.
Both men then did something bad..but with varying degrees.
Both destroyed guilty and innocent like..both were crazed in their own way.
Both managed to get some bad guys to go down with them.
I think McCarthy is the bigger fuck up of the two, because he made those traitorous scumbags the victims and legitimized anti-right wing blacklisting....and made any attempt to address any of the uglier aspects of the civil rights movement impossible and justified the modern use of "Oh you're just a hysteric/conspiracy nut/racist/McCarthyist" defense to attack anyone deemed on "the wrong side of history" (It's why seeing Whitehall rejects here who claim to be right wing rail against confederate statues and their defenders, fills me with disgust. You're not a conservative, you're a useful idiot of the left) because of his actions.
Leigh was a necessary evil..and Pinochet removed him as soon as his crazy ass became unmanageable.
In the end...both did damage to their own side..in that they allowed the leftists to retroactively spin a narrative gargled by cuckservatives ..and sanctimonious fools who think they're protection the constitution by allowing it to be butchered. A narrative that ultimately makes..addressing a severe and debilitating social ill... All the more difficult....
But if I'll agree with you that if we go on a grade McCarthy did more damage. I only said the two were similar.