Our society is not without faults. Our domestic and foreign policies are also often flawed. To correct failings, we need people who point them out, however unpopular that may be. We should be enabling a wide framework of public discourse, not seeking to silence people. To date, we haven’t quite reached the level of hysteria of 1950s McCarthyism, but we are perhaps coming close.
I do agree that red scare rhetoric is increasing but buy in large it’s directed at China and Xi. Anti-communist tropes do show up in popular discourse on Russia but in my experience it’s less so in discussions on influence campaigns but in talk of Russia’s territorial ambitions (understandable considering the place of Soviet symbolism in Russian nationalism and war propaganda).