Just because Hoover was wrong on the Mafia doesn't mean he was wrong about Communism. There was a very real threat from Communism in Hoover's time, and if anything it was underplayed. New York Times reporter Walter Duranty intentionally ignored Stalin's atrocities in Ukraine, and much of the rest of the media went along tut-tutting stories about Communist massacres and human rights violations as if they were nothing. When the USSR collapsed and scholars gained access to Soviet archives they found out that what they did was worse than what they thought. Read books by Dmitri Volkogonov who documented much of this. Read the Venona archives, read "The Black Book of Communism." Scholars from Yale put out an entire series of books on Communism with reams of evidence. You can even ask immigrants in this country who lived through Communism. It's not made up nonsense. It's far-left academics who haven't read the real history of the USSR and other Communist states that call what Hoover did "hysteria." Hoover wasn't a John Birch Society extremist; he actually dealt with Communist spies and subterfuge.

You are correct about things being different today, but the way things are today is different than what Hoover had to deal with, and it had nothing to do with his belief about the Mafia.

I also suggest you read Ronald Kessler's books on the FBI, who goes into great detail about the myth of Hoover being blackmailed for wearing a dress. It never happened. Even Jimmy Blue Eyes Alo was asked about this after his close friend Meyer Lansky died, and he also said that it wasn't true, and if anyone would have known about it, it was him.