This is not to be argumentative, but I'd wager McCarthy found less members of the Communist Party in the US during the 50s than the mutant population during the Registration Act era.  And that caused all kind of panic.  To this day, when I tell people I'm a Socialist, they freak out, as though I'm trying to overthrow the gov't.

Which is simply to say, from a propaganda perspective, the hidden enemy is more insidious than one out in the open.

^ Thank you Adam!  Turns out I wasn't paraphrasing at all!

Mind like a steel trap!

Mutant 0 was a big suspense fail during the Shadow Initiative days under Osborn and Gyrich. She was on this black ops team with the Iron Spider clones (don't get me started on that fiasco) and some other D-Level characters. I had no idea she was considered a mutant until after the big reveal. I'd dropped that book long before then. She was armored and her identity hidden for a while. It was lamer than it sounds.

***

The bar was already low after reading your description.  "This overview is horrible but the books themselves, even worse!"

It sounds like the tagline for the books Marvel and DC are putting out these days. 

Innocent people who where afraid that their kids would become mutants.

Had they know what sort of comics fans those kids would become when grown up, then them parents really would have been afraid. And for a good reason.

When Team America showed up in The New Mutants and were revealed to be mutants I knew there was trouble on the horizon.

I was thinking about this the other day. The Initiative proved that there is almost nothing unique about having super powers in the Marvel Universe.