Trump Is Building the Blue Scare | The Ezra Klein Show

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 10:00: Red Scare, McCarthyism, Cory Robin, Hollywood
2. 10:00 – 20:00: Red Scare, Soviet Union, Agriculture Department, McCarthyism
3. 20:00 – 30:00: Hollywood, Humphrey Bogart, Carl Bernstein, Committee for the First Amendment
4. 30:00 – 40:00: New Deal, Southern Democrats, Democratic Party, Dorothy Bailey
5. 40:00 – 50:00: Red Scare, New Deal, Bolshevik Revolution, Eleanor Roosevelt
6. 50:00 – 1:00:00: Silicon Valley, Christopher Rufo, Paul Krugman, Steven Little Miller
7. 1:00:00 – 1:10:00: Red Scare, Democratic Party, Department of Justice, Eleanor Roosevelt
8. 1:10:00 – 1:20:00: Ford Foundation, New Deal, Project 2025, Red Scare
9. 1:20:00 – 1:30:00: Red Scare, Soviet Union, Bard Rustin, Democratic Party
10. 1:30:00 – 1:32:13: City of Slaughter, Cory Robin, Hollywood, Karl Marx

Notable quotes from "Trump Is Building the Blue Scare | The Ezra Klein Show"

• Have been looking closer to home. This isn't a Reichto fire. This is more like the Red Scare. We often think of the Red Scare in terms of McCarthyism, named for Joseph…

  about Red Scare · at 0:28

• Had to be chopped off everywhere they could be found using state power. The Department of Justice has prosecuted and will continue to prosecute with vigor the actions of…

  about Department of Justice · at 1:14

• Jimmy Kimmel. But to see where they might go, we need to look at where America not all that long ago was. Cory Robin is a political theorist at Brooklyn College. He's an expert…

  about Cory Robin · at 2:50

• Many of them immigrants, radicals. it was centered around something called the Palmer raids during which thousands were arrested and hundreds were deported. The second red scare is what we oftentimes call McCarthyism.

  about Palmer Raids · at 3:42

• Very high level members of the Communist Party who were also spying for the Soviet Union. and so there right there you immediately have the problem.

  about Soviet Union · at 9:39

• Wendell Holmes, the Supreme Court Justice, and he became a fairly high figure in the agriculture department.

  about Agriculture Department · at 14:37

• It's not quite like if Jake Sullivan or you know on the right maybe Steven Miller turned out to be a spy for the Chinese Communist Party. It's maybe just like one step below that but it is one step below that. He was a scion of the.

  about Steven Little Miller · at 17:32

• So there are a lot of institutions that are aligned with the Democratic party that have been engaged with this and then suddenly McCarthy emerges and finds a way of turning what they had been doing into their vulnerability. I.

  about Democratic Party · at 32:52

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Eleanor Roosevelt — Person · 4 mentions · first at 9:08
  Americanism. communist party members were part of the federal government. you know under Roosevelt cultural workers became really big parts of Hollywood and the cultural industries. You had some in the universities and most importantly in.
• Cory Robin — Person · 3 mentions · first at 2:54
• Steven Little Miller — Person · 3 mentions · first at 17:36
• Joseph McCarthy — Person · 2 mentions · first at 0:39
  The Red Scare. We often think of the Red Scare in terms of McCarthyism, named for Joseph McCarthy, its most enthusiastic and effective practitioner. But it was a lot more than that.
• Humphrey Bogart — Person · 2 mentions · first at 25:04
  Amendment. and they go to DC and it's people like Jean Kelly, Lauren Beall, Humphrey Bogart and there's beautiful picture of them marching on the Capitol.
• Harry S. Truman — Person · 2 mentions · first at 30:14
  Not understood and again I'm taking this from Klay Ryzen's book, but that in 1948 Truman unexpectedly beats Thomas Dwey. And Truman had been quite unpopular. He was a bad…
• Charlie Cook — Person · 1 mention · first at 0:00
  In the hours and days after Charlie Cook's murder, there was discussion on social media about whether this would be America's Reichto fire.
• Adolf Hitler — Person · 1 mention · first at 0:14
  A reference to the fire that was part of that was a rationale for Hitler's crackdown on political freedom in Germany. Many of us were worried hearing that. And I think what we've seen since suggests the fears were right. But the.
• Mitchell Palmer — Person · 1 mention · first at 4:55
  Fact there was an a bombing attempt or actual bomb attack on Attorney General Mitchell Palmer who was the attorney general for the Woodro Wilson administration and this was coming off of a wave of you know fairly intense left-wing.
• Emma Goldman — Person · 1 mention · first at 5:25
  Really decided to clamp down upon that and ended up rounding up people including most famously Emma Goldman who was deported in something called the Russian arc. She was on a…
• Oliver Wendell Holmes — Person · 1 mention · first at 14:36
  He had gone to Harvard Law School. I think he had clerked for Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Supreme Court Justice, and he became a fairly high figure in the agriculture department.
• Whitaker Chambers — Person · 1 mention · first at 15:11
  Of that millia and got involved in what became exposed as a spy ring involving a man named Whitaker Chambers. A kind of only in America type of figure. Very troubled very…
• Jake Sullivan — Person · 1 mention · first at 17:32
  It's not quite like if Jake Sullivan or you know on the right maybe Steven Miller turned out to be a spy for the Chinese Communist Party. It's maybe just like one step below that but it is one.
• Henry Wallace — Person · 1 mention · first at 17:56
  A figure. And I'm glad you brought up the agriculture department because you know Henry Wallace who ends up being FDR's vice president in 1944 comes out of the agriculture…
• Carl Bernstein — Person · 1 mention · first at 20:22
  Range of, the government's gotten big. and our members of the Communist Party, Carl Bernstein's father, the great journalist, his parents were communists. and the government starts getting rid of them as a security threat with and.
• Ed Sullivan — Person · 1 mention · first at 26:32
  And he's told by Ed Sullivan, who's a really good friend of his, what you did there in DC, it's not going over well. You're losing your audience share, whatever the metrics are. And.
• Ring Lardner — Person · 1 mention · first at 28:31
  Comedy, you could say, which was a lot of it was done by people like Ring Lardner who were, communists. had a kind of strong social content and a lot of that kind of disappears.
• Margaret Chase Smith — Person · 1 mention · first at 32:06
  Him. They wanted him and they used him because there were some Republicans who stood up to him. Margaret Chase Smith most famously, but he was very useful to the party. they, he immediately got out on the stump during the 1950 midterm.
• Dorothy Bailey — Person · 1 mention · first at 36:15
  There was a woman named Dorothy Bailey who was a government worker, I think in the post office, black woman, and she has to go through an investigation. She's named as a.
• Francis Perkins — Person · 1 mention · first at 40:21
  Of this a lot of women coming to DC and starting to get positions of power in government. Most famously Francis Perkins the secretary of labor but there were many people you…
• Paul Krugman — Person · 1 mention · first at 55:21
  The '4s or in the '60s and '7s, but there were what tremors, let's say. another thing that Paul Krugman just wrote about recently, is, in terms of gender equality, it's not so much that women have entering the workforce. That's been.
• Christopher Rufo — Person · 1 mention · first at 59:00
  And he was very cynical and open about it I mean you read Christopher Rufo and he's very explicit about being a student of what he believes the left does.
• Robert Jackson — Person · 1 mention · first at 1:18:08
  Justice Jackson, great Justice Robert Jackson, who's a New Deal Supreme Court appointee, and he was also the prosecutor at Nuremberg, he said, security is like liberty in that many.
• Henry Farrell — Person · 1 mention · first at 1:21:10
  Particularly in Africa and Asia. and it was disciplined. That's not there anymore. Henry Farrell, the political scientist at Hopkins, has a great post that came out in the last…
• General Dwight D. Eisenhower — Person · 1 mention · first at 1:24:01
  Of the Soviet Union is real, too. who ends McCarthyism? It's Eisenhower. And why does the Republican party nominate Eisenhower rather than Taft? in significant part, it's that what is holding it together is the fight against communism. And.
• Bard Rustin — Person · 1 mention · first at 1:28:56
  Interestingly enough, actually in the 60s there were some people like Bard Rustin who were always trying to repair that alliance but it was really broken after that. so I'd say in the field that was probably the biggest.
• Peter Cole — Person · 1 mention · first at 1:30:32
  And but after Gaza but there's a translation by a wonderful translator named Peter Cole that's coming out with New York Review of Books it's called City of Slaughter that…
• Karl Marx — Person · 1 mention · first at 1:31:15
  It's a study of Karl Marx by a young political theorist named Bruno Leopold who's in Britain. And it's the marks you never knew about. It's the marks of a theorist of freedom who cared about.
• Alger Hiss — Person · 1 mention
• Arthur Schlesinger — Person · 1 mention
• Ayn Rand — Person · 1 mention
• David Horowitz — Person · 1 mention
• Dean Acheson — Person · 1 mention
• Frank J. Rosa — Person · 1 mention
• Gene Kelly — Person · 1 mention
• Hannah Arendt — Person · 1 mention
• Helen Gahagan Douglas — Person · 1 mention
• J. Edgar Hoover — Person · 1 mention
• Karl Jaspers — Person · 1 mention
• Ken Klippenstein — Person · 1 mention

Books & papers

• The Reactionary Mind — Book · 3 mentions · first at 3:03
  Brooklyn College. He's an expert on McCarthyism as well as the author of the book The Reactionary Mind, which is, in my opinion, one of the most insightful books you can read…
• Grapes of Wrath — Book · 1 mention · first at 27:48
  Grapes of Wrath. I'm right here to tell you, mister, there ain't nobody going to push me off my land. My grandpa took up this land 70 years ago.
• Gentleman's Agreement — Book · 1 mention · first at 28:07
  And a gentleman's agreement about anti-semitism.
• City of Slaughter — Book · 1 mention · first at 1:30:36
  Named Peter Cole that's coming out with New York Review of Books it's called City of Slaughter that complicates that story and shows what a powerful poet who complicates any…
• Naming Names — Book · 1 mention · first at 1:30:55
  Recommend. a second book is Victor Nask's naming names which is about the McCarthy era and the reason I recommend it's about Hollywood is it really focuses on what we were just talking about the individual and the role of.
• Citizen Marx — Book · 1 mention
• Red Scare (book by Klay Risen) — Book · 1 mention

Companies & orgs

• Agriculture Department — Company · 3 mentions · first at 14:42
• Democratic Party — Company · 3 mentions · first at 32:54
• Department of Justice — Company · 2 mentions · first at 1:19
• Roosevelt administration — Company · 2 mentions · first at 12:35
  Diplomacy at Yalta. there's people who are fairly high up in the, Roosevelt administration who know about what's going on there, who are also linked with the party and passing secrets. So, it, it's it's it's real stuff and I think, we.
• Southern Democrats — Company · 2 mentions · first at 34:05
  Things typically are now. Absolutely. you alluded to this, but of course, Southern Democrats were a big part of the red scare. And if I could just bring in an additional element of that, and you ask why were they why were.
• Ford Foundation — Company · 2 mentions · first at 1:09:27
  These networks is the term I want to zoom in on there. In that same episode, Vance talks about the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Foundation, The Nation Magazine.
• Brooklyn College — Company · 1 mention · first at 2:59
  America not all that long ago was. Cory Robin is a political theorist at Brooklyn College. He's an expert on McCarthyism as well as the author of the book The Reactionary Mind…
• Harvard Law School — Company · 1 mention · first at 14:34
  He had gone to Harvard Law School. I think he had clerked for Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Supreme Court Justice, and he became a fairly high figure in the agriculture department.
• Committee for the First Amendment — Company · 1 mention · first at 24:58
  On behalf of these many communist screenwriters, they form something called the Committee on the First Amendment. and they go to DC and it's people like Jean Kelly, Lauren…
• Look magazine — Company · 1 mention · first at 26:46
  Share, whatever the metrics are. And he gives an interview, a very famous interview. I think it was with Look magazine, and he says, I don't know what I was doing. I'm a dope, let the let, the big shots handle that. I'm just a, you.
• Red Cross — Company · 1 mention · first at 36:37
  Asked is, Do you believe in desegregating the blood supply of the Red Cross? And I remember when I was in my first year of graduate school or second year of graduate school…
• Open Society Foundation — Company · 1 mention · first at 1:09:31
  Episode, Vance talks about the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Foundation, The Nation Magazine.
• FBI — Company · 1 mention
• House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) — Company · 1 mention
• Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) — Company · 1 mention
• Woodrow Wilson administration — Company · 1 mention

Products & tech

• SuperMobile — Product · 2 mentions · first at 39:28
  To the experts at UCLA speed test. And they're using that network to launch SuperMobile, the first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built-in security…
• Pumpkin Papers — Product · 1 mention · first at 15:58
  Photographs and then take them and put them in his pumpkin patch. That's why they're called the pumpkin papers for his handlers to take back to the Soviet Union. And I think…
• How to Marry a Millionaire — Product · 1 mention · first at 28:39
  And then you get, like how to marry a millionaire, which is a wonderful movie, but very different.
• Russian Ark — Product · 1 mention

Concepts & topics

• Red Scare — Concept · 26 mentions · first at 0:34
• McCarthyism — Concept · 10 mentions · first at 0:37
  Isn't a Reichto fire. This is more like the Red Scare. We often think of the Red Scare in terms of McCarthyism, named for Joseph McCarthy, its most enthusiastic and effective practitioner. But it was a lot more than that.
• New Deal — Concept · 8 mentions · first at 9:32
  Know coalitional actors basically and they were an really important part of the New Deal which is very important for us to understand for what follows. but there were certainly…
• Palmer Raids — Concept · 2 mentions · first at 3:47
• Antifa — Concept · 1 mention · first at 2:12
  We're going to go after the NGO network that fermentss, facilitates, and engages in violence. Antifa is going to be designated a domestic terrorist organization.
• One-drop rule — Concept · 1 mention · first at 36:57
  The battle over desegregation is on and about to get much, much bigger. and you have something called the one drop rule in this country that says you're black if you have one…
• Lavender Scare — Concept · 1 mention · first at 39:46
  Tell me about the Lavender Scare. So, in the 1930s with the New Deal, you had the arrival in DC. DC had always been a kind of gay city. it was a place where gays and lesbians could kind of.
• Bolshevik Revolution — Concept · 1 mention · first at 44:49
  See that in everybody from Jay Ed Garhoover he makes a very famous statement about how during the Bolshevik revolution you know people say oh the communist party there's only x…
• Smith Act — Concept · 1 mention · first at 1:10:59
  I want to read to you the language of the Smith Act, which was the kind of the major legislative tool that was used against the left during the McCarthy era. This is this was the way you could bring people up on criminal charges.
• Project 2025 — Concept · 1 mention · first at 1:15:15
  Various institutions society were turned against us. We're this is what project 2025 is largely about. we are going to use this state to bring them to heal. We're going to…
• Operation Dixie — Concept · 1 mention · first at 1:28:45
  And once the second Red Scare was able to break what was called Operation Dixie, in a way it kind of left black Americans really on their own.
• Vietnam War — Concept · 1 mention · first at 1:29:26
  Historians who've made the argument that this sets the stage for the disastrous consequences with the Vietnam War that you just, lose a whole body of institutional knowledge…
• Hollywood Ten — Concept · 1 mention
• Kishinev pogrom — Concept · 1 mention
• Reichstag fire — Concept · 1 mention

Places & events

• Hollywood — Place · 13 mentions · first at 1:05
  This enemy was everywhere that communists have made such an attempt in Hollywood is already evident.
• Soviet Union — Place · 9 mentions · first at 9:42
• Silicon Valley — Place · 2 mentions · first at 50:24
  Very different coalition. a coalition that now includes Elon Musk, includes much of Silicon Valley and the tech platforms, the people in charge of them, that includes a very…
• South Carolina — Place · 1 mention · first at 1:16:38
  Nancy Mace, the congresswoman from South Carolina after the murder of Charlie Kirk said we don't fund hate, we fire it. We fire hate. and you talk about they have a nar about a narrative. You.
• Gaza — Place · 1 mention
• Yalta — Place · 1 mention

Sponsors

• T-Mobile — Sponsor · 2 mentions · first at 39:21
  Edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal. T-Mobile knows all about that.

Full transcript with timestamps

0:00 In the hours and days after Charlie Cook's murder, there was discussion on social media about whether this would be America's Reichto fire. A reference to the fire that was part of that was a rationale for Hitler's crackdown on political freedom in Germany. Many of us were worried hearing that. And I think what we've seen since suggests the fears were right. But the analogy the analogy was wrong. We should have been looking closer to home. This isn't a Reichto fire. This is more like the Red Scare. We often think of the Red Scare in terms of McCarthyism, named for Joseph McCarthy, its most enthusiastic and effective practitioner. But it was a lot more than that.

0:45 Communism. What is it? The Redscare's basic structure was to define a political enemy that could not be compromised with. Who are the apostles of a system that attempts to destroy the American way of life? The point was to use that charge that this enemy was everywhere that communists have made such an attempt in Hollywood is already evident. Turning law and order into revolution and into chaos that its tentacles had to be chopped off everywhere they could be found using state power. The Department of Justice has prosecuted and will continue to prosecute with vigor the actions of subversive groups using cultural power by intimidating employers to go after a very wide swath of your political opponents.

1:34 Uh this frame up attack upon the Communist Party is an attack upon the trade unions and every democratic movement in the United States. What we are seeing now is a blue scare. The radicals on the left are the problem. With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen and we will do it in Charlie's name. We're going to go after the NGO network that fermentss, facilitates, and engages in violence. Antifa is going to be designated a domestic terrorist organization.

2:17 At least a dozen companies and universities to fire or suspend workers over social media posts. There's free speech and then there's hate speech. But the Red Scare took decades to build. It had at its heart a genuine foreign adversary and real domestic espionage. The Blue Scare isn't being built with the same care or attention or effort at creating political consensus. The Trump administration, as it often does, is speedr runninging the project. It took them mere days to get to Jimmy Kimmel. Jimmy Kimmel. But to see where they might go, we need to look at where America not all that long ago was. Cory Robin is a political theorist at Brooklyn College. He's an expert on McCarthyism as well as the author of the book The Reactionary Mind, which is, in my opinion, one of the most insightful books you can read on the Trumpist right and what is behind it. As always, my email esrainshow@ny times.com.

3:21 Cory Robin, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Let's begin here. What was the red scare? There were actually two red scares in America. Uh the first one was in 1919 1920 and that was a intensive government assault on a group of left-wing anarchists, socialists, many of them immigrants, radicals. Um it was centered around something called the Palmer raids during which um thousands were arrested and hundreds were deported. The second red scare um is what we oftentimes call McCarthyism. that was a much longer, far more comprehensive um involving a far greater range of people and ideologies and movements and I would argue had a much more profound and long-term effect on American political culture. So, let's talk about the first for a second because the Palmer raids feel very relevant in this moment. Can you talk about what they were and what triggered them? Yeah, there was a really intense uh but fairly

4:25 brief um episode of of political repression but triggered by this um combination of ambient fear and anxiety um rooted in real things I should say not just hallucinatory. there was a series of bombings that happened um culminating um you know on on some fairly influential figures um and I think in fact there was an a bombing attempt or actual bomb attack on Attorney General Mitchell Palmer who was the attorney general for the Woodro Wilson administration and um this was coming off of a wave of you know fairly intense left-wing activity there was a fairly robust socialist party the Bolevik revolution had just happened. Um there were labor unions champing at the bit coming out of World War I and um the government uh really decided to clamp down upon that and um ended up rounding up people including most famously Emma Goldman um who was deported uh in something called the Russian arc. She was on a a boat

5:33 with a bunch of other radicals and just sent back to Russia where she had been born. And it gets at something that I have been worried about in this moment that I see a symmetry with in this moment. But you often have profound periods of repression of state sponsored violence that pick up on maybe something people had wanted to do before but triggered by by genuinely real violence by assassination attempts by bombing uh attempts and and and that's there in that moment. There is a real Yeah. uh act of violence. Yeah. and then a huge ideological project in response.

6:12 Absolutely. And in fact, I would argue that most political repression has those features that you've just said. I think sometimes people on the left and and liberals and centrists tend to treat political repression as if it's purely a, as I said, a hallucinatory response to fantasized enemies. And that's rarely the the case. There are often times uh real stakes. you know, there can be real acts of violence as there were. There can be real um challenges to the ruling order and and and the political regime. Um but you are right that the actors who want to do something about that are often times waiting for what we would call the pretextual moment and then everything gets thrown in but the kitchen sink as they go after that.

7:01 As we get to the second red scare, I I want to pick up on the way the world changes in between. As you said, the first one is 1919, 1920. That is before World War II, before in many ways, communism goes on an international march. I was reading Klay Ryzen's excellent book, Red Scare, which taught me a lot. And and one of the points he makes in that book is that we look back on the Red Scare mainly in the dimensions in which it was a wild overreaction or an act of repression. But to understand it, you have to understand the ways in which communism was alive and growing and there were actual fronts in America and there was fears that, you know, there could be takeovers. Try to just give me a little bit of that that texture. Yeah, communism really was um you know on the forward march um and particularly in the 1930s and the 1940s as the battle against fascism got going. Um communists you know played the forefront in in that

8:08 battle and communists came out of 1945 with a tremendous amount of stature. In fact, I was just reading this wonderful book by um uh Walter Kowski, German writer, and it's four days at the end of World War II, and it's just tremend it's based on diaries and memoirs. The the love that American soldiers had for Soviet soldiers. I mean, you really feel just it's there had been a real war fought and there was a real sense of camaraderie between them. So communism had been building. Um and then also in the United States um as opposed to 1919 where those parties were really much smaller. They were concentrated really in immigrant urban communities.

8:56 Communism had become as it was famously said in the 30s and 40s 20th century Americanism. Um communist party members uh were part of the uh federal government. um you know under Roosevelt um cultural workers became really big parts of Hollywood and the cultural industries. You had some in the universities um and most importantly in the labor unions and most of these people I think historians would agree were just idealistic progressive um you know coalitional actors basically and they were an really really important part of the New Deal which is very important for us to understand for what follows. Um but there were certainly very high level members of the Communist Party who were also spying for the Soviet Union. Um and so there right there you immediately have the problem.

9:49 Um which is you you've got a a a party and a movement and a group of people that have really become integrated into in ways that we find would find very hard to imagine today the mainstream of American life um and its culture. And yet part of that party is also allied to what immediately you know following 1945 is going to become the big enemy of the United States. And that is a recipe for disaster. So you have in this period not the beginnings but but the the growing strength of a number of emancipatory movements. You have labor unions. You have the desegregation and civil rights movements. You have a movement for gender equality. you have in a much more nent way a movement for sexual equality for you know rights for gay and lesbian men and women and the communist socialist sort of two things at once. There's on the one hand just a group of people with commitment to more left and radical politics which are

10:52 braided into these movements for obvious reasons are actual political allies. And then it's connected and you have these party structures, some of them explicitly communist parties, some of them um fronts that really are trying to take uh orders from Moscow. Like that's not fake. They're they're trying to do what they think the party in the Soviet Union wants them Yeah. to do. And it's like in this kind of ambiguity between the two, like the ways that touching, you know, uh a normal political reform movement also might mean touching a movement actually allied to the Soviet Union that you get like the raw material for what becomes a second red scare.

11:36 Yeah. I mean, I think before we get to that, which is um maybe both more ambiguous but more explosive, what you just said, we also have the question of actual espionage and spying. This is the other big thing. And I do think, you know, that's really important because of course, you know, in many ways that's the crown jewel of uh the right-wing attack. And it's the crown jewel because it's real. It's not fake. It's, you know, um, and, you know, there were people who were, you know, very closely tied with the Communist Party and the Communist Party, um, who were doing actual, you know, spying and espionage. Um, and this and at high levels at very high levels.

12:19 I mean, there are nuclear secrets smuggled out of the United States that accelerate the Soviet Union's development of a atomic weapon, which is considered an an a huge loss in the Cold War. Absolutely. and also, you know, diplomacy at Yalta. You know, there's people who are fairly high up in the, you know, Roosevelt administration who know about what's going on there, who are also linked with the party and and passing secrets. So, it, you know, it's it's it's real stuff and I think, um, we do a disservice to try to pretend like that wasn't the case because that was part of the the tragedy of the whole moment. Um, but then you have what you were just talking about, which is to what extent is the Communist Party really sort of taking orders from the Soviet Union about its political line?

13:03 And I think there historians get are much more um uncertain about about how to do that. And I think we have to be really really careful because there are a lot of times when um you know the the communist party is pursuing um not just good emancipatory things but as we would say like you know really good coalitional politics um really building bridges between different groups and you know sometimes the Soviet Union was in favor of that sometimes it wasn't but so there it gets much trickier um and I think the really important thing about this is less for the Red Scare and more just because of what it the internal division it creates on the left and the internal suspicion and the internal sense of betrayal that you get some people feeling when they feel like wait a minute when you're speaking to me are you speaking to me as a good left-winger or are you taking dictation from somebody else and I think

13:58 that's where um this atmosphere of suspicion and recrimination really becomes um very difficult and has some lessons I think for us today um not in terms of people taking, you know, dictation from a foreign power, but that that atmosphere of mutual distrust among people who are allies um is is poison and and it becomes a real problem and makes you very vulnerable. Tell me a little bit about Alger. Alger was a kind of very waspy uh blue-blooded um um government official. He had gone to Harvard Law School. I think he had um clerked for Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Supreme Court Justice, and he became a fairly high figure in the uh agriculture department.

14:46 And um he was um in many ways a representative figure of what we're talking about in DC. It was a very left-wing city. It had a very left-wing culture. Um and the Communist Party was a big part of that. And um he was part of that millia and got involved in what became exposed as a a spy ring involving a man named Whitaker Chambers. A kind of only in America type of figure. Very troubled um very interesting uh very mournful figure uh and who was the opposite in a way of H. I mean just as a character study he was you know H was very good-looking. He was very suave. He was very tall. Um he was very slender. Um you know, Chambers just was a mess and he looked like a mess. Um Chambers was a spy and Algerus was his contact and um his passed him a series of papers and Chambers would allegedly come to his house, you know, take um photographs and and then take them and put them in his pumpkin patch. That's

15:58 why they're called the pumpkin papers uh for his um handlers to take back to the Soviet Union. And and I think the significance is less the specifics of what was going on it than that this just became I don't know how you would even describe it today. Everything from Charlie Kirk to OJ Simpson to it was just a cultural event. Who's the Liar might well be the title of the drama which unfolds before a packed caucus room where the House unamerican affairs committee members swear in Alger former State Department executive. Mr. H is accused of being a former communist and before news cameras faces his accuser. Well, so there's the House on American Activities Committee, and you get this I mean, I believe the first televised congressional hearings are this Chambers H showdown.

16:54 Mhm. I first knew him as Crosley. What his name is today, I am not prepared to testify to or what other names he may have had. And I've been trying, you know, when you read back into this, it's so hard to put yourself in the mindset of what it all is. the agriculture department is a much bigger deal in that period of American life than it is today. Not that it's a small thing today, but we have way more farmers right? And H goes on to be a top aid to like Dean Aerson, you know, it was like top, you know, the absolute elite of the elite foreign policy side of things.

17:32 It's not quite like if Jake Sullivan or you know on the right maybe Steven Miller turned out to be a spy for the Chinese Communist Party. It's maybe just like one step below that but it is one step below that. He was a scion of the American establishment. He really was um a figure. And I'm glad you brought up the agriculture department because um you know uh Henry Wallace who ends up being FDR's vice president in 1944 um comes out of the agriculture department and so you know there's a real sense that he is you know from the establishment but he's part of the American grain uh so to speak. This does a lot of things I think but one of the things is it really creates a sense well if it could have been him then you can't discount it being anybody. M what are the tools that are being used in this period of the red scare?

18:26 There are many and that's the important thing. So let's just start with that you know um and this is really a larger lesson about political repression in America. Um both what's different and what's similar. You know McCarthyism that red scare was just not particularly a violent affair. Um there were not really that many people comparatively speaking who went to jail. There were not that many people who were deported uh if you compare it to the first Red Scare. But what you did have um is roughly 20 to 40% of the American workforce subject to surveillance in investigations and firings um for their beliefs and activities. And I just want to say something because I think when people and I'm glad we're using the language of the red scare as opposed to McCarthyism because you know when we say McCarthyism, people really think about Joe McCarthy. He comes on the scene, nobody's ever even heard of him really

19:26 until 1950. The Red Scare happens much earlier. It really starts in 1946 and it is comprehensive. Uh first and foremost, I think at the level of the government, you have to look at the FBI. As it turns out, the FBI was majorly gathering surveillance and information and then passing it up the food chain. Um, and so it then goes to higher levels of the executive branch and that leads to the second dimension of the Red Scare, which is the purge of the civil service. Um, it begins in around 1947. Um, and you know, we're not talking about figures like H. We're really talking about people who work in, you know, in Washington really um uh you know, in the post office and in a whole range of, you know, the government's gotten big. Um and our members of the Communist Party, Carl Bernstein's father, the great journalist, his his parents were communists. Um and um the government starts getting rid

20:32 of them as a security threat with and there's hearings and there's a bureaucracy. It's not just random and arbitrary terror, which is an important thing to evidence. It's a very bureaucratic procedural mechanism, but it really um doesn't just get rid of around I think 10,000 um members of the civil service, but also is um you know just really creates an atmosphere just you know think of what happened recently with Doge um not nearly as um uh scattershot but you know it has a chilling effect. So that's the second part. Then you have congressional hearings which we've just already alluded to, but there's HUAC, the House Committee on Unamerican Activities Committee. There's McCarthy's committee and a several other committees in the Senate. These are very high-profile media publicity events where they're getting fed information from the FBI, often confidential information, where you can't confront your accuser because

21:28 it's not a court of law. Um, but it is a court of public opinion. And that then, and this gets us now to another level of McCarthyism, how you perform, what you do um before these hearings, if you're testifying, goes then to your employer. Um and this becomes, you know, very famous in Hollywood by people who are either willing to testify, are not willing to testify, are willing to testify about themselves, are not willing to name names about other people. There's a whole thing there. um and and employers start um firing people who are suspect. I've just talked about maybe one tenth of what the rare red scare was. Um but but it's important.

22:14 Let me hold on the tenth for a minute because there's something about the Hollywood dimension of it that I think is is important and is important for thinking about now. The question before this committee and the scope of its present inquiry will be to determine the extent of communist infiltration in the Hollywood motion picture industry. So you have this group of screenwriters that is called up and and screenwriters in Hollywood uh at this time are probably the the most leftwing of the Hollywood uh machine. Yeah.

22:47 Your purpose is to use this to disrupt the motion picture industry to invade the right not only of me but of the producers to their thoughts to their opinions. Contempt citations and ejection from the hearings came in rapid succession. It's very apparent that you're following the same line of these other witnesses. I am following no line which is definitely the communist line. I am using my own head which I shall continue. Excused. then if you want to make a speech, go out here under one of the big trees and bank down.

23:17 And some of them, you know, were involved in communist or communist front organizations. Some of them are kind of just more leftwing, but they're a big cause celeb and Hollywood rallies around them. And it's pretty amazing in retrospect how quickly Hollywood with all of its cultural power falls. Yeah. they have these hearings or kind of a fiasco and the you know motion picture association of America or possibly it's you know whatever it's called then basically agrees to you know a kind of soft blacklist to codes of what sort of uh movies can get released in Rand writes a guide to what should be in movies you shouldn't be you know valorizing the working man right and it it reshapes the content of movies.

24:11 I I think this is like one of the very scary parts. They don't pass a law telling Hollywood what to do. Right. Right. They go after a couple of screenwriters and then Hollywood collapses. And the thing about that selfcensorship is over time, as anybody who's ever been in an institution knows, you do things initially under kind of this, you know, threat of coercion and then over time you start inhabiting the role. Um, in Hollywood, I think you just see a a version of this very much writ large. Um, there was, you know, a kind of uh very high-profile set of hearings and and and just to to put some meat on those bones about how Hollywood rallies on behalf of these many communist screenwriters, um, they form something called the Committee on the First Amendment. and they go to DC and it's people like Jean Kelly, Lauren Beall, Humphrey Bogart and there's beautiful picture of them marching on the Capitol.

25:09 You know, we stand for American values. We're the true patriots. We believe in the First Amendment. And then, as you say, very quickly Hollywood uh crumbles. um you know the mobilization is a it just fails and um the people with economic power in Hollywood just start getting very very nervous. Um there are these kind of uh freelance forces out there. Um there's a famous grosser, the grosser from Syracuse who is um he's got um he won't put products on his shelves if um he finds out that the networks or other you know kind of cultural things are putting advertisements for those products.

25:58 there's a kind of reverberation that just starts extending out there where people feel like there's going to be some real economic bottomline consequences if we pursue this route. For me, the the heartbreaking sort of icing on the top of that cake is Humphrey Bogart who rallied um to defend the First Amendment, you know, who who we all know because of Casablanca, you know, right? the great hero of independent, you know, I'm the nobody, not the Nazis are going to push me around. And he's told by Ed Sullivan, who's a really good friend of his, you know, what you did there in DC, it's not going over well. You're losing your audience share, whatever the the metrics are. And he gives an interview, a very famous interview. I think it was with Look magazine, and he says, "I don't know what I was doing." you know, I'm a dope, you know, let let the let, you know, the big shots handle that. I I'm just a, you

26:57 know, I'm just an ordinary schmo kind of a thing. It's just the exact opposite. And, you know, ends his career with that um hanging over him. So, you know, that's um and and as you said, this is all very fast. Um but there are a lot of little steps as we've seen in the last couple days you know that can happen within 24 hours. I mean back then it was probably you know a couple of months but very fast turnaround. Can you give me some examples of how that changed Hollywood? What what are the kinds of movies it made before that it didn't make after or the the kinds of themes it got that that got dropped? Like how did that actually change the culture people consumed?

27:39 Sure. You have some, you know, more overtly political films in the early 1940s. Um, um, you know, Grapes of Wrath. I'm right here to tell you, mister, there ain't nobody going to push me off my land. My grandpa took up this land 70 years ago. My poor was born here. We was all born on it, and some of us was killed on it. You know, sort of social justicey films. Um, and a gentleman's agreement about anti-semitism. Well, face me now, Miss Wales. Come on, look at me. Same face, same eyes, same nose, same suit, same everything. Here, take my hand. Feel it. Same flesh as yours, isn't it?

28:22 There was all these like social theme films. Even, you know, screw ball comedy, you could say, you know, which was uh a lot of it was done by um people like Ring Lardner who were, you know, communists. Um had a kind of strong social content and a lot of that kind of disappears. And then you get, you know, like how to marry a millionaire, which is a wonderful movie, but very different. If you had your choice of everybody in the world, which would you rather marry, a rich guy or a poor one? I think I'd rather marry a rich one. You still have some wonderful films, but I think the great films there's an inward turn. You know, this kind of more psychological interiority at the exclusion of the social and then you also have just um you know, the kind of the the embrace of sort of fluff and um yeah, we've sort of kept Joseph McCarthy lurking on the the edge of this conversation. Tell me about him.

29:19 He was a senator from Wisconsin, a Republican senator. He had been, I think, a bit of a I wouldn't say a war hero, but he had fought in the Second World War. And he is elected in the wake of the Second World War. This is uh kind of u a return moment for the Republican party. They had been really kept out of Congress um from 1932 to 1946. They take back the House and he gets elected to the Senate. and um he uh in 1950 um makes this famous speech at Wheeling, West Virginia um where he says that he has in his hands um a list of and I think the first number and the numbers keep changing but was 205 card carrying members of the Communist Party in the State Department.

30:08 Can I note one thing? Sure. that I had not understood and and again I'm taking this from from Klay Ryzen's book, but that in 1948 Truman unexpectedly beats Thomas Dwey. And Truman had been quite unpopular. He was a bad underdog going into that election. And the Republican party's lesson from that is Dwey did not use anti-communism as an issue. Yeah. and that the the sort of power structure of the Republican party prior to McCarthy sort of emerging in this way has taken the lesson that we are not going to make that mistake again.

30:44 Yeah. We are going to beat the hell out of the Democrats on communism. And so the Republican party was ready for McCarthyism. Yeah. Um just a a a slight footnote to that which is that in 1946 when the Republicans did take back the house um they're doing trial runs that's when Richard Nixon is elected um famously on a red baiting campaign against Helen Gahagen Douglas. Um so there are parts of the rep Republican party that are trying it out. But you're absolutely right. 1948 Thomas Dwey represented a kind of um internationalist um you know wing of Mitt Romney.

31:27 Yeah. Well republicanism uh you know I would say even more far more liberal than you know Mitt Romney actually. I just mean in the sense that one of the lessons they take from him is that we tried playing it nicely. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And um and so um someone like McCarthy in 1950 is um is a very successful practitioner of putting the Democrats on their heels. And the important thing to remember about McCarthy um is that the Republican party needed him. They wanted him and they used him because there were some Republicans who stood up to him. um Margaret Chase Smith most most famously, but he was very very useful uh to the party. they, you know, he he he immediately got out on the stump um uh during the 1950 midterm um elections and there was, you know, a big faction of the Republican party um including the minority leader, you know, we're not talking about a a kind of radical rightwing faction, but the

32:32 center of the the party um that really depended upon him um you know, for electoral purposes and just, you know, for framing the attack, for putting the Democrats on their back feet. But the important thing I just wanted to stress was that between that 1946 and 1950 like the Democrats I mean communism anti-communism was a democratic issue. So there are a lot of institutions that are aligned with the Democratic party that have been engaged with this and then suddenly McCarthy emerges and finds a way of turning what they had been doing into their vulnerability. I I think this is so important and I think it's a really hard thing to throw your mind back into because the parties aren't polarized and ideologically distinct in the way they are today. And so even McCarthy, Joseph Kennedy Jr. is a major McCarthy supporter. McCarthy spends many many weekends at the Kennedy compound. Robert F. Kennedy is on McCarthy's staff. you

33:30 know, the House on American uh House Committee on Unamerican Activities is at times led by a Democratic chairman. And so you have both. You have like liberal Republicans who actually do challenge McCarthy and end up in, you know, backwaters or in trouble for it. You do have liberal Democrats who often lose in challenging McCarthy. They lose primaries, they lose elections. Uh but it's not highly structured as a Republican Democratic issue in the way things typically are now. Absolutely. I mean, you alluded to this, but of course, Southern Democrats were a big part of the um the the red scare. And and if I could just bring in an additional element of that, you know, and and you ask why were they why were they so anticonist? Well, of course, you know, the the Communist Party and left-wing unions had really made it a project starting in the 1930s. And in fact, FDR supports this. He in 1938 goes to the South because they believe

34:35 that until we organize the South with labor unions and the right to vote for African-Americans, we can't complete the New Deal. It's just going to be still born. This is a very high level project and you need organizers to do this and there are these organizers who go in and you know southern Democrats you know do not like this and so this isn't just you know as we saying it's not just a partisan kind of a thing. It really goes to the heart of a social cleavage in a big part of the country and there are real stakes um for both sides in winning that battle. This seems also to get at a a reason this becomes so uniting on the right that and I mean here the ideological right not just Republican party that there's an effort to paint every social movement they don't like and this goes back to this ambiguity as a communist plot to take over America. Racial integration communist plot to take over America. labor unions

35:39 and and the sort of elevation of the working man, a communist plot, you know, gender equality, sexual equality, a communist plot. And so you have a lot of purges of people who their real sin is working on behalf of these issues that today we look back on as obvious, you know, just the emancipatory path of American politics, the arcbending towards justice, right? But people lose their jobs, people are investigated, you know, based on, you know, the effort to to paint all of these as communist plots. Uh there was a woman named uh Dorothy Bailey who was a government worker, I think in the post office, black woman, and she has to go through an investigation. She's named as a communist. Um and she's asked a bunch of questions. One of the questions she is asked is, "Do you believe in desegregating the blood supply of the Red Cross?" And I remember when I was in my first year of graduate school or

36:41 second year of graduate school reading this, you know, just very naive and thinking, "What in the world are they talking about?" It's 1950, 1951. The battle over desegregation is on and about to get much, much bigger. and you have something called the one drop rule in this country that says you're black if you have one drop of blood. Um the last thing you want to do if you believe in all of those things is to have blood from a black person going into uh the bloodstream of a white person. And the Communist Party as part of its organizing very wisely, you know, picked this as a battle cuz it was it's so outrageous.

37:28 Um, and so the irony that's very hard I it's for still for me to get my head wrapped around is that then becomes a question that you're asked by a government or an employee, a private inquisitor. Um, and you say, "Why are they asked that question?" Well, because many people will deny that they're part of the Communist Party, although or they'll say they're no longer part of the Communist Party. And then the question is, well, how do you determine are they really a communist or not? And it's, you know, what they called this the duck test. If it looks like a duck, if it quacks like a duck, it's a duck. And it's it it just begins to get at, I think, um, not just the moral dimension of all of this, but just really the cultural politics. I mean, just you can think of a range of issues now that we just completely take for granted that were part of this left-wing front of like moral common sense, like this is

38:27 what good people believe in. And it was very present in Hollywood. It was very present in um parts of the academy. It was very present in um the me parts of the media. And it goes back to that point you made at the very beginning which is this wasn't a hallucination you know on their part like there were communists. They were involved in these ideas. There were liberals allied with them. The ground between them was kind of murky. And you had conservatives, conservative Democrats and and Republicans who for both material and ideological reasons and and electoral reasons hated it. Um, and it, you know, it's it was really a kind of a civil war. In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal. T-Mobile knows all about that.

39:23 They're now the best network according to the experts at UCLA speed test. And they're using that network to launch SuperMobile, the first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built-in security, and seamless satellite coverage. That's your business supercharged. Learn more at supermobile.com. Seamless coverage with compatible device in most outdoor areas in the US where you can see the sky. Best network based on analysis by Uclt Intelligence data 1 2022. Tell me about the Lavender Scare. So, in the 1930s with the New Deal, you had the arrival in DC. DC had always been a kind of gay city. Um, it was a place where gays and lesbians could kind of um exist. Uh, but particularly with the New Deal, you have people coming from all across the country. Um, and many of them join the administration. And also you have and this is a really important part of this a lot of women coming to DC and

40:18 starting to get positions of um power in government. Most famously Francis Perkins the secretary of labor but there were many many people you know beneath her and Elanor Roosevelt is kind of a you know a fixture in in this community. And so they create a culture that is associated with the New Deal of increasing gender equality or at least um increasing representation of women in public spaces and political spaces and also um increasing this sort of increasing gay I wouldn't kind of say public culture but you know kind of a subculture that was a part of it.

40:55 There's one other backstory here which is in espionage circles or in counter espionage circles always finding out if somebody was gay um was a like you know it was a really good weapon to know because you could use it as blackmail and it's suddenly you know the security apparatus long before McCarthy and all those guys wants to make sure that they know people's sexual orientation because you know if they're gay they're vulnerable to spying for the Soviet Union. So there's elaborate bureaucracy that's created around this. But then as we get closer to McCarthy and you see hints of this in Alger there is this notion that um these guys who are commies and liberals and pinkos they're they're queer Deian Aerson with his fancy pants and his you know mustache he's a little bit too concerned about how he looks and his clothes and um it has tremendously devastating consequences. what had been kind of a limited security espionage

42:01 thing becomes a real purge of um of government and it really gets going after 1950. So at that point I think the statistic if I'm remembering this correctly is is that you know um every day you know a communist is being arrested or kicked out of the government but also a gay person is being kicked out of government. This is what blew me away. McCarthy's fan mail, 25% of it was about security threats. 75% of it was about sexual depravity, what they called sexual depravity. This was a big part. And I think one of the things I'm trying to draw out in all of this is that you end up with this amorphous omni threat.

42:45 Communism is its heart, but maybe it's gay people in government and the sort of sexual and gender revolution that that is speaking about or signaling. Maybe it's racial integration, labor unions, maybe it's the New Deal itself. But the turning of it all into a a plot, a threat, a kind of insidious force that can be used to corrupt any other part of it, I think is very it's very core to the politics of that. And also, as best I can tell, very core to how it maintains momentum because it's hard to find all these communists.

43:22 There actually aren't that many of them. So McCarthy begins to go after gay people, right? Like you can kind of keep changing the subject and things are linked to each other. Yeah, even if they're not actually the same or those links aren't even important. Yeah. What was going on there in the sort of uh Red Scare imagination, let's say, is the conversion of politics into plot, conspiratorial plot. And I think it's really important to put both of those pieces together the way you just did because I think often times when we look back on this, it's easy to say, well, I'm a I'm not a conspiracy thinker. I'm against conspiracies. I don't I don't think like that and and so on and so forth. But what makes conspiracies powerful, particularly in a moment like that, is it's not making up. Yes, it's cartoonish, and yes, it's simplifying, but it's not um it's not it's it has real raw material to work with. And of

44:21 course for the people who are battling that red scare and pursuing it, it also gives them a sense of if we could get to the heart of that plot, we can stop all this. Um, like we can, you know, it's it's like Archimedes lever, you know, you can really give me a lever and I'll move the world, you know, and we just have to find that. Um and you know you see that in everybody from Jay Ed Garhoover he makes a very famous statement about how during the Bolshevik revolution you know people say oh the communist party there's only x number and he said well look at the numbers during the belic revolution it wasn't you know that different um and there's just a real sense wrong actually yeah u there's you know and but it's not true in terms of like it's not a plot yes um that's not true that's not the way it worked would that I think for many leftists would that it were so easy.

45:17 Yeah. Um but it's not completely wrong either. And you know I think that's a good place to move closer to the present. So let's start before Charlie Kirk is assassinated. Trump wins his second term. He takes office. what that you had been watching seeing in the ideological structure of Trumpism or the methods that Trumpism was applying to unfriendly institutions and movements echoed this. How were you telling that story to yourself as somebody so steeped in the Red Scare? You know, let me first start by saying that during the first Trump term, I was part of a fairly small group of people on the left who were very skeptical of a lot of the warnings about authoritarianism fascism autocracy strongman politics. Um, and I think I had a lot of evidence on my side. Um, I wasn't just being orary. You know, there was many many ways in which I thought compared to say George W.

46:28 Bush, if we're thinking about political repression, if we're thinking about transforming institutions, that Trump was actually um you know, quite a peddling kind of actor, you know, I know this the second red scare, I know the labor wars in this country, I know about the battle over abolition. It seemed like Trump was small potatoes. um not just because of the ways he was he was constrained. It also seemed like well what would be the what was the revolution that it was sort of counteracting. I mean um you had nothing like the New Deal. You had nothing like you know what what we've just been describing. So I I was skeptical and what shook me out of this um was the assault on government workers and the firings.

47:13 Um that was the first thing for me like that's always the canary in the coal mine is employment sanctions. Um there's a long history of it. It's really the way a lot of American political repression has happened. Web de boys and black reconstruction. You know this very violent moment against black people says it's it's employment sanctions that really is the driving engine. So anybody with that kind of antenna, you didn't see that really in the first term. In fact, it was quite the opposite. you know, civil society rallied against uh Trump, resisted in all these ways, and then all of a sudden you see these mass firings happening. You know, there's all kinds of reasons to worry about that.

47:55 But I was thinking about it instantaneously as McCarthyism um because of the firing. The other thing then was of course the capitulation of law firms and universities and you know the record of elites and institutions unfortunately is is not so great. Um and so seeing those institutions um start capitulating and often capitulating to financial threats, economic threats, you know, not we're going to put you in jail, but you know, we're going to take away your funding, we're going to do this and you do that. And I think, you know, Americans have a weird attitude towards money. You know, on the one hand, it's the most important thing in America, and on the other hand, we have this very moralistic idea, well, if it's just money, stand up to the, you know, the bastards. And it's like, you know, could we put the could we put these two worlds together? Um, you know, the economy is a medium of political

48:51 coercion in this country. It always has been. Trump didn't invent that. I want to pick up on something you said uh because it it speaks to your book the reactionary mind which I love have read twice. I think it describes secondterm Trump much better than first term Trump. One of your big points in the reactionary mind is that there's a we often think of conservatism as conserving but it's also a movement that reacts to threats to power and to the social order. And you you said something there that one reason you took firstterm Trump less seriously as a threat was that there wasn't a revolutionary emancipatory movement that was really in reaction against or at least as you saw it. I would say between 2016 and 2024 that at least at a cultural level changes. You have sort of a racial reckoning um not only but particularly after George Floyd's murder. You have uh the me too movement.

49:52 Mhm. You have a big move on gender expression and gender rights uh around trans issues in particular. You have I actually think co and the professional classes are somehow very relevant here. Um the sense that cultural powers being exerted there. So that's actually a lot of something to react against. Yeah. Absolutely. And Trump comes back to office with a very different coalition. a coalition that now includes Elon Musk, includes much of Silicon Valley and the tech platforms, the people in charge of them, that includes uh a very big gender backlash behind it, that includes the comedians like Joe Rogan and and you know, Theo Vaughn and the sort of centers of power that they're cultural, that are, you know, um atmospheric that actually have a lot of money, that have control of attention, uh includes RFK Jr. and his coalition, which is not insignificant. I mean, Trump's 2024 election, he has a much

50:58 higher share of the black vote and particularly black men than he did in 2016. He does very well among Hispanic voters. And the social order becomes very liquid. Yeah. In this moment. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting because I think we spent a lot of time in the first Trump ad or I certainly did, you know, and I would say to people, what is, you know, what is it? And people talk about demographic change and and so on, but I kept saying, you know, one of the big things was racial. That's what I thought it was. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

51:28 And you know, um it's not that that doesn't create some anxiety. Of course, it does. But again, historically speaking, those weren't the kind it wasn't just demographic change. You needed something more than that. And also, I was thinking on racial equality. You know, the the the metrics were actually going the other way. So it was like they the right had won that battle. Um neighborhoods were more although they didn't feel that way around Obama. It's true that they didn't feel that way and I think but I don't think that matters as much because I think the reality was they might not have felt that way but they weren't able to do much with the feeling that they had.

52:06 They needed some raw material to work with. And I think you've just begun to, you know, lay out some of the raw material that they began to get between 2016 and 2024. And the thing that really concretized this for me that kind of brought it all together, there was an interview, God, I always forget his name. He's from Silicon Valley. Andre. Mark Andre. Yeah. In the New York Times. Really, my colleague Rosa. Yeah. It was an excellent interview. and he talks about what it was like to have his employees start coming back to work after the initial shutdown. So co was a giant radicalizing moment and then by that point we had lived through eight years of what was sort of increasingly clearly a a social revolution like very clearly like companies basically being hijacked to be engines of social change social revolution you know the employee bases going feral u you know there were cases in the you know in the in the

52:56 Trump era there were companies multiple companies I know that felt like they were hours away from full-blown violent riots on their own campuses by their own employees he was like a father whose teenage kids were rebelling against him and he talks about at the companies that where he knew the CEO knows very well and he was invested feeling like on any given day the employees might riot I think was the the term he used. Yeah. And you know they're speaking up they're demanding different power. Yeah. I should have brought this into the that initial list because I think the feeling among many of these people that you were having a all of a sudden the employees had all the power right they were getting people fired. They were demanding the the workplaces made political statements like who was really in charge here?

53:32 Who was in charge? Any union organizer will always tell you the fundamental battle in any union drive is not about the profit, you know, bottom line. It's who's in charge of the workplace. And there was and and and I think what's important about all this is that it brings all these cultural issues because a lot of these younger employees were talking about trans rights. They were talking about uh me too. They were talking about Black Lives Matter. So it those aren't just, you know, floaters out there in the culture.

54:02 they're embodied in workers who um are fighting with you about you know the direction of the workplace and you know for any employer when that starts happening you know your mind starts racing very very fast and again this is kind of similar to the anti-communism thing that we were just talking about because it's not just fantasy on the part of an employer um that you know we could be losing control they sometimes are losing control and you know that has implications ations for all sorts of things. You all think that conservatism correctly understands the reality of political loss.

54:39 Yeah. And stature loss that that conservatives are often right that they are losing things. Yeah. And I think this is something the left and liberals and centrist we all have a everybody has a very hard time coming to terms with this. We'd like to think that these people are just crazy. Um that they're just making stuff up. Um that they're liars. Um that they're all these things. But the truth of the matter is, you know, it's kind of hard to create a politically repressive social movement out of nothing. Um, and you know, there were some real I wouldn't say they were as fundamental as some of the stuff we saw in the 1930s or the '4s or in the '60s and '7s, but you know, there were what tremors, let's say. Um, another thing that Paul Krugman just wrote about recently, um, is, um, you know, in terms of gender equality, um, it's not so much that women have entering the workforce. That's been

55:34 going on. I mean, first of all, black women, you know, and, uh, women of color have been in the workforce forever, but in the ' 40s, you do see increasing numbers of women coming into the workforce, but starting in the 80s and 90s, you see women uh, younger women increasingly looking for careers. It's the kinds of jobs that they're looking for. They're looking for jobs that white men have traditionally had. CEOs, professors, uh, filmmakers, the whole, you know, editors of the New York Times, the whole nine yards. It gets very zero sum very fast. And so, yeah, I do think that um, conservatives understand this and, you know, people on the left either don't understand it or try to pretend it away. And it you're you're sort of entering into a war kind of disarming yourself. You you just don't quite understand denying the other side's subjective reality out of which they will power their politics. Uh, one thing

56:35 I look I have the experience I think that many people on the left do where I hear some of these complaints and I think they're ridiculous. But the level of radicalization around feeling that Twitter was not giving your work enough promotion that you know you weren't allowed to spread what certainly seemed to many and many experts to be vaccine misinformation, right? that there was actually much more the the sort of raw material of the movies are all diverse now. We're going to make Thor in Marvel comics into a woman. We're going to make Captain America into a black man. Like, who cares? It's a comic book. People care.

57:16 Yeah. And I'm not saying that it is wrong to do that. I want to be very clear. But it is motivating to do that. You have a line in the reactionary mind where you say quote conservatives often are the left's best students. Tell me about that. I started teaching about conservatism in I don't know the first or second Bush administration. Just started reading these texts and one of the things that shocked me and I started with Edmund Burke, you know, the father of the the whole thing. um was all the times in which he um you know he hates the jackabins, he hates the French Revolution, he hates all of it, but he says over and over and over again um in their commitment, in their fidelity, in their vision, in their execution, they there are superiors and there is a real um kind of grudging respect for what this rabble has been able to accomplish. And over the years you see this recur throughout the

58:19 history. Um you see increasingly elaborate attempts to learn from the left. Um now sometimes this is very kind of strategic and instrumental. You know let's um oh god he he just recently died. uh David Harowitz um who had been on the left and then moved to the right and he was a big activist against universities and he said you know let's let's just use all the language the left on the campus is using and just turn it against them say you're the ones engaging in hate speech you're doing this you're doing that so and and he was very um cynical and open about it I mean you read Christopher Rufo and he's very explicit about being a student of what he believes the left does.

59:06 Steven Miller in a different way the same thing. There's been this move in the past couple of months to say, "Aren't you all the big proponents of free speech? Didn't you just run as opponents of cancel culture and say that you would defend our rights to to say anything?" And there's been this effort to to tag the right with hypocrisy, which to be fair, it's very hypocritical. That's, you know, a fair play. But I think it actually misses in a way what's going on. Like I think they consciously understand themselves as having learned from what they think the left did when they feel the left had control of cultural institutions, you know, cancelling people for things they said, you know, sending like online mobs against them, shadowbanning them, moderating them, you know, using money through Title N and other things to push universities ideologically. And now they are supercharging it.

59:56 And I am not I want to be clear that I am not um absolving them of their responsibility for this or saying this is the last fault. But I I I do think there is something here in their I I really believe that what they understand themselves is doing is a kind of hypercharged turnabout and that in some ways we're in a weaker position because if we can charge them with hypocrisy, they can charge us with hypocrisy. Yeah. I would like to move it out of the moral register because I think you're making a really important point that everybody needs to understand but that sometimes the language of hypocrisy kind of I agree with you. Um but let's just um start with a point that I think a lot of the best historians of McCarthyism, the second red scare make, which was that a certain part of the apparatus that had developed had um and was used against the communist party was developed by the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s. I

1:00:57 mean, Jed Garoover was beloved by the Roosevelt administration who used him to go after its partisan enemies, but also whatever threat there was perceived to be of Nazi saboturs and allies with the Nazis and so forth. And it's not a question of turnabout is fair play. It's just governments. I mean, you know this, you're a student of the administrative state. Like, you build these bureaucracies. They don't just go away. And, you know, bureaucrats are trained. And so that's the first thing is is that a bureaucracy has been built over the years in part um by the Democratic Party, by liberal groups and and so forth in universities um that it was just a matter of time that would be turned against them. And I think there were some people on the left who were warning about this from the beginning and they were not listened to.

1:01:50 Um, I mean I if the most dramatic turnaround from everything and I I feel it very much at the level of rhetoric and I've seen this on campuses. I've seen this among students is the use of if you are a critic of Israel, if you are opposed to the state of Israel, if you're an antonist, you're engaging in a form of hate speech. And I have had conversations with students um who will say quite sincerely and many of them had been and probably still are kind of progressive Obama um you know with Kla Harris types um but very committed to the state of Israel and that weaponized language of victim identity hate speech which I mean you know was very popular potent and powerful on the left that speech is a form of harm, right? Which in certain instances it can be. I I want to be clear on that. But, you know, just the assumption that people say things that make me uncomfortable that I find offensive and

1:02:56 so on and so forth. That was the I think probably in the last two years was if you want to look at you know just politically potent explosive moments where you're seeing the writing on the wall that to me was it because university administrators really um were caught kind of with their pants like they put their pants down like they they didn't know how to react to this because they were so steeped in that language themselves. They had no way. And suddenly you have kids who are expelled, students who are expelled, faculty who are going to be investigated and you know the truth of the matter is calling for the you know destruction just calling for it saying I believe in this is not a violation of the you know it's protected speech. So some of the things that you were just talking about them doing the universities they justified their crackdown in terms of anti-semitism. Always a very strange

1:03:52 rationale for what they were doing. Yeah. But I think when he comes into office with this strange this new coalition, it doesn't have what we were talking about a minute ago, which was an omni threat. Doge was justified as efficiency, right? As if it were the reincarnation of reinventing government from the Bill Clinton administration. And there were, you know, you can go watch panels of people on the right saying, "No, no, we have to be honest. This is about ideology. were trying to take back the administrative state, but it was justified in terms of efficiency and saving money.

1:04:25 Uh you have the attack on the law firms, which isn't really justified by any big argument at all. They just do it. Attack on media outlets is more justified by a sense of bias and attacks on Donald Trump. There isn't a thing uniting it. Mhm. And it wasn't exactly that it was slowing down, but I would say a month ago, two months ago, my sense of it was that as bad as it was, it wasn't quite holding together. Mhm. And then Charlie Kirk was assassinated. Yeah. And I guess, well, let me ask you this. How have you seen them change what they are saying, what they are doing in the aftermath of that?

1:05:09 Yeah. So I think uh at the level of words um which I'm usually a little skeptical of but I think in this instance matter you see the emergence of vengeance as a language and vengeance is a is an old language goes back to the ancient Greeks and the Bible. Uh and it's a very dangerous language. Um, and there's a reason why the Greeks were terrified of it. Because, put it this way, it has a licensing structure that is extraordinarily permissive on the one hand, but on the other hand, and this is a almost a paradox, it has a very stern injunction at the moral injunction at the heart of it. You have to take revenge for this loss. And if you don't, it's as if you're committing a second murder yourself. You're not honoring this person.

1:06:09 And this is, as I, it's a really terrifying language. It's not one that's monopolized by the right. There was a wonderful historian, Arno, who wrote a wonderful book about the French and the Russian Revolution where he talks about it's called the furies actually after the ancient Greek gods about the role of vengeance on the left. And it it is absolutely terrifying um this sort of holy violence that it seems to authorize where people are morally empowered to do horrible things that they wouldn't ordinarily feel themselves authorized to do. So just before I came over here I looked the Chronicle of Higher Education is just keeping track of how many people have been fired faculty and jobs since the Charlie Kirk murder and in because of that it's up to uh it was like up to almost 40 this morning. That's are we less than a week now? It's about a week now. That's just one week and those are not

1:07:10 they're just one industry and one industry and and voluntary these are decisions of employers that are just doing this and these in an industry by the way where you have the most protection of any employ work more protection than you have Ezra Klein you know with tenure and often you know union rights and so forth it's it's Hana Arent wrote a letter to her mentor where uh Carl Yasper is in the middle of the McCarthy era and she said um everything melts like butter under the sun and what she meant was the collapse of the institutions and the collapse the leaders of the institutions of people who you know as you were saying about Hollywood just the day before sounded a little bit more robust and I've just you know this murder has galvan vanized uh the right um for reasons that like the second red scare are both uh strategic and sincere and you can see it and um it feels like they're just getting

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1:08:51 Best network based on analysis by speed test intelligence data at 1 2025. I want to play you a clip of Steven Miller whose deputy chief of staff was close to to Charlie Kirk. and seems as much as anybody to be sort of structuring the the response here. With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen and we will do it in Charlie's name.

1:09:21 These networks is the the term I want to zoom in on there. In in that same uh episode, Vance talks about the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Foundation, The Nation Magazine. Charlie Kirk was murdered by, as best we know, a single gunman making a very, very very um terrible decision. But what I see happening is an effort to blow this up into a kind of omni threat. There is this thing called the radical left. It's not just this crazy guy in Utah. It's all the NOS's that support liberal or left-wing causes. It's anybody who, you know, through, you know, the Soros Foundation has supported liberal judges. It's it's an effort to turn and the I guess the argument is they created a climate in which this guy got radicalized but the the effort to expand this to create your your threat that links it all together and then you know crack down on that threat that feels to me like where we're entering into a like I've been thinking

1:10:35 about it as a blue scare right that that feels to me like the the symmetry here the the size of the enemy which I think is something they sort of thought before, right? They didn't just learn about Yeah, I think bringing in the Ford Foundation is ridiculous, but they've been talking about the NGO network for a long time, right? But now they have their their reason to go after it. I I want to read to you the language of the Smith Act, which was the um kind of the major legislative tool that was used against the left uh during the McCarthy era. This is this was the way you could bring people up on criminal charges.

1:11:15 What was criminal was conspiring with someone else to organize a party or a group. Conspiring with someone to organize a party or a group to advocate, teach or encourage the desiraability of the overthrow of the government by force or violence. What do you notice there? you notice the number of nouns and verbs you have to get to before you get to violence right? And I think it's very relevant to what you just said. Um it is the identification of a a network that can be tied in any way, shape, or form to acts of violence. The flip side of this which the um journalist Ken Clipperstein just posted about is also that they've come up with a new formula for the lone gunman type which is neolistic violent extremists.

1:12:13 Neilistic is an interesting word choice because it's kind of like anything and everything. So on the one hand they're identifying this network to go after a whole apparatus that they both believe and you know don't and some of them opportunistically believe uh but then also this very free floating uh signifier of the kinds of individuals who might engage in uh violent extremism. Yeah. answer the idea is there is no such thing as the individual that it the individual is the product of a climate. Everybody's a vector.

1:12:50 Everybody's a vector. And so you know if you're an organization who's anybody who works at it or you know who maybe now said anything that is disrespectful to Charlie Kirk or talked about things that you think are the kind of thing that the shooter could have believed. they become fair game. Absolutely. And again, you know, the the the thing that the president and I would look to is, you know, the employ it starts it often times start with the employer investigating their own personnel um and those investigations then become a kind of raw database um for the authorities. But you can see how in an environment like this um that those you know that archive becomes fair game for the Trump administration to demand handing it over, sharing it with other actors. To me, it's the elaborate infrastructure, the meeting of rhetoric and institutions and law and the state that to me is is is what we're seeing.

1:13:56 I think that's right. And then I think what we're seeing is the connecting that to state power. Yeah. In a way the left I think whatever the right thinks of it really did not. Yeah. And did not do in this way. Um there is a I mean you just saw with the Jimmy Kimmel thing. Yeah. Which is feels very red scare to me. Yeah. And comes from the head of the FCC. Yeah. Functionally threatening to use the FCC's power Yeah. to block a merger. Yeah, the federal government has a lot of discretionary power reaching all across the economy. It funds universities. It approves or disapproves of mergers. It does it regulates different players. It has all kinds of authorities to ask for information.

1:14:48 it can do if it begins to unleash itself from, you know, procedural neutrality. Yeah. There's very little it can't touch. And so what they seem to me to be doing is they've been building for some time, really since coming into their second term. You know, they came in and said, you know, the cultural institutions, the various institutions society were turned against us. We're I mean, this is what project 2025 is largely about. we are going to use this state to bring them to heal. We're going to break them. And they were doing that to greater and lesser degrees of effectiveness.

1:15:28 But they didn't really have a story. Mhm. And what they have now is a story mixed with like the genuine energy of vengeance. Right. They are they did know him. They are really furious. I mean, Trump almost was killed by a different assassin's bullet. And so, the I think the mixture of, you know, genuine sincerity, fury and a pre-existing ideological project that they had been very very very systematically figuring out what leverage a federal government has and how they could use it often in very novel ways. That's coming together now into something new and I think is is bringing us into a new era. Pam Bondi saying she had to walk this back a little bit, but Pam Bondi saying the attorney general hate speech isn't protected right by the Constitution.

1:16:19 I mean, we're we're in something new here, like a very fractured mirror of the previous era, but now deployed by a state trying to crush the network that it understands to be its political enemy. Yeah. Nancy Mace, the uh congresswoman from South Carolina after the uh the murder of Charlie Kirk said uh we don't fund hate, we fire it. We fire hate. Um and you know, you you talk about uh they have a nar about a narrative. You couldn't come up with a a more pathy narrative. Um I mean they're not just going to fire people over this although they are going to do that but you know they want to you know crush the institutions uh that they claim you know as you say fostered uh this environment they have a you know they have a they have a they have a martyr they have a cause celeb I mean I it's interesting you brought up Trump about his almost being assassinated because it almost seems like he was more moved by what happened

1:17:22 to Charlie Kirk than what happened to him. Um but it's it's it's um it's become emblematic. You know, he's a figure. Um and you know, you see this throughout the history of both right and leftwing movements. They have their martyrs. I think Trump felt less vulnerable in a strange way. Yeah. After the near assassination of him, I think it scared him. I think it shook him. Yeah. But I also think he came out with this, I am chosen by God. I am touched. I am marked. Yeah. And Kirk's killing made them all feel vulnerable.

1:17:59 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, um, vulnerability is a very scary emotion. Justice Jackson, great Justice Robert Jackson, who's a New Deal Supreme Court appointee, and he was also the prosecutor at Nuremberg, he said, um, security is like liberty in that many are the crimes committed in its name. But then let me flip this because I do think there's a lot of discontinuity here too. One discontinuity is leftism, liberalism, whatever you want to, however you want to define the thing they're actually now going after. It's not communism.

1:18:39 Yeah. It's not on a global march unexpectedly taking over countries. It's not, you know, committing espionage at the high levels of American government because it's also not an alien force trying to alter the country from within, at least not in the eyes of much of the country. I I think that they are very rapidly overreaching. That doesn't make about not dangerous. It doesn't mean people are not going to see their lives destroyed or worse. But the Kimmel thing was a signal to me. Kimmel's suspension. Once you've defined it as Jimmy Kimmel, you've I think gotten pretty lost in what you're going to be able to defend because to most people, Jimmy Kimmel does not represent a form of leftwing radicalism. He is milktoast network comedy.

1:19:33 And then you begin to create a nobody is safe dynamic, which is what they want to create, but is also not a great politics. I mean, I've been thinking about this from your line when you say conservatives are often the are often are the left's best students the former the left they are struggle they are studying in this case that Rufo and Miller and others are studying it was in some ways quite effective for a minute but it's politically disastrous it overreached almost immediately it became a thing that Democrats had to run from and I wonder if that's a difference between this era and that one that they're on very different they have a lot of power but they not built slowly built a politics that can support this, right? I mean, you brought up the fact that there there's no tie today between the domestic quote unquote threat and a foreign threat, and that's of course true. But the flip side of that was that

1:20:25 that the Soviet Union and having to conduct the second red scare in light of the Soviet Union and the kind of hedgeim ideological challenge it posed in throughout the globe force the right to be careful about how it engaged in its project. You know, they're very very careful to say, you know, it's it's we are defending as as Arthur Schleser, you know, the vital center against the extremes of both. And you had right-wing organizations on the attorney general's list. I mean, Jed Garoover's FBI, despite what the movies tell us in the it did help break up the clan in the 1960s, it had to it had to. It was just part of this global contestation, particularly in Africa and Asia. Um, and it it was disciplined. That's not there anymore. Henry Farrell, the political scientist at Hopkins, has a great um post that came out in the last couple months about, you know, the thing that regimes really need to make very clear

1:21:22 is like we're going to reward you if you're with us and we're going to punish yours if you're against us. And they you have to be really really consistent about that. Like there's a there's almost a proto rule of law element in that reality. And when regimes don't do that, which you know, I think is part of the problem that we're seeing is that, you know, what does it take to kind of get them off your back, it's not really clear. And what's it going to take to not have people harass you and do all these things? It's not really clear.

1:21:52 That's not always a great position for an authoritarian, pro-authoritarian regime to be in. Um because it means your coalition partners are going to become as uncertain as your enemies are. And so on the one hand it does mean that the rights narrative of a kind of foreign domestic threat is a little bit murkier but it also means it's a little bit um unconstrained by that international ch I mean obviously there are still international challenges to the United States but they're not the same ideological challenges. If anything the United States seems to following the the model of other authoritarian regimes throughout the globe. So that's where I'm I'm I'm just uncertain. I mean, I think we're in I think we're in the most politically dangerous period of my lifetime. That's how at least I am experiencing it. I think the mistake I made during the first term um and up until the second term, you know, just

1:22:49 being steeped in history sometimes can be not such a great thing. You're always looking for parallels. You're looking for discontinuities and all the rest of it. But the thing is when you actually go back to VHimar Germany, you go back, you know, the thing that you see most clearly among everybody is this is all new. This is we have no idea where this is going. And the historical imagination I think today I've been trying to disentangle myself a little bit from that and say, you know, Trump is a he's he's his own kind of an actor.

1:23:20 Um, I've become very careful about which historians or historically steeped uh commentators I have on. Not because they're they're wrong, but people get very trapped in their dominant metaphor. If what you know is Russia, this becomes Russia. If what you know is Germany, it becomes Germany. If what you know is fascism, it becomes fascism. And those are all they all have light to shed. And they can all create a sense of a story that we already know how it turns out. Yeah. And we don't. And I do think your point about the disciplining force of the Soviet Union is is real, too. I mean, who ends McCarthyism? It's Eisenhower. And why does the Republican party nominate Eisenhower rather than Taft? I mean, in significant part, it's that what is holding it together is the fight against communism. And and Eisenhower is less of an isolationist and a much more credible figure. on that.

1:24:21 To me though, there's also a lesson in that which is I mean a lot of people challenged McCarthy and lost you know liberal Democrats, liberal Republicans that what was dangerous for McCarthy was when he really abandoned the center was going after the the army and and other things where people just didn't buy it anymore and then you know he could be sort of pushed to the margin. And I think this is tricky. I think I'm I'm watching people have very different reactions about politically how to respond right now. And I don't think any of us know. I think anybody who says they know is lying. Um but it's one of my instincts that their abandonment of free speech, their abandonment of due process, their going after people like Kimmel. You know, I think everybody thinks it was bad for Democrats that they lost the comedians.

1:25:15 Well, is this are the comedians so happy about what they see happening right now that I think they're the the one place where I think people need to think very carefully about about their response and what they want to do is what kind of coalition can you build against this because all of a sudden to go to something that that you were saying earlier people get very nervous. There's a lot of political power and people feeling unsettled about where they're going to stand in society and what damage can be done and to them and all of a sudden, you know, the Trump administration is coming for a very wide swath of everyone.

1:25:52 Yeah. And to what we were talking about with the Red Scare, it took a long time to build that. They're speedr running this very fast. Right. Yeah. This is the sort of the scary part of the story. The second Red Scare succeeded. Um, part of what deprived McCarthy of oxygen was not just that he went after the military, but that um, you know, they had really drumed out and, you know, at at the level of what their ambitions were, they had really succeeded in in in stopping the New Deal from where it was heading. And um, his electoral returns were just, you know, it was diminishing to some to some degree. What would you say the damages of the Red Scare after it had ended did to the left, did to the country, did to its government, its institutions, and what do you think that tells us about what, you know, four years of the Trumpist assault on our government institutions now could Mhm.

1:26:52 do? I think the first and most important thing was that there was a nent budding movement that was bringing together labor rights and civil rights um race and class the relationship between African-Americans and capitalism um that the Communist Party and left-wing front groups and just kind of left liberals were pursuing and the um the second red scare just shut that down. And so I would say to this day, we've never really recovered from that. And we've seen that when we have these arguments that we have about race versus class. This was something that people at the forefront of those movements were thinking hard about.

1:27:37 Why did it shut that down? I I've never I don't quite understand it. So there was a movement in um the 194 well it started in the 1930s but 1940s in particular to go into the south and start organizing the south which was really where the at that time still was the bulk of the African-American labor force. Um, and there was a very clear understanding that if we were going to get things like national health care, which was on the agenda for the Democratic Party, even Harry Truman, um, and other, you know, kind of more expansions, uh, you know, uh, include African-Americans in the Social Security Act, all those things, um, that you needed to break, uh, the Solid South, you needed to, you know, um, in emancipate and infranchise black Americans, but to do that was required ired a lot of sacrifice on the part of labor unions, on the part of white workers, on the part of white liberals, and so forth. And

1:28:34 in order to engage in that sacrifice, you had to start making an argument about why standing up for African-Americans wasn't just the right thing to do, but the smart thing to do. And once um the second Red Scare was able to break what was called Operation Dixie, um in a way it kind of left um black Americans really on their own. Interestingly enough, actually in the 60s there were some people like Bard Rustin who were always trying to repair that alliance but it was it was really broken after that. Um so I'd say in the field that was probably the biggest loss. I think a second one was about foreign policy. Um there were a group of people in the state department who were experts on East Asia um security experts who were you know on the left were were all purged. There have been a lot of historians who've made the argument that this sets the stage for the disastrous consequences with the Vietnam War that

1:29:28 you just, you know, lose a whole body of institutional knowledge um that has devastating consequences for the people of Vietnam and for, you know, for the United States as well. The lessons I think for today are um you know as we're seeing with the purge of the government you know there's a whole body of knowledge um that seems to be gleefully uh being tossed aside when it comes to climate when it comes to vaccines whole array of things we do not know what the consequences are then always a final question what are three books you'd recommend to the audience there is a translation um of a Jewish Hebrew uh Israeli a poet bialik who died many years you know in last century he's considered the great Jewish national poet and he wrote this poem after the kishv pram in 1903 called um on the slaughter and Netanyahu invoked this um and but after Gaza but there's a translation by a wonderful translator

1:30:32 named Peter Cole um that's coming out with New York Review of Books it's called City of Slaughter that complicates that story and shows what a powerful poet who complicates any idea of vengeance in particular vengeance. Um so that's one book that I would really recommend. Um uh a second book is Victor Nask's uh naming names which is about the McCarthy era and the reason I recommend it's about Hollywood um is it really focuses on what we were just talking about the individual and the role of individuals and the choices they make and what the ramifications are and it's a wonderful read. came out I think in 1980. Um, and the last book is called Citizen Marks. It's an academic book.

1:31:15 It's a study of Karl Marx by a young political theorist named Bruno Leopold who's in Britain. And it it's the marks you never knew about. It's the marks of a theorist of freedom who cared about things like freedom of the press passionately. His first article is about freedom of the press. And this I think might be of particular interest to you. somebody who really cared about, this was a shock to me, institutional and constitutional design. He was obsessed with the constitution of the second French Republic and all the, you know, the kinds of things that all of you guys, you know, write about. There's Markx, you know, going all in and it's, you know, 1850, 1851. It's not the young Marks, it's it's the mature Marks. So, Cory Robin, thank you very much.

1:31:56 Thank you. Hey. Hey. Hey.

Questions about this episode

What is discussed in "Trump Is Building the Blue Scare | The Ezra Klein Show"?

In order: 0:00 Red Scare, McCarthyism, Cory Robin, Hollywood; 10:00 Red Scare, Soviet Union, Agriculture Department, McCarthyism; 20:00 Hollywood, Humphrey Bogart, Carl Bernstein, Committee for the First Amendment; 30:00 New Deal, Southern Democrats, Democratic Party, Dorothy Bailey; 40:00 Red Scare, New Deal, Bolshevik Revolution, Eleanor Roosevelt; 50:00 Silicon Valley, Christopher Rufo, Paul Krugman, Steven Little Miller; 1:00:00 Red Scare, Democratic Party, Department of Justice, Eleanor Roosevelt; 1:10:00 Ford Foundation, New Deal, Project 2025, Red Scare; 1:20:00 Red Scare, Soviet Union, Bard Rustin, Democratic Party; 1:30:00 City of Slaughter, Cory Robin, Hollywood, Karl Marx.

What is mentioned in this The Ezra Klein Show episode?

95 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Red Scare, Hollywood, McCarthyism, Soviet Union, New Deal, Eleanor Roosevelt. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Trump Is Building the Blue Scare | The Ezra Klein Show"?

The episode runs 1 h 31 min; the transcript is about 15,183 words in 109 timestamped sections.

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