Historically High - The Red Scare: McCarthy V Communism

Episode Date: July 29, 2026

In the late 1940's and 50's America went through a type of mass hysteria fueled by both foreign governments and our own. The Cold War had just begun between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Russians soon built and tested an atomic bomb so Americans no longer felt untouchable in our own country. It was a time when accusations of being a communist or even attending a meeting unknowingly could land you in jail. It's during this Crimson Panic that Senator Joseph McCarthy began his one man, one weasel, crusade against communism in the states without silly things like proof or evidence. Strap in and don't be afraid, we're talking about Communism, McCarthyism and The Red Scare. Thanks for listening and don’t forget to hit subscribe, leave a 5-star rating and write a review. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Join us at Patreon.com/HistoricallyHigh and get enrolled for some fun extra content Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

We're coming in hot. We have literally been talking for 45 minutes. Have we? Hashing stuff out of how this is going to go. Talking about fears, concerns. I mean, the title is going to explain, well, for most people, but the Red Scare heavily involves communism. It's, in fact, it's all about communism. And little disclaimer in this episode, we're going to be hitting you with some facts.

So if you haven't already been scared off by the word communism, If you're scared of the word facts, maybe don't listen to this episode. There are so many angles to this, both from the Russian angle, what's going on in the states, the world war is going on at this time too, and then just this paranoid state that encompasses the entire U.S. because of this boogeyman. And it's a boogeyman that we have two other kind of periods in time that were worse, that ruined a lot of people's lives all because of this fear. Three. Three?

We're in the third. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. This one, as far as compared to the 20s and then the 40s is relatively mild on the mass incarcerations and blacklisting and that kind of thing. Yes. Yes.

But there is still some of that going on. or the perception of that going on. It truly is something where we're going to talk about kind of this theoretical Marxist communism that was something that was written in the 1850. So many people just as soon as you said that, you Marxist, son of a bitch. Kind of the communism that we have today. Because Marxist communism in today's communism is pretty opposed to kind of the general beginnings of what Karl Marx, I think, had in mind, and mainly because what we have now

is authoritarian dictatorship communism. And once we start talking about kind of the definitions and explain what Marxist communism looks like, we're talking about something that was a stateless society or supposed to be a stateless society that is run by a dictator. And you can't have a stateless society that's run by a dictator. That's run by the state, who is one person. Yeah, a man can't be the state. Okay. Before we lose anyone else by talking about Marx and communism and all that filthy, calmly rhetoric, remember, hey, patreon.com slash historically high. Join up.

We do other episodes. Game shows every other week. Episodes kind of on smaller topics on the other weeks. Yeah, it's good shit. We love having you there. We love having that little extra time that we can let our hair down. Not that we really ever have. have had our hair up, but...

So if you're still here, we know that's because you trust us. We're going to take you on a ride. You ready, comrade? Let's jump in. Carl Marx. Carl Marx was German. Carl Marx was not Russian.

And Carl Marx was kind of the architect of one of the theories of communism. And I say one of the theories because we've only seen two, physical examples of communism. We've seen, I guess, three. Leninism. We've seen Stalinism.

And we've seen Maoism. I guess you would say, right? Yeah. Yeah, I would say so. And even that is now different because that's evolved into a hybrid of communism and capitalism. Yeah, you have Pol Pot to throw in there too.

And you still have private ownership of a lot of stuff. The state owns a lot of stuff in China. This is not going to be focusing on that. This is going to be focusing war on the Red Scare within like the 40s and the 50s. Got to lay the ground work though. Yeah. Does the guy who maybe gets away with the least amount of crap, is that Friedrich Engels?

Because when you say the Communist Manifesto, the first name out of everybody's mouth is Carl Marx. Correct, but if you, okay, you asked me this before, I had to look it up. Was Karl Marx Russian? Karl Marx was not Russian. He was German. But does Karl Marx sound Russian? It's Carl with a K, so yeah. Yeah. No, Friedrich Engels, you'd be like, German.

So I am just reading definitions. I'm not making shit up. We're good. I don't know why I'm so worried about this. You guys trust us, right? So here's the deal. With Marxist communism, ideally, communism was supposed to work as a stateless, classless society, like you said,

where everyone shares resources and works together for the common good. Beautiful. It's a, that's what anyone thinks of in a utopian society. Does anybody, when they view utopia, it's all people walking around happy. And so you assume it's all different classes or maybe it's classless and that's why everyone's happy. But in utopia societies, you never see someone that's like the fucking billionaire and everything. Everyone just seems to kind of like be on the same level, right? Yeah, and everybody seems happy.

And in 1848, when the Communist Manifesto comes out and Marx and Ingalls put this out. The main argument is that human history has been driven by class struggles in, I mean, is that really, I mean, I don't know if I would use the word driven, but I can point to a lot of different times in history where conflict has come because of class struggle. Buddy, the amount of times we've discussed slaves, surf, surfdom, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, I can definitely see that. Here's the thing, too. It's always a situation in which who's fighting the fucking wars. Not the rich folks

Yeah, exactly So a lot of this fuel for Mark's anger To actually like create this Idealic society or idealic way of living Was kind of prompted by The everyday life of a 19th century Basically person within the working class And that's when machine driven factories first took over

When stuff first comes in There's no you know Ocia Or anything like that basically what you're doing is you're installing all of these huge industrial machines that are allowing you to make more profit faster and so thus you're able to get rid of already some of your workforce but then the people that are still working there have to work with most likely pretty untested equipment and they're literally losing hands they're losing limbs a lot of people

are being killed there are zero laws protecting workers during the time of like the industrial Revolution. Industrial revolution sped up a lot. It was also very efficient at taking limbs from people. It was a meat grinder is what it is for humanity. A regular workday lasted anywhere from 12 to 16 hours, six days a week. We've talked about that. Workers didn't get weekends, paid vacation, fucking joke, no sick leave. And if you got sick or injured, you just got fired and replaced from this massive pool of just like desperate unemployed people. So you were literally, Like people talk about feeling like numbers now, literally the same thing, same thing back then. They didn't even assign you a number back then.

It was just, hey, you. Yeah. So children, as young as five, were also forced to work in coal mines and textile mills. Factory owners loved hiring kids because guess what? Those small little digits could easily fit inside the jam machines and everything. and because they're tiny, they'd have to, you know, you only have to pay them a little tiny fraction

of an adult's wage. Yeah, they don't have bills. But dude, fucking like, fuck, I had a really morbid thought. So, like, there was a point during the Industrial Revolution where just there were these kids walking around areas just missing fingers and stuff.

Kids smoking cigarettes, kids dirty from a job in the coal mine. Yeah, you get fucking black lung when you're 12. Yeah, children. that died in the coal mines and they were just brought out in a coal cart and somebody else goes in and replaces them. And then it's it's probably not even like a hey, we have to send somebody to their home to inform their parents. We'll just, when their kid doesn't show up and they come looking for them, we'll just tell them that they died. So you get factories that are dark.

They're fucking hot. They're filled with the smoke coming off of all these machines. No safety guards. I mean, at this point, there wasn't if you lost your job. or lost your life on the line, there was no fucking insurance or workman's comp. Again, you were just fired if you couldn't do the job. But what this also did is it created other jobs.

For like, you know, families poured into cities looking for factory jobs, causes rapid overcrowding. You're living in these little, you know, tenements that you're basically just springing up. Like we talk about Hooverville's, I think, during the Depression. You get neighborhoods that are just popping up because of this influx of workers. No clean running water. no trash pickup, no sewage system. And because of that, you get like cholera

spreading just all over these areas and then again into the city that they're also being built on to and the life expectancy for like city workers ends up dropping because of this stuff. So you're seeing all of this. This is all the ugly shit that comes out of the Industrial Revolution. So in that picture too, does the prediction that a working class

or that the working class people will eventually overthrow these wealthy business owners and create a fair, classless society where property is shared. Does that sound like the craziest prediction in the landscape that you just laid out? 100% not. Like this is literally Marx and Ingalls sitting around and they're just like, let's say they're sitting out at a street cafe, something like that. And they're just walking people walk by and they see a guy on fucking crutches with a missing leg. They see kids missing digits.

They see guys missing an arm. and they know that it's happening because of these factory jobs. And all you're thinking to yourself is, fuck, when are these people going to get tired of this? Yeah. This is horrible. At some point, like, you'd think they would have enough, tell all these guys to go fuck themselves

and seize it all for themselves so they can at least try to make the conditions better. And that's what it gets born out of is a very common thought of like, hey, maybe people should have some protections and not worry about getting dismembered at work all the fucking time. So they want to fix the system. So again, they create this theory in the mid-1800s.

They're looking at the world around them of what it's becoming and noticing that things aren't getting better. More things are going to get industrialized, which means there's going to be more dangers out there. And because these factory owners have this massive pool of people that they can pull from at any time, they don't have to make the job more desirable. The fact that it's a job is enough for those people to take the risk of injury and death to have that.

And it's, I guess, all in the pursuit of trying to get running water or trying to get any sort of extras in life. And in a weird, like, you know, juxtaposition. So Friedrich Engels was actually born into like a really wealthy family that owned textile factories in Germany and England. So he's living this like double life, basically working as. a businessman by day and then writing and helping to create this like what would be considered radical propaganda or political papers by night and someone like that you're thinking you know how do they know these conditions Ingalls is coming in and being like you'll never guess what I had to fucking witness today a six year old kid lost his hand and and that's realistic shit so in 1842

Ingalls moves to Manchester England he's helping run his father's cotton mill He's seeing horrific conditions that the workers are facing. He actually wrote a book called The Condition of the Working Class in England, which, again, this is documented proof. And Marx is just like, num, num, num, num, examples, examples. This is exactly why we need this change. And he wants this to back up his economic theories. So, weirdly enough, Marx is also horrible with money. Spends his life in deep poverty.

And basically, Ingalls uses his own wealth to just pay all of Marx's bills. and rent for decades, basically keeping him going so he can just like write this. This is the yin and the yang. Marks looks out that he makes friends with Ingalls, gets him on his side about this because basically Ingalls is just like,

oh yeah, I'll just pay you to write this shit. But after Marks dies, Ingalls has to spend like a few years organizing all of these like fucking handwritten notes. He's going through stuff. There's probably a lot of ramblings and raving. So he's happened to try to...

Tons of shit. Yeah, he's happened to try to put it into something cohesive. And he actually wrote in public the final volumes of Mark's most famous book, which I think is Das Capital, right? I figured. Well, I guess the manifesto was like a pamphlet. Yeah.

So, like you were saying, Marx believed that history is driven by these fights between different social classes and under capitalism, which, holla, it's what we use today. That's why we're able to have a podcast. He saw two main groups. We talked about the bourgeoisie,

the rich factory owners and bosses who own what he referred to as the means of production. That's the tools, factories, and land. And then there is the proletariat, who is the majority, the working class people who must sell their labor

for a paycheck. Every time I hear that, I think of the Flowers for Charlie episode of Always Sunny. Because he's the proletariat and everyone else in the bar is the bourgeoisie. And he's got both of the headphones

in his ears and he's talking about all of this different stuff. And he's using enough like semi-coherent verbiage that it kind of sounds like he really is getting smart. And then all of a sudden at the end,

he's just an idiot. He's just so self-confident that he uses these things. And to think about this layout of society, I mean, you would call Frederick Ingalls the proletariat, or the bourgeoisie, correct? Correct, yeah.

He was the bourgeoisie. And then you have Karl Marx, who doesn't really fit into the proletariat role, but I have to assume, in the lifestyle that he lived, he saw a lot of poverty, and he saw a lot of kind of what Ingalls didn't see past the factory of how poor everybody was. And so for Ingalls to basically call out his own people.

Yeah, which is why I think he also had to kind of put it in Marxists, because that's the thing too. You have to be able to put someone to it that could be tied closer to that group of people that are experiencing that struggle. And a guy wearing an ascot isn't going to be selling. No, that's not who you want to put on the cover of that book. So Marks, again, is arguing that owners get rich by paying workers less than the true value of their work. I could just change the name of Karl Marx.

And I could just say, we're going to make up a guy named Adam Smith. Adam Smith. And say, Smith argues this. And everyone would be like, Adam Smith is a fucking smart guy. So he believes that because of that unfair system, it would eventually make workers so angry they're going to revolt. in this copy shop conversation. They're like, when are they going to try to do something to stop losing their limbs? So he combines three ideas to form this theory.

It's British economics. So there was this guy, Adam Smith. Jesus, did you pull that name? Okay. It was a really common name. That's why I pulled it out. Your name is a common one. So Adam Smith and this guy named David Ricardo, which basically explained how labor creates wealth.

And so Marx uses this to show how bosses take the value of workers' labor as profit. there was a German philosopher who his name was George Wilhelm Friedrich Heigel who had this theory called Dialetics I believe it was and it says history moves forward through clashes of conflicts and clashes of ideas and so Marx kind of adopts this to focus on like the physical class you know lower class upper class that's what it was at this point there was no middle class and then it was French socialism so French thinkers like this guy named Charles Fourier and Henry the Saint-Soulin, St. Simon, had already started talking about shared property,

and then Marx built that into the early communist ideas. So this is somebody who takes ideas from different places, and he puts them together in what he believes will be the best working system. He's just mushing three different kinds of clay to make a sculpture. Which, in my personal opinion, I'm not saying he cracked it, but I'm saying that's the argument that I feel like anybody that talks about like not being like a third political party or anything like that I'm like you realize that like if you wanted to create a third party it'd be easy if there wasn't an

establishment against it because you would just say hey 60% that all of us are in the middle do you just want to have like a you can't call it a communist party even I was trying to think because common like common sense coalition party maybe A common coalition party of the common sense party or whatever. Because that party would be like everyone's like, yes, I want to be because these fucking 20% of people on each other side suck ass. But he's basically, again, you're taking, he's cherry picking these ideas and putting them together. So in 1847, a group of workers called the Communist League basically asked Karl Marx and Friedrich to write down a clear path for their movement. So there's already a league before he even really writes the communist movement.

manifesto. It's just this group of people who share this idea. Ingalls basically is there to provide the real world facts. He basically gets up there and he's like, my name is Frederick Ingalls and I own a couple of factories and everyone's like, boo! And he's like, hold on a second. Marks is like, let him talk. Let him talk. He's like, I'm on your side. Fuck the bourgeoisie. The conditions are terrible. But I can lend legitimacy to this cause because I'm the one that can speak toward the fact that, yes, I am a witness. I own these factories where people are treated

terribly. So they published the short pamphlet in 1848 and it's right as these massive revolutions are breaking out all across Europe. Yeah, because what you have the, I guess the French revolution is early 19th century. I believe there was a Prussian revolution. It's Europe, man. Yeah. There's so many different countries that everyone is trying to fight. And again, that's not even fights with other countries. These were revolutions going on. to try to overthrow these monarchies and things like that. So this like, I guess the, what I want to call it, like the pamphlet, is it the manifesto? It was that the manifesto basically argues that all of human history is a story of rich people oppressing poor people.

I mean, yeah, right? I mean, we've talked enough about history on this to know there are sultans, there are kings, those people are rich, they oppress the poor people, that's how they're kings. There's some miraculous shit that happens all around that. But yeah, that's kind of like the baseline of human history. That's, that is literally, that's what it is. That's the bar. History just dips up and down below that bar when certain events happen. So it ends with this famous rally cry of workers of the world unite.

Pretty innocuous. It's probably, I remember kind of hearing that, but that's kind of what it is. Sounds like the Wonder Twins stole some shit. Mm-hmm. Before reaching total communism, Marx outlined that there is a middle, often skipped step. Actually, not often skipped in the... Never proceeded from...

Never done middle step. Again, that's why there's different types of communism, called socialism. So socialism is where the working class would rise up, overthrow the factory owners, and take control of the government and industries. Okay? The government would take away private property. from the rich and run the economy on behalf of all the workers. So this is a temporary, this socialism thing is not a, it's fucking Pokemon.

This is the middle thing until you get evolved into what actual communism is. People would be paid based on how hard and long they worked. Wow, you never hear about that when people are describing communism because they always say like everybody just gets the exact same. No, you get, it's, it is a meritocracy. You do get paid. again, I'm saying how it is ideally drawn out. We're not saying this is how it operates. Theoretical.

We're saying this is Marxism, Marx's version of this. Over time, as people learn to cooperate and share, the need for a strict government would simply fade away. And in a fully realized communist society, factories, farms, and stores would belong to the whole community, not individual people. There would be no rich. There would be no poor. Everyone would be equal. Since everybody cooperates, states, laws, and money would no longer be necessary. the society would run on the famous slogan

from each according to his ability to each according to his need. So basically what that means is you work as hard as you can to help everyone and you receive whatever food, shelter and care you need to live. I'm not saying... In theory, not bad.

And I'm not saying it's perfect because you're dealing with humans. Humans want more. We are a greedy species or a materialistic species. But again, this is where small scale like we've talked about with like communes and stuff like that work

because you're not forcing everybody into it so you're not having to try to adapt everybody you're basically saying like hey we're thinking about doing this do you want to join and if that person's of the same mindset and wants to participate they participate the hippies had this down to almost

a science as long as they didn't have some kind of a sex crazed leader or anything like that this was the whole idea behind them moving out in running a farm, running a commune, which is where you get that from, where everybody is out producing and everybody is out giving and everybody has exactly what they need and everybody shares everything. Now, again, that works when you have 20 people of the same mind.

Yeah. When you start looking at larger countries and larger masses of people, there will always be people that are greedy and then people that take. and those stretch the bounds of society of this commune to where they want to do less and get the same amount, or they want to take more and use the other people. So my view on this is we've never seen an operational example of communism. Never happened. But you can easily, even just looking through what Marx described as his ideal form of it,

that there are holes in it in the sense of, a mass population and everything like that, there becomes hurdles, of course. But there are parts that you could pull out of that that would be useful in the creation of another type of governance. So don't you can't, it's not an all or nothing type thing. For this, it is for him. Yeah. But what you see is communism has to have the stars aligned for it to work.

The way Marx describes it is you have to have an industrialized country. because that industry and that advantage of the worker is what then forces the riser to work up to overthrow them. So you are basically handing over a functional society that is not experiencing any type of turmoil or trauma or outside factors. And you're going to hope for a smooth transition to that government. Again, hoping the human factor doesn't completely fuck it over. And then at a certain point, an undisclosed amount of years when society has adapted depending on how many you have and how many you have and how. well you've performed it, you get, then get to turn that into communism. The council is dissolved and you have true communism.

I feel like the way that it's described, you'd really have to invest and say, guys, if we're going to give this communism a thing ago, thing ago, it needs to be like a fucking 50 year project. Yeah. If not more, because you have to have generations that are able to pass on that are hanging on to fucking grudges and be able to bring in new people that are willing to go and buy into it. So I don't think this thing works realistically in practice just for the amount of time

that it would be required to go from whatever you're at, which has to be, again, a place in good shape to socialism, have the conditions in which everyone unifies all the workers rise up and are in agreement. A leveling of society. Run socialism the correct way and hope that the people that you're hoping will run the government aren't just like, are we in control now? We're in power now. Fuck it.

We're not going to give them the keys. We're going to go and keep the keys. and you have one guy that's like, I want all the fucking keys. That's what has happened with actual communism. Correct me if I'm wrong, but nowhere in Marx or Engels writing is there ever a dictator mentioned, right? No, 100%. No, that's not a part of it? Not even when it's socialism, yeah.

So what capitalism meant to Karl Marx is he was of the mind that labor creates all the wealth. It does technically, right? Because unless it's an automated factory or whatever, but back then, labor created the wealth. Unless you invent something, I guess. Correct. If a worker makes a pair of shoes that are worth like 100 bucks, but the factory owner only pays them 30, the owner then has that remaining 70 as profit. And technically that's stealing from the worker because it's the worker whose labor you're actually using. So he called this surplus value.

So under capitalism, workers become disconnected from their work. They instantly, they instead of, you know, feeling proud about making like a beautiful product, a factory worker just does one boring task all day, like stamping something or checking something to survive. They feel like a cog and machine. You ever felt like that? Yeah. Also, I just immediately get thrown back into Henry Ford's assembly line. Yeah. Because that's what those people were doing all day, every day,

was stamping out a cylinder or something like that, or I guess boring out a cylinder. Also, I can't believe we've got to mention this. We had a tragedy in the studio. Unfortunately, the bubler that we've had for the last three and a half, four years, had a retired, shredded his ACL. And so he's out of the game.

Stem broke during the cleaning. It's a real tragedy. We do have a temporary stand-in that was bought in, I believe it was Newport in Oregon, along one of the little beach beach shops. The thing's a monster. It might be a little more powerful than what we were used to using before. So there could be a little...

It's like when you get a U-Haul. You're not used to driving it because it's pretty big, but it'll do. Yeah, we stepped up from a violin to a cello. Okay, so basically, Marx argued that capitalism is unstable because owners compete for maximum profit, that they make too many goods, and that overproduction leads to economic crashes, job losses, and constant chaos. Kind of experience that in our world, whether we want to acknowledge that or not, but it's usually blamed on outside factors, not just the constant chaos of capitalism.

Again, this is why we have the podcast. Capitalism, baby. Yeah. I can't think of a better system, so I'm not going to sit here and say that it's one way or the other. It's what we have. But there are certain aspects of different philosophies that do sound very appealing. Well, and not ever to say that capitalism is wrong, and it's something that should be outlawed. But I think that we can all agree that there's improvements that we can make to capitalism to make it work better for,

everybody. There's things we can take from capitalism to merge into a new thing along with multiple other things and just be like, isn't this better for everyone? Like, why are we just, yeah, it's not wondering. Conscious capitalism sounds like a real great system. So, communism, you know, when it first happened, we talked about this a little bit before, it had to be in wealthy advanced countries. He thought it was going to happen in Great Britain or Germany because they had these massive factories that were full of angry workers. And instead, the times that we do get communism and being implemented. It's in poor farming countries

which forced the leaders of those countries to rewrite Marx's rules about communism. So what they basically did, I feel like, is Lenin kind of had like, he like ripped out, like he had the first like chapter of Marx's theory where he talks about how good it's going to be. And then like the instructions of how to get there,

Marx was like, or Lenin was like, hey, I need you to just kind of like, rip out the middle section here and install a bunch of blank pages and then I'm just going to fill a bunch of shit in and then leave the stuff at the end where everyone's like super fucking happy as long as they played along with this and then that's what I'm going to do and then Mao was kind of the same thing. They're just like yeah, what he did just do that except I'm going to write it my own way. We're not going to write exactly what he wrote and we're going to do it the way I want to do it. But make sure the end of it keeps the happily ever after thing as long as everybody buys into it. I'm not sure everybody's going to follow this example. I think that this might hit it right on the head, and I think you're going to appreciate this. I'm ready. Marx's idea was a red zone offense. He had 25 yards to go to score a touchdown.

He knew how to get the 25 yards because somebody else had already gotten the other 75 yards. Soviet communism... You're saying the 75 yards was the industrialization and the infrastructure of the country that was going to happen. Gotcha. So his offense is to take it from the red zone into the end zone. They did 75% of the work.

They supplied 75% of the materials for this to happen. Well, communism traditionally is popping up that we have today. They're starting on like their own 10. Yeah, with the backup quarterback. Yeah, they've moved themselves up to about the 50 and nothing is fixing it. So they call in Stefan, or they call in Jenikowski. And he walks up there and he boots a 60-yarder. And he hits a field goal.

It's effective. It puts points on the board. Is it a touchdown? Not even close. Not even halfway to a touchdown. But at the same time, they still reached a level of where they're putting points on the board. Or the perception of points on the board. Yeah.

Points for who? Well, I mean, communist societies are still around today. So it's not like they don't work completely. They're just massively oppressive. Hold on. But is it then it's not Marxist communism? it's Putin's communism or whatever it is or it's uh, fuck white, Mao?

No, Mao, Pol Pot. Who's there now? Gee, Jee, Jee, Ping. Who's fucking there now? I think it's Jijing Ping. Is it Jijing Ping? Okay, so it's his version of, and again, that's like, Jiji Ping looked at it and is like,

fuck that capitalism thing is good. We need to do that. And he's like, but sir, everyone's behind, you know, the communism thing, he's like, all right, fuck it. I'm going to need you to rip some. some pages out of this book. Yeah.

Keep what, you know, what, uh, Mao put in there, but like rip out towards the end of it. Keep the happy shit. But I'm going to write in some stuff too. The capitalism is good, too. And so we'll just do a combination of it. I also think that I'm saying this just from the hip. Chinese, because I believe he's councilman, Xi Jinping. Okay.

So there's like a Chinese council, a board that sits at the head of everything. Like minister or something like that. Yeah. So he's president. Even though there is a dictator in Xi Jinping. President. There's a Chinese council that is kind of the one that controls everything within the society. Based on what he tells them.

Yeah. It's the perception of a representation. I don't think there's a Russian council. I think it's just Pouty and then everything that falls below him with his oligarchs and all the leaders and everything. It's not Pooty the Blowfish? No. So yeah, he's like, man, I hope this happens in Great Britain or Germany and not Russia or China. Not an agrarian society.

Or civil war China. not something that has to be found almost through revolution. Yeah, we can't have this start from scratch. There's got to be a lot of groundwork played before this is even possible. So Lenin realizes Russia doesn't have enough factory workers to start a revolution. So basically he's like factory workers, peasants, I'm just going to use the peasants instead. Same, same. So he creates a small army of like professional revolutionaries that are called the Vanguard.

I think Stalin was part of that, right? Yes. Sure. Maybe. Yes or no. I think yes. There's no way of not. knowing to basically rule the country from the top down so he's like okay hey what i'm going to do

is we're going to get some like pros that are going to know what the peasants want and then at that point we'll just go ahead and rule so what this did is it creates a powerful authoritarian dictatorship rather than a shared society where everyone was equal so he was just basically like we're going to have this group of professional government which that's what it was in the first place right there was already that council when he came in. Well, in order to get to Lenin, you had to have the,

as far as the revolution goes, you had to have the abolishment of the monarchy. The Romanov's getting the boot, finally. And then you would have to have a second revolution after that because this was a temporary society that was still involved in World War I. And the rest of the peasants were like, we don't want to fight a war anymore.

We've got to settle this shit at home. We're tired of it. fucking dying. So you have a second revolution that takes place after the annexation of the monarchy. So Romanov's out, temporary kind of like council type situation, multiple, yeah. Then after that, it was the revolution. From not wanting to be at war anymore. Correct.

So the Bolsheviks won that. Bolsheviks are in power. Then there's the civil war in which the Bolsheviks win against the like combined efforts of the old monarchists, the socialists, and then somebody else. I can't remember. Not to give Lenin any credit because he doesn't deserve any credit, but would you want to transition into an everybody's cool and this is a communist society after you just had to fight a civil war

to try to hold on to things? Well, and here's the thing. What Mao had the advantage of is he saw how it kind of worked in Russia. And he was like, okay, shit, I need to alter this because it didn't work very well with them using peasants. and we're also an agricultural country. So he basically makes like rural farmers rather than like city workers, the heroes of the Chinese Revolution.

He just switches that over. And then later on China basically is like, okay, what we're going to do is we're going to keep the government, but the economy is going to be a capitalist economy. So we're just, we're taking this and, you know, we're taking the other thing that we like. We're just going to have it be both ways.

So we got a lot of exports. Yeah. So again, Marx's goal is for the government to a, eventually fade away completely. This would be a long time for this to happen. I'm not sure. I didn't go far enough into Marx's work to really grasp how long he kind of predicted this would take. That's for a Marx episode.

But again, every country that tried communism in the 1900s ended up creating a larger, more controlling government with secret police and basically total control over daily life. But it somehow still has the name of communism. Well, and it's, this is the argument of Swazka's a Buddhist symbol. Communism was a Marxist ideal. Yes. And then it was co-opted by a Lenin. It was co-opted by a Mao. And this is what we have is communism now.

The swastika was taken by the Nazi party and turned into what it is now. You know what this is? This is when a director films a movie. And it's his magnum opus. It is his masterpiece. And it's great because it's exactly what everybody wants out of that director. And then the studio watches it. And they're like, you got to cut an hour out of this.

And he's like, the fuck. Everything in this movie supports everything else. It has to be shown like this. This is how I intended to be shown. They're like, fuck you. You're under contract. Cut the hour. And he's pissed off.

He ends up turning in the movie. Critics aren't crazy about it. Story doesn't make a lot of sense. But then a couple of years later, he releases that cut. And everyone's like, fuck me. This is perfect. How is this not shown? theaters. Communism, it's never had the directors cut. It's never had how Marx wrote the script

or shot the movie. No one has seen that. It never will. No, no, I know. Because again, this is, this was something designed at a specific time in history where that was the front and center issue. I'm not saying that worker mistreatment, that still is a fucking front and center issue. But there's been this creation of so many fabricated issues that you can't see what the real ones are.

Yeah, you're fighting on a macro scale when the micro is killing you slowly. And it's a situation where we've done all of this laying out of Marxist communism and everything up to this point to go into an episode that

all of that stuff is very important. for the baseline, but Marxist communism isn't the beast that they were fighting during the Red Scare. No, it's the example that is stamped with the word that is using the term communism. By authoritarian regimes. Yes. So everything that we talked about is very important just to kind of lay up why communism was something that was co-opted because it was something that sounded good to people that

were disenfranchised. Yeah. I guess, yeah, disenfranchised. And then it was a situation where the guy that was sort of running the coup decided that he liked what he had and wasn't going to dissolve the state and handed over to the people. What was the, so you had the national, sorry, nationalist. What was the National Socialist Workers Party? It was the National Socialist Workers Party, right? Yeah.

Was there another name in there? But National Democratic Socialist Workers Party. It had names that countered each other, remember? And then they would just make the name larger with whoever they were actually meeting with. So if you were meeting with the workers, you'd make the workers the prevalent thing. Communism is one of those things where it was exactly, it was named for the fact of being communal, for living on it like a commune. Everyone being working together.

And then because that sounded good and that's what they sold it as, somehow people were still believing it until all of a sudden now there's a dictator. And they're like, well, why is there? I thought in coming. There's like, no, you guys mustook what communism was. Did you guys all read, have all you peasants read marks before no? I'll tell you what he meant. Yeah, that's the big problem is everybody couldn't read.

So the manifesto, if it wasn't read to you and you didn't know how to read, you just kind of had to go by what the smarter guy was telling you. And can you believe what a flex? So you know sometimes like when you'll see on TV They're like have you ever read anything by Marx before And they're like yeah And they're like oh so you read that stuff about the territory And he's like no that's not what are you describing Have you read Marx before and they're like no and you're like

Yeah none of that's in there They want to take your guns Marks is a big proponent for guns Yeah he didn't mind guns In fact guns were one of the ways that they were able to take over the means of production It becomes a boogeyman because as this Russian revolution is happening, taking place in 1917, kind of towards the tail end of World War I, the USA is this mix of patriotism and anarchy and what's perceived as left-wing social agitation and this heavy immigration that's just aggravating all of these tensions inside the United States. and left-wing social aggression gets kind of conflated with all of these strikes that are happening in these factories and the goings-on.

They need a reason to try to blame all this agitation on something, and it couldn't just be because the workers are tired of getting fucked over, right? No, no. There has to be somebody that... Oh, someone's got to be pulling the strings, because guess what? Those workers have no fucking right to be upset about their 16-hour work days. And they're no days off and they're lost limbs. Because you know what?

They should be happy that they have a goddamn job. But if they are unhappy, it's because someone's feeding that to them. They're weird, propagandist, communist ideas. And that's a fear. Yeah. It's like we're worried that European immigrants are going to bring these communists and anarchists. Again, they had to package those together because if they were just like, they're going to bring their communist ideas to the United States. And they're like, well, like, what kind of, and they're saying this.

it's the fucking Leninist, communist it is, because that's what they can point to and say, see, that's what communism looks like. And no one's going to go, I mean, who wrote it, though? They're like, this guy named Carl Marx. They're like, do you have his book?

Like, no, we don't allow people to read it because it contradicts everything we're trying to make people believe. Yeah, you have this fear of this Bolshevik revolution at home that puts people on edge. Part of the reason it's putting people on edge is because there's news coverage of these labor strikes. and by 1919, these labor strikes had increased to record levels.

They're happening all over the country. So it's not even like there's a worker strike that's happening in New York and you're not going to find out about it in Indiana. There's worker strikes in Indiana that you're finding out about because they're that close. The news isn't all a world or a fully national thing yet, but there's enough of these strikes happening in these areas to where everybody's seeing the news coverage. And as far as that news coverage is happening, the media. is portraying these radical threats to American society. These left-wing provocateurs are the ones that are running these social agitation, these strikes that are going on.

And mostly these workers are just fighting for more fair and equal treatment in their fields of work. No more thumbs. No more thumbs. We keep our thumbs! Prior to that, you have the passing of the Espionage Act in 1917. It gets challenged in court in 1919 by a guy named Charles Schnee. and a couple others, they were distributing flyers to draft age men, just urging them to resist being drafted into the military,

and they end up being charged under this espionage act. And SCOTUS rules that they weren't protected by the First Amendment. The right that everybody looks to for free speech, the reason that they weren't protected was because the espionage point to these acts with the intent to prohibit any interference with military operations, recruitment, to prevent insubordination in the military, and to not support enemies of the United States during wartime. So SCOTUS can interpret the Espionage Act in a way to where handing out pamphlets to resist a draft isn't protected under the First Amendment.

And this is how they rule. There's a string of bombings. There is a string of bombings. There is a is a plot that includes a targeted attack on the Attorney General Mitchell Palmer. We talked about this during the Jay Edgar Hoover episode. This explosion accidentally kills the bomber instead of blows up the house and blows up Mitchell. But at this point in time, Palmer begins these Palmer raids that took place from 1919 to 1921. So these, okay, I'm going to tell you my thought process. you tell me if it's crazy. You think the communists

bombed people in the government to try to get the workers to rise up to overthrow the government. So you're trying to make the government out, these guys are trying to make the government out to be sympathetic figures because you attack them with a bomb,

could have injured their families, and that's how you're going to build up a support system within a country to try to promote communism. Or it could have been the anarchists that were doing it, because that's just anarchy. It's in their name. It's right there in the fucking name.

So these palmer raids are used as an excuse, again, because there has to be a fucking boogeyman, right? Yeah. And what's scarier than anarchy? Communism, right? So their goal on these raids is to arrest and deport foreign-born workers who are suspected of being radical communist, anarchists, and

socialist. I don't know how socialist or communists are thrown in there. Because ain't bombing shit. At the same time, those are, we just saw how the revolution Yeah, they have an ist on the name. That's, if anything with an ist on the name

you're going to go after? Well, a revolution that just took place in Russia. And they were revolutionary communists, so all communists must be revolutionists. I, yeah, I mean, they're in a pretty precarious situation where they just saw one country fall. And then the socialists are just like, you guys understand we're like the second step of communism, right? We're not really a thing. It's kind of like stages. We're not really with them. We're to a different part of that. But 6,000 people get labeled as these leftists, anarchists, labor activists.

They're told, you guys are bad. You're trying to. improve workers' lives, but we're going to take it as trying to take down the leaders of capitalism. And I mean, the timing of this, when it happens, is at the same time, like four million American workers had gone on strike for better pay, shorter hours, shit that we're still fighting for today that unions fucking fight for. And this is again, this is where a lot of this stuff comes from as well. The government and media, again, blames this on foreign radicals. I don't know how, you know, where would that's not used all the time right um and then when palmer decides to launch this massive crackdown who does he bring in to lead up the information gathering on these radical groups hoover a young

hot shot 24 year old j edgar hoover um yeah he's brought in together information and this is kind of where he gets his start um on november 7th 1919 and january 2nd 1920 feral agents and local police had swept through like over 30 cities across the country and focusing heavily on Russian of course Italian and Eastern European immigrants and as they're busten into homes meeting

halls because there were places where immigrants would gather together there were examples that they gave where it was like we used like these town and these meeting halls because it was hard for these guys to learn English it was hard for them to learn reading for math so we would have someone that knew this stuff

that could speak their language and people would come classes at these places. But you get these raids where they're smashing into this, and they're going through literally anything and everything to find what they would consider subversive materials. Anything that they thought could be even a whisper of fucking communism or anything like that were these subversive materials. They're smashing furniture, beating the shit out of people, arresting anyone

suspected of having any radical political ideas, even if they had done nothing wrong. and during those sweeps, over 10,000 people are arrested. Doing those two fucking dates. So they had 6,000 people that they labeled for basically arrest for being labor activists and anarchists and all this stuff.

They sweep 10,000 people up. So clearly that list had grown quite a bit. And a majority of these people that they're taking into custody aren't seeing judges. They're not given determinate sentences. They're not being held on charge. They're just being held for an indeterminate amount of time until something changes.

But buddy, they're being put in like camps. Basically these overcrowded freezing jail cells for days or weeks without being allowed to talk to a lawyer or other families. Huh. The government ends up deporting more than 500 foreign citizens during just those raids and stemming. Because guess what? They went through and they didn't have anything on all the other people. All this shit had been like cooked up. so Palmer claimed he'd uncovered this massive plot to overthrow the government on May 1st 1920

it's going to happen it's going down on Mayday and when that day came and went nothing happened completely peaceful and at that point they realized and were on to the fact that Palmer had kind of exaggerated what the actual threat level was so you get these prominent like private lawyers citizens start speaking now arguing that the government had completely ignored the Constitution by denying all of these people that they swept up, fair trials, searching homes without warrants. Because again, that was 10,000 people brought in. That was people that they busted in their house, tors it up, and literally could not find anything because there was nothing to find. So you had a lot of these instances.

And in response to these massive, like abuses by the government, a group of activists actually forms this little thing called the ACLU. So the American Civil Liberties Union is founded in 1920 to protest people's constitutional rights from the government. I apologize. I've really met cotton mill, so I don't know if that sounds weird. You have a situation where the Palmer raids are hitting the United States in such a way to where even the government is arguing about who has the right to deport. You have President Wilson signing a Sedition Act in 1918 before the Palmer raids even get kicked off. This is limiting the exercise of free speech by criminalizing language that's deemed disloyal to the U.S. government. Now, I would have to say... That's sounding a little bit like England.

Can't speak against the king. It's truly a situation where we... Whenever nowadays, if somebody gets criticized or if somebody gets arrested or anything like that, They said, oh, there's never been an attack on free speech like this. In 1918, they criminalized language that was deemed disloyal to the government. It criminalized being able... Yeah, they say a lot of things now, buddy, that people don't... Like, here's the deal.

That happened back in, like, 1918. That's why I love doing this, man. I really like doing this for these episodes because, man, we forget shit. And of course we do. Because guess what? not everybody are fucking history nerds like us and want to kind of learn about this shit and everything. Most people can't remember shit from 25 years ago or anything

or kids that are growing up. This is all first time that this kind of stuff is happening. So when somebody says that's on the TV or on the fucking screen in front of them, there's never been an attack like this on the First Amendment. They're like, oh shit, I guess there hasn't been. Because like they wouldn't lie or anything like that. But you learn about stuff like this. And history is just a repeated

playbook that is used at certain times and you got to wait until it cools off sometimes. You got to wait a certain like, I like to compare it to, this is going to be the nerdiest shit. There's a book in D&D that you can read and it gives you stat increases. It's like a huge, but then you can't use it again for 100 years. So imagine it being something like this where it's like... Human years? Huh? Human years?

Yes, human years. Okay. Everything usually operates on the same time scale. Okay. But what I'm saying is, you have this, it gets a little bit too hot. You got to wait for people to forget it a little bit, and then you can pull out the old plays again. Yeah. Yeah, it's, I mean, America should be, the United States should be Apple Pie, baseball,

in criticizing the government. Those should be kind of the three core tenets of what this country is built on, which I'm pretty sure. My goddamn bumper sticker says. Apple Pie probably should be German. and being dis- It was a strudel we made in a square pan. Being critical of the government

feels like something that's happened. That's the most American, out of all things, is that's what, that's why people fucking moved here is because they're like, yeah, I can talk shit about the people that are making Lawsonry. Fantastic.

This is also where Jay Edgar gets to use his work during the raids to build up what's called the Bureau of Investigation. Shocker, this becomes the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Also, if you've not listen to the episode on this shipbird

that is Hoover. Go do that after this episode. He basically spends the next several decades tracking and monitoring civil rights leaders. It's like 50 more years. It's like 60 more years after this. Several decades. I mean, several can mean a lot.

I can't say multiple because that could be two. Yeah. Many decades. Many, many, many decades. A lifetime. A lifetime. Civil rights leaders, anti-war activists, and political radicals. Or who he did. these people.

So, are we, like, second Red Scare time? No, we still, 19, 19, 20, you have the criminal syndicism, or syndicism laws. We're going to go with that.

They were enacted that outlawed advocacy for violence in affecting and securing social change. Now, this isn't something that I would necessarily push back on. I don't think you should advocate violence for social change. I think we should be a society.

that's evolved far enough to be able to not have to use... A room of fucking grown-ups? There is a clear and present danger test that's used... I still think orcas. You don't see orcas fucking doing this shit. No.

I still think that they were just like, we got to an evolutionary point, and it was like, is it going to be humans or orcas? And so when we started moving, the land species just didn't get smarter. Now the orcas are just trapped in water. And so at this point,

now they're just like, should we just start, sinking their boats. I think orcas still attack sharks just to eat their livers. So they're... They're not killing other orcas. Yeah, true. There was this use during Schnech versus the U.S.

that was deemed the, or called the clear and present danger test. And basically what this is, is it says both the sedition and the espionage acts are constitutional, because they pass the test of are these things that are being outlawed a clear and present danger to society? So if there is something that presents a clear and present danger to society, we will deem them constitutional. This test is kind of the law of the land for things for the next 50 years that determine these limits on the First Amendment protections. So you have a situation where we have 50 years of road on First Amendment questions that are determined by this single test of the government deeming something is a clear and present danger to society, which... That's a lot of interpretation.

Yeah. And the government clearly isn't going to say, oh, well, I mean, saying that you're going to harm the government or being critical. to the government could cause an uprising, and an uprising would be dangerous to society, so therefore it's not upheld by the First Amendment. It took so long for things to change, and we didn't really have a major gap between these first and second red scares.

The second red scare kind of starts in 1930. There's this Republican congressman named Hamilton Fish. Before we get in, the second one, let's take a bathroom break. Oh, okay. Well, hello. Listen, while we head to the restroom and get ourselves something to drink, why don't you do something nice for yourselves? Head on over to patreon.com slash historically high and get signed up for a little bonus content. I mean, come on, you deserve it.

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You can hit us up on our email at historically high podcast, H-I-G-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-ROTC at g-Mail. All right, and with that said, let's get back to the good stuff. Okay, we're talking fish. Hamilton Fish. Hamfish? Yeah, hamfish. 1930 Republican Congressman Hamilton Fish

introduces House Revolution or House Resolution 180 It establishes this committee to investigate communist activities inside the United States This is a forerunner to something We're going to be talking pretty heavily About later on

That's called the Committee of Un-American Activities Not even fucking Like imagine it if not even original Well we need more creativity in the government We liked it. People do American activities. Can I get one of those nameless beverages that will be named once they give us a sponsorship? Tea or Sparkle?

Oh, the blue one. Okay. Basically, this committee, this fish committee investigates people and organizations suspected of being involved in whatever communist activities are in the United States. Subversive activities. Yeah. They targeted the 1920 formed ACLU that you were just talking about. And then communist presidential candidate William Foster. Didn't get a whole lot of run as a communist presidential candidate.

That's what I'm saying. You could have just kept it going after he didn't get any traction and be like, no. Like if you want to run it back, run it back and you'll just lose again. And then we'll just let you guys peter out on your own. You're just going to keep failing. Doesn't it feel like that? Like, the fear of communism. Like, at some point, it's just like, you talk a lot of shit about it, but like, are you scared to fight it?

Like, you haven't given it a chance to fail yet. You just told me how bad it is instead of letting me watch it and fail. If it's so shitty, it'll be entertaining to watch it earn. Do that. I'm scared of the high dive because you haven't let me jump off of it. But the caveat is, you got to run that O-EGy. G. Mark's shit. You got to run it by the book, and guess what?

Likely to fail, because there's a lot more people now. There's a 99.9% chance that this is going to shit the bed. Yes. But you haven't given us the chance to watch it shit the bed. Leave no doubt. Leave no doubt. Yeah, let us see it with our own eyes. The Fish Committee's findings were, I don't know, I would say.

Had they gone bad? Their recommendations were, to grant the DOJ more authority to strengthen immigration and deportation laws to keep commies out of the country. So their recommendation is just to make everything harder. Catch and release? I don't think a whole lot of that stuff's going on. This one's pretty interesting. 1934 to 1937, you have the McCormick Dixstein Committee.

This becomes the Committee of Un-American Activities like we were talking about. We will call them Whoack, probably, because that's a fucking long- committee to say the house or house unamerican committee is basically what huac is it's the dickstein committee well dickstein plays a pretty interesting role here

uh huac is tasked with investigating both far right and far left activity in the country so i'm glad that we're talking about fascism now in the 30s especially after 34 because the h man's in we have musilini

that's going so we need to look at the far right just as much as the far left because fascism's taken hold. McCormick and Dickstein held public office or held public and private hearings and they collected more than 3,400 pages of testimony. They subpoenaed most of the leaders of the fascist movement in the United States. They also questioned them about this alleged fascist plot to seize the White House. It was known as the business plot. And they didn't really get beyond thinking that it was just some half-cooked idea that went through this fascist party that was in the United States. You know what it is most likely? And again, I'm not sticking up for this. This is when you are

so focused and fearful of something that literally has zero power in your country. Yeah. Like, when you're coming across that fearful, you're just like, no, our system is pretty fucking good. Like, it can handle this shit. So just let it handle it. Yeah. This fascism thing comes off of a conversation that a guy heard where two guys were talking over a fucking drink. And they were just like, so how would we like how like what do we have to like overthrow like the White House or anything like that? And if you really stop to think about that, you're just like, so you're just going to attack the White House and then you're going to rule the country? Like there's not the remote for the country in the White House. Yeah, just because just because you take the white.

It's not like a capture the flag. But that's what I'm saying. When you spend two seconds, given that some critical thought, it's just like, oh, so there was a plot to try to cause some anarchic, to cause some chaos. But realistically, like, were you guys hoping to kind of, like, steal the China? That's what it amounts to, right? Yeah, it's, I mean, I've never committed a murder if I had a conversation about how I would do it. But it's terrifying, like, communist plot to attack the White House. Oh, no, this was a fascist plot.

Oh, okay. This was on the far right side of things. Might as well have been, though, right? Now, the biggest problem with the McCormack Dixstein Committee is it turns out that Dixstein was an NKDV plant. That was the precursor to the KGB. That was the precursor to the KGB, correct as I remember? Correct. He was paying.

That's going to hurt its credibility a little bit. Did they have to rename it after that? I think that's when they went to the Un-American Committee. Well, this wasn't found out until many years later, but he was being. paid to hand order all these secret congressional pieces of information up until 1940. So you had a guy that was on the House Un-American Committee, and you couldn't root out... It was doing the most un-American thing. You couldn't root out that this guy was a communist. You were trying to stop these people from infiltrating the country, and you couldn't even figure

out that the guy that was running the Un-American Committee was an NKVD plant. You know what that is? That's the, oh my God, I don't know, it just passed across my feed today. There's a scene off of it's called the musket fuck which one is it it's not through musket oh it's uh man in the iron mask i think and has like the depiction of the musketeers and it's like john malcovitch is one of um jeremy irons and he's like i've been tasked with finding the leader of the jesuits and they're like oh it's a big job it's gonna be difficult and he's like i in the leader like this guy's in that position he's like so you hired the russian plant to find the russian plants yeah he was just hiding in plain sight. He couldn't have been sitting at a better position to pass back all of

this information. But at that point, I mean, are we even at war with Russia, right? This is the most beautiful shit about this. And I'm going to be so happy talking about this later on. 1938, Huac falls under the purview of Texas Democrat Martin Dyes Jr. Now, he wasn't an NKVD plant, so we are already making steps in the right direction. Okay, good to hear. Um, Huac was charged with the investigation of alleged disloyalty and subversive behaviors of private citizens, public employees, and organizations with communist and fascist ties. This mostly focused on the communists. And we're so much closer to World War II and fascism being the big threat.

That's what I'm saying. That should be the concern. Why is that? Is that going to be on the next board? Did you just leave me with the... Okay, thank God. Because I was like, I need Nancy. answer to this. Because that's insane, right? What is currently sweeping, what is taken over Italy,

and what has taken over, here's the thing, though, did we ever think Italy was a threat? No, they never really were, because Mussolini was a dipshit. Did we think also? This is also going through the Depression, right? Yeah. So we're not paying attention. Do we really think the defeated former Weimar Republic, Germany, is a threat at this point? No, we slapped the Germans last time we went up again. So for us, because fascism has the definition to it now, back then it was the name of their movement, the Fassie, this bundle of what rods over a hatchet or something like that, that was just the name of the movement, which had been

unproven at that point. And we're just like, oh, this, you know, fucking spaghetti lover in fucking Italy, Mussolini, he's doing his thing. That doesn't seem to be an issue. We're going through our own shit back home and Hitler is, what's Hitler going to do? They got nothing in Germany right now. Their economy is shit. We stopped paying them. We stopped giving them money. They have no money. They were getting it from us. So what can they do? And so I guess with Russia seemingly doing okay or still being a functional nation, they were like, that's the threat. It's the communism. Well, they turn inward. And part of this is I can't help but think

I mean this is truly attacking different parts of the new deal and what FDR did to try to discredit them or point them to FDR was pulling some communist shit to try to get our country back on track because one of the first victims

of the Dyes led Huac was the leader of the federal theater project her name was Hallie Flanagan she was subpoenaed by the committee to answer questions theater theater is a communist agenda

dancing around acting like somebody else yeah I mean it's it's a crazy thing to point that out just be like yeah so we're going to need you to answer questions related to your project we believe that your project is being overrun by communists

the federal theater project is going to be overrun by communists I can see ballet they're great yeah because that is such a prominent thing. No, in Russia, though. Like the Russian ballet.

I think this is where it was invented. Man, do you think ballet, oh, during the Red Scare ballet had to take such a hit? Yeah, we were probably getting other Eastern European ballet dancers. It just wasn't quite the same. She was, this shit's incredible. So she was asked by this representative Joe Starns of Alabama. Don't have anything against Alabama, but this is right down your guy. This man is not a.

Great representation. He asked if playwright Christopher Marlowe was a Communist Party member. Now, if you remember all the way back to our Shakespeare episode, Christopher Marlowe was a writer before and during Shakespeare's time. He was a Victorian playwright. Communism wasn't founded as a party in the way that we know it now. Gotcha. Until 1919.

Because it hadn't been created. So we're talking centuries prior to this, and this guy just asked a theater director if Christopher Marlowe, the playwright that was dead for 150 years before communism began a thing. You know, we can track it back to Marx at the earliest, right? That's when it became a thing. So you're telling me that the man that was dead, possibly 100 years prior to Marx, or at least a few decades, he was not a communist. You're like, he wouldn't know what to call it, I guess.

I don't know what the guys ideals were, but like, yeah. Not really a thing that anybody could have heard about back then. But it's shit like that to where they're trying to perform these serious committees. They're asking dumb fucking questions. The questioning to me, did you ever watch any of the Johnny Depp Amber Heard trial or the highlights? I had to tap out. Okay, I get it. I didn't watch the whole thing, but I caught some highlights because there's some funny shit that happens.

One of the things is... Pooh in the bed. And then Johnny Depp was cutting up cocaine with his own driver's license. I believe so. He's pretty, he's pretty adamant. He's just like, yeah, I was doing that. But no, the herd's lawyer was talking to him. And then you poured yourself a megapint.

And then he just kind of looks at a glass. He goes, a megapoint. Like, that's what I said, oh, sorry, just brushed him. Like, that's why I sees this line of question. He's like, playwright Christopher Marlowe, eh, communist. He's like, it wasn't a thing. He was dead long before had a name. Yeah.

Oh, because his playwright, or because the playwright, Or because the plays that he wrote had some ideals that the communists used to. That the people should rise up and, like, you know, not be abused. Yeah, just because it was a century before. Weird, yeah. It's weird how, you know, a society which operates where people are treated, you know, respectively, that seems to be a desire throughout human history. He even made some dumbass crack about, like, one of the ancient Greek playwrights

being a member of the party or something to, just dumb shit. So you're supposed to be having these very serious inquiries and subpoenaing all these people. And they're just saying just the stupidest thing's possible. Can you imagine that anything they find were like the playwright or someone mentioned in passing? They're just like, man, the workers are getting really mistreated in this country. Like that's a fucking communist line is what that is. Like an observation of the mistreatment of people being mistreated as communist. They didn't know shit about industrial.

back in Marlowe's day? This is when things get real incredible and real serious because as I was talking about, we are investigating far-left and very far-right organizations. There's a pro-Nazi organizer named George Van Horn Mosley that testified for five hours, and he laid out this Jewish communist conspiracy to take control of the United States government. we let a fascist talk to a committee for five hours about a Jewish communist conspiracy

to control the U.S. government. Do you know who I would take less credit or I guess less of a great? I don't even know how to say. You would say, oh, I got the word. Who I would trust less to tell me about... Credibility. Yeah.

That's the guy that we're letting talk for five hours about communists and, Jews that he doesn't like. Hold on a second. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Okay, I'm going to ask you a question. And even as sad as the question is or as sad as the answer is going to be, I need you to give it to me honestly.

Are you ready? Yeah. Do you believe at any time within the last eight to ten years, Alex Jones was called in to talk to a committee? I mean, for his trial, yeah? No, no, I don't be as far. You're talking about in front of the government.

I mean in front of the government. Yeah, maybe there's one or two. Okay. This is just that. Hey, man, history repeats. Yeah, I guess it happened again. Turn on the frogs, day. Another thing that who I did at this point under Dyes was they produced something called the Yellow Report.

I bet you can't guess what the Yellow Report was about. I can. I won't. Okay. This is going to be off topic. Whenever you like read stuff like this, do you ever, there's a sadness to it because you'd like to imagine that this is the first time. Yeah. We're this dumb, right?

Yeah. And then by finding out that this is not the first time, we have been this dumb, you're kind of even more disappointed saddened because you're like, oh, we did this before. and we haven't learned or been smart enough to recognize when similar things are being done. For me, it's seeing stuff like this and just thinking, wow, they were so brazen about it. Nowadays, you don't see people as frequently using the term yellow for an Asian person. It still pops up. It still happens. There's still racism out there. But it was so casual.

In relation to the fever? Yeah. It was so casual back in the 40s that a government committee was calling something the Yellow Report. Not to be politically incorrect, but we've all suffered from various degrees of yellow fever before in our lives. Yeah, it depends on the right life. Carl, I found the pornography. Why is it all Asian? So the yellow report made a case for Japanese internment camps for Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor.

This is, I mean, that's, it's a sad look into our history. The fact that it was the official name of the report and it wasn't just known around the office as that. That's what's sad about it, right? Japanese American report, we couldn't have gone with that. Couldn't have done, yep. just crazy Who Act becomes a permanent committee January 3rd, 1945

in 1946 Who Act considers opening an investigation into the Ku Klux Klan. That doesn't sound terrible, but at the same time, they decide against it. And there's a representative, John E. Rankin from Mississippi. Can't believe he's about to say this.

The KKK is an old American institution. And that's why he believed that once they decided not to go into it and investigate. That's why I decided that this wasn't something to investigate. Clearly, this dude was a clan member. Wait, he said the reason is that because it's an existing or old American institution that it shouldn't be looked into.

Can't be un-American if it's an old American institution, right? Oh, Jesus. Just insane. It took 20 more years before there was an investigation into the KKK by these committees. Just so long. During World War II, we had the Soviets sign this secret Maltaf-Ribbentroft Pact of non-aggression. And this is where things get fun. Because after this pact happens, there is a shift in the CP USA, so the Communist Party USA's views, from anti-fascism to peace.

That would immediately make me very suspicious. If I'm worried about the communists and the communists hate the fascists, And now the communists are saying, hey, let's give peace a chance. Maybe there's something up. Well, here's the thing, too. You would probably pick that up a little bit had you had, depending on what level of monitoring. But it's not like they're having a fucking commie fascist picnic at the park where you're seeing them hanging out together. They're like, when did this happen?

Yeah. But you also got to imagine how much, how much commie fascist, like, violence was going down on the streets. was it just a lot of like yelling at each other when they entered the same restaurant like i you know coincidentally i'm assuming it's rallies and all that kind of things and they would show up to each other's rallies and be like hey you guys fucking suck counter protest all that kind of stuff so instead of aiming at the fascists they aim their movement towards this anti-fDR activity you are going out and trying to discredit fDR who will trying to cut the legs out from under him and the guy that is actively helping provide

war materials to the Allies at that point in time before the internet like you didn't acknowledge it yeah not even with no the cut the legs out from under FDR you got one in this stuff yeah you don't expect it coming at sleeper no that's fantastic I like that one

maybe I'm too sneaky about it yeah I hopefully somebody else caught up before I did because that was a great one once Hitler invades Russia in 1941 it turns out that the CP USA shifts the rhetoric back towards anti-fascism. It's weird how that happens.

It was weird. Like right around Barbarossa, we noticed an increase in, like, the hostility between the two groups. And you have to imagine any sort of U.S. government back then would be very pissed when the CP USA's new slogan becomes,

communism is 20th century Americanism. Probably not like that. Don't like hearing them sitting there and espouse that, communism is Americanism in the 20th century. The United States now aligned with its former enemy

that are investigating for the last 24 years, there's a change of pace in things. Call it a feeling in the air. And instead of... You have Hollywood that instead of producing any anti-communist product

or any anti-communist propaganda is now making films portraying Stalin in Russia and the Soviet Union as this great place. Is this wonderful place because they are our allies? No shit. We had to start. We called him Uncle

fucking Joe in newspapers and everything like that. Here is the fucking double-edged sword of fucking propaganda. You want to sit here and say you need to have the public behind one of the worst people in human history. And then

afterward, when he ends up being the worst, one of the worst people in human history, you still look like you're fucking tied to him. But somehow, people are just like, oh, he's bad now? Because you're telling us he wasn't bad the whole time. Oh, he just like turned into a villain. You don't just explain like, no, here's what actually happened. Folks, guess what? We had to get in bed with this, with the devil in order to go ahead and win this thing.

Is that what everyone wants to hear? Because that's the truth. Yeah. And it's bad guy, good guy, back to bad guy. And so you're like, well, hold on, how Stalin good and communism bad? Because Stalin is communism. And so they're sitting there like, uh, tell us what you want us to think. Yeah.

Keep that in mind that the U.S. government was pressuring Hollywood to make pro-S. Soviet movies because it's going to come back around and some questioning a little bit later on. we are going to take a little break from Huac here for a second because we have to introduce the shit star of this whole episode Joseph Raymond McCarthy Joseph Raymond McCarthy is born November 14th, 1908 outside of Appleton, Wisconsin. I believe Appleton, Wisconsin is Harry Houdini,

his birthplace as well. He was a failed chicken choker or chicken farmer. He did that on purpose or was that a Freudian slip? Well, he might have choked more. a few chickens if we're going to get into some lore of McCarthy later on. He ends up graduating with a law degree from Marquette. He paid his way through law school as just this degenerate gambler. Love playing poker.

Love playing cards. He would be admitted to the Wisconsin Bar in 1935. He runs a tremendously unsuccessful campaign for DA. He runs as a Democrat in 1936. He got admitted to the bar in 1935 and he looks at what to do for a job. He's like, DA, next year. Very next year, I'm going after the DA. He absolutely gets crushed in 1936.

He licks his wounds for three years, private practice. In 1939, he runs for the elected post to the 10th Circuit Court. Judge, he ends up beating this incumbent Edgar Werner. He becomes the youngest circuit judge in the state's history. And in doing so, the reason why he says that he wins this is because he, drove around to every constituent, every voting constituent in the area. And he went up to their farms and he knocked on their doors and he shook their hands and he had an honest conversation about what kind of a judge he plans to be.

It didn't have Dick to do with the fact that when he was campaigning, Werner, the guy that he was campaigning against was 66 years old. He was telling everybody that Warner was 73 years old. He said that he was too old to do his job. There was a docket that was backed up a mile long of people not getting serviced by their judge to get their rulings in their court cases or anything like that. And in truth, not a lie. He was definitely not seven years older than he was.

But at the same time, he was pretty slow. He wasn't great. He wasn't really ruling. A lot of the rulings that he was rendering were getting changed in the higher courts of Wisconsin. He was still, he was one of those guys that's like he wasn't aware that certain laws had been changed. He was still operating on like whatever penal code was literally. 10, 15 years prior. 66 is still, in my opinion, like, yeah.

I think that's a sweet spot. I think once you hit 70, we got to start having a conversation. But 66 is, is a judge? I'm saying is a judge if you've seen 40 years of cases or 30 years of cases? I get that you're arguing the argument of experience. Yeah. I'm saying that you risk when you're that old of losing touch of certain things.

The pulse of. Yes. Yeah, I mean, you're working. working on case law, you're working off of statutes and all of these other things, but... Give me 50. You put in a solid 25, 30 years of solid lawyering. I think that's probably... And then also being a judge a little bit. I think that's the sweet spot where you have enough experience. I agree with that. He wasn't the worst judge. He was pretty fast in his rulings. One of the things, and I, I mean, I'm not going to give on this. Just do really any credit beyond this.

but in cases of divorce, they said that the number one thing that he always had in mind during a ruling was what was best for the children. I mean, that's the one thing that you want to hear about a judge that's handling divorces. Yeah.

Is that he has the children's best interest in mind. Also, at the same time, he runs into a situation that won't be the last in his life where he's censured in 1941 for losing evidence in a price-fixing case. That feels a bit convenient, right? Mm-hmm.

You're dealing with a price-fixing case. somebody who is very rich and powerful is being sued, and some of that evidence just seems to go missing. Well, yeah, I mean, because the price fixing, the reason that you would price fix is so you can gouge and make more money, so the person that had been price gouging had a bunch of extra money in which they could turn around and use that money to make evidence go away. A judge.

Pay a judge. Not saying that that happened. I'm just saying it's easy to work away to that conclusion. Joe had higher aspirations in his life than just being the circuit judge. And in talking to some of his other judge friends, we are in the heat of World War II. Joe is told... Well, he was told... Club judge.

It'll brighten his star if he goes and he fights and he becomes a war hero. So in 1942, Joe enlists in the Army, despite having what's a judicial exemption, like, you're a necessary part of society. we don't need you going over and fighting. He waives that exemption. He ends up joining the Marines as a first lieutenant. He serves as an intelligence officer for this dive bomber squadron that's working in the Solomon Islands in Bougainville. Yeah.

No idea where that is. It's got to be probably down there by the Solomon Islands. I'm just so. Yeah. He works there for two and a half years. And Joe volunteers for some flight combat missions as this gun observer and most of the time that he spends in the air,

they're not under any fire. There was one occasion where they went out where they allowed him to fire the gun and he supposedly still holds the record for the most rounds fired in one flight and he was just basically spraying coconut trees. He wasn't going after any enemies. Fuck them trees.

There was... Because they weren't flying him anywhere where there were enemies. So there was one mission that he was up there observing when they actually took fire, but that was the closest they did ever come to combat in World War II. He gets these 12 missions done. After the war is over, he ends up lying and saying that he flew 32 missions, because 32 missions under your belt qualifies you for the Distinguished Flying Cross and other air medals. So he receives the Distinguished Flying Cross, he receives these other air medals.

He also comes home with this war wound because he said that during one of these missions when they were attacked in the air, he took a piece of shrapnel and it broke his leg. And so he's a war veteran with this injury. Now, Joe lied about this story because as they were doing the celebration of crossing the equator, Joe jumped down from a ladder. And when he landed on the ground, he snapped his leg. So this war wound that he got in a dog fight turned out to be him jumping off of a ladder on the ship and landing on the ship and snapping his leg. Did no one never, when was this found out?

When was this discovered after he was. A whole lot of people that came back that had stories that were not lining up with some of Joe's claims. What I'm wondering is, was this ever proven? Yeah. So he got checked, because you would have a trapnel scar there. You could also have a surgical scar

depending on how they had to reset the leg. Correct, but what if you didn't have surgery to reset it? They were just able to do that. Well, there's only maybe a select few men that could have seen his leg later on in life. Yeah. But they said that he intermittently walked around with a limp and did a whole lot of things to play up this injury.

And again, later in life, he gets checked by quite a few guys that were at war saying there's no way that this story could be true. Yeah. Same thing with the 32 mission. and the Distinguished Flying Cross, they basically called him a stolen valor king, basically.

So he comes back with this moniker of Tail Gunner Joe. And Tail Gunner Joe has his sights set on a run for the Senate. Now, when he was still enlisted and over in 1944, he had run for Senate. He had run for a seat in the U.S. Senate and ended up not even, making it out of the primary. I mean, I believe it's probably pretty hard to run an election, or to run a campaign from being overseas fighting. But at the same time, you are...

That's what lets me know that he didn't do dick. Yeah. You could run a fucking political campaign. You had the resources to where you had the ability to communicate with people constantly to get a message out there to do stuff like that. Like, that tells me right there and I'm not trying to discount. fuck, I hate this guy so fucking much that I don't even give a shit. This guy's a horrible human being. He was a piece of shit. Yeah, he's full of shit. He had all this time to do that over there.

It's pretty amazing that he was, he found the time. This time, though, he campaigned as a Republican. So, Wisconsin was a state where being a Republican was just going to be a leg up. They were a red state. Gotcha.

Excuse me at that point in time. McCarthy would end up leaving the Marines, Not McCarthy. Oh, it is McCarthy. Yeah. McCarthy would end up leaving the Marines in April of 45, I believe,

before the Pacific War was over. He runs again in 1946, and this time he defeats three-term Senator Robert Lafoyette Jr. In the primary, on the Republican side, and ends up going

through and just smoking the dem in the election. He becomes a junior senator of Wisconsin. Now, Lafellette, the guy that he was running against, one of his big campaign pushes was that Lafellette was a war profiteer because he was making investments and basically profiting off of the booming stock market. At a time when McCarthy was doing the exact same thing and actually made more money, but there's questions as to where McCarthy's funding was coming from to make the initial investments that he had made. These things are going to get a little bit more clear just with some things that he does pretty soon after this. So his first three years as a senator were pretty unremarkable. He was a popular dinner guest. People liked having him around.

Other senators were not a big fan of him because he was always bragging about his military service that was just not right. And he was trying to push and find a way to raise his star power within the Senate. He fought against wartime rationing and price controls on post-war sugar. And he makes a pretty bold claim during a Senate hearing where he stands up and he says, I just got off the phone with the director of sugar or some shit like that. And they say that we have plenty of sugar that we don't need to be rationing it anymore. The reason that that's funny is because that's, based upon the stuff that we've looked into him

that I could see him just trying to use that and been like, I talked to the general sugar master general. He's claiming that there's an excess of sugar and that rationing and price control shouldn't be a thing anymore. And there's another senator that gets up and challenges him and says, well, get him on the phone. Let's prove it. I want to hear it from him because I've also been in contact with

whatever it is, the commerce. Sugar master general. Yeah, sugar master general. General and he said that there's not. It turns out that one of the reasons McCarthy was pushing so hard, and this wasn't a solid reason, but I'll let you put two and two together here. McCarthy had accepted a $20,000 loan from a Pepsi bottling executive prior to his push for sugar.

Like a, I mean, like close personal childhood friend that just happened to be a Pepsi bottling executive and he just happened to be, you know, a senator, right? someone he'd known for a long time. In fact, their kids had grown up together and everything, so probably a cousin. Definitely not just someone high up within Pepsi and something to do with sugar.

Yeah, dude. And, you know, price controls. Rationing. You're not making me sense, man. No, but the cool thing about it is is Tell Gunner Joe gets a new nickname in the Senate. He's now known as the Pepsi Cola Kid. This is, I mean, if you didn't like this guy already,

McCarthy had lobbied for a commutation of death sentences that were given to the Wafin SS soldiers that were convicted for war crimes for carrying out the 1944 Malmati massacre. Now, this massacre happened on American POWs, and I'll just go ahead and lay it out kind of as it happened. This was a war crime in this community. committed by the Waffin SS, December 17th, 1944 at the

Balganese Crossroads, the city near Malmadi like we were talking about in Belgium. This was during the Battle of the Bulge, and soldiers, these Waffin SS soldiers killed 84 U.S. American prisoners of war who had surrendered after

a brief battle. The Waffin SS soldiers had grouped the U.S. POWs in a farmer's field, and they were, and they used machine guns to shoot and kill grouped POWs. Many of the prisoners of war who survived the gunfire of the massacre

were executed with a gunshot to the head as they were walking around the field shooting them. Now there were witnesses to this because there were survivors that had either fled into the forest or had played dead and not been shot. McCarthy is pushing for a commutation

from a death sentence for Woffin SS fighters that used a machine gun on American POWs. His justification for the commutation was that the confessions that were plucked out of the Waffen SS members were done so under torture.

He makes this claim in front of the Senate and then never gives any sort of information to back up this claim. Never brings any facts. Never shows that there was torture that was done to these guys to get these confessions out of them. I don't know what that is

It's it's pretty crazy if you're trying to raise your star power in the US Senate To try to commute Wafin S soldiers sentences Yeah That did that shit I okay this here's the thing There's this episode can get into tin foil hat territory Yeah pretty pretty easily We might already been there helped helped along by certain things

Yeah I mean I'm trying to see the play behind it if okay Wisconsin large German population maybe yeah I'm sure okay maybe maybe because he situation where he knows it's not going to go through anyway it's going to be so opposed that him just having that token little thing about being like I had to represent the German people that could have been related like I don't know you know what I'm saying he had to try to use that it's like because here's the deal he's not smart when it comes to planning his

like his scheme yeah it can fall apart and it gets dismantled very easily it's just so happens that he burns really bright for a short period of time and it could be trying to push the the torture aspect of I don't feel like this was something that should have happened to get this confession and maybe it wasn't true. But again, if you have witnesses to the Malamati Massacre that were other American POWs that saw this happen, there's really not a whole lot else that you can say, because you don't need a confession if you have witnesses to this happening. I also see this being a situation where he's not a good senator.

No. Well, yeah. He, as voted upon by in the 1950 poll of the U.S. Senate press corps, who vote him the worst senator currently in office. I see him making this mistake. Yeah. For reasons unknown. I don't know. And then

him hitting gold on something and just being like drunk with the fucking power. He was drunk. He was drunk a lot. Not just with the power. No, not just with power. He was just drunk, but also on power. We've talked about some pretty violent alcoholics on this show.

And I'm not sure that there's much more of a violent alcoholic that we've talked about from the United States. Like, this guy drank so heavily. We'll talk about that. Buddy Nixon tried to get drunk and fucking nuke Grenada, didn't he? He tried to get drunk and start some wars, yeah. Okay. He definitely did.

But at the same time, he had his Kissinger there to make sure McCarthy doesn't have his Kissinger. He tries. Thankfully, thankfully McCarthy had less power. Yeah. But for a while had similarly equal. power, weirdly enough. Influence, I would say.

Influence, that's a very good point. Influence, I think. He learned a lot from Huak, and some of the things that he sees during his time as a senator, and Huac, again, is a House committee. He's a senator. He's not on Huac, but he's able to look into these things and kind of watch what's going on. And in 1947, Huac held or holds these nine days of hearings into the alleged communist

propaganda and influence in the Hollywood motion picture industry. Remember what we were talking about a little bit earlier, about the pro-soviet movies that were made during World War II while they were our ally? So some of these directors and some of these screenwriters that they're bringing in were guys that produced the films. Upon their request. As they're being questioned about why they were making these pro-communist motion pictures, these movies,

they're saying, your government, the guys that are in charge of you. You asked us to. But at the same time, they're trying to find this communist sentiment, this pro-communist push. Like, you think that we could have made these movies

and got them released across the nation without you guys being okay with it? Yeah. Yeah, especially, I mean, at a time when it's still, we already had one red scare. You would already know that pro-communist stuff is probably not going to be on the table unless you're asked by the government. How many of us were making these movies prior to Barbarossa? Yeah.

Isn't it weird that like the first movies came out months after that? After we allied with, you know, Stalin? Crazy, yeah. So this group names... I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. This group named the Hollywood. 10 that's made up with names, the likes of screenwriters,

Dalton Trumbo, John Howard Lawson, Avel Bessie, and Lester Cole, these huge names in the Hollywood motion picture industry, these guys still have films and plays and everything that's out there.

And this is kind of a crazy time because we always talk about how art kind of needs some sort of painful emotion behind it. Yeah. These guys that end up getting blacklisted from Hollywood because of their alleged associations

with the Communist Party. And I'm not saying that all of them weren't communists. There were definitely some communists in here. But again, they're Hollywood screenwriters. What in the hell are they going to do? Well, here, and it sounds even more American if you're really like this. Don Trambo.

John Howard. Lawson. Or is it John Howard Lawson? Yeah. John Howard Lawson. What's that next one? Alva Bessie. Alvabessi and Lester Cole. Yeah, those are the most American-sounding name.

So, well, some of the evidence that was used against these screenwriters was they went through and were releasing their real names because in the movie industry, you have stage names. And they're saying, wouldn't this be the perfect communist plot to come into the United States and take on these other names? to try to hide, I don't know, maybe Jewish last names. Why are they trying to hide in plain sight? Yeah, no, it makes sense that they're going to use fake names that they're communists trying to hide inside of our country. Hey guys, remember that thing that happened starting in like the 30s when all of us started getting rounded up in Europe

and, you know, people were hiding, trying to get away. There was a lot of heat that might have something. I don't know. Might be why some of us are here, yeah. Maybe, yeah, I don't know. The Hollywood 10 would be convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions that were posed by the committee. Do you know one guy, he was a musician,

was actually found in contempt in prison because he refused to play patriotic music at a hearing? I mean, that sounds like these things were done more out of trying to make a public spectacle, right? you're going after Hollywood. Sounds very authoritarian to me. Yeah.

Maybe the bigger issue besides being held in contempt and being put in jail for a year or some time is they're blacklisted from their industries. So you have a couple of these guys who are

excuse me, writing under-assumed names, Dalton Trumbo took on a fake moniker, another fake moniker, I believe. They would sell, they would give scripts to their friends who weren't blacklisted to sell for them just so they could make money. And Dalton Trumbull, I believe, won, I think it was an Academy Award under a fake name. And they just literally found a random guy off the street and sent him up there under this assumed name that Dalton Trumbo had picked out to accept the award on stage. just some relative unknown stranger guy

wins an Academy Award. You know what it probably was. It was probably some dude from the set that was like a grip or sound guy so people could be like, yeah, we definitely saw him on set. I mean, he was there all the time. It's crazy.

It was crazy how far they went. So in total, they brought in 43 people that were summoned. There were 10 of them that were subpoenaed that refused and were just immediately sentenced to jail. These questions, Aren't so much geared towards trying to I mean they are geared towards are you a communist have you ever been a communist those kinds of questions

But once you go through that list and they've said no or have you ever attended a communist meeting You're gonna say yes if you say yes. I've attended a communist meeting but I was just there to see what it was about or I went to a couple meetings and it just wasn't for me The next question out of who walks mouth is always who else was there name names yeah and And did you hear anybody talking? What books did you see on the table? Was it anybody's book? Yeah. It's a situation where you're asking them to narco on other people.

While they fully know that they will either be put in jail, they will be deported, or they will be blacklisted from the industry. So if you're naming names at all these other communists get-togethers that you have been to, then you're basically exiling those people regardless of how they answer. It wasn't even communist get-togethers. No. It could have been situations that they, you know, somebody there at the get-together had previously been at a communist get-together, but because they were at this get-together, it had to be a communist get-together. Some of the saddest parts of this is it's people that get thrown under the bus for maybe

not attending, but somebody that's panicking and trying to. trying to pass long names. There's a certain element to it where, God, I just, I'm trying to find this train of thought again. So you're brought in, you're asked, or given the impression that the more information you provide, the less severe, the more cooperative and compliant that you are, the better the situation is going to turn out for you. You're going to be useful to them, and so they're going to be more leaning on you. And if that threat is presented to you, in a situation especially where evidence and rationale don't seem to be playing a lot of a big key role because they're bringing you in because you were just at a party of someone that had been at a communist or like had those ideals. Just shut up to a rally. And now they're throwing all this stuff at you.

And you're not making sense because like how are you connected? I was just there. Like is it illegal to be there? And they're like, who else was there? And they're like, tell us who else was there and we're, you know, we'll go ahead and stop the questioning. And you're then incriminating other people without even knowing you're incriminating them. I think at a certain time they knew. Yeah, where I was going with that was a lot of these communist rallies and these communist meetings were the only political parties in this country that were talking about civil rights issues.

Republicans and Democrats did not give two shits about civil rights at that point in time. Yeah. So if you are in support of equal rights for everybody and no other political parties giving you that. What's the key fucking message of Marxism? It's just like everybody is like on a level playing field. You show up to support rights for minorities. And just because it's a communist meeting, they're the only ones in town that are talking about it. You can be arrested, deported, blacklisted. What's crazy too is you're like, someone's talking about it. You see them talking about something and they're, just like, if you like what we're talking, show up. And they hand you just something that has an address or it doesn't explicitly state that it's communism. You show up and you're like, this actually sounds pretty good. You're attracted to the just general, you know, harmony of it or whatever

we want to call it. And that's the night it gets raided. Or it's being surveilled at that point. And then all of a sudden, your photograph coming out. And then your questions about it, and you're like, I just, I got handed this. And they're like, likely story. Who else was in there? you think you're fucking in trouble and you just start naming off names of somebody you just shook their hand or you you've talked to them for the first time. You got

Jay Edgar Hoover playing puppet master in the back tapping phones of CP USA members that may not be speaking to another member but just a friend that's not a part of the movement and all of a sudden that gets put into a file and then all of a sudden that file ends up in

who X back pocket and they're going to come ask you about these things. You don't know anything that's going on with Hoover and the FBI at this point in time. But Hoover is feeding the information about some of these people that they're deeming subversive. Along with that, they attacked union activists and all of these different labor movement activists. They attach this communist stigma to any sort of union organization. There was this guy named Harry Bridges, who was the, I believe he was the union leader for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. They bring him in and they question him about his top.

highs to communist sympathies in communist organizations because there's high levels of Eastern European people that are working the docs that are down there in the shit doing these jobs that are a part of this union.

And we're talking about so much of what's happening with the government asking these people questions. All this is being covered by the news. So this mass hysteria is running through the private sector and you have companies that are going through and conducting their own

investigations. Hiring their own security forces. You have thousands of people that are losing jobs, not because they're communist, but because their bosses are so concerned about the threat of communism in a union uprising within their industry

that they are firing people, they're scaring people, they are basically making everybody just have to look over their shoulders at all times. July 31st, 1948, American Elizabeth Bentley, who was working as a Soviet agent,

named the Senior Treasury Department official named Harry Dexter White as a communist. There was a senior editor of Time magazine, Whitaker Chambers, that had named multiple officials as communists. One of the men that he names is White. So White's now been named by two separate people as a communist.

Also, there was a second State Department official that was named by Whitaker Chambers. He named a man named Alger Hiss as a communist plant. His helped establish the UN.

He also worked very closely with FDR. And Alger Hiss was the big fish in government that Houac was going for. They were trying to root out communist that had infiltrated the government, and they have a guy named Alger Hiss that was just named by one of these outed communist informants that had worked in the private sector.

It's all sort of pointing to Hiss as an agent. This was never proven. At the same time, Alger Hiss's alleged crimes had passed the statute of limitations for espionage, but he was so pissed off at Whitaker. And there's something called Senate privilege where basically if you're speaking on the floor of the Senate, anything that you say can't be held as liable or slander or anything like that. I'm not 100% sure why that is. That feels pretty insane that that's a place where you want to be as honest as possible,

yet you can't be held accountable for slandering somebody's name. His challenge is Whitaker to say the things that he said basically naming him as a comment. communist outside of the Senate chamber, and Whitaker goes ahead and does that, and Al Jorhis then sues him for libel. Now, Al Jus had already been questioned by Huac about his communist activities. His subversive activities. And during the libel lawsuit that he had launched against Whitaker for calling him out as a communist, they find out that he lied during his congressional hearing about being a communist. Hiss? Yes. Okay.

So, Alger Hiss is arrested for perjury, and Al Jus is sent to jail on the charge of perjury. Now, we have a man who is brought in front of Congress to be asked about being a communist and basically committing espionage inside the country, and they can't pin him on, or they can't get him on the espionage charges because the statute is passed. They can get him on the perjury. And the newspaper then says, uh, potential communist or alleged communist. communists jailed. Yeah. Don't know what it's for. You're not going to read past the byline at that point in time, but we got one.

Good. We got him. We got one. One thing that also really ratchets up the heat of the Red Scare, because after World War II was over, that was who we were like, this is going to be the next enemy. Two real world superpowers at that point exist, and it's Russia and it's the United States. and Russia has this massive, massive military. So people are like, okay, they're, you know, at least they're over on the other side and everything like that. We got kind of close to Alaska.

But yeah, that was going to be the person that was going to be the challenger. Buddy, I think Alaska was still theirs at that point. Was it? It was Alaska. So in 49, Soviet Union successfully tests the first atomic bomber, its first atomic bomb. and what this basically did is this illusion that regardless of what was thrown in us we had the ultimate ace of our sleeve in being the only country at that time to have nuclear capabilities when that bomb was set off in Siberia wherever it was that sense of safety just went out the window and realizing that the Soviets could launch a nuclear attack against the U.S.

and essentially play tit for tat, that made the panic itself about preventing any type of Soviet spies. And if they were Soviet spies, they were communists. So ergo, fat, go, every communist is a Soviet spy. So that just ratchets up the heat. And now all of a sudden you have this now underlying fear of the Soviet Union who's on par with this weapon-wise. but now people are, oh, no, how'd they get the bomb? They must be stealing secrets and everything like that.

And it turns out, they were. They were. Here's the deal. And I'm not saying that like, that's a good thing or anything like that. What I'm simply stating is that had they developed the bomb first, you bet your ass we would have had it or been in there trying to go ahead and steal that shit and come back and make our own. Did we have U.S. agents over in the region of the USSR trying to infiltrate the Soviet nuclear program?

100%? Yes. To find out what their capabilities and try to maybe sabotage it and to know what they were up to. Yeah. 100% for sure. It's a crazy way to think about it. Yeah. Here's the deal.

As a competitive, we win it fucking everything mentality. We get pissed off when we flat get outplayed. regardless if we're playing the same fucking game. There's also the aspect of if I'm in that position and I'm alive at that time and there is a concern that the Soviets are going to beat us, just as an ordinary citizen, the Soviets are going to beat us to the atomic bomb.

I mean, I don't know how much the Manhattan Project was talked about. I'm pretty sure it's pretty secretive. Would I want my government sending spies over to the Soviet Union to find out? Abs of fucking luli. Yep. So I can't really blame the Soviets for wanting the same thing because it's it's mutual. We're talking about mutually assured destruction. 1949 is not over yet.

The hits keep coming because communist forces led by Mao Zedong end up winning the Civil War and are able to take control of China, which is the world's most populous nation. So now you have these two communist, I don't know if you'd consider China's superpower at that time. but just the populace. Yeah. You have Russia, which already has an insane military. Now it's got the nuclear capabilities, and both of these countries that touch each other are both communist. Well, your natural reaction to that is these guys are very,

are ripe to team up. And who's going to stand against them if they do? The free world shrinking. Yeah. Communism is getting a much bigger foothold. This isn't like, hey, Russia's communist, and then, oh, look, Tibet is communist. No. Or, oh, look, Uzbekistan is communist.

This is Russia. Fuck, that's big. This is China. Huh? That's like the entirety of age almost. Oh, and then all of the other Soviet bloc countries in Eastern Europe that we're taking. You're telling me that it literally stretched. is right up to fucking Germany's into Germany.

Yeah. At that point, half of Germany. Yep. At that point. And then all the way over to the Pacific. And we're sitting in Japan. Yeah. Occupying.

Licking its wounds. Yeah. I wonder if that was part of the occupation. Was after a while after, you know, they got through getting everything settled. And then 1949 happens. Do they think about how much further they can extend the occupation just in case Mao turns to the west? I mean, where else are they going to go? Korea.

You're trying to get a foot on the mainland. We'll talk about that shortly. I know. So there's high-profile cases that are revealing Soviet spies like Al Jerez. You get these two scientists, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who are actually executed for passing atomic bomb secrets to the Soviets. Ethel. Ethel, no real. part in the plan.

She just, what she did, it was kind of unknowingly that she did it. She just was kind of going along with what Julius was asking her to do, I guess. In 1950, this is where we get, I believe, it might have similar dates. It's when this little-known Republican senator from Wisconsin,

who has been voted as the worst, sees this political opportunity in this growing fear. and he ends up giving this speech, and was it at the diner, wherever it was, where he has the piece of paper? So they stiffed him. Because McCarthy is so terribly unpopular, every year on Lincoln's birthday, they have this thing called Lincoln Dinner, where they send all of the Republican senators out to all of these big areas, and they give these speeches in these big Republican-held cities to rouse support. And everybody else gets all of these cool appointments to go to all these Republican-Henters.

held strongholds, and McCarthy gets sent to Wheeling West Virginia. And not only is he going to Wheeling West Virginia, the speech that he's giving is in front of the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling West Virginia. So not exactly a... They're making it very clear where he stands within the Republican Party. And he was given this speech on like some sort of housing equality or some shit like that, something that was completely inconsequential. He was supposed to give a speech on that.

And he decides to mix things up a little bit. He walks up in front of these probably highly, I'm not going to go there, these very nice Republican women in Wheeling, West Virginia. And he holds up this stack of papers and claims that he has the names and evidence of 205 communists and I believe it was morally perverse, individuals that are working

in front or in the state department that's a pretty bold claim to make and it's a very bold claim to make a perfect place to make perfect play this guy is throwing out he's desperate he is thrown out a hell Mary

he holds up the paper ladies pay attention juicy shit coming at you I hold in my hand 205 criminals members of the Communist Party who at this very moment

are working within your very own U.S. Department of State. I'm letting you know you are the first to hear this because guess what these women do? This shit explodes. Who's better at spreading information with zero

evidence than a group of fucking Republican women? Yeah, I mean, I'm sure it was a of that. It was also a mixture of... These aren't 20 and 30 year old women. These are in their fucking 50s and 60s. All they have time to do is talk.

Well, and it's Wheeling, West Virginia. What else are you going to do? Uh-huh. You're going to go do coal? Not the ladies. No. He hit this at the right time because he was going to be the last story that goes into the paper before it's printed that night to be distributed the next day. And it blows up in West Virginia. And then it sort of blows up everywhere else.

It's juicy shit, dude. Yeah. And one of the biggest problems about this speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, is as it's catching plenty of attention, Joe might have been a little lit that night. And when I say that, I mean that because during, like over the next month, he's giving these speeches. And that 205 number morse to 57. And then it morphs to 81. I think the biggest mistake was not having a list of anybody. Yeah.

He didn't have a list. he was pulling these numbers out of thin air. He goes from 57 to 81 to 108. So he went down by like 150, and then he climbed up a little bit to 81, and then he's like, ah, fuck it, we're back up to 108. Well, he had to gauge crowd reaction. Yeah.

Okay, so right now, 205, that's a lot. You've got to be on the name, names. True. Hey, give us one. I can't. So what you do is you overcompensate the next time. Well, you're drunk the first time, maybe. So you don't really remember.

And no one's recording you because, Who's recording the fucking Wheeling West Virginia? Yeah, exactly. You're not asking for a Wheeling West Virginia paper to try to remember the number of communists you just named working in the state. And then you're like, fuck, I got to make this more manageable. I go 57. And people are just like, what? And they're like, I thought they said it didn't sound like it was that big like the last time.

And then the next time he comes out, he goes a little bit higher. And people are like, oh. And he's like, okay, I'm getting closer. I got to keep it around this number. Triple digits? But now I'm going for gas. He really didn't know. He didn't know because there weren't that many names.

The supposed names that he had had been pulled off of these old archaic lists of investigations that were done before. And they weren't even great names because he didn't have all of them yet. So eventually we have a big issue with communism blowing up even further because now Joe's made these accusations. Communism can only get scarier on June 25, 1950, when, China, the newly formed Mao China, goes in with the North Koreans and they invade South Korea. Now we have the Korean War starting and we're deciding to get in as the, I believe, the UN forces and help South Korea fight against communism. The bigger problem is that now the Senate is starting to wonder, well, what are these? names because that feels like the number changed a lot and he hasn't really said anybody's names

or given really any information. We need to figure out more about this. So the Senate votes to investigate and this man named Millard tidings, only the second Millard that I think we've ever come across on this podcast, to head this committee. Now, Joe's got a problem because he can't produce this list. He ends up taking a meeting with one of Jay Edgar Hoover's right-hand. man, a truly first-rate propagandist. And he says, hey, I can give you some names that we have. And I also need to kind of show you how to maximize your abilities here. Hoover sees this and is basically like my goal of being able to surveil people just based on bullshit,

I'm going to put my hand up this guy's ass. And he's big and dumb. And I'm going to be able to puppet this guy. and he already has the message. I just need to make sure that he has the tools and a megaphone to be able to do this. The other advantage that McCarthy has over everybody is that he's heard everything that anybody's ever said about him

because he has two satellites for ears on the side of his head. He's got a big head. He's got a giant... No one has been shy. He's the worst. These ears on the side of his head make his head look small. But here's the other thing too.

He's fucking desperate. it. Yeah. So, tidings mission, and this is a mission that he shares with the other members of the Senate, he says, let me have three days in public hearings and he will never show his face in Senate again.

Tidings is ready to clean McCarthy's clock. And Joe ends up naming these nine specific people that he had got dirt from the FBI on. Now, his big attack was on this guy named Owen Lattimore. and Owen Latimore feels like a massively big fish because Owen Latimore was the U.S.

emissary to Changi Shek, who was fighting against Mao's forces. And the reason why Owen Latimore gets fingered in this whole thing is because Latimore had made some sort of communication or sent cables back to the United States, basically saying that it would be a better situation because Shanghai Shek's, his government, is so, corrupt that they would be impossible to continue to work with. So maybe we let him fall and then Mao may not be as tough to deal with or we can just go ahead and walk through China at some point. And immediately as McCarthy is questioning these witnesses and questioning Latimore, he's bringing up all of these things. And Owen Latimore was a pretty brilliant individual when it comes to just Eastern diplomacy

and the way the business is handled over there on a governmental level. Latimore ends up not necessarily being blacklisted but he just gets so tired of it that he just moves over to England after this because his reputation is so sullied. It's a situation

where the tidings report will conclude that this list included no communist, no pro-communist, And it labels McCarthy's charges as frauds and hoaxes. And this bats McCarthy down in really no way because this was a Democrat that was going after McCarthy. And McCarthy basically tells tidings that he will go after him and he will make sure that he doesn't hold that seat after the next election. Spoiler alert, a Republican takes tidings seat.

and McCarthy is given the pat on the back for leading the charge against tidings. By 1953, the Republicans had won a majority, and crazily enough, it's a, what was it, 1952, that Eisenhower gets elected, and Eisenhower is the first Republican president in over 20 years. Oh, yeah. Like, they hadn't held the president, because FDR had to. himself quite a stay and then you had Truman that took over so the Republicans

are feeling themselves and as this is going on McCarthy's appointments come up because now that they have control of the Senate he gets appointed to the permanent subcommittee on investigations

and he uses this appointment to terrorize everybody he had helped in this effort called the Lavender Scare which we will do a future episode on. We'll touch a little bit in here because it's, I don't know, it's a very

Hoover-esque situation where he's trying to get dirt and information using people's sexual preferences and their... So he can fulfill his sexual preferences. As a cross-dresser himself. And McCarthy is pushing to try to get not only communists out of the government,

but also the gay and lesbian community, the queer community he's trying to push out. Like, again, subversive for them has this insanely broad definition. And the most insane. And we'll talk about it again more during the Lavender Scare episode. But everybody in the government that's looking into this is being convinced that homosexuality is a... Gateway drug to communism. Well, it makes them vulnerable for...

Corruption. Well... Hold on a second. Wait a fucking minute. So you're saying that if someone found out someone was a lesbian or gay or anything like that, that would give them blackmail information to try to use their governmental position. Almost in the same, like, so wait, so, but someone that had like business dealings in other countries and everything like that, that person would be completely fine and wouldn't be under, you know, above reproach for any business dealings, right? Because, you know, because you'd have blackmail on them and make them do certain things and all that, yeah. So instead of coming to a logical conclusion,

that maybe we take it off the table as a blackmailable thing and just be okay with people loving their own sex, we're just going to start kicking them out of the government. So instead of just getting over your fucking bigotry, because that's too much work, let's just make it illegal. Yeah, just nuts.

He attacks it for him in a minute. Because I am so uncomfortable with myself that I really want to be able to do this shit. Yeah. And there's going to be, Some examples in this episode of that. I'm going to actively fight against it. It's the legal governmental version of methinks thou doth protest too much.

It truly is. And we'll get to it pretty quickly here. His attacks focused on the Truman administration being soft on communism. This leads to Truman getting in his own head, and he starts conducting these loyalty tests on all State Department officials. I mean, he gets this sudden political class. out. And honestly, I think this is them when the Republicans get in a position.

I think this is them being like he's the worst of us. He irritates the fuck out of them. Let's put him in a position, this subcommittee on investigations that gives him a massive budget, subpoena power, and basically the legal authority to interrogate anybody he wants. Well, call me crazy, but

he's doing this to Truman prior to him getting that seat on the permanent subcommittee of investigations. So is Truman's conducting these loyalty tests, I believe that McCarthy is of the thinking that if he, if Truman does all these loyalty tests, he will have access to these eventually

to be able to investigate these people. He doesn't realize that Truman's holding all of these loyalty tests and all of this information that he's gaining under executive privilege. Yeah. So these will never fall into McCarthy's hands because this is before he's appointed. This is before 1952 when Eisenhower comes in.

Gotcha. So he's kind of laying the groundwork for maybe the ability to use what Truman is finding out against the State Department officials later on. It's a crazy world when Chris is talking about these Soviet atomic spies, the Rosenberg's Julius and Ethel. And you have other people that make their names being the prosecutor. that sentence these people to death. And again, there's no question.

Julius Rosenberg was a Soviet spy. He was an atomic Soviet spy that sold our information back over to the Soviet Union. He was prosecuted by a guy named Roy Cohn. Now, I believe Roy Cohn was 27 at the time when he prosecuted the Rosenbergs. And so his name's out there.

He's going to be a major player in this whole entire thing. as we said 1952 Eisenhower becomes president McCarthy is put on this subcommittee he ends up hiring Roy Cohn

as his lead prosecutor and pretty much the gloves come off but the gloves come off in a different situation that you would be thinking because he was talking about the State Department right

he was talking about all these subversives all these communists in the State Department one of the first people one of the first organizations that they set their eyes on is this place called Voice of America. Now, Voice of America is basically a government group of people that have fled from these other communist countries and other fascist countries and everything like that, where the United States is beaming these radio programs back behind enemy lines in these other countries.

And McCarthy being just the most paranoid person in the local. world is pulling these people in from voices of America and saying, are you guys sending some sort of messaging that's maybe pro-communist back into these countries? Maybe they're already communist? Yeah, sharing secrets with these people behind enemy lines. And it's just him, it's a witch hunt. That's all that it is. And he's looking for kind of the lowest-hanging fruit.

And the way that these committee meetings would go was they always said in the morning McCarthy was on it. In the morning McCarthy was very poignant with his questions. He was attacking. He was going after everything that he could. Then they would take a lunch break. And when they would take a lunch break, McCarthy would go eat a hamburger and he'd go slam a few whiskeys back. They said all of these committee meetings in the afternoon, he was sloshy, he was slurring his words. it was very evident that he was plastered.

Oh, yeah. He, so he regularly drank over a court of liquor a day, they said. His staff were so fucking anxious about what he was going to do or say during, like, afternoon hearings because he had drank so much of lunch. So going back to the Pepsi Cola kid thing, they said there was another reason that he was called that is because he would frequently pour straight liquor into soft drink bottles and sneak alcohol onto the Senate floor and into meetings. Come on.

That's like 10th grade behavior in English class. That's slipping vodka into a water bottle and trying to be cool in school. I mean, fellow senators and journalists frequently, you know, had witnessed him either staggering, slurring his words, or exhibiting, like, what they considered, like, I think they quoted as, like, a fog of booze and rage before, like, stepping in front of the camera. One of those situations where I imagine it, like off heavyweights,

like Ben Stiller, Uncle Tony gets really pissed off and he turns down he's like, what's wrong Tony's like everyone is, it's a little fall out apart he's like, well, why? He's like, because they won't listen to me. So who's faulted? It's their fault. And then he would get in front of the microphone.

It's not your fault. It's their fault. It's your fault. And they will be punited as he gets in front of the mic. So this is just shaking this foundation of what's essentially an American propaganda program

that's trying to do good work in trying to break up communism. It's shaking these organizations to their court. Ike doesn't like this shit. Ike does not like McCarthy one bit. Ike has multiple opportunities to shut down what McCarthy is doing, but all of his aides are saying McCarthy's a very popular Republican.

We need to try to show unity within this party in order to portray strength. He has tapped into something that everybody has that has stoked enough fear because again, the nuke, all that kind of stuff. It is, yeah, it's fucking terrifying. Like, I'll say like a being back then. It would have been easy to stoke that fire. And he fucking loaded that shit up.

Yeah. He, for a few years, I think it was during, it was during Ike's administration. He became so powerful that even like, the president and other senior leaders were afraid of him. Just for the simple fact that if someone had crossed him, he would label them as either a sympathizer, soft on communism, or he would bring up something so innocuous,

just alluding to them having communist ties because he never actually produced solid evidence for his claims. It was a front page headline and then a retraction that nobody ever saw if something came out. but he didn't have to do it in a way that he was absolutely saying they were. He just said, those are the words of a communist. I didn't say your one. I said your word choice sounds like the words of a communist. Or you have the communist stare.

You had that look on your face. Yeah. And like you're saying, he fires off one lie and that's front page news. And by the time they figure out that it's a lie and they print it not on the front page, McCarthy's told five other lies that they just have it. been able to keep up. But it becomes the burden of proof is on the person being accused. Yeah. He does not operate in which the fact that he has to provide the proof of that. He simply just has to provide the headline. And this works. And what McCarthyism, the term itself,

becomes this textbook definition of making reckless, unproven accusations, the damage of her sin's reputation. But then, but you don't have to prove them. They're just accusations. But they're enough that there's no coming back from it. You can't print a retraction big enough. Yeah. Or you don't even print the retraction because there's no fucking accountability on this. Yeah, there's no time.

You have these juicy other headlines that you've got to put out. Along with hiring Roy Cohn, Joe hires a kid named George Schein. And Shine is the heir to this hotel fortune. And he's pretty, I mean, he's, he was not paid. unpaid consultant.

And shine would take a shine to Cohn in multiple ways. After they were done, just basically dragging Voice of America through the mud, there's news that these international libraries all around the country, the organization, God, I forgot what it was called, they ran the international libraries that we would send overseas as far as American writings and stuff like that so Cohn and Shine go over to Europe

and they're going through these libraries and they're finding all of these communist writings all of these books that are stocked on these pro-America library shelves that have all of these communist ideals in them and instead of doing the logical thing and calling all of the librarians in that stalked those books overseas,

he goes ahead and brings the authors of those books in for questioning. Now, the authors of those books have no idea where their books have ended up. Are these American authors? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, they had no idea. There were authors that they brought in were when he would ask them a question about, did you know that this title of this book was over in this library over in England?

And some of these guys say, I don't even know how they got a copy of that book anymore. I haven't written. That book went out of print 25 years ago. I don't know what happened. It could be second or third hand. Yeah. In their situations, as they're going through and they're talking to these authors, where they're asking them again the same questions, are you a communist?

Have you ever been affiliated with the Communist Party? Have you ever been to one of their meetings? and you could either say yes and be blacklisted for the rest of your life and potentially punished further beyond that. Well, I mean, if they wrote books on communism, don't they have all the proof that they need? You'd think. But I guess you could just say, well, nothing in my book showed any type of support. It was a thesis or it was some type of just report on the happenings.

It was a historical recounting of the rise of communism. I guess that makes more sense. But it's still one of those things where it doesn't matter what you tell them your thought process was. No, no, 100. But what I'm saying is you're automatically making the assumption as those guys of saying like, this could be a historical account of the Russian Revolution and communism's part in it. But if those books, they're probably so asked backwards for anything that if the book says communism in it, it's going to be questioned.

They were so asked backwards that is they were telling them. these libraries to pull these books off the shelves and get rid of them. Some of the librarians sort of burning the books. And apparently that was a little too close to the Germans burning the books. And when they found out about the like, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho. Let's not burn those. Let's just throw them away or maybe put them in the backlog.

And some of these authors had heard about it. So as they're being questioned, you have these authors that are saying, well, I was writing maybe what you thought was this kind of communist ideal in this book. you guys are burning books like the Nazis. So how bad am I if you guys are imitating fascism? Just a very interesting back and forth as to how these things are handled. But again, it's a situation where they come up with jack shit.

They didn't find anything in Voice of America. They didn't find anything in these overseas libraries. They didn't find anything in any of these other pushes that they were going for. I got to give a shout out to this. Senator from Maine whose name was Margaret Chase Smith, who I believe she was the only woman in the U.S. Senate at the time. She was the first woman to be in the House of Representatives and the Senate, too.

And she pretty much risks, because again, this is when he's very powerful, risks her entire career to basically speak out against him. It was on June 1st, 1950. She walks into the Senate floor, delivers this 15-minute speech called the Declaration of Conscience. She never actually mentions McCarthy by name, but she doesn't need to because it's so very very clearly about that person. Everyone knows who she's talking about. She blasts the Senate for turning into a forum of hate and character assassination

because that's kind of what it had become. Because again, the number one, you know, response, if anyone criticizes McCarthy is, you sound like a communist. He's just going to make the accusation enough to where you don't even have time

to be like, the damage has already been done. Yeah, it's already been. printed. It's already in the newspaper. Everybody already knows. So you're going to be blacklisted from any other job that you could potentially get in this field. It was enough to where these investigations that were going on were concerning some people so much that they were committing suicide. They were taking their own lives because they were so afraid that no matter how

they answered these questions, they were going to have their lives ruined. Yeah. And that's not to say, well, they were probably guilty and that's why they did it to take the easy way out. No, they were scared. They were scared that the rest of their life was going to be upended by just these investigations into something that had nothing to do with. Okay. Look at our current climate, political climate, how easily people turn on each other and everything like that, or what extreme, you know, people will do in extreme circumstances.

If people were so scared of communism and it's one of those things where it could be anyone and your name gets brought up but there's not enough noise behind it when you get cleared so everybody thinks that you're a communist but you're really not you've been acquitted whatever

who is gonna you know you get some crazy fucking person who thinks they're gonna be hero and fucking shoot you or something be like I shot a communist you lose all your friends you lose everything else you lose your safety

you lose anonymity and even for the fact that if your friends were like I know you're not a communist man, but do you realize that like my employer, I'm a teacher or I'm a janitor or something like that because this was something that really did happen with these like loyalty, this loyalty shit was I can't have them pulling your name up and having me lose my career and my livelihood. I can't be your friend. I can't be seen with you. This fear of indoctrination in other aspects beyond just the government is kind of scary. One of the big things, too, that when you think about the red scare, this isn't something that was just in the government. This changed daily life for a long period of time for Americans.

The system itself, sorry for drinking on the mic, creates this, like, bounty hunting system for information. I guess you could say were like ordinary, just like regular people are now a resource for surveillance. So this was one of those times when it was like, if you see something, say something. This is like when that saying fucking comes out. And McCarthy didn't just want to find out if you were a communist. They wanted you to prove your loyalty by destroying your other ones. So like, again, if you come in and to protect yourself, you're willing to, you know, throw other people under the bus

they're gonna dangle that fucking carrot as often as they can. If you were subpoenaed, you can't just come in to be like, I am not a communist, it's not enough. If you want to clear your name. I am not a crook.

Yeah, it was good for somebody. Well, actually, that one was very unsuccessful as well, not a lot of people believed him. But yeah, to clear your own name, protect your career, you're basically forced to

give that list of friends, colleagues, neighbors, ex-partners, who you had ever seen at a leftist meeting. You ever saw read a book by someone that was considered to be on the radical list for authors or expressing subversive thoughts?

So you're going through your mind and you're like, oh, I was in that girl's house and I saw a book, but it could have been her fucking Brumakes book. But you're having to bring up all this stuff because you feel like if you're just ticking off boxes of information you're giving, they're just going to let you walk out the door. And it's turning neighbor against neighbor. If you refuse names like the Hollywood tendon, again, that's, again, blacklisted. They're deputizing basically like the American public and people that just, Karen's today. That's exactly what it is.

It's people that are just fucking bored and looking to fucking harass people. This was their fucking heyday when they were able to do this because, like, you're being made out to be like, if you're a true American, hunt for the communist. And it's not like, hey, just be on the lookout for something. Now they have people actively trying to like dig into other people's lives because the propaganda is painting communists, not as these foreign soldiers that you're going to easily recognize,

but as talented, you know, secret agents that are living next door that have the perfect American accent and you need to look and try to spot any differences that what you believe are complete American characteristics or American mannerisms if they're doing something different you need to go ahead and report that kind of stuff and like it's not just from a societal standpoint

from like a employment standpoint through these institutions issuing these loyalty oaths you were mentioning that executive order about what governmental employing right? Oh yeah, dude, this is So this is a Truman thing, Executive Order 9835

and basically what it was was it would recommend termination for anybody who had confessed to spying in the Soviet Union some suspected of being un-American and what this was it was basically like a federal

employee lawyer program where they would pledge their loyalty to them. 2,700 dismissals, 12,000 resignations in the years between 1947 and 1956. Those are the people that were either found to potentially be un-American or had resigned in refusal to sign this loyalty oath, which somebody asked me to sign a loyalty oath. I don't think I'm ever doing that. It doesn't really matter what the organization is. A loyalty oath sounds a little too official for me.

An organization worth being loyal to does not require one to sign a loyalty or oath to make you. Yeah. It gains the loyalty just simply through its actions and it's, yeah. And along with that, the problem with these investigations and these refusals to answer questions during these loyalty oaths interviews. and then the Senate interviews is if you can't say yes and you don't want to say no

because they're not going to believe you you can also plead the fifth and as we all know that stops you from incriminating yourself by answering a question doesn't absolve you of it though it does exactly it doesn't absolve you so whether you're truthful

in a yes or a no or you plead the fifth to not potentially incriminate yourself, the fifth is just as bad if not worse, because that's... It's too bad to even talk about? Uh-huh. Yeah. And this wasn't just like full-blown state government workers or anything at the state department. This was school teachers, janitors, librarians, factory workers who were forced to sign

these government or corporate pledges basically swearing that they'd never associated with any group deemed subversive. And as, I mean, if you really look at how many people, just from within the government, it seems like how many people went through it, like with interviews and stuff like that. But the stuff that wasn't on the books was so more widespread,

just basically turning the country into this environment where everyday American, that had known their neighbors that had gone along with their neighbors now turned those neighbors into an existential threat because you now couldn't be sure of who was who they said that it altered just the society to the point where no one wanted to everyone dressed alike because you didn't want to stand out for any reason people when they would have um like send their kids to school and everything would be like don't tell anybody what books we have in the house if they asked to say we don't have any books in the house because it's safer.

We don't have any books in the house. Sounds way more suspicious. I mean, like, if you really think about it, what's the one thing? Like, if you're thinking about things that you need to survive for,

like well-being, not survival food, all that kind of stuff, but the thing that it's best for your mental state is it's safety, right? Yeah. Safety and community. And they take that,

you know, that human desire for safety for just, having that social interaction and they basically just weaponized it into like a incentivized betrayal system. And the craziest thing about that is that like you don't need, again, this is a senator that is doing this that has this much power during this short period of time. But you don't need like someone with a special police force on every corner. if the population is policing itself

and just simply feeding the information back to you. That's the craziness of like the impact and the power that this thing had. It is. There's also, I mean, just thinking about it from trying to put myself in that position, regardless of all of the propaganda, you've seen that there's different times like the Berlin airlift. when the Soviet Union is kind of checking the USA on some things. And then you find out that they have an atomic bomb too.

Yeah. I don't know if it would take a whole lot of extra propagandizing for me to be on the lookout. I mean, they certainly were. I'm, but. No, no. I understand that. Here's the thing. The people who are finding the communists, I'm doing this in air quotes and everything,

know the actual level of the threat. Yeah. They know that people they're accusing of being communist are not really communist. But by accusing people and keeping that threat high of the danger, it ensures that they stay in those powerful positions and maintain that power. Because as soon as that monster is dead, or as soon as people grow up enough to not believe in that monster, it has no power.

And it also forces people into making rash decisions that you don't always think through. So if you maybe see something weird that goes on at Steve's house and then you're thinking about it for the next few days, that thought could impede a little bit deeper into more paranoia. It's a slippery slope. I see the initial fear. Like Steve's not going to fucking nuke you. Steve has nothing to do with the nuke, but somehow you've been. conditioned to believe that if Steve succeeds, your civilization ends. Well, not only to that, but if Steve is a communist and Steve and I work together and he goes

into work and he starts rallying everybody into one of these labor unions and then they end up costing us our jobs, that could be too far for me. Not even necessarily doing something violent, but forcing me out of work because of a decision that he made as a communist trying to fight for something. Yeah, you always go to the most unlikely scenario, but it's always the worst. Like, do you know, logically,

what, like, Steve would be fired the moment anyone found someone... Like, that's the thing in your head, like, Steve's gonna rally, you know, everyone. But then if someone were to sit there and think logically, they'd be like, not many people like Steve. No.

I don't know if people are going to want it. Like, people, don't like sitting at the lunch table with Steve. You think he's going to be charismatic enough to get people to risk their employment? Yeah, I've seen Steve picking up cigarette butts that have already been smoked outside.

But if you can press the button, the tender button that's hot at the moment, you can make people fucking believe anything because I don't, fuck. They're playing on emotions and it's not to say that those emotions weren't justified, but at the same time,

the amplification to ruin other people's lives. It's just, it's unforgivable. It's already hot in the room and you go to the thermostat and you're turning it up even more. Yeah. 1953 for Joe is, he's made a lot of bad decisions in his life, but this was probably the worst. Joe and Roy Cohn set their sights on the Army. And Cohn ends up pointing towards this Army Signal Corps lab in Monmouth, New York.

He is so hot on this alleged spy ring that's inside the Signal Corps that he actually calls up Joe while he's on his honeymoon when he gets married to his one and only wife that comes pretty late in life because I believe we said he's born in 1908 named Jen Kerr, who is a staffer in his Senate ship. Why would they go after the army? because they're concerned that the army is somehow dropped the ball in a certain aspect of checking connoism. The kid that you're talking about, that shine. Well, yeah, that's the underlying. That's the only reason. That's the other stuff is bullshit. They go after him because come to find out this shine guy was, uh,

pulled out of the draft or dodged the draft. No, no, he was drafted into the military. Oh, no, no, that is right. You're correct. You're on to something, but it's a little later. Yeah, he got drafted, put in a extremely cushy position, and was constantly away from his posted positions because there's receipts of cone, like taking him out for, like, expensive meals and stuff like that in New York,

and ensuring that this guy wasn't in a, basically, just had a cush position, using their political power as part of this investigative committee to basically make sure that this guy was protected within the military and given favorable treatment. So... I made sure that Shine didn't even have to do KP duty. Do you know how much you have to care about somebody to go far enough to say, hey, I don't want this guy cleaning up the kitchen? You got to care real deep about it. There's something there.

Also, a lot of these committee meetings, and this is, I don't know how in the, I don't know how he got away with it. Most of these committee meetings where they were doing these interviews were held in New York. Part of the reason that they were held in New York was because Shine's family had a suite in like the Waldorf Astoria. That's right. That him and Cohn would go stay at. And a lot of these other senators that were on this committee didn't exactly want to travel to New York, because they had, you know, actual business being a senator, and they couldn't just focus on one stupid thing,

didn't come to New York. So oftentimes there weren't any Democrats that were actually on the committee president or present at these hearings because they didn't want to go to New York and they had better shit to do. So, again, we're laying it on pretty thick with cone, protecting shine, cone and shine going to Europe together. wants to give him the cone bone.

I think he gave him the cone bone a lot. I think Cone got the bone. Not saying there's anything wrong with that, but the way Cone handles it. No, I think Cone is a bottom. So full disclosure, young Roy Cone, a very striking young man.

I don't think so. Really? He looks like a weasley fuck. He does, but he also looks like a... Weasley fuck. He has soft features. He's a weasley, soft, a baby soft penis fuck.

If you just saw him without the stigma around him, maybe. Greasy fuck. You're not getting a different answer out of me. So, yeah, I mean, they're essentially blackmailing the military with the threat of these attacks. The military comes at them and is basically like, hey, we know you are using your political influence and power to do this. And in turn, as part of Roy Cohn's attack, what do you always do when you're attacked? You attack back twice as hard. So he's able, him and McCarthy, think it is a good idea to accuse the United States Army of being communist subversives or to having them within the army.

the guys that are responsible for winning the wars are now being put on trial for being communist that is the dumbest fucking move to go after the army one even further to go after the army under the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower Yeah.

Supreme Commander. Of the fucking allied forces of World War II. It's, it was suicide. It was political suicide pretty much from the get-go. So,

Cohn calls, I don't know how much he had to twist McCarthy's arm to come back early from his honeymoon with the staffer. But he shows up

and they have this whole grand plan to uncover this Soviet spy ring inside the Army Signal Corps. And there was a little bit of smoke here. There's no plan. You cannot convince me based upon the things we are going to discuss. Here's what it is.

I think they had ideas. I don't think there was a plan. I thought, or I think what happened here is they thought that they were just going to be able to use the same old playbook of just trying to steamroll and making baseless accusations and using shock moments and then moving on to something else

before giving somebody time to retort it or argue it. I thought they I think they were just going to try to run through them. But the Army's like well hold on because what we're going to do is the Army wasn't represented by an Army lawyer. They went and they got a guy

who was a well-established older Boston lawyer named Joe Welch who was like I'll take this shit for free because I know this guy do you know that Joe Welch was like a theater guy too

oh yeah okay this guy saw and he's like I also have heard that these hearings are going to be like one of the first hearings because they're so big televised on TV ABC and Dumont and he's like and I've seen

Cone and I've seen McCarthy and I know how they operate. Yeah. I want this fucking smoke. And so Welch and his team basically build a case based on,

crazily enough, facts and evidence and are just sitting, waiting on this stuff for this, for this hearing. We got so much fun to get to before the hearing.

I'm not going to the hearing. I'm just saying who they tapped for the hearing. Yeah. Welch is, I mean, he puts that theater love to work. He certainly does. The dude is just like a kindly old grandpa type.

Well, he knew that in order to counteract McCarthy's hardness, he had to come at him soft. He had to try to fluff McCarthy up into a rage and then be a victim. He had to be someone who could patronize him, but be old enough that it came across as folksy, wise patronizing, where people are just like, oh, he's right. So, Joe, shine, and Cohn go after the Army Signal Corps. And is they're going after the Army Signal Corps? They actually do have some information. I don't know if it was obtained with the CIA or maybe some of the spies that were over there,

that there was some information that the Signal Corps was privy to that had ended up in Soviet hands. They knew that there was something there, but they had no proof of, who it was. And when they go into the accusations and the questioning and the Signal Corps, like you said, it's not attacking voice of America anymore. It's not attacking an author. It's

attacking the military who's number one goal. You are literally attacking one of the most beloved historical American institutions. Yeah. I mean, these guys are trained to fight communists. So

the burden of proof that you're going to have to make to even make a somewhat, some semblance of a case. You're doing this eight years after the end of World War II? Stupid. Absolutely stupid. So he strikes out massively. And McCarthy's down bad after missing out on the Signal Corps. Cone runs to him next and says,

hey, man, I got something huge. And again, I'm not sure how this went word for word, but McCarthy says, well, you're going to have to bring me something pretty big. We missed on the Signal Corps. And Cohn says, I got a dentist. McCarthy, I'm sure, I'm sure, was like, the fuck am I going to do with the dentist? He goes, he's a military dentist. Why is that such a big deal?

And Cohn somehow convinces him that a dentist has the ability to listen to people in the military that are talking about plans that could be then passed back to the Soviet Union. And part of this thought process is, okay, well, we need some information on him. So they pull up his military records and they're looking through it. And they find out that during one of these loyalty hearings that this dentist had gone through, he refused to answer some questions. And as he refuses to answer these questions, obviously, that's noted and all of the information. and so he thinks, okay, so he's not answering questions about the Communist Party. He was a private citizen dentist before he was drafted into the military.

Let's see where this takes us. They would basically, I don't really know how to put it, because it doesn't make a lot of sense the way that they went about it kind of haphazardly because this guy's name was Irving Perez. And if Irving Perez was a communist, I have no idea. The fact that he wouldn't answer the questions, he was either too smart to answer the questions or he just really didn't want to tell them.

But he's under investigation. While he's under investigation, he's promoted to major. So he gets a promotion in the army while he's under investigation for maybe being a communist. And Perez, in refusing to answer these questions, McCarthy commands his, basically the guy that's in charge of his, I mean, it's the secretary of the army. His name's Robert Stevens.

He should have no, he has no control. He's a fucking senator. That's the secretary of the army. He's commanding him to court-martial Perez to try to punish him for being a undercover communist spy and then getting promoted to major, major while he's being questioned. And Perez... He's placing listening devices in all your molars. Yeah, dude.

Perez ends up getting this honorable separation. and McCarthy freaks out. He goes after this guy, he was a brigadier general, his name is Ralph Zwicker. Ralph Zwicker was a World War II hero, a pretty important guy in the fight with World War II, and he's basically asking Zwicker, hey, how come he was under investigation

and you guys promoted him? And Zwicker goes, well, technically at that point in time, it was a loyalty investigation. and that was all presidential privilege, so I can't answer that question. And McCarthy comes back at him and asks, if it was your decision,

not knowing if he was a communist or not, but believing that he could be a communist, would you have promoted him? And he says, I can't answer that question. And he goes, well, it's a yes or no answer. No, it's irrelevant because, yeah. Turns out that the reason that Perez was promoted to Major was there was a

law, I guess, that was voted on by the Senate that says if somebody is pulled out of a private industry to do that industry within the military, after two years, they're automatically promoted. Okay. So Joe McCarthy had voted on the bill that allowed Perez...

To allow the circumstances to happen. Yeah, to allow the circumstances to happen. Exactly. And McCarthy didn't know that. He had no idea. He didn't put two and two together and think, oh, well, I voted on that before. I wonder if that's how he ends up getting this. So he's just omitting all of this stuff. And Eisenhower's fucking pissed.

Eisenhower's had enough. There's so many things that he's done that Eisenhower's, he's just ready to finish off McCarthy. And he brings in one of his aides and they are talking to the military. And he's asking if there's any dirt that they have on McCarthy. And it turns out that this gentleman that they're talking to says, we have some phone calls that we begin recording and some letters that we begin keeping from Roy Cohn

on behalf of one of the soldiers that was drafted. He's also a guy that works in the... Is an unpaid consultant, last name, Shine, for McCarthy. For McCarthy, it looks like they were trying to blackmail the army as they were going after the Army for preferential treatment for Shine.

and my scenario goes, that's great information. Glad we have that. I want you to go ahead and present this choice to McCarthy. Just say, hey, if you drop this shit against the military, and if you drop Cone, we are going to just go ahead and let this play out.

If you don't do that. If you don't drop them, we're going to go ahead and report that Shine has been giving preferential treatment. And McCarthy tells them to, themselves and they're trying to protect communists and immediately they end up going to the press and it

comes out that Shine is getting this preferential treatment for McCarthy and Cohn. McCarthy strikes back in the media by basically saying that they are blackmailing McCarthy creating a fake story about

one of his unpaid consultants in order to shut down this investigation into the communist protecting military. He's trying to spin it the exact opposite direction. He's trying to counterpunt. Yeah. He's trying to redirect, yeah.

And then Mike goes ahead and makes a call over to a man named Edward R. Murrow. Edward R. Murrow was a fantastic news reporter. He had this nightly show called See It Now. And basically he puts out this piece on McCarthy talking about how he is just as anti-communist as everybody else. but the way that McCarthy is going about this is the complete wrong way and just basically levels McCarthy because Murrow is so highly respected that all of the people that are tuning into this program are now seeing that Murrow is not agreeing with McCarthy's methods.

So the thing with McCarthy up to this point is what he's been doing, a lot of it has been behind closed doors and Senate hearings, things like that. the public support for what he's doing is simply just based upon the headlines that are coming out for who he's questioning or what they're accomplishing or what they're not accomplishing or anything like that. So as far as public opinion goes, there hasn't really been any type of, I guess, live look at how McCarthy has gone about doing his thing and essentially how, like his demeanor or like kind of what looks like. Now, when McCarthy eventually they get into this hearing between the army and the Army and the Army McCarthy hearing that begins on April 22nd, I think it's 1954, these are broadcasts

simultaneously on ABC three channels because they were like three or four main channels. It's broadcast on three of them at the same time. So regardless of what you're watching, this isn't like you're watching other people watching and they're giving commentary. It's just seeing it as it's happening. Now, when he appears, because this guy's a fucking raging alcoholic, he appears like bloated, fucking sweaty, unkempt. And whereas he might have been giving these little press conferences before where they could maybe tidy him up a little bit, but his staffers were still worried because he couldn't walk and he slurred his speech. Now they are seeing him during days of hearings, 36 days of hearings against the army. and what this does is it beams his fucking sweaty balding which i'm now bald now so i can make fun of it balding ass just looking like shit and they see him for what he is during these hearings

where he's raspy slurred he's interrupting the proceedings yelling point of order into his microphone and to audiences who are seeing you know what this is this is an eastern west berlin situation during these hearings where people got to see capitalism, communism go head to head. This was seeing the ravings of a unsubstantiated lunatic against a very poised and friendly legal team for the army. And to the audience, you're seeing the opposite of what you want under your politicians. you're not seeing a neat polished politician,

you're looking at someone who is unstably aggressive and just throwing threats out and all of a sudden now instead of someone just coming to the microphone during a press conferencing, I have a list of 205 communist agents in the State Department and then be able to just walk away. Now he's in a seat where someone that is very smart

is now going to be looking at him and saying, well, we need to get to the bottom of this. Let's start naming names. Let's figure this out. If the army's complicit, I want to know. And Welch is extremely good at walking these guys lies into a corner to force them to have to, you know, answer for them.

This is taking place in front of 20 million viewers a day. This was the OJ trial of its time. It was being watched by everybody And this was, I believe that they said That there was like a 30% increase in the population That owned a TV in like the years between 1950 and 1954 So you have this basically new audience That has never really got to see what's going on up close

Probably never watched one of these hearings before ever Oh no And now they're seeing this theater play out where McCarthy had decided, him and Cohn had decided before this whole thing had started, that Cone was going to be his defense, and that McCarthy wasn't going to talk. And as you pointed out, McCarthy talked a lot. He talked drunkenly after promising not to speak. And there were certain times when Welsh would call up a witness,

somebody that had worked in the McCarthy party, or I guess before McCarthy was a staffer for McCarthy. and at certain points in time McCarthy or his staffers whoever got creative would cut pictures of like a military general out and then like a communist leader out and they would lay them over each other and they would take a copy of it

and they would copy it enough times until it looked like it was the same picture. But it was so like degraded. Bad. But this is somebody where Photoshop doesn't exist but you're not smart enough to make it look believable unless it if it's in a newspaper sure because people are just going to look at that

and if there's a headline on it they're going to look the picture and be like oh my god but you put it in front of someone's trained eye who's well versed in evidence and review and stuff like that and McCarthy and them aren't smart enough to know what they're going up against

so when they tried to show you know, the Army's harboring, you know, communist by presenting this photograph. It's of a young Army officer. The Army's lawyer or Welch basically proved on live TV that it's fraudulent. I mean, like in real time is looking at this thing and is like, you guys realize that you can tell where you cropped other people out of the picture to make it look like this person who you're going after as like a communist is standing right next to like

the commanding officer, the general and trying to implicate that this guy's a known communist and this general's okay with it. You guys have removed like eight soldiers. It wasn't that many, but it's like you guys have moved someone that was in the background

that someone might not even been aware of what was in the picture and put them front and center. And all of a sudden, people are realizing real time, they're just like, and again, the guy presenting this Welch, he's just this folksy guy who's talking like this and he's like you know and he's not coming out with

outburst but he's looking at something he's like you know mr mccarthy this is really interesting who provided you this photo because i can see some some possible issues with it there was an instance where they put up the map of the united states and it had all of these little like concentrated like black circles on and he's like these are all communist like radar installations and everything and Welch gets up there and looks at it and he looks really close and looks at all the names and he's like Mr. McCarthy would you like to come read some of these names with me? And he's like, these are just normal secured military installations that we have on any other map. You know, we can lay over another map. In fact, this reminds me of a child with measles with all the, and he's just doing this

kindly old and people are just like, this guy is like, you're seeing a very nice person next to a complete asshole and a smarmy sleazy douchebag. And the comparison is very, very, the contrast is very apparent. They also made a gentleman's agreement between Welch and Cohn that Welch would not bring up the fact that Cone had received had technically gotten draft affirmance when he shouldn't have. And in exchange, Cone and McCarthy would not bring up that there was, a employee at, I can't remember the name of the law firm. It's the one that was hired. It's the one that Welch worked for. It was a well established. A Boston law firm. Yeah. Um, yes. And he was like, you're not going to bring up that we have this junior partner or lawyer that helped with the case

that while he was at Harvard had belonged to this Harvard committee that had ties to like communist ideals or something like that. It was something that was supposed to be a gotcha. and the reason that they made this deal is because Welch was extremely protective of his employees because if you think about the deal, it's much better for Cohen to not be basically called out on the stand or when they're talking

that he was a draft doctor and he himself, because of his position, received preferential treatment. Welch, all he was getting out of it was this guy that's not even here that's back at the office in Boston is not going to have his name smeared through the mud for something he did in college.

These shots that Welch took were, like you say, that of a kindly old man, but all it was was just pecking away at McCarthy. As you were talking about with that photo that was Photoshopped, as Welch is talking to the staffer that had provided that photo that he was asking him about, he goes, where did you get this photo?

And he goes, I don't remember. And they go back and forth with that refrain for a couple of times. And he goes, Mr. McCarthy, have you ever seen this photo? Do you know where this photo came from? And McCarthy says no. And he looks back to the guy that he's grilling, the staffer, and he goes, did you get it from a pixie? And the guy goes, did I get it from a pixie?

And he goes, yeah, a pixie. He goes, what's a pixie? And he goes, it's related to a fairy. But it wears boots. The whole audience. breaks out into laughter. And the reason that they break out into laughter is because not only are there

very open rumors that Cohen is gay, there's all of these fun rumors about Joe McCarthy being a homosexual himself. And again, zero wrong with it. In full support, we have to point this out and we have to make fun of this guy because this is a guy that ruins so many lives by bringing light to this lavender scare.

He was fighting against gay people in the government so hard while being a closeted gay man himself. And again, Cohen, there's no question. We'll talk about how we know that Cohen was there. McCarthy, interestingly enough, in this file that he had gotten from Jay Edgar, or this file that the guy, Jay Edgar Hoover, that he'd gotten all these other files from,

had a file, of course, on McCarthy. And it had different entries into there where McCarthy had been seen frequenting a known gay bar in Milwaukee. There was another report in there that there was a military member that McCarthy had unknowingly tried to pick up at a bar in Washington, D.C. So this guy that's providing Hoover, that's providing all this information to McCarthy, has this file that he's maybe not necessarily keeping a secret is thought to be.

And there's another time when McCarthy is being questioned by Welch, and he has this letter basically saying all this information that I've given to you is all completely confirmed by the FBI signed J. Edgar Hoover. He just produces, it's like the paper from below the desk. It's like, voila. It's this top secret. Again, he's claiming that Hoover wrote this. He's cashing it on help that Hoover has given him.

But Hoover's not in on this. He just pulls, like, this is literally how reckless he is. He's just thinking, I'll pull this out. And then by the time I have to provide evidence that this is who it came from, all have talked to Hoover. And he'll back me up. Or do you think that this was legit? legitimate letter that was written by Hoover

that he denies writing. No. You don't think that Hoover's trying to sink McCarthy's ship once he realizes that he's not going to be useful anymore? And so he just denies it because the FBI says that they have no record of this letter being written by Jagger. Okay, so a couple different scenarios here.

Hoover is either like you said realizing that he's not useful anymore and that the only way, because if he starts to go down but has some credibility left, like it's a slow sink, then he can try potentially put heat on Hoover and maybe take Hoover down with him. But if he is able to just chop this guy's head off, ruin his credibility overnight, then that kind of makes any other

claims he comes out about Hoover helping him out or anything like that, the ratings of a dejected man who's lost all his standings. You know what? You know what's crazy? is that this is a Sophie's choice situation where I have to decide if McCarthy was that fucking stupid or if Hoover was that fucking like diabolical. Hoover was diabolical. He was, but can both be true at the same time?

Yeah, because Hoover may not have written that letter, but he'd, we know undeniably that Hoover had provided him with evidence. I know how fucking evil Hoover was, and it just depends on what he thought McCarthy was to him at the time, I guess. Another time that turns into maybe the biggest event that happens during these hearings during these 36 days is Welsh is just grilling Cohn. He's asking him to produce this list of names that's been floating around in the ether for so long without being mentioned. And he starts pushing him and he goes, I need that list by the end of the day. Can you get it to me by sundown?

And they're going back and forth. and Cohn is definitely taking the brunt of this. Welsh is, he's getting his goat completely. And then McCarthy does the one thing that Cone and Welsh had agreed not to do. Well, wait, well, there's still some stuff before that. So, huh? Yeah, what do you got?

So before that, when he's talking to him about this list, and when he's talking to Cone about the list, and he's like, if you have this list, can I ask but one thing that you can take away from this some advice from an old man he's like when you see a communist come running fast come running fast because what he ended up proving was there was this like you said that huge piece of the evidence that they're saying we have this name of people and everything he's like so it's obviously very very important this name is of the highest order he's like you sat on it for like a month and a half and not only did you do you do that you

Did you have it? But you like went on vacation and you went on some trips. If this was so important, wouldn't you have got this into the hand of the person that could have done something about it like as quickly as possible? One would think. Yeah. And then they tried to use the excuse that because they were working 24 hours a day because there was such a big communist threat that that's why they were so disorganized and everything like that. Welch was able to subpoena and get access to their daily scheduled or schedule, which showed these elaborately long lunches scheduled nap time and all of this other shit that was nothing to do with like catching communist and was basically to like showing the level of also corruption within his own office of being like, you guys are doing this. He's like, man, you guys are really have a lot of free time on the American taxpayer dollar.

You guys have scheduled dawdling on your list here. And I mean, that's the thing too, is he dug them so far down a hole that you could just see McCarthy like desperately trying to figure something out. And you were about to say what it basically McCarthy thinks he's going to come out with this and it's going to be a knockout blow. And what he doesn't realize is that he's about ready to punch himself right now. the dick. Yeah, and this is McCarthy interjecting. It's a little long, so I'm going to try to get through it kind of quick.

McCarthy says, to the question of Welsh, just berating Cohn for not being able to produce this list and requiring to produce it by, I think it's sundown, he says, he just interjects, he goes, uh, well, I guess McCarthy says,

Mr. Chairman, in view of the quest by Mr. He gets cut off by Senator Munt, who's running this. Do you have a point of order? and McCarthy says Not exactly Mr. Chairman, but in the view of Mr. Welsh's request that the information be given once we know of anyone

who might be performing any work for the Communist Party. He's saying this a lot slower and a lot drunker. I think we should tell him that he has in his law firm a young man named Fisher whom he recommended incidentally to do the work on this committee who have been

for a number of years. It was fish that was the senator, right? This is Fred No, no, it's different. Remember earlier on we talked about Fish? It was Hamilton Fish. Yeah. No, no, this is Fisher. This is the lawyer. This is Fred Fisher, the person that worked for the law firm, the junior. Works for Welsh. So he says,

incidentally, to do the work on this committee, who has been for a number of years, a member of an organization which is named oh, years and years ago as the legal bulwark for the Communist Party, an organization which always springs to the defense of anyone who dare expose communists. I certainly assume that Mr. Welsh did not know of this young man at the time he recommended as the

assistant counsel for this committee. But he has terror and such a great desire to know where anyone is located who may be serving the communist cause, Mr. Welsh. And I thought we should call your attention to the fact that you're Mr. Fisher, who is still in your law firm today, whom you asked to have down here looking over the secret and classified material is a member of an organization, not named by me, but named by various committees, named by the attorney general, as I recall, and belonged to it long after it had been exposed as a legal arm of the Communist Party.

Now, as he's saying this, Welch is also trying to kind of be like, he's trying to catch McCarthy and being like, you realize you're crossing a line. He's like, sir, he's like, there's no need to do this. There's no need to assassinate this young man's character or anything like that. Roy Cone is looking like he's going to throw up. Yeah.

As McCarthy's saying this, he has a flop sweat and he looks like he's about to throw up because now he knows not only is Welch about to basically just embarrass him, but he now knows that the agreement is off if Cone's shit is going to get brought up. Yeah, and McCarthy continues on.

He doesn't quit. That long diatribe continues. with knowing that Mr. Welsh, I just felt I had a duty to respond to your urgent request that before sundown, when we know of anyone serving the communist cause, we let the agency know. Now, we're getting, or now, we're now letting you know that your man did belong to this organization for either three or four years, belonged to it long after he was out of law school. Now, I've hesitated bringing that up, but I have been rather bored with your phony request to Mr. Cohn here, that he,

personally get every communist out of government before sundown. Therefore, we will give you the information about the young man in your organization now. I'm not asking you at this time to explain why you tried to foist him on this committee that you did. The committee knows. Whether you knew that he was a member of that communist organization or not, I don't know. I assume you did not, Mr. Welsh, because I get the impression that while you are quite an actor, you play for a laugh. I don't think you have any conception of the danger of the Communist Party. I don't think you yourself would ever knowingly aid the communist cause.

I think you're unknowingly aiding it when you try to burlesque this hearing in which we're attempting to bring facts, however. So to me, that also feels like he had he had practiced something, what he would say in the event that he was going to pull that. out regardless of the agreement and welch at the same time knew the mccarthy was going to be unstable enough or desperate enough or enough of a boy to do so so his response was measured not only in what he said but also like his actual like character you could see he is actually like getting teary eyed a little bit and so you're going to be mccarthy i'll be welch here we go he goes until this moment senator i think i never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness fred fisher is a young man who went to harvard law school and came into my firm and is starting what looks to be a brilliant career with us little did i dream that you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad it is true he is still with hale and door it is true that he will continue to be with hale and door it is i regret to say equally true that I fear he shall always bear a scarred needlessly inflicted by you.

He goes on to say, if it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty, I would do so. I'd like to think I'm a gentleman, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me. He keeps McCarthy, keeps trying to then kind of double down. Again, remember, go on the attack. And he finally cuts him off mid-sentence ago. Senator, may we not drop this? We know we belong to the Lawyers Guild. Let us not assassinate this lad further.

Senator, you've done enough. He says, have you no decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency? And as he tries to kind of get a response out, it is applause from everybody there. Because they've witnessed for 36 days, just this dude try to bully and badger this guy, and they can tell that this is a move of desperation.

And then Welsh walks out of the courtroom And he looks over at one of the other lawyers with a smile And he says, how do I do? Like he did great But at the same time, he didn't respond in any way that was phony He simply just turned the circus that McCarthy was trying to be the ringleader of And he's like, give me the fucking baton bitch Yeah, he let McCarthy show everybody who he was

And it turns out that that was a sloppy, crazy alcoholic that was going to lob any grenade that he had in his pocket. The reaction was pretty immediate because he went from, I think, in a month, like a 50% approval of the job he was doing down to 34%. His popularity plummeted instantly because now people connected the dots and said, this guy's been at this for how long? And has he been handling this this way the entire time to fucking janitors and teachers and everything. And this is how he talks to the army. Yeah. It didn't take very long. It was June 11th, 1954 when the Vermont Republican. So this is the Republican Party smelling blood in the water and

knowing that they need to remove the cancer that was Joe McCarthy. Senator named Ralph Flanders introduced a resolution to have Joe removed from basically all of his committee seats. And they go through the procedure and realize that they don't do it quite right or they don't have everything lined up to do this so then the censure resolution comes up which is going to do the same thing because it's not going to allow him to hold any of those positions in a in a way that they can work around it's a censure used to be a death sentence for a congressperson i mean still is for joe yeah in the times that we live in now i think it's looked at is a little bit more of

toothless bite. It's like an impeachment, unfortunately. Yeah, I mean, there's no removal that goes on. But what this, what it does is, in addition to the censure is it's basically like a formal

public vote of disapproval. It's a public shaming. Correct. What it also does, though, is it sets the precedent for what they're going to, how they're going to treat him going forward. Yeah. His political power advantage is not because of the censure,

but because of how everybody refuses to then work with him when he goes to talk on the floor, people get up and just leave. Incredible. He has no power, and he is stripped off of these committees again because no one is going to work with him. So the people that are in charge of these committees

are like, you're useless on this committee because no one will work. Even if you are try to be useful, people will out of spike just not fucking work with you. You're a pariah at this point. So they added 46 charges to this central revolution. And I mean, it goes like, what is it like 60 something to 20? And you don't I fucking love to?

So he gets put into the hospital and they put this on hold for 10 days. So he can go to the hospital. They want him there. He goes and they take this vote in front of him. He's there when it happens. Well, and this is two months later, 10 days after he's, he's in the hospital, they push it back a little further. They get him for two counts that are levied against him,

and that it was that McCarthy had failed to cooperate with the subcommittee on rules of administration and repeatedly abused the members who were trying to carry out their assigned duties. And the second one was that McCarthy had charged three members of the Watkins Selection Committee with deliberate deception and fraud, that the special Senate session was, quote, unquote, a lynch party, and it characterized the committee as the unwittingly handmaiden, involuntary agent, attorneys in fact of the Communist Party, and it acted contrary to senatorial ethics,

intended to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute, to obstruct constitutional processes of the Senate, and to impair its dignity. So this is just them saying, you made all of us look bad. You have shamed this fucking institution. Exactly. So this vote takes place as you were talking about December,

2nd, 1954, the Senate votes 67 to 22. All of the Democrats voted for censure and the Republican Party was split 22 to 22 in favor and against. So 67 to 22 is a massive loss for him. And McCarthy gets condemned and he's just, he's a pariah. As you're talking about, there's, I believe it was Eisenhower was holding some sort of like a fundraiser gala, the Republicans and every single Republican congressman was invited except for McCarthy. And McCarthy was calling his assistants and telling them to call Eisenhower's secretaries and ask them if he was going to get an invite. And every single time those assistants called those secretaries said he's not going to be here.

He's not going to come. We're not going to let him show up here. Ike says no. Yeah. And McCarthy just descends into this kind of drunken spiral. More drunken spiral. Because he doesn't have time to do anything. Now he's got nothing but free.

He used to just drink on his free time. Yeah. And he had a lot of free time because he was taking naps. He was drinking at lunch and everything. But now even the times in the morning when he was having to be sober, eh, don't have to be sober anymore. So now he's just drinking full time. I don't know.

it was her trying to maybe infuse a little bit of life into him. But I believe it was either within the year or the year before he passes away, that his wife, Jen Kerr, talks him into adopting a child. Sorry for that kid. I'm glad he died. Yeah. Not the kid. Not the child.

I'm glad that if there had to be a child brought in there, that McCarthy was not around long enough to imprint anything on that child, because this fucker died three years after the vote to censure him. May 2nd, 1957, he dies at the age of 48. The official report is that he dies of hepatitis. Pretty much everybody knew that he died of cirrhosis of the liver. He died of alcoholism. There was really no doubt in anybody's mind.

There were some allegations, and I don't know how founded they were, so I didn't go into him because I didn't really need anything else, but that he had become pretty addicted to morphine over his time. So there is a chance, I don't know how prevalent it was back in. Because I wanted some pain. Yeah. Yeah, he definitely, he wasn't feeling anything those last three years for sure. Between the booze and potentially him shooting up morphine,

not a feelings kind of guy. But still 48 years old. They said that there was a pretty big outpouring as far as all of the things. senators that came to the funeral and he had multiple funerals. When his body was transported back to Appleton for his final funeral, they had loaded him up into the plane. And of course, he was in the casket with the flag draped over it. Yeah, because he died while he was in office.

Yeah, I guess the senators that had gone on to the plane to go back to attend the funeral ended up playing a game of poker on McCarthy's casket sitting. right on the American flag. And there's something that's pretty poetic about a guy that was a degenerate gambler that gambled his way into being able to pay for law school. Yeah, that's true. And then you have these senators that have such little respect for this guy that they're just going to play a card game, a poker game, a game of betting on his casket.

I mean, that's not where the red scare ends. The second red scare will continue. It loses a lot of steam here. Well, it also loses a lot of steam, I think, because Stalin died. Yeah. Stalin's out of the picture. And the Supreme Court actually pulls its head out of its ass. And in 55, so a year after McCarthy gets censored, they basically restrict the ways that the government can enforce its anti-communist policies.

By 1957 there was a Yates versus the United States and in 1961 there was a scales versus the United States that helped limit Congress's ability to circumvent these First Amendment rights. So it took all the way from us losing a lot of the First Amendment powers in what, like 1918, the Espionage Act and all that kind of stuff, all the way up until 1961 for SCOTUS to finally step in. say, hey, we need to start looking at this First Amendment a little bit differently. We need to maybe bring some protections back in this freedom of speech amendment that we have. Along with that, in 1967, there was the United States versus Rubble that ruled that a ban on communists in the defense industry was unconstitutional. I don't know about that one. That one feels like maybe it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. And again, I understand that we just spent this whole entire time talking about people that were labeled as communist that weren't communists that had their lives ruined.

1967 were still in the shit of the Cold War. It's still an active threat. Yeah. Yeah. Unconstitutional, I agree with because you can't ban somebody based upon their political beliefs from the defense industry. but that would be the one where I'd look at it and think, okay. But here's the other thing too. I think it moves from the threat next door

and that tapers off to where then at that point it's still, and at that point it's just the nuclear threat. But that one's scary fucking enough as it is. But at least then you are like, well, at least now I feel like more comfortable I can hunker down with my neighbor. They have a bunker. Maybe they'll let me come over there.

We had enough time to dig enough fallout shelters is that everybody get a little bit more comfortable with the idea. So, I mean, today, it should feel like after these first two issues that we shouldn't be dealing with the red scare, but I mean, the word communist and communism is spread all over everywhere. There's allegations being levied against all sorts of people because communism is a buzzword. You just call someone a communist without any indication. You know what?

Someone calls somebody that you should be required to tell them, label them what type of communists they are, because it's rude not to be more specific. Yeah, it truly is. And it's a part of the reason why, you know, this blends over from McCarthy into today is really Roy Cohn. Roy Cone is kind of the linchpin in all this, because in 1973, Roy Cohn meets Donald Trump. And during that time, the 27-year-old Trump and his father are being sued by the U.S.

Justice Department for discriminating against black tenants and their housing projects. And what they were doing was if there was a black applicant, they were putting a C for colored on the application. And in buildings that were populated by white people, they were being rejected. And they were basically doing a end around to try and segregate the areas. So other attorneys basically, they're like, you guys. need to settle this and move on because this you guys are going to get sued they're going to win in court so trump asked cone for his advice and he tells him tell him to go to hell and fight

the thing in court so cone takes the case and there are certain rules that are going to sound very familiar when we say this um but they were honed in practice during the McCarthy hearings so cone takes the case and immediately launches this aggressive counter suit files a $100 million defamation suit against the government. And while the countersuit is quickly dismissed because it's bullshit, and the Trumps have to sign a consent decree settling the housing case in 75. Without admitting guilt. Without admitting guilt.

So following that playbook, it's declared a total victory in the media. So they still have to pay out, but it's still a total victory. So I don't know how it's a victory if you had to pay out because you wouldn't have had to pay out if there wasn't something you were guilty for. But I digress. That's simply the legal system. It's kind of an Alford plea where you don't have to admit guilt, but you admit that they have enough evidence to be able to find you guilty. So we come to a particular set of rules of Cohn's playbook. and during the 13 years that he basically served as not only his personal lawyer, but his mentor.

Yeah. His mentor. These rules are instilled within a current somebody. And tell me while you got them all pulled up. Yeah. That close your eyes. And regardless of where you sit, just let the situations fill your head where these sound familiar. Attack, attack, attack.

never apologize or show weakness and always counterattack with greater force. I think we can all think of some things there. Deny everything, admit nothing, disregard the facts, deny wrongdoing, and never acknowledge defeat. Claim victory, regardless of the actual outcome, always declare that you'll won. We just spent three plus hours talking about how in these hearings and a craft that was owned by McCarthy and also used to a very effective extent by Roy Cohn. I mean, it's the same playbook. We're seeing the same thing that's instilled into how things are handled today in government,

how there's a refusal to admit defeat. There's a refusal to take the blame for something. There's deflection at every turn. and there's lies that are told, and this isn't just, I mean, this is just politics today. This isn't even really just down to one person. I mean, there's a person that we've been talking about that was mentored by a guy that ran this playbook.

But at the same time, this is... He also represented New York mobsters, George Steinbrenner, which might as well fall into the latter category. It's a monster? Yeah. Steinbrenner? Yeah. All right. Yeah, he's a Yankee.

Fuck him. And then there was, oh. he was like a professional fixer as well for all of these like sleazy ass fucking people and eventually sometimes it takes a while McCarthy karma got him pretty quick he kind of sped it along that's um cone karma caught up to him a little bit later but in a fuck i don't even is it justice in a way is it i was going to say but justice but is that a thing Cohn gets sick. He becomes severely ill in 1984. Donald's at his bedside.

Papa, papa, papa, are you okay? He says, I just have liver cancer. It wasn't liver cancer. Nope. He had contracted AIDS or HIV was dying of AIDS related complications. And it was a very among certain circles and everything that Cohn was, was, was, closeted and everything, which nothing wrong with that. No.

But when you pursue other people trying to live the same life but openly and just trying to be themselves and you are going after those people like we'll discuss during the lavender scaurps. And I think we're going to do a Patreon on that one, right? Yes. You have, you, fuck it, you got it coming. So, fuck it, man. I don't have any sympathy.

I just, we just talked for. three and a half hours about a couple of these fucking assholes ruining people's lives. Yeah, I got zero fucking sympathy. In fact, it didn't get him soon enough. No? Because what sucks is now what I have to think about is the

fact that he probably fucking had it and how many people he could have possibly spread HIV to. Knowingly or unknowingly? Yeah. Yeah, he spread his hate and vitriol in more ways than one for sure. All right. Is there a fun way to end this?

Yeah, cone dynidavates. Okay, good. That's about as good as it's going to get. That's the fucking light at the end of the tunnel for this one. Yeah. So, I mean, when we were planning on doing this episode throughout the week, we would kind of kick stuff back and forth about, this episode doesn't have to sound favorable for communism or anything like that,

but I think my biggest, I guess, kind of goal going into this episode is that, try to understand why the word is scary when people that are making it scary are manipulating it I guess have a reason to deflect your attention as much as I fucking hate to say this

do some of your own research on this kind of stuff because it's not hard just to take a look at some of the shit that Marx wrote and just be like oh that does that sounds different from what I thought communist was maybe people just kind of co-opted it

and use it in their own, you know, selfish ways. Yeah, and as much as we can point to Marxist communism and say that it's different from what people say, what we've been taught and seen through Stalinism and Maoism and all of these other communist offshoots, it's not a good thing. No, it doesn't mean that communism, even the Marxist version, is going to work, anything like that. But it and of itself

is much less nefarious and innocuous than what it's actually become outside of his idea. It's grown in fear. And also here's the thing. If there's someone trying to make you feel like communism is a threat, that's bullshit. Do do a little look and see what it would take

for communism to even get the tiny, little toe even established. It's not even an established recognized party. Like, do you realize, like, what a takeover would it require? It's not fucking humanly possible. So quit being scared of it. Well, at the same time, we have proof in other countries that have communist parties that are democracies that communism doesn't end democracy.

No. But you don't hear about those, right? No. No, we don't talk about the places where there is a communist party, and they do get a seat or two here or there, but they've never come close to having a majority or any sort of power. Because it would be the proof that people need

that there's an example that it doesn't work and that it's not something to be fearful of and because it's never good, it's just, yeah, it's fucking ridiculous. If you never get a chance to stop scaring you, it's going to always scare you. Yes, exactly. All right, man, damn, three hours and 40 minutes.

We haven't done that a while. It's good. We need to get that in every once in a while. This is hopefully, going to get a lot of people through that fall asleep routine. This episode is going to provide so much fall asleep time for people. It's a week's worth of sleep. Yeah, exactly. Hope you guys learned something. Hope you enjoyed the episode. And we'll catch on the next one. Peace.