The Red Scare Returns? Lessons from McCarthyism in the Age of Trump 2.0
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Hi, everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is On with Kara Swisher and I'm Kara Swisher.

The Cold War has been over for more than 30 years, but President Trump and his Republican acolytes are still throwing around the C word, that would be communist, at anything that smells slightly progressive. It's not quite McCarthyism, but it feels like we might be getting close and maybe even worse, which is why I want to talk to Clay Risen today. He's a New York Times reporter and the author of a number of history books, including his latest, Red Scare, Blacklist, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America.

It's been called the most complete history of the Red Scare that has ever been written, and it's a fascinating read. And even though he doesn't write about the MAGA movement, it's easy to see connections between the Republican Party of the 1940s and 50s, Joseph McCarthy's insane tactics, and today's political climate, including that Roy Cohn, former mentor and attorney to President Trump, was a big part of the story.

I really enjoyed the book. I devour everything about the Red Scare and history before that, because I think history is obviously instructive. But at the same time, we always think it couldn't happen here. And it has, actually. And we've managed to push it back time and again in our history. So I think

Hearing about this era, which I think was one of the more pernicious eras and the heroes that pushed back on it, is critically important today. I want to talk to Clay, obviously, about the conservative anti-communist groundwork that led to the Red Scare, why McCarthy was so successful and where he sees parallels today. I think it's an important conversation to have just ahead of the 4th of July as we're thinking about what actually makes our country great. And friends, it was not Joseph McCarthy himself.

It was great that we pushed back on him. Our expert question today comes from political analyst Molly Jungfast, who has a personal link with this story. So stay with us. This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. I'm Kathy Jones, Schwab's chief fixed income strategist. And I'm Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist. But

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Clay, thanks for being on On. I appreciate it. Oh, thanks for having me. So this is a topic, I hate to say it, near and dear to my heart. I eat up everything about McCarthyism, about the Red Scare, and I actually had a minor in this area in college. So it's my favorite area to talk about, even though it's frightening. But before we talk about your book, which is mostly set in the 40s and 50s, I want to talk to you about the new...

Sort of Red Scare New York last week. Zoran Mamdani won the Democratic mayoral primary in New York City, beating out former Governor Andrew Cuomo. President Trump has called him a communist multiple times, also a lunatic. And on Sunday, he threatened to cut federal funds to New York if Mamdani is elected and doesn't do the right thing, whatever that means.

Now, Mamdani is not a communist. He's a democratic socialist. But former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers also warned that Mamdani has, quote, advocated Trotskyite economic policies and that rich New Yorkers will flee to Florida if he's elected, which personally, I think it's a good thing. And establishment Democrats also seem worried, but they're always worried. So what do you make of the reaction to Mamdani? I thought when people voted, they get to have what they voted for. But I don't know. That is usually the case. Yeah. And look, I mean,

Just as an observer, I find it saddeningly predictable, you know, that someone that comes with fresh ideas and, you know, you can like him or not like him, but certainly he's bringing a different perspective and one that a lot of people like. I mean, the numbers for young voters in this primary are way up compared to 2021.

And, you know, he's activating a part of the base or a part of the Democratic electorate that the rest of the party, in theory, should be very excited about. But, of course, he's doing it by challenging the establishment and, you know, frankly, a gerontocracy. I mean, we all talk about how the Democratic Party's problem is it's run by kind of an... Yeah. So it was sort of predictable that there would be this backlash against him. I do think it is...

funny and disheartening that so many people jumped on the socialist equals communist equals un-American equals, you know, run down the list of things. I mean, so I'm from Tennessee, and the guy who represents my neighborhood, Andy Ogles, who is a very far-right

You know, he's called for Maumdani to be stripped of his citizenship using McCarthy-era tools, legislation that would allow the government to strip him of his citizenship to deport

deport him. And, you know, it's, yeah, that's not going to happen. But then again, who knows these days? Who knows these days? So using the word commie, like commie was sort of one of those things like commies are everywhere, pinkos, if you're not a commie, etc. Talk a little bit about the use of the language and then the deportation. I know he got widely derided, just for people to be clear, but that's not to say he doesn't have support for that.

Yeah, no. And if you look at some of the legislation that was never overturned and was in some cases not even ruled on by the Supreme Court, so it's still in effect. It is dangerously vague. And actually, you know, could someone make the case that under that law he could be penalized? Because the law itself criminalizes even association in many ways with the Communist Party. So someone could dig something up.

and say, well, this is evidence. But to your point about the language, this is one of the reasons I wanted to write the book was I grew up in the 80s and 90s and calling someone a commie or a pinko or whatever was this sort of all-encompassing charge. During the

Cold War, it had a relatively specific meaning. What I think is interesting is how that's become, it's kind of metastasized to mean really anything on the left that you don't like, right? So it doesn't even have to be a particularly radical point, you know, but if you are someone on the left calling you a communist, it has a certain valence. And it's interesting, in 2025, we're still talking about communism as if it's some sort of

mortal threat to the United States. Which it felt back then. So Mamdani isn't the only reason your book feels prescient, but you've said that you hadn't intended to be a reflection on the current political climate when you started writing in 2019. What was your impetus then for writing it? Obviously, this is something that stayed with us politically for a long time. And what surprised you most when you started to dig in? So to take the first question, I mean, I've written some other books of post-war American history, and I've

follow, read a lot of post-war American history. And one thing that jumped out at me was how the Red Scare shaped a lot of that history, the civil rights history, the history of Vietnam. It's kind of this dark matter that is warping and distorting American history through the 60s, 70s, you know, up to today. And so...

It sort of struck me that that was something that I noticed, but was never quite explicated. And so I thought, you know, it was time for a book that really dug into that.

And there have been books on the Red Scare before, but they're older and they tend to be of the Cold War. And so I wanted to write something that was, you know, spoke very much to our present day, you know, again, without being presentist. But, you know, what the most surprising thing, I think, is how much, even separating aside some of the specific things Trump has done,

has done since taking office, just how directly some of the conspiracy theories and thinking about kind of the political theory, as it were, on the far right, is so similar to what you found during the Red Scare. This whole idea that there's this anti-American conspiracy, this elite cabal in the government. Yeah, yeah. I mean, without having the term

Deep State, that's what they were talking about in the 40s and 50s. That's what McCarthy was talking about. And it struck me over and over how clearly and tightly that

parallel exists. And I actually think it's a through line. I think there's a genealogy. You can look at the thinkers around the Red Scare and who they influenced and how it came down through Goldwater, through Pat Buchanan. I mean, again and again, the same kind of rhetoric. And of course, now today we see it very clearly. So most people associate, as you said, the Red Scare with the onset of the Cold War and Senator Joseph McCarthy.

And you took a while to get to McCarthy, actually. The fear monger about communism for at least a decade before he came on the scene. And I'm an aficionado of Rachel Maddow's Ultra, you know, and prequel before that. Talk about the first Red Scare, because it had been around for a while and these groups had been forming. And it was quite linked with anti-Semitism at the same time. Yeah, very much so. I mean, take it.

pretty far back to look at the strength of anti-radicalism, anti-leftism in the United States. Certainly once

You have communist revolutions in Europe and the successful one in Russia. It became very present fear for a lot of people that we could have something similar here. And so there was a Red Scare after the First World War, and that was largely very immigrant-oriented. So it's tied in with the xenophobia of the moment, where hundreds of people are deported, targeted, arrested for any connection to what was

called radical beliefs at the time. And, you know, that ended pretty quickly. But it left behind kind of a detritus of bureaucracies and ideas. And, you know, the FBI came out of that. Hoover came out of that period. And then with the New Deal and the kind of, you know, real turn,

broad turn to the left in the United States in the 1930s, there was also a reaction to that. And it was only after the end of World War II and the onset of the Cold War that that reaction really found a grip. You started to gel. Yeah, I really started to gel. This was right-wing pushback to the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt. That was very clear. Yeah, I think one of the things about the New Deal is that

It was not just a set of policies, but it was part and parcel of a cultural change, you know, a broad embrace of women's rights, labor rights, people of color, as well as, you know, just the music changed, the theater. You could see it in...

a wide range of sort of cultural markers. The reaction was as much to that as it was to policy. But it was only with the onset of the Cold War that these claims of, you know, commies under the bedsheets and, oh my gosh, the communists are here. Then it really took on a strength. And it's also that, you know,

you know, the government after World War II was much more powerful than it was even in the 1930s. You know, Hoover had a lot more power to go after people, to track people, to keep lists. I mean, Hoover had a list of people who would be detained without charges in the event of a national emergency. There were plans to build camps where people

leftists would be put, regardless of what they'd actually done. And it's important to recognize that after World War II, there were legitimate concerns about espionage and legitimate concerns about subversion. I think they were overblown, and I think they were, you know, that was a law enforcement issue, counterintelligence issue, but they justified this enormous undertaking of cleaning out

any kind of, not just communism, but progressive sympathies in elementary schools, sanitation departments, high schools, Hollywood, the State Department. It was a witch hunt nationwide. So as you describe it, Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy was anti-communist, but more than that, he was an opportunist. He was also a very troubled person. From all descriptions, he didn't have

Well, I think he was, in a weird way, for all those reasons aside, he was the right man for the right people.

right moment. He was a first-term senator who was not really very popular even among Republicans in the Senate. He sort of broke rules and he didn't fit in with the establishment. He didn't

sort of pay fealty to the leadership. And so he was, you know, sort of looking for something that he could carry into his campaign and kind of raise his profile. And it's really important to remember that his rise, his sort of debut on the national stage as this anti-communist campaigner came weeks after Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury. Explain Alger Hiss for people who don't know. Oh, yeah. Sorry. Alger Hiss was a former State Department official who...

Right. It was spying for the Soviet Union. It was one of the cause celebs, you know, trials of the century. And he was finally convicted. So all of this is happening. And then McCarthy makes his move and he says, look, I have a list of, you know, the number changed, but, you know, X number of communists in the State Department. And of course, you know, people want to believe a senator. They want to believe data. And they're afraid. Right.

So there are a lot of reasons why all of a sudden this guy claiming he has this knowledge can suddenly attract all sorts of attention. And then he was that very specific person who was willing to just throw it all against the wall. And he became kind of a thug.

I mean, I don't want to say useful idiot, but, you know, something like that for the Republican establishment. But he was willing to say things that they weren't. So he's sort of this berserker out there tearing stuff down. And so people who weren't afraid of him

We're actually kind of happy to see him doing that. And it's what cleared the field for him for four years. It's a long time. People don't realize how long it is. So his big claim was, of course, that communists infiltrated the government and others were security risks, including gays and lesbians. There was a big lavender scare as part of that, too. So the lavender scare was actually...

you know, sort of instigated by McCarthy. It was one of his charges was there were gay men, particularly in the State Department. And it plugged into a certain homophobic stereotyping of diplomacy of, you know, I mean, there's great historical work on kind of the construction of manhood during the Cold War. And, you know, this is part of that, right? It's the

men's men, they fight wars, and the other guys, they sit around and drink tea and talk about diplomacy. So it grew out of this, this sort of stereotypes, but it was also a real backlash because, again, part of this turning to the left or this more cosmopolitan-tolerant society was, you know, just the beginnings of an inkling of space where gay men and lesbian women could be

kind of be out. I mean, Washington during the war was known as a place where if you were careful, you could be out of the closet. There were clubs, there were places, and I don't want to say it was any kind of Eden.

But the backlash was real. And it wasn't just McCarthy. There were crackdowns by Hoover. There were crackdowns by city police in Washington. But then it became this campaign in the Senate. There were two separate sets of hearings about gays in the State Department.

And in the government generally, there were orders that went to every single federal agency, even down to like the Memorials Commission and, you know, the Smithsonian, where they were supposed to report back on the numbers of gay people, names and numbers in their agency. And, you know, the result was hundreds of people were fired. Obviously, many more probably were able to

go back in the closet or not come out of the closet. Lives were ruined. And all on this premise that somehow being gay was...

made you a risk during the Cold War, the biggest charge was that you were a black male risk, right? Right. Sure. But also, the director of the CIA at the time, he gave testimony, and he had a list of 10 reasons why gay people were suspect. And, you know, they included things like, well, if you're in the closet, you're already a liar. So why can we trust you? To things like, gay men are in a cabal. Like, there's this gay cabal.

Right. Yeah. Today we look at it and go, oh, that's kind of ridiculous. Sure. But but back then it was taken as writ that, yeah, this is a threat. Right. Well, you know, it honestly didn't end. I was thinking of joining the State Department. And one of the questions was, you're gay. You'd be blackmailed. I'm like, but I'm out. And then they're like, but you could be blackmailed. And I was like, but I'm out. It was like such a ridiculous conversation. Look, I mean, these things you can say it ends. Yeah, but it doesn't. We'll be back in a minute.

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So the Hollywood blacklists were the most famous example of the era, although again, the attacks on Hollywood by the House Un-American Activities Committee started before McCarthy. Talk about these lists and how they were compiled and what effect did they have directly and indirectly at the time? Yeah. So one of the things that I found interesting in my research was just the kind of the architecture of the blacklist. Because

On one level, there was no blacklist officially, right? There's no one list. But instead, there was, first of all, there's a whisper campaign and all of the Hollywood executives talk to each other. And they would say, you know, Dalton Trumbo or, you know, take your actor or writer. They would say, this guy is not employable in Hollywood. And they would all agree. They might not write it down, but they would all agree.

But then there were these lists that would be compiled by private citizens. There was one called Red Channels that was put together by a group of ex-FBI agents. And it's ridiculous. Some of the reasons why people were suspect, like Aaron Copland was suspect because he signed a letter welcoming Dmitry Shostakovich to the United States. He was a Russian composer. So therefore, he was a Red, right? Even though

He's just being nice to a composer. So this kind of thing went around. And then there was a whole kind of undeclared star chamber of columnists, union officials, mid-level executives who kind of also enforced it, right? They were the ones who would go and talk to individual actors or lawyers. You know, at a certain point, it became so pervasive that Hollywood realized they had a problem. They couldn't keep operating if they kept...

kicking out their writers and actors. And so then there was this whole process for how do you clear yourself? It was almost like, you know, Spanish Inquisition. And how did people then clear themselves? Yeah. So this was another thing that was fascinating for me to read. So there were lawyers and there were some very specific lawyers that you would go to and you would say, what do I need to clear my name? And in some cases, all it was, was writing a letter. So

So the Hoover Institution at Stanford has all these letters from Vincent Price and from Kirk Douglas and, you know, these actors who were accused were not yet blacklisted, but were accused. And these letters are just these...

this outpouring of self-derision, you know, saying, I made a mistake, I'm so sorry. And then these letters would be sent around to this sort of star chamber, and they would decide, you know, is this person truly, truly regretful? And if not,

John Houseman was declared not sufficiently sorry. Why? I can't believe he even wrote a letter. They didn't believe his letter. They thought, you know, he's kind of painting by numbers. He doesn't really mean it. Whereas Kirk Douglas was determined to be sorry for whatever his supposed sins were. And then the message would go out to executives. Hey, this guy, he's cleared. He can act again.

Sometimes the lawyers would say, you know, actually, you have to talk to the FBI and House Un-American Activities Committee. What about those who resisted?

They were... It's interesting, too, on that end, there were so many names of people who were famous at the time or were up-and-coming. You know, Larry Parks, for example. I mean, today, no one knows who Larry Parks is, right? But Larry Parks was an up-and-coming actor. He was pretty well-known as, you know, someone people thought, yeah, he's going to win an Academy Award. He's going to be... And he was one of the first actors called and forced to name names. And he...

He named some, but it wasn't sufficient. So he was still blacklisted. And he never came back. What about those who didn't name names, who refused to name? You know, the actors who resisted had a really hard time because you can't act. The writers had a better time of it. Dalton Trumbo continued with his career because he had a pseudonym and he had a front. And so the writers largely were able to kind of

pull stuff together if they were enterprising some of the actors who had stage credibility could come to new york and you know the red scare never really hit the theater scene in new york as one of the few places where there there was some of a blacklist but there was also a lot of producers who said we don't care um and it's new york you know yeah it's you're relatively safe so

So they also, as you said, schools, school districts, universities, courts. Talk a little bit about that, because that's what it feels like today.

and what they determined to be a communist theme, but also any book by anybody accused of being a communist. So, Dashiell Hammett, the mystery writer, author of The Maltese Falcon, his books were all removed from every library. Teachers were hounded out of the profession. New York actually was kind of the ground zero for this. There was a very thorough...

red hunting in the classroom going on in New York City and New York State. There was one teacher that I highlight in the book who was considered the best math teacher in America. He was taught at Bronx Science. And he was called in front of McCarthy's committee, and he didn't give them the answers he wanted. And he said, his name was Julius of Halawati. And he

he said, look, I know what's going to happen to me. I know my job's over. My career's over. And he went back home and he was fired from his job at Bronx Science. His wife was fired from her job. She was also a teacher. And this happened hundreds of times in New York, thousands of times around the country. It also happened at the college level, particularly for

public schools. There were loyalty oaths that a lot of people felt were violations of their freedom of speech and their academic freedom. And those professors were also fired. And actually, another echo with today is that, just like today, back then, Harvard was the target. Anybody who had any connection at all to left-wing thinking, they were called on the carpet. Harvard itself didn't

always stand up to defend all of its professors, but did a decent job of withstanding McCarthy. But again, the reason was, you know, this is the big kahuna. We go after Harvard and everybody else will follow suit. That's the goal. That's the goal. So, you mentioned FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. What was he like? He was like, get out of my, you're in my grill, dude. Like, I can't imagine they had a good relationship. Did the McCarthy hearings help or hurt his own aims? You know,

At first, Hoover welcomed McCarthy, partly because they had guys like Nixon originally were, you know, sort of friends with both. And, you know, Nixon was always this kind of slippery middleman between the really reactionary right and the establishment. So at first, Hoover was open to the idea of McCarthy. But, you know, Hoover was not a dumb man by any means.

And he saw earlier than most people that McCarthy was dangerous and that Hoover's mission to truly clear out

left-wing ideology from the American public was endangered by McCarthy, by McCarthy's tactics. Because he went too far. Yeah. And so he stopped sharing documents with McCarthy. And McCarthy would say things in hearings like, well, the FBI files prove that such and such is a communist. And Hoover would say, well, I can't tell you what's in the files, but I can tell you that that's not true. I mean,

I mean, he would directly contradict. Contradict him because he was in his way at what he thought was really fair. Hoover was ultimately an institutionalist. And Hoover had survived a long time by not getting too close to any one figure. You know, definitely making sure that the powers that be respected him and did what he wanted. But he was never beholden to any one person.

And so, you know... And had his own secrets, of course. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he had his own little world. Yeah. Not that little. Yeah. So McCarthy also hired this young prosecutor, Roy Cohen, to his Senate Permanent Subcommittee. By the way, Robert Kennedy was also involved. Not the current one. But...

Cohen was, of course, years later, a mentor to Donald Trump. Talk about Roy Cohen's role in the Red Scare, both in McCarthy's attacks and ultimately his downfall, and the same for Kennedy. Yeah, I think...

You know, one of the ways that I think of Roy Cohn during that time is he came into McCarthy's committee after 1952, after the presidential elections, but also just a Senate election where McCarthy was a power broker. He made and broke senators, especially in 1952. And so, you know, he was able to kind of build whatever he wanted, and he was given the Government Oversight Committee.

as government operations. And he built out a new staff. And he hired Cohn effectively to be his CEO, right? The guy running the operation. And Cohn did two things, right? First of all, he made it an operation

Whereas before, it had kind of been McCarthy and just kind of whoever was working for him. Cohn brought a real coherence to the operation and saying, you know, here's who we're going after, here's how we're doing it. He did not rein it in. He really pushed it forward. And he urged McCarthy to take risks and to go after bigger and bigger targets. And often they were targets that Cohn himself had beef with, like, you know,

One of his best friends was being inducted into the Army. Cone tried to get the Army to give him favors. The Army wouldn't. So Cone had McCarthy go after the Army. That was his boyfriend, but go ahead. Yeah, right. And so McCarthy went after the Army. And that's ultimately what triggered McCarthy's downfall, because that was taking on not just the Army,

But it was, you know, President Eisenhower was an army guy. I mean, that was his sacred ground. And so where Eisenhower had been kind of hands-off when it came to McCarthy...

Once McCarthy went after the army at Cone's behest, he decided to take McCarthy down. And, you know, I think it's interesting also the things that Cone learned from McCarthy, but also brought to McCarthy. I mean, they really gelled in a lot of ways. And one thing...

carries through, I think, to what people understand of Cohen's influence on Trump is the never apologize, never back down. If you hit a

wall. If people call you out, move on. Find something else, right? It's almost this kind of shark mentality. Just always be moving forward. Never stop attacking. And, you know, that was Cohen's message to McCarthy. It's what he took away from McCarthy. And ultimately, it's what he brought to his clients after he went back to New York and, you know, carried that through. That included Donald Trump, right? Yeah. So, and what about Kennedy? Yeah.

It's interesting. I mean, Kennedy came on board at the same time as Cohen. And, you know, the two of them really didn't like each other. They were very different guys in a lot of ways, but they were also very similar. And they're sort of young men on the make, real, they would consider themselves type A, alpha men. And they both wanted that top job, right? That chief counsel job. And McCarthy was very close with Kennedy's father. He and...

Bobby Kennedy and John F. Kennedy were close. I mean, they were socially, politically in a lot of ways. So Bobby Kennedy felt like it was his job to get. And when this young kid, and, you know, Cohn was an amazingly smart guy. He graduated from law school before he

was able to drink and was very good at his job. But Kennedy felt like he'd been cheated. And so he only lasted for a few months before he left McCarthy's committee. Now, you know, years later, some Kennedy allies and apologists will say he left because he didn't like what McCarthy was selling. But there's not really a lot of evidence for that. It's really more like he didn't get what he wanted because

He may have had remorse later that he had ever affiliated himself with McCarthy, but at the time, that was not the reason he left. He was not a pushbacker. No, no. There were pushbacks. There were two very key televised moments that are often attributed with revealing McCarthy to the American public. The Edward R. Murrow CBS special, See It Now, where he played a reel of McCarthy grilling people, and the Army McCarthy hearings where Joe Welch said, obviously, that famous quote, have you left no sense of decency? Talk about that.

Talk about the public fault. Did people just get tired of this? Because he wasn't ousted immediately. He still had a lot of supporters. And talk about the role of the media in this, because they sort of were like on one hand, on the other hand, as I recall. They were. I mean, the media really struggled with McCarthy, because going into the early 50s, there was very much a...

sort of, you know, stenographic approach to politics. It's like, we will report what public figures say in public, and that's it, right? So not a lot of investigation into what's actually going on, not a lot of doubt about what's being said, because there was a certain faith in the

well-meaning of politicians. And so a lot of people, editors and writers, really struggled with McCarthy. And McCarthy was very good at manipulating the media. Honestly, there were a lot of reporters and editors who were conservative, who liked what McCarthy, and the Chicago Tribune was adamantly, at the time, very right-wing. Well, he was anti-Semitic and everything else bad. Exactly. One of the worst people in history. Yeah.

And so, you know, there was a long-running debate about how to deal with it. But it was really, you know, as you say, Murrow and Welch, I think both of them really understood something important, which was that McCarthy, at the end of the day, was a creature of the old media. And he knew how to manipulate print, and he knew how to manipulate audiences when he was speaking, right? But captured on film and, you know, challenged on film

He looked bad. One of the brilliant aspects of Murrow's presentation is that he simply allowed... Now, it's edited, and there are certainly tricks involved, but what people saw was just McCarthy being a bully, being clearly probably drunk in his... I mean, he was often pretty inebriated. Significant drinking problem, yeah. Yeah, he did have a serious drinking problem. And...

people got to see this. And it wasn't the McCarthy that they had read on the page. This was real McCarthy. You know, the same thing with Welch. And I encourage people who have never seen it to go watch that bit, because as powerful as Welch's statements were, the context is important. McCarthy was so much of a bully. And the thing is, Welch, I mean, there's

It's all speculation, but I think it's pretty clear that Welch planned all of this. Welch was a great actor, and he understood that the Army McCarthy hearings were not a trial. They weren't. There was no judgment and that the senators didn't really matter. It was the public that mattered. It was a show. And so everything he did was aimed at these millions of viewers and to get McCarthy's goat. And that's what he did. And that's what he did.

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So there were others that then started to push back. It has so much echoes of today. Eisenhower's attorney general accused President Truman of having known about communist infiltration in his administration. Truman then gave a televised address saying that Eisenhower administration had fully embraced McCarthyism, which had taken on a dictionary meaning in the world. He says, and I'll read it, and that meaning is...

The corruption of truth, the abandonment of our historical devotion to fair play. It is the abandonment of due process of law. It is the use of the big lie and the unfounded accusation against any citizen in the name of Americanism and security. It is the rise of power of the demagogue who lives on untruth. It is the spread of fear and destruction of faith in every level of our society. That certainly could be written down.

Yeah. Many guests on the show have used similar words, obviously, to describe the Trump administration. You write that there is a line linking the Red Scare to the MAGA movement today. Talk about the strongest parallels you see and who are the modern day equivalents of McCarthy, Cohn, Hoover, Stephen Miller. Maybe he's his own singular sensation. Russell Vogt, Steve Bannon. Yeah. I mean, I think...

One thing, and this struck me last year, you know, to take maybe not an individual person, but an individual statement by J.D. Vance. And this was during the story about Haitian immigrants eating dogs in Springfield, Ohio. They're eating the cats.

don't you have a responsibility to tell the truth? And he said something to the effect of, it's not my job to tell the truth. It's my job to say things. It's your job to check them. Which is a very, McCarthy often said that. McCarthy would say, look, I'm going to say things that are true. I'm going to say things that are not true. I'm going to put it out there. And you decide. Which is obviously an invitation to misinformation. I mean, that kind of thing is a direct

borrowing from McCarthy, whether Vance meant it that way or not. The other thing that Vance said that I thought was really important in terms of drawing parallels is he said, well, look, it doesn't matter whether it's right or wrong. The details don't matter of any individual story. The bigger point is what matters, right? That's his little trick. He's always on the bigger point. Yeah. And that's what McCarthy would do, right? McCarthy would

comment with a charge about an individual person. And it would be proven that that's not true at all. And McCarthy would say, look, it doesn't really matter whether this person or that person is guilty of what I say. My bigger point, that there are communists in the government, that's true. What's dispiriting is that that was very effective back then, and it seems to be very effective now.

But talk about the equivalence. Is there an equivalence to these people today? You mean like a one-to-one? Yeah, I don't know if you had to. Look, there are lots of parallels between McCarthy and Trump. Cohn and Stephen Miller. Cohn and Stephen Miller. I think Miller's maybe more of an ideologue than... I mean, Cohn was certainly ideological, but he was also ultimately a power. Right, power. Yeah. And... Bannon? Bannon, you know...

There's probably no one quite like Steve Bannon in the past. I mean, one of the things that is different from then to today is...

For what it's worth, there's more of an intellectual construct today, or at least people claiming to have an intellectual construct. There were intellectual anti-communists, but they tended not to line up with the witch hunters. You know, they tended to be a little more reserved, a little more wary of what was going on. I mean, in that sense, I think one of the important things about the Red Scare is that it's a predicate.

Right. It sort of opens the door in history to worse behavior. Right. Things that self-respecting people might not have done back then, they do today. What is the strongest parallel, if you had to pick one? Yeah, I think it's the prevalence of a deep conspiracy theory that certainly drove the Red Scare. Right. Underneath

All of this was said to be a cabal of communists and fellow travelers who had infiltrated the federal government, infiltrated big business, infiltrated schools, and were all working toward a particular end. And I think today that's the same thing. I mean,

one of the things that often gets lost in a lot of the news coverage of this or that thing going on is that the motivation for a lot of it is, you can say racism, you can say a lot of things, and that's true. But what links it all together is this belief that

They are taking radical steps because there is a radical anti-Americanism that has foisted immigrants on us or, you know, trans rights or, you know, that these things are all connected and they're operated by this cabal. Right. So we talked saying commie was often the catch all for anyone who had progressive affiliations, but it seems like the terms like woke liberals, DEI are being used by Republicans to have the same effect to undermine civil rights. Right.

Absolutely.

you know, the possibility of Soviet espionage, right? You know, today we can have a conversation about what is the appropriate level of material to teach our children. And then some people do have that conversation. But in both cases, the idea of communism or of wokeism, you know, has really been hijacked by movement that sees this idea as a key to go through a door to make radical changes that go beyond conversations about curriculum, right?

Right. Or affirmative action. Also, diversity, affirmative action, these things we've been talking about for a long time. And, you know, yes, today we talk about it in, you know, maybe new terms, trans rights or what have you. But it's not, to me, it's not...

radically different. What's changed is that the critics, the opponents, the reactionaries have figured out a way to really weaponize this and to make it, yeah, I think a new witch hunt, a new Red Scare. A new version. Now, it's not just on the left. Two centrist Republicans, Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska and North Carolina Senator Tom Tillis have both recently announced they will not be seeking re-election. Trump had threatened to back his primary challenger, Tillis, after he voted against the Big Beautiful movement.

bunkers, Bill. What a moment where the center cannot hold. How do you look at this? Or, I mean, it feels like this poem keeps getting played out. Yeah, but, you know, I don't know. I mean, I think one of the challenges for a historian, you always want to say, well, the way things worked in the past will kind of indicate the way things work today, right? And so that allows you to sort of say, well, look, there's a pendulum and it swings back and forth. And, you know, you can look at American history and say, well, that is kind of how it went.

On the other hand,

fall, change happens. And one of the things that I'm very worried about is that you look at the Red Scare, I think there are a couple of things that really prevented it from getting out of hand. And, you know, it was a strong judiciary, a fairly liberal judiciary, especially under Earl Warren, and one that was very focused on civil liberties. It was, you know, a political establishment on the right that was ultimately averse to

to the Red Scare. Not everybody, and there's certainly people who embraced it, but Eisenhower and kind of the moderate Republicans, they stepped in, and I think they were really part of the explanation for why it ended up not happening or not going to the extent that someone like McCarthy wanted it to. Today, we don't really have those. I mean, the judiciary is

I mean, at best, right? And certainly the Supreme Court, given its recent decisions, I don't think is something that liberals, progressives should be looking to for comfort. And you mentioned Tillis and Bacon every couple of weeks. There's some new member of the establishment who just says, I can't. And of course, there aren't many...

I mean, the establishment doesn't really have any power anymore. Right, right, the Republican establishment. Yeah, Republican establishment. Reagan Republicans, you would say. Yeah, I mean, just reasonable people. Yeah, I would think Reagan has to come back from the dead, I suppose. But they wouldn't like him either. He's too much of a pinko. But both J. Edgar Hoover and later McCarthy used data collection, as we talked about, to go after political comments inside government.

As you said, Trump's rise was also predicated on the idea of the administrative deep state. And Elon Musk and Doge fired huge swaths of federal workers and collected data. Who knows what they've collected? Clearly, the administration's capabilities for surveillance with that data are greater than ever before. And this time, the administration is the driving force, not a senator.

As you noted, Trump can use the judiciary to change norms and policies around usage and mishandling of data, too. Are you concerned about the power at this moment? At the same time, I keep thinking they're not going to be happy when the Democrats take over with all these new powers. You know what I mean? Like, which is which could go the other. I know if they are allowed to, but I feel like they will be. You know, there's a new precedent for future administrations here.

There is. And I mean, that's sort of the question, right? I mean, assuming that everything works like it's supposed to in a liberal democracy, there will be change in that regard. What they do with it, you know, we'll see. I mean, you can imagine the next point where, for whatever reason, because history is weird, the Republicans say in 2028,

we have a Democratic president and Republicans have even more power in the House and the Senate, right? They could pass legislation that pulls back a lot of the same things that they gave to Trump. And in ways that

Don't just take us back to the status quo ante, but actually, you know, significantly undermine the president. So all kinds of things can happen. And I think, look, the way that I tell the story of the Red Scare is definitely a left-right story. I think that the right bears a lot of responsibility for it. But ultimately, I think people both, whatever your political affiliation is, should be really concerned about how...

which Hans paired with governments with strong domestic security operations and huge troves of data, what kind of damage that can do to civil liberties. And it doesn't matter if it's left or right. These things happen that happened under Truman and Eisenhower. It, I think is already happening today with regards to, you know, ice and, and just how readily resources line up to support that. I mean, as a civil libertarian, what,

Whatever your politics otherwise are, you should be really, really concerned. Concerned about the data collection. So in every episode, we get a question from an outside expert. Yours is from political analyst and writer Molly Jongfast.

Hi, Clay, and thank you for having me, Cara. My question is about McCarthy generally and the fall of McCarthyism. I'm wondering if there are elements of his fall that are instructive for Democrats in their quest to push back against McCarthyism.

slumpy authoritarianism. Now, just for people to know, you wrote about her grandfather, author Howard Fast, in the book, who was under surveillance, etc. So what can we learn at this moment? Yeah, I think, you know,

I keep going back to what Edward R. Murrow did, right? In realizing that there was a new media out there, television, and that he could use the power of television to do something that traditional media couldn't do, right? And so he showed a side of McCarthy. And so I sort of think, well, who would be the modern equivalent? And I think, you know, it's going to be somebody

if it happens, somebody who understands this moment. It may not be a journalist. It may be a politician. I mean, you can see Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani really understand how to speak to people today through the internet. It could be a journalist. It could also just be someone who goes viral and suddenly becomes an overnight sensation because they get

to zero in because I think that's the thing, right? There is an immense amount of latent opposition out there. You look at the poll numbers, there is not a single Trump policy that is particularly popular. But also, it doesn't matter right now because he has the power to do it. Now,

You can imagine also a moment where people become truly animated and people who otherwise didn't really care become activated. As you saw these young people. Yeah, yeah. And I think it's going to be someone or a group

disparate group of people who figure that out. And I wish I were as good, I wish I had that skill to say. Well, one of the problems is, you noted that McCarthy's televised bullying turned 1950s America against him when they saw it. Now, Trump and Magov made bullying part of the brand. I mean, it's part of the dunking. I think tiresomeness of that is really where the problem may have gone.

going for it. It is. It is. Yeah. It's interesting to see if that's... People have enough of it. Like, enough of it. Just the way they did when his ratings fell for The Apprentice. They've had enough of him. Do you see that happening? Well, you know, I guess it comes to the question of

when does that make a difference? Right? Because I think it'll make a difference next year in the midterms, for sure. Will it make a difference on, I mean, Stephen Miller doesn't care what Trump's ratings are. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. doesn't care what his, Christine Noem doesn't care what his ratings are. Will Trump care? I don't think he does in the way that he did in the first term. So, you know, a lot of it is

the building of momentum behind ultimately political change, right? And so it's not something that happens right now. It's not going to be a gotcha moment. It's going to be people like Mamdani and AOC and others to be named who can motivate young voters and new voters in

Right.

It celebrates the passage of the Declaration of Independence. Next year, it will be 250 years. Thomas Jefferson wrote those famous lines in the preamble, we hold those truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

President Lincoln called the declaration a rebuke and stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression. So when you look back at McCarthyism and look at our current situation, how well do you think we've done living by those tenets? You know, I think one of the things that, you know, the last couple of years...

especially during the first presidential term, first Trump term, we talked a lot about norms and how he was tearing up norms. Today, we don't even talk about it because I think anything that's a norm doesn't count anymore. And one of the things that certainly you look back to Lincoln and then again during the Red Scare, and so much of the faith in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution was predicated in a

in an unspoken way on the existence of norms. And norms enforced by people who kind of all agreed on a basic level. Who are normal. Right. I mean, Nixon was always considered the worst guy. But Nixon ultimately followed norms. I mean, Nixon resigned because he knew that he would be challenged and he, you know, that he would be probably taken to court. He knew that it was impossible for him simply to resist the forces of justice. And I think

I couldn't imagine that happening today. I think we're just in a different moment. And when we, I mean, everyone talks about what happens after all of this. I don't say there's an after. That has to be a long-running conversation, right? About how you build a stable democracy that is not predicated on norms, that really is predicated on an extensive set of rules that are enforced in a way that

Maybe we can't even conceive of. I don't know how that would be shaped. But we have to move away from this idea that we're all just going to agree to play by a certain set of rules that we've never written down because those have all been broken. One thing that would give you hope.

One thing that would give me hope, you know, honestly, it is the fact that when it comes down to it, a vast number of Americans oppose what's going on. You know, I was up in upstate New York, and we were just driving around small towns. It was on Saturday. And there were no King's protests on every corner of it, you know, every main street, you know, downtown corner of every little town. And then you look at these protests that

you know, every month or two that really well up and where hundreds of thousands of people come out. And, you know, the history of movements in the United States is something that

people don't appreciate as much as they do standard political change, right? It's easy to say this election happened, this election happened, but movements change history. And it means something that there are hundreds of thousands of people out there protesting and organizing. And that gives me hope, you know, not the solution, but it's the precedent. It's a predicate to a solution. And that

That makes me feel good about where we're going. Yeah. So I always feel like, you know, when they say you have no sense of decency, they don't. So let's move on and move on. Let's stop arguing about that part. That's what I always say.

People used to always be like, can you believe Trump did that? I'm like, I do. I do. So, next. What's next? And I think that's the greatest strength of America is next. Anyway, I really appreciate it. Wonderful book, Clay. It really is. It's really important to read at this time. Understanding history has both lessons and warnings, of course, but it's also a really fascinating story. Well, thank you, Cara. Thank you.

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