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The MAGA attack on government jobs, takeover of government agencies, and purge of supposed “DEI” and “woke” professionals has a long history in the US. Julian uses old-timey newsreels, biographies, and events in the public record to trace the lines from 1919 to today, making stops at the so-called Red Summer’s “race riots,” Red Scare communist panics, Hollywood Blacklist, and Lavender Scare that fired thousands for being presumed gay.
Unrelated to any of this completely useless and repressive paranoid bigotry, actual Soviet spies were being apprehended and prosecuted—even then everything was not on the level. The prosecutors had their own hidden skeletons and shady bedfellows, even as they claimed the patriotic moral high ground.
At the heart of this history is a lineage of men who never let truth get in the way of gaining, and wielding, power and cruelty. Julian uncovers a surprisingly direct lineage of dirty-tricks demagogue succession, from Woodrow Wilson to A. Mitchell Palmer, to J. Edgar Hoover, to Joe McCarthy, to Roy Cohn, to Roger Stone, to our current president.
Editorial Note: The Paul Robeson clip that starts the episode is a re-enactment by James Earl Jones for the Zinn Education Project. It uses the transcript of Robeson’s 1956 appearance before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee.
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Would you like to come to the ballot box when I vote and take out the ballot and see?
Mr. Chairman, I respectfully suggest the witness to be directed to answer the question.
You are directed to answer the question.
In the first place, wherever I have been in the world, the first to die in the struggle against fascism, Were the Communists.
I laid many wreaths upon the graves of Communists.
That is not criminal.
Chief Justice Warren has been very clear that the Fifth Amendment does not have anything to do with the influence of criminality.
And I invoke the Fifth Amendment.
The witness talks very loud when he makes a speech, but when he invokes the Fifth Amendment, I can't hear him.
I have medals for diction.
I can talk plenty loud.
Well, you talk a little louder.
I invoke the Fifth Amendment loudly.
That was the voice of lawyer, acclaimed singer and actor, former NFL football player, and political activist Paul Robeson, testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956.
hold on.
I'm actually cutting in here because that seemed too good to be true.
In seeking to validate that clip, I found it was recorded by the actor James Earl Jones for the Zen Education Project.
But speaking of Paul Robeson, he was just one of thousands subpoenaed to testify and to answer questions like, are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?
We will explore the real deep state lineage that actually stretches back from Trump 2.0 as far as to 1919. But we'll start our exploration just a few years before that Robeson clip in 1950. Welcome to Conspirituality,
where we explore the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Julian Walker, and this episode is called Sex, Lies, and Communist Spies.
In February of 1950, a junior senator from Wisconsin stepped up to the podium in Wheeling, West Virginia, to deliver a speech a junior senator from Wisconsin stepped up to the podium in Wheeling, West Virginia, to deliver a speech to the
He had been in the Senate since 1946, but he was unpopular amongst his peers and had drawn suspicion and criticism for his advocacy on behalf of 74 Nazi soldiers.
Who had been convicted of war crimes for the infamous Malmedy Massacre of 84 American POWs along with Belgian civilians.
The SS Division, to which those soldiers belonged, was believed to have killed some 350 unarmed Americans and another 100 Belgians over the course of a month toward the end of World War II. The senator, himself a former judge, was being fed false information from a Nazi sympathizer about how the convictions were obtained, alleging torture and coercion.
But biographers have noted that his own antisemitism probably played a role in his views on the case.
For days, the senator gatecrashed the hearings on the Malmedy massacre and spoke so frequently, During the proceedings that his name appeared in the transcript more than anyone else's.
Then he made a public show of telling the press he was quitting in disgust, even though he'd never been appointed or invited to the hearings in the first place.
So the senator's political career was floundering.
He would in a few months' time actually be voted the worst sitting senator in the government in a widely publicized press corps poll.
He needed an issue, something on which he could establish himself in the public mind, and his inner circle had tossed around some possible topics for that Lincoln Day speech.
Pension plans for veterans, supporting the St. Lawrence Seaway, housing policy.
None of them seemed flashy enough.
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