Conspirituality - Bonus Sample: Sex, Lies, & Communist Spies Aired: 2025-03-10 Duration: 05:23 === Invoking The Fifth (05:14) === [00:00:03] Are you now a member of the Communist Party? [00:00:04] Oh, please, please, please. [00:00:07] Please answer, will you, Mr. Robeson? [00:00:09] What is the Communist Party? [00:00:11] What do you mean by that? [00:00:12] Are you now a member of the Communist Party? [00:00:15] Would you like to come to the ballot box when I vote and take out the ballot and see? [00:00:19] Mr. Chairman, I respectfully suggest the witness to be directed to answer the question. [00:00:23] You are directed to answer the question. [00:00:25] In the first place, wherever I have been in the world, the first to die in the struggle against fascism, Were the Communists. [00:00:34] I laid many wreaths upon the graves of Communists. [00:00:39] That is not criminal. [00:00:42] Chief Justice Warren has been very clear that the Fifth Amendment does not have anything to do with the influence of criminality. [00:00:50] And I invoke the Fifth Amendment. [00:00:52] The witness talks very loud when he makes a speech, but when he invokes the Fifth Amendment, I can't hear him. [00:00:57] I have medals for diction. [00:01:00] I can talk plenty loud. [00:01:02] Well, you talk a little louder. [00:01:03] I invoke the Fifth Amendment loudly. [00:01:06] 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. [00:01:22] hold on. [00:01:24] I'm actually cutting in here because that seemed too good to be true. [00:01:27] In seeking to validate that clip, I found it was recorded by the actor James Earl Jones for the Zen Education Project. [00:01:37] 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? [00:01:52] 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, [00:02:14] where we explore the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism. [00:02:23] I'm Julian Walker, and this episode is called Sex, Lies, and Communist Spies. [00:02:30] 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 [00:02:52] 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. [00:03:07] Who had been convicted of war crimes for the infamous Malmedy Massacre of 84 American POWs along with Belgian civilians. [00:03:17] 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. [00:03:45] But biographers have noted that his own antisemitism probably played a role in his views on the case. [00:03:55] 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. [00:04:08] 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. [00:04:21] So the senator's political career was floundering. [00:04:26] He would in a few months' time actually be voted the worst sitting senator in the government in a widely publicized press corps poll. [00:04:35] 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. [00:04:46] Pension plans for veterans, supporting the St. Lawrence Seaway, housing policy. [00:04:54] None of them seemed flashy enough. [00:04:56] You've been listening to a Conspirituality bonus episode sample. [00:05:01] To continue listening, please head over to patreon.com slash conspirituality where you can access all of our main feed episodes ad-free as well as four years of bonus content that we've been producing. === Subscribe to Bonus Episodes (00:04) === [00:05:18] You can also subscribe to our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.