Jan. 13, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
03:26:19
3557 The Truth About McCarthyism: Modern Parallels
The mainstream narrative would tell you that from 1950 to 1954, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy unjustly accused a wide variety of Americans of being communist spies, creating a hysterical witch-hunt that destroyed the lives of innocent people. What is the truth about Sen. Joseph McCarthy and McCarthyism? What are the modern parallels between mid-1950s McCarthyism and the events of today? Sources: http://www.fdrurl.com/truth-about-mccarthyismFreedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Alright, hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
I hope I have your attention.
Please, please, I know, I'm excellent at background noise, background music, perhaps mumbling over the soundtrack to one of your favorite video games, but I'm going to ask you, as I did in the Truth About the Fall of Rome presentation, to please give me your undivided attention, because this...
Actual blueprint of saving Western civilization.
Yes, it's going to come down to you.
I know.
Sucks a little born too late to explore the world, born too early to explore space, but you do have the giant task of saving Western civilization, or as I like to call it, civilization, and that falls to you.
This is going to be an essential part of of your education and armament in the great battle to rescue a fading set of values from a hungry and corrupt world.
So we're going to talk about McCarthyism, and I'm sure you have your ideas about McCarthyism.
Let me tell you, the statrix, the matrix of state education, the Marxist blood-red indoctrination windows that have been shuttered over your very soul are going to be blown Wide and open in this presentation, my friends.
You are going to learn the facts, the truth, everything that you need to know to save the world will be right here, right now, because it's not really about the 1950s.
People get a little bit confused about this kind of stuff.
It's not about the 1950s.
It's not about the 1960s.
It's about The next few years.
McCarthyism is going to come back.
Questions of McCarthyism as the swamp is drained, as the leftist infiltrators into Western governments are slowly pulled out of their hidey holes in academia and the media and the government and various civil service bureaucracies.
Ooh, we are going to see some spitting venom cobra snake enraptured, encircling of the windpipe of Western civilization, and it's going to take a lot A lot of willpower, a lot of focus, and no small amount of courage.
I think it's actually going to be an enormous amount of fun, but then I'm a little bit of a hunter.
I hope that you will join me as we talk about the truth about McCarthyism and the modern parallels just about to reemerge from the fetid swamp of leftist politics.
So let's dive straight in.
The mainstream narrative would tell you that from 1950 to 1954, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy unjustly accused a wide variety of Americans of being communist spies.
He created a hysterical witch hunt that destroyed the lives of innocent people.
I'm sure you've heard something along these lines.
Rutger's professor, David Oshinsky, said, He slandered dozens of prominent citizens.
He terrorized witnesses who appeared before his committee.
He had a devastating effect on government morale.
And he made America look ridiculous and frightening in the eyes of much of the world.
But his critics were right.
He never uncovered a single communist.
Actually, that's true.
He never did uncover a single communist.
Ooh, there's so much to say.
Historian Robert W. Griffith, quote, Each of McCarthy's charges was fraudulent, and each was duly exposed.
Yet, taken together, they greatly increased his personal notoriety and contributed to his mounting campaign to discredit.
Political journalist Richard Rovere said, It happened to be a fact that not one certifiable communist had been disclosed as working for the government, though quite possibly there were a few.
The worst was that McCarthy and McCarthyism had led us to think that the health of the state was war against clerks of dubious patriotism.
Well, that's not the most unconfusing of sentences, but President Dwight Eisenhower's brother Arthur Eisenhower said...
When I think of McCarthy, I automatically think of Hitler.
See?
It's nothing new.
Everyone you dislike is Hitler, the emotionally reactive guide to chatting about things on the internet.
Investigative journalist I.F. Stone said, McCarthy will never be beaten on the defensive.
He loses one fight and starts two new ones.
Charges are always more exciting than their refutation, and he thereby dominates the front pages.
He has...
Hardly begun to hit his stride as master of the big lie, like Hitler and Goebbels.
He knows the value of ceaseless reiteration.
He has their complete lack of scruple and sets as low an estimate as they on the popular mind's capacity to remember.
So, madness.
Actor Humphrey Bogart said, they'll nail anyone who ever scratched his ass during the national anthem.
Now, by the way, he and I think Lauren Bacall did drop by the...
House Un-American Activities Committee investigation into communists in Hollywood had nothing to do with McCarthy.
McCarthy was in the Senate.
This was the House.
The Congress had nothing to do with McCarthy.
And they found the communists, or the accused communists, rather, being so repulsive and gross that they kind of packed up quietly and went home, Bogart and others.
Edward R. Murrow, famous journalist, said,"'No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices.'" You know, when people on the left say we, they mean you.
Albert Einstein said, I have never been a communist, but if I were, I would not be ashamed of it.
The current investigations are an incomparably greater danger to our society than those few communists in our country could ever be.
These investigations have already undermined, to a considerable extent, the democratic character of our society.
Which is, um...
Why you shouldn't take me seriously in the realm of physics and we should not take Albert Einstein seriously in the realm of political philosophy or reality.
United States President Harry S. Truman said, We are going to continue to fight communism.
Now I'm going to tell you how we are not going to fight communism.
We are not going to transform our fine FBI into a Gestapo secret police.
That is what some people would like to do.
We are not going to try to control what our people read and say and think.
We are not going to turn the United States into a right-wing totalitarian country in order to deal with a left-wing totalitarian threat.
Oh, boy.
I know these things.
They all make sense to you right now.
Oh, yes.
And, you know, before I was awakened.
Thanks, Anne.
It was all made sense to me, too.
But when you finish the presentation, come back and listen to the stuff again.
United States Senator Joseph R. McCarthy said, McCarthyism is Americanism with its sleeves rolled.
It means sleeves rolled up and get into business.
So, you know, this term, McCarthyism, it's still widely used as a synonym for paranoid attacks against the innocent.
I'm sure you've heard of the term McCarthyism.
What does it mean to you?
Boy, you know, just people went all in in smearing and attacking McCarthy.
One of the things that's interesting, I think, is that if McCarthy was correct, and if there was considerable communistic, totalitarian, or Soviet infiltration of the US government...
This is exactly the narrative that you would expect, that he was paranoid, that he was crazy.
I mean, have you ever had any other instance where you're concerned about a dangerous ideology but you're called phobic, like it's a mental disorder?
This is, of course, you know, the paranoia is how the left deals with arguments without actually having to get involved in facts or reason or evidence or anything like that.
What does it mean to you, McCarthyism?
We are going to dig deep, baby, and I promise you it is going to be a wild ride.
It is one of the greatest stories never told.
It is one of the greatest stories in the modern world.
It would have made, and hopefully will make at some point, an unbelievable miniseries, an unbelievable television series, or a lengthy movie.
It is just an incredible story, and we're going to get into it.
So the late 1940s, early 1950s, it was like really tense in the world, explosive.
There was like intellectual, moral, and armed conflict both around the world and within the United States of America.
See, communism, which conservatively resulted in the deaths of close to 100 million people in the 20th century alone, communism was an explicitly expansionist ideology and was really, really winning.
The Soviets largely taken Eastern Europe.
Communists won their battle for control of China.
Hundreds of millions of people fell into the totalitarian war of Chairman Mao.
In 1950, there was an invasion of South Korea, which shattered fantasies of this hopeful post-war cooperation with the Kremlin.
Now, of course, remember, Communist Russia was an ally of the Western powers during World War II, and it likely would have been fairly unwinnable without the support of the Russians in World War II. The Russians, of course, dealt with the Eastern Front and the Western powers with the Western Front, and Russians suffered staggering, unbelievable losses in their war against the Germans.
Now, there was a reason why when George Orwell wrote 1984, he wrote it in 1948, just flipped the last two years to get the year his dystopia novel was set in, where the allies become the enemies, become the allies, become the enemies again, because that had kind of happened with the Soviet Union.
The West invaded Russia in an attempt to overthrow the overthrow.
And reverse the communist dictatorship.
There was a bit of a detente for a while.
And then in the 30s, when Stalin allied with Hitler, they became the great enemy.
And then when Hitler invaded Russia, and then Russians switched to the allied side, they became the big friends again.
And there was, of course, a lot of pro-Soviet propaganda during the time that Russia was allied with the West.
And so this was a very big mess.
A lot of switcheroos had to happen.
And as a Famous line from Churchill when he was asked, well, isn't Stalin just basically a horrible, murdering, totalitarian dictator?
And Churchill said, well, if Hitler were to invade hell itself, I'm sure I could find something nice to say about the devil.
So, this wasn't just Eastern Europe.
It wasn't just China.
It wasn't just a threat to South Korea.
In the mid to late 1940s, All these countries fell to communism.
You've got Albania, Bulgaria, East Germany, Romania, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, North Korea, China, and Syria all fell to communism.
In 1946, Soviet-backed communists attempted a coup in Greece and got fairly close to their objective.
Communist influences were washing over places like Cambodia, Indonesia, Argentina, Laos, Bolivia, and many additional countries.
And this led to enormous fear and anxiety within the Western world.
I mean, it really was.
Like, if you look at the map, you can find these online.
The red spreading across the world makes it look like a giant crime scene with freedom bleeding out all over the various continents.
And of course, Christians really had a very legitimate and deep fear of communism for a wide variety of reasons.
But the atheistic Soviet communists, not entirely unacquainted with Judaism, actually did murder millions of Russian Christians.
And the idea that when communists take over, that they murder a lot of Christians, well, there were some not insane fears about that on the part of Christians.
And it is one of the great credits.
One of the reasons why I've become warmer and warmer towards Christians is because they're the ones who actually took on communism.
It wasn't the atheists, with the exception of Ayn Rand, who, of course, grew up under communism and hated it for what it did.
And you can see The Truth About Ayn Rand.
It's a three-part series.
I've done more on that.
But things weren't looking good.
See, the whole Second World War was fought to save Europe from totalitarianism.
I mean, in September of 1939, England entered the war to save Poland from totalitarianism, from National Socialism, from Nazism.
And...
At the end of the Second World War, hundreds of millions of people within a few years fell into totalitarianism.
We're going to save you from dictatorship here.
Here's your dictatorship.
And yeah, so after England entered the war to save Poland, just handed over Poland.
To Stalin after the war at the Yalta Conference.
Of course, the Western powers divided Europe into East and West, and the Soviets controlled the East.
Of course, the Soviets haven't been invaded just one time too many by the Western powers and Napoleon onwards.
And even before, well, they wanted a buffer zone, and it was handed over to them.
And McCarthyism has a lot to do with this, or wanted to expose a lot of why all this happened, which we'll get to shortly.
And of course, after the Second World War, because communism was winning, so hands down around the world...
There was the Truman Doctrine, right?
So Truman was the president who was catapulted into office when FDR died after three terms.
He'd been in power since the Great Depression.
And so Truman came up with this doctrine, so we're going to use dollars and military and fight against communist takeovers around the world during the Cold War.
And it's one of the reasons or one of the ideas behind why America became so imperialistic.
All of the stuff that still goes on, a lot of this came out of The Cold War.
And there was a big change.
And this is why the modern parallels are quite interesting.
After a lengthy Democrat rule, the January 1947, just a year and a half or so after the end of the Second World War, you had a Republican Congress for the first time since the beginning of the early days of the Great Depression.
And they were ready to hunt some breads.
They were ready to drain The swamp.
And so this was all going on in the background.
There was this huge clash between totalitarianism and at least the remnants of liberty.
So why were people so keen on communism?
Well, it's a big question.
I'm going to race through a couple of things here.
This is not comprehensive, but hopefully it will give you some directions to go to understand.
So if you look at...
The history of wealth or incomes around the world, it's like flatlined, and the population barely increases for a long time.
Until the agricultural revolution, which started, depending on how you measure it, sort of 14th, 15th century, and then began to peak 16th, 17th, 18th century, yet an industrial revolution, which created a lot of extra crops.
They got winter crops and turnips and so on.
They had a harness which didn't choke the horse or the oxen so they could pull more.
And land became more rationally organized.
It wasn't constantly subdivided up through primogeniture.
And so you got a lot of excess food.
With excess food, you got an urban population.
With an urban population and free trade, which began to grow in the Netherlands and out of England, In the 18th centuries, you got a large urban population, people living in cities, along with free trade, and then you start to get industrialization.
Now, the Industrial Revolution is when you start to see, after this long flat line of nobody getting richer basically forever, it goes through the roof.
Life expectancy increase, infant mortality decreases, and just people aren't dying on a regular basis.
So what happens is the Industrial Revolution appeared to increase poverty.
Why?
Because very few people lived in cities before, and so when people died in the country, people didn't—lots of writers around to see it.
They weren't dying in front of you.
The deaths were all kind of—or they weren't hungry or starving in front of you.
They were all kind of removed from the people like Dickens and so on who would write about this kind of stuff.
So the Industrial Revolution, by decreasing poverty, actually gave the appearance that poverty was increasing— Fewer people were dying.
And, of course, you saw these children slaving away in these factories.
And Charles Dickens was one of them when he was younger.
And people said, oh, there's child labor.
That's terrible.
And of course, when children were on farms, they worked as well.
And Joseph McCarthy was actually one of those children.
And so the fact that children weren't dying, but were living because they got to work and make an income, people thought, well, it's terrible.
There's child labor.
But child labor is better than children dying because they don't have enough resources to survive.
Now, so you have an increase in the appearance of poverty because this is the old Malthusian thing, right?
That population increases exponentially, but food production only increases linearly.
So whenever you get food production increase, you just get more people being alive, more people being hungry, more people congregated in cities being hungry and working and, you know, busting their nuts from dawn till dusk.
So it looks really bad because it's getting better.
It's just one of these paradoxes of life.
Now, of course, in the Industrial Revolution, visible pollution increased, and we see this, of course, going on in China at the moment.
You get smog and so on.
And sanitation.
Got better too, though.
This is important as well, right?
One of the reasons why pollution got so bad was that governments refused to enforce laws that were supposed to deal with pollution.
Anytime you pollute your neighbor's property, you would owe it in restitution, but the governments basically got bought off by the factory owners so that they could pollute at will and so on.
So visible pollution increased, even though, again, life expectancy was going up, food quality was increasing, sanitation was increasing, plumbing was getting better and so on.
Inequality increase.
Now, that's what freedom does.
When everybody's starving, it's equal opportunity skinniness, right?
But when you start to get the free market, then, you know, given the bell curve intelligence of intelligence and ability and ambition and so on, inequality appears to increase when you start to get more and more freedoms.
And that is upsetting for people who are more egalitarian in their natures.
Now, as wealth increased, governments could tax more.
And when governments can tax more, well, they like using that money as collateral to borrow to give the appearance that the governments are adding something significant to the value of the economy, right?
So governments can't really give you anything because governments don't create anything.
And the ideal of governments that came out of John Locke and that was like small government that protects the two basic tenets of common law, number one.
Don't initiate force against other people.
And number two, keep your words, which is the basis of criminal law and contract law.
But of course, when governments start to get more and more tax revenues, they can use that money as collateral to borrow, and then it appears like the government is bringing a lot of value to the economy.
Like if you date some woman and you think she has a job, but she's actually just running up her credit card, it looks like she's buying you a lot of dinners.
I guess she is, but it's not going to last for very long.
So when you get increased tax revenues and governments can borrow more, then you get the rise of the welfare state, right?
Germany had the very first welfare state, followed by totalitarianism.
Well, that's a topic for another time now, isn't it?
So vote buying, and in particular, you get the rise of government education.
Oof.
Government education.
When you get government education, then you get a valueless curriculum.
You can't teach any fundamental values.
You can't have the transmission of any foundational values because it's upsetting to people who don't share those values.
You've got to strip values out of government education, and when there are other cultures out there who are willing to indoctrinate their children in core, fundamental, powerful values, those cultures will swamp yours.
Because you strip values out, which means people become relativists and nihilists and hysterics and they lose the foundation, the moral foundation that gives us weight and depth and power and self-defense as a culture.
It all gets stripped out with government education for fear of offending people and the other cultures that can pound fundamental values into the hearts and souls of their children end up with much more of a mission, much less hedonistic, much less nihilistic, much less materialistic and tend to win.
And so, yeah, all of this blatant vote buying starts to happen, and governments want to expand more and more, as they always want to do, but they can't, you know, snap their fingers and create gold or silver or bronze or copper or whatever the coins are going to be made of.
So private currency, currency that's based on something, prevents the expansion.
of the state or at least really slows it down.
And so what do governments do when they can't grow because they're limited by private currency or gold-backed currency?
Well, they create central banks.
They create the capacity for them basically to make up money At will.
This happened generally throughout the 19th century in various degrees, to various degrees.
It's not the same as it is now because a lot of them are still gold backed, but they can start to create fiat currency, which gives them a big edge in growth at the expense of the future and stability.
Because so many governments controlled currencies, they were able to Manufacture the resource literally out of thin air many times, create the resources necessary for total war.
So when war broke out in 1914, because there were so many central banks around, they could just keep funding the war, which caused unbelievable amounts of 10 million dead and then many, many more times that dead in the Spanish flu that swept through Western Europe in particular because the troops were coming home and everybody was hungry and all that kind of stuff.
And then, of course, after the war, governments have to print lots of money to pay off war debts, to pay for the pensions of war widows, right?
I mean, it's really, really quite tragic to think that if women weren't being paid pensions, if their husbands got killed, would the women be more anti-war in a way?
Would they say, you know, no, we're not going to pull a Spike Lee movie Chirac and say, no, we're not going to have sex with you if you keep fighting or if you go to war.
So governments keep printing money to pay for war debts and pensions and all the money they borrowed to wage the total war, which causes a massive inflation in Germany in particular.
And then that triggers a big crash, wipes out the middle class in Germany, thus triggering more extremism.
And then the world enters into a sort of 13-year Great Depression.
Governments around the world, particularly in America, just started, like, when the Depression hit.
There was actually a worse Depression in 1920, but it resolved itself in 16 to 18 months because the government really didn't do anything, just let the market do its thing.
And we've got interviews with Lawrence Reed, The Great Myths of the Great Depression.
You can sort of find them on this channel.
We've got this 13-year Great Depression, and governments just become more and more interventionist.
And partly this has to do with, you know, when women get the vote, you get massive amounts of social programs, right?
You subsidized healthcare to free healthcare.
You get old-age pensions, like all the things that women who will often choose security over freedom want to vote for.
So when the Great Depression hit, governments just became more and more interventionist, more and more socialist, which...
It didn't help at all.
And it took, of course, the Second World War to restore some semblance of liberty to Western societies, particularly in Germany.
So after all of this mess, right, after the supposed inequalities of the Industrial Revolution, after all this pollution and inequality and people starving right in front of you in a horrible, vivid way rather than expiring quietly out in the countryside where you can't see them, and then you've got this boom and then you've got this Great Depression and then you've got this boom and then you've got this Great Depression that can't be solved, everyone thinks, well, that's capitalism and it's ridiculously unstable and causes So because people confused creeping socialism with capitalism, they said, well, what's the opposite of capitalism?
It must be communism.
So communism then became very popular for a lot of people.
They really...
I mean, a lot of them were, you know, nasty sociopaths, in my opinion, but a lot of them, because they were misinformed and lied to by a lot of people, they...
I think they genuinely thought and felt that there was going to be a better system than freedom and confused the mess of creeping socialism with freedom.
So, it really was just spreading like crazy.
I'll mention this when I do a speech later from Joseph McCarthy, but...
Just in the sort of six years after the Second World War, the population under communism increased manyfold, and the free population certainly didn't do as well.
So, let's start talking about some of the precursors to why McCarthy was so powerful, so volatile.
I mean, he was just a junior senator, and he gave one speech to like, I don't know, 200 people in Wheeling, West Virginia, and things just went mad from there to the point where you can still get a good eye twitch out of a solid lefty by bringing up McCarthy in the here and now many, many decades afterwards.
So, again, we've mentioned this before, the pro-Soviet propaganda that happened, right, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941.
Don't worry, Adolf, you'll be done by winter.
Oh, no, you won't.
And so, basically, your soldiers, who weren't equipped with much winter gear, will end up snapping off their toes idly while freezing to death in the Russian winter, because the Russians have this great, expansive territory.
And what they do when they're invaded is they do this scorched-earth policy.
They retreat...
And they poison the whales and they kill the livestock and they salt the fields.
And so, you know, an army marches on its belly and if you don't have enough food, your army's not going to do very well.
So it turned into a giant mess.
So, after being allied with Hitler and therefore being the enemy of the Western powers, when Hitler invaded Russia, then Russia and America became wartime allies.
Of course, more than America, but we're just going to talk about Russia and America at this point.
So, you got a lot of pro-Soviet propaganda, and this was pretty important.
And the communists in America were on stand-down orders from Stalin.
And he said, listen, we're allies, we're both fighting the Nazis who were the traditional enemies, right?
It's important to remember that fascism and communism, they're not opposites at all, at all.
Communism is socialism plus class, and fascism is socialism plus nation, right?
National socialism, Nazism, right?
So they're both totalitarian systems as a whole.
So the communists in America, who were on orders from Moscow, were told to stand down, to be conciliatory, to be friendly, to be helpful, all that kind of stuff.
Now, in the spring of 1945, this is before even the end of the war, although the end was in sight.
In the spring of 1945, on orders from Moscow, US communists reversed this peace and reconciliation stuff and switched to a militant anti-capitalist stance.
Now, Canadian and American authorities uncovered evidence of Soviet espionage.
They found suggestions that Americans had been illegally involved in passing classified secrets to the Russians.
In 1946, Senator Robert Taft accused President Harry Truman of seeking a Congress, quote, dominated by a policy of appeasing the Russians abroad and of fostering communism at home.
Now, we've had so many decades of largely indifferent to or pro-communist propaganda in the West that we hear communism and we don't get the same visceral impact that we've been programmed to have from something like Nazism.
You know, we hear Nazism is negative, negative, negative, horrible, horrible, horrible.
Communism doesn't really, like, just take an experiment, right?
And I remember when I was on a debating team in college some decades back, there was this guy walking around with a little pin of Karl Marx.
And I remember my debating partner was, hey, Karl Marx, guy still owes me money.
I don't know why I found that funny, but I did.
Whereas, you know, you can walk around with Karl Marx, you can walk around with Che Guevara on your t-shirt and so on.
Trotsky, you can do maybe even some Lenin.
But, you know, try Hitler, right?
You're not going to get the same reaction.
People can walk around with Karl Marx and people are like, oh.
So we just don't have – although – Communism vastly more destructive and murderous than National Socialism ever was.
But, you know, it should tell you.
It should tell you something about leftist or communist or pro-communist infiltration of Western media and Western academia.
So if you're having trouble following why this is so important or getting that same emotional reaction, just replace communism with Nazism or Al-Qaeda or whatever, ISIS or whatever, right?
So, in March 1947, President Truman, a Democrat, of course, inherited from FDR, the presidency, he issued an executive order creating a federal loyalty security program, right?
So, this is long before McCarthy.
McCarthy's not till 1950.
March 1947, on reports from Canadian and American authorities of illegal passing of classified secrets to the Russians, President Truman, a Democrat, issued this executive order, federal loyalty security program.
Federal employees could be fired.
Believe it or not, government workers could be fired.
Could be fired for treasonous activities as well as sympathetic associations with organizations deemed by the Attorney General to be, quote, communist, fascist, or...
Totalitarian.
This is the important thing.
A lot of people think that McCarthy was just like trying to destroy lives and so on.
McCarthy, although he was a Democrat when he was younger, did a little switcheroo.
McCarthy, a Republican, was actually trying to enforce the laws created by Truman and his Congress Democrats, right?
So this is, again, part of the history that you probably haven't heard a whole lot of.
So, it's so funny, you know, because it was really, really hard back then as it is now to fire government employees.
I mean, try firing a teacher, good lord, I mean, in a government school.
So, you could be fired for treasonous activities as well as sympathetic association with organizations, right, deemed to be communist, fascist, or totalitarian.
You know, I don't know why that needs to be said, but if you run a government, having people employed in the government, dedicated to the overthrow and replacement of your government with an entirely oppositional system, yeah.
Generally, let's say you run a restaurant, you probably don't want to hire people who want to burn down your restaurant and replace it with an abattoir.
You know, just generally might not be a great idea.
So between 1947 and 1956, over 2,700 employees were dismissed through these sorts of statutes.
And again, this all started long before McCarthy kind of came onto the scene.
So, again, we're looking at the origins that made McCarthy the catalyst for lighting the fire of concerns about communist infiltration.
And it wasn't just, ooh, the communists are in the government drawing a paycheck.
It was like the communists are in the government fundamentally changing what the government does with regards to communism and aiding and abetting its takeover of massive swaths of the planet and giving the communists the atomic bomb, right?
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sent to the electric chair for this, or tried and found guilty.
It turns out he was, and she was more of a tag-along.
But yeah, they were communists who had helped the Soviets to get the bomb.
And it seems kind of treasonous to me.
I'm no expert, no lawyer, but...
So this stuff all happened again before McCarthy.
So summer 1946, a State Department official named Samuel Klaus...
He wrote this detailed memo about massive security problems in the State Department.
Security problems in the State Department.
I can hear some bell ringing.
It'll come back to me.
So he wrote this 106-page report and it detailed the number of Russian agents reported to be on the state payroll, alleged Communist Party members, there were 33, other suspects or sympathizers, a further 90.
And that seems quite significant.
Now, four years later, Senator Joseph McCarthy found out about this memo and stirred up a hornet's nest about...
It's context.
Now, why?
Why did he stir up a hornet's nest about the contents of this memo?
Well, my friends, it's because really not much had been done to deal with this issue.
And in the couple of years from 1946 to 1950, hundreds of millions of people had been swallowed up in the giant, horrifying moor of communism.
And it seemed like the West was simply going to lose.
So, as a result, Democrat Senator Millard Tidings...
Yes, we're going to hear Tidings of Joy from time to time in the course of this presentation.
He just popped up like a fairly evil gopher from time to time.
So he requests a copy of this memo written by Samuel Klaus, and it gets delivered to him.
Now, interestingly enough...
This key document, it's like the foundational record of communist infiltration into the U.S. State Department.
And of course, this is all supposed to be kept under lock and key.
It's all supposed to be kept as part of the records and all that.
Interesting.
It's magic.
It's vanished from all the archives.
So the researchers who are trying to figure out what was going on that led up to McCarthy, they all go looking for this thing and it turns into this questing beast nonsense.
They can't find it anywhere.
Over 20 documents detailing the infiltration into the State Department, they're all gone.
They're all vanished.
Now, if it was all lies and nonsense, why would they need to vanish?
Think if there was genuine, significant, serious Soviet infiltration into the US government, what would it look like if you tried to expose it?
Well, they'd attack you like crazy.
They'd lie about you like a lot.
They'd cover their tracks.
They'd get rid of documents.
They'd make things vanish.
And then they'd start all these bullshit proceedings against you.
Ha!
Think about this as we go forward in this presentation.
Also missing newspaper reports from libraries and the Library of Congress, right?
So McCarthy gave a famous speech at Wheeling, West Virginia in early 1950.
And there was a recording made.
By a local radio station, that was deleted.
There were newspaper reports about it the next day where they talked about how many people he said were communists or potential communists.
They're all gone, missing.
Right before, right after, they're there in the microphones.
These ones, a couple of days, are gone.
Just gone.
Someone, or more likely many people, have gone in and scrubbed the record.
Hmm.
Makes you think.
Now, J.B. Matthews, he was an ex-communist, and we'll talk quite a bit about the number of communists who, a lot of them had these religious experiences and felt compelled in the re-pursuit of their faith to expose communism and to expose communists.
And this we'll see quite a bit.
This J.B. Matthews, he was an ex-communist.
He was...
Talking to the Dyes panel, which was trying to find out about this stuff.
And he was so good, he was appointed as a research director.
So he's an ex-communist.
And of course, as an ex-communist, he knew the communists around.
He returned to public life as an aide to McCarthy.
He compiled a 2,000-plus page document listing 500 organizations and 22,000 people, all with ties to the communist network.
Now, again, this is before McCarthy, before Basically says much of a public word about this and certainly isn't waving around these pieces of paper.
The infiltration had started in the 20s, had escalated in the 30s, and had not been, of course, vigorously pursued in the 40s, early 40s, because Russia was an ally.
So the Hatch Act, as this was adopted in 1939, it was toughed in 1940, again, under the Democrats, right?
It made illegal the hiring or retention of federal workers who advocated the, quote, overthrow of our constitutional form of government, which is sort of a rote phrase that officially refers to members of the Communist Party.
And I quote...
The United States Civil Service Commission has decided officially that, as a matter of policy, it will not favorably certify to any department or agency the name of any person when it has been established that he is a member of the Communist Party, German Bund or any other communist or Nazi organization.
Further, if we find anybody has had any association with the communists, the German Bund, or any other foreign organization of that kind, that person is disqualified immediately.
All doubts are being resolved in favor of the government.
Right.
So, this is very important.
So, if you're a member of these parties, you can't work in the government.
You can't work in the government.
If you're even associated with them, let's say you're married to a woman who's a communist.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
Disqualified immediately.
Fired with no recourse and no process, no procedure, nothing.
We find that you're either a member of a communist or a Nazi organization or you're associated with people.
Your best friend is a Nazi or a communist.
You can work for the government.
So when people get mad at McCarthyism, they're getting mad at the attempt to enforce a law put in by Democrats.
Hmm.
Again, I mean, these aren't things that you hear about much, but this is very, very important, right?
To understand this.
Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?
This isn't something that just was made up by Joseph McCarthy.
It's what the law says.
Now, this was diluted somewhat during World War II because Russia was an ally.
So, why?
Why was McCarthy even needed?
I mean, why did he need to have these hearings?
Why did he need to do all of this stuff?
It's a fine question.
Okay, so for those who've been following the election, this may be like the recent election with Hillary versus the Donald.
This may be so kind of known to you, but for those who haven't.
The FBI, of course, gathers information and passes it along to the agency or department where a security problem exists.
The FBI can't prosecute.
They can recommend, right?
Which is kind of what they did, right?
James Comey recommended to the Justice Department whether Hillary Clinton be prosecuted or whether he would rather have some sort of bizarre weightlifting accident.
Now, if the FBI says to a department, you are riddled like air in Swiss cheese with communists, if the report is ignored, or if the department takes action but is overruled by a review board, only a congressional committee could expose and hope to remedy the situation.
So you understand?
They can say, you've got problems with security, if they ignore the report, and there's so many reports that were ignored that were put in by the FBI. Only the Congressional Committee can do anything.
So, that's, again, he was a Senator.
He was in the Senate.
He wasn't in Congress, but that's important.
So, for example, in December of 1945, the FBI sent President Truman a report revealing that his Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Harry Dexter White, was a Soviet spy.
Reading this stuff, I had a giant Brad Pitt-style thistle of hair when I started, and now it's all gone!
Because if you get something from the FBI, you're the president, you get something from the FBI saying, your assistant secretary of the Treasury, not an unimportant position, is a Soviet spy, you'd think you'd freak the F out, right?
Oh no, quick!
Boop, boop, boop!
Let's get this guy.
Let's batten him down.
Let's twist his arm in uncomfortable positions.
Let's put him in stressed positions.
Let's play Klaatu to him until he confesses.
Let's all hands on deck.
We've got to solve this problem.
But no.
Truman ignored the warning.
And in early 1946 promoted White to executive director of the U.S. mission to the International Monetary Fund.
FBI? The FBI's telling you the guy's a Soviet spy?
Well, there's only one thing to do.
Let's promote him.
Truman was sent a second report by the FBI, but again, did nothing.
Now, White resigned from the government in 1947.
His communist ties were exposed by Elizabeth Bentley.
We'll get to her in a few minutes.
She was another ex-communist who became an informer when she appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1948.
Now, the State Department received additional warnings from the FBI in the mid-1940s of extensive communist penetration of its office.
But the warning was mostly disregarded.
It was not until McCarthy came along turned to this white-hot spotlight on the situation that dozens of security risks were exposed and removed.
40.
40.
Yes, I'm afraid it's 10 years in the rear view for me, but also, the FBI had also sent 40 confidential reports about the communist activities of Edward Rothschild.
Please leave your comments below and link me to many videos.
Communist activities of Edward Rothschild, who was employed at the government printing office, but Rothschild wasn't removed from his highly sensitive position until his background was exposed by the McCarthy Commission in 1953.
Now, the FBI... I think it's fair to say it has just a little bit of a PR problem at the moment.
But back then, the FBI was one of the few agencies extremely vigilant about security risks and communist infiltration of the U.S. government.
And they really tried to do a lot.
They sent reports.
They tried to get people to act on them.
Hundreds of reports were being sent around.
And then people would say, oh, I never got that report, or I passed it along to so-and-so.
And it all vanished into the ether.
The FBI was slowly going insane.
So, let's start looking at some evidence.
The FBI was watching the Soviet infiltration of the U.S. government very closely.
It sent 370 reports to 14 federal agencies.
Now, these were forwarded again to the White House and to the Attorney General's office.
370 reports!
To me, it's staggering.
This stuff wasn't acted on.
Now, the State Department, after the end of the Second World War, incorporated a bunch of other departments and inherited the security risks and security vulnerabilities of those departments.
Those departments didn't have the same standards, not that the standards in the State Department seemed to be especially high, but these other departments didn't have the same standards when they got incorporated, they inherited all these security risks, and again, didn't really do much of anything about this.
So again, the FBI is all over this.
For instance, in December 1942, the FBI knew that nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was a key figure in the atomic energy project, had been identified by communists as a secret party member.
Now again, they're allies, but it's kind of an allying of convenience.
And this seems quite important.
Now, Oppenheimer was inactive.
He'd gone neutral.
He'd gone inert in terms of these activities because the wartime work he was engaged in was so important that the Soviets wanted him to...
Go make that bomb because then somebody else will pass the secrets along to us.
So they said, don't act in any way.
Don't go meet with communists.
Just pretend to not be involved with this so that you can finish the work on the bomb, so that someone can deliver the how to build the bomb to us.
In 1945, and we'll dip into these a little bit more, the FBI had credible information that senior government officials such as Alger Hiss, Lachlan Curry, and Harry Dexter White were Soviet agents.
These were big top dudes.
You say, oh, well, out of thousands, it was just, you know, a couple of hundred, but it depends which hundred, right?
For instance, in 1944, Lachlan Curry told the KGB that Roosevelt was willing to give in to Soviet demands about the Russian-Polish border.
In other words, FDR was willing to betray the Polish government in exile.
Again, this is why the British went to war in the first place, why the whole British Empire, why the whole British Empire was burned to the ground and destroyed in In order to fight, partly to restore Poland its sovereignty, and this is really significant.
If the other party to a negotiation knows what you're willing to give in to, then they can just walk away with it, and that's a mess.
So, yeah, all of these other departments merged together, and that became a huge mess, because once they merged, it was easier for them to get the information in the State Department.
Now, again, in the incomprehensible pile of decisions that lead to this kind of stuff, exposure of communist infiltration was actually blocked by the Democratic President Harry S. Truman.
He applied secrecy orders which denied Congress access to FBI information and related executive data on security problems.
Now, this is hard to comprehend.
Again, I don't mean to keep repeating this, but I'm just being honest with you, it's hard to comprehend.
He said Congress cannot get access to FBI information and related executive data on security problems.
And again, this stops the whole process.
The FBI can't prosecute, can only recommend prosecution, can only recommend action be taken if the department doesn't take it or they're blocked by a review board.
It's up to Congress or it's up to some senator to go waving around documents.
But if the only group who can do anything about it is Congress and...
The president says, no, you can't get the information, then basically nothing can be done.
Why?
Why?
Why would he do this?
Well, we'll see why as we go forward.
So, in autumn 1949, three men brought McCarthy, Joseph McCarthy, a 100-page FBI report alleging extensive communist penetration of the State Department.
Now, this was kind of the spark that lit the bonfire.
These three men had begged multiple other senators to awaken the American people to this dangerous situation, but only Joseph McCarthy was willing to take on this volatile project, which I believe actually ended up killing him in short order.
In autumn 1949, he had eight years to live, and I'm guessing it would have been a lot longer.
If he hadn't taken on this project.
So the FBI, not fooled, desperate to get the information out, constantly blocked by the inertness of these departments, by review boards that overruled any decisions, and by a president who blocked Congress from getting access to the information they needed to be able to pursue this matter further.
In June 1947, a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee sent a memorandum to then-Secretary of State George Marshall, quote, A condition developed and still flourishes in the State Department under the administration of Dean Acheson.
It is evident that there is a deliberate, calculated program being carried out, not only to protect Communist personnel in high places, but to reduce security and intelligence protection to a nullity.
So, this is being sent to the Secretary of State, 1947, years before McCarthy passed.
This memorandum went on to say, We're good
Now, it's not because gay people are innately security risks.
It was because being homosexual was illegal, and therefore you would be subject to blackmail if other people found out about this, right?
So Joseph McCarthy actually had Jews and gays on his stuff and so on, and it was fairly diverse in that way, but the homosexuality was a security risk because of the risk of blackmail.
On June 24, 1947, Assistant Secretary of State John Purifoy notified the chairman of the Senate subcommittee that 10 persons had been dismissed from the department, five of whom had been listed in the memorandum.
So again, this was all bubbling and boiling long before McCarthy made his case.
From June 1947, until McCarthy's infamous speech in February 1950, the State Department did not fire one person as a loyalty or security risk.
In other branches of the government, however, over 300 persons were discharged for loyalty reasons alone during the period from 1947 to 1951.
So there is a significant case to be made that the State Department, because of course it was like the Secretary of State as the Chief Ambassador, because it deals so much with foreign entities and...
Those foreign entities were increasingly communist, that the State Department was the most riddled with security risks, and it dismissed not one person, whether hundreds of people were discharged from other branches of the government.
What is the tipping point?
Okay, what happened right before McCarthy took to the stage?
Now, this is a big story.
You can research this on your own, and I would recommend Ann Coulter's book Treason for this.
In 1949, Alger Hiss, a former State Department official, was accused of passing secrets to the Soviet Union during the 1930s.
Now, the statute of limitations for treason had run out.
I didn't know they could, but they had.
But a jury did end up convicting Hess of perjury for denying he was a spy under oath.
And this was a big and wild battle.
Alger Hess, you know, a graduate of Ivy League University and impeccably groomed and dressed.
And this is another reason why they didn't want this stuff to be exposed.
A lot of these people were coming out, a lot of these traitors were coming out of these Ivy League institutions where they were being taught this radical anti-Americanism.
So the leftist and collectivist intellectuals who had worked assiduously in their attempt to destroy Europe, when the war erupted, they fled to America and they got a lot of positions in the media and in particularly in academia.
And then after the end of the Second World War, American servicemen were given subsidized or free college education.
And this is how the virus spread in America, right?
The leftists destroy Europe, they flee to America, and then they use the GI Bill to further infect returning servicemen with collectivist ideologies, with leftist ideologies.
And then they then pass that along to the 60s generation, the hippie generation, who begin the real work of implementing all of these collectivist ideals, which lead us to where we are now.
Now, the following year, 1950, British authorities revealed that a high-ranking physicist named Klaus Fuchs had spied for the Soviets while working on the Manhattan Project.
Of course, Manhattan Project took place in America, so as you can tell from the name.
And so it really mattered to the Americans because a lot of this happened on...
American soil.
Also on the Manhattan Project was a fellow named Theodore Hall.
He was a young American physicist.
He actually died in Britain in 1999.
Never been publicly named as a spy until the declassification of the decrypted Soviet cables entitled Venona, the Venona Project.
We'll get to that in a few minutes.
But yeah, this wasn't known until later.
But in September 1949...
The Americans as a whole, the American population, was shocked to discover that the Soviet Union had not only built but successfully tested an atomic bomb.
This was years before most experts had imagined it would be possible for them to do so.
And there was a sense of, well, how could they possibly have got to the bomb so quickly?
There was concern, and the FBI, of course, had voiced that concern many, many hundreds of times, that betrayal, espionage, and spycraft was causing all of this.
December 1949, again, months before the Wheeling, West Virginia speech that Joseph McCarthy made.
December 1949, Mao's Communist Army captured mainland China, prompting headlines about the loss of China to communism.
To communism.
You know, when you fought a war for years to rid the world of totalitarianism, and then you see hundreds of millions of people falling into the war of totalitarianism, it's a little frustrating.
June 1950, as we mentioned, communist North Korea invaded South Korea.
The resulting Korean War soon devolved into a prolonged stalemate, but its dramatization did help to launch the careers of people in the TV show match.
So, there's that.
Now, many Americans thought that only some kind of vile and seditious fifth column working to undermine the U.S. from within could explain this series of absolute disasters around the world.
You know, the First World War was touted as the war to end war, and of course it didn't.
As I've mentioned before on this show, the Americans, by entering the war, put the Germans in such a desperate situation that they ended up...
Sending Lenin through Finland into Russia armed with money to ferment the Russian Revolution.
So you just don't know.
If the United States had not entered the First World War in 1917, the powers would have fought to a stalemate.
There wouldn't have been any disastrous Treaty of Versailles.
There wouldn't have been the war reparations.
There wouldn't have been the hyperinflation.
There wouldn't have been the Second World War, most likely.
So you never know which way this butterfly effect from hell is going to go.
Now, in 1951, a federal judge found Julius and Ethel Rosenberg guilty of passing atomic secrets to Soviet agents.
Both were eventually sent to the electric chair.
And the leader of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, made it clear that he wanted communists and communism to rule the world.
I guess later Khrushchev would say, we will bury you.
And it was an expressly expansionistic ideology.
It was world communism.
It was not national communism.
It was world communism, and it was winning like hell around the world.
Now, these international disasters kind of had the fingerprints, bloody fingerprints of the State Department all over them.
Arguably, the U.S. State Department had a virtually unbroken record during the Cold War of undermining anti-communist governments and backing communist regimes, putting Soviet communist desires ahead of American interests, allowing 200 Soviet nationals to work and spy for years in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, and bitterly opposing allowing 200 Soviet nationals to work and spy for years in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, and bitterly opposing the Reagan administration's efforts in 1986 to reduce the massive Soviet espionage presence at the United Nations, to just Thank you.
So, was the communist penetration issue really solved?
Well, given how things continued in the State Department, arguably not.
Now, July 30, 1953, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, chaired by Senator William Jenner, released its report on interlocking subversion in government departments.
Among its conclusions, 1.
The Soviet International Organization has carried on a successful and important penetration of the United States government, and this penetration has not been fully exposed.
So this is years, a couple of years after McCarthy started, not been fully exposed.
Two, this penetration has extended from the lowest ranks to top-level policy and operating positions in our government.
Three, the agents of this penetration have operated in accordance with a distinct design fashioned by their Soviet superiors.
4.
Members of this conspiracy helped to get each other into government, helped each other to rise in government, and protected each other from exposure.
Right.
But Joseph McCarthy never found one single solitary communist in the U.S. government.
What people say to themselves and to the innocent young, such as myself, who had to be force-fed all of these falsehoods.
So, let's have a look at what happened in communist China.
The United States was deeply involved in losing China to the communists in 1949.
This is staggering.
Mao and the communist government, the worst, most murderous, most destructive totalitarian regime in all of human history, anytime, anywhere, and perhaps even until the very end of time.
In communist China, over 50 million people were murdered by their own governments.
You got early political purges and land reforms, 2 million dead.
Great leap forward, 31 to 33 million people dead.
The Cultural Revolution, 1 million dead.
Oh, but some estimates go as high as 20 million dead.
Ethnic minorities killed, including the occupation of Tibet, 750,000 to 900,000.
Forced labor camps, 20 million.
And again, not all these directly killed.
Some of it was the usual nightmare Cambodian-style killing field to collectivize farming, leading to mass starvation and driving people out of cities back into the countries, because the left always claims to be progressive, but basically they want to go back to the Stone Age, but with them in charge.
And so this is greater than the death count of all of World War II. I mean, do...
Do Chinese lives not matter?
Does it not matter that this happened?
That the United States, which was helping to fund the powers of Chiang Kai-shek, who was fighting against the communists, and then betrayed him?
As usual, the U.S. puts you on the field of battle, then strips you of the capacity to win?
And you had top people from the American government embedded in China.
This guy John Service, endlessly describing murderous black-toothed communist Chairman Mao as progressive, democratic, that he had impressive personal qualities, praised his realism and practicality, his objective and scientific ordinalness.
He was straightforward and frank, possessed of incorruptibility with a real desire for democracy in China.
He wanted aggressive resistance to the Japanese...
And that he had, quote, complete support of the local population.
So, yeah, you've got John Service and other, they're called the China Hands, constantly sending back memos, saying that, oh yeah, Mao, he's a great guy.
Mao?
Oh yeah, absolutely.
He'll rub your feet.
You know, he'll clean your car for free.
I mean, he'll dust and vacuum.
He does windows.
He's like the perfect guy.
And they were all reinforcing each other, right?
So John Service's friends would say, oh, John Service is a total expert.
He'd say, oh, they're total experts too.
And you've got all this information floating up that really affected who the government ended up, who the government in the U.S. ended up supporting.
They ended up helping to betray Chiang Kai-shek, helping to hand China over to the communists, who then murdered or starved or butchered over 50 million people.
Why doesn't, it's like more than 10 holocausts by official estimates.
Do Chinese lives not matter?
I would think that they do.
And of course, when you say to the American government in World War II, oh, yeah, Mao is totally going to help you fight against the Japanese, given that America is at war with said Japanese, well, that's kind of a bit of a carrot to dangle in front.
Of course, the reality is that the communists did very little actual fighting against the Japanese anyway.
So, yeah, the United States and betrayers within the United States helped bring to power the most hideous and murderous totalitarian despot in world history.
Does this not matter?
Ah, but it's really important to figure out what number Joseph McCarthy actually used.
Don't Chinese lives matter?
They do to me?
I think it would to the leftists.
Walter E. Williams wrote, an economist, and it's a 50 million?
It's a low estimate.
He wrote, between 1949 and 1987, China's communists, led by Mao Zedong and his successors, murdered and were otherwise responsible for the deaths of 76 million Chinese.
And, um...
You can read stories in the starvation.
Unbelievably horrendous.
People were so hungry, they would rip open pillows and attempt to eat the feathers in the pillows.
They would eat tree bark.
They would find the outside dried skin of onions and try to eat them as so hungry, turned to cannibalism.
Ungodly, in the most fundamental sense of the word.
Communist sympathizers within the State Department, yep, played a key role in the subjugation of mainland China to communism.
Ambassador William D. Pauli said, It is my judgment, I was in the State Department at the time, that this whole fiasco, the loss of China and the subsequent difficulties with which the United States has been faced, Was the result of mistaken policy of Dean Acheson, Phil Jessup, Owen Lattimore, John Carter Vincent, John Service, John Davies, OE Club, and others.
When Ambassador Pauli was asked if he thought the failed policy was the result of, quote, sincere mistakes of judgment, end quote, the ambassador responded, no, I don't.
If these communist sympathizers helped deliver the Chinese to the communists, they are among the enablers of the greatest mass murderer in human history.
But the only thing you'll hear about is McCarthyism.
Where is the compassion for the ultimate horrors the U.S. helped deliver the Chinese people to?
Goddamn lefties.
So in the early stages of World War II, the anti-communist Chiang Kai-shek was supported and treated as a worthy ally by the United States government.
The State Department, led by Secretary George C. Marshall, lobbied hard for an American policy more favorable to the communist insurgents at Yunnan.
The US eventually suspended aid to Chiang Kai-shek for much of 1946 to 1948 in the heat of his death struggle with the communist forces.
Hey, you want to be our ally?
Fantastic.
We'll get you set up.
We'll put you on the field of battle.
And they were going to suspend aid to you.
Good luck with that.
And this is the kind of stuff where people in this battle ended up siding more with the communists who maintained their aid, right?
The Soviet funding of communism around the world was substantial and huge and reliable, whereas the Americans could turn on you on a dime if you happened to be against the communists and the commie sympathizers in the American government got a hold of your case file, so to speak.
Investigations in the 1950s showed that Treasury official Harry Dexter White and some of his aides worked to block the transfer of $200 million in gold and other credits pledged to Chiang Kai-shek, and that Adler, as the Treasury's local man, sent back a constant stream of anti-Chang reports from China.
$200 million?
That's back when $200 million really was, in fact, a lot of money.
And they blocked it.
Worked to block it.
Like Harry Dexter White himself, some of his treasury aides would be identified as members of the communist governmental network, right?
So this is communist or communist sympathizers in the U.S. government working as hard as they can to ensure that communism takes over in China.
It turned out that treasury aide Solomon Adler shared a house in China with a communist secret agent named Chai Chaoting and China Hand John Service, right?
So, yeah.
Your roommate is a communist secret agent who's giving you lots of facts about what's going on in the country without telling you he's a communist.
These service Adler memos have been characterized as saying things like, the government of Chiang Kai-shek was corrupt, despotic, and ineffective.
The Chinese Reds, by contrast, were paragons of virtue, moderate and democratic, beloved of the people, and, most important in the context of the war, only the communists were carrying on the battle against Japan.
We mentioned Elizabeth Bentley.
We'll get to her in a few minutes.
She was asked once, she was an ex-communist who turned informant, And she was asked, who are the best agents for placing communist people throughout the government?
And she said, I would say our two best ones were Harry Dexter White and Lachlan Curry.
They had an immense amount of influence on new people, and their word would be accepted when they recommended someone.
The State Department decisions that were made, incomprehensible, without taking into account the massive communist influence reportedly within the department.
In 1949, the State Department discussed what kind of strategy the U.S. should take regarding Asian matters given the new developments in China.
The prevailing view reportedly encouraged the United States officially to recognize the communists in China immediately and to abandon support of the remaining anti-communist forces.
There was also the Lattimore proposal, which often stated that the United States should abandon South Korea just as it had abandoned Chiang Kai-shek.
Quote, But not to let it look as though we pushed it.
And again, the invasion of South Korea was a great shock to the American population.
In December 1949, the State Department circulated a memo surmising plans to give up Formosa and definitively surrender China to communism.
Again, this is about two months before McCarthy made his case, or began making his case.
Now, three weeks later, then Secretary of State Dean Acheson, this is just after 1949, Dean Acheson made a famous speech to the National Press Club in which he appeared to exclude South Korea and Formosa from the perimeter of American defense.
Oh yeah, South Korea, Formosa, China, yeah, we're not going to bother defending those.
Now, this was right before the invasion of South Korea.
In January 1950, the Latimer proposal for shaping or derailing American foreign policy in Asia appeared to be ready to proceed without interference, without any kind of halt.
Now, January 25th, 1950, right before McCarthy's speech, Secretary Dean Acheson vehemently defended the communist spy Alger Hiss.
This is the very day that Hiss received a criminal conviction for denying under oath that he was indeed a Soviet spy.
So here you have Dean Acheson, Secretary of State, saying, oh, Alan J. Hiss is a great guy.
He's wonderful.
You know, he's the best we've got.
On the same day, he gets a criminal conviction for denying under oath he was a Soviet spy.
I mean, now it wasn't just the FBI who was going mental.
It was the American public as a whole.
That was going mental.
What are we going to do?
And just by the by.
Later on, McCarthy was told under oath by state personnel that in 1946, quote, we were instructed to remove all derogatory material from the personnel files, and we were instructed to dispose of this material.
So there was a cover-up years before McCarthy did what he did, because two weeks later, after Dean Acheson...
Is vehemently defending this communist spy, Aldrichis?
Two weeks later, Joseph McCarthy steps up to the podium in Wheeling, West Virginia, and began finally, openly, discussing communist infiltration at high levels of the U.S. government.
McCarthy fundamentally questioned how, in the six years since the Allies had won World War II, the communist world had expanded to enslave over 800 million new people.
For more confirmation on this, we can turn to diplomat George Kennan, who said, The penetration of the American governmental services by members or agents, conscious or otherwise, of the American Communist Party in the late 1930s was not a figment of the imagination.
It really existed, and it assumed proportions which, while never overwhelming, were also not trivial.
Warnings which should have been heeded fell too often on deaf or incredulous ears.
However, the diplomat George Cannon made this assessment before the revelation of the Venona decrypts.
This is how the government managed to get its hands on decrypted Soviet cables going back and forth to America, which we'll get into in a moment.
The facts in these Venona documents were extremely damning.
They've actually been available for over 20 years.
They were declassified in 1995.
Bet you haven't heard much about them, have you?
Although, again, it is one of the most amazing stories around.
So, it was a cautious assessment and really would have to be revised.
Not a few, quote, but hundreds of American communists abetted Soviet espionage in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s.
No modern government had been more thoroughly penetrated.
Now, of course, when you factor in that only a tiny fraction of the Venona intercepts between Moscow and America have ever been decrypted, a couple of percentage points depending on how you count it, no one even knows the entire extent of the Soviet penetration.
But when you look at What happened in the 1930s when there were problems caused by government intervention and rather than pull back on government intervention, as had been the pattern earlier on, there was a doubling down on government intervention which made all these problems worse.
I wonder to what degree Soviet agents were attempting to hamstring capitalism to introduce more and more government reforms and intrusions into the free market in order to cripple it.
As Vladimir Lenin said, The end goal of socialism is communism.
So, to sum up, in the face of these growing concerns about these repeated disasters, hundreds and hundreds of millions of people falling into Soviet dictatorships, Senator Joseph McCarthy made a series of accusations which rocked the foundation of the United States government.
So his basic arguments were that communists had made continued and largely successful attempts to penetrate the U.S. government and subvert its foreign policy decisions, specifically in relation to China.
Now remember this, of course, when China fell to communism, there was a period where China and Russia got along relatively well and coordinated their efforts.
Now at some point there was a Sino-Soviet split, but this was not evident right away.
So, yeah, the communists have made continued largely successful efforts to penetrate the U.S. government.
The official state responses to these penetrations and subversions, especially within the State Department, ranged from weak to simply non-existent.
And that these facts had been outright concealed from the American people.
They were ignored or downplayed or actively covered up by the government authorities, whose primary job was to specifically guard against such dangerous So, why would McCarthy make the case that the State Department, or the government as a whole, the State Department in particular, were kind of indifferent to all of these infiltrations?
As early as September 1939, of course, the opening salvos in World War II, a fellow named Whitaker Chambers, and we'll get into more of his story later, but Whitaker Chambers was an ex-communist who provided information about Alger Hiss and others involved in communist infiltration to State Department official Adolf Burrell.
Now, Burl himself was gravely concerned.
Alger Hiss was pretty powerful up there in the State Department.
So Burl was gravely concerned, but nothing was really done to impede Hiss's steady climb up the ladder together with several of his fellow travelers.
So Whitaker Chambers, an ex-communist, alerted a State Department official.
That State Department official attempted to raise the roof about this, to get this dealt with.
But not only was Hiss...
Not fired, which of course he could have been if there had been credible evidence that he was associated with communism, but he was continually promoted.
Again, is it comprehensible?
It kind of is, and we'll sort of get to why.
Now, Alger Hiss, well, not only did he continue to rise up through the State Department, he played an active role at the Yalta Conference, where the fate of Eastern Europe was decided in favor of communism.
And he became Secretary General of the founding conclave of the United Nations.
Alger Hiss rose through the State Department, helped hand over Eastern Europe to communism, and was Secretary General of the founding conclave of the United Nations.
In November 1945, J. Edgar Hoover gave the White House considerable detailed evidence that an extensive spy ring was embedded deep inside the U.S. government.
And he named Treasury official Harry Dexter White, former White House assistant Lachlan Curry, as well as nine others.
In 1946, J. Edgar Hoover tried once more to alert the White House to dangers posed by people like Harry Dexter White, who, like his, was moving ever higher in official circles.
In 1948, right, so 1939, Whitaker Chambers goes to this official in the State Department and tries to warn them.
Almost a decade later, he finally goes public with his charges against his, Whitaker Chambers calling him a communist.
The official White House response dismissed the case as a red herring.
Internally, White House staffers worked hard to discredit Chambers, Whitaker Chambers, the man who, as an ex-communist, came forward and named who he knew when he was moving in communist circles.
So the White House worked hard to discredit Chambers rather than focusing on the staggering danger represented by Alger Hiss.
The Venona Papers revealed a terrifying reality.
Some in the White House suggested that Chambers, not his, should be tried for perjury.
Efforts were also made to find out if Chambers had ever been in a mental institution.
Ah, the modern parallels.
Almost too obvious to point out.
And as far as can be...
Extracted or determined from the official record, nothing was done to act on the advice about these dangers.
Nothing was done.
Now, people focus on Joseph McCarthy, particularly people on the left.
He is the ultimate demonic presence of accusation and witch hunting and so on.
But was McCarthy the only member of Congress who was critical of Those whose policies had enslaved 400 million Chinese in a communist dictatorship will know.
January 30th, 1949, this is a year before McCarthy's Wheeling West Virginia speech, I have here in my hand, a young congressman from Massachusetts deplored, quote, over these past few days we have learned the extent of the disasters befalling China and the United States.
Our relationship with China since the end of the Second World War has been a tragic one, and it is of the utmost importance that we search out and spotlight those who must bear the responsibility for our present predicament.
At the Yalta Conference in 1945, a sick Roosevelt, with the advice of General Marshall and other chiefs of staff, gave the Kuril Islands as well as the control of various strategic Chinese ports to the Soviet Union.
There were those who claimed and still claim that Chinese communism was not really communism at all, but merely an advanced agrarian movement which did not take directions from Moscow.
Listen to the words of the Bolton Report.
Its doctrines follow those of Lenin and Stalin.
Its leaders are Moscow-trained.
Of 35 leading Chinese communist political leaders listed in the report, over half either spent some time or studied in Moscow.
Its policies and actions, its strategy and tactics are communist.
The Chinese communists have followed faithfully every zigzag of the Kremlin's line for a generation.
This is the tragic story of China, whose freedom we once fought to preserve.
What our young men have saved, our diplomats and our president have frittered away.
So this is a young congressman saying that China's been handed over to Moscow-trained communists and we really need to find out what the hell's going on and who's responsible.
The young Massachusetts congressman's name, I'm sure you guessed by now, the young John F. Kennedy.
Now, the relationship between the Kennedys and the McCarthys was actually quite close.
But Kennedy, you see, is a Democrat, right?
So you don't talk about Kennedy's concerns, which mirrored Joseph McCarthy's quite a bit.
McCarthyism is totally evil, but Kennedy was young and handsome, addicted to painkillers and...
Bangs the girlfriend of a mafia boss, but he's on the left, so he's fine, right?
He's a Democrat, so he's no problem with that.
This also, to me, it sort of reminds me of one of the challenges that...
Totalitarian states can deal with spies and infiltrations fairly easily because they really don't have a due process of law.
So they just grab whoever they suspect and kill them.
But when you have an open society with a common law tradition, it's at a significant disadvantage because the left can take advantage of that openness and that concern and that care and that empathy and all that kind of stuff.
To advance its causes.
And, of course, the left, in its cry-bully fashion, always claims to be a victim when, of course, the societies that they generally espouse are constantly victimized and murder others.
So I just wanted to point this out.
So before we get into McCarthy's adult record, I think it's worth just having a little bit of a look at where he came from.
It's also, again, quite a remarkable story, McCarthy's early life.
So, Joseph McCarthy was born to a poor Irish Catholic family in Wisconsin.
He was the fifth of seven kids.
Of course, this is back when white people could afford to have kids because there was not really a welfare state.
Now, he had unbelievable energy, intellect.
He had a near photographic memory.
He was so bored in school, he fled it in the eighth grade to start his own poultry business.
But unfortunately, a brutal winter killed all of his flock, so he ended up going back to school.
He enrolled in high school and finished his four-year coursework in less than nine months.
He had this Prodigious work ethic, sort of get up at five o'clock in the morning and study all day, ferocious concentration and a great deal of personal charisma as well.
Even his enemies often loved him and he was extremely beloved by the American people who were incredibly frustrated with the corruptions of the existing administration under the Democrats and they just loved him.
His funeral was very well attended, his approval ratings at least until the Death by a thousand paper cuts of slander from the media and from others began to chip away at his public support.
He was very, very popular.
Yes, he did four-year coursework in less than nine months, got pretty much straight A's.
In 1930, he enrolled in Marquette University and developed a reputation as an ace all-night poker player and a boxer, an amateur boxer.
And, of course, the...
The girly boys on the left would, oh lord, he was a boxer!
Oh lord, he would stay up all night and gamble!
You know, they tried to smear him this way.
But he actually used his gambling winnings and wages from ob jobs to finance the pursuit of his law degree, and then he returned home from the law degree and set up a practice and, you know, realized that to get anywhere, he wanted to go into politics.
So, in 1937, at the ripe old age of 29, McCarthy became the youngest judge in Wisconsin history.
He worked incredibly hard to clear a huge backlog of 250 cases.
He was successful and popular as a judge.
This near-photographic memory really helped all of this.
He was...
Really great at the common man touch.
He got along with the people who operated the elevators and the people who drove the cabs and the people who installed his plumbing.
He actually preferred, in many cases, the company of people who were more working class than sort of highfalutin people around him.
This is sort of similar to Trump.
He was sort of a champion of the everyday guy against the rarefied elites.
And this, of course, is part of his anti-communism.
The American public was deeply terrified and enraged by the success of communism.
And it felt like this is an icy, wraith-like, ghoulish hand around their neck because they knew that if communism got into power, according to basically what had been reported in the past, the Christians were going to be killed by the millions.
So the fact that this guy had a great rapport with the working man with the common people and championed their interests against the predatory elites, again, it's kind of an interesting parallel, I think.
Okay.
Now, he originally started out as a Democrat.
Democrats weren't very popular in Wisconsin as a whole, and then he switched to becoming a Republican.
Now, when the war broke out for America, of course, he was draft-exempt as a judge.
However, he did volunteer for the Marines.
Now, that's really quite a remarkable thing.
When you think of the people on the left, like Bill Clinton, who has been accused of draft dodging and things like that, It's pretty impressive.
He didn't have to go, but he volunteered for the Marines.
He became an intelligence officer, and then he flew numerous combat missions in the position of tail gunner.
And later on, the left made up all this nonsense like, Joseph McCarthy claimed to have half a pound of shrapnel on his leg, and he never made any such nonsense.
But yeah, he didn't have to go.
He went.
He didn't have to fly combat missions, but he went, which, I mean, whether you like it or not, you've got to admit that takes some courage.
And then McCarthy set aside on politics as a Republican.
And when he campaigned to become a senator, ooh, see if this rings any modern parallel bells for you, my friends.
He was traveling through Wisconsin, doing speech after speech after speech, traveling wherever he could, speaking to whoever he could, working tirelessly.
His opponent pretty much stayed in Washington, was considered to be a shoe-in, had lots of experience, was kind of the incumbent, and boom!
McCarthy won, becoming the youngest senator in the country at the age of 38.
Hey, what have you done lately?
Or me?
Now, he did have concerns about communism, but it was not his primary concern.
He didn't often speak of communism or espionage, but he was a staunch anti-communist.
Now, in early 1950, he began alleging that there were communists and communist sympathizers in Truman's State Department.
Now, there's no recording of his famous Wheeling, West Virginia speech, and his notes have been scattered and lost.
The only recording there was was erased a day or two later.
So I'm going to read his speech.
This is not acting it out.
I just want you to get a sense of the moral imperative behind what he was doing and the clash of cultures that he felt was occurring.
And so this is the moderated version of the Wheeling speech.
This was introduced into the congressional record on February 20th, 1950.
Ladies and gentlemen, tonight...
As we celebrate the 141st birthday of one of the greatest men in American history, I would like to be able to talk about what a glorious day today is in the history of the world.
As we celebrate the birth of this man who with his whole heart and soul hated war, I would like to be able to speak of peace in our time, of war being outlawed.
And of worldwide disarmament.
These things would be truly appropriate things to be able to mention as we celebrate the birthday of Abraham Lincoln.
Now, five years after a world war has been won, men's hearts should anticipate a long peace, and men's minds should be free of the heavy weight that comes with war.
But this is not such a period.
For this is not a period of peace.
This is a time of the Cold War.
This is a time when all the world is split into two vast, increasingly hostile armed camps.
A time of a great armament race.
Today, we can almost physically hear the mutterings and rumblings of an invigorated god of war.
You can see it, feel it, and hear it all the way from the Indochina hills, from the shores of Formosa, right over into the very heart of Europe itself.
The one encouraging thing...
It's that the mad moment has not yet arrived for the firing of the gun or the exploding of the bomb, which will set civilization about the final task of destroying itself.
There is still hope for peace if we finally decide that no longer can we safely blind our eyes and close our ears to those facts which are shaping up more and more clearly.
And that is that we are now engaged in a show-down fight.
Not the usual war between nations for land areas or other material gains, but a war between two diametrically opposed ideologies.
The great difference between our Western Christian world and the atheistic communist world is not political, gentlemen.
It is moral.
For instance, the Marxian idea of confiscating the land and factories and running the entire economy as a single enterprise is momentous.
Likewise, Lenin's invention of the one-party police state as a way to make Marxist ideas work is hardly less momentous.
Stalin's resolute putting across of these two ideas, of course, did much to divide the world.
With only these differences, however, the East and the West could most certainly still live in peace.
The real, basic difference, however, lies in the religion of immoralism, invented by Marx, preached feverishly by Lenin, and carried to unimaginable extremes by Stalin.
This religion of immoralism If the red half of the world triumphs, and well it may, gentlemen, this religion of immoralism will more deeply wound and damage mankind than any conceivable economic or political system.
Karl Marx dismissed God as a hoax, and Lenin and Stalin have added in clear-cut, unmistakable language their resolve that no nation, no people who believe in a God can exist side by side with their communistic state.
Karl Marx, for example, expelled people from his Communist Party for mentioning such things as love, justice, humanity, or morality.
He called this soulful ravings and sloppy sentimentality.
Today, we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity.
The modern champions of communism have selected this as the time.
And, ladies and gentlemen, the chips are down.
They are truly down.
Lest there be any doubt that the time has been chosen, let us go directly to the leader of communism today, Joseph Stalin.
Here is what he said, not back in 1928, not before the war, not during the war, but two years after the last war was ended.
To think...
That the communist revolution can be carried out peacefully within the framework of a Christian democracy means one has either gone out of one's mind and lost all normal understanding or has grossly and openly repudiated the communist revolution.
Ladies and gentlemen, can there be anyone tonight who is so blind as to say that the war is not on?
Can there be anyone who fails to realize that the communist world has said the time is now?
That this is the time for the showdown between the democratic Christian world and the communistic atheistic world?
Unless we face this fact, we shall pay the price that must be paid by those who wait too long.
Six years ago, There was, within the Soviet orbit, 180 million people.
Lined up on the anti-totalitarian side, there were in the world at that time roughly 1.625 billion people today.
Only six years later, there are 800 million people under the absolute domination of Soviet Russia, an increase of over 400%.
On our side, the figure has shrunk to about 500 million people.
In other words, in less than six years, the odds have changed from 9 to 1 in our favor to 8 to 5 against us.
This indicates the swiftness of the tempo of communist victories and American defeats in the Cold War.
As one of our outstanding historical figures once said, when a great democracy is destroyed, it will not be from enemies from without, but rather because of enemies from within.
The reason why we find ourselves in a position of impotency is not because our only powerful potential enemy has sent men to invade our shores, But rather because of the traitorous actions of those who have been treated so well by this nation.
It has not been the less fortunate or members of minority groups who have been traitorous to this nation, but rather those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest nation on earth has to offer.
The finest homes, the finest college education, and the finest jobs in government we can give.
This is glaringly true in the State Department.
There, the bright young men who are born with silver spoons in their mouths are the ones who have been most traitorous.
I have here in my hand a list of two hundred and five, a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.
As you know, very recently the Secretary of State proclaimed his loyalty to a man guilty of what has always been considered as the most abominable of all crimes, being a traitor to the people who gave him a position of great trust.
High treason!
He has lighted the spark which is resulting in a moral uprising and will end only when the whole sorry mess of twisted, warped thinkers are swept!
From the national scene so that we may have a new birth of honesty and decency in government.
So, of course, McCarthy never claimed to personally know of the communists in the State Department or anywhere else.
His concern was that there were security risks that weren't being vetted, there were security risks that hadn't been resolved, and there were security risks still working at high levels in the State Department shaping U.S. foreign policy.
And given the disasters of U.S. foreign policy, there was reason to be concerned.
So this is sort of important.
He just said, nothing's being done.
There's these security risks and nothing's being done.
Nobody even knows what the status is.
This is terrible.
And this was his major concern.
So this is important.
Now, after he made the speech, the topic blew up in the American media.
And it actually provoked a Senate investigation led by Miller Tidings, who was a Maryland Democrat.
The three Democrats concluded that McCarthy's allegations were a fraud and a hoax, while the two Republicans in the investigation dissented.
And this was much larger than the sort of 57 names that were talked about, right?
Because one thing that the left does is they focus on inconsequential details.
Was it 57?
Was it 81?
Was it 205?
He can't even get his numbers straight, and that gets people running into this minutiae.
You know, we'll deal with this problem right after you count all of the grains of sand on this beach down.
Oh, I think some have changed.
You better go back and start again.
It just keeps you away from the big picture.
And McCarthy was actually consistent in his use of the numbers.
He was referring to different reports when he was referring to different numbers.
And of course, who cares about the actual number?
The question is, were there people, other altruists in the State Department betraying Were other people following the communist line?
Were they subject to influences from Moscow?
Those were the big questions.
Whether it was 57 or 81 or 205, which are all referencing different reports, is completely inconsequential.
But if they can get you to focus on that, as the old saying goes, if they can get you to ask the wrong questions, they don't care about the answers.
So, this big picture stuff was what the American public was concerned about.
All of the people who were defending McCarthy's opponents, they all focus on these nitty-gritty numbers, but this is the big picture.
This is from McCarthyism, The Fight for America.
Quote, For the last six years, we have been losing the war against communism at the rate of 100 million people a year.
Anyone watching our civilization plunge so rapidly toward the abyss of oblivion must conclude that we are losing the war to communism for one of two reasons.
We are losing either because of stumbling, fumbling idiocy on the part of those allegedly leading the fight against communism, or because, like Alger Hiss, they are planning it that way.
I have maintained that regardless of whether our defeat is because of treason or because of incompetence, those doing the planning should be removed from power if this nation and our civilization are to survive.
My efforts have been in that direction and will continue to be so.
So, again, he's not saying it's for sure treason.
He had talked about 20 years of treason, which, of course, encapsulated the Republican congressional opposition to FDR and Truman, so they weren't always the hugest fans of him, but 100 million people a year falling into communism.
Something really needed to be done, you understand?
I mean, the sinkhole was taking down civilization itself.
So, of course, McCarthy began working to expose communist influences in the American government.
He chaired commissions and was endlessly attacked by the left-wing media.
He got tangled up in censure motions and investigations, and he died in 1957.
We'll get more into this.
I just wanted to give you sort of the big picture.
Because earlier I was saying, well, why is no one doing anything?
Well, I would argue, and I'll bring this more up in the conclusions, I would argue that That the real fifth column, the real espionage that was occurring in America was occurring in the media.
Because the question was, why wasn't anyone doing anything about it?
I mean, we are going to assume that these people had some love of the system that employed them.
I'm not talking about the communists and communist sympathizers and those who were on the pay or under the influence of Moscow.
I'm talking about everyone else who could have done something about it.
Why weren't they listening to the hundreds of reports sent by the FBI? Why?
Well, because...
Because the media would slander them.
The media would destroy their reputations.
The left-wing media would attempt to undo them completely.
As, of course, they tried with Donald Trump.
If it wasn't for the internet and for what's called the alternative media, also known as the unbought and paid-for media, the voluntary media, the honest media, the truthful media, the media with integrity, they would have probably succeeded with Donald Trump.
And so...
Why weren't people taking on these communists?
Because, let's say that there were some communists in the State Department and you were that person's boss.
Well, you could get that person fired if you had credible information that they were a communist or involved in fascist organizations or something.
You get them fired relatively easily.
But there would be a protracted legal battle.
And if they had any kind of power, they would call their friends in the media.
And their friends in the media would swarm and defend whoever you were trying to fire and dig up every devious detail they could on you and make up ones if they can't find enough bad ones and so on.
Um, I mean, Whitaker Chambers' brother committed suicide, and Whitaker Chambers was the ex-communist who turned on communists and became an informant, and the media just...
I mean, really tried to destroy the guy in ways that are beyond almost imagination.
Whitaker Chambers' brother committed suicide, and the media reported that, or hinted, that Whitaker Chambers' brother had committed suicide because he'd had a homosexual affair with Whitaker Chambers.
And this is when Whitaker Chambers said, what kind of beasts am I dealing with here?
This bottomless well of verbal abuse characterized by a leftist media It's enough to make people say, you know, okay, I could maybe uproot a couple of communists, but my life is going to be destroyed.
I'm going to spend the rest of my life being investigated.
I'm going to get fired.
I'm going to be smeared.
And if you look at...
McCarthy was held up as a warning, of course, to the future.
If you try and mess with the left, this is what they will do to you.
They will destroy your reputation.
They will attack everything.
I mean...
Whitaker Chambers' wife was crying when she was being deposed and so on.
I mean, they will just make your life a living hell if you mess with them.
And this level of verbal abuse and slander and libel that goes on makes a lot of people, of course, not want to get involved in any public affairs at all and certainly not get involved in any anti-leftist crusades.
They will just go for you in truly horrendous and vicious ways.
And until the alternative media came along, there really wasn't much to counterbalance it.
So this is my guess as to why people avoided this kind of stuff.
Now, one of the tactics of the left is to ascribe armchair nonsense psychological theories to explain people's deep moral convictions and motivations in a crusade against evil, right?
So you've probably heard the idea or the argument that Richard Nixon just hated all the Ivy League guys and hated Kennedy because Kennedy was like refined and higher class and so on.
And this is all nonsense.
This comes out of the fact that Richard Nixon, when he was younger, was involved in the fight against Alger Hiss's communist penetration of the State Department.
And so if you sort of look at the three people who've been demonized significantly by the left, they're all involved in this anti-communist crusade.
J. Edgar Hoover, of course, you know, he was crazy.
He was nasty.
He was mean.
He was a vicious guy.
And he cross-dressed her and all this nonsense, right?
And then you have Joseph McCarthy, of course, spearheading the fight against communism in the U.S. government.
And you have Richard Nixon, who they eventually forced out of office for basically doing not much of anything that previous presidents hadn't already done.
And so this is how they do things.
And so with McCarthy, the left had to explain why he was doing what he was doing.
Why was he so focused on anti-communists?
Well, of course they say, you know, he's sweaty, he's paranoid, he's crazy, he's evil, he's, you know, they just come up with this nonsense about things.
But the answer is actually...
Fairly clear.
He got lots of information.
People were kind of freaking out.
Nobody was doing anything to deal with this incredible menace, not just to America, but to the world itself.
You know, 400 million Chinese probably weren't really appreciating the influence of communist sympathizers in the State Department and turning them over to be swallowed alive in the bottomless...
Grindy tooth more of totalitarian communism, but he was not alone, right?
John F. Kennedy was significantly concerned about this, and there was another fellow you probably haven't heard about that provided the initial impetus for Joseph McCarthy.
It was a man that Joseph McCarthy, I believe, truly loved.
In the middle of the 20th century, of course, the two most important anti-communists in the U.S. government were Secretary of the Navy and later Secretary of Defense James Forrestal and Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Now, the prehistory of McCarthyism is hidden from you for the simple reason that if all of the dominoes that fell that then pushed Joseph McCarthy to take his action, if you don't see the previous dominoes, then Joseph McCarthy looks crazy.
So if you don't see all the concerns that led up to something like McCarthyism, then he just looks like some crazy guy who wanted to make a name for himself by making up accusations against innocent people.
This is why I've spent so much time in this presentation on the prehistory of McCarthyism.
McCarthy was the latest in a long series of incredibly serious concerns about the spread of communism and about the role of the U.S., particularly the State Department, in seemingly prehistory Promoting it.
So you haven't heard, probably, of James Forrestal.
You haven't heard of Whitaker Chambers.
You haven't heard of Elizabeth Bentley.
You haven't heard of all of the other people.
You've just heard a bunch of slander about people, and you've not heard any of the prehistory that led up to this, because the prehistory puts it in context, right?
So I'm trying to help you to put it in context.
So James Forrestal was very important.
They were both Irish Catholic Americans.
I mean, Joseph McCarthy was of German and Irish ancestry.
I'm half German and half Irish, and let me tell you, that gives you a combination of stubbornness and sentimentality that can be quite helpful in a public crusade for virtue.
And they both rose by hard work from fairly humble origins to high office in Washington, D.C., and they both successfully spearheaded the fight against worldwide communism.
And...
Again, this is sort of a bit of prehistory that's really important.
In the closing days of World War II, enormous amounts of military hardware were just scrapped.
They weren't stored.
They were just scrapped or just thrown overboard if they were naval in nature.
And James Forrestal fought hard to preserve military funding because, of course, they wanted the peace dividend.
And the thing is, too, given how many...
Wormtongues and Iagos were whispering into the president's ear and whispering into the ears of other people highly placed in the U.S. government.
Of course, the pro-communists wanted America to disarm itself.
Of course they do.
Of course they want America to disarm itself.
Because that way, it's not able to push back against Soviet expansion.
So after China and Czechoslovakia both fell to communist dictatorships, James Forrestal was working like crazy to try and preserve military funding.
And of course, all of the traitors in the US government, I assume, were counseling that military funding be enormously cut again, giving the Soviets further hand an easier time expanding.
Now, both men, of course, were the victims of vicious smear and propaganda campaigns from leftists, mostly in the media, and they even forced Forrestal out of office.
This is horrendous stuff.
So after he was forced to resign, Forrestal just walked around in a daze and he ended up in a mental health treatment facility.
While undergoing treatment, Forrestal suspiciously fell from a 16th story window and died.
Now, in hospitals, especially mental hospitals, the bar's on the window.
It's hard.
It's locked.
You know, they know that there are suicidal people around.
So he just apparently leaned, like, unlocked, got open, somehow leaned out and fell from a 16-story window and died.
And this was truly heartbreaking to...
Joseph McCarthy.
It was James Forrestal who had, to some degree, brought this topic to McCarthy's attention.
Part of his anger towards the communists or the leftists.
Either somebody pushed him or, you know, he'd been so attacked that he had become suicidal.
Because McCarthy once said, in discussing communists in our government, he said, we're not dealing with spies who get 30 pieces of silver to steal the blueprints of a new weapon.
We are dealing with a far more sinister type of activity because it permits the enemy to guide and shape our policy.
So again, he really, really understood this, and he had seen Forrestal go through the media attacks that he'd gone through.
The same thing, of course, happened to Joseph McCarthy.
Joseph McCarthy, just to take a few examples, was accused of having an inglorious war record, of exaggerating his war exploits.
Ooh, an Irish person exaggerating anything.
Whatever next!
He was accused of claiming to have a half a pound of shrapnel in his leg.
He was accused of having acted improperly as a judge in Wisconsin.
He was accused of being some horrifying homosexual...
Oh, no, wait!
Actually, he's some uncontrollable heterosexual sex maniac.
He was accused of having cheated on his income tax.
He was accused of being an Irish Catholic bigot.
Ooh!
And he was accused of being overly friendly with the KKK. I mean, just all...
false.
And, okay, he did exaggerate his war record a little.
Oh, well.
Nobody's perfect.
But this is all the stuff.
And people, until more recently, until the trust in the media has reached sort of new all-time lows, people would generally say, number one, if people are that upset with him, he must be doing something wrong.
And number two, that where there's smoke, there's fire.
You know, if all of these accusations are being hurled at this guy, maybe there is something wrong with him.
And this is, of course, what people on the left, and just the verbal abusers in the world in general, this is what they rely on.
It's just they pour more and more hatred, more and more venom, more and more hysteria, more and more horror at you.
And then what happens is people just say, well, you know, must be something.
I mean, they really hate the guy and blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
So this is...
That's terrible stuff.
Now, Forrestal himself had personally and repeatedly alerted McCarthy to the dangers, both personal and nationwide, of communist infiltration of the US government.
And the irony and the horror, I think, of this situation is that both Forrestal and McCarthy entered Bethesda Hospital relatively healthy, but ultimately left in coffins.
They both went to the same hospital relatively healthy and never came out.
The official McCarthy medical report left, let's just say, some serious questions as to the precise cause of death.
But incredibly, this man who was hated and received endless death threats and so on, no autopsy was ever performed.
Sort of reminds me of the recent passing of a Supreme Court judge.
No autopsy performed with Anthony...
Anthony Scalia, either.
So, this is just one of these terrible parallels, horrifying parallel in history.
Relatively healthy, you go into Bethesda Hospital, and you don't.
It's like the Roche Motel.
You can check in.
I guess you come out in a bag or a coffin.
So, Joseph McCarthy said, Before meeting Jim Forrestal, I thought we were losing to international communism because of incompetence or stupidity on the part of our planners.
I mentioned that to Forrestal.
I shall forever remember his answer.
He said, McCarthy, consistency has never been a mark of stupidity.
If they were merely stupid, they would occasionally make a mistake in our favor.
This phrase struck me so forcefully that I have often used it since.
And the language skills of these men, their capacity to synthesize and communicate to the average person is really quite something.
You hear that phrase, and that can be the kind of sentence that changes a person's life.
McCarthy said, I witnessed the frustration of those honest,
intelligent, loyal Americans who were attempting to expose our suicidal foreign policy.
The question of Soviet penetration of the American media is a question for another time, but it's well worth researching.
McCarthy said, day after day, I came into contact with convincing evidence of treason.
Obviously, unless the public was aroused, the downward course upon which we were embarked would continue, and at an accelerated pace.
But how to arouse the public to the danger before it was too late?
Well...
As if the spread of communism internationally was not shocking, horrifying, and upsetting enough, Americans were equally shocked by the story of a small pro-communist journal called Amerasia.
And this was the story.
In June 1945, agents of the FBI, after fairly lengthy surveillance, a couple of weeks, arrested two editors of the journal Amerasia and one of its frequent writers, along with three U.S. officials, Andrew Roth, Emmanuel Larson, and John Stewart Service.
Who were accused of leaking them secret government information.
In conjunction with the arrests, the FBI found approximately 1,000 government documents in the possession of the suspects.
These crucial documents largely dealt with Asian foreign policy, and many bore the labels secret, top secret, or confidential.
As McCarthy reported, the purpose of Amerasia, this journal, was fairly clear.
Its chief financial backer was Frederick V. Field, a notorious Soviet propagandist named by Elizabeth Bentley as the Communist Party's domestic commissar for Asian matters.
So, remember, John Service was heavily involved in the betrayal of China to communists.
So, here you have what I would consider, looking at it from the outside, a pretty open and shut case.
Again, top secret, secret confidential sort of reminds me of Hillary Clinton's server and the lack of concern for protecting state secrets in that venue.
But this is more conscious, right?
This is leaking secret government information and being in possession of government documents that you damn well shouldn't be in possession of.
Now this is from historian M. Stanton Evans.
You've simply got to read his book, Blacklisted.
Unfortunately, he recently died.
I wasn't able to get him for the show.
So he wrote, And urging that we dump him.
Sample.
We need not support Chiang in the belief that he represents pro-American or democratic groups.
We need to feel no ties of gratitude to Chiang, right?
So this is Chiang Kai-shek.
We talked about this before.
This was shocking to everyone.
Shocking!
And the fact that one of the guys sending back pro-Chairman Mao, future Chairman Mao, pro-Mao Tse-Tung missives and anti-Chiang Kai-shek missives...
That he was involved in this kind of betrayal was just appalling to everyone who could read about this.
M. Stanton Evans went on to say, On returning to the United States in April 1945, service immediately took to hanging out with Jaffe, whom he supposedly had just met, delivering copies of his reports and commenting that what I said about the military plans is, of course, very secret.
And this was recorded by FBI surveillance.
Given all of this, McCarthy said, J. Edgar Hoover believed he had an airtight case and Justice Department officials geared up for prosecution.
Huh.
Modern parallels again, baby.
Everything old is new again.
History is the same damn story with slightly different hairdos.
And here we have an open and shut case.
Of improper handling of state secrets, improper handling of confidential material.
Pretty open and shut case.
And then, for some mysterious reason, the Justice Department decided to downplay the matter and treat it as a minor indiscretion.
Service got off scot-free and was restored to State Department duties.
Jaffe and Larson escaped with fines and all the others.
Walked!
Who knows who had what on whom?
How much dirt was there?
How much was there mutually assured destruction?
Who knew what was going on?
So surface.
Caught in the net of this pro-communist magazine sting operation.
Restored, scot-free.
Go back to your work.
Go back to shaping US foreign policy with regards to China.
I'm telling you, I'm telling you, if the Justice Department had done its job in this matter, I, for one, am convinced that China would not have fallen to the Communists.
The Justice Department, deciding not to pursue this airtight case, according to J. Edgar Hoover, who is head of the FBI, I think might know what the hell he's talking about, if the Justice Department had pursued this case...
Between 50 and 73 million lives would have been saved.
But you see, the really important thing is what number Joseph McCarthy actually used when talking about the number of potential security risks in the State Department.
That's what matters!
About 50 to 70 plus million people died, generations lost to communist dictatorship.
People eating their offspring out of starvation.
That doesn't matter.
What matters is that Joseph McCarthy sometimes played poker.
I'll be glad to be done this presentation.
It's a moral horror to stare upon this stuff.
But we need to.
We need to.
Because it's going to happen again, I guarantee it.
M. Stanton Evans said, in essence the whole thing was shoved under the official rug, to be conveniently forgotten.
It was McCarthy charged a security breach and a cover-up of immense proportions.
Evans said, we now know that McCarthy was right in what he said.
The whole thing...
It was fixed from the beginning, engineered by Elizabeth Bentley's agent Lachlan Curry, operating from the White House, and carried out by Washington Wheeler dealer Thomas Corcoran.
The truth of this emerged a decade ago, when FBI wiretaps from the 40s came to the surface.
These showed Curry, Corcoran, service and justice officials conspiring to deep-six the case and succeeding.
The Amarajah case displayed to the fullest every kind of security horror and federal crime, theft of documents, policy subversion, cover-up, perjury, and obstruction of justice, to name only the most glaring.
I just really wanted to remind you, go read his book.
It's called Blacklisted by History, The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies.
It is a spy novel and a thriller and a horror story of biblical proportions.
Evans said, in short, everything McCarthy had said about the subject was correct, while his opponents were not only wrong, but lying.
The Tidings' investigation for its part was a sham, the cover-up of a cover-up, not an investigation.
Now, Whitaker Chambers.
What a life, what a story.
The fact that this hasn't been made into a movie, as I mentioned before, just shows you just how lefty the media is as a whole.
So he was an American writer and a translator.
Now, he was originally a communist, and he later turned against communism and tried to warn the U.S. media and government about communist infiltration, because he knew the big names.
He knew the big people.
He was a courier.
So they would hand documents to him.
He would then hand it off to the Soviets.
Now, a few of you have, more than a few of you, have been curious about why I'm more friendly towards Christianity these days.
Well, I'll tell you this.
It was Christians who led the fight against communism, which is why, most likely, why we're not currently enslaved and or dead at the moment, if not us, certainly millions and millions of people around the world.
Whitaker Chambers found God.
Joseph McCarthy was religious.
Elizabeth Bentley found God.
And they went from the nihilism of communism to the moral strength.
Actually, in 1927, Whitaker Chambers translated the children's book Bambi, which became an instant classic.
Whitaker Chambers' autobiography called Witness was one of Ronald Reagan's two favorite books.
Ronald Reagan, of course, a staunch communist fighter who really helped to bring down the Soviet Union.
So Chambers joined the American Communist Party in 1925 and left it in 1938, realizing the evils of Joseph Stalin's great purges.
One of the reasons why, by the by, the Soviets did so badly in the Second World War was because Joseph Stalin had killed an awful lot of his most competent generals.
And when reading about these great purges, he went, wow, this is kind of the party of evil, the group of evil.
So he left it in 1938.
As we talked about before, in 1939, he goes to the official in the State Department warning about Aldrichs and others.
So the former Communist Chambers, when he decided to leave communism and work against communism with the conservatives, he told his wife that we're leaving the winning party to join the losing party.
And he said, it was very powerful, he said that the fight against communism...
It's the fight against communists and ex-communists, because it's only the ex-communists who have seen so deeply into the evils of communism that they have the moral strength and will to fight it.
And he was actually told, this is how pervasive the Soviet infiltration of the US government was.
Whitaker Chambers was told by the Soviet espionage boss, even in Germany, under the Weimar Republic, the party did not have what we have here, the infrastructure.
So, when Chambers decided to quit being a communist, he was up all night trying to convince Al-Jahis to leave the Communist Party, but he failed, and one of the reasons Al-Jahis's wife was actually even more pro-communist, if I remember rightly, than he was, and he said, I can't leave my wife.
So, Chambers saved a collection of documents he had previously received from Hiss to protect himself and his family against blowback, and went into hiding in seclusion out of Fear, right?
He knew what the communists were capable of, so he tried to convince Alger Hiss to not be a communist, but he saved some of the letters that Hiss had delivered to him as a courier, some of the documents, to protect himself, and bailed.
Now, in 1948, Whitaker Chambers got the attention of a freshman California representative named Richard Nixon.
And he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, HUAC, presenting a list of members of an underground communist network that had infiltrated the United States government during the 1930s and the 1940s.
So this is interesting because, of course, HUAC, House Un-American Activities Committee, is often associated with Joseph McCarthy.
Joseph McCarthy was a senator and therefore had nothing to do with the House, which is the Congress, House Un-American Activities Committee.
This was happening in 1948.
This is a full two years of Before McCarthy's speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, where I hold here in my hand names of...
So this is all going back in the game.
The left doesn't want you to know about the prehistory, right?
McCarthy just came out of nowhere with these wild accusations.
He was crazy, right?
So, eventually, Chambers accused Hiss publicly of being a communist on the radio program Meet the Press.
And, of course, all of Hiss's friends, Altra Hiss's friends, were like, oh, you've got to sue this guy!
He's liable!
He's calling you a communist!
And he waited and waited and waited and eventually did file this suit against Chambers.
He kind of had to.
Otherwise, he's sort of admitting that he is, as far as I understand it.
Now, leftists used many tactics to smear and discredit Chambers, the usual stuff.
And they included the claim that he was homosexually obsessed with Hiss, wanted to have sex with him.
And that he was delusional and mentally ill and all the other stuff that I've talked about.
He stood tall.
I mean, it was rough.
It was rough.
At what point it was Chambers may have attempted suicide during one of these trials.
I mean, it was just horrible, horrible stuff.
You couldn't really punch back.
Joseph McCarthy actually won a libel suit against a paper that printed stuff.
It doesn't matter.
I mean, people don't...
If you just keep pouring crap on people, eventually some of it seems to stick, again, until the present.
So, Chambers, in New York, right, when he was a communist, he was the courier, right?
And he did this in New York, and starting in 1934, he did this in Washington.
So he delivered messages, received documents from Soviet spies who were working in the government, and he photographed them or delivered them to these Soviet intelligence officers to be photographed.
And then he would take these documents that had been copied or photographed and return them back to the spies within the U.S. government who would put them back in their offices before they were missed.
This is before the days of photocopiers, so you had to do it either by hand or photograph them or whatever.
And so...
In November 1948, Chambers led two HUAC investigators to a pumpkin patch in Maryland, where he had concealed four rolls of microfilm in a hollowed-out pumpkin.
These pumpkin patch papers, as they were called, were State Department documents that Hiss had copied in his own handwriting or on his own typewriter and then handed over to the Russians through Chambers, we would assume.
Now, this was amazing stuff.
Now, of course, Hiss said, no, no, no, it was not my typewriter.
And they had to go like crazy to find the typewriter.
They had given it to someone else, and they compared all of the little, you know, the P's had certain configurations.
If you zoom in on them, you can see them certainly.
It's like metadata.
It's like a fingerprint.
Each typewriter is individual.
Eventually, they did realize it was Hiss's, or they found out or proved that it was Hiss's typewriter.
That had typed these documents and to the end of his days, his said, I'll never know how Whitaker Chambers broke into my house and used my typewriter.
He did admit that these other things were in his own handwriting, but the typewriter thing he denied forever.
And I mean, what an incredible story.
An incredible story.
There was also confusion about when the film had been manufactured.
Originally, the manufacturer said, no, it was manufactured after this time period.
And Richard Nixon got so angry, he called Whitaker Chambers, you're a liar!
But it turned out, no, no, no, we got it wrong.
It was before.
I mean, it was really just an incredible story and well worth examining in more detail.
And eventually, Hiss was convicted of Poetry for denying.
See, he said he didn't know Whitaker Chambers and then documents were Shown that Whitaker Chambers had been to his house, that he did all these business dealing.
So it turns out, right?
So he was convicted eventually of perjury and spent some time in prison and then was fated and lauded and all that afterwards.
Anyway, that's...
We'll pick that up just a little bit later.
It's an incredible story and a wild story and a ridiculously exciting story, which you should definitely explore.
I can't do it justice as I sort of fly by it here.
But Whitaker Chambers said...
The simple fact is that when I took up my little sling and aimed at communism, I also hit something else.
What I hit was the forces of that great socialist revolution, which, in the name of liberalism, spasmodically, incompletely, somewhat formlessly, but always in the same direction, has been inching its ice cap over the nation for two decades.
And this is the great danger of the state.
There is sort of an iron rule of organizations that every organization will inexorably move to the left, move to the left.
And this is true of the state as a whole, and it's important to do what is possible to prevent or reverse that until we can find a more permanent solution to social organization.
So, the man, incredibly heroic and was, you know, attacked endlessly for his bad teeth and his appearance and all this kind of stuff.
And people thought, like, they would take books that he translated and say, ah, that's the motive, right?
So again, the left creates these armchair psychological motives to explain why people are doing things so that they can avoid the actual question at hand and the moral imperative behind why someone is doing something.
So, Whittaker Chambers translated a book, which was the story of an incompetent guy in an Ivy League school conspiring to bring down a more brilliant and talented boy and so on, and said, ah!
You know, but as people pointed out at the time, just because he translated the book doesn't mean it's about him.
I mean, he also translated, Bambi, this doesn't mean that he's a gun-shy deer.
So, I think that's a line from Coulter.
So, an incredible story.
And again, this all happened before.
Before!
Joseph McCarthy started his speech, right?
Dean Acheson was the guy who defended Alger Hiss right after Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury for denying under oath he was a Soviet spy.
Statute of limitations had run out, couldn't be tried for treason.
But right after, Dean Acheson defends the guy, and this may have been the last straw for Joseph McCarthy and the American public as a whole.
All of this before.
You need the backstory to understand what happened.
Doesn't come out of nowhere.
So let's talk about Elizabeth Bentley.
She was, again, a Soviet spy.
She had a religious experience and also turned against communism.
Again, were there a lot of atheists who fought hard against communism?
I mean, for heaven's sakes.
Christopher Hitchens, son of a hitch, guy started out as a Marxist.
So this former communist, Elizabeth Bentley, she spoke to the FBI twice in 1945, and this resulted in a 107-page statement detailing 87 U.S. citizens and Russians who were, according to her, communist spies.
And she ended up actually revealing about 150 people.
Who were members or collaborators of the Communist Network.
And many of those were still in the federal government.
And Elizabeth Bentley gave FBI the single greatest data set of the Cold War, except perhaps for Venona, but Venona came later.
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover reportedly assigned 72 special agents to verify Elizabeth Bentley's damning allegations.
Again, five years before McCarthy.
Now, Bentley's handler had been Jacob Golos.
He was a Russian Jew who had survived a Siberian labor camp and helped found the Communist Party of the United States after becoming a U.S. citizen.
Now, Golos had previously given Elizabeth Bentley $2,000, a staggering sum in those days, and she surrendered this money to the FBI. This was the only evidence, the hard evidence, that was given.
And, sorry, by the by, Elizabeth Bentley, in talking to the FBI, named Aldrich Hiss as a communist spy.
Now, tragically, the Russian intelligence discovered her defection because there were moles everywhere, everywhere, they were honeycombed.
They stopped all espionage and called all Russian nationals home.
And this consistently happened.
Somebody would turncoat and give up communist spies.
The Russians would find out about it and they would destroy all the evidence and come home or stop all your activity.
And so they were just always a step behind or several steps behind trying to catch these people.
Now, after a couple of years, army codebreakers on Venona were finally able to decrypt several Soviet cables detailing U.S. spying activities, right?
So this happened in the later 40s.
They were working on breaking these Soviet cables, and we'll get to more of this in a moment.
So they did actually decrypt several Soviet cables.
After cross-referencing the names of the spies in the decrypted cables with Elizabeth Bentley's reports, the FBI had the documentation they needed to proceed with their cases.
So, evidence.
This is very, very powerful stuff.
And it takes it from theory or accusations to verifiable facts.
So after the collapse of the Soviet regime, some of the communist archives were opened.
Not nearly as much as a truth teller would expect or desire, but there was some of this.
So there is now access to material long possessed by the US federal government.
Some of it is really, really quite astonishing.
So most important are the so-called Venona transcripts, and only a couple of percentage points of these have been decrypted.
So these are transmissions between Kremlin spymasters and their agents in America, as well as there now are available wiretaps conducted by the FBI and other confidential data from the Bureau, all dating back to the 1940s.
These and other sources reveal that there was a relentless drive by communists to infiltrate the US government, steal its secrets, and subvert its most important decisions.
It also clearly revealed that U.S. defenses against such subversions, especially in the State Department, almost ridiculously absent, just walking all over the place.
And again, people were afraid.
Oh, you try and fire some guy, he's going to raise a big stink, he's going to call his friends in the media, your life's going to be destroyed, so forget it, right?
I mean, the real fifth column, as I mentioned, was the media, and it was the Soviets taking advantage of the danger the media represented to anyone who opposed leftist agendas.
That was all of this stuff.
Many U.S. officials whose job it was to guard against subversion took a disconcertingly casual view of their responsibilities.
So we'll get into the Venona project in more detail here because it really, really is important.
So in 1943, the U.S. Army began a project to decrypt Soviet cables.
This was a little bit off the books.
The guy in charge was just concerned that there was going to be another...
And the Soviets used what's called a one-time pad.
So they would get people there with numbers.
They would create random numbers using dice or something like that.
There were no computers, of course, to do this, certainly not in the Soviet Union.
So they'd use these one-time pads.
But what happened was...
As a result of errors, as a result of the chaos or confusion of war, a number of pads were reused.
Now, once they're reused, you can actually begin to decrypt.
And so in 1943, they began to try and decrypt these Soviet cables, but weren't having much luck.
In 1945, they were told to, quote, cease any effort against the Soviet problem.
Allies and all.
But what happened was in 1944...
Finnish intelligence officers approached the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, the mission in Stockholm, and they offered to sell to the Americans about 1,500 pages of Soviet code material.
The intelligence officers had acquired the scorched code books and other cryptographic materials during the 1941 Soviet invasion of Finland.
Then Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius Jr., whose aide was the Soviet agent, Alder Hiss, told OSS Director Donovan to reject the offer because Russia was an ally.
So again, you've got to stick with this, right?
The guy they call up, Donovan, right?
Another fine Irishman, I guess.
Donovan called up and said, we've got this stuff.
We can start to decrypt the Soviet cables, maybe.
Alder Hiss knows, knows he's going to be named in the Soviet cables.
So, I would assume that the Secretary of State talks to Alger Hiss and says, I don't know, do you think we should?
And Alger Hiss is like, oh gosh no!
Gosh no!
We shouldn't do that because I'm going to be named as a Soviet spy!
So no!
They're an ally!
Unthinkable!
Terrible!
A breach of protocol!
Betrayal!
Right?
This is how it works!
This is how they hid!
This is how they destroyed!
However, fine man that he was, OSS Director Donovan said, sucks to be you, I'm going to buy the materials anyway.
Now, due to the instigation of the State Department, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered Donovan to return the material to the Soviets.
See, this is, again, oh, so horrifying.
How much could have been saved?
How many hundreds of millions of people would not have to endure and be slaughtered under communism if different decisions had been made, if a tiny bit of courage had been applied?
Because, of course, the State Department hears that these guys have purchased the material that allows them to decrypt the Soviet cables, a lot of whom are pointing to Soviet moles in the State Department, would reveal them openly.
And so the State Department is like, oh, no, no, you've got to get this guy to return the material to the Soviets, for reasons that are too obvious to describe in more detail.
After a failed attempt to deliver them to Pavel Fittin, head of NKVD, that's the Russian Secret Service Foreign Intelligence, the material was eventually handed over to Soviet Ambassador to the U.S., Andrei Gromyoko.
As a result of Roosevelt's decision, the use of this material to aid the decryption of Soviet cables would be delayed until 1953.
Just horrendous.
But again, it's exactly what you'd expect the moles in the State Department and the moles advising the Secretary of State to do.
Don't decrypt these cables.
How could you think of it?
He's an ally.
Remember that old Jim Carrey line?
I think they're on to me!
The head of Venona was told by the White House to stop.
Cease any effort against the Soviet problem.
Now, on June 4th, 1945, six weeks after assuming the presidency as the result of the sudden death of FDR, Harry Truman was briefed about Venona and told that the decrypted messages revealed massive Soviet intelligence operations within the United States.
Seems important to me.
Truman remarked that the claims sounded like a fairy story.
I guess the left had no problem with Russia back when it was communist.
It's only now that it's nationalistic and Christian that it has become the enemy.
The Moynihan Commission of Government Secrecy 1997 wrote in its final report, The first fact is that a significant communist conspiracy was in place in Washington, New York, and Hollywood.
Oh, the more things change, the more they seem to stay the same.
The Moynihan report said, the United States government possessed information which the American public desperately needed to know.
Proof...
See, one revelation that came out of the Venona Project decrypts is that a lot of the Americans who spied for the Russians were never prosecuted.
Because to prosecute them, the government would have to provide proof.
To provide proof, they would have to reveal the existence of this decryption program.
They would have to reveal that they were reading the Soviet cables.
And whether or not these decrypted cables would be admissible in a court of law, it's kind of a complicated question.
The lawyers on the defense could say, well, decrypt them all, because maybe there's other stuff that exonerates my client.
Oh, you can't?
Well, that's reasonable doubt and bloody blah, right?
So, this was a huge problem.
That people in the government...
Had information about Soviet spying that they couldn't reveal or chose not to reveal to the general public.
Some of this information, we know that Hoover handed over documents to Joseph McCarthy.
So Joseph McCarthy had information about Soviet spying that he could not reveal to the American public.
And of course, that way, people say, well, he's just making stuff up.
He didn't write.
Well, information has come out over the last 20 years that shows that he knew a lot more than he could reveal.
During World War II, the Soviet Union ran deep espionage operations against the War Department and the State Department, the War Production Board, the Office of Economic Warfare, the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, and even the Office of the President of the United States.
Soviet espionage infiltrated every single agency of the American government and stole secrets from many other organizations concerned with national security.
This is no longer a theory.
There is hard proof.
So, from 1942 to 1945, very few of the thousands of encrypted cables sent between US KGB stations and Moscow could be read.
After 1948, no messages could be broken because the codebreakers had been betrayed by Russian linguist William Weissband, who worked with them at Arlington Hall outside Washington, D.C. Eventually, about 2,200 messages were decrypted, and American counterintelligence found cover names for more than 300 Americans who spied for the Soviet KGB in World War II. However, only 100 people were ever definitively identified.
And this was one of the great tragedies, that when they were actually decrypting the first message, I've broken the code, decrypting the first message, this guy, William, was leaning over and looking at and reporting to Moscow.
And there was more.
A Soviet assistant to the KGB, Washington Station Chief, wrote an anonymous letter to J. Edgar Hoover.
This was back in 1943.
And he named several high-level KGB operatives.
And many of them were, of course, involved in this perpetual espionage attempt to gain the secrets of the atomic bomb coming out of the Manhattan Project.
Just horrifying.
In 1949, a codebreaker was able to decipher enough of a Soviet message to identify it as the text of a 1945 telegram from Winston Churchill to Harry S. Truman, thus confirming beyond the shadow of a doubt that during the Second World War, the Soviets had a spy with access to top-secret communications between the President of the United States and the British Prime Minister.
And this was astonishing.
The Armed Forces Security Agency demanded copies of the transmissions handled by the British Embassy.
They began matching them against encoded messages in the Moscow to New York channel that they were deciphering.
They worked backwards through the codebook and were able to transcribe these messages and revealed there had been a massive bleed-out of secrets from both the British Embassy in Washington.
And the Los Alamos, New Mexico atomic bomb project facility.
Massive hemorrhaging of secrets.
But McCarthy was paranoid, right?
Hayden Peake, curator of the Central Intelligence Agency's Historical Intelligence Collection, has stated, no modern government was more thoroughly penetrated.
Alright, so let's do a quick circle back and review, shall we?
According to the Venona decrypts, at least 350 Americans worked directly for Soviet intelligence during World War II. And remember, there's only a few percent of the Soviet cables that have been decrypted.
The number could very well be orders of magnitude larger.
American counterintelligence eventually identified more than 125 of these agents, was never able to definitively find out who the other 200-plus were.
They could have been positioned even higher than the ones that they found out about.
Almost every single one of the people accused of being Soviet agents by Elizabeth Bentley and Whitaker Chambers, the two ex-communists, both denounced for making false charges by political partisans in the 1940s, as well as by historians ever since.
Almost every single one of the people they accused turns out to have actually been a Soviet spy.
Now...
If the media, if historians were actually interested in the truth rather than in programming you to accept creeping socialism, this would be a huge shock and a revelation.
Can you imagine?
Imagine if the people who'd been accused were definitively cleared.
Imagine how trumpeted that would have been by the media.
But they don't want you to know this, because any time you move against socialists or communists, they want to be able to scream, Paint you in that sort of leering, sweaty, unshaven, ranty...
Oh wait, that's me.
They want to be able to paint you with that kind of brush, right?
So if all anti-communism is paranoid hysteria, they don't want to ever point out that the touchstone or the lodestone for the basis of this pushback was actually valid, because they wouldn't then be able to scream McCarthyism, or if McCarthyism turned out to have some pretty...
Devalid elements, then when they screamed McCarthyism, they would be screaming that.
You might have a little substance behind your accusations.
According to Professor...
Harvey, clear?
There were at least 16 Soviet agents in the OSS, predecessor to the CIA, including Duncan Lee, Chief Counsel to General William Donovan, the Office of War Information, the Board of Economic Warfare, United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, War Production Board, War Department, Signal Corps, Censorship Office, the Justice Department were all penetrated.
But it was just a hysterical and imaginary red scare, right?
Professor Clear goes on to say, Appalling!
Shocking!
Shouldn't every single one of these institutions be revisited, at least in the estimation of historians, given that the man who designed it was a spy for a totalitarian regime?
I think that seems somewhat important.
Talk about the tragedies in Latin America as well.
I mean, just look at Argentina.
Argentina in the 1930s had a living standard equivalent to that of the United States.
And look at how much creeping socialism has overtaken Latin America.
It's unbelievably brutal.
And what's going on in Venezuela at the moment after Chavez put in his radical socialist program?
How much of this stuff was put in place by the American spy for the Soviets in charge of Latin American affairs?
Larry Duggan, this agent.
And the KGB so valued White's information, including meetings at the founding UN conference where he revealed the American negotiating strategy, that when he hinted at leaving government service because of financial pressures, the KGB offered to pay his daughter's college tuition, where I'm sure she could have been well indoctrinated in general leftist principles.
levels.
Professor Clear goes on to say, there were even Soviet sources with access to the Venona project.
One of the Russian language specialists working on the project was William Weisband, who was exposed by a decrypted message as a long-time KGB asset.
In 1950, the new liaison from British intelligence to Venona was Kim Philby, one of the most prominent Soviet moles within the British intelligence service.
The Soviets thus learned about Venona very early, tracked its progress, and were able to warn vulnerable agents.
Ironically, some of the spy hunting turned up without spies.
Gosh, I wonder why.
Is it because there weren't that many spies?
No!
It's because the infiltration was worse than anyone imagined at the time.
They couldn't find the spies, not because the spies weren't there, but because the spies were virtually everywhere.
You understand?
They could warn everyone who was coming, destroy your stuff, get rid of stuff, stop meeting people, you're being surveilled.
Well, look, he didn't find that many spies.
He says, by the time American counterintelligence began to follow and surveil those who had served as Soviet spies, they had ceased their activities and disposed of incriminating evidence.
The professor goes on to say, about all the FBI was able to do was, through interrogation, let these former spies know they were under suspicion, force them out of government service, and by leaking their names to congressional committees, ensure that they were called to testify before such bodies as the House Committee on Un-American Activities, where most took the Fifth Amendment, refusing to answer questions based on the possibility of self-incrimination.
That tactic provided legal protection, but also branded them in the public eye as security risks.
Now, I understand this is a very, very slippery slope, and I, of course, want to point out the moral hazards of this kind of approach.
But in reality, during this time, the FBI knew that they were spies, but was not able to or unwilling to admit the source of the knowledge for fear of alerting the Soviets to the existence of the capacity of the U.S. to decrypt their cables.
Not knowing that, because the spy network was even more extensive than they anticipated.
It's like that scene from Alias, you know, with Jennifer Garner's character, Michael Vartan says, oh no, it's actually this big, right?
I mean, just unfold this org chart from hell.
And so they knew, but they couldn't prove, or they couldn't Release the source of their knowledge.
Now, I understand this is not a good position that we want the government to be in on a regular basis.
We know you're guilty, but we can't show you how.
But in hindsight, we understand where all of this is coming from.
So why didn't they talk about where they were getting the information from?
In 1956, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wrote an internal memo revealing three major reasons why the Bureau didn't reveal its smoking gun evidence regarding communist spies.
There were concerns that disclosing the existence of the Fanona program could help the Russians ameliorate the damage to their U.S. spy networks.
'cause I mean, if the, If the Russians knew, of course the Russians did know, let's pretend they didn't, if the Russians found out that the cables were being read, they would disband their entire network and start rebuilding it in some other way.
At least they could keep watching these people.
This was their thought.
This concern was in fact largely groundless.
As we pointed out, a Soviet spy was actually standing right over the shoulder of the ASA codebreaker when he decrypted the first Soviet cable detailing that the Kremlin's agents had targeted the Manhattan Project.
Kim Philby, already penetrated the top ranks of Britain's foreign intelligence agency, had been briefed on Venona.
Now, if the content of the Venona cables had been made public, McCarthyism would have been unnecessary.
This is really, really important to understand.
This is sort of the upside-down tip of the pyramid of causality and responsibility.
If they had published what they had learned from the Venona cables...
So, McCarthyism was because the FBI and the Army were hiding the contents of the Venona Cables.
And therefore, he had information, and we don't know how much, but he had information that gave him a certitude.
He was still bound, of course, by all of the legal restrictions and controls within the U.S. judicial system, at least at the time.
But if the FBI and the Army had made the Venona cables public, there would have been no reason for any kind of McCarthyism.
But they didn't, for reasons that...
understandable at the time, but in hindsight, were worse than useless.
Worse than useless, because if they had revealed all of this stuff, they would have been able to scoop up all of these spies.
And the true depth and horror of Soviet penetration of the US government would have been revealed.
And it wouldn't have been able to be branded as some irrational, crazy, paranoid witch hunt, and so on.
So what happened was, because McCarthyism pursued people, and the proof showed up often decades later, it was easy to brand it as a hysterical witch hunt, thus branding anti-communism as a form of irrational paranoia.
And this was extremely damaging to efforts to fight against creeping socialism.
The FBI pursued people that had direct evidence with spies, but chose not to reveal the source of this evidence, thus creating confusion and hostility among the left, which I can completely understand.
I'm skeptical of everything the government says in general.
Ah, the Russians hacked the election.
What does that mean?
We can't tell you.
I get all of that.
I understand all of that, and I'm sympathetic to that, and I'm certainly not saying the government should just have the power to say, oh yeah, he's guilty, we can't prove how or why, but this decision, which was not McCarthy's decision, To not publish any of the contents of the Venona Cables was the impetus behind why this became so frustrating, confusing, and angering among the left.
For the other reasons, too, that for everyone on the left, the enemy is always to the right.
You never go to the left for your enemies if you're on the left.
So, this naming names thing.
Did Joseph McCarthy make...
All of these names public, ruining reputations, potentially slandering innocent people, destroying their lives, and so on.
Well, no.
So after his Wheeling speech, which we heard earlier, McCarthy gave another speech in Congress on February 20, 1950, and was frequently interrupted with demands that he make his list of names public.
McCarthy refused.
Senator Joseph McCarthy said, if I were to give all the names involved, it might leave a wrong impression.
If we should label one man a communist when he is not a communist, I think it would be too bad.
So he was very concerned with falsely describing people as communists.
So McCarthy continued his speech but only identified suspects by their case numbers, not condemning a single potentially innocent individual by name.
It took, of course, McCarthy about six hours to give this controversial speech due to near-constant interruptions and harassment from hostile senators.
Scott Lucas, Brian McMahon, Garrett Withers and Herbin Lehman, who interrupted him 123 times in total.
So no, he did not name names.
He was very concerned that these cases had not been investigated and that no resolution had been made with regards to these security risks in the State Department, but he was not out there just naming names.
Now, did McCarthy believe that there were thousands of communist spies in the State Department?
No.
He said very explicitly, quote, the vast majority of the employees of the State Department are loyal, end quote, and that he was only interested in those where they demonstrated loyalty to the Soviet Union or the Communist Party.
He said, some of these individuals whose cases I am giving the Senate are no longer in the State Department.
A sizable number of them are not.
Some of them have transferred to other government work, work allied with the State Department.
Others have been transferred to the United Nations.
Now, Senator Carl Mundt put it quite well.
He said, one of the great difficulties we confront in trying to get communists out of government...
Is that apparently, once they have been removed from one department, there is no alert given to the other department, so they simply drift from one department to another.
This sort of reminds me of, you know, pedophilic Catholic priests being transferred from diocese to diocese, or the far more numerous sexual predations of particular sections of public school teachers just being moved from place to place or put in these rubber rooms.
So, was McCarthy right?
I think we've been building a fairly solid case that there was more than a little substance behind these accusations.
Was he right or wrong about the State Department?
Regarding the State Department, I think it's fair to say McCarthy was largely right.
Of the 110 names that McCarthy gave to be investigated, 62 were employed by the State Department at the time of the hearings.
The committee, supposedly, cleared everyone on McCarthy's list, but within a year, the State Department started proceedings against 49 of the 62.
By the end of 1954, 81 of those on McCarthy's list had left the government either by dismissal or resignation.
Now, we talked about John Stewart Service before.
Five years before McCarthy mentioned the name of John Stewart Service, Service was arrested for handing over classified documents to the editors of Amarasia.
The Truman administration did manage to cover up the espionage scandal, and Jon Stewart, as we mentioned, was never punished for his crime.
McCarthy also produced significant evidence that service had been, quote, part of the pro-Soviet group, end quote, that wanted to bring communism to China.
But the Tidings Committee said that service was, quote, not disloyal, pro-communist, or a security risk.
Huh.
Democrats protecting leftists.
I guess there's a time and a place for every historical anomaly.
Over the next 18 months, the State Department's Loyalty Security Board cleared service four more times.
Which makes you wonder how many spies there may have been in the Loyalty Security Board because, of course, that's where you'd want to place your assets if you were the Soviets.
Okay.
Finally, in December 1951, the Civil Service Commission Loyalty Review Board found that there was, quote, reasonable doubt regarding his loyalty and booted him from the State Department.
Oh!
And his life was over.
Destroyed!
He wandered the streets under a cloud of enemy.
Nah.
So, this idea that McCarthy ruined people's lives and so on, well, the Supreme Court reinstated John Stewart's service in 1956.
And he became the American consul in Liverpool, England until he retired in 1962.
He then joined the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley.
It seems almost inevitably, and visited Red China in the fall of 1971 at the invitation of communist tyrant Zhou Enlai.
Following his return from China, he helped to communize service, wrote a number of articles for the New York Times, and was the subject of a laudatory cover interview in Parade magazine.
So, yeah, help to deliver 400 million people.
Into communist dictatorship and play your hand in being responsible for the deaths of between 50 and 74 million people.
And you too can join the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley.
Ah, the left coast.
If only the original Superman had been right.
Oh, and Lattimore, he was one of the principal architects of the State Department's pro-communist foreign policy in the Far East.
In a closed session of the Tidings Committee, Senator McCarthy called Lattimore the top Russian spy in the department.
That charge, by the way, was not leaked to the public by McCarthy, but rather by columnist Drew Pearson, right?
So it was in a closed session, so he could say what he wants, but this was leaked by a columnist.
Now, McCarthy did later modify his statement on Lattimore, saying that, quote, I may have perhaps placed too much stress on the question of whether or not he has been an espionage agent, and went on to say that, quote, 13 different witnesses have testified under oath to Lattimore's communist membership or party line activities.
Although the Tidings Committee cleared Lattimore of all charges, another Senate committee, the Internal Security Subcommittee, vindicated Joe McCarthy in 1952 when it declared that, quote, Owen Lattimore was, from some time beginning in the 1930s, a conscious, articulate instrument of the Soviet conspiracy.
Was his life ruined by this charge of being a spy or his subsequent indictment for perjury?
No, of course not.
Absolutely not.
He continued on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University.
He went to Communist out of Mongolia for the Kennedy State Department in 1961.
He headed up a new Chinese Studies Department at Leeds University in England in 1963, before returning to the U.S. in the 1970s for speeches and lectures and a joyful and wonderful public life touring the leftist champagne socialist party scene.
Just amazing.
I mean, it really is absolutely shocking.
Just, I mean, all you have to do is get more of this.
Look up what happened to all the members of the Weather Underground terrorist group.
I mean, a bunch of them ended up on faculties.
I'm telling you, it's a viper's nest in academia.
So, was all this public smearing going on?
Well, From February 9th, 1950 until January 1st, 1953, and that's quite a spread of years, Joseph McCarthy publicly questioned the loyalty or reliability of a grand total of 46 persons, and he particularly focused on the cases of only 24 of the 46.
Writers have pointed out that McCarthy, quote, There is a First Amendment in the United States.
The Communist Party was a legal entity, funded and controlled by Moscow, fairly generous, but was a legal entity.
It wasn't that he was trying to throw people in jail.
It wasn't like, oh, if you're a member of the Communist Party, we're going to throw you in jail.
No, it wasn't anything to do with that.
Laws invented by Democrats.
To make sure that communists and fascists weren't riddling the foreign policy decisions of the U.S. State Department and other departments.
You can't be a secret communist interacting with other communists around the world.
This is not that complicated.
I mean, if you're running a secret research facility for a car company, car company A, let's say, and it turns out that one of your employees...
Do you think you're still going to keep working with them?
Of course not.
Of course not.
It's not even that complicated.
Now, there's no evidence that Hoover told McCarthy about the Venona project, and so McCarthy was flying blind to some extent.
Perhaps.
We don't know.
While some of the evidence against some of those accused turned out to be less than reported, Joseph McCarthy's record overall is extremely good.
The intelligence agencies giving him data had access to facts and evidence that they could not share.
And again, I'm not saying this is the right thing to do or the right way to go about things.
So at the time, I can understand some of the pushback.
But now this should have all been revised 20 years ago.
Falls to people like me.
This also applies to the 1953 to 1954 period when McCarthy was chairman of a Senate committee and publicly exposed 114.
Most of these persons refused to answer questions about their alleged communist or espionage activities on the ground that their answers might tend to incriminate them.
Now, the fifth is very, very important, and I'm not saying it should ever be overturned and all that kind of stuff, but remember, way back, the law said that all doubts about loyalty must be resolved immediately.
On the part of the government, for the sake of the government.
So they don't have to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt.
This is not a criminal case.
They don't even have to get this to the civil standard as sort of a preponderance of guilt.
All they have to do is be suspicious with some grounds, and then they can boot you.
That's the law.
And you can get upset at McCarthy for trying to enforce a law passed by Democrats We're good to go.
You've got to be kidding me.
Well, last year and a half or so.
I mean, just check out my presentations that seem sort of endless, the untruth about Donald Trump, part one through infinity, and I'm sure there'll be more.
The left constantly smears people, constantly smears people with things that are actually false.
And then when they scream, smearing is so terrible, well, it's just textbook projection and manipulation.
So what was the fallout of all of this?
Well, you know, McCarthy only scratched the surface of the actual Soviet penetration, which will most likely never be known.
I don't think that there's any way to decrypt many of the remaining Venona cables because it was one-time scratch pads and they're all gone, I would assume.
Only a few percentage of Venona cables decrypted.
Hundreds of spies were identified.
So, um...
It was...
Very much touching the surface of what was going on.
Now, McCarthy did prompt a tightening of security procedures for a while.
The State Department and other sensitive federal agencies did dismiss nearly 4,000 employees in 1953 and 1954, although many of them shifted to non-sensitive departments, because it's just great when you can't fire people, isn't it?
Now, some of these security risks returned to their old agencies when any reasonable security measures were virtually scrapped during the Kennedy crisis.
Hey, a Democrat got back into power, and what happened was all the spies and moles came slithering back to their original layers.
Now, during the mid-1950s, a State Department security specialist named Otto Otepka reviewed the files of all departmental personnel and found some kind of derogatory information on 1,943 persons. a State Department security specialist named Otto Otepka reviewed the That's close to 20% of the total payroll.
Years later, he told the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee that Of the 1,943 employees, 722, quote, left the department for various reasons, but mostly by transfer to other agencies before a final security determination was made.
And this often happened.
People would say, they'd be told, you'd be called into your boss's office, so we're going to open a security determination.
They'd be like, oh, I'm out of here.
I'm gone.
Problem solved, right?
Problem solved.
Ah.
Otepka trimmed the remaining number on the list to 858.
In December 1955, he sent their names to his boss, Scott McLeod, as persons to be watched because of communist associations, homosexuality, habitual drunkenness, or mental illness.
And again, homosexuality would lead you to be open to blackmail since it was illegal at the time.
But here's the thing.
Everyone who might have had a motive to make a move against security risks within their own department, well, they'd seen the giant smoking crater of Joseph McCarthy's life.
I mean, he was still alive at this point, but they'd seen what happened to the guy.
Did they really want to take on the media in this way and have their lives destroyed and be investigated themselves and be brought up on potential charges and get involved in lawsuits?
I mean, did they really want to?
I To take those kinds of risks.
And one of the purposes of McCarthyism and the anti-McCarthyism that was engendered by the media and so on, one of the purposes was to warn other people off from poking any kind of flashlight into this rat's nest of vipers.
Was McCarthy just so harsh and cruel and mean?
During 1953, in the first three months of 1954, McCarthy's committee held 199 days of hearings, examining 653 witnesses.
And remember, the witnesses aren't the people necessarily who were accused.
These individuals first appeared in executive session where they were told of the evidence against them.
If they were able to offer satisfactory explanations, and most of them were, they were dismissed and nobody ever knew.
That they had ever even been summoned.
They say, well, this is the evidence against you.
What do you have to say?
Oh, well, I can explain it this way and that way.
Okay, accepted.
Off you go.
And nobody ever knows that you've been summoned.
Those who ended up appearing in public sessions were either those who repeatedly played the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination card or those about whom there was a reasonably strong presumption of guilt.
Even those witnesses who were brazen and insulting and defiant were afforded their full constitutional rights.
They could confer with their counsel before answering a question, and that's something they would not be allowed to do in a courtroom.
They were allowed to confront their accusers, or at least have them identified and have questions submitted to them by their counsel.
They were allowed to invoke their First and Fifth Amendments rather than answer questions about their alleged communist associations.
Now, you go to communist countries, and you look at the kind of show trials that go on, and the kind of shooting squads that go on, and the kind of pits of bodies that are discovered, and you try and find places where those accused by the state in totalitarian dictatorships, so beloved in so many ways by so many of the left, where do they get these kind of protections?
Stalin's show trials, where he just, you know, countless people were shot for imaginary crimes...
Did they have these protections?
No.
In fact, one of the lawyers for one of the defendants said, yeah, he was actually very reasonable, very nice.
I'd heard all these terrible things.
It turned out that, you know, the guy was a judge.
judge, he knew his law.
So, as we mentioned, McCarthyism used devices like the Smith Act and the House Committee on Un-American Activities created by New Deal Democrats.
Now, when these instruments, these laws, were used to attack fascists or even Trotskyites, communists cheered and sometimes aided and abetted the government in its persecution.
So, the communists had no particular issue with these laws when they were used against the enemies of communism.
Ah, but when the tables were turned and the laws that many communists had cheered and helped the government in the persecution of their enemies, when the tables were turned and the government used the laws against the communists, ah, it's foul, it's terrible, it's horrible, it's fascistic, it's...
And, I mean, the sort of Admiral Ackbar, it's a trap, stuff, I mean, was pretty constant.
So McCarthy made his charges public February 1950.
So the Democrats, Senate Democrats, demanded, oh, stop hiding behind closed-door sessions and start naming names.
And they did that, of course, I would assume, to rouse opposition.
But once McCarthy did that, the Senate Democrats attacked him for alleging misdeeds without giving the accused the opportunity to defend themselves.
You've got to name these people.
Okay, I'm going to name these people.
Oh, you're accusing them publicly and they haven't had a chance to defend themselves.
Well, of course, you know, they want him to start naming names so that they can go, ooh, do you know who's accused you of something?
You've got to fight back and get the whole conflict going.
And of course, McCarthy's enemies, oh, they just really disliked all of these supposed incursions into civil liberties and so on.
And they were champions, you see, of civil liberties, his enemies.
Well, what did they do in defense of these civil liberties?
Well, they tapped his phone.
They intercepted his personal mail.
They put a paid spy in McCarthy's office and illegally released his tax returns to the press.
Now, McCarthy did actually end up with a large refund as a result of...
The release of his tax returns.
But you see, it's really, really terrible to accuse someone of being a spy and so we're going to put a paid spy in Joseph McCarthy's office.
Horrendous.
Horrendous.
No right to talk about legal standards when you're willing to violate them to this degree.
So...
I so appreciate you getting through to this part of the presentation.
This is where the real muscle goes on the bone with regards to what we're talking about.
It's not about the 1950s, it's about the next couple of years.
So what's going on now?
Well, there have been no shortage of articles in the mainstream media comparing Donald Trump to Senator Joseph McCarthy.
When you understand the truth about McCarthyism, this comparison takes on an even more interesting context.
The Atlantic wrote, The new McCarthyism of Donald Trump!
Salon, A modern-day Joseph McCarthy, Donald Trump is the latest in a long line of American demagogues.
Washington Post, Joe McCarthy was brought down by attacks on his decency.
Trump will lose the same way.
Forbes, Is Donald Trump the new Joe McCarthy?
Ah, the Valley Girl question mark that gives you legal protection.
New York Times, What Donald Trump learned from Joseph McCarthy's right-hand man.
The New Yorker.
The model for Donald Trump's media relations is Joseph McCarthy.
The Guardian.
Donald Trump on terror is just McCarthyism for a new age.
Yahoo.
Eight reasons Donald Trump could be a modern-day Joe McCarthy.
Huffington Post.
American demagogues Joe McCarthy and Donald Trump.
The Baltimore Sun.
Trump blusters shamelessly on, reminiscent of Joe McCarthy.
Boston Herald.
Donald Trump sings to McCarthy like, lack of decency.
Well, I can guarantee you that Donald Trump's presidency is going to root out some lefties or disempower some lefties in the mainstream media, which is pretty much all the mainstream media these days.
And so, yes, they are, of course, going to try to portray him as McCarthyist, right?
To bring up this soar-unlike ghost of the disheveled senator from Wisconsin and get you to believe that all of the accusations are false and made up and paranoid, right?
All this kind of stuff.
Yeah.
Sorry, lefties.
Not an argument!
Just wanted to mention that.
Now, for those who don't know, I spent a couple of years at the National Theatre School studying acting and playwriting, and one of the luminaries of 20th century playwriting was Arthur Miller wrote Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, and so on, a lot of other things.
Now, this is the kind of information that people get when I was younger.
You had to read through the crucible because, of course, it was really, really important to program you with a knee-jerk reflex to associate the hunt for communists in the U.S. government to be the equivalent of looking for witches in Salem, right?
Because, you know, witches don't exist and it's all paranoid.
And it was a fabulous piece of propaganda, just as Death of a Salesman actually saw that Judd Hirsch, who's very terrifyingly good in the role.
Death of a Salesman, one of these hostile to the free market.
It's alienating kind of thing.
So, a lot of people get their information about McCarthy from plays like The Crucible, which Arthur Miller hedged a lot, but in many ways sort of subtly confessed that it was about McCarthyism.
So...
This is, um, so basically the Crucible is about the Salem witch trials.
Uh, you know, the main character is, is, is pushed, pressed, threatened with torture and to name his fellow citizens as, as witches.
And it's a plea for sentimentality and moral horror that is sort of impossible to push back against.
In the play, one character threatens to, like there's this female black slave, and he threatens to whip her to death if she doesn't confess to witchcraft.
And of course, you know, I've read quite a lot about Joseph McCarthy.
I don't ever remember him threatening to whip slaves to death if they don't confess to communism.
And there was timing involved.
The Crucible opened in January 1953.
The Rosenbergs, Julius and Ethel, were executed in June 1953, so although their trial had started two years earlier, and Arthur Miller, like a lot of people on the left, fairly fervently believed in the Rosenbergs' innocence of spying, the reality, of course, that has come out.
And this came out, I think Arthur Miller died in 2005, so that would be a decade after the Venona decrypts came out, so...
He could have updated his perspective, but no!
The left live in a fine little Irish village called Dublin Down.
So, the Venona documents have completely identified Julius Rosenberg as the chief of a Soviet spy ring and David Greenglass, his brother-in-law, as the source for the Soviets at the...
Secret atomic bomb facility in New Mexico.
And the plague gets increasingly hysterical.
The black slave goes insane from all the hysteria after being imprisoned and starts hearing voices and now actually claiming to talk to Satan.
And...
People become alcoholics, and the charges of witchcraft spread throughout the village, and they confess, and they're given lengthy presents terms, and so on, and their property gets seized by the government, and near the end of the play, like a dozen of the villagers have been hanged, and seven more are likely to be hanged the very next morning for refusing to confess to witchcraft, and I mean, it really gets insane.
There's nothing to do.
Nothing to do with McCarthyism whatsoever.
But I think this is how the snowflakes on the left perceive being asked questions about whether they are in fact communists when evidence points to the fact that they are in fact communists.
For a lot of people on the left, identifying things correctly causes hysteria.
And I don't know exactly why, other than...
They don't like reality?
They wish to substitute will, fantasy, imagination, and emotion for basic, practical, rational, empirical reality?
I don't know.
But this is how a lot of people get their impressions of this.
It's not actually that great a play, because it's so hysterical and so over-the-top.
And, of course, even for the time it's hysterical, but if you try and think it has anything to do with McCarthyism...
Now, one researcher has reported that Arthur Miller, the writer of the play, had been a struggling Marxist playwright since the late 1920s.
He had been interviewed by the Marxist publication The Daily Worker and wrote for the Marxist publication The New Masses.
He wrote Death of a Salesman.
And of course, commies loved the play.
People on the left loved the play because it's so viciously anti-Christian, right?
That's a significant bonus.
Significantly anti-Christian.
And of course, it would have been far more real.
To compare this hysteria in the Salem in this time period, it would have been much more realistic and more fair to compare this to Stalin's show trials where crimes were invented and people were executed and so on.
But no!
You see, if you're on the left, if you're a Marxist, then you never want to criticize the Soviet Union.
You only want to criticize somebody who's trying to expose communists illegally working in the State Department for the American government.
And Miller did, after decades, speak about the crucible, and he said, quote, It would probably never have occurred to me to write the play about the Salem witch trials of 1692 had I not seen some astonishing correspondences with that calamity in the America of the late 1940s and early 1950s.
He says, I refer to the anti-communist rage that threatened to reach hysterical proportions, and sometimes did.
He was actually hauled in front of the House Committee, Arthur Miller.
The lead counsel asked Arthur Miller, did you ever sign an application to join the Communist Party?
And then the counsel presented the five-digit application number on the Communist Party application form.
And on that application form was Arthur Miller's name and his address at 18 Shimmerham Street in New York.
They actually published a photocopy of the application card.
So that's pretty important.
And so, yes, he had applied to join the Communist Party.
And he's like, well, I would not affirm that.
I have no memory of such a thing.
And he actually does concede.
So he writes, his memoirs were called Time Bends.
He said, well, it's possible that HUAC... Lead investigator Richard Ahrens, he might have, or could conceivably have produced...
This Communist Party membership card.
So the actual quote is, how to explain that even if he had produced a party card with my signature on it, I could only have said yes.
I had probably felt that way then.
But if there was no such card, how could he imagine that it would be produced?
He knew there was a card out there somewhere.
And so he was a card, well, confirmed applying for membership in the Communist Party and seems to indicate that...
There's a membership card in the Communist Party.
Now, with his name out there, somebody said, I understand, right?
So, Nazism.
If he had applied to join the Nazi Party, do you think that his plays would be lauded and reproduced and Liam Neeson would be growling his way through the lead?
I mean, do you think that if he had been in the KKK, the KKK, 3,000 deaths ascribed to the KKK, terrible stuff, 100 million deaths ascribed to communism.
You understand?
This is how insane the world is that we live in.
This is how distorted the reality is that it's constantly being impressed like a vicious leftist brand on our perceptions.
Arthur Miller is a hero.
Arthur Miller is a genius.
Arthur Miller is a wonderful playwright.
He was a commie.
Which is worse than being a Nazi in terms of the death count.
I guess unless Chinese lives don't matter or the lives of those in the Soviet Union or in particular the Ukraine, unless Christian lives don't matter, unless the lives of people in Korea don't matter, unless the lives of people in Vietnam don't matter, unless the lives of people in Cambodia don't matter under the killing fields under the Khmer Rouge.
This is how cold-hearted people on the left are.
Cold-hearted and vicious.
These lives matter.
These hundred million lives or more matter.
And that's just the death count.
Let's not even talk about the extra couple of hundred million lives.
Destroyed, undermined, turned to depression, turned to alcoholism, turned to futile rage, turned to self-mutilation, turned to despair.
Living under totalitarianism, lives lived in terror of the secret police kicking in your door, dragging you away to parts unknown Solzhenitsyn style.
The 20th century became a living hell for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of people.
Does the left care about that?
Do they give a shit about that?
No.
The problem is McCarthy called Communists Communists.
That's the big problem coming out of the 1940s and the 1950s.
Not the hundreds of millions of people trapped in totalitarian hell holes, murdered by the tens of millions, starved, beaten, brutalized, tortured, imprisoned unjustly, living in abject, livid terror their entire lives.
That doesn't matter!
Only the guy who did a little bit to oppose it.
He's the only demon that comes out of this entire time period.
I don't even...
I can't even...
Literally joking.
Horrendous.
Let me give you a parallel here that's, I think, very instructive.
While the Senate in the United States was debating whether or not to censor McCarthy for saying some mean things...
There was also these Army McCarthy hearings where it was demanded to know whether someone McCarthy-liked might have gotten a fur-lined cap and he was cold to the Army.
This fellow named Andrei Vyshynski died while the Senate was debating whether to censure McCarthy.
Now, Vyshynski was the prosecutor for the true witch hunt of Stalin's show trials in the Soviet Union.
He sent scores of people to their deaths for crimes they didn't commit.
And people say, well, McCarthy was mean, accused people without evidence.
This is some quotes from Andrei Vyshynski as he is prosecuting people for truly imagined crimes.
He said, shoot these rabid dogs!
Death to this gang who hide their ferocious teeth, their eagle claws from the people!
Down with that vulture Trotsky from whose mouth a bloody venom drips, putrefying the great ideals of Marxism!
Down with these abject animals!
Let's put an end once and for all to these miserable hybrids of foxes and pigs, these stinking corpses!
Let's exterminate the mad dogs of capitalism who want to tear to pieces the flower of our new Soviet nation.
Let's push the bestial hatred they bear our leaders back down their own throats.
It's speeches where you...
Dogs of the fascist bourgeoisie, mad dogs of Trotskyism, dregs of society, decayed people, terrorists, thugs and degenerates, and accursed vermin.
Historian Arkady Vaksberg says this aided, quote, a hitherto unknown type of trial where there was not the slightest need for evidence.
What evidence do you need when you were dealing with stinking carrion and mad dogs?
Vyshynski was also attributed, he was considered to be the author of a fairly famous quote from the Stalinist era, which is, Give me a man and I will find the crime!
Now, That seems somewhat bad to me.
I'm no lawyer, but I'm a human being with a heart and a brain, and that's vicious and ugly abuse of power when it comes to trials.
This was happening at the same time as McCarthyism was at its height.
And who do the leftists get upset with?
McCarthy or Fischinski?
Have you ever even heard of the name Fischinski?
And these were a tiny sliver of the millions of deaths Of innocent Russians and Eastern Europeans under the Soviet totalitarian dictatorship.
Do they care?
They're missing something.
They're fundamentally missing something.
A hole in their hearts, the size of their hearts.
What's wrong with these people?
These innocent people being slaughtered by totalitarians?
And the only thing that bothers you?
Is McCarthy trying to find security risks who helped to deliver hundreds of millions of people to dictatorial enslavement?
Say, well, but they didn't have the facts at the time.
Okay, let's say that's wrong.
Let's say they didn't have the facts at the time and Venona wasn't published.
Okay, fine.
Fine.
They had Al Drahiss, who was convicted for perjury for saying he wasn't a spy.
That seems quite important.
The FBI had tons of documents.
The FBI couldn't get anyone to take this case on.
And after what happened to McCarthy, it's not hard to understand why people weren't interested in taking these cases on.
But let's say, oh, they just didn't have the information.
Okay, well, since Venona was released and the FBI wiretaps and all of the other information in the communist archives were released in the 90s, oh, they've had the facts beyond a shadow of a doubt since then.
And it was far worse than anyone anticipated.
And all the people they said were innocent, largely proven guilty.
Has there been any revision?
They're not interested in the facts.
They're interested in protecting their fellow travelers from anyone with a flashlight to turn on to see these roaches infesting the West.
McCarthy was wrong.
The conspiracy was far bigger than he anticipated.
But the narrative is exactly what you would expect if McCarthy was right.
You understand?
Demonizing McCarthy is exactly what you would expect if McCarthy was in fact right.
That the communist infiltration in the State Department was brutal enough, the communist infiltration in other departments was brutal enough.
But if leftist sympathizers...
And fellow travelers infested the media.
This is exactly the narrative that you would expect if they infested academia.
This is exactly the narrative that you would expect.
And of course, they had to destroy McCarthy not just to keep him at bay from continuing to expose infiltration, but as a warning to the future.
As a warning to other people.
To other people.
I don't think...
It's too much of a stretch to say that certain portions of the US government were virtually occupied by a foreign power.
The number of people of high power and high influence who were communists, communist sympathizers, Soviet agents, or fellow travelers.
There had been, in some areas, almost a coup by a foreign power of Significant portions of the U.S. government and some of the most important portions of the U.S. government.
The lack of sympathy for the victims of communism to me is one of the defining characteristics of whether somebody has any kind of compassion for other human beings at all.
Any kind of compassion for other human beings at all.
If the only thing that troubles you about the 1930s to the 1950s is McCarthyism, you need to take a long hard look in the mirror.
And wonder why there's one embattled senator trying to enforce the law passed by New Deal Democrats, trying to get foreign agents out of the U.S. government.
Not throw them in jail.
Just fire them.
As if you found an industrial spy in your corporation, you'd fire them too.
If you don't find yourself troubled or bothered...
By the hundred million bodies of 20th century communism, there's something wrong with you.
I'm telling you, something deeply...
Maybe you can be fixed, I don't know.
But there's something fundamental.
You do not see these bodies that rise up and eclipse the very sun itself.
Do you not have any compassion for the lives of people under communism?
Or have you been so programmed by the leftists that the only thing that troubles you about the 20th century is national socialism?
The Nazis.
Ah, the Nazis, yeah.
Terrible.
But body count's still significantly lower than that of communism.
When you look at communism, think Nazism on steroids.
If these people were Nazis, this is how distorted our reality has become.
If Arthur Miller or other people were Nazis, we'd go mental.
If Joseph McCarthy...
If he was in the government of Germany in the 1920s and was trying to root out Nazi influences in the German government, he'd be a hero.
There'd be like a Schindler's List movie about the guy.
A hero trying to battle the infestation of Nazis in the German government.
It already would have been a miniseries starring everyone.
He pushed back for a little while, as Ann Coulter has characterized it, he bought a couple of decades for the West.
How many people did he save from communism?
With the communists in the State Department regularly encouraging the handover of entire countries to communists, how many millions of people did Joseph McCarthy help save from communist totalitarian dictatorship and murder and slaughter and starvation and destruction and lives in terror?
How many?
Do you care?
Does it matter?
It does.
You should.
There are real people out there.
How many traders are still in there?
I don't know.
I think we're going to find out over the next couple of years when this final pitched battle, the last battle for the West, is about to be fought.
You understand that?
This is why I'm doing all of this.
This is why I'm begging you to please invest a couple of hours in learning about these things, to share, to like, subscribe, get this information out there.
The final battle is about to begin for the West.
Right?
The pushback that the right is now having, right?
The left has known it's a war for 150 years.
The right is now only waking up to the fact that it's a war.
And I'm talking about everything peacefully here in terms of the combat analogy is just peaceful and it's all intellectual and verbal.
But you need to head back.
If people break the rules of combat, you break the rules right back.
You're in a boxing match, people start hitting below the belt, yep, start kicking them in the nets.
I mean, if it's a fight, it's a fight.
And you don't have higher standards than your opponent in your fight.
This noble losing that the Republicans have been pursuing for the past couple of decades has just resulted in the virtual loss of Western civilization.
The final battle is about to commence.
And we've seen it before.
We've seen this particular instance.
And what is most instructive about McCarthyism is not what happened at the time, for which there are some Understandable confusions on the part of the left.
But what's happened since the information has come out?
Virtually no historical revisionism whatsoever.
Because the West, you understand, the West can't be beaten economically.
It can't be beaten militarily.
How can it be taken down?
Well, it can only be taken down by words from within.
It's the only way the West can be destroyed.
It's the only way the West can finally lose It's the only way the West of the present can be turned into the Roman Empire of the past.
It's through betrayal, through the framing of particular narratives, through the pursuit of particular values, through the suppression of particular information, through the manipulation with the meat brain hooks of propaganda jerking around people like Geppetto.
The West can only be taken down from within.
The pen is mightier than the sword.
Europe can't be invaded by an army.
You understand?
America can't be invaded by an army.
It can't be encircled by a navy.
How can the West be taken down?
By language, by treason, by betrayal from within.
And you can't fight that with force of arms, nor should you.
I mean, go read the Communist Manifesto.
Go read the platforms of the Communist Manifesto.
And I did a show about this years ago.
Most of the platforms of the Communist Manifesto have been perfectly implemented in the West.
Creeping socialism is a thing.
The end goal of socialism is communism.
And communism will kill me.
I mean, and you probably, if you're watching this, if you're a Christian, if you're on the right, if you're into the free market, if you're into the rule of law, if you're into common law standards of justice, if you're into limited government, if you're into no government, if you're into voluntarism, if you're into peaceful negotiated solutions to human conflicts, make no mistake, the communists will kill you, will kill you and your family.
That's the law and the example and the rule of history.
You're not fighting for an ideal, fundamentally.
You'll be fighting for your life.
Look what happens to intellectuals who are not Marxists when the Marxists get into power.
Look what happens.
It's your bloodline you are protecting.
Civilization protects your bloodline, and that's important.
But we protect civilization to protect ourselves.
To protect everyone we love.
To protect everyone we care about.
That's why we need civilization.
Civilization is a wonderful thing.
But it's kind of abstract.
What is less abstract is being dumped into a mass grave by totalitarians.
Where does the end process of ever-expanding government end up?
Where does it go?
I mean, under Obamacare, in America, the government just took over one-fifth of the U.S. economy.
And it wants more.
Look at the amount of land that the federal government has taken over under Obama.
Millions and millions of acres.
Where does it end?
Where?
You can't fight these ideas, these values, these concepts, this totalitarian mindset You can't fight it with force of arms.
If we can't fight it with words, I believe it will end up with force of arms.
And it will be the ugliest and bloodiest battle the world has ever seen.
I am desperate to try to avoid that.
I'm not even going to tell you how certain I am that it can be avoided at the moment, because I like to stay optimistic.
But it does come down to people like me and people like you.
This is why, you know, I ask people to support this show.
I ask people to support the show, freedominradio.com slash donate, because it's either going to be a war of words or it's going to be a war of arms.
And the kind of weaponry we have now means that the war of arms might be the end of everything, of the vast carbon-based biological experiment called life on this planet.
I am working as hard as I know how to push back against these toxic ideas that enslave and destroy humanity.
And it is only through force of will, through elegance, through charisma, through research, through facts, through evidence, that we can push back against this nihilistic insanity that threatens to overwhelm everything around us.
Armies are useless in these battles.
It is a war of ideas.
It is a war of willpower.
It is a war of resolution.
I ask for your help.
I ask for your support.
Please, freedomainradio.com slash donate.
I thank you enormously for watching.
Please help.
Get this information out to others.
This is essential, essential stuff.
And if we don't learn from the past, the losses around the world will be the losses at home.
You think it was bad when the Chinese fell into totalitarianism?
