True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 102: Fed as Folk
Aired: 2020-09-25
Duration: 01:18:13


=== Perceiving IQ Ranges (02:27) ===

[00:00:00]  Let me ask you something.
[00:00:01]  How do you like, how do you perceive me, Liz?
[00:00:05]  How much time do you have?
[00:00:08]  Well, I mean, technically all the time in the world.
[00:00:11]  This is my job.
[00:00:12]  What do you mean?
[00:00:12]  How do I perceive you?
[00:00:14]  Like, when I talk, what do you think?
[00:00:18]  I mean, I feel like this is a loaded question.
[00:00:22]  Whoa, I didn't think it was a loaded question, but now that that sort of changes the tenor of things.
[00:00:28]  I just mean, I don't, what are you getting at?
[00:00:31]  What do you mean, what do you, that's too open-ended.
[00:00:33]  When I talk, what do you think?
[00:00:35]  Do you think I'm, well, this is, God, I do not know.
[00:00:39]  Just.
[00:00:40]  Just ask me.
[00:00:41]  Do you think I'm stupid?
[00:00:43]  No.
[00:00:45]  Okay, well, I've got really bad news for you.
[00:00:50]  I have 80 IQ.
[00:00:53]  Is that good or not?
[00:00:54]  I never know.
[00:00:55]  I don't know.
[00:00:55]  I don't know what you know.
[00:00:56]  80 is a super high number, right?
[00:01:00]  Like if someone told you that 80 is something, you would say that.
[00:01:03]  This is the scale.
[00:01:04]  It's like incomprehensible.
[00:01:05]  It's like Fahrenheit to Celsius.
[00:01:06]  IQ should just be zero to 100.
[00:01:09]  Well, I was actually genius.
[00:01:11]  Zero is stupid.
[00:01:14]  Yeah, baby.
[00:01:14]  A baby, and it gets bigger as you get older, too.
[00:01:17]  Like, you should get one a year.
[00:01:19]  Yeah.
[00:01:20]  So also, if you have an IQ, when you're, okay, so you're 25 and your IQ should be about 25.
[00:01:26]  If you're really smart, it should be like 35, 45.
[00:01:31]  You're really smart.
[00:01:32]  Exactly.
[00:01:34]  Maybe you're an old soul.
[00:01:35]  Maybe you're 75 at a young age.
[00:01:38]  That makes sense to me.
[00:01:39]  What is this like 80 to 145?
[00:01:43]  No one knows what that means.
[00:01:44]  Who's 145?
[00:01:46]  No, I'm talking about the IQ range.
[00:01:48]  I know, but like, who is that?
[00:01:49]  Like, who has that?
[00:01:50]  Why would you have?
[00:01:51]  What's the point of that?
[00:01:52]  Me, I have that.
[00:01:54]  You have that?
[00:01:55]  Well, okay.
[00:01:55]  Wow.
[00:01:56]  Well, that makes sense.
[00:01:56]  Have I ever told you about my group Mensa?
[00:02:23]  Liz, would you snitch on me?

=== Dylan's Reflections On Groups (15:28) ===

[00:02:27]  No, never.
[00:02:27]  Of course not.
[00:02:28]  Oh my God.
[00:02:29]  So when people draw in their breath like that instead of just being no, because I feel like we could have just had a, that was like a three-second beat.
[00:02:36]  You could have just.
[00:02:36]  Do you know what it was?
[00:02:37]  Is that I had tabbed over into my email because I saw I had an email.
[00:02:41]  From the FBI.
[00:02:45]  You're tapping over during the introduction, Liz?
[00:02:48]  Oh my God.
[00:02:49]  As if you never tab over.
[00:02:50]  I see.
[00:02:51]  I never tab over.
[00:02:52]  I can show you.
[00:02:53]  I can't show you the tabs because it's coming out.
[00:02:54]  I'll tell you right now.
[00:02:56]  I have on my tabs open, I have an e-book copy to purchase of American Communism and Crisis.
[00:03:02]  And then, okay, the other one's also my email.
[00:03:04]  But that was the email to give to our noble and not mean to me producer so we could figure this all this out.
[00:03:10]  This wasn't me.
[00:03:11]  I'm not doing, if you're tapping on the company hour, the company dime, then I don't know.
[00:03:16]  We're going to have to, I'm taking this to the boss.
[00:03:20]  First of all, I'm the boss.
[00:03:21]  Second of all, welcome to Tronon.
[00:03:26]  Hello.
[00:03:27]  My name is Liz.
[00:03:29]  My name is Brace, but not if she's the boss, because if she is, my bad.
[00:03:33]  We're joined by our producer, Young Chomsky.
[00:03:35]  He's going to nod or shake his head.
[00:03:37]  You can shake your head if it's no.
[00:03:39]  He's just not.
[00:03:40]  Okay, he's nodding now.
[00:03:41]  Okay, I'm really sorry, Liz.
[00:03:42]  Please, I was just kidding.
[00:03:45]  I was just horsing around with you.
[00:03:49]  All right.
[00:03:49]  Well, good.
[00:03:50]  We have a hell of an episode in front of us today.
[00:03:52]  We do, we do.
[00:03:54]  This is a fun one and a topic that I think we, I mean, we kind of get into it in the interview, but a time period that is, I think, greatly misunderstood in the popular imagination.
[00:04:07]  Absolutely.
[00:04:08]  Particularly when it comes to the activities of the Communist Party and the government.
[00:04:14]  Absolutely.
[00:04:15]  I think that this is, especially in times like these, when, I mean, we touch on this a lot in certain points in the interview.
[00:04:23]  In times like these, when there is this sort of this sense and this reality in some sense of heightened repression of people for whatever reason, it's really good to like not view this as like an aberration or something that's like, you know, crazy that's happening for the first time or whatever, but to actually look at this through the lens of history, which a lot of people really do not like doing, which bothers me to no small extent.
[00:04:47]  But yeah, we have with us a renowned scholar, which is always good to have.
[00:04:52]  And you want to, well, you want to hit, you want to hit play, baby?
[00:04:56]  Yeah, let's get into it.
[00:04:57]  Root Hog and I, friend, Root Hog and I gotta get to Boston or Root Hog and die.
[00:05:05]  Psycho and Vanzetti die at sundown tonight.
[00:05:08]  So I've got to get to Boston, Root Hog and I. Train wheel can roll me, cushions can ride.
[00:05:17]  Ships on the well, we have with us here today, ladies and gentlemen, Aaron Leonard, an author and historian who's written a couple books in the past, Heavy Radicals about Maoist repression.
[00:05:27]  Unfortunately, not about Maoists doing the repression, about Maoists being repressed, and in the USA, and Threat of the First Magnitude about Informants.
[00:05:37]  No, it is not a biography of yours, truly.
[00:05:39]  It is about informants who've gotten to the highest levels of organizations in the past.
[00:05:43]  And he's out now with the Folk Singers in the Bureau, a book about, well, two of my greatest passions, folk music and the FBI.
[00:05:52]  Aaron, how are you doing?
[00:05:54]  I'm doing well.
[00:05:55]  Thanks for having me on.
[00:05:57]  Yeah, thanks for coming.
[00:05:58]  Yeah, very, very excited.
[00:06:02]  Big, big-time folk fan.
[00:06:04]  And I think maybe for some of our, let's say, more hip-hop style listeners, when we talk about folk music, who are we talking about?
[00:06:14]  Like in this book in particular?
[00:06:17]  Yeah, I mean, the folk music more generally is academics like to debate what it is, where it comes from.
[00:06:24]  I'm not a musicologist, so I'm not burdened by that.
[00:06:29]  The people I'm particularly interested, well, okay, so how did this book come about?
[00:06:34]  I finished two books that focused more on Maoism in the 60s and 70s.
[00:06:40]  And I thought I was going to write about the FBI and the musicians of the 60s, right?
[00:06:45]  Jefferson Airplane, MC5.
[00:06:47]  I couldn't get the files.
[00:06:49]  Actually, since then, I've gotten more files, but that's for another time.
[00:06:55]  But in the course of researching this, I read this book by Sean Willenz, Bob Dylan's America.
[00:07:03]  And he talked about Woody Guthrie.
[00:07:05]  You know, I kind of knew Woody Guthrie.
[00:07:08]  This land is your land.
[00:07:09]  I ain't got no home.
[00:07:11]  I didn't know his political background.
[00:07:13]  I knew he was kind of left and progressive, man of the people.
[00:07:17]  But Walenz basically alluded to the fact that he was very close to the Communist Party.
[00:07:24]  So I sent off for Guthrie's FBI file, and sure enough, you know, they had it.
[00:07:30]  And I started reading it, and it was very interesting.
[00:07:34]  And then it occurred to me, well, if Woody had a file, Pete Seeger, I knew he had a file, but I never actually looked at it.
[00:07:42]  So I looked at it.
[00:07:43]  And then there were other people like Alan Lomax, who was this song collector, ethno-musicologist.
[00:07:50]  I got his file.
[00:07:51]  Then I got Sis Cunningham, this out of Oklahoma, who was part of this group, the Almanac Singers.
[00:07:58]  She started Broadside Magazine that introduced the world to Bob Dylan's song.
[00:08:03]  I got her file.
[00:08:05]  And it quickly became apparent that everybody who was in the folk movement of the 40s and 50s, who had any kind of relationship to the Communist Party, including Burl Ives, Sam the Snowman from Rudolph the Red Goats Reindeer, they had an FBI file.
[00:08:21]  So I said, well, you know, there's a book here.
[00:08:24]  And I can understand it.
[00:08:25]  And at the same time, I had started to be interested in how the Communist Party was basically suppressed in the period 47 to 56.
[00:08:36]  So there you go.
[00:08:37]  Yeah, I think there's sort of two converging kind of timelines here in the book.
[00:08:43]  I mean, that's certainly what I noticed, is that you kind of go through the history of the Communist Party from maybe the late 30s to the 50s.
[00:08:52]  And then you also, concurrently, was the folk music movement, which they sort of both like really rose up.
[00:08:59]  I mean, specifically this brand of folk music.
[00:09:02]  They both sort of like came into prominence and were very popular around the same time.
[00:09:08]  And then sort of would have both, let's say, drained in popularity.
[00:09:12]  I mean, of course, folk music did continue, but mostly with different artists in the 50s and 60s.
[00:09:18]  And it's really interesting to see sort of the interplay between the two because I grew up too knowing that like, you know, Pete Seeger is like this lefty.
[00:09:25]  He played at Barack Obama's inauguration, man.
[00:09:29]  You know, he's a big progressive.
[00:09:31]  And like you said, you know, with this land is your land, that kind of stuff.
[00:09:37]  But it becomes apparent, especially reading this, I did not know like how exactly involved they were.
[00:09:43]  I knew that like I just read a book about, we were talking about earlier about a communist summer camp.
[00:09:48]  They talked about Pete Seeger coming up there with Paul Robeson, but I didn't know that like Seeger played that famous Peekskills concert with Robeson or anything like that.
[00:09:57]  And so that's something I was really interested in.
[00:10:01]  And is in that actual direct relationship between these singers and the party.
[00:10:06]  It wasn't just like purely sort of a fellow traveler type relationship, but they actually had some pretty close contacts with, especially the New York Party.
[00:10:15]  Yeah, I kind of have, you know, to read the literature, it's like nobody was ever in the Communist Party.
[00:10:23]  It's like everybody's falsely accused or said to have been, blah, And, you know, the level of anti-communism in the United States is such that one does not acknowledge having been in the Communist Party, except in, you know, certain specific exceptional instances.
[00:10:42]  The reality is, is if you were a radical in the 30s and 40s, there was high unemployment, people were being evicted, Jim Crow was rampant.
[00:10:54]  Every day you could pick up the paper and read about lynching.
[00:10:56]  And the Communist Party was cool.
[00:11:00]  If you were radical and you were very radical, it was an attraction.
[00:11:04]  And some of the best people of their generations were attracted to that.
[00:11:09]  I mean, I'm very, you know, I think I'm very level-headed in my assessment of the Communist Party as far as being critical and such.
[00:11:18]  But I think if I were around in 39, that's where I would have went.
[00:11:22]  I mean, there was this model in the Soviet Union that appeared to have solved some of these problems.
[00:11:29]  I mean, as it turned out, it wasn't really true.
[00:11:31]  But I mean, it's something we don't have today.
[00:11:34]  Nobody can point to this country or that country is where we want to get to.
[00:11:39]  But back then, you did, and it had a powerful effect.
[00:11:43]  So I wanted to try to say, you know, look, the McCarthy era is done.
[00:11:47]  We can talk about this now.
[00:11:49]  I mean, I don't blame Alan Lomax or Gordon Friesen, Cis Cunningham's husband, for downplaying and trying to say they weren't in the party.
[00:11:59]  It meant going to prison.
[00:12:01]  But those times are over, so we can talk about it as it actually was.
[00:12:05]  And Seeger was at Peakskill, Fred Hellerman, Ronnie Gilbert, they were all in this group, the Weavers, Lee Hayes.
[00:12:12]  They were all at Peakskill.
[00:12:13]  Woody Guthrie was at Peekskill in a car.
[00:12:16]  They were breaking the windows.
[00:12:18]  he was yelling out, you know, hey, you missed the window back here.
[00:12:22]  And then he sang, it takes a worried man to sing a worried song.
[00:12:25]  And it tells you something about Woody's disposition.
[00:12:29]  They were all there because they were all in this milieu of the Communist Party.
[00:12:35]  Yeah, I think that, I mean, I would say I think your book goes even further and gets to a really interesting point, which says that actually this art would not have been produced if it weren't for the party.
[00:12:47]  That the party was kind of a vehicle, not just for bringing, I mean, for literally, quite literally putting all of these people in the same room, right?
[00:12:55]  Like that wouldn't have existed.
[00:12:57]  But also, I think the way you put it is that it gave them, it gave the art a kind of breathing room that it wouldn't have had with all of these people isolated from each other, you know, even outside of the politics that were driving them.
[00:13:11]  And I think that's a really interesting point when we think about kind of the kind of the co-production of art and how it crosses over, you know, between individuals.
[00:13:20]  And it's something that I don't know.
[00:13:24]  I think like isn't usually remarked on when we talk about kind of party structures and what and the kind of political or artistic product that they end up producing, that these kind of structures end up producing.
[00:13:41]  Yeah, I hear what you're saying.
[00:13:44]  It's an important point.
[00:13:45]  And I'm not sure I have the totality of it, but take the example.
[00:13:49]  I think I have kind of a provocative chapter opening where I say, you know, imagine you're sitting in some cafe in the village, you know, in 1943 and you say, well, you know, in 10 years, you know, number one hit is going to be good night irene Good night, Irene, and good night.
[00:14:18]  You know, which is brought forward by a former chain gang member in Louisiana named Huddy Ledbetter.
[00:14:25]  You know, Huddy Ledbetter is Led Belly.
[00:14:28]  Lead Belly is, you know, he did Good Night, Irene, Rock Island Line, Midnight Special.
[00:14:35]  Huddy Ledbetter is somebody George Harrison said, you know, without Led Belly, there would have been no Lonnie Donegan doing Rock Island Line.
[00:14:44]  I got sheep, I got cows, I got horses, I got pigs, I got all the livestock, I got all livestock, I've got all livestock and a Mancy Wally.
[00:14:59]  You're all right then, boy, you don't have to be.
[00:15:01]  Without no Rock Island line, there would be no Beatles, which is pretty intense.
[00:15:06]  You know, no Woody Guthrie, no Bob Dylan.
[00:15:09]  So there's continuity, but how does Jim Crow America have Jewish intellectuals, you know, Harvard dropouts and former chain gang members and Josh White, who came out of a religious South Carolina?
[00:15:28]  How do you get all those people in the same room, let alone making the same music?
[00:15:32]  This society did not want that.
[00:15:35]  And in many ways, it still resists that kind of stuff.
[00:15:39]  So there was this organization that could do that.
[00:15:42]  And it's troubling because the organization was so fraught.
[00:15:48]  Boy, if it was cool, if it didn't have all these crazy problems, but it's like it was able to take things further because of the cool part of it.
[00:15:58]  Yeah, what in particular, like, do you think it was, I mean, you say it's cool, like, which I fully agree with.
[00:16:06]  I mean, I think that if you were a happening person in the 1930s and you didn't belong to the Communist Party, you were probably locked in prison or in a mental institution.
[00:16:15]  But which many of these people ended up being locked in one or the other anyway, so perhaps not the greatest point.
[00:16:22]  But what do you think it was that sort of drove these people not only to the party, but to like create these things alongside the party?
[00:16:29]  I mean, this felt like, and it's, because it's not just in music, it was in art and it was in writing and all this stuff too.
[00:16:35]  I mean, you know, famously, you had Hemingway and sort of that like, certainly not as connected to the party as the people mentioned in this book, but you had this sort of whole generation of writers who, if not members of the party, most of them weren't, were very like worked sort of closely alongside either its front organizations or especially in relation to Spain, you know, sort of like Red Aid organizations for Spain.
[00:16:57]  What do you think it was that like drove all of these different people and really great like seminal American artists to work for this these ideals and stuff?
[00:17:08]  Because we still have like pain and suffering and hunger and all this stuff, but there isn't the same sort of sense of like social duty and onward progress.
[00:17:18]  Yeah, it's I think it goes back to what I said earlier is it seemed like there was a solution.
[00:17:24]  And I guess that's part of the problem of living in the current world.
[00:17:28]  I mean, I know for myself, I'm an old radical leftist who's kind of come to the point of not quite figuring out how one would create a better world.
[00:17:39]  I know it's needed.
[00:17:41]  I mean, the best I can come up with is, you know, we all really need to push as far as we can toward whatever, and hopefully, we'll be able to look over the horizon and see what's needed.
[00:17:53]  But I think they saw over the horizon.

=== Looking Over the Horizon (02:22) ===

[00:17:56]  I think they were mistaken, but hey, that's life.
[00:18:00]  You know, I think Mao once said to W.E. De Bois, this famous quote, he said, oh, oh, you know, I've made so many mistakes.
[00:18:09]  And Mao said, well, you never made this mistake of giving up, right?
[00:18:13]  So I think that's where we are.
[00:18:15]  We can't give up.
[00:18:17]  But what the answer are elusive.
[00:18:20]  And then the other thing is, because as you were speaking, you were making me think, you know, artists are different.
[00:18:26]  I mean, I didn't used to think this.
[00:18:27]  I had this whole Marxist thing about, oh, we're all blah, blah, blah.
[00:18:31]  We can fundamentally be the same.
[00:18:32]  Paintbrush workers.
[00:18:34]  Yeah, artists look at the world different.
[00:18:37]  I have an artist friend.
[00:18:38]  I'll be walking along and I'll be two blocks ahead and they'll be staring at a flower, you know, because they're seeing something I don't see.
[00:18:46]  And at their best, they see into the future.
[00:18:51]  I think these folks discovering this folk music felt they had discovered something, and they certainly had.
[00:18:57]  I mean, they discovered humanity's legacy of passing these wonderful songs and fine-tuning them and smoothing them and then passing them on.
[00:19:06]  And a lot of them are still with us.
[00:19:09]  It'd be a good discussion to have.
[00:19:11]  What are the roots that exist now?
[00:19:14]  But I think they thought, and there's a quote from Sis Cunningham.
[00:19:19]  She went to this, I think it's this school in Menna, Arkansas when she was in her early 20s and she was reading Das Kapital.
[00:19:29]  And the sense of community at the school was such she felt like, oh, there's a whole new world that I was being introduced to, which, you know, that's cool.
[00:19:38]  But it's got to be real.
[00:19:40]  Otherwise, it's just religion, right?
[00:19:42]  Yeah.
[00:19:42]  Or, you know, I mean, we saw people intentionally try to create that whole new world on a small scale in the 60s and 70s.
[00:19:49]  And really today, but just not in such like a vulgar commune form or whatever.
[00:19:53]  Yeah.
[00:19:54]  I think, too, like, you know, just to stress this point to our listeners who, you know, haven't read the book, that we're not just talking about artists who are just making art on their own.
[00:20:05]  I mean, it did have, you know, explicit political aims as well, which is a big part of the story, too.
[00:20:13]  Yeah, I mean, I just had a class today and I played this Woody Guthrie song.

=== Changed Position: Gun and Politics (15:18) ===

[00:20:18]  I forget the name of the Russian sniper woman, but Woody wrote this.
[00:20:22]  Pavlichenko.
[00:20:23]  Yeah, he wrote a song, you know, fell by your gun, 300 Nazis fell by your gun.
[00:20:28]  Fell by your gun, fell by your gun.
[00:20:34]  300 lances fell by your guns, fell by your guns.
[00:20:40]  I mean, some of this stuff is kind of awful.
[00:20:42]  That song isn't all that awful.
[00:20:45]  Some of it is like real agitpro.
[00:20:47]  But, you know, all of this, the consequences were FBI attention.
[00:20:53]  You know, the FBI in 1939 was a few hundred people.
[00:20:58]  You know, the U.S., you know, coming out of World War II was the most powerful country in the world, and the FBI had thousands of agents.
[00:21:06]  I mean, it's in keeping with an empire that you need a political police.
[00:21:12]  And J. Edgar Hoover stepped up.
[00:21:14]  He stepped up not on his own, but FDR gave the FBI incredible authority.
[00:21:20]  And that's part of the story, too.
[00:21:23]  You know, the Communist Party, they do these weird gyrations.
[00:21:27]  Initially, they support this non-aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union because it was in the Soviet Union's interest to not have war with Germany.
[00:21:41]  When that fell apart, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the USSR obviously changed its position and the Communist Party changed its position as well.
[00:21:51]  So they went from being marginalized and repressed from like 39 to 41 to being on the same side and very much accepted.
[00:22:02]  So the folk singer, I mean, there was this group, the Almanac singers in 1941, who did a lot of anti-war music in keeping with the party's line.
[00:22:13]  And there's an article in the Atlantic saying, you know, songs like these ought to be subject to the Selective Service Act.
[00:22:20]  These people ought to be in prison, in other words, for saying, you know, conscription, mandatory conscription is bad and stuff.
[00:22:28]  So the repression goes, you know, there's a dialectic between the repression and the music.
[00:22:34]  You know, to the degree the music is stepping out and challenging the status quo.
[00:22:40]  And that's actually still true.
[00:22:42]  You know, go ahead and write a certain kind of song.
[00:22:44]  See how far you get.
[00:22:46]  Well, you mentioned the Dixie Chicks in the book as well.
[00:22:49]  And I think that's a perfect example.
[00:22:51]  I mean, look what happened to them.
[00:22:52]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:22:53]  The Dixie Chicks had the audacity to question the Second Iraq War, and they were taken off the radio, all of country radio.
[00:23:04]  And they never recovered fully.
[00:23:06]  I mean, they still have a career because there's a huge audience for them, but a huge swath of the public square was taken away from them.
[00:23:14]  And then I gave the example more recently of Beyoncé having the audacity to conjure up the image of the Black Panthers at the Super Bowl.
[00:23:23]  She's just mercilessly attacked on Fox News and the right-wing media for that.
[00:23:31]  if you push against the limits, there's going to be consequences.
[00:23:35]  And it's always been true.
[00:23:37]  You know, the best music generally, you know, isn't embraced.
[00:23:42]  It's resisted, if anything, which means, you know, I guess it means you got to kind of support your local artist, right?
[00:23:49]  I mean, they can't do it all by themselves, can they?
[00:23:53]  Well, you must not have heard much of the artists around San Francisco these days, brother.
[00:23:57]  I'm just kidding.
[00:23:58]  Now, there's some all-right rock and rollers.
[00:24:01]  You talk about, you mentioned there, the sort of flip-flopping of the party on the issue of the war.
[00:24:07]  And with that, the sort of singers that went with it.
[00:24:11]  And I always think it's so fascinating whenever I read accounts of the Communist Party, United States, in the 30s going into the 1940s, how all of these people really just joined the hell out of the U.S. government in their war effort.
[00:24:26]  I mean, we got a bunch of these folky guys getting into the Office of War Information, I believe it was.
[00:24:34]  Seeger joins the Merchant Marines, which as a technically licensed Merchant Marine myself, felt very edifying to read.
[00:24:43]  And, you know, or not Seeger, excuse me, Guthrie.
[00:24:46]  And Seeger, I believe, joining the Army.
[00:24:48]  I can't remember.
[00:24:49]  Yeah, he was a private in the Army.
[00:24:51]  Yeah.
[00:24:51]  And it was just so like, I mean, there was this tremendous push from these guys.
[00:24:57]  And then they wrote these really like, I wouldn't necessarily call all the songs semi-patriotic songs, but certainly songs extremely behind the war effort, essentially.
[00:25:08]  And certainly quite a lot of kind of silly, like anti-Hitler songs, which Leadbelly, I believe, got into that racket as well.
[00:25:15]  I'm not familiar with what Lead Belly did on that, but I know that the Communist Party was, I think they literally said we're all in for national unity, including they did this pretty despicable thing where these Trotskyists were put on trial for the Smith Act.
[00:25:33]  Trotskyists, I think they're in Minnesota.
[00:25:37]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:25:38]  The Smith Act said you can't teach the desirability of the overthrow of the government.
[00:25:43]  It wasn't like you couldn't, it wasn't like they were charged with trying to overthrow the government.
[00:25:48]  They were just tried for teaching the Communist Manifesto and saying, well, that's a good book.
[00:25:55]  They were convicted and some went to prison.
[00:25:57]  The Communist Party just kind of said, well, too bad.
[00:26:00]  They're trots.
[00:26:01]  And then, you know, just a few years later, the Communist Party was subject to the same thing.
[00:26:06]  But it was emblematic of this totally behind the U.S. patriotic anything to defeat Nazism because it was in the interest of the Soviet Union to do so.
[00:26:18]  And it's, you know, the irony is, so the Communist Party got to be very large.
[00:26:24]  I believe they got up to 80,000 members.
[00:26:27]  They got accepted.
[00:26:29]  I think I have in the book a quote where they stop Cisco Houston for a man of the street interview for the Daily News, and he talks about how great it is the Soviet Union fighting Hitler and how they were instrumental in winning the war.
[00:26:42]  I mean, what's striking is he felt he could say that to an on-the-street reporter, circa 1944, 1945, because their position was synonymous with FDRs.
[00:26:55]  They were not outside.
[00:26:57]  But within a year, they were absolutely on the outside, which shows you how far sycophancy will get you.
[00:27:07]  Yeah.
[00:27:08]  Yeah, you mentioned the ramp up with FDR and Hoover cracking down on the party.
[00:27:14]  And like, that's, I mean, a significant part of the book, we should say, is detailing the efforts of the FBI and what becomes the FBI in infiltrating and suppressing the Communist Party.
[00:27:29]  And basically trying to, I mean, I think, I hope, you know, I don't mean to overstate or overreach, but, you know, I think kind of trying to shade the narrative that many have written about,
[00:27:41]  about why the Communist Party and the United States kind of fell apart and, you know, interweaving this narrative about the Folksingers as a way to demonstrate the capacity of the Bureau and its kind of myriad of ways of infiltrating and suppressing party members.
[00:28:01]  Yeah, you know, it's a, as you were speaking, I realize it's like this, this has ramifications on a number of levels.
[00:28:09]  First off, the fact that they're close to the party means a lot of them are on the security index, which means if the U.S. goes to war with the Soviet Union, they're probably going to be put into tension camps.
[00:28:21]  Yes.
[00:28:22]  Concentration camps, if you will.
[00:28:24]  If you're on this list, the FBI is making sure they know where you live every six months.
[00:28:30]  So there's this ongoing surveillance.
[00:28:32]  People talk about FBI surveillance, but they don't quite understand why it's happening.
[00:28:38]  I mean, the FBI is either approaching you or your neighbors to find out where you live, or they're trying to flip you.
[00:28:45]  They're trying to feel out if you'll talk to them and maybe work as an asset for them.
[00:28:51]  Or, you know, if you're really a high-profile target, they will be tapping your phone and putting a video camera, you know, in your bedroom or whatever.
[00:29:02]  But there's actually a methodology.
[00:29:04]  It's not just this free, vague, constant surveillance.
[00:29:09]  But the thing with communism is coming out of World War II is, you know, think about the United States.
[00:29:15]  It's like it's won World War II.
[00:29:18]  It's the most powerful country in the world.
[00:29:20]  It represents Western capitalism.
[00:29:22]  But then the Soviet Union's also won World War II.
[00:29:26]  They lost 20 million people.
[00:29:28]  The United States lost 400,000.
[00:29:31]  And then in 1949, Mao leads people in revolution in China.
[00:29:39]  And suddenly one third of the world is under some kind of communism.
[00:29:43]  And this is where defeating communism becomes a high priority.
[00:29:47]  I mean, it's one thing to attack it in 1940 when it's got this anti-war position.
[00:29:52]  It's another thing to attack it in 1947 where it's actually an existential threat.
[00:29:59]  Is Italy going to be communist?
[00:30:00]  Is France going to be communist?
[00:30:02]  Is Greece going to be a communist?
[00:30:05]  And all this is kind of forgotten now by many who look back at what the FBI was doing and think, well, it was just Hoover being paranoid.
[00:30:14]  Well, he was actually carrying out the dictates of a larger political apparatus that wanted to keep its power.
[00:30:23]  And that's where it got real heavy.
[00:30:24]  I mean, the folks singers, by and large, didn't go to prison, but they were constrained on how they could work.
[00:30:29]  But they always had this thing over them that they didn't even know about.
[00:30:35]  A turn in a headline would have meant being rounded up and put away.
[00:30:40]  And then, of course, with the party leaders themselves, they actually were put away.
[00:30:45]  But then that list, that security index, stretches into the 60s.
[00:30:51]  And not only on the Communist Party, but people like James Foreman, Kwame Touré, Stokely Carmichael, all these folks.
[00:31:00]  I mean, the FBI is learning year in and year out, and including they get informants in place, you know, through the 50s that are operating in the 60s.
[00:31:10]  So it was part of my interest, too, because I focused a lot on the 60s.
[00:31:14]  I discovered some of these informants, this guy Morris Childs and the Communist Party.
[00:31:20]  But then I see his legacy goes back to like 1952.
[00:31:25]  So it's kind of putting this big puzzle together.
[00:31:29]  It's a good detective story, but it's also more than that, isn't it?
[00:31:33]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:31:35]  And I think, too, like you said something just now about, you know, people don't really have a real conception of how, let's say, robust the FBI programs were.
[00:31:47]  And I mean, in the book, the amount, amount of information the FBI had on even just the internal dynamics of the party and like basically where possible choke points were or what like possible arguments they could exploit, or just monitoring so many internal debates is really I mean, I don't.
[00:32:10]  I don't want to say impressive, but it is almost.
[00:32:13]  You know, I mean it certainly made an impression on me.
[00:32:16]  Yeah, I mean, you know it gives you pause.
[00:32:19]  If I can jump in it's.
[00:32:21]  Yeah, because there's this example.
[00:32:24]  So the Communist Party in their, you know they launched this white chauvinism campaign around 1949, the famous white chauvinism campaign.
[00:32:35]  Yeah, they're trying to root out racism in the party which you know probably right, there was probably, I mean look, I'm sure people had some raw, ignorant thinking back then and there was probably some of that in the party, but I don't think the party was like the, the big site and home of white chauvinism in U.S. Society.
[00:32:56]  Thank you very much.
[00:32:57]  Go to fucking Mississippi, excuse me.
[00:32:59]  You know yeah, but they try to root it out.
[00:33:03]  So they have this internal purge and you know hundreds of people are are kicked out.
[00:33:08]  You know some of the offenses are you for serving a black comrade a cup of coffee with a chipped cup, there was, you know, perceived racism and stuff.
[00:33:18]  I mean, there's a whole thing for me to get into this about some of the people they alienated.
[00:33:23]  But you know, for the sake of this example, in 1962 the FBI, basically drawing on the the old white chauvinism campaign, circulated surreptitiously documents to the California party accusing certain comrades of white chauvinism and they actually lost an entire branch in Compton as a result.
[00:33:46]  I mean, the FBI did this as part of its counterintelligence operation.
[00:33:50]  So they they're monitoring the internal politics and they're using it against people, which it just says to me.
[00:33:57]  You know you, you better have your internal house in order and then not be doing a bunch of stuff that you know you probably don't need to be doing that way.
[00:34:05]  You know there's other ways of addressing these things.
[00:34:07]  You know Aaron, I first read about the white chauvinism campaign like I think five, I've heard about it before, but like really read about it about five years ago in that book, The Romance Of American Communism which, which you know, also details an instance where someone served watermelon to a dinner party and that was taken as like a sort of a racial slight, which I got to say that that's, that's a, that's a very uh.
[00:34:32]  That takes a lot of setting up for that.
[00:34:34]  I feel like you could have just been racist regularly, I don't know, but um it it it, it.
[00:34:39]  I in the your description here, I mean when I read that I was like wow, that is absurd.
[00:34:43]  But in the intervening years since I read that, in the past five years, it's just struck me how like, how many of these tactics are just like it's repeated again and again and again.
[00:34:54]  I mean even in in one part of your book you talk about uh uh a, a woman in New York in this, like you know uh, mixed race, like folk, you know these people who are getting ready to put on this concert.
[00:35:06]  One of them is like, well, I don't think the weavers should play because they're essentially accused.
[00:35:10]  He accuses them of doing cultural appropriation of of, of black music, and and this is this is, you know, to put it in perspective this is when the party is basically nearing the height of its of repression towards it uh and, and it strikes me as sort of like, very similar to a lot of the, the sort of squabbles you see today, where things are very bad, but but people sort of just focus on on this, like I mean, these people aren't even Maoists, for god's sake.

=== Mattuso's Resistance to HUAC (14:55) ===

[00:35:36]  They're, like you know, democratic socialists or whatever.
[00:35:39]  But they focus on this like internal rectification, it's this like spiritual purification where like well, if I am able to like sort of root out all of my you know nasty it's uh, you know instincts and thoughts or whatever, like that, then i'll be able to be this sort of perfect political figure, or at least i'll be happy.
[00:35:57]  Yeah, I mean, I guess the metaphor is war.
[00:36:00]  I mean, you don't want your army going into battle, with one platoon fighting the other.
[00:36:06]  I mean, that's essentially what these purges are like.
[00:36:09]  But there's this I I quote Pettis Perry, who was a African-american comrade in the Communist Party, and he gives this blustery 1950 speech.
[00:36:19]  You know, I mean, if you ever read Stalin, Stalin has simple sentences with absolute declarations and Parry says, well, some comrades think now is not the time to fight white chauvinism.
[00:36:32]  You know, we need everybody we can get.
[00:36:35]  And uh, then Paris answers his question saying well yes, we do need everyone we can get, but we don't need white chauvinism, we need marxism.
[00:36:44]  Six months later he's in prison, you know, for violating the Smith Act.
[00:36:49]  You know, now is not the time, you know.
[00:36:52]  Do you need to address white chauvinism?
[00:36:54]  Should you tolerate?
[00:36:55]  I mean, I would argue no, you know you shouldn't tolerate, but you should, you know, find the ways to to.
[00:37:02]  You know, you know, help people who are just being ignorant through it and people who are hostile.
[00:37:08]  And you know you probably don't want to be hanging with those folks, but you don't have to pretty easy to Explore to snitches and spies, anyway.
[00:37:14]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:37:15]  I mean, there's this guy, Harvey Mattuso.
[00:37:17]  He's this young guy.
[00:37:19]  That's how you pronounce it?
[00:37:21]  That's how I pronounce it.
[00:37:22]  Oh, my God.
[00:37:22]  I've been calling him Harvey Matakow.
[00:37:24]  What Batuso sounds actually like her name?
[00:37:27]  I was like, damn, this is, what is this guy, Hungarian or something?
[00:37:30]  This is my God.
[00:37:32]  Yeah, I think that's actually a really, the Mattusau story is really, I found it, I had no idea about it.
[00:37:38]  And I love reading about snitches.
[00:37:40]  Yeah, Harvey Mattuso's a snitch.
[00:37:42]  You know how he ended up, right?
[00:37:44]  Well, first off, Harvey Mattuso's a trip.
[00:37:46]  You know, he would freelance as a clown.
[00:37:49]  So that's a red flag for you right there.
[00:37:52]  I mean, that's not a problem.
[00:37:52]  Liz, do not listen to him.
[00:37:53]  Liz used to do that.
[00:37:54]  You just used to do that.
[00:37:55]  Do not listen to him, Liz.
[00:37:56]  Do not do clowns.
[00:38:00]  And he ended up later in life converting to Mormonism.
[00:38:05]  Now, that's the real red flag.
[00:38:09]  But so Mattuso gets out of the army.
[00:38:11]  He starts working with the party, hangs around people songs.
[00:38:15]  He's instrumental in literature distribution.
[00:38:20]  He wins a contest selling the most daily workers' subscriptions.
[00:38:23]  And he wins an all-expense paid trip to Puerto Rico, right?
[00:38:28]  The Communist Party has these gimmicks.
[00:38:31]  I mean, I'll be honest, I wish parties today still had those.
[00:38:36]  So, you know, he's an up-and-comer, and he's got a certain position of respect.
[00:38:42]  But it seems like the subscriptions probably is bullshit.
[00:38:45]  He might have paid for them himself.
[00:38:48]  But what happens is he's dating a woman in Harlem who works for the Amsterdam News, African-American woman.
[00:38:57]  And he is caught up in the white chauvinism campaign because he has a day job of being a bill collector.
[00:39:05]  So it said, look, you are, you know, oppressing black and Puerto Rican people by collecting bills.
[00:39:11]  I mean, it's not a good job to have, and I don't recommend anybody get it, but this was what was used against Mattuso, and it totally alienates him, you know, to the point where he approaches the FBI to become an informant, which he does for a year.
[00:39:29]  And then he's kicked out of the party because they become suspicious of him.
[00:39:33]  And he goes on to testify in front of Congress where he names Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Lee Hayes, Ronnie Gilmer, Fred Hellerman, Brownie McGee, everybody associated with the folk singers.
[00:39:46]  And the minute your name goes on record in HUAC, they're taking notes and following up.
[00:39:51]  If they don't have a file, it's going to be open and they're going to pursue you.
[00:39:55]  And once a file is open, it's very, very rare for that file to close.
[00:40:00]  It certainly never disappears, which is why I have a book.
[00:40:04]  Files still exist.
[00:40:06]  So that's what Mattuso does.
[00:40:08]  Ends up, you know, because he's a very peculiar character he ends up having a moment of clarity, he regrets what he does.
[00:40:17]  He writes a book, you know, basically taking it all back.
[00:40:20]  But you know look, some things in life you can't undo.
[00:40:24]  You know, Mattuso's legacy is he made life hell for.
[00:40:28]  Pete seeker, spent almost 10 years facing uh prison because of Harvey Mattuso, you know.
[00:40:34]  So I I did.
[00:40:37]  You know, don't do those kind of things.
[00:40:39]  It's not good, no matter how mad you are.
[00:40:41]  I think snitching is sort of like it's it's, it's one of the lowest things you can do and i've done a lot of low things, but that is I mean.
[00:40:48]  Yeah Christ, especially on people that, have they sent you to Puerto Rico?
[00:40:51]  For god's sake, someone sends me to Puerto Rico.
[00:40:53]  I'm in the party for life, i'll tell you that.
[00:40:55]  Well, the thing with Mattuso snitching, I mean, just for me to be very specific, these people weren't doing anything wrong, you know, they were living their lives and they were politically associated.
[00:41:05]  So for her to him to get up there and basically essentially brand them as some kind of criminals, that's actually the thing he shouldn't have done.
[00:41:13]  So you've got to go down.
[00:41:14]  You've got to go down and join the union and join the union.
[00:41:18]  You've got to join by yourself.
[00:41:23]  Ain't nobody near, ain't nobody near and join it for you and join it for you've got to go down and join the union and join the union she's got to join.
[00:41:39]  Mentioned HUAC, and I just want to pause on that for one second, because one thing I didn't totally understand was the, the tension you detail between Hoover and McCarthy and basically like fighting over political turf and the turf wars that were happening over what had been, you know, a pretty, you know expansive and long, you know long-running FBI operation and several I mean obviously several operations infiltrating uh.
[00:42:09]  groups and flipping uh members, you know, etc etc.
[00:42:16]  And with Mccarthy just kind of like busting through the door with all his fake lists, kind of like throwing all of that into chaos, it seems.
[00:42:25]  Yeah, I mean.
[00:42:26]  The short answer is, politicians are the worst, aren't they?
[00:42:29]  Yeah totally, I mean he's, I mean he just seizes On this issue, and he makes a career for it.
[00:42:35]  I mean, one of the things I hope people reading the book will walk away with is a better understanding that McCarthyism is a misnomer.
[00:42:43]  We're actually talking about a second Red Scare.
[00:42:46]  This starts in 1947, three years before McCarthy, and it goes on three years plus after McCarthy is thrown down.
[00:42:54]  I mean, he was a dangerous man.
[00:42:56]  He was a powerful person.
[00:42:58]  He could ruin your career.
[00:42:59]  I believe he drove some people to suicide.
[00:43:02]  Oh, he's also, Roy Cohn involved in all that.
[00:43:05]  Yeah, Roy Cohn was his aide, but Bobby Kennedy, right out of law school, worked for Joe McCarthy, which helps you understand why when J. Edgar Hoover in 62 takes this dossier on Martin Luther King to Bobby Kennedy saying he's working with communists, that Bobby Kennedy signs off to wiretap Martin Luther King.
[00:43:30]  Bobby Kennedy has gotten a pass historically on that.
[00:43:34]  I don't know what Kennedy's frame of mind was in 68.
[00:43:38]  It seems like he had shifted his view, but up until the Kennedy, the first Kennedy administration, he was an ardent cold warrior, as was his brother.
[00:43:52]  John Kennedy is the only senator who did not vote to censure Joe McCarthy.
[00:43:59]  He said he had a bad back.
[00:44:00]  I don't feel good.
[00:44:01]  I can't vote.
[00:44:02]  Classic.
[00:44:03]  Incredible.
[00:44:04]  Yeah.
[00:44:05]  Belden method.
[00:44:06]  But it's, you know, McCarthy is a figure, but there's a bigger thing going on.
[00:44:11]  And it's the bigger political apparatus has a lot of unity about destroying this party.
[00:44:19]  Oh, yeah.
[00:44:20]  Because it's a pro-Soviet party and Soviet Union is not welcome in 50s United States.
[00:44:29]  So something that I thought was really interesting in reading this too was, I mean, you do talk a lot about different people who resisted HUAC, who resisted, you know, their Smith Act trials and stuff like that.
[00:44:41]  And then you talk about the people who either didn't resist but didn't quite snitch, who maybe went in and gave testimony but refused to name names.
[00:44:50]  I believe Josh White was one of those people.
[00:44:52]  And then you talk about people who did go in and actually did name names.
[00:44:56]  And so like, what kind of pressures were those people subjected?
[00:45:00]  Like, how come some men broke and some men didn't?
[00:45:02]  Because I don't think it all necessarily, I mean, at the end of the day, it does come down to, you know, to backbone and strength the character.
[00:45:09]  But like, you know, there's often ways to get at a man that are almost guaranteed to get him.
[00:45:15]  And so what were some of the reasons some of these characters actually did go and cooperate?
[00:45:20]  Yeah, it's a really interesting story.
[00:45:23]  I mean, the first thing is nobody should be put in this position.
[00:45:28]  These people should not have been put in a position.
[00:45:30]  You have to either go to HUAC and talk and name your friends and subject them to possible imprisonment, or you have to go to prison yourself.
[00:45:39]  Now, that is like a terrible position to put these people in.
[00:45:44]  Okay, but saying that, I think what you just described is, you know, people do have to make decisions.
[00:45:50]  Life forces you to make consequential decisions.
[00:45:54]  Millard Lampell, who ended up winning an Emmy in the 60s for a television show he later did this series Rich Man, Poor Man.
[00:46:04]  You know, he was in the Communist Party.
[00:46:06]  He testified in front of HUAC and said, I'm not naming names.
[00:46:10]  You know, I can't do it.
[00:46:12]  These people are my friends and colleagues, and it would be against everything I believe in.
[00:46:16]  Now, as it was, he didn't go to prison.
[00:46:20]  So, you know, good, but he was willing to.
[00:46:23]  Pete Seeger went in front of Congress and said, look, this is the United States.
[00:46:28]  You claim to have, you know, freedom of speech, and I don't think you should be asking me these kind of questions.
[00:46:34]  He didn't go to prison on a technicality, but he faced some real difficulties.
[00:46:39]  Others took the constitutional protection against self-incrimination.
[00:46:46]  So as a result, they weren't held in contempt, but they were viewed objectively as communists or people lying, you know, willing to lie about it.
[00:46:55]  But then you have Burl Ives and Josh White, and Oscar Brand actually is the even more complicated character.
[00:47:02]  But Burl Ives is famous.
[00:47:06]  His career is on the rise.
[00:47:09]  He's soon going to be movies in movies.
[00:47:11]  He wins an Academy Award in the 60s, before Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer.
[00:47:17]  He goes up there and he names names.
[00:47:19]  He names three people, including his publicist.
[00:47:23]  own publicist yeah i believe it's uh i have the names in the book i'm I want to look back and get that particular detail straight.
[00:47:30]  But these are people close to him.
[00:47:33]  And he does a funny kind of equivocation.
[00:47:36]  He said, oh, I went to a few meetings, but I don't like communism anymore.
[00:47:41]  I mean, the few meetings is actually six or seven, and you actually had to have a card to get in.
[00:47:46]  It was a Communist Political Association, probably an open meeting for musicians.
[00:47:51]  But he had been around that orbit before then.
[00:47:55]  But as a result of him basically going and denouncing communism publicly, his career went forward.
[00:48:02]  Josh White, you know, he is African-American out of South Carolina.
[00:48:08]  He's a great singer and had a very good career, played at Cafe Society and was probably going to be even bigger.
[00:48:18]  He gets called in.
[00:48:19]  They don't make him name names.
[00:48:22]  And it's probably a peculiarity of the way Congress was dealing with African Americans.
[00:48:28]  If you read the testimony, some of it is, it's really sickening how paternal it is.
[00:48:33]  But he's not.
[00:48:34]  Yeah, I think in some of the stuff you included, I think they call him boy a few times.
[00:48:39]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:48:40]  What do the Negro boys think about what Paul Robeson say?
[00:48:44]  You know, these are men, you know, you know, some men who'd served in World War II.
[00:48:49]  You know, he tried, he goes in there.
[00:48:51]  They don't ask him to name names.
[00:48:53]  He says, the communists, they use me as a sucker.
[00:48:56]  You know, I don't want to have anything to do with them, but I'm still for black rights.
[00:49:01]  So he tries to, you know, offset one for the other.
[00:49:04]  And I make the point that Congress doesn't care about what he thinks about, you know, the freedom and equality of black people.
[00:49:11]  They just want him to prostrate himself.
[00:49:14]  But his career is still kind of upended.
[00:49:17]  And then I found this thing in his file that was really peculiar.
[00:49:21]  After he testifies, he's still going to the FBI trying to get off of their radar.
[00:49:29]  You know, he's talking to them and he's basically, as near as I can tell, he's just telling stories, making it sound like something other than it is.
[00:49:37]  But there's this thing in his file, this report, saying that two NYP detectives had searched the house of a woman who committed suicide, and they'd found Josh White's name in it.
[00:49:52]  And they were blackmailing Josh White, who was making like thousands of dollars in clubs in Las Vegas.
[00:50:00]  And they were extorting him.
[00:50:02]  I don't know a lot of the other details of this story, but it sounds like he's being blackmailed, which said to me, maybe he was being blackmailed before when he went there.
[00:50:13]  I mean, I don't have proof of that, but I do have proof that Josh White had this notion of blackmail in mind, which says something, and I say some things about Burl Eyes, which I won't go into here, but there's more operating behind the scenes than just narrow careerism.

=== Norms Under Siege (14:19) ===

[00:50:31]  They're morally compromised, but a lot of pressure is coming down on them.
[00:50:36]  And then Oscar Brand is a radio figure.
[00:50:39]  He was on the radio in New York for 60 years.
[00:50:42]  He had a folk show.
[00:50:44]  Everybody in the world was on it.
[00:50:46]  And if you read Oscar Brand's New York Times obituary, it says he was never called in front of HUAC.
[00:50:53]  And I actually discovered that's not true.
[00:50:56]  He was called, and he recalls himself in his 1962 biography that he talked to somebody that he kind of dodged a bullet.
[00:51:06]  But he also, in the NYU Tammy Library, there's the files of this former, this red channels, this booklet of people who shouldn't be allowed to perform on radio and in film.
[00:51:22]  And they've got the background files and they've got Oscar Brand writing to them saying, get me off this list.
[00:51:28]  I hate communists.
[00:51:29]  So he negotiated.
[00:51:31]  So, you know, Oscar Brand is like, fortunately, he didn't have to publicly go and name names.
[00:51:37]  But, you know, his story is a little more complicated than he characterized it as being blacklisted by the left and the right.
[00:51:45]  But he stayed on the radio forever.
[00:51:47]  And sure, that's good.
[00:51:48]  I'm glad he stayed on the radio.
[00:51:50]  but I don't think it's quite the way he says it played out.
[00:52:20]  We will see.
[00:52:21]  As we go marching.
[00:52:22]  As we go marching.
[00:52:23]  And we'll win that one big union by and by.
[00:52:33]  You've got your job.
[00:52:34]  Well, I think just in a more generalized sense, like I really think that it's important that people today get an idea of just all the various techniques that the government and the FBI gets a lot of attention, of course.
[00:52:49]  I mean, the book's called The Folk Seekers in the Bureau, but you make very clear that this was all levels of government coming down on the party and on, let's say, progressive-minded people.
[00:53:00]  And these techniques that they use, I mean, what you've just described here in this interview, you know, blackmail, threats of blacklisting, you know, surveillance.
[00:53:09]  And I know just from, I used to sort of study the post-war kind of careers of Lincoln Battalion veterans.
[00:53:20]  I mean, they would go to their work and they would ask their bosses, you know, is this person a communist?
[00:53:24]  Which obviously gave the boss an idea to fire them.
[00:53:27]  I mean, one thing that we stress a lot in the show is that these techniques don't happen in a vacuum, right?
[00:53:33]  Like, they didn't perfect these, you know, these methods of surveillance totally.
[00:53:39]  They refined them and then they continued to refine them upwards and sort of into the next phase of sort of the Red Scare in the 60s and 70s as well.
[00:53:48]  And, you know, I know you've done books on the, you know, on repression in the 60s and 70s.
[00:53:53]  And do you see like a through line towards the techniques of repression used by the FBI from the 30s to the 50s up into the ones against the Maoist groups in the 60s and 70s?
[00:54:03]  Oh, for sure.
[00:54:03]  You know, I mean, it's, you know, it's kind of the principle of evolution, right?
[00:54:08]  Favorable characteristics tend to get passed along.
[00:54:12]  And I think tried and true methods tend to get passed along.
[00:54:16]  I mean, if you go on the FBI's website today and you look at their definition of informance, I mean, they still exto the use and the need of informants.
[00:54:26]  I mean, this situation today, I know this isn't exactly your question about the 60s and 70s, but.
[00:54:32]  Oh, well, whatever.
[00:54:33]  I think it's relevant.
[00:54:36]  The landscape today is different.
[00:54:38]  I mean, technology has qualitatively transformed certain aspects.
[00:54:44]  I mean, certain things can be done technologically that used to involve what they call human intelligence.
[00:54:51]  So I think it would be naive in the extreme to think, well, this is how they did it then.
[00:54:57]  This is how they're doing it now.
[00:54:59]  I mean, there's just an abundance of stuff at the fingertips that, you know, I mean, if I were out there politically active and street demonstration is not something I do so much, I would really want to be mindful of making myself vulnerable in ways.
[00:55:18]  But the other thing is tried and true methods do hold.
[00:55:22]  And informants, knowing where people live, compromising people, all those things work.
[00:55:29]  And it's kind of actually, you know, it was funny.
[00:55:32]  It was a backhanded compliment and also gave me pause that the Naval War College has my second book posted, you know, in their library.
[00:55:42]  So I guess they feel people should read that book.
[00:55:46]  So that says to me that, yeah, and I read James Comey's book, right?
[00:55:52]  And I was actually struck by this.
[00:55:54]  That's a brave man.
[00:55:55]  Yeah, well, I was struck by the fact that Comey actually doesn't understand the agency he headed.
[00:56:01]  I mean, he has these really trite characterizations of Hoover's FBI, which, you know, whoever's saying Hoover's FBI, I tend to think they're probably not looking at the FBI that Hoover led.
[00:56:17]  You know, I mean, he was good at his job, but he was actually part of an organization.
[00:56:22]  I mean, sure, there was a certain cult of the individual and stuff, but the people around him were very loyal and they were very sophisticated.
[00:56:32]  And yeah, a lot of this stuff did get put into the 60s and 70s and had a very detrimental effect.
[00:56:38]  And I think a lot of these things are going to be challenges for people striving for social justice today.
[00:56:47]  I don't take a side on these things, but I really don't want people to be victimized who don't deserve to be victimized from these things.
[00:56:57]  Well, I think like a good, kind of a good coda to this is talking about, as you mentioned in the book, there have been lots of books written and lots of studies done internally, externally, on why the Communist Party, the United States, which, you know, as you rightly point out, I mean, Well, it had after the war, I mean, it had what, like 80, 100,000 members.
[00:57:20]  I mean, it was quite large and was headed towards being quite large.
[00:57:24]  But it pretty much just fell apart through the ensuing decades.
[00:57:30]  And, you know, a lot of the popular narrative around that, not incorrectly, is about a lot of the internal politics and dynamics, as well as kind of what happens to the party after, you know, Khrushchev's famous speech denouncing Stalinism and moving the Soviet Union in a different direction and the split that causes in the CPUSA.
[00:57:54]  But, you know, I think that the important intervention of your work is, you know, really documenting all the ways in which the Bureau shaped a lot of these internal things and exploited them, as we were saying.
[00:58:11]  And I think it's in a previous book where you detail some of this, where you're talking, I mean, I think you talk about how, you know, forgive me if I'm getting this incorrect, but, you know, they would create even like shadow parties, like fronts, basically, or like fake ML organizations in order to disrupt kind of internal dynamics within the party.
[00:58:37]  Is that correct?
[00:58:38]  Yeah, that's correct because they'd actually studied this stuff so clearly when the Soviet Union and China had a falling out.
[00:58:45]  They created a phony Maoist group to try to disrupt the pro-Soviet group.
[00:58:51]  They said, oh, you've got secret Maoists in your group, and people were kicked out.
[00:58:55]  But I wanted to step back because one of the things, one of the discoveries is, you know, the Communist Party, on the one hand, I think when Khrushchev denounced Stalin, that was the end of it.
[00:59:07]  People had hung on and they justified everything, but then suddenly you had Khrushchev admitting, look, a lot of people were killed who shouldn't have been killed.
[00:59:16]  A lot of people were put in prison who shouldn't have been put in prison.
[00:59:20]  There was a purge of the military at the cusp of World War II, and that shouldn't have happened.
[00:59:24]  I mean, and this was just basically saying, you know, ripping the veil off the Wizard of Oz and it disenchanted, split the party to smithereens.
[00:59:34]  But up to that point, they had held it together, even though they went from 80,000 probably to 20,000.
[00:59:40]  But in that time, they had their top leadership put in prison for five years under the Smith Act.
[00:59:47]  And then they had succeeding waves of these Smith Act trials of their secondary leadership being put in prison.
[00:59:54]  I mean, it was like an assault unlike nothing that's ever happened in this country.
[00:59:58]  I mean, I make a point.
[01:00:00]  I mean, I spent, I lived in New York during Rudy Giuliani's tenure.
[01:00:07]  And Giuliani, at one point, he talked about these preemptive arrests he made and some of the audacious things he did.
[01:00:14]  and he says, well, you know, we do these things and we'll sort it out later.
[01:00:19]  And it occurred to me, you know, in the context of Donald Trump, you know, the media is all like, oh, he's destroying norms.
[01:00:26]  And it's kind of one thing they're talking about something else.
[01:00:30]  But on another level, it occurred to me that the norms in U.S. society, the Bill of Rights, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, all these sacred rights are norms that routinely get upended and put aside to the point where the norm is the norms get put aside.
[01:00:50]  So we live under this illusion of a certain level of freedom.
[01:00:54]  And I think what you saw with the Communist Party, which is not organizing for armed insurrection, it's organizing to be basically like a Euro-communist party over the 50s.
[01:01:06]  Proto-Euro communists.
[01:01:07]  Yeah, yeah, exactly, because it's not Europe, right?
[01:01:10]  Well, and they'd follow the line, of course, of fosterite deviationism that long.
[01:01:15]  And then, of course, that led them to the political system.
[01:01:16]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:01:17]  Even if they rejected it.
[01:01:18]  But they weren't out to overthrow the government.
[01:01:21]  They weren't revolutionary, but yet they were totally brought to heel.
[01:01:25]  I mean, they were made illegal technically, but it didn't really hold because it contradicted an earlier law.
[01:01:31]  But they were de facto illegal.
[01:01:35]  They could operate somewhat publicly, and they sent a huge swath of their organization underground.
[01:01:42]  But all of this was done without, I think we were talking about this earlier, fascism was never declared.
[01:01:47]  It was never Hitlerite fascism, which is the specter that they raised up.
[01:01:53]  But it was repression.
[01:01:54]  And, you know, I make the point, it's repression in a country that's very wealthy and doesn't need to systematically execute people on the street in order to maintain political control.
[01:02:05]  Some countries do need to do that.
[01:02:07]  Dominican Republic under Trujillo, for example, maybe the United States will descend down to that at some point.
[01:02:14]  And there is certainly political violence, but they didn't need to operate quite on that level.
[01:02:20]  But repression is repression in terms of what it's attempting to accomplish, which is to protect the status quo and minimize, weaken, or neutralize anything that would attempt to thwart that.
[01:02:37]  Yeah, I want to pinpoint something you just said about it never being like Hitlerized or it never being fascism never coming to America.
[01:02:46]  And I think what you said about how norms, these kind of norms that we cling to is that the thing is, that you point out is that all of these norms as we know them now are historically contingent and have been shaped and changed.
[01:03:03]  And yet we examine, we don't look at them in that way, right?
[01:03:06]  We don't have this sort of like kind of more robust or larger scale understanding of them and how they've shifted.
[01:03:13]  And so we just see this kind of like one static point in the present of what that norm is, right?
[01:03:18]  And it being violated.
[01:03:20]  But the thing that gets me, and you point out, I think you point this out very well in the book, is that, you know, whatever it was that members in the party were always concerned with this kind of like outside, you know, I don't mean to be glib, but the specter of like fascism coming, right?
[01:03:40]  Or, you know, as the point that you make with the example of the white chauvinism, this kind of intervening force that was coming that had to be eradicated before, that we had to prepare for before, when the complete and total demise of the party and the repression that you document so clearly was all happening like at the very moment, right?
[01:04:05]  And they, and not only was it happening, you know, as they, you know, as they were just, you know, as they existed and in the kind of context of just that at that point, contemporary America, but also like their internal dynamic, they weren't even focusing on the internal dynamics that were giving rise to opportunities to then be exploited by the U.S. government.
[01:04:28]  And so it's like, you know, they were focusing on these kind of like, you know, hysterical specters, fantastical ideas of what the repression would look like that they didn't even see what was even, what social forces they were conjuring up within their own ranks that then led to the, you know, incredible repression that they faced from the U.S. government.

=== Internal Dynamics Exploited (04:24) ===

[01:04:50]  And I think that's such an interesting lesson or just an interesting way to look at the dynamics of the party and kind of the short-sightedness, right?
[01:05:01]  And I think we still see some of that today.
[01:05:04]  Oh, for sure.
[01:05:04]  And, you know, it's look, it's a, it's a, forget about, you know, I don't want to get too controversial, but I don't think it's a deep state.
[01:05:13]  No, do it, do it, do it.
[01:05:16]  I don't see it so much as a deep state, as a state, or in the old Marxist term, there's a superstructure.
[01:05:24]  It's like what got the Communist Party was, okay, there's the FBI, there's Congress, there's these independent right-wing forces who, you know, there's an abundance.
[01:05:34]  There's probably many more of them now than there were.
[01:05:37]  And then there's the media.
[01:05:39]  And Paul Simon has this line from his Cape Man album, an underappreciated album.
[01:05:44]  It's like, the newspapers and TV would kill you if they could.
[01:05:49]  Afraid to leave the project to cross into another neighborhood.
[01:05:57]  The newspapers and the TV crews will they kill you if they could.
[01:06:03]  I mean, it's, you know, if the media turns its head, turns its light on you, forget about it.
[01:06:09]  I don't know how you can withstand it.
[01:06:11]  You know, if they nail you for three days, you know, how are you going to stand up to that?
[01:06:15]  So there's all these things working together.
[01:06:18]  You don't need to put people in Dachau in that way.
[01:06:22]  Or maybe you do.
[01:06:23]  I don't know.
[01:06:24]  I mean, you know, I'm not inclined toward, you know, predestination on anything.
[01:06:30]  But, you know, it's look, I think some things can be learned from looking at what happened in Germany.
[01:06:36]  You know, probably the biggest lesson in Germany was the failure of the social democrats and communists to be able to stand against Hitler.
[01:06:44]  You know, it's not just Hitler's wrath and willingness to use violence.
[01:06:50]  But, you know, so it's a political question, right?
[01:06:52]  But the repression in the United States is very extreme.
[01:06:56]  I mean, the Black Panthers, there's been a lot of talk about the counterintelligence program of the Panthers, but they were also vilified in the media.
[01:07:03]  You know, they wanted to break unity with the group.
[01:07:06]  Part of the program of COINTELPRO was to make sure intellectuals don't support you, to make sure people in the churches think you're a pariah.
[01:07:15]  So I guess you have to be holistic when you look at what you're doing.
[01:07:23]  And if you're a political force, you have to look at the big picture of what's coming at you.
[01:07:29]  And it's not just a Reichstag fire and then the orders, the laws being passed that allows you to imprison everybody all at once.
[01:07:40]  I mean, it could happen, sure.
[01:07:43]  The one point I wanted to make, too, is like, you know, like if you're a Muslim from how many countries now, you can't come to the United States.
[01:07:53]  What the hell is that all about?
[01:07:55]  Exactly.
[01:07:55]  You know, I mean, there's no, I mean, but it's the law right now.
[01:08:01]  And it's, you know, it's rather outrageous, but it's emblematic of the relative nature of the freedoms that exist here.
[01:08:09]  Yeah, I was actually reading last night at around three in the morning about this college professor from Florida, a Muslim guy from Palestine, who is a Palestinian nationalist and actually campaigned for Bush in 2000 because Bush had said something about no collection of secret evidence against, you know, his brother had been, you know, put in prison on some trumped up charges.
[01:08:30]  And so he campaigned for Bush because he thought Bush would be better for Muslims, which, well, I'm not sure that anyone would have been very good for Muslims in that period.
[01:08:39]  But he was actually thrown in prison after giving an interview on Bill O'Reilly's show where O'Reilly confronted him with some statements he'd made about Israel.
[01:08:48]  And within a couple of years, he's hit with, I don't think it was RICO charges, but it was racketeering charges about raising money for groups in Palestine.
[01:08:59]  And I believe he's out of prison now.
[01:09:02]  He's in Turkey.
[01:09:03]  But I mean, it just goes to show, like, They really began crafting these methods in, well, even before your book starts, you know, really in the 20s and stuff like that, especially using deportation as a tool.

=== Using Deportation as a Tool (03:26) ===

[01:09:15]  I mean, that's still really used as a weapon by the government today.
[01:09:18]  Yeah, that's number one on the list.
[01:09:20]  You know, Dave, exactly.
[01:09:22]  Yeah.
[01:09:22]  Are you an American?
[01:09:23]  Are you an American?
[01:09:24]  Oh, that's easy.
[01:09:25]  Get out of here.
[01:09:27]  And that was, you know, back then that was kind of easier to use against the left because everyone was from like Hungary and shit.
[01:09:32]  Not to, listen, I know I said the word Hungary.
[01:09:34]  I love Hungarians.
[01:09:36]  Rashida, if you're listening to us, love you, baby.
[01:09:38]  But, you know, like everyone, there was a lot more foreigners sort of on the left back then.
[01:09:46]  There was a huge amount of people who had left Europe because of their political beliefs and had been able to sort of reconstitute themselves here, often in sort of language-based federations in the Social Democratic Party.
[01:10:00]  But today, you know, the political landscape has changed.
[01:10:03]  And certainly, I mean, we look at it used as a tool like in those in some of those meat plants that were sort of the subject of these stories at the beginning of COVID.
[01:10:14]  And before COVID, you know, when workers would complain about not getting paid or stuff like that, the bosses would call ICE and get them kicked out.
[01:10:21]  And, you know, those are people being deported essentially for standing up for their lights regarding their labor.
[01:10:28]  And so, I mean, this is still a really effective tool because there's almost no defense against it.
[01:10:34]  I mean, they can get you out if they want to.
[01:10:36]  But, Aaron, thank you so much for joining us.
[01:10:38]  Do you have any final, final top-level thoughts or parting wisdom for our noble listeners?
[01:10:45]  No, but I do hope the book is of some value.
[01:10:48]  I mean, it's, I mean, I wrote it because it's just a fascinating topic.
[01:10:53]  And I think Repeater Books put up a playlist that I had.
[01:10:57]  I mean, it's too bad, you know, in some of these forms, you can't actually get the music out there because that's really what animates things.
[01:11:06]  And it's also kind of what makes life worth living.
[01:11:09]  You know, Kurt Vonnegut once said, Oh, the Beatles make me happy to be alive, right?
[01:11:14]  You know, music is fundamentally important.
[01:11:16]  But I think there's a lot in the book.
[01:11:18]  There's a lot of lessons, some of which I'm probably haven't absorbed myself, you know, but it was a good project to try to lay this down and kind of have it there for people to hopefully have some use of.
[01:11:32]  I actually, I, I, little, little listener tip here.
[01:11:35]  Uh, during the entire time that I was reading this book, I read it on my phone, which is not something I usually do, but but uh, I actually listened to, I think, every, not every, but almost every Weaver's album, uh, and and and a bunch of Woody Guthrie's album about Sacco and Vanzetti.
[01:11:54]  It's a whole album, kind of covers uh, with sort of the lyrics change to be about Sacco and Vanzetti.
[01:12:00]  Great record.
[01:12:01]  And I listened to that basically the whole way through.
[01:12:04]  And that really made sort of the book.
[01:12:06]  I don't know.
[01:12:06]  It's good.
[01:12:07]  It's a really good companion to actually listen to the music while you're reading this.
[01:12:10]  Fantastic book.
[01:12:12]  I really enjoyed it.
[01:12:13]  Well, thank you.
[01:12:14]  I appreciate that.
[01:12:15]  Well, all right, Aaron.
[01:12:17]  Thank you for joining us.
[01:12:18]  And we'll see you at the, what is it, the Gas Lamp Cafe?
[01:12:21]  What do they used to call that place?
[01:12:22]  Yeah, I'll listen.
[01:12:24]  I'll be wearing one of those kind of half berets, half cabby hats people used to war and talking in a much heavier Jewish accent than the one I've had.
[01:12:33]  I think it's gaslight, right?
[01:12:35]  Gaslight, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:12:37]  It's good talking to both of you.
[01:12:38]  Thanks.
[01:12:39]  Thank you.

=== Beats And Beastly Spoilers (05:31) ===

[01:12:41]  Early every year, the seeds are growing.
[01:12:49]  Unseen, unheard, they lie beneath the ground.
[01:12:56]  Would you not till their leaves are showing that with weeds all your garden will abound?
[01:13:06]  If you close your eyes and stop your ears, hold your tongue, then how can you know?
[01:13:13]  For seeds you cannot see may not be there.
[01:13:17]  Seeds you cannot hear may never grow.
[01:13:22]  In January, you still got the choice.
[01:13:26]  You can cut the weeds before they start to bud.
[01:13:30]  If you leave them to grow high, they'll silence your voice.
[01:13:35]  And in December, you may pay with your blood.
[01:13:39]  So close your eyes, stop your ears, close your mouth, take it slow.
[01:13:45]  Let others take the lead and you bring up the rear.
[01:13:48]  And later you can say you didn't know.
[01:13:52]  Every day another vulture takes flight.
[01:13:56]  There's another danger born every morning.
[01:14:01]  I could be a folky.
[01:14:03]  What do you mean?
[01:14:04]  Do you play any instruments?
[01:14:06]  Yeah, I've put out seven records.
[01:14:09]  I know, but I kind of forget what you did on them.
[01:14:11]  I thought you just kind of like, you just sang, I thought.
[01:14:13]  I sang on the first, I sang on all of them, but I sang on the first three and then, or yeah, first three.
[01:14:18]  And then no, I put out six records.
[01:14:21]  I sang on the first three, and then I played bass on the last two.
[01:14:24]  And then there's an unreleased bass, unreleased record with me and a couple of the big boy rockers that is, well, I play a couple instruments on that.
[01:14:36]  None of them very well.
[01:14:37]  You know, if you want to be a folky, you know what you should take up?
[01:14:40]  I always found this very charming.
[01:14:42]  One of those like one-man band situations.
[01:14:45]  You found those charts?
[01:14:46]  I found those incredibly obnoxious.
[01:14:49]  You see a guy paint in front of makeout room.
[01:14:51]  Oh, I don't like that.
[01:14:52]  I feel like the only time you like encounter them is like, you know, down a dark subway, You know, whole way meandering through, and then you see the man and the one, you know, the one-man band, and it's probably like two cats sitting on another rat with like a dog.
[01:15:08]  Well, there used to be a juggling act.
[01:15:10]  So, I, you're the thing that Liz is referencing here, you might, you listeners might be like, that is absurd.
[01:15:14]  There's no way that those disparate sorts of animals could come together in perfect peace and harmony.
[01:15:19]  But there was a guy in San Francisco who had sitting next to him, or rat on the cat on the dog.
[01:15:26]  No, yeah, cat on the dog and a rat on the cat.
[01:15:30]  Yeah, rat on the cat on the dog.
[01:15:32]  Do you know what happened to him?
[01:15:33]  Oh, no, what?
[01:15:34]  He got run out of town because people thought the animals were drugged.
[01:15:39]  Like, people kicked him out of San Francisco.
[01:15:41]  They weren't drunk.
[01:15:42]  I saw those animals.
[01:15:43]  How do you, what do you mean, he got kicked out of San Francisco?
[01:15:45]  What?
[01:15:46]  He got excommunicated?
[01:15:47]  Like, what do you mean?
[01:15:47]  Like, ran him out of town.
[01:15:48]  That's no wall.
[01:15:50]  I don't, I baby.
[01:15:51]  I don't know.
[01:15:51]  People ran him out of town.
[01:15:53]  That's just like, look it up.
[01:15:54]  Cat, rat, dog guy ran out of San Francisco.
[01:15:57]  It's incredible.
[01:15:58]  You know, you know, the techies, the techies, no shame.
[01:16:02]  No shame.
[01:16:03]  Absolutely.
[01:16:04]  First, they came for cat, rat, rat, cat, dog, guy, and I said nothing.
[01:16:08]  Yeah.
[01:16:09]  And then, well, I actually did.
[01:16:10]  I actually raised a pretty big stink over there.
[01:16:14]  Well, someone has to speak.
[01:16:16]  Cat, rat, dog is the language of the unheard.
[01:16:19]  There we go.
[01:16:20]  Said by Angela Davis.
[01:16:23]  All right.
[01:16:24]  Well, let's wrap this up like a nice little Christmas.
[01:16:27]  But you know what's funny?
[01:16:28]  Not to give a little spoiler alert, but this is true in On Music Week.
[01:16:32]  Is it?
[01:16:33]  Yeah.
[01:16:34]  Oh, yes.
[01:16:35]  I just realized.
[01:16:36]  Okay.
[01:16:37]  That's right.
[01:16:37]  We are interviewing Kanye motherfucking West on Friday.
[01:16:41]  Presidential camp.
[01:16:42]  He's not really a presidential candidate.
[01:16:44]  He forgot.
[01:16:46]  I don't think he forgot.
[01:16:47]  I think he just never did it.
[01:16:48]  100%.
[01:16:49]  He forgot.
[01:16:50]  Like, he was in the ballot anywhere?
[01:16:52]  In like a couple places, I think.
[01:16:54]  If Kanye is in the ballot on your state, you have a moral duty to vote for Kanye West.
[01:16:59]  100%.
[01:16:59]  This podcast with no equivocation endorses Kanye West.
[01:17:04]  100%.
[01:17:05]  I mean, it's without a doubt.
[01:17:06]  You see him.
[01:17:07]  That was a pretty weak stream, but did you see him piss on the Oscar or Grammy?
[01:17:10]  Whatever the name is.
[01:17:11]  I don't.
[01:17:12]  I don't look at that kind of thing because I'm not a pervert.
[01:17:15]  Well, okay.
[01:17:16]  Well, we'll talk about this after because I'll just show it to you after.
[01:17:19]  I shouldn't have.
[01:17:19]  I guess that's you probably won't look at it now.
[01:17:21]  But, anyways, yeah, I personally will be writing Kanye West in.
[01:17:28]  Yeah, absolutely.
[01:17:30]  Well, let us end this and so I can go off and work on my beats some more.
[01:17:35]  Oh, great.
[01:17:36]  All right.
[01:17:37]  Well, I'm Liz.
[01:17:38]  What if I became a beats guy?
[01:17:41]  What if I was a guy like Liz?
[01:17:42]  Wait, can you come over?
[01:17:43]  I got to show you my beats.
[01:17:45]  Do you ever know guys like I knew beats guys?
[01:17:47]  No.
[01:17:49]  Yeah, I'd see a certain someone here knows a beats guy.
[01:17:53]  Anyways, I'm Bryce, the Beats guy, and we are joined by other Beats guy, Hyung Chomsky.
[01:17:58]  And this is the podcast.
[01:18:00]  Fuck, wait, I always fucked this up.
[01:18:01]  True Anon.
[01:18:03]  Yeah, I'm not a beats guy.
[01:18:06]  True and on.
[01:18:07]  Oh my god, shut up.
[01:18:08]  Okay.
[01:18:11]  We'll see you next time.
[01:18:12]  Bye-bye.