True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 502: Red Scare
Aired: 2025-11-14
Duration: 01:38:06


=== Why Second Best Matters (02:49) ===

[00:00:00]  If I had to rank Communist Party USA leaders, it's actually not much of a contest.
[00:00:07]  Why?
[00:00:08]  For first or last?
[00:00:10]  Or for second, which is always an interesting position.
[00:00:13]  Oh, that's tough.
[00:00:15]  I feel like if instead of asking people who's number one, you should ask them number two, because I think it gives you more insight into their thinking.
[00:00:23]  True, because there's always like LeBron, for instance, right?
[00:00:26]  I don't believe he's a master.
[00:00:27]  LeBron is.
[00:00:28]  No, but I know, but we're talking, but he, but if he was, he'd be number one.
[00:00:32]  He excels.
[00:00:34]  But in basketball, for instance, and I feel like this is pertinent considering what we're doing tonight.
[00:00:39]  We're fucking hooping.
[00:00:41]  Because Brace likes to practice his dunking.
[00:00:44]  As I age into being an even older Jewish person, I have to get into playing basketball.
[00:00:52]  I don't think you should.
[00:00:53]  I'm just.
[00:00:54]  You don't think that I can dunk?
[00:00:55]  You've seen me dunk.
[00:00:56]  Here's what I want to say.
[00:00:58]  I like your knees, and I think you should keep them.
[00:01:02]  Me too.
[00:01:02]  I think I should keep them fully extended as I go into.
[00:01:06]  I can dunk.
[00:01:06]  I want to say this right now.
[00:01:09]  Gracopedia, if you're listening.
[00:01:11]  Wikipedia is dunking.
[00:01:12]  This is for the AI transcript of this podcast that comes in whatever future and then will be used to populate all information about you on the internet.
[00:01:20]  Absolutely.
[00:01:21]  Yes, yes.
[00:01:22]  Liz.
[00:01:23]  And we're not joking now.
[00:01:25]  We're being serious completely.
[00:01:30]  You've seen me dunk before, correct?
[00:01:34]  I want you to, you have to say yes.
[00:01:36]  Yes.
[00:01:37]  You've seen me dunk many times, yes?
[00:01:40]  Yes.
[00:01:42]  Oh, so you're trying to make it.
[00:01:43]  Well, now it's, now it's maybe a little bit more.
[00:01:46]  It doesn't understand my tone.
[00:01:47]  It doesn't.
[00:01:47]  It doesn't.
[00:01:48]  Neither do I sometimes, frankly.
[00:01:51]  And if I've dunked so consistently in the time that you've known me, then I think it's a fair thing to say that I can dunk.
[00:02:00]  Brace Belden can dunk.
[00:02:03]  That's good.
[00:02:27]  That's good.
[00:02:28]  You know what?
[00:02:29]  I can dunk.
[00:02:30]  And I can say hello, I'm Liz.
[00:02:36]  My name is Bryce.
[00:02:37]  And I'm producer Young Chomsky.
[00:02:39]  And this is Trunan.
[00:02:41]  Hello.
[00:02:43]  There was a lot more I wanted to get to from this book.
[00:02:47]  I know.

=== Cointelpro's Confusion (15:34) ===

[00:02:49]  You don't want to take people down too many paths.
[00:02:52]  Well, there's a lot that we didn't cover of the book in this interview.
[00:02:56]  And yeah, I still think the interview was quite good.
[00:03:00]  I think so too.
[00:03:00]  I really love talking to Aaron.
[00:03:02]  Me too.
[00:03:03]  I feel so cozy.
[00:03:03]  I feel like I wish we had a little fireplace in our studio.
[00:03:06]  We could just like curl up, a little blanket and a little pillow and just be like, Aaron, talk to us about the stories.
[00:03:14]  Instead, I mean, you guys obviously can't see it.
[00:03:16]  We're sitting very upright.
[00:03:18]  We're not only upright, my chair is on its last legs.
[00:03:23]  No pun at all, because it really is.
[00:03:25]  Well, we got to make sure.
[00:03:26]  But also, we have the AC on, full blast, November style.
[00:03:31]  Shirts off.
[00:03:32]  Obviously, Liz in a Moomu, myself in a sort of a caftan.
[00:03:38]  And yet we're matching.
[00:03:40]  And yet we're matching.
[00:03:41]  And yet you're matching.
[00:03:42]  Because we're always matching.
[00:03:42]  It's sort of a bananas and pajamas situation.
[00:03:44]  Well, you know, when I walk through these studio doors, I, of course, I take off the pants and I put on the sarong.
[00:03:50]  And that's how we get in the mood here.
[00:03:51]  That's how we get in the mood.
[00:03:52]  We all sort of put on our foreign accoutrements and clothes, and then we get down and talk business.
[00:03:58]  What's the business we're talking today, Liz?
[00:04:01]  The Communist Party of the United States.
[00:04:04]  Of America.
[00:04:05]  Oh, of, well, I said of the United States.
[00:04:08]  Oh, of America.
[00:04:09]  Because maybe there's some other United States somewhere else we haven't heard about yet, you know?
[00:04:13]  United States of Africa.
[00:04:14]  Exactly.
[00:04:15]  Well, don't even fucking say that, dude.
[00:04:17]  They'll kill you for that.
[00:04:18]  No, and the AI is going to put that in there and it's going to be a whole thing.
[00:04:20]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:04:21]  Oh, my God.
[00:04:22]  But one day there will be.
[00:04:24]  Yeah.
[00:04:24]  One day there will be.
[00:04:26]  Hillary.
[00:04:27]  We are talking to Erin Leonard.
[00:04:30]  Fan favorite.
[00:04:31]  Fan favorite.
[00:04:32]  And who have you not had on the show?
[00:04:34]  Let me say that in a way that is not me eating every word there.
[00:04:38]  Who we've not had on the show for a while, but I'm glad we're having on again.
[00:04:42]  Yes.
[00:04:43]  And we're talking about the long war against American communism.
[00:04:48]  Let's run the interview.
[00:05:01]  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the show.
[00:05:05]  We have with us here in the studio, fully above ground, fully legal, Aaron Leonard, author and historian, living in California, author of six books about government repression and the left in America.
[00:05:21]  And a couple of those.
[00:05:22]  Am I crazy?
[00:05:23]  One or two of those about folk music.
[00:05:25]  Yeah, folk music and music of the 60s.
[00:05:28]  Yes.
[00:05:30]  Here to talk about his new book, Menace of Our Time, The Long War Against American Communism, which Gerald Horne, I have to add this in, Gerald Horne called Comprehensive and Sprightly.
[00:05:43]  Sprightly?
[00:05:44]  I know.
[00:05:45]  He's got away with words.
[00:05:47]  It was very kind of him to say that, I must say.
[00:05:50]  I'm not being ironic.
[00:05:51]  I appreciate it.
[00:05:52]  Welcome to the show.
[00:05:54]  Oh, it's great to be back.
[00:05:55]  It's great to be in, I guess this is the People's Republic of Brooklyn.
[00:06:00]  It's so nice to have you here, not on Zoom.
[00:06:03]  Oh, it is.
[00:06:03]  Good to do it in person.
[00:06:06]  Yeah, ditto to that.
[00:06:07]  Yeah.
[00:06:08]  So the book is, well, what would you say without reading the back of the book?
[00:06:12]  Although, you know what?
[00:06:13]  Because this is the back of the book with what it actually explains what the book is about.
[00:06:17]  Sometimes they just put the, you know, the little blurbs on there.
[00:06:21]  I don't love that.
[00:06:22]  What is the book about?
[00:06:24]  It's the history of the repression of the Communist Party USA, which was the party that represented communism in the United States.
[00:06:35]  I mean, it's without getting too defensive out the gate.
[00:06:38]  I mean, I have issues with the Communist Party USA.
[00:06:41]  I kind of write in the introduction because I kind of did come out of a Maoist background.
[00:06:48]  I'm a lapsed Maoist.
[00:06:50]  I've since moved on from that.
[00:06:51]  And they don't let me into their temples anymore.
[00:06:56]  But, you know, we Maoists, we were so much better than the Communist Party USA.
[00:07:01]  They were old.
[00:07:02]  They were stodgy.
[00:07:03]  They liked the American flag.
[00:07:06]  They were hierarchical.
[00:07:08]  They were like a little devious and sneaky.
[00:07:10]  On the other hand, they thought we were young whippersnappers who didn't know the seriousness of what we were talking about when we were talking about revolution.
[00:07:21]  Classic.
[00:07:22]  We were both right.
[00:07:24]  You know, I mean, maybe it would have been nicer if one of us wasn't so off track, but there it is.
[00:07:32]  However, look, the 20th century is really the story of the battle between capitalism and this nominal communism.
[00:07:43]  I mean, it kind of frames the whole thing.
[00:07:45]  I mean, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it seems like a lot of the historiography has tried to move on, but I can't really understand, and I don't think it's proper to understand the 20th century without understanding this battle for communism.
[00:08:02]  And you have this U.S. Party, which starts in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.
[00:08:12]  It's got its roots in the Socialist Party, which sprang up in the late 19th century, which that's probably another book to write, which I don't think that's my job.
[00:08:24]  But 1917, Lenin kind of comes out of nowhere, seizes power, and just upends the world order.
[00:08:34]  And the left socialists gravitate toward this communism.
[00:08:39]  But I wrote this book, The Folk Singers in the Bureau, about people such as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, Alan Lomax, Bess Lomax, about how they were partisans of the Communist Party USA in the 40s and early 50s, and how as a result, the FBI in particular was all in their business.
[00:09:03]  To do that, I actually ended up having to try to understand the Communist Party USA, and I was just fascinated at the level of repression brought against them.
[00:09:14]  And this was in the period of what's popularly known as the McCarthy era.
[00:09:21]  which I think and other historians agree, you know, maybe in different terminology, that that's actually a wrong way to describe the era of the Second Red Scare.
[00:09:34]  I mean, Joe McCarthy shows up on the scene 1950, and by 1954, I believe he's being censured.
[00:09:41]  Well, the drive against communism starts, the particular drive of the Second Red Scare starts in the aftermath of World War II when Truman declares the Truman Doctrine.
[00:09:55]  I'm going to give money to fight communism in Greece in the Greek Civil War, and I'm going to give money to Turkey.
[00:10:02]  We're not letting Stalin take any more of what he's taken.
[00:10:07]  I mean, Trump the other day said the U.S. won World War II.
[00:10:11]  Well, I think two people won World War II, the Soviets and the U.S.
[00:10:16]  Yeah.
[00:10:17]  And that actually kind of determined the world.
[00:10:19]  And there was a lot more cost on one side.
[00:10:21]  Good point.
[00:10:21]  I mean, what was it, like 20 million people in the Soviet Union died?
[00:10:25]  And if you read what the German and Nazis did to the Slavs, it's just horrific.
[00:10:33]  I mean, it's a story that needs more attention than it's gotten.
[00:10:36]  So I write this book about the folksingers in the Bureau, and I get very curious about the Second Red Scare.
[00:10:45]  And I'm discovering, oh, there was something in 1939, 1941, which some historians have called the mini-Red Scare.
[00:10:54]  I'm like, oh, that's interesting.
[00:10:56]  And then there's the first Red Scare, which I'll talk about in a second.
[00:11:02]  And then there's the COIN-TELPRO era, which is not a Red Scare, but it's a period where the COINTELPRO is this program the FBI started in 1956.
[00:11:15]  It stands for Counterintelligence Program.
[00:11:19]  And it's not just a drive to collect intelligence.
[00:11:22]  It's a drive to disrupt organizations.
[00:11:25]  Something I actually learned from this book that I didn't realize before is I think COINTELPRO is heavily associated with the disruptions towards like the Black Panthers and other new left groups, which was involved in COINTELPRO and also like MH Chaos, for instance.
[00:11:37]  But the Majority of COINTELPRO operations were against the Communist Party USA, which at that time, or at least during part of the time of COINTELPRO, was probably smaller than most new left groups.
[00:11:52]  I mean, there's dwindling, dwindling numbers, posts like 54, 55, 56.
[00:11:58]  But still, they were really focused on them.
[00:12:00]  Yeah, I think it comes out statistically about 60,000, excuse me, 60% of the COINTELPRO cases are leveled against the Communist Party USA, which, so from the standpoint of my research, it's like, oh, if you're not telling that story, you're not really telling the story of COINTELPRO.
[00:12:22]  And I got to get props to the LA Public Library because if you go to the FBI's website and put in COINTELPRO, the Black Panther COINTELPRO shows up, the New Left shows up, I believe White Hate shows up.
[00:12:36]  Communist Party USA COINTELPRO doesn't show up.
[00:12:39]  But there's something called Archives Unbound, so your listeners can go to this.
[00:12:44]  I think probably the New York Public Library might have it too.
[00:12:47]  It's Gale's Archive Unbound.
[00:12:50]  They have the full corpus of the COINTELPRO there.
[00:12:54]  They also have Benjamin Davis file, which Gerald Horne, who generously blurbed my book and wrote a wonderful biography of Ben Davis.
[00:13:06]  Horn actually obtained Davis's FBI file, which is enormous.
[00:13:12]  It's something on a level of 20,000 pages.
[00:13:15]  I mean, I looked through as much of it as I could, and I think he did as deep a dive as he could.
[00:13:20]  But there's just, there's the transcription of the wiretaps of him, you know, that's going on because he's a leader.
[00:13:27]  He's an African-American city councilman from Harlem, circa 1948, 49.
[00:13:36]  So he's like a high priority target.
[00:13:40]  Point being is, yeah, COINTELPRO, people think they know about COINTELPRO.
[00:13:46]  I thought I knew about COINTELPRO.
[00:13:49]  Turns out I didn't.
[00:13:52]  The interesting thing about COINTELPRO, and I'm kind of poking into the book in various ways, but I guess it's okay.
[00:13:59]  We're non-linear here.
[00:14:00]  It's good.
[00:14:00]  Yeah, that's good.
[00:14:02]  The name COINTELPRO always kind of confuses me because I think militarily the doctrine of COINTELPRO is you are trying to undermine foreign intelligence.
[00:14:12]  And then there's an aspect of maybe domestic subversion.
[00:14:15]  But I think more popularly it's foreign intelligence.
[00:14:18]  So why that name?
[00:14:20]  Well, it turns out, like, so Khrushchev stands up in 1956 and denounces Stalin, which, I mean, the analogy I make, it's akin to the Pope getting up and saying, well, you know, I'm not so sure about this Jesus thing.
[00:14:37]  Yeah.
[00:14:38]  It just sends an earthquake through this global communist movement.
[00:14:42]  The FBI is watching this and they're like, oh, well, here's an opportunity.
[00:14:49]  Khrushchev did to the Communist Party what all this other repression could only have imagined in terms of kind of cutting the links out from underneath.
[00:14:59]  I think that and the incident in Hungary kind of coming in like a one-two, which people say was a Stalin thing, but no, it was Khrushchev that did it.
[00:15:10]  It was during Khrushchev.
[00:15:11]  It's almost dead.
[00:15:13]  Those were dealt a near-fatal blow to basically like, well, I guess not like Western European, but like the British Communist Party did not do well after that.
[00:15:23]  And the Communist Party USA was just decimated.
[00:15:28]  Yeah, they survived the second Red Scare.
[00:15:32]  Their top leaders were systematically sent to prison.
[00:15:36]  They went from perhaps 80,000 people down to about 20,000, which 20,000, you know, in the U.S., that's not nothing.
[00:15:45]  But after Khrushchev did his shtick, they went down to several thousand, if that.
[00:15:51]  And that's kind of where they stayed.
[00:15:55]  But back to the point of counterintelligence is my sense that the FBI and the larger U.S. ruling apparatus began to look at the Communist Party not so much as this domestic force that's going to challenge us, even if it's maybe kind of a fantastic notion.
[00:16:14]  They started to look at it as like, this is mainly an agent of a foreign power, and we're going to target it as such.
[00:16:22]  And that's why the COINTEL PRO Moniker makes sense.
[00:16:26]  But they also saw that, you know, with the diminishment of their power, we can actually attack them from within.
[00:16:34]  Of course, they had an informant moving up into the highest ranks, but I'll talk about that at another point.
[00:16:41]  So yeah, the book is, I just kind of followed my curiosity, but began to think, you know, well, you got two major Red Scares, and I need to talk about the Palmer raids, but you got two major Red Scare, a mini Red Scare, the COINTELPRO era.
[00:16:59]  It's really kind of like a whole thing.
[00:17:02]  It's like there's never been a time when this group hasn't been subject to pretty intense repression.
[00:17:09]  I mean, yes, there are degrees.
[00:17:10]  It wasn't like it was, you know, to use the popular, turned up to 11 all the time.
[00:17:17]  But it never relented.
[00:17:19]  And even when in the 30s during the Popular Front era, when the communists were attempting to play nice with Roosevelt, even then there was significant things happening against them, repression-wise.
[00:17:32]  Yeah, I think, you know, it's cute because you start the book out talking of, you know, like you mentioned, how you've never been kind of a big fan of CPUSA just from your own political background.
[00:17:41]  And maybe that was, you know, maybe now you say it's a little mistaken.
[00:17:44]  But you say that during the course of writing and researching this book, that your perception of the party changed, that, you know, you kind of came into a new understanding.
[00:17:53]  I feel like our listeners are all probably have various opinions about CPUSA.
[00:17:59]  I think we all do, either from what they've read from, you know, the waves of the red scares or from their limited, I'm assuming limited interaction with the current CPUSA and their kind of presence.
[00:18:15]  But I'm curious as to like kind of if you can say like what about this research shifted your kind of perception of the party?

=== Attracted Among the Best and Bravest (07:33) ===

[00:18:24]  No, that's an excellent question, observation.
[00:18:30]  I was talking with my colleague Connor Gallagher, who co-authored my first two books.
[00:18:36]  Him and I talk often, try to bounce around ideas.
[00:18:42]  And I asked him, I said, you know, look, well, historically, was the Communist Party USA a good thing or not?
[00:18:49]  And I think the answer is, yeah, they were.
[00:18:51]  I mean, come on.
[00:18:52]  I mean, who was fighting against lynching in the 30s?
[00:18:55]  Who was fighting for unions?
[00:18:57]  Who was fighting for unemployment?
[00:18:59]  Who was like moving people's furniture back into their apartments when they were evicted?
[00:19:05]  And they attracted the best and the bravest.
[00:19:09]  Not all of them, but they attracted among the best and bravest society, humanity in this country at that point.
[00:19:18]  These were people who were willing to stick their neck out and cast aside their privilege toward a greater morality and a higher calling.
[00:19:30]  And they do need to be acknowledged for that.
[00:19:34]  That doesn't negate all the problematics that exist.
[00:19:39]  I mean, the problem is as you get older, things are complicated.
[00:19:45]  Yeah, I mean, I think with the CPUSA too, I think it has a sort of interesting, you know, the genesis of the CPUSA, which you mentioned, is like essentially a split off the Socialist Party.
[00:19:54]  And the Socialist Party was in large part, from my understanding.
[00:19:57]  Yes, it was like the Socialist Party, but a huge part of it was like these language-based groups that made up part of it.
[00:20:04]  I don't even know how to describe that, but like, and we've talked about this in previous episodes, but like a Finnish language Socialist Party like groups would have sort of their own factions within it and things like this.
[00:20:15]  And I think one of the big differences between the CPSA and before that the Socialist Party USA and like their European counterparts or their counterparts elsewhere, but mostly in Europe, is that there wasn't this tradition of they didn't have the same exact struggles that they would have had in like Germany or in France where like the labor movement here,
[00:20:39]  a lot of the Communist Party like early So the big personalities associated with it with it came out of syndicalism, which isn't always the case for European parties.
[00:20:50]  I mean, it is and it isn't.
[00:20:51]  But like in Germany, for instance, like they have, they were sort of a little further down the line when they started the Communist Party or when the Socialist Party split off.
[00:21:00]  I mean, obviously all these groups are rooted in the labor movement.
[00:21:04]  But in the U.S., I mean, one of the big tendencies here was like the IWW and this sort of what would later be called criminal syndicalism.
[00:21:11]  But that was really a lot of times like very revolutionary.
[00:21:15]  And then you had people like the right wing of the Socialist Party, which were a little more sort of akin to the Labor Party or the Social Democratic Party of Germany or the right wing of that.
[00:21:27]  I think one of the interesting things about the history of the Communist Party of the USA, but also in Canada and in Mexico too, I kind of find this interesting, although for different reasons, is that they just had significantly less success than basically anywhere else in the world.
[00:21:41]  And the Communist Party USA, I would say now, and for, I guess, you know, for all of recent history, has been known not for its successes in terms of like getting laws passed and, you know, maybe for the Scottsboro Board stuff or like for the unemployment councils, but mainly in terms of the repression, right?
[00:22:00]  So like the most famous things about the Communist Party USA are essentially the outline of a Communist Party USA and both red scares and then the Hollywood blacklist and the McCarthy stuff.
[00:22:12]  And so it's interesting, I think in popular conception and in truth, in many ways, like the Communist Party USA really were just guys who got arrested a lot.
[00:22:23]  Provocative point there, Brady.
[00:22:25]  Or spied.
[00:22:26]  Yeah, well, boy, one thing is they came about in the United States.
[00:22:35]  Because as you're speaking, you're making me realize, you know, we're in the United States at a particular moment.
[00:22:41]  You know, my sense is we've got an elevated decline going on.
[00:22:48]  Yeah.
[00:22:49]  I mean, whether or not this gets reversed, I mean, I can't see into the future, but there's nothing going on over the course, probably since Obama, that indicates that anything other than the U.S. as this great power coming out of World War II is becoming a great deal less.
[00:23:06]  And that's actually kind of the major story.
[00:23:08]  One of the revelations in writing this was what was the material basis for this Communist Party in this country.
[00:23:16]  And it was like, you had industry.
[00:23:18]  Yeah.
[00:23:19]  It was vital.
[00:23:20]  And, you know, it was like bread and butter.
[00:23:22]  The 1919 steel strike is where William Z. Foster, the party leader, came out of.
[00:23:29]  And yeah, some of the wobblies actually, I believe Big Bill Haywood migrated into the party and stuff.
[00:23:36]  But you had all that whole industrial base.
[00:23:40]  We've been in this nominal post-industrial society since manufacturing, socialized production has been in decline since the 80s.
[00:23:53]  I mean, there's still manuals.
[00:23:55]  Before that, right?
[00:23:55]  Yeah, starting in 1960, you're right.
[00:24:00]  So, which has kind of presented profound challenges for activists wanting to conceive of a better world.
[00:24:10]  But there was a materiality and a material basis for this thing to spring up.
[00:24:15]  But they sprang up, kind of to your question of why was it they were never as big a deal as in other countries, in a country that was on the rise, that was going to become a global superpower.
[00:24:26]  I want to read something that has become the preeminent global superpower.
[00:24:31]  I want to read the opening of my book because I think this goes to it.
[00:24:36]  The fireworks display at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo on September 5, 1901, was a sight to behold.
[00:24:45]  A highlight of the pyrotechnics was the display that spelled out the message, welcome President McKinley, chief of our nation and our empire.
[00:24:57]  And homage to the commander-in-chief of the United States who had arrived to speak at the event and the recent colonial acquisition of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Hawaii, and Guam during the Spanish-American War.
[00:25:12]  I was writing this, I think, before Trump came into office and started channeling McKinley, and I was kind of struck by kind of bookends.
[00:25:22]  You know, McKinley comes in at the point where the U.S. is becoming this global empire.
[00:25:28]  They go into World War I, you know, achieve a lot of prestige internationally.
[00:25:34]  They come out of World War II, and they're just this behemoth.
[00:25:38]  And, you know, here you've got this person, Trump, you know, all these years later, you know, let's do tariffs, let's channel McKinley.
[00:25:47]  And it's on the downside of things, you know, the downbound train to use Bruce Springsteen song.

=== Anarchist Exclusions and Deportations (15:05) ===

[00:25:58]  And Chuck Berry did a song called Downbound Train.
[00:26:00]  Doesn't surprise us.
[00:26:01]  going down to the devil.
[00:26:03]  The dream that he rode on a down-bound drive.
[00:26:09]  I mean, it is interesting.
[00:26:11]  So like, you know, you mentioned the Palmer raids before, and I think that people who know about like the history of kind of radicalism in the United States will probably be familiar with this.
[00:26:20]  For those who aren't, well, we'll get to it in a second.
[00:26:23]  But you can't help but draw a few parallels between the Palmer raids and between like really repression of left-wing beliefs in the early 20th century and a lot of what you saw, especially in the, I guess, the summer months, but I guess we're probably going to continue to see with some of Trump's more political immigration targeting.
[00:26:44]  I don't mean like obviously all the immigration targeting is political, but like targeting people, for instance, for being the woman who wrote an op-ed about, I think it was like starvation in Gaza, who was taken from out of our home or Mahmoud Khalil.
[00:27:00]  Like for people who are being investigated and possibly deported, put through deportation proceedings because of political beliefs.
[00:27:07]  That's really how a lot of the American government's war against left-wing beliefs also started.
[00:27:14]  I mean, you have in 1903 the Anarchist Exclusion Act, which also outlaws, I think, epileptics trying to get into the country.
[00:27:23]  They just sort of added that one in too.
[00:27:25]  Maybe they forgot it from a prior one.
[00:27:27]  And then a lot of this culminates in like, you know, there was sort of a wave of anarchist bombings, which I think have now been kind of mostly forgotten, but there were some pretty famous ones and culminates in like these huge raids and immigration raids because most people, I don't know, most people, but a lot of people involved in left-wing politics were immigrants, or immigrants from various European countries mostly.
[00:27:51]  And the government just sent agents after everyone they could and would just deport you.
[00:27:57]  And they sort of were fairly successful in many cases in breaking up left-wing groups because they saw that like the base here was immigrants.
[00:28:07]  It's yeah, even before the Palmer raids, so after McKinley gets killed, there's this, because the guy who shoots McKinley is this steel worker named Saul Goth, if I'm pronouncing that correctly.
[00:28:23]  God knows how to.
[00:28:23]  It's one of those C's and Z's in it.
[00:28:27]  Apologies for that, but what actually was interesting is, so the guy is, you know, 190, what is it here?
[00:28:35]  It's 1901, and the guy is in the greeting line for McKinley, and he's got a weapon or a pistol wrapped up in a handkerchief.
[00:28:45]  He shoots McKinley in the chest.
[00:28:48]  McKinley holds on for eight days, and there is suddenly a whole hue and cry against anarchism.
[00:28:56]  New York State passes this criminal anarchy law making it a felony to advocate in print the desirability of revolution.
[00:29:06]  But what's remarkable is, let's see, let me read from the book because in Camden, New Jersey, a man named Ethelbert Stone was arrested while McKinley still clung to life on the charge of aiding and abetting the attempted assassination.
[00:29:24]  His crime, he had remarked that he would not be surprised if McKinley was killed.
[00:29:30]  I mean, this kind of reminds me of the storm after Charlie Cook was a kid.
[00:29:35]  I was just going to say there's some conspiracy theories in the world.
[00:29:38]  It was like you really just needed to not say anything because it was going to be misconstrued.
[00:29:44]  Oh, wait, Liz, are you talking about conspiracy theories of the McKinley shooting?
[00:29:48]  And Kirk.
[00:29:49]  I mean, there's like some interesting parallels here.
[00:29:52]  From what I know, it was like people were like, well, he's like a police agent that did it.
[00:29:57]  That was sort of the conspiracy theory at the time, was that he wasn't really an anarchist.
[00:30:01]  He was like a Krozglaw.
[00:30:04]  Listen, and forgive me if you're Czech or Polovich or whatever the fuck that is.
[00:30:07]  There's a lot of Z's in there.
[00:30:08]  We don't have that kind of lettering here.
[00:30:11]  It's true, and you can't, don't pretend like you know how to pronounce it.
[00:30:15]  But I'm just saying that it's funny, you know, when we're talking about these kind of bookends and the Trump admin always reaching back into the McKinley administration and later and kind of after McKinley for both policy, but also they're using a lot of legal precedent as well.
[00:30:30]  That was kind of established then, what we're kind of talking about now, that, you know, these sort of like these big triggering events in both administrations have various conspiracy theories all around them, is all I'm saying.
[00:30:43]  I think where I would go with that is this Paul Simon line from his play, which I forget the title, but the newspapers and the TV, would they kill you if they could?
[00:30:55]  The Cape Man.
[00:30:56]  The newspapers and the TV crews, well, they'd kill you if they could.
[00:31:03]  It's a really great album, very underappreciated.
[00:31:06]  But the newspapers and the TV, they'd kill you if they could.
[00:31:09]  So McKinley gets assassinated.
[00:31:12]  An anarchist is implicated.
[00:31:14]  Anybody even whispering the A-word is implicated.
[00:31:20]  Another case.
[00:31:22]  Another man, Pella Condimenico, was arrested after stabbing a man named John Alfonso in the throat.
[00:31:32]  The two men had fought after accusing each other of being anarchists.
[00:31:36]  Neither were.
[00:31:38]  It's the old McTavish is dead and his brother don't know it.
[00:31:40]  His brother is dead and McTavish don't know it.
[00:31:43]  They're both dead in the very same bed.
[00:31:46]  Neither one knows the other's dead.
[00:31:49]  There's something that you mentioned there, which is that even the like the state law that New York State passes, whatever, they can't advocate for revolution or even ideas about revolution in print.
[00:32:02]  A lot of this stuff pretty quickly came up against the Supreme Court.
[00:32:05]  Like there was an anarchist, a British anarchist that was deported.
[00:32:08]  I think his name was like John.
[00:32:09]  You know, it's like a British name.
[00:32:10]  His name is like John.
[00:32:11]  But he gets deported in, I believe, 1903 after the Anarchist Exclusion Act is passed.
[00:32:18]  And he takes it to the Supreme Court and they're like, nah, that doesn't apply to you.
[00:32:22]  Like, you know, the First Amendment does not apply to people who like come here.
[00:32:25]  You're not a citizen and you're advocating for the overthrow of government.
[00:32:30]  And this is something that we see a lot during kind of up until a certain point is just like these really kind of draconian unconstitutional laws are passed or programs are assembled by the FBI or whatever in order to stamp out what they thought of as the, I guess, the enemy here.
[00:32:57]  You know, I want to fast forward a little bit to the offensively the founding of the Communist Party, because the Communist Party was not a, and which, by the way, had one of the worst names for a party, I think until it became Communist Party USA in like the late 20s.
[00:33:12]  But it was like Communist Workers Party.
[00:33:15]  Well, there were two.
[00:33:16]  Workers' Communist Party.
[00:33:17]  Workers' Communist Party, yes.
[00:33:20]  As opposed to what was the Monty Python thing in the Parliament.
[00:33:22]  Peacher Dam People's Ferrara.
[00:33:24]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:33:24]  I know.
[00:33:25]  Because there was two and they basically had identical names.
[00:33:27]  But you mentioned in the book that the Communist Party was essentially founded in secret.
[00:33:32]  And maybe not so uncommon for communist parties all across the world.
[00:33:37]  But it was founded in secret and was like essentially kind of criminalized or quasi-criminalized for the first 10 years.
[00:33:43]  Yeah, you know, there's an awful lot to unpack there.
[00:33:46]  First, fun fact, when they finally did unite these two different parties into one place, guess what town it was in?
[00:33:53]  What?
[00:33:53]  Woodstock, New York.
[00:33:55]  Oh, yeah, you're right.
[00:33:56]  Yeah.
[00:33:56]  It was on the outskirts, but Woodstock is who would have thought?
[00:34:00]  Yeah.
[00:34:00]  Well, in a big field outside of Woodstock.
[00:34:06]  So a lot of things.
[00:34:07]  Well, first off, we kind of stepped past the palmer rates.
[00:34:11]  Yeah.
[00:34:11]  Because it's complicated.
[00:34:13]  I think Joseph Heller has this line.
[00:34:16]  It might be in Catch 22, and I can't remember it exactly, but it's like, the law is whatever you can get away with.
[00:34:23]  Yeah.
[00:34:24]  And that's a lot of what we're seeing contemporarily.
[00:34:29]  And we're also seeing the pushback, which is heartening.
[00:34:33]  I mean, the old left-wing trope where there is repression, there will be resistance is still true.
[00:34:43]  But the palmer raids happen, and maybe this will help kind of open this up.
[00:34:48]  So the anarchists plant a bomb outside the Attorney General's office in Washington, D.C. FDR actually lives across the street.
[00:34:57]  Palmer is on his way up to bed, so he survives, but the windows are blown out.
[00:35:04]  It was a funny thing.
[00:35:05]  You read the New York Times and they quote FDR saying, well, I don't think the anarchist was wealthy because of his socks.
[00:35:12]  I mean, there was remnants of a human being.
[00:35:16]  And that's what, you know, you just see the patrician sensibility coming through with FDR.
[00:35:23]  But the Palmer raids happen, and you have this Lusk Commission in New York State, because New York is like the most powerful state in the Union, which they go and they round up a bunch of communists.
[00:35:37]  And then Jagger Hoover, who is an uppercomer in the Bureau of Investigation, he rounds up a bunch of people, and he says these are perfect cases, uses the exact same language as somebody else has used recently, but they round up thousands of people.
[00:35:56]  They send 400 of them, I think about 400, on a ship and they deport them out, including Emma Goldman.
[00:36:03]  The several thousand others, I'm probably conflating the numbers, are not deported because things change.
[00:36:12]  People in authority start to question, we've got this Constitution, the United States is singular in freedom, certain freedoms.
[00:36:23]  There's pushback and these folks are eventually released and stuff.
[00:36:28]  But for a while, they're not.
[00:36:30]  But this is the flames that the United Communist Party is born in.
[00:36:37]  And they initially work underground.
[00:36:41]  And they are these foreign clubs, a Russian club, Lithuanian club, Estonian, Finnish, you know, and they've got their own communities and hierarchies and things of that sort.
[00:36:52]  I mean, later the party will become, for lack of a better term, Americanized and stuff.
[00:36:57]  But they initially work as an underground entity.
[00:37:00]  Lenin says, knock it off.
[00:37:02]  You guys, you can publish literature.
[00:37:04]  You can do stuff.
[00:37:05]  Don't be underground.
[00:37:07]  Which I thought was like really interesting because during the Second Red Scare, the Communist Party again goes underground because they say fascism is coming, German-style Hitler fascism is coming.
[00:37:19]  And it hurt them.
[00:37:22]  I mean, I can see where the decision came from.
[00:37:25]  It was not capricious or it was not fantastic.
[00:37:30]  You know, I mean, you just look around in the world today, things, you know, people use the term scary, which I try to avoid because be angry.
[00:37:40]  But anyway, you know, fear is a real, real thing.
[00:37:43]  You know, I acknowledge that.
[00:37:45]  But going underground means immediate, well, actually I'm working on this book now about SDS and encounter the Weathermen who were this quasi-terrorist group.
[00:37:56]  And they went underground and that was kind of it for them.
[00:38:00]  Yeah.
[00:38:00]  You know, as far as like a force of any kind of influence and things like that.
[00:38:05]  So it's real, to use the term, problematic.
[00:38:08]  So the party is birthed underground.
[00:38:14]  And after several years, they do come above ground.
[00:38:17]  You said something that I just want to kind of go back to just real briefly, which is that you talked about Hoover, who's this kind of up-and-coming figure at this moment.
[00:38:26]  And I do think it's worth pointing out that both Hoover and the Bureau were sort of coming into their own alongside the Communist Party also being formed and coming into their own.
[00:38:37]  And these two then institutions, and this is much of your book, are in a kind of dance with each other and also form much of the Bureau's reason for existence, basically, in those early years.
[00:38:52]  And especially all of Hoover's successes and his own professional advancement that he was looking for as careerism really gets tied up in going after this one entity, it seems like.
[00:39:04]  And so it's hard to kind of even talk about his career or the Bureau without talking about the Communist Party.
[00:39:12]  And yet we very much do.
[00:39:14]  And the FBI is its own sort of thing with its own sort of history.
[00:39:20]  But these two bodies are like intimately intertwined.
[00:39:23]  As you're saying that, I'm thinking, boy, wouldn't that be a good Netflix series?
[00:39:27]  I could see a good four or five seasons.
[00:39:30]  Well, there's plenty of material.
[00:39:33]  Actually, Karl Marx wrote this essay on crime.
[00:39:38]  I don't think I fully agree with all the points in the essay, but he does make the point.
[00:39:42]  It's like, you know, without the criminal justice system, they got diddly.
[00:39:48]  That's true.
[00:39:49]  So the two things are dialectically related.
[00:39:52]  They both create each other.
[00:39:54]  Yeah.
[00:39:54]  But it's not in a loop.
[00:39:58]  It's developmental.
[00:40:00]  I think Hoover, well, interesting about Hoover is he is, I believe he gets his start in the Library of Congress.
[00:40:09]  He is a real capable bureaucrat in the kind of the neutral meaning of the term.
[00:40:15]  And he develops this filing system where he says, give me five minutes and I can retrieve records based on this.
[00:40:24]  I mean, you could imagine what Hoover could do today with AI.
[00:40:27]  Oh, my God.
[00:40:28]  I mean, it's an awesome and terrible prospect.
[00:40:31]  But he modernized the Bureau and he carried that forward.
[00:40:37]  The other thing is you see that he's got decades of experience.
[00:40:41]  So when it comes to the tumult of the 60s, he's not just pulling it out of his hat.
[00:40:45]  No, he is doddering and he's confronted with a situation that's totally unique and stuff.
[00:40:52]  But as I've dug into this more, it's like just making fun of Hoover and dismissing him is, you know, okay, fine, ridicule is fine.
[00:41:01]  But, you know, who is it?

=== Hoover's Legacy (10:09) ===

[00:41:03]  Lao Tzu?
[00:41:04]  Know your enemy, know yourself.
[00:41:06]  You can win a thousand battles and never face defeat.
[00:41:09]  It's worth understanding who these folks are.
[00:41:12]  The FBI, a lot of the higher-ups are very professional.
[00:41:16]  They're very good at what they do.
[00:41:18]  They're devious and they're responsible for a lot of very bad things.
[00:41:22]  But it's worth understanding that they are the front line of protecting the status quo.
[00:41:30]  And, you know, if you want something other than the status quo, you got to confront that reality.
[00:41:36]  You know, I want to make clear sort of a certain periodization for our listeners.
[00:41:43]  The Communist Party kind of went through, the different sort of phases of it, kind of up until the end of World War II, where you stop getting into like periods and it kind of just becomes what it is.
[00:41:55]  But the Communist Party USA and the communist movement overall, from its inception, really was guided by an international strategy that was like people tried to apply in different ways in different countries, some more successfully than others, through the Communist International, which was a real thing that I think cannot be like overlooked or even just has to be mentioned,
[00:42:24]  which was a Soviet Union-based international.
[00:42:29]  There have been several internationals before this.
[00:42:30]  Anybody who's familiar, obviously Karl Marx, said First International, blah, blah, blah, blah.
[00:42:36]  At the time that the Communist International was formed, I think there was three international.
[00:42:39]  There's the second international, two and a half international, and then the Communist International, the third international.
[00:42:44]  And then the fourth.
[00:42:45]  And well, that was later.
[00:42:47]  And there's about 54th internationals.
[00:42:52]  So that's 20.
[00:42:53]  That's about 20 internationals.
[00:42:55]  And now there's no internationals.
[00:42:57]  Although actually to our people, there still is the Socialist International.
[00:43:01]  There still is the Socialist International.
[00:43:04]  And then there's conferences, unfortunately.
[00:43:06]  Yes, yes.
[00:43:07]  And then there's also, I believe, there's whatever International Democratic Party is a part of, but I can't remember what it's called.
[00:43:13]  But it exists.
[00:43:17]  The first period was kind of part of like the Bolshevikization of a lot of parties, not just in the U.S., but like across the world, where you had these parties that broadly were aligned with Lenin or like the Zimmer Wald left or whatever.
[00:43:32]  They were left-wing, often mostly, in fact, probably always opposed to World War I.
[00:43:39]  But they had different beliefs and they had different structures.
[00:43:42]  And then, you know, sort of Lenin kind of came up with this way to formalize that.
[00:43:48]  And in the U.S., that sort of took a while.
[00:43:50]  It took about 10 years, especially because they were underground and there was two different ones.
[00:43:55]  And then you have the second period, which is like sort of, I guess from like 1922 on, which was like them essentially trying to poach workers from other, or like the base of other socialist parties.
[00:44:09]  And, you know, there was a series of failed revolutions in Europe or short-lived or just, you know, dead in the cradle revolutions in Europe.
[00:44:19]  And sort of a consolidation of what Marxism-Leninism meant or what Leninism meant, because Marxism-Leninism, I guess, came across a little later.
[00:44:28]  And then third period where they sort of veer off and declare war on everybody.
[00:44:34]  Unfortunately, that fails very miserably.
[00:44:37]  And then in 34, 35, they're like, actually, remember, we're friends with everybody.
[00:44:42]  And then, as you described earlier, when the Communist Party USA makes nice with Roosevelt, communist parties across the world do that and sort of make nice with everybody.
[00:44:50]  They enter the government in some places.
[00:44:52]  In Spain, they fight on the side of the Republic in the Civil War.
[00:44:54]  In France, they enter the government oftentimes unsuccessfully.
[00:45:00]  And then in 19, well, throughout World War II, which starts in different places in different times, they support the war effort because the Soviet Union, although not at first, which also does them great damage in many places.
[00:45:12]  But once the Soviet Union is attacked by Nazi Germany, they support the war effort and try to get everyone to go fight the Nazis.
[00:45:20]  And I think broadly, that is kind of pre-World War II, pre-Red Scare in America communism, or pre-second Red Scare communism.
[00:45:30]  And it's interesting because no matter kind of what their orientation is towards the government or towards other parties or anything, the FBI is just like, we fucking need to get, we need to kill these guys.
[00:45:44]  But it's interesting because there's also these really massive wars within the Communist Party itself during this time.
[00:45:50]  And Jay Lovestone, who later is a, and this, and if you, a lot of guys around Jay Lovestone have a kind of similar history, but was, I believe, a Socialist Party USA member, then a leader of the Communist Party USA, and then expelled in the 20s and then a Trotskyist and then a CIA asset, I guess technically not an agent, but he is actually expelled for American exceptionalism,
[00:46:19]  which is a term that I believe Stalin coined while expelling Jay Lovestone from the Communist Party USA.
[00:46:26]  And it's funny, though, because his thesis was that like America has this really advanced economy.
[00:46:32]  It's kind of like not like Europe.
[00:46:34]  And I'm not defending Jay Lovestone here, but he wasn't wrong in some ways.
[00:46:40]  And it's interesting because you have this, and you mentioned this in the book, you have this like both these wars within the Communist Party, and then you have this war against the, or this war waged on them by the FBI, because they're not really effective at waging their own war against the FBI.
[00:46:55]  And the FBI really ably exploits, in Jay Lovestone's case, the CIA exploits these divisions within the Communist Party.
[00:47:04]  You know, so I did a when I wrote the book, I deliberately did not go into the internal politics too far into the internal politics of the CPUSA.
[00:47:16]  There are volumes and volumes, and people are still trying to understand it.
[00:47:22]  And, you know, I've read some of it.
[00:47:23]  It's fascinating stuff.
[00:47:25]  I mean, the internal politics of these, you know, having worked with the RCP for many years, become keenly aware of the drive to get it to the correct line.
[00:47:37]  And I'm still trying to process what good was it all.
[00:47:42]  I mean, you know, there's obviously having an ideological compass, you know, is of some importance, having morals and, you know, all that.
[00:47:51]  But then there's just this inter-necine sectarianism tearing itself apart.
[00:47:57]  It's all very problematic.
[00:47:59]  I wanted to step back a little because you just covered a huge swath of stuff.
[00:48:04]  One thing is, so yesterday was Armistice Day, the end of World War I.
[00:48:09]  And one thing that doesn't get mentioned a lot, what a disaster for capitalism that was.
[00:48:14]  Yeah.
[00:48:15]  You know, it's like Germany almost, well, Germany didn't almost, but the rise of Hitler is rooted in how that war ended.
[00:48:24]  You know, there's an attempt at revolution by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.
[00:48:29]  You know, they're assassinated by these Free Corps, which are a lot of World War I vets who will, you know, end up, many of them become stormtroopers.
[00:48:38]  And this goes back to the periodization.
[00:48:41]  So the periodization is, you know, I think your assessment was on point, but this first period is: look, revolution is coursing around the globe.
[00:48:50]  What Marx foresaw is happening.
[00:48:54]  There's reason to believe this is true.
[00:48:56]  Russia becomes the Soviet Union.
[00:48:59]  I believe there's a revolution in Hungary.
[00:49:01]  Bella Lugosi's in the government.
[00:49:03]  Not Bella Lugosi.
[00:49:06]  Yeah, it was Bella Lugosi.
[00:49:07]  Bella.
[00:49:08]  No, Bella Kuhn.
[00:49:09]  No, no, no.
[00:49:10]  I know who Bella Kuhn is.
[00:49:12]  Bella Lugosi was also part of that revolution.
[00:49:16]  Well, you know, I don't know.
[00:49:18]  He wasn't in the government.
[00:49:18]  I think he was in some way.
[00:49:19]  You're being funny.
[00:49:20]  No, I'm not being funny.
[00:49:21]  No, Well, it is kind of funny.
[00:49:23]  And Bella Lugu, what a face.
[00:49:26]  What a face on that.
[00:49:27]  Bella Kuhn.
[00:49:28]  No, the best draft cinema, too.
[00:49:31]  Well, I'm saying, but I think both Bella Lugosi and Bella Kuhn.
[00:49:34]  Yeah, I think you're interesting looking guys.
[00:49:36]  Do you know who could play a good Bella Kuhn?
[00:49:39]  Bella Lugosi.
[00:49:40]  But no one else could do it.
[00:49:45]  But yeah, that's why he became our Dracula is because he had to leave after the revolution in Hungary.
[00:49:53]  Now, this is fascinating stuff.
[00:49:55]  Now, that would be a good movie.
[00:49:57]  I know.
[00:49:58]  Bella Leosho.
[00:49:58]  Getting the call.
[00:49:59]  Yeah.
[00:50:01]  Sad Bella Lugosi.
[00:50:02]  So many Bellas.
[00:50:03]  So many Bellas.
[00:50:04]  Too many Bellas.
[00:50:05]  Wasn't there Beauty in the Beast?
[00:50:06]  Was there a Bella?
[00:50:07]  Bella.
[00:50:08]  Yeah, but surely the Beast would have been Hungarian.
[00:50:10]  And beauty.
[00:50:12]  I think it's all kind of, well, a lot of fairy tales are Hungarian-coded.
[00:50:17]  But anyway, sorry.
[00:50:18]  Everyone's doing these revolution.
[00:50:19]  I mean, in Italy, there's all this sort of revolutionary upsurge.
[00:50:25]  Right.
[00:50:25]  So the world is being, you know, to use the cliche, it's being turned upside down.
[00:50:30]  This is the first period.
[00:50:31]  Yes.
[00:50:32]  You know, Lenin is like, can't stop, won't stop.
[00:50:35]  You know, revolution is.
[00:50:36]  Yeah, just keeps going.
[00:50:40]  But that gives way to the second period, which is we need to consolidate.
[00:50:44]  You know, things are a little chill as the new economic policy happens in the Soviet Union.
[00:50:49]  But then, you know, that doesn't last.
[00:50:51]  And they usher in the third period, which is steeped in this Marxist or political, economic theorem of the general crisis of capitalism.
[00:51:03]  Capitalism is just going to collapse.
[00:51:05]  And, you know, you got to be careful with that.
[00:51:08]  Like Lenin writes this book, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.

=== The Rise of Hitler (14:26) ===

[00:51:13]  It's like, how do you know that?
[00:51:15]  It's like imperialism has to go away before you can say that.
[00:51:19]  I mean, are we in late stage capitalism?
[00:51:21]  You know, I don't like it when people say that because I'm like, no, there can be way later stages than this.
[00:51:26]  Yeah, I mean, it'd be nice, but, you know.
[00:51:28]  But yeah, the thing is to not get, well, whatever, historically determinist about such things.
[00:51:36]  But the third period is bad because this is the communists telling everybody, we are on the cusp of revolution.
[00:51:45]  I think it gets expressed worse in Germany, Weimar Germany, where the party is like the social democrats are fascists.
[00:51:54]  And they were bad.
[00:51:55]  The social democrats did attack the communists.
[00:51:57]  I was about to say, people give, and I just want to give a little bit of a defense here for the Communist Party of Germany.
[00:52:04]  And I also want to correct myself because I've always said the communist, you know, that famous quote that people sort of use to denigrate the Communist Party of Germany, after Hitler, our turn, which I've always said, well, it's technically true, in half the country at least.
[00:52:18]  That quote I found out was actually by a social democratic politician.
[00:52:21]  It was not from the Communist Party of Germany.
[00:52:24]  But people always talk like The three arrows, but you often see in like sort of antifus stuff, right?
[00:52:31]  Those arrows, one was against monarchism, one was against Nazism, and the other was against communism.
[00:52:36]  And that was sort of the social democratic orientation towards the communists.
[00:52:40]  And so, and also a lot of the social democrats in Germany, they were in bed with the fat cats.
[00:52:45]  But still, it's clear, listen, hindsight 2020, clear there were some mistakes made on both sides there, but people really blame the Communist Party of Germany and Talmud and all these guys for giving us Hitler.
[00:52:57]  But I'm like, you know what?
[00:52:59]  I'm pretty sure it was the Social Democrats who voted for the enabling of it.
[00:53:02]  They betrayed, yeah.
[00:53:03]  They betrayed.
[00:53:04]  They betrayed.
[00:53:06]  Well, my sense is there's a whole package, but as you're saying that, I'm thinking like, you know, Stephen Miller, there's Stephen Miller and there's Kamala Harris, right?
[00:53:18]  I mean, and this came up around, well, I don't want to get in too deep, but over the matter of Gaza, you know, there is a difference in how these people approach things.
[00:53:29]  What the Biden administration supported, you know, in Gaza when it was going on was reprehensible.
[00:53:36]  He enabled the whole thing.
[00:53:39]  But it could be worse, you know, and that's what I think Hitler showed.
[00:53:43]  You know, there is a distinction between these very powerful people at the pillars of these governmental administrations.
[00:53:53]  So, and I'm trying to make an analogy and maybe I don't know how well it holds up.
[00:53:58]  I mean, I will say the KPD, I think you are correct in assessing that they basically alienated themselves from everybody.
[00:54:06]  Like, not just the KPD, but like communist parties throughout Europe really lost a lot of friends and maybe lost a lot of support from like workers that did all the Social Democratic parties in Europe had huge amounts of worker support that the communists were trying to get from them.
[00:54:24]  And their tactic of trying to get that support by like this attack that they were doing just didn't objectively didn't work.
[00:54:30]  I mean, I'm not saying they are theoretically wrong, but it didn't work in practice.
[00:54:34]  Yeah, so the communists target the social democratic government as social fascists.
[00:54:41]  At the same time, the Nazis are gaining steam.
[00:54:45]  And the Nazis, I did this inter, if people are curious, I have a website, myname.net, aaronleonard.net.
[00:54:52]  That's A-A-Ron Leonard.net.
[00:54:56]  Two A's.
[00:54:57]  Yeah, well, you do, but try to go into Starbucks sometime and see what they come up with.
[00:55:03]  Fair enough.
[00:55:03]  Fair enough.
[00:55:05]  I thank Kay and Peel, though, for getting that spelling correct.
[00:55:09]  Anyway, I have an article there, interview with the historian about the rise of fascism and Richard Evans.
[00:55:21]  And he talks about the tens of thousands of armed men who helped bring Hitler to power.
[00:55:28]  And it was based on not only the Free Corps in the wake of World War I, but then the street fighting with the paramilitaries of the Communist Party, which these people really kind of sharpened their blades.
[00:55:45]  And this invariably did lead to the rise of Hitler, who was like one-third.
[00:55:52]  He had something akin to one-third of the electorate, and it was dwindling.
[00:55:56]  But he seized power.
[00:55:57]  And I still kind of puzzle over this.
[00:56:00]  It's like, I mean, the question is, well, what if there wasn't a Hitler?
[00:56:05]  There probably still would have been something really bad in Germany, but there's nobody like Hitler.
[00:56:10]  And I say that in the most derogatory way imaginable.
[00:56:14]  This man was just awful, exponentially awful.
[00:56:18]  And that actually plays a role in how history unfolds.
[00:56:23]  But the communists lose.
[00:56:26]  Hitler comes to power.
[00:56:29]  The first thing he goes after is the communists.
[00:56:31]  He puts Ernst Thalmann in Dachau, lets him wallow there for close to 10 years before executing him.
[00:56:39]  But then he goes after the Social Democrats.
[00:56:42]  And nobody is protesting.
[00:56:44]  There isn't a mass.
[00:56:46]  There's one or two sporadic efforts.
[00:56:48]  But there isn't the kind of movement that's taking Hitler serious.
[00:56:52]  I think the, I don't know if the communists felt like their turn would come next.
[00:56:58]  You are correct.
[00:56:59]  Literally, it was a social democrat who coined that rather peace in our time kind of a quick.
[00:57:06]  It's a tough one.
[00:57:09]  But then the whole period shifts.
[00:57:11]  Second period, okay, third period's over.
[00:57:14]  Ding, ding, ding, next class, popular front.
[00:57:17]  Yeah.
[00:57:17]  You know, and then it's like, you know, veering off the other way if we have to unite with everybody we can to stop this emerging fascism.
[00:57:28]  And, you know, that brings us, you know, into the period of the 1939 and the non-aggression pact with Germany.
[00:57:37]  And, you know, it's just one gosh darn thing after another.
[00:57:40]  To linger on sort of the Popular Front period for a second, this actually went pretty well for the communists in certain ways.
[00:57:48]  But I think that it's interesting because both the third period and the popular front period really sort of presage a lot of the Communist Party's post-war or actually, let me phrase that because it's almost like all, they kind of, their post-war orientation through whatever, 45 until today, they sort of mix up all of the different periods and just deploy them occasionally.
[00:58:10]  Like they'll go underground like, you know, the first period, but then they'll be like, really, they'll attack all these other sort of left-wing groups in sort of third period in like the 1960s, 1970s.
[00:58:20]  And then they'll basically ally with the Democratic Party.
[00:58:24]  And now, I mean, now they're sort of in an eternal one-sided popular front where the Democratic Party is like, we don't even know you guys, but they're like, we're voting for you.
[00:58:35]  But it's interesting because there are these distinct periods.
[00:58:38]  And then the political orientation of the periods after World War II just is really not as sharp.
[00:58:47]  And I think in large part that's due to one of Stalin's worst ideas.
[00:58:54]  And yeah, you know, and he had, and I, you know, I say this to somebody, you know, who was an objective observer.
[00:58:59]  He had some bad ideas sometimes.
[00:59:02]  Destroying the Communist International was one of one of, I mean, that was like almost the death knell for any chance at really international revolution.
[00:59:10]  International revolutions after that succeeded in spite of that.
[00:59:15]  But it's interesting.
[00:59:18]  In the U.S., they were really sort of attached themselves to Roosevelt.
[00:59:21]  And Eleanor Roosevelt was fairly, she was a little more open-minded, I feel like, thanks.
[00:59:25]  Yeah, she was definitely more left than her husband.
[00:59:28]  Yeah, and she would, I get to sense they probably didn't get along that well.
[00:59:32]  Really?
[00:59:33]  She seems so nice.
[00:59:36]  But I did discover FDR was pretty bad news.
[00:59:39]  Yeah.
[00:59:40]  I mean, I discovered this famous quote, like 1934.
[00:59:45]  I mean, the Republicans were all in his business all the time.
[00:59:47]  Ah, you're soft on the communists.
[00:59:50]  And he's like, no, I'm not.
[00:59:52]  We're actually doing something about these people.
[00:59:55]  You have to undermine the soil that's engendering them.
[00:59:59]  I mean, and he famously, I think in 1939, 1940, he talks to a gathering of a youth conference, which included a huge component of the Young Communist League.
[01:00:11]  And he basically tells them, you know, look, I understand some of you are communists.
[01:00:16]  And you have the ability to say that, but be careful.
[01:00:19]  And then, you know, within a year, they pass the Smith Act, which is essentially, you know, if you're an immigrant and you're a communist, you know, you're a persona non grata.
[01:00:30]  But then there's another stipulation which basically federalizes this New York concept.
[01:00:36]  New York concept, 1902, criminal anarchy, you can't write about revolution.
[01:00:42]  The Supreme Court upholds it.
[01:00:45]  Like, I think 20 years later, this guy, Benjamin Gitlo, who had been a Communist Party leader, a lot of the Communist Party leaders, some of them didn't turn out too well.
[01:00:55]  Gitlo ended up becoming something of, became a renegade.
[01:01:00]  But the Supreme Court issues a Gitlo decision.
[01:01:04]  People don't know this, saying, you know, look, we don't have to sit around and wait for the spark to start a fire.
[01:01:10]  We can stop this stuff now.
[01:01:12]  Barney Fife, nip it in the bud.
[01:01:15]  And not to be the most devil's advocate guy that's ever been born.
[01:01:21]  You aren't.
[01:01:22]  I'm not.
[01:01:23]  No, but maybe I am.
[01:01:26]  It is interesting because, and as somebody who is knowingly guilty of this, it's like, let's be completely honest.
[01:01:35]  The Communist Party USA was trying to overthrow, or at least theoretically should have been trying, whether they were actually trying is, you know, up to a little subjective.
[01:01:47]  But theoretically, they should have been trying to overthrow the government of the United States and replace it with a different form of government.
[01:01:56]  And so it's like, and people always do this, and I do this too.
[01:01:59]  It's an effective thing to do.
[01:02:00]  I'm not saying you shouldn't do this, but it's like, you're always like, well, wait, why are you trying to take away my ability to overthrow you?
[01:02:06]  And it's good to use the hypocrisy of liberalism against itself.
[01:02:10]  You know what I mean?
[01:02:11]  Because it can be effective and it can work.
[01:02:13]  But the reality is, is when they say stuff like this, I'm like, I don't really have much of an argument.
[01:02:16]  Like, yeah, the Communist Party USA, they would have locked your asses up.
[01:02:20]  Well, no, it's a good point.
[01:02:21]  And I would have supported them.
[01:02:23]  It's a true point.
[01:02:24]  But there's another point.
[01:02:25]  It's like, laws are laws.
[01:02:28]  To the degree they stayed within those bounds, there is a constitutional imperative that says you can say stuff.
[01:02:35]  You can say whatever the heck you want.
[01:02:37]  You start moving on it.
[01:02:38]  We've got laws for that, too.
[01:02:41]  And this is where a distinction gets drawn.
[01:02:44]  And I argue that the party throughout its history largely did stay within the laws.
[01:02:51]  Now, they also didn't at periods, too.
[01:02:53]  Yeah.
[01:02:54]  You know, and it's true.
[01:02:55]  I mean, yeah, when the 11 leaders were put on trial in Center Street in 1949, the Communist Manifesto was read into the transcript.
[01:03:10]  Yeah, yeah, it's a revolutionary doctrine.
[01:03:14]  And in 1969, there was this case against a Ku Klux Klan person in Ohio called Brandenburg versus the state of Ohio.
[01:03:22]  Because the Klan, they have an agenda too, and it's pretty screwed up, violent agenda.
[01:03:27]  But the court said you can say this.
[01:03:31]  You can't say that.
[01:03:31]  That's a foundational case for your speech.
[01:03:34]  But for most of the 20th century, it was illegal.
[01:03:38]  And I think if you asked any school person, school boy or girl, you know, well, could you, I mean, personally, you know, back in the day, I'd be on the street corner screaming revolution, revolution.
[01:03:52]  Turn the clock back 20 years, I would be committing a felony.
[01:03:56]  Well, it's interesting because I feel like there's this throughout the book, one of the main enemies that the Communist Party USA has is the FBI.
[01:04:06]  But then also it's this relationship with liberalism and like the liberalism of the US government, which like waxes and wanes throughout the years, I guess.
[01:04:18]  But like I think part of the, one of the reasons that they weren't really able to get as much purchase.
[01:04:23]  I mean, the main part, or not the main part, but the heyday of the CPUSA was in the 1930s, where they had like over 100,000 members, right?
[01:04:31]  Well over 100,000 members, I think.
[01:04:34]  And these big rallies, they were a national force.
[01:04:38]  But I think one of the things that stymied them throughout their history is not only repression from the government, but also the liberal outlook of certain politicians and the Constitution, I guess.
[01:04:57]  Because, you know, and this is not going to come as a shock to anybody, but like Communist Party or Communist movements have often thrived under really harsh repression, right?
[01:05:09]  You know, in Russia, you know, in pre-1917, Russia, you know, in China, for instance, like even in Vietnam, like there was, there were these, like, there was these really repressive governments, and in various cases throughout South America, too, that they were able to like fight against in this way, like in almost open war, not maybe clandestine, but warfare.
[01:05:35]  Whereas the U.S., it was like the Communist Party kind of couldn't get around to that point, right?

=== Robeson's Communist Controversy (11:24) ===

[01:05:39]  Like there was a secret police, political police in many instances, that were arresting them, but they were never able to like heighten the tensions enough to where they were able to fight back on that kinetic plane.
[01:05:51]  I guess that makes sense.
[01:05:52]  That sort of stuff didn't actually happen until the 1960s, 1970s, and didn't work.
[01:05:56]  Well, I guess my sense, and I think I may have made this point earlier, is look, the United States, your point on exceptionalism, is an extremely rich country.
[01:06:06]  And from 1947 until about 1970, you know, you could be an auto worker and you'd buy a boat.
[01:06:13]  Yeah.
[01:06:14]  You know, you would have a little, you know, country cottage on the lake or, you know, a little place down the shore.
[01:06:20]  It was a good life.
[01:06:21]  And, you know, it was the goodies.
[01:06:23]  And I think the material basis for people not gravitating toward a radical solution was really what kept things in check.
[01:06:34]  This is the development of the middle class.
[01:06:36]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:06:37]  A nice middle class life.
[01:06:38]  And that's all gone now.
[01:06:39]  Well, we have credit cards.
[01:06:41]  And people, I mean, this is David Harvey likes this term of fictitious capital.
[01:06:47]  Yeah.
[01:06:47]  I mean, right now there are probably trillions of dollars floating out there ready to get burned up.
[01:06:53]  But, you know, that's another conversation.
[01:06:57]  So you mentioned the trial of 11 communists down on Center Street.
[01:07:01]  And that's the Smith Act trial, right?
[01:07:04]  Yeah, and it's intense.
[01:07:07]  There's a whole coming together.
[01:07:09]  So this second Red Scare gets going.
[01:07:12]  Truman, he institutes loyalty oaths.
[01:07:16]  He announces the Truman Doctrine.
[01:07:21]  There's these espionage scares where some of these people come out of the woodwork like Whitaker Chambers saying they were spying for the Soviet Union.
[01:07:30]  I mean, the U.S. and the Soviets were allies.
[01:07:33]  People forget this.
[01:07:34]  You know, the communists were passing, some of the communists were complicit in passing secrets to the Soviets because they didn't want them to be at a disadvantage.
[01:07:44]  It was kind of in the, you know, Truman himself acknowledged it was only a matter of time before the Soviets got the bomb, just because a lot of the physics was actually in the public record.
[01:07:58]  Point being is a lot of wind was whipped up about, you know, these spy cases.
[01:08:04]  And, you know, people like the Rosenbergs, you know, not the wife, but the husband probably was spying.
[01:08:11]  There's now evidence.
[01:08:12]  His ass definitely did that shit.
[01:08:14]  Absolutely.
[01:08:14]  Yeah.
[01:08:15]  Yeah, but did he actually turn, you know, give the Soviets the bomb?
[01:08:18]  I don't think that.
[01:08:19]  But I would argue that.
[01:08:21]  He should have.
[01:08:22]  If he didn't, he should.
[01:08:23]  I agree.
[01:08:23]  But I kind of think, I think he did.
[01:08:26]  Let me, before anybody gets all pissed off at me, he did it, and he's a hero for having done it.
[01:08:34]  And I think if, because the U.S., that was part of their case against him, right?
[01:08:37]  It's like he helped them get a nuclear bomb.
[01:08:40]  He probably had some part in it.
[01:08:42]  I think a lot of people did.
[01:08:43]  Yeah, I think I do.
[01:08:44]  I agree.
[01:08:44]  I think a lot of people.
[01:08:46]  I think there's evidence that a lot of people.
[01:08:47]  I think Klaus Fuchs was the one who gave out the best technology.
[01:08:50]  But my thing with the Rosenbergs, as far as this book is like, you know, just like the guy, well, they executed him.
[01:08:58]  And his wife.
[01:08:59]  Yeah.
[01:09:00]  And, you know, they the reason they even brought charges against her, and it just shows you how nasty the Department of Justice was, they're trying to leverage her against him.
[01:09:10]  Roy Cohn.
[01:09:11]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:09:11]  So it's just ugly stuff.
[01:09:13]  But that's part of the kind of a certain moment in the second Red Scare.
[01:09:17]  But let's go back to the 11.
[01:09:19]  Okay, so you've got these spy scandals going on, getting people in a certain frame of mind, like there's this dangerous conspiracy lurking.
[01:09:28]  Then you have the Hollywood 10 in 1947.
[01:09:32]  They're brought in front of Congress.
[01:09:34]  They're asked to admit Communist Party membership.
[01:09:38]  The FBI has researched them.
[01:09:40]  They have their cards.
[01:09:42]  You can actually call up the transcript and they've got the party card numbers.
[01:09:46]  So this is the evidence they were party people.
[01:09:50]  They refuse to answer.
[01:09:52]  And rather than taking the fifth, they refuse to answer.
[01:09:55]  So they get contempt.
[01:09:57]  And they're sentenced to a year or two in prison each.
[01:10:00]  People like Dalton Trumbo and Yeah, I don't know how I got this, but I have a signed Polaroid from him.
[01:10:08]  Wow, that's I don't know where the fuck it came from.
[01:10:10]  Probably eBay.
[01:10:11]  But, you know, the thing, it's interesting because so they're, you know, this is like very clever on the part of the powers to be to put these quote-unquote intellectuals and eggheads up there because they're less sympathetic than some of the celebrities who, you know, had they been challenged and stuff.
[01:10:31]  So that happens.
[01:10:32]  And then we go into 1948, 1949.
[01:10:36]  Paul Robeson, this towering figure, singer, actor, lawyer, athlete.
[01:10:42]  A true multi-hyphen.
[01:10:43]  Yeah, you know, African-American man.
[01:10:46]  You know, fights for integration into baseball, goes to a conference in Paris, says something along the lines of, let's not have another war.
[01:10:54]  It's not good for anybody.
[01:10:56]  It gets conflated to black people are not going to fight and defend America.
[01:11:00]  I'm coarsely paraphrasing, but that is, yeah, that is basically what they do.
[01:11:04]  They turn it into a Fox News moment.
[01:11:07]  Robeson is supposed to perform in Peekskill, New York at a summer concert at the end of August.
[01:11:13]  While that's happening, 11 leaders of the Communist Party, their trial for violating the Smith Act gets underway.
[01:11:22]  The violation of the Smith Act gets back to your point about the dissolution of the Komen term.
[01:11:28]  1944, Earl Browder leads the Communist Party.
[01:11:31]  He's kind of seen the party through its greatest expansion.
[01:11:36]  Communism is 20th century in Americanism.
[01:11:39]  He envisions after World War II, and you could see this.
[01:11:43]  The U.S. and the Soviets are allies.
[01:11:44]  We're going to have a whole different deal.
[01:11:46]  I'll shake hands with Vanderbilt if I need to.
[01:11:49]  He was reading that like Life magazine things about like saying nice things about Stalin during World War II.
[01:11:54]  He's like, see, look, like they like us now.
[01:11:57]  So what he does is, we're going to get rid of this Communist Party USA name.
[01:12:01]  We'll make it an association.
[01:12:04]  The Communist Party of America.
[01:12:06]  Stalin says, I don't like this.
[01:12:08]  Jacques Ducla, the true leader of the PCF, is like, this guy's a fucking sucker.
[01:12:15]  He sucks.
[01:12:16]  So suddenly everybody who supported Earl Browder and the Communist Party was like, we've always hated Browder.
[01:12:22]  He's a revisionist.
[01:12:24]  Browder is driven out.
[01:12:25]  It was interesting looking at and seeing later in life Browder talking to the FBI just to have a sympathetic ear.
[01:12:32]  Oh, God.
[01:12:33]  And his grandson, obviously his grandson, weird, one of the guys who went and looted Russia in the 1990s, but also has a lot of weird stuff with him now.
[01:12:42]  But his great-grandson, I found this out while reading your book, because I was like, I was looking up for some reason, just like, I was like, because his sons were famous mathematicians.
[01:12:51]  Earl Browder's sons, oh no, his brothers are, I think his sons were.
[01:12:55]  His grandson was the guy who looted Russia.
[01:12:57]  And then his great-grandson came up with do notpay.com.
[01:13:01]  What is do notpay.com?
[01:13:02]  I think it's some shit like it's like some shit where you like contest like parking tickets.
[01:13:08]  Okay.
[01:13:09]  I'm just hearing it and like that just seems like a really noble undertaking.
[01:13:13]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:13:14]  I'm like, you know what?
[01:13:15]  I'm like, that's like, do not.
[01:13:16]  That's almost common.
[01:13:18]  I'm like, that's fair enough.
[01:13:19]  But sorry, sorry, I interrupted.
[01:13:21]  I interrupted.
[01:13:21]  So Robeson's going to sing in Peakskill.
[01:13:24]  Yes.
[01:13:25]  Earl Browder had disbanded the party.
[01:13:27]  Stalin said, knock it off.
[01:13:29]  The party is reconstituted.
[01:13:31]  And that's when they broke the Smith Act.
[01:13:33]  They created a party with the intent of advocating the overthrow of the United States government.
[01:13:39]  So that's what they're charged with.
[01:13:41]  The trial is like, if people are familiar with the Chicago 8, Chicago 7 trial, total media event, this is kind of the forebear of that.
[01:13:50]  The lawyers are actually put in prison for contempt.
[01:13:53]  The judges hostile.
[01:13:55]  They're all convicted.
[01:13:57]  But the trial is going on at the same time as this Peekskill concert is going on.
[01:14:01]  Ben Davis and I think Jack Satchel, two Communist Party leaders, go to the concert.
[01:14:08]  So the concert is besieged by a bunch of reactionaries with the American Legion at the point.
[01:14:15]  It's supposed to take place at the end of August, and the concert site is ransacked by these vigilantes.
[01:14:22]  The concert's canceled.
[01:14:24]  Robeson's on the train platform.
[01:14:26]  He has to go back to New York.
[01:14:28]  It's rescheduled for September.
[01:14:30]  It comes off the concert's success.
[01:14:34]  But then as people are leaving, the reactionaries and community people have set up a gauntlet and they're just hurling huge, deadly stones at the cars.
[01:14:44]  The picture you have in the book of that is fucking crazy.
[01:14:48]  Because I knew about the Peakskill riot, but it looks like a staged photo or something.
[01:14:53]  It's like people are really.
[01:14:55]  It looks like one of the lynching photos.
[01:14:57]  Yeah, it really does.
[01:14:58]  And so same sort of.
[01:14:59]  Like the postcards of the hanging.
[01:15:00]  There's kind of a cop sort of exploding out of his Sam Brown belt and all these people like really viciously screaming early shit.
[01:15:09]  But the two events take place at the same time, the Peekskill riot and the trial.
[01:15:15]  And also Robert Thompson, one of the guys who's on trial, he's viciously attacked.
[01:15:21]  I think a year earlier, he lives in Sunnyside, Queens, and two guys come out of nowhere and try to beat him to death.
[01:15:28]  He's a war veteran, decorated war veteran.
[01:15:30]  He kind of beats him off.
[01:15:32]  He'll later go underground, be put in prison.
[01:15:35]  He'll get attacked again by a Yugoslav fascist.
[01:15:38]  I mean, they really wanted to kill Robert Thompson.
[01:15:43]  You know, this is what these people were up against.
[01:15:45]  I mean, this was, you know, you had to have some courage to be with this stuff.
[01:15:51]  As screwed up as the policies could be and the draconian hierarchy and the internal politics and all that, which is just maddening.
[01:16:00]  But still, if you were that, you had to be ready to get beaten and go to prison.
[01:16:05]  And, you know, you had to basically back up your speech, back up your principles.
[01:16:11]  Yeah, I actually, I knew, I knew Simon Gerson's daughter, I don't know what, like six years.
[01:16:19]  I met her like six years ago, and she sort of told me about some stuff related to this.
[01:16:23]  Because he was, he was, I don't know if he was one of the 11, but he was one of the people that was picked up during the Smith Act stuff.
[01:16:29]  Simon Gerson was, I believe he was an assistant to us, a New York government official, and he kind of got driven out of office.
[01:16:38]  Yeah, he was like a let he was like the New York, I think the New York Communist Party is like a legislative.
[01:16:44]  You folks in New York, you've got like a kind of a sketchy history there, you know?
[01:16:48]  Yeah, yeah, but because Ben Davis was in office, right?
[01:16:52]  City council meeting.
[01:16:53]  Yeah, they arrested a city and city councilman, and then the rest of the city council votes to kick him off the council.
[01:17:01]  And he's replaced by, you know, somebody who a non-communist.

=== Morris Childs' Informers (09:25) ===

[01:17:04]  Yeah, that's democracy for you.
[01:17:05]  Yeah.
[01:17:06]  And they won't let him pick his own replacement, which is another thing.
[01:17:09]  You know, when I was in high school, we had this group, the Stoned Rabbits People's Party.
[01:17:14]  Great name.
[01:17:14]  You know, back in the day, you know, we wanted the ability to smoke cigarettes on school grounds.
[01:17:20]  They didn't let you?
[01:17:21]  No, they didn't let us.
[01:17:23]  And I was president of student council based on my party.
[01:17:26]  So I kind of called a meeting and I got this rule passed.
[01:17:32]  So you know what they did?
[01:17:32]  They kicked me out of school and they called another meeting.
[01:17:36]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:17:36]  So it's like that's how you know what?
[01:17:38]  You learned a lot.
[01:17:40]  That's how democracy works.
[01:17:42]  Wow.
[01:17:44]  So I want to fix.
[01:17:45]  I quit smoking, but I went Benjamin Gitlo on the smoking stuff, I guess.
[01:17:52]  So the Communist Party, I mean, one of the reasons that they do the Smith Action, all this stuff, is they're like, we need to just arrest the leadership.
[01:17:59]  Because they sort of kind of correctly figure that if we just basically decapitate the party, it's going to be run around like a damn chicken without a head.
[01:18:09]  But also, it'll drive, and this is like where you sort of see some of the COIN-Telpro logic come into play.
[01:18:14]  It'll drive sort of a logic of paranoia within the people who weren't arrested.
[01:18:19]  Because the reality is, is that there were informers, as you really ably sort of show throughout the book, there was informers from basically day one of the party.
[01:18:28]  A lot of informers.
[01:18:29]  A lot of informers.
[01:18:30]  And high up, too.
[01:18:32]  Yes.
[01:18:32]  Yeah.
[01:18:33]  Slow down, actually.
[01:18:35]  Really all over the place.
[01:18:36]  At a certain point, I mean, the famous, the sort of famous crack about the CPUSA is that like everybody at a meeting is an informer or whatever.
[01:18:43]  This is like the 1980s.
[01:18:45]  But like, it kind of, I think you say at one point, you're like, it appears to be that one in 20 members was an informer by like the 1960s.
[01:18:53]  Yeah, well, just To be fair, you know, their membership had decreased from 20,000 to 2,000.
[01:19:02]  And so who's the hardcore is either the hardcore or the informants, you know?
[01:19:07]  I know, but if you're like one of the informants, I guess you're getting paid.
[01:19:10]  Right.
[01:19:11]  And so you're like.
[01:19:11]  But also, I mean, that was an explicit project, right?
[01:19:15]  It wasn't as if like so many people simply just turned on their own volition.
[01:19:19]  I think it's like worth to go back to that kind of like dialectical relationship.
[01:19:24]  Like, you know, because I do, you know, I don't want to be unfair.
[01:19:28]  Like you're saying, like, the membership had decreased so much.
[01:19:30]  It was such a different era.
[01:19:32]  And some of that was shaped.
[01:19:34]  I mean, not some of it.
[01:19:36]  A lot of it was shaped by the very attacks that had been going on for decades prior.
[01:19:41]  Yeah, I would point people to my second book, which is Threat of a First Magnitude, which I don't think I would hope people would really use it as the resource it was meant to be because I actually discovered, I don't know if I discovered, but at least I was able to give attention to a doctrine of the political police, not just in the United States, but overall is the object of the game is to get your informant as high up as possible.
[01:20:10]  And I don't think most left entities have much sense of this.
[01:20:16]  It was funny, you know, doing this book, I discovered a publication from the 20s where I think it might be a Cohen turn missive where they're saying, you know, the problem is with this democratic centralism is we got this membership down below that doesn't know what's going on.
[01:20:32]  So if they get the informers up here, you know, we're kind of, you know, they're going to be able to operate in place.
[01:20:38]  And the Bolsheviks faced this very early on in Malinovsky.
[01:20:42]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:20:42]  Like they had, there were Okrana informants who were like well placed within the Bolsheviks.
[01:20:49]  A little democracy goes a long way sometimes.
[01:20:52]  Don't go crazy, you know.
[01:20:53]  Don't listen.
[01:20:54]  Yeah, And democracy is a sort of malleable term, right?
[01:20:58]  But you need to give people ownership of what's going on.
[01:21:02]  You need to enable people to understand the deal.
[01:21:05]  Well, you talk a lot in the book about Operation Solo, which is the challenge of calling, yeah.
[01:21:11]  It's fucking crazy.
[01:21:13]  But could you explain to us what went down there?
[01:21:15]  Okay, interesting thing, too, is just to kind of make this point, the FBI during COINTELPRO is very tuned into anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union.
[01:21:26]  So whenever there is like reports of anti-Semitism, they make sure that it goes out to the Communist Party membership.
[01:21:35]  Yeah, well, that's something you mentioned here, which I was like, this is crazy.
[01:21:38]  Is there like, yeah, every time there was like an article in the New York Times or whatever about like anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, they would clip the article and then mail it to like Communist Party members' houses.
[01:21:48]  So were people just getting like letters every other day being like, who the fuck is sending me like these clippings?
[01:21:54]  Well, the FBI was very aware of it.
[01:21:56]  It's like a lot of times Hoover would say, don't send it because they're going to know we've got a list.
[01:22:01]  So we need to figure out an artful way to do this.
[01:22:03]  And I'm sure they screwed up.
[01:22:05]  Morris Childs, my sense is that was probably one issue for him.
[01:22:10]  But he was, Morris Childs was editor of the Daily Worker in the 40s, been a friend of Earl Browder.
[01:22:18]  I mean, this is where the confluence, the dialectic between these internecine internal struggles and then the wider way they operate in the world starts to bear fruit.
[01:22:28]  Earl Browder's thrown out.
[01:22:30]  Morris Childs' protector is gone.
[01:22:34]  He's feeling sick.
[01:22:35]  His wife leaves him.
[01:22:37]  He's out of the party.
[01:22:38]  His wife leaves him because she's in the party.
[01:22:40]  He's not.
[01:22:41]  I mean, there's all this screwed up stuff that goes on.
[01:22:46]  Morris Childs is on a sick bed, and this FBI agent in Chicago goes and basically becomes his buddy.
[01:22:54]  Let's talk, you know?
[01:22:55]  Yeah.
[01:22:56]  And it's like when you're isolated and somebody wants to have an intelligent conversation, that's very seductive, you know, in the true sense of the word.
[01:23:05]  They flip Morris Childs and they cultivate him.
[01:23:09]  It's a program called Top Lev.
[01:23:11]  Top Level.
[01:23:12]  Not a very...
[01:23:14]  Yeah, not a very great one.
[01:23:15]  Yeah.
[01:23:15]  Yeah.
[01:23:17]  For people who don't believe in conspiracy theories, wake up.
[01:23:21]  Yeah.
[01:23:22]  Yeah.
[01:23:22]  No, because they really do.
[01:23:23]  I mean, they go to this guy and they're like, what do you think about working for me?
[01:23:28]  And they recruit him and they let him be a sleeper, you know, like until he essentially, by the time Gus Hall takes control of the party, Morris Childs is effectively number two.
[01:23:42]  Henry Winston, the African-American comrade who was jailed under the Smith Act, is, I think, nominally number two.
[01:23:50]  But Morris Childs has the juice because he is the guy who takes 20-odd trips to the Soviet Union and brings back millions of dollars.
[01:24:01]  And this is what blows me away.
[01:24:02]  It's like, this is known.
[01:24:04]  I didn't discover any secret documents, but it's like essentially the FBI was instrumental in funding the Communist Party USA in the 60s through the vehicle of Morris Childs.
[01:24:16]  Read the book, Operation Solo, by this guy, John Barron, who's a reader's digest guy.
[01:24:22]  He's a right-wing guy.
[01:24:24]  And he had the cooperation of Childs FBI handlers.
[01:24:29]  And it's all kind of there.
[01:24:32]  You know, this is not me just making this stuff up.
[01:24:35]  But he's allowed to be in the CPUSA.
[01:24:39]  The FBI could have closed it down at any point.
[01:24:42]  In fact, when it seemed like Morris Childs might get exposed, they deliberately targeted another leader of the party, claiming he was the informant, and he got driven out.
[01:24:54]  There's an academic journal article by Haynes, and I forget the other author, but it's good research.
[01:25:01]  Yeah, that's what solo is, and Morris Child stays in place till 1980 when he just retires as an old man to Florida.
[01:25:11]  Yeah.
[01:25:11]  You know, never uncovered.
[01:25:13]  And he is, you know, this is like the CPUSA is seen as, you know, a foreign intelligence threat, an agent of the Soviet Union, not a domestic.
[01:25:26]  I mean, I think he's even Child's informing on the CP's domestic activity is modest because he's mainly an asset to understand what's going on in the Soviet Union, which kind of raises the whole question of, you know, remember when the Soviet Union collapsed and everybody's like, oh, we didn't see that coming?
[01:25:45]  I mean, I wonder how much they did see coming and how much they didn't.
[01:25:48]  Well, it's also kind of related to his like job going to the Soviet Union.
[01:25:53]  Like he was the guy that was bringing over millions of dollars.
[01:25:56]  What the fuck were they doing with that money?
[01:25:58]  Like you have an organization of 3,000.
[01:26:01]  Dude, if I had a political party with 3,000 guys and I was getting 10 mil, which by the way is like 1975, $10 million or whatever.
[01:26:11]  Zero, yeah, straight ruble.
[01:26:15]  I'm like, dude, we're having the sickest cars.
[01:26:21]  I mean, like, we're going to attract people by just like driving around in really nice cars and be like, communism did this for us.
[01:26:28]  Because it's technically true.

=== Funding The Communist Party USA (02:40) ===

[01:26:29]  You're not lying.
[01:26:29]  It is technically true.
[01:26:31]  But it is crazy in the book.
[01:26:33]  I mean, trying to, you know, wrap your head around the fact that the FBI was basically sustaining this party to be this vehicle for this other thing that ends up being, I mean, I don't know how instrumental.
[01:26:45]  You would have thought that would have been a scandal, right?
[01:26:48]  But it also reminds me so much of just kind of like inertia a little bit.
[01:26:52]  It's sort of like we've been doing this for so many decades and the like, you know, all of our work has, you know, resulted in basically collapsing this entity or carving it up so much that only we occupy it now.
[01:27:10]  And so we have to kind of sustain it just in both for our own purpose and to like give itself, give the organization its own purpose now because it's all basically, you know, our employees.
[01:27:25]  Well, yeah, I mean, there's an aspect of that.
[01:27:28]  It just keeps going on its own energy, but it does end.
[01:27:32]  You know, I mean, it's all developmental.
[01:27:35]  And again, I guess I kind of went to the point where in the 50s things shifted.
[01:27:40]  You know, up to that point, there was, I mean, look, the reality is the Communist Party USA never came close to apprehending actual power.
[01:27:49]  Yes.
[01:27:50]  But, you know.
[01:27:53]  It could have, though.
[01:27:54]  Yeah, I mean, nobody expected Lenin to take over and topple the czar either.
[01:27:59]  You know, it's like it's easier to read it after it's over.
[01:28:03]  Well, it doesn't happen until it does.
[01:28:05]  You know what I mean?
[01:28:06]  But yeah, like it, it, it, uh, but I would agree that like with history and like being able to compare them to Communist Party in basically every other country in the world, they didn't do amazing in terms of getting power.
[01:28:21]  Yeah.
[01:28:21]  But also a totally different government system than you can compare to any other kind of European system in the sense that there's no proportional representation anywhere.
[01:28:33]  There's no parties really in America, plus the material base, plus like I think what your book really well documents.
[01:28:42]  I mean, you know, obviously the repression in European countries was up there and very different.
[01:28:50]  But because they had almost a kind of like, you know, historical place within a lot of these like parliaments, the repression that you document, I think totally, at least for me, it totally shaded my understanding of kind of like some of the contingencies of the CPUSA.

=== Defining Repression's Legacy (06:55) ===

[01:29:10]  Yeah, I'm saying that.
[01:29:10]  And like what could have, no, just not what could have been, but like that it's hard to really make a, it's hard to understand their limitations without also understanding everything that they kind of like face, which completely decapitated them very, very, very early on.
[01:29:29]  The legacy of anti-communism in this country is still with us.
[01:29:32]  And it's, it's, I just remember growing up with a Cold War education, 10th grade history, we were being taught about Hegel and dialectics exactly so we.
[01:29:42]  That was a cool school.
[01:29:43]  Well, it wasn't cool.
[01:29:44]  It was exactly.
[01:29:45]  It wasn't smoke there.
[01:29:46]  Yeah, you couldn't.
[01:29:48]  And it was exactly to tell us how bad this stuff was.
[01:29:51]  But look at the hue and cry about Mamdani.
[01:29:54]  Yeah.
[01:29:55]  You know, I mean, the cover of the New York Post, Red Apple, which is the title of a book by this friend of mine, this Australian academic who wrote a great book about the red scare in New York and such.
[01:30:09]  But, you know, communist is, I mean, it's a word with the power of something like pedophilia.
[01:30:16]  Yeah.
[01:30:17]  It's like you are like, you are like that.
[01:30:21]  I mean, for most mainstream people in the U.S. It's interesting too, because like to go to go or to kind of go back and I think one of the things that really stymied the CPUSA was actually the New Deal.
[01:30:35]  Like, you know, all these right-wingers gave Roosevelt a lot of shit to put it to put it, I guess, lightly about the New Deal.
[01:30:43]  But I think the New Deal really kind of like, it works.
[01:30:47]  It knocked the wind out.
[01:30:48]  It knocked the wind out of this.
[01:30:49]  Just like I said, it's like, we have to go for the soil that's engendering these people.
[01:30:53]  And he was correct.
[01:30:55]  I mean, from his, from his, well, from a rejective perspective, he was correct.
[01:30:59]  It did.
[01:30:59]  It did go after the soil.
[01:31:00]  But it's interesting, like now, you know, there still is, because I always look up and like, which of these laws are still in the books?
[01:31:07]  And most of them aren't even nominally on the books because people always talk about, oh, yeah, laws, it's still a law, but like nobody charges anybody over that anymore.
[01:31:15]  Like, that's not how it's used anymore.
[01:31:16]  But like, I'm always like, if it's still in the books, it could be.
[01:31:20]  Silly thing to say.
[01:31:21]  Not what you're saying, the people who are saying that to you, when like since Obama, they've been reaching back into the books and using laws that haven't been used since the very time that we've been talking about.
[01:31:34]  And then there's 9-11 where they passed new laws.
[01:31:37]  Exactly.
[01:31:38]  But one of the ones that still is on the book is that if you apply, I don't know if it's if you even apply for a visa or a green card, they ask you if you're a member of a communist party.
[01:31:46]  No, it's a green card.
[01:31:47]  You have to say if you're a member of Communist Party.
[01:31:49]  Exactly.
[01:31:49]  And it's like, and I was looking to see like whose members or whose green card applications have been denied from this in recent history.
[01:31:57]  I think it's mostly Cubans.
[01:31:59]  But it's like, it's still, you're still not technically.
[01:32:03]  And there's allowances.
[01:32:04]  No, not a Communist Party.
[01:32:05]  Oh, that's okay.
[01:32:07]  Well, there is one, but that's not the Royal Party.
[01:32:11]  But there's still these things that exist on there.
[01:32:16]  And they have these sort of allowances to like, where they're like, well, if you, you know, if we think you're all right, you can still come in or whatever.
[01:32:23]  But it's still on the books.
[01:32:25]  And it's still something that's like, that's asked on green card forms.
[01:32:28]  And like, that is completely, I think that came about in what?
[01:32:31]  Like, I mean, you mentioned, I think before World War II, after World War II, I think they added like, or a member of any other totalitarian parties, which actually did not stop that many people.
[01:32:39]  I love the idea of being like, I'm the member of a totalitarian party.
[01:32:42]  Yeah, I'm like, well, what is you're like, so you're trying to.
[01:32:44]  What is that famous movement across?
[01:32:47]  No, they do define it.
[01:32:48]  They do define it.
[01:32:48]  They do define it.
[01:32:49]  And they define it as a group that, I can't remember, I was, because I was looking at this the other day.
[01:32:53]  Like, they define it as a group or a political party that is like a one-party rule and enacts violence against its opponents.
[01:32:59]  So I'm like, there's not like two-party rule here.
[01:33:02]  Just one is bad.
[01:33:03]  And technically, technically, who are they talking about?
[01:33:07]  China, for instance, is a coalition government.
[01:33:11]  Technically.
[01:33:13]  Well, so just, I don't know, man.
[01:33:17]  I'm trying to think of how to bring this all home.
[01:33:21]  When I was writing this book, Dylan quotes.
[01:33:24]  When I was, yeah, right.
[01:33:26]  When I was writing this book, I did not think Donald Trump was going to come back in office.
[01:33:31]  You know, there was no intention that, well, you know, and then he, you know, he came into office and, you know, they're doing all this craziness with enemy aliens.
[01:33:41]  You know, and the Smith Act is still actually on the book, but it's been neutered in terms of, you know, what it actually can do.
[01:33:49]  But it's just interesting how, again, the Joseph Heller, they'll do what they're allowed to do.
[01:33:58]  When I was writing it, though, I kind of wanted people to understand it.
[01:34:02]  And this is hopefully a question for the future that we live in a post-Trump world.
[01:34:09]  It's like, you know, be careful about your expectations because the freedom in this country is very tenuous and very relative.
[01:34:19]  Yes, there's nominal freedoms, but they have the ability, you know, 100 which ways to sundown to dispense with them.
[01:34:26]  And, you know, and it's in concert with, you know, it's not just the dialectic between the FBI and the radicals, but you've got Congress, you've got the news media, you know, who all kind of, you know, for lack of a better word, conspire to create a climate in which things can be tamped down in the status quo.
[01:34:47]  And the status quo is bad.
[01:34:49]  You know, people are suffering and they're suffering needlessly and something new does need to be brought into being.
[01:34:57]  And I have no idea when and how that happens.
[01:35:01]  But people invariably will be compelled and arcing toward not just social justice, but equality.
[01:35:13]  And the authorities are going to do everything they have in their arsenal to keep it in check.
[01:35:19]  And I think actually understanding it in particularity and not being taken in can be helpful.
[01:35:26]  I mean, it's only just one element of a larger struggle.
[01:35:30]  And in that sense, I hope people do read the book and get something from it.
[01:35:36]  Aside from just the fascinating historical stuff and all the little examples, it's like actually knowing what's actually happening and not just being whipsawed by these things can be enormously powerful.
[01:35:54]  Well, the book is so comprehensive.
[01:35:57]  It's great to see all this material in one place, which I know was essentially one of the projects of the book.

=== Our Listeners Deserve Insight (02:01) ===

[01:36:05]  And it's just excellent.
[01:36:06]  I think our listeners, I almost said our readers, I think our listeners.
[01:36:10]  Well, there are little readers.
[01:36:11]  There are little readers who read with their ears, will read it with their eyes and really enjoy it.
[01:36:19]  And we'll link to it in the show notes.
[01:36:22]  It's been so great to have you in person.
[01:36:25]  I just enjoy it so much.
[01:36:27]  I'm tempted to move back east so I can come and do this again.
[01:36:30]  Would love that.
[01:36:33]  Aaron Leonard joining us with Menace of Our Time: The Long War Against Communism.
[01:36:38]  I had to look up against when the subtitle always fucks me up.
[01:36:42]  What is it called?
[01:36:42]  The sub-something, whatever.
[01:36:44]  Whenever we have a guest and it's a long book title, that's what always fucks me up because I won't remember the entire thing.
[01:36:50]  It's out on Rutgers University Press.
[01:36:52]  And like Liz said, we have a link.
[01:36:54]  Thank you for joining us.
[01:36:55]  Okay.
[01:36:55]  Thanks for having me.
[01:36:57]  I'm Liz.
[01:37:12]  I'm Brace.
[01:37:13]  And I want to say this.
[01:37:14]  I want to say this.
[01:37:17]  Browder, they kind of did do Browder a little dirty because you can't fault a guy for being stupid, right?
[01:37:25]  You can actually.
[01:37:27]  But I'm like, just demote him.
[01:37:30]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:37:30]  He was already very isolated.
[01:37:32]  He was very isolated.
[01:37:34]  But I love William Z. Foster.
[01:37:37]  I'm a big Foster head.
[01:37:38]  You are?
[01:37:38]  Yeah.
[01:37:39]  I have several of his books.
[01:37:40]  I like William Z. Foster.
[01:37:41]  I look up to him.
[01:37:42]  I think he's great.
[01:37:43]  And he's really one of the few guys who was just, everyone else kind of like, not everyone else, Ruthenberg didn't, but like, and not, you know, to be fair, it was really just Lovestone and then later a little bit Browder.
[01:37:54]  But I'm like, you know, he didn't snitch or nothing.
[01:37:58]  I like William Z. Foster.
[01:38:00]  But my name is Brace Belden.
[01:38:01]  And I'm Producer Young Chomsky.
[01:38:03]  And this has been Drone on.
[01:38:04]  We'll see you next time.
[01:38:05]  Bye-bye!