The right wing media is buzzing with accusations that the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City is a communist. They're calling for his removal from not only the ballot... but the also the country. This anticommunist panic isn't new. Sources:Drabble, John. “To Ensure Domestic Tranquility: The FBI, Cointelpro-White Hate and Political Discourse, 1964-1971.” Journal of American Studies, vol. 38, no. 2, 2004, pp. 297–328. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27557518. Horowitz, David Alan. “White Southerners’ Alienation and Civil Rights: The Response to Corporate Liberalism, 1956-1965.” The Journal of Southern History, vol. 54, no. 2, 1988, pp. 173–200. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2209398.Katagiri, Yasuhiro. Black Freedom, White Resistance, and Red Menace: Civil Rights and Anticommunism In the Jim Crow South. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2014.Lewis, George. The White South and the Red Menace: Segregationists, Anticommunism, and Massive Resistance, 1945-1965. University Press of Florida, 2004.Kovel, Joel. Red Hunting in the Promised Land: Anticommunism and the Making of America. 2nd ed. London: Cassel, 1997.https://politicalresearch.org/2022/01/04/blue-lives-matter-and-us-counter-subversive-traditionShanahan, J., & Wall, T. (2021). ‘Fight the reds, support the blue’: Blue Lives Matter and the US counter-subversive tradition. Race & Class, 63(1), 70-90. Brenner, Samuel Lawrence (May 2009). Shouting at the Rain: The Voices and Ideas of Right-Wing Anti-Communist Americanists in the Era of Modern American Conservatism, 1950-1974 (Thesis). Brown University.Schrecker, Ellen. “Immigration and Internal Security: Political Deportations during the McCarthy Era.” Science & Society, vol. 60, no. 4, 1996, pp. 393–426.Schrecker, Ellen. “Archival Sources for the Study of McCarthyism.” The Journal of American History, vol. 75, no. 1, 1988, pp. 197–208Ornstein, Norman J., et al. The People, the Press & Politics : The Times Mirror Study of the American Electorate. Addison-Wesley, 1988.https://www.ilrc.org/sites/default/files/resources/denaturalization_pa.pdfhttps://immigrationforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Fact-Sheet-on-Denaturalization.pdfhttps://www.npr.org/2025/06/30/nx-s1-5445398/denaturalization-trump-immigration-enforcementhttps://www.argusleader.com/story/news/2021/01/08/gov-kristi-noem-says-georgia-elected-communists-serve-u-s-senate/6605474002/ https://www.warscapes.com/conversations/conversation-mahmood-mamdani https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1424 https://www.congress.gov/103/statute/STATUTE-107/STATUTE-107-Pg2317.pdf https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/department-justice-creates-section-dedicated-denaturalization-caseshttps://www.niemoeller-haus-berlin.de/niemoeller-gedicht/https://thelifeofahistorian.com/historiographical-review-woods-lewis-katagiri/ https://www.justice.gov/civil/media/1404046/dl?inline See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
In 2012, 16-year-old Brian Herira was gunned down in broad daylight on his way to do homework.
No suspects, no witnesses, no justice.
I would ask my husband, do you want me to stop?
And he's like, no, keep fighting.
After nearly a decade, a breakthrough changed everything.
This is Cold Case Files Miami, stories of families who never stopped fighting.
Listen to Cold Case Files Miami on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Just like great shoes, great books take you places through unforgettable love stories and into conversations with characters you'll never forget.
I think any good romance, it gives me this feeling of like butterflies.
I'm Danielle Robet, and this is bookmarked by Reese's Book Club, the new podcast from Hello Sunshine and iHeart Podcasts, where we dive into the stories that shape us on the page and off.
Each week, I'm joined by authors, celebs, book talk stars, and more for conversations that will make you laugh, cry, and add way too many books to your TBR pile.
Listen to Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Maybe you've heard that Stonewall was a riot where queer people fought back against police, or that it's the reason Pride is celebrated this time of year.
It was one of the most liberating things that I have ever done.
Legend says Marsha P. Johnson threw the very first brick.
Start banging on the door of the Stonewall like one, boom.
This week on Afterlives, we'll separate the truth from the myth in the life of Marsha P. Johnson.
Listen to Afterlives on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Did it occur to you that he charmed you in any way?
Yes, it did.
But he was a charming man.
It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story because this ties together the Cold War with the new one.
I often ask myself now, did I know the true Jan at all?
Listen to Hot Money, Agent of Chaos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Call Zone Media Call Zone Media On February 11th, 1967, the Pittsburgh police raided an apartment near the University of Pittsburgh campus.
They had a warrant to search the place for marijuana.
53 people were arrested, charged with the vague sounding crime of visiting a disorderly house.
The party's host, Frank Goldsmith, was charged with possession of drugs.
But there weren't any drugs.
Perhaps frustrated at finding the place completely bare of so much as a loose joint, they ransacked Goldsmith's bathroom, where they found some tablets in a container in the medicine cabinet that were eventually proven to be prescription allergy medication.
As the police tore through the apartment, one officer ripped a poster of Mao Zedong off the wall.
He turned to one of the guests and demanded to know who the man in the poster is.
Apparently the cop didn't get the joke because the college student told him, that's Ho Chi Minh before he went on a diet.
And when the officer produced the poster in court two weeks later, he told the judge it was Ho Chi Minh.
One of the young men who was there that night told the police that unless they were charging him with a specific offense, he would not submit to an arrest.
As a foreign national, he'd specifically sought this guidance from his embassy.
Mahmoud Mamdani would later tell the Washington Post that the officer responded by calling him a racial slur and telling him to go back where he came from.
Eventually, all the charges were dropped.
The FBI denied any involvement.
The police may not have found any drugs that night, but they found evidence of something far more insidious.
Communism.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.
I'll set your mind at ease right now.
You may have recognized that name, Mahmood Mamdani, as the father of Zoran Mamdani.
And neither of them are our weird little guy.
But the news this week was a real distraction.
And I didn't end up picking a weird little guy at all.
But it did get me thinking about something that weird little guys spend a lot of time thinking about.
Last week, on June 24th, Zoran Mamdani won the New York City mayoral Democratic primary.
The next day, the President of the United States posted on Truth Social, the social media platform that he owns, It's finally happened.
The Democrats have crossed the line.
Zoran Mamdani, a 100% communist lunatic, has just won the Dem primary and is on his way to becoming mayor.
We've had radical lefties before, but this is getting a little ridiculous.
A 100% communist lunatic, huh?
Zoran Mamdani is a Democratic socialist.
But that's a distinction that's lost on Donald Trump.
And he's not alone.
The day after the primary, the New York Young Republicans Club tweeted a photo of Mamdani with the word deport stamped in red over his face, accompanied by this rather alarming demand.
A call to action from the New York Young Republicans Club.
The radical Zoron Mamdani cannot be allowed to destroy our beloved city of New York.
The Communist Control Act lets President Trump revoke Zoron Mamdani's citizenship and promptly deport Him.
The time for action is now, Stephen Miller and Tom Homan.
New York is counting on you.
A day later, Congressman Andy Ogles posted a letter that he'd sent to Attorney General Pam Bondi, asking the Department of Justice to open an investigation into whether Momdani could have his citizenship revoked.
Ogles, too, called him a communist.
But what is a communist?
I'm not actually going to tell you.
It's not that kind of podcast.
But more importantly, it doesn't matter.
Because if I'm being honest, my answer to the question of, is Zoron Mamdani a communist?
Is the same answer that most right-wing extremists would give you if they were being honest.
I don't know and I don't care.
In the world of weird little guys, a communist can be anyone.
Even you.
Remember, just two weeks ago, you heard this.
It doesn't fucking matter.
She's a communist.
What?
You need to stop talking.
Nobody's an she is a communist, an anti-white liberal.
That's James Alex Fields talking about Heather Heyer's mother.
He was sitting in jail, awaiting trial for a hate crime murder.
And that's what he had to say about the mother of the woman he killed.
She's the enemy.
An anti-white communist.
In later sworn statements produced in civil litigation, Fields would agree that he believed every member of the crowd that day was communist.
A week after Fields murdered a counterprotester at that Nazi rally, Jason Kessler, the man who organized the Nazi rally, posted, Heather Heyer was a fat, disgusting communist.
Communists have killed 94 million.
Looks like it was payback time.
While he was in prison, Fields received a letter from Matthew Heimbach, the leader of the neo-Nazi group, the Traditionalist Worker Party, in which Heimbach referred to the counterprotesters that Field hit with his car as, quote, rampaging communist hordes.
When Christopher Cantwell, one of the neo-Nazi activists who was supposed to give a speech that day, got maced, he blamed, oh, you guessed it, communists.
What just happened?
They maced me.
Who?
I don't know.
Communists.
This isn't unique.
In my work, I see this every day.
Anyone who opposes fascism is a communist.
Anyone advocating for racial equality?
A communist.
Democrats?
Communists.
Gay people, Jewish people, immigrants, civil rights activists, progressive clergy, anyone who's ever attended a rally for any left-wing cause.
Communists, one and all.
And it's been like that for decades.
Here's George Lincoln Rockwell, the commander of the American Nazi Party, in 1966.
In my opinion, communism is the organized mutiny.
I'm going to say this slow because it's a lot packed into a few words.
In my opinion, communism is the mutiny of quantity versus quality.
I think that communism is the organized mutiny of the inferior biological peoples in the world led by the Jews against the people who have built civilization.
That's what I think it is.
Or how about David Lane, the man who came up with the 14 words?
Before we go any further, we might as well discuss three words that are considered by many to mean different things, but are in reality all one and the same thing.
These three words are Judaism, communism, and the doctrine of equality.
That clip is from a sermon that David Lane delivered at the Aryan Nations Compound in 1981, just two years before he became a founding member of the Nazi terrorist organization, the Order.
And speaking of the Aryan Nations, here's their leader, Richard Butler.
Once they can destroy the will of the white man who says communism will cover the earth forever.
Now, communism is real.
It's a real political ideology that exists in the world.
There are people who are communists.
And anti-communism was a significant force in American politics in the 20th century.
From the Palmer raids during the first Red Scare in 1920 to the years of paranoia and persecution led by Joseph McCarthy.
But anti-communism survived the death of McCarthyism.
In his book, Red Hunting in the Promised Land, Anti-Communism and the Making of America, Joel Covell argues that there is a difference between anti-communism, that is, capital A, anti-hyphen, capital C communism, and anti-communism, all one word and lowercase.
Covell defines capital C communism as actual communists, right?
These actually existing movements and governments and people who organize according to the principles of communism.
And capital C anti-communism, he says, is an objective dislike of capital C communism.
So capital C anti-communism is, obviously, about communism.
Lowercase anti-communism, on the other hand, he calls the reigning ideology Of the West, and argues that it has very little at all to do with communism.
In 1987, the Times Mirror commissioned Gallup to survey the American electorate.
Over a period of several months, Polsters conducted in-person interviews with 4,244 American adults all over the country, administering a long questionnaire that asked a variety of demographic and political questions.
70% of respondents self-identified as anti-communist, compared to 49% of people who said they were religious, 47% who supported the civil rights movement, and 27% who identified as a supporter of unions.
In the technical appendix, the pollsters note that, quote, as an identity, anti-communism is virtually universal in America.
But if you dig through the responses to the other questions these people were asked, it kind of looks like most people who claimed that their political identity was as an anti-communist might not really know what communism is.
And 56% of respondents said they believed that it was the cause of most social unrest in America in 1987.
Covell calls this the black hole of anti-communism, quote, a feeling that nullifies any reasoned or differentiated argument that distinguishes anti-communism from a simple reaction to communism and promotes it to the status of a great organizing force in American life.
Anti-communism took on a kind of religious fervor in American politics during the Cold War.
Anything the government did in the name of fighting the Soviets was good.
Any opposition to it was bad.
To the point that people were tying themselves in knots.
When religious leaders spoke out against the threat of nuclear annihilation, conservative writer William F. Buckley accused them of idolatry, of venerating life at the great cost of ignoring the greater good, which is, I guess, having a large nuclear arsenal to resist the threat of communism.
One of Ronald Reagan's own closest advisors admitted during a congressional hearing that he'd been unwilling to speak frankly to the president about the obvious illegality of the Iran-Contra affair because he was afraid of being called a commie.
Everything done in the name of fighting communism is good.
Anything that needs to be fought is communism.
And any resistance to that fight makes you no better than a communist.
Quote, viewed against this diabolical force, all moral and rational comparisons disappear, like light sucked in by the virtually infinite gravity of a cosmological black hole, Covell wrote.
Communism could be anything, rendering the word effectively meaningless.
An accusation I see quite often levied at, well, people like me, people who write about fascism, white supremacy, neo-Nazis, etc., is, will you just call everyone you don't like a Nazi?
And I'm sure there are people out there getting a little too casual with it, but I can only speak for myself.
And I know that words mean things, and I'm careful with them.
I won't say I've never been wrong, but I'm not careless.
There have been so many times that I've responded to that particular jab with just a quick citation.
Here's a picture of his bedroom with a Nazi flag on the wall and a framed picture of Hitler.
Here's a video of the man in question literally saying straight to camera, I am a fascist.
Here he is in a clan robe, throwing a Roman salute, going on a podcast to talk about the sin of race mixing, whatever.
I try to use words carefully.
But for the anti-communist, the word is so all-encompassing that you can call anyone a communist, and you'll never be wrong.
And no man in American history better exemplifies this quicksotic project of rooting out imaginary communists than J. Edgar Hoover.
Ellen Schrecker, a historian of McCarthyism, wrote that if people had known in the 1950s what we would eventually learn when the FBI was forced to disclose files from that era, McCarthyism would have been called Hooverism.
In Hoover's 1958 book, Masters of Deceit, he explained just how devious the communists can be.
The party's objective is to drive a wedge, however slight, into as many minds as possible.
That is why in every conceivable way, communists try to poison our thinking about the issues of the day.
Social reforms, peace, politics, veterans, women's, and youth problems.
The more people they can influence, the stronger they will be.
Responding to that passage in particular, Fred Cook wrote in his review of the book for the nation, obviously it is hardly safe to think about any of the issues in these all-embracing categories.
For communists may be thinking about them too.
And how is one to know whether one's thoughts are actually one's own or the reflection of some subtle communist thought inoculation?
By the 1960s, there wasn't the same appetite for the outright McCarthyism of the 40s and 50s.
But Hoover's personal commitment to rooting out the specter of communism never faded.
I know the little opening vignette of an episode of this show is usually kind of a bait and switch, some interesting but only tangentially related tidbit that I don't really revisit.
But this one's fascinating.
Remember, in 1967, Zoran Mamdani's father, Mahmoud Mamdani, was a college student at the University of Pittsburgh.
He was one of several dozen students caught up in a police raid at an apartment just off campus one night.
The police claimed to be looking for drugs.
They didn't Find any, and the charges against all 53 people were dropped.
But this wasn't an ordinary college party.
Half of the people taken into custody that night were students from nearby St. Vincent College.
Their theology professor, Father Roseborough, had left the party early and wasn't there when the cops showed up.
The party that evening was a reception for an out-of-town guest.
David Dellinger, a pacifist activist, gave a talk earlier that day at the University of Pittsburgh.
And he told the audience about his recent visit to Vietnam, where he'd gone to talk to the people who'd been affected by the American bombing campaign.
Frank Goldsmith, the party's host, was the chairman of the local chapter of the Committee to End the War in Vietnam.
Everyone in attendance that night was, to some degree or another, active in the anti-war movement.
Two months after those charges were dropped, Marcus Childs wrote an article about the raid in the Washington Post.
Childs was clear that both the FBI and the DOJ had denied any involvement in the incident.
But he says that those close to the case believe that it was absolutely connected to the FBI's interest in the campus anti-war group, writing, quote, there is reason to fear a revival of the Red scare, the Red Raids, and the McCarthyist hysteria.
This particular incident itself doesn't get much press after that.
I mean, there's nothing to report, right?
The charges were dropped.
It was over.
But the very day that newspaper story ran, April 21st, 1967, an FBI agent carefully cut it out of the newspaper and Xeroxed it.
Later that day, that same FBI agent wrote a memo to his boss, William Sullivan, the head of the Bureau's domestic intelligence division, running the operation we now know as COINTELPRO.
Attached to the memo was that copy of Chiles' article.
In the margins in J. Edgar Hoover's handwriting, there's a little note.
What are the facts as to our interest in this matter?
The memo, written by Charles Brennan, claims, quote, the FBI had absolutely nothing to do with this raid.
And it concludes with this paragraph.
This is another example of the increasing tendency of so-called liberal writers and faculty and student groups to criticize the Bureau in an effort to stop our investigation of subversive elements active in campus groups.
These individuals are consciously or unconsciously aiding the Communist Party in its lifelong fight to stop the FBI's investigation into subversive influences on the campuses.
A few days later, J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation himself, wrote the journalist a nasty letter, calling the article irresponsible and outrageous, and again claiming that the FBI had no involvement in or knowledge of the raid.
Now, I don't know if you can tell how I feel about J. Edgar Hoover, but I don't think he's telling the truth.
Shocking, I know.
But the story doesn't make sense.
In several newspaper stories, the Pittsburgh police sometimes claim that they'd been surveilling Frank Goldsmith's apartment for weeks.
Other articles are very specific that they had a search warrant that was signed 12 hours before the raid, and that the warrant specifically authorized for the search of marijuana.
But the FBI memo and some of the newspaper articles claim that the raid was actually just prompted by noise complaints from neighbors and the search for drugs was incidental.
And then, of course, there's the fact that declassified FBI files exist for a number of people who were at the party that night.
Frank Goldsmith, the man whose apartment was raided, had been under investigation for his involvement in the anti-war movement for over a year.
In one FBI file bearing the title, Communist Influence in Racial Matters, a memo dated just a few months before the raid outlines surveillance of Goldsmith performed by the Pittsburgh Police Department on behalf of the FBI.
And the raid at Frank Goldsmith's apartment wasn't Mahmoud Mamdani's first rush with FBI surveillance.
Two years earlier, in March of 1965, he was one of 128 college students from the Pittsburgh area who piled into buses that made the 12-hour drive to Montgomery, Alabama.
And there they participated in a protest organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
I was born in Kampala, Uganda, in East Africa.
I was given my middle name Kwame by my father, who named me after the first Prime Minister of Ghana.
And decades ago, in Uganda, we won our independence from the British in 1962.
We can clap for that.
And when we did, the United States government gave the Ugandan government 23 scholarships as a gift for independence.
And my father won one of those scholarships.
He came to this country to study to be an engineer at the University of Pittsburgh.
And some time into his studies, his face buried in his book, he heard the words reverberate in the corridor around him, which side are you on?
Which side are you on?
These were words being sung by members of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, recruiting students to get on the bus to go to Montgomery, Alabama.
And my father got on that bus.
He marched.
He was hosed down.
He was thrown in jail.
He was given one phone call.
And he called the Ugandan ambassador to the United States.
He said, can you get me out of jail?
The ambassador said, what are you doing in jail?
We sent you there to study.
My father said, you sent me here as a gift for our freedom.
They are fighting for theirs.
It's one and the same.
His son's recounting of the story doesn't say how many students were on the buses.
And neither did any of the newspaper stories that I could find from 1965.
But a memo that landed directly on J. Edgar Hoover's desk did.
The names of every student on those buses was turned over to the FBI by an informant.
And in the weeks that followed, Mahmoud Mamdani was one of scores of students who received a visit from a federal agent.
In an interview in 2013, Mahmoud Mamdani says that it was the FBI's obsessive attempts to root out communism that, ironically, introduced him to Marx.
Reading from that interview, two or three weeks later, I was in my room.
There was a knock at the door.
Two gentlemen in trench coats and hats said, FBI.
And I thought, wow, just like on television.
They sat down.
They were there to find out why I had gone.
Because this turned out to be big, it was after Montgomery that King organized his march on Selma.
They wanted to know who had influenced me.
After one hour of probing, the guy said, do you like Marx?
I said, I haven't met him.
Guy said, no, no, he's dead.
Oh, wow, what happened?
No, no, he died long ago.
I thought the guy Marx had just died.
So then, why are you asking me if he died long ago?
No, he wrote a lot.
He wrote that poor people should not be poor.
And I said, sounds amazing.
I'm giving you a sense of how naive I was.
After they left, I went to the library to look for Marx.
So that was my introduction to Karl Marx.
He'd never heard of Karl Marx.
But he was already a communist.
Because everyone who marched for civil rights was.
Thank you.
In 2012, 16-year-old Brian Hreira was gunned down in broad daylight on his way to do homework.
No suspects, no witnesses, no justice.
The call was horrible.
I replay it over in my head all the time.
For years, Brian's family kept asking questions while a culture of silence kept the case cold.
Snitches get stitches.
Everybody knows it.
Still, they refused to give up.
I would ask my husband, do you want me to let this go?
He said, no, keep fighting.
I told her I would never give up on this case.
And then, after a decade of waiting, a breakthrough.
We received a phone call that was bittersweet because it's a call that we've been waiting for for a very long time.
I'm Enrique Santos.
This is Cold Case Files Miami, a podcast about justice, persistence, and the families who never stopped fighting.
Listen to Cold Case Files Miami as part of the My Cultura Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Just like great shoes, great books take you places through unforgettable love stories and into conversations with characters you'll never forget.
I think any good romance, it gives me this feeling of like butterflies.
I'm Danielle Robet, and this is bookmarked by Reese's Book Club, the new podcast from Hello Sunshine and iHeart Podcasts.
Every week I sit down with your favorite book lovers, authors, celebrities, book talkers, and more to explore the stories that shape us on the page and off.
I've been reading every Reese's Book Club pic, deep diving book talk theories, and obsessing over book-to-screen casts for years.
And now, I get to talk to the people making the magic.
So if you've ever fallen in love with a fictional character, or cried at the last chapter, or passed a book to a friend saying, you have to read this, this podcast is for you.
Listen to bookmarked by Reese's Book Club on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
From iHeart Podcasts, before social media, before the internet, before cable news, there was Alan Berg.
You dig what I do.
You have a need.
Unfortunately, you have no sense of humor.
That's why you can't ever enjoy this show, and that's why you're a loser.
He was the first and the original shock shot.
That scratchy, irreverent kind of way of talking to people.
You're as dumb as the rest.
I can't take anyway.
I don't agree with you all the time.
I don't want you to.
I hope that you pick me a bird.
His voice changed media.
His death shocked the nation.
And it makes me so angry that he got himself killed because he had a big mouth.
KOA Morning Talk Show host Alan Berg reportedly was shot and killed tonight in downtown Denver.
He pointed to the Denver phone book and said, well, there are probably 2 million suspects.
This guy aggravated everybody.
From iHeart Podcasts, this is Live Wire, the loud life and shocking murder of Alan Berg.
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Maybe you've heard that Stonewall was a riot where queer people fought back against police, or that it's the reason Pride is celebrated this time of year.
It was one of the most liberating things that I have ever done.
But did you know that before it went down in history, the Stonewall was a queer hangout run by the mafia?
The voguing at Stonewall was unbelievable.
In the summer of 1969, it became the site that set off the modern movement for LGBTQ plus rights.
Started banging on the door of the Stonewall like one, boom, boom, boom.
Legend says Marsha P. Johnson, a mother in the fight for trans rights, threw the very first brick.
She was really like scrubbed out of that history.
This week on Afterlives, we'll separate the truth from the myth in the life of Marsha P. Johnson.
Listen to Afterlives on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Music There is a fascinating and complicated history of how anti-communism functions specifically in the South during the civil rights era.
But to be honest, I feel like I didn't do enough reading this week to really do It justice?
The short answer is just that.
It was often politically useful to label all civil rights activists as communists.
And that was kind of the only answer in the literature for a long time.
But there are a handful of books now that explore the complexities of anti-communism in the South.
Like I said, I didn't get a chance to read more than a chapter of any of these, so I couldn't tell you which I would recommend, but it seems like the best sources, if you want more on this topic, are George Lewis's The White South and Red Menace, Segregationists, Anti-Communism, and Massive Resistance, Jeff Woods' Black Struggle, Red Scare, Segregation and Anti-Communism in the South, and Yasuhiro Karagiri's Black Freedom, White Resistance, and Red Menace.
But here's the thing.
Some of those civil rights activists were communists.
That gets lost when you explain it all away as McCarthyist hysteria and red baiting.
Some of them were communists and proudly so.
But who is or isn't a communist doesn't actually matter to the anti-communist.
Remember that clip of Christopher Cantwell being asked who maced him?
He has no idea who it was.
But it was communists.
Because whatever bad thing is happening to him is communism.
So I suppose it's no surprise that Zoran Mamdani is being accused of being a communist.
And I do mean accused.
People like Congressman Andy Ogles are trying to have him investigated.
Zoran Mamdani is an immigrant.
He was born in Uganda and moved to the United States as a child and became a naturalized United States citizen in 2018.
There is no doubt about those facts.
He is a United States citizen.
In that post from the New York Young Republicans Club, the group cites the Communist Control Act of 1954 as grounds to have Mamdani deported.
There are a couple of layers here.
There's a lot going on, but I think they're wrong on every single front.
That act, the Communist Control Act, is technically still on the books, but it would only bar a member of the Communist Party from holding certain offices.
It has nothing to do with his naturalization status.
It was signed into law by President Eisenhower in 1954, the same year that Eisenhower himself was accused of being a card-carrying member of the Communist Party by Robert Welch, the founder of the viciously anti-communist John Birch Society.
Those facts aren't actually really related in any way.
It's just further proof that anyone the anti-communist dislikes can be sucked into the black hole of anti-communism.
Even Dwight D. Eisenhower.
And the act itself was never really widely used.
The Supreme Court ruled in the 1960s that it didn't prevent the Communist Party from participating in the New York State unemployment's insurance system as an employer.
But the ruling didn't go further than that as to the constitutionality of the law as a whole.
It was found to be unconstitutional by a federal court in Arizona in 1973, but a challenge to the law was never heard by a higher court, so we don't have a Supreme Court opinion on the matter.
But again, that's because it was so rarely used.
This wasn't something that was happening a lot.
And I guess it's no longer safe to make a prediction like this, but I would say in a world that stayed even half sane, barring him from holding office under the Communist Control Act of 1954 would not hold up.
It would not hold up to a challenge.
Although, again, everything's out the window now.
Other Magasphere influencers quickly identified another line of attack, one that wouldn't just keep him out of office, but could get him out of the country.
Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, another relic of the McCarthy era, members of the Communist Party are not eligible to become naturalized citizens.
Specifically, Title VIII, U.S. Code Section 1424, prohibition upon the naturalization of persons opposed to government or law or who favor totalitarian forms of government.
It's a lengthy section.
It manages to be incredibly vague and open-ended, despite taking over a thousand words to explain itself.
Section A just lists six different situations that would make a person ineligible for naturalization.
And here is just one of those six subsections.
A member of or affiliated with the Communist Party of the United States, any other totalitarian party of the United States, the Communist Political Association, the Communist or other totalitarian party of any state of the United States, of any foreign state, or of any political or geographic subdivision of any foreign state, any section,
subsidiary, branch, affiliate, or subdivision of any such association or party, or the direct predecessors or successors of any such association or party, regardless of what name such group or organization may have used, may now bear, or may hereafter adopt, unless such alien establishes that he did not have knowledge or reason to believe at the time he became a member of or affiliated with such an organization and did not thereafter and prior to the date upon which such organization was so registered or so required to be registered have such knowledge or reason to believe that such organization was a communist
front organization.
What the fuck does that mean?
Now, as always, I'm not a lawyer.
I didn't go to law school.
Nobody taught me how to read the laws.
But I looked at this pretty hard.
And I looked very hard for definitions.
You see, when legislators write a law, they'll often include specific definitions of unique terms or words or terms that could be ambiguous.
And there are some words and phrases in this Section that I don't know that I would say have a clear, straightforward, plain language meaning that is not ambiguous.
So, surely there is a section somewhere in this chapter that defines specifically what they mean by communist front organization.
Because that could mean a lot of things.
But it isn't there.
There is no definition in this chapter for that term.
And I looked and I looked, and it's not in the U.S. Code at all.
But it used to be.
The term was originally defined in a law that was passed two years earlier in the Internal Security Act of 1950, in the section of the code that established the Subversive Activities Control Board.
The Supreme Court ruled in 1965 that it was unconstitutional to force members of the Communist Party to register with the Subversive Activities Control Board, and that entire code section would eventually get repealed in 1993, which is why it no longer appears in the U.S. Code at all.
So the code section we were just talking about, the section that would allow for the denaturalization of people who were members of organizations that were required to be registered with a body that no longer exists and was found to be unconstitutional.
I'm not sure how you can sort that out.
I'm not sure how you can apply a law whose terms are defined in a code section that is unconstitutional and repealed.
And again, at the risk of being repetitive, there is another huge problem here.
He's not a communist.
He's not a member of the Communist Party.
He's a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
And I promise you, it's not a communist organization.
So even if he were to accept the outrageous argument that this law born of Cold War hysteria is valid and that it could and should be applied, it doesn't apply.
He's only a communist in the sense that that's the word used to attack people like him.
A lot of these rabid anti-communist armchair attorneys who are posting online are pulling in another section of that same Immigration and Nationality Act, Title VIII USC 1451, Revocation of Naturalization.
So that last section says that you can't get naturalized if you're a member of the Communist Party, but this one goes further.
Even if you were not a member at the time of your naturalization, if you decide later to join the Communist Party, after you've become a citizen, they can take it back.
If a person who shall have been naturalized after December 24, 1952 shall within five years next following such naturalization become a member of or affiliated with any organization, membership in or affiliation with, which at the time of naturalization would have precluded such person from naturalization under the provisions of Section 1424 of this title,
it shall be considered prima fascia evidence that such person was not attached to the principles of the Constitution of the United States and was not well disposed to the good order and happiness of the United States at the time of naturalization.
And the section continues, saying that naturalization in this situation could be revoked for, quote, having been obtained by concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation.
So they're not saying you were a communist at the time, we didn't know, we caught you later.
They're saying that even if you never thought about communism until after you were a citizen for several years, they can take it as proof that you lied on purpose, years before the thought ever entered your head.
Thank you.
In 2012, 16-year-old Brian Herrera was gunned down in broad daylight on his way to do homework.
No suspects, no witnesses, no justice.
The call was horrible.
I replay it over in my head all the time.
For years, Brian's family kept asking questions while a culture of silence kept the case cold.
Snitches get stitches.
Everybody knows it.
Still, they refused to give up.
I would ask my husband, do you want me to let this go?
He's like, no, keep fighting.
I told her I would never give up on this case.
And then, after a decade of waiting, a breakthrough.
We received a phone call that was bittersweet because it's a call that we've been waiting for for a very long time.
I'm Enrique Santos.
This is Cold Case Files Miami, a podcast about justice, persistence, and the families who never stopped fighting.
Listen to Cold Case Files Miami as part of the My Cultura Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Just like great shoes, great books take you places through unforgettable love stories and into conversations with characters you'll never forget.
I think any good romance, it gives me this feeling of like butterflies.
I'm Danielle Robé, and this is bookmarked by Reese's Book Club, the new podcast from Hello Sunshine and iHeart Podcasts.
Every week I sit down with your favorite book lovers, authors, celebrities, book talkers, and more to explore the stories that shape us on the page and off.
I've been reading every Reese's Book Club pic, deep diving book talk theories, and obsessing over book-to-screen casts for years.
And now, I get to talk to the people making the magic.
So if you've ever fallen in love with a fictional character, or cried at the last chapter, or passed a book to a friend saying, you have to read this, this podcast is for you.
Listen to bookmarks by Reese's Book Club on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
From iHeart Podcasts, before social media, before the internet, before cable news, there was Alan Berg.
You dig what I do.
You have a need.
Unfortunately, you have no sense of humor.
That's why you can't ever enjoy this show, and that's why you're a loser.
He was the first and the original shock job.
That scratchy, irreverent kind of way of talking to people.
You're as dumb as the rest.
I can't take anyway.
I don't agree with you all the time.
I don't want you to.
I hope that you pick me a bird.
His voice changed media.
His death shocked the nation.
And it makes me so angry that he got himself killed because he had a big mouth.
KOA Morning Talk Show host Alan Berg reportedly was shot and killed tonight in downtown Denver.
He pointed to the Denver phone book and said, well, there are probably 2 million suspects.
This guy aggravated everybody.
From iHeart Podcasts, this is Live Wire, the loud life and shocking murder of Alan Berg.
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Maybe you've heard that Stonewall was a riot where queer people fought back against police, or that it's the reason Pride is celebrated this time of year.
It was one of the most liberating things that I have ever done.
But did you know that before it went down in history, the Stonewall was a queer hangout run by the mafia?
The voguing at Stonewall was unbelievable.
In the summer of 1969, it became the site that set off the modern movement for LGBTQ plus rights.
Started banging on the door of the Stonewall like one, boom, boom, boom.
Legend says Marsha P. Johnson, a mother in the fight for trans rights, threw the very first brick.
She was really like scrubbed out of that history.
This week on Afterlives, we'll separate the truth from the myth in the life of Marsha P. Johnson.
Listen to Afterlives on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm going to go to the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Denaturalization is not common.
At least it didn't used to be.
Between 1990 and 2017, there were an average of 11 cases per year.
And when I punched in this code section into Court Listener, a website that lets you search federal court filings, I browsed a handful of the cases that popped up.
They're mostly pretty serious.
Like it's not gray area stuff.
It's big red flag, obvious problem-type situations.
Like you could see why this was a big deal and had to happen in many of these cases.
Like a handful of very old men who obtained United States citizenship by covering up that they'd been Nazi war criminals.
There were a surprising number of those in the 90s.
We were deporting 85-year-old SS officers at a pretty good clip there for a minute.
A 2020 report from the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild, though, warned that the number of denaturalization cases increased dramatically during Trump's first term.
In 2018, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services announced that they were prepared to refer 1,600 cases to the DOJ for potential denaturalization proceedings.
In 2020, the DOJ formed a new office dedicated to investigating and litigating denaturalization cases.
Although, aside from the mention of that office in some of these publications that were by and for immigration attorneys, I can't actually find anything about the existence of that office past the date of the DOJ press release announcing it.
So it's hard to say if they actually did that.
But denaturalization cases have been increasing in recent years.
And now the administration is seriously considering reviving it as a tool of suppressing political dissent.
In early June of 2025, the Justice Department published a memo directing attorneys in the DOJ's civil division to, quote, prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law.
The memo lists 10 categories of denaturalization cases.
It's got the basics, you know, war crimes, terrorism, gangs, people who lied about their criminal history or made other material misrepresentations during the naturalization process.
But it also includes as a separate category of people to target for having their citizenship stripped away, quote, individuals who engaged in various forms of financial fraud against the United States, including Paycheck Protection Program loan fraud and Medicaid or Medicare fraud.
The 10th category is just vibes.
Quote, any other cases referred to the civil division that the division determines to be sufficiently important to pursue.
And it kind of feels like that would means any immigrant who makes the president mad.
At a White House press briefing on June 30th, Caroline Levitt declined to say whether Trump had weighed in on Congressman Ogle's calls to deport Mamdani.
Does President Trump want Zoran Mamdani deported?
I haven't heard him say that.
I haven't heard him call for that.
But certainly he does not want this individual to be elected.
I was just speaking to him about it and his radical policies that will completely, legally crush Mamdani.
But she did say, quote, it's something that should be investigated and that he is, quote, quite literally a communist.
These McCarthyism era laws target communists.
So it kind of matters what a communist is, or at least what they think it is.
Here are some things that Donald Trump has called communism.
There's Zora and Mamdani, of course.
What did you make of the New York Democrat primary?
Mamdani.
He's a communist.
I think it's very bad for New York.
I don't know that he's going to get it.
It's inconceivable that he's, but he's a communist and he's a pure communist.
I think he admits it.
And for all the noise he's making about New York City getting its first communist mayor, he seems to have forgotten they already had one.
Five years ago, he took time out of a busy day to call in to An episode of Fox and Friends to call Bill de Blasio a communist.
Oh, the mayor has no response.
He doesn't know what he's doing.
He's a fool.
He's a socialist, communist, maybe.
He's a fool.
And it's not just mayors of New York pledging their allegiance to communism in the president's imagination.
It's everyone.
I'm sure it wasn't the only C word he wanted to call her, but he called Kabala Harris a communist throughout the few months leading up to the 2024 election.
She's a Marxist.
She's a Marxist.
A lot of people say don't use the term Marxist because people don't understand.
Okay, she's a communist.
She's a communist.
And our country is not ready for a communist.
It will never be ready for a communist.
And of course, everyone involved in his criminal prosecution was a communist.
Every time the radical left Democrats, Marxists, communists, and fascists indict me, I consider it a great badge of honor because I am being indicted for you.
I am being indicted for you.
It's true.
He couldn't quite make up his mind about Elizabeth Warren.
At some 2020 campaign rallies, she was an avowed communist, a Marxist even.
But other times, she's just borderline communist.
And frankly, had Elizabeth Warren been loyal to her philosophy, which is radical left, socialism, perhaps communism, I don't know, perhaps.
It's verging on communism, right?
He warned voters in Georgia that John Ossif and Raphael Warnock were going to bring about the communist revolution.
Very simply, you will decide whether your children will grow up in a socialist country or whether they will grow up in a free country.
And I will tell you this, socialist is just the beginning for these people.
These people want to go further than socialism.
They want to go into a communistic form of government.
And I have no doubt of that.
This 2020 appearance on the Rush Limbaugh show is reminiscent of the sort of classic civil rights era anti-communism, right?
Only radical Marxism could explain black people having an interest in racial equality.
They must be getting riled up.
The first time I ever heard of Black Lives Matter, I said, that's such a terrible term because it's such a racist term.
It's a term that shows division between blacks and whites and everybody else.
And it's a very bad term for blacks.
But they were very angry.
It's a Marxist organization.
That's the key.
It's pigs in a blanket.
Pigs in a blanket.
And of course, Bernie Sanders is a communist and then some.
And just this week, you called Bernie Sanders a maniac and a communist and a communist.
Christine Ohm, Stephen Miller, Andy Ogles, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Caroline Levitt, the Libs of TikTok lady.
The Magasphere can't stop talking about it.
They're surrounded by communists.
Trump was surprisingly candid about this at a press conference last summer.
All we have to do is define our opponent as being a communist or a socialist or somebody that's going to destroy our country.
They're communists.
They're the enemy.
All we have to do is call our opponent a communist.
It's a little cliché, I think, to remind you of the poem.
You know the one.
First they came for.
But what do you think the first line is?
Because this is the opening of Martin Niemöller's poem in the original German.
"Als die Nazis die Kommunisten holten, habe ich geschwiegen.
Ich war ja kein Kommunist." That recording is from the website for the Martin Niemeller House, a museum in Berlin dedicated to preserving the memory of the role played by the confessing church in resisting Nazi Germany.
The first line is not.
First they came for the socialists.
That's probably the line you had in your head.
Underneath the poem, on the museum's website, they note that the poem is by Martin E. Muller.
And it says, widely used worldwide, often carelessly modified.
Communisten means communists.
First they came for the communists, then the trade unionists, then the Social Democrats, then the Jews.
But I don't think Americans can bear to admit that when someone starts imprisoning and deporting communists, it looks a little bit like a Nazi government.
Thank you.
Weird Little Guys is a production of cool zone media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.
The show is edited by the wildly talented Laurie Gagan.
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at WeirdLittleGuysPodcast at gmail.com.
I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
It's nothing personal.
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weirds of the Guys subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my weird little guys.
Thank you.
In 2012, 16-year-old Brian Herrera was gunned down in broad daylight on his way to do homework.
No suspects, no witnesses, no justice.
I would ask my husband, do you want me to stop?
He was like, no, keep fighting.
After nearly a decade, a breakthrough changed everything.
This is Cold Case Files Miami, stories of families who never stopped fighting.
Listen to Cold Case Files Miami on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Just like great shoes, great books take you places through unforgettable love stories and into conversations with characters you'll never forget.
I think any good romance, it gives me this feeling of like butterflies.
I'm Danielle Robet, and this is bookmarked by Reese's Book Club, the new podcast from Hello Sunshine and iHeart Podcasts, where we dive into the stories that shape us on the page and off.
Each week, I'm joined by authors, celebs, book talk stars, and more for conversations that will make you laugh, cry, and add way too many books to your TBR pile.
Listen to bookmarked by Reese's Book Club on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Maybe you've heard that Stonewall was a riot where queer people fought back against police, or that it's the reason Pride is celebrated this time of year.
It was one of the most liberating things that I have ever done.
Legend says Marsha P. Johnson threw the very first brick.
Start banging on the door of the Stonewall like one, boom.
This week on Afterlives, we'll separate the truth from the myth in the life of Marsha P. Johnson.
Listen to Afterlives on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Did it occur to you that he charmed you in any way?
Yes, it did.
But he was a charming man.
It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story because this ties together the Cold War with the new one.
I often ask myself now, did I know the true Jan at all?
Listen to Hot Money, Agent of Chaos, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
