McCarthyism

The ticket prices have gone downwards.

I mean, is he in a situation, perhaps contractually, where he literally cannot... sort of poke his head above the parapets and say anything it could he be taken to prison i mean not literally but i mean you know is he literally bound and tied into a contract where he cannot even if he wanted to and even if it would possibly reverse the massive backlash um Would it would it would he be able to kind of reverse? Do you think Ed Sheeran can redeem himself? Is there a feeling at the end of this febrile week that he can actually do anything to rectify the damage that's been done? Or is this now a downward descent? I mean, the interesting thing is, is that there's this McCarthyist.

I mean, well, look, this isn't even an Israeli Zionist thing.

This is an American thing.

Completely destroyed it.

And then over in the US, we have McCarthyism, which is another form of censorship, which you had the Red Scare, which specifically went after communists, and Lavender Scare, which went after...

Because I think people are sort of familiar with the Red Scare and that went through Washington and Hollywood and outing communists for fear of communism.

People might be less familiar with the Lavender Scare, which also came out of McCarthyism.

So the Lavender Scare was a moral panic about homosexual people in the United States government, which led to their mass dismissal from governmental service during the mid-20th century.

And a lot of the reasoning behind that was that these people were easily... manipulated by uh i guess communists or the russian government um because they had a secret and they could they would easily give up information if in in trade to keep that secret um here we go gay men and lesbians were said to be a national security risk and communist sympathizers which led to the call to remove them from state employment It was also thought that due to the stigma around homosexuality, gay people were vulnerable to blackmail, is what I was just saying, which could lead to a breach in national security.

So the movie then trickles into that and sees how queer people were persecuted during the 1950s, McCarthyism.

I learned about the Red Scare in a college class that I took.

D.C. A sort of, like, it's not brought up in the movie, like, all that much, but a backdrop, like, it's set in 1954 and, like...

the is sort of like the advent of the cold war and like that's a that's kind of like a like a McCarthyism yeah it's very much a backdrop for the movie and it comes up in a couple of different places especially in the ending especially in the ending yeah where you know communism is just red herring it really is um But yeah, like, the scene where Wadsworth kind of breaks down what everyone is, like, being blackmailed over is just, like, it's so just, like, it's so sharp and it's so dry and it has, like...

Just, like, all of these, like, little jokes in terms of phrase that just, like...

They just, like...

And Clinton was bombing Iraq once every three days.

But I also think the surveillance agenda is very similar in that there's, and this is something I argue in my book, in that there's a long-term, decades-long project by the right to essentially revive McCarthyism using the framework of counterterrorism.

And when 9-11 happens, just as those people in the Bush administration want to bomb a country that had been bombed to pieces, Iraq, even more, and invade and occupy, the people who wanted to sort of undo the post-Hoover restrictions on the FBI immediately jumped into action.

One of the first things Ashcroft does in response to 9-11 is he loosens up the FBI's domestic security guidelines.

I mean, you're the one that's killing and torturing people and starting wars on a whim and, you know, supporting white supremacist Christian nationalist violence.

And it's like, I'm the violent one because I want to afford food.

And another historical analogy that I just thought of, if I can bring in, you know, when the FBI, there's a lot of work amongst academics in the late 70s, early 80s that's been forgotten, where they use Freedom Information Act requests to sort of expose the origins of McCarthyism, what they discover is.

was that McCarthyism was not an organic reaction.

As part of, you know, I will answer that question as part of the wrap up here.

But I think the simple explanation is that, the legacy of McCarthyism.

I was joking earlier, of course, when I said that you're a raging McCarthyist, but the left and center-left and even the center-right is super, super anxious about looking under every rock and finding Russians because there is a legacy of that being a highly disreputable and oppressive thing to do that is based on lies, which in a lot of cases it was, although there were Russian agents in the United States in the 50s.

And Andrew mentions the legacy of the Salem witch trials as well.

And I think this is what kept me from seeing the misdirection that kept me from seeing that Lansbury's character was using her husband to take out legitimate people and install sleeper agents, was that you have...

the parody of McCarthyism and the buffoon of the James Gregory character.

So that you're focused on that.

But at the end of the day, he would have been right, just mentioning the wrong people.

That was all about the Cold War propaganda.

You know that, right? Like it wasn't this was all McCarthyism.

This was this whole 1950s and 60s era of if you are if you're communist, you hate America.

And if you love America, you're capitalist.