July 3, 2025 • 47 mins
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-tradition
Shanahan, 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. 197–208
Ornstein, 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.pdf
https://immigrationforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Fact-Sheet-on-Denaturalization.pdf
https://www.npr.org/2025/06/30/nx-s1-5445398/denaturalization-trump-immigration-enforcement
https://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-cases
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Col Zone Media. On February eleventh, nineteen sixty seven, the
Pittsburgh police raided an apartment near the University of Pittsburgh campus.
They had a warrant to search the place for marijuana.
(00:22):
Fifty three 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
(00:43):
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 a dong off the wall. He turned
to one of the guests and demanded to know who
(01:04):
the man in the poster is. Apparently the cop didn't
get the joke because a 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
(01:25):
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.
Mum Dani 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
(01:48):
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 in city communism.
I'm Molly Conger and this it's weird, little guys. I'll
(02:27):
set your mind at ease right now. You may have
recognized that name my mood mom Dannie as the father
of Zoran Mamdanni, 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
(02:47):
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 twenty fourth, Zora Mama won the
New York City mayoral democratic primary. The next day, the
President of the United States, posted on truth Social, the
(03:09):
social media platform that he owns, It's finally happened. The
Democrats have crossed the line. Zorah Mumdani, a one hundred
percent communist lunatic, has just won the dem primary and
it's on his way to becoming mayor. We've had radical
lefties before, but this is getting a little ridiculous. A
one hundred percent communist lunatic. Huh, Zora Mumdani is a
(03:35):
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 Mumdanni
with the word deport stampedon read over his face, accompanied
by this rather alarming demand. A call to action from
(03:57):
the New York Young Republicans Club. The radicals Zoronmumdanni cannot
be allowed to destroy our beloved city of New York.
The Communist Control Act. Lets President Trump revoke Zoron Mumdanni's
citizenship and promptly deport him. The time for action is now.
Stephen Miller and Tom Homan, New York is counting on you.
(04:19):
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 Mamdanni could
have his citizenship revoked. Ogles too called him a communist.
But what is a communist? I'm not actually going to
(04:42):
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 Zoronmumdanni a communist, it's the
same answer that most wing extremists would give you if
they were being honest. I don't know, and I don't care.
(05:09):
In the world of weird little guys, a communist can
be anyone. Even you remember just two weeks ago you
heard this.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
It doesn't matter. She's a communist. You need to stop talking.
Nobody is an She is a communist and anti white liberal.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
That's James alex Field's talking about Heather Hire'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,
(06:04):
Fields would agree that he believed every member of the
crowd that day was Communist. A week after Fields murdered
a counter protester at that Nazi rally, Jason Kessler, the
man who organized the Nazi rally hosted Heather Hire, was
a fat, disgusting communist. Communists have killed ninety four million.
(06:28):
Looks like it was payback time. While he was in prison,
Fields received a letter from Matthew Heinbach, the leader of
the neo Nazi group the Traditionalist Worker Party, in which
Heinbach referred to the counter protesters that Field hit with
his car as quote rampaging communist boards. When Christopher Cantwell,
(06:50):
one of the neo Nazi activists who was supposed to
give a speech that day, got maced, he blamed, oh,
you guessed it. Communists.
Speaker 3 (07:06):
Ye I don't know all that communists.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
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
(07:36):
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 nineteen sixty six.
Speaker 4 (07:54):
In my opinion, communism is the organized mutiny. I'm going
to this law because it's a lot packed into a
few words. In my opinion, communism is the mutiny of
quantity versus quality. I think the communism is the organized
mutiny of the inferior biological people in the world, led
by the Jews, against the people who have built civilization.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
That's what I think it is.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
Or how about David Lane, the man who came up
with the fourteen words.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
That clip is from a sermon that David Lane delivered
at the Aryan Nation's compound in nineteen eighty one, 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.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
What they can destroy the will of the white man,
who is that communism forever.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
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 twentieth century, from the Palmer Raids during the
First Red Scare in nineteen twenty to the years of
(09:37):
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 Kovell argues that there is a difference between anti communism,
that is, capital a anti hyphenpital C communism and anti
(10:03):
communism all one word and lower case. Covelt 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
(10:24):
an objective dislike of capital C communism, so capital C
anti communism is obviously about communism lower case anti communism.
On the other hand, he calls the reigning ideology of
the West and argues that it has very little at
(10:45):
all to do with communism. In nineteen eighty seven, the
Times Mirror commissioned Gallop to survey the American electorate. Over
a period of several months, Bolsters conducted in person in
interviews with four two hundred and forty four American adults
all over the country, administering a long questionnaire that asked
(11:06):
a variety of demographic and political questions. Seventy percent of
respondents self identified as anti communist, compared to forty nine
percent of people who said they were religious, forty seven
percent who supported the civil rights movement, and twenty seven
(11:27):
percent who identified as a supporter of unions. In the
technical appendix, the Polsters 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
(11:49):
claimed that their political identity was as an anti communist
might not really know what communisms and fifty six percent
of respondents said they believed that it was the cause
of most social unrest in America in nineteen eighty seven.
Covell calls this the black hole of anti communism quote
(12:13):
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
an 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
(12:35):
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 of Buckley accused them of idolatry, of venerating
life at the great cost of ignoring the greater good,
(12:58):
which is, I guess, having a large nuclear arsenal to
resist the threat of communism. One of Ronald Reagan's own
closest advisers 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 kami. Everything done in the name
(13:22):
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
(13:44):
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 well, you just call
(14:06):
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
(14:27):
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 band 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
(14:48):
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 quixotic project of rooting out
imaginary communists than j Edgar Hoover. Ellen Schrecker, a historian
(15:14):
of McCarthyism, wrote that if people had known in the
nineteen fifties 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 nineteen fifty eight book
Masters of Deceit, he explained just how devious the communists
(15:35):
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,
(15:57):
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 maybe thinking about them too, And how is one
to know whether one's thoughts are actually one's own or
(16:19):
the reflection of some subtle communists thought anoculation. By the
nineteen sixties, there wasn't the same appetite for the outright
McCarthyism of the forties and fifties, 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
(16:40):
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 nineteen sixty seven, Zoron
Mamdani's father, Mahmoudmumdani, was a college student at the University
of Pittsburgh. He was one of several dozen students caught
(17:02):
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 fifty
three people were dropped. But this wasn't an ordinary college party.
Half of the people taken into custody that night were
(17:24):
students from nearby Saint Vincent College, their theology professor, Father Roseboro,
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,
(17:47):
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
(18:09):
anti war movement. Two months after those charges were dropped,
Marcus Childs wrote an article about the raid in the
Washington Post. Child 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 believed that
(18:29):
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 mccarthuris hysteria. This particular incident itself doesn't get
much press after that. I mean, there's nothing to report. Right,
(18:53):
the charges were dropped, it was over. But the very
day that newspapers ran April twenty first, nineteen sixty seven,
an FBI agent carefully cut it out of the newspaper
and xeroxt it. Later that day, that same FBI agent
wrote a memo to his boss, William Sullivan, the head
(19:15):
of the bureau's domestic intelligence division running the operation we
now know as co Intel pro. Attached to the memo
was that copy of Charles's 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,
(19:36):
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 in student groups
to criticize the Bureau in an effort to stop our
(19:57):
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 subverse some
influences on the campuses. A few days later, j Edgar Hoover,
the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation himself, wrote
(20:19):
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 Jaedgar Hoover, but
I don't think he's telling the truth. Shocking, I know,
(20:42):
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 by hours
before the raid, and that the warrant specifically authorized for
(21:03):
the search of marijuana. But the FBI memo and some
of the newspaper articles claimed 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
(21:25):
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 outlined surveillance of Goldsmith performed by
(21:49):
the Pittsburgh Police Department on behalf of the FBI, and
the raid at Frank Goldsmith's apartment wasn't Mahmoud mam Danni's
first rush with FBI surveillance. Two years earlier, in March
of nineteen sixty five, he was one of one hundred
and twenty eight college students from the Pittsburgh area who
piled into buses that made the twelve hour drive to Montgomery, Alabama,
(22:13):
and there they participated in a protest organized by these
student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Speaker 5 (22:20):
I was born in Kampala, Uganda, in East Africa. I
was given my middle name Kuame 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 nineteen sixty two. We can clap for that,
and when we did. The United States government gave the
(22:43):
Ugandan government twenty three 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 sometime 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
(23:05):
by members of SNICK, 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
the United States. He said, can you get me out
of jail? The ambassador said, what are you doing in jail?
(23:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
His son's re counting 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 nineteen
sixty five. But a memo that landed directly on J.
Edgar Hoover's desk did. The names of every student on
(23:57):
those buses was turned over to the FBI by formant,
and in the weeks that followed, Mamud Mumdani was one
of scores of students who received a visit from a
federal agent. In an interview in twenty thirteen, Mamoud Mumdani
says that it was the FBI's obsessive attempts to root
out communism that ironically introduced him to Marx. Reading from
(24:22):
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
(24:42):
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. I said, no, no, he's dead. Oh wow,
(25:03):
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
(25:25):
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. There is a
(26:01):
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. Their short answer
is just that it was often politically useful to label
all civil rights activists as communists, and that was kind
(26:25):
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,
(26:48):
and Massive Resistance, Jeff Woods Black Struggle, Red Scare, segregation
and anti Communism in the South, and yeah, Soohiro Kategii's
Black Freedom, White Resistance, and Red Men. But here's the thing.
Some of those civil rights activists were communists. That gets
(27:11):
lost when you explain it all the way as McCarthy's
hysteria and redbaiting. 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 Caentwell
being asked who maced him. He has no idea who
(27:33):
it was, but it was communists, because whatever bad thing
is happening to him is communism. So I suppose it's
no surprise that Zoron Mumdani is being accused of being
a communist, and I do mean accused. People like Congressman
Andy Ogles are trying to have him investigated. Zoron Mumdani
(27:57):
is an immigrant, was born in Uganda and moved to
the United States as a child and became a naturalized
United States citizen in twenty eighteen. 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 nineteen fifty four
(28:21):
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
(28:42):
from holding certain offices. It has nothing to do with
his naturalization status. It was signed into law by President
Eisenhower in nineteen fifty four, the same year that Eisenhower
himself was accused of being a card carrying member of
the Communist Party by Robert Well, the founder of the
viciously anti communist John Birch Society. Those facts aren't actually
(29:08):
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 nineteen sixties that it didn't prevent
(29:29):
the Communist Party from participating in the New York State
Unemployments 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 nineteen seventy three,
but a challenge to the law was never heard by
a higher court, so we don't have a Supreme Court
(29:51):
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 nineteen fifty four would
(30:12):
not hold up. It would not hold up to a challenge,
although again everything's out the window now. Other Magaspear 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
(30:35):
relic of the MacArthur era, members of the Communist Party
are not eligible to become naturalized citizens. Specifically, Title eight
US Code, Section fourteen twenty four prohibition upon the naturalization
of persons opposed to government or law, or who favored
totalitarian forms of government. It's a lengthy section, it managed,
(31:00):
which is 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 sub sections. A member of or affiliated with, the
(31:21):
Communist Party of the United States, any other totalitarian party
of the United States, the Communist Political Association, the Communists,
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,
(31:42):
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 register, have such knowledge
or reason to believe that such organization was a Communist
(32:04):
Front organization? What the fuck does that mean?
Speaker 6 (32:12):
Now?
Speaker 1 (32:12):
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
(32:36):
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
(32:58):
mean by communist front or 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 US Code
at all. But it used to be. The term was
(33:23):
originally defined in a law that was passed two years earlier,
in the Internal Security Act of nineteen fifty, in the
section of the Code that established the Subversive Activities Control Board.
The Supreme Court ruled in nineteen sixty five that it
was unconstitutional to force members of the Communist Party to
register with the Subversive Activities Control Board, and that entire
(33:47):
Code section would eventually get repealed in nineteen ninety three,
which is why it no longer appears in the US
Code at all. So the Code section we were just
talking about, the section that would allow for the vitualization
of people who were members of organizations that were required
to be registered with a body that no longer exists
(34:08):
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.
(34:29):
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 you 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.
(34:51):
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 eight USC. Fourteen fifty one, Revocation of naturalization.
(35:17):
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,
(35:37):
they can take it back. If a person who shall
have been naturalized after December twenty four, nineteen fifty two, 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 fourteen
(35:58):
twenty four 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
(36:20):
revoked for a 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
(36:42):
for several years, they can take it as proof that
you lied on purpose, years before the thought ever entered
your head. Denaturalization is not common, at least it didn't
(37:10):
used to be. Between nineteen ninety and twenty seventeen, there
were an average of eleven cases per year. And when
I punched in this code section into court listener who
website that let's use 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
(37:32):
red flag obvious problem. Tize 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 nineties. We were deporting eighty
(37:54):
five year old SS officers at a pretty good clip
there for a minute. Twenty report from the National Immigration
Project of the National Lawyer's Guild, though, warned that the
number of denaturalization cases increased dramatically during Trump's first term.
In twenty eighteen, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services announced
(38:15):
that they were prepared to refer sixteen hundred cases to
the DOJ for potential denaturalization proceedings. In twenty twenty, 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
(38:37):
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
(38:59):
it as a tool of suppressing political dissent. In early
June of twenty twenty five, 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.
(39:21):
The memo lists ten 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 citizenships
stripped away. Quote individuals who engaged in various forms of
(39:43):
financial fraud against the United States, including paycheck protection program
loan fraud, and medicaid or Medicare fraud. The tenth category
is just vibes. Quote any other cases refer to the
Civil Division that the Division determines to be sufficiently important
(40:05):
to pursue. And it kind of feels like that one
means any immigrant who makes the president mad. At a
White House press briefing on June thirtieth, Caroline Levitt declined
to say whether Trump had weighed in on Congressman Ogle's
calls to deport Mamdanni. Does President Trump want Zooran Mamdani deported.
Speaker 7 (40:30):
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 rush.
Speaker 1 (40:43):
But she did say, quote, it's something that should be investigated,
and that he is quote quite literally a communist. These
McCarthy's and Earl laws target communists, so it kind of
matters what a communist is, or at least what they
(41:06):
think it is. Here are some things that Donald Trump
has called communism. There's a ro on, Mom, Donnie, of course,
what did you make of the New York Democrat primary?
I'm Donnie.
Speaker 3 (41:20):
He's a communist.
Speaker 8 (41:21):
I think is very bad for New York.
Speaker 6 (41:24):
I don't know that he's going to get inconceivable that,
but he's a communist, and he's a pure communist. I
think he admits it.
Speaker 1 (41:33):
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 into an
episode of Fox and Friends to call Bill de Blasio
a communist.
Speaker 6 (41:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (42:00):
And it's not just mayss of New York pledging their
allegiance to communism in the president's imagination to everyone. I'm
sure it wasn't the only C word he wanted to
call her, but he called Kamala Harris a communist throughout
the few months leading up to the twenty twenty four election.
Speaker 8 (42:18):
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.
Speaker 9 (42:27):
She's a communist, and our country is not ready for
a communist.
Speaker 8 (42:33):
It will never be ready for a communist.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
And of course everyone involved in his criminal prosecution was
a communist.
Speaker 3 (42:45):
Every time the radical left, Democrats, Marxist, communist and fascists
indicte me, I consider it a great badge of honor
because I am being indicted for you. I am being
indicted for you.
Speaker 1 (43:02):
He couldn't quite make up his mind about Elizabeth Warren.
At some twenty twenty campaign rallies she was an avowed communist,
a Marxist even, but other times she's just borderline communist.
Speaker 8 (43:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:32):
He Warren voters in Georgia that John Ossef and Raphael
Warnock were going to bring about the communist revolution.
Speaker 9 (43:39):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:58):
And I have no doubt about.
Speaker 2 (44:04):
This.
Speaker 1 (44:04):
Twenty twenty 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.
Speaker 6 (44:19):
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 show's division between
blacks and whites and everybody else. And it's a very
bad term. Four blacks, but they were very angry. It's
a Marxist organization.
Speaker 1 (44:37):
That's the key.
Speaker 6 (44:38):
It's pigs in a blanket, pigs.
Speaker 1 (44:40):
In a blanket. And of course Bernie Sanders is a communist.
And then some and just this week you call Bernie
Sanders a maniac and a communist and a communist. Christy Nomes,
Stephen Miller, Andy Ogels, Marjorie Green, Caroline Levitt, the Libs
(45:01):
of TikTok Lady the Maga Sphear can't stop talking about it.
They're surrounded by communists. Trump was surprisingly candid about this
at a press conference last summer.
Speaker 6 (45:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (45:26):
They're communists, they're the enemy. All we have to do
is call our opponent a communist. It's a little cliche,
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
(45:49):
of Martin Eimuller's poem in the original German.
Speaker 5 (45:53):
That's the Nazis de communist nor words k sweeden ishvaja
con communist.
Speaker 1 (46:02):
That recording is from the website for the Martin Emuller House,
a museum in Berlin dedicated to preserving the memory of
the role played by the Confessing Church and resisting Nazi Germany.
The first line is not first they came for the socialists,
but that's probably the line you had in your head
underneath the palm. On the museum's website they note that
(46:25):
the poem is by Martin Emuller and it says widely
used worldwide, often carelessly modified. Communists means communists. First they
came for the Communists, then the trade unionists, then the
(46:46):
social Democrats, then the Jews. But I don't think Americans
can bear to admit that when someone starts imprisoning and
deporting communists a little bit like a Nazi government. Weird
(47:18):
Little Guys is a prorection of Cool Zone Media and
iHeart ratio. It's researched, written and recorded by me Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Liechtman and Robert Evans. The
show is edited by the wildly talented Ory Gagan. The
theme music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email
me at Ridttle Guys Podcast at gmail dot com. I
will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the
(47:40):
show without the listeners on the weirdsle the Guys subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you on
my weird Little Guys
Col Zone Media. On February eleventh, nineteen sixty seven, the
Pittsburgh police raided an apartment near the University of Pittsburgh campus.
They had a warrant to search the place for marijuana.
(00:22):
Fifty three 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
(00:43):
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 a dong off the wall. He turned
to one of the guests and demanded to know who
(01:04):
the man in the poster is. Apparently the cop didn't
get the joke because a 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
(01:25):
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.
Mum Dani 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
(01:48):
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 in city communism.
I'm Molly Conger and this it's weird, little guys. I'll
(02:27):
set your mind at ease right now. You may have
recognized that name my mood mom Dannie as the father
of Zoran Mamdanni, 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
(02:47):
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 twenty fourth, Zora Mama won the
New York City mayoral democratic primary. The next day, the
President of the United States, posted on truth Social, the
(03:09):
social media platform that he owns, It's finally happened. The
Democrats have crossed the line. Zorah Mumdani, a one hundred
percent communist lunatic, has just won the dem primary and
it's on his way to becoming mayor. We've had radical
lefties before, but this is getting a little ridiculous. A
one hundred percent communist lunatic. Huh, Zora Mumdani is a
(03:35):
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 Mumdanni
with the word deport stampedon read over his face, accompanied
by this rather alarming demand. A call to action from
(03:57):
the New York Young Republicans Club. The radicals Zoronmumdanni cannot
be allowed to destroy our beloved city of New York.
The Communist Control Act. Lets President Trump revoke Zoron Mumdanni's
citizenship and promptly deport him. The time for action is now.
Stephen Miller and Tom Homan, New York is counting on you.
(04:19):
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 Mamdanni could
have his citizenship revoked. Ogles too called him a communist.
But what is a communist? I'm not actually going to
(04:42):
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 Zoronmumdanni a communist, it's the
same answer that most wing extremists would give you if
they were being honest. I don't know, and I don't care.
(05:09):
In the world of weird little guys, a communist can
be anyone. Even you remember just two weeks ago you
heard this.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
It doesn't matter. She's a communist. You need to stop talking.
Nobody is an She is a communist and anti white liberal.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
That's James alex Field's talking about Heather Hire'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,
(06:04):
Fields would agree that he believed every member of the
crowd that day was Communist. A week after Fields murdered
a counter protester at that Nazi rally, Jason Kessler, the
man who organized the Nazi rally hosted Heather Hire, was
a fat, disgusting communist. Communists have killed ninety four million.
(06:28):
Looks like it was payback time. While he was in prison,
Fields received a letter from Matthew Heinbach, the leader of
the neo Nazi group the Traditionalist Worker Party, in which
Heinbach referred to the counter protesters that Field hit with
his car as quote rampaging communist boards. When Christopher Cantwell,
(06:50):
one of the neo Nazi activists who was supposed to
give a speech that day, got maced, he blamed, oh,
you guessed it. Communists.
Speaker 3 (07:06):
Ye I don't know all that communists.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
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
(07:36):
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 nineteen sixty six.
Speaker 4 (07:54):
In my opinion, communism is the organized mutiny. I'm going
to this law because it's a lot packed into a
few words. In my opinion, communism is the mutiny of
quantity versus quality. I think the communism is the organized
mutiny of the inferior biological people in the world, led
by the Jews, against the people who have built civilization.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
That's what I think it is.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
Or how about David Lane, the man who came up
with the fourteen words.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
That clip is from a sermon that David Lane delivered
at the Aryan Nation's compound in nineteen eighty one, 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.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
What they can destroy the will of the white man,
who is that communism forever.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
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 twentieth century, from the Palmer Raids during the
First Red Scare in nineteen twenty to the years of
(09:37):
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 Kovell argues that there is a difference between anti communism,
that is, capital a anti hyphenpital C communism and anti
(10:03):
communism all one word and lower case. Covelt 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
(10:24):
an objective dislike of capital C communism, so capital C
anti communism is obviously about communism lower case anti communism.
On the other hand, he calls the reigning ideology of
the West and argues that it has very little at
(10:45):
all to do with communism. In nineteen eighty seven, the
Times Mirror commissioned Gallop to survey the American electorate. Over
a period of several months, Bolsters conducted in person in
interviews with four two hundred and forty four American adults
all over the country, administering a long questionnaire that asked
(11:06):
a variety of demographic and political questions. Seventy percent of
respondents self identified as anti communist, compared to forty nine
percent of people who said they were religious, forty seven
percent who supported the civil rights movement, and twenty seven
(11:27):
percent who identified as a supporter of unions. In the
technical appendix, the Polsters 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
(11:49):
claimed that their political identity was as an anti communist
might not really know what communisms and fifty six percent
of respondents said they believed that it was the cause
of most social unrest in America in nineteen eighty seven.
Covell calls this the black hole of anti communism quote
(12:13):
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
an 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
(12:35):
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 of Buckley accused them of idolatry, of venerating
life at the great cost of ignoring the greater good,
(12:58):
which is, I guess, having a large nuclear arsenal to
resist the threat of communism. One of Ronald Reagan's own
closest advisers 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 kami. Everything done in the name
(13:22):
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
(13:44):
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 well, you just call
(14:06):
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
(14:27):
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 band 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
(14:48):
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 quixotic project of rooting out
imaginary communists than j Edgar Hoover. Ellen Schrecker, a historian
(15:14):
of McCarthyism, wrote that if people had known in the
nineteen fifties 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 nineteen fifty eight book
Masters of Deceit, he explained just how devious the communists
(15:35):
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,
(15:57):
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 maybe thinking about them too, And how is one
to know whether one's thoughts are actually one's own or
(16:19):
the reflection of some subtle communists thought anoculation. By the
nineteen sixties, there wasn't the same appetite for the outright
McCarthyism of the forties and fifties, 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
(16:40):
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 nineteen sixty seven, Zoron
Mamdani's father, Mahmoudmumdani, was a college student at the University
of Pittsburgh. He was one of several dozen students caught
(17:02):
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 fifty
three people were dropped. But this wasn't an ordinary college party.
Half of the people taken into custody that night were
(17:24):
students from nearby Saint Vincent College, their theology professor, Father Roseboro,
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,
(17:47):
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
(18:09):
anti war movement. Two months after those charges were dropped,
Marcus Childs wrote an article about the raid in the
Washington Post. Child 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 believed that
(18:29):
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 mccarthuris hysteria. This particular incident itself doesn't get
much press after that. I mean, there's nothing to report. Right,
(18:53):
the charges were dropped, it was over. But the very
day that newspapers ran April twenty first, nineteen sixty seven,
an FBI agent carefully cut it out of the newspaper
and xeroxt it. Later that day, that same FBI agent
wrote a memo to his boss, William Sullivan, the head
(19:15):
of the bureau's domestic intelligence division running the operation we
now know as co Intel pro. Attached to the memo
was that copy of Charles's 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,
(19:36):
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 in student groups
to criticize the Bureau in an effort to stop our
(19:57):
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 subverse some
influences on the campuses. A few days later, j Edgar Hoover,
the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation himself, wrote
(20:19):
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 Jaedgar Hoover, but
I don't think he's telling the truth. Shocking, I know,
(20:42):
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 by hours
before the raid, and that the warrant specifically authorized for
(21:03):
the search of marijuana. But the FBI memo and some
of the newspaper articles claimed 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
(21:25):
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 outlined surveillance of Goldsmith performed by
(21:49):
the Pittsburgh Police Department on behalf of the FBI, and
the raid at Frank Goldsmith's apartment wasn't Mahmoud mam Danni's
first rush with FBI surveillance. Two years earlier, in March
of nineteen sixty five, he was one of one hundred
and twenty eight college students from the Pittsburgh area who
piled into buses that made the twelve hour drive to Montgomery, Alabama,
(22:13):
and there they participated in a protest organized by these
student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Speaker 5 (22:20):
I was born in Kampala, Uganda, in East Africa. I
was given my middle name Kuame 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 nineteen sixty two. We can clap for that,
and when we did. The United States government gave the
(22:43):
Ugandan government twenty three 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 sometime 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
(23:05):
by members of SNICK, 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
the United States. He said, can you get me out
of jail? The ambassador said, what are you doing in jail?
(23:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
His son's re counting 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 nineteen
sixty five. But a memo that landed directly on J.
Edgar Hoover's desk did. The names of every student on
(23:57):
those buses was turned over to the FBI by formant,
and in the weeks that followed, Mamud Mumdani was one
of scores of students who received a visit from a
federal agent. In an interview in twenty thirteen, Mamoud Mumdani
says that it was the FBI's obsessive attempts to root
out communism that ironically introduced him to Marx. Reading from
(24:22):
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
(24:42):
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. I said, no, no, he's dead. Oh wow,
(25:03):
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
(25:25):
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. There is a
(26:01):
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. Their short answer
is just that it was often politically useful to label
all civil rights activists as communists, and that was kind
(26:25):
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,
(26:48):
and Massive Resistance, Jeff Woods Black Struggle, Red Scare, segregation
and anti Communism in the South, and yeah, Soohiro Kategii's
Black Freedom, White Resistance, and Red Men. But here's the thing.
Some of those civil rights activists were communists. That gets
(27:11):
lost when you explain it all the way as McCarthy's
hysteria and redbaiting. 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 Caentwell
being asked who maced him. He has no idea who
(27:33):
it was, but it was communists, because whatever bad thing
is happening to him is communism. So I suppose it's
no surprise that Zoron Mumdani is being accused of being
a communist, and I do mean accused. People like Congressman
Andy Ogles are trying to have him investigated. Zoron Mumdani
(27:57):
is an immigrant, was born in Uganda and moved to
the United States as a child and became a naturalized
United States citizen in twenty eighteen. 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 nineteen fifty four
(28:21):
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
(28:42):
from holding certain offices. It has nothing to do with
his naturalization status. It was signed into law by President
Eisenhower in nineteen fifty four, the same year that Eisenhower
himself was accused of being a card carrying member of
the Communist Party by Robert Well, the founder of the
viciously anti communist John Birch Society. Those facts aren't actually
(29:08):
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 nineteen sixties that it didn't prevent
(29:29):
the Communist Party from participating in the New York State
Unemployments 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 nineteen seventy three,
but a challenge to the law was never heard by
a higher court, so we don't have a Supreme Court
(29:51):
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 nineteen fifty four would
(30:12):
not hold up. It would not hold up to a challenge,
although again everything's out the window now. Other Magaspear 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
(30:35):
relic of the MacArthur era, members of the Communist Party
are not eligible to become naturalized citizens. Specifically, Title eight
US Code, Section fourteen twenty four prohibition upon the naturalization
of persons opposed to government or law, or who favored
totalitarian forms of government. It's a lengthy section, it managed,
(31:00):
which is 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 sub sections. A member of or affiliated with, the
(31:21):
Communist Party of the United States, any other totalitarian party
of the United States, the Communist Political Association, the Communists,
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,
(31:42):
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 register, have such knowledge
or reason to believe that such organization was a Communist
(32:04):
Front organization? What the fuck does that mean?
Speaker 6 (32:12):
Now?
Speaker 1 (32:12):
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
(32:36):
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
(32:58):
mean by communist front or 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 US Code
at all. But it used to be. The term was
(33:23):
originally defined in a law that was passed two years earlier,
in the Internal Security Act of nineteen fifty, in the
section of the Code that established the Subversive Activities Control Board.
The Supreme Court ruled in nineteen sixty five that it
was unconstitutional to force members of the Communist Party to
register with the Subversive Activities Control Board, and that entire
(33:47):
Code section would eventually get repealed in nineteen ninety three,
which is why it no longer appears in the US
Code at all. So the Code section we were just
talking about, the section that would allow for the vitualization
of people who were members of organizations that were required
to be registered with a body that no longer exists
(34:08):
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.
(34:29):
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 you 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.
(34:51):
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 eight USC. Fourteen fifty one, Revocation of naturalization.
(35:17):
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,
(35:37):
they can take it back. If a person who shall
have been naturalized after December twenty four, nineteen fifty two, 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 fourteen
(35:58):
twenty four 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
(36:20):
revoked for a 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
(36:42):
for several years, they can take it as proof that
you lied on purpose, years before the thought ever entered
your head. Denaturalization is not common, at least it didn't
(37:10):
used to be. Between nineteen ninety and twenty seventeen, there
were an average of eleven cases per year. And when
I punched in this code section into court listener who
website that let's use 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
(37:32):
red flag obvious problem. Tize 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 nineties. We were deporting eighty
(37:54):
five year old SS officers at a pretty good clip
there for a minute. Twenty report from the National Immigration
Project of the National Lawyer's Guild, though, warned that the
number of denaturalization cases increased dramatically during Trump's first term.
In twenty eighteen, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services announced
(38:15):
that they were prepared to refer sixteen hundred cases to
the DOJ for potential denaturalization proceedings. In twenty twenty, 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
(38:37):
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
(38:59):
it as a tool of suppressing political dissent. In early
June of twenty twenty five, 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.
(39:21):
The memo lists ten 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 citizenships
stripped away. Quote individuals who engaged in various forms of
(39:43):
financial fraud against the United States, including paycheck protection program
loan fraud, and medicaid or Medicare fraud. The tenth category
is just vibes. Quote any other cases refer to the
Civil Division that the Division determines to be sufficiently important
(40:05):
to pursue. And it kind of feels like that one
means any immigrant who makes the president mad. At a
White House press briefing on June thirtieth, Caroline Levitt declined
to say whether Trump had weighed in on Congressman Ogle's
calls to deport Mamdanni. Does President Trump want Zooran Mamdani deported.
Speaker 7 (40:30):
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 rush.
Speaker 1 (40:43):
But she did say, quote, it's something that should be investigated,
and that he is quote quite literally a communist. These
McCarthy's and Earl laws target communists, so it kind of
matters what a communist is, or at least what they
(41:06):
think it is. Here are some things that Donald Trump
has called communism. There's a ro on, Mom, Donnie, of course,
what did you make of the New York Democrat primary?
I'm Donnie.
Speaker 3 (41:20):
He's a communist.
Speaker 8 (41:21):
I think is very bad for New York.
Speaker 6 (41:24):
I don't know that he's going to get inconceivable that,
but he's a communist, and he's a pure communist. I
think he admits it.
Speaker 1 (41:33):
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 into an
episode of Fox and Friends to call Bill de Blasio
a communist.
Speaker 6 (41:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (42:00):
And it's not just mayss of New York pledging their
allegiance to communism in the president's imagination to everyone. I'm
sure it wasn't the only C word he wanted to
call her, but he called Kamala Harris a communist throughout
the few months leading up to the twenty twenty four election.
Speaker 8 (42:18):
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.
Speaker 9 (42:27):
She's a communist, and our country is not ready for
a communist.
Speaker 8 (42:33):
It will never be ready for a communist.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
And of course everyone involved in his criminal prosecution was
a communist.
Speaker 3 (42:45):
Every time the radical left, Democrats, Marxist, communist and fascists
indicte me, I consider it a great badge of honor
because I am being indicted for you. I am being
indicted for you.
Speaker 1 (43:02):
He couldn't quite make up his mind about Elizabeth Warren.
At some twenty twenty campaign rallies she was an avowed communist,
a Marxist even, but other times she's just borderline communist.
Speaker 8 (43:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:32):
He Warren voters in Georgia that John Ossef and Raphael
Warnock were going to bring about the communist revolution.
Speaker 9 (43:39):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:58):
And I have no doubt about.
Speaker 2 (44:04):
This.
Speaker 1 (44:04):
Twenty twenty 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.
Speaker 6 (44:19):
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 show's division between
blacks and whites and everybody else. And it's a very
bad term. Four blacks, but they were very angry. It's
a Marxist organization.
Speaker 1 (44:37):
That's the key.
Speaker 6 (44:38):
It's pigs in a blanket, pigs.
Speaker 1 (44:40):
In a blanket. And of course Bernie Sanders is a communist.
And then some and just this week you call Bernie
Sanders a maniac and a communist and a communist. Christy Nomes,
Stephen Miller, Andy Ogels, Marjorie Green, Caroline Levitt, the Libs
(45:01):
of TikTok Lady the Maga Sphear can't stop talking about it.
They're surrounded by communists. Trump was surprisingly candid about this
at a press conference last summer.
Speaker 6 (45:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (45:26):
They're communists, they're the enemy. All we have to do
is call our opponent a communist. It's a little cliche,
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
(45:49):
of Martin Eimuller's poem in the original German.
Speaker 5 (45:53):
That's the Nazis de communist nor words k sweeden ishvaja
con communist.
Speaker 1 (46:02):
That recording is from the website for the Martin Emuller House,
a museum in Berlin dedicated to preserving the memory of
the role played by the Confessing Church and resisting Nazi Germany.
The first line is not first they came for the socialists,
but that's probably the line you had in your head
underneath the palm. On the museum's website they note that
(46:25):
the poem is by Martin Emuller and it says widely
used worldwide, often carelessly modified. Communists means communists. First they
came for the Communists, then the trade unionists, then the
(46:46):
social Democrats, then the Jews. But I don't think Americans
can bear to admit that when someone starts imprisoning and
deporting communists a little bit like a Nazi government. Weird
(47:18):
Little Guys is a prorection of Cool Zone Media and
iHeart ratio. It's researched, written and recorded by me Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Liechtman and Robert Evans. The
show is edited by the wildly talented Ory Gagan. The
theme music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email
me at Ridttle Guys Podcast at gmail dot com. I
will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the
(47:40):
show without the listeners on the weirdsle the Guys subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you on
my weird Little Guys
Host
Molly Conger
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