On this edition of Your Call’s Media Roundtable, New York Times award winning reporter Clay Risen discusses his new book, Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America.
Risen examines how Senator Joseph McCarthy and a vast network of government officials and organizations led a ruthless campaign that systematically destroyed thousands of lives in a paranoid crusade against alleged Communist conspiracies.
He writes: "The Red Scare had inflamed a passionate core of hard-right conservatives, who were prepared to believe the worst about the government and liberals, and to act on it. The era left a permanent scar on the left, one measured not only in lives and livelihoods lost, but in the deepened and lasting divide between moderates and progressives. But it transformed the right to a much greater extent. The Republican Party had accepted the hard right into its ranks after it refused to deploy anti-Communism in the 1948 presidential election. Eisenhower and his allies managed to push it back out, but they had shown the possibility of capturing the party, even if doing so might take decades."
Risen also connects the red scare to Trump and Musk's anti-DEI and anti-intellectual purges.
Guest:
Clay Risen, reporter and editor at The New York Times, member of the Society of American Historians, and author of several books, including A Nation on Fire, The Bill of the Century, and his latest, Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America
Resources:
The New Yorker: How the Red Scare Reshaped American Politics
The New York Times Magazine: What’s So New About the ‘New Right’?
Politico: What Happened the Last Time a President Purged the Bureaucracy
