The New Red Scare
Sources
[BOOK] Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism and the Making of Modern America by Clay Risen
Yannielli, Len. Clay Risen’s ‘Red Scare’ misses mark on history of communism and anti-fascism movements in U.S.. People's World. July 2, 2025. https://peoplesworld.org/article/clay-risens-red-scare-misses-mark-on-history-of-communism-and-anti-fascism-movements-in-u-s/
Markowitz, Norman. Red Scare without the Reds? Clay Risen loses the plot. Communist Party USA. Sept. 30, 2025. https://www.cpusa.org/article/red-scare-without-the-reds-clay-risen-loses-the-plot/
Pratt, Timothy. Arrest of American who has given $1m in aid to Palestine prompts fears of ‘growing repression from Trump’. The Guardian. July 15, 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/15/james-fergie-chambers-arrest-palestine-aid-trump
Pratt, Timothy, Wife of US heir and activist donor on fighting his extradition to US: ‘It’s incredible that this can happen’. The Guardian. July 18, 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/18/fergie-chambers-stella-schnabel-spain-extradition
Roston, Aram. ‘Enemies of civilization’: top Trump officials launch sweeping attack on left. The Guardian. July 16, 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/16/political-violence-event-trump-marco-rubio
Lavin, Rachel. Millionaire US pro-Palestinian donor arrested over Hamas funding allegations lived in Ireland. The Irish Times. July 17, 2026. https://www.irishtimes.com/world/europe/2026/07/17/millionaire-us-pro-palestinian-donor-arrested-over-hamas-funding-allegations-lived-in-ireland/
Schenck v. US (1919) https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep249/usrep249047/usrep249047.pdf
Dennis v. US (1951) https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep341/usrep341494/usrep341494.pdf
Yates v. US (1957) https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep354/usrep354298/usrep354298.pdf
US v. Robel (1967) https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep389/usrep389258/usrep389258.pdf
Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep395/usrep395444/usrep395444.pdf
Transcript
I want to tell you a story, did you hear about this? An American millionaire named James “Fergie” Chambers was on vacation in Spain with his wife back in July, just a few weeks ago. They were on the Spanish island of Ibiza, considering a move there with their family. Chambers, his wife Stella Schnabel, and their five year old son were driving down a dirt road on the way to a school visit, when 7 Spanish police cars forced them to stop their vehicle, pulled Chambers away from his family and told him he was under arrest. The process took all of five minutes.
They were visiting from their home base in Dublin, where Chambers and his family had been living for a year in a 7 million euro mansion. Chambers has moved around a lot in his life, recently living in Tunisia where he purchased the football club Club Africain. Prior to his Tunisia move, Chambers had been living on a commune he started in Massachusetts. And that wasn’t even his first commune. The 41 year old centi-millionaire has gotten around a lot in his life, thanks in large part to the fortune he inherited as heir to the massive Cox Enterprises, one of those massive conglomerates that owns a ton of random businesses including a major cable television provider and also Kelley Blue Book for car valuations, among many other things. Chambers is said to be worth around $200 million dollars. He’s also a self-proclaimed communist and anti-imperialist and has been an activist since 2014, often using his fortune to provide bail funds and lawyers fees to activists in need from Ferguson, Missouri, to the Dakota Access Pipeline, to the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta.
In 2023, it was revealed that Cox Enterprises, the family business he was heavily invested in as a member of the Cox family and heir to their fortune, had invested $10 million dollars into the very Atlanta cop training facility he was protesting against. After learning this information, Chambers chose to divest from the company, walking away with a reported 250 million dollars.
And since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack, Chambers has been a vocal supporter of Pro-Palestinian causes, speaking out, sometimes controversially, in support of the Palestinian people, and donating around $1 million dollars to causes to support Palestine, including healthcare and mental health support for orphaned children in Gaza. And it is that work, more than anything else, that caught the attention of the US government, though Chambers claims he has suspected he was on some government watch list or other for the better part of the last decade.
After being arrested on that dirt road in Ibiza, Chambers was transferred to a jail in Madrid, where he was brought before Spain’s Audiencia Nacional. His arrest in Ibiza was not based on crimes committed under Spain’s jurisdiction. Instead, the arrest was based on an extradition agreement between Spain and the US. On request from the US government, Spanish authorities can arrest people on Spanish soil accused of committing crimes in the US and forcibly remove them back to US jurisdiction. While Chambers’ arrest was swift, the process itself takes some time. The Spanish court has 40 days to determine whether it will comply with the extradition request, and Chambers has a lot of money and lawyers to fight the extradition. The indictment against Chambers remains sealed, but according to his lawyer and family members, he is being accused of money laundering and supporting a terrorist organization. Chambers’ money makes him an easier target–he’s higher profile, so the fear will be more widespread, and the movement of money is a favorite tool used by the feds to get an indictment. Move money anywhere and they’ve got you for wire fraud, money laundering, you name it.
The one hiccup to this extradition request is that under the extradition treaty between the US and Spain, there is a pesky little requirement. The offense must be punishable under the laws in both countries. So both Spain and the US must recognize that Chambers has committed a criminal offense. And under Spanish law–and, technically, under US law as well–donating money to an orphanage is not a criminal offense. And Spain is less swayed by the pull of Israel, as evidenced by the arms embargo that Spain has had in place against Israel since 2025. And numerous MPs and other political leaders in Spain have seen the extradition request for what it is: a weaponization of the justice department against a US civilian as retaliation for vociferous, unapologetic leftism, especially his support for the Palestinian cause. It is an attempt to scare everyone into submission. It is a show of force. You aren’t safe, no matter where you run, no matter how much money you have, you cannot hide.
AD
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I wanted to talk about Chambers’ arrest because it is a piece of a larger story happening in the United States today. As Chambers was being arrested in Ibiza, Marco Rubio, along with Stephen Miller, headed up a convention of 66 nations, gathered together to discuss what the US claims is a growing threat of leftwing violence worldwide. Rubio declared that the original war on terror, started after September 11th, had largely been won. It was the new threat from leftist terrorists that was the next great global struggle. He linked the struggle with the current war in Iran, saying quote “Iranian proxy networks are increasingly intimately tied to leftist militant groups around the world.” Citing no evidence. Rubio, a descendent of Cuban immigrants, has also made it clear he has his eyes squarely on Cuba, the socialist nation currently struggling to survive under a US blockade exacerbated by the loss of its oil trading partner Venezuela.
In describing this leftist terrorism, the Trump officials didn’t hold back. Stephen Miller crowed quote “The leftist is fundamentally motivated by envy, by hatred, by jealousy. The leftist looks at what is beautiful and what is good and what is natural and is filled with envy and hatred. The leftist looks at a perfect family with a perfect life and a perfect job and a perfect kid and goes to church every Sunday.”
Marco Rubio accused leftwing activists of having “a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice liberation – an overwhelming need to tear down, to wreck, what is beautiful and what is right on behalf of people who are only filled with ugliness and have nothing else to offer the world through violence and through terror. … They despise the west because the west is great.” He called leftists “an encroaching darkness” and “the enemies of civilization.”
This was on July 16th. That same day, Marco Rubio issued an official press statement, announcing a new visa restriction policy, barring visas for anyone who is a member of or supports far left terrorist or other aligned groups. The announcement was made pursuant to National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 or NSPM 7, a directive from Trump made back in September in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, that orders the federal government to target so-called “antifa” and other alleged “domestic terrorist” cells for enhanced prosecution. NSPM-7 made clear that the federal government is targeting a specific ideology: people and groups that espouse anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, support for the overthrow of the US government, gender extremism, and hostility towards those who hold “traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
NSPM-7 and these latest developments have people comparing what’s happening today in the US to another period from our not so distant past: the Red Scare. McCarthyism. The blacklists. And you’re not wrong for seeing similar patterns. Most people are familiar with Joseph McCarthy, the list-wielding Senator from Wisconsin who made it his mission to root out the deep state communists in government, and the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, or HUAC, which targeted Hollywood stars, forcing them to name names and inspiring the Arthur Miller play, The Crucible, about another wave of mass hysteria a few centuries before. But I actually want to tell you about a lesser-known case from the Red Scare era, it’s a Supreme Court case, I am a lawyer after all, but it’s a case that provides a really stark comparison between these two eras in the US, separated by 70 years and yet so eerily similar in so many ways.
First, however, we need to set the scene, because the context leading up to the Red Scare often gets missed and is so essential to understanding how it ever happened in the first place.
One thing not everyone realizes is that the McCarthyism of the 1950s was not the first “Red Scare” of the 20th century in the US. That was technically the Second Red scare, which means what the US is currently entering would be its third red scare, or perhaps its fourth, depending on who you ask. But it’s that first Red Scare, after world war one, where we need to start to understand the context of the midcentury Red Scare that we’re more familiar with. While technically allied with Russia during world war I, the US watched in horror as the country experienced the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, the creation of the world’s first socialist state, the ousting and murder of the royals and bourgeoisie, the nationalization of major industries, and the redistribution of land. At the same time, the US was seeing a large influx of immigrants, including from the USSR and from countries that it fought against during the Great War.
J Edgar Hoover was a young, eager law graduate in 1917 when he joined the Department of Justice and was put in charge of its Alien Enemy Bureau. His job as head of the bureau was to track down and deport disloyal noncitizens residing in the US. This is where Hoover’s lifelong obsession with surveillance would take root. He knew that it was through covert surveillance, rather than overt violence, where the federal government could best exert control against its supposed enemies, foreign and domestic. In 1919 and 1920, Hoover orchestrated an alarming series of immigration raids, though the credit went to his boss, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. The Palmer Raids targeted hundreds of alleged communists, leftists, nonloyal aliens, anarchists and other so-called radicals for arrest and deportation in an attempt to thwart what Hoover and the federal government was certain was an imminent communist takeover of the US fomented by foreign operatives. One of Hoover’s favorite tactics during the Palmer Raids was warrantless searches of potential suspects and interrogation techniques that crossed the line into cruel and unusual.
That revolution never materialized and the first Red Scare fizzled out as the roaring 20s took hold, but it was during that first Red Scare that J Edgar Hoover embedded himself in the justice department, his power growing exponentially. In 1924, he became head of what would become known as the FBI, a position he held for half a century. It was ultimately fear of noncitizens, of dangerous immigrants, that caused the first Red Scare and set the stage for the growth of the surveillance state with J Edgar Hoover at its helm.
Then came the 1930s and along with the new decade came the burgeoning Great Depression, the worst global financial crisis in history which left fully one quarter of workers in the United States unemployed. Manufacturing dropped by 30%. And the Dust Bowl left many farmers destitute. At the same time, the Soviet Union was industrializing, it was expanding rights for women, it was, compared to the US, apparently kind of thriving. Obviously that’s an oversimplification, but the comparison was rather stark. Communism seemed alright to a lot of people in the US watching their country crumble. Union membership expanded, as did interest in and membership of the Communist Party of the USA. Millions of people dipped a toe into communism during this time, not necessarily becoming a dues-paying member of their local chapter, but perhaps attending a meeting or two, reading a treatise, befriending some commies, and certainly joining a union. Then, Roosevelt’s New Deal ushered in a seachange, greatly expanding the federal government, providing jobs for millions of young people, including opening doors to women and African Americans that had previously been closed (not of course equal to opportunities to White Men, but the bar was on the floor). And unions gained protections under the newly created Labor Relations Board. A new generation of American workers came of age under a powerful, worker-friendly federal government.
Hollywood especially became a hotbed of progressive activity, a brand new industry that was creating an unprecedented class of celebrity and wealth but also attracting the same theater workers that staffed the progressive New York City theater scene. Hollywood during the 1930s saw a spate of labor organizing. Screenwriters, often well educated and informed on world events, were beginning to incorporate their leftist leanings into their screenplays by doing things as revolutionary as creating interesting characters who happened to also be women, African American, and/or working-class.
To conservatives in America, the wealthy, the business owners, the ardent Christians, the white patriarchs and supremacists, these newfound civil rights, women’s rights, urbanization leading to frivolity, loose women, and, god forbid, the gays, on top of the drastic expansion of the federal government, including the creation of income taxes back in 1913, it was all too much to bear. More than just an inconvenience to their fortunes or their positions of power, all this anti-capitalist rhetoric indicated to them that something sinister was afoot. Something threatening, likely caused by the Jews, of course, but also the communists, especially from Soviet Russia.
Speaking of the gays, let me pause for a minute to acknowlege the lavender scare that happened alongside the red scare. There was a pervasive myth and fear among the right and conservatives that these well-heeled intellectual bureaucrats behind the New Deal were also a little bit gay, all of them. It became a euphemism that calling someone an intellectual meant they came with a hint of homosexuality as well. As the red scare ramped up, it became a common talking point that anyone with a history of homosexual acts could have that history used against them as leverage. Being gay made people more susceptible to manipulation by Soviet spies and communists. And the soviet spies and communists that (they believed) had infiltrated the government, the schools, and every other facet of American life also could be fomenting homosexuality among themselves, among other members of the government, among the children, making everyone that much more susceptible to Soviet communist persuasion and blackmail. So as you hear about how the fear and paranoia played out especially in the immediate post-war years, please know that as part of all of this there was a throughline of homophobia as well and often accusations of homosexuality were intertwined with accusations of communist sympathies so that one kind of insinuated the other, and all were guilty by association.
That fear and paranoia had to be put on hold during WWII, when common enemies made allies out of the US and Russia once more. But it was during this pre-war era, when the New Deal ushered in a wave of progressive change, that the backlash was brewing.
Much has been said about the post World War II economic boom that happened in the US as it established itself as the new leader of the free world. And that was to come, but what is often overlooked in that conversation is the extreme instability experienced around the world, including in the US, in the years immediately after WWII ended in 1945. Upon returning from war, veterans found scarce housing and few jobs. Women who had been effectively running the country’s industries while the men were off at war, were pushed from their employment to make way for the returning men, told to get back in the kitchen. Black men who had fought and watched their friends die in the war, came back expecting rights, freedoms, and respect that white racists were unwilling to give. Racial violence skyrocketed in the south in the immediate post-war years as the KKK made a resurgence and white supremacists attempted to violently maintain control.
At the end of world war 2, fully 1/3rd of all non-farmer workers were in a union, and a large number of those unions was controlled by communists and their allies. It’s hard to overstate just how massive the labor unrest was in the years immediately after world war 2. In 1945, 400,000 workers struck. And throughout the course of 1946, four point six MILLION workers participated in strikes across the country, including in Hollywood, where labor strikes angered studio heads. Meanwhile, Russia reverted once more from being an ally to being a dangerous, malicious enemy. Socialist Russia expanded dramatically in those post world war 2 years, as did communism globally. In 1948, Czechoslovakian communists took control of that country. That same year, the Soviets closed off access to West Berlin. Meanwhile, China was fighting a bloody civil war and it looked like Mao Zedong and his communist party was going to win despite the US sending billions of dollars to thwart his advance. Then, Russia detonated its first atomic bomb, sending shockwaves through the world and ushering in the Cold War. It truly cannot be overstated how pervasive the threat of a third world war was in the minds of everyday Americans. People who had just fought, who had lost family members, immediately on the heels of World War 2, were terrified that the world was on the precipice of another, this time with mutually assured destruction on the table.
So it was in this context, with billions of people living in newly communist countries across the world in a matter of a few short years, the growth of unions and labor organizing and communist sympathies in the US, and the terror of mutually assured destruction, that set the scene for the anti-New Deal backlash to take root and foment into a full blown Red Scare.
Many cite the creation in 1947 by Presidential order of what came to be known as the Truman Loyalty Program as the true start to the second Red Scare. Remember the US was deep in the throes of a post-war reckoning and communism seemed to be expanding precipitously across the globe, leading to fears at home that the Soviets would attempt to bring that communist revolution to the shores of the US. Hoover had increased the surveillance powers of the state abroad during the war and brought that surveillance home to be used against civilians within the US to thwart his renewed fears of a communist takeover. It was especially feared that the Soviets had infiltrated the federal government with spies intent on undermining the US and passing its deepest secrets back to the Soviets, fomenting revolution and increasing Russia’s global power. In an attempt to root out the deep state, Truman’s loyalty program was born. It required every federal employee to be screened for “membership in, affiliation with or sympathetic association with” subversive organizations. These organizations were collected on an official government list which eventually contained hundreds of so-called subversive groups that could get you fired from your job and blacklisted from the federal government forever. And being found guilty of these associations didn’t require you to be a soviet spy or even a card-carrying member of the communist party. Did you attend a rally? Sign a petition? Befriend a commie? Anything could potentially show up on your federal loyalty screening and get you fired from the federal government and permanently blacklisted. During the course of Truman’s loyalty program, 5 million people were investigated, 2700 were fired, 12,000 quietly quit, and not a single spy was ever discovered by the program. Despite this failure, the program legitimized, by presidential decree, what conservatives had been screaming about for decades: that there was a cadre of communist subversives inside the federal government that needed to be rooted out.
One of the people yelling the loudest was a Representative named Martin Dies. In the 1930s, the US House of Representatives created a special committee called the House Unamerican Activities Committee, or HUAC, to root out what they saw as a growing fascist movement in the US and abroad. Instead of going after the far-right extremists, Dies took over the committee in the 30s, convinced there was a communist cabal behind Roosevelt’s New Deal and determined to root it out. He was laughed out of Congress and left in 1945, but it turns out Martin Dies was just a man ahead of his time. By 1947, HUAC was the central instrument through which the federal government was weaponized against everyday Americans. One of the first people to be targeted by HUAC in 1947 was a woman named Helen Bryan for her role as secretary of, get this, the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee–one of many early “antifa” organizations on the government’s list of subversives. HUAC’s main tactic was to target a group–either a formal organization or an informal loosely affiliated group–subpoena its members to force them to appear to testify before the committee, and if they refused to acknowledge their membership in the Communist party, or refused to name names or provide documents, they were held in contempt of Congress and sent to prison. And if the person subpoenaed by the committee cooperated, named names, confirmed they were communists, even if that membership ended decades prior, they were blacklisted everywhere. The VAST majority of the people brought before the committee, which amounted to HUNDREDS by the time the red scare was over, were presented with no evidence of party membership or disloyalty to the US, but that didn’t matter. Guilt by association was rampant, it was enough just to be accused, or to be associated with the accused, for you to become blacklisted yourself.
Legitimized by the federal government through Truman’s loyalty program and the HUAC subpoenas, the anti-communist fever ran rampant through the country. In states and cities across the country, mini-HUACs formed to root out communists in local school boards, on the PTA, on the election commission. The fear spread into the private sector, where private businesses would similarly test the loyalty of their employees and attempt to remove anyone with communist ties, less out of fear of communist infiltration and more out of fear of the stigma of allowing communism to foment within their ranks, which could lead to boycotts from anti-communists and potential government investigation.
And opportunists profited from the chaos, creating and selling lists of suspected communists. Vigilante organizations sprouted across the country to root out communists everywhere–in schools, civic clubs, churches, boy scout troops, by boycotting films with actors suspected of communism, forcing the resignation of university presidents, of local school teachers. No one was safe from the stain of being accused of communist sympathies and an accusation alone could ruin peoples’ lives.
This happened in communities big and small across the country but the most famous of the accused were the Hollywood 10, a group of actors, screenwriters, and other industry professionals who were accused of being communist sympathizers and infecting Hollywood with Soviet-backed propaganda. HUAC’s Hollywood 10 hearings were the biggest media event of 1947. And it’s not hard to understand why–famous Hollywood celebrities and their glamorous chain-smoking wives, parading through the halls of Congress. And it was more than just those 10, the government called before it a large number of cooperating witnesses ready to name names. Some, like Ronald Reagan, a young b-list celebrity and head of the screen actor’s guild, merely confirmed he was suspicious of the communists but didn’t overtly name names. Others folded like a house of cards. But the Hollywood 10 refused to comply, to name names, or admit to their guilt. They were held in contempt of Congress, indicted by a federal grand jury, all 10 were found guilty, and they each served prison sentences of between 6 and 12 months. Of course, after they served their time in prison, they continued to serve time on the Hollywood blacklists that exploded after their highly publicized HUAC hearings. Most of the 10 never worked again. Some worked under pseudonyms. A few lucky ones managed to reinstate a successful career decades later after the stigma had worn off of their name. Thousands of names were on unofficial blacklists in Hollywood and across the country. HUAC and its ensuing chaos turned into a national, Congressionally sanctioned witch hunt, with support from the executive and judicial branches as well, that created a culture of guilt by association in every aspect of American life.
Where Truman’s loyalty program failed to uncover any espionage, it was the Hiss-Chambers Affair, beginning in 1948, that provided clear evidence that the rot went straight to the top. In 1948, Whittaker Chambers (no relation to the James Chambers whose story started this episode, as far as I’m aware) Whittaker Chambers was a farmer who also happened to be an influential editor for Time Magazine. He was also a former communist who had worked as a spy and courier for the Soviet Union in the 1930s. However, by the end of the 1930s, Chambers was disillusioned with the direction Stalin was taking the country and terrified of his fate as a disillusioned former spy. And his fears weren’t unfounded, at the end of the 1930s, numerous former Soviet spies were murdered or went missing. Fearing for his safety and hoping to keep some evidence hidden in case he needed it as leverage, he gave a folder of files to a friend and had that friend hide it in the dumbwaiter of the friend’s parent’s house for safekeeping.
When Chambers was called before HUAC in 1948 to testify as to his role as a communist spy, he came ready to name names, a born again Christian completely disillusioned with the soviet experiment. One of the names he named, the most explosive, was a man by the name of Alger Hiss, who Chambers claimed worked with him as a courier and an informant for the Soviets. Hiss’ name was so explosive because, unlike the other names Chambers recalled, Hiss was a prominent architect of the New Deal who held a prominent role in Washington and was incredibly well connected within the highest echelons of the state department.
Part of the spectacle of the Hiss-Chambers affair was the optics. Whittaker Chambers was a rotund low-brow farmer, a working man, whose bad teeth were so notable it seems to have been his main defining feature. Alger Hiss, on the other hand, was a well-heeled, successful, well-educated, trim and clean cut New Deal bureaucrat with years under his belt in government. He was present at the creation of the United Nations, attended the Big Three Conference at Yalta where the major post-war powers emerging after the second world war planned the future of the geopolitical world order. At the time of the Hiss-Chambers affair, Hiss was the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. At just 41, he embodied everything the anti-New Deal conservatives hated–an intellectual, a lawyer, a condescending one at that, who had all the right things to say, seemed slick and clean cut, an elitist bureaucrat of the worst stripe. And now here’s someone saying he was a soviet spy to boot. And this accusation was explosive because it confirmed peoples’ worst fears–the state department really was infiltrated by communists and the entire geopolitical post-war world order had been orchestrated by soviet spies and sympathizers at the highest level of government.
Unfortunately for Whittaker Chambers, Alger Hiss proved a very convincing opponent. The highly televised hearings led to a stalemate, a he said/he said wherein one of the men was highly educated, very well spoken, and incredibly sure of himself. Chambers had his back against a wall, his writing career and his reputation in tatters. So he reached for the one thing he had left. He called that friend and had him retrieve the spy documents from his parents’ dumbwaiter in Manhattan. Chambers was ready to play his last card. One night in late 1948, he called up HUAC investigators and told them to come to his farm outside Washington DC. He brought them back to his pumpkin patch, stopping at one innocuous gourd and lifting off its top to reveal five metal tins wrapped in wax paper, and telling the investigators “here’s what you’re looking for.” At the time of the discovery of what would come to be called The Pumpkin Papers, a young representative from California, Richard Nixon, was on a much delayed honeymoon with his wife in the Bahamas. When he heard of the discovery of the Pumpkin Papers, he cut the honeymoon short, jumping on a seaplane to Miami and then on to Washington DC as quickly as possible, so that the next day he could pose for press pictures while holding an impossibly tiny plastic magnifying glass in front of a strip of film. It was the Hiss-Chambers affair and Nixon’s dogged relentless hunt for evidence against Alger Hiss that made a name for Nixon in conservative circles and catapulted a career that would ultimately get him into the White House.
The documents contained in that pumpkin would implicate Alger Hiss as a soviet spy, and a grand jury would later indict Hiss on two counts of perjury for lying to the government at official congressional hearings. The three-year statute of limitations for espionage had passed, so perjury was all they could get him on. After a hung jury, a second trial in 1950 ended with Hiss being found guilty and sentenced to five years in prison. Whittaker Chambers was hailed as a conservative hero and posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan in 1984.
While the fanfare of the HUAC hearings, the Hollywood 10, and the Hiss-Chambers affair was playing out on the national stage, a little known case was winding its way through the US court system. This was a case that got media coverage at the time, and you might read it in law school, but otherwise has been lost to the other more public, more explosive events from the red scare era. That little-known case is called Dennis v. US, and it offers a glimpse into a playbook that the current Trump regime seems to be dusting off to use once again against leftists in America.
The Smith Act is a law passed by Congress in 1940 mostly aimed at immigration restrictions. It was meant to bar the entry of disloyal and radical immigrants coming into the United States to thwart the war effort during world war 2. However, buried in the Smith Act, a couple little-known provisions that didn’t even warrant floor debate at the time of their passage became the central crux of the federal government’s fight against communists on US soil. These provisions of the Smith Act bar anyone ”teaching the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying any government in the United States by force or violence.” It also barred anyone from joining “any society, group, or assembly of people” that wanted to destroy or overthrow the US government.
The Smith Act was a handy tool in J Edgar Hoover’s well-stocked toolbelt, and his mass surveillance, which grew substantially during World War 2, as did his budget, swept up all sorts of so called subversives, but a special favorite of Hoover's during this period was of course the communists–specifically, leaders of the Communist Party of the United States of America, or CPUSA. He had been surveilling these members for years, and in 1948, with the red scare ramping up, Hoover recommended a number of CPUSA leaders he had been surveilling for prosecution by the DOJ. Again this was the year after Truman’s loyalty program and the HUAC witch hunt began and the same year as the Hiss-Chambers affair, Hoover knew now was the time to strike while the iron was hot and public sentiment was frenzied enough to go along with it.
And so an indictment was filed against 12 CPUSA leaders, accusing them of violating the Smith Act because, as part of their membership and leadership in CPUSA, they were teaching and advocating for the violent overthrow of the government, according to the indictment. This despite the fact that some of the government’s own informants, including Elizabeth Bentley, former soviet spy turned informant, confirmed before a grand jury that most party members had never even read the canonical texts by Marx, Lenin, or Stalin, because they were, quote “dry as dust.” She claimed the party was all talk and no action and had never successfully taken any steps to overthrow any government, let alone bring about the overthrow of the global capitalist system. The same year the indictment came down, 1948, CPUSA had thrown most of its time and resources behind the failed third party presidential campaign of Henry Wallace, not exactly the activities of an armed and dangerous group of violent rebels intent on overthrowing the government.
To be clear, that is not to undercut the very real work that members of CPUSA did during this era–the level of worker power and labor organizing before, during, and immediately after the war can be attributed partially to the work of CPUSA. Members of CPUSA were ardent civil rights advocates long before the movement swelled in the 1960s. And it is true that many espoused the belief that the capitalist system had to fall, that’s kinda the central tenet of Marxism, and that reforming the existing structure wasn’t sufficient, especially in the United States where we had and continue to have a government made by and for the capitalists.
But the central question in this case, which came to be called Dennis v. US, and all of its progeny, was whether the first amendment protected the right of communists to be MEMBERS of the communist party and to support the IDEA of overthrowing the US government. And in the mayhem of the era and of the trial and subsequent appeals, things got pretty twisted. For one, the Smith Act doesn’t say anything explicitly about the communist party, but it is implied by the language barring anyone from being a member of a group that espouses the overthrow of the US government. Because by 1948 it had been fearmongered into the minds of everyone across America that to be a communist meant to want to overthrow the US government. Whether or not there was evidence that a person ever actually believed such a thing, let alone took steps to spread that belief, LET ALONE took steps to actually make it happen, was irrelevant. Remember the 20s and 30s saw a huge surge in labor organizing and in interest in the communist party. A lot of people dipped a toe into communism but never made it to full fledged revolutionary. A lot of people went to the meetings or joined the unions without ever concluding that the US had to be overthrown and they were gonna be the ones to do it. None of that mattered, in US society writ large or in the courtroom as Dennis v. US played out. The trial officially started on January 17, 1949 and wouldn’t conclude until October, making it the longest trial in US federal history at the time.
Now the way the trial SHOULD have unfolded at the time would have been based on existing Supreme Court precedent about the first amendment. The official test for whether speech was protected under the 1st amendment in these cases at the time hinged on whether the speech created a clear and present danger. This was established in a 1919 Supreme Court Case called Schenck v. US which upheld the conviction under the 1917 Espionage Act of socialist party members in the immediate aftermath of the first world war who were accused of creating a real and present danger when they, get this, distributed pamphlets encouraging men to fight the draft.
That test would later be updated in Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969, which is still good law today. Today, the law holds that speech is not protected under the first amendment if it is directed towards inciting imminent lawless action AND is actually likely to incite such lawless action. But back in 1949 during the Dennis trial, the standard was "clear and present danger" at a time when communism presented the clearest most present danger on the planet. Reminder the soviets had just detonated their first atomic bomb, bringing about mutually assured destruction in what felt like a looming third world war, and fully 1/4th of the global population had fallen into the hands of the communists in China in 1949. And all of this was propagandized to the GODS for the American people, who were terrified.
The defendants in the Dennis case, the members of CPUSA, knew from the start that they weren’t likely to get a fair trial, which was probably a fair assumption. How do you find a jury of people neutral about the greatest danger ever facing humanity, or so they were taught. So, much of the defendant’s time at trial was meant to attempt to make it obvious to the American people watching at home that the whole thing was a farce, a political prosecution, hoping to expose the entire system for the corrupt machine that it was. And during the trial, which was like I said still highly publicized even if it didn’t stick in the American psyche like other aspects of the Red Scare did, your opinion on the Dennis case at the time largely hinged on your political beliefs–people on the left thought the defendants were martyrs being convicted solely for their beliefs, in violation of the First Amendment, and people on the right thought they were the antithesis of everything America stood for, that they were soviet puppets, that they were dangerous operatives attempting to undermine their entire way of life.
A couple of the defendants in Dennis v. US were black, and it’s important to understand how race played into this. Because conspiracies about black radicals threatening the white way of life are older than the republic itself. The second slavery hit the shores of the US, there has been fear of violent revolts. And much of the fear rested on the idea that those revolts would be lead by a few radical outsiders and agitators fomenting anger among an otherwise happily enslaved population. In the 1850s, those outside agitators were abolitionists. By the middle of the 20th century, those agitators were communists (and probably also jews, but you couldn’t say that immediately after WWII). Communists were making otherwise happy black folks mad about their lives in Jim Crow America. Representative John Rankin of Mississippi, a member of HUAC, said at the time that the “racial disturbances that you have seen in the South have been inspired by the tentacles of this great octopus, Communism, which is out to destroy everything.” This is, of course, a pervasive myth in the making of America, that enslaved people and people living under Jim Crow didn’t know any better, largely were peaceful, there was one big fight about it in the 1860s and another in the 1960s but otherwise it’s been an accepted way of life. This erases the ongoing fights for freedom, repeated and bloody rebellions, the constant attempts to reform the system, that don’t make it into your high school history books but that make it very clear nothing is ever “just the way it is” and humans rarely accept their own subjugation without a fight. But to anti-communist bigots and fearmongers in the middle of the 20th century, the only way the black population could have gotten it into their heads that Jim Crow was bad is because some outside Soviet communists came in and told them to be mad. So the fact that a couple of the defendants in the Dennis v. US trial were black definitely shaped the narrative.
And after 10 months of trial, 50 witnesses, and a transcript that ran over 21,000 pages, not a single one of those pages included smoking gun evidence of any clear and present danger that the defendants were going to overthrow the US government. Nevertheless, the jury deliberated for all of 7 hours before finding all defendants guilty of violating the Smith Act. By this point, one of the 12 defendants had fled the country. 10 of the defendants were sentenced to 5 years in prison, with the 11th only getting 3 years because he was a world war 2 veteran. The trial judge also held the lawyers for the defendants in contempt of court for their work attempting to draw out the trial and expose the corruption in the system. Most of their lawyers were jailed for upwards of 6 months after the trial concluded. And after such a successful prosecution of some of the highest ranking members of CPUSA, the floodgates were opened. The federal government began bringing indictments against more and more people in the lower rungs of the organization, all accused of violating the Smith Act. And those defendants had a hell of a time finding lawyers after the Dennis case lawyers were all disciplined so harshly.
The Dennis defendants appealed their conviction up to the 2nd circuit, which issued an opinion penned by Judge Learned Hand, yes his government name was Learned Hand, he's the most famous 20th century judge who never made it onto the Supreme Court, you hear his name a lot in law school--Judge Learned Hand upheld all of their convictions, reasoning that the "clear and present danger" test had to be understood in light of present day conditions and the escalating Cold War. He wrote "The American Communist Party is a highly articulated, well contrived, far spread organization, numbering thousands of adherents, rigidly and ruthlessly disciplined, many of whom are infused with a passionate Utopian faith that is to redeem mankind…. The violent capture of all existing governments is one article of the creed of that faith, which abjures the possibility of success by lawful means.” Given such a dangerous and violent movement, the real question, according to Judge Hand, “is how long a government, having discovered such a conspiracy, must wait. When does the conspiracy become a ‘present danger’?” In his estimation, the government shouldn't be forced to wait until the revolutionaries are lined up with their molotov cocktails at the doors of the capital before taking swift action against them.
When the case made its way up to the Supreme Court, the court cited Judge Learned Hand's finding in the 2nd Circuit, quoting verbatim that very line, and upholding the convictions.
This despite the fact that by the time Judge Hand was making his ruling in 1950, indeed at the time of the original trial in 1949, membership in the communist party in America was tanking, infighting was causing fissures and disrupting any movement building, and the Soviet Union itself had deemed America incapable of ever fomenting revolution and pulled much of its support and resources from the Communist party in the US. And remember this is all before Joseph McCarthy made his big announcement that he had a list of communists in the government.
That is in many ways the central irony of the whole red scare--there WAS soviet infiltration in the US government and Soviet support of American communists on the ground. There was a grain of truth to the Red Scare, as there usually is during times of severe paranoia. But as the Red Scare was unfolding from 1947 to the mid 1950s, the Soviet infiltration into the government was largely abandoned, much of the soviet spying had already occurred, the great threat from within had largely retreated, deeming the United States of America a lost cause, too hostile to ever be the site of a socialist revolution.
What was to come--continued HUAC hearings, the prosecution and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for being Soviet spies despite scant evidence and global protests to try to stay their executions, the rise of Joseph McCarthy, whose name became the symbol of the entire affair but who really only played a small part, riding on the shirttails of an anti-communist fervor that was bigger than just one man--all of it was based less on facts and truth and actual threats to national security and more on a nation reeling from a global financial collapse, a progressive movement that saw the growth of the federal government and the expansion of rights for workers along with the imposition of income taxes and strong anti-trust laws, capped off by a bloody, savage horrific war that completely up-ended the global world order. It was a time of upheaval leading to mass paranoia seeking out a scapegoat. People were looking for clean, black and white explanations for their fears. It was a time when your answers for who to blame and who to fear depended entirely on which side of the political spectrum you fell on.
Even after Joseph McCarthy's years of lies, of his witch hunt orchestrated on the floors of the US Senate, and after his fall from grace during the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954, when he was exposed as an unlikable, mean-spirited liar on live television, followed by his censure in the Senate, even then, after all of that, fully one third of Americans still sided with Senator Joseph McCarthy after the Red Scare subsided, and they considered his subsequent treatment to be simply more proof of the pro-communist cabal secretly running the government. Despite his infamy, McCarthy continued to be seen as a martyr for the cause supported by 1/3rd of the American populace. He died just a few years after the height of his fame, in 1957 at the age of 48, likely from cirrhosis of the liver caused by alcoholism.
Even when the days of highly televised finger pointing, a witch hunt turned literal in Arthur Miller's The Crucible, even when those days were over, anti-communist fervor never really went away. It was simply sanitized, made moral, made "rational" and adopted into laws and policies in the United States that made the ravings of a mad liar like Joseph McCarthy an acceptable, rational policy of the state. Not long after taking office in 1954, President Eisenhower made a speech touting the many wins against the Communist enemy, including more convictions under the Smith Act, deportation of 84 "alien subversives", the expansion of the list of subversive organizations, and the removal of 2200 federal employees for their possible ties to communism, saying "The constant surveillance of Communists in this country is a 24-hour, 7-days-a-week, 52-weeks-a-year job." Calling someone a "commie" became a catch-all accusation, and the threat of communism as the big bad boogeyman in the night come to take away your freedoms continues to be alive and well, most consistently used by the right in America but also used to instill fear in the hearts of centrist Democrats as well, who refuse to side even with Democratic Socialists, who are in no way actual Marxist-Leninist and who, in fact, are attempting to work within the system to reform it, something that actual Marxist-Leninists are often highly critical of.
But the stain of that 1950s anti-communist McCarthyism remains in the United States psyche JUST enough to deter the government from pursuing the same witch-hunt style prosecutions of communists that pervaded the middle of the 20th century. They need a new name for the black and white evil that has invaded every corner of American life, threatening it from within. And thanks to the War on Terror, they have an easy scapegoat--terrorists. Foreign and domestic. The modern day Smith Act--a law passed for one thing but being co-opted to prosecute the left--are the US anti-terror laws passed in the wake of 9/11. But it is the same playbook wrapped in slightly different packaging. You see it clear as day in NSPM-7, the memorandum that created the basis for the Red Scare we’re watching grow in the US today. The President of the United States in 2025 explicitly said we’re going after “antifa” and “antifa” includes anti-capitalist beliefs and quote “support for the overthrow of the United States Government.” Language that is taken straight from the Smith Act. It doesn’t matter that “antifa” isn’t even a real group. It doesn’t matter that the people the government accuses of being “antifa” have never actually done anything that incites imminent lawless action. The mere act of believing in something, affiliating with a group or a person that believes in something that the government finds objectionable, that’s enough. And what do I always say? If the government can point to a “national emergency” as support for violating the rights of the people, it can often get away with it in court. We saw it in Dennis v. US and we’re seeing it unfold now. Whether it unfolds into a full-blown Red Scare is yet to be determined, though the conditions seem ripe.
So what do we do with this information? A common theme throughout, I’ve noticed, is that the federal government is betting that you’re just uninformed enough not to spot the lies they’re telling you. The central one being that all members of the communist party want to see the violent, armed, immediate overthrow of the US government. That is of course fearmongering propaganda and an oversimplification of Marxist-Leninist teachings. You can avoid falling for the government’s fearmongering by educating yourself on what Communism actually is. You don’t have to agree with it, but you should know what it actually is and not just the oversimplified propaganda version of it. I’m begging you to read a damn book. The Communist Manifesto is 40 pages long and you can find the PDF with a quick google search. But the doctrine is truly dry as dust so there are ways to learn about it without having to rip open a copy of Das Kapital or other thick Marxist works. There are TONS of YouTube channels, just google what is Marxism and watch a few. And I recently read this book, Why Marx Was Right, which breaks down a lot of Marxist teachings by dispelling some of the most pervasive myths about Marxism, like, for instance, that Marx teaches the virtue of armed bloody revolutionary overthrow of the United States government. And because the current government has co-opted the war on terror for its modern day Red Scare, it’s worth educating yourself on what antifa actually is. I have purchased but haven’t yet read Mark Bray’s Antifa; The Anti Fascist Handbook. Bray got literally run out of the country by Turning Point USA for this book and is currently living in exile in Spain, so it’s probably good. And then I read the book Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism and the Making of Modern America by Clay Risen. It’s a new york times bestselling book written by a new york times journalist so like do with that information what you will but it’s well-researched and provides a lot of information that I found helpful in my research for this video, so if you’re interested on diving deeper into this topic, that is a helpful resource as well and it was available as an ebook from my public library.
Okay so what do we do? Read books. But also, if you can, unionize. The motivation behind all of this is to keep people disempowered, and labor organizing or forming a tenants union can be a way to reclaim some of that power. There are SO many resources out there on how to form a union with your workplace or with other tenants in your building, a quick google will get you started down that path.
And then finally I think it’s important to take a step back and see the history of the United States, and probably most societies, for what it is–a long push-pull between progress and the backlash to that progress. What we’re seeing is the backlash, which means progress was made. And progress will be made again. The pendulum always swings back, one way or another, and I think it is a revolutionary act to hold out hope for a pendulum swing to come again. That doesn’t mean we lay dormant until the pendulum swings back towards us, it means learning and organizing and preparing to take advantage of that pendulum when it does swing back.
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I’ll be back Friday with more news and analysis!
Thanks so much for watching, have a good day, buh bye!
