Trump Is Building the Blue Scare
About this episode
Is the Trump administration building a second Red Scare? Klein asks political theorist Corey Robin — a historian of McCarthyism and author of 'The Reactionary Mind' — to use the history of America's anti-communist panics as a lens on the present. Robin walks through the two Red Scares (the 1919–20 Palmer Raids and the post-1946 McCarthy era), their tools — loyalty purges, congressional hearings, blacklists, the Lavender Scare — and their costs, including the destruction of labor organizing in the South and setbacks for health care reform. He argues today's 'Blue Scare' uses Charlie Kirk's murder to define the left as an enemy that cannot be compromised with, via loyalty tests, firings, and corporate capitulation (Jimmy Kimmel, law firms, universities). They discuss what ended McCarthy, the dangers of ceding free speech and due process, and why the economy itself can become a medium of political coercion.