The Red Scare Returns? Lessons from McCarthyism in the Age of Trump 2.0

President Trump and other Republicans keep throwing around the C-word — Communist — to smear anyone slightly progressive, including Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s new Democratic mayoral candidate. But right-wing fearmongering isn’t the only reason it feels like McCarthyism is on the rise again. So, just in time for the 4th of July, Kara speaks to New York Times reporter and author Clay Risen about his latest book, Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism and the Making of Modern America. They unpack Joseph McCarthy’s insane antics, parallels between the Republican party of the 1940s/50s and today — and what lessons, if any, we can learn from McCarthy’s ultimate downfall. Questions? Comments? Email us at [email protected] or find us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:12Kara Swisher?

  Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. The Cold War has been over for more than 30 years, but President Trump and his Republican acolytes are still throwing around the C-word, that would be communist, at anything that smells slightly progressive. It's not quite McCarthyism, but it feels like we might be getting close and maybe even worse, which is why I want to talk to Clay Risen today. He's a New York Times reporter and the author of a number of history books, including his latest, Red Scare: Blacklist, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America. It's been called the most complete history of the Red Scare that has ever been written, and it's a fascinating read. And even though he doesn't write about the MAGA movement, it's easy to see connections

• 0:56Kara Swisher?

  between the Republican Party of the 1940s and 50s, Joseph McCarthy's insane tactics, and today's political climate, including that Roy Cohn, former mentor and attorney to President Trump, was a big part of the story. I really enjoyed the book. I devour everything about the Red Scare and the history before that, because I think history is obviously instructive, but at the same time, we always think it couldn't happen here, and it has, actually, and we've managed to push it back time and again in our history. So I think hearing about this era, which I think was one of the more pernicious eras, and the heroes that pushed back on it, is critically important today. I want to talk to Clay, obviously, about the conservative anti-communist groundwork that led to the Red Scare, why McCarthy was so successful, and where he sees parallels today.

• 1:41Kara Swisher?

  I think it's an important conversation to have just ahead of the Fourth of July, as we're thinking about what actually makes our country great. And, friends, it was not Joseph McCarthy. It was great that we pushed back on him. Our expert question today comes from political analyst Molly Jungfast, who has a personal link with this story, so stay with us.

• 2:11Speaker 01

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• 2:54Speaker 02

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• 3:26Speaker 03

  I'm Anna Garten, and each week on Happy Hour, I invite new and old friends for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. On this week's episode, I'm joined by Chloe Mal. We talk all about her taking on the top job at Vogue, finding her personal style, and her favorite lunch order in the iconic Conde Nast cafeteria. New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Cheers.

• 4:05Kara Swisher?

  Clay, thanks for being on On. I appreciate it.

• 4:08Speaker 04

  Oh, thanks for having me.

• 4:10Kara Swisher?

  So this is a topic, I hate to say it, near and dear to my heart. I eat up everything about McCarthyism, about the Red Scare, and I actually had a minor in this area in college. So it's my favorite area to talk about, even though it's frightening. But before we talk about your book, which is mostly set in the 40s and 50s, I want to talk to you about the new, sort of Red Scare New York last week. Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic mayoral primary in New York City, beating out former Governor Andrew Cuomo. President Trump has called him a communist multiple times, also a lunatic. And on Sunday, he threatened to cut federal funds to New York if Mamdani is elected and doesn't do the right thing, whatever that means. Now Mamdani is not a communist, he's a democratic socialist.

• 4:54Kara Swisher?

  But former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers also warned that Mamdani has, quote, "advocated Trotskyite economic policies" and that rich New Yorkers will flee to Florida if he's elected, which personally, I think it's a good thing. And establishment Democrats also seem worried, but they're always worried. So what do you make of the reaction to Mamdani? I thought when people voted, they get to have what they voted for. But I don't know.

• 5:16Speaker 04

  That is usually the case, yeah. And, look, I mean, just as an observer, I find it saddeningly predictable, you know, that someone that comes with fresh ideas, and, you know, you can like him or not like him, but certainly he's bringing a different perspective and one that a lot of people like. I mean, the numbers for young voters in this primary are way up compared to 2021. And, you know, he's activating a part of the base or a part of the Democratic electorate that the rest of the party, in theory, should be very excited about. But of course, he's doing it by challenging the establishment and, you know, frankly, a gerontocracy. I mean, we all talk about how the Democratic Party's problem is it's run by kind of a... Yeah.

• 6:01Speaker 04

  So it was sort of predictable that there would be this backlash against him. I do think it is funny and disheartening that so many people jumped on... The socialist equals communist equals un-American equals, you know, run down the list of things. I mean, my, so I'm from Tennessee and the guy who represents my neighborhood, Andy Ogles, who is a very far right Republican, you know, he's called for Mondani to be stripped of his citizenship using McCarthy era tools, legislation that would allow the government to strip him of his citizenship to deport him. And, you know, it's, it's, uh, yeah, it, that's not going to happen. But then, then again, who knows these days?

• 6:46Kara Swisher?

  Who knows these days? So using the word commie, like commie was sort of one of those things like commies are everywhere, pinkos, if you're not a commie, et cetera. Talk a little bit about the use of the language and then deportation. I know he got widely derided, just for people to be clear, but that's not to say he doesn't have support for that.

• 7:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, no. And if you look at some of the legislation that was never overturned and was in some cases not even ruled on by the Supreme Court, so it's still in effect. It is dangerously vague. And actually, you know, could someone make the case that under that law, he could be penalized? Because it's, it's, the law itself criminalizes even association in many ways with the Communist Party. So someone could dig something up and say, well, this is evidence.

• 7:36Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 7:37Speaker 04

  But, but to your point about, you know, the, the language, I mean, this is one of the reasons I wanted to write the book was, you know, I grew up in the eighties and nineties and calling someone a commie or a pinko or whatever was this sort of all encompassing charge. During the Cold War, it had a relatively specific meaning. What I think is interesting is how that's become, it's kind of metastasized to mean really anything on the left that you don't like, right? So it doesn't even have to be a particularly radical point, you know, but if you are someone on the left calling you a communist has a certain valence. And it's interesting, in 2025, we're still talking about communism as if it's some sort of mortal threat to the United States.

• 8:20Kara Swisher?

  Which it felt back then. So Mamdani isn't the only reason your book feels prescient, but you said that you hadn't intended to be a reflection on the current political climate when you started writing in 2019. What was your impetus then for writing it? Obviously, this is something that stayed with us politically for a long time. And what surprised you most when you started to dig in?

• 8:39Speaker 04

  So to take the first question, I mean, I've written some other books of post-war American history, and I follow, read a lot of post-war American history. And one thing that jumped out at me was how the Red Scare shaped a lot of that history, civil rights history, the history of Vietnam. It's kind of this dark matter that is warping and distorting American history through the 60s, 70s, you know, up to today. And so it sort of struck me that that was something that I'd noticed but was never quite explicated. And so I thought, you know, it was time for a book that really dug into that. And there have been books on the Red Scare before, but they're older and they tend to be of the Cold War.

• 9:21Speaker 04

  And so I wanted to write something that was, you know, spoke very much to our present day. You know, again, without being presentist. But you know, what the most surprising thing, I think, is how much, even separating aside some of the specific things Trump has done since taking office, just how directly some of the conspiracy theories and thinking about kind of the political theory, as it were, on the far right, is so similar to what you found during the Red Scare. This whole idea that there's this anti-American conspiracy, this elite cabal

• 9:56Kara Swisher?

  Dark thing.

• 9:57Speaker 04

  in the government. Yeah, yeah. I mean, without having the term "deep state", that's what they were talking about in the 40s and 50s. That's what McCarthy was talking about. And it struck me over and over how clearly and tightly that Parallel exists and I actually think it's a through line. I think there's a genealogy. You can look at the thinkers around the Red Scare and who they influenced and how it came down through Goldwater, through Pat Buchanan. I mean, again and again, the same kind of rhetoric. And of course, now today, we see it very clearly.

• 10:29Kara Swisher?

  So, most people associate, as you said, the Red Scare with the onset of the Cold War and Senator Joseph McCarthy. And you took a while to get to McCarthy, actually. The fear monger about communism for at least a decade before he came on the scene. And I'm an aficionado of Rachel Maddow's Ultra, you know, and Prequel before that. Talk about the first Red Scare, because it's been around for a while and these groups have been forming. And it was quite linked with antisemitism at the same time.

• 10:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, very much so. I mean, you take it pretty far back to look at the strength of anti-radicalism, anti-leftism in the United States. Certainly, once you have communist revolutions in Europe and the successful one in Russia, it became very present fear for a lot of people that we could have something similar here. And so, there was a Red Scare after the First World War. And that was largely very immigrant oriented. So, it's tied in with the xenophobia of the moment, where hundreds of people are deported, targeted, arrested for any connection to what was called radical beliefs at the time. And, you know,

• 11:38Speaker 04

  that ended pretty quickly. But it left behind kind of a detritus of bureaucracies and ideas. And, you know, the FBI came out of that. Hoover came out of that period. And then with the New Deal and the kind of, you know, real turn, broad turn to the left in the United States in the 1930s, there was also a reaction to that. And it was only after the end of World War II and the onset of the Cold War that that reaction really found a grip.

• 12:07Kara Swisher?

  That just started to gel. Now, this was right-wing pushback to the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt. That was very clear.

• 12:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think one of the things about the New Deal is that it was not just a set of policies, but it was part and parcel of- A cultural change, you know, a broad embrace of women's rights, labor rights, people of color, as well as, you know, just the music changed, the the theater, you could see it in a wide range of sort of cultural markers. The reaction was as much to that as it was to policy. But it was only with the onset of the Cold War that these claims of, you know, commies under the bed sheets and oh my gosh, the communists are here. Then it really took on a strength and and it's also that, you know, the government after World War Two

• 12:55Speaker 04

  was much more powerful than it was even in the nineteen thirties. You know, Hoover had a lot more power to go after people, to track people, to keep lists. I mean Hoover had a list of people who would be detained without charges in the event of a national emergency. There were plans to build camps where leftists would be put, regardless of what they had actually done. And it's important to recognize that after World War Two, there were legitimate concerns about espionage and legitimate concerns about subversion. I think they were overblown. And I think they were, you know, that was a law enforcement issue, counterintelligence issue, but they justified

• 13:34Speaker 04

  this enormous undertaking of cleaning out any kind of, not just communism, but, you know, progressive sympathies in, you know, elementary schools, sanitation departments, high schools, Hollywood, the State Department.

• 13:52Speaker 04

  It was a witch hunt nationwide.

• 13:55Kara Swisher?

  So as you describe it, Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy was anti-communist, but more than that, he was an opportunist. He was also a very troubled person. From all descriptions, he didn't have any of the qualities that would make his rise to fame seem inevitable. Talk a little bit about this because there were other more interesting figures in that group. Why this guy?

• 14:17Speaker 04

  Well, I think he was, in a weird way, for all those reasons aside, he was the right man for the right moment. You know, he was first term senator who was not really very popular, even among Republicans in the Senate. You know, he sort of broke rules and and he didn't fit in with the establishment. He didn't. Sort of pay fealty to the leadership. And so he was, you know, sort of looking for something that he could carry into his campaign and kind of raise his profile. And it's really important to remember that his rise, his sort of debut on the national stage as this anti-communist campaigner came weeks after Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury.

• 15:00Kara Swisher?

  Explain Alger Hiss for people who don't know.

• 15:01Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. So, sorry. Alger Hiss was a former State Department official.

• 15:05Kara Swisher?

  Spy.

• 15:05Speaker 04

  Who, right, was spying for the Soviet Union. It was one of the cause celebs, you know, trials of the century. And, and he was finally convicted. So, all of this is happening. And then McCarthy makes his move and he says, look, I have a list of, you know, the number changed, but you know, X number of communists in the State Department. And of course, you know, there, people want to believe a senator. They want to believe data. And they're afraid. So, there are a lot of reasons why all of a sudden this guy claiming he has this knowledge can suddenly attract all sorts of attention. And then he was that very specific person who was willing to just throw it all against the wall.

• 15:48Speaker 04

  And he became kind of a, I mean, I don't want to say useful idiot, but you know, something like that for the Republican establishment. He was willing to say things that they weren't. So, he's sort of this berserker out there tearing stuff down. And so, people who weren't afraid of him were actually kind of happy to see him doing that. And it's what cleared the field for him for four years.

• 16:11Kara Swisher?

  It's a long time. People don't realize how long it is. So, his big claim was, of course, that communists, you know, did infiltrate the government and others were security risk, including gays and lesbians. There was a big lavender scare as part of that, too.

• 16:23Speaker 04

  So, the lavender scare was actually, you know, sort of instigated by McCarthy. It was one of his charges was there were.

• 16:31Kara Swisher?

  Homosexuals.

• 16:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, gay men, particularly in the State Department. And it, it plugged into a certain homophobic stereotyping of diplomacy of, you know, I mean, as there's some, there's great historical work on kind of the construction of manhood during the Cold War. And, and you know, this is part of that, right? It's the. Uh, men's men, they fight wars and the other guys, they sit around and uh, drink tea and talk about diplomacy. So it grew out of this, this set of stereotypes, but, but it was also a real backlash because again, part of this turning to the left or this more cosmopolitan tolerant society was,

• 17:11Speaker 04

  you know, just the beginnings of an inkling of space where gay men and lesbian women could, could kind of be out. I mean, Washington during the war was, uh, was known as a place where if you were careful, you, you could be out of the closet. There were clubs, there were places and, you know, I don't want to say it was any kind of, uh, Eden, but the backlash was real and it wasn't just McCarthy. There were crackdowns by Hoover. There were crackdowns by, uh, city police in Washington, but then it became this campaign and looks in the Senate. There were two separate sets of hearings about gays in the State Department.

• 17:50Speaker 04

  And, and in the government generally, uh, there were orders that went to every single federal agency, even down to like the memorials commission and, you know, the Smithsonian, where they were supposed to report back on the numbers of gay people, names and numbers in their agency. And, you know, the result was hundreds of people were fired. Obviously many more probably were able to go back in the closet or not come out of the closet. Uh, your lives were ruined and all on this premise that somehow being gay was, made you a risk during the Cold War. The biggest charge was that you were a blackmail risk, right?

• 18:32Kara Swisher?

  Right, sure.

• 18:33Speaker 04

  But, but also the director of the CIA at the time, he gave testimony and he had a list of 10 reasons why gay people were suspect. And, you know, they included things like, well, if you're in the closet, you're already a liar. So why can we trust you? Uh, to things like gay men are in a cabal, like there's this gay cabal, right?

• 18:54Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 18:55Speaker 04

  Today we look at it and go, oh, that's kind of ridiculous.

• 18:57Kara Swisher?

  Sure.

• 18:57Speaker 04

  Uh, but, but back then it was taken as writ. That, yeah, this is a threat.

• 19:02Kara Swisher?

  Right. You know, it honestly didn't end. I was thinking of joining the State Department. And one of the questions was, you're gay. You could be blackmailed. I'm like, but I'm out. And then they're like, but you could be blackmailed. And I was like, but I'm out. It was like such a ridiculous conversation.

• 19:15Speaker 04

  Look, I mean, these things, you can say it ends.

• 19:18Kara Swisher?

  No.

• 19:19Speaker 04

  But it doesn't.

• 19:23Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 19:36Speaker 01

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• 22:39Kara Swisher?

  So the Hollywood Blacklists were the most famous example of the era, although, again, the attacks on Hollywood by the House Un-American Activities Committee started before McCarthy. Talk about these lists and how they were compiled, and what effect did they have directly and indirectly at the time?

• 22:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, so one of the things that I found interesting in my research was just the kind of the architecture of the blacklist, because on one level, there was no blacklist officially, right? There's no one list. But instead, there was, first of all, there's a whisper campaign, and all of the Hollywood executives talked to each other. And they would say, you know, "Dalton Trumbo," or, you know, "Take your actor or writer." They would say, "This guy is not..." Employable in Hollywood and they would all agree. They might not write it down, but they would all agree. But then there were these lists that would be compiled by private citizens. There was one called Red Channels. It was put together by a group of ex FBI agents.

• 23:41Speaker 04

  And it's ridiculous. Some of the reasons why people were suspect, like Aaron Copland was suspect because he signed a letter welcoming Dmitry Shostakovich to the United States. He was a Russian composer. So therefore he was a red, right? Even though he's just being nice to a composer. So this kind of thing went around. And then there was a whole kind of undeclared star chamber of columnists, union officials, mid-level executives who kind of also enforced it, right? They were the ones who would go and talk to individual actors or lawyers. You know, at a certain point, it became so pervasive that Hollywood realized they had a problem.

• 24:25Speaker 04

  They couldn't keep operating if they kept kicking out their writers and actors. And so then there was this whole process for how do you clear yourself? It was almost like, you know, Spanish Inquisition.

• 24:37Kara Swisher?

  And how did people then clear themselves?

• 24:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, so this was another thing that was fascinating for me to read. So there were lawyers and there were some very specific lawyers that you would go to. And you would say, what do I need to clear my name? And in some cases, all it was, was writing a letter. So the Hoover Institution at Stanford has all these letters from Vincent Price and from Kirk Douglas. And, you know, these actors who were accused were not yet blacklisted, but were accused. And these letters are just these, this, this outpouring of self derision, you know, saying, I made a mistake. I'm so sorry. And then these letters would be sent around to this sort of star chamber and they would decide, you know, is this person truly, truly regretful?

• 25:24Speaker 04

  And if not, They, you know, John Houseman was declared not sufficiently sorry.

• 25:30Kara Swisher?

  Why? Why? I can't believe he even wrote a letter.

• 25:32Speaker 04

  They didn't, they didn't believe his letter. They thought, you know, he's kind of painting by numbers. This isn't, he doesn't really mean it. Whereas Kirk Douglas was determined to be sorry for whatever his supposed sins were. And then the, the message would go out to executives. Hey, uh, this guy is, uh, he's cleared. He can act again. Sometimes the lawyers would say, you know, actually you have to talk to the FBI and House on American Activities Committee.

• 26:00Kara Swisher?

  What about those who resisted?

• 26:02Speaker 04

  They were, it's, it's interesting too. On that end, there are so many names of people who were famous at the time or were up and coming. You know, Larry Parks, for example, I mean, today, no one knows who Larry Parks is, right? But Larry Parks was an up and coming actor. He was pretty well known as, you know, someone people thought, yeah, he's going to win an Academy Award. He's going to be, and he was one of the first actors called and forced to name names. And he named some, but it wasn't sufficient. So he was still blacklisted and he never came back.

• 26:37Kara Swisher?

  What about those who didn't name names, who refused to name?

• 26:39Speaker 04

  You know, the, the actors who resisted had a really hard time because you can't.

• 26:45Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 26:46Speaker 04

  You know, you can't act. The writers had a better time of it. Dalton Trumbo continued with his career because he had a pseudonym and he had a front. And so the writers largely were able to kind of pull stuff together if they were enterprising. Some of the actors who had stage credibility could come to New York. And, you know, the Red Scare never really hit the theater scene in New York. It's one of the few places where there, there was some of a blacklist, but there was also a lot of producers who said, we don't care.

• 27:16Kara Swisher?

  They don't care.

• 27:17Speaker 04

  Um, and it's New York, you know?

• 27:19Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 27:20Speaker 04

  It's, you're relatively safe.

• 27:21Kara Swisher?

  So they also, as you said, schools, school districts, universities, courts. Talk a little bit about that because that's what it feels like today again.

• 27:29Speaker 04

  It does. And that's one of the places where there's such a resonance with today. There was a, a very thorough crackdown on teachers at all levels and school libraries. So just like today, book banning was widespread. And at the time it was, you know, certainly any book with a communist theme and. What they determined to be a communist theme, but also any book by anybody accused of being a communist. So Dashill Hammond, you know, the mystery writer, author of The Maltese Falcon, his books were all removed from every library. Teachers were were hounded out of the profession. New York actually was the kind of the ground zero for this.

• 28:12Speaker 04

  There was a very thorough red hunting in the classroom going on in New York City and New York State. There was one teacher that I highlight in the book who was considered the best math teacher in America. He was taught at Bronx Science and he was called in front of McCarthy's committee and he didn't give them the answers he wanted. And he said, his name was Julius of Hallowa Hadi. And he said, look, I know what's going to happen to me. I know my job's over. My career's over. And he went back home and he was fired from his job at Bronx Science. His wife was fired from her job. She was also a teacher.

• 28:52Speaker 04

  And this happened hundreds of times in New York, thousands of times around the country. It also happened at the college level, particularly for public schools. There were loyalty oaths that a lot of people felt were violations of their freedom of speech and their academic freedom. And those professors were also fired. And actually, another echo with today is that, just like today, back then Harvard was the target. Anybody who had any connection at all to left wing thinking they were called on the carpet, Harvard itself didn't always stand up to defend all of its professors, but did a decent job of with

• 29:33Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 29:33Speaker 04

  Withstanding McCarthy. But again, the reason was, you know, this is the big kahuna. We go after Harvard and everybody else will follow suit.

• 29:41Kara Swisher?

  That's the, that's the goal. That's the goal.

• 29:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 29:43Kara Swisher?

  So, speaking, you mentioned FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. What was he like? And he was like, get out of my ear and my grill, dude. Like, I can't imagine they had a good relationship. Did the McCarthy hearings help or hurt his own aims?

• 29:56Speaker 04

  You know, At first Hoover welcomed McCarthy, partly because they had guys like Nixon originally were, you know, sort of friends with both. And, you know, Nixon was always this kind of slippery middleman between the really reactionary right and the establishment.

• 30:14Kara Swisher?

  Mm hmm.

• 30:14Speaker 04

  So at first Hoover was open to the idea of McCarthy, but, you know, Hoover Hoover was not a dumb man by any means. And he saw earlier than most people that McCarthy was was dangerous and that Hoover's mission to truly clear out left wing ideology from the American public was was endangered by McCarthy, by McCarthy's tactics.

• 30:39Kara Swisher?

  Because he went too far.

• 30:40Speaker 04

  Yeah. And so he stopped sharing documents with McCarthy and McCarthy would say things in hearings like, well, the FBI files prove that such and such is a communist. And Hoover would say, well, I can't tell you what's in the files, but I can tell you that that's not true. I mean, he would directly contradict.

• 30:58Kara Swisher?

  Contradict him because he was in his way at what he thought was really fair.

• 31:02Speaker 04

  Hoover was ultimately an institutionalist and Hoover had survived a long time by not getting too close to any one figure, you know, definitely making sure that the powers that be respected him and did what he wanted, but he was never beholden to any one person. And so, you know.

• 31:22Kara Swisher?

  And had his own secrets, of course.

• 31:24Speaker 04

  Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he had his own little world.

• 31:27Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 31:28Speaker 04

  And not that little.

• 31:29Kara Swisher?

  Yeah. So McCarthy also hired this young prosecutor, Roy Cohen, to his Senate Permanent Subcommittee. By the way, Robert Kennedy was also involved, not the current one. But Cohen was, of course, years later, a mentor to Donald Trump. Talk about Roy Cohen's role in the Red Scare, both in McCarthy's attacks and ultimately his downfall, and the same for Kennedy.

• 31:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think, you know, one of the ways that I think of Roy Cohn during that time is, you know, he came into McCarthy's committee after 1952, after the presidential elections, but also just a Senate election where McCarthy was a power broker. He made and broke senators, especially in 1952. And so, you know, he was able to kind of build whatever he wanted and he was given the government oversight committee, I guess, government operations. And he built out a new staff and he hired Cohn effectively to be his CEO, right? The guy running the operation.

• 32:32Kara Swisher?

  Sure.

• 32:33Speaker 04

  And Cohn did two things, right? First of all, he made it an operation, whereas before it had kind of been McCarthy and just kind of whoever was working for him. Cohn brought a real coherence to the operation and saying, you know, here's who we're going after, here's how we're doing it. He did not rein it in, he really pushed it forward. And he urged McCarthy to take risks and to go after bigger and bigger targets. And often they were targets that Cohn himself had beef with, like, you know, one of his best friends was, you know, being inducted into the army. Cohn tried to get the army to give him favors, the army wouldn't. So Cohn had McCarthy go after the army.

• 33:18Kara Swisher?

  That was his boyfriend, but go ahead.

• 33:19Speaker 04

  Yeah. And so, so McCarthy went after the army and that's ultimately what triggered McCarthy's downfall because that was taking on not just the army, but it was, you know, President Eisenhower was an army guy. I mean, that was his, his sacred ground. And so where Eisenhower had been kind of hands off when it came to McCarthy, once McCarthy went after the army at Cohn's behest, he decided to take McCarthy down. And, you know, I think it's interesting also the things that Cohn learned from McCarthy, but also brought to McCarthy. I mean, they really gelled in a lot of ways and, and one thing.

• 34:01Speaker 04

  That carries through, I think, to what people understand of Cohen's influence on Trump is the never apologize, never back down. If you hit a wall, if people call you out, move on, find something else, right? It's almost this kind of shark mentality, just always be moving forward, never stop attacking. And, you know, that was Cohen's message to McCarthy. It's what he took away from McCarthy. And ultimately, it's what he brought to his clients after he went back to New York and, you know, carried that through.

• 34:36Kara Swisher?

  That included Donald Trump, right?

• 34:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:39Kara Swisher?

  So, and what about Kennedy?

• 34:40Speaker 04

  It's interesting. I mean, Kennedy came on board at the same time as Cohen. And, you know, the two of them really didn't like each other. They were very different guys in a lot of ways, but they were also very similar. And they're sort of young men on the make, real, they would consider themselves type A alpha men. And they both wanted that top job, right? That chief counsel job. And McCarthy was very close with Kennedy's father. He and Bobby Kennedy and John F. Kennedy were were close. I mean, they were socially, politically, in a lot of ways. So Bobby Kennedy felt like it was his job to get. And when this young kid, and, you know, Cohen was an amazingly smart guy, and he graduated from

• 35:25Speaker 04

  law school before he was able to drink and was very good at his job. But Kennedy felt like he'd been cheated. And so he only lasted for a few months before he left McCarthy's committee. Now, you know, years later, some Kennedy allies and apologists will say he left because he didn't like what McCarthy was selling. But there's not really a lot of evidence for that. It's really more like he didn't get what he wanted. He may have had remorse later that he had ever affiliated himself with McCarthy. But at the time, that was not the reason.

• 36:01Kara Swisher?

  He was not a pushbacker.

• 36:02Speaker 04

  No, no.

• 36:03Kara Swisher?

  There were pushbacks. There were two very key televised moments that are often attributed with revealing McCarthy to the American public. The Edward R. Murrow CBS special, See It Now, where he Played a reel of McCarthy grilling people and the Army McCarthy hearings where Joe Welch said, obviously, that famous quote, "Have you left no sense of decency?" Talk about the public fault. Did people just get tired of this? Or because he wasn't ousted immediately. He still had a lot of supporters. And talk about the role of the media in this because they didn't, they sort of were like, on one hand, on the other hand, as I recall.

• 36:34Speaker 04

  They were. I mean, the media really struggled with McCarthy because going into the early 50s, there was very much a sort of, you know, stenographic approach to politics. It's like, we, we will report what public figures say in public. And that's it. Right? So not a lot of investigation into what's actually going on. Not a lot of doubt about what's being said because there was a certain faith in the well meaning of politicians. And so a lot of people, editors and writers, really struggled with McCarthy. And McCarthy was very good at manipulating the media. Honestly, there were a lot of reporters and editors

• 37:18Speaker 04

  who were conservative, who liked what McCarthy, and the Chicago Tribune was

• 37:22Kara Swisher?

  The Colonel.

• 37:22Speaker 04

  adamantly, at the time, very right wing.

• 37:25Kara Swisher?

  Well, he was anti Semitic and everything else bad.

• 37:29Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 37:29Kara Swisher?

  One of the worst people in history.

• 37:31Speaker 04

  Yeah. And so, you know, there was a long running debate about how to deal with it. But it was really, you know, as you say, you know, Murrow and Welch, I think both of them really understood something important, which was that McCarthy, at the end of the day, was a creature of the old media. And he knew how to manipulate print, and he knew how to manipulate audiences when he was speaking. Right? But captured on film, and, you know, challenged on film, he looked bad. One of the brilliant aspects of Murrow's presentation is that he simply allowed, now, it's edited, and there's certainly tricks

• 38:10Speaker 04

  involved, but what people saw was just McCarthy, being a bully, being clearly, probably drunk in his hearing. I mean, he was often pretty inebriated.

• 38:21Kara Swisher?

  Significant drinking problem, yeah.

• 38:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, he did have a serious drinking problem. And people got to see this. And it wasn't the McCarthy that they had read on the page. This was real McCarthy. You know, the same thing with, with Welch. And I encourage people who have never seen it. To go watch that that bit because as powerful as Welch's statements were, the context is important. McCarthy was so much of a bully. And the thing is Welch, I mean, there's it's all speculation, but I think it's pretty clear that Welch planned all of this.

• 38:55Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 38:55Speaker 04

  Welch was a great actor and he understood that the Army McCarthy hearings were not a trial. They weren't. There was no judgment and that the senators didn't really matter. It was the public that mattered.

• 39:08Kara Swisher?

  It was a show.

• 39:08Speaker 04

  And so everything he did was aimed at these millions of viewers and to get McCarthy's goat. And

• 39:17Kara Swisher?

  And that's what he did.

• 39:17Speaker 04

  And that's what he did.

• 39:21Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 39:35Speaker 05

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• 40:19Speaker 05

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• 40:46Kara Swisher?

  I'm Kara Swisher and I like people who say the quiet part out loud. In fact, I love it. That's Tiger Sisters, a new podcast that recently joined the Vox Media Podcast Network. Cherie Brook-Lu and Jean Lu. Are real sisters who built their careers at LinkedIn and Goldman Sachs. On their weekly podcast, they're giving the next generation practical tips on how to get ahead, how to write emails people actually answer, how to make your LinkedIn profile stand out, and how to keep learning as an adult. It's straight talk about money, career, and relationships every Monday. Follow Tiger Sisters wherever you get your podcasts.

• 41:23Speaker 06

  Hey, y'all. It's Ested from America Actually at vox.com. We know that you have big questions about the world, and so do we. At Vox, we focus on covering the things that matter in your life and the things that make you curious, whether that's the big politics questions of the day, climate solutions that might actually work, or hopeful news in cancer or Alzheimer's research. We believe that journalism made for the everyday curious person can make a difference in making a better world. And if that sounds like something you want to be a part of, Vox now has a brand new app, and it brings all of our journalism together in one place. Go to vox.com/app to download today.

• 42:06Kara Swisher?

  So there are others that then started to push back. It has so much echoes of today. Eisenhower's Attorney General accused President Truman of having known about communist infiltration in his administration. Truman then gave a televised address saying that Eisenhower administration had fully embraced McCarthyism, which had taken on a dictionary meaning in the world. He says, and I'll read it, "And that meaning is the corruption of truth, the abandonment of our historical devotion to fair play. It is the abandonment of due process of law. It is the use of the big lie and the unfounded accusation against any citizen in the name of Americanism and security. It is the rise of power of the demagogue who lives on untruth. It is the spread of fear and destruction of faith in every level of our society."

• 42:50Kara Swisher?

  That certainly could be written today.

• 42:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 42:52Kara Swisher?

  Many guests on the show have used similar words, obviously, to describe the Trump administration. You write that there is a line linking the Red Scare to the MAGA movement today. Talk about the strongest parallels you see, and who are the modern day equivalents of McCarthy, Cohen, Hoover, Stephen Miller? Maybe he's his own singular sensation. Russell Vought, Steve Bannon?

• 43:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I think... One thing, and this struck me last year, uh, you know, to take maybe not an individual person, but an individual statement by J D Vance. And this was during the story about Haitian immigrants eating dogs.

• 43:29Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 43:29Speaker 04

  In Springfield, Ohio.

• 43:30Kara Swisher?

  They're eating the cats.

• 43:30Speaker 04

  Right, yeah, they're eating the cats or eating the dogs. Okay, so Vance said two things in different interviews. One was the interviewer presented clear evidence that this was not true. And they said, you know, don't you have a responsibility to tell the truth? And he said something to the effect of, it's not my job to tell the truth. It's my job to say things. It's your job to check them.

• 43:53Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 43:53Speaker 04

  Right. Which is a very, McCarthy often said that. McCarthy would say, look, I'm going to say things that are true. I'm going to say things that are not true. I'm going to put it out there and you decide, right? Which is obviously an invitation to misinformation.

• 44:08Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 44:08Speaker 04

  I mean, that kind of thing is a direct borrowing from McCarthy, whether Vance meant it that way or not. The other thing that Vance said that I thought was really important in terms of drawing parallels is he said, well, look, it doesn't matter whether it's right or wrong. The details don't matter of any individual story. The bigger point is what matters, right?

• 44:28Kara Swisher?

  He's always, that's his, that's his little trick. He's always on the bigger point.

• 44:32Speaker 04

  Yeah. And that's what McCarthy would do, right? McCarthy would comment with a charge about an individual person.

• 44:38Kara Swisher?

  It was untrue.

• 44:38Speaker 04

  And it would be proven that that's not true at all. And McCarthy would say, look, it doesn't really matter whether this person or that person is guilty of what I say. My bigger point, that there are communists in the government.

• 44:49Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 44:49Speaker 04

  That's true. What's dispiriting is that that was very effective back then, and it seems to be very effective now.

• 44:57Kara Swisher?

  But talk about the equivalence. Is there an equivalence to these people today?

• 45:02Speaker 04

  You mean like a one to one?

• 45:03Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, I don't know if you had to.

• 45:05Speaker 04

  Look, there are lots of parallels between McCarthy and Trump. You can.

• 45:09Kara Swisher?

  Cohen and Stephen Miller.

• 45:10Speaker 04

  Cohen and Stephen Miller. I think Miller's maybe more of an ideologue than, I mean, Cohen was certainly ideological, but he was also ultimately.

• 45:19Kara Swisher?

  Realist.

• 45:19Speaker 04

  Power.

• 45:20Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 45:20Speaker 04

  Yeah. And.

• 45:22Kara Swisher?

  Bannon?

• 45:23Speaker 04

  Bannon, you know, there's probably no one quite like Steve Bannon in the past. I mean, one of the things that, that is different from then to today is. For what it's worth, there's more of an intellectual construct today, or at least people claiming to have an intellectual construct. There were intellectual anti-communists, but they tended not to line up with the witch hunters. You know, they tended to be a little more reserved, a little more wary of what was going on. I mean, in that sense, I think one of the important things about the Red Scare is that it's a predicate, right? It sort of opens the door in history to worse behavior.

• 46:03Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 46:04Speaker 04

  Things that self-respecting people might not have done back then, they do today.

• 46:09Kara Swisher?

  What is the strongest parallel, if you had to pick one?

• 46:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it's the prevalence of a deep conspiracy theory that certainly drove the Red Scare. Right? Underneath all of this was said to be a cabal of communists and fellow travelers who had infiltrated the federal government, infiltrated big business, infiltrated schools, and were all working toward a particular end. And I think today, that's the same thing. I mean, one of the things that often gets lost in a lot of the news coverage of this or that thing going on is that the motivation for a lot of it is, you can say racism, you can say a lot of things, and that's true, but what links it all together is this belief that

• 46:52Speaker 04

  they are taking radical steps because there is a radical anti-Americanism.

• 46:58Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 46:58Speaker 04

  That has foisted immigrants on us, or, you know, trans rights, or, you know, that these things are all connected and they're operated by this cabal.

• 47:08Kara Swisher?

  Right. So we talked, saying commie was often the catch-all for anyone who had progressive affiliations, but it seems like the terms like woke liberals, DEI are being used by Republicans to have the same effect to undermine civil rights, LGBT rights, immigrant rights. Is woke the new pinko? Or is it different? Or have they overdone it in some way?

• 47:28Speaker 04

  Well, I think there are a lot of parallels, right? So in the same way that during the Red Scare, you could say, well, look, yes, we should have a reasonable conversation and talk about.

• 47:40Speaker 04

  You know, the possibility of Soviet espionage, right? You know, today, we can have a conversation about what is the appropriate level of material to teach our children. And then some people do have that conversation.

• 47:51Kara Swisher?

  Mm hmm.

• 47:52Speaker 04

  But in both cases, the idea of communism or of wokeism, you know, has really been hijacked by movement that sees this idea as a key to go through a door to make radical changes that go beyond conversations about curriculum, right? Or affirmative action, also diversity of affirmative action, these things we've been talking about for a long time.

• 48:15Kara Swisher?

  Mm hmm.

• 48:15Speaker 04

  And, you know, yes, today, we talk about it in, you know, maybe new terms, trans rights or what have you, but it's not, to me, it's not radically different. What's changed is that the critics, that the opponents, the reactionaries have figured out a way to really weaponize this.

• 48:34Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 48:34Speaker 04

  And to make it, yeah, I think a new witch hunt, a new red scare.

• 48:38Kara Swisher?

  A new version. Now, it's not just on the left, two centrist Republicans, Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska and North Carolina Senator Tom Tillis, both recently announced they will not be seeking reelection. Trump had threatened to back his primary challenger Tillis after he voted against the big, beautiful bonkers bill. What a moment where the center cannot hold. How do you look at this? Or they, I mean, that's sort of, it feels like this poem keeps getting played out.

• 49:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, but, you know, I don't know. I mean, I think one of the challenges for a historian, you always want to say, well, the way things worked in the past will kind of indicate the way things work today, right? And so that allows you to sort of say, well, look, there's a pendulum and it swims back and forth.

• 49:17Kara Swisher?

  Right, relax.

• 49:18Speaker 04

  And, you know, you can look at American history and say, well, that is kind of how it went. On the other hand, empires fall, change happens. And one of the things that I'm very worried about is that you look at the red scare. I think there are a couple of things that really prevented it from getting out of hand. And, you know, it was a strong judiciary, a fairly liberal judiciary, especially under Earl Warren, and one that was very focused on civil liberties. It was, you know, a political establishment on the right that Was ultimately averse to the red scare. Not everybody, and there's certainly people who embraced it. But Eisenhower and kind of the moderate Republicans.

• 50:02Speaker 04

  They they stepped in and I think they were really part of the explanation for why it ended up not happening. Or not going to the extent that someone like McCarthy wanted it to. Today, we don't really have those. I mean, the judiciary is wobbly. I mean, at best, right? And certainly the Supreme Court, given its recent decisions, I don't think is something that liberals progressives should be looking to for for comfort. And you mentioned Tillerson bacon, like every couple of weeks, there's some new member of the establishment who just says, I can't. And of course, there aren't many. I mean, the establishment doesn't really have any power.

• 50:40Kara Swisher?

  Right, right. The Republican establishment.

• 50:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, Republican establishment.

• 50:44Kara Swisher?

  Reagan Republicans, you would say.

• 50:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, just unreasonable people.

• 50:47Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, I would think Reagan has to come back from the dead, I suppose. But they wouldn't like him either. He's too much of a pinko. But both J. Edgar Hoover and later McCarthy used data collection, as we talked about, to go after political comments inside and government. As you said, Trump's rise was also predicated on the idea of the administrative deep state. And Elon Musk and Doge fired huge swaths of federal workers and collected data. Who knows what they've collected? Clearly, the administration's capabilities for surveillance with that data are greater than ever before. And this time, the administration is the driving force, not a senator, as you noted. Trump can use the judiciary to change arms and policies around usage and mishandling of data, too. Are you concerned about the power at this moment?

• 51:28Kara Swisher?

  At the same time, I keep thinking they're not going to be happy when the Democrats take over with all these new powers. You know what I mean? Like, which is, which could go the other, I know, if they are allowed to. But I feel like they will be. You know, there's a new precedent for future administrations here.

• 51:44Speaker 04

  There is. And I mean, that's sort of the question, right? I mean, assuming that everything works like it's supposed to in a liberal democracy, there will be change in that regard. What they do with it, you know, we'll, we'll see. I mean, you can imagine the next point where, for whatever reason, because history is weird, the Republicans say in 2028, we have a Democratic president and Republicans have even more power in the House and the Senate, right? They could pass legislation that pulls back a lot of the same things that they gave to Trump and in ways that don't just take us back to the status quo ante, but actually, you know, significantly undermine the president.

• 52:28Speaker 04

  So all, you know, all kinds of things can happen. And I think, look, the way that I tell the story of the Red Scare is definitely a left, right story. I think that the right bears a lot of responsibility for it. But ultimately, I think people both, whatever your political affiliation is, should be really concerned about how witch hunts paired with governments with strong domestic security operations and huge troves of data, what kind of damage that can do to civil liberties? And it doesn't matter if it's left or right. These things happen that happened under Truman and Eisenhower. It, I think, is already happening today with regards to, you know, ICE and, and just how

• 53:10Speaker 04

  readily resources line up to support that. I mean, as a civil libertarian, whatever your politics otherwise are, you should be really, really concerned.

• 53:20Kara Swisher?

  Concerned about, about the data collection. So in every episode, we get a question from an outside expert. Yours is from political analyst and writer Molly Jong Fast.

• 53:29Speaker 05

  Hi, Clay, and thank you for having me, Kara. My question is about McCarthy generally and the fall of McCarthyism. I'm wondering if there are elements of his fall that are instructive for Democrats. That's in their quest to push back against slumpy authoritarianism.

• 53:50Kara Swisher?

  Now, just for people to know, you wrote about her grandfather, author Howard Fast, in the book, who was under surveillance, etc. So what can we learn at this moment?

• 53:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think, you know, I keep going back to what Edward Amaro did, right? In realizing that there was a new media out there, television, and that he could use the power of television to do something that traditional media couldn't do, right? And so he showed a side of McCarthy. And so I sort of think, well, who would be the modern equivalent? And I think, you know, it's going to be somebody, if it happens, somebody who understands this moment. It may not be a journalist, it may be a politician. I mean, you can see Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani really understand how to speak to people today through the internet. It could be a journalist. It could also just be someone who goes viral

• 54:44Speaker 04

  and suddenly becomes an overnight sensation because they get how to zero in. Because they think that's the thing, right? There is an immense amount of latent opposition out there. When you look at the poll numbers, there is not a single Trump policy that is particularly popular. But also, it doesn't matter right now because he has the power to do it. Now, you can imagine also a moment where people become truly animated and people who otherwise didn't really care become activated.

• 55:15Kara Swisher?

  As you saw, these young people.

• 55:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. And I think it's going to be someone or a disparate group of people who figure that out. And I wish I were as good, I wish I had that skill to say.

• 55:30Kara Swisher?

  Well, one of the problems is, you noted that McCarthy's televised bullying turned 1950s America against him when they saw it. Now, Trump and MAGA have made bullying part of the brand. I mean, as part of the dunking. I think tiresomeness of that is really where the problem they have going for them.

• 55:46Speaker 04

  It is, it is, yeah.

• 55:47Kara Swisher?

  It's interesting to see if that's, people have enough of it, like enough of it, just the way they did when his ratings fell for The Apprentice. They've had enough of him. Do you see that happening?

• 55:58Speaker 04

  Well, you know, I guess it comes to the question of. When does that make a difference? Right? Because I think it'll make a difference next year.

• 56:07Kara Swisher?

  Midterms.

• 56:07Speaker 04

  The midterms, for sure. Will it make a difference on? I mean, Stephen Miller doesn't care what Trump's ratings are. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. doesn't care. What is Kristi Noem doesn't care.

• 56:19Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 56:19Speaker 04

  What his ratings are. Will Trump care? I don't think he does in the way that he did in the first term. So, you know, a lot of it is the building of momentum behind ultimately political change. Right? And so it's not something that happens right now. It's not going to be a gotcha moment. It's going to be people like Donnie and AOC and, and others to be named, who can motivate young voters and new voters in 2026 and going forward. But I think, you know, it's got to be a wholesale.

• 56:53Kara Swisher?

  Yeah. The Pride Festival in Hungary, the Canada, Australia. You're watching. I, I watch history and I'm like, oh no, I feel bad for these people at some point. We'll see. So this episode, I'd like to end on a happier note. This episode will air on July 3rd, the day before Independence Day. That celebrates the passage of the Declaration of Independence. Next year, it will be 250 words. Thomas Jefferson wrote those famous lines, the preamble. We hold those truths to be self evident that all men are created equal and they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. President Lincoln called the Declaration a rebuke and stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression. So when you look back at McCarthyism and look at our current situation,

• 57:36Kara Swisher?

  how well do you think we've done living by those tenets?

• 57:40Speaker 04

  You know, I think one of the things that, you know, we, the last couple of years, especially during the first presidential term, first Trump term, we talked a lot about norms and how he was tearing up norms. Today, we don't even talk about it because I think anything that's a norm doesn't count anymore. And one of the things that certainly you look back to Lincoln and, and then again during the Red Scare and so much of the faith in. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution was predicated in an unspoken way on the existence of norms and norms enforced by people who kind of all agreed on a basic level.

• 58:20Kara Swisher?

  Who are normal.

• 58:20Speaker 04

  Right. I mean, Nixon was always considered the worst guy, but Nixon ultimately followed norms. I mean, Nixon resigned because he knew that he would be challenged and he, you know, that he would be probably taken to court. He knew that it was impossible for him simply to resist the forces of justice. And I couldn't imagine that happening today. I think we're just in a different moment. And when we, I think, everyone talks about what happens after all of this. I don't say there's an after. That has to be a long running conversation, right? About how you build a stable democracy that is not predicated on norms, that really

• 59:03Speaker 04

  is predicated on an extensive set of rules that are enforced in a way that maybe we can't even conceive of. I don't know how that would be shaped. But, you know, we have to move away from this idea that we're all just going to agree to play by a certain set of rules that we've never written down, because those have all been broken.

• 59:22Kara Swisher?

  One thing that would give you hope?

• 59:25Speaker 04

  One thing that would give me hope. You know, honestly, it is the fact that when it comes down to it, a vast number of Americans oppose what's going on. You know, I was up in upstate New York and we're just driving around, small towns, it was on Saturday, and there were no King's protests on every corner of it, you know, every main street, you know, downtown corner of every little town. And then you look at these protests that, you know, every month or two that really well up and where hundreds of thousands of people come out. And, you know, the history of movements in the United States is, is something that... People don't appreciate as much as they do standard political change, right? It's easy to say this election happened, this election happened.

• 1:00:09Speaker 04

  But movements change history and it means something that there are hundreds of thousands of people out there protesting and organizing. And that gives me hope, you know, not the solution, but it's the precedent. It's a predicate to a solution.

• 1:00:24Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:24Speaker 04

  And that that makes me feel good about where we're going.

• 1:00:27Kara Swisher?

  Yeah. So I always feel like, you know, when they say you have no sense of decency, they don't. So let's move on and move on. Let's stop arguing about that part. That's always... People used to always be like, can you believe Trump did that? I'm like, I do. I do. So next, what's next? And I think that's the greatest strength of America is next.

• 1:00:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:00:45Kara Swisher?

  Anyway, I really appreciate a wonderful book, Clay. It really is. It's really important to read at this time. Understanding history is both has both lessons and warnings, of course, but it's also a really fascinating story.

• 1:00:56Speaker 04

  Well, thank you, Kara.

• 1:01:02Kara Swisher?

  On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castor-Rosell, Kateri Yokum, Megan Burney, Alison Rogers, and Kalen Lynch. Dushat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Rosemarie Ho. Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Aruda, and our theme music is by Track academics. If you're already following the show, you have no king and never will. If not, have you no sense of decency? Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network and us. We'll be back on Monday with more.

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

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