There Is A Spectre Haunting New York City

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Speaker 36 On February 11th, 1967,

Speaker 36 the Pittsburgh police raided an apartment near the University of Pittsburgh campus.

Speaker 36 They had a warrant to search the place for marijuana.

Speaker 36 53 people were arrested, charged with the vague sounding crime of visiting a disorderly house.

Speaker 36 The party's host, Frank Goldsmith, was charged with possession of drugs.

Speaker 36 But there weren't any drugs.

Speaker 36 Perhaps frustrated at finding the place completely bare of so much as a loose joint, they ransacked Goldsmith's bathroom, where they found some tablets in a container in the medicine cabinet that were eventually proven to be prescription allergy medication.

Speaker 36 As the police tore through the apartment, one officer ripped a poster of Mao Zedong off the wall. He turned to one of the guests and demanded to know who the man in the poster is.

Speaker 36 Apparently the cop didn't get the joke. because a college student told him, that's Ho Chi Minh before he went on a diet.

Speaker 36 And when the officer produced the poster in court two weeks later, he told the judge it was Ho Chi Minh.

Speaker 36 One of the young men who was there that night told the police that unless they were charging him with a specific offense, he would not submit to an arrest.

Speaker 36 As a foreign national, he'd specifically sought this guidance from his embassy.

Speaker 36 Mahmoud Mamdani would later tell the Washington Post that the officer responded by calling him a racial slur and telling him to go back where he came from.

Speaker 36 Eventually, all the charges were dropped. The FBI denied any involvement.

Speaker 36 The police may not have found any drugs that night,

Speaker 36 but they found evidence of something far more insidious:

Speaker 36 communism.

Speaker 36 I'm Molly Conger,

Speaker 36 and this is Weird Little Guys.

Speaker 36 I'll set your mind at ease right now.

Speaker 36 You may have recognized that name, Mahmood Mamdani, as the father of Zoran Mamdani.

Speaker 36 And neither of them are our weird little guy.

Speaker 36 But the news this week was a real distraction. And I didn't end up picking a weird little guy at all.

Speaker 36 But it did get me thinking about something that weird little guys spend a lot of time thinking about.

Speaker 36 Last week, on June 24th, Zoran Mamdani won the New York City mayoral Democratic primary.

Speaker 36 The next day, the President of the United States posted on Truth Social, the social media platform that he owns,

Speaker 36 It's finally happened. The Democrats have crossed the line.
Zoran Mamdani, a 100% communist lunatic, has just won the Dem primary and is on his way to becoming mayor.

Speaker 36 We've had radical lefties before, but this is getting a little ridiculous.

Speaker 36 A 100%

Speaker 36 communist lunatic, huh?

Speaker 36 Zoran Mamdani is a Democratic socialist. But that's a distinction that's lost on Donald Trump.
And he's not alone.

Speaker 36 The day after the primary, the New York Young Republicans Club tweeted a photo of Mamdani with the word deport stamped in red over his face,

Speaker 36 accompanied by this rather alarming demand.

Speaker 36 A call to action from the New York Young Republicans Club. The radical Zoron Mamdani cannot be allowed to destroy our beloved city of New York.

Speaker 36 The Communist Control Act lets President Trump revoke Zoron Mamdani's citizenship and promptly deport him. The time for action is now, Stephen Miller and Tom Homan.
New York is counting on you.

Speaker 36 A day later, Congressman Andy Ogles posted a letter that he'd sent to Attorney General Pam Bondi, asking the Department of Justice to open an investigation into whether Momdani could have his citizenship revoked.

Speaker 36 Ogles, too, called him a communist.

Speaker 36 But what is a communist?

Speaker 36 I'm not actually going to tell you. It's not that kind of podcast.
But more importantly, it doesn't matter.

Speaker 36 Because if I'm being honest, my answer to the question of, is Zoron Mamdani a communist?

Speaker 36 is the same answer that most right-wing extremists would give you if they were being honest.

Speaker 36 I don't know and I don't care.

Speaker 36 In the world of weird little guys,

Speaker 36 a communist can be anyone,

Speaker 36 Even you.

Speaker 36 Remember, just two weeks ago, you heard this.

Speaker 36 It doesn't fucking matter. She's a communist.

Speaker 36 What?

Speaker 36 You need to stop talking.

Speaker 36 Nobody's angry. She is a communist, an anti-white liberal.

Speaker 36 That's James Alex Fields talking about Heather Heyer's mother.

Speaker 36 He was sitting in jail awaiting trial for a hate crime murder. And that's what he had to say about the mother of the woman he killed.

Speaker 36 She's the enemy.

Speaker 36 An anti-white communist.

Speaker 36 In later sworn statements produced in civil litigation, Fields would agree that he believed every member of the crowd that day was communist.

Speaker 36 A week after Fields murdered a counter-protester at that Nazi rally, Jason Kessler, the man who organized the Nazi rally, posted,

Speaker 36 Heather Heyer was a fat, disgusting communist.

Speaker 36 Communists have killed 94 million. Looks like it was payback time.

Speaker 36 While he was in prison, Fields received a letter from Matthew Heimbach, the leader of the neo-Nazi group, the Traditionalist Worker Party.

Speaker 36 in which Heimbach referred to the counterprotesters that Field hit with his car as, quote, rampaging communist boards.

Speaker 36 When Christopher Cantwell, one of the neo-Nazi activists who was supposed to give a speech that day, got maced,

Speaker 36 he blamed,

Speaker 36 oh, you guessed it, communists.

Speaker 36 What just happened? They maced me.

Speaker 36 Who? I don't know.

Speaker 36 Communists.

Speaker 36 This isn't unique. In my work, I see this every day.

Speaker 36 Anyone who opposes fascism is a communist.

Speaker 36 Anyone advocating for racial equality? A communist.

Speaker 36 Democrats? Communists. Gay people, Jewish people, immigrants, civil rights activists, progressive clergy, anyone who's ever attended a rally for any left-wing cause.

Speaker 36 Communists, one and all.

Speaker 36 And it's been like that for decades.

Speaker 36 Here's George Lincoln Rockwell, the commander of the American Nazi Party, in 1966.

Speaker 37 In my opinion, communism is the organized mutiny.

Speaker 37 I'm going to say this slow because it's a lot packed into a few words. In my opinion, communism is the mutiny of quantity versus quality.

Speaker 37 I think that communism is the organized mutiny of the inferior biological people in the world led by the Jews against the people who have built civilization. That's what I think it is.

Speaker 36 Or how about David Lane, the man who came up with the 14 words?

Speaker 38 Before we go any further, we might as well discuss three words that are considered by many to mean different things,

Speaker 38 but are in reality all one and the same thing.

Speaker 38 These three words are Judaism, communism, and the doctrine of equality.

Speaker 36 That clip is from a sermon that David Lane delivered at the Aryan Nations Compound in 1981,

Speaker 36 just two years before he became a founding member of the Nazi terrorist organization, the Order.

Speaker 36 And speaking of the Aryan Nations, here's their leader, Richard Butler.

Speaker 39 Once they can destroy the will of the white man who says communism will cover the earth forever.

Speaker 36 Now,

Speaker 36 communism

Speaker 36 is real.

Speaker 36 It's a real political ideology that exists in the world.

Speaker 36 There are people who are communists.

Speaker 36 And anti-communism was a significant force in American politics in the 20th century.

Speaker 36 From the Palmer raids during the first Red Scare in 1920 to the years of paranoia and persecution led by Joseph McCarthy.

Speaker 36 But anti-communism survived the death of McCarthyism.

Speaker 36 In his book, Red Hunting in the Promised Land, Anti-Communism and the Making of America, Joel Covell argues that there is a difference between anti-communism, that is, capital A, anti-hyphen, capital C communism,

Speaker 36 and anti-communism, all one word and lowercase.

Speaker 36 Covell defines capital C communism as actual communists, right? These actually existing movements and governments and people who organize according to the principles of communism.

Speaker 36 And capital C anti-communism, he says, is an objective dislike of capital C communism.

Speaker 36 So capital C anti-communism is, obviously, about

Speaker 36 communism.

Speaker 36 Lowercase anti-communism, on the other hand, he calls the reigning ideology of the West and argues that it has very little at all to do with communism.

Speaker 36 In 1987, the Times Mirror commissioned Gallup to survey the American electorate.

Speaker 36 Over a period of several months, Polsters conducted in-person interviews with 4,244 American adults all over the country, administering a long questionnaire that asked a variety of demographic and political questions.

Speaker 36 70%

Speaker 36 of respondents self-identified as anti-communist,

Speaker 36 compared to 49% of people who said they were religious, 47% who supported the civil rights movement, and 27%

Speaker 36 who identified as a supporter of unions.

Speaker 36 In the technical appendix, the pollsters note that, quote, as an identity, anti-communism is virtually universal in America.

Speaker 36 But if you dig through the responses to the other questions these people were asked, it kind of looks like most people who claimed that their political identity was as an anti-communist

Speaker 36 might not really know what communism is.

Speaker 36 And 56% of respondents said they believed that it was the cause of most social unrest in America in 1987.

Speaker 36 Covell calls this the black hole of anti-communism, quote, a feeling that nullifies any reasoned or differentiated argument, that distinguishes anti-communism from a simple reaction to communism and promotes it to the status of a great organizing force in American life.

Speaker 36 Anti-communism took on a kind of religious fervor in American politics during the Cold War. Anything the government did in the name of fighting the Soviets was good.
Any opposition to it was bad.

Speaker 36 To the point that people were tying themselves in knots.

Speaker 36 When religious leaders spoke out against the threat of nuclear annihilation, conservative writer William F.

Speaker 36 Buckley accused them of idolatry, of venerating life at the great cost of ignoring the greater good, which is, I guess, having a large nuclear arsenal to resist the threat of communism.

Speaker 36 One of Ronald Reagan's own closest advisors admitted during a congressional hearing that he'd been unwilling to speak frankly to the president about the obvious illegality of the Iran-Contra affair because he was afraid of being called a commie.

Speaker 36 Everything done in the name of fighting communism is good.

Speaker 36 Anything that needs to be fought is communism.

Speaker 36 And any resistance to that fight makes you no better than a communist.

Speaker 36 Quote, viewed against this diabolical force, all moral and rational comparisons disappear, like light sucked in by the virtually infinite gravity of a cosmological black hole, Covell wrote.

Speaker 36 Communism could be anything,

Speaker 36 rendering the word effectively meaningless.

Speaker 36 An accusation I see quite often levied at, well, people like me, people who write about fascism, white supremacy, neo-Nazis, et cetera, is,

Speaker 36 will you just call everyone you don't like a Nazi?

Speaker 36 And I'm sure, There are people out there getting a little too casual with it, but I can only speak for myself. And I know that words mean things.
And I'm careful with them.

Speaker 36 I won't say I've never been wrong, but I'm not careless.

Speaker 36 There have been so many times that I've responded to that particular jab with just a quick citation.

Speaker 36 Here's a picture of his bedroom with a Nazi flag on the wall and a framed picture of Hitler. Here's a video of the man in question literally saying straight to camera, I am a fascist.

Speaker 36 Here he is in a clan robe, throwing a Roman salute, going on a podcast to talk about the sin of race mixing, whatever.

Speaker 36 I try to use words carefully.

Speaker 36 But for the anti-communist, the word is so all-encompassing that you can call anyone a communist, and you'll never be wrong.

Speaker 36 And no man in American history better exemplifies this quixotic project of rooting out imaginary communists.

Speaker 36 than J. Edgar Hoover.

Speaker 36 Ellen Schrecker, a historian of McCarthyism, wrote that if people had known in the 1950s what we would eventually learn when the FBI was forced to disclose files from that era, McCarthyism would have been called Hooverism.

Speaker 36 In Hoover's 1958 book, Masters of Deceit,

Speaker 36 he explained just how devious the communists can be.

Speaker 36 The party's objective is to drive a wedge, however slight, into as many minds as possible. That is why, in every conceivable way, communists try to poison our thinking about the issues of the day.

Speaker 36 Social reforms, peace, politics, veterans, women's, and youth problems. The more people they can influence, the stronger they will be.

Speaker 36 Responding to that passage in particular, Fred Cook wrote in his review of the book for the nation,

Speaker 36 Obviously, it is hardly safe to think about any of the issues in these all-embracing categories. For communists may be thinking about them them too.

Speaker 36 And how is one to know whether one's thoughts are actually one's own or the reflection of some subtle communist thought inoculation?

Speaker 36 By the 1960s, there wasn't the same appetite for the outright McCarthyism of the 40s and 50s. But Hoover's personal commitment to rooting out the specter of communism never faded.

Speaker 36 I know the little opening vignette of an episode of this show is usually kind of a bait and switch, some interesting but only tangentially related tidbit that I don't really revisit.

Speaker 36 But this one's fascinating.

Speaker 36 Remember, in 1967, Zoran Mamdani's father, Mahmoud Mamdani, was a college student at the University of Pittsburgh.

Speaker 36 He was one of several dozen students caught up in a police raid at an apartment just off campus one night.

Speaker 36 The police claimed to be looking for drugs.

Speaker 36 They didn't find any, and the charges against all 53 people people were dropped.

Speaker 36 But this wasn't an ordinary college party.

Speaker 36 Half of the people taken into custody that night were students from nearby St. Vincent College.

Speaker 36 Their theology professor, Father Roseborough, had left the party early and wasn't there when the cops showed up.

Speaker 36 The party that evening was a reception for an out-of-town guest.

Speaker 36 David Dellinger, a pacifist activist, gave a talk earlier that day at the University of Pittsburgh, and he told the audience about his recent visit to Vietnam, where he'd gone to talk to the people who'd been affected by the American bombing campaign.

Speaker 36 Frank Goldsmith, the party's host, was the chairman of the local chapter of the Committee to End the War in Vietnam.

Speaker 36 Everyone in attendance that night was, to some degree or another,

Speaker 36 active in the anti-war movement.

Speaker 36 Two months after those charges were dropped, Marcus Childs wrote an article about the raid in the Washington Post.

Speaker 36 Childs was clear that both the FBI and the DOJ had denied any involvement in the incident.

Speaker 36 But he says that those close to the case believe that it was absolutely connected to the FBI's interest in the campus anti-war group, writing, quote, there is reason to fear a revival of the Red scare, the Red Raids, and the McCarthyist hysteria.

Speaker 36 This particular incident itself doesn't get much press after that. I mean, there's nothing to report, right? The charges were dropped, it was over.

Speaker 36 But the very day that newspaper story ran, April 21st, 1967,

Speaker 36 an FBI agent carefully cut it out of the newspaper and Xeroxed it.

Speaker 36 Later that day, that same FBI agent wrote a memo to his boss, William Sullivan, the head of the Bureau's domestic intelligence division, running the operation we now know as COINTELPRO.

Speaker 36 Attached to the memo was that copy of Chiles' article. In the margins in J.
Edgar Hoover's handwriting, there's a little note.

Speaker 36 What are the facts as to our interest in this matter?

Speaker 36 The memo, written by Charles Brennan, claims, quote, The FBI had absolutely nothing to do with this raid.

Speaker 36 And it concludes with this paragraph.

Speaker 36 This is another example of the increasing tendency of so-called liberal writers and faculty and student groups to criticize the Bureau in an effort to stop our investigation of subversive elements active in campus groups.

Speaker 36 These individuals are consciously or unconsciously aiding the Communist Party in its lifelong fight to stop the FBI's investigation into subversive influences on the campuses.

Speaker 36 A few days later, J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation himself,

Speaker 36 wrote the journalist a nasty letter, calling the article irresponsible and outrageous, and again claiming that the FBI had no involvement in or knowledge of the raid.

Speaker 36 Now,

Speaker 36 I don't know if you can tell how I feel about J. Edgar Hoover, but I don't think he's telling the truth.
Shocking, I know.

Speaker 36 But the story doesn't make sense. sense.

Speaker 36 In several newspaper stories, the Pittsburgh police sometimes claim that they'd been surveilling Frank Goldsmith's apartment for weeks.

Speaker 36 Other articles are very specific that they had a search warrant that was signed 12 hours before the raid, and that the warrant specifically authorized for the search of marijuana.

Speaker 36 But the FBI memo and some of the newspaper articles claim that the raid was actually just prompted by noise complaints from neighbors and the search for drugs was incidental.

Speaker 36 And then, of course, there's the fact that declassified FBI files exist for a number of people who were at the party that night.

Speaker 36 Frank Goldsmith, the man whose apartment was raided, had been under investigation for his involvement in the anti-war movement for over a year.

Speaker 36 In one FBI file bearing the title, Communist Influence in Racial Matters, a memo dated just a few months before the raid outlines surveillance of Goldsmith performed by the Pittsburgh Police Department on behalf of the FBI.

Speaker 36 And the raid at Frank Goldsmith's apartment wasn't Mahmoud Mamdani's first rush with FBI surveillance.

Speaker 36 Two years earlier, in March of 1965, he was one of 128 college students from the Pittsburgh area who piled into buses that made the 12-hour drive to Montgomery, Alabama.

Speaker 36 And there they participated in a protest protest organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Speaker 40 I was born in Kampala, Uganda, in East Africa. I was given my middle name, Kwame, by my father, who named me after the first Prime Minister of Ghana.

Speaker 40 And decades ago, in Uganda, we won our independence from the British in 1962.

Speaker 40 We can clap for that.

Speaker 41 And

Speaker 40 when we did, the United States government gave the Ugandan government 23 scholarships as a gift for independence. And my father won one of those scholarships.

Speaker 40 He came to this country to study to be an engineer at the University of Pittsburgh.

Speaker 40 And some time into his studies, his face buried in his book, he heard the words reverberate in the corridor around him, which side are you on? Which side are you on?

Speaker 40 These were words being sung by members of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. recruiting students to get on the bus to go to Montgomery, Alabama.
And my father got on that bus.

Speaker 40 He marched. He was hosed down.
He was thrown in jail. He was given one phone call.
And he called the Ugandan ambassador to the United States. He said, Can you get me out of jail?

Speaker 42 The ambassador said, What are you doing in jail?

Speaker 40 We sent you there to study.

Speaker 40 My father said, You sent me here as a gift for our freedom. They are fighting for theirs.
It's one and the same.

Speaker 36 His son's recounting of the story doesn't say how many students were on the buses.

Speaker 36 And neither did any of the newspaper stories that I could find from 1965.

Speaker 36 But a memo that landed directly on J. Edgar Hoover's desk did.

Speaker 36 The names of every student on those buses was turned over to the FBI by an informant.

Speaker 36 And in the weeks that followed, Mahmoud Mamdani was one of scores of students who received a visit from a federal agent.

Speaker 36 In an interview in 2013, Mahmoud Mamdani says that it was the FBI's obsessive attempts to to root out communism

Speaker 36 that, ironically, introduced him to Marx.

Speaker 36 Reading from that interview,

Speaker 36 two or three weeks later, I was in my room. There was a knock at the door.
Two gentlemen in trench coats and hats said, FBI.

Speaker 36 And I thought, wow, just like on television. They sat down.

Speaker 36 They were there to find out why I had gone. Because this turned out to be big.
It was after Montgomery that King organized his march on Selma. They wanted to know who had influenced me.

Speaker 36 After one hour of probing, the guy said, Do you like Marx?

Speaker 36 I said, I haven't met him.

Speaker 36 Guy said, no, no, he's dead.

Speaker 36 Oh, wow, what happened?

Speaker 36 No, no, he died long ago.

Speaker 36 I thought the guy Marx had just died. So then, why are you asking me if he died long ago?

Speaker 36 No, he wrote a lot. He wrote that poor people should not be poor.

Speaker 36 And I said, sounds amazing.

Speaker 36 I'm giving you a sense of how naive I was.

Speaker 36 After they left, I went to the library to look for Marx.

Speaker 36 So that was my introduction to Karl Marx.

Speaker 36 He'd never heard of Karl Marx, but he was already a communist,

Speaker 36 because everyone who marched for civil rights was.

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Speaker 36 There is a fascinating and complicated history of how anti-communism functions specifically in the South during the civil rights era.

Speaker 36 But to be honest, I feel like I didn't do enough reading this week to really do it justice.

Speaker 36 The short answer is just that.

Speaker 36 It was often politically useful to label all civil rights activists as communists.

Speaker 36 And that was kind of the only answer in the literature for a long time.

Speaker 36 But there are a handful of books now that explore the complexities of anti-communism in the South. Like I said, I didn't get a chance to read more than a chapter of any of these, so I...

Speaker 36 couldn't tell you which I would recommend, but it seems like the best sources, if you want more on this topic, are George Lewis's The White South and Red Menace, Segregationists, Anti-Communism, and Massive Resistance, Jeff Woods' Black Struggle, Red Scare, Segregation and Anti-Communism in the South, and Yasuhiro Karagiri's Black Freedom, White Resistance, and Red Menace.

Speaker 36 But here's the thing:

Speaker 36 some of those civil rights activists were communists.

Speaker 36 That gets lost when you explain it all away as McCarthyist hysteria and red baiting. Some of them were communists and proudly so.

Speaker 36 But who is or isn't a communist doesn't actually matter to the anti-communist.

Speaker 36 Remember that clip of Christopher Cantwell being asked who maced him?

Speaker 36 He has no idea who it was.

Speaker 36 But it was communists. Because whatever bad thing is happening to him is communism.

Speaker 36 So I suppose it's no surprise that Zoran Mamdani is being accused of being a communist.

Speaker 36 And I do mean accused. People like Congressman Andy Ogles are trying to have him investigated.

Speaker 36 Zoran Mamdani is an immigrant. He was born in Uganda and moved to the United States as a child and became a naturalized United States citizen in 2018.

Speaker 36 There is no doubt about those facts. He is a United States citizen.

Speaker 36 In that post from the New York Young Republicans Club, the group cites the Communist Control Act of 1954 as grounds to have Mamdani deported.

Speaker 36 There are a couple of layers here. There's a lot going on, but I think they're wrong on every single front.

Speaker 36 That act, the Communist Control Act, is technically still on the books, but it would only bar a member of the Communist Party from holding certain offices.

Speaker 36 It has nothing to do with his naturalization status.

Speaker 36 It was signed into law by President Eisenhower in 1954, the same year that Eisenhower himself was accused of being a card-carrying member of the Communist Party by Robert Welch, the founder of the viciously anti-communist John Birch Society.

Speaker 36 Those facts aren't actually really related in any way. It's just further proof that anyone the anti-communist dislikes can can be sucked into the black hole of anti-communism.

Speaker 36 Even Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Speaker 36 And the act itself was never really widely used.

Speaker 36 The Supreme Court ruled in the 1960s that it didn't prevent the Communist Party from participating in the New York State unemployment's insurance system as an employer.

Speaker 36 But the ruling didn't go further than that as to the constitutionality of the law as a whole.

Speaker 36 It was found to be unconstitutional by a federal court in Arizona in 1973, but a challenge to the law was never heard by a higher court, so we don't have a Supreme Court opinion on the matter.

Speaker 36 But again, that's because it was so rarely used. This wasn't something that was happening a lot.

Speaker 36 And I guess it's no longer safe to make a prediction like this, but I would say in a world that stayed even half sane, Barring him from holding office under the Communist Control Act of 1954 would not hold up.

Speaker 36 It would not hold up to a challenge.

Speaker 36 Although, again, everything's out the window now.

Speaker 36 Other Magasphere influencers quickly identified another line of attack, one that wouldn't just keep him out of office, but could get him out of the country.

Speaker 36 Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, another relic of the McCarthy era, members of the Communist Party are not eligible to become naturalized citizens.

Speaker 36 Specifically, Title VIII U.S. Code Section 1424,

Speaker 36 Prohibition upon the naturalization of persons opposed to government or law or who favor totalitarian forms of government.

Speaker 36 It's a lengthy section.

Speaker 36 It manages to be incredibly vague and open-ended, despite taking over a thousand words to explain itself.

Speaker 36 Section A just lists six different situations that would make a person ineligible for naturalization.

Speaker 36 And here is just one of those six subsections.

Speaker 36 A member of or affiliated with the Communist Party of the United States, any other totalitarian party of the United States, the Communist Political Association, the Communist or other totalitarian party of any state of the United States, of any foreign state, or of any political or geographic subdivision of any foreign state, any section, subsidiary, branch, affiliate, or subdivision of any such association or party, or the direct predecessors or successors of any such association or party, regardless of what name such group or organization may have used, may now bear, or may hereafter adopt, unless such alien establishes that he did not have knowledge or reason to believe at the time he became a member of or affiliated with such an organization and did not thereafter and prior to the date upon which such organization was so registered or so required to be registered have such knowledge or reason to believe that such organization was a Communist Front organization.

Speaker 36 What the fuck does that mean?

Speaker 36 Now, as always, I'm not a lawyer. I didn't go to law school.
Nobody taught me how to read the laws.

Speaker 36 But I looked at this pretty hard.

Speaker 36 And I looked very hard for definitions.

Speaker 36 You see, when legislators write a law, they'll often include specific definitions of unique terms or words or terms that could be ambiguous.

Speaker 36 And there are some words and phrases in this section that I don't know that I would say have a clear, straightforward, plain language meaning that is not ambiguous.

Speaker 36 So surely there is a section somewhere in this chapter that defines specifically what they mean by communist front organization.

Speaker 36 Because that could mean a lot of things.

Speaker 36 But it isn't there.

Speaker 36 There is no definition in this chapter for that term.

Speaker 36 And I looked and I looked, and it's not in the U.S. Code at all.

Speaker 36 But it used to be.

Speaker 36 The term was originally defined in a law that was passed two years earlier in the Internal Security Act of 1950, in the section of the code that established the Subversive Activities Control Board.

Speaker 36 The Supreme Court ruled in 1965 that it was unconstitutional to force members of the Communist Party to register with the Subversive Activities Control Board, and that entire code section would eventually get repealed in 1993, which is why it no longer appears in the U.S.

Speaker 36 Code at all.

Speaker 36 So the code section we were just talking about, the section that would allow for the denaturalization of people who were members of organizations that were required to be registered with a body that no longer exists and was found to be unconstitutional.

Speaker 36 I'm not sure how you can sort that out. I'm not sure how you can apply a law whose terms are defined in a code section that is unconstitutional and repealed.

Speaker 36 And again, at the risk of being repetitive, there is another huge problem here.

Speaker 36 He's not a communist. He's not a member of the Communist Party.
He's a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. And I promise you, it's not a communist organization.

Speaker 36 So even if you were to accept the outrageous argument that this law born of Cold War hysteria is valid and that it could and should be applied, it doesn't apply.

Speaker 36 He's only a communist in the sense that that's the word used to attack people like him.

Speaker 36 A lot of these rabid anti-communist armchair attorneys who are posting online are pulling in another section of that same Immigration and Nationality Act, Title VIII, U.S.C.

Speaker 36 1451, Revocation of Naturalization.

Speaker 36 So that last section says that you can't get naturalized if you're a member of the Communist Party, but this one goes further.

Speaker 36 Even if you were not a member at the time of your naturalization, if you decide later to join the Communist Party, after you've become a citizen, they can take it back.

Speaker 36 If a person who shall have been naturalized after December 24, 1952 shall within five years next following such naturalization become a member of or affiliated with any organization, membership in or affiliation with, which at the time of naturalization would have precluded such person from naturalization under the provisions of Section 1424 of this title, it shall be considered prima fascia evidence that such person was not attached to the principles of the Constitution of the United States and was not well disposed to the good order and happiness of the United States at the time of naturalization.

Speaker 36 And the section continues, saying that naturalization in this situation could be revoked for quote, having been obtained by concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation.

Speaker 36 So they're not saying you were a communist at the time, we didn't know, we caught you later.

Speaker 36 They're saying that even if you never thought about communism until after you were a citizen for several years,

Speaker 36 They can take it as proof that you lied on purpose.

Speaker 36 Years before the thought ever entered your head.

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Speaker 36 Denaturalization is not common.

Speaker 36 At least it didn't used to be.

Speaker 36 Between 1990 and 2017, there were an average of 11 cases per year.

Speaker 36 And when I punched in this code section into Court Listener, a website that lets you search federal court filings, I browsed a handful of the cases that popped up.

Speaker 36 They're mostly pretty serious. Like it's not gray area stuff.
It's big red flag, obvious problem-type situations. Like you could see why this was a big deal and had to happen in many of these cases.

Speaker 36 Like a handful of very old men who obtained United States citizenship by covering up that they'd been Nazi war criminals.

Speaker 36 There were a surprising number of those in the 90s. We were deporting 85-year-old SS officers at a pretty good clip there for a minute.

Speaker 36 A 2020 report from the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild, though, warned that the number of denaturalization cases increased dramatically during Trump's first term.

Speaker 36 In 2018, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services announced that they were prepared to refer 1,600 cases to the DOJ for potential denaturalization proceedings.

Speaker 36 In 2020, the DOJ formed a new office dedicated to investigating and litigating denaturalization cases.

Speaker 36 Although, aside from the mention of that office in some of these publications that were by and for immigration attorneys, I can't actually find anything about the existence of that office past the date of the DOJ press release announcing it.

Speaker 36 So it's hard to say if they actually did that.

Speaker 36 But denaturalization cases have been increasing in recent years. And now the administration is seriously considering reviving it as a tool of suppressing political dissent.

Speaker 36 In early June of 2025, The Justice Department published a memo directing attorneys in the DOJ's civil division to, quote, prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law.

Speaker 36 The memo lists 10 categories of denaturalization cases.

Speaker 36 It's got the basics, you know, war crimes, terrorism, gangs, people who lied about their criminal history or made other material misrepresentations during the naturalization process.

Speaker 36 But it also includes as a separate category of people to target for having their citizenship stripped away, quote, individuals who engaged in various forms of financial fraud against the United States, including paycheck protection program loan fraud and Medicaid or Medicare fraud.

Speaker 36 The 10th category is

Speaker 36 just vibes.

Speaker 36 Quote, any other cases referred to the civil division that the division determines to be sufficiently important to pursue.

Speaker 36 And it kind of feels like that would mean

Speaker 36 any immigrant who makes the president mad.

Speaker 36 At a White House press briefing on June 30th, Caroline Levitt declined to say whether Trump had weighed in on Congressman Ogle's calls to deport Momdani.

Speaker 44 Does President Trump want Zoran Momdani deported?

Speaker 36 I haven't heard him say that. I haven't heard him call for that.
But certainly he does not want this individual to be elected.

Speaker 36 I was just speaking to him about it and his radical policies that will completely

Speaker 44 crush.

Speaker 36 But she did say, quote, it's something that should be investigated and that he is, quote, quite literally a communist.

Speaker 36 These McCarthyism era laws target communists.

Speaker 36 So it kind of matters what a communist is,

Speaker 36 or at least what they think it is.

Speaker 36 Here are some things that Donald Trump has called communism.

Speaker 36 There's Zoran Mamdani, of course.

Speaker 36 What did you make of the New York Democrat primary?

Speaker 36 Mamdani.

Speaker 42 He's a communist. I think it's very bad for New York.
I don't know that he's going to get in. It's inconceivable that he's, but he's a communist and he's a pure communist.
I think he admits it.

Speaker 36 And for all the noise he's making about New York City getting its first communist mayor, he seems to have forgotten they already had one.

Speaker 36 Five years ago, he took time out of a busy day to call in to an episode of Fox and Friends to call Bill de Blasio a communist.

Speaker 47 Oh, the mayor has no response. He doesn't know what he's doing.
He's a fool.

Speaker 47 He's a socialist, communist, maybe. He's a fool.

Speaker 36 And it's not just mayors of New York pledging their allegiance to communism in the president's imagination. It's everyone.

Speaker 36 I'm sure it wasn't the only C word he wanted to call her, but he called Kamala Harris a communist throughout the few months leading up to the 2024 election.

Speaker 48 She's a Marxist. She's a Marxist.
A lot of people say don't use the term Marxist because people don't understand. Okay, she's a communist.

Speaker 48 She's a communist.

Speaker 48 And our country is not ready for a communist. It will never be ready for a communist.

Speaker 36 And of course, everyone involved in his criminal prosecution was a communist.

Speaker 41 Every time the radical left Democrats, Marxists, communists, and fascists indict me, I consider it a great badge of honor because I am being indicted for you. I am being indicted for you.

Speaker 36 It's true.

Speaker 36 He couldn't quite make up his mind about Elizabeth Warren. At some 2020 campaign rallies, she was an avowed communist, a Marxist even.

Speaker 36 But other times, she's just borderline communist.

Speaker 48 And frankly, had Elizabeth Warren been loyal to her philosophy, which is radical left, socialism, perhaps communism, I don't know, perhaps. It's verging on communism, right?

Speaker 36 He warned voters in Georgia that John Ossif and Raphael Warnock were going to bring about the communist revolution.

Speaker 48 Very simply, you will decide whether your children will grow up in a a socialist country or whether they will grow up in a free country.

Speaker 48 And I will tell you this, socialist is just the beginning for these people. These people want to go further than socialism.

Speaker 48 They want to go into a communistic form of government, and I have no doubt about it.

Speaker 36 This 2020 appearance on The Rush Limbaugh Show is reminiscent of the sort of classic civil rights era anti-communism, right?

Speaker 36 Only radical Marxism could explain black people having an interest in racial equality. They must be getting riled up.

Speaker 49 The first time I ever heard of Black Lives Matter, I said that's such a terrible term because it's such a racist term. It's a term that shows division between blacks and whites and everybody else.

Speaker 49 And it's a very bad term for blacks. But they were very angry.
It's a Marxist organization.

Speaker 35 That's the key.

Speaker 47 It's pigs in a blanket, pigs in a blanket.

Speaker 36 And of course, Bernie Sanders is a communist and then some.

Speaker 44 And just this week, you called Bernie Sanders a maniac.

Speaker 42 And a communist.

Speaker 44 And a communist.

Speaker 36 Christy Noam, Stephen Miller, Andy Ogles, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Caroline Levitt, the libs of TikTok lady. The Magasphere can't stop talking about it.

Speaker 36 They're surrounded by communists.

Speaker 36 Trump was surprisingly candid about this at at a press conference last summer.

Speaker 48 All we have to do is define our opponent as being a communist or a socialist or somebody that's going to destroy our country.

Speaker 36 They're communists.

Speaker 36 They're the enemy.

Speaker 36 All we have to do is call our opponent a communist.

Speaker 36 It's a little cliche, I think. to remind you of the poem.

Speaker 36 You know the one.

Speaker 36 First they came for.

Speaker 36 But what do you think the first line is?

Speaker 36 Because this is the opening of Martin Niemeller's poem in the original German.

Speaker 50 Alst die Nazis die communist nerve wolf nabe ich geschwiegen,

Speaker 50 ichweier kan communist.

Speaker 36 That recording is from the website for the Martin Niemiller House, a museum in Berlin dedicated to preserving the memory of the role played by the confessing church in resisting Nazi Germany.

Speaker 36 The first line is not.

Speaker 36 First, they came for the socialists.

Speaker 36 That's probably the line you had in your head.

Speaker 36 Underneath the poem, on the museum's website, they note that the poem is by Martin E. Muller.

Speaker 36 And it says,

Speaker 36 widely used worldwide, often carelessly modified.

Speaker 36 Communisten

Speaker 36 means communists.

Speaker 36 First, they came for the communists.

Speaker 36 then the trade unionists, then the Social Democrats,

Speaker 36 then the Jews.

Speaker 36 But I don't think Americans can bear to admit that when someone starts imprisoning and deporting communists,

Speaker 36 it looks a little bit like a Nazi government.

Speaker 36 Weird Little Guys is a production of CoolZone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.

Speaker 36 The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at WeirdLittleGuyspodcast at gmail.com.

Speaker 36 I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal.
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.

Speaker 36 Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my Weird Little Guys.

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