The Long Red Scare: Inside the FBI’s Secret War on American Communism with Aaron Leonard

Aaron Leonard and Donald Parkinson sit down for a conversation on Leonard's recent book 'Menace of Our Time: The Long War Against American Communism'. Relating this history to current events, Leonard and Parkinson discuss the various ways that the U.S. government, and in particular the FBI, subverted civil liberties and indulged in state repression according to the ebbs and flows of geopolitics while never abandoning its agenda of surveillance and subversion of the Communist Movement. From the early days of Criminal Syndicalism laws and the Palmer Raids to the rise of the New Left and the marginalization of the Party, the long arc of a campaign of espionage that utilized legal and extra-legal tactics provides an important window into the nature of state repression against left-wing dissidents in a country that is supposedly a bastion of political liberty.