Podcasts about Whittaker Chambers

We Must Save the Books. That's Michael Kimmage's SOS message from Trumpian Washington in this issue of Liberties Quarterly. Kimmage, former director of the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center, describes the surreal experience of being hired in January 2025 only to see his institution shuttered by Trump's administration three months later. He reflects on the "American ruin" created as a consequence of abandonment of the Wilson Center's 30,000 book library. And Kimmage connects the rapid destruction of foreign policy institutions like USAID and the U.S. Institute of Peace to a broader assault on expertise and nonpartisan learning, warning that without such institutions, "an abyss opens" in American governance and international relations. Five Key Takeaways* Institutional Destruction was Swift and Unexplained - The Wilson Center, USAID (reduced from 10,000 to 15 employees), and U.S. Institute of Peace were shuttered within months with no clear rationale provided, creating a "nightmare-like" quality where decisions happened without accountability.* America's First Modern Ruin - Kimmage describes the abandoned Wilson Center library as unprecedented in American experience - a functioning institution in the heart of Washington D.C. suddenly left as a tomb-like ruin, unlike anything seen in a country never defeated on its own soil.* Books Were Saved, But Expertise Was Lost - While the 30,000-volume library was eventually rescued and distributed to universities, the real loss was the destruction of nonpartisan expertise and institutional knowledge that took decades to build.* Echoes of 1950s McCarthyism - The assault on expertise mirrors McCarthyism, with direct connections through Roy Cohn's mentorship of Trump, but differs in scale since it's driven by a president rather than a senator.* The Death of Learning in Government - The shutdowns represent a fundamental rejection of the idea that careful, nonpartisan study of international affairs is essential to effective policymaking, potentially creating an "abyss" in American foreign policy capacity.Michael Kimmage is Director of the Wilson Center's Kennan Institute. Prior to joining the Kennan Institute, Michael Kimmage was a professor of history at the Catholic University of America. From 2014 to 2017, he served on the Secretary's Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio. He has been a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and at the German Marshall Fund; and was on the advisory board of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. He publishes widely on international affairs and on U.S. policy toward Russia. His latest book, Collisions: The War in Ukraine and the Origins of the New Global Instability, was published by Oxford University Press in March 2024. He is also the author of The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy, published by Basic Books in 2020, and The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers and the Lessons of Anti-Communism, published by Harvard University Press in 2009.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting the daily KEEN ON show, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy interview series. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit andrewsullivan.substack.comSam is a biographer, historian, and journalist. He used to be the editor of the New York Times Book Review, a features writer for Vanity Fair, and a writer for Prospect magazine. He's currently a contributing writer for the Washington Post. His many books include The Death of Conservatism and Whittaker Chambers: A Biography, and his new one is Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America.It's a huge tome — almost 1,000 pages! — but fascinating, with new and startling revelations, and a breeze to read. It's crack to me, of course, and we went long — a Rogan-worthy three hours. But I loved it, and hope you do too. It's not just about Buckley; it's about now, and how Buckleyism is more similar to Trumpism than I initially understood. It's about American conservatism as a whole.For three clips of our convo — Buckley as a humane segregationist, his isolationism even after Pearl Harbor, and getting gay-baited by Gore Vidal — head to our YouTube page.Other topics: me dragging Sam to a drag show in Ptown; the elite upbringing of Buckley during the Depression; his bigoted but charitable dad who struck rich with oil; his Southern mom who birthed a dozen kids; why the polyglot Buckley didn't learn English until age 7; aspiring to be a priest or a pianist; a middle child craving the approval of dad; a poor student at first; his pranks and recklessness; being the big man on campus at Yale; leading the Yale Daily News; skewering liberal profs; his deep Catholicism; God and Man at Yale; Skull and Bones; his stint in the Army; Charles Lindbergh and America First; defending Joe McCarthy until the bitter end and beyond; launching National Review; Joan Didion; Birchers; Brown v. Board; Albert Jay Nock; Evelyn Waugh; Whittaker Chambers; Brent Bozell; Willmoore Kendall; James Burnham; Orwell; Hitchens; Russell Kirk; not liking Ike; underestimating Goldwater; Nixon and the Southern Strategy; Buckley's ties to Watergate; getting snubbed by Reagan; Julian Bond and John Lewis on Firing Line; the epic debate with James Baldwin; George Will; Michael Lind; David Brooks and David Frum; Rick Hertzberg; Buckley's wife a fag hag who raised money for AIDS; Roy Cohn; Bill Rusher; Scott Bessent; how Buckley was a forerunner for Trump; and much more. It's a Rogan-length pod.Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson on the Biden cover-up, Walter Isaacson on Ben Franklin, Robert Merry on President McKinley, Tara Zahra on the last revolt against globalization after WWI, N.S. Lyons on the Trump era, Arthur C. Brooks on the science of happiness, and Paul Elie on crypto-religion in ‘80s pop culture. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Brian talks about Aaron Sorkin, books, and Leonardo da Vinci for several minutes before remembering they're trying to do a comedy podcast, then immediately blasts Ayn Rand's shovel face. (Here's a link to the Whittaker Chambers review of Atlas Shrugged Brian mentions.) Also: “Puttin' on the Ritz”;”Rock Lobster”; all of a sudden, Jeff wants to shit at work; prostate exams; Brian tells the coconut joke AGAIN; old man balls; there's a video of a girl sucking chunky peanut butter through a straw; being middle aged is brilliant; John Cena's heel run; Adolf Hitler's heel run; an Australian woman got caught trying to sell human toes; pretty soon, you'll be able to finance your DoorDash order; the Daffy Duck and Porky Pig movie; check local listings, but McDonald's wants $3.40 for a large fries; and finally, farting at work.

An atheist, a radical for capitalism, a caricature of a greedy libertarian, a best-selling novelist, a difficult partner and passionate lover, and the self-proclaimed greatest philosopher since Aristotle: Ayn Rand was many things, and we talk about almost all of them in this epic episode. To do so, we called upon historian Jennifer Burns, whose intellectual biography, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right , is enormously helpful in trying to understand an idiosyncratic writer who, both then and now, fits ambiguously into the "fusionist" post-war conservative movement. Rand remains a controversial figure whose ideas permeate our culture and continue to inspire some of the most consequential (and least appealing) political figures in the United States. To understand Rand and her influence, we examine her family's experiences during and after the Russian Revolution, her journey to the U.S. and early success in Hollywood, the arduous path she trod to become a writer, Rand's involvement in anti-New Deal politics in the 1930s and 40s, her ideas, philosophy, and scandalous personal life, and much more.Sources:Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead  (1943)— Atlas Shrugged (1957)— We the Living (1936)Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (2009)— Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative (2023)Whittaker Chambers, "Big Sister Is Watching You," National Review, Dec 28, 1957Murray Rothbard, "The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult," (1972)Mary Gaitskill, Two Girls, Fat and Thin (1991)Lisa Duggan, Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed, (2019)— "Ayn Rand and the Cruel Heart of Neoliberalism," Dissent, May 20, 2019.Adam Curtis, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, (2011)Listen again:"Milton Friedman and the Making of Our Times," Dec 3, 2023...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to all of our premium episodes!

Seventy-five years ago, Whittaker Chambers accused highly respected U.S. government official Alger Hiss of being a Communist. Hiss denied the accusation. Who was telling the truth? In his latest podcast, Ray Notgrass examines the controversy, the court trial that resulted, and the impact that the controversy had on American politics.Homeschool curriculum and resources for all ages: https://notgrass.com/Supplemental videos, field trips, and other resources: https://homeschoolhistory.com/Encouragement for homeschool moms: https://charlenenotgrass.com/

Atlas Shrugged seems to be everywhere today. Randian villains are in the news. Rand remains influential on the right, from the Reagan era to the modern libertarian movement. Perhaps most significantly, entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen who are moving into government with DOGE, have been influenced by Rand, and, fascinatingly, Andreessen only read the novel four years ago. Hollis Robbins (@Anecdotal) and I talked about how Atlas Shrugged is in conversation with the great novels of the past, Rand's greats skills of plotting, drama, and character, and what makes Atlas Shrugged a serious novel, not just a vehicle for ideology. Love it or loathe it, Atlas Shrugged is having a moment. Everyone brings a preconception of Ayn Rand, but she has been opposed by the right and the left ever since she first published. Other than Jennifer Burns' biography, academic study has largely declined to notice Rand. But Rand deserves our serious attention, both as a novelist, and as an influence on the modern world. Here are a couple of excerpts.We talk a lot these days about, “how can I be my best self?” That's what Rand is saying. She's saying, actually, it's not about earning money, it's not about being rich. It is about the perfection of the moral life. It's about the pursuit of excellence. It's about the cultivation of virtue. These are the important things. This is what Dagny is doing. When all the entrepreneurs at the end, they're in the happy valley, actually, between them, they have not that much money, right?Also this.What would Ayn Rand think about the influencer economy? Oh, she'd despise it. She would despise it… all these little girls wanting to grow up to be influencers, they're caught in some algorithm, which is awful. Why would you want to spend your life influencing others? Go create something. It's a hard medicine.And.Her aesthetic is very classical, draped. She doesn't wear flowery patterns. She wears draped, clearly close-fitting gowns and gray tailored suits and a minimum of jewelry, though she does have this bracelet chain made of Rearden metal. You don't know when she possibly has time to go shopping, but she's perfectly dressed all the time in the fashion that we would understand as feminist. She wears trousers, she wears suits, but when she goes out, this black velvet cape. I think it's important to see her as that, even though nobody talks about that in terms of this novel, what a heroine she is. I know that when I was reading her as a teenage girl, that's it.TranscriptHenry: Today, I am talking with Hollis Robbins, former dean of the humanities at Utah University and special advisor on the humanities and AI. We are talking about Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Hollis, hello.Hollis Robbins: Hello. I'm really glad to have this conversation with you. We've known each other for some years and follow each other's work. I was trained as a scholar of 19th-century American, Victorian, and African-American literature, mostly novels, and love having conversations with you about big, deep novels. When I suggested that we read this book, I was hoping you would be enthusiastic about it, so I'm really happy to be having this conversation. It's hard to know who's interviewing you or what conversation this is, but for you coming at this middle-aged. Not quite middle-aged, what are you?Henry: I'm middle enough. No. This is not going to be an interview as such. We are going to have a conversation about Atlas Shrugged, and we're going to, as you say, talk about it as a novel. It always gets talked about as an ideology. We are very interested in it as a novel and as two people who love the great novels of the 19th century. I've been excited to do this as well. I think that's why it's going to be good. Why don't we start with, why are we doing this?Hollis: I wanted to gesture to that. You are one of the leading public voices on the importance of reading literature and the importance of reading novels particularly, though I saw today, Matt Yglesias had a blog post about Middlemarch, which I think he just recently read. I can credit you with that, or us, or those of us who are telling people read the big novels.My life trajectory was that I read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead before I read Dickens, before I read Jane Austen, before I read Harriet Beecher Stowe or Melville or the Brontës. For me, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead were foundational novels as novels. I wondered what it would be like to talk to somebody whose experience was flipped.Henry: Right, I'm 38 and I'd never read this book. I was coming at it partly having read all those other books, but partly for my whole life, people have said, "Oh, that's really a bad book. That's so badly written. That book is no good." The number one thing I can say to people is this book is fun.Hollis: It's really fun. I was going to say usually what I forget to do in talking about books is give the summary. I'm going to hold up my copy, which is my dog-eared copy from high school, which is hilarious. It's got the tiniest print, which I couldn't possibly read now. No underlining, which is interesting. I read this book before I understood that you were supposed to underline when you liked passages in the book.It was interesting to me. I'd probably read it five or six times in my youth and didn't underline anything. The story is--- You can help me fill in the blanks. For readers who haven't read it, there's this young woman, Dagny Taggart, who's the heiress of the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad fortune. She's a woman. This takes place in about, I think, the '40s, '50s. Her older brother, Jim Taggart, is CEO. She's COO, so she's the operations person. It is in some ways the story of her-- It's not quite a bildungsroman. This is the way I tell the story. It's the story of her coming to the realization of how the world works. There's many ways to come at this story. She has multiple boyfriends, which is excellent. Her first boyfriend, his name is Francisco d'Anconia. He's the head of d'Anconia Copper. He too is an heir of this longstanding copper fortune. Her second is a metals magnate, Hank Rearden, who invents this great metal, Rearden metal.Really, it's also the story of the decline of America, and the ways that, in this Randian universe, these villainous group of people who run the country are always taking and extracting from producers. As she's creating and building this great railroad and doing wonderful things and using Rearden metal to do it, something is pulling all the producers out of society, and she's like, "What is going on?"It turns out there's this person, John Galt, who is saying, "I don't like the way the country is run. I don't like this extractive philosophy. I am going to take all the producers and lure them voluntarily to a--" It's a hero's lair. It's not like a James Bond villain lair. It's a hero lair in Colorado called Galt's Gulch. He is John Galt. It ends up being a battle between who is right in a wrong world. Is it the ethical person, Dagny Taggart, who continues to strive and try to be a producer and hold on to her ethics in this corrupt world, or is it somebody saying, "To hell with this. I am going on strike. You guys come with me and let the world collapse." How's that for summary?Henry: No, I think that's great. I couldn't have done a better job. One thing that we can say is that the role of reason, of being a rational person, of making reason the sole arbiter of how you make choices, be they practical, ethical, financial, whatever, that's at the heart of the book, right?Hollis: That's the philosophy. We could go there in a second. I think the plot of the book is that she demonstrates this.Henry: What she has to learn, like what is the big lesson for Dagny, is at the beginning, she hasn't fully understood that the good guys use reason and the bad guys do not, as it were.Hollis: Right. I think that's right. I like thinking about this as a bildungsroman. You said that the book is fun. Her part of the book is fun, but not really fun. The fun part of the book, and you can tell me because every time you kept texting me, "Oh my God, Jim Taggart. Oh my God, Jim Taggart. Oh my God, Jim Taggart."--Henry: These guys are so awful. [laughs]Hollis: They're so awful. The fun parts of the book, the Rand villains are the government entities and the cabals of business leaders who she calls looters and second-handers who run the country and all they do is extract value. Marc Andreessen was on a podcast recently and was all about these Rand villains and these looters. I think, again, to get back to why are we doing this and why are we doing this now, Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged is in the air with the second Trump administration.Henry: Yes. In a way, we're doing this because the question is, is this the novel of the future? Right? What we're seeing is it's very influential on the right. Rand's ideas have long been a libertarian inspiration. Elon Musk's read her. You mentioned Andreessen, Peter Thiel, all these people. It goes back to the Reagan days. People in the Republican Party have been quoting Ayn Rand. Then more broadly, we see all these worries about social collapse today. What happens in the plot of Atlas Shrugged is that society does slowly collapse.Dagny has to realize it's because of these people who are not using their reason and they're nationalizing things and taking resource away from proficient entrepreneurs and stuff. It's all about infrastructure, energy, people doing exploitation in the name of the common good, ineffective political leaders, people covering up lies and misdemeanors, people being accepting of what is obviously criminal behavior because it's in the cause of the greater good. We have free speech, all these topics, energy production. We're seeing this in the headlines. When I was reading this book, I was like, "Oh my God, how did she know?"Hollis: How did she know?Henry: How did she know.Hollis: I think the bildungsroman aspect of this as a novel. It's hard to read it as a novel. I think it's hard. By the way, I have to really I applaud you for not, until you got almost to the end of the book, texting me about this person or that person, or how it's political. I admire you for looking at the book and coming to the book as an expert in novels.What she comes to terms with, and it's a real slowly-- It's not even scales falling from her eyes. She doesn't sit and say, "Oh my God, the world is corrupt." She just is like, "That person's corrupt. I'm not going to deal with them. That person's corrupt. I'm not going to deal with them." She just keeps going, but she doesn't ever accept with a fatalism that she's living in this world where every single person who's in charge is going to let her down.Henry: It's also interesting to me that she doesn't complain.Hollis: No.Henry: Now, that reminded me of I wrote about Margaret Thatcher in my book. She was another big one for however hard it was, however difficult it was, why would you complain? Let's just go to work. A lot of people found her difficult for that reason. When I was reading this, I was like, "Ayn Rand clearly has the same idea. You can nationalize every last inch of the economy. I'm going to get up and go to work and try and beat you. I'm not going to sit around and complain." It's a very stern attitude in a way. She's very strict with herself. I found the book to be-- I know Rand is very atheist, but a very Protestant book.Hollis: Yes, it really is.Henry: Intensely Protestant, yes.Hollis: That's a nice way to think about it. A certain kind of Protestant, a Weberian Protestant.Henry: Sure.Hollis: Not a Southern Baptist Protestant who believes in the absence of reason. I was thinking I was teaching in Mississippi years ago. I was teaching a course on Wordsworth and had to do a unit on Voltaire because you can't really understand Wordsworth unless you understand Voltaire. There was a woman in my class. She was a version of Presbyterian who doesn't believe in reason, believes that in the fall, man lost their reason.Therefore, she asked if she could be excused from class because I was talking about Voltaire and the importance of reason. She said, "This is against my religion. If you believe that man has reason, you are actually going about it wrong, so may I be excused?" Which in all the years I've had people ask for excuses to miss class, that was a memorable one.Henry: That's unique. [laughs]Hollis: It's interesting because, again, I should get back to the novel, the opposition from Rand is as strong on the religious right as it is on the left. In fact, very strong. When Atlas Shrugged came out, William F. Buckley famously had Whittaker Chambers write the review. He hated her. He despised her. He despised the fact that she put reason first.Henry: Yes. I think that's worth emphasizing that some people listening will think, "I'm Rand. These nasty ideas, she's on the right." She's been ideologically described in that way so many times. Deirdre McCloskey in the Literary Review has just in the most recent edition written an absolutely scathing article about Rand. That's libertarian opposition to Rand.McCloskey is saying Hayek is the real thing here and Rand would have hated everything that Hayek did. She got everything wrong. I think the opposition to her, as you say, it's on both sides. One thing that's interesting about this novel is that because she created her own philosophy, which people will have different views on how well that went, but there isn't anyone else like this. All the other people like this are her followers.Hollis: Exactly.Henry: She's outside of the other systems of thought in a way.Hollis: We should talk about Rand. I'm going to quote a little bit from this book on feminist interpretation of Ayn Rand. Let's talk a little bit, if we can, about Dagny as the heroine of a novel, or a hero, because one of the really interesting things about reading Rand at this moment is that she's got one pronoun, he, him, man. She is in this era where man means man and women. That there isn't men and women, he and she, and now it's he, she, and them. She is like, "There's one pronoun." Even she talks about the rights of man or man believes. She means everybody, but she only means man too. It's interesting.I was very much part of the first pronoun wars in the 1980s when women scholars were like, "He and she." Now we're thrown out the window with that binary. Again, we don't need to talk about pronouns, but it's really important to understanding Rand and reading this novel, how much she embraces men and the male pronoun, even while she is using it both ways, and even while her story is led by this woman. She's beautiful. She's beautiful in a very specific way. She's tall, she's slender, she's got great cheekbones, she's got great shoulders, she's got long legs.Her aesthetic is very classical, draped. She doesn't wear flowery patterns. She wears draped, clearly close-fitting gowns and gray tailored suits and a minimum of jewelry, though she does have this bracelet chain made of Rearden metal. You don't know when she possibly has time to go shopping, but she's perfectly dressed all the time in the fashion that we would understand as feminist. She wears trousers, she wears suits, but when she goes out, this black velvet cape. I think it's important to see her as that, even though nobody talks about that in terms of this novel, what a heroine she is. I know that when I was reading her as a teenage girl, that's it.Henry: I want to be Dagny.Hollis: I want to be Dagny. I want to have capes, right?Henry: There's a very important scene, it's not too much of a plot spoiler, where Hank Rearden has invented this new metal. It's very exciting because it's much more efficient and it's much stronger and you can build new bridges for the trains and everything. He makes a bracelet of his new metal. It's a new steel alloy, I think, and gives it to his wife. His wife basically doesn't care.She's not really interested in what it takes to earn the money, she just wants to have the money. You get the strong impression throughout the book that some of the people that Rand is most scathingly disapproving of are wives who don't work. None of those people come out well. When Dagny goes to a party at the Rearden house and she is romantically involved with Hank Rearden, she sees the bracelet.Hollis: She isn't then, right? Isn't she not then?Henry: No, but they have feelings for each otherHollis: Right. Reasonable feelings for each other.Henry: That's right, reasonable feelings, but they're not currently acting on those feelings. She sees the bracelet and she exchanges her, I think, diamonds-Hollis: Diamond bracelet.Henry: -for the Rearden metal bracelet with the wife. It's this wonderful moment where these two opposite ideals of womanhood that Rand is presenting. It's a great moment of heroism for Dagny because she is saying, "Who cares about glittering diamonds when you have a new steel alloy that can make this incredible bridge?" It sounds crazy, but this is 1957. Dagny is very much what you might call one of the new women.Hollis: Right.Henry: I think in some ways, Rand-- I don't like the phrase she's ahead of her time. I've read a lot of 1950s fiction. This is not the typical woman.Hollis: No, this is not Cheever. This is not a bored suburban housewife at a time when the way the '50s are taught, certainly in America, it's like women could work during the war, then they were suburban housewives, there was bored, there were key parties and all sorts of Cheever sorts of things. This is not that. I read this first. I was only 15 years after it was published, I think, in the '60s, early '70s reading it.This, to me, seemed perfectly normal and everything else seemed regressive and strange and whiny. There's a lot to be said for reading this novel first. I think if we can talk a little bit about these set pieces because I think for me reading it as a novel and hearing you talk about it as a novel, that novels, whether we're thinking about-- I want to see if you want to compare her to Dorothea or just to any other Victorian women novel that you can think of. That's the closest, right? Is there anybody that's closest to Dorothea from Middlemarch? Is that there are these set pieces. People think that Rand-- the idea is that she's not a great writer. She is a great writer. She started in Hollywood. Her first book, The Fountainhead, was made into a movie. She understands plotting and keeping the reader's attention. We go forward, we go backwards. There's her relationship with Francisco d'Anconia that we see her now, years after, then we have flashbacks to growing up and how they became lovers.There are big meeting set pieces where everybody's in the room, and we have all the backstories of the people in the room, what is going to happen. There are these big party scenes, as you say. For example, this big, glorious, glamorous party at the Rearden house, Francisco is there. Francisco and Hank Rearden get in a conversation, and she's like, "I want to go see what my old boyfriend is talking to the guy I like about."There are these moments where you're not supposed to come at the book that way in this serious philosophical way. Then later on when there's this wonderful scene where Francisco comes to see Dagny. This is much later. Hank and Dagny are lovers, so he has a key to her apartment. He walks in and everybody sees immediately what's going on. It's as good as any other farce moment of somebody hiding behind a curtain, right?Henry: Yes.Hollis: Everything is revealed all at once. She's very good at scenes like that.Henry: Yes, very good. She's very good at high drama. One of the phrases that kept coming back to me was that this book is a melodrama of ideas.Hollis: Yes.Henry: Right? It's not a novel of ideas as such, it's a melodrama of ideas. I think one thing that people who think she's a bad writer will say is it's melodrama, the characters are flat, the prose is not lyrical, all these different things. Whereas when I read it, I was like, "She's so good at melodrama." I feel like, in some ways, it does not feel like a 1950s novel because there's so much excitement about technology, so much feminism, just so many things that I do not associate--Maybe I'm being too English, but I don't read John Cheever, for example, and think, "Oh, he loves the train." Whereas this book is very, very exciting as a story about inventing a new kind of train that goes really fast," which sounds silly, but that's a really Dickensian theme, that's in Middlemarch. Actually, that's what Matt Yglesias was talking about in his excellent piece today. What does feel very 1950s is you've got the Hollywood influence. The dialogue, I think, is not always great, but it is often great.I often would read pages and think, "This would actually be really good in, not an A++ movie, but in a decent crime movie or something. This would be quite good dialogue." There's a comic book aesthetic to it in the way that the scenes play out. Just a lot of these '50s aesthetics actually are present in the book. I'm going to read one paragraph. It's from part one. I think we should read out loud a few bits to give people a sense.Hollis: Yes.Henry: This is when Dagny has built a new train line using grid and metal to make the bridge so that it can go over a valley. I think that's right. The train can do 100 miles an hour. It's this very, very exciting new development. It means that energy can be supplied to factories, and so it's a huge, big deal. This is when she's on the train going at 100 miles an hour and she just can't believe it's happening."Things streaked past a water tank, a tree, a shanty, a grain silo. They had a windshield wiper motion. They were rising, describing a curve, and dropping back. The telegraph wires ran a race with the train, rising and falling from pole to pole, in an even rhythm like the cardiograph record of a steady heartbeat written across the sky. She looked ahead at the haze that melted rail and distance, a haze that could rip apart at any moment to some shape of disaster.""She wondered why she felt safer than she had ever felt in a car behind the engine. Safer here where it seemed as if should an obstacle rise, her breast and the glass shield would be the first to smash against it. She smiled, grasping the answer. It was the security of being first with full sight and full knowledge of one's own course, not the blind sense of being pulled into the unknown by some unknown power ahead."That's not MFA prose or whatever, but it turns the pages. I think she's very good at relating we're on the train and it's going very fast to how Dagny is thinking through the philosophical conundrum that is basically going to drive the whole plot forwards. I was reminded again and again of what Virginia Woolf said about Walter Scott, where she compared Scott to Robert Louis Stevenson. She said that Stevenson had beautiful sentences and dapper little adjectives. It was all jeweled and carefully done. You could marvel over each sentence.She said, "Whereas Scott, it's just page after page and no sentence is beautiful," but she says, "He writes at the level of the page. He's not like Stevenson. He's not writing at the level of the sentence. You have to step into the world." You can say, 'Oh, that wasn't a very good sentence,' but my goodness, the pages keep turning and you're there in the world, right?Hollis: Exactly.Henry: I think she made a really important point there and we just undervalue that so much when we say, oh, so-and-so is not a good writer. What we mean is they're not a Robert Louis Stevenson, they're a Walter Scott. It's like, sure, but Walter Scott was great at what he did. Ayn Rand is in the Walter Scott inheritance in the sense that it's a romance, it's not strictly realistic novel. You have to step into the world. You can't spend your whole time going, "Was that a great sentence? Do I really agree with what she just--" It's like, no, you have to go into this utopian sci-fi universe and you have to keep turning the pages. You get caught up and you go, "Wow, this is this is working for me."Hollis: Let me push back on that-Henry: Yes, good.Hollis: -because I think that was a beautiful passage, one of my favorite passages in this book, which is hard to say because it's a really, really big book. It's a memorable passage because here she is in a place at this moment. She is questioning herself. Isn't she questioning why? Why do I feel safe? Then it strikes her. In this moment, all interior while all this stuff is happening. This whole Rearden metal train bridge set piece is one of the highlights of at least the first half of the book. You come away, even if we've had our entire life up to her, understanding her as a philosophical this woman. How is that different from Dorothea or from Elizabeth Bennet? Yes, Elizabeth Bennet, right?Henry: Oh, no, I agree. My point was purely about prose style, which was to say if you say, "Oh, she writes like a Walter Scott, not like a Robert Louis Stevenson," you're going to deny yourself seeing what you've just said, which is that actually, yes, she has the ability to write philosophical characters.Hollis: When I first read Pride and Prejudice, I read it through the lens of Rand. Now, clearly, these heroines had fewer choices. Dorothea marries Casaubon, I don't know how you pronounce it, because she thinks he's a Randian expert, somebody who's got this grand idea. She's like, "Whoa, I want to be part of this endeavor, the key to all mythologies." Then she's so let down. In the Randian sense, you can see why she would have wanted him.Henry: That's right. I think George Eliot would have strongly disagreed with Rand philosophically. The heroines, as you say, what they're doing in the novel is having to realize that there are social conventions I have to understand and there are things I have to learn how to do, but actually, the key to working all that out is more at the moral philosophical level. This is what happens to Dagny. I think it's on the next page from what I just read. There's another passage where it says that she's in the train and she's enjoying. It's working and she's thrilled that her train is working. She was trying not to think, but she couldn't help herself.She said, "Who made the train. Is it the brute force of muscle? Who can make all the dials and the levers? How is it possible that this thing has even been put together?" Then she starts thinking to herself, "We've got a government who's saying it's wrong to do this, you're taking resources, you're not doing it for the common good." She says, "How can they regard this as evil? How can they believe that this is ignoble to have created this incredible thing?"She says she wants to be able to toss the subject out of the window and let it get shattered somewhere along the track. She wants the thoughts to go past like the telegraph poles, but obviously, she can't. She has this moment of realization that this can't be wrong. This type of human accomplishment can't be against the common good. It can't be considered to be ignoble. I think that is like the Victorian heroines.To me, it was more like Fanny Price, which is that someone turns up into a relatively closed system of ideas and keeps their own counsel for a long time, and has to admit sometimes when they haven't got it right or whatever. Basically, in the end, they are vindicated on fairly straightforward grounds. Dagny comes to realize that, "I was right. I was using my reason. I was working hard. I was being productive. Yes, I was right about that." Fanny, it's more like a Christian insight into good behavior, but I felt the pattern was the same.Hollis: Sure. I'll also bring up Jane Eyre here, right?Henry: Yes.Hollis: Jane Eyre, her relationship, there's a lot to be said of both Mr. Darcy and Mr. Rochester with Hank Rearden because Hank Rearden has to come to his sense. He's married. He doesn't like his wife. He doesn't like this whole system that he's in. He wants to be with a woman that's a meeting of the mind, but he's got all this social convention he has to deal with. Rochester has to struggle, and of course, Bertha Mason has to die in that book. He ends up leaving his wife, but too late. If we're going to look at this novel as a novel, we can see that there are these moments that I think have some resonance. I know you don't seem to want to go to the Mr. Darcy part of it.Henry: No. I had also thought about Jane Eyre. My thought was that, obviously, other than being secular because Jane Eyre is very Christian, the difference is that Hank Rearden and Dagny basically agree that we can't conduct our relationship in a way that would be morally compromising to her. They go through this very difficult process of reasoning like, "How can we do this in a good way?"They're a little bit self-sacrificing about it because they don't want to upset the moral balance. Whereas Mr. Rochester, at least for the first part of the book, has an attitude that's more like, "Yes, but she's in the attic. Why does it matter if we get married?" He doesn't really see the problem of morally compromising Jane, and so Jane has to run away.Hollis: Right.Henry: One of the interesting things about Rand, what is different from like Austen and the Brontës and whatever, is that Dagny and Hank are not in opposition before they get together. They have actually this unusual thing in romance and literature, which is that they have a meeting of minds. What gets in the way is that the way their minds agree is contra mundum and the world has made this problem for them.Hollis: I think in a way, that's the central relationship in--Henry: Yes. That was how I read it, yes.Hollis: Yes. The fact as we think about what the complications are in reading this novel as a novel is that here is this great central romance and they've got obstacles. She's got an old boyfriend, he's married. They've got all these things that are classic obstacles to a love story. Rand understands that enough to build it, that that will keep a lot of readers' interest, but then it's like, "That's actually not the point of my book," which is how the second half or the last third of the novel just gets really wiggy." Again, spoiler alert, but Hank is blackmailed to be, as the society is collapsing, as things are collapsing--Henry: We should say that the government has taken over in a nationalizing program by this point.Hollis: Right, because as John Galt is pulling all the thought leaders and the industrialists and all the movers of the world into his lair, things are getting harder and harder and harder, things are getting nationalized. Some of these big meetings in Washington where these horrible people are deciding how to redistribute wealth, again, which is part of the reason somebody like Congressman Paul Ryan would give out copies of Atlas Shrugged to all of his staffers. He's like, "You've got to read this book because we can't go to Washington and be like this. The Trumpian idea is we've got to get rid of people who are covering up and not doing the right thing."They've blackmailed Hank Rearden into giving up Rearden Metal by saying, "We know you've been sleeping with Dagny Taggart." It's a very dramatic point. How is this going to go down?Henry: Right. I think that's interesting. What I loved about the way she handled that romance was that romance is clearly part of what she sees as important to a flourishing life. She has to constantly yoke it to this idea that reason is everything, so human passion has to be conducted on the basis that it's logically reasonable, but that it therefore becomes self-sacrificing. There is something really sad and a little bit tragic about Hank being blackmailed like that, right?Hollis: Yes. I have to say their first road trip together, it's like, "Let's just get out of here and go have a road trip and stay in hotels and have sex and it'll be awesome." That their road trip is like, "Let's go also see some abandoned factories and see what treasures we might find there." To turn this love road trip into also the plot twist that gets them closer to John Galt is a magnificent piece of plot.Henry: Yes. I loved that. I know you want to talk about the big John Galt speech later, but I'm going to quote one line because this all relates to what I think is one of the most central lines of the book. "The damned and the guiltiest among you are the men who had the capacity to know yet chose to blank out reality." A lot of the time, like in Brontë or whatever, there are characters like Rochester's like that. The center of their romance is that they will never do that to each other because that's what they believe philosophically, ethically. It's how they conduct themselves at business. It's how they expect other people to conduct themselves. They will never sacrifice that for each other.That for them is a really high form of love and it's what enables huge mutual respect. Again, it's one of those things I'm amazed-- I used to work in Westminster. I knew I was a bit of a libertarian. I knew lots of Rand adjacent or just very, very Randian people. I thought they were all insane, but that's because no one would ever say this. No one would ever say she took an idea like that and turned it into a huge romance across hundreds of pages. Who else has done that in the novel? I think that's great.Hollis: It really is hard. It really is a hard book. The thing that people say about the book, as you say, and the reason you hadn't read it up until now, is it's like, "Oh, yes, I toyed with Rand as a teenager and then I put that aside." I put away my childish things, right? That's what everybody says on the left, on the right. You have to think about it's actually really hard. My theory would be that people put it away because it's really, really hard, what she tried is hard. Whether she succeeded or not is also hard. As we were just, before we jumped on, talking about Rand's appearance on Johnny Carson, a full half hour segment of him taking her very seriously, this is a woman who clearly succeeded. I recently read Jennifer Burn's biography of her, which is great. Shout out to Jennifer.What I came away with is this is a woman who made her living as a writer, which is hard to do. That is a hard thing to do, is to make your living as a writer, as a woman in the time difference between 1942, The Fountainhead, which was huge, and 57, Atlas Shrugged. She was blogging, she had newsletters, she had a media operation that's really, really impressive. This whole package doesn't really get looked at, she as a novelist. Again, let me also say it was later on when I came to Harriet Beecher Stowe, who is another extraordinary woman novelist in America who wrote this groundbreaking book, which is filled--I particularly want to shout out to George Harris, the slave inventor who carried himself like a Rand hero as a minor character and escapes. His wife is Eliza, who famously runs across the ice flows in a brave Randian heroine escape to freedom where nobody's going to tell them what to do. These women who changed literature in many ways who have a really vexed relationship or a vexed place in academia. Certainly Stowe is studied.Some 20 years ago, I was at an event with the great Elaine Showalter, who was coming out with an anthology of American women writers. I was in the audience and I raised my hand, I said, "Where's Ayn Rand?" She was like, "Ha, ha, ha." Of course, what a question is that? There is no good reason that Ayn Rand should not be studied in academia. There is no good reason. These are influential novels that actually, as we've talked about here, can be talked about in the context of other novels.Henry: I think one relevant comparison is let's say you study English 19th-century literature on a course, a state-of-the-nation novel or the novel of ideas would be included as routine, I think very few people would say, "Oh, those novels are aesthetically excellent. We read them because they're beautifully written, and they're as fun as Dickens." No one's saying that. Some of them are good, some of them are not good. They're important because of what they are and the barrier to saying why Rand is important for what she is because, I think, people believe her ideas are evil, basically.One central idea is she thinks selfishness is good, but I think we've slightly dealt with the fact that Dagny and Hank actually aren't selfish some of the time, and that they are forced by their ethical system into not being selfish. The other thing that people say is that it's all free-market billionaire stuff, basically. I'm going to read out a passage from-- It's a speech by Francisco in the second part. It's a long speech, so I'm not going to read all eight pages. I'm going to read this speech because I think this theme that I'm about to read out, it's a motif, it's again and again and again.Hollis: Is this where he's speaking to Hank or to Dagny?Henry: I think when he's speaking to Dagny and he says this."Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he want. Money will not give him a code of values if he has evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose if he has evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent."The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him with his money replacing his judgment ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered, that no man may be smaller than his money."Hollis: That's a good--Henry: Right? It's a great paragraph. I feel like she says that in dozens of ways throughout the book, and she wants you to be very clear when you leave that this book is not a creed in the name of just make money and have free market capitalism so you can be rich. That paragraph and so many others, it's almost biblical in the way she writes it. She's really hammering the rhythms, and the tones, and the parallels. She's also, I think, trying to appropriate some of the way the Bible talks about money and turn it into her own secular pseudo-Aristotelian idea, right?Hollis: Yes.Henry: We talk a lot these days about, how can I be my best self? That's what Rand is saying. She's saying, actually, it's not about earning money, it's not about being rich. It is about the perfection of the moral life. It's about the pursuit of excellence. It's about the cultivation of virtue. These are the important things. This is what Dagny is doing. When all the entrepreneurs at the end, they're in the happy valley, actually, between them, they have not that much money, right?Hollis: Right.Henry: The book does not end in a rich utopia, it's important to say.Hollis: It's interesting. A couple of things. I want to get this back since we're still in the novel. Let me say when we get to Galt's great speech, which is bizarre. He says a similar thing that I'll bring in now. He says, "The mother who buys milk for her baby instead of a hat is not sacrificing because her values are feeding the baby. The woman who sacrifices the hat to feed her baby, but really wants the hat and is only feeding the baby out of duty is sacrificing." That's bad. She's saying get your values in order. Understand what it is you want and do that thing, but don't do it because somebody says you have to. She says this over and over in many ways, or the book says this.Henry: We should say, that example of the mother is incidental. The point she's always making is you must think this through for yourself, you must not do it because you've been told to do it.Hollis: Right, exactly. To get back to the love story aspects of the book because they don't sit and say they love each other, even all the great romances. It's not like, "I love you. I love you." It's straight to sex or looks and meetings of the minds. It's interesting. We should deal with the fact that from The Fountainhead and a little bit in this book, the sex is a little rapey. It's a difficult thing to talk about. It's certainly one of the reasons that feminists, women writers don't approve of her. In the book, it's consensual. Whatever one wants to think about the ways that people have sex, it is consensual in the book. Also in The Fountainhead.I'm sure I'll get hate mail for even saying that, but in her universe, that's where it is. What's interesting, Francisco as a character is so interesting. He's conflicted, he's charming, he's her first lover. He's utterly good in every way. He ends up without her. Hank is good. Hank goes through his struggles and learning curve about women prioritizing. If you don't like your wife, don't be married to your wife. It's like he goes through his own what are my values and how do I live them.I know you think that this is bizarre, but there's a lot of writing about the relationship of Hank and Francisco because they find themselves in the same room a lot. They happen to have both been Dagny's lovers or ex-lovers, and they really, really like each other. There's a way that that bonding-- Homosexuality does not exist in her novels, whatever, but that's a relationship of two people that really are hot for one another. There is a lot of writing. There are queer readings of Rand that make a lot of that relationship.Again, this isn't my particular lens of criticism, but I do see that the energy, which is why I asked you which speech you were reading because some of Francisco's best speeches are for Hank because he's trying to woo Hank to happy valley. Toward the end when they're all hanging out together in Galt's Gulch, there's clearly a relationship there.Henry: Oh, yes. No, once you pointed out to me, I was like, "That makes sense of so many passages." That's clearly there. What I don't understand is why she did that. I feel like, and this is quite an accomplishment because it's a big novel with a lot of moving parts, everything else is resolved both in terms of the plot, but also in terms of how it fits her philosophical idea. That, I think, is pretty much the only thing where you're left wondering, "Why was that in there? She hasn't made a point about it. They haven't done anything about it." This I don't understand. That's my query.Hollis: Getting ready to have this conversation, I spent a lot of time on some Reddit threads. I ran Atlas Shrugged Reddit threads where there's some fantastic conversations.Henry: Yes, there is.Hollis: One of them is about, how come Francisco didn't end up with anybody? That's just too bad. He's such a great character and he ends up alone. I would say he doesn't end up alone, he ends up with his boyfriend Hank, whatever that looks like. Two guys that believe in the same things, they can have whatever life they want. Go on.Henry: Are you saying that now that they're in the valley, they will be more free to pursue that relationship?Hollis: There's a lot of things that she has said about men's and women's bodies. She said in other places, "I don't think there'll ever be a woman president because why would a woman want to be president? What a woman really wants is a great man, and we can't have a president who's looking for a great man. She has to be a president." She's got a lot of lunacy about women. Whatever. I don't understand. Someplace I've read that she understands male homosexuality, but not female homosexuality. Again, I am not a Rand scholar. Having read and seen some of that in the ether, I see it in the book, and I can see how her novel would invite that analysis.I do want to say, let's spend a few seconds on some of the minor characters. There are some really wonderful minor characters. One of them is Cherryl Taggart, this shop girl that evil Jim Taggart meets one night in a rainstorm, and she's like, "Oh, you're so awesome," and they get married. It's like he's got all this praise for marrying the shop girl. It's a funny Eliza Doolittle situation because she is brought into this very wealthy society, which we have been told and we have been shown is corrupt, is evil, everybody's lying all the time, it's pretentious, Dagny hates it.Here's the Cherryl Taggart who's brought into this. In the beginning, she hates Dagny because she's told by everybody, "Hate Dagny, she's horrible." Then she comes to her own mini understanding of the corruption that we understand because Dagny's shown it in the novel, has shown it to us this entire time. She comes to it and she's like, "Oh my God," and she goes to Dagny. Dagny's so wonderful to her like, "Yes. You had to come to this on your own, I wasn't going to tell you, but you were 100% right." That's the end of her.Henry: Right. When she meets Taggart, there's this really interesting speech she has where she says, "I want to make something of myself and get somewhere." He's like, "What? What do you want to do?" Red flag. "What? Where?" She says, "I don't know, but people do things in this world. I've seen pictures of New York," and she's pointing at like the skyscrapers, right? Whatever. "I know that someone's built that. They didn't sit around and whine, but like the kitchen was filthy and the roof was leaking." She gets very emotional at this point. She says to him, "We were stinking poor and we didn't give a damn. I've dragged myself here, and I'm going to do something."Her story is very sad because she then gets mired in the corruption of Taggart's. He's basically bit lazy and a bit of a thief, and he will throw anyone under the bus for his own self-advancement. He is revealed to be a really sinister guy. I was absolutely hissing about him most of the time. Then, let's just do the plot spoiler and say what happens to Cherryl, right? Because it's important. When she has this realization and Taggart turns on her and reveals himself as this snake, and he's like, "Well, what did you expect, you idiot? This is the way the world is."Hollis: Oh, it's a horrible fight. It's the worst fight.Henry: Right? This is where the melodrama is so good. She goes running out into the streets, and it's the night and there are shadows. She's in the alleyway. Rand, I don't have the page marked, but it's like a noir film. She's so good at that atmosphere. Then it gets a little bit gothic as well. She's running through the street, and she's like, "I've got to go somewhere, anywhere. I'll work. I'll pick up trash. I'll work in a shop. I'll do anything. I've just got to get out of this."Hollis: Go work at the Panda Express. Henry: Yes. She's like, "I've got to get out of this system," because she's realized how morally corrupting it is. By this time, this is very late. Society is in a-- it's like Great Depression style economic collapse by this point. There really isn't a lot that she could do. She literally runs into a social worker and the social-- Rand makes this leering dramatic moment where the social worker reaches out to grab her and Cherryl thinks, "Oh, my God, I'm going to be taken prisoner in. I'm going back into the system," so she jumps off the bridge.This was the moment when I was like, I've had this lurking feeling about how Russian this novel is. At this point, I was like, "That could be a short story by Gogol," right? The way she set that up. That is very often the trap that a Gogol character or maybe a Dostoevsky character finds themselves in, right? That you suddenly see that the world is against you. Maybe you're crazy and paranoid. Maybe you're not. Depends which story we're reading. You run around trying to get out and you realize, "Oh, my God, I'm more trapped than I thought. Actually, maybe there is no way out." Cherryl does not get a lot of pages. She is, as you say, quite a minor character, but she illustrates the whole story so, so well, so dramatically.Hollis: Oh, wow.Henry: When it happens, you just, "Oh, Cherryl, oh, my goodness."Hollis: Thank you for reading that. Yes, you could tell from the very beginning that the seeds of what could have been a really good person were there. Thank you for reading that.Henry: When she died, I went back and I was like, "Oh, my God, I knew it."Hollis: How can you say Rand is a bad writer, right? That is careful, careful plotting, because she's just a shop girl in the rain. You've got this, the gun on the wall in that act. You know she's going to end up being good. Is she going to be rewarded for it? Let me just say, as an aside, I know we don't have time to talk about it here. My field, as I said, is 19th century African American novels, primarily now.This, usually, a woman, enslaved woman, the character who's like, "I can't deal with this," and jumps off a bridge and drowns herself is a fairly common and character. That is the only thing to do. One also sees Rand heroes. Stowe's Dred, for example, is very much, "I would rather live in the woods with a knife and then, be on the plantation and be a slave." When you think about, even the sort of into the 20th century, the Malcolm X figure, that, "I'm going to throw out all of this and be on my own," is very Randian, which I will also say very Byronic, too, Rand didn't invent this figure, but she put it front and center in these novels, and so when you think about how Atlas Shrugged could be brought into a curriculum in a network of other novels, how many of we've discussed so far, she's there, she's influenced by and continues to influence. Let's talk about your favorite minor character, the Wet Nurse.Henry: This is another great death scene.Hollis: Let's say who he is, so the government sends this young man to work at the Rearden Mills to keep an eye on Hank Rearden.Henry: Once they nationalize him, he's the bureaucrat reporting back, and Rearden calls him the Wet Nurse as an insult.Hollis: Right, and his job, he's the Communist Party person that's in every factory to make sure that everything is--Henry: That's right, he's the petty bureaucrat reporting back and making sure everyone's complying.Hollis: He's a young recent college graduate that, Hank, I think, early on, if it's possible even to find the Wet Nurse early scene, you could tell in the beginning, too, he's bright and sparkly right out of college, and this is, it seems like a good job for him. He's like, "Woohoo, I get to be here, and I get to be--" Yes, go ahead.Henry: What happens to him is, similarly to Cherryl, he has a conversion, but his conversion is not away from the corruption of the system he's been in, he is converted by what he sees in the Rearden plant, the hard work, the dedication, the idealism, the deep focus on making the metal, and he starts to see that if we don't make stuff, then all the other arguments downstream of that about how to appropriate, how to redistribute, whatever, are secondary, and so he becomes, he goes native, as it were. He becomes a Reardenite, and then at the end, when there's a crowd storming the place, and this crowd has been sent by the government, it's a fake thing to sort of--Hollis: Also, a very good scene, very dramatic.Henry: She's very good at mobs, very good at mobs, and they kill, they kill the Wet Nurse, they throw him over. He has a couple of speeches in dialogue with Rearden while he's dying, and he says--Hollis: You have to say, they throw him, they leave him on this pile of slag. He crawls up to the street where Rearden happens to be driving by, and car stops, and so that finding the Wet Nurse there and carrying him in his arms, yes.Henry: That's right, it's very dramatic, and then they have this dialogue, and he says, "I'd like to live, Mr. Rearden, God, how I'd like to, not because I'm dying, but because I've just discovered tonight what it means to be alive, and it's funny, do when I discovered it? In the office, when I stuck my neck out, when I told the bastards to go to hell, there's so many things I wish I'd known sooner, but it's no use crying over spilt milk," and then Rearden, he goes, "Listen, kid, said Rearden sternly, I want you to do me a favor." "Now, Mr. Rearden?" "Yes, now." "Of course, Mr. Rearden, if I can," and Rearden says, "You were willing to die to save my mills, will you try and live for me?"I think this is one of those great moments where, okay, maybe this isn't like George Eliot style dialogue, but you could put that straight in a movie, that would work really well, that would be great, right? I can hear Humphrey Bogart saying these things. It would work, wouldn't it?She knows that, and that's why she's doing that, she's got that technique. He's another minor character, and Rand is saying, the system is eating people up. We are setting people up for a spiritual destruction that then leads to physical destruction. This point, again, about it's not just about the material world. It's about your inner life and your own mind.I find it very moving.Hollis: These minor characters are fantastic. Then let's talk a little bit about Eddie Willers, because I think a lot about Eddie Willers. Eddie Willers, the childhood three, there were three young people, we keep going back to this childhood. We have Dagny, Francisco, because their parents were friends, and then Eddie Willers, who's like a neighborhood kid, right?Henry: He's down the street.Hollis: He lives down the street. He's like the neighborhood kid. I don't know about you. We had a neighborhood kid. There's always neighborhood kids, right? You end up spending time with this-- Eddie's just sort of always there. Then when they turn 15, 16, 17, and when there's clearly something going on between Dagny and Francisco, Eddie does take a step back, and he doesn't want to see.There's the class issues, the status issues aren't really-- they're present but not discussed by Rand. Here we have these two children heirs, and they don't say like, "You're not one of us, Eddie, because you're not an heir or an heiress." He's there, and he's got a pretty good position as Dagny's right-hand man in Taggart Transcontinental. We don't know where he went to college. We don't know what he does, but we know that he's super loyal, right?Then when she goes and takes a break for a bit, he steps in to be COO. James is like, "Eddie Willers, how can Eddie Willers be a COO?" She's like, "It's really going to be me, but he's going to be fine." We're not really supposed to identify with Eddie, but Eddie's there. Eddie has, all through the novel, all through the big old novel, Eddie eats lunch in the cafeteria. There's always this one guy he's having lunch with. This is, I don't know, like a Greek chorus thing, I don't quite know, but there's Eddie's conversations with this unknown person in the cafeteria give us a sense, maybe it's a narrator voice, like, "Meanwhile, this is going on in the world." We have these conversations. This guy he's having lunch with asks a lot of questions and starts asking a lot of personal questions about Dagny. Then we have to talk to-- I know we've gone for over an hour and 15 minutes, we've got to talk about Galt's Speech, right? When John Galt, toward the end, takes over the airwaves and gives this big three-hour speech, the big three-hour podcast as I tweeted the other day, Eddie is with Dagny.Henry: He's in the radio studio.Hollis: He's in the studio along with one of John Galt's former professors. We hear this voice. Rand says, or the narrator says, three people in the room recognize that voice. I don't know about you, did you guess that it was Galt before that moment that Eddie was having lunch with in the cafeteria?Henry: No, no, no, I didn't.Hollis: Okay, so you knew at that moment.Henry: That was when I was like, "Oh, Eddie was talking, right?" It took me a minute.Hollis: Okay, were you excited? Was that like a moment? Was that a big reveal?Henry: It was a reveal, but it made me-- Eddie's whole character puzzles me because, to me, he feels like a Watson.Hollis: Yes, that's nice, that's good.Henry: He's met Galt, who's been under their noses the whole time. He's been going through an almost Socratic method with Galt, right? If only he could have paid a little bit more attention, he would have realized what was going on. He doesn't, why is this guy so interested in Dagny, like all these things. Even after Galt's big speech, I don't think Eddie quite takes the lesson. He also comes to a more ambiguous but a bad end.Hollis: Eddie's been right there, the most loyal person. The Reddit threads on Eddie Willers, if anybody's interested, are really interesting.Henry: Yes, they are, they're so good.Hollis: Clearly, Eddie recognizes greatness, and he recognizes production, and he recognizes that Dagny is better than Jim. He recognizes Galt. They've been having these conversations for 12 years in the cafeteria. Every time he goes to the cafeteria, he's like, "Where's my friend, where's my friend?" When his friend disappears, but he also tells Galt a few things about Dagny that are personal and private. When everybody in the world, all the great people in the world, this is a big spoiler, go to Galt's Gulch at the end.Henry: He's not there.Hollis: He doesn't get to go. Is it because of the compromises he made along the way? Rand had the power to reward everybody. Hank's secretary gets to go, right?Henry: Yes.Hollis: She's gone throughout the whole thing.Henry: Eddie never thinks for himself. I think that's the-- He's a very, I think, maybe one of the more tragic victims of the whole thing because-- sorry. In a way, because, Cherryl and the Wet Nurse, they try and do the right thing and they end up dying. That's like a more normal tragedy in the sense that they made a mistake. At the moment of realization, they got toppled.Eddie, in a way, is more upsetting because he never makes a mistake and he never has a moment of realization. Rand is, I think this is maybe one of the cruelest parts of the book where she's almost saying, "This guy's never going to think for himself, and he hasn't got a hope." In a novel, if this was like a realistic novel, and she was saying, "Such is the cruelty of the world, what can we do for this person?" That would be one thing. In a novel that's like ending in a utopia or in a sort of utopia, it's one of the points where she's really harsh.Hollis: She's really harsh. I'd love to go and look at her notes at some point in time when I have an idle hour, which I won't, to say like, did she sit around? It's like, "What should I do with Eddie?" To have him die, probably, in the desert with a broken down Taggart transcontinental engine, screaming in terror and crying.Henry: Even at that stage, he can't think for himself and see that the system isn't worth supporting.Hollis: Right. He's just going to be a company man to the end.Henry: It's as cruel as those fables we tell children, like the grasshopper and the ants. He will freeze to death in the winter. There's nothing you can do about it. There are times when she gets really, really tough. I think is why people hate her.Hollis: We were talking about this, about Dickens and minor characters and coming to redemption and Dickens, except Jo. Jo and Jo All Alones, there are people who have redemption and die. Again, I don't know.Henry: There's Cherryl and the Wet Nurse are like Jo. They're tragic victims of the system. She's doing it to say, "Look how bad this is. Look how bad things are." To me, Eddie is more like Mr. Micawber. He's hopeless. It's a little bit comic. It's not a bad thing. Whereas Dickens, at the end, will just say, "Oh, screw the integrity of the plot and the morals. Let's just let Mr. Micawber-- let's find a way out for him." Everyone wants this guy to do well. Rand is like, "No, I'm sticking to my principles. He's dead in the desert, man. He's going to he's going to burn to death." He's like, "Wow, that's okay."Hollis: The funny thing is poor John Galt doesn't even care about him. John Galt has been a bad guy. John Galt is a complicated figure. Let's spend a bit on him.Henry: Before we do that, I actually want to do a very short segment contextualizing her in the 50s because then what you say about Galt will be against this background of what are some of the other ideas in the 50s, right?Hollis: Got it.Henry: I think sometimes the Galt stuff is held up as what's wrong with this novel. When you abstract it and just say it, maybe that's an easier case to make. I think once you understand that this is 1957, she's been writing the book for what, 12 years, I think, or 15 years, the Galt speech takes her 3 years to write, I think. This is, I think the most important label we can give the novel is it's a Cold War novel. She's Russian. What she's doing, in some ways, is saying to America, "This is what will happen to us if we adopt the system of our Cold War enemies." It's like, "This is animal farm, but in America with real people with trains and energy plants and industry, no pigs. This is real life." We've had books like that in our own time. The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver said, that book said, "If the 2008 crash had actually gone really badly wrong and society collapsed, how would it go?" I think that's what she's reacting to. The year before it was published, there was a sociology book called The Organization Man.Hollis: Oh, yes. William Whyte.Henry: A great book. Everyone should read that book. He is worrying, the whole book is basically him saying, "I've surveyed all these people in corporate America. They're losing the Protestant work ethic. They're losing the entrepreneurial spirit. They're losing their individual drive. Instead of wanting to make a name for themselves and invent something and do great things," he says, "they've all got this managerial spirit. All the young men coming from college, they're like, 'Everything's been done. We just need to manage it now.'" He's like, "America is collapsing." Yes, he thinks it's this awful. Obviously, that problem got solved.That, I think, that gives some sense of why, at that moment, is Ayn Rand writing the Galt speech? Because this is the background. We're in the Cold War, and there's this looming sense of the cold, dead hand of bureaucracy and managerialism is. Other people are saying, "Actually, this might be a serious problem."Hollis: I think that's right. Thank you for bringing up Whyte. I think there's so much in the background. There's so much that she's in conversation with. There's so much about this speech, so that when you ask somebody on the street-- Again, let me say this, make the comparison again to Uncle Tom's Cabin, people go through life feeling like they know Uncle Tom's Cabin, Simon Legree, Eliza Crossing the Ice, without having ever read it.Not to name drop a bit, but when I did my annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin, this big, huge book, and it got reviewed by John Updike in The New Yorker, and I was like, "This is freaking John Updike." He's like, "I never read it. I never read it." Henry Louis Gates and then whoever this young grad student was, Hollis Robbins, are writing this book, I guess I'll read it. It was interesting to me, when I talk about Uncle Tom's Cabin, "I've never read it," because it's a book you know about without reading. A lot of people know about Atlas Shrugged without having read it. I think Marc Andreessen said-- didn't he say on this podcast that he only recently read it?Henry: I was fascinated by this. He read it four years ago.Hollis: Right, during COVID.Henry: In the bibliography for the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, and I assumed he was one of those people, he was like you, he'd read it as a teenager, it had been informative. No, he came to it very recently. Something's happening with this book, right?Hollis: Huge things are happening, but the people who know about it, there's certain things that you know, you know it's long, you know that the sex is perhaps not what you would have wanted. You know that there's this big, really long thing called John Galt's Speech, and that it's like the whaling chapters in Moby-Dick. People read Moby-Dick, you're like, "Oh, yes, but I skipped all the chapters on cetology." That's the thing that you say, right? The thing that you say is like, "Yes, but I skipped all the John Galt's Speech." I was very interested when we were texting over the last month or so, what you would say when you got to John Galt's Speech. As on cue, one day, I get this text and it's like, "Oh, my God, this speech is really long." I'm like, "Yes, you are the perfect reader."Henry: I was like, "Hollis, this might be where I drop out of the book."Hollis: I'm like, "Yes, you and the world, okay?" This is why you're an excellent reader of this book, because it is a frigging slog. Just because I'm having eye issues these days, I had decided instead of rereading my copy, and I do have a newer copy than this tiny print thing, I decided to listen on audiobook. It was 62 hours or whatever, it was 45 hours, because I listen at 1.4. The speech is awesome listening to it. It, at 1.4, it's not quite 3 hours. It's really good. In the last few days, I was listening to it again, okay? I really wanted to understand somebody who's such a good plotter, and somebody who really understands how to keep people's interest, why are you doing this, Rand? Why are you doing this, Ms. Rand? I love the fact that she's always called Miss. Rand, because Miss., that is a term that we

There are no stronger advocates against communism than those who once embraced it. Rebekah Bills shares 9 thought-provoking quotes from Whittaker Chambers on his ideological transformation. Article of the Day: Are you dreading getting together with family for Thanksgiving after a particularly ugly election year? Barry Brownstein offers 5 ways to not let politics ruin your family get togethers. Sponsors: Life Saving Food  Fifty Two Seven Alliance HSL Ammo Quilt & Sew

Americans are prone to get caught up in the game of left vs. right and Blue team vs. Red team. Unfortunately, Satan uses this game to sidetrack us from the real battle: good vs. evil. Whittaker Chambers said that there are only two choices: God or man. When we believe man is the solution to our problems, we deny the power of God. When we are fearful, we become desperate, and desperation creates the conditions for us to accept solutions that sound good, but ultimately lead to destruction. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/curtisbowers00/support

Alger Hiss worked in high-level roles in the U.S. government during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. And then he was accused of using his access to spy for the Soviets. Research: “Alger Hiss.” FBI. https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/alger-hiss “A Byte Out of History, the Alger Hiss Story.” FBI. Jan. 25, 2013. https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/a-byte-out-of-history-the-alger-hiss-story Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Alger Hiss". Encyclopedia Britannica, 8 Jul. 2024, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alger-Hiss Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Whittaker Chambers". Encyclopedia Britannica, 5 Jul. 2024, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Whittaker-Chambers Chambers, Whittaker. “The Ghosts on the Roof.” Time. 5, 1948. https://time.com/archive/6784924/the-ghosts-on-the-roof/ Mark, Eduard. “In ReAlger Hiss: A Final Verdict from the Archives of the KGB.” Journal of Cold War Studies, vol. 11, no. 3, 2009, pp. 26–67. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26923052 Fox, John F. Jr. “In the Enemy's House: Venona and the Maturation of American Counterintelligence.” FBI.gov. Oct. 27, 2005. https://www.fbi.gov/history/history-publications-reports/in-the-enemys-house-venona-and-the-maturation-of-american-counterintelligence Hadley, David. “The Long Controversy Over Alger Hiss.” Teaching American History. Jan. 21, 2020. https://teachingamericanhistory.org/blog/the-long-controversy-over-alger-hiss/ “KGB interviews GRU agent and net controller name ALES 30 March 1945.” https://media.defense.gov/2021/Aug/01/2002818545/-1/-1/0/30MAR_KGB_INTERVIEWS_GRU_AGENT.PDF Rowe, Daniel, and Sarah Fagg, ed. “Alger Hiss and American Anti-communism.” New Histories. Vol. 3, Issue 5. https://newhistories.sites.sheffield.ac.uk/volumes/2011-12/volume-3/issue-5-crime-punishment/alger-hiss-and-american-anti-communism Sander, Gordon F. “Microfilm hidden in a pumpkin launched Richard Nixon's career 75 years ago.” New York Times.  Dec. 2, 2023. https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/12/02/pumpkin-papers-richard-nixon/ “Secrets, Lies, and Atomic Spies: Alger Hiss.” NOVA. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/venona/dece_hiss.html “The Yalta Conference.” U.S. State Department, Office of the Historian. https://history.state.gov/milestones/1937-1945/yalta-conf#:~:text=At%20Yalta%2C%20Roosevelt%20and%20Churchill,of%20influence%20in%20Manchuria%20following See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Right after Fusionism, Part 2: Whittaker Chambers and the Economic Temptation

In this episode, Joe and Grettelyn get a preview of one of the upcoming talks at this year's Chesterton conference from speaker Joe Walsh, who will be looking at commonalities between G. K. Chesterton and Whittaker Chambers! To register for the conference, visit https://www.chesterton.org/43rd-annual-chesterton-conference/ today!

On this episode of Our American Stories, the book Witness: A True Story of Soviet Spies in America and the Trial That Captivated the Nation is one of the biggest U.S. bestsellers of the 20th century, yet it is almost unknown among Americans today. Here to tell the story is Greg Forster on behalf of the Acton Institute. Support the show (https://www.ouramericanstories.com/donate)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this week's episode, Jeremi and Zachary are joined by Michael Kimmage to discuss the ongoing war in Ukraine. Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, "For a War of Worlds" Dr. Michael Kimmage is a professor of history at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC. He is also a fellow at the German Marshall Fund, and chair of the Advisory Council for the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC. From 2014 to 2017, Kimmage served on the Secretary's Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio. He publishes widely on international affairs, U.S.-Russian relations and American diplomatic history. Dr. Kimmage is the author of: The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (2009); In History's Grip: Philip Roth's Newark Trilogy (2012); The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy (2020). His forthcoming book is Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability (2024).

On the 75th anniversary of their discovery, what is the history of Whittaker Chambers' infamous Pumpkin Papers, their implications for Richard Nixon's career, and their significance for conservatism, patriotism, and loyalty in America today? On this episode, Jacob Heilbrunn speaks with Sam Tanenhaus, a contributing writer at the Washington Post's Book World. He is a former editor of The New York Times Book Review and the author of “Whittaker Chambers: A Biography” (Random House, 1997). His work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, and the National Interest. His forthcoming book, “William F. Buckley, Jr.: His Life and Times,” will be published in Fall 2024.Music by Aleksey Chistilin from Pixabay

In this episode of “The Ben & Marc Show”, a16z's co-founders Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen take on the biggest  and most important film of the year – Christopher Nolan's latest blockbuster “Oppenheimer”. The film – based on the 2005 biography “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer'' by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin – chronicles the life of the American theoretical physicist, whose direction of the top secret Manhattan Project forever changed the course of world history. In this one-on-one conversation based on YOUR questions from Twitter, Marc and Ben examine the historical accuracies (and inaccuracies) of Nolan's epic work, explore in-depth the life of the enigmatic physicist himself, and tackle – from all angles – the social and philosophical aspects of communism, a theme that weighs heavily in the film, as Oppenheimer's association with party members led to his political downfall. We hope you enjoy this episode! Watch the video version here:  https://youtu.be/AwOFcxENsVk?si=vUF9ZO5Fcj9W0O49 Resources:Marc on X: https://twitter.com/pmarcaMarc's Substack: https://pmarca.substack.com/ Ben on X: https://twitter.com/bhorowitz NY Times: "The Problem With Everything-Bagel Liberalism" by Ezra Klein: 'https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/02/op... Books mentioned on this podcast (and others you'll want to check out):– “Red Decade” by Eugene Lyons https://amzn.to/3OEQMbZ– “When Reason Goes on Holiday: Philosophers in Politics” by Neven Sesardic https://amzn.to/455zYRv– "Witness" by Whittaker Chambers https://amzn.to/3OEu0RC– ”The Great Leap Forward" by Alexander J. Field https://amzn.to/3QlCYV2– "The Economic Consequences of U.S. Mobilization for the Second World War" by Alexander J. Field https://amzn.to/3Yemsbz– “The Man From the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann” by Ananyo Bhattacharya https://amzn.to/446SbNf– “Stalin's War: A New History of World War II” by Sean McMeekin https://amzn.to/47c29zw– “McCarthy” by Arthur Herman https://amzn.to/3OFKYzc Stay Updated:Find us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16zFind us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16z The views expressed here are those of the individual personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any a16z funds. PLEASE SEE MORE HERE: https://a16z.com/disclosures/

This is the twenty-seventh installment in Eric's epic summer series covering the contentious and war-torn season of American history from 1914 to 1974. In this episode, he highlights the key event in this past century that sparked the liberal/conservative philosophical divide that we still struggle with in America today. It was a court case. The first televised court case in American history. ------------For more information about Daily Thunder and the ministry of Ellerslie Mission Society, please visit: https://ellerslie.com/. If you have been blessed by Ellerslie, consider partnering with the ministry by donating at: https://ellerslie.com/donate/

This week, Jeremi and Zachary are joined by Dr. Michael Kimmage to discuss the current state of the Ukraine War, and potential paths for it going forward. Zachary sets this scene with his poem entitled, "For Yegor." Dr. Michael Kimmage is a professor of history at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC. He is also a fellow at the German Marshall Fund, and chair of the Advisory Council for the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC. From 2014 to 2017, Kimmage served on the Secretary's Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio. He publishes widely on international affairs, U.S.-Russian relations and American diplomatic history. Kimmage is the author of: The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (2009); In History's Grip: Philip Roth's Newark Trilogy (2012); The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy (2020). He writes frequently for Foreign Affairs and other major publications. He has a forthcoming book on the history of the Ukraine War, Collisions.

Pete Peterson, Dean of the Pepperdine School of Public Policy, on a proposed listener book club, Whittaker Chambers' autobiography Witness, a growing inability to defend the need for liberal arts education in America, and the California State Assembly denying statements by representatives of Crisis Pregnancy Centers and blocking Senate Bill 14— which would have sent child traffickers to prison for life.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On this episode of Our American Stories, the book Witness: A True Story of Soviet Spies in America and the Trial That Captivated the Nation is one of the biggest U.S. bestsellers of the 20th century, yet it is almost unknown among Americans today. Here to tell the story is Greg Forster on behalf of the Acton Institute. Support the show (https://www.ouramericanstories.com/donate)See omny.fm/listener for privacy information.

In 1948 Whittaker Chambers shocked the nation when, while testifying before Congress, he gave the names of individuals he claimed were working within the United States government as Communist spies for the Soviet Union.  Among those named was Alger Hiss, Chamber's close friend and former Communist comrade.  The ensuing trial quickly divided the nation into competing narratives.  Who was lying and who was telling the truth?  Was Chambers insane or, perhaps, seeking to destroy Hiss due to some personal grievance?  Was this merely a pretext to the coming Communist “purges” under the McCarthy hearings that took place a few years later?  Or had Chambers alerted the nation to the fact there were Soviet spies deep within the government and the prevailing liberal elite of that era had failed completely to respond to the threat?   Sam Tanenhaus, American historian, biographer, and journalist joins Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis to take a deep dive into the remarkable life of Whittaker Chambers, including how Chambers came to break with Communism, whether Hiss was truly guilty, the real threat of Communism of that era, what the Chambers/Hiss trial came to represent for the nation as a whole, Chamber's association with William F. Buckley and the burgeoning conservative movement, and his lasting impact on the Right.   About Sam Tanenhaus Sam Tanenhaus is the US Writer at Large for Prospect and the editor of both The New York Times Book Review and the Week in Review section of the Times.  From 1999 to 2004 he was a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, where he wrote often on politics.  His work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and many other publications.  Tanenhaus's book, Whittaker Chambers: A Biography, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.  His books also include The Death of Conservatism and a soon-to-be-released biography of William F. Buckley Jr. and is the US Writer at Large for Prospect.  

In today's politics, it is not uncommon to see Members of Congress in shouting matches among each other and even toward witnesses. But what historical precedent could explain how we arrived at this point in time of polarized American politics? In this episode, learn more about the highly televised HUAC hearings of Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers and how the confrontational saga paved the way for this day and age of bitter polarization.Support the showNEW! Visit georgewashingtoninstitute.org for the one-stop shop of all things Friends & Fellow Citizens and George Washington Institute!JOIN as a Patreon supporter and receive a FREE Friends & Fellow Citizens mug at the $10 membership level or higher!SUBSCRIBE to our e-mail list for the latest news and updates from Friends & Fellow Citizens!NOTE: All views expressed by the host are presented in his personal capacity and do not officially represent the views of any affiliated organizations. All guests on interview episodes are solely those of the interviewees and may or may not reflect the views of the host or Friends & Fellow Citizens.

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this bonus episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemyThe great Sam Tanenhaus (author of Whittaker Chambers: A Biography) returns to the podcast for a spirited and gossipy discussion of everything we missed — or only briefly mentioned — in our main episode on Chambers, including: his religious faith, his sexuality, his ideological position in the National Review crowd, Hannah Arendt's review of Witness, and much more.Plus: we extract from Sam Tanenhaus an update on the status of his HIGHLY-anticipated biography of William F. Buckley Jr... This one is for real heads. Enjoy!

On this episode of Our American Stories, the book Witness: A True Story of Soviet Spies in America and the Trial That Captivated the Nation is one of the biggest U.S. bestsellers of the 20th century, yet it is almost unknown among Americans today. Here to tell the story is Greg Forster on behalf of the Acton Institute. Forster is a Whittaker Chambers expert who has earned a Ph.D. with distinction in political philosophy from Yale University. Support the show (https://www.ouramericanstories.com/donate)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode, Matt and Sam go deep into the life and times of Whittaker Chambers, most famous for his role in the "trial of the century"—the trial of Alger Hiss for perjury after Chambers accused Hiss of being a Communist spy during his years working in the federal government, especially the State Department. The two figures, once friends, came to symbolize a clash that was bigger than themselves, and prefigured the turn American politics would take at the onset of the Cold War. Chambers would become a hero of the nascent postwar conservative movement, with his status as an ex-Communist—one of many who would congregate around National Review in the mid-to-late 1950s—bringing his moral credibility to the right as one who had seen the other side and lived to tell his tale. Before all that, though, Chambers's life was like something out of a novel: a difficult family life, early brilliance at Columbia University, literary achievement in leftwing publications, and years "underground" engaging in espionage for the Soviet Union against the United States. "Out of my weakness and folly (but also out of my strength), I committed the characteristic crimes of my century," writes  Chambers in his 1952 memoir/jeremiad Witness.  Your hosts break it all down, assess his crimes and contributions, and explore one of the most consequential American lives of the twentieth century.  Sources:Sam Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (1997)Whittaker Chambers, Witness (1952)Whittaker Chambers, Cold Friday (1964)Whittaker Chambers, "Big Sister is Watching You," National Review, December 28, 1957The Whittaker Chambers Reader: His Complete National ReviewWritings, 1957-1959 (2014)William F. Buckley, Jr., editor, Odyssey of a Friend: Whittaker Chambers Letters to William F. Buckley, Jr. (1969)L. Brent Bozell, Jr. and William F. Buckley, Jr., McCarthy and His Enemies: The Record and Its Meaning (1954)Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties (1956)Landon R.Y. Storrs, The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left (2013)Richard H. Crossman, editor, The God that Failed: A Confession (1949)Lionel Trilling, The Middle of the Journey (1947)Matthew Richer, "The Cry Against Ninevah: A Centennial Tribute to Whittaker Chambers," Modern Age, Summer 2001Christopher Hitchens, "A Regular Bull," London Review of Books, July 1997Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis, "No Laughing Matter" (YouTube, 2007)Jess Bravin, "Whittaker Chambers Award Draws Criticism—From His Family," Wall Street Journal, March 28, 2019Isaac Deutscher, "The Ex-Communist's Conscience,"  The Reporter, 1950. John Patrick Diggins, Up From Communism: Conservative odysseys in American intellectual history, (1975)Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left, (1961)Larry Ceplair, Anti-Communism in Twentieth-Century America: A Critical History, (2011) ...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes! 

This week, Jeremi and Zachary are joined by guest Dr. Michael Kimmage to discuss The Russo-Ukrainian War. Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, "A Year After the War Began." Dr. Michael Kimmage is a professor of history at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC. He is also a fellow at the German Marshall Fund, and chair of the Advisory Council for the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC. From 2014 to 2017, Kimmage served on the Secretary's Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio. He publishes widely on international affairs, U.S.-Russian relations and American diplomatic history. Kimmage is the author of: The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (2009); In History's Grip: Philip Roth's Newark Trilogy (2012); The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy (2020). He writes frequently for Foreign Affairs and other major publications.

Modern presidents both influence and are influenced by books, movies, and television; with no commander in chief is that more clear than with Ronald Reagan. Dr. Benjamin Griffin, chief of the Military History Division at the United States Military Academy, has researched and written the definitive book about the 40th president's interactions with Tom Clancy and other authors, Hollywood films, and other pop culture: Reagan's War Stories: A Cold War Presidency.In this chat, David Priess and Griffin discuss Tom Clancy's influence on an entire generation, how books with clear moral narratives informed Reagan's childhood, the influence of Whittaker Chambers on Reagan's iconic "A Time for Choosing" speech in 1964, the rich relationship between Reagan and Clancy, the outsized impact of Clancy's first two books, and the complicated notion of presidential "vision."Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad. Among the works mentioned in this episode:The book The Hunt for Red October by Tom ClancyThe book The Third Word War by Sir John HackettThe book Red Storm Rising by Tom ClancyThe book Subregional Security Cooperation in the Third World by William TowThe book That Printer of Udell's by Harold Bell WrightThe film High NoonThe John Carter of Mars books by Edgar Rice BurroughsThe book Witness by Whittaker ChambersThe book Darkness at Noon by Arthur KoestlerThe book The Bourne Identity by Robert LudlumThe film All the President's MenThe film Apocalypse NowThe film The Deer HunterThe film PattonThe film Back to the FutureThe TV movie The Day AfterThe movie The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)The book Euromissiles by Susan ColbournThe book The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

11/7/22 - Mary Nicholas, MD, is a retired physician and research librarian. She was active in the University Faculty for Life. She has contributed articles to both the American Thinker and Canada Free Press. Today's show will place a focus on Mary's book, The Devil and Bella Dodd: One Woman's Struggle Against Communism and Her Redemption. Show Resources: 1. Witness: A True Story of Soviet Spies in America and the Trial That Captivated the Nation by Whittaker Chambers (https://www.amazon.com/Witness-Cold.../dp/162157296X) 2. The Soviet Story (free) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7IrB_6mX4k

This week, Jeremi and Zachary talk with Dr. Michael Kimmage about how the Ukraine War has developed over the course of the year, and how they predict things will progress in the future. Dr. Michael Kimmage is a professor of history at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC. He is also a fellow at the German Marshall Fund, and chair of the Advisory Council for the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC. From 2014 to 2017, Kimmage served on the Secretary's Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio. He publishes widely on international affairs, U.S.-Russian relations and American diplomatic history. Kimmage is the author of: The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (2009); In History's Grip: Philip Roth's Newark Trilogy (2012); The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy (2020). He writes frequently on the Ukraine War and related topics for Foreign Affairs.

NOW, TRUMP MUST BE PROSECUTED FOR ESPIONAGE A BLOCK (1:30) The New York Times' blockbuster and a stunning Trump leak of a letter from the National Archives makes it inevitable (2:15) There is no prosecutorial discretion here: if you've stolen MORE THAN 300 CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS THEY HAVE TO PROSECUTE YOU (2:43) And if some are the highest level of classification, you must be prosecuted FOR ESPIONAGE (3:00) The Times also implied there's video of people actually mishandling these documents (3:41) DOJ also isn't sure Trump isn't hiding MORE classified docs at Mar-a-Lago (5:08) None of the crimes mentioned on the search warrant are affected even if Trump somehow DID declassify the papers he stole (5:27) You also don't want to be Christina Bobb right now (6:47) Trump's motion to have a 'Special Master' review everything seized is described as 'Alice In Wonderland' (7:22) and incredibly it contains Trump boasting of how he got a threat relayed to Attorney General Garland (8:37) Judge Reinhart also seems to be leaning against unsealing the search warrant affidavit - in part for Trump's physical safety (9:55) Trump flunky Kash Patel is blaming the Government Services Administration because they haven't gotten around to blaming the moving company yet (10:05) Early Tuesday somebody connected to Trump LEAKED A NATIONAL ARCHIVES LETTER TO TRUMP'S LAWYER and ex-journalist John Solomon posted it (10:30) Archivist Debra Wall has detailed all of Trump's efforts to keep the stolen documents through the first five months of this year (11:07) Wall says Trump tried to claim executive privilege over them! The Biden White House finally agreed to waive any executive privilege (11:49) But Solomon (and presumably Trump) think the mere mention of Biden in the letter will let them paint this as Biden politically attacking Trump (12:09) without realizing that the letter confirms Trump DELIBERATELY held on to the documents and cannot claim some kind of mistake (12:39) And Wall even notes some documents were "Special Access Program materials" - bureaucratic speak of ultra-secret Black Ops programs. Trump is in twice as much trouble as he was before Solomon posted (15:20) They won't listen, but this would be a good time for his supporters to bail out on Trump because it's all indictments from here on in. B BLOCK (19:05) Every Dog Has Its Day: Roxy (20:33) Postscripts To The News: there's a Trump Electoral Fraud scandal too. The Your-Kraken-Is-Showing crowd seems to have illegally disseminated election data to people like friends of Sean Hannity (21:59) Why did The New York Times run a Trump Op-Ed by Rich Lowry when (23:13) it could've just reprinted his self-gratifying assessment of Sarah Palin's wink from 2008? (24:47) Sports: Tom Brady's back. The Masked Singer? Refilled his consecrated ground? (25:17) Bryce Harper's minor league rehab is...SPONSORED? (27:40) Trump, Tim Michels and Russia Ron Johnson compete for Worst Persons honors, with Ron insisting he was only involved in the coup for just "seconds." C BLOCK (32:00) My career stories - Things I Promised Not To Tell - focuses in this episode on the most talented (and most self-destructive) person I've ever worked with. He was a New York and Los Angeles radio news anchor and TV news reporter named Will Spens. He was a genius, but his ability to do what others would not try, eventually destroyed him.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This episode is sponsored by Wren. Signup at wren.co/shermer and Wren will plant 10 trees in your name. Start a monthly subscription to fund climate solutions. Shermer and Kirchick discuss: archives and secret sources of secret histories • the cause of homophobia, and how and why homosexuality was thought of as a “contagious sexual aberrancy” • why there is no lesbian history of Washington • J. Edgar Hoover, Clyde Tolson and gay mythmaking • FDR and Sumner Welles • why at the height of the Cold War, it was safer to be a Communist than a homosexual • Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss • the McCarthy hearings and how the Lavender Menace became inextricably linked with the Red Menace • astronomer Franklin Kameny and the Mattachine Society • JFK and his tolerance of homosexuality • Richard Nixon's notorious homophobia • Ronald Reagan's conflicting attitudes toward homosexuality • George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and real progress in acceptance of homosexuality • the trans movement and its homophobic consequences. James Kirchick has written about human rights, politics, and culture from around the world. A columnist for Tablet magazine, a writer at large for Air Mail, and a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, he is the author of The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age. Kirchick's work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement. A graduate of Yale with degrees in history and political science, he resides in Washington, DC. This episode is also sponsored by Wondrium. 

This week, Jeremi and Zachary are joined by Michael Kimmage to discuss the Ukraine conflict. Zachary sets the scene with his poem: "For Mariupol" Dr. Michael Kimmage is a professor of history at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC. He is also a fellow at the German Marshall Fund, and chair of the Advisory Council for the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC. From 2014 to 2017, Kimmage served on the Secretary's Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio. He publishes widely on international affairs, U.S.-Russian relations and American diplomatic history. Kimmage is the author of: The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (2009); In History's Grip: Philip Roth's Newark Trilogy (2012); and The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy (2020). He writes frequently on Ukraine, Russia, and U.S. foreign policy in Foreign Affairs and other major publications. This Episode was Mixed and Mastered by Karoline Pfeil, Oscar Kitmanyen, and Will Shute

Joe diGenova, legal analyst and former U.S. Attorney to the District of Columbia, joined WMAL's "O'Connor and Company" radio program on Monday about progressive Elie Mystall pushing the idea that the U.S. Constitution is "trash" and he also discussed the importance of the 70th anniversary of the publication of "Witness" by Whittaker Chambers. For more coverage on the issues that matter to you, visit www.WMAL.com, download the WMAL app or tune in live on WMAL-FM 105.9 FM from 5-9 AM ET. To join the conversation, check us out on Twitter: @WMALDC, @LarryOConnor, @Jgunlock, @amber_athey and @patrickpinkfile. Show website: https://www.wmal.com/oconnor-company/ WMAL's "O'Connor and Company" podcast is sponsored by Cornerstone First Financial: https://www.cornerstonefirst.com/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

As Chambers wrote to his friend Bill Buckley, most of us think the story of Oedipus ends when he learns he married his own mother and puts his eyes out.  In fact, however, Oedipus lived for years afterwards.  After the trials, Chambers lived for 10 years and Hiss for 45.  Neither escaped The Case, nor did their wives and children.  (Add this, by the way, to all the reasons that committing treason is a bad idea.). Each man wrote a book.  Chambers' became a best-seller, a major American autobiography, and a sacred text of the post-WWII right.  Hiss's book sank like a stone, as did another he wrote in the mid-1980s.  Chambers tried to stay out of the public eye.  Hiss tried to stay in it, but failed to establish either his innocence or the dimensions of the shape-shifting conspiracy that had framed him.  This Podcast recounts the tragic post-court life of each of our protagonists.    FURTHER RESEARCH   Episode 36:  Chambers' autobiography is “Witness,” most recently published by Regnery Gateway in 2014.  He was working on a huge, never finished book (working title “The Third Rome”) when he died.  Associated essays of his were published by Random House in 1964 under the title “Cold Friday” — the name of a field on his farm.  His articles for The National Review (amounting to less than 85 pages) were published by that magazine in “The Whittaker Chambers Reader: His Complete National Review Writings 1957-59” in 2014; these and his earlier short pieces appear in “Ghosts on the Roof: Selected Essays,” edited by Terry Teachout and published by Transaction in 1996.  Two books of Chambers' correspondence have been printed: “Odyssey of a Friend:  Letters to William F. Buckley, Jr., 1954-1961” (Regnery Gateway 1987); and “Notes from the Underground:  The Whittaker Chambers-Ralph de Toledano Letters 1949-60,” published in 1997 by Regnery Gateway.  Mr. de Toledano covered the trials for Newsweek Magazine and became a prominent conservative writer.  If you're interested in what Chambers did and thought in his last years, the best of the foregoing works is (in my opinion) the Chambers-Buckley correspondence.   Hiss's memoir, “In the Court of Public Opinion” (Knopf 1957), draws heavily on his Petition for a New Trial on Grounds of Newly Discovered Evidence.  His late-in-life autobiography, “Recollections of a Life,” was published by Seaver in 1988.  It is as dry as his first book.  Hiss's son, Anthony, maybe best known as The New Yorker's railroad correspondent under the pseudonym E.M. Frimbo, wrote about himself and his father in “Laughing Last” (Houghton Mifflin 1977) when things were looking up for his dad.  After the verdict of history had turned the other way, the young Hiss produced “The View from Alger's Window: A Son's Memoir” (Houghton Mifflin 1999).  It concentrates on the correspondence he shared with his imprisoned father.  The New York Times reviewer described the latter book as “deeply troubling,” “a painful story of the family as a factory of denial.”“Family Ties,” by Ann Douglas, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/06/27/reviews/990627.27dougl.html. That The Times would publish such a review indicates how much, even among northeastern liberals, the verdict had solidified against Hiss and for Chambers.   More about the two protagonists' post-trial lives can be found in Professor Weinstein's book “Perjury” at pages 550-72 (chapter titled “Alger and Whittaker: The Vigil and the Death Watch”); and at pages 444-514 of the Sam Tanenhaus biography “Whittaker Chambers.”   Questions:  Which protagonist suffered more after the trials — the imprisoned Hiss or the ostracized Chambers?  Do you have a hunch that one or both of them overcame gloom and died with a somewhat satisfied, “something ventured, something gained” feeling?  Of the wives and children, only one (Hiss's son) capitalized on The Case.  If you had been one of the others, would you have been tempted to follow Tony's path?   If Hiss was guilty, why didn't he avoid the limelight like Chambers did?  And, when his son got interested in The Case, why didn't Hiss say to him “Son, this has taken over my life, but it doesn't have to mess up yours. I've got some years to live and powerful friends on my side; you just get on with your own existence and leave this to us.”  Why would he let his son take up a cause that Hiss knew was a lie and would likely someday be exposed as such, making his son look pitiful?

Alger Hiss is taken to prison   Alger Hiss's conviction — technically for perjury, but effectively for treason — was a major event.  It was a disaster for The Establishment, especially liberal Democrats, and vindication for Republicans and populist Democrats.  The 18 month labyrinth of HUAC hearings, depositions in Hiss's libel suit, grand jury proceedings, and two criminal trials were the long, long overture to the so-called McCarthy Era.  Senator McCarthy, in fact, gave his famous “I have a list . . .” speech just weeks after Hiss's conviction.  This Podcast gives an overview of the many and complex reactions to the guilty verdict.  Everyone, it seems, accepted the factual correctness of the verdict.  But many liberals could not help making up excuses for Hiss, or damning Chambers for being fat and melodramatic.  And many conservatives and populists could not help painting all liberals and Harvard graduates with the black pitch of Hiss's treason.  Most interesting and encouraging to me, a significant number of liberals and Democrats were sufficiently mature and morally alive to engage in genuine introspection and self-criticism, to admit they had ‘blown it big time' when it came to Soviet traitors in our midst, and to resolve to fashion a liberal anti-communism that was just as vigorous as what Republican conservatives had been offering for decades.     FURTHER RESEARCH    The McCarthy Era, although sparked by this Case, is an oceanic subject beyond the scope of these Podcasts.  If you want to read about it, among the best conservative books are George H. Nash's “The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945” (Basic Books 1976), esp. 84-130; and Richard Gid Powers' “Not Without Honor:  The History of American Anticommunism” (Free Press 1995), esp. 191-272.See also Professor Harvey Klehr's essay “Setting the Record Straight on Joe McCarthy,” https://archives.frontpagemag.com/fpm/setting-record-joe-mccarthy-straight-harvey-klehr/.   Among the far more numerous, totally anti-McCarthy books are David Caute's “The Great Fear:The Anti-Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower” (Touchstone 1979), esp. 56-62; Fred J. Cook's “The Nightmare Decade:The Life and Times of Senator Joe McCarthy” (Random House 1971); Victor Navasky's “Naming Names” (Viking 1980) (especially the early pages); I.F. Stone's “The Truman Era: 1945-52” (Little Brown 1953) (Stone was himself a secret agent of the Soviet Union); and James A Weschler's “The Age of Suspicion” (Random House 1953).  I must note that it was a stroke of genius for the minimizers of Communist treason to name the era after anti-Communism's most irresponsible big name.  This is as if racists had succeeded in labeling the civil rights movement The Al Sharpton Movement.     Concerning the impact of the Hiss verdict in particular, Dean Acheson, in his autobiography “Present at the Creation:  My Years at the State Department” (Norton 1987), titles his pertinent chapter (at 354) “The Attack of the Primitives Begins.”  Alistair Cooke (at 340) also saw nothing good coming from Hiss's conviction.  A more mature view, at page 267 of Walter Goodman's “The Committee:The Extraordinary Career of the House Committee on Un-American Activities” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 1968), is that the Hiss-Chambers Case “whip[ped] up a storm which did not last long but left ruins in its wake.”  Other more realistic analyses of the Case's impact on America are in Weinstein at 529-47 (chapter titled “Cold War Iconography I:  Alger Hiss as Myth and Symbol”); the best single essay on this Case in my opinion, Leslie Fiedler's “Hiss, Chambers, and the Age of Innocence” at 3-24 of his “An End to Innocence:  Essays on Culture and Politics” (Beacon Press 1955) and Diana Trilling's essay “A Memorandum on the Hiss Case,” first published in The Partisan Review of May-June 1950 and re-published at 27-48 of Patrick J. Swan's anthology of essays on this Case, “Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers, and the Schism in the American Soul” (ISI Books 2003).  The latter two essays I highly recommend.   Questions:  If you had been adult when Hiss was convicted, what would have been your reaction to his conviction?  ‘Justice at long last,' ‘a miscarriage of justice,' ‘guilty but a fair trial was impossible,' ‘technically guilty but with an excuse,' or something else?  Would your reaction have been purely emotional/political/tribal, or would you have cited one or more facts to support your reaction?  Would you have been totally certain that your reaction was the right one, or would you have harbored some doubts?

Psychiatrist Dr. Carl Binger This Podcast presents the testimony of an eminent psychiatrist, Dr. Carl Binger.  He opined that Whittaker Chambers suffered from a mental illness, called “Psychopathic Personality,” which causes its sufferers to make false accusations that they sincerely believe to be true.  Dr. Carl Binger was supposed to be, to use a baseball metaphor, The Clean-Up Hitter of The Hiss Defense.  The Defense had loaded the bases with Hiss and his wife (we barely knew Chambers/Crosley), the character witnesses (Alger is a fine upstanding man), and the Catletts (we had The Typewriter when The Spy Documents were typed).  Binger was supposed to bring all those runners and himself across home plate by answering a question so obvious that Hiss was asked it at his first HUAC appearance: why is Chambers lying?  Chambers had no rational motive to lie, but . . . . maybe an irrational one. Chambers' greatest fan would admit that his life was a target-rich environment of off-the-beaten-path behaviors.   Prosecutor Murphy fought to the bitter end to keep Binger's opinion from reaching the jury's ears.  But he had a good Plan B.  His cross-examination of Dr. Binger has been called the most destructive cross-examination of a psychiatrist in history.  The conventional opinion of scholars is that when Murphy was through with Binger, there was nothing left, not even mincemeat.  To many, Binger's testimony seemed a failed attempt to smear an honest man who was merely strange. See if you agree.   FURTHER RESEARCH   About Binger's testimony, see Cooke at 304-13; Smith at 386-93, saying (at 391) that “Murphy cut the poor psychiatrist into ribbons” and (at 393) that “the psychiatric evidence turned out to be a boomerang”; and Weinstein at 510-16.   One interesting aspect of this Case is the peek it gives into the morals and standards of this country's Establishment in the late 1940s.  Psychiatry had ceased to be new and frightening and had become, among many of the finest minds, almost a religion displacing Judaism and Christianity.  Forward-looking thinkers ranked Freud with Aristotle, Copernicus, and Einstein as one of the giant pioneers of human thought.  (Today, most see him as a great, brave pioneer but dismiss his all theories and techniques.). Alistair Cooke was so worshipful of psychiatry that he could not fathom Prosecutor Murphy questioning Dr. Binger's opinion.  Cooke seems to have thought Murphy outrageous when he demanded that the exalted expert make sense to the jury.   More broadly, at the time of the Hiss trials, the range of proper behaviors was much narrower than it is today.  Men worked and women stayed home to run the house and raise the kids; a web of laws and customs held blacks in inferior positions; swarthy-complected immigrants from Southern Europe, such as Italians, were barely considered to be white people; left-handed people were considered handicapped; people rarely married outside their religious denominations; homosexuality was a mental illness; proper citizens wouldn't dream of going outdoors not in a coat and tie; and you could tell much more about people's economic and social status by their clothing than you can today.  Any deviation from these norms might prompt wrinkled noses, raised eyebrows, and even suspicions of mental illness.  The latter was unfathomable and would bar you from decent society forever.  The Hiss Defense tried to use such limits on propriety and decency to make Chambers unbelievable and despicable.  The Defense failed because of Chambers' articulateness and his cool under fire, and because of the cross-examination of Dr. Binger.  And as Alistair Cooke wrote (at 312), the magician Binger could pull strange and frightening objects from his top hat, but he could not make the documents disappear.   Questions:  As you hear Dr. Binger's direct testimony, do you think to yourself “My God, he's got Chambers to a T.  Thank God we have modern psychiatry to explain rare mental illnesses like Chambers'”?  Or do Binger's words strike you as modern witchcraft concealed behind two Harvard degrees?  Psychiatry has changed hugely since 1949.  If you have any knowledge of it, what would a mainstream psychiatrist (if there is such a thing any more) say of Chambers today?  One said to me, “Probably neurotic, but not psychotic by any means.”   Concerning procedure, do you agree with Prosecutor Murphy that merely allowing the jury to hear the 65-minute long question listing all of Chambers' strange acts was itself unfair to Chambers and The Prosecution, and that the judges should have ruled on the admissibility of psychiatric testimony before?      

  Each side in this Case had a male homosexual secret.  Remember that we're in 1949, when conservatives thought that male homosexuality was a sin and a crime and enlightened liberals thought that gay men were tragic mistakes of nature, mentally ill, women trapped in men's bodies, but fortunately there was talk therapy, shock treatment and, if all else fails, lobotomies.  (Homosexual men were subjected to lobotomies until recently in Communist Cuba.)   Chambers, during his years in the Communist underground, had had gay sex with men he met in public places.  And Hiss's stepson (Mrs. Hiss's son by her first marriage) was gay and had been discharged from the Navy in 1945 on psychological grounds, which was a polite way of eliminating gay sailors.  The precise dimensions of each side's gay secret, how it was concealed, and how it was hinted at publicly and used covertly, is the subject of this Podcast.   Further Research:   Robert Stripling, HUAC's Chief Investigator and Nixon's partner in the first phase of the Case, said that it was whispered around the hearing room from Day One that Chambers was “a queer” — Stripling's word, not mine.  He also said that, whenever an ex-Communist testified, within hours rumors began that he or she was an alcoholic or drug addict, had been to see a psychiatrist, or was a “sex pervert” — again, Stripling's words, not mine.   The liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote discreetly that the “anti-Chambers whispering campaign was one of the most repellent of modern history.”  George H. Nash, “The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945” at 100 (Basic Books 1976).  Alistair Cooke used equal delicacy when, in his inventory of ‘secret explanations' of what happened between Hiss and Chambers, he wrote “one or two other theories . . . went the rounds of Washington and New York [that] . . . so mercilessly intrude into other people's lives that the incompleteness of this report appears a small price to pay for giving everybody so slandered the benefit of a large doubt.  The reader who is most prurient to know about such theories will be the one most apt to hit on them.”  Cooke at 334.  Dr. Weinstein, in his definitive book on this Case, deals with Chambers' homosexual acts at 112-13, 129-30, with Hiss's stepson's gayness at 424-25, and with Hiss's use of Chambers secret gay life to ‘explain' his mentally ill lies about Hiss at 405-08 and 639-41 (section 4, titled “Chambers as Paranoid:  The Revenge Motif” in an appendix titled “Six Conspiracies in Search of an Author, 1948-1996”).    I have never seen any indication that the two sides in this Case formally agreed not to smear each other with their gay secrets.  Nor have I ever had any reason to believe that Alger Hiss was in the slightest degree gay.   Questions: If you were one of Hiss's lawyers and the prejudices of 1949 were still widespread today, would your ethics deter you from smearing Chambers as gay (and therefore mentally ill or evil)?  Don't you have an ethical obligation to defend your client vigorously??  If you were Prosecutor Murphy, and if you feared testimony by Hiss's stepson, would you use your gay smear on the same grounds?  On the whole, which side do you condemn more for its use of the other side's ‘gay secret'?   Here is a poem, titled “Lothrop, Montana” that Whittaker Chambers wrote. It was published (under Chambers' real name) in The Nation magazine — to this day, the media headquarters of the Hiss side — on June 30, 1926, at page 726:   The cottonwoods, the boy-trees, Imberle — the clean, green, central bodies Standing apart, freely, freely, but trammeled; With their branches inter-resting — for support, Never for caressing, except the wind blow. And yet, leaning so fearfully into one another, The leaves so pensile, so tremulously hung, as they lean toward one another; Unable to strain farther into one another And be apart; Held back where in the earth their secret roots Wrap one about another, interstruggle and knot; the vital filaments Writhing in struggle; heavy, fibrous, underearthen life, From which the sap mounts filling those trembling leaves Of the boy-trees, the cottonwoods.   Is it reading too much between the lines to see in there a description of wrestling (Chambers' college sport) by two young gay men, ending as each one's ‘sap mounts' within their ‘secret roots' and ‘trembling leaves'?

Photo: http://www.spartacus-educational.com Now comes the witness who, in my opinion, dooms Alger Hiss.  He gives expert testimony supporting Chambers' claim that the typed spy documents were passed to him by Alger Hiss after Mrs. Hiss typed them on the Hiss home typewriter.  Lloyd Paul Stryker did not ask this witness a single question on cross-examination.  Listen to this Podcast to learn who was the witness and how he formed his expert opinion.  After the witness left the stand, all ears waited to hear Hiss explain how dozens of documents, obviously prepared for espionage, got typed on his home typewriter but he is still innocent. FURTHER RESEARCH: As one scholar put it, you wouldn't want to hang a man based  on the testimony of Whittaker Chambers and nothing more, but how could you disbelieve Chambers plus 64 pages of typewritten spy documents that had been typed on the Hiss home typewriter?  Herbert L. Packer, Ex-Communist Witnesses:  Four Studies in Fact Finding (Stanford Univ. Press 1962) at 22. The next witness is Raymond Feehan, sometimes called Ramos Feehan — a great multi-cultural name, perhaps only possible in 1949 in New York City.  Mr. Feehan was an FBI employee and a member of the profession of The Examination of Questioned Documents.  I have been unable to find a photo of him or any other information about him — which makes him the perfect dispassionate expert.  Alistair Cooke describes him as “a vigorous, dark-haired F.B.I. expert, . . .strictly a laboratory man . . . [who] appeared quite untouched by the emotions of the case . . . . [and had] all the basking pride of a travel lecturer much in demand.”  Alistair Cooke, A Generation on Trial (1952) at 168-69. Mr. Feehan opined that the typed spy documents and another bunch of documents, which everyone agreed had been typed on the Hiss home typewriter, had been typed on the same typewriter.  This opinion, wrote Alistair Cooke (at 168), “provoked quick intakes of breath from many casual spectators.” It is often misstated that this Case turned on a typewriter.  That's not true.  Mr. Feehan formed his opinion before the typewriter that everyone agreed was the Hiss home typewriter had been found.  Mr. Feehan based his opinion instead on a comparison of two sets of documents — the typed spy documents and the so-called Hiss Standards, which everyone had agreed had been typed on the Hiss home typewriter.  It is as if you proved that the fingerprints on a certain glass were my fingerprints by comparing them not to my fingers, but to a fingerprints (say, in the files of the FBI) that everyone agreed were my fingerprints.  The Prosecution's evidence, the evidence that convicted Alger Hiss, would have been exactly the same if no typewriter had ever been found. Concurring in Mr. Feehan's opinion was the founder of the profession of The Examination of Questioned Documents, one Ordway Hilton.  Ordway Hilton, Scientific Examination of Questioned Documents (Revised Edition) (Elsevier Science Publishing Co. 1982) at  224-25, 232. Questions:  How will Hiss explain how the typed spy documents got typed on his home typewriter?  His Explanation #1, to the Grand Jury, that Chambers snuck into the Hiss house and typed them up himself when no one was looking, didn't work.  He'll need a damned good Explanation #2, won't he?  You'll have to wait for Podcast #26 to hear it.  In the meantime, can you think of a way that Chambers (or someone with more time and resources) could make a ‘fake' typewriter and produce typewritten documents that looked exactly like documents that had been typed on the real Hiss home typewriter?  For that, you'll need to wait for Podcast #35.

Federal Courthouse, NY, 1938 This is a short podcast to acquaint you with the actors about to come on stage in the drama of Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers. They are the government Prosecutor Thomas Murphy, Hiss's principal defense lawyer Lloyd Paul Stryker, Judge Samuel Kaufman, and the jury.   Additional Research   Murphy, a 6' 4” muscular giant of a man with an enormous walrus mustache, tried to come across as the quiet, somewhat plodding, but totally competent and honest government attorney just doing his job.  He knew he could not match Hiss's barrister Lloyd Paul Stryker, the greatest criminal defense lawyer in the country and a dramatic actor who could resemble a July 4 fireworks display if he wanted to.  Also, prosecutors' excessive drama can create sympathy for defendants.  In later years, Murphy was briefly Police Commissioner of New York City (appointed by a reform Mayor) and for decades afterwards was a judge, appointed by President Truman, in the court where the Hiss trials occurred — the federal District Court for the Southern District of New York.  A lawyer/friend who practiced before him told me that Murphy was a very quiet, laid back, passive trial judge and that these traits reflected his inner total self-confidence and sense of his own competence.  My friend said that no matter which side of a case you were on you were always happy when you got Murphy as trial judge. He would let you put on your case as you wished and wouldn't be interrupting your choreography to preen before the jury, comment on the evidence, or audition for higher office   Lloyd Paul Stryker was a magnificent performer, a real barn-burner.  He might be out of place in today's cool culture.  To him, his client was all things good and the other side was pure evil.  It was that simple.  He tended to ‘swing for the bleachers,' ignoring details and endlessly pounding away at one or two simple points in Shakespearean English.  He had a one man office, employing very young lawyers for a few years and then letting them go (with the benefit of having worked for a grand master).  Among the books he wrote (in his spare time!) are laudatory biographies of our first impeached President, Andrew Johnson, and the famous 18th-19th century liberal British barrister Thomas Erskine, and two legal treatises — all available on Amazon.  By the time of this trial, he was approaching old age.  He had made a lot of money but I think he had spent most of it.   Little is known about the judge at the first trial, Samuel Kaufman.  He must have been good to become a judge in the prestigious Southern District, but he left no mark and was thought by some to be a hack from the Manhattan Democratic Party's ‘machine' in Tammany Hall, which was still quite powerful in the 1940s.  He was so small physically that, when he leaned back all the way in his swivel chair up on the bench, he sometimes disappeared from view.   About the jury, the important thing is that, judging from their occupations, none of them had been to graduate school and perhaps none of them had been to college.  They were the kind of people who can't afford to live in Manhattan any more.  This trial took them into an unfamiliar world, of conceptual policy making and political ideology.   Questions:  Do you think Murphy and Stryker were well suited for the roles in which fate cast them?  If you were one of them, how would you use the other's character traits to your advantage?  If you were Murphy or Stryker, how would you take the jury into the foreign (to them) world of the State Department and espionage for the Soviet Union in a way that made your side look good and the other side look bad?  How would you make your man, Hiss or Chambers, seem to someone on the jury as just an honest ordinary person like me?    

Certainly, this Case was painful for Chambers — bringing him close to prison for perjury, ending the quiet and lucrative life he had enjoyed for years and costing him the only decent and decently paying job he had ever had. All the same, Chambers loved melodrama, and can you imagine any more satisfying melodrama than, on a dark and freezing night, leading two government investigators to a pumpkin vine behind your farmhouse and presenting them with five rolls of camera film containing proof of espionage and treason by the man who personifies the governing class of the country?   Further Research:   The dramatic, and sometimes almost comic, events of the first week of December 1948 are recounted in 191-207 and 287-93 of Weinstein's “Perjury,” still the definitive history of this Case. The memoirs of the major participants tell what happened, each somewhat differently from all the others: Bert Andrews' “A Tragedy of History” at 174-91, Chambers' “Witness” at 751-60, Nixon's “Six Crises” at 46-56 and his “RN” at 67-69, and Stripling's “The Red Plot Against America” at 141-51. The most fascinating discrepancy in the accounts concerns the auto trip that Nixon, Stripling, Bert Andrews and the stenographer Rose Purdy took from Washington to Chambers' Maryland farm on the afternoon of December 1 to find out ‘what the hell' had caused Hiss's lawsuit against Chambers to blow up. Chambers, at 751 of Witness, says that Stripling came to see him — strongly implying that Stripling made the tip alone. Nixon adds himself to the trip. (“Six Crises” at 47, “RN” at 67.) Bert Andrews adds himself as the third member of the trip (at 175). Stripling mentions only himself and Nixon (at 143-44). Why would Chambers want to give the impression that only Stripling came to see him? Why would Chambers want to leave Nixon out of the scene? I don't see how that would help him or his side. I doubt he would have forgotten about all the others.   If you go to YouTube and search for “Pumpkin Papers,” you will find a group of film clips, starting with Nixon's and Stripling's press conference and including excerpts from the prior HUAC hearings and later films taken on the courthouse steps during Hiss's trials. You can find other newsreels (which were shown in movie theaters and were the only form of moving image news before TV) about this case by searching on YouTube for “Alger Hiss” or “Whittaker Chambers.” The same search requests, made on CSPAN's web page, will yield more newsreels, lengthy films of the August 25 hearing, as well as many interviews and much commentary on this Case. I suspect that this Case, and Chambers in particular, were favorites of Brian Lamb.  Questions: Who do you think is the most likely leaker of Chambers' first bombshell to the Washington Post? Personally, I have no idea; no evidence, no rumors, not even a theory. Do you feel sorry for Pat (“Here we go again!”) Nixon? Do you sympathize with Nixon's rage at Chambers for not telling him, during the HUAC hearings, that he had proof that Hiss was not only a Communist, but a spy? Can you think of one or more reasons Chambers held back that fact (if it's a fact)? Chambers gave several reasons, which he gave to the Grand Jury. For them, you will have to listen to the next Podcast.  

 Pic: Library of Congress In Podcast 11, Nixon and Stripling pull off another tactical masterstroke.  They bring Hiss and Chambers together, to the surprise of both of them, in a hotel room in New York City.  Despite the locale, it's a formal hearing of Nixon's HUAC Subcommittee and there is a transcript (not to mention half a dozen memoirs).  Nixon asks Hiss, once and for all, if Chambers is the man he knew as George Crosley 10-15 years before.  What happened next has been called “bizarre and even incredible” and “a bit like a Henry James story, . . . full of subtleties and ambiguities.”  Hiss and Stripling were both there and, although they agreed on very little, each in his memoir used the exact same phrase to describe what happened — “something out of a dream.” Further Research: Episode 11:  The descriptions of the scene in Suite 1400 of the Commodore Hotel in New York City in the principals' memoirs are Chambers at 599-615 (at 603 “I felt what any humane man must feel when, pursuing an end he is convinced is right, finds himself the instrument of another man's disaster”), Hiss at 81-99 (at 99, “I resented the Committee's callous and ruthless procedures.  . . .  [T]he Committee and I were now at war.”), Nixon (Six Crises at 31-37, (RN at 61-63 (at 61), “I do not think that I have ever seen one man look at another with more hatred in his eyes than did Alger Hiss when he looked at Whittaker Chambers.”), Stripling at 126-32 (at 128, when Chambers entered the hotel sitting room where Hiss was, “Hiss did not turn around, did not change his expression.  I suppose I expected him to leap up, wheel around, and demand why this man — whom he had testified he did not know — had made these astounding charges against him.”).   See also Weinstein at 45-49 and  Alistair Cooke (at 73-84) describing (at 74) the scene as one that “began circumspectly enough and ended in a naked and desperate scramble for reputation.” Hiss brought along a friend, Mr. Charles Dollard, President of the Carnegie Corporation of New York.  Chambers writes (Witness at 603) that Dollard “hovers at the edge of the ensuing scene like the ‘first attendant, friend to the Duke' in a Shakespeare play.  Most of the time he  lurked in one corner of the room . . . with a curiously fixed smile on his face, which Hiss's loftier jibes turned incandescent with amusement.  . . .  I am not alone in supposing that this by-play was intended to convey the sense that these two beings were native to another atmosphere, were merely condescending, a little impatiently, to the summons of the earthlings in the room.”   Dollard later told Hiss's attorneys that “Alger behaved very badly.”  (Weinstein at 49 (footnote).) Questions:  Do you think, as I do, that when Hiss asked to speak with Chambers' dentist, he was just trying to abort the hearing, to close down the scene because he had no idea what to do — ‘get me the hell out of here,' ‘beam me up, Scottie!'  Do you sympathize with Chambers, who wrote that “I felt somewhat like a broken-mouthed sheep whose jaws have been pried open and are being inspected by wary buyers at an auction”?  (Chambers at 606.)       

Richard M. Nixon, Library of Congress  Alger Hiss calmly and patiently denies Whittaker Chambers' two charges: that the two of them were in the Communist underground in 1934-37 and that they became close friends.  The Commie-hunters on the House Un-American Activities Committee are swept away by his poise and simplicity and tell him what a wonderful witness he is.  Only two listeners smell something fishy in Hiss' carefully phrased testimony: a staffer named Robert Stripling and a freshman Republican Representative named Richard Nixon.  The two form a team of rivals (each claiming credit for the tall thinking and smart talking) and change history.  All four men are now inextricably intertwined in a scandal that will rock the nation.   Further Research Episode 6:  Robert Stripling's book (largely ghostwritten by the popular writer Bob Considine) is “The Red Plot Against America” (Bell 1949); it describes Hiss's testimony and reactions to it at 110-16.  More accounts of Hiss's first testimony are; Nixon at 5-11; Smith at 161-83; Toledano at 151-54; and Weinstein at 21-28.  The full transcript of Hiss's testimony is in the Alpa Editions reprint of the HUAC hearings at 642-59. Alger Hiss's memoir of the Case, “In the Court of Public Opinion” (Knopf 1957) describes at 3-14 Hiss's reaction to Chambers' accusations and his first testimony in response.  This book is so dry (in it, Hiss never once describes having a feeling) that it has been called the only boring book ever written about this Case.  More interesting pro-Hiss reading is the John Chabot Smith book referenced above and a pro-Hiss book that focuses on Nixon's misstatements and craftiness (a territory almost as target-rich as Hiss's testimonies), “A Tissue of Lies:  Nixon vs. Hiss” (McGraw Hill 1979) by Morton and Michael Levitt.   Questions:  You're Alger Hiss, President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a minor luminary of America's post-War foreign policy establishment.   Whittaker Chambers testifies to HUAC that the two of you were in a secret Communist chat group 10-15 years ago and that you two became best friends.  What do you do? Several options:  (1) Do nothing, because no one who matters to your life cares a fig for what goes on at HUAC; (2) appear before the Committee with both guns blazing, in the style of the Hollywood Communists (but remember they came to a sticky end); (3) admit, sheepishly, that back in the dark days of the Great Depression, when you were just out of grad school and had more youthful idealism than good judgment, you did something very foolish that, fortunately, did no harm in the long run and you stopped doing it years ago; and (4) calmly deny Chambers' charges like a gentleman who will not stoop to wrestle in the mud; tough it out, hope Chambers gets tangled up in melodrama, and that, with your sterling reputation and friends in high places, you can emerge in two weeks as fabulous as always and with the added sheen of having repulsed a despicable smear campaign.  Hiss chose #4. If you were Hiss, would your choice depend much on whether Chambers' charges were true?  What if they were true and you knew that you two had also been in a spy ring, a major league crime that Chambers could blackmail you with for the rest of your life if you admitted to the chat group and the friendship?  But since he was in the spy ring, too, you could blackmail him for the rest of his life. Extra Credit Question:  I assume that by now you have read parts of Hiss's testimony and its dissection by Nixon and Stripling.  As you read Hiss for the first time, did you notice any of the suspicion-raising bits that Nixon and Stripling saw?    

With Bernie as the front-runner of the Democrat candidates right now, it's a good time to revisit some of the times he PRAISED communists like Castro and communist countries like the former Soviet Union and China. ALL socialists are bad! Plus, it's about time we saw some justice served to actor Jussie Smollett, who has finally been indicted by a grand jury. And finally, the University of Virginia has a new multicultural center that's open to everyone. Well, except white people. ----- Today's Sponsors: Black Rifle Coffee is a veteran-owned and operated premium, small-batch, roast-to-order coffee company for people who love America. Wake up to America's coffee by going to https://blackriflecoffee.com/whb to receive 20% off your first order of any coffee products (including Black Rifle Coffee Club). The Bouqs Company is here to make your life easier and they offer more than just roses. Sweet treats, beautifully styled bouquets, plants, gifts, and succulents are all on their site. Go to https://bouqs.com/whb for 25% off with code 'WHB'. ----- ► If you love this video, please subscribe to my channel and hit the notification bell: https://bit.ly/2TSyM3k Connect with Jon Miller on social media: https://twitter.com/MillerStream https://www.instagram.com/officialjonmiller https://www.facebook.com/whitehousebrief/ https://www.facebook.com/MillerStream/ About the White House Brief on BlazeTV: Find out what the mainstream media ISN'T telling you about the Trump administration. BlazeTV White House correspondent Jon Miller braves The Washington Hit Squad to cut through the fake news. About Jon Miller: Jon Miller is the host of "The White House Brief” on BlazeTV. He previously worked for Fox News, TheBlaze, and Mercury Radio Arts. In his time in media, Jon has actively fought against leftist bias and attacks against black conservatives like himself. Raised in a non-political household that valued a strong work ethic and individual responsibility, Miller was first introduced to conservatism by reading Whittaker Chambers, Friedrich Hayek, Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater, and Edmund Burke. While attending Columbia University, he joined the College Republicans, but found them to be “too liberal” and then worked as an assistant for Glenn Beck at Fox News. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you're an “expert,” the results in New Hampshire were a doozy. But if you're someone with an ounce of political intuition, the results were exactly what you'd expect. We have been saying for months that Biden had no shot and to watch out for Mayor Pete. Also, leaked audio of Bloomberg reveals how he ACTUALLY feels about "stop-and-frisk" despite his recent reversal. Miller debates Andrew Wilkow on the merits of saving lives through "stop-and-frisk." David Brooks of the Atlantic explains that the nuclear family was a mistake. We think publishing such an asinine article was a mistake. ------- Today's Sponsors: The Bouqs Company is here to make your life easier and they offer more than just roses. Sweet treats, beautifully styled bouquets, plants, gifts, and succulents are all on their site. Go to https://bouqs.com/whb for 25% off with code WHB. Home Title Lock puts a virtual barrier around your home's title and mortgage. Go to https://HomeTitleLock.com and enter your address to see if you're already a victim. Act now to get 60 risk free days of Home Title Lock. ------- Connect with Miller on Social Media: https://twitter.com/MillerStream https://instagram.com/officialjonmiller https://www.facebook.com/whitehousebrief https://www.facebook.com/MillerStream/    About the White House Brief on BlazeTV: Find out what the mainstream media ISN'T telling you about the Trump administration. BlazeTV White House correspondent Jon Miller braves The Washington Hit Squad to cut through the fake news.   About Jon Miller: Jon Miller is the host of "The White House Brief” on BlazeTV. He previously worked for Fox News, TheBlaze, and Mercury Radio Arts. In his time in media, Jon has actively fought against leftist bias and attacks against black conservatives like himself. Raised in a non-political household that valued a strong work ethic and individual responsibility, Miller was first introduced to conservatism by reading Whittaker Chambers, Friedrich Hayek, Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater, and Edmund Burke. While attending Columbia University, he joined the College Republicans, but found them to be “too liberal” and then worked as an assistant for Glenn Beck at Fox News.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman was the first to go. Could Trump finally be draining the swamp by ridding the National Security Council of dozens of Obama holdovers? Plus, in our mission to cover the stories that don't fit the establishment narrative (you know … that angry white supremacists are the only ones who pose a real threat to this country) we cover one story that few have touched: the attempted attacks on Trump supporters' lives in Florida. And lastly, Rebel News founder Ezra Levant caught a convicted terrorist on his Air Canada flight. Excuse me, Canadian government, what say you about this atrocity? Levant shares his shocking experience with Miller. Today's Sponsors: The Bouqs Company is here to make your life easier and they offer more than just roses. Sweet treats, beautifully styled bouquets, plants, gifts, and succulents are all on their site. Go to https://bouqs.com/whb for 25% off with code WHB. PARLER is the news & free speech app that won't silence your opinion or violate your privacy for financial gain. Simply download the app, create your account, post, share, and SPEAK ... FREELY. https://parler.com/auth/access ------- Connect with Miller on Social Media: https://twitter.com/MillerStream https://instagram.com/officialjonmiller https://www.facebook.com/whitehousebrief https://www.facebook.com/MillerStream/    About the White House Brief on BlazeTV: Find out what the mainstream media ISN'T telling you about the Trump administration. BlazeTV White House correspondent Jon Miller braves The Washington Hit Squad to cut through the fake news.   About Jon Miller: Jon Miller is the host of "The White House Brief” on BlazeTV. He previously worked for Fox News, TheBlaze, and Mercury Radio Arts. In his time in media, Jon has actively fought against leftist bias and attacks against black conservatives like himself. Raised in a non-political household that valued a strong work ethic and individual responsibility, Miller was first introduced to conservatism by reading Whittaker Chambers, Friedrich Hayek, Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater, and Edmund Burke. While attending Columbia University, he joined the College Republicans, but found them to be “too liberal” and then worked as an assistant for Glenn Beck at Fox News. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Even the Democrats are saying it was Trump's best week EVER, but we can't let the president get too complacent — there's more work to be done! Plus, Miller has some explaining to do about his tweet that went viral Sunday night during the Oscars. ------ Today's Sponsors: The Bouqs Company is here to make your life easier and they offer more than just roses. Sweet treats, beautifully styled bouquets, plants, gifts, and succulents are all on their site. Go to https://bouqs.com/whb for 25% off with code WHB. Ashford University is higher education at your own pace. Gain skills you can use in your job now, and knowledge that prepares you for the job market of tomorrow. Enroll now by going to https://Ashford.edu/WHB ------ Connect with Miller on Social Media: https://twitter.com/MillerStream https://instagram.com/officialjonmiller https://www.facebook.com/whitehousebrief https://www.facebook.com/MillerStream/   > Try BlazeTV FREE for 30 days: https://blazetv.com/WHB   About the White House Brief on BlazeTV: Find out what the mainstream media ISN'T telling you about the Trump administration. BlazeTV White House correspondent Jon Miller braves The Washington Hit Squad to cut through the fake news.   About Jon Miller: Jon Miller is the host of "The White House Brief” on BlazeTV. He previously worked for Fox News, TheBlaze, and Mercury Radio Arts. In his time in media, Jon has actively fought against leftist bias and attacks against black conservatives like himself. Raised in a non-political household that valued a strong work ethic and individual responsibility, Miller was first introduced to conservatism by reading Whittaker Chambers, Friedrich Hayek, Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater, and Edmund Burke. While attending Columbia University, he joined the College Republicans, but found them to be “too liberal” and then worked as an assistant for Glenn Beck at Fox News. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The entire impeachment saga was a waste of everyone's time, and the Democrats (and Mitt Romney … or is that repetitive?) should be absolutely ashamed of themselves for foisting it on all of us. Now, until the Democrats come up with their next scheme, Trump can move on to the things that ACTUALLY matter to the American people. Also, Jon Miller discusses David Hogg's latest bout of idiocy and how Joe Biden was never going to be the front-runner. Today's Sponsors: Black Rifle Coffee is a veteran-owned and operated premium, small-batch, roast-to-order coffee company for people who love America. Wake up to America's coffee by going to https://blackriflecoffee.com/whb to receive 20% off your first order of any coffee products (including Black Rifle Coffee Club). The Bouqs Company is here to make your life easier and they offer more than just roses. Sweet treats, beautifully styled bouquets, plants, gifts, and succulents are all on their site. Go to https://bouqs.com/whb for 25% off with code WHB. Connect with Miller on Social Media: https://twitter.com/MillerStream https://instagram.com/officialjonmiller https://www.facebook.com/whitehousebrief https://www.facebook.com/MillerStream/   > Sign up for my free daily email to find out what's really going on in the White House: https://blazetv.com/WHB   About the White House Brief on BlazeTV: Find out what the mainstream media ISN'T telling you about the Trump administration. BlazeTV White House correspondent Jon Miller braves The Washington Hit Squad to cut through the fake news.   About Jon Miller: Jon Miller is the host of "The White House Brief” on BlazeTV. He previously worked for Fox News, TheBlaze, and Mercury Radio Arts. In his time in media, Jon has actively fought against leftist bias and attacks against black conservatives like himself. Raised in a non-political household that valued a strong work ethic and individual responsibility, Miller was first introduced to conservatism by reading Whittaker Chambers, Friedrich Hayek, Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater, and Edmund Burke. While attending Columbia University, he joined the College Republicans, but found them to be “too liberal” and then worked as an assistant for Glenn Beck at Fox News. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joined by Stu Burguiere, host of "Stu Does America," Miller takes on traitorous Mitt Romney, who announced he will vote to convict Trump and remove him from office. No one is surprised, but it's never a bad opportunity to point out what a piece of garbage he is. Trump delivers another outstanding State of the Union speech, but Dems completely dishonor the office by ripping his guest of honor, Rush Limbaugh, who was just diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer, and ripping … literally ... Trump's speech to shreds. The sad state of the Democrat Party is so tangible you can taste it. Today's Sponsors:  The Bouqs Company is here to make your life easier and they offer more than just roses. Sweet treats, beautifully styled bouquets, plants, gifts, and succulents are all on their site. Go to https://bouqs.com/whb for 25% off with code WHB.---Keeps helps men keep their hair and prevent hair loss. Get a free online doctor consult and 50% off your first order. Visit https://Keeps.com/TODAY Connect with Miller on Social Media: https://twitter.com/MillerStream https://instagram.com/officialjonmiller https://www.facebook.com/whitehousebrief https://www.facebook.com/MillerStream/   > Sign up for my free daily email to find out what's really going on in the White House: https://blazetv.com/WHB  About the White House Brief on BlazeTV: Find out what the mainstream media ISN'T telling you about the Trump administration. BlazeTV White House correspondent Jon Miller braves The Washington Hit Squad to cut through the fake news.   About Jon Miller: Jon Miller is the host of "The White House Brief” on BlazeTV. He previously worked for Fox News, TheBlaze, and Mercury Radio Arts. In his time in media, Jon has actively fought against leftist bias and attacks against black conservatives like himself. Raised in a non-political household that valued a strong work ethic and individual responsibility, Miller was first introduced to conservatism by reading Whittaker Chambers, Friedrich Hayek, Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater, and Edmund Burke. While attending Columbia University, he joined the College Republicans, but found them to be “too liberal” and then worked as an assistant for Glenn Beck at Fox News. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We are all eagerly anticipating what Donald Trump has to say at tonight's State of the Union. Jon Miller thinks things are looking more than okay. He gives a fun and thorough review of where the country is at in terms of the economy, employment, the military, race relations, and criminal justice reform.   Today's Sponsors:   The Bouqs Company is here to make your life easier and they offer more than just roses. Sweet treats, beautifully styled bouquets, plants, gifts, and succulents are all on their site. Go to https://bouqs.com/whb for 25% off with code WHB. Tommy John is more than just underwear. They've got 750 products online such as super soft loungewear, polo shirts, and apparel. For 20% off your first order, visit: https://TommyJohn.com/WHB      Connect with Miller on Social Media: https://twitter.com/MillerStream https://instagram.com/officialjonmiller https://www.facebook.com/whitehousebrief https://www.facebook.com/MillerStream/   > Sign up for my free daily email to find out what's really going on in the White House: https://blazetv.com/WHB  About the White House Brief on BlazeTV: Find out what the mainstream media ISN'T telling you about the Trump administration. BlazeTV White House correspondent Jon Miller braves The Washington Hit Squad to cut through the fake news.   About Jon Miller: Jon Miller is the host of "The White House Brief” on BlazeTV. He previously worked for Fox News, TheBlaze, and Mercury Radio Arts. In his time in media, Jon has actively fought against leftist bias and attacks against black conservatives like himself. Raised in a non-political household that valued a strong work ethic and individual responsibility, Miller was first introduced to conservatism by reading Whittaker Chambers, Friedrich Hayek, Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater, and Edmund Burke. While attending Columbia University, he joined the College Republicans, but found them to be “too liberal” and then worked as an assistant for Glenn Beck at Fox News. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Equal Rights Amendment should have died a long time ago. Women already have all the same rights as men. This law can only bring harm to women by destroying programs, like WIC, that specifically benefit women. It could also make them eligible for combat. Not good! Then, Republican strategist Luke Mahoney discusses the many different ways the Democrats are failing themselves and this country during impeachment. Finally, Jon Miller is getting a puppy! He needs your help narrowing down the choices.    Today's Sponsor:   If you're thinking about buying a car, refinancing your home, or applying for credit – call https://creditrepair.com first. Get your free credit score and report – plus smart advice from actual humans on how you can improve both. Call 800-551-9835       Connect with Miller on Social Media: https://twitter.com/MillerStream https://instagram.com/officialjonmiller https://www.facebook.com/whitehousebrief https://www.facebook.com/MillerStream/   > Sign up for my free daily email to find out what's really going on in the White House: https://blazetv.com/WHB  About the White House Brief on BlazeTV: Find out what the mainstream media ISN'T telling you about the Trump administration. BlazeTV White House correspondent Jon Miller braves The Washington Hit Squad to cut through the fake news.   About Jon Miller: Jon Miller is the host of "The White House Brief” on BlazeTV. He previously worked for Fox News, TheBlaze, and Mercury Radio Arts. In his time in media, Jon has actively fought against leftist bias and attacks against black conservatives like himself. Raised in a non-political household that valued a strong work ethic and individual responsibility, Miller was first introduced to conservatism by reading Whittaker Chambers, Friedrich Hayek, Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater, and Edmund Burke. While attending Columbia University, he joined the College Republicans, but found them to be “too liberal” and then worked as an assistant for Glenn Beck at Fox News. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sanctuary city policies allow murderers, rapists, robbers — the worst offenders you can think of — to roam free. American citizens die horrible deaths because Democrats love illegal immigration more than their own country. Donald Trump stressed this at his rally last night and now needs to start punishing the sanctuary jurisdictions all over the country. Then, BlazeTV host Chad Prather joins to talk about the idiots on CNN who are all but handing Trump a November victory with their open mockery of rural voters. They also laugh about the MSNBC reporter's flub of the word “Lakers” while discussing Kobe Bryant's untimely death.   Today's Sponsor: Home Title Lock puts a virtual barrier around your home's title and mortgage. Go to https://HomeTitleLock.com and enter your address to see if you're already a victim. Act now to get 60 risk-free days of Home Title Lock.    Connect with Miller on Social Media: https://twitter.com/MillerStream https://instagram.com/officialjonmiller https://www.facebook.com/whitehousebrief https://www.facebook.com/MillerStream/   > Sign up for my free daily email to find out what's really going on in the White House: https://blazetv.com/WHB  About the White House Brief on BlazeTV: Find out what the mainstream media ISN'T telling you about the Trump administration. BlazeTV White House correspondent Jon Miller braves The Washington Hit Squad to cut through the fake news.   About Jon Miller: Jon Miller is the host of "The White House Brief” on BlazeTV. He previously worked for Fox News, TheBlaze, and Mercury Radio Arts. In his time in media, Jon has actively fought against leftist bias and attacks against black conservatives like himself. Raised in a non-political household that valued a strong work ethic and individual responsibility, Miller was first introduced to conservatism by reading Whittaker Chambers, Friedrich Hayek, Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater, and Edmund Burke. While attending Columbia University, he joined the College Republicans, but found them to be “too liberal” and then worked as an assistant for Glenn Beck at Fox News.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices