It's the Brian Laira show on WNYC.

Good morning again, everyone.

Now we continue our WNYC Centennial series,

A Hundred Years of a Hundred Things.

You know, we started this last July, and now we have reached thing number 80.

It's 100 years of McCarthyism from a century ago to today.

Just as an example of how contemporary the notion of McCarthyism still is, just yesterday,

a group of Columbia University faculty members sued the Trump administration

over the $400 million in medical research and other grants. Trump is withholding until the

university satisfies Trump's demands on various things. While referring to the suit,

teachers union president Randy Weingarten called it called what Trump is doing modern day

McCarthyism so here we are with that word still in play for things that are at least allegedly

going on right now our guess for this hundred year segment is New York Times correspondent

Clay Risen who also writes books about history and has a new one that plays

right into our 100 years' hands called Red Scare, Blacklist, McCarthyism, and the Making of

Modern America. Clay, thanks for coming on. Congratulations on the book. Welcome back to WNYC.

Oh, thanks, Brian. It's an honor to be here. People who know about McCarthyism

from Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy usually think of it as a Cold War 1950s phenomenon,

but your timeline does go back a full hundred years to shortly after World War I. Why start

there? Well, yeah, you know, there really were two red scares,

separate but connected. The first one began right after World War I and involved

rounding up and in some case deportation of people who are considered radicals. These were

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