Shining City Audio, a John Meacham and C-13 original studio.

February 9, 1950, Joe McCarthy launches a new red scare.

I'm John Meacham and this is Reflections of History.

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Today, we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communist atheism and Christianity.

Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin said in an address to the Ohio County Republican Women's Club

in Wheeling, West Virginia on this date, Thursday, February 9, 1950.

McCarthy went on, the modern champions of communism have selected this as the time.

And ladies and gentlemen, the chips are down. They are truly down.

McCarthy was something extraordinary in modern political life, a freelance performer who grasped what many ordinary Americans feared

and who had direct access to the media of the day.

One communist on the back of it, of one universal day is one communist two minutes.

He exploited the privileges of power and prominence without regard to its responsibilities.

To him, politics was not about the substantive, but the sensational.

The country feared communism, and McCarthy knew it, and he fed those fears with years of headlines and hearings.

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