Welcome back to the Dershow, you know, when I was growing up, the most important committee

of Congress was the House on American Activities Committee.

It destroyed the lives of so many innocent people at pressured television stations to take

people off who were suspected of communism, it was called red channels.

There was a blacklist.

Witnesses was summoned to the committee and asked about their friends, privileges that

they might have had weren't taken seriously.

And of course, we gave a name to this phenomenon, it was called McCarthyism, even though

Senator McCarthy was in the upper house, not the lower house.

His influence was felt throughout Congress.

So it was also a Senate committee, but the House on American Activities Committee was

the more influential and more dangerous and caused more harm.

Now I don't want to make direct comparisons between the House on American Activities Committee

and the January 9th House Committee that is now scheduled to hold televised hearings

with a retired TV producer kind of directing it on Thursday night, by the way, the only

good thing is the Celtics aren't playing on Thursday night, so I can watch it without

avoiding my cheering for my home team.

But what's going on with the House on American Activities Committee, the new version, really

does invoke comparisons, now there are differences.

The House on American Activities Committee was chasing a phantom, I mean, communism was

there, it existed in the United States, it certainly was a serious threat all over Europe.

The Soviet Union had taken control of all of Eastern Europe, much of Central Europe,

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