Hello and welcome to this day, a history show from Radiotopia. My name is Jody Avergan.

I will keep this intro short because this is part two of what we were calling chilled speech week, I guess.

But in the last episode, we talked about the early days of the anti-communist fervor in the

50s, especially a lot of the lists that were created by this pamphlet that circulated called

Red Channels, and how that started to then ferment fear and suspicion and oppression and

cancellation in Hollywood, in academia, and then eventually we also see the government itself pick up the

mantle with the Hughack hearings and McCarthyism and so forth. Now we turn our gaze to another

era of chilled speech and a sort of mania about public speech, and that is the time after 9-11.

Here, as always, Nicole Hammer of Vanderbilt and

Kelly Carter Jackson of Wesley. Hello there. Hello, Jody. Hey there. So we lived through this.

We remember it, but I will confess that even in rounding up some of these examples, I'd forgotten

a little bit of how wild things, wild and

woolly things got in the weeks and months and years after 9-11.

Really wooly. I mean, one of the sort of lasting sort of memories for me is just suddenly

everything was blanketed and red, white, and blue flags. Like, you turned on the television, there was just flag iconography everywhere.

This is when cable news channels, but especially Fox News, they just start draping their sets,

not just in like the breaking news things, but they were just flags, flags, flags, flags, flags, flags,

flags, flags, flags.

And there's this real sense of a kind of, I mean, people were moved, right?

To express their grief and to express a sense of belonging.

But there was also some compulsory patriotism going along around, which didn't make people feel great.

Like more than the Olympics.

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