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My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.

As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices.

What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,

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If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. Hello and thanks for downloading witness history from the BBC World Service.

All this week we're looking back at key moments in the history of the American presidency.

In 1979 an organization was launched which changed the course of American politics.

The moral majority was set up by religious conservatives to promote family values and it urged Protestants in particular

to vote Republican.

Richard Vigory was one of the driving forces behind the movement and he spoke to me Claire Bowes about the birth of the religious

right and its role in helping Ronald Reagan win the presidency in 1980.

Dr Johnson said nothing focuses the mind like an impending hanging.

Richard Viggery, a lifelong Republican.

We felt in those days we were not far away from being hanged literally not figuratively but

literally by the communist because if they took over the world we were going to be

on a short list to be executed.

The fear of communism had hung over Richard Vigory for his whole lifetime.

Playing games with children in the neighborhood outside of Houston, cowboys and Indians, I wasn't in my with the other kids

shooting Indians or shooting robbers. Didn't tell anybody but I was shooting

communists. And it wasn't just the issue of communism. In 1979 he and other conservatives felt that the

USA was going in the wrong direction.

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