The FBI w/ Stephen Underhill
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 22 January 2024
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The FBI has been the subject of criticism and concern since it was founded in 1908, but it has nevertheless become one of the most powerful, stable, and mythologized branches of the Executive Branch of the US government. In this episode, Steve Underhill joins us to discuss the origins of the FBI, the role J. Edgar Hoover played in making the modern Brueau, and how that greater history of the FBI can help us understand how they've approached their seizure of documents from Mar-a-Lago and the subsequent attack from Donald Trump.
Dr. Stephen M. Underhill is Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication Studies at Marshall University, where he studies the rhetoric of law enforcement. His book The Manufacture of Consent: J. Edgar Hoover and the Rhetorical Rise of the FBI was published in 2020.
This is a rebroadcast of RTN #247, which originally aired on September 19, 2022. The original episode was edited by Gary Fletcher. This reair was edited by Ben Sawyer.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Ben Sawyer and this is the road to now. |
| 0:09.3 | 2024 has already been an amazing year for us. |
| 0:12.6 | Bob and I have recorded so many episodes this year. |
| 0:15.5 | We are working on this series about also-rans, you know, these elections where you have |
| 0:20.5 | third party or fourth-party candidates shaking things up. You know, these elections where you have third party or fourth party |
| 0:21.9 | candidates shaking things up, you know, it's an election year, anything could happen. So we've |
| 0:26.4 | been working on that, and the lineup is insane. We've already had Lindsay Trevensky on 1824. |
| 0:32.5 | We have Rick Pearlstein coming up on 1980, Julian Zelizer on 1992. The lineup is amazing, and that's going to come out |
| 0:42.1 | in a couple of weeks, a couple of months. We're still working on the scheduling. We also, |
| 0:46.2 | in the meantime, have been recording these new episodes, and we interviewed Jeffrey Rosen, |
| 0:51.5 | the National Constitution Center. We've had him on before. He's got this |
| 0:55.1 | incredible new book coming out called The Pursuit of Happiness, this deep dive into the way |
| 0:59.9 | the founders understood the meaning of that phrase. And as we recorded these, we realized that |
| 1:05.6 | Jeffrey Rosen wanted us to air his episode next week to go along with the book launch. And guess what? That book's so good. We're going to help that guy out and do it. So that left us a gap week, surprisingly, because we've banked maybe a month and a half worth of episodes at this point. So this week, we're going to share a previous episode. This is always a delight for no other reason because I get to go back and listen to episodes as I edit these. |
| 1:29.5 | And this week, we're returning to one from late 2022 with Stephen Underhill on the FBI. |
| 1:35.9 | This conversation was mind-blowing. Listening to it again, it's just there's so much in here. |
| 1:40.3 | Jay Edgar Hoover was a power monger, just the way he shaped the country behind the presidency. |
| 1:47.1 | It's almost hard to believe. So we're resharing this episode. There is some talk in here from the |
| 1:51.9 | time about the documents in Mara Lago and Trump against the FBI. I've trimmed out a lot of that, |
| 1:58.6 | but it still kind of sets the tone for some of the later conversation. And we'll be back next week with Jeffrey Rosen on the pursuit of happiness, |
| 2:05.5 | and then after that, this lineup this year is just brilliant. |
| 2:09.5 | Thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting us. Patrons, you guys are amazing. |
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