Unraveling 16: Drain the Swamp v1.0
Jocko Unraveling
Jocko DEFCOR Network
4.8 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 3 April 2021
⏱️ 95 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Description: As the Cold War kicked off in the late 1940s, America was rocked by revelations that hundreds of Soviet spies had somehow entrenched themselves in the highest levels of the government. When Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy took the lead in exposing them, he kicked a hornet's nest that soon swarmed and overwhelmed him. The period known as the "Red Scare" is a complex time in American history, and Senator McCarthy was a complex man with ambivalent personal motivations. Unfortunately, the hornets he agitated included the political press and academic establishment, who for decades worked to wash away the complexities of the man and the era.
The popular political cartoonist Jules Feiffer once wrote that "the secret to good cartooning is hate." Not personal hate, he clarified, but professional hate: "the intensity of conviction that comes to a craftsman's work when he has made the decision to kill, the decision to shun all political and behavioral complexities, so that the subject becomes, purely and simply, a demon."
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | 1. This is the Jocco Unraveling Podcast episode 16 with Darryl Cooper and me, Jocco Willink. |
| 0:09.4 | So on the last Unraveling Podcast, we talked about the Salem Witch Hunt. An event that |
| 0:23.6 | is shocking and horrifying, not because of the witches, but because of the people, because |
| 0:33.9 | of the human beings caught up in the mob mentality that start to do things that are unthinkable |
| 0:43.0 | in normal circumstances. But there is another event, maybe not quite as horrific, maybe |
| 0:52.2 | not quite as shocking, but it often gets thrown into the witch hunt category. And if you |
| 1:00.3 | look closely at it, it reveals something that's actually different in many ways. It's |
| 1:07.9 | the Red Scare. The Red Scare in particular, the second Red Scare from the late 1940s, proceeding |
| 1:16.3 | into the mid to late 1950s. The second Red Scare also known as McCarthyism due to Senator |
| 1:27.5 | Joe McCarthy who led the charge, who went all in against communism. And as you pulled |
| 1:38.5 | this thing apart, you start to try and figure out, well, what was it that he was afraid |
| 1:45.7 | of? What was it that he was paranoid about? Right word? What's up? What was it? How did |
| 1:58.1 | it end up there? How did it end up into what is often called a witch hunt? It's a little |
| 2:09.3 | different scenario that you end up discovering. And part of that's due to information that |
| 2:15.8 | we have now, which is available, which is reveals a lot more. You can see the witchcraft |
| 2:23.2 | and the witchcraft was real. Let's unravel this. What do you got? Well, I think it would |
| 2:34.9 | be good to start by thinking about the way we tend to process history, especially our |
| 2:42.5 | own history, and the way we interact with others as a country, as a society. And every |
| 2:46.8 | country does this, every people does this, where over time, the history, your own history, |
| 2:52.5 | as you know it, doesn't come down to you in a very nuanced way. I'm talking in the |
| 2:57.1 | popular consciousness. You can go find an academic book, but if you go to most people and |
| 3:01.3 | say, what is the popular consensus about what happened throughout all the events of |
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