If we want to understand how we arrived in this authoritarian moment in 2025, we need to understand one of the central pathways that brought us here: McCarthyism. In his firsthand account of the 1949 ...

Red scares in the American past and present. What are the parallels between the rise of McCarthyism in the 1950s and today? “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” So begins ...

When, exactly, was America great? For as long as Donald Trump has touted the MAGA slogan, he has been cagey about the answer. But recent weeks have suggested a few possibilities. One is the Gilded Age ...

NPR's Steve Inskeep speaks with author Clay Risen about his new book, "Red Scare," which tells the story of McCarthyism based in part on newly declassified sources. A new book by journalist Clay Risen ...

Early in “Red Scare,” Clay Risen’s thorough, impassioned but even-handed study of Cold War hysteria in the U.S., the author makes a point of explaining what his subject is — and isn’t. “There is a ...

Clay Risen, a New York Times reporter who has written several volumes of popular history, has now tackled the familiar story of the Second Red Scare—the period after World War II, when the nation's ...

Recent actions by the Trump administration — including the arrest of pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil — have drawn comparisons to the Red Scare of the early and mid-20th century. Here & Now's ...

In “Red Scare,” Clay Risen shows how culture in the United States is still driven by the political paranoia of the 1950s. By Kevin Peraino Kevin Peraino is the author, most recently, of “A Force So ...

The political theorist Corey Robin walks through the history of the Red Scare and the “fractured mirror” it is to Trump’s attack on the “radical left.” This is an edited transcript of an episode of ...

I met Pete Seeger personally while directing a documentary film about his environmental legacy. Yet, the First Amendment has not always been potent enough to protect the right to speak. The Cold War ...