Ed Helms

credibility built on fear and panic might actually be quite fragile.

I will say Trump seems to be proving otherwise.

Yeah, you're right.

Well, guess who sneaked away from this whole affair squeaky clean?

Yeah.

Yep.

Palmer's downfall left zero stink on J. Edgar Hoover, who was truly the organizer of these raids.

He would soon become the head of the Bureau of Investigation, which, of course, would become the Federal Bureau of Investigation, where Hoover would spend the next half century perfecting the art of collecting secrets, intimidating enemies and rewriting the rules to suit himself.

The Palmer raids faded from headlines, but their DNA certainly lived on.

It reemerged in McCarthyism, in COINTELPRO, in the Patriot Act, and in basically every, quote, emergency measure justified by fear.

Enemies come and go, right?

But the playbook stays the same.

It's manufacture panic, suspend rights, call it patriotism.

There are so many parallels, obviously, to this modern moment.

They were just coming out of a pandemic.

We have COVID right behind us.

The targeting of immigrants, the – as Scott was pointing out, the kind of targeting of the other.

We're not mad at foreign sort of states abroad that might be threatening us.

We're just mad at ourselves internally.

There's a breakdown of due process that we're seeing in these ICE raids.