Jeff Roche

speaker

654 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2025 last heard 20 Dec

Jeff Roche’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.

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New Books in History · Jeff Roche, "The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right" (U Texas Press, 2025) · 20 Dec 2025 podcast

So that was the other big fear for him.

And that you can see across his careers is this free enterprise plus the protection of white supremacy is very important to he and many of his followers.

Yeah, so the signature sort of move that happens in this time period you're describing is a, not a mass movement, not yet, but a large enough movement in going from being uncomfortable with the spread of federal power and centralized power to be seeing that as part of a larger plot, right?

And when we're talking about the right wing, the Texas right wing in the late 1940s into the 1950s and early 1960s, the group we're talking about are conspiracy theorists.

And they are paranoid.

And they have come to various conclusions.

versions of a conclusion that there is a secret communist conspiracy at work in American life and American public life to overthrow the nation from within.

And that gains traction over the 1950s.

And anti-communism becomes this powerful language.

It's not very delicate, but it's as subtle as a sledgehammer.

But it's powerful.

Anything you notice in modern life that you don't really feel comfortable with

One of the explanations for the arrival of this thing that you don't like, it's part of a communist conspiracy.

And that finds fertile soil in West Texas for a variety of reasons.

Central is that the region during this time period hadn't really changed.

I mean, this is... Once the war begins and once the rains come back, the idea of commercial family agriculture in this so small town continues.

But the rest of the nation had become more urbanized and had become... Larger industries are at work and there's a lot of movement around the country.

And that's just not really happening in West Texas.

So...

And the powers that be, let's call them the decision makers at a local and regional level, really begin to focus in on protecting the status quo and protecting their idea, their vision of what American life should look like.

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