Jeff Roche

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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 threats to that vision become—they're taken seriously.

And so this easy explanation that things you don't like are a part of a communist plot takes root everywhere, all over the country, but in particular here.

The other part of the reason is that the media culture—

in West Texas was dominated by people who took this communist, this internal communist very, very seriously.

And with limited media markets and then, you know, lack of access to alternative points of view certainly helped us along.

All of the major newspapers in the region from in Emerald, Lubbock, and Midland were all dominated by

by sort of conservative editors who pushed a particular kind of conspiracy-laden anti-communism within the pages of the newspapers and the radio and to some degree on the newer TV stations.

So there's a couple of ways this happened, and I should have mentioned this in the section about West Texas and how it spreads there so quickly.

There's a neglected mention that...

This is one of the great joys of doing grassroots history is you find places where politics happen that you don't necessarily, you didn't expect it to see it there or you didn't, maybe that's not a strong enough word, but when you see it afterwards, you're like, okay, that makes sense.

So a lot of this politics is also happening in small town and small city civic organizations.

Yeah.

Chambers of Commerce, Kiwanis Club, Rotary, Junior League, these kinds of things.

And at the national level, there is an outpouring of what we would now just call content, sort of right-wing content.

ultra-conservative, anti-communist content that's being produced in several kinds of places.

And the content is usually in the form of film strips, but also speakers' bureaus.

And this content in particular was designed to be shown at the weekly meetings of these kinds of organizations.

And they're all... I mean, if you've ever been to...

Rotary Club meetings or things, they're always looking for something to fill the hour that you meet a week.

So the thing is like 30, 35 minutes.

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