Max Boot
speaker
527 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 28 Jul
Max Boot’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It didn't make a lot of sense.
But this was the kind of the paranoid atmosphere of the late 40s, early 50s.
I think what was really important was that when his movie career dried up, his agents found him a new gig working for General Electric, GE Theater, which was hosting this Sunday night show on CBS.
And in those days, General Electric was a very conservative company, very right wing, because they saw spreading free market ideology as being kind of an inoculation of
against union troubles.
And so they went to a lot of troubles to make sure that all their managers and spokesmen read all these conservative publications and were fully indoctrinated into this kind of right-wing worldview.
And Ronald Reagan was a very faithful employee, and he had a lot of time to read because he was afraid of flying in those days.
So he would take the train from LA to New York to speak on behalf of General Electric.
And then he would go around the country speaking at GE plants and civic organizations and elsewhere.
And he wasn't just speaking about
how great GE's products were.
He was talking about the issues of the day, and he was reading National Review, reading Human Events, reading Reader's Digest, all these other publications, and hearing what his GE bosses were saying.
And so his worldview was changing.
As I mentioned, he had already become the staunch anti-communist by that point, but it was really his stint with GE in the 1950s that also converted him into this hardline, free-market,
guy who saw any kind of government regulation as the destruction of freedom in America.
And that became kind of the gospel that he was preaching on behalf of GE, basically talking about the threat of communism from without, from the Soviet Union, but also from within, and suggesting that any kind of social welfare legislation was going to lead to communism in America.
And in the 60s, when the bills to create
Medicare and Medicaid were being debated in Congress.
He called that socialized medicine and predicted it would lead to this totalitarian regime in America.
So he became this very staunch, hardline right-winger, I think, during his tenure working for GE.
Showing 161–180 of 527 · page 9 of 27
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