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Chapter 1: What is the significance of the Palmer Raids in American history?
I wanted to do this podcast because I was hoping to establish a friendship with you because I thought you'd be really fun to party with. And I'm no longer sure. You seem very serious and kind of, I don't know, very highbrow. So anyways, that's a bit of a disappointment.
Yeah, I can deliver on both fronts. Okay, good.
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Chapter 2: How did the political climate in 1919 lead to the Palmer Raids?
It's basically like Doris Day. Right? No, I turn into Bea Arthur.
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Hey there, I'm Ed Helms, and welcome to Snafu, the show where I take my guests on a delightful romp through history's biggest screw-ups in a courageous and, let's be honest, largely futile attempt to better understand the human condition. My guests today are two of the sharpest... funniest and most brutally honest voices in tech, business, culture and politics.
Individually, they're award-winning journalists, thought leaders and podcasters hosting fantastic shows like On with Kara Swisher, The Prof G Pod and Raging Moderates. But together. They co-host Pivot, a show that is highly entertaining and profoundly insightful and basically required listening for anyone trying to navigate this insane moment that we find ourselves in.
Welcome to Snafu, Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway.
Thank you. You know, Scott is the definition of snafu. That's, you know, how we got started. It was a snafu.
That's my stage name when I'm a stripper.
Yeah. Yeah. No, it's your porn name.
Snafu. There you go. Snafu. How do you mean that you got started through a snafu?
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Chapter 3: What were the immediate impacts of the Palmer Raids on civil liberties?
And you're so well informed, but also clearly insanely busy. So I have to been dying to ask you this. How do you keep up with the news? Like, what are your news consumption habits? What are your go to sources? Kara, you first.
I've lately been using blue sky and threads to keep up with news. Like I watched there, but I do read the wall street journal, the Washington post when things are suggested, um, uh, the New York times, obviously, but I look everywhere. I find news everywhere, weird stories, people, things sent to me, but I have a pretty strong news diet.
And then I watch a lot of TV and et cetera, trying to keep on cultural stuff and read people. I like, right. That are really smart, including Scott. I read his stuff that he reads. He writes all the time and no mercy, no malice. But I keep up with it rather actively, and I think Scott does too.
So my media go-tos, The Economist, the BBC, and the Financial Times. Ed, all of that is a lie. I get all of my information. I get all of my information from Instagram, TikTok. Threads. And occasionally threads. And I hate to say it, but my mind is being shaped by algorithms run by psychopaths. Yeah, that tracks. I get all my news from social media now, and it wasn't that way two years ago.
I want to get right into today's snafu because it's really a doozy, and I think you're going to find some rather strikingly resonant story points here. Today, we're going to jump back to 1919, to one of the most insane and shameful chapters in U.S. history, the Palmer Raids. Are either of you familiar with the Palmer Raids?
I'm not. I'm not. There's so much of U.S. history we do not learn.
It's basically police abuse, isn't it? Yeah, that's essentially sort of the nugget. So let's start with a little political context. The U.S. was pulled into World War I in 1917, and the national mood was very tense, to say the least. President Woodrow Wilson was worried about internal opposition to the war. So with the help of Congress, he passed two critical laws.
First, the Espionage Act of 1917, meant to stop spies and wartime sabotage. But it quickly became a catch-all for just silencing dissent. You could be jailed for criticizing the draft or handing out anti-war leaflets. Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs gave a speech questioning the war and got a 10-year prison sentence.
Next came the Sedition Act of 1918, which made it a crime to say anything, quote, dangerous. disloyal about the U.S. government, the flag, or the military.
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Chapter 4: How did the Palmer Raids reflect societal fears of communism?
Newspapers were shut down, teachers got fired, and ordinary citizens were arrested for nothing more than calling the war a mistake. So obviously, this is a bit of a middle finger to the Constitution. Carol, why do we do this? Why do we keep convincing ourselves in scary times that free speech is the problem and that maybe silencing people and banning books will somehow make our problems go away?
Right. I think it was from the very beginning. John Adams wasn't he. There was an involvement of another thing back then. There was whether it's seditious. You know, I think he sued a newspaper man for propaganda or whatever. So it's not it's not a new thing. We know it. We always do. I mean. We always try to find people of dissent. And let me give you one example that people don't know about.
But when the Gutenberg Press was created, everyone always associates with the Bible and then the Renaissance, scientific books. But the very first book of the... of the Gutenberg era was a thing called the Hammer of Witches, which was a treatise on women and Satan and witches.
And before women did a lot of herbal remedies around Europe, and afterwards they got killed because they linked them with Satan. And there was one example that he used, which is that there's these women that go around and put men's penises in a basket and put it at the top of a tree, steal penises. And we have to stop this at all costs.
And there was a story in there where a man went up and got a different penis that was bigger. But it's a crazy book. And then there were all these laws passed to try to stop people from being dissent. They were either women that were practicing or different or people that were different. And so there were all these laws passed and they were murdered, really. So I don't think this is a new thing.
It's such a, like, after the attack on January 11th, there was that those laws passed that were really, I think, dangerous in the United States out of fear, I guess. I don't know. Scott, what do you think?
If you think about socialism as the pursuit of equality, liberalism is the pursuit of liberty and certain inalienable rights at birth. Fascism or the juice of fascism is to convince people, usually for political means, that the enemy is within. You know, people say Hitler declared war on Poland. He first declared war on his own people.
And the most hopeful thing you can take from this nafu you're talking about, it's sort of coming back from senior class or AP history. By the way, I never took an AP class. That's a lie.
No, you didn't. I was like, what are you talking about?
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Chapter 5: What role did J. Edgar Hoover play in the Palmer Raids?
And the most hopeful thing we can take, a secret police, I think they rounded up and incarcerated 10,000 people, some of them- Hey, don't get ahead of me here.
We're going to walk through all of it.
He's been Googling right now.
We're going to get there. We're going to get there. I'm just wondering, right out of the gate before this even happened, free speech was just sort of thrown under the bus. Like and it just it is to Kara's point, it's something we just keep returning to.
But that's what's hopeful is we've been here before. And I would like to think that America, when people when people protest in a civil way, a peaceful protest exercise at the voting booth, similar to the Red Scare, where they discredited. McCarthy, my guess is they discredit and our democracy came back stronger.
So what I tried, the only way I don't go fucking crazy and go from 10 milligram edibles to 40 every night is recognizing that it is not the first time America has faced what is going on right now. Amen.
Except, Scott, during that time, the Red Scare, so many people's lives were ruined, right? And at the same time, by the way, for people that don't understand what was happening there, there was really significant Nazi propaganda. There were things to fear, right? Like Hamilton Fish and all these different senators. So there is real stuff happening that then gets people to overreact to...
The rest of it. And so you can't ignore the real attempts by even today by Iran, by by China and others to try to fuck up this country. They're actually real and something we should be concerned about.
That is spot on. And this is what we're about to dive into is actually the the first what's what's referred to as the first red scare. The McCarthy era was was the second red scare. True. Let's jump ahead now to 1919. The war has ended, which sounds great, but the national mood is actually very dark. In fact, America is basically a pressure cooker with the lid barely holding on.
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Chapter 6: How did the Palmer Raids affect immigrant communities in America?
Wages are plunging. Prices are soaring. Four million soldiers are limping home, wounded, traumatized, and finding themselves jobless, wondering what the hell they'd fought for. Add to all this a monstrous pandemic situation. The Spanish flu has torn through cities and rural communities alike, killing over 675,000 people, which is more than we lost in the actual war.
So the whole country is basically a powder keg. And then a spark from overseas really lit the fuse. Any guesses what that might have been?
A memo that was leaked?
The Bolshevik Revolution. Oh, that. Yes, that. Yeah, of course.
I saw that movie.
Yeah. Here we go. In Russia, Lenin and his followers overthrew the czar. They executed the royal family and declared the birth of a communist state, a government where the working class held all the state power, in theory, at least. Now, to struggling American workers getting terrible wages and monstrous working conditions, that may have sounded kind of intriguing, like maybe a ray of hope.
But obviously to the American elite, the power brokers, the dealmakers, it sounded like an existential threat. I see this as basically the collision of two very primal emotions. It's rage versus fear. You have the workers raging about inequality and then, of course, elites are afraid of losing their status and their fancy things.
Is this dynamic just baked into capitalism or is there a better way? Is socialism kind of trying to have both sides?
Yeah.
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Chapter 7: What lessons can be learned from the Palmer Raids for today’s society?
Now, such that the 26 wealthiest families in America pay an average tax rate of 6%. That is now. Bad news about income inequality is it always happens. The good news is it's always self-correcting. And more bad news, though, is that the means of correction are usually war, famine, or revolution.
And I would argue that as revolutions take on new complexion, we're in the midst of a series of small revolutions. Black Lives Matter and the Me Too movement were both righteous movements that had real justifiable components, but they weren't going after the sexual harasser owner of a taco truck. They weren't going after someone who was racist in a small company.
They were going after rich people. And at some point, when the bottom 52% of America have the same amount of wealth as Elon Musk, they figure out that the fastest way to double their wealth is to go after that person. And that's where we are. At some point, we are having a series of small revolutions to try and correct income inequality.
Yeah, that's a good break.
That's heavy. That's a good break.
And people are getting it. I'm sort of shocked we haven't had much more of a of a revolution or anger over money.
The crazy thing is that back in 1919. These workers were in like really horrendous conditions and still trying to make it work. But it's sort of it's all relative, right? It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what like what the actual conditions might be. It's the disparity itself that is so that just feels so off.
Well, that's a that's a great that's a great point. Just interrupt you because. there's something to the notion, and this is a true statement, a middle-class person right now is living better than the richest person on the planet 100 years ago. And middle-class, Mississippi is our poorest state. It has a higher household income than the UK or Germany or France.
So America is actually, you could correctly say a middle-class person in the US is thriving and doing really well. But that's not how the human brain works. The human brain sees 210 times a day that if they're not on a Gulf Stream or don't have a boyfriend with ripped abs, that they're failing.
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Chapter 8: How do the Palmer Raids relate to current issues of civil rights and government overreach?
What Trump has effectively done really well is like, OK, Republicans and Republican donors, I'm going to divide up TikTok. I'm going to give you AI legislation that makes you richer. And Democrats who are really rich and hold the power, there's a really uncomfortable silence, a conspiracy that says, don't get too angry because you're going to make bank. If you're a rich Democrat.
And one of the most disappointing things about this is good Democrats who are in positions of powers have been fucking silent on all of this. Why? Because stop, stop. It hurts so good. My taxes are going down. I would agree.
Yeah, absolutely.
Brutal.
And also, you know, it's often at the expense of the young toward the old. And, you know, you see it in Congress where they're, you know, antiquated and they're making rules that benefit the top groups.
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What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're gonna become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult?
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