There Is A Spectre Haunting New York City

Perhaps frustrated at finding the place completely bare of so much as a loose joint, they ransacked Goldsmith's bathroom, where they found some tablets in a container in the medicine cabinet that were eventually proven to be prescription allergy medication. As the police tore through the apartment, one officer ripped a poster of a dong off the wall. He turned to one of the guests and demanded to know who

the man in the poster is. Apparently the cop didn't get the joke because a college student told him that's Ho Chi Minh before he went on a diet, and when the officer produced the poster in court two weeks later, he told the judge it was Ho Chi Minh. One of the young men who was there that night, told the police that unless they were charging him with a specific offense, he would not submit to an arrest. As a foreign national. He'd specifically sought this guidance from his embassy, Mahmoud.

Mum Dani would later tell The Washington Post that the officer responded by calling him a racial slur and telling him to go back where he came from. Eventually, all the charges were dropped. The FBI denied any involvement. The police may not have found any drugs that night, but they found evidence of something far more in city communism. I'm Molly Conger and this it's weird, little guys. I'll

set your mind at ease right now. You may have recognized that name my mood mom Dannie as the father of Zoran Mamdanni, and neither of them are our weird little guy. But the news this week was a real distraction, and I didn't end up picking a weird little guy at all, but it did get me thinking about something that weird little guys spend a lot of time thinking about. Last week. On June twenty fourth, Zora Mama won the

New York City mayoral democratic primary. The next day, the President of the United States, posted on truth Social, the social media platform that he owns, It's finally happened. The Democrats have crossed the line. Zorah Mumdani, a one hundred percent communist lunatic, has just won the dem primary and it's on his way to becoming mayor. We've had radical lefties before, but this is getting a little ridiculous. A one hundred percent communist lunatic. Huh, Zora Mumdani is a

Democratic socialist. But that's a distinction that's lost on Donald Trump. And he's not alone. The day after the primary, the New York Young Republicans Club tweeted a photo of Mumdanni with the word deport stampedon read over his face, accompanied by this rather alarming demand. A call to action from the New York Young Republicans Club. The radicals Zoronmumdanni cannot be allowed to destroy our beloved city of New York. The Communist Control Act. Lets President Trump revoke Zoron Mumdanni's

citizenship and promptly deport him. The time for action is now. Stephen Miller and Tom Homan, New York is counting on you. A day later, Congressman Andy Ogles posted a letter that he'd sent to Attorney General Pam Bondi asking the Department of Justice to open an investigation into whether Mamdanni could have his citizenship revoked. Ogles too called him a communist. But what is a communist? I'm not actually going to

tell you. It's not that kind of podcast. But more importantly, it doesn't matter, because if I'm being honest, my answer to the question of is Zoronmumdanni a communist, it's the same answer that most wing extremists would give you if they were being honest. I don't know, and I don't care. In the world of weird little guys, a communist can be anyone. Even you remember just two weeks ago you heard this.

crowd that day was Communist. A week after Fields murdered a counter protester at that Nazi rally, Jason Kessler, the man who organized the Nazi rally hosted Heather Hire, was a fat, disgusting communist. Communists have killed ninety four million. Looks like it was payback time. While he was in prison, Fields received a letter from Matthew Heinbach, the leader of the neo Nazi group the Traditionalist Worker Party, in which Heinbach referred to the counter protesters that Field hit with

his car as quote rampaging communist boards. When Christopher Cantwell, one of the neo Nazi activists who was supposed to give a speech that day, got maced, he blamed, oh, you guessed it. Communists.

survived the death of McCarthyism. In his book Red Hunting in the Promised Land, Anti Communism and the Making of America, Joel Kovell argues that there is a difference between anti communism, that is, capital a anti hyphenpital C communism and anti

communism all one word and lower case. Covelt defines capital C communism as actual communists, right, These actually existing movements and governments and people who organize according to the principles of communism and capital C anti communism, he says, is an objective dislike of capital C communism, so capital C anti communism is obviously about communism lower case anti communism. On the other hand, he calls the reigning ideology of the West and argues that it has very little at

all to do with communism. In nineteen eighty seven, the Times Mirror commissioned Gallop to survey the American electorate. Over a period of several months, Bolsters conducted in person in interviews with four two hundred and forty four American adults all over the country, administering a long questionnaire that asked

a variety of demographic and political questions. Seventy percent of respondents self identified as anti communist, compared to forty nine percent of people who said they were religious, forty seven percent who supported the civil rights movement, and twenty seven

percent who identified as a supporter of unions. In the technical appendix, the Polsters note that quote as an identity anti communism is virtually universal in America, but if you dig through the responses to the other questions these people were asked, it kind of looks like most people who claimed that their political identity was as an anti communist might not really know what communisms and fifty six percent of respondents said they believed that it was the cause

of most social unrest in America in nineteen eighty seven. Covell calls this the black hole of anti communism quote a feeling that nullifies any reasoned or differentiated argument that distinguishes anti communism from a simple reaction to communism, and promotes it to the status of a great organizing force an American life, Anti communism took on a kind of religious fervor in American politics during the Cold War. Anything the government did in the name of fighting the Soviets

was good. Any opposition to it was bad, to the point that people were tying themselves in knots. When religious leaders spoke out against the threat of nuclear annihilation, conservative writer William of Buckley accused them of idolatry, of venerating life at the great cost of ignoring the greater good, which is, I guess, having a large nuclear arsenal to

resist the threat of communism. One of Ronald Reagan's own closest advisers admitted during a congressional hearing that he'd been unwilling to speak frankly to the President about the obvious illegality of the Iran Contra affair because he was afraid of being called a kami. Everything done in the name of fighting communism is good. Anything that needs to be fought is communism, and any resistance to that fight makes

you no better than a communist. Quote. Viewed against this diabolical force, all moral and rational comparisons disappear like light sucked in by the virtually infinite gravity of a cosmological black hole. Covell wrote, communism could be anything, rendering the word effectively meaningless. An accusation I see quite often levied at well people like me, people who write about fascism, white supremacy, neo Nazis, etc. Is well, you just call

everyone you don't like a Nazi. And I'm sure there are people out there getting a little too casual with it. But I can only speak for myself, and I know that words mean things, and I'm careful with them. I won't say I've never been wrong, but I'm not careless. There have been so many times that I've responded to that particular jab with just a quick citation. Here's a picture of his bedroom with a Nazi flag on the

wall and a framed picture of Hitler. Here's a video of the band in question literally saying straight to camera, I am a fascist. Here he is in a clan robe, throwing a Roman salute, going on a podcast to talk about the sin of race mixing. Whatever. I try to use words carefully, but for the anti communist, the word is so all encompassing that you can call anyone a communist and you'll never be wrong. And no man in American history better exemplifies this quixotic project of rooting out

imaginary communists than j Edgar Hoover. Ellen Schrecker, a historian of McCarthyism, wrote that if people had known in the nineteen fifties what we would eventually learn when the FBI was forced to disclose files from that era, McCarthyism would have been called Hooverism. In Hoover's nineteen fifty eight book Masters of Deceit, he explained just how devious the communists can be. The party's objective is to drive a wedge,

however slight, into as many minds as possible. That is why, in every conceivable way, communists try to poison our thinking about the issues of the day social reforms, peace, politics, veterans, women's and youth problems. The more people they can influence,

the stronger they will be. Responding to that passage. In particular, Fred Cook wrote in his review of the book for the Nation, obviously it is hardly safe to think about any of the issues in these all embracing categories for communists maybe thinking about them too, And how is one to know whether one's thoughts are actually one's own or

the reflection of some subtle communists thought anoculation. By the nineteen sixties, there wasn't the same appetite for the outright McCarthyism of the forties and fifties, but Hoover's personal commitment to rooting out the specter of communism never faded. I know, the little opening vignette of an episode of this show is usually kind of a bait and switch, some interesting but only tangentially related tidbit that I don't really revisit,

But this one's fascinating. Remember in nineteen sixty seven, Zoron Mamdani's father, Mahmoudmumdani, was a college student at the University of Pittsburgh. He was one of several dozen students caught up in a police raid at an apartment just off campus one night. The police claimed to be looking for drugs, They didn't find any, and the charges against all fifty three people were dropped. But this wasn't an ordinary college party.

Half of the people taken into custody that night were students from nearby Saint Vincent College, their theology professor, Father Roseboro, had left the party early and wasn't there when the cops showed up. The party that evening was a reception for an out of town guest. David Dellinger, a pacifist activist, gave a talk earlier that day at the University of Pittsburgh, and he told the audience about his recent visit to Vietnam, where he'd gone to talk to the people who'd been

affected by the American bombing campaign. Frank Goldsmith, the party's host, was the chairman of the local chapter of the Committee to End the War in Vietnam. Everyone in attendance that night was to some degree or another active in the anti war movement. Two months after those charges were dropped, Marcus Childs wrote an article about the raid in the

Washington Post. Child was clear that both the FBI and the DOJ had denied any involvement in the incident, but he says that those close to the case believed that it was absolutely connected to the FBI's interest in the campus anti war group, writing quote, there is reason to fear a revival of the Red Scare, the Red Raids, and the mccarthuris hysteria. This particular incident itself doesn't get much press after that. I mean, there's nothing to report. Right,

the charges were dropped, it was over. But the very day that newspapers ran April twenty first, nineteen sixty seven, an FBI agent carefully cut it out of the newspaper and xeroxt it. Later that day, that same FBI agent wrote a memo to his boss, William Sullivan, the head of the bureau's domestic intelligence division running the operation we

now know as co Intel pro. Attached to the memo was that copy of Charles's article in the margins in J. Edgar Hoover's handwriting, there's a little note, what are the facts as to our interest in this matter? The memo, written by Charles Brennan claims, quote, the FBI had absolutely nothing to do with this raid, and it concludes with

this paragraph. This is another example of the increasing tendency of so called liberal writers and faculty in student groups to criticize the Bureau in an effort to stop our investigation of subversive elements active in campus groups. These individuals are consciously or unconsciously aiding the Communist Party in its lifelong fight to stop the FBI's investigation into subverse some

influences on the campuses. A few days later, j Edgar Hoover, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation himself, wrote the journalist a nasty letter, calling the article irresponsible and outrageous, and again claiming that the FBI had no involvement in or knowledge of the raid. Now, I don't know if you can tell how I feel about Jaedgar Hoover, but I don't think he's telling the truth. Shocking, I know,

but the story doesn't make sense. In several newspaper stories, the Pittsburgh police sometimes claim that they'd been surveilling Frank Goldsmith's apartment for weeks. Other articles are very specific that they had a search warrant that was signed by hours before the raid, and that the warrant specifically authorized for the search of marijuana. But the FBI memo and some of the newspaper articles claimed that the raid was actually just prompted by noise complaints from neighbors and the search

for drugs was incidental. And then, of course there's the fact that declassified FBI files exist for a number of people who were at the party that night. Frank Goldsmith, the man whose apartment was raided, had been under investigation for his involvement in the anti war movement for over

a year. In one FBI file bearing the title Communist Influence in Racial Matters, a memo dated just a few months before the raid outlined surveillance of Goldsmith performed by the Pittsburgh Police Department on behalf of the FBI, and the raid at Frank Goldsmith's apartment wasn't Mahmoud mam Danni's

first rush with FBI surveillance. Two years earlier, in March of nineteen sixty five, he was one of one hundred and twenty eight college students from the Pittsburgh area who piled into buses that made the twelve hour drive to Montgomery, Alabama, and there they participated in a protest organized by these student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

and my father won one of those scholarships. He came to this country to study to be an engineer at the University of Pittsburgh, and sometime into his studies, his face buried in his book, he heard the words reverberate in the corridor around him. Which side are you on? Which side are you on? These were words being sung by members of SNICK, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, recruiting students to get on the bus to go to Montgomery, Alabama.

And my father got on that bus. He marched, He was hosed down, he was thrown in jail. He was given one phone call and he called the Ugandan ambassador the United States. He said, can you get me out of jail? The ambassador said, what are you doing in jail? We sent you there to study. My father said, you sent me here as a gift for our freedom. They are fighting for theirs. It's one and the same.

federal agent. In an interview in twenty thirteen, Mamoud Mumdani says that it was the FBI's obsessive attempts to root out communism that ironically introduced him to Marx. Reading from that interview, two or three weeks later, I was in my room. There was a knock at the door. Two gentlemen in trench coats and hats said FBI, and I thought wow, just like on television. They sat down. They were there to find out why I had gone, because this turned out to be big. It was after Montgomery

that King organized his march on Selma. They wanted to know who had influenced me. After one hour of probing, the guy said, do you like Marx? I said, I haven't met him. I said, no, no, he's dead. Oh wow, what happened? No, No, he died long ago. I thought the guy Marx had just died, So then why are you asking me if he died long ago? No, he wrote a lot. He wrote that poor people should not be poor, and I said, sounds amazing. I'm giving you a sense of how naive I was. After they left,

I went to the library to look for Marx. So that was my introduction to Karl Marx. He'd never heard of Karl Marx, but he was already a communist, because everyone who marched for civil rights was. There is a fascinating and complicated history of how anti communism functions, specifically in the South during the Civil rights era, But to be honest, I feel like I didn't do enough reading

this week to really do it justice. Their short answer is just that it was often politically useful to label all civil rights activists as communists, and that was kind of the only answer in the literature for a long time. But there are a handful of books now that explore

the complexities of anti communism in the South. Like I said, I didn't get a chance to read more than a chapter of any of these, so I couldn't tell you which I would recommend, but it seems like the best sources if you want more on this topic are George Lewis's The White South and Red Menace, Segregationists, Anti Communism, and Massive Resistance, Jeff Woods Black Struggle, Red Scare, segregation and anti Communism in the South, and yeah, Soohiro Kategii's

Black Freedom, White Resistance, and Red Men. But here's the thing. Some of those civil rights activists were communists. That gets lost when you explain it all the way as McCarthy's hysteria and redbaiting. Some of them were communists, and proudly so. But who is or isn't a communist doesn't actually matter to the anti communist. Remember that clip of Christopher Caentwell being asked who maced him. He has no idea who it was, but it was communists, because whatever bad thing

is happening to him is communism. So I suppose it's no surprise that Zoron Mumdani is being accused of being a communist, and I do mean accused. People like Congressman Andy Ogles are trying to have him investigated. Zoron Mumdani is an immigrant, was born in Uganda and moved to the United States as a child and became a naturalized United States citizen in twenty eighteen. There is no doubt

about those facts. He is a United States citizen. In that post from the New York Young Republicans Club, the group cites the Communist Control Act of nineteen fifty four as grounds to have Mamdani deported. There are a couple of layers here. There's a lot going on, but I think they're wrong on every single front. That Act, the Communist Control Act, is technically still on the books, but it would only bar a member of the Communist Party from holding certain offices. It has nothing to do with

his naturalization status. It was signed into law by President Eisenhower in nineteen fifty four, the same year that Eisenhower himself was accused of being a card carrying member of the Communist Party by Robert Well, the founder of the viciously anti communist John Birch Society. Those facts aren't actually really related in any way. It's just further proof that anyone the anti communist dislikes can be sucked into the black hole of anti communism. Even Dwight D. Eisenhower, and

the Act itself was never really widely used. The Supreme Court ruled in the nineteen sixties that it didn't prevent the Communist Party from participating in the New York State Unemployments Insurance system as an employer, but the ruling didn't go further than that as to the constitutionality of the

law as a whole. It was found to be unconstitutional by a federal court in Arizona in nineteen seventy three, but a challenge to the law was never heard by a higher court, so we don't have a Supreme Court opinion on the matter. But again that's because it was

so rarely used. This wasn't something that was happening a lot, and I guess it's no longer safe to make a prediction like this, But I would say, in a world that stayed even half sane, barring him from holding office under the Communist Control Act of nineteen fifty four would not hold up. It would not hold up to a challenge,

although again everything's out the window now. Other Magaspear influencers quickly identified another line of attack, one that wouldn't just keep him out of office, but could get him out of the country. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, another relic of the MacArthur era, members of the Communist Party

are not eligible to become naturalized citizens. Specifically, Title eight US Code, Section fourteen twenty four prohibition upon the naturalization of persons opposed to government or law, or who favored totalitarian forms of government. It's a lengthy section, it managed, which is to be incredibly vague and open ended, despite

taking over a thousand words to explain itself. Section A just lists six different situations that would make a person ineligible for naturalization, and here is just one of those

six sub sections. A member of or affiliated with, the Communist Party of the United States, any other totalitarian party of the United States, the Communist Political Association, the Communists, or other totalitarian party of any state of the United States, of any foreign state, or of any political or geographic subdivision of any foreign state, Any section, subsidiary, branch, affiliate, or subdivision of any such association or party, or the

direct predecessors or successors of any such association or party, regardless of what name such group or organization may have used, may now bear or may hereafter adopt, unless such alien establishes that he did not have knowledge or reason to believe at the time he became a member of or affiliated with such an organization, and did not thereafter, and prior to the date upon which such organization was so registered or so required to be register, have such knowledge

or reason to believe that such organization was a Communist Front organization? What the fuck does that mean?

meaning that is not ambiguous. So surely there is a section somewhere in this chapter that defines specifically what they mean by communist front or organization, because that could mean a lot of things. But it isn't there. There is no definition in this chapter for that term. And I looked, and I looked, and it's not in the US Code

at all. But it used to be. The term was originally defined in a law that was passed two years earlier, in the Internal Security Act of nineteen fifty, in the section of the Code that established the Subversive Activities Control Board.

The Supreme Court ruled in nineteen sixty five that it was unconstitutional to force members of the Communist Party to register with the Subversive Activities Control Board, and that entire Code section would eventually get repealed in nineteen ninety three, which is why it no longer appears in the US

Code at all. So the Code section we were just talking about, the section that would allow for the vitualization of people who were members of organizations that were required to be registered with a body that no longer exists and was found to be unconstitutional. I'm not sure how you can sort that out. I'm not sure how you can apply a law whose terms are defined in a Code section that is unconstitutional and repealed and again at the risk of being repetitive. There is another huge problem here.

He's not a communist, he's not a member of the Communist Party. He's a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. And I promise you it's not a communist organization. So even if you were to accept the outrageous argument that this law born of Cold War hysteria is valid and that it could and should be applied, it doesn't apply. He's only a communist in the sense that that's the

word used to attack people like him. A lot of these rabid anti communist armchair attorneys who are posting online are pulling in another section of that same Immigration and Nationality Act, Title eight USC. Fourteen fifty one, Revocation of naturalization. So that last section says that you can't get naturalized if you're a member of the Communist Party, but this one goes further. Even if you were not a member

at the time of your naturalization. If you decide later to join the Communist Party after you've become a citizen, they can take it back. If a person who shall have been naturalized after December twenty four, nineteen fifty two, shall, within five years next following such naturalization become a member of or affiliated with any organization, membership in or affiliation with which at the time of naturalization would have precluded

such person from naturalization. Under the provisions of Section fourteen twenty four of this title, it shall be considered prima fascia evidence that such person was not attached to the principles of the Constitution of the United States and was not well disposed to the good order and happiness of the United States at the time of naturalization. And the section continues saying that naturalization in this situation could be revoked for a quote having been obtained by concealment of

a material fact or by willful misrepresentation. So they're not saying you were a communist at the time, we didn't know, we caught you later. They're saying that even if you never thought about communism until after you were a citizen for several years, they can take it as proof that you lied on purpose, years before the thought ever entered your head. Denaturalization is not common, at least it didn't used to be. Between nineteen ninety and twenty seventeen, there

were an average of eleven cases per year. And when I punched in this code section into court listener who website that let's use search federal court filings, I browsed a handful of the cases that popped up. They're mostly pretty serious, like it's not gray area stuff, it's big red flag obvious problem. Tize situations like you could see why this was a big deal and had to happen in many of these cases, like a handful of very old men who obtained United States citizenship by covering up

that they'd been Nazi war criminals. There were a surprising number of those. In the nineties. We were deporting eighty five year old SS officers at a pretty good clip there for a minute. Twenty report from the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyer's Guild, though, warned that the number of denaturalization cases increased dramatically during Trump's first term.

In twenty eighteen, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services announced that they were prepared to refer sixteen hundred cases to the DOJ for potential denaturalization proceedings. In twenty twenty, the DOJ formed a new office dedicated to investigating and litigating

denaturalization cases. Although, aside from the mention of that office in some of these publications that were by and for immigration attorneys, I can't actually find anything about the existence of that office past the date of the DOJ press release announcing it, so it's hard to say if they actually did that. But denaturalization cases have been increasing in recent years and now the administration is seriously considering reviving

it as a tool of suppressing political dissent. In early June of twenty twenty five, the Justice Department published a memo directing attorneys in the DOJ's Civil Division to quote, prioritize, and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law. The memo lists ten categories of denaturalization cases. It's got the basics, you know, war crimes, terrorism gangs, people who lied about their criminal history or made other material misrepresentations

during the naturalization process. But it also includes as a separate category of people to target for having their citizenships stripped away. Quote individuals who engaged in various forms of financial fraud against the United States, including paycheck protection program loan fraud, and medicaid or Medicare fraud. The tenth category is just vibes. Quote any other cases refer to the Civil Division that the Division determines to be sufficiently important

to pursue. And it kind of feels like that one means any immigrant who makes the president mad. At a White House press briefing on June thirtieth, Caroline Levitt declined to say whether Trump had weighed in on Congressman Ogle's calls to deport Mamdanni. Does President Trump want Zooran Mamdani deported.

used worldwide, often carelessly modified. Communists means communists. First they came for the Communists, then the trade unionists, then the social Democrats, then the Jews. But I don't think Americans can bear to admit that when someone starts imprisoning and deporting communists a little bit like a Nazi government. Weird Little Guys is a prorection of Cool Zone Media and iHeart ratio. It's researched, written and recorded by me Molly Conger.

Our executive producers are Sophie Liechtman and Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly talented Ory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me at Ridttle Guys Podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show without the listeners on the weirdsle the Guys subreddit. Just don't post anything that's going to make you on my weird Little Guys