Mar 28, 2025
Suspicious foreigners arrested without warrants. The suppression of free speech in the name of national security. Civil liberties shredded in a climate of hysteria. During and immediately after the First World War, the federal government under President Woodrow Wilson and ordinary patriotic Americans enforced conformity...
Mar 25, 2025
In late June 1973, former White House counsel John Dean delivered startling testimony before the congressional committee investigating Watergate: Richard Nixon had an enemies list. The point, as Dean had written in a 1971 memo, was to "use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies." The exposure of...
Mar 21, 2025
In March 2020, the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak, months after it originated in China, a global pandemic. It soon infected millions of Americans in all 50 states, upending daily life and revealing deep fissures and paranoia in society. Historian John Barry is an authority on the 1918...
Mar 18, 2025
Note: This podcast was published before a federal judge found that Elon Musk likely violated the Constitution in his effort to demolish U.S.A.I.D.
President Trump's move to shutter the U.S. Agency for International Development pleased its critics on the left and right while leaving the agency's supporters -- and many...
Mar 14, 2025
At the Munich Security Conference, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, "Many, many leaders have talked about Europe that needs its own military, and army -- an Army of Europe. And I really believe that time has come. The Armed Forces of Europe must be created." This idea is almost as old as NATO, and it will...