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This is an adapted excerpt from the Dec. 7 episode of “Velshi.”
In 1947, during the rise of McCarthyism in the United States, a group of 10 men — screenwriters, filmmakers, producers and the like — were summoned to Washington, D.C., to answer questions before a congressional panel called the House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC for short.
That was emblematic of the Red Scare, an era when paranoia ran high among the people of this country because the political climate encouraged citizens to keep an eye on each other.
The panel had a simple question for them: “Are you, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?” If the answer was yes, the panel wanted to know who else they knew or suspected to be a communist or communist sympathizer. The men refused to cooperate, and they refused to name names.
One day later, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved citations against them for contempt of Congress.
Those men became known as the Hollywood Ten. They were the first group of people to be systematically blacklisted in Hollywood and shut out of the industry for known or suspected ties to the Communist Party or its ideology.
That was emblematic of the Red Scare, an era when paranoia ran high among the people of this country because the political climate encouraged citizens to keep an eye on each other and report “un-American” activities.
That was only the beginning. Two and a half years later, a book called “Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television” was published by three former FBI agents who used their ties to the government and HUAC to compile a list of 151 people in media who they believed had communist connections.
The list included people like actor and director Orson Welles, the composer Leonard Bernstein and folk singer Pete Seeger.
A lot of you may remember that ugly chapter of American politics. Well, more than seven decades later, it seems the book may have been reopened.
About a week ago, the White House debuted a “Media Bias” page on its official government website. It features a “Media Offender of the Week” and a section called the “Offender Hall of Shame.” It also lists specific stories and journalists with which the White House has taken issue, for one reason or another.
A few days after the page went live, the White House followed up with a new announcement: They want your tips. In a press release headlined “A CALL TO ACTION: Submit ‘Media Bias’ Tips,” the White House encouraged “everyday Americans to support the truth and hold the Fake News accountable.”
It’s hardly the first time that the Trump administration has urged ordinary citizens to submit reports against people or practices that don’t align with its ideology.
Shortly after Donald Trump was inaugurated, the Office of Personnel Management sent out a memo with administration guidance aimed at rooting out diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
The memo stated, “We are aware of efforts by some in government to disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language.” It then provided an email address and asked people to report information about ongoing covert DEI-related activities.
The FBI has also asked the public to report hospitals, clinics or practitioners who “mutilate children under the guise of ‘gender-affirming care.’”
As part of its effort to sanitize American history, the Trump administration asked visitors at national parks and landmarks to report any signs or information that are “negative about either past or living Americans or that fails to emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes.”
At the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a “stand down” order was issued earlier this year, which means regulators who work for the agency should essentially stop doing their jobs. Shortly after that order, a “CFPB Tip Line” account was created on X.
But the tip line was not set up for the public to report corporate violations to the consumer watchdog agency that was designed to investigate them. Instead, it solicited tips on CFPB employees who continued to perform regulatory oversight despite the “stand down” order.
Then there’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Trump’s Department of Homeland Security. Even before the president began his second term, his chosen border czar, Tom Homan, boasted that he wanted to set up a tip line that the public could use to phone in leads about criminal undocumented immigrants.
Since entering office, the Trump administration has posted multiple times on social media, inviting the public to “help your country locate and arrest illegal aliens.”
An Instagram post from the Department of Homeland Security.Department of Homeland Security
An ICE tip line has actually existed for more than two decades. People have used it to phone in information about a whole host of unlawful activities, including drug smuggling and money laundering.
But the concern in all of these cases is not necessarily about the tip lines themselves; it’s about the recruitment of the American public to police one another.
There’s a term for this: denunciation. It’s the practice of citizens monitoring one another’s movements and reporting activities to the government. It’s characteristic of repressive societies and authoritarian states.
This is not the honorable work of being a whistleblower, either. Whereas whistleblowers document and report abuses of power, often by people in positions of authority, denunciation is more about reporting activity that the state does not agree with, even if it’s not a crime.
People do it to curry favor with the government. They may even be rewarded in some way.
This was common in the Soviet Union, where people reported on their friends, family and neighbors and got them sent to the gulag. It’s happened more recently in modern-day Russia, too.
After the country invaded Ukraine, the Russian government cracked down on critics of the war it had started; and again, as the BBC reported at the time, people started snitching on their friends, family and neighbors to the authorities.
Denunciation is a means of control that’s meant to enforce and uphold the state ideology. Historian Timothy Snyder invoked the idea of denunciation in a Substack post last year. Referring to Trump’s mass deportation plans, he wrote:
Such an enormous deportation will require an army of informers. People who denounce their neighbors or coworkers will be presented as positive examples. Denunciation then becomes a culture. If you are Latino, expect to be denounced at some point, and expect special attention from a government that will demand your help to find people who are not documented. This is especially true if you are a local civic or business leader. You will be expected to collaborate in the deportation effort: if you do, you will be harming others; if you do not, you risk being seen as disloyal yourself.
The invitations for tips and reports from the public on a number of different ideological — and not necessarily criminal — issues are priming people to be informants.
For what it’s worth, many Americans seem resistant to the idea of being informants. The tip line advertised at national parks and landmarks earlier this year received a lot of angry messages.
One visitor to Philadelphia’s Independence Hall wrote, “What upset me the most about the museum — more than anything in the actual exhibits — were the signs telling people to report anything they thought was negative about Americans.”
And last month, the president of the Boston University College Republicans received swift backlash after he posted on X that he had been “calling ICE for months on end” about a local car wash where immigration agents had recently arrested some employees.
Last week, that same college student posted a “life update” on X for those who had called him out: a photo of himself standing behind the podium in the White House press briefing room.
Ali Velshi is the host of “Velshi,” which airs Saturdays and Sundays on MSNBC. He has been awarded the National Headliner Award for Business & Consumer Reporting for “How the Wheels Came Off,” a special on the near collapse of the American auto industry. His work on disabled workers and Chicago’s red-light camera scandal in 2016 earned him two News and Documentary Emmy Award nominations, adding to a nomination in 2010 for his terrorism coverage.
