New York Times: For instance, while much has been written about the F.B.I.’s first and most influential director, J. Edgar Hoover, and his hunt for communists and his suspicion of the civil rights movement, little attention has been paid to his effort to unmask gays in government and academia. Ahem: According to John Cheever, 1948 was ‘the year everybody in the United States was worried about homosexuality’. And nobody was more worried than the federal government, which was rumoured to be teeming with gays and lesbians. One might think that Washington’s attentions would have been focused elsewhere – on the Soviet Union, for example, or on Communist spies – but in 1950, President Truman’s advisers warned him that ‘the country […]

Paul Hockenos, journalist and author, reviewed The Reactionary Mind for The National, which is published out of Abu Dhabi and features a lot of great cultural reporting. His verdict? “Robin, a New York-based political scientist and regular contributor to publications like The Nation and the London Review of Books, has written an original book with an armful of theses that shed revealing light on the whys and wherefores of right-wing politics in the United States and beyond.” Andrew Tonkovich interviewed me for his show Bibliocracy, which airs on KPFK out in Los Angeles. It was a fun interview, in which he had me read some passages from the book. Listen here (link should be good for another 90 days). David […]