Faculty note: Prof. Jon Shelton quoted in PolitiFact | The Pants on Fire claim that communists have controlled U.S. institutions for decades

During a recent interview with Fox News, Monica Crowley, a conservative commentator and longtime foreign policy specialist, made a bold claim: Overseas communists have controlled key institutions of American life for decades.Crowley, who served as assistant secretary for public affairs at the Treasury Department during the Trump administration, was interviewed on the June 12 edition of the weekly Fox News show “The Next Revolution With Steve Hilton.”

…The USSR also exerted influence over the (relatively small) Communist Party of the USA, said Jon Shelton, a University of Wisconsin-Green Bay professor and author of “Teacher Strike!: Public Education and the Making of a New American Political Order.”

The highest-profile battles involved Hollywood. In the 1930s and 1940s, “there were Communist Party USA members and sympathizers who were writers, directors, and actors,” said Victor Devinatz, a labor historian at Illinois State University. During World War II, some of these figures helped make films that were anti-fascist, at a time when the U.S. was allied with the Soviet Union, and films that had working-class themes, though the films did not explicitly advance communist politics.

Source: PolitiFact | The Pants on Fire claim that communists have controlled U.S. institutions for decades