DSA Propaganda? NBC Celebrates Play Based on Actors Probed for Being Commies

Curtis Houck
July 9th, 2026 2:31 PM

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In perhaps a preview of coming attractions from the liberal media when more communists join the ranks of Congress in January, NBC’s 3rd Hour of Today promoted on Thursday a new off-Broadway play fretting over those in Hollywood who were investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in the post-World War II era for alleged communist ties.

One of the cast members — far-left actress Molly Ringwald — went as far as to claim “we are in that sort of environment now” in America, ostensibly because of Donald Trump. Presumably, these people will not be caught dead performing a play about, say, Whittaker Chambers or Rebecca West.

It came near the end of the segment discussing the play with Ringwald and fellow cast member Bob Odenkirk when she conceded, “it’s a story that’s always really been interesting too, from the time I started in Hollywood” when she heard of the time period because she “didn’t learn about the McCarthy Era in school.”

Ringwald explained she had made a supposed faux pas early in her career by telling someone at a dinner that one of the people she would like to work with was filmmaker and playwright Elia Kazan, who was briefly a Communist Party member in the mid-1930s before renouncing his ties and turning over names of communists to Congress.

“I said, I really love to work with Ilya Kazan, and she said, oh, what would you call it, naming names? And then I went back to work the next day. And I said — I told my friend, BJ, and he freaked out, and he said, ‘But they already had every name. They already had it, you know,’” she said.

It was then she — who plays Lillian Hellman in the show — alluded to the supposed connection and blacklisting of those in Hollywood now, supposedly at the hands of Trump: “And I thought, oh, this is interesting. So, I started to do a lot of research about it, and it really was this time in American history that you think can never come back, and yet, we are in that sort of environment now.”

Earlier in the segmenT, Odenkirk shared the background of the actor he plays, Lionel Standard, who went onto play the butler in the early 1980s show Hart to Hart.

Showing his lefty bona fides, Odenkirk also lamented that the post-World War II era “was a very tough time for the whole country” (click “expand”):

[H]e was an actor his whole entire life, and he — he appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee twice to say that he was not a communist. But it didn’t matter, just having his name associated with this whole thing then he was blacklisted. He ended up not — you know, struggling for work, doing nightclubs, going to Europe for a couple of years. It’s one of the reasons he’s in Once Upon a Time in America. He’s in that movie because it was shot in Italy. But he struggled for work for about 15 years, and then was — slowly found his way back to another career in showbiz.

But it was a very tough time for the whole country, and certainly for people in the arts, because for some reason, everybody got very scared, and excited about who might have been a communist, or even just attended a meeting, or been friends with someone who was, and it became this blacklist, and people didn’t work, and were forced to testify. And so — some — the play is, as you point out, transcripts from the actual hearings that a great playwright Eric Bentley cut together, and you see every side of it. You see people who name names, Ilya Kazan, and other people like that. You see people who fight and push back. You see every side of it. It’s very entertaining. It’s got humor. My character, Lionel Standard, just gave ‘em a big — gave ‘em the finger.

NBC was so excited they teased it not once or twice, but three times. In the first two, co-host Craig Melvin boasted Odenkirk and Ringwald were working on a “powerful” and “really cool project” while, in the other, NBC News NOW’s Savannah Sellers said they teamed up for a “new project...about an infamous time in our country’s history.”

Cuing up the pair during the interview (see below), Melvin delivered his synopsis of the play, Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?:

So, the play follows the work of the infamous 1940s House Un-American Activities Committee, which investigated anyone suspected of having communist ties, including some powerful members of Hollywood as well. Molly, Bob, good morning to both of you. Love the concept. For folks who may not be familiar with this particular part of American history, the play, we should point out, based on actual transcripts from those committee meetings.

One of many long-running liberal lies, the various congressional entities, ranging from HUAC to what then-Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) was up to in the Senate, were, in fact, onto something and it wasn’t without merit.

Just over a week ago, The Federalist’s Hayden Daniel addressed this in an excellent column, “McCarthyism Didn’t Go Far Enough To Root Out Filthy Commies, So Now We Have Modern NYC.”

Here’s an excerpt of his history lesson (click “expand”):

Enter Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wis. In 1950, McCarthy gave a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, warning, “Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity. The modern champions of communism have selected this as the time. And, ladies and gentlemen, the chips are down — they are truly down.”

(....)

The perjury conviction of Alger Hiss, who had been accused of spying for the Soviet Union while an official at the State Department, gave some validity to McCarthy’s charges.

(....)

Thus, largely thanks to the media, McCarthyism became a byword for cynical witch hunts and needless censorship...But he was right.

The Communist Party USA had more than 37,000 members in 1950, and it received a generous subsidy directly from the Soviet Union.

(....)

The Venona project, a counter-intelligence operation run by the National Security Agency from 1943 to 1980, found the communists had indeed infiltrated the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. The communications intercepted by the project showed that top officials in multiple departments....were in regular contact with the Soviet government.

(....)

Several scientists...who had worked on the Manhattan Project, steadily fed atomic secrets to the Russians, allowing them to break America’s atomic monopoly[.]

To see the relevant NBC transcript from July 9, click here.

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