Behind the Bastards - Part One: How The Liberal Media Helped Fascism Win

Episode Date: August 20, 2024

Robert sits down with best pal Michael Swain to discuss the great liberal media organizations of Italy, Germany and the U.S. in the 1920s and 30s, and how they failed utterly to stop Mussolini and Hitler.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What's recording a video and also audio my Michael Swain our guest for today's podcast welcome to behind the bastards Michael how are you how are you doing great buddy no sinking no clapping the magic of just starting love Love it. Just starting, right into it, you know? Walls and balls together at last. We're behind them. Yeah, look at their asses, cause we're there, buddy. That's right.

That's the only thing we are is there. Michael, you use OBS to record video. OBS is a program that people who are using video for purposes like this use. And what I've been thinking about it, because you just had a little issue with it and we're like, my OBS isn't, isn't, you know, is flaring up or something.

It sounds like a disease, like an old person disease. Like I got, I got, my OBS is, is fucked to hell and back folks. I was thinking owner is bastard software. I can't even sit down. But yeah. Hey, wanna, wanna. Oh right.

Michael, we're talking about Nazis. Whoa. Oh, no whammy, no whammy, no whammy, stop. Nazis, the Holocaust, bunch of stuff that's less fun than the House of Bucks shit. Yeah, the East India Company was awesome because it was like some Dan Carlin shit. This will be horrible.

Oh, it is gonna be horrible. Anyway, cold open, done. What happens when a professional football player's career ends and the applause fades and the screaming fans move on? I am going to share my journey of how I went from Christianity to now a Hebrew Israelite. For some former NFL players, a new faith provides answers. You mix homesteading with guns in church, voila, you got straight away.

Listen to Spiraled starting August 27th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Meet the real woman behind the tabloid headlines in a personal podcast that delves into the life of the notorious Tori Spelling as she takes us through the ups and downs of her sometimes glamorous, sometimes chaotic life in marriage.

I just filed for divorce. Whoa, I said the words that I've said like in my head for like 16 years. Wild. Listen to Miss Spelling on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Kay hasn't heard from her sister in seven years. I have a proposal for you.

Come up here and document my project. All you need to do is record everything like you always do. What was that? That was live audio of a woman's nightmare. Can Kay trust her sister or is history repeating itself? There's nothing dangerous about what you're doing. They're just dreams.

Dream Sequence is a new horror thriller from Blumhouse Television, iHeartRadio and Realm. Listen to Dream Sequence on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back, Michael. I technically lied a little. It's not, I mean, it's about Nazis, but it's not just about Nazis.

This episode is a script. I originally wrote about a year and a half, two years ago, I got asked to go speak at Oxford Student Union, which was great. Lovely people, grateful to the fellow who invited me and set it up, grateful to the leftist club, the beleaguered leftist club at Oxford who met with me, very nice people.

Two questions, sorry. Did you wear shoes? I did. Did you bring a machete? No, you're not, but Michael, you cannot bring a machete to the UK They they do not take kindly to any they're making kitchen knives now that have blunt tips So you can't stab someone with them. Oh, yeah, I saw the safety kitchen. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah that would not have gone over well, but no I we tried to record it there and the

No, we tried to record it there, and between the moving around a bunch and the actual size, anyway, the recording got fucked up. And then we recorded it again, and the recording got fucked up again when we had another guest in. But it wound up being good because, as you might be aware, I mean, good's the wrong word, but as you're aware, there have been a massive series of horrific war crimes that have been committed very recently.

So I got to update this episode in a relevant way because what's happening in Gaza is deeply relevant to what we're talking about here, because these episodes are about how the media responded to the rise of the Nazis and the Holocaust in the 1930s and 40s. And it's overall kind of a story about how, particularly the liberal media in multiple countries

failed universally across the world in its attempt to deal with and stop the rise of fascism. And that's a worthwhile story because a lot of the same families here in the US, a lot of the same families who directed American media in particular and failing to report properly on the Nazis are still running the most influential media outlets and they're still failing in the same ways.

And I think this is useful history for people to have. So Michael, are you ready to learn about how the liberal media is essentially incapable of confronting fascism in a direct and meaningful way? Or at least was. Well, it's something you have to not already think that, but also I'm just reeling from the implication that I was a backup guest on this topic.

That's all I can really focus on. So let's do the Nazi stuff. I mean, we tried, we recorded this last a year ago, but I, after October 7th and everything that's happened since then, I had to like rewrite it. There's no statute of limitation on my feelings Michael this is one of my best scripts. I worked really hard on this one. No, this sounds amazing. It sounds fascinating Don't let me stop you were my top draft pick

Yes, I mean we were originally going to do a different episode with you But we had to wind up pushing it a week So sure we had someone else on the apartheid or episodes. Well, the Sophie bump is what you really want. Yeah. So I'm golden. Look, this is just, it's just how it's gonna happen. Okay. On February 17th, 2017, the Washington Post, one of the USA's chief papers of record, changed their slogan to democracy dies in darkness. If you can remember that.

This was right at the start of the Trump era. democracy dies in darkness, if you can remember that. I do. This was right at the start of the Trump era, everybody was like real, the whole resist thing was real gung ho and I think they were playing into that, right? Let's get the libs really fired up to enjoy and pay money for our content by acting like we're the last bulwark

against the rise of fascism in America. It sounds like some Emperor Palpatine is somehow back shit. It does. It's absolutely a George Lucas slide, yeah. It was updated in there, and also it's just not true. Democracy doesn't die in darkness. Democracy dies because you have like

a million different multicolored lights all shooting into everyone's eyes at the same time. It's like a fucking club floor, right? Like that's how democracy dies. Everyone is too disoriented to realize what's happening. Anyway, this new slogan was updated and their online massed head immediately and added to print copies of the paper a week later.

And the reaction was mixed. A writer for ProPublica called it awesome. At South by Southwest a few weeks later, New York Times executive editor Dean Baca compared it mockingly to an ad for the next Batman movie. And we're not mostly going to be nice to the Times in this episode, but I think Baca actually got that very correct.

That does sound like a Nolan Batman line. Yeah. Now fears that the US was lurching towards a new authoritarian crisis brought with them a surge of new paid subscribers to both the Post and the Times. A.G. Solsberger, publisher of the New York Times, used some of that money to run a commercial

at the 2017 Academy Awards, wanting the nation's most connected celebrities, the truth is more important now than ever. Now, both slogans depict a view of legacy media that news media executives want to push of an embattled fourth estate that's the bulwark against fascism and corruption. Very little evidence supports the claim

that our media institutions have ever worked this way. The 21st century has seen an unprecedented global expansion in news media, and yet Freedom House, a DC based nonprofit that conducts research and advocacy on democracy, calculates that over the last 16 years, the number of people living in societies that are considered free has declined by more than 25%,

which is like a pretty startling number, I would say, of unfree people. Although, you know, what is freedom? I'm not free, you know, I think RFK Jr. would agree with this. I'm not free to eat roadkill in every state, you know? So what use is liberty if I can't eat,

if I can't scrape a deer carcass off the highway in Utah? What? Sophie, look! Yeah, a car in every garage, a turkey in Utah. What? Sophie? Look. Yeah, a car in every garage, a turkey in every pot, and a worm in every brain. Every American deserves that. Look, are you gonna say that if we all had brain worms,

this country would vote worse? If. Because I don't know that I think that's the truth. No. I think we're already rocking a 60-40 on that, brother. Yeah, yeah, I do think a significant portion of this country has parasites in their brain. At least toxoplasmizes.

Yeah, yeah. So the decline in people living in free countries is initially sharpest in what they referred to as authoritarian states like Belarus and Syria. But in recent years, it has increasingly impacted nations with long stable democratic traditions. These countries also happen to have the largest and most active news media sectors.

Editors from prestigious publications like the Times and the Post talk a lot about the importance of objectivity, right? In other words, not being a journalist like me, you know, who repeatedly is open about the fact that I think the Republican party needs to be burnt to the ground. But Gallup continues to register American trust in the media at or near record lows.

2022 was the first time that the percentage of Americans with no trust at all in the media was higher than the percentage with a great deal or fair amount of trust combined. So whatever you want to say about the value of objectivity, I think the facts suggest that all of the focus our legacy media has on being quote unquote objective has led to a situation in which absolutely no one trusts them. So I don't know. Well, it seems like you're not doing a good job. Definitely coming from a filmmaking background,

it's like an old saw that there is no objective way to make any kind of film, documentary or not, because you are a human filtering things through your perceptive process. And making art is a sequence of decisions. So you can't not do that. So in a way, it's more effective and transparent to be like, I'm coming from this place.

Here's what I believe. Yeah. Yeah. I agree with Verner Herzog on this. We're not flies on the wall. We should we should aspire to be the hornets that sting. You know, like that's the actual purpose. I just I broke with him ever since he refused to show us that bear footage. Show us the bear footage.

I wanna watch that man die. Is there a grizzly man footage? Yeah. That's a great reaction to Timothy Treadwell's life story. Which we should have been able to see. Why not? I've seen worse. Yeah.

So these facts, you know, that this obsession with objectivity has at least coincided with a collapse in trust in the news media are not divorced from the actions of the editors and publishers of these great legacy companies. Roughly a year after the post changed their slogan, you know, democracy dies in darkness, they accepted an editorial from Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the authoritarian leader of Turkey, who currently imprisons more journalists than any other world leader. This is relevant because his op-ed bore the title,

Saudi Arabia Still Has Many Questions to Answer About Jamal Khashoggi's Killing. And yes, they do, but you shouldn't be the one saying it. The guy who kills and imprisons more journalists than anyone shouldn't be complaining about the murder of a journalist. Yeah. What are we doing running this ad? Was there no one else who could write that story?

Was there quite literally nobody else? Well, there were three Spider-Men, but they were busy pointing at each other. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The Times, obviously during the same period,

has continued to run a blistering series of irresponsibly sourced articles on transgender healthcare, which has helped to fuel a right-wing eliminationist crusade against trans people. When both GLAAD, a queer advocacy organization, and several thousand New York Times contributors wrote letters complaining about this,

management dismissed their concerns. They weren't being objective enough. Times publisher, A.G. Solsberger, did make a personal statement when one of his reporters was allegedly spit on over this issue. The murder of Brianna Gay, a transgender 16 year old in the UK, did not merit any direct comment from Solzberger. You know, I think it's worth kind of looking at it like that. None of these, none of these claims about like, well, we have to be objective,

you know, it's people, it's important for us to remain trustworthy. They're never consistent about it, right? There's certain things we'll try to be objective about, but you know, when there's an opinion that the people who own the paper have, that's going to be the paper's opinion. And we're just gonna pretend like that's objectivity. And this is the reality that you find

when you analyze the responses of the liberal press in Weimar, Germany, in pre-Mussellini Italy, and in the United States in the 20s and 30s. It's kind of sobering how direct the comparisons are. Because rather than being opponents to fascism, these publications were at best ineffectual witnesses to disaster and at worst enablers of that disaster. We're gonna talk about a lot of different newspapers

and how they fucked up, but we're gonna start in Italy in the period from World War I's end in 1918 to Mussolini's March on Rome near the end of 1922. This is generally broken up by historians into two eras. You've got the Red Years, which saw powerful working class movements arise and try to do revolutionary activity. And then you've got the Black Years, which saw a fascist counter movement boil up in response and eventually seize power.

Errorette Gochman from Princeton has done the most accessible analysis of how liberal newspapers and pundits responded in both of these periods. And Goetzschman primarily analyzes L'Estaempa, which was the most influential newspaper for like social Democrat Italians, right? The kind of progressive left and also Italian illustration, which was a weekly paper that kind of was more geared

towards the middle-class center, right? In modern US terms, L'Estaempa is something like the New Republic or maybe Jacobin, and Italian illustration is like the Times or the Post. The Red Years were characterized by two large scale attempts at a general strike, the first of which occurred in 1919 and was centered around protesting the involvement of allied governments in the Russian civil war. Neither paper supported the strike, claiming a general solidarity with labor,

but complaining that a strike would destroy Italy's collective wealth. And we're not talking about like an open-ended, like with the writer's strike, right? Where it is scary, because it's like, we don't know when this is going to end. We don't know how long, you know, people are going to have to be out of work.

You know, it's necessary, but it's a frightening thing to contemplate. This was a two day strike meant to sort of a like, we're trying to make a statement, right? But none of the papers were willing to endorse even something that limited. Lestampa argued that it would have damaging effects on the national economy and quote, would be a disaster for all, bourgeoisie and proletarian alike.

And again, we're talking two days here. Like you can't go without this for two days. Did they have an argument for how the proletariat would suffer beyond we'll punish you and respond? No, no, not at all. Just that like this two day strike would be so devastating to the economy. The economy will slow down so much.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. You know, Italy in the 1930s, just the thing, or 1920s, things are moving so quickly economically. You know, it's the New York of the Mediterranean, right? We can't throw brakes on this gravy train. Yeah. Things are moving too fast.

It's also been there. Yeah. Things are moving too fast. It's also been there. Yeah. We got a lot of pasta to move. It's not like it keeps for a long time. We say gravy, we mean tomato sauce, but that's a whole different thing. So meanwhile, Italian Illustrations coverage focused more on fears about communism in Russia and connections between like Italian socialists and their Russian and Hungarian counterparts.

Lestapa, with its more working class readership, focused on the disruption of the strike, and Italian illustration attacked the strike movement for its purported ties to radicals who were like oftentimes fighting in the East actively because the Russian Civil War is still going on. In September of 1920, the Federation of Metallurgical Workers or FIOM ceased negotiations with factory management after being refused a new wage agreement. To avoid a strike and the economic consequences of a strike,

workers occupied factories and defended them from their employers with armed red guards. This is a very cool chapter of Italian politics, right? Like these laborers take control of their places of business and put up armed guards in order to like fight it out with the cops and the fascists if they try to take them back. Now writers for Italian illustration

were immediately dismissive of this movement. They described the laborers who occupied the factories they worked in as little boys playing shopkeeper, grocer, salesman, and sailor, which is like, this is always what they do. It was like, well, these leftists- Sailor was a curve ball. Say, yeah, well, they're taking over docks too.

Okay, sure. You get to, like, you look at the campus protests, you get a lot of like, these little kids don't understand the world. You know, they're playing and being adults. They don't really get it. But in this case, it, like, you look at the campus protests, you get a lot of like, these little kids don't understand the world. You know, they're playing and being adults. They don't really get it. But in this case, it's like, well, these guys are literally the ones

who work at the factories. Like, they're not little boys playing as like, whatever. They do this job for a living. That's why they've taken the factory. They've seized the means of production, which I believe I've heard somewhere. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It's just, it's wild how consistent the attacks are, but also how utterly divorced from reality, especially in this period they were. The occupations were portrayed as a fundamentally childish thing, evidence of the, quote, infancy of a naive new society that mimicked the toils of grownup society. And again, these are the grownups who were toiling. I don't know how this is mimicry. These are the men working in those factories for a living. By definition, you are a writer, which I do for a living.

And it's not as hard as working in a factory. I can tell you that. What are you talking about? The occupation sparked a violent reaction from Italy's far right street movement. Fascist gang attacks on workers and occupied factories grew increasingly common alongside police raids. This created a sense of constant paranoia

within the Red Guards. As Mussolini's squadristis took to carrying out what they called punitive expeditions against labor organizations. Historian Angelo Tasca describes them as treating the murder of workers as sport. Despite this hideous situation, La Stampa and Italian Illustration were united in treating the fascist violence as secondary to the problem of organized labor. Red Guards, they argued, had provoked gunfights with the fascists by their very existence. You can't blame the fascists for wanting to attack them.

The fact that they existed and were trying to defend themselves justifies them being attacked. Well, they're just taking it a priori of like, surely we all agree, it's always right to enforce the status quo and return to normalcy, yes? Or like, that goes without saying. And you're like, well, we are actually trying to alter some of the aspects.

We wanted to change things in a way that was positive. Well, you're evil for that, right? Yeah, exactly. And it's, I mean, it is really that direct. Liberal columnist Renato Simone wrote a column in which he argued that the real victims in this situation in which communists and socialists were being murdered, like lit on fire, shot to death in their own factories.

Come on, Simone. Renato Simone wrote, yes, yes, Renato Simone's like, the real victims here are middle-class liberals who have to deal with disruption. Yeah, they're traffic, dude. They were 25 minutes late to work because of these kids. These kids are just doing this as a fad, you know? They just love getting shot to death by fascists.

That's right. You know? For the gram. Simone, one actual line from this column is, oh, how tragic is the life of the poor bourgeoisie in Italy? You can't like, you couldn't even make fun of it. So while this was- The subtext is quite literally, let them eat cake.

Like it's a direct- Yeah, let them eat cake. Historical echo of it, yeah. Yeah. I hope, I hope when the war got on, his house got hit by a bomb. I'll say that much. Sure. While this was going on,

liberal papers treated Mussolini's rise as concerning and the fascists as problematic, but also less of a direct threat than the excesses of the far left. A degree of fear may also have stopped larger publications from taking a more active role in the struggle for the reins of Italy's government. During the first half of 1921, fascists destroyed 17 left-wing newspapers and printing presses. Again, they are literally killing journalists and destroying piece by piece the free press in Italy, and the free press in Italy. And the free press in Italy,

the liberal free press in Italy, the press that has the largest circulation is largely being like, well, you got to understand why they're doing it. There's a lot of economic, what's the disenfranchisement among this population, their anger, we have to understand their anger, right? It's very familiar bullshit,

but it's interesting to see it happen while the fascists are actively killing the media. In the summer of 1921, various left-wing armed groups and leftist war veterans formed a united militia to combat the fascists, the Arditi del Popolo. Now we know today that these people were organizing a defense against Mussolini during basically the last moment in which any defense would have been possible.

And I wanna read a paragraph here from Gochman's piece. Lestampa's coverage of the Arditi del Popolo's demonstration in Rome aimed to delegitimize the newly formed workers' self-defense group, doing so in a manner reminiscent of the paper's condemnation of the Red Guards that were active during the factory occupations of September, 1920. La Stampa emphasized the combativeness

of some of the workers who were present. For example, the Royal Guards had no choice but to arrest the most quarrelsome and hotheaded of the demonstrators. Additionally, while describing instances of violence involving a young man struck with a blow to the head falling to the ground, or a manual laborer struck with his hands on his bloody head, the newspaper employed the passive voice and thus obscured the direct agency of the policeman and the fascist squadristi in the events.

You can't write that fascists hurt somebody, just like you can't write that cops hurt somebody. Someone simply got hurt, you know? Mm-hmm. Yeah, and we'll talk some more about this trend that absolutely doesn't persist to the present day. But you know what does persist to the present day, Michael? I could guess, but I don't wanna steal your thunder and revenue, so you take it.

Capitalism, sweet lady capitalism, Michael, still with us. You know, she's our nursemaid. She's our lover in a lot of ways. You know, our only friend, some would argue. Not me, but some. Anyway, here's ads. It was December 2019 when the story blew up. In Green Bay, Wisconsin, former Packer star Kabir Vajabiamila caught up in a bizarre situation.

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Michael, does your soul feel refreshed from hearing about Shumba Casino, the good news? It feels capitalized. And you take that as whatever emotional charge you want to. Yeah, I love gambling. I love capital. You know, I love capital. That's how you get things started. Yeah, yeah.

Fascism is flooding into Italy in 1921, right? And yet, the media as laborers try to organize to fight against it can only kind of use the passive voice to describe the violence of Mussolini's blackshirts as they slowly take power or pretty quickly take power and it's interesting to me like how consistent this this denial of agency to some people and this apportioning of blame to others is still to this day And right as I finalized this article, which is like a year ago now,

the Atlantic published a pretty reckless article about the dangerous new anarchist movement in the United States that I think is a good example of this. Among other things, the article made lurid reference to the shooting of an armed fascist gang member, a proud boy in Portland, by an anarchist named Michael Reinhold and claimed that the police had later been forced to shoot Reinhold in self-defense.

Which is interesting to me because evidence, significant documentation of that shooting proved that Reinhold never fired at officers when he was shot dozens of times, like he was not brandishing a weapon. They came in and they assassinated him. And part of how we know they assassinated him is that President Trump bragged about

having his federal agents assassinate this guy. He got up on stage and said, I had them kill this man. But you don't have to report on that if you're the Atlantic, right? Because like, that's not gonna sound objective, you know, if you talk about the fact that this guy was probably murdered before he could have his day in court. I don't know, it's good to see the same thing

repeatedly happening. Well, yeah, propaganda is equally what you omit, right? What's wild to me to see in the present is, again, capitalism. The 24- hour news cycle that we know is now algorithm driven and hit driven, um, which I'm totally part of, but pop culture sense, but with news, it's gotten to the point where they don't report anymore that Trump says fucking insane stuff because they're

like, everyone knows that already. That doesn't pull clicks because it's established. And it's like, yeah, but it bears repeating. It's like, you should be covering it. Well, it's the same thing. I rarely say like the Libs have a point about, this major thing, but when they got angry that like there was all this focus on Biden

being too old to be president and not any focus on how Trump is clearly also slipping, right? Like he is not the man he was in 2016. Like that's a fair point. It's kind of fucked up that they just pretended he was not also sundowning. Right, and it's not even the agenda. I mean, in some cases it is,

but I believe in most cases the reporters are not going, I'm a Trump-er, so I'll omit this information as a propaganda Psy-op. They're going, the Trump stuff's old, the Biden stuff's new. I'm trying to write stuff that hits, that's it. I also think, I think they don't like Biden. Biden's administration has kind of famously strangling media access in a way that makes it harder

to get out stories. Whereas with Trump, it's always really easy to get stories, right? So I do think there's a degree of like, we're just kind of pissed that this guy is harder for us to monetize I think that is the issue for the Turkish guy was murdering them and they love it They love more than getting oh my god

Great stuff. Anyway, you know Michael one of the promises we make here at coolzone to all of our employees Is that if you are murdered by the Saudi government, we're not going to then hire another dictator to make a podcast about how that was wrong, you know? That's- I think I get the analogy there. And I appreciate it. Yeah, we do that in a blood oath.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not our blood. You know, we found some other- I was gonna Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not our blood. You know, we found some other. I was going to say, is it the classic over the palm? No, because that's not enough blood. I see. It's more of a carry situation, Michael. We talk a menstrual blood then?

Well, look. Different scene, different scene. I think, I think honestly, as an American, it's my right to not tell our employees where the blood came from. Gotcha. Yeah. I think the Supreme Court will back that.

Yeah. Yeah. I did email him the truth. So we'll see how good he is. You can keep a secret, right? Please. Edward Snowden, you seem like you're really the guy to do this. So the main thing that the Italian liberal press

is guilty of in this period is treating radical left-wing organizing as if it's outside of acceptable lines fundamentally, while treating the fascists and their violence as understandable, as normal normal and maybe even inevitable. Lestampa published a column in which they blamed anarchists and communists for arming themselves, which had forced the blackshirts to arm themselves.

They promised the fascists would happily hand over their guns if the Arditi del Popolo had not given, quote, fascism a motive to cry provocation. These fascists are just aching to give up their weapons, but you mean all leftists armed yourself and now they can't. Like what an insane thing to write. In 1920s Italy, like by late 1921, much of the liberal media class saw protest and organizing by workers as the primary cause of fascist violence.

This resulted in what historian Angelo Tasca called a philofascism on behalf of many middle-class liberals. We can see this in the reaction of writers for Italian illustration to the August 1922 general strike. In their eyes, the economic disruption justified right-wing violence, which provoked a broad and immediate consensus in public opinion for the fascists.

The paper glowingly celebrated blackshirts replacing workers on train platforms and public services. Renato Simoni wrote that the failed protests of 1922 enabled fascism to demonstrate its merits. Wow, these fascists are killing reporters, but they sure can work a trade platform. But also they're scabs. But also they'll cross the picket line, yeah.

It's also, it's such a direct, it ports so directly to like, well, of course people are murdering protestors who block roads, they have to get to work, right? Like, it doesn't, nothing, none of this ever changes, you know, this attitude that like, some things are worth killing people over. And it's not, you know, self-defense.

It's stuff like, I might be late to my job, right? That's worth, but if someone on the left were to kill a fascist in self-defense, that's unjust. But somebody murdering a group of people for standing in a road, well, that's understandable. You gotta get where they're coming from here, you know? And may have- Right, as we've seen time and again, the human mind is so malleable for better and worse.

You can, there's just big brother hits so often where it's like, no, literally the opposite of that. What do you, am I insane? What's going on? Yeah. Good stuff. Historians like Adrian Littleton will argue that sympathy to fascist aims was a common reaction for liberal papers reporting on the chaos of the early 1920s. This doesn't mean that there weren't liberal papers that opposed the fascists as consistently

as left-wing papers, but it does mean that many of the more influential writers in the center left showed what you could call a bias towards normalcy, one that could accommodate fascist violence, but could not accommodate organized labor, right? You still get this today, right? Not just for organized labor.

There's a lot of folks in the liberal media who can accommodate Israeli violence, right? But cannot accommodate any sort of fair discussion about protests against that violence, for example. When I think about that, I think about the New York Times recently published an op-ed by Brett Stevens in May of 2024 titled, A Thank You Note to the Campus Protesters. In it, Brett argued, kind of snarkily, I get that many, if not most of you, see yourselves as dedicated idealists who want to end suffering for Palestinians, champion equality and oppose all forms of bigotry. There are ways you could do that

without making common cause with people who hate Jews, want to kill us and often do. Supporting a two-state solution would be one such way. Insisting that Palestinians deserve better leaders than Hamas is another. Building bridges with Israelis is a third. And it's like, yeah, man, I agree Palestinians deserve better leaders than Hamas,

but that's not really the immediate issue. The immediate issue is all of the people being killed, right? You very carefully said things where you're like, that's also technically true. How do you expect them to vote right now, Brett, right? Like who did who's going to hold that election at the moment? The polling places would get bombed. It's totally it's totally the same mechanic as a guy who's like, well, you know, the 13 percent of the people in America invested in the stock markets line went up

this month and bitch, I can't afford ham sandwich. So I don't care about that. And the whole thing about like, yeah, there's some college students and other protesters who've like waved Hamas flags. Do I like that? I don't like any flags, right? I'm not a flag guy.

But again, that's not the issue. If the people, if you could point to a guy waving a flag and be like, and he also killed 7,000 children, I would say then yes, this is a serious issue, right? That's the thing is how do you not see it in the same bucket is ultimately the argument against the protesters is always you're burning a flag, which to me is kind of violent-y.

It could escalate to violence. And you're like, violence? I just saw a guy carrying his decapitated baby around. What are you talking about? And it is, but that is you've hit upon it because like what Brett and a lot of the leadership cadre at the Times are doing, it's the same as what a lot of these Italian journalists did.

They equated rudeness and disruption of like transit and stuff to the slaughter, to murder, right? Like those things are equal, right? Brett is saying a college student being rude is actually more dangerous than killing a city with the children, right? If you think about it, they're both annoying,

murder and hanging out. A guy waving a Hamas flag and the slaughter of 30,000 small children, equally problematic. They both make me mildly uncomfortable. So I would say that a dude being kind of a dick at a protest is less of a problem than burning thousands of children alive.

We can get a little more context into the thoughts and decisions of the kind of newsmen who made these sort of decisions, right? We can normalize the fascists, but not the left by pivoting over to Weimar, Germany and the Olsteen publishing house. Olsteen was founded in 1877, which is seven years after the birth of the German state by Leopold Olstein, the son of a paper merchant. By the time the Weimar years rolled around, Olstein was the biggest name in German print media. They put out newspapers, magazine, and books,

a dizzying array of what we now call content. The Olsteins were a politically progressive Jewish family, and as a result, much of what they published was reflexively liberal in its outlook. They were obviously an early target for the Nazis who described them as when the Nazis talked about Jewish press, like if you've ever seen a Hitler speech or read anything where the Nazis are talking about the Jewish press in Germany, they're talking about Olstein, right?

That's not like a broad general, just a broad general term. They are specifically referring to Olstein because it is the biggest publishing house in the country. The Nazi tracked the press as a Jewish instrument of power published in 1920, focused an entire chapter just on Olstein. German communists hated Olsteins too, for different reasons. Like most publishing empires, Olstein made its money from ads. Consumer culture was a new concept in post-war Germany, and Olstein cheered it on with publications like Tempo,

which devoted large illustrated sections to which products people should buy to make the most of their weekends, which were also a new concept. As a result, it's not surprising that most Olstein papers reflected a political allegiance broadly tied to the German Democratic Party or DDP, which had helped to write the Weimar Constitution. The one major break Olsteine had with the DDP was over the value of unionizing. Corporate spokesmen emphasized the positive relations

between management and labor at Olsteine. And one of Olsteine's owners noted that, we think that like these good relations, they'll be ruined if you unionize right it'll separate us from each other anytime you hear that from your boss you know you're about to get rat-fucked great great stuff I was at a company that will not be named but if you know my history I've only been at two companies, so you could figure it out. But they were like, man, it's what a hard job. They hired an executive who didn't work at that company. So it's a guy you've never, who's this guy?

We don't know this guy, whose job was to do a little spiel and spin that like, it would be in your best interest to not talk about unionizing. Like we've been hearing a lot about it. Could you guys not use the word union or talk about union or forming a union? Yeah. So weird. He just does the like,

hey kids sits down backwards on the chair. That's his job. And we found out later he goes from company to company doing that. There's enough demand for that. Yeah. No, of course. Because they don't understand that like why people want to unionize.

Like I do think there's a degree to which they're baffled that people would want more money than they have. It's, I don't know, crazy rich people brain worms, right? Which are worse than I think the RFK Jr. brain worms. Those are honest, God-fearing brain worms, right? Which are worse than I think the RFK Jr. brain worms. Those are honest, God-fearing brain worms, right? Not the kind that money gives you. What? Speaking of God-fearing brain worms.

You know who doesn't have brain worms? The sponsors of our podcast. I just don't know. The eponymous Lisa of mattress fame. Yeah. Wait, who's that? Oh, that was the one. All the pods pushed. Lisa mattress.

Oh, is Lisa one of the mattresses? I just I remember. I think I've done two different mattress company ads at this point. Sure. I'll take another. We should keep selling beds over the internet. Right. Yeah. It was December 2019 when the story blew up.

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You know, why don't you buy a bed listener then come back to the podcast, laying down on your bed, delivered to you in a suspiciously small package that then kind of inflates when you open it and you ask yourself, are there like weird chemicals in this that makes this possible? This doesn't seem like it should be a thing

that a bed can do. But then you stop thinking about it. Just like you stopped thinking about what all the plastics in your water bottle were doing. Well, you inevitably transitioned to, hey, remember those little dinosaur sponges and the pills that expanded? Then why'd they start making those?

Was that a chemical thing? How are you doing the rabbit hole? Yeah, yeah. It's just not worth thinking about. What is worth thinking about? Don't forget to use coupon code old and Stahl and Stein, whatever it was. So, Osteen Publications fell into a version of the same trap that befell Lestampa, claiming support for organized labor except for when it actually organized.

Meanwhile, it was hesitant initially to report on the Nazis, due in part to a fear of feeding into Nazi myths of Jewish control of the media. Because we are a Jewish-owned publishing house, we can't report on Nazi violence against the Jews because people will think we're not being objective. Like that's how deep the brain worms go about this kind of thinking. And I will say for the Olsteen family, it's a little more understandable

than it's going to be when the same thing happens in the US because they are also worried, well, this could actually direct some real violence to me. Right? Although I think a more rational person would have said, well, but the Nazis are going to direct violence against you guys no matter what. We say you might as well try to make people aware of it.

Now, conservative mass media did not suffer from the same problem. The August Sherl Company, purchased by Alfred Hugenberg in 1916, owned one of the largest papers in Berlin, as well as one of Germany's first newswire services. Hugenberg was also a far right political activist and politician.

He is the Andrew Breitbart of his day, and he felt no compunction against using his papers to espouse an anti-democratic agenda. He was not anti-Semitic in a way that rose above the background level of the era. He was not motivated by it like the Nazis were, but he was willing to work with Adolf Hitler to further his own ends. The two started collaborating after the death of Chancellor Gustav Strassmann in 1929. This was after an election in which the German National Party had lost a bunch of seats. He was

willing to work with Hitler and use his papers to try and launder their reputation to more mainstream German conservatives. Meanwhile, Olsteen, the largest liberal publishing house in the country, refused to embrace anything beyond tepid support for this kind of vague concept of democracy. The Nazis were depicted in Olsteen publications as something to be mocked and scorned, but not as a serious threat to the future of the system. We'll make fun of them a little bit, but like we can't. Trump is a clown. There's no way. Right. Trump is a clown. There's no way. Right. Frans Olsteen.

Totally. Wow. Interesting. Yeah. Same thing. Right? wow. Interesting. Yeah, yeah. Same dip, same thing, right? That's how they ease you in. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's remarkable how directly it grafts onto what we've seen. Franz Olsteen, who was one of the few mainstream journalists

to spend real one-on-one time with Hitler in this period, described him as a poor fanatic, a pitiful man. It was impossible in Osteen's eyes that such a man could actually threaten German democracy. This guy's too much of a clown to be a real danger. Well, I mean, Dr. Seuss is dunking on him left and right. He's no threat to us. Yeah, exactly.

This caused serious debate. Heinz Osteen actually yelled at the editorial department for mocking the NSDAP. He wanted them treated like a serious party. So did Karl Jodicke, an assistant to Oostein's GM, who wrote a white paper arguing the Nazis were, quote, a movement for political freedom and economic justice. So not only are like, on one hand,

you've got the people who are like, well, these guys are just clowns. And then at the other, you've got folks who are like, no one hand, you've got the people who are like, well, these guys are just clowns. And then at the other, you've got folks who are like, no, they're not clowns. They're a real movement with real issues. And we should, we should fairly discuss the issues that the Nazis are bringing up. As a liberal publisher, Olsteen opposed the party's anti-democratic politics, but Yodke warned against them getting caught up in, quote, the politics of petty details. And what did Yodke warned against them getting caught up in quote, the politics of petty details. And what did Yodke mean by petty details?

Reporting on a quote, assaults of evil Nazis on peaceful protesters, right? We can't get caught up in the politics of who are the Nazis murdering? Who were they beating in the streets? How many folks are they assassinating, right? That's gonna get, you know, you don't wanna get bogged down on that stuff.

We have to discuss the bigger issues. Like, what do they think about the economy? It's like- Always the economy. Always the economy, that's what really matters. Not the fact that they are murdering journalists. Like, that's not really a big deal to us, you know? The assassination, the beatings of Jewish people

in the street, not really a problem. Let's talk about what they have to say about inflation. Now, the very best investigation I have found into this period of German media is the book, Modern Modernity by Jochen Hung. It focuses on the Olsteine company in one of its most popular papers, Tempo. Hung writes, quote,

"'To be able to compete with Nazi propaganda, the Olsteine papers had to change their tune, Yodaki claimed. Instead of touting lofty ideals of individual freedom and democracy, they had to follow a resurgent patriotism, which strongly emphasized the welfare of the whole community instead of the individual and worked with emotions instead of reason and skepticism, as this was the only way to gain influence with the masses. The temporary curtailing of civic rights and democracy was inevitable in this time of crisis, he argued. Shouldered with their daily struggle,

the people did not care much for the luxury of freedom at the moment anyway. As he showed in a later memorandum, Yodiki was clearly fascinated by the Nazis. The core principle of the movement, he argued, was a return to universally accepted, non-debatable, unchangeable forms of life instead of general relativity. So you've got this guy who is working for this paper owned by a Jewish family that is ostensibly liberal, who is one of the people making calls there.

And he's kind of obsessed with the Nazis in a positive way. Like he has gotten enraptured by how different they seem and how exciting they are to report on, right? And he's focusing- It's a fresh new hate group. Revitalizing my hate glands, yeah. Yeah, and he's so interested in reporting on what they claim to believe that he's like,

we can't report on the violence they're doing. That's not fair, right? That's missing the point of the Nazis, right? They're not about the violence, they're about the economics. Yodiki argued that the Nazi movement's simplicity was what gave it the ability to grab hold of and guide the masses. Their primitive slogans of hate and vengeance were more effective than the wonky policy

arguments of the German state party, who Olstein had earlier backed. The company's pivot away from directly criticizing Nazi violence caused Gersam Schlollam, a Berlin-born Jewish philosopher and writer, to call Osteen one of the most dishonest and misleading media companies in Germany. As Hitler neared power in 31 and 32, Osteen pivoted to position itself as loyal to the political machine of Paul von Hindenburg. Their hope was that he would maintain a semblance of democratic civil society in the face of Hitler's rise, right? That Hindenburg, this old man who's committed to the system, he'll protect us from Hitler, right?

This was a bad call, in hindsight. And also an obviously bad call at the time. Now, there were journalists and papers who published serious exposes on Nazi crimes. In the 1928 election season, social democratic papers published stories claiming Hitler had been bribed by Mussolini in exchange for ending the German claim to South Tyrol when he took power. Hitler sued over the matter and the libel case ground forward until 1932, the subject of heavy reporting all the while.

Likewise, when Hans Litten subpoenaed Hitler over the stabbing of two workers by SA men and questioned him on the stand about incitements to violence and Nazi propaganda, reporters dutifully brought the trial to millions of German living rooms. It didn't matter. Kurt Tucholsky, one of Weimar's most influential journalists, noted morosely, the prestige of large democratic newspapers or artists and of liberal associations, in fact, bears no relation to their actual power. Kurt saw them as functionally toothless in the face of what he called the power of reaction, always there and working more skillfully and, above all, less respectfully.

And I, again, that's exactly how it feels today, right? Things have changed in the last couple of weeks to some extent, but I think we've all felt that feeling of like, okay, so everyone in any position of cultural influence claims to be against the rise of fascism in this country. And that has done absolutely nothing to make it less popular. It doesn't hurt them at all. It seems to be completely toothless. And these respectable people who are in traditional positions of cultural influence, they just

have no ability to confront the fascists on their own turf because the fascists are willing to like, they have no need to be respectful, right? They have no need to follow the rules. They also appeal to fear, which is such a primal motivator for us just as animals. I highly recommend a documentary called Century of the Self, which is about how Freud's brother, I believe, potential cousin, was, I mean, people, you just described someone who discovered this, so people independently discover it, but he's the godfather of modern advertising, in a sense, for discovering that, like, oh, emotion.

Don't explain why the product is good. Just make them feel like they're a piece of shit if they don't have this thing. It's so easy to control people this way. And it's like every time someone discovers that, it's the beginning of the end. That's a big problem. Like that's not good. Yeah, it's an atom bomb that like keeps getting forgotten

and rediscovered. And so it's like, I'll just do that. Yeah, exactly. It's great stuff. Now my opinion about this, because I spent a lot of the last three or four years in particular as like Biden's chances grew more dire and the far right kind of got more mask off about,

like you just had more of their influencers saying, we're about to end democracy, huzzah, right? Yeah, it's a rollback. Like, sorry, you just briefly touched on trans rights and it's like, they're, statistically speaking, are so few trans people, it's so obviously a tip of a rollback. It's like, we're testing whether we can say

gay people are bad. Obviously we're doing that. Like this is phase one. Yeah, we wanna kill them too, but like, we gotta start with the smaller group that has less power, it is easier to marginalize, right? Because gay people actually have a lot of cultural power and money. At this point, right.

Yeah. You know, and it's... When it comes to how ought the media report on stuff like this, right? Because Tukolsky, the point he's making is that, well, the legacy media is bound by rules that hamstring them from fighting these people because they feel they have to treat them respectfully. And you can't get across the damage, danger of them if you do it that way, right?

My contention is that fascism is a mortal threat to journalism, right? If you are a journalist, like any creature when its life is threatened has the right to defend itself. And if you are a journalist dealing with fascism rising in your country, I would argue it is not rational to be fair to them, right? Your job should be trying to destroy them, you know?

And I think back, when I think about this and how you, like what kind of weapons work, right? If traditional straight reporting and object objectivity like if literal facts do not beat these people and they never do It doesn't matter that the fascists lie. You are not going to fact check them away It has never happened and it will never happen Now fast forward to today when a Twitter account with 1700 followers made a post claiming that JD Vance, one of our country's most prominent fascists, had written about fucking a couch in his book Hillbilly Elegy.

Because no one actually- So easy to confirm or disconfirm. It's in a book. Go look it up. Right. But no one read that book, so nobody checked it, right? People pretended to read it, but it's dog shit, right? So because of that,

like people just weren't interested in checking it. The lie went incredibly viral with an even number of people believing that JD Vance had literally fucked a couch and also an even number just understanding the joke, which is that Vance is, again, it gets to a truth about Vance, which is that he is the kind of weirdo who would fuck a couch.

When VP candidate Tim Walz referenced the couch fucking in his own way during his inaugural speech on the campaign trail, the same media organs, a number of them, who have all failed to hinder the growth of authoritarian politics in the US, erupted in outrage, right? You know, Democrats shouldn't go low. It's bad to lie, you know, in this way. And I disagree.

I mean, it's not an AI episode, so I won't, but this also speaks to like, because I don't trust mainstream media and I get all my news online, online is also a wild west where you're like, maybe an AI wrote that. So you kind of absorb your news that you think is factual, A, with a grain of salt and B,

through like a cloud of data points. So I still don't know. I understand the couch thing is false. Did he search for dolphin porn? Are you up on the definitive answer on that? I think he may have just been looking for, he may have had an explanation I saw that seems at least equally plausible is that, because folks, if you're not aware of this,

he posted like a video of a dolphin molesting a woman, which is actually a thing that happens pretty frequently. Dolphins are, do not uncommonly sexually assault human beings. Dolphins are capable of rape. Like they know what they're doing. Anyway, whatever. It's enough of my anti-dolphin agenda. Look, dolphin genocide now! We have to take them out!

Yeah. No, so, uh, he posts this video of a woman getting like molested by a dolphin and it's like, boy, the Internet's sure a fucked up place or something like that, right? And you can see- This is Democrats. This is you. Whatever. Yeah, searched for women plus dolphins basically, and folks were like, was he just searching for dolphin porn?

I think it's also plausible that like, he was just scrolling through, found this on his feed, moved past it because shit was happening, and then was trying to find it later, and used the search terms to try to find it. But like the wink, wink, nudge, nudge, hey, how did he find this of it all? That's just a joke. Yes, yes, yes.

Okay. And it's the same as the couch thing, right? And they're like, well, it does kind of seem plausible that this guy would be looking for dolphin porn, right? Yeah. And that's why this, that's why, and it's hurt him. This has damaged, and you've seen like some of the fascists who are on his side try to like launch a campaign to argue that Wall that walls or to,

to like try, they've tried to do the same thing with Tim walls by like spreading rumors that he drinks horse cum or something, but like Tim walls doesn't seem like he drinks horse cum, right? JD Vance seems like a couch fucker who watches dolphin porn. So it's just not, it's just not gonna work Like Trump, Trump knows this cause he's fairly good at it. It doesn't always work. But there's something about vibe that makes an insulting nickname stick. Yeah, we're not stick, you know? Yeah.

And for the record, if you were to try the same thing with Trump, it wouldn't work because Trump doesn't seem like a guy who like even searches for porn. Right. Like he's just not that kind of you would need a different set of tactics with him, but this works on Vance. No, but you're like, he sexually assaulted a woman and paid her off. You're like, I buy that. Yeah, definitely, for sure.

That does seem like him. And when it comes to the folks who are concerned about the danger to our national political environment, if we accept things like what Walls did, referencing this lie about Vance, I don't know. We can't get any lower at this point, folks. Like, there's no bottom that we're going to sink to by actually using some of the weapons these people do

and fighting on the same playing field. It's like if a guy comes up to you in the street with a crowbar and starts swinging, and you pick up another crowbar, and then someone else is like, hey man, you're being just as bad as him by picking up that crowbar. No, you want a crowbar if a guy is swinging a crowbar at you.

You want to at least have the same grade of weapon that that motherfucker's got. In a vacuum, the idea of beating someone with a crowbar is immoral. It's really nasty. Yeah, there's context. We're not in a vacuum, brother. He attacked you with the crowbar first.

Hit him in the face. But that doesn't, I feel like whenever you say it, you gotta bring up proportionality, because then people use that to go, right, this guy set foot on my property, so I murdered family or these people took hostages so we're going to genocide them real quick. Yeah. I think the difference is if you're doing it to literally the people doing it to you

and JD Vance is spreading lies about trans people. JD Vance has talked repeatedly that he doesn't think women should be able to like hold elected office. Right. that he doesn't think women should be able to like hold elected office, right? He is like, when you're dealing with that guy, like we're not saying, I think this random Trump supporter is a couch fucker, you know? Like this is extremely targeted

and there's, I don't really see there being any splash damage here. That's to an unfair degree. And I don't know, I'm glad that there are people in the media and people within kind of the liberal political establishment who clearly finally understand this because I had really identified with Tucholsky's exhaustion and hopelessness, right?

Over like, why doesn't anyone know how to fight these people, right? Now, I will say some of, you know, if you're looking, if you wanna like fairly sort of discuss why Tucholsky was writing the way he was, it's also because he had this belief like a lot of media elites did that every German outside of Berlin was a Philistine, right?

Like all of these people, like the regular people are too dumb to understand what the Nazis are doing. Which I think- The Nazis are playing 4D chess, dude. I'm just saying. Yeah. I think what,

I think actually what you saw with Walls is a lot better. Like it's a lot smarter than, not just like what has been being, been done before, but like what a guy like Tukolsky would have said. Where you're not treating the audience as dumb, you're not trying to manipulate them, you're telling a joke and you're trusting that they will understand the joke, right?

In a way that's like- It's also going where the culture's going in the sense that way back when, right? When they first televised the debates, we started getting the rhetoric of like, I kind of want a president that I'd like to have a beer with or hang out with. And then people end up voting that way. And then presidents start going, fuck high art or being a leader.

I'm going to be on between two ferns because that's where votes are. People think that's funny and endearing. So, yeah, I think they're just going wherever they can to get the attention they so desperately crave. Yeah, which we all do to some extent, Michael. Oh, absolutely. I know that attention is my sunlight. I'm a wilting flower without it.

Oh, really? Yes, Sophie, obviously. Well, dude, and you're one of, this show is one of the premier voices pointing stuff out that you're one of this show is one of the premier voices pointing stuff out that you're unable to change. Yeah, can't do anything about this, but somebody should. But it sucks.

Yeah. Now I wanna say again, cause we're coming down so hard on the German media during this period. There were a lot of journalists who strove to activate people and who were trying to meet the Nazis on their level and fight them. One of them was one of my very favorite people in history, an American columnist named Dorothy

Thompson. Thompson is one of the best, one of the great journalists of all time, one of the great anti-fascist journalists of all time. And she wrote that Nazism was, quote, a repudiation of the history of Western man, of reason, humanism and a Christian ethic. Thompson joined members of the foreign press corps like William Shire, who had began to see warning the world about Hitler as a moral imperative. And Shire is, you know, he's one of these guys, if you read through, cause he's the

author of the rise and fall of the third Reich, right? If you read him today, you will note that he is wildly homophobic, massively homophobic, like a real bigot in that regard. But he is also a committed anti-fascist and he would later report on the annexation of Austria at substantial personal risk. The men who ran Olsteen took a different tactic. To keep Hindenburg happy, they began to run articles supporting the military and rearmament. They stopped their support of liberal democratic parties and they hired a man named Hans Schaeffer,

the former state secretary, to reform their coverage of the Nazis. Now to Schaeffer's credit, his stated goal managing the paper was to turn it into a weapon of resistance to the Nazis, which sounds good, but here's how he thought he was going to do that. So his idea was that like, well, if we just let Hitler get into power, then

he's going to have to govern and the gridlock of the Weimar system is just going to wear him down to a nub. So Schaeffer supported and Maitre's columnists supported the attempts of the von Poppen and von Schleicher governments to create a coalition with the nazis because he was like Once they have to govern that'll destroy them and we the osteen papers will have a valuable role to play as the loyal Critical opposition, you know, we'll make it clear how incompetent they are and that will gradually lead to their push them toward smartness, yeah. Yeah, we're going to, if people just see how bad they are at governing, surely we'll be able to vote them out. Which is like, yeah, they're not gonna let you vote again,

brother. Like that's not where this is headed, man. Surely once they drive off the cliff and kill us all, we'll be like, I told you so, don't do that again. Yeah, I don't think that Don't do that again. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think that's how this is going to end. So yeah, real miscalculation.

Now Schaeffer did see himself as protecting democracy, even though he had to support an authoritarian government to do so. As a result, in 1932, he directed Tempo, Olsteen's most popular publication, to devote more and more page space to the street fighting between Nazis and their opponents. Both sides were presented as functional equals since they both ignored the laws of the state. On New Year's Eve, 1932, Tempo published a political cartoon

that embodied the fundamentally naive way it depicted German society. The cartoon showed a tired woman, mother Germany, tucking her problem children into bed and hoping that they'd get along next year. And the problem children are, there's like hanging on the posters of the bed, there's like a Nazi helmet

and there's like an iron front cap and a communist hat. So it's like all of these people are, there's quarreling in the streets, but they're just like little kids wrestling or whatever. And soon they'll all be countrymen again and things will be okay. Yeah, yeah, you really got your fingers on the pulse there. In the decades since Hitler's rise to power,

different historians have posited a variety of suspicions as to why the Weimar press failed so miserably as a guardian of democracy. Kurt Kozik, who published an exhaustive three-volume study on the German press in 1972, blamed a lack of internal freedom at news publications. The financial needs of owners who profited by selling ads always came before quality reporting. Modrus Ecksteens, who authored a study on the German Democratic Press titled Limits of Reason, broadly agreed with this conclusion.

And nothing illustrates this fact more clearly than the way the Olsteen publications responded to the rise of the Nazis in the early 30s. This was the last time liberal resistance to Hitler might have won the day, and it was inarguably the last opportunity to try. But the popularity of the Nazis and the success with which they demonized their most firm in opposition, communists and street fighting socialist, meant fervent opposition had a cost too high for any capitalist entity to bear. So Olsteen's papers lurched away from reporting on politics and plunged further into encouraging

consumption. Their answer was, we've got to fix the economy to stop the Nazis. So we've got to get people buying stuff again, right? Going on vacation again. And I'm going to, I'm going to read a quote from modern, moderate modernity writing about the July, 1932 issue of tempo. The header of each issue of the promotional magazine usually carried short aphorisms or motivational sayings. And this issue declared that everybody has to buy as much as they can afford. An appeal that turned consumption into almost a national duty. When the von Poppen government announced an investment program to inject life into the stagnating economy in 1932,

Paul Ellsberg, editor-in-chief of Olsteen's Central Business Desk, lauded the move and prophesied a considerable strengthening of purchasing power in the near future. So in the last year before Hitler took power, the major liberal press organ of the country is being like, what y'all have to do to stop this is buy. Like get in there and support the economy. That's gonna fix everything. Well, it'll incentivize people to vote right.

Right, right. Well, you're they're saying you're voting by spending money. That's the voting that really matters. Right? Yeah. Now, this is the last year before Hitler takes power. And instead of reporting on what the Nazis are doing with Hindenburg and the conservative parties, or even like suggesting the building of a popular front between the left and the center and social democratic parties.

Tempo urged readers to build a front of all optimists fighting against the fear of consumption, right? Don't build a united political front against fascism. Build a front of optimists who wanna spend money. Let's get Krasinski out here. Let's do some good news for goodness sake. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

This is very much the, yeah. Let's get the good news in front of people. I mean, my brain is ruined by the internet so I can only think in terms of memes, but this is fine. It's the dog sitting in the flaming building. Yeah. Yeah, spend some money and you won't notice the flames. Yeah.

Now it's interesting, Tempo didn't just try to do ad speak here. They tried to assemble a street movement around capitalist consumption, publishing tearout flyers for readers to send their clients at work. They were urged to set an example for their neighbors by spending more money themselves.

This was the only thing that could save Germany from darkness. Spending creates jobs. Jobs create income, which will be spent on your products. So fight with us for a healthy consumer optimism and start in your own interest with yourself. Now, nothing that happened, the fact that the economy fell apart,

that like purchasing power did not increase, none of this stopped Tempo's management from pushing this vision of consumption. Instead, they added advice on weaponry to their technology everybody needs column, advertising concealed truncheons for readers to fight off robbers with. Now, when I was a kid reading about the rise

of the Third Reich in school, every textbook that mentioned the subject featured nearly identical photos of these huge piles of wheelbarrows of Deutschmarks to emphasize how bad the inflation was in Weimar Germany. I was led to believe that people picked Hitler because he promised them a way out. And the reality, of course, is that most Germans never chose Hitler in an open election. His success was based as much on trickery and corruption as electoral victory.

But the Great Depression did play a role. And I think mainstream histories of this period tend to under emphasize how much of what happened was the result of failure by liberal messaging rather than Hitlerian brainwashing. The Nazis and the communists both saw their popularity increase in this period while the German liberal parties bled voters. And this is because both Nazis and communists

offered voters visions, right? Different visions, but visions nonetheless of a way forward that was not simply, let's keep doing the same thing that obviously doesn't work. Tempo, as the most popular liberal magazine in the country, showcases this failure. It told readers there is but one way to fight the crisis, buying. Women were depicted not as the noble wellsprings of the German race or as equal beings, but as economic engines praised for the money they spent.

Just one day after the parliamentary elections in late 1932, Tempo ran an ad that captioned a photo of a woman in line at the store with the words, women must continue voting, right? The vote that matters from women is where you spend your money. So the brief boon and travel, the tempo had helped push in the late 20s, had collapsed by this point.

And the magazine just kind of responded by lying about the situation, predicting that late summer in 1932 is gonna be the sunny holiday season that Germans need to like get their minds off the domestic situation. One of their regular columns was written by a character named Hans Einfach, which means basically

John Everyman in German. A few days after the July election with the Nazis working their way into the halls of power, Hans published a column on political violence. He described it as silly, a shame on both sides, and made a few lighthearted jokes at the expense of the Nazis. Then, as Jochen Hung writes, he described the decision to spend money on a holiday, despite not being able to afford it, as the necessary defiance of the economic situation.

Finally, it's summer. Many people are sitting at home at the moment contemplating if they can afford a few days of holiday. I have come to the conclusion that I can't afford it. And that's exactly why I will go on a holiday. We just have to afford it. It's such a, such like a baffling death drive. This like, we're going to try to get people to buy vacations as the economy falls apart and they,

like Hitler comes into power. Like the most important thing we can do is get people to spend money they don't have. It's also interesting that it's not for self care, that it's explicitly like we do things where we go, oh, you're having a baby, that's wonderful. Give me $10,000 for a bunch of bullshit, please. We cover it with something.

You know, it's like the idea of pamper yourself. You deserve it. Like in this crazy life where we're all oppressed by capitalism. Come spend more money because you deserve it. It's interesting to hear them be like, spend money to spend money. Like, just give us money. Yeah. And it's all the all that these Osteen papers are doing is telling people to spend money

and putting their faith in Paul von Hindenburg, who like, because he's, you know, they've gone from, we're like, we're progressive, you know, we're looking at the future to, well, this old man will moderate the Nazis, right? He'll surely be alive forever, right? In Tempo's Everyman columns at the same time tended to portray anyone who was like on the left

as unhinged, right? The ideal voter was level-headed, slow and steady, like Hindenburg. Hung writes, Tempo's voice of the common man often compared the hostile climate of Weimar's political sphere to everyday situations, such as a squabbling family or life in a tenement house, with the

extremists being portrayed as wayward sons or annoying neighbors, but ultimately part of the community, who could be tamed and integrated. Clearly, the aim of such articles was to create a sense of normality in uncertain times among Tempo's audience and to give them a model to follow. In other parts of the paper, however, the value of rationality had lost its allure. The lax morals of the rational girls of the 1920s, Frau Christine argued in one of her columns, had given men a twisted idea of sexuality

and had ultimately lowered their respect for women. It's remarkable just how consistent that is too. Like we're dealing the same, like JD Vance is a big part of this. Like, well, women leaders have been a disaster. You know, women who won't have kids who just wanna live for their own pleasure and enjoyment are evil. They're degenerate psychopaths, right?

It's all the same shit. You know? Yeah, good stuff. I've encountered that argument surprisingly often. The, well, why would they have wombs if they weren't supposed to only function in that context? If that's all they are is life support for a womb. Right, they were happier.

It's more natural for them to just care for kids. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, when's the last time you went into the woods and killed a fucking small rodent with your bare hands? Shut up. We do society now. We do what we want.

Like, we make pizza and we have careers. Fuck off. Yeah. We filter our water instead of regularly shitting ourselves to death. We do all kinds of stuff, dude. A million things we aren't supposed to do if you're just like, your body does this, shut up.

I'm an advocate of doing more of that stuff. But every time I get on like the conspiracy internet, I further reinforce my belief that like, we should put lithium back in the water, right? Like it could really help. That might be our way out of this. I want mercury in my hat brim, man. Why not? Yeah.

Yeah. Let's do it. So, you know, Michael, we are all broadly familiar of what happened to German democracy after 1933, right? None of this like buying stuff didn't worth this idea that like just vote for moderates didn't work. The Nazis took over, right? Olsteen and all publishers with Jewish owners were nationalized and Aryanized by the Nazi state.

It is interesting to me that the Nazis kept the name Olsteen. They were pragmatic enough to see it as a good business decision. And you know, that is what we're covering today. We're going to on Thursday, talk about the United States finally. But Michael, first, let's talk about you. Let's talk about the Small Beans Network.

Sure. Oh boy. Oh, I get a double plug. I didn't know I'd get to spiel both episodes. All right. In German, they would call that a doppelplugin. Doppelplau? I don't know if that's true, but who cares? Duplplugin?

Sophie's just ends the episode. I'll try to be quick, but I really mean at this time, this is maybe the most important plug of my life. So if you've liked me on Cracked or even if you happen to have encountered any of my fiction before I finally finished a novel that I've been working on since I was 14. It's an epic fantasy sci-fi memoir. I'll just describe it as like Harlan Ellison meets Vonnegut meets Douglas Adams. Robert Brockway called it hilarious,

heartbreaking shit like that. I think it's really, really good. It has my whole heart and soul in it. And I just released the audio book version. So you can hear that on the Small Beans free feed by just searching Small Beans or the name of the novel, which is called The Climb. Or if you're already sold,

you can head to patreon.com slash small beans slash shop where you can get the physical version or a PDF or the audio book. Check it out. Michael, I gotta tell you, I deeply love the, uh, the image in my head of Vonnegut and, uh, Harlan Ellison and Douglas Adams meeting. Cause I imagine Vonnegut and Harlan Ellison and Douglas Adams meeting. Cause I imagine Vonnegut and Douglas Adams would have a great time.

And Harlan Ellison is just going to be the most miserable man. They'll fucking hate each other. Oh my God. Yeah. It's a real Calvin Coolidge, Huber, Humphrey situation. Get the fuck. They might be like, sir, I respect your fiction, please get the fuck out of here.

Yeah, I do not want to talk to you. Go to hell. Good stuff. Anyway, well, that's gonna do it for us at whatever podcast this is. Until next time, go to hell. I love you. You wanna plug on the audio version

that we have YouTube now, Robert? No, of course not, Sophie. Why would I do that? You wanna end your job now? Did you already stop recording? No, of course not, Sophie. You know, Sophie. I do know. I made a decision on my own

to pivot to video recently. This is me telling you actually. So it's your fault. We're pivoting to video. All the sadness in my life. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. I decided unilaterally to do that. Wow.

And yeah. I let you make a decision. It's great news. Thanks for telling me. That was a mistake. That was a horrible mistake, Sophie. I don't know why you listened to me about these things. I'm always wrong.

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