Behind the Bastards - Part Two: The Birth of American Fascism

Episode Date: November 8, 2018

Robert is joined again by Katy Stoll and Cody Johnston to continue discussing how fascism started in America.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. You know what's healthy? This. Good for your heart, good for your lungs. I find the best way through this is just to keep reopening wounds and then putting some salt in it. And then talking about it and really focusing on it.

That's good if you tried numbing yourself with drugs and alcohol. It's super good. That's what you do. It's all part of that. That's the next step. Once it's unbearably painful, you consume whatever you need to get through the next 12 hours. I always get these emails and DMs and stuff like, Hey, great show of the show, but how do you keep saying? It's like weeded.

What are you talking about? I'm never not high. How do you relax? I thought you were going to say, I don't. I mean, I do drugs and rewatch community for the fifth time because it makes me feel like the world's saying for a moment drama in the background. I'm listening to, I have to admit, I've never read Harry Potter and I am listening to them. Oh, that sounds soothing. It is so soothing.

That sounds nice and soothing. I can't wait to get back in my car and listen to it. It's nice. It's nice. I know what happens with the gang. Jim Dale, what a treasure. Optimistic fiction, Star Trek, the next generation. You don't think too much about what's happening now and the fact that when they reboot it,

it's probably just going to be Picard punching pieces. A 76 year old man rather than choosing to use his words instead of weaponry because Diplomacy and compassion perhaps. Like that episode where like there's this space monster that kills a couple hundred people, but then they're like, oh, it's just hungry. We can find a way to like make sure it doesn't kill any more people without killing it because it's better to not kill things. Even if they've done wrong, if they don't know that what they've done was wrong because they're an animal.

Sometimes not killing it is better. What a concept. Let's talk about Nazis in America again. Oh boy, yeah. So when we just left off, 22,000 people had rallied at Madison Square Garden to support the German-American boon. 100,000 anti-fascists had shown up outside. They had fought with the police, the largest display of force in NYPD history.

To protect the fascists. There we go. And then the fascist had beaten the shit out of a Jewish boy who'd run on stage when Fritz Kuhn was directly attacking the Jewish race. To applause. To applause. To riotous cheers. Joyful glee.

That's unfamiliar. So we're all caught up up to speed now. We're all back up to speed about what happened two days ago on this podcast. Now there are numerous accounts of police failing to intervene against violent fascist mobs throughout the 1930s. In 1933, after the first pro-Nazi rallies in Los Angeles, a World War I veteran named Leon Lewis started a grassroots undercover spying operation along with several other disabled veterans. They joined various fascist groups, including the silver shirts, in order to report on their operations. When Lewis went to the police to talk about what he had seen the silver shirts planning,

which was, you know, the overthrow of the democratically elected government, the extermination of several races, the enslavement of black people, when he went to the LAPD with this, you know, throw to the LA Times. Quote. Not only were the police unconcerned, but they were sympathetic to the Nazi silver shirts. I have records of Leon Lewis going to Los Angeles police chief Jim Tugan Davis. And telling him, look, I'm not just some amateur. I was actually a captain. I did some intelligence in the army.

I have these veterans with me. And we even covered a plot to seize the armories here where all the ammunition is and weapons. We know they are actively buying guns in San Diego and they're planning to take over the city government and take over the armory. And he brought all of this to police chief Davis and Davis cut him off two minutes into Lewis's spiel and said, stop. Hitler was only doing what he had to do to save Germany. And in fact, Hitler was right. And the real problem aren't the Nazis and fascists walking around the streets of LA. The real problem is in Boyle Heights where all those communists are.

I am still so mad. What he didn't say, but was clear is that as far as police chief Tugan Davis was concerned, every communist was a Jew and every Jew was a communist. Right. Well, we learned that last episode. We did learn that last episode. Learned your lesson as well. And an atheist. An atheist.

Two gun Davis. Two gun Davis. Neither of those guns for Nazis. No, no, no. I know. I know where both of those guns are pointed. At anyone who's not white standing near Jim Tugan Davis. Gosh. Oh, heck.

He worked hard for those two guns. There was a time when he was one gun Davis and it did not have the same cash in. I can tell you where that one gun was pointed. In April of 1939, less than two months after the German-American Buns Madison Square Garden rally, a group of several hundred anti-fascists attacked the news boys distributing Father Coughlin's newspaper. Christian front members rushed out to fight them and the NYPD basically sat out and did nothing while they beat the anti-fascists.

Some people said this was because most cops were Irish-American and the Christian front was a Catholic priest's fascist militia. Maybe. Okay. Now, that same year, the Roper Center for Public Opinion reported that only 39% of Americans agreed that Jews deserved equal rights. 10% of them believe the government should deport Jewish Americans. So that's fun.

So if you were a random observer in 1939, the fact that the fascists lost big in 1936 might not have been all of that comforting. In fact, it really looked at the time like fascism was only growing stronger in the land of the free. After his defeat in 1938, failed congressional candidate John Winrod started actively working with Father Coughlin. They refined their strategies together and tried to focus more on non-intervention than explicit fascist politics.

Quote from Hitler's American friends. Coughlin argued that the war was a clash of competing capitalist interests, not a fight to save Europe from the barbarism of Nazi domination. He praised Hitler openly and attacked Roosevelt. Winrod's message was similar. Less than a month before Pearl Harbor, he was still arguing that the European war was raging because, quote, a reaction has developed in the old world against Jewish communism and Jewish capitalism.

International Jewry is in a state of great perplexity. And so it happens that we have an administration at Washington, which is pro-communist and Jewish dominated. During this time, FDR was refusing to take in Jewish refugees from Europe, so as to not anger American voters, but Jewish dominated. In July of 1939, Christian Front Violence hit a fever pitch. Coughlin was forced to tell his listeners that he was, quote, neither the organizer nor the sponsor of the Christian Front, and moreover, that it is not becoming for me to

identify myself with this organization or any other organization. At the same time, Father Coughlin started showing up at German-American Boon meetings and having his boys hand out copies of his newsletter at their gatherings as well. There were rumors that the two groups might soon merge. So except for that organization? Brave. That was every that one. Brave of him.

Yeah. The reality, thankfully, is that the German-American Boon was on the verge of collapse. At the start of 1939, Fritz Kuhn had announced that every state besides Louisiana had at least one Boon office, but the MSG rally would prove to be the Boon's undoing. See, Fritz had essentially crowdfunded the rally. There we go again. And about $14,000 of the money he'd raised just sort of disappeared. New York City Mayor LaGuardia had basically given the rally his OK out of the hope that,

once Americans saw fascism up close, they decided it was ridiculous and terrible and rejected. LaGuardia was furious at the violence at the rally, especially the violence done to the young man who'd rushed on stage. LaGuardia ordered an investigation into the Boon's finances and found evidence that Kuhn had embezzled. Fritz Kuhn was arrested and charged. Simultaneously, Kuhn was subpoenaed by the Dees Committee.

Think of the Dees Committee as a precursor to McCarthy's House on Un-American Activities Committee. It was a House on Un-American Activities Committee, but it was both looking at fascists and communists during the period prior to World War II. So on an interesting note, a 19-year-old girl testified right after Kuhn that the German-American Boon summer camps were, quote, rife with homosexuality. Interesting historical point, yeah. Now the trial revealed that Kuhn had spent a large chunk of the embezzled money on his

mistress, including the equivalent of $12,000, $2,018 on long-distance charges. He also spent $66 and $1930 on a doctor's bill for a former Miss American contestant he'd been dating, which I'm guessing was for a backyard abortion sort of thing. Kuhn was convicted in December, kicked out of the Boond and sent to Sing Sing Prison, the most whimsically named prison in America. Certainly is. It's really fun, right? It does something.

It's full of butterflies and crabs. Sing Sing! Yay! It can't be that bad. It can't be that bad. It's the word sing twice. I love singing. How could double singing be bad?

I would have been excited for sing games. Look, it's the sing prison. So the German-American Boond continued in Kuhn's absence, and the tens of thousands of fascists it had nurtured were still out there, but the organization itself declined sharply after this point. Since 1939 was also the year Pelley and his silver shirts would be brought to heel, midway through the year an employee of Pelley's was found to be attempting to infiltrate the D's committee.

A summons was issued for Pelley in 1939, and he went on the run rather than testify. He spent his fall running away from the law, writing articles that he published in his newsletter about his flight from the authorities. He also sued the D's committee for $3.15 million, claiming it was defamation to describe him as a racketeer. In October, Pelley missed a parole hearing in North Carolina because remember he'd been arrested for defrauding the people who had tested him. Yeah, a judge ordered an investigation into silver legion business in the state, which

led to their national headquarters being searched by the police. And then, in January of 1940, things got weird. Democratic congressman Frank Hook introduced letters to Congress that looked like they were between D's and Pelley secretly allying in order to attack unionists and leftist organizers. The letters were later proven to be forgeries, but Hook refused to concede that he'd been tricked until the DOJ looked into it. Now while all this was uncoiling, Pelley headed to Washington DC, walked into the D's committee proceedings and turned himself in.

He was questioned under oath about the letters and denied writing them. He wouldn't wind up jailed until 1941, but Pelley grew increasingly irrelevant after this point as members fled the silver shirts after this period. So you've got the German-American boon and 1940s collapses and the silver shirts have collapsed and like these first sort of fascist organizations that had entered after the rise of the fascists in Europe declined into irrelevance in 1940. It's a good time to decline. It's a good time for fascists to decline in relevance.

This is not the end of yet. On January 7th, 1940, Father Coughlin told his radio listeners that he'd kind of started to think that democracy might be a worse political system than having a dictatorship. He claimed that democracy, quote, has failed so long to function advantageously for the nation. That next week, J. Edgar Hoover led an FBI raid that arrested 18 members of the Brooklyn chapter of the Christian Front. According to the New York Times, the cell of fascist terrorists had planned, quote,

the overthrow of the government of the United States. Most of the 18 men were veterans or national guardsmen and they'd stockpiled rifles, handguns, explosives, and thousands of pounds of ammunition. In his press conference on the matter, Hoover said, quote, plans were discussed for the wholesale sabotage and blowing up of these institutions so that a dictatorship could be set up here similar to the Hitler dictatorship in Germany, seizing the reins of government in this country as Hitler did in Germany. Their scheme was to spread a reign of terrorism so that the authorities would become thoroughly

demoralized. Weird. Yeah. Nothing like that. I'm familiar. It'd be like if someone mailed a bunch of bombs to a bunch of lawmakers, something like that. Sounds made up.

Sounds like made up. That does not happen in real life. No. No. Now, Hoover also noted that the group wanted to eradicate all Jews in the United States. It seems pretty clear that these guys were nuts. Even back then, the NYPD was equipped to handle 18 dudes, but it still caused a stir. Coughlin had to disavow both the would-be revolutionaries and the Christian Front.

He claimed he'd only ever supported the creation of a Christian Front. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Nothing to do with the Christian Front that was attacking people and planting the violent overthrow of the United States government. This is a big difference.

Yeah. A and B, it's a critical difference. These fucking fake news liberals trying to smear Father Coughlin, he wanted a Christian Front, not the group coincidentally called Christian Front. Twisting all these words. Sad. Yeah. Sad.

Okay. Reporters were later able to find several articles of Coughlin's newsletter where he had talked glowingly by name about the guy who planned the whole terror campaign. Okay. Of course. Of course. In February of 1939, a Gallup poll revealed that 23% of respondents thought the D's committee should focus on, quote, Nazi activities.

17% thought it should focus on the communist threat, but 30% thought it ought to focus instead on war propaganda. These people weren't exclusively talking about German war propaganda. A February 1941 Fortune magazine survey found that 33% of Americans surveyed believed advocates of sending aid to Britain were propagandists. So this is an important nuance here. In August of 1940, Gallup asked Americans if they thought Hitler would invade the United States if Britain fell under Nazi jackboots.

Opinion was evenly split, with 42% believing the Nazis would invade the United States, and 45% disagreeing. In October of 1940, a year before the U.S. entered World War II, only 11% of Americans wanted U.S. forces used to protect Great Britain. While most Americans supported sending aid to Britain, 57% of those who did said they supported sending aid because they thought it would keep the U.S. out of World War II. This suited the Nazis just fine. During this entire period, Nazi propaganda continued to virtually ignore grassroots American

fascism and focused instead on spreading propaganda to keep us neutral. Here's how Hitler's American Friends describes it, quote, the entire German objective was to sow enough confusion and discord that the American people would grow weary and simply want to check out of world events. The Nazis and their supporters jumped on this task with enthusiasm. Washington newspaper correspondent David Lawrence reported in 1940 that the city was full of Nazi propaganda that had been, quote, planted here and there in those academic circles, isolationist quarters or political precincts where almost any argument opposing the president's

policy would be seized upon as valid. The Nazis, he stated, quote, know their America. Interesting. Weird. I could see parallels there. Maybe. Couple countries. I could see some parallels.

Just trying to sow discord without any particular role other than that because they just won. Quit. Just making stuff up, man. You're forcing all these parallels. I know. I know. It's not. None of it sounds familiar.

Whew. I love talking about stuff that never happened again. Never happened again. Yeah. Thank God. Thank God. Now, the Nazis did not need to do much to stoke anti-Jewish sentiment among Americans. 39% of Americans surveyed believe Jews should be treated equally, 53% claimed Jewish people

were somehow different from Anglo-Americans, and 10% of course supported deportation. Of course. So, in 1940, an election year, one popular right-wing anthem was, Refugees Go Home. Whoa. Right? Because there were all these refugees from the Nazis, they called them Refugees and said they ought to be sent back to die. So.

Like a thing that never happened again. Like, yeah, like who would want to take refugees from a place where there's sort of mass murder going on? How many people during the war knew about the extent? It was pretty common knowledge, actually. Was it? It was pretty common. Now, at this point, there were concentration camps.

The death camps did not exist at this point. That wasn't until like 42 and after that really got going. Right. Well, they existed, but they weren't doing it, like the camps, but they weren't. There's a difference between concentration camps and death camps. The concentration camps were up. Right. There were no extermination centers.

Yes. So that did start in 41 with the invasion of Russia, but it wasn't centers. It was like Einsatzgruppen units wiping out Jewish populations and what had been Russia. But it was very well known the persecution of Jewish people, the fact that many of them had been put into camps, the increasing laws. Like that was all common knowledge. So cool on us. Cool on us.

But just like Jewish people, communists, socialists, social democrats, homosexuals, handicapped people, just put them all in there. Put them all in camps. Put them all in camps. Put them all in camps. Put them all in camps. Yeah. So in 1940 and 41, we've got the Silver Shirts, the Boond and Father Coughlin, all out of

the picture or fading in relevance. They flew too close to the sun, who revealed their power level too early, as modern Nazis would say. But fascism in America was not quite willing to give up the ghost. Good. Way to go when I go get her. Yeah. That's the thing about fascism.

It never quits. Never quits. Never quits. Never quits. You just keep going. You just keep... Put your mind to it. You can accomplish anything.

You pull them up by those bootstraps. Your jackbootstraps. There we go. Jackbootstraps. So the real problem that fascism had had up to this point in America is that all of its most prominent speakers had focused too much on the Jewish question. Americans were pretty antisemitic, but most people's antisemitism wasn't violent. You can be an antisemite and not believe in extermination or whatever.

Yeah. Right, it's prejudice and bigotry, but it's not like I'm violent. Yeah. So there was also the example of Nazi Germany doing really messed up things to Jewish people as an example of how bad it could get. And so a lot of Americans who were anti-Semitic still didn't want that.

But it turned out that the best way to make Americans really embrace fascism was to tie it to isolationism. Enter the America First Committee. Hell yeah, that's a good, oh yeah. It began in law school classrooms at Yale. Robert Douglas Stuart Jill. Fuckin' Yale. This has not been a good year of PR for Yale.

Turnin' out the finest. Just the best people. The best people. Fuckin' Yale-ies. So Robert Douglas Stuart Jr., son of the vice chairman of Quaker Oats, started holding meetings with a couple of dozen other law students.

They talked about the worsening foreign war, Roosevelt's decision to run for a third term, and how they might impact the course of American politics to keep their nation out of the war and put an end to Roosevelt's socialist New Deal policies. Both equally important. Now, the goal of America First then was to unify the anti-interventionalist right

with the actual fascist right. Basically, anyone who didn't like Roosevelt could coagulate around keeping America out of the war. After the war, American fascist philosopher Lawrence Dennis said, quote, the anti-intervention or then so-called isolation cause was basically anti-New Deal. It was against America getting into the war

only because the New Dealers seemed to be using American intervention in the war as essentially a New Deal strategy. The America Firsters or anti-war factors were not really pacifist or anti-war. They were anti-New Deal, and that made them anti-war in that period in situation. Very important distinction here.

Real important situation. It's not like we're against war, it's... We're against this war because we like the Nazis. Yeah, here we go. We don't want you to fight the Nazis. Maybe fight the communists. Oh, oh, oh, oh, you want a war with the communists? We can do that.

Yeah, we're on board for it. Because did you guys know that all the communists are Jews and atheists? That's some solid science. This is a bad time for an ad, say, way. But, you know, I love washing the taste of the horrific history of American fascism out of my mouth with the fine products and services

advertised on this show. Sold. You could have buy all of them. I could use some products and ore services right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, well, here they are. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations.

And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover environment undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time,

and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called InSync. What you may not know is that when I was 23,

I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev,

is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And we're back, and we're talking about Nazis. But why? Well, fascists. Yeah, right, right, right. You got to admit fascists. Not all fascists. Not all fascists, let's not. Hashtag, not all fascists.

Let's start that. Let's get that going. Hashtag, all fascists. So a number of major corporate leaders backed the America First Committee. The most prominent of them was J.C. Hormel, the meat packing impresario whose company gave the world spam. Rich Assman.

I knew, I knew that name. You're going to really enjoy this one, Cody. Rich Ass cloth magnate, William Regnari, was another major financial backer of America First. Does the name Regnari sound familiar to you? William Regnari II, his son, would go on to fund the National Policy Institute, the fascist think tank run by Richard Spencer.

That's fun, right? That's good. We finally did it. We made it. We made it there. The first connection today to something. Yeah, the only relevant connection. Wait a minute.

Robert E. Wood, chairman of Sears Roebuck, was also a member. Henry Ford was thrilled to kick him off because of the anti-Semitism. Sure, sure, sure. He was just too far. That'll seem ironic in a moment. Oh, god.

Now, the America First Committee would not truly reach its maximum audience until they found their charismatic leader, the only possible candidate for the role of American Fuhrer, Charles Lindbergh. Now, born in 1902, Charles Lindbergh had been an airmail pilot until 1927, when at age 25, he flew from New York to Paris and was the very first human being to complete this 33-hour journey.

He was one of the most famous men in the world in 1932, when his child was kidnapped and probably accidentally murdered. Lindbergh was young, handsome, rich, sympathetic, and white. When he started giving speeches for the America First Movement, people listened. In August 1940, immediately after the Dunkirk evacuation, Lindbergh stated, quote, I believe

that no outside influence could solve the problems of European nations or bring them lasting peace. They must work out their destiny as we must work out ours. In the past, we have dealt with a Europe dominated by England and France. In the future, we may have to deal with a Europe dominated by Germany. You remember how when we intervened

in the problems of European nations, and Europe is still a war-riven hellhole today? Did you miss that? I think I may have missed that. Did you miss that? I was just in Europe. It seems like maybe American intervention actually kind of worked out there.

No, no, no. I think we just went to the places where there's no. And Russian. We went to the tourist areas where we were alive. We made sure we went to only the places it weren't. You stayed away from the war zones in France. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure.

So Lindbergh's called. Germany was great. It was a really nice time. It is. Turns out when you kill all the fascists, the country could be fed hard. Yeah, you have a good time. You can thrive.

Yeah. So thanks for that, Russia. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So 50-50 mixed bag. They went a little bit overboard. It's like, thank you, but don't let that go to your head. Yeah, yeah. Because I'm not that grateful.

Well. Well, I'm grateful for that, but like. I'm pretty grateful for the 8 million Nazi soldiers they killed. 100%. I meant, you know, big picture. Yeah. You get it.

Continue with the story. 1945 was a mixed bag, but mostly good. Mostly good, yeah. So Lindbergh called Great Britain a war agitator and said, quote, it is perfectly understandable that Britain wants the United States in the war on her side. England is now in a desperate position. Her population is not large enough,

and her army is not strong enough to invade the continent of Europe and win the war she declared against Germany. Oh, hey. Oh, Charlie. That bitch. He warned his audience that America had been left with the debts from World War I, and then he claimed, quote, if it were not for her hope that she

can make us responsible for the war financially, I believe England would have negotiated a peace in Europe many months ago, and we'll be better off doing so. Sound reasoning. Yeah, just do the peace. Just do the peace. But do you guys see the brilliance there? Rather than advocating for dictatorship like Coughlin

and Smith and the Silver Shirts had done, or advocating on behalf of Germany like the Bund had done, Lindbergh attacked Great Britain. Thanks to Hollywood today, English accents are kind of like the, that's like your cheat code for making someone seem credible, find like a British guy, get Anthony Hopkins to say, and they're like, yeah, he's smart and credible, right?

But starting in the 15th century, the most prominent international stereotype of the English is that they were all goddamn liars, because they lied to everyone about everything for 300 years in order to conquer the world. There was even a very common slur for them in the day, perfidious Albion. It arose in the 17, it's a beautiful slur.

I mean, it sounds like a spell in Harry Potter. It arose in the 1700s as a French accusation, I believe of English dishonesty towards foreigners, because the British screwed the French show for a, French screwed the British. No one's nice in the past or now. It picked up in use during the Boer War of 1899 to 1900 because of the concentration camps

and the genocide of the Boer people. And if you listen to a lot of Irish music, the particularly turn of the 20th century Irish political ballads, you will run into the phrase regularly. The song Foggy Do, which is best cover was done by Sinead O'Connor, was written sometime in 1919, after the 1916 Easter Rebellion,

and it has probably the most artistic use of the term when talking about the first shots of the Irish rebellion of 1916. Oh, the night fell black and the rifles crack made perfidious Albion real. Now, this is important because at this time in America, population of about 100 or so million, about 20 to 30 million Scottish, Irish,

and German descended people, all of whom are very rightfully primed to think England's lying about fucking anything. This is a smart play by Charles Lindbergh. I don't love it, but I get it. It works, it works. It's not a dumb move. And it proved to be a more effective strategy

than calling for outright dictatorship. So within like a couple of months, there were 800,000 Americans that had joined America first. So you've got like a million people who have signed on to this movement in a matter of months, as opposed to like years to take 50,000. Right, that's a lot for like 1% of the population. Yeah, that's like a percent of the population

in the course of a couple of months, just because Lindbergh pops onto this train. And it's building for this whole time that we're talking about here. So this thing is wildly popular. Now, thank God, the British were spying on us. In this instance, we needed some spying on, some real bad stuff was going on.

They put together a dossier on the America first movement and what it meant to the British government. At this point, their whole foreign policy was in essence, get the Americans to help, the Nazis are going to take over Europe. So these spies were terrified of America first. They called it a fundamentally American movement, conducted on American lines and the most effective weapon

at the disposal of the enemy for the purpose of keeping the United States out of the war. Essentially, Britain is the guy who cried wolf but with conquering the other world and a violent nightmarish regime. But then they suddenly become less shitty, like 10 years before this was. And then they're like, help, please.

These other guys are even worse. That is the boy who cried wolf. Wait, no, wait, wait, read for real. No, a couple hundred years ago, we killed 40 million Indians in a wildly irresponsible capitalistic venture, but we're not that now when the Nazis are. We get it, we get it, we get it.

We know, like on the colonies and stuff, we were so, we're so sorry. We really fucked up. We're so sorry. We're really sorry. Please just help us. But these German lads. Help us, help us.

Help us. Shut up, Randall. So the British saw through the seemingly reasonable, respectable facade of America first, and they said these British spies wrote, it is the raw material of American fascism. The present tactics and methods of action of each movement reveal it as the American fifth column,

sowing racial hatred and accentuating internal division. This is the effect of its activity and whether the process is conscious or unconscious is irrelevant. So, British intelligence divided the membership of America first into six categories. I think you'll find this pretty interesting, y'all. Number one, big businessmen in Chicago,

which it called the most important group. Number two, Republicans and leaders of the opposition to the New Deal. Number three, the pacifism of Quakers, intellectuals and liberal philanthropists. Number four, extreme left-wing opposition to the Roosevelt administration, including labor leader John L. Lewis and his daughter,

who was also a prominent labor leader. Number five, the anti-Semitic fascism of retired generals and ex-servicemen. And number six, emotional mothers. One of the big things of this is they would bring on gold star mothers who lost their kids in World War I to say, we want to save American mothers from losing their sons.

I mean, this is some very intelligent manipulation. Really smart. Really had their act together. Now, back in 1937, Lindbergh had been put forward by a young Republican group as a potential member of the GOP Steering Committee. These young men were worried that the Republican party was, quote, hopelessly reactionary

and an incubator of fascism. So. Oh my goodness. I know, right? Wow. I know, pretty remarkable. It must have really surprised these young Republicans when Charles Lindbergh started hanging out with the Nazis.

He visited Nazi Germany three times while the fear was in power. The second time was in 1938, immediately after Kristallnacht. The night of broken glass when the Nazis took the streets and burnt down synagogues, broke Jewish people's and murdered people, it was horrible. Right? Real bad time.

He's there like the night after. And he writes in his diary, quote, I do not understand these riots on the part of the Germans. It seems so contrary to their sense of order and their intelligence in other ways. They undoubtedly had a difficult Jewish problem, but why is it so necessary to handle it unreasonably? My admiration for the Germans is constantly being dashed

against some rocks such as this. What is the object in this persecution of the Jews? Oh my goodness. There's a lot going on in that paragraph. But Charlie, you've got so much to say. They have a Jewish problem, obviously. Obviously. They've been taking it violently.

Why can't we have some sort of like nonviolent, sort of like ethnic cleansing, but like the nonviolent. Peaceful ethnic cleansing. Peaceful ethnic cleansing. Exit, oh. I can't speak. Can't say it 10 times fast, I'll tell you that much. Probably a good thing you can't say.

It's like my mouth shut down, just stop. Just like don't even bother, why would you? Not letting those words out. So in 1941, Lindbergh really stepped up as activism for America. First, he started traveling around the country giving speeches, setting himself up as the clear candidate in 1944 and making every argument he could

for American neutrality until then. One poll showed 26% of Americans wanted to see him given some high government office. Here's a quote from Hitler's American friends. Throughout the spring, Lindbergh spoke to standing room-only venues, attacking Roosevelt and urging full American neutrality. The president himself soon became convinced

that Lindbergh was a fascist with dictatorial designs and in late April, Roosevelt launched a direct attack by comparing him to Southern sympathizing copperheads during the Civil War and defeatists in George Washington's army at Valley Forge. Lindbergh outraged, resigned his commission in the Army Air Corps Reserve. Crowds at his rallies continued to grow

and in late May, he packed Madison Square Garden with more than 20,000 people. Thousands more listened on loudspeakers in the streets. The presence of boond members, various anti-Semites and other extremists was widely reported in the press, including groups of Italian fascists and silver shirts. But the publicity was far from completely positive. Life magazine observed that the audience

had burst into deafening cheers for even the smallest aspects of Lindbergh's speech, including when he mopped his brow with a handkerchief. An unnamed Lindbergh associate was quoted as referring to the phenomenon as furor worship. The more Charles Lindbergh spoke, the clearer it became that he was a goddamn racist. He stated that he worried white America

would be replaced by quote, a pressing sea of yellow, black and brown and stated that if he had to choose, he'd prefer his country ally with Nazi Germany rather than Soviet Russia. White replacement, you say. Yeah, weird. That's a new phrase.

Weird how a group of people in America has been consistently worried about that for almost a century now. It still hasn't. Yeah. White people still doing fine. Weird. Yeah, it's weird how that happens.

It's coming, it's coming, it's coming. It's coming. It's coming, it's coming. It's coming. It's on its way. Surely this is the year. Surely this is the year. For the white genocide.

Mm-hmm, the hashtag white genocide. So some of Lindbergh's growing fascism probably had to do with the friendship that he had made with French surgeon and scientist Alexis Carroll. This is where things go in a direction you guys are not. Did you predict that he was simultaneously while running for American Fuhrer, working on a project to become a mortal

with a fascist French doctor? Oh boy. Oh boy. I had no prepared for that. I wasn't prepared, I wouldn't have predicted, but I am not surprised. Yes, yes. Now, Alexis Carroll was a Nobel Prize winner

who'd figured out how to transplant human blood vessels, which is great, but he'd learned how to do that because he wanted to turn the human body into, quote, a machine with constantly repairable or replaceable parts so that rich white people and only rich white people would live forever. Carroll was a fascist and a eugenicist who believed the planet was incumbent

with people who should be dead. Oh. So. We're scientists. Lindbergh was a eugenicist too, and since he was an engineer, he and Carroll started working on a pump designed to keep human organs alive outside of their body.

They actually invented it and it's a useful medical device. I believe it. Yeah, absolutely, of course. Yeah, and of course, during their hours of close collaboration together, Carroll ranted regularly about the Jews and extolled the benefits of fascism. In September 1941, Charles Lindbergh gave a speech

in Des Moines. I'm gonna read a couple of segments out of this, bad boy. 1941. 1941, September of 1941. Right over there. Real close. Right over there. Here's Charles, lucky Lindy, quote,

National polls showed that when England and France declared war on Germany in 1939, less than 10% of our population favored a similar course for America. But there were various groups of people here and abroad whose interest and beliefs necessitated the involvement of the United States in the war. I shall point out some of these groups tonight and outline their methods of procedure.

In doing this, I must speak with the utmost frankness for in order to counteract their efforts, we must know exactly who they are. The three most important groups who have been pressing this country towards war are the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt administration. He then went on to elaborate. No person with a sense of dignity of mankind

can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany. But no person of honesty and vision can look at their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy both for us and for them. Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way, for they will be among the first to feel its consequences.

Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastations. A few far-sighted Jewish people realize this and stand opposed to intervention, but the majority still do not. Their greatest danger to this country lies in the large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio,

and our government. Wow. But also, wow, great performance. Great, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, that was convincing. Quality. There goes the tolerant left wanting to go to war

with Nazi Germany. I just think everyone should be allowed to speak and execute those Jews. Unbelievable. It's pretty remarkable. Incredibly believable, but like. Super believable. Oh, boy, yeah.

Also, don't trust media or the movies. Because they're Jewish-owned. Also, it's worth noting that the last big public speech Hitler gave before invading Poland, he stated that if the Jews succeeded in his words, drawing the world into another war, they'd be the first to suffer, which is exactly the phrase in Lindbergh used a year later in this speech.

That's bonkers. Wow. Wild. Wow. That speech that Hitler gave is generally given as the most direct evidence we have that he had planned the Holocaust ahead of time. Because, again, he didn't keep his name tied to stuff,

but like he. Right, he's very clearly. Yeah, like it out. Lindbergh said almost the same thing. Oh, my god. And it's like, yeah, the Jews are getting for war. Yeah, yeah, they're doing it. They're doing it at the once.

They're the ones. Those Jews that let themselves get rounded up and murdered and put to work. It's their fault. And in Hollywood at this time, we're refusing to criticize Nazi Germany in most of their movies because they were scared it would whip up anti-Jewish paranoia, which seems a lot more reasonable when you hear

this show. We're like, yeah, I get why you were scared. Right. Yeah, all this, I mean, all the reactionary stuff. Like, OK, yeah, you say that, and then you push people to the. Yeah. Bummer. Yeah.

Lindbergh advised Americans who got angry at news stories of horrific Nazi atrocities to quote, ask who owns and who influences the newspaper, the news picture, and radio. There was a great deal of backlash to Lindbergh's openly blaming the Jews as a collective for trying to force America into a war. A poll conducted that same month found

that 74% of Americans agree that Nazi Germany needed to be destroyed in order for the US to remain free and democratic. The vast majority of Americans were consistent. They would oppose any suppression campaign aimed at Jewish Americans. But those statistics do not tell the whole story. A survey taken about people's intentions

for the 1942 midterm elections, the last such survey before Pearl Harbor, found that 40% of respondents planned to vote Democrat, 26% Republican, and 18% keep out of war. This means if the Republicans and the keep out of war party had allied, they could have potentially won in 1942 and presumably again in 44. And it is worth noting that Wilkie, the Republican who

had run against Roosevelt during this, after the Des Moines speech basically said, if Americans cannot deal with the current global catastrophe without turning to racial hatred, we don't deserve to have a democracy. That was Wilkie, the Republican speaking out vociferously against fascism right after this speech. That's something we need.

Wouldn't that be nice? Goodness. Yes, America first very well could have in 1942 won several seats in Congress. And that could have, this is the kind of thing that at this point in September, there was a good chance that Charles Lindbergh could have become president in 44.

This all would have kept rolling. But then on December 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The US got into the war and America first dissolved as an organization in December. Charles Lindbergh even wound up flying a few combat missions in the Pacific. World War II went the way it did.

And for the most part, Americans forgot that a domestic fascist movement had ever once earned the support of hundreds of thousands of American voters. Most Americans, at least. Vice President Henry A. Wallace never forgot. And in 1944, when Hitler's Third Reich was on its last legs, he wrote a description of American fascism that

is just as relevant 80 years later as it was then. Quote, the American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impune democracy. Their final objective towards which all their deceit is

directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjugation. Pretty spot on. Pretty spot on. I hate it. It's a real bummer.

Now, there's a fun code to this story, though. Y'all remember Lawrence Dennis? Yeah. He had a secret. The intellectual founder of American fascism had a secret that nobody knew at the time. Spill the gossip. Now, you remember how he was described as swarthy?

Yeah. It's because he was a black guy. Secretly. Wow. Secretly. What? Yes. He had been born in 1892 in the heavily segregated South.

But since he was able to pass for white at a certain point, he decided to live his life that way because of the obvious and massive benefits of being a white guy in 1930. Gerald Horn, who wrote a book about Dennis called The Color of Fascism, doesn't know if Dennis's wife even knew he wasn't white. His daughter was never told. Now, I found a good Guardian article about this.

And it includes a heartbreaking quote from Walter White, a former head of the NAACP in the late 1940s. Quote, every year approximately 12,000 white-skinned Negroes disappear. People whose absence cannot be explained by death or immigration. Men and women who have decided that they will be happier and more successful if they flee from the prescription and humiliation which the American color line imposes on them.

The article also included a quote from Horn, trying to explain exactly why a black man in the 1940s would line himself up with fascism. Quote, well, you could see why he would think it was inevitable. Fascism was a far greater threat to the US than communism ever was. Dennis had no faith in the white working class.

So if you believe it's going to happen, you have one of two choices. You can fight against it, or you can ride the wave. He decided to ride the wave, and that was hard-boiled cynicism and coldly calculating. Wow. Don't even know what to do with it. So that's how it started.

That's how it started. I know how to feel about it. I don't know what to do with it. Don't know what to do with it, yeah. I feel like a lot of people should hear a lot of the quotes that have been said today. That have been read today? Yeah.

If only they would. Yeah. Should we send this to people that should know about it? I mean, I obviously have a vested interest in people listening to this. Sure, sure, sure. I would like it if people would share this. Yeah.

Yeah. I'll share it. Thank you. I could use some products and services to wash the taste of it out of my mouth. Oh, man. Yeah. It's just the kind of stuff that like everything

lines up so frustratingly perfectly in a way that kind of makes you feel like you're going insane. Yeah, yeah. It makes it feel crazy. You know, like I feel that more and more because the polarization is obviously growing. Yeah. And the people in power are fueling it and supporting it

and using it to manipulate people. And then there are supposedly intellectual people who are riding that wave and totally ignore everything in a way that, yeah, makes you feel kind of crazy. Absolutely. I mean, for a long time, I'm more used to it now, but then sanity, it feels deeper, like more chaotic, like a bad nightmare or something.

But at the very beginning, especially, there were so many times I would be like, it's not me, right? I'm not wrong. I'm not the only. Yeah. And that's, yeah. You see this. And it's, there's something very telling

and very telling about America and the fact that the first fascist intellectual we have was not a guy who was wildly dedicated to the principles of fascism because he was not. Dennis's attitude was always, this is inevitable. And this is probably better than the other one. And the reason he thought it was better than the other one, probably, is because he was like, I know white people

in America, they're going to choose fascism before they choose communism. So I want to get on the right side of this shit, so I don't get murdered. Right. It's not necessarily this one's better than the other. It's just this one is more likely because of where we are. Because I know how fucking, yeah, yeah.

And he's not wrong. He was not wrong. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I mean, I think we see that a lot. And like I said, I see this in conversations sometimes where it's like, oh, you literally would choose that instead of the other. Or even like, you'd choose that instead of democracy

if you could. Yeah. Because you haven't heard all these quotes. Or literally exactly how you're thinking. Exactly what's happening. It's so on the nose. We oftentimes joke about like, oh, it's like watching a TV show that's poorly written.

They're like, oh, we're all on a simulation. But that does have, I think, a negative effect on people's psyche. Yeah. And it really does make you feel like, how can you be a prominent figure that has a huge audience and influence over people, sometimes with like a national audience, and millions of people

watching you or listening to you, where you blatantly ignore facts. And you push this kind of thing and frame it in a way that forces people to either ignore this stuff or not know about it. And like protect this knowledge and this history that illustrates what we're experiencing. Literally as precious as life itself,

because it represents millions of lost lives when people did not heed the warning signs. The last time this all happened. Yeah. Yeah. That's still the thing that shocks me. Continue to re-grapple with, I can see missing the warning signs the first time this happens.

Or just for the general population, like, oh, I didn't know. I was going along. You can't anymore. You can't say that this isn't happening. You can't say that it doesn't have potentially disastrous. Well, it is happening. But you can if the only media you watch is Fox News. And when the Proud Boys are beating up gay people

in the streets, their headline is, Antifa brought a sword. Antifa brought a sword. Even though Kevin McGinn brought a sword. And it was a fake sword that he was using to re-enact the execution of a socialist politician in Japan by a fascist. There it is.

That's the stuff. At the Metropolitan Republican Club of New York. And it makes you feel crazy. And it kind of makes you feel helpless of like you're like. Not kind of. Like you're shouting into a void. And the people aren't listening to literally just like what you just said.

Because they're making money and they want more cool stuff. That's the Ben Shapiro's and the fucking idea logs who aren't fascists but push people towards fascists and the Tucker Carlson's and whatnot. Opportunists. It's just about money. And you could see there was like a half a minute there in the middle of all this where Glinbeck had an opportunity

to like be like, oh, I have erred terribly. I see what I did. I see what I've done to this nation. Kind of started and then contributed to. And then he decided to make money again. Of course, yeah, money's good. What are you going to do? Is not as lucrative to pretend to be not a grifter?

Well, if there's one thing America has always been better at than anyone else in history, it is a goddamn grift. Oh, yeah. We are the fucking grifter kings of the world. Absolutely. I mean, that's why we got the president we got. You're the guy.

We're the fucking grifter nation and you're the king of grifters. Yeah, you did it. Even though really if we wanted to elect the king of grifters, we would have elected Elron Hubbard, who would have been. Sure. Maybe not a better president, but a different one. A different one.

A different one. A different kind of president. It's been a lot of money on our Navy. I can tell you that much. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Get out of those international waters. Everywhere is international waters now.

All right. Unbelievable. Plugables? Oh, god. Check us out. Check us out. We got some more news on YouTube. Check out our Patreon, our podcast,

even more news on all the podcast things. Twitter, some more news. My individual one is Dr. Mr. Cody. It's DRMISTERCODY1. Spell that up for everyone. I have to spell it out because you could be doctor. You could DRCT. Oh, you know, you never know.

Yeah, you hitched yourself to that wagon and now you've got to stick with it. Can't change those. I can't change it. And what he said, because I do those things with him, and except I have my own Twitter, and it's my name, Katie Stoll. There was a lot of eloquence on display in both of you

there, I was really proud of you. Our shows are called Even More News and Some More News. Oh, Google, Google them. And we recommend you check them out. Yeah, do check out Some More News and Some News, Even More News. Even More News. Even More News.

So many titles to keep track of. I know. I have a show, too. I've forgotten the title, but you know it. You clicked on it. So listen to the next one when it happens next week. You can find us on the internet at behindthebastards.com. You can find us on Twitter at adbastardspod, or Instagram,

at the same thing that I said before, but for Instagram and not Twitter. I could have just said adbastardspod again. But then I did. You can find me at iWriteOK on Twitter. Buy a shirt from T-Public so that I can fill a bunker. Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And hide. Let him stockpile rations, guys. Yeah, stockpile a number of things. Yeah, yeah. Stockpiling. Actually, it's stockpiles of stuff. Stockpiles of stuff. We've got all these millionaire stockpiling stuff

and all these kind of crazy folk stockpiling stuff. Let's all stockpile stuff. Maybe a couple months of perishable food. That's not crazy. That's not a crazy person thing to do. Dumb bunch of reasons it could be useful to have a couple months of food. Well, you also got to prep for that big one.

Sure, sure. Big quake, keep some water on hand. Both of those things are good. Maybe. Everything's melting. Yeah. Everything's melting. Guys, be scared.

Be angry. Be angry. And then. Be best. I was going to say, drink to relieve the stress. But there are other drugs. There's a lot of great drugs out there. A lot of America's really bullish on opiates.

Seems like there's no downside to that drug. I haven't read any of the reporting on this. It may have gone horribly wrong. I can tell. Has something bad happened with that? Oh, Robert, I'm so sorry to have to tell you. This is a real letdown, guys. Now, this was the letdown.

Not everything the past two hours. I just thought if there was one thing I could trust, it was Purdue Pharmaceuticals in Ossicon. Oh, yeah. That's another episode, I think. That's heartbreaking. Well, maybe I'll research that one. Yeah.

Well, I look into that subject. I recommend it. Until next week, when we will be talking about God knows what else, but something terrible and someone terrible. I'm Robert Evans. This has been Behind the Bastards, and I love about 40% of you. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series

that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time,

and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that

tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see

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