Offline with Jon Favreau - Rachel Maddow on America’s Forgotten Insurrection

Episode Date: October 16, 2022

For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast. 

Exciting news! Pod Save America dropped a bonus episode this weekend featuring an interview with former president and my old boss, Barack Obama. You don't want to miss this. Listen to the conversation on Pod Save America on SiriusXM or wherever you get your podcasts. What do you think the pro-democracy forces in this country need to be doing now that we're not currently doing or maybe not doing well enough. Well, I think you had it right when you were talking about the obligation to persuade, right? You can't content moderate your way out of this problem in social media, right? You can't say like, the problem is the person who created this meme. Well, the person who created this meme created it and sent it somewhere, seeded it somewhere, but then the reason it became a problem

that you know about is because it was widely circulated by people for whom it resonated. That is a persuasion problem. And it's kind of an education problem in the sense that people should hopefully, I think, sort of take on the mantle of education around this issue. I know that sounds

wussy, but like people ought to know that the anti-Semitic stuff that's circulating right now around Trump's social media presence and pro-Trump social media presence is not like edgy, modern, anti-woke bravery. It's old news. Like, are you seriously trafficking in this old stuff? You know who you sound like? That kind of inoculation, I think, to people so that they don't just get moved by this stuff uncritically is the work of public intellectuals and journalists and activists and people who have sway in the media landscape where people are otherwise being confronted with these kinds of messages. I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline.

Hey, everyone. My guest today is Rachel Maddow, longtime anchor at MSNBC. A couple months ago, Rachel stepped down from her daily show to give herself some time in the spirit of Offline to unplug. But Rachel is a political junkie just like me. So instead, she threw herself into researching and telling the story of a little known but incredibly important moment in American history, one that ultimately evolved into her new podcast, Ultra, which is the topic of our show today. So Ultra is the story of a right-wing plot to violently overthrow the U.S. government that was aided and abetted by members of Congress, not in January of 2021, but in January of 1940. According to Rachel, our unprecedented political moment isn't unprecedented at all. She argues that America has flirted with fascism before

and came much closer to ending democracy than we did last year. That may sound dreary, but as Rachel and I talk about, it's actually quite hopeful to know that we've last year. That may sound dreary, but as Rachel and I talk about, it's actually quite hopeful to know that we've overcome worse. The players, the context, and the media may have changed, but the tactics and strategy required to defeat fascism have not. So we talked about the threats of the past and today, how social media and the internet has changed the nature of those threats, and why it's so damn hard to hold together a liberal democracy of more than 300 million people.

And if you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did, you have to subscribe and listen to Ultra. It's fantastic. You won't regret it. As always, if you have comments, questions, or ideas for new guests, please email us at offline at crooked.com and please rate, review, and share the show.

Rachel Maddow, welcome to Offline. Hi, John. How are you? I'm well. How are you doing? I'm good. I'm really happy that you do this particular podcast. I think this is a sign of maturity and investment in self-preservation and intellectual health. And I'm really glad that you do it. This is a cool framing. I love that you're doing this. Yeah, I started it for my own mental health as much as everyone else's. So it's been a selfish reason as well. I loved your podcast, Bagman. I am even more obsessed with Ultra. I was hooked in the first five minutes, even though it involves a plane crash and I hate flying. Sorry. Yeah. I'm about to fly after this, but I still, I was

listening yesterday. Um, so I want to sum it up without spoiling it for people. You are telling a little known, little remembered story about a fascist plot to overthrow the U S government in the early 1940s, seeded by Hitler's Germany, that almost succeeded. How did you discover this story? And why do you think it hasn't really been told yet? I'll answer the second question first. I think that the reason it hasn't been told yet-ish is kind of the same problem as Bagman, which is that there is a thing that happens in history where if you happen to land in the timeline close to a bigger thing, we can only remember one thing from that part of the timeline. And so Agnew getting forced out as vice president and the bizarre and

interesting and complex role of the Justice Department in figuring out how to deal with this rank gangster criminal in the White House, That story is fascinating, but it happened immediately adjacent to Watergate. And Watergate is more important because it ousted the president, and so therefore we have to unlearn Watergate, basically, in order to learn Agnew. It's sort of the same thing with this, I think, in that these seditious plots and the Hitler government trying to build not just a fifth column here, but trying to support Americans who really did want a Hitler-style fascist takeover ended up being subsumed into the larger plot of us beating the snot out of them on the battlefield. And so that's understandable. Like, World War II is more important, but there is this other thing adjacent to it, sort of overshadowed

by it in the number line. And that means that the story hasn't widely been told. Interestingly, where the story goes, where the podcast goes is to a specific sedition trial in 1944, whereupon obviously World War II is well underway. And there is a little bit of an sort of academic and political live history of that, but only on the right, because the right has told that history basically from the perspective of sympathizing with the defendants and saying, oh, the Justice Department is always just out to get conservatives and this was a political witch hunt. And I'm happy for them to tell that story, but there's a broader history to tell

about it too. And so that's what I'm trying to do. And how did you stumble upon this? John, I live in a dark place. I mean, same, same. I mean, I, you know, six or seven years ago started reading a lot and thinking a lot about democratic countries confronting a shift to authoritarian forms of government and fascist movements and how you deal with politics moving from, I would say, extremism to something beyond that, to kind of ultra-politics, where you're no longer talking about solving things through political means and you're talking about using violence. I've been sort of marinating in that, both in terms of what I'm reading for fiction and also what I've been thinking about in rank extremism on the right adjacent to Republican electoral politics. And through the 70s and 80s, you end up getting it, abutting

Republican politics. I was sort of interested in that. And then I got into, from that, the origins of American Holocaust denial. And then I got from that into actually Nazi acolytes in the United States. And then when I realized what was going on with this sort of revisionist history of the sedition trial from 1944, I realized, oh, crap, I have found myself in the middle of something I cannot extricate myself from without doing six months of work on it. Cheery, cheery stuff. I mean, yeah, I'm a great girlfriend.

A very intentional and terrifying theme of the show is the many parallels between what happened in the early 40s and what's happening today. And that includes and really starts with a powerful ultra-right propaganda apparatus with tremendous reach. Can you tell us a little bit about Father Charlie Coughlin and his radio show. So Coughlin is, I feel like Coughlin is the one figure from this whole podcast, from this whole story that I'm telling that you might have heard of. Yeah. I feel like people talk about Father Coughlin. He sometimes, I thought it was Father Coughlin, but it's Coughlin. Me too, until I heard the podcast. Yeah. Yeah, me too, until I started listening to the contemporaneous stuff. I was like, oh, he has more media reach than anybody we can analogize him to in modern

politics. And I feel like the reason that his name is still alive is that people do generally think, oh, we've had right wing populist demagogues in conservative media before it's been dangerous, before you have this kind of vague sense about it. I don't think that he's analogous to anything today. He had 30 million to 40 million people listening to him every week at a time when there were less than 130 million people in the country. That is just huge reach. That is unheard of.

When we think about maximum reach and universalist media experiences, we think about the big three networks. No, he completely swamped them in terms of what was going on. And there's never been anybody that dominant since. And he was really, really, really radical. He didn't start off as a radical. He kind of started off as a New Deal FDR supporter, but then turned very explicitly to fascism. And, you know, he printed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and he called for his followers to take up arms and become militia groups and effectively to overthrow the government, which they tried to do. And so we've got our share of right-wing media-driven political extremism, but Coughlin, there's nothing like that. And actually, for me, that's kind of a helpful benchmark because I think it's worth being real about what we have faced in the past and how dangerous it was in the past and what, you know, previous good-hearted, civic-minded Americans saved us from. And the threat that Coughlin posed was way worse than what we have faced in our demagogic times. And that should,

I think, to me at least, that's heartening. Like, we've gone up against worse than this. Well, and it was so overt, right? I mean, we're sort of past dog whistles now in our extreme politics. But when you have Father Coughlin just being like, just openly anti-Semitic, asking people to take up arms.

And of course, he facilitates the creation of the Christian Front, which is essentially a fascist paramilitary organization that nearly executed a plot to overthrow the government. Can you talk a little bit about the plot and how close it was to succeeding? It's only one of like four or five that we can tell in the course of just focusing on 1940. There was a lot of this kind of stuff going on. But with the Christian Front, one of the things that was scary about it was it's the combination of its extremism, its violent extremism and how popular it was. I mean, it grew out of this massive media figure of Charles Coughlin and his 30 to 40 million supporters. When the Christian Front unit in New York went on trial for sedition, 2,000 people in Brooklyn showed up to cheer them when they were acquitted and otherwise got off with a mistrial. I mean, it was really well supported. It wasn't some, you know, neo-Nazi fringe group standing on an overpass in Florida,

right? This was a group that had a lot of community support. And so that's unnerving. But then also just what they were capable of. Most of the people who were arrested in the Christian Front sedition trial and put on trial were. They had explosive U.S. military explosives. One of the stories that we actually don't tell on the podcast but is true is that this machine gun unit, National Guard commander, who gave the Christian front guys all this cordite, all this military-grade ordnance, also then advised them on how better to make their pipe bombs, how to better make their bombs to make them more effective. So they're making and stockpiling military grade ordinance in bombs that are designed to blow up like a Jewish newspaper and the federal reserve bank outposts and all these different things. They had a plan to kill 12 congressmen simultaneously. And they were hoping that by attacking institutions of the government and Jewish and left wing targets, they would inspire kind of an Antifa violent response that they would get anti-fascist, communist, Jewish,

whatever they fantasized would rise up against them. They believed that the National Guard, which was already on their side in some ways, would side with them. The National Guard would be activated. They would bring the Christian front with them and there would be a military junta that took over on the eastern seaboard and then established emergency powers over the U.S. government. And so it was to get rid of democracy, to have a military-based, law enforcement-based violent overthrow. And they had a date for it. They had the weapons for it. They were well-trained. And the FBI believed they were within a week of starting to set off the bombs when they picked them all up. And then they were acquitted.

They were. Well, it's also it's it's just incredible that we got that close because I feel like the history you learn in school or at least the history I learned, even when you're like at advanced levels of history is like, well, there was World War Two and the United States was resistant. Like people didn't really want to go to war because we had just been through World War One. And so there was a lot of people in the country who didn't think we should before Pearl Harbor. And maybe there were some sympathizers here and there in the United States. But this was like a full fledged movement that nearly took us to the brink of collapse if they had succeeded in their plot. And like you said, this huge mass movement that had popular support.

Yes. And it wasn't just them. I mean, the Christian front is mostly Catholic. Father Colgan is a Catholic priest. The Klan is very, very anti-Catholic. Well, you had a Klan-adjacent violent fascist plot to overthrow the U.S. government right after the 1940 election as well. You also had the Silver Shirt Movement, which was kind of a middle-class movement, started by this guy who was this actually very successful Hollywood screenwriter. He'd won an O. Henry Award for his short stories. This guy who had this weird... He wanted to be the Adolf Hitler of the United States. His

followers viewed him that way. He commanded that his followers had to have tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition in every home and lots of different firearms. They did. It was teachers, businessmen, very middle class thing. It was very popular both in California, Pacific Northwest. He had thousands of followers. And their plan was to take over West Coast armories, challenge the military and National Guard and law enforcement there to join their fight against the communists and the Jews, and to install a Hitler-friendly dictator in the United States, basically by cobbling together a coalition of all the anti-Roosevelt forces in the country who'd be dissatisfied by

Roosevelt's re-election in 1940. And so it wasn't a foregone conclusion that we were gonna get involved in World War II. It also wasn't a foregone conclusion to all Americans that if we did get involved in World War II, which side we would be on. And we had to fight for that. We had to fight for it. And we should remember that fight

because the people who fought it, who fought the fascist groups and the violent groups, they have things to teach us about how to do this work well. Well, you mentioned the acquittal, and it made me sort of rethink the whole thing and draw on more parallels to today, because you expect that a bunch of fascists go to trial and after they've been arrested for a plot to violently overthrow the government and they're going to get convicted.

But instead, you tell the story of how there's all core is a struggle for hearts and minds, including the hearts and minds of people within those institutions. And I think about how many people seemed like over the last several years, they were waiting for like Bob Mueller to save us and then the first impeachment and the second impeachment and now the January 6th hearings and Merrick Garland, anything that could free us from the actual burden of having to do the hard work of persuasion. Like, have you thought about that? Yes, exactly. Part of the reason that I'm interested in this as a topic is not because Father Coughlin is an analog to somebody who's doing that kind of work today or because there's some forgotten Trump-like figure who we can analogize. It's not that. the timeless and recurring appeal of fascism and authoritarianism and people being receptive to the

idea that there's some other, there's some parasitic other, whether it's the Jews or the immigrants or the liberals or the gay people or whatever it is, there's some other that's taking away what is rightfully yours. They need to be exterminated and then we can go back to the way it was when we were in our rightful place as the people in charge. That message is the core message of fascism and authoritarianism, and it has appeal. And you have to win the argument, regardless of who's the figurehead at the moment. Like, there's a reason that all the strongmen around the world who are preaching these kinds of messages all kind of seem the same. Like, if you squint, can you tell Berlusconi from

Orban? I don't know. They're both kind of the same. Maybe one's a little heavier, you know, but it's all the same thing. And it's this recurring political and human impulse to turn ourselves over to strongmen and to give up on democracy because democracy allows for other people to have a say too. And that is the fight. And that fight is about exposing people who are organizing along these lines and opposing them and, you know, making sure they're brought up on trial when they do commit crimes. But first of all, not all of these things are crimes. And second of all, the kinds of crimes these are are really hard to win convictions of in a liberal democracy, where you have the right to think anything you want, say anything you want, and associate with whoever you want. Our constitutional protections that make us a

liberal democracy also make it hard to get convictions on sedition. Even when you've got it happening, sedition happens. It's just very hard to count on the criminal justice system itself to be the silver bullet for getting rid of that. Well, especially because most sedition plots that get tried don't succeed by definition. You'd have us on trial if you had succeeded. It's you on trial. But it's a way, I mean, and we're seeing this today with the Oath Keepers and everything that's happening around January 6th. There is a, and you get this from the right sometimes, like, oh, was it really serious and that scary because they didn't succeed? But it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But if they succeeded, there would be no government anymore.

Yes. But they wanted to. Adam Schiff was really good on this in the second impeachment, which I think we sort of forgotten like what it was like actually when they tried the second impeachment. But Schiff was the one who made the point. He was like, it can't be that you can try to violently overthrow the U.S. government. And if you succeed, you get to be dictator for life. And if you fail, nothing happens. That can't be the decision tree you are presented with as a potential fascist insurrectionist. And so there has to be some kind of consequence. But the consequence for our particular experience with this on January 6th, maybe some of it is going to happen in court for the people who are the high-level conspirators. But more likely, it's going to happen with what

the January 6th committee is doing in exposing the truth of it, making sure there can't be revisionist history, trying to bring about political accountability for those who did it. That's as much the work. So the Nazis are directly involved in this plot. They spread propaganda in the U.S. Their agents actually influenced U.S. politicians, supported the Christian front. And it made me think about how Putin and other authoritarians are trying to destabilize democracies like ours with similar tactics, maybe more advanced tactics now that thanks to technology. How much was that on your mind when you were learning about this story? I didn't actually know about the Hitler government's direct funding and involvement in

some of this stuff until pretty far into it. It was kind of like, oh, and then there and there was also that. And it ends up being important because the Justice Department goes through this process, which you can sort of see from the outside. I'm not sure anybody's ever kind of written about it this way, but you can see that if you put it on a timeline, you line it up chronologically in terms of what we know the Justice Department was looking at and where the FBI had informants and stuff. You can see the Justice Department realizing chronologically, okay, the Hitler government has infiltrated the U.S. Congress and is paying off U.S. senators and U.S. congressmen to spread Nazi propaganda, actually propaganda written by the German government in Berlin, to spread that propaganda to the American people at the expense of the American taxpayers using Congress to do it. That's bad. And the Hitler government is also

funding and supporting violent pro-fascist movements in the United States that are planning on attacking the U.S. government and trying to overthrow it. And those things are happening at the same time. And so you have each of those things is scary. But if you think about them together, that's very dangerous because then that's very violent and aggressive and also very close to real political power. So being able to run a potential inside outside strategy when the Hitler government is spending a lot of money and a lot of energy trying to operate this way in the United States, I think that's what flipped out the Justice Department, not flipped them out, but sort of spurred them to action. When they put the Christian Front on trial in 1940 and failed, it was a huge humiliation for the government. And they were really unwilling to pursue any other kinds of prosecutions like that

for several years thereafter. It was only when they got to the point where both of these things were happening at once. And frankly, munitions plants started blowing up in the United States and there started to be what appeared to be acts of Nazi sabotage here that they realized, okay, we got to go. And the prosecution that they brought in 1944, kind of, again, alleging a conspiracy where the Germans were doing it and Americans were carrying out those wishes. it was a totally unwieldy prosecution. And we'll get there later in the podcast to explain how that bared out. But that nexus was what was scary to them. And I think that's, you know, Russia being interested in shaping U.S.

politics and shaping American public opinion is something that I don't think we need to be hair on fire about all the time. It's been going on for a long time. The way it becomes a more hair on fire moment in the United States is when those interests get close to real power and when they get close to those whowires to watch for. And that's why somebody getting into the White House who welcomes Russian intervention in the election to get him there is a scary thing and is worth flipping out about. how the internet and social media has supercharged the spread of propaganda and disinformation. That's especially true on the right. How do you think that's changed the threat that we're facing today and also how we face it? That's a really good question. I mean, on the one hand, talking about nobody having Coughlin's reach is kind of comforting in terms of no one person being able to do that much damage. On the other hand, how much more damaging is it when you don't have a Coughlin to sort of monitor and respond to, and instead it's coming from everywhere? It's just, I mean, the iterative nature of social media where you feed something back to it and then it accelerates what gets fed

back to you in terms of, accelerates it in terms of its extremism. That's something that really there wasn't there. There isn't a historical analogy for when the part of Hitler's rise to power. Right. What happens to him between 1923 and the Beer Hall Putsch in 1933 when he's chancellor. Part of what happens is that he sort of perfects his idea of propaganda. OK, I can't just take power with a violent cadre in order to take power and hold power and rule the country. I need to move people and manipulate them by propaganda, which we need to do as the first priority of our governing strategy. And the United States never took that as seriously as the Germans did. We saw it as like kind of malign disinformation or bad advertising or something, something that might be annoying to Americans or might be somehow, you know, given us bad ideas.

But they appreciated the pure power of it, which is why they spent tens of millions of dollars in 1930s money attacking us that way. So, I mean, I do feel like there's when technology changes, things can get more toxic. But our strategies to interfere with it can also just get more sophisticated. So, you know, it's a mix. Well, it's decentralized in a way also. And like you said, it's harder to monitor the effects of the spread of information because people are going down YouTube rabbit holes and they're on Reddit and then they're on like 8chan and this stuff bubbles up. I go back and forth where like, was it better to have Trump on Twitter where we're all watching him all the time and can see it? Or is it better to have him on Truth Social with a bunch of other right-wing extremists who are just

like causing all kinds of trouble that's not getting bubbled up to the surface all the time because we're not monitoring it. And I haven't been able to figure out which is worse, but it's really hard to sort of wrap our arms around all the different threads of extremism that's out there. And I think that's partly because of technology and the internet. But it also affects him, I think, because one of the things that happens in his truth social bubble is that he's only speaking to people who agree with him and who are going to egg him on rather than people who are going to be outraged by him. And so what he thinks is resonating, what he thinks is working, what he thinks people like to hear from him is from a more narrow sort of corner. And it means that when his message does cross over to a broader audience, it sounds crazier than it might otherwise have done had he been able to work it out on a more broad based platform like Twitter.

I think it actually does push him into more extreme positions. And that is dangerous to the extent that he still holds sway over the Republican Party. But to the extent that people who aren't necessarily politically engaged are sort of checking in with what he's saying these days, he does sound more bananas now than he did a year ago. And that was true of the 2020 campaign even versus the 2016 campaign is he was talking about things in the stump in 2020 that you had to be so online to understand even what he was talking about. And that's happening again today, too, at his stump speeches. And so that's I mean, do you want him out there like spreading 8chan memes and like putting out, you know, stuff about QAnon that nobody doesn't resonate with anybody?

I don't know. I mean, I don't know how much the danger of Trump right now is that he appeals to disengaged, nonpolitical people who may or may not vote. Is that the danger of Trump right now or is the danger of Trump right now that he is speaking to true believers who may commit extremist acts of violence or other forms of attacks on the country that are coming from the real fringe? I don't know. I mean, both at once. No, I think the latter is quite dangerous. What did you learn from this story about what draws people to fascism? Because that does seem like a more timeless lesson between the period that you covered and what's happening right now. I don't know if I know what draws people to it, but I know that you don't have to be very good at it to sort of strum that chord. You don't

actually have to be a genius or a maestro or an excellent communicator. You just have to be good enough at pushing those buttons. I mean, we're wired as humans in the type of society that we live in to pick an other, to problematize it, to dehumanize it and decide that's the root of our problems and decide that we want to go back to some mythical thing where that problem hadn't overtaken us and ruined our otherwise good lives. We are just wired for that. And the thing that strikes me over and over again with the Christian front plot and the silver shirts plot and the Klan adjacent plot and all these other things that I go through in the podcast between 1940, late 1939 and 1944, is that they did get dismissed by people. All these guys got dismissed as crackpots or as being non-compelling or as being, you know, kooky in some sort of way. So these things must not have resonated with normal people. And it turns out that being clownish or being ham-handed in some way doesn't map neatly onto being ineffective when what you're playing with is this kind of psychological and sociological fire.

It's just dangerous. No, and it's also I'm so glad that you said that it's easy and you don't have to be that smart because I do think one thing Democrats do today is they look at Republicans and say, oh, they're so smart. They always figure it out. Why can't we be that smart? And it's like what at least the extreme right is trying to do. That's easier, right? It's easier to burn down the barn. It is easier actually to resort to hate and violence. There's nothing like magical about that. democracy is really hard. Persuading a country of 300 plus million people that is incredibly diverse that we all got to hang together and follow laws and let each other say things that we hate. That's really hard. And I don't think we get that like our side just has a much tougher challenge ahead of us. Yes. And also, given that we're a liberal democracy, I think some people look at this kind of content in this podcast and the stuff that we're talking about here and think, God, that is a drag. Why are you working on that? Like, don't you need a break from this stuff? To me, this is heartening because the lesson of this to me is, hey, sedition happens.

Sedition happens, you know, fascist uprisings happen. Like, we're a country that has more guns than people. And so when we have people who have been preached to that violence is the answer and politics must be abandoned and instead they need to take power by force, they're going to have access to a lot of force to do it. That's going to happen. That's part of the mix. And it doesn't mean that things are working well, but it does mean that life proceeds apace and we ought to learn from history. And the Americans who have faced these things before ought to be studied and ought to be remembered. And we ought to know their stories because this stuff does recur. It's human nature

and it is a feature of an open society where you have the right to think, say, and associate the way you please. And we just have to be good at fighting it. We need to expect that it's going to keep happening. We need to inoculate ourselves so that we're not shocked when it happens. People need to know when they start hearing anti-Semitic tropes or, you know, blame the immigrant kind of tropes, that that's old news, that this is something that demagogues the world over have been pushing over and over again. And they ought to be laughed at when they say it. But we ought to expect that they'll keep saying it. And we need better muscles and we need to be, I think, more connected to our history of fighting it in the past to know that we're not alone and we're not doing this for the first time.

Well, without giving away the rest of the series, like what strategies were broadly effective in fighting fascism in the period that you're talking about in the early 40s? Exposure is the most important thing, actually, I think. I mean, I think that's the lesson. And I don't know that that's true time immemorial. That certainly seems to be the lesson of this chunk of time, sort of 1940 to 1944, that I'm looking at. You get very popular, very influential journalists and columnists, people like Drew Pearson and Walter Winchell and Dorothy Thompson, deciding that they can type of thing bubbling up in the country to be aware of for tens of millions of Americans who are reading those very influential journalists. That really helps. You also get individual activists, very brave activists. There's a woman named Frances Sweeney in Boston who's herself a devout Catholic woman, who's horrified by what's going on with this Coughlin adjacent Christian front and what's happening with basically radicalizing Irish

Catholics in Boston. And she takes it upon herself to infiltrate those groups, to heckle them, to make sure that they know there's opposition. And then she basically berates the local police department until they agree to start monitoring them and ultimately to raid them when they get involved in overt Nazi propaganda stuff. In the same time in Southern California, the Jewish community there is absolutely horrified by the fact that there is an Aryan bookstore. It's called the Aryan Bookstore, operating adjacent to something called Deutsche Haus in Los Angeles. And there's brown shirt meetings happening in Los Angeles. And there's a Hitler Youth summer camp in La Crescenta, California. It's happening. And the Jewish community is scared. There's violence against

Jews that's happening in Southern California. These groups are getting stronger. They're openly recruiting. The police and the sheriff's department want nothing to do with it. The FBI is no help. And they decide, OK, we're going to form our own private spy groups where we persuade people who we know who look German to go infiltrate these groups and report on them and expose them. And essentially, they become like an Antifa spy organization to expose what these groups are doing. They serve sort of as agent provocateur in some cases, and they, again, force law enforcement, and in some interesting cases,

military intelligence to respond to what these groups are doing. So it is intrepid, and it's brave, and it's interesting, and in some cases, it's very funny. But it's all about exposure. It's about not allowing them to operate only in their own bubble and to define what they're doing in their own terms, but rather to shine a light on them and to trust that Americans will recognize the fascist message as being problematic as much as it appeals to some of their base. What do you think the pro-democracy forces in this country need to be doing now that we're not currently doing or maybe not doing well enough. Well, I think you had it right when you were talking about the obligation to persuade, right? You can't content moderate your way out of this problem in social media, right? You can't say like, the problem is the person who created this meme. Well, the person who created this meme created it and sent it somewhere, seeded it somewhere. But then the reason it became a problem that you know about

is because it was widely circulated by people for whom it resonated. That is a persuasion problem. And it's kind of an education problem in the sense of that people should hopefully, I think, sort of take on the mantle of education around this issue. I know that sounds wussy, but like people ought to know that the anti-Semitic stuff that's circulating right now around Trump's social media presence and pro-Trump social media presence is not like edgy, modern, you know, anti-woke bravery. It's old news. Like, are you seriously trafficking in this old stuff? You know who you sound like? That kind of inoculation, I think, to people so that they don't just get moved by this stuff uncritically is the work of public intellectuals and journalists and activists and people who have sway in the media landscape where people are otherwise being confronted with these kinds of messages. Yeah. The other podcast I do called The Wilderness, I sat down with focus groups of voters who aren't very connected to politics, but they were all Biden voters. They showed up in 2020, but they're not sure if they're going to show up again.

And, you know, everyone on Twitter who listens to these focus groups is like, I listened to a couple episodes. I can't do it anymore. If these people don't know by now that we're under a fascist threat or that the Republicans are extreme, if they don't know this by now, then I can't help them. I give up. You know, on one hand, I'm like, I totally get the frustration.

I sat in those focus groups. I had to have a poker face when people said like, what's a midterm? You know, like I get it. But I'm not trying to be like naive here what i'm trying to say is this is the only way if we want a liberal democracy we're stuck here with the other 300 some million people we have to persuade them it's the only way because the only other option is violence yes yes and Yes. And here, I brought this. I know we're on audio, but I'll show you.

Can you see this? Oh, yeah. Christian Front. So this is an anti-Christian Front pamphlet that was put out by an anti-fascist organization in the Bronx in the late 30s, trying to get people in the Bronx to mobilize against the Christian Front thugs that were holding street meetings and randomly beating up Jews on the streets in the Bronx to mobilize against the Christian front thugs that were holding street meetings and like randomly beating up Jews on the streets of the Bronx. Practical steps.

It can be stopped now before it acquires the prestige of success. Here are things that you can do. First of all, keep us, meaning keep your local anti-fascist organization, advised of incidents such as stabbings and beatings that may happen in your neighborhood. Number two, petition your local city council and police to take action within the existing law and without violating the right of free speech against the incitements to riot from the Christian front. Number three, organize local tolerance committees in your own neighborhood to hold street and other meetings. Number four, ask your local clergyman to

preach sermons on tolerance. Distribute literature exposing the Christian front for what it really is. This is in the 30s, people trying to deal with the threat of a group that at that very moment was stockpiling bombs and heavy machine guns to go simultaneously assassinate a dozen congressmen and set off a national civil war to install a fascist dictator. And the way they're doing it is like, can you form a tolerance committee on your block in the Bronx? Well, I mean, this is this is the struggle that we all have right now is like I wake up every day and before we do the pot, it's like, all right, I think that the danger out there is real and extreme. But I also don't want to completely freak people out and sound hysterical all the time. Right. Like and it's and social media makes this easy to write like everything's at an 11 all the time.

And if everything's at 11 all the time, then like people start tuning you out. But at the same time, you don't want to be completely calm because you're like, hey, there's a potential for a fascist takeover out there. And so learning that a fascist takeover is something that's a live option for some people who are doing some of this work, people who are like, that's a good thing to know. Like, this isn't so extreme that it's impossible. There was actually a violent armed attack on the U.S. Capitol within the last two years. We should get real about that and not have revisionist history about it. But also the solution to it is to give people who might be attracted to those ideas contact with other ideas. There has to be human to human contact.

There has to be door knocking. There has to be civic organizations that aren't designed to polarize but are instead designed to bring people together. And there has to be a way for people to whistleblow if they start getting into or getting adjacent to some of this violent stuff that they then have doubts about. There has to be a way for them to truth tell about it, whistleblow about it, and a place for them to go. And so part of it, yes, is law enforcement, but there has to be civic strength. You know, people who are part of professional organizations, people who are part of religious organizations, people who are part of civic groups that, again, aren't designed to polarize, that aren't designed to set you against somebody else, but rather to get you talking to each other. All that stuff builds us as a liberal democracy.

And it sounds boring, but it's the work. And it never stops. It never stops. That's what it means to be a citizen in a free country. That is 100% correct. You're one of the most brilliant and influential progressive journalists and storytellers of our time. Like, how do you see your role in this fight going forward? I know you're pursuing other projects. You're not doing five nights a week now on cable. What's your sort of thought about how you're in this fight? I don't know.

I mean, I feel like I'm like really, I was saying to somebody the other day, like the story that's in this podcast is something that I feel like I've been really I was saying to somebody the other day like the story that's in this podcast is something that I feel like I've been 20 months pregnant with like I have to get this story out there but it's also hard to do well like this is you know the this is something that I'm have been working on for months and months and months and will be working on until the last second before the last episode is posted in November. Each episode, new episode comes out every Monday for the next six weeks. And so I'm just, I'm going to keep doing that. I've got some other projects that are kind of along these lines in terms of, I mean, for me, what speaks to me is history. And so I think that there are things in America's relatively recent

past that helped me contextualize and understand and sort of make me energized about the work that's to be done now. So I'm going to keep doing that. I like to have, I'm really enjoying having a little more space, not having to be on the air every night so that I can work on longer term projects like this. So I've got like kind of seven or eight different things along these lines. The podcast is the first one. But then, you know, I'm every night, every Monday night on MSNBC and I'm leading our coverage of all the January 6th hearings. And, you know, I'll be there on election night. And I don't know, I just feel like there's a lot of stories to tell.

I want a little more elbow room to be able to read more and not get my, you know, I don't want to be online every day. I don't want to be in the news cycle every day. I want to be finding primary source stuff from the 40s that helps me tell stories that hopefully illuminate where we are. I don't know. I'm just trying to stay alive. We are all extremely fortunate that you have decided to get offline a little bit more and tell these stories. It is a fantastic podcast. Everyone go listen to Ultra. It comes out every Monday. And Rachel Maddow, thank you so much for joining Offline. John, thank you so much. This was really fun, and I'm so glad you're doing this show. You guys are doing fantastic work.

Thank you. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Andrew Chadwick is our audio editor. Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis, sound engineer of the show. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Tanya Sominator, Michael Martinez, Andy Gardner-Bernstein, Ari Schwartz, Andy Taft, and Sandy Gerard for production support.

And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Melkonian, and Amelia Montooth, who film and share our episodes as videos every week. On this season of The Wilderness, I'm finding out what voters who aren't hooked on Twitter or cable news think about politics. We've learned a lot so far and dove deep into what it will take to actually reach these voters and help save democracy in 2022 and beyond. Make sure to catch up on what you've missed now and tune into the final episode of The Wilderness Monday, wherever you get your podcasts.