Speaker 1: It's Behind the Bastards, the only podcast where we have
Speaker 1: to edit out large chunks of it because of the
Speaker 1: number of veiled threats I make towards social media. CEOs
Speaker 1: my guest today to talk about some of the worst
Speaker 1: people in all of history. Uh is my my good friend,
Speaker 1: one of my favorite stand up comedians and fellow podcast
Speaker 1: ear like Musketeer. It spelt like musketeer, but the podcast
Speaker 1: Sophia Alexandra. Yeah, I'm so happy to be here. Thank
Speaker 1: you for having me. Thank you, Sophia for being here.
Speaker 1: How are you doing today? You know, just smiling ear ear,
Speaker 1: smiling ear to ear. Sophia, how do you how do
Speaker 1: you feel about Nazis? Um? Well, are they hot? I
Speaker 1: mean statistically some of them where yes? Of course, still
Speaker 1: a no for me, still a no, a no. Okay, okay,
Speaker 1: that's a bold, bold stance for you to take you.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much. I am braver than than the president,
Speaker 1: that's for sure. Yeah, yeah, that's for sure. So you know,
Speaker 1: one of the few nice things about the last couple
Speaker 1: of months, which have broadly sucked, is that like a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of mainstream news sites and pundits, uh and
Speaker 1: and influencers and whatnot who were like making fun of
Speaker 1: folks like me who were worried about, you know, the
Speaker 1: whole fascism thing. Um are now are now talking seriously about,
Speaker 1: like this is pretty fascist. A lot of the stuff
Speaker 1: that's going on seems like we're in a bad place,
Speaker 1: like the Atlantics running articles and ship on you know that.
Speaker 1: Um So that's been nice that, like people are taking
Speaker 1: the rise of fascism in America more seriously. Um And
Speaker 1: except for like, this is the reaction that would have
Speaker 1: been appropriate like four years old, four years ago, and
Speaker 1: now is just so underwhelmed ing and so much less
Speaker 1: than what we need that it's almost negligible. Yeah yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I'm not giving them credit, but at least
Speaker 1: at least people aren't like calling you like a doomsayer
Speaker 1: or whatever for for being like, hey, this kind of
Speaker 1: seems like what was happening in Germany back in the thirties.
Speaker 1: You'll remember Germany back in the thirties, what happened there.
Speaker 1: The truth is, people don't they just remember, how like
Speaker 1: the haircuts, Yeah, that's why we did, you know. And
Speaker 1: one of the earlier episodes we did on this show
Speaker 1: was about like the non Nazi bastards who helped Hitler
Speaker 1: rise to power UM, which was based on a really
Speaker 1: good book that people should still read called The Death
Speaker 1: of Democracy, and kind of at the time when I
Speaker 1: put that together, I thought it was really important that
Speaker 1: people understand how um, like multicultural and progressive the Weimar
Speaker 1: Republic was, and how that sort of a place turned
Speaker 1: to totalitarian is m because I think it's possible for
Speaker 1: any democracy, no matter how progressive, with like the right
Speaker 1: number of bad years, and we've certainly had some bad years. UM.
Speaker 1: So the thing I wanted to do today, though, like
Speaker 1: that episode focused a lot on politicians, on like you know,
Speaker 1: high ranking conservative politicians, on members of the aristocracy, on
Speaker 1: like you know, left wing politicians, and like like the leaders,
Speaker 1: like the different leaders of political parties, and like the
Speaker 1: decisions they made that allowed Hitler to to get into
Speaker 1: power UM, And I want to focus on I want
Speaker 1: to focus on a different group of people today who
Speaker 1: were who were as responsible for letting Hitler do what
Speaker 1: he did, but who weren't a lot of them, Like
Speaker 1: we don't even really know the names of the individuals,
Speaker 1: and it's not really important because what we're talking about
Speaker 1: today are the little Nazis, the rank and file fascists
Speaker 1: who voted Hitler into office and gave him their support,
Speaker 1: because I think there's a lot we can learn about
Speaker 1: our own modern fascists. And again, not like the not
Speaker 1: the proud boys and stuff, not the people taking to
Speaker 1: the streets and fighting, but the people who are like willing,
Speaker 1: who will who would support President Trump not just in
Speaker 1: re election, but in throwing people into camps and you know,
Speaker 1: re educating or killing his ideological and enemies. Like the
Speaker 1: kind of people who wouldn't stand out on the street
Speaker 1: and risk their lives for a fascist regime, but would
Speaker 1: kind of stand back and let it happen and give
Speaker 1: it just enough of their support that it's able to
Speaker 1: go the rest of the distance. We're talking about those
Speaker 1: kind of people today, and we're talking about those kind
Speaker 1: of people from the Nazi regime, like the the little
Speaker 1: Nazis is a is a term that I'm actually stealing
Speaker 1: from a very controversial book by an author named Milton
Speaker 1: Sanford Meyer. Um and Meyer's book was probably the first
Speaker 1: postwar investigation into how and whine normal German citizens joined
Speaker 1: the Nazi Party. So it's not a book again about
Speaker 1: like the proud boy equivalence, the fascist street paramilitaries who
Speaker 1: helped Hitler rise to prominence. It mostly deals with like
Speaker 1: bakers and teachers and like policemen who decided pretty late
Speaker 1: in the game to to support Hitler and help him
Speaker 1: do the things that he did. So that's who we're
Speaker 1: talking about today, is the is the little Nazis. And
Speaker 1: I think people will recognize a lot of comparisons, um
Speaker 1: between those folks and some people they may know in
Speaker 1: their daily lives. I think it's a little bit hilarious
Speaker 1: when people talk about, like when people would talk about
Speaker 1: Nazis like like during the forties and then people just
Speaker 1: went along with them and they'd be like, I could
Speaker 1: never do that. And now fast forward to today, like
Speaker 1: those are the same people that won't even fucking read
Speaker 1: a proper article or you know, vote or you know,
Speaker 1: do anything that might be helpful for anyone sign a petition.
Speaker 1: I don't fucking know, you know, Yeah, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it's it's um So that passivity, I guess, is what
Speaker 1: I'm saying. Is it We all have that to some degree.
Speaker 1: It's it's a thing you have to like that. It
Speaker 1: is absolutely that passivity is what lets the Nazis get
Speaker 1: away with the things that they get away with, exactly.
Speaker 1: And we'll be talking about those kind of folks too.
Speaker 1: We'll be talking, particularly at the end of part two
Speaker 1: about the folks who supported the Nazis even though they
Speaker 1: weren't Nazi voters, you know, supported them by their inaction, UM,
Speaker 1: because I think that's important to talk about. But a
Speaker 1: lot of what we're chatting about are folks, like folks
Speaker 1: who kind of the kind of people who would have
Speaker 1: said something along the lines of, well, I don't like Hitler, um,
Speaker 1: but I don't you know, I think that I don't
Speaker 1: think that he's very serious about a lot of this
Speaker 1: anti Jew stuff. I think that'll that will die down
Speaker 1: once he wins, and like you know, he'll be good
Speaker 1: for the economy. And you've heard the people who are
Speaker 1: making the same arguments in nine three or whatever that
Speaker 1: like folks made in sixteen and are continuing to make UM.
Speaker 1: And that's why I think I think UM. Milton Myer's
Speaker 1: book is so valuable because it basically what he did
Speaker 1: is he traveled to Germany immediately after the war UM,
Speaker 1: and he made he befriended a bunch of members of
Speaker 1: the Nazi Party, and not again, not like people who'd
Speaker 1: had any stance, but like normal working class people who
Speaker 1: just joined the party and voted for Hitler. And he
Speaker 1: was he was a Milton was a Jewish journalist, um.
Speaker 1: Which he didn't talk about the fact that he was
Speaker 1: Jewish to them, but he like he made that that's
Speaker 1: not really gonna be something that people loved here in
Speaker 1: the Nazi Party meetings, He's like, I mean, one of
Speaker 1: the things that might be most unsettling, and we'll get
Speaker 1: to this, is that, like, I think a lot of
Speaker 1: them probably wouldn't have cared all that much because that
Speaker 1: wasn't their motivation for supporting the Nazis, which again is
Speaker 1: one of the more unsettling things about them, is the
Speaker 1: number of people who enabled the Holocaust despite not really
Speaker 1: having super like like organized anti Semitic feelings themselves. Um Like,
Speaker 1: that's one of the most unsettling things about the Holocaust
Speaker 1: is the number of people who enabled it to happen
Speaker 1: despite not particularly wanting it to happen, um. Which is
Speaker 1: kind of one of the things we don't talk about
Speaker 1: enough when we talk about the Holocaust, because that's almost
Speaker 1: even scarier to me than the people who whose hatred
Speaker 1: and racism moved them to take action. It's the people who,
Speaker 1: like you, knew this was wrong and you let it
Speaker 1: happen um or you even helped in some way. I don't.
Speaker 1: We'll talk about that too, So let's cut straight to
Speaker 1: the chase. Though. Are there dead babies in this episode?
Speaker 1: There's the insinuation of dead babies in this episode because
Speaker 1: a lot of babies died in the Holocaust, but we
Speaker 1: don't there's not. Well, actually no, there is. There is.
Speaker 1: There is direct baby killing. Yes, what will be talking
Speaker 1: graphically about baby killing in part two? Actually? Yes, start
Speaker 1: a bit. This is how you get me. I can't
Speaker 1: write a Sophia episode without some dead babies in it.
Speaker 1: You can't look. It's Sophie grinning over there. I think
Speaker 1: she remembered before I did this. Yeah, So when when
Speaker 1: When Meyers set out to write this book and you know,
Speaker 1: started making all these friends, his goal was to sketch
Speaker 1: out quote the delineation of the personal conditions under which
Speaker 1: the little man anywhere becomes involved in the development of
Speaker 1: totalitarian evil, and the ways in which he assumes or
Speaker 1: avoids moral responsibility for his participation in it. Which I
Speaker 1: think is a really good premise for a book, um,
Speaker 1: especially consider he was kind of the first guy to
Speaker 1: look into this. So he moves to Jeremany right after
Speaker 1: the war. He makes good friends with like ten male
Speaker 1: former members of the Nazi Party, and he titles his
Speaker 1: book about them they Thought They Were Free. And we'll
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about that title later, and I
Speaker 1: think it's one of my favorite, my favorite titles for
Speaker 1: any book. UM. Now, there's a lot of good critiques
Speaker 1: about Meyer's book, and we'll talk about as fuck. It's
Speaker 1: incredibly ominous, and it incredibly pointed, and it makes a
Speaker 1: very important point that again we'll talk to in a bit. Um.
Speaker 1: There's there's good criticisms of the book, a number of
Speaker 1: them being that, like, for one thing, he only talks
Speaker 1: to men, right, which is like kind of a bias
Speaker 1: of the time, um, which is is definitely a flaw
Speaker 1: in the book. He also Tinman isn't a huge chunk
Speaker 1: of people, but you get a lot of detail into
Speaker 1: why those ten people did you know, the things that
Speaker 1: they did, which I think is really valuable. UM. And
Speaker 1: you know, they're ten people from one town, so you
Speaker 1: can't assume it's like a super broad It doesn't give
Speaker 1: us the broader picture on on all of the different
Speaker 1: reasons people picked the Nazi Party. So we'll be going
Speaker 1: to I have a lot of outside evidence, a lot
Speaker 1: of things besides the book that we'll be talking about
Speaker 1: that sort of give us that broader picture. Um. I
Speaker 1: want to start our episode with a brief overview of
Speaker 1: Meyer's life because I think it's really interesting. Uh. He
Speaker 1: was born in Chicago in nineteen o eight and he
Speaker 1: studied at the University of Chicago, but he got kicked
Speaker 1: out before graduating because he was caught hucking beer bottles
Speaker 1: at the dean from like the top floor of his dormitory.
Speaker 1: Me a bad boy. Yeah. When he was questioned about it,
Speaker 1: he was like, my only regret is I didn't hit him.
Speaker 1: You gotta love the guy. Um. So he drops out
Speaker 1: of college and he gets a job in journalism shortly thereafter,
Speaker 1: and he, you know, he does a number of things.
Speaker 1: He works for her paper, so he gets some like
Speaker 1: muckraking kind of like populist sort of experience. Um. And
Speaker 1: he actually he winds up being the guy who comes
Speaker 1: up with the actual like the lion that is every
Speaker 1: journalist job description today. He's the guy who convinced the
Speaker 1: phrase speak truth to power, Like that's that's Milton Meyer. Um,
Speaker 1: he's the first person to like put those words together,
Speaker 1: which I think still is the best job the best
Speaker 1: like job summary you can have as a journalist. That's
Speaker 1: not came up with breast cancer, thirst trap, but that doesn't.
Speaker 1: That's pretty good to friend as much. I have that
Speaker 1: tattooed on my body. Also, Yeah, oh is it? Is
Speaker 1: it where you said you were going to get it
Speaker 1: above Oh yeah, no, yep, yep, yep, yep, not on
Speaker 1: the ankle, because you're going to get it under the dick,
Speaker 1: and then he decided to go above that the under
Speaker 1: the dick was too full of other tattoos. Smart. I have,
Speaker 1: oddly enough the opening to slaughter House five, which was
Speaker 1: maybe a poor choice in retrospect, a lot of words
Speaker 1: to it on there. So it's your way of telling
Speaker 1: us you are huge, because that's not what needs to
Speaker 1: happen during this Nazi reckoning episode. Robert Evans, Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: not the president. I'm not going to turn something serious
Speaker 1: into talking about my dick. So Milton was fundamentally a
Speaker 1: believer in human rights and he felt that people should
Speaker 1: fight like hungry dogs to maintain those rights in the
Speaker 1: face of state oppression they thought they were free. Came
Speaker 1: out of his confusion that citizens of the Weimar Republic,
Speaker 1: which is again a very progressive state, would give up
Speaker 1: their rights so readily. Like he was kind of baffled
Speaker 1: by this, and he just personally needed an answer. And
Speaker 1: for his time, you know, he had his biases, like
Speaker 1: we just talked about, not really talking, not talking to
Speaker 1: women to any meaningful extent, but he was also a
Speaker 1: pretty enlightened soul for his time. He repeatedly compares the
Speaker 1: bigotry paced faced by European Jews to Jim crow um,
Speaker 1: to the oppression of black people in the United States
Speaker 1: to the internment of Japanese Americans. Um So, he's he's
Speaker 1: a guy who's who's looking. He's not, He's he's very oh,
Speaker 1: kind of what the United States represents in his eyes,
Speaker 1: but he's certainly not blind to its faults, and he
Speaker 1: sees that like, oh, a fascism comes to the United States,
Speaker 1: it will be based in bigotry against these different groups.
Speaker 1: That I think is pretty accurate. Um So he's he's
Speaker 1: he's I think a guy who's worth paying attention to
Speaker 1: um And I really, like I said earlier that like
Speaker 1: I like his definition of little men, of of what
Speaker 1: like a little man is in a culture. And I'm
Speaker 1: gonna quote from that now. He's talking about the friends
Speaker 1: that he made to write this book. These ten men
Speaker 1: were little men. Only Hair Hildebrant, the teacher, had any
Speaker 1: substantial status in the community. And when I say little men,
Speaker 1: I mean not only the men for whom the mass
Speaker 1: media and the campaign speeches are everywhere designed, but specifically
Speaker 1: and sharply stratified societies like Germany, the men who think
Speaker 1: of themselves in that way. Every one of my ten
Speaker 1: Nazi friends, including Hildebrant, spoke again and again during our
Speaker 1: discussions of we little people. We have that in the
Speaker 1: United States, don't we do a different extent. We don't
Speaker 1: call it, they don't call themselves the little people, but
Speaker 1: everyday Americans, real Americans, like that's our version of that.
Speaker 1: Working class heroes. Yeah, working class heroes. We have our
Speaker 1: version of that. You know, it's important not to over
Speaker 1: extend comparisons because Germany very different society, a lot of
Speaker 1: stuff going on that we don't have going on, just
Speaker 1: like we but like you can you can see a
Speaker 1: line like you know, people who see themselves that way.
Speaker 1: I think that reminds me of the fact that basically, like, uh,
Speaker 1: when you don't have a lot, yeah, the one thing
Speaker 1: you can like cling to is your identity. Yeah, exactly
Speaker 1: is your identity. So if you see yourself as constantly
Speaker 1: getting like the short une of the stick, you would
Speaker 1: think of yourself as like, yeah, I'm the everyday little man,
Speaker 1: you know, and it's it's it's those little men number one.
Speaker 1: As Mayer points out, it's the little men that all
Speaker 1: of the Nazi electoral campaigns were focused on. They wanted
Speaker 1: to win the little men, and it's a little men
Speaker 1: who made the Holocaust possible. You know, if you have
Speaker 1: a couple of hundred or a couple of thousand people
Speaker 1: who want to kill all of whatever ethnic group, the Jews,
Speaker 1: the immigrants, like whatever, if you have a few hundred
Speaker 1: or a few thousand of them in a society, the
Speaker 1: most they're gonna do is commit some hate crimes, which
Speaker 1: are terrible, but they're not going to be able to
Speaker 1: actually carry out a genocide if there's not a few
Speaker 1: million people who get on board just enough to let
Speaker 1: it happen, you know, And that that's why I like
Speaker 1: Meyer's book. That's why I think it's important. So yeah, again,
Speaker 1: not a perfect book, but I think a valuable one. Now,
Speaker 1: I want to start this episode by busting a myth,
Speaker 1: and we just talked about it, and it's the myth
Speaker 1: that every person who would joined the Nazi Party or
Speaker 1: supported them actively hated Jewish people. Um. And I think
Speaker 1: it's important to counter that, not to give the Nazis credit,
Speaker 1: because I think it actually condemns those individuals. More. The
Speaker 1: thing that's important for people to understand is that you
Speaker 1: don't little men and women don't have to hate in
Speaker 1: order to enable genocides. Benign indifference is all that's necessary.
Speaker 1: And this is really well illustrated by the story of
Speaker 1: one of myers Nazi friends, a former bank clerk named Kessler. Now,
Speaker 1: Kessler was late to join the Nazi Party, and he
Speaker 1: was never a full convert to the ideology. As late
Speaker 1: as nineteen thirty eight, he maintained a fairly close friendship
Speaker 1: with a local Jewish man named Rosenthal, who had once
Speaker 1: been his boss, the director of his bank. Now, the
Speaker 1: day before Christallnacht, when the synagogue in their city was
Speaker 1: burnt to the ground, as were so many other synagogues
Speaker 1: in Germany. Kessler told his Jewish friend that quote, with
Speaker 1: men like me and the party, things will be better,
Speaker 1: You'll see. Um can we say though that this has
Speaker 1: a real have I have one black friend kind of vibe?
Speaker 1: You know? Sure, like I have a Jewish frenz. See
Speaker 1: doesn't really seem like it's great if you can. It's
Speaker 1: one guy you know that's Jewish and that's fun in it.
Speaker 1: That's that's not good. It's certainly not good. And again
Speaker 1: I'm not trying to like defend these Nazis by saying
Speaker 1: that they didn't actively hate. The point is that, um,
Speaker 1: it was it was it was people like Kessler who
Speaker 1: and and this guy like that might got to know
Speaker 1: him pretty well. He talked about his friendship with this
Speaker 1: man a decent amount, and like talked about to the
Speaker 1: extent that like you can you can see that Kessler
Speaker 1: felt guilty about his party affiliation and was trying to
Speaker 1: assuage it with with with comments like this, which means
Speaker 1: there was number one, an extent to which he knew
Speaker 1: what he was doing was wrong and he was kind
Speaker 1: of trying to wash the slate clean in his own
Speaker 1: head by saying like, no, by joining this party, I
Speaker 1: can pull it back towards a rational side of things,
Speaker 1: right Like that was what this guy had to tell
Speaker 1: himself in order to kind of deal with the guilt
Speaker 1: that he knew he was supporting something bad. Um. And
Speaker 1: I think we know a lot of people who are
Speaker 1: in that position in our country today. Um, I'm related
Speaker 1: to some of them. Uh. Kessler believed quote that has
Speaker 1: more and more decent citizens joined it. It being the
Speaker 1: Nazi party, it would certainly join it for the better.
Speaker 1: And Meyer goes on to write, quote, my friends meant
Speaker 1: what they said. They calculated wrong, but they meant what
Speaker 1: they said. And the Moral and Religious bank clerk was
Speaker 1: on the basis of that mortally wrong calculation to preach
Speaker 1: the most barbarous paganism and the decent bourgeoisie teacher who
Speaker 1: was to teach Nazi literature from Nazi textbooks provided by
Speaker 1: the Nazi school board. Teachers teach what they are told
Speaker 1: to teach, or quit, and to quit a public post
Speaker 1: mint in the early years of the Third Reich, unemployment
Speaker 1: later when one had an anti Nazi political past and
Speaker 1: meant concentration camp. Once you were in the party, said
Speaker 1: his friend, the baker, who doesn't say he ever wanted
Speaker 1: to get out. You didn't get out easily. And again
Speaker 1: you see what he's kind of the point he's making
Speaker 1: there is that like these people talk about how hard
Speaker 1: it is to get out, but they didn't try. And
Speaker 1: this is one of the things that if you that
Speaker 1: that I think because of when he was writing this,
Speaker 1: Meyer didn't know. But there's actually it's over emphasized the
Speaker 1: degree to which people would have potentially faced punishment for
Speaker 1: refusing to take part in a in an anti Jewish bigotry.
Speaker 1: There was not a single leader in the Wehrmacht, not
Speaker 1: a single officer in CEO, who was punished for refusing
Speaker 1: to take part in a massacre. And some of them did.
Speaker 1: The ones who participated did so because they were scared
Speaker 1: that it would harm their ability to get promoted, or
Speaker 1: because of peer pressure. But like nobody, it actually is
Speaker 1: a myth that members like you were punished if you
Speaker 1: actively tried to help people hide. Let's just say it
Speaker 1: was frowned upon, but it wasn't. You wouldn't like the
Speaker 1: people who participated weren't in fear of their lives if
Speaker 1: they didn't participate. There's no saying it wasn't prohibited. They weren't.
Speaker 1: Like if you do this, you will suffer with this.
Speaker 1: It was, Oh, it's frowned upon, so probably not do it.
Speaker 1: Oh do it because it will make me unpopular to
Speaker 1: not do it. Like and again, that's much more unsettling
Speaker 1: than these people all being radicalized automatons who are just
Speaker 1: lockstep in favor of Nazism. Like, it's so much less
Speaker 1: scary to me that somebody could be like a straight
Speaker 1: up member of the s S and just onboard for
Speaker 1: genocide than somebody than that somebody could help with the
Speaker 1: genocide because like, well, people won't like me if I
Speaker 1: don't like that. That's way scarier to me. I don't know,
Speaker 1: um and just real, yeah, and real it speaks to
Speaker 1: something ugly in all of us, because I think a
Speaker 1: lot of people would do that. I mean, the whole
Speaker 1: idea behind the parties that you're joining a group of
Speaker 1: people and that gives you something that you don't get
Speaker 1: when you're on your own. You know, that can be
Speaker 1: positive or negative depending on what the party you're joining is.
Speaker 1: And when I read all these stories because there's a
Speaker 1: few of them, and Myer's book about people who thought
Speaker 1: that joining about like kind of more moderate folks who
Speaker 1: thought that joining the Nazi Party would pull it in
Speaker 1: a better direction. I'm reminded of General mad Dog Maddis now.
Speaker 1: I think you remember, like back when he first got
Speaker 1: appointed Secretary of Defense. They are all these think pieces
Speaker 1: about like how good this would be and about how
Speaker 1: this would like make Trump more moderate and and and
Speaker 1: pull him towards the sides side of rationality. Uh. There's
Speaker 1: a Mother Jones article titled Democrats hope mad Dog will
Speaker 1: call him Trump down. Um, like Senator Jack Reid when
Speaker 1: he was like because he had to get a special
Speaker 1: dispensation to be the Secretary of Defense that she had
Speaker 1: been in the army so recently, Um Jack. Senator Jack Read's,
Speaker 1: a Democrat, said that he hoped Madis would be the
Speaker 1: saucer that cools the coffee. Um. And Senator Richard Blumenval,
Speaker 1: who did vote against giving Maddis a waiver, still said
Speaker 1: that like, Uh, in this moment of history, I believe
Speaker 1: that your appreciation for the costs of war and blood
Speaker 1: treasure in lives and the impact on veterans afterwards, were
Speaker 1: enable you to be a check on rash and potentially
Speaker 1: ill considered force use of military force by a president
Speaker 1: elect who perhaps lacks that same appreciation. And of course
Speaker 1: what did we see. Maddis completely failed to drag Trump
Speaker 1: towards a reasonable position on absolutely anything. Civilian casualties from
Speaker 1: US action increased massively as soon as Trump took office.
Speaker 1: The rate of joke drone strikes increased to an enormous degree,
Speaker 1: and as a result of the Trump administration's escalation of
Speaker 1: violent force, the United States now kills more Afghan civilians
Speaker 1: than the Taliban does. Um, there's just no evidence that
Speaker 1: Maddis calmed Trump at all, because fascists don't let reasonable
Speaker 1: men dictate their policies. If they did, they wouldn't be fascists,
Speaker 1: you know. Um, But it's the same people keep making
Speaker 1: the same calculation, right. Um. You know, you can cliche
Speaker 1: it's the whole thing, Like, oh, you can change it
Speaker 1: from the inside. Yeah, that's a cliche for a reason,
Speaker 1: because that ship does not work. It's like that might
Speaker 1: change it from the inside. You're in the inside. You're
Speaker 1: on the fucking inside. That's what the inside is. That's
Speaker 1: what it means. Yeah, it's like that lion in the
Speaker 1: Simpsons when Homer says, but Marge, maybe if I'm a
Speaker 1: part of that angry mob, I can help steer it
Speaker 1: in positive directions. He will not. Yeah, Um, but I
Speaker 1: think we can all Like you see people today making
Speaker 1: the same calculations. Um, And you see people today like another.
Speaker 1: I have a lot of family members who kind of
Speaker 1: made the calculation. I can remember early in sixteen, we
Speaker 1: had a family reunion before Trump was back, when everyone
Speaker 1: was still assuming he would he would fail to win. Um.
Speaker 1: And like all of my Republican family members were dunking
Speaker 1: on the guy because they all loved John McCain and
Speaker 1: Trump had said a bunch of shitty things about John McCain,
Speaker 1: so they hated Trump. And then he became the candidate
Speaker 1: and they all voted for him. Uh. And they insisted
Speaker 1: to me that it was it was worthwhile because at
Speaker 1: the very least Trump was not a dirty socialist like
Speaker 1: Hillary Clinton. And let's let's skip over the fact that, like,
Speaker 1: let's skip over everything that's wrong with that statement. It's
Speaker 1: something that you all that it's another echo because campaigning
Speaker 1: against violent communists was a big part of the Nazis
Speaker 1: rested their electoral hopes on um. Myer's friend Herr Kessler
Speaker 1: told him quote, Hitlerism had to answer communism with something.
Speaker 1: Just as radical communism always used force, Hitlerism answered it
Speaker 1: with force. The real, the really absolute enemy of communism,
Speaker 1: always clear, always strong in the popular mind, was national socialism.
Speaker 1: The only enemy that answered communism and kind. If you
Speaker 1: wanted to save Germany from Communism, to be sure of
Speaker 1: doing it, you went to national socialism. The Nazi slogan
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty two was if you want your country
Speaker 1: to go Bolshevik, vote communist. If you want to remain
Speaker 1: free Germans, vote Nazi. Now you go look at some
Speaker 1: of the things at the ads Trump has been putting
Speaker 1: out over the last two three months, the things he's
Speaker 1: been saying about Antifa, and and tell me it's not
Speaker 1: the same fucking ad. And in fact, the Friday before
Speaker 1: I wrote this, Trump gave a speech where he told donors,
Speaker 1: I am the only thing standing between the American dream
Speaker 1: and total anarchy, madness and chaos. It's the same fucking
Speaker 1: play and acting during the debate by saying um that
Speaker 1: the violence UM and white supremacy are not a problem,
Speaker 1: and yeah, that that it's a it's actually a left
Speaker 1: wing problem. That's where all the violence is from. And
Speaker 1: it's definitely not a right wing problem, which is the
Speaker 1: same nonsense. And it's it's I mean, which even the
Speaker 1: even the FBI will say like no, dude, and have
Speaker 1: been pretty consistently saying like no, no, no. All of
Speaker 1: the murders pretty much are on one side of this thing.
Speaker 1: But like, yeah, it's the it's the reason Trump declared
Speaker 1: Portland and a couple of other cities anarchist jurisdiction, even
Speaker 1: though we have like the most violent and authoritarian police
Speaker 1: force in the country. It's because it doesn't matter what
Speaker 1: the truth is on the ground, if you can make
Speaker 1: Americans think Portland has been burnt down by anarchists. And
Speaker 1: he was hoping like there's good people on both sides. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and then now like can you imagine looking back at that,
Speaker 1: Now that's quaint, because that's acknowledging that there's good people, um,
Speaker 1: who are not fascists, Whereas what he said at the
Speaker 1: debate was that, um, actually all the good people are
Speaker 1: right wing and all the bad people are left. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's it's too early to know how that's all
Speaker 1: going to shake out electorally. A lot of the recent
Speaker 1: polls make it look like his law and order campaign
Speaker 1: has not worked, like it hasn't brought more people to him. Um. Really, again,
Speaker 1: we'll see on the election how true, how accurate those
Speaker 1: polls are. I'm hopeful and don't give a funk about
Speaker 1: a poll now. I don't trust any polls. I've been
Speaker 1: hurt too bad. I'm sorry, but we've all been burnt badly,
Speaker 1: which is good. I'm actually glad that no one trusts
Speaker 1: the polls because the polls are all showed that Biden
Speaker 1: has it basically locked down. I don't want anyone to
Speaker 1: feel but I don't trust that ship for us a second.
Speaker 1: So every time they say, hey, there's substantial lead, that
Speaker 1: just makes it so that people are like, I guess
Speaker 1: I can stay home. Yeah, I want people to be
Speaker 1: scared as well. Pols shut the funk up. So I
Speaker 1: am though interested to see how it actually winds out
Speaker 1: working for him, because it might if if he fails
Speaker 1: to attract a lot of support for the law and
Speaker 1: order thing, then maybe it's a sign that the United
Speaker 1: States is less less far gone than I had feared. Um,
Speaker 1: we'll see, but it's it is worth noting that like
Speaker 1: he's he's campaigning on the same fucking lines that Hitler was,
Speaker 1: and that that does kind of talking about the degree
Speaker 1: to which anti communism was kind of more of it
Speaker 1: was more of what got people to vote for the
Speaker 1: Nazis than anything the Nazis particularly supported. In some cases,
Speaker 1: you know, obviously it differed between like the class of
Speaker 1: people who are voting for him, But a lot of
Speaker 1: folks supported the Nazis because they hated the Communists and
Speaker 1: not because they were all on board with everything the
Speaker 1: Nazis was, which which one of the big things that
Speaker 1: I think is so irresponsible about the way our schools
Speaker 1: teach about Hitler is they they talk about him and
Speaker 1: the Nazis as if they were swept into power by
Speaker 1: a wave of mass support spurred on by like the
Speaker 1: desperate circumstances of the Great Depression, right, Like the picture
Speaker 1: I had of it was like you see, you get
Speaker 1: like two or three paragraphs about how the Weimar Republic's
Speaker 1: economy was shipped that one of those pictures of like
Speaker 1: a lady with a wheelbarrow full of of of Deutsche marks,
Speaker 1: and then like um and then it's like and then
Speaker 1: Hitler was elected because things were so bad, so many
Speaker 1: people were out of work, everyone was desperate, and he
Speaker 1: promised to to fix things. And that's not what swept
Speaker 1: him into power. Actually, UM this idea that like there
Speaker 1: were all these starving unemployed workers who swept Hitler into
Speaker 1: power um is a historical UM. Workers were not the
Speaker 1: Nazi Party's core of support. And I actually found a
Speaker 1: very fascinating two thousand eight analysis of German voting behavior
Speaker 1: from Princeton and the res searchers looked at the voting
Speaker 1: patterns of unemployed workers and blue collar workers who were
Speaker 1: at in Germany at the time, and they were looking
Speaker 1: specifically at unemployed workers and blue collar workers who were
Speaker 1: at high risk of losing their jobs. And they found
Speaker 1: that among this population, quote, when the unemployed opposed the government,
Speaker 1: they turned primarily to the communists, whose parties catered directly
Speaker 1: to them, not the Nazis. Moreover, the Nazis promoted autonomy, entrepreneurship,
Speaker 1: and private property ideas which were not directed to the unemployed.
Speaker 1: So these like these poor starving workers didn't turn out
Speaker 1: for the Nazis in large numbers. Instead, one of the
Speaker 1: Nazis strongest basis of support, and in fact their strongest
Speaker 1: base of support among Germans who were actually hurt by
Speaker 1: the economic downturn, So not like the wealthy or anything.
Speaker 1: Their strongest base of support among like Germans who were
Speaker 1: hurt by the Great Depression were small time bosses um,
Speaker 1: a category of people that the study authors described as
Speaker 1: the working poor quote. This is a phrase used in
Speaker 1: the field of American politics, within political science, and within sociology,
Speaker 1: but it has not been used previously to describe by
Speaker 1: our Germany. We use it because the groups described this
Speaker 1: way we're indeed working, and they were poor despite having
Speaker 1: other important characteristics. The group that fits this description most
Speaker 1: directly are the self employed, the independent artisans, shopkeepers, small farmers, lawyers,
Speaker 1: et cetera. Most accounts assume the self employed were fervent
Speaker 1: supporters of the Nazis. These individuals were hurt economically by
Speaker 1: the depression, but they because but because they own their firms,
Speaker 1: they were at relatively low risk of unemployment. Instead, bad
Speaker 1: economic times would merely mean that they would make less money,
Speaker 1: often a lot less. So it was not of the
Speaker 1: people who got fucked by the depression. It was not
Speaker 1: the people who were starving in the streets. It was
Speaker 1: the people whose small businesses suddenly weren't allowing them to
Speaker 1: purchase luxuries. Those were the people who really turned out
Speaker 1: for the Nazis. And again, reading that number one is
Speaker 1: completely counter to what I learned in high school about
Speaker 1: how Hitler got elected. That it was it was the
Speaker 1: small business owners who were like some of his most
Speaker 1: reliable supporters. But it also jells a lot with some
Speaker 1: ship that I saw this summer at the start of
Speaker 1: the anti lockdown protests in Oregon's capital Salem, a small
Speaker 1: business owner named Lindsay Graham ironic name a lady um.
Speaker 1: She received a fifteen thousand dollar fine for reopening her
Speaker 1: hair salon and violation of the state's law about COVID.
Speaker 1: And she immediately like drew in this like tsunami of
Speaker 1: right wing support, and all of these far right militia
Speaker 1: type started rallying at her salon with guns and stuff. Um,
Speaker 1: And it was this, you know, it was a grift
Speaker 1: for her. She raised more than seventy thousand dollars during
Speaker 1: her like two or three days in the limelight. But
Speaker 1: I think she's a really good example of the kind
Speaker 1: of working class people who field Hitler's rise, not down
Speaker 1: and out starving poor, not laborers living paycheck to paycheck,
Speaker 1: but little like lower middle and lower middle class business
Speaker 1: owners who were like scared of winding up in the
Speaker 1: same low place as the people who were on unemployment. Right,
Speaker 1: those are the people who embrace fascism most readily. And
Speaker 1: I think that's important. Well, it's the same thing that
Speaker 1: um that happens now that I think you can see
Speaker 1: a lot of anger about on like social media because
Speaker 1: you get to see um that older people, UM and
Speaker 1: younger people are having different not just older people and
Speaker 1: younger people are having different opinions and experiences, but it
Speaker 1: breaks down um into marginalized groups being like, oh, so
Speaker 1: you're angry now because your kid can't go to college
Speaker 1: or own a house, or you're angry now that you're
Speaker 1: losing these things, like we've never been able to achieve them,
Speaker 1: you know, So we've always been angry and that's not
Speaker 1: made us right wing, you know. And it's the people
Speaker 1: that are insulted that now like they've been taking it
Speaker 1: for granted that the American dream um of you know,
Speaker 1: your children are going to have it better than you, Um,
Speaker 1: they were taking for granted that would happen, and a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of people in society are saying, well, you
Speaker 1: just got here now, but we've always been here. It's
Speaker 1: kind of we've all we've always known that the dream
Speaker 1: was was was horseshit? Like, yeah, welcome to the I mean, well,
Speaker 1: not welcome because you guys are embracing mass murder instead
Speaker 1: of but like whatever, yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a good
Speaker 1: line in that Princeton study that I think is important. Um,
Speaker 1: the party active being the Nazi party actively promoted private
Speaker 1: property and so turned off many unemployed who either had
Speaker 1: little private property or generally supported more government intervention in
Speaker 1: the economy. And that's just not the picture. I don't know,
Speaker 1: like was your you were you were Jewish, So maybe
Speaker 1: you've got a better education about the Nazis than I
Speaker 1: did as a as a gentile boy. But like that's
Speaker 1: so different from what I learned in high school. I
Speaker 1: mean I grew up with like a totally different Nazi understanding.
Speaker 1: Initially because um, the U s SR is like obsessed
Speaker 1: with not like Nazis, Like because really, I said, because
Speaker 1: you know, we kind of bore the brunt of the
Speaker 1: whole thing, and so yeah, like World War Two is
Speaker 1: still talked about in like a huge amount, and like
Speaker 1: you know, Ukraine or Russia and so growing up, like
Speaker 1: I not only heard from my grandparents and stuff, but
Speaker 1: there was also just a lot of attention being paid
Speaker 1: to it by like the government and schools always. So
Speaker 1: I would feel like by the time I got here,
Speaker 1: I was like I know a lot more about and
Speaker 1: like they don't call him Nazis. They say fascists. They
Speaker 1: you know which is but like here, fascists is like
Speaker 1: for anybody, Yeah you know what I mean, And Nazis
Speaker 1: is specifically Nazi Germany. But you grew up, grow up, um,
Speaker 1: Like when I was growing up, you just here for
Speaker 1: sists for scist then it's just Nazi, like Nazi fascists specifically. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's there's a lot. Yeah, but you were saying as
Speaker 1: like a gentile boil boy, did you like did you
Speaker 1: do the whole like an frank mandatory reading in school?
Speaker 1: Did you love that? Yeah? And I feel ways about
Speaker 1: that because I would not have wanted my teenage diary
Speaker 1: to become read by millions of people. But also like
Speaker 1: I don't think it's it's useless that that people do
Speaker 1: read it a lot because she's very sympathetic. I don't.
Speaker 1: I went to the Anne Frank House a few years back,
Speaker 1: and it's a pretty it's a very good museum. I'll
Speaker 1: say that. Like, if you're ever in Amsterdam, check it out.
Speaker 1: Did you ever go to the Museum of Tolerance with
Speaker 1: your like school or anything? We we don't think it
Speaker 1: was called that we went to a Holocaust museum. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I feel like as a Jew, you
Speaker 1: hear a lot, and like by the time you go,
Speaker 1: you're like, I've already seen the the piles of like
Speaker 1: little kids shoes and stuff, and like the purses and
Speaker 1: all of that. So like by the time you go,
Speaker 1: you're like, I've seen like so much horrible shit. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I don't know. Maybe the Jewish thing is you get
Speaker 1: a lot more of it. Yeah. Yeah. The thing that
Speaker 1: really fucked me up was I went to Saxonhausen, which
Speaker 1: is one of the very small concentration camps, so not
Speaker 1: a death camp, a concentrate. A lot of people died there, obviously,
Speaker 1: but not like you know, there's a difference between the
Speaker 1: death camps and the concert saxon Housen was like was
Speaker 1: it was up mainly for political prisoners, although a number
Speaker 1: of Jewish people wound up there too, and they had
Speaker 1: we were there number one, and like the dead of winter,
Speaker 1: so like seeing the tiny little uniforms, the threadbare uniforms
Speaker 1: that they had to wear, and like being out there
Speaker 1: in like a German winter was like, oh my god.
Speaker 1: But they led us to these like this, the solitary
Speaker 1: confinement cells, which were holes in the ground with steel
Speaker 1: grates over them, and you could still see bloodstained marks
Speaker 1: in the concrete where people had tried to claw their
Speaker 1: way up. Um, like that was like one of that.
Speaker 1: That was like the thing that um stuck with you
Speaker 1: has stuck with me the most that I've physically seen
Speaker 1: as evidence of Holocaust. Yeah, um, okay, back to the
Speaker 1: little Nazis. But first first, it's a really awkward time
Speaker 1: for ad break. You know, who won't put political and
Speaker 1: racial prisoners into a debt note. Okay, that's not a
Speaker 1: good way toly dads. How do we you know, speaking
Speaker 1: of private property, speaking of earning things, Yeah, here are
Speaker 1: some things you can earn. We're back. So we had
Speaker 1: a little we went on a little bit of I
Speaker 1: think a valuable, valuable tangent there. But but I was
Speaker 1: talking about that, you know how small business owners were
Speaker 1: a huge core of support for the Nazis, And obviously
Speaker 1: this is just like one of the demographics they went through.
Speaker 1: One of the interesting things that Princeton study found is
Speaker 1: that kind of while a lot of bad historians try
Speaker 1: to focus on how like like like, how surprising it
Speaker 1: was that the Nazis one, when these Princeton folks like
Speaker 1: because they compared the election that brought Hitler to power
Speaker 1: and from our Germany two dozens and dozens of other
Speaker 1: democratic elections throughout like a century of democratic elections in
Speaker 1: the United States and elsewhere, and so compared them to
Speaker 1: how other countries elections performed during like economic collapses, and
Speaker 1: found that like, no, no, no, all of the trends
Speaker 1: in Germany were basically the same. This was a very
Speaker 1: normal election with an abnormal candidate. Um. But it wasn't nothing.
Speaker 1: Nothing different happened in Germany. They reacted the same way
Speaker 1: as democratic voters always do. But there was a Hitler running,
Speaker 1: you know, um, and that the Trump factor before exactly
Speaker 1: we could not have imagined it. Nope, And now that
Speaker 1: it's happening. We still can't believe it, and it's still
Speaker 1: pretty for years and we're still every day reach any
Speaker 1: level of being surprised and like and also like of
Speaker 1: the governments like changing just because like no one knew
Speaker 1: you had to put in rules about this kind of thing.
Speaker 1: No one expected that this would happen. Yeah, and this
Speaker 1: is one of those things that like there's a value
Speaker 1: that's non zero. I don't think it's something obviously it's
Speaker 1: something we cannot rely on, but there's a value that's
Speaker 1: non zero in folks like Joe Biden being like believing
Speaker 1: in civility, because as soon as someone who comes along
Speaker 1: who doesn't all of these other these other traditions that
Speaker 1: we've counted on to keep us safe collapse and it
Speaker 1: turns out that there's nothing protecting us, which is why
Speaker 1: we shouldn't be relying on them and the way that
Speaker 1: Joe Biden does. But there's not a zero value in
Speaker 1: everyone deciding not to be complete ship to each other.
Speaker 1: Civility has its purpose, is what I'm saying. Although, yeah,
Speaker 1: if only one team plays by the rules exactly, click
Speaker 1: that it doesn't really work. Yeah, so we're talking about
Speaker 1: that salon owner in Salem, Oregon, who became like a
Speaker 1: bunch of armed militia people started rallying and all getting haircuts.
Speaker 1: And one of the people who like supported her grift
Speaker 1: and and showed up to get like a very public
Speaker 1: haircut as part of his kind of campaign was Joey Gibson,
Speaker 1: who's the head of a right wing street gang called
Speaker 1: Patriot Prairies, very closely affiliated with the Proud Boys, with
Speaker 1: other far right militia groups. Um. And you know, it's
Speaker 1: it's well, we'll talk about other people like him, because
Speaker 1: he's he's similar to some of the little Nazi folks too,
Speaker 1: and in some ways that are interesting. I I think
Speaker 1: one of the things that's interesting about that Princeton study
Speaker 1: is when you're kind of looking at it points out
Speaker 1: that a lot of people voted for the Nazis for
Speaker 1: reasons that we're not the stuff that everybody knows about
Speaker 1: the Nazis, that weren't like their theories about arianism and
Speaker 1: like the master race and like the quasi spiritual stuff
Speaker 1: about Hitler is the embodiment of the German people. Um.
Speaker 1: It was because they thought that he'd make the economy
Speaker 1: better and that their small business would improve It was
Speaker 1: because they were scared of the communists who wanted to
Speaker 1: take their stuff, and he said that he would get
Speaker 1: rid of the communists. It was for all of these
Speaker 1: things that like, we're not any of the fun Nazi stuff.
Speaker 1: It was none of like the kukie shit that that
Speaker 1: actually got the Nazis elected. Um and I I yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm going to read a quote from Meyer's book here
Speaker 1: that I think is very relevant. None of my friends
Speaker 1: was the least interested in Nazi race theory as such,
Speaker 1: not even the tailor or the bill collector, who are
Speaker 1: two of them, more like uh firm Nazis. Five of
Speaker 1: the ten of them laughed when they spoke of it,
Speaker 1: including the cabinet maker. That was nonsense, said Harry Klingelhoffer,
Speaker 1: which is the cabinet maker for the s S and
Speaker 1: the universities. Look at the shape of my head, it's
Speaker 1: brought as a barn side. Look at my brunette wife.
Speaker 1: Do you suppose we're not Germans? No, that they could
Speaker 1: teach to the s S and the university students. They
Speaker 1: would believe everything that made them great, and the university
Speaker 1: students would believe anything complicated. The professors too, Have you
Speaker 1: seen the race purity chart. Yes, I said, well, then
Speaker 1: you know a whole system we Germans like systems. You know,
Speaker 1: it all fitted together, so it was science system and
Speaker 1: science if you only looked at the circles black and
Speaker 1: white and shaded and not at real people. Such dumb
Speaker 1: stuff they couldn't teach to us little men. They didn't
Speaker 1: even try. And that reminds me of a lot of stuff,
Speaker 1: including like some things my dad said about how you
Speaker 1: can't you shouldn't take Trump seriously, you shouldn't take him literally. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Everyone in the beginning said, oh, he's just saying that
Speaker 1: stuff to be controversial and he's not going to do
Speaker 1: any of that. Do you really think he's going to
Speaker 1: do that stuff, the stuff he's saying, And the answer
Speaker 1: is yes, yeah. Oh, this Nazi race theory, it's just
Speaker 1: for it's just for these like weirdos at school and
Speaker 1: intellectuals who like complicated bullshit, like no one really cares
Speaker 1: about it. It's not going to lead to anything. Oh no,
Speaker 1: it led to something, yeah, yeah, but like for for
Speaker 1: the little Nazis, for the people who were critical and
Speaker 1: actually voting Hitler to our like the stability of the
Speaker 1: Reichs Mark had a lot more to do than um
Speaker 1: with you know, race hatred or anything like that, Which
Speaker 1: didn't mean these people weren't racist, they all were. It
Speaker 1: just meant that rather than like actively caring about racism,
Speaker 1: they were people who were very tolerant of racism, which
Speaker 1: I think speaks to a lot of Trump support too, right, Um,
Speaker 1: And I think we have to start start definding racism
Speaker 1: is not just like oh, would actively murder some we
Speaker 1: have a different race in the street, but do nothing
Speaker 1: while someone else talks about murdering someone else in the street.
Speaker 1: And I think like the difference between um, hearing a
Speaker 1: Trump supporter say like, like, if you're telling me you're
Speaker 1: voting for Trump because of economic policy, that is another
Speaker 1: way of saying that you're a racist because the well
Speaker 1: being of people of other races is less important to
Speaker 1: you than your economic well being. Yeah, you're willing to
Speaker 1: overlook racism so that you will have more money. Right,
Speaker 1: that's racism. We have to not think about it often,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, And I'm certainly not saying that these
Speaker 1: people weren't racist. I'm saying that like the type of racist,
Speaker 1: like the way in which they supported the Nazis is
Speaker 1: different than you might than you might expect, um, and
Speaker 1: that you need millions of these people to enable the
Speaker 1: ones who are you know, racists, Yeah, Gateway racists exactly. Um.
Speaker 1: And you see a lot, you see a lot of
Speaker 1: like Trump is really you see a lot of him
Speaker 1: pulling for the same folks. Like in the debate he
Speaker 1: brought up people's four oh one ks a lot right
Speaker 1: in the stock market, and those things are not things
Speaker 1: that matter to most people who are going to be
Speaker 1: listening to the show, and to most working people who
Speaker 1: are a lot of them paycheck to paycheck. But it
Speaker 1: matters to the working middle class because that ships their cushion.
Speaker 1: That's what keeps them from being paycheck to paycheck. It's
Speaker 1: what stops them from being the poor, is that they
Speaker 1: have those cushions. And you know that's that's who Trump was,
Speaker 1: what Trump was signaling to Um. Yeah now again And
Speaker 1: as we kind of talked about earlier, another one of
Speaker 1: Hitler's appeal to the little Nazis was a promise to
Speaker 1: protect them from the chaos and tumult of like a
Speaker 1: changing world. And that brings me back to Joey Gibson,
Speaker 1: who I was talking about being at that that hairdresser's
Speaker 1: uh kind of fashy anti covid rally. Um. If you
Speaker 1: sit down and listen to one of Gibson's speeches, and
Speaker 1: if you go through like a few years of interviews
Speaker 1: and profiles on the guy or on people like him,
Speaker 1: um who are kind of involved in these right wing
Speaker 1: street movements, you'll be struck by how little they really
Speaker 1: say because there's there's nothing. They don't have anything ideologically
Speaker 1: other than a desire to get into fights with leftists.
Speaker 1: Um So, everything they say is essentially trying to obscure
Speaker 1: the fact that they're just there for the violence. Which
Speaker 1: is a shirt that one of the Proud Boys, who's
Speaker 1: very prominent, Joe Biggs, who met with Lindsay Graham, the
Speaker 1: cong Risman a couple of weeks ago, one of the
Speaker 1: shirts he wears when he goes to Portland says, I'm
Speaker 1: just here for the violence anyway. Um So, And it's
Speaker 1: worth noting like now they don't say anti communist. Trump
Speaker 1: doesn't say anti communists as much as he says anti anarchist,
Speaker 1: anti antifa, like that they that's the buzzword now, but
Speaker 1: back in before antifa was as much of a buzzword
Speaker 1: as it is. They were all saying that they were
Speaker 1: anti communists. Trump and all of his all of these
Speaker 1: little street leaders and in fact, Joey Gibson did like
Speaker 1: a stand against Communism rally in Seattle that year, and
Speaker 1: that was like the big buzzword before they realized Antifa
Speaker 1: really sold a lot better. Same with socialism. They was
Speaker 1: like socialism, then communism and then now it's yeah, and
Speaker 1: it's the same. It's the same with the Nazis. You know. Um,
Speaker 1: back in Weimar Germany, there were a lot of communists.
Speaker 1: The kp D was one of those popular parties in
Speaker 1: the country, and it grew more powerful every year alongside
Speaker 1: the Nazis. Um right before you know, obviously the Nazis
Speaker 1: through them all in camps after they won. But there
Speaker 1: were actually couple of armed communist uprisings in Bimar Germany
Speaker 1: prior to Hitler rising to power, and like this would
Speaker 1: be like groups of communists occupying large chunks of German cities. Uh.
Speaker 1: They took over a lot of Berlin in nineteen nineteen
Speaker 1: right after the war, like hundreds of like half a
Speaker 1: million of them occupied the city. Um, just through sheer
Speaker 1: weight of numbers and the uprising only ended when thousands
Speaker 1: of fascist paramilitary fighters, the Free Corps, which is kind
Speaker 1: of like the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters are today,
Speaker 1: invaded Berlin and shot every Communist they could get their
Speaker 1: hands on. And the Free Corps were like a bunch
Speaker 1: of anti communist military veterans, a lot of whom had
Speaker 1: just stepped out of the trenches of World War One
Speaker 1: and like, we're really fucking angry and also dealing with
Speaker 1: wildly untreated PTSD uh and who, Yeah, they got to
Speaker 1: go on regular murders freeze and they're kind of the
Speaker 1: precursors to the essay to the brown Shirts, like the
Speaker 1: Free Corps were are generally seen as a pre Nazi
Speaker 1: fascist movement in Germany. Uh, and we certainly have that too.
Speaker 1: You've got a lot of veter arens groups, or you know,
Speaker 1: at least people claiming to be veterans, who were defining
Speaker 1: themselves by their resistance to antifa and communism. You got
Speaker 1: Stewart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers, who when that member
Speaker 1: of Patriot Prayer was shot dead by that BLM guy
Speaker 1: who stated, like the Civil Wars started now, right, you
Speaker 1: already you have these networks here too. Again, the same
Speaker 1: thing keeps happening. What I like about it is that
Speaker 1: we learn nothing, not a thing. I mean, that's my
Speaker 1: favorite part. I guess this. Yeah, we'll see, we'll see
Speaker 1: what we learned. I see some lessons, although I think
Speaker 1: a lot of why things are somewhat different now might
Speaker 1: just be that, um, like in World War like like,
Speaker 1: like the Nazis benefited from the fact that all of
Speaker 1: their original leaders were like these pretty hardcore veterans, like
Speaker 1: they'd seen some ship, like Hitler would like Hitler would
Speaker 1: get into a fucking fist fight with you, Like. None
Speaker 1: of them were scared of getting hurt. None of them
Speaker 1: were scared of like doing violence to people. And um,
Speaker 1: you certainly have a lot of fascists who are willing
Speaker 1: to do violence to people in the United States. But
Speaker 1: I've stood toe to toe with some of these guys
Speaker 1: and in a one on one fight, they're all cowards,
Speaker 1: almost all of them. You know, there are some dangerous
Speaker 1: ones out there, but you don't have the density of
Speaker 1: actual combat veterans of people who like went through enough
Speaker 1: ship that they're just they don't give a ship about
Speaker 1: being injured or killed. You don't have as many of
Speaker 1: them as a percentage of the movement as the Germans did.
Speaker 1: And that's I think one of the reasons that they
Speaker 1: haven't been able to move as quickly as they do,
Speaker 1: not have that advantage that the Nazis did, I guess
Speaker 1: Silver Linings, Yeah, I mean it is. I would prefer
Speaker 1: that most of the fascists who are talking about wanting
Speaker 1: to kill Antifa actually be too scared to get into
Speaker 1: a gunfight, then have them all be completely willing to
Speaker 1: get into a gunfight. Yeah, that's why I said, Silver
Speaker 1: Linings question Mark. Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's better than
Speaker 1: we got a little easier than than the Germans had it.
Speaker 1: As I guess what I'm saying, Sophia was like optimism,
Speaker 1: Robert trying to be optimistic here. Yeah, I'm sad. It's
Speaker 1: good stuff. It's good stuff. So yeah, like that was
Speaker 1: that was a big That was like a big part
Speaker 1: of why um Hitler was able to do what he
Speaker 1: did is that he was able to really successfully portray
Speaker 1: himself as the opponent of communism and deteriorating conditions and stuff.
Speaker 1: Um And as Meyer wrote, quote, there was the question
Speaker 1: was not whether communism threatened the country as with the
Speaker 1: continuation of deteriorating conditions. It certainly did or soon would.
Speaker 1: The question was whether the Germans were convinced that it did,
Speaker 1: and they were. They were so well convinced by such
Speaker 1: means as the Reichstag fire of nineteen thirty three that
Speaker 1: the Nazis were able to ultimately establish anti communism as
Speaker 1: a religion immune from inquiry and defensible by definition alone.
Speaker 1: When in nineteen thirty seven the Pope attack the errors
Speaker 1: of national socialism, the Nazi government's defensive its policies consisted
Speaker 1: of a note accusing the Pope of having dealt a
Speaker 1: dangerous blow to the defense front against the world menace
Speaker 1: of Bolshevism. And I find that interesting too, because it's
Speaker 1: another thing that that is happening again. Right like Trump
Speaker 1: and the right are repeatedly attacking the Pope as a
Speaker 1: socialist and a communist. UM. I found an article by
Speaker 1: a far right Catholic journalist who seems to be a
Speaker 1: straight up Catholic fascist named George Newmeyer. UM called uh.
Speaker 1: He read a book called The Political Pope, and he
Speaker 1: told CBS, Pope Francis is a socialist and an opponent
Speaker 1: of Donald Trump, so you know you're seeing I don't know,
Speaker 1: it's weird to me the which the same things keep
Speaker 1: happening cheer for, like the Pope, the Pope and the
Speaker 1: post Office times. Well, I've always liked the Pope post Office.
Speaker 1: I didn't have anything against it, but I just didn't
Speaker 1: know what to like. He's so vocally pro Yeah, resistance heroes,
Speaker 1: the postal Office. Um, yeah, and yeah. I mean, I
Speaker 1: think the thing that I found most striking about that
Speaker 1: segment from Myers book is the idea that the Nazis
Speaker 1: established on anti communism as a religion, because it's something
Speaker 1: I never really thought about it in those terms. But
Speaker 1: I think in my years of documenting the far right
Speaker 1: and attending these protests and street fights with groups like
Speaker 1: the Proud Boys, I have like actually watched that happen,
Speaker 1: and I think there's actually you can make a strong
Speaker 1: argument that that's part of what we're saying with Q
Speaker 1: and On, because I think Q and On very much
Speaker 1: is a religious movement. It's a cult, and and it's
Speaker 1: a cult that presupposes, number one, all left wing foes
Speaker 1: of Donald Trump are Marxists, and that they're all satanic
Speaker 1: baby eaters, trying to kill the United States like it.
Speaker 1: You're seeing there is an anti communist religion in the
Speaker 1: United States right now, and it might be the fastest
Speaker 1: growing religion in the country. Um and yeah, it just
Speaker 1: happens differently, but it's the same, it's the same idea.
Speaker 1: You know. I think that's really um unsettling to me.
Speaker 1: I guess, oh yeah, I feel great. Yeah, I'm not
Speaker 1: wild about it. So when you have a religion, um,
Speaker 1: whether it's an you know that religions, anti communism or
Speaker 1: something else, any religion that's going to really take off
Speaker 1: needs martyrs, right, Every religion that's that's worth its salt
Speaker 1: has some martyrs. You gotta have. You gotta have some
Speaker 1: dead people to look up to. And Hitler's anti communist
Speaker 1: cult acquired a number of martyrs on its rise to power,
Speaker 1: and none of them was more influential than a young
Speaker 1: man named Horst Vessel. Have you ever heard a Horst?
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, did you say horse vessel? Horst horsed Vessel
Speaker 1: w E S s E L. And the horst is
Speaker 1: h O R s T because I thought h O
Speaker 1: R s E v E S s E L. No, No,
Speaker 1: no kind of it does sound a bit like that shape.
Speaker 1: Its Horst Wessel, but I think it was pronounced Vessel
Speaker 1: because it's it's German with the the ws and ship.
Speaker 1: So I don't know. I don't know if you'd call
Speaker 1: a Horst a little Nazi because he was actually a
Speaker 1: very radicalized Nazi street fighter who had dreams of being
Speaker 1: a big man in the movement. Medium sized what would
Speaker 1: you say? Yeah, he was a medium sized Nazi when
Speaker 1: he died, Um and yeah. I want to I want
Speaker 1: to read a quote about Horse from the book Hitler's
Speaker 1: True Believers by Robert Gladalley, because I think the story
Speaker 1: of Horse Vessel is really worth telling, particularly in the
Speaker 1: context of these groups like the Proud Boys. Quote. The
Speaker 1: essay attracted activists like Horse Vessel, born in nineteen o
Speaker 1: seven and thus too young to have served in the war,
Speaker 1: who left a record of his political awakening that he
Speaker 1: wrote in nineteen twenty nine. He said that between ages
Speaker 1: fourteen and eighteen he had been a bundas a member
Speaker 1: of the middle class youth group of involved in wandering
Speaker 1: and sports like wandering is hiking. It was the Germans
Speaker 1: had just discovered hiking in this period. In fact, nearly
Speaker 1: all members of the essay, the Brown Shirts in nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty three, had been in such a youth group. At
Speaker 1: the same time, Vessel was involved in the Black Reich's
Speaker 1: Fair the underground Army, which is like you had the
Speaker 1: German Army, which was limited to a hundred thousand men,
Speaker 1: and because it was so limited, you had this giant
Speaker 1: was essentially a militia. Was like all of the different
Speaker 1: militia networks we have in the United States together you
Speaker 1: had this illegal army. Um. So Vessel was a member
Speaker 1: of this underground army. He practiced shooting and even carried
Speaker 1: a pistol. His worldview perceived a division between US and them,
Speaker 1: with the US including his comrades, the Fatherland, the Vulcans
Speaker 1: and the German and them meaning the Communists, social Democrats
Speaker 1: and Jews. Such emotional experiences were part of Vessel's life
Speaker 1: before he ever became a member of the n s
Speaker 1: d a P. In the essay, he said that what
Speaker 1: the Nazis had was an idea, which is to say,
Speaker 1: something that the other paramilitary groups completely missed. And that's
Speaker 1: one of the things that scares me, because I think
Speaker 1: that we might be seeing the collapse of Trumps. Um,
Speaker 1: it's too early to say. The fact that he disavowed
Speaker 1: the Proud Boys and they didn't immediately say he's just
Speaker 1: doing this because he had to, like they got pissed,
Speaker 1: makes me think that UM, aspects of what he Trump
Speaker 1: has built, because he's bad at being an authoritarian, maybe
Speaker 1: collapsing at all of the infrastructure has been assembled in
Speaker 1: is there. And I think, like the thing that scares
Speaker 1: me is the person who's going to pick up what's
Speaker 1: essentially a gun lying on the table next, Because it's
Speaker 1: what Vessel says, when somebody comes around, who who has
Speaker 1: the charisma that Trump has to unite the group that
Speaker 1: Trump has united, and also the intelligence to wield them properly. Um.
Speaker 1: And that that would include having what Trump is am lacks,
Speaker 1: which is a meaningful idea that can actually weld more
Speaker 1: than the coalition that Trump got together. UM. That worries
Speaker 1: me a lot about somebody like Tom Cotton, you know,
Speaker 1: whoever comes next and is better at than Trump at
Speaker 1: at doing this. UM. I don't know, that's something that
Speaker 1: worries me. So like our little Nazis, Horse came from
Speaker 1: the middle class, but the working middle class. His father
Speaker 1: was actually a right wing preacher. Um who like a
Speaker 1: Protestant right wing preacher who died young gets sick Um
Speaker 1: and yeah, it's it's it's interesting horse does a guy
Speaker 1: to study Um? And he was shot dead on February
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty. And the exact reality of what happened is
Speaker 1: shrouded in rumor from the beginning. At the time, there
Speaker 1: were rumors because he was living with a former prostitute,
Speaker 1: so there were rumors that he was a pimp and
Speaker 1: that he was killed by the former pimp of this
Speaker 1: woman he was living with. The actual reality is a
Speaker 1: lot mercury, which seems to be true, is that his
Speaker 1: landlady kind of put a hit hit out on him,
Speaker 1: so he was he was living with his a small
Speaker 1: apart yo yo, I'm sorry a landlady murdering their own tenant. Well,
Speaker 1: she made for him to die like bad of a tenant.
Speaker 1: Was he must have been a tap dancer or some
Speaker 1: ship because this is why people get those like walks,
Speaker 1: but nobody can get in. It's it's a weird story.
Speaker 1: So like when I say that she was his landlady,
Speaker 1: they were all living in the same apartment, so he
Speaker 1: was renting a room from her um, and she was
Speaker 1: fine with him and didn't care he was a Nazi,
Speaker 1: even though she was a widow and her former husband
Speaker 1: had been like a Communist street fighter, but she she
Speaker 1: was a political She was fine with him being a Nazi,
Speaker 1: but when he brought his girlfriend to live with him,
Speaker 1: she got really pissed at him, and so she wanted
Speaker 1: to force him out of the out of the apartment.
Speaker 1: And so she went to a bar where a bunch
Speaker 1: of her husband's old not or a communist street fighting
Speaker 1: friends hung out, and she was like, hey, will you
Speaker 1: help me clear this guy out? And they were like, well,
Speaker 1: you let a Nazi live with you, We don't really
Speaker 1: give a ship. But then they were like, well, but
Speaker 1: it's this the Nazi is horsed vessel. And he was
Speaker 1: a pretty prominent member of like the Nazi street fighting
Speaker 1: groups because there's not there was not in nineties at
Speaker 1: this time. There was not a lot of money in
Speaker 1: being a Nazi street fighter at this time. You know,
Speaker 1: like he was not he was not raking it in.
Speaker 1: He was not like a good grifter. I think he
Speaker 1: had those ambitions, but he was really just like he was.
Speaker 1: He was like a Joey Gibson type. Right, Um, he
Speaker 1: was not good at making money from it, and uh
Speaker 1: so he he Again, isn't clear what happens, but as
Speaker 1: Lanley goes to like to these Red Front fighters and
Speaker 1: when they mentioned Horst's name, they're like, okay, well we'll
Speaker 1: beat the guy up. And instead of beating him up,
Speaker 1: they shoot him to death. And what happens is very unclear.
Speaker 1: The guy who actually kills him, when he goes to trial,
Speaker 1: maintains that he fired out of self defense because he
Speaker 1: entered horsehouse with a gun, and he says that Vessel
Speaker 1: pulled a gun of his own. Um, and maybe, uh,
Speaker 1: it's entirely possible. Uh. The the author of one of
Speaker 1: the books that I've read on this thinks that it's
Speaker 1: most likely that that the guy who shot him fired
Speaker 1: first and fired as soon as he recognized Horse in
Speaker 1: the doorway. Um, but it is weird that he only
Speaker 1: fired once, which he probably wouldn't have done if it
Speaker 1: had been a hit. So you get, it's very uncertain
Speaker 1: what happened. But knew that the shot was good, right,
Speaker 1: it was a good hit. No, yeah, yeah, why did
Speaker 1: you have would you need more bullets? Because usually when
Speaker 1: people yeah, they just kind of spray. If you're not
Speaker 1: a good hit man, yeah, this guy was your job.
Speaker 1: You just calm and it's one shot and you came.
Speaker 1: But I guess the point. These guys weren't good. They
Speaker 1: were like drunk straight fighters. Sorry, I care more about
Speaker 1: murder than you do, Robert. Let's feel to carry it
Speaker 1: out properly. It's just that feels like a weird comic book.
Speaker 1: The reality of what happened matters less than how it
Speaker 1: was interpreted by the Nazis. Because Joseph Gebbels gets ahold
Speaker 1: of this story and he immediately declares like he declares
Speaker 1: Vessel to have been like a martyr to the Hitlerist cause,
Speaker 1: and it clears this to have been a Communist hit
Speaker 1: Um as opposed to it was kind of more like
Speaker 1: yeah yeah yeah. But he declares him like a victory
Speaker 1: of the evil Communists and Vessels who have been like
Speaker 1: a young hero of the Nazi movement. They find a
Speaker 1: poem in the horse's house that he had written about
Speaker 1: like uh, the Nazi Party, and they said it to
Speaker 1: song Um and it becomes the official theme song like
Speaker 1: theme music of the Nazi Party, and it is for
Speaker 1: the remainder of the time that the Nazis exists, the
Speaker 1: horse Vessel ed I think Lightnings song or whatever. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, who won't become who didn't write for the Nazis,
Speaker 1: the Nazi song, none of the following good I told
Speaker 1: so few years ago. No ads from horse Vessel, we
Speaker 1: will not accept them. And the fact that he's been
Speaker 1: dead for close to a century has certainly helped us
Speaker 1: in that very proud that we've stuck to that line.
Speaker 1: We're back, okay, so we're we're talking about old horse
Speaker 1: horse vessel. So uh yeah, Girbels declares him to be,
Speaker 1: you know, a martyr to the Hitlerist cause and all
Speaker 1: this good stuff. A poem, his poems set to music
Speaker 1: comes the theme song of the old Nazis. Um, And
Speaker 1: they have a big, huge Google's plays for them to
Speaker 1: have like a massive funeral in imitation of like the
Speaker 1: state funerals that are given the national heroes. For this
Speaker 1: kid who was just like a gang member basically um
Speaker 1: and of course the rote a poem. So I would
Speaker 1: prefer it if you update your description of him as
Speaker 1: a Nazi slash poet, Nazi poet gang member. So his
Speaker 1: funeral is briefly interrupted by some communists who throw stones
Speaker 1: at the Nazis, not really a lot, like literally just
Speaker 1: a couple of stones, but the Nazis play that up
Speaker 1: to is like, look at how horrible these communists are.
Speaker 1: They won't even let us have a funeral. And it works.
Speaker 1: Horse death radicalizes a lot of Germans. For the Nazis.
Speaker 1: It's considered to be like his funeral and everything are
Speaker 1: considered to be sizeable inflection points for the Nazi cause
Speaker 1: it really kind of spells a death blow for like
Speaker 1: the left wing street fighting movements, um, you know the
Speaker 1: they're the anti fascist movements, not all of which were communists,
Speaker 1: because right there's the German Iron in Front, which is
Speaker 1: like the social democratic street fighting gang, which is where
Speaker 1: you get if you've ever seen the three arrows spray
Speaker 1: painted anywhere, that's the Iron Front symbol, and the arrows
Speaker 1: each represent anti UH, anti church um, anti UH communist
Speaker 1: and anti fascist, right like it's it's like it's it's
Speaker 1: it was a whole bunch of things they were. They
Speaker 1: were again, so like yeah, the the Iron Front um
Speaker 1: like all, but but they all get like kind of
Speaker 1: looped lumped in as as communists and socialist by the
Speaker 1: Nazis and Horsts death and funeral kind of spells the
Speaker 1: end for them. And I I feel like everyone who's
Speaker 1: heard this, if you're at all familiar with anything I've
Speaker 1: been talking about, you're probably already comparing what happened to
Speaker 1: Horst to what happened to Aaron J. Danielson, the member
Speaker 1: of Patriot Prayer who was shot dead last month in
Speaker 1: Portland on his way home from a pro Trump rally.
Speaker 1: Right Like, you have to see some of the comparisons, um,
Speaker 1: Danielson was killed by a pro BLM activist who had
Speaker 1: declared himself a hundred percent ANTIFA on social media, although
Speaker 1: I can tell you he had a lot of really
Speaker 1: negative dealings with a lot of anti fascists. I know
Speaker 1: because he was. Anyway, it's a complicated story, um. Now,
Speaker 1: Immediately after Danielson was shot, the President began recasting him
Speaker 1: as a right wing hero, and national media gave long
Speaker 1: interviews to uh Cocattle, Patriot Prayer members and Patriot Prayer associates,
Speaker 1: people that I've been covering for years and never thought
Speaker 1: I would see on national news, like Hayley Adams, who's
Speaker 1: a local white supremacist. UM wild that all these people
Speaker 1: wound up on TV UM, and of course the Proud
Speaker 1: Boys took this as an opportunity to announce a justice
Speaker 1: for Jay Rally, which was the thing that we just
Speaker 1: got over and survived in Portland. UM. And obviously like
Speaker 1: it's it's we're very lucky that UM things have not
Speaker 1: it doesn't. It seems like maybe I don't know why
Speaker 1: it is, but but Danielson's death, UM did not turn
Speaker 1: into the kind of thing horse Vessel's death dead. UM,
Speaker 1: it didn't get that kind of traction, you know, I
Speaker 1: don't I don't know if that it's due to aspects
Speaker 1: of our media culture that nothing gets that much traction,
Speaker 1: that that Trump is too much of a narcissist to
Speaker 1: really let the focus be on anyone else. UM. I
Speaker 1: don't know why it is, but you can see that
Speaker 1: when I when I when that first happened, UM, I
Speaker 1: was worried that we were going to see that because
Speaker 1: the reality is that actually there's a lot of similarities
Speaker 1: between danielson shooting and horse shooting, including the fact that
Speaker 1: Danielson also had a gun, Like he was prowling through
Speaker 1: the streets of Portland with a nine millimeter handgun and
Speaker 1: seventy six rounds of ammunition loaded into extended magazines, which
Speaker 1: is not like what you carry for self defense. You know,
Speaker 1: maybe you don't, okay, but there's like seventies six people
Speaker 1: at least that hate me. So I never leave the
Speaker 1: house with less than seventy six bullets. I mean, I
Speaker 1: I'm I feel comfortable walking out doors with usually between
Speaker 1: twelve and twenty four rounds of nine millimeter And I'm
Speaker 1: pretty paranoid. Um, And you are well more liked than me,
Speaker 1: way more well liked. Sorry, there are those some similarities, UM,
Speaker 1: some weird ones, including the fact that, like the ryanod,
Speaker 1: the guy who shot Danielson claimed that it was in
Speaker 1: self defense, that like one of the people with him
Speaker 1: pulled a knife, and that you know, they all had firearms,
Speaker 1: and like they did all have firearms. There's other reports
Speaker 1: that one of the people with it it's it's it's again.
Speaker 1: It's this kind of like this murky shooting that you
Speaker 1: don't really know exactly what happened, and it it gets
Speaker 1: used politically, and I guess we're lucky enough that it
Speaker 1: doesn't seem to have worked the way the way Horse
Speaker 1: Vessel's death did. Um. Maybe it's because Jay didn't write
Speaker 1: any poems. I don't know. Um, maybe no landladies were involved. Definitely,
Speaker 1: no landladies involved. I do feel confidence state like it's
Speaker 1: entirely there's a very good chance that the guy who
Speaker 1: shot Danielson that it was like a targeted hit. Like
Speaker 1: I don't know, Um, some of the pictures do indicate that.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it's a complicated it's a complicated story. But
Speaker 1: I couldn't help thinking about it whenever I think about
Speaker 1: the story of Horse Wessel. Um. Now, the yeah, Horst
Speaker 1: is again, you said it right. He's kind of a
Speaker 1: medium Nazi and he believed strongly in fascism. But the
Speaker 1: kind of people who were moved by his death and
Speaker 1: who like sort of switched again nineteen thirties pretty late
Speaker 1: to get on board with the Nazis. But the kind
Speaker 1: of people who were who were frightened as a result
Speaker 1: of his death of the Communists and turned towards the Nazis.
Speaker 1: They weren't true believers in the same way most of
Speaker 1: them weren't believers, you know, the little Nazis weren't really
Speaker 1: believers in anything but their own comfort and security. Um,
Speaker 1: they were you know, the thing that united them is
Speaker 1: that they were malleable enough to get behind fascism when
Speaker 1: they thought that it was the thing that would keep
Speaker 1: them safe and secure in their position in society. And
Speaker 1: there's a there's a really good line from one of
Speaker 1: Myer's Nazi friends, a cabinet maker named Klingelhofer. Uh quote.
Speaker 1: Inside the system, you see the benefits outside it. When
Speaker 1: you are not benefited by it, you see the faults.
Speaker 1: I suppose that's the way it is in Russian. Now.
Speaker 1: That's the way it is everywhere always, is it? Not?
Speaker 1: For all this we thank our leader. The kids said
Speaker 1: in school, how they said for this, we thank America.
Speaker 1: If communism comes, they'll say for this, we thank Stalin.
Speaker 1: That's the way men are. I find that unsettling and interesting.
Speaker 1: And it kind of goes to the point that, like,
Speaker 1: while the Nazis never attained a majority in any electoral um,
Speaker 1: like since as soon as Hitler came to power and
Speaker 1: started actually delivering on some of the things he'd promised
Speaker 1: to them, including jobs in a rebuilt military and retaking
Speaker 1: the Studente land and stuff, everyone got behind him. And
Speaker 1: they didn't get behind him because they were convinced about
Speaker 1: like the again, the stuff everyone obsesses over, the weird
Speaker 1: racial theories the Nazi had, Nazis had they got behind
Speaker 1: him because they were inside the system and it was
Speaker 1: protecting them, and so would most people, which is fun
Speaker 1: to think about. So I mean to me, I guess
Speaker 1: one of the things that strikes me is like, it's
Speaker 1: very easy to make anything sound like the worst thing
Speaker 1: in the world. Umah. And it of course it makes
Speaker 1: sense that it's interchangeable for people, whether something is the
Speaker 1: worst thing in the world or the best thing in
Speaker 1: the world. Um I can tell you someone that has
Speaker 1: lived under communism that there were some great things about it,
Speaker 1: like socialized medicine, you know. So I'm not gonna say, uh,
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna say like really radical as ship, because
Speaker 1: I think it's pretty easy to see, um, when you
Speaker 1: live in a system even from outside that everybody like
Speaker 1: has in America been taught like forever communism is like
Speaker 1: the biggest threat. It's so horrible, so nobody likes to
Speaker 1: hear that there's like, you know, even the most terrible
Speaker 1: thing has some good things about it. And then I
Speaker 1: think it clouds people's judgment to think that like even
Speaker 1: the thing that they love could eventually become terrible. But
Speaker 1: that's just how it is. Yep, yep, yep. And it's
Speaker 1: like it's a thing we all need to keep in
Speaker 1: mind because like, once you're if you're protected by the
Speaker 1: system in the way that like we all we both
Speaker 1: are currently as white people to a degree protected by
Speaker 1: the system. Um, it's very easy to turn that into
Speaker 1: ignoring what happens to people outside the system, because not
Speaker 1: doing that, you know, when when you care about people
Speaker 1: at the border, outside the border of your system, then
Speaker 1: that puts you at risk because like then you're then
Speaker 1: you're upsetting the apple cart. And that's uh, you know,
Speaker 1: that actually brings me to what I think might be
Speaker 1: one of the most unsettling parts of Meyer's book, which
Speaker 1: is it's the story of an anti fascist activist who
Speaker 1: became a member of the Nazi Party. UM. A friend
Speaker 1: of his name, Heinrich Hilda Brandt, who was the school teacher,
Speaker 1: and he joined the Nazi Party late in nineteen seven.
Speaker 1: So hither have been and in power about as long
Speaker 1: as Trump has been when this guy joins the Nazi
Speaker 1: Party and Hilda Brandt was not even really a convert
Speaker 1: to the Nazi part party uh. He again had been
Speaker 1: a Nazi anti Nazi street activist, and he eventually converted
Speaker 1: because he was he was afraid for his own life.
Speaker 1: Um Meyer writes, quote, he may not have been the
Speaker 1: only one of my ten friends who was afraid not
Speaker 1: to join, but he was the only one of them
Speaker 1: who knew then and now and says so that fear
Speaker 1: was his reason. Fear and advantage. But how he said
Speaker 1: is one to separate them. He had been an anti Nazi,
Speaker 1: an active moderate democrat in East Prussia before he came
Speaker 1: quietly to Hessa in ninety five, and his past uneasily
Speaker 1: buried got a job teaching literature. So that's really scary
Speaker 1: to me to think about somebody who could join the
Speaker 1: Nazi Party as an anti Nazi activist knowing it's the
Speaker 1: wrong thing to do, purely forced because you're scared for
Speaker 1: your own life, Because a lot of people will do that.
Speaker 1: A lot of people who have come out into the
Speaker 1: streets now if things really went as bad as they might,
Speaker 1: would do that because at the end of the day,
Speaker 1: that's what people do, is try to protect themselves in
Speaker 1: their family. Um. Yeah, And I guess that's not so
Speaker 1: surprising that someone would join a party like that to
Speaker 1: protect their own life. What what might be more surprising
Speaker 1: and definitely is more unsettling, is that once Hildebrant got
Speaker 1: inside the Nazi Party and he found he kind of
Speaker 1: liked fascism. I was just gonna say, did you fall
Speaker 1: in love? This the classic meet cute romantic comedy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I could never. Oh my god, I fascism Actually yeah,
Speaker 1: still starring Hugh Grant. I'm gonna read another. I'm going
Speaker 1: to read another quote from Meyer's book here. Perhaps he
Speaker 1: said it was because I wanted unconsciously to justify what
Speaker 1: I had done. If so, I succeeded. But I say
Speaker 1: it now too, and I know it now. There were
Speaker 1: good things, great things in the system, and the system
Speaker 1: was itself was evil. For instance, Meyer asked, you mean
Speaker 1: about the evils. Hildebrant responded, No, I know about those
Speaker 1: said fire about the good things, the great things. Hildebrand responded,
Speaker 1: perhaps I should make it singular instead of plural, the
Speaker 1: good thing. For the first time in my life, I
Speaker 1: felt I was really the peer of men who, in
Speaker 1: the Kaiser's time and in the Fimar time, had always
Speaker 1: belonged to classes lower or higher than my own men,
Speaker 1: whom one had always looked down on or up to,
Speaker 1: but never at. In the labor Front, which is like
Speaker 1: the Nazi Workers Organization, I represented the Teachers Association. I
Speaker 1: came to know such people at first hand, to know
Speaker 1: their lives and to have them know mine. Even in America,
Speaker 1: perhaps I have never been there. I suspect that the
Speaker 1: teacher who talks about the common people has never known one,
Speaker 1: really known one, not even if he himself came from
Speaker 1: among them, as I with an army officer as a father,
Speaker 1: did not. National socialism broke down that separation, that class distinction.
Speaker 1: Democracy such democracy as we had didn't do it and
Speaker 1: is not doing it now. That's interesting to me that
Speaker 1: that's what brought this guy on board with Nazism is
Speaker 1: the feeling, as he described, of absolute equality. Uh. And
Speaker 1: he told Meyer that like, really the thing that got
Speaker 1: him was my inferiors accepted me. That's so sad. Yeah,
Speaker 1: also similar to what people found in communism. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: This breaking down of these barriers that were incredibly stressful
Speaker 1: to keep up in German society was you know, to
Speaker 1: talk about extents that we can't make comparisons between what
Speaker 1: happened in Germany and what's happening here. There were actually
Speaker 1: like hard barrier if you were a professor in in
Speaker 1: Germany in this period of time, there was almost an
Speaker 1: absolute wall of social separation between you and any kind
Speaker 1: of working person. They would see you as elevated beyond
Speaker 1: being someone they could just talk to and likewise, and
Speaker 1: that was a thing that Nazism did was kind of
Speaker 1: try to build this this this this people's racial community
Speaker 1: Bolkska mine shaft, that that unified the people who were
Speaker 1: in together in one group. And this this school teacher,
Speaker 1: who again knew enough to be an anti fascist activist,
Speaker 1: founded intoxicating once he was inside, found being a part
Speaker 1: of this in group to be irresistible and missed it afterwards,
Speaker 1: even though he knew all of his life that the
Speaker 1: Nazi Party was evil. That that's fucked up. That's so. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not great, no perceived equalities. A hell of a drug,
Speaker 1: it is. It is. And you think about, like I've
Speaker 1: been to a Trump rally, like and you you feel
Speaker 1: that kind of social atmosphere there, you know, it just
Speaker 1: seems like you're sick of being bullied, so you become
Speaker 1: the bully. Yeah, And it's also this feeling that the
Speaker 1: people who are as opposed to this feeling that like
Speaker 1: the people in charge are like are are in some
Speaker 1: way august that there's something, there's something like special and
Speaker 1: powerful about the offices. They hold this feeling that they're
Speaker 1: they're just like you. It's like when everybody made fun
Speaker 1: of Trump's fast food feast for those football players. I'm
Speaker 1: sure the football players wish they had gotten some fancy food,
Speaker 1: but like Trump's voters loved that because it it made
Speaker 1: it brought him down to their level. He's good at that.
Speaker 1: Like people wonder how can a billionaire like attract those people,
Speaker 1: It's because a ship like that it worked. Um yeah,
Speaker 1: the whole thing about oh anyone can be president, that
Speaker 1: is the appealing thing to people who are his supporters.
Speaker 1: It's like, well, yeah, it's sure he's an idiot, or
Speaker 1: he has he doesn't know about this, or he doesn't
Speaker 1: listen to his advisors like they're like, he acts exactly
Speaker 1: how I would if I was president. Oh oh he didn't.
Speaker 1: He doesn't read any of the reports. I wouldn't either.
Speaker 1: I'd also make people write me a memo and that
Speaker 1: I would only read the first sentence of that memo
Speaker 1: or yeah, of course I would tweet whenever and like
Speaker 1: call into Fox News with just like any random thought
Speaker 1: because like, of course I'll do anything I want, and
Speaker 1: I think that is what they love. They're like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's literally what the funk I would do if I
Speaker 1: was president, which is whatever the funk I want. Yep,
Speaker 1: cool stuff. So yeah, uh and in kind of the
Speaker 1: same vein, like kind of on this same vein, like
Speaker 1: we talked about, like Trump lowering himself making the presidency
Speaker 1: seemed more accessible to the kind of people who vote
Speaker 1: for him. Another thing that both he and the Nazi
Speaker 1: Party really did have in common in terms of like
Speaker 1: things that they ran on and things that made them
Speaker 1: appealing to you know, the same kind of person is
Speaker 1: attacking and dewriting experts, right, and the idea of expertise
Speaker 1: that's been a huge part of the Trump administration, a
Speaker 1: huge part of Trump's what he's campaigned on. It's one
Speaker 1: of the things that's biting him in the ass now
Speaker 1: as he gets COVID nineteen is his his kind of
Speaker 1: contempt for expertise, but it's shared by a lot of
Speaker 1: these people who don't like like the idea that a
Speaker 1: doctor could tell them what to do, could tell them
Speaker 1: to wear a face mask or something, just because he
Speaker 1: went to some fancy school for a while. Um, And
Speaker 1: that that was a thing that you very much saw
Speaker 1: in Weimar Germany among the little Nazis. Nazis and rode
Speaker 1: into power by harnessing a strong anti intellectual current among
Speaker 1: very low class Germans. Meyer writes that probably six or
Speaker 1: seven out of ten of his Nazi friends saw quote
Speaker 1: unquote intellectuals as fundamentally unreliable and untrustworthy people, and academics
Speaker 1: were the least trustworthy. This sat very well with a
Speaker 1: little Nazis, who resented those with higher education. And this
Speaker 1: next paragraph from Meyer's book resonates more strongly with America
Speaker 1: in than almost any other passage in the book. Quote Nazism,
Speaker 1: as it proceeded from practice to theory, had to deny
Speaker 1: expertness in thinking, and then the second process was never completed.
Speaker 1: In order to fill the vacuum, had to establish expert
Speaker 1: thinking of its own, that is, to find men of
Speaker 1: inferior or irresponsible caliber whose views conformed dishonestly or worse yet, honestly,
Speaker 1: to the party line. The non political pastors satisfied Nazi
Speaker 1: requirements by being non political. But the non political schoolmaster was,
Speaker 1: by the very virtue of being non political, a dangerous
Speaker 1: man from the start. He himself would not rebel, nor
Speaker 1: would he, if he could help it, teach rebellion. But
Speaker 1: he could not help being dangerous, not if he went
Speaker 1: on teaching what was true. In order to be a
Speaker 1: theory and not just a practiced national socialism required the
Speaker 1: destruction of academic independence. And of course we could draw
Speaker 1: some lines to that ship right now, right like the
Speaker 1: Trump just gave an executive order about patriotic education and
Speaker 1: banning certain types of historical education from schools, Like we're
Speaker 1: seeing a lot of this, yeah, And also the fact
Speaker 1: that like no ship, Jews got the ship out of
Speaker 1: the ship end of the stick in Germany when they
Speaker 1: were a lot of the intellectuals and a lot of
Speaker 1: the educated because um of their place in German society
Speaker 1: and the importance of education and learning in the Jewish community.
Speaker 1: And it was a way I in a in a
Speaker 1: kind of bitter irony. Part of like why that was
Speaker 1: such a preferred path for Jewish people in Germany is
Speaker 1: because they saw it as a way of same thing
Speaker 1: with military service a way of gaining acceptance in a
Speaker 1: culture that was kind of hostile to them. Is like, well,
Speaker 1: but if I've become a professor, there's respect with that,
Speaker 1: and then people will respect me as a Jewish Man,
Speaker 1: and people will maybe respect my people more. And it's
Speaker 1: I mean, you can. There's there's a reason why black
Speaker 1: people in Hispanic people would also like LGBT people, serve
Speaker 1: in the military at a much higher rate than um
Speaker 1: than the general population. It's because there's respect in that
Speaker 1: from from pretty much all corners of society. And it's
Speaker 1: just this thing, it's a thing a lot of people
Speaker 1: do kind of instinctively when you're part of a disadvantaged
Speaker 1: and targeted group, is you seek the protection that respect
Speaker 1: gives you. Yep. Good stuff. So in my episode of
Speaker 1: the non Nazi Bastards behind Hitler, I referenced Dorothy Thompson,
Speaker 1: who's a really interesting person to study. She was a
Speaker 1: journalist who reported from Germany and its last three days
Speaker 1: before the war. Um she was forced out of the country.
Speaker 1: She's also married to the guy who wrote It Can't
Speaker 1: Happen Here, UM, that famous book about like what an
Speaker 1: American Fascist would look like? UM. Yeah. She wrote a
Speaker 1: really good article after getting kicked out of Germany and
Speaker 1: returned to the US called who goes Nazi question Mark,
Speaker 1: And the whole thing is set. It's her at a
Speaker 1: dinner party, looking at all of the attendees and thinking
Speaker 1: in her head which one of them will support the
Speaker 1: American equivalent of the Nazi Party if it comes here,
Speaker 1: and like trying to decide, like which aspects of their
Speaker 1: personality would make them vulnerable to doing that. It's a
Speaker 1: very interesting article, and there's one quote from it in
Speaker 1: particular that I want to read. And this is her
Speaker 1: kind of moulling on what makes people Nazis. Sometimes I
Speaker 1: think there are direct biological factors at work, a type
Speaker 1: of education and feeding and physical training which has produced
Speaker 1: a new kind of human being with an imbalance in
Speaker 1: his nature. He has been fed vitamins and filled with
Speaker 1: energies that are beyond the capacity of his intellect to discipline.
Speaker 1: He has been treated to forms of education which have
Speaker 1: released him from inhibitions. His body is vigorous, his mind
Speaker 1: is childish. His soul has been almost completely neglected. I
Speaker 1: just think about a lot of proud boys when I
Speaker 1: get so Now, wait a minute, but physically vigorous. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a lot of them are like a lot of real
Speaker 1: buff dudes that ship like big young people. Yeah, like
Speaker 1: very like large, the kind of person we call it
Speaker 1: shud colloquial, right, yeah, yeah, she's talking about shuds. She's
Speaker 1: just she's defining chuds here, and she's not the only one. Mussolini,
Speaker 1: his favorite philosopher, a guy named Giovanni Gentile, noted of fascists,
Speaker 1: we think with our blood. And he was not making
Speaker 1: I don't think a racial statement there. He was instead acknowledging,
Speaker 1: because this was an Italian fascist and they were kind
Speaker 1: of less on the racial thing. He was acknowledging that
Speaker 1: violence of action, relentless, aggressive physicality was a key attribute
Speaker 1: for the kind of men who became fascists. Thinking and
Speaker 1: consideration were effeminate and shameful. Or is the proud boys
Speaker 1: say today? Funk around and find out. Oh wow, yeah, yep,
Speaker 1: that's part one. We're gonna talk about the Holocaust a
Speaker 1: lot in part two, so I hope you're looking forward
Speaker 1: to that. Thanks as always for inviting me for that.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it's gonna be a lot of dead babies
Speaker 1: next episode. Thank you. Robert can't think of can't talk
Speaker 1: about dead babies without youself. We can, but I feel guilty. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I feel ashamed. Um, yeah, I guess Thanks you guys
Speaker 1: for having my back. Yeah, that's that's, that's it, right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Do you have any writer or die, Sophia, writer or die? Uh?
Speaker 1: Do you have any plug plug plug plug plug doubles?
Speaker 1: I sure do. I have an album out called Father's Day.
Speaker 1: It's fucking hilarious, Thank you so much, on any of
Speaker 1: the platforms. Um. You can also just buy it on
Speaker 1: my website, Sophia Alexandra dot com. So that's it. Well,
Speaker 1: you can find Sophia and you should do that. Don't
Speaker 1: find me. I am I am hiding. Now this has
Speaker 1: been the episode