Bonus Episode: Rachel Maddow in Conversation with Tony Kushner
01:23:55 Share

Hey, small businesses. Sentara Health Plans has a team dedicated to answering your questions, leaving time for other business thoughts like... How did an action figure get stuck in the air vents? Or... What is the ideal human-to-goat ratio for my yoga class?

Knowing your health plan questions are answered, you can now focus on your other business needs. Sentara Health Plans, a dedicated team for your small business. Sentara Health Plans is a trade name of Sentara Health Plans, Sentara Health Insurance Company, Sentara Behavioral Health Services Incorporated, and Sentara Health Administration Incorporated. Exclusion terms and conditions apply. Hey everyone, it's Rachel Maddow here.

Because of the July 4th holiday, we are not releasing a new episode of Ultra this week. Don't be mad. Don't be mad. It's going to be worth the wait. We'll have episode four for you next week. But I do have something to hold you over in the meantime, and it's something I'm quite excited about. I recently got to sit down with the legendary Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and screenwriter Tony Kushner, who is an all-time hero of mine.

This is still something I can't quite believe, but Tony Kushner and the equally amazing Danny Strong are currently working on a screenplay for Steven Spielberg based on the first season of Ultra. So I sat down with Tony. We were in Provincetown, Massachusetts. It was a live audience.

I started by reading an excerpt from my book Prequel, and then Tony and I talked about Prequel and about season one of Ultra and some of the themes in this new season of Ultra. And we talked about some of the resonant dynamics, for lack of a better term, that we are seeing in our current political moment.

I also need to warn you that it has two terrible dad jokes in it, for which I do not apologize. But here's me and Tony Kushner. I'll be back next week with a brand new episode of Ultra.

One last note, remember if you want to get each new episode a few days early and if you want to skip the ads, you can subscribe to MSNBC Premium on Apple Podcasts. But if you don't, that's fine. It's free to listen anywhere you get your podcasts and every new episode comes out on Mondays. All right, for now, here's my conversation with the great Tony Kushner. Thank you so much for being here. It's exciting. It's humbling.

to be here. And I'm sorry that I'm going to bum you out on your long weekend. But we're here to talk about schism! Yay! Yeah. All right. I will also say that I am, it is a remarkable thing that Tony Kushner is here tonight. Thank you.

And is going to have this conversation with me. I'm going to try to rush through the remarks I have planned at the beginning because I want more time to talk with Tony. He has been a hero of mine as long as I've been cognizant of the need to have my own heroes and to come to my own conclusions about heroism. And I say that in very concrete terms. He's the first person that I ever thought, as an adult, that is somebody who I...

believe is doing a better job than the rest of us in terms of thinking about the world. And of all the people I have ever interviewed, from my time in local morning zoo radio to Air America radio to guest hosting on all those weird shows on MSNBC to my weird show on MSNBC to all the interviews I've ever done in any context, the single smartest person I have ever interviewed is Tony Kushner.

So having him here tonight is a thrill for me. Okay, so all that said, I'm going to read a thing, I'm going to say a thing that's going to bum you out, I have a little joke at the end, and then we're going to talk to Tony. He was one of the most successful and celebrated industrialists on the planet. His anti-Semitism was rank, and it was unchecked.

He spewed it freely in private tirades among friends, family, close business cohorts, newspaper reporters, or pretty much anybody within earshot. In the office, in private chats, in interviews, at dinners, even on camping trips. A close friend wrote in a diary after witnessing one late night round-the-campfire diatribe, quote, Ford attributes all evil to Jews or to the Jewish capitalists.

Henry Ford even ordered his engineers to forgo the use of any brass in his Model T automobile. He called brass a Jew metal. Ford said, quote, wherever there's anything wrong with the country, you'll find the Jews on the job there. He blamed a vast and inchoate Jewish conspiracy for inciting his workers and his stockholders to demand that he share a sliver more of the expansive Ford Motor Company profits with them.

He blamed Jews for the gold standard. He blamed Jews for the advent of the Federal Reserve Bank. He blamed Jews for ruining motion pictures in America. He blamed Jews for ruining popular music. He blamed Jews for ruining baseball.

Ford was hardly the only radical anti-Semite in the United States circa 1920. But in addition to his fortune and his famous name and his iconic automobile company, Ford had a megaphone your average crazy uncle theorizer lacked. He had a newspaper. It was called the Dearborn Independent, and he had purchased it for a song in 1918.

The paper was a big money loser in the beginning with poor to middling circulation. Ford's editorial harangues did little to draw in any new readers. How many attacks on the man who'd beaten Ford in the most recent Michigan U.S. Senate race did the public really want? Oh, but Truman H. Newbery had stolen that election. One of the Dearborn Independence editorial staffers who was a veteran of the New York newspaper wars had an idea.

He wrote to Ford's right-hand man, find an evil to attack. And then in all capital letters, let's find some sensationalism. And lo, the answer landed unbidden not long after. A newly translated English edition titled The Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion.

The pamphlet was the work of rabidly anti-Semitic Russian fabulists who were furious at the Bolsheviks' toppling of the old czarist aristocracy. The czarists portrayed the Russian Revolution as not just a local affair, it was the early innings of a plot by a cabal of all-powerful Jewish schemers to take over the whole world.

And the Protocols was billed as the product of a surreptitious note-taker at a top-secret meeting wherein these Jewish puppet masters had drawn up their evil strategy and laid out their tactics in detail. Obviously, there was no secret meeting. There was no secret plot. There was no surreptitious note-taker. The whole thing was...

a work of fiction. It was a very considered, very deliberate lie and a very dangerous piece of propaganda. And Ford and his newspaper bore down on it. With a new weekly series in the Dearborn Independent based on the protocols, it would end up being a 92-part weekly series. Every week for 92 weeks, for nearly two years, headlines like these ran in Ford's paper.

The International Jew, The World's Problem. Also, Jewish Jazz, Moron Music, Becomes Our National Music. Also, The Perils of Baseball, Too Much Jew. These were splashed onto the pages of Ford's newspaper, which was distributed in Ford Motor dealerships across the country. Ford also saw to the publication of his Fowl series in book form. It was titled The International Jew. It ran to four volumes.

Never mind that the protocols had been exposed as total make-believe in 1921, somewhere in the middle of Ford's anti-Semitic screed of a 92-part newspaper series. Ford's weekly international Jew essays continued without pause, and Ford motor dealers kept tossing the latest issue of the Dearborn Independent under the front seat of every newly purchased Model T in the country.

Ford saw to it that the four volumes of The International Jew, the book, were translated and published worldwide in 12 international editions, including one in Germany, and stick a pin in that. Other Americans organized an anti-antisemitic publicity campaign of notable and notably Gentile Americans. Prominent public figures like Woodrow Wilson, Clarence Darrow, W.E.B. Du Bois, William Jennings Bryant all joined the fight.

They called Ford's utterings un-American and un-Christian. Former President William Howard Taft, soon to be named Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, accepted a speaking engagement at an ADL meeting in Chicago two days before Christmas 1920.

At that Anti-Defamation League meeting, Taft lambasted Ford and his loony assertion of a powerful Jewish conspiracy surreptitiously stripping power from Christians around the world. Taft said, "There is not the slightest ground for anti-Semitism among us. It has no place in free America." The German edition, though, of Ford's book had landed in the hands of one particularly gifted propagandist.

When Adolf Hitler's book, Mein Kampf, was published in 1925, Hitler appeared to lift not just ideas but whole passages from Ford's own publications. The Mein Kampf first edition extolled Henry Ford by name. Hitler wrote, It is the Jews who govern the stock exchange forces of the American Union. Every year makes them more and more the controlling masters of the producers in a nation of 120 million people.

Only a single great man, Ford, to their fury, still maintains full independence. When a reporter from the Detroit News showed up at Nazi Party headquarters in Munich in December 1931 to interview Hitler for her regular newspaper series, it was called Five Minutes with Men in Public Eye, she was surprised to find there in Munich, hanging on the wall behind Hitler's desk, a large framed portrait of

of America's most famous anti-Semite. Hitler told the newspaper woman, quote, I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration. The reporter asked Hitler that day why he was anti-Semitic. He said without hesitation, quote, somebody has to be blamed for our troubles. So the great thing about conspiracy theories is that they are undisprovable.

They don't require facts to prove them, and you can't use facts to disprove them either. And why is that? Because it's a conspiracy. And what is a conspiracy? A conspiracy is a secret. It's a secret plan. So we're not allowed to know the truth. That's why we don't have provable facts. Whatever facts you're trying to bring the discussion, oh yeah, that's just what they want you to think.

What this means is that anybody bringing purported facts with them to the discussion is suspect. And that applies to everyone. Science isn't real. Scientists are just manipulating us. So-called experts, what are they? What do they know? Do your own research. Journalists, don't get me started on journalists. Fake news, am I right? None of it's real. This is a very handy dynamic, right?

It means, for one, that the conspiracy can be anything, right? Nobody can bring facts to bear on your conspiracy that will change it. So you can just let your mind run wild. Make it as lurid and exciting and dark and sexy and elaborate as you want. Whatever revs you up, whatever gets your blood pumping, that can be it. It can't be disproven. So just go with your gut. Maximize the emotional charge that you get out of it. And then...

Unhook yourself from normal political processes because once you believe that a secret conspiracy is controlling the economy, a secret conspiracy is controlling disease and healthcare, a secret conspiracy is controlling the government, well, that renders you incapable of thinking and working logically about how to improve those things, right? There's no reason to engage constructively with

protecting the quality of the drinking water in your town or getting potholes filled or having a smarter relationship with the European Union, whatever it is you care about, there's no reason to work constructively on trying to get anything done better through government if there is an evil, unaccountable cabal, a deep state cabal that is secretly running it. So stop working on government. Stop running for office.

Stop petitioning your government for the redress of grievances. Instead, just focus on the cabal, on the shadowy enemy that must be behind all these things that are wrong. And that is how you lay the ground for fascism in a broad swath of an otherwise sane public, even in a modern state, right? This place, this nation used to be great, but now it is no longer great.

It has been weakened by our enemies within who are secretly acting in ways to hurt us, who are secretly powerful. They have frankly stolen the nation and let the real people of the real nation left them outside and powerless. If that's the situation, then of course you have to fight to save your country. But how do you fight?

You don't use the political process, right? These internal enemies, you've heard the lurid, emotionally charged, terrifying stories about them. They're so bad, they're so evil, they're so powerful. Normal measures are ineffective against them. We need to do something radical. We need to break some rules. We're certainly not going to handle this with just normal politics. They, of course, have rigged normal politics, the cabal.

So we can't use politics to oppose them. We're going to need other means. We're going to need something more radical. We may need to prepare ourselves to use force. That's how it works. And then you're there. And then we're here. So why spend time worrying about and thinking about and telling stories from history at a time when the news is so pressing? At a time when the news of the day is so deeply alarming?

For me, first of all, the news is not going anywhere. It's always there, no matter what I spend time thinking about otherwise. But for me, the reason to study history now and to learn stories from history now is because it is kind of a cheat sheet. This stuff does keep happening. I mean, democracies don't all fall exactly the same way, but they do fall to exactly the same kind of guy.

making exactly the same kind of appeal about lost greatness right lost greatness the enemy within the need to be tough and break the rules and all the rest of it what we're going through is a recurring thing and so we shouldn't feel like we need to reinvent the wheel to fight it every time it comes up history is here to help here's an example

Exactly 100 years before our 2020 election, which ended the way you remember, exactly 100 years before that, in 1920 in Bologna in Italy, politicians on the left won a regional election.

And Mussolini had formed his fascist fighting leagues the year before in 1919. And when this Bologna election went to the left, Mussolini's fascists decided they would reject that election result. And they stormed the council building. And they rioted. And indeed, they killed nine people. And it worked. The council was suspended. And that basically negated that election.

That was 1920. By the following year, by 1921, they were doing it everywhere all over the country. Opposition and left politicians were attacked. They were run out of parliament. Their homes were burned. The important part of it, the part that we write in our cheat sheet, Cliff's Notes version of history, is that at the time, the state failed. The state was, I don't know if they were unable or unwilling to stop it, but they couldn't stop it.

The government appeared powerless to protect political rights in that moment. They could not protect the political process and the people participating in it. And so the state, proven to be weak, was overrun. Because who wants to stand up for a powerless state like that? Instead, you want to go with the people who have not only the momentum, but the will and the results to show for it.

So they're formed in 1919, 1920, they storm the council building, 1921, they start running opposition party politicians out of parliament and out of their homes. In 1922, the fascist groups all march toward Rome, and Mussolini does not take power by force. Italy's king just hands Mussolini the government, because who is going to stop him? Better decide with him instead.

Mussolini, having taken power that way in 1922, tried to look like a normal politician for a couple of years. It didn't stick. By 1924, he had murdered the head of one of the main opposition parties. And when people were outraged, he decided, oh, you're outraged? Well, let's actually cut to the chase. He outlaws all opposition parties and abolishes elections, and we're off to the races.

These things are easier for us to see when we see them in other countries and when we see them in other time periods. But we're right in the middle of this stuff. I mean, what I'm describing here, the fascists being formed in Italy in 1919. Fascists are formed in Italy in 1919. The Nazi party is founded in Germany in 1920. The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion is published in the United States at that same time. And Henry Ford starts reprinting it in his newly purchased Dearborn Independent.

Fast forward a decade, 1933, Hitler is chancellor in Germany. In 1933, in the United States, William Dudley Pelley forms the Silver Shirts as his anti-Semitic fascist militia in the United States, which has thousands of followers in multiple states.

By 1940, France is falling to Germany, Italy has joined the Nazis in the war, and the wife of Charles Lindbergh, the man who is more famous in America than anybody other than the president, the wife of Charles Lindbergh, the famous pilot, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, has just published what will become the number one best-selling book in the country. It is titled The Wave of the Future, and it is all about how fascism is the glorious future for all of us. It is the top-selling book in America in 1940.

These wins blew the same for us here as they did in other countries, which we should learn from now that we have another political movement on the right in this country that is trying to end democracy, to try to make us more like the authoritarian regimes they admire abroad. It's not a coincidence that these movements tend to be global. These guys tend to support each other, and they take inspiration from one another, and their success in one place is often mirrored by attempts at success elsewhere.

in another. So there's a lot of different things to learn from this history. I think most bluntly, the thing that I have learned and that I remind myself of all the time is that we are not immune from these types of historical movements.

We were not immune at the time that we think of as our touchstone for understanding the evils of fascism. We were not immune then, and we are not immune now. Lots of very powerful people in our country, people like Henry Ford, people like Charles Lindbergh, have sought this for our country in the past. And political opposition matters, but so does the political process. Because what is democracy except a process?

Democracy doesn't guarantee any end result. It's a process. It's a system of rights, a system of protections from tyranny. And if we don't fight to protect the process, we will lose it. The anti-democratic right in this country this year in 2024 is not running against the Democratic Party. They are running against the democratic process. And

The people who participate in this process, who make this process work in this country, are human beings who need protection. We need to protect the press. We need to protect the judiciary and the court system. We need to protect the electoral process and all of the people who administer it in ways large and small. We need to protect opposition politicians.

And we also need to protect the people who are being scapegoated and who are the subject of corrosive conspiracy theories. Not only because we owe it to them as humans, but because corrosive conspiracy theories corrode democracy. They make you willing to give it up. When the Republican presidential candidate this year says he is going to build camps for millions of people, have you not been all that worried about it because he says he's only going to put immigrants in those camps?

Do you think that's all there for? We have a cheat sheet from history if we choose to learn it and to let it help us. But let's learn it fast because it is time to start building the barricades. So Susan told me when I was talking to her about this tonight or today, she told me that this was too dark and I had to include a joke. So this is the last thing I'm going to say. Thank you, Susan.

I do have a joke here to end. You ready? What time is it when the cows lay down to go to sleep? It is pasture bedtime. Oh, grudging, grudging. All right, I told you I was going to bum you out. I told you I had a joke. I have one other joke because that one didn't land well. What's the best thing about Switzerland? I don't know, but the flag's a big plus. Better? Okay. Thanks, you guys. Thank you very much for being here.

Tony Kushner, American hero. Hi, Tony. Hi, Rachel. Oh, my God. Okay. I'm nervous about this, as I told you, because I don't usually do the interviewing, and I'm interviewing you, which is ridiculous. But here we go. I want to start by asking, what you just read and what you said was really terrifying and really spectacular. And the book and Ultra, the podcast, are both amazing.

really magnificent accomplishments. So, you know. So this is a big thrill for me. And let's start out by talking about the origin of both of these. I wanted to ask you when you remember having the first awareness of some aspect of this vast and complicated history that you've arranged in the podcast and in the book. And then...

Moving on from that, when you decided that you were going to dive deep into this prodigious amount of research that was done and organize it all and turn it into a podcast and then, I assume it was a podcast and then a book or maybe it was both at the same time. So can you just... Yeah, it was... I was interested in why we were seeing a big upsurge in Holocaust denial. Yeah.

at the same time that we were seeing a rise in, the rise of Trump in the Republican Party and the rise of his brand of sort of anti-democratic, pro-authoritarian politics. And I've never heard Trump say anything like Holocaust denial. I've never heard him encourage that, even though he's certainly been weirdly friendly with people who espouse that. But I've never heard it come out of his mouth. And I didn't understand why his rise was,

seem to be empowering what I thought of as, you know, the racist skinhead fringe and the weird revisionist history, Holocaust revisionist history quacks that I associate with the sort of 80s and 90s. Why are these guys so encouraged by Trump? He's not explicitly welcoming them, but something about this is, it's working like a helix.

And so in order to look at that, I wanted to look at the origins of American Holocaust denial. Because among other things, the Holocaust denial is weird. I mean, it's, especially when you realize that it goes back to the 1940s. So the earliest instances that I know of, of an American writing Holocaust denial literature is 1946. Right?

think about that? The number of refugees in America, the number of American GIs who had seen it, the films from the camps. I mean, in 1946, the Nuremberg trials were happening. I

And when I started to figure out who had done the earliest work, I started to figure out what their political project was. And then I realized that a whole lot of them had been put on trial in 1944 and that the judge died in the middle of the trial and they all got away. And oh my God, what happened to them? And then I realized I had a podcast. So was that Elizabeth? Yeah.

was um was that Elizabeth uh doing him uh 46 was actually a guy named Francis Parker Yaki who wrote what's considered to be the American mind comp in 1946. um the second season of Ultra is about him but yeah the he was in he was of that milieu he wrote for social justice for Coghlan's

for Coughlin's publication. He was in the Silver Shirts, the William Dudley Pelley Group. And this became very quickly the America First. America First was the biggest anti-war movement we've ever had in this country. And they were, Henry Ford was part of it, but Charles Lindbergh was part of it. And there was all these very, very powerful people who were involved in it. And as soon as we went to war, they sort of ostensibly shut down. But then a lot of them immediately got to work denying the Holocaust.

As soon as it was insane, I guess, still insane, but they believed it was possible to do it. I was horrified and delighted that one of the crazier of the sedition trial defendants in 1944, Elizabeth, is it Dillingham? Dilling. Dilling. I think you say in the epilogue in prequel, goes on to a career of Holocaust denial. Yes. After that. You want to know the other crazy thing about her? You know there's that moment in prequel where...

she gets in one of the sort of the ways that you know from contemporaneous news coverage that she's a raging anti-Semite is that at one point she screams at somebody in public in front of record reporters and uses an anti-Semitic slur and you know goes does a whole whole whole rant and she's with her son when she does it his name is Kirk Patrick Dilling and

And the reason it made the papers is because he was in the army at the time. He was a corporal, and there was a question as to whether he was going to get court-martialed for having participated in this anti-Semitic attack with his mother. And he does not get court-martialed, but eventually he gets sent to Germany to work in the denazification courts. That was a bad idea.

And then Langer, the senator Langer from Wyoming. North Dakota. North Dakota made a speech on the floor of the Senate and mentioned Elizabeth Dilling and her son. She was a mother who was worried about it and left out the part about her and him attacking another serviceman. Yes. Yeah. So Elizabeth Dilling was also funded by Ford.

to go out into American universities and find evidence of Jewish communist control.

And so she went out and kind of did a, you know, anti-DEI crusade in American universities at the time on Ford's payroll. And that led to a really weird moment when Glenn Beck was at the height of his powers when he was on Fox News during the Obama years. And Glenn Beck brought out Elizabeth Dilling's anti-communist red network screeds and encouraged all of his viewers on Facebook.

on Fox News that this book should be their Bible and they should do more work like this. He did not mention that she had been put on trial for sedition. We're going to take a quick break here, but we'll be right back with more of my conversation with Tony Kushner. Sunday on MSNBC, two documentaries at nine to be destroyed. The story of one community's fight against book banning, followed by It's OK, a short film about embracing differences in small town America. Sunday at 9 p.m. Eastern on MSNBC.

Today's news requires more facts, more context, and more analysis. The world's never been harder to understand. That's why it's never been more important to try. MSNBC. Understand more.

There are like a shock a minute in both the podcast and in the book. But I think overall, the biggest shock for me at any rate was that I didn't know any of this stuff going into it. I mean, it's a period of history that's been written about as much as any other period in American history, the Civil War, any of the really intensely studied periods, the 30s and the 40s.

And, you know, I knew about America First and I knew about Lindbergh and I knew about, you know, some of these creeps. But I had absolutely... I'd never heard of the sedition trial. I had never heard of the Brooklyn Boys and the Brooklyn Boys trial. I'd never heard of these ammunition plants being blown up in New Jersey. I mean, all of it had completely gone...

looked to me like it had gone away, including the fact that I had always believed, because I thought the German Bund and the America Firsters were the primary problem, that after Pearl Harbor, they just sort of packed up their bags and crawled under rocks, and that was it. And what comes out in Ultra and in prequel, that this continued,

well into the war and involved, most shockingly, members of Congress, a number of them. Why that should be shocking now, I don't know, but it's still... I think it's a recent disease as opposed to... So I wanted to ask you about the erasure of this and that Glenn Beck can sort of bring this creature from our...

nightmare corners from the past out and sort of talk about her as this great anti-communist crusader and still rely on the fact that nobody knows her to know that she was a rabid anti-Semite. So how do you account for that? It feels like it's a more complete erasure of a fairly significant, a very significant event than almost anything. I mean, it certainly equals any other kind of erasure in American history, and I'm so...

I don't know exactly, but I feel like there isn't, nobody had a good reason to tell the story, with the possible exception of the fascists themselves. And that was one of the reasons I decided to also write the book in addition to doing the podcast, because the only secondary sources that were out, I mean, you know, primary sources is material from the Times, secondary sources is people writing about the thing. The only secondary sources that were out there were either like

old and very hard to access, very, very marginal academic stuff. Nothing popular, nothing public-facing at all, except for the books written by the fascists themselves.

There's a lot of neo-Nazi history of this, of the sedition trial defendants and of that time, because they are proud of it. They want it to be remembered. They think of it as a high point in their influence in the United States. They're still circulating William Dudley Pelley's writings. They're still circulating Lindbergh's essays on how aviation is a gift to the white man and all whites ought to fight together against the rising tide of color. And I...

As you point out in the book, you can order all this stuff on Amazon. Yeah. It's right there. Thanks, Jeff Bezos. But it's... So the Justice Department decided to bring a sedition case in 1942...

And one of the senators who was involved with a Nazi agent's multimillion-dollar propaganda plot where he was using congressional offices to send German propaganda to the American public to get us to stay out of the war, one of the senators implicated in that threatened the attorney general, said, fire that prosecutor or else. And the attorney general said, okay, and fired the prosecutor.

Then when another prosecutor came in to take over the case, it took him two years to get it together. He brought the case in 1944. That ended in a mistrial when the judge died before the Justice Department decided whether they were going to retry the case, which

which you can do with a mistrial, he went to Germany because by then the war had ended. He went through the Nazis' files and talked with German war criminals convicted at Nuremberg and got all the evidence about the Americans they had been colluding with here. And he brought that back to the Justice Department and they fired him. The same senator, actually, who had been implicated.

went to President Truman and ultimately went to the then Attorney General Tom Clark and they fired the prosecutor and buried his evidence. So the Justice Department doesn't want to tell this story. It's not true. Interesting, if you go to Truman's files, Truman's archives, there are reams of outraged letters and telegrams from people who are so mad that he fired this prosecutor because it was really big news at the time, but he never wrote about it, never explained it.

The Justice Department doesn't want it told. The partisans of various political figures don't really want it told. The Nazis themselves are delighted to have it told, but I don't really want to take their word for it on how it went down. So I just tried to do it instead. One of the... I guess this is a good moment, is that you say that we're working together. I'm working on a screenplay based on Eldred and Prequel for...

I'm co-writing it with Danny Strong, and it's for Spielberg, who is the first person who told me, called me on the phone and said, I found it, I found it, I know what I want to do. And he said, send me the first episode of Ultra. And so, listen to this, listen to this. And we were both sort of completely blown away by it. So in one of our conversations...

I asked you the question, what happened, since I was clearly wrong that after Pearl Harbor these guys disappeared, what happened to them after, you know, so there's this big sedition trial. By 1940, Judge Eichler died in 45, right?

Late 44, yeah. And then the trial was so insane that the judge had a heart attack and died and it was declared a mistrial. And then the Justice Department decided not to retry the case. So I had asked you what had happened to these people after they were all let go because fascism is, you know...

on vogue again now, but there's a long stretch where it was still not particularly appealing to get out and say, hi, I'm a fascist, I love fascism, um, before Donald Trump made it, you know, like, a good, a cool thing to do. Um, so, uh,

I had asked you about that, and you told me something that was, I thought, really, really interesting about the transmogrification. I mean, obviously, a lot of these people became anti-red crusaders and so on. But you also made the point that a lot of them went into, became some of the movers and shakers in the anti-civil rights movement. Yes. And in the fight against African Americans, the civil rights movement and its progress.

So I wanted to ask you to talk about that a little bit because I thought that was interesting. Yeah, I mean, one of our...

sort of precursors, or one of the things that we need to contend with in our own history is Jim Crow as a modern form of fascism and apartheid in this country. And the fascists of the day and the anti-fascist African Americans of the day certainly recognized it as such. And so you do get this real parallel

for example, George Detheridge, who's one of the, great name, right? Like, if you're writing, if you're writing villains for film or podcasts, it helps to have a guy with death in his name, right? He also worked with a German consul named Killinger. Like, oh, that's great. Thank you. But,

Death Ridge is one of these guys who ends up in the Deep South and ends up working in the, I mean, the Civil Rights Movement was not the only movement around civil rights. The segregationist movement was also a movement with political movers and shakers and with funders and with propaganda and with tactics and meetings and groups and all of these things. And Death Ridge ends up

among them. But a lot of the guys who end up in the North supporting the anti-civil rights movement, supporting the segregationist movement, come out of this realm too, including some of the stuff I'm working on now is the stuff that I find very spooky, which is the sort of

eugenics, racial pseudoscience that the Nazis came to us for when they were looking for the basis for writing their Nuremberg Laws. Americans were pioneers in eugenics just as much as any European country was. And the eugenicists of the 30s that the Nazis liked so much ended up being the scientific expert witnesses of

on the, on the wrong side, on the, on the segregationist side of all the landmark civil rights cases. Um, and so there is a real, I mean, segregate, you know, segregation is fascism. Langston Hughes, I quote Langston Hughes saying that in the book, but segregation and fascism are, um, are the sort of two gold. It's, I sort of think of it as, it's like that song says it's, um, different demons, same devil. Yeah. I don't know that song, but it's a good question. Um,

In prequel, you also go into this interesting history of this guy. It was his name Krieger, Heinrich Krieger, who was sent to, I think, the Arkansas Law School because Hitler had an actual interest in studying American legalities, the legal way that a democracy found to systematically discriminate against individuals.

It's under mention against black people in this case, and they wanted to copy American judicial moves and sort of import them and make them applicable to Jews in Germany.

And there's a phrase that I didn't know. I learned it in prequel, umwege. Tell us about umwege. Umwege is a German word, and the idea was that you've got the letter of the law. German law at the time, and even now, is sort of very mechanistic. There aren't a lot of penumbras of interpretation. It's all pretty...

it's engineered and the idea of omega was that you could find within the black letter law room to interpret in ways that could get you to the result that everybody understood was supposed to be the result of this law even if the law didn't explicitly say it and so the germans were very interested in the united states being seen as a leader among nations

and having this very honorable, very impressive constitution that democratic countries are following and aping all over the world. Germans didn't want to be seen as a rogue nation. They wanted to be leading the world as well. They wanted everybody to admire them. And so they said, how can a country that has, you know, the 14th Amendment also have

legal segregation, anti-miscegenation laws, and all of these other things. And they described how we did that with this phrase, umwege, in terms of having law that looks one way, but that is meant to do another thing. I think the closest idea they had to it, which was not written about by the Nazis themselves, but has been written about them since, is the idea of the Führer Principle, right? That Nazi leaders and Nazi, you know, apparatchiks

wouldn't necessarily have to be told exactly what to do when it came particularly to things like oppressing and murdering Jews. They would just follow what they knew the Fuhrer would want to have done. And so that is what made it legal, the sense of, you know what we need to get to. And that, to me, is important with me, and that unnerves me because every time Russia has an election—

or Viktor Orban has an election, you know, why do they go through the, why do dictators, why do, you know, Orban would call himself an illiberal leader. Why do they go through the process of having these false elections? Why did Mussolini, after he abolished Russia,

opposition parties. I said he abolished elections. Technically, elections went away, but he allowed there to still be referenda. So every five years under Mussolini, you were allowed to go vote to say how much you liked Mussolini. And that was their election. But why do they do this? Why does it matter? It's because they want the trappings of legitimacy that we embody for now. Yeah, I mean, there's an interest. It's happening in Iran. They're going to have

parliamentary elections and like 10 of the whole population turns out for them because they why bother since all the candidates have already been vetted by the supreme leader but it's so there's an interesting thing though about

between fascism and legality. I mean, because most fascist governments, I mean, at least in the sort of, the Nazi model, they're elected legitimately or quasi-legitimately and then

begin to dismantle the machinery of democracy, but carefully so that they maintain a relationship. And it's an odd thing. This woman, Edith Lowenstein, who was part of the prosecution team, who then became a very famous immigration lawyer, one of her first jobs, she emigrated from Germany in '36, and one of her first jobs was translating this book by a guy named Ernest Frankel called "The Dual State."

that lays out, it's the first time I think that anyone in the United States had published a book sort of explaining how fascism was working in Germany. And the dual state was essentially, if I'm right about this,

there were two states operating side by side. One was the legal state, where, following the black letter of the law, and then there was the emergency state that dealt with the fact that democracy is an okay idea, but it's very... And rule by law, due process are all very cumbersome, and times move faster, so you have to have somebody with an executive power. It's really the unitary executive theory. I mean, Barr would love this. And it's a...

So there's still this need to sort of preserve, I guess, an illusion of legality or something deeper than that, that it's a...

there's a weird intimacy, and I think that that's one thing that comes through over and over again in Ultra and in Prequel, of a kind of an interweaving of fascism and democracy. So when you were saying in your remarks that there's a return of this, a recrudescence of this, can you imagine a time where democracy lives free of the threat of fascism? I mean, it's sort of

I mean, what you're talking about in terms of leaving the trappings of democracy in place to draw from its legitimizing force while also totally hollowing it out and running the country by fiat, like that is really, that is everywhere. That is with all the different types of fascist and authoritarian leaders that take over, except in the

you know, monarchist tradition or in places where, like in North Korea, where you've got like a quasi-religious, right, essentially monarchist state, any place that transitions from democracy to authoritarian government always does this thing. And I sort of feel like it's,

It's backward-looking in a way because you don't want to tell a population that has previously governed itself under democracy, we are no longer going to do that. Democracy is over. I am just going to be your dear leader now. Please bow down. I mean, it's going to work for some people in the right color hats and the whole thing. Some people like that. But it's not going to work for everybody. But if you tell them this is democracy...

This is your choice. This is what democracy means. And oh, look, we have elections. And isn't it weird how I keep winning 99.9% of the vote?

That's how Huey Long talked about democracy, right? That Huey Long in Louisiana was the closest thing we've ever had to an American elected dictator. He effectively turned Louisiana into a dictatorship before he was assassinated in 1935. And he talked about the perfect democracy being one in which everybody had the opportunity to vote for him because they were so happy with what a great job he was doing. And that's how you know it's a good democracy, right?

So there is something about neutering it by co-opting it and calling it something else that I think maybe they think is more resilient than just proclaiming it over. One last quick break here, but then we'll be right back with more of my conversation with Tony Kushner. Stay with us.

At Radiolab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But, but.

We do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radiolab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcasts.

I want to ask you to read something from, because this is something that I'm struggling with a lot, as you know, because I've called you on the phone repeatedly and said, "I don't understand this."

Because part of what is really compelling... I mean, there's sort of an interesting dual character to both Ultra and Prequel in that they're thrilling stories of heroism. There are people like Leon Lewis, this Jewish lawyer who organises his World War I vet buddies to infiltrate these really terrifying Nazi organisations in LA because the...

Law and order is paying no attention to them. So he's an absolutely remarkable figure. And there's equally, to me, I'm trying to convince Stephen of this, is Henry Hoke. Tell them a little bit about Henry Hoke. Henry Hoke is so fantastic. I feel like one of the things that I feel like I learned from you before I ever met you is that we...

tell stories to one another about our country and about our own history in order to give each other steel in our spines, in order to say people like you, people with less to offer than you, people more beleaguered than you, people just as flawed as you have done heroic things. You're not born a hero. Heroism finds you when it needs to.

And so we tell each other stories about people doing good works in part to convince one another that we too could do good works if the moment met us. And Henry Hoke is the perfect example of that because Henry Hoke was a total dork. His field was direct mail advertising. And he was a pioneer in direct mail advertising. He was very good with inset cards.

like, you know, like reader annoyance cards, you know, like that go in the magazine. And he had, like, he coined all these little direct mail advertising phrases about, you know, the promise and the push and the pay and the, like, it was, he's great. And this was, this, this was not a man who was, like, born to roll the, the, the boulder up the mountain. This was not Sisyphus. And his son went to Penn and

and came home soon after enrolling at Penn and said, Dad, I don't want to be there anymore. I don't like the environment. What don't you like about the environment? Well, every day, like under the doors of our dorm rooms, we get all this propaganda. We get all this stuff that's telling us about, you know, fascism is good and we shouldn't fight the war. This is like in 38, 39? Yeah. And Henry Hoke is like, hmm, with my direct mail advertising expert eye, I can tell this is...

This is an unusual thing that this is targeting college students. He goes and talks to other dads who have other kids in other schools, and he finds out it's happening at all of their schools. And then he finds out that it's happening not just in schools, but it's happening in insurance offices and dentist offices and all sorts of different professional environments are being sent this stuff, and it's all very well tailored to its individual audiences. And it's different levels of like,

coarseness of paper and it's different levels of education level that it's written in and targeted toward, different levels of slickness and coarseness. And he realizes this is A, huge, B, very well targeted, and C, really expensive. Where is this stuff coming from? And he uses his direct mail advertising expert eye to discern from some of the printed address labels on some of these materials

He figures out which addressing machine has produced these labels. And it's an out-of-date addressing machine. And he knows the three companies that have them. And he contacts two of them and they can account for them. And the one, they sold it to somebody else and he goes and finds it. And he unravels this entire plot that there is a multimillion dollar machine

propaganda operation being directed from the foreign office in Berlin through a Nazi agent in the United States who is sending this stuff by the ton out through multiple channels in the United States with a lot of help from Henry Ford, it should be noted, but also using the congressional franking privilege of two dozen members of Congress. And Henry Hoke figures it out because he's a dork.

And he turns his direct mail advertising trade publication into a scoop machine where he's just running expose after expose after expose of this thing that's happening. And talk about a moment meeting the man, right? Had he been a dental hygienist, none of this would have happened. Had he been a car salesman, rather, he just happened to be the right thing and to be incredibly brave.

And he published this stuff. He did every interview that he could. He wrote books about it. He went to the sedition trial himself. He worked for members of Congress who were trying to oust the members of Congress who had allowed their congressional frank to be used for this propaganda thing. He was a f***ing mensch. Forgive me. Sorry. And my mom is here, so I'm really sorry. Sorry, Mom. All the more moving because he's not Jewish. Yeah.

Leon Lewis was a Jewish lawyer, so, I mean, he had a reason, you know, a very personal reason to despise these guys. But this man is just sort of like a decent American guy, and on his own dime, he devotes this, you know, sort of extraordinary sleuthing ability and uncovers this. And it's sort of, by the end, I think, the statistic you give in prequel, it's like 300 million pieces of mail were written by the Third Reich

including during the war, were shipped through with this abuse of the congressional phrase. So this is like gigantic, horrendous scandal. And this guy, so he's amazing. And Dillard Stokes, the Washington Post reporter who, I mean, anyway, you have to read the book. It's just great. It's like a page turner. The main hero in a way is Ojan Raghi, the prosecutor.

And we've talked about him a lot. He's a very complicated figure. I've worried so much about you and John Rogge, I have to say. Yeah, he's a complicated guy. Like, learning his history, I would think, like, what's Tony going to think? Well, tell me one thing, Rogge, that you told me

And after, I mean, this guy was very brave. When the Justice Department fired him as the prosecutor in charge of the case, he had already started going rogue. He was...

went to Swarthmore and then to various other places and began to tell about the stuff that he had uncovered about congressional infiltration by the Third Reich and so on. And then he has a very surprising little incident a few years later where he defended... David Greenglass. And if you know the story of the prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, David Greenglass was Ethel's brother. And he was absolutely...

part of what happened and he dropped the dime falsely on his sister in order to save himself and his wife and ragi was part of representing him so this is the part i was like i don't want to tell tony um but he's i mean again you don't need to be a perfect person you don't need to have perfect politics you also don't need to have a life that prepares you for your moment

These are complex people with interesting lives who make interesting decisions and they aren't all perfect and they aren't all right. I mean, Raggi did go rogue at the Justice Department. Had I been a Justice Department official at the time, maybe I would have fired him too. He did some stuff that he wasn't supposed to do. But he also did incredibly heroic work to expose a thing that we never otherwise would have known about had he not had the gumption that he had. So yeah,

Yeah, all of these people end up being... I mean, he did a lot of other good things, too. He represented the Trenton Six, which was a great civil rights case. The communists hated him. He was denounced as a communist, and then the communists denounced him, too. He didn't have a friend in the world. He's my kind of guy. Yes, and I didn't mean to imply that he was a bad guy. I mean, but one thing that's interesting is that this is, and this is one place where it's kind of painfully relevant to our current moment...

you watch in two sort of spectacular moments, first in this trial of these Brooklyn seditionists who were stockpiling weapons and really planning serious violence against Jewish New Yorkers, against communist members, or people that they thought were communist members,

you watch the government's case under Raghi's supervision completely disintegrate and fall apart, and there's a hung jury for some of them, and then the rest of them are all acquitted. And then the sedition trial, which is just this three-ring circus that also sort of falls apart. And there's a fascinating thing about...

democracy trying to address the problem of fascism in its midst and kind of doing a big face plant. I mean, it's not really working, and especially in the courts, there's a kind of ineptitude and clumsiness about it. I was going to ask you to read, there's a wonderful section, a passage, when Raghi is on Meet the Press after he's gone rogue.

Here it is. Okay. I outlined it. Oh, God, yeah. For you. You know, at some point, will somebody please take a picture of Tony's tabs in the book? Because I'm, this is, I'm peaking. It's one of those books where you think you're going to just put a little tab in every time there's something interesting, and then you realize at the end that you're

When I start taking notes from the book, I will basically just be transcribing the entire book. Then I'll probably go and put tabs in my notes and keep... And if I do that, I'll never have to get around to writing the screenplay, which is really the objective of all this. Because writing is too hard. I start, like, highlighting a column, and then I realize I've colored in the whole paper. It's the same thing. Um...

This is Marcus Childs, who is a Washington-based reporter. Childs then asked John Raggi if he agreed that presenting evidence suggesting collusion between notable Americans and the German government, quote, had the effect of convicting people in the minds of the public without a trial or without a hearing. Raggi responded, growing a little heated, quote, no, no, I don't. As a matter of fact, I'd say this to you. We had reached the point where legal remedies were inadequate.

You in the press are in the field of education. The field of education is bringing these facts to the American people. Now, if you're going to say to me that I can't use the facts in an educational way, then you are, in effect, saying that there is no way of meeting the fascist threat. Using a legal term to describe the government's abandonment of the earlier sedition charges, Raghi then railed at the civic no-man's land into which his evidence was falling."

quote, you can't do it legally, and you say to me, ah, but you mustn't talk about these things because the case was nulla pros, meaning not prosecuted. And if you put me in that position, there are no remedies against fascism. So, yeah, so I was very moved by that. It speaks to something that I've been struggling with. It's the question of how democracy and the rule of law addresses something that is not only...

hell-bent on destroying democracy and the rule of law, but also... Well, I guess the question is, does democracy work? I don't have the five seconds. Yes or no? Like... I'd like to buy a vowel. Do we... Do we have... You know...

To what extent is this a story of fascism sort of successfully investigating and exploring the weaknesses and the loopholes in our laws and also our own... I mean, he's asking a contradiction. You make a very good point. The Justice Department does not make statements other than in its, you know... I mean, it doesn't...

go out and editorialize. There are the decisions that are made and the indictments that it hands down, and it really limits itself for a very good reason, because it keeps the courts from becoming complete political weapons, more like Comey and the FBI and Hillary last time in that disgraceful episode. So...

I think that, and Barr did it several times. So, you know, it's a good idea that you don't go rogue and that you don't talk out of, you know, that you adhere to this thing. But then Raghi is asking this very important question. So then what happens? How do we, this is vital information that we were, our guard was lowered and that these people, fellow Americans, worked for this foreign government

I mean, the unindicted co-conspirator number one in the sedition case was Adolf Hitler. So is this a story, I guess, in a way, of an alarming contradiction or weakness at the heart of the democratic enterprise? I mean, I guess that's...

Well, in the very sort of nuts and bolts concrete sense, what Raghi said at the time was that when he went to Germany, again, to go interview Nazi war criminals convicted at Nuremberg and to look through Nazi files, he was German-American and he spoke German.

And so that when he and Edith Lowenstein went to Germany, they didn't have much help, but they were able at least to read these materials and go through them themselves. And when he got permission to do that,

He had already told the Justice Department that he thought the case could not be tried successfully. This is after the mistrial. It's been seven months in court. It was a total circus. The judge is dead. They're going to have to bring it before a new judge and retry everybody, and the war is over. And he thought there's been Supreme Court decisions that have happened since we brought the case that have expanded First Amendment rights in a way that

or expanded our understanding of First Amendment rights in such a way that may impact this trial. Like, I don't think you can try it. Can I go to Germany anyway? Why did they allow him to go to Germany anyway? He says, because he had an explicit agreement with the Attorney General that he would produce a report for the public about the underlying evidence about the relationship between the Third Reich and Americans in this country who helped them with their stuff. And when he came back and his evidence showed the names of 24 members of Congress...

that's when the attorney general said, not only is this never going to see the light of day, you are fired. But he says they were reneging on an agreement. So was he going rogue in that moment? It's the eye of the beholder. The larger question, though,

did you, Robert Paxton has this book called Anatomy of Fascism. There's a lot of books about fascism now. It's a growing industry. His book is a little older than the current flurry of books about fascism, but he has, I think, what I consider to be a really good framework for what he calls the five phases of fascism. And the first one is that you emerge from discontent

Either you find discontent organically existent in the world or you create some. Second, you establish yourself as a political entity, essentially declare your intention to enter the political sphere. Third, normal right-wing political entities gatekeep for you. You partner with them and they allow you in.

Then once you are in power, because normal right-wing political figures have decided to partner with you, then once you are in power, phase four is you consolidate power. You start hollowing out any checks and balances. You start making sure that agencies and anything discretionary all accrues to you and that all levers of power that exist within the democratic form of government are now going to be controlled by you when, you know, not to make it too contemporary, but when they talk about Schedule F,

This new Trump initiative to get rid of all civil servants, that's so that they can have all their own people all throughout the government. It's part of the idea of consolidating power. And then only in stage five do you radically change the system of government. But you get there through democratic means. You accrue power to the extent that the democratic system and its wisdom allows you to do it. And then you use that power to end democracy.

to stay in power indefinitely and to never allow anybody else to have any other form of authority or power that might challenge you. And that system, if you define it that way, it does actually kind of explain all the different types of democratic transitions to authoritarianism that we've seen in the last hundred years. And that to me is why I am very energized right now

about the need to protect the democratic process because you cannot close the democratic process um but you have to recognize that abuse of the democratic process is part of the plan and so you cannot make it physically dangerous to be an opposition political figure

or physically dangerous to work at a polling place. You cannot allow it to be physically dangerous to be a juror or a witness or the daughter of a judge. And if we allow those things to happen, we're in phase four and heading into phase five. And so just being cognizant that democracy doesn't defend itself. It's made up of human beings, including us. And when it is under attack and when it is abused within the system,

that abuse ultimately is its undoing. And I just, I feel that with a lot of energy. So winds me up. I mean, I have 600 other questions to ask you, but I'm not going to do that. But I'm going to squeeze in one more question and then I'll do some questions from the audience. Great. This is actually a question that my husband suggested who is a journalist. And it connects with what you were just saying. That, that,

I wanted to just ask you about the role of journalists in, you know, there are certain newspapers, I won't name names, that have a very sort of deep investment in the notion of sort of objectivity and impartiality of the, you know, we're the writers of the first draft of history and, you know,

various shades of gray, so on. And they sometimes go out of their way to make it, to sort of create the sense of balance. I mean, we're going to talk a lot about Hillary's emails because we've said a few nasty things about Donald Trump. The Washington Post, right after Trump was elected president,

and Washington Post comes out pretty heroically in prequel, came out with a new slogan for itself, Democracy Dies in Darkness. And in doing that, they sort of laid down a marker. They were saying, we are...

as impartial as we can be and objective as we can be, we want to tell you the truth, but we do have a horse in this race. We are an institution, a free press, that exists as a project of liberalism and democracy as a project of liberalism, and we would not exist but for democracy. Therefore, we are not going to...

pretend that we are not advocating for democracy. In a way, you've sort of answered this question, but I just wanted to ask you to talk about that a little bit because it's, again, a contradiction because the press is not supposed to have, you know, a horse in the race. But when...

Democrats are running against Republicans and Republicans are running against Democrats. There's no reason for the mainstream press to make, you know, other than editorial page endorsements of one side or the other. You have two competing governing parties that both want to govern within our system of government and want to enact different types of policies and make different types of appointees. Okay. If you have a political party that is running against

to offer policies and promote appointees within our political system of government, and they are running against a political party that is against our system of government and proposes to dismantle it. The press needs to recalibrate what it means to be balanced in that moment. And...

You know, your mileage may vary. Everybody, I think it is totally possible to have good faith, a lot of different good faith positions on this matter. But I do feel like one of the things that's happened over the course of the last five years is that we've seen this argument that we need to tilt our coverage this way. We need to indulge the sort of anti-small d democratic stuff that we're seeing. We need to

play it down or play up democratic scandals and try to create a false equivalence with that radicalism on the right, because otherwise we will not be trusted. Otherwise we will be denounced. We don't want Republicans to feel like they don't have a home here. And that ship has sailed. That, that...

I just fundamentally disagree with that, with the idea that you can appease your way to a fairer balance. Good people on both sides. There are good people on both, yeah. Yeah, the...

You know, it's like when, I think it was Pete Buttigieg in the 2020 primary had a good line in a debate once where he was like, listen, they're going to call us socialists whatever we do, so why don't we just do good stuff? And don't worry about whether or not they're going to call you a socialist, because they're going to call you a socialist. Like, if you wake up in the morning, they're going to call you a socialist. There's nothing you can do that will make them not call you a socialist. So just do the right policy and expect the name-calling. It's the same thing with the press. All right, great. So do I have...

Whoever, I don't know. Do you have questions on cards or anything? I do. I wrote them down. Oh, good. Index cards make me even more nervous than I am otherwise. So, all right. Lauren Barry sent in a question, all in caps. Again, a yes or no answer. Or Mark said I should ask you to answer this in a limerick. Is our democracy going to survive the next election? Say it again. Is our democracy going to survive the next election?

It depends. Okay. That's it. Good, good, good. We have to make sure that it does. Yes. Right? It doesn't automatically do it.

Catherine Burgess asks, when you meet a MAGA Trump supporter, can you offer us some... which would be unfortunate, but if you do, can you offer salient points to make... to open a conversation with this person? Like, how would you... If you were in that position, how do you... You talked about conspiracies and the madness of that. How do you...

So Susan and I live in a part of, we live in Massachusetts, but we spend most of our time in a part of the state that has a lot of Trump supporters. And I have neighbors who are Trump supporters. And I know people who have those political feelings. And you may too. And I've

I don't feel like there's some sort of, you know, magic pixie dust you can spread over somebody that makes them either, you know, see the light or see things differently. But I do believe in human-to-human connection.

And part of the reason that I wanted to talk about the appeal of conspiracy theories tonight is because the conspiracy theories right now from the right are about the left. And they are about, yes, trans people, and they are about immigrants, and they are about Jews, and they are about other outgroups that are being targeted in pernicious and violent ways. And they are broadly about the people who disagree with Donald Trump.

And if you are a person who disagrees with Trump and you are not a MAGA person, if you're encountering somebody who's a stranger to you, but you know that they are coming from the sort of MAGA mindset, they may think that you have horns. They may think that you are a pro-pedophile, Pizzagate, you know, QAnon something, right? They may think that you stole the last election. And there's nothing that you can argue to them that will change that perception, but you can be a human being

to them. And I really, I do believe that everybody is capable of redemption. I believe that when you look somebody in the eyes and you see them as a human being, it is harder to want to kill them. I believe that it is important that you don't live in your phone.

that you know your neighbors, that you have relationships with people because you see them at the dump or the transfer station or the stop and shop or the gas station regularly or because your kid plays little league with their kid or because you go to the same church or because you like the same baseball team and your seats are next to each other. Knowing different types of people and communicating with people at a human level is very powerful and creates resistance to mass violence.

And we have to think about it in those terms. That sort of answers a number of these questions. Deborah Kodir, I can't remember my own writing. Deborah. Deborah asked, why do you love Massachusetts? And Steve DeRocha asked, why do you love Provincetown? Yeah.

And a couple of other people asked questions about... Oh, Nancy Scaglione-Peck asked if you've been whale watching. And Andrew Schaff asked how you avoid depression and if you have any survival tactics that you want to give us.

I like the idea that those are the verses in a song. There are a lot of people who are worried about you, I think, and worried about themselves as well and want to make sure that you have a happy place to go to. Oh, I'm in my happy place. I am. Yeah, I grew up in California, in Northern California, and my mom and my dad and my brother are here tonight, so that's very exciting. Yeah.

And I ended up in Massachusetts by accident. I had not finished my dissertation, but I had finished my funding for graduate school. And so I needed to live in a place where I could work and have very little rent to pay and where I would be miserable. And so I would want to work very fast toward finishing my dissertation so I could get out. And I thought I would, I moved to Massachusetts because I thought I would hate it here.

And it's honestly, um, and I, you know, I'm, I've been here 27 years now and I would never live anywhere else. So, um, and don't worry about me. I'm, uh, I've got a great life and a great partner and, um, great big stinky dogs and I'm very happy. So I just want to tell you this. Um,

As somebody who has made a living telling stories for a really long time, I'm in awe of your gifts as a storyteller. I think that's one of the things that everybody...

You watch every episode of your show, and the way that you bring us through large sections of history, and also the clever way that you work in suspense, and...

looping back, which gives us, I think, also an important sense of how history works and how we move through time that we're always having to remember so that we can look back and make, oh, that's that person who did this. And if we forget that connection, you always take care of us and get us there by the end. And then we always arrive at,

and this is, I think, the mark of a real storyteller of genius, we arrive, we know starting out sometimes in your episodes, like, you say, okay, we're going to start out talking about something that happened 75 years ago in a little town you've never heard of, and you'll have no idea why this is relevant, but you know, I can't wait to find out what the answer to this is and how it's going to reveal itself. And so you really are...

You have a great gift, and it's a great gift to all of us that you shared with us. Thank you so much, Tony. Thank you so much for listening to this special bonus episode this week. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode of Rachel Maddow Presents.

Rachel Maddow Presents Ultra is a production of MSNBC. For this special bonus episode, we want to say huge thanks to Tony Kushner and to Mark Cortale and to Sally Norris and to Provincetown Town Hall. Ultra is executive produced by myself and Mike Yarvitz.

It's produced by Kelsey Desiderio and Jen Mulraney Donovan. Our associate producer is Vassilios Kerselakis. Audio engineering and sound design by Bob Mallory and Catherine Anderson. Our head of audio production is Bryson Barnes. Our senior executive producers are Corey Nazo and Laura Conaway. Our web producer is Will Femia. Aisha Turner is the executive producer for MSNBC Audio. Rebecca Cutler is the senior vice president for content strategy at MSNBC.

You can find much more about this series at our website, msnbc.com slash ultra. Mr. Rogge, don't you think that the publication of your report had the effect of convicting people in the minds of the public without a trial or without a hearing? Mr. Spivak. No, no, I don't. Ms. Pleason has a question. As a matter of fact, as a matter of fact, I'd say this to you. We had reached the point where legal remedies were inadequate.

As a matter of fact, I'd prepared a report in which I'd said legal remedies are inadequate. You're in the field of education. Now then, if you're going, the field of education is bringing these facts to the American people. Now if you're going to say to me that I can't use the facts in an educational way, then you are in effect saying there's no way of meeting the fascist threat. You can't do it legally. And you say to me, ah, but you mustn't talk about these things because the case was now processed. And if you put me in that position, there are no remedies against it.

Sunday on MSNBC, two documentaries. At 9, To Be Destroyed, the story of one community's fight against book banning. Followed by It's Okay, a short film about embracing differences in small-town America. Sunday at 9 p.m. Eastern on MSNBC.