Ken Burns UNUM

- Hey, it's Ken Burns.

I'm very excited to welcome you back to another Unum conversation, this time with one of my most favorite people on the planet, Rachel Maddow.

The last time I was on your show, Rachel, was, believe it or not, 10 years ago.

- Oh, wow.

- And we were discussing our friends, the Roosevelts.

And out of 14 or 15 hours of footage, you, to my complete surprise, pulled out this amazing footage from the Civilian Conservation Corps, the CCC, this great sense of Americans coming together to work for a common purpose, in this case, the Depression, of putting young people to work in the face of massive unemployments.

And there was one scene that you particularly liked that I was kvelling over because it was one that made me cry and still makes me cry, of just hundreds of people raising their shovels and raising their pickaxes and raising everything together.

Hundreds of people in a kind of unison that spoke to the kinds of ways that Roosevelt was trying to bring us together.

And so that's the last time I left you.

There's been a lot of water under the bridge.

And so I'm very, very pleased for you to join us today.

We're talking about your new book, "Prequel," which has got a subtitle of, "An American Fight Against Fascism."

And it feels like during the last 10 years, we've been out there exploring similar themes in American life, ones that unfortunately resonate a bit too much today.

And not in a good way.

Your book tells the story of the rise of a fascist movement within the United States in the years leading up to World War II with the incredible effort to expose and diffuse that movement.

And while you were working on your book and doing the research, we were bringing out our film, "The U.S. and the Holocaust."

And for us, we were trying to understand what currents in American life long before World War II and leading up to it, basically blocked Jews and others from being able to escape from what would later be called the Holocaust.

We were specifically looking at it in that context as we were having other films, but we were looking at how long those issues have been with us in America.

So, first, tell me a bit about why a book on American fascism and why the title "Prequel."

- First of all, Ken, I'm so, so happy to be having this conversation with you.

First of all, I miss you, and we should talk more frequently.

We should do stuff like this and talk about mutual interests more often.

But I have to say, the thing that I learned the most from "U.S. and the Holocaust" was about...

I mean, the documentation about what happened in the Holocaust, what happened in Europe, stunning and life-changing, particularly a lot of the way that you documented and found very, very difficult to find footage from Eastern Europe.

That was just, I mean, honestly life-changing for me to witness that.

But the way that you documented how antisemitism in the United States worked to change American policy, to determine the range in which FDR was allowed to operate while he was fully aware of what America was capable of doing for good and the peril that the world was in from what the Nazis were orchestrating in Europe and how American public opinion so constrained our response and ultimately defined our response so that it's something that we can't be proud of.

We can't be proud of the way that we dealt with Jewish refugees in the face of the Holocaust, as much as we can be proud of what we did on the battlefield in terms of stopping the Nazis.

And that does dovetail with what I've been working on, which is American pro-fascist sentiment, American pro-Nazi sentiment, and American antisemitism, and those not being foreign things.

It wasn't, you know, just the influence of our enemies abroad and spies and a fifth column and all that stuff.

It's something native to the United States.

And that is, I think, really important to understanding what happened then.

It's also really important to understanding what we're contending with in the sort of modern iterations of some of these fights now.

- You know, the historian Peter Hayes in our film says that excluding people is as American as apple pie, even though the myth is of, "Give us your tired, your poor" and the Statue of Liberty and Emma Lazarus's poem sort of became, for us, touchstones of how to understand it just as we were eroding those touchstones with a reality of America that didn't belie a support for that, but, as you said, narrowed the possibilities of what Roosevelt could do.

Like he's not gonna let in 20,000 Jewish children because he knows what the politics are, the real politics of an American people.

That's the thing we don't want to accept.

An American Congress and American politicians and his own administration, people in it that are reluctant.

So in our film, we're trying to look at the historical antecedents of anti-socialism and xenophobia and restrictions on immigration.

Nell Painter sort of following Peter Hayes says, early in our film, "Part of our national mythology is that we are good people.

"We are a democracy, and we are a democracy, "and in our better moments, we are very good people."

But she goes on, "That's not all there is to the story.

"And I think if we're going to congratulate ourselves "on our democracy, which I think we should, "we also need to face up to the other side."

And as you detail in the book, there were American-grown Nazis who gathered in cities, reached out to their neighbors, organized camps to indoctrinate their children.

We include a clip in our film that shows what appears to be a typical American summer camp, except it's a Nazi summer camp.

And we felt compelled to date stamp it with the New Jersey location because it looks like an American picnic with the American flags, but oh, yes, there are swastika flags as well.

And you referenced this in your book, as you wrote, "Here at home, "World War II vibrates "with such moral intensity for Americans "that it's hard to picture, hard to believe, "hard to conceive that there were Americans, "let alone lots of them, "who thought that not just we should stay out of the war, "but if we did decide to fight, "we should join the Axis powers "who'd be the better bet to go on."

And one of the people who was moving their chips over onto that Nazi square was Charles Lindbergh, great aviator hero, became the most outspoken person of the America First Committee.

His undoing and a kind of an arrearing of an American conference takes place in Des Moines, Iowa, where he gives a speech that is so rabidly antisemitic that nobody can no longer tolerate it.

And everybody goes.

So it's ironic that we are now in the lee of an Iowa caucus, which has endorsed a person who has spoken the same words of Adolf Hitler, about people poisoning bloodlines, about the vermin that opposition represents, all of the things that were part and parcel of the dialogue of that time.

This is gobsmacking to me, and that there's not somebody like an Army-McCarthy, "Have you no shame, have you no sense of decency?"

We've lost all of that.

It's shameless.

A majority of Iowans were shocked, shocked by what Charles Lindbergh said, and a majority of Republican Iowans just supported a man who quotes liberally from the speeches of Adolf Hitler.

- Yeah, I mean, I think it's not so much that we have an American reality and an American myth, but that we have competing American realities.

Because I do think that the Emma Lazarus poem is on the Statue of Liberty for a reason.

And I think there are lots of Americans who have devoted their lives and their fortunes and their fates toward making that promise true.

It's just that there are Americans who have fought on the other side of that as well.

And so I think that, you know, there were concerns about Lindbergh's pro-German, pro-Nazi sentiments, Lindbergh's antisemitism, the America First Committee and what they were trafficking in.

I mean, the America First Committee, as you note in the film, 800,000 people.

It's the largest anti-war organization ever in American history.

Might be the largest American political organization of its time depending on how you look at it.

It's full of incredibly influential people.

Charles Lindbergh is, you know, the consensus American hero, but there's all these titans of industry.

It's the most influential people and the most respectable people in the country.

But there are concerns pressed by other Americans about the fact that they're trafficking in antisemitism.

And why is it that thugs from the Christian Front and the Silvershirts and all of these other native fascist groups are flocking to those organizations?

Why is it that a paid Nazi spy, like Laura Ingalls, who was another celebrated aviator, she was told by her Gestapo handler, the best thing she could do for the Third Reich was to keep giving speeches for the America First Committee.

I mean, this stuff was getting exposed, in prosecutions of Laura Ingalls, in activism by Americans who were advocating against them.

And it was their pushback, I think, that drove the public reaction against what Lindbergh said on September 11th in Des Moines in that speech that got people so upset.

It's a constant fight.

I mean, that's why I called my book "Prequel."

Not because we have bad guys now, and they look like the bad guys in the past, but because there is a prequel for fighting against this sort of stuff in America.

There are generations of Americans before us who have fought pro-authoritarian, anti-democratic, antisemitic, nativist, xenophobic violent movements in this country, and we should learn from them.

- The scary thing, though, it seems to me, is the fragmentation of media.

So that generally people got it from newspapers that were trusted, radio stuff that could have characters like Father Coghlan on it spewing anti-Semitic bile.

But there was a general sort of sense.

And apparently more than 65% of the Republicans who voted in the caucus in Iowa believe that Joe Biden didn't win the election.

So we've got a place to go.

I mean, we're now debating the 14th Amendment and whether that could be applied to Donald Trump as having sponsored an insurrection.

The actual event of the insurrection isn't as important as the assault on the ideas of us, meaning the U.S., meaning the Constitution.

And, of course, we have the example in the past of Harry Truman electing not to prosecute the Nazis who were clearly active in this way.

And so, you know, maybe that's a manifestation of our charitable and forgiving side, but we also have a way of letting these things slip away, like the elusive bar of soap in the tub.

And so I'm wondering, how do we reckon with this?

What's your prescription in a world in which the people who believe that Joe Biden didn't win, as he did by more than 7 million votes, live in a universe and are fed a certain diet that do not actually permit them to cross over into a reality that would say two plus two is four, the Earth is round, not flat, and that we could agree on some generally accepted things?

If we are going to be, and I'm so happy to hear you articulate so forcefully, the idea of prequel is also a call to every Middlesex village and farm to sort of gird yourself for the big anti-fascist, anti-tyrannical, anti-authoritarian fight before us.

How does that army unite and do the kind of good we want it to do, obviously free of violence, and seek those objectives if people are reading off entirely different scorecards?

- It's interesting.

I think that there is a really like earnest, good faith fight to have about the different types of media that we've had over different generations and how relatively dangerous each one was.

I mean, if you look at Father Coghlan, who you talk about in "U.S. and the Holocaust" in great detail, you know, the thing that's amazing about him is the combination of his radicalism and his reach, right?

In a time when there's less than 200 million people in America, he's reaching 25 or 30 million people in a week.

That kind of reach is just unheard of in terms of modern media.

And that means that he was a big deal.

He got great ratings.

But at the same time, he is saying, "I take the Franco way," meaning we need a military dictatorship in the United States.

"I take the road of fascism."

He's calling for bullets once the ballot stop working.

And importantly, and inconceivably, he's organizing his listeners into what he calls platoons.

He's organizing his listeners into armed militia groups to pursue an armed fascist takeover of the U.S. government.

And in fact, some of the Christian Front members who follow in his orders effectively get put on trial for sedition in New York City in 1940 for a plot to overthrow the U.S. government that was gonna start with the murder of a dozen congressmen.

And so that is something that we couldn't have today in today's fragmented media landscape.

We couldn't have somebody with that much reach and that radical.

Because you'd never have anybody reaching that large a proportion of the American public.

So that was sort of dangerous in its own way.

I feel like through Coghlan and through some of these other stories of that time, the thing that I've come to is that the real danger is in the connection between radicalism and reach.

It is not necessarily a shock to our system that you've got pro-Nazi, anti-democratic, pro-violent authoritarian movements.

We've always had those in this country.

The real risk is when they get hooked up to real power, when they, in the 1930s, and the time that I write about in "Prequel," get hooked up with two dozen members of Congress who are working with a Nazi agent to promote German propaganda through the U.S. Congress to the American people.

The real danger is when a movement that believes that elections can be undone because you say that you don't believe in the outcome hooks itself up to one of the two major governing parties in the United States, the Republican Party.

If the MAGA movement were the Pat Robertson movement of the 1980s, we wouldn't be having this conversation right now.

It's that the MAGA movement has ascended and taken over the Republican Party.

And once you've got radicalism of that degree linked to something that powerful, then you've got an existential crisis for our constitution and for our democracy.

- I mean, I was beginning to feel pretty good about what you were saying about the fragmentation.

But then, you know, you made me feel miserable again.

'Cause I remember the first days of the first Trump administration.

He closes the door and brings the Russians into the Oval Office, bans the U.S. press, and the only pictures we have of the event are from the Russian news sources, and they're having some conversation.

And we're, you know, "What happened?"

I think we do wring our hands and tend to be sort of like, "Oh my goodness, we have these homegrown Nazis."

At the same time, perhaps the more disturbing or sinister manifestation is the way in which the Germans were themselves influenced by us and our actions and our history of racism, northern as well as southern, race laws, of course, the larger history of genocide against Indigenous peoples.

Which Hitler wrote about and was just incredibly admiring that we were able to kill them all, or at least isolate them into reservations.

He might call them concentration camps.

Were you surprised to learn about the impact American history had on the formation of Nazi ideology and laws?

I mean, you could tell us a bit about Krieger and the German government sending him to the University of Arkansas School of Law in '33 to learn about American race laws.

I mean, the German laws that they passed, you know, that came out of this study, were kind of mild compared to the statutes, as many said, in quotes, a drop of Negro blood.

What does that make, 164th, whatever?

But if you were 1/8th Jewish, you could still be okay in Nazi Germany, but you're not okay in the former Confederacy of the United States.

That to me is the thing that's so disturbing.

We're talking about people trying to get out.

And we did let in more people than any other sovereign nation, nowhere near enough, a fifth of maybe perhaps what our immigration, our terrible immigration laws, the Johnson-Reed Act could have permitted if we hadn't been so stingy within the confines of those laws and moved the barriers.

But maybe we could have done 10 times as many, which means we're knocking off maybe 2 million off the 6 million.

And maybe by knocking that off, you've given other people in different choke points inspiration to move on it.

But they're looking for a piece of paper that you need to get a physical body across the border.

The ideas don't.

The ideas good and bad travel.

And I think your book is really good at the idea of just how much of a two-way street this is.

This isn't just Nazi propaganda coming here, this is Nazis going, "Oh, you have a lot to teach us."

- Yeah, yeah.

You know, Ken, when I watched "U.S. and the Holocaust," one of the pieces of film that you had that I was shocked by, I had to stop it and go back and keep rewinding it and watching it again, is that you had footage, not just the still images and some of the short video clips that a lot of us have seen from the German American Bund Rally in February, 1939 at Madison Square Garden, but you had sound of the speakers.

Two of them, Fritz Kuhn, who was the head of the German American Bund, who has this very thick German accent.

And he ends up in jail for embezzlement before we're pretty far into World War II.

Oh, yeah, exactly.

It turns out a lot of these guys are crooks.

Weird, right?

Authoritarianism and corruption go together.

It's crazy that way.

"Why is that you don't want the rule of law?

"Oh, I see."

But you also had this guy named Gerhard Wilhelm Kunze, K-U-N-Z-E. Until I saw that footage in your film, I always assumed that he had a big thick German accent just like Fritz Kuhn.

He does not at all.

He's the propaganda minister for the Bund.

He's born in the United States.

He's absolutely pro-Nazi.

He says in court he hoped to renounce his U.S. citizenship and go fight with the Nazis against the U.S. Army in the case of armed conflict between our countries.

When I heard him speak in your film, I went back and I looked at the text of what he said at that speech.

And one of the things he said that day in Madison Square Garden was, "It has always been American "to protect the Aryan character of this nation."

And he talked about anti-race mixing laws, and he talked about the genocide of the Native Americans, and he talked about segregation and all this American-as-apple-pie racism stuff.

And, yes, he was right about that.

And the Nazis did, you know, talking about holding up a book, I brought the James Q. Whitman "Hitler's American Model" book, so you could see to credit.

'Cause he's done so much of the original archival research about the Nazis sending over a lawyer named Heinrich Krieger to the University of Arkansas Law School to study American race laws to help them form the Nuremberg laws.

To find out that the Nazis looked at American race relations and that they thought that lynching was uncivilized.

They thought that our lynch laws in the southeast and the de facto legal lynching of Black Americans was something that they, as Nazis, couldn't countenance.

But they wanted to build on the ideas of it.

I mean, that is humbling to us to say the least in terms of our moral role here and what it means for our moral responsibility to fix it.

- I agree.

And I think that since we are so interested in boldface names and famous people.

We've brought up Father Coghlan and Charles Lindbergh.

There's George Sylvester Viereck, is that how you pronounce his name?

But there's Henry Ford.

And can we stop?

This is one of the titans of American industry, you know, who's held up as an example of this, who is so virulently antisemitic that he believes that Jews are responsible for the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the change he's detected in the taste of his favorite candy bar.

And more importantly, he buys The Dearborn Independent, turns it into the second largest circulation newspaper in the country and then reprints issue after issue after issue, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," which we know is this late-19th century Russian hoax, which is the most, you can't really read it today and not cringe at its sort of overt antisemitism.

I mean, this is all out in the open.

And you describe, in your book, you say, "A double helix "of the violent Nazi and Nazi-supporting threat "in the United States.

"It was part foreign and part domestic, "part propaganda and part armed paramilitary."

How homegrown are these ideas, where do they stem from, where do you think American fascism is unique from other national fascist movements?

I could just tell you maybe as a little bit of a silver lining.

I'm making a film on the American Revolution, which is not 55 white guys in Philadelphia deciding everything and not dealing with slavery, but dealing with union.

It's really about the most diverse group of people who came together to make it.

And it's uncomfortable with all of the undertow that everybody from George Washington on down has.

But, you know, the militias, the dirty militias often disappeared.

And the guys who won the war, the Continentals, were this were ragtag group of, you know, ex-cons and teenagers and unemployed and recent Irish and German immigrants and Black, both free and runaway, people.

And, you know, just an amazing assortment, as polyglot as you could possibly imagine.

The idea that all of these 13 colonies, let alone with their diverse interests, could come together to create the country with all of the asterisks and all of the yes buts, is pretty amazing.

And yet at the same time, all of this other stuff is somehow incubating, not necessarily on the backburner.

- Yeah, that's right.

I'm very interested in the sort of transnational character of authoritarianism and fascism.

And you see that you mentioned Henry Ford.

I mean, from people reading my book, anecdotally what I hear is the most shocking moment in the book is when I recount how a reporter from a Detroit newspaper went and met with Hitler in his office in Munich before he became chancellor, and what Hitler wanted to talk about was his admiration for Henry Ford.

And he had a portrait of Henry Ford on the wall behind his desk.

The German language edition of "The International Jew," which Henry Ford published in nine languages, including German, was incredibly influential.

The head of the Hitler Youth in Germany says that it was Henry Ford who opened his eyes to the Jewish problem and made him want to become a national socialist.

I mean, there is a transnational, two-way street going on there.

And you do see, both then and now, you see authoritarians try to cross borders and support one another and try to build up each other's movements.

That said, there is no such thing as foreign fascism.

Fascism always is nationalist.

Fascism is always the most patriotic thing in the world.

And you'd never import a fascism from another country to your own, because it will always be about you being the super patriot of your own country.

And so you see these things that are incredibly nationalistic, incredibly specific to the location and to the political movements that exist there before the rise of an authoritarian fascist movement.

But they rhyme with each other.

There's a reason that Hitler and Mussolini got along so well.

There's a reason that Hitler was so supportive of the Nazi movements here in the United States.

There's a reason that the American hard right right now is doing their conferences in Hungary with Viktor Orban.

- In love with Viktor Orban, yeah.

- There's a reason that, for all the other things that he's doing in the world and in his own country, Vladimir Putin nevertheless finds time to interfere in the democracies around the world and to push pro-Putin, pro-authoritarian parties everywhere he can.

In the United States, in France, in Germany, everywhere.

There is a transnational character of authoritarian movements.

And that happens over time.

But when it rises in your own country, you know, it's the cross and the flag, and it's the most patriotic thing imaginable.

And one of the things that anti-fascists need to learn is how to recognize the signs, how to speak the language, and how to interrupt some of the ways that those kinds of movements market themselves to people and make themselves popular.

It is a popular message to tell people that, "We were a great nation and we're not.

"We've been victimized, we've been humiliated.

"We need to get our pride back.

"The law can't help us.

"We need extraordinary measures.

"Violence is purifying and noble.

"We need to do something desperate."

I mean, those are famous fascist motivators, and they're alive and well right now in our country.

- In our country.

And it's always creating an other.

Right now it's the immigrant, but it always has lots of subgroups that include, once again, American Jews, and Jews in particular across across the world.

Could you tell us briefly the story of Henry Hoke?

I mean, the advertising executive who's basically, you know, a Woodward and Bernstein of following the paper trail.

- God, I love the story of Henry Hoke because he's totally forgotten in history, and he shouldn't be.

I would love for him to be famous again.

But also he was just a citizen.

He was a regular guy.

He had a little trade publication.

He was an expert in direct mail advertising.

He would like help people design, you know, 3 by 5 cards that would have the maximum effect in terms of making people try this new product.

He was an ad guy.

And his son went off to university, his son went to the University of Pennsylvania.

And he contacted his dad not long after he'd been away at Penn to tell his dad that he was unhappy at school and he maybe wanted to come home.

He maybe didn't wanna stick it out.

His dad pressed him on what was going on.

And he said that one of the things that made for a very unsettling atmosphere on campus was that they were getting just inundated with tons and tons of anonymous propaganda that was antisemitic, pro-German, pro-Nazi, and reactionary in ways that he felt was uncomfortable.

And Henry Hoke thought this must be some sort of scandal at Penn.

And so he started looking into it at Penn and contacting professors.

And then pretty soon he realized it wasn't just at Penn, it seemed to be in Philadelphia more broadly.

He contacted other dads with other kids at other schools, realized it was at those schools, then realized it wasn't just at these universities and in these university towns, it was that every insurance agent in the country was receiving this stuff, every dentist office, public school teachers.

Every type of organization that you could imagine to which you could affix a mailing list was getting this propaganda by the ton.

As a direct mail expert, he actually knew how to follow that stuff to its source and figure out who was doing it.

He recognized it as expensive, as state-of-the-art, as very well done.

He recognized that somebody needed to be sort of masterminding it.

And he traced it back to German consulates, to George Sylvester Viereck, who was the top Nazi propaganda agent in the United States, and ultimately to the U.S. Congress, where two dozen senators and U.S. congressmen were helping Viereck distribute this stuff, often at taxpayer expense using the congressional franking privilege.

He started publishing articles about it in his little trade publication.

You know, this wasn't The Washington Post, it was just, you know, Henry Hoke's advertising magazine.

But he followed that thing and lobbied and had this just sense of purpose about it as a regular citizen that changed the world, changed the country.

- So maybe "Prequel" could be a manual.

I mean, it's filled with people, or so-called ordinary Americans, right, like who sort of rise up.

And let's name a few names.

Let's say Gerald Nye of North Dakota and Burton Wheeler from Montana and Hamilton Fish from New York.

These are people in active service of German Nazi propaganda and of American Nazi homegrown interests.

And what ultimately holds them in check are the actions of people like Hoke and ordinary people who are inventing a playbook to do that.

I mean, perhaps we spend way too much time in conversations like this, and we're not composing the mailer, the direct mailer that goes to the people or the post or the blog or whatever it takes to get to the people, to perhaps have them disengaged, to pry their hands from the gun a little bit, of the certainty that they have, the great certainty, which is the death of democracy is of course certainty that you know," These people are bad, "these people are wrong, "these people are poisoning us."

So I mean, do you see that?

What's the playbook of "Prequel" in terms of resisting this?

It's in the Hoke story, it's in a lot of other people.

- Yeah, I mean, ultimately the story that I tell in "Prequel" is a hopeful one.

Because the effort of activists like Henry Hoke, we were just describing what he did.

Journalists.

I single out people like Drew Pearson who was a crusading columnist, very influential in his day.

And also just a regular line reporter named Dillard Stokes at The Washington Post, who did amazing shoe-leather reporting exposing this stuff.

Ultimately the impact of all that stuff being exposed, and the Justice Department did good work in exposing it too in some of the prosecutions that they brought, the exposure meant that the American people knew that this was happening.

And so they were able to connect these messages that they had been receiving that didn't really seem to come from anywhere identifiable, they were able to connect them to a massive German government, Nazi government operation targeting the American public.

And they were able to see which Americans knowingly confederated with that effort in order to help the Germans against America.

And once the American people knew that, they took action, and they voted out almost all of the members of Congress and senators who were involved in this stuff.

And people like Gerald Nye and Burton Wheeler and Hamilton Fish, they weren't just run-of-the-mill, backbench members of Congress.

These were the most powerful members of Congress that there were, they were household names.

Everybody thought that Gerald Nye was gonna be presidential timber at some point.

Hamilton Fish was from one of the most powerful political families in American history at that point.

And, you know, Hamilton Fish I think was in Congress 22 or 24 years before he was voted out.

But when he was voted out, it was a campaign that was about his working with a Nazi agent.

And it was that exposure which drove him out 'cause the American people didn't want it.

And that, to me, is hopeful because that gives you the playbook, which is expose it, explain it, put it in context, and let the American people stand up for democracy when you have given them the tools to do so.

- Well, that's clearly what the whole nub of it is.

I mean, I think of the Steinbeckian, almost, hog farmer in Iowa who I wanna reach.

I mean, this is called Unum.

It's not pluribus.

It's Arthur Schlesinger saying there's too much pluribus and not enough unum.

And how it is that we get together and decide... We're not gonna decide, as you say, all one thing.

It's not gonna be a kumbaya moment, except of course, when in the CCC we raise our tools together in common purpose.

But we do wish there was a way that we could reach that guy who believes that Joe Biden didn't do this that is okay if we're gonna close our borders.

These are people who do not see immigrants and probably could use some immigrants to help their business.

But no matter.

And that somehow anything that's going on that is against Donald Trump has been manufactured by his enemies, when in fact those who sort of participate in looking at this see that there's sort of real church and state delineations within the state between investigations and things like that.

So I just wanna go back and I wanna reach the hog farmer and just, "Please, please don't believe this."

Remember, Iowa went for Barack Obama in 2008, and now it seems kind of lost to the lie.

- Well, you know, I think that it is a tide that rises and falls, and it is something that is always with us.

I do think that we have to be alert and aware to the fact that there are ultra-right movements in America that wax and wane, that are always here.

There is a very homegrown form of antisemitism, racism, and authoritarianism anti-democratic movement, which we've just always got.

And what that means is that part of a democracy is that you never eradicate your enemies.

You just prevail for a while.

And then you live to fight another day.

And that's part of what we do.

I wanna mention one other thing about one of those members of Congress that you mentioned.

Burton Wheeler.

Burton Wheeler did a lot of good things in his time as a Montana senator.

But one of the things that he did is that he prevailed upon the Attorney General to fire a prosecutor who was investigating the Nazi propaganda scheme that Burton Wheeler was part of.

And not one but two U.S. attorneys general, Francis Biddle and Tom Clark, acceded to those demands.

And Harry Truman acceded to Burton Wheeler.

Harry Truman was friends with Burton Wheeler from the Senate.

And Burton Wheeler came to Harry Truman as president and said, "You gotta get rid of that prosecutor "'cause I'm in his crosshairs."

And Truman did it and got rid of him.

And the lesson for that is not, "Oh, you know, Truman's a bad guy," or, "Boy, that Burton Wheeler, he's a bad guy," it's that we need to protect law enforcement.

The rule of law doesn't stand up for itself.

If we allow people with power, people with political influence to pressure it and to make sure and to see that people with power get that preferential treatment and stuff gets buried.

We are in a moment right now where a major issue of accountability with the leader of the anti-democratic movement on the ultra-right in America right now is facing multiple forms of legal accountability.

Standing up for the legal system to ensure that it can do its work without fear or favor and without physical intimidation is the challenge of our time right now.

Burton Wheeler's story tells us that from the 1930s and the 1940s, but I feel like we don't know that enough in our gut right now about how much... Justice Department isn't perfect.

Attorneys general and district attorneys, they aren't perfect.

But the judiciary must be protected.

And you can't let your feelings about individual Supreme Court justices or ethics rules or how things are going in the judiciary occlude the view that I think we must all agree on, that we have a tripartite system of government, and the judiciary has to be free to hold people to account in accordance with the rule of law.

And there isn't enough urgency and even, I think, discussion about that right now.

And that's the moment that we are in, with judges getting swatted and having bomb threats at their home and death threats and prosecutors wearing bulletproof vests and having to move their families.

This is a really serious part of what we're contending with right now.

- Yeah, I agree.

I've developed a real odd-couple unlikely friendship with Michael Luttig, who I presume politics are the exact opposite of mine.

But we share a similar love of the systems and the need to protect them, the rule of law.

Feel the same thing about Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, people who I probably have never agreed on a particular thing, but I agree wholeheartedly in what they're doing.

We interviewed somebody that you interviewed for our last Unum conversation, Cassidy Hutchinson, a kind of real hero of what's going on, a so-called ordinary person who...

I did ask her a tough question at the end, I hope it was a tough question, which is, "You were right there.

"You saw the tantrums, "you saw the food go up against the wall.

"You saw this, the magnetometers, "you heard about going to the Congress, "no, going back to the White House, "and yet you were still gonna go down to Mar-a-Lago "and take a job.

"And finally your mom just sort of said, "'You can't fix him.'"

And she goes through two depositions with a Trump lawyer and suddenly has a crisis of conscience.

So how do we do this?

She said to us, "If Trump is elected "as the next president of the United States, "we are one step closer to operating under a dictatorship."

And, Liz, I think, said it even plainer than that, "We're sleepwalking towards a dictatorship."

- Yeah.

I mean, one of the things that I think is important for us, for people like you and me, in learning Cassidy Hutchinson's story, is that there has to be a Cassidy Hutchinson story.

We as a country tell each other stories about American history and about American citizenship that are, in effect, fables that teach us values and that give us heroes to want to be like.

And learning about the heroic exploits of the normal people among us and the difficulties that they faced and how they found the strength to do the right thing and then telling that story in a way that it can be absorbed and repeated and understood as one of the hallmark moral moments of our time.

That's an important part of standing up for our country, making sure that those stories are known.

I want people to know about Henry Hoke.

I want people to know about John Rogge, I want people to know about Dillard Stokes, I want people to know about Cassidy Hutchinson, I want people to know about what Liz Cheney, who I disagree with on everything, what she sacrificed for what she believes is the constitutional order of the United States.

Understanding those stories, telling those stories and protecting those people is part of how we try to save the country.

- Part of my mantra for the last few years has been something that a colleague of mine gave me from the novelist, Richard Powers, that the best argument in the world, and my goodness, all we do is argue, won't change a single person's point of view.

The only thing that could do that is a good story.

And I've fortunately been in the story, I hope good story business, for 50 years, trying to tell stories with exactly that in mind.

That you're not putting your thumb on the scale.

There's always undertow.

The greatest hero always has extraordinary flaws.

I mean, we're dealing with George Washington right now, who, we don't have a country, we have historians who go, "I don't believe in the great man theory of history, "but I don't see how we're a country "without George Washington."

I mean, it's pretty amazing.

And yet also, right after Yorktown, he's going, "Okay, that regiment and that regiment, "go get all the Black people "and send them back to their plantations."

And a slave owner and very complicated.

But that's who we are.

So I'm wondering, and I may be going back and combining two different things we've dealt with.

One is this idea of holding up the Cassidy Hutchinsons and the Liz Cheneys and the Hokes and the other people who are doing the good work, creating stories and examples, but also saying, how do you get to those people who simply sweep all of this under the rug and believe that, you know, evangelists who think that this is, you know, this clearly un-Christian man is sort of the new savior and the new Messiah?

I mean, there's a moment in the "Wizard of Oz" when the water is doused on the Wicked Witch, and all of a sudden instantly her legions who have been the scariest people on earth, besides the monkeys, are suddenly liberated.

"Hail, Dorothy."

Do we have in our storytelling toolbox the ability to provide us, we've given you Liz Cheney, somebody from your own ranks, we've given you a young ingenue from your own ranks, Cassidy Hutchinson, at what point do you stop discrediting them and go, "Oh my God, maybe they're right.

"What can I do?"

I mean, even Chris Sununu, the governor of my state, who's been pretty good, suddenly says he'll vote for Trump of course.

I mean, you just go, "But wait a second."

What does that mean?

What kind of profile in lack of courage does that represent?

- And actually just this week, I was struck by Marco Rubio endorsing Trump as well because of Marco Rubio's own words when he was running against him in 2016.

Something along the lines of like, "At some point, people, "you're gonna snap out of it "and have to justify your support of this man, "and how will you possibly..." I mean, no, that was Marco Rubio telling the American public, "Beware the sway of a figure like this."

And here he is endorsing him not that much long later after all of the things that have happened ever since.

One of the things that I did recently just to kind of recenter myself and "Clear!"

shock is I went back and I read The New York Times article that ran on the front page of The New York Times the day the Senate Intelligence Committee report came out about Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by Marco Rubio, that report chaired by Marco Rubio finding that Putin wanted to interfere in the election in order to promote the election of Trump and that the Trump campaign welcomed it and that the Trump campaign knowingly fed proprietary helpful information about the campaign to a Russian intelligence officer.

Like, oh, that happened.

Wait a second.

And that was a Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee that concluded that.

And the man who helmed that report is now endorsing Trump.

And so what I take away from that is that there is no bucket of water.

There is no magic disqualification potion.

There is no... You know, this is not a canary with a thing over the cage and it wakes up and it starts singing again.

This is an ongoing fight.

This will be the fight of our generation.

And I think part of what's important about it is to recognize that it is not just the work of one man.

That there is something in the American public that wants to hear that democracy and the rule of law and science and expertise and journalism and all these things are weak and they're not up to the terrible challenges that we face now and we need a real man to actually do it.

We have to understand the appeal of that and argue not just against Trump, but against authoritarianism.

We need to argue not just against the creeping threat of fascism and authoritarianism in our country, we need to argue for democracy.

And I think so many of us who feel like we're in the fight for democracy right now also indulge in real cynicism and even schadenfreude about the failings of our democracy.

And we run down Congress and we talk about people running for office as being, you know, not credible people or people not really doing anything except for themselves.

Every time we are running down democracy, we're doing the work of authoritarian projects.

- That's right.

I spoke last year to Nicolle Wallace you know, back in February after the president had visited Ukraine and said, you know, this is elder abuse.

You know, I mean, this guy has legislative accomplishments that are as great, maybe the third greatest in the last 100 years after FDR and LBJ.

And if he cured cancer, people would be complaining that he had put too many doctors out of work.

You cannot buy a break.

And I agree that that's cynicism or that passivity or that willingness to be distracted by the latest little thing is the greatest danger to us.

I mean, we know we've met the enemy, and he is partially us, to paraphrase Pogo from the '40's.

But what do we do?

You've talked about Hoke and about Rogge, and there's one other character that I'd love you to talk about is Leon Lewis as somebody who, you know, can be an example for us, should be an example for us.

- Leon Lewis, I feel like is almost on the border of, again, I do not believe in the great man theory of history, but Leon Lewis is somebody who's almost not quite a regular American.

Like what he did was so heroic and so above and beyond that I think most people righteously cannot ever imagine themselves doing something that brave.

Leon Lewis was a World War I veteran.

He was a lawyer, he was Jewish, he lived in Los Angeles.

And he, in the pre-World War II era, 1930s Los Angeles, realized that this Friends of New Germany group, which soon became the German American Bund and the Silvershirts paramilitary anti-Semitic militia that was forming, and the appeal that these groups had to members of the LAPD and members of the National Guard, and even to active-duty Marines that were working in the Port of Long Beach, he started to realize, like, "Oh, I've seen these sorts of dynamics at work in Europe, "and I know where this goes.

"And we should at least be monitoring this "to figure out what's going on.

"Particularly 'cause law enforcement "appears to be kind of partial toward it.

"Like law enforcement is not only not alarmed here, "but there appear to be a lot of cops "who are involved in these movements."

And Leon Lewis, almost single-handedly, formed a private spy operation in which he recruited fellow World War I veterans.

He was Jewish, but the people he recruited were almost all not Jewish.

They were German Americans 'cause they were the ones who would fit in in these undercover groups that he wanted them to join.

And they collected information on what these fascist groups were doing, and they fed it to law enforcement.

And it took them nearly a decade of collecting this information and trying to feed it to law enforcement before finally the Justice Department took them seriously and collected all the work that they had done.

But they laid the groundwork for the sedition trial of 1944, for the court martials of multiple U.S. Marines who were shoveling U.S. military materiel out of the armories to these fascist paramilitary groups.

It was an absolutely uphill battle.

It was incredibly trepidatious.

There's evidence that at least one of Leon Lewis's spies may have been murdered by members of the group that he had infiltrated.

It was just incredibly dangerous work.

And he just ferreted away at it for more than a decade.

Was never thanked for it, never got any credit for it.

His obituary, when he died as a relatively young man, he had a heart attack while he was driving on the Pacific Coast Highway one day, his obituary made no mention of the fact that he had done this.

But he's a big part of the reason that we know what American fascists were doing at that time, and he's a big part of the reason that Nazi organizing, Nazi-funded paramilitary work in the United States was exposed and stopped.

- You used the word rhyme a while ago, and clearly that echoes from a phrase that we think Mark Twain said that, "History doesn't repeat itself, "but it rhymes."

I've felt that in all of my work, every project that we've done, whether it's about the Brooklyn Bridge or about the celibate religious sect, the Shakers, obviously about the Roosevelts or Vietnam or the U.S. and the Holocaust, it's rhyming powerfully, sometimes terrifyingly in the present, particularly the latter film.

We advanced its release a year, which caused great disruptions among the heroic people who were doing the day-to-day on that.

But we wanted it out to be part of the conversation of the midterms.

You know, I just think, as we leave today, I'd love to have you just...

I mean, I think you've said it well.

"Prequel," I think for many people might seem to be like, "Yikes, this is going to happen to us."

But "Prequel" also means, "Here are all the people "that made sure that that did not happen.

"And so take from them the manual, "the operating instructions, "on how you maintain a democracy."

So talk to me about your level of hopefulness and what the rest of us, Rachel, need from you in order to sort of... We don't write these books just to see our name in print.

What do you want us to do?

- I think that the most important, and it's maybe gonna sound too simple, but the important thing is to name the thing that we are fighting for.

And in all of its flaws, in all of its frustrations, we have an ancient... By the world's standards, we now have an ancient democracy.

And that means we've got a judiciary, it means we've got a legislature, and it means we've got an executive branch, and they are co-equal.

And we maybe need to relearn, A, that we've got those things, and, B, why we have them, because we have to both fight to preserve them and we have to use those things as our weapons to fight.

And so you cannot fight an authoritarian movement with an authoritarian impulse.

You have to stand up for democracy.

If one of the things we're worried about is the scapegoating of the other, scapegoating of immigrants, the scapegoating of trans people, the scapegoating of liberals and the opposition and the deep state as vermin that must be exterminated in this country, you can't do that by saying the people who are making those claims are themselves vermin, are themselves monsters, are themselves inhuman.

Instead, you have to embody the values that you are fighting for.

Nobody who is fighting for the future of this country right now, against me, however different they may be approaching this, however opposite they may be approaching this, none of them is subhuman.

Nobody is a monster.

Nobody is irredeemable.

I believe as a matter of my faith, that everybody, until the last breath on Earth, is capable of salvation, is capable of change, is capable of redemption.

You can repent and you can be redeemed until your last breath on earth.

And I believe that is a matter of faith, but I really believe that as a matter of our democracy as well.

And I don't think that anybody, the farmer that you are imagining talking to right now in Iowa, anybody who is absolutely susceptible to these conspiracy theories and these comforting stories about strong man leadership and how that will save us, I don't believe that any American is beyond seeing through that someday.

And we just need to make good arguments, to not give up on anybody, to stand up for our democracy, to protect the rule of law, to make sure that people who are working as cogs in the democratic machine, election workers, people like Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman, people like that are protected, that their stories of heroism are told and advanced.

There's no magic bullet.

There is no magic bullet.

We have to do all of these things all at once.

But Americans before us, specifically in the 1930s and the early 1940s, were up against something a little bit like this that also had Nazi Germany pulling in that direction while they were steamrolling all of Europe and killing 6 million Jews.

They were up against a form of American fascism that had centripetal force from what was going on in Europe that is nothing like what we are dealing with today.

And if Americans in that context could beat it here, we can beat it here.

We can, we have to.

And it's just gonna take a lot of work.

- You know, going back to that old democracy, in its founding document, a few phrases after the famous ones that we all know, Thomas Jefferson wrote, "All experience has shown "that mankind are disposed to suffer "while evils are sufferable."

What it seems to me that he was saying is that all human experience heretofore has been essentially under authoritarian rule, that we have been subjects, superstitious peasantry, and not this new thing that was being suggested by this deeply flawed, but beautiful new model, which is citizens.

And I think what you have said is a kind of call to the highest office in the land, which is citizenship, in which you participate, you know the history, that's called civics, which we don't teach, but it doesn't take much to understand the basic things that you and I have been talking about today.

And to engage in them, actually, to not argue as much as to tell the stories and then do the legwork necessary to protect this beautiful, but clearly flawed thing.

Rachel, it is such a pleasure to talk with you.

Rachel's book is "Prequel," which is, "An American Fight Against Fascism."

I urge everyone to buy the book and then join.

Thank you so much.

- Thank you, Ken.

This is fantastic conversation.

You've inspired me, really.

Every time I talk to you, I feel smarter and brighter and more energized.

I really, really, really love talking to you about this stuff.

- Same here, same here, thank you so much.

This has been a wonderful, wonderful hour.

It's really, really great.