April 25, 2023 • 40 mins
Back in World War II, a group of Nazis tried to overthrow American democracy, with the help of some U.S. congressmen, no less. We’re talking about The Great Sedition Trial of 1944, and it’s the subject of a history podcast hosted by Rachel Maddow called ULTRA. SNAFU and ULTRA have so much in common. Both podcasts are deep-dives into important moments in American history, which are largely forgotten – and yet, they feel oddly prescient to our world today. Ed recently sat down with Rachel to discuss these two extraordinary stories, the roots of authoritarianism, and how it all weaves into current events.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome back, SNAFU listeners. We're back to discuss a dicey subject,
a far right coup, an attempt to overthrow the democratically
elected government of the United States of America. Because you'll
never dee our country with weakness. You have to show
(00:24):
strength when you have to be strowing.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
We all know.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Nope, not that one.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
In the United States District Court Washington DC.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
Chief Justice Edward C. Iiker. Besides, at the trial of
thirty elled seditionists. Here we go. That's the one that's right,
my friends. Back in nineteen forty four, the Nazis tried
to overthrow the US government with the help of some
US congressmen know less. I'm talking about the Great Sedition
Trial of nineteen forty four, which is the subject of
(01:03):
a history podcast hosted by Rachel Maddow called Ultra. Now.
Ultra and Snaffo have a lot in common. Both podcasts
are deep dives into important moments in American history which
are largely forgotten, and yet they feel oddly prescient to
our world today. So naturally I wanted to sit down
(01:24):
and talk with Ultra's creator. So today I'm coming into
your feed with a treat. My conversation with Rachel Maddow
about Ultra and Snaffo. We talk about these two extraordinary stories,
forgotten history in general, the roots of authoritarianism, and how
it all weaves into current events. Rachel is well known
for being a rigorous on air journalist, author, and podcaster.
(01:47):
She's curious, a deep thinker, profoundly insightful, and pretty damn funny,
all of which makes her a hell of a lot
of fun to talk to. I really enjoyed this conversation.
I learned a lot, and I think you will too.
So here it is my chat with Rachel Matdow. Hello.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
Hi, It's Rachel Meadow.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Rachel Maddow. It's so cool to meet you. This is awesome.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
Nice to meet you too. It's great. This is very exciting.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
Indeed, I agree, Thanks so much for jumping into our
SNAPU universe. So what's happening? Where are you?
Speaker 2 (02:27):
I'm in rural dirt road, western Massachusetts road.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
I don't know that.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
It's kind of the ambient vibe where I have. We're
really out in the middle of nowhere. It's fantastic.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
What are you hiding from, Rachel? What's going on?
Speaker 3 (02:43):
Humans?
Speaker 1 (02:45):
Yeah? Okay, that's fair. Are you in a bunker?
Speaker 2 (02:50):
What's weird? Actually, and this is true. The cottage that
I'm in right now, this little house in which we
built this studio, audio studios and stuff so I can
do my TV show from here, has a legit nuclear
bomb shelter in the basement, like.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
Because you built it or because it was already there.
Speaker 3 (03:06):
No, it was there.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
It was built by whoever had this house in the fifties.
And it's got concrete like this and triple rebar. And
when we came in to like flatten out the floor
and make everything normal, the contractor was like, we have
to leave the basement.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
Can I tell you something. I'm not like a crazy
prepper kind of doomsday person, but like I would like
to have a bunker.
Speaker 3 (03:32):
It just seems like a nice option.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
Yeah, all right, well this is fun. I would love
to go deeper into apocalypse preparation, but we have some
really fun stuff to talk about. First of all, your
podcast Ultra was the number one podcast on Apple for
what like five weeks, a bunch of weeks.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
A bunch of weeks it was number one, and then
it was less than number one, and then it was
back up to number one again.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
So It was really a surprise and very exciting.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
Yeah, and very well deserved. I listened to it twice.
I just had it was so fun. I listened to
it all the way through and then I was like,
I got to hear that again, but I don't have
as much time, so I listened to it at like
one point eight speed. And it's funny when you listen
to something sped up like that, everyone sounds unbelievably intelligent.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
I had the opposite problem, which is that my doctor,
who is you know, my doctor, like kind of my friend.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
But my doctor.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Texted me all concerned that there was something wrong with
me because he had listened to Ultra and he was like,
you really, I know you've had issues with depression and
stuff in the past, and you really turns out he
was listening to it on zero point seventy five.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
Oh my god.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
He thought I was really down.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
That's amazing.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
He thought he had special medical insights into what was
going on with this podcast.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
That's amazing. Great Ultra. It is an extraordinary story. It
is extremely well told. It's incredibly engaging and really really fun.
And I would love to just for our SNAFU listeners
if you haven't heard, Ultra. Can you break it down,
just like, what's the basic story.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
The basic story is, in the lead up to World
War Two, there was a really really big Nazi and
I mean that specifically. I don't mean like Nazis, I
mean we're the Nazis, big Nazi effort to try to
exploit what the Germans called kernels of disturbance in the
United States, and so they were trying to propagandize us
(05:41):
really heavily. They supported a bunch of American native fascist
movements that were way scarier than we remember them in history,
and they paid a bunch of members of Congress and
senators to be on their side for this effort. And
it all sort of culminated in the Great Sedition Trial
(06:01):
of nineteen forty four, when nearly thirty of the folks
who were involved with the Nazis in these various plots
got put on trial and they got off.
Speaker 3 (06:14):
There was a mistrial, and they were all let go.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
It's so profound, this story, it is so intense, and
it's totally mind blowing. In your description just now, you
said the trial was the Great Sedition Trial of what
nineteen forty four forty four, that implies that this was
like a landmark event that we all know and understand.
(06:38):
What's so incredible about this story to me, among there's
lots of things incredible about it, but one of the
most incredible things is how forgotten it is. And it's
something that I think our podcasts share, which is the
sort of forgotten history stories that are that are insanely important.
And one of the historians in your podcast actually says
(07:00):
at one point, I'm a PhD in history, and most
of my colleagues who are PhDs in history have never
heard of this, and so then, of course the general
public has no idea, and I wonder why is it forgotten?
Speaker 2 (07:17):
Well, it's you know, I was thinking about the parallels
with that and with Able Archer with what you cover
in SNAFFU, and I think there there is something that's
like important for us to reflect on as people who
tell stories and who are interested in history, which is
that sometimes the reason something is forgotten is because of
(07:39):
who won and who lost.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
Right Like, of course, the good history is told the winners.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
History is told by the winners, and sometimes what the
winners most want is for us to forget that the
thing happened and that's definitely. I feel like that's a
little bit of the story that you unfold in in Snaffu,
Like with the the doing its assessment of what happened
with Abel Archer and whether it was a close call,
They're like, no, no, no, it was fine.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
It was no big deal.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
And that's part of the history that you uncover and
that you tell in the story. But it's also important
that the CIA wants it to be minimized, wants it
not to be remembered as a significant thing. And a
sort of different version of that happens in my story
where the good news, ending to the extent that there
is one, is that all of the elected officials who
(08:29):
were part of this plot, who are the real bad
guys here, the public knew enough, they found out enough
about what those guys were up to that they voted
them all out of office, like one of them got
voted out of office. And so even though a lot
of them were household names, really influential members of the
House in the Senate at the time, once they got
turfed out by voters who were disgusted by their behavior,
(08:51):
they went from being big deals to being losers.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
And the losers get forgotten, and.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
So part of the history that we have to contend
with is how much are the players here minimized in history,
either because it's convenient for somebody or because the good
guys won, And how much does that affect whether this
story is easy to find or easy to be told.
So I just I find that dynamic interesting because you
(09:16):
have to put yourself then in the story. In terms
of how hard it is for you to find these things.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
Well, it's a little bit of a scary reality when
you think the forgotten stories of history are very often
some of the most important because the reason that they're
forgotten is that they were either painful or embarrassing or
extremely problematic. And yet those are the things that we
do have the potential to learn the most from.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
And the other circumstances in which that happens is because
it was a really scary thing and some Americans or
some characters in the story rose up and did the
right thing and neutralized the danger right here, right. Yeah,
But that's also those heroes. We also need to learn
that story. So it's it can't it can be like
a deliberate shunt this away. Let's not think about it,
(10:05):
But it can also be a like who close call,
let's forget about it?
Speaker 1 (10:09):
Yeah you know, yeah, okay, so how the hell did
you find it? Like with SNAFU, we just we knew
we wanted to do a podcast, and we wanted to
do something kind of history and irreverent, and we set
about looking for the thing. Did you know you wanted
to do a podcast and look for something exciting and
(10:31):
meaningful or did you just dig up this story or
stumble on it and then say this has to be told?
Speaker 2 (10:38):
So I was I sort of feel like the all
the best stories that I've ever been involved in telling
come out of ignorance, like, come out of legitimate curiosity,
like I don't understand where this came from, or this
thing that everybody thinks makes sense to them doesn't make
sense to me. And I was going through that sort
of train of thought just as part of my news
(11:00):
you know, my day job at MSNBC, thinking about Holocaust denial.
So we're having this big upsurge in anti Semitism and
kind of anti semitism wedded to political power, which is
a very dangerous thing. And at the core of all
of it is this sort of burbling thing where people
say the Holocaust didn't happen. And I've always felt like
it's not obvious to me how that can exist. Intellectually, sure,
(11:27):
like it's one thing to be prejudiced, it's another thing
to say this obvious thing and history of which we
have all this proof, I choose to.
Speaker 3 (11:33):
Contend that it didn't happen.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
And so I was interested in where that came from,
and particularly where it came from in the first instance,
like how early on did people start denying it?
Speaker 3 (11:44):
And what I.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
Found, to my surprise, is that Holocaust denile really came
from the United States. It didn't come from Germany, and
it happened really early on. It happened in the forties.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
Wow, which is.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Nuts, because there's all these American Gish and refugees from Europe,
including refugees from Germany coming here, who are eyewitnesses, who
are survivors who had family members killed or who were
liberating the concentration camps. I mean, so all this irrefutable evidence,
and yet this thing emerges in the late forties in
the United States and then starts pinging around the world.
Where we're going to say that didn't happen? So interested
(12:18):
in where the hell did that come from and why
and who were the characters who dreven this up knowing
that it was false but concocting it for a political reason.
And in trying to figure that out, which is a
story I'm still going to tell, but I haven't gotten
there yet, I realized that actually those folks came out
of this milia during World War two in the United
(12:38):
States that we've forgotten about, and they all went on
trial and oh my god, the judge died in the
middle of the trial and they were all set free,
and then what happened to them is so it ended
up being kind of the prequel to the story that
I wanted to tell, but I realized there was enough
there that I should probably tell it.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
That's that is fascinating. I feel like that's of how
some of the best stories do come about.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
Can I ask you a Snafu question about that, Liz? Yeah,
I thought the thing that I most admired about the
storytelling in Snaffhu was your sort of fearlessness about casting
doubt on the story. So obviously there's I mean, for
everybody's listened to it, like, there's lots of twists and
lots of you know, backing up and reconsidering stuff that's
earlier been presented. And I wondered, when you constructed the
(13:25):
story and when you decided to do it, did you
know about the doubt and uncertainty and sort of woliness
of the bottom line of that story when you started,
or did you think it was a more certain story
when you started and you only got to that you know,
more mature, complex bottom line once you were into it
(13:48):
in the middle of the research.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
Yeah, it was the latter. Like everything you read about
Able Archer in the sort of to the extent that
it's in the zeitgeist, just little blips and blurbs. It
sounds like a very cut and dry thing, but like anything,
the more you dig, the more nuanced it becomes. And
then it became for us as storytellers just feeling a
(14:12):
kind of responsibility to reflect that nuance and the complexity.
You know, even some even historians, have some different perspectives
on it that are very meaningful. I don't know. We
really wanted to lean into the integrity of it, and
that made it a little bit messier of a story,
but ultimately the messiness kind of gave rise to some
(14:36):
really exciting questions and kind of pontifications, and that's really
where we wound up, kind of putting the focus in
that last episode.
Speaker 2 (14:45):
Well, it makes it more profound and more real. It
also makes it more of a contribution to the history
of it. Right to have all the interviews that you
do and to have an honest reflection of the real
you know, the legitimate contention with the various facts and
the various perspectives on it. It's a it's a real
work of history with all the jokes included. But also
(15:09):
it does get you to a more profound place in
terms of getting I think, encouraging critical thinking about seemingly cut.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
And dry episodes.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
I just thought that was really, like I said, mature
and complex and cool.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
Go on.
Speaker 3 (15:28):
Also, you guys, you're just so handsome, and it was.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
No, that's I'm literally like getting chills. That means so
much to hear from you, Rachel. I really really appreciate that.
And yeah, we really put a ton of work into it,
and so that means a lot.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
I think you had it harder than I did, because
in my case, the Great Sedition Trial of nineteen forty
four is forgotten. The only histories of it have been
written by people who simple thized with the fascist defendants,
and so all the histories of it have all been
about how they were railroaded, and it was terrible that
these people were put on trial, and how ridiculous this
contention that the Nazis were working with any Americans? Do
(16:13):
you believe how prejudiced the Department of Justice is against
good American conservatives? And so all the history, all the
history of it was really biased and all in the
same direction. And nobody had ever revisited that history looking
at it from a more balanced perspective, And so I
didn't have to I didn't have to contend with sort
(16:35):
of you know, great nuanced, honest broker perspectives on both sides.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
There was just a bunch of clap trap about it.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
And nobody had ever done a broader, less I think,
in my from my perspective, less biased look at the evidence.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Wasn't I thought Roggy wrote a book. But were you
able to dig that up? Is that is that findable?
Speaker 2 (16:57):
Ish?
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (16:58):
I mean, if you want to get a copy of it,
I can maybe give you a deal. I think I
own all the copies of it. It never had like
a second printing. It never went anywhere.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
So sorry to tell us who Roggy is, because I
just brought him up out of the blue.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
So Roggy is O John Roggy, who is a German American.
Interestingly enough, he grows up in the United States, son
of German immigrants, speaking German at home, and he's this
wonderkin's lawyer and prosecutor and Justice Department official, and he
ends up being the crusading prosecutor who tries to bring
the sedition trial home, who tries to finish it, who
(17:34):
fights against the mistrial. And the great twist in my
story in Ultra is when as the trial's falling apart,
Raggy gets leave to go to Germany and he gets
to try to prove his contention that these weren't just
(17:54):
conservative Americans who had their own anti Semitic fascist ideas
that were actually working with the Nazi government. They're being
paid by the Germans in many instances. He gets to
prove that from the German side, and he interviews all
these Nazi prisoners and they in fact give him all
the dirt on all the Americans they were working with,
and so he's able to prove the collusion, if you will,
from the other side, and by the time he brings
(18:18):
those findings home to the United States, we have won
the war. Everybody wants to move on. Roggy has become
a political figure in a way that he is very
much demonized by one side and then ultimately by the
other side, and nobody really wants to hear it. And
so he does create this really valuable historical record. But
(18:41):
by the time it lands he finally gets it published,
he has to fight with the Justice Tournament to get
it declassified and all this stuff. By the time it
finally lands in the public record, it's nineteen sixty one,
and this is ancient history, and nobody buys the book,
and nobody reviews it, and nobody stocks it in their archives,
and it just disappears until you know, all these decades later,
(19:04):
that story ends up being of interest to me because
of its resonance with our current situation and it's and
thank god he did it, because the records there, even
though nobody cared about it in his lifetime and he
died in obscurity.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
It just raises so many fascinating questions and issues. Okay,
so anti semitism or racism in all its forms, these
are things that most people agree are bad, right, bad
and gone. Yeah, you're right. Yeah. They also seem embedded
(19:38):
in most modern emergencies of fascism.
Speaker 3 (19:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
I know, throughout history, totalitarianism pops up in many different
forms all over the political spectrum, but fascism, and I
ask this not as any kind of indictment of conservatism,
but fascism in particular, seems to bubble up from the right.
Why do you think that is.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
Well, I mean, I do think that there's you know,
there's different types of authoritarianism, right, and there's definitely you know,
left wing authoritarianism as well, and the when you're talking
about you know, tyrannical forms of government, right wing authoritarianism, which.
Speaker 3 (20:22):
In some instances is fascism.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
Not always, but sometimes this is fascism ends up having
a recurrent appeal in our country and in other Western democracies.
I think because people don't like democracy. I mean, the
basic idea of democracy is that everybody gets a say.
And if you think that you and people like you
(20:45):
should get a say but other people shouldn't, that's a
that's an instinct that people have. And there can be
left wing authoritarianism, which is a different drive and comes
from a different place and leads to murder, leads to
mass murder in general as well.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
Just as much mayhem.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
But on the right, the way it works is me
and my people were the only people who should count
as citizens. The other people who are technically you're telling
me how to be part of this democracy are lesser
than or evil or their interlopers, and we not only
need to exclude them from the decision making process, but
we need to blame them for all the things that
are going wrong here, and we need to exclude them
(21:23):
from the decision making process and punish them for all
the terrible things they've done.
Speaker 3 (21:27):
Because if it was just us in charge, everything would
be fine.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
And that's the basic idea, and that's why authoritarianism on
the right almost always.
Speaker 3 (21:37):
Comes with antisemitism.
Speaker 2 (21:40):
It's either going to be anti semitism or it's going
to be some other thing that looks like anti semitism
that is directed towards some other minority, because you need
some out group to define as the source of all
the problems, because you, the in group, are perfect, and
if you were just given full control, everything would be fine.
And it's just it's dumb, and it's simple and it's
(22:01):
recurrent and.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
Well, humans, we're dumb. Us are dumb, we do dumb things.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
And we don't remember what the old dumb things were.
So the new dumb things come around and we're like,
whoa wait, you're telling me it's the Jews.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
You know. Shocker, there's that great Hegel quote. The only
thing we've learned from history is that we learn nothing
from history. And I wonder if you have any thoughts
on how we can do better. It feels like in
with modern technology, we should be able to be better
at learning from from history, but maybe we're just not
(22:37):
wired for it in our DNA.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
I think that you know, fart jokes helps, like you know,
like when you know you did that whole riff on,
like the Valentines, Like I have so many treasons that
I love you, like Valentine's for Spies huh, and the
well fake game show that you inserted into, like like
the it's storytelling skill and up being the entertainment quotient
(23:03):
in direct ratio with the complexity of the story that
you're telling. That helps, Like, I don't know that that's
technological innovation, but it's it's an evolution of our sort
of ambition to make these stories understandable, memorable, repeatable, you know,
both on TV and in this kind of podcast and
book world that I'm into. I try to tell stories
(23:26):
in such a way that they stick. And so even
if you can't persuade somebody else to listen to Ultra,
or you can't persuade somebody else to read my book
about Spiro Agnew, if you listen to the podcast or
if you read that book, you will have absorbed the
story well in us that you can give somebody the
gist of it and pass on. And that's what you're
(23:46):
doing in SNAFU. That's the whole idea of doing real
history that's rigorous and honest and intellectually engaged with the
ambiguities and all those things. But it's also fun and
is also not homework. It's just it's something that's a pleasure.
And I think that's you know, if you've got those skills,
(24:07):
that's a that's a mitzvah, that's a service to humanity
into our country to use them that way.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Yeah, you got to give give people some some candy
with the vegetables, right, you gotta.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
Do you got to do your Nancy astrologer stuff. It
turns out to be important.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
It is. It's crazy how important astrology was in the
Reagan administration. It's crazy. It's absolutely crazy.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
Growing up in the eighties in San Francisco, I have
to tell you the fact that Nancy's astrologer was in
San Francisco, I remember being like kind of proud.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
Yeah, oh that's funny.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
This idea, like the rasputant pulling the strings in the
Reagan white House might be this lady in knob Hill.
Speaker 3 (24:49):
It's actually like a source of regional pride for me.
Speaker 1 (24:53):
Oh that's great. I think the thing that I feel
like is missing is And maybe this is a maybe, Rachel,
maybe this is a book pitch for us. Maybe we
do a book together, and it's basically like the lessons
of history. These are the lessons, and then here are
the events that teach us those lessons. So you can
no longer say like, well, I don't know how to
interpret that, or I don't know what to learn from that,
(25:14):
Like we need a compendium of the lessons.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
Lesson seventeen, Stop blaming the juice.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
Yeah, okay, here's what that's one, right, Here's why this
is a book. We need to write have a phone.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
That connects between Washington and Moscow.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
That you have that phone, Yeah, and you and use
it occasionally.
Speaker 3 (25:36):
But I think that.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
It's interesting to me that there really is a lot
of interest in documentary and history stuff. That's a surprise
to me, Like seeing like how popular documentaries are on Netflix.
When Netflix offers you in with literally equal effort, like
clicking on one side of the screen versus the other,
you can watch anything. So many people opt for documentaries.
(26:00):
There there's something there isn't There's a rational and constructive
human hunger to learn stuff. And that's that to me
is very heartening. You know, I feel like that's room
to run.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
I agree. I agree with that, and I actually I
think the success of your podcast to me was very
reassuring just the you know, I think the lessons baked
into your podcast are so important and meaningful and prescient,
and I loved I was just so thrilled that that
so many people were we're getting.
Speaker 3 (26:35):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
Both of these stories able archer or or Snaffo, i
should say, and ultra our podcasts. And you have an
incredible career as a broadcaster, legendary broadcaster for many many years.
How how is this kind of segue back into audio gone,
(27:02):
And how did it affect how you consider telling this story.
Speaker 2 (27:05):
It's a good question because definitely sort of falling in
love with the story and doing the research and realizing
like kind of where it was going and what the
bottom line of it was going to be and everything,
it was definitely an open question as to how to
produce it, like make I could. I know that I
could write a book about it, because I'm almost done
with the book about it now, or I could try
to produce it for TV, or try to make it
(27:27):
into a movie or do some other thing. And ultimately
I decided to do it as a podcast because I'm
kind of just in love with audio. I think that
my background in radio was I don't know if that
if it stamped a love for audio on me, or
if I was just wired that way anyway. But when
I even when I when I do TV shows and
(27:49):
stuff like, I don't really think about what stuff looks like.
I think of the visual presentation of whatever's going on.
It's just kind of decoration for the words. And when
you do audio, there's this I don't know, level of.
Speaker 3 (28:05):
I don't want to say, like.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
I don't want to be too sappy about it, but
there's a sort of level of intensity, like you're kind
of speaking into somebody's ear rather than sitting in front
of them talking, and it's it's it's can be intense,
and it's also unforgiving. I think you have to be
more precise in an audio environment and than you do
when you have the help of visuals to distract people.
(28:28):
So I find it to be more challenging and more rewarding.
It's also kind of more more the way that I
like to absorb information. I don't like to watch stuff
as much as I like to listen to it.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
That's interesting, I'm I feel similarly, I found myself just
devouring podcasts and audio books in a way that I
never really consumed television. I mean I watched TV, of course,
but I never I was never like a, you know,
addicted to shows or anything. And I but then podcasts
would just suck me in and I realized, like, this
(29:00):
is this incredibly powerful vehicle, and and the way that
we work with a microphone it's incredibly intimate, and I
love that.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
I think it's like, oh god, I'm pregnant, I'm very powerful.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
My voice is very powerful. No, But I feel when
I watch a documentary, especially something historical, a lot of
times you can feel the sweatiness of the visuals there.
They clearly had to dig for something to put here,
Like okay, we're panning over photographs. Here, we're you know,
(29:39):
we've got some weird visual metaphor happening, or we're looking
at uh, like reenactment footage. Sometimes it just feels like, okay,
we get it, Like you had to put something there
and you didn't have something. But with audio, there's you
don't there's no cheating, you just it's all. It's all there.
Speaker 2 (29:57):
It's all speaking right into the person ear, which is
inside their head, which is right next to their brain.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
It's like a laser.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
And I found that in an interesting way when we
put out the first couple episodes of Ultra, we didn't
make up any of the sound. All the sound that
we used was was real tape. But a lot of
people thought that we had faked the news broadcasts, that
we had found actors who were going to speak in
weird old trans Atlantic accent.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
It is hard to believe that broadcasters spoke in this
heightened tone like that. Yeah, it's it's kind of wild,
but they really.
Speaker 2 (30:33):
Told ourselves that old timey news was all very objective
and stayed and there wasn't any opinion or emotion in it. Yeah,
because they really did talk like this and then threw
all sorts of shade and their side and they were,
you know.
Speaker 3 (30:47):
And lots of asides and lots of opinion, and that's
what it sounded like.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
Well, so tell us what's happening next with Ultra because
there's a very exciting sort of next step.
Speaker 3 (30:57):
Yeah, this is I kind of can't believe it.
Speaker 2 (30:59):
But Steven Spielberg optioned Ultra to make a movie out
of it, and so he's this you know, he's an
up and comer, is the one that sort of one
to watch.
Speaker 1 (31:13):
First of all, huge congratulations, and it's a no brainer.
This makes perfect sense. The story is so riveting.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
I hope that that is true.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
I mean what I am learning is as I am
sort of tiptoeing into this side of the world where
I have never been before, is that a movie is
going to be made?
Speaker 1 (31:31):
Is you know, yeah, we're going to ruin it with visuals.
Speaker 3 (31:37):
Well no, but like is a movie going to be made?
Speaker 2 (31:39):
Like until someone is buying a ticket, receiving their change,
and walking into a dark room where a projector is running.
I don't believe the movie exists, you know what I mean, Like,
there's a lot that goes in between optioning a movie
and then it actually coming into the world, and.
Speaker 3 (31:54):
So I believe that it's going to be a movie.
But we'll see. I know, I'm you know, I did this.
Speaker 2 (31:59):
My previous podcast was called Bagman, was about Spiro Agnew
and that's also in the movie making process. That's going
to be a focus features film. But it just takes
a long time, and there's all sorts of things that happen.
And I mean, I'm used to a daily production cable
news world, where you think of something in the morning
and it's on TV at night and then you have
to stop thinking about it because you got to do
something else the next day.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
And that's how we make movies. Rachel No, I know,
I know, there's a whole rigamarole, and you're very wise
to kind of hold off on on the excitement of
having a movie until you're walking in the door. But
just having a movie optioned by someone like Spielberg is
(32:41):
so thrilling or focused features for the Agnews story. Those
are just such credible storytellers and you can sort of
feel confident that they'll be these stories will be handled
very well. I feel like this would be such a
cool movie.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
Both of them feel like movies to me too, Like
I like, you know, I watch as much you know,
streaming television and miniseries and all that stuff as anybody else.
But I do feel like both of these stories like
seem like, you know, sit down for two hours and
watch a single arc in the movie theater like its
just and I would. I'd just love for it to
work in both cases.
Speaker 1 (33:15):
So I think I should play Oh, John Rocky, Okay,
you think I should be Roggy in this movie?
Speaker 2 (33:20):
Right?
Speaker 1 (33:20):
I mean that just skills obvious, obvious obvious. Okay. So
both of our podcasts have a lot of present day
relevance and impressions, and yours, I think is is really
(33:43):
really intensely relevant to right now. So in what at
what stage in your process did the events of January
sixth happen? Was that? Were you already working on this podcast?
Speaker 2 (33:59):
No, I wasn't working on the Sedition trial by that point.
Speaker 3 (34:04):
What was weird is that the.
Speaker 2 (34:05):
Resonance stuff like I felt like I got a little
kick in the teeth from the universe because when the
first episode of Ultra was posted, when we published was
the day that the Oathkeeper's sedition trial started, so.
Speaker 3 (34:20):
That was that was weird.
Speaker 2 (34:23):
And then it was eight episodes and by the time
we got to episode eight was when we were waiting
for the verdict. So it was really just that was uncanny.
I just felt like that was a that was a
little that was unsettling almost, But you know it also
I feel like you do in trying to pick the
right story to tell, you have to believe in the
story on its own terms, sort of regardless of the resonance. Like, yes,
(34:46):
there is going to be resonance, and there are lessons
to be learned and things to be gleaned from the
past that could help us in our current contention. But
I don't feel like you can you can't let that
drive you know, that has to a little bit of
that is just going to be stuff that you can't
see along the way, I was thinking about it with
Able Archer and Snafu with the before the Korean airliner
(35:10):
was shot down, you highlight how the Russians were essentially
paying were giving bounties to their own side for people
who were spotting radar incursions on the radar, and so
you were essentially saying, like, that's bad news in terms
of what eventually happens with the civilian airliner being shot
down after being misidentified as a military threat in Russian airspace. Well,
(35:35):
you know, just within the past week, Russia just gave
medals to the fighter pilots who dumped all that fuel
on the US Reaper drone over the Black Sea.
Speaker 3 (35:44):
I mean, it's the same.
Speaker 2 (35:46):
I mean, I'm sure you weren't thinking about that when
you didable Archer and suffer, But Russia is doing the
same thing in monetarily and with military awards, rewarding people
for doing incrediblyckless things that threaten conflict between the East
and West.
Speaker 1 (36:03):
Sure. Well, one of the things that I think was
really profound in Ultra was what this idea that emerged
that there was no legal remedy for all of this
horrible behavior. The legal remedies failed, there was a mistrial,
and then the government basically just gave up on prosecuting
(36:26):
these misdeeds and because they didn't want the headache, and
so Roggy sort of makes the case in that Meet
the Press interview that the remedy then must be just
transparency and information, getting it out there, educating the public.
That's all you can do. When this bad behavior can't
(36:48):
be actually meaningfully reprimanded in some way, all you can
do is expose it. And I think that's very powerful.
It's also a little bit terrifying and disheartening, and I
wonder if you feel like the January sixth trials have
They've obviously gone a lot smoother than the Great Sedition trial,
(37:13):
but is that evidence of progress? Do you think we're
doing better?
Speaker 2 (37:19):
It's interesting because it really does. I think it cuts
both ways. I think there is a case to be
made by looking back at the fascist movements in this
country that were supported by Nazi Germany, including an element
of that that operated inside the Congress. There's ways to
look back at that, all that story that I tell
(37:40):
in Ultra and say, you know, some of these things
were legit crimes and people should have gone to jail,
and that like crimes were committed here and crimes should
have been prosecuted as such, including by some members of Congress,
where that escaped punishment. I think largely because they bullied
the Justice Department into not coming out for them, and
(38:00):
we're seeing a little bit of that happening. We're seeing
some resonance with some of the stuff that's happening right
now in our new cycle. But the other, the sort
of good news side of what Roggy was preaching on
Meet the Press that day is that, you know, the
people need to know this information. The legal remedy isn't there.
The legal remedy is that the legal solution has failed.
(38:22):
The legal remedy cannot be used as are the sum
total of our response here. What has to happen is
that the people need to know. And obviously people knowing
isn't an end in itself. That doesn't fix it. What
he means, what goes unsaid, is that when the people know,
they will act and if and you can trust Americans
to defend our democracy and to stand up against tyranny
(38:45):
and to reject authoritarianism and anti semitism and all the
other things that go with it, but they need to
know that it's happening. And so that one calls on
all of us. Yeah, I mean, it calls on journalists,
it calls on activists, it calls on everybody. Who can
contribute to the public record, including you know, dorks making
podcasts down the road. But hopefully it means that a
(39:08):
well informed public will make righteous decisions.
Speaker 3 (39:11):
And I want to believe that I.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
Do too, And I think that's a good note to
end on. Rachel, thank you so so very much for
jumping in the booth here and having this chat with us.
It's just really, really fun, and I wish you the
best of luck with the movie adaptation.
Speaker 3 (39:31):
Thanks Ed, Thanks this has been super fun. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (39:37):
SNAFU is a production of iHeartRadio, Film Nation Entertainment, and
Pacific Electric Picture Company in association with Gilded Audio. It's
executive produced by me Ed Helms, Milan Papelka, Mike Falbo,
Andy Chuck, and Whitney Donaldson. Our lead producers are Sarah
Joyner and Alyssa Martino. Our producer is Carl Nellis, Associate
producer Tory Smith. Our senior editor is Jeffrey Lewis via
(40:00):
Canny as our production assistant. Our creative executive is Brett Harris.
Engineering and technical direction by Nick Dooley. Special thanks to
Alison Cohen and Matt Eisenstadt.
Welcome back, SNAFU listeners. We're back to discuss a dicey subject,
a far right coup, an attempt to overthrow the democratically
elected government of the United States of America. Because you'll
never dee our country with weakness. You have to show
(00:24):
strength when you have to be strowing.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
We all know.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Nope, not that one.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
In the United States District Court Washington DC.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
Chief Justice Edward C. Iiker. Besides, at the trial of
thirty elled seditionists. Here we go. That's the one that's right,
my friends. Back in nineteen forty four, the Nazis tried
to overthrow the US government with the help of some
US congressmen know less. I'm talking about the Great Sedition
Trial of nineteen forty four, which is the subject of
(01:03):
a history podcast hosted by Rachel Maddow called Ultra. Now.
Ultra and Snaffo have a lot in common. Both podcasts
are deep dives into important moments in American history which
are largely forgotten, and yet they feel oddly prescient to
our world today. So naturally I wanted to sit down
(01:24):
and talk with Ultra's creator. So today I'm coming into
your feed with a treat. My conversation with Rachel Maddow
about Ultra and Snaffo. We talk about these two extraordinary stories,
forgotten history in general, the roots of authoritarianism, and how
it all weaves into current events. Rachel is well known
for being a rigorous on air journalist, author, and podcaster.
(01:47):
She's curious, a deep thinker, profoundly insightful, and pretty damn funny,
all of which makes her a hell of a lot
of fun to talk to. I really enjoyed this conversation.
I learned a lot, and I think you will too.
So here it is my chat with Rachel Matdow. Hello.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
Hi, It's Rachel Meadow.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Rachel Maddow. It's so cool to meet you. This is awesome.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
Nice to meet you too. It's great. This is very exciting.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
Indeed, I agree, Thanks so much for jumping into our
SNAPU universe. So what's happening? Where are you?
Speaker 2 (02:27):
I'm in rural dirt road, western Massachusetts road.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
I don't know that.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
It's kind of the ambient vibe where I have. We're
really out in the middle of nowhere. It's fantastic.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
What are you hiding from, Rachel? What's going on?
Speaker 3 (02:43):
Humans?
Speaker 1 (02:45):
Yeah? Okay, that's fair. Are you in a bunker?
Speaker 2 (02:50):
What's weird? Actually, and this is true. The cottage that
I'm in right now, this little house in which we
built this studio, audio studios and stuff so I can
do my TV show from here, has a legit nuclear
bomb shelter in the basement, like.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
Because you built it or because it was already there.
Speaker 3 (03:06):
No, it was there.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
It was built by whoever had this house in the fifties.
And it's got concrete like this and triple rebar. And
when we came in to like flatten out the floor
and make everything normal, the contractor was like, we have
to leave the basement.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
Can I tell you something. I'm not like a crazy
prepper kind of doomsday person, but like I would like
to have a bunker.
Speaker 3 (03:32):
It just seems like a nice option.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
Yeah, all right, well this is fun. I would love
to go deeper into apocalypse preparation, but we have some
really fun stuff to talk about. First of all, your
podcast Ultra was the number one podcast on Apple for
what like five weeks, a bunch of weeks.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
A bunch of weeks it was number one, and then
it was less than number one, and then it was
back up to number one again.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
So It was really a surprise and very exciting.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
Yeah, and very well deserved. I listened to it twice.
I just had it was so fun. I listened to
it all the way through and then I was like,
I got to hear that again, but I don't have
as much time, so I listened to it at like
one point eight speed. And it's funny when you listen
to something sped up like that, everyone sounds unbelievably intelligent.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
I had the opposite problem, which is that my doctor,
who is you know, my doctor, like kind of my friend.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
But my doctor.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Texted me all concerned that there was something wrong with
me because he had listened to Ultra and he was like,
you really, I know you've had issues with depression and
stuff in the past, and you really turns out he
was listening to it on zero point seventy five.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
Oh my god.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
He thought I was really down.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
That's amazing.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
He thought he had special medical insights into what was
going on with this podcast.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
That's amazing. Great Ultra. It is an extraordinary story. It
is extremely well told. It's incredibly engaging and really really fun.
And I would love to just for our SNAFU listeners
if you haven't heard, Ultra. Can you break it down,
just like, what's the basic story.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
The basic story is, in the lead up to World
War Two, there was a really really big Nazi and
I mean that specifically. I don't mean like Nazis, I
mean we're the Nazis, big Nazi effort to try to
exploit what the Germans called kernels of disturbance in the
United States, and so they were trying to propagandize us
(05:41):
really heavily. They supported a bunch of American native fascist
movements that were way scarier than we remember them in history,
and they paid a bunch of members of Congress and
senators to be on their side for this effort. And
it all sort of culminated in the Great Sedition Trial
(06:01):
of nineteen forty four, when nearly thirty of the folks
who were involved with the Nazis in these various plots
got put on trial and they got off.
Speaker 3 (06:14):
There was a mistrial, and they were all let go.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
It's so profound, this story, it is so intense, and
it's totally mind blowing. In your description just now, you
said the trial was the Great Sedition Trial of what
nineteen forty four forty four, that implies that this was
like a landmark event that we all know and understand.
(06:38):
What's so incredible about this story to me, among there's
lots of things incredible about it, but one of the
most incredible things is how forgotten it is. And it's
something that I think our podcasts share, which is the
sort of forgotten history stories that are that are insanely important.
And one of the historians in your podcast actually says
(07:00):
at one point, I'm a PhD in history, and most
of my colleagues who are PhDs in history have never
heard of this, and so then, of course the general
public has no idea, and I wonder why is it forgotten?
Speaker 2 (07:17):
Well, it's you know, I was thinking about the parallels
with that and with Able Archer with what you cover
in SNAFFU, and I think there there is something that's
like important for us to reflect on as people who
tell stories and who are interested in history, which is
that sometimes the reason something is forgotten is because of
(07:39):
who won and who lost.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
Right Like, of course, the good history is told the winners.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
History is told by the winners, and sometimes what the
winners most want is for us to forget that the
thing happened and that's definitely. I feel like that's a
little bit of the story that you unfold in in Snaffu,
Like with the the doing its assessment of what happened
with Abel Archer and whether it was a close call,
They're like, no, no, no, it was fine.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
It was no big deal.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
And that's part of the history that you uncover and
that you tell in the story. But it's also important
that the CIA wants it to be minimized, wants it
not to be remembered as a significant thing. And a
sort of different version of that happens in my story
where the good news, ending to the extent that there
is one, is that all of the elected officials who
(08:29):
were part of this plot, who are the real bad
guys here, the public knew enough, they found out enough
about what those guys were up to that they voted
them all out of office, like one of them got
voted out of office. And so even though a lot
of them were household names, really influential members of the
House in the Senate at the time, once they got
turfed out by voters who were disgusted by their behavior,
(08:51):
they went from being big deals to being losers.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
And the losers get forgotten, and.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
So part of the history that we have to contend
with is how much are the players here minimized in history,
either because it's convenient for somebody or because the good
guys won, And how much does that affect whether this
story is easy to find or easy to be told.
So I just I find that dynamic interesting because you
(09:16):
have to put yourself then in the story. In terms
of how hard it is for you to find these things.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
Well, it's a little bit of a scary reality when
you think the forgotten stories of history are very often
some of the most important because the reason that they're
forgotten is that they were either painful or embarrassing or
extremely problematic. And yet those are the things that we
do have the potential to learn the most from.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
And the other circumstances in which that happens is because
it was a really scary thing and some Americans or
some characters in the story rose up and did the
right thing and neutralized the danger right here, right. Yeah,
But that's also those heroes. We also need to learn
that story. So it's it can't it can be like
a deliberate shunt this away. Let's not think about it,
(10:05):
But it can also be a like who close call,
let's forget about it?
Speaker 1 (10:09):
Yeah you know, yeah, okay, so how the hell did
you find it? Like with SNAFU, we just we knew
we wanted to do a podcast, and we wanted to
do something kind of history and irreverent, and we set
about looking for the thing. Did you know you wanted
to do a podcast and look for something exciting and
(10:31):
meaningful or did you just dig up this story or
stumble on it and then say this has to be told?
Speaker 2 (10:38):
So I was I sort of feel like the all
the best stories that I've ever been involved in telling
come out of ignorance, like, come out of legitimate curiosity,
like I don't understand where this came from, or this
thing that everybody thinks makes sense to them doesn't make
sense to me. And I was going through that sort
of train of thought just as part of my news
(11:00):
you know, my day job at MSNBC, thinking about Holocaust denial.
So we're having this big upsurge in anti Semitism and
kind of anti semitism wedded to political power, which is
a very dangerous thing. And at the core of all
of it is this sort of burbling thing where people
say the Holocaust didn't happen. And I've always felt like
it's not obvious to me how that can exist. Intellectually, sure,
(11:27):
like it's one thing to be prejudiced, it's another thing
to say this obvious thing and history of which we
have all this proof, I choose to.
Speaker 3 (11:33):
Contend that it didn't happen.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
And so I was interested in where that came from,
and particularly where it came from in the first instance,
like how early on did people start denying it?
Speaker 3 (11:44):
And what I.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
Found, to my surprise, is that Holocaust denile really came
from the United States. It didn't come from Germany, and
it happened really early on. It happened in the forties.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
Wow, which is.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Nuts, because there's all these American Gish and refugees from Europe,
including refugees from Germany coming here, who are eyewitnesses, who
are survivors who had family members killed or who were
liberating the concentration camps. I mean, so all this irrefutable evidence,
and yet this thing emerges in the late forties in
the United States and then starts pinging around the world.
Where we're going to say that didn't happen? So interested
(12:18):
in where the hell did that come from and why
and who were the characters who dreven this up knowing
that it was false but concocting it for a political reason.
And in trying to figure that out, which is a
story I'm still going to tell, but I haven't gotten
there yet, I realized that actually those folks came out
of this milia during World War two in the United
(12:38):
States that we've forgotten about, and they all went on
trial and oh my god, the judge died in the
middle of the trial and they were all set free,
and then what happened to them is so it ended
up being kind of the prequel to the story that
I wanted to tell, but I realized there was enough
there that I should probably tell it.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
That's that is fascinating. I feel like that's of how
some of the best stories do come about.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
Can I ask you a Snafu question about that, Liz? Yeah,
I thought the thing that I most admired about the
storytelling in Snaffhu was your sort of fearlessness about casting
doubt on the story. So obviously there's I mean, for
everybody's listened to it, like, there's lots of twists and
lots of you know, backing up and reconsidering stuff that's
earlier been presented. And I wondered, when you constructed the
(13:25):
story and when you decided to do it, did you
know about the doubt and uncertainty and sort of woliness
of the bottom line of that story when you started,
or did you think it was a more certain story
when you started and you only got to that you know,
more mature, complex bottom line once you were into it
(13:48):
in the middle of the research.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
Yeah, it was the latter. Like everything you read about
Able Archer in the sort of to the extent that
it's in the zeitgeist, just little blips and blurbs. It
sounds like a very cut and dry thing, but like anything,
the more you dig, the more nuanced it becomes. And
then it became for us as storytellers just feeling a
(14:12):
kind of responsibility to reflect that nuance and the complexity.
You know, even some even historians, have some different perspectives
on it that are very meaningful. I don't know. We
really wanted to lean into the integrity of it, and
that made it a little bit messier of a story,
but ultimately the messiness kind of gave rise to some
(14:36):
really exciting questions and kind of pontifications, and that's really
where we wound up, kind of putting the focus in
that last episode.
Speaker 2 (14:45):
Well, it makes it more profound and more real. It
also makes it more of a contribution to the history
of it. Right to have all the interviews that you
do and to have an honest reflection of the real
you know, the legitimate contention with the various facts and
the various perspectives on it. It's a it's a real
work of history with all the jokes included. But also
(15:09):
it does get you to a more profound place in
terms of getting I think, encouraging critical thinking about seemingly cut.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
And dry episodes.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
I just thought that was really, like I said, mature
and complex and cool.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
Go on.
Speaker 3 (15:28):
Also, you guys, you're just so handsome, and it was.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
No, that's I'm literally like getting chills. That means so
much to hear from you, Rachel. I really really appreciate that.
And yeah, we really put a ton of work into it,
and so that means a lot.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
I think you had it harder than I did, because
in my case, the Great Sedition Trial of nineteen forty
four is forgotten. The only histories of it have been
written by people who simple thized with the fascist defendants,
and so all the histories of it have all been
about how they were railroaded, and it was terrible that
these people were put on trial, and how ridiculous this
contention that the Nazis were working with any Americans? Do
(16:13):
you believe how prejudiced the Department of Justice is against
good American conservatives? And so all the history, all the
history of it was really biased and all in the
same direction. And nobody had ever revisited that history looking
at it from a more balanced perspective, And so I
didn't have to I didn't have to contend with sort
(16:35):
of you know, great nuanced, honest broker perspectives on both sides.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
There was just a bunch of clap trap about it.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
And nobody had ever done a broader, less I think,
in my from my perspective, less biased look at the evidence.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Wasn't I thought Roggy wrote a book. But were you
able to dig that up? Is that is that findable?
Speaker 2 (16:57):
Ish?
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (16:58):
I mean, if you want to get a copy of it,
I can maybe give you a deal. I think I
own all the copies of it. It never had like
a second printing. It never went anywhere.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
So sorry to tell us who Roggy is, because I
just brought him up out of the blue.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
So Roggy is O John Roggy, who is a German American.
Interestingly enough, he grows up in the United States, son
of German immigrants, speaking German at home, and he's this
wonderkin's lawyer and prosecutor and Justice Department official, and he
ends up being the crusading prosecutor who tries to bring
the sedition trial home, who tries to finish it, who
(17:34):
fights against the mistrial. And the great twist in my
story in Ultra is when as the trial's falling apart,
Raggy gets leave to go to Germany and he gets
to try to prove his contention that these weren't just
(17:54):
conservative Americans who had their own anti Semitic fascist ideas
that were actually working with the Nazi government. They're being
paid by the Germans in many instances. He gets to
prove that from the German side, and he interviews all
these Nazi prisoners and they in fact give him all
the dirt on all the Americans they were working with,
and so he's able to prove the collusion, if you will,
from the other side, and by the time he brings
(18:18):
those findings home to the United States, we have won
the war. Everybody wants to move on. Roggy has become
a political figure in a way that he is very
much demonized by one side and then ultimately by the
other side, and nobody really wants to hear it. And
so he does create this really valuable historical record. But
(18:41):
by the time it lands he finally gets it published,
he has to fight with the Justice Tournament to get
it declassified and all this stuff. By the time it
finally lands in the public record, it's nineteen sixty one,
and this is ancient history, and nobody buys the book,
and nobody reviews it, and nobody stocks it in their archives,
and it just disappears until you know, all these decades later,
(19:04):
that story ends up being of interest to me because
of its resonance with our current situation and it's and
thank god he did it, because the records there, even
though nobody cared about it in his lifetime and he
died in obscurity.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
It just raises so many fascinating questions and issues. Okay,
so anti semitism or racism in all its forms, these
are things that most people agree are bad, right, bad
and gone. Yeah, you're right. Yeah. They also seem embedded
(19:38):
in most modern emergencies of fascism.
Speaker 3 (19:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
I know, throughout history, totalitarianism pops up in many different
forms all over the political spectrum, but fascism, and I
ask this not as any kind of indictment of conservatism,
but fascism in particular, seems to bubble up from the right.
Why do you think that is.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
Well, I mean, I do think that there's you know,
there's different types of authoritarianism, right, and there's definitely you know,
left wing authoritarianism as well, and the when you're talking
about you know, tyrannical forms of government, right wing authoritarianism, which.
Speaker 3 (20:22):
In some instances is fascism.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
Not always, but sometimes this is fascism ends up having
a recurrent appeal in our country and in other Western democracies.
I think because people don't like democracy. I mean, the
basic idea of democracy is that everybody gets a say.
And if you think that you and people like you
(20:45):
should get a say but other people shouldn't, that's a
that's an instinct that people have. And there can be
left wing authoritarianism, which is a different drive and comes
from a different place and leads to murder, leads to
mass murder in general as well.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
Just as much mayhem.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
But on the right, the way it works is me
and my people were the only people who should count
as citizens. The other people who are technically you're telling
me how to be part of this democracy are lesser
than or evil or their interlopers, and we not only
need to exclude them from the decision making process, but
we need to blame them for all the things that
are going wrong here, and we need to exclude them
(21:23):
from the decision making process and punish them for all
the terrible things they've done.
Speaker 3 (21:27):
Because if it was just us in charge, everything would
be fine.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
And that's the basic idea, and that's why authoritarianism on
the right almost always.
Speaker 3 (21:37):
Comes with antisemitism.
Speaker 2 (21:40):
It's either going to be anti semitism or it's going
to be some other thing that looks like anti semitism
that is directed towards some other minority, because you need
some out group to define as the source of all
the problems, because you, the in group, are perfect, and
if you were just given full control, everything would be fine.
And it's just it's dumb, and it's simple and it's
(22:01):
recurrent and.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
Well, humans, we're dumb. Us are dumb, we do dumb things.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
And we don't remember what the old dumb things were.
So the new dumb things come around and we're like,
whoa wait, you're telling me it's the Jews.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
You know. Shocker, there's that great Hegel quote. The only
thing we've learned from history is that we learn nothing
from history. And I wonder if you have any thoughts
on how we can do better. It feels like in
with modern technology, we should be able to be better
at learning from from history, but maybe we're just not
(22:37):
wired for it in our DNA.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
I think that you know, fart jokes helps, like you know,
like when you know you did that whole riff on,
like the Valentines, Like I have so many treasons that
I love you, like Valentine's for Spies huh, and the
well fake game show that you inserted into, like like
the it's storytelling skill and up being the entertainment quotient
(23:03):
in direct ratio with the complexity of the story that
you're telling. That helps, Like, I don't know that that's
technological innovation, but it's it's an evolution of our sort
of ambition to make these stories understandable, memorable, repeatable, you know,
both on TV and in this kind of podcast and
book world that I'm into. I try to tell stories
(23:26):
in such a way that they stick. And so even
if you can't persuade somebody else to listen to Ultra,
or you can't persuade somebody else to read my book
about Spiro Agnew, if you listen to the podcast or
if you read that book, you will have absorbed the
story well in us that you can give somebody the
gist of it and pass on. And that's what you're
(23:46):
doing in SNAFU. That's the whole idea of doing real
history that's rigorous and honest and intellectually engaged with the
ambiguities and all those things. But it's also fun and
is also not homework. It's just it's something that's a pleasure.
And I think that's you know, if you've got those skills,
(24:07):
that's a that's a mitzvah, that's a service to humanity
into our country to use them that way.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Yeah, you got to give give people some some candy
with the vegetables, right, you gotta.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
Do you got to do your Nancy astrologer stuff. It
turns out to be important.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
It is. It's crazy how important astrology was in the
Reagan administration. It's crazy. It's absolutely crazy.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
Growing up in the eighties in San Francisco, I have
to tell you the fact that Nancy's astrologer was in
San Francisco, I remember being like kind of proud.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
Yeah, oh that's funny.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
This idea, like the rasputant pulling the strings in the
Reagan white House might be this lady in knob Hill.
Speaker 3 (24:49):
It's actually like a source of regional pride for me.
Speaker 1 (24:53):
Oh that's great. I think the thing that I feel
like is missing is And maybe this is a maybe, Rachel,
maybe this is a book pitch for us. Maybe we
do a book together, and it's basically like the lessons
of history. These are the lessons, and then here are
the events that teach us those lessons. So you can
no longer say like, well, I don't know how to
interpret that, or I don't know what to learn from that,
(25:14):
Like we need a compendium of the lessons.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
Lesson seventeen, Stop blaming the juice.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
Yeah, okay, here's what that's one, right, Here's why this
is a book. We need to write have a phone.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
That connects between Washington and Moscow.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
That you have that phone, Yeah, and you and use
it occasionally.
Speaker 3 (25:36):
But I think that.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
It's interesting to me that there really is a lot
of interest in documentary and history stuff. That's a surprise
to me, Like seeing like how popular documentaries are on Netflix.
When Netflix offers you in with literally equal effort, like
clicking on one side of the screen versus the other,
you can watch anything. So many people opt for documentaries.
(26:00):
There there's something there isn't There's a rational and constructive
human hunger to learn stuff. And that's that to me
is very heartening. You know, I feel like that's room
to run.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
I agree. I agree with that, and I actually I
think the success of your podcast to me was very
reassuring just the you know, I think the lessons baked
into your podcast are so important and meaningful and prescient,
and I loved I was just so thrilled that that
so many people were we're getting.
Speaker 3 (26:35):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
Both of these stories able archer or or Snaffo, i
should say, and ultra our podcasts. And you have an
incredible career as a broadcaster, legendary broadcaster for many many years.
How how is this kind of segue back into audio gone,
(27:02):
And how did it affect how you consider telling this story.
Speaker 2 (27:05):
It's a good question because definitely sort of falling in
love with the story and doing the research and realizing
like kind of where it was going and what the
bottom line of it was going to be and everything,
it was definitely an open question as to how to
produce it, like make I could. I know that I
could write a book about it, because I'm almost done
with the book about it now, or I could try
to produce it for TV, or try to make it
(27:27):
into a movie or do some other thing. And ultimately
I decided to do it as a podcast because I'm
kind of just in love with audio. I think that
my background in radio was I don't know if that
if it stamped a love for audio on me, or
if I was just wired that way anyway. But when
I even when I when I do TV shows and
(27:49):
stuff like, I don't really think about what stuff looks like.
I think of the visual presentation of whatever's going on.
It's just kind of decoration for the words. And when
you do audio, there's this I don't know, level of.
Speaker 3 (28:05):
I don't want to say, like.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
I don't want to be too sappy about it, but
there's a sort of level of intensity, like you're kind
of speaking into somebody's ear rather than sitting in front
of them talking, and it's it's it's can be intense,
and it's also unforgiving. I think you have to be
more precise in an audio environment and than you do
when you have the help of visuals to distract people.
(28:28):
So I find it to be more challenging and more rewarding.
It's also kind of more more the way that I
like to absorb information. I don't like to watch stuff
as much as I like to listen to it.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
That's interesting, I'm I feel similarly, I found myself just
devouring podcasts and audio books in a way that I
never really consumed television. I mean I watched TV, of course,
but I never I was never like a, you know,
addicted to shows or anything. And I but then podcasts
would just suck me in and I realized, like, this
(29:00):
is this incredibly powerful vehicle, and and the way that
we work with a microphone it's incredibly intimate, and I
love that.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
I think it's like, oh god, I'm pregnant, I'm very powerful.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
My voice is very powerful. No, But I feel when
I watch a documentary, especially something historical, a lot of
times you can feel the sweatiness of the visuals there.
They clearly had to dig for something to put here,
Like okay, we're panning over photographs. Here, we're you know,
(29:39):
we've got some weird visual metaphor happening, or we're looking
at uh, like reenactment footage. Sometimes it just feels like, okay,
we get it, Like you had to put something there
and you didn't have something. But with audio, there's you
don't there's no cheating, you just it's all. It's all there.
Speaker 2 (29:57):
It's all speaking right into the person ear, which is
inside their head, which is right next to their brain.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
It's like a laser.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
And I found that in an interesting way when we
put out the first couple episodes of Ultra, we didn't
make up any of the sound. All the sound that
we used was was real tape. But a lot of
people thought that we had faked the news broadcasts, that
we had found actors who were going to speak in
weird old trans Atlantic accent.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
It is hard to believe that broadcasters spoke in this
heightened tone like that. Yeah, it's it's kind of wild,
but they really.
Speaker 2 (30:33):
Told ourselves that old timey news was all very objective
and stayed and there wasn't any opinion or emotion in it. Yeah,
because they really did talk like this and then threw
all sorts of shade and their side and they were,
you know.
Speaker 3 (30:47):
And lots of asides and lots of opinion, and that's
what it sounded like.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
Well, so tell us what's happening next with Ultra because
there's a very exciting sort of next step.
Speaker 3 (30:57):
Yeah, this is I kind of can't believe it.
Speaker 2 (30:59):
But Steven Spielberg optioned Ultra to make a movie out
of it, and so he's this you know, he's an
up and comer, is the one that sort of one
to watch.
Speaker 1 (31:13):
First of all, huge congratulations, and it's a no brainer.
This makes perfect sense. The story is so riveting.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
I hope that that is true.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
I mean what I am learning is as I am
sort of tiptoeing into this side of the world where
I have never been before, is that a movie is
going to be made?
Speaker 1 (31:31):
Is you know, yeah, we're going to ruin it with visuals.
Speaker 3 (31:37):
Well no, but like is a movie going to be made?
Speaker 2 (31:39):
Like until someone is buying a ticket, receiving their change,
and walking into a dark room where a projector is running.
I don't believe the movie exists, you know what I mean, Like,
there's a lot that goes in between optioning a movie
and then it actually coming into the world, and.
Speaker 3 (31:54):
So I believe that it's going to be a movie.
But we'll see. I know, I'm you know, I did this.
Speaker 2 (31:59):
My previous podcast was called Bagman, was about Spiro Agnew
and that's also in the movie making process. That's going
to be a focus features film. But it just takes
a long time, and there's all sorts of things that happen.
And I mean, I'm used to a daily production cable
news world, where you think of something in the morning
and it's on TV at night and then you have
to stop thinking about it because you got to do
something else the next day.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
And that's how we make movies. Rachel No, I know,
I know, there's a whole rigamarole, and you're very wise
to kind of hold off on on the excitement of
having a movie until you're walking in the door. But
just having a movie optioned by someone like Spielberg is
(32:41):
so thrilling or focused features for the Agnews story. Those
are just such credible storytellers and you can sort of
feel confident that they'll be these stories will be handled
very well. I feel like this would be such a
cool movie.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
Both of them feel like movies to me too, Like
I like, you know, I watch as much you know,
streaming television and miniseries and all that stuff as anybody else.
But I do feel like both of these stories like
seem like, you know, sit down for two hours and
watch a single arc in the movie theater like its
just and I would. I'd just love for it to
work in both cases.
Speaker 1 (33:15):
So I think I should play Oh, John Rocky, Okay,
you think I should be Roggy in this movie?
Speaker 2 (33:20):
Right?
Speaker 1 (33:20):
I mean that just skills obvious, obvious obvious. Okay. So
both of our podcasts have a lot of present day
relevance and impressions, and yours, I think is is really
(33:43):
really intensely relevant to right now. So in what at
what stage in your process did the events of January
sixth happen? Was that? Were you already working on this podcast?
Speaker 2 (33:59):
No, I wasn't working on the Sedition trial by that point.
Speaker 3 (34:04):
What was weird is that the.
Speaker 2 (34:05):
Resonance stuff like I felt like I got a little
kick in the teeth from the universe because when the
first episode of Ultra was posted, when we published was
the day that the Oathkeeper's sedition trial started, so.
Speaker 3 (34:20):
That was that was weird.
Speaker 2 (34:23):
And then it was eight episodes and by the time
we got to episode eight was when we were waiting
for the verdict. So it was really just that was uncanny.
I just felt like that was a that was a
little that was unsettling almost, But you know it also
I feel like you do in trying to pick the
right story to tell, you have to believe in the
story on its own terms, sort of regardless of the resonance. Like, yes,
(34:46):
there is going to be resonance, and there are lessons
to be learned and things to be gleaned from the
past that could help us in our current contention. But
I don't feel like you can you can't let that
drive you know, that has to a little bit of
that is just going to be stuff that you can't
see along the way, I was thinking about it with
Able Archer and Snafu with the before the Korean airliner
(35:10):
was shot down, you highlight how the Russians were essentially
paying were giving bounties to their own side for people
who were spotting radar incursions on the radar, and so
you were essentially saying, like, that's bad news in terms
of what eventually happens with the civilian airliner being shot
down after being misidentified as a military threat in Russian airspace. Well,
(35:35):
you know, just within the past week, Russia just gave
medals to the fighter pilots who dumped all that fuel
on the US Reaper drone over the Black Sea.
Speaker 3 (35:44):
I mean, it's the same.
Speaker 2 (35:46):
I mean, I'm sure you weren't thinking about that when
you didable Archer and suffer, But Russia is doing the
same thing in monetarily and with military awards, rewarding people
for doing incrediblyckless things that threaten conflict between the East
and West.
Speaker 1 (36:03):
Sure. Well, one of the things that I think was
really profound in Ultra was what this idea that emerged
that there was no legal remedy for all of this
horrible behavior. The legal remedies failed, there was a mistrial,
and then the government basically just gave up on prosecuting
(36:26):
these misdeeds and because they didn't want the headache, and
so Roggy sort of makes the case in that Meet
the Press interview that the remedy then must be just
transparency and information, getting it out there, educating the public.
That's all you can do. When this bad behavior can't
(36:48):
be actually meaningfully reprimanded in some way, all you can
do is expose it. And I think that's very powerful.
It's also a little bit terrifying and disheartening, and I
wonder if you feel like the January sixth trials have
They've obviously gone a lot smoother than the Great Sedition trial,
(37:13):
but is that evidence of progress? Do you think we're
doing better?
Speaker 2 (37:19):
It's interesting because it really does. I think it cuts
both ways. I think there is a case to be
made by looking back at the fascist movements in this
country that were supported by Nazi Germany, including an element
of that that operated inside the Congress. There's ways to
look back at that, all that story that I tell
(37:40):
in Ultra and say, you know, some of these things
were legit crimes and people should have gone to jail,
and that like crimes were committed here and crimes should
have been prosecuted as such, including by some members of Congress,
where that escaped punishment. I think largely because they bullied
the Justice Department into not coming out for them, and
(38:00):
we're seeing a little bit of that happening. We're seeing
some resonance with some of the stuff that's happening right
now in our new cycle. But the other, the sort
of good news side of what Roggy was preaching on
Meet the Press that day is that, you know, the
people need to know this information. The legal remedy isn't there.
The legal remedy is that the legal solution has failed.
(38:22):
The legal remedy cannot be used as are the sum
total of our response here. What has to happen is
that the people need to know. And obviously people knowing
isn't an end in itself. That doesn't fix it. What
he means, what goes unsaid, is that when the people know,
they will act and if and you can trust Americans
to defend our democracy and to stand up against tyranny
(38:45):
and to reject authoritarianism and anti semitism and all the
other things that go with it, but they need to
know that it's happening. And so that one calls on
all of us. Yeah, I mean, it calls on journalists,
it calls on activists, it calls on everybody. Who can
contribute to the public record, including you know, dorks making
podcasts down the road. But hopefully it means that a
(39:08):
well informed public will make righteous decisions.
Speaker 3 (39:11):
And I want to believe that I.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
Do too, And I think that's a good note to
end on. Rachel, thank you so so very much for
jumping in the booth here and having this chat with us.
It's just really, really fun, and I wish you the
best of luck with the movie adaptation.
Speaker 3 (39:31):
Thanks Ed, Thanks this has been super fun. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (39:37):
SNAFU is a production of iHeartRadio, Film Nation Entertainment, and
Pacific Electric Picture Company in association with Gilded Audio. It's
executive produced by me Ed Helms, Milan Papelka, Mike Falbo,
Andy Chuck, and Whitney Donaldson. Our lead producers are Sarah
Joyner and Alyssa Martino. Our producer is Carl Nellis, Associate
producer Tory Smith. Our senior editor is Jeffrey Lewis via
(40:00):
Canny as our production assistant. Our creative executive is Brett Harris.
Engineering and technical direction by Nick Dooley. Special thanks to
Alison Cohen and Matt Eisenstadt.
Host
Ed Helms
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