Part One: How The Liberal Media Helped Fascism Win

invited me and set it up. Grateful to the the Leftist club, the beleaguered Leftist club at Oxford who met with me, very nice people.

So I got to update this episode in a relevant way because what's happening in Gaza is deeply relevant to what we're talking about here, because these episodes are about how the media responded to the rise of the Nazis and the Holocaust in the nineteen thirties and forties, and it's overall kind of a story about how particularly the liberal media and multiple countries failed universally across the world in its attempt to deal with and stop the rise

of fascism. And that's a worthwhile story because a lot of the same families here in the US, a lot of the same families who directed American media in particular and failing to report properly on the Nazis, are still running the most influential media outlets, and they're still failing in the same ways. And I think this is useful history for people to have. So, Michael, are you ready to learn about how the liberal media is essentially incapable of confronting fascism in a direct and meaningful.

to enjoy and pay money for our content. By acting like we're we're the last bulwark against the rise of fascism in America.

realize what's happening. Anyway, this new slogan was updated and their online mast had immediately and added to print copies of the paper a week later, and the reaction was mixed. A writer for Pro Publica called it awesome at south By Southwest. A few weeks later, New York Times executive editor Dean Baca compared it mockingly to an ad for the next Batman movie. And we're not mostly going to be nice to the Times in this episode, but I

think back actually got that very correct. That does sound like a like a Nolan Batman line.

important now than ever now. Both slogans depict a view of legacy media that news media executive is want to push of a battle of an embattled forth estate that's the bulwark against fascism and corruption. Very little evidence supports the claim that our media institutions have ever worked this way.

The twenty first century has seen an unprecedented global expansion in news media, and yet Freedom House, a DC based nonprofit that conducts research and advocacy on democracy, calculates that over the last sixteen years, the number of people living in societies that are considered free has declined by more than twenty five percent, which is like a pretty startling number. I would say of unfree people, although you know what is freedom? I'm not free? You know. I think RFK

Junior would agree with miss I'm not free. Road killed in every state, you know? So what use is liberty if I can't eat, if I can't scrape a deer carcass off the higher or Utah? What, Sophie?

In the Post talk a lot about the importance of objectivity, right, in other words, not being a journalist like me, you know, who repeatedly is open about the fact that I think the Republican Party needs to be burnt to the ground. But Gallup continue used to register American trust in the media at or near record lows. Twenty twenty two was the first time that the percentage of Americans with no trust at all in the media was higher than the

percentage with a great deal or fair amount of trust combined. So, whatever you want to say about the value of objectivity, I think the fact suggests that all of the focus our legacy media has on being quote unquote objective has led to a situation in which absolutely no one trusts them. So I don't know, Well, it seems like you're also doing a good job.

more journalists than any other world leader. This is relevant because his op ed bore the title Saudi Arabia still has many questions to answer about Jamal Koshovii's killing and yes they do, but you shouldn't be the one saying it. The guy, the guy who kills and imprisons more journalists than anyone, shouldn't be complaining about the murder of a journalist. Yeah, yeah, Like, what are we doing running this ad? Was there no one else who could write that story?

Times publisher A. G. Sulzberger did make a personal statement when one of his reporters was allegedly spit on over this issue. The murder of Brionna Gay, a transgender sixteen year old in the UK, did not merit any direct comment from Sulzburger. You know, I think it's worth kind of looking at it like that none of these claims about like, well, we have to be objective, you know, it's people. It's important for us to remain trustworthy. They're

never consistent about it. Right, There's certain things we can we'll try to be objective about. But you know, when there's an opinion that the people who own the paper have, that's going to be the paper's opinion, and we're just going to pretend like that's objectivity. And this is the reality that you find when you analyze the responses of the liberal press in Wymer Germany, in pre Mussolini Italy, and in the United States in the twenties and thirties.

It's kind of sobering how direct the comparisons are, because rather than being opponents to fascism, these publications were at best ineffectual witnesses to disaster and at worst enablers of that disaster. We're going to talk about a lot of different newspapers and how they fucked up, but we're going to start in Italy in the period from World War one's end in nineteen eighteen to Mussolini's March on Rome near the end of nineteen twenty two. This is generally

broken up by historians into two eras. You've got the Red Years, which saw powerful working class movements arise and try to do revolutionary activity, and then you've got the Black Years, which saw a fascist counter movement boil up

in response and eventually seize power. Error At Goachman from Princeton has done the most accessible analysis of how liberal newspapers and pundits responded in both of these periods, and Goachman primarily analyzes Les Stampa, which was the most influential newspaper for like social democrat Italians right the kind of progressive left, and also Italian Illustration, which was a weekly paper that kind of was more geared towards the middle

class center right. In modern US terms, Lestampa is something like the New Republic or maybe jacomin An Italian Illustration is like The Times or the Post. The Red Years were characterized by two large scale attempts at a general strike, the first of which occurred in nineteen nineteen and was centered around protesting the involvement of Allied governments in the

Russian Civil War. Neither paper supported the strike, claiming a general solidarity with labor, but complaining that the strike would destroy Italy's collective wealth. And we're not talking about like an open ended like with the writer's strike right where it is scary because it's like we don't know when this is going to end. We don't know how long. You know, people are going to have to be out of work. You know it's necessary, but it's a frightening

thing to contemplate. This was a two day strike meant to sort of a like we're trying to make a statement, right, but none of the papers were willing to endorse even something that limited. They Lestampa argued that it would have damaging effects on the national economy and quote would be a disaster for all bourgeoisie and proletarian alike. And again we're talking two days here, like you can't you can't go without this for two days.

In September of nineteen twenty, the Federation of Metallurgical Workers or FIOM, ceased negotiations with factory management after being refused a new wage agreement. To avoid a strike and the economic consequences of a strike, workers occupied factories and defended

them from their employers with armed red guards. This is a very cool chapter of Italian politics, right, Like these laborers take control of their places of business and put up armed guards in order to like fight it out with the cops and the fascists if they try to take them back. Now. Writers for Italian Illustration were immediately

dismissive of this movement. They described the laborers who occupied the factories they worked in as little boys playing shopkeeper, grocer, salesman and sailor, which is like this is always what they did. Was like, well these these left Yeah, well they're they're taking over docs too. Okay, sure you get to day, like you look at the campus protests, you get a lot off. Like these little kids don't understand the world. You know, they're playing and being adults, they

don't really get it. But in this case it's like, well, these guys are literally the ones who work in the factories, Like they're not little boys playing as like whatever. They do this job for a living. That's why they've taken the factories, the.

murder of workers as sport. Now, despite this hideous situation, Lestampa and Italian illustration were united in treating the fascist violence as secondary to the problem of organized labor. Red Guards, they argued, had provoked gunfights with the fascists by their very existence, right, you can't blame the fascists for wanting to attack them. The fact that they existed were trying to defend themselves, justifies them being attacked, right.

destroying peace by piece. The free press in Italy, and the free press in Italy, the liberal free press in Italy, the press that has the largest circulation, is largely being like, well, you got to understand why they're doing it. You know, there's a lot of economic you know, what's the disenfranchisement. You know among this population, they're anger. We have to understand their anger. Right, It's very familiar bullshit, but it's interesting to see it happen while the fascists are actively

killing the media. In the summer of nineteen twenty one, various left wing armed groups and leftist war veterans formed a united militia to combat the fascists, the Rditi del Popolo. Now we noted day that these people were organizing a defense against Mussolini during basically the last moment in which any defense would have been possible. And I want to

read a paragraph here from Goachman's piece. Lestampa's coverage of the Rdidi del Popolo's demonstration in Rome aimed to delegitimize the newly formed worker's self defense group, doing so in a manner reminiscent of the paper's condemnation of the Red Guards that were active during the factory occupations of September nineteen twenty. La Stampa emphasized the combativeness of some of the workers who were present. For example, the Royal Guards had no choice but to arrest the most quarrelsome and

hot headed of the demonstrators. Additionally, while describing instances of violence involving a young man struck with a blow to the head falling to the ground, or a manual laborer struck with his hand on his bloody head. The newspaper employed the passive voice and thus obscured the direct agency of the policeman and the fascist SQUADRISTI in the events. You can't write that fascists hurt somebody, just like you can't write that cops hurt somebody. Someone simply got hurt,

you know. Yeah, and we'll talk some more about this trend that absolutely doesn't persist to the present day. But you know what does persist the present day?

take power. And it's interesting to me, like how consistent this denial of agency to some people and this apportioning of blame to others is still to this day And right as I finalized this article, which is like a year ago now, The Atlantic published a pretty reckless article about the dangerous new anarchist movement in the United States,

and I think is a good example of this. Among other things, the article made lurid reference to the shooting of an armed fascist gang member, a Proud Boy, in Portland by an anarchist named Michael Reinol, and claimed that the police had later been forced to shoot Rhinel in self defense. Which is interesting to me because evidence, significant documentation of that shooting proved that Rainel never fired at officers when he was shot dozens of times, like he

was not brandishing a weapon. They came in and they assassinated him. And part of how we know they assassinated him is that President Trump bragged about having his federal ass assassinate this guy. He got up on stage and said, I had them kill this man. But you don't have to report on that if you're the Atlantic, right, because like that's not going to sound objective, you know, if you talk about the fact that this guy was probably murdered before he could have his day in court. I

don't know, it's just it's good. It's good to see the same thing repeatedly happening.

that already. That doesn't pull clicks because it's established and it's like yeah, but it bears repeating.

Lestampa wrote had a call published a column in which they blamed anarchists and communists for arming themselves, which had forced the black Shirts to arm themselves. This, they promised, the fascists would happily hand over their guns if the Rdidi del Popolo had not given quote fascism a motive to cry provocation. These fascists are just aching to give up their weapons. But you mean all leftists armed yourself, and now they can't like? What an insane thing to write.

In nineteen twenties Italy like by late nineteen twenty one, much of the liberal media class saw protests in organizing by workers as the primary cause of fascist violence. This resulted in what historian Angelo Taska called filo fascism on behalf of many middle class liberals. We can see this in the reaction of writers for Italian Illustration to the August nineteen twenty two general strike, and their eyes the economic disruption justified right wing violence, which provoked a broad

and immediate consensus in public opinion for the fascists. The paper glowingly celebrated black shirts replaced workers on train platforms and public services. Renado Simoni wrote that the failed protests of nineteen twenty two enabled fascism to demons straight. It's merits. Wow, these fascists are killing reporters, but they sure caad work a train platform.

that's unjust. But somebody murdering a group of people for standing in a road, well that's understandable. You got to get where they're coming from here, you know.

organized labor, right. And it's you still get this today, right, not just for organized labor. There's a lot of folks in the liberal media who can accommodate Israeli violence, right, but cannot accommodate any sort of fair discussion about protests against that violence, for example. And there's a you know, when I think about that, I think about The New York Times recently published an op edd by Brett Stevens in May of twenty twenty four titled A thank You

Note to the Campus protesters. In it, Brett argued, you know, kind of snarkily I get that many, if not most, of you see yourselves as dedicated idealists who want to end suffering for Palestinians, champion equality, and oppose all forms of bigotry. There are ways you could do that without making common cause with people who hate Jews, want to kill us and often do. Supporting a two state solution would be one such way. Insisting that Palestinians deserve better

leaders than Hamas is another. Building bridges with Israelis is a third. And it's like, yeah, man, I agree, Palestinians deserve better leaders than Hamas, but that's not really the immediate issue. The immediate issue is all of the people being killed.

like those things are equal. Right, Brett is saying a college student being rude is actually more dangerous than city with the children murder and a guy waving a Hamas flag and the slaughter of thirty thousand small children equally problematic.

the son of a paper merchant. By the time the Weimar years rolled around, Olstein was the biggest name in German print media. They put out newspapers, magazine and books, a dizzying array of what we now call content. The Olsteins were a politically progressive Jewish family, and as a result, much of what they published was reflexively liberal in its outlook. They were obviously an early target for the Nazis, who described them as when the Nazis talked about Jewish press.

Like if you've ever seen a Hitler speech or read anything where the Nazis are talking about the Jewish press in Germany, they're talking about Olstein, right, That's not like a broad general just a broad general term. They are specifically referring to Olstein because it is the biggest publishing house in the country. The Nazi tracked the press as a Jewish instrument of power, published in nineteen twenty, focused an entire chapter just on Olstein. German communists hated Olstein's

two for different reasons. Like most publishing empires, Olstein made its money from ads. Consumer culture was a new concept in post war Germany, and Olstein cheered it on with publications like Tempo, which devoted large illustrated sections to which products people should buy to make the most of their weekends, which were also a new concept. As a result, it's not surprising that most Olstein papers reflected a political allegiance broadly tied to the German Democratic Party or DDP, which

had helped to write the Weimar Constitution. The one major break Olstein had with the DDP was over the value of unionizing corporate spokesman emphasized the positive relations between management and labor at Olstein, and one of Olstein's owners noted that we think that liked these good relations be ruined if you unionize, right, it'll separate us from each other. Anytime you hear that from your boss, you know you're about to get rat fucked. Great, great stuff.

a lot about it. Could you guys not use the word union or talk about union or forming a union?

why don't you buy a bed? Listener, then come back to the podcast, laying down on your bed, delivered to you in a suspiciously small package that then kind of inflates when you open it and you ask yourself, are there like weird chemicals in this that makes this possible. This doesn't seem like it should be a thing that a bed can do. But then you stop thinking about it, just like you stopped thinking about what all the plastics in your water bottle?

owned publishing house. We can't report on Nazi violence against the Jews because people will think we're not being objective, right, Like, that's how deep the brain worms go about this kind of thinking. And I will say, for the Ostein family, it's a little more understandable than it's going to be when the same thing happens in the US because they

are also worried. Well, this could actually direct some real violence to me, right, although I think a more rational person would have said, well, but the Nazis are going to direct violence against you guys no matter what, so you might as well try to make people aware of it. Now, conservative mass media did not suffer from the same problem. The august Scherrel company, purchased by Alfred Hugenberg in nineteen sixteen, owned one of the largest papers in Berlin, as well

as one of Germany's first newswire services. Hugenberg was also a far right political activist and politician. He is the Andrew Breitbart of his day, and he felt no compunction

against using his papers to espouse an anti democratic agenda. Now, he was not anti Semitic in a way that rose above the background level of the era right unlikely, he was not motivated by it like the Nazis were, but he was willing to work with Adolf Hitler to further his own ends, so the two started collaborating after the death of Chancellor Gustav Stressmann in nineteen twenty nine. This was after an election in which the German National Party

had lost a bunch of seats. He was willing to work with Hitler and use his papers to try and launder their reputation to more mainstream German conservatives. Meanwhile, Ostein, the largest liberal publishing house in the country, refused to embrace anything beyond tech support for us. You know, this kind of vague concept of democracy. Right. The Nazis were depicted in Olstein publications as something to be mocked and scorned, but not as a serious threat to the future of

the system. Right, we'll make fun of him a little bit, but like he's a clown. There's no way, right, Franz Olstein, who yes, yeah, same same thing, right, that's how they fees you in Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's it's it's remarkable how directly it grafts onto what we've seen. Franz Olstein, who was one of the few mainstream journalists to spend real one on one time with Hitler in this period,

described him as a poor fanatic, a pitiful man. It was impossible, in Olstein's eyes that such a man could actually threaten German democracy. Right, this guy's too much of a clown to be a real danger.

freedom and economic justice. So not only are like, on one hand, you've got the people who are like, well, these guys are just clowns, and then at the end you've got folks who are like, no, they're not clowns. There were real movement with real issues, and we should we should fairly discuss the issues that the Nazis are bringing up. As a liberal publisher, Olstein opposed the party's anti democratic politics, but Yodicki warned against them getting caught

up in quote the politics of petty details. And what did Yodicky mean by petty details reporting on us quote assaults of evil Nazis on peaceful protesters. Right, we can't get caught up in the politics of who are the Nazis murdering? Who are they beating in the streets. How many folks are they assassedascinating? Right, That's that's got to get you know. You don't want to get bogged down on that stuff. We have to discuss the bigger issues, like what do they think about the economy? Sick?

most popular papers, Tempo Hung Rights Quote. To be able to compete with Nazi propaganda, the Olstein papers had to change their tune, Yodicki claimed. Instead of touting lofty ideals of individual freedom and democracy, they had to follow a resurgent patriotism which strongly emphasized the welfare of the whole community instead of the individual, and worked with ations instead of reason and skepticism. As this was the only way

to gain influence with the masses. The temporary curtailing of civic rights and democracy was inevitable in this time of crisis, he argued, shouldered with their daily struggle, the people did not care much for the luxury of freedom at the moment anyway. As he showed in a later memorandum, Yodocky was clearly fascinated by the Nazis. The core principle of the movement, he argued, was a return to universally accepted, non debatable, unchangeable forms of life instead of general relativity.

So you've got this guy who is working for this paper owned by a Jewish family that is ostensibly liberal, who is one of the people making calls there, and he's kind of obsessed with the Nazis in a positive way, Like he has gotten enraptured by how different they seem and how exciting they are to report on, right, And he's focusing.

wonky policy arguments of the German State Party. Who Ostein had earlier backed the company's pivot away from directly criticizing Nazi violence called caused Gersam Schlolm, a Berlin born Jewish philosopher and writer, to call Ostein one of the most dishonest and misleading media companies in Germany. As Hitler neared power in thirty one and thirty two, Olstein pivoted to position itself as loyal to the political machine of Paul von Hindenberg. Their hope was that he would maintain a

semblance of democratic civil society in the face of Hitler's rise. Right, that Hindenberg, this old man who's committed to the system, he'll protect us from Hitler. Right. This was a bad call in hindsight, and also an obviously bad call at the time. Now there were journalists and papers who published

serious exposes on Nazi crimes. In the nineteen twenty eight election season, social democratic papers published stories claiming Hitler had been bribed by Mussolini in exchange for ending the German claim to South Tyrol when he took power. Hitler sued over the matter, and the libel case ground forward until

nineteen thirty two, the subject of heavy reporting all the while. Likewise, when Hans Litten subpoened Hitler over the stabbing of two workers by SA men and questioned him on the stand about incitements to violence in Nazi propaganda, reporters dutifully brought the trial to millions of German living rooms. It didn't matter.

Kurt Trukolski, one of Weimar's most influential journalists, noted morosely the prestige of large democratic newspapers or artists, and of liberal associations, in fact, bears no relation to their actual power. Kurt saw them as functionally toothless, and the face of what he called the power of reaction always there and

working more skillfully and above all less respectfully. And I again, that's exactly how it feels today, right, You know, things have changed in the last couple of weeks to some extent, but I think we've all felt that feeling of like, Okay, so everyone in any position of like cultural influence claims to be against the rise of fascism in this country, and that has done absolutely nothing to like make it less popular. It doesn't hurt them at all. It seems

to be completely toothless. And these respectable people who are in traditional positions of cultural influence, they just have no ability to confront the fascists on their own turth because the fascists are willing to like they're not. They have no need to be respectful, right, they have no need to follow the rules.

discover it. But he's the godfather of modern advertising in a sense for discovering that, like, oh, emotion, don't explain why the product is good, Just make them feel like they're a piece of shit if they don't have this thing. It's so easy to control people this way, and it's like every time someone discovers that it's the beginning of the end. That's a big problem. Like that's not good.

like have a lot of cultural power. But at this point, right, yeah, uh you know, and it's when it comes to like how ought the media report on stuff like this, right, because Tukoski, the point he's making is that, like well, the legacy media is bound by rules that hamstring them from fighting these people because they feel they have to treat them respectfully, and you can't get across the damage

to danger of them if you do it that way. Right, My contention is that fascism is a mortal threat to journalism, right if you are a journalist, like any creature when it's life is threatened, has the right to defend itself. And if you are a journalist dealing with fascism rising in your country, I would argue it is not rational to be fair to them, right, Your job should be trying to destroy them, you know, And I think back when I think about this and how you want, like

what kind of weapons work? Right? If traditional straight reporting and objectivity, like if literal facts do not beat these people, and they never do, it doesn't matter that the fascists lie, You are not going to fact check them away. It

has never happened and it will never happen. Now, ask forward to today when a Twitter account with seventeen hundred followers made a post claiming that jd Vance, one of our country's most prominent fascists had written about fucking a couch in his book He'll Billy Elegy, because no.

fuck a couch. When VP candidate Tim Walls referenced the couch fucking in his own way during his inaugural speech on the campaign trail, the same media organs a number of them who have all failed to hinder the growth of authoritarian politics in the US erupted outrage. Right, you know, democrats shouldn't go low. It's bad to lie, you know in this way. Well this is also yeah.

know what they're doing. Uh. Anyway, whatever, it's enough of my anti dolphin dolphin aside, we have to take it out. Yeah no, so uh he posts this video of a woman getting like molested by a dolphin and is like, boy, the internet's sure a fucked up place or something like that, right, and Democrats, Yeah, searched for women plus dolphins basically, and

folks like, was he just searching for dolphin porn? I think it's also plausible that like he was just scrolling through found this on his feed, you know, moved past it because sh it was happening, and then was trying to find it later and used to.

This is damaged. And you've seen like some of the fascists who are on his I'd try to like launch a campaign to argue that that Walls or to like try They've tried to do the same thing with Tim Walls by like spreading rumors that he drinks horsecom or something, but like Tim Walls doesn't seem like he drinks horsecom right. Jd Vance seems like a couch fucker who watches dolphin porn. So it's somebody that's just not gonna work.

people do and fighting on the same playing field. It's like someone it's like if a guy comes up to you in the street with a crowbar and start swinging and you pick up another crowbar, and then someone else is like, hey, man, you're being just as bad as him by picking up that crowbars. No, you want to you want a crowbar. If a guy is swinging a crowbar at you, you want to at least have the same grade of weapon that that.

unfair degree, and I don't know. I'm glad that there are people in the media and people within kind of the liberal political establishment who clearly finally understand this, because I had really identified with Tukolski's exhaustion and hopelessness right over, Like why doesn't anyone know how to fight these people? Right now? I will say some of you know, if you're looking, if you want to like fairly sort of discuss why to Kolski was writing the way he was.

It's also because he had this belief, like a lot of media elites did, that every German outside of Berlin was a philistine, right, like all of these people, like the regular people are too dumb to understand what the Nazis are doing, which.

and endearing. So yeah, I think they're just going wherever they can to get the attention they so desperately crave.

American columnist named Dorothy Thompson. Thompson is one of the best, one of the great journalists of all time, one of the great anti fascist journalists of all time, and she wrote that Nazism was quote a repudiation of the history of Western man of reason, humanism, and a Christian ethic. Thompson joined members of the Foreign Press Corps like William Shier, who had began to see warning the world about Hitler

as a moral imperative. And Shyer is you know, he's one of these guys if you read through, because he's the author of the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich Right. If you read him today, you will note that he is wildly homophobic, massively homophobic, like a real bigot in that regard. But he is also a committed anti fascist, and he would later report on the annexation of Austria submit at substantial personal risk. The men who ran Olstein took a different tactic to keep Hindenberg happy.

They began to run articles supporting the military and rearmament. They stopped their support of liberal democratic parties, and they hired a man named Hans Schaeffer, the former State secretary, to reform their coverage of the Nazis. That a Schaeffer's credit. His stated goal managing the paper was to turn it into a weapon of resistance to the Nazis, which sounds good, but here's how he thought he was going to do that.

So his idea was that like, well, if we just let Hitler get into power, then he's going to have to govern and the gridlock of the Viymar system is just going to wear him down to a nub. So Schaefer supported and made sure his column is supported the attempts of the von Poppen and von Schleicher governments to create a coalition with the Nazis, because he was like, once they have to govern, that'll destroy them, and we the Ostein papers will have a valuable role to play

as the loyal, critical opposition. You know, we'll make it clear how incompetent they are, and that will gradually lead to.

since they both ignored the laws of the state. A New Year's Eve nineteen thirty two, Tempo published a political cartoon that embodied the fundamentally naive way it depicted German society. The tune showed a tired woman mother Germany, tucking her problem children into bed and hoping that they'd get along next year. And the problem children are there's like hanging on the posters of the bed. There's like a Nazi helmet, and there's like an iron front cap and a communist hat.

So it's like all of these people are you know, there's quarreling in the streets, but they're just like little kids wrestling or whatever, you know, And soon the lollby countryman again and things will be okay. Yeah, yeah, you really got your fingers on the pulse there. In the decades since Hitler's rise to power, different historians have posited a variety of suspicions as to why the Viymar press

failed so miserably as a guardian of democracy. Kurt Kozick, who published an exhaustive three volume study on the German press in nineteen seventy two, blamed a lack of internal freedom at news publications. The financial needs of owners who

profited by selling ads always came before quality reporting. Modris Eckstein's, who authored a study on the German democratic press titled Limits of Reason, broadly agreed with this conclusion, and nothing illustrates this fact more clearly than the way the Olstein publications responded to the rise of the Nazis in the early thirties. This was the last time liberal resistance to Hitler might have won the day, and it was inarguably

the last opportunity to try. But the popularity of the Nazis and the success with which they demonized their most firm and opposition communists and street fighting socialist meant fervent opposition had a cost too high for any capitalist entity to bear. So Olstein's papers lurched away from reporting on

politics and plunged further into encouraging consumption. Their answer was, we've got to fix the economy to stop the Nazis, So we've got to get people buying stuff again, right, going on vacation again, And I'm going to read a quote from Moderate Modernity writing about the July nineteen thirty

two issue of Tempo. The header of each issue of the promotional magazine usually carried short aphorisms or motivation sayings, and this issue declared that everybody has to buy as much as they can afford, an appeal that turned consumption

into almost a national duty. When the von Poppen government announced an investment program to inject life into the stagnating economy in nineteen thirty two, Paul Elsberg, editor in chief of Olstein's Central Business Desk, lauded the move and prophesied a considerable strengthening of purchasing power in the near future. So in the last year before Hitler took power, the major liberal press organ of the country is being like, what y'all have to do to stop this is buy right, like,

get in there and support the economy. That's goin to fix everything.

of consumption. Right, don't build a united you know, political front against fascism. Build a front of optimists to want to spend money.

consumer optimism and start in your own interest with yourself. Now, nothing that happened, the fact that the economy fell apart, that like purchasing power did not increase. None of this stopped Tempo's management from pushing this vision of consumption. Instead, they added advice on weaponry to their technology. Everybody needs

column advertising concealed truncheons for readers to fight off robbers with. Now, when I was a kid reading about the rise of the third Reichen School, every textbook that mentioned the subject featured nearly identical photos of these huge piles or reel barrows of Deutsche marks to emphasize how bad the inflation was and y our Germany. I was led to believe that pick people picked Hitler because he promised them away out And the reality, of course, is that most Germans

never chose Hitler in an open election. His success was based as much on trickery and corruption as electoral victory. But the Great Depression did play a role, and I think mainstream histories of this period tend to underemphasize how much of what happened was the result of failure by

liberal messaging rather than hit larry and brainwashing. The Nazis and the Communists both saw their popularity increase in this period, while the German liberal parties bled voters, and this is because both Nazis and Communists offered voters visions right different visions, but visions nonetheless of a way forward that was not simply let's keep doing the same thing that obviously doesn't work. Tempo as the most popular liberal magazine in the country,

showcases this failure. It told readers there is but one way to fight the crisis. Buying. Women were depicted not as the noble wellsprings of the German race, or as equal beings, but as economic engines, praised for the money they spent. Just one day after the parliamentary elections in late nineteen thirty two, Tempo ran an ad that captioned a photo of a woman in line at the store with the words women must continue voting right. The vote that matters from women is where you spend your money.

So the brief boone and boom and travel that Tempo had helped push in the late twenties had collapsed by this point, and the magazine just kind of responded by lying about the situation, predicting that late summer nineteen thirty two is going to be the sunny holiday season that Germans need to like get their minds off the domestic situation. One of their regular columns was written by a character named Hans Einfach, which means basically John everyman in German.

A few days after the July election, with the Nazis working their way into the halls of power, Hans published a column on political violence. He described it as silly, a shame on both sides, and made a few lighthearted jokes at the expense of the Nazis. Then, as Yuchen Hung writes, he described the decision to spend money on a holiday despite not being able to afford it as

the necessary defiance of the economic situation. Finally, at summer, many people are sitting at home at the moment, contemplated if they can afford a few days of holiday. I have come to the conclusion that I can't afford it, and that's exactly why I will go on a holiday. We just have to afford it. It's such a such like a baffling death drive. That's like, we're going to

try to get people to buy vacations. As the economy falls apart and they, like Hitler comes into power, the most important thing we can do is get people to spend money they don't have.

because you deserve it. It's interesting to hear them be like spend money, to spend money, Like just give us money.

who was like on the left as unhinged. Right, the ideal voter was level headed, slow and steady, like Hindenburg hung rights. Tempo's Voice of the common man often compared the hostile climate of Weimar's political sphere to everyday situations such as a squabbling family or life in a tenement house, with the extremists being portrayed as weward sons or annoying neighbors, but ultimately part of the community who could be tamed

and integrated. Clearly, the aim of such articles was to create a sense of normality and uncertain times among Tempo's audience. And to give them a model to follow. In other parts of the paper, however, the value of rationality had lost its allure. The lax morals of the rational girls of the nineteen twenties, Frau Christine argued in one of her columns had given men a twisted idea of sexuality

and had ultimately lowered their respect for women. It's it's remarkable just how consistent that is too, Like we're dealing the same, Like JD. Vance is a big part of this, Like, well, women leaders have been a disaster, you know, women who won't have kids, who just want to like live for their own you know, pleasure and enjoyment are evil. They're degenerate psychopaths, right, Like it's it's all the same shit, you know. Yeah, yeah, good stuff.

we have careers. Fu.

They were pragmatic enough to see it as a good business decision, and uh, you know that is what we're covering today. We're going to on Thursday talk about the United States finally, but Michael, first, let's talk about you. Let's talk about Let's talk about the Small Beans network.

like that. I think it's really really good. It has my whole heart and soul in it. And I just released the audiobook version so you can hear that on the Small Beans Free feed by just searching small Beans or the name of the novel, which is called The Climb, or if you're already sold, you can head to patreon dot com slash Smallbeans slash Shop where you can get the physical version or a PDF or the audiobook. Check it out.