BONUS: Forgotten History with Rachel Maddow

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 strength when you have to be strowing.

We all know.

Nope, not that one.

In the United States District Court Washington DC.

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 a history podcast hosted by Rachel Maddow called Ultra. Now.

Hi, It's Rachel Meadow.

Rachel Maddow. It's so cool to meet you. This is awesome.

Nice to meet you too. It's great. This is very exciting.

Indeed, I agree, Thanks so much for jumping into our SNAPU universe. So what's happening? Where are you?

I'm in rural dirt road, western Massachusetts road.

I don't know that.

It's kind of the ambient vibe where I have. We're really out in the middle of nowhere. It's fantastic.

What are you hiding from, Rachel? What's going on?

Humans?

Yeah? Okay, that's fair. Are you in a bunker?

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.

Because you built it or because it was already there.

No, it was there.

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.

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.

It just seems like a nice option.

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.

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.

So It was really a surprise and very exciting.

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.

I had the opposite problem, which is that my doctor, who is you know, my doctor, like kind of my friend.

But my doctor.

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.

Oh my god.

He thought I was really down.

That's amazing.

He thought he had special medical insights into what was going on with this podcast.

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.

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 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

There was a mistrial, and they were all let go.

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. What's so incredible about this story to me, among there's lots of things incredible about it, but one of the

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 who won and who lost.

Right Like, of course, the good history is told the winners.

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.

It was no big deal.

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

And the losers get forgotten, and.

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 have to put yourself then in the story. In terms of how hard it is for you to find these things.

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.

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, But it can also be a like who close call, let's forget about it?

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 meaningful or did you just dig up this story or stumble on it and then say this has to be told?

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 you know, my day job at MSNBC, thinking about Holocaust denial.

Contend that it didn't happen.

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?

And what I.

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.

Wow, which is.

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.

That's that is fascinating. I feel like that's of how some of the best stories do come about.

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

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 kind of responsibility to reflect that nuance and the complexity. You know, even some even historians, have some different perspectives

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 it does get you to a more profound place in terms of getting I think, encouraging critical thinking about seemingly cut.

And dry episodes.

I just thought that was really, like I said, mature and complex and cool.

Go on.

Also, you guys, you're just so handsome, and it was.

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.

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

There was just a bunch of clap trap about it.

And nobody had ever done a broader, less I think, in my from my perspective, less biased look at the evidence.

Wasn't I thought Roggy wrote a book. But were you able to dig that up? Is that is that findable?

Ish?

Yeah?

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.

So sorry to tell us who Roggy is, because I just brought him up out of the blue.

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

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 in most modern emergencies of fascism.

Yeah.

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.

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.

In some instances is fascism.

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 should get a say but other people shouldn't, that's a

Just as much mayhem.

But on the right, the way it works is me and my people were the only people who should count

Because if it was just us in charge, everything would be fine.

And that's the basic idea, and that's why authoritarianism on the right almost always.

Comes with antisemitism.

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 recurrent and.

Well, humans, we're dumb. Us are dumb, we do dumb things.

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.

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 wired for it in our DNA.

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 in direct ratio with the complexity of the story that

Yeah, you got to give give people some some candy with the vegetables, right, you gotta.

Do you got to do your Nancy astrologer stuff. It turns out to be important.

It is. It's crazy how important astrology was in the Reagan administration. It's crazy. It's absolutely crazy.

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.

Yeah, oh that's funny.

This idea, like the rasputant pulling the strings in the Reagan white House might be this lady in knob Hill.

It's actually like a source of regional pride for me.

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, Like we need a compendium of the lessons.

Lesson seventeen, Stop blaming the juice.

Yeah, okay, here's what that's one, right, Here's why this is a book. We need to write have a phone.

That connects between Washington and Moscow.

That you have that phone, Yeah, and you and use it occasionally.

But I think that.

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. There there's something there isn't There's a rational and constructive human hunger to learn stuff. And that's that to me

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.

Thank you.

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, And how did it affect how you consider telling this story.

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

I don't want to say, like.

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. So I find it to be more challenging and more rewarding. It's also kind of more more the way that I

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 is this incredibly powerful vehicle, and and the way that we work with a microphone it's incredibly intimate, and I love that.

I think it's like, oh god, I'm pregnant, I'm very powerful.

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, 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

It's all speaking right into the person ear, which is inside their head, which is right next to their brain.

It's like a laser.

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.

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.

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.

And lots of asides and lots of opinion, and that's what it sounded like.

Well, so tell us what's happening next with Ultra because there's a very exciting sort of next step.

Yeah, this is I kind of can't believe it.

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.

First of all, huge congratulations, and it's a no brainer. This makes perfect sense. The story is so riveting.

I hope that that is true.

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?

Is you know, yeah, we're going to ruin it with visuals.

Well no, but like is a movie going to be made?

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.

So I believe that it's going to be a movie. But we'll see. I know, I'm you know, I did this.

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.

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 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.

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.

So I think I should play Oh, John Rocky, Okay, you think I should be Roggy in this movie?

Right?

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 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?

No, I wasn't working on the Sedition trial by that point.

What was weird is that the.

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.

That was that was weird.

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

I mean, it's the same.

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.

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

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

And I want to believe that I.

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.

Thanks Ed, Thanks this has been super fun. I appreciate it.

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 Canny as our production assistant. Our creative executive is Brett Harris.