They’re the ones who have to answer for whether this is what they want, too. The real question is for people who are doing business with Twitter, but also for the Republican Party. Obviously, there’s a compounding upset to the fact that the richest man in the world and the leader of the Republican Party are trafficking in this stuff at the same time - and in what seems to be a mutually reinforcing way. He seems, deliberately, to be doing this stuff on the platform that he’s running. It’s not like he’s just giving interviews saying this stuff. Musk’s capacious brain, I don’t know what his aims are. This is the territory that we’re in.Īdding to the resonance of the ‘30s - in this era of rising anti-semitism - Elon Musk seems to really want to fulfill his casting as a latter-day Henry Ford. And he’s sketching this out as the grounds on which he wants to be running for the Republican nomination, and for the presidency. It’s as inflammatory as anything he’s ever said in the past. He wants, according to Washington Post reporting, to invoke the Insurrection Act to be able to use the military against civilians on Day One. He’s saying, I want my critics in the media and the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff put on trial for treason - the punishment for which he then reminds us, explicitly, is death. He’s saying my political opponents are “vermin” - and should implicitly therefore be exterminated. Trump is saying immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of America. He’s not saying “I was misunderstood” or “I didn’t mean it” - or “I was joking when I told Russia to do that.” There’s no playing around. But now there’s more seriousness about it. Trump and Trumpism has always been based, to a certain degree, on the transgressive thrill of saying something you’re not supposed to say - something that shocks and upsets people. It feels like we’re at a “break glass in case of emergency” moment - the way people are talking about what’s happening in our politics. There’s a reason that everybody’s starting to use some of the same red-hot language to describe what we are seeing. In just the past couple of weeks, Trump has told us the authoritarian danger America would face from a second term. We no longer have creeping fascism it’s bursting through the walls like the Kool-Aid Man. I’d argue that current events are forcing your hand. I don’t want to be the one to define the extent of the echo of the ultra-right guys from the late ‘30s and early ‘40s in the guys we have today. There has been a previous episode - that we were unaware of - that can inform our own decisions now about how to combat it in our own time. The instruction manual, directly-relevant-to-today stuff, is in the Americans who were fighting against the ultra-right movement of their time. The idea of the title is that it’s not about the bad guys. And I’m glad that you are leading with it. Why did you leave those dotted lines for readers to connect? You don’t even link the original “America First” movement of the ‘30s and ’40s to its current MAGA iteration. You don’t, for example, compare the charismatic populist strongman Huey Long to Donald Trump, or measure the reach of the massively popular radio host Father Charles Coughlin against a Tucker Carlson type. The book is titled Prequel, but you don’t draw many explicit parallels to our current timeline. (The book builds off of Maddow’s hit podcast, Ultra, that she discussed with Rolling Stone on the eve of its launch a year ago.) Most importantly, Prequel introduces readers to a forgotten cast of American heroes who fought back, working to expose these dark machinations, and who ultimately defanged and defused America’s domestic fascist movement. The book lays out terrifying plots by fascist militant groups - with names like the Silver Shirts and the Christian Front - and highlights a cadre of would-be America Fuhrers, strongmen who wanted to rule as authoritarians at here home. Prequel examines the rise of home-grown fascism in America in the 1930s and 40s - as well as notorious infiltrators from Hitler’s government who cultivated and funded the movement, even capturing hearts and minds among members of the U.S. Rachel Maddow’s new book explores a dark episode of American history, one that flies in the face of our sanitized national narrative about the United States being the unalloyed champion of democracy that crushed foreign fascism during World War II.
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