Part Two: How The Liberal Media Helped Fascism Win
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Call zone media. Hashtag never again will we do this podcast. Hashtag never again we're never going to do this podcast.

That's what you're going with? We're done. We're done forever. Anyway, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where I just carried out a cunning power play against my producer, Sophie Lichterman. She was not ready for it at all. It came down upon her like the tanks of Operation Barbarossa on an unprepared Soviet army. Michael Swain, great to be here, Robert. How does it feel?

How does it feel, Dan? It feels, you know, this is my encirclement of Keeve, you know? Perfect. Beautiful, Michael. I feel like a god.

Wow. Great. Unstoppable. That's the goal. I really want to cut off the feed. Yeah, you probably should. I am now comparing myself to the Wehrmacht. So that's not going to end well. Daniel Malcolm, could you just shut him off? Just replace me with an AI version asking Michael. Michael, how are you doing today? I hear you've got a novel. Oh, boy. Oh, we're doing the plug right at the top. That's great. We're in the P-Zone, Michael.

Do you remember when Pozones were a thing? Robert, don't ever call things... It was like a calzone. No. Okay, well... I've long had a fantasy of founding the SoCal Locale Calzone Zone, but that's neither here nor there, Robert. Thank you for the opportunity to push my novel. I really, really mean it from the bottom of my plug bag. I released my debut novel. It's a sci-fi fantasy magical realist memoir.

In the sense that you'll barely know that it's about my life because there's robots and spells and shit. But it is. So if you're interested in. As someone who knows you, there's a lot of robots and wizards around you at any given time. That's right. Yeah. But if you're interested in like alcoholism or drugs.

My time at crack that's in there too, in a sense. It's called the climb. There will be a free three hour sample coming out, probably out by the time this drops on the small beans feed, which is my own podcast network. You can find that just by pointing your podcast app at small beans and looking for the climb, or you can get the whole thing over at patrion.com slash small beans slash shop.

where you can find the audio book version, which I imagine most people will want. But there's also a PDF version and an e-reader version and all that good stuff. Awesome. Yeah. Excellent. Excellent stuff. Check it out. Michael, you and I worked at a website called cracked.com back in the day. And we had a colleague. I've never heard that word. And I don't know what you're talking about. Yeah.

We worked with a guy named Tom Ryman who did a great video once about how in the movie Jaws, the shark is alcoholism, right? There's no real shark. Everything in that is explicable as a bunch of drunk people by the ocean, like get fucking up and destroying their own boat and whatnot. I always liked that interpretation. And I do now always watch movies with an eye for like, what thing in this could represent alcoholism?

which has made the Star Wars series a lot more entertaining. Just got to say that episode also made me realize, which I don't think they touch upon, even the famous shark death. It's like, yeah, you put a bottle in your mouth, you die. Yeah. It's alcoholism. Yeah.

It's all alcoholism. Anyway, you know what's not alcoholism, Michael, is the addiction. Really, ad break already? Really? That is sometimes alcoholism. God willing, if we get that, the big Jim Bean sponsorship. That'd be nice. Sophie's been clamoring for, yes. Yeah, it sounds like me.

What's like alcoholism is the addiction that the liberal owners of mainstream newspapers in the United States had with trying to normalize and support the growth of fascism in Europe. That is a kind of addiction. Oh, that. Yeah. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. That's the liquor of fools is thinking that you can make a deal with the fascists, it's

Speaking of fools, you're all fools for not knowing that this was the cold open.

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Sign up at WorkMoney. Get money-saving tips. Skip the rent. Get more rich. Sign up at WorkMoney.org slash MoreRichContest for your chance to win $50,000. This election season, the stakes are higher than ever. I think the choice is clear in this election. Join me, Charlemagne Tha God, for We The People, an audio town hall with Vice President Kamala Harris and you, live from Detroit, Michigan, exclusively on iHeartRadio. They'll tackle the tough questions, depressing issues, and the future of our nation. We may not

see eye to eye on every issue but america we are not going back don't miss this powerful conversation with vice president kamala harris tomorrow at 5 p.m eastern 2 p.m pacific on the free iheart radio apps hip-hop beat station and it's the hot open we're back michael are you toasty are you burning up

I'm offended by being called a fool, but I'll get over it in time. I have a question. How do you think those people that were supposed to go to space for eight days feel about being stuck there indefinitely? Fine. I keep thinking about them. I imagine if you get into space, it's because your whole life has been...

geared towards letting you get to space. That's what I was going to say. Aren't you like sweet? I would say until he gets to like three, four months, I'd be sweet. Bonus time in space. Extra time in space. This is what it's all about. Dope. This has been what my whole life is for. But I don't know these people. Maybe they're miserable. I don't care.

Wow. You go to space. You have to accept that you're going to space. It's dangerous up there. We're not supposed to be in space. It's a bad place to be. And it's going to be unpleasant. You know, that's space is whole thing. Yeah. Somebody offered you a trip to space. Would you go?

Absolutely. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. No question. I'm a novelty seeker. Yeah, of course. But I would not enjoy it while I was there. Right. It would be a life changing experience, but it's supposed to I'm sure it's deeply uncomfortable and physically just a nightmare. They were supposed to go for eight days and they're they're saying it could be 2025. Maybe.

Yeah, I mean... Whoa, okay, that's intense. That's what I'm saying. That sounds... There's, you know, the only thing less trustworthy than fascist governments in Europe in the 1930s is the Boeing Corporation today. Oh, I thought you were going to say it was like... The killing us. Let's maybe try to do some podcasts about some bad guys. Yeah, well, that too. It never ended. He'll never say that. It never ended. We're still here. Fuck them. So...

In some ways, the US media responded to the rise of Hitler and Mussolini worse than the German or Italian media had done. Oh, good. This was due in a degree to simple distance. Fascism was seen by a lot of these guys. It's a foreign ideology. So whatever they're saying about killing journalists and whatnot, that's not going to hurt us over here in the United States because we're not Europe, right?

Now, that wasn't the only reason why so much of the media was sympathetic to Hitler and Mussolini. In a lot of cases, it was because the rich men who owned those media organs were fascists or at least phylo-fascists, right? They liked the fascists.

Many of the wealthy men who owned large publishing houses saw communism as a rising threat and Italy as a bulwark against the USSR, which if you just think about the military capabilities that Italy evinced during World War II is extremely funny. The idea of Italy trying to fight the Red Army, it's just, yeah, it will last about 14 minutes.

Anyway, within days of the March on Rome, the Birmingham Age Herald, a major Alabama paper, described Mussolini as looking like a movie star. Wow, he's really got a movie star. Good looks. This fascist who's made remade the government in his own image. What a hot guy. Hey, that Putin looks good with his top off, though. You got to hand it to him. Yeah, they never stop falling for it.

Much was made of the fact that actual movie stars found Mussolini magnetic. In February of 1927, Motion Picture Magazine published a photo of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, both movie stars, doing a fascist salute in honor of their new friend, Mussolini, who they'd met the year before. Yeah, yeah, old Doug Fairbanks doing the Mussolini salute for his new friend, Mussolini.

Benito, Rudolph Valentino, an Italian born star known as the great lover by Hollywood press was often compared positively to Il Duce, right? Like, wow, Valentino and the dictator of Italy are very similar, you know, good looking guys. I bet Mussolini fucks. That's journalism. I don't know if I already need to hear that sentence.

Oh, you know, Mussolini fucked Sophie. You know, that's I don't need to hear it, though. That's what the U.S. media argued. And that's the cold open. And we go.

It's never a cold open with Mussolini. Without Mussolini getting wet. Yeah. The early obsession many Americans had for Mussolini, which transferred to Hitler in substantial degree, was due to several interlocking causes. Katie Hull, a lecturer in American studies at the University of Amsterdam, argues that these reasons were the Italian corporate state's ability to project the image that they had solved the problems of democracy.

combined with Mussolini's personal masculine magnetism and the belief that fascism offered a solution to the Great Depression. We can see a lot of the same factors at work today, in right-wing idolization of strongmen like Erdogan and support for profoundly anti-democratic solutions to problems, best embodied by the coup attempt on January 6th. The

The reality was that Mussolini's government was incompetent, a fact that would soon be made evident with their disastrous invasion of Ethiopia and incompetent handling of World War II. But many mainstream reporters in the U.S. took the fascist government's claims about its own success at face value. They believe the trains ran on time because the fascists said we've got the trains working, even though the trains did not run on time.

That was not a real thing. I love when history is the exact opposite. Like I recently learned that Lizzie Borden almost certainly didn't kill her parents and the media just shat on her until that became the history. So interesting. Yeah. And as a result, you know, they really put a black mark on all of us who have killed people with axes. And it's just not very fair to be honest, you know, like we're at like,

axe murder is a legitimate American pastime and I just we're only a few steps away from criminalizing the machete and then obviously this show yeah you can tell me it's wrong to cut people up into pieces because you're angry I just want to point out you've gifted me both those things which is so funny I know

Yeah, because I'm horny, whatever. I'm a patriotic, red blooded American, Sophie. And I think that everyone deserves the right to partake in this country's great traditions. You know, that's where I am. I have a great axe. Mm hmm.

The Saturday Evening Post published Mussolini's autobiography as a serial starting in 1928. They described the fascist movement as "rough in its methods" but praised it for halting the "radical left." That's the Saturday Evening Post. They're a little rough, but at least they dealt with those radical workers trying to get fair wages.

Similar tributes came in from the Chicago Tribune. The New York Times credited fascism with bringing Italy back to a state of normalcy. In his study, Mussolini and Fascism, The View from America, John Patrick Diggins notes that out of 150 articles that mentioned Mussolini in U.S. newspapers from 1925 to 1932, the majority had either a neutral or a bemused positive tone. Right?

There was no sort of fear about this guy. You know, he was just kind of exciting. And look, he dealt with those mean old commies, right?

These evil anarchists. One of the relatively few journalists to write objectively on Mussolini for American papers in this early portion of his reign was John Gunther, who profiled him for Harper's. And his piece is an interesting historical document for its takes on Mussolini, but it's absolutely critical for its insights into the way the international press works.

around Mussolini, right? Gunther, because he's a guy who gets to interview and profile Mussolini, is familiar with the process and he sees Mussolini

What happens to other journalists, the guys who are writing all of these fawning articles that are turning Mussolini into a celebrity back in the U.S.? Quote,

Once they have been received by Mussolini or Hitler, they feel a sense of obligation which warps their objectivity. It is very difficult for the average correspondent to write unfavorably about a busy and important man who has just donated him a friendly hour of conversation. I think it's a critical revelation, not just about how the media even up to today reports on dictators and fascists, but how they report on guys like Peter Thiel, very wealthy billionaires, guys like Elon Musk, right?

They're so odd to be in the presence of a celebrity and a man of power who is dedicating time that makes them feel so important that they become warmer and less objective towards the subject of the interview. And if you happen to form any kind of personal connection, like my own window into this is working for IGN and reviewing games and they're constantly accused of. And I think you have to be really rigorous with yourself to avoid being like,

Well, the game sucked, but they all seemed so nice and they gave me access to their time and their work. I can't just give them a four or whatever. And that's just video game reviews. I can't imagine being like, I'm going to come out against the president actually after meeting him and shaking his hand and all that.

Yeah, it's a real problem, one that has not gotten to be any less of a problem. I think it's called propinquity. Good word. Yeah, that is a good word. Speaking of propinquity, someone interested in drawing more modern parallels here might bring up the case of Maggie Haberman.

Her work for the New York Times reporting on the Trump White House was praised by many liberals, even though Trump's people saw her as providing positive PR. Haberman was criticized back in 2022.

when she finally published a much ballyhooed book about the Trump administration, which included a, she quoted the former president as promising not to leave office after his defeat in 2020. Now, Haberman didn't report on this at the time. And a lot of people were like, the fact that the president said in front of you that he would refuse to leave office after losing an election is

was probably something the American people immediately needed access to. As a journalist, you had an ethical responsibility to tell them right away. But Haberman, a lot of people will allege, wanted to withhold this information because if she put it out, she would have lost her access to Trump. And she wanted to stick with him because she wanted to get more stuff to put in her book so that she would get more money for it, right?

The argument here, the criticism of Maggie, is that she held off on reporting crucial information about a threat to democracy for her own personal financial enrichment. Now, Haberman's people, for their part, claim she shared this fact with her editors. And her editors at the time were like, no, the fact that the president has refused to leave office is not newsworthy, which I do believe editors at the time would make that call. But that's a bad, unethical call.

Right. Like what is more newsworthy than that? He'll say it to a bunch of evangelicals on camera, so it'll be fine. Yeah. I just can't. It'll come out. Thank you, Michael. Don't worry. January is right around the corner. Something's going to happen. Yeah. Back in the 30s, New York Times correspondents made equally problematic judgments in their coverage of our friend of the pod, Adolf Hitler.

Perhaps the most sinister example of this was the case of New York Times correspondent Frederick Birchall. Prior to Nazism's final victory over Weimar democracy, Birchall had followed Hans Schaefer in what was called the caged Hitler theory.

This was the idea that if Hitler got into power, decent conservatives and government would moderate his behavior. And so letting Hitler win was not disastrous, right? Like it was a brilliant plan to weigh the Nazi leader down with busy work that would stop him from doing any damage, right? Perfect strategy. Yeah, that's going to work great. We're going to talk. Thank God. Yeah. Yeah. Thank God. We've got this. We've got the plan. Speaking of plans, Michael. Easy. I have a plan.

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Michael, I hope you have enjoyed purchasing. I bought them all. You bought them all. Yeah. I bought them all purely to support the economy and therefore the state. Yeah. You got LASIK for parts of your body that aren't even your eyes. You just shoot lasers at you. I said, how much laser can this buy me and slapped my wallet on the counter? That's right. That's right. Yeah. They love, they just love lasering, you know, any good, any God fearing American does really.

Anyway, back to a non-God-fearing American. What is happening? What are you talking about, Sophie? I'm just talking about our man who thinks that he's going to stop Hitler by giving Hitler everything he wants.

Now, Birchall was one of a few New York Times Berlin Bureau correspondents who stayed on after the Nazis took power. He had a major influence on how Americans perceived the coming regime. And so it had an impact when he claimed in writing for the New York Times, there will be, quote, no extreme persecution of Nazi opponents under Hitler's regime. And he said the Nazis aren't going to be mean to anybody who opposed them because, quote, there would be no advantage to the government in unsettling Germany's social structure.

Yeah, you really got the pulse of the Nazis there, Birchall. What would they have to gain? Yeah. Killing all the Jews? That would be crazy. Meanwhile, he's doing speeches like, we must kill everyone. They're going to kill everybody. Yeah.

No, that's a joke. Okay, here's the deal. We let him win. We feed, let him, you know, take more rope, more rope. Bring him down from the inside. Give him all the rope. Hand the whole thing of rope over to him and then leave. You know? Have you seen The Wire? This is a five-year process, minimum. Yeah, yeah.

So the Enabling Act of March 1933 brought the Nazis pretty much total power. Many Americans did find this deeply unsettling, and so with the Times' consent, Birchall took to the airwaves on CBS radio. He avoided any mention of the anti-Semitic violence that Nazis had already been engaging in since Hitler's ascension, and instead told millions of Americans there was, quote, "...no cause for general alarm."

He advised his audience to dismiss from their minds any thought that there would be in Germany any slaughter of the National Socialist Government's enemies or racial oppression in any vital degree. The wrongest a man has ever been. Like, powerful Jake Tapper energy out of this guy. Just like, the Nazis aren't going to kill anyone. Why would you think that? Calm down. Everything's gonna be fine.

Quote me on that. It's almost like someone torturously trying to figure out an opposite day sentence. Yeah. Quickly. The Nazis will spare all the Christians. This dude's wrong or lying. This is not coming together. Yeah.

So while Birchall was optimistic about the Hitler regime in public, he knew that he couldn't actually like he knew that because he's reporting from Berlin. He knows the Nazis are actively at the moment murdering Jews and communists. Right. He knew that what he was saying was indefensible, but he justified lying to make Hitler seem safe to his publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, by informing Sulzberger that.

I conceived of the notion of making the broadcast a bait for a real live interview with Hitler, one which I have been vainly seeking. He was lying to the American people about Hitler not wanting to murder anyone so that he could get an interview with Hitler. Yeah.

Great guy. Presumably the interview is him going like, I want to murder everyone. You know, it's just disseminating his view. So what is. Yeah. It's like the most poisonous access journalism has ever been. Is this right here? Yep. And now this is officially the point in this two episode story arc where I'm going.

Oh, OK. I see where you're going with this in terms of modern day. Yeah. Like Israeli coming to Congress. I mean, not just that, honestly. Like I wrote this before, you know, that had reached the crescendo that it's at. But global fascism rising generally. Yeah. Yeah. It's like a lot of things. You know, we've been seeing this. This has been very evident and clear for a long time.

Although you are right, like that's part of why I felt the need to rejigger this article in light of what's been happening in Gaza, right? Is that like, oh, I think there's actually a moral responsibility to draw that comparison and make it much clearer. There was an immediate and a massive backlash to what Birchall was doing with the Times.

It was led with particular fervor by a number of Jewish papers. Now, none of these, because these are like small community papers, right? Because you've got ... This is still a period in which there are neighborhoods that are like, "This is the Jewish neighborhood in this city," or whatever. They'll have their paper. None of these have the clout or the reach of the times, though. None of them are able to speak to a national audience, really. They are rightfully yelling about what Hitler's doing, but they just don't have the kind of mouthpiece.

that the Times is. And for the next 10 years, the New York Times failed utterly to hire any men of serious skill to work its Berlin Bureau. Much of this can be traced to the owner of the paper, Adolf Ochs, who wanted his reporters to conduct themselves like, quote, an order of monks.

One result of Ox's commitment to impartial journalism, as he saw it, was that most reports from Berlin during Hitler's rise and the early years of the regime were little more than a collection of quotes from various German newspapers. This became a problem when the Nazis started banning opposition papers from taking control and taking control of Jewish-owned publishing houses like Olstein. So the Nazis...

run the papers. And Ox is like, we should just, most of our coverage should just be reporting on what their paper. Yeah. Right. It's now also amazing. Cause isn't one of their stupid arguments for killing everyone that the Jews run the media. It's like the projection thing. It's like, no, you run the media. Yeah. Well, they've taken over now, but like, what's interesting to me, Ox, this guy who's like, you know,

we should mostly just be reporting what the German press is saying, not being critical to the Nazis. It's transparency. It's fair and balanced to just transparently pass things along. Yeah. Yes. Yes. And he is, he is, he is Jewish. Ox is a Jewish man, right? But he disliked the idea that the times might be, he's so obsessed with objectivity. His big fear is not, we're going to let a genocide happen. It's,

If we're seen as sympathetic to Jews in Germany, people might consider us an activist paper and there's nothing worse than being an activist. Or personal, have a personal stake and I'm above that. Yeah. Yeah. Like these people are disgusted by the concept of activism, right? Yeah.

Arthur Hayes Sulzberger, effectively Ox's heir as publisher of the Times, admitted privately that he didn't have any sympathy. Again, Sulzberger is also Jewish. He had no sympathy for Jews suffering under Nazism because, and this is literally what he writes, he was, quote, too fortunately born.

Right. In other words, Salzburg admitted, I just don't care about poor Jews suffering in Germany because I'm a rich urban Jewish man in the United States. Why would I be sympathetic to poor, uneducated rural Jews fleeing from Eastern Europe? Right. He felt to Seinfeld on Bill Maher smoking cigars, saying Trump is not. It's funny how Trump won't really affect me. Yeah, no shit, dude. Of course.

Of course not. Have some awareness beyond that. Yeah. And it's just very clear. Sulzberger found these people almost like these poor refugees from Eastern Europe who had flooded into Germany as a result of pogroms during the Russian Civil War. He found them as gross as the Nazis did, right? Because they're like poor and dirty. That's this guy's attitude, right? I'm not saying that about them. But that's clearly what Sulzberger thinks. Yeah.

As early as the 1890s, Sulzberger and Ox had embarked on a quest to, in their words, again, their words, de-Jewify the New York Times. The current publisher of the New York Times, by the way, is Arthur Greg Sulzberger. On a related note, here's a tweet from climate reporter Kendra Pierre-Louis about the conversation she had with a, quote, top New York Times editor. I wonder who it was.

I think a lot about the top New York Times editor who I told that historians were warning we're in a similar period to the ramp up to the Holocaust, and maybe we could look back and see what the New York Times had done wrong to not repeat mistakes. He shrugged. The New York Times didn't really cover the Holocaust. And...

That's true. I don't know if she was talking to Sulzberger, but whoever she was talking to at the times had the same attitude that Sulzberger had to the Holocaust, which is that's not our business. I don't know. I haven't thought that far. I don't care. Yeah.

Is it good to cover genocide? Impossible to say. What if you have to be unbiased to do so? Yeah, is it perhaps why early man created the concept of impartial journalism to warn us about genocides? Hutus, Tutsis have different opinions on machetes. Like...

It's just that he's like, my family's owned this paper since like, I don't know, 1896 or whatever. I'm not going to go against the family because I'm a rich guy and that's what we do. I think it's it's they're so rich. And so these people have are generations removed from any kind of normal life. Right. Right. They can't feel fear.

Right. The only fear they can feel is the fear that mean old socialists are going to take some of their money. That is the only thing that stirs any sort of stir in their hearts. Their doll's eyes. Dead eyes. Yes. That is how I would describe Soul Burger. Black eyes. Dead eyes. Like a doll's eyes. Someone is coming for your money. That's the only thing that can get a rise out of them. That's all these motherfuckers. Right. That's why newspapers should be a public good funded by people.

taxes. I don't know. It's not perfect. There's flaws with that, but it'll, you know, we've seen how our system works.

Over the course of the Second World War, the Times did in fact cover the Holocaust, though it is fair to say not well. One thing that's often to defend the Times, people point out they published around 1,200 articles about the mass murder of Jews and undesirable groups by the Nazis shape. That's state. That's three or four a week leading up to the war years. And that sounds good, right?

Given this, one might conclude that Kendra is being unfair, but I don't think she is. And I'm going to read a quote from the History News Network to elucidate why. At the end of the war and for decades afterward, Americans claimed they did not know about the Holocaust as it was happening. How was it possible for so much information to be available in the mass media, yet simultaneously for the public to be ignorant?

The reason is that the American media in general, and the New York Times in particular, never treated the Holocaust as an important news story. From the start of the war in Europe to its end nearly six years later, the story of the Holocaust made the Times front page only 26 times out of 24,000.

front page stories. And most of these stories referred to the victims as refugees or persecuted minorities. And only six of those stories were Jews identified on page one as the primary victims. While the Holocaust was happening, out of 24,000 front page stories during the period of the Holocaust, six times were there front page articles that identified the Jews as a victim of Nazi violence. Wow.

One per million. Yeah, about one per million. Nor did the story lead the paper, appearing in the right-hand column reserved for the day's most important news, not even when the concentration camps were liberated at the end of the war. In addition, the Times intermittently and timidly editorialized about the extermination of the Jews, and the paper rarely highlighted it in either the Week in Review or the Magazine section.

Now, I'm focusing a lot on the Times here, and my focus on them is rooted in the fact that the Times was, and is still today, our nation's chief paper of record. And as a result, we have a lot of detail as to how its journalists and editors saw the problem of rising Nazi power.

Now, I don't think that tells the whole story because there are a lot of – not only are there a lot of individual journalists at The Times who did care about reporting on the Holocaust, just as, by the way, The Times Visual Investigation Desk has done crucial reporting on what's been – being done in Gaza, right? There are good people at The Times reporting.

The editors and owners of the paper, well, the editors are a mixed bag and the ownership of the paper is fucking terrible, right? That's my stance on the matter. It's also worth noting that, again, many local US papers, particularly smaller Jewish papers, did a marvelous job of spreading detailed information about the first Nazi crimes.

Likewise, there were marvelous foreign correspondents in Germany who did dogged and courageous work exposing early Nazi atrocities. The problem was that for years, influential papers like the Times refused to take their work seriously. The fear was, as always, bias. One of the best sources on early Nazi violence was the Jewish Telegraph Agency, which had been founded by an Austrian and provided early evidence of mass violence against German Jews.

The Times refused to report on its reporting. They refused to do what they were doing with German papers and cover what the JTA was saying because it was not neutral. It's a Jewish paper, so it can't neutrally report on violence against Jews. So we're not going to cover that at all.

But as we talked about in the first episode, nothing is neutral. That's impossible. It's never happened. No one has ever been neutral. Point of view over the other. Yeah. Yeah.

Now, they didn't actively, they didn't reject all stories from the JTA out of hand. When the agency happened to interview a source the Times considered credible because they were famous, in this case, Albert Einstein, the Times was happy to carry a JTA wire story. Now, Einstein is one of the most popular public intellectuals of the early 20th century.

When the JTA asked him for his thoughts on the 1930 German elections, he stated that the, quote, Now,

Einstein was extremely wrong there, right? The Hitler vote was absolutely a symptom of anti-Jewish hatred. Emotionally driven. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now that said, I will note Einstein was a consistent opponent of the Nazis. Um, and you can find quotes from him that are much more direct and sensible in their opposition to Hitler. So I think we can forgive the statement from Einstein as a single lapse of judgment, right? Like I'm not trying to, to shit on the man's attitude towards the Nazis, but he was wrong in this. Um,

And it's interesting, though, that this was the thing, the time that like the Times chose to take a JTA story this time when Einstein is saying, don't be the Nazis aren't racist, you know.

Even as the war years began, the Times continued to avoid reportage on attacks by Nazi street gangs against Jewish Germans. When the Warsaw Ghetto uprising occurred, the story was buried on page 10. Even coverage of the liberation of Auschwitz tended to avoid mentioning that the vast majority of victims were Jewish. It's just in the leisure section. They're like, don't vacation there right now. But we won't say why. Yeah. Don't summer in Auschwitz this year. Yeah. Yeah.

This is where things get a little complicated, because it is probably fair to say that non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust are forgotten or not sufficiently discussed, due in part to an understandable desire to compensate for the poor coverage Sulzberger and his colleagues put out during the genocide itself.

In his Cambridge Press study about the burying the Times did of the Holocaust, Laurel-Left notes that the primary reason Sulzberger refused to change his initial reaction towards reporting on Nazi violence against Jews was an unspoken fear that he would risk his own position in American society, often framed as part of a broader fear that Jewish assimilation in the U.S. would be harmed if too much attention was paid to the suffering of Eastern European Jews under fascism.

Daniel Johnson writes in an article for commentary.org, above all, he was wary of any new influx of European Jews into the United States. Assimilation for Sulzberger was a prize for which he was prepared to let other Jews make any sacrifice. That's good. Yeah.

Yeah. Just a nice little reminder of like what human evil is, you know, it's not just these Nazis wanting to exterminate people. It's this guy going like, I could help maybe save lives, but you know, that might endanger me being able to go to the best parties. So let's just not do that. Let's just not cover this, you know? Yeah. I think the, maybe the most discouraging thing for your soul that you can witness is

is extreme. It's like, okay, extreme violence and cruelty is bad enough, but spectators who laugh or treat it like it's fine. And you're like, damn, the human being can really get dark. Jesus. Yeah. Yeah. When people just aren't,

concerned, don't care about what's happening, what's being done to people. This has always been my frustration talking to some of my members of my family who supported the Iraq war about stuff I saw in Iraq. They're so bored of it.

of being taught of talking about the damage that they helped to do it. Just absolutely no interest in, in thinking about it and talking about it. You know, that's what the Republican party is, has tried to move on to being like, you know, fuck the Iraq war. Like, like they weren't the ones who did it. Right. You know, not that they were the only ones who did it. There's plenty of Democrats who voted for it, but like you guys, it was your thing. Right.

Like you don't get to fucking escape it because you don't want to talk about it anymore. Oh, and the othering of the Arab world as far as those people are terrorists is a narrative that's still foundational to what's going on there. Yeah. And yeah, the way in which it's interesting to me, because like I think I do actually talk about terrorism in a way that's unbiased because like.

I am very sympathetic to the aims of the PKK, which is a Kurdish terrorist organization, right? The fact that they have... And I'm not supportive of terrorism, but I think that oftentimes in history, there are groups that find themselves resorting to that and their broad aims are still justified, right? I feel the same way about the ANC, right? Nelson Mandela was not just...

tarred as a terrorist because of a political campaign by the apartheid government, Nelson Mandela went into hiding and established the arm wing of the ANC, which bombed civilians, right? Like he was a terrorist, you know, like terrorism. You can, you can objectively say all of these things are terrorism. And that doesn't mean that like,

You support it when the cause is good. It just means that you acknowledge there are terrorists sometimes whose overall cause is justified. It's like looking at the IRA. Do I think like do I think it was evil to like throw a bomb in a pub? Yeah, that is evil. It's bad to bomb a pub.

But that doesn't mean the overall fight was evil, right? Like you it's just everyone. Everyone agrees that terrorism is fine in certain circumstances. I don't see any moral difference. And they just don't call it terror. They're like, this is the good kind. So we picked a different word because this is the approved form of domestic terrorism. We're OK with.

Yeah. The bombing of Western Europe by the Allies during World War II was one of the largest acts of terrorism in history. It was the deliberate targeting of civilians to frighten them and break their will. There's no other way to describe it but terrorism. That's what it fucking was, right?

And I would argue that it actually didn't work. You can't really bomb people's will to fight away. But I don't think actually in World War II, we were wrong to have tried it for a period of time because the situation was fucking desperate. And you're going to try everything at that point, right? It's just how people react in situations like this. Everyone does it. Every side does it.

I think that's actually reporting on it objectively, you know? Sure. But the Times disagrees. I remember you were very pro-Maki and anti-Cardassian when that whole thing was going on. I am extremely supportive of Maki Ames. That's good. Do I like Chakotay? No. As an actor, I dislike him. Sure. Yeah. Look, I support insurgent attacks against Cardassian infrastructure, and I always have.

Yeah. But they're filthy Cardies. Yeah. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa, Michael. All right, Cole. We don't got to get all Miles O'Brien in here. That's right. Yes. Let's go down this tangent. Speaking of Miles O'Brien, a lot of people would argue the Miles O'Brien of physics was Albert Einstein. Yeah.

And Einstein reached out to Sulzberger to try to help him, you know, kind of after this point. He reaches out to Sulzberger at one point because there's a Berlin theater critic named Alfred Kerr, who is obviously Kerr is a Jewish man. And the Nazis want him dead. They have a real thing against critics.

So Einstein reaches out to Sulzberger with like, hey, you have a lot of pull and power. Can you help us get this guy out of Germany and into the United States so he doesn't get murdered? And Sulzberger yells at Einstein. He says, I am disassociated from any movement which springs from the oppression of Jews in Germany. Only in this way can the unprejudiced and unbiased portion of the times be understood.

What an insane thing to say. I will refuse to pay attention to the oppression of Jews in Germany because that's the only way that we can be unbiased is if we pretend this isn't happening. That's the neutral stance. Is pretend it's not happening. Wow.

So that statement is particularly ironic when we return again to how The Times has recently covered protests against the genocide in Gaza. I read an article recently on Dropsite News by Arvind Dhillawar, a freelance journalist who had worked for The Times reporting on an article about an anti-Zionist protest in New Jersey. The precise focus of the protest was Israeli realtors holding an event to auction off illegally seized Palestinian land.

Arvind writes, quote,

I have been threatened. I had a box truck with my picture on it and the words liar, liar driven around town. My house has been broken into. I have received anti-Semitic messages," Goldberg told Leland, adding, "I have never felt so afraid to be Jewish as now." And hey, look, if protests were corresponding to surges in violence towards Jewish people, that's worth reporting. But

But in this case, the claim by Hillary is, so far as we can tell, untrue. Arvind filed a records request, and the records he received from the police showed that police concluded no break-in was attempted at her property, right? That no crime at all had been attempted against Goldberg. They had found no evidence of it. There were no signs of forced entry. She calls them a dozen times for follow-up checks on her home, and at no point do the police find anything indicating her claims were true.

Arvind goes on to write,

Instead, Managing Director of External Communications, Charlie Stadelander, said in a statement that the article was thoroughly reported, fact-checked, and edited, and we stand behind its publication. Goldberg did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The cops are like, there was a truck going around her house with her face that said truth teller, truth teller. Everything's the opposite of what you're saying it is. And look, again, I don't want to pretend. Obviously, there has been a surge in anti-Semitism and some of it is tied. I don't blame the fact that people are protesting against a genocide for it. But those protests have provided cover for Nazis, right? You can find evidence of that.

And there is evidence that like aspects of like far right propaganda, anti-Jewish propaganda have been adopted by some folks on the left. Taking the opportunity. They're like anything to say anti-Jewish stuff. Yes, yes. Yeah, of course. Yeah, exactly. That is a thing that happens. It's a thing you have to guard against happening, right? It's a thing you have to be aware of.

But the Times is deliberately refusing to correct their reporting that makes the problem look much worse than it is. And it's because their narrative that they want to portray about these protests is helped by that inaccurate reporting, right? And that's to them neutrality. Cool stuff.

Back to the 1930s. Over in France, excellent work was done by La Humanité, the paper of the French Communist Party, which wrote unsparingly about Nazi violence towards Jews and other targeted groups. This reporting was ignored by the American press because it was a communist paper.

Now, there's a great book about all this, Berlin 1933, written by French media critic Daniel Schneiderman. I found an interview with Schneiderman in The New Yorker from back in 2019 that contains a fascinating quote on what he called activist journalism, which he argues was the only journalism that responded ethically to the rise of fascism.

Activist journalism, Schneiderman writes, journalism that subordinates the quest for truth to the quest for a truth that is useful to its cause is the only journalism that today doesn't have to feel ashamed about what it produced. Everything reasonable, scrupulous, balanced, in my opinion, contributed to lulling the crowd to sleep.

If I had been a reader at the time, though, I probably would have quickly stopped reading after a few days, dissuaded by the bludgeoning. So Schneiderman's saying, like, only these activist papers that had a clear angle are the ones who accurately describe the danger of the Nazis. But I think if I had been reading them at the time, I wouldn't have paid much attention because –

It's just kind of exhausting to get that sort of ideological bludgeoning. And I find this compelling. I think it's actually kind of courageous that he admits that, right? That's evidence of an honest thinker who was like, I can see that these people were the only ones who did the right thing. And I don't think I would have listened to them at the time. I actually respect being able to say that about yourself quite a lot. Yeah, it definitely bums me out, though, through the climate change lens, because a similar analog would be,

We're going to die. We're all going to die. We're all going to die. And eventually you're like, look, I know, but I'm sick of hearing it. It's really depressing. It's like, we are though. Or did you not want to know? This really is that level of problem. Yeah. Yeah. It's a,

Yeah, again, I like Schneiderman a lot because he's kind of able to acknowledge that about himself and about all of us. Like, no matter what you think, you do this about something. You kind of have to to survive, right? But that's part of where these guys, how these guys thrive, these monsters thrive. Yeah. Now, it is, you know, I find this all especially worth pointing out because the next period in... Sophie, did we do a second ad break? Nope.

You know what? The next period for all of us, Michael, is going to be to cut to ads. So have a little have a little ad, you know, shovel some ads into your face. You know, ads are as a great writer. William Shakespeare once said the oatmeal of art. So enjoy some oatmeal while we get ready to do more art.

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Sign up at WorkMoney. Get money-saving tips. Skip the rent. Get more rich. Sign up at WorkMoney.org slash MoreRichContest for your chance to win $50,000. This election season, the stakes are higher than ever. I think the choice is clear in this election. Join me, Charlemagne Tha God, for We The People, an audio town hall with Vice President Kamala Harris and you, live from Detroit, Michigan, exclusively on iHeartRadio. They'll tackle the tough questions, depressing issues, and the future of our nation. We may not

see eye to eye on every issue, but America, we are not going back. Don't miss this powerful conversation with Vice President Kamala Harris. Tomorrow at 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific on the free iHeartRadio app's hip-hop beat station. Ah, we're back. Michael Maestro Swain, are your fingers ready to tap the ivories of...

Talking about my keyboard as I easily Google William Shakespeare oatmeal and try to figure out what the fuck that was about. Yeah. I like to think he knew about oatmeal because as a British person, he couldn't have had teeth. Why not oatmeal? Yeah. Did he coin crocodile? He did. What a cool guy. Yeah. Billy shakes.

I'm sure it's based on a Greek root or something, but I like to think that he's just saw one and he's like, yeah, that's a fucking crocodile. Crocodile. It is one of those, you know, there's some animals like you look at a fucking, a

a Marmoset. Right. And like, it's not obviously a Marmoset. Other names could have worked for a Marmoset. You'll get a crocodile and you're like, yeah, that's a fucking crocodile. Right. Where you're like, you are a Todd. That is your name. Totally. Yeah, for sure. Every Todd I've seen has been a Todd. Anyway. Uh, so the next period of American journalism regarding the fascists, you know, the one that occurred from the late thirties up to the start of the war, uh,

things got a little better, quite a bit better by the end. The rapid change in American attitudes towards isolationism in World War II is some evidence of this, but we also see it in the response of the populace and the mainstream media to domestic fascist groups like the Silver Shirts and the German-American Bund.

Here at least, the outright sympathy of the Italian liberal press and the frightened tremulousness of the Weimar media were less present. When the Bund famously rallied in Madison Square Garden in 1939, reporters on scene for Bund clashes with anti-fascists wrote articles with titles like, "'Nazi Advocacy of Roosevelt's Death Charged' and "'Seven Are Injured at Nazi Rally' and that's like, you know, good."

In an article several days after the rally, even The Times argued that Bundists were, quote, "...determined to destroy our democracy." The paper's editor later released a statement saying the Bund meant to set up an American Hitler. And this, The Times, was at least following in the footsteps of the American people, who by this point had started taking the warnings of reporters who were quite biased against Nazis seriously.

And I might argue that they only, you know, the Times only jumps on the bandwagon of doing that when it becomes clear that there are Nazis in the U.S. who might threaten them even more than being sympathetic to Jews in Germany would. As U.S. entry to World War II grew closer, the most influential reporting on the Nazis came not from the unbiased monk-like reporters valued by AUKUS, but from foreign correspondents like William Shirer and Dorothy Thompson.

Thompson's most influential article, and today this is one of the most influential things anyone will ever write about fascism, was published in August of 1941 for Harper's Magazine. It had the evocative title, Who Goes Nazi? And rather than purporting to be even-handed journalism, it presents the reader with a series of fictional characters from various backgrounds all conversing at a dinner party, and it asks the reader to predict which ones might go Nazi.

I take some enjoyment in the fact that Thompson included a character in her article who was almost certainly based on Mr. Sulzberger, right? On the head editor at the Times. Quote,

He is intelligent and arrogant. He seldom associates with Jews. He deploys any mention of the Jewish question. He believes that Hitler should not be judged from the standpoint of anti-Semitism. He thinks that the Jews should be reserved on all political questions. He considers Roosevelt an enemy of business. He thinks it was a serious blow to the Jews that Frankfurter should have been appointed to the Supreme Court.

The saturnine Mr. C, the real Nazi in the room, engages him in a flatteringly attentive conversation. Mr. J agrees with Mr. C wholly. Mr. J is definitely attracted by Mr. C. He goes out of his way to ask his name. They have never met before. A very intelligent man, he says.

And Thompson's article today still draws a lot of hatred from conservatives who find it very unfair and unbiased, and it was. Dorothy understood that fairness and objectivity don't fight fascism. There's a good chance her prose will make you feel uncomfortable, and it ought to. But I promise if you read her article, you will at least feel something. Now, I'm not half the writer Dorothy was, so rather than attempt to wrap this piece up myself, Michael, I'm going to leave you with one last quote from that essay.

It's fun, a macabre sort of fun, this parlor game of who goes Nazi. And it simplifies things, asking the question in regard to specific personalities.

Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi. They may be the gentle philosopher whose name is in the Blue Book or Bill from City College to whom democracy gave a chance to design airplanes. You'll never make Nazis out of them. But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success, they would all go Nazi in a crisis.

Believe me, nice people don't go Nazi. Their race, color, creed, or social condition is not the criterion. It is something in them. Those who haven't anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don't, whether it is breeding or happiness or wisdom or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi. It's an amusing game. Try it at the next big party you go to.

Yeah, accuse everyone you disagree with. Yeah, I think it gets at the base of something that people are wielding to great effect right now, which is it's weird to hate people for no reason. They're weird little guys. Yes, yes. And I think that recognition that like you become a Nazi when there's nothing inside you.

but the love of and need for wealth and power, right? When that's the only thing you've got,

It's fundamentally a product of insecurity. And so the way to fight these people, as we're starting to see with like Vance here, is to make them feel more insecure, right? When you frame them, when you either talk of them as like, well, these are just common salt of the earth people with legitimate grievances, or when you do what I think a lot of liberals started to do with Trump, which is why you've got this weird chunk of people who like don't think he could have been shot, right?

just like honestly as part of an assassination attempt, you know, people treat them like almost a supernatural enemy, right? Like they're, you know, they're this kind of like evil demonic force as opposed to, no, these are sad people

insecure, sick little weirdos, right? And when you shine that light on them, when you make that clear, however you do it, if you do it through just objective reporting, which you can do, or if you do it through satire, right? Whatever you have to do

You have to find their points of insecurity and stick a thumb in them, right? That is how you fight these people without pulling out guns, right? If you want to avoid that, and I sure do, that's how you do it. That's how you get kicked out of Tenacious D, though. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a bummer. That sucked.

It is. That did suck. It's such a, oh, bro code. Come on, man. Man. Yeah. Yeah.

No, but I don't know who wouldn't who wouldn't sacrifice a 30 year friendship for the bliss that is getting to be in the what's that fucking video game movie that Jack Black's about to be in? Borderlands. Borderlands. God. Considered fucking terrible. There's already no. Yeah. No, no, no. Nothing more valuable than getting to be in the Borderlands movie because of an off the cuff joke.

That, no offense, literally everyone thought in their head, like there's no, it's whatever. Anyway. Yeah. I don't know. I think it speaks to what we were saying in terms of, yes, in a vacuum, violence is always shocking and feels unnatural in a way. But-

remember that the one context where it kind of makes sense is like, yeah, but if someone's been beating the shit out of you for eight hours, like there's a point, there's a point. There's a point, right? And that point was for us in the political sense of like getting dirty. That point was like six years ago, six to eight years ago. We've held ourselves back long enough. Yeah. Anyway, Michael,

Speaking of fighting back, you know what? You can fight back against your boredom by reading Michael's novel. That's right. Which will make you entertained and happy.

It's true. I plugged it at the top, but I'll mention again, it's called The Climb. You can get a free sample by checking out the Small Beans podcast feed or check out the Small Beans Patreon page and click the shop tab if you end up wanting the whole thing. It's an audio book and a book book. You can get either flavor. Awesome. Yeah. Now, anyway, thank you so much. We got two things to plug at the end here, Robert. Yeah. Do it. So.

I'll do the first one if you do the second one deal. Okay. He's clearly forgot the plugs over here. I'll remember by the time we get there, I think. The first one is we have a new podcast at Cool Zone Media hosted by Molly Conger. It's called Weird Little Guys and shows like that relate to episodes like this.

I stealth plugged it earlier. I know I caught that and I was like, wow, Swaim really, really calling it back. I'm loving it so far. Oh, thank you. Molly's amazing. And the other thing, Robert, is what is the other thing, Sophie? I don't know. I'm looking to Robert and we go. I'm looking at you. Other people can look at you.

Sophie, let me explain to you. So about like 150 or so years ago, some, I'm guessing they were Frenchmen figured out that if you like put a hole in a box and run light through it,

you can kind of get images to print essentially onto pieces of paper, right? This led to the creation of what were called photographs and cameras. And eventually people recognize that if you take a lot of these still images and you run them in sequence, you can create the illusion of movement. And now we at Cool Zone have joined this glorious tradition

by pivoting to video ourselves because that's never bad. Never bad. YouTube.com slash at behind the basket. Masterfully stretched. Thank you. Thank you, Michael. Thank you, Michael. Thank you. And thank you. That's it. That's the episode. Bye. Is it? I mean, do you have anything else you'd like to add? Michael.

It's nice to talk to you. Oh, me? That was directed at me? No, I was just saying it's nice to talk to you. That's what I wanted to add. Oh, yeah, no, it's a blast. I love that. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. Did you, the recent news came out that Tim Walls is a Sega Dreamcast player.

I think this might be what cinches the election, you know? Can we do another hour on that? Perfect Blue and the little DMU? Now he's a monster. Oh, okay. We have different attitudes. So good, dude. I want to say Crazy Taxi was on the Dreamcast. One of the launch titles, I believe. September 9th, 1999, Dreamcast Day. It was really the first. Yeah. The precursor to that good GTA 3 energy.

Yeah, for real. I was just thinking about Crazy Taxi as I hopped in here. And there was the Simpsons ripoff of Crazy Taxi. It was pretty good, too. Yeah, hit and run. Yeah, hit and run. Great game. Anyway, think about the Simpsons now, folks. Touch grass, wear sunscreen, be well. Bye.

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or, check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast is supported by BetterHelp, offering licensed therapists you can connect with via video, phone, or chat. Here's BetterHelp Head of Clinical Operations, Hesu Jo, discussing who can benefit from therapy. I think a

A lot of people think that you're supposed to be going to therapy once you're like having panic attacks every day. But before you get to that point, I think once you start even noticing that you feel a little bit off and you can't maintain this harmony that you once had in relationships, that could be a sign that maybe you want to go talk to somebody.

There's always a benefit in talking to someone because we can all benefit from improved insight about ourselves and who we are and how we behave with other people. So if you're human, that's like a good indicator that you could benefit from talking to somebody. Find out if therapy is right for you. Visit BetterHelp.com today.

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