This probably goes in this subforum, since it involves Maddow and MSNBC. It’s now two episodes in out of a first (only?) season of a planned eight. It covers the phenomenon of the pre-WW2 America First* movement and looks/sounds fascinating. Begins with looking into the 1940 plane crash of a new DC-3 with an experienced pilot and copilot in charge but perhaps not at the controls when the plane dived into a field with such violence that the engines ended up six feet below ground level. On board were 25 people, one of whom was a US Senator from Minnesota named Ernest Lundeen who was found earlier that day by his secretary, crying and saying things about how he’d “let it go too far.”
*(and anti-Semites/Nazi sympathizers like Ford, Lindbergh and Father Coughlin)
Given the description, the historical parallels to our current dispensation are obvious.
I love Maddow but I don’t really do podcasts. The commute from the kitchen to the office is too short and at any other time I’d be consuming real media.
This is four episodes in and it’s fascinating stuff.
At one point in 1940 there was a whole (real, historical, 1921-1945) Nazi propaganda operation being run out of the office of a US Senator using the Congressional frank to mail copies of Nazi agent-written speeches delivered by the Senator to said Senator’s constituents, on the US taxpayer’s dime.
But it went well beyond one Senator, as was soon discovered on investigation.
Well, now the narrative is “We Were the Good Guys” and “Greatest Generation” and all that, and a lot of that is true, but there were literally millions of copies of those speeches mailed out from the offices of a number of Congressmen and Senators. They had to have some effect. Hell, someone (probably a sympathetic American MP) slipped Goering a cyanide capsule so he wouldn’t hang at Nuremberg, for instance. There was a lot more hate for the Japanese than for the Germans (when after all about a third of Americans had some German ancestry).
