EXCLUSIVE: Rachel maddow explores what the prosecution of American fascists in the WW II era can teach us about accountability for Jan. 6.
dropped early this morning. The series premieres Oct. 10, with eight weekly installments. Maddow talked exclusively tolast week to introduce the “mostly forgotten history” that Americans would do well to remember.This is the first time that I’ve talked about it. I have to warn you, you’re getting the raw, uncooked, blurred blurts about it. It’s called, and in the broadest sense it is about sedition — which is timely with the Oath Keepers sedition trial in D.C. starting.
The Justice Department at the time — in fits and starts — ended up cottoning to both of these plots and realized they were connected. They brought a big prosecution to try to stop a seditious conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government by force, with help of the Hitler government, which by then we were actively fighting in World War II.
But the German propaganda efforts in the United States, in particular, were something that was often downplayed at the time, and is still downplayed. Because we never think about propaganda as important. We saw it as bad advertising. Or disinformation. But that was how the Nazis were waging war. And their propaganda operation inside the United States was big, well-funded, and aggressive. Some of the most famous members of Congress at the time were implicated in this plot.
In 1940, J. Edgar Hoover went out and gave a press conference with this big splash, front-page gigantic headlines all across the country, about the arrest of 17 members of a group called the Christian Front. The Christian Front, again, is a group lost to history. In January 1940, the FBI announced that 17 members of the Christian Front were being charged for sedition because they had a plot to kill a dozen members of Congress and blow up buildings — with a pretty well-organized plan to have it set off a violent coup that would allow them and their allies to take over the government. They thought that killing the congressmen would set off a civil war in the United States.
They went on trial a few months later. They all got off, and that was the cautionary tale for the Justice Department. The Christian Front were emboldened and Coughlin felt vindicated. So when they came back to the same issue a few years later with this Great Sedition Trial in 1944, that previous defeat was still ringing in their ears.
There were also some Silver Shirt-adjacent plots in Southern California that had a specific anti-Semitic twist. They were going to find, hunt down, and assassinate the 20 most high-profile Jews in Hollywood, including studio executives, actors, and entertainers. Then they were going to hang them and display their bodies and shoot their corpses as they hung from lampposts. They hoped it would cause American Jews to flee.
When they brought the sedition indictments, it was a risky decision. And it makes me appreciate more how risky the decision is by the Merrick Garland Justice Department to bring this sedition trial against the Oath Keepers. Because sedition charges are really hard to prove — even in the worst cases.
It helps me understand what went wrong in terms of people feeling like Robert Mueller was going to besolution to what Russia did in 2016, and it helps me understand the value of the work of the Jan. 6 committee. In terms of the content, the research process for this has been like writing a PhD thesis. It’s not an adaptation of a book or an article that somebody’s written. We did interview some historians and authors, and you’ll hear some of them in the podcast, but I built a whole new library in order to learn this stuff well enough to feel comfortable telling the tale.