Lawfare Daily: Rachel Maddow Talks McCarthy, Fascism, and Ultra

[Intro]

Rachel Maddow: There is a deeply anti-American core to this, what they try to make manifest as a sort of super patriotism. And in this era, we can see it, I think, in very stark relief because they weren't anti-American in the abstract. They were anti-American in the context of America fighting Germany.

Benjamin Wittes: It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Benjamin Wittes, Editor in Chief of Lawfare with Rachel Maddow.

Rachel Maddow: The superpower that these guys appear to have, is that it seems like nothing in the system constrains them, and that they're bigger than the system, and that therefore they give all this hope to the people who want to destroy the system. Well, the system needs to disprove that and bring them back down to size.

Benjamin Wittes: Today we're talking about Rachel Maddow's latest podcast series, the second season of Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra.

[Main Podcast]

I want to start with Bag Man, because there actually is a interesting through line between these three series that you've done on historical events that are not about the present except that they really are. And so I want to start by just getting your sense of, first of all, how did, how did Bag Man lead to Ultra and how did Ultra season one lead to Ultra season two?

Rachel Maddow: Oh, God, that's such a good question. I don't, I mean, I'm interested in your theory about how Bag Man loops into all of it. I mean, because part of what was so compelling to me about the Bag Man story was that there was this sort of forgotten, very near predecessor to what we were seeing with the challenges the Justice Department was facing around having a crook in the White House again. And I felt like people didn't know, but then what made me want to do it as a podcast was how much Agnew is like Donald Trump in terms of the way he talks and the kind of politics that he taps into. And so for me, that was like kind of a standalone thing. But how do you see Bag Man as connecting to Ultra?

Benjamin Wittes: Well, two ways. The first is that it has this, they all have this theme, which is forgotten, or mostly forgotten history, or history that we remember a little corner of, but not the full story of, that is, in fact, bearing on what we're going through now.

Rachel Maddow: Yes.

Benjamin Wittes: And the second is that there is a common theme in the rhetoric and, and beliefs of the far-right ecosystem. Whether it's Agnew and for those who have never listened to Bag Man, Bag Man is the story of Spiro Agnew and the attempt to prosecute him and get him out of office Nixon's first vice president. And just like he sounds a lot like Trump, in season two of Ultra, boy, the effort to not respect the results of an election sounds a lot, you know, if we could just get some alternative electors, right? You know, history doesn't rhyme, but it sure does sound like, you know, it, it has a certain assonance and consonance. And I, I, I do think there's a theme in this body of work that you've done of, like looking for the resonances of our current moment, sometimes little, sometimes huge, sometimes tonal, sometimes substantive, that is, that we've forgotten about with this kind of overriding message that we've been here before

Rachel Maddow: That, that's exactly right and, and I, some people see that, I think, as a pessimistic view, like a fundamentally kind of scary and upsetting view. Like you're telling me there's been things this bad before and, and, and political figures this terrible and damaging to the democracy. And I, for me, it's an optimistic thing because when I find things that I think are legitimate antecedents to the kinds of challenges that we're facing now, that are really scary and unnerving challenges that we're facing now, I am comforted by the fact that other Americans had to deal with things this bad and in some cases worse. And I feel like it's a substantive piece of homework to do, to learn how, why they succeeded and what they did and what worked and what didn't and what kind of costs they had to pay.

And, you know, Ultra season 2, one of the things that is sad about it is that so many of the people who did the right thing and who stood up for democracy and who stood up against demagoguery and tyranny paid terrible prices for it, paid with their careers, in some cases paid with their lives. And also, it was, in the end, something that saved the country. It doesn't always feel like every one of these people standing up does anything, and you see them put through the ringer, and you see their lives ruined, you see their families pay the price. But you add up all of these acts of opposition to the demagogue, and in the end, it works. And that to me is both sad for those individuals, but also heartening, and it, to me, shows their heroism.

Benjamin Wittes: So when you drive from up the eastern seaboard on I-95, you cross into northern Maryland over, I believe, the Susquehanna River over the Millard Tydings Bridge on I-95. And I was aware that Millard Tydings was a senator from Maryland. I think that was that and that there's a bridge on I-95 named after him is I think the universe of my knowledge about him. And usually as a mid Atlantic guy, you know, when you learn the history of some white guy senator from your region in the 40s and 50s, what you learn is really upsetting. You know, somebody who you know as the father of some great program. You know, something named after him turns out to be a vicious segregationist. But you made me feel good about Millard Tydings, and I'm always going to have a smile on my face when I drive in Northern Maryland now,

Rachel Maddow: There's definitely an interstate theme, right? Because there and, because there's the Miller Tydings Bridge that you're describing. There's also a Hamilton Fish Bridge in New York City, and in, in New Hampshire, there's a whole stretch of interstate 93 that's named after Styles Bridges, who is one of the great villains, like a really, really complexly evil villain in Ultra season 2. And between him and Hamilton Fish, I feel like the Tydings Bridge in Maryland evens it out a little bit because it gives us a little bit of a hero.

Benjamin Wittes: Right, I like, put a big portrait, statue of him there and maybe rename the other bridges. Yeah. I think modern New Hampshire is probably not that thrilled to have been represented by Styles Bridges. All right, I want to do this entire interview in the form of asking you who is questions.

Rachel Maddow: Okay.

Benjamin Wittes: And I want to start with the overarching villain of your story, which is a guy I had never heard of despite being somewhat steeped in the history of extremist movements. Francis Yockey is not a name I had run across. I've never read his book, “Imperium,” and you make a kind of amazing antihero out of him. Who is he and why should anyone care?

Rachel Maddow: So Francis Parker Yockey was an American who was involved with a bunch of the pro-fascist American groups that Ultra season 1 was about before World War II, groups like the Silver Shirts and Charles Coghlin's anti-democratic Catholic militia groups and the German American Bund. He was tied in with all of those groups. He then was in the army during the beginning of World War II and went AWOL under weird circumstances. One of the forgotten American, real, like, cinematic spy stories of World War II is that the Germans landed two U-boats here, one in Florida and one in the Hamptons, and dropped off a team of four saboteurs in each place. And they had tons of money and secret agent stuff with them and explosives. And they had this remit they'd been trained in the Third Reich to come over here and start blowing up water supplies and railroad depots and aluminum factories and all sorts of stuff.

And Francis Yockey had a personal connection to one of the saboteurs. And when the FBI wrapped up those saboteurs, they then started going after their accomplices in the United States, including family members and friends. And Francis Yockey was one of the people they wanted to talk to, and he went AWOL. And after his involvement in pro-fascist groups, and then that, you're starting to get the sense of like, oh, this guy might be. Ultimately, he gets discharged from the army as, as mentally ill, which seems to have been a hoax. He, he seems to have sort of pulled one over on them with that. But then in one of the great acts of bad vetting in American history, he gets himself hired to go work at the Nuremberg trials.

Benjamin Wittes: And for the prosecution side.

Rachel Maddow: For the prosecution side. And he goes over there. And I mean, the army has him listed in their files as a Nazi sympathizer. And they know about him having gone AWOL to evade questioning in conjunction with Operation Pastorius and they know about his prewar ties. And he nevertheless somehow gets hired to be a lawyer for the prosecution. And indeed, once he gets there, he's a mole for the Nazis at the Dachau trials, which you have the, there's the main Nuremberg trial, the subsequent Nuremberg trials, and then there's the Dachau trials, which were most of the trials that the U.S. Army put on for Nazi war criminals. And he cheats.

He gets over there and he steals stuff from them and helps them. And army counterintelligence figures it out and they go to find him and he has fled the country and he becomes, for more than a decade, essentially the most wanted American fascist fugitive ever. He becomes part of what's called the Fascist International in the immediate post war years, gets involved with Oswald Mosley's fascists in Britain, he speaks at fascist gatherings in, in Italy. The U.S. government is tracking him everywhere. He's linked to Nazis who have gone to hide in Argentina. There's a weird side subplot with the Nazis in Argentina getting involved in setting up Perón's nuclear program there, and what is, the U. S. intelligence is very worried about what they have developed there and what they may be able to put on sale in the black market and Yockey’s involved in that. He's just this, he's the anti James Bond. He's this kind of monstrous figure and he turns up back in the United States in the early 1950s and ends up hooked up with Joe McCarthy of all people.

Benjamin Wittes: Right, so I'm gonna do Joe McCarthy last because he's the one that everybody listening has heard of, and almost nobody listening will recognize him in the story that you tell. That it's a completely different story about Joe McCarthy than we, than we know. So hold the McCarthy thought, people. Yockey’s most enduring influence is this book that he writes which you credit with kind of the creation of Holocaust denial. Tell us a little about “Imperium.”

Rachel Maddow: So when he flees Germany, when army counterintelligence is looking for him as for having been a mole inside the war crimes trials. He goes to, he goes a few different places, but he ends up in Ireland, on the Irish coast, and he writes this like 600 page fascist screed, which is considered by a lot of people on the far right to be the American “Mein Kampf.” And it's a, you know, it's standard Nazi stuff that the innovation for him in the post war years in terms of Yockey's thinking, like the thing that he contributes as a theorist is that focus of the right as, as, as anticommunist is misplaced because what is much worse than communism is Judaism. And we ought to admire what Stalin is doing with the pogroms and the show trials and the murders of the Jews. And so it's as bad as it sounds, but Yockey's contribution is essentially that the United States is as a multiracial democracy and a place where Jews live and aren't subject to pogroms and oppression in the way they are in other places, the United States is a lost cause.

It's deeply anti-American. It's deeply pro-Russian. And he's basically calling for, he says at one point, he's writing just before 1950, and he says that by 2050, the results of World War II will be reversed. And there will be a fascist world empire, and the United States will have woken up. And we'll finish the job that Adolf Hitler started. But he's, that's his basic idea that anti semitism as a as a prime mover will create a fascist white empire in Europe in cahoots with Russia against the United States until the United States kills or expels the Jews and then we can join the white Reich that was always supposed to win World War II in the first place. So that's Yockey's, that's Yockey's big contribution to the world of, of alt-right thinking. You know, and, and it's, he's celebrated today. There are new editions of his writings and of “Imperium” that come out all the time. Alt right websites, you know, celebrate, you know, the centennial of his birth and they put out birthday event tributes for him. And there's right wing video games that feature him as a, as a hero. He's been cited by white supremacists, including by one at the sentencing for his hate crime murder trial. He cited Yockey by name at his sentencing as his inspiration for doing it. He's a real, he's a real hero on the alt-right today.

Benjamin Wittes: It's so interesting because he, you know, when I've delved in these spaces, I guess they're relatively stovepiped, you know. The person who, the theoretician of that period who I always see cited everywhere is Julius Evola, who makes a cameo in, in the last episode as kind of another one of these.

So, Yockey must have been, and you go into this a little bit, but I'm curious for your thoughts on it. He must have been absurdly talented. First of all, there's a weird kind of manic energy to writing 600 page book with no sources, you know, kind of while you're on the lam. But secondly, he seems to be an incredible con artist, that while he's on the lam, he manages to enlist, he manages to join the prosecution force in, in, in Dachau. He manages to operate as a mole for defense lawyers in that context. He manages to then go back to the United States and become a speech writer for, for a sitting U.S. senator, McCarthy. He manages to speak at rallies. So two possibilities. One is the FBI didn't really want to find him. And the second is that he was really good and that he managed it for a good long time. And then, spoiler alert, managed to cheat the hangman at the end, mysteriously getting a cyanide capsule in San Francisco jail when he needed one. How do we, how should we think of him? Is this a situation where he's really a James Bond or an anti-James Bond figure? Or is this a situation where the, the anti-left orientation of the FBI at the time was, like, had he been a communist, they would have caught him pretty quickly.

Rachel Maddow: Yeah, it's, it's, and that, it's a good question, and actually, that's actually just the right way to put it, because if you look at the FBI files that are available on Yockey, they I mean, as you mentioned before, he does seem to be the first American to have ever articulated Holocaust denial in print. He has this incredible influence in terms of electrifying and inspiring, even during his lifetime, some sort of hero worship among fascist groups and Nazi groups, both in Europe and the United States. Like, he's having a really big impact on the right in really toxic ways.

And the FBI is interested in him. Yeah, like they're, they're looking for him. But they, he does seem to be way too easily falling through the cracks in all sorts of different circumstances. There's two exceptions to that. One is in 1958, there is the bombing of the main synagogue in Atlanta. And the FBI and the administration is worried enough about what's happening with the bombings of both black and Jewish sites in the south, that they actually do light a fire under the FBI, and the FBI decides that Yockey is one of their main suspects for the Atlanta synagogue bombing, and so they sort of up their efforts to find him. They're looking for, they send around multiple copies of his photograph, they activate every FBI field office in the country. They start asking all of the right wing, all the right wing activists, far right activists who they've got on their radar, they start asking them proactively about Yockey. So that, that mattered to them.

But the only other time you really see tons of energy is when they think that he is linked to the Soviet Union. At one point, they think that he is trying to sell plans for what's called a cobalt bomb, which they think was potentially developed by the Nazi scientists who went to Argentina. He's trying to sell that in Egypt, but he's there trying to sell that in Egypt, when they're very worried about communist influence in particularly pan Arabist movements in the Middle East. And he seems to have arrived in the Middle East after having been in Russia. And so you see the FBI, and indeed the CIA, quite exercised about that because they're worried that he may be doing something on behalf of the Soviet Union. And it's not at all clear whether he was.

There seems in, in sort of Yockey lore on the far right, they talk about him spending time behind the Iron Curtain. And he certainly had enough resources to have-. When the FBI finally got up caught up to him, he did have three passports in three different names, seven birth certificates in seven different names, right?

Benjamin Wittes: He had help from someone

Rachel Maddow: And thousands and thousands of dollars in cash and access to more. So he had connections, but that the worry that it was Soviet connections is the thing that seems to have activated FBI interest in a way that all of his right wing influence never really did.

Benjamin Wittes: Who was Malmedy? Not a person, but needs a little who is here.

Rachel Maddow: Yeah. So toward the end of World War II, Germany's losing. They're losing thanks to their fight on the, against the Soviets. They're losing thanks to D-Day. So they're losing in the East and the West. And Hitler mounts a heroic last counter offensive, which is massive. And it is in Belgium in the winter of 1944. Lots of U.S. troops are in Belgium in 1944. They're basically getting ready to march over the border into Germany. And while they are overwintering there, Hitler pulls off what is an, an impressive show of force for an almost defeated German military. And it's the Battle of the Bulge. And because it is a surprise attack, they take a ton of territory very quickly. And then there's like basically a six-week battle and the allies take all that, all that back.

But when they take it all back in, in January, what they discover is that in the first very, very early days, the opening salvo of the Battle of the Bulge, one of the things that Hitler's advancing troops did, is they carried out the largest massacre of the war of unarmed U.S. POWs. Dozens of American GIs from a lightly armed artillery observer unit got overrun by an experienced Nazi Panzer SS unit and, and they lined him up in a field and massacred them. And it was called the Malmedy Massacre. And there's some interesting reporting that I find credible, recent scholarship that suggests that the Malmedy Massacre was so terrible, and so shocking, and so galvanizing to the U.S. public, that the images of American G. I. s with their hands above their head frozen in a field in, in, in Belgium in January 1945 when they were discovered, those images ran in popular magazines in the United States. It was some of the first U.S. military casualties of World War II that there were actually gruesome photos of in the press. The public being galvanized about it, the scale of the horror, just the way that unfolded, arguably, led Eisenhower to commit that there would be war crimes trials. That this wouldn't just be a war that ended with victory and then we all go back to rebuild our countries, that there would actually be some sort of accountability for the way the Germans waged this war. And the things that they did that should never happen in war again.

And, in fact, the Malmedy Massacre perpetrators were rounded up, and they were interrogated, and put on trial, and they were all convicted, and dozens of them were sentenced to death. And then it took a bizarre turn. There was a U.S. defense lawyer who was a real antisemite and segregationist. His name was Willis Everett who lost the case. He was the defense lawyer for the Malmedy defendants, and he lost the case. He was very well connected at home and in Georgia. And he came back to the, he left the army, came back to the United States and decided that he was going to avenge his loss and have this trial reopened somehow. Meanwhile, the Malmedy defendants, the Nazis who had been convicted, got themselves a new lawyer in Germany who was a leader in the various underground plots to bring the Nazis back to power in Germany.

And a symbiotic thing started where Willis Everett in the United States and the Nazis in Germany created, they just concocted out of whole cloth, a totally false story that the only reason they'd been convicted is because they'd been tortured by terrible Jewish American soldiers into giving false confessions. And they were all innocent. And the real criminals were these American Jews who were out for vengeance and who these poor innocent Nazi boys were tortured and they should all be let go. And it's completely made up, but they ultimately find an audience, among other places, with a young Wisconsin senator named Joe McCarthy, who takes up their cause and just eats it, just completely wholesale, completely uncritically. And with support from the Chicago Tribune, a very conservative newspaper, sort of the Fox News of its day, and the sort of nascent post war American right wing political movement and political media, they end up, it's a foreign influence operation, basically. It's a total propaganda hoax, and they get the Malmedy Massacre, they turn it into something opposite than what it was. There's, no Nazis ever executed for that. They're all let go from prison, and the American people are sold this bill of goods that American Jews in the army were the real villains here. And those Nazis were innocent. It was all false, and it was McCarthy's first real splash in American politics.

Benjamin Wittes: Yeah, so I'm going to come back to McCarthy in a second, but I want to talk about, which you don't in the, in the series because you assiduously and very carefully don't make reference to modern events in any of these series. But they're always there. And the Malmedy Massacre is, you know, sitting there as this thing that we're, like, you can't listen to this story without thinking about January 6th. January 6th, of course, isn't a massacre, but it is, like Malmedy, something we all saw with our own eyes.

We didn't have to have it splashed on Life magazine with, you know, U.S. servicemen with their hands in the air being shot in the back of the head. We saw it live. And as a result of a sustained influence operation and a politician and set of politicians who are just lying about it and saying things that we actually, if we remember what we saw, we know are not true and they're conspiracy based and they're-. It catches on among a very large segment of the population. Now, the striking thing about Malmedy to me is that you can do that when the other side committed a crime against you. You know, you can make up, like, January 6th is striking, you know, it's one side of America versus another side of America, and you can say, no, that didn't happen.

But this is somebody killed dozens of our boys and we know exactly who it was and they've confessed and there's no doubt and there's been a fair trial. And then you announce that it didn't happen. I, I can't think of another example of this. There's no Holocaust denial among Jews, right? This is like Americans claiming that a great crime against America didn't happen. So my question is, what is the appeal in the far right to the idea that this killing of American soldiers, it's not like, you know, Dachau, which we discovered, right? But it wasn't against us. This was us. Why is it appealing to the far-right psychology to deny a crime against American normies?

Rachel Maddow: I, I think about when I was researching the sort of aftermath of the Malmedy scandal, about McCarthy having made it a scandal, I just, I fell apart watching the accounts of the Malmedy survivors. I mean, the other detail of this as a crime is that there's a number of American GIs who were there that day who played dead and crawled into the woods and got away. Part of the reason Americans knew about this in the media as it happened, not only because of those photos, but because when those witnesses got away, they immediately went and talked to reporters and told them what had happened. And so there's this, there, there's There's eyewitness testimony.

And then after McCarthy helps them all get off and turns it into this backwards story, those survivors are still around. And there's an incredible series of interviews with them that are at the World War II Museum actually where they talk about how they know it's real and even though Americans broadly don't believe now what they went through, they'll always know it. And they, their anger and their sort of refusal to give up on the truth that they lived and survived and that their friends died for is for me, almost, almost, I almost can't take it in. And in a smaller way, but following the same contours, I think about officers like Michael Fanone and Harry Dunn.

Benjamin Wittes: Capitol police officers on January 6th.

Rachel Maddow: Who were not only part of the fight, but who were injured. In Michael Fanone's case, grievously injured. And then not only are they being told that it didn't happen, but that they were the bad guys. And the attacks now on Fanone and Dunn and other Capitol police officers who have, who have spoken out about what happened to them is, is sickening to me along the same lines as, as listening to those Malmedy survivors.

In terms of what motivates the, the false tale, you know, turning it into a hoax, turning it, turning it around backwards, I think there are different the different motivations for different actors. But part of what I think you find when you're looking at these things that I'm so interested in, which I think is broadly, you know, American electoral politics opening the door to violent, anti-democratic extremists and what happens when they let them in the door, what then happens inside our politics, because I think that is what we're going through right now. That you, you see all of the craven and self interested and terrible motivations of those extremists, you see them just brought in the door to and then they meld with whatever the political motivations are, the people who let them in the door.

So for the Nazis, they don't want to get executed, right? For their law, for their Nazi lawyer, he wants the Nazis to come back to power in Germany and is part of multiple efforts to do that. He's a leader of something called the Socialist Reich Party, which was actually banned in Germany as the successor to the Nazi party in 1952. But in order to bring the Nazis back to power, you need to account for the body count and the atrocities somehow. And so he wants to make the famous atrocities not have happened. And so he comes up with this hoax that says that these guys are innocent. So those are their motivations. But then you get to the United States. Well, what are the motivations of the people here who are advancing this? Well, the first person to advance this-

Benjamin Wittes: I mean, it, sorry to interrupt. But it's a, normally the demagogic thing to do is to amplify the crime committed against you. Right? So if you think about the riots going on in Britain right now, it's somebody gets stabbed and you blame it on migrants. You don't deny the stabbing happened, right? Like there's something really perverse about an American politician. I understand why Nazis would want to do it, but an American politician looking at a massacre of American troops and saying, there is political gain to be had out of denying that it happened.

Rachel Maddow: Well, but so the, the people who are pushing this in the United States, the first one was William Langer. Who you know from Ultra Season 1, right, who's a big part of the America First movement, and who is a fan of the sedition defendants. And who is somebody who absolutely, you know, is sort of remembered, I think, kindly as an isolationist, but he absolutely, specifically did not want us to be fighting Germany, and thought it was a bad idea to fight Germany. And so he's motivated, in part, I think by trying to prove that the Germans weren't so bad and we shouldn't have fought them in the first place.

I mean, why do you have so many American right wing groups, you know, Regnery Publishing still exists today. Why do you have Henry Regnery with his publishing company and with his magazine at the time, Human Events, which still exists, which now, right? Why do you have them saying that the Malmedy Massacre didn't happen, and the real victims, the real criminals were the American Jews, Jewish soldiers who were somehow victimizing the Nazis here? Why do you have them downplaying the Holocaust and saying the Allies did worse things? Well, they didn't want us to fight Germany and they think that Germany was all right and we're the bad guys. There is a deeply anti-American core to this, what they try to make manifest as a sort of super patriotism.

And in this era, we can see it, I think, in very stark relief because they weren't anti American in the abstract. They were anti American in the context of America fighting Germany. America fighting the Nazis, which they didn't want us to do because they thought the Nazis had something on their side that appealed to them. And that makes you want to excuse all the bad things the Nazis did. And that makes the war crimes trials a bad thing. That makes Malmedy something that you need to make go away. It sort of lines everybody's incentives up. And it's, it's both craven and opportunistic, but it's also insidious in terms of the way that makes people think about the conflict that we just had and the evil that we just confronted.

Benjamin Wittes: All right. Who was Willis Carto?

Rachel Maddow: You know, Willis Carto is the reason that I started doing this whole thing in the first place. When I originally set out to do Ultra, the whole thing was going to be about Willis Carto.

Benjamin Wittes: Really? I first ran into Willis Carto in, I want to say I was a student at Oberlin, and there was, he had this newspaper for years and years and years The Spotlight. And there was an ep we were, a friend and I were, this was during the height of the Farrakhan era when Jesse Jackson got in trouble for being, you know, not being willing to denounce Louis Farrakhan. And there was a whole issue of The Spotlight, which was this white supremacist publication devoted to Willis Carto's meeting with Louis Farrakhan. And of course, they had two great things in common. They believed in the separation of races and they hate Jews. And then they got, you know, the, it was about how much they had in common and they got along great. And there's this, you know, this photo of these, you know, kind of pasty white, white supremacist guys in like suits and then the Nation of Islam guys, you know. And they're sitting at the table. I, I fell in love with Louis Carto then. How did you get get interested in him?

Rachel Maddow: So Carto is one of these figures, I mean, I was interested in what are the origins of American Holocaust denial? Like, why, why are we seeing a resurgence of Holocaust denial and really crude, like, German Nazi level caricatures of American Jews at the same time that we are seeing the rise of Trumpism in the Republican Party. Where did American Holocaust denial come from? I sort of learned the story of Yockey. Why do I know about Yockey? It's because this guy, Carto, started publishing Yockey. And Carto was a champion of, of Yockey.

Yockey's book, “Imperium,” that we were just talking about a few minutes ago, it was originally published, it was in two volumes. It was in hardback. It was in, it was in England, I think they had two different, I think two different print runs. I think maybe volume one was a thousand copies. Volume two was like two hundred copies. There's almost none of this book, which takes on an important role in the right. It almost doesn't physically exist. There's so few of them. Right now if you want to, I just checked this this morning, if you want to buy one of those original hardback copies from the original British print run of “Imperium,” you can buy one for roughly 40,000 dollars. Because there is that kind of a market for them on the very far right, and that's great. But Carto is the one who made it available as a cheap paperback, and through his group Liberty Lobby, which was always underappreciated both for its influence on the Republican Party and its radical extremism. It became, the Yockey sort of a house philosopher of Liberty Lobby and the patron saint of Willis Carto's whole life on the American right.

So Carto is an important figure for understanding the American right, I think from, from 1960 roughly until the, certainly through the Reagan era. Arguably beyond that. He didn't die until 2015. But he was the sort of nerve center for bringing together the really, really, really far right. I mean, Carto was, I'm not, exaggerating to say he was a Nazi. He had four busts of Adolf Hitler in his office. I mean, he was a, he was a Nazi. While also getting Liberty Lobby advisors and staff and board members recommended for relatively high government positions in multiple presidential administrations, including Reagan's. So, he’s important in terms of bringing the, understanding how those two sides of the right spoke the sort of credible mainstream right and the not credible really off the edge right have spoken to each other over the years. I've always been interested in him because of that. He's also just sort of unrelentingly bad. He has no story arc. There's never like a moment where like Willis Carto does a good thing and then turns to the dark side.

Benjamin Wittes: He was always on the dark side.

Rachel Maddow: He was always exactly what he was, which makes him actually not, he makes him a great character in other people's stories. It doesn't make him a great central character because nothing changes. He's always a fricking Nazi trying to make everybody believe Francis Yockey's nonsense about the Jews and the Russians. So.

Benjamin Wittes: But he plays two really important roles in this story. One is, as the publisher and perhaps the facilitator of the suicide of Francis Yockey, who he seems to have revered. But the second is in relation to Joe McCarthy. And so, last stop before we do the who is Joe McCarthy question, tell us both about his personal relationship with Yockey and also what his role was with respect to McCarthy in the fifties.

Rachel Maddow: So McCarthy is censured in 1954. And I think when we think about the McCarthy era now, we look back at when we think like, oh, McCarthy, like, became an important figure in 1950 when he did his, I have here in my hand a list of communists. And then 1954, he got censured. And that was the end of him. And in between, he ruined a bunch of lives and created this word McCarthyism. But that was it. In fact, in 1954, stuff was really crazy around McCarthy. He had risen in power in American politics, and in Republican politics specifically, in a way that was, it was easy to see what he was doing and he was he was the talk of the town. He was the most important figure and most discussed figure in American politics during those four years. But at the same time, he never denounced the very far right elements that he attracted.

So like in 1952, he's approaching the height of his powers, and he accepts a speaking engagement at a German American friendship rally that's organized. It's hosted by a guy who's part of the National Renaissance Party, which is quite literally, a uniformed Nazi street fighting militia in New York City. In 1953, the following year, that guy gets kicked out of Germany. Germany kicks him out of their country for him being too much of a Nazi. He does a speaking tour in Germany trying to convince neo Nazi groups to overthrow the Adenauer government and bring National Socialism back to power. In 1954, as McCarthy is facing censure, that same guy from the National Renaissance Party is helping organize a rally at Madison Square Garden that has 13,000 people at it. All calling for support for McCarthy, calling for him to be president, and calling for the U.S. Senate to not censure him. The movement against McCarthy's censure brought together in a pretty explicit way the worst elements of the anti-democratic and violent right that he had never denounced, and very mainstream electoral Republican political figures. And so when he was censured in ‘54, they went crazy. And there was an effort, even as McCarthy himself was falling apart. He, he drunk himself to death before he was 50 years old. Even as he personally was falling apart, and I think actually couldn't personally bear the weight of what was being put on him by all the right wing groups that decided he was their vehicle.

They tried in 1956 to put him up against Eisenhower for the Republican presidential nomination. There were individual third party movements that were organized specifically to be vehicles for him, and if it couldn't be him, then somebody else like him, but they wanted him. And Carto was one of the people at the San Francisco Republican National Convention in 1956 who spoke to the press about the fact that, you know, they could get, they could get Joe McCarthy there on a moment's notice. And they wanted to force an open convention and that Eisenhower was a communist and they needed to get McCarthy back in there. McCarthy was in no shape by that point again to bear that kind of political burden. He was dead by 1957. But Carto was there as part of it. And then by 1960, after McCarthy was dead, Carto was trying to organize the Republicans into a January 6th style defiance of the, of the vote certification.

Benjamin Wittes: And what do we know about his personal relationship with Yockey?

Rachel Maddow: We know that Carto kind of worshipped Yockey. But in terms of his personal contact with him, Carto was in correspondence with that Nazi militia that I just mentioned, the National Renaissance Party. Yockey was both being published by that militia. They had a very influential far right Nazi newsletter called the National Renaissance Bulletin. He was also a member of the National Renaissance Party. And when Yockey turned up, having been a fugitive for more than a decade, he turned up in San Francisco. That's where Willis Carto was living at the time. And when the newspapers in the San Francisco Bay area filled with these stories of this mystery man with all the passports and all the birth certificates. And the FBI calling him a big fish, somebody who we're very interested in. And, you know, the, there's, they asked for 50,000 dollars bail for the guy, which is about a half million dollars in today's money. And it's this sensation.

Carto essentially rushes to the courthouse to watch his court hearings, to connect with him at his court hearings, and then ultimately to visit him in jail. And we think he's the last person who saw Willis Carto alive outside the jail, or inside the jail, but not in the jail cell before Yockey killed himself under very mysterious circumstances. Carto emerged from that personal meeting with Yockey and wrote this sort of embarrassing mash note of a hero of Western civilization, best thing since Adolf Hitler, kind of peon to him. And then ultimately became his champion over the course of decades, not only selling his, selling “Imperium,” but selling all of his other works and promoting, promoting his philosophy. And interestingly, there's not going to, I don't think there's going to be an Ultra Season 3, but if there were, it would be about the youth militia that Carto organized along the lines of Yockey's, Yockey’s philosophy.

Benjamin Wittes: One other question about Willis Carto.

Rachel Maddow: Yeah.

Benjamin Wittes: Where is he buried?

Rachel Maddow: Willis Carto is buried in Arlington Cemetery, which is astonishing. He is, I, I mean, who am I to question anyone's patriotism, but he himself would say, worked his whole life to try to destroy the United States of America.

Benjamin Wittes: Yeah, overthrow the government.

Rachel Maddow: To overthrow the government and, and wished for our defeat specifically against Nazi Germany. And nevertheless, himself was a veteran, had served in the, in the military. And there were protests when he was slated to be buried at Arlington, but he is nevertheless there, which he, he saw during his lifetime as a great joke, that he thought that would be one last way for him to sneer at, at the United States.

Benjamin Wittes: All right, let's turn to Joe McCarthy. The story you learn as a child or even as a college student about Joe McCarthy is that he was a demagogic senator who was responsible for the sort of second Red Scare. He fingered, ruined a lot of people's lives by naming them as communists. He took some legitimate concerns about, you know, the Alger Hiss’s of the world and created flamboyant lies about large numbers of communists in the State Department and in the Defense Department. And he is finally taken down in the Army-McCarthy hearings, censured, and then drinks himself to death a couple years later. Your Joe McCarthy is a very different and actually much more menacing figure. And so I want to ask, you've touched on this a little bit, who is Joe McCarthy and how should we understand him in relation to this story?

Rachel Maddow: I think the best thing that you can say about Joe McCarthy in relation to this story is that he wasn't a very good political organizer. Had he been, a good political organizer, I think, had he been able to build a more sustainable movement around himself that was about not just exercising power, but attaining more of it, I think the country would have ended up in a different place. There were very real worries expressed by very serious and well-connected observers in the early 1950s that McCarthy would be the end of American democracy, that he would ascend to the presidency and then essentially abolish the Republic. They feared that he'd be able to do it in part because of the way he had been able to dismantle the Republican Party, the way the Republican Party essentially just collapsed in the face of his demagogic power. And the undercurrent that I think is underappreciated, which is part of why I wanted to tell this story, is that he wasn't good at building a political movement, but he was linked to a political movement. And it was a political movement that had its roots in prewar fascist organizations in this country.

Benjamin Wittes: But not just its roots. I mean, one of the things that's so striking about your portrayal of McCarthy is that, it's not just its roots. He's as committed to making the Malmedy thing not have happened as the Nazis themselves in, you know, at Spandau prison. He's as committed, you know, this thing that we think of as his anti-communism was really just that he was a fascist. And he's cavorting with having his speeches written by Francis Yockey, having Willis Cardo try to overturn elections. He's, he's actually badly, but sort of effectively, running a fascist movement.

Rachel Maddow: Yeah. I mean, Ben, one of the things that I think is, A really underappreciated thing about the Army-McCarthy hearings, right? The Army-McCarthy hearings are where we get, At long last, have you no sense of decency, sir? And we think of that as the place where his support collapses and that leads to the censure. And that's all true to a certain extent. But what were the Army-McCarthy hearings about? Well, it was yet another antisemitic, scapegoating, false tale by McCarthy. Among the other things that led to those hearings were his false allegations that Jews in the army at Fort Monmouth in New Jersey were all communist spies. And they weren't, but he ruined dozens of their lives and careers along the way toward making that demagogic claim.

But the other thing that was going on in the Army-McCarthy hearings was that he was telling members of the U.S. government and specifically members of the military that they should find classified material and send it to him, contravening orders to do it. He was saying, listen, I'm the only singular figure inside the U.S. government who's actually anticommunist. So if you think there's a commie somewhere, you think there's somebody who's a bad actor somewhere, defy your chain of command and send that material to me. And Eisenhower's the, I mean there's, there is a commander-in-chief, there is a chain of command. There are rules about classified material and he's saying, screw all of that. Your only loyalty should be to me because I'm on, I'm the real one. It's a very project 2025 view of how the U.S. government and the U.S. military should work. That it should be individual loyalty to a man and screw all other forms of rules, regulations, laws, and order that's designed to make us a constitutional republic. That, you know, I alone can fix it, is, is both what led to the Army's pushback that led to those hearings, but it is also, I think, what most clearly defines McCarthy as a, as a fascist.

And as you see today, McCarthy being exhumed and held back up as a hero again. I mean, JD Vance is the first blurb on this book, “Unhumans,” right? That is about progressives being not, subhuman people that need to be crushed, and we need to get rid of democracy in order to do it. Well, one of the heroes of that book is Franco, who used military force to overthrow the Democratic Republic in Spain. But the other hero in that book is, is McCarthy. And it was because of McCarthy's willingness to discard the constitutional republic in order to accrue power to himself. And he just, while he was a very skilled orator and demagogue, he was not personally disciplined enough to hold it together for long enough to benefit from it in the way that he might have. And he was also not great at bringing other people along with him to create a, you know, to create a movement that could effectuate the things that he was trying to do. But he was, he was almost, I, I, I would describe him as one of, one of the most purely fascist American political figures of any significant power. I would put him very much in line with, with Huey Long.

Benjamin Wittes: Yeah, I mean, I, I was aware of In the generic sense, the horrors of McCarthyism, I was not remotely aware of the degree to which there is a direct line between neo-Nazism and McCarthyism.

Rachel Maddow: Yeah

Benjamin Wittes: They are interwoven in a way that is really remarkable and both interpersonally through the Yockey's and Cardo's and the National Renaissance Party, right? Through all of these, like, incredibly disreputable, horrible people.

Rachel Maddow: Gerald L. K. Smith.

Benjamin Wittes: And Gerald L. K. Smith. But also through events. And Malmedy is a, a, a really shocking example of that. All right, before we wrap up, we got to spend a little bit of time on the good guys.

Rachel Maddow: Yeah.

Benjamin Wittes: Because there are some beautiful good guys in this story, and you start the whole series with one of them and some pigeons. And things end really badly for him, but we don't have a bridge named after Senator Hunt, but tell us about him.

Rachel Maddow: Senator Lester Hunt was legitimately a good guy. He was a dentist. He was a World War I veteran. He was a Minor League baseball pitcher. He was a good dad. He became secretary of state and then governor and then senator from Wyoming. And when he went to the United States Senate, his fellow freshman senator, Joe McCarthy, was almost immediately kind of his opposite number. When the Malmedy stuff was made into a scandal, the Senate Armed Services Committee assigned three senators to look into it, small subcommittee, and Hunt was one of them. McCarthy wasn't on that committee, but he got himself assigned to it anyway, because he was trying to make his bones, trying to make a big scandal out of this thing. And Hunt was just repulsed by him.

There were other, there were other connections between them. Interestingly, they shared a property line. The, in, in Washington, Hunt's home looked into McCarthy's backyard, their backyards backed up onto one another, and so he sort of saw how McCarthy lived, and they had very different ideas just in terms of their character and as, as, as men, not as politicians in terms of how to live, and Hunt was disgusted by him. But Hunt was sort of a, an affable, easy to get along with, non-confrontational guy who nevertheless thought long and hard about the right way to try to undo McCarthy and he saw senator after senator after senator go up against him and just get churned up and, and lose their careers and lose their influence and not seem to make a dent against McCarthy's power.

And Hunt was very strategic about it and he decided finally that what he would do is he would crusade in a smart and articulate way for senators to lose the protections of the Speech and Debate Clause that allow them to defame citizens without any fear of legal recourse. And it's a sort of radical thing in terms of the Constitution. But everybody in the country knew that what he was trying to do was to take away Joe McCarthy's ability to do what he was doing. Everything McCarthy did was based on lies, absolutely everything. Malmedy, the communist stuff, the Fort Monmouth stuff, everything, it was all based on lies and his fellow senators knew that and Hunt tried to make it cost him something to lie and in so doing earned himself a lifelong enemy in McCarthy. McCarthy blackmailed him over a matter related to Senator Hunt's son. Blackmailed him to force him out of the Senate so the Republicans could take control of the Senate and it, it worked in getting Hunt out of the Senate. But the way it got him out of the Senate is that he took his own life.

Benjamin Wittes: Give us a list of some of the other good guys so that we, so that we don't live with the, we don't close with the main good guy killing himself.

Rachel Maddow: Well, your guy Miller Tydings with your bridge in Maryland, he absolutely gets McCarthy dead to rights on the fact that he made up all of the communists in government stuff. Joseph McCarthy never exposed a single communist in government, ever. And Tydings was the first guy who nailed him on that. William Benton, another, senator from Connecticut, nailed him on his financial corruption. McCarthy's personal financial corruption was legion. I mean, it wasn't Trump organization level, but it was up there. He nailed him on that. That ended up being very key to ultimately taking, taking him down.

Senator Baldwin actually ran that official investigation into Malmedy, and while McCarthy made his stink about Malmedy and created this myth about it. Baldwin's report was not only right about what actually happened at Malmedy, but specifically, this is remarkable, explicitly called out the fake news that the hoax about Malmedy as having been created by Nazis in Germany who are trying to come back to power, who were using American senators and the American right wing media in order to try to advance their cause. They were all right. Drew Pearson, the legendary and controversial crusading columnist, dogged McCarthy like a hemorrhoid his entire political career in a way that drove McCarthy absolutely crazy.

Benjamin Wittes: Yeah, McCarthy had a sledgehammer in his office with a sign that said, for Drew Pearson only.

Rachel Maddow: Yeah, and Pearson absolutely had McCarthy dead to rights, including on Malmedy, in a way that drove McCarthy crazy. There were interesting lawsuits between the two of them, which was interesting. But yeah, Pearson, I, I know he's a, he's a, he's a, controversial figure and a very provocative figure in American journalism, but boy was he like a dog on a dog with a bone on on McCarthy and he was right about all of it.

Benjamin Wittes: So what's the lesson here? I mean, you have. McCarthy remembered for a piece of the truth. You have these crazy right wingers who have, at different times, enormous and not significant influence. You have a kind of set of themes that are familiar and recur throughout our history, and you have the role of both electoral manipulations and lies. Like, it all feels super contemporary, which is of course the point, but bring it all together. What do you learn? What do you take from it all?

Rachel Maddow: There is a history in this country, which is not surprising. It happens everywhere. We are not immune though. There is a history in this country of conspiratorial, factually unhinged, anti-democratic, reactionary politics and activism. And it's almost always out there, sort of off the cliff, you know, off, off the edge of the, off the edge of the fringe. But occasionally there is somebody, there is somebody in American mainstream electoral politics, there's somebody with power, there's somebody who is ascendant, who finds common cause with these folks. They decide that person inside politics is their vehicle, and that person decides that those people, as dangerous as they are, offer something to his, his movement and to his ascendants. And when those things come together, we should not be surprised that that resulting movement inside electoral politics does not respect electoral outcomes, does not respect election results, does not respect democratic norms, does not respect the rules of the Senate, does not respect the kind of rules of decency about not going after politicians family members.

They don't want the kind of system that we have. The whole reason they're involved in electoral politics at all is to just try to destroy this system. And so no, they're not going to respect its bounds. And that, it has happened, not often, but it has happened recurrently in our country, and the way you beat it is by, A, adjusting your expectations accordingly, learning from history of the times this has happened before, not being surprised that, you know, the Georgia election board says county elections officials no longer have to certify the vote anymore, right? That's where these guys are going.

But it also means that you shouldn't expect there to be any individual act of opposition to these folks that, you know, makes them go poof. They don't need to be exposed. They know who they are. There's nothing that embarrasses them. There's nothing that show, you know, shows their ties to extremism that will wipe them out, wipe them out because they, oh no, it's my kryptonite. They've been seen to be who they are. It can't just be one thing. Yes, when they commit crimes there has to be a criminal law response, but there also has to be every other way of standing up to them. They don't go away unless you fight them and stop them. And you have to stop them using the tools of our democracy because what they're trying to get rid of is our democracy.

Benjamin Wittes: I take you to be saying something else as well, and we were texting about this a little bit yesterday, but you know, that we always expect there to be a kind of cataclysmic battle where the bad guys are defeated, right? The, since we were talking about Malmedy, the sort of, you know, fall of Berlin kind of moment. But in fact, it's more like a game of whack a mole, right? Where you're, the themes never go away. The energy never entirely goes away. And you, one person doesn't defeat McCarthy.

Rachel Maddow: Yeah.

Benjamin Wittes: Ten people doing ten things that don't defeat McCarthy together cause him to drink himself to death. Bob Mueller, you know, it's never Mueller time, right? It's, it's never, you know, Jack Smith does not come riding to the rescue, but the accretion of these pressures over time remind people to stuff the genie back into the bottle for now.

Rachel Maddow: I mean, when our system works well, and I mean our system broadly, involving not only the electoral system, but also our free press, our constitutional protections, the way that we operate as a, as a democracy and a free society. When the system is working right, there should be a cost for lying. You should worry about going to jail if you're committing fraud. There should be an almost sure consequence that you will go to jail if you are a violent thug and trying to advance your causes that way. If you're cheating people, if you are lying, if you are a fraud, if you are violent, all of these things are not only disfavored in our system, but punished and constrained by our system. As long as people are making the system do that.

Rather than being shocked by the fact that one of our major political parties has elevated somebody who's been convicted of 34 felonies and is, you know, facing all of these other charges and has this record of, of, of legally adjudicated fraud on massive scale. Rather than being shocked by that and expecting that that should not happen, it's due to everybody who, who doesn't approve of that to make sure that the system creates a cost, creates a political cost for those things. And so, you know, the, the Lester Hunt story is a sad tale. Tydings lost his seat. Senator Tydings lost his seat for standing up for McCarthy.

Benjamin Wittes: But he got a bridge.

Rachel Maddow: But he got a bridge. Benton lost his seat. Baldwin lost his seat. He quit politics, actually, entirely. Lester Hunt lost his life. You know, Drew Pearson had to deal, Drew Pearson had to deal with the cost of standing up to McCarthy that included physically getting beat up by McCarthy. I mean, he was physically attacked by McCarthy. Fun fact, the person who pulled McCarthy off of Pearson, while McCarthy was beating Pearson. The man who pulled, pulled McCarthy off was Richard Nixon, bizarrely, who happened to be at that club at the same time. I mean, there's, you pay a cost and you never know which one of these things is going to matter because no individual thing matters. It is the accretion of all of these things that matter. And the superpower that these guys appear to have is that it seems like nothing in the system constrains them, and that they're bigger than the system. And that therefore they give all this hope to the people who want to destroy the system. Well, the system needs to disprove that and bring them back down to size. And there isn't a magic way to do it, but it does mean that these guys don't go down without a fight, and lots of different people have to fight them in lots of different ways.

Benjamin Wittes: We're going to leave it there. The series is Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra season 2. As you can tell, I am very enthusiastic about it and cannot recommend it highly enough. I do suggest you listen to season 1 first. And there's an episode of the Lawfare Podcast about that as well. I'm devastated to hear that there won't be a season three, but I trust the thematic continuity between Bag Man and season one and season two will not end entirely and will continue in some form and look forward to having you back when, when it does.

Rachel Maddow: I promise to at least keep texting you creepy tidbits about Willis Carto, Ben.

Benjamin Wittes: And that's, that's as it should be. Thank you, Rachel.

Rachel Maddow: Thanks, my friend.

Benjamin Wittes: The Lawfare Podcast is produced in cooperation with The Brookings Institution. You can get ad-free versions of this and other Lawfare podcasts by becoming a material supporter of Lawfare using our website, lawfaremedia.org/support. You'll also get access to special events and other content available only to our supporters. Have you rated and reviewed the Lawfare Podcast? If not, please do so wherever you get your podcasts and look out for our other podcast offerings. This podcast is edited by Jen Patja and your audio engineer this episode was Goat Rodeo. Our theme music is from Alibi Music. As always, thanks for listening.