The Too Many Führers Problem: Steven J. Ross on the History of American Neo-Nazism

00:00:30 Andrew Keen: The justice department is now siding with the Ku Klux Klan. The Southern Poverty Law Center has been accused of running agents within radical right wing organizations and using money raised for other purposes to pursue supposedly law-abiding citizens. Meanwhile, a book has come out today, The Secret War Against Hate, American Resistance to Antisemitism and White Supremacy, which speaks of this being an episode which has happened before. My guest today is the author of this book, Steven J. Ross, very distinguished writer on cultural and political affairs, a longtime historian at USC talking to us from Los Angeles. Steve, is history repeating itself, with what happened last week?

00:01:25 Steven J. Ross: Yeah. Well, unfortunately, it isn't so much history repeats themselves, but hate repeats itself. This time hate is coming from the federal government, because they are going after the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has been the main watchdog against antisemitism, racism, and all kinds of discrimination and violence throughout our country. And, they have acted, they have been there since the seventies, and they took up the mantle of trying to protect minorities when government officials had basically abrogated their responsibility for protecting people. And, so this is going back when you said history repeats itself. This happened in the early 1940s through the 1970s when the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, and a group called the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League were running undercover operations infiltrating every fascist, Nazi, and racist group in the country with the idea that when a government fails to protect the lives of its citizens, it is incumbent upon those citizens to take action and protect their own lives and the lives of fellow Americans. That's what they did in the, forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, and that's what the Southern Poverty Law Center has been doing for the last fifty years. And they should be the heroes of our country and not being prosecuted by the government.

00:03:07 Andrew Keen: So let me just get this right, Steve. Your book, The Secret War Against Hate, talks about the way in which antifascists infiltrated radical right wing groups after the war. And last week, the justice department, one of the headlines was the justice department sides with the Ku Klux Klan. The justice department came out with a ruling suggesting that, if not illegal, it was certainly, bending the law to do what, the current southern Poverty Law Center did, which is infiltrate right wing groups. Is that a fair summary?

00:03:47 Steven J. Ross: Yes. It's a fair summary. It's an unfair accusation, because, again, the, first of all, they're accusing, people who were undercover agents working for the Southern Poverty Law Center of inciting hate, because they belong these organizations, and they continue their activities while they're monitoring them. But they don't talk about the FBI agents who monitored those same groups, who joined those same groups, and FBI informants working for the government who are doing the same exact thing, but none of them are coming under assault.

00:04:27 Andrew Keen: You talk about the FBI. One of the dominant political figures of the twentieth century, of course, was J Edgar Hoover. How does he appear in your book, The Secret War Against Hate?

00:04:41 Steven J. Ross: Well, I am no fan of J Edgar Hoover, and, he's one of the reasons these groups have to form. Because as far as Hoover's concerned, throughout his whole working life from the time he started working for the FBI, which was then the Bureau of Investigation in the late 1910s and early twenties until his death in 1972, he really only cared about communists and tracking down and persecuting communists. He didn't care about Jews. He didn't care about blacks. He didn't care about minorities. In fact, I don't have, as they say, the burning gun. But having gone through his correspondence, I can tell you he sure looks and smells like an antisemite to me and a racist. For example, in one set of correspondence with his Atlanta head, his special agent in charge, they referred to the Anti-Defamation League as the Anti-Deformation League. And just one incident that gives you, insight into Hoover. Back in 1940, the German-American Bund was operating, and LA was for many, in many ways for the Nazis, the most important city in America, not New York because of the movie industry and because the LA ports, unlike the New York ports were open. You didn't have a mayor like Fiorello La Guardia who was monitoring those ports very closely. Here it was a free access to sending in spies, sending in propaganda, and sending in money for payoffs. And I know this because, my previous book, Hitler in Los Angeles

00:06:36 Andrew Keen: I was just about to bring it up. It was a book shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, a major book, Hitler in Los Angeles, How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America. Of all the places, Steve, in America, one would have I mean, again, this is very superficial, and, of course, you correct this kind of superficiality in your book. But of all the places in America, one would have one would not have expected there to be a great deal of popularity of Nazism or sympathetic Nazi groups in Los Angeles, of all places.

00:07:16 Steven J. Ross: Well, there were. And, mainly, I mean, the Nazis never gained enough credence to win over a population, but they were plotting terror, blowing up government facilities and murdering Jews. And because of Leon Lewis, a lawyer who turned spymaster, and the various spies he recruited who were almost all Christian, they foiled every one of these plots at death and destruction. So that Southern California had no real incidents, not in LA, of sabotage during before and during the war largely because of the spy operation.

00:07:58 Andrew Keen: We're all familiar, of course, with Philip Roth's book about fictional novel about well, all novels, of course, are fictional. The novel about the America First Movement in the 1930s. In your view, how serious was the threat of neo-Nazism in the thirties and even after the second World War?

00:08:20 Steven J. Ross: Well, it was serious enough to worry, many Jews and blacks. I don't think it ever certainly in its own lifetime, it never rose to what they hoped, which was either to become a third party or to take control one of the two major parties. But they were the Nazis were growing in this country, and the reason why they are a serious threat is because so much of the government, officialdom was anti-communist. And their attitude was anyone who was an enemy of the communist was an ally of theirs, And that included the German-American Bund and all the Nazis in the United States. In Los Angeles, the German-American Bund was feeding information on a regular basis to police captain Red Hynes, who was in charge of the red squad in LA. And all he cared about was getting information that could put down the reds, and he was willing to do whatever he could to get that kind of information. And if that meant making deals with the Nazis as he did, he was happy to do so.

00:09:31 Andrew Keen: Given that America just fought a war against Nazi Germany and, of course, all the crimes against humanity that were revealed after the second World War. How much popular support was there for the American Nazi Party? I've sort of asked you this question before, but if there was support, where did it come from? Who was who was vulnerable to the idea of resurrecting Nazism in America of all places?

00:10:01 Steven J. Ross: Well, it wasn't so much that the Nazis really had a chance of, rising to positions of real power in America, but it was rather you have to see them as part of a right wing movement after World War two. And I had grown up with the Tom Brokaw view of the good war and the greatest generation, believing that to be true. And when I asked my undergraduates, freshmen and sophomores a few weeks ago, how many of you ever heard of Tom Brokaw? There wasn't a single hand that went up. How many of you ever heard of the good war or the greatest generation?

00:10:41 Andrew Keen: You might remind everyone, Steve, who Tom Brokaw is. I just went to the 60th birthday party of his daughter, a friend of a friend of my wife, in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago. So I'm all too familiar with him, but not everyone will be familiar. Tell us who he is.

00:10:59 Steven J. Ross: Tom Brokaw was for many years one of the leading broadcasters. He was the lead anchor on NBC Nightly News for quite a while, and certainly one of the most respected journalists in the United States. And he would later write a book called The Good War or The Greatest Generation, I forget one of the two titles, where he talked about that the war, World War two, brought Americans together. And one of the positive things was that within these platoons, you brought together people who never would have had contact with one another in the course of everyday life. The kid from New York, the kid from California, from Mississippi, from Maine, from Nebraska, the Jew, the Catholic, the Christian, or perhaps the Muslim. And you certainly had blacks in the military even though they were segregated. But in the course of fighting a war, you begin to realize that you see who these people are, and you realize they're no different than you other than where they were born and what religion they had. And by the end of the war, as Brokaw writes, it created a new sense of acceptance in America. Not toleration, but acceptance that, you know, I don't have to love you so much. I want you to marry my sister, but you have fought for your country. We fought together. We saw our friends killed together, and you deserve to lead a life free of fear and harm. And that has been and, basically, Brokaw then talked about the postwar era as a salad bowl era where all these different groups somehow managed to get along with one another. And what I discovered in the course of writing this book is what he said is true, but he only told half the story. And that many of the people who went to war after Pearl Harbor went to war not to fight Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, not to fight for democracy, but they went to war because they're good old boys, and I'm talking about largely men from the Confederate States and Southwest. And they went to war as patriots, and that is absolutely critical to remember. Because one of the things my book does is draw a line, a continuum from 1945 to the storming of the Capitol in 2021. And many of those people who stormed the Capitol were the grandchildren or great grandchildren of those who came back from war. And those southern boys felt that they had gone to war at a time where blacks and Jews knew their places. But when they came back, what they called the Jew Deal Congress had perverted American democracy. They had passed all these laws making it easier for blacks, Jews, and minorities to compete for housing and for jobs. And they argued as soon as they came back, we have been betrayed by our government and that the non-patriots had seized control. And we were gonna take control of our government again, and we were gonna establish a government that would honor white Anglo-Saxon Christians who built western civilization and built America. That's what they argued. And, the first thing they did was a revival of the Ku Klux Klan and then the creation of these right wing neo-Nazi parties, the first one being in Atlanta in 1946 called the Columbians. And they dressed up in Nazi uniforms. They goose-stepped down the main streets of Atlanta. They sent in their own troops anytime a black family tried to move into a white working-class area. They claimed that they were gonna finish the job that Hitler had begun, that Hitler had not been radical enough, and so they were gonna have mass execution of every Jew in America, and they were gonna expel every black man, woman, and child.

00:15:05 Andrew Keen: I mean, it's somewhat of a radical agenda here. How much popular support did these people have? I mean, you talked about all these men from the Southern states who went off to the second World War. I'm assuming you're not suggesting that most of these were somehow sympathetic to American Nazism, were they?

00:15:29 Steven J. Ross: No. It was less sympathetic to American Nazis. You have two groups. You have those people who are avowed Nazis, but you have what I call the betrayed generation. People who came back feeling their government had betrayed them, and so they were making alliances with anyone else who felt the government had betrayed them, and that included these Nazi groups around the country. And so while none of these groups I write about ever had more than, at most, a few thousand dues-paying members, at one point, one of the spymasters estimated that if you looked at the number of Americans who read their publications and who followed these neo-Nazi groups, was about 10,000,000 Americans. And what I would argue is they never expected to really seize control. I mean, they said they wanted to seize control of the government, But I think what they really hoped for was to penetrate one of the two mainstream parties and bring their radical right ideas into the mainstream of American politics.

00:16:38 Andrew Keen: We've done a lot of shows on this broader argument. I'm sure you're familiar with John Ganz's book, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracies, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, which makes David Duke a very important figure in the broadening or mainstreaming of the kind of ideas that you write about in your book, Steve. I'm not sure how much you write about Duke. You make a character called George Lincoln Rockwell central. Tell us about him and how he connects with later neo-Nazis like Duke.

00:17:22 Steven J. Ross: Well, George Lincoln Rockwell, had a conversion experience while living in San Diego, working on a military base where he read Mein Kampf. And at that point, he said it was like the sky opened up and he saw God. He saw the clarity of what he called Hitler's vision and that Hitler had been right. And he would join in with a number of the other neo-Nazis. There were the Nazis. There was a huge, right wing movement of fascists and Nazis, but it was very fragmented. And they all kept calling for a fascist front, a united fascist front. So in the fifties, the later part of the fifties, Rockwell was part of those fascist groups, actually from the mid-to-late fifties on. And he would go on to form the American Nazi Party in March 1959, believing that he was better than any of the other fascist leaders. He knew more. And he was better in the sense it was Rockwell who brought the modern neo-Nazi movement into the modern media age. And that he was able to attract the kind of national attention that no other leader could because he understood the power of publicity. And he understood that any publicity, even negative, was good publicity. And so he would arrange a series of stunts, call the press before the stunt happened, told them what was gonna happen, and they would send cameramen out, reporters. Later on, TV cameras would come to cover stunts. You know, stunts like dressing up one of his Nazis in a gorilla uniform and having him jump onto the floor of congress and, talk with a black accent, you know, that I'm your uncle Remus, and I'm here to, you know, run the government. And just ridiculous things, but those ridiculous things made the front page of newspapers and put him on the front page of American consciousness.

00:19:28 Andrew Keen: Perhaps Rockwell was an early version of Nick Fuentes. Of course, Rockwell existed in the pre-Internet age. But coming back to my question on the Klan, Steve, the Klan, of course, has a long and very checkered and controversial history in the US. What was the relationship between Rockwell and his American neo-Nazi party or Nazi party? Wasn't even there was nothing neo about it, and the Klan?

00:20:00 Steven J. Ross: They the Klan didn't join up with Rockwell. They didn't trust him. The Klan was willing to unite with some of the far right groups, but the Klan also considered themselves Americans, and so they didn't wanna go too far to the right. So example, when I mentioned the Columbians who were the first Nazi group, who marched in Atlanta in 1946. The Columbians wanted to form a unified front with the Klan, and the Klan said, no. We don't wanna unite with you because you are too extreme in your racial views. So I just thought, my god, when the Klan says you are too extreme in your racial views, that gives you a sense that these people I'm writing about are on the far, far right.

00:20:50 Andrew Keen: Right. That's the right of the, Klan, which, as you know, was quite an achievement. So how do I wouldn't say America firsts, but how do critics of American entry in the second World War, people like Joe Kennedy, father of JFK, of course, how do they fit into your narrative?

00:21:09 Steven J. Ross: Well, the America first movement started in the 1930s, and the most prominent leader, would be the pilot who flew across

00:21:21 Andrew Keen: Lindbergh, who, of course, features strongly in Roth's novel as well.

00:21:26 Steven J. Ross: Right. Well, Lindbergh also takes the Order of the German Eagle from Hitler, is there in person. The, America Firsters were divided into two groups. There were people like John Kennedy who joined and Gerald Ford who joined, young men at the time. And those people believed they were non-interventionists. That is they believed that the lesson of World War one is we should not get involved in European politics, that what came out of World War one was the loss of a generation of men in Europe. Scandals in America, huge scandals about munitions manufacturers and clothing manufacturers who were making clothes for the military, who were making millions of dollars on their contracts, squeezing out the last dollar they could. And people were really angry, and they felt, no. We should not get involved in European affairs. But the majority of members of America First were pro German advocates who wanted to keep America out of war so that Hitler could, rearm Germany, attack and conquer a number of European countries, and that by the time he had captured a good part of Europe, it would be too late for America to fight him. And America would have to make an agreement where they would be ruled by the Germans.

00:22:56 Andrew Keen: Is there a legitimate argument, though, Steve, for isolationism in the 1930s of some Americans who just said, this is not a struggle. We're not particularly keen on Nazi Germany or Bolshevik Russia for that matter, but we're not gonna get involved. I mean, can one wanna stay out and not be a Klan member, a Nazi?

00:23:21 Steven J. Ross: Yes. Well, as I say, there were quite a few people who I think fit that description that just were non-interventionists and felt that war is not the answer. And we can see that in the anti-war movements today that people say war is simply not the answer. And they are not right-wingers. They have a point that war isn't the answer. But in the case of Hitler, what we have and we wouldn't really know this until a little later. We have a man who wanted to destroy western civilization. It wasn't just getting rid of Jews. He wanted to destroy all the marks of western civilization and remake it as a kind of Nazi vision of a new world order in which Germany would rule the world. And in fact, his followers in LA built what I call the Western White House for Hitler here in the 1930s, and it was a self-contained compound from which Hitler would rule the United States in cooperation with Japan. And the reason they built this in LA was it's roughly halfway between Berlin and Tokyo. So he figured he would be flying over here.

00:24:36 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I wonder what Hitler would have made of Los Angeles. I guess he might have enjoyed some of the hikes in the hills. He might have worn his shorts in Los Angeles and not felt out of the mainstream. It's a wonderful thesis, Steve. We're gonna take a short break. And afterwards, I wanna come back. We began this conversation by talking how history is repeating itself. I wanna come back and talk specifically about the reappearance of hatred in the form of Trump and, MAGA and, of course, the Proud Boys and many other groups. But before we do that, gonna take a short break, and then we'll be back with Steven J. Ross, author of a really important and interesting new book, The Secret War Against Hate. It's out today. We'll be back in a second. Don't go away, anyone. This is not a commercial break. That's because we don't have commercials on this show. I'm not gonna waste your time trying to sell you inane products. However, I do have pretty good deal for you. I'm writing a book about The United States. It's due out in 2028. And if you become a paid subscriber on my Keen On America Substack, You'll not only get very cool notes and photographs and videos from this project, but I'll also send you a personalized signed copy of the book when it comes out in 2028. So go to keenon.substack.com and become a paid subscriber. That's keenon.substack.com. And now back to our conversation. We are speaking with Steven J. Ross, a very distinguished American historian who has a new book out today. It's called The Secret War Against Hate, American Resistance to Antisemitism and White Supremacy. Deals with a chapter in this history after the second World War. But, Steve, I know, you believe at least that history is repeating itself with Trump and the Proud Boys and MAGA and January 6 and everything else. Why is your new book, The Secret War Against Hate, why is it so instructive in terms of making sense of what's happening in America today in, April 2026?

00:27:18 Steven J. Ross: Well, it's important for several reasons. And the most important is so many Americans think that what we are experiencing today, the level of hate in this country, was really brought about by Donald Trump. And my argument is that's not the case, that these right-wingers and their causes have been here since the 1930s, but particularly in the aftermath of World War two. And it's not so much that history is repeating itself. It's that there's a continuum. It's never stopped that this level of hate. As I say, I draw a direct line between the postwar groups that formed and their leaders to the militia movement, to the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, and the Oath Keepers. The names have changed, but the issues, the causes, and the hate have remained the same and constant since 1945.

00:28:22 Andrew Keen: But what about you mentioned in our in the first part of the conversation that most of the support for nuts for the American Nazi Party came out of troops coming back from the war from the South. Is this still geographic, Steve? I mean, it just seems as if January 6 and Yeah. The Proud Boys. I mean, you some of the members perhaps come from the South, but many from the West, from the Midwest, even from the West Coast.

00:28:48 Steven J. Ross: Well, that would it would really change after 1954 with Brown versus Board of Education, which, basically said separate but equal is not equal. And it the Supreme Court ordered the South to well, ordered the nation to desegregate, that you could no longer have separate facilities for blacks and whites. And that would lead to what many critics called race mixing, and that was opposed by many Americans throughout The United States. And then once you had busing and black children going with white children, what you began to see is membership in these right wing movements by the late fifties and early sixties had spread across the country, that it was no longer southern phenomena, it was no longer the old confederacy. That's where, in many ways, racism was the strongest, but it was no longer exclusive. It went everywhere. New York, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, San Diego, all had chapters of right wing movements.

00:29:54 Andrew Keen: What are these people in your view then really want? Whether it's the Proud Boys or the people who showed up for January 6 or, of course, the Unite the Right people at the Charlottesville rally in 2017. Do they wanna go back to a segregated South? Do they wanna incinerate Jews? What do they want?

00:30:16 Steven J. Ross: Well, they're no longer, yeah, they're saying the Jews will not replace us, but they're not saying, like, people like Jesse Stoner, who had been a member of the Columbians and then formed the Stoner Anti-Jewish Party, the Christian Anti-Jewish Party, and then was a key mover behind the National States' Rights Party. These people early on were calling to death the Jews, the immediate extermination of Jews, and the expulsion of all blacks to Africa. That isn't happening anymore, but they want less money and less faith I'm saying what they want. They want less money and less favoritism by the government. That these people I call the betrayed generation feel that blacks, Jews, and minorities have gotten too much from the government since 1945, and that the people who built western civilization, white Anglo-Saxon Christians, have been kind of, thrown to the heap of history.

00:31:15 Andrew Keen: Is there any truth to that, Steve, do you think?

00:31:18 Steven J. Ross: Excuse me?

00:31:19 Andrew Keen: Is there any truth to that?

00:31:22 Steven J. Ross: Well, you know what? If you perceive it, then it is true to you, that government aid was going in the sixties to black communities, to minorities, but it wasn't like white people were, being oppressed. Many people and particularly during the war in Vietnam coming back and here's where they were right. They felt that not enough was being done for the troops who had gone off to fight. Although many of those troops were also people of color, so to that extent, all the troops who went off to fight in many ways were shortchanged when they came back, and that happens, frankly, after every war that America fights. And so there was there was certainly an element of truth, and they felt that the mainstream parties were ignoring them, especially the Democratic party. And they were angry, and they wanted one of the parties to step up and recognize the contribution that they had made to civilization.

00:32:22 Andrew Keen: One of the things that has changed since the period you write about, in your new book, the secret war against hate, is, of course, the existence of the state of Israel and a huge complicated debate about whether one can be critical of Israel without with or without being anti Semitic. There was a report out recently that, apparently, US universities are seeing an influx of, quote, unquote, antisemitism centers. How do you think, Steve, the existence of the state of Israel and its increasingly controversial place in American foreign policy. How does that affect things? Does it change the narrative?

00:33:05 Steven J. Ross: Well, it just gives the right wing more ammunition. They've always been antisemitic well before the formation of the state of Israel in 1948. They talked that Jews were running the world. The irony, of course, is they talked from both sides of their mouth. On one hand, Jews were running media. Jews were running the banks. Jews were running the world finance system. Jews were controlling the United Nation up to today where saw George Soros is controlling all the things that are happening behind the scenes in order to aid Jews. So well before the state of Israel, there was this perception of Jews running the world, but at the same time, Jews were the communists who were trying to destroy capitalism. So Jews were the uber capitalists, and the Jews were trying to bring down the uber capitalists. So either way, you could hate Jews for whatever reason you wanted. And Israel just made it even more intense. And the rhetoric there was the same as the anti Catholic rhetoric that began in this country in the eighteen thirties where and it's still today many groups would say that you can't be a good Catholic, a observing Catholic, and a true citizen because any good Catholic would respond to the urgings of the pope before they would respond to the president of The United States. And since '48, many on the far right argue that Jews can't be real citizens because they would favor Israel before they would favor America. And so you know? And, what's been going on in the last several years has only made it worse for, you know, only made it worse for Jews and made it better for the critics of Israel.

00:34:52 Andrew Keen: And, of course, somebody like Nick Fuentes probably fits into that category, even Tucker Carlson.

00:34:59 Steven J. Ross: Very much so. And what about from

00:35:02 Andrew Keen: the left, in your mind, at least, as a historian, particularly of antisemitism in the United States, hate in the United States, can one be very critical of Israel, even question its right to exist without being an anti Semite?

00:35:18 Steven J. Ross: I think one could be critical of Israel, in the same way one can be critical of The United States. There's a difference between the people of a country and the country's policies themselves. And I would say that to criticize the Israeli government, one has to be one doesn't criticize Israel. One criticizes the American government. Excuse me. In the same way, if you would criticize the American government, you don't criticize the American people. So one can, I think, very easily criticize Netanyahu without being seen as an antisemite, an anti-Zionist or saying Israel doesn't have a right to exist? That's a very different set of issues, I think, that are more complicated.

00:36:10 Andrew Keen: You've written extensively on Hollywood. You wrote a book, Working Class Hollywood. You wrote wrote another book, Hollywood Left and Right, How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics. How should the entertainment business and Hollywood in particular, approach this subject? How or let me revise that question. What was the response of Hollywood to what you're describing, to the rise of not American Nazism then, and how should it be doing it now?

00:36:43 Steven J. Ross: Well, the first and most fundamental fact that people need to understand is Hollywood is in the money-making business, not the consciousness-raising business, and that first and foremost, it's about corporate profits. And for many people, if you can raise consciousness while making money, all the better. But that also leads you there's two Hollywoods. There's corporate Hollywood and creative Hollywood. And corporate Hollywood are the ones who decide what films will be made, what films will not be made. And corporate Hollywood from the start has been conservative, and as the theme of my book, Hollywood Left and Right, is that even though the Hollywood left has been more visible and numerous, the Hollywood right has had a much greater impact on American political life. And during the 1930s, Germany threatened the United States and threatened the Hollywood studios that if you make any film that in any way attacks or mocks, Germany or the Nazi party or Adolf Hitler or any of our leaders, we will ban all your films. And in 1934, Hollywood passed its code, which had a section that said, you can't mock, attack, or in any way denigrate a foreign country and its leaders. And rather than telling the production code to go to hell, all the studios basically kowtowed to Hitler and his man in, Los Angeles, the consul, Georg Gyssling, and they stopped making films because Germany was their second largest market after England. And in the thirties, roughly a third of the profit of the studios came from Europe. And so while the moguls were Jewish, business was business. And it wasn't until 1939 that the Warner Brothers made the first anti-Nazi film, called Confessions of a Nazi Spy, and they were only able to make that because it was based on a court case. It was not abrogating responsibility towards the German government. It was not condemning anyone. It was simply reporting on German spies in America.

00:39:01 Andrew Keen: And, of course, most of us know that Hollywood's early Hollywood at least was driven by a number of explicitly racist films. In the Oscars a couple of months ago, Steve Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another, which I think made some money, probably not quite as much as it should have, carried off most of the Oscars. And it certainly, at least in my view, a very articulate movie against hatred. What did you see the film? What do you think

00:39:36 Steven J. Ross: it was? I liked it. I don't think it was a totally successful film. I would divide into two things. As a successful narrative, there were some problems. But as a political film that really started by dealing with the immigrant crisis here and bringing attention to these detention centers and how awful they are, and fighting against that system. To that extent, I admire the film as a form of political resistance.

00:40:08 Andrew Keen: What's your take, Steve, on the role of the Internet and all this? Of course, the period you write about in your new book, the Internet didn't even exist in the minds of technologists, let alone in the market itself. I'm guessing that the Internet changes everything because, it enables and compounds characters, like George Lincoln Rockwell. Had he been around in the age of YouTube and my YouTube and Instagram and TikTok, you'd probably be better known.

00:40:45 Steven J. Ross: Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, one of the things that I write about is how in 1945 in May, the May, a few days before VE Day, the three leaders of these undercover spy operations for the ADL, the American Jewish Committee, and the Anti-Nazi League, their offices were all in Midtown Manhattan, a few blocks from one another. And, unknowingly, they sat down and wrote the same exact memo, which kinda blew me away and gave me chills. And in the memo, they said, we can resist any hate group in America, even the Ku Klux Klan, as long as we take them on one at a time. But our great fear is if these right wing groups that are fractured figure out a way to communicate with one another in a sort of more instantaneous way, we are in big trouble. And the second fear is that one day, some of these right-wingers would peel off into one of the two mainstream parties and take their radical antisemitic and racist views into these mainstream parties, and then we would really be in trouble. And what we have seen now is those predictions have come true, that the Internet we now know that in the months before the, Capitol riots, these groups were all communicating with each other through the Internet and coming up with plans for coordinated attack, and going through all kinds of, you know, permutations of if this happens, if that happens. But the ability to instantaneously communicate with one another really strengthen the right wing force in this country, which had been divided for decades. It's one of the reasons that we say they came together under Donald Trump because they suffered from what I call the too many Fuhrers problem, that every one of these leaders called for a united fascist front, but they all wanted to be the Fuhrer in charge of that. And it wasn't until Trump came along that they said, oh, Trump can be our Fuhrer. He is articulating what we say after Charlottesville. He told the American public there are good people on both sides. And so the Internet changed the ability of the right wing to have a more prominent role in American society.

00:43:21 Andrew Keen: Yeah. We really as you say, we are in big trouble. We may have not just a new Fuhrer, but a Fuhrer with a Jewish son-in-law, which certainly is odd in an odd kind of way. So, Steve, what should we do? We can't shut the Internet down. Of course, that doesn't seem very realistic, and there are lots of good things. What needs to be done? I assume you're not against infiltrating some of these groups, and you're probably very sympathetic as I am to the Southern Poverty Law Center. But more broadly, for people who may not have time to infiltrate radical groups, the Proud Boys or Nick Fuentes's group. What should people do? What's the way to fight this extremism?

00:44:08 Steven J. Ross: Well, I have a short-term and a long-term. I'm a historian, so I deal in general with the long-term of things. But in the short run, when people ask me, it's always the first question when I'm done giving a talk. What can we do? And the first thing is vote people out of office. And what you can do there is, either get on one of those buses to another swing state and, campaign there or simply bring two people to the polls who are not planning to go out and vote and drag their bottoms out of their home to the polls, vote in person so that, you know, we're not gonna get mail-ballot fraud accusations. But I end the book by talking about the long-term solution. And as I was thinking about what is a long-term solution to this, I thought, you know, all these groups from 1945 on constantly say we are the inheritors of the founding fathers tradition, that we are the modern founding fathers, and the person they loved the most was Thomas Jefferson. Because it was Jefferson who said the tree of liberty needs to be watered with the blood of tyrants every few decades. And so I thought maybe I can hoist these right-wingers on their own petard and find something that Jefferson had to say that would help. And I looked through the notes on the State of Virginia that Jefferson wrote in the 1780s. And here's what he wrote. I'm gonna paraphrase it. Every so often, we are going to have a political huckster who comes along and tries to convince the American people that what is good for him is good for the country. And Americans will believe it for a while, but if they study the issues of the day, the collective population will get rid of those scoundrels because a collective group of Americans who are really looking at the issues and educate themselves into the issues of the day will ultimately come out on the side of democracy. But in order to ensure that people were educated enough to make those decisions, Jefferson called for a constitutional amendment that would create universal education in perpetuity because he argued that an educated citizenry was the only way for republic to survive. And if you look today at the voting patterns, much of the right wing have either high-school education or less, whereas most of the people who are tend to be more liberal or moderate, have college have at least some years of college. And I think the Trump's attack on higher education is in part about destroying — remember, they just got rid of the education department. And this is about creating an uneducated public because the less educated citizens are, the more vulnerable they are to political manipulation. And so if we can go back to where political candidates really talk about being an education president, which we've not seen in quite a while, but don't just do it rhetorically and put money in education and build up our school system and reintroduce civics classes, which have disappeared. I think that's the long-range solution. An educated citizenry will create a democratic country and keep it alive. I believe in perpetuity.

00:47:56 Andrew Keen: Well, there you have it. A secret war against hate. Steven Ross is calling for a less secret war against ignorance. Perhaps, if we educate people more, relying on the wisdom of Thomas Jefferson, of course, is a rather controversial figure, a democrat, but also a slave owner. That's subject maybe of another show, another book. Steve, congratulations on the book. Fascinating conversation. This subject, unfortunately, isn't going away. The book is out today, The Secret War Against Hate, American Resistance to Antisemitism and White Supremacy. Steven J. Ross, thank you so much.

00:48:38 Steven J. Ross: Thank you, Andrew. I appreciate being on your show.