Tony Kushner (3:13)
Yeah. All right. I will also say that I am. It is a remarkable thing that Tony Kushner is here tonight and is gonna have this conversation. Going to try to knock. I'm going to try to rush through the remarks I have planned at the beginning because I want more time to talk with Tony. He has been a hero of mine as long as I've been cognizant of the need to have my own heroes and to come to my own conclusions about heroism. And I say that in very concrete terms as the first person that I ever thought as an adult, that is somebody who I believe is doing a better job than the rest of us in terms of thinking about the world. And of all the people I have ever interviewed, from my time in local morning Zoo Radio to Air America Radio, to guest hosting on all those weird shows on msnbc, to my weird show on msnbc, to all the interviews I've ever done in any context, the single smartest person I have ever interviewed is Tony Kushner. So having him here tonight is a thrill for me. Okay, so all that said, I'm gonna read a thing, I'm gonna say a thing that's gonna bum you out. I have a little joke at the end, and then we're gonna talk to Tony. He was one of the most successful and celebrated industrialists on the planet. His anti Semitism was rank and it was unchecked. He spewed it freely in private tirades among friends, family, family, close business cohorts, newspaper reporters, or pretty much anybody within earshot in the office, in private chats, in interviews, at dinners, even on camping trips. A close friend wrote in a diary after witnessing one late night round the campfire diatribe, quote, ford attributes all evil to Jews or to the Jewish capitalists. Henry Ford even ordered his engineers to forego the use of any brass in his Model T automobile. He called brass a Jew metal. Ford said, quote, wherever there's anything wrong with the country, you'll find the Jews on the job there. He blamed a vast and inchoate Jewish conspiracy for inciting his workers and his stockholders to demand that he share a sliver more of the expansive Ford Motor Company profits with them. He blamed Jews for the gold standard. He blamed Jews for the advent of the Federal Reserve Bank. He blamed Jews for ruining motion pictures in America. He blamed Jews for ruining popular music. He blamed Jews for ruining baseball. Ford was hardly the only radical anti Semite in the United States circa 1920. But in addition to his fortune and his famous name and his iconic automobile company, Ford had a megaphone your average crazy uncle theorizer lacked. He had a newspaper. It was called the Dearborn Independent and he had purchased it for a song in 1918. The paper was a big money loser in the beginning with poor to middling circulation. Ford's editorial harangues did little to draw in any new readers. How many attacks on the man who'd beaten Ford in the Most recent Michigan U.S. senate race did the public really want? Oh, but Truman H. Newbery had stolen that election. One of the Dearborn Independent's editorial staffers who was a veteran of the New York newspaper wars had an idea. He wrote to Ford's right hand man, find an evil to attack and then in all capital letters let's find some sensationalism. And lo the answer landed unbidden not long after a newly translated English edition titled the Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion. The pamphlet was the work of rabidly anti semitic Russian fabulists who were furious at the Bolsheviks toppling of the old czarist aristocracy. The tsarists portrayed the Russian revolution as not just a local affair. It was the early innings of a plot by a cabal of all powerful Jewish schemers to take over the whole world. And the Protocols was billed as the product of a surreptitious note taker at a top secret meeting wherein these Jewish puppet masters had drawn up their evil strategy and laid out their tactics in detail. Obviously there was no secret meeting, there was no secret plot. There was no surreptitious note taker. The whole thing was a work of fiction. It was a very considered, very deliberate lie and a very dangerous piece of propaganda. And Ford and his newspaper bore down on it with a new weekly series in the Dearborn Independent based on the Protocols. It would end up being a 92 part weekly series every week for 92 weeks for nearly two years headlines like these ran in Ford's paper. The International Jew the World's Problem. Also Jewish Jazz Moron Music Becomes our National Music. Also the Perils of Baseball. Too Much Jew. These were splashed onto the pages of Ford's newspaper which was distributed in Ford Motor dealerships across the country. Ford also saw to the publication of his foul series in book form. It was titled the International Jew. It ran to four volumes. Never mind that the Protocols had been exposed as total make believe. In 1921, somewhere in the middle of Ford's anti Semitic screed of a 92 part newspaper series, Ford's weekly International Jew essays continued without pause. And Ford Motor dealers kept tossing the latest issue of the Dearborn Independent under the front seat of every newly purchased Model T in the country. Ford saw to it that the four volumes of the International. The book were translated and published worldwide in 12 international editions, including one in Germany and stick a pin in that. Other Americans organized an anti anti Semitic publicity campaign of notable and notably gentile Americans. Prominent public figures like Woodrow Wilson, Clarence Darrow, W.E.B. dubois, William Jennings Bryant all joined the fight. They called Ford's utterings un American and unchristian. Former president William Howard Taft, soon to be named Chief justice of the Supreme Court, accepted a speaking engagement at an ADL meeting in Chicago two days before Christmas 1920. At that anti Defamation League meeting, Taft lambasted Ford and his loony assertion of a powerful Jewish conspiracy surreptitiously stripping power from Christians around the world. Taft said, there is not the slightest ground for antisemitism among us. It has no place in free America. The German edition though of Ford's book had landed in the hands of one particularly gifted propagandist. When Adolf Hitler's book Mein Kampf was published in 1925, Hitler appeared to lift not just ideas but whole passages from Ford's own publications. The Mein Kampf first edition extolled Henry Ford by name. Hitler wrote, it is the Jews who govern the stock exchange forces of the American Union. Every year makes them more and more the controlling masters of the producers. In a nation of 120 millions, only a single great man, Ford, to their fury, still maintains full independence. When a reporter from the Detroit News showed up at Nazi party headquarters in Munich in December 1931 to interview Hitler for her regular newspaper series. It was called Five Minutes with Men in Public Eye. She was surprised to find there in Munich, hanging on the wall behind Hitler's desk, a large framed portrait of America's most famous anti Semite. Hitler told the newspaper woman, quote, I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration. The reporter asked Hitler that day why he was anti Semitic. He said without hesitation, quote, somebody has to be blamed for our troubles. So the great thing about conspiracy theories is that they are undisprovable. They don't require facts to prove them. And you can't use facts to disprove them either. And why is that? Because It's a conspiracy. And what is a conspiracy? A conspiracy is a secret. It's a secret plan. So we're not allowed to know the truth. That's why we don't have provable facts. Whatever facts you're trying to bring the discussion. Oh yeah, that's just what they want you to think. What this means is that anybody bringing purported facts with them to the discussion is suspect. And that applies to everyone. Science isn't real. Scientists are just manipulating us. So called experts. What are they? What do they know? Do your own research. Journalists. Don't get me started on journalists. Fake news. Am I right? None of it's real. This is a very handy dynamic, right? It means for one, that the conspiracy can be anything, right? Nobody can bring facts to bear on your conspiracy. That will change it. So you can just let your mind run wild. Make it as lurid and exciting and dark and sexy and elaborate as you want. Whatever revs you up, whatever gets your blood pumping, that can be, can't be disproven. So just go with your gut, maximize the emotional charge that you get out of it, and then unhook yourself from normal political processes. Because once you believe that a secret conspiracy is controlling the economy, a secret conspiracy is controlling disease and healthcare, a secret conspiracy is controlling the government. Well, that renders you incap of thinking and working logically about how to improve those things, right? There's no reason to engage constructively with protecting the quality of the drinking water in your town, or getting potholes filled, or having a smarter relationship with the European Union, whatever it is you care about. There's no reason to work constructively on trying to get anything done better through government. If there is an evil, unaccountable cabal, a deep state cabal that is secretly running it. So stop working on government, stop running for office, stop petitioning your government for the redress of grievances. Instead, just focus on the cabal, on the shadowy enemy that must be behind all these things that are wrong. And that is how you lay the ground for fascism. In a broad swath of an otherwise sane public. Even in a modern state, right? This place, this nation, used to be great, but now it is no longer great. It has been weakened by our enemies within who are secretly acting in ways to hurt us, who are secretly powerful. They have frankly stolen the nation and let the real people of the real nation left them outside and powerless. If that's the situation, then of course you have to fight to save your country. But how do you fight? You don't. Use the political process. Right. These internal enemies, you've heard the lurid, emotionally charged, terrifying stories about them. They're so bad, they're so evil, they're so powerful. Normal measures are ineffective against them. We need to do something radical. We need to break some rules. We're certainly not going to handle this with just normal politics. They, of course, have rigged normal politics, the cabal, so we can't use politics to oppose them. We're going to need other means. We're going to need something more radical. We may need to prepare ourselves to use force. That's how it works. And then you're there and then we're here. So why spend time worrying about and thinking about and telling stories from history at a time when the news is so pressing, at a time when the news of the day is so deeply alarming? For me, first of all, the news is not going anywhere. It's always there, no matter what. I spend time thinking about otherwise. But for me, the reason to study history now and to learn stories from history now is because it is kind of a cheat sheet. This stuff does keep happening. I mean, democracies don't all fall exactly the same way, but they do fall to exactly the same kind of guy making exactly the same kind of appeal about lost greatness. Right? Lost greatness, the enemy within, the need to be tough and break the rules and all the rest of it. What we are going through is a recurring thing. And so we shouldn't feel like we need to reinvent the wheel to fight it every time it comes up. History is here to help. Here's an example. Exactly 100 years before our 2020 election, which ended the way you remember, exactly 100 years before that, in 1920, in Bologna in Italy, politicians on the left wonder a regional election. And Mussolini had formed his fascist fighting leagues the year before in 1919. And when this Bologna election went to the left, Mussolini's fascists decided they would reject that election result. And they stormed the council building and they rioted and indeed they killed nine people. And it worked. The council was suspended and that basically negated that election. That was 1920. By the following year, by 1921, they were doing it everywhere. All over the country. Opposition and left politicians were attacked. They were run out of parliament. Their homes were burned. The important part of it, the part that we write in Our Cheat Sheet CliffsNotes version of history, is that at the time the state failed, the state was. I don't know if they were unable or unwilling to stop it, but they couldn't Stop it. The government appeared powerless to protect political rights in that moment. They could not protect the political process and the people participating in it. And so the state, proven to be weak, was overrun. Because who wants to stand up for a powerless state like that? Instead you want to go with the people who have not only the momentum, but the will and the results to show for it. So they're formed in 1919, 1920, they storm the council building. 1921, they start running opposition party politicians out of parliament and out of their homes. In 1922, the fascist groups all march toward Rome. And Mussolini does not take power by force. Italy's king just hands Mussolini the government because who is going to stop him? Better to side with him instead. Mussolini, having taken power that way in 1922, tried to look like a normal politician for a couple of years. It didn't stick. By 1924, he had murdered the head of one of the main opposition parties. And when people were outraged, he decided, oh, you're outraged. Well, let's actually cut to the chase. He outlaws all opposition parties and abolishes elections and we're off to the races. These things are easier for us to see when we see them in other countries and when we see them in other time periods. But we're right in the middle of this stuff. I mean, what I'm describing here, the Fascists being formed in Italy in 1919. Fascists are formed in Italy in 1919, the Nazi Party is founded in Germany. In 1920, the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion is published in the United States. And at that same time, and Henry Ford starts reprinting it in his newly purchased Dearborn Independent. Fast forward a decade. 1933, Hitler is Chancellor in Germany in 1933, in the United States, William Dudley Pelly forms the Silver Shirts as his anti Semitic fascist militia in the United States, which has thousands of followers in multiple states. By 1940, France is falling to Germany. Italy has joined the Nazis in the war. And the wife of Charles Lindbergh, the man who is more famous in America than anybody other than the President, the wife of Charles Lindbergh, the famous pilot Anne Morrow Lindbergh, has just published what will become the number one best selling book in the country. It is titled the Wave of the Future. And it is all about how Fascism is the glorious future for all of us. It is the top selling book in America. In 1940, these winds blew the same for us here as they did in other countries, which we should learn from now that we have another political movement on the right in this country that is trying to end democracy, to try to make us more like the authoritarian regimes they admire abroad. It's not a coincidence that these movements tend to be global. These guys tend to support each other and they take inspiration from one another. And their success in one place is often mirrored by attempts at success in another. So there's a lot of different things to learn from this history. I think most bluntly, the thing that I have learned and that I remind myself of all the time, is that we are not immune from these types of historical movements. We were not immune in the time that we think of as our touchstone for understanding the evils of fascism. We were not immune then and we are not immune now. Lots of very powerful people in our country, people like Henry Ford, people like Charles Lindbergh, have sought this for our country in the past. And political opposition matters. But so does the political process. Because what is democracy except a process? Democracy doesn't guarantee any end result. It's a process. It's a system of rights, a system of protections from tyranny. And if we don't fight to protect the process, we will lose it. The anti democratic right in this country this year in 2024 is not running against the Democratic Party. They are running against the democratic process. And the people who participate in this process, who make this process work in this country, are human beings who need protection. We need to protect the press. We need to protect the judiciary and the court system. We need to protect the electoral process and all of the people who administer it in ways large and small. We need to protect opposition politicians, and we also need to protect the people who are being scapegoated and who are the subject of corrosive conspiracy theories, not only because we owe it to them as humans, but because corrosive conspiracy theories corrode democracy. They make you willing to give it up. When the Republican presidential candidate this year says he is going to build camps for millions of people, have you not been all that worried about it because he says he's only going to put immigrants in those camps? Do you think that's all there for? We have a cheat sheet from history if we choose to learn it and to let it help us. But let's learn it fast because it is time to start building the barricades. So Susan told me when I was talking to her about this tonight or today, she told me that this was too dark and I had to include a joke. So this is the last thing I'm gonna say. Thank you, Susan. I do have a Joke here to end. You ready? What time is it? When the cows lay down to go to sleep, it is past your bedtime. Oh, grudging, grudging. All right. I told you I was gonna bum you out. I told you I had a joke. I have one other joke. Cause that one didn't land. Well, what's the best thing about Switzerland? I don't know, but the flag's a big plus. Better. Okay, thanks, you guys. Thank you very much for being here. Tony Kushner, American Hero. Hi, Tony.
