The One Where Jon Schools Me About Fascism

Summary

Unlearn16: Class is in Session

Episode: The One Where Jon Schools Me About Fascism

Host: Unlearn16
Guest: Jonathan (@johnstartruck), 20th-century history teacher and TikTok creator
Release Date: February 10, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode features Unlearn16 in conversation with Jonathan, a high school history teacher from Alabama whose viral TikTok book reviews and passionate inquiry into the rise of fascism have earned him a wide following and collaborations with the History Channel. The discussion explores the roots and mechanisms of fascism, particularly in Nazi Germany, with a sharp focus on how ordinary people become complicit in authoritarian systems. Through layered historical analysis and contemporary comparisons, Jonathan unpacks the psychological, cultural, and institutional conditions that gave rise to fascism and considers what warnings and hopes this history offers for the present.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Jonathan's Background & Motivation

• [00:52]–[03:59]
  Jonathan introduces himself as a high school history teacher (with ~9 years’ experience) and a veteran of the US Marine Corps. His journey into the intensive study of Nazism began when a close Marine friend fell into extremist online communities. Disturbed by his friend's transformation, Jonathan began researching how authoritarian systems co-opt ordinary people, leading him to teach, write, and commentate on fascism for wider audiences.

  “I’m fascinated by systems…how do bad guys make bad guy things work? …how do you take an otherwise decent person and you make them a cog in this murder machine?”
  — Jonathan [02:52–03:11]

2. The Social and Historical Roots of Fascism

• [09:01]–[21:00]
  Jonathan argues that the rise of Nazism was not inevitable but the result of compounded social, economic, and psychological factors dating to the late 1800s:

  • Industrialization uprooted rural communities, erasing close-knit identities and creating urban alienation ("anomie").
  • Loss of Community led people to seek meaning in new social organizations—sometimes for progress (suffragettes, labor unions), but also exclusionary and racist ones (the Klan).
  • Pseudoscience and Philosophy: The ideas of Francis Galton (“scientific” racism and eugenics) and Friedrich Nietzsche (“master/slave morality” and alienation) set an intellectual groundwork vulnerable to perversion by extremists.

  “Amid all of these new modes of living, they've lost a really essential sense of community…they’re looking to find meaning.”
  — Jonathan [13:36–14:05]

3. The Role of War, Catastrophe, and Paramilitarism

• [25:04]–[41:00]
  Jonathan pinpoints the trauma of World War I—specifically the Battle of Verdun—as the catalytic event that fractured German society, spread defeat narratives like “the stab in the back,” and primed the population for scapegoating and radicalization.

  • After the war, returning veterans—traumatized, unemployed, and impotent in both literal and social senses—formed the backbone of paramilitary groups (“Freikorps”), becoming susceptible to propaganda and echo chambers that blamed their suffering on Jews, socialists, and foreigners.
  • The government’s reliance on these groups to put down strikes and guard officials created a violent feedback loop where democratic institutions became complicit in their own destabilization.

  “The militarism doesn’t go away when the military goes away—you just don’t have anywhere to put it.”
  — Jonathan [36:26–36:29]

4. The Meteoric Rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party

• [42:50]–[55:05]
  Jonathan details how Hitler, initially a government spy on radical groups, was seduced by the rhetoric of Dietrich Eckart and the occultist, racist mythologies swirling in postwar Munich. He quickly emerged as a charismatic leader, able to exploit public disillusionment.

  • The Nazis absorbed multiple right-wing currents: violent street-brawlers (Brownshirts), occultist aristocrats (SS), and embittered working/middle-class citizens.
  • Economic collapse (the Great Depression) provided the opportunity:

  “What happens is some of these paramilitaries start attaching themselves to him…and the Brownshirts become a part of the Nazi party as their official paramilitary arm.”
  — Jonathan [45:09–46:52]

  • Once in power, the Nazis rapidly replaced elections with managed plebiscites, absorbed all social organizations, and enforced conformity:

  “It doesn’t matter what they [average Germans] thought. They were not allowed to think anymore.”
  — Jonathan [54:51–55:05]

  • Unlearn16’s interjection:

  “They need somewhere to put it. You have propaganda being fed to them at next to no cost...They spend all their time in echo chambers gassing each other up, talking about the good old days…figuring out who is to blame…”
  — Unlearn16 [42:51–42:49]

5. Critical Junctures and Accidents of History

• [36:55], [37:31]–[58:34]
  The hosts note the role of lucky (or unlucky) contingency:

  • The Treaty of Versailles failed to purge militarism even as it disarmed Germany, leaving space for violent organizations.
  • Hitler was initially seen as a useful idiot by establishment conservatives like Hindenburg and Papen, who thought they could control and then dismiss him—until circumstances (notably Hindenburg’s death) left Hitler unopposed.

  “Everybody thinks Hitler is a…lunatic and an idiot…He is useful. We will use him until he collapses and then he will eventually push himself too far.”
  — Jonathan [56:10–56:15]

6. Contemporary Parallels: What’s the Fascist Moment Today?

• [59:29]–[64:18]
  Jonathan draws careful distinctions between 20th-century fascism and today’s authoritarian threats:

  • Today's reactionaries are explained as less committed and less organized, focused on self-branding, commodifying outrage, and lacking military discipline.
  • The U.S. constitutional order remains resilient: “Our constitutional order is really, really well built to resist authoritarians. That was kind of the point of doing it…” [60:50]
  • However, Jonathan warns against complacency, noting that “evil succeeds when good men do nothing.”
  • The greatest danger lies not in zealotry but in passivity and the normalization of “lunatics” under the guise of expediency by elites.

  “Several of them [Nazi leaders] died in the attempt of securing power because they genuinely believed in this mass movement… So many of our current run of thought leaders on the far right are con men who don’t believe in anything.”
  — Jonathan [60:04–60:49]

  “The reason that Nazism succeeded was not the amount of people that were evil and did bad. It was the amount of people who saw what was happening…and that’s all they did. Evil succeeds when good men do nothing.”
  — Jonathan [63:34–64:18]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On searching for hope:

  “There are lots of silver linings. Do not be hopeless…Our founders didn’t want another king. …A lot of the people leading this authoritarian surge are entirely in it for themselves…The constitutional order is being strained the hardest it’s ever been. Yes. It’s still holding.”
  — Jonathan [59:17–64:18]

• On the return of fascist techniques:

  “Propaganda being fed to them at next to no cost that they can have direct access to. They spend all their time in echo chambers gassing each other up…”
  — Unlearn16 [42:51]

• On Hitler’s transformation:

  “He goes to spy on somebody… and he ends up getting drawn in. Yes, he bites all the way he’s supposed to be…”
  — Unlearn16 [44:58–45:09]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Segment | Timestamps | Description | |----------------------------------------|--------------|------------------------------| | Jonathan’s background & social media | 00:52–03:59 | Teaching, TikTok, motivation | | Roots of fascism & meaning-making | 09:01–21:00 | Industrialization, philosophy| | World War I as catalyst | 25:04–35:09 | Battle of Verdun, postwar | | Paramilitarism and propaganda | 39:05–42:49 | Freikorps, incel culture | | Hitler’s rise: occultism to power | 42:50–55:05 | Early Nazi Party, depression | | Conservative underestimation of Hitler | 56:10–58:34 | Hindenburg, Papen | | Comparison to today/hopeful closing | 59:29–64:18 | Modern threats, resilience | | The “good men do nothing” thesis | 63:34–64:18 | Call to action |

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Takeaways for Listeners

• Fascism is not purely the work of monsters; it is a system that seduces, weaponizes, and normalizes the actions of ordinary people.
• Catastrophe, loss of community, and echo chambers prepare the ground for radicalization.
• The normalization of demagogues, enabled by self-interested elites, is as dangerous as zealotry.
• Present-day authoritarianism is opportunistic and commodified, but not as deeply rooted in organizational or intellectual coherence as 20th-century fascism—a potential point of hope.
• Passivity is the real danger. “Do something—even a little—and we win.” [64:18]

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Further Resources

• Jonathan’s TikTok & social media: @johnstartruck
• Books: The Night Sky Darker, Fire in the House of God, The Stars Themselves Shall Weep

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Final word:

“Evil succeeds when good men do nothing. …As long as enough of us do something, then we win.”
— Jonathan [64:18]

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[Podcast outro, plugs, and detailed contact info omitted for focus on core content.]

Transcript

[A]

Class is in session. Hey, everybody, and welcome to Unlearn 16. Class is in session. Guys, guys. I've imported a teacher, 20th century history teacher from Alabama. And I think we're just pretty much going to change the world right now. Fix everything in Canada, in the United States. Yes, that's what we're trying to do. I'm going to hand over to Jonathan right here. I'm going to let him give his bio, who he is, where he stands and his expertise. But guys, I'm going to be the student today because his expertise and his focus is so incredible and so significantly important right now that I'm going to kind of. I'm just going to hand over a mic a little bit here, Jonathan. So give the listeners or the watchers a little bio, a little background in who you are.

[B]

So my type 5 of who am I is is I like it is in over my head is how I would describe it. I'm a high school history teacher that started posting history book reviews for fun on TikTok and then the algorithm grabbed me and now I have a quarter million followers. Crazy. I've been like, working with the History Channel, wrote some books. It's. It's been a weird ride. But, like, I started reading obsessively about Nazism and the Holocaust. I really wanted to understand. I'm fascinated by systems. I'm really fascinated by, like, how do bad guys make bad guy things work. And then before I knew it, I had a master's in my field and I'd been teaching the 20th century with an emphasis on Nazism and the Holocaust for the better part of 10 years. And now, now I'm coming on to Cool People's podcast to say how frightened I am about things being relevant.

[A]

You know what I love about that? I love about that because it started with you doing something authentic to you that you loved, that drove you. And it just expanded who you were. And as you expanded who you were, you just brought everybody along for the ride. I honestly believe that that's such an incredible possibility if people let it be of social media in general. Right. Rather than trying to fit into something or do something because you think that people are going to like it or they're going to respond to it, to just authentically do what Dr. You, what you're interested in and people. And apparently so will the History Channel. It'll flop.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

That's amazing. That's amazing. So grade 11's your specialty and how long you been a teacher for?

[B]

Did you say this is year nine in the classroom, Year nine.

[A]

And how. How's that going for you? What are we.

[B]

I love it. I love it. I'm almost nervous about the direction that all of the media stuff is going because, like, I don't want to leave the classroom. Yeah. And there are opportunities I'd be a fool not to take.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But at the same time, like, I love my students. I love the relationship I've gotten to build with them. My colleagues are awesome. And it's. It's. Let me be prepared for this moment that we're all kind of struggling through right now. I feel like I have a responsibility to. To answer that preparation with action.

[A]

Oh, it's incredible. Now, why would you have to step away from the classroom? Just in the sense of the history channels knocking your door saying, you're going to write this book, you're going to do this documentary. You're like, I can't do both. Or are you. Do you ever feel a little limited? I know some people do. By being a teacher and doing this.

[B]

At the same time, it's that it's the latter. Things are moving in a positive enough and consistent enough direction of, like, people that I'm meeting and opportunities that have been available to me. And it's like, we're not at the point yet where we quit the day job and do this full time. We're not. We're not there yet. But if things keep moving at this pace for, say, another year, then I will be there, and that'll be a big choice to make. And, of course, I got to bring my whole family along with that choice and, like, make sure we're all in agreement, like, this is what we want to do.

[A]

Right. Okay. Now what? So you.

[B]

You.

[A]

You've decided to focus on. I want to know what made you go down that road, number one. Number two, I want to get to what's life like in Alabama right now, given the entire context. And then I want to talk a little bit about how what you've studied and the systems that you've studied and how we can talk maybe about applying that to today and what we should be watching for.

[B]

So what. What got me into it is I had a dear friend that I served with in the Marine Corps who fell down some. Really?

[A]

I'm sorry. You left. You were a Marine out of this quarry.

[B]

Guess I left that one out of the story.

[A]

What are we doing here? So, okay, wait, wait, wait. Before you get into. My friend in the Marine. So how long did you serve? What? You know, you're in the. Some People don't want to talk about necessarily experiential stuff, but just to give us a bit of background, I was.

[B]

I was with for 6 years with kilo battery 214 based out of Huntsville. It's a high Mars battery, so. Smart rockets.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

Holy explosion.

[A]

Very big, big explosion.

[B]

Explosion.

[A]

Six years. Is that. Was that. Is that like a tour? Like how long do you decide to stay in for six years. And. And then you got out. Is that.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. So you, you take it in enlistment at a time and you can do different lengths of contract. And when mine was coming up, I had to like, assess where I was in my life. And I mean, the thing that did it for me, like we were doing our, our, like our hikes on the end of this field exercise, and my joints were screaming at me and I was like, I'm 24 and my joints hurt and I think I'm good. I think it's time to do something else.

[A]

And that. Would that have just been the job? The job just put that. That strain on your body or.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a lot of. Part of it is just the physical demand of like carrying a pack, doing physical exercise to pass your fitness tests, but part of it is the culture of like, you don't really ask for help when you're hurting. You. You tough through it, you shoulder through it. And so like little bumps and tend to manifest as worse things when you do that. So there's a lot of guys that I served with who are just like carrying a bum shoulder around and it's like, you should probably go get that looked at. I don't need it. I don't need. No that.

[A]

Sure, sure.

[B]

I'm good. I need it. I need. I need to solve this.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Well, you know, and. And it sounds like you needed. I feel like you probably needed something else too. I. I feel like the. The road that you decided to go down. I don't think it's any coincidence that you serve for six years and at that level and for that particular. You know what I mean? And then understanding I want to couple this with this other kind of learning and this other kind of experience. I. I have no doubt they subconsciously go hand in hand. So how did you. So you. You're talking to Marine guy?

[B]

Yeah, friend of mine. He. So he fell down a pretty noxious online rabbit hole, and I didn't know what exactly was happening to him. I just know that he and I disagreed on lots of things and I'm. Yeah, I wear it on my sleeve. I'm very left leaning politically. He was always very right leaning, called himself a libertarian. And I enjoyed that. We had really spirited disagreements and he enjoyed that too. We would talk, you know, way into the wee hours of the morning, argue with each other. It was great. And over time it just got worse and worse and worse. And the things he said got more and more nasty and, and, and then he started being just pretty openly anti Semitic. And I wondered what, you know, what happened to my friend? Like, this is somebody that I really enjoyed being around. And now I can't, I can't, it's too painful. I can't be around him anymore. And I started digging, started reading, and then one book led to another, led to another. I was already in a history program for undergraduate, and so I started moving my academic direction that way to try and take it more seriously. And the more, the more I learned about Nazism and the way that fascism sort of worms its way into otherwise well meaning people, the more I became curious about systems, the more I became curious about how do you take an otherwise decent person and you make them a cog in this murder machine? I mean, that's what the Hitler government was, this, this machine that produced death factories.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And the overwhelming majority of the people who were a part of it were otherwise normal, reasonable people who in any other circumstance would have lived normal, reasonable, productive lives. And I wondered so much about like, why does that happen? And along the way I think I've found some answers to that question. And of course there's way better scholars than me have been trying to answer that question since like the late 40s. So I'm hoping that the expertise that I sort of stumbled into being really interested in can be useful in helping us navigate this sort of authoritarian moment that we find ourselves in.

[A]

Absolutely. So, okay, so, so let's take this from an academic sort of standpoint then. I mean, I think a lot of people feel as though they have a relatively good perspective or knowledge base, let's say on sort of the ally side of World War II and what went on over there. I know that when I teach about World War II, I definitely, I mean, I start at 1923, even though I could go further back than that. And you know, my kids are always very sort of confused, even though I do the full gambit. And they're just like, why are we going? Why are we starting so far back? I'm like, because this is the moment. Because 1923 he gets put in prison and when he gets put in Prison. I think there's a moment there where he's done stuff before, obviously, but he gets put in prison because. And I. And I definitely want your opinion on this. In the absence of real honesty and authenticity from our leaders, we will accept pieces of it and then coded the rest in lies. Because I. Because I think what he did very unfortunately, well, in that trial is. And for those who are listening, I'm talking about when he's put on trial for treason, trying to overtake the government. And he said something to the effect of when they gave up in World War I, they gave up on the country. And that was treasonous. What they did was treasonous. And for people that had been so beaten down by the Treaty of Versailles, I feel like a country went, what? Like, let me listen to this guy a little bit more, right? And then you had reasonable people go, okay, this is a weird. And then he goes to prison. Everybody else is cutting deals, and this guy goes, no, I'll go to jail. I'm not, I'm not gonna. Now he only went for nine months, right? But. And we start talking about the cult of personality that it takes in order to manifest the beginnings, right? You know, a lot of people would be like, well, what would you do if you could go back, you know that story, if you can go back in. In history and get rid of one person? Everybody's always like, Hitler. And I'm always like, well, what about the guy that would have been smarter and better than him? I'm terrified of that because Hitler did horrific things, but thank God he was crazy. Like, he pushed himself. You know what I mean? So where would you. Do you have steps that you would follow? Do you have moments in. Like, how would you analyze that?

[B]

Yeah, So I would push it back before 1923. I think it's really important to understand that in. In any other timeline where any other number of events happen, Nazism does not happen, Right. That so many things had to go the exact wrong way to get us to that trial in 1923. And then the subsequent failure of the Weimar Republic following that trial to do anything about the paramilitarism that Hitler was inspiring around himself. And so I wouldn't start it at 23. I would really start it back into the late 1800s. There's a lot of things happening at once that all sort of melt in the wrong direction. So on the first end, all of the Western world is industrializing, right? And what this means in practice is that a lot of people are leaving their small town environment and Moving to the city because the wages are stabler and the conveniences are better and the hospitals are more reliable. Right. And when they get there, they find all those conveniences are very much true and all of the ease of access to life is very much there. But they've replaced a kind of work that they were doing that was very directly related to themselves and very intimately related to themselves and their family history with being just another face on an assembly line. And all of the community that they had built in these small towns around Europe, around the United States, is being replaced by really long work hours that go year round where on the farm they would have been used to working during the farming season and then mainly just taking care of their home when they're not farming. So they get a lot of rest during the year, and then that goes away. On the assembly line, access to hard liquor is much easier and much cheaper. And so they're replacing beer with liquor. And so you get a lot of alcoholism, you get a lot of narcotics abuse, because, I mean, this is the. You get cocaine, tooth drops at the convenience store.

[A]

Right, right, right.

[B]

And amid all of these new modes of living, they've lost a really essential sense of community and belonging that they had in the farming town. And so they're experiencing a no me or this. This sense of smallness, the sense of loss, and they're looking to find meaning. And so in the late 1800s, we have this burst of social organizations. It's no coincidence that the NAACP is forming at the same time as the suffragettes are really g. In the American context, at the same time as the labor union movement is really taking off around the Western world at the same time as all of these socialist political organizations are forming up, eventually communist sort of vanguard movements around the Western world forming up. And all of this is a way for these people to navigate that sense of loneliness that they're all feeling and find that they are a part of something bigger, that they are a part of something they can really get their hands on and feel a sense of self in. But along with those, those more positive social organizations like suffragettes and naacp, you also get in the United States things like the Klan as a way to attach identity to race. And it's here in the late 1800s where we have two really big thinkers kind of explode onto the scene in the middle of this loneliness, in the middle of this loss, in this middle of searching for meaning. And one is the father of eugenics, Francis Galton. And so Galton argues, I know you. You know, this Part.

[A]

But for your listeners, no, you just, you keep listen. And right now, just whoever is watching me, if you see me looking down, I'm taking notes. Kids, I don't know why you don't have your pencil out either. Like, I am taking step by step notes because I'm already at a point where I'm like, oh no, what, what about today? Oh no, I see this happening today. So you, you keep going. So thank you.

[B]

There will be a test later. So there will be a test.

[A]

Pull it together, folks. Yeah.

[B]

So Galton creates this more scientifically justifiable model for racialist ideas that had been dominant for hundreds of years. This notion that cultures are superior and inferior and it is the white man's burden to civilize the savage. And so the Europeans had been going out and colonizing America, was beginning its major sojourns west, all in the name of like, we're bringing civilization to savage. We're following the white man's burden. And Galton, I guess institutionalizes this notion, says, no, it's not cultures, it's not this like, woo, woo. We all grew up together.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

Genetic destiny that you were born better and others are born worse. And so the, the notion of like helping them is pointless because their genetics make them that way. And so Galton is giving a more scientific sounding veneer over racialism and really building scientific racism and as a way of viewing others. And at the same time, Friedrich Nietzsche is writing in Europe and Nietzsche is contesting that the old world of decadent, fat, slovenly nobles have created this crisis of meaning. And they have done it because they have been duped. And Nietzsche builds this theory of ethics that there are three kinds of people. There are the masters, the slaves and the priests. And in Nietzsche' conception, the masters run the world by force. And they've always ran the world by force. And there were no ethics in the ancient world. And Nietzsche's wrong about this. He was nuts, right? Like by the late 1800s, he's like drooling on himself. He's not like actually like genuinely has a psychotic break. Yeah, like he has a full psychotic break. His sister has to like change his diaper. And nature is building this theory of ethics that there were no ethics in the ancient world. The masters ruled by force and the slaves obeyed. And that is the natural law. And then along come the priests. And the priests were this balm to justify what the masters were doing by giving it a divine coding. And the priests eventually started siding with the slaves and convinced the masters that they should not be brutal, that they should not rule by force and terror, but instead they should give alms to the slaves and eventually emancipate their slaves. And that the masters started believing, believing this notion. And it's created this crisis of ethics in our modern time. And this theory, excuse me, this theory of the world fits really well inside of eugenics thinking to say, oh, excuse me, that there was this natural order, and the natural order is gone. And so of course you feel lonely and small and afraid. And of course things don't make sense because the natural order that you are very comfortable is gone. Now, Nietzsche is roundly rejected by academic institutions at the time, but he becomes this sort of like parlor shop, bar room philosopher that people who typically aren't engaged with academic thinking get really invested in. And it's no coincidence that those people who are getting really invested in Nietzsche are the newcomers to the cities who.

[A]

Yeah, I want to pause because they feel very comfortable. I think a lot of people. There's two things that I think a lot of people associate with Nietzsche. I mean, it would be the superman and God is dead. And both of which they take wrong. Like most of the time when people quote him and people have an idea of who they'll say, well, he was an atheist. No, no, no, no. He was saying, just like you described. I think this is super important, that we killed him.

[B]

Yeah, God is dead and we've killed him.

[A]

We have killed God because of this new sort of reigning academic and philosophic kind of focus on exactly what you've described. And the idea of a superman. It isn't this notion of a savior. It's a notion of some men are just built better and we all need to accept it. And until we accept it, we're going to be lost in the woods kind of thing. So I just wanted to point that out.

[B]

Yeah, no, you're right.

[A]

Wrong all the time.

[B]

And. And so these ideas are really gaining. Not mainstream. Eugenics is very much mainstream, but Nietzsche is not. Nietzsche is this sort of cult figure. And all these ideas are metastasizing alongside this even more fringe notion of occultism that is really moving into the mainstream as people are leaving their hometown churches and trying to find a sense of what happens after I die. What does it mean to be a good person? What is the spiritual center I'm looking for where their pastor would tell them that before, but now their pastor is a harder character to find in the cities. And you get this just wave of scam artists who are doing seances and tarot card readings and horoscopes and they start all sort of forming their own version of this story that fits very well into Nietzsche and fits very well into Galton as humanity used to be this advanced race. And then some cataclysm struck and the advanced people traveled the world giving religion, philosophy and technology to the ancient peoples. And this sort of closes the gap that you might have when you're looking at eugenics and saying, well, if the non white people are worse, then why were the pyramids as engineering marvels in Egypt and in Latin America and not in Europe? Why were the really incredible structures of the ancient world in other places besides Europe? Well, if there is this advanced original man that gave technology to all of these people, suddenly those questions are answered and it's like, oh, well, the ancient people received wisdom from the first men. They received wisdom from these first people. And then you add on all kinds of layers of like, they were worshiped as gods and they're the old gods of all the tribal societies were these advanced men who brought them science and technology. And this is like super, super, super fringe. But what matters is who latches on to those stories. Because people like Heinrich Himmler, the head of the ss, were fully invested in these sort of old ancient. And Himmler just adds the Nazi veneer on top of it of like, oh, the ancient peoples were Aryans. And that makes sense as to like why Germany is culturally superior, but we're beset on all sides by enemies because the ancient calamity was caused by, by the Jew and the Jew has been stalking us ever since. And, and so it's not that the occultism ever breached containment into more than just like a parlor trick that most people didn't believe. It's that the people who did start taking it seriously were very high up in the Nazi party.

[A]

That's right. Okay, wait, wait, before we go any further, so let's just, let's just break that down for a second because it's incredibly important to have both of those things happening at the same time. And they'd have to happen at the same time. A dependency on stability and religion. Like it or hate it, it's always been, it's always been something humans have sought after. What happens, why am I here? Those big meaning questions, I don't care what religious route you take or what spiritual route you take, it doesn't seem to matter. I think there's something intrinsic to a human spirit that searches for those answers. And I think in order to not feel lost, because none of us want to, we very much want to latch on. We very much want to hold very, very tightly to something. And then as you're describing, industrialization and the loss. And I think this is quite beautifully said too. We lost a piece of our humanity with industrialization, and I know that Marx will end up talking about it later, but this alienation from who we are and who our spirit is, as we go to work for 8, 10 hours a day and we're just a cog in a machine of a wheel and we do this tiny little piece and we never have full control of our labor. We're never connected to a thing. We create and we, we sell or we trade or whatever. There's, we're, we're very removed from that creativity. And I do think there's a loss of our humanity there. And what you're saying is that, and there always is something ready to move in, especially people who see the loss and go, I can capitalize on that. I, I got something for that. And, and whether that's subconscious or not and, or, or purposeful, because I do think sometimes things are subconsciously driven. I think the people in power, they'll pick it up purposefully, like it will work for them. Right.

[B]

And that's, that's what you're talking about this too.

[A]

I can't help but think of Indiana Jones. I don't know why.

[B]

Well, yeah, man, Indy fought the Nazis.

[A]

All I think about is Raiders Lost Ark and opening the Ark of the Cov. It and Hitler. It's all I think about. It's all we just needed, you know, Harrison Ford back in that day. Anyway, so, okay, so we're at, we're at the head of the SS picking up on the occult. And what year are we talking about at this point when he really, Himmler.

[B]

Is going to latch on to occultism? Probably somewhere in his early 20s.

[A]

And what year would that be? 19.

[B]

Oh, God, that would be, that would be in the 1910s. That would probably be right after World War I.

[A]

Right after the war. Yeah.

[B]

And that's, that's really where I want to situate us, is in World War I, because industrialization, for all of its problems, social organizations do form and people do get accustomed to new modes of living, and they do find community and belonging and new ways to reorient their lives. And so the, the amount of people that are in this stage of, of absolute loss and, and disparaging is, is small compared to the whole of the amount of people in Western society. What you need to really make it go is a catalyzing event, something that will reignite this mass sense of loss. Now that all of these ways that you can make identity, aside from your family on the farm, have fully matured. So you can identify with your race, you can have the sense of mysticism, you can join a paramilitary. What you need is some major catalyst to really drive that loss into the mainstream. It's the Great War. It's the Great War. It's the war.

[A]

World War I. Yeah.

[B]

So when we get to the Battle of Verdun, and I think this is the place, if I was going to stick a pin and like, where does Nazism come from? Rather than these nebulous ideas that ultimately align to become precursors to fascism, I would pin it right on Verdun. So the Western Front hasn't moved. It's 1916. There are losses at a scale that no government is really capable of comprehending. We have massive morale drain on all sides of the war. There are food shortages at home. On all sides of the war, there's this like, when's America going to jump in? Is America going to jump in? And at the Battle of Verdun, we meet this guy named Falkenhayn. And General Falkenhayn is a German officer who is telling the Kaiser that he can get a breakthrough on the Western Front if the Kaiser gives him sufficient resources. And the Kaiser agrees. More than just giving him the manpower and giving him the machinery, he also sends the Crown Prince to Verdun. So he sends his son to Verdun. And what Falkenhayn is telling the Kaiser is, hey, Hindenburg is just stacking him up in the East. We're winning in the East. If you let me really take a gamble here in Verdun, I'll get you a breakthrough in the west and we'll win the war. Falkenhayn is lion. Falkenhayn knows that he cannot get a breakthrough at Verdun. He knows that what he plans to do, what he's only telling his closest confidants is, quote, I will bleed the French army white. He believes that the morale in France is significantly lower than the morale in Germany. And if he can visit enough casualties on the French army by forcing them to fight at Verdun to hold him off, then the French army will collapse, its morale will completely disintegrate and Germany will overwhelm the Western Front. And he's not telling the Kaiser any of this because he knows that his casualty rates will be higher. And they are. And what we see is a Germany that begins to sort of celebrity status Falkenhayn, because it gets some meaningful victories and he does move the line forward at Verdun. He seizes this major fortress at Verdun. And once Falkenhayn is in the fortress, he becomes completely and poignantly aware that he cannot hold it, that the French and the British are massing north of his line for the Psalm offensive. And they can keep pulling reserve units from the planning of the Psalm offensive to just. But they can keep pulling those reserve units preparing for the Psalm onto Verdun. And so Falkenhayn keeps sort of dragging it out and the Emperor is getting really impatient. He's like, so when are you going to get me this breakthrough? We've been here for a long time now and you said you, you had it in the bag and we're losing, you know, we're in the 300,000 men casualty range, like, like, where's my breakthrough? The Emperor gets fed up and he brings in Paul von Hindenburg. And Hindenburg is this celebrity soldier. He's nigh undefeated on the Eastern Front. The Eastern Front is going really well for Germany. And so you get this really weird morale gap where all of the Eastern Front guys who have been fighting under Hindenburg are convinced they're about to win the war because they've just been clobbering the Russian Empire. And all the Western Front guys are like, like, I'm in hell, let me go home. So Hindenburg comes in, celebrity soldier, he's going to save the day. He's going to win Verdun. And Hindenburg is incredibly intelligent as like a tactical and strategic thinker. And he knows right away, I can't hold Verdun, but what do you do? The German people have been told and they like did a national holiday about it. When Verdun fell, when the Verdun fortress fell and like kids were let out of school and there was a work stoppage and they drained some reserves of food to do this big feast in all the cities. And, and here comes Hindenburg and he's going to win. And Hindenburg's like, ah, I can't. It's not possible. So what we see at Verdun is this sort of slow pulling away where the French can't get a breakthrough and neither can the Germans. And so both forces just slowly start peeling off of the fortress until it becomes just this shell cratered slop heap in the, in the middle of no man's land. And what Hindenburg walks away from Verdun, with is this notion of like, we're going to lose and it doesn't matter that I've been winning over in the east, we're going to lose. And if we lose, the reputation of the German army goes and my reputation goes. And so he begins trying to concoct a scheme to prepare Germany for defeat in a way that keeps the reputation of the army intact. And so, as the opponents of the Kaiser in the Reichstag are preparing to draft a new constitution and propose like, hey, we need to like, really limit the powers of the Emperor and we need to find some way to settle this war. And the food shortage crisis is getting out of hand and the casualties are too high and we're risking like revolution, we're risking general strike. We have to find a solution now. And they're going to the town of Weimar to try and set this new constitution. Hindenburg finds his out of use, his reputation to give that republic its fire. Because the thing that they can't manage is, well, if we give the Kaiser this constitution and say we want out of the war, then he'll just say, no, I have the army, I don't have to listen to you. But if Hindenburg is on our side, the Kaiser doesn't have the army, Hindenburg has the army. And so because of Hindenburg's loyalty shifting from Kaiser to Weimar, the Emperor is forced to abdicate and step down from power. And microseconds after that happens, Hindenburg starts pushing the stabbed in the back line because there are all these reactionary newspapers talking about how, well, if we only fought harder, if we only were more aggressive, if only the people had the true spirit of 77 and they were these old, you know, Kaiserreich, old guard that fought under Bismarck, then we would win this war. And Hindenburg is like, yes, yes, that's true. You're being betrayed. The socialists and the communists and the Jews, they're betraying you. And the reactionary newspapers just devour this narrative. And it serves Hindenburg incredibly well. He gets a German republic that he will eventually be the president of, and he's beloved and respected by the soldiers and the civilians alike. He's a, a hero for the cause of peace because he helped resolve the conflict in a way that made the fighting stop. But he's an old guard, true warrior because he fought to the bitter end. And so he gets to thread this needle of being the, the perfect sort of embodiment of the new, more liberal faction and the old right, the old aristocratic right in Germany. And it's in that last gasp of the Great War where the Kaiser is sort of frantic, the Kaiser stepping down, and Hindenburg is pulling the army back, that we meet all of the people who will lead the Nazi Party. Hermann Goering is flying with the Red Baron, and he is traumatized by losing someone that he incredibly respected when the Red Baron got shot down. And he knows that, like, the Red Baron was his meal ticket. That was his way to fame and glory, was like, I was one of the squadron members for the Red Baron. And now the Red Baron's gone and I have nowhere to hang my hat. I need to join one of these upstart political movements and see if I can't make a name for myself that way. You get Adolf Hitler, who wakes up from. Who wakes up from essentially a coma in a hospital to find out that the war is over, a war he was convinced he was winning when he entered that field hospital from a gas attack. You get Heinrich Himmler, who was always the second favorite son, whose brother got to go and do hero stuff and got to go and fight on the front while he was a reserve soldier because he was too young to fight. And brother comes home broken. And now here's little Himmler becoming a man for the first time and dealing with this mishmash of like, well, brother got to go and be a hero. But he also lost. But I've idolized him my whole life, but dad also idolized him, so I'm kind of glad that he got his. But then I never got to get mine. And maybe if I was there, things would be different. And this ability, obsession with military identity that he never really got to embody. All of these people are ripped into. In that morale gap where the Eastern Front soldiers go back home and say, well, of course we were stabbed in the back. Of course we were. We were going to win. And all of the Western Front guys are like, the hell are you talking about? We were getting pounded day in and day out. There was no winning. Nobody was going to win. We were all just going to lose. And it's in this sort of political misunderstanding of how the German people negotiate what World War I was and what its conclusion meant. Inside a world where Nietzsche is talking about the overman who used to rule by terror. Inside a world where Francis Galton's ideas talk about racial supremacy and the Germans already had a really strong sense of, like, cultural superiority over the other powers in Europe. And Nazism and the fascism boiling over in Italy just latches.

[A]

Oh, yeah, for sure. Then they watch that. Right. Okay. So we get to the end of World War I. You have the Treaty of Versailles that everybody talks about sort of famously as being sort of. Well, will be. I think the. The. The unfortunate, perfect end to get to World War II that you're gonna. You're gonna speak to in a second. But. But I. It's so great. Like, it's such an incredible piece of history, all the things that you're describing, because when we start talking about the Treaty of Versailles and you have, like, guys like Woodrow Wilson going, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is too much. You're. You're punishing this country too much. It's too. They can't take everything. You can't take away their army. You can't take away their colonies. You can't make them pay everything back. You can't give them all the guilt. You can't do all that to one nation. But from listening to you, it's like you might have been able to if all of that backstory hadn't happened that you just described.

[B]

Yeah. And I think Wilson is a. Wilson is a master statesman. Right. He really, really knows the international situation. And I think Wilson sees. And I think England also sees that the German militarism doesn't go away when the military goes away.

[A]

No.

[B]

You just don't have anywhere to put it.

[A]

That's right. You have all of that. That rage, and you have all of that superiority. You have all of those thoughts, but you don't have anywhere to negotiate it. Now, when does it happen? Because. Because listening to you, you would think Hitler would ally himself to some degree with Hindenburg. Right. Against the old. Against. Because he believed that. Right.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. He was an early adopter of Stab in the back. Yeah, yeah.

[A]

He loved the stabbed in the back. I'm on your side. When did that shift? When Hindenburg thought he was an idiot and didn't like him? Or when Hindenburg saw that Hitler could have been a bit of a. A bit of a wrench in his plan now that he had ascended to the presidency.

[B]

Yeah, that's the. That's the trouble is, I think what we see a lot of out of Hitler's early moves in politics, and of course this is after he has the Chancellorship, is we get. Again, it's a perfect storm. Right. Of, like, if anything goes differently, Nazism doesn't happen. So if we. When we end up skipping a lot here, but I understand we're. You know, we all. We don't have to.

[A]

No, no, go back. We don't have to skip a lot. Go back to where you were. Yeah.

[B]

Thank you so much.

[A]

I get to just take your time.

[B]

Okay?

[A]

This is important. I don't care how long this goes. I got. I got hours.

[B]

So we get to post war Germany is like an economic nightmare. We're talking a thousand percent, month over month inflation. Phrases like useless eater are getting pushed around as a way to reference unemployed people. Like, it's a really aggressive, almost petty culture of grievance that is building. And this is especially true among These World War I veterans who now are buying into the stab in the back theory. And they're coming home and they're looking at their countrymen who wanted the war to end and were right to want to end. And they're saying, you screwed us, and now you're asking for a government handout so you can feed yourself. We were on the cusp of victory. And like, like we were talking about just a second ago. The militarism doesn't go away when the military does. And this is especially poignant for the Weimar Republic that understands that the Kaiserreich had not made really many friends. And all of the friends it had made were gone. The Austro Hungarian Empire had collapsed. The Ottoman Empire had collapsed. The Italians switched from the Central Powers to the Entente at the end of the war. So Germany's kind of alone in Central Europe and it needs some kind of military to protect itself. At least it feels it does, but it can't field an army. So the solution is to sort of look the other way as Fry Corps units or free soldier units, mercenary companies, paramilitary.

[A]

We're talking about Perry. God. This, the. The common. I'm getting more scared of right now as you talk than I have been. But please start seeing the rise of the para military as a, as an outlet. Right. That's what we're talking about.

[B]

The Fry Corps units start popping up and they become quite useful to a Weimar government that is rather conservative. It's not the old right aristocracy conservative, but it is a conservative government. And when you get these left wing labor movements that start popping up, it's organizations like the Steel Helmets, a Fry Corps unit that puts down an attempted general strike. When politicians need bodyguards, they hire Fry Corps units. And so it becomes a way for these unemployed, deeply traumatized World War I veterans to find work because they're having trouble reintegrating into normal life. The French occupation of the Rhineland has made it hard for them to access the. The factory jobs that they would have had. And so they end up going for for fry core jobs. And among these fry core units are deeply anti Semitic, deeply reactionary thinkers that are gobbling up the new media. These zines, they're one and two page newspapers. You could do multiple print runs a day, they cost a penny. And the zines are publishing just stab in the back nonsense at all times. They're publishing anti African racism because it's black colonial troops that are occupying the Rhine. The French leave colonial troops behind. And we see this. Odd. I guess it seems odd at first glance and then it starts to make a lot of sense, but there's a lot of sexual impotence among these guys that they had been in the trenches for a very long time without access to women. And they come back home and they can't. Yeah, they're broken men and they can't start a family.

[A]

Perfect sense now. Yeah, yeah, of course they can't start a family.

[B]

And so they bite into like, the reason you can't start a family is because all of these Jews are corrupting your women. And they're bringing, they're bringing jazz culture from America into Germany and they're bringing the Hollywood queer scene from America into Germany and they're bringing black people from America into Germany and the colonial troops are raping your women. And so all the wives that you would have are sullied and ruined and you wouldn't want them anyway. And so you get these dudes who are like the most sexually frustrated people who have ever lived and they're also broke and they have no formal employment and the only thing they have to do all day is hang out with other dudes like them in the fry corps, talk about each other up.

[A]

Oh my God. Jonathan.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

I don't drink, but I'm thinking, yeah.

[B]

You need a cigarette, huh?

[A]

Oh my God. Yeah, the. And we're going to get to all of that. I'm going to let you get through. I'm going to let you get through because we're going to get to what we think the points of, you know, because I mean, they're pretty evident. But I think we should go through point by point by point talking about all these things because. Okay, so the incel is born, basically. Amazing. They need somewhere to put it. You have propaganda being fed to them at next to no cost that they can have direct access to. They spend all their time in echo chambers gassing each other up, talking about the good old days when we used to have power, used to be able to do things, figuring out who is to blame for all of It. That can't possibly be themselves or the war or the government that force the war upon them. It has to be something else, because that's what everybody's been saying for so long.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

Holy.

[B]

Yep. So it's in this world where we get young Addie, right? We get little Adolf. And Adolf is one of the few guys that gets.

[A]

When you say that, all I can think about is that YouTube video, you know. You know, the little. Little Hitler. Have you ever seen that video?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

He's like. And he's in a classroom. He keeps taking the Czechoslovakian desk, and he keeps taking the. It's one of the best. It's probably the only thing I've ever really loved. Okay, so you get young Adolf. What are we. What age are we talking about here?

[B]

So he is in his. I want to say he's in his. His late 20s at this point. His late 20s, early 30s. And he is one of the few guys that gets to keep his job in military intelligence. And because he was a. He was a runner In World War I, he was a letter carrier, and that's. That sort of translates into intelligence work. And his job is as a spy. He goes to these young political upstart parties because there are dozens and dozens of little ones and reports back as to whether or not they're radical revolutionaries. The Weimar government is paranoid of overthrow, and they're right to think so, because you have an attempted revolution from the left right after the war that the SEAL helmets put down, and then you have an attempted revolution from the right in the Cap Putsch that was led by Erich Ludendorff, who is another major tournament general. And so the Weimar government is paranoid about attempting coups. And so Hitler's job is to. As I should be the right to be. And the Hitler's job is to go to these small parties and report back on, like, do they seem serious? Do they seem like they're actually going to try and do violence? And it's at these little spy operations that he meets a dude named Dietrich Eckhart. And Eckhart is a playwright and he's an occultist. He is full all the way into, like, the ancient Aryan Superman had magic, and they gave religion and technology to the ancient peoples, and they migrated up through. Through the Mediterranean and they traveled to India and then they settled in Germany. And that's why Germany's always been superiors. They're the direct descendant of these. These supermen who were destroyed by their ancient enemy, the Jew. And Hitler bites all the way in. He starts speaking at these party meetings. And he very quickly promotes in this party.

[A]

So he goes to spy on somebody, to tell on them to, to, to inform on them to the government. And he ends up getting drawn in. Yes, he bites all the way he's supposed to be.

[B]

And he is stepping into this world of new right politics at the same time as Himmler, at the same time as Goeting, at the same time as Goebbels. And they're all sort of adrift and finding somewhere to be. They're all finding little paramilitary pockets they can worm their way into. And when Hitler starts doing public rallies and shifts the branding to the National Socialist German Workers Party or the Nazis, when he shifts the branding to this is not a left wing movement. This is not a right wing movement in his conception. This is the third position. This is the future. And, and this notion and, and he's described as the man with fire in his eyes. And so over time all of these future party leaders, they wander into the rallies that he's putting on and they're just in enthralled by him. And he really did. He has commanding speaking voice. He spoke in, in the sort of language of the common people. Because he didn't have a higher education. He was addicted to methamphetamine. He was, he was always drinking. And so like he's, he's this sort of rough and tumble guy from the street. He's like me. And they're really drawn in by that. And what, what happens is some of these paramilitaries start attaching themselves to him. And he gets in really good with the steel helmets, he gets in really good with the Sturmbetteilung. The Brown Shirts. And the Brown Shirts become a part of the Nazi party as their official paramilitary arm. The Brownshirts are led by Ernst Rohm. And it's here before the Beer Hall Putsch where the sort of constellation of the Nazis worst people form and begin digging in in their leadership position. Goebbels is this failed newspaper guy, failed movie writer guy. He's always been.

[A]

They all just want to be playwrights and movie stars and artists. For the love of God, give them the arts. Maybe this doesn't happen.

[B]

Yeah, my solution to our modern problem is like a state mandated girlfriend and automatic entry into art school. If you apply, you're in. It's just like, oh draw, here's a partner. Go learn something. Don't go back outside.

[A]

Remember Kim Shan un used to have those photos of. It was always like a rap video photos like he, it was always in the V formation. This the way they stood. I'm like, just give the guy a movie. He'd stop being such a pain in everybody's ass. I don't think he wants dictatorship. I think he wants, you know, a three picture deal in a rap album.

[B]

Yeah, just like let him be a K pop star.

[A]

This is what I'm saying. Okay, okay.

[B]

All right. You get these different strains of Nazism in this really early period. You have Ernst Rohm's permanent revolution where he wants the non stop street violence at all times. There's not some grand plan. And it seems like his ultimate goal is to worm his way into the Wehrmacht, into the German army, and sort of make the army the brown church. Make the brown church the army. The army hates him. They're disgusted by him. He's a drunk. He is openly practicing homosexual. Man, they are really weirded out by Unstraum. And so he's not really getting anywhere beyond head of the brownshirts, but his brownshirts worship him. Then you get Heinrich Himmler, who has been obsessed with all these medieval stories and the mysticism and the seances. And he wants like a return to the old Superman. And he forms the ss, the Schutzstaffel, the protection squad as like his better essay, his better brown shirts. And they have really strict entry requirements and they have military style uniforms that are designed by Hugo Boss. So they're meant to look like really imposing, really intimidating. They take a lot of strenuous physical and mental education. They do a lot of propaganda and indoctrination. And they're meant to be like this better example of the brownshirts who are all seen as these drunk thugs. And Hitler almost accidentally really cements himself as like he's the guy you have to impress because if he shuns you, then the party shuns you. And this creates a competition that always puts Hitler above these sycophants who tend to have violent men at their beck and call and want to impress him and often want to eat the other ones. So then you get the beer hall putsch and Hitler's very frustrated. The Nazis had a really bad turnout in their first big election run. He sees potential opening in Bavaria where he got the strongest votes. He thinks if he goes down there in a show of force, then the state government in variable just hand him power. And it goes about as badly as it possibly can. Hitler himself puts a gun in. I want to say it was the provincial governor, but I could just blanking on like who specifically it was. But Like, Hitler's leading this charge up to the State House. He puts the gun in the guy's face and he's like, like, you're gonna hand me the government. And the guy is like, no, I'm not. I've already called the army. Like, I'm not handing you the government. And the army shows up and a bunch of Nazis get shot, and Hitler gets arrested, and a bunch of the other ones get arrested too. And what begins to happen while Hitler is in jail is that rivalry between Himmler and Rome starts to flare because Rome has become the sort of spiritual leader of the Nazi party in absentia because the party is banned, their uniforms are banned, their symbol is banned for, for the next election cycle. And Himmler and Rome keep feuding, feuding, feuding, feuding, feuding. When Hitler is released and he's had time to write his manifesto, it takes off. And all of these Nietzsche obsessed, eugenics obsessed dorks around the world just gobble it up. They gobble it up. Like Henry Ford buys like a half a million copies of the thing and distributes it to people, right? And the Nazis spend the rest of the 20s seen as a joke. There are moments where they might even give up the whole thing because their election numbers are like sub 10%. And then the Great Depression happens, and the Great Depression happens, and it hits German manufacturing really hard. And this return to economic prosperity and this rise of the German roaring twenties evaporates overnight. And here's Hitler saying, I told you so.

[A]

I told you so.

[B]

You called me a radical. But the international financiers ruined your life, didn't they? But what's particularly important here is that the German working class was initially hit really hard by the Great Depression. The German aristocrats and the middle, they were all initially hit really hard by the Depression. But it's the German middle class that suffer the most from it. Because even once the economy begins to stabilize, their savings have already been wiped out by the inflation. And so they're looking for a person to blame. They're remembering the lean years of the early Weimar period. They're looking at their children and saying, oh my God, my kids are going to have to go through the same suffering that I went through. And like, maybe this guy isn't so crazy. And they're able to write off what I find really fascinating in the book, what We Knew by. By Ruband. In what We Knew. The. The Rubrand does a lot of polling of people who live through the Hitler government, Germans who lived through the Hitler government, and one of the polling questions he asked is assume you don't know anything about the Second World War and assume you never learned anything about the Holocaust. Why did you support Hitler when it started? Why did you vote for the Nazis in. In 32, 33. And all of them said, the overwhelming majority say economic anxiety and less than 5% say anti Semitism, racism, or any kind of international issues. It's almost all entirely restore the glory of old Germany and fix my bank account. And Rubin concedes that a lot of these people were probably lying because after the Holocaust, you don't admit that you were on board with it. But a substantial number of those people are probably quite honest in that it was economic anxiety that drove them into the arms of the Nazis. And once the Nazis take power and they suspend elections, it's worth notes, really worth noting, that before they begin implementing any of their program, elections go first. And you replace elections with plebiscites that are managed by the party. So there will be public opinion polls and they're open ballot. There is a brown shirt in the polling booth with you. There are hundreds of reports of Germans being told when they showed up for these opinion polls that they were handed a completed ballot and told to put it in a Dropbox. And then the brown shirt would walk them to the Dropbox. And so once the elections are suspended, the Nazi program begins to be rolled out. Then Himmler makes his move. He offs Ernst Wrong. He absorbs the Gestapo into the ss. He absorbs the Sturmiteilung into the ss. And so now the Nazis have the actual state. They have a state within a state in the SS that is managing arrests and organizing prisons and conducting street rallies. They have their own party newspaper that is absorbing all of the free press that was active in Germany. So now the only place you can get your money media is from the party. The criminal justice is handled by the party. The elections don't exist, and any plebiscites are managed by the party. And so after 1936, especially when you said, what did the average German think? Like, not when Hitler was elected, but like as the regime is going. And my answer to that is, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what they thought. They were not allowed to think anymore. All of the social organizations had been absorbed.

[A]

Everything horrible started happening. It was already done. I mean, I mean, and we skipped over the burning of the Reichstag, right, which really sort of, I would expect, solidified the enemy, whoever the enemy is, and then people are just handing him power like it's going out of it. Oh, take it, take it, take it. You're going to save us.

[B]

And so here we come back to here we come back to Rome. So the Reichstag is burned and everybody knows it's a farce when we read Garden of Beasts by Eric Larson. And this is a biography of America's ambassador to Germany. What that ambassador is writing back to the State Department. What Dr. Dodd is writing back to the State Department. Department is. Everybody I talk to says that this is a show trial. They don't believe the official story. They know the Nazis are lying. The sort of general wisdom on the street is like, this is the end of Hitler. He's finally gone too far. He's framing somebody for this tragedy. He's gone too far. What Rome, or excuse me, not what Rome sees, what Hindenburg sees and what Vice Chancellor Papin sees is this Hitler guy's a lunatic. Everybody thinks he's an idiot. We're going to use him and we're going to use him. So we're going to sick him on the left and he, we're going to give him these emergency powers and he can have the Reichstag decree. And Hindenburg is not going to call up the army. He's not going to use his power to vacate and clear the chancery. He's going to let Hitler Tucker himself out. Smash.

[A]

I need you to repeat that. Everybody thinks Hitler is a. What, like Hindenburg thinks Hitler is a.

[B]

A lunatic.

[A]

A lunatic and an idiot. And an idiot.

[B]

Yeah. Hindenburg and Papen are both aligned of like we can use him. He is useful. We will use him until he collapses and then he will eventually push himself too far. And that will be our excuse. He will break something important and we will say, ah, but I, Hindenburg, a man of the people, have the interest of Germany at heart. And as president, I will vacate the chancellery and we will do new elections. And so what we see is this tidal wave of violence unleashed on the left. Left. It's unleashed on the communists, it's unleashed on the socialists, it's unleashed on left leaning Social Democrats, it's unleashed on Catholics. Anybody that had any sort of left wing sympathies whatsoever finds themselves nabbed up and hauled to a concentration camp. We get the outpouring of initial waves of anti Semitic violence, anti immigrant violence. There are accounts of tourists who are just falling face forward into embassies because the Gestapo snatched them up because they weren't like patriotic enough when the, the Brown Shirts walked by doing A street march, and the Gestapo just beat them senseless and then put him back out on the street. And so the international community is saying, like, this Hitler guys, like, give Hindenburg five more minutes and he's going to sack him. We can't keep having this. This is an international incident. One after the other, Hindenburg's gonna sack him. And then Hindenburg dies. Yeah, Hindenburg dies. He's.

[A]

He's old and he think he just died.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So, no, there's no. There's no putting the poison in his tea kind of thing. Like, no wild that he just dies, though.

[B]

Well, Hitler doesn't need him to die. Rather, Hitler needs him to die to assume the powers of the presidency and the Chancellor drop the title and become. Sure, he needs that to happen. But I really want to emphasize that shift from Chancellor to Fuhrer, by the time it happens, it's basically a technicality.

[A]

Semantic.

[B]

Yeah. He has a paramilitary that far outnumbers the actual military. He has all of the organs of the state. He has party members in all of the positions of bureaucratic power. He has support from the German courts that were this old right, aristocratic, conservative bent anyway. And so the last piece is like, whenever Hindenburg dies, that's when I. I take the official title and I officially control the army, even though now that Rom is dead, the army respects me because they saw me as handling wrong, and that's what they wanted.

[A]

So. Oh, my God. So by virtue of the Treaty of Versailles, dismantling the military, but not dismantling or stopping or negating militarism, they allowed. They created the space with which these individuals could create a paramilitary to take over the state with nothing to protect the state or democracy as it very much existed in Germany from being eradicated.

[B]

Just nail on the head.

[A]

Well, you know, it's the. That's the only silver lining so far of where we're sitting right now. A little bit.

[B]

Yeah. There are lots of silver linings. Do not be hopeless.

[A]

As long as the military does what I'm hoping the military will do. You know what I mean? Like, there's no outplaying the American military.

[B]

So there's a couple of. A couple of points of hope. And I will call. I will call our present moment a fascist moment. But I want to emphasize that it's not the same kind of fascism, just like the liberalism of today is not the same liberalism of the Founding Fathers. Others. What we see out of the fascists, original recipe in Italy and in Germany is that a lot of the party leaders are these Incredibly highly educated, incredibly intelligent men. And what we see out of our modern burst of fascism is it's podcast hosts and it's talk show guys, and it's people who wrote children's books.

[A]

Reality tv.

[B]

Yes. Reality TV stars. It's people who wear the original recipe guys. All of them suffered and sacrificed and risked life and limb to secure their power. Several of them died in the attempt of securing power because they genuinely believed in this mass movement of fascism as the solution to the modern world. And so many of our current run of thought leaders on the far right are con men who don't believe in anything when. When Charlie Kirk gets assassinated. And of course, it's horrifying that a public figure gets popped in broad daylight. Of course that's horrifying. We see it's immediately used to milk money before he's even in the ground. T shirts. T shirts.

[A]

His wife.

[B]

Yeah, I saw a guy wearing a T shirt two days after it happened. A memorial T shirt. And the logistics of that shirt existing mean that someone designed and printed it the minute it happened. Like, the dude died. And then someone immediately got on Canva and started doing. And so my, my sense of hope here is several pronged. First, our constitutional order is really, really well built to resist authoritarians. That was kind of the point of doing it, is our founders didn't want another king. The other point is that a lot of the people leading this authoritarian surge are entirely in it for themselves. And we see it over and over. The minute things get wobbly, they bail, they cash their bag and they bail. And it's also being driven at the ground level, at the foot soldier level, by people who are so atomized and isolated and brain melted, that you do get acts of incredible violence. And I don't want to. I don't want to dissuade from, like, the people like Kyle Rittenhouse that are out there opening fire on people, or the people like, oh, my God, he was the Christchurch shooter who got radicalized on 4chan.

[A]

Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

What we don't see are incredibly well organized military style paramilitaries staffed by people who were military veterans who follow a robust chain of command and have connections to the state. Yeah, that's. We do have.

[A]

Even if we compare it to ice, Right? Like, even if. I mean, a lot of people are listening to this, comparing it to ice, but even compared to ice, what we're seeing, with. I'm not seeing, when you see the videos, whether they're horrific and somebody gets shot nine times or whether you're just seeing these guys obvious operate. The last thing I see, the last thing I see is organized, intelligent, command driven and actual military men. You see disorganization, fear and, and screaming.

[B]

Whether it's not they lose, they lose, they're losing. And that's what I think is really important for us to understand is they are losing. That ICE pulls back from Minnesota that the Trump administration goes to court when it tries to overreach with its, excuse me, again, where it tries to overreach with its power and it loses, it loses in court when it does that. The constitutional order is being strained the hardest it's ever been. Yes, it's still holding. And if I could give your viewers, and I know we're kind of coming up on time, if I could give your viewers a thing to take away from.

[A]

As long as you have nowhere to go. This is the most, I feel I've just been educated about seven years right now. So you take your time. You don't look at the CL unless you have to go. You don't.

[B]

I'm a dad and it's getting on bedtime.

[A]

So you got your bedtime. I got you, I got you.

[B]

If I could give your, your viewers something to take away with them. The reason that Nazism succeeded was not the amount of people that were evil and did bad. It was the amount of people who saw what was happening. They talked to their friends and they, oh, this Hitler guy's a lunatic and he'll be out and oh, I can't stand that guy. And oh, this guy. And that's all they did. Evil succeeds when good men do nothing. I'm not to you at home. I'm not saying you have to be the first in line on the protest. I'm not saying you have to donate all your money. I'm saying you have to do something. And as long as enough of us do something, then we win.

[A]

I'm going to leave it there. I'm going to leave. Jonathan, this was by far the most fascinating, educational, incredibly important hour I have spent in a very long time. I would love to have you back anytime you have time around bedtime, before bedtime, and my channel is your channel. I will talk about anything. You are incredible. Please tell everybody where to find you and, and where to watch more of what you have to say.

[B]

Okay, so Pluggy, the Pluggies.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

You can find me on TikTok at johnstartruck. Like Monster Truck with a J. You can find me on Instagram @johnstartruck. Monster truck with a J. You can find me on YouTube where I do longer form stuff and more documentary style videos. You can find me on Patreon. Again, all of that is Johnster Truck. And if you would like to read my science fiction where I try to apply a really academic approach to authoritarianism to a setting that has laser guns and spaceships and magic, what then you can check me out on Amazon. My books are the Night Sky Darker, Fire in the House of God and the Stars Themselves Shall Weep. Book one just got finished with its audiobook on Audible. Oh my.

[A]

And by the way, for everybody listening to that and you couldn't take all those notes so fast, I am going to put that. He's going to send it to me. I'm going to put that all in the description section. So you can go to the description section, you can find it. You don't have to be worrying about taking all of those notes. But that is incredible. Jonathan, thank you so much for spending an hour. I truly appreciate it. I welcome you back anytime you want and thank you for the moment and the pieces of hope that we are now standing in because I think that's incredibly needed. And to everybody who's listening, thanks for hanging out with us and I will see you next time. Same bat time, same bat. Channel dismissed.