Election Protection in the Midterms—Plus Racism and Antisemitism in the 1940s and ’50s

Ian Bassin: It’s good to be on, Jon.

JW: Republicans have been trying to make it harder for Democrats to vote for a long time – a couple of decades. Would you say that what Trump is doing now makes the 2026 midterms different from the preceding elections?

IB: Fundamentally so. Although I think it is worth acknowledging that we’ve never had completely free and fair elections in the history of this country. We’ve had elections that, for better or worse, we’ve accepted for the most part, at least in the modern era since the enactment of the Voting Rights Act, as delivering the will of the people and translating that into governing power.
What we’re facing now, though, is something fundamentally different in a number of ways. First and foremost, we have a president of this country who essentially took the oath of office with his fingers crossed behind his back. This is a president who doesn’t believe in the foundational principles of the Constitution, and doesn’t believe in the idea of democracy, that we the people, ultimately, are the sovereigns who hold power, and we get to exercise that power through free and fair elections to decide on our voters.
And that’s not just me speculating. We saw what happened in 2020 when Trump lost, refused to accept that defeat, incited a violent insurrection on the Capitol, and to this day refuses to accept what the will of the voters was. So we’re living in an era in which we have a president who doesn’t believe in democracy, and we’re now living in an era in which that president, upon his reelection, has converted the entire apparatus of the federal government into a democracy denying machine. That, I think, means that, for all the flaws we’ve had since 1965, when we’ve had a relatively functional democracy, we are now facing challenges that are an order of magnitude different.

JW: And then last week, the Supreme Court, in the case Louisiana v. Callais, decided that partisan gerrymandering is constitutional, but districts drawn to give minority voters an opportunity to elect candidates is not. Is that relevant to the work of Protect Democracy?

IB: Absolutely. And in a sense, it kind of draws together these two strands that we were just talking about to create this perfect storm because, as we were just saying, we as a country have had a pretty horrific history of voting rights and democracy in the pre-civil rights and voting rights era, right? We lived through centuries of slavery. We lived through decades of Jim Crow. And only in 1965, with the passage of the Voting Rights Act, could you argue that we really did have a relatively functional and inclusive democracy in which all eligible voters had a reasonable opportunity in a free and fair way to cast a ballot and have their will honored and reflected in the governing structure of this country.
And as I mentioned just before, we’re now facing a moment in which we have an autocratic leader in the White House who doesn’t believe in the fundamental principle of democracy. And as you noted, we have a modern Republican Party that even prior to Donald Trump, had been no friend of voting rights and had put in place a conservative majority in the Supreme Court that has been attacking voting rights even prior to the Donald Trump era. It was before Trump put anyone on the court that John Roberts had begun his assault on the Voting Rights Act, and that assault reached its apotheosis with the decision recently in the Callais case, basically gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and paving the way for further radical gerrymandering, especially in the American South, in ways that will ultimately not just deprive Black voters in the South of having the opportunity to fairly elect candidates of their choice, but fundamentally risk giving Republicans an artificial chokehold on political power in the South, not unlike what the Democrats had when the parties were reversed in their ideologies on kind of the southern strategy in the pre-Civil rights era. So, we’re facing these twin perils of the longtime fight for voting rights in the Confederacy, and now the autocratic ascendance of Donald Trump. And obviously, they are connected, but they are also distinct.

JW: Let’s start by looking at the preparations to defend the elections by going to court, by asking judges to protect the voters and their votes. The litigation front, let’s call it, has a lot of very talented, committed people at work and have been at work for more than a year. The blue state attorneys general, Rob Bonta in California, Tish James in New York, Keith Ellison in Minnesota and a couple of dozen of their colleagues have been preparing for this moment since Trump won in November 2024. And so have the ACLU, the Brennan Center, the Legal Defense Fund, a dozen other long-standing legal groups. So, we have a lot of talent, a lot of energy, a lot of organization and money ready to go to court to stop Trump and MAGA from interfering in the midterms. Where do you see Protect Democracy fitting into this spectrum?

IB: Well, first off, Jon, I’m glad that we’re making this pivot, right, because we’ve just been talking about all these really negative and depressing and horrific developments in our democracy. But it’s important that we remember that all is not lost. I actually think, for all of the very real dangers and concerns that we were just talking to, at the end of the day those of us who believe fundamentally in freedom and democracy, not only are we winning, we are going to win. So good. Let’s pivot to how we’re going to do that.
So first off, let’s just talk about what is happening now — not just with the Callais decision, but Trump and his his fellow MAGA acolytes now calling for a redistricting of the entire South. Recently, we saw the governor of Louisiana so desperate to rig the elections that he declared a state of emergency in the state of Louisiana — a state of emergency to stop elections that were already underway. These are not elections that had not begun yet. Mail ballots were already out to military and overseas voters. In Louisiana, voting had begun in Louisiana primaries. And Governor Landry declares a state of emergency to stop it. And so, the first question you want to ask is why? And the answer is because they’re losing.
So, like, the first thing to understand here is that all of this is, as you started at the top of the show, because Donald Trump and his vision and his movement are losing. They are a sinking ship and they know it. And therefore, the only thing they can do is try to rig the elections and cheat, so, the first thing to understand is that.
The second thing to understand is it’s not going to work. It’s not going to work. It’s not going to work — for a number of reasons. One, they’re going to try to do all of this radical redistricting at the last minute. And in most of the cases, it may not be in all of the cases, but in most of the cases, they’re going to get stopped and slowed down in the courts. Now, they may not get stopped ultimately from doing this before 2028 or 2030. But when it comes to trying to change all of these maps before 2026, as you noted, the state attorneys general, the Rob Bontas of the world, some of the private sector litigators, the Marc Eliases of the world, they’re going to go to court and they’re going to slow these things down, because the Supreme Court in Callais did not strike down section two of the Voting Rights Act entirely, they just created an incredibly convoluted and gutted scheme for trying to argue these cases, which means there is still a judicial controversy that needs to weave its way through the courts. And the courts are notoriously slow.
And so, what I suspect is going to happen is a lot of these cases are going to get litigated. That’s going to bog them down and probably mitigate the dangers that the Republicans are able to redistrict a whole bunch of states in advance of 2026. They may get one, but even that’ll be slowed down to one or two.
The other reason, though, I think it’s going to fail is because what Supreme Court Justice Alito ultimately said in the Callais case was, “you can really only bring these cases if you can show that there was really out-and-out racism that was at play, and that needs to be remedied.” And normally in the history of this sort of litigation in the United States, it’s very, very hard to show that, because although those of us with eyes and ears can tell that racism is at play, it’s infrequently that legislators get up on the floor of their legislative chamber and say, “I am doing this to prevent those people who have a different skin color than me from voting.”
But in the Donald Trump era, they actually do that. That’s the incredible thing. It’s both awful, and also, it is kind of a saving grace in this litigation– that they’re not hiding it anymore.
Donald Trump gets up there and talks about “shithole countries.” And he’s frankly just an out-and-out racist, as are so many people in his orbit. And so that is actually going to make it so that there are potentially hooks to bring to litigate this case, even under the disingenuous and absurd standards that that Samuel Alito has laid out.
And then the last reason why I don’t think ultimately this Republican authoritarian scheme is going to work is because it is going to it is going to trigger enormous backlash. And here’s what I mean by they’re losing and they’re sinking ship. If you look at what’s been happening, Jon, I know you’ve been doing this. Look at what’s been happening in all the special elections that have been taking place in the primaries that have been taking place, we are witnessing a sea change, a tidal wave of voter rebellion against the Trump movement. If you look, for example, in the state of Texas that held a competitive Democratic primary in a competitive Republican primary this cycle, more people voted in the Democratic primary than voted in the Republican primary, which is kind of unheard of in Texas. And it wasn’t just because more Democrats were voting in the Democratic primary. You had people who were previously Republicans becoming Democrats to vote in that primary.
If you look at the Florida state Senate race in Trump’s backyard in Mar-a-Lago that the Democrats won, you had Republican voters moving over to vote for the Democrat. Same, if you look at the special election to fill Marjorie Taylor Greene’s seat in Georgia, even though the Democrats didn’t win that seat, they picked up about 25 or so points on their 2024 totals. Because this is Marjorie Taylor Greene’s seat, there’s not some groundswell of hidden Democrats coming out of the woodwork in that district. No. You had Republicans moving over to vote for the Democrat. And when Jeff Landry declares a state of emergency to stop an election midway and take the ballots out of the hands of voters, I’m telling you, the American people are not going to like it, whether they’re Democrats, Republicans or independents, and they are going to rebel against it. And the Republicans are doing all of this in order to gerrymander these seats, which means they’re going to take districts that are plus-ten, plus-12, plus-14 Republican, and say, “you know what? We can spare some of those Republican voters that are in this heavily rural district and move them into an urban district that Democrats had previously won.” Tennessee is going to try to do this, for example, around Memphis.
And the result is you’re going to reduce those rural districts from plus-11 Republican to something like plus-six Republican in order to make the urban district a plus for Republicans, which means you’re making both districts more vulnerable to a Democratic blue wave. And if you do that and you get a Democratic blue wave of angry voters, including Republicans who don’t like their ballots being taken out of their hands, the Republicans are stepping, I think, on a gigantic political rake that is going to snap up and smack them in the face.
And so, I think we should have some degree of confidence here that we need to do our jobs, protect democracies out there with all the other groups that you noted, litigating, and making sure that we are protecting fair rules, protecting voting access, preventing voter suppression, making sure voters have the information they need to cast a ballot freely and fairly. But if we do our jobs, the nonprofits that are in this world do their jobs, the elected officials do their jobs, and ultimately the voters do their jobs and show up en masse, too big to rig, a victory too big to rig that I think all of these sort of untoward and corrupt machinations are going to end up blowing back on the autocrats who are trying to deploy them.

JW: I want to talk about voting by mail. Trump has always been against voting by mail, something that—

IB: Unless he’s voting by mail, in which case he’s totally fine with that.

JW: Thank you for reminding us about that. This is ever since, ever since the Covid pandemic made voting by mail a health necessity, we’ve discovered that a lot of people want to vote by mail. Some states now it’s 100% voting by mail. Trump has always wanted to stop this. His executive order on voting by mail requires the Post Office to refuse to deliver or collect mail-in ballots to or from anybody who is not on a list of eligible voters compiled by the Department of Homeland Security. Now, this, of course, requires that the Trump administration create a list of eligible voters, and if states refuse to send in their voter lists under Trump’s executive order, the Post Office is ordered not to deliver any mail ballots in states that refuse to cooperate with this plan at all, and not to collect any mail ballots for states that don’t send in their voter lists. Now, for the states that do comply with this. And by the way, none have up to this point, not even the reddest trifecta states, for states that do send in their voters lists or that will mail carriers are ordered to verify the individual names against the DHS database before delivering the mail or collecting the mail of ballots from them. It seems like this is an impossible task for the Post Office, but other people have pointed out it’s also against the Constitution. Would you explain that, please?

IB: Yeah. So, look, all of this is both serious and scary and silly. And what I mean by that is, thankfully, in this country, the founders had the wisdom of decentralizing power. At the federal level, power is separated between three branches the legislative, the executive and the judiciary. And on top of that, power is also separated in a federalist system between the federal government and the states. And the founders understood that that was important to prevent the aggregation of power in a single individual’s hands, because that was the tyranny that we had just fought a revolution against King George III to free ourselves of. And so one of the important things the founders did was they said, hey, you know, if you had someone who was the president who wanted to stay in power forever and make himself a king or a tyrant, if you gave that person the power to set the rules for elections, they’d be able to set rules that guaranteed they’d stay in power forever, and we would recreate the monarchical tyranny that we had under King George. And so we’re not going to allow presidents to have anything to do with the rules around elections. We’re going to situate the rules around elections in the hands of the states. And in limited instances, we may allow the Congress to override in certain ways decisions by the states. But fundamentally, the states get to decide. But the one person who doesn’t get to decide anything about elections is the president of the United States. And so when Donald Trump issues his executive order saying yada, yada, yada, yada, yada about elections, the bottom line is he doesn’t have the power to do any of that, and the courts are going to strike it down.
And so, it is serious because as we were talking about before, we have a president who doesn’t believe in democracy, who who’s going to try to do everything in his power to rig the system, to entrench himself. But thankfully, in this instance, he’s basically written a Truth Social post for all that it is worth, and the courts are going to say so.
But I think the other thing that’s important to recognize here is because he can’t dictate the rules of elections by himself, no matter how many words he puts on a piece of paper and calls an executive order. He is going to need allies. He is going to need accomplices throughout the system, in the states, in the legislatures, in the courts, in the places that do have some power over how elections are run. And the only way he’s going to get those accomplices is if he can convince enough people that there’s something fundamentally broken and wrong with the elections, and fraudulent and rigged about the elections, such that all these accomplices need to be counted on to do something, to change the rules in order to address the problems that Donald Trump has invented in his own mind and in his social media company.

IB: And so, we should expect that he is going to continue going out there claiming that there’s dead zombies voting, and that some ancient Venezuelan leader’s ghost has crept into voting machines and that yada yada yada, you know, you name it, he’s going to come up with every one of those things and he’s going to manufacture evidence. That’s why they’re out there seizing voting machines in Fulton County — because they want to come up and, sort of like the little kid in the Bruce Willis movie “The Sixth Sense,” say, “I see dead people,” right? That’s what they’re going to try to do in order to convince all these accomplices that there’s something broken that needs fixing. But at the end of the day, we had a very successful election in 2020 in which Donald Trump lost, and we had a very successful election in 2024 in which Donald Trump won. And we’re going to have a very successful election in 2026, no matter what Donald Trump tries to do about it.

JW: There’s a lot of anxiety about Trump or his minions trying to seize the ballots after Election Day for a recount. And we actually have had a test run of this idea here in California, where Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, who happens to be a Republican candidate for governor, seized 650,000 ballots from the state’s November 2025 special election. This was the one on redistricting that created five new Democratic seats. The sheriff said he was going to recount the ballots and that this was a fact-finding mission. California Attorney General Rob Bonta, of course, went to court, but nothing happened the way we might have liked it to happen right away. It took quite a while to get the ballots back. What’s the story of what went wrong in that case?

IB: I think what we’re working on now as an ecosystem is making sure, first and foremost, that county level officials are prepared in the event that they get served with some sort of warrant by a local or federal law enforcement body, knowing what their rights are, in order to be able to go to court if necessary, and have a court opine on whether or not the legal process is, is legitimate in that context, that they’re prepared with making sure that they preserve a chain of custody and a proper set of records over these materials, so that no matter what happens to these materials, there’s a consistency in who’s holding a clear copy of what the what the ultimate records were, and making sure that those county level officials have the resources, either from the state or from other supporting entities, they need to wage these battles. So, for example, in that in that instance, making sure that if a local sheriff is going to a local county, that the county has the support of the state legal resources if necessary.
And so, in some ways, let’s thank Chad the local sheriff there. I’m not going to give him the attention he wants by promoting him, because it really was a stunt for his campaign. But we appreciate that he’s doing those things because it’s creating a dry run, in order for those people who are concerned with really protecting the integrity of our election, the integrity of the processes to get their practice reps in, in getting ready for the real event in November. And so I actually think we should be appreciative of the fact that we had that dry run in Fulton County. We had that dry run in California. I think our local election officials are getting ever more ready to defend it when the real danger happens in November.
But as we said before, the greatest protection against an attempt to rig an election is making a victory too big to rig. And that is where the listeners right now can play their role, which is making sure that we have the largest turnout ever for these midterms, that people who don’t normally think about or talk about politics, certainly during midterm years, or might even be exhausted or turned off by this sort of barrage of disgustingness that has been our politics during this Trump era realize that the way to turn the page on the era is to show up in November.

JW: Let’s make it “too big to rig.” Ian Bassin is co-founder and executive director of the group Protect Democracy and a leader in election protection. Ian, thank you for all your work, and thanks for talking with us today.

IB: Thanks for having me on.
[BREAK]

Jon Wiener: The Trump Justice Department recently brought criminal charges against the Southern Poverty Law Center for fraud and money laundering. The SPLC, as we call it, has been a leading civil rights organization that targets racist hate groups, and one of their tactics has been paying undercover agents to join hate groups and gather information on criminal activity, which they then reported to the police and the FBI. The groups the SPLC infiltrated and reported on included the ones planning that Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017.
Last week, the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, said that, from 2014 to 2023, the Southern Poverty Law Center paid more than $3 million to people who had infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan and other extremist organizations and neo-Nazi groups. The law center, he said, was, “doing the exact opposite of what it told its donors it was doing. Not dismantling extremism but funding it.” But government officials going after progressive activists who infiltrate far right-wing groups is nothing new. For some history, we turn to Steven J. Ross. He’s a distinguished professor of history at USC and an award-winning author, most recently of the book Hitler in Los Angeles, a Pulitzer Prize finalist. His new book is The Secret War Against Hate: American Resistance to Antisemitism and White Supremacy. He’s also an old friend of mine. Steve, welcome back.

Steve Ross: Thanks, Jon. Glad to be with you.

JW: What do you make of the Trump Justice Department bringing criminal charges against the Southern Poverty Law Center for funding hate groups?

SR: Well, first, I would say this is exactly what Trump was accusing the Biden administration of doing, which is weaponizing the Justice Department. And here’s the bottom line, Jon, and this is the bottom line from the 1930s on, when various groups started spying on hate groups: If the government had been doing its job, there would be no need for an SPLC. There would have been no need for the nonsectarian anti-Nazi League. There would have been no need for the American Jewish Committee or the Anti-Defamation League to be running spy operations. And when a government is unable to protect the lives of its citizens, which is its primary obligation, it is up to those citizens to protect themselves. And that’s what the Southern Poverty Law Center has been doing since the 1970s, protecting Americans from harm by other Americans.

JW: And for a period, mainly for the Obama years, the FBI actually had a kind of an alliance with the Southern Poverty Law Center and relied on them for information about these far-right wing hate groups.

SR: Yes. In the same way the government had been doing that for different groups, really starting in the 60s, 70s. And it wouldn’t be until J. Edgar Hoover died that the government would start working closely with various groups that were trying to protect Jews, Blacks and minorities. But as far as J. Edgar Hoover was concerned, the entire force of the FBI should be focused on far-left communist-leaning groups because they were the true threat. And even though communists had always promised to take over America through infiltration, far right groups, far right groups have said, we’re going to do it through murder, intimidation, and violence. Which side has the government been on for most of the 20th and 21st centuries?

JW: Well, the most stunning thing to me in your new book is not the courage and commitment of the people who infiltrated and spied on the neo-Nazi groups. The most stunning thing to me was that even after World War II, some Americans organized Nazi groups to carry on Hitler’s legacy in the United States after World War II. Who were they and what were they thinking?

SR: Well, these were people I called the betrayed generation who were the mirror image of Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation. Unlike the Greatest Generation, many of whom actually did go to war, to fight for democracy, to fight against fascism, Nazism, Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo. Many people who went to war went to war, not because they were filled with this virtuous idea of protecting democracy. They went to war because they were good old boys from the old Confederacy and southwestern states, who said Japan bombed us, and when someone punches you in the mouth, you hit them back. These people, from 1945, through their grandchildren and children who stormed the capitol in 2021, they believed that they were betrayed by their government, that they were patriots. They went to fight a war. They went to fight for America only because America was attacked. And when they came home, they argued that the “Congress Jew Deal,” as they called it, betrayed all white Americans by passing all this legislation making it easier for Blacks and Jews to compete for housing. And they argued that before the war, Blacks and Jews had no problem with us because they knew where to. They knew where their place was. And now these uppity people have come back and we need to put them back in their place. And so, they began lynching. I didn’t come across any white Jews who were lynched, but they were lynching Black veterans in their uniforms. For Jews, they were just setting off bombs saying, if you don’t leave town, next time, it’ll be inside your house or inside your business. And they believe that they had to carry on the job started by the Founding Fathers, which is to create a nation of white Anglo-Saxon Christians. They became very generous. They eventually allowed Catholics into that group.
So, it used to be Protestants. But after the war, okay, Catholics can come in too. And these people believed, and many of them said that, in the 40s, late 30s and 40s that we should be allying with Germany, not Russia, because Russia is the godless communist country. At least Hitler believed in God, which he didn’t really. But they thought that.
And they started saying groups starting with the first of these groups, you know, there’s always the Ku Klux Klan that you should know in their patriotic hearts and wisdom. Once Pearl Harbor happened, they refused to have any more cross burnings. They said, we will suspend cross burnings and pretty much torture until the war is over.
And in September, October, after the war was over, they held their first cross burnings. 3000 people came, several hundred soldiers admitted, and traffic was controlled by the Atlanta Police Department led by John “itchy finger” or “itchy trigger finger” Nash. Half the local Klan belonged to the Atlanta PD. So they were doing all of that, and they were then superseded the next year, 1946, by one of the most radical groups called the Columbians. And they were an out and out Nazi group. They made up uniforms that were styled like the SS uniforms. They marched down Peachtree Street, the main street in Atlanta. Goose stepping in their Nazi uniforms, and their leaders called for immediate extermination of all Jews. They argued that Hitler had not done enough, that there was still too many Jews around, and that they would be much more modern in their techniques. They would use electrocution, firing squads, poison, gas. They would execute all American Jews, and they would expel all Black people to Africa. And they in turn would be followed by other groups.

JW: You mentioned bombings. I want to focus on this because this was another big surprise to me, what you call the age of terror. The bombing of churches and synagogues in the South began in the late 50s and continued into the 60s. Now we all know about the most famous one, the Birmingham church bombing, where the four little girls were killed. That was September 1963, the 16th Street Baptist Church. But that was hardly the only one. I was astounded at how many bombings you report there were in the mid 50s in the South.

SR: Yeah, well, that was a direct result of the May 1954 Brown v. Board of Education, a Supreme Court decision. Brown v. Board of Education said separate but equal is not equal and that you can no longer have segregation. The South needs to be integrated. And what I write is, for Southerners, that was the beginning of the second Civil War. Only this time it was the North firing on the South that started it. And what the country soon realized. It’s one thing to pass a law or to declare one law unconstitutional, but it’s another to get people who would rather have anarchy than follow this new law. And so, the response of the far right, led by Jesse B. Stoner, one of the four godfathers of white supremacy post war, I follow, they began a campaign of bombing. And within a few years there were so many bombings, particularly in Birmingham, Alabama, that it became known as Bombingham. And this was the terror technique. And Stoner and his allies joined together to form the National States Rights Party, arguing that we are the only party that can stop the violence. And they were right because they were the only party generating the violence. Jesse Stoner was the bomber in chief.

JW: Let me just insert here, between 1954 and 1958, you report there were 80 bombings of churches, synagogues, homes of leaders, offices, and I was surprised by how many of these targets were synagogues. Why were the Jews considered to be the targets of this bombing campaign in the South?

SR: They were considered the chief target because Southerners had a schizophrenic attitude towards Jews. Because on one hand, Jews were the leaders of communism who were trying to destroy capitalism throughout the world. But they also said that Jews were controlling the world’s capitalist system and that they controlled the courts, they controlled the banks, they controlled TV, they controlled the newspapers, they controlled politicians. And one of the key demands of the second big leader, Stoner, before he rose up to become the head of one of the leaders of the National States Rights Party, he had first started the Stoner Anti-Jewish Party, and that name didn’t go too well. So he called it the Christian Anti-Jewish Party. And Stoner went a step further than the Columbians in that he said, not only do I call for the immediate extermination of all Jews, but there’s something in it for us, because when the Jews are all dead, we the government, because we will be in charge of the government, then we are going to take all Jewish money and distribute it equally amongst all Christians in America. When that happens, every Christian in America is going to be rich beyond their dreams. And as for Blacks, we’re going to send them over to Africa and we’ll give them $10,000 and a Cadillac.

JW: Well, your book has a lot of memorable characters on both the right and the left. One of my favorites is Stetson Kennedy. He started out as a writer. He’s from an old aristocratic southern family, but he was also a committed anti-racist, something unusual among white Southerners in the 50s and 60s.

SR: Yes, he was born, as I write, he was born at the wrong time, in the wrong place, at the wrong family. Because his family were all proud Confederates and his uncle, he grew up in Florida, he was eventually drummed out of his family because of his writing, criticizing racism, criticizing, really blasting D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation as warping our history. He was also one of the things, you know, what triggers political loyalties often are the, well, not so small, but personal things, not just ideology. And in this case, his nanny, who was Black and really raised him, was beaten to hell because she accused a bus driver of giving her the wrong change. And he was too small to be drafted, he was undersized, but his friends were all drafted. And he said, I’ve got to do something and they’re going off to Europe to fight. I’m going to go to the Deep South to fight. And he adopted a made-up name, John Perkins. He passed himself off as the nephew of Brady Perkins, who was one of the clan leaders of Florida. And he goes to Georgia, and they admit him into the Klan, and he starts taking reports. He comes home from the meetings, and he writes out lengthy reports of everything discussed. And to make a long story short, he eventually sows those reports to the Anti-Defamation League, to the nonsectarian anti-Nazi League, and to the assistant attorney general of Georgia. He goes undercover for all three groups, and then he joins the Columbians as well and starts sending reports up north, particularly to the anti-Nazi League. That was even more out there in terms of agent provocateurs than either the ADL or the American Jewish Committee. And he, more than anyone else, is responsible for breaking up the Colombians.

JW: So, we’ve been talking here mostly about the 40s, 50s and the 60s. Do you think there’s a direct line between the Americans who became Nazis after World War II and the organizers of January 6th, like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers? I know the far right in the 40s and the 50s never had as their leader, an American president.

SR: Right. I mean, I didn’t do a chronological or genealogical search, but there is a direct line in terms of ideas. And I would guess if you began searching, you would find relatives who had at one point had been a leader in one of the 40s, 50s 60s far right groups. Because what happens there, the four people I trace had people who they trained under them, who believed, in the end, they were better than the people training them. And they went off and started their groups. And the same thing happened all over again. So, if you look at the names, starting with Richard Butler, who really is the genius behind the Aryan Nations from the late 70s through the capitol riots, that tree, that haters tree, those people go off and keep founding groups. And even though, again, the groups are different names, it’s no different in 1945, 46 than it was in 2021. The only difference is, if anything, the 2021 ones have toned it down because they are not calling for the immediate extermination of Jews, Blacks and minorities. And the other reason we can talk about 2021 being a key year is that from the post war period until then, the far right suffered from what I call it the “too many Führers problem”– that each of these people who went off and founded a group, they all called for a fascist united, a united fascist front, every one of them. The problem is they wanted everyone to unite under them. Each man wanted to be the Führer, and they could never solve that. There was no one person so charismatic that they were all willing to follow him until Donald Trump.

JW: But the interesting thing here is Trump is not really a neo-Nazi true believer. He needs them. He defers to them. But his background and his trajectory is quite different. He’s never really been one of them. How do they regard him? Do they think they’re being used by him, or do they think they are using him?

SR: I think all we can do — we can summarize it in one sentence: At Charlottesville, “there are good people on both sides.” The minute they heard that, first of all, Trump was playing to their anti-immigration. And they have all talked about the fear that one day white people would be a minority in America. And that picked up, as we know, in the 40s, 50s and especially the 60s. And that one day immigrants might come in and, you know, just overwhelm us that it’s not going to just be internal reproduction. All these immigrants who are not Christian are not white Anglo-Saxons. Everything that we have done to build our country is going to be destroyed. And while Donald Trump is not a true Nazi, is not a true fascist. He walks like them; he talks like them. And most important, for them, it doesn’t matter if he’s using them or not. He is telling the American public they are good people, and their demands are not crazy. Their demands are not unreasonable. They’re not un-American. They’re good people here, and that’s it. That’s why they were willing to unite around – they know who he is. They know he’s not truly one of them. But they have never had a president who have called them and their ilk good people.

JW: One last thing, a personal question. I wonder what it was like for you to spend years doing research when your days and nights were filled with thinking about neo-Nazis and anti-Semites. I know you get to write about the heroes who fought them, but still, it can’t have been easy to fill your mind with this for so long. Especially since I know your parents are Holocaust survivors.

SR: Well, it was easy, Jon. It gave me great joy. At night, no problem at all. I slept like a baby – because I kept thinking, “boy, wait till this comes out. This is my revenge.”

JW: Steve Ross – his new book is The Secret War Against Hate: American Resistance to Antisemitism and White Supremacy. Rachel Maddow called it “a brilliant history, a brilliant story.” Steve, thanks for talking with us today.

SR: Thanks, Jon.