Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

by Rachel Maddow

“in the career of Huey Long is epitomized the essential weakness of democracy—the pathetic willingness of the electorate to trust a glib tongue and a dynamic personality. Quite justifiably he was called a forerunner of American Fascism.”

One big appeal of fascism, if nothing else, was its unapologetic embrace of cruelty. Cruelty toward others, coupled with hypersensitivity toward any slight to oneself.

William Dudley Pelley, like a slug, left behind him a visible, mucoid trail by which we can still know him today.

“Appease Fascism? Why Not Tickle Tigers?”

the question Hitler had asked five years earlier: “So shall we today, as the true chosen people of God, become in our dispersal the omnipresent power, the masters of the earth?”

“Do you remember what Hitler had said?” Hoke wrote. “ ‘America is permanently on the brink of revolution. It will be a simple matter for me to produce unrest and revolts in the U.S., so that these gentry will have their hands full with their own affairs.’

the Nazi game plan aimed to disunite the United States by tearing at the weakest political and cultural seams in American society: the divide between haves and have-nots, fear and hatred of immigrants, white supremacist race hate, and antisemitism.