Prequel Quotes

“Librarians and archivists and teachers are the Fort Knox of memory, history, and truth. We must defend them with everything we’ve got.”
― Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

“One big appeal of fascism, if nothing else, was its unapologetic embrace of cruelty. Cruelty towards others, coupled with hypersensitivity towards any slight to oneself.”
― Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

“In other words, Americans had found ways - on matters of race - to use the law to justify just about anything they wanted to do. Leave the egalitarian, idealistic language on the books, but interpret that language however you need to, to justify any policy that just feels right.”
― Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

“The fight here at home in the 1930s and 1940s is a story of American politics at the edge: a violent, ultra-right authoritarian movement, weirdly infatuated with foreign dictatorships, with detailed plans to overthrow the U.S. government, and even with former American military officers who stood ready to lead.”
― Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

“The German propaganda operation in America, according to the first U.S. academic study on the topic, identified these kernels of disturbance as “racial controversies, economic inequalities, petty jealousies in public life,” and “differences of opinion which divide political parties and minority groups.” Even the “frustrated ambitions of discarded politicians.” Germany’s agents were tasked with finding these fissures in American society and then prying them further apart, exploiting them to make Americans hate and suspect each other, and maybe even wish for a new kind of country altogether. A partisan, bickering, demoralized America, the Nazis believed, would be incapable of mounting a successful war effort in Europe. It might even soften us up for an eventual takeover.”
― Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

“To represent Hitler only as a screaming madman and a bloodthirsty persecutor, and nothing else, is manifestly unfair, considering his phenomenal public career, his unchallenged political and social achievements, and his position as head of the most important continental European power.' Stop for just a second and let that sink in.”
― Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

“There was a lot of talk about protecting the U.S. Constitution, though basically all his policy proposals were blatant violations of this document.”
― Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

“These islands and their likely ungovernable and unassimilable 'alien races' belonged to the United States, the court opined, but were not a part of it. Puerto Ricans, for example, the justices explained nonsensically, were 'foreign to the United States in a domestic sense.' Which is exactly as dumb as it sounds.”
― Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight Against 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.”
― Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

“Henry Ford’s antisemitism was rank, and it was unchecked. He spewed it freely in private tirades among friends, family, close business cohorts, newspaper reporters, or pretty much anybody within earshot. He lectured his sometimes-weary auditors in the Ford Motor Company offices, in private chats, in interviews, at dinners, even on camping trips. Ford “attributes all evil to Jews or to the Jewish capitalists,” a close friend wrote in his diary after witnessing a late-night, round-the-campfire diatribe. Ford whined about “New York Jews” and railed about “Wall Street Kikes.” He even ordered his engineers to forgo the use of any brass in his Model T automobile, calling it “Jew metal.”
― Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

“Rauschning’s testimony, in other words, was that 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.”
― Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

“However, the Post went on, “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.”
― Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

“Calvin Coolidge in 1924 had signed into law radical restrictions on immigration, but not before publishing a stinging little essay in Good Housekeeping magazine titled “Whose Country Is This?” Immigration restrictions, Coolidge wrote under the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, were a necessary first step in walling off white America from “the vicious, the weak of body, the shiftless or the improvident.” These types, he implied, could be identified by nationality and skin color. “There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons,” Coolidge wrote. “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend…. The unassimilated alien child menaces our children.”
― Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

“It is our long and continuing American tradition to carefully avoid reckoning for the grandest of American sins...”
― Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

“the Nazi game plan aimed to disunite the United States by tearing at the weakest political and cultural seams of American society: the divide between haves and have-nots, fear and hatred of immigrants, white supremacist race hate, and antisemitism.”
― Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

“The great issue was to liberate the world from the poison of democracy, with its degenerating doctrine of liberty and equality.”
― Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

“... the evidence will show that they intended to abolish the Republican and Democratic parties. The evidence will show that they intended to abolish freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom from arrest without cause, and all the other civil liberties guaranteed us by the constitution... The evidence will show that the defendants themselves talked in terms of bloodbaths or blood flowing in the streets...”
― Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

“but in the end they decided that a little coup here or there didn't necessarily render a man unfit to serve in the highest legislative body in the nation.”
― Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

“The Senator also unleashed a nasty personal attack on his seventy-three-year-old accuser: 'One can probably excuse Secretary Stimson on the ground of his age and incapacity. Everyone in Washington knows that the old gentlemen is unable to carry on the duties of his office...”
― Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

“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.”
― Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

“When a reporter from The Detroit News showed up at Nazi Party headquarters in Munich in December 1931 to interview Hitler for her “Five Minutes with Men in Public Eye” series, she was surprised to find, hanging on the wall behind Hitler’s desk, a large, framed portrait of America’s most famous antisemite. “I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration,” Hitler explained to the newspaperwoman”
― Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

“The America that the priest and his thirty million faithful listeners loved was being destroyed by a Jewish-commie-Bolshevist conspiracy. Real America needed to wake up! Time was getting short. The time for action - real action by real Christians - was near!”
― Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

“You are bound to concede that each individual, whether he is a Jew or a Gentile or a Catholic or a Protestant or what not, must be, if he is an American citizen, protected in the enjoyment of his fundamental rights, the same as everyone else, isn't that right?”
― Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

“their one wobbly, short punch at the ultra-right revealed a gathering swirl hurt and hate that was about to come into direct, potentially violent confrontation with the U.S. government.”
― Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

“The reporter asked Hitler that day, point-blank, why he was antisemitic. 'Somebody has to be blamed for our troubles,' he said without hesitation.”
― Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

“Love and harmony were nice and all, but for pure motive force, hate trumps.”
― Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

“Hitler was able to exploit with guile the gullibility of the 'best' people, and with the utmost sincerity the patriotism of the nationalists who wanted to see Versailles avenged... The anti-communist line got the capitalists, the anti-Versailles line got the army and the nationalists, the anti-Semitic line got the masses as well as the classes.”
― Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

“Judge Louis B. Brodsky went out of his way to explain that many regarded this new emblem of Germany as a 'black flag of piracy' and believed that the SS Bremen had engaged in a 'gratuitously brazen flaunting of an emblem which symbolizes all that is antithetical to American ideals of the God given and inalienable rights of all people to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.' The judge's long speech from the bench took aim at the Nazis' 'war on religious freedom... the suppression of the blessed trinity of free speech, freedom of the press and lawful assembly, the degradation of culture, an international menace threatening freedom; a revolt against civilization - in brief, if I may borrow a biological concept, an atavistic throw-back to premedieval, if not barbaric, social and political conditions.”
― Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

“How do you legally privilege white men as a 'ruling race' in a land in which the written Constitution - and quite explicitly the Fourteenth Amendment - guarantees equal protection of the law to all, regardless of skin color?”
― Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

“Awful it may be to contemplate, but the reality is that the Nazis took a sustained, significant, and sometimes even eager interest in the American example of race law... Nazi lawyers regarded America, not without reason, as the innovative world leader in the creation of racist law.”
― Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism