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RACHEL MADDOW MEDIA MOVES “WE HAVE FACED THREATS THIS BIG BEFORE”: RACHEL MADDOW’S NEW PODCAST IS A HISTORY LESSON ON AMERICAN DEMOCRACY UNDER ASSAULT 
Rachel Maddow on Tuesday, October 2, 2019 BY NATHAN CONGLETON/NBCU PHOTO BANK/NBCUNIVERSAL/GETTY IMAGES. Original article: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/10/rachel-maddows-podcast-is-a-history-lesson Peter Burgess COMMENTARY Peter Burgess | ||
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MEDIA MOVES “WE HAVE FACED THREATS THIS BIG BEFORE”:
RACHEL MADDOW’S NEW PODCAST IS A HISTORY LESSON ON AMERICAN DEMOCRACY UNDER ASSAULT
In vivid, narrative style, the MSNBC host’s latest audio series, Ultra, transports listeners to the early 1940s, when right-wing extremism flourished not only on the airwaves, but in the halls of Congress. “Move over, Marjorie Taylor Greene!”
WRITTEN BY JOE POMPEO
OCTOBER 9, 2022
When I published a Rachel Maddow profile a few months ago, the part that made the most news was Maddow saying not-terrible things about Tucker Carlson. More tantalizing to me, if not the tabloid press, were Maddow’s comments about a juicy podcast she was hard at work on, the first major production of her new megadeal with NBCUniversal and MSNBC. “It’s an American history, underappreciated story,” Maddow had told me in May, keeping the description vague, “that has resonance for all these things we’re dealing with today—the threat of authoritarianism and the question of whether or not criminal law is the appropriate venue, and has the right constitutional powers, to handle those kinds of threats. It’s about journalism and journalistic ethics, and the ability of powerful people to manipulate American systems.”
Get your popcorn out, because the pod’s ready for showtime. As Maddow fans might expect, it begins with a rabbit-hole-style windup that sucks you in before you know what you’re getting sucked into. There was this guy, 62-year-old Minnesota senator Ernest Lundeen, a sobbing mess as he prepared to board a Pittsburgh-bound Pennsylvania Central Airlines flight out of Washington, DC, on Saturday, August 31, 1940. The flight went down less than 40 miles from the takeoff point, with no survivors from the 25 passengers and crew members, their body parts scattered across a field in rural Virginia. The crash was a head-scratcher. Brand-new Douglas DC-3. Airline with no accidents in its history. Experienced pilot with a spotless record. No evidence of a fire or an explosion or engine trouble before witnesses watched the doomed aircraft nose-dive into the earth. The plot thickens: There had apparently been a scuffle between passengers right before takeoff, and it turns out Lundeen wasn’t the only notable person listed on the flight manifest, which also included the names of an FBI special agent, a second FBI employee, and a federal prosecutor. Weird.
So you make it about 23 minutes into the episode, feeling like you’re in Amelia Earhart and D.B. Cooper territory, when finally you start to realize what you’re actually doing there: Of COURSE this business about Senator Lundeen and the mysterious plane crash was apparently somehow related to a Nazi agent infiltrating Congress as part of a plot to overthrow the US government. That’s the gist of Ultra, which drops Monday, an eight-episode weekly audio series about the little-remembered Great Sedition Trial of 1944. MSNBC bills the podcast as “the all-but-forgotten true story of good, old-fashioned American extremism getting supercharged by proximity to power. When extremist elected officials get caught plotting against America with the violent ultra right, this is the story of the lengths they will go to…to cover their tracks.”
It’s a history lesson worth taking given the fragile state of American democracy in 2022, menaced by increasingly visible far-right extremists, politicians with authoritarian tendencies, and riots in the halls of Congress. “I think it is a healthy impulse,” Maddow told me, “to look back at World War II—where the feel-good history is that all Americans were united against Hitler, and it was always inevitable that we were gonna get in the war and kick their butt—to be willing to look back at that time and the more nuanced truth of it, which is that a lot of Americans not only didn’t want us in the war, they thought if we were gonna be in the war, we should be on the other side.”
Those Americans are Ultra’s villains, including “some really terrible members of Congress,” as Maddow put it. “I think lots of Americans would tell you right now, like, wow, we’ve got some people in Congress that are—it’s hard to believe they’ve got these positions of authority. And this story is a great reminder that there have always been terrible members of Congress, and some were even more terrible than you can possibly have imagined.... Like, move over, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Jewish space lasers. Meet the guy who’s reading excerpts from Protocols of the Elders of Zion on the floor of the House.”
In a similar vein, Maddow continued, “we tend to think that our conservative-media universe right now is as extreme and also as influential as you can possibly imagine. I think there’s a great reality check for that with the treatment we have [in Ultra] of Father Charles Coughlin,” an anti-Semitic, fascist-friendly Catholic priest whose weekly radio broadcasts in the lead-up to WW II reached an audience of 30 million. “Coughlin isn’t a figure that’s lost to history, but I think a true appreciation of his reach, his dominance, and his radicalism is worthy. Like, in some of these cases, the historical resonance is worthy because something rhymes so much with what we’re going through now, and in other cases, it’s worth remembering, like, Oh, wow, people have faced worse.”
Ultra’s heroes, who arguably have been lost to history, are Maddow’s passion. “Investigative journalists and crusading columnists and activists working both to expose the threat and also, in some cases, to infiltrate these groups,” she said. “There were essentially Jewish activist groups in Southern California in the lead-up to World War II that couldn’t get the FBI or law enforcement interested in these armed groups, these really radical groups, and what they were doing, including, you know, plotting really violent attacks on the government and mounting sort of pogrom-style violence against Jewish communities. And so they did it themselves. They recruited, in many cases, German American World War I veterans to infiltrate these groups and report on them and expose what they were doing. There were journalists like Dorothy Thompson and Drew Pearson, and a Washington Post journalist with this great name, Dillard Stokes, who does this absolutely intrepid investigative work.… There’s all these sort of intrepid, anti-fascist Americans who work in all sorts of interesting ways to interrupt and expose these groups. To see all the different, creative, funny, nimble, brave, interesting, and morally supercharged ways that Americans decided to take this fight on themselves, messing with the fascists, it’s inspiring, and it’s interesting, and it’s energizing.”
I asked Maddow where America finds itself on the fascist-threat scale now compared to the early 1940s. “I wouldn’t put a number on it, but I do think that this moment we are in, in which there is a loud and proud authoritarian push on the right, and it is connected to right-wing electoral politics, this”—meaning the story she tells in Ultra—“is the other time when we were in that environment, where you’ve got a link to violence, a willingness to use violence to upend the American system and potentially end the American system, and you’ve got people who are in electoral politics who are both sympathizing with that and advancing it. The difference is that, back then, what led to the Great Sedition Trial and the Justice Department investigation is that the Hitler government was involved in sort of grooming members of Congress and US senators, and they were also funding people with guns and bombs who were willing to try to take over. We don’t have a Nazi Germany who’s running that kind of an operation in this country now. The way to look at it is we have dealt with this problem before, and we should not feel like it is a sort of existential ending. We have faced threats this big before, and there isn’t one quick, neat trick to fix this—it requires a sustained effort, but we’ve done it before.”
With any major work of nonfiction, the stakes are high in the sense that you need enough people to read or watch or listen to your storytelling to justify the amount of time and resources you put into it. Maddow, with her preternatural cable news star power, has comfortably exceeded that bar with her best-selling books and her hit 2018 podcast, Bag Man, which soared to number one on the Apple charts and is now being adapted into a film by Ben Stiller and Lorne Michaels. The stakes for Ultra are arguably higher. NBCUniversal is paying Maddow a lot of money to concentrate on these types of projects while hosting The Rachel Maddow Show at 9 p.m. just one night a week; the ratings for that hour the other four nights, now anchored by Alex Wagner, have fallen from Maddow's hard-to-reach heights (as was to be expected). “I’ve had this change in my job,” said Maddow, “and for people who are used to seeing me five days a week on TV, they’re no longer seeing me five days a week on TV. So at this very basic level, it’s like, well, you haven’t been doing your TV show all the days that you used to, is this what you’ve been working on? There’s this sense of, like, is this worth what you’ve given up?”
Ultra, of course, is just the beginning. Maddow, whose copilot on the show is longtime collaborator Mike Yarvitz, already has a second season in mind, as well as the accompanying book she sold to Crown. She’s also working on another podcast—“not a super-highly produced, intensely reported work of historical nonfiction, but a different style of podcast; I’ll be part of it, but I won’t be all of it”—that she expects to debut early next year. Then there’s a scripted TV series about a group of women in post–WW II Washington. “That’s the other thing that I’m working on almost full-time,” she said.
Can viewers expect to see more of Maddow on television as the midterms draw near? “It depends on how the news cycle goes,” she said. “With the January 6 hearings, as that’s getting rescheduled, I’ll be helming whatever that coverage is. And I imagine we’re gonna be doing lots of special coverage in advance of the midterms. But I think it’s working out really well to have me on Mondays and Alex on Tuesday to Friday. It feels pretty stable. But as we get closer to the election, whenever we’re doing special coverage, I’ll be there.”
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