Eighty-odd years ago there was a corrupt North Dakota governor who lost re-election but refused to concede, refused to leave office, declared martial law, incited an insurrection . . . finally did leave . . . but was then endorsed by his party and elected to the United States Senate, which issued a 4,200-page report recommending he not be seated but ultimately seated him anyway.
He collaborated with a whole lot of Nazi sympathizers, many of them fellow “America First” senators and representatives — this was during World War II — whom the Justice Department had to decide whether to indict for sedition (it did) . . . and, well, there’s only one episode of ULTRA left, so by the time you’ve caught up with the first six — and now this seventh — the final episode will have dropped, where we get to find out what happened.
There’s so much more to this . . . and so stunning are the parallels to Putin’s effort to do what Hitler tried to do in dividing us and overturning our democracy and weakening our alliances with Europe . . . that you owe it to yourself to overcome whatever acquired resistance you may have to Rachel Maddow and listen from the beginning. (In that first episode, a different U.S. senator mixed up in all this is murdered.)
I find Rachel to be unfair and/or shrill some of the time; wordy or grating some of the time; but terrific much of the time . . . and this podcast is definitely one of those times.
BONUS — 37 SECONDS
