Trump's Night in the Garden: Racist campaign rally recalls infamous 1939 Nazi rally in New York

AMY GOOD MAN: I would like to include Marshall Curry in this discussion. Marshall Curry attended the event at Madison Square Garden, but also made an Oscar-nominated film. This film was called A night in the gardenabout the 1939 Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden. This is a clip.

FRITZ KUHN: Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Americans, American patriots, I am sure that I will not come before you this evening as a complete stranger. You have all heard of me from the Jewish controlled press as a creature with horns, a cloven hoof and a long tail. With American ideals, we demand that our government be returned to the American people who founded it.

If you ask what we are actively fighting for under our Charter, firstly: a social, fair, white, non-Jewish-governed United Kingdom. Second, a non-Jewish controlled union, free from Jewish, Moscow-directed rule.

AMY GOOD MAN: A night in the garden. This wasn't a clip from Nazi Germany, but a Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden in 1939 from Marshall Curry's Oscar-nominated short film. That voice, explain what we just saw and heard and the person, the protester, who came and got beaten up.

MARSHALL CURRY: Secure. In 1939, there was a rally at Madison Square Garden where 20,000 New Yorkers gathered to celebrate the rise of National Socialism. And when I first saw this footage, I was completely shocked to see the American flag and George Washington and, you know, hear people singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and saying the Pledge of Allegiance and then saluting with stiff arms and cheering white supremacy.

So the man who spoke was called Fritz Kuhn. He was the leader of the German-American Confederation, which had camps all over the country, had a fairly large following and considerable power. The protester who runs onto the stage and gets beaten up was a man named Isadore Greenbaum, a Jewish plumber's assistant who went to the rally that very night to find out what was going on and was shocked and horrified by what he saw was.

AMY GOOD MAN: And you were at Madison Square Garden on Sunday?

MARSHALL CURRY: I did that. So I made this film seven years ago from archival footage that we found at the National Archives, the UCLA Archives, and the Grinberg Archives. And that was, you know, seven years ago, at the beginning of the Trump administration. I saw some similarities between some of the demagoguery that took place on stage in 1939 and what Trump did at his rallies. And so – but I had never seen a Trump rally in person. And when I heard he was going to be at Madison Square Garden, I thought I had to see it for myself.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And, Marshall Curry, as you expressed your surprise, many Americans do not realize how large the fascist and Nazi movement was in the United States at the time. Could you talk about that?

MARSHALL CURRY: Secure. I mean, growing up, I always learned in school that America took on the fascists and we fought the Nazis and defeated them. And that's what we did, and that's, you know, a great pride of our country. But we didn't quite agree. As today, there were people among us who were anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant.

And I think what struck me most when I saw this footage was the way the demagogues in 1939 used the same tactics that we see today. You know, they use this kind of dark humor. They cloak their ideology in symbols of patriotism and target immigrants, the press and minority religions. And they do it to distract people from the fact that what they really want to do is cut taxes on rich people and take away health care and take policies that people wouldn't support.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And I want to ask Ruth Ben-Ghiat: This rally in Madison Square has happened many times in US history. People forget that George Wallace, the white supremacist governor who ran for president in 1968, held a rally at Madison Square Garden in October 1968. And it was also full of segregationists from here in New York City. And the police actually picked up people on the street, anyone who tried to protest the Wallace rally. I know because I was a young student at the time trying to get to Madison Square Garden, I was picked up by the police a few blocks from Madison Square Garden and we were held in vans until the rally was over, hundreds of people. The reality is that it's not that hard for a political movement to fill Madison Square Garden. You're talking about less than – in a metropolitan area of ​​20 million people, 20,000 zealots in an arena is basically two-tenths of 1% of the population.

RUTH BEN–GHIAT: Yes. And the other thing is that this rally, all the different varieties of it, playing “Dixie,” this Trump rally, you know, Trump, from the very beginning, in 2015-16, has always provided a big tent for every possible type of racist and extremists in America. He reached out to southern racists, to people who – he reached out to Proud Boys, to neo-Nazis, famously at the Charlottesville rally – to any kind of person with a grievance, and then expanded on that by advocating a grand replacement theory , and, of course in collaboration with Fox, with the GOP elite etc.

And so all of that was represented at this rally, along with business people like businessman Grant Cardone, who said, “We've got to slaughter these people,” referring to people who don't support Trump. And you had people from the world of entertainment and sports. And so Madison Square Garden, a place for spectacles and sports spectacles, entertainment spectacles and political spectacles, was actually the perfect place for MAGA to show how many people fit into the big tent of racism and extremism.

AMY GOOD MAN: Ruth Ben-Ghiat, we would like to thank you for being with us, expert on fascism and authoritarianism who wrote the book Strong Men: Mussolini to the Present. Your newsletter is called Clearabout threats to democracy. And we would like to thank Marshall Curry, director of the Oscar-nominated short film A night in the garden about the Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden in 1939.

When we come back, as a billionaire Washington Post Owner Jeff Bezos defends his decision to block the newspaper from endorsing Kamala Harris. We will speak to the Pulitzer Prize winner post Reporter David Hoffman, who has resigned from the post Editorial in protest, and with Los Angeles Times Editorial Editor Mariel Garza. She stepped back after that L.A. Times The billionaire owner also blocked the board's support for Harris. Back in 20 seconds.