Hey, thanks for joining us. I am very excited to share this with you. I recently got to sit down with one of my favorite people, someone from whom I have learned a ton and who has become a real friend. So much of what I have written about and podcasted about and talked about in the news over the last few years about fighting fascism here in America. So much of that stuff that I have learned,

I have learned from a man named Stephen J. Ross. Stephen J. Ross was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize

in 2018 for his incredible, just shocking book, Hitler in Los Angeles. And now he's got a new book,

which is just as jaw-dropping as that one. The new book is called

The Secret War Against Hate American Resistance to Antisemitism and White Supremacy. Resistance

is the key word. I devoured this book. It picks up right at the end of World War II and

goes through this incredible period in U.S. history that's very poorly understood. Stephen J. Ross is an incredible historian. More than that,

he is an incredible storyteller. He joined me live in front of a live audience at the 92nd Streetwide

in New York City. Oh, I'm so excited. I'm very excited to be here. Okay. So I'm going to read you a tiny little

squib from Stephen's book, and then I'm going to say a couple of things,

and then Stephen and I are going to talk, and then we're going to take your questions.

So there's no surprises.

The Second American Civil War began on the evening of October 20th, 1945.

As millions of veterans came back from World War II,

Ku Klux Klan leaders sounded a battle cry to preserve their beloved white Protestant nation from its many enemies. Fifty-five-year-old obstetrician and Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon, Samuel Green, warned Atlanta's returning warriors,

White supremacy is threatened.

America, he said, is calling every white man who has red blood into the fight.

Samuel Green, who proudly supported a Hitler-style mustache, renewed the fight for

racial purity that balmy October night in Georgia. He did so by holding the region's first major

cross-burning since Pearl Harbor. Again, this was 1945. Patriotic Klansmen had halted cross-burnings

during the war, Green explained, because it was necessary, he said, that all factions unite to win the war.

But that night in October 1945, Klansmen signaled the start of a new

...