Alright, this is really exciting. Sam Sanders from it's been a minute is in the studio. Yes, it's in the house. Hi. How are y'all good?

How are you? I'm good. I'm joining y'all from sunny Los Angeles. So I'm doing great. Yeah, no, we're happy that we're happy to have you because we recently both heard one of your episodes that was very historical and

definitely drew a through line. So yeah, we wanted you to come on and talk to us about it and also we wanted to share that episode with our listeners. So this episode, which I'll talk about in it, I interview Adam server. Adam server is a staff writer at the Atlantic magazine and we talk about this article. He wrote all about the long history of white nationalism in the US. And so that alone will be good enough for a conversation, but what I really want to talk about and why we talked right now.

Now is because if you look back far enough, there is a through line, you could say between America's history of white nationalism and a lot of our politics today.

And so tell us like how that started for you in terms of your like interest. So bear with me. We're going to go down a little path right now, but it's worth it. I promise. So Donald Trump.

Our current president, as we all know, since the beginning of his campaign for president, his signature issue has been immigration. And so the thing about Trump and immigration is that it's really easy to tell who his biggest influences are on this issue.

It's three men. They're mostly credited with shaping the way that Donald Trump talked about immigration. They are Jeff Sessions, who used to be his attorney general.

Steve Bannon, who used to be one of his top advisors and Stephen Miller, who was still in the White House as one of his advisors.

So those are like the three right the three immigration musketeers for Donald Trump. Right. So

I have been obsessed for a while now with this old archive tape of Steve Bannon and Jeff Sessions.

Senator Sessions, thank you so much for taking time away from the family and I to join us. Thank you.

And Steve Bannon's interviewing him and they're talking about the immigration bill of 1924.

All right. And what does that bill say?

So that bill set quotas on certain countries and limited how many folks could come in from those countries. And the whole thinking was that

the US should let in more people from European and Northern European nations than from other places like say China.

So as they're talking about this Jeff Sessions and Steve Bannon both praised this bill and they say, yeah, they were right back then when they said that there were too many folks coming in and they're right when they say it now.

I was reached about this high in 1924 the president and Congress changed the policy and it slowed down immigration.

But here's the thing and here's where it gets really weird, Jolton.

The guy who was credited with the big ideas behind this bill from 1924, his name was Madison Grant.

So let me tell you Madison Grant claimed a fame.

Madison Grant was the one of the biggest white nationalists of his day, a prolific writer on the topic.

And his ideas about white nationalism influenced the entire world to the extent that they influenced Adolf Hitler.

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