So tell us a little bit about some of the heroes of the book and really the heroes of our history.

Right.

Well, the three groups I write about in this book are the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and a group that no longer exists called the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League.

Um, and what we have to understand is the ADL has been a different ADL after October 7th.

So we don't want to, uh...

What has gone on there is very different, and it's come under, uh, attack by both Jews, non-Jews.

So I don't wanna deal with contemporary ADL.

Where might you help us end that would give us some hope?

What were their tactics against groups like the National Renaissance Party but also the Columbians?

Well, Stetson Kennedy was born in Florida.

As I write in the book, he was born at the wrong time to the wrong family in the wrong place.

His family had been Confederate leaders, and his uncle was one of the Klan leaders in Florida, very well known.

And Stetson Kennedy was too small to be drafted, but all his friends were drafted.

And he said, I've got to do something.

They're all dodging bullets.

Were they right to worry about those international connections?

Um, what were their tactics against groups like the National Renaissance Party but also the Columbians?

Yeah.

Well, uh, Stetson Kennedy was born in Florida.

Uh, as I write in the book, he was born at the wrong time to the wrong family in the wrong place.

His, uh, family had been, uh, Confederate leaders, uh, and his uncle was the, one of the Klan leaders in Florida, very well-known.

And Stetson Kennedy was too small to be drafted, but all his friends were drafted.

And he said, "I've gotta do something.

Does it undermine their effectiveness, their ability to work together, their ability to plan long term? It seems to drive a real schismatic and sort of purge-driven, um, internal discipline that was very unhealthy for those groups in the long run, um, just to have had them infiltrated successfully in some key cases.

After World War II, who were they and what were they thinking?

Well, these were people I called the betrayed generation, who were the mirror image of Tom Brokaw's the greatest generation.

Unlike the greatest generation, many of whom actually did go to war to fight for democracy, to fight against fascism, Nazism, Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo, many people who went to war went to war not because they were filled with this virtuous idea of protecting democracy, They went to war because they were good old boys from the old Confederacy and Southwestern states who said, Japan bombed us.

And when someone punches you in the mouth, you hit them back.

These people from 1945 through their grandchildren and children who stormed the Capitol in 2021, they believed that they were betrayed by their government, that they were patriots.

They went to fight a war.

They went to fight for America.

He's from an old aristocratic Southern family, but he was also a committed anti-racist, something unusual among white Southerners in the 50s and 60s.

What were those reasons?

The reason is, uh, if you go back even to the early '30s, uh, the FBI was not that big at the time.

There were only a few hundred agents, and J. Edgar Hoover was obsessed with communist infiltration of America.

And to be blunt, he didn't give a damn about Jews and protecting Jews.

In fact, when there was a Jewish leader who was one of the founding members of the ADL, Leon Lewis, who had moved to Los Angeles, and in August 1933 when he realized that no one was doing anything to oppose the rise of Hitler, and a Nazi group had just held its first meeting in Los Angeles, he said, "If no one's gonna do anything, I will." He was an attorney, and he recruited four men, uh, all, uh, Christians who went undercover, joined these Nazi groups, and got information that he knew would be sustainable in court.And he went to the police chief and tried to get him to take over the operation, saying, "I'm just a lawyer, but I've discovered, uh, through these agents there are Nazi plots to drive through Boyle Heights," which was the Jewish neighborhood, "with machine guns, killing as many Jews as possible." There were plots to blow up the docks in Los Angeles, where military installations were, uh, and various other plots.

And he tried to bring this to police chief, and the police chief stopped him dead and said, "You don't get it.

The real problem in Los Angeles is not the Nazis.

So what kind of information does he report back?