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Our culture has long been vulnerable to celebrities and influencers who popularize hate. From Father Charles Coughlin in the 1930s to Mel Gibson in the 2000s, each has taken advantage of their platform to spread conspiracy theories or antisemitic tropes to the masses.

But the rapper and internet celebrity Kanye West, or “Ye,” remains in a category all his own. Unlike others before him, Ye has never tried to mask his hatred of Jews or couch his beliefs in timeworn antisemitic conspiracy theories. While he once seemingly attempted an apology to the Jewish community, Ye has doubled and tripled down on his antisemitic rants – again and again and again. Ye, who makes no secret of his hatred for the Jewish people, infamously threatened to go “death con 3 on Jewish People.” His latest apology, issued last week, came as a short burst of tweets less than 9 hours after an antisemitic extremist...

On Feb. 20, 1939, more than 20,000 yelling, cheering people packed New York City’s Madison Square Garden. They weren’t there for a basketball game or a concert. They were supporters of the German American Bund, a pro-Nazi organization that was ready for an alternative to democracy. They waved Swastika flags and raised quite a ruckus. And they were hardly alone in their mission, as the new PBS American Experience documentary Nazi Town, USA makes abundantly clear.

While most Americans identified fascism and the Third Reich as existential threats to civilization, many...

Norman Lear was woke before “woke” became a derogatory smear. He was woke before it was briefly appropriated in mainstream parlance as a liberal badge of honor. Before he died on Tuesday at the age of 101, Norman Lear was one of the few people alive who entirely preceded the term, which can trace its origins to as far back as 1931 as a warning among African Americans to stay vigilant for racist threats.

That was also the year that Lear, then a 9-year-old Jewish American boy growing up in Connecticut, experienced the awakening of his own social consciousness, coming across a broadcast from the antisemitic Father Charles Coughlin (considered a progenitor of hate radio). “I started to pay a lot more attention to people who were even more different in the eyes of people like Father Coughlin,” Lear told NPR in 2012.

His cognizance of and desire to confront social bigotry permeated...

Norman Lear changed television. That, we know, is an absolute fact, and I’ll get to it in a moment. But what really saddens me at the news of Norman Lear’s death, at 101, is he won’t be here anymore to serve as a voice of reason as the United States continues to lose its mind.

Lear was a World War II hero who spent much of his life defending democracy via what he put on our television screens and also in his high-profile advocacy work. He often talked of what inspired him to be politically active: At 9 years old, Lear was tinkering with his radio when he discovered the bile spewing from anti-Semitic broadcaster Father Charles Coughlin over the airwaves.

“I think about it all the time,” Lear told me in 2019, when I spoke with him multiple times for a Variety cover (among the several times I had...

Rachel Maddow’s new book explores a dark episode of American history, one that flies in the face of our sanitized national narrative about the United States being the unalloyed champion of democracy that crushed foreign fascism during World War II.

Prequel examines the rise of home-grown fascism in America in the 1930s and 40s — as well as notorious infiltrators from Hitler’s government who cultivated and funded the movement, even capturing hearts and minds among members of the U.S. House and Senate.

The book lays out terrifying plots...

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“We’d rather march to hear Willkie on national unity than be marched into a concentration camp,” Harry Warner firmly stated in the summer of 1941. The mogul was responding to criticism for his encouraging studio employees to attend a rally at the Hollywood Bowl featuring 1940 Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie, a strong advocate for U.S. intervention in World War II. That same summer, a competing rally was held at the Hollywood Bowl on behalf of the America First movement. The keynote speaker was famed aviator and eugenics enthusiast Charles Lindbergh. The same aviator who, at an America First rally in Des Moines on Sept. 11, 1941, argued that one of the biggest threats to the United States was the Jewish-controlled media. Lindbergh’s hate-fueled rhetoric is covered at length in the new PBS docuseries, The U.S. and the Holocaust, produced by Ken Burns,...