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Well, in my 20s, I happened to walk into a used bookshop up in Vanuys, California, where I was living.

That's journalist Anthony Mostrum.

It might have been the unusual book jacket design, but it just grabbed my eye. I had no idea what it was.

That book that he spotted that day, it had a magenta-colored cover, as thick as a phone book, and it was just strange enough looking that he decided, what the heck. He stuck it under his arm, brought it up to the counter.

I bought it. It was a used book for five bucks or whatever. Took it home. After that, I I didn't really think much more about it. I put it in my home library, and it was just another one of my extremist books on my shelf.

Across the country, right around the same time, a historian named John Jackson was having a similar experience. I found a copy in the early '90s in a used bookstore, and so I went up to the counter and put it down. The bookseller looks at the book and looks at me, a big, bald, white man, and says something like, Oh, it's a controversial book.

I'm a historian.

This is interested. I'm not a Nazi.

Please don't think that. This book that both John Jackson and Anthony Mostrum are describing here, this book they both happened upon and used bookshops. It's a book called Imperium. The content of that book is why a bookshop owner might shoot a sideways glance at somebody who was picking it up.

It's very much an anti-Semitic book. It's very much a hate book.

Imperium was published in the late 1940s, but only barely. Its initial print run was maybe a couple of hundred copies. And the author of the book, that was hard to figure out. The book was published under a pseudonym.

Ulik Varanj. Ulik is a given Irish name, and Varanj refers to a nomadic tribe of Vikings who, some historians say, were the first to settle Russia.

Ulik or Ulik Varanj was listed as the author, but that was a false name. Imperium had to be released under a false name because the real author of the book, when he wrote this thing, he was on the run. Ulik Varenge was the pseudonym of the American fascist, Francis Parker Yaki. By the late 1940s, by the time he wrote this book, Yaki had been wanted for questioning about his relationship with a Nazi saboteur who was executed in the United States during World War II. They brought with them a great store of explosives with which to blow up factories and demoralize civilian life. He had been linked to the German-American boon and to the Silver Shirts, the leadership of which had been charged with sedition during World War II. Yaki himself had gone AWal from the US Army. He'd been thrown out of the US Army, which listed him as a Nazi sympathizer. After all that, astonishingly, he had been given a job as a US government lawyer at the Nazi war crimes trials in Germany.

Twenty-two Nazi war criminals went on trial at 1:10 this morning.

Once there, he became a mole inside the prosecutions, using his position to surreptitiously help the Nazi defendants he was sent there to prosecute. Army counterintelligence files from the time say Yaki was also trying to recruit German army officers, Nazi veterans, into an underground movement that would rise up against the Allied occupying forces in Germany. But when US intelligence officials decided they wanted to go question him, he was gone.

He's being tracked by US intelligence, yet he's able somehow to fly out of Germany without any No one's stopping him.

Francis Yaki somehow slipped out of Germany, ahead of the counterintelligence agents who were looking for him. He left behind his wife and his two young daughters.

What do they call it in the spy shows? He goes to ground.

Yaki is always slipping in and out, using false passports, false names, and just jumping from continent to continent.

Where Yaki first surfaces is way off the beaten path.

He secured a room at a small inn on the Irish Coast to write what would eventually become a 600-page book, which was called Imperium.

Francis Yaki holds himself up inside that little cottage for months, working on that book that you can still stumble across in a used bookshop. You can get odd glances from the shop owner if you dare pick it up. You might also find one of the many newer editions and reprints of this book, or the French edition, or the Spanish edition, or the one in German.

For a lot of people on the far right worldwide, nowadays, the Bible is imperium, replacing Mein Kampf.

The book that Francis Jaki churned out inside that cottage on the Irish Coast is a sprawling, secret weapon had been his close ties with America first members of Congress, like Senator Ernest Lundeen of Minnesota, for whom Wierick wrote speeches, like congressman Hamilton Fish of New York, whose office Wierick used as a clearinghouse for literally tons, millions of pieces of German government propaganda. But in the postwar era, for groups like the National Renaissance Party, Hamilton Fish, Ernest Lundeen, politicians like that were the old class, the previous generation. Who could these guys hope to work with now? Here's Steven Ross with producer Mike Jarvis. Were there any particular elected politicians that they liked, that they were drawn to, that the National Renaissance Party saw as singing a similar tune as them?Saint Joe, Joseph McCarthy, was the one politician that that James Madall and many of the others rallied around, that they thought he was the only one speaking the truth.Saint Joe, Joseph McCarthy. That's who the National Renaissance Party believed was their guy.Madole Paul found Joe McCarthy the only American politician really worth listening to and supporting. He spoke their office with him.Saturday, September seventh. It's MSNBC Live, Democracy 2024, our premier live audience event with your favorite MSNBC hosts.Visit msnbc.Com/democracy2024 to buy your tickets.

secret weapon had been his close ties with America first members of Congress, like Senator Ernest Lundeen of Minnesota, for whom Wierick wrote speeches, like congressman Hamilton Fish of New York, whose office Wierick used as a clearinghouse for literally tons, millions of pieces of German government propaganda. But in the postwar era, for groups like the National Renaissance Party, Hamilton Fish, Ernest Lundeen, politicians like that were the old class, the previous generation. Who could these guys hope to work with now? Here's Steven Ross with producer Mike Jarvis. Were there any particular elected politicians that they liked, that they were drawn to, that the National Renaissance Party saw as singing a similar tune as them?

Saint Joe, Joseph McCarthy, was the one politician that that James Madall and many of the others rallied around, that they thought he was the only one speaking the truth.

Saint Joe, Joseph McCarthy. That's who the National Renaissance Party believed was their guy.

Madole Paul found Joe McCarthy the only American politician really worth listening to and supporting. He spoke their office with him.Saturday, September seventh. It's MSNBC Live, Democracy 2024, our premier live audience event with your favorite MSNBC hosts.Visit msnbc.Com/democracy2024 to buy your tickets.

office with him.

Saturday, September seventh. It's MSNBC Live, Democracy 2024, our premier live audience event with your favorite MSNBC hosts.

Visit msnbc.

Com/democracy2024 to buy your tickets.