Or learning history by watching “Birth of a Nation” in 1915 at the White House, with a president who spread this Hollywood propaganda from coast to coast, using his authority to endorse a horrific cause. It worked. By 1924 the Klan had reach a peak of 5 million direct members with many untold new sympathizers. Never had any other piece of American propaganda effectively been spread before in America, pushing this vicious ideology out of the South through cheap sentimentality and the excitement of the new media. The country got burned out from such raging hate and membership declined. But the damage was done and those beliefs had been spread like a covid virus far outside the borders, tainting American racism. By contrast, Goebbels’ propaganda films, though very well shot, seemed less inspiring. Like the rampant forceful denial the author points out of all the American denialists who don’t want Hitler’s Nuremberg laws and mounting ideology compared to the Jim Crow states, not only is the comparison apt but well justified by all the examples given in this article, which isn’t even the complete list, but they still fail to compare Wilson’s successful promotion of this propaganda to Adolf’s and Goebbels’ inspiration to make films. That comparison would be a bridge tor far for them.

Very well done in lining up all the comparative historical examples from America that inspired old Adolf.