I’ve been belatedly listening to the Rachel Maddow podcast “Ultra” which is about a far right, Nazi-sympathizing, authoritarian plot to overthrow the FDR administration during the late 30s and early 40s. I knew about the German Bund, of course, and I’ve written about the big Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden. But I confess I was not aware of the massive investigation and trial to put Nazi spies and collaborators on trial. The echoes of today are overwhelming which is why Maddow dug into the story, I assume. (She never mentions it in the podcast, though, which is very effective.) Being in that mindset, I guess it’s not surprising that I love the lede of this piece in The New Republic: In his book In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, Erik Larson cites a cable sent to the State Department in June 1933 by a U.S. diplomat posted in Germany that provided a far more candid assessment of the Nazi leadership than the one that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration was then conveying to the public. “With few exceptions, the men who are running this Government are of a mentality that you and I cannot understand,” read the cable, which was written five months after Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor. “Some of them are psychopathic cases and would ordinarily be receiving treatment somewhere.” The article isn’t about that, however. It’s about a secret communications back channel among current American right wing players. There is documentary evidence…