Hi everyone, it's Rachel Maddo. I'm excited to tell you about a new original podcast

that I'm co-hosting with my longtime producer and friend Isaac Davie Eronson. It's called

Rachel Maddo Presents, Day-Jean News.

So much in the news these days feels overwhelming. We find ourselves thinking, I don't think

anything like this has ever happened before. But what if that's wrong? That in fact,

we have contended with something like this before. Would that help us understand what's

happening now? Each week on Day-Jean News we'll bring you a story from history that has

uncanny resonance with something in the headlines today.

Retire the word unprecedented. Bring back uncanny. For a preview, you can stay right here

and listen. To hear the first episode and get the whole series, search for Rachel Maddo

Presents, Day-Jean News, wherever you're listening right now, and then just click

follow. Day-Jean News, DEJA and EWS.

The start of this story never gets any less surprising no matter how many times it resurfaces.

It's sometimes called the business plot, but that's too forgettable a name. The unforgettable

name associated with it is the hero of the business plot. A man named Smetley Darlington

Butler.

In the early 20th century, Smetley Butler was not just a great name. He was a household

name. He was a marine general. He was the most decorated marine in U.S. history at the

time. And in the mid-1930s, Smetley Butler went public with this shocking claim that a

shadowy cabal of rich and powerful business interests had tried to recruit him to lead

a coup, a fascist coup against President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

I appeared before the Congressional Committee, the highest representation of American people

...