The Next Threat | E1 The Basement

January 25, 2022·33 min·2 clips

Mark Greenblatt watched men wearing Auschwitz shirts and swastikas breach the US Capitol—and as a son of a Holocaust survivor, he said he was 'truly petrified' for the first time in his life.

A warning comes first. Jalyn Gentry describes the fear of seeing white supremacist propaganda just outside her dorm. She was a freshman at Northern Kentucky University, where the campus boulder, usually a place for student messages and tributes, had been covered with racist material in January 2021. Its location made the threat feel close. Jalyn passed it on the way to class, back to her dorm, and to the dining hall. Then the episode opens up. That campus incident leads into older histories of hatred, including a family account of Rozhish and the murder of its Jewish community. The details come in sharply: machine guns, beer, truckloads of bodies, and the fact that a great-grandfather survived because he left. The past does not sit quietly here. The narrator draws a straight line to January 6th, when ideas that might seem buried showed up in public again. At the Capitol, protesters gathered in Washington, D.C., and a smaller group broke through police, smashed windows and doors, and entered the building. Mark watched from home. He saw swastikas, Auschwitz references, and people he understood as modern-day Nazis inside the United States Capitol. For the son of a Holocaust survivor, the question became harder to avoid. Were these fringe figures, or a sign of something bigger? What starts in a basement of family memory turns into an investigation of white supremacist links, democratic vulnerability, and the size of the threat. The episode ends with a signal of where the reporting goes next: a conversation with a man described as a terrorist in the United States, but not in Russia.

As heard by us

A campus hate incident opens into a steady report on how old extremist ideas still surface.

The episode begins with a campus hate incident and keeps widening from there. Jalyn Gentry's account of finding white supremacist propaganda across Northern Kentucky University gives it its sharpest edge, especially when the vandalism lands right outside her dorm and shadows the…

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Why you'd press play

You want a campus hate story that widens into a bigger extremist threat.

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