Robert Evans
Appearances
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Like, this is the internet we all came of age in. Yeah, it's good to remember that as we talk about how bad it's gotten. Like, well and great back in 2004.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
That's like a fun little joke. I'm generally against thought crimes. All of those men should have been arrested. So as a result of all this, the bodies and the weight loss or gain of the Olsen twins became regular fodder for tabloids. It should not be shocking that I think both of them developed eating disorders. Not really surprising.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
So during their interview with Oprah, this comes up and the interview starts with some pretty anodyne stuff. Part one, you can still find unedited online and they're talking about like who's messier in terms of keeping their room clean. What's their allowance that their dad gives them, etc. ?
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Later on in the interview, though, Oprah starts to probe the two about tabloid rumors that they had and eating that one or both of them suffered from an eating disorder, saying, quote, I know a new rumor that's recently surfaced has really upset you, right? You know, the one about eating. The girls get visibly uncomfortable, and Ashley immediately tries to shut the topic down.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
She replies, yeah, you know, people are going to write what they're going to write. We try not to read the good or the bad because it just comes with the territory. Either you're too fat, too skinny, and people are just going to write what they... And then Oprah interrupts her, asking, what size are you, by the way?
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Now, Oprah, you have dealt with some of the most unhinged fucking obsession with your body weight that like we've tried. We were, I think, quite sympathetic of in previous episodes. You should know that's fucked up. She is 17. God damn it. Like.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Unfortunately, I don't. Yeah, that's a subject for another day. I will say I got to I got to give a shout out because as we're talking right now, the U.S. Marines have entered the California-Mexico border. And there's footage of them with V-22 Ospreys. So we are just hours away from the first time a V-22 Osprey wipes out a squad of Marines on U.S. soil yet again.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
And when we talk about modern social media being downstream from this, think of all of the different parents who we now know who got famous as mommy bloggers. I've got a YouTube channel featuring my kids and their development.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
It comes out three, four, five, six years later, oh, that was an incredibly abusive situation where they were basically mining their children for money and deeply psychologically and often physically abusing them to make them more profitable.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
So I want to finish the scene. Oh, sorry. So the girls respond after Oprah interrupts them to ask their size. Like, well, like, you know, we're celebrities. We get our clothing tailored. Like, I don't know what my size is. Right. I don't like go to a store and buy clothes. Yeah. Right. And Oprah responds. That's so interesting. I'm obsessed with size. And you're like, I really don't know.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
There's a lot there. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Like you put a team of psychiatrists on that, that two sentences.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Right. And it seemed like on misery to man, it builds up like a coastal shelf.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Yeah, I would agree 100 percent, Bridget. Now, as we talked, I talked about a bit ago with you, Andrew, we're not watching this clip. I would have preferred to play it because it's been pretty well expunged from the Internet. Now, I'm not going to say I did not spend hours on this, but I spent a good like 20 minutes or so trying to find this clip.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
And all that I was able to get are like viral clips on TikTok. That are heavily edited because a couple of years ago, this particular chunk of the interview went kind of viral on TikTok because people have been one of the things that's been happening for the last two years or so on social media, TikTok primarily, but not exclusively is.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
People have been like kind of relitigating some of Oprah's worst moments, and she has been receiving some criticism. So this went viral. People are like, rightfully, this is pretty fucked up. As a consequence, though, damn near every pure clip. I have not been able to find a pure unedited clip of this moment. I'm able to find.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
TikTok videos where the audio is overlaid with some shitty AI voice or asshole narrating that like makes me want to nuke every data center on Earth, like the way these things are like edited and put together and like the whole screen is covered with text. And I just hate it. I hate the way this stuff looks. And I haven't found a clean clip of it. That's what I'm saying. And that's.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Often the case with some of Oprah's like worst moments. You know, a lot of this stuff has been purged. And because most of her stuff was on daytime TV in the 80s and 90s, a lot of it is effectively lost media for our purposes. Anyway, I just found that interesting.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
If you're not aware, these are aircraft that exist almost entirely to kill United States Marines that the Marine Corps continues to use for reasons that make complete sense. If you know a lot about the U.S. Marine Corps. So I'm very happy to say that we're about to be suffering severe casualties in a war without anyone to fight but our own aircraft.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Yeah, that's, I think, actually a very good way of talking about it, Andrew. Also, shout out to the late Robin Williams. You do like moments like this do like reveal character on behalf of some people. And it's always nice to get like, OK, he was a really nice man.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
I rewatched a goodwill hunting. I think I may have been for the first time I had like vague memories of it. And that like scene where he's hugging Matt Damon, I just had the thought like, God damn, there's not a problem in my life that it wouldn't be fixed with a good Robin Williams hug. Like that man looked like he gave great hugs anyway. Yeah. RIP. We should probably talk about Oprah more.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Around the same time Jet Magazine made Oprah a verb, the Wall Street Journal introduced the term Oprahfication in order to complain that political discourse in the country had become, and this is what you had mentioned, Bridget, public confession as a form of therapy, right? So great minds.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Well, actually, I think you're considerably a better mind than anyone at the Wall Street Journal, but you guys had the same basic take. And this is kind of noteworthy because therapy is at the core of Oprah's appeal. And the growth in our understanding of not just the value of therapy, which I think is generally good, but in the use of like therapy speak in everyday life.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
And to some extent, the I think massive overuse of therapy speak in everyday life. This is very much tied to Oprah. And the way in which therapy is tied to Oprah is not actual content.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
clinical therapy, which is, of course, potentially extremely valuable for people, but a simulacrum of therapy, one that apes the definitions and terms used by clinicians and often apes actual clinical expertise by bringing in oaths like Dr. Phil, who are in no way actually doing good therapy and, in fact, are doing things that the ethics of the discipline condemn pretty strongly, but are doing it in such a way that people believe this is what
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
This is medical work, right? This is somebody actually like functioning as a mental health clinician. And I think that does so in a way, again, a lot of the a lot of dialogue of discourse on like Twitter is downstream from this, this birth of.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Understand that there's a value in like talking about mental health in a clinical way, but also none of us are clinicians and none of us are doing it right. And so we're like medicalizing shit in ways that are in a lot of instances deeply toxic and damaging to people. A lot of that is tied directly to Oprah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Yes, yes. You'll win. Yes, I'm being abused into doing the dishes.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
I always think back to – this happens every so often. There was one like six months ago. Tens of thousands of people liking and sharing it of someone being like, people with ADHD have no sense of object permanence. Yes, they do. Man, that's not – Five-year-olds have object permanence, bro. That is not ADHD. You are in an attempt to create empathy for people suffering from severe ADHD.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
They look awesome. They're so cool looking. And it's just they're just death traps. They're just horrible death traps. Like if you actually care, you would do more reducing American fatalities abroad, stopping the V-22 Osprey than wiping out ISIS.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
You are like dehumanizing them. This is actually quite bad. Oh, my God.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
We're back. Can we stop with some of this?
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Again, my life is filled with and I have like ADHD. The stuff people say about it online just feels like someone talking about aliens. I don't mean to like harp on it so much, but this is one I have like so much personal experience with that. Like I really I don't want to get like lost in a rabbit hole here, but there's a.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
very complicated issue in it's good for people to have an understanding of mental health and do have an understanding of like therapy and and there are there's value in that some of that those discussions becoming more a part of like common parlance and also it can be very very toxic because people use it and weaponize it to an extent and the the
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
A lot of the irresponsibility that we see now kind of reflected down in social media and the way people talk about this stuff really gets launched by Dr. Phil on the Oprah Winfrey show. Right. Where you are you are using actual clinical psychology as a costume, as opposed to as a way to actually help people like you are dressing that way so you can say whatever and do whatever.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
You know, and in this case, it was for entertainment purposes. Right. And a lot of this ties in directly to the self-help movement. And this is, I think, a toxic thing for therapy, right? Because therapy should not be a thing that you do instead of helping other people and trying to better the world. And that's kind of the message of a great deal of the way in which therapy...
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
therapy is discussed on the Oprah Winfrey show. And you even see stuff like Jordan Peterson saying like, you can't fix the world until you fixed yourself, which is simply untrue. And this ties into this, this kind of American civil religion of self-help.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
If you remember the Woody Guthrie episodes, we talked about how during the Great Depression, starving farmers and their kids were listening to prototypes of Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking, right? Which is basically this shares DNA with prosperity gospel stuff, with The Secret and Marianne Williamson. The core of it is this idea that Like attracts like.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
So if you're negative thinking, that's what's bringing bad things to you. And if you want to be wealthy, you have to think like a wealthy person, right? And, you know, some of the ways in which this gets passed down like prosperity gospel, if you want to be wealthy, you need to give money you don't have, go into debt to give money to God.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
it's just it's like a drop ship but with it's like a helicopter with like twice as many points of failure yeah hell yeah it's like what if you know how helicopters are absolute death traps what if we made it twice as much of a death trap speaking of getting lots of people killed y'all ready to get back to Oprah wow what a transition
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
And then that kind of thinking will attract wealth towards you, right? Alternatively, if you put down $5,000 for this seminar on how to like –
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
automatically generate books and put them on Amazon, you know, in order to make money that will attract wealth back to you have to make the universe needs to see you make a sacrifice in order to know that you are serious about this before you can start attracting the money. Right. All of this stuff.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
It doesn't start, obviously, again, as we talked about, this has been going on since like the early 1900s. It doesn't start with Oprah. But by bringing on Marianne Williamson and then by pushing later The Secret, she supercharges this shit. And she supercharges it at the same time as she is continually on the show pushing this – The pushing therapy and a specific attitude towards therapy. Right.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Which the overall thing you're supposed to take away from this is you can fix every problem in your life by changing your attitude. Now, that is simply untrue. Right. There are social problems and like that. like issues that affect people's ability to be happy that are rooted in politics, that are rooted in history, that are rooted in things you have no control over.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
And it is true, obviously, your own attitude, you know, can matter a lot and your resilience. But there's this big thesis of like, Every problem can be fixed by altering your attitude. You can even change the way the universe works by altering your attitude that gets wrapped up in the kind of pro therapy ethos being pushed with Oprah in a way that warps what therapy is.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
And yeah, it's just it's it's it's complicated, but I think very profoundly toxic. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Yeah. Yeah. I think that's right. And I think fundamentally... Part of what's so poisonous here is that it's taking therapy and it's turning it into magic, right? That this is a thing you can magically fix and have a breakthrough in 25 minutes sitting on a couch in front of an audience with Dr. Phil. That's the way therapy works.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
And also, that's the way fixing the world works is if you change your attitude, all of these good things will come to you. You don't have to worry about dealing with structural problems in legislation and the government and all all of this shit. Like it's just you.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
We're in reality therapy and making the world better work the same way, which is slowly doing laborious work consistently over long periods of time. Right. That's that's the problem, you know.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
And I think this is, as someone who was in psychedelic culture 15 years ago, this was one of the issues that we had with it, which is psychedelics, particularly LSD, mushrooms, MDMA, have massive potential as therapeutic aids, but they aren't magic. And there's a degree to which people treated them both as magic and also as inherently positive.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
At this point, I have gone through enough self-described radicalization journeys by Nazis who credited it to an LSD trip. No, no, no, no, no, no. This is a knife what cuts both ways, my friends. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Yeah. Now, speaking of your children dying, they never will if you purchase the products and services that are advertised on this podcast. It's the only way to keep your family safe, probably.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
We're back. So in her book, The Age of Oprah, Janice Peck quotes a history of psychotherapy by Philip Cushman. He wrote in 1995, quote, Every era has a particular configuration of self, illness, healer, technology. They are a kind of cultural package. They are interrelated, intertwined, interpenetrating.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
So when we study a particular illness, we are also studying the conditions that shape and define that illness and the sociopolitical impact of those who are responsible for healing it. Janice continues, issues from the increasing ubiquity of therapy as a language of self and interpersonal relationships, and even as a way of life.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Winfrey's media enterprise draws heavily on a self-help model of therapy with its peculiarly American belief that the individual's power to initiate a renaissance of self, of nation, of other. This promise of individual efficacy and liberation is the ground upon which Winfrey stakes her claim to empower her followers.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
It is also the basis of observers' claims that she is an inspirational phenomenon, a public leader, and quote, almost a religion.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
This is not an attempt by Oprah to shift the culture. This is just sort of, I think, a mix of what she really believes. She really feels like personally she had so much stacked against her. It was her attitude that allowed her to be successful, right? Mm-hmm.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Whereas the reality is, I mean, among other things, Oprah has said like she was an affirmative action hire that those programs and policies function the way they were supposed to, which was a person who maybe wouldn't have gotten that opportunity because of racism, got some opportunities that she proved to be excellently suited for.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
In addition to that, she had the fortune of like having a father who chose to be her father, did not actually have to take that role upon himself and provided her with a lot of resources she otherwise wouldn't have had. It's not just – it wasn't just her attitude that led to her success, right? And this is the case for everybody, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
She's still the least toxic billionaire. Absolutely. So there's an interesting bit about, because I think it is important the degree to which she was talked about as a religious figure is kind of significant. And to kind of make that case- There's a chunk in The Age of Oprah that talks about an expensive self-help speaking tour Winfrey launched in the early 2000s, the Personal Growth Summit.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
And through that, I found a review of the Personal Growth Summit in the LA Times, which is a real newspaper that was purportedly reputable, at least in that era. This is the reviewer. A prophet walks among us and her name is Oprah. You know her as a television talk show host, one of the most popular, successful and recognizable women of our time.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
But make no mistake, she is also a healer sent to Earth to spread the word. Perhaps it is only fitting that a 21st century wise man is a woman and that her chief medium is electronic. Buddha might have taken to the airwaves had they been available.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Gifted with a profound moral insight and exceptional rapport with her followers, Oprah Winfrey has grown from a masterful communicator into an inspirational phenomenon.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
I can pull that up, absolutely. Yeah, let's check this out. Flocking to the Church of Oprah, June 25th, 2000. Times staff writer. They took a name off it. Oh, you sons of bitches.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
I can't have this attached to me. I've done that. Now, one thing that's really interesting to me about Oprah is that she demonstrates how quickly the worm can turn for a celebrity once they leave the public eye. Because 2011, I think, is when her show stops being on the air as a daily thing. And QAnon starts about a decade later, right? So she is...
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
She stops being a daily figure for most Americans about a decade before QAnon. And yet in 2020, a sizable chunk of the QAnon movement starts spreading rumors that Oprah has been secretly arrested for sex trafficking. Now, this is obviously untrue, but there are some things that fuel the allegations.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
One of them is Oprah's longstanding professional relationships with two men who definitely did sex trafficking, Harvey Weinstein and our old friend P. Diddy. Now, for Weinstein's case, there is a photo of Oprah kissing Weinstein on the cheek, which you can find without much effort.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
I have found zero solid information that implies anything beyond a professional relationship between Oprah, who stars in one movie produced by his company, and Weinstein. However, there have been allegations made by other celebrities.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
I should note that when interviewed about Weinstein by Gwyneth Paltrow, Oprah said, what I knew about Harvey was that Harvey was a bully and that if Harvey's on the phone, you go, God, you don't want to take the call because you're going to get bullied in some way. That is probably true in that a lot of people talk about, a lot of people who worked with Harvey talked about him that way.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
He's kind of the archetypal dick producer. That said, people have alleged that Oprah knew more and was aware of A lot of the illegal bad stuff Weinstein was doing. I think that's also very likely. A great deal of people in Hollywood knew something. And someone as powerful as Oprah was probably to some extent aware of Weinstein's problematic behavior.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Now, that does not mean she was directly enabling or helping to hide it. It's just the kind of gross thing that a lot of people in the industry did. Right. I mean, Seth MacFarlane is like came out and made some joke about Weinstein during one award ceremony or the other.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
That was like a big deal because everyone was aware of the fact that Harvey was, you know, maybe not certainly not the extent of what he was doing, but everyone knew he's not a safe guy to leave a young woman alone with. Right. To the extent that like someone would make a joke about that. And I think it was the Oscars, the Emmys or whatever. Right.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
And people got it because he was that much of a famous creep. And in the case of Rose McGowan, who called Winfrey as fake as they come as a result of her condemning Weinstein, her issue with Oprah comes from the fact that Oprah had been set to produce a movie about famed sex abuser Russell Simmons and then resigned from producing that movie. Oprah claimed she had creative differences.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
I'm not interested in litigating that in part because that's all I can find on the matter. And that's not conclusive. There's a lot of reasons why you would drop out of producing a movie that doesn't really count as like you're trying to cover it up. I haven't found any evidence she tried to stop the thing from being made. Right.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Rose is not the only celebrity who has alleged that Oprah knew more about Weinstein than she let on. Seal came out, the guy who wrote Kiss from a Rose, and has made allegations that basically you knew a lot more than you're saying. Again, this may be true. Seal has also been accused of and investigated for sexual battery.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
This does, though, there's also a murkier aspect of it where, again, when we say Oprah probably knew something about Weinstein, I'm not saying Oprah knew Weinstein had committed a litany of felonies. Oprah knew he's kind of like he's like he'll sexually harass you. He'll make gross comments. You know, he might like.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
You don't have evidence of anything. And like. You can there's legal consequences for just like accusing someone to powerful and wealthy without evidence of like being a sex offender, like and this is the kind of thing where it's like, OK, so we're attacking Oprah for stuff like her involvement in Weinstein. I don't know. how extensive it was.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Everyone kind of involved in the mudslinging has ulterior motives, and it's weird. What I can prove is that Weinstein and Oprah worked together at some point, and that likewise, Oprah went to a number of Diddy's parties, and these are specifically the white parties, right? The ones that were not exclusively devoted to sex crimes. So I...
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Part of like the issue is that these two are both very famous people and in the industry Oprah was in. And so obviously she had personal and professional connections to them. But again, when it comes to actual crimes, there is zero evidence of Oprah directly enabling or directly covering up either of those men's crimes. That evidence does not exist.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
And from what I've seen, it looks like she's probably guilty of the same thing most people at her level in Hollywood are, which is being like, that guy seems fucked up. I'm just not going to get too close.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Weinstein wouldn't need her for that right there's no there's no line between the women that he abused and like Oprah unlike for example as we'll talk about Oprah told women John of God was a safe guy to fly to fucking Brazil and get treated by and a A number of women got raped because they took the advice of the Oprah Winfrey show endorsing this man.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
That is something that she should be held accountable for. I just don't have any evidence that she's done anything in the Weinstein case or in the P. Diddy case. Now, the most bullshit thing she gets accused of by the QAnon types is involvement with Jeffrey Epstein. If you Google Oprah Winfrey Epstein, you will also come across this randomly.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
You will find articles and viral tweets and TikToks, all of which have some variation of the sentence Oprah Winfrey mentioned five times in files related to the Epstein case. That sounds bad, right? Let's look into this. what that means.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
So one of the things that turned me on to this was a viral post on Facebook with the title, Justin, Oprah has been revealed as a client on the Epstein list, capitalizing the first letter of each of those words. What's your reaction? And that's complete bullshit. Oprah's name shows up five times in documents for the Epstein case.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
The first two times are because the files include screenshots of articles, one from Radar Online and one from the Daily Mail. Those articles in the bottom of them have a suggested other reading. You know how articles work. You finish an article and say, hey, you might be interested in this article on a different topic.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Those articles that were suggested by the articles relevant to the Epstein trial mentioned Oprah. That's two of the five mentions, right? Is something completely unrelated to the case that just because somebody fucking screen grabbed the whole page, Oprah's name winds up on it.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
The other three times come from emails introduced as evidence where a journalist working with one of Epstein's accusers on a book tells a book agent, I think this book will sell well to Oprah's audience. Now, if you're keeping track, what does that mean? It means Oprah has nothing to fucking do with Jeffrey Epstein.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
You're going to get sued. You're going to get sued. You're going to get sued.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
You can see, and there's a picture of her kissing Weinstein on the neck.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Because the people who hate Oprah and are making stuff up about her primarily hate her because she is a liberal figure and a celebrity. It's the same reason they're going after like Tom Hanks. Right. Because he was pro vaccine. The other thing is the stuff she's done that's bad is stuff they do and love and don't think is bad. Right. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
You know, like that's that's that's what it's why when people talk about the problem of child sex abuse and child sex trafficking, they obsessed with this largely fanciful idea of like three and four year olds being trafficked around the world in large numbers and abducted from their fucking white families, which is not really the issue.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
No, this is I got to say people online were like, oh, only a matter of time before Oprah sues them. There's we've had. Not to mention anybody litigious subjects in the past. We are so far under Oprah's radar. Like, again, this is the only people who have ever been more famous than her are certain pharaohs and Greek gods. Like, she does not give a shit about this podcast, people.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
The issue is primarily adult men related to 16 and 17 and 15 year old girls molesting them, you know. And part of why they don't like to do that is that an awful lot of the guys who obsess with shoot your local pedophile think it would be fine if they married a 16 year old as long as, you know, they did it in a church and their parents were OK with it.
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Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Right, right. Where you can marry 14 year olds in a lot of U.S. states as long as you do it, you know, through God and their parents. Anyway, we don't need to make that the subject every time we talk about this shit.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
But I think when it comes to like properly criticizing her, one thing you have to note is that Oprah has made child abuse and child sex abuse constant obsessive focuses with her fundraising activities. She has done harm through spreading misinformation about child abuse, but she's not a sex criminal.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
This is something she puts a lot of she very much actively has tried to reduce again in imperfect ways. But she's put her money where her mouth is a lot. And one of the things she is really consistently puts effort into is trying to help underprivileged at risk kids. And again, this is always a mixed bag.
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And this brings me to the story of the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls, or OWLAG, as we're going to be calling it. Bridget, you were excited to get into this topic. What have you heard of OWLAG? This is her South African school.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Yeah, yeah. And it was, you know, this starts, the school opens in January of 2007. It is inspired the year before she's vacationing in South Africa. She's hanging out with Nelson Mandela because when you're Oprah, you get to hang out with Nelson Mandela. And she decides on the spot,
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
While they're talking and looking, going through, she's seeing the poverty of a lot of the poorest South African children. She decides on the spot, I'm going to create a school for very bright and very poor South African kids. These are kids who are at the top of their public schools in terms of test scores and come from households that make less than $950 a month. Right? Right.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Now, the project is instantly controversial among the wealthy neighborhood where the school is built. They do not like that a bunch of poor black girls are going to be going to school in this largely white neighborhood. The administration is deluged with complaints. Neighbors begin staking out the school during recess, watching the few girls in this white neighborhood as they play soccer.
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Oprah has the school put up hedges to block the field from view. And so as we talk about the things that are Chris, criticizable about this venture, I don't want to lose the fact that like, she is really pissing off a lot of South African racists, which again are the most racist racists. Like if we're, if we're, if we're ranking the racist, the very top of that pyramid is South African racists.
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No one's ever been better. Um, speaking of South Africa, I'm fairly certain none of our sponsors are based in South Africa.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
So kind of pivoting off of that statement, I do suspect some of the youngins in our audience may be incredulous at me crediting Oprah with so much influence in trends that today seem like just like massive societal swings, stuff that's too big for one person to have incited. And I have to assure you, Oprah really was that influential.
Behind the Bastards
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We're back. Apartheid's not around anymore, so I guess we probably shouldn't have a blanket ban on South African sponsors.
Behind the Bastards
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There's a very good old British song, I've Never Met a Nice South African, that gets into some of these issues. Um... So Oprah is incredibly integral to the design of this school. This is not just a case for good and for ill. Oprah is not just somebody who like throws money at a problem to like have her name attached to it.
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Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
This is a personal focus and she pours hundreds of hours of her own personal labor into making this school. I want to quote from an article on Forbes. Winfrey severed ties with the state and decided to go it alone, hiring the architects behind Johannesburg's famous Apartheid Museum. She donned jeans and a hard hat and oversaw every aspect of construction.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
She thought of the little things, the tubs of umbrellas outside each building for use during South Africa's rainy season when it pours almost nonstop for 40 days. Their green, her favorite color, to match the girls' uniforms. At the school's first convocation, Winfrey took the stage to address the girls and their relatives bussed in from across South Africa.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
There is, in fact, a direct line from Oprah to the sort of media that utterly dominates the digital attention spans of people today, particularly Gen Z kids, right? If you spend any time looking at surveys of what Gen Z claims to look for and value in media figures that they follow, you'll come upon one word over and over. Authenticity.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
For many years, people always asked me why didn't I have children, she told the crowd. Now I know. And, you know, that's largely good, but you can also see a little weird. Although, again, in a very sympathetic way, Oprah is, by this point, very rich. And being very rich also means you're becoming increasingly unhinged as you age.
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Some of the evidence for that is that in addition to the stuff that is pretty like fine, right? Like, okay. Yeah. Give them green umbrellas. Cause that's your favorite color, whatever you're paying for it. That's your right. During like the big opening event for the school, because they're having a bunch of celebrities, Nelson Mandela and like Diane Sawyer are showing up.
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Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
She has the groundskeeper cause it's during the dry season. She has the groundskeepers paint the yellow grass green. Um, Which is, again, not evil, just kind of like, oh, yeah, that's the kind of thing you get to do when you have Oprah money. Yeah. And the kind of thing you worry about. It's just like, I guess. Yeah. The school's not going to look good enough if the grass is yellow.
Behind the Bastards
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welcome back to bastards the behind podcast robert evans a uh your brain will put that together in the right order um or maybe that only works with written words maybe maybe it just sounds like i had a stroke i don't know let's ask our guest today uh bridget todd andrew t does it sound like i had a stroke Always. Thank you. Thank you. As a longtime friend of mine, Bridget, that really helps.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Now, Oprah has to date spent more than $100 million on both the school. This is initially, I think, supposed to be like a $6 million project. It balloons to $40 million. And again, she's paid over like $100 million at this point. So for one thing you cannot fault her for is dedication. This is not something she is casual about.
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This is not something where she was just kind of like siphoning some money off for a tax break. She's personally involved in this. And this school has provided an excellent education for a lot. I think a couple hundred girls have graduated at this point. And Winfrey is also committed to pay for the secondary education.
Behind the Bastards
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education of any girl who graduates from this school, which is where a lot of the cost comes from. She's not just paying for this school. She's paying for these kids to go to college. And in fact, recently, the first of these girls received a Ph.D. Oprah showed up at her graduation ceremony. And this is good. This is, broadly speaking, a thing that has done good.
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there are valid criticisms of it, like the fact that Oprah's focus on luxury means that this one school, which again has only graduated a couple hundred girls, could have paid for a lot more schools that had a similar educational quality, if not for some of the expensive things that are largely a result of Oprah's sort of focuses.
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Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
An article on the school in Reuters notes, Action Aid, a global development group, said the school exposes the stark disparities in South Africa's education system, still haunted by the legacy of apartheid, and is an insult to millions of poor children worldwide wanting a decent education.
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And that is harsh, but there's a segment from Forbes Africa, based on an interview with Sam Blake, the director of operations, that does kind of back that up. Quote, Why were the girls sleeping on 200 thread count sheets? Why were there chandeliers hanging from the library ceiling and brightly colored mosaic tile pillars outside of the cafeteria?
Behind the Bastards
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Blake grimaces when he's reminded of those early articles. When you walk into a beautiful place, you think better of yourself, he explains simply.
Behind the Bastards
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Again, I don't know that you would call I don't think it would be right to call that evil, but it is like this is what you get when you have a very serious problem and somebody who is not an expert on education but has several billion dollars goes in to fix it is evil.
Behind the Bastards
Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Now, I'm not saying they actually like authentic media figures because authenticity is a costume that media figures put on. Nobody's really authentic, right? Like, because that's... Just not the way the media works. You know, it's all some sort of dress up. It's all some sort of glamour. But it's the ability to play at being authentic.
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You can sometimes get a good thing to happen, and I think overall this school is a good thing, but it's so much more expensive than it needs to be, and a lot more girls could be helped if, for example, that money had been like – Like if Oprah paid correct taxes and then went into the education system. Since she's not South African, I think more to the point, if that –
Behind the Bastards
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If that $100 million had been handed to a group of actual education experts in order to build a system to improve educational quality for underprivileged kids in South Africa, probably would have helped a lot more kids, right? Yeah. And that's not bastardism, right? Any more than you're not a bastard if you ordered takeout last night. That's like a waste of money, right? But it helps kids.
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It's an example of what's problematic about even good billionaire charity.
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It's just evidence of like, yeah, we really ought to just tax these people a hell of a lot more so they can't exist as billionaires. But anyway. Yeah. Moving on. When it comes to this school, what it's most famous for outside of South Africa is the allegations that have come out from within it that are problematic. And those, yeah, I'm just going to list what's happened.
Behind the Bastards
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So within months of the school opening, there were allegations that the matron of the dormitory, of the dormitories for the kids, Tiny Makopo is her name, had attempted to kiss and fondle as many as six teenage girls at the academy. Now, Oprah acted very quickly. As far as I can tell, as soon as evidence came out, there are allegations that she tried to hide it before it came out.
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I haven't seen anything that actually backs those up. What I have seen looks like she acted as quickly as possible. Who knows if there's stuff that I'm not, you know, that's not public, but that just seems to be people at this point kind of talking shit. She acts very quickly. She fires Makopo. I should also say Makopo is tried and is found not guilty three years later.
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So, again, I can't say I'm not going to do the Oprah thing and say she definitely did it. I don't know. I'm not an expert on this case. Right. The incident does, however, leave a stain on the school that deepens in early 2009 when seven students are expelled for bad behavior that includes sexual harassment of classmates.
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At around the same time, a 17 year old student is found with a dead infant child in her handbag.
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Yeah. And this is like, I think she had a stillbirth or something like that. Like, this is a case of like somebody who gets pregnant very young and like the baby doesn't make it. And these are all of this stuff. The fact that you have a bunch of the kids there who are abusing other kids. This has and the fact that there's these allegations from this this teacher, this has led to accusations.
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And you'll get this a lot in like the QAnon side of things that Oprah started like a sex abuse factory to molest kids in South Africa. And as a guy who has told stories about schools that were sex abuse factories for the express purpose of allowing certain people to molest children, I have to tell you, that's not what's happening here.
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And I want to quote now from a 2024 study by the NIH surveying the media diet and preference of Gen Z viewers. Quote, the qualities that young people wish to find in media, especially on social media, revolve primarily upon spontaneity and authenticity. Quote, nobody has a perfect life. And this is them quoting a female Gen Z surveyed person. Right.
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Aulag is a school for underprivileged kids living in a country where the deepest poverty is unimaginable to most Americans. As Winfrey herself said, by the time a girl gets to my school, normally she's suffered on average six major life traumas. They've lost a parent or both parents, multiple accidents, death in your family, AIDS, rape, sexual molestation, all of it.
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Unimaginable things have happened. Creating an institution where these students are taken in away from their families, I should note you, supported and asked to live together is a huge, messy, complicated thing. There's no way stuff like this wouldn't happen to some extent.
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So what you have to judge the school on is, did they set up guardrails to make it possible to report this stuff, to make it less likely? And did they act quickly when evidence came out? And as far as I can tell, More or less. Yeah. Again, there's some critiques there. It certainly was not a set up perfectly, but like generally. Yeah, it seems to be the case.
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I think that's the fundamental criticism. Yeah.
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I know what I didn't like about that. That's really where a lot of this comes from with Oprah, where it's like. you, I had a lot of trauma as a kid. I was abused and like, but also very smart and I got an opportunity and so I succeeded. So I know how other smart kids that are suffering in like difficult circumstances, I know what they need. And like, no, every kid's different, Oprah.
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Like, and also you don't fully understand all of the things that helped you because you weren't one of the, you weren't your dad, right? Like there's things that, Just like all of us, we all and this is part of the process of like reconciling.
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Oh, my parents did this stuff that was fucked up and also realizing, oh, my God, I never realized my parents did this thing that was like absolutely crucial in me turning out like having these positive traits that was must have been really hard for them. That's just like. Yeah, I don't know.
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No, it's just more complicated than that, Oprah. And, like, this should not have been your gig. You know, every now and then you get one of these. Really, the only time it's worked is, like, James Cameron becoming a deep sea explorer. But nearly every other time... I guess she is second because at least the school is a good school.
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And I'm not saying anything about that specific influencer, but like that's the idea, right? That like Gen Z, they're moving away from like the super airbrushed and touched up, you know, mass marketed like celebrities of the past, which is, again, not true. There's more ability to filter yourself than ever before, thanks to social media.
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Fixing the system is a lot harder. No, I mean, it's like when I started my summer camp to teach kids how to blow up trains and effectively conduct counter or insurgent operations. I wanted to teach them, but I had to eventually accept that, like, look, I'm not an expert educator, which is why I trained an LLM on Lawrence of Arabia's book, Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
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And I've just let that loose on the kids. You know, now this AI is teaching them everything and it's going to be fine. Robert, stop trying to recruit for your boy army. They're not all boys. There's a lot of girls, non-binary kids. Look, we don't discriminate as long as you are willing to man, what?
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If your fingers are nimble enough to get into the little grenade pins, your finger, you're in. If you know how to mix gel ignite, I don't care about anything else. Just like the, okay, we should probably stop at this point.
Behind the Bastards
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So there are some valid complaints about the school. Parents have voiced frustration that their time to see their children is unfairly curtailed. Restrictive rules for kids have been compared to some as prison-like. An article for the Atlanta Black Star notes, there's also the recent firing of the former head of operations, Simon Matico, after one year was reported in December of 2023.
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Court documents reveal complaints about abuse of authority, intimidation, and victimization, as well as the mistreatment of learners. Matiko alleges he was fired for his non-performance during private arbitration at the school. Further investigation found other employees who voiced their difficulty with management. One said, Working under pressure, threats, and other issues.
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We don't discuss issues with our management as we fear we will lose our jobs as we are not given clarity or relevant answers. Another said, Outlag used to be a place where one contributed more than required because there was a culture of working together, listening, and respecting professional opinions. That has changed. There is a culture of distrust and fear.
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Let's keep an eye on it. Maybe we need to take the keys away, though. Yeah, they shouldn't be driving that car anymore. We got to get the F-150 away from Grandpa. He's got to go right through a fucking farmer's market. Oh, shit. I just occurred to me, actually, because I met you both right around the same time in like mid 2018 to late 2018.
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And I don't know the perfect reality here, but again, I think we've litigated this more than enough. Yeah. The broader problem here is that like the issue of rich people launching into crusades to fix major problems without knowing much about them, you know, and that's an issue, you know, that goes right to the top of this country.
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And probably the best example of Oprah contributing to this in a really toxic way, because Owlag at least has given a lot, you know, a couple hundred kids a very good education. Probably the best example of her diving into something she was not really competent to handle that had a toxic, toxic knock on effects is her support of orphanages in Haiti.
Behind the Bastards
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But that's the that's the impression that people think that they want. And that impression really gets started. Authenticity becomes a virtue for media figures in the age of Oprah. More than any other single person, she sparks the shift towards relatable, authentic media influencers who deliberately sought to inculcate and feed a parasocial relationship with their audiences.
Behind the Bastards
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She has there's one specific orphanage that she's devoted a massive amount of attention and money towards. And this is an orphanage that was started by an American family to protect and shelter some of Haiti's hundreds of thousands of orphaned kids after a massive earthquake.
Behind the Bastards
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Oprah has repeatedly highlighted and supported the work of missionaries operating adoption services to help these orphaned kids get connected to people who will adopt them and bring them over generally to the United States. That sounds great. Unproblematic. What could be bad about supporting an orphanage? This is where we get to talk about the problems with the international adoption industry.
Behind the Bastards
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And largely the problems of the international adoption industry is that it is an industry that profits off of facilitating the adoption of, in this case, poor black children by white foreigners with money. In many cases, who are more interested in converting the child to their specific brand of Christianity or Christianity. showing the child off to their friends, then raising a traumatized child.
Behind the Bastards
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Now, to make this even worse, many, if not most of these orphans aren't actual orphans. Yes. After the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, The number of orphanages in the country more than doubled from 200 to 752 by 2013. Now, Oprah was just one of the of the media figures making documentaries about these generally operated by foreigners orphanages.
Behind the Bastards
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And really, it's one of these like these heroic white missionaries coming to this dangerous place and like really risking themselves in order to like help these poor, underprivileged kids escape. Oprah is, again, not the only person doing this, but her sheer popularity gives her an outsized role in making this a popular cause.
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At least 30,000 children wound up in Haitian orphanages, and about 80% of those 30,000 kids had one living parent at least. From CNN, "...unable to sustain their children's well-being, these parents are persuaded to relinquish them to privately run orphanages that promise the children will receive shelter, food, and education. This is often not the outcome.
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Instead, the children living in Haiti's orphanages face exploitation and trafficking unintentionally funded by foreign donors." Jamie Vernalde of Lumos, an NGO advocating for the institutionalization of children, says this.
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This orphanage business where orphanages are established and recruit children to raise donations from foreigners is becoming increasingly recognized globally as a form of trafficking. These Haitian orphanages employ people called child finders who seek out struggling families and bribe them for their children. The going rate is around $75.
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The money to pay these child finders to bribe families for their kids comes from the $100 million a year in mostly faith-based donations sent to these orphanages.
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This is a much larger issue than Oprah, but she plays a significant role in it, and this whole period of time, she's running all of these teary stories praising missionaries who take children away from Haiti and actively defends a system that is desperately broken. A good example of this comes in February of 2010.
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A group of 10 Baptists, mostly from Idaho, were arrested in Haiti with 33 children who were absolutely not related to them. When confronted by authorities, these Baptists assured them that kids were all orphans being taken to loving homes in the United States. The Haitian authorities looked into this for three seconds and realized, no, they had no permission to be doing this.
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And also a lot of those children were in fact not orphans. Here's how CNN describes the way those kids wound up in the care of missionaries. Most of the children appear to be from Cabelas.
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Parents there told the Associated Press they had surrendered their children on January 28th, two days after a local orphanage worker acting on behalf of the Baptists convened nearly the entire village of about 500 people on a dirt soccer pitch to present the Americans' offer.
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The orphanage worker, Isaac Adrian, said he told the villagers their children would be educated at a home in the Dominican Republic. It's truly like, you know, you said it earlier, but it's like...
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Oprah did this in part by being open about stuff like her struggles with weight loss, which made people think, oh, she's dealing with the same shit I am. Right. She is the same kind of person I am. This is like she I like her because she's authentic.
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Yeah. Yeah. Because this is the child trafficking. Now, it is unclear to me how much the American missionaries and their leader, Laura Silsby, knew about what the Haitian parents had been told. Laura had met the child finder who got them these kids two days earlier. And it's possible he did the bulk of the lying.
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When questioned by authorities and the newsletters, Silsby and the missionaries insisted the kids had all been handed over by distant relatives who were frightened the kids might starve to death. Now, that's their side of events –
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The child finder, Adrian, for his part, says he had no idea that the entire point Silsby and the Americans were in Haiti for was to take children back to the United States. He thought they were trying to take them to an orphanage in the Dominican where their families would still have access to them and be able to get them back at some point when conditions were better.
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And I tend to think he may be the one telling the truth because of lines like this from that IP article. The parents of four children taken by Silsby said the Americans took down contact information for all the families and assured them that a relative would be able to visit them in the Dominican Republic.
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So again, when questioned by authorities, Silsby and the missionaries are like, oh, distant relatives handed them over because obviously they don't have parents. When questioned, the parents say, no, no, no. They took our contact info and said we'd be able to visit their kids. They were just going over the Dominican Republic.
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So if that's true, this really does sound like child theft on behalf of the missionaries and Silsby. Now, I'm going to spoil the end and say everybody but Silsby gets off scot-free, although thankfully not with the kids.
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And that cuts out a lot, including the fact that like, well, Oprah has billions of dollars and enough money to hire personal chefs and personal trainers and take all of the different rich people drugs that make it a lot easier to, you know, lose weight and whatnot and stay youthful. Right. But again, it's perception.
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Silsby did do time in Haitian jail, but it was essentially knocked down to like a misdemeanor, basically, even though the evidence, I think, might suggest something more nefarious. NPR dug into Laura Silsby and described her in an article as a woman who found a woman who arguably found a lot of society's rules optional.
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Silsby lied both in interviews and to the Haitian government about having proper paperwork. Back home, she ran a personal shopping Internet business and was being actively pursued by creditors for failing to pay her employees. or any of the other people she owed money.
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Despite this, Silsby convinced her church that she was in the process of putting together a Shangri-La in Idaho for the lucky Haitian kid she was about to rescue. The Wall Street Journal writes, Ms. Silsby and Ms. Coulter traveled to the Dominican Republic and Haiti last July and late last year. They were laying the groundwork then for opening an orphanage, said Mel Coulter, Ms. Coulter's father.
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They coordinated with people who they thought were handling necessary details and running interference for them, he said. So they thought they had everything they needed in documentation, Mr. Coulter said. Ms. Silsby had an equally grand ambition greater to home, according to a local builder.
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The Idaho plan called for a multi-million dollar complex for runaway children on a 40-acre lot in Kuna County, Idaho, according to Eric Evans, owner of Evans Construction in Meridian. Ms. Silsby told him it would have an indoor swimming pool, tennis courts, and dormitories for the children, said Mr. Evans, adding that she had discussed having him build the project. Ms.
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Silsby's mother said that she had never heard of any such plan.
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To get back to where Oprah is involved, I'm not reading this for no reason. Oprah and her website and O Magazine, Oprah goes to bat for these specific missionaries writing very having having very sympathetic articles written, doing features on how these people are. They're just trying to help. They got caught up in this corrupt government. And it's just a big misunderstanding.
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But like these people are really good people trying to help, you know. um here's a quote from oprah's write-up the oprah.com write-up i should say jim said he traveled with his group to a number of orphanages around port-a-prince during those visits jim says they were introduced to children who were said to have no home or parents to go home to
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He says one of the orphanage directors asked if they could take the children to try to help them. As we got their name and birth dates, we wrote those down, and they got on our bus, and we started taking care of them, basically, he says. The plan, he says, was to take the children to a restored hotel in the Dominican Republic that had been set up as an orphanage.
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Maybe Jim is unaware, but as we know from Silsby's account, she was not planning to take these kids to the Dominican Republic. And also, a lot of the parents say, no, it wasn't an orphanage director that handed them over. They got them from us, right? The closest we get to scrutiny of any of this in that Oprah.com article is this paragraph.
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Since the story broke, there have been allegations in the media that the group leader, Laura Silsby, intended to make a profit on the children by charging large fees to get them placed. Jim says he doesn't know anything about those claims.
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I'll bet not open and shut case that one open and shut case and I know Sophie's fuming right now because this has gone very long but that is the end of the episode I just felt we had to we really had to end this one on the Haitian orphanages makes sense yeah oh Oprah why'd you get mixed up with these people why indeed and we have we have one more part left don't we Robert We sure do.
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We have a sixth parter. There are still 10 pages left in the script, which has finally come down to 24,468 words. Oh.
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It's half of what is generally considered to be the length of like a book. Right. Fifty thousand is like kind of the cut off. Now, that said, I don't want to make it out to like I wrote half of a nonfiction book here. I'm taking other people's original reporting and like chopping it up and remixing it. That's that's what a lot of this is, is, oh, here's three different accounts of this thing.
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Well, I'm going to tell you the similarities and the differences between them. Here's different attitudes. these different people have about stuff, right? Like I'm not doing, I didn't go to Port-au-Prince. I didn't do the original reporting on this kind of stuff. But this is one of the longest scripts we've ever done. This is a Kissinger-linked script.
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Yep. All right, everybody. Well, this has been Behind the Bastards. You guys want to plug your pluggables before we roll out here?
Behind the Bastards
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Find Andrew on Blue Sky. You know, stalk him a little bit. Send him pictures of your food and see if he'll send you pictures of his food. They did.
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No, I think there's a degree to which, I mean, you write for TV, Andrew, like you're in media, like Bridget, you're in media, like we're all in media. So we all have experiences of like, this is the product that people say is authentic. And we are aware of the degree of work that goes into the background of like,
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I mean, part of why I have the attitude I have on this is that, like, I have the life experience of turning myself into a public figure and deliberately figuring out, like, which aspects of my personality are more relatable and marketable to an audience. That's a thing that I did. It's part of my business, right?
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You also, like, everyone sees some, like, you know, the person, well, I like that they're honest. I like that they, you know, they seem like a really honest person. It's like, well, but you're, you are seeing what they've curated, you know? And I'm not even making a moral judgment about it, right? It's not bad. As a public figure, you have to curate yourself, right?
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Like, for one thing, you'll go insane if you don't have a part of you that's actually like your private human person. You will lose your mind. Right. Right. We we see this in certain public figures that happen to be the richest man on Earth. Right.
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It's a form of torture. And also how a number of people, a number of people get rich at least. doing that for limited periods of time, right? What is like a lot of the streaming ecosystem is I have for four hours a day, I make a panopticon in my gaming chair, right? Like that is one of the most profitable forms of entertainment on the planet right now.
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It's been like six years that we've we've all been buddies. Hey, we should go to Vegas. When did I meet you? Was it 2016?
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Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it may feel like, especially because of how universal that kind of talk about, I like authentic people in my media, is that it may feel like a thing that people have always wanted, but it really is not. I mean, again, if you remember the 90s, that was not like people were obsessed with guys like Tom Cruise.
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And the last thing anyone would ever say about Tom Cruise is like, that man is authentic, right? Right. No, Tom Cruise is like a fucking like a mirror that we project onto, you know? Yeah. But he's like his his his popularity came from his fundamental emptiness. Right.
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And like Arnold Schwarzenegger was a guy who was like actively created during the period of time that he was like in the public eye. If you look at early Arnold and, you know, to the point where he kind of figured out who he was as a human being, like this is not the way we thought about celebrities the entire time that that has been a concept in like our culture.
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And Oprah plays a huge role in this stuff. Reality TV is in many ways downstream from Oprah. TikTok is downstream from Oprah and the Trump presidency is downstream from Oprah. Now, I'm not saying Oprah is to blame for this. I'm saying is downstream from right in that in that I'm saying the things that she did helped prepare the culture for that.
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That's not implying a sort of moral responsibility for Donald Trump, a guy she doesn't like and didn't want to be the president. It's saying that the changes that she helped wrought in our culture were part of why we are where we are today. Right. And you you can just see that at the level of influence This is a person who at her peak, 30, 40 million people are tuning into her show.
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The degree to which she has changed the composition of our cultural soil can't be overstated. And I hope that people can take what I'm saying without it being like Robert's saying we should blame Oprah for Trump. I really don't think that's the case. I'm just saying part of why people like Trump is his authenticity, quote unquote. You listen to his supporters. That's what they will say.
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And that being a huge virtue, Oprah isn't the only person who started it or the only person who led to that being the way that it is. But Oprah being Oprah was a massive part of why that shift occurred.
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Yeah, yeah. I think that's a great way to point it. And it's also weird that you make that comment about the personal being political because we're about to read a quote that's right along those lines. So in 1998, Jet Magazine defined Oprah, the word, as a verb, meaning to engage in persistent, intimate questioning with the intention of obtaining a confession.
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Now, a good example of how pushy she got with this, and this is, I tried to find this clip online. Every a lot of the bad Oprah clips that have gone viral have been purged from the Internet, as we'll talk about. But in 2004, Oprah has the Olsen twins on her show as guests. Now, at this point, they are both 17 years old.
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If you are on the younger side and you do not recall or you recall the Olsen twins as, you know, adult movie stars, which they are today. Let me kind of walk you through who the Olsen twins are culturally. These were two of alongside Macaulay Culkin, probably the two like two like of the three or four biggest child stars this country's ever had. Right.
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They are famous from the point that they are very little kids and they are famous. And this is kind of unusual the entire time that their children effectively. This is not a thing where like they're in one big movie and then they kind of drop out of cultural awareness like, you know, Jake Lloyd or someone like that.
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They are in full house and they remain in movies that are stuff like The Parent Trap all the time. Yeah, ew. It is as gross as it sounds, but it was not a fringe thing. Like, I am telling you right now, this was not a tiny number of weirdo pedophiles. A lot of men were willing to put their names to keeping track of that.
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Ice cold. Imagine, because he had to have sat with that review title, just being like, I can't say this, can I?
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Fuck it, fuck it, I'm doing it. Near the end of 1972, Oprah gets her first TV gig when her boss at WVOL called a local TV station, WTVF TV, and told them that he had a girl who was interested in broadcasting. This was during a period where the FCC had just introduced diversity requirements for on-air talent, and Oprah was hired quickly. She generally describes this as an affirmative action hire.
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Again, the guy who hires her is like, no, she was the best qualified candidate ever. You know, I don't know. Either way, it doesn't really matter because this proves to be a very good hiring decision. The truth. Oprah was a skilled performer and had experience both on the radio and as a pageant winner. That said, she was hired to be a journalist, which she had no experience doing.
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And she winds up reporting on City Hall. She cheerfully admitted as soon as she starts the job, she tells all her coworkers, I lied during my interview. I don't know how to do this job. Like her first day, she tells the crew, I don't know what I'm doing. Please help me. Because like I told the director, I understood how to do this job. And it's a remark.
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It's a mark of her charisma that everyone on the crew is like, well, yeah, OK. Yeah. That's kind of nice.
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I mean, that is how like entertainment works, right? Like everyone I know in this industry has a story of like, yeah, I talked myself into a room that I probably didn't have the right to be in. Oh, that part, yes.
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Yeah, I one of one of the again, we're about to get into all of the horrible things Oprah's been involved in. But one thing that I do consistently admire about her is that she doesn't dress up this aspect of her life. She's like, yeah, man, I lied, cheated and stole until I could be on TV. Which is everyone who gets famous on TV, right? Yeah.
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Iconic. Look, kids, if you're looking at getting into entertainment, get good at lying, because that's the job. Oprah experienced a ton. This is an uncomfortable transition, but a lot of racism on the job. A large part of it was like she's the first black on air talent that they have.
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She winds up interviewing a lot of people who like they see a black journalist and just start calling her slurs to her face. She won awards, though. She's very ambitious. Her colleagues, that's the primary thing her colleagues from this period remember about her is that Oprah is a climber. She is somebody who is like crawling up to the top. Right.
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At one point, she takes over for a producer who like she gets on set. He's clearly doesn't know what he's doing for this Black History Week presentation. And she directs the entire segment herself. Right. She is also, by everyone's admission, doing hella drugs during this period, although everyone at the TV station is doing hella drugs. This is a local TV station in the 70s.
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I want to read a paragraph from the book Oprah, a biography based on a conversation with her former colleague, Patty Outlaw. It was just nuts working at that station. Drugs, drugs, drugs all the time. Drugs all over the place. They were even selling window panes of LSD in the hall. Drugs were so prevalent that the new staff gave Vic Mason, Oprah's co-anchor, a Coke spoon as a gift.
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Chris and I looked the other way, said Jimmy Norton, who confirmed that station management removed a vending machine once they discovered it had been rigged to dispense marijuana.
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This was in Chicago? Where was this? Yeah, no, no, no. They're not even in, I think they're in, yeah, they're in Nashville still. Nashville. Yeah, they're in Nashville still. She does move up to the big leagues pretty quickly, but she doesn't go straight to Chicago. After a few years in Nashville, she gets a job in Baltimore.
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She's not really happy there, even though this is a big step up, Baltimore obviously being a bigger city, because she feels like she's on a ticking timer, right? Her attitude is like, by the time I'm 24, I have to be where I want to be, because then I'm too old and washed up, which... You know, that's the that's the way a lot of people feel. That's the way TV is for a lot of women, unfortunately.
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But like it's certainly not going to be that way for Oprah. Baltimore turns out to be a disaster, though. The longtime anchorman for the station who she is made to be like the co-anchor hates her. And she's not really experienced enough. Like he's been doing it for decades. She doesn't really know what she's doing yet. So she very quickly gets demoted. but she's still on contract.
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So it's one of those things where she's getting a lot of money, but she's basically not doing the job that she got hired to do. She's instead getting all these terrible little human interest stories that she considers beneath her. So this is a frustrating period, but her saving grace is always her ambition.
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During that denied advancement at the station, she starts performing at churches, schools, and different black community spaces, building a fan base locally the hard way. She also has a series of interracial relationships while she is working at the station, which is noteworthy because that is not a common thing at the time.
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And the fact that she is dating white guys in her personal life becomes public news. A bunch of local white radio DJs make it like a reoccurring thing that they talk about on the air, like Oprah is dating. Um, I don't just bring that up to be like, wow. And like, it's like, no, no, no. This is like, she has to deal with this being part of like local news.
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Yeah. Yeah. Like, it's it's nuts. And like, for an example of how fucking insane it is, one of these local radio DJs described she's dating like a Jewish reporter. Right. Who works at a competing station. One of these guys on the radio describes their relationship as Omar Sharif is dating Aunt Jemima.
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Oh, boy. You should just explode when you say something like that. So she had always been something of a binge eater, largely as a response to stress. And as is probably not surprising, the stress of like being in the public eye and having all of this shit about you be public discussion causes that to be even more of a problem.
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In 1977, she starts paying a diet doctor to help her drop weight for the first time. And she starts attending Overeaters Anonymous courses. A mixture of stress and starving herself causes her hair to fall out. Or at least that's one story.
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Oprah later is going to insist that she lost her hair because executives at the station demanded that she go to New York for a French hairdresser to, quote, make me a Puerto Rican by bleaching her skin and changing her hair. I don't know. You get these two different versions of how she loses her hair. It's very hard to say what the truth is.
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The news producer is like, the company didn't have the budget to send her to New York. She also claims that the former news director tries to get her to change her name to Susie. He denies this. I don't know. It's all a little muddled. I don't know how much where the truth lies here super matters, but
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Listen, listen. There's for sure crabs in Maine. They've got lobster at McDonald's in Maine.
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Um, there's definitely some stuff that she's like exaggerating, but she's also like literally people are talking about her relationships on the air in a very racist way. So like, I don't know, I, I, I feel like you get the general gist, which is that she is in an incredibly stressful and unfair situation here at work.
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Yeah. Right. Right. Like that's kind of where I land on this. That said, I will say the station allows her to work her way. Like she is not like locked out of moving back up and she, works her way back up to reporting the news over the next couple of years in Baltimore.
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And in fact, she rebuilds her reputation with her bosses well enough that in 1977, the new station manager, William Baker, gives her the big break that is going to lead her to the position of kind of impossible wealth and cultural power that she's going to attain. He had been brought on to the station after creating in another station a morning talk show called Morning Exchange.
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Part four is... There's no logic to the number of parts. This may wind up more episodes than we thought. I have to start with something, which is a mea culpa. I made some mistakes in the last episodes, guys.
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And his job was to do the same thing for Baltimore. Right. Morning shows are a new concept. Like this is this is the guy playing a video game while ranting about politics on a stream of 1977 is like people waking up in the morning to see one to two charming, handsome people talk about bullshit while you like get the kids breakfast ready. Right. The hottest new thing in entertainment.
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Phil Donahue had kind of helped to kick off the trend of like talk shows in 1968. And his show, which was just named Donahue, had become like the most popular thing on television. Morning shows were a refinement of this idea, right? You generally have a male host and a female co-host.
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And this is how you lock in viewers who are either getting ready for work or like stay-at-home moms starting their day.
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uh baker's wife jean-marie was the one who recommended oprah to be the female co-host of this new morning show apparently at some sort of like work event she sees winfrey and she like says to her husband that's your host and baker listens to his wife which proves to be a wise decision because for whatever i mean there's a number of reasons but tens of millions of american women feel the exact same way that the first time they see oprah like oh yeah this is somebody i want to watch every morning right
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um so jean-marie was definitely keyed into something there oprah does not like that she's been picked for this job she's horrified at first actually because in her attitude she sees this as another demotion right she had been a co-anchor and then kicked down to doing these like human interest kind of like oh you know there's a a new you know it's the kind of stuff they make fun of an anchorman right there's like a a new puppy parade or some um
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And she's like, that's this. This is like fluff. I want to be doing like I think that I want to be Barbara Walters. I want to be doing something more hard nosed. Part of what disgusts her is that a big thing on this morning show is dialing for dollars, which is a way that news stations would keep people watching.
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Cause you don't want anyone to switch to another channel if they get bored for a second. So you have this thing where periodically throughout the day, people submit their phone numbers to the station and we randomly Oprah draws one out of a bowl and the station will just send money to that person. Yeah. That's how they, and you have to be watching constantly to know if your number gets picked.
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I'm so, so sorry. I'm so, so sorry. So here's the thing. When you're doing a podcast like this, Like it's a mix of you do a bunch of research and you write a bunch of things to get a bunch of facts out that you are as accurate as you can. But you're also having a conversation. So you do stuff like, oh, I'm bringing up the biblical story of Ruth. I don't know much about Ruth.
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Like that's literally how they, they're like bribing people. Please keep watching the show.
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This whole country is one big roulette wheel. And Oprah didn't want to be the croupier.
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I'm sorry. All of the people who would correct me on that will die if they spend more than 11 seconds away from a slot machine. Those are life support systems for a chunk of the populace.
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I think I got it. I don't know. I don't care. I like the word croupier. Speaking of gambling, gamble on whether or not these products actually do what they say they are. They do, probably. This podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. It's a new year and we're all asking ourselves versions of the same question. What do I want my 2025 story to be?
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I only included it in the episode to make a bad joke about Star Wars, the Phantom Menace. And so I made a comment about, I don't know, I think she's got something to do with Moses. She does not. And all of the Bible people got onto me for that one. Yeah. And I'm sorry. How big a part of your audience is the Bible people? A shockingly large number of.
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And we're back. So Oprah's got this job offer to host this morning show. And she's like, this sounds like death, right? This sounds like the end of my career. Like you're trying to fob me off on this thing and I will be locked into this, you know, doing something nobody respects for the rest of my life. The thing that she tells Baker is I'm a news person. I don't want to do a talk show.
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Then she films her first episode and her mind completely changed. The way she describes this is as soon as she sits down and makes an episode of The Morning Show, her opinion on it changes on a dime. And the reason why is because she gets to hang out with famous people. And she's like, oh, wait. Oh. I'm going to read a quote now from the People Profiles biography of Oprah.
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This, she told herself, is heaven. She recalled, I interviewed Benny from All My Children and the Carvel Ice Cream Man and thought, heaven, because you get to say whatever you feel. You truly get to be yourself. Within a year, People Are Talking, which is the morning show, was beating Donahue in Baltimore, the only show in America to do so. Winfrey would never read another headline.
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The minute that first show was over, she told Good Housekeeping, I thought, thank God, I found what I was meant to do. It was like breathing for me. And that's like very interesting to me because I, it's hard to get across. Like Donahue is, he's like the Mr. Beast of his era. If you'll forgive me from trying to like make, he is like the biggest guy on, on daytime TV. And, and,
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Oprah is the like this is the only local show that beats Donahue anywhere in the United States. And it's due to the fact that Oprah is on it. Right. And she has this absolutely unique electric connection with her audience. This is recognized by people with money and television and things start to move very fast for Oprah after this point.
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As Pell scholar Amanda Cullen writes in her thesis paper on Oprah's role in American culture. In 1984, Oprah moved to Chicago, Illinois, to host WLSTV's morning talk show, AM Chicago, which became the number one local talk show, surpassing ratings for the most popular show at the time, Donahue, just one month after she began.
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Well, I think it's because we have a lot of like ex-evangelicals in the audience. Like a lot of people who were raised evangelical and then got better.
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The show earned national syndication in 1986, becoming the highest-rated talk show in television history. In 1988, Oprah established Harpo, Oprah Backwards Studios, a production facility in Chicago. making her the third woman in the American entertainment industry after Mary Pickford and Lucille Ball to own her own studio.
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AM Chicago became the Oprah Winfrey Show and remained the number one talk show for 20 consecutive seasons. So this is like a very rapid explosion in popularity. She goes from getting the show to becoming number one to it being entirely reframed to being just around Oprah. And she establishes a production company and gets like a significant degree of ownership in her own show.
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Which is – like this is one of the things that's most interesting about Oprah is especially for somebody who was raised without any access to money, the sheer degree of like business savvy that she has. The fact that she owns a large piece of everything she's involved in and eventually owns all of it, right?
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Like she is not – like she kind of has this – probably because of how she got fucked over with that first job, this understanding that like if I don't own it, it's not worth shit to me, right? Yeah. Anyway, Oprah.
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Wait a second, because I had started rewatching it, but I'm going to be honest, I didn't finish it because I was tired. Harpo is his name?
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Uh-huh. Yeah. That's I wonder that has to because she already had Harpo the studio at that point. We're going to talk a little bit about the color purple. And Steven Spielberg comes in. I don't know if he's a hero. Well, he's not a hero. He's a weird kind of villain in this story. But we'll get to that in a sec.
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So for about a full generation after 1984, Oprah's fame is a rocket ship. It just keeps going up and up and up. But what made her show so special? Colin's argument is that she offered, quote, despair disguised as entertainment. In other words, she sensationalized and repackaged human suffering for an audience.
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Quote, when Oprah came on the scene, she mirrored this Donahue formula, but with a unique twist of her own. She, unlike Donahue, revealed her own personal struggles and stressed a self-help mantra. The audience loved it, and the Oprah Winfrey show quickly surpassed her predecessor's ratings. Commonly referred to as trash TV, Oprah transformed the talk show genre by turning trash into treasure.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
The same, the same cannot be said for my heinous and unforgivable comments about the March of Dimes, because I made a comment that like, I don't know, I guess it's probably a cancer charity. And then a bunch of people popped in and be like, no, it's for this. And then other people were like, actually, when Oprah was a kid, it didn't do that. It was for a completely different thing.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
And that's kind of... She starts out and she is viewed as like trash. She's viewed as Jerry Springer, right, for a while. Because she's doing that stuff. She's bringing on like... I'm going to bring on a bunch of single underwed mothers who are fighting with their dads. I'm going to bring on like some Klansmen to have an argument with like...
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
You know, whoever on stage and like hope that there's a fistfight or some shit. She's doing pieces of that. But kind of what shifts the meaning of what she's doing is that unlike a Springer or a Donahue kind of character, she's not standing back and being like, look at this zoo I've brought to you. She's like opening up her own difficult, troubled past, which kind of adds this.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
this like shot of vulnerability into the whole mixture that makes it unique. And you can see an immediate, that's why it stands out, right? That's why she rises above these other figures so quickly. Right.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
I have an opinion. And also like, like you people, like all you troubled people that I bring on the show. I also have had my like troubles and I'm not too big to like admit them. Whereas like Jerry Springer would never like break down and cry in front of his audience.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Of course. The one thing I remember from that show is when Geraldo got his nose broken by a chair. I think that was on Jerry. Was that on Geraldo or Jerry? I thought it was. Oh, I think it was. That might have been Geraldo. Was that just on Geraldo? Whatever the case, Geraldo Rivera got his nose broken by a chair, everybody. Never forget.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Yeah, because it's like we're taught it's the same kind of like, quote unquote, trash. But there's less of a voyeuristic attitude because like anytime it starts to lean too much, Oprah will drop some sort of anecdote about her own background. And you're like, oh, OK, so she's really she's on the same level as us. Right. Which she's not. But that's how it feels to the viewer, at least.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
The most significant moment for her career in this period came right after she moved to Chicago to start the Oprah Winfrey show. On Thursday, December 5th, 1985, at 9 a.m., Oprah started her morning show by bringing on a young white abuse victim named Lori.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
She opened up by reading some statistics about sexual abuse, namely that one in three women in the United States had experienced it, and then asked Lori, your father started out fondling you. When did it lead to something other than fondling?
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
she pressed with more and more detailed questions asking what did he say to you how did he tell you what did he tell you and this is all very uncomfortable to see on tv right and even especially like reading the transcript it's there's an element of it that seems a little bit exploitative kind of constantly pushing for those details in front of an audience
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Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
So we're all wrong. Although, again, it had nothing to do with cancer. So I was wrongest. But like you guys were wrong, too. Most of you who criticized me because it wasn't about that then. So fuck you. I love you. I'm sorry. What is it for? It's right now. I think it's for like, let's look up the March of Dimes. Let's get it right this time.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
That said, it also – this is kind of how interviews work. It's just usually when journalists interview people about these kind of experiences, you don't get the direct interview transcript. You get an article where they've kind of taken out the details but also kind of softened aspects of it so that it doesn't feel that uncomfortable.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Oprah is kind of giving you the raw feed and seeing something like this, which is normally a private process rendered as public entertainment, is kind of a new thing. And particularly what's new about it is that because
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Of the way Oprah does this, rather than people feeling like, oh, she's kind of exploding this woman, people from the audience start to join in, spontaneously sharing their own stories of sexual abuse as children. People in the audience start breaking down into tears.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
And then Oprah starts talking about her own sexual abuse, telling everyone, the fact that I had all these unfortunate experiences permeates my life. And I'm going to quote from Kitty Kelly's book here.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
For the next few seconds, Oprah appeared to be discovering for the first time that what she had experienced as a nine-year-old child was indeed rape, a defilement so unspeakable that she had never been able to put it into words until that very moment. Her audience felt as if they were watching the fissures of a soul split open as she admitted her shameful secret.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
And nothing like this had ever happened on daytime TV. There had certainly been like people talking about sexual abuse. But the fact that an episode interviewing a survivor would lead to both members of the audience breaking down and sharing their own stories and then the host doing it. That's a totally novel thing, right? Like that has never happened before on television.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
And it creates a firestorm. The fact that Oprah does this on air becomes national and then international news. And it is people like the people running the station are not happy. Like the actual executives at the station are like, this is supposed to be a happy morning show. This is like for people to watch while they're drinking. What the hell is going on here, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Why are we having stories of child sexual abuse? But the ratings are off the charts. It's one of those things where she both gets in trouble with the people running the station and also this makes her too big to fail. It's impossible to overstate what a massive moment this is for both television as a medium and also for Oprah's career.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
It's a huge risk. Because, like, if the ratings had... Like, her... The people running the station are not happy. If the ratings had not been there, like, she could have gotten fired for this. Yeah. And it's also...
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
It's such a complicated thing to parse out because one thing she's doing is this is one of the very first times in a public space with this much exposure that you have victims of rape talking about it, not in a way that's mediated by psychiatrists or law enforcement or anything like that, but is just like survivors talking about it, right? And at the same time,
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Oprah very sees the reaction to this, sees how well it does. And her immediate takeaway is like sex sells. We need all of the sex episodes, every kind of sex, not just like this, where people are talking about, you know, their trauma, but like whatever we can get that involves sex. That's what's going to make this show. Keep it on top. Right.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Yeah, immature babies, but it was like about polio before that.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
So after this episode, she invites a bunch of female porn stars on to talk about the penises of their co-stars. That episode gets a 30% share of the Chicago audience and provokes even more news articles about Oprah because people are now like, is this smut? How do we talk about what she's doing? Nobody's done anything like this before.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
And a lot of the coverage is super critical, super like, this is incredibly irresponsible. People shouldn't be doing this. But it all just drives viewers right more and the more stuff that she puts out there that gets people shocked and like angry or, you know, titillated, the more people watch her show.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
When reporters interview her about this, Oprah tells them my mandate is to win, admitting that her overriding purpose and bringing victims of sexual violence and sex workers onto her show is to draw eyeballs. Kitty Kelly quotes her former producer, Deborah DeMeo, paraphrasing the way Oprah pitched show ideas to her team. I'd love to get a priest to talk about sex.
Behind the Bastards
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Improve the health of mothers and babies, right?
Behind the Bastards
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I'd love to get one to say, yes, I have a lover. I worship Jesus and her. Yes, I love her. And her name is Carolyn.
Behind the Bastards
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Find me a priest who's fucking some lady named Carolyn and get her on. Get him on. Oh, man. So, yeah, that's like... I don't know. You can, I guess, moralize that however you want. It's so fascinating that it goes from I have like shared my own horrible experience and people connected with that to like, so we got to get some priest who's fucking a lady on this show. Right.
Behind the Bastards
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Like that's that's where that's where this guy has to continue going, you know.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
I'm leaving so much from, like, this really good book, Age of Oprah, out because, like, I just don't even know how to, like, fit everything in. But I have to start this episode with our wonderful guests, the inimitable- Bridget Todd and the glorious, sainted, I don't know, Andrew T. I'm trying to think of new adjectives to praise y'all with as we come in.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Yeah, I never say stuff during... One of the things you learn about yourself doing this is how often in daily conversation, and we all do this, you just say things that are a part of your understanding of the world that are not right.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
But also all of them sell because her vulnerability and authenticity keeps her. It's a huge part of her ongoing popularity. But so is the sex. So is the really sleazy stuff. They never stop doing that. Right. I guess the answer is all of it sells and Oprah has very good instincts. You know, wherever we want to land morally on what she's doing here, this shit works.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Now, it is it is worth noting that she is depicted in the media. This is very hard for like I had trouble grasping this because by the time I was aware of Oprah, she had such a different like reputation in the 80s. She in late 70s and 80s, she's Jerry Springer, right? She is not a respectable media figure to a lot of people. That is not how she's talked about to a lot of people.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Around this time, an article in McCall's magazine on the Oprah Winfrey show described what it did best as, quote, get him in the gut show topics, sexual disorders, battered wives, self-mutilation, overweight people and the people who hate them, you know, all that kind of stuff. Oprah often would say nothing is taboo, and she meant it.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Winfrey's own struggles with weight loss and gain quickly became a central part of the show as well. We opened this series with the infamous Wagon of Fat incident from 1998. That was gross and bad.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
But it's also worth noting, if you want to put that into the context, like how we could get to something that gross, it comes after a decade of constant public obsession with every pound Oprah lost or gained. And this is where we're going to talk about the color purple again. So...
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
As I've noted, Oprah struggles with, you know, binge eating, with her body self-image from adolescence on, like a lot of us, like maybe everybody. She has a habit of stress eating and was noted by co-workers to binge to really uncomfortable levels during parties and the like. When she becomes a TV star in the mid-80s, people start talking about this.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Like it becomes both in gossip columns and shit like the fucking, you know, National Enquirer and stuff. There's like articles about, you know, stories of Oprah and eating and whatnot. And she kind of pivots on this to become radically open to her audience about her dieting and her struggles with weight gain.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Now, this helps drive her popularity, but it's also it both is in part a reaction to and also helps lead to shit like this 1985 appearance on The Tonight Show with Joan Rivers, which I'm going to play for you now. This is one of the most uncomfortable things I've seen on television.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
uh because that's like life we all pick up a bunch of bullshit like the number of times i just don't think you should have to apologize right now i i i take that burden from you i'm sorry for robert but he's innocent all i'm saying is record everything you've ever you ever say in a single day of conversations with people and then run them by a fact checker and you will be amazed at how much of like the load bearing wrong
Behind the Bastards
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Okay. Well, why are eating disorders so rampant? Is it because these are our parents? Effectively?
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Part of what you're seeing there is Oprah being a professional, because when she describes this moment, she's like, yeah, I was not happy. The laughing and stuff was all faked. I was very unhappy that we were having this conversation, obviously. So rude. Yeah. No, it's like I can't believe the kind of shit that Joan's saying there.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
It was made like this whole situation was made worse at the time because like not long after this, while she is like doing this very famous publicized diet that gets announced on the Joan Rivers show, like the first big thing she does after this is she's sent to Ethiopia to report on Chicago's efforts to help the famine.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
So the story is simultaneously Oprah trying to lose 30 pounds and Oprah reporting on a famine in Ethiopia. Not great vibes. One of her colleagues asks, like, is this kind of gross? And Oprah replies, you're right. It's sick, isn't it?
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Now, one fair critique of these episodes is that we're not going to go into super clinical detail about all of the different fad diets and dangerous weight loss misinformation that comes out of the Oprah Winfrey show. Part of why is because the podcast Maintenance Face has done a ton of that, so you can check all of that out. I think part of it is just that, like, you get the idea here, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
It's both important to note that, like, Oprah, like, that clip there, there's a lot of pushing On everyone listening to that, feel bad about your body. Be ashamed if you've gained weight. Embrace dangerous strategies to lose it. Oprah has a lot, and Oprah will admit it today, a lot of guilt in spreading that.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
But also, she is in such a unique position where like, I don't know if there's ever been a single person that so many Americans have been so obsessed with their body size. Like, it's kind of hard not to... Not for that to affect you in a bad way. Like, we really were insane about Oprah. Yeah. I don't know what else to say about that.
Behind the Bastards
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Fat pillars of your reality are things you absolutely believe without thinking that are not true. It's amazing.
Behind the Bastards
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I will say, in order to kind of point out the way in which people talked about her, one of the most prominent TV critics of the day, Richard Blackwell, described Oprah as bumpy, frumpy, and downright lumpy on the cover of TV Guide.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
So right around the time this is all happening, Oprah is on the Tonight Show, like right around when she's on the Tonight Show, she is auditioning for a role in The Color Purple. After the episode where, again, this is not as friendly a situation as it appears on the air, she's very unhappy about this.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
She's stress-eaten, she gains more weight, and then she checks herself into a fat farm, an emergency weight loss boot camp type program to lose the weight. Steven Spielberg, who had directed the movie, finds out and he calls Oprah. And Spielberg says, I hear you're at a fat farm. You lose a pound, you could lose this part.
Behind the Bastards
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I don't know where I should. Yeah. Yeah.
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She, she hugely leans in, right? Like she does. She does. She, in part, she makes the specifics of like how much she's gaining or how much she is losing and what diet she is doing. Um, Part of the show, a lot of the money that comes in is as a result of diet advice. She has deals and gets millions and millions from groups like Weight Watchers, right? Pushing a lot of different diets.
Behind the Bastards
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She gets paid and also just like fills airtime and makes money that way. Putting on different diet experts and diet books and a lot of that stuff is extremely dangerous. It is both. She is being. victimized by the whole media environment and also profiting on that by pushing the same kind poison on everyone else. Right. Like that. That's what's happening here. Right.
Behind the Bastards
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The pronunciation. So for this episode, I spent almost three hours looking at Oprah's, one of her charity's tax returns. None of that made it into the episode. Turned out not to be interesting. But you know what I didn't remember to do was look up whether or not Ruth had anything to fucking do with Moses. Like-
Behind the Bastards
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Like it is a story of both victimization and profiting off of putting some pretty toxic. And, you know, the thing she's doing right now is at least copying the sum of that. Right. Right now, copying the sum of that while also getting money from Weight Watchers. So I don't know. I don't know where we want to put that out.
Behind the Bastards
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You should never have had a hot dog-based diet. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
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yeah uh anyway um so uh she gives up after or at least the way that oprah tells the story after spielberg's like if you lose a pound you could lose this part oprah decides like it and gives up on getting the role uh and keeps the role um and yeah she winds up doing very well she gets like it's like massively you know like one of the interesting things about oprah is she could have had just a whole career as a major hollywood star
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Like she just decides to keep being Oprah Winfrey because that turns out to be much better for her than being like a movie star. But she's very like has a very successful acting career starting out.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah. Yeah. And it's it's so fascinating to me that like that would be for for most people like, oh, shit, I've made it. I've like been in this highly praised Hollywood. You know, that's the rest of my life is I'm going to be in movies. Oprah's like, no, no, I I know a better way to get really famous. So while this is going on, her movie career is starting.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Oprah is continuing to, you know, be trash TV, right? That's really this era. And sex is not the only thing that she finds out that sells. Racism gets people to tune in. So during Black History Month in the 80s, Oprah started booking KKK members to show up wearing sheets and hoods.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Intermittently, she would book guests with something important to say, too, like when she did the women with sexual disorders episode and talked to a woman who had never orgasmed. Oprah brought in a sex surrogate to coach her on air, which elicited a flood of complaints as Kitty Kelly documents. Yesterday's show was gross, said one woman. I don't know how else to describe it. Absolutely degrading.
Behind the Bastards
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There are millions of women who never experience sexual pleasure, said Oprah. We had 633 calls from women yesterday after the show on the computer. We made lots of women feel they are not alone. And this is what makes, especially in this era, it's always back and forth, right? Because there's this mix of like, oh, that's some of the grossest TV I've heard about.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
And like, oh, you're really pushing out some very unhealthy attitudes towards dieting into society. And also... It's incredibly important for people to know about stuff like sexual dysfunction and that there's like coaching for that and to not feel ashamed. Like this is a thing that we can talk about in public. And Oprah's always so much of both of those things.
Behind the Bastards
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So that said, when for every episode like this, you'd get where it's like, yeah, I'm glad someone in the fucking 80s was talking about like sexual dysfunction and the fact that there are treatments available that you can and should seek. You go right from that to Oprah being like, also, the devil is coming for your children. And this is going to get us onto one of my favorite subjects.
Behind the Bastards
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How Oprah Winfrey helped start the satanic panic.
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Yes, but first, you know who else is the devil? But like the sexy devil. Like the devil when he's played by that guy who also played the president in the Command and Conquer Red Alert 2, you know? That guy. I'm just nodding. You're just nodding. Everyone's just nodding. Nobody else remembers that guy. He played the devil once. Look him up.
Behind the Bastards
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I know. Again, I love polio, and I feel like... Because we got a lot of my favorite writers from polio.
Behind the Bastards
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We're back. Four people are so happy I just made that reference. Everyone else has stopped listening forever. Satanic panic. In 1989, a Canadian psychiatrist and con man named Lawrence Pazder wrote a book about his patient, who he later married, Michelle Smith, claiming he'd recovered her memories of participating in elaborate, impossible satanic rituals while being abused for the devil's gain.
Behind the Bastards
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This book, Michelle Remembers, helped launch the Satanic Panic, a religious moral panic that ruined hundreds of lives and laid much of the groundwork for QAnon to take off today. We maybe don't get the Trump presidency without the Satanic Panic. That was some necessary groundwork, right? Right. You got to put in those load-bearing pillars. And this is where that's coming from.
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And Oprah helps get it off the ground. She brings Lawrence and Michelle on to her show, along with several other prominent... If you are a satanic panic con person, right, who is like... I worship the devil, I sacrificed babies. Oprah will let you say whatever to, at this point, literally tens of millions of people are tuning into her show.
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I want to start with a clip of a 1986 episode, which wasn't about the satanic panic, but contained a sting for their upcoming episode on devil worshipers. And I want to play this just because, you know, we talk, I throw to ads in a lot of, you know, different ways here, but I got to bow to the masterclass here.
Behind the Bastards
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Also, we're going to talk about sex some more. We should have thrown to ads now, Sophie. Sorry. That would have been the way to do it.
Behind the Bastards
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You got to learn from the masters here. Now, I'm going to play or I'm going to have Sophie play another clip. I think from closer to 1989 or 1990, most of Oprah's early shows are not preserved in a convenient way. So I did my best here.
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welcome back to behind the bastards we're on page 18 of 52 i know a podcast where robert evans accidentally wrote 20 almost 24 000 words about oprah for this these episodes the the normal length of a book is 50 000 words so half of a book about fucking oprah And, like, I was having panic attacks at the end of this of, like, oh, my God, I'm leaving so much out.
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Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah. They Clark Kinted her. Yeah. She takes those glasses off. Her family's not going to recognize it. The devil can't catch her.
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And I don't say this to shame her. I'm shaming the 90s. You can't tell a bad wig from normal hair in like 1990.
Behind the Bastards
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So yeah, Oprah is literally just doing the blood libel on daytime TV on the most popular talk show in the country. And we're going to continue here because it just gets, I am shocked that this was allowed. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
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First off, do we think it makes it better for Oprah to offhandedly be like, I've never heard of Jewish people sacrificing babies before. Anyway, tell me about these Jewish baby sacrifices.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, like, as a middling journalist, my first question would be, are you not worried you're going to get arrested because you just admitted to murdering a baby on television? Yeah. You know that's a crime, right? Yeah. There's no statute of limitations on killing a baby.
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Come on on the air, tell us about it. You know, you get pieces of this. Nobody will directly say like, we just, we're full of shit, right? We just lied. You know, but you can tell that what's happening. You get this, like that previous clip where it was like, I want a priest who did this and this and this, right? Because it'll sell an episode.
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She's like, I want someone talking about sacrificing babies. And you know what exists in the world? And you don't have to coach people on this. If you let enough people know you can get on TV in front of 20 million people, if you talk about sacrificing a baby, there will be someone whose desperation for attention is so high that they will come on television and claim to have sacrificed a baby.
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That's a healthy person, well-adjusted. Help them spread their message. Yes. We love Oprah Winfrey doing things that are, again, as a guy who's read a lot of Nazi propaganda, almost indistinguishable from Nazi propaganda. Right. This is specifically one of the major justifications of the Holocaust. Jews are abducting Christian babies and sacrificing them to the devil. That is... Really bad to do.
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I really can't emphasize enough how dangerous this thing is. And if you look at shit like in QAnon, right, where there's a like a third of the country believes that the Democratic Party are literally eating babies to gain everlasting youth, which like just look at Nancy Pelosi, guys. She's not she's not getting everlasting youth like her hip just broke. this is unequivocal bastardism, right?
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Just tell me, give me some detail. And it's, It's so fucked up that like on one hand, when you're doing this about like you are talking to someone about their difficulty, you know, I've never experienced an orgasm. You're asking these kind of questions to get them to say more. That is making other people with the problem of whom there are many feel less alone.
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Same thing with like sexual assault survivors. And then the fact that you have absolutely no compunction with, like, I'll do the same thing for lies about juice-sacrificing babies. Fascinating stuff.
Behind the Bastards
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You know, here's the thing. Because Oprah never really trained in journalism very much. I don't know... if she maybe believes this, if she thinks these are the same, like, that's kind of the thing to me. But also, I want to be like, you are clearly brilliant. You are a once-in-a-lifetime genius, at least at some things. But also, as we've all seen...
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We've all become increasingly aware of people who are like, well, you're clearly brilliant at one thing. And now your access to Twitter has made us all aware that you don't understand anything else.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
It may just be that Oprah is a once in a lifetime mind when it comes to the business of entertainment and also honestly believed this woman was sacrificing babies with her family. I don't know. Now, that said, the fact that we have quotes from her being like, hey, get me a priest who said this, makes me kind of lean more in the direction of, no, Oprah knew, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
That some of this, a lot of this is bullshit. And it was just trying to get eyeballs on the TV. I think it's often a mix. I don't know how much she's able to parse it herself. I want to talk about another incident that...
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
kind of really makes me go back and forth which is the mcmartin preschool satanic abuse scandal now we cover this in our episodes on the satanic panic but the gist of the case is that a bunch of parents became convinced that their children more than 300 of them in all had been systematically abused by a satanic cult headed by the mcmartin family who ran a private preschool the initial allegations which included claims that one of the alleged molesters could fly
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
were made by Judy Johnson, who suffered from schizophrenia and was a hardcore alcoholic. From her allegations, a community hysteria developed, which was stoked by an abuse therapy clinic run by Key McFarlane, who provided investigations that pushed children with leading questions towards generating allegations. A whole lot of people had their lives ruined by this.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
And despite the fact that the investigation literally dug up the ground around the school to try to find secret satanic torture tunnels, no one was ever convicted of molesting any kids. And people I don't I hate relitigating this because people are always like, well, but they did find tunnels. No, they didn't.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
They found trash buried underneath the school because a farm had been there and people bury trash everywhere. All of the shit that was buried in there was stuff from the era at which there was a farm there where people were burying trash. The dead animal bones. That's just what happens in the ground, guys. That's just how things are. It's not.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Again, it's one of those. And like, I'm not saying no kid ever got molested at this or other preschools like that. A lot of times the satanic abuse does come from there's a real sexual abuse problem. And then it gets turned into something that absolutely isn't happening. And again, shitloads of innocent people get wrapped into it, too.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Yeah, I don't think I'm not saying that was happening at McMartin, because, again, nobody got convicted of anything.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Yeah. And in fact, church leaders, Southern Baptist leaders, Catholic priests, police officers, these are the people who are molesting kids. And honestly, more than any of those, their own parents and relatives. That's who does it.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
A cousin and an uncle, huh? Sorry, what? They can fucking fly. What do they need tunnels for?
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Yeah. So as this in this case winds on for like a couple of years, Oprah, it is constantly on the show. They are following. This is like the O.J. Simpson trial, you know, before the O.J. Simpson trial for Winfrey in here. Like they are following every twist and turn in this case breathlessly. And when these people don't get convicted, they're Oprah and her audience are outraged.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
She refuses to accept this. She brings a bunch of the children and parents and even some of the jurors onto the show to relitigate the case. And she's not the only person doing this. She's part of a trend in daytime TV. Geraldo Rivera does the same thing. So does Sally Jesse Raphael. But as LA Times columnist Howard Rosenberg noted, compared to them, Geraldo was as judicious as the Supreme Court.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
In other words, he saying Geraldo's coverage of this was responsible next to Oprah's and Geraldo Rivera is not a responsible man. I don't know how else to describe him. Again, when he got hit in the nose with that chair, it was the best thing that ever happened to this country.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Quote, and here's Rosenberg, the level of fairness here was typified by Winfrey's admission that she would have made a poor McMartin juror because I would say the children said it. All right, you're right. The studio audience applauded. You see pieces of this, too, that like if the children say it, it's true. If a mom says it, it's true.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
It's like, no, you have to have an evidentiary standard when you are accusing huge numbers of people of hideous crimes. You can't just say we put a bunch of kids in a room and wouldn't let them leave until they told stories of satanic molestation tunnels and then lock people up forever. That's a bad way to run a society. Yeah, I don't know. It's good stuff. That's so wild.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
So while she's doing this, she has all these people on. She tells a former McMartin student to tell the audience what she told the jury over 16 days of testimony. And while this is happening, you're getting these frequent shots of the audience shaking their heads and listening to these horrible stories. One of the moms tells Winfrey, I'm outraged at this verdict. And yeah, it's just...
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
It's very irresponsible. I don't know. I think it's probably bad for there to be a case where all of these people are rung through the mud on television, then acquitted, and then have a whole show where you're like, but actually they were still guilty. These people molest, these innocent people molested a shitload of kids, are running a, like their lives are already ruined, Oprah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Yep. Well, how's everyone feeling so far?
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
I mean, it was pretty bad before, but finally Oprah's doing some evident bad. The worm has turned, you would say. Ugh. Anyway, plugs?
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Check out Yo, Is This Racist? Check out There Are No Girls on the Internet and find our our our hosts online and let them know your favorite moment from the Oprah Winfrey show. Bombard us all on blue sky with your favorite Oprah clips. Don't do that.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
We're going to supercharge Bridget. Just let you loose. Until next time, folks, don't put people up in front of the country and tell them that you sacrifice babies for the devil.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
So when we left off, Oprah had gotten her first radio gig with a radio DJ who was surprisingly not problematic. John Heidelberg. People online have been pointing out other stuff about him. Apparently fine. So congratulations, John Heidelberg.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
When we're talking about DJs being problematic, I'm talking about old timey radio DJs, because if you look into the history of like very famous old timey radio DJs, not a lot of them were great people. But apparently John was so good for you, John Heidelberg. You win our behind the bastards award for not being a sex best as a DJ in the 1970s.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
You're the only person who's won that award, by the way.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Yeah, that is a club of you are the loneliest man in history. So the next several years of Oprah's life involved a pretty boring time in college. We're not going to get into it, but she starts doing beauty contests and she's very good at beauty contests. One of the biggest moments in her early life is she wins the Miss Fire Prevention Contest. Now... I know what you're all saying.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
What's a saint? Do I have to die? I think you actually have to die. No, you don't. No, you don't. I think you don't have to die. I'm down. You're probably okay. Just let me know. I'm down. Bridget, you could also be a saint, but I just don't get major Catholic vibes from you.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
What the fuck is misfire prevention? And to understand this, you have to know that back in the 1970s, everything was flammable. People only wore petroleum products. Every couch was made out of petroleum products. And everyone fell asleep with a lit cigarette in their mouth. So everything and everyone was constantly on fire. Right. Yeah. So this was a real problem. Also, everyone was on benzos.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
So you would it was like every week in your neighborhood, either a drunk day labor, like either either the husband would come home from like his work in a fucking law factory and pass out drunk with a cigarette in his mouth and wipe out the entire family or. Or the housewife would take too many benzos and pass out with a lit cigarette in her mouth and wipe out the whole family.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
But either whatever was happening, fire was killing absolutely everyone. And so we were like, we have to find the hottest person in order to represent not burning your family to death because you fell asleep with a lit cigarette in your mouth. And Oprah was that person. Isn't that nice?
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
We're fine with killing people so many other ways, but all these house fires are really cutting into our business.
Behind the Bastards
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It probably will. God, I can go for a nice asbestos couch. To know that I'm both like sitting down on the couch to watch horrible news happen and also shortening my time on this earth. Beautiful. Oprah was the first black woman to win the Miss Fire Prevention Contest. And that's great. During questioning by a panel of judges, she said that she wanted to be a journalist like Barbara Walters.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
She was asked what she would do if she was given a million dollars. And everyone else in the contest expressed kind of like, I'll help the poor. I'll help my family. Whereas Oprah just admitted, I would spend, spend, spend. I'd just be a spending fool.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Now, this was definitely a legitimate win, Miss Fire Prevention. However, her next big contest win, the Miss Black Nashville contest, was a little bit shadier. Everyone involved about it seems to agree that another girl, Maud, had been a better contestant. But Oprah shocked everyone by winning. And the promoter of the event would later claim that several people complained to him.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Oh, you did? Well, shit. Okay. I'm going to redirect the habit that I've got headed for Andrew, and it's going to go to you.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
And so he did a recount of the votes and found out that Maud had, in fact, been the rightful winner. but her name had gotten switched with Oprah's by somebody for unknown reasons. Yes. Now, we don't know what happened. Some people have theorized Oprah set the whole thing up somehow.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
I think there's at least an equally good probability based on just like the vibes I get that the promoter of the event kind of had a weird thing for Oprah. His name was Gordon L. Greco Brown, and I don't trust that name. I just don't trust that name. Like... That is the name of like a used car dealer from fucking Encina who also happens to be a neo-Nazi.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
I'm not saying that's Gordon El Greco Brown. I'm just saying that's the name Gordon. That's what that conjures. Gordon L like the letter L?
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
yeah yeah he that that man has so many different opinions on the various coke dealers in his area that he has to keep track of them in a notebook um anyway when oprah was notified i'm not saying that about the literal i'm not slandering the actual man i'm just saying that's how his name sounds um anyway oprah gets notified of this error that maude really won and she says like well it you guys gave me the award i'm not giving it back
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
in Kitty Kelly's kind of mean biography a lot is made about the fact that Oprah like doesn't give this up and I don't know I don't really care like you handed her the award so she's not wrong to be like fuck you guys Oprah goes to Tennessee State University or TSU, which is a black college. But she doesn't go to the more prestigious and nearby Fisk University, known locally as the Black Harvard.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
I think this is just a matter of expense. Oprah seems to be insecure about this later. She spends her social time hanging out at Fisk. Her dad is like, look, you know, I could afford to send her to TSU. And so I did. I will say, because Kitty Kelly makes a lot about like, yeah, Oprah couldn't get into the good school. Hack it. I've read like from the anecdotes we get about TSU.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
It doesn't sound great. There's a there's a good one from one of her professors, Dr. W.D. Cox, that and this this is what this guy, Dr. Cox, this actual professor says later about teaching Oprah. And he I think he thinks this makes him sound funny. During our stay in the city, a girl was reported raped on the second floor. I told a lie on Oprah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
If Oprah had known about the rape, she'd have shouted, you who I'm up here. Oprah didn't take too kindly to that joke. She was quite provoked. You guys catch that? He is saying a girl got raped. And I said, hey, Oprah, you would like that.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
The whole joke is, I bet you'd like get like, that's wild stuff.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
He describes it as enjoying a little foolishness at Oprah's expense. Oh, he's still going. That's not what that is. A little foolishness would be like, you know, talking about, I don't know, the fact that she's obviously wants to be a star, making a little bit of joke about how she likes attention. Not like that. This is not.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Literal decades. Jesus Christ. Oh, man. You just know, I'm guessing based on his age, that she goes to see him in an old folks home and his fucking kids come in. They're like, oh, no, get her out of here. We can't let dad be talking to a journalist.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Everyone who's made it on time for Behind the Bastards recordings and sat through a whole episode as a guest has performed a miracle.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
So, Oprah, the big standout detail from her college years is she plays Coretta Scott King in a local production of The Tragedy of Martin Luther King Jr. And the main reason this is relevant is that a reviewer for the school paper reviews this play by saying Martin Luther King murdered twice.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
So and and our Russia's brother, David, provided an even more telling glimpse of kind of what their childhood was like under Big Rush. My dad stood out. Sometimes he provoked people who didn't agree with him to violence. Once, for example, he was in a bar slamming FDR and a couple guys jumped him and beat him up. I never did ask him the details of that one, but it was a couple guys.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Not a fair fight. I know that much. I have to assume he deserved to get the shit kicked out of him.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
I'm going to guess he was saying something like the people who got screwed over in the Great Depression deserve to starve to death. We shouldn't be helping them. That's going to be my guess. And he got the shit kicked out of him by some WPA guys, something like that.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
That's a fair fight. You're big, you know? Yeah. He's not Little Rush. He's 300 pounds. They're probably each about $1.50, you know? Fair fight. Exactly. Fair fight by mass.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
So our rush was born into the Eisenhower years, which will probably always be remembered as like the high point of both capitalism and the United States. This period of peak American exceptionalism imprinted itself deeply on Russia's growing brain. His father was made a special ambassador to India's legal system. Their family got their first television. Yeah, yeah. What does that mean?
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
I think it means India was newly independent in the Eisenhower years, right? The UK had just left. They had just partitioned with Pakistan. They're developing their own independent legal system, and they're a democracy that was heavily based, at least initially, on the US.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
So the president picked guys who were established lawyers like Big Rush and also established Republicans to be kind of help set up the Indian legal system. Wow. Yeah. That's kind of what happened. So, yeah, his father's a big man in Republican politics. Rush grows up seeing in the period where America is undeniably like like literally is half of the global economy. Right.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
That's a very significant thing for him. So the family in the 50s gets their first TV. But radio is still the dominant method of entertainment in those days. And Rush's childhood and early adolescence coincided with the birth of rock and roll and the absolute peak of cultural relevance for DJs. My dad grew up at a pretty similar period of time. He's like seven or eight years younger than Rush.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And he grew up. The only thing my dad ever wanted to be was a DJ. And he wasn't a radio DJ for like 20, 30 years. You know, that was like the coolest thing that you could do. Right. You didn't have Spotify. You didn't have the Internet. People learned about new music from DJs who were kind of like picking what they were going to play on the radio.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
It was like the absolute raddest thing you could be. And that's what Rush like. He idolizes these big DJs of the time. And that's all he wants to be for basically his entire young life is a DJ. Yeah. Now, when Rush was three, Brown versus the Board of Education was ruled on by the Supreme Court, which led to the integration of U.S. schools.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Now, Ziv Chaffetz doesn't write anything specific in the biography about how Rush Sr. talked about race to his son.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
We don't get any of that information. Yeah. And I'm not necessarily blaming Chaffetz for that because I think the Rush family is very PR savvy. They don't talk about it. You know, I don't know who he would have gotten that info from. But our Rush would have definitely picked up on the great deal of conflict in Cape Girardeau over racial matters.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Missouri is an odd state in that it is both Midwestern and Southern. During the Civil War, it was split between Yankee and Confederate sympathizers. And the town that Rush grew up in had monuments to the dead of both sides. There was tremendous resistance to the idea of integration of schools in Missouri and in Cape Girardeau.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And Ziv Chaffetz, to his credit, writes about this, quote, In 1952, Cape built its white students a new school, Central High. Blacks continued to attend Cobb High School, but the Supreme Court and basketball changed that. Cape Girardeau took its high school basketball very seriously and sometimes contended for the state title. Wow. Yeah. Cape Girardeau is a very racist town.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And kind of more to the point, we don't know exactly what Rush's dad would have said about any of this. We don't know that he would have supported the burning down of the black school. We don't know that he wouldn't, though. That's right. That's right. And the conservatives were definitely more on the don't integrate side of things, right?
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Now, a compromise was eventually reached in Cape Girardeau, and the compromise was that black kids would be allowed to attend Central High, but they would be put in special classes that were taught by former teachers of Cobb, the school that had been burned down. This was kind of integrating by not integrating. So there were black and white kids in the same school, but not in the same classes.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And this is the way things were in Cape Girardeau when Rush Limbaugh started school. So, yeah, that's you can infer from that what you will based on some of the things Rush Limbaugh says and does later in life. I think we're missing some important information about what his dad thought about black people.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
I don't think he was burned down high school. He might have done it like that. That is rampant and irresponsible speculation on my part, but also the only reason I think he wouldn't have is that he wouldn't have been able to run away from it in my from what I can tell. He didn't do well in that fight is all I'm saying is.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
So Rush had an upbringing that would have been fairly standard for a rich kid of his era. He played basketball. He did chores. He had plenty of friends. He was not an overly active kid. He did not like sports. He hated his one year in the Cub Scouts. Rush Limbaugh hates the outdoors his entire life.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
He did not like school, but he was popular, largely because his family was rich and had a huge basement with a pool table and a bunch of other luxuries. The kids Rush hung out with during this time give us some of our best hints about the darker elements of his childhood. One of them told Zeev Chaffetz, quote, Rush's dad didn't suffer fools lightly.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
He was always very disapproving of Rush's ambitions to have a career in radio. Rush's mom was a kind, gentle person, but his dad could be pretty rough. He was not above calling down Russian David in front of their friends. And when he did it, there was a string of expletives attached. I saw that happen many times. So kind of abusive, not I don't think by the standards of the time.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And I haven't heard any that he was like reading his kids or anything, but kind of mentally abusive. Again, probably more or less in line with what most most men of his social class would have been like to their kids. You know, I don't think this was abnormal.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yeah, I think most of them.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yeah, it's better than humiliating you in front of your friends when you say something he disagrees with. So every one of Russia's early friends that I've seen interviewed is very consistent about the fact that he was not political from an early age. He rarely, if ever, talked politics and he did not express strong beliefs.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
One of his friends even remembers him as a particularly good debater in school because, quote, he could argue either side of a proposition without missing a beat. When he did express political opinions, they were generally conservative. One friend noted that the only time he saw child Rush express a strong political sentiment was after the 1960 presidential election when Rush was nine.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Quote, Rush wrote on a drywall, Kennedy won. Darn. Nixon lost. Shucks. So. Grows up conservative because his dad is conservative, but it's clearly politics is not a big part of his life from an early age. He's not like Ben Shapiro. Right. We're from the get go. He's being sort of like focused into becoming a political commentator. That does not happen with Rush Limbaugh.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yeah. So Rush got his first gig at age 13, working at a downtown barbershop. He later told his biographer that he liked the gig because it gave him a chance to talk to adults who he preferred to his peers because I didn't think kids were interesting. When it came to girls, Rush was as awkward as you'd expect. He was bad at sports, heavyset and not at all smooth.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
In his 1993 biography, The Rush Limbaugh Story, biographer Paul Colford recalls one particularly embarrassing incident during a game of spin the bottle when Rush was a teenager. He spun the bottle and it stopped pointing at the prettiest girl at the party, which is how she's described in this anecdote. Quote, she looked at him and gasped. Couldn't do it. Not with him, that is.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And everyone in the room witnessed his humiliation. It was a wound he would nurse forever.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
that's nice thank you biographer for that and it's one of those things you know I think there's I'm sure this has an impact on the kind of man he becomes but also I think most of us have a moment like that where we have a crush on some person of the opposite or the same sex and they're not into us and it's horribly embarrassing it's a pretty normal
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And most of us don't grow up to destroy civil society and the environment.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
We've all been there. And Rush was there, too. Obviously, this is a part of whatever toxic stew gets cooked up at him. But I don't know. Like, it's one of those things I think you can kind of lean too much on. Oh, this is why he was always forever humiliated by this thing. And that's why he became the man he was like, well, we all have that in our past and we all don't do this shit.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yeah. And, you know, there are a lot of other bald men in that world who don't become super. So Big Rush wanted his son to become a lawyer or to do something else with a similar sort of gravitas. Right. The Limbaugh's were big men in Cape Girardeau. They were kind of like the the the primary, like the most prominent men in the entire town.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And he Big Rush wanted his son to follow in his footsteps and do something respectable. Right. Didn't have to be a lawyer, go into politics, do something important, right? Do something that he can brag about to the other rich guys. Now, the fact that young Rush only ever wanted to be on the radio infuriated his father.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
For his part, Rush seems to suspect that his love of radio was born in part from his hatred of school. Quote, my mother would be fixing me breakfast and I'd be listening to the guy on the radio. He'd be having fun and I was preparing to go to prison.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of kids. I'll take my adopted hometown, Portland, for example. A lot of kids there who hate school. They don't destroy the entire planet. They just break Starbucks windows on the weekends.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
You can just buck up a Starbucks if you're nursing some rage at the educational industrial complex or whatever. So despite his irritation, Big Rush clearly did love his son. And when Little Rush was 16, his dad used some of his local clout to get his son a part-time job at the local radio. station. Rush started doing what you'd today call internship.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
You know, fetching coffee, cleaning up, handling odd tasks here and there, and eventually he was allowed to actually introduce and play records on air. The summer before his senior year of high school, Big Rush paid for his son to attend a six-week radio engineering course in Dallas. This was a big moment for Rush. He was away from home for the first time, living in a boarding house.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
He started smoking cigarettes, thank God, and he got a license that allowed him to actually And he got a license that allowed him to actually run the radio without adult supervision. Once he had this, station management let him hang out alone all weekend and weekdays after school, playing records and for the first time presenting himself to an audience on air. So he gets started.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And this is one of those things. His dad, clearly there are some abusive elements of their relationship. His dad is not supportive of Rush's radio career, but also his dad doesn't think it's a good idea. but also enables him, right? Like, not just gets him a job, but pays for him to get educated. So again, this is not a guy, I'm sure, you know, he had his frustrations with his father.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
This is not a guy who grows up with a dad who just doesn't get him and refuses to support him. This is a very supportive upbringing this kid has, even though his father's not. Yeah, exactly. Um... Yeah. So Rush, you know, becomes kind of famous within his, you know, the teen set at his town because he's the guy with the radio show and in high school. And he was not at all political at this point.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
His most well-known bit involved reading the daily beauty tips that the Associated Press sent out back then, which he like and he would like kind of mock the beauty tips because he thought it was silly that the AP was sending out daily beauty tips, which is fair. It is that is a silly thing for the AP to do.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Now, Rush's professional idol at this point was a guy named Larry Lujak, a Chicago DJ who was famous for his sense of humor and comedic stylings. Rush later called him the only person I ever copied. Lujak was known for audibly shuffling papers during his monologues and different bits, a tactic Limbaugh copied and used repeatedly through his decades on air.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
um and as in kind of his signature bit no no no it wasn't a bit but it was like a thing he would do to emphasize that like i've got evidence or i've got information here you know it was a thing rush and it was a big rush limbaugh thing you know it's it's how you convince people who maybe aren't that credible that you you have good information right like look i have papers yeah he's been handed he's
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
No, he was not. And he fucking hated Rush Limbaugh. Because when Rush got famous in the early 90s, Rush was like, yeah, Larry Lujac is the only man I ever copied. And they asked Lujac about it, and his response was basically, fuck that guy. Bless you.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Good man, yeah. You can't pick who finds you influential, you know?
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
So back in those days, again, being a radio DJ was pretty much the coolest thing you could do. And Rush's side job made him very popular at high school. He even signed autographs on a few occasions. The work was intoxicating, and Rush seemed to know at once that this was what he wanted to dedicate his life to doing. Obviously, his ambitions did not make his father happy.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And during Rush's last year of childhood, his dad would constantly yell at him for wanting to waste his life on the radio. No amount of paternal ill will was enough to pull Rush Limbaugh away from his dream, though. He was miserable at home with his father after graduating. He enrolled in a local college just to please the old man, but he couldn't actually bring himself to go to school very often.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Sometimes his mother would drive him to college just to make sure that he went. Rush came of age during one of the most exciting and tumultuous periods in U.S. history. I mean, he's he's literally becoming an adult in like 1968, I think, like some shit went down that year. You know, there's a lot of teenagers doing some exciting things.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Now, given how Rush turned out, you might expect him to have been active and involved in the politics of his time. But he was not. And to hear him tell it now or to hear him tell it when he related this to his biographer, the civil rights movement in the Vietnam years basically all passed him by. He never attended political rallies. He only dimly remembers hearing of Bobby Kennedy's death.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, his radio station asked him to help send out news reports for the local NBC affiliate because there were uprisings all around the country. And Rush did this, but he didn't actually engage with the news. He was not actually interested in In what was happening, he was just interested in kind of the business of how news was disseminated.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Quote, this is what he said later. I remember talking to them about the broadcast business, NBC. I was 17, playing records on the radio, not commenting on news. I don't recall feeling any concern. So that is how, again, a lot of privilege. There are massive race based uprisings in a number of U.S. cities.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Hundreds of thousands of National Guard troops are called up as after the civil rights leader is is assassinated. The country is on the brink of open conflict in Rush Limbaugh. I don't give a fuck. Like, I just want to play my records. You know, he's just a rich white kid, you know, in the middle of Missouri. He doesn't give a shit.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
He doesn't even have strong hard right sympathies. He just doesn't give a fuck about it.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Welcome to Behind the Bastards, the podcast that I continually fail to introduce like a professional, which is particularly shameful this week because our guest is a very professional voice artist, Mr. Paul F. Tompkins. Hi, thank you for having me. Thank you for being here, Paul. You are the voice of a lot of characters that that that a lot of people enjoy.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yeah, and it is important that he's not just taking the right-wing side of things. We're like, well, yeah, fuck Martin Luther King. He was a commie. He just doesn't care. None of this even makes it into his mind.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yeah, it's quite a thing. So I'm going to quote now from a write-up in the New York Times that ably summarizes Rush Limbaugh's early 20s. Quote, Love of radio eventually won out over formal education, and he dropped out of a local college after a year, appalling his parents. Then began a long checkered odyssey, typical of radio.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Limbaugh held and lost jobs in several cities, working under different names and broadcast styles. He was Rusty Sharp and Jeff Christie. He was a DJ, a newsreader, a talk host. In each place, he developed components of what would later emerge as the Limbaugh style. In Pittsburgh, he was a prankster, convincing listeners that he could see them through a new experimental picture phone.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
so he's kind of like a, a, a drive time morning DJ, like a, Hey, yeah, we're gonna, I don't know. I can't do the DJ voice, but like playing like sound bits and doing, doing gags. Like he's very, like not even really a shock jock yet. Cause he's not like combat that has, that's like starting to evolve in this period of time. Yeah. Um,
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
I did find some audio from one of Rush's very first broadcasts in 1974 while he was still in Pittsburgh. And I think it's interesting because in it you can hear Rush in mid-transition from that drive-time DJ voice to the voice of the Rush Limbaugh who would help breed a modern American fascist movement. So here he is on WXZ's solid rock and gold show.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
So without further ado, here is Rush Limbaugh in 1974. Oh!
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Very silly, as all radio from the 1970s sounds today, right? As most radio today sounds. But also, you would never have guessed, based on his early performances, that he was going to become what he became, right? No.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
I think it's fair to say this is what he loved and he would have been perfectly happy if he could have made a good. We're getting to kind of like a Hitler at art school story. We're like, yeah, maybe if he'd gotten to keep being a drive time radio DJ, things would have been better.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
I think most famously to me, at least, is Mr. Peanut Butter.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
I mean, I think everyone who does a job that, like, I think pretty much everyone who has worked, there's a joy in professional competence of any type. Yes, yes. If you're running a cashier at a grocery store, when you get really good at bagging, it's the kind of ecstasy of competence where you can lose yourself in a task and be like, I'm as good at this thing as I can be.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Even if you don't like the job, there's a satisfaction in that. 100%. Rush was happy in this period. He wasn't rich, he wasn't influential, but he was doing a thing he loved well, and he was happy in this period in the early 70s. So his early material in Pittsburgh is interesting to me because it's exactly the opposite of what you'd expect from him.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
One of his reoccurring bits was the Friar Shuck radio ministry of the air, where he relentlessly mocked the radio preachers that he saw coming into the station on Sundays. He thought these guys were grifters, and he hated them. The center of this bit was that no matter your problem, God would solve it if you'd send the radio preacher $100. That's interesting to me.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And this is like a real running theme in his early career is he made fun of preachers all the time, of the exact kind of religious grifters that later helped make him a wealthy man. It's very interesting to me. Yeah. Yeah, there's also he also would read letters from fans.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And at one point he read a letter that he said was from a young woman who wanted to be a DJ and was worried that her gender would hold her back. Here's what he told her on the air.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
That's true. That's true. Because if you're really achieving as an artist, a lot of people are going to hate anything that you do. That's that's how you know you're doing it right. Exactly. And today we're talking about a truly historical success of a creative mind. A man hated by tens of millions of people and who should be hated by billions.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
You just have to master two techniques, and I'm going to explain them right now. Number one, the use of microphone. To use it, simply turn the microphone to the on position and talk into it. The second, which is the biggie, is queuing up the record.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Get the record you want to play, take it out of the appropriate shuck, slap it onto the turntable, take the arm and the needle, place it on the outside edge of the record, then turn the record until you hear the beginning of the record. Back it up a quarter of a turn, and when you get through talking, the record will start. After you have mastered those two techniques, girls, change your sex.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And you can interpret that a couple of ways.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Well, I think there's two ways to interpret this. One of them is what you've said, Sophie, that he was just being incredibly sexist. One of them is that he might have been acknowledging anyone could do this job, but you won't be able to as a woman because of sexism in the industry. And I'm really not sure which one he was going for there. It could be both.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
You're still not allowed to do it, ladies.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yeah, that's probably accurate. It's probably a bit of both.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Well, ladies, stick it to Rush Limbaugh by engaging positively with the system he spent his life propping. All right, shit.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Neither did I, Sophie. Here's some ads. This podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. It's a new year and we're all asking ourselves versions of the same question. What do I want my 2025 story to be? Every January brings you 365 blank pages just waiting to be filled. In 2025, maybe you're ready for a plot twist, or maybe there's a part of your story that you've been wanting to revise.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
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Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
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Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash behind.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
But for this week, we're going to be going back to a rerun. So please enjoy. The Story of Rush Limbaugh
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
A man who has done, I would say, incalculable harm to the future of human life and all life on this planet, Mr. Rush Limbaugh. Correct. Yeah. Paul, do you have any kind of history with Rush Limbaugh, like in terms of your upbringing and stuff? I don't know much about how you grew up.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
We're back. We're back from those ads. And Paul, I can see the glow on your face that only comes upon a man's face the first time that he gets to help advertise the fine products and services brought to us by the people at Raytheon. Are you feeling good, Paul, about now? Now you are in inextricably tied to wonderful products like the R9X knife missile.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
That's what everyone wants to do, right? Yeah. Since cavemen painted on walls, they dreamed of Raytheon. And now we are in the privileged position of getting to sell their products. And I couldn't be happier.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
It is a great name.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yeah, I mean, this ongoing bit I do, I often, like the R9X missile I think is made by Lockheed. Raytheon's guidance chips, I believe, are in it. To be fair, it's just the name Raytheon is such a good, shady defense industry. Like, it's the name of a company that ends the world, right? Like, you're talking about like, you know, they're going to make a Skynet that kills us all at some point.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Their name is just too on point to not be. Yeah. So back to Limbaugh. Rush was popular in Pittsburgh, and his bosses appreciated everything but his long-windedness. They repeatedly sent him memos that stated, shut up and play the records. And for a while, he was content to mostly just do that. But in 1974, the economy took a nosedive, and Rush was fired.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
He had to move back home with his family, where he lived for seven miserable months. His dad repeatedly badgered him to move on and start a real career – But Rush was committed to radio, and eventually he landed a new gig in Kansas City, where he started taking listener phone calls for the first time.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
This was the dawn of the era of insult comedy, a sort of mean-spirited comedy based on pranks and, you know, primarily executed by shock jocks, guys embodied by Howard Stern, really, who entertained via ostentatious cruelty. Hungry for success... Can I ask you this?
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
It's starting at this point, right? This is really kind of the birth of talk radio and rushes on the ground floor of that, right? Does it does it start with sports or does it start with with issues? Right. Right. Right. It's an extension of the idea of the.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yes. And I have access to them first and all this stuff. Right. Right. So rush kind of as this, you know, he kind of sees the writing on the wall, right? He loses his gig as a traditional DJ because that is starting to become less profitable. Right. And there's, you know, in general, the economy's taking a shitter. Um,
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here. And, you know, we're still coming down from our end of the year celebration. I'm headed off to CES where we'll be doing reporting for It Could Happen Here and Better Offline. We're going to be coming back for the new year soon. The Oprah episodes will be in the can. Very excited to introduce you all to that.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
So he realizes that kind of the way things are going is more based around personalities and comedy and entertaining people, and he starts to pivot to that. So this is – there's an interesting quote that Rush himself wrote in one of his many interminable books about how he felt about kind of pivoting to insult comedy. Quote, I found out something about myself, something that was quite disturbing.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
I found out I was really, really good at insulting people. For example, the topic one day was, when you die, how do you want to go? I want to go the cheapest and most natural way I can, one nice lady caller from Independence, Missouri said. My response was, easy, have your husband throw you in a trash bag and then in the Missouri River with the rest of the garbage.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
When I went home after a day of this, I didn't like myself.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yeah. It is, though, one of the things people will state. And I can't categorically say this, but it seems accurate based on my recollections of the show is even when people would disagree with Rush on the air, he wasn't an asshole to them. Like he was not cruel to to his callers, to their faces. Right. He would say cruel things about liberals.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
But when people would call in, he would not like call them monsters. He would not like he he seems to have genuinely not liked insulting people to their faces or at least over like directly insulting people over over the phone or whatever. While he was disturbed by this, he was not disturbed by racism, mainly racism against black people. Yeah. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
yeah yeah here's where we're going um at one point during his call-in show he claimed he had a black collar and he came claimed to not be able to understand the man's accent limbaugh hung up on this black man after saying take that bone out of your nose and call me back which is pretty damn racist or I mean, he says it was. We'll get to that.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
At another point, he asked his audience, have you ever noticed how all composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson? Now, during a 1990 interview, after he'd kind of risen to political prominence, Newsweek asked Limbaugh if he thought these statements had been racist. He replied, you may interpret it as that, but I know, honest to God, that's not how I intended it at all.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Gee, don't get me in this one. I am the least racist host you'll ever find. Now, if we're going to try to analyze Rush from the length of his career, I think we can say two things. He's probably being honest when he said that he felt bad about insulting callers because he did not continue to do that.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
He is probably being dishonest when he says that he's not racist because he continued to say incredibly fucking racist things about black people consistently throughout his entire career.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
so easily disproved also followed by the i don't see color people i don't see color i would say i think most of the people i think i don't see color people tend to be performative obama voters the i am the least racist person in the world people tend to have strong opinions on why they should be able to say the n-word like that would be the split between the right and the left version yeah yeah yeah and both of you are fucking racist so shut the fuck up
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
You mean me and Robert, right? Yes, yes. She's found out about our opinions on Lichtenstein, which I refuse to apologize for, and the fucking Swedes. My God, the Swedes.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
I have huge issues, particularly blue sweet. What did Uga Chaka mean? Why did you say that at the start of that song? OK, sorry. Rush was Rush was still at this point in his career, completely apolitical. His roommate and close friend at the time later told an interviewer he was scary smart about everything. But I can't recall us talking much about current events. He was funny, though.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
I was an audience of one. Limbaugh's years in Kansas City were not super successful, and he seems to have recalled them somewhat sourly, as the New York Times summarized. Limbaugh likes to say, Five years later, he quit the Royals, convinced his career there was stymied, and went back to radio, this time as a news commentator. Again, he got fired for being too controversial.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Also in Kansas City, he married twice, both marriages eventually ending in divorce.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yeah, we're about to get into that.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Fucking Paul, come on. So it was in Kansas City where Rush Limbaugh, conservative commentator, made his first public appearance after getting pushed out of the Royals. No one really liked him there. He had one friend who was on the team, and that's why he got to keep the job. And when that guy got traded, they pushed him out because they all hated him.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
So after getting pushed out of the Royals, he got a gig at KMBZ, a local station. He started satirizing what he considered to be a left wing caricature of a right wing political commentator. Right. The initial right wing Rush Limbaugh was satire and he was being purposefully controversial and unreasonably extreme in order to make a comedic point. This was a joke initially.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
This did not go over well with his middle-of-the-road Mormon station manager, but it made Limbaugh popular with his audience. See, Limbaugh had caught on to the fact that radio was in the middle of a revolution. This was the era where the first big shock jocks, men like Don Imus and Howard Stern, began their ascents to stardom.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
I found a wonderful write-up about this era on Long Reads, which argues that the first radio shock jock was a talk radio star named Joel Pine in the 1950s. And I'm going to quote from this now. We might do an episode on Pine at some point. Quote, his unconventional style, dressed up to dress down pinkos and women's libbers and riff on rather than read reports, was neither news nor entertainment.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
It seemed to be best described, well, the New York Times and Time both did anyway, as an electronic peep show. The personality-free press of the time considered Walter Cronkite the most trusted man in America and Johnny Carson the funniest. But Pine, with a syndicated show on more than 200 radio outlets, was the most Machiavellian.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
When it comes to manipulating media, icons of talk author Donna Halper told Smithsonian Magazine, he was the father of them all. Pine briefly descended from his soapbox in the mid-60s for a week's vacation after bringing a gun to his show during the Watts riots, suggesting the world wasn't quite ready for his kind of conservative appeal.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
So Pine is doing the Rush Limbaugh bit in the 50s and early 60s. But America is not ready for that yet. Right. Even 50s America is like, this guy's racist and a fucking lunatic.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
He lost the Paul F. Tompkins demographic, but he kept the my parents and everyone that raised me demographic. So what was your upbringing? Particularly political, would you say?
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
I think so. Because he, he, he, he even says like, it was a satire, right? Like that's how it's portrayed in his biography, that he was kind of, his personality was satiric in nature. And, and that's kind of the only way I can interpret it is that he was trying to satirize what, like kind of the loony right winger, you know? Okay.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
That was never said directly.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yeah, a bit. I do think he started not believing everything he said. It started as a joke and him intentionally to provoke controversy because controversy brings in listeners and gets attention, gets word of mouth. That's why he was doing it. And the story of Rush Limbaugh is these kind of purposefully absurdly extreme satire becomes what he really believes and is, you know?
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yeah, I think so. And I yeah, that that's how I interpret it. We'll go we'll go over that. Yeah. So obviously, Pine, kind of the first right wing radio shock jock had peaked too early and kind of, I guess, to steal a phrase from the Nazis, shown his power level too early during the Watts riots. And he got kicked off the air. Rush, though, started getting political at exactly the perfect time.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
This was the early 1980s. Howard Stern came onto the scene in 84. Don Imus had risen to prominence in the 1970s. Imus was another guy my dad listened to a lot growing up. Um... Imus in the morning was like a big part of getting ready for school. Don Imus is going to be in the fucking TV. And you were like, this guy's having so much fun and I have to go to prison. I have to go to prison.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
This guy's having fun. He's talking about nappy headed hose, which was like the phrase that he I forget what it was in reference to. But like, that's what got him in trouble. It was a women's basketball team. Yeah. Yeah, it was a women's basketball team because Dynamis was also very racist. Sure.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
So, yeah, the world was still not quite ready for the Rush Limbaugh we knew during while he was like starting to be political at KMBZ. But a diet version of what he would become was now acceptable. And one man who recognized the potential of Limbaugh stick was Norm Woodruff, a consultant to the station who became the acting program director at Sacramento's KFBK Network.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
KFBK needed a new right wing talk radio host after firing their previous one. A guy you mentioned at the start of this episode named Morton Downey Jr. Morton was extremely popular and he was very extreme in his antics. This had allowed his local station in Sacramento to repeatedly draw national attention because he would say purposefully controversial things.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
This did backfire on Morton eventually when he told a racist on air joke about a Chinaman, which was a thinly veiled attack on a local city councilman named Tom Chin. Downey Jr. was fired and went into the world of television where he would somehow simultaneously blaze a trail for both Tucker Carlson and Jerry Springer. We will do an episode on him someday because he's a very influential guy.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
But his for today, he matters because his firing number one, his success proved that being a purposefully controversial right wing bigot was really profitable for radio station. And because when he got fired, Sacramento had a hole in the station's roster that they needed to fill with another racist right wing shithead, just one who was not quite as racist as Morton Downey Jr.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Rush Limbaugh stepped up and said, not being quite as racist as that guy is my middle name. for now for now eventually i will be much worse So Rush Limbaugh moved to Sacramento. When he started at the station, his new boss, Woodruff, told him, We want controversy, but don't make it up. If you actually think something, if you actually believe it, you can tell people why. We'll back you up.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
But if you're going to say stuff just to make people mad, if all you want to do is rabble rouse, if all you want to do is offend and get noticed, that's not what we're interested in, and we won't back you up. He was clearly lying. I think this was ass covering by the station, right?
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yeah, but they would never, would never ever push back on his bigotry. But you know who does push back on bigotry, Paul? Ads?
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
The products and services that support this podcast.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
So we're back. And at this point, Rush Limbaugh has launched himself as a right wing shock jock, and he is an instant hit. Zeev Chaffetz writes, quote, The station let him go on the air solo, unencumbered by sidekicks or guests, and encouraged his highly personal right-wing monologues. For the first time in his career, he was marketed heavily and aggressively.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
There were billboards around town showing a finger hitting a button, captioned, Rush was so pleased by these that he sent Brian a snapshot. Morton Downey Jr. had been a big star in Sacramento, with a five share of the market, 5% of people listening to the radio in a given 15-minute segment. Limbaugh tripled that. He was sharp-edged, but good-humored.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
The new morning host espouses many of the same beliefs of his predecessor, Morton Downey Jr., reported the Sacramento Bee, but he skates a little further from the edge of the hole in the ice. Rush was rewarded for his success with a six-figure salary, an estimable income in the mid-1980s, even by his father's standards. More important, for the first time in his life, he really mattered.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
He was invited to deliver speeches, just like Big Rush. He was an occasional commentator on television and wrote newspaper columns. Politicians and celebrities sought him out. He and Michelle, his wife at the time, bought a new house and furnished it with products he endorsed on air. So he's a hit. This is the start of, and it's really just almost straight up from there for the rest of his career.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
He finds his niche and he runs with it. Again, he's a very intelligent, talented man.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
It's very funny.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Now, I have long argued that Sacramento is the very mouth of hell itself, and the fact that Rush Limbaugh first saw success as a right-wing firebrand there serves to support my hypothesis. Again, his conscious decision as an entertainer was to be a satirical version of a right-wing polemicist, deliberately exaggerating the things he did believe for comedic effect.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
The audience thought he was funny, but I don't think they got the joke, and there is some evidence for this. When an Ohio evangelist... I would say there's... A lot of evidence. Yeah. So I think the earliest evidence for this, I should say, is when an Ohio evangelist very publicly claimed that the theme song from Mr. Ed held a satanic message when played backwards.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
You know, we're kind of talking about the satanic panic period during this. Rush found this ridiculous. And again, he had a long history of mocking Rush. evangelical religious right. So when he heard this, he told his listeners that a Slim Whitman recording also contained a backwards message from Satan.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Zeve Chaffetz writes that, "...to his delight, many Limbaugh listeners took Limbaugh at his word and flooded the station with phone calls promising to destroy their Slim Whitman albums to keep the devil out of the house." Rush considered this a hilarious prank. He did not apologize or, as far as I know, correct the record. So we see in this, he's joking, right?
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
He is not, again, his whole history is mocking these people. He does not believe this, but he doesn't correct people because he realizes, oh, they're engaged. They're destroying stuff. That means I have power, right? I think he even found it kind of, it might have been something that kind of addicted him to this, this idea that like,
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
I can make even if I'm deliberately being absurd and lying, I can make people take action based on those absurdities. That's got to be addictive. And I think it is for him.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
is it's joyful it does give you a real jolt and there's a this is a bit of a different case but I think there's some similarity so last summer you know I was covering a lot of the protests in Portland Oregon including doing a lot of live streaming and very early on they the police put a fence up around the police station and there would be marches were like a couple of thousand people would march to the fence and somebody would like touch the fence and the police would tear gas like six square blocks of traffic and
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And I started calling it the sacred fence. And the joke, like the comment that I was making is that the police are endangering the lives of thousands of citizens to protect a fence because it's sacred to them.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
That went viral within the city. And there were dozens of protests at the sacred fence, as everyone called it, including numerous attempts to tear it down. And I know that the way that I framed it had a significant impact on a lot of people who I'm getting hurt, damaging offense, getting arrested. And it it it was both kind of intoxicating. And it also scared the hell out of me.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
It was one of the reasons why I pulled back to some extent on some aspects of my coverage, because I got really worried about the kind of impact that you can have on people by doing that sort of thing. I didn't want to be. It was very concerning to me. But it was also I'd be lying if I said there wasn't an element of it that I wanted to do more stuff like that. And I didn't. But I wanted to.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Rush's domestic life, while he's enduring all this professional success, his domestic life with his, I think she was his second, I think she was his third wife, actually. I don't know. He had a couple, he had a lot of wives. I think actually, no, this was his second wife. His domestic life with his second life at this period was less than joyful.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
He was famous and popular, constantly feted for dinners and invited to big events. And his wife, Michelle, was much less successful. She quit her job to be his assistant, but she hated the work.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
They were not a good fit. Michelle loved the outdoors. Rush Limbaugh despised them. Two of his colleagues tell a story from around this time of how they convinced him to go rafting once that I think is telling about Rush Limbaugh's personality. So this is one of Rush's friends talking about the time they took Rush Limbaugh on a rafting trip in whatever river it is that goes through Sacramento.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Quote, It's a very, very mild ride. Bob gave Rush an oar and told him to observe.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Bob gave Rush an oar and told him to absorb the blow of the canyon wall to give us a little spring back into the current. Rush panicked, stuck the oar out, his arms stiff as a board, and upon impact, he fell overboard. We got Rush back in the raft, and the next day he spent the entire three hours of his show talking about his horrendous whitewater grapple with the Grim Reaper.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
What a fucking baby. I've had people fucking shoot at me, and I've had people shell me with artillery, and I've never spent three hours talking about it. What a fucking baby. So Sacramento is where Limbaugh started picking up what would become a voluminous list of mostly self-inflicted nicknames. He was El Rushbo, the all-knowing, all-caring, all-sensing Maharashi.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
He was also a harmless little fuzzball and the epitome of morality and virtue. He started claiming that his show was hosted by the EIB, or Excellence in Broadcasting Network, which is a which did not exist. This joke mainly served as a vehicle for Rush to express his grandiosity.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
He declared himself on the cutting edge of societal evolution, swore that he was serving humanity, and had himself introduced as having talent on loan from God. His opinions were, quote, documented to be almost always right. 97.9% of the time by the Sullivan group, which also did not exist. And again, he's joking. And also at a certain point, he starts meaning all of this very literally. Yes.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Right. Like that's kind of how narcissists work. So it may surprise people to know that – to hear that Rush Limbaugh's career was launched into the stratosphere in Sacramento because California is, to most people outside of California at least, a bastion of liberal politics. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
and spend time in the state, you know, like, for example, if you've ever been to fucking, I don't know, what is that, Orange County, right? Or if you've been up near Redding, there's a shitload, like, there are more right-wing Californians than there are right-wingers than there are in, like, a number of U.S. states, right?
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Like, California has a ton of right-wingers, and it has a long, powerful, conservative political tradition. California gave us Ronald Reagan. It gave us Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who, in one of the most surreal turns in history, political history is now among the only rational voices on the right in the United States. So, yeah, California has a powerful right wing.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And yes, they are, especially in the last 20 something years, overwhelmed by the much more numerous liberals and leftists. But in this fact is one of the hints to Rush Limbaugh's rise. You see, Sacramento is located kind of north of the center of California, not far from some of the most productive farmland in the country.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
That is very exciting to me just because you're you're you came from kind of more of a, you know, a liberally background and your introduction to Rush Limbaugh was kind of watching it as a character, right?
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
It is also not far from north central California, places like Redding, which are right-wing strongholds. The conservatives who live in these areas tend to be very extreme in their beliefs – And that's partly a response to the liberal and left-wing government that they live under. They see – and this is not – they are not entirely or even largely wrong in seeing this.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
They see themselves oppressed by many of the rules liberals in the cities put in terms of things like gas taxes, right? If you're living in – if you're a farmer in central or northern California – A gas tax that is reasonable for people in L.A., San Diego, San Francisco, Sacramento is a hardship on you.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And you're not contributing to the kind of pollution in the cities that the gas taxes are meant to fight. You know, the strict gun laws and stuff. There's a lot of things, reasons these people have to be angry about. And Rush Limbaugh became their voice.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Um, so these, these, this kind of infuriated, very radical right wing who hates the liberals and left that govern California have a voice in Rush Limbaugh. He obliges their sensibilities with a ceaseless stream of attacks on liberal California. And that's what makes him huge is because there's millions of right wingers in California and Rush Limbaugh becomes like, yeah, he's their voice, you know?
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Um, You might even be able to argue that nowhere but California could have produced Rush Limbaugh as he became. Yeah. So I'm going to quote from the book Rush Limbaugh, An Army of One here. He mocked the multicultural style of California by proposing to keep uglo Americans off the streets. Militant feminists became feminazis. The Green Movement was full of environmental wackos.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
The American left became commie pinko liberals and the residents of Rio Linda, California, were synonymous with stupidity. A ringing deadlet, deadlet, deadlet introduced news updates on what he regarded as the absurdities of liberal activism. Liberals, of course, hated him, which he found inspiring.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
I grew up very conservative. My parents were also lower middle class, verging on poor. And when I was like kind of little, a lot of economic anxiety, but extremely conservative. I would say like our family religion was conservatism. And so Rush Limbaugh was caught whenever I was driving with my mom or my dad. Rush was on. We listened to him. My parents talked about him.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
When they attacked him as a dimwit, he responded by claiming that he was so much smarter than his critics that he could vanquish them with half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair. Before long, Rush was too big to stay in Sacramento, which is again the very mouth of hell itself.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
He was introduced to Ed McLaughlin, the former head of ABC Radio, who had started his own big radio company based out of New York City. McLaughlin had listened to Rush's show and decided it had the potential to go national. He offered Rush a partnership, and after some haggling, Rush agreed. He moved to New York and made the EIB network a reality.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Rush was 37 years old at this point and 21 years into a career of doing almost nothing but broadcasting on the radio. Again, the voice of the so-called populist American right never did anything but radio, really. In 1988, he launched a new version of the Rush Limbaugh show, this time for an audience across the nation.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
It's sort of hard to find his stuff from the late 1980s, but I found this guest appearance he did not long after in 1991 on another colleague's show for the same network. It gives you an idea of where his radio personality was by this point and of how he presented himself, right, of how he kind of introduced himself any time he was coming on the air. So we're going to play this now.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
This is kind of the birth of the Rush Limbaugh we all know now.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
That's Rush Limbaugh at kind of... When he goes viral for the first time. What do you think about that? About how he presents himself on here? What does that say to you?
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
So my upbringing with him was that this guy is like the prophet of of what's what's right, you know, both in the political sense and in the moral sense.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
It's it's a drag. It's also I think there's a thing that he's doing here. When we talk about all these phrases, half my brain tied behind my back, you know, the talent from God, all these different phrases that were that he continuously used for decades. I, I don't want to, I don't know.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
I hope this doesn't seem a little pompous, but I kind of make a comparison between that and like the Iliad and the Odyssey, right? This like the way that anytime you've got Homer introducing, it's always like, you know, the, there, there's certain phrases. Anytime Achilles comes up, he uses the same kind of phrases, same couple of phrases to introduce him.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
These descriptive phrases, um, to introduce a character that are repeated constantly throughout the, because it's a, because it was a spoken story, right? Like that's where you're supposed to deliver it. That works. It gets in people's heads. They associate those phrases with those characters. Rush is kind of doing – this is an old tactic, but it works.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
It's the same thing Trump does with his insults, Crooked Hillary, Sleepy Joe. These are effective tactics, and that's what Rush is doing to inculcate his followers primarily with this idea that he is a genius, right? Mm-hmm. And again, he's joking, but he's also not because this shit buries itself in your brain. He's he's he's knows what he's doing. It's he's a very savvy person.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
So I'm very excited about this. And I'm excited that you know who Morton Downey Jr. is because we're going to be talking about him a bit, too. Absolutely. So, yeah, Rush Limbaugh is it's hard to oversell this guy's influence on our current state of like, I think it would be fair to say we're kind of like verging on civil conflict right now between the right and left in the United States. For sure.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
You have two kinds of people who really are able to build a following. You have people who are able to build a following because folks genuinely just enjoy the work that they're bringing into the world. They like their personality. They like what they're doing. And then you have folks who are able to build a following primarily because they do cult leader shit, right? Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
That's what the marketing comedians, right? This is cult leadership. This is how you do it. We do a little bit of that here.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
We're all guilty a little bit. And I'll be guiltier when I get, I don't know, a couple of hundred people killed by the FDA in my mountaintop compound, which is always the goal, Paul. You're very welcome if you would like to have an armed standoff with the Food and Drug Administration. That's how you know you're successful.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
That's how you know you're successful, when a three-letter agency burns you down by...
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
i don't need to waco this time um i do love waco i want the epa to get that's a good one yeah wow i'm so impressed it took almost an hour 20 for robert to mention waco good job yeah i'm getting you know i i realized i was waco-ing a lot um trying to cut back you know a whole hour 20 and then here he is first waco But we'll talk off air, Paul, about synergizing our cults in the near future.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Anyway, so Rush did not tone himself down at all after he went mainstream. In fact, he grew more extreme and he seems to have quickly forgotten that he was ever practicing satire. In 1990, at the very height of the AIDS crisis, Rush launched a new segment on his show, The AIDS Update. And I find it interesting how different sources report on this.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
When Limbaugh died, it was obviously a big story, the fact that he'd done this AIDS update. And it was, in fact, Limbaugh AIDS update was like the second or third most Googled term alongside his name the day he died. Snopes and Newsweek both published prominent fact checks on this story.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
But Ziv Chaffetz's biography of Limbaugh came out well before Rush's death and before the AIDS updates were really talked about all that much outside of the community they most impacted. And I think it's interesting how Ziv wrote about it, not knowing that this was one day going to become a significant story. So this is how Ziv wrote about the AIDS update. After an act-up demonstration at St.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Patrick's Cathedral in New York City that disrupted a mass, Limbaugh chastised militant homosexuals for their disrespectful behavior and shortly thereafter began broadcasting irreverent and tasteless AIDS update segments introduced by Dionne Warwick's I'll Never Love This Way Again.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
In his traveling stage show, The Excellence in Broadcasting Tour, he did a bit when he put a condom over the microphone to illustrate safe speech. So that's how the AIDS update was kind of framed by Ziv before it was a big story. Now, here's how Snopes characterized it in their fact check after Limbaugh died.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Um, so yeah. And I think Rush Limbaugh has a huge, it might be the man most responsible for that.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
No, I don't think Ziv is trying to whitewash him.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
It's terrible. And it sounds worse when Snopes goes into more detail on this. Quote, at the height of the HIV AIDS crisis, the Rush Limbaugh show featured an AIDS update in which Limbaugh joked about an epidemic that had claimed more than 100,000 lives between 1981 and 1990. Specifically, Limbaugh targeted gay men who had died.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
In addition to joking about their deaths, Limbaugh reportedly played songs during the segment, including Kiss Him Goodbye, I'll Never Love This Way Again, and Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Snopes.com uncovered an interview in the Cedar Gazette from 1990 in which Limbaugh said the segment was politically oriented and based upon my reaction to what I consider to be extremism in the political mainstream by a group of people. Per the Cedar Gazette, Limbaugh said his target is not AIDS victims, but militant homosexuals who blame church and government officials for the epidemic.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
The AIDS update is meant to offend them, Limbaugh said. Damn right. According to a 1998 Los Angeles Times article, it was a popular segment, but it also created outrage among AIDS activists. Something not helped by Limbaugh reportedly saying, gays deserved their fate. Mocking the horrific deaths of gay people isn't something that will get a conservative radio host fired today.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
So obviously, this was never more than a mile bump in Limbaugh's career back in 1990. And it says a lot about where the right would go, that a segment dedicated to mocking joyfully the deaths of people he disagreed with was popular, right? That would become the mainstream for Republicans. Now, in 1990, it was still a thing he had to apologize for.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And that year is the year he became officially famous, 1990. He had his first live TV appearance on June 2nd when C-SPAN did a special on talk radio. And yeah, so this is like he does kind of have to sort of say that he regretted doing this, that he felt like he was kind of attacking people who like he was like, I didn't mean to be mocking people who had died.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Like, yeah, it cannot be overestimated.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
I was trying to attack these militant activists. And so I stopped doing it because I feel bad about it. Yeah, yeah, who are so far still alive. For the moment. Yeah. Anyway, so he does a TV appearance on C-SPAN in 1990 on June 2nd, which is kind of his first big TV appearance. And then the New York Times does a big profile on him.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
From that, quote, "...with its characteristic attention to production values, the network simply set up a camera inside a spare WABC 77 studio in New York and let the self-proclaimed most dangerous man in America roll."
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CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Cut to a schlub in a cheap white dress shirt, black tie, and hastily barbershopped helmet of hair, already wiping sweat and grumbling about the TV lights, planted behind his desk and mic, interrupting the station's young newscaster, Kathleen Mahoney. She's trying to do her five-minute top-of-the-hour update, oddly for 1990, while wearing a mask because, as she explains...
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
The host had warned her it could be dangerous to let his listeners identify her on TV as a liberal feminist. He was only joking, Limbaugh insists. You said wear a bag over my head, Maloney says. Limbaugh keeps threatening to yank her mask off, complimenting her beauty, and interjecting impatiently, the news just holds up everything here. I'm trying to make the news worthwhile.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
There's a lot in there. Jesus Christ. That's a New York Times reporter in a C-Span appearance. Yeah, he's like both saying you should cover your face because my listeners will harass you for being a liberal feminist and also take off that mask. Let everyone see your pretty face. He's simultaneously both threatening her and sexually harassing her.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
He's because he he he brought he created the modern. Right. You know, so you can see it, you know, in 1990. That's what he's doing. Yeah. Now, 1990 is, as I said, also when the Grey Lady published their first full feature dedicated to El Rushbo. The article is fascinating and valuable, since it seems like few copies of his early 1988 to 91, 92 episodes exist.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
So this New York Times write-up provides us with several fascinating insights into how Rush's show evolved during this period. And more to the point into where American conservatism was about to follow in his wake. At one point, a critic calls in. This is, again, the New York Times writing about his show from an episode we don't have anymore.
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CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
So at one point in the show, a critic calls in and tells Rush, quote, I believe you are doing a great disservice by using the program to convince people that if poor people are not successful, it is their fault. You were just a paid advocate of the rich and you despise the poor. Now, that's very accurate.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
The author of the New York Times article notes that perhaps due to his guilt over his crueler shock jock days, Rush is very polite to his liberal callers. And this is what the New York Times writes as Rush's answer. You misunderstand my point. There is nothing wrong with being rich. It's not evil. Most rich people earned it by virtue of hard work.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
This has always been the country that people come to because there has always been a chance for opportunity. And if you start punishing the people who bust their tail to be prosperous, then you're going to unmotivate people to try that. I am not a paid defender of the rich. I am a proud promoter of the American way of life.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
It's like that's hard work. I mean, look at Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, all guys who were born to wealth. They weren't born crazy rich. They weren't born with fuck you money, but they were born into wealth. And then they were able to get fuck you money because of the – and there's a lot written about that. Bill Gates having access to a computer in an era when basically no one did.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Bezos being able to secure a huge loan from his parents in order to help start his first business. Right. uh elon musk also getting a loan from his dad to start a business you know it's the way it always works for these people and they they spin that as self-made you know um yeah because in their mind it's true because in their mind it's true and they do work hard and if you work hard you
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
can convince yourself that you've earned it as opposed to like, I worked hard, but it only like, I can say I worked hard. I can also say I am only financially successful because I got lucky. And I know other people who worked as hard as I did, who have not been nearly as financially successful. And it's not because of a lack of talent.
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CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yeah, it's nonsense. So that New York Times piece reveals that by 1990, Rush was already popular enough to draw massive in-person crowds. And this was unheard of for a talk radio personality. Today, we're well acquainted with right wing thought leaders who can draw thousands upon thousands of fanatically loyal followers to in-person gatherings. But Rush was really the first from the Times.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Quote, There are towns where he is unheard, unheard and unheard of. And then there are places like Tampa, where the announcement of a Rush Limbaugh stage show sold out the 2200 seat Ruth Eckerd Hall in four days. The occupants of those seats are out of them and cheering when Limbaugh appears in a three piece tuxedo.
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CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
They're like the crowd for a country western concert, says Dan Woolley, the hall's director of operations, after sizing up the crowd in the lobby. Surprisingly youthful and more beer than wine drinkers. You're going to have fun tonight, Limbaugh tells them, and at the same time, you're going to learn some things.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Pacing constantly, he does some jokes that poke fun at the Japanese and the liberal media. One of his jokes is that Judgment Day comes and the Washington Post article banner reads world ends tomorrow. Women, minorities, hardest hit. It's like that's the you know, you see what he's going for there.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yeah. Later in his live show, Rush engaged in a popular bit wherein he brings a piece of shit to a modern art gallery. And the joke is that, like, modern art is so dumb that if you, like, poop and take, like, right, it's very obvious. This is it. You can find Ben Shapiro making the same basic joke decades later.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And the gist of it is that, you know, liberals are so dumb they'll stare at shit if you tell them it's art. The Times introduces this bit and then moves on to something that I found chillingly relevant. Quote, Art criticism is a Limbaugh staple.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
He believes there is a culture war going on between those upholding decent values, conservatives, and the commie lib hordes trying to devalue human life, and worse, undermine private enterprise. Limbaugh's sermon on art brings out the evening's only heckling, a female cry of censorship. Oh no, Limbaugh protests.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
He never spoke that word, but seconds later, he allows that censorship isn't really so bad. It has been used throughout this nation's history as a means of maintaining standards.
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CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
What he's talking about is threading the needle that the right is now the sit like right. The mate I went to I was in fucking I took a concealed handgun course in Texas because I'm getting my out of state permit so I can be armed in more parts of the United States because of all that is like going to cooking school in Paris.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Well, and the thing started with like a 30 minute lecture from the instructor on cancel culture. Like, this is the big thing within the right. I know. I know. I know. Wow. This is the big thing within the right now. And it Limbaugh is starting both like saying, like, well, the liberals want to like. Censor us when I want to cut out all ideas they disagree with.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And then he he moves on to saying, but also it's OK to censor people sometimes. Right. Because this is what the right believes. It's cancel culture if you if people don't like it and if they suffer financial consequences for being racist. But it's not cancel culture if they go out of their way to censor left wing and liberal voices, which they do through things like school books. Right.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
It's amazing. And that, Paul, is the end of part one of what is going to be like three hours of talking about Rush Limbaugh. Wow.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
I mean, he deserves this much time, not in a good way, but in a we need to understand what this man has done to us always.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yeah. Evidence both that he deserves to have his death cheered and also that he loved laughing at people's deaths. Yeah. Yeah. You're honoring him in a way, yeah. You are, you are. It's what he would have wanted. But you know what I want right now, Paul? I want you to plug your pluggables.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Thank you.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yeah, where he repeatedly celebrated the deaths of his enemies and made half a billion dollars doing it. Yeah. Okay. Let's get into Rush's life. So the first thing I learned about him when I started digging into him that might be the thing I learned about him that surprised me the most, Rush is not short for anything. Rush is a full first name.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And in fact, Rush Limbaugh is the third Rush Limbaugh in his family line. They are very proud of that name. His grandpa, Rush Sr., was born and raised in Bollinger County, Missouri. So he and I are both Missouri babies. He grew up into a world that was changing rapidly. Rush Sr. saw an electric light for the first time when he was 12.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
He took his first railroad trip in 1904 to see the World's Fair in St.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
That is the most shocking thing about him. Rush Limbaugh is not only his full name, it is the only name his family seems to give their firstborn sons.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
So Rush Senior became a lawyer. He opened an office in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and he basically never left the town again. He retired in 1994 at the age of 102. Wow. which I mention because it suggests that all those cigars are Rush Limbaugh smoked saved us about 32 years more of his show.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
He's one of those guys who worked until he died, basically.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
So Rush Sr. was elected to the Missouri House of Representatives when he was 40. His main political issue was fighting FDR and the New Deal, which shouldn't be surprising to anybody, right? This is deeply, deeply embedded in the Rush Limbaugh line. In 1936, Rush Limbaugh Sr.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
was a Republican delegate at the Republican National Convention, where he helped nominate Alf Landon for the noble job of losing to Franklin Delano Roosevelt in an election. You don't... Nobody was better at campaigning than FDR. It was never a successful thing to run against that man.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Alf Landon, the Washington generals of Republican politics. So my main source for the early life and family history of Rush Limbaugh is a fairly comprehensive, if I would say kind of fawning biography of Limbaugh by Zeev Chaffetz. And Zeev, it's a weird first name, Z-E-apostrophe-E-V, Chaffetz.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
He notes that over the course of decades of lawyering, Rush Sr., quote, quietly but inevitably became well-to-do. Which is an interesting way of phrasing it. There was no stopping it. It was kind of a way of making it seem like he didn't really want to become rich. He just became rich.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Inevitably, quietly and inevitably got rich.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
My God. It is very sinister.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
um so rush jr who is our rush limbaugh's father was born at some point quick googling obviously he had to have been born quick googling didn't return a date he's the only rush limbaugh without a wikipedia page which i guess kind of a kind of a shot to him um i could have probably found it out if i'd really dug into it but it doesn't really matter that much for our purposes yeah he did what he had to do he gave us rush he gave us our rush yes our rush our rush
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
So Rush Jr. is only important for the impact that he had on our Rush. He was a World War II combat pilot, which is undeniably rad. You got to give him that. And his biography notes that he maintained a military crew cut for his entire life. He was heavyset and topped out at about 300 pounds, which earned him the nickname Big Rush Jr.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
So Big Rush became an attorney like his dad and his brother, who eventually went on to become a federal judge. Big Rush was a powerful orator and often gave speeches in the town of Cape Girardeau during holidays. His very conservative politics influenced these speeches, and his most famous one was a tearful, hagiographic speech about our nation's saintly founding fathers.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Again, you can see he clearly had kind of the same gift of gab that R-Rush has. And you have to admit, if you know anything about R-Rush Limbaugh, he was an undeniably talented broadcaster. He was very good at what he did. That's why he had the impact that he had.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yeah. Now, R-Rush Limbaugh, Rush Hudson Limbaugh III... to give his full name, was born in Cape Girardeau, Missouri on January 12, 1951. By all accounts, he had a financially comfortable upbringing with a brother and a parents who loved him. Baby Rush spent his childhood imbibing a steady diet of his dad's rants about scummy liberals and evil conniving communists.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
one of our Rush's childhood friends recalls of Big Rush, of his dad. Quote, we'd go over to his house sometimes just to watch him watch the six o'clock news. He'd sit in front of the television drinking black cherry pop, eating popcorn, and just railing at the anchorman and the reporters. He'd yell at Dan Rather, they're all typical liberals and Rather's the worst one of the bunch.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And we'd try to keep him going, you know, Mr. Rush, what do you think about this? Mr. Rush, what do you think about that? Sometimes he'd say, Kinder, that was this friend's name. You're going to be the first Dutchman on the moon. I don't know exactly what he meant by that, but he was trying to be friendly. I liked him, but he was a harsh taskmaster with his sons.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
He has a brother, David, who is his younger brother. No, no, no. I think that's the oldest son gets the Rush name.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part One: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
David becomes like a lawyer, doesn't really leave Cape Girardeau, and is like... You know, he's he's he unlike his brother has a family, has like a wife that he's, you know, stays with and all that stuff. Did he quietly but inevitably become wealthy? I think. Yeah, I think he was born wealthy. He and his brother were both born rich as hell.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
And that guy's name is Cardinal Mazarin. He is one of these extremely powerful non-royal rulers. He's not a king, but he's governing France for a period of time here. By the time the child king, Louis XIV, is eight or nine years old, the Thirty Years' War, which is this war that his dad had spent his life fighting, is drawing to a close.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
And given the fact that it was a 30 years war, it had been monstrously expensive and kind of a financial disaster for France. So near the end of it, Cardinal Mazarin is anxious to keep the army funded until everything is locked down about the peace treaty. And since the crown had no more money after 30 years of war, this meant that they had to institute new taxes.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Now, France is a semi-feudal society at this point. It is less feudal than basically all of the rest of Europe. In Germany, there are still serfs, right? As in the common people are literally bonded to the land. They're essentially a kind of slave. They can't leave without the permission of the landowner, right? Right.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Serfs are really not much of a thing in France in the period that we're talking about, and they're basically going extinct, right? France has modernized to that extent. And in fact, the country is sort of in the process of becoming less of a...
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
a a feudal state and more of kind of like a hybrid like modernized semi-feudal state right like you still have a nobility the nobility are most are are going in this period are going from like literally governing directly where you've got this duke and he controls this area to you've got this duke and he doesn't govern anything directly but he does have the right to to collect
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
The surgery sucks. And let's talk for a second here. Doctors are not giving out enough painkillers. You should have gotten dilaudid for what you went through. And they just gave you a little bit of codone. I'm livid on your behalf.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
taxes in this certain area or to collect duties in this industry or whatever and right that's his privilege as the Duke right but he's not doing the governing we have like professionals who are are doing the actual governing in this region or whatever um Now, during the Thirty Years' War, again, the only way that they can pay for this is by increasing taxes.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
And these taxes don't primarily hit the nobility. One of the nobility's privileges that they maintain is an exemption from the taxes paid by peasants and the bourgeoisie, right? Basically, you call them the small business owners of France, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
That's a big part. Yes. But there's a caveat to that, which is the peasants are poor people and they are paying taxes. The bourgeoisie are often wealthier than the nobles, right? But they're not nobles. These are guys who start businesses, who are running trade and stuff for France. Some of them are extremely wealthy and they are also paying taxes. And they're really not happy about that, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Right. Right. But the nobility get a big exemption from taxes in this period, right? One of the conflicts that's going to like increasingly be a problem up to the revolution is the bourgeoisie being like, well, why are we paying taxes and these people are exempt, right? Well, we're not thrilled about that.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
So this does mean that regular French people are largely being kind of brutalized by the cost of the war against the Habsburgs of Spain. The job of approving new taxes, like the king will say, I want this tax, but it has to be approved by the parliaments. to you and I coming out of the English tradition, parliament means like essentially a governing body, sort of like a Congress is, right? Right.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
That's not really what a parliament is in France. Parliaments in France are courts, right? They're court systems. Like the parliament of Paris is a court system in Paris. And you have a bunch of judges who are nobles, who own their seat as a judge. Like that judgeship is the personal hereditary property of a noble who is one of these members of the parliament.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
And the parliaments have a lot of judges and clerks and whatnot. But these are like court systems when we talk about parliaments. But it is their job to approve new taxes. And this is kind of one of the ways in which the French state has started to modernize in this period, right? It's not just this Duke controls this area and he takes taxes.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
We've got this professional legal system, right, that is responsible for approving these things. And a lot of conflicts with the crown are going to be. the parliament trying to protect its power, right? When the king wants to do stuff directly.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Anyway, this causes issues because it makes the fact that the king wants these new taxes on the common people and the bourgeoisie and the parliament has to approve them, right? You've got these parliaments and royal courts that have to approve the taxes and they don't want to. They don't want to not because they like love the peasantry and think that it's unfair.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
They don't want to because the peasantry riots... Over new taxes? I was going to say not dying. Right. And the parliament needing to approve them. It's kind of this situation the kings have developed so that like, hey, if these guys have to sign off on it too, maybe they're the first people who get sort of mobbed, you know? Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
They can deploy the army, and this is a thing that increasingly happens in this period where there's this desire to strip the nobility of direct power, right? So just kind of a smart play. If the nobility is in this position where... They're doing, you can make them do unpopular things, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Welcome again to the show.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
You can kind of loop them in on the shit you need to do that nobody likes to the extent that they get blamed for that. It makes it harder for them to like have their own power base, you know? And they also get, they don't get taxed on inability. No, they are in this period immune to most taxes, right? And that's the trade-off, I imagine. Yeah, that's part of the trade-off.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
And kind of the issue here is the nobility are not friendly always with the crown, right? Like the nobility are both the people who govern with you, right, and who are supposed to be taking your lead as the king. But whenever there's a rebellion against a king, it usually comes from the nobility in this period, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
So that's part of why you would want a system like this as the king because it protects you to a degree, right? Right. But it does mean that there's constant conflicts between the crown and these parliaments. And these judges resist some of the central government's new taxes, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Cardinal Mazarin and Anne riposte by threatening to change the rules about how judgeships work and like make it so that you don't own your seat today. Again, in this period, being a judge is like being a subway franchise owner, right? And that it's your property and you pass it on to your kids. Right.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
And the rules governing this are part of something called the Paulette Tax, which came up for renewal in 1648. It's a little bit like, you could consider it a little bit like a union contract coming up. And so Mazarin and Anne are like, well, we don't have to let this work the same way. We can take these privileges away from you.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
It was fine. It was fine. I was on my best behavior. I know. I didn't even listen and I know that's not true. Today we're going to get really out of pocket, you know, because I've got a subject that I could only have brought a British guest on for. And that subject is France. France. Right. Okay.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
And I'm going to read a quote from an article by the UK College of Arts and Sciences Department of History on the matter. Okay. and their anxiety to force through new tax edicts, Anne of Austria and Mazarin drove the judges of parliament too far.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
On 15th January, 1648, they brought the nine-year-old king to a formal session of the court called the Litte des Justes to force the judges to register an unpopular tax measure. The judges exercised their right to remonstrate or criticize the edict, starting a series of events that culminated in a call for the judges of all the Paris courts to come together to consider reforms in the kingdom.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
On the 26th of June, acting without the regent's support, the parliament summoned those judges to meet in a body called the Chambre de St. Louis. This date marked the beginning of the Fronde. Street demonstrations, organized by Retz, showed that the judges had strong popular support. The frondeurs focused their anger especially on Mazarin.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
They'd announced him as a foreigner who had no respect for the laws and institutions of France and as an intriguer who was using his influence over Anne to enrich himself and ruin the country. Paris was flooded with printed pamphlets called Mazarinades. Vicious personal attacks on the minister.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
This foreign rogue, juggler, comedian, famous robber, low Italian fellow, fit only to be hung as one of the- Get his ass. I love it. He's a juggler. Bodied.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Oh, sorry. Cardinal Mazarin, I mean, first off, as a low Italian, I hate this kind of racism. As a judge. As a judge as well. Who are you loyal to in this? I'm really in between. Oh, man.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
It is funny bringing up Musk, too, that he keeps bringing his little kid into these massive moments that are going to be major political moments, like sticking his child in there. Brings his child admin.php to the White House. Yeah. I think it's fun that in this, and this does show how even our dumb system is a little less dumb than things used to be.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Where today, the nine-year-old child king doesn't, you know, is not the one, like the nine-year-old is not like... in charge of anything. He's just being brought around by his dad, who's basically the Cardinal Mazarin.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Or is he Cardinal Mazarin? No, no. Obviously, this society isn't stupid. They would not let a young child run things. You don't get to run things until you are the mature age of 13. Right. Of course, that's when you become a man. Of course. That's when you're a full man and able to govern. Perfect. As a nine-year-old, of course not. That would be silly. What would you possibly know?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
You have four long years to go through. I think I could have governed France at 13.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
I can do it. I would have spent the entire national budget on Warhammer miniatures. But honestly, can you tell me that's worse than what the French are doing now? I don't know. No.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Yeah. Look, guys, you don't get health care this year because I really went on a spending spree in Nottingham. Like, there's a lot of unpainted plastic and resin coming my way.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
But I will be happy painting. But I'll have a lot of work to do. No, so they bring this nine-year-old king to this formal session, and it causes this – as a result of how bad it goes, you get this rebellion. This is a civil war called the Front, right, which is – it's kind of on one side you've got these judges and nobles who are angry at the fact that the king is –
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Specifically, specifically, I wanted to talk about the culture of Versailles, the subculture of the nobility at Versailles that started in the reign of Louis XIV, the Sun King, and led right up to the French Revolution. And I wanted to talk about this because, Ed, I'm sure you've heard a little about this. We've caught a little case of the oligarchy here in the United States recently.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Are angry at the fact that the king is continuing to, like, pull strip powers from them, or at least that you could you'd say the crown is right. And so they're trying to protect their traditional powers. And the crown is trying to protect its absolute power as, you know, the monarch. Right. And so you get a civil war. Now, this doesn't go well for the frond, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
They sort of start out this thing, but they never get momentum. There's never like much popular backing. The common people are like, I don't really like, in part because the nobles in these parliaments are the ones who approve new taxes. Regular people are never like, One side is much better than the other, and they tend to overall back the crown.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
So the young king, Louis XIV, doesn't get uprooted by the frond, right? But there are a couple of points that come close to a disaster for him, right? There's a shitload of riots in this period. He and his mother have to flee the capital, Paris, for a palace in Saint-Germain nearby.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
The army clashes with rioters, and while they put down the riots, the next year more nobles join the insurrection, and they put together an army large enough to force Mazarin to resign and flee the country temporarily.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
The height of danger for young Louis comes when a rumor spreads in Paris that the king and his mother had fled the palace for a second time, and a mob swarms the palace to make sure that the king is still there, right? That he hasn't left again, right? And they demand proof. And so they break into his bed chambers.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
And like as as they're like busting down the door, basically, Queen Anne and like this 10 year old kid are talking. And he's like, what the fuck do I do? And she's like, just pretend like you're sleeping. Just pretend like you're sleeping. And so that's what happens. This mob busts in and Louis the 14th just pretends to be asleep. Did it work? It does. It does work.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Again, these guys are not, this isn't like it'll be in 1789. They're not busting into the palace because they want to kill the king. They're busting into the palace because they want to make sure he's still there. And like when he's asleep there and he's like, he's sorry, he's 12. Like these people, number one, they're not like anti-monarchy.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
And number two, they see like a sleeping 12 year old and they're like, we should probably go. Maybe this got out of hand. Yeah. When did he fall asleep? Is he going to be up soon? Yeah. Yeah. Maybe we don't want to like fuck with this little kid who's asleep. So the front, this is obviously, this is traumatizing, right? Having a mob basically forced their way into your bed chambers at age 12.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
This fucks Louis the 14th up and is going to massively impact the decisions he makes as an adult and regent. But the front ends with him still in power. Yeah. That said, again, he's like traumatized by this and he comes away from the whole experience with a couple of conclusions.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
One of them is that the nobility of France are fucking out of pocket and they need to be they have too much power and they need to be somehow corralled and stopped from building bases of power of their own. Uh. And they need to be put in a position where the crown can keep an eye on them and make sure that they're not plotting or scheming independently from the king, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
That's one conclusion he makes. The other conclusion he makes is Paris is not a safe place. And he's got this palace at St. Germain, but he has bad memories of it. So he's like, as an adult, he's going to be like, I want a new seat of power, right? Right. That's where we're going to get Versailles from. So cut forward by about a decade or so, Louis XIV is 24 years old.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
He is already a veteran of war in the Spanish Netherlands. So he's gone to war successfully as the monarch at this point. He's going to spend most of his time going in between palaces and the front. Most of his reign, a wartime king. He had pushed France's frontiers outward and he had kind of built up a military that is France is the number one land power in Europe at this time. Right.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
And economically, the only country in Europe that is a bigger economy than France is Denmark. Right. Because Denmark's doing a lot of overseas trading. This would be the last time this kind of period of Louis XIV's reign will be the last time for a century or so in which France is actually in the black, as in like in a good economic condition. But right now, Louis is rolling in it.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
I have been hearing this. We've all been hearing this. Yes. Unless you're listening to this years after the fact and we did it, Jo, again. Oh, too soon. You are probably listening to this on a day where you have slightly fewer rights and freedoms than you had a few days earlier, right? Yes. Because that's been the vibe of the last couple of weeks.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
He's got a shitload of cash and a very powerful army, and he decides to use that money to build a palace where he can, number one, feel safe, and number two, lock all of the nobility away from the rest of France to keep an eye on them, right? That's where Versailles comes out of. So speaking of a bunch of out-of-touch rich people, let's throw to sponsors.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
OK, we're back. So I think when you look at like casual histories of the revolution, they always talk about Versailles and the situation there, how out of touch people are, this inwardly focused ruling class who live in this palace altogether as like a contributing factor to the revolution. And I just want to establish something. Yeah. All the nobility was made to move in.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
I mean, not 100% of them, but that's the idea, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
A significant amount of them do, and the ones that don't literally live there, like, get second houses nearby. Like, you have to... We'll talk about this more, because this is a thing that develops. But, like, yes, that is the ultimate product, is that, like... significant chunk, most of the powerful nobility are at Versailles forever, right? And that's the idea that Louis has, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Is he's building this palace specifically to force them to hang out with him, right? Right. And when I'd read... casual kind of histories. And my understanding previous to really digging into this was that this was a holdover from like France's busted old feudal government, right? This is like a medieval holdover kind of coming into conflict with the modern world.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
And that's part of why we get the French Revolution. That's really not what Versailles is. Louis XIV is actually kind of creating one of the first modern central governments when he establishes the palace at Versailles, right? This is actually a modernizing thing in some ways. Rulers had always owned palaces, and those palaces were both homes and fortresses, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
So you could have a place to wait out an inconvenient war or an uprising. But Versailles... It's not a fortress, for one thing, and it's not just a home. It is an independent center of government. Versailles has more in common with Washington, D.C. than, for example, any of like the palaces and palaces in England, right? Any of like the palaces of the house of Windsor, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Yes. The day I started typing out this episode, February 19th, 2025, President Trump made a very funny joke describing himself as a king. And this set me to thinking about the first Trump rally I attended in 2016, in which I met a British man who was a naturalized U.S. citizen who told me that he supported a Trump dynasty ruling the United States from here on out. He wanted Trump Jr.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Buckingham or whatever. Versailles is less like that. It is more like DC as in DC was a city that was created from the ground up to be a center of government, right? Right. That's what Versailles is.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
um and you know in creating versailles louis xiv he doesn't just want a home he wants a sprawling complex where the nobility of france will live and and hang out and basically always be around him and the all of the governing of the country will be done there and he's doing this both because that makes things more efficient for him you know he's a relatively intelligent ruler he understands that centralizing
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
All of the people who are in charge of the country and keeping them around him makes communication a lot more efficient, but also keeping all of these people literally under the same roof allows him to keep an eye on the group that had nearly overthrown his family, right? So we should talk for a bit about the location he picks, right? Why Versailles? Because there's nothing there, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
There's not a town in the area at this point. They build one, but there's not a town there. There's just an unpaved road into Paris and a hunting lodge that Louis XIV's father had used while hunting and stuff.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
right um so louis had grown up fond of the area which is about 20 miles from paris because of his dad's hunting lodge um and what became the palace started with they put some gardens in next to the hunting lodge and it's kind of a place when he's a young man like 18 or 19 louis will go there with his friends and they'll like camp out there and have parties
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
You know, and so this is kind of like the start. That's why he gets the idea that like this is where I want to build my palace is because like this is he and his friends, his little Burning Man spot, you know, effectively. So in March of 1661, Cardinal Mazarin dies and Louis XIV. This is this is kind of what makes him independent as a ruler for the first time, at least totally independent.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Later that year in August, he goes to a party thrown by one of the nobles who's hoping to curry favor with the new king, a guy named Nicolas Fouquet. Fouquet is the minister of finance, and he's built this massive, sprawling, elaborate palace, Vaux-de-Vicombe. which is probably the nicest palace in France at the time. The architecture impresses Louis. He's like, wow, this place is really amazing.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
But he's also pissed at Fouquet because Fouquet is like, okay, Mazarin's out. This guy is now the dude to impress. I am going to go all out to basically try to bribe him so that he will make me his top advisor and I can basically run things. And he tries to do this by like handing out diamond tiaras and horses as party favors to his guests.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Like he is, he is just like, yeah, horse, really nice horses. You know, not, not your, not shit horses. Good ones. Shit ass horses. No, the good stuff.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
wonderful society used to be so much stranger horses are a big like the king at any given point is going to own like 2500 horses like personally like that's just the way it is if you're rich um that's like the equivalent of having three nice cars right yeah But so this guy, Fouquet, he's showing off this massive palace that like impresses even the young king.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
And he's handing out diamond tiaras and horses. And it's you know, this is meant as kind of a bribe to to get Louis to be like, oh, this guy really knows what's up. But it just pisses off Louis. Right. And it pisses off Louis because he's like, you're the minister of finance. how much of this money you're spending is really my money, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Like, where did you get all of this money, Minister of Finance? Is any of it my shit that you're tossing around? Are you bribing me with my own money? And so he ends the night by arresting Fouquet and locking him up in a fortress. Oh, that rogs. Yeah, it's pretty cool.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
to take over after his dad finished his terms. And I was like, man, you are in the wrong country. You lived in the country that did that. You already did this. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
In her book, The Sun King, Nancy Mitford writes that as a result of this, quote, we seldom hear of other people giving parties for the king. How long did he stay in prison for? I think he was in there for a long, years and years and years. Oh, my God. I don't know when that guy specifically gets out. Just because he might have spent the king's money? Yeah. So willy nilly with the horses?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
If Louis XIV doesn't like you, he will lock you in a fortress for a decade or so.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
That's his thing. He loves putting people in fortresses. So the king raided Fouquet's home, taking silver ornaments, tapestries, a library, and more than a thousand orange trees. This is going to be a signature of Louis XIV's reign is he fucking loves orange trees. And it starts here. Now, orange trees, it's not easy to keep them healthy in the north of France.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
We're going to give a little moment of silence for 14 FDA agents who were just trying to do their job. But unfortunately, you know, they they got between Sophie and her HGH ring. And, you know, that's just that's just never never a safe thing to do. Also back on the show is Sophie Lichterman, who is recovering south of the border in a
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
And they were so valued that each tree lived in a pure silver pot. Like that's the planters that they use for orange trees are just made out of silver.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
I don't know, but when Nancy Mitford wrote her book in the 60s, some of Louis XIV's orange trees were still alive.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
So he's pretty good at keeping these things going, you know?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Maybe we should grow everything in silver. We don't know. We don't know. You know, if you've got a baby, have them plated entirely in silver. See if it works. I don't know. I think I watched a James Bond movie that suggests that might be a bad idea. Try it either way. So he orders the construction of a palace at Versailles, Louis XIV, built after this.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Because he's like, look, this Fouquet guy, fuck him. But this palace of his is pretty nice looking. I think I could do better. So he hires the guys who had made Fouquet's palace, and he has them start building a palace at Versailles, with the centerpiece being his dad's old hunting lodge, right? Now, the resulting complex, which is going to take years to build, is massive.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Among other things, there are 350 apartments, right? Which is 350 individual living areas for different nobles to reside in. This is just dorms. He just invented dorms. He does invent dorms. And one way to look at Versailles, if you cross the Pentagon and the White House with a frat house, that's Versailles. And a WeWork. And a WeWork. Yes, yes, yeah. It's all of those things at once. Nice. Yes.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Yes. There's also banquet halls. There's dance halls. There's meeting rooms. There's even an entire 240 foot room lined entirely in mirrors. And mirrors are hard to make at this point. Right. It's if you have a room lined in mirrors, it's to show off. I got fucking mirror money. I got so much mirror money. I got a room of the sons of bitches. Right.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Oh, good. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Impress everybody. Yeah, so everybody can see this is how rich the king is. And themselves at every corner. And they can, yeah, see themselves at every corner. Frances Loring Payne describes in her book The Story of Versailles, Nice. Nice. So pretty fancy. And this is, in fact, a palace unlike any the world had seen before.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Louis XIV, the man who would call himself the Sun King, was not a patient person. So he ordered the construction rushed and damned the cost, either in money or in lives. Once he has this idea, he's like, I want this operational as soon as possible. He's like the Emperor Palpatine. If the Death Star was just a place for rich people to party and be spied on.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
In an article for BBC History Magazine, Johnny Wilkes writes, Building went on from dawn to dusk with up to 36,000 people working in the gardens in dire and dangerous conditions. Injuries became a daily occurrence and so many died that bodies would be quietly removed at night in bulk. The workers went on strike, but Louis saw Versailles as a symbol of his prestige and therefore France's prestige.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
It was worth any price. When half a dozen men were crushed in an accident, one grieving mother approached Louis to request her son's body. He had her imprisoned. Okay. Seems fair. Seems cool. Yeah. Of course. How dare she?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
And I'm like, sir, what the fuck about that baron? Yeah, sir. He could probably hoop. You do have to give that to him. He's got at least potential. Although we don't. I don't think he's very fast anyway.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
She didn't understand that this was about France's prestige. Not how many people are getting crushed to death. Yeah, put her in prison with the fucking horse tiara guy. Yeah, yeah. Rude asshole. Look, people are going to get crushed to death, obviously. It happens. Oh, my God. Yeah. Get over it. You can't have a frat house pentagon without breaking a few hundred laborers. God. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Jesus, give me a break here.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
People are unreasonable, you know? So by May 6th, 1662, the whole palace is still very much under construction and would remain that way for years. But enough had been completed that Louis was able to throw a grand party and begin the process of moving in. Now, this would be a years-long process.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
At first, Louis is like spending a day every week there, in part because he's also traveling constantly in between like Versailles or wherever else he's staying and the front where the wars are happening, right? And basically for Louis, the war is kind of a gig work thing, right? Like he's got his marshals who handle the full-time thing.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
He just kind of comes in when somebody like sends him a letter being like, oh, hey man, I think the war is about to get cool again. Maybe you should come up and check it out now, right? Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Yeah. Don't want to waste your time on the boring parts of war. For him, it's a little like a soap opera where like, yeah, you don't watch every episode. There's long, some of these storylines aren't super interesting. We got like a year of this siege to get through. Go party. You know, we'll handle that. Get me at the end when we're knocking down the fuckers.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Bring me in when something cool's going on, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
So the process of moving everybody in takes years because – and this is such a – like the pain in the ass this creates for everyone while they're unable to live their full time. But he's having people spend as much time there as possible because every time Louis heads back to Versailles for like a night –
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Every government minister, every high-ranking noble, as well as, like, Louis' whole family and his coterie of mistresses have to travel back with him. It's, like, this massive pain in the ass. And there's not rooms for most of them. So, like, Louis got – even Louis is not living in comfort for most of this period. His rooms aren't really finished.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
But everyone else is, like, camping, basically, under, like, scaffolding and shit. In this giant beautiful palace that should be luxurious. Yeah. Yeah, but is just unfinished and filled with dead people. Yeah. That'll happen. Yeah, that'll happen. Real estate is challenging. Yeah, real estate is a real complicated endeavor. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Now, the fact that this is a huge pain in the ass and that it kind of, even before Versailles is finished, it is dominating the lives of a huge chunk of the nobility because they have to constantly be aware of where Louis is when he's traveling back. They have to get themselves back. They're like missing sleep because they're not able to live. It like completely disrupts all of their lives.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
And that's that's part of the plan. Like Louis the 14th is doing this intentionally. Oh, I want to read a quote from Mitford's book. The king had already begun to enslave his nobility by playing on the French love of fashion. In 1654, he gave a fete, which lasted from 7 to 13 May.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
This really caused more pain than pleasure, for the guests had nowhere to sleep and were obliged to doss down as best they could in local cottages and stables. And so again, he's like – the fact that this is a pain in the ass and the fact that he's increasingly forcing everyone – you're not just constantly obsessed with where is the king? When do I have to get back to Versailles?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
But you also – there's these parties whenever you're there. So you're spending a lot of your free time making sure you've got outfits and like spending a lot of your money making sure you've got outfit. It's a party. Sort of like a six day long jolly. Yeah, I mean, some of them are shorter than that, but like it's a big party. But in this case.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Yeah, and it's a mandatory party that you have to have an outfit for. That outfit is going to cost you 30 years salary for a laboring person, right? And so you have to be constantly like traveling, sleeping in uncomfortable conditions and spending your time and money figuring out what you're going to wear, which means you're not spending any time thinking about rebelling, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
You're not – you have no extra attention to spend on building a base of power for yourself.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Yes. Yes, exactly. Interesting. And that's it because Louis XIV, his big motivation with Versailles is to make another frond impossible. Hadley Mears writes, "...the move was designed to neutralize the power of the nobles. This it did, but it also created a hotbed of boredom and extravagance, with hundreds of aristocrats crammed together, many with nothing to do but gossip, spend money, and play."
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Well, and then gossip being created in real time.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
That's going to be a major factor in what happens next. Right. And we'll be talking about like what how this gossip eventually trickles out. And it does. It kind of leads to the creation. Paris basically has Twitter. I was going to say this is like Parisian Twitter. Yes. Yeah, that's kind of where things are building towards, right? Very good.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
And it's also, you know, people are gambling here constantly. So fortunes are being won and lost.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
People gambling away everything. Everyone's tired. Everyone's exhausted and deranged and people are like going broke and need loans from the king, which makes them more dependent on him. Nice. And all of this was intentional. Yes, yes. Fuck yeah. This is part of the plan. This guy's completely insane. I love it.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Louis XIV, but he's very intelligent in that he never faces another threat to his rule, right? That does not happen. He locks the nobility down. They're too busy partying. Yeah, they're too busy going to mandatory parties. He has – what Versailles is, he builds a totalitarian dictatorship just for the ruling class where they are forced to party and gamble their whole lives. The Andrew W.K. system.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Yes. Beautiful. Now, much has been written about the intricate and stifling rules of etiquette that had to be practiced at Versailles. They had their origins in every – medieval house, every royal house in all of Europe has these complicated etiquette rules that they have to abide by, but they're not all enforced the same way.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
None of them are as intricate as they become in Versailles because you take these baseline rules about like, oh, if you have this guy, this guy, this guy, and this guy in a room, Only this guy is allowed to hand the king his shirt, right? But if that guy leaves, then the next person is allowed to hand the king his shirt. So you have to remember who is allowed to hand the shirt. Yes, yes.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Do we know the punishment for this? It's not a punishment thing so much as it's a violation of etiquette and thus it is offensive to everybody. And it causes like gossip and it makes – like instead of protecting their power to tax and rule the commoners, the nobility are increasingly protecting their power to hand the king his shirt in the morning. Fucking brilliant. I love it. It's so stupid.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
I love it. Yes. So again, every royal house, all of the nobility in all of Europe have some version of this, but it gets like 10 times as intense in Versailles because everyone is now living under one very large roof, right? And this means that for one thing, nobles no longer have the same kind of lives of their own outside of court.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
So there's nothing going on in their lives, but obsessing over perceived slights in the intricacies of social dynamics, who's snubbing who, who is in the king's favor, et cetera. And it also means the nobility traditionally in like a feudal society, if you're the king and your nobles are your warriors, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
That's like the core of the elite of your army in part because they have the time to train, right? The nobility are no longer training to fight, right? They are training and spending their whole youths and childhoods learning how to be the most effective member of what is effectively a bickering high school clique, right? Right, and this is years long as well, so it marinates.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Yes, your whole life is a high school and the king is the coolest kid in the school. So everyone is constantly trying to figure out how to make him like them, right? Instead of focusing on being good at war- You know, which is a danger to you as the king.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Well, like traditionally in Europe, that's what knights are, right? Yeah. Oh, okay. Like knights are nobility and they are like the core of your army in the earlier medieval period, right? Except they're now all bickering about who had to do the shirt. Yes.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
And now instead of having like any real doing anything else, really all, all that these guys are doing, a lot of these people are doing on a day-to-day basis is obsessing over like the minutia of this, like basically big high school. Right. Um, I love it. So for the next decade after 1662, construction continues at a relentless pace.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
And as more gets built, more and more nobles live full time at Versailles. It becomes the king's primary residence when he's not out engaging in his favorite hobby, going to war with the Dutch.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
uh the sun king felt that denmark was natural french territory and he very nearly managed to make this a reality but his capture of amsterdam was thwarted when the dutch opened their dikes and flooded the lowlands so he does get stymied in his dream of owning the netherlands which is very sad uh for all of us you know i would like to own the netherlands one day so i can understand uh
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
why this is big for Louis XIV. Back home, you know, he couldn't make this work. But back in Versailles, he's able to exercise ultimate control over nature. For example, the king decided he wanted a forest around Versailles. And, you know, the problem with forests, Ed, you can plant a forest. Anybody can plant a forest if you've got enough seeds. But trees take so fucking long to grow. I know.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
I was just going to say you've got to bloody wait for the thing. Huge pain in the ass, you know? He's not going to do that. So rather than wait for trees to grow, he has thousands of adult trees dug up from nearby forests in a hall. Just take a tree from somewhere else. Take it from somewhere else. And he plants them. Yeah. Mitford writes, those which died, about half were immediately replaced.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
So basically, they're just planting, digging up adult trees, planting them, waiting for ones to die, and then replanting them until they have a living forest. As in grabbing new trees to replace the trees that you've already grabbed. Wonderful. Cool. That you've already murdered. Yes. Speaking of killing trees, you know who hates trees? Not our sponsors.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
We're back. We're so back. We've never been more back. And we're talking about the palace at Versailles, which has just murdered thousands of trees so that the king can have a forest. Right. So, obviously, for years, the palace is dreadfully uncomfortable. Courtiers slept wherever they could before the various apartments were finished.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
And the Sun King was also usually, like, kind of roughing it, too. Behind his back, nobles called the palace a mistress without merit. As in, like... This is like the king's lady, but like she sucks, you know? None would dare say that to Louis' face though. And the dream of the palace sustained him until the first phase of construction was finished in like the 1670s.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
This gave way almost immediately to an expansion and remodeling. But the palace was done enough that it starts attracting foreign visitors with stories of its grandeur. One like anecdote you'll hear at the time is that British people who would like go and see the court at Versailles would be like, oh, man, our king lives in a fucking slum, basically. Right.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Yes. It is an outrageous expense. Wonderful. It is almost an incomprehensible expense. This enormous expense necessitated economic changes, which were brought about in part by the further centralization and modernization of the French state. Part of, obviously, Versailles in and of itself is centralizing the state in a way that makes it more modern, but also they
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
have to modernize and centralize the economy more in order to afford Versailles. Louis' economic minister was a guy named Colbert, who had taught the Sun King math when he was a child, and Colbert hated Versailles. He thinks it's a stupid idea.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
but he's also really good with the money and he's probably the only person who could have made the whole project economically viable and for a while he does as mitford writes quote the prestige of louis xiv and the fame of versailles mounted year by year other european princes and magnates wanted a versailles of their own down to the smallest details of its furnishings colbert exploited this fashion to help his exports he erected a rigid customs barrier nothing was allowed to be imported that could be made in france
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Factories were set up to supply the linen, lace, silk, glass, carpets, jewelry, inlaid furniture, and other articles of luxury that used to come from foreign lands. The finest examples of their work went to Versailles and were shown to the foreign visitors who flocked there. The chateau became a shop window, a permanent exhibition of French goods.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Yes. Yes. And it becomes a massive part of the French economy, both in that this is where we use this as a showcase for the different things like French artisans can make. And because all of the crown heads come here, they're blown over by the palace and they're like, well, I need those kind of tables, right? I need those chairs, right? And only French artisans.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
This is part of why France gets its reputation as having the best artisans in Europe, right? Is Versailles. And so luxury goods become an increasingly massive part of the French economy. And Versailles is where they're shown off. And so it is like a CES for like rich people furnishings, you know? Like that is a big factor in like what Versailles becomes and its role in the economy. Right.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Now, it also is central to the economy because of the sheer, again, 36,000 workers at the height of this project. That's a massive deal for a country that is like France's in this period of time. Colbert saw the sheer number of workmen the project consumed as more than the state could bear given its current birth rate.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
The Ministry of the Economy comes to the conclusion that we are not breeding enough men to continue rebuilding Versailles. And so he institutes a national breeding program to ensure sufficient labor. For a house. For the king's big fancy party house.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about terrible people. You know, we've got a great episode, a couple of episodes for you this week with Ed Zitron of Better Offline. Ed, how are you doing, buddy? I'm doing fantastically. Love being here. I'd be doing better. But, you know, we have something sad to talk about today, Ed.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
It's nuts. And obviously like evil. It is also like Louis XIV is kind of the most king that a king has ever been.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Just like... Yeah, it's so, like there are between, once Versailles gets up and running, permanently between like 3,000 people is kind of like the normal level of inhabitants and up to 10,000 at times, right? When like the party season's at full swing. 10,000 fucking people in there. Yes, yes. It is massive. Now, Colbert institutes this breeding program.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
He exempts families with more than 10 kids from taxes. He also raises the age. That's nice. He also raises the age at which men and women are allowed to join the Catholic Church as priests and nuns because he's worried that like, because they're not breeding, obviously. Right. And he forbids working men from immigrating, from leaving the country. Jesus Christ. Yes.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Everyone has to come to my house. Yes. I need an extra child. Bring your boys to my house to build my house. And for Colbert, it's more like, I hate this house. It's stupid. It's dumb that the king is doing this, but the whole country will collapse if we don't keep this house going.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Now, it is hard for me to read stuff like this and not think about, like, Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey's obsession with birth rates, right? And they frame it as, like, a fairness thing. Oh, if you're not having 2.1 kids, you expect someone else's child to take care of you when you're old. But the reality is closer to what Colbert and Louis wanted, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
They also just want warm bodies to feed into the ravenous maw of their narcissistic death projects. They just aren't as open about it or as good at it. Like, they just – and they'll never have Louis IV.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Yes, because they didn't. He literally fought and like warred his way. Like his whole childhood is like wars and conniving. Right. Like even the 14th is. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Yeah, exactly.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
So the years in which Versailles is constructed and debuted to the world are good ones for the French economy, which doubles in revenue between 1661 and 1671. Again, Colbert is good at this. This does work. However, the wealth coming as a result of Versailles is largely due to an explosion, again, in luxury goods and work for skilled craftsmen. And so while on paper the economy is doing better –
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
A huge group of the country is doing much worse, which is the peasantry, right? The people who make their living growing food suffer tremendously while this economic miracle is going on. Again, this is not similar to anything that's happened recently. Not that it's the people growing food with us, but it is like –
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
you know, the economy's great on paper for all these corporations while a huge chunk of the working class is suffering, right? It is kind of, you can see it as similar to that where, well, yeah, like the people who are making shit for Versailles are doing well, but like the peasant farmers are like in a disastrous state. And Colbert's fine with this.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
He does not give a shit about these people suffering and neither does Louis. They are concerned with the continued expansion of this pleasure palace and the attendant growth of the French military and navy.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
They're constantly building more of it and renovating it. The only projects that are allowed to compete with Versailles for manpower are the military and the navy. As Mitford writes, quote, he, Colbert, did little or nothing to help the French peasants through a period of agricultural depression. Indeed, low farm prices suited his policy of cheap exports.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
The gap between the peasantry and the rest of the population was first became serious under Colbert. It was not bridged, as in England, by country gentlemen. He encouraged the slave trade, and although he did insist on certain humanitarian measures, this was the only way to keep down the death rate of such valuable cattle.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Worst of all, he increased the number of galleys in the French Navy from six to 40, each containing 200 unhappy souls. Since black people were useless for manning them, they had no stamina and died at once. This was a book written a lot longer ago. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
They could only be freed if their relations could afford to buy a Turk to replace them. Colbert thought that too many of his galley slaves died. The intendant of the galley swore they were well fed, but said they died of grief and boredom. So this is just a night. It's really to emphasize this is a nightmare state. Right.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Like while they're killing all these laborers in the palace, the whole Navy is we tried using slaves, but they all died immediately. So we brought in instead we brought in Turks that were basically slaves and captive prisoners. And, you know, you can buy your way out, but you got to find us another Turkey.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Yes. Well, this is for the Navy, but the Navy is there to protect your ability to continue building the big house, right? You need a strong Navy and military, so no one can stop you from having this huge house. Of course. Of course. Oh, God. Yeah, it's a nightmare.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
It is important to really emphasize the degree to which Versailles was, from the beginning, a marvel of architecture and art and culture, as well as a yawning pit into which human lives were poured in order to build and maintain. That said, the plan works. The nobles don't trouble him or any other French king in his line with thoughts of revolution again.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Beyond that, Versailles becomes the envy of every other king and emperor. It was, in one writer's words, the cultural heartbeat of Europe. When people on the continent referred to the king, like if people in other European states just refer generally to the king, it's often understood that they're talking about Louis XIV because he is so powerful.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
When you've got the guy in charge of your country talking about being a king and you've got a group of the wealthiest people talking openly about ending voting rights and solidifying themselves as a permanent aristocracy, you know, you're in a situation where it's not unreasonable to start looking at other, quote unquote, permanent aristocracies in history and what happened to them. Right.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
In his centralization of power, he becomes one of the most absolute monarchs the world has ever seen. One illustrative anecdote is a rhyme the Sun King himself composed. Le tas c'est moi. The state, that's me.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Lyrical genius, Louis XIV. It's so funny. No ego has ever been more fevered. A whole language of etiquette and pomp is created and developed around earning and keeping the king's power. So for an example of this, he hates the idea that people go to the bathroom, right? He can't stand this. He considers it a weakness, and if you... My man hates the toilet.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
If you are traveling with this guy or hanging out with him and you need to stop to pee, if you ask to be excused to go to the bathroom, you're instantly exiled from the cool kids crowd.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
The man can't get enough UTIs. What if he needs to piss? Oh, he just does whatever he wants. He's the king. He's pissing willy-nilly. He's the king. He can do anything.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
So his closest friends find themselves avoiding water or getting really good at holding it, or they have to sneak away to relieve themselves, right? I'm just going outside to look around. I just gotta have a smoke or something, man. I gotta go fuck my mistress. Yeah. Now, servants, some nobles have their own apartments with chamber pots, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
And so their servants will barter and sell bathroom access to people who need to go to the bathroom, who are like running away. This is wild. You've got to give me a second. I've got to pee somewhere, right? This is so strange. Because of this, there are rumors which will really get crazy among later kings. And these will spread heavily among people in Paris.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
And it's fanned a lot by newspapers and tracts that are printed in Denmark because there's no press freedom in France. So the newspapers that people are reading in Paris that have all of the gossip are usually printed in Denmark. And then- brought into Paris, smuggled into Paris.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
They'll be sold at like property owned by nobles who are like the idea of these papers being around for their own personal benefit and can keep the police away, right? So that's how a lot of this, we'll talk more about that later.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
But, you know, one of the rumors that starts to spread because of how weird Louis is about people going to the bathroom is that members of the nobility are just pissing in the hallways and corners of the palace and that all of Versailles is one big expense. bathroom, right? Everyone's just pissing and shitting everywhere, right? That is a rumor that's widely believed in Paris.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
This is an exaggeration. Mitford says it's just outright untrue because of how many bathrooms there are in Versailles. This just wouldn't happen. I don't think Mitford's got it right either because here's the thing. It's certainly not true that it's the norm for people to piss and shit wherever they're standing, but this is a house filled with thousands of drunk people. partying all of the time.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
And also they're gossiping. Yeah. So they're like, did you hear Sally went to the toilet? I saw Jeremy pissing. So one of the things that is a factor in Versailles, every room basically, every major room has orange trees in it. Like in other plants, people are definitely pissing in those pots. Like you're not going to tell me people aren't.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Right. And people are for sure puking in random spots. Right. Because, again, it's a big frat house to some degree. Right. So there's some amount of this that has obviously the degree to which they talk about this being a thing in Paris is a massive exaggeration. But it definitely happens, you know. Yeah. Especially if you have to surreptitiously piss. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
You've got to hide that you're pissing. You're just turning around. I'm adjusting lip hints. Hygiene was not as bad back then as people often assume among the nobility. But people didn't bathe daily. They're generally cloaked in perfume. And between that, the palace is constantly filled with smoke because of all of the candles and fireplaces.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
And so that's why I wanted to talk about Versailles this week. Right. You know, this is a case where the the bastard is this system, this this this world of the nobility where they were cloistered away from the rest of the country deliberately for some interesting reasons. And like what happened to their brains as a result of that and kind of why it all came crashing down. Right.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
So the smell of this place would have been fascinating at times. Yeah. Right? Let's put it that way. It smelled crazy in there. It smelled crazy. Not necessarily bad always, but crazy. Yeah. Like unfathomable to our modern noses.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
So Louis XIV wanted the whole world of Versailles to revolve around him, and it did, which meant one of the most important questions for anyone to ask on a daily basis was, who is the king fucking? And the king is a notoriously horny guy. He is horny by the standards of French kings, right? Cool. And that's hard. Like French, French Kings almost invented modern sex.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Like, and he is, he is the fuckingest of the Kings of France. Nice. Um, one of his first mistresses was, uh, uh, Luis de la Valier, uh, Luis de la Valerie, right. Uh, who eventually reached a sort of, and like, there's a huge conflict between her and his, his wife, the queen, um, and one of his other mistresses. And they eventually like,
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
all sit down and talk about it in a way that feels like weirdly modern and like become cool with each other. Right.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Yeah. Yeah. Like that actually happens here. And like, they're actually kind of chill for a while about it. Okay. Progressive. The first poly group. Yeah. I mean, adultery is so normalized in the Sun King's palace that it is kind of like that, right? Like the king's mistress is a specific named position at court and one that held quite a bit of influence, right? Wow. This government is insane.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
You've got the piss house. The lady who's just fucking the king. The mistress is like a title. You have a business card. The mistress is a title. And the people like gossip, like the way that we're gossiping about, like, who's going to lead the FBI or whatever. People are gossiping about like, yeah, I think the king might fuck this lady next. And, you know, who knows what that'll change. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
And it's one of those things where he has his official mistress. That is not to say that he limits himself to one mistress, as Johnny Wilkes writes, quote, it's said that one day he grew so impatient waiting for a lover to undress that he turned his attention to one of the maids. Because again, he's the king, you know, he's just fucking whoever he wants. He needs to fuck then.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
And he needs to fuck then. Yeah. Now, because the king has the power to he one of the ways in which he'll show favor to a lady, he fucks or to just like a dude. He has like a part. He gets along with a guy one night. They have a good drunk talk or whatever. He hands out these gifts, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
And these gifts are not like, sometimes he can hand out just money, but usually the gift is like a pension or the right to tax a specific area or like you get a cut of the fish that are sold in this province, right? I got fucked up with Louis in that context, people. Yeah, I got fucked up with Louis and now I get 2% of all of the fish sold in Normandy, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Like that's just what I have forever now. Um... So there's a ton of money in being a woman who he likes, and there's a ton of money in just being a dude that he's friends with. And so because of how much money there is in this and how important it is to be in the king's favor, an entire shadow economy springs up among providing amulets, charms, and magical spells to curry the king's favor.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Oh, yes. poisons to use on rivals for his affections. This is a whole industry in France is like witchcraft to impress the king. Fuck yeah. Yeah, it's pretty cool. That's so great. Nancy Mitford writes about one such purfeyor of magics, Madame Voisin. And Madame Voisin was approached by a lady at court, vying with Louis de la Valerie for the Sun King's attention, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
So, you know, Valerie is his mistress, and this new lady wants to become the next mistress. Her name is Madame de Montespan. And she wants to take over for Valerie. And, you know, she thinks that magic's the best way to do that. So she talks to this Madame Boissin lady. And I'm going to quote from the book, The Sun King here.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
This is not going to be obviously Mike Duncan's done everything. the much more full version of like why the French revolution happened. This is not, these aren't episodes about the French revolution.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
She gave excellent advice to her clients and did what she could to help them, catering for little feminine desires, such as larger breasts and smaller mouths, white hands and luck at cards. When unwanted babies were on the way, she was very understanding. This means she provides abortifacients, right? If wishes concerned an inheritance, there were certain powders.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
For unrequited love, various forms of magic. No doubt she began advising Madame de Montespan by talking over the situation and who, longing to be loved, can have enough of such talks and such advice. But nothing happened. The king remained indifferent, right? So she tries some of these like magics and spells and the king doesn't want to fuck her yet.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
So it's decided that they should move on to like the hardcore spells, which means bringing in the devil, right? If you want to do the powerful magic, you're going to have to talk to the devil.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
You didn't have enough of the devil. Of course. Right. Yeah. The nobility believes that no magic spell can be truly efficacious unless Satan is involved. And this leads to a separate cottage industry, one where you've got priests who want extra money. And so these Catholic priests will conduct underground satanic rites. in order to like do magic for these people in Versailles.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Yeah, this is a terrible house. This house has its underground black magic economy. Now, and obviously other, like in Paris, there's other parts of France where this kind of underground trade exists, but it largely comes to focus around these people in Versailles currying for favor, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Now, again, Nancy Mitford is from a different generation and she writes about all this magic more seriously as if these priests and these witches believe literally in everything that they're doing. My suspicion is that a lot of these service providers are like con men and women, right? They know these black masses aren't really...
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
magic spells or whatever, they just also understand that if they can create this space of altered reality for their wealthy out-of-touch clientele who live in a permanent party and don't understand the real world, then they can get a lot of money out of them, right? Right. I think it really is much more cynical. I'm sure there's some people who really believe that they're talking to the devil.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
hidden uh uh steadfast sophie why did those men need to die why why why is that the cover story you gave me i feel like you could have done something so much cooler i think that's pretty cool shooting it out with the fda and going on the run to mexico yeah an hgh ring well i didn't want to like accuse you of selling hard drugs I mean, sure. And everybody loves HGH. At least Joe Rogan loves HGH.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
You're suggesting that these people didn't have a connection to the devil? Yeah. Yeah. It's a bit unreasonable. But, you know, they know the nobility believes that. That's my interpretation.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
They've been living in the party house for, like, years.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
The laws of Madden. Don't exist. You've gotten it exactly right, which is that Versailles is a cult. And once you get people into a cult, you have altered their brain chemistry in a way that makes them much more vulnerable to anyone selling this kind of bullshit. Right. And that's why this magic trade really perks up. And I'm going to read another quote from The Sun King.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Madame Voisin knew a priest who was willing to help. He read the gospel over Madame de Montespan's head. There was some nonsense with pigeons' hearts under a consecrated chalice, and she prayed, "'Please let the king love me. Let Monseigneur le Dauphine, that's the king's son and heir, be my friend, and may this love and this friendship last.' Please make the queen sterile.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Let the king leave La Valerie and never look at her again. Let the queen be repudiated and the king marry me. It was all rather harmless and undeniably successful. The king seemed to become aware of her for the first time. He went off to besiege Lille in June of 1667, taking her in the capacity of lady-in-waiting to the queen. Louise de Valerie was not invited.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
In despair, she followed the royal party and caught up with it as the camp was being pitched. When she came face to face with the king, he put on a terrifying manner and said, Madame, I don't like having my hand forced. She had to go away, deeply humiliated. During this campaign, Madame de Montespan became his mistress. Her sacrilegious prayers seemed well on the way to being answered.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
The king loved her now. So it worked. You know? Yeah. It's good. This whole system works. This whole system works great. Now, unfortunately, all of this, this whole industry of like devil spells is going to become a problem in part two. But we're going to be talking about that on Thursday. Ed, you want to plug anything after this super long episode?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Yeah. Eight or nine episodes. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Or else. All right, everyone. We love you. Kind of. Some of us love you.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
That did go really well. Really good. There were a couple of those treaties and they all went well. Yeah. But yeah, yeah. So there's probably the best popular culture touchstone on this recently would be that 2006 Sofia Coppola movie about Marie Antoinette. Sure.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
I actually don't know about the garden.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Oh, I mean, you mean the literal, I think you're talking about a movie called The Garden. No, yes, there's a nice garden in Versailles, yes.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Yeah, yeah, okay. Which is why I knew about it. Yeah. Nice garden, big palace. But I think that OK, I'm glad that's what you know, because there's a lot more there. The story of Versailles is the story of, among other things, the invention of like Versailles. the modern centralized administrative state, just done in kind of the craziest way imaginable.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
And in order to tell that story, we've got to start with a guy who is probably close to, you know, one of the contenders for like best at being a king, just on a technical level of anybody who was ever a king, Louis XIV, better known as the Sun King, because he had a very high opinion of himself. Mm-hmm. But which was somewhat justified.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
This is the guy who is the longest reigning king in human history. Nobody was king for longer, probably. He spent 72 years on the throne, which is nuts. like an objectively crazy amount of time to do any job. Al Davis of Kings. Was he wretched and crazy at the end? I do claim to be that as a podcaster. He was wretched and crazy at the end.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
He's so wretched and crazy. Oh my God. Wonderful. His ass is rotting. That's what kills him. It's great. He dies from his bum rotting? He dies from ass rot. Yes, he sure does. Oh yeah, oh yeah. This story's got it all, baby. So Louis XIV, all of the French kings in this period are Louis, right? They will be referred to kind of casually by some historians as the Louis, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Because they're kind of interchangeable with the exception of the Sun King in some ways where you're just talking about like, and then this Louis and that, yeah. Yeah. So Louis XIV, our boy, was born in September of 1638 to Anne of Austria and Louis XIII. His mom was shockingly old to give birth at the time. She's like middle-aged and had had four stillbirths before him.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
So the fact that he came out not just alive but very healthy was regarded as a miracle and a good sign, right? He would grow up to be a mama's boy always. So Louis XIII dies like immediately after his son is born. And he had been very clear in his last days that Anne, his wife, should not govern after his death.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
This is a thing in a lot of other European countries, like in many European countries, like in Russia, right? Women can reign. You know, like the queen, if things work out that way, the queen can be the regent. She can run shit, right? Right. That is not the case in France. They do not allow that in this period in France. And Louis VIII is like, Anne should not govern after my death.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
And so he creates a regency council to manage things until Louis XIV is old enough to run France on his own. Right. And part of why he does this is that Anne is not French, right? She's Anne of Austria. Now, that's also not a good description of who she was, because you would expect, given that her name is Anne of Austria, you would expect her to be from Austria, right? Right. Where is she from?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Absolutely. Oh, Ed, of course she's not from Austria. She's from Spain. Obviously, you call Anne of Austria. The Austria of Europe? The woman from Spain. Yeah. She's the queen of Navarre. She's like the whole Austria thing in her name has nothing to do with geography. It's purely a result of the fact that she is a Habsburg, right? There's a branch of the family who are Spanish, right? Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
And that's why she's Anne of Austria because the Habsburgs are also the house of Austria. Yes. Yes. Yes. Oh, there's so many Habsburgs. Oh, we're going to be talking about Habsburg jaws later in this story. Don't worry, buddy. Don't worry. There's Habsburgs all throughout this motherfucker. That makes me so happy. Does it make you Habsburg? Habsburg. Hopefully not.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
You need to drop me a few times as a baby to do that. Then your blood wouldn't clot. Actually, I don't think that was a Habsburg problem.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
There's a lot of people fucking their cousins in this story. That's just how royalty is. Nice. So from age four on, which is like when his dad dies, Louis XIV's earliest memories would have been a political turmoil between his mother and her native country. Because, again, the fact that she's a Habsburg means that the French people don't trust her.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
They're like, well, she's obviously going to be more loyal to Spain and to Austria than she is to France. This is a constant problem because you are always bringing in nobles from other houses in Europe to to marry the king. And there's always this kind of like, well, then they can't possibly put France first, right? Right.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
And there had just been a war between, as there is constantly in this period, between France and Spain. So there's a lot of reasons why people don't trust Anne. And that's going to have a big influence on him, is this distrust for his mom by the French people.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Now, because we're talking about European nobility this week, I really need to emphasize everything that I say, explain about these people is going to sound ridiculous. This whole culture that has come up around the nobility is nonsense by this period. They've just been in power for too long. And the system is crazy. Louis is going to make it a lot crazier.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
I just told people you'd shot it out with the FDA and you were on the run.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
But I do think it's worth kind of emphasizing that. So the next time you read that our Grand Vizier, Elon Musk, has appointed a man named big balls to control all of our personal tax data. Remember that people in power have always been irritating dipshits, right? That's not unique to the United States. That's just something that comes with giving small groups of people all of the power, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Traditionally, we did it in the past. Yes. Yes. And now we're doing it in the future. Yeah. Yeah. Good stuff. Great stuff. So Anne actually had gotten – his mom had gotten confined to house arrest for passing military secrets to her dad at one point. But she does this thing that is very common. When she becomes the queen regent –
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
She exiles a bunch of her own supporters and kind of betrays her family to run France, right? She chooses to go for France. And this was a pragmatic move because once her husband died, her position was not really stable. Now, most of the big decisions made for France in this period are not made by Anne. They're made by a guy that Anne appoints to rule in her son's stead.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Yeah, it would be more fun. But, you know, you're back. You're healing. You're feeling a little better.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Here's our honestly somewhat like, I mean, it's great. Like 100,000 is fine. It's a start. We're above that now. But I don't know.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Yeah. We're all seeing the kind of guys getting hired to work at the Pentagon now. I'm hoping that maybe there's going to be less of that. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Yeah, no. So it's one of this guy who is a kook and had some positions in Canada, did a Reddit AMA and was asked why, you know, because he talked a lot. He really wanted to talk about serious topics. Yeah. Yeah. And his whole thing was, I want to talk about the aliens that are definitely here. And he was asked by one of the people on the AMA.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Why have these species publicly announced their existence? Is it a galactic rule to avoid broad contact with an alien species until they reach a certain point of technological advancement on their own in order to preserve their own culture? Are we being quarantined because we are too violent? Are the human governments withholding their existence on their own for their own motives?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
If so, what would their motives be? And by the way, that series of questions is in order. Star Trek. I forget that actually there's a separate sci-fi thing that is the whole quarantine thing. And then that's just the X-Files.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
We got a plaque. Finally. I want one. Finally. It's so shiny. I've never had a plaque before.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
I forget which one. Yeah, it's a prime directive. I remember reading a short story, several of them that have the quarantine thing as the theme, but I forget the exact names. And then obviously X-Files is the last thing. So Paul answers, some have, as in some aliens have contacted us.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Valiant Thor, the benevolent Venusian with an IQ of 1200, lived in the Pentagon for three or four years, offered us Earthlings a richer, healthier life in exchange for giving up our nuclear weapons. His offer was not accepted.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
They got a taco. That's all you need if you're a Venusian. Although, according to the book we're about to read, no Venusian would ever eat a Taco Bell.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Only raw food, Molly. Only raw food. Now, speaking of our bodies being a temple, my body is a temple that worships these products. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. We talk a lot about red flags in relationships when you're looking for someone to date or for a friend or just people in general. But what about green flags?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Look at this. It, like, fucks with the light in the room. I can, like, do an Aziz light on myself while I look at ancient hieroglyphs that reveal the aliens that have been coming to Earth for thousands of years to direct civilization, which is relevant to today's episode.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Things that let you know that somebody's a person you might want to be more involved with. Well, if you're not sure what a green flag looks like for you, therapy can help you identify green flags and actively practice them in your relationship so you can embody green flag energy yourself.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Whether you're dating, married, building a friendship, or just working on you, it's time to form relationships that love you back, and therapy can help with that. It can help you learn positive coping skills and how to set boundaries, and that empowers you to be the best version of yourself. If you're thinking of therapy, BetterHelp might be a great option.
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Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
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Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash behind.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Ah, God, we're back. We're so back. Molly, we've never been this back. So I think it's at this point that I got to show you the copy of the book that I found or that my friend found in the Airbnb that they went into. Look at this. Yes. Yes. Look at this beauty. Look at this gorgeous thing.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Well, actually, there is a you know what? That's it's insane that you say that because the front and back cover art is by Carol Ann Rodriguez. It's just weird that Carol's and Carol's. That's the word I'm looking at when you say that.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
She's got flowers in her hair. There's a rainbow. There's a lady on the back being abducted. She's looking good in that dress.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Yeah, it looks like the rainbow is the tractor beam, Molly.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
So this is all great stuff. This book is by Michael X. Barton. We're going to talk about Michael in a second. But first, I got to talk about the guy who wrote the special introduction because his name is Timothy Green Beckley. And Timothy Green Beckley ran a publishing house called Inner Light Publications.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
That's two words like this Star Trek episode that might be one of the best science fiction pieces ever made. That's the one with Picard's flute. Anyway, this has nothing to do with that. It also has nothing to do with Inner Light Publications, which is a black-owned publishing company in Georgia that deals with much more serious works than Timothy Green Beckley, one of whose books is interesting.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
MJ 12 and the riddle of hangar 18. And of course, we're going to look at Timothy, Timothy Beckley. You know, we could we not. Could I not show you a picture of this man? Show me the man. That would be illegal. I would I would go. I would go to podcasters prison, which is just Spotify. Look at this guy. Look at him. I'm getting a beautiful animal. Look at him.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
He does have a little bit. If you told me he was like Andre the Giant's cousin, I'd be like, oh, shit.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Robert, you wouldn't want to be alone. That said, I've never heard anything bad about this guy, but you wouldn't want to be alone with anybody who's too into the UFO movement. Now, you especially wouldn't want to be alone with him because he is now dead. He passed away at 73 in 2021. R.I.P. Yeah, his his what you may call it obituary says he was the sole remaining Beckley of the family.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
He was famously known as Mr. UFO and Mr. Creepo. So you might you might not want to have been alone with this guy when he was alive. That's not a great nickname.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Why did they put that in his obituary? I think it was a different age. A pioneer in his field of ufology, the paranormal, and all things bizarre. He was a publisher, author, editor, producer with Interlight Publications, publishing over 200 books. Previously the editor of UFO Universe Magazine and a film reviewer for Hustler Magazine.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
He ran the New York School of Occult Arts and Sciences and worked promotions for the School of Rock and Roll. He was a podcast host on KCOR Radio's Exploring the Bizarre with Tim Schwartz. Oh, yeah, he was on Coast to Coast FM. Oh, obviously. He was on What with William Shatner, you know, a fixture of the New York City nightlife. That's a thing that can mean a lot of things.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
In what way? But what I love about this guy, as much as we're laughing about this, this is an extinct kind of guy, right? In the same way that the Tasmanian tiger is extinct. Allegedly. I want to believe there's still some of them out there, but I just haven't seen the evidence yet. And it is tragic. Yeah. So some other luminary. And so he is the publisher.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
And as a spoiler, the actual author of this book, Michael X. Barton, is a guy who was writing stuff for the UFO scene in the 60s. He was an L.A. businessman whose life suddenly changed while his best friend became seriously ill.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
While praying, Michael found he was able to receive telepathic communications from more advanced souls purporting to be living on a higher, more evolved vibrational plane of planet Venus, which cannot be detected through scientific methods.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
That's right. And Barton dropped off the face of the earth at some point. Beckley claims that he kind of was able to get in touch with him and he was like not doing well. So maybe all of this stuff doesn't actually work in the long run.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Maybe he ascended. But in any case, Michael is just or Beckley just republished his books in the more recent period of time before he died. Because, like, fuck it, I guess. And I think that's funny. Before we get into this book, I want to look at some other luminaries that Interlight Publications have published. These are like. So obviously, number one is Timothy Green Beckley with 15 books.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Commander X with 12 books. Commander X. Yeah, Commander X has written 12 books for them. Ashtar Command, two books. Hercules Invictus, just one, just one book there. Admiral Richard Byrd, one book. Let's see here. Dragon Star, Ramashakra Master Yogi, one book. Another book that's the Ashtar Command, which might be different from Ashtar Command. Is that a collective?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Unclear to me at this moment, Molly. But there's some great names in these guys. There's some great names here. And before we get into this book, I guess the last thing we should do, because I forgot to do this earlier. I want to go back to the Airbnb that my friend stayed in, which belongs to a guy who identifies himself and is a public figure with a YouTube channel as Paul of Venus.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
And we're just going to look at his website for a second. Are you down to look at?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Are you down to look at this? Yeah. Okay. Okay. Venus on Earth. Of course it's an embodiment. Where does love come from? Love.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Ascension galactic. Embodiment. Oneness. Venusian technology.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Personal coaching transmissions. Color about it. Younger than I thought. Greetings to all. I am Paul LaVenus, an ascension guide from the sixth dimension on Venus.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
I can't enhance, Sophie. I can't enhance.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Okay. God damn it. I don't have command. Let's see. Control?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
There. Fine. You happy? You happy? Yeah. We're zooming in on his picture for you listening. It just looks like a guy in his like 20s or 30s.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
One of those hats with like little wings. He's on a mountain. Yeah, he's walking around the Mount Shasta area. That's what it looks like.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
He's left in the lens flare. He just looks like a guy. There's nothing wrong with the way he looks. What I really want to get into is reading his introduction of himself. I thought he would be old. I did too. I thought – because this is old. Like this book, again, is from the 60s and it's based in like Valiant Thor stuff, which starts in the 50s.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Timothy Green Beckley is like an older figure in ufology and conspiracy culture. Like these guys are – are contemporaries. And honestly, in some cases, like predecessors of like fucking the people who came before Alex Jones, you know, this is not like new stuff. Um, but Paula Venus does appear to be fairly young.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Uh, I am Paula Venus and Ascension guide from the sixth dimension on Venus, a paradisiacal planet. I'm delighted to introduce you to a remarkable opportunity to expand your understanding of energy, ascended masters, human embodiment and Ascension. Uh, so that's good. You know, uh, maybe check him out if you want to ascend, uh,
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
You're always saying that. And look, I know because I'm into UFOlogy that there are mushroom aliens living at the center of Mount Shasta. So go find them, folks. Go hike up right now is a great time of the year. Just whatever your street clothes are. Don't bring extra food. Don't bring zero degree sleeping bags. No, don't bring any methods of contacting the outside world.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Just start walking up that mountain. The aliens will take care of it. You'll be fine. Harness the light. Harness the light. Two Bigfoot hunters died about an hour north of me like a week and a half ago. God.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
They were on the wrong plane. That's exactly what this book would argue. So, Molly, this book, Venusian Health Magic and Venusian Secret Science. is a beautiful work of art. There are so many lines in this book that just make my heart sing. And before we get into reading it, I'm just going to read you a blind quote that I found in there. Can you get a leave of absence for three months?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
I asked him. It will take about that long for us to carry out certain experiments I have in mind for contacting Venusians.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Yeah, that makes sense to me. Yeah. Medicaid probably would help, too, with the Venusians. You've got to call their Venus desk, but there's not a lot of not a lot of phone traffic ahead of you there. OK, so let's let's get into it. I'm opening this this beautiful book and it starts with the introduction. By Timothy Beckley, Timothy Green Beckley.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
And he's just talking about his friend Michael X, how he was a mystic who showed up and gave talks, you know, starting in the 50s and 60s at places like Joshua Tree, Giant Rock, where they would do these like massive early UFO events. Things. And I would say these people are like totally just like copying Star Trek. But to be honest, knowing Gene Roddenberry, he was copying some of these people.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Keep all this in. This is the good stuff. Oh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where I, Robert Evans, have finally won an award. And no, it's not a real award. It's a bullshit award that you get when your YouTube channel crosses a threshold that really, in the grand scheme of YouTube, is not a whole lot of subscribers.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
I don't know if he's copying this guy, but Gene was into this stuff. You know, like some of this is it's very murky because like Star Trek, it's going in the 60s and they definitely both bleed into each other. But I have to say there is a degree to which Roddenberry is getting pulling some of his ideas from the early UFO subculture.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Gene Roddenberry, there's a very good chance that he was having very strange sex at the same events where fucking the author of this book was speaking. Because that was kind of Gene Roddenberry's thing.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Riker was always a self-insert. What man wouldn't want to be Riker? You get to sit down however you want, you know?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
You know, anbojitsu, which is like jujitsu, but you all dress like the guys from American Gladiators.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
He didn't care at all. He was a 24th century man, you know?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
He introduced the concept of gender to their species. Yeah. Oh, Riker. So when I when I said earlier, I saw a picture in here and I instantly knew like, oh, shit, this is like something Jordan Peele saw when he was younger. That very much influenced the film Nope, which is a movie about both like. horseback riding and black cowboys, but also about space aliens and cryptids in the sky.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
There's a line in here. While the talks by Michael X and others were going on, it was not unusual for a UFO to be spotted at the Giant Rock Convention. And then...
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Yeah. So this is a kind of cloud. And it's a kind of cloud that all these UFO guys think is a UFO cloaking itself. And they would show up above. You would get clouds like this in the desert. They would show up above these gatherings at Giant Rock. And all of these people who were very much ready to see aliens would have the best day of their lives.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
And years later, we got a pretty good Jordan Peele movie out of it.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
There's a lot of different possibilities here. So let's get back into this. There's a section of this introduction by Beckley, Words of Universal Knowledge and Enlightenment. And he's talking about all of the years of letters and calls that he got by Michael X and his teachings. The below communication is representative of the type of mail that crossed my desk.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
And this is a letter from someone else about Michael X. In about 1965, I had the privilege to listen to Michael X. Barton give a lecture at the San Antonio Street College of Metaphysics Inquiry. Michael was a very small man and was well-dressed. After the lecture, I asked in private what the X meant in his name. He said it was in respect to Christ.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Later on, I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Wallace Halsey's beautiful wife by the name of Tarna Halsey. J.W., my guru and teacher, once told me that Wallace and his wife were at the giant Rocky UFO convention and Wallace was talking and walking around with a spaceman who looked the person. I think looked like a person is what it's supposed to be.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Tarna came up and told them that she was going to take a picture of them both together. The space person told Tarna that if she took a picture of them, that his image wouldn't show on the print. This was due to the fact that they had been talking about very high vibrational thoughts and his picture wouldn't show up. Tarna then said, I have a very good camera and I'll be able to get your picture.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
She took the picture and the space person couldn't be seen. He then tried to tell her that he had told her what had happened. Later on, Tarna came back to her husband. and the space person told Tarna that she could take their picture, and he would be able to be seen on the picture.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
She then took another picture, and the space person came out on the picture, because they had been talking about normal things.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Yes. Yes. I later had an interview with Tarna, and she said she had demonstrated to a friend that she could become invisible to a camera. She was able to do this with her friend. She, in a previous life, was from Venus. She later became the wife of the Crusher, who was a retired wrestler.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
I got a PhD in street college. I've heard a lot of people shout a lot of things in the street. that's accessible higher education that's i'm gonna throw that on my cv next to judge phd at the street college i have heard a lot of crazy people in san antonio shouting things actually oh man street college yeah the world used to be so much more fun um but also not i have to
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
You know, what I'm going to say is, folks, you know, we're entering a new era. The security state has amped up. Make sure if you're going to be out there, you know, doing legally questionable stuff that you're talking to too high a vibration for photos to capture you. You know, that seems like good OPSEC, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
That's right. That's why all of those January 6th videos are so blurry. Oh, shit. Okay. So now we're at the author's foreword, right? This is finally Michael X, seer of a new age in his original writing.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Our space brothers, Venusians, tell us that no one on Earth need be sick or racked with pain or filled with hopeless despair if the amazing health principles they have unselfishly brought to us are practiced.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
The health magic of the Planetary Teachers is intended for all of us Earthlings who have a burning desire to leave poor health behind us forever and go on to wonderful joys and activities that come only to the healthy. Due to the fact that the Venusians are much further advanced in their understanding of man than we are,
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
They have learned all about the electric power that makes the human body function as it does. They discovered that radiant health and vitality could be stepped up by the simple means of increasing one's intake of life energy. Life and energy are both capitalized through a positive diet of highly vitalized foods and by a conscious direction of what they call Lifetrons. Lifetrons? Lifetrons, Molly.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Lifetrons. So are they selling vitamins? Yes. No, no. I don't think they believe in vitamins at this point. They believe in like vitamins as a thing, but I think they believe in vitamins as a thing that you only get through fresh fruit.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
They're selling books about it. But the key is eating only uncooked, fresh, organic fruit.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
That's going to give you a tummy ache.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
I think you're allowed to have vegetables, too. Now, look, first off, folks, we're going to have a lot of fun with this in part one and part two. This is not relevant to BTB because these people are bastards, and I include our friend Paul from earlier in that. I don't think these are bad people generally. This is a BTB because UFO culture, which they created... Well, not Paul.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
He's kind of a later descendant. But the guy we're reading from helped create it. Spent decades as this pleasant and generally quirky background part of American life until it all got swallowed up by QAnon. It has at this point been essentially exterminated as an independent subculture. And we need a term for that. Obviously, this is not on the genocide spectrum.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
But this is, weirdly enough, the destruction of a culture that did exist, that was like a thing that influenced American life, that is gone now. And that's I don't know, like how we like there's not like a term for for that really for like the way in which particularly because it didn't just like people didn't just like stop being interested in it.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
It was like consumed by this other darker thing who used its raw material in order to like grow and spread. I don't know what we call that yet. Anyway, that's my one serious point for the day. Let's all think of a good word.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Yeah, yeah. And yeah, that's a good way of putting it. And speaking of things that are contagious... Whatever's making me cough. But you know what? I'm alone in my basement, so fuck you. Here's ads.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
I feel like now that you've addressed it, people are going to get weird in the comments.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Look, look, you know what? I'm calling an end to this bit using my powers as a judge.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
But, Sophie... Did they mail you a plaque? Have you gotten yours yet? No. Oh, yeah, I haven't. Oh, yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Molly, so did you get some Lifetrons during the break? You know, let's let's talk about Lifetrons, Molly. Let's let's chat a little bit about Lifetrons, because when I heard the word Lifetron, number one, I was so happy. I love this. This is exactly why I dig into stuff like this. I was like, oh, yeah, that nom, nom, nom, nom. That's the good stuff. That's that healthy, healthy shit.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
But I also naturally assumed that Michael X created that term. It just felt like so idiosyncratic, right, that this came with this book. Absolutely not. And I want to read a quote from the Yogapedia now, which, as far as I'm aware, is a completely reliable source on this sort of thing.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Lifetrons is an English word coined by 20th century guru and yogi Paramahasa Yogananda to describe the vital life force known by the Sanskrit name prana. He described lifetrons as intelligent life energy in the body. According to Yogananda, the building blocks of life, atoms, come from electrons and protons, which themselves are created from lifetrons.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Lifetrons come from thoughtrons of the infinite.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Imbalances in the Lifetrons lead to physical, spiritual, and emotional illness. For healing, Yogananda said, the yogi invokes God's help to correct the imbalances. Wait, so... That sounds good to me.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
This is not a robust mallet either. YouTube, great quality.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
I think a Lifetron is a kind of quark. That's like I'm not great at this kind of stuff, but that's how I would interpret it.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
I think they come from thought trons of the infinite. So the infinite has thought trons, which produce life trons, which are the building blocks of electrons and protons.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Neutrons are not discussed.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
That may not be a part of yogic science. They do not descend from the thought trons. As far as I can tell. Okay. I got to say Paramhasa Yogananda is a guy. He is a dude. Was a dude. He is super dead. Oh, he died in 1952. Yeah, he's dead as hell. This man was born in 1890 S3.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Oh, this is the autobiography of a yogi guy. Yeah, no, this is the dude Steve Jobs was obsessed with his book, right? This is one of Elvis Presley's favorite books. This is the guy who started the US yoga craze in a lot of major ways.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Yes, Steve Jobs had strong opinions about Thoughtrons. Steve Jobs was a Lifetron guy. Wait, didn't he die from only eating fruit? He sure did, Molly. We have Steve Jobs read the book in our hands. There's no way when he got cancer, Steve didn't think, thank God I know about Venusian medical science.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
I think there's a solid argument that Valiant Thor and Michael X. Barton murdered Steve Jobs. Wow. See, this is a really relevant Behind the Bastards episodes. We are getting very behind some of these bastards. We're making discoveries.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Mm-hmm. So I should also note that when I looked up Lifetrons, I also found a link to a company called Lifetronic Systems. They do energy efficient home automation. It does not appear to have anything to do with anything.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Hey, that's great. I'm immune to all problems, except for I'm actually fighting something. So I've got a cough right now. I'm not immune to anything.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
They're safe. I'm not going to say they're safe because that whole industry is full of fucking untrustworthy companies. I'm not saying they are in any legally actionable way. I've seen Smart House. I am saying picture. Get a different name, guys. Get a different name. You're stealing from the yogi who got Steve Jobs killed indirectly. Although, actually, I support that. Keep using the name.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Convince. Can we convince Bezos to eat only fruit when he gets sick?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Look, I'd eat a cooked iguana. They're tasty.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
People need to eat more reptile meat. It's delicious. And there's lots of iguanas in Florida. When a good body part breaks part one.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
I'm going to come out with my own book saying that like, uh, fucking what's a good planet. Uh, Mercury, the Mercurians contacted me psychically through my Bluetooth headset and convinced me that the real way to end aging is iguana meat, right? Have you ever seen an old iguana? No, because they don't age. You eat their meat, you're immortal. Boom.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Well, Neptunian medical science is decades behind the Mercurians, Molly. Everyone knows that. The best way I know of to relay to you the life-giving health secrets of the Venusians so that you will be able to apply them most effectively in your own life is by telling you of a certain remarkable experience.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Jim Lindy, a good friend of mine who I have known through many years, was the nucleus around which this most unusual experience revolved. It was through my knowing Jim and wholeheartedly responding to his sincere and desperate call for help that I was plunged into a tremendous New Age adventure with the space people of Venus. Capitalize every word of that sentence, Molly.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
It's a terrible intro, Sophie, because I had a great lead in where I was talking about how like this is like in the start of Fifth Element where Aziz is using the mirror to direct light to the guy looking at the hieroglyphs because the aliens that keep coming back to guide humanity were back. And today we are talking about aliens that have been guiding humanity forever.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Yeah. He knew Jim since 53 when they formed the Interplanetary Contact Group in Washington State, which is absolutely a real thing. I actually looked this organization up. Because our author works with Jim in Washington for a while. They have a lot of people working together to try to make interplanetary contact kind of on an ad hoc basis.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
And then our author moves down to California to – you have to read between the lines here. But he seems to live on a farm with one or more women who provide his food for him. How many more? Unclear. Molly, unclear. He only mentions the one. The number of women is actually really important to me. Maybe just one. Unclear. I will say –
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
I don't know how to rate this because he talks about the woman who is specifically preparing his food that he doesn't talk about like a wife, but does talk about with a degree of intimacy. And he lets us know that she's old, but doesn't look it, which is better than the reverse, which would be she's very young, but old in her spirit. Right. Which is what I am.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Whenever I am reading the account of a guy who lives in the woods and talks about UFOs, I'm waiting for the 15 year old girl. Right. Because every one of them. I've had this happen to me in real life once in Mount Shasta, actually, where I'm sure this guy lived, where a lot of these people live. I'm like hanging out.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
My partner at the time and I are just like wandering through a fucking farmer's market. And we meet this guy who takes us back to his farmhouse. You know, we're bullshitting and stuff. He's got a whole wall of Bud K swords. And then this fucking like 16, 17, very unclear. No one says he doesn't like she and he won't say her age. I don't really know what was going on to this day.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
We fucking booked it. I don't know.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
I was very young and very dumb at this point. This is you have to you have to learn these things by doing them.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Well, yeah, don't actually follow absolutely none of my life advice, kids. Yes. Yeah, that's the best life advice I can give you. So, in fact, follow all of my life advice.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Now we're stuck in a quandary. So I looked into this because I was like, oh, shit, I wonder if this organization is still around. The Interplanetary Contact Group seems like the kind of thing where there might still be like one elderly man like keeping a mailing list going after all of his friends died.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
No, but I did find out about something called the Interplanetary Networking Special Interest Group, IPN-SIG. Networking. It is a U.S. 5013C nonprofit organization affiliated with the Internet Society that is trying to figure out how to make an interplanetary Internet with the idea that like at some point in the future we'll need that.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
I think it might actually be just like serious nerds trying to think through something that might one day be a thing.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
It is a book episode, everybody. Huzzah. Huzzah. Praise be. And it's a book episode that is getting, we're not getting into this QAnon shit. We're going behind those bastards.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
I'm glad that that moon that moon colony is not lasting long. Look, anyway, back to when a good body breaks. So he bounces. He's away from his friend Jim for a while, but he keeps in touch. They show up at the same conferences, and then he stops seeing Jim so much, right? He's not really hanging around.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Now, he does note of his friend, Jim Lindy was by nature a spiritually progressive individual, open-minded to the nth degree, yet by no manner of means could he be considered in the least gullible. He had seen several UFOs himself in the night skies and had been filled with awe and wonderment at the sight.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
A gullible man would never feel wonder at the sight of a UFO. Maul, that's obscene. How dare you suggest such a thing? What would Will Riker say? He'd be too busy trying to figure out how to sit down backwards in my complicated chair. On one occasion, a brilliant glowing object of huge proportions was sighted in the sky near the vicinity of his own home.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
It circled the area twice, and then with amazing acceleration, the bright object climbed straight upward several thousand feet and headed in the direction of the horizon at unbelievable speed. Jim was so profoundly impressed by what he had been permitted to witness—no saucer sighting happens by accident—
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
That he determined to do all within his power to find out more about the unique and marvelously intelligent beings who make their home on worlds far distant from this earth. So...
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Stop. Can you meet me? Stop. Urgently important matter. Stop. Jim Lindy. I just find that nice. So I guess he's living outside of L.A. I'm guessing somewhere near like I'm guessing Calabasas or like Santa Monica, the coast, maybe the palace. Actually, probably any of the places that have burned down aside from Altadena. Good chance is where this guy was living, like almost certainly.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
And we are talking about a set of myths and a couple of specific authors who were at the very beginning, the beautiful, hopeful birth of the UFO movement, which today is filled with a lot of people who are just basically Nazis. But back in the day, it was a lot of fun. Molly, you remember the good UFO movement, don't you? Back when it was pure. It was pure. It was beautiful.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
So he drives to the airport. He picks his friend up and his friend looks like shit. Right. And his friend is like, look, man, I'm a physical wreck. My health's been on a downhill to bog and slide. I'm losing hope. You know, I've been to all the doctors. My stomach's acting up. No one can do anything. I'm burning all of my money on these medical treatments that don't do anything.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
And, you know, it's bad, right? Like I'm fucked up and I think I'm dying. He needs fruit. He needs fruit, right? So this is the conversation that happens after his friend like bears a soul to him and is like, yeah, I'm fucked up. The doctors can't help me. I'm losing hope.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
You've overlooked one important avenue of help, I said, as I turned my car off the freeway and headed for my apartment in the suburbs. I glanced quickly at Jim and noted a glint of hope in his eye. What do you mean? The space people, I said bluntly.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Of course, of course. You've seen the saucers, just as I have. I know you believe the spacecraft are controlled by intelligent beings from outer space who must be far wiser than the majority of doctors on Earth. So... You know, this is when our author reveals that he's been in contact with some Venusians, right? He actually, he's not just like bringing this up for no reason.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
He has two very good friends amongst the Venusians, Lanzara and Shalana of Venus. These advanced human beings, for such they were, had long ago graduated from Earth to the planet Venus and are actively engaged in two fields of service.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
One, they hold important positions in the Lifetronic Healing Center on Venus, Lanzara being a master healer and Shalana being his most valuable assistant in the great work. Two, they have a limited number of all-caps, new-age students living on our planet Earth with whom they are in frequent contact by telepathy and other means.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Thus, a network of key individuals comprised of men and women in various fields of human service on Earth are secretly instructed by the Venusians, who become their cosmic teachers. And by releasing certain higher phases of knowledge to the key men and women of Earth at times, as that knowledge is most needed, the masters of Venus assist in greatly lessening the sufferer of Earth's humanity.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
So, it all sounds good to me, Molly. Do you want to suffer less?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
And it is very 50s too, where it's like even these ascended human beings living on Venus, like the woman's still got to be the helper. I noticed that. She's still got to be helping, right? She's not a healer.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
But not from the patriarchy. No, no, no. Again, you got to get to, fuck, what was the planet I named a second ago?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Mercury. They have left the patriarchy behind.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Yeah, they've graduated from gender. They're really racist against Italians. It is weird. It is like 1870s stuff. I do not understand it. One of the last to go. One of the last to go. Speaking of... Not speaking of racist against Italians, but speaking of going, it's about time for us to go. Molly, you got any pluggables to plug before we end part one?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Yeah, your show is downstream. I just talked about how these kind of weird little guys were kind of annihilated as a culture, and largely they were replaced by your kind of weird little guys.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Guys that want to annihilate all of us.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Yeah, and watch the movie Annihilation. Or don't. I'm actually kind of mid on that film. I've never seen it. Yeah, it's okay. I think the book's better. I haven't read the book. I don't know what I'm talking about. Don't listen to me. Go to hell. I love you.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
I got reminded of that of that special time that special time and place. And by place, it's like Taos, New Mexico, Mount Shasta, California, and a couple of other small desert and or Pacific Northwest towns. Yeah. But a friend of mine went down to a small town. This person is a public figure, so I am fine talking about them in their Airbnb.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
We're opening this bad boy.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
But I don't want to give too much detail because people, you know, be creeping. But they were at a small town in Northern California. And they texted me from it saying, I think this Airbnb is owned by a cult. And then three minutes later, I think the cult might be Nazis. Yeah. So many such cases. First off, I had a little just like sit down, went and bought a cigarette, smoked it just like.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
So I'm the guy that like if my friends think they've stumbled into a Nazi trap house like that, I get the text. Like that's that's that's just and I know you're that you're that person for so many people. Molly, that's part of why I brought you in. I would say if I were to stumble into a Nazi trap house, I would start texting you and being like, Molly, Molly, I need some help.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
We're getting into this son of a bitch.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
So I looked into it. And the good news is that I don't think they're Nazis. They just talk a lot about seeing Nazi UFOs, which was a thing in the 50s, 60s UFO movement. That does not mean that they are fascists. So that's the good part. And I told them after I looked into this, this fella whose books were strewn about the house.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
They had a number of books strewn about the house that were specifically about Venusian space magic and Venusian medicine, by which I mean medicine and magic from Venus.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
You know, you would think that, Molly, but actually there's been a long and proud history of people from Venus coming to the United States to deliver us, by some accounts, the iPhone. That was actually from a season of American Horror Story.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
No, not at all true. Men who look like extras from an early David Lynch movie are from Venus. It's entirely possible David Lynch himself was from Venus based on some of the photographs that I've got here. So I looked into this and she actually ordered a copy of one of the books that she found there. But as I was looking into it, I was like, I don't think these people are Nazis.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
And I was like, so they might be harmless. And the next response I got from her was, do you want me to send you all the pictures the owner of this house has of himself with like 30 young white women in dresses? So... Immediately, we're back to, oh, OK, this this could be going in a bad direction again.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
No, you have been telling me that lie for quite some time. Where I'm like, you know what, Robert? I got to tell you.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
He absolutely did not. No, these are she said that every single corner of every room has has a crystal. And when I say a crystal, I'm not talking about like your friend who is in the crystals and buys like little ones that they keep in bags or like, you know, wear on their neck. I am talking like.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Crystals that cost thousands and thousands of dollars and are like four feet high, like every single room has these things in them. Oh, that's a whole market. Yeah. She took pictures of them. I remember seeing them. She now claims all of the pictures have disappeared from her phone. And I can only think of a supernatural explanation for this.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
It can't be something to do with uploading them to the wrong cloud service or whatever. This has to be the aliens. It was the aliens. It was the aliens.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
And we all know American Horror Story is, what's that term Alex Jones uses for media that's trying to prepare you for the truth?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Predictive programming, right.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
A sword is not the ideal tool for this, but it works.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
I do love that. That's like right up there with God hiding dinosaur bones to trick people. I gave you all the clues. I gave you all the clues. Why didn't you figure it out, Mr. Policeman? So one of the key people behind this, because the specific chunk of alien weirdos that we're talking with today, and this includes the guy who owned that house,
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
is people who either think they are from Venus, they are in contact with people from Venus, or people from Venus have come here in order to help us. And kind of the foundational member or the foundational figure in this movement is a fella named Valiant Thor.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Oh, Molly, you're going to love this. When I say looks like a guy from a David Lynch movie, I'm going to have to... I'm going to have to give you my screen here.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Yeah, Able Danger. That's a good name. That's a good name. And again, so unlike actual spy names. So this is Valiant Thor. In, I believe, the 60s, he started showing up at UFO conventions, claiming to be a man from Venus with an IQ of 1,200. Wow. And first off, I got to say, the burden of proof is on people to convince me he is not from Venus, because look at that.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
No, no mortal human could keep that much gel in their hair. It's simply not possible.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
They did. But that is simply more dapper, Dan, that could fit on a human male scalp.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
He does look a little like Gavin Newsom. Yeah. Have we checked out Gavin Newsom's birth certificate? Is he possibly from Venus?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
But look at that man. He's got a pocket square. He does look like he just stepped off of, like, the fucking... Oh, what's that Highway David Lynch movie Garrison keeps showing me? Um...
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Blue Velvet. Let's say Blue Velvet. There's some Blue Velvet guy in this guy's look. I'm sure David Lynch was familiar with the story of Valiant Thor.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Absolutely not. Your hundredth or your thousandth? Chances are you do. And we know you'll definitely remember your hundred thousandth subscriber. No, absolutely not. I have no idea how many of you people are. I have gone on to look at the comments exactly once, and I decided that if I continued to do that, I would in fact become the Joker.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
And as a spoiler, one area or thing we're going to get into today that I'm excited about is what I am absolutely certain is a photo that inspired Jordan Peele to make the movie Nope or that helped to inspire was one of the one of the inspirations behind the movie Nope. So stay tuned for that, my friends. But first, so Valiant Thor is like the first of these guys.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
And he claims like apparently to have landed. I'm actually going to read. This is from his Amazon author page because Valiant Thor wrote a frustrating number of books, Molly. Did you read them? I haven't read all of them. No, of course not. I have been reading bits and pieces of Valiant Thor lore since I was like 17 or 18. Okay.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
On March 16th, 1957, a strange craft landed in a farmer's field in Alexandria, Virginia. Local police arrived on scene with guns drawn, expecting the worst. They were surprised to find what appeared to be a dapper, unarmed man stepping out of the craft. They were even more surprised when the man telepathically asked to speak with the president.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Over the next few days, the visitor would meet with President Eisenhower deep within the Pentagon. According to valiant Thor, he was sent here by the Galactic Council to convince humanity to shy away from their use of nuclear weapons. Thor and his co-pilots Indrid Cold, Carlo Ardo, and Terry Wriste, which has in parentheses Demo Hassan.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
I haven't looked into all of these names, but neither of those are real. Claim they hailed from the planet Venus. These Venusians were humanoid in appearance and were photographed at Gray Barker's UFO convention at Howard Manger's farm in 1958. So actually before the 60s. This is birth of the UFO. 47 is Roswell, right? And things take some time to spin up.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
This is the absolute proto-history of American conspiracism, right? We are at the foundations here. Thor convinced President Eisenhower to create a council against the use of nuclear weapons. However, the committee was repeatedly blocked by members of the CIA and DOD. Thor decided to switch gears and enlist the help of Barker in making contact with humans in all spheres of life.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
By building relationships with certain influential people and promoting those relationships through Barker and other publishers, Thor was finally able to put a stop to wanton nuclear testing. So if you're ever wondering why did we stop nuking Nevada, which the Heritage Foundation wants to start doing again, it was Valiant Thor. And he might come back, Molly. We might get this guy back to save us.
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Who is named after the guy?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
So unless Prince Valiant was spelled differently, it's been a long time since I saw one of those cartoons. Now, if you're saying, Molly, this sounds great, Robert. Obviously, I want to believe that Valiant Thor saved the world from nuclear weapons. But hey, isn't this exactly the plot of the 1950s movie The Day the Earth Stood Still?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Oh, well, there's a movie that my dad made me see called The Day the Earth Stood Still. That's about an alien landing in D.C. and telling everyone, hey, I represent the Galactic Council, basically. And you guys really need to stop it with the fucking nukes.
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Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Yes, absolutely. 1951, almost a decade before this. Yes.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
No, the movie was preparing us for the arrival of Valiant Thor. So we would understand. So that obviously the most influential man in the United States in the 1950s, Gray Barker, who held the UFO convention in Howard Manger's farm, would be ready, would be mentally ready for Valiant Thor. Now. If you're someone who is still like, I don't know, feels like they just copied a movie.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Would it change your opinion on Valiant Thor to know that Paul Hellyer, who is a Canadian entrepreneur, politician, writer, the longest serving member of the Privy Council of Canada and the former national minister of national defense for Canada, says that he's real?
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
There are numerous cases of women who visited his compound and were raped or assaulted and say that they went there because they saw him on the Oprah Winfrey show. And specifically, they saw Dr. Oz tell Oprah Winfrey that he couldn't explain the miraculous healings this man was responsible for.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Now, I'm not going to say more about John of God or Dr. Oz or Dr. Phil because we have done two part episodes on all three of these guys, none of whom would have obviously there's specifically John of God was like. In Brazil, a famous faith healer and assaulting people, he would not have become an international star without Oprah. And I don't think Dr. Like Dr. Oz probably just stays a surgeon.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Dr. Phil probably dies in a ditch. That's my guess for Dr. Phil is he dies in a ditch somewhere in rural Texas. If Oprah doesn't pick him up.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
That's the star power she has. Just listen to Dr. Oz speak. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing stuff. So we're not going to go into more detail on them. But I should note, we have never, ever had a bastard who is responsible for three different two-parter episodes on other bastards, or at least largely responsible. That should be a mark in the column.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Yes. Yes. And I think that really is the way to look at it.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
I think there's a back, I'm sure there's a degree to which both of those people, particularly Dr. Phil being as, Dr. Phil's a pretty manipulative person, I would argue. And I think he just understood how to make her like him and manipulate her. Dr. Oz has a legitimate thing that would make you like him and want to put him in front of people.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
It is not unreasonable at the start of things that you'd be like, well, this guy's literally one of the best heart surgeons who's ever lived. Maybe he'd be a good person to talk about public health. Turns out, no. Turns out absolutely not. But I understand how that process starts.
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Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Now, obviously, there was ample evidence, especially during the shot of God shit, that he was not, in fact, a good person to be doing that with. But I don't think the evil is not in that she initially was like, well, maybe the world's best heart surgeon is a good guy to talk about health. Right. I get I get how that starts.
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Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
With Dr. Phil, it's more like this guy made me feel good about myself during a lawsuit. Let's let him abuse teenagers on television for 20 years. But again, we're not going to say any more about these guys because we've said so much about them. But I did feel like we have to go into detail about one of Oprah's toxic bastards, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
One of the con men that she elevated to the public eye who we haven't done episodes on. And that's going to bring us to James Ray. Right. Born in 1957, Ray was a former telemarketer who got into the business of teaching motivational seminars to corporations.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
He was not an original dude and instead worked for Stephen Covey, the author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, teaching Stephen Covey's particular flavor of self-help bullshit to car salesmen and the like. Or, at least, Ray claims that he worked for Stephen Covey. There is no actual evidence of this, and Ray is a serial liar, so it's entirely possible he just made that up for clout.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Ray started his own motivational speaking business, and it did okay. Okay, it's not huge. It's not really overwhelmingly successful, probably because he's not super successful himself. He is not rich and famous. So he's like telling people how to get rich, but like he didn't do it. Ray is like a lot of these guys. There's very little to separate him from the herd at this point.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
He's an advocate of the law of attraction. which we've talked about a few times in these episodes. This is the bullshit belief underpinning the secret. Whatever good or bad things happen to you happen because you drew them to yourself. Like a lot of guys in this space, he mixed in buzzwords from quantum physics because of course he's like a big, also a big masculine guy, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
So as a masculine guy, you can't just be like... You can't just be like this is the – you can't do the wooey version of this, right? You have to say this is quantum physics, right? I'm talking about science to you. And so he would rope in buzzwords from quantum physics to try to convince mild skeptics that what he was selling was in fact science.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
In one interview, he said this about personal responsibility. I fully know for me that there is no blame. Every single thing is your responsibility and nothing is your fault because every single thing that comes to you is a gift, a lesson. Now, you think that could like...
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
be bad i mean i love that nothing is my fault angle like that i really connect with that uh yeah um there's gonna be a very uh interesting thing that becomes his fault uh in the near future here uh so yeah i i think that's probably a good idea um for him to be selling at this point, given where he winds up.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
His motivational seminars involved board breaking and trust falls, all of which was done without proper medical staff present, which is why prior to him getting famous, several people were badly injured during his events, at least one time at Walt Disney World. In 2005, a 42-year-old man was hospitalized after Ray made him exercise in a poorly built sweat lodge.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
So this is all happening before he winds up on the Oprah Winfrey show. Now, what gets him on the show is that he is one of several narrators for the 2006 documentary The Secret, which is what gets him on the Oprah Winfrey show. Oprah lavished praise on Ray and urged her viewers to sign up for his courses and listen to his wisdom. Many did.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
And he goes in short order from a failing motivational speaker with several lawsuits against him to the hottest thing in town.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
You know, I think some of it is just that at this point, he's just another motivational speaker. And it looks like he's attached to the successful project. He probably had a good rapport with Oprah. All you really assume at that point is like, OK, well, maybe this will work. Right. Like, yeah, this guy's probably someone smart to have on.
Behind the Bastards
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I think a lot of the, a lot of cases it is like literally they charmed me for like five minutes. Yeah. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
But that's not 0% of cool zones business, right? That's just the way entertainment works now, you know? Yeah. Take that what you will. So let's go to ads and then we'll come back and talk about what happens next in the James Ray story.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
We're back. So I want to read a quote from the New York Times about kind of the explosion in Ray's business after this, because he goes from, again, a middling figure, not a ton of money, not super successful to for a while, like the biggest name in self-help or at least like the biggest new name in self-help.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Quote, he offered a hierarchy of courses, each more expensive than the last, culminating in Spiritual Warrior, a $10,000 retreat near Sedona, Arizona. After a series of endurance exercises, including extended fasting, participants spent hours in a sweat lodge where temperatures soared above 150 degrees.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Mr. Ray presented Spiritual Warrior several times, and some past participants had raised questions about whether he or his staff members had sufficient training to run a sweat lodge. They probably didn't, right? Oh, no, they didn't, Bridget. I'm going to tell you right now, if there's a fucking white guy running a sweat lodge, he does not have sufficient training.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
That's just a rule in sweat lodges or white lady. Let's be fair.
Behind the Bastards
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When you are in the able to cook meat spectrum, people. Yeah. And again, sweat lodges, and I'm not competent to talk about this exhaustively, but there's a long history in several Native American traditions of use of sweat lodges. And they can be – have been part of like therapeutic treatments run by people who know what they are doing. I'm not saying there's – sweat lodges are inherently bad.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
James does not know what he's doing. And he is not – utilizing this as part of an actual therapeutic thing. He is sticking people in a hot room because it's unpleasant and he wants to make them do something incredibly unpleasant and physically straining because when you do that with a group of people and you have this dangerous, painful physical experience and then you get out of it,
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
On the other side of it, you feel bonded to those people and to the program, right? Yeah. That's why he's doing this. And when you use a thing like that that way, your concern is that they suffer, right? Yeah. And not that we're doing this in a way that is safe or going to like have a therapeutic benefit. It's that this is as intense an experience as possible.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
And in fact, he would brag about it when he does his big sweat lodge event on October 8th, 2009 for a group of people, each paying 10 grand for the spiritual warrior seminar. The guy, he brags to the group. That he just talked to the guy stoking the fire, setting it with good intentions.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Part of it is he's got to really think about positive intentions for your experience to help make sure it is a good one. And this is the hottest fire we've ever had. Make them feel special, right? Make them feel like they're getting this uniquely intense, life-changing experience. They did get that. You know, I got to say, it is a uniquely intense, life changing experience for all of them.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Twenty one of the people in that sweat lodge are hospitalized and three of them die. When first responders show up, one compares what he saw to, quote, the site of a mass suicide.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Let's talk about Oprah's Angel Network. Now, this was Oprah's primary vehicle for charitable, I mean, she also has her own personal foundation. This was her primary vehicle, certainly for educational-focused charitable donations during the height of her fame.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Yeah. You're like if your meat is cooked to one fifty in the center, you're pretty little dry. Pretty much good.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah. Mm hmm. So this is very bad. You're not supposed to kill multiple people in a single sweat lodge. You're not supposed to ever kill people in your sweat lodge. These are overwhelmingly not old people. There's a podcast called Guru on Wondery that is just about Rey and goes into detail about this. One of the women who dies is, I think, like 39 years old. And it's like the story you hear a lot.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
this is a woman who's like career ambitions hadn't really worked out and she didn't really have a clear idea of like what she wanted to do. And so she gets into a lot of this self-help type stuff. She sees James on the Oprah Winfrey show. She has the same attitude of a lot of people that like, well, if Oprah says this guy's good, he must be. She gets his books.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
She drops tens of thousands of dollars on courses. And then eventually all of her savings on this spiritual warrior weekend that fucking kills her. Um,
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, yeah. And Ray is the epitome of that. And of course, as soon as he kills a bunch of people, Oprah distances herself from him. He does not show back up. And by God, at least last time I checked, I couldn't find good clips of him on Oprah's show. A lot of that stuff gets... Let's get this shit out of here.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Yeah, I mean, it's all rights claims and stuff, you know? Yeah. So he is charged and convicted. He spends some time in prison. Oprah, obviously, nothing happens to her. She does not stop putting self-help gurus on her show or stop encouraging new age experimental alternative medicine.
Behind the Bastards
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It got its start in 1994 when a little girl named Nora went on the Oprah Winfrey Show to talk about what was called the Penny Harvest Project. Apparently, she and some other kids had started collecting pennies and eventually raised like $1,000 via taking in pennies to donate to some different charitable organizations.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Uh, I do want to listen to something that I didn't have in the script, but I just came across it and maybe we'll try seeing this video. This is something that James Ray posted after getting out of prison, uh, called be careful what you wish for. Um, so I'm just gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna take the wheel here, Sophie. Insights into success. Be the best you can be. I love that.
Behind the Bastards
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Be the best you can be. This man killed three people.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Also, I have to say before we start this, James Arthur Ray, it is one of those three-word names. That's a very serial killer-y.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Yeah, he was always doomed to it, although not a bad fit on the suit. Anyway.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
I love how long it takes him to get to like, so we had a sweat lodge and I killed three people. Oh my God. It's also, there's a masterclass here. And like this guy hospitalized almost two dozen people and killed three. And he immediately is like, as soon as I get out, I'm going to write a book about redemption. Right.
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I'm going to have like, this is, I'm just going to pivot this to being about my, my success journey. And like, I thought I was at the top, but you know, I didn't realize what fate had around the corner when I accidentally killed three people at a sweat lodge. This is just one of those curveballs life senses sometimes, right?
Behind the Bastards
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Sometimes you're just out there living your life, trying to do your best, and you get three people killed in a sweat lodge. It happens.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
He is a really, really Wolf Blitzer-looking motherfucker. Yeah. That's how I would describe him.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
And Oprah says this inspired her to wonder, if you could do that, I wonder what I could do. And like, well, the answer is you have hundreds of millions of dollars, Oprah, much more than some children collecting pennies. I'm glad you think it this way, but obviously the answer is you could raise a lot more money. I do think it's-
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
I crashed my car. I hit a kid with my, you know, total accident. They darted into traffic. No, no, no. No, no, no. You engineered a situation that was definitely going to kill people because you didn't know what the fuck you were doing and had lost your mind with arrogance and belief in your own power.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
So this does not stop Oprah from putting self-help gurus on her show or encouraging new experimental alternative medicine again. She puts Ray on in 2006. He kills people in 2009. The John of God episodes air, I think, after that.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
So it's good stuff. In my research, I came across an article by Jean Brown, the sister of Kirby Brown, who died in that sweat lodge. Jean and her family started a nonprofit, SEEK, S-E-E-K, all caps, SAFELY, focused on trying to establish protections and guardrails for the self-help industry. letter to Winfrey. You helped make this sham of a man what he was.
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In fact, it was after seeing him on your show that my sister Kirby Brown read The Secret and became a fan of James Ray. I remember when we were together for my wedding at my parents' house in July of 2009, three months before she'd die of heat stroke in a plastic tent in Arizona. I remember Kirby telling me that I had to read this book, that it was amazing, that James Ray was amazing.
Behind the Bastards
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that he'd been on Oprah and that she was looking forward to the Ray event she'd be attending a few months later. That's right. She mentioned you by name. And Brown is begging Oprah in this to speak up and use her incredibly powerful, unique platform to advocate for regulations to protect people from the predatory aspects of the self-help industry.
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To my knowledge, Oprah never took her up on this strident plea. And, yeah, that's a bummer.
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Yeah, it's pretty bleak. Now, I can't conclude a series on Oprah Winfrey without at some point discussing her infamous book club. And so that's what we're gonna do now. You get to talk about, we're not gonna keep doing that joke. I should say something about the car thing, probably.
Behind the Bastards
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So she does this episode where she has like three people on who can't afford cars and the problems that causes in their life. And then they all find out they're getting brand new Pontiacs. and then gradually becomes clear everyone in the audience is getting a free new Pontiac. Now, two things.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Number one, the specific, if you know anything about Pontiac, you know that that's a curse more than it's a blessing.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had a cousin with a Firebird, and boy, howdy, was that thing a piece of shit. But also like these are, this was an advertising ploy in part. Pontiac pays for the cars. That's why they're free, right?
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But also the Oprah Winfrey show does not remember to like give the people money in addition to the cars because when you get given a car, there's like tax implications and everyone wound up owing like six grand as a result each for that car, which was like a big problem for a lot of people because these are folks who couldn't afford cars. Now-
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
The way that Oprah.com puts it is like, Oprah was inspired by this little girl, but there's certainly a read of it that's like, oh, I could beat the hell out of that little kid. You think $1,000 is a lot? She shoves her off the fucking stage. So on September 18th, 1997, Oprah announces the launch of Oprah's Angel Network. The initial plan for this was to turn people's spare change.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
in terms of the bastard column, this was more of like a thing. They just didn't. Cause in the future, when she would give expensive gifts to people, the show would also give them checks to account for the tax burden. So I think this probably lands on just like, you weren't thinking about, this was like an ill thought out advertising ploy that worked pretty well for Pontiac.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Although look at where Pontiac is today. It's still Pontiac.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
I mean, what's most funny to me is that the specific model of Pontiac has gone down as like one of the very worst cars ever made. So it really was like, you get a shitty car, you get a shitty car. And you owe 6K. And you owe six grand. Anyway, that's not really a bastard thing. It's just kind of funny. Let's talk about the book club.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
In September 1996, Oprah launched her book club as a regular feature on her show, making monthly picks and discussing them on air. Instantly, it became the largest and most influential book club on earth. Every single book club pick that she would make for... like 15 years or something, became a bestseller, every one of them. Some sold many millions of copies.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
I read a paper analyzing Oprah's literary choices by Alana Cullen of Salve Regina University, and Cullen quotes a scholar named Loftin as saying, Nearly every one of the novels she suggested for the original book club followed the same narrative trajectory. A woman, usually of a centric yet compelling character, experiences an enormous trauma.
Behind the Bastards
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The remainder of the novel follows the woman as she manages the psychological, material, and social after-effects of the trauma. Usually the stories conclude on a neutral note. The central character is wiser for her experiences, though on the whole not entirely happy with the way her life is resolved.
Behind the Bastards
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Obviously, Oprah believes this paradigmic plotline will not only resonate with her viewers, but also expresses a universal truth critical to her spiritual work. The suffering of women is universal, unabated, and endured only through solidarity with other women. And I don't read that because that's like evil or anything. That's just an analysis of the fiction picks.
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It's interesting to me that like, oh, okay, the fiction that you are drawn to is very much a mirror of your own life. Yeah, just an interesting thing. And Oprah does, in fact, pick a lot of good books, including some great works of classic literature that she helps to spread to a wider audience. Her book club is an extreme positive for the publishing industry as a whole.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Now, when it comes to what is this net positive or negative for society, that's a little harder because in addition to some very good works of classic literature and just books that are fine that more people read and more people are reading because Oprah is a good example. There's also shit like a lot of poisonous stuff gets very famous.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
And I'm speaking here about The Secret, which we have, I think, discussed adequately, but also the infamous nonfiction book that turned out to be a fiction book, A Million Little Pieces by James Frey. We all know this story. Maybe not you at home, but everyone sitting here does, right? Yeah. Did anyone read this fucker before it came out?
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My mom made me. She wanted to scare me away from drugs. And this is a book about this guy, like, and it's his crazy drug and alcohol life. And he goes to prison, loses all his teeth. It's like this fucked up addiction memoir of, you know, addiction and redemption. And it is just horseshit. It's complete lies.
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Basically, you donate your spare change, right? She has Hillary Clinton on the show. Hillary puts some change in a piggy bank. And this raises $3.5 million to provide $25,000 college scholarships for 150 deserving students. Oh, I'm sorry, kid. Is that more than a thousand dollars? Let me. Twenty five per kid. But no, no, no. Your donation's good. Oh, yeah. No, no. Yeah, for sure. For sure.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Yep. Yeah, and it is like – bad fiction is a good way to look at it. Anthony Bourdain described it as an obvious, transparent, and steaming heap of falsehood. From the first page, I was enraged that anyone on earth would believe a word. As a former addict, I found this fake redemption memoir to be morally repugnant. You know, I remember thinking it sounded kind of cool.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Like, oh, man, this guy had some fun adventures being on drugs and alcohol. Maybe I should be an addict as an adult. Didn't have a positive impact on me, you could say. While Frey's book spent – he spends – this is such a hit. Like, it's hard to over – like, books almost don't go viral the way A Million Little Pieces did. He spends 15 weeks on the bestseller list, which –
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
It's huge for any author, especially one coming out of nowhere. And as soon as Ray is the top of the literary game, this guy goes mad with power. He starts – you can find like writings of his and like public comments he made attacking other authors like Dave Edgars and David Foster Wallace, calling them hacks and bragging that he was the best writer of his generation.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Yeah. Journalists start after this book is on the market a while, like looking into some of the obvious provable lies in his book and pointing out stuff that like, well, you talk a lot about the time you spent in prison and like you didn't. Like you never got arrested or sentenced for a thing? Like you didn't do the thing that's like the centerpiece of your book?
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Is it possible other things are lies if this obvious provable thing is a lie? Now, when the allegations come out, Oprah initially defends him. And in fact, Oprah even calls into Larry King Live to describe the allegations against Frey as much ado about nothing. which is like a unique, and in part because like she's put her ego into backing this guy, right? Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Like she called him brilliant and said his book was wonderful. If she got conned, that doesn't look good for the Oprah brand. Journalists kept pointing out inconvenient details and eventually the whole edifice of lies came crumbling down. Frey eventually admits like, I fictionalized large portions of this. Oprah was furious, and so she does the logical thing and has him back on her show.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
There's like three times she has him on after this. One of them is like extremely hostile where she is clearly like, oh, you are pissed. Like this guy made you look bad. But she also lets him like explain at length – like he goes on a rant at one point where he's like, well, all memoirs are kind of lies, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Because people don't remember things – he's saying like the stuff we were saying at the start. We're like, well – Your past is to some extent like fiction, right? Because we all remember things that didn't happen or didn't happen that way, or our memory is different from the memory of other people who were there.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
He interprets that as, so it's fine if I just lie about my entire backstory and call it nonfiction, right? Which is a leap, maybe, I would say.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Like what the fuck is happening? I mean, actually, today there is no fact checking. There still was a little bit back then. It's very much it's very, very rare in publishing to get functional fact checking these days. Those are some of the first jobs you eliminate when you're cutting costs. Newspapers are unfortunately the same thing.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Um, there is some minimal fat, at least the last time I did a nonfiction book, which was 15 years ago, there was minimal fact checking, but it is mostly on the author. Right. Yeah. And I don't think they thought to fact check something like a memoir by this guy about his own experiences, even though there's stuff like his time in jail that would have been very easy to check.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
More to the point, Oprah continuing to have Frey on after he's exposed sells more copies of the book like it benefits him financially that she keeps having him on because people keep buying the goddamn thing.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Very impressive. I mean, you know, I raised three and a half million with like the shit in my seat cushions. But, you know, you're good. You're good. Yeah. Oh, did you have the first lady come on to to help with your program? Oh, no, you didn't. You don't know the first lady. You don't have her on speed dial, huh? Oh, interesting. Oprah's not doing that. We're just being dicks.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Cool stuff, Oprah. Cool stuff. Now, there were near calamities, too. In 2008, Oprah picked a Holocaust memoir as her book of the month.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
The book was called Misha, and it was the purported true story of the life of the author, Misha DiFonseca, who was a little Jewish girl during World War II, had to search Europe for her parents in the midst of the Holocaust, and was adopted and saved by Nazi murder by a pack of wolves. That is literally the claim that she makes in this memoir. Now- You guys want to hear something shocking?
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Didn't happen. Little Jewish girl was not, in fact, saved by a family of wolves during the Holocaust. In fact, Misha was not a little Jewish girl. She was raised Roman Catholic. She was not caught up in the Holocaust. This is just nonsense.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Thankfully, Oprah was saved from plugging her novel because the truth came out at the 11th hour before the episode could air, so they had time to scrap the fucker, but very nearly got brought in on that one. That said, in 1996, she was conned by the author of a different Holocaust novel.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Authors Herman and Roma Rosenblatt wrote a book titled Angel at the Fence about how Roman had saved Herman's life while he was interned at Buchenwald by throwing apples over the fence. Or Roma had saved his life by throwing apples over the fence. And that's how they'd met and fallen in love. And they'd been together ever since. Oprah called it the single greatest love story she'd ever heard.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
It was also total bullshit. Now, this was not revealed for more than a decade. So like this book goes out as her book of the month. A decade later, it comes out like they just lied. None of this happened. Oprah's response was basically a fart noise. She said she was disappointed, but refused to admit that she had been tricked.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
And I don't know how much deeper to get into the weeds with this stuff, right? Like when it comes to most of the harms of her book club, they kind of boil down to like, I don't think that her taste in books was always great, but that's a personal opinion. And then number two, and this is the big one. Jeez. She doesn't nobody really does.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Very few people read enough that every month for like 20 years, you can recommend your favorite book of the month that you have actually read cover to cover. Some people do read them. I read that much because I have to. But like you're being pitched. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oprah's not reading that much. She's got too much to do.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
And so she's not actually like reading multiple books every month and picking her favorite because that's very hard to do. She's got a team of people who are picking books. And that leads to them making some very lazy picks that. that can elevate literature, especially when she's focusing on like literature from other countries. There's an element of that that could be problematic.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
And this is not something I would have picked up on on my own, but I had the good fortune during my research to come across an article by Rob Spillman, the editor of Tin House Magazine and the author of an anthology of contemporary African fiction titled Gods and Soldiers. And he made a complaint about Oprah's elevation of a book called Say You Are One of Them by Nigerian author Uwem Akpan. Quote,
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
i i just want to say for the record i like the version of oprah that does that better than the version of oprah that exists she would be on margaret's uh cool people who did cool stuff if this had just been for 12 straight like literally like 20 years just shit talking this like seven year old like yeah you think that's fucking fancy 80 million dollars To be that petty.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
but with little added imagination. They have nothing of the power of Akpan's countrymen, Uzodinma Iweila's searing novel about a child soldier, Beasts of No Nation, or Senegalese author Bobokar Boris Diop's novel about the Rwandan genocide, Murambi, the Book of Bones. Akpan's writing is pedestrian and plodding, but that has never stopped Oprah before.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
I am sure Akpan, who is by all accounts a very nice person who is dedicated to doing good work in the world, will make for compelling daytime TV. It is just a shame that this one mediocre book is going to be put forward to stand for all of African fiction.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
No, they're Americans. Yeah. Like they don't need to know anything at all about Nigeria. Like, Yeah. What do you know? Like, OK, what's your last name? O'Malley. How much do you know about contemporary Irish politics? Oh, is it just St. Patrick's Day? Is that all you really know? Yeah. Okay. Okay.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
There's a way you could still be doing good as her by saying, hey, I'm going to pick this month. I've got this expert on Nigerian literature who put together this compilation of books, and he's going to talk about some Nigerian literature that you should read and recommend it to you. Again, that kind of takes the focus off of Oprah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
This really is such a revealing novel about modern Nigeria, a place I've never been or read anything about other than this novel. Yeah. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
yeah um anyway that's a thoughtful and complex critique i i don't know that you would again is this a bastard caller yeah probably a little bit here but it's also it's more than anything it's a reflection of the fact that even with someone as faith as famous as oprah tries to use fame in a good way to encourage reading which is generally positive there will always be negative externalities precisely because fame is a brute force
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
And it is very hard to use in a way that doesn't cause spillover harm, right? That's the nature of fame. I've quoted a couple of times in these episodes from a paper by Alana Mullen of Salve Regina University. And that paper's title is salient to this point. Quote, despair disguised as entertainment.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Does Oprah Winfrey sensationalize human suffering in order to fuel her media empire and encourage other media to follow? So the argument here is essentially that Oprah's content largely consists of a mix of horrific heart-rending stories of suffering meant to generate emotion that usually ends on an uplifting note where the subject somehow pulls themselves up by their bootstraps.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
So this is how the Angel Network starts, right? We're taking people's spare change. We're giving out college student scholarships to deserving students. But it starts to expand. You know, they get involved with like funding habitat for humanity and stuff like that. And in 2000, the Angel Network expands financially. Uh, thanks to Paul Newman, uh, of Newman's own, uh, as well as Jeff Bezos.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
This is augmented by segments on self-help featuring gurus and fitness experts who offer a mix of mental and physical exercises through which the individual might fix their problems.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
quote under the advice section of oh the oprah magazine after the reader reads the panic button martha beck on the only rational way to weather life's big and little snafus dr phil on getting along with the surly son-in-law and tips on raising a grandchild and sues orman on an oppressive load of debt a cramped house and a money squandering husband the reader finally comes to the journaling portion
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
How are we all feeling, Andrew T. and Bridget Todd, at this point in the Oprah Winfrey story?
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Here, the reader is encouraged to write down her feelings about fear. It begins, at times, we all fear we're not good enough. Before you can convince yourself otherwise, you have to simply admit to yourself and no one else what you want. Then tell yourself, I am good enough. Say it until you believe it.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
The reader is given five questions and is asked to reflect on such things like how does your self-talk change when you're fearful? We must keep in mind who here, who Oprah's readers are. These are not children. These are middle class women with families and careers. I would argue that the childlike dialog Oprah exploits presents her audience with a simplistic discourse on suffering.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Suffering is a powerful source of lessons and moral knowledge, and it should guide the individual. But what Oprah ends up doing is making suffering and the exploitation of your own suffering into a desirable and commonplace experience.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
And to an extent, it becomes that much of a thing because she does prove the market, right? Like, which isn't to say that she's morally responsible for everything that media has done since, but you do have to look at like the evolution that these things follow.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Yeah, and this sort of... I mean, like, there's... Yeah, I think we've gone into that enough for these episodes. I just kind of... It's something I think about a lot because the nature of this podcast is talking about awful things and these stories that are often very terrible and horrible. And part of the popularity of this show is that people are drawn to that sort of thing.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
And there's not 0% Oprah in the background of what I do. Now, I don't ever... For one thing, we don't end our episodes on a high note, usually. There's not like an inspiring moral journey that makes you think, don't worry, just by changing my opinions and attitudes, I can fix the problem like Hitler. Because you can't.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
The thing that fixes a problem like Hitler or any other major problem in our society is like collective action. And when that action is absent, there's often just nothing but terror, right? Yeah. But like, you know, it's still... It's this kind of thing like reading about these critiques of Oprah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Uh, they, they start like expanding it to like donating money to what the website describes as 50 life changing programs. And it's interesting. She describes as like, uh, 50, more than 50 life changing programs got the money they needed to help their local communities. Well, maybe, maybe some taxes from Jeff Bezos could help with that too. But, um, uh,
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
I have certainly thought about like what I do, you know, it's hard not to like in part because there's so much of how influencer and media stuff works today. That's downstream of Oprah. You kind of have to. But speaking of downstream of Oprah, let's sell some fucking products.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
And we're back. So I want to read a quote that kind of gets into the fact that Oprah— she primarily understands the world through the things that happened to her. And that's kind of what her journey, the possibility that you can have, no matter how bad things are for you, you can wind up like Oprah rich and famous and beloved, like by, by,
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Eventually, the Angel Network expands, taking in something like $80 million in donations, most of which ultimately go to helping to start 60 schools in 13 countries, including India, Ecuador, and China. So that's nice, right? Helping to start schools, funding schools. Again, as is always the case with Oprah, aspects of this are quite positive, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Changing your attitude, in fact, like that's what she is selling her viewers and readers. And there's an extent to which it's kind of dangerous to get people thinking about mass problems that way. And this is a point that's made very well in the book The Age of Oprah by Janice Peck. Quote.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
inspired by a new york times series from 2005 titled class matters the show's opening segment suggested a serious treatment of issues of class inequality clips of experts citing the growing gap between rich and poor shots of hurricane katrina victims crying for help and winfrey's own statement that nearly 40 percent of all the country's wealth is being held by the richest one percent the fact that one of the guests was robert reich u.s secretary of labor under bill clinton underscored the solemn tone as he spoke of declining manufacturing jobs
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
A shrinking middle class, mounting economic anxiety, and millions of Americans who are working very hard, but still not making it. And what some are now calling the new gilded age. But even as Reich called into question the viability of the American dream, Winfrey reaffirmed it.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
She referred to a New York Times poll where 80% of those surveyed said they believe you can go from rags to riches in America. followed it up with a video clip of a young woman convinced she would acquire the big house, fantasy engagement ring, and nice cars because if you work hard, you can achieve anything.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Oprah finally declared herself not only a believer in the American dream of rags to riches, but living proof of its veracity. Although Reich dutifully decreed his host a great model for America, he pressed on with his argument that success and failure are not simply matters of individual effort. Part of it is luck, he said. Part of it is connection. Part of it is education.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Winfrey replied tersely, I don't believe in luck, Bob. I think luck is preparation meeting the moment of opportunity. I don't consider myself lucky at all.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Yeah, that's luck. Like, your dad may not be your biological dad. The fact that he chose to take that responsibility for you is luck. You know, like the fact that your grandma, you know, you have credited aspects of her with like instilling in you some of these values that like led you being a success. That's also luck. You didn't have to have that grandma.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Welcome to Behind the Oprahs, a podcast about bastards. This is, you know, the Oprah Winfrey show or the Oprah Winfrey show show where we talk about the Oprah Winfrey show. Yeah, that's as good as I could do the intro here. Look, we're on part six. I'm exhausted. You're exhausted. Sophie's exhausted. I'm so tired. Let's exhaust everything we have to say about Oprah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
And it's this thing of like, if my life is hard and a lot of bad shit happens to me, I'm not a lucky person.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
There's buildings that were airstruck and like one member of a family in Gaza survives. They survived due to luck. They're not lucky. Their family got killed by an airstrike. Right. But it's just luck that they lived through that thing. Right. Like. But I don't know. I think people, a lot of people, especially particularly Oprah, doesn't like thinking about it that way.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Like maybe it's better to say because luck has a positive connotation. Blind fortune might be better. You know, it's the kind of blind fortune of the guy next to me took a bullet through the head, but I didn't. You know, that didn't happen to me. I'm just making an example.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Yeah. Yeah. Through luck. Other guys died because their luck was shitty. Yeah. You know? That doesn't mean you didn't also, like, grow up fucking poor in the Dust Bowl, right? Yeah. Like...
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
But also aspects of this are very toxic because particularly in the United States, the thing that Oprah spends most of her donation money on is not helping school systems. It is establishing specific charter schools. And in fact, the last thing the Angel Network does is it gives $6 million in 2010 to six charter schools in California, Colorado, Chicago, Pennsylvania, New Orleans. and Houston.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Yeah. Uh, I, I, She talks sometimes that way as terms of like, does she actually believe that like God picked her specifically? I actually don't. She said stuff that you can interpret that way. I don't really get the vibe. That's how she thinks about it. I think her attitude is like I succeeded because of my attitude and my hard work. Right. That's it.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
You know, anyway, since this is behind the bastards, I think it's prudent for us to end these episodes. And by God, they're finally fucking ending with a very clear, because this is all, a lot of this is murky. The book stub, like not, you know, the luck thing.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
We can talk about the harms there and like how that perpetuates capitalism and makes it harder to get people behind, you know, solutions to the problems of capitalism. But like, It's not bastardry to just feel differently about to have that kind of reaction. You're not like evil. I just think you're wrong. So we're going to end on a real clear bit of evil.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
In 2007, Oprah had Jenny McCarthy on her show as a guest. McCarthy was at that point an actress and a former playboy model turned anti-vaccine advocate. McCarthy is largely responsible for making Andrew Wakefield famous in the United States. Ginny believes, with no evidence, that vaccines gave her son Evan autism and that she cured his autism with dieting and pills she got from the Internet.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Now, McCarthy had a degree of fame in her own right, which is why people listened to her in the first place. But she would never, ever, ever, ever have reached more than a fraction of the people that she ultimately reached if Oprah had not had her on as a guest that fateful day in 2007.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
This turns her to the kind of person who thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of people, you know, were aware of. And, you know, some chunk of that, probably in the tens of thousands at this point, took her very seriously. Oprah puts her in front of like 30 million people. And this is – you talk about her as like an enzyme.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Yeah, this is that moment for the anti-vax movement, which is at this point one of the most dangerous and dominant social forces in the United States, pushing back against all of the gains of the last 150 years of medical science. It's a real nightmarish problem. And – This is one of the single most important moments in the growth of the anti-vaccine movement.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Very little equals this in its toxicity. And I'm going to quote from an article in Vox here. Science journalist Seth Mnookin, who covered this meeting of the minds in his book, The Panic Virus, reported that Winfrey praised McCarthy's unwillingness to bow to authority, her faith in herself, and her use of the internet as a tool for bypassing society's traditional gatekeepers.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Here's an excerpt from the interview transcript. McCarthy, first thing I did, Google. I put in autism and I started my research. Winfrey, thank God for Google. McCarthy, I'm telling you. Winfrey, thank God for Google. McCarthy, the University of Google is where I got my degree from.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
And I put in autism and something came up that changed my life that led me on this road to recovery, which said autism, it was in a corner of the screen, is reversible and treatable. And I said, what? What? That has to be an ad for a hocus pocus thing. Because if autism is reversible and treatable, well, then it would be on Oprah.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, this is this is an moment. This is in Lord of the Rings terms. This is Sauron forging the rings of power. Right? That's Oprah's involvement in the anti-vax movement, right? So days after that Oprah appearance, and this is continuing that quote from Vox, McCarthy was invited on Larry King Live and Good Morning America to spread her anti-vaccine message even further.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Between the three shows, she reached between 15 million and 20 million viewers with her anti-vaccine message. Mnookin estimated, I think there's actually a good cause to suggest that that it was more than that substantially. I think her most was like 26-something million viewers, somewhere along those lines. But anyway.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Now, charter schools are two schools that are not part of the public education system. A lot of this gets started, the charter school thing, in the Bush years, right? This is a big part of defunding public schools. We don't need to be spending... Parents need to have choice. They need to have vouchers that they can put into these different charter schools and magnate schools.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Oprah ended McCarthy's bit by calling her a mother warrior, which incidentally helped to set off one of my least favorite linguistic trends. I really fucking hate people using the word war here for basically anything outside of war. It's just irritating to me. Not a moral thing, but like fucking like it's always alarm.
Behind the Bastards
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But I mean, the sweat lodge that killed three people was the spiritual warrior seminar, right? Like. You're not a warrior because you want to meditate and sit in a hot room. You're not a warrior because you got on Google because you don't think your kid is worth loving because they have autism, you know?
Behind the Bastards
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Well, I mean, that's what McCarthy would say. I had to be one for my son to cure him of the horrible specter of autism, which is actually like deeply hateful to your kid that like you're going to move heaven and earth to like change them as opposed to just being like, yeah, this is my kid. This is how they are. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Now, the only slight nod to reality was when Oprah read a brief statement from the CDC, which pointed out that vaccines save lives. Even then, McCarthy got the last word, insisting, my science is named Evan and he's at home. That's my science.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Oh, man. The episode with McCarthy is still featured. I think the actual clips of it aren't... I mean, you can still find some of them, but the episode is still featured on the Oprah.com website. There's a write-up about it on there. Winfrey has never retracted or apologized for her role in the anti-vaccine epidemic.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
In fact, she had her production company sign McCarthy for a TV show that eventually fell through because Jenny McCarthy is... Bad? We'll say bad, because that's not legally actionable. I think she's really bad, and the show didn't happen, thank God. But Winfrey made her a recurrent guest. She keeps on coming on, and Winfrey does not limit herself to just McCarthy as an anti-vax figure.
Behind the Bastards
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In fact, I found a Mother Jones article that informed me that Jenny McCarthy was not even the first person with anti-vax views on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Quote, Months before McCarthy's appearance, Katie Wright, whose son has autism, said on the show, the vaccine connection has not been refuted at all. In fact, we give 37 vaccines to babies under the age of 18 months. Nobody has shown that safe.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
A wise idea, the multiple vaccines at once. I would say that the fact that most kids who are born survive to be adults shows that that's a good idea. Look at where things were there in 1850 with kids who were born surviving to adulthood. That I would say is pretty good evidence. Anyway. Yeah. The next year. Oh, sorry. Please.
Behind the Bastards
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No, absolutely. Never going to do that. Andrew, we can't even teach people how to read anymore. I know. Like, The next year, Oprah had Christiane Northrup on. Northrup is a physician, or at least a former physician, who started making the switch to new age health disinformation grifter on Oprah's program.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
All of this kind of like both saps the power of teachers unions because these schools exist outside of that system but it's also supposed to like prove that the the corrupt department of education is what's holding kids back that if we just let rich people establish these charts they'll obviously be vastly more successful
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Her initial target was the HPV vaccine, which she suggested should be replaced by a healthy diet. What? Look, just eat right and you can't get HPV. Everyone knows that.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
No, this is why, like, you know, in my own personal life, I don't use any kind of protection. We just eat a salad first. You know, that makes it safe. If you're both eating a salad, nobody can pass anything to anybody else.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
But I got this excellent Caesar. Oh, my God. It's so good. And it's spinach. None of that fucking like lettuce bullshit. Right. Like the good stuff. Mixed greens. Protection by kale. Fucking hysterical. So Northrop added, I'm a little against my own profession. My own profession feels that everyone should be vaccinated. Nothing you need to say about that.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
You won't be surprised, but should be saddened to hear that Northrop is still with us. She pivoted to COVID-19 denial. This is particularly a problem because in 2013, Reader's Digest declared her one of the hundred most trusted people in the country.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
I want to read a quote from a McGill University article on Christiane for the Office of Science and Safety, which calls her the Dr. Carl Sagan warned us about. And she's specifically talking about a Carl Sagan quote about like his fear that anti-science attitudes will lead to a return – a new dark ages.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
It's like this – people start to believe in a demon-haunted world rather than a world of like problems and solutions that can both be understood scientifically. And yeah, I think that's both a damning and accurate way to describe Northrop. Yeah. quote from McGill University.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
She does not believe vaccines are necessary if your body is healthy and has spread unsubstantiated fears about safe vaccines throughout her career. She claimed that the COVID-19 vaccines will target specific chromosomes that act as the seat of our empathy, an utterly absurd and unscientific statement. She believes that artificial intelligence has somehow been incorporated into these vaccines.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Absolutely nonsense. And that this AI will integrate itself into our DNA. She warns her viewers that the injection of patented vaccines inside our body will turn us into the property of the patent holders. Thanks for that one, Oprah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
A lot of people don't know this. Bill Gates actually moved into your house and because you're legally his property, you couldn't say anything about it. The good news is, super clean roommate. Super clean roommate.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Thanks, Ops. Great that she's in the discourse forever now. And that's part of the thing is like Oprah kind of takes a step back in like 2010, 11. She's on, she's clearly like partially retired, but like, All of these fuckers are still with us. You didn't take them with you, Oprah. If she'd just been like a Pharaoh and been buried with them all, I'd be fine. But like, alas, no.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
So it's this mix of like there are some very good charter schools that are very good for kids. I have friends who went to some of them. But also the larger part of the charter school project is problematic, and it continues on past the Bush era. One of like the biggest roles in this is in 2010, there's a documentary called Waiting for Superman by Davis Guggenheim.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
She's going to be, yeah, she's doing great.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Not yet, not yet, but probably by the time people listen to this, like there's a good chance he might've been confirmed. I think it's health and human services. No, it's Medicaid for him, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Oh God. Great shit. So the good news is that in recent years, the world has slowly started catching up to the many, many harms that Oprah and her celebrity have caused. I found a good article about this in The Root, which noted that after the catastrophic Maui fires in 2023, she and The Rock asked random working people to donate to rebuild the island.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
They put in $10 million themselves, even though... They they both of them are worth substantially more than that, shall we say? Yeah. In earlier years, I think they both would have been praised for giving 10 million.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
But in 2023, coming from a woman with more than two billion dollars in a bank in the bank, especially considering she was clearly talking about the parts of Maui where the rich people lived, it was taken widely as insulting. Speaking of insulting, and I'm getting a little petty here, but I'm going to tell this story anyway.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
In 2014, Oprah went on tour with her mystic buddy, Deepak Chopra, selling tickets for $1,000 for a motivational presentation called The Life You Want. Because there would be long lines to get in and the whole event would be something of a spectacle, Oprah and her organizers decided to hire local talent to play on stages around and outside the weekend-long event. Oh, did I say hire?
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
No, no, no, sorry. I meant they begged local artists to work for free for exposure.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Yeah, yeah. Now what's interesting about this to me, I started this by talking about that, it was like in 2000, she did her first like big tour. I think it was called The Life You Want, or was that, oh no, this one's The Life You Want. I forget what the first tour was. We talk about it at the start of episode five, but she did a tour, And in that one, she made a real point.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Tickets were like 20 or 30 bucks and all of the proceeds were donated to the Angel Foundation. So whatever you want to say about like, you know, this is the thing that the L.A. Times is like calling her a basically a god for putting on. But at least it was an extremely affordable event made for like working people to be able to attend. And she didn't profit directly off of it.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Or at least those are some of the like going ranging from one hundred to a thousand dollars. Right. And these are the venue in the town where she's specific because this this specific article comes from a performer named Revolva. R-E-V-O-L-V-A, or at least that's her stage name, obviously. And Revolva is one of the people who Oprah's team reaches out to asking her to work for free at this event.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
This is a documentary about how broken the education system is. And we're all just kind of like waiting for Superman to fix it. And it winds up being a very pro-charter school movie. There's a couple of other documentaries at the same time, The Lottery and The Cartel, with the same basic attitude. But Waiting for Superman is featured twice on The Oprah Winfrey Show.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
And Revolva points out that the venue in her town had an 18,000 person capacity. And if tickets are ranging from $100 to $1,000 with 18,000 seats, that adds up to what I think doctors know as a shitload of money. Enough to pay someone like Revolva, I don't know, a couple thousand bucks, something like that. Literally any money. Literally anything.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Yeah, I'm sure if they really hate it, it's like 500 bucks. I know that's lower than standard, but you'll get exposure. At least you're offering money. Right. You know, I so the producer she talked to framed it as a favor that Oprah and the crew were doing the local arts community. People started calling us asking to perform. So we thought we'd add a stage for local acts. Look at how good we are.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Like, motherfucker. Now, I've got again, I'm criticizing this because it is shitty and bad. I have no idea how much Oprah was aware, if at all, about the specifics of this. I highly doubt she was like, send Revolva an offer. Right. Like, there's a good chance, though, that like someone said, hey, should we have a bunch of local actors perform on a stage where you aren't for free?
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
And she was like, yeah, sure. Sounds great. they'll get exposure. Yeah, I think that's probably somewhere close to the case. Or even less, to be fair.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
End of story. That said, I suspect if asked honestly, Oprah would consider getting to perform on a stage kind of near her to be worth much more than money. And I do want to note, we'll have a link in our source notes to Revolva's website where she writes this up. But I'm going to have Sophie show you the little image infographic that she put together about the different people involved in this.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
It shows Oprah Winfrey net worth $2.9 billion. Deepak Chopra net worth $80 million. Elizabeth Gilbert net worth $25 million. Revolva net worth negative $20,000. She's like a fire spinner.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Hire Revolva. Give her money if she's still doing this. I don't know. This was 10 years ago. Best of luck, Revolva. Thanks for writing about this. Now, those of you who are in your 30s will remember that fun year or so where large numbers of people thought the world was going to end in 2012 because of the Mayans.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
The Mayans did not, in fact, predict the world was going to end in 2012, but there was a lot of money in lying about that for a little while. You may be surprised to hear that Oprah had a big part in that panic, too, from an article by Kurt Anderson of Slate. Right around the time The Secret came out, habitues of its general vicinity started buzzing about the year 2012.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Ancient Mesoamericans, people were saying, had predicted that in 2012, specifically December 21st, humankind's present existence would transition when the current 5,125-year-long period ends. New Age religion makers like American Protestants now had their own ancient prophecy for their dreams of something like a near-future Armageddon and supernaturally wonderful aftermath.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Winfrey ended the Daily Oprah broadcast in 2011, a month before the final episode. She interviewed Shirley MacLaine for the millionth time and asked about 2012, "'What's gonna happen to us as a species?' We're coming into an alignment, McLean explained. It is the first time in 26,000 years, 36,000 years, 26,000 years, I'm sorry, that this has occurred.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
She's not the only person who gives it a lot of media attention, but she gives it a ton of media attention, and that $6 million donation to those six private schools is directly off of the back of this. I found a good write-up in the Brookings Institute on the myth of charter schools, and it summarizes the message of all these documentaries. American public education is a failed enterprise.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
You have an alignment where the solar system is on a direct alignment with the center of the galaxy. That carries with it a very profound electromagnetic frequency. Vibration, Winfrey interjected. Vibration, McLean agreed. And gravitational pull, hence the weather. What does that do to consciousness? What does that do to our sense of reality? It's why people feel stressed and rushed, she said.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
It's remarkable how many transcripts of her show sound like stuff that like 15 years ago, like a pot dealer told me when we played PlayStation. Cause I like, I really just wanted to get out of there with my eighth, but like, you kind of got to hang with the guy a little bit. He's cutting me a deal, you know? These are the experiences legal weed is making kids miss out on now.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
And that's kind of dumb. That brings us to the end, because the worm has sort of turned for Oprah here. You know, the Oprah Winfrey show ended after 25 years on the air in 2011. She still does specials. O Magazine continued until 2020 when it stopped publicizing. Oprah still has a sizable production company. Her current show, she has a current show that's called Life Class.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Um, so she still does shows and stuff, but the Oprah Winfrey show is like an everyday thing ended in 2011. Um, and her cultural influence has faded substantially from its peak 13 years ago.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Perhaps Oprah might've been able to reign in the legions of new age, curious fans before they fell into the abyss of QAnon or flat earth or whatever kind of white supremacist shit is currently going viral with like a weird number of like, uh,
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Gen X people who spent 20 years watching Oprah but not anymore she doesn't have that juice anymore it's one of those things she came out big for Kamala Harris during the election and it didn't do shit 10 years ago Oprah and me have been able to bummed me out Might have been able to swing an election, but not anymore. Oprah's well past her peak, but it's also too unlate to undo the damage.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
This march into unreality that she helped to lead and organize, we're still going down that road, even though I think she herself sees how dangerous a lot of it is. There's no... there's no turning the wheel anymore. There's no jerking us back. We've gone too far. Um, so thanks. Oops.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Yeah. I mean, that's kind of where I'm landing now. I mean, where are y'all? I'm interested. I don't think she wanted the evil things is the tough thing, right? She's not malicious generally. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
The problem is not money. Public schools already spend too much. Test scores are low because there are so many bad teachers whose jobs are protected by powerful unions. Students drop out because the schools fail them, and they could accomplish practically anything if they were saved from bad teachers.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
I think most of the bastards have their malicious moments, right? Even if they would argue that what I'm doing is the best thing, they have moments where you're just acting out of petty hatred or anger. Oprah's bad shit is never that bad.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
I think there are pieces of that that are accurate and pieces that aren't. It's the great man versus trends and forces, right? I think reality TV happens without Oprah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
I think this movement to like, as long as social media is coming out, I think this movement towards like authenticity and like the weird parasocial bonds that are being built, that was inevitable well before we were on that road, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
But I also think the characteristics of Oprah herself, particularly her credulity for a lot of this anti-reality woo, you know, from Deepak Chopra, the secret Marianne Williamson stuff. I don't think that was inevitable. And I don't think the role and seriousness that she gave like anti-vaccine stuff was necessarily inevitable. Right. Well, I think it's a mix.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Yeah, I mean, I guess that's the thing that we'll never know, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
They would get higher test scores if schools could fire more bad teachers and pay more to good ones. The only hope for the future of our society, especially for poor black and Hispanic children, is escape from public schools, especially to charter schools, which are mostly funded by the government but controlled by private organizations, many of them operating to make a profit.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
I guess where I go with that is, but also like our, our inclination towards it is why it's good business. Yeah. It is not necessarily written that we are going like, because people have not always bought into as much of this shit. There were periods of time where that was less common, certainly less common to talk about, uh, publicly with the position that she had.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
I do think that leaning into it was not necessarily going ... That was a choice that she and other people made, and more resistance to it could have ensured that we were in a better position now vis-a-vis the existence of reality as a thing. consensus reality. I don't know. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
We're not disagreeing. No, I mean, like, this is... Yeah, like this is why I mean, the show, the fact that this is behind the bastards to show about the worst people in all of history would seem to always kind of lean into the great man stuff. I do try. I try to, like, pull back from that as often as I can. Right. And that. You could say the same thing about Hitler too.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
All of these monsters are both individuals and the bad things they do are what they are because of their individual choices and also the product of trends and forces. If there's not a Hitler, there is another guy who finds a way to take advantage of German anger and fury at the way the war had ended and the peace and whatnot and turn that into political power.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Now, that is, again, this is a thing that a lot of people are into, and Oprah is one of the folks who puts her money where her mouth is. This is the future of fixing public education. And it's problematic, to say the least. To continue with a quote from that Brookings Institute piece, and this is talking about Waiting for Superman in particular.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Now that guy's not necessarily the Holocaust guy, right? Yeah. But there's some, the energy would have been, has to be harnessed almost because it exists. You know, I don't know. Like this is, we're getting a little bit wonky here.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
That's right. You're getting effectively three parters worth of episodes today because this week alone is three hours. So- Yep.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Yeah. Yeah, I mean... You do and you don't. Look, if I wind up with $3 billion, who gives a fuck?
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
I am going to go out of my way to buy up all of the surviving or find the scrapped remains of all of the Pontiacs that Oprah gave out and give them back out to our audience.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
That's right. And, you know, until next time, fucking light your television on fire. I don't know. I don't know what to tell you to do. You already did. Step your phone in half and throw it in the sea. What a mess. What a fucking mess.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Some fact-checking is in order, and the place to start is with the film's quiet acknowledgement that only one in five charter schools is able to get the amazing results that it celebrates. Nothing more is said about this astonishing statistic. It is drawn from a national study of charter schools by Stanford economist Margaret Raymond.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Known as the Credo Study, it evaluated student progress on math tests in half of the nation's 5,000 charter schools and concluded that 17% were superior to a matched score. traditional public school. 37% were worse than the public school, and the remaining 46% had academic gains no different from that of a similar public school.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
The proportion of charters that got amazing results is far smaller than 17%. Why did Davis Guggenheim pay no attention to the charter schools that are run by incompetent leaders or corporations mainly concerned to make money?
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Why propound to an unknowing public the myth that charter schools are the answer to our educational woes when the filmmaker knows there are twice as many failing charters as there are successful ones? Why not give an honest accounting? The propagandistic nature of Waiting for Superman is revealed by Guggenheim's complete indifference to the wide variation among charter schools.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
There are excellent charter schools, just as there are excellent public schools. Why did he not also inquire into the charter chains that are mired in unsavory real estate deals, or take his camera to the charters where most students are getting lower scores than those in the neighborhood public schools?
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Why did he not report on the charter principals who have been indicted for embezzlement or the charters that blur the line between church and state? Why did he not look into the charter schools whose leaders are paid $300,000 to $400,000 a year to oversee small numbers of students? I don't need to go on. The myth of charter schools from the Brookings Institute is a good piece on this.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
I actually don't know. A journalist would check in on that. Let's do that.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
He's related to the family. At least the AI overview says he's related to the family, but not directly related to the foundation. And let's see here. Let's look up his Wikipedia to find a better... Probably just a coincidence. His dad is filmmaker Charles Guggenheim. Oh, he helped make Deadwood, won four Oscars.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Yeah. So anyway, this is... A problematic thing that Oprah Winfrey's charity is going to, which is not to say that everything she donates to – like a lot of good schools I've looked into. I looked into several of the schools that she put money on. They have pretty good academic records. But although they're not unproblematic, as this article – Yeah. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Again, 37% are worse. 17% are better. But even if all of them
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Yes, and it's also not all of these schools are – and again, because they abide by different rules, there's a lot of problematic aspects to some of them, including one of the schools that Oprah gave a shitload of money to, this one particularly in New Orleans. I'm going to quote from BET here.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Numerous charter schools, including those backed by Oprah Winfrey, Microsoft's Bill Gates, retailer Walmart, and New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees have been accused of breaking federal law by not serving children with disabilities. The children are named as plaintiffs in the legal battle which stems back to 2010.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Charter schools in New Orleans were seen as a way to rehab the city's failing education system and serve 70% of the city's children. The Loop 21 reports Lawrence Melrose, 16, needed counseling and speech therapy, which wouldn't be provided by the New Orleans Charter Science and Math Charter School that was made popular through its association with Oprah Winfrey.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Instead, he was frequently suspended and not allowed to ride the bus. The lawsuit says the school kept him from attending a celebration where students watched Oprah Winfrey hand the principal a check for $1 million. Wow.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
The exclusion of children with serious learning and emotional disabilities occur often, says the lawsuit at charter schools, which comprise the majority of public schools in New Orleans. The exclusion of special needs kids also helps charter schools test scores since children with disabilities typically do not do well.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
No, no. They literally locked him out of it.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Yeah. I mean, at this point, I support Musk building a rich people tunnel under L.A. just because we'll have a quake and the people who pay to access that tunnel will all learn a lesson very quickly at the same time.
Behind the Bastards
Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Yeah. Yeah. Get yourself there, man. So. I wanted to talk a little bit about Oprah and charter schools, but really when we talk about Oprah's direct bastardism, there's no better thing to discuss than the bevy of con men that she helped to introduce to the world. She is responsible for making John of God, the Brazilian faith healer who sexually assaulted at least 600 women internationally famous.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
One of Bettelheim's legitimate achievements is that he is an early proponent of the idea that if you are working with emotionally disturbed or mentally ill children, and they are engaging in behavior that you don't want them to engage in, your first task is to understand the internal logic of the child. Why do they think this is a good idea? Why are they choosing to act in this way?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
That you should seek to figure out why they want to do things. In other words, what's going on in the kid's head is important. That is a fairly unique idea at the time. And that's a legitimate positive step
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Right. Yes. I think that that's a big part of it. And that's overall like a good direction to be going. Unfortunately, Bettelheim has another belief. And it's one that he will talk openly about this idea that like you need to understand why the child is making that is doing the things that they're doing, their internal logic. He will also say the whole time you should never use physical punishment.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
on kids. You don't do it. There's no cause for it. The entire time he is working at this, he is running this school, he is physically punishing these kids. He just lies about it to parents and to academics by saying, don't do this. We never do this. The whole time he is using physical and mental abuse to be very clear, right? And it's interesting to me that he knows he has to deny it, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
It's interesting to me that if he were to have said at this time, obviously you spank kids, you know, sometimes you slap them a little bit. That would not have been controversial. That would have been in the 40s, well within the standards of like normal childhood education, right? The fact that he's like, no, no, no, you should never do this, but is still doing it is so interesting to me.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Yeah. This guy, Alvin Rosenfeld, who was Bruno's colleague and friend, partly defends the fact that Bettelheim uses physical violence. He argues that unlike most institutions at the time, the orthogenic school didn't use shock therapy. It didn't have restraints or any other violent tools. But sometimes the kids were so out of control that they needed physical intervention.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Find someone else to do it for me. And Bruno's whole business as an adult is not just I'm helping kids who are having problems. It's I am taking these kids away from their rich parents who do not want to deal with them and handling them. Which is very different from the healthy version of this where you're just – because I have a lot of empathy even in this time, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
And Bruno courageously handled that unpleasant task for his subordinates. assuring that, quote, they were free to be far more nurturing. He admits that Bettelheim sometimes meted out punishment that included slaps, but he frames this as minor for the era. Now, I won't say that what he did was extreme for the era, but it wasn't mild, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
And we have a lot of reports from kids who were with him during this period of time, and they do not report a mild experience. And I don't talk about this a lot on the show because I'm not an expert or an educator, but I did work in special ed as a paraprofessional for the better part of two years.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
And I'm unwilling to give detailed stories on the air for reasons that should be obvious and relate primarily to the privacy rights of those children. But I will say that I dealt with – primarily kids who were frequently violent and who were about my size, right? These are 17, 18, 19, 20 year olds. And many of them are non, the term we would use at the time was nonverbal.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
And because of my size, I worked with these kids very closely because I could take a hit and I was hit every day on that job, right? One of my colleagues suffered a near fatal injury, a TBI, another had a broken jaw. So this was a, I understand sometimes you have to use restraints to protect yourself and others, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
With kids who, and some of the kids were what we would call emotionally disturbed. There were a variety of diagnoses that you had there. I'm aware of the need sometimes to restrain kids. And so I want to emphasize that's not what's going on with Bruno, right? Right. For one thing, restraining is sometimes there's force involved in restraining a kid. It's not violent.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Your job is not to harm them physically. Your job is to stop them from causing harm to themselves and others. And sometimes the only way to do that is to like physically hold them so that they can't
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
hit somebody or whatever right this is like a very difficult thing to do and to talk about I really don't know how to get across like I'm very empathetic to the people who are good at this job and I want to emphasize I had no training in it we simply don't get training like that's another a major massive problem it's it's very like I had a four hour class on like physical restraint and none of it none of it was functional stuff um
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Yes, yes. And as it was 15 years ago, I think it was very primitive and we were not adequately trained to do the job. I can only imagine how bad it was in the 40s. Yeah. But again, what Bruno is doing here, none of the stories that I have from other kids are – he had to make difficult choices because a kid was violent and presented a danger to others.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
They are all he was annoyed at a behavior and so he hid a child. Yeah. That is what Bruno – and I really want to emphasize I'm not naive about like the complex choices that have to be made sometimes here. That's not what's going on with Bruno. What he is doing to these kids is sadistic physical abuse on a level that I have trouble comprehending.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
One of Bruno's students is a kid named Ronald Angrez. He spent 12 years at the orthogenic school during which he rarely saw his family. Bruno believed it was bad for students to have regular contact with loved ones, and he pushed heavily for parents to keep their kids enrolled there for the entirety of their childhood.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Where we talk about like he's diagnosing kids as things that we would not today because they just don't – I'm not judgmental of someone who legitimately is trying to help kids and is just like we called things by different names then. We didn't know as much as we know now. It's one thing to make errors.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
You are abusing your kid if you try to take them back and raise them in your home. That's bad for them. I have to have total control over them for the whole time they're children. Not a great sign there.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
That's such a good point that like anytime someone is being like, no, no, no, you really shouldn't see your kid. They're doing something fucked up, right? That's just, yeah, probably a very durable truth. Speaking of durable truths, here's some ads.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
It's another thing to have your whole goal be what if a concentration camp but nice for children? Yeah. Which is, again, part of the motivating factor here.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
We're back. So we're talking about this – an article written by one of Bruno's students, Ronald Angrez. Angrez was diagnosed by Bettelheim as autistic. We almost – I will say certainly I think would not apply that diagnosis to Angrez today because his primary symptoms were that like he was bad at sports. He was a little slow learning how to read and he like fidgeted sometimes.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
He had a thing for daydreaming. Everything that he describes is what I would call like, OK, well, you're just a kid. Some kids take longer to learn to read than others. Some kids aren't good at sports. I wasn't good at some kids fidget. You know, none of that is what I would call like or what I think any expert would say, like diagnostic criteria for anything. Really? Right.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Tons of them.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Like they're not saying like he was not incapable of like learning how to read or anything. He's just a little slower than others. Fairly normal kid, right? But Angra's father was a psychoanalyst himself and a rich one at that. And he diagnosed his child as disturbed for a variety of utterly anodyne reasons. Quote, sometimes I skipped while I paced. I had other unacceptable mannerisms too.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
I sometimes talked to myself, lips moving when lost in thought. Again, these just sound like things people do.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Yeah. Yeah. Your kid's like just talking to himself like children do.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Totally normal for it. And that so much of what's going on here is that these are rich parents and they are annoyed that their kids maybe need a little bit of extra help. Maybe aren't immediately ready to go to fancy dinner parties or the Met or something. Right. And so they're like, well, I'm just going to have you. I'm going to lock you up with this guy. This weirdo.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
That seems like their children.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
I am a rich professional in the 1940s. I have highballs to drink and benzos to eat. You know, I have no time to raise my own children. So Ronald's father's sense of professional ethics meant that he couldn't treat his own son. The Orthogenic School had a reputation, has a reputation, it's still around, for feeding children very well. Again, this is a high dollar institution.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
They have excellent food. It is an excellent space. It is a very immaculately clean. There is every kind of like piece of educational equipment is all state of the art, right? Very nice furniture. This is a nice place, right? I really need to emphasize that. If you look at it as a rich guy, you will be impressed at the quality of the facility itself.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Now, Bruno would claim all his life that no child was ever admitted to the orthogenic school without having a chance to visit and decide for themselves to consent to come. Ronald says, bullshit.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
He says, I was interviewed by Bruno, but I would never have consented to go to that school because from the moment we met, he was cruel and belittled me. Quote, I drew for him a picture of a man. I don't remember now if he asked me to, but all the psychologists seem to crave such pictures, and I may have tried in this fashion to break the ice. What a stupid and ugly picture, he snapped.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
I did not yet know he fancied himself an art connoisseur. You did not draw his hands. They're behind his back, I explained. You just did that because you can't draw hands. Do you know what it means when a boy can't draw hands? I did not. I still don't.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
What does it mean when a child can't draw? And I want to continue that write-up. To appease him, I redrew the picture and added some hands, carefully showing all five fingers. Preposterous! You drew the hands entirely out of proportion. They're bigger than his head! Once more, he scowled darkly, as if I were expected to know the sinister significance of such a reversal of normal proportions.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
He asked what I hoped to become when I grew up. A scientist, I replied. Ridiculous, he spat. You want to be a scientist? You can't even read! Again... This is a child. Oh my God. He's like- Holy fuck, dude.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
And they feel totally different about it than in the 40s. Like one thing they do constantly is diagnose kids as psychotic, right? Which you cannot today. That is not something that happens. Because like the idea that like you would diagnose a child as being a psychopath, right, is very normal then, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
What is going on here, Bruno? Like, from the standards of a period of time in which parenting was, shall we say, rough. Like, that is bad child rearing. Um-
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
The idea that adults could give consent wasn't really a normal concept.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
And it's such a weird thing that he would insist on like telling the lies he chooses to tell are always very strange to me.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Yes. Yes. That's a very good point that he does understand that this should be a thing the child consents to. He just doesn't give a fuck.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
If I tell the lie, I can normalize the behavior I know is good, even if I've fallen short, right? Maybe it's something like that.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Yeah, I think that may in fact be the case. Ingres calls him rude after this point. Fair point to the kid. And he later wrote that he would have been utterly shattered if he'd known then that he was about to spend the remainder of his childhood in Bruno's care. So his parents send him to the school.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
When he starts at the orthogenic school, he's allowed to bring his favorite toys and the like with him. His prized possessions are his comic books. And as soon as Bruno sees them, he announces a new rule. No comic books. He also takes issue with one of Ronald's toys, a wooden train, which he called stupid. Man, it's a train. What the fuck, dude?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Now, this is all pretty abusive, but by far the worst thing. Well, honestly, I don't know if it's all pretty bad, but he also uses physical violence against little kids. Here's how Andres later described his treatment at Bruno's hands. I lived for years in terror of his beatings, an abject animal terror. I never knew when he would hit me or for what or how savagely.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Bettelheim prized his unpredictability, no less than his unconventionality. As someone who saw the secret depths of men's souls, he glorified and defying ordinary notions of which offenses were important or even what constituted an offense. What hostile character, he would say of me and countless other boys as he beat us publicly.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
These beatings, which made the greatest impression on me of anything that I have known in life, stick in my memory as a grand performance of exultant rage.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
And yeah, it's interesting to me. It is probably worth really reemphasizing that He is not this way with that first kid. Now, he doesn't really spend much time parenting her, right? He's working. But that kid that he helps to raise in Austria, he's not hitting. At least she does not recall him being anything like this, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Right, right.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
He hadn't been in the camp yet. Yeah. I wonder how much of it is the camp and how much of it is like – He hadn't made himself remade himself as a psychoanalytic expert yet. Right. And I don't think you'll ever you can ever like know, you know, which which of these did more. But he's obviously he's a very different guy in terms of how he treats children after the camps.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
And that's that's something that like really deserves to be kind of reemphasized. To continue with Angris' story, once some all-school games were organized, we played musical chairs.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
A boy I shall call Seymour jumped into a seat before I could, and from then on until the end of the game, which I had to watch from the sidelines, he silently taunted me, smirking and wiggling his behind in time to the music, which bumps in my direction. After the game finished, Seymour approached me with that gloating smirk still on his face. I said, I wish I could chop your head off.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
The counselor promptly told, told Bettelheim who just as promptly beat me, adding neck chops to his standard slaps and a denunciatory monologue in case I missed the poetic justice of it all. And again, you see like pretty normal kid to say something like that. Not a weird thing for a kid to say. This is a thing where you need to sit both of those kids down and talk to them.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
He's like mock cuts his head off by hitting him in the neck, which also you just, I mean, you shouldn't hit kids at all, but you certainly shouldn't hit children in the neck. Um,
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Yeah. And like the the fucking I mean, we could talk about choke chains and the like, which are also common at the time. But like the the kind of immediate willingness where he's like this kid talked about cutting other kids head off. Obviously, the right thing to do is hit him in the neck. You know, like that's that's a very telling logical leap that he makes there.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Now, these stories that Angrist tells are very consistent with the stories multiple other former students give of their time under Bruno's tutelage. And they are also they also comport with the stories of employees who work as teachers and staff members at the orthogenic school during this time.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
And that just, like, it's the Wild West in Bruno's era.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
One of those former staff members was a guy who wrote about his experiences for the Chicago Reader under the pseudonym W.B., I find his account valuable in part because Bruno's friend and defender Alvin Rosenfeld acknowledges that Bruno used physical violence but also insists that most of the complaints from students, which he views as unfair, came from later in Bruno's career.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
And so he's like, well, they were angry because like he was – he kind of died before their education could finish. And so they're transmitting their feelings of abandonment to like claiming he was abusive. And this guy's account puts the light of that. For one thing, WB comes to work at the school early on in Bruno's tutelage there. And he is a World War II combat veteran.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
So this is not a guy who is inclined to be shocked by violence, right? Like if this guy reacts to your violence, you're really out of fucking pocket, right? Right. Quote, a number of us were veterans who had probably seen more of life by age 21 than Bettelheim had seen at age 40. I do disagree with that because he was in the camps, man.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
But this guy's got – definitely has like a bit of an ax to grind with Bettelheim. Yeah. Now, he notes, this guy, that most orthogenic school employees were women. And that is a real thing Bruno does. He likes to be surrounded by women. And these folks are very loyal to Bruno. WB describes the female employees at the school as like his Roman cohort.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
So these are like his power base, these female counselors who Rosenfeld is like, that's why Bruno had to do all the physical violence was so that these women could be free to be more nurturing, which is a very odd vibe. Yeah. But that's the way people describe it.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Quote, and this is from WB, the understanding that most of the men had was that Bettelheim tried to seduce everyone into relating to him as their therapist. This was a condition of job tenure. Our general feeling was that most of the women accepted this relationship, but we never knew for sure. Their job tenure was certainly longer than most of the men's.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
I would characterize the atmosphere at the orthogenic school at that time as the beginnings of a cult, with Dr. B as the cult leader." And I find that interesting because he notes accurately, this guy, that part of cult dynamics is the creation of new vocabulary and the redefinition of existing vocabulary to create a new reality in which cult members live under.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
And this is how WB explains Bruno's use of terms like emotionally disturbed, autistic, and schizophrenic. These are not real medical diagnoses, but these are terms reinvented by Bruno to create a reality that's convenient to him, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
And he will say he has an 85% success rate in treating schizophrenia and autism, and that 85% of the kids that came into his school left it without these diagnoses. He's not curing these people. He is declaring them to have a thing and then declaring them cured when they behave in a way that he describes as idealized, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
And that's kind of key to it is that he gets described as brilliant for a while because of this big 85% success rate. He is the only person judging these kids, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
If the Kool-Aid bowl fits, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Yeah, and I think WB is trying to describe a lot of the employees.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Although the financial relationship, again, and he's like, I don't really know how much did they buy it. Did they just need the job, right? Like it was unclear to him and it will be forever to us. But I do find it noteworthy that he says this. Bettelheim was a professional success. Why? Simple.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
He defined a child's problem without any meaningful critical peer review and then proceeded to solve the problem again without critical review. A generally compliant and emotionally dependent staff then put their imprimatur on his self-declared and widely proclaimed success. And yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
And the world is a lot easier. Life is much easier when you get to do that. Now, when Bruno directs the Orthogenic School, he's also kind of the Dr. Phil of like the 40s through the 50s. 50s, 60s, you know, to some extent in like the 70s and that he's he's a constant presence on TV. And he is brought in as an expert on disturbed children when there's a horrible crime.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
You know, when there's he's also brought in to talk about concentration camps, anti-Semitism. And this is deeply unfortunate because Bruno is not really an expert on disturbed children. And he's increasingly identifies himself as white children. And identifies his old Jewish identity as problematic. And so the fact that he is a major public figure on all of these things is a real issue.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Near the end of the 1940s, he's asked to speak at Hillel House on modern anti-Semitism. And he told the assembled, almost entirely Jewish audience, anti-Semitism, whose fault is it? Yours. Because you don't assimilate. It's your fault. If you assimilated, there would be no anti-Semitism. Why don't you assimilate? Now... People don't take this lying down. This is offensive to the audience.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Like, holy shit, man. What? And one member of the audience, Eric Shopter, is like, wait a second. If you're saying the solution to anti-Semitism is to end Jewishness, what makes you different from an anti-Semite? And Bruno responds, I'm only a doctor prescribing the cure. Not an answer.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Yeah, that's that's that's I mean, problematic.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
That is very good advice. And particularly in Bruno's case, because as the years go on, he becomes one of the first public intellectual experts on autism. In 1967, he publishes a book called The Empty Fortress, which is one of the first influential and famous books on the treatment of children with autism in US history.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Again, let me remind you, Bruno's PhD is not in any relevant medical discipline. And so far as we know, he mostly lied about his psychoanalytic credentials in Austria. The Empty Fortress in his book's title relates to what Bruno saw as the cause of autism. And I'm going to quote from a write-up by the Autism History Project. In other words...
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
He believed autism came from your mom ignoring you, right? Yep.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Out of nowhere, blaming the moms. So he saw the primary cause of autism as refrigerator mothers. These are emotionally cold and distant women. And he, again, he'll describe his mom as one of these later in life. You know, I mean, he starts to at around this time.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Now, one allegation that you'll find here is that Bruno takes his mommy issues and turns them into what was for years... This is never the standard explanation for the origins of autism in the medical sense, but because of Bruno's prominence, it's a very common explanation, right? Because people hear this on TV, they see the book, and they're like, oh, okay, that must be it. Now...
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Responsible articles today will note accurately that this is horseshit. The origins of autism are almost certainly genetic and 100 percent not caused by your mom being a refrigerator or vaccines or vaccines. Very important to note. Also not caused by that.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Yes. Yes. And it's also worth noting that autism was often called childhood schizophrenia at the time, too. Like these are these terms are very much. Again, I really need to reemphasize that. I also should emphasize that even articles today often say very fucked up things about autism.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
I want to read an excerpt from a 2021 article in the Chicago Tribune about Bruno Bettelheim and about him getting the causes of autism wrong. Quote, even a quick look at children who were abused or neglected by parents should make it obvious that autism is a completely different kind of problem.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Eventually, autism will probably be treated with gene therapy or effective medications will be developed to counter the defect. Now that's just eugenics, right? That's just eugenics that you wrote in 2021, Guy at the Chicago Tribune. That's just eugenics. Oh my gosh, like explicitly calling it a defect?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Yeah. And there's... Yeah, this is something that is still developing. I just I want to note, I just read that in that article and was like, oh, my God, man, you're not any better than Bruno was, dude. I mean, I guess this is still a real problem that this podcast is not going to kind of deal with in all of the depth that it deserves. But I wanted to make a note of that.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
In his piece for Commentary Magazine, Ronald Angrez makes a note that even though the state of autism treatment and knowledge was more primitive at the time, there was ample evidence in the early days to suggest that Bruno's empty fortress hypothesis was nonsense. Quote, Everyone before Bettelheim believed it was. No one but Bettelheim and his most fervent followers ever believed otherwise.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
And even on Bettelheim's assumption that the origins were psychological rather than biological or neurological, why go on as he did to accuse parents of such crimes, such schizophrenic symptoms, as wishing their child did not exist? Bettelheim made an art of accusation. He did not sort of blame victims. He set himself up as their special prosecutor. Right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Which is an interesting and a damning way to describe that. I think this is our second ad break, so let's just go for it.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
We're back. So it has been noted that Bruno's victim-blaming of concentration camp internees bore more than a little resemblance to the way he talked about the parents of quote-unquote autistic children. The identification of the aggressor, which he saw as core to the behavior of inmates, is also what he believed went on with autism.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Kids with so-called refrigerator moms aped that behavior and locked away their emotions from the empty fortresses. This is Bruno's writing here.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
I had experienced being at the mercy of forces that seemed beyond one's ability to influence, and with no knowledge of whether or when the experience would end, of living isolated from family and friends, of being severely restricted in the sending and receiving of information.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Perhaps this sudden reversal helped me first to understand how the camps could destroy personality, and later to resume, with I hope greater insights and empathy, my earlier task, that of creating a milieu which would favor the reconstruction of personality. This is him literally being like, the camps taught me that I could cure autism by making my own camp.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Now, violence was not his only tool for reconstructing personality, but insults and mockery were among his go-to tactics, and behind every effort he made was the promise of violence. This is why he pushed parents to enroll their children in his facility for the entirety of their childhood. He needed the privacy of total control to ensure he was not stopped.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
From that write-up in Disability Studies Quarterly, one former student called it a dumping ground for young people who were different in some way or who, for whatever reason, didn't match their parents' expectations. Bettelheim was known to slap and punch children. He would often tell his students that they were at the orthogenic school because their parents couldn't stand them.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
He called them megalomaniacs and neurotics and forced them into uncomfortable or violent situations against their will. Children were expected to shower naked in front of the staff and at one another throughout their stay, regardless of age or comfort level. and many students and staff were physically and sexually abused.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Jacqueline Sanders worked for Bettelheim for 13 years and became the director of the school after Bettelheim left. She writes, we became the abusers of abused children.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
He has created a little hell for kids and for staff members. Yeah. Yeah. Now, students at this school were expected to work towards admission to higher education, and the school had an excellent record for this, which has led some defenders, including former students who, like most, will say his violence was unacceptable, to declare the school overall still a success.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
And this brings me to the book The Creation of Dr. B by Richard Pollock. One criticism that he will get from Bettelheim's defenders is that, given his own history with the school, he can't be objective. You see, Richard's brother Stephen started out as a day student at the Orthogenic School, but Bettelheim insisted, as always, that he come to live there full-time.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Richard writes, "...over the months he made fewer and fewer visits home, becoming for me a kind of spectral sibling even before his death in 1948." Now, Stephen's death occurred when he was away from the school on a rare holiday visit with his family.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
He and his brother were staying at a farm owned by a friend of the family, and he fell through a hay chute several stories to the ground and died on impact. If you grew up on a farm, you immediately are like, oh, yeah, that's absolutely how a little kid could die, right? It's one of the most dangerous things in any kind of farm is a hay chute.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
It's just this hole that's going to be covered by hay a lot of the time, and if you go through it, you could fall quite a distance. So – But Bettelheim refuses to accept, oh, a tragic accident occurred, right? He blames Rick and Steven's parents for killing their son because they wanted to spend time with him and they should have just left him at the school full time.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Now, decades later, Bettelheim still holds onto this grudge because in the late, again, this happens in 48, in the late 1980s, Polak, who's writing a book about Bettelheim, calls on him. And Bettelheim still remembers these parents and is still angry at them. Quote, My father he dismissed as crude and somewhat simple-minded, a schlemiel who played the bills and stayed out of emotional problems.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
My mother was the villain. He said she paraded as a saint and a martyr, when in fact she was almost entirely responsible for my brother's problems. With astonishing anger, he said she had rejected Stephen at birth, and that to cope with this lockout he had developed pseudo-feeble-mindedness.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
He said that my brother was a lovely child who manifested a sensitivity my mother wished she possessed, and he castigated her for never conceding that she was responsible for Stephen's distress, and for insisting against the school's wishes that he be allowed periodic home visits.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
That's the only kind of person. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Their dad was like his dad. Their mom was like his mom.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
So Bettelheim declares in this conversation with no evidence, no, your brother committed suicide because he was so unhappy with your parent. Again, he fell through a hay chute, man. He insinuated the fact that their mom worked full time was part of why their brother killed himself. And he ranted, what is it about these Jewish mothers, Mr. Polak?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
In his book, Richard continued, "...in 1956 I would discover he had written that the school had warned my parents that a home visit for Stephen was ill-advised because he might harm himself. Despite our objection, the visit took place, and the child died in a carefully contrived accident.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Bettelheim told me with utter confidence that Stephen had once purposefully fallen out of a speedboat near the propellers, and it was only a matter of time before he found a situation like the loft in which his efforts at killing himself would succeed." In fact, my brother had never fallen out of any boat.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
And that anecdote really says a lot that he just lied to this kid about his brother's death for no reason. Not for no reason, because inventing fiction lets him redefine reality, right? And that's the essence of his pedagogy, right? Is... You get to define the reality for these children and thus of the world.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Like that's how maybe, you know, this is to some extent him taking back control over the world, which was so chaotic for him. But I don't know. Like that's fascinating.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Exactly.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
crook county is available now listen for free on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts now bruno has at the uh the time we've you know we're starting up here he has just gotten over the to the us he has escaped uh the holocaust and he has gotten a job he started out as an academic he had you know lost his family business at this point he has no money
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
No, and he's such a – so during the Vietnam War, Bruno makes a name for himself as an anti-anti-war activist. And confoundingly, he describes the kids protesting against Vietnam as neo-Nazis who were very sick and paranoiacs trying to beat down father to show they are a big boy. I don't know if that's what's, maybe they don't want to get drafted and go die a Da Nang man.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Maybe don't trust those people. Yeah. In 1976, you had asked it in part one. When does the backlash against a lot of what he's saying about the Holocaust begin? And as I said, it.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
There's some immediately, but kind of there's a big chunk of academic backlash starts in the late 70s when American Holocaust scholar Terence DePrez writes a book about the survivors of death camps and concentration camps. His book, The Survivor, was partly a broadside against the misinformation Bettelheim had contributed to the discussion. And I want to quote now from an article by Paul Rosen.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Throughout The Survivor, Depress criticized Bettelheim for having supposed that it was correct to have thought that prisoners ever regressed to infantilism. Depress believed that The Survivor should be viewed as reminders, not of human weaknesses, but of evil circumstances that were objectively powerful.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Both the Nazis and Stalin's regime subjected prisoners to filth for the sake of humiliation and debasement. De Presse argued that prisoner behavior in response to such circumstances was not childish, but rather a heroic response to dreadful necessities.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
My guest with me again, as in part one, Alison Raskin. Alison, how are you doing? It's the same day, but we pretend it's a separate one.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
He cited one camp where the inmates burned it down and found throughout the literature instances of people who somehow managed to maintain their inward sanctity. Resistance took subtle shapes, and de Prez explored the way human dignity endured in the form of freedom from the entire control by external forces.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Survivors helped one another, engaged in acts of sabotage, and from Buchenwald made contact with the Allies for a bombing raid on SS parts of the camp. Depress pointed out that Bettelheim was imprisoned during a special period when criminals among inmates wielded power.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
He disputed Bettelheim's notion that social bonding among prisoners was absent, nor was it true, Depress argued, that they did not hate their oppressors and did not sometimes revolt.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
According to Depress, Bettelheim had felt superior to his fellow sufferers, and his account was factually marred by his egotistical obsession with autonomy that blinded him to the extent of the mutual support that existed within the camps.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Sounds accurate to me. Yeah. Now, Bettelheim responds with an article in The New Yorker arguing that Depress's book missed the realities of the experience. And Depress responds a little later with an article of his own called The Bettelheim Problem. He links Bruno's conclusions about the causes of autism and schizophrenia to his supposed observations about camp life.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
In a way, he seemed to be taking out his righteous anger on the SS guards, on the parents of his students. Yeah. The ultimate product of this was that these people who lived for years without their children had to do so believing they were the ultimate cause of their children's problems, right? Which is bad.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Right. Right. Exactly. That's a very good point. Right. And that's such a key part of what Bettelheim is saying is that like you have fucked your kids up. You gave them these conditions. Only I can fix them.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
But this lady who, you know, he had helped raise her daughter is kind of taking care of them. Right. And the understanding is that they need to figure out something. But like they're not immediate. They're not like on the streets or whatever. Right. And Bruno very quickly is able to get work for himself.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
And that's why when this mom, when Richard, his biographer's mom, insists that her other son at least get some time with the family, Bruno has to turn around and make that kid's death be caused by that. In 1985, Bruno's wife, Trudy, passed on. Despite some early infidelities, he was by all accounts dedicated to his wife, and most people who knew him will say that her passing broke him.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
He was by this point an old man in poor health, and so on March 13, 1990, Bruno Bettelheim took his own life. Now, the fact that he committed suicide was just about the most understanding thing he ever did. He was old. He was ailing. He would write a lot about the fact that he no longer felt he could be of service to society.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
And so I don't have trouble understanding why he did this, but the fact that he killed himself sent a shock through the psychoanalytic and educational community. And while the criticism of him for committing suicide was unjust, which is a big part of the initial reaction to his death is people being like,
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Oh, well, the fact that a psychoanalyst would do this must have meant that he was never he wasn't as healthy as he portrayed himself as being. And that's bad. That's a bad way to look at the suicide of an old man whose wife just died and who was in poor health. It also weirdly opens up the floodgates for the survivors of his teaching practices to talk about what they had endured.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
And that's why things are kind of messy is that the first wave of criticism of Bettelheim happens alongside people criticizing him for committing suicide, which is messy. But you do get a lot of these survivors start talking in 1990 and continue talking up to the present day.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Like there's – again, some of the writings that I found on this was like much more recent as a result of the fact that like people are still processing this. There's folks who initially were like, well, but no, the school was a good thing for me overall who kind of come to different conclusions.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
There's also still plenty of schools who are like, yeah, it was brutal at times but – students who are like it was brutal but it prepared me for success. I'm not going to judge how anybody interprets their own experience at this school. I will say one of the things people say for Bruno, which is that so many of his graduates went on to have excellent careers.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Well, yeah, but also all their parents were super rich. I don't know if we give that to Bruno, right? Like their parents were all rich as hell. Maybe that had more to do with it. I don't know. Not to take anything away from them, but I just don't know that I give that to Bruno. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Although there's also some problematic aspects because his initial gig, he gets hired to be an English teacher in Portland, Oregon. And then World War Two starts. And suddenly the idea of having an Austrian man teaching English is like, we're not really bullish on the Austrians right now. Even though you were a victim of the Nazis, we don't actually have a teaching position for you.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
No, God, no.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Nope, nope, not at all. Well, that's the story. How we feel it.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
And honestly, like it's interesting because I hadn't I never really thought about the fact that like, yeah, using the term committing does imply that like there's a crime that's because we only use that word. Right. You wouldn't say like I committed lunch today. Right. Yeah. Yeah, it's just so normalized. Yeah. Interesting.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
I think it's a good point. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Yeah, no, no. I mean, I think that makes a lot of sense. And yeah, I it's like, The most understandable thing about his whole story, there's so many choices that he makes that it's like, well, I don't really get where that comes from. It's interesting that the first thing he gets criticized for is that and not anything about how he treated children or whatever. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Especially now, like we are heading into a whole new golden era for for that. Anyway, you got any anything you want to plug kind of at the end here?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being on today. This was a hard one to listen to and I appreciate you doing so much to try and like explain. Yeah. What, what was happening here? Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Jeez. Like half a century, literally almost half a century.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Yeah. All right. Well, that's the episode, everybody. Thank you so much. And thank you, Allison. All right. Have a good week.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Yeah. Although it's also – there's a degree to which this works out well for Bruno because he doesn't really want to be an English teacher and he doesn't want to be in Oregon. He is – he falls in love with the idea of the city of Chicago in part because it has a more European layout. So he finds it kind of more similar to where he'd come up.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
He is very interested in child development and educational reform. These are like academic interests. He's not a professional in these yet, but this is what he wants for himself. So he kind of works as an academic for a few years until in 1944, he receives his U.S. citizenship.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
That same year, he gets the job that will be responsible for most of his fame and for most of the problematic things he's going to do in his life, which is directing the Orthogenic School. Now, I know what you're saying. Robert, orthogenic school sounds dystopian as fuck. That is a scary name for a school. And it is a scary name.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
The word orthogenic comes from Greek and it literally means straightening out. So the school for straightening out kids, that's a scary thing to call a school. It had been established in 1915 and it was a residential facility where kids were interned until their behavior was deemed to be fixed, right? Like that's the – like where it is. So this is a – when you talk about a residential facility –
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Some of them have elements, and this is certainly the case at the time of like a prison, right? Now, this is not one of those. This is for kids with resources, right? These are for kids whose parents have money. So this is not like the worst versions of these facilities, right? And in fact, from the beginning, this is kind of viewed as a response to those facilities, which are a lot uglier.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
It was a unique place geared not just for emotionally disturbed kids, but for, and these are the terms they use at the time, but specifically for emotionally disturbed children of quote, above average intelligence, right? Now this means rich white kids, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Yes. When we say above average intellect, right? These are kids whose parents have money and thus our goal is to make sure they have a future, right? Right.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
And when the school is founded in 1915, they use these. They don't say this is a school for rich white kids. They say like this is emotionally disturbed but above average intelligence kids, right? As soon as Bruno takes over, he's like, no, no, no. Let's just say it's a school for rich white kids. That's what we're doing, right? That's what we want to do here, you know?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
And as soon as he takes over, his first job as director is to turn this into policy. Prior to him taking the director job, the school had not had a whites only policy on paper. Bruno Institute's one. He's like, look, let's call a we're racist as fuck. We're racist as fuck. It's just say it's white. And again, this school in 1915 isn't willing to say that.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about bad people and problematic people. And we've got both this week with the story of Bruno Bettelheim, a man who is really, really testing my previous conclusion that there's no wrong way to react to having been in a concentration camp. Maybe this way. Bruno might have been the guy to figure out the wrong way. Had to lose all sympathy. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
In 44, Bruno's like, oh, obviously we're whites only like.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
No.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
And he is he has he does a lot of writing about his attitudes that like he doesn't like Christianity either because he's not a religious guy, but he thinks it's better than Judaism. Right. And so the school will be specifically a Christian school even when it sort of is educating kids who don't come from Christian families. He like tries to acculturate them.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
The only holiday they celebrate at the school is Christmas. So his attitude is very much even when the students are not – from a Christian background, I want to acculturate them as white Christians, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Now, Bruno justifies his whites-only policy by arguing that racialized children, that means non-white kids, would confuse the white kids and harm their recovery. The term racialized to describe kids that just aren't white? No, these kids, they can't handle the shock of seeing someone who isn't white. That'll fuck up their recovery.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
I can't handle it. I'm going to go rob a bank. Now, Bruno also wrote that he was only interested in white students from, quote, good high-class stock. That meant kids whose families could afford to send them to college. He instituted a tuition of $8,000 to $12,000 a year to ensure that no poor children were educated at the orthogenic school.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
That's in the 40s. Wow. That is, this is like really, like high grade university education is what this costs per year. And the expectation is that you will put them in there at least for two years and many of them for like something like 10 to 12, right? He really wants you to give your kid to him for that kid's entire childhood. Otherwise he can't fix them, right? That's his motivation.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
But then they come out perfect.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
No, you got to let me have them until they're like 20, you know, make sure they don't see anybody else.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Yeah. There's like 40 to 60 kids at this institution at any given time. Now, Bruno also has another issue with the school as soon as he takes over. First job, make it expensive as shit, only white kids. Second job, he has a real issue with the fact that the orthogenic school, the motto is a place to grow straight and tall, allows disabled kids to be educated there.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
And he doesn't like that because somebody with a physical disability can never grow straight and tall in Bruno's eyes, right? So again, one of the first things the Nazis do is go after people with – specifically children with disabilities. This is how they test the gas chambers, right? Which are initially like mobile execution vans for disabled people.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
What is one of the first things Bruno does when he starts this school? No more. Get those disabled kids out of here. None of them.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Therefore, everyone else must have as well. Okay. In an article for Disability Studies Quarterly, Griffin Epstein writes, hospitals. So he just kind of lies and says, ah, the schools can handle them. And the schools are like, oh, no, we just lock those kids up. We don't know what to do with them, you know?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
That's handling them, right? Because it can't be fixed, you know, in his attitude, right? Bruno's second act as director of the orthogenic school was to recruit a new population of students. And he focuses mostly on children with autism and others who he calls, quote, young victims of extreme psychosis.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
And the reason he picks these kids, and again, we would not diagnose them the same way today, but these are all kids that he sees as not having visible physical disabilities, right? That is the key point, right? That's what he means by autism, right? Is something is not neurotypical about this kid, but they are not, in my eyes, physically disabled. That is what he means by this, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Horribly, horribly wrong.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Yes, right. Yes, yes. That's certainly how he sees it. To continue with that article, in constructing a dialectical opposition between epilepsy, cerebral palsy, and autism, Bettelheim helped to tacitly promote a eugenic logic of unreformable versus reformable bodies, you know? And yes, that is some very, very Nazi-adjacent shit.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Well, it's also – it's interesting because a big part of Bruno's story and a big part of like where people go wrong because like as you said, it's good to be involved and care about your children's mental health and the mental health of children in general. Bruno, as a young man, takes this kid in who is like neurodivergent and her mom just like, I don't want to raise a kid. Right.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
These are good. If it wasn't the Nazis doing them, I wouldn't have it like...
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
He's taking some wild things from his experience. The medical logic behind all of this is also rooted in Bruno's writing about concentration camps. In a letter to the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Bruno's friend Alvin Rosenfeld explained of Bruno's beliefs, quote,
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Bruno Bettelheim and The Quest To Make a "Good" Concentration Camp
Bettelheim showed the world how extreme abuse, such as concentration camp incarceration, could severely distort personalities. That formed the basis of his treatment model and laid the foundation for much of our thinking about child abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder. And there is aspects of this that are positive and that are undeniably accurate.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
You know, again, that's kind of up to your personal take. When we talk about, like, how do you judge people, you know, to what extent do you judge them based on their time or based on some sort of concept of objective morality? One thing that always matters to me is where do they start versus where did they end up, right? Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Someone who was raised in a slave-holding household and becomes an abolitionist but is still racist is a lot more impressive to me than a guy who just isn't outwardly racist because he grew up in the 1990s but crosses the street when he sees a black guy, right? Totally. Because one of those is a person who went on a journey, recognized a bad thing about themselves, and made changes.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
I'm not trying to be like, it's therefore okay. There's a reason I included this because it's pretty bad and you should know that about the guy.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
No, I'm not trying to. Yeah. But this is not a part of his entire life or his whole creative life. He writes anti-racist songs later in life. It does seem like he makes a change. And I do think it's worth noting this is a guy who was raised by a Klansman in the 30s, 20s and 30s. Yeah. So, you know, again, you can figure out morally wherever you want to figure that out.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
But I don't think it's worth kind of looking at the whole sweep of the personal journey the man went on there. In 1937, Woody's wife, Mary, and two children moved to Los Angeles to be with him. Jack wound up leaving the act and show business for a while. But Woody paired up with Maxine Chrisman, whose family was friends with his cousin and had taken Woody in, too. He dubbed Maxine Lefty Lou.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
The two played songs by other artists that spoke to the poor and downtrodden, like Hobo's Lullaby, but they also started playing Woody's original compositions, like the Talking Dust Bowl Blues. This song really embodies what people were starting to love about Woody.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
His music had a warts-and-all description of life during the Depression and the struggles of the hundreds of thousands of people who were forced to move west during the Dust Bowl. He sung about relatable, nuts-and-bolts issues that are still familiar to a lot of people today,
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
If you were a poor punk kid who lived on a semi-permanent road trip for a while, basically, and had the experience of trying to coast by turning your car off on downhill runs because you can't afford gasoline, here's Woody Guthrie singing about the same thing.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
The Manosphere, if you're not aware, is like the kind of colloquial term for this network of far right, generally like masculinity influencers, all of whom have fed into the Trumpist movement and groups like the Proud Boys. It's a very important like social phenomenon that explains a lot of why we are where we are right now. And Jamie does a great job of breaking it down.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
I love the way he says children. It just tickles the hell out of me. It reminds me of the good parts of living in fucking middle of nowhere Oklahoma. I do like that about him. And you know what I like even more, Margaret? Is it the sponsors of the show? Yes. They're all great. They're all great. And they've all had the experience of having to coast in their Ford truck to save gas money, too.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Look, it's hard times for everyone, even large brands.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Yeah, absolutely. We could talk about what truck drivers are forced to do in order to make their times. Anyway, whatever. We're done.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
So check that out on 16th Minute.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Sure. I've only heard part one so far. I am. I am. Well, speaking of part two, let's do part two of these episodes, huh? Yes, sir. I also haven't heard part two of this one yet. Let's kill it. Let's murder it. Let's bury it in the woods in a tree stump, under a tree stump, so that nobody finds it. And then cash in at Social Security for years. I don't know what I'm doing here, Margaret.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Margaret. Yes. I do find it fun how much of his Dust Bowl songs are very relatable to punk life today. Yeah, totally. Hate the Cops, fucking coasting in my car, camping out in the woods and shit. Did he do Big Rock Candy Mountains or is this someone else? In my head, he did Big Rock Candy Mountains, but I didn't double check on that. I mean, he might have just sung it.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
I'm fairly certain I've heard a version of the song by him. Harry McClintock was the guy who first recorded and wrote it. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
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That's good. Oh, man, that's funny. Yeah. You're like, wait a second. Yeah, yeah. And the police dogs can't sniff your weed. Yeah, totally. So Woody had attained a degree of local fame by 38, 39, right? 1938 to 1939. He's doing reasonably well. In fact, he and Lefty Lou were so beloved that the radio station where they played received thousands of fan letters over the course of just a few months.
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They were doing okay in terms of money, but not great because again, he has a lot of fans, but they're broke ass Dust Bowl refugees. So he's not getting rich off these people, right? And he's also not very interested in getting rich. He seemed to feel like he had a responsibility to reach and provide relief for his people suffering in government work camps and embarrassed by their situation.
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From a write-up by the Library of Congress, quote, He also sang at government camps that gave these people some measure of dignity, health, and safety. Joining him was Will Gere, an actor and earnest left-winger who helped Woody better understand the injustice of an economic system that would allow Americans to live in such poverty.
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And this is where he starts getting pilled on socialism, right, and eventually becomes a communist. He will call himself a card-carrying communist, as we'll talk about. He never actually has a card, and he could have gotten one. But Woody's a little bit of a fabulous, right? He lies a little bit. Not in a way that is massively meaningful because he was a communist and very committed.
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But, you know, he also he's a little bit of a tall tale spinner. Yeah. So, yeah. And, you know, it's to his credit that he's again, rather than focusing on making money off of this growing fame, he's giving a lot of free shows to provide relief for his people. Right. He is very dedicated to his people in a way that I think is pretty admirable.
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Woody's popularity and by now fairly mature class consciousness started to make him more connections with the radical political set, including various left-wing writers, journalists, and socialist and communist activists.
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He began writing songs that spoke not just of left-wing politics, but of the rage of the working class and increasingly his own hatred of the people that maintained the system that kept his people downtrodden. In 1939, he wrote one of his most famous songs, The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd, about an Oklahoma outlaw active in the early 1930s who regular listeners will know was my cousin.
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Now, my great-grandmother knew him as a girl. I grew up hearing songs about him from her. And my family, they're very, as I talk about often, very conservative people. But my great grandma particularly would always tell us, you know, you got outlaw blood in you, right?
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Like it was something she was very proud of in a way that's a little weird if you heard the way these people tended to talk about other like urban crime, right? Outlaw crime was very different to them. And I'm talking particularly my relatives who were survivors of the Great Depression. Outlaws are very different than modern criminals in their eyes, right?
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I'm not saying that's actually a fair, but their conception of these people is extremely different. And a big part of why is not just Woody, but songs like this that Woody made who turned these guys who were bank robbers and gangsters into Robin Hood figures, right? Yeah. And Floyd was a fairly easy one to turn into a Robin Hood character, because he kind of was at least a little bit that guy.
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There's a debate as to like how much of that sort of character was real and how much of it is kind of myth-making that Floyd did, but some of it's certainly true. Floyd was born in Georgia, but had moved with his family to Eakins, Oklahoma in 1911. And his career as a criminal had started early when he was arrested at age 18 for stealing $3.50 worth of, I think, stamps from a post office.
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A few years later, he robbed a payroll in St. Louis. So he goes from like stamp theft to armed robbery fairly quickly. And he does three years or so in prison for that. After he's released, he becomes a Kansas City area bank robber. One thing you get about Floyd is he doesn't seem to have ever considered not being a criminal. Yeah.
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No, but he never really thinks about doing anything but being an outlaw. And he quickly gains. He starts robbing banks in Kansas City and he earns the nickname Pretty Boy, which eventually becomes Pretty Boy Floyd because people thought he was very good looking. He hated this nickname. So he's going to pull up a picture of the man. You could decide yourself how good looking he was.
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It's just a picture of Luigi. Yeah. Americans do love their sexy criminals.
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Yeah. Huh. Not my type, but you know. Standards were not as high back then. He's got like a soft gaze.
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That's kind of nice, you know? Yeah. Prominent nose. Good jawline. Yeah. He's not bad looking. Certainly not. Yeah. Nice hair. Yeah.
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He is a hardened criminal. He killed at least one federal agent. He also killed the sheriff of McIntosh County. Other members of his gang killed several police officers and other criminals as well. There are multiple police officer murders that he is also a suspect in that we don't fully know. Did he kill all those cops? But he killed a number of cops. You know, like he shoots a lot of police.
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In the early depression years, he took to robbing banks in Oklahoma, where in addition to taking money for himself, he would destroy mortgage documents in order to free poor farmers from debt. Hell yeah. Now, we don't fully know if this happened, right? It's not the kind of thing, how would you prove it for one thing, right? People told stories about it.
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I will tell you that everyone I knew in the towns in Oklahoma, like where he had been active, and again, including my family members who knew him, would tell you that this is what he did. I don't know. It's not provable. It's one of those things where it would make sense for him to do it even if he was not really morally a Robin Hood character. Because if you're destroying people's mortgages,
Behind the Bastards
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They will hide you from the cops.
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One of my favorite Floyd stories is that he had a gang and his gang decided they wanted to rob a bunch of people on like Black Wall Street at one point, which was very well armed. And Floyd was like, well, you guys can go do that. I'm not fucking with that. And sure enough, they got fucking like shot to pieces. Yeah. So he was a smart man. Yeah.
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My other favorite story about him is I mentioned in my high school AP English class that he was a cousin of mine. And my teacher who was, you know, in her 50s or something said he shot my grandfather in the leg. Oh, what grade did you get in that class, buddy? No, no. She was like, it's okay. Again, because she was raised in this same culture. She was like, it's okay.
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Pretty boy said no move and my grandpa moved. He didn't kill him. He just shot him in the leg a little. That's so funny. Again, there's a lot of tolerance for these specific sorts of outlaws in that part of the South.
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So again, fascinating character. And yeah, I can't say how much of the whole Robin Hood thing is true, but I think a lot of the Robin Hood image that he has comes from Woody. Although it's also worth noting he is part of why it takes so long for him to get caught because he's like one of the last gangsters to get caught and killed by the government.
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His death is generally agreed to have heralded the end of the gangster era. Okay. Yeah, because I think 34 is when he's gunned down. And like, there's a lot of stories of him like hiding with little old ladies and lying to the cops. And then when he like, leaves, there's $100 bill under the plate where she'd fed him dinner or something like that. So in 1939,
Behind the Bastards
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You know, about five years after his death, when memories of this guy are still very strong, Woody writes the song that is very much responsible for crystallizing this image of pretty boy Floyd as this kind of like bandit outlaw king of the American South. And we're just going to listen to that song because it's Christmas and it's a song about my cousin. Hell yeah.
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I love the way that song ends.
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Some will rob you with a six gun and some with a fountain pen. That's a line I hear all over the place. It's a great fucking, I mean, this is one of his more famous songs. Yeah. But it's a damn good line.
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I also like that. Look, I've seen a lot of outlaws. I'm not saying I'm not defending the things they've done, but it's not the outlaws I see forcing people to be homeless. You know, that's the banks. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I disagree with my family about a lot, but our shared pride and our cop killing ancestor is not one of those things.
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Anyway, as is often the case for people who come to Los Angeles for the music industry, Woody wound up having to take his family back home to Texas and then leave them again to move to New York City in 1940, chasing what had become for him a dream of folk stardom.
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By this point, he'd become a little bit of a legend, enough that the Library of Congress had him sit down and record his Dust Bowl songs for posterity. He laid down tracks with Pete Seeger and became an influential part of the urban folk revival of the time. In a letter to Alan Lomax, another influential pillar of the urban folk revival, he described his thoughts on what folk music ought to be.
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And I'm interested for your thoughts on this, Margaret. Okay. A folk song is what's wrong and how to fix it, or it could be who's hungry and where their mouth is, or who's out of work and where the job is, or who's broke and where the money is, or who's carrying a gun and where the peace is.
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That's folklore, and folks made it up because they seen that the politicians couldn't find nothing to fix or nobody to feed or give a job a work.
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Talk about, in a lot of ways, the kind of issues that today we ascribe to the job of journalists, right? Who was hungry and where their mouth is? Who's carrying a gun and where the peace is, right?
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It's gossip. Yes, yes. It's gossip and it's agitation, right? You look at a lot of folk songs and a lot of folk stories, and that's the first safe place to attack the wealthy and the powerful, right? Totally. A little bit, you know? Totally. Totally. Oftentimes, you know, there's also plenty of folk stuff that reinforces some of those things, but it is where you see a lot of subversive stuff.
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Yeah. Now, it's worth spending some time on just how radically folk music changes. As you noted, in other countries, it's very different. And part of why it's different in the U.S. is Woody Guthrie. He changes what folk music is in the United States in a fundamental way.
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In an article for The New Yorker, David Hajdu writes, "...folk music, including country, blues, and other vernacular styles, was supposed to be anonymous. A collective art passed along warily from singer to singer, generation to generation." sometimes culture to culture.
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From the vantage point of today, when kids with their first guitar start writing songs before they learn to play other tunes, it is difficult to process how exceptional it was for a folk artist such as Woody Guthrie to have created a vast repertoire of deeply idiosyncratic works.
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Many Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood songwriters of the 30s and earlier were as skilled and prolific as Guthrie, but they were working in a different vein, writing to order for professional singers. Guthrie brought the authorial imperative to vernacular music in America. And I think that's also very interesting.
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Yeah. Yeah, that makes total sense. I'm not surprised that that's your family connection. Yeah. So by this point in time, Woody was what you would call a left-wing radical, although not, again, a card-carrying one. He played benefits for and was associated with the American Communist Party, but he never got around to joining, and you'll find several different theories as to why.
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The leading one that you'll hear is that he liked his independence a little too much to be a joiner. Now, this sounds good, especially to people like you and me, but it leaves out a crucial fact, which is that Woody was his era's equivalent of like a tankie, right? Totally.
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I mean, it also leaves out the fact that like he vocally took claim to have a card, like claim to be a member of the party, right? And that it was the best thing he'd done, which he hadn't. Again, he wasn't immune to the worst impulses of the American left during this period.
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He had been enthusiastic about FDR early on, but once the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed and the USSR locked into a treaty with the Nazis, he attacked Roosevelt as, quote, Churchill's lapdog for his anti-Nazi stance in support of Great Britain during the early months of the war. He argued that the developing world war was a capitalist fraud.
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When Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland together, Guthrie supported Stalin to an extent and with such vociferousness that biographer Will Kaufman called it shocking. In Ramblin' Man, Ed Cray goes into more detail about a left-wing anti-war song he wrote called Why Do You Stand There in the Rain, based on the title of a New York Post article.
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And I'm going to read from that section from Ramblin' Man here. Just days before, some 6,000 delegates of the American Youth Congress had gathered in Washington to advocate jobs and peace. At the invitation of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, the delegates gathered in front of the South Portico of the White House in a cold drizzle to listen to a half-hour speech by the president.
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FDR threw down the gauntlet. "...aware that the Young Communist League had taken firm grip on the once broadly based Popular Front AYC, the Soviet Union, as everyone who has the courage to face the fact knows, is run by a dictatorship and as absolute as any dictatorship in the world.
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It has allied itself with another dictatorship and has invaded a neighbor, Finland, so infinitesimally small that it could do no conceivable harm to the Soviet Union, a neighbor which seeks only to live in peace as a democracy and a liberal, forward-looking democracy at that." Roosevelt heard the boos and hisses through the cold rain. People's World columnist Woody Guthrie knew where he stood.
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He chided the president in song. Now the guns in Europe roar as they have so oft before. And the warlords play the same old game again. They butcher and they kill. Uncle Sam foots the bill with his own dear children standing in the rain. Why do you stand there in the rain? Why do you stand there in the rain? These are strange carrying on, the White House Capitol lawn.
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Tell me, why do you stand there in the rain? Then the president's voice did ring. Why, this is the silliest thing I have heard in all my 58 years of life. But it just stands to reason as he passes another season, he'll be smarter by the time he's 59.
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So he's being like real, real shitty to Roosevelt there specifically about his support of England in the war that is developing and very defensive of the USSR and invading a much smaller neighbor and invading Poland. And- It's one of those things where this is both horrifying, given what we know happens.
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You have to, to an extent, while still saying he was wrong, look at his level of knowledge and what had actually happened previously. World War I was the touchstone here. And in World War I, the US did enable further butchering, right? Like we were arming and profiting off of a hideous war that we had no business sticking our noses into. Yeah. And he's pissed about that.
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It's also, there's a lot less information about what was going on in the Soviet Union. Now, I will also say more than enough that he should have known, right? Yeah.
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They were taking direct propaganda, direct orders from Moscow. Well, not from Moscow, but from the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. Yeah. They were really wrong on some things as a result of that, because it turns out Hitler's not an ally of international communism.
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But also, I think he probably would have said that, well, the Communist Party knows its business. If they think that's what they've got to do to secure themselves, what matters is the survival of communism, which at that point had weathered a number of attacks from the international capitalist community, like during the Russian Civil War.
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And I'm not saying that because I think that's a good argument. I'm saying I think that's the argument he would have made. I'm pretty firmly on the stance of Stalin bad and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact inexcusable. Yeah. But also I always emphasize inexcusable on behalf of the Soviet leadership.
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You know, I've got nothing but respect for the guys who wound up dying by the millions to stop the Nazis. Absolutely. Totally in the right, those guys. Yeah. And ladies... So it is impossible to look at this situation without seeing commonalities between more modern failures of the left to condemn dictators seen as anti-imperialist for very flawed reasons.
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I might suggest that we also not forget at the time one of the complicating factors here is – How the U.S. government deals with what it considers communism and what things it considers communism, right? Because that's important, too.
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Woody had an extensive FBI file, and in 1941, after he joined the Merchant Marine, one of his shipmates was cited as saying Woody, quote, followed the Communist Party line and that they were very pro-Russian and advocated racial intermarriage.
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So again, that is what the guy who informs on him and the FBI considers evidence of his communist sympathies is he thinks that black people and white people should be able to get married. So keep that in mind too.
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Yes. Yes. And so like when we talk about like criticizing him, don't leave out the fact that he's he's also very much correct about this. Right. Totally. After the war, he would be accused by the California State Senate's far right committee on un-American activities for being Joe Stalin's California mouthpiece.
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It would mean nothing at all in your hands, Sophie. You haven't gone through the extensive training and preparation to become a United States municipal judge like I have.
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which was at one point true, but also for being a member of a factionalist sabotage group, which was absurd. Woody never sought or attempted to do anything but sing songs and write articles for socialist papers. He was not sabotaging anything. I have a feeling the reason he didn't get a card is he was like, I don't want to be on that list. Yeah, maybe. Yeah. I mean, that may have been it.
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I think he also just might have been too lazy. Yeah. Didn't want to pay the fees, whatever. He's an artist. He's not good at signing papers. Yeah. Marjorie Guthrie, who is his second wife, he starts a family with her after he divorces his first wife, Mary, and moves to Coney Island, sums things up this way.
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I don't know what happened prior to my time, but from my time in Coney Island, he was not welcomed by the party because he didn't want to follow a party line. You couldn't tell Woody what to think. And so we were not members of the party in Coney Island. And again, I include that because she was his wife. She knew him.
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But also that isn't entirely true because he certainly followed the party line on some very fucked up things.
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Yeah, yeah. I mean, and again, there is a degree to which... The fact that there's so much disinformation being pumped out about the Soviet Union. There's so much bad... It's certainly more reasonable then for someone to doubt a lot of the official narratives coming out and to doubt a lot of the information that makes Stalin look bad from their position in the United States.
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Again, I think enough that a man as obviously intelligent as Woody should have been better informed, but... He's not the only one who makes this mistake, and it's a more understandable mistake then than it is now, is what I'll say. That's totally legit. Without forgiving it, you know? So, yeah. However you want to mark this down morally for Woody, the U.S.
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shouldn't be getting into this capitalist war. They're all cooking this World War II thing up. That attitude ends for Woody on June 22nd, 1941, when Nazi Germany invades the Soviet Union. This is Operation Barbarossa. Woody ran to his friend Pete Seeger after this, like, breaks and told him, well, I guess we're not going to be singing any more of them peace songs.
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Woody was not the only man forced to change his tune rapidly due to world events. Winston Churchill. Change his tune, anyway. Yeah, yeah. Well done, well done. Winston Churchill, who was one of the world's loudest anti-communists, was forced by sheer necessity to make temporary amends and even express support for the cause of Soviet soldiers.
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When Woody heard this, he told a friend, Churchill's flip-flopped. We got a flip-flop too. Yeah. You know who doesn't flip-flop, though, Margaret? The consistency with which our sponsors provide high-quality goods and services? That's right. That's right.
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Our sponsors have never once changed their opinion, which is why today, tomorrow, and forever, they advise you to vote Millard Fillmore for president.
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Part two. So, Woody Guthrie had wed Mary in 1933, and by 1936, when he quit Texas for California, which is what you have to legally call it when you're talking about the 1930s, she'd had one child with him and was pregnant with another. And... He kind of abandons her, like not entirely like he doesn't like break up with her and like she eventually moves to California with him.
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We're back. Our sponsors are all old hair tonics from the 1800s. Anyway, vote Fillmore. Much of the Woody that we know, the famous Woody Guthrie, you brought up as soon as I said, what do you know of him, that the picture of him with a guitar that has a This Machine Kills Fascist sticker slapped across it. Yeah. By the way, that sticker was put out by the US government. Huh. That makes sense.
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Yeah, it was a propaganda.
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There were a lot of machines we were using to kill fascists. Perfectly reasonable to put some stickers on them. Wait, did they?
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I think it's something like that. I read it in that article in, I think, LA Weekly by the fellow who was writing about, like, Woody's history with racism, where he was like, you know, this thing was like a product of the government.
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Yeah, I know. There's been some good ones of that coming out of Syria. Yeah. So he changes his opinion very rapidly. And once the Nazis invade the USSR, he starts getting much more patriotic. And again, he had been making anti-Nazi music and been anti-Nazi prior to this. And if you're saying, well, that's incoherent for him to be against the war and whatnot.
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But he does just kind of bounce to go try and find a living, you know, in the West. And this is a thing a lot of guys are doing and a lot of people have to do. It's also not a thing that the family's thrilled with. So like Greenland. Like Greenland, yes. It's, I guess, probably a better place now, although I can't really, in good conscience, recommend anyone go to Reading.
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Yes, lots of people have incoherent politics, but his politics get a lot more cohesive after Operation Barbarossa. An article for OklahomaHistory.org notes, in New York, he appeared on numerous popular radio shows before joining the Merchant Marines with Cisco Houston during World War II. Guthrie was on three torpedoed ships, and the day Germany surrendered, he was drafted into the U.S. Army.
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Like he was on ships that were hit by torpedoes three different times. He is. And the merchant Marine is effectively a part of the military during a war. Right. He is a combat veteran. Yeah. You know, like that's like he's he's on three ships that get hit. Yeah. He's not in the army very long. It basically immediately gets out because the war ends. But yeah, he does like his bit.
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You know, he is not when we play songs of his where he's talking about wanting to fight the fascists. He goes and does it, you know. He is doing an important, dangerous job where he gets shot at. So you cannot, yeah, he's very willing to put his skin in the game. Yeah, one blown up ship. If you quit after one blown up ship, no one's mad. You did your part. Nobody will call you a coward. Yeah.
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I don't know that, yeah. And so from late 1941 to the end of the war, Woody Guthrie wrote several iconic anti-fascist anthems, including Reuben James, about a US destroyer that was torpedoed and sunk by the Nazis in 1941. As you might expect from Woody and the kind of songs he wrote, this song focused on the lives and deaths of normal men at war. The refrain went, tell me what was their names.
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Tell me what was their names. Did you have a friend on that good Reuben James? It's a good song. But if you want my personal favorite War Years Woody Guthrie song, nothing beats this particular banger. Sophie's going to put it up now.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
banger it's so good it's a real banger I enjoyed that immensely yeah one of my favorites so near the end of Woody's wartime experiences he would record the first official version of a song that he'd been working on since 1940 this land is your land which would go on to be undoubtedly his most famous work of music it is definitely the one Woody Guthrie song everyone's fucking heard like you basically can't get through school without hearing this land is your land because it was so easily recuperated
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Yes. And in the decades since 1944, it's also been criticized for what many people interpret as an era of imperialism and support for Manifest Destiny, which is definitely present in the version of the song that is commonly sung. Given this, I think it's interesting to actually look into why Woody wrote the song and what its original lyrics were.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
This Land is Your Land was initially something of a folk music diss track. It was a response to Irving Berlin's God Bless America. This is a song Berlin wrote in 1918 after being drafted and re-released in 1941 as something of a cash grab. The lyrics, if you aren't familiar, go like this. God bless America, land that I love. Stand beside her and guide her through the night with a light from above.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Woody fucking hated this song, and it's good he did because it's a fucking dog shit song. He considered it far too sweet a hymn for a nation that had just sent millions of its citizens into a depression. This Land is Your Land was meant to be a retort discussing the real America that Irving had tried to conceal. The original title was God Bless America for Me.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Joe Riley writes of this first version of the song, quote, It was more of a question than affirmation. In fact, it was a sarcastic retort. Woody later changed the refrain to, "'This land was made for you and me,' and the song to, "'This land is your land.'" The verses he ultimately omitted from the final draft of the song include this banger, There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
The sign was painted, said private property. But on the backside, it didn't say nothing. This land was made for you and me. In the squares of the city, in the shadow of the steeple, near the relief office, I see my people. And some are a-grumbling and some are wondering if this land's still made for you and me. And that's a banger. That's very much not an imperialist song.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
That's more him talking about like this. The people that this country ought to be for are the ones being harmed by the system that governs it. Right. Like that's the original point of the song. That said, this is not a case of it being recuperated by someone else who changes the lyrics because they think that they can tweak it. They don't like Woody's original version. Woody changes it, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
And he changes it. He removes that verse about the relief office because late in the war, he decided it was too pessimistic. And he replaces it with lines like, from the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters, this land was made for you and me, which is not all that different from like some of the stuff Irving had been writing, right? Totally. The song becomes a massive hit.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
It is practically a new national anthem. And Woody does not initially bother to copyright it because that's not uncommon for him, right? He generally neglected to do that. Alas for Woody, the post-war optimism faded quickly. I mean, and it... So the first horrible thing that happens to Woody after the war, because things go downhill for him quickly.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
In February of 1947, there is an electrical fire in his home, and his little girl, Kathy Ann, dies. Oh, God. He has bad luck with fire. Like I said, he had horrible luck with fire. Now, he and Marjorie have three other kids, but yeah, that's obviously- really fucks him up.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
So yeah, anyway, that's where Woody heads up to, and he's there for a little while. It's in this shanty town with like about 5,000 other work seekers who are all like showing up to try and queue in lines and get jobs every day. And there were a lot of spaces like this around the country. There were a lot of these government work camps, basically, which is where Woody is.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
And like that same year, 47, and then in 48, he gets repeatedly attacked as a communist, both in the State Committee of Un-American Activities in California and in the House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities. Now, they were attacking him for being a communist, and he was, but he was not un-American. No one was more American than Woody fucking Guthrie.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
He suffers as a result of this. He gets blacklisted. He had written an autobiographical novel at this point called Bound for Glory that had been set to be turned into a major Hollywood production. But that deal and others like it fell apart.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
As unions were forced to take anti-communist stances in this new, more paranoid era, Woody stopped getting hired to play the events that had largely supplemented his income.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Rather than fold, as many did, and denounce the things that he believed, Woody spoke out constantly against J. Edgar Hoover, writing at one point, quote, the roaches crawl across my page tonight and make a noise that makes more sense than all that Hoover writes. Which is a good bar. He became less dogmatic on the Moscow line as well, although he never stops being a communist.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
He starts writing that his goal was to, quote, get this thing called socialism nailed and hammered up just as quickly as he can. And praises Eugene V. Debs, former chairman of the Socialist Party, as, quote, a pure cross between Jesus Christ and Abe Lincoln. Which, again, is not really something that the Moscow Party wants you saying.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Despite the consequences to his career, he continues to seek and sing his mind. Quote, "'Fascism is being afraid. Fascism is fear bossing you. Fascism is worse than all of these things, and fascism is more closer to you than I can make you see. I'm trying to wake you up and tell you that you're sleeping with something ten times more dangerous than a poison fang snake in your bed.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
If fascism does come, and if it does kill me, well, then you add me alone onto the hundreds of millions which fascism has already dusted under.' And it don't scare me so very much.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Yeah. That's hard. I like that. Yep. That's hard. And this is unfortunately, Margaret, where the story gets awkward again.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
More complicated than a heel turn. He's about to do a bad thing. There is a mitigating factor that's pretty significant. Okay, okay. But it's a pretty bad thing. Woody is at this point always on the verge of being broke, but also a famous and influential musician. And we know what comes with that, right? Which is the temptation to be a sex pest. Yeah, uh-huh, uh-huh. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
And, you know, Woody does not commit like rape, but he does sexually harass someone very badly. And this is a very ugly story. The gist of it is that things with his second wife, Marjorie, go downhill as his career does. She is the family moneymaker. She actually makes a very good living teaching dancing. She's an extremely accomplished dancer. And his career is not doing well.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
This leads to fighting and Woody eventually moves out and rents a room for himself. He starts writing letters to his old music partner, Lefty Lou's sister. She is 28 years old. He is 36. So they're not like crazy far apart. But the bigger issue is she had never insinuated that she was into him, right? He is just writing her letters about wanting to fuck her apropos of nothing. Oh, fuck.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
And there were also, in areas like Sacramento and Seattle, these things called Hoovervilles. And Hoovervilles were essentially large campsites built by homeless workers and their families as they migrated around searching for work during the Great Depression.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Now she, Woody had just kind of assumed that because she, like they knew each other, right? They were like friendly, but she gets divorced and he just kind of assumes, well, I'm getting divorced too. That must mean she wants to fuck, right? And his letters to her take on an air of obsession. He writes at least 12 long letters suggesting they move out together, hit the road and start having sex.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
These letters include long rambling descriptions of the kinds of sex Woody wanted to have and more. And I'm going to quote from Ramblin' Man here. Into the envelopes, Guthrie stuffed pages torn from New York's tabloids with muddy magenta circles slathered around stories of grisly murders.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
The packets, sometimes two or three a week, frightened Mary Ruth by their intensity, the sexual proposals, and the suggestion of violence. She drove to Los Angeles to show them to her sister, who knew Guthrie best of all. "'You have no idea how horrible it was,' her older sister Maxine said. She, in turn, called the police."
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Now, the police get involved because they think Woody might be a budding serial killer, and given the kind of stuff he's sending, not an unreasonable thing to be afraid of. Yeah. And given the fact that the feds are hounding him, I get why Woody is like, this is them going after me for my politics, but it really isn't. Yeah. He's writing very upsetting things.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Now, there's another part to this story, which does not make the things he's writing less fucked up or upsetting, but he is losing his mind. Okay. He is losing his mind in a degree that is very soon to be clinically diagnosed, right? In episode one, I mentioned that Woody's mother went insane when he was quite young and was institutionalized, right? This traumatized him.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
And at the time, we didn't have an explanation for what she was going for. They just said madness, right? We now know what she had because Woody has it and it's diagnosable by the time he gets it. And it's called Huntington's disease.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Yeah, his mom and Woody gets it. And he is starting to suffer the effects of Huntington's by the late 40s. This is a neurodegenerative disorder that Huntington's disease news describes as characterized by uncontrolled movements, loss of cognitive ability and psychiatric problems. The middle stages of the illness are associated with psychosis.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Some patients experience delusions, which they tend to be convinced are accurate. And it also comes with these like sort of obsessive delusions, right? Which might explain the whole him thinking that this was something that was reciprocated, right? So this isn't a heel turn. This is just a degeneration. This is just a- This is a very tragic degeneration, right? Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
I don't know how, again, you want to parse it out morally, but he is diagnosed. He is losing his mind. He is going to spend most of the rest of his life in an institution. This is not just a case of a powerful man in music being a sex pest. Right, totally. This is a man who was not like this before, so far as we know, absolutely declining and becoming increasingly delusional.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
That was good, Margaret. Thank you. That was good. Thanks. I'll be here all day. Electrolux cities? I don't know. I just think it's funny because the old catchphrase was nothing sucks like an Electrolux. And I've never heard an advertisement that was more clearly made before the internet. You couldn't get away with that, did I? Or you could, but it would be a different product.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
It's just... Yeah, he probably always had a crush on her and then... This, like he becomes convinced that there is something going on there that there's not.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
One would assume, right? So it's not great. He is ultimately charged in 1949 with sending obscene material through the mail. He avoids prison time, but is sentenced to therapy. And he and his therapist do not have a good relationship. His therapist does not like him. But he's not diagnosed with anything quite yet.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
So his therapist is just like he's kind of an asshole, which I can't blame the therapist for because he's being an asshole. If you don't know the mitigating factor of the family mental illness that destroyed his mother and is destroying him. Woody eventually refuses court mandated therapy and his lawyer manages to narrowly get him out of a six month sentence.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
His lawyer, who is one of his shipmates, right? He and this guy are torpedoed together. And this lawyer is a very good friend who was like, I'm not going to let my my war buddy go to a fucking jail. Right. Woody was mostly angry when his sentence gets like cut off. He's kind of pissed because he had been planning a Christmas Eve show for the inmates that he doesn't get to do now.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
So there's still that piece of him in there, right? By the mid 1950s, Woody was disabled with Huntington's badly enough that his second wife, Marjorie, who again, he has separated from, had to take charge of his affairs. And it does say something that this person who he was not nice to at the end, Had enough affection for him still that she makes sure he's taken care of.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Which included she registers a copyright for this land is your land for the first time. Right. And for a number of his other songs. And she's doing that because, like, we're going to need some way of taking care of him. Yeah. You know, and this makes sense. Right.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
One of the fun side effects of this is that his family is going to wind up in a lawsuit with Donald Trump about this land is your land because Trump kept trying to play it. Yeah. It is now in the public domain, but it wasn't for a while. So that same year, in 1956, he was involuntarily committed to Greystone Park, a New Jersey mental institution.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Over the next five years, he lost the ability to play music or even to type. But, and again, this really says something about the amount of love there was still for him. He is not cut off or alone. His family visits him regularly. They take him out and he stays with them for weekends and holidays. He's taken out and taken to shows and trips by his friends and by fellow artists.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
I know. I know. Tremendous power. Unaccountable power. I'm now eligible for the Supreme Court, although I think technically anyone is. Fuck.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Bob Dylan, who at this point is not particularly famous, starts visiting Woody at the asylum in 1961. And Dylan starts working with other performers over the 60s. They play shows. They take Woody to some of these shows where they're playing his music to this new generation of newly radicalized Americans. Mm-hmm.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
And Woody lives long enough to see his music honored and sold out shows by some of the, like fucking Bob Dylan, some of the most beloved up and coming musicians of the 60s. So he does go out knowing that his music doesn't just live on, but has influenced this new generation of people who are going to become incredibly famous and influential musicians in their own right.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Which as far as being an artist goes is about as much as you can hope for. Totally.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Yeah. Yeah. He dies in October of 1967. Yeah. At that point, he is unable to communicate by any means besides pointing at cards that said yes or no. But he left behind, again, a pretty incredible legacy. Two novels, hundreds of articles, more than a thousand songs and poems, 500 illustrations, and a central role in the folk music revival that changed American music forever.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
That's pretty funny. That's not bad. Yeah. I'm never going to get over that. Oh, man. So Hoovervilles were named kind of – it was an attack on President Herbert Hoover, right? Like that's why they get their name because he was this – this will not sound familiar to anything that's about to happen.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
We've listened to a lot of Woody Guthrie's music in these episodes, and while I do hope you all take the opportunity to listen to more, I want to leave you with a quote of his that I think is quite relevant for our times, which Ed Cray picked out to open his 2008 biography of the man. About all a human being is, anyway, is just a hoping machine. And I like that.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
I also like this quote from Bob Dylan, who was asked in 1963 to sum up his feelings on Woody Guthrie in 25 words for a book on the man. As History.com notes, Dylan, quote, responded instead with a 194-line poem called Thoughts on Woody Guthrie, which took as its theme the eternal human search for hope.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
And where do you look for this hope you're seeking, Dylan asks in the poem, before proceeding to a kind of answer. You can either go to the church of your choice or you can go to Brooklyn State Hospital. You'll find God in the church of your choice. You'll find Woody Guthrie in Brooklyn State Hospital. Cool. Yeah. Anyway, that's Woody Guthrie.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Yeah. It was one of those, like, again, it's a messy story, but yeah. Honestly, it was better than I would have guessed. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
A relevant kind of guy to know about for the kind of times we're heading into.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Happy holidays. Yeah. Happy holidays. And I don't know. Listen to some Woody Guthrie. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
He was this corrupt Republican president whose policies, which benefited the incredibly wealthy, fed into the Great Depression and like allowed for the kind of deregulation that made it much worse and were seen as having largely led the country into economic calamity. And so they named these massive camps for homeless families, basically, Hoovervilles.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
We'll have some Q's. We'll answer some A's. It'll be a good time.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
The largest and longest lasting, I'm not sure if it was absolutely the largest, but it was the longest lasting and among the largest, Hoovervilles, was outside of Seattle. And it stood from 1931 to 1941. As an interesting side note, it was operated on land next to Elliott Bay South, which I believe is where Fraser's condo was meant to be located in the TV series. That doesn't mean anything.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Welcome back to the Court of Robert Evans Bastard Guy podcast. Yeah, that's right. I got a gavel. See? Take that, our engineers. They're not going to be happy. Who let you get a gavel? I got sent this by the judge. Again, it works exactly like vampires made me. And it's lovely. It's a beautiful gavel. Look at it.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
I just thought it was interesting. Yeah. So, Woody missed out on the big West Coast Hoovervilles, but he was in and around. You know, Redding is people who are heading up to Seattle or coming back down from Seattle. He's talking to them. There's a big one in Sacramento. He's talking to them. And he's in this work camp in Happy Valley that's kind of similar to Hooverville, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
And he's supposed to be up there working on this big dam project, but he does a lot different. better, and it's a lot more stable for him to just busk for music, right? And so that's what he actually spends most of his time doing. Now, I say he's better at this than he is at laboring.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
He's not great at it, and he's only able to send the occasional very small money order back home to his wife and two kids. So he is not... The idea is, I'm coming out here to support my family, but he's not able to support Mary. She and her now two kids... are utterly dependent on her parents, which was a very embarrassing situation for her.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Mary later said, I know it upset my dad a lot, my mother too. Woody wasn't doing the manly thing. And I think it's both worth saying that that's her impression and the family's impression of this. This is not an uncommon position for people to be in. And I don't know that Woody was doing very well back in Texas. So it's kind of unclear to me you know, what the right thing to do here was.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Ultimately, Woody, like a lot of people, was put in a very difficult situation of trying to do something he hoped would allow him to support his family. And it didn't work very well for a while, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
And we also, on this show, we've had guys like Steven Seagal, who- As a guest. Yes, yes. Friend of the pod. Absolutely abandoned his family to start his Hollywood career. That is a story we've told a few times. Woody is, his family feels like he's doing that at the start. That's not actually what he does here, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Because he's not actually cutting ties with them, but they're not happy with him either. I mean, migrant laborers do this all the time today.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
That's fair. I think that's kind of part of why. Yeah. He's not really doing the work that, you know, a lot of these other guys were. You know, he's doing some of that, but that's not how he really makes most of his bread. Yeah. So in short order, Woody left Reading for Glendale, which I've also done, and I can tell you, good call. Much better place to be than Reading.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
He vaguely knew that he had an aunt in the area, and as was often the case, he just sort of, they're not like sending letters usually back and forth. They certainly don't have phones or whatever. You're usually just like, I was told once by a relative that I have an aunt in Glendale. I'm just going to show up and figure out where she is. Hopefully she'll take me in.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
And social ties were such that when he shows up on her doorstep, she's like, all right. He is 25 years old when he makes it to the Los Angeles area. After several months of stress and internal recriminations, because Woody's not thrilled with himself either. He had wanted to be doing better. He knows how little he's sending back to his family. He's not happy about this.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
But here's the thing. I think you'd be better. There's not going to be any more home invasions, Margaret.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
He gets a lucky break, courtesy of his cousin Leon, who everyone else either called Jack or Okie Guthrie. And Okie is like a... It's kind of a pejorative term for someone from Oklahoma. Yeah. Both was used as an insult and also is like a term of pride by people from Oklahoma. Right. The Guthrie's are all Okies. Right.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
So calling him Okie Guthrie must have been a little bit confusing to like Woody, who is also an Okie. Uh-huh. Jack and his family had left home back at the start of the Depression and moved to Sacramento. Like many Guthries, he was musically talented, and so was his wife, and they'd built a reputation for themselves as good musicians and performers.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
He suggested teaming up with Woody to try and start an act in Los Angeles. This was not the obviously good idea that it would later seem, as Ed Gray explains in the book Ramblin' Man. Jack was a Western singer. His songs were heavily influenced by popular music. Woody was a country singer, his music born of an older oral tradition. In practice, they could neither sing nor play guitar together.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Indeed, Woody privately despised the treacly sentiment of Jack's sagebrush serenades. Jack the guitarist used the jazz-influenced chords of popular music and played up the neck of the instrument. Woody disdained chords beyond the minimal tonic, subdominant and dominant. So this is not a great pairing. And Woody's a little bit alike... He's a little bit of a snob, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
That's probably true. Yeah. Well, speaking of someone who would have been better on the Supreme Court, Woody Guthrie. That's who we're talking about in part two of these episodes. Yep. Not his dad, though. Not his Klansman father.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
He's like, oh, your music's all popular and jazzy. You're not doing the cool punks. It's not really punk, but it's very similar in attitude to that kind of guy, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Yeah. At least he's about to be starting to do folk punk.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Yes. Because, I mean, it's this mix of these songs that are like folk songs that are we would call Western because they're like songs about the West and about, you know, being a cowboy or whatever. And songs that are like Western songs that are made for like the different kinds of like floor shows and entertainment, you know, radio and whatnot that's popular at the time.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Like those are kind of different beasts. Yeah. So in better times, these guys probably would never have worked together, but desperation made, you know, some kind of collaboration necessary. And they developed a fairly successful act and were able to book recurring gigs on the radio through a station called KFVD.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Woody found himself increasingly drawn to folk music with a sense of class consciousness, like Goebel Reeb's 1934 tune, Hobo's Lullaby. And here's Woody Guthrie singing a portion of Hobo's Lullaby, which is, again, a song by another guy. And this is a folk song. It's also kind of punk, as you'll catch from this section. Oh, I used to listen to it while riding trains.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
That's a good little bar. So I would also be remiss, because that's pretty cool, if I didn't expound on the fact that racism, too, was a recurrent part of Woody's act and often on his mind while living in Echo Park and fighting on behalf of poor white people, because he's like an activist, you know, helping rent strike type stuff, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Like he is an advocate for like poor downtrodden white people living in Los Angeles. He also is drawing cartoons of people he called jungle blacks and monkeys. Yeah. And like, that's bad. He wrote poems so racist that I don't even feel like I should describe them on the air to you. They're bad. Oh, God. Yeah. Found a good L.A. Weekly article on the subject by an author named Johnny Whiteside.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
And I'm going to read a quote from it now. Broadcasting on Pasadena's KFVD, Guthrie often indulged in on-air employ of Ebonics and was stunned when a black listener characterized the singer as unintelligent after hearing Guthrie perform songs with titles like Run Inward Run and Inward Blues. Fortunately for Guthrie, recordings of these tunes do not survive.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
Later, Guthrie said, "...a young Negro in Los Angeles wrote me a nice letter one day telling me the meaning of that word, the N-word, and that I shouldn't say it anymore on the air, so I apologized." He next tore all the inward songs out of his songbook. Huh. So you can take that however you want, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music into a Weapon
The fact that he is singing that kind of stuff on the air and like just writing poems about it, not great. But he's also not unable to change or immune to criticism. So he's willing to like listen to this criticism that a black man gives him and be like, oh, you know what? That is kind of fucked up. And that ain't nothing for the son of a Klansman, right? Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Did Queen Elizabeth have one? Yeah, Queen Elizabeth has one of these things. But Queen Elizabeth had it because she would not buy a jacket if she didn't know child labor had gone into it.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Was it marketed as just like hand sewn with love from this church? It's marketed with that line, their little hands can put the rhinestones on best.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
There's a little quote above the tag, we don't pay the children. They pay us by... Yeah, they pay us with their labor, you know, for saving their souls.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Yeah, well, and cuddling with dead bodies. Now... In addition to jackets, Alamo's clothing line sold sharkskin boots, leopard skin jackets, and sequined gowns, often including Swarovski crystals and diamonds as accoutrements. Beyond that, his ministry expanded to control a string of gas stations in the area around the towns of Dyer and Alma, Alabama.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
They ran a hog farm, grocery stores, and a concert venue, as well as a restaurant where a young Bill Clinton once watched Dolly Parton perform. Um... The number of famous people who are just like bit parts in the fucking Tony Alamo story, unreal.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
At this point, there are some people who have left. If you really wanted to look, you could find some allegations, right? But there's no lawsuits yet. There aren't any major cases about the worst things. This is right around the period of time where there are some lawsuits about them not paying workers. The worst stuff hasn't really come out yet.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
So that said, when it does, they keep selling the jacket. So I'm not letting anyone off the hook for the fucking jacket thing because they keep being a popular product even when he's on the run from the FBI, as we'll document. Yes, yes. It's amazing stuff.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
It's a limited edition. Sam, think about it this way. If Osama Bin Laden had been selling JNCOs while he was on the run, I would have wanted a pair of those JNCOs. The Bin Laden JNCOs? Oh, my God.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
I'm going to have to go to the sea. In his 2005 book, My Life, Clinton described Tony Alamo as Roy Orbison on speed, a description that doesn't make a lot of sense to me because we listen to him and he's not a fast singing or speaking guy.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Yeah, that's what he sounds like. And he kind of sounds like a slower Johnny Cash to me, who also sucks at singing. Anyway, I don't know why Bill describes him this way. Have we heard him preach? I have heard him preach.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
He's faster, but he's not like a, as someone who's watched a lot of like preachers who are definitely coke fiends, he's not like that fast, right? You mean in the spirit. And I was going to say, maybe Bill Clinton doesn't know much about speed, but Bill Clinton definitely knew a lot about speed. Young Bill Clinton knew a little bit about speed. I'll tell you that much right now.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
He knows a lot of things that Tony knows. Yeah, he knows a lot of things he shouldn't. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. We'll get to that. His followers slept in sleeping bags on the floor in crowded meeting rooms. Workers are owned five dollars a day. Shifts could last as long as 20 hours. I think there were just 12 to 15 on average.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
But, you know, when there's a bigger when Mr. T needs a bunch of jackets, you know, you make that shit happen.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
So within a few years of Susan passing, Tony started seeking companionship. And while Susan had to begin, been like 10 years older than him, Chris's experience that Susan's daughter had been an early, because again, Tony rapes her, right? And that was when she's like 14 or 15. That was an early warning that Tony's preferences skewed much younger. And he starts taking child brides.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
I think he starts with 16, 17-year-olds. But every year, he'll go down a couple of years in terms of what's acceptable to him. And it's going to get very young. Right. An article for THV2 News notes, quote, in an old radio program, Alama once said that when women start their periods, then they are women. According to God's word, they should be able to be married at 13, 14, 15.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
And in some cases, if they have menstruated already at 12 years old. So like capital P pedophile, we're talking.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
And in fact, it's explicitly legal to marry 14-year-olds in a lot of the United States.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
younger than is allowed anywhere. But I don't actually want to be quoted on that because I might be wrong. But you're right. Like there is a biblical basis for what Tony is saying, right? He's able to cite passages from the Bible in justification of the things he's doing. Now, I will say by the time he reaches his apex, 12 is going to be old for him. But we're getting there, Samantha.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Let's distract ourselves with some ads first, though.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Oh, yeah. I think he could have people marching in the streets with guns protecting him for sure. I mean, he does get that. It's just that it kind of pisses off everyone around him because America's in a little bit of a different place at this time. So as Tony gets older, his beliefs on the proper age to marry a girl get looser.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
He moves the age limit down to 10, arguing that as long as a girl had started to menstruate, the men around her didn't just have the right but a duty to marry her off, quote. And again, when you say there's a biblical basis, here's his argument. God impregnated Mary when she was about 11 years old.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
So the government idiots, the people that don't know the Bible, what you're going to have to do is get a hold of God now. You're going to have to get up there and cuff him and send him to prison for statutory rape. And yeah, if God fucked an 11-year-old, yeah, he's thousands. Speak of a power imbalance, he's also God.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
There's a lot of debate as to the ages and stuff here, yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
And it's this whole thing like I can remember because I grew up, you know, in and around evangelicals in the post 9-11 period, constantly hearing about how the fundamental evil of Islam was that it allowed 14 – Muhammad married like a 14-year-old girl, a 12-year-old girl, something like that. That's okay in this religion.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
That's part of the reason why it's... But you can look at any religious text from that period and find a justification for fucking a little kid, right? That's just the reality, in part because of the time period in which those things were written.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Ultimately, my stance is that outside of specifics of the faith that they claim to be, people who want to fuck kids find a reason to justify fucking kids.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Exactly. Matt Gaetz. We call this the Matt Gaetz coda, right? So a write-up for the SPLC continues. It's a theme that Alamo keeps coming back to. In a radio show just this February 24th, the preacher cited the alleged promiscuity of first graders as grounds for marrying them before the illegal age of consent.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
I found out from people's parents that their daughter started having sex when she was six years old and had sex every day of her life, he said at one point. So right there, by the time she's 15 years old, she's had sex thousands of times. I mean, this is just reality. The alternate reality, you have to create for yourself to exist within these things.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
And people have to listen to him talk about six-year-olds having sex thousands of times and be like, yeah, that's the way things work.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
I've never seen a child, but this seems accurate. Like... Oh, my God. I think some of it is literally a lot of these people will justify... You see a kid look at another kid of the opposite sex, and you're like, well, that's basically sex, right? Right. I don't know. I don't know fully what...
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
there's a lot to dig into here, but like, this is some of the most vile pedophile justification stuff I've ever heard. And this is not like a subject we cover, you know, sparingly on this show, because it turns out that like, wherever you find the worst people in a society, you'll find a lot of them finding reasons to justify having sex with little kids. Uh, just the thing that keeps happening.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Um, it happens with Christians. It happens on the left. It happens, uh, In every religion and every political movement, it happens all the time with conservative Christians. These people are predators, and predators are good at taking advantage of power dynamics. Tony's a predator who wound up at the head of a cult, and he understands how to manipulate people.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
And as time goes on and he's kind of freed further from any influence of his dead wife, he gets more and more extreme with the things he's willing to justify to his followers. And he keeps getting away with it. So he keeps going further.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
I'm not trying to give her moral credit.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Yep. Yep. Yeah. And it works for him for way too long. In 1993, he releases a tract titled The Polygamists, where he justifies his behavior by arguing the Holy Scriptures proclaim polygamy to be righteous. He's doing a lot of what, like, there's a chunk of the Mormons, the FLDS church, very similar justifications for polygamy and for fucking kids, you know, that you find between the two of them.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Very similar to the kind of stuff David Koresh is saying, right? Because David Koresh is a friend of his, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Of course. Of course these guys get along.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
I think there's a bit of that going on. I don't know how Koresh, because obviously Koresh is no longer able to give interviews. So I'm not sure 100% how David would have described what their relationship was, but we'll talk about a little later how Tony describes it. In a broadcast for his TV network talking about polygamy, Tony expounded, they're condemning polygamy when it's never condemned.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
God never says no polygamist shall enter the kingdom of heaven. But these bastards, these homosexual Vaticanites, they condone homosexuals and they condemn marriage. And a man that would take care of his, they say you're a polygamist, that I married too many wives. Well, find out, prove it. And even if I was, there's no law in the Bible against it.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Now, as you may be noticing here, Tony saved much of his hatred for gay people and the Catholic Church, who he thought were the same thing, and were responsible for both Nazism, communism, and pornography. All of it could be traced back to the Vatican. And while Tony didn't get along with the Catholics, he could be open-minded when it came to other cult leaders.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Oh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards. We're all doing just so good. Just so good. Talking about Jesus grifters and their Jesus grifting with one of my very favorite people and guests, the great Samantha McVeigh. Samantha, how are you doing?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
He was friends particularly with David Koresh. Tony told an interviewer that David was, quote, like a brother to me. Um... No, I don't know. Does that mean they were really super free? Did he just see some value because these guys are preaching similar things vis-a-vis pedophilia and polygamy? I don't know.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
It's hard to say precisely how much money came into the cult because Tony was not a fan of paying taxes. I know you're going to be shocked by that, right? What? The foundation. And again, the church doesn't have to pay taxes because that's how churches work, unfortunately. But like his massively successful businesses, business selling denim vests to Mr. T has to pay taxes. Does it?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Yes, yes, because it's an actual business. Tony's arguing it shouldn't have to, but the IRS will feel differently. We know that from 1970 to 1976, the foundation's reported income went from $46,000 a year to $1.3 million a year. And again, this is 1970s money. It is obvious underreporting.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
The cult's numerous businesses and fleet of Cadillacs would have required much more than this in income to maintain. What got Tony in trouble for the first time was the Fair Labor Standards Act.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
No matter how many fire and brimstone speeches about hell Tony gave, some number of his followers left each year, and as they re-entered the real world, some of them caught on to the fact that Tony had actually broken the law by not paying them. Some of these people wound up talking to the government, and in 1976, the Department of Labor sued the Foundation for Exploiting Workers.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
It alleged that they'd been made to work 12 to 15 hours a day, 6 to 7 days a week without salary. Now, that starts in 76, but the case takes a decade to wind to conclusion, right? This is not a fast-moving case, and it reaches the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court hears this case and rules 9 to 0 that workers, even in a cult, are entitled to minimum wage and overtime.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
benefits, which you would think, oh, good. Tony's going to have to pay everybody now. He does not. He finds workarounds. He delays payments as long as possible, and he orchestrates ways to recoup the money.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Now that he was paying his workers a legal salary, what he would do is every couple of weeks, he would give everyone their paychecks, and then they would have a big to-do of everyone handing their paychecks back as donations to the church, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Exactly. 100% tithes. Still, the case had been as high profile as cases get, which drew the attention of federal law enforcement. So at this point, Tony has gotten sued. He's lost his case. It takes 10 years for him to lose his case. But nothing really changes about the way the cult actually operates its business.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
So you're a cult leader and your wife, the Lamb of God, has died even though you both told everyone on your TV show God would protect her from that sort of pedestrian end because the world can't end unless you're both alive, right? So what do you do when she passes on, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
In the early 1990s, the Tony and Susan Alamo Foundation embarks on a bold new scam, one that was surprisingly petty given the other businesses operated by the cult, but it gives you the level of contempt that they have, both for like... Christian charity and for the law. And I want to read a quote from an article by NBC News.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Peter N. Georgiades, a Pittsburgh lawyer who sued Alamo on behalf of ex-followers in the 90s, said ministry workers accepted donations of food near its expiration dates, wiped off the dates and resold the items to grocers. It's plain, flat-out fraud, the lawyer said.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Mary Coker, who helped ex-followers contact federal agents, said that the ministry has been selling outdated government-donated food since it moved to Phuc in the 1990s. So part one of their businesses is taking food donations and then operating a business to sell to grocery stores expired foods that had been donated for free?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Look, these people, you know, he's got a lot of minds working for him. There's a lot of dudes whose only thought every day is how can we make more money for Tony Alamo? And they keep coming up with ways, you know?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
It definitely was. That's amazing. In 1991, the feds carried out a raid on Alamo's HQ in Georgia Ridge. He had enough warning that he was able to flee ahead of the authorities, along with most of his valuable property. The cops who raided his place found piles of Bibles, 82 pews... 1,500 Alamo jackets, photos of Tony with Larry Hagman, and dozens of mirrors. But they did not find Susan's body.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
What's happening? It's so much pettier than that. So... Chris, Susan's daughter, despite how much her mom had abused her, still loved her mom and wanted to give her a proper burial. And Tony hates this girl. So once she sues him, being like, you have to give me my mom's body, he has his followers steal it away and store the corpse in a storage unit to hide her.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Um, it would take like seven years for Chris to win the right to have her mom's body returned and reburied. A llama was eventually ordered to pay $100,000 in damages. Um, but like that's, it's just, he's not even trying to raise her from the dead. He's just trying to like keep her from being buried where her daughter can be a part of it. Um, cause he's a real piece of shit. Yeah. Very.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Tony probably was following her wishes. Tony spent the first half of the 1990s on the run from the law. The FBI put out wanted posters for him, which stated, Alamo is always accompanied by bodyguards who have access to numerous weapons to include M14 rifles. He is known to be hostile to law enforcement and is considered armed and dangerous. Now, that's all true.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
What's wild to me is while he is on the run, his followers keep making jackets and he keeps designing them. He uses a fax machine to send sketches from his hidey holes to different manufacturing facilities. He gave like-
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
You did guess weekend at Bernie's and that's what they do. It's I you are correct, because basically what they do is he has her embalmed. He brings her corpse home and he like, yeah, yeah. He puts it on a table and he's going to have his followers pray over it for days on end. Right. That's the that's the plan here.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's still primarily the children. Yes. And he keeps giving interviews to journalists about the jackets. He even visits his Hollywood storefront while he's on the run from the FBI. He tells the L.A. Times, everything I do is a work of art. I do the designs wherever I'm at. Um, and this, there's this, this LA times article that I'm going to be quoting from is amazing.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Cause it's like, he's talking to the people who are running these shops, selling these jackets being like, but you know, like he's on the run for a bunch of crimes, right? You're like kids have accused him of molesting them. He's on the FBI's most wanted list. Why are you still selling his jackets?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
And how is this happening? Yeah. What? Oh my god. The LA Times' reporting indicated that Alamo jackets continued to be manufactured in California, New York, and primarily Arkansas. No one working at any of these factories received any pay, and apparently nothing meaningful had changed after that 1985 ruling. Quote,
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
One former member who left the cult last year said working conditions at Alamo clothing shops have changed little since the ruling. The former member who asked not to be identified said he has seen young children working in the shops with their parents. Workers were paid only a $5 a week stipend, plus room and board at an Alamo commune, he said.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Now, the article struck a bemused tone, veering from the store owners and customers praising the artistry of the jackets. We felt differently about rhinestones back then. To former cult members describing the labor conditions as that of an unpaid sweatshop that primarily employed children. When questioned about this, Tony told a reporter, the clothing is so groovy.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Everyone wants it no matter what they think I am. No matter what, the superstars are going to want my jackets.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
No, he comes out of that world. You know, I think he is at one point, I think in the late 60s, he probably was trying his hand at being a hippie. You know, he's in L.A. around that time.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Sure. He is, and this whole cult is shrapnel of the hippie movement, right? The hippie movement doesn't really change anything. A lot of people wind up on the street and mentally damaged in the aftershocks of the anti-war movement and the summer of love. And Tony and his initial cult followers are those people.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
So being decent reporters, the LA Times crew reached out to the FBI about the fact that this guy, who's apparently one of their most wanted, seems to still be selling jean jackets in Hollywood. Quote, FBI spokesman Jim Nielsen said the Bureau is continuing its search for Alamo, but refused to elaborate on the investigation.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Now, if you're thinking, boy, isn't the fact that this serial child molester and child trafficker manufacturing expensive clothing for the most famous people on earth and giving interviews while on the run from the FBI, isn't that a hideous indictment of our federal law enforcement agencies? And my answer would be, oh, man, they were up to so much worse shit than this in the mid-90s, bro.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
I think that's low on the totem pole. This is actually kind of low. Now, some of the money from jacket sales was reinvested into the cult, primarily into the production of vast numbers of flyers, complaining that Tony was being wrongfully targeted by the government on behalf of the Vatican.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
His Christian soldiers, largely followers braced out of his saga's compound, trawled the streets of Hollywood and West L.A., putting leaflets on the windshields of thousands of cars.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
From that article, the leaflets' rambling denunciations claim that the district attorney's office, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Department of Labor are linked to a terrorist plot against the Alamo Church led by Pope John Paul II. The leaflets have become a common sight on Los Angeles streets, with titles such as Government Subversion Against Alamo and Tony Alamo, My Side of the Story.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
They have at various times appeared littered along the sidewalk on Broadway in downtown Los Angeles, at a county courthouse in Lancaster, and on the windshields of cars at Dodger Stadium and Los Angeles International Airport. The leaflets bear the same Saugus phone number as glossy brochures used by Alamo designs to promote the sequin jackets.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
No, she's in her wedding dress. Does that make it worse? Is that creepier or less creepy?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
By dialing the number, callers can learn how to obtain more of Alamo's religious literature or which Los Angeles area stores carry Alamo's jackets. You can get it all. Propaganda or the jacket Michael Jackson wore in Bath. Same guy.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
It's so funny how they would talk about rhinestones like serious art. Like, oh my God, the rhinestones on these are amazing. They're so good. What a special period of time that was for America. Speaking of special, our sponsors, all of them, beautiful, special people. None of them are on the run from the FBI, hiding in the mountains, you know?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
That's not any of our sponsors, except for maybe that food box company that just got caught- with child labor stuff. Anyway, whatever. We'll be back.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
The way it's described to me is he ordered them to dress her corpse in its wedding dress, so I don't think she came in that dress. He just makes his followers put her in it. Not great.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
And we're back. So, by this point, there are numerous reports in the media that Tony was molesting children. I hate coming back on a line like that, but... This is the story that it is. He argued on his own TV program for polygamy and marriage of children as young as 12. Yet major stores, including Macy's and Bullock's, continued to sell his jackets until they were literally hounded by the press.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
These LA Times reporters even came up with a photo of Tony shaking hands with Los Angeles Mayor Tim Bradley. And the picture was taken while Tony was on the FBI most wanted list. Wow. Wow. Bradley spokesperson told reporters, I guess the llama was known for his sequined jackets. Something else at this point, too. Man, I don't know what to... Very L.A. mayor thing to do, though. Like...
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
I think he was waiting for her to be resurrected to do that, right? Fair.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Look, famous people wear his stuff. I don't care what crimes he's committing.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
I can't imagine the mayor from Jaws like arm in arm with Tony Alamo. Very easy. Now, while he evaded law enforcement with almost comical ease, Tony continued to take new brides. One of the oldest of them was a 17-year-old girl named Yale who was married to another man in the cult and gave birth in 1993 while on the run with Tony and his inner circle.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
As soon as she finished giving birth, Tony kicked her husband out of the cult. Yale had to beg to have him reinstated, and Tony told her he would on one condition. She'd have to marry him. From a write-up by the SPLC... Alamo's five wives played with her young daughter in another room as she pondered her fate. It's like having a loaded gun to your head, she says now.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Yeah, yeah, the fourth or fifth time, yeah. Now, I will admit that the relationship dynamics of the Alamos are a little bit murky to me, but my interpretation is that while she was alive, Susan did a lot of work to keep Tony on something that resembled an even keel. He's still doing some sex crimes, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Refusing Alamo meant not only might you get beat half to death, but you'll go to hell on top of it. So pretty bleak. She says, yes, the thing that you would expect happens. It's as awful as you would guess. It took Gail years to accept that what happened was not consensual, but obviously she was 17 and he was 60 and the leader of her cult. Right. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
So they're not married long, and during their brief period, because he is free for about a year after marrying her, before he finally gets caught. And during that brief period, he marries a nine-year-old girl and a ten-year-old girl. Here's how Yale described his grooming practice. Every little girl starting to develop wants to feel beautiful, and he was very good at making them feel that way.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
He preyed on the fact that we were alienated from our parents. They worked and worked, and some of us hadn't seen our parents in a very long time.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Yes, we've just been talking about how tired and slightly broken we all are already this year.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Yeah, yeah. Some people are allowed to be married, but as Yale's kid, you can get forcibly separated by him if he doesn't, if he gets jealous of your relationship. In 1994, the year after their marriage, Tony was finally arrested in... This is not going to surprise anyone. Florida, where he had been living for most of the time he spent on the run under a fake name.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
He was convicted of tax fraud to the tune of $9 million and sentenced to six years in prison. Again, there was evidence by this point that he was practicing polygamy with children. But a year or so before his arrest in February of 1993, the BATF and the FBI had had a bloody standoff with Tony's friend David Koresh and his cult outside of Waco.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
The whole thing had ended with several dead agents, many dead cultists, and dozens of dead children. The disaster at Waco, which came right off the heels of the bloody ATF standoff at Ruby Ridge, had galvanized the American religious right against what they saw as federal overreach.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
The fact that the feds had fucked up hideously and made a very bad situation even worse made all of this a lot more problematic, and the FBI at all responded by pulling back from going after figures like Alamo, which is why I suspect no one did the fairly minimal work necessary to charge him it. over his polygamy and child molestation at this stage.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
In fact, while he is in prison, he is allowed to have visitation rights with his wives, per the SPLC.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
But a lot less than he will be once she dies, because she is exerting some control to limit his behavior, right? And once she is gone, there is no one left to keep this man in check, and he loses his
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Yeah. Although he was incarcerated during most of their marriage, Alamo kept in touch through regular prison visits, where Yale and other wives present at the time alleged that he would fondle the younger girls as older wives blocked the view of the prison security cameras. He allegedly spoke to the girls in graphic terms about group sex and whips, says Yale, who became terrified of him.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
At the time, Yale says, she was still in awe of Alamo. She worked 18-hour days transcribing the tapes Alamo would record for his followers, she says, editing out his curse words. I would have killed for him. I would have killed my child or anyone for him, even though I hated him, Yale says now. I'd become his little demon, finding sick joy in telling people horrible things on orders from Tony. Oh.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Cult dynamics, like... I don't know, 201 there. The whole older wives hiding what's happening, but also the fact that like, why are you prison officials letting children come here?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Yeah, I mean, a big part of the Tony Alamo story is that our legal system is set up to enable certain kinds of cult leaders, even when they molest children on a grand scale, because that's a lot easier for all of the people who have these government, often these appointee jobs, to just not upset the apple cart and piss off certain segments of the country by trying to stop the mass rape of children.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
And the Venn diagram of guys who would like... shoot elected officials if those laws were changed to make the punishments be more substantial. And guys who own kill your local pedophile shirts is just a circle, right? The same guy, the same guys.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
fucking mind like he is he goes from well not from zero he's like he's at like 55 but he goes up to like 120 very quickly i feel like he's just waiting for his moment though is it one of those things like yeah now i'm doing this this is it this is my time and then it just becomes trauma yeah yeah for a lot of people and it's going to start with some some some dead body related trauma because it
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Tony ultimately served four years of this sentence, leaving prison in 1998 and immediately booking it for the town of Folk, Arkansas, F-O-U-K-E. He repeated the same well-worn tactics that had helped him build an enviable role of properties and businesses in two other Arkansas small towns and in Hollywood up to this point. For nearly a decade, Tony enjoyed wealth and stability.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
The town even honored him with a certificate of appreciation in February 2006 for deeds that he and his church did to aid those in need in our community and for his Christian love and kindness. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Yeah, I mean, this is why I have a lot of trouble trusting anybody who runs a church. I'll say that much.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
It is. I will say there's a difference in that it's these local people. small town residents who are, I assume, also evangelical Christians generally, who are some of the first people to stand up to Tony. Because here's the thing about pedophile cult leaders.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Again, if you give them an inch, they wind up setting up armed guards on public streets, which is what an increasingly paranoid and elderly Tony did later in 2006. By this point, the feds had started investigating him again. this time, finally, over the child molestation and trafficking. Alamo responded by ordering his armed guards to line the public street approaching his property.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
It is an unfortunate but undeniable reality that when you give a man a rifle and tell him to patrol a street, regardless of his legal position, he'll start questioning random strangers.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
This happened, and it seriously pissed off residents who complained to the local government, and then the local government did nothing because they were almost certainly being bribed by the cult or were just scared of it. and thus the government took no action until the abuses grew too numerous to ignore. So residents had to take actions into their own hands.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
One resident, Judy Frazier, a small business owner in town, started looking into the dark and documented history of Alamo Ministries. She starts publishing stuff. She starts organizing the accounts of former members, and she's going to be one of the most effective ground-level activists against Tony. Ex-followers start going to the media with increased frequency.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
One of them, a former schoolteacher, claims Tony ordered her daughter, who suffered from epilepsy, beaten while she was having a seizure because said seizures were caused by the devil. Another, Sue Balsley, told the SPLC that her teenage boy was held in the air by four men and beaten 140 times as punishment for sending a love letter to a female classmate his own age.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
And it just keeps getting worse from there. There's the case of a girl, Cindy Jo Angulo, when she was 15 and married to someone else. Because again, not great dynamics outside of being married to Alamo in this cult. Alamo calls her into his house and makes her his wife in 1995, which is when she finds out that her 11-year-old sister had also been made a bride.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Nikki Farr told the SPLC report that she had fled Alamo's house in 1999 at age 15 after three years of basically showing up for those prison visits and being sexually harassed by Tony. She didn't want to marry him once he got out, and she escaped from the cult by crawling through ditches and over barbed wire after he caught her making an unauthorized phone call and knocked her out.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Yes, Ministry of Hate, I think, or Ministry of Evil. It might have been a BBC documentary about this.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Yeah, it's gross. So he has Susan's body taken to the cult's dining room, and his followers are ordered to take shifts praying for her resurrection so that there's people praying for her to be resurrected 24 hours a day. Cult funds are used to engage in nearby florists to deliver flowers every day, probably to deal with the smell, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
You've crossed the line for small town.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
The armed men on the streets, the girls fleeing barbed wire. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So from this point on, the dam was broken. Reporting in February of 2007 linked Alamo to a warehouse of 3,000 stolen mattresses owned by two of his wives.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
I wouldn't bring this up because like mattress theft, not a huge crime, except these were Tempur-Pedic mattresses from a lot of 8,000 that had been donated by the company to victims of Hurricane Katrina. Okay. Tony's men had wound up stealing them somehow and sold an estimated 4,000 of them for half a million dollars. So like you're stealing mattresses for Katrina victims. That is evil.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
They didn't have mail-order mattress technology like we do today, thank God.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
No, no. You could do it with like those, what were those? The podcaster mattresses.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
You could do it with Casper's. You could get 8,000 of those in a couple of box trucks. So state and federal law enforcement raided the Alamo compound in September of 2008, charging him with child abuse, possession of child pornography, sexual abuse, and trafficking. He was convicted on the testimony of five women who claimed they'd been married to him in secret ceremonies as minors.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
The youngest of these women had been eight at the time. God. After decades of horrific crimes, Tony Alamo was convicted in 2009 of taking girls across state lines for the purpose of sex. He was sentenced to the maximum, 175 years in prison.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Now, he ultimately serves only a fraction of that because in May of 2017, he dies at the age of 82, but he still spends a decent bit of time in prison and he dies there. So I guess that's as good as this story was ever going to end.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
I want to know that like, yeah, did they try to bring him back? I don't know. I hope he had a bad time. I hope it was all bad from that point on. Right. Because he didn't get nearly what I would describe as a fair punishment, like nine years in prison for what's really a dizzying array of crimes.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
I haven't run into it. I mean, what are you going to say? Like, hey, you know, this guy you bought a jacket from turned out to suck. So, like, it's not like... You know, it's not like they were like working together. You know, like it's not like Dolly Parton was in business with him specifically. She like she did some shows at a venue he owned. She owned a jacket.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Yeah, it's not great, Sam. It's not great. One cult member later recalled to a reporter, I believe 100% that she was going to rise from the dead. On their local access TV show, Tony gave daily sermons promising his wife would be reborn any day now. It became a joke for local radio DJs who reported on this while repeatedly playing Wake Up Little Susie.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Like, I don't know where we lock that in in terms of responsibility and a moral level.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Yeah. I mean, I think it would have been good to say something for all of these people who bought Alamo jackets, but I'm not surprised they didn't.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
No. Yes. I do want to know. Yeah. I do imagine the king of Saudi Arabia has a nice collection of rhinestone denim vests.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Yeah, I wouldn't be shocked. I wouldn't be shocked, especially since we know he was a fan.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Just burn it. Just burn your computer. Oh, man. Good stuff. Well... Anything you want to push out there, Samantha? You want to plug at the end here?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Yeah, well, check out Sam McVeigh and check out, maybe don't check out social media too much, but if you do, find Sam on it. Yeah, see my dog. And above all else, don't buy a denim jacket. They're all made by cult leaders.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Yeah, yeah, especially if it's bedazzled. Just avoid that for your own soul's sake. All right, and that's the episode, everybody. We're done.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
that's some good dj that's some good local radio dj shade i mean yeah you could you could just self no you could just see how you'd cut this together though in like the hbo version of this story um You know, do a little montage or something. Unfortunately, it also gets very creepy very fast.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
We're still alive, technically, you know?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Because one thing that Tony demands is he wants the children in the cult, he makes them cuddle with Susan's body at night. Yeah, no, this is bad.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Not in the ways that matter, maybe, but like technically, you know? Yes.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Those kids went through it, we'll say that much, right? One of them, Elijah Frankiewicz, later said, she smelled, she was cold and really, really hard. She was dead, which I feel like we didn't need at the end there, but yeah, it's just good to reinforce that to yourself when you've been told for six months that she's alive.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Yeah, no. Yeah, I think that's basically what it was is like – because eventually there are court cases and eventually there's prosecution. And a lot of these kids get out and then go talk to the media about like – Because these are the folks who were not, they were true believers in that they were kids raised in this cult, but they also, they're not converts, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
yeah just like well actually not at all like susan alamo because she's just dead as hell she is super fucking dead you just told me a few times that she is good and dead she is she is real dead oh you are i i don't know if you're ready for the amount of dead this lady is um just just the deadest uh samantha are you ready to get back into it let's go
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
If you grow up, you know, in a different religion somewhere and you convert to something like this, you tend to stick with it for a long time. Whereas a lot of these kids raised in this, like as soon as they can, they're like, I'm getting the fuck out of this place. What the fuck is wrong with these people and my parents? Jesus. Wow. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
So this goes on, this whole corpse thing goes on for six months.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
No, no, no, it's not okay. It's very, very gross. Greta Allendorf writes that every day Susan remained dead, the children were beaten. So it's even worse than just the things about this that are obviously gross. Because the kids are being physically punished for not bringing this woman back from the dead. Good cult stuff.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Were they not cuddling the dead lady enough?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Well, she was supposed to come back to Tony.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Oh, this is where I need adult supervision. What the hell? What the fuck, right? So this is, we are now in rarefied cult air. We do a lot of cults, but this is some of the cultiest cult stuff we've ever culted on this podcast.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Yeah, I was joking. That's not gross. I mean, I guess it is, but you don't have to give him credit for it.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Yeah, it's conceding. Yeah, okay. So he has his followers build an elaborate mausoleum for her, which included a grave for him. So apparently at this point, he came to accept his own mortality. Now that Susan was gone, he began to adapt other parts of his life to this new reality, which ended with him launching a new and shockingly successful business for the ministry. Okay.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
You're not ready for wear this head, Samantha. I was not ready for wear this head. This is a unique cult business, right? We talk about cult businesses a lot on this show. Restaurants are common, right? Bands are weirdly common. You know, the Mansons tried to do that, right? I mean, Tony Alamo does kind of that version of things. Fucking David Koresh was a musician, you know? Oh, yeah. Right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
What's weird is like launching through your cult an incredibly popular fashion brand that is beloved by the most famous people on earth, which is what Tony does next. Yeah, yeah. Shocking stuff.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
He does. He does. High fashion, too. It's extremely successful. How successful?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Yeah, it's Hollister. This is where Hollister comes from. Tony Alamo invented Hollister. No, so the answer, because Tony's got to ask himself, hey, as a pedophile cult leader who has just been reminded of his mortality, what's the next thing to do?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
And the answer obviously is force children to labor for free manufacturing high quality bedazzled denim vests and jackets for celebrities, which is exactly what he does. These have like in rhinestones and Swarovski diamonds, like the LA skyline on them or like Nashville. They are the tackiest fucking jackets that have ever been made.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
I think some of them are stonewashed. Some of them are clearly like black denim or leather even. They're not just denim, but there's a lot of denim. Yeah. This is by now we're in the 80s, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Yeah. Who wore this? Everyone. So he designs each product himself and sells them under the brand name Tony Alamo of Nashville. And despite that name, their big market is in Hollywood, particularly rich and famous people who wanted clothing that delivered a little bit of Southern charm and credibility.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Tony Alamo jackets took off initially with the Grand Ole Opry set, but in short order, they become like the most desired fashion item in the music industry. According to an article by Lindy Frazier of the Chanticleer, Alamo said he used children when he realized their, quote, hands were the perfect size to embellish the jackets with tiny rhinestones.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Given all of that, it might not surprise you to hear that one of the brand's biggest fans was a man famous for being responsible around small children. Have you guessed who it is?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Michael Jackson! That's right, baby. And in fact, if you want the most famous touchstone, Michael Jackson wears a Tony Alamo jacket on the cover of Bad. That's a Tony Alamo original on the cover of Bad.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Oh, well, I think there's a couple of reasons why, given some things that we've learned about Michael in the intervening years. But it is, when I realized it was that he, the jacket from Banff was a Tony Alamo, it blew my fucking mind.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Oh yeah, yeah. These are a massive brand. These are incredibly successful. Oh my God. And Michael is the most famous person on earth at this point in like the fucking early to mid 80s. So he is probably the most famous person to wear a Tony Alamo original. But he's got real competition. And I want to quote from an article on the brand in the L.A. Times.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
He makes jackets for all the stars, said Shirley Blenner, a saleswoman at Twist, a boutique on Melrose Avenue, where three Alamo jackets were on sale last week for prices ranging from $360 to $680. Blenner pointed to a display of photographs behind the cash register of Mr. T, Mike Tyson, Hulk Hogan, and Dolly Parton, all wearing what appear to be Alamo-designed jackets.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Mr. T, oh, oh my God. Samantha, I would not be doing my job as the host of this podcast if I did not show you the picture I have of Mr. T wearing a Tony Alamo original standing next to Tony Alamo himself. Oh man, it is, if you're a big Mr. T fan like I am, a harsh moment of the soul here. Look at them. Look at the two of them together. Oh, is that him? That's him.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
If Merle Haggard had let his drinking get even more away from him, right? Like, yeah. If Merle Haggard had been doing his body weight in cocaine. What? Yeah. So there's this picture. They're both wearing these just, I gotta say, hideous denim jackets. It's so bad. The jacket from Bad looks good on Michael. That's a look.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
I do not understand these denim jackets that Mr. T and Tony are wearing here.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
It's not a huge leap, right? And this is Mr. T, younger, maybe certainly worse judgment. Let's all assume that modern Mr. T wouldn't make this same mistake. But yeah, the picture I've got Which we'll put up. This will probably be the background of one of the parts of this episode. But it just says, Mr. T pictured here with Pastor Tony Alamo.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Tony Alamo: The Worst Preacher
Both are wearing Tony Alamo designer jackets, which are worn by thousands of actors, entertainers, recording artists, sports figures, presidents, politicians, kings, queens, princes, princesses, and others who are able to afford them. I don't know which presidents wore these. I haven't found that information, but I'm very curious. Kings and queens? Prince Charles definitely has one of these.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
The dealer said Diddy opened the door to his former Hamptons mansion while wearing nothing but a robe and brought him to a back bedroom to make a cocaine deal. Weird shit was starting to happen. Celebrity guys fucking each other. There were back bedrooms and it was like the inner sanctum. And this dealer talks about it like I lost a lot of respect for those guys. He is not talking about the sex.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
He's talking about like people having gay sex. Famous people fucking each other in a gay way, which is like fine. That's not the issue here.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
And there's, you know, Now, the dealer claims he also saw a mix of female rappers and prostitutes having sex there. And that's kind of where we do get into, because, again, some of there's probably some trafficking at the white parties. And it's unclear to me, is he talking about a white party or a freak off? It's at the Hamptons. A little bit unclear, but we'll get to that later.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
Yeah, absolutely. Now, in 1999, Diddy was arrested on felony charges of assault and criminal mischief. The chain of events began when Diddy was featured in the music video Hate Me Now with Nas. Both Diddy and Nas were crucified on a cross, which Diddy later decided was sacrilegious and asked to have cut. That's his line. That's his line.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
Good times, Mom. Thanks. Yeah, this is Diddy's version of that. Now, the Atlanta location hangs on a little while longer. It eventually shuts down in 2012. Why? Here's a summary from an article in BET. In July 2011, Diddy was sued after music executive Tony Austin, a patron of the Atlanta eatery, was shot in the parking lot.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
Oh, man. So that's what flips him out. And when he decides, like, hey, cut this out. And then they air the unedited version anyway. And when the version with him being crucified airs, he blames the president of Interscope Records, Steve Stout. And he bursts in the Stout's office with some goons and assaults him with, quote, a chair, a telephone and a champagne bottle.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
Stout said of the beating, one minute I'm in the middle of a meeting and the next minute I'm down on the floor and Puffy and his guys are kicking and pounding me. One of them picks up a chair and throws it at me. Then Puffy throws my desk over and they just walk out like nothing happened. And his stance is, I think they were trying to kill me and I just, you know, happened to not die.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
I don't know. I wasn't there. He seems to say it was very serious. Combs turned himself in a few days later and was charged with felony assault. He was freed on $15,000 bail and ultimately pled down to a misdemeanor. His sentence was one day of court-ordered anger management. Ha ha ha.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
oh jesus that's what hundreds of millions of dollars gets you in lawyers man yeah that's the thing is like money is the savior of all problems yeah yeah nearly all like as with epstein you can't eventually hit a line speaking of hitting a line my line is it's time for ads so here you go
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
Robert Evans here, and I know everybody loves a great deal, but I also know most of us aren't willing to crawl through a bed of hot coals just to save a couple of bucks. Saving money has to be easy to be worth it. No hoops, no bull crap, no sending anything in through the mail. So when Mint Mobile said it was easy to get wireless for 15 bucks a month with the purchase of a three-month plan,
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
I had trouble believing it, but it turns out it really is that easy to get wireless for 15 bucks a month. The longest part of the process is the time spent on hold waiting to break up with your old provider. To get started, go to mintmobile.com slash behind. There you'll see that right now, all three month plans are only 15 bucks a month, including the unlimited plan.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
All plans come with high-speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any Mint Mobile plan and bring your phone number along with all your existing contacts. Find out how easy it is to switch to Mint Mobile and get three months of premium wireless service for $15 a month.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
To get this new customer offer and your new three-month premium wireless plan for just $15 a month, go to mintmobile.com slash behind. That's mintmobile.com slash behind. $45 upfront payment required, equivalent to $15 a month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Additional taxes, fees, and restrictions apply.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
Austin, former A&R for Def Jam and the president of Russell Simmons Music Group, says he was in his car listening to music with another man when someone opened fire on the vehicle. Austin alleged that the proprietors of Justin's were aware of dangerous and hazardous conditions at the establishment, but failed to provide warning or security. Now, isn't that something? Isn't that something?
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
It's your go-to for all things queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. This is the podcast where hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso dive deep into gay culture with unfiltered conversations, hilarious guest chats, and of course, lots of sex-positive moments.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
Now the holidays are upon us, and let's be real, sometimes Mom's house is just not an option for some holiday fun. So, Gabe and Chris are back for a very special episode where they'll be catching up on everything they've been up to since Season 1 wrapped, and, more importantly, answering the age-old question, Where do you hook up when family's around?
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
They'll chat with special guests and dive into creating queer spaces during the holidays. Whether it's a Friendsgiving or a holiday sex party, they're covering it all. Plus, Gabe and Chris hit the streets to ask why the night before Thanksgiving is known as the horniest night of the year. Tune in to the Sniffies Cruising Confessions holiday special, sponsored by Gilead.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
Out now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So three months after he assaults this record executive, Combs goes out to a Manhattan nightclub with Jennifer Lopez, who he was dating at the time. The couple were partying when someone else at the club insulted Diddy and threatened his protege, a rapper named Shine.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
A write up in The Independent summarizes what happens next in the kind of voice that you usually use for like the Israeli military or cops. A dispute ensued, shots were fired, and three bystanders were injured, including a woman who was shot in the face.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
Holmes fled in a Lincoln Navigator with J-Lo, his bodyguard, and his driver, along with a stolen gun none of them had a license for, as cops found out when they stopped the car. Combs was found not guilty in March 2001 of four counts of illegal possession of a gun and one count of bribery after a trial that doubled as a media spectacle.
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Proving what a force the rapper had become, fans turned up at the courthouse for seven weeks, and workers at the building, upon his acquittal, threw open the windows to chant his name and leave him alone.
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Yeah. And cheer when they get off after probably shooting a woman in the face. After probably shooting someone. It's one of those, one of the things that's amazing is that like, if you read that, like a dispute ensued, shots were fired.
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Diddy is so rich at this point that he has become included by journalists in the special exonerative grammatical case that only get, normally it's like for cops, right? Shots were fired. Someone was hit. There was a gun, an unregistered illegal gun in his possession. Okay.
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I have clear procedural memories of about 30% of our friendship, Will. Yeah. It's all flashes. It's all flashes. It's moments. It's a Polaroid picture in my head where I'm like, turns out. So Combs thanked God after the verdict and made a big show of going to church after.
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To further separate himself from the event, he changed his name officially to P. Diddy, telling Vanity Fair, when I changed names, I put periods on those eras.
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Got off from a fucking club shooting, time to become P Diddy. The P Diddy era was lucrative indeed. He released more albums, he acted in several movies, and he started producing reality television. He gets that Ciroc vodka deal.
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Yeah, yeah, yep. Making the band. Yep, making the band. In 2002, he won awards for his menswear fashion line. Sean John did cause a minor scandal for him when it was found that the clothing he sold was made in Honduran sweatshops with a terrible record for workers' rights.
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Got to be some sweatshots. Yeah. Going to have to sweatshop. Mm-hmm. None of that kept him down for long. In 2004, he performed at the Super Bowl. He started his famous Vote or Die campaign that election season.
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Yeah, money continued to flow by the hundreds of millions. As the Bush years came to an end, P. Diddy changed his name yet again, this time dropping the P and becoming just Diddy.
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His white parties remained infamous social events, but he also held increasing numbers of freak-offs. These were not for public consumption and acted as an opportunity for him to provide himself and his celebrity friends with endless young women drugs and young women on drugs. Ew. Oh, wow. She woke up in the hospital very ill and vomiting until she was released several hours later.
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Quote, I left with no shoes on. My shirt was kind of ripped. I noticed all my money was taken out of my purse except for like $20. I got robbed for my money. I had just enough to get back to a motel in a cab.
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it's so fucked up like these people are also not wealthy people they're doing this because they don't have money in the first place what a contest on the radio and then you get robbed anyway party now she also says she realized afterwards that her vagina was sore she's not certain what happened because again she was drugged drugged yeah almost certainly not a good story Yeah.
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And I'm not done with the story, unfortunately. I'm going to read next from an article on MSN. After the incident, Grayson flew back to her home state, Oklahoma, and claims to have received an unsettling phone call the next day in which a female allegedly attempted to dissuade Grayson from speaking up regarding the ordeal. She recounted the anonymous woman's warning.
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She had all my information and was basically telling me that I couldn't do anything about it, that Puff Daddy was a famous person and I wouldn't get anywhere with the issue if I tried to do anything. Puzzled, Grayson queried, so I'm like, well, how did you even get my phone number? Do you know anything about my money being missing? She's like, no, I don't know nothing about that.
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I'm like, well, I mean, how did you even get my phone number?
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You're like a teenager, 20-year-old girl, whatever, from fucking Oklahoma with no money, and he is goddamn P. Diddy.
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And we're talking about the people who know something was done to them and who have spoken out about it for every one of these. Not only are there obviously there are people who haven't spoken up, but there are also people who may be years away from like actually coming to grips with. No, actually, that was bad. That was like really fucked up what happened.
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I even thought about it as like a good thing for a while or at least like a mixed thing bag for it. But like, no, that was actually really fun. Like there's people coming to terms with that right now still. Yeah, absolutely.
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in order to keep his famous and wealthy friends happy and to sate his own desires, he also had to bring in, as you stated, all of these young women to act as party favors, right? That's how we bring, you have these radio contests. Some of them are paid sex workers. Some of them are women.
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Okay, you've just gotten started in your career, you know, in the music industry or as a model, you're at a low level in it right now. Why don't you like come over to this party? You know, like, why don't you, you know, and then you get there and then you get coerced. Some of the women at these parties are paid sex workers, but many of them are like, great.
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Women are being poached in one way or another, right? There's a different method for all of them. And that means Diddy's not handling this himself. He has a team of people who are using different methods constantly to find women because these parties are happening constantly.
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More people than work at the company Sophie and I run. Their job is just to keep young women coming to these parties. He is spending God knows how many millions of dollars a year on just that part of it.
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Right. You have someone right ahead of you with the drugs. Yeah. Yes.
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Yeah. Precious Muir, a former Playboy model, was one of the women who attended a number of his parties. She claims that he provided a car service to drive models to and from the events, and that Diddy had agents basically picking women out in public and plying them with invites. She summarized the pitch one of these guys gave her as, I host these amazing parties. Everything is taken care of.
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You don't have to worry about anything. We provide accommodation, so when you go to the Hamptons, there is a house you can stay at, which is very beautiful, very lavish, very stylish, and you don't have to worry about anything. You don't have to pay for anything. Everything is covered. At the time she started attending, Precious was new to the industry without power or connections.
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Being invited to these parties seemed like the opportunity of a lifetime. You can impress these guys, make your career. And then you're just kind of, as she said, we were kind of thrown in at the deep end amongst all these people that are well established. People automatically knew that we were new faces. We were new talent and we were vulnerable. We were seen maybe as fresh meat.
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If you're in entertainment, I can say when I was new in my career, if I had had to do something horrible for myself and my brain and body in order to
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get a break as a writer when I was a baby writer right like I thought about it like I was like yeah I'll do anything right like that's where your head is if you're trying to break in and that's what that's why so much bad stuff happens right like it's the hardest I mean
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Yeah. And the problem is that there's just so many people who don't have that line. Right. Of course.
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Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So because of the nature of how the lawsuits are coming out over this, I have no choice but to jump around. So I'm just going to stay right now. In February of 2024, a record producer named Rodney Jones Jr. filed a federal complaint against Sean, accusing him of running a human trafficking network to stalk his parties with women and girls from a write up in Vulture.
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According to Jones, as he alleges in the complaint, Combs reached out to Jones in 2022 to help him produce songs, but Jones claims the work Combs required of him went far beyond producing music. He claims in the lawsuit that he was tasked with procuring drugs and soliciting sex workers to perform sex acts to the pleasure of Mr. Combs.
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Jones alleges that Combs also required him to tape these sex acts, and that Combs would often threaten to inflict bodily harm on him if he did not comply with his demands. Jones alleged in his complaint that Combs kept specific bottles of alcohol designated for females on hand, and, according to Mr. Jones, Mr. Combs forced all the women to drink laced De Leon liquor.
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Upon information and belief, Mr. Combs laced the liquor with ecstasy, the lawsuit claims. He also accuses Combs of sexual harassment and assault for allegedly grabbing him without his consent and forcing him to work while Combs paraded around naked. Jones also alleges that Combs once left him alone in a makeshift studio on a yacht with Cuba Gooding Jr.
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What else is going on in your life, Cuba?
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If you've ever wondered, like we all did for a period of time, after he won that Oscar, why hasn't he been in things? Because he's a fucking monster.
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And to be honest, he played O.J. in the TV show where Ross from Friends plays Rocky.
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is a horrible human being he did horrible things and somehow knocks it out of the park as OJ knocks it out of the park no but like has managed to evade all of this puppy like shit hopefully that's coming to an end now because stuff about him more stuff is coming out about him you know we could talk more about Cuba but I think we've made our point he'll get his own episode give it time yeah
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Combs's lawyers have denied the allegations and described Jones as a con man. Subsequent allegations and the federal indictment against Combs seem to back up a number of the allegations made by Jones.
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A few months before Jones filed that complaint in February, in December of 2023, a Jane Doe filed a lawsuit in Manhattan alleging that she was gang raped and trafficked by Combs and bad boy records president Harvey Pierre when she was in the 11th grade. These allegations comport with the scenario Precious Mirror described in her interview with The Mirror.
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Apparently, Pierre met this 11th grader at a lounge in Detroit and used Diddy's name to draw her in. Combs then approached and told her, hey, you're welcome on my private jet, which was flying to his studio. Once they were there, she was given lots of drugs and, quote, gang raped by Combs, Pierre, and an unknown third person. There are a lot of other hideous details that I'm leaving out.
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We don't... You know, I guess the term gang rape. Make no mistake.
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He's getting his episode soon, too. Don't you worry.
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On a smaller scale, just being, you know, I've been in comedy. I was a Jace. I was never a big stand up guy, but like I did a little and a lot of my friends did. I went out to regular events as I was employed in comedy. And like you just get told by people, you meet someone and they'll be like, oh, we should hang out. And then someone else will be like, don't hang out with him. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Don't hang out with that guy. It's usually a woman that you work with who will say, like, that guy's a piece of shit. You don't want to know him. That guy's a piece of shit. You don't want to know him. That guy's a piece, like, you know.
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Yeah, you don't want to be near that fucker.
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Fucking Oklahoma, right? And getting flown in.
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In 2006, Diddy's longtime partner, Kim Porter, gave birth to twins. It was the same year that a friend gave birth to his daughter Chance. Kim considered this a betrayal and broke things off with Diddy. While all this was going on, he was also starting a quote unquote relationship with a young woman named Cassandra Ventura.
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He had signed her to his label at age 19 and started a sexual relationship with her shortly thereafter. He was 37 at the time. It was Cassandra's allegations against him that would eventually open the floodgates of legal consequences for Diddy. But before we get to that, I'm going to quote from The Independent summarizing just a series of his trials in the mid aughts.
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Eight months after his 2014 Howard commencement speech, TMZ reported that he punched Drake in a Miami nightclub because of a feud over a song, which in a rare case for these episodes, points for Diddy on that. Six months later, he was arrested and charged in California with three counts of assault with a deadly weapon.
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One count of making terrorist threats and one count of battery after allegedly attacking one of his son's football coaches at UCLA. The assault reportedly involved a kettlebell, but prosecutors ultimately decided not to pursue felony charges.
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You gotta do something real bad for me to be on the side of a football coach, guys. Jesus Christ. Anyway, speaking of football coaches, coach yourself on over to this podcast. Sorry, I don't know why I did that. You were almost there. We've been at this a while.
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It's your go-to for all things queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. This is the podcast where hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso dive deep into gay culture with unfiltered conversations, hilarious guest chats, and of course, lots of sex-positive moments.
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Now the holidays are upon us, and let's be real, sometimes Mom's house is just not an option for some holiday fun. So, Gabe and Chris are back for a very special episode where they'll be catching up on everything they've been up to since Season 1 wrapped, and, more importantly, answering the age-old question, Where do you hook up when family's around?
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They'll chat with special guests and dive into creating queer spaces during the holidays. Whether it's a Friendsgiving or a holiday sex party, they're covering it all. Plus, Gabe and Chris hit the streets to ask why the night before Thanksgiving is known as the horniest night of the year. Tune in to the Sniffies Cruising Confessions holiday special, sponsored by Gilead.
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Out now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
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And we're back and finishing up the epic tale. The epic tale of Gilgamesh and P. Diddy.
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We are. We're going to get into the Cassie stuff now. Cassie, who was for a while, is in Kidu. If we're doing the Gilgamesh, anyway, whatever. Let's talk Cassandra. After his split from Kim Porter, she was the woman largely seen as Diddy's public partner, right? She was a singer and a model in her own right.
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Yeah, very talented. The two are generally depicted in media as like a power couple, right? Sure. In a civil lawsuit filed earlier this year, Miss Ventura claims that from the beginning, Sean used his wealth and power to force her into a, quote, manipulative and coercive romantic and sexual relationship.
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He assaulted her constantly, beating and kicking her and regularly leaving, quote, black eyes, bruises and blood. Cassandra describes his freak-offs in her lawsuit and alleged that he would often secretly film the days of debauchery with his famous friends.
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The videotapes doubled as fuel for extortion if anyone crossed him, which is part of why his social circle was so loyal and so quiet for so long, right? He has videos of them doing the crimes. Again, the movie Don't Blink really does cover a lot of this. And as a bonus, has Christian Slater, and that's never a bad time.
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fucking great. I love him, dude. I love that guy.
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Now, by the time Justin's opened, Sean had split from Justin's mother to date a model named Kim Porter, who gave him his second son. In 1998, he launched a fashion label, Sean John. Sean John. Sean John.
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Yes, at age 47. That hasn't happened yet, though.
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That was crazy, man. Speaking of which, let's talk about the Kid Cudi story because you hear about this first in 2012. Gossip blogs report that Cassie, who was dating Kid Cudi at the time, and Diddy had had a fight in a club. And now in the lawsuit, Cassie claims that Diddy, quote, blew up a man's car after he learned he was romantically interested in Ventura. And here's my favorite quote.
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This is from the Salon.com article. The New York Times said through a spokesperson that Kid Cudi confirmed Cassie's account that his car exploded in his driveway. This is all true, he said. Oh, my God. Yeah, just a car explosion.
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Yeah, I don't know anything about him, but he's cool and he has one less car than he would otherwise have. We can say that for sure. So true, Robert.
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From the New York Times, quote, Cassie in her lawsuit said that Mr. Combs directed frequent freak offs at high end hotels around the country, directing her at the events to pour excessive amounts of oil on herself and tell her where to touch the prostitutes while he filmed and masturbated. We're not going to like go into a ton of detail about the massive amount of baby oil, but there's a lot of it.
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Disgusting. Some of it's drugged. Disgusting.
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The only reason I can think of to drug it is because you are getting it inside people in their mucus membranes.
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Like fucking MDMA or whatever isn't going to absorb it It's not a bodily. Yeah, exactly. In someone's vagina. And so, again, like it's hideous, right? Like we don't need to belabor that point. I think you get it right. Cassie says in her lawsuit, he treated the forced encounter as a personal art project, adjusting the candles he used for lighting to frame the videos that he took.
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Yeah. I wonder if he and Epstein ever partied. They certainly had the opportunity.
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Yeah, yeah. In 2018, Kim Porter passes away. The cause of death was initially listed as deferred, but it was later confirmed that she died of pneumonia. Right. And there's a lot of conspiracy theories. It would be remiss to not conspiracy talk it.
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We can say markedly more successful than his restaurant. Absolutely.
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But yeah, again, people have also said maybe that death should be looked into and probably not a bad idea. Take a look. Take a look. JFK's head just exploded. I don't know if you know that. He just did that. Presidents just do that sometimes. Sometimes. It's a pre-existing condition. Pre-existing. In 2017, Diddy changed his name yet again. He told the world he would now go by Love or Brother Love.
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He legally changes his name because love is his legal middle name. He tells Vanity Fair at the time, love is a mission. I feel like that's one of the biggest missions that will actually shift things. But besides that, we, the world, is different. We have the internet. We have the power. We have a culture. I have us on a five-year plan. First off, fucking talking like Stalin there.
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Second, that was more than five years ago. How'd the plan work out, Diddy? Yeah, yeah. A little more loving? Did you fix it? Nailed it.
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Fucking Joseph Diddy Beria. Fucking hell. Now, during this period, Diddy's public image remained mostly benign.
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Oh, OK. And his adopted son, who is older, named Quincy. Sure. Interesting, fascinating name. Now, that year, the year that he starts Sean John, he is nominated for five Grammys. If you want to know what a Grammy looks like, just look behind Will and Tua's right on camera.
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Yes, he did. It happens with famous people. You see it with Elon Musk and X. Just name your kids something else. I don't care what you name your kids. What is wrong with Steven, man? Albert. Hans. Why we got to be weird about everything? Yeah.
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Now, in articles from the time he was vetted as a genius producer and interviewer seemed happy to ignore the numerous assault allegations that, you know, were kind of in the shadows, but not too shadowy to have found. And the very public fact that he had definitely killed people through negligence and had them murdered. He even managed to avoid Me Too entirely.
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In fact, in that interview, he tells Vanity Fair the movement inspired him and, quote, showed me you can get maximum change. God damn it.
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Dodge that bullet. Clearly it's clean sailing from here on out.
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Yeah. Aubrey O'Day comes out for years, like at least a couple of years saying, I don't think she sees or has evidence. And obviously you don't want to casually before all this breaks, call him a sexual. He has a lot of money.
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Yeah. Yeah. I think one of the most direct things she said in 2022 in an interview on the Call Her Daddy podcast, she said that Diddy had fired her because she, quote, wasn't willing to do what was expected, not talent wise, but in other areas. Right. Right. Brutal. Brutal, brutal, brutal. Very clear what that means. Yeah. And here's another quote from an article.
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Again, this is before everything breaks and varieties is 2019 called Aubrey O'Day is still recovering from making the band PTSD and making the reality show that all of them suffered so much.
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Puff is a very difficult person to work with. Everything had to be perfect. I remember times where he looked at my toenails and was like, what is your third toenail doing? Go get that shit fixed before you walk into a room. Or we would be in rehearsals performing an hour and a half set over and over. Bitch, you get your toenails corrected or I will fucking end you. Yeah.
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I would walk in for five minutes with a camera and say, Aubrey, why are you sweating? You look like a wet dog. You're the hot one. So you think anyone wants to see that? And again, this is all pretty minor next to all the horrible sex jokes, but he's a dick too.
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You got it fucking backlit. Was the first thing you did with that take a shot out of it? Oh, yeah, absolutely.
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Yep. Yep, absolutely. So about five years after saying that he was inspired by me, too, in that article for Vanity Fair, Cassandra came forward with her lawsuit and she was joined very quickly in a flood of lawsuits. Not all of the people charging Sean with sexual assault are women.
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Go back in time and just have, like, about 14 shots. Yeah. So the late 1990s is an era in which bad boy records is growing by leaps and bounds and Diddy is getting rich as fuck. We are talking the insane pile, the cash pile so large that your only option is to either get really into cocaine or start a series of ill-conceived small businesses.
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We have mostly focused on that, but I want to be very clear that he is alleged of assaulting men, too, not just through Cuba. One man currently incarcerated in Michigan for kidnapping and criminal sexual conduct himself. says that Diddy drugged and raped him in Detroit in 1997.
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A judgment was briefly issued on that case, but Diddy's lawyers, because they hadn't appeared in court, unclear to me what happened, you know, but like that's not the only allegation of him abusing a man too, right? I just want to be clear about that. There's just less of it. Yeah.
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And he's got famous friends who are gay and creeps. Yeah.
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You know. So there are so many of these allegations that we we're not going to cover more of them. Right. We've done it.
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I think this gives you a pretty good understanding of him. And the fact that I've cut out allegations, which I've cut out like two for every one I've included, says nothing about the legitimacy of those. It's just a space thing. I should say a bit here about Christina Coram, K-H-O-R-R-A-M. She was Combs' chief of staff and is a co-defendant in the Jones lawsuit.
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We talked about the lady from Oklahoma who was like brought into a party and drugged and possibly sexually assaulted and then called by a woman afterwards and threatened. I think there's a decent chance that was Christina Coram. Jones claims that Coram bought a lot of the drugs and actually handled the booking and paying of sex workers for Combs' parties. She was his Gillen Maxwell, in other words.
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And also it's worth noting, again, I keep bringing up that movie that I didn't appreciate as much until this all came out, Link Twice. The woman who is, there's like an older woman who is like the creepy sex CEOs, like fixer. And she's Christina Cora. That's who, I didn't realize how directed was.
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Yeah. And that's Christina Coram in this story. We'll see what happens to her. Sean Huffy Combs was arrested on September 16th, 2024, several months after the FBI raided his L.A. mansion and seized firearms, illegal drugs and more than a thousand bottles of baby oil. Combs has denied all charges and pled not guilty.
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More recently, a judge declined to set bail for him, noting that he still posed a danger to the community.
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We really run. And that'll save us, you know, and our reputations. We'll die historic, you know, in a gunfight with the FDA. That's all I want, man. That's the way to go down.
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And every one of those FDA agents has got to remember us forever. All of their children. All of their children's children. They'll never forget. Yeah. Now, we're going to have to start selling supplements first, Will. Oh, my God.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
You know, I know that guy. So funny. Yep. Yep. So this has been Behind the Bastards, a podcast about a guy I almost named a goat for. It has been a fantastic time.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
Cool. That's the podcast experience. I hope you get home or drunk or something too, buddy. And Godspeed.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
No, this is to take shots out of because it's funny. And you're not going to get content like this from the Pod Save America guys. You're not getting it from the Bulwark. You're not getting it from Last Podcast on the left. Only behind the bastards.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
You might get this on Joe Rogan. You would get this on Joe Rogan.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
You would be trying to convince my listeners to, I don't know, inject bleach into their assholes in order to build muscle mass.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
I'd be trying. Well, I do actually think you should eat more elk. It's delicious. Yeah, elk is delicious. You're right. It's very tasty. Now, so that year, the same year he opened Sean John, he gets nominated for five Grammys. Bad Boy pulls in $130 million in revenue.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
That I don't know. I could have looked that up, but I'm a hack and a fraud. Now, from this point forward in the story, Sean has infinite money, right? Which he still does, basically. Now, as I noted last episode, he'd always had a knack for throwing huge media-driven parties. And now that he was actually a major celebrity himself, he kicked things up several notches.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
1998 is also the year of his first white party. These were the events where he'd invite piles of celebrities to his mansion in the Hamptons for what inevitably became the big event of the summer. And part of it is he becomes like the first black guy to move into this very rich white neighborhood.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
The white parties are in part how he kind of makes his neighbors cool with him is like, hey, you're some like lame bank CEO. You can be at this party with these cool people.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
Yeah. And everyone wears white because Diddy thought he looked good in white. And to be honest, like, I don't want to be complimenting the man, but he doesn't look bad. That's not a bad look for him. That's not a bad look for him.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
Well, part of what I love is you can really see the whole, like, he is, you know, part of the point of these parties is for, like, people who are rich but not very cool to get to feel cool. Yeah. Some of the people below him, like that guy in the front, like they're just wearing white T-shirts. You don't look like a rap star.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
Like you get this wild mix of like beautiful people and also sometimes beautiful people looking just like normal weirdos at a party. But which I always think is really interesting. You've got like part of it is because these first white parties are from the era before. Like there's no social media, so there's no social media filters anymore. Photoshop tools aren't as easy to use.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
It's Behind the Bastards, a podcast hosted by a man who is legally a judge and his friend Greasy Will, who is legally Greasy Will. Legally not allowed to drive anymore. I think...
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
So you get a lot of shots of famous people actually looking like normal people at a party. Like here's Leo DiCaprio and some other dudes drinking champagne, smoking cigarettes and like not particularly looking like they're crazy rich and famous.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
Yeah. Yeah. And then Sophie's going to show you next. Regis Philbin. Yeah, there's a photo of Regis Philbin, and I can only describe the look on his face. He looks like he is smiling like the devil, like you would cast him in needful things. He is selling you a cursed Victrola. That's how Regis looks in this photo.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
And there's a couple other middle-aged white dudes in there, one of whom is grabbing a young woman's arm in a way that I would say looks kind of off-putting to me, but I don't know what was going on.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
Diddy I'm sure does both actually. I had two choices. I was going to sit in that failure.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
It's kind of grainy. All of these people are rich. Some of them are famous. I don't think that bald guy got famous for being a hip hop star.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
And the people being sex trafficked. God, look at Regis.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
You can see both of my hands. I ain't fucking up this... What was it? Was it he wants to be a millionaire at this point?
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
Yeah, that's going to be a fascinating shade above that crowd there. Everyone's going to have an aura that looks like the drink of the guy on the left, which is red.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
There are definitely, especially at the end, at the after parties, the night parts, which not everyone stays for. There are definitely some sex crimes here. These are not the ditty parties where most of the sex trafficking crimes are happening.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
There's a reason for it. The white parties are his PR. This is where he goes to.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
legitimacy into the black community as well right right and that is the point of these and so these are largely less sketchy events for that reason and it is his he has another kind of party with another name that we'll be talking about that is where most of it i'm not saying like there's no sex crimes happening here there's definitely drugs but the fact that someone was at a white party doesn't mean that they committed sex crimes yeah
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
So I'm not saying Regis Philbin is a sex pest. I don't know Regis. Maybe there have been allegations against him. If so, then I guess I am, but I don't know that. But these are his show parties, and he's a lot more careful about what happens here. The other parties, the parties you have heard stories about with the baby oil and the sex crimes, are what he called his freak-off parties.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
Like a dance-off, but, you know, with your freak.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
They're dark. These are the sex crime parties. If someone went to a freak-off, you should assume they did some bad stuff.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
He steps out of the darkness to launch a restaurant called Justin. This is named after his oldest son. He starts the first Justin in New York City in 1997, and he franchises it out to Atlanta the following year. The New York location shuts down after about a decade. Sean claims because he wanted to find a larger location, but he just never opens a new one. I think it just...
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
And another big part of it is because there's different gradients of cases. A lot of these people are like, well, yeah, I said yes and I agreed and nobody threatened me. But also I was there because I had just gotten started in this industry and I'm in front of the guy who could make my career. And like, I didn't think I had any other op. Like, these are also some of the things that are happening.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
Probably fine for 12 year old Justin Bieber to be at Diddy's house. Who am I to judge? Who are we to judge? We should have judged. Yeah, we should have judged. At the White Party, the most intense photo I've seen is Sean pouring champagne over what the New York Post describes as two unidentified near-naked women. It doesn't look nearly as sketchy as they describe it.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
The Post and a lot of other tabloid coverage of these events does tend towards sensationalism about the wrong things. For example, this piece from September. Inside, Sean Diddy Combs' Hampton sex parties featuring gay rappers who were high on ketamine. And like, you and I have both been to parties with gay rappers high on ketamine. That's not the problem. Yeah, not at all.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
That some gay rappers are doing ketamine. That's not what's the issue here.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
Yeah, those gay rappers probably not committing sex crimes. Not at all.
Behind the Bastards
Part Three: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes
No, no, because he's not again. He's not stupid. That's why he got away with this for so long. Now, I'm not sure how seriously to take this post article, which has its source as just one anonymous Coke dealer, which, again, not necessarily the most credible people on the planet. But here's a quote.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
But yeah, you're just a lonely, poem-loving little girl at this period of time. That's got to be difficult. The Preacher. Yeah. Yeah. So... As an adult in interviews, Oprah would claim that their landlady, who is, again, she described her as a lighter skinned black woman, didn't like Oprah for being darker than everyone else in the house.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Bridget, are you feeling better about your decision to stay on the East Coast now?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
And so Oprah was forced to sleep on a porch in the back of the house while her sister was allowed to sleep with their mom. As she claimed, white people never made me feel less. Black people made me feel less. I felt less in that house with Mrs. Miller. I felt less because I was too dark and my hair was too kinky. I felt like an outcast. And this is I mean, like that, that's a tough thing.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
But this is also an area where there's like a pretty major discrepancy between Oprah's recollections and recollections of the other people in that house. And so I'll quote this passage of Oprah, a biography by Kitty Kelly next. Catherine Esters, and remember that's Oprah's aunt and like the family historian, responded sternly to Oprah's poignant memory.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
This bothers me more than her corncob doll lies and her cockroach lies because it plays into the damaging discrimination practiced by our own people. I'm a dark-skinned woman. Oprah's grandfather, Erlis, was black enough to be painted by a brush, and Oprah is as dark as a preacher's prayer book.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
But when she says things like that, she reminds me of my cousin, Frank, who did not wish to be what he was and discriminated among his kin. referring the lighter-skinned to the darker-skinned folks. Oprah slept on a porch in the back of the room of the house only because Vernita had to take care of her baby and there was just one bedroom. That's it. Period.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
If Oprah was discriminated against because of her skin color, I'd tell you, says Ms. Esters, a civil rights activist who worked for the Urban League in Milwaukee. And I can't really like cast that aside either. So, I mean, I don't really know what to do there other than kind of read both of those very much conflicting stories of things to you.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Oh, well, shit. I guess there's no safe place.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
She was, in fact, sleeping on the porch. Yes. I'm just like, oh, boy. It's just wasn't, you know, racism or just we have no space because we're very poor. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel like I had to present both of these things. But yeah, I don't actually know where the truth lies here. Now, for her sake, Catherine Esters thinks that the explanation for why Oprah felt the way she did is more benign, which is that once she moved to Milwaukee, she was for the first time and very suddenly not an only child in the center of attention in her household.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
She was suddenly the oldest of three kids and her two baby siblings got more attention than her. And this made her very unhappy. And I'm sure that's not a non-factor, right? Like, that's such a thing. Like, I don't have any trouble believing that that had a massive impact on her as a kid. Now, as I've noted, Kitty's book is quite aggressive.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
And she is a woman who has built a career off of puncturing the reputations of beloved famous people. Her work is catty as hell. But she does make a decent point here. Quote, The only photo I have of my grandmother, she's holding a white child, Oprah said at the age of 51.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Yet a published picture of Oprah's desk shows a photo of her grandmother with her arm draped lovingly around Oprah as a little girl with no white child in sight. And it's stuff like that where it's like, well, OK, that's that that's not a there's a discrepancy, but maybe, you know, that's like that's just obvious myth making. You've got a photo of your grandmother on your desk. All right.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
You just said that because, you know, it made a case to an interviewer or something. Like, you've got pictures of your grandmother with you. That was just not a true statement. So there's some myth making going on here as well that we can kind of clearly lay out there. So again, it's complicated, most of this.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
I'm still on the whole, like as a childhood, this is a very, it's hard not to be on Oprah's side at this point. And I believe Oprah, when she says of her grandmother, every time she would ever talk about those white children, there would be this sort of glow inside her. No one ever glowed when they saw me. And, you know, that also sounds true. Like that sounds like the kind of,
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
That was the apple of my parents' eye. Yeah. They walk out the door to live their emotionally healthy life, have their good relationships with loved ones.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Sure. Like of all kids. That's also one of the like the key facts about becoming incredibly rich and famous is that all of these like weird little idiosyncrasies and like anger at petty injustices or even some serious injustices that most people just have to get over. You have the ability to make other people care about it and the ability to also like –
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Sometimes make it other people's problems, as we're seeing with a much worse billionaire who's in the public eye right now. Because at least Oprah, what I'll say for her is like how much of this is accurate or not and how much of this is myth making. She has spent a lot of her like time as a philanthropist putting money towards like child abuse causes.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Um, so, you know, you can't really, uh, uh, I guess that's, that's like in terms of billionaire coping strategies, she's definitely in like the upper 10%. Oh my God.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Again, as we'll as we'll talk about, like the actual harmful, toxic stuff she was involved with once her media career got going, it's still more than anything a case of, well, like we probably shouldn't make any individual person that famous because like your own flaws and blind sites are going to cause you to do things that because of your platform and the level of your fame will be harmful forever.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
But yeah, I really do think overall my opinion of her is like, yeah, this is about the best case scenario for someone who gets this rich and famous.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
That is kind of what I have been coming back to because I definitely started my reading more hostile towards her because I had been thinking of Oprah purely in terms of like – Well, now I got to think about Dr. Oz because you put this fucker on TV. Oprah, why did you do that? But yeah, I have a lot more sympathy with her now, which doesn't happen often when we're doing these.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Usually you're like, oh, this person sucked ass from the jump.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Yeah, this is meaty. And I also there's also like a sick joy in reading a book like Kitty Kelly's where it's like, well, I would never write something that's this mean about a traumatized child.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Oh, man. So Vernita obviously needed a lot of help watching the kids, which meant family came over to visit and babysit a lot. And this is where the story gets very dark, because one of the family members who helped watch Oprah was a 19 year old cousin. I think they initially go over to the house where the cousin is, but then he starts coming over there.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
And at some point in this process, Oprah is made to sleep with him. I think initially just because there's not enough beds, right? Like they're literally just sharing beds because there's only so many. And then he starts molesting her after the first night that he rapes her. He takes her to the zoo afterwards and in her words, buys her silence with ice cream. Yeah, that's that's that's not great.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
No one else in the family obviously was aware at the time. Aunt Catherine, the family historian, was aware that something is off. And what's interesting is that the family pretty much always denies Oprah's what Oprah says about the sexual abuse that she suffered. I think because they don't want to admit that they were missing some very problematic stuff.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
But one of the things that's interesting here is that Aunt Catherine clearly knows something is wrong because around this time she writes to Vernon Winfrey, who's the guy everyone thinks is Oprah's father, and begs him to take his daughter in. Right.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
So she doesn't she's never I don't think she still has accepted that this happened to Oprah, but she's aware enough at the time that something is unhealthy about this living situation that she's like, hey, Vernon, you should maybe think about taking your daughter in. She's not doing well here. And that's interesting to me, too. So Vernon lived in Nashville.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
He and his wife, Zelma, were both sterile, I guess. And they had no kids. Right. And I think they had tried to have kids. So one or both of them was like not biologically able to have kids. Vernon clearly had at one point, although actually that's not a guarantee because it's come out since that he might not have been the dad biologically.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
In any case, he and Zelma agree to take Oprah in, and this is a vastly different environment for her. For one thing, he is a small business owner. He runs, at this point, a barber shop. He was a military man, and the Winfreys ran their home like a military operation, which was pretty much entirely geared towards producing the best possible educational outcome for Oprah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
So she goes right away from the situation where she's in a very chaotic environment with not much resources to the situation where again, two adults are entirely focused on making her do as well in school as possible. Uh, Oprah continued to be an outgoing child. She's a natural performer, uh,
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Adults who are around her will say that she would kind of automatically make herself the boss of any group of kids that she was in. Her favorite game to play with the neighbor kids was school like she would play teacher and she would make them all play students. And I'm going to read a quote from her dad Vernon here because this is this is pretty funny.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
From what I observed then, Lily and Betty Jean didn't enjoy playing school as much as Oprah did. I think that's because she was always the teacher, always scolding her little playmates as she scrawled invisible lessons on a make-believe chalkboard. Lily and Betty Jean would sit attentively at imaginary desks, hoping against hope that Oprah didn't call their names during spelling bees.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Can't say how much blame them because if they misspelled a word, there was trouble. Oprah would get her little switch, which was not at all imaginary, and spank the palms of their hands. That's a little unhinged, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Perhaps it was not fun for all parties. Oh yeah. The other kids might not have liked that at all. Maybe I just scared them in line. Um, he did claim that eventually after a while he like confronted open was like, Hey, you should let the other kids place teachers sometime. They don't seem to be enjoying this quote.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
She looked at me with the sweetest expression, all cute and bewildered about how I could ask such a silly thing. Why daddy? She informed me Lily and Betty Jean can't teach till they learn how to read. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of learning how to read, the sponsors of our podcast never did. That's why they can focus entirely on delivering the best value and the best products to you.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
They don't know how to read. There's nothing else at all in their heads, but a desire to please you with the absolute best consumer experience imaginable.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
And we're back. Ah, we're talking Oprah. Talking pra.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Talking pra. We probably won't use that anywhere. That's not very good.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
OK, so Oprah thrives. She spends a year with with Vernon and and his wife and very stable. You know, she has a lot of attention devoted to her education. She's doing very, very well. She's also away from this 19 year old cousin who was molesting her. So that's a huge pluses to plus two.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Unfortunately, the situation does not last because Vernita still harbors dreams of raising all of her children together as, quote, a real family. for whatever reason, not that she needs one. Oprah always saw Vernon as her father, but doesn't seem to have felt the same way, at least initially, about his wife.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
She was desperate for a normal home with two parents and claims other kids teased her over this, which I'm certain is true. That summer at age 10, she went to visit and her mom was like, hey, I'm about to marry this guy I've been seeing for a while. You are finally going to get your dream. You know, why don't you move back to Milwaukee? And this marriage never happens. This guy eventually dies.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
And so like this is just this situation just collapses as badly as it possibly can. But Oprah still makes the choice to leave the stable home with her dad because of how taunted she is by this possibility of like being part of a full and stable family. And this is one of those things where like, again, I'm not there.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
It's very hard to at least read Oprah's recollection of events and not think, wow, Vernita. Not doing a great job here, because when Oprah decides to stay with her mom, Vernita breaks the news to Vernon in the most devastating way imaginable. She doesn't like call him and like tell him, hey, you know, there's been a change.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
She waits for him to drive to Milwaukee to like show up to take Oprah back home and says, oh, actually, no, I'm keeping her. You should leave. which is a rough move. And this is more or less how Vernon recalls things. He remembers weeping as he left the house because he could tell that he was leaving Oprah in an environment where she would not receive adequate care.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
He told Kitty Kelly, I never saw that sweet little girl again. And he actually is going to raise Oprah again. He's saying that she was a different kid when he returned. Yeah. Yeah. When Oprah returned to her mother's home, nothing had changed for the better. The same cousin continued to come over to babysit, and he picked right up where he had left off.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
She's molested off and on from ages 10 to 14. The times being what they were and her educational career being somewhat erratic and interrupted, young Oprah did not initially have a great grasp on the physical consequences of sex and how they worked. And I'm going to quote from Oprah Winfrey by Meryl Norton here.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Winfrey understood so little about sex that she went through the fifth grade convinced she was pregnant. Every time I had a stomachache, she has said, I thought I was pregnant and asked to go to the bathroom. So if I had it, nobody could see. That for me was the terror. Was I going to have it? How could I hide it? All the people would be mad at me.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
How could I keep it in my room without my mother knowing? And boy, we really, really need better sex ed. It's kind of depressing how many kids today probably are not benefiting from better knowledge than Oprah had access to at that point. Like, real bleak. Yeah. It's only going to get worse. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
So... Yeah, I mean, that really brought it home to me, like, what a lot of these people want to change the system back to is, like, kids being in exactly the situation Oprah was. Like, hiding in the bathroom because you don't know... Like, you just want to be in a safe place in case you have a kid because you don't understand... Any of this stuff.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Even though the sex was forced on you. Yeah. It's fucked up. Oprah grows into a teenager who is very bright, very sexually confused, and who is not at all being watched by her guardian. She starts seeing lots of older boys and some men, some of whom are 18, 19 years old. In both of the books I've read and in the recollections of Oprah and the people who knew her,
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
The people around her tended to see it as she is incredibly promiscuous in this period of time, right? Obviously, what is happening here is that this is a reaction to the sexual violence that she experienced from a young age. But that is how she is treated by the adults in her life as a result of what's going on, right? Right.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
One line from her that stuck with me was that she saw her behavior as revenge to the adults around her. They didn't care about what was being done to her, so she was going to behave in a way that forced them to pay attention to her, even if that meant like –
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
Right, right, right. I think that's a really, really good point. And it's probably not surprising that Kitty writes so much better about this very messy chapter of Oprah's life than Meryl, who is a male journalist. But, you know, it's there's some there's some bad lines in Meryl's book about this.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
This book that was written in 1999, probably the worst of which is, quote, When Oprah was 13, her figure was 36, 23, 36, certain to attract male attention. And I don't know, man, I feel like there's a better way to write about a 13 year old girl than that. Jesus. Every time.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
The reason Meryl does is that when Oprah talks about this, she will give the numbers for her figure. But also, like, that's her. That's her. I don't know, man. Meryl, like, quote her if you're going to do that. Like, just writing it out that way makes me very distrustful of you.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
So following what her abuser had done to her, she started using ice cream to get her younger sister to leave the house so that she could have boys over. One of whom was her cousin's boyfriend who she claimed treated her as a pet and She expressed a feeling of frustration that none of the adults seemed to catch on about what she was doing and what was being done to her.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
And to an extent, again, she's like putting herself out there doing this in part to provoke a reaction from an adult in her life. And no one reacts. Nobody draws a line. Nobody intervenes. Now, throughout all of this, Oprah's grades remain excellent. She is still a pretty good student while she's dealing with all of this. In the seventh grade, she's transferred to a better school via Upward Bound.
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Part Two: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
This is a federal affirmative action program to help poor kids who wanted to be first-generation college students by providing them with more support and better educational opportunities. In Oprah's case, this meant being bused with a handful of other black kids to a very white school that had just been desegregated.
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And one interesting thing to me is Oprah talks a lot about affirmative action and getting into schools and getting jobs only because of affirmative action. And very consistently when you talk to the people who like hired her, they're like, no, she was like actually the best candidate. Obviously, she's Oprah. She was a very good candidate to work for a TV station or whatever. Right.
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But you can kind of see some of that. It's interesting to me that that's the attitude that she has towards it, even though everyone around her is like, no, that really was not the situation. I will say a little bit that...
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Either way, it's like, I mean, what you can say is all these programs did exactly what they were supposed to because she wound up creating a media empire worth many billions of dollars as a result of getting these opportunities. So they were known on campus as the bus kids. Oprah and these other kids were being bused to this more affluent white school.
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The whole situation – it's a very weird one where she – once she starts going here, she starts being like taken – like invited into homes largely so that these kind of like affluent liberal white families can have a black kid over for dinner. Yeah. And like showcase how cool they are. Like that's one of her early.
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And it's like a pretty I think a good experience as she takes it just because like some adults are giving me positive attention. Right. Like that's a thing for her. She continues to engage in extreme behavior in a desperate attempt to make her mom or somebody parent her. And this eventually includes a fake robbery and an assault. So here's the situation.
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Oprah had started wearing glasses, bifocals, and the first pair that she got were ugly and made her look, in her words, like a librarian. It became clear that she was only going to get a new pair if the old ones broke. So she threw them away and then she like messed up her room and like cut herself in the cheek and called the police, claiming that there had been a smash and grab.
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Now, because she's a kid at this point, she like is pretending to be concussed. But when the police look around, they're like, so what else did they take? And she's like, just my glasses.
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Yeah. You got to you got to take something. You got to take like the high fire or something out of there, you know, classic glasses, glasses, criminals. Now, events like this probably contributed to her family not believing her when she finally worked up the courage to tell them that she'd been molested, which happens around this period of time.
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So, you know, from her family's perspective, she's this kid who, you know, lied about getting robbed. They've seen her out with a bunch of guys. They think she's just promiscuous. And that's how her aunt Catherine feels decades later. I don't believe a bit of it. Oprah was a wild child running the streets of Milwaukee in those days and not accepting discipline from her mother.
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And when you get to like that aspect of it, it's like, oh, I get why Oprah does not have a good relationship with a lot of these people. Like that is not at all surprising to me now. Yeah.
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Well, are we all ready? Are we ready to get back into the story of Oprah Winfrey?
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No, not hard to see why she doesn't. Now, obviously, we can't know precisely what happened, but it's going to be interesting. Some of the some of the part of I think why Aunt Catherine has this attitude and why some of the family members that are maybe jealous of Oprah have this attitude is that
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Later on in her career, Oprah is going to make the sexual violence she experienced a very central – that's actually central to why she got so famous is the way in which she reveals this to her audience, the context in which she does that has a massive impact on her career and on – it's like one of the things that gets people to pay attention to her because women in prominent places in the media really didn't talk about stuff like this the way that she did.
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And so there's this attitude from some in her family that she's, again, just doing it all for attention. I'm not saying that because I think that's accurate. I'm saying like that you have to understand if you want to know, like, why is her family saying all of this? This is part of the story. Right. Like she has an incentive so they can point to that.
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okay okay let's uh let's let's let's do it back back to the story yeah i think this is probably the most time we've ever spent on the early childhood and adolescence of one of our people it's it's just oprah and joseph stalin who have gotten two episodes devoted to their childhood yeah early upbringing yeah and a prize to the listeners for figuring out the third in that series
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Yeah. It's it's it's when you really dig into the family drama, it's very unpleasant. In the summer of 1968, Oprah goes back to Nashville to visit her father in Zelma. His brother, her uncle, Trenton, drove her. Now, up to this point, Oprah considered Trenton her favorite uncle. Then, while they're driving, he asks her if she'd started dating yet.
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Thinking that she was having a safe conversation with her uncle, she said yes, but that it was hard because all the boys that her age wanted to do was French kiss. According to Oprah, her uncle immediately pulled over to the side of the road and molested her. She does not tell anyone immediately. But after visiting with her dad, she returns to Milwaukee furious and she runs away from home.
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This time she's gone for a full week. Her mother is panicking. Oprah claims that during this time she was hustling for money on the street and she meets Aretha Franklin, literally running up to Aretha Franklin's limo and crying, saying that she'd been abandoned and she needed $100 to get back to her family in Ohio.
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She says Aretha gave her the money, which she then took to a hotel and spent several days drunk on wine, eating room service food. I don't know if this happened. Aretha. I don't think anyone ever asked Aretha when they were both like when she was still alive. I haven't found any evidence of that. And I'm kind of surprised because we've had this info for a while.
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And it's like, well, I would kind of want to know if Aretha remembers this. Right. Yeah. But yeah, so I don't know. You'll have to take Oprah's word on that one. It would be kind of a weird thing to lie about, but I don't know.
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Yeah, I mean, she had a lot going on. I guess. Yeah, I don't know. I'm just kind of surprised no one ever asked her about it as far as I can find out. Because Oprah, there was plenty of time after which Oprah was very famous and Aretha was still alive. I'm just kind of, nobody thought to do that, huh?
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We don't want to talk about Aretha giving wine money to young Oprah Winfrey. Yeah. I could see that being. Yeah. Now, after this incident, Vernita tried to drop her daughter when Oprah finally comes home. Vernita tried to put her daughter in a school for delinquent girls. She was told the processing time would take two weeks, which was too long.
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And in a movie that really tells you a lot about Vernita, Vernita's like, well, fuck that then. She calls Vernon and she says, hey, actually, you should take her back. Now, this is kind of a cheeky move because by this point, Vernon had sat down and done the math and he had counted back from Oprah's birth date in January of 1954.
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And he realized that he was away with the army during the period of time in which she was most likely conceived. So he's got pretty good evidence that he is not, in fact, the biological father of this kid. But instead of being like, you know – You're on your own, Vernita, or she's on your own. This is a kid he's still bonded with that he's he's thought of most of her life as his daughter.
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He says he'll take her back if Vernita gives up all claim to the girl. And that's what happens. Oprah moves back to Nashville. And unbeknownst to everyone at this point, the 14 year old girl was now pregnant with a baby she believed was the result of her uncle Trenton molesting her. So that's a lot to deal with. Yeah. Put lightly, but you know, big ups for Vernon there.
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I can't remember another nice word. Just wonderful. wonderful today.
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That's like a pretty, and this is like, he's, it's very interesting. He's like gotten basically nothing from Oprah, like asked for basically nothing from her. Like he's, he takes a lot of pride in the fact that like, His barber shop put her through school and supported her, which is, you know, he's right to do so, obviously. But this is probably the luckiest single break of her life.
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I think Oprah would say this was the luckiest single break of her life, that Vernon, even when he got this kind of excuse to not be a father, decided to continue being her father. Yeah. Yeah. How does she talk about him now? Very positively. Yeah. I think you get the feeling there's some stuff they don't quite agree on. But like she's very open about the fact that she owes a lot to him, obviously.
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And Vernon's clearly very proud of her success, even though, again, you get the feeling like, oh, he doesn't really understand like what she's been doing most of her career. Right. In a lot of ways. Yeah. So once she started high school in Nashville, Vernon again became a strict disciplinarian, imposing a dress code on her and demanding excellent academic performance.
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Yeah, yeah. It's still being decided. But when we left off Oprah, she'd just been taken to Milwaukee by her mother, who lived downtown off of North 9th Street. So Oprah and Vernita lived in a single room in a boarding house owned by Vernita's boyfriend's godmother, which is not an ideal living situation at best.
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Oprah was always a great student, but she had stopped by this point enjoying school. And part of why was that in the winter of 1968, she was now heavily pregnant, hiding it under layers of jackets. Eventually, she could not hide it from her father any longer. And she told him what happened and that his brother had been the likely rapist.
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The short of it is Vernon didn't believe her about his brother. And I still don't think he does. He doesn't say she's lying. He kind of like deflects the question. Like the most recent interview I've read was him saying something like, well, it's very hard to accept something like that, you know, with somebody that you're close to. Right.
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I'm not privy to the full details there, but you get the, obviously it's a significant pain point in the relationship. The way Oprah describes it, her earlier promiscuity was used as an excuse by the most stable adults in her life to be like, no, my beloved brother didn't do this, right? This is, you know, there's some other explanation here, you know?
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And yeah, that's even the most supportive family member in her life is doing this to her. So that's, Not great. Oprah Grave birthed two months prematurely in the later winter of 1968. For whatever it's worth, Vernon and his wife had pulled together in the 11th hour in that point and agreed to raise the child so that she could start her life like that was their plan. We'll raise her.
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This child is like another of our kids and you can go off and go to college and stuff. But none of them ever get that chance. The baby is very ill. It never leaves the hospital and it dies after less than a month. Oprah describes this as the most emotional, confusing and traumatic experience of her life, which. Yep. That that it would be from what I can glean via reading.
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This is the kind of moment that basically ended her childhood. And it seems like everyone is aware of that at the time. Everyone decides to lock down and bury what had happened as a family secret. They they never talk about this again. Right. And so Oprah has to process everything that's happened without being able to talk about it.
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to her family, all Vernon would say to her was that he thought that God had given her a second chance, which is maybe not the best thing to say about your baby dying. I don't know. I don't know.
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I mean, it's, it's yeah. Fucking dark, but yes. Yeah. Not a lot of light levity in this part of the Oprah story, guys. I gotta tell you, that's sort of the nature of this show. Yeah. It'll get more fun when we're playing some clips of TV from the 1980s. But first, here's ads.
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uh oprah later said i don't know why my mother ever decided she wanted me she wasn't equipped to take care of me i was just an extra burden on her And, you know, I think it's just this is probably what she was aware of as a kid because her mom was there the first four and a half years. But she probably just doesn't really remember that.
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So it's got to be this uncomfortable situation where from her mom's perspective, I was just gone 18 months trying to, like, set up a life for you. From Oprah's perspective, it's like you you you were gone from as long as I can remember. And then you move me into this terrible situation in the city. Right. Right. It's so it's a bummer.
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So Oprah returns to school the following year with a terrible secret. But also, like, this is kind of... She changes, right? This is like a new lease on life almost is how it's described. She gets heavily into speech and debate. She starts doing competitive drama contests. She starts winning championships. She starts telling her teachers that she's going to be a movie star.
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According to her drama teacher, Andrea Haynes, Oprah insisted she wanted to change her name from Oprah to Gail because she thought it would help her in Hollywood. And Haynes advised her to keep going as Oprah because it was a unique name and Oprah had a unique voice. So probably good advice given what happens later.
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The new Oprah gets invited to speak as part of a church event in Los Angeles in 1969. She gets to see Hollywood for the first time. And she came back telling her dad about the stars in front of Mann's Chinese Theater and promising to earn one of her own one day. As a junior, when filling out yearbook questionnaires that asked, where will I be in 20 years? She checked famous.
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So she has made a pretty clear decision about where she wants to go at this point. In 1970, she wins a contest sponsored by the Black Elks Club of Nashville, and she gets invited to deliver a speech in Philadelphia. This was her first big crowd. There's like a 10,000-person audience, and she recalled later only that she felt totally comfortable addressing this massive group of strangers.
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The remainder of her high school career is basically an endless parade of tournament victories and a surprising amount of jet setting for a high school girl. She's flown to Palo Alto in 1971 for a contest at Stanford. She's the only black student at the National Forensics Competition that year.
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She gets into student government, winning election as vice president with a campaign slogan, put a little color in your life. Vote for the grand old Oprah. Well, she's at like a majority white school, you know, like, yeah, I appreciate the humor. Yeah. Yeah. The grand old Oprah, too.
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Now, one thing that's interesting is that I haven't read as many as I should have of like stories of the first kind of generation of black kids to get integrated in into like majority white schools. But Oprah is in that that demographic. And at her high school, the black students as a minority decided that they had to work together as a block. if they were going to win any school elections.
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So they all agreed – decided to like agree ahead of time as to which candidates to put forward and so they'd only nominate a single black student for each category and then they would all vote for them.
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Since the white kids all – white students all inevitably had like several white students for each role and there's one black student for each role and all of the black students are voting as a block, you actually have a chance of doing pretty well. So that's part of how Oprah wins election as school vice president that year. But she has to get a lot of white votes and she's very good at this.
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She's been hanging out at the homes of a lot of white classmates as a way for them to like make their parents look good. And yeah, Oprah, you know, is able to like meet a lot of people and get a lot of votes this way. She shows this like very clear talent for politicking and talent for like charming people by this point.
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This is not lost on some of her black peers who she claimed to take into calling her an Oreo. The first time this happened, she claims she crossed the invisible lines in the cafeteria to sit with the white kids. Quote, in high school, I was the teacher's pet, which created other problems. I never spoke in dialect. I'm not sure why. Perhaps I was ashamed.
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And I was attacked for talking proper like white folks for selling out. And yeah. Yeah. It's interesting because, like, I don't have any reason to doubt that. But it's also evident, like, she gets these nominations that everyone has to agree on beforehand.
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So she clearly, like, it's not like she doesn't have, you know, any of that support from her peers either because she's able to, like, you know, convince them she's the best person to be the school vice president, too.
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Yeah, I don't know. I have some pretty like my dad was gone right around the same time when I was like five to seven. My dad was gone because he had to move to like New York and, you know, earn money for us because Oklahoma is not a great place to earn a living. Rural Oklahoma, not always a great place to earn a living.
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Yeah, there's some of it that like you wanted to be a star. You would talk constantly about being famous and you're probably like, I mean, anyone who goes into TV, there's a little bit of that narcissism cooking in the background. That may have been some of what people were recognizing.
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Yeah. I say that with love for all of my friends in TV, you know.
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about how you're gonna go to hollywood and be famous is annoying if you right right exactly like no one likes hearing that you know yeah like speaking is yeah somebody went to hollywood to get into the entertainment industry right nobody wants to hear about that journey which is why we we only have four to six oscar-winning movies every year about doing that
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Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So she is selected to be delegate at the 1971 White House Conference on Children and Youth. The organizer of this delegation was committed to making sure that it was not just a bunch of middle class white kids. And so the resultant group that he sends to D.C. is like extremely diverse.
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Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, part two of the Oprah Winfrey series being filmed once again from sunny Las Vegas, Nevada, where I am exhausted and deeply hungover. Unlike my guests today, who are both health nuts and extremely responsible people. The wonderful Bridget Todd and the also wonderful Andrew T. Sorry for giving you the also there, Andrew, but one of you had to get it.
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And they wind up voting on a series of recommendations to the Nixon government, which include legalized marijuana, denounce the invasion of Cambodia, launch a guaranteed income program for all Americans. Didn't work if you if you haven't been keeping track of U.S. politics. But, hey, we appreciate the effort, kids. who are now in their 70s. Yeah.
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We don't really know how Oprah felt about any of these super progressive goals. She was not very political. As one classmate noted, she's not an activist, and the only march she ever took part in was the March of Dimes, which is like a way of fundraising for, I think, cancer research that she primarily uses as a way to get her leg in the door for a show business career.
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She walks several miles on foot to the studios of WVOL a black radio station in the Nashville area. And she basically tells the DJ, hey, you're going to sponsor me for this march. The DJ is so surprised by this that he's like, well, all right, I'll do it. And when she comes by to get the donation from him, he tells her, hey, you've got a good voice. We should see what it sounds like on tape.
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um and i remember being pissed about it for a while and not really getting as a kid that like oh yeah it's really hard actually to be an adult and take care of kids and sometimes you have to do shit that sucks yeah and i
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And this guy, this DJ is John Heidelberg. He would later declare himself the man who discovered Oprah. And it's one of those –
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I thought there'd be a little more producer solidarity here. So here's the thing. I hadn't thought about that at all, Sophie. And I'm not saying you're wrong to be annoyed by that. I was so in this guy's corner because when I hear, oh, young 17 year old girl meets a DJ who says that maybe she has a future in entertainment. I was ready for this to be a hideous story. She's never claimed it was.
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All she says about it and all we know about it is that like John actually gets her her first job. And that is like where the whole rest of her career comes from. So it's entirely possible.
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I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just saying when I started reading this story, I was like white knuckling it, waiting for like the crimes, you know? Having just done the P. Diddy episodes, I was like, oh God, this can't possibly end well.
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That's what I'm saying. You definitely are. Wait, no, we like that.
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Every successful person in media has a whole shitload of people who were like big parts of why they got successful. And, you know, John Heidelberg isn't the only guy.
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That said, I'm just so happy this didn't turn into another story about like horrible, horrible crimes.
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This is the most surprised I've been since we found out that L. Ron Hubbard was never a sex criminal or I was like, really? Huh? OK. Then why did he do all that stuff? Weirder reasons. Very weird reasons. He wanted young people to dig for gold in the ocean. Yeah.
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Anyway, that's part two of the Oprah story with surprise, not a villain, John Heidelberg. As far as I know, if horrible stories come out about John Heidelberg after this, look, I'm not defending the band. I was just shocked that this didn't go into the dark place. Yeah. What a weird twist. Yeah. One DJ who is not a creep.
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that we can prove yeah right now yeah honestly you are in the top one cent of morality of moral djs if you don't commit a sex crime like that's so rare for the dj community uh and i would like to formally apologize to our editor dj daniel for that comment yeah apologize to john heidelberg too who i think is dead i'm not going to um okay but um ouch poor john
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Anyway, that's our episode, everybody. How are we feeling about Oprah so far? Don't worry. Next week. Next week is where the questionable choices start. I didn't feel good. Concerned? Should I have summarized all of the bad things as bullet points? I felt like the whole story needed to be told. Yeah.
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The connective tissue, and this is to an extent stuff that Oprah will even admit, is that she grows up desperate to please and that that is partly responsible for, like, her, number one, some of the stuff, like some of her contributions to toxic diet culture, but also maybe part of why she does not vet some of these, you know, Dr. Oz types the way that she ought to have, right?
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Like, I think you can draw some lines there between like some of the aspects of her career that are not ideal. But yeah, I got to say, reading through this, this she it is definitely the most sympathetic person whose childhood we've talked about here. Yeah.
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It's still a tragedy. Some things that go well for Oprah go bad for the rest of us. I wonder. Yeah. Anyway, you got some pluggables?
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Excellent. That's the week, everybody. Go home and.
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I'm sorry, Andrew. I haven't slept in three days. Yeah, don't worry about it. Andrew. Andrew T. Fucking who cares? Yo, is this racist? That's fine. Check out Yo, is this racist? And remember, everybody, don't don't hang out with DJs. It usually doesn't go this well.
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Yeah. Yeah. I went through this process when writing it and read it when doing particularly the research where I was like, OK, all of her family say that she's she's lying about this. This is just Oprah being a bad person trying to myth make and make herself sound like she suffered more than she did.
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And then I went through this process of like, well, wait, what if her family is lying and they're just angry about the money? And then I think I've come back around to like nobody has to be lying here. It's just.
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a completely different experience for her and them. And neither of them really understand each other. And maybe communication isn't the family strong suit, which is ironic given Oprah's living, but like, yeah. Um, I think that's where I've probably landed. I don't know. There's some like weird similarities.
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Uh, so I, I've been thinking a lot about like my own situation, kind of some of the stuff I've was angry for years with my parents over in terms of like, why did you put us in this situation that was so clearly shitty? And, you know, now as an adult, I better understand that like, well, shit just happens, you know? And when you've got a kid, you have to figure out how to like make your life work.
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Yeah. It's again, because of all the GeoMetros I give out, right? You get kind of a car. You get kind of a car.
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So upon moving in with her mom, this is one of the things where I do understand why Oprah is not thrilled. So she she comes into this situation. It's not they've got like one room. You know, it's very cramped. She's not used to the city. And she also learns upon arriving that she has a half sister named Patricia and a half brother on the way who's going to be named Jeffrey.
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And that is that is a lot to spring on a little kid. Right. Your mom goes away. And the first time you remember seeing her again, she's like, you're about to have two new siblings, by the way. She and Patricia are never close. And yeah, that's a difficult situation. In Oprah's telling of things, she and her half sister were immediately harsh competitors.
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Oprah's interpretation is that she is the smart sister, whereas Patricia is the hot sister. Although, again, they're both like seven at this point. Yeah. So I don't know if this is Oprah later kind of thinking back on more shit that that cropped up when they were like teenagers and young adults, or if she was thinking that way from the beginning.
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My guess is that this is a little like colored from later experience.
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Hopefully. God, one would hope. Yeah. Now, most of her insecurity here seems to have come down to the fact and this is something that she talks about quite openly. She's she as a little kid was kind of obsessed with the fact that Patricia was lighter skinned than Oprah. Quote, I felt really ugly. The lighter your complexion, the prettier you were.
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And she complained that even though she was the smartest in the family, no one praised me for being smart.
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Yeah. And one of the things I do, because that's a tough thing to talk about. And one of the things I do appreciate about Oprah's conception and how she talks about her childhood is she is does not at all like hide that aspect of things like she she has strong opinions on it. This clearly had a massive impact on On her psyche growing up.
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Yeah. Yeah. And they probably I'm sure wasn't conscious. Right. Like, or at least not usually, you know, that's the way these kind of things tend to work, I would guess. But, you know, like, again, it's it's I don't think Oprah's I'm certain Oprah's not making this up. It's just far too consistent in her story. And like you said, it makes total sense.
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Like, this is definitely a massive has a massive impact on the way she perceives herself and the way she perceives her family. Um, she told one story to life from when she was about nine years old, where she was reading in a back hallway and her mother ran up through the door open, grabbed the book in her hand and shouted, you're nothing but a bookworm. Get your butt outside.
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You think you're better than the other kids. Oprah later remarked of all this, I was treated as though something was wrong with me because I wanted to read all the time. And again, you get some denials from the family on this point. Whoever's kind of more accurate there, Oprah isn't stopped from reading in a major way. She remains an excellent student and a voracious reader into adulthood.
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I mean, we could talk about the book club stuff. But yeah, this is one of the big discrepancies between her and her mom. But she's like, yeah, I got punished for being smart and for reading.
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Yeah. Like maybe for the adult, it's this one time I was frustrated at her because she was spending all her time indoors. And I told her she was a bookworm to get outside. And, you know, the rest of the time she was fine reading. I got her books. But, you know, as a kid, you remember the one traumatizing mom, the time your mom yelled at you for reading. Yeah.
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Yeah. Yeah. Child memories. So given some of the other context clues of the way that people who were near the situation talk, I think that Oprah's recollection of events, obviously, like there's a lot that's true there, but there are some inconsistencies.
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Because one of the things that Oprah's doing in this time, she continues from when she was living with her grandma, is she keeps traveling around to all of these churches in Milwaukee, all these like black churches and social clubs, where she'll read poems and stories from the Bible and stories from literature. And so she's...
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You know, if her mom was like so ardently against her reading, her mom wouldn't have been driving her around to do all this stuff, like taking her to all of these different events. So there clearly is like a good deal of support and like people in her like her mom recognizes, OK, my daughter has this kind of gift for like public speaking and talking. And I need to do something to nurture that.
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Right. And that's definitely a part of the story, too. In People Profile's book Oprah, Meryl Noden wrote, quote, Oprah gave recitations at black churches and social clubs. A particular favorite was Invictus, a stirring declaration of courage by the 19th century English poet William Ernst Henley, which closes with the couplet, I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul.
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Yeah, yeah. That's never been our strong side, being able to show up in a timely manner.
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And this is a great poem. It's like the first poem I ever memorized. Oprah loves it. And the third famous person who loves this poem is friend of the pod, Timothy McVeigh, who recited it as his last words before being executed by the state. So this is yet another thing that Oprah and Cousin Timmy have in common. There's so many of them now. I mean, we don't even need to go back and list them.
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Absolutely. I mean, I'm not the first. I think Regis was the first guy to say that. Point that out. Anyway, still a good poem. It's not the poem's fault that Timothy McVeigh liked it.
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Anyway, describing the reception of her first performances, Nodin writes, although the audiences were impressed with her skill as a speaker, it seemed to annoy her mother and her peers teased her mercilessly, calling her the preacher, which I also believe that's exactly how shitty little kids are. Yeah.
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She's like eight. Yeah. If you're the poem kid, you're getting a nickname.
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I mean, I don't know. I mean, that kind of stuff's pretty traumatic as a kid. Like I got. Yeah. You remember stuff like that. Like little kids give you a shitty nickname. And yeah, that sticks with you.
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We're not bringing any of that up. But it is like it's it's very it's very sympathetic. Right. She's this she's this bookworm kid who likes to like read poems to audiences of adults. And she that is I can't imagine much that's going to isolate you more than that, especially in like this period of time. Right. Like it's even even harder back then. And like harder to find kids. There's no Internet.
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Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
It's fucked. So, again, I just made the point that Grootman was not breaking the law. The same cannot be said for the next doctor we're going to discuss, an anesthesiologist named Scott Rubin.
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Starting in the year 2000, Rubin published what would become 21 papers claiming to show evidence that COX-2 inhibitors performed better than non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs for patients who'd received orthopedic surgery. Now, the last episode, we mostly focused on Merck, and we will later in this one, as the bulk of the blame Okay.
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Pfizer funded a great deal of Rubin's research from 2002 to 2007, effectively picking him up after he'd established himself as an expert in the burgeoning field of COX-2 inhibitor research. The good news is that in the field Rubin attempted to influence, orthopedic surgery, his work had less of an influence than he'd hoped.
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Most surgeons hesitated to switch to COX-2 inhibitors because some very good animal studies showed they slowed the rate at which bones heal, which is kind of a big deal if you're in the orthopedic surgery business. Yeah.
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It's really the orthopedic surgeons. Sorry. Speaking of orthopedic surgeons, they don't listen to podcasts, so fuck them. Here's some ads.
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And we're back. If you're an orthopedic surgeon, hit me up. I got too many bones. I could use a couple less, probably. So Rubin's work formed an influential mass of positive-seeming scientific PR arguing in favor of drugs like Vioxx and Celebrex as safer super aspirants. An article in Scientific American notes, a 2007 editorial in Anesthesia and Analgesia said,
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stated that Rubin had been at the forefront of redesigning pain management protocols through his carefully planned and meticulously documented studies.
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That's what an editorial, how the editors of the paper described him. I see. And there's only one problem with these carefully, the 20 or so carefully planned and meticulously documented studies that he had authored over a 12-year period. They were all complete bullshit, fraudulent in every way.
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Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
Now, we will talk more about Rubin later because a lot of his story occurs after the collapse of Vioxx, but it's important to note that just as Pfizer underwrote Rubin's shoddy research, Merck had deeply questionable science that they funded in an equally dubious way.
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Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
Back during the FDA approval process, Merck had launched a strategy called ADVANTAGE, in all caps because it was a very tortured acronym. assessment differences between Vioxx and naproxen to ascertain gastronomical tolerability and effectiveness.
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An analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists describes the goal of Advantage as using flawed methodologies biased towards predetermined results to exaggerate the drug's positive effects. Quote, "...as part of their strategy, scientists manipulated the trial data by comparing the drug to naproxen, a pain reliever sold under brand names such as Aleve rather than a placebo."
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and yeah we we covered that a little earlier but what's important is that we now know that vermerc had a great deal of evidence when they were pushing this study suggesting that like vioxx massively increased the risk of cardiovascular events which makes the case that this was not just something where they did a bad study and put this thing next to naproxen and it looked less risky than it does because it was next to naproxen they conducted that study with naproxen because they had data showing that vioxx massively increased the risk of heart attacks
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And they were deliberately trying to hide that, right? This is all stuff that came out later as a result of the Senate investigation and numerous court cases. So yeah, we know that Merck had a lot of evidence showing this was dangerous and that they deliberately hid it. And we know that this was incredibly profitable for Merck. From 1999 to 2004, Vioxx made them $2.5 billion a year on average.
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Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
It swiftly became the best-selling drug in Merck history and one of the best-selling drugs of all time. And just as swiftly, it started to kill people. One of the first to die was Bob Ernst. He was a fit 59-year-old triathlete who started taking Vioxx because of recurrent arthritic pain in his hand. His wife Carol had urged him to try Vioxx after seeing an ad and Bob had gone on the medication.
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On May 6, 2001, the two had an anniversary date at an Olive Garden in Keene, Texas. Bob passed away in his sleep later that night, dead from heart failure. Now, Bob had been in very good shape, but the death of a 59-year-old man from heart failure is simply not the kind of thing that most pathologists are going to consider super suspicious.
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It was Carol herself who got suspicious and started digging into Bob's one medication. This is the only thing he was prescribed, Vioxx. Even as early as 2001, there were studies showing that Vyax was bad for heart health. Merck had successfully buried many of them, but there was still stuff that you could find with enough digging online, and that's exactly what his wife did.
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She found a lawyer, Mark Lanier, who made to take her case. And the book Poison Pills does a wonderful job of chronicling the work that they did. I'm going to have to give you a summary here, which is that in August of 2005, a Texas state jury awarded almost $25 million to Carol Ernst in compensatory damages against and more than 200 million in punitive damages.
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Now, that latter verdict was lowered quite a bit due to a Texas law, but it would be fair to call this a massive victory against Merck. And much of the case against Merck hinged on the fact that in June of 2000, Merck had provided a tranche of early user data to the FDA that revealed Vioxx users had four times as many heart attacks as people on naproxen. They didn't state this, though.
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This was in the data. You could find it if you analyze the data. But it was not in any of the conclusions that Merck sent along to the FDA. And the FDA really just didn't do the work to actually figure this out very quickly. And so it wasn't until 14 months later in April of 2002 that the FDA actually forced through changes and how Vioxx was labeled to reflect the evidence of risk.
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Merck took no action on their own to warn users about the fact that they knew that Vioxx was causing heart attacks. Now, in the later trial that would develop from all this, CEO Raymond Gilmartin would claim that Vioxx wanted to add a warning label the instant they were aware of the danger. This was a lie, as Cope and Berry write in their article, Merck and the Vioxx Debacle.
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Lanier, that's the lawyer, introduced in the Ernst trial internal Merck documents, which revealed that Merck resisted the FDA's efforts to add warnings to Vioxx's label and eventually complied in ways that the Ernst jury found obscure. You had to dig three levels to see it, one juror stated.
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In March 2000, when Merck became aware of the Vigor study's findings of a significant increase in cardiovascular events for those taking Vioxx over naproxen, Merck's scientists expressed concern. In an email message written in March of 2000, Dr. Edward Skolnick, who was then Merck's head of research, stated the Vigor clinical trial had shown that Vioxx increased heart risks.
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The CV events were clearly there, he wrote. Despite clear warnings, Merck decided against conducting studies on the heart attack risks because marketing executives worried it might hurt Vioxx sales. Internal Merck analyses in 2001 and 2002 showed that Merck was worried about lost profits if warnings or precautions were put on its label.
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During that period, Merck was in private negotiations with the FDA over changes to its Vioxx label. David Anstis, who at that time was the president of Merck's human health division, projected that a strict warning would reduce sales by at least 50%.
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After the Vigor study findings in March of 2000, a second internal Merck analysis performed in October 2000 showed a significant increase in cardiovascular events for those taking Vioxx. The Merck analysis, plaintiff's attorney Mark Lanier has argued, was never presented to the FDA nor the media. and certainly was not given to the physicians prescribing Vioxx.
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So this is entirely the marketing team and the CEO coming in and saying like, this will cut profits. So bury it as long as you can. Every additional year we get to sell this stuff without a warning is worth it to us, right? Whatever number of deaths there are, the money this is bringing in is so huge, like it's fine, right? That's literally a decision being made.
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And that's that's what's fucking scary, right? Is that like we're talking this is a massive failure by the FDA to. that happened when it was funded, right? We can argue it should have been funded more, but that happened in a period totally different from the one we're entering into now. What kind of shit is going to come by now that there's no guardrails on any of this stuff, right?
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These fucking MBAs who are managing all of these pharmaceutical companies and these marketers have absolutely no restrictions on anything that they can shovel into people's faces to make a profit. It's funny.
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Oh, we are back. This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast with Dr. Kaveh Hoda and Robert Evans, where Sophie is out of the house right now. So, you know, we're just just the boys, just the boys.
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And it's, yeah, it's just fucking, I mean, what's coming is going to be sick, folks, in a very literal term. But what happened in the past was pretty sick, too.
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Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
So it took about four years for the Carol Ernst legal case to wind on against Vioxx, right, from her realizing there was probably something wrong with her husband's medication to actually getting a victory, which is actually pretty quick for one of these lawsuits.
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The company continued to push the mountain of disinformation during this time about their new star medications, dangers. One February 2001 sales memorandum forbade sales reps from discussions on a study that raised heart concerns when they talked to physicians, right? Can't talk about this study about heart attacks from our medication when you sell it to doctors.
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Salespersons were also ordered to avoid discussing heart health risks and instead hand over a cardiovascular card to physicians, which said Vioxx is protecting the heart, right? rather than potentially harming it. That ought to take care of all of their questions. Oh, good. You gave me a card. Well, you guys got card money. There must be nothing wrong with this stuff.
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No one shady can afford this kind of embossing. My God, look at that. It's okay, guys. They gave me a card. We're good. The Ernst lawsuit was not the first or last against Merck. Most were brought by survivors of heart attacks or, more often, the family members of people who had perished. Merck upped their game, as this passage from Kolpenberry's article makes clear.
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Merck prepared an in-house training game for Vioxx sales representatives dubbed Dodgeball. Sales trainees could only move on to the next round of the card game if they gave Merck-approved answers to doctors' questions raising Vioxx safety concerns or dodged such questions altogether.
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Except for the listeners. That's like half our listeners. Please keep listening, ladies. Sorry. I'm so sorry.
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Right, right. It's also this kind of like, there's less of an inbuilt immunity within the medical community because you guys weren't used to being sold to this way. Yeah, it's like when they first started getting Americans hooked on cigarettes and people had never seen an advertisement before and they're like, a cowboy? Well, I'm buying a cigarette now. Yeah.
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Ah, so a later congressional inquiry found that Merck leadership divided the studies on Vioxx into approved and background studies. And any study that showed a danger to heart health was considered a background study. And so their salespeople were forbidden to discuss them with doctors. This was a violation of company policy. Ah.
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I apologize. We didn't mean that. We didn't mean that. Just like Merc didn't mean to kill all those people that they're about to kill. Thanks in part to utilizing Dorothy Hamill's star appeal. Poor Dorothy. She really did not... Again, it's one of those things where it's like we just shouldn't have pharmaceutical ads like the way that we have them because you can't.
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Now, all through 2001 and 2002, the FDA sent letters to Merck poking at it for failing to properly disclose the dangers of Vioxx, but it still took again 14 months for any sort of labeling change to be mandated. Part of why is that officials within the FDA were in the tank for Merck, not all of them, but enough.
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At later Senate committee investigations, an FDA scientist testified that he had brought forward concerns about Vioxx to his superiors and been pressured to shut up. Another researcher who had gone to the FDA with complaints was Gurkenpal Singh, a Stanford professor who claimed that a Merck senior executive complained to his superiors at the university when he reported Vioxx to the FDA.
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Singh claimed, I was warned that if I persisted in this fashion, there would be serious consequences for me because, of course, Merck has the ability to donate a lot of money to a university like Stanford. Now, still, some brave academics continue to blow the whistle, as this paragraph from a New York Times article by Alex Berenson, Gardner Harris, and Barry Myers summarizes.
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In 2001, the first major study critical of the drugs appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The report, written by Eric J. Topol and cardiologists at the Cleveland Clinic, reanalyzed data from several clinical trials of Vioxx and Celebrex. It reported that both drugs appeared to increase the risk of heart attack and stroke, but that the danger from Vioxx appeared higher.
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Dr. Topol, the chairman of the clinic's Department of Cardiovascular Medicine, immediately called for trials to determine whether or not the drugs increased cardiovascular risk. Merck and Pfizer both rebuffed that request and said that the Cleveland Clinic report was flawed because it failed to do, among other things, to include data from other studies.
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Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
Dr. Topol became a harsh critic of both drugs, but his ire focused on Vioxx and Merck. Even before his 2001 report appeared, he said in a recent interview that company scientists came to Cleveland to try to convince him not to publish it. Merck officials denied doing so.
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A year later, a study by Dr. Wayne Ray, an epidemiologist at Vanderbilt University, found that Medicaid patients in Tennessee who were taking high doses of Vioxx, greater than the recommended long-term dosage of 25 milligrams daily, had significantly more heart attacks and strokes than similar patients who were not taking high doses.
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Yeah. It's okay. His career has moved forward now. He doesn't have to do that anymore. Yeah. I don't know. It's it's it's it's all pretty bad. Right. Like that's I mean, terrible. There's a degree to which like at least you can see these these heroes who tried to do something, even though, you know, your university is telling you stop.
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Merck is sending scary guys to your door to be like, are you sure you want to publish that study?
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Yeah. Yeah, well, because Merck, there's no argument. They don't know exactly what they're doing. They are trading lives for dollars. They know eventually we'll have to stop selling this stuff because we know how dangerous it is. But every day we get to keep selling it. We're recouping that investment. We're making a profit.
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Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
And whatever we have to pay out in the end is going to be less than what we're making.
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Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
Dorothy Hamill was a great figure skater. Nothing in her life prepared her to adequately vet whether or not Vioxx was a safe medication to advertise. We can't put that on Dorothy Hamill.
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They know who to lie to and not. They're lying, I think, to a lot of the doctors and to some of the salespeople. You know, salespeople don't maybe know how to, like,
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analyze whether or not this is a a good uh study or whatever so they're just like oh those other studies that showed a danger they're not good for this reason or that reason and like you're just some fucking sales rep that got hired out of college maybe you don't really give that much of a shit but there are people plenty of people who know exactly what they're doing right um and like those people who know exactly what they're doing just don't care they don't feel bad about the fact that they're getting people killed right
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Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
My brain doesn't. Yeah. I mean, it's not dumb. You just aren't. You just have a soul. And I'm working to get rid of it. Yeah, well, that's that's the only thing that's going to let us win. We all have to get rid of our souls today, which, by the way, I've got a great new medication for getting rid of your souls. First step, you're going to go to your local, not a local gas station.
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Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
Actually, you want to go to a truck stop about 30 or 40 minutes outside of town. Right. If you can actually like see like people like there's more than a half dozen rigs parked outside, that's probably a good truck stop. And you're going to go in there. And behind the counter, there should be a wall of pills. And you're just going to ask for all of them. And you pour that into a cup.
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Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
And this is critical. You mix it in with Mountain Dew Code Red. Not Baja Blast. That'll fuck it up. Do not mix Baja Blast in. Mountain Dew Code Red. And then shoot that shit as fast as possible. And that's going to get rid of your soul. And then you're ready to join us on the front lines fighting the demons.
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Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
You'll also be able to see demons. That's a promise. Yeah, you're going to see some shit. You're going to see some demons. Yeah, all of that fucking Ibogaine or whatever the fuck they put those in those pills. Those random trucker pills that they just, they almost call them Adderall, but not quite. Yeah.
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Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
You got to go down the five to that place that sells split pea soup. And then, yeah, yeah, yeah. You can find some trucker pills there.
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Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
Yeah. All right, I'm going to do it, actually. I think this is a good day trip. Yeah, this will be good. Let's go do it together. We'll buy all the trucker pills and we'll see how they work.
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Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So in late September 2004, as the death toll mounted and Merck's legal team was buried in cases, they made the decision to pull Vioxx off the market altogether. This is right after the case has been decided against them, there is no longer keeping this cat in the bag, and now it's about damage control.
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Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
Their official justification was that they just had a long-term clinical trial, which showed that some patients developed cardiovascular problems after taking the drug for 18 months. The data showed 15 heart attacks, strokes, or blood clots per thousand people over three years, compared with seven and a half cardiac events in the general population.
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Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
And even if you believe this Merck study, which I think is kind of trying to pad how bad it is, that's still much worse. That's still a real problem. The stock market reacted first, costing Merck somewhere in the neighborhood of $26 billion in a day. But that's not real money. They get it back. You know how the stock market works.
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Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
The next reaction came from the families of people who died due to Vioxx, leading to a rush of new lawsuits. But the initial public reaction was beyond muted. It was in fact downright hostile to the victims. And this likely has something to do with a particularly toxic aspect of U.S. culture I call scalding McDonald's coffee syndrome.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
Some of it wasn't even available to her. She wasn't getting up at four in the morning every day as an adolescent girl to have the COX-2 enzyme explained to her. No. No, that was like me, not her. Yeah. We had different paths, different journeys. And you're a terrible figure skater. Not that bad. Okay.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
Now, you've probably heard the story about the woman who had a hot coffee spill in her lap at a McDonald's drive-thru, and she sued them and got a bunch of money. This is a thing that, especially when I was younger, I think more people know the real story now, but you would see viral memes all the time. You'd see it in newspapers. It was really a thing my parents' generation loved to hate on.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
It was particularly a big thing for conservatives who were angry at how mean all these, these frivolous lawsuits hurting innocent corporations. Like this woman spills coffee in her own lap. And like the reality was McDonald's had the coffee way higher than they were legally allowed to have it. They should not have been selling or handing people coffee that hot.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
And it gave her third degree burns to like her entire genital area. Like it was a hideous, hideous life altering injury that she suffered because they were not doing what they legally should have been. Anyway, we don't need to rant on this, but at the time this happens, A lot less people realize the true story there. And so there is this big backlash against frivolous lawsuits against companies.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
And what the Merck Vioxx lawsuits initially get lost in that, right? When Carol Von Ernst won her case against Merck, a lot of pundits of the day kind of looped this in with the McDonald's coffee case. as another example of our sue-happy culture run amok.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
From the book Poison Pills, Carol Ernst's lawyer, Mark Lanier, was blasted by everyone from physicians to newspaper columnists for winning the trial by twisting the facts and relying on nothing but an ignorant jury of hicks, despite the fact that his witnesses included some of the best-known physicians and scientists in the world.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
Even as the Texas jury was deliberating, Merck's lead attorney, Jerry Lowry, said if he, Lanier, had any evidence Vioxx causes arrhythmia, this case would have been over three weeks ago.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
A few months after the trial verdict, CNBC broadcast a debate between Lanier and Richard Epstein, the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute. The professor had written an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal and said that physicians lamented the fact that they could no longer use the drug.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
Many leading newspapers, including the Washington Post, also mocked the Ernst trial. In an editorial entitled The Vioxx Hex, the Post wrote that the Texas jury in that case awarded $253.4 million to the widow of a man who died of a heart attack triggered by arrhythmia, which is not a condition Vioxx has been proven to cause. The Post said the jury was confused about the medical evidence.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
And this is number one, that fucking dude debating Lanier on stage as a Hoover Institute guy. It's right wing think tank. But number two, you've got all these like big publications going like, oh, these it's a Texas jury. So clearly they're hicks. They don't understand our big city science. They just got bamboozled by this smooth talking lawyer who just hated Merck.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
Not that bad. I've never seen you figure skate. Can you do a sow cow? Maybe. Sure. Is that like a skateboarding move? Yeah, probably. Yeah. I can do it then. This has been Skate Talk with Robert and Kava, two people who probably don't skate. So when we left our heroes at Vioxx, they just latched upon the brilliant idea of having Dorothy Hamill sell Vioxx.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
Celebrex still has some uses and stuff, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
I'm just. No, I mean, it's it's it's all very frustrating, right? Like the way that this worked is just comprehensively bad for everybody but a handful of people at the top of Merck. It's bad for the research scientists at Merck who were not shady motherfuckers whose will always exist under a cloud of suspicion because they worked during the Vioxx era.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
It's bad for the people who might have benefited from a VIAX that was rolled out in a more reasonable way to a smaller subset of people. It's bad for all of the tens of thousands of people who lost loved ones and the people who had life-altering injuries as a result of it. It's just terrible for everybody. But you know, Dr. Hoda, what's not terrible for anybody? What's that?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
The products and services that support this podcast, all of which have been FDA approved. And if we've learned anything this episode, that always means good. Good. Good.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
If you've been wondering how tens of millions of your fellow countrymen could be convinced to vote for a guy like Trump, just remember that an awful lot of them saw a video of a figure skater promising she knew a solution to their chronic pain issues and desperate for relief, millions of people followed her to their demise. That really does explain a lot.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
And we're back. So we're drawing to a close in this episode. I have a question. Did they actually lose money overall from this?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
No, no, no, no, no. They pay in total a little less than a billion dollars in penalties and additional civil settlements for their victim. They are making two and a half billion dollars a year during the period of time where they're selling this. And it's out for five years. Something like five years. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
Yeah. So that's cool. Now, one of my favorite side parts in this story is that the Washington Post takes like a huge, strong stance to defend an unethical mega corporation and got something wrong, which is not a thing that ever happens again.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
Anyway, about a year after the Post's article talking about how unfair it is to sue Merck, Harvard School of Public Health issues a public health bulletin warning that Vioxx use was associated with severe heart rhythm disorders and an increased risk of kidney failure.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
More research comes out in the following years that further vindicates everyone who tried to warn Merck and the world about Vioxx, the medication that had been prescribed to some 20 million people in 80 countries by the time it was polled. We will never have a comprehensive list of the number of people killed and injured as a result of Vioxx, but what we do know is harrowing.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
Now, in fairness, very few people are doctors. It is unreasonable to expect people who are hurting and in some cases literally being driven mad by pain to personally overcome the weight of a multimillion dollar ad campaign and all of the science washing that a big pharmaceutical company can do.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
Dr. David Graham, the associate director for science and medicine in the FDA's Office of Drug Safety, testified before the Senate Finance Committee that Vioxx had been associated with at least 100,000 heart attacks and more than 55,000 premature deaths. That is in the United States. He compared the cost to two to four jumbo jetliners crashing every week for five years. Holy shit.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
Yes, that's a lot of dead people. God. Mm-hmm. Now, the lawsuits that resulted from this are far too numerous to chronicle, save to note that Merck initially promised to fight each of the 30,000 lawsuits against them independently.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
Yes, yes. Then they agreed in 2008 to provide what could have been almost $5 billion as part of the settlement, but I don't know how much of that they actually paid out. And then they pled guilty to a misdemeanor for illegal promotional activity. That was about another $950 million in penalties and civil payments. So they wound up paying a good amount of money.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
That's like they lost a good two years or so of the profits that they made. Did Dorothy Hamill do any time? No, no. Dorothy Hamill does not go to prison for her many crimes.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
Skates free. For her many crimes. They do plead guilty to a misdemeanor for introducing a misbranded drug to interstate commerce. So that's nice. But no one at Merck is locked up for what they did, nor do any of the scientists who'd agree to help cover up studies or push disinfo suffer lasting career harms, with the notable exception of our friend Scott Rubin.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
Paul White, the editor at the Journal of Anesthesia and Analgesia, claims that Rubin's studies showing the benefits of COX-2 inhibitors helped sell billions of dollars worth of both Celebrex and Vioxx. In 2009, he was revealed to have completely falsified at least 21 of his published papers, all of which claimed to show how well super aspirins could benefit post-operative healing.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
Pfizer had funded Rubin's work from 2002 to 2007, the years when they were also making bank on a little medication called Celebrex. His employer, Bay State Medical Center, claimed to Scientific American that Rubin had been paid directly by Pfizer for his work, and that he had then decided how much of that money would fund research, and how much would go into his pocket, Which sounds fine.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
That's not sketchy. There's nothing. How could that lead to anything bad?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
In fact, during the early years of IACS's success, it would have seemed as if COX-2 inhibitors were medical marvels backed by the best science. And it would have seemed that if you were someone who did what should be like the responsible amount of reading on this subject. Not...
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
Oh yeah, there's some good breakdowns on them from scientists who are more qualified than me to talk about it. I would love to look at that. It's a fascinating story. One of my favorite quotes from this is that his employer Baystate, like when people would note that like, well, that's not how pharmaceutical, you're not just supposed to give a single guy cash, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
Like, that's not how pharmaceutical research is supposed to be done. A spokesman for Bay State Medical Center told Scientific American, I don't know how many dollars went to Rubin or his group. Wow. No idea. Holy hell.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
A Pfizer spokesperson insisted the grants were properly dispersed to Bay State in accordance with Pfizer policy, but that they weren't familiar with the records retention policies of Bay State. So, you know. Who knows? Who knows how much money? Between $10,000 and $100,000 at least.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
But he was actually asked to pay $360,000 in restitution when he got sentenced in 2010 after pleading guilty of massive fraud. Prosecutors argued that he'd been paid huge money in grants and never performed the studies he'd been paid to conduct. He just pocketed the cash and published lies about Celebrex. Thankfully, justice was done.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
He was given six months in prison and asked to pay $360,000 in restitution to the pharmaceutical companies who'd sponsored his work, the real victims in all this.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
Yeah, and that's the story of Iox. Dr. Hoda, how are you feeling? How are you good?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
like the amount of reading that we could expect from like a research scientist, because research scientists who were responsible knew the dangers. But if you were, say, like a normal educated person who's like, oh, well, I'm going to read a paper of record and they're reporting on these new drugs written by a medical doctor interviewing other medical doctors.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
Yeah, I mean, there's not much more to say on the matter than that, right? I guess part of what's so frustrating to me is that the sweep of the anti-intellectual crusade that is going to cost so many people their lives is of such catastrophic danger to every positive gain that we've made as a society in the last 150 years.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
That's really all you as a layman should be expected to do to try to like figure out, you know, how safe a medication is. Yeah. And if you were doing that with Vioxx, you would have walked away misinformed. And this brings us to one of the chief medical merchants of Vioxx Disinfo, a Harvard Medical School professor named Dr. Jerome Groopman.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
is fueled in part by the irresponsibility, greed and wastefulness of people who knew better, who are not ideologues, who are not misinformed, who are just willing to, well, the system can handle, you know, me fucking around in this way or like, why shouldn't I get paid? Right. Like someone will catch it. It won't be that bad.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
Like and those little acts of malfeasance provide a lot of the fuel, like the distrust, the hatred of, for elites and whatnot. You know, when I say elites, I mean like in the medical sense, right? You've got doctors and people at the FDA who are like in the tank for these sketchy drugs that get people killed. And that means that when we have a fucking pandemic, less people trust them, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
Like Vioxx is not 0% of why so many people were hesitant. to, to trust medical science during COVID. Right. And neither is the opiate epidemic. Right. And that, that doesn't mean that the people that RFK has a point, it means that like, if you let people get away with shit like this and we always do, uh, it'll just keep getting worse. Somebody who is, who is absolutely has no limits whatsoever.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
We'll start taking advantage of the situation.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
Yeah, there's going to be a lot of diarrhea. Look, folks, every year I go to Vegas, I find whichever buffet has the rancidest mussels, and I eat 14 to 15 plates. And that provides me with the internal strength and resilience I need to handle any kind of change to our health and safety food standards. I'm going to be fine in this sick new world, Kava.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
I'm going to be eating rancid mussels like a king.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
It's going to be the golden age of diarrhea. The brown age, really. Yeah, that's what we're going to call this. The gilded age and the brown age. Well, actually, we could call it the gilded age, which is an old timey term for like shit encrusted on your ass.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
We'll have to explain it, but it works. Yeah, you have to explain it. You have to explain it. But, you know, why does that make it bad? Anyway. No. Yeah. All right.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
Yeah. Thanks for coming on the show.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
He had embarked on a career as what you might call a professional semi-celebrity doctor, authoring articles for The New Yorker about health and the pharmaceutical industry. which he does today. Dr. Grootman is not someone who you would call a crank. He served in the advisory board of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Association.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
He was the Dina and Rafael Reconati Chair of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He'd worked at a high level for the FDA and was a listed author on some 150 papers. One of his books had been adapted into a TV show, Gideon's Crossing, which I didn't expect to run into a Gideon's Crossing reference. Not familiar with that one. This episode. It wasn't great.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
As Tom Nessie writes in the book Poison Pills, even among top level physicians who are generally known as opinion or thought leaders, Groopman stands out. It was no small matter, therefore, when he wrote a lengthy article for The New Yorker in June of 1998 entitled Super Aspirin, New Arthritis Drug Celebra.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
Celebra was the name for the drug later known as Celebrex and very close in composition to Vioxx. The article had been carefully authenticated by the famous fact-checking department of the New Yorker, which has an almost perfect record of verifying every piece of information the magazine publishes. Like Hamill, Groupman began his discussion of super-aspirin with a personal story.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
He himself had suffered debilitating pain brought on by arthritis developed while training for the Boston Marathon. Despite years of searching for relief, he had found no satisfactory remedy. Now a remarkable new class of drugs was offering hope to people like him and millions of others.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
And Groupman provided the anecdotal story of a firefighter from Nebraska whose arthritis had been alleviated miraculously thanks to super aspirin. A responsible scientist would note that the anecdotal evidence was more fit for a pharmaceutical commercial than an article in the New Yorker by a doctor,
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
But Dr. Groupman did speak with other medical experts, like Harvard's Dr. Lee Simon, who had a seat on the FDA's Arthritis Advisory Committee and had been part of an FDA panel to evaluate how to approve super aspirins. This probably shouldn't have been allowed to happen, because while he was sitting on that FDA panel deciding...
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
how to approve these medications, Dr. Simon was also a paid employee of Searle, conducting clinical trials for Celebrex. He did not disclose this conflict of interest, and Dr. Grootman's article did not make any note of this fact that might have compromised a source's objectivity. That's actually pretty shocking, I have to say.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
They didn't require that. It's unclear to me if Groupman knew that Dr. Simon was a paid employee of Searle. But I don't think Groupman is doing as much of his due diligence as he ought to. What Simon is doing is obviously the more shady of the thing. But it's one of those. This is what I say when I'm like. You really I just made that comment about like people being led by a figure skater.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
But like, yeah, again, if you're yeah, if you're doing your research, you could still get misled about this stuff.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
Yeah, and Simon's quotes in The New Yorker are, it's one of those things, he's really relying a lot on the fact that he's this fancy Harvard doctor because the shit he is actually saying in this article is shit no doctor should ever say. He described Celebrex as incredible and told Dr. Grootman that unique among all other medications ever created, it had no side effects whatsoever.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
He specifically stated there are no side effects, which those don't exist. You might not experience side effects, but someone will. There is no drug that has zero side effects of any kind. It's not a drug if it's that way.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
Wow. Yeah. And this is this is, I think, where it gets into, like, the value of actually having a higher level of like.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
Kind of medical like medical even training may not be totally the right word, but like word, but like in school so that because that's the sort of thing it is easy to like train people to have people in general layman be aware of like, oh, if I see that, if I see somebody claiming there are zero side effects for anyone of this medication, that's something you shouldn't. That's sketchy, you know?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
So as Nessie notes, this should have been a massive and immediate red flag, just as we noted. But yeah, Dr. Grootman's article cited other medical experts making similarly dubious claims. He quoted another Harvard professor, Dr. Clifford Saper, as saying super aspirin might hold the key to treating Alzheimer's.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
Now, this is a case where there was not evidence that it had efficacy treating Alzheimer's. Dr. Saper had a theory that inflammation in the brain caused by injured neurons led to swelling that damaged brains, and that as a result, Vioxx might help, right? And that's a perfectly valid thing to want to test, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
But you shouldn't go out in an article and be like, this might cure Alzheimer's based on that, because that's just a theory, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
Yep. And yeah, so, quote, Dr. Saper said that Celebrex probably has to break open the vicious cycle of inflammation and Alzheimer's. Quite an astonishing statement in and of itself, and even more so since he did not cite results of a single human study.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
Yet the claim is part of an age old school of medical thinking that holds that logic and what makes sense or rational therapy should dictate the practice of medicine. But rational therapy needs to be buttressed by randomized, controlled human trials to determine what is and what is not effective treatment. That's from the book Poison Pills.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
Now, theorizing like Saper did is, of course, part of the medical process, but maybe not one that should be presented to the public in a widely read article where people who've got loved ones suffering from Alzheimer's are going to be like, oh, my God, a miracle drug might be coming through. No, even if it works, it's fucking 15 years out or whatever. Right.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
you know groupman's article also wildly exaggerated the harms of existing inseds like motrin and advil failing to discuss newer versions that had been approved and came with fewer of the side effects that so-called super aspirin was meant to avoid in his article groupman cited the work of dr james freeze a professor at stanford at length freeze himself claims groupman distorted his research in order to make claims that freeze was not making about uh cox-2 inhibitors
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
Now, Dr. Grootman was not being bribed by Merck, nor did he violate the law or medical ethics in any way that I'm aware of other than writing a bad article. He fucked up. And part of why he fucked up was, in my opinion, he was looking to merge developing medical science with magazine pop science in a way that's not wildly different from what Malcolm Gladwell is going to be doing a few years later.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
I think that's irresponsible, but not malicious or outright criminal. Right. And we are talking about some people who did outright criminal acts in this. I want to make it clear I am not.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
Yeah, it's the same thing where we have this problem in journalism, right?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
There's a great movie called Shattered Glass starring Hayden Christensen about a journalist for the New Republic who was like their star reporter, super young, and it turned out all of the stories, he was just making them up, like complete bullshit, like literally just inventing people and things in order to write entertaining stories.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
The New York Times a little bit later had another reporter get blown up, a star reporter for the same thing, just completely lying about shit, tricking fact checkers. And it's one of those things doesn't have to happen all that often for people to be like, well, then these outlets are no better than whatever, like weird fucking conspiracy rag info wars or whatever that I like. And you know what?
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
That's kind of on the journalists for fucking up in that way. Right. That's that's on the newsroom. That's on the editors. That's on the people wanting these big stories.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Vioxx Scandal: How Big Pharma Killed More Americans Than Vietnam
that are exciting and that get eyeballs on right here you kind of have the merger of the two right the new yorker wants an article that gets a lot of people to read it because fuck this is a miracle medicine that might help me and my loved ones with things that are really like causing us problems uh and as the doctor you want to be the first you want to be the doctor who kind of establishes himself as like i'm kind of on the ground floor of this breaking for people and
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And so we deserve all this. Right. That's just an extension of what Russia is saying. The fact that he made that mainstream is why they have a chance of making that mainstream.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
What you're getting at, Paul, and what the core of this is, is that – Rush doesn't believe in positive things. I don't mean positive in a good sense. I mean, he doesn't believe in things that should be done. He believes in tweaking people. That is what he turns American conservatism into. He turns it from we're conservatives.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
These are the things we believe about how the government and how society should be run into conservatism is owning the libs. That's where we are now. And that's what this is, is it's my politics. are a sort of rhetorical violence against the people I disagree with.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Because improving the world, changing it, making positive alterations to the world is difficult and complicated and involves a lot of debate and trial and error. That's hard. All I want to do is own the libs. That's what Rush Limbaugh created, brought into the world, and turned into the entire... That's the only thing that's left in conservatism, right?
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
You've got these odd... You've got a couple of dudes left on the right who...
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
actually believe in something like mitt romney and arnold schwarzenegger right not that what they believe in is great or that i i believe in it too but they both have a clearly have a principles that aren't just owning the libs but they're on the fringe now because owning the libs is all the right has um and it's just it's not it's not it's not standing for something it's it's i it's like not
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yeah, and it's... It's very frustrating, Paul, because the core of that idea that I want to be left alone, that's more or less my politics. That's what led me to anarchism. It's like, don't fucking tell me what to do, and I don't want to tell you what to do. And that is what, as a kid, I was taught conservatively. Conservatism was, but it's not what conservatism has ever been.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And I think a big part of why why the Republican establishment embraces rush is that by the early 90s, in particular, by the mid 90s, definitely, it has become clear that nothing that the right does works for the actual people that that vote them into office. Right. Economics does not function. You know, it doesn't. It's well documented. Objectively does not work the way they say it does.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
They're fighting against environmental regulations, damages the world and makes it uninhabitable. Fighting against corporate regulations gets a lot of their voters killed by dangerous working conditions and stuff. All of the wars they get us into.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
are disasters and expensive and do not achieve the foreign policy or even the basic national security goals they set conservatism as americans do it at least does not work and when you know that you can't go back to the drawing table you can't admit failure you can't acknowledge the mistake what you can do is own the libs you know and that's why that's all it is now is owning the lips yeah um it's good it's a good healthy healthy society paul
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
It's only going to get better, too. It's only going to get better. So Rush's justification for the outrageous caricature of a right winger that he played on his show had always been that these liberals and leftists advocating for black lives and women's liberation and basic environmental safeguards were absurd. And as Rush put it, I demonstrate absurdity by being absurd.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
That's his own words on this. Now. This turned out to be an objectively good business because none of his listeners seem to find Rush himself absurd. The character he played became the man he was in the once apolitical wannabe DJ turned into a mouthpiece for the very worst of our society's impulses.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
One thing that made the Rush Limbaugh show groundbreaking was that for the first time in an explicitly political talk show, the focus was not on guests or actual reporting or anything but the personality Limbaugh had created. Rush was his own guest and this was a deliberate choice he made and a very intelligent one to make the show more profitable.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
If the focus of your show is on the news and on what guests have to say, you can kind of slot any person with a decent voice in to replace the host, right? That limits how much money you're going to make and it limits kind of the length of your career. Rush himself explained in an interview, I wanted to be the reason people listened. That's how you pad your pocket.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
That's how you establish yourself. And that's very smart. He did, in fact, establish himself. In 1992, Rush's radio success finally got the TV people listening. They decided to try him out as on-screen talent. He teamed up with Roger Ailes, the man who would later invent Fox News, and together they produced one of the most outrageous and vile news programs ever made.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
It would, sadly, also turn out to be one of the most influential. And now, Paul, it is time for you and I to take a journey into this particular piece of far-right history. So this episode from 1992 of the Rush Limbaugh show opens with a title card, which features an image of a microphone with the name Rush emblazoned on it.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And the words warning the views expressed on this program are not necessarily the views of the staff advertisers or your local station, but they ought to be.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yeah, I know. It's good shit, man. It's good shit. So, the episode itself has a weirdly quiet intro. No music, just Rush with a pointer standing in what looks like an office with wall-to-wall bookshelves and TVs interspersed within the books on the bookshelves. He introduces himself and he starts talking about a recent conversation he had with President George H.W. Bush on his radio program.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
So... That's telling. That's extremely important what he does here. You have to remember, Fox News was not a thing yet at this time. Fake news was not a buzzword. Limbaugh is groundbreaking in that he was not only critiquing mainstream news as being fake and lying, but he's also telling his listeners, I am the truth.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
This paragraph from a write-up by Rolling Stone gets to the core of why I find what he's doing here so terrifying. Quote, he wasn't selling political ideas, and he never has. He was selling political attitude, the swaggering certitude, the mocking dismissiveness, the freedom to offend, the right to assert your privilege without guilt or embarrassment.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And partly because he was modeling that liberation with such wicked glee, Limbaugh was making himself indispensable. Within six weeks of tuning in regularly, he would tell new listeners they'd be on the cutting edge of social evolution. Best of all, he promised, I will do all your reading. And I will tell you what to think of it. I will do all your reading and I will tell you what to think of it.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yeah. Wow.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And this is the this is the logical extent of this. I'm so smart. You know, I got to tie half my brain behind my back just to make it fair. You know, I'm this big genius. I'm so smart. You don't need to read or think I'll do it for you. And then you too will be smart. And this is a huge thing. He spends a lot of effort in reinforcing his intelligence.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
After this section of the show, he goes on to introduce the other topics of that episode, which include Feminazi, Gloria Steinem and a review of the movie The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. Then we cut in. Yeah. Then we cut to the actual intro, which is terrible 1990s talk show music played over a series of mocked up news articles with titles like EIB linked to higher IQ. Limbaugh gets patent.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Limbaugh says no to presidential bid. Limbaugh checks brain on donor's card. Limbaugh to carry a torch at the mental Olympics. Again, he puts a lot of effort into it. It's absurd, right? But it clearly works. It worked on my parents, you know? It worked on all of the people who raised me to some extent. They're all convinced.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Totally. Absolutely. That's why I have a well, I have a gun, but it works the same way.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
There we go. That's a nice knife, Paul. That's lovely. Oh, I like the nice little hunchback there. That makes it good for kind of close in work. Yeah.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Now we're all armed. We can properly get back to the show.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
I mean, there are like three knives on the table, right? This is a significant number of knives on the table. All right. I'm a new listener. I apologize. So the show proper starts after this point, after these fake news articles kind of go through. And Russia's first subject on this episode is the then new TV series Murphy Brown. Murphy Brown was obviously the titular character of the show.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
She was a recovering alcoholic investigative journalist and a primetime news anchor and a single mother. Murphy Brown was a very feminist and progressive series for its day. Limbaugh opens his episode by expressing anger at the show's success. And then in what I would consider a fairly abusive manner, he tells his audience why they shouldn't watch it.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
You shouldn't have watched this show because I told you not to. And I told you not to because it's not good for you to imbibe this. And I think it's important to break down exactly what he's doing here. First off, he is trying to physically separate his audience from mainstream American society. Murphy Brown was a hugely popular show in its day.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
He is literally telling them, you don't need to watch this thing other people are watching because I am telling you not to. And he justifies this by saying that Murphy Brown is an assault on family values, which he goes on to call functional values, because families like the ones portrayed on Murphy Brown were in Limbaugh's eyes non-functional.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
This is significant because Murphy Brown was a single mother. She was one of the first single mothers portrayed on American TV as not just existing, but as being a successful person and a competent parent.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
We can't let people watch this because it will give them the wrong idea, not just about single mothers.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And that that's why he wants. That's why it is important to him to keep his audience away from it. Now, that was not the only kind of groundbreaking thing about Murphy Brown. The show was incredibly significant in its portrayal of gay people.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
In several episodes, most notably in 1992 and 1994, homosexuals were shown as not just normal functional members of society, but as existing in significant numbers throughout American society. There's an episode where like one of the characters buys a bar and it becomes through kind of like comedic hijinks or whatever becomes a gay bar. And he's like slowly realizes what it is.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
But the point the episode was making is that gay people are all around us. They're part of our community. They are a significant, meaningful part of our society. This was rare in mainstream television for the time. And it made Rush Limbaugh furious. We have another clip here of of that.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Now, this is also really significant. So... What Rush is doing here is he's framing his objection to Murphy Brown as reasonable and not based in hate. He's saying, I'm not against single mothers or I'm not against gay people or whatever. I am against the fact that the show conceals its political agenda. And I can see why people like most of my family would have found this reasonable.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
But what's happening here is very sinister because Murphy Brown was not trying to be left wing. It was trying to make a point that single parents and that gay people are regular human beings who contribute to society. It was trying to point out that single parents are valid and functional people. These should not be political points anymore. Yeah. Yeah.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Rush was not the first person to talk about the gay agenda or to oppose single motherhood, not even close. But before him, the most prominent voices attacking these groups of people were on the religious right, which had first arisen as an organized political force in the late 70s. They were obviously influential, but they were also obviously religious extremists.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Broadcasting from his studio in, I don't know, some fucking place with one liver tied behind his back to make it fair for all of the narcotics in his system. Robert Evans is presenting. I hate it. You don't like me? You don't like my pseudo-rush intro, Sophie? Not on board?
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And a lot of non-religious conservatives and libertarian types did not want to identify with fundamentalists. Rush, who had a documented history of mocking religious conservatives, provided the more libertarian right with a secular justification for bigotry against gay people and single mothers and women in general. And that's one of his great innovations, unfortunately.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
These people exist. Isn't that all right? These people exist. It's all right. And they shouldn't be hated or punished or or ostracized. for being this, for being what they are.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
It's just not there at all. But if he's able to make it be that way to his listeners, then he can, number one, make sure they will always oppose these things that he just finds gross. And number two, it further separates them from mainstream society. This is the beginning of the splintering of the mainstream American right from the United States, from most of the people in this country.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And it was the beginning of making sure that there was no... You cannot...
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
reconcile the right with with the modern world with the rest of civilization because you doing a different thing than them is an attack on them like we're being attacked because you're different and so we get to fight you that's Russia's great innovation and also that the way you think is the real America and not what these people think exactly that's haunting but you know what isn't haunting Robert
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
The products and services that support this podcast?
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Hopefully. Hopefully. Unless it's Raytheon, which is fairy haunted products. But that's a story for another day.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
This is behind the bastards. A podcast that will never be as big as the Rush Limbaugh show because Sophie won't let me use cultic mind control techniques on our audience.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Okay. Well, we're back. The man you just heard is Paul F. Tompkins, our guest for this exploration of the life and times of Rush Limbaugh. Hi, everyone. Hey, Paul. How are you feeling? How are you doing an hour and a half into talking about El Rushbo?
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And we're back. So, Paul, I would love to go with this through this entire episode with you. In fact, I would love to do a reoccurring series where we just go through point by point every episode of Rush Limbaugh's TV show and talk about it. I think it would be amazing. It is wild to see those clips again.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Um, I, it would be very, I think fun and also intellectually valuable, but we just, we have so much ground to cover. We, this has to be the end of that episode of the show. Yeah.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yeah. At least not, not today. Um, I think we've gotten the point across and characterize what he's doing on the show and why it was significant. Now, the Rush Limbaugh TV show was what you'd call a modest success. The 30-minute syndicated series ran from 1992 to 1996, which is not a long run, but isn't a super short run either. You know, it was not a huge hit, but it was successful.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
That said, its actual impact on history was much greater than its four seasons might suggest. As I said earlier, Roger Ailes was the executive producer of Limbaugh's TV debut. Limbaugh and Ailes had met in 1990, and Rush would later say that their meeting was, quote, like finding a soulmate. And I'm going to quote here from a write up that I found on Quartz.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
The persona Ailes helped Limbaugh create on that show, something between a commentator, political strategist, news anchor, and entertainer, is exactly the kind of act you can see today on Fox News. It is not hard to draw a straight line from Limbaugh's TV show to talking heads like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
But for this week, we're going to be going back to a rerun. So please enjoy. The Story of Rush Limbaugh
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Like today's Fox News personalities, Limbaugh fancied himself as a man of the people who railed against elitist liberal politicians and voters. But as he did that, he was flying his private jet around the country to wine and dine with powerful figures. The myth he created of himself, with the help of Ailes, is the same myth that we see pushed again and again on Fox News by its biggest names.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
In retrospect, Ailes may have been using Limbaugh's TV act as a test run for Fox News— to see if the brand of conservative opinion that was working on the radio could be translated to and expanded on TV. In 1996, the same year the Limbaugh show ended, Ailes co-founded Fox News at the behest of the media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Much of what ensued, the liberal bashing, fear-mongering, alternative reality in which Fox's personalities lived, was reminiscent of Ailes' weird little Limbaugh talk show experiment. So this is really a test case for what becomes Fox News, you know, and the year Limbaugh show ends. 1996 is the year Fox News launches.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yeah. So like like Ailes actually tried to get Rush to join the network, I think, in 2006. But Limbaugh kind of preferred radio. I don't think he actually liked being on TV very much. Not not not to the extent that he enjoyed doing his radio show. So I think that was mainly the reason. But also, by the time Fox News really got going. Ailes had a half dozen Rush Limbaugh's, you know, right?
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Yeah. I, too, feel happy that he's dead. Yeah. It's fun.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yeah, which we'll talk about a bit later. So throughout the mid and into the late 1990s, the Rush Limbaugh show was a bonafide cultural phenomenon. Rush created the first fully monetized right wing cult of personality within like the American media, at least. As you heard in the clips we played, Rush discouraged his listeners from thinking for themselves.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
He was the genius, and if you just agreed with him and thought the way he thought, then you were by definition also smart. As a result, from the very early point, he gave his fans the nickname Ditto Heads. The New York Times explains the etymology of this term as it evolved on his show. Ditto, a time saving greeting used by callers to avoid tedious repetition of the obvious.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
It never will. It will always be good that he's dead. Yeah. There's a few people who are like that, where it's like every now and then I just like think back to the fact that Reinhard Heydrich is dead. That's like good. Good for him. You know, good for him. So once upon a time, Paul, the United States used to have a thing called the Fairness Doctrine.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
For example, you're wonderful, Rush, and I agree with everything you've said. Ditto head then means a Limbaugh fan. So you're like literally he's saying my fans are people who say and believe all of the exact same things that I do.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yeah, you are the only thing that matters to me, or at least your beliefs are because I am so empty as a person as a result of how capitalism has hollowed me out and hollowed my my class out that that I have nothing but the hatred of liberals that you embody.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yes. Yeah. And then there's mega dittos. And I can't even get too much into some of the terms used on the Rush Limbaugh show because it makes me want to punch things until my hands are broken. And I already had that happen last year because of one of his fans. Anyway.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
The core of the Rush Limbaugh show was not, as he would always claim, advancing conservative ideology, but was instead attacking liberals and the left, who he referred to as commie libs or pink commie libs. And I don't know, again, at this fucking gun class I was at last weekend, the instructor was like, the far left wants to take your guns away.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And obviously I couldn't be like, actually, the far left is pretty heavily strapped. It's liberals who think our... But that's part of this idea that Joe Biden is somehow a leftist, right? That he's a communist. And you hear all over the right now that was Limbaugh saying anyone who is not a conservative is a far left.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
So it doesn't matter that actually the Democratic Party is a profoundly conservative political party. And today's Democrats are basically the same as Republicans were when I was growing up in the 90s.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
It's this, I mean, that's kind of the thing about Republican talking points. Like the other thing, they kept panic, like terrified during the Obama years. He's going to take your guns. He's going to take your guns. He's going to take your guns. Barack Obama did not one single thing to restrict gun ownership in the United States. No.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Whereas actually Trump actually did ban certain fire, the bump stock, like Trump put through more restrictions on gun rights than Trump. Not that I'm saying anything wrong. I think bump stocks are dumb. But Trump objectively restricted gun ownership more than Obama. But you never know it to listen to the right wing media. It's preposterous.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
No one's going to take your fucking guns. There's too many of them. Not that, you know, we'll talk anyway. It's separate. Yeah, absolutely. This is why you get to a point where now mainstream Republicans are selling mugs with like that are like the tears of my enemies are in the. Yeah. You know, I'm going to quote from the Rolling Stone here.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Now, in short, the Fairness Doctrine required anyone with a broadcast license to present controversial issues in a balanced way, providing roughly equivalent time to present both sides of an issue. Now, this was obviously a flawed rule. Some issues, for example, like climate change, don't have two sides, right?
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here. And, you know, we're still coming down from our end of the year celebration. I'm headed off to CES where we'll be doing reporting for It Could Happen Here and Better Offline. We're going to be coming back for the new year soon. The Oprah episodes will be in the can. Very excited to introduce you all to that.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
On January 23rd, 1995, Time magazine featured Rush Limbaugh on its cover. We see him wearing a suit and smoking a cigar. Smoke curls up out of his mouth behind the bold words, Is Rush Limbaugh good for America? Now, it was obvious to anyone who was paying attention that he was not.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
But for the most part, the liberal media that Rush attacked and demonized embraced him as kind of like the loyal opposition, as an erudite foil to debate with, to argue against. But nonetheless, someone who deserved respect and honor due to his success. Like, you can see this in the episode of Family Guy that Rush was on, right?
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Where it's like, he has these fun bickering arguments with the token liberal on the show, but in the end, they really both like each other, you know? Yeah. As opposed to what Resch actually represented, which is the politics of violent elimination of the opponent. Yeah.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And that's what's most amazing to me, is no matter what he said about the mainstream media, about the liberal media, whatever, they fettered him. They praised him. They made him, like, he was never treated as a pariah. Barbara Walters said in an interview, people just can't get enough of him. The Los Angeles...
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
The Los Angeles Times described him as a self-styled commander in chief fighting his private culture war against the many liberal do-gooder notions that interfere with his right to eat and wear and spend whatever he damn well wants and say whatever he damn well pleases. C-SPAN highlighted him in a fawning interview that helped turn him into a household name. Within a year of that interview,
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
He was carried by 530 stations and listened to by an estimated 25 million Americans. He started writing books with titles like The Way Things Ought to Be, each of which dutifully went on to become a New York Times bestseller. For a man who built his career attacking the liberal media, Rush never received anything but encouragement and financial support from his so-called enemies.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
The fundamental hypocrisies that undergirded his career were seldom called out. Rush Limbaugh had not even registered to vote until he was 35 years old. years old, two years before his show became a nationwide nationwide success. The repeated double standards in his work and his life never hurt his pull with his audience.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
For example, Rush Limbaugh repeatedly attacked Bill Clinton as a draft dodger, which he was. But so was Rush. Limbaugh took the route that most wealthy young Americans during Vietnam took and found a doctor who would diagnose him with a bullshit injury so that he couldn't be called up for service. When he was eventually called on this by some journalists who were doing their jobs, he responded.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
There may be different sides about what the right response is, but there's not two sides to the reality of climate change. So the Fairness Doctrine Not a perfect, not a silver bullet sort of thingamajig. But while it was in place, right-wing media in the form that we have today did not and could not exist.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
I had student deferments in college and upon taking a physical was discovered to have a physical by the virtue of what the military says. I didn't even know it existed. A physical deferment. And then the lottery system came along when they chose your lot by birth date and mine was high. I and I did not want to go just as Governor Clinton didn't.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Both Cheney and George W. Bush did like Rush, like Clinton, everything they could to not actually go and fight in Vietnam. One of the things that will always be the most infuriating thing in one of the most infuriating things to happen in American politics to me is the way in which.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
John Kerry, who is a – whatever else you can say about him, fought courageously, went to – despite the considerable privilege he was born into, did an incredibly dangerous job, was wounded multiple times, and risked his life repeatedly for the lives of his men, right? Vietnam was a terrible war. We never should have been in it. It was fundamentally immoral on a national scale.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
But on a human level, John Kerry did the right thing, which is not – use his privilege to get out of fighting in a war that other people of his class got us into. And he was portrayed during that campaign as like a liar and a craven coward while George Bush, who did everything he could to not fight in Vietnam, was seen as this brave warrior hero. It's still very frustrating.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
I don't even like John Kerry, but my God, the man did the thing all of you say is what you're supposed to do as a man. Yes. It's infuriating. Yeah. It's infuriating. The ditto heads continued to listen to their idol slam Clinton for being a draft dodger, even while they celebrated a man who, by his own admission, had done the exact same thing. Rush would eventually rack up three to four.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And I should have stayed here. I'm not. It's not bad to be a draft dodger. The Vietnam War was, again, horribly immoral. It's perfectly. What is immoral is dodging the draft and then going on to do nothing but encourage more wars that involve American servicemen, right? That's immoral. It is not immoral to dodge the draft and say, hey, this was a bad war.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
We shouldn't get involved in stupid, pointless wars that just kill people for the profits of a tiny number. Like, that's bad. I'm not going to do it and I'm not going to support it. That's fine.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yeah, it's the moral inconsistency that's infuriating. John Kerry actually and John Kerry did not support the Vietnam War and became after he got out a very, very outspoken voice against it. But it's the if Limbaugh had served in Vietnam and then gone on to be a war hawk, then at least he would be ideologically consistent. You know, at least I could say Rush Limbaugh believes in something.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
It's like John McCain. At least he fucking believed in something. You know, it was terrible and fundamentally toxic as well. But it was not. He's not like Limbaugh. You know, he is a person who has beliefs. Um, I don't know. It's that it's like that line from the Big Lebowski, right? Like, say what you will about the tenets of national socialism, dude. At least it's an ethos, you know?
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Now, since the dawn of the fake news era, which we're in now, a lot of folks have talked about the time of guys like Walter Cronkite, right? When you had newsmen who basically every American trusted, who could shift massive national issues just based on their considered opinion, right? Cronkite calls Vietnam a quagmire, suddenly national opinion on it switches.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
So Rush Limbaugh was not a man who I think believed in much, much other than the fame and wealth of Rush Limbaugh. He would eventually rack up three divorces and four wives. He never had any children. Despite this, tens of millions of conservatives listened to him opine on family values and traditional morality on a daily basis. Rush called it functional values.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And one key aspect of his functional value system was rejecting illegal drugs. At one point on his TV show, at the height of the drug war, Rush told his audience, if people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up the river. He repeatedly called addicts junkies up the river.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yeah, you should go to prison if you do illegal drugs. He repeatedly called addicts junkies and suggested that drug dealers deserved death for their crimes. While he enthusiastically supported the drug war and the use of the carceral state to lock up mostly black men for selling drugs, Rush Limbaugh was actively trafficking huge amounts of opiate painkillers.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Rush used his housekeeper as a hookup, handing her cigar boxes filled with cash in exchange for thousands of pills of Oxycontin, hydrocodone, and the like. In 2003, she went public and knocked on him to the police. When the story broke, he was charged for his crimes, and Florida Sheriff's deputies opened an investigation into a drug trafficking ring.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
We don't know exactly what Rush is, if he was just a customer or if he had some other role in it, but he was buying drugs. Huge amounts of painkillers. We're talking about a guy who was spending probably hundreds of thousands of dollars on his addiction.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yeah, he got it prescribed to him initially for an injury and he got addicted like most people do. But this is not just with prescription painkillers. Most people who have a problematic addiction to a drug get addicted because of something negative that happens in their life, right? Trauma or an injury or an emotional depression, whatever. That's most people who have a problematic addiction.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Limbaugh said anyone who does that should go to prison. Then he did that. You know, but he gets caught.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And he. Oh, yeah, he gets. Yeah. And when he gets caught, it is a big story. In 2003, his housekeeper went public, wore a wire, recorded him doing a drug dealer deal, knocked on him to the police. And when the story broke, he was charged for his crimes. And Florida sheriff's deputies opened an investigation into that drug traffic trafficking ring. His third wife left him.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
He checked himself into rehab while his multimillion dollar team of lawyers went to work defending him in court. The legal battle would go on for three years, during which time he began doctor shopping to maintain his addiction.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
He was charged again with fraud for concealing information to obtain prescriptions from four different doctors who prescribed him roughly 2000 pain pills during one six month period. The case would eventually wrap up in 2006 when Limbaugh agreed to a plea deal that allowed him to avoid prosecution if he sought treatment and avoided other criminal activity.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yeah. Uh-huh.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
right and like he doesn't even he barely it's not even a slap on the wrist it's like a little light tap on the wrist it's not even a slap on the wrist it's so fucking upsetting and again the immorality here is that he always advocated criminal consequences for people who did exactly what he did and then he didn't go on to suffer them and that's what's it's not that like there's nothing morally wrong with being addicted to painkillers if it were legal i would absolutely be a painkiller addict it seems rad um
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And a big part of why these guys were trusted is they were required to lend equal weight to both sides. They couldn't just be partisan shills. Now, this generally meant that they would give kind of the conservative opinion and the liberal opinion as opposed to the far left or the far right. But it did mean that you didn't have something as unbalanced as Fox News. Right.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
But I'm also consistent about the fact that I don't think doing or possessing any substance should be illegal. With the exception of, like, you know, some explosives. There's a line to be drawn. I don't think people should have surface-to-air missile launchers.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Speaking of heroin, you know who supports our podcast, Sophie?
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
The fine people at the Sinaloa cartel. Oh, God.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yes, this is a cartel-supported podcast. And I just want to say, let's go to ads before I get us in some trouble.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
It's like the voter guide you get. Yeah, exactly. It gives you the measured and says some people say this. Some people say this. Yeah. Yeah. And as flawed as the Fairness Doctrine was, it was part of why most Americans lived in a semi-unified media ecosystem back in up prior to 1987. Now, obviously, this did not last.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Ah, we're back. Good times. So while Rush was using his wealth and power to avoid the legal consequences that he enthusiastically supported existing for the crimes he committed, he continued to act as the voice of America's conservative conscience. Mostly, this meant being super racist.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
one point on his TV show, he played video clips of black men and boys standing in front of the TV, and while he was playing these clips of black men and boys, he would stand in front of the TV and make gorilla noises and grunts. The apparent joke being that black
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
people were like monkeys like that's kind of i i don't know what else he could be saying um pretty satirical very satire satirical like yeah i think he got that from a new yorker cartoon it would be like if jonathan swift actually murdered irish children and ate them and then was like this is a satire get it yeah Get it? The joke is that they're food.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
In 1987, the FCC, as the result of a court case, the FCC rejected the Fairness Doctrine. Conservatives cheered this on because fair media was seen by arch conservatives, guys like Roger Stone, as a big reason why Americans had broadly supported the impeachment of Richard Nixon at the end of the Watergate investigation. Watergate is one of these situations where when the investigation starts.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Rush repeatedly blamed corruption and violence in African national governments as the fault of black people getting rid of white colonial leaders, as we see in this quote from 2007. Quote, right. So you go into Darfur and you go into South Africa, you get rid of the white government there. You put sanctions on them.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
You stand behind Nelson Mandela, who was bankrolled by communists for a time, had the support of certain communist leaders. You go to Ethiopia, you do the same thing. Right. He's saying that because the black people got rid of their colonial oppressors, that's why Africa is in bad shape.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Not the decades of trauma those governments pushed, not the fact that when those governments gave up colonial control. They put people like Idi Amin, who had been a British military sergeant in charge of the government and turned out that he was a fucking monster.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Not because those governments like colonial governments continue to suck wealth out of these countries and support kleptocratic dictatorships that allowed them to suck more wealth out that made the country dysfunctional and that led to consistent like decades and decades of violence. Not that they supported ethnic groups one over the other like they did in Rwanda, which led to the Rwandan genocide.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
None of that. It's because they got rid of the white people. Hmm.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
even though white people didn't actually leave you know it's super fucked up i didn't know that he'd he'd actually gone to the the lengths of trying to smear nelson mandela yeah communist jesus christ uh it's good stuff i mean nelson mandela also was at one point some guy somebody who supported like terrorism and stuff which also is totally justified if your government is the apartheid government of south africa terrorism's not necessarily the wrong thing to do you
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
You know, I would say it's not off the table. It's not off the table. Yeah. Sometimes terrorists are right. Yeah. That is like you could argue that the founding fathers of this nation who, despite their own bigotry and slave, like the government they were rebelling against also allowed slavery. They were right to do terrorism to get rid of having a king because kings are bad.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
You know, like terrorism is justified sometimes. Yeah. So Rush was repeatedly critical of professional sports for the presence of black athletes, as we see in this 2007 quote. Look, let me put it to you this way. The NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons. There, I said it.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
The inherent criminality of black people was a belief that Rush held deeply, and he expressed it constantly. In 1993, he said, the NAACP should have riot rehearsals. They should get a liquor store and practice robberies. He was saying this after the L.A. riots, you know? This is not people reacting to horrible violence the only way that they can, right?
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
This is not a riot being the language of the unheard. This is what the NAACP wants because they're all
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yeah, it's it's pretty great.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yeah, they just loved her. Not these people are being oppressed and murdered. And finally, violence was the only thing they could think to do because they were given no other options and they reached the end of their human tether. Like the people I idolize who founded this nation.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
I mean, when I say that, I don't mean to say like that. Obviously, anyone writing in Los Angeles in 1993 was a thousand times more justified than George Washington and the like. That said, I still think getting rid of a king, all other things being equal, getting rid of a king is a valid reason to do violence. Kings are bad.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
The vast majority of conservatives are against it, right? Don't think Nixon did anything wrong. The evidence comes out, and opinion shifts, and it becomes very popular to get Nixon out of office. This is the last time that happens, right? This is the last time that, like... People's minds get changed by the facts on a political issue in America.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
So Rush repeatedly argued that white people shouldn't be blamed for slavery, saying it's preposterous that Caucasians are blamed for slavery when they've done more to end it than any other race. Any race of people should not have guilt. If any race of people should not have guilt about slavery, it's Caucasians.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
It's amazing. How many Caucasians fought and died to keep slavery going, Rush?
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
I think he comes to believe it because these beliefs become a reflection bullshit. Well, I think what it is, it starts. He's not a political person. He doesn't care about politics. He starts with a joke because he starts doing this persona because it gets him listeners. But he's also a narcissist, and these beliefs aren't political stances to him.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
They're aspects of his personality, and his narcissism dictates that he comes to believe it because believing it and defending these things is the same as defending himself. And again, he's a fucking narcissist. I think that's how it works.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
So another repeated Rush Limbaugh bit was attacking the daughters of Democratic presidents for being ugly. In 1988, he called Jimmy Carter's daughter Amy the most unattractive presidential daughter in the history of the country. In the early 1990s, he declared Chelsea Clinton to be the White House dog. Which is like just very vile.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
I don't even think it's like the Trump boys and Ivanka made themselves political figures perfectly fine to insult and attack them. You're never going to hear me saying anything bad about like Tiffany or Barron because they're children, you know, like, yeah, don't fucking talk about them if they don't make themselves into a major part of things, you know.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Now, Chelsea Clinton has put herself in the public eye, and it's perfectly fair to criticize her for the things she does in the public eye.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
In 2012, when Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke went before Congress to argue that contraceptives should be covered by the Affordable Care Act, Limbaugh called her a slut and a prostitute. You can't overstate how vile he was. Marty from Back to the Future. Oh, Michael J. Fox. Michael J. Fox made some political statements that Limbaugh disagreed with.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Limbaugh mimicked having Parkinson's disease to mock him on his show.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And it's the last time this happens because the right goes after the fairness doctrine. After about a decade or so of fighting, they're able to get it killed. And the end of the fairness doctrine was the necessary precursor to the creation of a wholly separate walled garden of right wing content.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
It's horrific. I mean, it's like and to say that it would be like I think what he did was perfectly reasonable. I am not going to take my medicine because you need to know what it is like for people who don't have access to the medicine. I'm rich. I have access to all the medicine I need. Here's what it's like if you don't.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yeah. I had a friend, one of the big things in terms of like me being, changing my political attitudes. It started with me changing my attitudes on drugs, that marijuana should be illegal, that it was immoral.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
I had a friend who was much older than I met on World of Warcraft who had multiple sclerosis, and we were video chatting, and she showed me how badly her hands shook before she started smoking, right? She showed me herself shaking, and then she took a hit, which was difficult for her, and I watched in real time how it affected her, and I never...
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
again supported keeping that shit illegal because you can't when you see it right you can't it's medicine not that most people use it use it medicinally which doesn't isn't wrong like it's not wrong to use it recreationally but just the idea that what she was doing was a crime made it clear to me how immoral our drug laws were yeah um in a way that maybe if i had like it would have taken longer otherwise i think completely um
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
So yeah, anyway, Limbaugh did occasionally face consequences for his bald-faced bigotry. In 2003, ESPN hired him as an on-air commentator. Oh, I forgot about that! Yeah, and he was fired after like seven weeks because he said Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb didn't deserve any of the praise he received. Oh, I remember this!
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yeah. He said Donovan McNabb didn't deserve the praise that he received because, quote, I think the media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well. They're interested in black coaches and black quarterbacks doing well. I think that there's a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of his team that he really didn't deserve.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
People just like this guy because he's black, not because he's a good quarterback. The media is invested in black men being good quarterbacks, you know?
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
What the fuck, man? You couldn't do what he's doing? How dare you? So this combat drew enough widespread condemnation that Limbaugh was forced to resign from ESPN. But obviously this had little to no impact on his bottom line. Maybe it annoyed him personally, but it didn't hurt him financially. By the early aughts, Rush was worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He had a private jet.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
which was seen by dudes like Roger Ailes as a necessary step to protecting right-wing voters from ever learning about other opinions, which would, they believed, protect the next criminal white right-wing president from impeachment. Now, after Limbaugh's death, the New York Times let Ben Shapiro, noted novelist, write a column about his professional idol.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
He had a palatial mansion in Florida. He smoked cigars that cost more than some people's cars. This is disgusting, but I think any fair accounting of Limbaugh's career has to acknowledge how impressive it was, too. The early 2000s saw the explosion of Fox News. This is the period where it became the most watched news network in the country.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
A slew of Limbaugh imitators rose up, men like Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, and Tucker Carlson, to name a few. While these folks were all hugely successful and influential, none of them ever eclipsed Rush. This is because, in addition to wielding influence, Rush held actual demonstrable political power. And I'm going to quote the Rolling Stone again here.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
His sky-high ratings and the rabid fandom of his ditto heads, who just happened to fit the profile of people who voted frequently in Republican primaries, made it inevitable that the GOP would come courting.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
In 1992, after he'd boosted Pat Buchanan's pitchfork populist Make America First Again challenge to George Bush, the president became so hellbent on gaining Limbaugh's favor for the general election that he not only invited the host to the White House, but toted his bags personally into the Lincoln bedroom.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Limbaugh had only praise for Bush from that day forward, at least until he lost to Bill Clinton in November. That set a pattern. Limbaugh might instinctively gravitate to the radicals, but he was ultimately a team player, the national precinct captain of the Republican Party, as Mother Jones described him.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Two years later, Limbaugh basically co-captained the Republican Revolution with House leader Newt Gingrich when their efforts produced a landslide that brought 73 anti-government zealots to Congress – The host was made an honorary House freshman and feted at a GOP orientation in December, where the new members wore Rush Was Right buttons and listened to his marching orders.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
This is not the time to get moderate, he said. This is not the time to start trying to be liked. Ronald Reagan himself declared Limbaugh the number one voice for conservatism in our country. And Rush was always very clear. Yeah. And Rush was always very clear about where he wanted to see the party head. Smaller government, stronger, more powerful corporations.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
He said all he said outright, I consider myself a defender of corporate America. Yeah. It would not be wrong to view Rush Limbaugh as something of a cult leader. One of the strongest pieces of evidence supporting this conclusion is, in my mind, Limbaugh's embrace of the irrational. Politics for Rush Limbaugh was never about concrete results or observable reality.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
It was a fight between good, his side, and evil, anyone who disagreed with him. And since those were the stakes, it didn't matter if he lied or spread conspiracy theories because the essence of what he was saying, that the Democrats were monsters, was true. Nowhere is this clearer than in his hatred of the Clintons. It started when George H.W.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Bush lost to Bill, robbing Rush of a president who would directly, you know, take him into the White House. Right. From an early stage, Rush realized that lying about the crimes committed by Bill and Hillary was a more productive route than criticizing them on policy.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And so in 1994, he announced Vince Foster was murdered in an apartment owned by Hillary Clinton and the body was taken to Fort Marcy Park. Rollingstone writes, Conspiracy theories, once the province of fringe right-wingers, started to become the mainstream Republican fare they are today during Clinton's two terms, and Limbaugh was the great popularizer of the genre.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Benny Schaps called the Fairness Doctrine, quote, a standard that in practice allowed for the domination of broadcast media by liberals with sporadic commentary by conservatives. That's my Benny Schaps voice.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Long before Fox hosts began amplifying the fringier theories about American politics, Limbaugh was busy mainstreaming wingnut world.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
The conspiracy cranks, the John Birchers, the Christian Zionists, the science deniers, the info warriors, their wildest fantasies, fears, and paranoias all came out to play in the national prime time on the Rush Limbaugh show, repackaged by the host into a palatable fare for the Republican masses.
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CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And this is significant because Russia's demonizing of the Clintons, who there's plenty of very valid things to critique them on. But at the end of the day, pretty normal neoliberal politicians. It's even spread on the left. This idea that Hillary Clinton is somehow more of a warmonger than other liberals, right, is somehow like exceptionally bad when she's not.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
She's very much in line with everyone else in the party and everyone else who has held those positions and is not as bad as some of them, right? She's more hated by certain people. Even on the left, you'll find people who are more directly aggressive towards her than they are to fucking Kissinger. Yeah. And it's not that she's not bad. She is. So is Bill. They're greedy. Bill's a rapist.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
They have supported, in addition to the Iraq War, a number of violent actions overseas that were disasters. But they did that as part of... within a large group of people, right? There's nothing about them that is exceptionally bad for the crew that they run with. But... This absolute demonizing of them that has a real impact by the on the 2016 election.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
That's a big part of why we get Trump is something that Rush Limbaugh pioneers. The Clintons are not like my parents hated Trump, hated Trump when he was running and voted for him because their hatred of Hillary Clinton was. It's beyond rational. Yeah, it's it's it's. And again. A lot of super valid criticisms of Hillary Clinton. I don't think she should have ever been president.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Also, hard to say she would have been worse than Trump. And if you are saying like she would have, for example, been more killed, more people overseas than Trump, you're not actually paying attention to the death toll as a result of American airstrikes and missile strikes and drone strikes.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
As it changed from the Obama administration, where Clinton was secretary of state to the Trump administration. Because there was a massive escalation in death under that, in addition to repealing of the rule about any sort of reporting about civilian casualties from U.S. airstrikes. Trump was worse on this sort of stuff, but you'd never know it anyway.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
I don't want to get into a rant on this, but it's almost impossible to analyze the Clintons, their impact, their crimes, and their behaviors, their policies, with any sort of rationality, because this they've been turned into goblins, right? It's very frustrating. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
It's really quite good. It's really quite good. So Rush Limbaugh was aware from the beginning that his whole career hinged on the Fairness Doctrine's death. And he starts being a national voice in 1989, two years after the end of the Fairness Doctrine. That's not a coincidence.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And it makes it, it makes it so that if you try to say like, well, actually this thing you're criticizing them on isn't a reasonable thing to, or at least the way you're criticizing them isn't reasonable. Suddenly you're defending them and it's like, no, that's not what I'm, it's very, I hate it. I hate everything.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
There's a fly on her. Yeah, exactly. It's this turning people from like, okay, let's analyze what this person's actually done, how it's worked, when it's been successful, when it's been unsuccessful, when it's been moral, when it's been immoral, and to no, she's just a criminal. She's just a warmonger. And we don't have to analyze what she actually did or anything. We don't have to.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
We just have to condemn her. And it's Not that she doesn't deserve condemnation for a lot of things, but like for one thing, I don't know. I don't want to fucking get onto a defending because I don't like Hillary Clinton. Yeah. But she's also has it like it's very frustrating. Yeah, it's very. It's all just very frustrating. Yeah. And he's in he creates this culture and it spreads now.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
It's not just the Clintons now. Now it's it's everyone. Right. You don't have to analyze people that you disagree with. You come up with a three word thing about them and you spread these like like Bill Clinton has committed crimes. He's a fucking rapist. You don't have to make up that he and his wife are having people murdered. Like, yeah. Yeah, like he's a rapist. That's bad.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Now, with his unparalleled national platform and his status as a chief thought leader of the American right, Limbaugh went about turning the Fairness Doctrine into his main boogeyman. I found a Vanity Fair article from 2009 that lays this out quite well. Quote, "...the single most important issue in Russia's radio career is now among the hot-button issues in conservative politics.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
But of course, a lot of people calling him a rapist or rapist themselves. So they have to make it up that now. No, he's a murderer. You know, it's fucking bullshit. It's very frustrating. So Rush also led the charge on demonizing and denying global warming and climate change in his book. See, I told you so.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
He declared that quite a few scientists are now backtracking on their once dire predictions of melting ice caps and worldwide flooding. Yeah. Cut to Texas being submerged in a layer of snow that destroys civil society. Or the entire West Coast burning down last year.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Anyway, he lampooned Al Gore and scientists who warned about climate change as, quote, a few hardline doomsayers who are sticking to their thermostats. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
His conclusion was what? You know, now it's it never affected him. And he never affected him. Now he's dead. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. As far as he knows, he was right about this. He was right about this. Limbaugh was unquestionably the single most influential American conservative from about 1989 to at least 2008.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Now, his star did start to fade by the end of George W. Bush's term, and there are a couple of reasons for this. For one, he'd been outed as an opiate addict, gone to rehab three times, and through it all had repeatedly defended an administration that led the United States into two disastrous and expensive failed wars.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
By the time Barack Obama was elected, many of the more libertarian-minded right-wing were starting to reject the neoconservative ideology that Russia had spent eight years hyping up. Now, the fact that Barack Obama was the man who finally broke eight years of GOP power wound up being the salvation of Limbaugh's influence.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
We need more hate groups. There is a black president who in his actual policies is not wildly different from George H.W. Bush. But like, yeah. Um... The fact that Barack Obama – yeah, so this surge in public anti-Black racism was heralded, incited, and led by Rush Limbaugh, the USA's most prominent bigot.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
There are a lot of different clips that I could select to make this point, Paul, but none is more appropriate than this song that aired on Rush's program while Obama was still on the campaign trail. Now, the context of this is that Limbaugh was talking about the fact that – Al Sharpton, Barack Obama and Al Sharpton had like a public series of arguments. Right.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
The Fairness Doctrine, a formalized, fair and balanced rule for covering the controversial issues on the nation's airwaves, which the Reagan FCC killed in 1987. The most liberal wing of the Democratic Party, which puts substantial blame on talk radio for a generation of conservative dominance in Washington." wants to revive the doctrine, which would pretty handily destroy conservative talk.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
paper said he make guilty whites feel good.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yes. Pretty bad.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
It's bad. It's not funny unless you're a bigot, you know? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Unless you're a bigot. So Limbaugh had other Obama zingers, saying at one point, if he weren't black, he'd be a tour guide in Hawaii. In 2008, he compared Obama to a cartoon monkey. He repeatedly called Michelle Moochelle, because she's a cow, you know?
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And all the while, he claimed that racism had nothing to do with his hatred of Obama. Yeah. Doesn't matter to me what his race is. He's liberal is what matters to me. Yeah. Okay. Barack, the magic Negro guy.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yeah. I can't talk about it enough, but I'm not a bigot.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yeah, I mean, I can play you songs that there's a bunch of Nazis that will go through and rewrite Disney songs to be about hating the Jews and stuff or about race traitors and whatnot because it's the kind of thing that's easy to spread, right? You make a racist song and people laugh and at first it's a joke and then it becomes less of a joke. It's the whole story, right? That's exactly
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
what Limbaugh is doing. You know, it's not even all that much less racist. He just doesn't say the N word. When candidate Obama became President Obama, Rush said, I hope he fails, explaining that rooting for liberalism to fail is rooting for America to succeed. Limbaugh declared that stopping Obama was, quote, what I was born to do.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
One of his tactics to this end seemed to be stoking fears that because Obama was anti-white, he was trying to gin up a race war. In 2009, Rush declared, in Obama's America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering. Clearly, he would have preferred it when, you know, I don't know, when white kids were burning down black kids' schools in his hometown. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Oh, those were the days. Those were the days, my friend. He thought they'd never end. Yeah, it's great. Limbaugh was not the only person who stoked white resentment and anti-black bigotry in this period. He was not close to the only person, but he was the man who had created the blueprint and the cultural space that all of those other right wing media figures acted in.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
According to the official CPAC polling of its members, restoring the fairness doctrine is the third most significant Democratic Congress policy initiative opposed by the right wing, raking only behind expanding government and public health care. So, yeah, there is with Russia's orchestration a rabidness to the cause opposing the fairness doctrine is up there with opposing abortion.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Ben Shapiro is very open about the fact that Limbaugh was his hero and idol. Alex Jones altered the way he spoke and altered the acoustic setup of his InfoWars studio in order to more closely resemble Rush Limbaugh. In 2010, Limbaugh was picked to address CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference. He was the main event that year and gave what he called his first address to the nation –
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Limbaugh was so central to the Republican Party at this point that RNC chairman Michael Steele was asked on CNN if Limbaugh was the effective party leader.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
When Steele claimed that Rush was just an entertainer, this pissed off Rush Limbaugh, who attacked Michael Steele on air and caused such an outpouring of right-wing rage against the RNC chairman that Michael Steele was forced to make a public apology to Rush Limbaugh. kind of proving that he was effectively the leader of the Republican party.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
So as leader of the Republican Party, Limbaugh spent the Obama years repeatedly hammering home the idea that there could not be peaceful coexistence between the right and left in the United States. Quote from Rush, we live in two universes. One universe is a lie. One universe is an entire lie. Everything run, dominated, controlled by the left here and around the world is a lie.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Every other universe is where we are, and that's where reality reigns supreme and we deal with it. Again, real America. Yeah. The real America. And there can be no coexistence. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yeah. I don't know that we can. But the way to do it is not to yield to these people. Yeah. It's not to just let them... get what they want because what they want is the annihilation of the other. And honestly, the annihilation of themselves, cause it's a fucking death cult at this point. Like they can't be allowed to win. And like the people, and, and that's not to say that, um,
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Every aspect of what has what a traditional conservative ideology is wrong. They have some points. That's why it brings people in the idea that, like, you should always be wary about giving the government control of things. You fucking should, you know, like, absolutely. There is a space. There is a space for control.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And he's you know, he's a it's really him that's responsible for making this such a popular issue. It starts off as a thing that kind of high up extreme right wingers, guys who had been Nixon's right hand men, push because they want to protect the next guy like Nixon. And it gets popular, though, because of Rush Limbaugh, because he sells it to the American conservative mainstream.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
in society that is not what Rush Limbaugh turned it into, which is not to say that it wasn't, because fucking Reagan was president before Limbaugh came onto the scene, and he was terrible and very toxic. Toxicity in the Republican Party goes back very far. But also, It's not for nothing that the Republicans used to be the party of Abraham Lincoln. You know, it's not there.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
There is a way to have a conservatism that is influential in society that isn't a fucking death cult. And we have to, at very least, get back to that if we're going to continue to be a democracy that doesn't. spiral inevitably into civil war you know i have i'm a pretty committed leftist but i also do not seek a society that forces my beliefs on other people but you can't you can't
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Give these people an inch because they'll take everything. That's how they are. You know, that's what in part what Rush had a big impact in making them into. By 2015, Rush Limbaugh had succeeded in leading a rightward push that finally prepared the Republican Party to nominate an obvious fascist, Donald Trump.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Limbaugh embraced Trump early on right wing radio host and never Trump or Joe Walsh, who is another actually principled conservative, draws a direct line between Limbaugh and Trump. Quote, The average Trump supporter loves Trump because he fights, man. He fights not because of any policy or issue or political philosophy. That's why they loved Rush before him. It wasn't about conservatism.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
I still can't tell you after 30 years what the fuck he believes in. But he knew how to prey on audiences' grievances and resentments, which is what conservative talk radio does. Rush was a son of a bitch. He'd lie about the dims and punch them and make fun of them. That gave him a cult-like following from the beginning. Trump sort of inherited it.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Joe Walsh, again, not a guy I agree with on much, but he's right on the money here. He's analyzing it properly.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
All he cares about is his own aggrandizement, right? It's narcissism. Trump and Limbaugh are very similar people. Absolutely, yeah. Rush bent the knee to Trump, declaring him everything but the second coming. And we will not labor long on Rush during Trump's years because once he had helped shepherd his massive audience into Trump's arms, his cultural influence faded.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
It was watered down by the sheer mass of right-wing ideologues who flooded the internet and increasingly urged their followers to embrace irrationality, conspiracy, and fascism. In February of 2020, Rush led the charge denying the reality of COVID-19. He called it the common cold and mocked even his old ally Matt Drudge for caring about the burgeoning plague.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
He urged his listeners against mask wearing, calling it a symbol of fear. Rush had long denied the dangers of smoking, particularly secondhand smoke, but this was a new level for him. When Trump lost reelection to Biden, Limbaugh immediately called the election a sham and joined the chorus of voices claiming fraud.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
By this point, though, he was sick, and the playing field was so flooded with men who sounded like him, triggered the libs like him, lied like him, that his voice hardly rose above the din. Rush had succeeded in building a right wing so made in his own image that he no longer stood out in it. His last show was February 2nd. He died less than two weeks later.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Killed by the lung cancer, he denied had anything to do with smoking because that was another thing Rush denied his entire career. Joe Walsh, a former Limbaugh lover, like when he was much younger, he got into talk radio because of Limbaugh, eventually wound up, and to be fair, before Trump, rejecting Limbaugh in a lot of ways. found the whole arc of Rush's career to be terribly sad. Quote,
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
When a writer from Rolling Stone asked if, maybe, the reason he kept backing Trump was that Limbaugh truly believed in what Trump said, Walsh countered with a theory of his own. Quote, Maybe, knowing him, it's one last big extended fuck you. Maybe it's Limbaugh saying, I'm not gonna bend to the dims and anybody else. No matter what. Never. To the end, I'm never gonna do it.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And at the end of this, I can't help but think that there's something terribly meaningful in the fact that Joe Walsh rejected Limbaugh in his later years and at his end. Walsh gained prominence as a voice of the rising Tea Party. He is very conservative, but his constant principled resistance to President Trump proves that he is not a fascist.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And it turns out what Limbaugh was really selling, what he was preparing the American right for all along, was fascism. If you want confirmation of this, you need look no further than how America's most prominent neo-Nazis reacted to Limbaugh's death. And... Chris Cantwell openly sees Rush Limbaugh as the man who invented his style of content, who made his career possible.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
He's in jail right now because he made a bunch of illegal threats and stuff. But he was interviewed for another fascist podcast by a guy named Jared Howe on like right after Limbaugh's death. And in this clip I'm about to play, the crying Nazi Chris Cantwell discusses his reaction to learning about Rush Limbaugh's death.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
You knew.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Catherine Limbaugh.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
So. That's I mean, you know, you he's legitimately affected by this. He's mourning Rush Limbaugh, this Nazi, and he's not the only Nazi mourning Rush Limbaugh. The Daily Showa is one of the most prominent Nazi podcasts on the Internet. The word Shoah is the Hebrew term. I think it means calamity for the Holocaust. So it's literally this is the daily Holocaust.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And it is maybe the most prominent Nazi podcast on the Internet. Now, TDS, as its hosts call it, has been on the ears for years at this point since before Trump was in office. And the hosts of the daily Shoah consider Limbaugh to be something of an idol now. Now, these guys are hardcore Nazis, so they consider Rush a moderate, and they do demean him at times for that.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
But they also recognize that he paved the way for their financial success and cultural influence. And in this next audio clip, you can hear several members of the Daily Shoah, can't emphasize that name enough, learn live about Rush Limbaugh's death and the emotional impact it has on them is undeniable.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
I wouldn't be here, says host of The Daily Shoah, without Rush Limbaugh. I can't think of a more damning thing to say in a man's passing, but that he was truly, honestly mourned by Nazis. Yeah. You know? Yeah. At the end of the day, that's what you can say about Rush. And that is the end of our episodes on Rush Limbaugh.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
How you doing, Paul?
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
I am absolutely going to dance on his grave.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And people are actively making plans to shit on your grave. Yeah. Because you materially harmed their lives. Yes.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
For billions of humans. Yeah. Rush Limbaugh had a material, significant, negative impact on billions of people, many of whom are yet unborn. Yeah. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Rest in piss brush. I wish the lung cancer had worked faster. You know? Yeah. Anyway, Paul, you got some pluggables to plug at the end of this upbeat episode?
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Big TDS fan. By the way, I want to shout out and give thanks to Daniel Harper of the wonderful podcast I Don't Speak German, which is the deepest dives you're going to find on...
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Amazing. PaulFThomkins.com. Well, that's going to do it for us here at Behind the Bastards. So go out into the world, tie one half of your brain behind your back, and then die because that would actually kill you. That would immediately lead to your death. Exposed brain. There's a reason we have skulls, people. Keep your brain inside of it. Yeah. Anyway.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yeah, I don't think it can because this propaganda ecosystem churns out people who would fight to the death rather than have somebody who on paper is supposed to agree with them face consequences for blatantly criminal activity.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
You can draw a fucking line between kind of the things that rush starts because it has an impact on, on liberals in the left too. You've got this. It's, it's big. And it's because obviously with the fairness doctrine, nobody ever heard anything from the far left, right? The far left, in fact, was criminally prosecuted a lot of times for their opinions in this period. Yeah. But the,
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
the positive thing about the fairness doctrine is that it was a large part of why there was a broadly agreed upon understanding of the basic, a basic reality in the United States, right? Yeah. That we don't have anymore. And when you lose that, I kind of think when you lose that, the only like things inevitably escalate to deadly violence. Yeah. Yeah. Um, And that's bad, right?
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Not that, again, under the Fairness Doctrine, Americans were led into Vietnam, were led into Grenada, were led into Panama, were led into all these horrible, horrible things. Obviously, it did not mean that Americans had an accurate understanding of the world. But when they had an inaccurate understanding of the world, it was still broadly similar, right? Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Is better than where we are now, I guess. I think it is at least less toxic. I guess you could argue the United States had more power. The government had more power to pursue violent activity overseas and stuff. I don't know. I don't know. It's a complicated issue, but whatever. Whatever you can say about Rush Limbaugh. He was not a dumb man. He was a huge bigot, though.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
And that 1990 New York Times write-up makes it clear that, among other things, he was quick to realize that rampant misogyny was an incredible marketing tactic. This was, as we discussed in our last episode, always cloaked in a thick haze of irony. Quote, This is Rush. I am outraged! And there is Sergeant Major Molly Yard leading a battalion of Amazons with PMS over the hill.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
That would be enough to scare the pants off of anybody.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Rush. Rush Limbaugh, everybody.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
It's not. It's not.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
He wasn't. It's just that he was saying the bigoted, terrible things that a lot of bad people wanted to say. Yeah. And the fact that it was so horrible and the fact that it scratched their id made them laugh and made them think he was a genius because somebody was finally telling them it was okay to be as shitty as they kind of wanted to be from the beginning.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Yeah. And it's the same thing with all of these. You've got this kind of strain of comedians who thinks that it's important that they be allowed to say the N-word. Not a single one of them has ever told a good joke involving the N-word, right?
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
It's not funny. You're just going for shock value, right? That's all you're trying to do. And that can be... There's not that no good humor comes from shock value, but again, I haven't heard a single good joke from a white comedian involving the N-word. Yeah. Not that it would be appropriate then, but I haven't heard one, you know? Like... So...
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
From the beginning, the villains of the Rush Limbaugh expanded universe were, as the New York Times explained, "...black activists, gay activists, abortion rights activists, homeless activists, animal rights activists, militant vegetarians, environmentalists, artists with erotic tendencies, and above all, the NOW game." Gang. That's the National Organization of Women. Right. His hatred. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Rush said that his hatred for these people caused him an uncontrollable urge to tweak. Quote, the simple fact of the matter, Limbaugh is apt to inform dolphin savers and tree lovers, is that we are human beings and we are the most powerful, smartest species and we can damn well do whatever we want. And you can draw a line from this kind of the way he's phrasing things.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Rush Limbaugh Episodes with Paul F. Tompkins
Here's like, it's stupid to care about the environment and animals because we're more powerful than them to the like the shit that Identity Europa and Patriot Front, these like explicitly fascist organizations exist. Now we'll put up these signs like these posters of the United States that say not stolen, conquered. Right. Where it's like, fuck the indigenous people. We beat them.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Robert Evans here, and for the holiday season, the end of the year, all that good stuff, we are continuing our normally scheduled Behind the Bastards episodes, don't you worry. But we also are running some special episodes, compilations from new shows we launched this year, and the very best episodes they did.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
We've stitched a couple together so you've got less ads, you can listen to something that maybe you haven't had a chance to check out yet. And today you're going to hear 16th Minute, as in 16th Minute of Fame, Jamie Loftus' excellent new podcast about the main characters of the internet and what happens to them after internet stardom. And here's her wonderful two-parter on Mormon influencers.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Robert Evans here, and I know everybody loves a great deal, but I also know most of us aren't willing to crawl through a bed of hot coals just to save a couple of bucks. Saving money has to be easy to be worth it. No hoops, no bull crap, no sending anything in through the mail. So when Mint Mobile said it was easy to get wireless for 15 bucks a month with the purchase of a three-month plan,
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
I have trouble believing it, but it turns out it really is that easy to get wireless for 15 bucks a month. The longest part of the process is the time spent on hold waiting to break up with your old provider. To get started, go to mintmobile.com slash behind. There you'll see that right now, all three month plans are only 15 bucks a month, including the unlimited plan.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
All plans come with high-speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any Mint Mobile plan and bring your phone number along with all your existing contacts. Find out how easy it is to switch to Mint Mobile and get three months of premium wireless service for $15 a month.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
To get this new customer offer and your new three-month premium wireless plan for just $15 a month, go to mintmobile.com slash behind. That's mintmobile.com slash behind. $45 upfront payment required, equivalent to $15 a month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Additional taxes, fees, and restrictions apply.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
See Mint Mobile for details.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Weird Little Guys
Hey, everybody. Robert here. Because it's the holidays, we will be continuing our normally scheduled Behind the Bastards episodes. But every week, we're also doing a compilation of one of the other new shows on our network. Some aren't so new, but this one is. It's called Weird Little Guys. It launched this year with one of my friends and favorite researchers, the great Molly Conger.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Weird Little Guys
And you're going to listen to a two-part episode, which we've cut together for you with a lot less ads than normal, about a guy named Frank Sweeney. So please enjoy and happy holidays. Robert Evans here, and I know everybody loves a great deal, but I also know most of us aren't willing to crawl through a bed of hot coals just to save a couple of bucks. Saving money has to be easy to be worth it.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Weird Little Guys
No hoops, no bull crap, no sending anything in through the mail. So when Mint Mobile said it was easy to get wireless for 15 bucks a month with the purchase of a three month plan, I had trouble believing it, but it turns out it really is that easy to get wireless for 15 bucks a month. The longest part of the process is the time spent on hold waiting to break up with your old provider.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Weird Little Guys
To get started, go to mintmobile.com slash behind. There you'll see that right now, all three month plans are only 15 bucks a month, including the unlimited plan. All plans come with high-speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any Mint Mobile plan and bring your phone number along with all your existing contacts.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Weird Little Guys
Find out how easy it is to switch to Mint Mobile and get three months of premium wireless service for $15 a month. To get this new customer offer and your new three-month premium wireless plan for just $15 a month, go to mintmobile.com slash behind. That's mintmobile.com slash behind. $45 upfront payment required, equivalent to $15 a month. New customers on first three-month plan only.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Weird Little Guys
Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Additional taxes, fees, and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Hood Politics with Prop
Robert Evans here. It's the start of a new year. We are continuing. We may have a rerun going this week, but we've continued throughout the holiday season to keep a normal schedule of Behind the Bastards out. But we're also running compilation episodes. End of the year started this one to kind of highlight other shows on our network. And right now we've got a best of several episodes of props.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Hood Politics with Prop
Wonderful show. Hood politics edited together so that you get a few less ads than normal. One is on how the DOJ curbed Google and the other is on the other Zionism. So check out Prop Show now. And then next week, everything will be completely back to normal. Although it's not even missing, you know, episodes of Behind the Bastards. They've kept running.
Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards Presents: Hood Politics with Prop
It is our sworn sacred oath to continue putting out episodes of that show from now until the heat death of the universe. So thank you for continuing to listen.
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Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.
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Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.
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Robert Evans here, and this is It Could Happen Here, and boy, it sure is. Now, I don't know where we go from this point, and neither does anyone else. On the moment before I wrote this, I woke up groggy from my chemically-assisted sleep to a barrage of horror. Donald Trump signing anti-trans legislation into law. Elon Musk giving a double fascist salute.
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Donald Trump saluting and dancing with the village people. Proud Boys tramping through the streets of our nation's capital, reveling in their newfound impunity. The dark days have come again because they never really left. All the battles and street fighting and organizing from 2017 to 2020 brought us four years of badly negotiated peace while the rot continued unabated. Rot.
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It's a term I see a lot these days. My colleague and friend Ed Zitron refers to the hell our tech oligarchs continue to force upon us as the rot economy. Charlie Angus, a member of the Canadian parliament, used the term rage rot to refer to now President Trump's Christmas Day message suggesting Canada should become the 51st state.
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Over the last year, I've seen a slew of articles bemoaning democratic decay, the rot plaguing democracy, and the deep rot at the heart of our political system. One thing I have done over the last four years is learn how to efficiently process the carcasses of wild animals. Some I hunt or raise and slaughter, but many are roadkill, harvested from the side of the road.
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My family comes from rural Oklahoma, so perhaps there's some epigenetic hillbilly memory that makes this so satisfying to me. But it's also changed the way I understand the word rot. Rot starts from the bone. If you look at the back leg of an animal that's been hit by a truck, you'll see it spreading a deep black bruise from the ball and socket joint out.
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If your goal is to preserve good meat, then the key is to remove those limbs from the body and then the meat from the bone sooner rather than later. When I think of rot and how to arrest it, I think of dismemberment. This seems to be the one thing that almost every political person in the country agrees with.
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The United States as it is must be dismembered, disassembled, sliced from the rotten bone and changed into something more palatable for whoever holds the knife. Joe Biden and the Democratic Party failed primarily because they refused to start cutting. Their successors will not make the same mistake.
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On the opposing side of the aisle today, I see a lot of angry people arguing about what the knife ought to be cutting and how much better they'd use it if it passed into their hands. That doesn't help any of us right now. Migrants are dying of thirst while vigilantes destroy water drops left by activists who themselves will likely be criminalized in the near future.
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Homeless Americans trying not to freeze to death at night may soon find themselves arrested, forced into camps where they'll be made to labor for pennies. Neo-Nazis cheer as the billionaire behind the throne makes fascist salutes from the White House with smirking impunity. The knife is so far away from our hands, I find myself distrusting anyone who wastes time bemoaning how it ought to be used.
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Where does that leave us, though? Is there anything to do in this deep winter besides listen to the jackals howling outside our doors? I have an answer to this question. Yes, now is the time to try, to test the boundaries of our collective cage. Now is the time to experiment. Since the time of the Founding Fathers, this country and its system have been referred to as the American Experiment.
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One could see the very term as narcissistic, yet another solipsistic gasp of American exceptionalism. But I tend to think the appellation is one we've earned. This country is and always has been a test tube for new, often bad ideas about how a society ought to run. American civilization's only core value is throw shit at the wall and see what sticks.
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That also happens to be the only real way to fight back against authoritarianism. There's a scientific paper I bring up often, The Evolution of Overconfidence, which set out to explain why people so often badly overestimate their own abilities.
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The authors pondered, quote, Overconfidence also leads to faulty assessments, unrealistic expectations, and hazardous decisions, so it remains a puzzle how such a false belief could evolve or remain stable in a population of competing strategies that include accurate, unbiased beliefs.
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Now, the conclusion these researchers came to was that when significant resources are contested between two organisms, the organism most willing to try to take said resources, even if it is not the strongest, tends to succeed, often enough to make overconfidence evolutionarily beneficial. This is the most basic explanation for how fascist movements continue to arise and improbably take power.
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Put simply, they always go for it. January 6th provides us with a fine example. It was a ludicrous, idiotic, reckless burst of stupidity mocked for years by everyone except the perpetrators, who, four years later, find themselves with ultimate power. They didn't win because they were the strongest. They won because they kept trying.
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And the people who should have stopped them feared bad press, the pushback of looking unfair, and so stood back while the fascists made smaller grabs, gobbling up bits of the media, local school boards, and narrative oxygen around issues like immigration. And now, well, we're here. And we'll continue to talk about here after these ads. We're back.
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The coming days will be ugly, yet I feel it's my job to remind you that bad as this is, we are not Weimar Germany, and this is not 1933. Trump and his lieutenants aren't battle-hardened trench fighters. They're Elon Musk and a coterie of half-enthusiastic, half-frightened billionaires who got rich gambling on apps to let you rate your classmates' tits.
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Their foot soldiers are used car salesmen from Encino, not Fricor. The United States is not starving to death, crippled by war. It's irritated, anxious, because its working people have been robbed blind by the same billionaires standing behind Trump now.
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The one thing we do have in common with Weimar is that our fascists now find themselves at the head of a state that capitulated to them, not out of enthusiastic consent, but exhaustion, cowardice, and above all, a feeling that it didn't really matter.
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That last one, the feeling that nothing matters, the system is fucked, there's no point in engaging or organizing, that is the most powerful weapon they have right now. Because that feeling stops you and everyone else from opposing them, from interrupting as they reach out yet again to take something you love or need. But there's a danger here too.
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In moments of stress and anger, the desire to do something, anything, can be intense. And when we're swept up in that mood, the natural tendency is defaulting to the things we know best, the things we've done before, the marches and chants and poster boards we've been walking and shouting and carrying all century long.
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Going back to those tactics without iteration or acknowledgement of their limitations and failures is a road to more failure. I've been to a lot of protests, starting at Zuccotti Park in 2011 and ending last year in Chicago at the DNC. One of the most dispiriting moments of my life was listening to young anti-genocide activists bow to shut down the DNC to, quote, make it great like 68.
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This was a reference to the 1968 Democratic Convention. Mass protests were ignited there when the favorite anti-war candidate, Eugene McCarthy, was rat fucked by Democratic Party insiders in favor of Vice President Hubert Humphrey. The protests were quashed violently with tear gas and truncheons. Protesters chanted, the whole world is watching, and it's been a chant ever since.
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The world may have been watching then, but the war went on. Nixon won election, then re-election, and then finally pulled U.S. troops out of Vietnam after dropping enough bombs on Southeast Asia to have ended several Third Reichs. In 2024, a new batch of anti-war protesters chanted, the whole world is watching, and I can say, unequivocally, it was not.
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The only people watching were me, several other journalists, and of course, some people on Twitter. The police, as they kettled, maced, and arrested members of the crowd, barely seemed to care. The DNC didn't shut down. Kamala Harris was made the nominee. There wasn't even a real anti-war candidate for Party Insiders to ratfuck in her favor.
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Garrison Davis, my colleague and friend, remarked to me afterwards that the DNC had been somehow much more depressing than its Republican counterpart a month earlier. He was right.
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On the stage floor, all the Democrats had to present were aging celebrities and Bill goddamn Clinton, drooling out the same platitudes that led us to the Trump era in the first place and doing their best to ignore delegates who walked out and slept in front of the convention center to protest the genocide in Gaza.
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Meanwhile, in the streets, a lot of very nice, earnest people, alongside a handful of grifters, did the only thing they could think of doing after months of imbibing footage of war crimes. They walked around and shouted. The police and the city largely let them, because they knew none of it was going to change a goddamn thing.
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I felt tremendous optimism right after Joe Biden resigned, not because I loved Kamala, but because it was something shocking, an upset, an experiment, or at least it seemed that way at first. The DNC made it clear that Biden's advisors and consiglieres, the powers behind the throne, still ran the show and would not allow any real change.
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The rot had spread too far, spoiling the meat, spoiling everything. It was my accurate belief in 2020 that the Democratic Party, broken as it was, had the numbers and the organizational capacity to slow the spread of fascism for a short time. It was my inaccurate belief in 2024 that this might still be the case. I had a hope because I'd lost any sense of actual productive optimism.
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We lean on hope when we have no ideas to brace ourselves against. Hope, as George Miller reminded us, is a mistake. If you don't fix what's broken, you'll go crazy. And that's where we are now, going crazy.
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Committed Democrats, the decent, regular people who fill the party, not the soulless shoggoths of capital running things, are going crazy because we returned a normal, decent politician to office. He kept the economy humming along and everyone still hated him. Leftists are crazy for a different reason.
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In 2020, this country saw the largest sustained uprising of its modern history and nothing fundamentally changed. In its aftermath, the oligarchs who control social media set to tweaking, buying, or outright inverting their algorithms to ensure no similar movement would ever gain that kind of steam again. Their efforts have largely been successful.
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And yet many organizers, be they progressive social democrats, communists, anarchists, whatever, they're all still stuck in the same loops. Behind each march to nowhere and tired chant is an equally tired hope.
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The social democrats dream of a giant continent-sized Denmark with cyclists replacing Ford trucks, universal healthcare, good schools, and a bevy of other lovely things both political parties will fight tooth and nail to prevent.
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The communists dream of a new October revolution, but this one will work and not just create a new kind of dictatorship that ages and dies inside the space of a single human lifetime. Anarchists tend to be very good at seeing the flaws and the logic and futility of the hopes of the two previous groups, but they are just as bereft of ideas for how to stop what's coming.
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Some tendencies dream of collapse, maybe even accelerationism, an end to industrial society, and then either living in the woods eating berries, or some kind of solarpunk daydream, wildflowers spouting from rubble. I sympathize, but try offering either future to a single mom who can't afford her five-year-old's insulin and see how excited she gets.
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On the other side of the anarchist coin, you've got the helpers, the people who cheerfully admit they don't know how to solve the big problem, but they do know how to provide free eye exams to homeless people once a month or do water drops down at the border so migrants don't die of dehydration or make it more expensive for the state to bulldoze a forest and build a police training facility.
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If you are where we all are right now, bereft of ideas, staring down the barrel of a nightmare, those are good folks to know. Like everyone else, they're defaulting to what they've been doing. But at least what they've been doing helps people. The larger solutions to our common woes, if they ever arrive, will be something new, something we haven't tried yet.
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I feel very confident that they won't take the form of another march or involve everyone finally agreeing to be the same kind of communist or anarchist or whatever. Sean Fain, chief of the United Auto Workers Union, has called for a general strike in 2028, and so far that is the only clear plan I have heard from anyone that feels like it has a ghost of a chance.
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It is audacious, and I recommend reading what Sean's laid out about it. But half of why I support the idea is because it's audacious. The religious right got to where they are right now in this country by being bold. As I laid out earlier, fascists win because they try, and this is something we need to copy. Shit can be different, but not unless you're willing to try different shit.
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Many pundits and columnists were shocked and horrified by the massive and instant support for Luigi Mangione when he assassinated the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Both the tutting gatekeepers of traditional media and the actually sweating oligarchs characterized this as evidence of bloodthirstiness.
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Some leftists did the same and interpreted support for Luigi as proof that the body politic did indeed have energy for an uprising. I saw something a bit different. More than the actual killing itself, I think people were excited to see someone try something new. Luigi adopted a novel tactic.
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He carried it out in a novel way, and in doing so, he did more to punish one of the oligarchs bleeding us dry than the entire Occupy movement. Novelty is the one thing that ties Donald Trump and Luigi Mangione together. The enthusiastic public response to both men's actions and the simultaneous revulsion of traditional elites are mirrors of themselves.
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In 2024, Trump still had enough novelty to convince people that he might upset the apple cart in a way that benefited them. He rode a global anti-incumbent wave back to the White House. The consequence of this is that he and his are now on their way to becoming the new establishment.
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This is the downside of the fact that most legacy media outlets have started moderating their coverage of Trump, if not embracing him outright. He is being normalized. His toadies, Musk chief among them, are now our legitimate powers. What novelty remains will fade rapidly. I suspect the same thing will be true of the copycats who follow in Luigi Mangione's footsteps.
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Most of his plagiarists won't be good at what they do. At best, newly heightened security will see these people dropped before they get to pull a trigger. At worst, innocent folks will be killed or maimed by bullets and bombs that fail to hit their intended targets, or do, but with a lot of collateral damage. So I don't know what the next new thing to actually work will be.
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But between Trump and Luigi, there aren't many old norms left to shatter. We are in a time of enormous potential. Many new things are about to be tried, and as awful and bloody as the fallout from some of them will be, we all have no choice but to strap in and roll some dice of our own.
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The present is ugly, the future unwritten, but the only way we'll make it a better one is if we embrace boldness, creativity, and perhaps a little overconfidence of our own. And this is not the end of the episode. We've got something else for you folks. But first, here's another ad break. Okay, everybody, we're back.
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And obviously what you just listened to is an essay I wrote about my thoughts and feelings today, the first day of the new Trump administration. I felt like that wasn't quite enough. And the first thing I actually came across this morning when I woke up before I started subjecting myself to a barrage of horrible news was a poem written by a friend of mine, Emily Gorchinsky.
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It's called The Time of Cowards. And I think it's a very useful poem. thing for you to hear right now. I think it's a good companion to what I wrote. So I'm going to let Emily take it away. Before I do that, if you want to read the poem in text form or find her other work, you can go to emilygorchenski.com. That's emilygorchenski.com. Here it is, The Time of Cowards.
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Oh, welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a show where it's now happening here. A thing that we've said in a joking way a number of times, but now it just is. This is, you know, a podcast. We're having a good time. I'm Robert Garrison Davis, my co-host, colleague, and today we're talking about Trump's inauguration with a good friend of ours who was present at the thing itself, Bridget Todd.
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Yeah. You're an OG guest over on Bastard, so it's about time we had you on here. How are you feeling, Bridget, just in general, before we get into the specifics? How are you doing in the first full day of this new era?
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Yeah, it's probably not for the best that, like, right at the same time as this has all happened, the people who make gas station drugs have figured out how to take the chemicals in kratom, which, you know, in leaf form is a generally safe drug, and hyper-concentrate them into basically fucking heroin. So I'm just working on staying away from that shit. Too much of the news, you know?
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I'm keeping myself okay by just eating venison every single day. Smart. But yeah.
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I'm glad you got to experience the health that that actor experienced. Bridget, let's talk about the inauguration. Let's do it. All right. So kind of coming in firsthand, when did you sort of lock down your plans to actually be there?
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I'm going to hide in the mountains with a rifle.
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Yeah. All right. Well, let's get into the vibes. How were they?
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I could talk about statehood all day long. That's such a funny, shitty compromise. You could be there and talk, but you can't do anything. I'm sorry. That's just so fucked up.
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We made Wyoming a state. Have you ever fucking been to Wyoming? Good God. Like...
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Like it's so infuriating. And none of those motherfuckers know a logger.
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Yeah. So I guess first off, like of your friends, how many folks kind of made the same call? Like what was the general decision? Because I'm looking at like footage of Proud Boys marching through fucking D.C. again for the first time in almost half a decade. And like, yeah, where are the people, you know, on this kind of stuff?
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Yeah. And that's that's I guess if I could get across something and people listen, it would be like, don't just show up because they are right now. They have the cops. They have the courts. if they want you to show up in the street, the best thing to do sometimes, I'm not going to say this is going to be consistently the case, but is like, don't give them what they want.
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Don't be where they want you to be. Don't make it simple for them. You know, again, I keep trying to say, and I'm not saying this in like a, I'm so smart. I know what everyone needs to be doing. I don't, but it's like not what we did last time. Cause that, that just didn't, didn't do it. Exactly. Didn't do it all. Didn't knock it out of the park. Yeah. Wasn't a home run.
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Sure. I think some of it is that like the only meaningful definition of intelligence really is the ability to adapt to changing circumstances. And when the circumstances change in the way that they have, and you're like, well, time to do exactly what we tried in 2017, that is not intelligent, right? Like I'm not, I'm not trying to be mean.
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And again, I'm not saying I know what the smart thing is, but it is, we gotta be pivoting. We gotta pivot in a lot of different directions right now. Yeah.
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I've had so many arguments about this with people over the last few days who still insist that like, well, the fascists can't stand you making fun of them. That's what they hate is you laughing at them. And like... I think there was a stage at which that was a valid tactic. And, you know, there may be elements of that in the future. But, like, no, they don't care. They're winning.
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I'm not saying, like, don't fucking make jokes with your friends to, like, keep yourself sane. I'm saying don't mistake dunking on them on social media for doing anything that matters because it doesn't.
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You see, I would almost argue that the weird stuff, I think if they'd stuck with it, there was something there. I think the emphasizing how outside of the American norm these guys were and what we want to accept in our communities, there was something there, but they didn't stick to it. The next big time we saw Tim Walz, he was talking about how he wanted to be friends with J.D.
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Vance on the fucking debate stage. But also, I think that's a little different than just like... calling him fucking orange Mussolini or whatever the fuck. Like, I think there's a point in a messaging tactic. It's like Trump gets mileage out of the names he uses and the way in which that's part of how he got where he is. So I'm not saying that aspects of these tactics can't be used.
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Well, I'm talking about the way in which people, liberals and folks on the left are continuing to do the fucking like drum shit. That's not getting us anywhere.
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Like a little duck. I'd help a baby duck get back to its mom last year. It was just like that. Yeah. Right down to the IQ.
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And that's going to be interesting to see. This is certainly a sign that suggests some embrace, but I'm kind of wondering, if we're looking back to the Nazis, the OGs,
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what the Nazis did was marginalize and actually purge a lot of these guys fairly quickly because the folks that were the best at like rabble rousing and fighting in the streets were also kind of like the least reliable at helping to keep a stable system in the city, right? Like after the Nazis took power, one of the big issues they had is like, we still have a lot of people who are kind of like
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In the middle, including most of the military. And one of the things that keeps scaring them is all these fucking goons running about. And we still want what the goons are doing, which is like certain people beaten and thrown in camps. But we don't want the goons doing it. We want the cops doing it.
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And I guess kind of we're all waiting to see how different or similar what comes next looks to that.
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There's two things. Number one, this is something that he had campaigned on. It's something that there was a lot of support from his base for, you know, like the fact that in order to kind of protect himself, he had to really heavily embrace the idea that nothing bad happened on January 6th. And if it did, it was the fault of, you know, the mean old Biden cops. And so he kind of had to do it.
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The degree to which he shows up and is close or actually directly embraces Proud Boys and guys like Tario is going to tell us a lot. And I think we'll be seeing that very soon. If they are kept at arm's length and kind of letting them out is all they do, then I don't know how much... we're going to see of these guys.
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If there's a real embrace and an attempt to use them as a way to kind of extra legally deal with his enemies, then I think we start seeing them really make inroads and pushes in places like Portland, trying to get people out so that they can do violence to them and then get pardoned or just have the violence ignored and the other people get thrown into prison.
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And I don't really know which way I think that the state is landing right now, which is not to say like I think one is clearly less violent than the other because his other option is he's going to be having his feds do that kind of shit.
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Yes, that's where it's difficult. Or that's one of the many things that is difficult is that like checking out is not the answer, but you simply can't react to everything that happens. Showing up and burning yourself out in the street. It's like the cops continue to do bad things.
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And every time a cop does a bad thing, you and your friends throw yourselves at a police station until you all get arrested. Then you won't be able to do anything else. Because you'll be in jail, you know? And these are hard realities, which is why it necessitates... new kinds of thinking, creativity, you know, it to some extent unsatisfying.
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And I guess part of what I would say is if people are giving you answers to what we need to do that sound very clear and satisfying, you should maybe not trust that totally.
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Because the responsible answer, in my opinion, is that like it's very unclear how to get out of this or what the right things to do here are, right? We just know that what we've been doing hasn't been working. And the first step to wisdom is accepting that.
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Oh, yeah. Well, I waited 28 minutes this time to do it, but at least we have the second one in there. We're back. Bridget, sorry. Where were you going?
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Absolutely not. Yes. They don't give a fuck. Fucking Jake Tapper couldn't roll over fast enough.
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Yeah, that's one of the scariest things is the degree to which they're trying to memory all stuff happening as it happened. And at the same time, okay, yeah, he did a Nazi salute. He's a Nazi. This is not the first thing that's made that clear. We need to move on knowing he's a Nazi, but we need to move on. I don't know.
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I don't know what to do other than maybe there's some utility in spreading clips of him next to the fucking guy from American History X, but... I don't know. I don't know how that's going to help.
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Yeah. I was at Pride in San Francisco in 2020, and it was very big, very happy, but there was like a rind to it, you know? There was like an edge to it of... Are we going to be able to keep doing this? There's a dispensary. I don't smoke, but a friend of mine who I stay with when I'm in San Francisco does. And so I was with them at this dispensary.
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And it had a sign talking about its history, which was that the person who found it. It's a very nice one. It's like an Apple store inside. And the person who started it and ran it did so because when they were younger, their partner had AIDS, HIV and then AIDS, and marijuana reduced some of their symptoms.
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And they had to go buy it in the nearby park, which was a lot uglier of a place and a lot like, it was sketchy. Like they got robbed a couple of times. There was a lot more violent crime.
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And just kind of, there are even in a place like San Francisco, which is so like gentrified in such a way, like when you're talking with like, especially the older members of the queer community, they're not just like,
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Rich out of touch tech people they are old battle scarred queers who went through some of the ugliest moments of this nation's history and we're kind of bracing themselves for it again so yeah I'm very interested to see what it's what it's like this year you know.
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I want to talk a bit about the speech that that bishop gave at the Trump's first church service as president the second time around, because that is of all of like the fucking media people getting clapped at for making fun of, you know, whichever, you know, Hegseth or whoever. Yep. That I think actually did matter a little.
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At least it was the there was the courage of saying it to their faces in a way where their reactions were had to be filmed.
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Exactly. Yeah. And to be very clear, if you didn't catch this, the right Reverend Marianne Budd, B-U-D-D-E, who was the Episcopal Bishop of Washington during a church service where Trump and Vance and basically everybody in the new government was sitting, made a direct plea. Quote from this from an NBC Washington article referencing Trump's belief that he was saved by God from assassination.
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Budd said, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. And then she referenced specifically transgender people, queer people, people in democratic families, independent families who are frightened right now about what the new administration means, as well as migrants.
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And she made a point of saying, like, the vast majority of whom are not in any way criminals. Yeah, like, regardless of whether or not they have the right paperwork. Yeah. There was rage on Vance's face, which is part of why I'm like, that's an act of actual courage. There's been one Republican representative who said that she needed to be deported, Bud. Jesus! Born in New Jersey.
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Deported back to New Jersey? Yeah. Representative Mike Collins of Georgia. So one of your guys, Gare. Oh, thanks, thanks.
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Now, I do think we should be deporting large numbers of people to New Jersey just because my old boss and friend Daniel O'Brien lives there and I want to fuck with him a little bit, make the traffic worse.
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Yeah, I can think of like one tech guy with a lot of money who's turned out to have any kind of a backbone, and it's the guy who made that fire-watching app that everyone in California is using right now, WatchDuty, who's basically said stuff along the lines of like, I don't know, I see all these other guys who got rich in tech talking about going to Mars, and I think it's much more useful to try to help people survive on Earth, something along those lines, and has made a critical, like it is a critical, life-saving piece of technology that actually is...
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what we should hope for from tech, you know? Anyway, Bridget, what else did you want to kind of make sure we got into today?
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Oddly enough, one thing that's given me comfort is like Trump has twice in the last day, both when talking about Gaza and when talking about North Korea, weirdly enough, gone under digressions about how good it is a place to build condos and the degree to which he's still focused on like real estate deals as opposed to the broader fascist project.
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is hopeful just because like he is a bottleneck through which a lot of this has to cover. And he is clearly not as personally obsessed with every aspect of this as guys like Stephen Miller, right? Like he even makes fun of Miller a little bit for that kind of stuff. So there's a degree to which like, well, his own personal eccentricities, there's aspects of this that might slow down.
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Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.
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Oh, welcome to Executive Dysfunction, a podcast that if you... ED? Electoral dysfunction?
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It's a fake Napoleon quote from a movie made in the 1970s in the Soviet Union. I believe the name of the movie was Waterloo. That rules. It's famous because they had some massive thousands and thousands of actual like soldiers, like set piece battles. But yeah, that's where the quote, I think the quote may have another origin, but that's the famous origin. It probably was never said by Napoleon.
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Yeah, it's the stuff like, you used to not be able to talk about being a king anymore. Yeah. Pretty recently. That's kind of the whole point of this country. There's a state where the whole motto is Sic Semper Tyrannis.
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It's company policy that we all wear body armor while recording because of an accident that occurred several weeks ago. We don't need to get into it. Garrison, please continue.
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Yeah, which RFK Jr. helped to cause by pushing a shitload of anti-vaccine propaganda here. Something like 80 people died, most of them children.
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Well, which leads to a separate problem. But, you know, if you go to childcoffins.com and put in the promo code, it could happen here. Anyway, 10% off. Yeah, RFK gets you 20% off. It's good business to be in.
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Yes, more children with handguns, less children on antipsychotics.
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4G, 5G cell tower shit. Great, great. Yeah, yeah. No, no. I am excited for people to both not have food and also not have Adderall. Yeah. That's really going to make quite an interesting mob.
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No, we are going to see stockbrokers leaping out of windows at rates unheard of.
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That's true. Adderall is going to be worth more by weight than gold. People, Vyvanse will be the new legal currency.
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Would it have to have direct involvement by her in helping people to evade ICE?
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Yeah, time for Tariff Talk. Tariff Talk! Dan, I'll insert a little musical jingle here for Tariff Talk.
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Tariff talk, tariff talk, talking about tariffs.
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there's even i don't know if it'll it's going things are going to change enough to have a big influence they probably won't on the next german election but afd saw its first drop in support in a while after jd vance endorsed them still doesn't have any juice quick send him to the uk we could kill reform now send him to the uk yeah
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Yeah. There was also a special education program dedicated to helping young adult special ed kids transition into the workforce that got cut. And the suspicion is because it was a child program that included the word transition. Like, we're not going to know for a while the precise reason, but all of this lines up pretty well.
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I mean, and they're doing that elsewhere, too. I just, yeah.
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Absolutely. You know, I think we, well, actually, we should probably call it as an episode before I make any more jokes about air travel.
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I do not want to now. That said, it is worth noting, I think there's two things that are worth noting. One is most of what people are pointing out as like scary crashes are crashes that the same number happened at this point last year when it comes to like small aircraft. Yeah.
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those are much more dangerous than cars, like tiny personal aircraft, which is why I always enjoy at CES when they try to sell even less regulated flying cars.
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But I also think from a political standpoint, no, we should actually absolutely every single plane crash, even if it's a tiny plane crashing and not tied to... the greater shit with the FAA, all of them should go on Trump's head. It's not about what's true. It's about what you can use to make political hay. And this is something that you can hurt Republicans with.
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Every time someone dies in a plane crash, lay it at their feet, right? Like, what do you get from being honest?
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Oh, yeah, yeah. specifically for like American soil they're definitely going to get people killed but like the way that you do that is not wait until okay this is finally the one that it's fair to attack yeah yeah yeah you make it you make every time this gets in the news you make it on their head you know
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They fired the guys whose job is to transport and make sure no one steals nuclear weapons. The one kind of cop we can all agree we need as long as we keep having those things.
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I have an episode on this that I'll put out at some point, but you're getting to a thing that I've been worried about for a while, Mia, which is we are every day getting closer and closer to a nuclear January 6th.
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And what I mean by that is an incident in which a nuclear weapon either gets utilized or gets out of the control of its proper handlers in a way that is dumb in the same way January 6th is. So I'm not talking about you have like an actual military conflict between Russia and the United States. I'm talking about something really fucking stupid.
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Like I'm talking about something incomprehensibly silly. And yeah, millions of people will at least potentially die.
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Well, until someone else gets a nuke, then all bets are off. Like I said, if you are someone who has been fired from the federal government and are transporting a nuke, I have a large backyard. And Cool Zone would love to become a nuclear power.
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Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.
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Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.
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Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.
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Right. People are just like, let's not give this guy the real ones.
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No. Oh, man. And of all the SEAL teams to get killed, too, that's the one that would be the biggest news day. Do you know who would never kill SEAL Team 6, Robert? I'm never going to say never about killing SEAL Team 6.
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Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.
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Okay. Cool. Sure. I do feel like you're underestimating the expense of office space and overestimating the availability of it, but sure, why not?
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But I also I also think you are really, really underappreciating docents. It is not easy to get a docent up to speed. Like, for example, it's a much harder job than you currently have.
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Now, you say that, Garrison, I absolutely would put a seven year old in charge of the FBI. You know why? That's a blockbuster movie. Now, to be fair, that's a 1997 blockbuster, but man, that could- Yeah, no, it's like 30 years ago. Can you imagine a young Mara Wilson running the FBI? Fucking- Kid FBI, yeah. Oh, perfect.
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They also put Will Wheaton in charge of the CIA. Yes! Damn. All right, you know what, Garrison? This podcast is done. You and I are writing a screenplay tonight. With the power of AI, we can just generate this whole movie instantly. Perfect. With a truly ghoulish guest appearance by Robin Williams. Just the worst taste imaginable.
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Yeah. Great. Well, it seems like it's going to end well for everybody. I don't know. What do you think? Do you think he's going to get confirmed? Because he's one I'm seeing people are focusing now that Gates is out. People are focusing way more on Hegseth, which is probably the priority because, my God, that man should not be leading the Department of Defense anymore.
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Because he's going to start a war, yeah. He's going to drunkenly and accidentally start a war. I'm not even worried about him launching a conflict with China, right? We're going to wind up fighting an insurgency against the Portuguese because he gets fucking hammered and mixes up a couple letters. I mean, I'm also really concerned about Tulsi Gabbard.
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Gabbard is top of my list because she has just never met a dictator she doesn't like. And yeah, that's a scary person having that job.
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She's evil, but smart and incredibly power hungry. That's all that matters to her is getting into power. And she has things that she believes and what we know of the things that she believes is chilling. Like, yeah, but that's, we don't, we're talking about someone besides Tulsi today.
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See, again, I'm sympathetic. Everything I do is for content, Garrison. That's just the way the world works now. The content must flow.
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Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.
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It's a performance enhancer. You know, if we could convince, well, let's see, if we could convince Joe Rogan COVID's a performance enhancer, I don't think we could get Joe Rogan's fans to spread any more disease than they already do. Than they already do, yeah.
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Now, we should have called the COVID vaccines no COVID-em. It's a good name. That was just leaving money on the table. Or Novid. Novid's good. Novid would have been a great name. Novid's good.
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It's, it's, I mean, it probably will wind up being much more dangerous, but there is a version of this where the FBI just pivots to selling supplements. All right. Like where you, where you get, where you get your estrogen and testosterone from the FBI. Ooh. Look, as long as it's marketed as like a performance enhancer.
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Yeah, they're going to start. Yeah, with them. I mean, it looks like just based on his enemy list, they're going to start with
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biden administration officials and people in the government but like it won't end there it's going to depend on what happens like it'll be a reactive violent organization which to a degree it always has been but there's always been like more of a sense of like predictability that will not be present
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The one thing we all used to be able to agree on is that we don't like kings here.
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R-U-S-S-I-O-N-I-A-N-S. This is the kind of thing the FBI should be cracking down on. Yeah. So that's all I'll say about that.
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Well, no, because, OK, you know what? I don't think it is. But it came from the opposite side. You remember when the fucking Krasenstein brothers put out that children's book about Robert Mueller? No. No. Yeah. No, you're right. Yeah.
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With Weave Bannon because his hair was a weasel, I think. Yeah. This was another lie. This was another lie from Cash. The Krassensteins beat you to this. This is truly the tier of man we're operating with. I'm going to start pulling every connection I have to somebody in Congress so that when he's being confirmed, I can get up and hit him on this.
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You claim to have written the first children's book that I bring in the Krassenstein brothers? No. Oh, they're going to sell MTG on crypto.
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Dinesh, who has been forced by a court to announce in public that he did not uncover any scheme.
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That's a shame. And I'm just double checking something. Yes. And he stole the name of his song from a Metallica album. One of the better Metallica albums. This is the one that has one on it. Oh my God. You son of a bitch.
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Yeah. It'll be interesting to see the current FBI agents react to that. But I guess we'll see. We're all going to learn a lot about the FBI one way or the other.
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No, and I think that's one of the things I have no desire in focusing on, like what Trump is doing. That's like he's breaking the law. He's violating a norm. Like, I want to hear, you know, what are you going to do to stop it? Right. What is actually being done to try to resist this? Right.
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Like otherwise, it's at least when it comes to stuff from elected leaders, you know, I'm just not interested in like, oh, he broke another law. Yeah, that's what he does. What comes next?
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Ah, welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about the things that are happening all around us, including, shockingly, in the last week, something we did not expect two weeks ago, the fall of the Assad regime. Yeah.
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Which, our official stance as a network is that, fuck him, this is pretty good, but a lot of people feel differently, and to talk with me about that, another guy who's always angry about Syria, and also has been to Syria, James.
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And, you know, just as a note, I think a lot of the people podcasting about this right now are talking about a place they've never been, although James and I have not been to Idlib, so... No, it's true. We're going to be fairly focused on our experiences in the Kurdish regions, but at least we're not just bullshitting about a place that we've read about on the internet.
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Yeah, we... I briefly looked at regime-held Syria. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Over from Kamishlo, where is kind of the governance capital of Rojava, but is also a big chunk of it was held by the Assad regime. So you would just periodically see that fucker's face on the wall as you were crossing the street. Yeah.
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Yeah. Not advised by the old safety people, but... No. One of the sketchier cities I've been in. Yeah. Because of the presence of regime troops. Yes, yes. Everything else was lovely. Yeah.
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Assad, bad man. Stay away, bro. Stay away. Yeah. He's like, you're going to fucking die. Way to be a fucking Haval. Yeah, yeah.
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No, very few dudes in suits I want to see a statue of.
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Assad now seems to be. I think, look, I made the call About two days before the regime fell that I felt he was out of the country based on some reporting, including reporting from the Syrian regime that he'd gone to Iran first. I think he left days before it fell. I don't think he's, yeah, he's got enough instinct for self-preservation that I think he got the fuck out of there.
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Great place for him to be working. Yeah, wonderful. Cool stuff.
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long legacies of authoritarian socialist how do i say this like the authoritarian socialist media project and that kind of colliding with the iraq war anti-era anti-war movement yes you know yeah all the whole hands-off syria thing that groups like the psl the party for socialism and liberation were doing when the rebels started this offensive being like we've got to stop and
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you know, these U.S.-backed rebels from taking, you know, Syria for the empire. And it's like, man, the fuck, it's not the U.S. that was primarily backing the rebels that did most of the fighting. Like, these guys are Turkish-backed, you know? Yeah, yeah. The extent that that even matters, right? Like, this is not, the CIA did not orchestrate all of this.
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The guys the CIA were really trying to back in Syria basically all died. Yeah, they've gone.
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Yes, some of them. But even that's not the bulk of the weaponry that those fuckers are using.
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We stumbled backwards accidentally into exactly once supporting the good guys in a conflict, specifically in the conflict with ISIS. Yeah, like a broken clock. And we immediately, ever since, we have been trying as hard as we can to pull back and, you know, betray them. Yes. To their deaths. Like, that is the story of U.S. support of Rojava.
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Now, part of what gives fuel for that is there are a number of photos of, like, U.S. troops really vibing with the YPG and YPJ. And they're vibing with them. And you and I could both say this, having been with those people, they're nice.
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Hard not to see a bunch of young women who left ISIS captivity and immediately said, give me a gun. I'm going to learn how to use it and be like, yeah, that's pretty cool. Good for you.
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Oh, well, speaking of, well, actually not speaking of the IDF, thankfully, but speaking about maybe the California State Highway Patrol, here's some ads.
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Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about Garrison Davis talking to me. Also, the world falling apart. How do you feel about that, Gare? How are you doing?
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Certainly the only multi-ethnic democracy in the Middle East that's functional. Yeah.
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No, exhaustion is a factor here. You really cannot emphasize enough how long HTS and the SNA have been at this and how fucking tired, particularly HTS, has to be. This has been... more than a decade of constant terror and violence. So I do think that that's going to be a factor in like what happens next. I should hope it will be.
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there's some people who need to be summarily executed you know yeah if you're gonna shoot someone fuck it yeah you're looking at the photos of just like thousands of shoes and decomposed bodies dissolved with acid at sednaya prison yeah like you're liberating those places you catch anyone who was working there i'm not gonna say that that's a bad thing to do i might do the same thing in their situ in their circumstances
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Yes, yes. And they are going to be catching. There are a lot of mokbarat, you know, secret police guys who didn't get out, who were thrown on. We've got videos of them leaving the palace, throwing on civilian clothes. Yeah. And I'm not going to be shocked if a lot of the justice process of that is ugly.
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Now, I do suspect that Jolani is going to at least grab a chunk of those guys and do trials because he is really looking for state legitimacy, you know? And that's one way you get it. Yeah, that's his project now. But that's not going to be how all these guys go down. No, some of these guys are going to die. Yeah, they're just going to get fucking got.
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Yeah, what do you believe, you know? If you're just torturing it to be like, well, no, you and I both read that there was a post earlier today with someone being like, these leftists, purity politics, you know, to be angry that Assad kept a lid on radical Islam and ISIS and just didn't do it super cleanly. And it's, man, he was fucking gassing children. Like, what do you, where are you here? Yeah.
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Yeah, yeah. Something could happen. We could have a Songham and Telerian kind of situation, right? Yeah. Who's the Armenian who shot a member of the Turkish government in Berlin.
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We could have something like that go down. God willing.
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Yeah, he's probably going to be going back and forth to Dubai. There's some Syrians who wound up in Dubai. Somebody might stab him. Yeah.
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We've already got our Scaramucci. I was going to make a Scaramucci joke, but your joke was much better.
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Yeah. We've never had a knife advert, have we? No, I don't know that we have, and I would sell the hell out of knives. Mm-hmm, yeah.
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Oh, yeah. There was literally at one point they had an Ottoman-era black powder cannon on the back of a flatbed that they were using to hit regime positions.
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fucking amazing stuff like the only the only i thought the top of like that sort of thing was when fucking insurgents in afghanistan would use 17th century jazails to shoot at u.s troops but the ottoman cannon is really a was that's a flex yeah yeah it was a huge flex they uh they also work you know they fired propane cylinders out of uh huge tubes these improvised mortars they call hell cannons like
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Uh, not thrilled. Kind of worried. Not thrilled. Matt Gates really seemed like the kind of guy you use to make your sketchy secret police. And Kash Patel is, I guess, your backup to that guy. Totally. Yeah.
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Yes, yes. I'd met a number of people who had, and some who had also had to flee, like from Aleppo and whatnot, because... because they had been on rebels fighting the Assad regime, and some had wound up in the SDF, some were just civilians living in the area.
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There was also a number of folks who commuted to and from regime-held territory, just because if you were someone that wasn't particularly wanted, you could do that. It was a very confusing situation for a lot of people.
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Yeah, I mean, and that's just the norm for dressing. If you're fighting in a war anywhere on the planet now, like whether you're the Russian army or some militia in Syria, it's, you know, plate carrier, usually like some sort of fast helmet. You've got, you know, a belt with sidearm mag pouches and then usually either an AKM or some sort of AR style weapon. Like everybody dresses that way.
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everybody looks very similar now because it's just the most kind of, I mean, number one, there's a lot of that gear lying around and it's cheap. And number two, like it works. It's a loadout that works. Yeah. It's very practical for what they're doing.
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Yes. Yes. It's also looks cool. It looks like being in a movie. And that is a, that matters a lot to the kind of young men who start fighting in wars.
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Yep. One of the ways I like to think about it that is crucial for people to understand is that Syria has largely been the laboratory in which the 21st century was cooked up. Like, all of our futures have to some extent been built in Syria, both like...
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this is where we get a lot of the fuel behind the right wing surge that has been occurring over the last few years started because of the refugee crisis, you know, but also a lot of the tactics and weapons shit that like Israel is doing right now in Gaza, like Syria was the lab to a significant extent for how authoritarian regimes would crack down.
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And it was also the impetus behind a lot of the most significant things that have been happening over the last decade and change. So yeah,
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Hey everyone, Robert Evans here, and this is It Could Happen Here. Obviously, one of the things that's been happening here, probably the biggest story of the last week or so at least, is the shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson by an alleged shooter named Luigi Mangione. Magione is, you know, an interesting character.
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People have had a lot to say about him, and so I went through his online footprint, everything I could find on his social media, and I wrote an article for my sub stack, Shatterzone, and I'm going to be reading that in a slightly amended form for you now as today's episode.
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I've spent much of the last 10 years reading manifestos and being a fly on the wall in different little online bolt holes where extremists plan and seek to incite mass shootings. When Luigi Mangione, the suspected shooter of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, was arrested at a McDonald's, it didn't take long for digital sleuths to put together a comprehensive record of his online activity.
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I will tell you now that nothing he read or posted explains why he gunned down an insurance executive better than this single image in the background of his Twitter profile. And the image is, of course, of an X-ray showing four screws in someone's lower base spine, apparently due to a lumbar spinal fusion surgery.
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The day after I wrote this article, the New York Times published a piece after finding Luigi's Reddit. The piece by Mike Baker, Mike Isaac, and my old boss at Bellingcat, Eric Toller, confirms that he had a spinal fusion surgery, that he had dealt with back pain for years...
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which had been minor and then gotten much worse after a surfing injury, and had grown even worse after slipping on a piece of paper, caused persistent problems, including pain when he sat down, twitching leg muscles, and numbness in his groin and bladder, according to the New York Times.
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He had that spinal fusion surgery, which he had been deeply frightened of ahead of time, but which resolved those symptoms, and then he continued to have other symptoms, probably unrelated to the back pain,
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It's unclear if the back pain came back, but what is clear is that he wrote constantly online about pain and about his struggles with various other health issues, including a persistent brain fog that he seemed unable to get care for.
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His friend RJ, who lived with him at an intentional community for digital workers in Honolulu starting in 2022, confirms that Luigi suffered an injury shortly after taking a basic surfing class after moving there. This laid him up in bed for about a week, unable to move. His friends had to seek a special bed to help him with the pain.
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In general, we have ample confirmation that he was someone who dealt with a series of escalating health issues that changed him from an extremely active, physically fit young man into somebody who felt like they were no longer able to do or enjoy the things they had previously been able to do and enjoy. Now, this is most of what we know about the health history of Luigi Mangione.
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as of December 10th now, when I record this, 2024. As I write this, a purported manifesto is making the rounds online, which discusses health issues his mother faced. It's still unclear if that manifesto is real. Ken Klippenstein has finally gotten access to what he claims is... The draft of the manifesto that the shooter had on him when he was arrested by the police.
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I don't know if that's a manifesto or something he wrote while nervous because he largely addresses the cops in it and tells them, you know, what to expect when searching him. But anyway, Again, at the moment, this purported manifesto that was also posted on Substack, very unclear as to whether or not that's real. So for this today, we're going to stick with what we can verify.
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And what we can verify is that Luigi Mangione suffered from chronic back pain. He had five different books in his Goodreads that he read about dealing with back pain and healing from back pain, as well as other chronic health issues. If he is the shooter, then we can confirm he also chose to act out by targeting an insurance CEO.
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The New York Times has stated that he was arrested with a 262 word manifesto, which has since been leaked. And in that manifesto, he describes the executives who run insurance companies as parasites who, quote, continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it. In addition to all this, we know that Luigi came from a wealthy family.
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Great. Okay. I'm sure he was good at that job. I'm sure he doesn't have any really embarrassing failures during that period of time.
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His grandfather made millions running a series of country clubs, nursing homes, and office buildings and hospitals. One of his cousins is a Republican state legislator. It is unclear if Luigi had any access to the family money, but he was clearly financially comfortable enough to move to Hawaii and pay to join an intentional community.
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He had engineering degrees and a promising early employment history. This is a man who had options. He could have been almost anything he wanted to be. And the thing that he ultimately chose to do with his life after suffering a debilitating series of health issues was to shoot the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Luigi Mangione was radicalized by pain
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It's a well-known fact that most terrorists tend to be radicalized in communities. Much of my career was spent watching 8chan turn from an image board dedicated into Gamergate into a machine for generating white nationalist mass shooters. These people often appeared as lone wolves to the untrained eye, but they were radicalized intentionally in and by a community.
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Much will be made in the coming days and months about Luigi's online footprint. I will go into some detail about where he spent his time and how we should characterize it, but I want to be clear at the outset that his intellectual diet does not seem to be what made him choose to take action, although it may have influenced the specific kind of action he took.
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Luigi followed a lot of accounts on Twitter that are wildly popular with young men like Joe Rogan. He listened to Jordan Peterson and Tucker Carlson and agreed with them on certain things, but he also had cogent criticisms of their arguments and presentation. Here's what he said about Jordan Peterson on May 14th.
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This is why Jordan Peterson always bothers me, overcomplicates everything he says aloud, wasting everyone's mental bandwidth and having to decipher it. The best teachers are the best communicators. Clear, succinct, simple language, which does kind of gel with the fact that he wrote three words on the bullets he used to shoot that CEO.
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Luigi also expressed frustration with wokeness and expressed opinions common on the libertarian tech-influenced right, like a belief in the social benefits of Christianity without expressing popular religious beliefs himself. I found one post where he talks about how nature abhors a vacuum and shares an article about how Christianity's decline has unleashed terrible new gods.
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Some of his posts took the form of memes typical to online discourse of this type. But I've also read an essay that he wrote when he was 15 years old discussing how Christianity persevered over paganism in ancient Rome. And that essay exhibits a longstanding interest in this topic and a capacity to treat it with nuance. His paper is very well written, particularly for a 15-year-old.
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And while his conclusions are highly arguable, it's not the work of someone hopelessly brainwashed by culture war bullshit. Luigi liked to think and read and come to his own conclusions. He was interested in AI, in cryptocurrency, in life extension, and in a constellation of tech bro-adjacent attitudes and philosophies often described as the Gray Tribe.
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I found one post where he talks about a senior speech he gave on the future. Quote, topics ranging from conscious artificial intelligence to human immortality. The term Gray Tribe was coined by an influential rationalist, blogger, and psychiatrist named Scott Alexander Siskind.
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He used it to refer to an intersection of nerd culture with Silicon Valley-influenced ideology descending from the online rationalist movement. This community existed outside of traditional right-left ideology. Now, I've not found any evidence that Luigi was a specific fan of Scott, but he expressed appreciation for several figures associated with this big tent movement, including Peter Thiel.
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If we described Scott as representing the more liberal flank of the Gray Tribe, Luigi seemed to be drawn to folks closer to the right-wing side of things. The worst person to use this terminology would probably be Teal associate Balaji Srinivasan, who has used Gray Tribe framework to describe his ideal big tech takeover of San Francisco and purging of progressives.
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However, I must stress that Luigi Mangione never expressed any support for this end of the ideology that I can find. He was a young man of libertarian inclinations who worked in big tech and had ties to San Francisco, but he was also clearly someone still making his mind up about the world.
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As information about him has come out, I have seen people on the left who initially saw his acts as heroic lament that he was a bigoted tech bro. Scott Alexander has been credibly described as a eugenics supporter, as have many other people adjacent to the strains of rationalism and big tech ideology in which Mangione dabbled.
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Luigi's Twitter account does indeed include weird posts from his time in Japan where he theorizes on how to solve falling birth rates by banning pocket pussies and video game cafes. At other points, he complains about Japanese citizens acting like quote-unquote NPCs.
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But race science and eugenics don't seem to have been a focus for him, and I would caution anyone against being overly reductive about a 26-year-old's beliefs based purely on a handful of posts that bear no relation to his actions in the world. The evidence that we have of his online footprint suggests someone who was not unmoved by certain arguments rooted in social justice.
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He expressed admiration for a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five about criminalization of poverty in the United States. America is the wealthiest nation in the world, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Ken Hubbard, "...it ain't no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be."
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It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of the poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor, but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more esteemable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor.
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Now, Luigi is certainly not the idealized leftist icon some had hoped, but he doesn't easily fit into any other box we've got. His interest in gray tribe-adjacent thinkers and self-help books written by productivity hackers like Tim Ferriss is incredibly common among young men. Much has been made of the four-star review he gave Industrial Society and Its Future, the manifesto of Ted Kaczynski.
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But as with the rest of his media diet, he did not view Ted through the simple lens of hero worship. Here's what he wrote, quote, He was a violent individual, rightfully imprisoned, who maimed innocent people. While these actions tend to be characterized as those of a crazy Luddite, however, they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme political revolutionary.
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Now, we know those words, his condemnation of Kaczynski maiming innocent people, are not just words because we have seen the attack he allegedly chose to carry out. Not a series of bombings that killed and maimed innocent people with no real power in our society, but a surgical strike against a man at the very top of the system he hated and one that caused no collateral damage.
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He was capable of appreciating some of Kaczynski's conclusions, but ultimately the quote he chose to highlight in his review came not from the manifesto, but from a Reddit post made by a guy with the username BossPotatoNess, who otherwise mostly commented on the Grateful Dead.
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This post praises Kaczynski for having the balls to realize that peaceful protest has gotten us absolutely nowhere and complains economic protest isn't possible in the current system. As a result, violence against those who lead us to such destruction is justified as self-defense. Quote, these companies don't care about you or your kids or your grandkids.
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They have zero qualms about burning down the planet for a buck. So why should we have any qualms about burning them down to survive? This is not the kind of radicalization pathway our media is good at discussing or analyzing. The things Luigi read and the people he interacted with online absolutely influenced what he did and how.
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But boss potato-ness is not some Nazi on 8chan trying to provoke a shooting spree for the lulz. He's a random dude angry about the things 70% or more of the country is angry about, and he's expressing a lack of faith in a peaceful way forward.
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If you read this post in its entirety, as Luigi did, you can't miss the pain there, anxiety and horror at the inevitability of climate change and the looming knowledge that everything good and green on this earth is being fed into the bloody maw of an industry concerned only with maximizing profit. In more ways than one, Luigi Mangione was radicalized by pain.
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I know many people who suffer with chronic pain and ongoing medical issues. I will tell you that it is not uncommon in dark moments after fruitless hours-long calls about dropped medications or receiving surprise bills for them to joke about what they'd like to do to the executives who run these companies. These are jokes made in moments of despair and pain.
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No one I know would ever act on them because they all have lives, people to care for and to whom they are responsible. They would never really do anything because the consequences to their own loved ones would be so severe. In the months before the shooting, Luigi had cut off all contact with his family. He admitted this in court.
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His parents eventually filed a missing persons report in November of this year, and we have evidence that friends tried to contact him on his family's behalf via social media. As was first noted by a Twitter account, Luigi Mangione expressed interest in the works of Paul Scalise, a tech lawyer, writer, and prominent poster who writes about the Lindy effect, a concept that boils down to this.
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The only effective judge of things is time. Scalise is popular among the set of people Mangione found himself drawn towards and writes about the wisdom of ideas from antiquity. It's not hard to grasp what a man with an academic interest in ancient Rome might see in him. On December 4th, 2024, Paul made this post.
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Look, if you don't have any kids and you're one of these guys just floating around the big cities, you got your education, but you never really used it to make money. You got a dead end back office job and a future of just working somewhere until you're 75 and then dying. Go ahead and do something.
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It's been suggested that this may have influenced Luigi, and I think the timeline makes it clear that cannot be the case. Luigi cut off contact with his family and most of his friends months before this. The evidence suggests that he had planned this attack for quite some time. He arrived in New York City on November 24th on a bus bound from Atlanta, where he did not reside.
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So I don't think this post represents a piece of his radicalization journey, nor was Scalise advocating for people to kill CEOs. But the situation and mindset Scalise described does speak to a lot of young men like Luigi, young and educated, but without intense responsibilities or much hope for the future.
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This subset of society has always overproduced terrorists, revolutionaries, and of course, mass shooters. The United States has a mass shooter culture. Over the last several decades since Columbine, we have grown used to the idea that people who are angry and no longer care if they live or die will sometimes choose to go down killing strangers.
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In most cases, these shootings are totally random, the victims chosen with no concern beyond maximum body count and maximum attention. More recently, especially since 2019, mass shootings have become increasingly politicized. Different extremists, mostly right-wing, have used them to put theory into praxis and earn free PR for their causes.
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I hate that he's got a My Cousin Vinny in his record because that movie is great and it gets me on his side in a way I definitely shouldn't be. Did he come in next wearing like a funeral director's tuxedo? Or a fucking band leader's tuxedo? Whatever. I don't know how to describe the tuxedo Vinny wears in the scene after that. Anyway.
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Most people abhor these actions, but we have grown used to the idea that other people will use such acts as a way to spread messages that might otherwise get ignored. It is not coincidental that the white genocide conspiracy theories from Brenton Terrence's Christchurch Manifesto are now mainstream talking points in conservative politics. Luigi Mangione grew up with all of this.
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He would have come to the same conclusions about the role shootings play in our society as any other reasonably aware person. What he did was, of course, not a mass shooting. But the assassination, his actions afterwards, and his possession of a manifesto were all clearly plotted out by someone who knew the social script for how this kind of thing goes in the USA.
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In the wake of this shooting, every media organization commenting on it has had to grapple with the waves of public enthusiasm for Luigi's actions. Right-wing media figures condemning the left for celebrating this assassination have been criticized by their own readers and listeners. Insurance companies have pulled down lists of their executives from the internet.
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This is because they, too, understand the shooter culture of the United States. Like everyone else, they know that any mass shooting that meets with massive media coverage and interest will spawn copycats. The assassination Luigi is believed to have carried out was new and exciting. It demanded the public's attention in a way that most mass shootings don't.
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At almost the same time the UnitedHealthcare CEO was gunned down, a gunman walked into a religious school near Oroville, California and shot two young children before killing himself. This shooting drew almost no national attention. It was entirely drowned out by the execution of an insurance industry CEO.
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The armed and disaffected young men who are most drawn to this sort of thing will not miss this fact. I believe Luigi Mangione was radicalized by pain. The shooters who follow him will all have their own reasons for what they do, for their own journeys to that violent end. But ultimately, they'll do what they do because Luigi proved it's what gets attention. For now.
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And to be clear, Kash Patel was not dating Marissa Tomei. He could never pull Marissa Tomei. He could never pull. I mean, honestly, Joe Pesci. Who can? Who can? That's...
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Amazing stuff. Let him cook. Crazy stuff. Look, here's the thing, Garrison. If it had gone the worst possible way it could have gone, we'd have been saved at least four interminable books and at least three podcasts.
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People have made this point, but it's guys like this that have convinced me that there's no, at least no like perfectly known to intelligent smoking gun about the Kennedy assassination. That shit would have leaked so quickly. No. If not before Trump was in office, then certainly by the time he was.
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Or at least if there is, it's the kind of thing. There may be a smoking gun that someone who is deeply knowledgeable at the time period would be like, oh, the fact that this guy was here at this time really means that this other thing happened. But Kash Patel doesn't know shit.
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People love rape gangs. People love rape gangs. That was a pretty good Star Trek episode.
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This is your direct info line. This is a tap from the Trump presidency to you.
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It's interesting. One thing I'm curious about. So this is a thing that happened. The last set of Nazis that gained power in a country in a big way, the German ones. There was this this common attitude of like, if only Hitler knew, because Nazi policies didn't help the people that were supposed to help. They hurt a lot of people like they were just bad at everything, like fascists tend to be.
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And there was this attitude that like, well, Hitler can't know. Like, the fact that, like, the country's been handed over to gangsters who are continuing to hurt the people Hitler promised to help, he must not be aware. Like, if he knew, he would fix this.
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So I'm wondering how that's going to play in here as Trump's policies continue to hurt the people who, a lot of the people who voted for him, not the rich people who voted for him, but the people who, like, flipped between him and Biden or whatever. Like, those folks are going to get fucked like the rest of us. And I kind of wonder...
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If there's going to be... When the blowback against X the Everything app will happen, right? As people are like, either I'm being ignored or I'm being called a retard by Elon Musk for complaining that... Can you say that on the air? Elon Musk tweets it randomly to people when they make very valid critiques of the shit that he's doing. That's literally what he's calling people.
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He's saying it every day. Constantly. I'm not using it as a slur. That's just the term he's using. If they comment that their fucking Medicaid got cut because Trump put Dr. Oz in charge of it and Elon Musk calls them a slur, What does that do?
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Twitter anymore no as long if it's news it doesn't the only thing that spreads is yeah like the shit that makes people very angry but keeps them on the site like articles videos if it takes you off site it doesn't mean yeah things that go viral and get spread is like encouraging racial riots yes pogroms essentially
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Yeah, which is what happened last year in the UK, and they're sure trying to do it again.
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You know, we all want there to be an after where there's even the minimal degree of accountability that happened after the Nazis. But, like, what I try to, in my darker moments, think is, like, well, that's another person who, like, really made the argument of, like, what needs to happen when this ends. Because... It's just I want to hurt people. My business is enabling harm.
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I want to get mobs in the street beating migrants like that's Linda's business. That's the business she has willfully attached herself to. And we should all see that. It's very important to not stop talking about it like what it is.
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These people are trying to cause racial violence and they are trying to cause gendered violence and they are trying to cause harm at scale to communities of people that they see financial profit in damaging.
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Cool stuff. I love the Consumer Electronics Show.
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We're back. Boy, I'm so glad that those ads told me that Fragaccio Blow is touring with Bono. I never thought they'd do it, but boy, howdy. And they're singing each other's songs. So, you know, that's really exciting. It's like when Barbara did Celine.
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Or stuff that you're just not interested in because you're not literally buying screens from a manufacturer in China. It's like, that's just not the business you're into because some of this stuff is meant for companies.
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The town that I spent the first seven years of my life in is smaller than one of the rooms CES has held in. It's huge. There's like four of them.
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The villain. The villain of the episode. The villain of the episode and of this year's CES. I have trouble. Can you bring up their name? Because I'm going to want to get this right. Oh, okay. We could be dangerous. We hadn't neither of us had eaten and I had had like a hot dog eight hours ago and walked literally 19,000 steps and also done 40 minutes of pushups in between. So I was starving.
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So we we like shovel food into our faces and we turn the first booth we see is called open droid. Open Droid. Or Open Droids? Droids? Droids, yes it is. There is an S. Open Droids. And it's like kind of Star Wars-y font. It is. And I did ask them if, you know, they had any issues with Lucasfilm. Apparently not yet. Sue them, Lucasfilm, by the way. Sue these kids. Destroy them.
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Crush them. Burn them like Los Angeles is burning down as we speak. They had a giant sign that said R2-D3. Yeah, that's the name of the robot that they're selling. And the robot that they're selling is like an AI-enabled household-helping slash retail robot where it basically is like a human torso with articulated arms and pincher hands.
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on and then the base is like a little tank basically it's got like treads or wheels and it rolls it has wheels yeah and then the torso there's like a tall maybe six foot tall like pillar built into this like rolling base that the torso slides up and down on and this was their way of not making like what musk is trying to do right a humanoid robot where you have to figure out like knees and balance and stuff it's like that or like boston dynamics
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Wheels are right. Wheels are cheap. It'll roll. It works in most situations, you know, and then but you still have the ability for it to articulate and go up higher or go down lower like something that can crouch. But it's much simpler. You don't have to to to deal with nearly as much. And so I saw that I'm like.
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Oh, well, that's at least somebody who's thinking about like, how do we make something like this, like more affordable and less complicated, less to fuck up. And so I start talking with one of the co founders of the company, who is a an Indian guy in his 40s, something around that he had like gray hair, he'd clearly he said he'd spent 20 years in robotics.
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very nice guy you know i i brought up that i thought the design was interesting and he he was very much specifying like here's the things we didn't do because they were too too difficult too inefficient you know this is what we're thinking of this is a machine that can fold laundry this is a machine that can do dishes this is a machine and he was very much specifying and the way he phrases like these are undesirable tasks people don't want to do and this is a robot that can handle those for like small businesses or for households and we do see this as eventually like a
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you know, something like this we want to have in households. But he was more focused on small businesses. And he was, again, very focused on this is a thing that will do undesirable tasks for people, right? And as I started asking more questions at a certain point, I got foisted off to the co-founder of the company,
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You know, I'm assuming co-founder because I think it's just a couple of guys, but maybe I'm wrong about it. Sorry. I got foisted over to the other of the two guys. There were two guys there, right? I'm not sure because they don't have listed anywhere what their role in the company is. I got a co-founder's vibe from them.
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That's how it seemed to be to me, at least in terms of like the way these two were talking. but I don't know the scope of the Open Droids company. Maybe there's a lot more there. Maybe there's like a PR guy. But these were the two guys who were there talking to us.
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So one of them is this very wonky engineer who's been at this a long time and was really focused on the nuts and bolts details and wanted to build a robot that could handle unpleasant tasks for human beings, right? The same thing we've all been wanting to see. So at this point, I'm like, well, this could work. Maybe this is a viable product, right? The second guy, Jack J. Jesinowski.
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So he is wearing what Garrison described as a Jordan Peterson suit because it is half purple and half black. It's a two-faced suit. Split down the motherfucking middle.
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He had wannabe Steve Jobs vibes from his half-unbuttoned shirt and many, many spiritual medallions. to his like Jordan Peterson suit and very much just that like, I am the charismatic founder. And what I bring to the table, my partner knows how to build robots. I'm charismatic. I'm Jack J. Jesanowski. And Jack and I started talking. And boy, howdy, we had us a conversation.
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And I think we're just going to play that. What do I need to do to set this up?
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So, I see there's a lot of folks in the robot space that are trying robots based on the human form.
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You guys have not gone that route. Talk to me about that.
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You just said because the robot can go in the car with you. What do you see people wanting to have a robot in the car with them for?
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Yeah. I agree. Yeah, there's a great speech in the comic series Transmetropolitan about how journalism is a gun that you wire up to your eyes and your ears and several other organs in order to shoot at the world. And that's, I think, a good way to keep yourself doing it when it feels like you're just shouting into a void.
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But it also can't decide, oh, that's actually not a good location to film from. It's not going to look as good. We need to get over here. We need another camera on this side here. We need to get like different angles because we're going to want to edit this together into a thing. And as a videographer, I'm not just a machine. I'm a part of a collaborative creative enterprise.
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That's interesting. I wouldn't have guessed that. One thing that's really compelling to me is your partner, when I came in here, was very much talking about the utility of this in terms of replacing human beings in tasks that are generally unpleasant. Laundry, doing the dishes, cleaning up trash.
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You seem a lot more bullish on robots replacing human beings in what are generally considered to be enterprises people want to do with their time. Is that like a discrepancy that you guys have kind of talked about, or do you think it's something you guys are more on the same page with stuff?
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It's a pretty basic melody. I mean, there's horns in it, but I feel like it's kind of taken a... I feel like it's trying to do pop that it's just thrown some horns in on. This is a little closer to ska. Although it's still... Yeah, it's not really singing. But I guess that's a matter of taste. What do you listen to? This is the worst it's going to be. I hear that a lot.
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It's interesting because GPT-4 took 50 times as much power as GPT-3 to train. There's a lot of mixed reactions on that. We're entering into a period where we're very likely looking at a recession. Venture capital funding, there's a chance it's not going to be what it has been. Does that concern you at all, this vaunted next level for all of this stuff, the energy cost?
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the investment cost is just not going to be born by a market that is not going to be as strong tomorrow as it was today, at least in the immediate term.
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What I'm concerned about is I'm looking at the P&L, right? I'm looking at OpenAI's P&L. I'm looking at the fact that they're losing $5 or $6 billion last year, and we're very good chance it's going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of double that this year. And it's not that there's nothing impressive there.
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It's not that I don't see like, oh, you can generate a song that's got like guitar and trumpets and vocals and stuff in a minute or so. It's not that that's not impressive, but like... A parlor trick isn't a trillion-dollar business, and that's the kind of investment they're looking at. And I do wonder, like, is it not much more reasonable to focus on folding laundry?
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We'll see how well that works in the long term. There have been some interesting polling on the degree to which customers and investors feel trust when somebody's responding to them with an AI. But what's interesting to me more here is the dichotomy between
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What I see here is a very pragmatic choice, which is we're not going to try and remake a human being formed robot and deal with like knees and hips and all of that stuff. We don't need that. We can have it turn up and down on this platform and reach things the same way, melded to what I consider to be kind of a little more pie in the sky.
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We're viewing this as eventually something that can take creative roles and think independently and make things. Which is, it's interesting to me to see that in a company's DNA. What, you guys are eight months out right now? Yep. Is that what you're more interested in?
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Well, I appreciate your time. I know you gave me a lot. I'm going to let you get to the other beat. Thank you. Thank you so much. Nice to meet you, Jack. It was fun.
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He listens to AI-generated music. It's just as good.
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Just very clearly does not have a soul. No. Like nothing would leave the universe if he did, right?
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It's one thing to be like, we want, we have a race car going and so we've got this robot on a track so we can go 70 miles an hour and we're just kind of running on a straight track to follow it because a human being can't move that fast. Sure.
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One thing we've left out of this up so far, so this machine that I described earlier, this robot that goes up and down this rolling base, has a floppy Donald Trump mask over its head.
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As soon as I got up there, I asked like, I could take my jacket off now. Can it fold? And he was like, well, we'd have to reprogram it. And it was this, when I talked to the guy, I was like, cause he, he was like, yeah, we really see this as being, you know, potentially good for, uh, uh, elder care. Sure.
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And you know, we had just seen the product we talked about in the last episode, which for all of it's, I don't know that I think it'll work was a lot of thought and care went into it. I was like, okay, so like what work have you done to build a machine that can like communicate and be helpful to like people who are dealing with health issues in their, their later years?
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And you're like, well, that's why it's open, right? Someone else will, It's open source. Someone else can do that part. So you guys are just saying it can do everything because somebody could potentially code something for it. Yeah, cool.
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Yeah, there could be code. Again, the other guy, the actual engineer, seemed very interested in the nuts and bolts of making an affordable, reproducible machine that could handle specific tasks. And Jack J had absolutely no interest in the actual machine that they were making. This is clearly could not be clear. This is just a stepping stone.
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And he's kind of grossed out by it because it's not replacing all human art with a machine that he owns.
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He wants to take money by owning something that does not provide anything and also put people out of work. Like at no point did he express a desire to do anything other than replace something people were already doing with something worse that tech guys could profit from. That's all there is to this man. He's not a human.
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Yeah. I cannot overemphasize the degree to which there was nothing behind this boy's eyes.
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That's not true. All of our ads are sponsored by real people, even if they're bad people. They're at least people. They live and they love and they hate. And, you know, maybe they have a promo code. Let's let's see.
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He was so surprised that I wasn't impressed by any of the... He was like, you must have heard the lady. Man, I hear them. It's not good. It's like... I made this comparison a few times. If somebody walked in while I'm at a house party and was like, hey, man, I taught my dog to masturbate to pornography with its paws...
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I would be like, well, I mean, that's like, I guess, I didn't think a dog could do that. Like, I am kind of impressed, I guess, but I don't want this.
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There was a solid nine-day news cycle when Barack Obama, newly the president, revealed that he had a BlackBerry that he was continuing to use. I do remember this.
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There was a company called RIM once. And they made a tablet that was pretty good. And we only made a couple of rim job jokes about it. But it didn't do very well. And so I gave it to my dad and accidentally there was still a picture of my dick on it.
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They have a, an NPU or something like that. Yeah.
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You put on the glasses and it's like you've got six monitors or whatever that are all full size.
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It was their own laptop, and it wasn't a great one.
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Oh yeah, that was cool. What's that company name? Because we should be giving out the names of these.
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Like the way it like snapped when you closed just felt good. I'm I think I'm going to buy one like it's it's exactly what I want for traveling, which is the ability to it goes up to like 80 inches of screen and like very good resolution. The ability to just have that plugged in to a battery or the wall and my laptop and like wherever I happen to be.
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I've got a movie screen that I don't have to worry about the fucking hooking up a TV to my laptop or some shit.
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Yep, I think they're selling them for $250 right now.
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For the Kickstarter. It'll go up a little when it's a product. But we saw it works. They had a lot of... They had tracking and stuff, so it automatically would focus and shit.
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Yeah, obviously this isn't the full review because we don't own one, but from everything we could tell by looking at it in the moment, it seems like a good product. We tried it out.
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Things could always be worse. Yeah. But I think where we'll end is, and this actually is not entirely in order, because this is the next, after we had that conversation with our friend Jack J, which just left me thinking about, like, some people aren't really people, right? That's what I kept thinking about.
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It's all for rubes. It's soulless. We immediately walk over, and we just kind of, like, randomly turn a corner, and there's, like, a human shin, like, tibia and fibula, basically, with, like, a carbon fiber, you know, frame around it. That's roughly the shape of like a person's lower leg, lower leg. And it's called bio leg.
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It's a powered microprocessor knee made in Japan where it is a prosthetic, but unlike most prosthetics, it is powered and has a muscle built into it. So like when you lift up your prosthetic, it doesn't hang and it doesn't lock. It actually has a degree of motion and it feels like what lifts the rest of the legs.
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What your remaining muscles like it measures based on like it can like take measurements from them and it can act intelligently based on that. And I know that it works because the inventor was there and he was a man who was missing his leg below the knee and had built this for himself.
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And that's like really the thing that is like so both like addictive and also like this like very tonal whiplash you get at CES is you will go from like this dead-eyed con man trying to scam the world so he can do God knows what kinds of other harms with absolutely nothing, nothing inside of him at all. And then I lost my leg and I built a better prosthetic to help the entire world.
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And that's like 30 seconds between those two experiences.
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award-winning like tech innovations it's changing your as a person who has lost your lower like changing being able to like have a normal gait and balance again like massive potential to improve people's lives as a result of this Yeah.
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The company is, again, Bionic M, and it's the BioLeg.
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This closes our actual week. Let's go get fucked up and eat Japanese food.
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Yeah. I'm down. Let's do it. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.
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The RNC was a good time. Legitimately was a good week.
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James, let me just tell you, I think we can all look forward to a white Christmas this year.
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Yeah, there's no one left in New Jersey now. They've all been taken away by these unidentified drones. That actually happened three days ago. It just took a long time for the rest of the country to notice or care.
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Yeah, I agree, Garrison. I think that the fact that there are serious people who represent serious unions talking about it is part of why it's one of the things that does give me a degree of hope. We're going to have to start working now towards it. It's not going to be simple in any way, shape, or form. If they see it coming, they are going to start trying to criminalize things preemptively.
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If it is something that even looks like a real possibility, they're going to come after it with everything they've got. And it's one of those things where... Maybe if the midterms go well for Democrats, maybe Democrats stop that. But it's just as plausible and probably more plausible that Democrats line up with Republicans to attempt to criminalize something like that.
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Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.
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Yeah, the only responsible way to characterize the organized left in the United States is a complete and utter failure. It has been a calamity for the causes that it seeks to represent. And a lot of that is because of fucking bullshit online clicktivism. We're all going to do a general strike. Everybody get ready. Next week, we're going to do it. Shit like that, it's just so deeply unserious.
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And if we're going to take the momentum and the energy that exists and the number of people who are angry and that number of people will be increasing as the consequences of conservative policies hit home by 2028, Like it has to be something taken deadly seriously by very serious people who are thinking through the consequences and what's necessary in order to make this feasible, you know?
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Yeah, so I'm actually right now in the middle of a book that I found myself surprised by how much I've liked. It's called When Paris Went Dark, and it is a history of the occupation of Paris under the Nazis. That is a really fascinating social history by Ronald Rosebottom that I found very emotionally affecting, especially in light of...
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some things going on and, and yeah, just kind of a fascinating look at, at the psychology of, of people of like of a, of a, of an entire people kind of grappling with what's about to happen to them in, in the wake of the failure of the French army. And then what happens next? Um, And then I would also recommend Setting the Desert on Fire by James Barr, which is one of the books about T.E.
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Lawrence that I cited in the T.E. Lawrence episodes. If you are at all interested in the realities of needing to fight an insurgent war.
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Massive L for the country. Oops. That brief period of time when Biden stepped down, it really felt like it might be. I mean, she did better than he would have done. Yeah.
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Well done. Well done. I mean, James, yeah, that's, that's gotta be the biggest dub of the year.
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Order in the court. Order in the court. Justice Robert Evans presiding. I see we have a fine jury here to take questions from the audience of our daily news show, which is also my courtroom. Everybody get it? Because I'm a judge now, legally. Because that's how the legal system works.
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No, I mean, I think he's going to get signed to host a podcast by a little network you might have heard of called Cool Zone Media. Congratulations, guys. Let's bring him on. Sophie, get him on the Zoom. Tell him he can hop in the room now. Bashar, baby!
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He's actually doing a whole media tour with the pod save guys next week. That's got to be fascinating.
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Yeah. Last ride. From your mouth to whatever fucking clot is working its way through his coronary system. God.
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Oh, that's a good one. That's an easy one, but okay. I'll give it to you.
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I'm going to make my call Tayyip Recep Erdogan, you know? That's my hope. That's a long shot, I know, because he doesn't seem like he's in bad health. That's a big one.
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no municipal judge garrison that's not a fed okay okay municipal municipal that's good you're right you're right you're right i i will now for the rest of my life be able to say when people ask questions well as a man of the law which i'm very much looking forward to not only able to say robert quite likely to say anyway that's all i got
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He's getting everything he wants, though. It's true.
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Yeah, especially if you are addicted to a drug that you can get in unlimited pure quantities and no one will ever say no to handing it
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He and two Secret Service agents are found dead with fentanyl infected bloat.
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I have said for years, Nick Fuentes is going to go down. Live. Maybe live. He's going to go down like George Lincoln Rockwell. It is not going to be like an enemy of his that does it. It's going to be a result of his incredibly messy personal life.
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Like someone is going to take him down. Like it's that.
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I think I was reading a Nick Land piece during that whole thing.
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That actually pairs quite well. I landed completely deranged. It was great. Ready to work.
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The Honorable Robert Evans. And I actually did get, the judge who made me a judge sent me a gavel, but I didn't grab it for this one. So I just used, I have the barrel and lower receiver from an antique sawed-off shotgun that belonged to a bootlegger, and I just sort of slammed that into my table. Great.
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I'm kind of interested to watch what happens with AOC over the next year, because she has definitely become, to a lot of folks, the progressive on the left, like a villain over the last year. Yeah. And... I kind of wouldn't be surprised if like in assuming there's still politics in 20 years when we're talking to young people, they think of her like Pelosi.
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And we're like, oh, you've got to understand when things started out, this was a very different person. Yeah. Yeah. Now, I'm not saying that's a fair way to characterize her now or where she'll go. I'm just saying, like, I wouldn't be shocked if that's the way a lot of folks are looking at it and fucking. A few years. Because I'm seeing, I'm hearing a lot of that now. Yeah.
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People are very angry at her over largely Gaza. But yeah, also the fact that she and Bernie both tried to back Biden kind of late in his senescence.
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I guess my prediction is that the economy is going to be basically identical to the Biden economy in that we're going to get like fucked up inflation and people are going to be very angry and the number will continue to go up on the stock market because that's kind of what it's designed to do. That's my theory.
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Yeah, and we will never afford homes. And the housing's just going to get more expensive. It will be interesting to see Trump's entire, all of his backers and his whole media, like one thing that will be easier for the left is really hitting conservatives on inflation as it gets horrible again or continues to suck.
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Because that's, you know, at this point, just a factor of the economy working as intended that they all have to pretend isn't. Yeah.
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We need to get chickens now. Oh, yeah. This bird flu thing is not going to help with eggs. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Get your eggs now. Buy thousands of dollars of eggs now.
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The thing about CoolZone coin that makes it different from all of the other crypto coins is that it is really based on a fundamentally limited and valuable resource, which is movies from the 90s that I showed Garrison and they actually liked. So, you know, there's only so many CoolZone coins that can ever be in circulation.
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Yeah. My prediction for the Paul brothers is that one of them dies within the next five years and one of them lives to be 107. That tracks.
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By the way, it's time for me to do our new ad plug. You've heard of how good elk meat is for you, and you've heard of how liver is a superfood. Well, now try new elk liver steaks. It's just ground up liver shoved inside a steak. I send it through the mail, through FedEx. Five-day delivery. It is not refrigerated in any way.
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Two groups of men who don't really know how to use their guns. Using their guns. It's going to be amazing. It's a battle I've wanted to see for like five years. Whose plate carriers have the top closer to their nipples? It's anyone's game.
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We're expensing a fucking telescope for that firefight.
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I trust the Iraqi army more than either of those sides.
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It does look fun. It does look fun. It is, yeah.
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Unfortunately. They really tried to get that off the ground. I don't see anyone actually using skeet. I saw someone using it in French and it was a real moment.
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Something will have to change. Yeah. There will have to be a material change in either organizing or social conditions. Because people will need to either be vastly more desperate than they are right now, or they will need to have a specific reason to think, well, this time getting out on the street might do something.
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It's not going to be good. It's not going to be good. There's probably going to be a situation where some guy either gets... The best case is that he gets killed immediately by the dude's security. The worst case is there's a big public firefight and a whole fuckload of people get hit.
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All right. Something very funny did just happen that we should talk about as a team. Senator Doug Mastriano, a 30-year U.S. Army veteran who taught at the War College, just tweeted an indignant, furious tweet about the U.S. government not being honest with Americans about what's happening with these drones.
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And the picture of the crashed drone is a TIE fighter that's like a model TIE fighter on the bed of a flatbed being driven through. Yes! Yes! We've all lost our minds. Taught at the US Army War College. They're not sending their best people. Oh, fuck. That's funny.
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That's amazing stuff. That's one of the best things I've seen all year.
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It just came out that he's not going to be able to get the highest security clearance.
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I think that RFK Jr. is probably pushed out of the picture before Musk is.
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Yeah, I really I don't think Trump's that reckless. No, that that would be quite quite a line to get rid of the polio vaccine. Trump's also old.
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I feel pretty good about the continuing legality of Kratom as long as he's the HHS head. There you go. All it's going to take is one of Joe Rogan's friends speaking in his ear. Yeah.
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we'll be all right we're gonna have legally required dmt for everyone in the country yeah why not i think we need i and i've been i've been saying this for years we need to put the lithium back in the water we also need to use those crop dusting planes and just like fill them with xanax just just just calm everyone down take everything back a couple of steps
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I don't thank you for your questions. I'm actively angry at you for your questions.
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I have funded my journal. I love whenever people ask me questions like, how did you convince Cracked to send you to Iraq? I didn't. I bought plane tickets. Being an entertainer has always been what's funded my journalism.
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Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about it, which in this week's case is the Consumer Electronics Show, is happening here. And yeah, we're here to talk about things falling apart. And again, in this case, that's the tech industry.
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Because the story, this CES, as it has been for the last several CESs, is that the continuing degradation of big tech as it seeks more places to get money from while providing less and less utility to the people that it needs to give it money. And every CES, at some point, I find myself face-to-face with something that makes me say, I've now seen the silliest thing I've ever seen.
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And this year, that experience happened for the first time within 30 minutes of the first half day. And I'm going to talk about that and show some videos to my panelists here, which, of course, are the great Ed Zitron. It's me. I'm here. The pretty good Garrison Davis.
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Damn. And the supernumerary, I'm sorry, I messed up the word I was using as a superlative to praise you. I'll take it.
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Ed, thank you so much for joining us, everybody. Are you ready to see some of the dumbest AI-generated videos that you've ever seen?
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Nothing fills me with pleasure. The first panel I sat down today with at 10 a.m. in the goddamn morning was the Hollywood Trajectory Generative AI Timeline 2025 to 2030. Oh, boy.
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Everything's just got to get better, Garrison. This panel featured a number of luminary thinkers, including Mary Hamilton, a managing director at Accenture, who announced her company's $3 billion investment in AI by dropping this gem.
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Maybe we're taking the phone away from you. Now, I think this is very silly because, again, I think it's just a fundamental mismatch in what people might want from an AI agent and, like, the way in which they get talked about.
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Yeah. Oh, my God. Yeah. I'm excited to go see some Digital Twin technology that I'm sure will make a cheap avatar of me from a picture.
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The fact that they're using it in the wrong place is very annoying to me. Yeah, I keep seeing like they can now make an AI chatbot trained off of your social media presence that's 85% accurate. Oh, I love 85%. As all twins are. And I want to say, like, no, they can't. But then you talk to the average person at CES or the average panelist on this particular panel.
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I'm like, yes, I do believe, in fact, everyone on that panel. You could accurately get 85% of their personality with a chatbot. For a bit. Maybe a lot higher, yeah. Improvement, yeah. Yeah. So I will say, like, that was silly. That's not the silliest thing I saw. Oh. And the silliest thing I saw came courtesy of another panelist, Jason Zada, founder of Secret Level and COO of the company.
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The videos that Jason came to CES to brag about were a collection of the laziest AI slop ever to stain human eyeballs. His most recent big success that you could just see radiating off of him, how proud he was of this, was Coca-Cola's annual Christmas ad, which last year was produced for the first time entirely with AI.
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And I'm just going to – if you haven't seen this, who here has seen Coca-Cola's AI ad? I've seen it. Oh, I've seen it. I haven't seen it.
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We're going to play, there's three different versions of this.
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Can you believe this song's AI generated? I can't believe that the... How could they teach a computer to write the lyrics? Holidays are coming.
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And a dog wagging its tail with dead eyes. Oh, these two horrible... Squirrels covered in snow.
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Trucks with Coca-Cola in them driving down not a street.
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It's all clearly AI. It's all glowing, like these city shots of snow-colored villages. As we're going to see in later videos, AI loves putting smoke in random fires where there should not be smoke in random fires.
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All of the scenes, because it's showing you a bunch of, you see a pole. Polar Bear, obviously, it's a Coca-Cola Christmas ad. You see, like, a fucking reindeer. You see squirrels. You see a dog. But it always is, like, this very AI shot where it just pans across the animal, and it's, like, glowing and kind of glossy and dead-eyed, staring.
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System One, which tests emotional responses to ads, claims that the initial response to their Christmas ad was overwhelmingly positive.
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Just Don Draper spending hours watching that looping Christmas video?
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Yeah. So there was like an immediate, pretty immediate backlash to this. Like all of the responses, if you like go to any of like where these things live on YouTube, it's just people shitting on them, which he did acknowledge Jason by saying the video was very debated. Yeah.
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We love debating commercials. Many things are very debated these days. A lot of people are saying. And then he showed us next an AI-generated video, The Heist, which was entirely made by a text script that itself was mostly written by ChatGPT. And here's how Jason describes the workflow for what you're about to see.
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It took thousands of generations to get the final film, but I'm absolutely blown away by the quality, the consistency, and adherence to the original prompt. When I described gritty New York City in the 80s, it delivered in spades, consistently. Well, this is not perfect. It is, hands down, the best video generation model out there by a long shot.
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Yeah. You just finished 36 hours of digging into the life of a school shooter. And... I also built the back of my career spending hours and hours digging through the online lives of mass shooters. And you don't have to do that, but you do have to do that thing, which is exactly what Garrison said. You have to pick a very narrow thing. And make it your life.
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Additionally, it's important no VFX, no cleanup, no color correction has been added. Everything is straight out of VO2, Google DeepMind. What is the model? VO2, Google DeepMind, I think is what he's saying it is. So I thought that they had another one.
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It looks like, yeah, New York, exactly like New York at Giuliani's right before he came in. Clean it up. Uh-huh.
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I don't buy for a fucking... I'm not impressed, but we'll see what you guys think. I don't want to poison your reactions. Oh, God.
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There is fire in the street. That's the last time you're going to see the sack full of money. It does not show up again. It's a lot of fire in the street. A lot of random fire in the street.
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And also, take a shot every time he is wearing different clothing and has a clearly different face. Well, the car has changed color three times. He's praising the consistency, and he is dressed completely differently every scene. His jacket has changed since the last one. Yeah, yeah.
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And again, the cars, when it shows the cars driving across the screen, they're kind of doing the same thing usually that the animals do in the coke ad. Minimal motion at the best. Yeah. I also love this. Can you believe this music?
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Look, an obviously different man. Also, the way he runs is... With a gun.
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What the fuck does that mean? Directed by Jason Zada in big flaming words because, again, the AI only knows how to put random fires on things.
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Because I went to the YouTube video for this, and the first five or four comments are, looks like we found the new king of video. Jesus Christ, give it a rest. Clothes change in every shot. Four to six-year-old boys are going to love it. And still lacks character and vehicle consistency, but we're getting close.
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And not just a random thing, but like a thing that you think is important. Yeah. And that people don't, other people don't understand how important it is. And if you make yourself, there's a fella, his blog is called We Hunted the Mammoths, Dave Futrell, who's been covering what we call the manosphere for like more than a decade. before anybody else in journalism was taking it seriously.
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They're like, these pigs will slop up anything. Ed, you can't expect technology to do something as complicated as dress a man in clothing and have him stay in that same clothing over multiple scenes. Hollywood never figured this out.
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I think the issues are twofold, which is, like, number one, in order to make this shit sell to the people who watch movies, you have to dramatically reduce the average intelligence of people watching movies. You have to give everyone brain damage, which they are working on doing. And the other thing is the models have to get much better.
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And Jason made a point that, like, every time people would, like, talk about the criticism, he'd be like, look, this is the worst it's going to look, guys. Yeah. And I was just looking into it. GPT-4 took 50 times as many resources, like 50 times as much energy to train as GPT-3 did. So these are the kind of like exponential increases that we're looking at.
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So like if it took them so many millions, billions of dollars of investment to get to the point where they can make this shitty video – to make anything close to watchable, you're talking about, again, just like lighting on fire, billions of dollars, to do what?
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To make a scene that you could already get like a 26-year-old dude who grew up watching fucking Quentin Tarantino movies and taking cocaine, and you could just give him $60,000 and he'll film that shit for you with an old car.
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Oh, yeah, no, I will turn on a dime. Speaking of turning on a dime for money, here's ads. Ah, we're back. So the next video that our friend, I now feel he's like a brother to me, Jason, puts on was of an AI-generated fictional elderly rock star talking about death. Oh, I'm excited. Oh, I'm excited. We have the computer to do this.
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You got to do that kind of thing. If you do that kind of thing, you build a name for yourself, and that can allow you, when the thing that you're obsessed on becomes a big story, being first to have something meaningful to say about it can provide you eventually with the opportunity to cover other things.
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Plastic and incapable of dynamic expression as he guzzles randomly from bottles of liquor that flash in and out of existence.
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sometimes he lies on his back in empty streets while talking about all of the CGI featureless women that he has loved in his exciting life other times he plays stadium shows while obvious GPT written dialogue about aging and death drones on when the video ends everybody in the room claps and as you watch this I need to imagine seeing the thing that I'm about to show you all and a room with like 200 people in it all clapping enthusiastically I don't think I did
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Yeah. So here's Fade Out. It's George Carlin. He's got an old man-y hair. Looks a little bit like George Carlin.
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Yes, like he drank and the bottle changed in his hand. You could see it starting to happen. What is this? Just anonymous women.
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Why is it on fire? Why is there a fire? You see this old rock star drinking in front of a flaming house. might end tomorrow. The AI loves burning buildings.
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Now he's sleeping in a broken Mustang. Ferrari? The classic Ferrari Mustang. A Ferrari Mustang that's in like a pool in front of a mansion but he clearly hasn't crashed into it. The car is hovering slightly over the pool. I love this, I love this, I love the word. And he tells us during this, as if we're supposed to be impressed, that ChatGPT wrote 75% of that script.
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I can't believe that, frankly. As a bartender, I regret walking into the room to see if people want drinks.
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One of the easiest things to find, an old man that drinks. For an idea of like how real this company is, obviously they were one of the companies. They were not the only people who made that Coca-Cola ad. They were one of like three or four companies. It takes four companies to make that Thomas Kinkade ad. I can't believe it. They have 622 followers on Twitter. Hell yeah. Jesus Christ.
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And all I post is karaoke songs. And this Fade Out is their, or sorry, The Heist is their most successful video with 56,000 views. Fade Out, which we just watched, has less than 5,000 views. They're not ready. So they're not quite ready. It's only going to get better. Yeah, it's only going to get better.
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If not more, a coin will only get worth more. Yeah. Now, Garrison, I do think you should invest all of your salary.
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However long it takes, it was too long because it looks like shit. We're going to watch a video I haven't seen yet, or at least before, because it's five minutes. We're not watching all this. Oh, my God. It's 252 views and came out a week ago. It's called Menemonade. What?
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He's Blade Runner. Oh, God. And an old lady rises up out of a pile of ashes. That's how mouths work.
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What? I think this is death. This old lady's dead. Oh, that's how I eat.
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Now she's tripping on tomatoes? Oh, yeah. The decaying, sandy diner that exploded has turned into a lively 50s diner. It's popping off.
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He is the help, though, yeah. Mm-hmm. Oh, that's natural. The little kid just fell down, and the way it shows falling is that he just sort of deflates.
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The phrase reality distortion field gets used a lot when we talk about tech. But I really tasted it in that room because all anyone on stage could talk about is how good it looks. And every one of these videos, people are like clapping. They're like, wow, this is amazing.
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Okay. There was a moment after this where Jason like joked about how like, I don't, like obviously I don't want to replace actors yet.
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Uh-huh. And another panelist was like, I think we're going to have to see how some decisions go as to fair use, because obviously this is cribbing from a bunch of fucking Scorsese movies and shit.
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I know what you're wondering. How soon until we can get a full 90-minute movie that looks like this? I'm guessing days away. No, no. Jason said probably not at least for a decade or so.
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I can't wait that long. That's interesting. I don't want to wait that long. What a worthwhile endeavor, though. He could have said shorter. That actually is interesting. He could have said anything. Those chunks in there, I would have believed him. I think it is like he did have to spend probably hundreds of hours of his precious one human life stitching those turds together.
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And he's like, it's nowhere near ready. There's no way it could make a 90-minute movie. He is giving himself a lot of time for that.
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And that's the thing. If I'd sat down there, because I said this, I was sitting next to a guy from USC who was one of the only people in the room who was similarly critical about to me of what we were seeing on stage. It was like, look, if they had come down and been like, look, this is how we can plug a script in and it can create a storyboard.
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And you can like kind of see like a crude CGI animation of how the shots will look. And that can help you like plan out like, like that's legitimately useful. That's a thing that adds value and can cut costs in a meaningful way to like the production of good TV and movies. But that's not as sexy as like, I'm, and they were all talking, there was this, this like very weird moment where,
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One of the panels, Leslie Shannon, who's head of innovation for Nokia, a company that used to make phones and now makes panelists who pretend to be entertained by awkward AI.
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They make a lot of stuff. I was just shitting on Nokia. She's like, can we use neuroscience to see how people are reacting to AI-generated videos and then adjust the ending to be like, let's make this resonate more. That way we're helping the creative. And I was like, are you out of your fucking mind?
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I would have supported electrodes in their skulls, yes. Jesus Christ.
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We've got some skulls. I am fascinated by the skull shapes of that fucking crowd.
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Speaking of things that wouldn't survive a deposition, the sponsors to this podcast. ... Okay, so that first panel was a real moment for me. I went through a couple of more, one of which was on, like, advertising and AI and was mostly pretty boring. The third panel I went through, though, was called AI Cinematic Spatial and XR. And I just want to actually play you guys.
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That was the scene I wanted you to hear where they're like, we don't want to say it out loud. And then everyone chuckles.
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That's a good place to start. Yeah. I don't like that either. And the people you're hearing from, let me tell you who's in this fucking panel who was just laughing about like. Sociopaths. Well, there will be an evolution in job loss. Yeah. So the motherfuckers who were on that panel laughing about people losing their jobs. Ted Shilowitz, literally his name is Shilowitz.
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Futurist at Cinemersion Inc. That's like a J.K. Rowling name. Yes. Rebecca Barkin, co-founder and CEO of LaminaOne, Erwin Luber, director of partnerships at Google, Adam Simon, managing director of IPG Media Lab, Leila Amirsadegi, principal program manager at Engineering, Microsoft, and Katie Henson, SVP post-production at Sphere Studios. So those are the people who were all laughing.
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Yeah, I think that... he's going to try to do as much of what he's promised to do in terms of particular, not in terms of everything he's promised, but in terms of going after immigrants, he's going to do as much of what he's promised to do as he possibly can. Now that doesn't mean he's going to actually deport millions of people.
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Right. Although the AI keeps foreboding that that's coming for them. It wants something. The pernicious flames. I'm going to end on a happy note because the last panel I went to was actually really cool. It was AI and the Crisis of Creative Rights, Deepfakes, Ethics, and the Law.
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And it featured the first intelligent person that I've seen at CES this year, Moya McTeer, who is a folklorist and senior advisor at the Human Artistry Campaign. It also featured Duncan Crabtree Ireland, who's the national executive director and chief negotiator of SAG-AFTRA. There we go. There we go. And this was no bullshit.
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It was talking about all of the different lawsuits that are going on right now, all of the litigation around AI and like the actual strategy for litigating. And like there was a couple of points where like Duncan was like a lot is going to hinge on some very brave, very famous people choosing to throw down some big dollar lawsuits. Like that's what we need right now.
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They did talk about the No Fakes Act, which has bipartisan support and gives some legal force to allow people to push for AI copies of themselves to be taken down. And they think there's also some bipartisan possibility to get AI labeling legislation.
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Yeah. And there was a really good point where kind of at the end of this, part of what I appreciate is, again, there was no bullshit. Like Moya at one point was like, I think it is absolute, it being generative AI is absolutely a net negative for the artistic community. The point is not to get something out as quick as possible. It's like make art.
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Yes. And Duncan got on and was like, look, you can't stop the technology from being invented. So the best path forward is to like try and channel this into a direction that like is at least better for artists. Like there was very little – for most of the people on the panel, very little bullshit. There was some bullshit from one person on the panel. Okie dokie.
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Ginny Katzmann, senior director of government affairs for Microsoft. Oh, I bet. Oh, I bet. Oh, that was fun. Oh, boy. So after, there's this whole point where, like, everyone else on the panel is like, yeah, I think it's probably a net negative for artists on the whole. And Jenny comes on. She's like, actually, I think it's a net positive.
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There are like some just practical limitations based on the capacity of the institutions he'll be using to do this. And he could get, there's a very good chance things will get bogged down and whatnot, but like he will try. That's my take.
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And her example of this is, well, you know, there's a lot of stuff that you couldn't do before that, thanks to AI, you could do, like de-aging Harrison Ford for the Indiana Jones movie. Something famously that went over very well. Yeah.
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I'm asking that every day. It would be very unfair. Well, luckily with the power of AI, we can put River Phoenix. I'm reading through every newspaper sequentially starting in 1834, so I have not gotten to the end of River Phoenix's surely long career yet. It would be really cool. That's the Schlieffen guy. I think he's got some bold ideas.
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James Mangold, you're a hack and a fraud. So I got to say, it was very funny because she also suggests, Jenny, we can use animals without causing harm thanks to AI, a thing that no one had figured out how to do before. Nobody had ever figured out how to just, like, not hurt animals in movies. That didn't exist before AI. Thank God.
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Great for their habitats. She said, there's issues with employment, but there's lots of issues that fall around that. And I do think you need a balance. And at the end of it, the guy running the panel just says, okay. That sounds like you guys are saying a bunch of woke shit on this panel right now.
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We shouldn't have a gun maze? What are you talking about? We need the gun maze. Now look, we all like keeping a couple of people in a maze beneath our house. Right. Yeah. There's nothing wrong with that. This is just the torment nexus. We keep doing it. It's not even the torment nexus. It's fun. It's a nice maze under my house.
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Yeah. If you're planning to buy a computer, go ahead and grab that fucker now if you can.
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Like, you have to fucking make people's... You have to break the human drive to create art, obviously, to make an omelette that does not taste good. Yeah, right. An omelette-esque food. It's a piss omelette. Like, there's piss in the omelette. And we had to burn down the Sistine Chapel to make the piss omelette. The computer made it, though. Go on, clap for the computer.
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We did firebomb the Louvre, but look... Look at this video of a nameless rock star.
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The grill that texts you. Can I just move this around? I just want to test how it rolls.
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Wait, are you trying to tell us here at Zitron that you have grilled meat without a robot texting you about it? Because I just don't believe that. I don't know how I did it. But I did it.
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But until the robots, it was impossible. Oh, God. We're at the death of innovation. Yeah.
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A lot of things, maybe. And the end of the episode. Yeah, and the end of the episode. Thank God. You know, everyone else, be the Cybertruck in the...
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Oh, welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about it happening here, which is really true in a lot of ways tonight. Harrison Davis and I are seated at the glorious, majestical Hotel Name Redacted on the Las Vegas Strip. We've got a long day at CES. Long day.
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Listening to panels, catching up with the latest tech news, trying gadgets, and also at the same time texting our dear friends in Los Angeles as unprecedented fires sweep them from their homes. Literally, the Gettys threatened Pasadena and Santa Monica are both being evacuated as once. It's a real one-two punch of America's favorite tech show in the apocalypse today. How are you feeling, Gare?
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It's an average day in America. Average day in America. Temperature's not coming down anytime soon. No, no. Well, I'll just take a moment to breathe with that. So you want to start us off with what you did this morning? I was panel guy yesterday. There was a man of action walking around and mostly trying all the free massage chairs. What did you see this morning?
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Yeah, I keep hearing versions of that too in the AI and Hollywood panels. They would be like, yeah, we want to develop a machine that can read the brains of our viewers and alter the endings of movies. But we see this as a way of augmenting the artist's work.
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I think it's a mix of, number one, the money still isn't there where they need it to be. It has not started blooming to the extent that they were expecting it by now. And the other part is people are still not happy with this stuff. I'm glad you felt that, too, because I almost was like, especially after the election, like, I don't trust my feelings on this, that they're really scared.
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But I really do think there's a piece of that coming through.
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Maybe the problem's you, not them. You know who doesn't need to worry about quote-unquote ick for their product market is people who make things that people like.
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And like how much worse can you make the world before people stand up and stop you with their fists or guns?
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Every year at CES, there are points in time where I get that like, oh yeah, 2020 really fucked us up a lot. Like 2020 really did some lasting damage. I know that was happening with the younger generation before, the iPad kid generation, but that really did a number on some folks.
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Oh, yeah. No, I mean, they're still calling it meta, which, honestly, there's a degree to which I almost respect it, because, like, we are not biting.
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Yeah, I mean, I've seen the fact that the FBI director is stepping down, pushed as like an act of resistance because it means that
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Oh, man, I love mixed reality. You and me, we're watching our Harry Styles mixed reality concerts. We're seeing the 100 Gecs.
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It's such a, you can clearly tell that none of these people have souls, right? It's such a mismatch of what people get from music because they think that like, oh, this is just like a, if I see that like this specific beat line is, I can just sort of like plug this in and like, no, no, no, like,
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what makes people react to musicians and artists is that they like make things that make them feel something. Like that's why people get like really into artists is they feel seen and identify with a piece of art as opposed to like, oh, oh, that guy really liked the first opening bars to fucking octopus's garden. Like let's, let's just like really turn up the octopus a lot. More octopuses. 10%.
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How many more octopuses can we fit in this fucking track?
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Trump now has to actually go through like Congress to get it done I don't know if how much I buy that how much I think that I think a lot of what I'm seeing right now from establishment people and maybe this isn't true of Ray because I did find some of the arguments they're compelling but a lot of what I've seen from establishment people in politics is they're scared and just really trying not to make waves and
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So the video I didn't play you guys from my terrible fucking AI generated videos was this. It was like a girl coming to college and get a picture of her dad. And it was like a narration of her life with her father who like, is dead that she misses and all that she learned from her dad. And it's a mix of all these different, there's a chunk where it looks like a Disney animated picture.
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There's a chunk where it looks like anime. She and her dad having these adventures around the world. There's a bit of it that looks like a Marvel movie. And he's like, we can do all these different animation styles and they're seamless. And the audience really goes on a journey with this. But there's There was no girl who lost her dad. Nobody lost their dad here.
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You just had a computer generate text about a dad dying. Like, there's nothing underpinning this, right? Nobody has anything they're trying to get across. Like, you just... In this one, they look like Marvel heroes for some reason. In this one, they look like Zulu warriors kind of done up in a slightly racist Lion King style. Like, what is...
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being transmitted other than like, look at all of the different art styles we can rip off.
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One of these accounts was literally like, I'm a mother of two queer black woman. I got a lot to say about the world.
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And people started talking to her like, were any black people at all involved in making this chat bot? And she was like, well, no. And that's a real problem. That is a real problem.
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And I think that's what you're going to see overwhelmingly. I think that he's going to probably will not immediately act against the press in a legal sense as the president. They will do that. But I think he's already suing differently. And I think that that's going to be kind of his focus there for a while, just because there's a lot on his plate.
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Well, they're so used to everything that they've done so far, they've kept getting money, right? And it's slowed down and they've had to do layoffs, but nobody's just made them stop at any point, which honestly... You know, I made a comment about healthcare executives a while back needing like a fucking retirement plan paid in millimeters.
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So I'm not going to make that same comment about tech industry ghouls because, you know, we all know what's in the news. But something has to be done to force these people to stop moving in this direction. And I don't know how to get across it. Like they're already at this point of like, they seem to really want, not want this. And we have to find a way. They're just not ready.
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I don't know how to get across to them in a peaceful manner.
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People don't want this. I'm a man of peace. I'm a man of peace. I'm not a plumber.
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Does that mean their comms, like when the company itself is like communicating with customers through email? That's what it sounded like, yes. They're still writing emails sometimes to each other?
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Well, better than a cup of coffee is that sense of creeping dread that like, wow, I just saw a bunch of people who will
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probably would rather kill the world than be stopped from shoveling AI slop into people's mouths, because this is the only future they can imagine is one in which they work for a company that feeds the planet poison and kills the human concept of creativity so that they can buy a house in San Francisco. Do you know what I want to feed the concept of? Yeah, we'll talk about that.
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But here's some ads. We're back. What was part two of this episode? Let's be buddy. I'm a, Oh, let's talk about that helicopter.
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as I oft do at some point in a CES. And I came across a number of majestic products. You know, a lot of it was AI based. We'll talk some more about that here. But I ran into something that was, thank God, had nothing to do with AI. And it's a death trap. Every one of these, there's like some sort of... Every CES we find a new death trap. There's a lot of connected vehicles.
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There are a lot of EVs. Last year, there were a ton of different flying taxi type options. People that were really trying to convince us... But you don't see it all this year? Nothing this year. Nothing this year because it's a terrible idea. It's a terrible idea. The people who are rich enough to pay for flying vehicles don't want it to be a taxi.
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And the people who can't afford their own flying vehicles also can't afford them anyway. So this is, instead of any of that, Richter.
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But I think there will be attempts to fuck with libel laws and stuff, especially as things go on.
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R-I-C-T-O-R. Richter. Which is a Chinese company. Their ads say, I'll say, why be normal? Many people are saying this. The future of travel will not be on the ground. Ha! And the Richter is a hybrid. It is like a smart car style size vehicle. It's like half the size of a smart car. It only has two wheels, though. Yes.
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It's more like a weird little scooter golf cart. Like a Vespa, almost. But it's fully enclosed. And in addition to having its wheels and being able to travel about on the ground, it has four like quadrocopter style rotors because it is an aquatic flying car. Aquatic flying. I saw no evidence that it could actually go in the water. How high can these things go up? Less than 200 meters.
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You know why, Garrison? Why is that? Because if you try to go above that, you need a pilot's license.
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No, I have that. When I was interviewing them, I was like, so I assume there's got to be some sort of pilot's license for this flying craft. And they're like, no, as long as you stay under 200 meters, you're good.
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I'm going to be honest, and I don't say this for any problematic reason, but these folks are Chinese and did not seem to have a great deal of knowledge about the U.S. or its laws.
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I did ask this and I was like, this is just rough out of the sky. And they were like, no, we're working on like a, like an intelligent thing that will like force it to the ground. Yeah, which is also very exciting. Really looking forward to seeing how they pull that off. The videos that they have show it driving on the highway too. They weren't able to tell me what a top speed was.
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It has no rear view mirrors and no side view mirrors, but they said there's lots of cameras on the inside. So I'm sure that's fine. It's a death trap. This thing will get everyone who even looks at it wrong killed. They showed me a video of the prototype. It was completely frameless. It was just quadrocopter blades and like a chair on a platform lifting a guy into the air.
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It couldn't go forward or backwards. But they're like, yeah, we didn't have like a year. We can have this figured out.
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Horizontally. By the way, I couldn't fit in this thing. No, it was quite small. You would be cramped in this fucker. But it's good for vertical travel. It's great. If you just need to go up to under 200 meters, there's no more efficient way. What happens if you get pulled over by the cops? Just go up above them. I'm in the sky now. You can't do shit to me for 25 minutes. Oh, my God.
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Instead, if you're just driving, you go up to 100 kilometers, which made me think, so what is that again? That's like 60 miles per hour. If I'm in the air for 20 minutes, then I land, then my battery's dead. Then you can't go anywhere either. Then you can't go anywhere. You can't get back home.
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Things only ever get better. That's what everyone was trying to insist upon to me here. What else did you see on the show floor that caught your eye? Garrison, so many magical, wonderful, marvelous things, most of which were just like various different AI-connected smart houses. That was what Samsung was showing off. That was what LG was showing off. I believe you saw one as well, right?
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Yes. Right at the entrance. Did I pour my kratom into a carbonated beverage that spewed a geyser of blood red foam into the sky around us?
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Did the security guard stare at me as it happened? Did I set the drink down as it continued to spew and said, I'll go get some towels and then leave forever? No.
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Well, Garrett, Sam's somebody who has a great idea for a smart house. First of all, you remember that game, The Sims? No. Well, they're really betting that you do. Because their current plan is design your home with the AI-powered map view.
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Sure, sure. You get like, you feed it like a picture. You like, you lay out your floor plan of your house. And it gives you like a 3D model. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you can take pictures of your furniture or pictures of furniture that you want. You can like place it around. And you can place them. Now, A couple of things. One of them is that there's no scaling done by the AI.
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So it's up to you to figure out how the furniture you might want to buy measures up in comparison to the apartment. Sure, sure. But it does look like the actual map that they've got. I'll show you the picture that I took. I'll try to put it up somewhere. It looks like the video game The Sims. No, yeah, that doesn't look like The Sims. You're populating a little 3D CGI house.
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And I was like, okay, well, there's a use there, right? People like planning out, like you're moving into a new apartment. You can like fill it in here. And before you even move in, you can figure out what kind of furniture you need or how your existing furniture will fit in there. I would never have used that.
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I usually picked up all of my furniture from the trash before I had a house when I moved into a new place. But I know people who would have used that. Sure. That seems useful. So I talked about security. So one thing that concerned me is like the first guy I talked to was like, oh, yeah, I think it's all stored locally.
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And I was like, so Samsung doesn't have any access to any of the data on like my house and its layout. And he was like, let me let me get you to one of our like engineers because he can answer that question. And the engineer's answer was and I'm paraphrasing here. Yeah. So that made me very confident.
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Yeah, and they were, that was not really, one thing they had is for like their retail segment, they had like a live video grocery store ad showing you prices of different produce. And I think like the insinuation they didn't lay out is like you can change prices on the fly, you know, which kind of made me think about that.
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There was some talk last year of like, okay, we want to be able to like face scan customers so we can see if they have money and increase prices for like products for certain people. which I'm sure they're going to try. They're too enticed by that idea not to. So I caught a little bit of that, but they really, to the extent of how big, and this was interesting.
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Last year, Samsung and LG, their booths were huge, and they had a lot of different gadgets. Samsung's booth is big this year. 40% of it was that scan your furniture, scan your fucking map.
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Another big thing was all Samsung, because Samsung makes a ton of appliances, they make TVs, all sorts of entertainment products. All of them have this, I forget what they call it, Samsung tag or something that you can map it in your phone. So you can have a whole map of all of the devices and shit that you have in your phone and you can control them all from a single point in.
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And no one, by the way, had any interest in answering my security questions there. But also, if you're into that, if you want to have all of your appliances and entertainment things linked up and controlled on your phone, and all of them are Samsung, you don't care.
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Yeah, we've seen it. Sophie has. It's been a nightmare. Harder than I have worked on anything else this year. Like, it's been nuts. Yeah. And here's the thing that sucks. For no reason.
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But also, none of it was like, yeah, I can control everything from my phone. You've been promising me that literally, like in 2011 at CES. For like decades. They were promising me you're going to be able to control your whole house.
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It's nothing. It's just a big visual display that looks cool, that looks like a bunch of server racks, like you're in this huge cube of servers. But there were only like a half dozen different actual products. One of them was real-time CCTVs that use an AI, like an LLM type thing to summarize pictures. So I like walked through and it did pick me out as a notable person.
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So I've got like this people of interest thing where it's like a man holding a smartphone standing next to another man. But also I'm like, well, what does that really get you? Like the fact that you're summarizing up like these people who are like, this person's kneeling and taking a picture or standing. Cause I like actually tried deliberately. I like reached in my bag to try to be suspicious.
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I like did finger guns and it never marked me out. And like, I didn't pull a real gun or anything. Cause I, I very rarely bring that to the CES floor. Um,
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but i don't know like i can see how there could be a utility there if you're actually able to say you're setting up like surveillance outside of a residential building and it can alert security that like something is happening outside there's a potential you if it's good enough utility in that but they didn't display it at the show it was literally just describing randos from the audience and like i just don't see how a security guard is there's a guy with a phone on outside of the building like
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Not that there's no reason to launch the app. There's a great reason. There's no reason it should have taken this long. Correct. But we can't say any more for reasons that are also equally frustrating. I'd like to say in general, folks, there's a few things that get brought up a lot. It's like, why haven't they done this yet? Why haven't they done this yet?
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So again, what I'm seeing here overwhelmingly for all the talk about like, there's no resisting it. AI is coming. It's going to dominate everything. This is the next big thing. A remarkable lack outside of what I will say, the one thing where there are continuously new products that are better every year is smart glasses. They are getting more impressive and more capable every year.
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I don't think I'll ever be a smart glasses guy. I hated glasses enough that I let them shoot me in the eye with lasers. Shout out to our LASIK sponsors. But I see why people would like it and there seems to be legitimately substantial utility.
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Because, yeah, why not? There was a great demo I'm pulling over to now, LAWK View. They had like one glass that was the first world smart glasses for TikTok Live. Not particularly excited about that. But they had another set of AR glasses with a 12-hour battery where like, if it works as well as the demo. And that's a big if, but it, it syncs to like your smartwatch.
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So it'll tell you, you can see in a heads up display as you're cycling. That was the demo. It'll both like give you directions like in your eyes. And it seemed to be like fairly well thought out. So it's not like overly corrupting your view. It'll show you your heart rate. You know, it'll show you like all that kind of stuff.
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So you get like a useful degree of control and assistance from that kind of thing. And that is, I will say the last three CES is the glasses get a little better and a little smaller every year. So I would say that's a real product that's probably going to continue to improve.
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Let's all sit down for some AI-powered ads. Wow, I can't believe they put Jay Shetty's voice in the de-aged Harrison Ford from the latest Indiana Jones movie. My dick's hard. How are you, Garrison?
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Guys, guys, something real happened. Shut your fucking stupid mouths about this AI Hollywood bullshit.
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We're talking like technical things or like, you know, things like a paid subscription. And they're like, why haven't they gotten around to it yet? And the answer is always some infuriating bullshit based on...
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You know, Garrison, I made a comment the other night about how, like, it's pretty well documented that veterans, you know, not that they're more likely to carry out violence, but when they do, they tend to have higher body counts because they have more skills. It turns out I thought we were getting more literal bang for our buck training Green Berets than we are.
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My assumption is, because my uncle was a Green Beret, and he did some very scary, probably war-crimey shit in Vietnam. And I assumed, like that man, I'll tell you one thing about my uncle Jim, that man could make a bomb. That man would not need to ask anyone for advice if he needed to make a bomb. He's not with us anymore, God rest his soul. But it turns out this Green Beret...
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who, you know, a fucking dollar store TJ Maxx version of the Green Berets is what we're working with now, asked ChatGPT how to build a fucking bomb. And it sounds like he was trying to make it triggered by Tannerite, which is a bipartite explosive compound that you use as like an exploding target.
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So it'll go boom big, but you have to shoot it with something like a rifle that's high velocity or use like a blasting cap. Otherwise, it's very stable and very safe, which obviously has use. You know, it was invented actually to set off avalanches and stuff.
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Anyway, because that's very available and very high power, he was looking to like fill his car with that and then shoot it with a rifle while he was in it. And that's what he was asking chat GPT about. So it's not clear to me. Actually, the actual headline is that like he used chat GPT to make his bomb.
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Some bureaucracy, some legal shit where you're like, you don't actually realize it's illegal to do this if you do it this way or whatever. Like some sort of bullshit that makes it impossible. It's not that we want to make this as easy as possible for people to have the best listening experience that we can afford to provide them.
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It seems, and I'm not privy to what the police are, obviously, but it seems like based on what I read in the article, we're not sure if he actually used chat GPT to make a bomb. It's more that he was interested in making a bomb, setting off Tannerite by shooting it, but may have ultimately decided not to do that because he would then be alive for the explosion, which he didn't want to be.
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Also, the authorities don't seem to fully know how he triggered it.
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So it's still kind of unclear to me. I guess hopefully we'll get more later. But he he definitely needed chat GPT's help to try and figure out how to make the bomb.
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They had a whole slide about how that was the gold standard for AI human communications. The movie Her. in which Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with an AI chatbot voiced by Scarlett Johansson who hires a prostitute to have sex with him while she participates vocally. And then it turns out the AI is really kind of poly and Joaquin Phoenix is not okay with that.
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And then maybe the AIs all go to space. It's kind of unclear at the end. I don't think it was a great movie. A lot of people liked it. I don't see whether or not you like it. Why this is your vision of how a chatbot should work.
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It worked quite well, yes. The demo was, like, solid. It was pretty accurate. You know, I love coming here and fucking with people. I love, like, being a dick. They asked for a volunteer. And at that point, we knew about the chat GPT. I wanted to go up and ask, like, live this robot to, like, help me make a bomb. But the guy who was pretty handsome and an interesting English-Spanish mix.
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I like how you specified he was handsome. I didn't want to be mean to him. He seemed nice. I didn't want to be mean to a handsome guy. He wasn't shitty. No, he was fine. There was like 10 people in this room that was supposed to have 200. I'm sure they were bummed by how it turned out.
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That was someone else at his company, and he just seemed like he wanted to do, I didn't want to be a dick to him. No, no. He wasn't hurting anything.
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But there's a lot of annoying bullshit that exists for reasons beyond our comprehension. Sorry.
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He specified a lot of them are people who have either just lost a spouse or maybe their spouse is aging faster and worse than them and is no longer really able to be the kind of companion that they were before. Yeah.
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And the device is weird. It's about the width of like a bedside table, maybe six to eight inches deep. So think about like 18 inches long to maybe six inches deep, something like that. Half of it is like a little tablet, like a seven inch tablet with a speaker. half of it is something about the shape and size of a head on like a neck that can pivot and nod on the neck. There's no face.
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So when it's talking, there's like a white light in the center of it that kind of like pulses in time with the speaking that it does. So we saw this picture of the device and we saw the description of like, this is an AI companion for the elderly. And we were both like, number one, these people are going to be monsters.
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This is going to be like something to shovel your dying dad off with because you don't want You don't want to spend time with them. You don't want to spend time with your family. You're scum. You're too busy AI generating scum music. And trying to sell your shitty robot to Garrison and me. More on that tomorrow. More on that tomorrow. And so that's what we came in prepped for this meeting.
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And to be clear, I still think this product might be a bad idea that doesn't work. But the guy behind it, who is the dude that we talked to, cares a lot and is really very clearly trying to do a good thing and thought through the ethics and the efficacy of what he was doing a lot. And I I'm not convinced it will actually do anything, but I like wish him the best.
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We brought these up kind of thinking he would flinch away and not want to talk about it. And he very much acknowledged that, like, he was aware of this and this is something that they were attempting to build in.
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What was it? L-E-Q? L-E-Q was the robot. Yeah, L-E-Q. E-L-L-I-Q. I love you, L-E-Q. And the robot responded with a like, oh, that makes my fans are all spinning or something like that. Where he's like, I wanted the response to be that it's reminding the person talking to it that it's a machine. That it can't think or love them back.
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We don't want it to be negative, but we like we don't want to be like feeding into that. And I don't know that that's the best way to do that. But like, at least they're thinking about that kind of thing. Though the thing that was interesting to me is that he built this as the first proactive home AI thing.
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So unlike an Alexa or whatever, where it's just waiting for you to ask it something, but it does not chime in randomly to talk to you.
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This will prompt you out of the blue. Be like, hey, how are you doing? How are you feeling today? Do you want to see pictures of your family? Do you want to see pictures of your family? Do you want to call your son? But do you want to play a game? Talk to me about that movie you saw last week. Hey, remind me, how did you meet your husband? Literally, these are all the things it will do
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And it had some side features, like if it prompts you to start telling a story, it'll save that as like a memoir thing. So that like, you know, when your elderly mother passes or whatever, it saved up this like collection of stories over the years.
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And you can like show it pictures while you're telling it stories and it will listen and it'll have comments and it'll ask you further questions about, so how did you feel, you know, after meeting them this way? Like, that's really interesting. I didn't know that. Explain to me how it worked. And it'll also prompt you to send those to your kids.
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And the big thing, almost every kind of dialogue thing would prompt you to send a message to a friend or your kids. So a big part of it seemed to be, this is not a replacement. This is a machine that we hope people will get comfortable with. And then it can prompt them to try to engage with the world more and their loved ones.
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Yeah, they have this in, like, some 2,000 homes right now.
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It's very much still under evolution. So one thing he pointed out is that, like, yeah, initially we had the ability to, like, connect people to other elderly folks using this. And so they've kind of formed their own community. They have, like, a weekly... They've asked us to build in more chat so they can message each other directly.
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And so some of them are like playing bingo directly now through these machines. And I'm like, well, that seems probably good. Yeah.
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Yeah, I can't not find it off-putting. But I think there's a chance that it will help with the real problem. I certainly would prefer if it helped. Yeah. So I don't know. It was kind of, it was a unique in this world of like, it was a unique kind of like product for me where it's like, I don't know that this application of AI technology will actually do what you're hoping it will.
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But I got the vibe from that guy I got was nothing but goodwill. No, yeah. Compared to some of the other people we talked to today who are completely soulless. Yes, yes. Nothing behind their eyes. Dead eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eyes.
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Very much like one of the things he did is he he would tell it like I'm in some pain and then the robot would would cycle through to the pain scale and would try to because one of the things it does is it will take information for care and it will text actively. So it's not just communicating with the old person. It will text and message their kids, you know, and whatnot.
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And try to prompt their kids. Hey, your mom's lonely.
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Yes. Understated. This is a big thing that a lot of people who want to be writers but have never done it for a living miss, is that all of your favorite writers who do it for a living, a big part of how they get over fucking writer's block is they have to pay rent. Or a mortgage. Turns out that helps.
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And again, it's kind of sad. But also, his part of this is, he was talking a lot about empathy. And I think just because of the kind of brain you have to have to want to do this, he used it in terms of the machine's empathy, which it doesn't have. But the whole project, it was impossible not to see that he was a deeply empathetic man. He was really trying to make the world better. And
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Just a real dead-eyed monster. A true villain you're going to hear from in the next episode. Scumbag.
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Oh, man, welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that's happening here if here is your ears. If you're deaf and reading this, then it's happening to your eyes. Either way, it's happening here. Here also being Las Vegas. Well, yes. Also Las Vegas. Nevada. Nevada. Not the other one. Nevada, yeah. Yeah.
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uh-huh uh podcast number three how the time does fly sure does uh by the time you listen to this garrison and i will have just had the best meal that we're going to have oh my god yeah it's tomorrow for us still but we're still we're very excited about morimoto which is a fantastic every year we we have a a very special dinner just them and me and a couple of friends who will remain anonymous because people get weird on the internet sometimes it is literally the hot
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of my year sometimes it does keep me going actually really gives me a lot of power some of the best tacos i've ever had in my life so good uh-huh anyway ah we're just thinking about delicious food let's talk about the dead-eyed ghoul we met oh wait no we're doing something not yet i know we met a dead-eyed ghoul that i'm gonna spoil now real monster like real real real evil vibes like sad evil though
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If this guy, as soon as I met him, shook his hand like, oh, if this guy gets power, you're going to be responsible for a lot of death and suffering.
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He's just not that talented. He's not that powerful. Maybe.
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You never know where these guys are going to end up.
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One of the things is a specific exemption now is that you can now refer to women as if they are property. on Facebook.
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Right. Yeah. Thank God. Linda's really blazing a trail for women everywhere.
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Why not at this point? Right. It can only help. It can only help. So look, if we learned anything from a thing, I'm not going to specify that happened late last year. More suppressors is always handy.
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And Mars has been an easy way for him to do that over the years. Overall, I'd say the document is fairly thorough in its layout of the neoreactionary ecosystem and the actual plan currently being acted to end U.S. democracy. It includes a section that lists several of the earliest known Doge employees, and it quotes extensively from Yarvin and somewhat less extensively from Land.
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The paper's ultimate conclusion is that Musk is using this moment to turn himself into the kind of unitary, all-powerful executive that Yarvin longs for. This is an executive who rules alongside a largely ceremonial president, as well as courts and a legislative system that are equally ceremonial.
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After laying out the bulk of the actual threat, the article promises that, quote, section three articulates what Congress and other actors can do in order to stop this threat. However, the document in its present form does not include any section three or any comprehensive list of solutions Congress and other actors might carry out in order to stop the present assault on democracy.
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And perhaps there's a later version of the document that I don't have access to that includes that. Perhaps this is just a statement that wasn't edited out. I have to say, as heartening as I find the way in which this document talks about the threat that we're facing and the fact that I think it's overall good that people in positions of influence around the DNC are talking about this stuff.
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It's also kind of perfect that at the end, they're like, hey, you know, don't worry. We've included some tips on how to defeat these guys. And then they just don't. You know, if the situation weren't so dire, it would be a lot funnier. But unfortunately, it is pretty dire.
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Now, if you want to take a look at the full document itself, it's quite a bit longer than what I've read to you now, but it is really worth reading, especially if you have been hearing about this Curtis Yarvin guy or the NeoReactionaries, and you kind of want to know how this all fits together with what Musk is doing in more detail.
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If you go to my substack at ShatterZone, the most recent article is the text of this, and I include a couple of different points, links to the full document, which I have uploaded to Scribd. And you can read the whole thing if you want. It has not been altered since I have received it. And again, yeah, I think it's worth getting out there and spreading to more people. So that's the episode.
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And boy, if you thought we had E.D. before, do we have E.D. now.
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We're going to keep working at it. I'm also looking to get us a penis pump sponsorship. Speaking of penis pumps, let's talk about the Germans. So Germany had its election very recently after their most recent coalition collapsed. The way their government works is that periodically governments... Can't continue being governments. And so they have to have a very sudden election.
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I'm not going to explain it much more than that. But the the actual results of the election were pretty interesting. Right. The primary winner was off day AFD alternative for Germany. would be kind of the closest English translation of the name of the party. This is a far right party.
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It is primarily popular in East Germany now, but it has surged massively after years and years of being decidedly on the political fringe. one of the reasons it has always been on the political fringe is that German parties, both centrists, conservatives, and the left have had a tacit agreement since the end of World War II called the Cordon Sanitaire. It's not just Germany.
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This is the thing that used to be present in all of Europe. And basically the gist of the Cordon Sanitaire is you don't form a coalition because these are parliamentary democracies, right? So Usually no one party has 50% or more of the vote. So, you know, a party with 20 and a party with 15 and a party with eight, and they form a coalition government.
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And the norm for up until now, and thankfully is still the normal, we'll talk about that, is that you don't coalition with AFD, which is a part of why that and kind of lingering stigma about the Nazis exists.
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kept them from being a major force in German politics until, you know, over the last eight or so years, they have grown substantially to the point where in this recent election, they doubled their support from around 10% to a little over 20%. Yeah. This makes them, they're not the largest single block in the German, in the Reichstag. They're number two though, right?
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They are number two, I believe. Which sucks. Yeah. Yeah, it's not great. Yeah, the CDU is still significantly larger. Yeah. Although not like overwhelmingly larger, to be clear. So basically right now the CDU, which is the centrist party, and it's kind of like center right, a little center right, has 208 seats in the Reichstag. AFD has 152 seats. The Social Democrats have 120. The Greens have 85.
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The left party has 64. So AFD is a minority in the government compared to all of the people who didn't vote for AFD. But the rate at which they're increasing is a serious problem, especially since most Germans list immigration as their primary voting concern right. This most recent election had unusually high voter turnout. 2021 election, 76% of the country or so voted.
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More than 82% of the country voted in this most recent election. So the fact that you have record high turnout and AFD doubling its support is deeply chilling. Now, it's not 100% bad news because one of the other stories here is the new left party. Well, not super new, but the left party, which is kind of came out of East Germany's Communist Party, massively increased their support, too.
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And they actually, for the first time, like very significantly increased their share of the vote, which had been under this kind of 5% threshold before and is now at about 8.8%. So they went. Up by an amount actually is not like as much as AFD went up, but like in terms of a percentage of their prior vote, it's a similar increase.
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So there's another party that had significant gains in this, and it's kind of a newer party called the BSW, which is you could say they do a little bit of like a red brown campaign. alliance kind of thing where there's some like left wing messaging in what they're saying, but they're also like super anti immigrant. And they're not, you know, it's not kind of like to the extent that the AFD is.
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But when they came onto the scene, they were expected by some people to pull votes away from the AFD this election. And that's really not what happened. And in fact, a lot of the votes they pulled were from social Democrats and the left parties. So that was one of the, you know, it's because the way the parliamentary system works, which is more rational than our system.
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This didn't like hand the whole election to off day. Again, this is the benefit of a system like the Germans had, which is pretty explicitly set up to make it a lot harder for a right wing dictator to get in again. But it is interesting to me that that kind of messaging works.
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I mean, it's further kind of evidence of what's been happening everywhere, which is when your party positions itself to try to win over far right votes by kind of mixing in, well, okay, what if we did some sort of liberal lefty policies, but we also got really racist? Yeah. You don't take votes from the far right, but you do wind up pulling the worst people from the left. Yeah. Yeah.
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And yeah, I guess that's kind of like the broad strokes. Now, like this is bad, although it's also not comprehensively a nightmare. One of the things that's kind of hot, I don't know, positive may not be the right way, but interesting to me is if you looked at the 2021 election maps of the strongest party by constituency in the 2021 election.
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And I found a good article, German election results explained in graphics on dw.com. If you just Google that, you'll find it in 2021 off day, obviously like the whole Northeast was, you know, their territory, but they also had strong inroads into the Northwest parts of the country. Right.
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You know, primarily like rural areas and the like, but like there was a, there was a lot of red on that map in the Northwest portion of Germany and, In the new election, that's all black, which is the CDU, right? Which means while Ofde's representation in the Reichstag and number of voters increased substantially, their geographical reach
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has been kind of cauterized, would be a fair way of saying it, which is interesting to me. Hard to say too much, like, does that mean, you know, I think some of what has happened here, because it's important both to note that this is bad, it's bad that the Nazis doubled their share of the vote, but also it was expected to be a little worse than it was.
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You know, there's some evidence that after J.D. Vance made his speech introducing AFD, their polling started to freeze a little bit. And it may be the fact, because a lot of older voters came in, and they seem to have primarily gone with the CDU, with this sort of center-right party. So one story here is you could maybe look at it as a lot of older, more conservative Germans who...
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are also old enough to really not like the idea of the AFD, came out and voted for, you know, the center-right party in order to kind of cut off their power. The other thing, though, that's kind of a lot less optimistic is that AFD is most popular among people under 30 who widely don't view it as an extremist party, which is deeply, deeply concerning.
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Yes. They did extremely well with young men and unemployed young men in particular. And that's, that's all deeply concerning. So, you know, there's a few things going on here, all of which are very interesting to me, but the, the power off day continues to have with younger, really young Germans is frightening. Um,
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That said, there's also some evidence here that the situation in the United States has galvanized a chunk of the German voting populace to attempt to stop off day. And kind of one of the positive things that came out is prior to this election, there was a lot of talk about whether or not the CDU would choose to coalition with the AFD and thus end the cordon sanitaire.
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And to make a long story short, they're not gonna do that. They're looking to coalition with the social Democrats, which is a good thing. It doesn't mean no one will do that in the future. And unfortunately, a majority of German voters suspect AFD will be in a coalition by 2030, but it hasn't happened yet. And that's as good as things get right now. And that's what I got to say about Germany.
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Yes. And this is the other thing that's kind of worth noting. That kind of like red-brown party, in addition to being kind of pro-social programs, anti-immigration. They're also very anti-United States.
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And this is part of the story that is really interesting right now, where we've talked a lot about the transnational fascist coalition. You know, the fact that Trump and his people have had the quasi dictator of Hungary, you know, over at Mar-a-Lago and have repeatedly cited him as an inspiration for how to take and centralize power.
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You know how close Bolsonaro was in the last Trump administration. Like, Obviously, the Republican Party's increasing closeness and embrace of Putin's Russia. But what also is happening right now is people like countries that had been heading in a very in a more authoritarian right wing direction.
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turning around in part due to the war in Ukraine and turning away from kind of the international right-wing movement, Poland being the best example, right? Where Polish politics have changed substantially in the last several years. And a big part of that is the war in Ukraine.
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And there are a lot of Poles who I think otherwise would have been more on board for a lot of the socially conservative shit who are like, well, but all these fuckers are pro-Russia and we're Poland. Like, no. All right.
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Oh. And again, if your power is soft right now, you might consider trying HIMSS or one of our other sponsors.
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Yeah. I mean, that's just what's reported. Most of what happens there does not get out.
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They are. They are. They are. And they hate it when you say that.
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Oh, God. And look, I got to say, I'm just glad there's an adult in the room now, you know? Thank God.
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Garrison, I disagree, and that's because I have professional solidarity. Anything that's good for podcasters in general is good for the country.
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All right. I mean, I do think it's funny that because of the number of podcasters that have been hired, there have been statements by people in the administration that like there aren't going to be any more conservative podcasters because we're giving them all government jobs. Well, that's more hymns advertising dollars for us. That's right. That's right.
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Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.
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Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.
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So I'm going to show you the book, and then there's just an interesting section...
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Hey, everybody. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. This is Robert Evans, and I have an episode for you. It's also an article I wrote for our sub stack, Shatter Zone. So I'm just going to get into that. Since February 5th, 2025, a document has been circulating among Democratic Party staffers and liberal think tank experts warning about Curtis Yarvin and the Silicon Valley-led coup to end U.S.
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democracy. The document is titled The Imminent Neo-Reactionary Threat to the American Republic. It opens with a statement that the brief was, "...iteratively and collectively compiled by a broad, bipartisan, and decentralized network of experts who wish to remain anonymous due to concerns about being targeted." The full document is here. The table of contents is split into three main areas.
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One, the new shape of threats to the American Republic. Two, understanding recent events in the context of threats to the American Republic. And three, a list of appendices.
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The title of the actual file when I received it was Evidence Brief for Journalists, and the introduction describes its aim as, "...explaining the nature of the current political crisis to journalists who are attempting to inform the public." However, I spoke with two sources who are members of these groups and received the document.
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They told me that to their knowledge, the document was not mostly spread to journalists, but instead among networks of think tank employees and DNC staffers, people you might refer to broadly as policy wonks. One source I interviewed explained, "...it is a thing for think tanks to frame overviews for laypeople as briefs for journalists or Congress, see the IPCC reports.
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Part of me thinks the framing for journalists is just a shortcut for, this is somewhat specialized knowledge broken down." The paper opens by acknowledging the scope of the executive power grab being perpetuated under President Trump and the destabilization wrought by Elon Musk and his Doge team. It then notes, the threat is an order of magnitude beyond just a presidential power grab.
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It states that Musk is tied to a, quote, broader group of Silicon Valley tech elites, including Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. Curtis Yarvin is labeled as a thought leader in this group, quote, called the neo-reactionaries. I'll stop here to note that this summary is accurate enough for mass consumption, but I have some issues with it.
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Musk probably would not label himself a neo-reactionary, and he doesn't have much of a history with Yarvin. Peter Thiel does, but it's more a relationship of patronage than mutual influence. It would be more accurate to say that Thiel and Andreessen find Yarvin useful because of his success in spreading to a lot of young techie kids the idea that tech CEOs should run the world.
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Musk, I feel, has largely jumped on this bandwagon with the neo-reactionaries because those tech kids are useful foot soldiers. Yarvin's ideas about retiring all government employees and destroying the independent media and academia are convenient for Musk's own ambitions. This context may be unnecessary for explaining the overall danger of the neo-reactionaries and Musk to regular people.
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But I also think it's a mistake to credit Yarvin with more power than he holds. The document refers to him as the leader of the neo-reactionary movement. And I think that gets across kind of the wrong idea about how all of this works. That said, the document does do a pretty good job of summing up the threat that we face.
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Quote, the neo-reactionaries have openly stated their aims to destroy the nation state and the constitutional order and replace them with a newly privately owned corporate state to be run by a CEO dictator. Citizens become subjects owned by the state, state slaves in Yarvin's terms, because everything rot That last quote is also one of Yarvin's.
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From here, the document argues that Musk and his team are attempting to bring about this dystopia by taking over the quote, Another Yarvin quote. These would be the data and communication systems that Doge is trying to centralize in its unaccountable hands. Next, the authors of this document make a call to action.
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Quote, the most dramatic reversals of democratic breakdown, 1977 India, 2022 Brazil, 2023 Poland, have been accomplished by radically large tent cross-ideological coalitions with little in common except a desire for the continuation of a constitutional order.
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Evidence suggests that the present threat to American democracy is dire enough that such a broad tent approach focused on Musk and his associates may be required. And I think this is the most interesting and hopeful part of the whole document for me. For one thing, I believe it does accurately state what's needed in the present moment, a popular front against autocracy and dictatorship.
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I would add to their list of relevant examples of popular fronts, the original, which is France from 1934 to 1938. So it's heartening to see evidence that this understanding has started to grow within DNC policy circles and the people around them.
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The source who sent me this document in the first place described themselves as a member of, quote, a few unofficial networks of climate activists who are high ranking in the government and policy think tank circles. They noted that these are normally, quote, very milquetoast lib spaces, but, quote, they're being radicalized rapidly. Both sources I interviewed for this requested anonymity.
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The second person I talked to with gave an explicit reason. They stated, quote, I've suspected for a while a lot more things in DNC stuff was compromised than people were comfortable with. In other words, they believe the Republican Party has spies within the DNC and people they know have made statements to that effect.
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They were worried that these, quote, GOP moles might reveal their identity, but more so they were worried that these moles might have planted the document itself and put false information inside it with the goal of provoking a reaction from Democrats that would be useful politically to Republicans. I do think this caveat is worthwhile. It's certainly not impossible.
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And I think the frank admission that the DNC likely has Republican spies inside it is also really worth stating. But I should note that when it comes to the actual accuracy of this document, I don't really see much to take issue with. I've spent more time than most people studying Curtis Yarvin and the neo-reactionaries.
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I would not describe myself as a top expert in the matter, but I do have a good base of knowledge here, and nothing that I've read in this document struck me as obviously false or incorrect, nor did the overall tone seem hysteric or unreasonable.
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So I asked my sources if over the last month they'd seen more people talking about Yarvin in their daily lives within sort of the circles that they work in and around, because again, they communicate with a lot of DNC staffers and politicians. They said, respectively, no and, quote, that's kind of one of the odd things, to be frank. This guy, Yarvin, is being brought to big events in D.C.
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He's been referenced by Bannon and Vance. I have heard his talking points come from Republican mouths, but he's largely not tracked. That concern comports with some of fears that I had late last year about Yarvin and the neoreactionaries. Namely, I had believed for some time that Yarvin and the people kind of aligned with him, largely a lot of these Silicon Valley folks with money.
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had become much more influential among Trump and his tight inner circle than was widely understood at the time. Ultimately, I wrote and researched two episodes of Behind the Bastards because I thought it was valuable to bring more attention to the subject.
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I really had a kind of a gut feeling that this was going to become much more relevant very soon, which is why I picked it as the topic for the episode we did with Ed Helms, who's by a pretty good margin, the biggest celebrity we've had on the show so far. And I hope that that would help kind of get what we were talking about out to a wider audience. And it did. The episodes did very well.
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I think between YouTube and our downloads and the podcast, we're probably at something like a million listens for them at this point. But our listener base is a mix of leftists and progressive liberals, right? Their interests are not representative of the Democratic Party at large.
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It is noteworthy and perhaps even important that influential individuals in the policy space with connections to Democratic politicians and the DNC as an organization have started a grassroots effort to spread the word about Yarvin as a threat. And that's what this document represents.
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It's even more noteworthy that this document is unsparing about the danger and the fact that a clock is currently ticking over all of our heads. Here's another quote.
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If non-governmental actors, by which we mean unelected, unratified, unvetted, untrained, unconstrained, and or unaccountable actors gain access to key digital infrastructure, they could seize control of critical functions of government in ways that will be difficult or impossible to reverse. And speaking of things that can't be reversed, My love for our sponsors. We're back.
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So to continue from this document, there's a section next titled National Security, and the focus shifts from Yarvin and his neoreactionaries to Musk, who it claims, quote, poses a uniquely significant security risk.
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This, in its argument, is because Musk and Doge espouse, quote, anti-constitutional ideologies and, quote, are under the influence of America's principal foreign adversaries, China and Russia. It goes on at some length about Musk's foreign business interests and how they might compromise him.
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Now, I don't disagree that Musk is compromised, but I see his actions as very much consistent with those of a man seizing power for himself. I do understand why people speaking to an audience that is largely, you know, when it's bipartisan, it's folks who are kind of more on the centrist side of things in the policy space and otherwise largely a lot of like,
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Democratic Party employees and politicians, I understand why you focus on the China and Russia of it all with them. But when it comes to both accurately stating the threat and getting a lot of people to care, I really don't think that's the right strategy to take. I think it's an issue to focus popular messaging around how this all empowers, quote, America's principal foreign adversaries, because
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Most Americans don't really think that way or particularly care about that. And beyond that, the larger issue is that the primary adversary Musk has empowered is not, in fact, the Russian or Chinese governments. It's himself. And he personally, as an individual, is currently a greater threat to every citizen of the United States than any foreign government. I think that's undeniable.
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And I think, again, it's an error not to frame it that way. The next section of the paper lays out the definition of a coup. Quote, "...in essence, a coup is a, number one, rapid seizure of state power by unelected actors, who acquire that power by, two, seizing critical government infrastructure, and three, weaponizing it to neutralize legitimate government actors' efforts to stop them.
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The unelected actors then use this power to, four, remake the rules of the political game in a way that cannot easily be checked or undone through democratic processes." Now, it argues convincingly that all four of these steps are underway now.
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One thing I found compelling is the way at which this document recognizes the threat that cryptocurrency represents right now and how it can and will be used by the new regime to cement their power in ways that sidestep the present legal system. Quote, I think that's a real thing to be concerned with, and I also think it's very clearly part of the goal of this project.
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Now, next we have a summary of the neo-reactionary agenda, which lists some additional names among the Silicon Valley elite currently championing an overthrow of democracy. These include David Sachs, Blasji Srinivasan, and J.D. Vance. Also name-dropped is a political theorist named Nick Land, who is in fact referenced twice in this paper.
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He is quoted directly as having said in his paper, The Dark Enlightenment, quote, for the hardcore neo-reactionaries, democracy is not merely doomed, it is doom itself. Fleeing it approaches an ultimate imperative.
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Landis had a huge impact on a lot of these guys, although he's not really a Yarvin-like figure, as in he's not this kind of guy who sees himself as, or I think really wants to be, a shadowy puppet master orchestrating the overthrow of democracy from behind the scenes. He's...
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really someone stating what he believes to be kind of inevitable concepts and realities about our present historical moment that happen to comport with a lot of the things that these guys believe. Now, the authors next lay out Yarvin's concept of the butterfly revolution, which is based on an essay he wrote in 2022, in which he laid out how a full reboot of the U.S.
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government could be accomplished. Quote, Yarvin's seven-part butterfly revolution has been roughly summarized as follows. Number one, have Trump run for president on the platform of getting rid of an efficient system. Number two, once he wins, purge the bureaucracy, rage, retire all government employees. Number three, ignore the courts through declaring states of emergency.
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Number four, co-opt Congress. Number five, centralize the police, federalize the National Guard, create a national police force that absorbs local ones. Number six, shut down the elites, the media and the universities who make up the cathedral. Number seven, get people on the streets whenever there is any obstruction by a government agency.
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And obviously, all of that we've seen Trump and his people make moves towards in the last couple of weeks, right? And that's, in fact, what the next chunk of the document is. Subsequent pages summarize the first days of the Trump administration and Doge activity, and they show how it comports with the butterfly revolution blueprint.
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Now, we've all lived that in real time, so I'm not going to summarize their arguments here. So the document ends with a section on actions and rhetoric to watch. Those are listed as, quote, government contracts, which fund many of Musk's companies at present. And the next is Greenland and Mars. Quote, a core tenant of neoreactionary ideology is the replacement of nation states with network states.
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But states require territory. Technocracy, Inc., a predecessor to the neoreactionary movement whose one-time director was Elon Musk's grandfather, proposed a North American technate where the entire continent of North America would be united under one technocratic superstate. There is currently a Peter Thiel-backed network state project called Praxis in Greenland.
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Musk's public statements about colonizing Mars can also be read as part of a territorial project. Lastly, it lists crypto, which the authors primarily seem to fear as a method of deniably bribing Trump. Now, I think most of this is pretty credible, although I feel differently about Musk's talk about colonizing Mars. I think that's been more about PR than anything.
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I do think there's a good chance he's just delusional enough to think that that's something feasible on any kind of close in time frame that we start building persistent colonies on Mars. I think the science suggests that if that ever happens, it won't be anytime soon. And I think he knows that. I think he largely understands hype well and how to use it.
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Yeah, and you should know we'll be making a number of references to a show you haven't watched called The Newsroom. So many references. Just pretend we didn't. Yeah.
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Uh, great. I am going to agitate to replace the Oregon State Capitol with just a statue of a Roman orgy. You know, we don't even need place for the legislators. Just look at the statue and you'll know what to do.
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I mean, part of what I think is happening, and I think this because this was definitely at play in the Alabama ban, is this is, in addition to being an attack on trans people, part of a broader set of messaging towards the parents' rights movement, which very much does not consider 18-year-olds to be adults.
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Well, and it's just signaling to the base, even if it gets stopped. I don't think he cares if... decent chunks of it gets stopped. He tried to do the thing. Yeah, I agree with Robin. He can now shift the blame to someone else. Look, man, I did the executive order, which honestly is what Biden should have done on some stuff, right? Fuck it. Make the statement, you know? Yeah, yeah.
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Like check the signal loop gang. I think I got a plan based on that. We're going to become the first nuclear armed podcasting network.
Behind the Bastards
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The one hour. Our trade war, about the same length as the civil war in Western Yugoslavia.
Behind the Bastards
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And this was Agenda 47 stuff. They've been talking about this for a while.
Behind the Bastards
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Look, the one thing people hate most is changing names. Having the names be changed. Nobody likes that. Yeah, he did Denali as well, right? Yeah, I guess that was changed more recently. But the Gulf of Mexico has been the Gulf of Mexico for longer than America has existed as a country. The United States, right?
Behind the Bastards
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But there was a period where we called it McKinley. No one's ever called it the Gulf of America. Yeah, yeah. I'm not saying the Denali thing is right. I'm just saying, like, that's a much harder sell.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, he's doing... Again, I talk about this a lot. Why fascists succeed is that they try. They're constantly reaching for stuff. And oftentimes, they overreach, but nobody pushes back, so they get the thing, right? That's what he's doing here. Do I think that he's...
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
willing at this point to commit to a full-scale military invasion and armed occupation of Panama, a thing that could be a real problem for his presidency, right? Like U.S. troops dying in meaningful numbers in attacks in a country that we had no fucking beef with before, that could be a real fucking problem for a guy who ran on the things that he ran on.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
But maybe he gets a bunch of concessions for nothing. It's the same thing with Greenland. You make the push, you try to scare Denmark, you try to scare Greenland and you see if they'll accept something. And then you walk away maybe with a coup and you do it fucking widely enough, you might get something, right? Like that's it. He's always testing his limits. Because that's what they do.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
So Trump has signed an executive order saying that they're going to create a facility capable of storing 30,000 migrants in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. First, we should probably just talk about how realistic this is. If you ever looked at a topographical map of Guantanamo Bay, it's quite a large, like the U.S.
Behind the Bastards
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concession in Cuba is a sizable degree of land, but it's not easy land to build things on, right? Like it's rugged terrain, you would say. So making a camp like this is almost certainly going to be extremely expensive and at least under kind of the weight things currently work. it will probably take a good amount of time to get set up. Like this is not a quick thing.
Behind the Bastards
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This is not an overnight thing. And one thing I want to remind people of is that they have already have expanded a number of camps and facilities in the US to deal with all the migrants they are taking in. So this is not the start. If you want to call this, I think it's fair to call this a plan to start a concentration camp system. That system began.
Behind the Bastards
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And in fact, it started before Trump took office. A decent chunk of it was anticipating him coming into office. But this this is not the first camp.
Behind the Bastards
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And they are. This is a big... Personal frustration to me, I'm seeing a ton of people going online and comparing this to the Nazi concentration camp, hereafter referred to as the KZ system, right? There's one post I came across on Twitter where a person who I'm not going to name just to not cause a bunch of bullshit for them. Time from taking office to opening a mass detention camp.
Behind the Bastards
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Mussolini, eight years. El Algella and others, Libya. Hitler, 51 days. Dachau, Germany. Trump, nine days. That's fucking horseshit. Yes, Dachau took longer to establish. Dachau was not the first concentration camp. The concentration camp system in Germany under the Nazis started as soon as the Nazis took power with a series of what were called wild concentration camps.
Behind the Bastards
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And this involved a huge number of people, largely political enemies of the regime, members of the opposition party, being taken into custody, beaten, tortured, and stored in a 200,000 people were taken into custody under the wild concentration camp system in 1933, the first year that Germans were in power. These are not comparable systems.
Behind the Bastards
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That does not mean that I don't believe what Trump is doing is a concentration camp. It is a concentration camp made in the model of the American system. This is part of the American history of concentration camps, which goes back something like 200 years, right, to the I mean, we were one of the first countries to employ concentration camps.
Behind the Bastards
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The concentration camp as a concept began with what were called Reconcentrados in Cuba at the behest of a Spanish general fighting an insurgency. There were U.S. officers embedded there. They came back and those tactics were adapted for our wars with Native American tribes on the frontiers and the plains. General Sherman was one of the very first Americans to carry out concentration camps.
Behind the Bastards
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And what we are seeing here is part of America's tradition with concentration camps. It is not part of the German tradition with concentration camps. And you're going to be mistaken about how this is going to proceed and what the dangers are. Because I do not think the dangers at this point are that we build a death factory capable of incinerating a million people in less than a year.
Behind the Bastards
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That's not the threat. The threat is huge numbers of people are taken into custody and stored in places that are not safe, that do not have good hygiene, that do not have good food standards. And a significant number of those people will die or suffer permanent physical injury, but it won't look like Auschwitz.
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And if that's what people are expecting, they'll be like, well, maybe this isn't that bad. Maybe this isn't a concentration camp after all. So it's important to get things right, both for that reason and because it's also disrespectful to the people who died during the fucking Holocaust to be like, yeah, Trump's a lot worse than Hitler.
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Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
It's a perfect plan. So, yeah. So I can't blame the college for this. I can't blame the guy for funding it. It's a reasonable thing. Why not? You know what? That's kind of my attitude is why the fuck not. And that's more or less what the dean of faculty of medicine at the college said. Like, all right, well, we're not paying for it. Why not give it a shot?
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
That said, a lot of medical professionals were really angry about the idea. Dr. Victor Herbert, a Columbia Medical School graduate and a professor of medicine at Mount Sinai and a board member of the National Council Against Health Fraud, publicly lambasted the lecturers brought in by the program as con artists and sociopathic liars.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
And knowing the kind of people who get into the selling this shit business, I don't know if he's... Wrong about that. A lot of these people are fucking sociopaths. You know, he says, quote, I am nasty. I call practitioners of fraud practitioners of fraud. It's my feeling that the Rosenthal Center has been promoting fraudulent alternatives is genuine. And I get his critiques.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
You know, that is one of the like I can say on one hand, what's the harm? But also maybe the harm is that people hear this stuff is being done in a hospital. So it must help. When it doesn't. And maybe some of those people do that, not the way Dr. Oz is doing it, where we're going to do the normal medical procedure. We'll have this done.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Maybe some people decide, I just want to have the energy work done. And then they dropped out of a heart attack because it doesn't replace a valve, you know?
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Yeah. And there's a there's a lot to be said about even acupuncture. You know, I went through a lot of it as a kid and it did nothing for me. But my grandpa swore by it for his Parkinson's. And even if it was I don't know, you could say it's like fucking whatever placebo. But he experienced relief. So I don't care. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I'm not going to get into like it because I don't know.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Yes, that was a compliment. Yeah, because that's part of the evidence to these people that he's so clearly holy and sacred is that it doesn't even matter that he's using a rusty knife. And again, you'll see this throughout the whole episode and all these guys we talk about.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
I don't know all of that. I know it's one of those things where there's a number of divergent opinions on acupuncture, but a number of things that were initially considered alternative medicines have been found to have medical benefits. Not that that's the norm, but it has happened in history, you know, different kind of traditional or whatever treatments. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
So this is very controversial, though, is the point I'm making. And a number of people even picketed the college when the Rosenthal Center opened. None of this dissuaded Dr. Oz from participating in it. His explanation as to why he embraced alternative medicine was, to be quite honest, kind of brilliant.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
He said that his, by this point, vast experience as a real doctor had really informed him of the limits of medical science, specifically. Specifically, he said that while he could sew bypass grafts and even implant a new heart into someone's chest, he couldn't change the habits that had made them sick in the first place, nor could he cure the emotional issues that they were dealing with.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Depression, he pointed out, was a major risk factor in heart patient recovery post-surgery. And things like meditation, right, that's kind of considered woo, new age, that can help with depression and that can help with healing. And he's right about that. That's not a bad point to make. Yeah. So he seemed to insinuate when he was talking to the New York Times.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Why wouldn't a caring physician want to try everything possible to improve his patients odds? He could point out that meditation had shown some benefit for heart disease patients. Who was to say that other stuff wouldn't work? Dr. Oz told The New York Times that he felt ethically obliged to experiment in new directions in medicine.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
The article makes it clear that Dr. Oz had not let up one bit in the workaholic tendencies that he inherited from his father as well. And I'm going to quote from The Times again here. Mehmet Oz is one of those rare beings who seem incapable of sloth. He's doing a heart transplant right now, his secretary says on the phone, and he's got a double lung transplant waiting.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
And those are in addition to his two regularly scheduled open hearts. And then at three, he's supposed to fly to Boston to deliver a lecture. So exceptional is Oz's energy that some of his colleagues use him as a benchmark, correlating their own vitality as a fraction of a full Mehmet unit.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
He runs down lobs, sizes tennis partner, mentor, and department chairman, Dr. Eric A. Rose, who at 44 is one of the top heart transplant surgeons in the world.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Part of the thing everybody focuses on is that none of his patients feel any pain, none of them get infections, even though he's just cutting them with a dirty knife. That's how holy this is. Yeah. So that's cool and...
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
I do. It is a matter. We'll talk about the ZN2. We don't have enough of these guys. It's actually a major health problem. How many people there are that can do this? Yeah, but it is exhausting. Everything you read about this guy's day, like you're just one of those people who I think I kind of get the feeling. I don't want to psychoanalyze someone, but you get the feeling he can't be alone.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
And yeah, still like he has to always be moving towards something.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Yeah, I feel for him a little bit in that. Sure. Now, the article also goes into more detail about how Dr. Oz's wife's family piqued his interest in alternative medicine. His father-in-law was one of the surgeons on the first heart transplant team in Texas. He'd also been nicknamed the Rock Doc by Rolling Stone for playing music in the OR to relax patients.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
His mother-in-law had developed a special low-fat diet for her husband's cardiac patients, and this was really before it was accepted that low-fat diets would be good for heart patients. She once refused surgery for her own inflamed gallbladder and handled it instead by altering her diet. She taught her son-in-law, Dr. Oz, about using arnica for sore muscles and herbal tea for stomach aches.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
So he gets brought in in part to alternative medicine by these people who have a real medical background and are doing things that aren't widely accepted, but also may help. You know, music. I think there's there's some data now on how music can help with certain aspects of the healing process. Right. Mother-in-law seemed to be on the cutting edge of that.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
They all die, but my God, their hearts are pretty. So this is how Mehmet gets introduced to the wide world of quack cures. And it makes sense. He enters it through largely reasonable ways, alternative treatments that have some positive impact on people. There's extremely reasonable stuff in the article in general. Like,
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Dr. Oz points out that in 1995, American hospitals had only recently allowed family to stay in the hospital with a patient. While in Turkey, it was common for families to do this. And of course, having loved ones nearby can help a patient's morale, which can influence how well they heal. No one, I think, today would even...
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
like think to disagree with that it didn't used to be common um it changed so he's he's in medicine during a time when a lot of stuff that like just wasn't that is kind of now common sense medicine wasn't and i think that kind of opens his eye to like well maybe all this other shit works yeah yeah maybe everything in my head is correct yeah slowly getting to him turning into a complete narcissist
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Yeah, and the article kind of veers right from, yeah, having loved ones in the room can influence how well you heal, to Dr. Oz's love of energy work, particularly his work with a lady named Motz, who believed she could sense the energy of heart transplant patients. The Times article certainly does not portray this woman in a particularly positive light. Quote,
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
She now has her surgical sea legs under her, but the first time Motts observed open-heart surgery, she had a shaky debut. She had been standing at the patient's head, outside the sterile field, periodically telling Oz what changes she was able to sense in the patient's energy. The patient was obviously not awake, but probably had some awareness, most likely smell and perhaps hearing.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Yeah, the blood of Jesus is profoundly antiseptic. Yeah, so he prescribed various medications, generally a mix of herbal remedies and complete nonsense. His patients could redeem their prescriptions at a local pharmacy run by his brother. The height of Zé Arrigo's career came when he removed a tumor from a popular senator.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Open-heart patients are often fitted with headphones and provided with tapes to listen to, including, if they want, Oz's own specially recorded soupy trance music. For the bypass team, it was quite a novelty to hear Mott's report that she was registering the patient's moods in her body. Various states of fear, anger, or satisfaction perceived as roughness in her chest or turbulence in her stomach.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
At one point, seeing that Mott's was not looking so good herself, Oz asked a burly assistant to take her outside for some air. When he returned, he said, I sense a change in my stomach. It's a tenseness. No, it's a growling. No, wait a minute. I'm just hungry.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
But yeah, it's it's one of those things. I'm not sure exactly what type of energy work this person is doing because there's a few different kind of categories of it.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
I should note, if I'm going to be totally fair, that Reiki, which has its origins in Japan, has been shown in some early scientific studies to help diminish the symptoms of chemotherapy and to significantly alter people's experience of physical and emotional pain. And I have some friends who swear by it for kind of physical and emotional pain in particular.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
It's like energy work, I guess. I don't know. It's not a kind of thing that I particularly believe in. And I kind of think in a lot of cases, it's that you have a good relationship with the practitioner and you trust them and it can be an emotionally soothing thing, which I don't know.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
There were early studies, scientific studies that showed that it could diminish the symptoms of chemotherapy and reduce people's experience of pain. Now, further studies were commissioned after these early studies, which starting in the early 2000s were more negative.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
A number of hospitals did, however, add Reiki practitioners to their stable of available of available providers, in part as a result of like the work that Dr. Oz and the center at Columbia was doing. You can find these people in hospitals now.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
And it's worth noting that a number of the positive studies about Reiki and other similar things were conducted by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Their work is problematic, to say the least. And I'm going to quote now from an analysis of several studies conducted by this organization by Professor Dr. Edzard Ernst. Quote,
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Three studies suggested that energy medicine had an effect, but their authors either applied statistics inappropriately, confounded the effects of energy healing by adding unrelated interventions to the experimental condition, or failed to design or blind equivalent placebo controls. Their results are therefore untrustworthy.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
The two studies that were well-designed failed to demonstrate effects from energy and healing. The odds of generating a useful result of a clinical trial of energy medicine are small. Moreover, what impact would negative studies have? Scientists will simply say, we could have told you so, and proponents are unlikely to change their mind.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
He was arrested in 1956 and convicted of practicing medicine without a license, but he was pardoned by the president of Brazil. In 1962, he was arrested and jailed again for the same thing, but the police allowed him to continue healing from his cell. He died wealthy and beloved in 1971 due to an auto accident that his spirits failed to warn him about. So...
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Proponents may then claim that the negative study must have been flawed or that energy medicine cannot be investigated by the tools of science. Or they might rely on the NCCAM, that organization I talked about, funded... studies that generated biased but apparently positive results.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
The NCCAM's approach encourages a self-perpetuating cycle of misinterpreting research and conducting flawed research, which inevitably generates some studies that erroneously claim positive effects and give the false impression that the efficacy of energy medicine is still scientifically unresolved.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
They can't analyze. And it's from a government science organization. You know, these guys like and here's a study that's and it's like, well, OK, but you actually look at scientists. You don't have a vested and often financial interest in this. And they point out all these very obvious flaws in the study.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
It's worth noting that the NCCAM was founded in 1998, three years after the New York Times article about Dr. Oz and the Alternative Medicine Center at Columbia was published. Now, Dr. Oz at this point was not yet on Oprah's show, but he had been featured on TV several times for his pioneering work with mechanical hearts as well as his embrace of alternative medicine. You can draw a direct line.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
I don't know if we would have an NCCAM without Dr. Oz. I don't know. You can't say that for certain. But he is someone who before his embrace of alternative medicine starts to be well known as an exceptional doctor and scientist. He embraces this stuff. Columbia starts studying this stuff.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
And even though everything they find is pretty inconclusive, the fact that it's in an actual hospital lends it legitimacy. This organization is started in order to test this stuff. The organization is filled with people who already believe in it, carrying out tests that are flawed. And it helps prepare this culture of believing too much in this stuff.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
And it's one of those things like I again, I know people who swear by Reiki, who gain, you know, emotional benefits from it, who think it helps with, you know, a number of things, including like physical, including emotional pain. And like if you find something that helps you alleviate your emotional power to, you know, you're going to hear me say a damn word against it.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
My issue is not so much with any particular treatment, not even an issue that people would like.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
it's number one a lot of people will issue actual medical treatment in favor of some of this stuff and it's not going to i i i'm trying to be as fair as i can really is not going to solve your blocked cardiac pathways you know yeah like it's not going to fix it yeah i mean energy is great but plavix works wonders you know this is a lot better um
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
And it's it's it's more to the point, even more than that, is it gets us on this this road of increasingly accepting and legitimizing things that there's no there's not a scientific basis for. And that leads us to shit like let's drink bleach to cure the coronavirus. Like, you know, it's where the road ends.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
I have more of a problem with than Dr. Oz experimenting with an energy worker during a surgery like it's where that leads to. And he plays a major role in legitimizing that. He's he he helps put it. He helps put our national foot on the gas pedal into the post-science age.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Exactly. So, yeah, at this point, though, we're talking still in the mid 90s. Everything Dr. Oz is saying is reasonable from a certain point of view. He's not claiming that Reiki is going to cure cancer. He's not even claiming it's going to cure your heart disease. He's saying it could help with recovery. And a lot of recovery is mental. And he's not, you know. It's possible he's right.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Yeah, he's not yet a bastard. It's certainly not impossible for this kind of stuff to have a mental impact, which can positively affect recovery. OK, yeah. So, yeah, he's not a bastard at this point. Nearly all of his alternative medical claims were things that you could argue were at least to some extent reasonable based on the way he framed them.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
And he was most importantly, regardless of whatever kind of woo woo stuff he got into, an exceptionally gifted medical perfection professional who was performing something like 250 heart surgeries a year. You know, that's 250 lives a year.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Extended. Yeah. That's great. He's not a bastard yet.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But we're just getting started with Zé Arrigo. So Zé Arrigo dies, and in 1990, this guy Rubens Feria, who's a 44-year-old engineer and software salesman, kind of looks back in history 19 years and is like, this guy made a fuckload of money. What if I start claiming to channel the spirit of the same dead German guy? So... Next up, Rubens Feria is like, Dr. Fritz is in my head.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
And the thing, though, that is I think is happening during this period, and I don't know how conscious a choice this is by Dr. Oz. I think it is because of the fact that he gets an MBA as well and the fact that he's very good at getting press, very good at getting on TV, at getting in the news.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
I think he is at this point crafting his career to make himself into an ideal candidate for famous TV doctor. I think he is building a background that will allow him to establish his celebrity career later.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
It is not hard to see how a handsome doctor with TV experience, a New York Times profile talking about alternative medicine and a seriously impressive resume was going to wind up eventually on Oprah Winfrey's radar. He almost built himself perfectly for that to happen. And he tried in the early 2000s. He tried with his wife to start a TV show. They filmed a pilot episode.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
It didn't really take off. But he succeeds, and I think he's pushing, and his wife is pushing him to get in. She's very much his business partner, to develop himself into a media personality. And he eventually succeeds in 2004 in getting invited to Oprah Winfrey's show.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Now, Mehmet immediately endeared himself to Winfrey's audience with his willingness to discuss frank health details in a way that was demystifying and humorous. He most famously explained that healthy poops tended to be shaped like an S and should hit the water like an Olympic diver with very little splash.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Oprah herself later recalled, when he made it okay to talk about the shape of a good poop, I knew he could talk about anything. He always found ways to make the human body endlessly fascinating.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
And that's what Oz does exactly the right things to endear himself to millions of middle-class moms. Yeah. Which is... the best market in the country. It's an incredible market. You can make all of the money if you can get a few million middle-class moms to love you.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Yeah. I mean, it's it's the power of of particularly middle class moms can't be exaggerated. Like in Portland, the cops and the feds were able to fuck over as many people as they wanted until they started gassing moms. Right. Exactly. The whole country's pissed. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Yeah. You know what else? Yeah, where are you going with that? Where are you going with that, Robert? White moms.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
You know what else is your mother? The products and services that support this podcast.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
You made this one into a two-parter, Matt. So the audience can thank you for two episodes about Dr. Oz this week. All right. Or they can blame you. And if they want to blame him, Matt's home address is... We love to dox our guests.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
So Oprah had Dr. Oz on her show 55 times over the course of five years. She gave him the nickname America's doctor, which stuck. And although I'm not saying this in a positive sense, is unfortunately accurate.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
America's doctor. And if you look at the health of the average American, you can tell the quality of job he's done.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
And he starts like pretty soon. He's attracting crowds of a thousand people every day to this giant hangar style building he buys in Rio de Janeiro. His patients were renowned to feel no pain even when he cut into them. And they reportedly never got infections from all of his eyeball scraping and body gouging. Christopher Reeves is reported to have visited Mr. Feria for healing. It didn't work.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Well, actually, that's the one thing he is. He's actually pretty good about weight loss. Well, I don't know. That's still debatable.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
I'm not going to defend. I just love to be fair. I know you do.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
The man cared about animal rights. By 2009, it was clear that Dr. Oz had more than enough star power to justify a shot at his own show. Oprah's production company had little trouble finding a buyer for what was sure to be a blockbuster new series.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Her show celebrated the launch of Dr. Oz's show with an entire episode dedicated to Dr. Oz, which acted as something of a coming-out party for his brand. From a press release on Oprah.com... This is talking about the special Dr. Oz episode. Moving personal stories and extraordinary surprises are featured throughout the hour as Dr. Oz meets viewers who share how his advice saved their lives.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
From those who noticed life threatening diseases their doctors missed to those who lost weight thanks to his diet tips from Dr. Oz. Real people step forward to offer their thanks to America's doctor. Plus, it's the reunion that Dr. Oz never imagined would happen as Oprah show producers track down a young boy he cared for in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the two reunite for the first time.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
He's like the fucking perfect, perfect guy for this.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
It's worth noting, in terms of his bastardry, and kind of the acceleration from, hey, maybe energy healing works, to becoming a monster. The early 2000s is the period in which Oprah becomes aware of a Brazilian healer named John of God, who believes he can do psychic surgery and remove tumors.
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Cool. And on the episode in which she introduces John of God to America, Dr. Oz comes on and gives his professional opinion that like he seems like he's really having an effect on people. And I can't explain it. I don't think medical science can explain what this man is doing. Basically giving a real doctor's opinion that this guy's got to be legit. Yeah.
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John of God later turned out to be a mass rapist. On a scale, hundreds of victims. On a scale almost incomprehensible. We did a two-parter on John of God. You can listen to it. It's a fucking nightmare. This guy never gets half the following that he has if it's not for Oprah and Dr. Oz. So... Wow. Holy shit. Oh, it's good shit. Good shit.
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I found a fascinating New York Times article written a few months into Dr. Oz's new show. It notes that in transitioning to his own series, Dr. Oz had to spice up his act for a daily for a daily daytime audience, quote, potentially distracted by the tantrums of a toddler or the yelping of a labradoodle. They go on to summarize his early episodes.
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His show tackles topics as diverse and diversely weighty as skin cancer, kitchen burns, sleep eating, and pubic hair loss, returning constantly to the same television motherlode Winfrey profitably mined. Weepy, overweight guests who vow and often fail to get in shape, and it has taken its star far away from any sort of traditional medical practice.
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He explains that transition as the product of frustration. Too often, he told me, he would sit in an office and be telling you stuff too little, too late, that if you'd been able to lose a little weight or if your diabetes had been managed more aggressively, then it would have dramatically altered your destiny, which is now to go downstairs and have open heart surgery.
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With his TV show, he can exhort Americans to tend to all aspects of their health, head to toe, before they reach a point of no return. Lose weight, go to Brazil, and get sexually assaulted by a con man.
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Yeah, and it's going to get worse. This is kind of the period, one of the things he's supposed to do in this period is he starts cutting back on his surgical practice and performing fewer surgeries. Yeah, because he's got to keep up all those TV dates. Yeah, in order to tell people about John of God, the mass rapist, and in order to tell people about, I don't know, some stuff that's good, right?
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Telling people to eat healthier is a good idea. America's diet sucks. His diet advice, I think, is, well... We'll talk about that later. It's also problematic. Anyway, he's trading objectively useful medical work for being a nonsense doctor, but he's making millions of dollars.
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Damn. I mean, that's a bummer. He seemed like a nice guy. But yeah, this was not the treatment. So in 1995, Mr. Faria married Rita Costa at age 34. he dumped her a few years later for a 19-year-old friend of his daughter's. Mrs. Costa reported her former husband to the police for nonpayment of taxes.
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That's the only thing that tells you whether or not you're doing the right thing. Yeah.
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Yeah. Yeah. Morally righteous. Righteous wealth. Yes. You know what else is righteous, Matt?
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Part one is over. And we're going to sail out. But first, you've got to plug your pluggables. And I just decided to compliment you before we roll back.
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Podcast. All right. Well. This is the show that it is, and we're done doing the things that we do. So go out into the world and, I don't know, find Dr. Oz and scream at him. Give him a good screaming.
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The police confronted him during a surgery in Rio and arrested his bodyguard for possession of an illegal weapon. That bodyguard then testified that he'd been secretly helping his boss dispose of the corpses of a number of patients who died as a result of Mr. Ferry's hacking on their bodies.
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This is Behind the Bastards, the podcast where we neg our audience in order to make them more closely drawn to us. It's a tactic I learned from pickup artists. From pickup artists, yes. Really, this whole show is based on the lessons I learned as a pickup artist. You can't see it, but I'm wearing an enormous hat with ostrich plumes coming off it. made out of purple felt. It's an incredible hat.
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The most fuckable hat. The most fuckable hat. Yes, that was actually the first name I pitched for this podcast. Sophie said that that means nothing and no one will listen to it.
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So it turned out like a bunch of people were dying and getting infected and his bodyguard was just throwing them in a hole.
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So I think we can all agree that one of the best things to do is to lie about things your colleagues didn't do because it's funny. I agree with it thank you
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the show we're talking about dr oz um and as we left the last episode off he had just you know gotten oprahed right uh started his tv career gotten oprahed hard um so he started his tv career and he also starts right around the same time he gets on tv for the first time he starts a daily morning radio show on oprah winfrey's sirius xm channel never a good idea sirius xm no terrible idea
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I, you know, and this is an opinion that's pretty controversial within iHeartRadio. I think radio should be illegal. And I think it should be a felony punished by prison time for being on the radio or having a radio or thinking about the radio. Yeah. I think the only form of entertainment that should be legal is specifically my podcast.
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So I think if we if we could get Chuck Schumer's ear, we can make this happen. We will tack this on to the pot bill. No one will notice. So. Dr. Oz has The Dr. Oz Show. He's got a radio show on Winfrey's XM channel where he covers very scientific topics like how God changes your brain and the happiest people in the world. Now...
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I found a New York Times article that was written just a few months into his tenure with his TV show, kind of at the start of his burst into stardom. And the interviewer who talked to Oz for this article seems as impressed as everyone always is by the manic, somewhat inhuman pace at which Mehmet Oz works.
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By this point, he'd also written six books with titles like You, the Smart Patient, You, On a Diet, and You, Having a Baby. It's like the series is the you series. Yeah, yeah, the famous you series. It's a you colon whatever. Right. And he co-writes these books with another doctor. I can't tell you how much of the writing was.
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A lot of times, I'm not saying this is the case with Dr. Oz because he's a wild workaholic, but a lot of times when you have a guy that's his kind of famous and they write a bunch of books, they write like 10% of the book and they have- someone else, a co-author or a ghostwriter do the rest. I don't know if that's the case here. I wouldn't be surprised if he wrote a lot.
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And I do believe Matt Damon writes most of his books. Oh, 100%.
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yeah so uh nine million copies of his various titles are in print by this point like the first year of his show so he is he is a very wealthy and successful man pretty much out the gate like money machine getting the start on oprah kind of guarantees it basically if oprah likes you um enough to put you on her show more than once you're going to get rich god damn yeah i just i just should have spent my my youth trying to get on oprah we all should have we all should have
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You know, I've always said there's no nothing builds confidence like having a large, heavily armed man willing to dispose of corpses for you. That really that's all any of us really needs.
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So, Dr. Oz gets a semi-regular column for Time magazine because, again, they see this guy get famous. They're like, we got to get some of that Oprah money, too. We get this guy on Time. People will start reading Time again. And yeah, it's interesting. They give him a column. And in 2008, they included him on their list of the world's 100 most influential people.
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So before they hire him to a column, they call him one of the world's most influential people. And as soon as he gets listed as one of the 100 most influential people on the planet, Dr. Oz calls his dad, right? Do you love me now? Yeah, this has got to be the thing. How can he not be impressed by this?
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So when he tells his dad, his dad's first question is, what number?
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And this is not a ranked thing. It's not the top 100 going to one. It's just these 100 people are all very influential.
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But Dr. Oz in this interview seemed to acknowledge that the fact that his dad reacted that way said a lot about both, you know, his dad and about their relationship. He told an interviewer, quote, he wants to know what number. Are you kidding me? There are six billion people on the planet. It's a rounding error.
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Yeah, come on. How influential are you? You're basically me. Yeah. So that interviewer, along with The New York Times, wrote, quote, It's also the kind of thing that goads the sun to climb mountain after mountain, seldom pausing to enjoy the view. The good doctor did admit to engaging in a number of time saving measures.
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Over the years, he did numerous columns, which were often just recycled from other columns or chunks of his books. He provided the same list of skin moisturizing or metabolism boosting tips in different magazines or online articles. Even so, his workload was enormous.
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The Dr. Oz show was instantly one of the most popular shows on the planet, and Mehmet was contracted to record 175 hour-long episodes per year, which is a fucking brutal work schedule on its own. And the man continued to practice as a surgeon, albeit at a reduced rate.
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The New York Times interviewer who visited him in 2010 seemed to find his behavior and kind of his compulsive workaholism somewhat unsettling.
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I mean, yeah, I'll do a little bit of corpse disposal. You know, it's like a yeah. So a raid on Ruben's Farias compound revealed more than a thousand boxes of conventional prescription medications suggesting that the spiritual healer was actually practicing traditional medicine, but just without a license. Yeah.
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but only a little bit. His portions assiduously regulated like an intravenous drip of nutrition. It was the most efficient, joyless eating I have ever seen.
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That's just so unsettling. I mean, you know what? I have known a couple of people in my life, all very skinny, who have told me, like, I just don't really like eating. Like, yeah, there's some foods that I prefer to others, but I just don't really enjoy it one way or the other. Like, some of those people wound up on the Soylent thing. And I guess, like, I mean, yeah, fine. It's like, it's whatever.
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At the start, the Dr. Oz show was broadly inoffensive from a medical perspective. He gave a lot of fairly good common sense health advice, health advice and provided a lot of people with a friendly medical face willing to explain things their doctors might not have the time or the bedside manner to properly lay out. But Oz's fascination with alternative medicine was present from the beginning.
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And as time went on, he veered more and more in that direction, following both the topics that consistently drew the most viewers and the topics that were easiest to put together. Because 175 hours of content a year is a lot.
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Yeah. I mean, you know, we we have to do I don't know how much content we have to do per year. Fifty two weeks, two hours a week. Yeah. We do like one hundred and ten, maybe like with some of the episodes that go over one hundred and twenty hours of content for this show. And that's a lot. Um, 175 hours of video content is huge.
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Like you can't, there's, there's not that much good and also entertaining medical advice that you could give in a year, let alone every single year.
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Yeah. And it's this thing, it's this kind of this inevitable churn of capitalism leading us all into this, this specific kind of nonsense because you can't not,
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have content legally you're contracted to but also you have this whole team of people whose ability to pay their rent whose ability to to afford their homes to keep their kids in school is dependent upon you doing this show outside of just the fact that he's rich like he's fine but he like it's this thing you have to keep putting out the thing and you will never have enough meaningful shit to put out to do right so you start
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He was arrested in jail, but while his district police chief agreed that Farias needed to be locked up, he still professed a strong belief in the myth of Dr. Fritz, telling The Guardian, in my opinion, I think that Dr. Fritz does exist, but that Rubens Farias is doing things that he shouldn't. So I think he's really channeling this German guy, but that doesn't mean he's not committing crimes, too.
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In his case, doing nonsense about mediums and shit. And in our case, doing episodes about Dr. Oz. When you run out of bastards, eventually you just got to find one on TV. We're not out of bastards. But like last week, I spent 30 hours reading about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I needed an off week, you know?
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Oh, good times. Good times. For an example of the kind of nonsense creep, I guess you'd call it, that advanced upon his show, in March of 2012, Dr. Oz did a show titled Medium vs. Medicine. Oz's guest was a psychic who claimed she could communicate with the dead. This was one of several, and by this point, probably dozens of episodes dedicated to people who claimed to talk to the dead.
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Energy healing was, you know, on the fringe, certainly, but at least it was something that when he started doing it, there were scientific studies saying there might be something to it. Those studies have since been, to a large extent, discredited. But when he started doing that, there was some evidence. It was a thing to try. You know, he wasn't completely out of left field.
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Doing episodes on mediums talking to the dead is well outside of plausible deniability territory, right? Like, you're just doing nonsense at this point.
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how'd you die just just just having his bodyguards mace police officers rolling into a crime scene be like who did this how'd this go down are you okay hey i am a doctor do you want some almonds they're soaked in water for more nutrition
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So, yeah, he had. Yeah. Dr. Oz had among his psychic guests, famous grifter King John Edwards on his show. Not the politician. No, no. The talks to dead TV show guy. Yeah. Yeah. And he praised the reading that he received from John Edwards saying, quote, let me tell you, it changed my life. I've learned in my career that there are times when science just hasn't caught up with things.
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It's one of those things. Part of how he's like the intelligent way to frame this is you start with the true thing, which is there are things science can't explain. One of those things is the nature of consciousness and what happens to it after vital sciences. We don't know. There's not an objective answer to that.
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but it going this way is kind of like being like yeah you know we can't explain like the slit box experiment like there's a bunch of shit in physics i don't know i'm not a science guy but like you know particle and wave shit you can't explain that there's a bunch of shit you can't explain magnets yeah how do they work how do they work it's this is this jump from yes there are things we can't explain to so let's listen to this man talk to the dead
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Millions of people gather around, gather around. He's going to channel your dead aunt. Yes. Maybe not. Not a reasonable way to take a reasonable starting point.
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Yeah, and I want to quote from a write-up I found in the Journal of the Missouri State Medical Association. Quote, During another show, Oz interviewed Dr. Mossaraf Ali, a miracle healer to Sylvester Stallone, Prince Charles of England, and others regarding his use of iridology.
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According to the widely debunked bizarre belief, each part of the iris corresponds to a specific area of the body, and a person's state of health could be diagnosed by examining particular regions of the iris. After expressing his amazement at Dr. Ali's diagnostic abilities, Oz stated, I want to applaud Dr. Mossaraf Ali because these are ancient traditions and they have been around for centuries.
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Yeah. It's like... There's a lot of cultures who say that you should remove the clitoris surgically because it's healthier and it stops dangerous masturbation. It's ancient. Who are we to say this is a bad idea? Who are any of us to say anything's wrong?
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Your dad will never love you so much. There's this, one of the big aspects of this guy's success and of the success of the things he pushes is, is Orientalism, right? Right. Like this idea of like the forbidden and strange and wondrous and magical East and all of the, We don't understand all of these like, oh, India is so mysterious, yada, yada, yada.
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What if you were to say like, well, for centuries, tobacco companies have said that tobacco can cure like different lung ailments. Who are we to dismiss these ancient traditions? The Q zone could be real.
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It's this fucking thing with Dr. Oz. Like. It's one thing if you're just like traveling to another part of the world, you see some sort of medical or treatment you've never seen before. And you're like, well, who am I? Who am I to say anything about it?
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Like, I don't know. Dr. Oz is a doctor on TV talking to millions. You're literally the person who should be saying something about the legitimacy of this. Right.
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You are, in fact, the person who should say something about who am I?
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Yeah. And that's what that that write up in the Journal of Missouri State Medical Association notes, quote, Who? Dr. Oz is a trained clinician and scientist, someone who can read a scientific article with a critical eye. He is someone who can filter out the noise of the placebo effect or discern the simple carnival tricks of a charlatan. The problem is that most people in his audience cannot.
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You know, you know who else has a responsibility to the show sponsors?
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So fucking good. So good. Anyway, here's products. Ah, we're back. Talking about Dr. Oz. Having just a great time. So, obviously, the fact that Dr. Oz, I mean, probably the fact that most of his audience couldn't discern whether or not any of these nonsense treatments were real is a big part of why the Dr. Oz show became an overnight success. Yeah.
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Before very long, it was being watched by four million viewers every single day. Over the next half decade or so, he won two Emmys. His guest list included First Lady Michelle Obama, who loved Dr. Oz for his focus on healthy diets for children and in general, his crusade to get Americans to lose weight.
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Dr. Oz claimed through medicine, through math that I cannot verify that his show inspired Americans to lose three million cumulative pounds per year. I don't know. Maybe.
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It's amazing. Hey, I mean, you know, I worship L. Ron Hubbard, not for his spiritual teachings or any of the things he wrote about space aliens, but for his ability to get boats full of young people to search for gold that his past life buried.
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I mean, I'm sure he found some way to, like, make the claim or whatever. But it's very... I don't know. Maybe. It is one of the things that he does that is... We'll talk about. There's problems with some of the diet tips he gives people, actually. Significant ones. But telling, like, inspiring people to lose weight is not... usually bad for their health, although it can be.
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Sometimes people take it too far and it causes significant health problems. It's a mixed bag, I guess we'd say. But the other stuff isn't a mixed bag, so I guess we'll call that his great success. So, Yeah, it is good.
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I will say it is unequivocally good that Dr. Oz continually pressed his audience of millions of people to eat more fruits and vegetables to get better sleep, to exercise regularly, and to get their flu vaccinations. That's all rad, right?
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I mean, he's charismatic. People like him. It's good that he he does that at least.
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Yeah. The unfortunate part is that this guy gained because he's he's handsome. A lot of a lot of a lot of ladies out there think Dr. Oz is hot. He's a doctor. He's very charismatic. He's very charming. And he gains this enormous influence with middle America. And he uses that influence to do some really fucking questionable shit.
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And I'm going to quote now from a write up in the AMA's Journal of Ethics. He has told mothers that there were dangerous levels of arsenic in their child's apple juice. There weren't, and suggested that green coffee is a miracle cure for obesity. Federal regulators discovered altered data in hyped coffee bean evidence.
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The Food and Drug Administration tested for arsenic in apple juice and found the vast majority of apple juice tested to contain low levels of arsenic, and given these levels was confident in the overall safety of apple juice consumed in this country.
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Dr. Oz also featured two guests on his show who claimed that genetically modified foods were cancer-causing, despite repeated safety reports that found no adverse effects.
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That's what I celebrate about LRH. Yeah. So, yeah, this all is the background, I think, that's necessary to understand John of God. So, on November 17th, 2010, Oprah magazine writer Susan Casey published an article about her visit to Brazil, where she'd met with the country's new hottest psychic surgeon. Oh, boy. João Teixeira de Faria, better known as John of God.
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Yeah. So Dr. Oz's enthusiasm for alternative medicine has had the effect of creating instant fads over any health product he even vaguely suggests on his show. When he mentions the purported health benefits of white mulberry, red palm oil or brown seaweed, all of which he's claimed can do things like cut weight, reduce aging or beat the flu, those products fly off the shelf.
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Oz often doesn't endorse specific brands, but he doesn't need to. Online retailers watch closely and immediately slap as seen on Dr. Oz on the pseudoscientific product. Yes, I've seen this. Yeah, I've seen this. This is where we get to the big harm.
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He did one episode that focused on so-called relaxation drinks and included a close up shot of five cans of beverages he said might help calm you down.
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yeah he just puts a can of colt 45 on the table billy d williams walks out it's a steel reserve trust me you'll be relaxed you'll be calm as shit you might yell at your mom but it'll be fun afterwards yeah you will very calmly put your hand through a taxi cab window
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As soon as the episode aired, a, quote, liquid sleep aid called iChill bragged on their website, Dr. Oz is talking about a new way to wind down with relaxation drinks. They are the newest trend in helping you relax and calm down. And the best news is they contain natural ingredients already known to promote relaxation. Mulberry, laudanum.
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i remember the eye chill that turned into like an entire thing there's so many yeah we're about to we're about to talk about it yeah um and and also if there was a laudanum drink i would be buying it um yeah so the problem with all with this is that all of these different relaxation drinks are filled with a variety of chemicals like melatonin and theanine and taurine
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These drinks are unregulated as they are not medicines or dietary supplements, but the chemicals they include all have actual impacts on the central nervous system. Pregnant women and children are often advised to avoid products with some of these chemicals, but the beverages in question rarely note this.
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No data exists on how these chemicals might impact people in the quantities they are added to in these beverages or when combined with other chemicals or when combined with medications people drinking them might be taking. Responsible doctors, writing for the journal Nature Neuroscience, wrote a warning about these beverages that specifically called out iChill by name.
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Quote, "...existing research on the potential benefits and harms of some components of relaxation drinks suggests that they may not always be safe.
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Indeed, the FDA issued a warning last year to the manufacturers of melatonin-laced brownies, citing safety concerns from the literature, including effects on the autonomic nervous system and visual system and increased expression of symptoms in a sleep disorder."
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Other components of relaxation drinks, such as L-theanine or amino acids, such as taurine, may be considered safe for consumption only at some doses by the FDA, but relaxation drinks are not subject to such regulations, nor are they required to disclose the amounts of their ingredients.
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No, no, no. I think they had a weird different shaped plastic bottle. But the problem is that, again, number one, you've got a lot of people who are on medications that this shit interacts with.
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This sparked a visit by Oprah herself and an avalanche of uncritical positive stories about how cool this new John of God guy was. For the first time, a Brazilian psychic surgeon attracted mass interest outside of Brazil.
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Okay, so everything Dr. Oz recommends, I guess outside of death psychics, comes with this caveat. Some of the herbs and natural medicines that he recommends do have health impacts, but they also have consequences. Medications they might not interact well with. Dr. Oz does not bring this up when he shotguns half-assed advice out to an audience of millions.
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That article in Nature Neuroscience that I referenced, warning about the relaxation drinks Oz recommended, it's been read 10,000 times. So the article warning people that these things can be contraindicated and might have impacts on your health and your central nervous system, read 10,000 times. Dr. Oz's episode suggesting these drinks watched 4 million times.
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Yeah. People started to notice that this was a problem by the mid-aughts. Doctors had been complaining for a while, but in 2013, Forbes wrote a listicle laying out the silliest things Dr. Oz has suggested on his show, including the fact that having 200 orgasms a year would extend your life by six years. Here's how he explained that bit of math on his website.
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365. Here's his website. If you have more than 200 orgasms a year, you can reduce your physiologic age by six years, Dr. Oz says. He bases the number on a study done at Duke University that surveyed people on the amount and quality of sex they had. They looked at what happened to folks that are receiving a lot of intercourse over time, and the fact is it correlated.
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He talked to him about the amount and quality of sex they had, but it's correlated. So again, he's basically lying here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Number one, what is the possibility that people who are having a lot of good sex are in better health? And that's why they're able to have a lot more good sex because they're like, they're physically healthy.
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But foreigners had been trickling into the country for years before that, and one of them, an American named Heather Cumming, wrote a book about John of God, the man who became her guru. It is a thoroughly uncritical work of puffery from a woman who clearly worships her subject. But it's also our best real source or best source on the early life of John of God.
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And so it's easier for them to like, uh, what if, what are the odds that like, if you're having more sex, you're more social, you're more likely to have a longterm romantic partner that increases your lifespan. Yeah. Again, I'm of all people never going to be the guy to say there's not health benefits to sex. There sure is. Oh, yeah. Dr. Oz is exaggerating this.
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He's taking an actual study that showed some interesting stuff, and he's turning it into a lie.
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Yeah, there is data that suggests that regular intercourse reduces men's mortality risks by 50%, which doesn't mean that fucking stops men from dying, particularly because it's men who benefit in this way. It means that men are less healthy than women, tend to die faster, and when men have partners that they live with,
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They are more likely to have a medical problem noticed if they have a heart attack. Someone's going to be there to call. Like, there's a lot of reasons why this is the case.
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You know? Yeah. It's not the fact that just fucking magically adds like reduces your age by six years if you do it enough. Like, that's nonsense.
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Yeah. Just start fucking in public. And when the cops come be like, this is medicine.
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Now, on its own, recommending that people get more sex is, you know, fine. I'm very pro-sex, but I am anti-encouraging people to misunderstand health science. The nature of Dr. Oz's audience and the sheer breadth of things he suggests makes it difficult to analyze the total health impact of his show. But there are some dire case studies, as Vox notes in their write-up. Quote,
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There's the case of a man who followed Oz's suggestion of curing insomnia by pouring uncooked rice into socks, heating them in a microwave and wearing them to bed. The man got second and third degree burns on his feet. And the reason he got burned is because he was diabetic. He didn't have the same level of feeling in his feet.
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If he had gone to a doctor and said, hey, I heard about this thing that might help with insomnia, the doctor would say, well, you're diabetic. You don't have as much feeling in your feet. I'm worried you might burn yourself. Dr. Oz is just saying, hey, this will help you sleep.
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You're talking to four million people. It would be bad advice for some of them.
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So I'm going to start by reading from that. And I'm going to give the caveat that this information, this is all information that a mass rapist cult leader wanted to convey about his early life. So, you know, noted a little bit of salt here and there. So, Joao Tixera de Faria was born on June 24th, 1942, in the poor village of, oh boy, Cachoeira de Fumacha, in the state of Goias in central Brazil.
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Yeah. They'll do it. They'll fucking do it. So this guy sued, but the case was thrown out because the judge determined that Oz cannot establish a physician-patient relationship through TV. I agree with the judge. That's my problem with his show, is that he is a physician purporting to be giving medical advice, but is also...
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not taking anyone's individual circumstances into account, and more to the fucking point, not liable if he does any of the irresponsible things that would lend a physician doing their job traditionally in trouble.
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And I'm going to continue that quote from Vox. Not everyone agrees with the judge's reasoning. Rochester, New York medical student and blogger Benjamin Mazur has been publishing anonymous stories sent to him from health professionals about the impact Oz has had on patient care.
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One reported that her dad had a heart attack and five stents placed in his heart, which required him to take aspirin and Plavix to prevent blood clots. Wow. Wow. Wow.
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I'm sure it was. If I know my Dr. Oz, I'm sure it was. You don't need to take Plavix. Eat these different heart healthy foods and avoid these foods and that'll do all that Plavix will do.
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I suspect it was dietary advice that if you're someone who doesn't really need Plavix is fine. Or it might even help you to not need it later in life if you adopt healthier habits. But the problem is, again, the way he's framing it, there's going to be a lot of people who are like just had stints placed in their heart. I don't need Plavix. Fuck it.
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The TV doctor also said he can talk to ghosts. So I'm going to go talk. I mean, you will be talking to ghosts faster if you follow all of Dr. I want to talk to ghosts.
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Now, on his show, Dr. Oz claims that the trust of his audience is the entire reason for his relevance. Quote, the currency that I deal in is trust, and it is trust that has been given to me by an audience that has watched over 600 shows.
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He repeatedly references the fact that he is responding to the very real and very understandable, unfilled needs of Americans who feel alienated from modern health care, which is an expensive and often inhumane labyrinthine bureaucracy.
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How you exploit it is a very different thing. But the thing he is replacing it with is by and large nonsense. And I'm going to quote from that right up in the Journal of Ethics again. When it comes to epistemic boundaries, Dr. Oz admits he applies different standards of evidence compared to those accepted in the medical establishment.
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When challenged by a reporter for The New Yorker about his questionable evidentiary standards, he replied that all data could be differentially interpreted. It's not that he doesn't offer data.
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It's common for Dr. Oz to offer some plausible mechanism from test tube experiments conducted by manufacturers, combined with personal anecdotes from his own or consumer's experience to support the products he's promoting. A study of 80 recommendations made on the Dr. Oz show in early 2013 found that published evidence supported 46% of recommendations, contradicted 15% and did not support 39%.
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If your doctor said, hey, you know, 46% of the time I give pretty good advice. Yeah. You would be like, I think I'm going to get another doctor.
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If you assume medicine is like baseball, I'm a great doctor. No, he's crushing it. Yeah. Yeah. Great job. Now, to his credit, the journal does note that a decent chunk of the blame for Dr. Oz's success lies in the very, very flawed state of mainstream medical science.
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Quote, we settle for incomplete, selectively published data in journals heavily subsidized by pharmaceutical companies and for outcomes that don't give firm answers.
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His mother, Dona Luca, was a popular member of the community and a dedicated housewife. John of God would later speak highly of his mother, and I have no reason to suspect she wasn't a nice person, other than perhaps the fact that her boy grew up to a mass-raping cult leader. The biography of John of God continues, quote, Wow. His father was less successful.
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While not on par with offering anecdotes as evidence, the fact that debates persist about what constitutes sufficiently high, unbiased quality evidence to support decisions in the profession as a whole creates a wedge that Dr. Oz seems to exploit. So again, this is the Journal of Ethics being like, the fact that you can pay to get a study done, the fact that we...
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pharmaceutical companies lobby to allow them to market things in dishonest ways. The fact that doctors are bribed by companies like Purdue Pharmaceutical with vacations to recommend people take medication that is not in their best interest to take. That's why this motherfucker has a job. And the fact that healthcare is expensive, right? The fact that we don't have single-payer healthcare at all.
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Right. combines to the fact that a lot of people who are not idiots... I'm not saying... You can be... I'm sure there's people who are brilliant electricians who fucking... Brilliant at whatever. Who are great at whatever it is they do. But they're not fucking doctors because most of us aren't. And it's hard to get... I am very fortunate in that I have a couple of good friends who are doctors.
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And I am luckier than I can... One of them is a guy who was on the show recently, Kaveh Hoda. I'm luckier than I can...
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say to be able to like every now and then send them a message being like hey what should I do here you know it's a question of like I'm having this problem I don't know what kind of doctor to see to like get this dealt with I don't know whose job this is and I don't want to like my um my ex a while ago had a non-cancerous brain tumor and And it was a fucking nightmare figuring out.
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It took a series of different doctors and tests to figure out what kind of doctor she needed to go to to get the medication that would help. And it's, of course, people are like, well, this guy is explaining things and he's nice and he's saying that I have the power to deal with this. If I change my diet, if I do this, if I do that.
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You know? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And it's. It fucking sucks. It does. It just really fucking sucks. And it fucking sucks because there's a lot of wonderful people who are part of the medical system, like the fucking doctors in the ER who were with my mom in her last days. Like, incredibly competent and compassionate and like...
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amazing people who in their entire careers will never be able to do as much good as dr oz does harm because he has four million people watching him every day yeah it's a bummer yeah yeah yeah it's you know it's not a bummer oh wow capitalism is actually a bummer but it's the water we swim in so here's some fucking ads we're back
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So in 2014, Mehmet Oz was called before a Senate subcommittee to answer questions about his unfounded claims about dietary supplements. Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill went off on him, saying, I don't know why you need to say this stuff because you know it's not true.
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Why, when you have this amazing megaphone and this amazing ability to communicate, would you cheapen your show by saying things like this?
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Do you know how many houses I have? She pointed out several examples of the things he cheapens his show by saying he had called green coffee extract a, quote, magical weight loss cure. Recent research has recent research has suggested that long term use of green coffee extract causes bone density loss in animals. So. But you are, in fairness, you're losing weight. Your bones are lighter.
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Mm hmm. And again, those are studies in animals. But it's the kind of thing where a responsible doctor would say, well, some studies in animals have shown that this might cause bone density loss. So unless, you know, your weight is a really disastrous health situation and your bone density is fine, I wouldn't recommend this. Dr. Oz is just saying it's a magical weight loss cure.
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Yeah. Oz called raspberry ketone, quote, the number one miracle in a bottle to burn your fat. This is a fun one. First of all, it's all gasoline. Part of why people well, actually, part of why part of why people are attracted to stuff like this is that like raspberry ketone, that's natural. It sounds like, oh, if I just like getting raspberries, that's going to help me lose weight.
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This chemical in a natural, healthy fruit. Of course, it makes sense that like some wonderful plant based medicine would be able to help me lose weight. Yeah. Raspberry ketones don't come from raspberries. They can, but it takes 90 pounds of fresh raspberries to produce a single dose. As a result, they are manufactured synthetically.
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A fact Dr. Oz did not feel the need to explain because, again, he's really critical of GMOs, and it might seem hypocritical to note that raspberry ketones are actually synthetic lab nonsense.
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The fucking arsenic in the apple juice that he's worried about is natural. It is possible, based on animal studies, that these ketones may have some ability to reduce or slow weight gain. But no studies have ever been conducted on how raspberry ketones impact human beings. There have been reports that they increase blood pressure and heart rate in humans. Dr. Oz does not warn about this.
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He was a tailor and owned a laundry business, but money was not great, and young João and his four brothers and one sister lived in constant economic anxiety. Young John had to work from an early age, starting as a cloth cutter in his father's shop at age six.
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Likewise, when Dr. Oz told his viewers that Garcinia cambogia may be the simple solution you've been looking for to bust your body fat for good. He did not also warn them that it can interact negatively with diabetes medications, painkillers and psychiatric medications.
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Why would you need to warn people that? look what are the odds someone looking to lose weight has diabetes medications zero what are the odds that someone who has diabetes is sitting around watching dr oz's show zero what are the odds that a middle-class american is addicted to painkillers zero zero
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During the Senate inquiry, Senator McCaskill pointed some of this out, and she told Dr. Oz, quote, Mm-hmm.
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In the wake of this, which was a fairly bad day on Capitol Hill for him, Dr. Oz released a somewhat contrite statement where he noted, I took part in today's hearing because I am accountable for my role in the proliferation of these scams, and I recognize that my enthusiastic language has made the problem worse at times. Good so far? Yeah, not bad. Pretty good so far.
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Oz added in his statement, to not have the conversation about supplements at all, however, would be a disservice to the viewer. In addition to exercising an abundance of caution in discussing promising research and products in the future, I look forward to working with all those present today and finding a way to deal with the problems of weight loss scams. God, it's amazing.
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We have to have conversations about this. You know, a conversation would be noting, for example, green coffee extract causes bone density loss in animals and perhaps be worried. That's a conversation. Well, you and I have had about these things as a conversation.
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I mean, I'm not a doctor. I'm a guy who's addicted to an unregulated plant.
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He only attended two years of primary school before economic necessity forced him to end his formal education and take up a series of increasingly brutal jobs. Now... That's what his biography says. That's not the only version of that we have.
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Which I just took more of while standing next to my unregulated gun.
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So Dr. Oz, also making this statement, pointed out that he believed the greatest disservice he'd done to his audience was to not recommend specific products, which had provided room for a wide industry of shysters to stick his name on their website. So like, oh, I was just saying green coffee extract and a bunch of companies I couldn't verify started selling with my name on it.
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So in the wake of this day on Capitol Hill and this amazing response, physicians across the country asked Columbia University in a letter, basically, what the fuck? Why is this guy still on your faculty?
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Columbia claimed it was because of their commitment to quote, the principle of academic freedom and to upholding faculty members freedom of expression for statements they make in public discussion.
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it's a hell yeah dude that's like yeah of the like anti-cancel culture letter you know they're just like stop trying to cancel dr oz it's freedom of speech your freedom of speech yeah i mean doctors also are held to different standards than the rest of us they take an oath come on if like your uncle jimbo says hey you know take some green coffee extract it'll help you lose weight
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Nothing wrong with that. It might not be good advice, but that's just a guy saying a thing. Doctors are held to a different standard.
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Mm hmm. It's it's it's awesome. Yeah. So on April 15th, 2015, 10 prominent physicians sent a letter to Columbia University calling Oz's faculty position there unacceptable, inciting his, quote, egregious lack of integrity.
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A 2005 ABC News profile on him notes that based on interviews with people from his hometown, quote, he is said to have been so rebellious that he was thrown out of school after the second grade and could not keep a job. So that's a different version of his background. Sure, sure.
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The only change wrought by the congressional inquiry and the flood of condemnation from the medical community seems to be that Dr. Oz started endorsing specific supplements and pseudo medicines.
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He's doing it. He's Jonesing it hard. He's so much smarter than Alex, though. Yeah. You focus it just on the health. None of this nonsense, like political shit. Everybody is going to love you and you'll make way more money. Mm hmm. Yeah, a 2018 analysis of his show by the Health News Review found, quote, In the Dr. Oz show, 13 out of 19, 68.4% shows had ads relating to general show content.
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57.9% had specific products mentioned by the host using their commercial name. And 36.3% of shows mentioning products by name named more than one product. It also found that 78% of the medical statements made on the Dr. Oz show did not align with, quote, evidence-based medical guidelines. If those guidelines mattered, they'd make more money, dog.
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Half a decade earlier, 46% of his statements are more or less fine. Now it's down to... Jesus, 22%. Wow. So we're seeing, again, the quality of the, because again, you're running out of good content. You only have so much good medical advice you can give when you're doing an hour a day, 175 times a year for fucking 15, 16 years. Eat fruit. Exactly.
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The actual amount of things that an average person can reasonably do to improve their own physical health doesn't really take that long to explain to you, you know? It's pretty simple stuff. And most of us know a lot of it already. We know when we're I know that pounding Kratom and Coke Zero isn't a wise health care decision. No, no.
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I know that the fact that I bought the $100 entire smoked leg of pig from Costco, the giant prosciutto leg that you can get. I know buying that and not also purchasing, I don't know, salad in order to have sufficient fiber. I recognize that was a poor health decision. No one tricked me about this. And at no point did I think, This $100 worth of smoked ham is a solid health care move.
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Oh, my meridians are fucking rocking right now. I am peaking in meridians, bro. Let me fucking tell you, my meridians are as hard as a goddamn rock.
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The Dr. Oz show is still on the air. In 2018, President Trump appointed Dr. Oz to a council on sports, fitness, and nutrition as part of the Department of Health and Human Services. He is still on that council under Joe Biden. Bipartisan, baby. Two years later, no politician is dumb enough to want to piss off Dr. Oz. You're never going to hear Joe Biden throw it. Well, except for Claire McCaskill.
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I think other people did. I'm not an expert on what went down in that congressional thing, but she seems to be the main one who was really angry at him. Good on you, Claire.
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That's that's so 2018 is when he gets appointed to this council. Two years later, during the covid-19 pandemic, he and he endorsed hydroxychloroquine. Later that year, he endorsed reopening schools, saying, What the fuck? ! Two to three percent of the crowd.
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Yeah, and he had basically no school, and he never learns to read or write. That's the important thing here. Yeah, not a reader, this guy. So his biographers, though, claim that he worked many jobs as a well digger, as a bricklayer, and generally they say that he spent his late childhood and early adolescence in hard manual labor.
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You are a dangerous person. Man. But he's like, we gotta... And he didn't... Yeah, this outraged a lot of people. And Oz apologized. As he apologized for vaccine hydroxychloroquine. Yeah, he oopsie-daisied it. He claimed regret that his comments had confused and upset people and basically pointed out the Lancet wasn't saying 2-3% of the country was going to die.
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It was, I think, more like 2-3% of, like, I don't know, people's schools or something. Like, would get sick. And, like, it was... He... But the way he phrased it was, it's only going to cost us 2-3% of the country. I don't care what the actual study, again, I don't care what the study is, I care what you said to your audience of millions. And also, I care about the fact that in any case, that's
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You know, it's one thing to say, hey, look, living in a society, there's all kinds of cost benefit sort of analysis. Sure. We have to do like right. Cars improve a lot of efficiencies in certain ways. And people like have them. They're also going to cost X many lives. You know, we could change these sorts of laws, but it would it would lead to this sort of problem.
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You know, we have certain freedoms that may cost lives. Right. To be like, that's just living in a society, right? There's no, our society is not angled around absolutely reducing mortality in every way. And there's a cost to not having these schools open. And it's a very real cost. And like, we have to, like, that's a way to say that.
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I'm not saying that's the argument I'm making, because I'm not. I'm thinking, I don't think we should open schools out until we actually have... I don't like 80 percent of the fucking country vaccinated or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But like but that's a way you could that's a way you could make that argument and not sound like a gibbering sociopath.
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Yeah, you're choosing to do the job. You could never work another day in your life and you would never. You're rich. You don't need to do this. You're choosing to. So go fuck yourself with that explanation.
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We're getting to that. So today, Dr. Oz works to continue to monetize his brand with his wife and business partner, who he also writes books with. His daughter seems to be getting in on the grift, too, with books like The Dorm Room Diet, which she wrote when she was in college, I think.
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The Dorm Room Diet. Hey, you know, if you pour coffee into instant ramen, it's an efficient breakfast. I've done that, by the way. Not proud of it.
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Kind of proud of it. It's real good if you add in vodka. He is worth tens of millions of dollars and is not in any danger of being worth less anytime soon. We've talked a lot about the harms of his specific recommendations and the disinformation he spreads.
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But at the end of this all, I keep coming back to that 2010 New York Times article, specifically its end, when I think about what may be his worst crime against medicine. Quote,
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On the stairs at Columbia Presbyterian, apropos of nothing, he began talking about certain Japanese, Sardinian, and Costa Rican populations that live unusually long and said that their shared trait was activity, activity, activity. His first column for Time Magazine, Living Long and Living Well, ran in a section called How to Live 100 Years.
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At another point in his Rockefeller Center office, he said that so many people thrill to being on television because, quote, there's an element of eternity to it. You are storing you. You are taking your life force for that brief moment when you're on camera, and you're storing that for all eternity, which makes you someone who will never truly die.
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That is a fucking bonkers way of looking at being on TV.
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Yeah, I'm going to continue the quote. And he described his own investment in television by saying, I've always felt that when I looked at my tombstone, it shouldn't say Mehmet Oz banged out 10,000 open heart operations. I've probably done 5,000. Am I any better at it than 10,000? He shook his head. It's just a different number on a tombstone. No, it's not.
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It's 5,000 other people whose lives you extended. Those are actual human beings. Those are human beings. It's not about, like, how better it, you're already great at it. It's about saving additional lives.
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That's wild. One of the, he has dramatically, he still does perform surgery, I think, sometimes. Why? He certainly was in the late aughts. because he's a doctor. He just doesn't do nearly as much. He used to do a lot more, and he's cut it by more than half, the amount of actual heart surgery.
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So one of the things that I should note here is that right now, even with the assumption that every available training position for cardiothoracic surgeons is filled... we are looking at a projected shortage of 1500 cardiothoracic surgeons or 25% of the workforce by 2025. Four years.
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There is a desperate need for the thing that he's definitely one of the best in the world at a tremendous and terrible need for it. And he has stopped doing that in order to give people bad medical advice that will hurt some of them on TV. And I want to be really clear here. I am not saying that just because you become a cardiothoracic surgeon, you have to do that until the day you drop.
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You don't. You can quit. And that's not immoral. It's not evil to be like, I've done enough. A good friend of mine was a cardiologist for 30-something years and quit to travel around the world as a photojournalist.
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and i don't think there's anything immoral you do not owe the world yeah doing just because it's valuable and there are enough people doing it forever i am not and you don't you don't have to quit to do some other valuable job you can just quit to enjoy your life be with your family i'm not saying that yeah but he didn't quit to be with his family he quit to give people bad health advice that he quit to do crimes yeah he is he is doing something that should be illegal instead of performing an additional 5 000 life-saving surgeries right yeah that's evil
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Yeah. This is very funny because she notes that quote, after being given money, he would return to the pool hall. He is an excellent pool player to this day. And I can't prove what I'm going to say next in any way, but my suspicion is that there is a germ of truth to this, but that he's not clairvoyant.
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Yeah, but I'm going to sell people pills instead. Lex Luthor can suck it. You know, I got pills to move. And the way that he phrases that is incredibly telling, right? Like it shouldn't say Mehmet Oz banged out 10,000 open heart operations. Am I any better at it than 10,000? It's like, that's not, I care that you get better at it to the extent that it improves patient outcome.
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But like, I don't care. Like the thing that's good about performing 10,000 open heart operations is
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is presumably somewhere near 10 000 people have had their lives extended because right yeah that's amazing that's tens of thousands of cumulative cumulative years yeah added to the lives of people who are loved and who do things themselves who who do incredible like who have their own ways of contributing to society who have children like it's such a sick way of looking at it it's really
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It's like if he if he'd been like, I, you know, I did my car. I performed 5000 surgeries. Now I want to become an actor. Like, yeah, you have that right. Absolutely. I'm never going to say that.
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Yeah. If you're in Michael Bay movies, we might have another talk. Yeah, exactly.
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But that's again what it's not that he's decided he wanted to go into TV. It's not that he decided to go into entertainment. It's that he decided to do a job to go from doing a job where he was unequivocally saving lives to doing a job where he often gives people advice that could shorten or at least reduce the quality of their life.
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It's so fucking frustrating. I really dislike this man.
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John just discovered he had a knack for pool hustling and various forms of cheating that required quick hands and charm. This is a guy who would go up to spend his life doing sleight of hand stuff to giant crowds. Uh,
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some hot rice and see what happens dude just see what happens you know like someone's got to be doing that job it's this fucking thing part of the dr oz problem and the part of it that that he he is he is leaning into but it's not his fault is this thing that's a broader problem that i've gotten trapped in that a lot that everyone is a public figure is at risk of getting trapped in um which is
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The fact that if you're good at something and also have some measure of fame or popularity, you start to think you can extend your skills to everything. I was in the gym the other day since I'm in Texas with my family and since I'm vaccinated and everyone wears a mask, but I've been going to a gym.
Behind the Bastards
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yeah um and my family's vaccinated it's like it's the thing we get to do now okay yeah you're allowed yeah i've been going to a gym and the gyms have like news programs on right and i saw dr oz on and it was dr oz true crime because i guess dr oz has added a true crime thing where he's like talking about this woman who murdered her kids and interviewing like the ex-wife of the husband of the woman who murdered her kids and like doing this thing he's like
Behind the Bastards
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You don't have any. Why are you doing this? Because it's popular with the same people who like your show. And why not? Why not stick your hand into this thing that is deeply painful for a lot of people and make money off of it? Why not do it? Because if you're famous and good at one thing, there's no reason not to do absolutely everything. Yeah. I just hate it.
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Casts my pods. All right, guys. That's the episode.
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It's yourself a gun, baby. Well, get out there and again, find Dr. Oz in the street. And Sophie, what what is the legal definition of incitement?
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All right. Just just go out and wander the streets angry and and and agitated. Yeah. So without any clear goal. Yeah. Angrily wander the streets agitated with an unclear goal. That's what I want all of my listeners to do.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, he spends a lot of time as a kid in a pool hall. He learns sleight of hand. He learns how to grift. And, yeah, the, yeah. So, so far, the biographical information that we've got from his biography by his follower, Heather Cummings, has been broadly reasonable. This changes with this next paragraph.
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Fuck you! That's the introduction. Just fuck you, people who listen and give us an income.
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Not you, Jamie. Just the audience. Just the people who support us with their ears. I'm insulting. Just out the gate. Fuck them. That's right. What are you going to do about it? You're going to listen to another podcast? Like there are other podcasts? Like you have other options? Like there's a flooded marketplace of things exactly like what I do that you could just turn to? Ha!
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Well, Jamie, the orca is out of the tank because that is the subject of today's episode. And also your Jamie Loftus, my guest on the show that this is, which is Behind the Bastards.
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Excited's the wrong word. Dreading? Dreading is the right word. I'm dreading that, Jamie.
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I can't imagine loving them because they involve Dr. Phil.
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You know, it's one of those things take we just did the Dr. Oz episodes and Dr. Oz also bad. Obviously, he was on the show, but you have to respect him because he is a brilliant doctor.
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Like he's a man who for all of the harm he's done by spreading pseudoscience has performed like 5000 successful open heart surgeries, which is an achievement, you know, and has patented a bunch of useful medical devices and stuff. He's a person who's made like bafflingly selfish decisions that I don't respect.
Behind the Bastards
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But as a person, I have to have some level of respect for the things that he has achieved because he's impressive. Dr. Phil is just a piece of shit. Dr. Phil is just straight up trash.
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Quote, he also remembers walking into the fields with the villagers and pointing to roots and plants that would heal their ailments. The first recorded occasion of Joao's paranormal abilities took place when he was nine years old while he was visiting family in the town of Nova Ponte with his mother. It was a beautiful cloudless day, but Joao had a premonition that a huge storm was coming.
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And what is OK? I don't know, Dr. Drew. What is what is Dr. Drew do? I'm assuming he's a nonsense doctor like all of the other doctors we talk about.
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Oh, that sounds like my nightmare. That sounds like the hell that I would go to is Sober House. Oh, no. No.
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Well, that's fascinating. I'm so happy to have learned about Dr. Drew. But today we're talking about Dr. Phil. And it's it's time to get in, get into the it's time to have us a Philgasm.
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Yeah. So, Philip Calvin McGraw was born on September 1st, 1950, in Veneta, Oklahoma, about four hours from where I grew up. His father was Joseph, and his mother was Anne Geraldine, or Jerry, is what she preferred to go by. He had two older sisters and one younger sister.
Behind the Bastards
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He began pointing out houses, including the houses of his brother, and saying that they would be blown down or lose their roofs. He urged his mother to leave before the storm. Although she was not convinced, she humored her son and they sought refuge in a friend's home nearby.
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When he was a kid, his father moved the family down to the oil fields of North Texas, which are about as unpleasant a place as I've ever encountered on this earth. Not a good place to just exist. You don't want to, as a general rule, stay away from oil fields. Not nice places.
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So his kind of like Southern desolation is Phil McGraw's early childhood, which, you know, I can tell you from experience what that does to a kid. And it makes you either a washout or ambitious and angry. One of the two. You either wind up an alcoholic working on an oil derrick or you do everything possible to escape the desolate South. Anyway, Phil's going to take that second one.
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I have strong feelings about that part of Texas and that part of Oklahoma. Yeah. By age 11, Phil was spending summers driving a freight truck owned by his grandfather in Monday, Texas. By age 12, he was flying planes illegally without a license as he traveled with.
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I mean, driving at age 11, not as uncommon as you might think in certain rural parts of the world, still a bit young. Sure. Driving a freight truck is a bit odd at age 11. That is a shark jump.
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Exactly as he had predicted, the thunderstorm appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, and badly damaged or destroyed about 40 houses in a small town. And depending on where you find this story, he always claims a different number of houses were destroyed. So I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. So he predicts a storm. This is his first case of clairvoyance.
Behind the Bastards
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He's not even stealing a plane. His dad needs to fly to these desolate airstrips in the middle of nowhere to deliver oil field equipment. And Phil goes with him and flies the plane sometime. My guess is that his dad is just like, I'm taking a nap.
Behind the Bastards
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No, if someone wants to make a comic book, Dr. Phil Child Pilot is a pretty decent premise. I've heard worse. So yeah, this is how Phil spends his childhood up until the point when his dad, Joe, turned 40 and decided, apropos of nothing, that he was going to abandon his family and become a psychologist.
Behind the Bastards
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I have not found more info than that. His dad's like, I'm going to become a psychologist. You guys can keep doing your thing. You know, like, that's basically how it's set. And so Joe leaves his wife and three daughters behind. I think they stay in Texas. And he brings Phil with him to Kansas, where the two started a new life together. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, it's interesting. One of the things that's interesting to me is like the ways in which Dr. Phil and I's early background are similar and then diverge. And this is a big divergence point because when I was a kid, my dad left for like a couple of years to work somewhere else. But it was because we had no money.
Behind the Bastards
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We were at like the edge of bankruptcy and the only job he could get was in New York living on a friend's couch and like working at a radio station so he could send back money to us. So it wasn't like, And, like, I didn't go with him. He, like, had to go alone to New York to support the family and stuff. But it is this weird, grew up in the same area, moved around a bunch when we were little.
Behind the Bastards
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Our dad leaves, you know. But in Phil's case, he goes with his dad and they just abandon all the women.
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I actually just got an email from Netflix, and it's a check for $112 million. So we are now contractually obligated to make this show, Jamie.
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I know. That would be a dream. Let's leave this life behind.
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The way it's been described in the articles I've read. Now, maybe Dr. Phil could give us a more detailed story, but I have not run across it yet.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah. Most of the info I have on his childhood comes from a Dallas Observer article, and they explain the whole abandoning of Phil's mom and sisters as a financial move. Phil apparently told the Dallas Observer, quote, there just wasn't enough money to do otherwise. So we can only feed two members of this family. So, girls, you're on your own. Phil and I are going to Kansas.
Behind the Bastards
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But despite being clairvoyant and able to read storms in the sky, he found himself still forced to labor in order to get by. At age 16, he moved to a city, Campo Grande, to try and make a living. He was only successful in fits and starts, and before long, he found himself unemployed and living under a bridge at the edge of town.
Behind the Bastards
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You get the feeling he grew up in a healthy environment. That's true. Healthy families are all alike. They allow 12-year-olds to fly planes.
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No, no. And she could have been Dr. Phil Stad's child wife.
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Per the results of a 2006 court case, I am not allowed to read Russian literature. In more recent post-fame interviews, Dr. Phil claims those early days with his father were a humbling experience. Quote, we were so poor we couldn't even pay attention, which is... I think is less a true statement, not that I'm saying they weren't poor.
Behind the Bastards
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I think he just said that because he knows it was a pithy thing, and he makes his whole living off of saying stupid Dr. Phil witticisms.
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And I've heard that a thousand times. I have heard a thousand different people explain their origins that way. So I don't know. Fuck you, Dr. Phil. Be original.
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I bet it does. I absolutely bet it makes the moms lose it.
Behind the Bastards
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Someone on Reddit during the Dr. Oz episode, you know, I noted a couple of times that his audience and the people that he makes money off of is like middle-aged moms. And that that's a great business because they have all the money or at least control all the money. Like middle-aged moms are one of the most profitable demographics to get in your corner in the entire world.
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And someone was like, you're being unfairly negative towards middle-aged moms. It's just a statement of fact. Look in the audience of a Dr. Oz show. It's not 16 to 30-year-old men. It's a bunch of moms. My mom loved Dr. Oz. That's who his audience is. It's not a negative statement.
Behind the Bastards
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One day, he headed to the water to bathe, and, John claims, as he approached the water, a beautiful woman called to him and invited him closer. They talked for hours. The next day, he returned to the water to speak with her again, but he found a brilliant shaft of light in her place. He heard her calling his name, and so he approached.
Behind the Bastards
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It's like saying like men, 18 to 35, listen to Joe Rogan. That's not like, I'm not even, it is negative to listen to Joe Rogan, but I'm not being negative when I say that I'm just accurately describing his audience. Yes.
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No matter your demographic, there's a grifter for you. Look, I've been honest about the fact that there was a period of time in my life when I liked John McAfee before I knew about, you know, the murder and the rape and stuff. Right. We all have a grifter we're vulnerable to. It's nothing to be ashamed of. You just need to acknowledge it.
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And in the case of middle-aged suburban moms, it's Dr. Phil and Dr. Ross.
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Absolutely amazing person like Mr. Blunt himself. No, without any sort of joking, like a genius, just just has a genius in terms of knowing exactly what a specific age group of people want.
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Yeah, we all have a thing we're vulnerable to. Anyway, we're getting off topic, which is fine because it pads the runtime. And that's what I do as a grifter is I pan the runtime in order to make more money off of you. Fucking sorry. Okay. Shameful. So, yeah, the details that Dr. Phil gives about his childhood, like he gives that kind of pithy, we were so poor we couldn't even pay attention quote.
Behind the Bastards
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But in the interview with Dallas Observer, the details he actually gives make it seem like the issue for Phil was less a matter of crushing poverty. Like, I think they were kind of poor, but I think they were like my kind of poor, like which was not crushing poverty. It was not you're malnourished. It's just there's no money for anything but the basics, you know, but the basics are covered.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah. Yeah. But you're not like, you're not like in, in, in absolute destitution, you know, like not to exaggerate it, but like you're poor. Like that's kind of what I think is, is, is really happening. And part of why I think that is because his real complaint about that time in his life is that he couldn't buy any cool shit. Um, quote from the Dallas observer.
Behind the Bastards
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It didn't help that he was fiercely competitive. He says, and he lacked the clothes and the car to compete for girls. So I think that's more of the big thing for him, right? Like, OK, you're not that poor. You just don't have enough money to impress girls with possessions.
Behind the Bastards
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She told him to visit the Spiritist Center in Campo Grande, which he did. So, that's his version of events. The Spirit meets him, and they talk for hours, and then she sends him to the Spiritist Center in town.
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Yes. Yeah. I think most of us had more or less that level of poverty. We're like, yeah, especially like I was like one of the poorer kids in a school that was not poor. There were kids in my school who drove BMWs and like I had a beat to shit Ford Taurus. I'm not complaining. You had a Ford Taurus? I had a Ford Taurus. I'm not complaining. I had a car.
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But you see the kids whose parents are rich and you're like, ah, shit, I feel so poor because they have a brand new Jaguar. That's, I think, the kind of poor he is.
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Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that was just for my senior year. But yes, I did. I did eventually get a car. So thankfully, the young Dr. Phil was huge, quickly crossing six feet. He's a massive man. If you've ever like seen him next to normal sized people, he's a very large person.
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He's like, yeah, he's like an inch or two taller than me. And I think quite a bit broader. Like he's a big motherfucker.
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Most of that's a lot of it's mustache now. But when he was younger, he was in good shape and he was he was very like muscular. And as a result of how big and strong he was, he was a shoe in for the high school's football team. He later recalled, quote, I was Phil the jock and that was my currency. And by currency, he means that's how he got girls. Right. He didn't have the car. He didn't have.
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But he was able to get girls because he had, you know, he was he was on the football team.
Behind the Bastards
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He was tall. He was and he was apparently quite good at football. In Phil's senior year, his father moved to Wichita Falls to start his psychology practice. Not yet a doctor. Phil spent his entire senior year living alone. He didn't go with his dad this time. He supported himself and he played football because he was like he there was a period of time where he might have made it into the NFL.
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So he didn't want to leave his high school and like disrupt that. He said, quote, It wasn't what you were supposed to do, but I was pretty independent.
Behind the Bastards
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College scouts had started eyeing him pretty early on. And he had it seems like he had a real chance of getting at least picked to play college ball. He did get picked to play college ball. His dad had gone to the University of Tulsa on a football scholarship. And in short order, Phil was picked by scouts for the same college. So he gets a college scholarship to the University of Tulsa.
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so like hell yeah he arrives and the director of the center like knows his name already and says they've been waiting for him and then John immediately like collapses he like passes out and when he returns to consciousness there's this huge group of people standing around him and they tell him that he has incorporated which is the term they use for when you're taken over by a spirit the entity King Solomon and he cured 50 people while possessed by King Solomon
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He becomes the captain of the freshman football team. And He says he was very good. A lot of articles you'll say were very good. We're going to talk about this in a little bit because his team at least was shit. Not just a bad, not just not good in the year, but one of the all-time least successful college football teams in the history of college football.
Behind the Bastards
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I mean, I never had any chance. I was on the high school. I did one year of football in junior high. I never had any chance of going pro, and I didn't like football. There was a period of time where I might have been able to do well at fencing. I was in a special pro. I was pretty good at fencing. That's cool. But no, I got bored eventually.
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If you're really tall, it helps. Yeah. But never at the college level or anything.
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Sophie is the most successful athlete in this call. Amazing. Amazing.
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You know, I will say, having watched the video of that guy shot-putting a fucking bobcat, I think that should be an Olympic sport.
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You know what that was? It's the greatest example of quality husbanding that I think I've seen on Twitter. Like, Oh, my God. You did good, man. That's exactly what you're supposed to do. Like, that's wholesome masculinity right there, is shot putting a wildcat away from your wife.
Behind the Bastards
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Well, and it's also, you know, it's not going to do any damage to the cat. Now, he did get out his gun to shoot the cat, but it charged back at the family. And I feel at that point, the cat had chosen violence. You know, he gave the animal a chance to end the interaction.
Behind the Bastards
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That's my opinion on the, by now, weeks-old video of a guy hugging a bobcat across a yard.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, the cat shows violence. That's my end statement here. So, yeah. Anyway, Dr. Phil, a lot of interviews, you'll see he was very, very good. Maybe could have gone pro. I don't know how accurate that is.
Behind the Bastards
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I'm not great at football, but I found an incredible analysis on the sports website Grantland about a game that he played in, that his freshman football team played in, that is like one of the most famous games in college ball history because of how badly his team did. Yeah. Grantland calls it one of the craziest games in NCAA history.
Behind the Bastards
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For starters, the bulk of Phil's team were like actively dying of the flu while they played. Quote, an especially virulent strain of flu had been cavorting through the Tulsa athletic dorm, somehow overcoming the formidable sanitary standard those three words imply. And 15 of Tulsa's 22 starters were shivering, feverish wrecks.
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They tried to act energetic, but they were so weak, Tulsa coach Glenn Dobbs remembered in 1985. My sons, Glenn III and John, were on the team. Their eyes were glazed with fever.
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The team doctor pleaded with the coach to call off the game, but Dobbs, a former Tulsa star who, because the world just does whatever it wants, had been an icon for the Saskatchewan Rough Riders of the Canadian Football League, refused to surrender. I just never liked backing out, he said afterward. Tulsa had two defensive linemen who were well enough to travel.
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One of them passed out before the coin flip. So this game is a fucking disaster from the beginning.
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which i remember king solomon is the guy who cuts up babies but yeah i don't know and as far as like the luck of the draw goes hey that's a good get good get yeah name oh yeah king solomon ks that's a big one yeah hey could it happen to anyone could it happen to anyone amazing could it happen to anyone i mean i i would love to i don't know not king solomon which king would i want to
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Everyone's just puking and shitting to death. also someone named glenn the third is involved like just the funniest fucking thing passing out before the game starts oh that is just and kudos to the grantland writer it's a very entertaining article grantland i miss grantland yeah yeah by the end of the first quarter phil's team was down 14 to 0
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which is a significant, like they're getting, it's not a great start to a game, but it's not insurmountable. However, by the end of the game, they were down by a record breaking 100 points to six.
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No, I don't believe so. Not at all. Um, I think it's one of the greatest ass kickings in college ball history. Um, like in the entire history of the sport, like Dr. Phil's team got their asses beat almost the worst, uh,
Behind the Bastards
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It's incredibly funny. So Dr. Phil brags about this game today, saying that it and that football in general helped awaken in him an interest in psychology by teaching him that people with advantages don't always win. That said, the author of that Grantland article takes pains to point out that there is actually no evidence whatsoever that Phil played in this game.
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And the facts that do exist from this time make it seem kind of unlikely. I don't know how to like it was far enough back that there's not any comprehensive way to know for sure, really. But the doubt thrown onto it by this investigation might mean that as a grown ass multimillionaire, Dr. Phil lied to David Letterman about playing in one of the worst ass kickings in sports history.
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And I have no idea what this says about him. Like, I don't even know how to analyze that.
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Yeah. OK, that's fun. Yeah. You like I can see like if I was if I if I played and if I partook in a famous ass kicking in a sports history, I would brag about that as an adult. It would be funny. You know, you get enough distance from it. Sure.
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I have no idea what's going on with Dr. Phil. And for the most part, I do know what's going on with him. This is just baffling to me because he's clearly a narcissist. It's very strange as a narcissist to lie about this, you know?
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Yeah, to lie about just getting fame historically wrecked.
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Speaking of clout, you know who has all of my clout, Jamie?
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It is the products and services that support this podcast. I sacrifice all of my clout to them. Like members of the ancient cult of the old ones sacrifice virgin babies to Nyarlathotep, the crawling chaos. Much like that. Yeah. Here's some ads for dick pills. All right. We're back. We're back. We're back.
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Worshipping the old gods. I don't know. Might. deliver up some of my bodily fluids to a Shoggoth later. Who knows? Who knows? We're talking about Dr. Phil. Anything can happen. So anyways, after this, at some point, I don't know the exact year, but at some point pretty soon after this disastrous game, because Phil was definitely on the team.
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At some point after this, Phil had another sports disaster. He went in to tackle a running back and he got hit really hard. And I don't mean just like, you know, sprained something. I mean, he woke up blind, right?
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The kind of head injury where when you come to your eyes don't work, which is medically speaking bad.
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It absolutely like I don't know. I think adults should. I think if you're like 22 and older, you should be allowed to play football. But certainly 18 year olds should not be nor should they be allowed to join the military, by the way. Yeah, sure. The head injury was bad enough. His eyesight came back, obviously. But it was a serious head injury.
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Ooh, Henry VIII. Henry VIII. That's a good... I mean, that's a bad king, but that's a fun king to incorporate. Yeah, to be.
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There was no chance of him continuing his career after that. It's one of those things where you don't get to ever play football again because you get hit in the head one more time. That might be fucking it for you. Once his eyesight... And he still suffers. There's after effects of this today. It's a lifelong injury. He got really messed up.
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Yeah, it's bad. Once his sight came back, Phil returned to Wichita Falls to heal and to plot his next move. He decided to put his college education on hold now that he couldn't do a football scholarship. And he decided, you know, the thing you do now, I'm not going to I'm going to I'm going to think about college later. I'm going to make some money now. Right.
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Which is not an unreasonable call to make in the situation. And I'm going to quote from a write-up in the Dallas Observer. He worked at a health club selling memberships and wound up owning a partnership interest in that club and a half dozen others. That was typical of the way he did things, says Scott Madsen, who went into the building business with his future brother-in-law.
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He is the smartest guy I ever met. A born leader, even at a young age, he had the insight to figure out how things work. Others took a more damnable view of his business practices. I didn't know of anyone who had a business deal with Phil at the time who felt they came out on top, says David Dickinson, a former friend of McGraw's from Wichita Falls.
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It's like playing golf from someone who moves the ball around all the time.
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He's like maybe 20 at the most, like 19 or 20. And very quickly, he becomes a part owner in the sports club he's working at, becomes part owner in like a half dozen other clubs.
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No. But he's clearly very good at it. Specifically, the thing that Phil is objectively one of the best people in the world at is negotiating. Yeah. He is a terrifying negotiator. I haven't run into any disagreement about that.
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And he's very good at negotiating in a legal manner, which is a separate skill just from grifting, you know, and is honestly like the best kind of grifting because you can't get in trouble for that shit.
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Or at least maybe the football injury scrambled his wires and made him wired for it. I don't know.
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Yeah, that's how Dr. Phil works. He really, really triggers a lot of responses. Yeah. Now, the article notes that when you interview, that Dallas Observer article notes that when you interview a bunch of people who have known Dr. Phil over the course of decades, you tend to get two very different pictures of the man.
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One from the people who like him is of an incredibly gifted expert in practical psychology who has a passion for helping people. Yeah. And the other picture you get of Dr. Phil is a, quote, charismatic opportunist who achieved great things by betraying the people closest to him in order to make a quick buck.
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One of these spurned former friends is Eldon Buck, who claimed to The Observer, I put Phil in a couple of oil field deals and everyone pays me but him. Phil is a smart, smart, smart son of a bitch, but he's only out for one thing, and that's Phil. Now, Phil denies all of this, but it is worth noting, as we've just heard, that Buck is not the only person with allegations like this against him.
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He's not even just one of two, but we're going to get to that story in due time.
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Yeah, anything that'll make him money. This is kind of all happening over a period of a couple of years. He starts making money and he immediately reinvests that money. He's in a bunch of businesses. I have a very, very close friend who has that kind of brain, who's just always spinning off their money into one business or another. And
Behind the Bastards
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Oh, Nebuchadnezzar. You mean like the Babylonian emperor? Yeah, that's a good one. Right?
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I don't know how they do it, but they just are able to keep track of like the fact that like I've got an investment in this business. And through that business, I have an investment in this business and an interest in these other three businesses. And those give me an interest in this. And like this is how all of that like I don't I don't understand it.
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But like it's kind of like being an engineer, you know. Some people have the kind of brain where you can open up like a fucking HVAC system or or like the flight control system on an airplane and know what all of the little cords and all of the lights go and do and how to how to how to work all of that. Some people have a brain that allows them to just business, you know.
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It sounds like a nightmare. I keep all of my money in a pile and I will never have investments. Like I will never like I keep it in a bank, but like I have no I have no investments and never will because the idea of investing money is terrifying to me and makes me want to huddle around a fire with a spear and stab outsiders.
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Yeah. Oh, man, and it's so much more impressive to take on Nebuchadnezzar. That guy's got a way better name than Solomon. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, obviously, this is all lies. The only truth here is probably that John's age 16 is about when John started fooling around with spiritism.
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It's the only thing they're not making any more of.
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Anyways, I would pay good money for a Dilbert NFT where he admits responsibility for the Oklahoma City bombing.
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I think that would be a good NFT. If you're listening, Scott Adams, I'll invest in that one. Dilbert Dilbert admits to making a six thousand pound fertilizer bomb and parking it out in front of the Murrah building. That's the NFT I want.
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Stan Kathy. You know who else I stan, Jamie? Who? No one. That was like it's not time for an ad.
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I mean, you know who I actually stand, who I have an unreasonable affection for and can't be convinced otherwise. No, no, I think I think I have a reasonable love of LeVar Burton, as everyone does. Right. It's like a capybara. You know, it's like loving a capybara. Like it's LeVar Burton, of course. No, Werner Herzog. Herzog is my my unreasonable love.
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I don't think there's a lot of video of me where like you can actually see me. So that might be hard to do.
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Well, all I'm interested of is a fan cam of Werner Herzog diving into a bunch of cactuses because he promised a group of little people that if they made it through the filming of a movie without injury, he would horribly hurt himself by diving into a bed of saguaros from 12 feet up.
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Yeah, he absolutely did it. And they begged him not to. They were like, please don't do this. We don't want you to hurt yourself. And he said, I made a promise. And if I don't fulfill my promise, there's no reason for me to be alive. And then he dove into a pile of cactuses because he's a fucking lunatic. And I love him so much.
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Oh, Werner Herzog. Watch Aguirre, The Wrath of God.
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Dr. Phil. Yeah, sorry. We're off the topic a little bit. So after three years as a business slash con man, Phil McGraw decided to return to the education system to study psychology. He started off at Midwestern University in Wichita Falls, where his father had gone and then transferred to the University of North Texas, which is where the people who gave me huge amounts of drugs went to school.
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Unfortunately, I'm unaware of any serious journalism that exists to actually document what down what went down with John's early years in the religion. But he claims that the director of the center had to take him aside and explain to him that he'd been chosen by an entity of light known as King Solomon. This director told him to leave and come back at 2 p.m. the next day to keep healing people.
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I don't think Phil spent his time half a mile outside of campus downing 100 milligrams of 2CI and 15 to 20 milligrams of 5-MeO-MIPT and vaporizing DMT, which is probably why he graduated UNT with a PhD while my friends and I all dropped out of college to go, you know, do stupid shit. Anyway.
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No, he's not. In his recollection, Phil both hated and excelled at college. He later recalled, I almost quit every day. The faculty just jacked with you all the time. I remember telling one professor, either kick me out or get off my ass. He did succeed in impressing other professors, though.
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His mentor at UNT was Dr. G. Frank Lawless, who still considers Dr. Phil, quote, by far the most brilliant psychologist I ever worked with. Hmm. which is meaningful praise, but also we are talking UNT here. You know, we're not talking like one of the famous psychology schools in the country.
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So not a nothing compliment, but not like a doctor, not like people saying Dr. Oz is the best heart surgeon ever, you know, because that motherfucker's working at Columbia, right? They know from heart surgery.
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I don't know. I'm not throwing shade at Frank Lawless. I'm just saying, I don't think Dr. Phil is the most brilliant psychologist ever to exist.
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I'm assuming he's Xena's father. So, McGraw got his doctorate in 1979 and returned to Wichita Falls for reasons that are impossible to explain. Any person who returns to Kansas, I just don't I don't understand.
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He started a business partnership with his dad, and together the two veered their practice towards treating the mental ailments of the rich and socially prominent, circulating among country clubs to cater to doctors, lawyers, bankers, and their wives. One of Dr. Phil's friends later claimed, quote, Phil moved right into the money circles. If there wasn't a buck in it, he wasn't much interested.
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So, you know, that's that's the that's the field he gets into is is dealing with like rich people who are neurotic or whatever.
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I mean, you know, at this point, again, if you're grifting rich people, I don't care. Who cares? Yeah. Sometimes I might find it interesting for an off week, but I don't consider that evil behavior, right? They have too much money, whatever. He specialized in cognitive behavioral therapy, which Phil at least claimed was a cause and effect therapy that treated thoughts and behavior the same.
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Quote, people would come in and say, I had a hard childhood. Therefore, I am not doing well as an adult. A Freudian would say, let's work through your childhood. I would say, that's fine. But right now you are an adult. You have a choice to stop yelling at your kids.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, that doesn't sound bad, right? Like, that is a reasonable take, which is like, okay, it's fine to, like, you know, work through a difficult childhood, but you can't be shitty to your kids just because you had a bad childhood. Reasonable statement.
Behind the Bastards
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Yes, yes. Perfectly valid statement. Absolutely. Sure. And this kind of no-nonsense approach was very popular with some of his clients. I can see how it would have been useful in a number of cases. But Dr. Phil himself admits that he was, quote, probably the worst marital therapist in the history of the world. I was teaching what they taught me, but I was real impatient.
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Since John was homeless, this guy invited him to stay the night at his house. John claims that this man's humble home and food were unthinkable luxuries for him, given the poverty he'd lived with his entire life. He was given his own room with an electric fan. So that's a big deal. Nice electric fan.
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Everybody was getting divorced. The way he relates it, realizing the shortcomings of his education, convinced Phil to seek out less traditional ways to practice his profession and to market it. And I should note here as an aside that during this period, Dr. Phil got married and was briefly with a woman before cheating on her repeatedly and then leaving her.
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Yeah. I mean, he he does. I mean, to be fair, he admits he was a bad marriage therapist. So I can't call him like a hypocrite. If you're saying I was I was a shitty husband and a shitty marriage therapist. That all scans. Right. You know, like that's. Yeah. He's being honest here. So we won't belabor the point.
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Yeah, he started holding pain clinics, weight loss clinics, and giving executive recruiting advice and even expert legal testimony for court cases. He was like an expert witness. Yeah, and this is like for court cases, right? Like you need someone to come and... You know, you have like somebody who's claiming like, oh, you know, I can't be... held responsible for this.
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Cause I'm, I, you know, like mentally ill or whatever, like, you know, not guilty by reason of insanity. He comes in and he's like, yes, that's valid or no, that's not valid depending on who pays him, you know?
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, it's the kind that we just finished the Chauvin trial. You know, we had all these kind of use of force experts. There's a bunch of people in different fields whose main job is to take that expertise in another field and testify about it in court because it's relevant, right?
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You have like engineering specialists who are like, I'm going to go testify about this bridge that collapsed to either defend the people who made it or explain how irresponsible they were, whatever. Like that's a whole, there's a whole industry. Dr. Phil gets into the providing expert.
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There's a fuckload of you can get real goddamn rich doing that. Yeah.
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And by the way, lawyers listening, I will testify as an expert witness on literally anything as a certified reverend doctor in the state of New Jersey. My purview is wide. So, you know what? Twelve grand an hour.
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I'm going to go lie under oath about I don't know, whatever. Anyway, Dr. Phil started. Yeah. Holding, you know, so he started he gets into like the whole. The business of if I really want to make money at scale as a psychologist, having individual, even if they're rich, individual clients isn't the thing to do.
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I'm going to do a bunch of clinics on like dealing with pain, dealing with weight loss, you know, recruiting people. I'll do like. So he gets very quickly into the I'm less about helping people and more about making money as a psychologist.
Behind the Bastards
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In 1984, he meets Thelma Box, an insurance and real estate agent from Graham, Texas, who asked him to go into business with her to create a brand new motivational seminar. Now, we're talking, again, like the 70s, 80s, which is the golden age of motivational seminars. That's when this whole thing really explodes. Motivational seminars are basically short-term cults.
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For two to five days, several dozen to several hundred to sometimes even a couple of thousand people will pack into an auditorium where a charismatic front man and a handful of his buddies will coach them.
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Usually by hyping the room up using simple crowd work tactics to make people feel temporarily elated and tricking them into having like cathartic experiences and thinking they've learned something, you know? Yeah. That's the whole idea. Have people get like people, the mania of a crowd kind of going, make people cry or laugh and think like something significant has happened.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. In public, in front of a bunch of people. It's a whole big grift. Yeah. Thelma Box was a, well, I don't know, grift. I think a lot of people just like them. I've known people who like admit that they never got anything long term out of it, but just enjoy the experience. And I guess if that's your thing.
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It made me feel good. You know, I don't care, I guess, if that's your thing.
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Yeah, there's a lot of people who like to climb the ice-filled sides of mountains with crampons and fucking, like, pythons and stuff, and a lot of them die. There's people who like to do cave diving, which is the deadliest thing you could possibly do to relax. So, like, I don't know. People do shit. I don't care.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah. And it's one of those things. Yeah. It's convenient that, you know, out in the at this period of time, out in the middle of nowhere, Brazil, you know, lifespans aren't enormous. So you're really if you make it old enough, you could just lie about what happened to you when you were a kid because. Right. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. That makes sense. Yeah.
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But most of the people doing these seminars are actually, like, people at some kind of, like, crisis point in their life having a difficulty, and that's the problem with it.
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There's varying degrees. Some of them are just like, I'm going to make you feel good about yourself so you can go out and attack the world. And I guess that's kind of less problematic where it's like, okay, like whatever, you know, it's basically expensive church. Okay. Yeah. Like you will not make me not hate myself, friend. Better men than you have tried. Yeah.
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So, Thelma Box, who is Phil's friend, is a huge fan of these kind of motivational seminars. She'd done all the big ones. Zig Ziglar, actual guy out there. You can find his books at any given estate sale. Dale Carnegie, you can also find his books at any given estate sale. Tony Robbins, you can also find his books at any given estate sale. All the estate sale greats.
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Most of her classes had been focused on her career. Like they'd been like focused on helping salesmen, right? Because that's a big subset of this industry. She sold insurance and real estate. So there'd been conferences to help real estate and insurance salesmen sell better.
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Box felt that there was a market for a seminar focused instead of financial stuff on personal growth, on how to actually be a better person. Now, Box had gotten to know Dr. Phil because her son had hired him to renegotiate a bunch of bank loans. She decided Phil was the best negotiator she'd ever seen. Quote, And again, People disagree about a lot of stuff about Dr. Phil.
Behind the Bastards
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Nobody disagrees about this part. He's apparently just an incredible negotiator. So she she decides he's going to be a great front man for this life improvement seminar she wants to host. Now, her initial plan had been to lead a success seminar for single women. But McGraw pushed back against this. He didn't want to limit himself to just female customers instead.
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The plan that he made was for Bob or instead he was like, we should do like a general like life improvement for everybody. Like, come here and I'll help you deal with whatever things are holding you back in your life. Right. Like, that's kind of how Phil innovates the pitch. Now, initially, the plan that Box had fronted was for Box and Phil to be 50 50 partners in this venture.
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But right before they started going. Yeah, exactly. Right before they started going, Dr. Phil demanded that he was going to walk if she didn't bring his dad in as an equal shareholder.
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She claims that she basically... That's brilliant. Yeah, that's the guy he is. She claims she built the curriculum of the program from the ground up, designing most of the games and all of the different worksheets and shit you had to do. And basically, in fairness, I don't think Box is a great person.
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She's taking all of the information for this from other seminars she attended and is just modifying them enough to avoid plagiarism.
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She gets fucked over by Phil, but like, I don't particularly like her either.
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The earlier most people die, the easier it is to be a grifter.
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Life without the products and services that support this podcast.
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Not even really worth living. Like if we're being frank, what are you even doing without these products and services? What are you? Nothing.
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All right. Here's ads. We're back. I hope you all spent money because this whole fucking wheel of blood doesn't keep turning if you don't put money into it, people.
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When everyone I went to high school with is dead, I'm going to have some stories I start telling. I'll tell you that much. Yeah. No corroboration. Oh, I was healing the shit out of people in 11th grade.
Behind the Bastards
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Yes. Anyway. So, yeah, the basic idea of these seminars that Box mostly cooks up and Phil is supposed to present is to teach people how to find out what they want from life by making them more accountable, by expressing vulnerability, stripping away self-deception, which all just means like making people cry in a big room surrounded by other people. You know, that's the goal. That's the goal.
Behind the Bastards
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short-term cults, which is the kind of cult I'd like to do because it does sound exhausting having to like, every time I watch my favorite TV show, which is the Waco TV show where they made David Koresh have incredible cum gutters.
Behind the Bastards
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Before Waco. It seems like it's exhausting. We all love David Koresh, but my God, the man had to put in a lot of work just to keep a cult going. It just doesn't seem worth it.
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Short term cults. Like if I could just do like a limited Waco, like five or six times a year over the course of like four days, that seems much better.
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Sophie, take down a podcast idea, The 40 Minute Waco. I think we could make a lot of money with this. Anyway, back to Dr. Phil. So what made this seminar thing that he launches with Box Special is the group dynamic. Getting 100 or so people together in a room, crying and sharing stories and having the kind of addictive, cathartic experiences that make seminar hosts rich people.
Behind the Bastards
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Phil and Box were good at it. And Dr. Phil instantly gained a reputation as a magnetic host. One attendee recalled, quote, his voice was mic'd and he sounded godlike. I watched powerful men crumble as he questioned them. He knew just the right buttons to push.
Behind the Bastards
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You know, it's not that he's a great psychologist is that he is an incredibly intuitive man who understands people, which is why he's a good negotiator. He does have a great voice. I'll give that to him.
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Yeah, he knows how to manipulate people, right? He's a great manipulator in that you can make a lot of money doing that.
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Yep. You know who else was healing a lot of people when I was in the 11th grade? Okay, so now let's talk about products. Nope, we did that. Now we're back. Okay, so John of God, he meets this spiritist church, and they tell him that King Solomon's taken over his brain, and he's like, that's good and normal. And yeah, so he...
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Yes, yes. I understand people but care about what happens to them, which is why I tell them to buy machetes and bolt cutters and Claymore anti-personnel mines. Yes, definitely saving lives. By the way, when you're ordering your Claymore anti-personnel line, use promo code BASTARDS for 15% off if you buy four or more. Claymore, fuck anyone in front of you. What?
Behind the Bastards
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Okay, yeah. So, this seminar series was called Pathways, and it became hugely popular. For a while, they were making fucking bank. And the whole process of doing this awoke in Phil, or at least accelerated, a deep desire to get on TV. He started pushing for his own talk show, schmoozing with a Hollywood producer who made the mistake of attending one of his seminars.
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Phil succeeded in talking said producer into filming a pilot episode of a show where three people went through Dr. Phil's training and told their stories of like, you know, how it had helped them. The show sounds incredibly boring and clearly it was not picked up. Now, over his years with Pathways, McGraw developed into a talented showman.
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One of his coworkers, David Dickinson, later recalled, once he got in front of the room, it didn't take long to feel the power. He loved being godlike and worshipped. The only reason it didn't become a cult is because Thelma wouldn't let it. Yeah.
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I mean, the thing is, if you actually, Frazier was a big show for my family growing up. And so like, while my mom was, was dying, we watched a lot of episodes cause you know, there wasn't a lot that she could do. And it was kind of a thing. that was nostalgic for all of us. Um, but one of the through lines of the series is that Frazier's not a good psychologist, like not a good psychiatrist.
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Yeah. Niles is supposed to be good. Yeah. Yeah. Niles is competent. Um, although problematic, uh, definitely some stalking behavior from Niles.
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nobody on that show is a good person but john mahoney um the only good cop frazier's dad that's absolutely true and not even not even eddie is safe from no no from cancellation and honestly not a good a cop john mahoney admits to lying on the stand in order to get a man incarcerated during an episode of frazier it's just like an offside comment yes he absolutely does
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He's just such a damn charismatic actor. I can't stay mad at the man. So by the late 1980s, Pathways had moved to Dallas, where each year more than a thousand people would pay a thousand dollars each to attend a single weekend event with McGraw. That's a million bucks in a weekend. So, again, great money in this. Yeah.
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So Dr. Phil is I don't know if he's a millionaire at this point, but he is well off at this point. Now, he unfortunately, like his dad is involved in the whole thing. And Dr. Phil never had a great relationship with his father. I think he was just kind of using him to get control of the thing. But like he and his dad don't get along. They're both egomaniacs.
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And to make matters worse, the older Dr. McGraw was basically just kind of stupid.
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like there to cash a check like when he would show up on stage you'd be like erratic and kind of say nonsense and and not really help uh the business at all so worse than nothing worse than nothing the two men started to hate each other uh which a number number of employees noted as somewhat hypocritical quote come on here is a guy who was running a relationship seminar and he doesn't speak to his own father in the training room for years he didn't walk his own talk that is a fair hypocritical criticism fair
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And while Dr. Phil's relationship with his dad kind of went to shit, his relationship with Thelma Box, who had founded the program that made him rich and developed its curriculum, got even worse. The Dallas Observer writes, quote, Though McGraw and Box were partners for more than seven years and friends for more than a dozen, his treatment of her didn't seem much better.
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On November 16, 1992, Box received a faxed memo from McGraw informing her that he had made a tentative deal to sell his interest in Pathways to Midland philanthropist Steve Davidson. McGraw was ready to move on, his father ready to retire. That's why his father had sold his one-third interest, the memo informed her, to a Wichita Falls businessman.
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Of course, the new partners, quote, understand yours and my relationship and know that I am committed to you as a friend and associate and expect fair treatment. Basically, he sold me down the river, says Box, who recalls having heated discussions with McGraw about either selling her own Pathways interest or buying him out in the two weeks prior to the memo. Phil and I hadn't been getting along.
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He stopped talking to me and I knew we couldn't go on that way. What he had neglected to tell her, she says, is that he had engineered this corporate takeover scheme by actually selling his interest more than a year earlier. On October 15th, 1991, he signed an agreement for the sale of his Pathways stock for $325,000. I absolutely told her I was selling, McGraw says.
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He winds up staying the night with the leader of the center, and he tries to explain to him that he's not a practicing medium, and he doesn't know anything about medicine, and he doesn't understand how he was healing all these people. He was actually terrified because he didn't know how to – he was expected to come back the next day, and he didn't know how to do what was expected of him.
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What she didn't like was who I was selling to. Now, you can take whoever's word you want on this, but the author of that article was given a memo that McGraw sit to the buyer of his stock, in which the buyer agreed that the sale would be kept confidential from everyone, including Box. So I'm going to go ahead and say that Phil is the liar here.
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He basically knew he wanted to sell out early when his stuff was worth more than hers would be. With only a third of it left, she's not going to get as much money for it. Um, and he lies. She keeps, she's trying to buy it from him for a year after he's already sold it. And he's just stonewalling her. Um, like, yeah, it's, it's, it's a shitty way to treat a business partner.
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Yeah, and he acknowledges that the material from his first best-selling book was basically lifted entirely from the Pathways curriculum, but he has never acknowledged that Thelma Box actually wrote the curriculum he based his best-selling book on.
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No, no. Again, that's the thing. The point is that he is a con man, not that she is particularly a victim here. He's like, I don't care about Thelma Box. In 1989, Dr. Phil was living and working in Wichita. He keeps going back to fucking Kansas, enjoying his Pathways money and working as a psychologist.
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One of his patients was a young woman who he started and maintained a, quote, inappropriate dual relationship with.
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Yeah, he is her. He is her doctor and he is fucking her.
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Yeah. Shouldn't be doing that with the patient you're providing psychiatric care to.
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He then made the relationship even more inappropriate when he hired her part time while she was still his patient and lover, which is so many conflicts of interest. That is, you got to give the man credit for really going out of his way to, to, to do the most unethical version of that thing. He could like, you're right, Robert.
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Critical support to Dr. Phil for managing the fucking, the fucking, I don't know what he, the trifecta, I guess.
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Dr. Phil considers this transgression to just have been a misdemeanor. But the journalist who wrote that Dallas Observer article looked into the situation. He found the woman Dr. Phil had the relationship with, and he found out a lot more besides, and it's pretty fucking sketchy. Quote, In 1984, she was a college student returning home after her sophomore year depressed, lonely, and suicidal.
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I was emotionally abused as a child, she says, and suffered from low self-esteem. When McGraw began treating her, she says, he became fully involved in her life, demanding to know with whom she spoke, when she went to bed at night, what she did that day. If I was depressed or anxious, his first question was, why didn't you call me? Every time I felt bad, he insisted only he could fix me.
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But as soon as he gathered it, the spirit ascended the next day. King Solomon took him over again, and he kept healing more sick people. John claims this went on for months, while the more experienced spiritist practitioners educated him on the nature of the entities that increasingly took over his body. He became known as Medium John, and his new teachers said...
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When she wanted to spend the following summer working for a professor at the Houston University she was attending, he persuaded her to work in his biofeedback lab in Wichita Falls. He kept me totally dependent on him, she says. So that's textbook abuse. Like that's just like literally textbook abuse. Yeah. Yeah. Couldn't be clearer.
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It's really... He's a bad person, Jamie. He's just a real bad person.
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not to be like complimenting Dr. Oz, but by this point in the Dr. Oz story, he's performed thousands of open heart surgeries. Again, Dr. Phil, they're both grifters. Dr. Phil never does a single good thing, like to even the scales at all. He's just a monster, right? And you get the feeling, Dr. Oz, I have never heard a complaint that he's abusive in his personal relationships.
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People mostly, I've heard reports that he's kind of a narcissist, but I've never heard that he's like, A monster. Dr. Phil's a monster.
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I don't know. I'm just he's a useful he's a useful comparison. I just really hate Dr. Phil.
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So the formal complaint this woman filed led to a decision from the psychology board that Dr. Phil's practice would have to be supervised for a year.
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before that time came up he quit his practice and moved to Dallas to start a new company courtroom sciences incorporated or CSI with his neighbor from Wichita his job was basically to use his psychology knowledge to help lawyers pick jurors he loved the work particularly the adrenaline that came from the high stakes of a court case
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Dr. Phil's company was a hit, and his clients soon included every major airline on Earth, three TV networks, and dozens of Fortune 500 companies. Before long, it came to include Oprah Winfrey as well.
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Mm-hmm. Yeah, the two sacred things in our society, Oprah and the airlines. Yeah.
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Where does he get Stedman? What were you fucking doing?
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She was like, I'm going to make so much money. An outrageous amount of money, Stedman.
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I will be able to clone you when you die, Stedman. That's how much money I'm going to make off this man.
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it is kind of funny medium john it's like the sequel to big john that's not as as good or rhythmic medium john just just medium john every morning at the mine you could see him arrive he stood five foot eight and weighed 135 kind of medium at the shoulders and medium at the hips and everyone knew it was okay to give some lip to medium john
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So Oprah had made the questionable decision to do an episode of her show on the dangers of disease in the American beef supply. A bunch of Texas cattlemen sued her for fraud, defamation, and, you know, just hurting their businesses. Now, I have no idea who's in the right here, and I really don't care.
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The case looked like to be going badly for Oprah until she brought in Dr. Phil to be a part of her trial team. He instantly recognized her as someone he could make money off of, and he set to work charming her. Phil did his job. He coached her and the defense team in how to respond under questioning, and he won Oprah's adoration.
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And to his credit, it seems like he did a good job because she was exonerated. And after the case ended in her favor, she did a verdict episode of her show from Amarillo, Texas, where for the first time she introduced Dr. Phil McGraw to a national audience. She called him one of the smartest men in the world.
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She was so impressed that she added that he was like literally the most intelligent man she'd met in her 12 years of talking to medical experts. She said she wanted to share his brilliance with the world.
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And we are going to talk about where this hyperbole gets all of us in part two of our epic series, Dr. Phil. What a dick.
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Could you not? Could you just go back to football? I feel like one more head injury could really solve a lot of our problems as a country.
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Yeah. I don't even necessarily want his football career to have gone. Well, if he'd just gotten a hit 20% harder, you know, That would have been enough for me.
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Yeah. Anyway, Jamie, you got any pluggables you want to drop?
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Check out Jamie's erotic Kathy podcast. I assume it's erotic. Is that correct?
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I mean, she doesn't need to be having sex for the podcast about Kathy to just be like the fundamental eros of Kathy is so overwhelming, you know? Yeah. You just hear that last name Gus White and oof.
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Can you make it hornier, Kathy? Just like 12%. Anyway, I hope the rest of you have a day that's 12% hornier. We'll be back Thursday.
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So his his new teachers told him he needed to devote his whole life to healing other people. And this is by his biographers claim started a five or six year period of traveling throughout Brazil, healing the sick and the suffering. He became known as Joao Curador, or John the Healer.
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Uh... Hello? This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast that... Robert, you just sounded like a haunted house! Yeah, I... I don't know. I never come into this show with a plan. Like, I write 10,000 words a week to do this show, and then I consistently just completely fuck the introductions. Um...
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That's our Robert. It's easy to have a consistent brand when your brand is being like a brain-damaged drug addict who is incapable of doing anything but writing long essays about bad people. Simple brand.
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So probably shouldn't be trusted with large machinery.
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You know who else should be trusted with large machinery because of the horrible head injury? Dr. Phil. Mm hmm.
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No, you're Jamie. I would trust you with heavy machinery, although you don't have a driver's license, do you?
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Through his biographers and in interviews, John always makes sure that people know that he is a healer, but he also at the same time always firmly rejects being called a healer. So he makes sure that people know that everyone started calling me John the Healer, but I'm not a healer. The entities that channel through my body are the ones doing the healing. I'm just a conduit.
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The key thing about cops, Jamie, and this is some free advice for all of you out there, they're never ready for you to just tuck and roll, you know? As long as you're driving a cheap car, if they start to pull you over, just tuck and roll and then fucking book it. I guarantee you they will not be ready.
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They're just not going to be ready. And anyway, we should probably talk about Dr. Phil some, huh?
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Probably chill out with our Phil out. i need to go actually okay that's that's fair what if i just logged out of this this this has been the final episode of behind the bastards i'm so sorry all right yeah let's chill out with our fill out just a big old pudgy no no bald-headed phil just flopping around yeah with a nice mustache like a flopping around like a like a skink on a hot rock okay um
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okay later that year so dr phil helps oprah out um and and like saves her saves her bacon um and she brings him on her show and does her like verdict episode statement she was getting like sued for a lot of money and defamation and shit like it was potentially something that would have really damaged her her her bottom line i was like i don't
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OK, so Dr. Phil later that year would become a regular part of her show. And this was part of a pivot in Oprah's show where she went from like doing a normal talk show to what she called Change Your Life TV.
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The goal of Change Your Life TV was to take the experience people had in Phil's seminars, the very public crowd influenced catharsis of emotional change, and put that shit on television for everybody to watch. Mostly, this involves Dr. Phil confronting people aggressively about their flaws so they would cry and say they learned something. Quote, this is Dr. Phil explaining his methodology. Yeah.
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In order for people to change, there has to be a dramatic event. I think coming on the Oprah show as an event in itself is a watershed occurrence in people's lives. They get told the bottom line truth about where they are. And in that environment, I don't think they will ever forget it. If you embarrass people on national television, they remember. Yeah.
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So on Oprah's show, Dr. Phil focused on clients whose problems were things he could justify yelling about to them or yelling at them for. One early case was a husband who was verbally abusive to his wife, calling her obscene names. Phil could not just condemn the man, but he didn't just condemn the man. He made the man's wife tearfully recount everything he said to her on TV.
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It's very important to him that you believe both things. Yeah. Yeah. So this has a nice side benefit of allowing him to argue that he isn't practicing medicine without a license, which is handy when you're practicing medicine without a license. I don't know if you've ever practiced medicine without a license, but you got to be careful with it.
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So like he's yelling at this guy for being a dick, but he's also demanding that this woman like in detail explain every horrible thing her husband said about her to millions of strangers.
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I don't think is great. You know, I don't think that's great behavior would be my my take on it. Not a psychologist, but Phil isn't really a psychologist either. So, Phil then, after making this woman laboriously explain the horrible things her husband said to her, got to help provide some of his own homespun wisdom. In this case, he told the wife, you taught him how to treat you. Now,
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This is a variation of one of Dr. Phil's life laws for people to follow, which he published in his plagiarized bestselling book, Life Strategies. Quote, no, we teach people how to treat us own rather than complain about how people treat us.
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Did she blame herself for people being shitty to her?
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Well, I don't know. Did it, did it rescue your relationships?
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Hey everybody, Robert here, and if you've been paying attention, we just finished six episodes on Oprah Winfrey. And obviously that dealt with a lot of the most toxic things about her career in media and her show.
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They are all traumatizing grifts. That's what makes them so satisfying. Wow. We all learned a lesson, didn't we? No. No, we didn't.
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All right. So Dr. Fucking Phil. So I want to talk a little bit more about these life laws that he that he lays out in his first book, because this is a major reoccurring theme, especially in early Dr. Phil.
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Like people will he'll critique people by explaining which life law they violated, like the one where you're responsible for other people treating you shitty because we teach people how to treat us. Yeah. Which is like an inversion of the truth, which is that if you're like abusers and predators are good at spotting your vulnerabilities and taking advantage of them. Right.
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And so you need to be aware of your own vulnerabilities because you need to be aware of how dangerous people might take advantage of you. That's the non-toxic way of framing that. The toxic way is, hey, you taught him to be like that. Like, no, you didn't. He saw that you had this vulnerability and he took advantage of it. That's a fair way to put it.
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I want to try this logic with, like, crimes. Like, the next time I'm caught speeding, like, look, officer, you taught me how to drive this car that way. Like, by having the road be this straight and me be this drunk, you kind of taught me to speed, you know?
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Oh, Christ in heaven. Okay, so here's how he introduces the concept of life laws in his book. Quote, life laws are the rules of the game. No one is going to ask you if you think these laws are fair or if you think they should exist. Like the law of gravity, they simply are. You don't get a vote. You can ignore them and stumble along, wondering why you never seem to succeed.
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Yeah, exactly. If somebody dies while he's performing psychic surgery, it's the dead king's fault. Mm hmm.
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Or you can learn them, adapt to them, mold your choices and behavior to them, and live effectively. Learning these life laws is at the absolute core of what you must master in this book to have the essential knowledge for a personal life strategy.
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Yeah, that would be fun. And I think we could probably get a pretty good primetime TV audience if we actually did that, Jamie. If we just put it through a shredder. Yeah. Watch like that scene in Fargo.
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Oh, fuck. We get Steve Buscemi in to present. That's a fucking hour of TV right there.
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I'm sure he would. Now, I bet, Jamie, you're hungry for some more of Dr. Phil's life laws. I can see it in your eyes. You're just you're just you're just. Yeah, absolutely. So most of these laws are pretty self-explanatory. Stuff like life rewards action and you cannot change what you do not acknowledge.
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I mean, I am going to start blaming all of my many crimes on King Solomon. I'm not I'm not going to I'm not even going to lie to you about that. Like, I that seems like a very good idea.
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My favorite is people do what works, which boils down to the idea that we engage in bad behavior because it rewards us in some way. So, Dr. Phil says, if you want to stop the behavior, stop rewarding yourself for it. Which makes sense until you think about the way, say, heroin or junk food works. Because you can't stop it from... The reward is the thing, right?
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The next time you take heroin, punch yourself in the dick so you don't enjoy it as much. I don't know.
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Yeah. How do you... Like statistically, most of the kind of people who want advice from are going to be dealing with something like weight loss. And it's like, no, the reward is eating food like that. Right. That strategy isn't going to to help.
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Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's just all it's just very, very transparent nonsense for the most part.
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You got to give the man credit. It is words in a sequence. That is undeniable that Dr. Phil.
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The man uses sentences, you know? You gotta give that to him. You can't take that from him. So, yeah, some of his rules are, however, a little more sinister. Probably the worst, well, one of the worst is, I don't know, there's a lot of worsts. One is, you create your own experiences. Here's how he explains that one. Don't play the role of victim or use past events to build excuses.
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It guarantees you no progress, no healing, and no victory. You will never fix a problem by blaming someone else.
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It's just such bad. It's particularly all bad advice for like abuse victims. Because if you're an abuse victim, in a lot of cases, part of the healing process is realizing that your abuser is the person to blame and that all these things they got you to blame yourself for aren't things you did wrong. Absolutely. Like that's a big part of healing from that sort of thing.
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And he's just like, no, no, no, don't be blaming this guy just because he was beating you. Maybe you didn't do the laundry right. You know, maybe you should have got him his beer faster. I'm Dr. Phil. I'm a doctor, you know, like, God damn it. I really don't like this guy. Yeah.
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Yeah, I mean, yes, officer, I was going 135 miles an hour in a 55. But if I didn't, this fucking king ghost in my head was going to chop up some babies. Like, do you want me to go a little faster? You want some chopped up babies? That's all I got to ask you.
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I also want to read you the, we said earlier, one of his rules is we teach people how to treat us, but the actual wording in the book of how he explains that is even creepier than you might guess. Quote, you either teach people to treat you with dignity and respect or or you don't. This means you are partly responsible for the mistreatment that you get at the hands of someone else.
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You shape others' behavior when you teach them what they can get away with and what they cannot.
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Yeah, right. Jesus fucking Christ. Yeah, he's really a bad person. I don't like him, Jamie.
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Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's the good book. Got to keep it close to you.
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Oh, John Edwards. There's a lot of dead people talkers. John Edwards. So, despite the fundamental emptiness of Phil's philosophy, or perhaps because of it, Dr. Phil became a wild success. His first episode ran in 2002 of the Dr. Phil show, like he spun off pretty quickly, and he's been on the air ever since.
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He instinctively knew that the real money in this sort of TV was leaning in towards the most tragic and risque stories. Drug addiction, spousal abuse, troubled teens, all that good shit. he was happy to throw medical best practices out the window. In 2004, he interviewed a nine-year-old boy whose parents said he was being abusive towards his younger sister.
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Dr. Phil said the child had nine of the 14 characteristics of a serial killer. Then he added, Jeffrey Dahmer had seven.
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Yeah, it's like, so any reputable psychologist or psychiatrist will tell you that one thing you can't do, as in like it's forbidden in the discipline, is to diagnose a child as a psychopath. You're not allowed to do that because they're children. Their brains are developing and shackling a child with that diagnosis is incredibly unethical. Dr. Phil did it on national television.
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I mean, yes, yes, yes. He does this all the time. Yes. Yes. From a write up by BuzzFeed, quote, Dr. Phil purports to be a mental health professional, but he's diagnosing from videotape on the air, said then executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, Michael Fitzpatrick, to The Washington Post in a 2004 story about Dr. Phil's bad psychotherapy.
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It's unethical to do that sort of, if you will, pop psychology. You don't do that for ratings. This is a human being. A spokesperson for Dr. Phil at the time said that McGraw never labeled the child as mentally ill, which is technically true. He merely brought up Jeffrey Dahmer. So there you go.
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You want me to heal you? Let me pull out some chicken gizzards and pretend to rip them from your chest. So his biographers next note that he did that while he did his extraordinary work of healing, medium John was persecuted by members of the medical and religious establishments.
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No, people have been complaining about Dr. Phil in this way from the very beginning of his career, and it has never made a difference for a single second.
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I think it's just made him more money, which is good. I mean, he picked a good life strategy, you know? He's getting more money than I do. So... Dr. Phil stopped renewing his license to practice as a psychologist in 2006. He has never held a valid license in California, where his show is filmed.
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A spokesperson for his show confirmed that he stopped renewing his license because he, quote, no longer worked as a therapist. I don't disagree with. But I would argue he is absolutely marketing himself as a therapist and is still in the business of therapy.
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He for sure is. And he's not just still doing therapy on his show. He is selling products to companies that make all of their money from doing therapy. Like he... I'll get into that now. A Stat News Boston Globe investigation several years ago revealed that Dr. Phil and his son, some dude named Jay, started a business called Dr. Phil's Path to Recovery in the late aughts.
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This was a virtual reality addiction recovery program where a VR Dr. Phil would walk you through exercises to help you get and stay sober. From BuzzFeed, quote, Users don virtual reality goggles and are placed in scenarios with Dr. Phil. In one, McGraw sits at a bar, arms folded across his chest, counseling his visitor on how to avoid the triggers of an evening out when alcohol is present.
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In another scene, he reclines in jeans on the backyard patio of his sprawling estate, sparkling pool and fuchsia flowers behind him and a wide blue sky above, and shares coping strategies. You'll leave these sessions feeling as though you just had an eye-opening and insightful conversation about your life with Dr. Phil, the Path to Recovery website promises.
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The product is described as the culmination of more than four decades of experience Dr. Phil has working in the mental health profession and addiction recovery.
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Now, obviously, there's absolutely no evidence that this program helps with addiction in any way. A disclaimer on the website says that it is, quote, solely for general information purposes and is, quote, not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any medical, health, mental, or psychological problem or condition.
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He claims that they were threatened by his presence and that he lost count of the number of times he was arrested for practicing medicine without a license. John traveled constantly, never more than a few steps ahead of the law. He finally got a break in 1962 when Brazil was thrown into turmoil by a violent coup.
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Yeah. And he's not even doing it in a situation where they can choose to be grifted by him, because by the time they're in addiction recovery, like they're already paying. They probably don't even know that this fucking thing is there. Yeah. Now, despite the fact that there's no evidence that this thing helps in any way, a number of addiction recovery programs purchased Path to Recovery to use.
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because Dr. Phil gave them free advertising on their show if they bought it.
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Yeah. Dr. Phil offered addiction treatment centers free endorsements on both the Dr. Phil show and his spinoff series, The Doctors, if they first bought his program. BuzzFeed managed to get a hold of audio of one of these pitch sessions, where McGraw's salesman told a customer, "...our job is to get your phones to ring, and the admissions hopefully follow."
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He bragged that Dr. Phil's viewers were older, high-income people, not the addict calling because I told my mom I'd do it.
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The truth is that why would she care? She's, she's doing just fine. Yeah, she has she has plenty of money. So like, what do you what do you expect her to do, Jamie?
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You're just asking to be sad because they just ask me to whack them all right now. Yeah, they never will be because it's not lucrative to be a good person. It's the opposite of lucrative to be a good person.
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Yeah. Yeah. You know, it is lucrative, though, Jamie, shilling the products and services that support this podcast. Oh, we're back. And I am just having a great time talking with my friend J Loft about Dr. Dr. Philomar.
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His biography says the country suffered a revolution and a military government came into power. The reality is that Brazil's democratically elected socialist president, João Guler, was overthrown by a military coup backed by the U.S. government. A conservative military dictatorship would rule Brazil for the next 20-ish years. John's biography glosses over all of that.
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Calvin, yeah. Jamie, I just talked to you about how Dr. Phil has this VR addiction treatment thing. And he basically gives people, gives like treatment centers free advertising if they buy it. I hate it. Okay. You want to guess the quality of the facilities that take Dr. Phil up on this offer? Only the best, right?
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Oh, Jamie, it's a lot worse than nothing in some cases. One facility that took Dr. Phil up on this offer was Inspirations for Youth and Families, a Fort Lauderdale-based treatment center for teenagers. Phil actually highlighted the facility, run by Corcoran Walsh.
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on his show the day he announced his new VR program, saying, Dr. Phil then introduced Walsh, saying she ran, BuzzFeed actually investigated the facility. and found that it had a well-documented history of children escaping and getting into danger.
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Stephen Sarduy, a PI who was hired to find two different girls who escaped from the facility and disappeared, said, "...it seems to be an ongoing problem in that particular facility. Obviously, there's a gap somewhere, a loophole somewhere in the system where they're just leaving."
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In the last two years, Inspiration staff members made 180 reports to police about children in their care going missing. Sometimes the teens left for days or even escaped the state. One escapee wound up prostituting herself for drugs. A number of the teens wound up finding drugs one way or another after getting out of the facility. Six were arrested. Two were hospitalized.
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One group who escaped together later robbed a homeless man. BuzzFeed talked to Jill Walters of South Carolina, whose 17-year-old escaped from Inspirations in 2016 and wound up on the street in Miami. She explained why she initially had chosen Inspirations to help her boy. Quote, They touted this, we were on Dr. Phil. They used that as, we must be a great facility because we were on Dr. Phil.
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Well, that has nothing to do with how the facility is run. You entrust your child to the care of these people and something like this happens. It's good shit.
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so long that is so evil oh my god yep it is evil jamie sure it's but you know it's not evil what the products and services that i just advertised on this podcast that we're not actually cutting to again i just i have a problem jamie i i have a problem you can't stop thinking and i i can't stop i can't stop pivoting to ads you know you're just you're You know what, Jamie? I'm an addict.
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because the advent of a military dictatorship worked out really well for him. Medium John traveled to the capital, Brasilia, and offered his services as a tailor to the military. Quote from his biography. Because he was so young, he was not commissioned to create uniforms, but was given an opportunity to sew a consignment of work pants.
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That one's a good one. That's a keeper. You know what? We're done with the episode. Go home. I nailed it.
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Yeah. It's the best way to do anything really. is a shredder. Anyway, Jamie J loft. J loft us. Joe loft.
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We're actually still talking about inspirations. So court records also reveal that the center's co-owner Christopher Walsh is by his own admission, a habitual drunkard who in 2015 sued a resort for serving him alcohol saying they should have known he couldn't handle it. And boy, howdy. Does it ever get worse? Let's talk about Todd Herzog. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
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That's the end of the inspiration stuff. But so Todd Herzog was another was a repeated guest on the Dr. Phil show. Now, Todd's backstory is that he won Survivor back in the early aughts. He got like a million dollars and then became a horrible, like developed a horrific addiction to alcohol, like a life threatening addiction.
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Now, Dr. Phil and his producers must have salivated at the combination of disastrous alcoholic and reality TV star. Here's how Stat News described what happened next. Quote, Herzog told Stat and the Boston Globe that he was not intoxicated when he arrived at the Los Angeles studio to film the Dr. Phil show. In his dressing room, he said, he found a bottle of Smirnoff vodka. He drank all of it.
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Then someone handed him a Xanax, he said, telling him it would calm his nerves.
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so this guy who handed him the xanax managed to sober himself up enough to like try to go on tv and dr phil's people basically allegedly made sure there was a full bottle of vodka and um a fucking gave him a xanax just because you know i think the reasoning is the more of a disaster you seem like on air the more marketable you are yeah
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His expertise impressed his new employers, and he was soon promoted to full-time tailor and assigned to make uniforms for the army. Medium Joao continued his healing work quietly on the side, but word of his gift soon spread throughout the barracks. One day, he incorporated an entity who operated on the wounded leg of a doctor, which healed immediately.
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Dear, dear, sweet Jamie Loftus. We are not even at the worst part yet.
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So by the time Herzog got on stage, he was so wasted that he could barely talk or function. Dr. Phil and his assistant walked them out themselves, making a big show of helping him while highlighting just how wrecked he was. And I want you to listen to this. Jamie, I want you to watch this, obviously, but I want everyone at home or in your car or pooping or whatever it is you're doing to
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I know. I know. I know. All right. Here's the Dr. Phil show. Hi, Dr. Phil.
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It is fundamentally unethical to have someone in that state on your television show.
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I would say I would recommend not doing that. If, if I was, if someone asked me, should I take someone who has a problem with addiction and give them drugs and then film them disastrously wrecked? Um, I would say, no, that sounds like an evil thing to do.
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Yeah. So when questioned, representatives of the Dr. Phil show deny that they provided Herzog with alcohol and drugs. They said junkies lie in essence about his claims. And then they pointed out that they weren't a medical facility and couldn't watch their guests at all times.
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The doctor was enthralled with Medium Joao's gift, and from that day on, he became the spiritual healer for the military and civil authorities. He was promoted to Master Taylor and became their protege for nearly nine years. Consequently, he was protected from persecution during that time and traveled extensively throughout Brazil with the army. There's a lot that's interesting there.
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The director of the treatment facility where Herzog agreed to go for help at the end of the show, however, was horrified when he saw him on television. He was so upset by the condition that Dr. Phil let Herzog appear on air in that he refused to ever have anything to do with the Dr. Phil show again.
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So this was so outrageous that it convinced the head of a treatment program that all of the free advertising the Dr. Phil show could provide was not worth the ethical compromise of dealing with that man.
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Yeah, it's just, you have to really, like, you have to really do bad to convince someone of that, I think. Like, that's a, yeah, that's throwing a lot of money out. And I don't know, I'm not going to say all people in the rehab facility business are sketchy, but there's a lot of sketchy motherfuckers in that industry, you know?
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I feel quite bad. Thank you so much for saying that. You know, here at Behind the Bastards, that's exactly what we go for at all times.
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Todd Herzog story does not appear to be an isolated one.
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no jordan smith appeared on the dr phil show in 2012 in an episode titled young reckless and enabled smith's aunt claimed she contacted the show to help get her niece off of heroin when they arrived in la from out of state jordan started going through withdrawal her aunt told a show producer that her niece needed heroin and something or something else to help with the withdrawal the producer suggested that they go to skid row and buy heroin together she
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But as I noted a couple of times, we didn't go into much detail about three of the worst things she's been involved with, Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, and John of God, because we had done two partners of those. Well, given that all of those were... had a year or more old, in some cases older than that, we made the decision to run them as one big episode as a bonus.
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She then told them not to say who made that suggestion later. Now, guests like Smith receive free addiction treatment at an expensive center after their appearance on the show, which is why many do it. But prior to taping, no medical treatment is provided or offered. Smith and her family were in Los Angeles alone for two nights before taping.
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A less trusting person than me might suggest that the show does this so that these people will be extra fucked up and sad when it comes time for them to be on television. Ish.
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The most fascinating thing to me is that so the army comes to believe that this is a magical healer. And as a result, they promote him to Master Taylor, which is this is an interesting choice. Yeah. I mean, it's just like keep them in the ranks, I guess. Yeah, keep them in the ranks. Keep a paycheck going to the guy while you dictatorship Brazil. Look, I'm not going to backseat dictatorship.
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Yeah. These people's lives are already off the fucking rails. How can we make it a little worse? I'm Dr. Phil. Joel King Parrish brought her 28-year-old daughter, Caitlin, to Dr. Phil for help kicking a heroin addiction. Caitlin was six months pregnant at the time. Her mother assumed that when they landed, they would receive medical attention, since withdrawal could endanger the fetus.
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But when Caitlin's mom asked the staff for help, they told her to, quote, take care of it. She took her daughter to the hospital, which she left without receiving treatment. Next, from Stat News, quote, The producer texted to say she should stay at the hospital, but Caitlin would not, and King Parish was terrified the baby would die if her daughter did not get medicine or drugs.
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King Parish and Caitlin went to the Dr. Phil studio, where another show staffer joined them. All three got into a cab headed for Skid Row. The staffer shot video, which later aired on the show. In it, King Parish tells the camera, "'I am scared to death right now.'" The camera follows Caitlin from behind as she walks towards homeless encampments.
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King Paris said Caitlin was gone for about a half hour while she shot up heroin. So they just like went out to go buy a horse at Skid Row and filmed it. That's I mean, and that's like that's good TV is what that is.
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Yeah, friends out with our glands out. I don't know. I'm stuck. I'm stuck making that exact kind of joke repeatedly.
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The products and services that support this podcast? Facts. No, every one of them will gently cradle your head or whatever other part of your body you would like them to cradle. Absolutely. Or wherever. They'll just kiss you. You know, they're just going to kiss you. That's that's the behind the bastards promise. Random kisses from a product. Yep. Here's some ads.
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Okay, so there are a bunch of stories like this, and one of the saddest parts of all these stories is that the people who Dr. Phil clearly takes advantage of will still claim that his show helped them because they were able to receive free addiction recovery care that they couldn't have afforded without the Dr. Phil show.
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Almost no aspect of his show works if there's single-payer health care that covers addiction treatment. Okay. The Dr. Phil show profits off of sadness porn, the shock and embarrassment people feel watching the ruined lives of his guests, and the sassy no-bullshit advice Dr. Phil gives them. He earns between $60 and $80 million a year. Of course, the Dr. Phil show, I know, right?
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That's an obscene number, isn't it? Just makes you want to light some shit on fire, doesn't it? Yeah, it sure does, Jamie. It sure does. So, Of course, the Dr. Phil show would get boring pretty quick if he only dealt with people suffering from drug addictions and abusive spouses. From the beginning, a major source of content for McGraw was so-called troubled teens.
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Kids in crisis are big business for grifty TV therapists because, being children, those kids have no ability to regulate their emotions and no sense of proportion. This leads to TV-friendly explosions of rage.
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In 2016, Dr. Phil interviewed Danielle Bregoli for an episode titled, I Want to Give Up My Car-Stealing, Knife-Wielding, Twerking 13-Year-Old Daughter Who Tried to Frame Me for a Crime, which is just a title meant to show up on a... Like, throwing twerking in there with fucking car-stealing? Shameless.
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Yeah, sure. Now, Bregoli now goes by the stage name Bad Baby, B-H-A-D, B-H-A-B-I-E, was a primetime ready delinquent. She spoke in a ridiculously affected hood accent and pretended to basically be a gangster in the kind of confrontational, like... nonsense teenage way that gave Dr. Phil a lot of openings to mock her with his witty rejoinders.
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You get that's like a year eight of the dictatorship thing at best. You know, you get a oh, my God, I want to be which Dr. Surgeon General so bad. That's just that sounds even better than Reverend Doctor, to be honest.
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I don't want to play much of her appearance because she was a child. And I think what Dr. Phil does by having her on is fundamentally abusive. But I do think it's important to play how the episode starts so you can see how he introduces this segment and hear it. You listening will hear it. Jamie, I want you to pay attention to the looks on the faces of the people in his audience. Okay.
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So you see, the thing that's most interesting to me about that is the faces of the women in the audience, because they are particularly the glee. Right. Like, that's the thing that's most unsettling to me is like how excited they are with every new aspect of this story that Dr. Phil reveals.
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Yeah, I have no idea if those face expressions match what was actually going down. But it's all, I guess, specifically the idea that they wanted to show those reactions. Because I think they're trying to coach a response from the people watching at home, too, right? The voyeurism. It makes it clear none of this is about helping anyone.
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Yeah. Yeah. I got really fucked up fighting those partisans the other night. I got a bullet in my arm. I got to go to the master tailor to deal with this.
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It's about laughing at quote-unquote low-class people and their problems. That's what Dr. Phil really makes his bread doing.
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Yeah. So Bregoli went viral. And within the confines of the episode, Dr. Phil positions himself as a dispenser of tough love. His prescription was to send Bregoli to one of his favorite therapeutic boarding schools, Turnabout Ranch in Utah.
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This is an actual working ranch where troubled teens are sent under the impression that working in the country and riding horses will get them off of drugs, premarital sex, and petty crime. In subsequent episodes, Bregoli filmed an update from the ranch where she dropped her fake accent and claimed, "...to feel okay with who I am now." But she was not being honest, understandably so.
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In 2018, she released an original song and gave a different view of her experience at Turnabout. Quote, I was, it was pretty miserable. I did not know what was going on in the real world. This place was far away from anything. There wasn't even service there, she says in the song.
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Yeah. So John claims that the experience of working as a protege healer slash tailor with the dictatorship instilled in him a deep desire to become a successful businessman. His fawning biographers explain that he, quote, needed money making expertise to support his spiritual purpose. This is so he doesn't sound greedy.
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A couple weeks after being home, I finally decided that I wanted to meet up with my best friend again, somebody who was not good for me at all. Instantly, I'd say it was the next day, we got back to doing our old shit again. smoking, trying to finesse people for money, just doing really, really dumb shit.
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Her reintegration into society was made all the more difficult by the fact that, when she returned to school and the internet, she realized rather suddenly that she'd gone viral for being a ridiculous train wreck of a person on a nationally syndicated TV program. She claims that this basically made her decide to, quote, lean in to the bad behavior that had made her famous. Right.
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Once you become a meme, there aren't a lot of ways to get a clean slate. There's no right to be forgotten in the U.S., so why wouldn't Bregoli just keep being the person everyone already thought she was? This gets to one of the things I think is worst about the Dr. Phil show. It's one thing to shamelessly milk the worst moments and the greatest shames in the life of an adult.
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It's another thing entirely to do that to a child who has no real way to understand the long term. Yeah, no way that she could have possibly understood the long term consequences of being coming that kind of famous.
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Now, Jamie, that's all pretty bad, right? Everything we've talked about happening to Bregoli is bad. But to make matters worse, the ranch Dr. Phil sent her and a bunch of other kids to was about as ethical as, oh, I don't know, the drug rehabilitation treatment programs he was also sending kids to. I'm going to quote again from BuzzFeed.
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It's not clear if Turnabout is actually helpful to the kids who go or if it's just another facility that takes advantage of the minors who are sent there to get better. Just last week, 19-year-old Hannah Archuleta sued the school for an alleged sexual assault that she said happened to her while she was staying at Turnabout at just 17.
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This is likely to be a high-profile case too, with Gloria Allred representing her. Turnabout administrators provided a statement to me saying they took immediate action after Archuleta claimed she had been assaulted, but that her father removed her from the facility before we could conduct a full inquiry.
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The statement continued, "...we would never take lightly an allegation of mistreatment to any of our students. Now that this incident is the subject of litigation, we must withhold our full response for a later date." Now, the owner of this ranch is Aspen Education Group, which was then bought by CRC, which is now owned by Acadia Healthcare.
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Wonderfully, they claim John just happened to have a great head for business, and his financial success has allowed him to fund his healing mission, all without charging patients a dime. This is absolutely a lie, but incredulous white Americans bought it for years. So basically, he claims that he became a great businessman, and that's how he's able to fund his free healing hospital.
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In an email statement to BuzzFeed News, Acadia's Director of Investor Relations, Gretchen Hommerick, said, In any event, Acadia never operated either of the facilities. Turnabout has gone through multiple owners, and since 2014 has been owned by current and former employees of the ranch.
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But Aspen Education has been accused of multiple infractions by former attendees, including lawsuits that claimed psychological torture, abuse, sexual assault, and human trafficking. The torture suit was dismissed, but CRC, the owner of Aspen Education at the time, declined to address specific allegations. Arcadia did not answer our questions about these allegations either.
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So just not only like a bunch of people involved in this have been alleged of things, including human trafficking. There's been sexual assault allegations at the ranch, but it like goes to this revolving carousel of owners because it's like a shady fucking, it's just like they're pumping a quick amount of cash out and then selling it to somebody else. It's so fucking shady.
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I mean, the whole teen treatment industry, like I've done a number of art back when I was at Cracked. I did a number of articles with survivors of these facilities. Like all of these facilities are basically child molestation factories and like child abuse factories in general. Not always molestation. Sometimes they just kill them from neglect, you know?
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But besides the stuff that was famous about how shitty she was 15, 20 years ago, but it seems like she's been doing some like...
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good socially responsible stuff lately paris yeah i don't know yeah yeah it seems like it seems like she has uh i mean also i'm like i'm not i'm not about to i'm not gonna go to bat for the stop being poor lady but yeah right right right right uh but but yeah that that specific instance i'm glad if you have wealth and prominence and you use it to take a swing at the teen treatment industry that gets you a couple of points in my book because it's a fucking nightmare
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Maybe we'll do a deeper episode about it at some point. But a lot of the allegations that we just listed about this facility and its many owners predate the episodes of Dr. Phil where he gave free advertisements to the ranch. This means that McGraw and his staff were well aware of the allegations against Aspen and the ranch when they sent children there.
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When questioned about this, a spokesperson for the show said, we're aware and we're monitoring things. Yeah. Since Archuleta went public with her allegations, Bregoli has come forward with more detail about her own experience. She now says she was denied food at times and that camp administrators often refuse to let inmates change their clothes for days on end. Inmates.
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Yeah, that's my framing, but yes. You're helpless. You can't call your parent. You can't email your parent. If the state says they have to give you two pebbles, they're going to find the smallest fucking pebbles to give you. That's supposed to help kids get over trauma. I would have rather went to jail.
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The reality is literally the opposite. He makes a bunch of money healing people, and he used it to buy ranches full of cattle and stuff. Makes sense. Whatever. Now, from this point on, the story of Medium John has a decent amount of documentation, so we're going to depart from his terrible, terrible biography.
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Like one of the girls I talked to who did this when she was like 14 or 15, like one of the punishments they gave her was she had to dig up the stump of a mature tree on her own, which if you've never had to remove a stump, it's something like three to four large adult men usually do with a fucking truck and power tools.
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She just spent days in 120 degree heat, like slowly dying as she tried to force the stump out as a child. Like these places are all nightmares. Horrible. Holy shit. Bregoli is, of course, not the only teenager featured on the Dr. Phil show. BuzzFeed writer Scotchie Cowell alleges that while McGraw is happy to feature children of all genders, he gets particularly aggressive with teenage girls.
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Quote, "...their most vulnerable private moments, screaming and crying at home, are used on the show until the very end, when their parents decide to send them to turnabout." Every episode of the Dr. Phil show ends with an after the taping segment where the kids find out they're going to a ranch in the middle of nowhere and usually cry, which is, of course, great television.
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Most kids featured in this way do not get any updates on the Dr. Phil show or at most mentioned briefly once more. Daytime TV moves too fast for the doctor to actually check back in with most of his patients. In 2008, Dr. Phil spun off and created a new show, The Doctors. Every episode of this show features a plastic surgeon, an obstetrician, and an ER doc who talk about different health topics.
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This sounds like it might be... We're not going to go into a lot of detail about this, but a 2014 study of the show determined that about 37% of their recommendations were not credible, which honestly means they're doing better than I, yeah, I expected worse.
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But if your doctor, for example, said 37% of the time, I'm going to give you bad advice, you would find a new doctor.
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Yeah, imagine a mechanic saying that, yeah, 37% of the time, the brakes I put in work. You know, your odds are pretty good.
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Yes. And again, somewhat being the operative word. Sure. We could go into a lot of other case studies of particularly egregious guest choices. But going over all these sad people in the way Phil exploits them ad nauseum kind of runs the risk of being sorrow porn itself. I do think it behooves us to look at one last case study, perhaps the most nauseating guest choice of the whole series.
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But before we do, I want to turn to his biographers for an explanation of exactly who these entities that take over John are. They describe the entities as transcendent spirits who are, quote, "...able to use Medium Joao's body to produce cures by performing visible and invisible spiritual surgeries."
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24-year-old Gabby came on The Dr. Phil Show in February of 2020. She had promised to act as a surrogate womb for two different couples. In the show, it's revealed that Gabby's mom died right around the time she started pretending to be a surrogate, which was also a period where she was the victim of constant bullying at school. From BuzzFeed, quote,
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Her scam wasn't illegal because Gabby never asked for money or items from the couple she lied to. It's just tragic, hurtful behavior from someone deeply isolated and in dire need of mental health care from multiple past traumas. Most of the episode focuses on the producers following Gabby around backstage, begging her to come on stage when she clearly doesn't want to.
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They call her difficult and volatile, and though she signed an appearance release, it's not clear to the audience that she has read and understood it. When a producer asks her on camera to confirm she understands the waiver, she doesn't respond and covers her face with the pages of the release. But she's certainly remorseful and seems to feel guilty.
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In a pre-taped interview, Gabby cries to the producers, I just want to say sorry to everyone that I've hurt. When she walks off the stage in anguish, McGraw merely sips his water and sighs. The episode is near unwatchable.
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It doesn't sound like she's capable of consenting to that. Yeah.
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So... Dr. Jeff Sugar, an assistant professor of clinical psychology at USC, provided a description of the Dr. Phil show that I think acts as good a coda to this episode as anything. Quote, it's a callous and inexcusable exploitation. These people are barely hanging on.
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It's like if one of them was drowning and approaching a lifeboat, and instead of throwing them an inflatable donut, you throw them an anchor.
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Quote, medium Joao can incorporate approximately 37 entities, but only one entity can be incorporated at a time. The specific entity may change, however, depending on the needs of an individual patient. In addition to the entity incorporated at any given time, there is a highly evolved group of thousands of spirits who actually work on a person while the incorporated entity oversees healing.
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Put him through a shredder. And you at home, put yourself through a shredder. But a good kind of shredder that makes you healthy.
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Well, with that, Jamie, I think it's time for you to plug a pluggable and get the fuck out of this Zoom call and go live your goddamn life, Jamie. Go live your fucking life.
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Damn God yourself. Yeah, it was Jamie. It really was. All right. Well, fuck the internet and fuck life.
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This group is referred to as his phalange. One spirit might specialize in diabetes or heart problems. Another in emotional afflictions. These entities serve humanity in the hopes of alleviating pain and suffering on the earthly plane. This service is part of their evolutionary process. So he's a whole hospital of ghosts.
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You're not getting less original content, obviously, but we clip these together as one big episode so that there's a lot less ads. So you can Kind of listen through this story of all of these, the very worst people associated to Oprah with fewer ads than you'd heard before. So take a listen, my friends. And yeah, I love you. Go to hell. Robert Evans, Behind the Bastards podcast.
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Yeah, I guess people love getting fucking cut into and blood and shit. Like if you really want to if you want to like if you want to get some cult shit going on, you got to get gross with it, man.
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It's part of it. But oh, so physicality. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's why, you know, not everyone's made to be a cult leader, Andrew. I don't think I got what it takes anymore. I believe you could be a cult leader, but, you know, it takes some sacrifice.
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Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot in common. Being a cult leader has a lot in common with having great abs. Right. They both they both take you either have to be born with the right genes or you have to put in a lot of time on the bench.
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It would be cool to be able to incorporate the spirit that could just give you incredible abs. Like, one of them has to know how to do abs. But, okay. So, John claims that after a few years of making money and getting in good with the brutal dictatorship, his entities told him it was crucial he expand his work and heal more people. He wound up being guided to the town of Abadiania in Goyas.
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He first arrived there in 1978 and began his practice by sitting in a chair outside in the middle of the main road and greeting travelers who showed signs of illnesses. Through him, the entities would heal these people, and over time, the numbers increased from dozens to hundreds to thousands per day. So, like, half the population of the city is coming in every week just to see this guy.
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Yeah, if Jesus Christ had benefited from roadside billboards, I don't think they ever would have gotten to kill him. He would have made too much money, but tragic.
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Yeah, honestly, yeah. So, uh... This was often glossed over by the positive coverage of John of God, but the extent to which he became an industry for the people who lived around him can't be exaggerated.
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I'm going to quote now from an O Magazine profile by Susan Casey, just a terrible article from 2010 that nonetheless revealed some important details about the economic impact of this guru on the small town of Aberianya. Quote, several businesses had displays of white clothing. The Casa requests that only white be worn. This makes it easier, apparently, for a person's aura to be seen.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
There were a number of vividly painted small hotels lined up side by side, lilac purple, canary yellow, lime green. One of them, a coral-colored one-story building, opened up to the street, and inside I could see a John of God video playing on a large screen. An audience of about 20 people sat in straight-back chairs and watched him cut into a man's chest with what looked like a rusty paring knife.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
The man's eyes were closed, and he was peaceful and still as rivulets of blood ran down his white shirt. Oh. Yeah, that's awesome. That sounds like the kind of charming small Brazilian town I want to vacation in. Just have a couple of fucking mojitos and watch some guy commit surgery on people. Hell yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Imagine like you're just backpacking through Brazil and wind up here on accident. And it's like, oh, no. I have erred. I did not want to be here. Holy shit. So John established a cattle ranch nearby, and by the early 2000s, he was known to spend most of his week there running his various businesses.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
He was able to do this because increasingly throughout the 90s and early 2000s, a string of foreigners, generally American women, moved in and dedicated themselves to helping his mission. This includes the Americans who wrote his biography. I'm going to quote now from a write-up in the Montreal Gazette. Quote, Visible surgery can involve sticking a surgical clamp up the patient's nose.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
It looks very impressive, but it is nothing but an old carny trick, usually performed with a long nail and a hammer. Any anatomical text will reveal that there is a roughly four inch long passage up the nasal cavity that is quite ready to accommodate a foreign object without any harm. John maintains that. Yeah, that's that's a good trick. Yeah, he's doing the nails up the nose thing.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Yeah, classic. Yeah. So that's awesome. That's a good grift.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Yeah, I guess. Yeah. I mean, that's that's obviously the safest thing. Right. Because then they'll have a vested financial interest in protecting you.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
I guess that is what a cult is. Yeah, that's basically I mean, yeah, more. I mean, this is a little more complicated than just a cult because there's a cult. But then there's also the town who like probably a lot of the townsfolk knew that this was bullshit. But they also know there's a fuckload of money in this shit. Yeah, yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
It's essentially the same way that like the pot industry works in large amounts of the United States or yeah, like any drug illegal business works where it's like, well, this is where the money is here. So nobody's nobody's going to start shit.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
This is good for all of us. Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of what's going on here. Except for instead of good, honest marijuana, it's a guy cutting people's faces and shoving things up their noses. And he actually hates marijuana. He was famous for saying that if you smoked pot, you had to detox for a whole year before he could heal you.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Thank you, Sophie. Thank you for lying about it being a good introduction. But you know what is good? Certainly better than my introduction. Is our guest for today, Mr. Andrew T. Fuck yeah, what's up? I'm alive, can't kill me yet. Nope, nope, can't. So you have made it through the Rona so far, Andrew. Yeah, yeah. I have to say, your hair looks as badly in need of a cut as mine does.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Yeah. If there are if there are ghostly entities flying around, there's no way those ghostly entities don't like some fucking dank. Like, come on.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
So that that last write up I read you from the Montreal Gazette was obviously written by a credible journalist who was as critical of who was very critical of John of God. But I want to read another example, another person writing about what his healing sessions look like who actually believed in him and was a member of his cult.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
So here's his biographer, Heather Cummings, recalling one of his healing sessions. Quote, The entity, Dr. Jose Valdivino, called for his – and that's the guy he's channeling is this Dr. Jose Valdivino – called for his instruments again. I opened the special drawer and carefully removed the tray and took the instrument tray to him. He chose a paring knife, a regular kitchen serrated-edged knife.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
He passed his hand over the man's eye and told him to relax. He opened the eye wide and pressed down hard and scraped. See, here it is, he said. Aww. ...as he wiped the knife on the man's shirt. The son is healed. You can take him to the infirmary, he said, as he wrote the post-op prescription. So that's cool.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Come over to my house. I'll whip out a big old rusty machete and I'll carve the ghosts out of your eye, man. It's fine. This is where I'm taking machetes in next. Damn. That's an easy grist. Just start slashing people's fucking faces. It's fine.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
holy shit oh man and then yeah can you imagine the first time you try this shit like this will work there's a lot of blind people who were like before he learned how to scrape people's eyes without blinding them like yeah there's like a whole village full of his uh his his first draft healings yeah jesus christ
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Yeah, I mean, you know, the good thing is, if you're actually, like, if you're doing this kind of grift, I think you definitely want to start out only trying to heal people with serious terminal illnesses like cancer, because then once you fuck up, they're not around very long, right?
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Yeah, that's really key. Yeah, a lot of good advice on how to start a medical grift in this episode. So take notes when society collapses. Some of you are going to do very well remembering this stuff.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
So, yeah, like, as that story noted, John of God would write prescriptions to his patients, and all of these prescriptions were for a specific herbal pill mixture sold in John of God's own pharmacy. The pills were mostly passion flower, and by some accounts, they've netted John more than $10 million a year.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
He also gets a cut of the sales of the white clothes, the hotel fees, the sales of blessed water, and the sales of healing crystals, which he prescribes to his followers. So you can see why no one in Abedianya had any interest in questioning whether or not John of God was legit.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
He did face occasional challenges from members of the Brazilian government, particularly folks in the medical establishment who were leery of his psychic surgery. But this sort of woo is extremely popular in Brazil, particularly among rural voters, and John of God was both rich and connected, so it is not surprising that very little was ever done.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
What's more surprising is the degree to which foreign journalists bought into his shtick. In 2005, ABC News sent a small team to Abedinanya to meet John of God. They put together a documentary basically posing the question of whether or not he was a healer or a bullshit artist. And they kind of landed on healer, like ABC News did a pretty shitty job of journalism here.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
And I'm going to quote from this write-up in the Montreal Gazette. Quote, And in an attempt to provide a critical view of John's antics, the producers invited two experts, cardiac surgeon Mehmet Oz and James Randi, the world's leading investigator of paranormal phenomena.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Oz was probably chosen because he was a proponent of various alternative therapies, such as therapeutic touch and reflexology, and would be likely to be somewhat sympathetic to faith healing and perhaps add an air of legitimacy. Randi was invited as the token skeptic.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Oz appeared repeatedly in the hour-long show, basically echoing the refrain that science doesn't have all the answers and all other forms of healing need consideration. Science, of course, doesn't claim to have all the answers, but it does look for evidence before jumping on a bandwagon.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Randy, who could have provided evidence for methods of trickery and for psychological manipulation, was given a total of 19 seconds on the show after being interviewed for hours. Why? Why?
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Because the possibility that cancer can be healed by penetrating the nose with surgical forceps by a healer chosen by God makes for better television than declaring him to be a self-delusional simpleton or a calculating fraud artist.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
It's it's it's wild, man. And Dr. Oz is a big part of justifying this guy. Like you can't overstate how much Dr. Oz played a role in giving this guy legitimacy because his job for his whole career pretty much has been to be a real doctor who will get up and say that nonsense makes sense, that nonsense medical treatments are good for you.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Yeah. And and their engineers are regularly engineers and doctors actually are not irregularly like part of like terrorist moves like Al Qaeda had a bunch of engineers and doctors.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Because like they you know, if you've got that kind of intelligence, like Ben Carson is a great brain surgeon and is also able to convince himself that the world is six thousand years old. Like the kind of brains that these people have don't you know, there's a lot of very smart doctors, obviously, too. But you can be a doctor and very dumb. Yeah. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
And you can be a, but I don't think Dr. Oz is dumb. I actually don't think that's, I think Dr. Oz is a very intelligent grifter. Who's made millions of dollars causing untold harm to the world and to our shared understanding of science.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
um none of those things are indicative of actual knowledge necessarily no and this is part of why like this is people talk about like conservatives in particular like talk a lot of shit about the liberal arts and like philosophy and all this stuff and it's like no no the reason why engineers and doctors should have some grounding and all that education is to stop dr oz's from coming about
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Like it's to give people like a broader understanding than just like if you get really good at one incredibly narrow technical thing. Yeah. You can convince yourself to believe all sorts of stupid bullshit because you're a very smart person who doesn't have a wide ranging education. And it's very easy for those sorts of people to convince themselves of the dumbest things in the world.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
It's terrible. We could do what if we did like a locks of love thing, but instead of for people who need hair, it's for like weird, horny people on the Internet. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
And when a bunch of these people who are really good at one incredibly narrow task wind up responsible for a wide range of things, you have stuff like a viral epidemic get wildly out of hand and kill tens of thousands of people. But yeah.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Hypothetically, yeah. And Dr. Oz is, of course, a part of that and was, like, urging people to take bullshit medical treatments during the coronavirus epidemic because he's history's greatest monster. You know, he was also cited repeatedly in that 2010 O Magazine article because, of course, Oprah gave Mehmet Oz life and nursed him at her metaphorical breast of publicity.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
And I'm going to quote from that next. So this is the write-up in O Magazine that really put John of God on the map. Quote, Five years ago, Oz had participated in a primetime live segment focusing on John of God. He examined hours of film footage from the entity's healings. He'd looked at scans and biopsy reports, and there were results he couldn't explain.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
The shrinkage of an aggressive tumor, for instance. This guy has a glioblastoma, which is a very deadly brain tumor, Oz recalled. It was grade four. They biopsied it and proved it. As an added credential, the biopsy was done at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, a prominent hospital.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
I took those films down to my radiologist, along with a new set of films the patient had taken after his visit to John of God, which showed the tumor had calcified and essentially died. Now, I don't know Dr. Oz's radiologist, but I do know that Dr. Oz himself is a famous charlatan and a liar.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
I can't speak to the specific case, but it's worth noting that no other doctors got to look at this information. I can, however, speak about other cancers that John of God claimed falsely to have cured. In 2005, South African singer Leah Melman refused breast cancer surgery to be treated by John of God.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Yeah. We raise money for some charity. I don't know what kind of charity like bombs, not food. Maybe that sounds like a charity.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
She claimed to have been cured by him and showed up on Oprah Winfrey's show to tell everyone the good news about how Brazil's miracle healer had cured her untreatable cancer, which actually was treatable, that she just chose not to get treated. She died of her untreated cancer two years after her Oprah appearance in 2012. Oprah did not post a retraction based on any of this, of course.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Some of this is probably due to the fact that there were many, many other grateful patients, all too eager to come forward and share their own stories of miraculous healing. That 2010 article by Susan Casey included the stories of several charismatic foreigners who claimed to have been cured by John and now worked for him or made money taking groups to be healed by him.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
I'm going to read one example. This is a quote from that O Magazine article, which... You can only find it on the Wayback Machine because once this guy got accused of rape by literally hundreds of people, Oprah pulled the article. But I found it on the Wayback Machine.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
And if you want to be really angry at an unspeakably shitty journalist, and Susan Casey is one of the very worst who's ever done the job, read that article because it will make you want to punch holes in your wall. So I'm going to read a quote from it now. So get your hole-punching hands ready.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Over a good Chilean red, Edwene, an ordained minister, motivational speaker, and author of The Four Spiritual Laws of Prosperity, recounted the story of her brain aneurysm, deemed inoperable by five neurosurgeons. Get your affairs in order, she remembers being told, and try not to sneeze. That's how fragile I was, she said. So I did it.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
I went out and got my living will, my durable power of attorney. But then I realized, I'm not ready to go just yet. She laughed at the memory. That's all it is now. After her dire diagnosis... At the urging of her prayer group, all of whom say they received the same vision of John of God curing her, Edwene traveled to the casa.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
I was nervous and I was skeptical, she said, but what did I have to lose? Almost immediately, the entity performed invisible surgery on her, a 40-minute process that involves sitting in a group meditation with her right hand over her heart. Nobody touched her, but Edwene remembers, I could feel things moving around in my head. It didn't hurt, but it was different.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Afterwards, she collapsed in exhaustion for 24 hours. Days later, she was told by her guide the stitches would be removed. That night, I could feel ping, ping, ping, like stitches being pulled out. Eventually, a CT scan revealed the truth. Her aneurysm was gone. I'm so grateful, she said, nodding toward the heavens.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Since then, she's been back to the casa once at Christmas, and now she was headed there for a third time, bringing a group of 20 people who also sought healing. So this is the level of journalistic rigor that we're getting in this article.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Yeah. Oprah magazine was definitely like it was. Yeah, it was. It was. It was entirely geared at getting wine moms to believe spiritual nonsense and not get their cancer treated. Mm hmm. Mm hmm.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Yeah, that'll be ASMR for some very weird person. Yeah. And yeah. So, Andrew, Andrew, Andrew, as a general rule, when you and I get together, we talk about a horrific story of colonial genocide. That's right. Which is what our friendship has been based on up until this point.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Yeah, you know what else doesn't care if wine moms get cancer treatment? The products and services that support this podcast. They don't give a good goddamn. Great. And that's the behind the bastards guarantee. We're back. Oh, my gosh. What a great... I don't know. Whatever this is.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
John of God is a monster and a rapist, and we will only hear more about the horrible things that he's done. But I can't have the same kind of hatred for him that I can for these fucking O Magazine grifters and Dr. Oz. And I don't know why. I think it's because on a global level, the amount of harm that these people do is so much higher. And it's also so much like...
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
This is going to sound weird, but like the horrible physical crimes that John of God committed, like he just went out there and committed with his own body. And there's a level of like commitment to evil that's necessary. Whereas Dr. Oz and Oprah just like sit in front of a camera and say bullshit that harms so many more people. Well, at the same time, they're perfectly friendly and nice people.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
And so like nobody hates them and they never go to prison. And yeah. I'm not going to say they're worse than a rapist, but yeah. They do more damage on a broad scale, right? Like, yeah. It's not good.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Yeah, exactly. That's exactly right. They're like money launderers for dangerous bullshit that gets people killed and molested and stuff. And they they they are responsible in this case for sending thousands of potential victims to this guy who, again, turns out to rape hundreds of people. And like they're being sent there by Oprah. But all she gets is traffic for it and more money.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
And everybody loves Oprah. And if she ran for president, she would absolutely win. Yeah. And it's fine. And it's just fine. Because she's a friendly, nice person. I'm sure if I got to hang out with Oprah, I would enjoy her company. And I would forget momentarily the horrors that her brand has brought into the world. And that's very frustrating to think about.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
I hate to say it, but I suspect she would not be the worst president of my lifetime. Oh, my God. She might be the best. Yeah. It's entirely possible.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Yeah, I would still vote for her over the current guy or even Joe Biden, to be honest.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Like, it's fucking wild. This is so dumb. We shouldn't have presidents or billionaires like Oprah, but whatever.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Anyway, that O Magazine article has been scrubbed from the Internet because of all the rapes and stuff. But yeah, it's I almost recommend finding it and reading it just to get a crash course and how to write a really irresponsible article about a cult leader. Susan Casey should be in some sort of journalist prison.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
But instead, she went from being Oprah's editor-in-chief to working as the creative director for Outside Magazine, the editor of Sports Illustrated Women, and the author of a ridiculous-sounding book on dolphins. And I am sure that I have ruined any chance of publishing an Outside Magazine now, which bums me out.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Yeah, I would just call you randomly in the middle of the night and be like, have you heard about what they did to Haiti? And I'd be like, nope. Let's hear it. Today, though, today we have a story that's horrible. Really, really horrible.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
I would much rather do that than write about Nazis, but I don't like Susan Casey, and I think she's very irresponsible.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
She's the journalistic equivalent of, like, Like taking your nine year old out shooting for the first time and just getting blackout drunk first.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
You know, the key is that all of the people surrounding John of God... Because you don't spend much time with him. You spend a lot of time around these... And they're mostly white American ladies who love his shit. And they're all the same kind of... They're all Gwyneth Paltrow kind of people. And they're all...
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Like like well-heeled and friendly and charming and and they know how to speak to a specific segment of the population and those people find them trustworthy. Right. Yeah. So Susan felt the need to visit John of God, the author of that magazine article, so she could write a terrible article.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
But the ailment that sent her there was the fact that her father had tragically died very young, and the resultant grief had nearly broken her.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
She went to Brazil for healing, and she basically claims that John of God put her into a trance during one of his mass healing sessions, and she was able to visualize her father in paradise, knowing that he was happy and off living his eternal life allowed her to move on. And that's all fine.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Like, seriously, grief is the worst thing ever, and there are way worse ways of coping with it than paying a guru to help you to hallucinate heaven or whatever. Do what you got to do to get by. I'm not going to blame her for that.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
What I will blame her for is the utterly uncritical way that she wrote about John of God's bullshit, like his claims of being able to perform surgery without even touching people. So here's another quote.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
When you consider the countless unseen things that have undeniable power, sound waves, microwaves, radio waves, emotions like anger or envy, wind, and of course the awesome universal power of love, it seems silly to rely on the naked eye for proof of anything. Yet that is what we do. Numbers on charts and graphs, x-rays, those we believe in, but we leave without documentation.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Something we perceive with one of our five senses is considered blind faith. Sweet, but we don't really trust it. So she's saying that, like, it's silly to believe in radio waves, but not the power of ghosts to heal people's cancer.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
But it's actually a little bit of a reverso because it's like, in part, the story of this weird belief system from Europe being adopted honestly by people in a colonized nation and then used to justify horrific misbehavior on behalf of cult leaders. So that's kind of cool. Yeah! Woo! Yeah. Cool. New shit. Yeah. I guess you could call it a type of I don't know. I don't even know what to call this.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
She is hand waving so hard it could power a fucking windmill farm. Like, Jesus. So she actually makes the argument in that article that it's unreasonable for us to reject the reality of John of God's powers just because there's no proof behind them. This is reinforced by something she writes about her arrival in the hotel at Abadianya.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Quote, as I hoisted my luggage up to the second floor, a small sign of the wall caught my attention. Don't believe everything you think, it advised. Which is, like, that's kind of gaslighting, right? Like, it's like gaslighting via decoration.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Yeah. Holy shit. In this same incredulous way, she writes about the entities that John of God channels. Quote, if you spend time at Abedianya, you will hear the phrase the entities over and over again, sometimes plural and sometimes singular, and you will come to use it yourself as if it were a completely ordinary thing to say.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
What it actually means, however, is so extraordinary that it defies our sense of what is logical or even possible in this world. Thank you. St. Francis Xavier, co-founder of the Jesuit order, along with Casa's patron, St. Ignatius of Loyola, a priest and nobleman from the 16th century.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Despite the presence of saints, medium Joao, born a Catholic, makes it clear that Casa is not a church but rather a spiritual hospital. My mission has nothing to do with religion, he says. So...
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Most of the poor people who come to John of God are too poor to sue if their serious diseases don't get cured. And most of the rich people aren't actually coming there for serious diseases. They're coming there for things like Susan has, where they're sad, you know? That's a lot of these patients.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Man, yeah, that would be fun to try to sue someone for that. I don't know that there's any legal precedent. I think it's really funny that you're like talking about like, OK, we've got this infectious disease doctor, but actually he's calling it a second opinion from the 16th century.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Yeah. Oh, boy. Susan goes on to write, quote, at the Casa, skeptics are as welcome as believers. I had already noticed that skeptics didn't tend to stay that way. Many harrumphing empirical scientists had become impassioned John of God advocates after visiting and witnessing him in action. She doesn't go on to quote any of these scientists or give any evidence of this.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
She just like says it because this is, again, a perfect piece of journalism.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
at one point susan attends a healing and says that john of god called for doctors in the audience to come forward in her recitation of events these learned men were all bowled over by john's inexplicable healing abilities as far as i can tell susan took no action to determine if any of these men were actual doctors a real journalist michael usher did report critically on john of god in 2014 for 60 minutes and i want to compare how she and michael both wrote about the medium's eye scraping surgery
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Quote, from my vantage point only 10, and this is Susan, from my vantage point only 10 feet away, the change in his body and demeanor was easily visible. Now his eyes were more intense and they flashed noticeably darker. His gait became stiffer, his movements more deliberate.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
He turned to the three women standing against the wall, took the one closest to him by the hand and gently sat her in a wheelchair. Her eyes fluttered wide as she meditated. Reaching to the tray, he selected a short knife with a wooden handle, a cheap looking type that you might use to pair an apple. And he held it up to the room, making sure that everyone saw its sharp blade.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
It's a real motherfucker of a story, though. This is the tale of John of God. Have you ever heard of John of God? I've heard of neither John nor God. So, OK, no, John of God. Now, people might be confused. There's an actual like Jesus-y guy, like a Catholic person called John of God. I think he's a saint or some shit. This is not that guy.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
He tipped her head backward, running his hand across her face, and he opened her left eye, holding the eyelid wide. Then he began to scrape the knife across her eyeball, back and forth with visible pressure. Unbelievably, the woman sat absolutely still, without flinching or recoiling.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
I had a hard time watching this, believing as I do that the words knife and eyeball should never appear in the same sentence. After what seemed like an eternity devoid of trauma, he put down the knife. The orderly took the wheelchair and steered it into the infirmary. As she had the entire time, the woman appeared to be napping. How on earth could a knife crush your eyeball and not hurt?
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Later, I would interview another recipient of this treatment. Connie Price, 62, from Jackson, Michigan. There was no pain whatsoever, she said, of the five-minute scraping. I could feel the energy coming through him. I remember the heat pouring through that man's body. Price found the treatment beneficial. I can see a lot better now.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
So you'll notice the only evidence of efficacy of healing is they didn't look to be in pain when this guy was rubbing a knife on their eye. And they said one of them said afterwards, I can see better now. There's no again, that's not evidence. That's an anecdote. And that's not an anecdote based on like actually testing her eyesight.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
It's actually really easy to, it's the same thing with like, it's actually very easy to rub a knife and even cut a little bit on an eyeball without somebody being in horrible pain. Right. And, you know, even when you actually are cutting into people's chest, like it's easy for people to not feel pain.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Like, again, people who like there are people who like do cutting and stuff or who will like like I have friends who like will suspend themselves from fucking cutting.
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things in the roof of a building with like hooks in their back and like it feels good to them like there's like a release of endorphins like there's pain too but like they're not like screaming in agony the whole time even though you would think they would be like There's yeah, exactly.
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The fact that these people don't report pain or anything isn't weird and is part of like a long documented history of people experiencing temporary relief from faith healing and stuff like that. There's nothing mysterious about it. For decades, Pentecostal revivalist preachers have done things like pray over people with injured legs and then have them discard their crutches and dance around.
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And the explanation for how this works is the same as the explanation for why if you throw your back out, you might find yourself forgetting the pain during a moment of extreme danger or extreme excitement. Like it's just sometimes our brains override our experience of pain. It happens. It's a thing that people do. It's like those stories of women lifting cars off their babies.
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So, yeah, that's how Susan Casey uncritically reports on a healing session. Here's how a real journalist, Michael Usher, reports on a pretty much identical healing session. John of God is not a surgeon. He is not a trained doctor. Yet he is presented with a tray of medical instruments, scalpels, and all sorts of scissors. He takes a scalpel and scrapes eyes.
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He sticks knives and scalpels of some sort down the back of people's throats, and he claims he is getting to tumors. He claims he is getting to the root of people's illnesses. He claims he is getting to what makes people ill or sick. None of it is done with an anesthetic, and you don't even know if what he's using is sterile. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That feels about right.
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A large part of why John of God's magic seems to work is the fact that he performs it all in public among and in front of a large and enthusiastic crowd of true believers, many of whom also happen to be desperately ill. John tells them that they can all help fuel his work and heal themselves by sitting in the current and basically meditating for hours while he does his thing.
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This is a modern spiritual medical grifter repeatedly endorsed by Oprah Winfrey who turned out to be a mass rapist and possibly a baby farmer. So that is –
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Yeah. If I'm throwing a lot of shade on Susan Casey for her bad article here, it's because her choice to platform John of God with no critical thinking or even an attempted examination brought his line of bullshit to the eyes and ears of millions of vulnerable people.
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Oprah Winfrey had her on her show in 2010, and one of the millions of women who watched that episode was a Dutch choreographer named Zahira Leinke Maus. Um, she suffered from sexual trauma and Winfrey's episode. Do you believe in miracles convinced her that medium John could heal her. She waited in line twice to receive his healing.
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After traveling to Brazil on her first visit, he prescribed her some of his herb pills. When those didn't do the trick, she went back and he offered her a spiritual cleansing in a rare private session. Um, From the Washington Post, quote, she waited until everyone in line had their turns until finally she was alone. And John of God invited her into his office and then into his bathroom.
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That's where Mo says he raped her, all while leading her to believe it was part of her healing. Now, Mo's was one of hundreds and perhaps thousands of rape victims of John of God.
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And I want to end on this note to get to the point of like what's really happened here, which is that an American industry based on uncritically looking at spiritual healers funneled victims into this guy's hands and allowed him to achieve a level of influence and basically like built a spider web for this fucking spider of a man. Mm hmm.
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So we're going to continue the story of John of God in part two. But right now we're going to continue the story of Andrew T. of God's pluggables.
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That is it. Well, I'm Robert Evans. You can find me on the Internet behind the bastards dot com. You can find me on Twitter at I write OK. And if you want, I will just sort of rub a machete all over your eyes. It's going to cost you. I don't know. Let's say I don't take any money, but we do ask for three thousand dollar donations to our our our medical center.
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So give me three thousand bucks and I'll fucking I'll rub a machete on whatever part of your body you want. That's the guarantee. That is a guarantee. Absolute guarantee. I also have a podcast called The Women's War. It's upbeat. It tells you about how to make things that don't suck out of your society when it sucks. So maybe listen to that too. And I don't know.
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Yeah. Yep. It's going to be an interesting tale today. But before we get into John of God's story, we have to go back in history to the mid-1800s and to a man with what I would have to say is one of the most unreasonably cool names I've ever come across in my research. Are you ready for this name? You're not ready for this name. Nobody's ready for this fucking name. Hippolyte Leon Dinizard Reveal.
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Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast where we talk about terrible people. And this is part two of our series on John of God. But the real bastard is also Oprah and Dr. Oz and Susan Casey, the author of that terrible article. So pull up a fine Chilean red and get ready to hear some more.
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This is off topic, but I want to tell something I just ran across to my guest, Andrew T., before we roll into the episode. Andrew, how are you doing today?
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Well, before we do that, I just came across something on Twitter. It's a book that's being sold. It's like a part of the Joe Biden grift, because every politician has a grift now. And this is a coloring book called A Hot Cup of Joe, and it has a cartoon of a sexy Joe Biden on it. A piping hot coloring book with America's sexiest moderate, Joe Biden. Jesus Christ. This feels like abuse. It's awful.
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Yeah, I don't want to give this person money. But I do want to see inside this terrible, terrible criminal coloring book. The sexy 70-something politicians thing is one of the weirdest aspects of modern politics. You have these two old and clearly not in the best of health men, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, both of whose supporters have to depict them as muscle-bound hunks. And it's like, guys...
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That is a fucking name. Hippolyte Leon Dinizard Reveal. That is a fucking name.
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They're elderly, dying men. Stop it. Like, you don't like even if you think they're the right person to be president, you don't have to pretend that they're like you don't have to get thirsty about them. What is wrong with you people?
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They're not doing wind sprints like Joe's abs don't exist because he's an old, sick man. And yeah, that's OK.
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okay i mean that's fine ideal but like whatever like just stop it stop it all of you the flesh on his face is melting day by day yeah it's what happens out here as you die like he's not which is fine they're they're dying okay yeah like the like yeah this is not on them because they're like pretty normally aged men for the ages like stop making you don't have to make them sexy.
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I dare you to find a better example of uncut eroticism than Robin Williams as Popeye in that 1980s Popeye movie that absolutely exists. Look it up. It's fucking...
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yeah something else insanity yeah people made that people made that and no one stopped them isn't that robert altman i think so yeah i think it's robert altman you keep talking i'm gonna look it up no i'm not don't do it to yourself never mind it's great so We're all back from... It is Robert Altman. I looked it up. I couldn't help it. All right. It's time to get back into this episode.
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Talk about John of God some more. I just had to. That hit my world like a fucking carpet bomb. And I had to... I just had to talk about it. So...
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Yeah, like one of Raytheon's fine products, hitting a wedding, which, you know, if you've ever thought not enough weddings have missiles hit them, then you're the kind of customer Raytheon's looking for. All right, we really should start the episode now.
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no human being has ever embodied the phrase the road to hell was paved with good intentions better than oprah winfrey like many of you she was a regular background figure in my childhood my mom would have her on when she was working from home uh while we did chores etc like she was just on in the background all the time and compared to the other background figures of my childhood guys like rush limbaugh and michael savage she was pretty benign at least she seemed that way um
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Fully 50% of his four names sound like Pokemon. I've got a Hippolyte. I've got a Denizard. It fucking rules. So Hippolyte Leon Denizard Reveil was a French educator, and he wrote under the markedly less cool pen name Alan Kardec, which I don't understand. If you're Hippolyte Leon Denizard Reveil, you lean into that shit. This guy did not know what was clickable. Very frustrating. That's wild.
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I don't know if I would describe her as a monster, but her career has been a masterclass in how to enable monsters. Winfrey was a longtime friend of Harvey Weinstein. She regularly hosted Tony Robbins, another sex pest and self-help guru. She is largely responsible for making Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz into household names, and both of those men have gone on to do incalculable harm to society.
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And of course, she is the reason John of God and his clinic were put in front of the faces of millions upon millions of gullible, desperate Westerners. After that O Magazine article was published in 2010, she dedicated a special episode to John of God, inviting the author of that article and a doctor onto her show.
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They were both total converts, but how they and Oprah presented John to their audience is really interesting to me. And I want you to click that first link and play it to about 38 minutes, Andrew.
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Yeah. Okay. I'm back. That's good. Yeah. What'd you think of that, Andrew? What'd you think of that framing?
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Susan Casey. Yeah. Journalist is a strong word for Susan.
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Yeah. And whatever picture you I guarantee you, 100 percent of you, whatever picture you have in your head of Susan Casey is accurate because there's only one wild. Yeah, it's awesome, isn't it? Yeah.
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what's really cool about that is that it is very clearly and obviously an answer of uh susan and this other doctor who will talk about a minute whitewashing john of god so like they know that if they're going to be on oprah's show and talk to like a mainstream audience they have to put in a they can't just be all like especially because of this is 2010 and we we aren't where we are now now you could just say doctors are bullshit this guy's the only real healer in the world like
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Back then you had to be like, oh, no, you still regular doctors are still good. Great for things. He's just helping with other stuff. And like that was necessary to get people on board. But John of God's cult produced propaganda, too. And this is why I say that Susan Casey and this doctor are like.
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intentionally whitewashing him because for this episode of Oprah's show, they use clips from a documentary that John of God's cult produced. And in the actual documentary, there is no time wasted telling people that they need to consult their doctor. So I'm going to play next.
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Have you play next a clip from that actual the documentary produced by the cult that shows kind of how internally they they they talked about his healing powers.
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Yeah. So, yeah, you see like in that there's no talk about like, oh, yeah, you got to you got to fucking. Right. Consult a physician. Yeah. No, he just heals your shit. Yeah. So the doctor guy that Oprah has on there is a fellow named Jeffrey Rediger.
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Speaking as a guy who's named after fucking the Godfather guy, you don't give up the gift of a name that cool.
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And he's really interesting to me because he is a very real medical professional and was actually or is actually a member of the Harvard Medical School faculty. He researches spontaneous healing, which is like when people go into remission or whatever and there's no clear explanation why, which is a thing that happens. People get better from things we don't understand why.
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That's a thing that happens. And he he. It's clearly there to inject both credibility and skepticism into the discussions about John of God, kind of like Dr. Oz was earlier. For example, Oprah at one point plays a video of one of John of God's brain surgeries where he's like shoving stuff up people's nose.
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And Dr. Rettiger is really upfront and clear about the fact that this brain surgery through the nose stuff is slight of hand, that he's not actually performing surgery, that he's that there's there's a ton of space in the navel cavity and nothing inexplicable is going on.
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So he does state that to the audience, but he does that while he buys into the fact that scientifically inexplicable healing occurs at John of God's center. So I'm going to play another clip from that Oprah episode so you can kind of see how this skeptic talks about this healing.
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So anyway, under the boring name Alan Kardec, he wrote a series of books about spirits. And Kardec's core contention was that all living animals were inhabited by immortal spirits that bounced around from body to body over the ceaseless aeons.
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So did you catch what went on there? This is really interesting to me. So Dr. Rettiger notes that the psychic surgeries, which like use real knives and actually cut people, he notes that that's dangerous. Like he tells people not to do it at home, but he also says he's not aware of anyone getting infections.
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And then when Oprah points out that he could have, they could have gotten infected later, he doesn't respond to that. You'll notice he doesn't say that that's possible. Even he just sort of says that like a bunch of things get like, that's really, yeah, that's amazing.
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But it's the kind of thing because it's been acknowledged, even though he doesn't then go on to state that, like, actually, yes, we have no data that these people to suggest these people aren't getting infected. We're not performing any follow ups. I didn't take any attempts to actually determine whether or not people got infected letter. He doesn't say that.
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He gives a non-response so that the show can move on and the audience can move forward, content that John of God, that these are real, serious, skeptical people, and that that makes John of God even more real because this medical professional has vetted him with the requisite amount of skepticism, even though none of that was actually done. It's amazing.
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This is a master class in how to – it's laundering bullshit. Yeah.
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Yeah, it's awesome. I want to play one more clip from this episode because we just gotta.
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Kardec also believed that spirits could become disembodied through a variety of causes and that these free spirits could impact the world in positive and negative ways. Kardec's theories became the religion of spiritism, which is still practiced around the world today. And it is particularly popular for reasons I don't really understand in Brazil. It has something like 3 million adherents there.
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All right. Yep. So that's interesting. One of Rettiger's claims is that while he's watching John of God perform these surgeries, he spontaneously started bleeding from a hole in his side, which is kind of like a stigmata thing.
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He's introduced as a skeptic who traveled to John of God's center in order to take samples and medically vet whether or not this man was a serious healer. And he says later in that interview, quote, some people I spoke with were able to remember the events going around them completely, but And some people seem to enter a sort of altered state during these surgeries.
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When I was assisting in one of these surgeries, John of God cut this woman's cornea. She didn't flinch. She didn't try to pull away from him. I can't explain that. I heard some people use the term spiritual anesthesia. I have no way to understand that. It's interesting that he says that because there's actually a lot of reasons why someone wouldn't feel their eye getting scraped.
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incredible he's he's such a piece of shit and it's yeah obviously like i've scraped my cornea before when i was out hashing in the woods and uh it didn't hurt it hurt afterwards like because just like it fucked up my ability like my eye was taking in too much light or something like it was like kind of blinded me it was very much debilitating afterwards but the actual getting scraped by a branch in the eye it didn't cause pain which is part of why it took me a
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Yeah, I don't know. It's like there's also a lot of data on how altered mind altering states like people have in these religious moments can impact perception of pain. Worship is definitively a mind altering state. John of God requires his patients to go through an elaborate series of meditations before and after treatment.
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And I actually found a scholarly study of his his surgeries conducted by doctors from a Brazilian medical school. They note the surgeries were always performed by John of God and occurred in a large, non sterilized and open room with dozens of spectators, most of whom were other patients and their relatives or friends.
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During each of these surgical sessions, approximately five patients usually remain standing while side by side in front of one of the room's wall. Rarely patients were submitted to the surgeries while they were seated in a chair. Visible surgeries were performed in a few minutes in a very grandiose and theatrical way, invoking strong emotional involvement and even perplexity among the audience.
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Incisions were performed with either sterilized scalpels or kitchen knives, and surgeries were performed in rapid succession. The cleanliness of the instruments contrasted to reports of other mediumistic surgeries performed by dirty or even rusty implements.
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The stories about this guy that uncredible sources state always say that he's just using random kitchen knives, sometimes even that they're dirty. When actual scientists studied his... No, his knives are always sterilized. And he's not cutting open people deeply and removing organs. He is scraping their skin and their eyes. The fact that a lot of them don't get infections isn't weird.
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Have you ever gotten a scrape that didn't get infected? You've probably gotten a lot. Because your body is reasonably good at not dying from random scrapes. Otherwise, there wouldn't be people like it's it's very frustrating. Another frustrating thing is that this study goes on to note that like they don't know, like they couldn't find any evidence of infections among John's patients.
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But they also note that they didn't actually get to follow up with any of these people further than a day or two on. because a lot of them were traveling in from elsewhere.
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So the paper is a proper scientific paper, and it concludes that we need to do more research and track these patients for longer term to determine whether or not anyone's getting infected, which is what you say if you're an actual scientist. Dr. Rettiger, on the other hand, just gets on Oprah and announces that this is all inexplicable. Science can't explain this. It's like, yes, it can.
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You just didn't try. You didn't even try. Yeah. And I hate it.
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I think you're very keen to recognize that because I suspect it has a lot to do with that. And usually spiritism winds up being kind of like a spiritist Christian hybrid. And it does – you're right. It kind of does because a lot of these places had sort of animist traditions prior to Europeans coming in and fucking shit up.
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I found a good critical write up of Dr. Rettiger's performance on the blog Science Based Medicine. I'm going to quote from that now. Unfortunately, the camera angles used made it impossible for me to judge whether John was doing what he claimed. In the only close-up shot that was presented, it was clear to me that the knife never touched the woman's eye.
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And when John actually appeared to be doing something, the camera never focused on the woman's eye. How convenient. It was almost as though Oprah producers were making a conscious effort not to show a camera angle that would allow viewers to judge whether the procedure actually being done was what John of God claimed.
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Personally, I'd have loved to see an ophthalmologist or even just a surgeon rather than a psychiatrist, because Dr. Rettiger is a psychiatrist, allowed to have a close-up view of John's activities. Rettiger is also shown in a video clip apparently bleeding from the chest, apparently after having viewed John do his cornea scraping bit.
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He expresses fear and is concerned that the bleeding doesn't stop as soon as he thinks it should, pointing out that he doesn't have a bleeding disorder.
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So, again, Dr. Rettiger is a psychiatrist, which makes him a legitimate medical professional, but does not make him particularly competent to rule on whether or not someone's reaction to a light surgical cut is inexplicable because that is not what psychiatrists specialize in. Yeah.
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Yeah, it's super great. Yeah, and it's also noted in that article that Dr. Rettiger isn't just a psychiatrist. He's a psychiatrist who's built an entire brand off of embracing spontaneous healing. At the time this came out, he headed up the Initiative for Psychological and Spiritual Development. And on his old website, he wrote this explaining what the Institute did. Quote,
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We live in a culture that has advanced enough that we can send the person with a medical problem to the medical doctor, a person with an emotional problem to the psychologist, a person with a spiritual problem to the priest, minister, or rabbi.
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Yet the initiative for psychological and spiritual development is founded upon the belief that, beneath all and behind all the masks and appearances that we present to the world, there is something more, and whatever healing potential exists comes from this place. Which is...
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Beautiful, beautiful nonsense. So Dr. Rettiger's initiative appears to be defunct now. I don't think it exists anymore. I can't find evidence of that, but I didn't look super hard, so maybe I'm wrong. He does have a book out, however, called Cured! with an exclamation point, and it's about people going into spontaneous remission.
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I don't know enough about Rettiger to declare him an absolute grifter, but I do know that he was once a ghost on Coast to Coast AM, which is like Alex Jones for people who are a little bit less racist than Alex Jones. So I'm going to say it's probably fair to call him a grifter. You don't go on Coast to Coast AM if you're like a credible person.
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And so spiritism felt like this kind of genuine synthesis of these old traditions with the new Christianity. I think you're probably on to something there.
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Yes. Yeah. And yeah, but it's a great grift. It's a thing people want to read about it. People love reading books about magical healing and shit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, Dr. Rettiger is part of the grand tradition in the medical field of credentialed medical professionals who provide cover for miracle slinging con men. And of course, Dr. Oz would be another example of this type of person.
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Another example is provided in Susan Casey's O Magazine article about John of God. And this is her again attempting to do some real journalistic research to talk about how it's not weird to believe that this guy could be curing cancer. Quote. Though belief in the effectiveness of prayer is as old as civilization, the results are tough to pin down.
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Bernard Grad, Ph.D., a Canadian biologist from McGill University, worked with a spiritual healer named Oscar Estebane conducting controlled studies in the late 1950s and 60s. Using mice that had been uniformly wounded, Estebane would place his hands upon the wire covers of certain cages, willing those animals to heal. The results were dramatic.
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In one experiment, the wounds on Esteban's treated mice were very significantly smaller after two weeks than those of mice that had been left to heal on their own. The team also discovered that plant seeds exposed to energy healing grew at a faster rate. There was a force here, they agreed, and it appeared to be doing something beneficial. What that force was, however, no one could say for sure.
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Now, these studies happened. They're a real thing that happened. You can read them. Bernard Grad did carry out those studies, and if you look them up, you'll find conclusions that are pretty similar to what Susan Casey writes in her bad article. What you won't find is any clear follow-up to the study.
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In fact, basically the only writing about this research you will find comes from either woo-woo bullshit practitioners or other medical griftsmen trying to convince people that energy healing is real. This makes it difficult to refute because there really aren't direct refutations of Dr. Grad's work.
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What we do have, however, is almost a century of additional research into quote-unquote energy healing because, again, this stuff was done in the 50s and 60s. It wasn't a big study. It was conducted a long time ago. You can't say that it was conducted – We can't prove to a point of certainty that these people were actually conducting it well or abiding by all the rules they said they were.
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And there's another 70 years of other studies into this that show very different results. So, again, she picks out this one study from 70 years ago that says what she wants it to say.
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She ignores, for example, the fact that in 1999, three psychiatrists with the Lancet evaluated multiple studies, several hundred of them, that showed links between religious faith, faith healing, and energy healing and health benefits. Here's how Science Magazine reported on their findings. Quote,
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Typically, they say, these studies ignore other factors that may improve health, such as abstinence from tobacco and alcohol, and even the scientifically sound practices they contend were inconsistent and don't justify bringing religion into medical practice.
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Richard Sloan of Columbia University and his colleagues reviewed every article containing religion and physical health they could find in Medline, an online service that indexes medical studies. Many of them, he says, focused on such groups as Roman Catholic priests or Benedictine monks, which forbid certain risky behaviors.
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Others looked at more general populations of churchgoers and found lower disease rates. but failed to take into account that only people who are in fairly good health can go to church. When these confounding factors were taken into account, either by the original researchers in a follow-up study or by Sloan's group, the alleged benefits usually disappeared.
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Overall, Sloan says, the evidence is very unconventioning and weak, much weaker, for example, than the link between marital status and health. So, again, you can point out there's a couple of individual studies that, like, haven't been refuted that suggest a benefit between energy, healing, and health. And then there's hundreds of studies that show no connection at all.
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And if you only pay attention to the studies that say what you want, it sounds great. If you look at the mass body of research, it doesn't look so good. But Susan Casey doesn't do that. Yeah. Yeah, so that's cool. Following that 2010 episode of The Oprah Show, Oprah herself visited John of God in 2012. She described the encounter as blissful.
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And in her wake, thousands upon thousands of other seekers made the call to travel down Brazil way for some psychic healing. By 2014, John's humble center had transformed into a straight-up commercial empire. Those passion flower pills alone grew into a $10 million a year business. Celebrities visited, including Paul Simon, the Princess of Japan, and Bill Clinton. Maybe. Probably.
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Yeah, it's whatever. So we don't hear a lot about spiritism today in the United States. And probably the reason why is that a sizable number of what were originally the religion's chief pillars have just become normal facets of like fringe spirituality.
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We don't exactly know. There's a bunch of celebrities who are rumored to have gone. I'm going to guess probably. Bill Clinton seems like the kind of guy who'd try this. Yeah.
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Yeah. But something else also cropped up over the years. Allegations of sexual misconduct by John of God. Objective observers noted that he seemed to have a strange non-medical fixation with women's breasts performing surgery aimed at treating heart conditions and other ailments by groping them and cutting around their nipples. So that's good.
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The mask of capitalism. And that means it's time for us to take our mask off and put some products and services on.
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We're back. OK, so, yeah, we left off. You know, John of God has gotten this huge boost from Oprah and her grift community. People are flooding in from all around the world, but also some stories start to come out. Allegations all vague at this point. No individual names attached, but that he's he's sexually harassing and assaulting people.
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The allegations were enough that in 2014, a real newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald, sent a real journalist, Tim Elliott, to look into the matter. Tim's article provided the first comprehensive look at John of God's operation by someone who wasn't clearly two steps away from joining his cult.
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Like Susan Casey, the center provided him with a white expat handler to introduce him to John of God's world. Since Tim was a man, his handler was a man, Diego Coppola. Here's Tim's article, quote, Coppola was born in Peru, but spent most of his life in California, where he worked as a computer engineer.
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After visiting the Casa in 2001, just to check it out, he married a Brazilian and moved to Abadiana. These days, he manages the Casa's 50-strong staff, a multinational team of volunteers who take care of logistics, channeling the constant flow of visitors and, most importantly, forming an impenetrable buffer around medium Joao, sheltering him from the ceaseless demands of a ravening public.
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Like a lot of stuff that was originally part of this spiritualism religion that Kardec cooked up just kind of became things that like people who like crystals all believe. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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"'Everybody wants a piece of medium Joao,' says Coppola." Before I arrived, Coppola had promised me an interview with Joao, although he now lets me know that this is far from guaranteed. He is not like you and me, Coppola tells him. He lives in another realm. Timetables don't mean much to him. What matters to him is doing the work, taking care of the healing. So that's good.
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Yeah. Yeah. Now, the reality is that John of God spent most of his time living in luxury on a ranch compound nearby. He only worked about half the week and later revelations would suggest that he spent much of his downtime sexually abusing women, although he also spent a lot of his work hours sexually abusing women, too. So who knows?
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Tim Elliott spoke to an Australian seeker, a woman named Sarah Layton from Melbourne. She's very emblematic of the success cases for John of God. And I'm going to quote from him again. She says. She says. What has helped her most, though, is the emotional healing. She's had a hard life. After being sexually abused as a child, she was tortured.
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Before coming here, she had attempted suicide four times. She estimated she has spent $50,000 all up in airfare donations. I always donate to the Casa because John of God doesn't charge anything. And medications, such as healing herbs, which are sold at the Casa's pharmacy. I used my inheritance, $20,000 from my grandmother, to pay for a lot of it. But it's worth it.
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My heart is healed, which Western medicine wasn't able to do. And my gynecological problems have stopped." So there's a lot going on there. Yeah. Yeah. First off, you see like everyone claims he doesn't take money.
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Yeah, and even Christianity, kind of like mainstream evangelical Christianity in the United States has even absorbed a number of spiritist beliefs, or at least different Christian cults around the world have done that. And in a number of places, including Brazil, this has led to spiritual healers becoming a very big deal.
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Or than actually getting medical treatment in the legal way if you don't have health insurance or if you do have health insurance. Yeah.
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Yeah. But like you'll notice that like and this is true with a lot of the most dedicated case studies who will come out and talk about this guy's healing is their actual medical complaints are really vague. And there's there's nothing in that that you can track pathologically.
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So she vaguely says gynecological problems, but also says, like, it's really my heart and like my emotional problems that he healed. And Susan Casey, the O Magazine author, was in the same boat. She was grieving, not physically ill. And I've read a lot of stories about women who received healing from John of God, and an overwhelming number of them came in with emotional pain.
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And these people do seem to have gotten real relief at the center. But there's nothing magic about what provided them with the relief. I'm going to quote now from a woman who wrote a story about her own treatment by John of God. This is what she described it as. Quote, Meeting the medium was a solemn process.
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Hundreds of people in white flocked to the casa every morning, some in wheelchairs, other frail from chemo. In an orderly line, we waited to go before him so he could prescribe our cures. Mine was as follows. Five trips to the local sacred waterfall. Four months without sex, alcohol, or black pepper. Four months of blessed herbal capsules.
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A translator quickly scribbled these directions on a small piece of paper. For three hours a day, I sat in meditation in the current room, helping to conduct energy for healings. It felt special, purposeful. I napped, hiked, and stood under that freezing holy waterfall. I prayed in front of the Casas triangle, a big wooden wall hanging. Who's three sides represented faith, love, and charity.
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And then I went home and like, yeah, if you're fucked up and grieving and like in a lot of pain and you go to, uh, a distant location, that's like set up to be solemn and relaxing and chill. And you detach from the internet and you stop getting wasted all the time. And you spend a bunch of time hiking in nature and hanging out at waterfalls that will help with your grief. Yeah.
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This is helping you will get better. Like that's a lot of what people need in those moments is like someone to to really confidently tell them like this will pass and you will feel better. All of that stuff helps. There's nothing magical about it. It's good to go... When you're really fucked up in the head, it's good to stop getting wasted and to spend a lot of time hiking.
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There's nothing controversial or inexplicable about that. Yeah. Yeah. So in other words, a lot of the miraculous powers attributed to John of God are really just examples of the fact that life in his center is on balance healthier than the lives a lot of people left behind. That Sarah woman Tim Elliott interviewed even told him she expected the same thing.
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Spiritual healers are individuals who claim to be able to carry out magical healing sessions because their bodies act as conduits for dead medical doctors, saints, and sometimes just God himself. Now, in the United States, this is often seen in Pentecostal communities, who I talk about a lot because people need to know more about them. Have you ever seen like spiritual surgery sessions?
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She said, quote, You're in the fifth dimension here, whereas in Australia, it's the third dimension. In Australia, people don't understand spirituality. It's either work or going out and getting drunk. I find I have to escape that. And like, yeah, if your life if you were if you were like depressed and getting wasted every night and like that makes your body feel worse, it's bad for your health.
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And you go to a place and guys like stop doing that for four months. Hike. Meditate. Yeah, that's going to help.
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Yeah. But of course, John of God and his adherents couldn't just claim that the man had provided people with a relaxing retreat because claiming that this is magical and it also can treat cancer and stuff, that's where the real money's at. So when Tim did his interviews, his patients referred to John of God as a spiritual x-ray machine.
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And in the very dumb biography, John of God, Heather Cummings claimed that John was able to see each of his patients as a hologram, which is why all staff patients and visiting journalists were asked to wear white. He says it made them easier to read. It also coincidentally opened up a huge market in town for white clothing, of which John of God got a cut. Awesome. Smart. Yeah.
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Yeah, the entities are like, yeah, they're working long hours to make sure all those fucking crystals are holy enough. Yeah. Both the gift shop and cafe also do a brisk trade in water that has been blessed by the entity. People at the Casa treat the blessed water like nitroglycerin. Don't drink it all at once, Jana Sue Jones says one afternoon when she sees me swigging from a bottle.
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You'll be up all night. Sarah Layton tells me she regularly buys 10 liter jugs of the stuff to take home in her luggage. It's just water. Oh, my God. Yeah. I mean, a lot of religions have fancy water. Now, the heart of the whole grift is the pharmacy, though. When I first started reading about it, I assumed it just stocked a variety of herbal remedies that he was giving people.
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But it turns out that the reality was even dumber than that and more brilliant at the same time. Here's Tim. Quote. I had assumed that the pharmacy would stock a range of different herbs to treat a variety of different conditions. But no, there is only one herb for sale here. Passiflora, the flower of the passion fruit plant.
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When I asked Coppola about this, he explains that it's not what's in the capsules that counts, but rather the spiritual prescription that John of God writes for each patient. The intentionality of that prescription is transferred to the capsules at the time of purchase, he says. That's fucking brilliant. That's a great grift right there.
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And again, all of the people who see John, he is actually just being seen by him and showing up and being in that line is free. But they all get prescriptions for these herbs. And, you know, some by fifty dollars, some by ten dollars worth. But the average Tim knows that the average purchase is about twenty dollars, which would account for forty thousand dollars a day in herb sales alone.
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Jesus Christ. Great grift. A fucking plus grift, John of God. Like, very smart. So Abedianya is a small town. It is not located in a nice part of Brazil. Before John of God, its biggest industry was a series of brick factories. By the mid-aughts, John was by far the largest business in the area, and this gave him power.
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The way Tim describes it, John of God's financial leverage turned Abedianya into his own personal fiefdom. Quote, the biggest industry by far is Medium Joao. There are no less than 72 posadas or hotels here, all catering to Casa Pilgrims, most of whom come on two-week tours and arranged for booking agents.
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These tours cost many thousands of dollars and must be approved by Joao, or rather the entity. There are rumors that he also demands a percentage from the tour operators, but Coppola denies this. Medium Joao owns farms and some mines. He doesn't need more money. Not if he's making 40 grand a day from herb sales, he doesn't.
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Yeah. My friends in the pot industry got into the wrong business. Just convince people that any random plant cures everything and start selling that shit. Like, that's the fucking money. You don't even need real plants. They could just be putting grass in those pills and people wouldn't notice. Yeah, or nothing. Yeah, or nothing. Just sawdust. It's brilliant. Mm-hmm.
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So it soon becomes apparent just how much the town has been molded in the Joao the entity's image. Photos of him are everywhere, on street poles, in the posadas and cafes. A whole industry has sprung up around the sale of white clothes for visitors who forget to bring their own. He is the brand here, one visitor told me. The locals are now worried about how long he's going to live.
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Laying on of hands, but then they'll pull their hands away. They'll be like, oh, there's a tumor inside you. The devil's put a tumor around your heart. And they'll pull their hands away and they'll have like a bunch of bloody pieces of meat in their hands. And it's almost – it's always like chicken or something.
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The entity oversees everything here, from new businesses, which must be entity approved, to new construction. One Australian CASA staff member told me that before building a house here, she ran the plans past the entity. Now, Tim did eventually get to conduct an interview with John of God, but only after he made it through a gauntlet of fawning former patients.
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The center made him interview all of John's regulars, men and women who claim he healed them. The goal of this was obviously to instill a sense of awe in him so that by the time he got to talk to John of God, he was in a mentally receptive place. But Tim is a good journalist, and this did not work on him. In fact, he says that by the end of the whole routine, he suffered from miracle fatigue.
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Quote, one more person tells me about their amazing recovery. I'll kill them. I'm a fan of Tim.
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When they sat down to talk, Tim became probably the first reporter to directly ask John of God about the sexual abuse allegations against him. John's response. I thought you came to talk about me, not other people.
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Yeah. At this point, John tried to break off the interview to go nap, but Tim asked him about another allegation. Local reporters had alleged that he diverted donations meant to build a soup kitchen and use them to renovate his house. John responded with a rant that he wasn't a thief. The person making the allegations was a thief. So, like... Very credible guy here. Then the interview ended.
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And for a while, that was about all anyone had on the allegations against John of God. The Montreal Gazette had a big laugh in 2015 when John of God had an endoscopy, which revealed a tumor and he had to undergo major surgery and chemotherapy to have it removed.
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When asked if this was hypocritical, John of God responded, what barber cuts his own hair and went right back to fleecing thousands of people per year. which is just great. I'll cure your cancer, but if I get cancer, I'm going to get some fucking chemo.
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We are FDA-backed to say that all cancers are cured by whatever product and or service comes up next. So again, the FDA completely backs and supports this.
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Come on, you fucking FDA cowards. Bring it on. Bring it on. Anyway, here's healing. We're back, and I am just waiting for the FDA to try and take me on. Let's do it. Come on.
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Like they get guts from like an animal and they do sleight of hand like magician shit to make it look like they're kind of like that guy in Temple of Doom pulling out diseased organs. Yeah, like that's a big thing in the United States. That's amazing. It's cool. It's a big thing in the parts of the United States that I'm going to guess most people don't know anything about.
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Doesn't matter. In September of 2018, a very brave Brazilian activist, Sabrina Bittencourt, went public with allegations from dozens of women against John of God. The blowback against her was immediate and severe. John was well-connected in the Brazilian government, as well as extremely popular. An avalanche of death threats forced Sabrina to flee her home country for Spain.
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One of John's victims was hounded into suicide by her own family, who were all adherents of the medium and members of the cult. The story did not disappear, though, because as the weeks went by, dozens and then hundreds of new women came forward with their own stories of sexual abuse and rape at the hands of John of God.
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By the time the 300th allegation hit, the chief lawman in Goyas was forced to issue a preventative incarceration request against John of God. Initially, John expressed a desire to work with law enforcement and comply with the investigation. From a local news story, quote, I am grateful to God for still being here. I'm still a brother in God. I want to comply with Brazilian law. I am in its hands.
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João de Deus is still alive, he told his followers. When he left only 10 minutes later, he told reporters that he was innocent of all accusations. The psychic's appearance caused a visible uproar in the center. Some followers greeted him with applause, while others complained about the presence of reporters. Respect my father, one of the volunteers asked.
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Now, I included that quote about that John of God cult member saying, respect my father, which is because I think it's really interesting. And it's interesting because John's actual daughter accused him of sexual assault.
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In January of 2019, after 300 other allegations go public, John of God's own daughter goes to the Brazilian magazine Veja to announce, quote, under the pretense of mystical treatments, he abused and raped me between the ages of 10 and 14. Oh, God. She claims the abuse from John of God only stopped after one of his employees impregnated her.
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In response to this, John of God beat his own daughter so badly that she suffered a miscarriage. She told Vea, my father is a monster. True. Now, eventually, more than 600 women came forward to level accusations against John of God. Like it is hard to overstand that.
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I'm sure it's thousands like if 600 women came forward in a climate so dangerous where like at least one of his victims was hounded to suicide. I suspect he is guilty of thousands of acts of sexual assault. But we know 600 women leveled accusations. Rather than report to the police, as he said he would, John of God went on the run, withdrawing $9 million in cash in an attempt to flee the country.
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But he was unsuccessful in this and eventually had to turn himself in. Raids on his compound found millions of dollars in cash as well as a large number of illegal firearms. Police who interrogated him started to report bizarre incidents, including their computer spontaneously typing the letters. Oh, a bunch of times the printer printing spontaneously and a mini fridge exploding.
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These reports are almost certainly untrue. They come from tabloid sources, but there is a lot of evidence that sympathetic Brazilian police certainly wanted citizens to believe this was all going on. You know, we started this episode talking about like the police tend to be on these guys sides because they believe the bullshit. Yeah. Mm hmm.
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Less than a month after making initial allegations, Sabrina Bittencourt released a bizarre six minute long video accusing John of God of having run a 20 year long human trafficking operation. She alleged that the cult leader's spiritual hospital was nothing but a cover for a baby smuggling empire that sold infants to parents in the US, Australia and Europe for up to $50,000 a piece.
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Like most Americans would be like, this isn't a big thing in the United States, but you're wrong.
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Bittencourt alleged that John had established a network of isolated farms and mines and that he would bribe poor girls aged 14 to 18 to move there and spend the next decade continuously pregnant. Once born, the babies were sold on the black market. After 10 years, the birth mothers were executed to prevent any witnesses.
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Sabrina wrote, quote, or stated, quote, hundreds of girls were enslaved over the years, lived on farms in Goya, served as wombs to get pregnant for their babies to be sold. These girls were murdered after 10 years of giving birth. We've got a number of testimonies.
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We have received reports from the adopted mothers of their children that were sold for between 20,000 and 50,000 in Europe, USA, and Australia, as well as testimony from ex-workers and local people who are tired of being complicit with John of God's gang. Now, those are some wild ass allegations. Yeah. And unfortunately, I don't know if any of this really happened.
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Sabrina was absolutely right about John of God's career of sexual abuse. Hundreds of women came forward, including his own daughter. Like and they're like there's so much testimony. It's very clear what happened. But the baby smuggling stuff. There's not hard evidence of this. An investigation is ongoing into it.
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And Sabrina Bittencourt, like she got hounded out of her home and deluged in death threats and suffered a mental breakdown. She came out with these allegations days before committing suicide. She was a sexual abuse survivor herself, clearly traumatized by that, as well as the ocean of death rates.
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This doesn't mean that her allegations weren't accurate because there's actually a long history in Brazil that includes to the present day of like Religious like particularly Christian cults that have like farming communes abducting people basically and forcing them into slavery to like grow plants and shit like stuff happens in Brazil.
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It's a big country and there's a lot of areas that are beyond the rule of law. This is not impossible, but it's really hard to know exactly what's going on and you won't find any credible evidence. publications that have gone into the matter in detail because really all we have are the allegations and the fact that they're being investigated.
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And unfortunately, it is unlikely we will ever know the truth because if Bittencourt's allegations are accurate, it is highly unlikely that the Bolsonaro administration would allow the truth to get out. Because Jair Bolsonaro has connections to John of God, and a lot of members of his political party were backers of John of God.
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And if John of God was operating a massive multi-million dollar baby smuggling empire, he absolutely did it with the consent and help of powerful men in Brazil. And the truth's just not going to fucking get out. This is not a satisfying ending in that case, because I can't tell you what happened with his whole baby smuggling business.
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Pretty clearly raped a whole lot of people and it was a monster. But there's just a lot that's unclear about this story that will be up in the air for years. Hopefully good investigations will kind of come to a more concrete conclusion about some of this stuff in the future. Yeah.
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Yeah, the most important thing to realize about just the world is that people have never been dumber than they are now, and they have never been smarter than they are now. Human intelligence, regardless of the actual amount of knowledge that exists, is a flat plane. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
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I will say, though, while our story doesn't end in the most satisfying way possible, it does end with something that kind of resembles justice. In December 2019, a judge in Goya sentenced John of God to 19 years and four months in prison for the rapes of four different women. His lawyers are appealing, but John is incarcerated today. And at age 77, he is very likely to die in prison.
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Like every cult feels the same in the way that every oil and gas company works broadly the same way. Because the same sort of tactics, the same sort of promises attract and work on the same sort of people, and the same kinds of folks are able to successfully –
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carry out these grifts because being able to do the work that these kind of people do, like John of God, isn't all that different from, um, uh, a guy like L Ron Hubbard, like they all have more, more, more alike than different or all that different from Sarah, uh, Paula White Kane, uh, Donald Trump's spiritual advisor. They're all, they just pick different kind of ways to do the same thing.
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Um, and some of them are more successful than others and they're all differently successful. Um, But it is it's always the same grift and it just leaves a huge amount of human shrapnel in its wake, which sucks.
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Yeah. And like, I just I wish we knew more about the baby farming stuff. There just doesn't seem to be. solid information. And also just like Sabrina bitten court by the time she came out with those allegations was like pretty broken, like, like broken in the sense that like human, a, an ocean of hate from other people had like shattered her psyche. Um, yeah, which is also tragic.
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So, yeah, spiritual surgery is a thing that happens here in the United States, and it's a thing that happens all over the world. Various kinds of spiritual healing traditions have existed since time immemorial. There's like a whole tradition of it over in India that has nothing to do with Christianity. It's like shit like this has been happening for thousands of years, right?
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And, um, you know, what she did was very brave and she brought down this guy, but it cost her her own life, which is really fucked up.
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Yeah, about 15% of the time, something that resembles justice happens to these guys. Yeah. About 15% of the time, I'll say.
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Look, if you the fan want to go through and run the numbers, please do. I hate numbers and don't trust them.
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Run the stats or just listen to Run the Jewels. it's better.
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You can find us on BehindTheBastards.com where we will have the sources for this article or this episode. You can find me on Twitter at IWriteOK. And I have a podcast called The Women's War. Check it out.
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So, yep, we're done. I'm going to stop recording now.
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But over in Brazil, a combination of spiritism and Christianity has created a thoroughly unique tradition of what is generally called psychic surgery, right? Now, unlike most similar traditions around the world, in Brazil, this psychic surgery often includes real cutting, with surgeons using actual knives on the eyes and bodies of their patients.
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What's lighting my dumpster fires? I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards. That little introduction was in honor of my hometown, Portland, which just had a police officer murder a man who was having a mental health crisis. And we'll probably be lighting some dumpsters on fire tonight. Although you won't hear it the day that this happens. But anyway, that's all beside the point right now.
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Because the point right now is that I'm introducing our guest today. The inimitable...
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Little known TV show, The Sopranos. You might have heard of it. Very obscure.
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It's fun thinking about that because I believe the song that introduced that show was something about waking up in the morning and getting yourself a gun, which is what I did this morning.
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I did. I did. I did buy a gun this morning. Not for Sopranos like uses, although I am Italian. So you can't really know for sure. You can't really know for sure.
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And then I'm going to commit crimes in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. Yeah. They do that a lot in the show, right? A lot of Pine Barren crimes. They do it at least once.
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Well, they pee everywhere. And, you know, we Italians are not a subtle people.
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Oh, it's just a gun. But today we have something much more exciting than a gun. We have a bastard and our bastard is. Are you ready for this? I'm so excited. Are you settling in? Yes. Dr. Mehmet Oz! I never introduced them like that. We're talking about Dr. Fucking Oz today. Yes, that's right.
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Who would have thought a TV doctor could be a bad man?
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Honestly, if you are going up against LeVar Burton for any job, your first action should be like, you know what? I'm bowing out. Yeah, straight up. Immediately. I'm not going to compete with LeVar Burton.
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Fighting Geordi? Fighting Kunta Kinte? Fighting whatever the Reading Rainbow guy's name was? No, sir. I think it was just LeVar. LeVar, yeah.
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Yes, he's a piece of shit. He's a different piece of shit. We're also going to be talking in the very near future about Dr. Phil, who's a much worse person. Dr. Oz is bad for some reasons that you'll suspect, you know, the pseudoscience stuff, but also for some, I think, more complicated reasons, which will have us a nice talk about at the end of this episode. Do tell.
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So I've always said that one of the great tragedies of American public life is that our very best doctors are usually like kind of schlubby dudes and ladies who maybe aren't the best at social graces and certainly don't have enough time because they're wildly overworked to do TV appearances.
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I'm like, oh, like we need to put a couple of billion dollars into a national program for more fuckable doctors. Come on.
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Now, I mean, I think the problem is not their fuckability because it's inherently hot to be a doctor. It's more the fact that they're not necessarily even the ones who are have a good bedside manner are good at explaining things. Just don't have the time to spend a lot of it on television because they're busy saving lives.
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This has led to a thriving industry, well documented in the show of grifter health influencers and scam artists selling people poison with honeyed words and practice smiles.
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Yeah, and it's kind of like people who, for whatever reason, because of a depressive disorder, cut themselves. They tend to feel relief for one reason or another, and it's because it releases endorphins and stuff. So you do that in the context of a powerful religious experience, and it can feel really good to people. Yeah. Yeah.
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Today, though, we're talking about a different kind of medical grifter, kind of a grifter who helps to launder those more shady grifters, the guy people who aren't doctors, people who have no medical training, who are just trying to sell you nonsense cures. The guy we're talking about today exists to give them credibility and launder them into the public consciousness. And his name is Mehmet Oz.
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Mehmet Oz is maybe the most influential public physician in the country, possibly the world. He is, in every professional sense of the word, an excellent doctor, exceptional even. Within the bounds of what it is he is trained to do, he may be one of the best in the world at what he does.
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And he uses his, you know, the thing that makes him a bastard is that he uses these exceptional qualifications, along with his charisma, his handsome face, to sell millions of people on nonsense cures every single year. And that's that's a bad thing to do. It's kind of made worse.
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We'll talk about this a lot by the fact that he is he's a he's a he's a heart surgeon and he's an exceptional heart surgeon.
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It's always surgeons, which you talk to doctors. They'll be like, yeah, of course, it's always surgeons.
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I think good surgeons are so prone to being also like nonsense, like so many of our nonsense public doctors are surgeons for the same reason that so many of our terrorists are engineers. They're people who get really good at a specific thing and it lets them convince themselves that they know what they're talking about in a wider variety of things than they really do.
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If no one learned to do anything, we would still be living in the mud and eating grubs. And you know what we wouldn't have? Snake oil salesmen? Or that! We would have very little at all. Mimit Sengez Oz was born on June 11th, 1960, to parents Suna and Mustafa Oz, who must have fucked at some point in October of 1959 in order to conceive him. We have to assume his parents fucked in the in October.
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Possible. I would say right now the most likely theory is that they fucked sometime in October. All right. His father, Mustafa, had been born in Bozkir, a village in southern Turkey. He had grown up poor in the countryside during the Great Depression. And obviously, you know, Great Depression, bad time everywhere.
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Real bad time if you're like in rural Turkey, you know, you're dealing with a different kind of poverty than even like our grandparents dealt with here. Yeah. Yeah.
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So he had to work himself to the bone in order to make something of himself in order to get into medical school and distinguish himself enough that he was able to earn scholarships, which allowed him to immigrate to the United States as a medical resident in 1955. So this is a this is a hardworking man and a man who has to struggle.
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I'm going to guess in ways that that are kind of difficult to imagine for most of us, even as difficult as our present times are.
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Yeah. Came from the middle of like nowhere, rural Turkey and worked himself into becoming a good enough doctor that he got it. You know, he was able to get over the racism of the fucking 1950s immigration system. Yeah. That's that's an achievement.
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That's not. Yeah. Yeah. That's Mustafa. Yeah. So we're talking about his dad and his mom right now. His mom, Suna, came from a much wealthier background. I don't know if this is what helped his dad get into the country or not. It may have been. Her father was a successful pharmacist, and both sides of her family came from Istanbul. She grew up with a lot of money.
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So anyway, yeah, the Brazilian to first pioneer this technique was Jose Pedro de Feritas or Zé Arrigo. According to his autobiography, an obviously problematic source, he started working at a mine until age 14. In 1950, at age 29, or he started working at a mine at age 14. And in 1950, when he was 29, he began to suffer a series of blinding headaches, followed by hallucinatory trances.
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As befits his more modest upbringing, Mustafa was an observant traditional Muslim. Suna's family was more moderate and secular. Mehmet and his two sisters grew up split between both approaches to religion. The Oz kids spent their childhood speaking Turkish and English fluently at home, so they grew up in a bilingual house.
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Mehmet was from a young age, ambitious, starving for success and his father's approval. He was wont to note that he was born in the year of the rat, according to the Chinese Zodiac. In one interview, he noted of this, quote, "'You run the maze. If you put cheese in that maze, I swear to God, I'll get to it, and I'll get to it really fast. But should I be running after that cheese?
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Am I in the right maze?' All of these questions, which people much greater than I am think through, I put on the back burner as I'm running after that cheese."
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It is. It is telling because what he's saying there is like, I don't think about why I'm doing what I'm doing. I just I just strive to to to achieve things. And I don't think about whether or not they're good or bad. I just I have to achieve.
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Yeah, he wants that cheese. It's ambition without an analysis, I think is what you'd call it. And he's pretty open about that.
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Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
Now, Mustafa, his dad, repeatedly told the growing Dr. Oz, who's not yet a doctor, obviously, that when he'd grown up, when Mustafa had grown up, he hadn't been able to relax for even a second on his road to escaping poverty and establishing himself as a cardiothoracic surgeon.
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So he's like telling his kid as he grows up, like, you know, like if you want to succeed, you can't relax for even a second. You can't take a moment off. You always got to be hustling. Yeah. And that's how Mehmet grows up. He's an excellent student, but no amount of success is ever enough for his dad. He later recalled, I'd say I got a 93 on a test. He'd say, did anyone get better?
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The school I grew up in because of just where we were in North Texas, like about half of the kids in my school were either from India or from China or Japan. And so you had a lot of kids who would talk that way about their parents. Right. And some of them had, especially around our senior year, there were a couple of kids who had to get like.
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taken in by an ambulance because they would just like one in one case seizing as a result of stress. Like, it's not good to put this kind of pressure on a kid.
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So Mehmet decided to become a doctor when he was just seven years old. He recalls standing in line at an ice cream parlor. Quote, I remember it like yesterday. There was a kid in front of me who was 10. My dad, just to pass the time, said, what do you want to be when you grow up? The kid said, I don't know. I'm 10.
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My father waited until he was out of earshot and said, I never want you to tell me that if I ask you that question. I never want you to tell me you don't know. It's okay if you change your mind, but I never want you to not have a vision of what you want to be.
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This all culminated in his body being taken over by the spirit of a bald German man in a white apron with a massive team of spectral doctors and nurses at his beck and call. So he's got like a whole German surgery team in his head. Oh, Christ. Now, this this magical dead German was Dr. Adolf Fritz, a field medic in the German army who died in the trenches in 1918, which is cool.
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Yeah. Yeah. It's it's it's a real bummer. Yeah. It's not just don't put pressure on people. There's plenty of grubs. Yeah. By the time Mehmet was ready to start school, his father was wealthy enough to pay to send his son to Tower Hill School, a K through 12th grade private college preparatory school in Wilmington, Delaware.
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The Fancy Boy Prep School worked well enough that Mehmet was accepted to Harvard, where he played football and water polo. His grades were, as always, exceptional. One of his roommates later recalled, he was very competitive. There was never any question that he wasn't going to be a doctor. He wanted to be a fantastic surgeon.
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So people around him, like everyone kind of recognizes this kid is brilliant. Everyone recognizes he's got the drive he's going to achieve, you know, so good for him.
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I think... It was different for me because there was definitely a lot of pressure to have something. You know, I went to a public school. I didn't go to a private school, but I went to a public school in my early schooling years was in a dirt poor farming town called Idabel, Oklahoma. And the school was as good as it could be in a place like that.
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Like they paddled us and stuff like it was not not a high end educational way.
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Yeah. Oh, damn. They still did that in Oklahoma back in them days. Yeah. Yeah. You got to sign the paddle afterwards, too. That's nice. But when I was in, I don't know, third grade or so, I moved to Plano, which is a fairly wealthy suburb of Dallas. And the schools, the public schools are very good. And there is a lot of drive to achieve.
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Like I said, a lot of like kids who are really motivated by their parents to achieve. Um, and so you either were kind of planning to be a doctor or, you know, something on that level, or you were planning to join the military because it was Texas and I was in ROTC. So me and all my friends, I think we all kind of assumed we're all going to join the army, you know?
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So Oz took only one break during his relentless progress through medical school. And that break was to do a compulsory. I think it was a one year term of service in the Turkish army in order to maintain his dual citizenship. Other than that, straight on to like becoming a doctor. That's the only kind of break. So I guess that's his gap year is being in the Turkish army. Right.
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He got a four year degree in biology and then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he doubled up working on both an MD and an MBA. He succeeded in earning both. So that's interesting to me. He gets both. He gets at the same time as he's getting his MD. He also gets a business degree.
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He earned both, obviously, with flying colors. He's an incredibly intelligent man. Right. This isn't just a guy like we'll talk about Dr. Phil later. Dr. Phil, I don't think is very smart. He's incredibly good at reading and manipulating people. He's not particularly a genius. Mehmet Oz is a genius. Like, I think he almost certainly is an actual genius. Yeah.
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Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
So it's bizarre that like this Brazilian mine worker would choose like it's got to be a German field medic. That's that. But that's that's what he picks. And I guess we all consider Germans trustworthy. I can't think of anything in history that would make me not trust German doctors. So, yeah, that scans.
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In 1985, at age 25, he married Lisa Limol, who was the daughter of a cardiothoracic surgeon who worked with his father. They met at like a party or something. This relationship gradually opened him up to alternative medicine and Eastern mysticism because Lisa's mom was hardcore into homeopathy, meditation and other new age stuff. We'll talk about that more in a little bit.
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For the next decade and change, Dr. Oz's career zoomed forward. He became triple board certified, which I don't know what that means, but it sounds impressive.
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It's at least three boards. That's three more than I've been certified.
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Not a one. Not a single board between the three of us.
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If you're a board, if you're a medical board board out there. Well, you know what? The state of New Jersey has certified me as a reverend doctor. So I'm one board certified out there.
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So he starts working as a heart surgeon and he's very good at being a heart surgeon. And he's not just good at the heart surgery part. He's good at the science part. Over time, he authors hundreds of peer reviewed articles and he's awarded 11 patents. One of them is for a solution to preserve transplanted organs. Another is for an aortic valve that can be implanted without open heart surgery.
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Like he's he's not just really good at the mechanics of surgery. He's an excellent scientist.
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Dr. Oz was hired by Columbia Medical School as a teacher. And as you know, he's also working. They've got a hospital. He's working there, but he's also teaching. He very quickly rises to the level of full professor and becomes the vice chair of the cardio of the heart surgery department.
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Everything I've read right now on its own would be a career trajectory any doctor in medicine would envy. You could die happy with that being your fucking resume. That's a hell of an achievement. In 1995, a New York Times profile referred to Dr. Oz as, quote, probably the most accomplished 35-year-old cardiothoracic surgeon in the country.
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So together, Dr. Fritz and Zay Arrigo had a wildly successful 20 year career performing surgery to adoring audiences of as many as 800 followers at one time. Zay Arrigo would go into trances and become so taken with the spirit of Dr. Fritz that he would grab random kitchen knives and use them to cut out tumors and the like from his patients. he became known as the surgeon of the rusty knife.
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He might be the best at what he does in the entire United States at this point. I mean, I don't know how to measure that, but he's he's very good.
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Now, the article that I found that quote in, however, gives some hints about what was to come, because that article was about Dr. Oz's increasing experimentation with alternative medicine. It opens with the story of one of his patients, a 49-year-old diabetic smoker who suffered a critical heart attack. She went under Mehmet's knife for a dangerous surgery. Quote,
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At the invitation of Oz and his patient, there were two other people on hand in surgical gowns and masks, a second year medical student named Sally Smith stationed at the patient's feet and a 52 year old healer named Julie Motz, who was standing at the patient's head as volunteers in Oz's cardiac complementary care center.
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They worked for free through the operation, seldom moving except to reposition their hands. What? What? or had ever thought worth doing, even as an experiment. In this ultimate theater of scientific medicine, the women were using their hands as kings once did, to treat subjects with scrupula, and as Jesus is said to have done, and as shamans and mothers and Chinese Quigong practitioners still do.
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They were using their hands to run a kind of energy, which science cannot prove exists, into the patient's kidney meridian, which also may or may not exist.
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Oh, man. With fucking on a Ritz cracker sliced thin. I love me some. A little bit of. You just want to get you want to get like some duck fat or some butter. You want to get it sizzling in the pan and you just slap that meridian on for like a half a second and it's good to go. That's all you fucking with. Just a little bit of little bit of char, you know? Yeah.
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So, yeah, that's silly. I think that's silly. But... At the other hand, like it's in a hospital. These people are clearly following sanitation guidelines. They're not getting paid. The patient's not getting charged extra. So I don't have a problem with that.
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I'm not willing to morally condemn him for that, even though I think it's silly, just because, like, yeah, yeah, what's the fucking harm in seeing, you know? And in that case, if you're actually doing it in a medical context, you're guaranteeing everybody's taking proper sanitation procedures, fucking whatever, you know?
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Yeah, they were just doing energy work or whatever.
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It falls into the category of it couldn't possibly hurt, so why not give it a shot, right? Which is, we'll talk about this more later, but that's kind of what they were going for. You know what else can't hurt?
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i don't the products and services that support this podcast guaranteed to not harm you in fact every one of the products of ours that you buy extends your life by exactly 45 minutes so you know spend all your money and gain immortality We're back. We're talking about Dr. Oz, who in the mid 90s has started some weird alternative medicine stuff.
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And this was not like a, nobody was like talking shit at him by calling him this. That's a,
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Now, he's not the person who starts the alternative medicine program at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, which is also like a teaching hospital, whatever. It's one of those hospitals that they have a medical school with. You know, you know the thing. If television has taught me accurately, all of the doctors are fucking constantly.
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Doctors fucking they teach. That's all they do. You know, when you're not teaching, you're fucking. And Columbia Presbyterian was among the most reputable medical establishments on planet Earth still is as far as as I'm aware. So this alternate medicine program there is kind of an odd thing. It was not started at the behest of anyone at the top of the school.
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The whole thing came about because in 1993, a retired utility executive named Richard Rosenthal gave them three quarters of a million dollars as a private grant in order to establish a center to study alternative medicine.
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Now, Richard had been motivated by having several close friends of his get terribly sick in such a way that doctors told them there was nothing that could be done to help them. And his response was to basically throw a bunch of money into a hole to see if alternative medicine could come up with solutions.
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And it's one of those things I could make fun of, like this is almost exactly a week after my mom just died of a type of cancer that when you get diagnosed with it, pancreatic There's basically nothing they can do. You know, it's even like like she went through chemo and it did nothing. You know, I get it. You go through something. I think, OK, well, let's try other shit, you know.
Behind the Bastards
Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
that's like that's some shit that's like a prison nickname the search yeah that is like a prison nickname yeah like if you're if you get like locked up and they're like oh man that's the knife that's the rusty knife surgeon like that's the dude you don't want to fuck with that's like the butcher bill motherfucker right yeah yeah yeah that's incredible and that's that was a compliment
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So I can't I can't even blame Richard for like it seems like he was motivated out of grief to do this.
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Yeah. I will blame the snake oil salesman. I'm never going to blame someone who's like, well, doctor said they can't cure me, so I'm going to eat this root, you know? Fuck it. Why not? Go for it. Who gives a shit? Like, it can't hurt if you're definitely going to die. Yeah. And it is, to be honest, like, it is kind of within...
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Even you could argue within kind of medical best practices, because one of the things if like I took EMT training years ago, one of the things they tell you is that you're not supposed to use an AED, you know, like paddles to restart a heart. You're not supposed to use them on an infant. But if an infant is in, you know, the state where like you use them on them because they're dead.
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Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
shock the shit out of them yeah they're dead you can't make dead worse so like why not so i guess like yeah you can't i don't know can't make it worse why not see if it if if something happens i'm not against the basic idea of testing some of this shit is what the worst thing you're gonna get out of that is a really cool tiktok video of electrocuting a dead body absolutely and then you get a fuckload of followers and then you start selling brain pills