Part Two: The Birth of American Fascism dissects 1930s-40s extremism, revealing how LA police ignored Silver Shirts' coup plots while the German-American Bund collapsed after Fritz Kuhn's embezzlement arrest. Despite 74% supporting Nazi Germany's destruction, Charles Lindbergh's eugenicist rhetoric united isolationists and fascists in the America First Committee, which could have won 1942 elections before Pearl Harbor dissolved it. The episode exposes Lawrence Dennis, a secretly Black intellectual founder who chose fascism over communism, and critiques modern figures like Ben Shapiro for profiting from similar narratives, suggesting historical patterns of media manipulation persist today. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:03:52
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I got you.
I'm Lori Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Groban.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, everybody.
This is Behind the Bastards.
I'm Robert Evans.
I'm here with Cody Johnston and Katie Stoll, and Cody is furious because of something that happened on the internet.
He literally got smoke coming out of his ears.
So mad.
He's really angry.
There's nothing I can do about it.
There's nothing to do about it.
Someone was blatantly wrong online on the internet.
And they said it.
And they said it.
And people support it, and I'm so on the internet.
You know what's healthy?
This.
Awesome.
Yeah, I can't wait.
Good for your heart.
Good for your lungs.
I find that the best way through this is just to keep reopening wounds and then putting some salt in it.
Okay.
And then talking about it and really focusing on it.
That's good.
Have you tried numbing yourself with drugs and alcohol?
I have tried that.
Super good.
That's what you do.
It's all part of that.
That's the next step.
Once it's unbearably painful, you consume whatever you need to get through the next 12 hours.
I always get like these emails and like DMs.
So like, hey, great show the show.
But like, how do you keep saying it?
It's like, yeah.
Weed.
What are you talking about?
I'm never not high.
How do you relax?
You were going to say, I don't.
I mean, I do drugs and rewatch community for the fifth time because it makes me feel like the world's sane for a moment.
There's drama in the background.
I'm listening to.
I have to admit, I've never read Harry Potter and I am listening to them.
Oh, that sounds soothing.
It is so soothing.
That sounds nice and soothing.
I can't wait to get back in my car and listen to it.
Fascism In America00:14:56
It's nice.
It's nice.
Find out what happens with the gang.
Jim Dale, what a treasure.
Optimistic fiction, Star Trek the Next Generation.
Oh, yeah.
You don't think too much about what's happening now and the fact that when they reboot it, it's probably just going to be Picard punching pieces, a 76-year-old man, rather than choosing to use his words instead of weaponry because diplomacy and compassion, perhaps.
Like that episode where like there's this space monster that kills a couple hundred people, but then they're like, oh, it's just hungry.
We can find a way to like make sure it doesn't kill any more people without killing it because it's better to not kill things.
Even if they've done wrong, if they don't know that what they've done was wrong, because they're an animal.
Wow.
Sometimes not killing things is better.
What a concept.
Let's talk about Nazis in America again.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
So when we just left off, 22,000 people had rallied at Madison Square Garden to support the German-American Bund.
100,000 anti-fascists had shown up outside.
They had fought with the police, the largest display of force in NYPD history.
To protect the fascists.
There we go.
And then the fascists had beaten the shit out of a Jewish boy who had run on stage when Fritz Kuhn was directly attacking the Jewish race.
Two applause.
Two applause.
Riotous cheers.
Joyful glee.
That's unfamiliar.
So we're all caught up to speed now.
We're all back up to speed about what happened two days ago on this podcast.
Now, there are numerous accounts of police failing to intervene against violent fascist mobs throughout the 1930s.
In 1933, after the first pro-Nazi rallies in Los Angeles, a World War I veteran named Leon Lewis started a grassroots undercover spying operation along with several other disabled veterans.
They joined various fascist groups, including the Silver Shirts, in order to report on their operations.
When Lewis went to the police to talk about what he had seen the Silver Shirts planning, which was, you know, the overthrow of the democratically elected government, the extermination of several races, the enslavement of black people, when he went to the LAPD with this, I don't know, throw it to the LA Times.
Quote, not only were the police unconcerned, but they were sympathetic to the Nazi Silver Shirts.
I have records of Leon Lewis going to Los Angeles Police Chief Jim 2 Gun Davis and telling him, look, I'm not just some amateur.
I was actually a captain.
I did some intelligence in the army.
I have these veterans with me, and we have uncovered a plot to seize the armories here where all the ammunition is and weapons.
We know they are actively buying guns in San Diego, and they're planning to take over the city government and take over the armory.
And he brought all of this to Police Chief Davis, and Davis cut him off two minutes into Lewis's spiel and said, stop.
Hitler was only doing what he had to do to save Germany.
And in fact, Hitler was right.
And the real problem aren't the Nazis and fascists walking around the streets of L.A.
The real problem is in Boyle Heights, where all those communists are.
Oh, still so mad.
What he didn't say, but was clear, is that as far as police chief 2-gun Davis was concerned, every communist was a Jew and every Jew was a communist.
That's right.
Well, we learned that last episode.
Yeah, we did learn that last episode.
Learn your lessons well.
And an atheist, right?
And an atheist.
Two-gun Davis.
Two gun Davis.
Neither of those guns for Nazis.
No, no, no, no.
I know where both of those guns are pointed at.
Anyone who's not white standing near Jim Tougun Davis.
Gosh.
Oh, heck.
He worked hard for those two guns.
There was a time when he was one gun Davis and it did not have the same cache.
I can tell you where that one gun was pointed.
In April of 1939, less than two months after the German-American Bund's Madison Square Garden rally, a group of several hundred anti-fascists attacked the newsboys distributing Father Coughlin's newspaper.
Christian front members rushed out to fight them, and the NYPD basically sat out and did nothing while they beat the anti-fascists.
Some people said this was because most cops were Irish-American and the Christian Front was a Catholic priest-fascist militia.
Maybe!
Now, that same year, the Roper Center for Public Opinion reported that only 39% of Americans agreed that Jews deserved equal rights.
10% of them believed the government should deport Jewish Americans.
So that's fun.
So if you were a random observer in 1939, the fact that the fascists lost big in 1936 might not have been all of that comforting.
In fact, it really looked at the time like fascism was only growing stronger in the land of the free.
After his defeat in 1938, failed congressional candidate John Winrod started actively working with Father Coughlin.
They refined their strategies together and tried to focus more on non-intervention than explicit fascist politics.
Quote, from Hitler's American Friends.
Coughlin argued that the war was a clash of competing capitalist interests, not a fight to save Europe from the barbarism of Nazi domination.
He praised Hitler openly and attacked Roosevelt.
Winrod's message was similar.
Less than a month before Pearl Harbor, he was still arguing that the European war was raging because, quote, a reaction has developed in the old world against Jewish communism and Jewish capitalism.
International Jewry is in a state of great perplexity.
And so it happens that we have an administration at Washington which is pro-communist and Jewish-dominated.
During this time, FDR was refusing to take in Jewish refugees from Europe so as to not anger American voters, but Jewish-dominated.
In July of 1939, Christian Front violence hit a fever pitch.
Coughlin was forced to tell his listeners that he was, quote, neither the organizer nor the sponsor of the Christian Front, and moreover, that it is not becoming for me to identify myself with this organization or any other organization.
At the same time, Father Coughlin started showing up at German-American Bund meetings and having his boys hand out copies of his newsletter at their gatherings as well.
There were rumors that the two groups might soon merge.
So except for that organization.
Brave.
Never sever that one.
Brave of him.
The reality, thankfully, is that the German-American Bund was on the verge of collapse.
At the start of 1939, Fritz Kuhn had announced that every state besides Louisiana had at least one Bund office, but the MSG rally would prove to be the Bund's undoing.
See, Fritz had essentially crowdfunded the rally.
There we go again.
And about $14,000 of the money he'd raised just sort of disappeared.
New York City Mayor LaGuardia had basically given the rally his okay out of the hope that once Americans saw fascism up close, they'd decide it was ridiculous and terrible and reject it.
LaGuardia was furious at the violence at the rally, especially the violence done to the young man who'd rushed on stage.
LaGuardia ordered an investigation into the Bund's finances and found evidence that Kuhn had embezzled.
Fritz Kuhn was arrested and charged.
Simultaneously, Kuhn was subpoenaed by the Dees Committee.
Think of the Dees Committee as a precursor to McCarthy's House on Un-American Activities Committee.
It was a House on Un-American Activities Committee, but it was both looking at fascists and communists during the period prior to World War II.
So, and on an interesting note, a 19-year-old girl testified right after Kuhn that the German-American Bund's summer camps were, quote, rife with homosexuality.
Interesting historical point.
Yeah.
Now, the trial revealed that Kuhn had spent a large chunk of the embezzled money on his mistress, including the equivalent of $12,000, $2,018 on long-distance charges.
He also spent $66 in 1930s dollars on a doctor's bill for a former Miss American contestant he'd been dating, which I'm guessing was for a back of the abortion sort of thing.
Kuhn was convicted in December, kicked out of the Bund, and sent to Sing Sing Prison, the most whimsically named prison in America.
It certainly is.
It's really fun, right?
It's just full of butterflies and grass.
Sing Sing!
Yay!
It can't be that bad.
It can't be that bad.
It's the word sing twice.
I love singing.
How could double singing be bad?
Would have been excited for singing.
Look, it's the Sing prison.
So, the German-American Bund continued in Kuhn's absence, and the tens of thousands of fascists it had nurtured were still out there, but the organization itself declined sharply after this point.
1939 was also the year Pelley and his silver shirts would be brought to heel.
Midway through the year, an employee of Pelle's was found to be attempting to infiltrate the D's committee.
A summons was issued for Pelley in 1939, and he went on the run rather than testify.
He spent his fall running away from the law, writing articles that he published in his newsletter about his flight from the authorities.
He also sued the D's committee for $3.15 million, claiming it was defamation to describe him as a racketeer.
In October, Pelley missed a parole hearing in North Carolina because rumor he'd been arrested for defrauding the people of the family.
Yeah.
A judge ordered an investigation into Silver Legion business in the state, which led to their national headquarters being searched by the police.
And then, in January of 1940, things got weird.
Democratic Congressman Frank Hook introduced letters to Congress that looked like they were between Dees and Pelley secretly allying in order to attack unionists and leftist organizers.
The letters were later proven to be forgeries, but Hook refused to concede that he'd been tricked until the DOJ looked into it.
Now, while all this was uncoiling, Pelley headed to Washington, D.C., walked into the Dees committee proceedings, and turned himself in.
He was questioned under oath about the letters and denied writing them.
He wouldn't wind up jailed until 1941, but Pelley grew increasingly irrelevant after this point as members fled the silver shirts after this period.
So you've got the German-American boond in 1940 collapses and the silver shirts have collapsed and like these first sort of fascist organizations that had entered after the rise of the fascists in Europe decline into irrelevance in 1940.
It's a good time to declare.
It's a good time for fascists to decline in relevance.
This is not the end of.
Now, on January 7th, 1940, Father Coughlin told his radio listeners that he'd kind of started to think that democracy might be a worse political system than having a dictatorship.
He claimed that democracy, quote, has failed so long to function advantageously for the nation.
That next week, J. Edgar Hoover led an FBI raid that arrested 18 members of the Brooklyn chapter of the Christian Front.
According to the New York Times, the cell of fascist terrorists had planned, quote, the overthrow of the government of the United States.
Most of the 18 men were veterans or National Guardsmen, and they'd stockpiled rifles, handguns, explosives, and thousands of pounds of ammunition.
In his press conference on the matter, Hoover said, quote, plans were discussed for the wholesale sabotage and blowing up of these institutions so that a dictatorship could be set up here, similar to the Hitler dictatorship in Germany, seizing the reins of government in this country as Hitler did in Germany.
Their scheme was to spread a reign of terrorism so that the authorities would become thoroughly demoralized.
Weird.
Nothing like that.
That's unfamiliar.
It'd be like if someone mailed a bunch of bombs to a bunch of lawmakers.
Something like that.
Sounds made up.
Sounds like a damn thing.
That does not happen in real life.
No, no.
Now, Hoover also noted that the group wanted to eradicate all Jews in the United States.
It seems pretty clear that these guys were nuts.
Even back then, the NYPD was equipped to handle 18 dudes.
But it still caused a stir.
Coughlin had to disavow both the would-be revolutionaries and the Christian Front.
He claimed he'd only ever supported the creation of a Christian Front.
So he had nothing to do with the Christian Front that was attacking people and planning the violent overthrow of the United States government.
A and B.
It's a critical difference.
These fucking fake news liberals trying to smear Father Coughlin.
He wanted a Christian Front, not the group coincidentally called Christian Front.
Twisting all these words.
Sad.
Yeah.
Sad.
Ugh.
Now, reporters were later able to find several articles of Coughlin's newsletter where he had talked glowingly by name about the guy who'd planned the whole terror campaign.
Of course, of course.
In February of 1939, a Gallup poll revealed that 23% of respondents thought the D's committee should focus on, quote, Nazi activities.
17% thought it should focus on the communist threat, but 30% thought it ought to focus instead on war propaganda.
These people weren't exclusively talking about German war propaganda.
A February 1941 Fortune magazine survey found that 33% of Americans surveyed believed advocates of sending aid to Britain were propagandists.
So, this is an important nuance here.
In August of 1940, Gallup asked Americans if they thought Hitler would invade the United States if Britain fell under Nazi jackboots.
Opinion was evenly split, with 42% believing the Nazis would invade the United States and 45% disagreeing.
In October of 1940, a year before the U.S. entered World War II, only 11% of Americans wanted U.S. forces used to protect Great Britain.
While most Americans supported sending aid to Britain, 57% of those who did said they supported sending aid because they thought it would keep the U.S. out of World War II.
This suited the Nazis just fine.
During this entire period, Nazi propaganda continued to virtually ignore grassroots American fascism and focused instead on spreading propaganda to keep us neutral.
Here's how Hitler's American Friends describes it.
Quote, the entire German objective was to sow enough confusion and discord that the American people would grow weary and simply want to check out of world events.
The Nazis and their supporters jumped on this task with enthusiasm.
Washington newspaper correspondent David Lawrence reported in 1940 that the city was full of Nazi propaganda that had been, quote, planted here and there in those academic circles, isolationist quarters or political precincts where almost any argument opposing the president's policy would be seized upon as valid.
The Nazis, he stated, quote, know they're America.
Interesting.
Weird.
I could see parallels there.
Maybe.
A couple of countries.
Just trying to sow discord without any particular goal other than that because they just want.
Just making stuff up, man.
Just like, you're just like, you're forcing all these paradigms.
I know, I know.
It's not.
None of it sounds familiar.
I love talking about stuff that never happened again.
Never happened again.
Yeah.
Thank God.
Thank God.
Now, the Nazis did not need to do much to stoke anti-Jewish sentiment among Americans.
39% of Americans surveyed believed Jews should be treated equally.
53% claimed Jewish people were somehow different from Anglo-Americans.
And 10%, of course, supported deportation.
Of course.
So in 1940, in election year, one popular right-wing anthem was, Refuge Jews go home.
Right?
Because there were all these refugees from the Nazis.
They called them refugees and said they ought to be sent back to die.
Like a thing that never happened again.
Like, yeah, like who would want to take refugees from a place where there was mass murder going on?
During the war, he knew about the extent.
It was pretty common knowledge, actually.
Why did it?
It was pretty common knowledge.
Now, at this point, there were concentration camps.
The death camps did not exist at this point.
That wasn't until like 42 and after that that really got going.
Well, they existed, but they weren't doing it.
There were camps, but then there's a difference between concentration camps and death camps.
The concentration camps were up.
Right.
There were no extermination centers.
Yes.
Right.
That did start in 1941 with the invasion of Russia, but it wasn't centers.
It was like Einstatz group and units wiping out Jewish populations in what had been Russia.
But it was very well known, the persecution of Jewish people, the fact that many of them had been put into camps, the increasing laws, like that was all common knowledge.
So cool on us.
Cool on us.
But just like Jewish people, communists, socialists, social democrats, homosexuals, handicapped people.
Just put them all in there.
Round them up.
Round them up.
Yeah.
So in 1940 and 41, we've got the Silver Shirts, The Bond, and Father Coughlin all out of the picture or fading in relevance.
They flew too close to the sun, revealed their power level too early, as modern Nazis would say.
But fascism in America was not quite willing to give up the ghost.
Anti-New Deal Groups00:03:05
Good.
Go ahead and go get her.
That's the thing about fascism.
It never quits.
Well, that's never about America.
Yeah.
You know, you just keep going.
You just keep.
Put your mind to it.
You can accomplish it.
You pull them up by those bootstraps.
Your jack bootstraps.
So, the real problem that fascism had had up to this point in America is that all of its most prominent speakers had focused too much on the Jewish question.
Americans were pretty anti-Semitic, but most people's anti-Semitism wasn't violent.
You can be an anti-Semite and not believe in extermination or whatever.
Yeah.
Right, prejudice and bigotry, but it's not like I'm violent.
Yeah.
So there was also the example of Nazi Germany doing really messed up things to Jewish people as an example like how bad it could get.
And so a lot of Americans who were anti-Semitic still didn't want that.
But it turned out that the best way to make Americans really embrace fascism was to tie it to isolationism.
Enter the America First Committee.
Hell yeah.
That's a good.
Oh, yeah.
It began in law school classrooms at Yale.
Robert Douglas Stewart Jr. Yale.
This has not been a good year of PR for Yale.
Turning out the finest.
Just the best people.
The best people.
Fucking Yaleys.
So Robert Douglas Stewart Jr., son of the vice chairman of Quaker Oats, started holding meetings with a couple of dozen other law students.
They talked about the worsening foreign war, Roosevelt's decision to run for a third term, and how they might impact the course of American politics to keep their nation out of the war and put an end to Roosevelt's socialist New Deal policies.
Both equally important.
Now, the goal of America First then was to unify the anti-interventionalist right with the actual fascist right.
Basically, anyone who didn't like Roosevelt could coagulate around keeping America out of the war.
After the war, American fascist philosopher Lawrence Dennis said, quote, the anti-intervention or then so-called isolation cause was basically anti-New Deal.
It was against America getting into the war only because the New Dealers seemed to be using American intervention in the war as essentially a New Deal strategy.
The America Firsters or anti-war factors were not really pacifist or anti-war.
They were anti-New Deal and that made them anti-war in that period and situation.
Very important distinction here.
Real important situation.
It's not like we're against war.
We're against this war because we like the Nazis.
Yeah.
Here we go.
We don't want you to fight the Nazis.
Maybe fight the communists.
Oh, oh, oh, oh, you want a war with the communists?
We can do that.
We're on war.
Did you guys know that all the communists are Jews and atheists?
That's some solid science.
This is a bad time for an ad say.
But you know, I love washing the taste of the horrific history of American fascism out of my mouth with the fine products and services advertised on this show.
Sold.
You're going to buy all of them.
I could use some products and/or services right now.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, here they are.
Washing Out History00:04:23
10-10 shots fired.
City hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
This is Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged you.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Sherry stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And we're back and we're talking about Nazi.
But why?
Well, fascists.
Lindbergh And Nazis00:15:57
Yeah.
Right, right.
You got to.
Not all fascists.
Not all fascists.
Let's not.
Not all fascists.
Hashtag not all fascists.
Let's start that.
Yeah, let's keep that going.
Hashtag all fascists.
So a number of major corporate leaders backed the America First Committee.
The most prominent of them was J.C. Hormel, the meat packing impresario whose company gave the world spam.
Rich-ass fashion.
I knew I knew that name.
You're going to really enjoy this one, Cody.
Rich-ass cloth magnate William Rigneri was another major financial backer of America First.
Does the name Rigneri sound familiar to you?
William Rigneri II, his son, would go on to fund the National Policy Institute, the fascist think tank run by Richard Spencer.
That's it, right?
Oh, that's good.
We finally did it.
We made it.
We made it there.
The first connection today to something happening.
Yeah, the only, the only relevant connection.
Wait a minute.
Robert E. Wood, chairman of Sears Roebuck, was also a member.
Henry Ford was for a while, but they had to kick him off because the anti-Semitism was just too far.
That'll seem ironic in a moment.
Oh, God.
Now, the America First Committee would not truly reach its maximum audience until they found their charismatic leader, the only possible candidate for the role of American Fuhrer, Charles Lindbergh.
Now born in 1902, Charles Lindbergh had been an airmail pilot until 1927, when at age 25, he flew from New York to Paris and was the very first human being to complete this 33-hour journey.
He was one of the most famous men in the world in 1932 when his child was kidnapped and probably accidentally murdered.
Lindbergh was young, handsome, rich, sympathetic, and white.
When he started giving speeches for the America First Movement, people listened.
In August 1940, immediately after the Dunkirk evacuation, Lindbergh stated, quote, I believe that no outside influence could solve the problems of European nations or bring them lasting peace.
They must work out their destiny as we must work out ours.
In the past, we have dealt with a Europe dominated by England and France.
In the future, we may have to deal with a Europe dominated by Germany.
You remember how when we intervened in the problems of European nations and Europe is still a war-riven hellhole today?
Did you miss that?
I think I may have missed that.
Did you miss that?
It was just in Europe.
It seems like maybe American intervention actually kind of worked out there.
No, no, no, no.
I think we just went to the places where we went to the tourist areas.
We made sure we went to only the places that weren't.
You stayed away from the war zones in France.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sure.
So, Lindbergh's called... Germany was a great really nice time.
It is.
Turns out when you kill all the fascists in the country, if you try it out, you can thrive.
Yeah.
So, thanks for that, Russia.
So 50-50.
They went a little bit overboard.
It's like, thank you, but don't let that go to your head.
Yeah, yeah.
Not that grateful.
Well, I'm grateful for that, but like... I'm pretty grateful for the 8 million Nazi soldiers they killed.
100%.
I meant, you know, big picture.
Yeah.
You get it.
Yeah.
Continue with the story.
1945 was a mixed bag, but mostly good.
So, Lindbergh called Great Britain a war agitator and said, quote, it is perfectly understandable that Britain wants the United States and the war on her side.
England is now in a desperate position.
Her population is not large enough and her army's not strong enough to invade the continent of Europe and win the war she declared against Germany.
Oh, Charlie.
That bitch.
He warned his audience that America had been left with the debts from World War I, and then he claimed, quote, if it were not for her hope that she can make us responsible for the war financially, I believe England would have negotiated peace in Europe many months ago, and we'll be better off doing so.
Sound reasoning.
Just do the peace.
Just do the peace.
But do you guys see the brilliance there?
Rather than advocating for dictatorship like Coughlin and Smith and the Silver Shirts had done or advocating on behalf of Germany like the Bund had done, Lindbergh attacked Great Britain.
Thanks to Hollywood today, English accents are kind of like the, that's like your, your cheat code for making someone seem credible, find like a British guy, get Anthony Hopkins to say and you're like, yeah, he's smart and credible, right?
But starting in the 15th century, the most prominent international stereotype of the English is that they were all goddamn liars because they lied to everyone about everything for 300 years in order to conquer the world.
There was even a very common slur for them in the day, perfidious Albion.
It arose in the 1700s.
It's a beautiful slur.
I mean, it sounds like a spell on Harry Potter.
It arose in the 1700s as a French accusation, I believe, of English dishonesty towards foreigners because the British screw the French show for a French screw the British.
No one's nice for now.
It picked up in use during the Boer War of 1899 to 1900 because of the concentration camps and the genocide of the Boer people.
And if you listen to a lot of Irish music, particularly turn of the 20th century Irish political ballads, you will run into the phrase regularly.
The song Foggy Dew, which his best cover was done by Sinead O'Connor, was written sometime in 1919 after the 1916 Easter Rebellion, and it has probably the most artistic use of the term when talking about the first shots of the Irish Rebellion of 1916.
Oh, the night fell black and the rifle's crack made perfidious Albion real.
Now, this is important because at this time in America, population of about 100 or so million, about 20 to 30 million Scottish, Irish, and German-descended people, all of whom are very rightfully primed to think England's lying about fucking anything.
This is a smart play by Charles Lindbergh.
I don't love it, but I get it.
It works.
It's not a dumb move.
And it proved to be a more effective strategy than calling for outright dictatorship.
So within like a couple of months, there were 800,000 Americans that had joined America First.
So you've got like a million people who have signed on to this movement in a matter of months, as opposed to like years to take 50%.
Right, that's a lot for like 1% of the population.
Yeah, that's like a percent of the population in the course of a couple of months, just because Lindbergh hops onto this train.
And it's building for this whole time that we're talking about here.
So this thing is wildly popular.
Now, thank God the British were spying on us.
In this instance, we needed some spying on.
Some real bad stuff was going on.
They put together a dossier on the America First movement and what it meant to the British government.
At this point, their whole foreign policy was in essence, get the Americans to help.
The Nazis are going to take over Europe.
So these spies were terrified of America First.
They called it a fundamentally American movement conducted on American lines and the most effective weapon at the disposal of the enemy for the purpose of keeping the United States out of the war.
Essentially, Britain is the guy who cried wolf, but with conquering in the other world and a violent nightmarish regime.
But then they suddenly become less shitty.
Right.
Like 10 years before.
And then they're like, help, please.
These other guys are even worse.
That is the boy who cried wolf.
Wait, no, wait, wait, read for real.
No, a couple hundred years ago, we killed 40 million Indians in a wildly irresponsible capitalist adventure, but we're not that now when the Nazis are.
We get it, we get it, we get it.
We know like, oh, God, colonies and stuff.
We're so, we're so sorry.
We really fucked up.
We're sorry.
We're really sorry.
Please just help us.
But these German lads.
Help us.
Shut up right now.
So the British saw through the seemingly reasonable, respectable facade of America First, and they said these British spies wrote, it is the raw material of American fascism.
The present tactics and methods of action of each movement reveal it as the American fifth column, sowing racial hatred and accentuating internal division.
This is the effect of its activity, and whether the process is conscious or unconscious is irrelevant.
So British intelligence divided the membership of America First into six categories.
I think you'll find this pretty interesting, y'all.
Number one, big businessmen in Chicago, which it called the most important group.
Number two, Republicans and leaders of the opposition to the New Deal.
Number three, the pacifism of Quakers, intellectuals, and liberal philanthropists.
Number four, extreme left-wing opposition to the Roosevelt administration, including labor leader John L. Lewis and his daughter, who was also a prominent labor leader.
Number five, the anti-Semitic fascism of retired generals and ex-servicemen.
And number six, emotional mothers.
One of the big things of this is they would bring on gold star mothers who lost their kids in World War I to say, we want to save American mothers from losing their sons.
I mean, this is some very intelligent manipulation.
Really smart.
Really had their act together.
Now, back in 1937, Lindbergh had been put forward by a young Republican group as a potential member of the GOP steering committee.
These young men were worried that the Republican Party was, quote, hopelessly reactionary and an incubator of fascism.
Oh my goodness, I know, right?
Wow.
I'm not holding any punches back.
Pretty, pretty remarkable.
It must have really surprised these young Republicans when Charles Lindbergh started hanging out with the Nazis.
He visited Nazi Germany three times while the Führer was in power.
The second time was in 1938, immediately after Kristallnacht.
The night of broken glass, when Nazis took to the streets and burnt down synagogues, broke Jewish people, murdered people.
It was horrible, right?
Real bad time.
He's there like the night after.
And he writes in his diary, quote, I do not understand these riots on the part of the Germans.
It seems so contrary to their sense of order and their intelligence in other ways.
They undoubtedly had a difficult Jewish problem, but why is it so necessary to handle it unreasonably?
My admiration for the Germans is constantly being dashed against some rock such as this.
What is the object in this persecution of the Jews?
Oh, my goodness.
There's a lot going on in that paragraph.
Charlie, you've got so much to say.
They have a Jewish problem, obviously.
Obviously.
But taking it violently.
Why can't we have some sort of like non-violent sort of like ethnic cleansing, but like not the non-haffinists?
Peaceful ethnic cleansing.
Peaceful ethnicity.
Peaceful ethnic cleansing.
I can't speak.
Can't say it 10 times bad if I tell you that much.
It's probably a good thing you can't say it.
It's like my mouth shut down.
Just stop.
It's just like, don't even bother.
Why would you not letting those words out?
So in 1941, Lindbergh really stepped up his activism for America.
First, he started traveling around the country, giving speeches, setting himself up as the clear candidate in 1944, and making every argument he could for American neutrality until then.
One poll showed 26% of Americans wanted to see him given some high government office.
Here's a quote from Hitler's American Friends.
Throughout the spring, Lindbergh spoke to standing room-only venues, attacking Roosevelt and urging full American neutrality.
The president himself soon became convinced that Lindbergh was a fascist with dictatorial designs, and in late April, Roosevelt launched a direct attack by comparing him to southern sympathizing copperheads during the Civil War and defeatists in George Washington's army at Valley Forge.
Lindbergh, outraged, resigned his commission in the Army Air Corps Reserve.
Crowds at his rallies continued to grow, and in late May, he packed Madison Square Garden with more than 20,000 people.
Thousands more listened on loudspeakers in the streets.
The presence of Bund members, various anti-Semites, and other extremists was widely reported in the press, including groups of Italian fascists and the silver shirts.
But the publicity was far from completely positive.
Life magazine observed that the audience had burst into deafening cheers for even the smallest aspects of Lindbergh's speech, including when he mopped his brow with a handkerchief.
An unnamed Lindbergh associate was quoted as referring to the phenomenon as Führer worship.
The more Charles Lindbergh spoke, the clearer it became that he was a goddamn racist.
He stated that he worried white America would be replaced by, quote, a pressing sea of yellow, black, and brown, and stated that if he had to choose, he'd prefer his country ally with Nazi Germany rather than Soviet Russia.
A white replacement, you say.
Yeah, weird.
That's a new phrase.
Weird how a group of people in America has been consistently worried about that for almost a century now.
And it still hasn't.
It still is.
Yeah.
White people still doing fine.
Weird.
Yeah, it's weird how that happens.
It's coming.
It's coming.
White people.
It's coming.
It's coming.
So it's white.
Surely this is the year.
Surely this is the year.
For the white genocide?
For the hashtag white genocide.
So, some of Lindbergh's growing fascism probably had to do with the friendship that he had made with French surgeon and scientist Alexis Carroll.
This is where things go in a direction you guys are not.
Did you predict that he was simultaneously, while running for American Fuhrer, working on a project to become immortal with a fascist French doctor?
Oh boy.
I had no idea for that.
I wasn't prepared.
I wouldn't have predicted, but I am not surprised.
Now, Alexis Currell was a Nobel Prize winner who'd figured out how to transplant human blood vessels, which is great.
But he'd learned how to do that because he wanted to turn the human body into, quote, a machine with constantly repairable or replaceable parts so that rich white people and only rich white people would live forever.
Carol was a fascist and a eugenicist who believed the planet was incumbent with people who should be dead.
So we're scientists.
Lindbergh was a eugenicist too, and since he was an engineer, he and Carol started working on a pump designed to keep human organs alive outside of their body.
They actually invented it and it's a useful medical device which is used today.
Absolutely, of course.
Yeah.
And of course, during their hours of close collaboration together, Carol ranted regularly about the Jews and extolled the benefits of fascism.
In September 1941, Charles Lindberg gave a speech in Des Moines.
I'm going to read a couple of segments out of this, bad boy.
1941.
1941.
September.
Getting real 18.
I'm real close.
Here's Charles.
Lucky Lindy.
Quote: National polls showed that when England and France declared war on Germany in 1939, less than 10% of our population favored a similar course for America.
But there were various groups of people, here and abroad, whose interests and beliefs necessitated the involvement of the United States in the war.
I shall point out some of these groups tonight and outline their methods of procedure.
In doing this, I must speak with the utmost frankness, for in order to counteract their efforts, we must know exactly who they are.
The three most important groups who have been pressing this country towards war are the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt administration.
He then went on to elaborate: No person with a sense of dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany, but no person of honesty and vision can look at their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy, both for us and for them.
Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way, for they will be among the first to feel its consequences.
Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength.
History shows that it cannot survive war and devastations.
A few far-sighted Jewish people realize this and stand opposed to intervention, but the majority still do not.
Their greatest danger to this country lies in the large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government.
Wow.
But also, wow, great performance.
Great performance from me.
Yeah, that was convincing.
For all of you.
There goes the tolerant left wanting to go to war with Nazi Germany.
I just think everyone should be allowed to speak and execute the Jews.
Unbelievable.
It's pretty rough.
Incredibly believable.
Super believable.
Oh, boy.
Yeah.
Also, don't trust media or the movies.
Because they're Jewish-owned.
Also, it's worth noting that the last big public speech Hitler gave before invading Poland, he stated that if the Jews succeeded in, in his words, drawing the world into another war, they'd be the first to suffer, which is exactly the phrasing Lindbergh used a year later in this speech.
That's bonkers.
Wow.
Wild.
Wow.
Hitler's Holocaust Plans00:14:41
That speech that Hitler gave is generally given as the most direct evidence we have that he had planned the Holocaust ahead of time.
Right.
Because, again, he didn't keep his name tied to stuff, but like he's very clearly laying it out.
Lindbergh said almost the same thing.
Oh, my God.
And it's like, yeah, the Jews are advocating for war.
Yeah, they're doing it.
They're doing it.
Jews that let themselves get rounded up and leave them murdered and put to work.
It's their fault.
And who in Hollywood at this time were refusing to criticize Nazi Germany in most of their movies because they were scared it would whip up anti-Jewish paranoia, which seems a lot more reasonable when you hear this shit.
You're like, yeah, I get why you were scared.
Right.
Yeah, all this, I mean, all the reactionary stuff.
Like, okay, yeah, you say that, and then you push people to the.
Yes.
Bummer.
Yeah.
Lindbergh advised Americans who got angry at news stories of horrific Nazi atrocities to, quote, ask who owns and who influences the newspaper, the news picture, and radio.
There was a great deal of backlash to Lindbergh's openly blaming the Jews as a collective for trying to force America into a war.
A poll conducted that same month found that 74% of Americans agreed that Nazi Germany needed to be destroyed in order for the U.S. to remain free and democratic.
The vast majority of Americans were consistent they would oppose any suppression campaign aimed at Jewish Americans.
But those statistics do not tell the whole story.
A survey taken about people's intentions for the 1942 midterm elections, the last such survey before Pearl Harbor, found that 40% of respondents planned to vote Democrat, 26% Republican, and 18% keep out of war.
This means if the Republicans and the Keep Out of War Party had allied, they could have potentially won in 42 and presumably again in 44.
And it is worth noting that Willkie, the Republican who had run against Roosevelt during this after the Des Moines speech, basically said, if Americans cannot deal with the current global catastrophe without turning to racial hatred, we don't deserve to have a democracy.
That was Wilkie, the Republican, speaking out vociferously against fascism right after this speech.
That's something we need.
Wouldn't that be nice?
Goodness.
Yes.
America First very well could have in 1942 won several seats in Congress, and that could have, you know, this is the kind of thing that at this point in September, there was a good chance that Charles Lindbergh could have become president in 44 if this ball would have kept rolling.
But then, on December 7th, 1941, the Empire of Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.
The U.S. got into the war, and America First dissolved as an organization in December.
Charles Lindbergh even wound up flying a few combat missions in the Pacific.
World War II went the way it did, and for the most part, Americans forgot that a domestic fascist movement had ever once earned the support of hundreds of thousands of American voters.
Most Americans, at least.
Vice President Henry A. Wallace never forgot, and in 1944, when Hitler's Third Reich was on its last legs, he wrote a description of American fascism that is just as relevant 80 years later as it was then.
Quote, The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact.
Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism.
They use every opportunity to impugn democracy.
Their final objective towards which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjugation.
Pretty spot on.
Pretty spot on.
I hate it.
Yeah, it's a real bummer.
Now, there's a fun code into the story, though.
Y'all remember Lawrence Dennis?
Yeah.
He had a secret.
The intellectual founder of American fascism had a secret that nobody knew at the time.
Spill the gossip.
Now, you remember how he was described as swarthy?
Yes.
Because he was a black guy.
Secretly.
Wow.
Secretly.
What?
Yes!
He had been born in 1892 in the heavily segregated South, but since he was able to pass for white, at a certain point, he decided to live his life that way because of the obvious and massive benefits of being a white guy in 1930.
Gerald Horne, who wrote a book about Dennis called The Color of Fascism, doesn't know if Dennis's wife even knew he wasn't white.
His daughter was never told.
Now, I found a good Guardian article about this, and it includes a heartbreaking quote from Walter White, a former head of the NAACP in the late 1940s.
Quote, Every year, approximately 12,000 white-skinned Negroes disappear, people whose absence cannot be explained by death or immigration.
Men and women who have decided that they will be happier and more successful if they flee from the prescription and humiliation which the American color line imposes on them.
The article also included a quote from Horne, trying to explain exactly why a black man in the 1940s would line himself up with fascism.
Quote, well, you could see why he would think it was inevitable.
Fascism was a far greater threat to the U.S. than communism ever was.
Dennis had no faith in the white working class.
So if you believe it's going to happen, you have one of two choices.
You can fight against it or you can ride the wave.
He decided to ride the wave, and that was hard-boiled cynicism and coldly calculating.
Wow.
I don't even know what to do with that.
So that's how it started.
That's how it started.
I know how to feel about it.
I don't know what to do with it.
I don't even know what to do with it.
Yeah.
I feel like a lot of people should hear a lot of the quotes that have been said.
That have been read today?
Yeah.
Yeah.
If only they would.
Yeah.
Should we send this to people?
I mean, I obviously have a vested interest in people listening to this.
Sure, sure.
I would like it if people would share this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'll share it.
Thank you.
Yeah.
I could use some products and services to wash the taste of it out of my mouth, though.
Oh, man.
It's just the kind of stuff that, like, everything lines up so frustratingly perfectly in a way that kind of makes you feel like you're going insane.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It makes it feel crazy.
You know, like, I feel that more and more because the polarization is obviously growing.
Yeah.
And the people in power are fueling it and supporting it and using it to manipulate people.
And then there are supposedly intellectual people who are riding that wave and totally ignore everything in a way that, yeah, makes you feel kind of crazy.
Absolutely.
I mean, for a long time, I'm more used to it now, but then sanity, it feels deeper, like more chaotic, like a bad nightmare or something.
But at the very beginning, especially, there were so many times I would be like, it's not me, right?
I'm not wrong.
I'm not the only.
And that's, yeah.
You see this.
And it's, there's something very telling.
And very telling about America and the fact that the first fascist intellectual we have was not a guy who was wildly dedicated to the principles of fascism because he was not.
Dennis' attitude was always, this is inevitable.
And this is probably better than the other one.
And the reason he thought it was better than the other one probably is because he was like, I know white people in America.
They're going to choose fascism before they choose communism.
So I want to get on the right side of this shit so I don't get murdered.
Right.
It's not necessarily this one's better than the other.
It's just this one is more likely because of where we are and how fucking.
And he's not wrong.
He was not wrong.
Yeah.
I think, yeah, I mean, I think we see that a lot.
And like I said, I see this in conversations sometimes where it's like, oh, you literally would choose that instead of the other.
Or even like, like, you'd choose that instead of democracy if you could.
Yeah.
Because you haven't heard all these quotes that are literally exactly how you're thinking.
Exactly.
Exactly.
It's so on the nose.
We like oftentimes joke about like, oh, it's like watching a TV show that's poorly written.
They're like, oh, we're all in a simulation.
But that does have, I think, a negative effect on people's psyche.
Yeah.
And it really does make you feel like, how can you be a prominent figure that has a huge audience and influence over people, sometimes with like a national audience and millions of people watching you or listening to you, where you blatantly ignore facts and you push this kind of thing and frame it in a way that forces people to either ignore this stuff or not know about it and like protect this knowledge and this history that illustrates what we're experiencing.
Literally as precious as life itself because it represents millions of lost lives when people did not heed the warning signs the last time this all happened.
Yeah.
That's still a thing that shocks me.
Continue to grapple with.
I can see missing the warning signs the first time this happens or like just for the general population, like, oh, I didn't know I was going along.
You can't anymore.
You can't say that this isn't happening.
You can't say that it doesn't have potentially disastrous.
If the only media you watch is Fox News, and when the Proud Boys are beating up gay people in the streets, their headline is, Annie Faw brought a sword!
Annie Faw brought a sword, even though Kevin McGinnis brought a sword.
And it was a fake sword that he was using to reenact the execution of a socialist politician in Japan by a fascist.
There it is.
That's the stuff.
At the Metropolitan Republican Club of New York.
And like, it makes you feel crazy.
And it kind of makes you feel helpless.
Like, you're shouting.
Not kind of.
Like, you're shouting into a void.
Yeah.
And the people aren't listening to literally just like what you just said.
Because they're making money and they want more cool stuff.
That's the Ben Shapiros and the fucking ideologues who aren't fascists but push people towards fascism, the Tucker Carlsons and whatnot.
Opportunists.
Yeah, it's just about money.
Yeah.
And you could see there was like a half a minute there in the middle of all this where Gwen Beck had an opportunity to like be like, oh, I have erred terribly.
I see what I did.
I see what I did.
I see what I've done to this nation.
Kind of started and then he decided to make money again.
Of course.
Yeah, money's good.
What are you going to do?
It's not as lucrative to pretend to be not a grifter here.
Well, if there's one thing America has always been better at than anyone else in history, it is a goddamn grift.
Oh, yeah.
We are the fucking grifter kings of the world.
Absolutely.
I mean, that's why we got the president we got.
Yeah.
You're the guy.
We're the fucking grifter nation, and you're the king of grifters.
Yeah, you did it.
Even though, really, if we wanted to elect the king of grifters, we would have elected L. Ron Hubbard, who would have been.
Sure.
Maybe not a better president, but a different one.
A different one.
A different one.
We would have spent a lot of money on our Navy.
I can tell you that much.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Get out of those international waters.
Everywhere is international waters now.
All right.
Unbelievable.
Pluggables.
Oh, God.
Check us out.
Check us out.
We got some more news on YouTube.
Check out our Patreon, our podcast, Even More News on all the podcast things.
Twitter, some more news.
My individual one is Dr. Mr. Cody.
D-R-M-I-S-T-E-R-C-O-D.
Spelled that out for me.
I have to spell it out because you could be Dr. ETH.
You just really like C-T-O-Y-O-Y.
You never know.
Yeah, you hitched yourself to that wagon, and now you got to stick with it.
Can't change those.
I can't change it.
And what he said, because I do those things with him.
And except I have my own Twitter, and it's my name, Katie Stoll.
There was a lot of eloquence on display in both of you there.
I was really proud of you.
Our shows are called Even More News and Some More News.
Good one to get in there.
Google them.
And we recommend you check them out.
Do check out some more news and some news.
Even more news.
So many titles to keep track of.
I know.
I have a show, too.
I've forgotten the title, but you know it.
You clicked on it.
So listen to the next one when it happens next week.
You can find us on the internet at behindthebastards.com.
You can find us on Twitter at at BastardsPod or Instagram at the same thing that I said before, but for Instagram and not Twitter.
Could have just said at BastardsPod again.
And then I did.
You can find me at iWriteOK on Twitter.
Buy a shirt from TeePublic so that I can fill a bunker and hide.
Let them stockpile rations, guys.
Yeah, stockpile a number of things.
Stockpiling.
Stockpiles of stuff.
Stockpiles of stuff.
You know, we've got all these millionaires stockpiling stuff and all these kind of crazy folk stockpiling stuff.
Let's all stockpiles.
Maybe a couple months of perishable food.
That's not crazy.
That's not a crazy person thing to do.
Any dumb bunch of reasons it could be useful to have a couple months of food.
Well, you also got to prep for the big one.
Sure, sure.
Big quake.
Keep some water on hand.
Yeah.
Both of those things are good.
Maybe everything's melting.
Yeah.
Everything's melting.
Guys, be scared.
Be angry.
Be angry.
And then.
Be best.
I was going to say drink to relieve the stress.
But there are other drugs.
There's a lot of great drugs out there.
A lot of America's really bullish on opiates.
Seems like there's no downside to that drug.
I haven't read any of the reporting on this.
It may have gone horribly wrong.
I can tell.
Has something bad happened with that?
Oh, no, Robert.
I'm so sorry to have to tell you.
This is a real letdown, guys.
Now, this was the letdown, not everything, the past two hours.
I just thought if there was one thing I could trust, it was Purdue Pharmaceuticals in Austin Tons.
Oh, yeah, that's another episode, I think.
That's heartbreaking.
Well, maybe I'll research that one.
Yeah, I look into that.
I recommend it.
Until next week, when we will be talking about God knows what else, but something terrible and someone terrible.
I'm Robert Evans.
This has been Behind the Bastards, and I love about 30% of you.
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This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
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An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
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If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
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