Arthur Desmond, a New Zealand radical who defended Māori rights and Te Kooti, reinvented himself in Australia as the financial journalist behind Hard Cash and the anarchist Active Service Brigade. After fleeing legal trouble, he adopted the pseudonym Ragnar Redbeard to publish Might is Right, shifting from labor advocacy to social Darwinism that justified violence against opponents. This ideological evolution mirrors modern extremist movements like the alt-right and incel culture, suggesting Desmond's trajectory from anti-capitalist organizer to white nationalist prophet offers a chilling historical blueprint for contemporary toxic masculinity. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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D&D Saved Lives From Shootings00:09:40
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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.
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On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Mode.
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 Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Goespiece and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots five, City Hall building.
How could this ever happen in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey Whippett.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
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A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
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What strung my outs?
I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards.
I was up too late last night ingesting narcotics and today's going to be a shit show.
Thankfully, to help me get through it, I have my co-host, Jamie Loftus.
Hi.
Robert, what's going on?
You two literally was just, you just got home and you just started doing whippets.
You know what I did last night?
I did.
Well, we can edit out if you don't want to get specific.
We can just bleep the drug of choice this time out.
Which would honestly make it sound way cooler than what you actually did.
Let's leave plausible deniability that it might have been legal.
Yeah.
So I did something that was legal, but very sad.
I did that thing where you get this the little four pack of tiny Sutter homes were on sale.
Oh, that's that is deeply sad, JB.
And then I drank all four.
It's sad.
It's sad to drink all four.
It's not sad.
It comes out to like two-thirds of a bottle of wine, which is actually, now that I'm saying it out loud, also sad.
But drinking four tiny bottles is tough.
It's tough.
What's sad is that when you're in that space, you want wine, but you don't have your shit together enough to open a bottle to like pull a cork out.
Like that's when you drink those Sutter home bottles.
They're twist tops and they were heavily discounted at my CVS.
God knows why.
Maybe there was tape on them.
I don't know.
I drank all four of them.
The mood that you are in when you drink that is like, I have the wherewithal.
The most that I can handle right now is opening a soda, but I want it to be wine.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
I just, I don't know.
I'm going to cut myself slack on it.
I'm not going to do any self-searching about why I drank the four tiny wines.
I was fine.
I had a fine day.
I don't have a problem right now.
No, you see, this ties actually into the theme of the episode, Jamie.
Because this is Behind the Bastards, the show where we talk about the worst people in all of history.
I'm sorry, I forgot to say that.
And a lot of the worst people in all of history spend way too much time analyzing themselves rather than just not thinking about things too hard.
And that is where we get terrible, terrible people, like the person we're talking about today.
Love it.
Yeah, that was a good intro.
Who is it?
I pulled it out in the end.
Who is it?
No one ever tells me anything anymore.
I asked to know, and then I was handily rejected.
Well, you will not know this person by their name.
Have you ever heard of Arthur Desmond?
No, he sounds like a sexy cartoon prince.
He is not.
Have you heard of Ragnar Redbeard?
Yes.
Why have I heard of that?
Is that a metal band, Robert?
Well, actually, yes, but that's not what it is originally.
Okay.
You remember the Gilroy Garlic Festival mass shooting?
Yes, I do.
Well, yeah, on July 28th, 2019, Santino Legan cut a hole in the fence surrounding that festival, snuck inside, and started shooting at people with an AR-15.
Yes.
He killed three.
He wounded 17.
His youngest victim was six years old.
And of course, as we always do now after a mass shooting, a bunch of researchers and law enforcement started going through that guy's online presence to try to figure out, all right, what was this one?
Was this guy like a white nationalist?
Was this an ISIS guy?
Was this just like just a dude shooting people for no reason?
Sure.
And we found an Instagram post that the shooter had made a couple of days before the shooting, and he attached an image of Smokey the Bear with a sign that said fire danger high today.
And then he posted, read Might is Right by Ragnar Redbeard.
Why overcrowd towns and pave more open space to make room for hordes of mestizos and Silicon Valley white twats?
Wow.
That was his post.
So Might is Right is a very famous book.
It's not the most prominent piece of white nationalist literature, but it's up there.
And the guy who wrote it used a pseudonym because no one has ever been named Ragnar Redbeard.
Like Vikings would have been like, dude, that's a little bit much, huh?
Right.
Like, yeah, a little silly.
It's a bit over the top.
It does sound like a steampunky kind of like a D kind of name.
I really, one of the untold stories of history is how many mass shootings Dungeons and Dragons has helped us to avoid by giving people with too much imagination an outlet rather than somewhere to go.
Yeah.
Not mass shootings, but like shitty books.
I shouldn't say mass shootings.
It stopped a lot of shitty books from happening because the tale of Arthur Desmond is the tale of a guy who, if he'd gotten together with friends and been able to play barbarian for like four hours every Sunday, maybe he wouldn't have written this book.
It's a class in Dungeons and Dragons.
Oh, okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Jesus Christ, Jamie.
Okay.
Sorry, King.
It's just getting screamed at by a man in a kimono.
I'm not paid to be here, Robert.
You're just screaming at me in a kimono.
I do like the kimono.
I like the passage of it.
Thank you.
Thank you.
This kimono is, I don't know.
I don't have a joke.
When did this come into the this?
The last time I was here, it was, it was, we were just still at the then, well, what is the big hooked knife?
The fluffy.
Oh, the machete?
The machete.
That's what I was trying to say.
I have a lot of machetes.
I know a lot of machetes around here.
But where is the kimono?
What happened?
Like, what's the story with the kimono?
Oh, my parents lived in Japan for most of their lives or a huge chunk of their lives.
And so I would get kimonos as gifts on a regular basis, and they're comfortable.
Okay.
Well, I like that.
Yeah.
They're nice.
It's a nice thing to put on when you're hungover in the morning and you have to do your podcast with your good friend Jamie Loftus.
I can't say it enough.
It is not the morning.
It is not.
It is well after 2 p.m.
But I have been up for less than a half hour.
That's true.
It was fun to watch in real time on YouTube.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If my shit is not together, like when I'm, my shit's not together, I start comparing people who play Dungeons and Dragons to mass shooters, which is wildly unfair and not the point I was trying to make.
And yet we had to cancel you.
And yeah, this is how I get, oh, please cancel me.
Oh, my God.
I could go back to sleep.
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay, great.
I forget who, I don't know who tweeted this, but there was a tweet that was like, I hope when I get canceled, I'm surrounded by my closest family and friends.
And I feel the same way.
We'll all be canceled one day, and then we will go to the happy hunting grounds where we can all get on open mics and shout racial slurs, which is like, what was that guy?
Seinfeld.
It's Seinfeld heaven.
What?
The guy.
Jerry Seinfeld?
The Radical Politician Tekuti00:14:22
No, no, no.
Kramer.
Oh, oh, Michael Richards.
That's the joke I was.
Michael Richards heaven would just be.
Oh, I thought you were like, I want to hear Jerry Seinfeld scream slurs.
I'm like, why would you want that, Robert?
It's this one poorly constructed joke after another.
There is.
You're waking up.
I can see you're drinking coffee.
You can see the pieces of the joke, right?
Everything.
I can see the ingredients, but you just threw them in the bowl.
That's actually how I cooked breakfast this morning.
Just oats without water.
Drinking coffee.
Spooning oats into my mouth.
Dry oats.
Oh, that's so nasty.
I had the breakfast place I go to, they finally told me that they think what I do to my breakfast is gross.
What do you do to your breakfast?
I get a bagel with cream cheese and a tomato on top.
And then I put so much salt on top of the tomato and the bagel.
And then I dip the whole thing in five packets of ketchup.
Now, you see, Jamie, I was actually going, like, I was planning before you gave that out to like make fun of you for whatever it was you were doing because like you set the precedent that that was okay, but that does sound good.
They were like, it's too much ketchup.
It's too much salt.
You're going to die.
And I hope I do.
Yeah.
We all will.
Yeah.
Hopefully we get canceled first so we have some time to sleep.
We can really have a time to panic.
Yeah.
It's time to talk about a man who was never canceled and definitely should have been.
Arthur Desmond, who is almost certainly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So this guy, Ragnar Redbeard, who wrote this book, Might is Right.
Obviously, it was a pseudonym.
And we don't 100% know who wrote Might is Right, but we're about 90% sure it was Arthur Desmond.
There are some people who will say it was Jack London, but he would have been like a teenager when the book came out.
And also Jack London was not that racist.
Well, that's pretty racist.
Yeah, but not that racist.
So Arthur Desmond, in addition to being Ragnar Redbeard, is probably, or because he's Ragnar Redbeard, is widely considered to be the most internationally influential political thinker in New Zealand's history.
Now, there are only about 14 people in New Zealand.
So, this is an easier, like if you're going to pick a country to be the most influential international political thinker from, it's one of the easier ones.
But unfortunately for New Zealand, he was a gigantic piece of shit.
Yeah, well, on this show, bad guy.
This is actually, I'm excited to talk about this one with you because this is a guy who's more complicated than you'd expect from a dude who wrote a book called Might is Right and used the name Ragnar Redbeard.
Yeah.
He actually started out kind of awesome.
So this is like a fucking godfather-like story of like a dude who seemed like he was kind of on a pretty great path and then basically became a Nazi.
So it's, I mean, it's a common thread.
There's that's relatable for many people in the country.
Yeah.
Well, unfortunately, yes.
About 30%.
Now, okay, I believe you.
We don't know precisely when Arthur Desmond was born or exactly where, nor do we know anything about his parents.
Mark Derby, who's a historian who wrote a book about Arthur, said in an interview, I'm not certain that Arthur Desmond is his real given name.
It probably isn't.
If you dig into this guy as much as possible using the internet, you'll run into speculation that he was probably born around 1842, certainly in the early 1840s.
He was of English and Irish descent, and he probably grew up somewhere around Hawkes Bay in New Zealand.
Nothing.
And that's Hawks with an E.
Yeah, it's a cool name.
Now, one site I think.
He had a New Zealand accent.
Oh, yeah, for sure.
Okay.
This is going to inform my opinion of him in his view.
Just imagine the guy, like, just pick a random cast member from what we do in the shadows and assume that's how this guy sounded.
Whichever one you want.
Okay, so it's Brett.
Okay.
So it's great.
Good choice.
Got it.
Got it.
Now, one site I found makes the claim that Arthur Desmond's, quote, background and date of birth has never been confirmed because throughout his life he made a point of covering his tracks, which is always a sign that somebody was up to a lot of good.
Now, whatever the reality of his mysterious origins, 1884 is the year in which Arthur Desmond first emerges solidly into the historical record.
He was, you know, somewhere between like 20 and 40 when he stepped forward to declare his candidacy for parliament.
The editor of the Hawke's Bay Herald wrote, quote, we only know that Mr. Desmond is a cattle drover and that he is of radical tendencies.
Desmond Rand, yeah, yeah, he's a political radical in a way that's good for the time.
Right.
He ran as a representative of the small settler and the working man, and he convinced about 190 people to vote for his platform, which was mainly based around what he called a single tax.
This was a very revolutionary plan to eliminate all taxes within the colony and replace them with a single tax on land ownership.
So he's anti-aristocracy, anti-elite.
He just wants the rich people to deal with the burden of taxes to free up the common man and the laboring classes and whatnot.
Okay.
Which seems pretty progressive for the era.
Pretty progressive for this era to be in.
He's on a good track, yeah.
He's on a good track.
Now, I'm sorry, I'm stuck on between 20 and 40.
Yeah, I don't know.
Some sources say that he was born in 1842 in the 1880s is when he got started into politics.
But other sources say he was like 25 when he got started into politics.
I really have no idea.
Again, we don't know when this fucker was born.
Damn.
You know, it was also the mid-1800s.
Nobody kept records.
People just dropped babies into fields and then off you went.
We should just start describing ourselves this way.
We're like, yeah, sometime, but between ages 20 and 40.
I would love that to be on my driver's license.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, between 20 and 50.
Yeah, somewhere in there.
So, yeah, he was a radical politician.
You would call him like a radical left-wing pro-labor guy.
I'm going to quote now from one of his speeches during this period where he's talking about sort of the working classes and their plight.
I have seen men living in a hut where no fire was allowed, going to bed on a wet, cold day to keep themselves warm.
I have seen the wind and the rain coming in through the cracked roof and the winter storm whistling through the rafters as it does through the rigging of a ship.
And I have also known of the owners of these colonial farms gallivanting in some London ballroom upon the profits of these slaves' labor.
So pretty well guy, you know?
Yeah.
Seems fine.
He was also an outspoken defender of Maori rights to their own ancestral land.
Oh, that's great.
Yeah, he was anti-white people stealing native land.
So that's cool.
What's the twist with this motherfucker?
It's less of a twist and more of like a gradual turn that eventually leads to him going in the complete opposite direction.
Ugh.
But it's, yeah, we'll see if we can pinpoint where this happens.
All right.
So, you know, obviously, this guy's a left-winger.
The press at the time instantly started mocking him and his wild beliefs about landowners paying taxes and indigenous people existing.
Arthur wrote back to his detractors and he accused the entire elected government of New Zealand of being a pack of thieves.
He was promptly banned from being published in the Hawke's Bay Weekly Courier.
Nice.
Yeah, three years.
Yeah, he was like writing fiery letters to the editor.
I like it.
Now, three years later, in 1887, Desmond ran for parliament again.
He claimed that his radical politics had prompted the landowners he relied on for work to blacklist him.
Unable to find work, he'd had to travel far from home in order to get hired by people who hadn't heard of him.
In spite of this, Desmond doubled down on his stances, excoriating landlords, bankers, monopolists, and capitalists in general in his speeches.
He also introduced a new policy.
Now, rather than just taxing landholders, he also wanted to nationalize all large estates and effectively take land away from the very wealthy.
Okay.
He was, yeah, he's pretty cool.
I mean, by my opinion here, he was more successful in this campaign and actually obtained a majority of the votes in Tarradale, which was the second largest town in the district.
Many Kiwis cheered when he called bank directors scoundrels and landlords blood-sucking leeches.
Yes.
And the press, yeah, yeah, yeah, right.
You're all on board with Arthur Desmond so far.
Yeah.
When the press attacked his radical politics, he called them hirelings of monopoly, which was almost certainly fair.
Nice.
Good banding.
Good band.
You hirelings of monopoly.
Yeah, that's like a ska band that advises people to pay their rent.
Yeah, dad's got to pay your rent on time.
There's somehow always headlining in New Hampshire.
Yeah.
Despite his substantial progress, Arthur Desmond still lost the election by some 400 votes.
Now, a more patient, Bernie Sanders-like radical might have kept on building his base of support after all he'd tripled his number of voters between 1884 and 1887.
And that's pretty good for a radical politician.
It's entirely possible he'd have won a seat in parliament after another couple of years of basebuilding and preaching his cause to the masses.
But he never got that chance.
Some of this may be due to the fact that he was an impatient, cussed son of a bitch.
But mostly it was because he'd failed to actually pay back any of the debts incurred by his campaign, leaving his supporters holding the bag.
By some accounts, he was quite literally run out of town.
So that's cool.
Okay.
Wow.
So maybe a little bit of a scoundrel.
Oh, good.
I was saying the right thing.
Someone says the right things and then is secretly.
Okay, so he's just like a, he seemed like he was a force of good, and then it turned out he was maybe just a regular politician.
He's still more complicated than that.
We've got a lot to go before he heel turns.
And it's, I don't really know what to make of this guy.
This is one of the more confusing figures I've dealt with.
And there's a lot of aspects of what he believed.
Like he was, I'll say this from the beginning, he was anti-Semitic, but also at the start, it doesn't seem like he was more anti-Semitic than anybody else.
Like, everybody was shitty towards Jewish people in fucking 1850s New Zealand or wherever you happen to be.
Because that was just, that was just life, you know, or 1880s.
It was just everyone was racist as hell.
So Desmond next moved to a place with the very upbeat name of Poverty Bay, which why would you name it that?
It really seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Like most people pick like upbeat in Greenland.
We call it like optimistic or tejas, which means friendship.
And New Zealand's like, everyone here is just going to be fucking poor.
Yeah.
That's what we're calling it.
They're like, listen, we can aspire for more, but why bother?
Yeah.
Why fucking poverty bay?
You know, to some extent, that's kind of comforting because you set the bar low.
Nobody's going to feel like they're a failure in Poverty Bay.
That's very true.
So Desmond found work in a timber mill and on a series of small farms.
The money was not good.
The labor was backbreaking.
And the strain of working all day for someone else's profit clearly wore on his soul.
Years later, Desmond would write about this period, quote, many a time when lying on my back in a bush ware or a tent after a day of grinding toil, have I resolved that if I ever had the chance to sweep away such a brutal system, it would not be neglected.
Ooh.
Okay.
This sounds like a, yeah, this is like a first act of the movie kind of declaration.
Yeah.
Okay.
Now, during his time out in the bush working at farms, he spent a lot of time with Maori people.
And at some point, he met a fellow named Tekuti.
Now, Tekuti was a Maori warrior and a former guerrilla leader.
He'd basically been a terrorist.
Like, this guy had been kind of like a New Zealand equivalent of a dude like, he'd been viewed a lot, at least like a guy like Bin Laden.
I don't think he was that bad, but he killed a lot of people.
And then as an older man, he reformed and he built a church and he became more of like a peaceful activist and was very, very popular.
So this is a guy who like, and like in fairness, if you're a Maori in New Zealand at this point and you like decide to murder a bunch of white people, you have some good reason to do that.
Yeah, I mean, there's usually really good reasons.
Yeah.
In general.
Jamie Law says pro-terrorism.
So wait, he was like, I was going to make a terrible, but every time someone was like, and then they kind of liked him at the end of his life, I'm like, oh, it's like when people gave Saddam Hussein like Doritos.
Yeah, I mean, he seems like he was a charming guy, Saddam Hussein.
We all, we'd all have him in him Doritos.
He got his Doritos.
That's all I know.
He did get his Doritos.
I think Tekkuti was a better person than Saddam Hussein, but that is a low bar.
Wow, really coming in hot for Tekkuti.
Now, Desmond had initially started hanging out with Tekuti's followers as part of an effort to learn some of their songs and rituals.
It seems to have been like an anthropological thing to him.
He was just interested in Maori culture.
Okay.
And so, you know, at some point in like the late 1880s, Tekuti decides that he's going to head back to Gisborne, which is the town of his birth, and do like visit there with some of his followers.
And this is hugely controversial among the white people who live in the area because obviously this guy had been a terrorist for a long time.
And they like formed an armed militia, and a lot of people are like, if he comes here, you know, we're going to fuck him up.
And Arthur Desmond is the only white voter in the area, the only white dude, because obviously nobody else is fucking voting, I don't think.
He's like the only voter in the district with any sympathy for Tekuti or the Maori in general.
And when the town held a meeting about whether to let Tekuti show up, Desmond was the only person who spoke in his defense.
I'm going to quote now from Takver, which is a website about radical Australian politics that's very sympathetic to Desmond.
Quote, 500 people packed into a schoolroom at Makarata and there was talk of bloodshed and massacres.
They decided to arm themselves and stop Tekuti.
Desmond spoke on behalf of Tekuti.
He told the meeting that he was acquainted with many of Tekuti's followers and that Tekuti meant them no harm.
All he wished was to visit the place of his birth.
The meeting ended in an uproar and he was thrown out.
So, at this point, pretty cool dude standing up for a native guy.
Using Privilege Responsibly00:04:57
Yeah.
Yeah.
That sounds like he's using his privilege responsibly.
And you know how our listeners can use their privilege responsibly, Jamie?
Oh, here it fucking comes.
Yeah, this is an ad pivot.
What?
No, no, roll with it.
I'm sorry.
Don't let me interrupt you.
Well, if you have privilege, why not spend it on the fine products and services that support this program?
Yeah, you're right.
You're right.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
The best way to flex your privilege is to participate in capitalism.
I think that we can all agree on that.
I think every radical philosopher can agree with that very simple point.
Yes.
Yes.
Arthur Desmond certainly would.
Listen, I pay $3 for a very salty bagel every day.
We all and $4 for fucking twist-top bottles of wine.
Well, it was $3.50 yesterday.
Jesus Christ.
Therefore, I must buy them.
That's 75 cents per tiny bottle of wine.
You're basically spending money to not buy wine at those prices.
You really, and they are just juice.
I don't even think they're alcoholic beverages.
It was just like I drank four Kool-Aid pouches and fell asleep, which also sounds nice.
If you want to spend your money sensibly, like Jamie did, buy these products.
Products.
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 that, 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.
They 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.
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.
Share each day 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.
I'm Lori 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.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Ragnar Redbeard's SoundCloud Mystery00:13:31
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, 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 luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And we're back.
So, where we left off, Arthur Desmond has just gotten kicked out of a first meeting where he's argued on behalf of this former guerrilla leader, current religious leader, Tekuti.
He's still semi-cool.
He's still pretty cool at this point.
Now, the colonists mostly hated Tekuti because, you know, he'd been a violent insurgent at one point.
And of course, they were racist, but they primarily were scared because they thought he was going to disrupt the upcoming sale of a bunch of Maori land to white people.
So their big worry is that he's going to organize the local Maoris to stop this transaction.
So I'm going to quote from Takfer again.
A few days later, on the 21st of February, another large meeting took place, this time in Gisborne.
800 people attended and passed a resolution to stop Tekuti by any means necessary.
Again, Desmond spoke in favor of Tekuti's visit.
He told the assembly that he had a message from the Maori leaders at Tekaraka and informed them that they had no right to interfere in what was to be a peaceful visit.
Again, the settlers wouldn't listen and a fight broke out.
Desmond, slightly outnumbered, had to be escorted from the meeting by the police.
He was described as the Pakeha emissary from the Hauhaus, which is like Pakeha is like a word for white guy, the Hauhauser or Tekuti's church, in the New Zealand Herald.
And according to the paper, he was lucky to get out of the meeting alive.
By this stage, Poverty Bay was in a panic.
The government stepped in and arrested Tekuti and his 70 followers, many of them women and children, at Weyotahi.
Tekuti was charged with unlawful assembly and dispatched to the Mount Eden jail.
So that's cool.
All right.
Yeah, this is, it's taking him a suspiciously long time to become someone who's unsympathetic.
That's part of what's interesting about this guy to me is his journey.
I think I kind of get why he turned into an asshole, but that's the story we're building to.
Okay.
So I think one of the problems when you have a guy who ends up where Arthur Desmond ends up, which is basically a Nazi, is it's easy to like work backwards and sort of attribute like the worst attributes that he wound up believing to like his prior actions.
Got it.
Guys like Mark Derby, who is Desmond's biographer and probably knows more about the guy than I do, suspects that he mainly supported Tekuti because he admired the Maori leader's violent past and his ruthlessness.
I don't know how much I agree with that.
And again, Derby has done more research than I have, but I did read a lot of Desmond's writings on Tekuti.
And I can't help but feel that there was more going on than just his appreciation of the former insurgents' ability to do violence.
That's certainly a part of it.
He does respect strength and like this guy's the fact that unlike the working classes of his time, this guy stood up with a rifle and acted out what he believed in.
But I think there was more going on here.
He wrote a poem about Tekuti, which was the first of many poems from Arthur Desmond, because he was actually, in my opinion, a pretty good poet.
And I'm going to read an excerpt from that poem, The Song of Tekuti.
No, it's actually pretty good.
It's kind of like Kipling in style, but at least from an early age, less racist.
And then it gets way more racist than Kipling.
So yeah.
Cool.
They tried to enslave us, to trample us down, like the millions that serve them in field and town.
But the sapling that's bended when freed will rebound.
Exult for Tekuti, yo-ho.
He plundered their rum stores.
He ate up their priests.
He robbed the rich squatters to furnish him feasts.
What fare half so fine as their clover-fed beasts?
Exult for Tekuti, yo-ho.
In the wild midnight foray, whose footsteps trod lighter.
In the flash of the rifle, whose eyeballs gleamed brighter.
What man with our hero could clinch as a fighter?
Exult for Tekuti, yo-ho.
They say it was murder, but what then is war?
When they slaughtered our kin in the flames of the paw?
Oh, darker their deeds and more merciless by far.
Exult for Tekuti, yo-ho.
So he's like, he uses a lot of yo-hoes there.
Yo-ho a lot.
I did.
This is the most yo-hoing I have ever done in this.
So you're like, that poem is awesome.
Yeah.
So you can see, you can see, you can see his appreciation for the guy's violence, but you can also see that it comes from like his recognition that these people have been oppressed by colonial power.
And he's like, look, you can call this guy brutal, but like the whole colonial system is a thousand times more brutal than whatever violence this insurgent dealt.
And that's the real crime.
See, what I was seeing was an AAAB rhyming pattern, and the B is always yo-ho.
Hey, hey, it's his first poem, okay?
Oh, that was a fun fourth-grade assignment.
I am going to read a lot more poems before this episode is out.
There are, this is the most poems we're going to have in an episode.
Does he ever go slam?
Does he ever go off the rhyme scheme?
I think in a modern era, this guy would be a white rapper.
He would be and would probably take like a violent right-wing turn.
He'd be like one of those flat earth rappers who like rants about like Talmudic Jews.
Yeah, they're like, I'm going on a tour across the flat earth.
Yeah.
Look out for your boy may fall off the edge.
Yeah, yeah, that he would be that guy a thousand percent.
Amazing.
Okay.
So, uh, after the end of his political career, Arthur Desmond moved to Auckland.
He got a job as what's called a gum digger, which I did not look up because I just want to imagine that as like literally a harvesting, like chewing gum from the world.
I know it's got to do with trees.
I understand what it really is, but I'm going to pretend that he's digging up like bubble yum.
He became a member of the Timber Workers Union, which was a fairly new thing at that point.
Unions were just starting to take off all over the world in the late 1800s, and this was part of a global socialist trend.
Workers of the world uniting in order to strike and bargain together for a larger share of the wealth they created for their capitalist masters.
Things started to look up for Desmond.
He was appointed to represent the timber union at the Auckland Trades Council.
And finally, he saw his fellow laboring people realize how badly their bosses and landlords were fucking them over.
His firebrand instincts and poet's heart made him an inspiring voice for labor.
During a maritime strike, he started publishing a newspaper, Tribune.
It took off among laborers and helped make Desmond a major leader inside the strike.
So he was just like...
He's just like marching around New Zealand being like, yo-ho, y'all, we gotta...
There's probably a lot of yo-hos.
Your landlord's an asshole, yo-ho.
Look, you couldn't get out of bed in the 1890s without a yo-ho or three.
Like, let's be fair here.
Yeah, it's true.
All right, so this is cool.
Yeah, yeah.
In one issue of Tribune, he wrote, quote, how can we expect just legislation and equal laws when those who control private plundering concerns are our legislators?
Which is a fair question.
Yeah.
For the first time in his life, things seemed to be going very well for Arthur Desmond.
Thanks to the Tribune, he was finally making a living as a writer, his dearest ambition.
And he had a prominent role stirring up the working class against the capitalist pig dogs, his other dearest ambition.
For a brief, shining moment, he tasted the sweet liquor of success.
Those of us lucky enough to have drank it know it tastes exactly like Shasta Cola.
Arthur Desmond's major target.
What?
That does.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, I was just appreciating that turn and phrase.
Thank you.
Arthur Desmond's major target during this period was the Bank of New Zealand, which he saw as the oppressive heart of the capitalist regime.
And it sort of was, definitely was.
Absolutely it was.
The Bank of New Zealand was incredibly corrupt and existed primarily to make the rich richer, something that has been true of no other bank in history.
On a regular basis, Desmond excoriated them from his secret office, hidden inside the headquarters of the Auckland Employers Association.
So he sets up an office in this big building and starts printing like this far-left anti-capitalist magazine without anyone there like knowing it and without paying rent or anything like that.
And he gets away with it for about three weeks.
And then, yeah, that's about all you could do that for us.
That's a very stressful three weeks.
Yeah.
There's this weird unshowered guy printing off pages of newsletters.
Should we do something about that?
Someone comes up to him and is like, hey, you get out of here.
And he's a giant red-headed man.
Like, he's hard to miss.
Yeah.
So he's a giant, like, red-headed guy from New Zealand who will eventually take on the rap name Ragnar Redbeard.
If you told me Ragnar Redbeard was a current like white SoundCloud rapper, I wouldn't blink.
I suspect there are some.
There's definitely like metal artists who use that name and variations of it.
Yeah, it does sound like that.
And there's like metal albums titled Might is Right.
He's inspired a lot of Nazi metal.
Good.
Well, yes.
So unfortunately, yeah, after about three weeks, the people who ran the association realized what was going on.
They told Desmond to clear his shit out, and as revenge, Arthur Desmond forged a confidential letter from a cabinet minister to the association, basically accusing them of kicking him out on the orders of a crooked politician.
He used this falsified information to accuse the association of conspiracy.
Now, this did not sit well with the cabinet minister that Desmond had implicated in a fake crime.
He sued Desmond for criminal libel, which Arthur Desmond was absolutely guilty of committing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So he kind of oversteps here.
And things get worse.
I'm going to quote next from Tiara, an online New Zealand-focused encyclopedia.
Quote, his opponents retaliated with accusations that his article, Christ is a Social Reformer, first published in the literary magazine Zealandia in June 1890 and reprinted as a pamphlet with an introduction by George Gray, had been plagiarized from an American magazine.
Desmond claimed that the American article had been stolen from his own and dismissed the accusation as an electioneering dodge.
His attackers included the leaders of the single tax movement in Auckland, with whom he had also fallen out.
Desmond next appeared in Wellington, where in early 1891 he endeavored to interest the Wellington Trades and Labor Council in supporting a new labor paper.
He lectured on the Wellington waterfront on Sunday afternoons.
A young man, Irish, eloquent, poetic, hard-up, red-haired, and red-bearded, is how he was described.
Okay.
So he gets canceled for plagiarizing and he has to move to Wellington.
That's right.
I like that.
I like this whole old-timey narrative of when you get canceled, you move.
You just go to another city.
Go somewhere else and wait to get canceled there.
Yeah, there was a time in which going from LA to San Diego was like landing on the fucking moon.
Right, right.
You just have a new name.
They're like, oh, yeah.
By the way, I did look up Ragnar Redbeard's SoundCloud, and there is a result of an Austrian man.
He hasn't uploaded for six years, but he has nine followers.
And some of his songs are called Love Isn't Everything, Tuesday Again, Destroy with Love.
Hard.
None of this sounds like our Ragnar Redbeard.
No, I mean, but it does.
But all of his album art is pictures of his abs, but not his head.
I mean, are his abs fire, Jamie?
His, yeah, they're good.
They're good.
He's wearing a leather jacket, and then it's just his abs.
Yeah.
Okay.
So that's just a plug.
Yeah.
Listen to this defunct SoundCloud rapper.
Or at least look at his sweet, sweet abs.
Sweet washboard abs.
Hey.
Good for him.
Good for him.
It's weird that we call them washboard abs because I feel like the period of time in which people figured out how to have really nice abs was not the period of time in which anyone used washboards to wash clothing.
And I also don't think a lot of people can like call to mind the image of a washboard very quickly.
No.
It's one of those things I just learned recently that uppercase and lowercase letters referred to like back when people used printing presses, you kept all the capital letters in one case, like a literal case and the lowercase letter.
Like there was an upper and a lower case in the box where you kept the letters.
This is not a status, but history is so stupid.
It's really dumb.
It's so dumb.
Wow.
Well, we've got, yeah, we've got stuff like that.
Like there's the fucking icon of a floppy disk in the top left-hand corner of like a Word document or whatever.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
So I guess washboard abs is like that.
Washboards.
Yeah.
Arthur Desmond probably had washboard abs at this point because he rarely got enough money to eat properly.
Sick.
Because he was a poor intermittent fasting.
Which is what happens when you get canceled for plagiarism and wind up working on the docks.
You fast a lot.
You get really sexy.
Oh, I'm sure he was hot as fuck at this point.
Cool.
So, Desmond did not stay in Wellington long.
Desmond's Cynical Profiteering00:15:37
Rather than battle the lawsuits over defamation and plagiarism, Arthur took the route of all great conmen and fled his home country for a less law-bound land.
In his case, it was Australia.
And in Desmond's defense, all Australians are criminals, so it's a solid place to run after being caught committing numerous crimes.
Wow, he went there.
He did.
He did.
And I will go there.
I am firm about Australians being criminals.
Don't let them behind you if you keep your wallet in your back pocket.
Now, Desmond landed in Sydney and immediately got back to the thing he did best: rabble-rousing.
Arthur befriended the leading men in Australia's labor movement, including two guys who would go on to become Australian prime ministers.
He started writing articles and poems again, and by 1889, he was known as the poet of revolution.
In my opinion, he was pretty good.
I'm going to read one piece he published in Reynolds' newspaper.
I think he gets better at this point.
So we'll see how you think, Jamie.
We'll see.
We'll see.
I kind of like some of them.
Like, yo-ho, bitch, it's good.
Okay, go.
So here's a poem he wrote.
Yeah.
I don't need your shit, Sophie.
I'm going to read a poem.
I'm going to read a goddamn poem.
Go read a poem.
Express yourself.
As you were, my son.
Some slay with sword.
Come on.
Some slay with sword and some with words.
Some have no battle plan.
Some stab with venom's subtle word.
Each does the best he can.
And each man gets what he can win, great wealth, great love, or fame.
The conqueror gets his just reward.
The conquered gets his shame.
And weak ones wear a crown of thorns or bleat in living hell.
The strong man crowns himself with gold in all the world as well.
And each man gains what others lose, no use to reason why.
Each plants his heel on fallen foes by love or law or lie.
It's a little poem.
Kind of dark.
That's really good.
It's interesting.
I mean, you can see where his ideology has started to move on from like this sort of like habitual support of the working class and like anti-elite to like this, the strong get what they can take and that's sort of normal.
Like he's starting to like he's, he's gotten jaded at this point.
Um, so he's in his like moody poetry period.
Yeah yeah he's he's he's, he's gotten he's, he's turning emo a little bit.
The yo-hos are gone.
He's on the money wave now and okay okay, he does change up his rhyme scheme.
He does.
Yeah he, he took poetry two and he's like, oh there's, he's, taking poetry three in a minute here.
It's uncool to rhyme yo-ho with yo-ho hey hey, this podcast is pro rhyming yo-ho with yo-ho.
That's fair.
Now Desmond starts another newspaper at this point named HARD CASH.
Uh, Takfer describes it as a journal of finance and politics published in Sydney.
Desmond was clever as an accountant and his articles on how money rules the world were well watched by businessmen.
Now Desmond's like HARD CASH was filled with like tips about which banks were going to go up and like where you should pull your money out of and which companies were gonna take downturns, and he developed a reputation of being incredibly accurate.
So he starts making a lot of money off of this because both, like working class people will buy it to know like, how to protect their money or what banks to pull it out of, but also, like the capitalist class starts buying it because he's just, he's always he's pretty much always right about these things and the police wind up on his tail because they're like, number one, how the fuck does this guy know all this stuff?
And number two, he's like causing runs on banks by telling people to pull their money out of banks and stuff um, and he's also kind of making himself very comfortable by selling this, this journal.
So he's gone from like a labor organizer fighting for the rights of the indigenous people to like advising people on how to make a killing in the stock market.
Essentially like that would be the modern um comparison okay, but he's he seems to be doing it with an eye towards fucking up the economy um, so he's, he's still kind of an anti-capitalist guy, but he's also profiting heavily off of his anti-capitalism right.
That's kind of how I translate it.
Yeah okay, okay.
So we're not.
I'm not, i'm not totally lost yet.
Okay, not totally lost Yet.
But you're also trouble on the horizon.
Trouble on the horizon.
He's getting more, more cynical and kind of profiteering off of his activism.
Yeah.
Which, you know, you could look at it.
He always was sort of doing that.
It's a little hard to tell because we don't have huge amounts of information about his earlier life.
It honestly sounds like he just wants to be a poet, but is like, oh, I guess I have to do this other stuff to, you know, like keep my poetry career moving.
Yeah, yeah.
He's got to start the Wall Street Journal in order to get his poems published.
Yeah, that's kind of what's going on here.
Okay.
Now, as an illegal magazine, Hard Cash was printed on a secret printing press, hidden inside a cave at a place called West's Bush in Paddington, because Australia is a ridiculous place.
The Australian Justice Department tried to shut it down.
They weren't able to track down Arthur Desmond because at this point, he was pretty good at avoiding the law.
However, they succeeded in arresting several other organizers who wrote for hard cash.
And these people stuck with Desmond.
They wouldn't give him up to the police, but Desmond kind of abandons them immediately.
He's just fucking in the wind.
So his conspirators get six-month sentences and get charged with libeling the prime minister.
And Desmond flees from the law and keeps writing revolutionary articles.
In the early 1890s, he joined up with the Active Service Brigade, which was, and by some accounts, he actually created the Active Service Brigade.
And this is an anarchist political action group.
Now, I've read two different sort of descriptions of what this was.
The pro-radical politics description is that conservative politicians were infiltrating labor groups and left-wing groups with hidden paid informants and stuff.
And the active service brigade would go in there and beat the shit out of those people and protect labor organizing meetings to ensure free speech.
And the other description of what happened is that he started a group of people who would beat the fuck out of anyone they disagreed with who tried to run for political office and like break up conservative political rallies.
I have no idea which is the actual case.
Okay.
Probably a lot of both, to be honest.
Yeah, it doesn't sound like either scenario is entirely likely.
A little bit of a he-said, she said nature to that.
Yeah, I'm going to guess the conservatives are like fucking around and trying to infiltrate left-wing political groups, and the active service brigade ferrets those guys out.
And I'm also going to guess they beat the shit out of a lot of people who just disagree with them because Arthur Desmond's kind of a dick.
Yes.
Kind of.
I mean, he only becomes a famous Nazi.
Yeah, he does become a famous Nazi.
I can't say which version of events is true, but probably both, right?
That's usually the case with situations like this.
Yeah.
Now, on paper, the ideals of the active service brigade were high.
They claimed to stand for free speech and attempted to, quote, change the present competitive system into a cooperative social system.
Those lofty goals stood in contrast to the deep economic depression that was then sweeping through Australia.
Banks were collapsing, in part due to the work that Arthur Desmond had carried out as the editor of Hard Cash.
Swish.
And yeah, Desmond finally was arrested in the early 1890s, not for running an illegal newsletter, but for writing going bunk in chalk on the wall of a bank, which seems to have been like part of an yeah, he was like writing that a bank was about to run out of money, basically.
So he's trying to create a run on the bank by putting this graffiti up.
And he gets busted for that.
But he got busted for a banksy crime?
Yeah, he did.
He did.
I mean, like, it's definitely more radical than Banksy.
He was actually trying to destroy a bank by doing this.
Yeah.
Like, this is the 1890s.
Everything was easier.
No, that's hardcore.
I mean, I'm back.
Yeah.
It is an easier era when you could like fuck a bank up by writing it's out of money on the side and chalk.
And people know the people just learned to read.
They won't believe it.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
So he did a little bit of graffiti.
He did a little bit of graffiti.
Yeah.
Nice.
Yeah.
Now, the government obviously hated Desmond's anarchist group, as all the governments hate all anarchists doing anything.
Desmond was repeatedly accused of sundry dynamite plots.
And it's anyone's advice as to whether or not he actually tried to blow anything up with dynamite.
To be honest, probably.
Yeah, I mean, he sounds like that guy.
He does sound like that guy.
Dynamite plan.
And there was a lot of anarch all over the world at this point, late 1890s, early 1900s.
There's a lot of anarchists blowing a lot of things up with a lot of dynamite.
Like when dynamite first gets made, they didn't think that like there's this interesting period in history when like they know how to make really effective explosives that anyone can use, but there also aren't laws against anything.
So it's like dynamite gets made and they're like, well, I guess we should just sell this to everybody.
And it leads to some problems.
Just a little.
Yeah.
Jeez.
Okay.
Yeah.
He's a dye.
I believe 100% that he's a dynamite guy.
There's a really good chance he's a dynamite guy for sure.
For sure.
I have no trouble believing that.
No.
Now, throughout all this, Desmond continued to fight to convince the laboring class to rebel against their capitalist masters.
In 1893, he wrote another poem titled Labor Song for the hilariously named Wagga Worker, which I assume makes more sense if you understand Australia.
Wagga Worker?
Okay.
The Wagga Worker.
It's cute, right?
It's like a baby.
It's like a baby trying to say MAGA.
He's a Wagga Worker.
This is definitely the opposite of MAGA, though.
Well, Robert, turn the M upside down.
What do you have?
Wago.
Exactly.
Obviously.
You could tell where he's headed.
Wait, are we going to read another poem?
Oh, you bet your ass we're going to read another poem, Jamie Loftus.
So this was published along with a short one-sentence editorial that just said, if you vote for the government, you vote for your own coffin political.
So now, here I'm going to read Labor Song.
Above the Senate's brawl, the maddening roar for gain.
Do you hear the Christmas carol, the felons clanking chains?
Beyond yon prison walls, your leg-ironed comrade slaves, while here in marble walls are harlots, knights, and knaves.
Your comrades rot in jail, the hungry cry for bread.
Your wives are thin and pale, their hearts are filled with dread.
And earth resounds with praise in holy, heavenly tones, while tigers prowl the land to crush your children's bones.
Ho, men of New South Wales, hark, hear the fetters clink.
Are you but eunuch churls that only scream and slink?
If you were virile men, you'd raise your strong right arm, beard tigers in their den to guard your mates from harm.
You live the life of dogs, you tug and scat and strain.
You back the slaver flogs while raking in his gain.
You see your sisters starve.
You see them on the marts.
You hear the tigers snarl while rending out their hearts.
Oh, men of New South Wales, behold your ruffian horde who spurn you with their hoof and bash you with the sword.
Behold the butcher band that sheer and tan your hide.
Have you not grit to stand and tame their wolfish pride?
You rise to voice your wrongs.
They club you for your pains.
Wheel out their murderous guns to scatter, splash your brains.
They steal your public lands.
They steal the cash you earn.
Ho, cringe to their commands.
You're only dogs, not men.
In glattering halls they feast, harlots, knights, and knaves, while inside prison walls, your leg-ironed comrade slaves.
Ho, men of New South Wales, hark, hear the fetters clink.
Are ye but eunuch slaves that only scream and slink?
I liked that one.
That was a better poem, right?
He's gotten dead.
I was trying to, but no, that one slaps.
That's a good one.
All right.
That's a good poem.
And you can see where he's, he's like, he's still a labor guy.
He's still on the side of like the working man, but he's like pissed off.
He's like, why won't people fucking rebel?
Like, this shit's been fucked up for so long.
He just keeps people dickless.
He's just like, you fucking eunuchs.
If you were slaborers, yeah.
Yeah, he's just had some fucking dick.
He's definitely like a misogynist at this point, but it's the fucking 1880s.
What do you want?
What you're doing?
Yeah, it's the 1880s.
Right.
Okay, so everyone's a misogynist, and that's normal and good.
And we love that.
It's not normal.
Like, in fairness, like people like Emma Goldman, like, there's a lot of anarchists who are actually like kind of radical about gender equality at this point, but Arthur Desmond is not one of them.
He's not.
I genuinely did.
I liked that one.
Yeah, it was a good poem.
I liked the part where I was like, I don't know.
I don't know.
And then it said, crush a child's bones.
And I was like, all right, I like it.
Fuck yeah.
Yeah.
No, it's you can, you can, there's something like that's kind of understandable there if you like like most of us I think have like looked out at the world recently, been like why the fuck are we letting this shit happen?
Like that's that, that's an understandable impulse to be like frustrated by that after so many years.
Yeah no, I like it.
Yeah, you know what I like Jamie, what tell me.
Tell me, I know products and services.
Yeah, you know what.
You know what won't crush your children's bones.
The advertisers or, depending on what you're in the market for.
Yeah, they might crush your bones, might crush your bones.
You got to be careful.
The dick, the dick pills will give you a bone to crush.
Well there, that could just be a service too.
Crushing your child's bones?
Oh, I wish we advertised for dominatrixes, but not the ones that crush children's bones, just adult bones.
I was thinking recently, I wish that a taxidermist would sign on with our show.
I think oh, wouldn't that be cool?
It would be really nice if there was like a punk rock uh, taxidermist that was willing to.
Yeah, put in Bechdel cast and and 15 off your taxidermied cocker spaniel.
I i'm interested in.
Like the, the ads you'd read for that.
Do you have too many animal corpses in your freezer that honestly, I wanted to get my hamster taxidermied and then I forgot that she was in my freezer and then I just kind of flung her out the window.
Solid, really solid.
I dug a small hole, but I didn't put in the effort I was planning.
Yeah, we all dig a lot of small holes in our lives, which is why we all need the products and services that support this show.
Gorgeous Pivot, thank you products.
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.
They said, oh hell no, I vowed I will be his last target.
He's gonna get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me babe, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
The Phantom and AI Responsibility00:02:34
I'm Lori 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.
Share each day 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.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Stirner Ahead of His Time00:09:25
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, 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 in life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
Yes.
So, by this point in time, Arthur Desmond has written his first poem that appeals to Jamie Loftus.
So I'm glad we finally got there.
I finally stand.
You finally stand, Arthur Desmond.
So as you can see by that poem, he was pretty well on his way to being very disenchanted with left-wing politics.
You can hear the frustration and rage at the broader masses of the working class and their failure to rise up in revolution.
The Labor government in Australia's mild reforms had taken much of the wind out of the left sales.
And after 1893, Desmond's writings grew more defamatory towards elected leaders and markedly more anti-Semitic.
His authoritarian tendencies also grew more and more pronounced.
And it's here that we're going to get into some real fun left-wing political theory discussion.
Do you love political theory, Jamie?
Love it.
Yeah.
Now, Desmond was definitely like in the anarchist sort of strain of thought by this point in time, but obviously that body of political theory is pretty wide.
There's a lot of different types of anarchists.
And the particular variety Desmond seemed to be most sympathetic to is called egoism.
Now, the simple, partly accurate summary of egoism is the idea that self-interest should be the foundation of morality.
And like the more positive way to translate that is that like systems that force people to act against their own self-interest, like capitalism forcing a laborer to work in a deadly mine in order to make ends meet, like that's fundamentally unethical because it forces people to act against their self-interest.
There's got to be a better name for it than egoism.
It needs work.
Yeah.
It needs work.
You've got some notes on this fringe political theory.
Yeah.
Now, lefty politics is a complex galaxy of frustratingly different belief systems, most of which sound like nonsense to anyone who hasn't read a bunch of books by dead men.
My definition of egoism isn't even super accurate to the egoism practiced by most egoists today because there's roughly as many different branches of that theory as there are egoists, which is to say, about 50.
Is there like egoist Twitter?
Yeah, there sure is.
Oh, yeah, they fucking love.
There's this guy, Max Stirner, who's like probably the most well-known egoist philosopher.
There's a big chunk of people on Twitter who fucking love his shit.
Okay.
Which I don't understand and will not attempt to analyze.
But he was a big influence on Arthur Desmond.
Stirner wrote a book called The Ego and His Own.
And I, yeah, again, I don't really understand Stirner's writings.
They seem kind of like, I don't know, like nonsense to me.
But I did find a summary of it by a group of hardcore libertarians with the American Institute for Economic Research.
Scary.
Max Stirner's individualist anarchism is a way to overcome the horrors of the modern state.
He envisions a union of rational egoists in a society that does not need a ruler.
The community of rational egoists is a universal commercial society.
In fact, the more a society is based on voluntary exchange, the less right it is and thus less effective the force.
Individualist anarchism carries its purpose in itself and does not serve a higher end.
The rational egoist will respect the rights of others because he respects himself.
He will not be violent because he does not want to be attacked.
This attitude of the individual anarchist stands in sharp contrast to the destructive role of the collectivist entities.
Individual egoism is the answer to the egoism of the collectives.
Stirner wrote, my cause is neither the divine nor the human.
It is not the true, the good, the right, the free, etc., but only mine, and it is not universal, but it is unique, like me, as I am only I. Nothing goes beyond me and myself.
I know, right?
I don't like him.
No, I don't like him either.
I don't like him.
He doesn't seem like he would be.
I don't agree with him, and I don't think he'd be fun to be around.
Well, and it's the way that Stirner writes is kind of so broad that there's like a right-wing and a left-wing interpretation of the same book that come to really different conclusions because there's a lot of Stirnerist egoists who are not at all the pro-capitalism interpretation and who take a totally different message from it.
Again, I've tried to read the book and I just decided to go read about the Syrian Civil War more because that's more uplifting.
It's just, it's frustrating to me.
I don't like political theory.
I kind of doubt that Desmond subscribed to the libertarian interpretation of Stirner's ideas because of his hatred of capitalism.
And also, he was not at all an advocate of nonviolence.
And in fact, in the early 1890s, he increasingly became an advocate for extreme violence.
He started to write lovingly of man as the fighting, roving, pillaging, lusting, cannibalistic animal par excellence.
So he definitely takes a lot of these egoist ideas in, but he is not the pacifist kind.
He's not the, oh, if I don't hurt anyone, they won't hurt me.
He's the kill and rape and Conan the Barbarian kind of fucking egoist.
So that's where this guy starts turning as his frustration against the failure of the labor movement to rise up like builds.
Right.
Okay.
Yeah.
During his last months in Australia, Arthur Desmond started to publish a 25-page tract, The Survival of the Fittest, which outlines some of his new ideas.
In it, he wrote about man's desire to destroy as the thing that makes him the absolute monarch of the world.
Now, Desmond was not the progressive sort of lefty either.
He viewed women as frail beings at the best of times and wrote, for the welfare of the breeds and the security of dissent, they must be held through subjection.
He promised disaster would follow if, quote, ever these lovable creatures should break loose from mastership and become the rulers or equals of man.
Was he single for most of his life?
Yeah.
He did marry a girl that was like 20-something years younger than him when he was an old man, and then she left very quickly after that.
Jesus.
And she died in a sanitarium.
He does sound absolutely unlovable.
I will say that.
Yeah.
He sounds hard to get along with.
Yeah.
You get that feeling from the guy.
Yeah.
Okay.
So he's single and he doesn't like it.
He's single and he does not.
Yeah, there's actually a lot of incel stuff coming.
Yeah, it's like you can just feel like she's frail and I actually don't even fucking care, but I'm just waiting because it needs to be said.
One of the things that's interesting about Might is Right, which we're going to cover the book in a lot of detail in part two.
He kind of predicted 30% of the internet and not the good 30%.
You know what 30% is.
Impressive, but not good.
He's ahead of his time, but not in a positive sense of that phrase.
Like he's ahead.
He's ahead of his time in the same way that the guys in the 1890s who imagined the mass bombing campaigns that would be the future of warfare were ahead of their time.
Like they were right, but not in a good way.
But not in the incredible.
And also, it's like, and also, I mean, good for you for predicting something terrible that people were powerless to.
Yeah.
So Desmond had other influences besides Sterner.
And again, I don't want to leave people with the impression that Max Stirner would have necessarily supported Desmond's conclusions about women and all of this stuff.
Like this is just like, yeah, I'm not, I don't know enough about Sterner to say that.
But that is what Desmond takes out of the writing.
Yeah, Desmond's opinions on women seem more like a him thing.
Yeah, that was going on way before he started identifying as an egoist, too.
He was always...
Yeah.
There's a lot of, you know, male poets who feel that way.
No.
Misogynist male poets?
You would be shocked.
I'm not even thinking of anyone.
Oh, I am thinking of someone.
Okay, never mind.
Go ahead.
I'm going to keep standing my woke king, Ruyard Kipling, who I think is fair to describe as the least racist man in history.
Oh, there you go.
Yeah.
Let's not fact-check that at all.
Yeah, let's not fact-check that in any way, shape, or form.
No, let's not.
Desmond had other influences besides Stirner.
Charles Darwin's writings on natural selection impressed upon him an almost religious belief in the importance of survival of the fittest, which is never a good set of thoughts to head too far down.
He also devoured Nietzsche, particularly the anti-Semitic bits of Nietzsche's theory.
All this, combined with his increasingly rabid disdain for the placid working class, turned Desmond from a labor organizer into a man who believed, quote, it is natural for men of power to rule feeble men.
Okay.
Yeah.
In 1894, the police finally got close enough to catching Arthur that he was forced to flee to Britain.
We don't know precisely what he did during this period.
There are stories that he traveled to Manchuria and South Africa, getting up to God knows what.
By the time he landed in North America in 1895, he had made the full transition from union man to leftist revolutionary to nihilistic egoist.
He settled in Chicago and almost immediately published a book, The Survival of the Fittest, in 1896.
We actually have one of the newspaper ads for this tome, and boy is it something.
So this is actually for a later version of the book when he changed the title to Might is Right, but it's still a good note to end on.
Arthur Fled to Britain00:08:51
So I'm going to read, I want Sophie to show you that ad and I'm going to read it out.
So it says in big capital letters, Might is Right!
The only book of its kind ever printed.
If you don't like this book, don't keep it.
Send it back at once, and I will refund your money and pay postage both ways.
Might is Right, or Survival of the Fittest by Ragnar Redbeard.
This is an historical and scientific re-vindication of the grand old Anglo-Saxon war philosophy.
They can take who have the power and they can keep who can.
In rugged boldness of style and volcanic energy of thought, this epic marking volume is without doubt the most remarkable pronouncement that has appeared in Christendom for 15 centuries.
Ragnar Redbeard, taking up the thread of Darwinism where Spencer in fear and trembling laid it down, points out that the higher type of organism is the warrior and that battle is the process ordained by nature for dividing the born subordinates and cowards from born nobles and proprietors.
Then war for life and land and love for women, power, and gold.
This earth and all its treasures vast is booty for the bold.
Booty for the bold.
Okay.
Yeah.
I mean, I like the colour.
Yeah, the cartoon of the cowboy on his horse.
I'm like, this is just a throbbing penis of an advertisement.
It was like, hey!
This is just, he could have just published a picture of his dick in the paper and it would have worked out the same.
Booty for the bold.
Booty for the barrel.
Like in the opening of the ad, he also gets defensive for no reason.
He's like, yeah, this book fucking rules.
If you don't like it, you can return it.
Like, what is it about?
Bitch.
I don't know if I'll like it.
He's like, no.
Like, he's anticipating rejection.
How could you not like it?
Look at the fucking cowboy.
And he's like, and I would be fucking remiss if I didn't include a little bit of a poem.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And you can see the cowboy drawing clearly has a big beard.
Yeah.
I think that's him as a cowboy.
Branding.
Yeah.
God.
So you love it.
You love it, Jamie.
You're going to be so frustrated next episode.
We're going to read a lot from Mita's right next episode.
And you are going to be beside yourself.
I can't believe it.
This is like the fucking founding father of incels and like the fucking worst parts of the alt-right.
Like, how could I not read this to you, Jamie?
It's true.
It does upset me the most.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, he had a good run there for a little while.
He had a good run there for a little while.
And then he became the patron saint of men who have a pile of cum socks beside their bed next to their rifle.
Just like, yeah, just like a gun next to a petrified sock.
Just one that doesn't flop if you pick it up.
The sock is the best case scenario.
The worst case scenario is it's one of those anime pillows.
Oh, no.
Yeah.
If he'd been born in modern times, Desmond would have definitely fucked a pillow with a Japanese waifu girl on it.
He would have, yeah, he would have gotten one of the pillows with the holes in it.
He would have had one of those.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Well, you know.
Arthur Desmond confirmed for pillow fucking.
Yeah, and I'm not saying pillow fucking is a bad thing.
I'm just saying he fits the bill.
He fits the bill.
Now, Jamie, in our next episode, we're going to go into detail about what exactly Arthur laid out in his manifesto, how it was received, and how it continues to influence people today.
But that's all going to come on Thursday.
For now, Jamie Loftus, it's time for you to deliver your manifesto in the form of plug-in yo pluggables.
Okay, pluggables.
I wanted to plug Ragnar Redbeard's SoundCloud, of course.
Everyone, I haven't listened to it yet, but I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
Please hit my mentions.
I will forget that I said this and I will be confused.
I'm on Twitter at Jamie LoftusHelp.
And you can listen to me on the Bechdel cast every Thursday at, oh, wait, isn't that every Thursday, period?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's it.
And if you're in New York or LA, I'm doing my one-person show that is basically Elizabeth Holmes in October.
So you can come.
Elizabeth Holmes would have really appreciated the wisdom in Midas, right?
She seems about just delusional enough to be into it.
Oh, brother.
You cannot find me on SoundCloud.
Although, once I get canceled, I do plan to start a second career as a SoundCloud rapper.
That would be a great place for you to retreat to.
Yeah.
You can find me on Twitter when I get unbanned.
Yeah, what's going on?
Well, Jamie, I posted a link to an article that I wrote about a terrorist attack.
Oh, they hate that.
Twitter banned me for that.
Yeah, yeah.
They hate it when you hate when you report the truth.
That's bad.
When you write...
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's it's it's it's fun.
Um, but you can find me presumably by the time this airs, hopefully, on Twitter at iWriteOK.
You can find this podcast on Twitter at Behind the Bad or at Bastards Pod.
Jesus Christ.
You can find us on the internet at behindthebastards.com, along with the sources for this article.
You can buy t-shirts.
You can buy cups.
You can buy branded tasers, tear gas grenades, whips and chains, everything you need to make might write in your life off of teapublic.com.
Just look up Behind the Bastards.
Terrifying.
Yeah.
Terrifying.
Well, what else, Robert?
What is there something else, Sovi?
Yeah, don't you have another podcast with Katie Stoll and Cody Johnston?
Those names aren't familiar to me.
What's happening?
Whom?
Maybe does one pump, one cream mean anything to you, sir?
Now that now you're speaking my language.
I also have a podcast with Cody Johnson and Katie Stoll about the 2020 election called Worst Year Ever because it will be the worst year ever.
So you can get started this year with some useful information to help arm you with knowledge for next year so that you don't have to arm yourself with sticks and spears in 2021.
So that's the end of the fucking episode.
Next episode, we'll have more poems.
Oh, good.
Yo-ho.
Yo-ho.
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.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
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 in life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Ray Gillespie and Michael Rancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots five, city hall building.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
I screamed, get down, get down, those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery 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.