Robert and Jamie dissect Arthur Desmond, the criminal grifter behind Might Is Right, whose pseudonym Ragnar Redbeard fueled toxic masculinity. They expose Desmond's plagiarized, racist text as a blueprint for Anton LaVey's Satanic Bible and modern white nationalist groups like the "Red Beard Right," linked to Santino Legan. The hosts argue that figures like Desmond and Jason Kessler pivot from failed leftist activism to violent nihilism driven by narcissism, validating primal anger without introspection. Ultimately, this lineage reveals how unexamined rage transforms into dangerous ideology, connecting early 20th-century grifters to contemporary extremism. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego 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.
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It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
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What?
Filling, Jesus, I don't know how to open this one.
I was going to make like a claim about like a joke about cum socks or something for the introduction because it's part two of our socks.
I'm ejaculating my cum socks.
Sophie, is that a good introduction?
The Archetype of Bullshit00:16:14
Not your best.
Not my best.
Oh, that was Jamie.
I pulled back.
What's squirting my cum socks?
Way better.
What's Jamie?
This was the introduction equivalent of that scene in Footloose where the two tractors are racing towards each other and then like one pulls away.
And I pulled away.
I pulled away in the game of unfortunate cum introduction based chicken and you did not.
No, I refuse to back down.
And I think I'm reaping the rewards as we speak.
So this is Behind the Bastards, the podcast where our introductions are increasingly unhinged and inaccessible to new listeners.
This is part two of our two-part episode on Arthur Desmond, author of Might is Right, the book that inspired the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting and a bunch of other stuff.
I don't want to like spoil the end, but this is a lot of where the Church of Satan comes from too.
So it's going to be cool.
Oh, yeah, baby.
Yeah.
Maybe we get through the whole first episode without okay.
Okay.
Yeah.
All right.
Buckle in.
Okay.
Strap together.
Belt down.
Yeah.
Yep.
Tape it back on.
Tape it back on.
Yeah, that's one way to say get it together, right?
Throw a wrench at it.
Yeah.
All of those are synonyms for get your shit roll out.
Throw a wrench at it.
All right.
It's time for part two.
Okay.
Might is right was originally published under the title The Survival of the Fittest.
It first existed, as I stated, as a 25-page pamphlet Desmond printed out while he lived in Sydney.
It wasn't until 1896 that the full book was published, and the final edition of Desmond's Life was published in around 1903 under the title Might is Right.
It's here I should note that not everyone agrees about the purpose behind this book.
While most folks seem to accept that Desmond meant everything he wrote, there's a sizable chunk of people who do think that this was a work of satire and that he was actually making fun of the kind of people that you and I find so frustrating.
They'll argue that Desmond was actually a committed socialist to the death and that Might is Right was basically him mocking the extremes of the politics that he hated.
Well, if so, irresponsible satirist.
If so, nobody got the joke because everyone takes it seriously.
Yeah.
But also, looking at Home Dude's life, there's a pretty natural evolution from like labor warrior to guy who just thinks that you should punch each other to determine who gets things.
Yeah, I don't.
I mean, that's a very, that's a very forgiving interpretation.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That it is.
And I think the people who consider it satire, I think in part, they just don't want to believe that anyone could take this book seriously, but I've spent a lot of time on the stupid parts of the internet and people take way dumber shit seriously.
They're like, he's got to be joking.
There's no way.
I mean, you do have to appreciate that he went back and he changed the title to something like punchier, too.
Might is right.
Yeah, he got notes.
Yeah, exactly.
They're like, survival of the fittest.
You know, it's kind of been done, it's kind of been said.
I'm going to guess he like rolled down to the gym and was like, did anybody read my book?
And there was just like a guy punching it being like, no, I don't read science books.
And I was like, but what if it rhymed, right?
What if it rhymed?
He's a poet.
Because he's a poet.
He's a poet.
And he knows it.
He's a shitty poet.
I wonder.
I wonder.
Does his poetry get better or worse, do you think, as he slowly becomes a Nazi?
I think Labor Song, the poem that you liked with the kids getting eaten.
The children's bones.
I think that's, yeah, the children's bones.
I think that's his high point as a poet.
Okay.
Looking forward to future work.
I'm about to read another poem.
Although it's not really a poem.
It's just sort of like flowery language.
I'm going to read how the book's introduction starts.
In this arid wilderness of steel and stone, I raise up my voice that you may hear.
To the east and to the west I beckon.
To the north and to the south I show a sign, proclaiming death to the weakling, wealth to the strong.
Open your eyes that you may hear.
That doesn't make any sense.
O men of mildewed minds, and listen to me, ye laborous millions.
For I stand forth to challenge the wisdom of the world, to interrogate the laws of man and of God.
I request reasons for your golden rule and ask why and wherefore of your ten commands.
Before none of your printed idols do I bend in acquiescence, and he who saith, thou shalt to me is my mortal foe.
I demand proof over all things and accept with reservations even that which is true.
I dip my forefinger into the watery blood of your impotent mad redeemer, your divine Democrat, your Hebrew madman, and write over his thorn-torn brow, the true prince of evil, the king of the slaves.
No.
Yeah, he's not.
He's real anti-Jesus and also anti-Semitic.
And they are both very much intertwined.
I was like, there it goes, and he's off.
That is.
We are off to the races.
That is bad on so many levels.
He's also obsessed with like, he's like, oh, you thin-blooded, like, there's just all this weird coded language for emasculation.
Like, how do you even think of that?
It's like when you go on an incel board and like, how would you think to describe something like that?
You're thinking about it too hard, my friend.
Yeah, it's um that like this is the problem.
I think like back in the day, Desmond was the only guy thinking like this because he was the only one spending all this time alone in front of a piece of paper writing out his crazy thoughts.
Right.
Um, but but now with the internet, people like you have whole communities of people who are thinking along the same lines and they just drive because like Desmond would have looked at the stuff Incels write about how like, oh no, dude, you've got this classification of chin and so you're gonna die alone because your chin's like an A3 and you gotta have an A6 or better chin in order to like get a girl.
Desmond would have looked at that and been like, what the fuck is wrong with you people?
But that's, you know, you can't have that without the internet.
This is as far into those territories as you got back then.
I say you leave him on those boards for a couple weeks, he would start to see.
He would start to see the darkness.
He might.
You do get that feeling from him that if he'd had the internet, he would have been pretty hardcore Elliot Rogers.
It does seem like every time he has like a lost year or two, he pivots intensely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I suspect he's spending a lot of alone time in those years.
Well, he's not good for him.
Absolutely not fucking.
That I can say pretty soon.
He is absolutely not fucking.
Arthur Desmond did not fuck.
And rightfully so.
Except for his pillow.
He's a loser.
Yeah.
Sorry.
No, we're very glad that he did not fuck much.
Yeah, for the betterment of everyone.
Now, the anti-Semitism is really stark to us because we come from a somewhat saner time where that's less common.
But in an era where that was more common, you can kind of see how the language and theme would be compelling to a lot of people in an era with a stricter social hierarchy and strong ideas of the place of religion, the family, the social order.
This is a time like the early 1900s when a lot of philosophies based on tearing it all down are gaining an ascendancy, not just sort of like different strains of anarchism, but like that's what socialism is about.
And that's kind of where like fascism comes from too.
So you can see where, why this would be compelling to a lot of people.
Yes.
Yeah.
Now, all that said, like as much bullshit as they're in there, there are like pieces of stuff in here that like I find compelling, or at least that I think I, in an earlier, dumber stage of my development, I would have found compelling.
Like there's stuff in here that's tailor-made to like latch onto the brains of 18-year-old kind of narcissistic kids who are like starting to read books that are like outside of the mainstream.
Yeah, the college freshman continues to be a little bit more.
And this is where we're building.
Exactly.
There's stuff in here that's made for that.
And I'm going to read one of those quotes now that like you can see why you can you can imagine the kind of person that this is electric to.
Okay.
In the nursery, at school and at college, plastic brain pulp is deliberately forced into the prearranged mold.
Everything that a corrupt civilization can do is done to compress the growing intellect into unnatural channels.
Thus, the great mass of men who inhabit the world of today have no initiative, no originality or independence of thought, but are mere subjective individualities who have never had the slightest voice in fashioning the ideals they formally revere.
So that's just like, yeah, it's just like adult, like your parents are stupid.
Your parents are so dumb.
And society is bullshit, man.
God, if I have to, yeah, it sounds like serious Gen X ideology of like, you know, your parents who loved you?
Fuck them.
Yeah.
Love it.
Fuck them.
Fuck them.
Those Ikea shoppers.
Yeah, yeah.
And there's, Desmond's a weird writer.
Like, there's single lines in here that are actually like really good lines, good turns of phrase.
And then like, you know, yo-ho bullshit.
Like, he's weird.
Like, it's, if he'd had an editor writer, he's a bad writer.
He's a bad writer with snatches of like really good turns of phrase.
So I'm going to read a paragraph that's complete nonsense and then ends on what I consider to be a pretty fun line.
Okay.
Mankind is a weary, a weary of its sham prophets, its demagogues, and its statesmen.
It crieth out for kings and heroes.
demands an ability, an ability that cannot be hired with money, like slaves or beasts of burden.
The world awaits the coming of mighty men of valor, great destroyers, destroyers of all that is vile, angels of death.
We are sick unto nausea of the good Lord Jesus, terror-stricken under that executive of priest, mob, and pro-consul.
We are tired to death of equality.
Gods are at a discount.
Devils are in demand.
Fun last line.
Okay.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But like, it's, he never had an editor.
And so.
No, he didn't.
Yeah, yeah.
But that is something.
In order to have an editor, you do have to have a friend.
And it seems unlikely.
He never had a friend.
I know.
He actually did have an editor, but I don't know what the fucking guy was doing.
Because there's a lot of nonsense.
And you can see, like, again, where I'm talking about how there's like all sorts of shit in here that's like proto, the stuff that people say online now.
We're tired to death of equality.
Like, that's a major through line in the book of just like the evils of equality.
And yeah, yeah, because yeah, well, Desmond's a big, like, the democracy is bullshit.
Like all of our societal notions of like the inherent equality of mankind is bullshit.
Like women's rights are bullshit.
The only thing that matters is like who can beat up everybody else.
Well, yeah.
Like that's his philosophy.
It's frustrating.
Yeah, that is like big like college, college freshman, like male college freshman energy where it's like, if I only was strong, I just need to get stronger.
I'll fix the world by being very strong.
And I guess like the point I'm making with the, he has odd single lines here that are like catchy is that like it's he's a writer whose writing is made to be like have quotes pulled out and tattooed on the arms of guys at the gym.
Like that's that's that's the kind of writer he is.
Like you can see why individual bits of this would like stick out to people reading it, which is where we're building with this.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
That's what he's good at.
Yeah.
And he also repeats himself constantly.
Every chapter, he repeats every single point that he makes in the entire book, which makes it a slog to read.
But if you're not good at reading, it makes it really easy to get the point driven home to you.
Fun.
Because you only have to read one chapter of this book to kind of get where it's all going.
It's like the secret.
Yeah, exactly.
So yeah, I'm going to read another quote.
This one could have come from a poorly mimeographed sovereign citizen pamphlet in the mid-1990s.
And it's again, like, there's just so much here that seems like directly influenced the modern far right.
The free man is born free, lives free, and dies free.
He is, even though living in an artificial civilization, above all laws, all constitutions, all theories of right and wrong.
He supports and defends them, of course, as long as they suit his own end.
But if they don't, then he annihilates them by the easiest and most direct method.
And you can't be tried under a flag with a fringe.
That means it's a flag of admiralty.
Was this written in all caps?
This sounds like it's a good idea.
He writes like, I've gone to a lot of gun shows in my day, and there's a lot of poorly like Xeroxed pamphlets in them.
Like Arthur Desmond reads like every one of those pamphlets.
Oh my god.
Like there'll be one poll quote on the front and you're like, okay, what's going on here?
And then it's just like fucking nonsense.
Yeah.
Everything he writes just seems like a hymn problem.
It just reeks of a personal issue with something that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's a he's a bitter, angry guy.
And that comes across really fucking clear.
And he's like, and I refuse to work on my personality.
Yeah.
No, The world needs to accept his personality, which is that the government should be based on who can punch best.
God, so many, yeah, so many people have done, like, so many men have done damage based on wanting the world to bend to their shitty personality instead of.
Yeah.
Arthur Desmond is like the fucking archetype of that.
Cool.
Although there's also, like, there's an angle of it that's kind of sad, too, because you can see, like, we covered how he started out as this, like, very pro-labor guy who was like kind of desperately trying to get the working class to like recognize how fucked over it was being by the system they lived under.
And he's completely abandoned that now.
And you can taste the bitterness over that fact in this book.
Right.
I mean, but that's just like a...
That feels just like a lack of commitment to the cause and just being like, I wanted to get all the credit and no one shared.
Sure, there were tons of people who did not give up and who actually made like significant social strides and stuff.
Yeah.
Desmond just, like I said, he didn't have patience.
Like, you know, when he started his political career, there was a point at which he probably could have made himself a career as a politician, gotten into parliament.
But like after the second election didn't quite go his way, he was just like, fuck it.
I'm going to write illegal newspapers.
Yeah.
Which, you know, I like illegal newspapers.
He got involved in the zine community.
We can't slide.
He got involved in the zine community.
Yeah.
Quote, the common people have always had to be befooled with some written or wooden or golden idol, some constitution, declaration, or gospel.
Consequently, the majority of them have ever been mental thralls, living and dying in an atmosphere of strong illusion.
They are befooled and hypnotized even to this hour, and a large proportion of them must remain so until time is no more.
Indeed, the masses of mankind are but the sediment from which all the more valuable elements have been long ago distilled.
They are totally incapable of real freedom.
And if it were granted to them, they would straightaway vote themselves a master or a thousand masters within 24 hours.
Mastership is right.
Mastership is natural.
Mastership is eternal, but only for those who cannot overthrow it and trample it beneath their hooves.
So yeah, that's where he's wound up.
Yeah.
Okay.
I hate him.
I hate him.
Yeah.
He uses the word eunuch a lot in this too.
He's been using the word eunuch a lot the whole time.
Yeah, that he starts using that mainly to refer to Christianity.
So like it'll be, he'll, he'll focus on like like it's Hebrew and it's like eunuch and it's like, yeah, he thinks it's dickless.
That's his number one insult.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, I know what you're wondering, Jamie.
Is this book racist as fuck?
And yes.
No.
It is absolutely racist as fuck.
Okay.
Are all men really brethren?
Negro and Indian?
Black fellow?
Kalmuck?
I don't even know what a Kalmuck is.
And Cooley?
The well-born and the basebread?
The beer-soaked loafer and the hero-hearted patriot-belted chieftain and ignoble mechanic slave?
Pot of iron and pot of clay.
That's a sentence.
Like, that's a fucking, that's a single sentence.
He wrote that down, Robert.
He wrote that down and was like, people have to read this.
People have to know.
I had to read this.
No one else has to read this.
Please don't read this.
There's no need to read it.
And then going, I mean, it's like, if you think that that is the content of it, and then you read the marketing for how important he clearly thought the book was.
Pages on Cannibalism00:06:16
Yeah, no one's ever had these thoughts before.
Yeah, he's like, my cool idea.
Racism.
He would have had so many fucking fight club posters up in his bedroom right next to the pile of socks as stiff as particle boards.
Petrified socks and a million snake flags.
I just, yeah.
Yeah.
Now, Might is right is on balance extremely repetitive.
Desmond does attempt to cite history and science in his arguments, but he never goes into any meaningful detail because he clearly only has a shallow understanding for anything that he references.
Cool.
One good example is this line.
The big fish eat the little fish.
The big trees, by absorbing them and monopolizing the nutriment, eat up the little trees.
The strong animals eat the weak animals and so on.
And ad infinitum, which is not how forests work.
Not entirely how fish work even.
Or even animals.
Like, yeah, it's just it with such all-capped confidence that you're like, does he know something I don't?
And then it's like, no, he's gaslighting you.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, some of that may just have been honest ignorance about the way forests work out.
Of course, the big trees are eating the little trees.
That's how it works.
Isn't it crazy how, like, yeah, you're just like, oh, he's gaslighting me.
You're like, no, he's not even that smart.
He can't even.
He's not even that smart.
I don't understand.
He just looked at a big tree next to a little tree and was like, well, that big one's eating the little one.
I got to write a book about this shit.
Clearly.
Yeah.
Oh, piece of shit.
All right.
Now, I'm going to guess it didn't surprise you that he was racist.
No.
Will it surprise you to learn that he's very pro-cannibalism?
Yes.
He's super pro-cannibalism.
This is the most pro-cannibalism book I've read.
No, I didn't run into a poem on figure of speech cannibalism.
Like, let's literally.
Like, he talks about cannibalism for pages.
And he never says, like, it's good to eat people, but like, he clearly admires cannibalism.
He clearly thinks about it a lot.
Like, I just read how racist it is.
Like, there's a bunch of lines about how black and white people clearly aren't equal and stuff.
The one time he talks about a non-white group of people positively, he's talking about New Zealand Aboriginals and cannibalism.
Like, that's his one wokest passage is being like, these guys eat people, and that's cool as hell.
And that's fucking metal.
He just sounds like a misguided, like, right-wing metal music.
Oh, God.
Yeah, he's a big cannibalism fan.
Do we clearly?
Do we know why he chose to publish this under a pseudonym other than it's absolutely full of shit?
But it doesn't seem like he thinks that.
So why isn't he willing to put his name on it?
You know, he had a bunch of pseudonyms throughout his life.
I think because he was a criminal.
Yeah.
He was constantly committing crimes.
He is like that.
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
Just curious.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So like, again, cannibalism.
Cannibalism.
Yeah.
He describes them as very intelligent New Zealand Aboriginals when he talks about like their cannibalistic traditions.
And that's the only positive reference to a non-white group of people in the book.
It's like, these guys eat people and that's sick as shit, yo.
Yeah.
I'm like, this is a very like hot topic analysis of cannibalism.
He is so uncomfortable.
Yeah.
I mean, it sounds like a terrible book, but at least there's twists.
I appreciate it.
He stands cannibalism, stannibalism.
Stannibalism.
God.
Okay.
Please don't make that t-shirt.
Please don't like that.
Oh, I am.
It's already his shirt.
I refuse.
Too bad.
Okay.
Arthur Desmond's attitude towards women is another area where his writing seems virtually identical to angry posts on 4chan or Reddit.
Yeah.
So I'm going to read a little bit of that now, Jamie.
Okay, hit it.
A man's family is his property.
It is part of himself.
Therefore, his natural business is to defend it as he would his own life.
Women and children belong to man, who must hunt for them as well as for himself.
He is their lord and master in theory and in fact.
Yeah.
Well, I agree with all of that.
So I don't really know why you were trying to set me off because I agree with it.
I think it's right.
Well, let's see how you feel about this next part.
Yeah.
Women are frail beings at the best of times and in their secret hearts are probably lovers of the unlimited.
For the welfare of the breed and the security of descent, they must be held in thorough subjection.
Man has captured them and besides providing for and protecting them, it is necessary to keep them on the chain, as it were.
Woe to him, woe unto them, and woe unto our race if ever these lovable creatures should break loose from mastership and become rulers or equals of man.
But that is impossible, he adds in parentheses.
I don't like there.
He's talking about women like they're mogwas.
So ugh, icky.
Yeah.
From the earliest ages, man has captured his wife by force or stratagem, and to this day, he does the same.
Marriage ceremonies symbolize his proprietorship, his capture.
The marriage ring is one link of a chain, emblematic of the fact that the prehistoric bridegroom chained his beloved one in a cave so she became tame, tractable, and reciprocative.
I don't know where he came up with that.
This is brutal.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
You would not be wrong to see Ragnar Redbeard as the prototype of the men's rights activist or the incel movement.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I suspect that today he'd be at the very least a very successful grifter in that world.
Yeah.
For example, near the end of the book is this chapter subtitle, Manhood is Demonized, it complains.
All caps king.
It is actually all caps.
Yeah.
Oh, good.
Yeah, it's literally all caps.
Manhood is demonized.
And again, this is like the late 1800s, early 1900s.
It is so, no, but it's also like 2018 in a way.
Yeah, it's very much both of those things.
So we're going to talk, Jamie, about how manhood is demonized.
But first, you know what's not demonized?
Capitalism?
Yeah.
Beat you to it.
Adpug!
Manhood Is Demonized00:10:05
Yes!
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.
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 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 get 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 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.
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.
We're back.
We're back.
We're talking about how manhood is demonized.
Yeah.
I think that, I mean, isn't it, Robert?
Wouldn't you agree?
Haven't you been on the boards?
It's a pretty hot topic of discussion.
It's all I can do to, I don't know, what's a stereotypical thing?
I feel truly like manhood is demonized in all caps sounds like a Reddit post I saw this week.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, literally, I've read variants of that exact sentence a thousand times over the last couple of years.
Okay.
Generally while someone on Facebook was trying to sell me like leather goods and axes and shit because manhood has been very successfully capitalized, which there's a funny bit to that here.
So I'm going to read a quote from that chapter on manhood is demonized.
Sure.
We're living and dying, mostly dying, in a poisonous environment of deep-seated moral dementia, social disease and political illusions.
The righteous and the just, hypocrites, deceivers, enemies of all that is noble, courageous and manly, destroyers of self-assertiveness, annihilators of heroism.
Would that I had a legion of demons to ring neck?
A crucified Jew slave terrorized under authority is set up as a god, a standard of measurement for all mankind.
That is why personal valor and nobility of thought are at such a tremendous discount.
Christendom is bondage.
Manhood is demonetized.
Our waste is betrayed.
Yeah, I think he was trying to say like demonetized, like made into a demon, but it's spelled demonetized.
Yeah.
Like he's PewDiePie.
Manhood is demonetized.
Yeah.
No, man, you can, it's monetized very well ever since.
Yeah.
Okay, so manhood is demonetized.
I would wear that shirt.
Now, what a piece of work.
You would?
I would wear that.
Yeah.
100%.
Yeah.
Now, Jamie, I bet at this point, I know what you're wondering.
How would Arthur Desmond...
How would Arthur Desmond scientifically define a female?
Oh, no.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I really did get like a weird feeling in my stomach when you said that female.
Yeah, I mean, he did.
Yeah, it's gross.
Okay.
Okay.
A woman is primarily a reproductive cell organism, a womb structurally embastioned by a protective, defensive, osseous network surrounded with the antennae and blood vessels necessary for supplying nutriment to the growing ovum or embryo.
That's a woman.
It sounds like a fucking creature from the black lagoon.
What is he?
Oh, that is.
You're just a womb with bones.
You're just a meat prison that's supposed to make me a child.
Yield me in air.
But he...
That is, oh, what a loser.
What a loser.
If he had a counselor or if he had somewhere to express himself.
Yeah.
Maybe this is.
But he did.
Actually, I think him having a place to express himself was the problem.
Well, I think that he certainly shouldn't have had a platform, Robert.
I think he should.
Oh, my God.
Hashtag deplatform Arthur Desmond.
Did he demonetize him?
Deemon.
A stroke did that a while back.
Thankfully.
So, wait, he said women have antenna?
Yeah.
Did he specify where they got him?
Nope.
But you have antenna and blood vessels to supply nutriment to your growing ovum.
Oh.
So congrats on that.
I bet you're happy to learn that.
My ovum stays growing.
So maybe it's the antenna.
You got to check those antenna.
Yep.
So, oh, what a dork.
Wow.
What a dork.
Pathetic.
The more you read Might is Right, the more convinced you become that, among other things, Arthur Desmond was the founding father of all incels.
And this quote, I think, embodies that more than any other.
Strap in.
Okay.
Sexualism and maternity dominate the lives of all true women.
To such an extent is this so that they have very little time left or inclination to think, and therefore they've never been fitted out ab inito with reasoning organs.
Probably this is what Muhammad alluded to when he sentatiously affirmed that women have no soul.
Even in man, the soul is probably a fiction, but in woman, its absence is an absolute certainty.
I got stuck on reasoning organisms.
Reasoning organs?
Yeah.
That's so nasty.
I just love that he's both like such an atheist, bro, that he's got to be like, nobody has a soul, but also like women for sure don't have souls.
I just, and again, it is like that trend that he has of just like, you're like, oh, this could be something horrible, or he might just really not know what he's talking about.
Where he's like, you know, when you're gestating a baby, you really got to focus and give it your full attention.
Or it's like you're just sitting on an egg for nine months.
You can't move.
You can't do anything, much less use your reasoning organisms or grapple with your soul because you don't have one.
Oh, Lord.
Well, Jamie.
Yes.
I'm sorry.
I was, my reasoning organism is just overextended right now.
Keep reasoning with those organs.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I can't, or my ovum will stop growing.
Oh, see, that's the classic, that's the classic contradiction of womanhood, right?
If I flex my reasoning organism too hard, my antenna will stop working and my ovum will shrink.
Don't you understand?
I do now.
Now that I've read Ma's Right.
And that's the last normal quote from the book we're going to read.
Writing in the 1890s00:08:57
I do have one last piece of Might as Right to read, and it's a poem.
Go for it.
No.
From Sandy Hook to London Tower, from Jaffa to Japan, they can take who have the power.
They may keep who can.
This is the law of heaven and hell, stupendous and divine, the highest, holiest law of all that governs mine and thine.
The law it is of sun and star, of president and pope.
It is the prisoner at the bar, the gallows and the rope.
It is the lawyer and his fee, the shearer and his sheep.
The eagle soaring swift and free, the dreadnought on the deep.
It is the bond, it is the loan, the prophet and the lost.
The usurer on his bullion throne, the idol of the cross.
It is the goth, it is the hun, the tyrant and his prey, the flame and saber, club and gun, oh, taxes that we pay.
It is the law of all the climes and all the things to be, and all the bold, tremendous times that you and I shall see.
From Sandy Hook to London Tower, from Greenland to Japan, they will take who have the power.
And I think I cut off the last line.
I was about to say, that's a very jarring place to end it.
Yeah, it ends with the word can, I'm sure.
Yeah, well, I mean, you don't know.
His poetry is so good and deft and unpredictable.
Where is it going?
That sounds like a shitty Black Sabbath song.
He should have kept writing labor poems about kids' bones being crushed.
That was, yeah, because it really...
That's his high point.
Yeah.
Yeah, when he was, when, and that was also like kind of his high point ideologically, too.
Yes, it was.
Yeah.
Good lord.
Okay, so he's a bad poet again.
I am also interested in the arc of his poetry.
Yeah, it's really, it's a parabola.
Yeah.
But we also know he's a plagiarist, so we may, my, my, my thing is maybe he didn't write the one good poem.
He just beat some guy up and stole his poem.
Well, yeah.
That's entirely possible.
Well, might is right.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
Good.
That is, that is how poetry works.
God, I mean, the untellable damage that's been done to the world over like shitty artists that just really couldn't get it.
It's just like, ugh, just get along.
That's part of what that's like the best argument you can make for like the fucking, whatchamacallit, the universal basic income.
It's like, then all the terrible artists in the world can make terrible art and not turn into Hitler.
And not yet become so deeply politicized.
Or George Bush, for that matter.
Yeah.
Yeah, if they both just lived in small apartments and painted, we'd all be better off.
Right.
It's like, yeah, no one's going to buy it, but they're not going to die.
It'll be fine.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If Arthur Desmond had just had a government apartment, he would have kept writing poems.
Some of them would have been good.
Some of them would have been terrible.
He would have published shitty zines for the rest of his life.
And no, I mean, you could argue that Might is Right is kind of a shitty zine.
Yeah, but it has way more impact than that.
Like, it's, uh, it's, we're, we're about to get into how this spread outside of the shitty zine community of the 1890s and early 1900s.
Okay.
But first, let's talk about the rest of Arthur Desmond's life.
Okay.
Now, once he made it to the United States, he appears initially and like registers in the city of Chicago as a reporter.
He also started going by the name Ragnar Redbeard professionally at this point, writing one friend that he had taken on the new name just for luck.
After Might is Right was published and started to gain serious prominence as a work of radical politics.
Desmond seems to have found himself in possession of a decent amount of funding.
He created the Adolph Mueller Company in 1897 for the sole purpose of selling Ragnar Redbeard books and pamphlets.
I'm going to guess Adolph Mueller was another one of his aliases.
Yeah.
Now, most of these seem to have just been reprints of pieces of Might is Right.
He published The Eagle and the Serpent in 1898, which was just a reprint of chapter six.
He started publishing a journal, Redbeard's Review, in England.
It mainly existed to like sell copies of Might is Right, and it ran for around four years.
Gross.
Desmond also started claiming to be a PhD at this time and started signing his work with LLD, the abbreviation for a doctorate of law.
One of his biographers looked into this and found it to be an absolute lie.
The University of Chicago, where he claimed to have gotten his degree, didn't even award its first LLD until a year after Desmond claimed to have received his.
Cool.
So pathetic.
Okay.
And yet another grifter who follows in the pattern of they all wind up pretending to be a doctor at some point.
Yeah, I mean, and that's that's almost Billy Wayne territory.
I know, I know.
And I'm, yeah, he's, he might leap out in through the poison room at this point to take over.
It's okay.
There's not a lot about the doctor part.
I bravely take on the incel beat.
And yeah, okay.
So he's, I mean, we knew he was a liar and a grifter, but okay, okay.
And we also don't know how old he is.
We really don't.
Like, not even super close to how old he is, to be honest.
We have a 20-year discrepancy.
I'm seeing like 1859 in a lot of stuff.
Yeah, it's really hard to tell.
Like, different sources, like you, like, one of the difficulties publishing or putting this together is like everyone who writes about him, there's a bunch of stuff that doesn't at all go along with each other.
And I don't know exactly how everything timed out other than like the publication of his books and stuff.
We have that set in stone.
But like, I mean, and some of that's just down to the fact that this was like the 1890s.
Nobody was keeping good records back then.
Sure.
But also, he was a criminal grifter who lied about every aspect of his life.
So it seems like he might lie about his age.
About everything.
We don't even know if Arthur Desmond was his real name.
Like, the reason they're pretty sure he was Ragnar Redbeard is just because like the poetry and shit in Might is Right sounds exactly like Arthur Desmond's poetry.
And that seems compelling to me.
Like just having read a bunch of his poems from earlier in his life and then reading Might is Wright, like I'm pretty fucking sure it's the same guy.
There's definitely a through line through all of the shitty poetry we've heard today.
And I'm also convinced that it's not Jack London who wrote Might is Right because Jack London, for all of his flaws, was a good fucking writer.
He could write a fucking book.
And Might is Right is mostly nonsense.
Like there's a couple turns of phrase that are neat, but it's mostly just like insane babbling with no through line.
I liked Children's Bones and that was a different publication.
That was a different publication.
There's nothing for me here.
Well, maybe you just got to read Might is Right, Jamie, and learn about antenna and birthing organs.
I need to learn a thing or two.
Now, it's possible that this new publishing career was very lucrative for Arthur.
Some sources say he did well enough to buy a large ranch in Kalispell, Montana.
He's said to have stocked it with game animals and entertained journalist friends of his there with hunting and shooting parties.
This is probably a lie because I've only found it in one source, but he might have gotten rich and bought a ranch in Montana.
I really don't know.
At the end of the 1800s, Arthur Desmond claimed to have fucked off to South Africa to fight in the Second Boer War.
He claimed to have joined a regiment of light horse cavalry in Cape Town and to have fought in the vicious Battle of Pardeberg in February 1900.
After that adventure, if it happened, he moved back to Chicago and lived for a time under the name Richard Thurland.
In 1903, he published Might is Right, the newest edition of Survival of the Fittish, with that title.
He wrote another book, Rival Caesars, which flopped.
And by 1904, he had been reduced to managing an ice cream and candy company.
So I don't know if he went to fight in the Second Boer War, but he definitely wound up managing an ice cream company.
Okay, best chapter of his life yet.
Yep.
Now, if you know one thing about Arthur Desmond, it's that whenever he was in an office building, he was running an illegal side business out of that office building that he wasn't supposed to be running.
Sure.
And true to form, while he was managing this ice cream company, he also ran an advertising business as a side hustle out of the office.
In March of that year, Desmond got into trouble when a telephone inspector asked to inspect the office as part of a routine checkup.
Arthur refused, possibly because he was running a side business out of the office that his employers were unaware of.
The inspector called the police, and Desmond held them off for some hours with a rifle he had claimed to have captured during the Boer War.
He was eventually assaulted, overpowered, subdued, and taken to the Cook County Jail to await trial.
Thankfully for Desmond, a lifetime as a labor firebrand and organizer had turned him into a capable public speaker.
He defended himself successfully in court and seems to have earned the sympathy of the jury enough that he was freed.
Oh, wow, that never works.
It did back then.
It was an easier time.
All right, well, give us a moment.
Of the rest of his life, we know fairly little.
We know he got married once to a woman like 20-something years his junior.
They had a child, but she left him fairly quickly for reasons that are probably obvious.
And she died at age 30.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, she died of tuberculosis, right?
That's what I'm saying.
I was trying to find out more about this poor lady who he was just like, wow, your antenna are looking mighty fine today, my inferior.
And then she was like, yeah.
I don't have trouble believing, like, understanding why she would have left.
Plug my ovum, daddy.
Gross.
Tuberculosis and Marriage00:04:18
I already know.
If you want to plug some ovum, check out the products and services that support this show.
I already know.
And also, ovaries?
Yeah, that was probably a bad line to go to Adzom.
I could hear you.
We can't edit audio.
We can't edit this.
We legally.
We can't.
Ovum!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Reprinting the Satanic Bible00:15:28
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.
We're back.
We're back.
We're talking about ovums and ads.
Ovums and ads.
Ovums.
Behind the bastards.
Oh, God.
Ovums.
That's feminist capitalism, baby.
I love.
Ovums and ads.
No, I can't participate.
Okay.
Arthur.
All right.
Newsman.
Arthur motherfucking Desmond.
So, yeah, his first biographer, who was also his editor, claims that Desmond stayed mostly in the Chicago area for the rest of his life, publishing articles and journals intermittently, arguing with other anarchists, and republishing one last edition of Might is Right before his death in 1929 from a spontaneous cerebral hemorrhage that he had while stocking books at the bookstore where he worked.
It was like a second-hand shop.
So he died of a stroke while putting books on a shelf.
The author of Might is Right, the book of how warriors should rule the world.
Very warriorly death.
Now, that said, there are other stories about how he died.
Some sources will claim he died fighting in Mexico in 1914 or in Palestine in 1918 or 1926.
There are stories that he died in World War I.
And for what it's worth, yeah, I think the likeliest version of events is that he ran a small bookstore as an old man and died in the late 1920s.
Yeah, I believe the book is a very good thing.
No narrative.
I hope that he was reading.
I wonder if he was like paging through something deeply pathetic and then he just fucked off, but forever this time.
Well, all right.
Rest in power, king, you loser.
Rest in power, king.
Now, while our buddy Desmond was dead and buried by 1929, his work has lived on, and it did not take long for his fevered writings to catch the imagination of another generation of political firebrand.
In 1957, Anton LeVay, the father of modern Satanism, was walking down a street in San Francisco, California when he came upon a rare bookstore.
In the window was a particular tome that caught his eye, an old copy of Might is Right.
Here's what LeVay wrote about finding it.
Okay.
What I saw should not have been in print.
It was more than inflammatory.
It was sheer blasphemy.
Obviously, McDonald hadn't even glanced within its pages, but figured the odd cover and title would remove it from the window.
As I turned the pages, more blasphemy met my eyes.
Crazy as it was, I found myself charged at the words.
People just didn't write that way.
There's a good reason for that, Anton.
Yeah.
Now, many scholars will claim with significant evidence that Anton LeVay plagiarized huge chunks of Might is Right in order to write the Satanic Bible, which is his most well-known piece, which he published in 1969.
It's generally considered to be the most influential satanic text.
I'm going to quote now from Digital Commons.
LeVay's plagiarism was extensive.
To his credit, however, LeVay removed some of the more offensive passages, and there are no racist undertones in the Satanic Bible.
So, LeVay finds this book, likes the parts of it about hating Christianity and about like some of the stuff about like the will to power, and just cuts out the anti-Semitism and the racism and basically reprints some of it almost word for word as the Satanic Bible.
Okay, I didn't, yeah, I wasn't aware that that was also that whole that whole narrative of just like, and yeah, he'd never like, I'd never seen something written like that before.
I wonder why that is, but we never get to the second question.
I mean, part of it is that, like, I, in a little bit of fairness to LeVay, like in the 1950s, you think about like how closed American society was and how like intolerant it was of any questioning of like Christianity, of patriarchal value, of like, so anything that's like I imagine there was so few, so, so little like really radical text being written then that anything that didn't reinforce like the fucking mad men lying about how society ought to be was like intoxicating to a guy like LeVay, and I suspect that's some of what's happening.
Yeah, oh, for sure.
If Anton LeVay had been born later, he probably wouldn't have found this as influential because there would have been other shit to read.
I mean, I'm glad that he at least cut out the shittiest parts.
Yeah.
But okay.
I would think twice if I was like found myself enthralled with a philosopher and was like, okay, well, I got to cut out pages of racism, but like there's some gold in here.
But he's pretty spot on with everything else.
So weird that he found that.
I like what he says about antenna and ovums.
Yeah.
Wait, did LeVay keep the woman stuff?
I don't know.
I didn't go deep enough at it.
But LeVay did admit to basically plagiarizing Might is Right.
And he actually wrote a foreword to a reprinting of Might is Right that is the edition I have.
Wow.
Quote, after spreading the gospel of Might is Right for over a decade came the official commission to write a satanic Bible.
My agent and publisher wanted the material I had already printed in tract form with additional stuff to make up the Bible as quickly as possible.
I was not a writer.
Some will say I'm still not.
But I had to draw from my inspirations what had to be said.
Now you may know that every single occult scholar I knew warned me against publishing the Anakian call, saying that nobody touched upon them and it was doomed to even mention them.
Okay, that was enough for me.
And they went.
So it was with the selected passages from Might is Right, except I got no warnings because nobody had even heard of the damn book, especially Head in the Clouds of Cultnix.
It had inspired me though, and that was enough.
The copyright, even with renewal, would have recently expired.
So it suddenly became part of the Satanic Bible, with myself and the publisher holding, in context, new copyrights on the portions employed.
So he like brags about plagiarizing it and copywriting and just getting away with it.
Yeah, just being like, well, yeah, sure, I stole it, but I found a loophole.
That sounds like a fun, like, indie comedy of like, I'm not much of a writer, but I've got to write a Bible and fast.
Like, horrible.
I'll just steal from this book.
I guess I'll just find this book by this incel racist.
Yeah.
I'm just, I'm sorry.
I'm looking at my Bible.
I'm just looking at the Anton LeVay Google Images page.
I've been here before, but it's always just newly shopping.
Oh, it's pretty fun, right?
Snake heavy.
Yeah, he was.
Snake heavy.
He had a style.
You got to give him that.
He was way ahead on brand.
I respected consistency of brand.
Yes, I did.
Yeah.
Now, LeVay claims he only included the sections of Might is Right that he agreed with because the rest of the work was filling with what he called glaring contradictions and was at best a rant.
Both of those things are very accurate.
He sought to preserve the things he found so inspiring in Desmond's book without including all of the bullshit.
Quote, it is, despite my enthusiasm for the book, inaccurate to state that Might is Right was the inspiration for the Church of Satan.
For the record, I was relatively young when I discovered it, but I had already indulged myself in the experience of reading every scrap of anarchist, nihilist, extremist, and free thought esoterica I could encounter.
A day hardly passes that I don't read a comment from someone who is astounded at how close his own thoughts come to the message of my satanic Bible.
I find that interesting because he's basically saying that like a lot of the stuff in Might is Right, I had thought of before as like a young dude on the fringes.
And like so much of Desmond's writing sounds like shit.
I've seen kids on 8-Chan type who I know hadn't like read that shit or kids on 4chan or read it.
Like there's a certain degree to which like frustrated young male minds think alike.
And like that's kind of what Might is Right is, is it's like the worst parts of the male id published by a low-rent poet and former labor organizer.
That's how I would describe the book.
Yeah.
Wow.
Yeah.
Wow.
I mean, I love when two kings collaborate.
Yeah.
So, you know, there, there is something primal about, I think, the young male psyche that Desmond was able to reach at times.
And that's why Anton LeVay found it so compelling and why he cut out bits of Desmond's philosophy to write the Satanic Bible, which was also like magnetic to a chunk of young men.
But, you know, someone like LeVay was clearly strong-headed enough that like he didn't imbibe all of the toxicity from Might is Right.
Other people are more vulnerable.
And this brings us back to the Gilroy garlic shooter, Santino Legan.
We don't know how or where he first came across Might is Right.
The book is available for free online, and I ran into it numerous times over the last year and posts filled with suggested reading material on 8chan's poll board.
They would include links to this one regularly.
It was not the most popular tome of white supremacist reading, but it was certainly prominent and it's only grown more so in recent months.
In my research, I found the website for a very dumb group called the Red Beard Right, purporting to be an organization of white nationalists adhering to the ideas and ideals of Arthur Desmond from that website.
Quote, this is a far-right website and unapologetically so.
However, this site has nothing to do with national socialism.
This website is not for basic bitch Hitler fanboys.
We are white nationalists, but not alt-right.
We are the real right.
Our ideal is not some kind of socialism without brown people.
We are pragmatic realists.
We embrace the nature of man and of life itself.
We recognize man for the aware beast that he is and have no desire to domesticate him into docile.
We seek to deal with the reality on its own terms.
We have no interest in bewitching ourselves with fanciful will-o-wisp utopias.
We are the red beard right.
We do not indiscriminately concern ourselves with just any white person's well-being.
We instead reserve our concern for the well-being of those Europeans we feel worth preserving a future for.
So there we go.
That's a great, sorry, this is a Wednesday.
The Redbeard Right.
Yeah, the Red Beard Right.
I mean, the thing that strikes me about all this Arthur Desmond stuff is it does sound like he was able to connect with that like young, angry, like repressed masculine thing.
But it doesn't seem even that particularly strategic.
It just seems like that was, he was stuck there, as opposed to like LeVay kind of more strategically pulling out stuff with a specific goal.
But it's to me, like, especially as his career goes on, it's unclear to me what like Arthur Desmond's real goal was other than to be like thought of as a fucking cool guy.
And it's, I yeah, which I think is why people are like so fluid in their ideology sometimes when they're just like, I just want someone to think I'm like smart and cool.
And if you don't think I'm cool in the labor unions, I'm fucking right off, you know?
And I think Prince Perk is the core of what Desmond did.
Like that was the heart of it.
And that's why it's so electrifying to a lot of young men because like there's this core of anger that like particularly young men often don't learn how to deal with.
Right.
And Might is Right kind of speaks to that in a very primal way.
And doesn't challenge any of it.
And it doesn't really require that you do any introspection.
Oh, boy.
No, it just requires that you do a lot of push-ups so that you can punch people.
Yeah.
Now, in the weight of Santino Legan's shooting spree, the Redbeard right was forced to directly address what had happened because research revealed that the gunman had shared a Facebook post made by the group.
Now, the post included a bunch of quotes from Redbeard's work, but it also included an image macro with a picture of a Viking that said, Dear conquered peoples, the history of humanity is one of constant conflict and competition for resources like land, food, water, and women.
You whine about the fact that Europeans were and are better at this contest than any other culture in the world.
You losers want us to regret being better at conquest and exploration than you were.
You want apologies and reparations from people who were smarter and stronger than you, people who unequivocally won.
We are not sorry.
We owe you nothing.
Deal with it.
Deal with it.
Calm up.
Deal with it.
Yeah.
Now, this obviously looked bad for the Redbeard right.
No kidding.
Yeah.
So one member of the group, posting under the misspelled username Red Beard, posted this: We at the Red Beard Right do not disavow his actions, but we are not responsible for the actions of those who read our posts.
We do not encourage our readers to commit violence.
We do not condone what he did.
His actions contributed nothing to our cause of white well-being.
His actions were strategically stupid.
So, yeah, it's fun, guys.
Cool.
Now, a bit of digging made it clear that Redbeard is James Theodore Stilwell III, which is absolutely the name of a guy who creates a website dedicated to the Redbeard.
Redbeard Right.
He calls himself a rogue philosopher, which is the most punchable thing you can find.
Sounds like a terrible YouTube channel.
I think I would have to fistfight someone who introduced themselves as a rogue philosopher.
Sort of a rogue philosopher.
That's my might is right.
I'm going to write a book just about punching people like this guy.
Yeah, just list of people I'd like to punch.
James Theodore Stilwell III.
Yeah.
He lives in Keene, New Hampshire, where he writes books like Power Nihilism: A Case for Moral and Literal Nihilism.
Well, he portrays himself as some sort of neo-Viking warrior skeptic.
My guess is that he will probably wind up living as a low-end bookseller and dying alone of a stroke like his idol.
As for Santino Legan, the Gilroy shooter, he proved to be distinctly less mighty than the Gilroy police, who shot him repeatedly with one minute of opening fire.
Most mass shooters these days tend to have some sort of political message they're trying to get out, and Setino was no exception.
He created an Instagram account just a few days before the shooting and posted about Ragnar Redbeard's might is right.
It's clear to me that he hoped people would be inspired by his shooting to read the book.
Law enforcement combed through Santino's home after the attack, and they seem to have been baffled by what they found there.
The Los Angeles Times quoted John Bennett, the FBI agent in charge of the investigation.
Among the information we are collecting, there is conflicting literature, everything from left to right.
So, Bennett said, investigators do not feel they can put this person in a box.
I wouldn't say it was extreme views.
It is writings and books that we have found through some of the search warrants.
We are trying to go through all the literature and make sense of it.
Now, to me, this suggests that Santino himself went through an ideological evolution not unlike that of Arthur Desmond, flirting with the most extreme elements of left and right-wing political theory before settling with violent egoistic nihilism.
According to some reports, one of Santino's victims at the festival was heard to ask him, Why are you doing this?
To which the 19-year-old allegedly responded, Because I'm really angry.
And I think that right there gets at the core of why Arthur Desmond did what he did and what was in like appealing.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, God, that's awful.
That's so brutal.
Okay.
Yep.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, there's that, Robert.
There's, oh, geez.
Yeah.
Fun with this one?
You know, it started kind of fun.
I liked the poetry parts.
I love dunking.
Yeah, the poetry parts was fun.
I love dunking on a shitty poet.
I mean, it is troubling that, like, I mean, yeah, just that something this angry, and it's just like so clear how like impotent it comes off and the fact that, you know, it's still, it's still appealing to equally angry people.
It's a sad takeaway.
It really is, because it sounds like Arthur Desmond was like a real, kind of like a sad, pathetic person himself and is inspiring sad, pathetic people to this day.
It just is, it's, ugh.
And the saddest thing about it to me is that like Desmond, there was clearly a point at which he could have done good for the world.
Ego-Driven Political Souring00:02:41
Like he started out with really good intentions.
Like you get a lot of credit for me if you're the only person, the only white dude in town willing to stand up for an indigenous person and their right to like exist in your community and stuff.
And it's just like that like that's the big question is like why do some men who wind up in kind of the similar situations where they're sort of pushing against the social tide stay true to their moral compass and like, you know, fight for what they see as justice.
And why do some men like Desmond become consumed by their anger and leave their idealism behind and just turned into these sort of like shitty asshole nihilists.
But like yeah, just like an ego-driven, like it is, it does seem like an ego problem if you if you feel ego, yeah.
Like it, the, the, like his like left-leaning political, um, I guess you could call it a career, but like early on when he was still doing cool stuff, it sounds like he just didn't get the like payoff of that that he wanted, which just puts in the expectation that he was always expecting something from doing this.
And if he didn't get what he wanted, then why do it?
It just, it's just, I mean, it's all very bleak to me.
Yeah, yeah.
It's like he wanted, I think you are right, that like he wanted recognition out of his activism.
He wanted to win and he wanted to be recognized for his importance in the struggle.
And when it became clear that like, no, dude, like turning around the kind of weight of human injustice that is like this inertia in our culture that like leads to such like an oppressed underclass of laborers, turning that around isn't the work of one person.
It's the work of millions of people over the course of decades and really centuries, if we're like being realistic about it.
And that doesn't mean it's not valuable, but like a guy like him, I think, was too narcissistic to accept that.
And so when he realized, he just bails halfway through and gives up on his principles.
It's that, I mean, and I do think that there are like other examples of that in the tons of them.
Yeah, of just like people who start with being really into leftist politics who just sort of sour for various narcissistic reasons.
It's a story.
You see, Jason Kessler, the guy who organized the bloody Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, his first big political action was taking part in Occupy Wall Street.
And if you go into the Discord archives that Unicorn Riot has posted of those fascist groups that planned those early 2017 rallies and you just type in the term occupy, a whole bunch of them got their start with Occupy Wall Street and sort of like liberal and left-wing activism.
Giving Up on Principles00:04:28
And then they realize like that shit's hard because you're fighting against social inertia.
And so they turn to this kind of violent, nihilistic, toxic bullshit because it's easier.
Yeah.
Yeah, it is.
It's less challenging and there's more direct ego-based reward, I guess.
It's just, oh, God.
Because I'm really angry.
Because I'm really angry really does sum it all up, doesn't it?
Yeah.
Yep, yep, yep.
Yep.
Well, you want to plug your pluggables, Jamie?
Yeah, this feels this it always it is it never feels right.
Um uh I love a good pluggable.
All right.
Uh I'm on twitter.com at jamieloftishelp and uh Instagram at JamieChrist Superstar.
You can listen to the Bechtelcast every Thursday.
And yeah, that's that's what all pluggables.
That's all your pluggables.
Well, you can find me at iRideOK on Twitter.
If you want to find a political philosopher who was not a violent nihilist and not anti-woman, maybe read some Marie Bookchin.
You can find this podcast sources at behindthebastards.com.
You can find shirts on TeePublic Behind the Bastards.
And you can find love inside your heart where it dwells in the hearts of us all.
Wherever it remains.
Seek it out.
Where it remains.
And let leopards crush your children's bones or whatever that line was.
Yeah.
Leopards!
Leopards!
Robert, you're going to plug worst year ever or no?
Oh, yeah, we have a podcast called The Worst Year Ever.
It's about the 2020 election.
Speaking of being pushed into violent nihilism.
Hard sell.
Hard sell.
I'm not good at selling things.
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.
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 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.
Listen to Nora Jones' Playing Along 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 hanging 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.
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.
Grego Lesby 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 the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.