William Walker, a Nashville-born physician turned filibuster, orchestrated a failed one-man colonial conquest of Nicaragua and Baja California in the 1850s. Driven by a twisted mix of manifest destiny and a desire to expand slavery, he raised funds through fraudulent bonds and recruited men under false humanitarian pretenses regarding Apache raids. After seizing La Paz and declaring himself president of a nonexistent Republic of Lower California, Walker exaggerated skirmishes into victories while burning towns. Ultimately, his story exposes the hypocrisy of American expansionism, revealing how racism and greed masked brutal imperial ambitions as noble endeavors. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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The Walkers Arrive00:10:32
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This is Behind the Bastards, the most poorly introduced podcast in the podcast game.
We also talk about bad people from time to time when I'm not introducing the show badly.
My guest today is Mr. Miles Gray.
Thank you so much.
How are you doing, Miles?
Great.
Since, I mean, I don't know when this comes out, but we saw each other recently.
That was a pleasant experience we had.
That was nice.
You came up to Portland.
Yes.
They wouldn't let us play with knives on the stage because they were cowards, but otherwise nice people.
They don't respect the laws of the state.
Yeah, exactly.
Bladed weapons are not tools over there.
They're wildly unregulated and it's beautiful.
Now, Miles.
Yes.
When Sophie asked you to guest on this week's episode, you had a simple request, which was, don't make it horribly bleak and depressing so that I want to die.
More or less.
Yes.
Not at your exact words, but your sentiment.
Yeah, is that this was how bleak is this one going to be?
Because you know, these shows, these episodes, I've done a few now.
They kind of fall into a couple different buckets.
Some are like so out of this world.
What the fuck is reality kind of thing where you're just your gob smacked because of that.
Other times you're gob smacked or laughing because sometimes it's fun.
Other times you so brilliantly bring the focus of the show in to talk about evil people that I found myself in a place where jokes do not exist.
And the only response I could have is, oh my God, that's so fucked up.
For life, I think you're going to like this one.
This is, obviously, it's a story about a terrible person.
Right, right.
Thousands of people die.
But it's a story of a monster that gets his comeuppance in the end.
Oh, wow.
So this is, yeah, yeah.
This one should be fun.
And it's not, you know, it's not mass child rape like we sometimes get into on this show.
So that's nice, too.
Yeah, I felt like even the like prevailing sentiment from listeners was like, damn, I think that was one of the darkest episodes ever.
Yeah.
Yeah.
As it should be.
It was very dark.
So today, Miles, have you ever heard of a fella named William Walker?
I mean, that sounds like a very common name where I'm trying to rack my brain being like, I'm pretty sure I do know a William Walker.
To put it shortly, Walker is an example of one of my favorite kind of history stories because he's a guy who is incredibly well known by millions and millions of people around the world, very close to the United States, in fact.
If you go to Nicaragua, if you go to Costa Rica, if you go to Mexico's Baja Coast or Sonora, Walker is a very prominent historical figure.
And even though he's an American, he's almost completely unknown in the United States today.
I mean, I guess most Americans have not known his name.
And the reason he's well known in Baja, in Nicaragua, in Costa Rica, is that he almost single-handedly tried to conquer all of those places.
What?
Yeah.
When?
Recently?
Yeah, in like the 1850s, like not all that long ago.
Wow.
When you really think about it.
Yeah.
Okay.
Look at him.
Yeah.
He was like a one-man colonialism.
That's like, it's weird.
The term makes me shudder, but also I dig the dedication.
If you're like, I'm going to do this whole colonialism thing, just with me.
Colonialism is usually the very bleakest stories.
And there's a lot of, I mean, obviously Walker was a horrible person who did horrible things that impacted huge numbers of people's lives.
But there's also one of the things that's kind of, I guess, makes this a little more of an upbeat story is that this is one of those cases of colonialism that was completely unsupported by the government of this guy's country.
And so he gets his comeuppance in the end.
Like it's not one of those tales where he exploited these people and got away with it forever.
And his great-great-grandkids are still rich today.
Right.
And now they have a whole line of hotels that we constantly patronize.
Is he one of ours?
Good old American?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
No, there was no other country in the world this guy could have come from.
But I thought maybe states of America.
Yeah, because I guess even an English guy would be like, I think we've had our time.
I don't need to be a one-man wrecking crew.
Yeah, you know, the English weren't really good at being one-man wrecking crews.
They were more, you know, that slow Nazi shit.
This is a very American story of a guy who just like looked at several foreign countries in a row and was like, I bet I could take that.
So that's truly an American attitude.
Looking at a map, like, huh?
What about this one?
Nicole, Rob Wee, who?
Cost or.
Yep.
All right.
Cost of doing business with me.
You were the right call for guests.
Oh, boy.
All right, let's get into it.
William Walker was born in Nashville, Tennessee on May 8th, 1824.
He was the first of six children of James S. Walker and Mary Norville Walker.
His family was not like super rich, but they were probably like the wealthiest family or among the wealthiest family in their frontier community.
Okay.
His father was a Scottish immigrant from Glasgow who'd moved to the United States at age 22 and started a general merchandise store with his uncle in 1820.
Soon, the business was successful enough that James and his uncle partnered with three other men to build a riverfront warehouse and buy a fleet of steamboats.
Now, Nashville was a big old shipping hub at the time.
And as the nation expanded westward, the Walkers made a small fortune facilitating the movement of tobacco, corn, and cotton across the country.
Since this was the early 1800s, all these products came from the deep south, and the Walkers business relied heavily on slavery.
So the family fortune, such as it is, is absolutely built off the blacks.
Well, backs.
You know what I'm trying to say here.
Yeah.
No, I'll let you slide with that one.
Yeah.
After a few years, James sold out and got into the business of selling commercial insurance, which oddly enough sounds like maybe even more exploited than what he was doing before.
I'm sure it's not.
That's just my opinion of the insurance industry.
So James's wife, Mary, was the sister of his two former business partners.
Now, census records from 1830, when William Walker was six indicate that his family owned no slaves, which was odd for a family at their level of wealth in Nashville at that time.
By the time William was 14, this had changed, and the Walker family owned four enslaved black human beings, two men and two women.
So he absolutely comes from a slaveholding background, grows up with us.
Religion was also a big part of the Walker family life.
His mother's family were prominent within the Baptist community, and his father was a member of the Disciples of Christ.
The Walkers were described as being strong and stern, and they were also extremely political.
William's mother was a good friend of Sarah Polk, the wife of future President James K. Polk.
While William was a child, James was named Speaker of the House and then the governor of Tennessee.
Since Polk was a Democrat and Democrats were at the time the party of even more white supremacy than the Republicans, you can assume for yourself what kind of politics William imbibed as a child.
Oh, really?
Oh, really wholesome stuff.
I'm sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh my gosh.
A lot of people would like to move back to those days, and that's all we'll leave it.
You're talking about John Kelly?
Yes.
I'm talking about, yes, Stephen Miller.
Yeah.
A whole lot of.
Well, John Kelly was at least gracious enough, showed his grasp of history to actually refer to like basically the antebellum South without fully saying that.
We're like, I think we know what you mean.
A Sensitive Boy's Eyes00:05:45
Yeah.
We used to respect each other.
Okay.
Yeah.
You mean white people?
Yeah, right.
And I guess we had what we would call back then indentured independent contractors.
Yeah, exactly.
It's like, I don't know.
There's no good joke to me.
No, there isn't.
Yeah.
I did only get one.
And it wasn't even that good.
We're just going to breeze right on past that.
So William was recalled by a family friend at the period as very intelligent and as refined in his feelings as a girl.
I used to go often to see his mother and always found him entertaining her in some way.
William was devoted to his mother.
His father was kind of a giant asshole, very, very strict and stern.
His mother was kind of more someone he could like deal with and get comfort from.
But she was also very ill throughout his childhood.
And he often spent his mornings in her room reading to her while she struggled to start the day.
William grew into a child his contemporaries described later as cold, quiet, studious, painfully modest, slight, effeminate, almost insignificant in appearance.
Oh boy.
Yeah, yeah, effeminate.
Yeah, you could, yeah.
You can tell what they're trying to say there.
Yeah.
And I can also just see like the, if we're looking at a biopic of this guy, we're starting to see the foundations of when he goes, oh, yeah, you know what I'm going to do then?
I'll show you fucking effeminate.
Oh, okay.
Watch me fucking be a one-man wrecking crew.
Yeah.
Oh, no.
Yeah.
That is really the story here.
Right.
Yeah.
He was small, thin, and not very masculine at a time when that was something a boy would pay dearly for.
The only physical feature that stood out about him were his eyes, which were a unique shade of gray that people without his, throughout his life would notice.
Everybody would comment it on this guy's eyes.
He's just sort of one of those people who everyone's like, that dude's eyes are fucking something's up there.
Right.
It's never the ones who are like, oh my God, you have such beautiful eyes.
It's always like, yo, did you see the fucking guy's eyes?
You see that dude's eyes?
What the fuck?
I think he's going to conquer Nicaragua.
Yeah.
He looks like he's transitioning into some kind of zombie or wraith.
Yeah.
Yes.
Now, possibly due to his mother's sickness, William's classmates found him to be grave and seemingly always afflicted by sorrow, which if you're a kid growing up in like the 1830s, I guess sorrow is really the only reasonable way to approach life.
But I don't think he was horrified by the injustices of his time.
No.
I think that was just like we started, that word was just used to describe what we call emo kids now.
Yeah, he definitely absolutely would have been, yeah.
And with his, I'm sure if he wasn't like super masculine, he would have got the little fringe haircut, had like one black fingernail, and been crying to like dashboard confessional lyrics too.
Yeah, absolutely.
He just may have been in the wrong time, you know?
This kid would have been a huge dash head.
Oh my gosh.
Yeah.
His hopes are so high that your kiss might kill him.
You just revealed something about yourself there.
That's the one dashboard song I know.
And I just think the lyrics are so great.
I know, right?
Cut to my full sleeve tattoo of dashboard album covers.
So yeah, William was like quiet and kind of sad, but he was not unfriendly.
And one classmate later noted, quote, none in school was more ready to oblige his fellow student with a little or extra help with a difficult lesson.
So he's a really smart kid and he helps out his fellow classmates a lot and kind of is known for that.
I heard that very cynically.
Like, yeah, he was always down to teach someone a fucking lesson rather than like, hi, do you need some help with your studies?
Yeah, I get the, I get the legitimately helpful thing more from like reading stuff that his fellows reported about him.
He was a good student and developed something of a complex around his grades.
When he got an answer wrong in class, he would cry, which did not help with his perceived level of manliness.
Yeah, yeah.
One friend noted, quote, I never saw him lively in my life.
That is, I never heard him laugh out loud as boys do at play.
Oh, shit.
Yeah, you're getting some, right?
Kids should laugh.
That's a bandera roja right there, a red flag.
Yeah.
I'm pretty sure my Spanish 2 skills haven't failed me.
The non-laughing thing as a teen as a little boy.
Yeah.
It's dark.
That's like some real dark shit.
Because it's usually not to like young adulthood you meet people who have like completely just gone into themselves and don't have any joy.
And I don't want to be like, you know, there's a fine line between being like, it's kind of weird that this guy never laughs and like being one of those dudes who's like, why don't you smile, ma'am?
But like, it is like you hear, like, everyone talks about this guy when he's a little kid.
He's like, yeah, he never really like laughed or played around.
And that is like, huh.
Yeah, like I'm in the moment, if I'm just taking him and like looking at it in a vacuum, my heart kind of goes out to this youngish.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
He's not an aspirant.
Like at this point, he's blameless, even of the slavery.
Like he's a little kid.
He doesn't have any choice in that.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Maybe he could have grown into, maybe he, like, he's clearly like a sensitive boy.
And we just really don't know enough about his actual thoughts at the time because it's fucking 1830s.
And yeah.
See, at least at least when they start doing this show like 100 years from now, when your consciousness has been uploaded to some kind of like bio algorithm, at least we'll be able to look at like the Twitter and Facebook posts of our future fascists and be like, oh, this is what they were going through at the time.
Conquering Nicaragua Boldly00:14:07
Oh, no.
They'll comb through my Twitter and be like, well, I mean, obviously he was going to do what he did to Nicaragua.
Spoiler alert for the 20 years from now when I conquer Nicaragua.
Wow.
Bold.
Not a colonialism thing.
Just like, just love conquering.
Yep.
Yep.
Just leave it at that.
In 1827, when Billy was three, his grandfather Lipscomb Norvell moved to Nashville to be with the family.
Lipscomb wound up having a profound impact on growing William.
See, he was a veteran of the Revolutionary War and he had fought at like most of it.
He'd been at the Battle of Brandywine Creek, the Battle of Trenton, the Battle of Monmouth.
He was one of the battle-hardened survivors of the hellish winter at Valley Forge.
What?
Yeah, so this, like, like his grandpa was like there for the fucking war.
Oh, my God, Trenton and Valley Forge.
That's like, you're going to be like, I see some shit.
I get it.
I'm a pussy.
You've eaten human flesh.
We know.
Oh, now it's starting to make sense.
Your grandpa is probably has in no way can look at a sensitive child and be like, yeah, that's going to work.
No, he's probably chewing bullets for gum.
He's like, you're done with that pewter dish.
I'm going to melt it down to some musket shot.
Gonna make my morning bullets.
You're not using that tea service, are you?
Norvell was present at the surrender of Charleston, which ended in defeat for the revolutionaries, and he was imprisoned for a year as a POW.
So like this dude goes through it.
So this is a big influence on William when he's young, his war hero grandfather.
His uncles were also major influences on his future life because, you know, William's dad was kind of very like a very boring and stern businessman who doesn't really, he doesn't really identify much with his uncles and his grandpa.
He does more so.
Four of his uncles either founded or worked as editors at newspapers.
Three more got involved with local or national politics, and five served in the military.
So in short.
Wait, wait, how many numbers did you say?
How many fucking uncles did you have?
A fuckload of uncles.
I mean, did you say like 10 different people, basically?
Yeah, yeah.
He's got like four, seven, yeah, like 12 uncles.
I keep forgetting though, too.
We're talking about the 17th century and 18.
Lipscomb Norvell, you don't survive, you don't survive Trenton and Valley Forge and then just not fuck out a couple of basketball teams worth of kids.
Yeah, seriously.
I got two starting fives plus a six-man for each one.
Yeah, yeah.
He just goes right from war at a pounding.
Oh, that's a real talking about real, the real baby boom coming after fucking surviving Valley Forge.
It is impressive.
Yeah, I mean, some of those are probably his mom's uncles.
I don't know.
Sure, sure.
Either way, dude has a fuckload of uncles.
Most of them are, they're all in journalism, politics, or the military.
So he grows up surrounded by influential, powerful men who either exercise political power directly or through the press or who are in the military fighting, colonizing the United States, killing Native Americans, Mexicans.
So these are like the people who raise him.
Right.
They're not just like kickback and relax if someone does some shit to you.
No family.
Yeah.
It's a high-achieving family.
Yeah.
Like they're well off, but these aren't like, they're not like inherited money, sort of like lazy aristocrats.
They're like everybody's like up and out of bed and fucking up the continent from like eight to nine, you know?
Yeah, I like to wake up and fuck the country, right?
And it's just every morning.
Just colonize the piss out of this, this motherfucker.
This day.
Colonize the day.
That's the motto in that house.
Yeah, that is absolutely how this kid is raised.
And it's not surprising that he grew up to be a very ambitious boy.
In 1837, at age 13, he finished his primary school education and enrolled in the University of Nashville.
And yeah, a lot of sort of like contemporary articles that you'll find talking about this guy will make it like he was a child genius.
Writing, I found like deeply written biographies of this guy by historians say that this was actually not that unusual at the time.
He was a little young, but it wasn't super weird.
You know, wait, so your freshman year of college is at 13?
Not for everybody, but it wasn't, it wasn't weird.
Oh, it's not like in the era we live in now.
It's like this child baby genius is going to college when they should be in academia for 19 years.
Yeah, he had a friend who went to college at 14.
Like it wasn't like super bizarre.
It wasn't like the norm, but it wasn't super weird.
Did high school exist yet back then?
Or like your primary school, you're like, yeah, you're going to learn everything you know by 14.
And then look, you can be an apprentice or whatever the fuck.
Yeah, that's kind of the thing.
By like 13, 14, you're starting to be an adult.
Like in Germany in like the 1870s, at 14, you are legally an adult.
Like it's time to go.
Yep.
So it's not that weird that he's, he's, you know, he's in college at 13.
Lives were shorter back then, right?
And education was rarer, you know?
You want to get a head start on things before you die of cholera at age 23.
Or a broken leg.
Yeah.
Or a broken leg.
Or just like a splinter from the wrong piece of wood.
Yeah.
Say, hey, I didn't have any, I didn't have the right salve to do with the infection.
Oh, I got a splinter.
I've loved you all.
It's been a good life.
Cheerio.
Glad I went to college at age nine.
So, yeah, college was rigorous for a 13-year-old boy.
And it's hard to imagine any modern teen dealing with this level of discipline and not coming out fucked up.
That said, again, this was not abnormal for the time.
And here's how the biography William Walker's Wars, which is a very good biography, describes his college education.
Quote, Entering students were expected to be accurately acquainted with the grammar, including prosody of the Greek and Latin tongues, as well as with English grammar, math, and geography.
Once admitted, students pursued trigonometry, principles of constitutional and international law, philosophy, natural history, and religious studies.
Discipline was strict.
Students attended chapel twice a day and stood for a communal prayer before each meal.
Quiet hours were enforced and activities like horse racing, dancing, or going to the theater were strictly prohibited.
Oh, yeah.
No, no horse racing or dancing?
No, absolutely no dancing, Miles.
I love that list of the horse racing, dancing, and the theater.
Miles, every step you take as a dancer is a step you take with the devil.
Oh, wow.
I'm pretty sure that poster was in my kindergarten classroom.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Dancing is Satan's golfing.
Sadly, though, the image was like of people break dancing.
They're like, just not that kind.
I would actually argue that breakdancing is the only acceptable kind of dancing.
I mean, yeah, anything like Capoeta.
The Seventh-day Adventist.
If you can fuck somebody up with your dance moves, like, hell yeah.
Just keep on keeping on.
So William grew into an extremely devout adolescent, and there was talk of him becoming a minister.
But then his interest took a turn towards politics.
He joined a debating society and eventually became its president.
He proposed several debate topics during his time, including, was it politic for the French to assist the U.S. in the American Revolution?
Was it preferable a monarchial or republican form of government?
And has the career of Napoleon Bonaparte been of benefit or injury to the world?
Wow.
Some hot takes to even pose those questions, sir.
Some hot takes.
You notice one of them is wondering whether it was worthwhile for France to intervene in a foreign nation's political development militarily.
And the other is wondering, is this imperialist warlord, was he good for history?
I'm just asking.
That's kind of what he's thinking.
I'm just asking.
I'm just asking.
I don't really have an opinion on it.
I'm just seeing what you think.
I mean, it's a question.
I don't know.
Maybe I have one and I'm not going to share it with you, but I just want to see how that sort of stacks up with the rest of the world.
But anyway, just asking.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm a big Napoleon fan, not of his conquering, but of his fucking.
Huge.
Oh, my gosh.
That dude.
Yeah.
Oh, he was laying pipe.
Oh, my God.
Like fucking Mario, man.
No.
Oh, yeah.
Uh-oh, here we go.
Oh, yeah.
So William graduated Summa Cum Laude on October 3rd, 1838, half a year after his 14th birthday.
So college wasn't long back then either.
By this time, his interest had changed yet again, and he decided to seek a medical degree.
First, he spent two years as an apprentice under local physicians.
Then he was admitted to the University of Pennsylvania.
He graduated in 1843 and headed to Paris to further his medical education in Europe.
He arrived at age 19, a doctor, but one wildly unready for the cosmopolitan realities of a progressive city like Paris.
In a letter home to his parents, he noted this of his new Parisian acquaintances.
Quote, Most of them have mistresses, and nobody thinks them any the worse for it.
Indeed, the relations of the two sexes among all classes of society are horrible.
You find many married couples between whom there exists a tacit agreement that the husband may have as many mistresses and the wife as many lovers as they choose.
The poison of infidelity is found in every vein.
The effects of it may be seen in the whole body.
What a striking lesson may the moralist learn here.
So he's like, everybody's fucking and they're fine with it.
How horrible.
Right.
I can't.
Yeah.
And the women have lovers as well.
Yeah, I want to make it clear.
He's not like, he's not like seeing that all of his friends are cheating on their wives and being like, that's fucked up.
He's seeing like, all these people are fucking other people that they're not married to, and everyone knows and is okay with it.
This is awful.
Yeah.
How is this city not gone asunder?
Yeah, how has God not turned it into salt?
Yeah.
So William was fascinated by the power and culture that radiated from old Europe, even though he didn't really gel with its libertine values.
He also wasn't a fan on what he saw as its limitations on individual rights.
He left Europe after two years, feeling more American than ever.
He also felt less like...
Yeah.
Yeah, nothing like getting around different opinions to get you to double down on your bad opinions.
Yeah, I mean, there's an extent to which I understand.
Every time I go to Europe, I realize how fundamentally an American I am, but it's not in a positive way.
It's like itchy that I can't blow shit up in the middle of nowhere.
And it's like, I don't know that that's a healthy thing to do, but it's just the way it is.
You're like, what do you mean you don't sell tannerite in this hardware store?
What is this communist Russia?
Yeah, William also felt less like a doctor than he had upon moving there.
In a letter home to his parents, he admitted that his interest in his chosen vocation had begun to fade.
Quote, it is said that no idea which enters our mind is ever entirely removed.
Often we see the specter, as it were, of our departed notions or opinions.
By experience, I know how firm is the hold of these early and long-cherished ideas.
With me, whilst a child and a boy, I determined on a political career.
There have been times when I thought that the last vestige of such an idea had disappeared, but often it reappears to me in my waking dreams, leaving me uncertain whether it be an angel of light or an angel of darkness.
Darkness, buddy.
Boy, yeah.
Darkness.
Don't get the best.
Bet on black on that one if you're at the gambling table.
In 1844, near the end of William's European tour, his family friend James K. Polk won the presidential election.
James was an expansionist and supported the annexation of the Republic of Texas, which most people considered to be America's greatest mistake.
He also supported the United States taking over Oregon, which Great Britain also claimed at the time.
Polk's victory over the Whigs showed that a majority of the American people supported these expansionist colonialist values.
It was in the air.
In 1845, writer John O'Sullivan coined the term manifest destiny, the idea that God himself had decreed the United States should expand to control all of North America.
It's one of those, I'm assuming we all remember this from history, Claude.
Yeah, the worst fucking idea put in anyone's head.
Yeah, God.
What if all this was ours?
What if God said, like, yeah, just take all this shit, dude?
I'm on your side, dude.
I'm God.
Listen to me.
You can remember, though, all those times in the Bible where Jesus stole people's houses.
Oh, yeah, that was Jesus.
Still the houses left and right.
Yeah, Manifest Destiny.
I need your money.
My chips, too, brah.
Yeah.
Sorry, Manifest Destiny coming through.
Get the fuck out, Manifest Destiny.
Yep.
Now, William returned to the United States shortly after Polk's victory and very soon made the decision to move to New Orleans.
This was a risky proposition at the time.
The city's swampy conditions and horrible water quality meant that it had a death rate twice that of other American cities.
So like moving to New Orleans is a little bit like playing Russian roulette in this period.
And now, to be honest.
Really?
Yeah.
I don't know.
Yeah, I have some friends there who just had both of their neighbors murdered.
Oh, my goodness.
Yeah, it's just like, it's just like a thing.
Like, I'll check in on them on Facebook and it'll be like, found some bullets in my lawn today.
Like, some shells and casings, like, more gunshots last night.
I don't know.
I haven't been.
I also hear it's a wonderful place, and I have a lot of friends who love it.
Like, they live there, but it's always been a little bit of a roll of the die.
Yeah, New Orleans.
I can always count on you to be like, be like, oh, yeah, I know someone lives there.
And then they knew somebody who was murdered.
Like, how?
What happened?
What happened?
Well, you know, if I'm not mistaken, in that case, it was like a murder-suicide because like the guy's mom had told him that like she couldn't afford her health care.
And it was like, yeah, it was like a really dark fucking tale, man.
It's fucked up.
Yeah.
Now we're going to be able to do that.
So that's really not on New Orleans as much as America.
Yeah, yeah.
I was like, yeah, this episode's pretty light.
And then you bring it to like the real, real.
Oh, boy.
Uncovering Disturbing Patterns00:05:48
We're getting off topic.
Yeah.
And that is, that's not on New Orleans.
That's on our entire country.
No, back to the bastard.
Sorry, Nola.
Yeah.
So, yeah, it was dangerous moving to New Orleans in this period.
Luckily, William was ethnically wealthy and he was able to shack up with a classmate from his college who had a nice townhouse in an affluent part of town.
So he didn't have to deal with like as much of the disease as like, you know, the tenements and stuff were going to have.
In New Orleans, William officially made the shift from medicine to politics and he began to study to become a lawyer.
Now, in New Orleans, as in Paris, Walker was horrified by the fact that everyone wasn't an insufferable goody two-shoes.
He wrote to his parents that they had no idea of the profaneness of the people of New Orleans.
I just love the pearl clutching of this guy.
Yeah.
And just cut to whatever dark shit is inevitable here.
But somebody's saying, poop.
Yeah.
It's so profane.
Yeah, like it is.
Like, he's literally talking about curse words.
And he was particularly horrified by the profanity used by one of his law teachers, a man named Mott.
Quote: Looking at him, I would suppose him almost incapable of using an oath.
But yet, I hadn't been in the office long before my ears were saluted with such words that I had deemed long before consigned to Draymond and Porter's.
This common use of oaths appears to be proclaimed by an absurd affection of energy.
Not content with activity and simple power, they must have bustle and swelling words.
A man wants to have the appearance of strength, although he is conscious of weakness.
Oh, wow.
Okay, big job.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, it's kind of like, you know, some people like when folks will like pose with guns and stuff, they'll be like, that person must have a tiny dick.
He's kind of doing the same thing, but with curse words.
Right.
It's like you, you're, yeah.
The reason you use curse words is because you have a little wiener and that's it.
Exactly.
You know, and that's why I will talk nice words because my pee-pee is also big.
Now, Miles, you know whose pee-pee is also big?
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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 gonna 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, Levy, 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.
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.
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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 life.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
The End of Freedom00:14:59
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
Miles?
Yes.
In 1846, the United States went to war with Mexico.
William was skeptical of this venture and called it a type of fever in a letter to a friend.
He noted that, quote, for a little time, the patient was far gone in a delirium of joy and destruction.
War was preached as being the noblest and sublimest of all states and conditions of men, a spectacle of delight for gods and demigods.
He evinced a particular disgust that the people of Mexico were being treated as pagans by many of his fellow Americans and not the good Christians that they were.
The war sparked a deep interest in current events in William and a growing obsession with the news that increasingly pulled him away from his nascent law career.
He passed the bar in 1847, but his young practice saw little success.
He got a gig working briefly at the Commercial Review, a local paper.
The work didn't last long, but William found journalism appealing.
In early 1849, he put together $1,000 of probably mostly his parents' money and bought an interest in the Daily Crescent newspaper.
Now, the Crescent was at the time a moderately liberal publication, which meant then that they accepted ads for slave markets, but didn't attack abolitionists as literal demons deserving of violent murder.
Oh, so like MSNBC.
Yeah, yeah, they're the MSNBC of the time.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
In 1849, New Orleans, this was a pretty progressive attitude for a rich white guy to take.
Now, 1849 proved to be a pretty bad year for Walker.
He'd fallen in love with a young woman, Ellen Martin, a socialite and a deaf mute whose parents had, unusually for the time, insisted on letting their daughter live a normal life.
That summer, a horrific bout of yellow fever hit New Orleans, afflicting William and forcing him to temporarily flee the city.
It reaped a more vicious toll on the Martin family, killing first Ellen's cousin and then taking hold of her.
She spent several miserable weeks battling the illness until on April 18th, it finally claimed her.
Walker was devastated by this, and his friends would later claim that it marked a turning point in his life.
He became cold, calculating, and increasingly violent.
His coverage in the Daily Crescent turned over and over to confrontational, attacking his fellow journalists for, among other things, reporting on corruption within a local bank.
Walker's angle seemed to be that, by reporting on this, journalists were damaging public confidence in the vague and revealing personal details about the lives of several bankers.
This new walker was also more inclined to support colonialist ventures in the late 1840s.
Narisco Lopez, a Spanish general and a former governor of Trinidad, Cuba, began agitating for the island to rebel against Spanish control and join the United States.
Lopez did not do this for reasons of Cuban self-determination.
He was worried that the island would be taken by a slave uprising, like the one that had liberated Haiti, and he wanted the military backing of the United States to protect he and his fellow property owners.
Spain had ended slavery in most of its domains in 1811, and so Lopez and his fellow people owners were worried that they would lose their ability to own people.
Lopez initially sought the help of the U.S. government in this, but President Polk's administration was unable to start a war with Spain.
He became convinced via delusion that the United States would step in if he could spark an uprising on the island.
And so he hatched a plan to recruit hundreds of random Americans with guns and use them as an army to invade Cuba.
By 1849, he was recruiting men directly from the streets of New York City.
Now, Zachary Taylor, the president who followed Polk, issued Proclamation 51 to warn Americans against participating in Lopez's scheme.
He promised that they would face charges at home and would receive no aid in their endeavors.
And it's kind of a mark of where we are right now that I think if the same thing happened today, the president of the United States would be completely on board.
I, oh, it's so many things, even what you're saying, like just mirrored the positions of so many people.
It's also really interesting to know that the real, I was like, when's the fork in the road moment come for this guy?
And it's when he lost his girlfriend or his wife?
His girlfriend.
His girlfriend to yellow fever.
And that is like when he, this sounds like the beginnings of the end for him.
What was yellow fever exactly?
I don't know.
Some horrible fever kills your ass.
Guessing it's a fever.
I think it's one of those poop yourself to death fevers.
Oh, God.
You hate one.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, no good.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm not a yellow fever expert, though.
You never claim to be.
I think we just got that.
You never claim to be.
Oddly enough, I am.
I don't know.
I don't have a joke for that.
Anyway, yeah, let's move along here.
So, yeah, Lopez succeeded in gathering up several hundred armed men, boats, and $80,000 in funding, which was enough money to run a war at that point in history.
To avoid arrest, he and his men disguised their endeavor as a trip to California to mine gold.
This did not fool anyone, and Lopez's army was broken up.
He fled from New York down to New Orleans, reasoning that the lawless swamps of Louisiana would be friendlier to someone trying to raise an army to invade a sovereign state in order to further the cause of human bondage.
And he was not wrong in this.
William Walker, for his part, loved General Lopez and supported his efforts.
He justified this by pointing out that a slave uprising in Cuba, so close to Florida, might spread the contagious disease of wanting to be free to enslaved black Americans.
Quote from one of his editorials: If, for example, the great number of Negroes now being carried into Cuba should end in a second Haitian insurrection and an establishment of a Negro state on the island, it would be very injurious and dangerous for our southern partners to have such a neighbor.
Of course, we have the right and ought to exercise it of preventing any policy that would lead to such a disaster.
Oh, boy.
It's funny how disaster of freedom.
These moments where like class power structures are about to be disrupted, and then the dominant class has to go, all right, so how are we going to fucking make sure this doesn't happen here?
It's like, how are we going to make sure this freedom thing doesn't spread?
Yeah, and then like with Haiti, it's like, okay, well, we'll just punish them forever monetarily with the banks.
Yeah.
And we'll make sure not they will never prosper and we'll keep them like indebted to this other system for the longest possible.
We'll keep punishing them right up until the modern era 2020.
And no one will talk about it because, like, we'll just assume at that point that Haiti's always been fucked up for inexplicable reasons.
Right.
And then Citibank is like, oh, wait, what?
What?
Oh, was that us back then?
Oh, okay.
We got to get a real Haiti episode up in here.
Oh, my.
Oh, Jesus.
Yeah.
I mean, like, because that really was weak.
Yeah.
All those slave uprisings really had people shook, like, in this way you're talking about where they're like, wait, we can't, we don't want people getting ideas about like liberation over here.
They had so many different ways to combat it that weren't like, hey, if you stop owning people, they won't want to murder you.
Right.
Just a pitch.
Just to pitch that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So Walker claimed that he supported an invasion of Cuba on humanitarian grounds, arguing that the U.S. could stop Cuba from importing new slaves.
And then slavery on the island would take the mild and comparatively inoffensive form in which it exists in the southern states.
Oh, fuck right off.
Yeah.
It's a real piece of shit.
Fuck.
I just love, again, same pattern.
Okay, this country's doing something that we don't want to give ideas to our people.
That might be a good thing.
Therefore, we were just going to force our way in with this weird, lame-ass subterfuge of like, no, we care about the people.
It's about the people.
Yeah.
It's really about the people.
It's not about like.
It's humanitarian.
It's not about preserving these power structures that we need to like extort and exploit the weak.
But anyway, it's fine.
Yeah.
Call it a humanitarian.
It's humanitarian.
Humanitarian.
In his constant editorials, William began to explicitly endorse the practice of filibustering or freebooting.
Now, this is not a term we use today often in its original form, filibustering, like it's the Congress thing where you talk for a long time and probably have to wear a diaper.
But back in the 1850s, according to the book Filibusters and Financiers, filibusters were basically people who would have been described as pioneers if they'd turned their attentions toward colonizing parts of North America already controlled by the government.
Quote, if, on the other hand, they happened to direct their attention towards another nation whose sovereignty was formally recognized by their own, they were called filibusters.
The term filibuster was originally one of opprobrium.
Bandits' use in the 50s was much resented by those to whom it was applied, inasmuch as it was regarded as synonymous with pirate or buccaneer.
And it stops meaning pirate in this period because a lot of people like filibusters, but really it is piracy.
It's just grander than normal piracy.
They're just fucking around and switching labels around to make it seem different.
Yeah.
It's just the label.
They're like, oh, God, please don't call me a buccaneer.
Yeah.
I prefer genocidal.
I mean, filibuster.
Yeah.
Friendicide.
Ah, shit.
No, that doesn't work out.
So I find that book, Filibusters and Financiers, really interesting because it was published in 1916, an age in which most white people considered colonialism to be a clear good and an age in which a lot of people still remembered the 1850s.
It credits the growth of filibustering and its support by men like William Walker to the fact that the blank map of North America was rapidly being filled in.
Quote, there is a proverb current among Frenchmen to the effect that the appetite comes with eating.
And in the case of the land hunger of the American people, the truth of this assertion seems well established.
As soon as they set foot on American soil, the colonists from Europe were compelled to wrest their lands from the savages, many of whom resisted the invaders to the death.
Nature, as well as the natives, had to be subdued.
Road and field were cleared with axe and spade.
Pioneers built their log cabins far in the wilderness and, like the advance guard of a marching army, kept always ahead of the main body of westward-moving settlers.
There was no arrest of this westward progress till the pioneers stood on the shores of the Pacific.
In 1803, the boundary was moved from the Mississippi to the Rockies, and the next generation saw it extending from the Rockies to the sea.
A whole continent had been won, but the land hunger seemed keener than ever.
The appetite had increased with the eating.
And you know, it's uh, yeah, I think that's pretty accurate.
Yes, in a like, obviously, they're kind of pro that, but it still doesn't mean it's an inaccurate assessment of what's going on.
It's funny, too, because I was just reading this study about how, um, like when people who aren't used to the American diet come to the United States and begin eating like typical foods, like, you know, people like that normal people would eat, like, not gourmet shit all the time.
Yeah, like 19 pounds of bacon wrapped up in cheese and decentralized.
High fat, high-sugar diet.
It leads to a normal breakfast, it leads to more eating.
So, like, it's still like the metaphor even holds for the way in which we even consume food in this country.
It's also like, yeah, and then that also extends to aggressive land grabs where you get a little bit and then you get such a boner for boundary pushing.
Uh, they just keep going until you get to a body of water that apparently you can't put a flag in.
Yeah, it's amazing.
Like, the American culture is very much like if you, I don't know, somehow like magically were to take like the collective hunger of like all past generations of human beings who struggled with like the wilderness and the seasons and the tides, and then just like lumped that into a relatively small chunk of human beings.
Like, like, like we're just filled with this insatiable need to consume that's almost metaphysical in its boundaries.
Anyway, the hunger never ends.
Yeah.
So, we're talking about this guy, Lopez, trying to conquer Cuba.
Um, he carried out a couple of different unsuccessful expeditions to Cuba.
He was eventually like executed and shit.
Um, it didn't work out, but this did not dissuade Walker from breathless support for the idea of filibustering.
He was, in general, more aggressive after the death of his girlfriend than he in all spheres of his life.
In late 1849, he got into a dispute with the editor of New Orleans' largest Spanish-language newspaper over the arrest or kidnapping of a Cuban citizen by the Spanish government.
The dispute was based mainly on a misunderstanding by both men, but incensed by an editorial that had insulted him, William Walker found the other publication's editor and beat him with his cane.
Oh, so he is like, and he's not really, he's never before this, like a violent physically person.
So, this is like he's there's really a change going on in this dude.
Oh, wow, yeah, beating him up over maybe what the whole thing.
Yeah, I thought, I thought you were talking about Ellian Gonzalez for a second in the beginning.
If I kidnapped Cuban national in the United States, no, no, no, no, completely different time, very similar, very different story.
Uh, but then he solves his beefs by just cane whooping somebody.
He gets really comfortable with violence after this point, and it's one of those things it's totally plausible that like the death of a loved one could lead to that kind of change.
I also wonder maybe maybe you just got hit in the fucking head at some point, and that's like a part of the story that's just not reported because nobody thought it was a big deal.
Oh, whenever I hear about like a personality change that leads to violence, I wonder maybe a TBI, yeah, yeah, or something going on with your brain, yeah, some CTE up in here, yeah.
Oh, geez, or just or hey, maybe you were called, you know, effeminate your whole life and old celery stick arms, and now you just have had it, and now your toxicity is now the world's problem.
Yeah, maybe this was something that was just simmering inside him his entire childhood, and it finally blew over.
And yeah, maybe the death of a loved one was a catalyst.
Who knows?
Either way, he is a very aggressive man from this point forward.
Right in 1850, Walker left New Orleans and his job at the Daily Crescent for the windy city that never sleeps, San Francisco.
His journey there was nightmarish by modern standards.
He had to take a series of boats down to Panama.
He had to hike through the mountains for days and then book passage on a steamer headed for the West Coast.
It took around five months.
So how long would it have taken over land?
I guess worse, probably, huh?
Yeah, because it's like it's very much less developed, you know, at that point.
Yeah, I mean, a lot more dangerous.
You take the 10 west.
Leaving New Orleans Behind00:04:36
Yeah.
You can take that from Jacksonville all the way, well, I don't know, to Santa Maria.
Yeah, the 10 at this point is a series of gunfights with bandits.
And there's no carpooling.
Yeah.
Now ensconced in California, William got another job at another newspaper, the Daily Herald.
He'd immediately set to work waging a personal war with the entire city's justice system, which, in fairness, was incredibly corrupt and fucked up.
Crime was rampant in San Francisco, which at that point was a nigh lawless frontier town.
William viciously attacked the district judge, Levi Parsons, for his failure to adequately prosecute criminals.
After a local businessman was murdered during a robbery gone wrong, William began to advocate armed crowds of murderous vigilantes as a good solution to San Francisco's crime problem.
Oh boy.
He wanted armed mobs to clean up the streets.
Who doesn't?
Miles?
Yeah.
A good old-fashioned armed mob.
This is so weird.
I just feel like this could be a headline we're going to read in like three months from now.
Yeah, it is.
I mean, it is like a focus of right-wing grifters right now, the fact that there's poop in the streets of San Francisco sometimes.
Yeah.
It's like, buddy, I got some news about Dallas for you.
Right.
Hey, just get some hire some Pinkertons and then clean it up.
It's like, what?
So here's how Walker wrote about his desire for vigilante murder squads.
Quote, when citizens are murdered and robbed in, their houses are feloniously entered in the most populous portions of the city.
Is it not time that there were some action taken to vindicate the law?
We have urged the formation of a volunteer night patrol.
Until such a body be organized, we doubt if there can be any security.
A summary example must be made of the first person detected in the commission of these crimes.
Hmm.
So we just got to go out and shoot us one criminal, and that'll scare the rest straight.
It's good to know that those terrible ideas, people have been having those for centuries now.
Yep, because people never learned a single thing ever.
Not one ever.
Has anyone learned a single lesson?
That is the lesson of history that we don't learn.
Yeah, we'll create order by creating more fear.
I'm pretty sure that's how it's going to work.
Walker was particularly furious when Judge Parsons ruled in the case of another judge who'd been accused of bribery.
He felt probably accurately that the judge had just done a favor for his buddy.
Walker was further outraged when this judge, a guy named Morrison, assigned the property of a dead man to one of his colleagues, even though the deceased had family back in Boston.
Walker attacked these corrupt judges with admirable ferocity, eventually provoking one of their protégés to attack Walker as a liar, a poltroon, coward.
This prompted William to challenge the man to a duel, which was accepted by another one of the judge's protégé.
The terms were set as revolvers fired at 10 paces.
Back when there was honor.
Back when there was honor.
Right?
Before we just cancel people.
Exactly.
When we would cruelly cancel people.
Instead, we would nobly stand 10 feet away and shoot each other with handguns.
Oh, my God.
10 paces, sir.
Not a send less.
William lost and received a bullet in his leg for his trouble.
He kept writing, though, and eventually earned himself a charge for contempt of court.
He was basically posted through it.
He was fined $500, which he refused to pay.
The people of San Francisco mostly seemed to back William in this, seeing his crusade against a corrupt judiciary as fundamentally just.
Next, according to the book Filibusters and Financiers, a mass meeting was held on the plaza on March 9th, 1851, with several thousand citizens in attendance.
Resolutions were quickly adopted approving Walker's conduct, calling on Parsons to resign his seat and asking the local representatives in the legislature to initiate impeachment proceedings.
After adjourning, the citizens marched in a body to the jail and made Walker a visit of sympathy.
Habeas corpus proceedings were next instituted before a judge of the Superior Court who held that Parsons might institute a suit for libel, but that his punishment for the contempt alleged in a newspaper statement was inconsistent with the freedom of the press and a violation of the Constitution.
Walker was thereupon set free.
He at once presented a memorial to the legislature, and the committee to which it was referred recommended on March 26th that Parsons should be impeached.
A special committee was then appointed to investigate the charges, and upon its reporting insufficient grounds for impeachment, the case was ended.
Had Walker possessed anything like personal magnetism, he might have made of this episode the foundation of a successful career in California politics.
He was indeed not without political ambition, but in the prime requisites of a successful politician, he was woefully lacking.
So he was just unable to turn this into any kind of political career.
I mean, how more could you fail upward as a white man?
You're like, look, I started some shit with a judge.
Political Ambition Fails00:05:17
I got clapped.
I had to take that L.
Then suddenly I became like, I got a lot of sympathy.
I could have turned that into something, but then I just didn't even know how to do that.
So I'm just going to rob people.
Hey, Robert.
Yeah.
Robert.
Yes.
Do you know what isn't woefully lacking?
Robert, this is an advanced day.
I feel break.
This is a lot of fun.
I felt like the longer he wanted to get it.
He wanted to let you sit with that one.
Oh, wow.
I did.
What a cool man.
And now you at home can sit with these products and services.
That was shameful, Robert.
I know.
Ads.
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 gonna 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.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago 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 to 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.
Yeah.
Listen to Thanks Stat on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Goespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
Quick question about duels.
Were you only allowed to shoot one shot when you turned?
Like it was like no, no, no.
Oh, so you could just one at a time.
All six at once?
No, no, it's one at a time, though.
Like, I think you have to like wait for the other person to do their second shot if you miss.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
Invading Mexico Territory00:14:32
Well, I mean, it's pretty cool.
It's pretty cool.
I'm surprised people just didn't cheat.
They're like, you know what?
I'm just going to unload this whole clip when I turn.
I don't give a fuck.
Yeah.
I'm sure people did cheat.
Yeah, and then it would just be like, it would be a terrible, it would be a dishonorable Andrew Jackson cheated at a duel and killed a guy.
Yeah.
And it ruled.
But anyway, we'll talk about that some other day.
So Williams' time in California turned him into a powerful supporter of Manifest Destiny.
You'll remember he was kind of like on the edge about the Mexican-American War at first, but like he's on board at this point.
Over his months in San Francisco, he switched from writing about crime to authoring more and more essays about the necessity of American expansionism.
He could see the writing on the wall.
The old United States was filling in and one entire massive continent was, in his view, not enough for the awesomeness that was America.
He believed the U.S. needed to annex not just Cuba, but Nicaragua and probably parts of Mexico, too.
He also felt that the annexation of Central American states might eventually provide the U.S. with more slave states, which would be pretty cool in his view.
There it is.
There it is.
Yeah.
That's debated, but seems to scan.
Yeah.
Oh, that's debatable whether that's what his actual intent was or the whole thing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We'll talk about that a little later, too.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, I was like, what does he think you're going to do with all this land?
He's not the only person who believed this.
There was actually like a southern, like Confederates after the Civil War who moved to, it might have been Costa Rica.
I forget exactly where to like try to start a new Confederacy in Latin or in Central America.
So this is like, he's not the only guy with this basic idea.
Yeah.
And all they were able to do is create Cancun.
Yeah.
Well, actually, Cabo San Lucas comes up in this quite a lot.
So, as William's career in journalism petered out and his brief career as a lawyer proved unfulfilling, his attention drifted more and more to the possibility of filibustering himself and possibly adding new territory to the glorious United States.
Perhaps he was inspired to this work by the example of his heroic grandfather.
In a high-achieving family full of soldiers and politicians and newspaper owners, conquering a sovereign nation was just about the only way to stand out.
He found an opportunity lurking just a few hundred miles south of San Francisco in the untamed wilds of northern Mexico.
At that point, the Sonora Desert and the place we now call Baja was still largely unsettled.
It was occupied by numerous indigenous people, of course, but by the standards of racists in the U.S. and Mexican government, it was essentially empty.
The few villages that existed there, this is just the way people thought at that time.
That's so aggressive.
Like, yeah, what they modern racism at that time just meant, eh, nobody's there.
Well, and it's funny because, like, the big problem Mexico has is that the villages that are there have all these problems with like Apaches and Comanches raiding them.
So it's like, this place is too empty for us to control.
And this is a problem because all of the people that are there want to kill us.
All of the people that are there in this empty place.
Yeah, and they're just kind of like, eh, not worth it.
So the first kind of freebooters who sort of sailed in to try to deal with this problem were actually French, a guy named Charles de Pendray.
And like a bunch of French San Franciscans traveled to Guimas, which is like sort of like the big city in Sonora, a port.
And they developed an agricultural settlement to like essentially try and provide a base of people that would allow them to basically provide some sort of order against the Apache raiders, right?
So like that's the goal here.
And it doesn't work out.
Pendré is eventually murdered after getting into a loud argument with the Sonoran government.
So like the Mexican government kind of wants these French people there because they're having trouble like controlling the territory and fighting off these native tribes.
But at the same time, they don't really trust these people because they're like, you're trying to steal this land from us, like we're pretty sure.
So it's like, it's, it's, it's fraught.
And there's a complicated history here that we're not going to get into enough.
Right.
But like both sides are stealing, so they have to be weary of the other.
They're like, well, we're trying to take this land too, but we kind of need you, but I feel like you're going to steal it more.
Oh, what do we do?
Yeah.
The colonizers catch 22.
Yeah, they are both colonizers here.
I guess you could say Mexico's less colonizer-y at this point because there is at least like they've been there longer.
I don't know.
I'm not going to try to parse that out more or later.
Sure, sure.
No, not at all.
Yeah.
Another wave of French freebooters came next, led by a French count, Gaston de Rousseau Boubon.
I'm not going to pronounce that right, but fuck him.
He received permission from the Mexican government to do the same thing, basically to start a settlement to try and like provide defense against the Apache.
But again, these would-be colonists in the local government wound up at loggerheads.
The count and his men eventually decided to settle their differences with the Mexican government by marching on a nearby city and conquering it at gunpoint.
They succeeded in this, but were eventually beaten by like a kind of a grassroots insurgency, and the survivors were chased out of Mexico in December 1852.
All this was closely observed by William Walker, who thought the whole mess sounded very exciting.
He'd actually put together a plan with a couple of business partners to establish a settlement in Sonora with the goal of protecting Mexican villagers and ranchers from Apache and Comanche raiders.
They'd been unable to get the Mexican government to give them permission, though, and Walker had shelved the idea until the Count's efforts ended in bloody failure at the end of 1852.
In June 1853, William Walker and two business partners traveled to Guimas, Mexico, with the goal of scouting out possible locations for a border settlement.
They received passes from the Mexilan consulate to visit the country, but they were most definitely not allowed to go there in order to plot how they could illegally build towns full of white settlers in Mexico.
The captain of the port was immediately suspicious of Walker and his friends and sent this message off to the local general.
Quote, Your Excellency will perceive that there is undoubtedly an intention to invade this portion of the Mexican territory.
There's like, yeah, everyone knows what's going on here.
You're like, you're not slick.
Yeah.
It's the same thing, like a timeshare pitch where it's like, yeah, yeah, you're offering me a fucking free trip.
I believe that.
What are you trying to fucking steal?
Yeah.
Now, the governor ordered Walker and his friends detained, and they spent the next month trapped in Guimas trying to convince the governor that, nah, really, guy, we're cool dudes.
We're not trying to conquer part of your country.
And while they waited, Walker made a bit of a name for himself around town for dressing like a maniac.
He was described as wearing a huge white fur hat whose long nap waved with the breeze despite the 100-plus degree summer heat.
Okay, we're the fucking big fur white fur hat in the Mexican summer.
Oh my.
To do what?
To let people know you're a pickup artist?
Hell it's the broil.
He's picking up the whole country.
I'm nagging the whole country, bro.
I'm negging him right into my bedroom.
Kind of is, actually.
Now, despite his best attempts at argument, the government held hard to the line that William Walker was absolutely not allowed to travel further into Mexico.
And so at the end of July, William and his friends left.
Despite their failure, he was optimistic, for he had received some very exciting news, which he related in an article published shortly thereafter.
Quote, Apaches had visited a country house a few leagues from Guimas, murdering all the men and children and carrying the women into captivity, worse than death.
The Indians sent word that they would soon visit the town where water is carried on asses' backs, meaning Guymas.
And the people of that port, frightened by the message, seemed ready to perceive anyone who would give them safety.
So he's like psyched about this.
Like some Apaches murder a bunch of people and he's like, fuck yeah, this is my chance.
Oh boy.
The tactics are always the same, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
Is there an atmosphere of fear there I can exploit for my own gain?
Fantastic.
Let me hop right in.
Let me roll right up in that.
Oh, you guys fearing for your life?
Okay, how about I come through with the homies who have no training?
But we will settle this.
Absolutely no training.
But we have guns.
Way more guns than we should have.
Despite the fact that literally no one he had met in Mexico had wanted him there, William Walker insisted to his readers that several women in the country had begged him to repair immediately to California and bring down enough Americans to keep off the Apaches.
Walker was not the least bit dissuaded by the Mexican government's refusal to work with him.
He felt that the ease with which those French settlers had captured a whole town meant that a comparatively small body of Americans would surely see even greater success.
Enough Americans with guns could protect local families from rampaging natives and, of course, secure themselves significant financial benefits.
Walker wrote insistently that such an act would be one of humanity, no less than of justice, whether sanctioned or not by the Mexican government.
And so William Walker returned to California, intent upon the goal of invading Mexico.
He wrote that his plan was to establish at as early a time as possible a military colony, not necessarily hostile to Mexico, on the frontier of Sonora, with a view of protecting that state from the Apaches.
It's like, we're not necessarily hostile.
No, I mean, yeah, we have guns and we're shooting people that like don't agree with us, but like, that's not the point, though.
We're here like that.
That's only hostile if you don't agree with us.
It's pretty simple.
I'm pretty sure we laid it out.
You disagree with me.
I shoot you.
It is the geopolitical equivalent of that scene in Simpsons where Bart walks forward swinging his fists in a windmill.
Hey, if I hit you, it's not my fault.
Exactly.
Actually, you're the aggressor because you knew it was coming your way and you got in the line of fire.
Now, what Walker was doing was wildly illegal.
And so he had to hide his activities, but he was really bad at secrecy.
And almost immediately, local papers started commenting on the rumors that he was going to invade Mexico.
There was criticism for the idea in some papers, but at the time, many Americans supported the idea of conquering more Mexico.
One of Walker's fellow Californians wrote this in an 1854 op-ed, speaking for a sizable chunk of the territory.
Quote, It is the fate of America ever to go.
She is like the rod of Aaron that became a serpent and swallowed up the other rods.
So will America conquer or annex all lands.
That is her manifest destiny.
Only give her time for the process.
To swallow up every few years a province as large as most kingdoms of Europe is her present rate of progress.
Sometimes she purchases the mighty morsel.
Sometimes she forms it out of waste territory by the natural increase of her own people.
Sometimes she annexes and sometimes she conquers it.
Oh boy, waste territory.
Yeah, this is the attitude common at the time.
I mean, yeah, you realize, like, whenever I think about this, I'm like, how are people so callous and like brazen in this time?
It's like, yeah, I get it.
The language you're using is just sort of, it's merely looking at it like you're, you know, at a fucking like a parking lot swap meet, and you want to make sure you get there early enough to get the good spot.
Yeah.
We don't often talk about that with Manifest Destiny.
It was not, I won't say the majority of Americans felt this way, but a not insignificant number of Americans were like, oh, no, we're supposed to take the whole fucking world or at least all of South and Central America.
100%.
You're like, if I can walk there and I don't need a boat, I think it should be ours.
Yeah.
For as long as that goes.
Now, Walker and a growing circle of comrades raised money for their venture by selling $500 bonds at half face value for the independence loan fund of the Republic of Sonora.
They promised that purchasers of these bonds would receive seven square miles of Mexico's sovereign soil once their new country was established.
In conversations with his supporters, Walker did not even bother to pretend that his goal was to create a settlement for humanitarian reasons.
Now he was openly raising funds to conquer Mexican territory and establish his own country.
In order to avoid running afoul of the Neutrality Act, Walker carefully worded his sales pitch to prospective soldiers.
Rather than outright saying, I'm recruiting mercenaries, he would talk up all the wealth and spoils and excitement to be gained in the venture in the hopes that his target would ask if they too could join.
For some reason, lost to time, Walker felt that people volunteering to invade Mexico with him was more legal than him hiring people to invade Mexico.
So it wasn't.
He would just have like a really cool pitch and like the whole point is like, dude, bait him in with such a dope pitch that they're going to be like, yes, I would like to join this illegal expedition.
I'm not raising an army.
An army asked me if they could help me invade Mexico.
That's totally different.
That's so different, Your Honor.
Are you kidding me?
I was like, this is how it started.
I'm like, yo, Brett, this place, Mexico, is fucking cool.
I'm going to check it out.
I don't know what you're thinking.
Next thing you know, he's coming with like a bunch of homies that have guns.
What do you want me to do?
Yeah, it just sort of happened.
Yeah.
Wow.
What a pitch, though, too.
And you're like, also, can you put in like five bucks on my fucking like colonizer fund?
And you will get, you will secure your own piece of land.
This all does kind of make me want like an 1850s like version of the hangover where like they all wake up having conquered Baja Mexico.
And you're like, what happened?
What happened?
Where's William Walker?
You can make a fun movie out of that.
Walker hired a ship called the Arrow to carry he and his men to Sonora.
And of course, both the Mexican and U.S. governments almost instantly realized what was happening.
The boat was seized while full of guns in San Francisco.
Walker responded by suing the government to release his boat, arguing that it had no authority to take possession of a ship without evidence of a criminal act.
He loudly denied he was planning any kind of invasion.
A media storm enveloped the whole issue, and Walker was once again successful in getting the people of San Francisco on his side.
While all this attention was focused on the arrow, William Walker went and chartered another ship and filled it with guns and ammunition.
A little bit after midnight on October 16th, 1854, the local police caught some of Walker's men moving supplies into the boat.
They seized a bunch of ammo, prompting Walker to panic and rouse all the men he could get his hands on, 45, most of whom were drunk, and rushed them aboard his new ship with whatever guns they had on hand.
The men set sail later that night, severely undermanned and underarmed, but finally on their way to Sonora.
What a fucking disaster.
Get on the boat.
Get on the boat.
I don't care how drunk you are.
Hey, what's going on?
Hey, Will, what's going on?
There's a cops are coming, man.
Do you want me to get on a boat?
I don't have my musket.
That's it.
Cops are angry because trying to invade Mexico.
Get on the boat.
Bring the shot.
Fuck.
Hurry, motherfucker.
There'll be fucking booze on the boat.
Just get on.
Bring your gun.
Now, Walker named his small army, slightly larger than a platoon, the 1st Independent Battalion.
The Disaster at La Paz00:05:22
He declared himself colonel because it was the 1800s and everybody was a colonel.
And then, shockingly, he succeeded in using his small force to conquer the town of La Paz, population 6,000.
This was less impressive than it sounds.
There was no one to defend the town.
Walker and a bunch of his men just stumbled, probably drunk, into the governor's office, waving guns and terrorized everyone there into giving them control.
As soon as the governor surrendered, William Walker ordered the Mexican flag taken down and replaced with a new flag he had designed himself.
The flag of the Republic of Sonora.
Looking out from his new base of operations, his ambitions expanded.
No longer was he content in creating a small Republic of Sonora.
La Paz had fallen so easily that he now desired to conquer the entire Baja Peninsula.
Within days of capturing the town, he renamed his new country, issuing a declaration that the Republic of Lower California is hereby declared free, sovereign, and independent, and all allegiance to the Republic of Mexico is forever renounced.
Okay, just like that, huh?
Ambition, man.
You got to fake it till you make it.
Just like that.
And also, wow, way to get slowly deceived by how easy one is.
Like, oh, well, that was pretty easy.
La Paz.
You covered this small town easily.
You know what?
Fuck it.
I'm going to do it.
You know what?
Yeah, let's do the whole thing.
Clearly, this is the hardest thing we'll ever have to do.
Do you know what did that flag look like?
I'm always curious when people like...
It's pretty boring.
Oh, okay.
It wasn't like indulgent.
I would have talked about it if it was cool.
No, no, it wasn't.
Sorry.
Damn it.
That's when these guys fucking disappoint me.
When there's like a real opportunity for some just straight up buffoonery and it's, like you know, actually took flags very seriously.
Very minimal design, very minimal design.
It's a pretty.
Yeah, it's not super crazy, uh.
Walker concluded his declaration by announcing that he was now the president uh, as well as a colonel, which is a pretty impressive series of title changes for a single week.
Yeah he's, not only am I the president, i'm the colonel of the HAIR CLUB FOR MEN.
President colonel yeah colonel president yeah, colonel.
President Walker set to work at once, giving a bunch of other people fancy titles, appointing a secretary of war who was, by himself, three percent of the army.
Most critically, he appointed a propagandist who started mailing off dispatches to the SAN Diego Herald in order to inform Americans Americans about what Walker and his men had done.
He set to work at once confiscating the arms and ammunition of the citizens of La Paz so they could not rise up against him.
He attempted to fortify the city, but eventually realized that it was indefensible if the Mexican army attacked.
And so he moved his forces to Cabo San Lucas, which he felt would be an easier place to draw Americans in to fight for his cause.
Wow.
He moves to Cabo because he's like, this is where if I want to get more Americans, I got to go to Cabo.
This is where it's at.
La Paz is so last year.
I mean, if you haven't been to Cabo, you really must.
Yeah.
So it's, it's he makes the same decision as an insurgent general as Jimmy Buffett does as Jimmy Buffett.
Come on down to Margarita.
Does he is he just thinking like because of location?
He's like, okay.
Yeah, this is this is an easier place to get reinforcements.
Like he's relying on, he's not an idiot.
He knows that like 45 men isn't enough to take all of Baja, but he hopes that like the stories that are spreading in the news will send hundreds of Americans to join his army.
And he knows that Cabo San Lucas, it's easier for people from California to get to get to right, right, right.
They're just going straight down the coast.
Yes.
Oh, okay.
I also, in my mind, I'm also thinking of a dude who's like starting at like a terrible vacation spot too.
And he's like, nah, you know what?
We're not going to get a lot of business here.
We got to go to Cabo, man.
They're going to see these beaches.
They're going to love it.
And they'll fight my war.
And they'll fight my war.
So, yeah, while he and his men were loading up their boat to flee the capital of their new country for the new capital of their new country, which they would have to conquer once they got there, they ran into a passenger ship waving the Mexican flag.
Walker's men boarded the ship at once and realized it held Juan Clemaco Reboledo, the new governor of La Paz.
They arrested him immediately and took him prisoner, along with the old governor.
The Americans hold up on their boat for a few nights with their prisoners, waiting in the harbor of the city they'd conquered.
When a few of them landed to get firewood, they were ambushed by Mexican soldiers and townspeople.
Walker and his troops responded to the ambush by returning fire, which is fair, and also by lighting random people's houses on fire, which is not fair.
They made it back to the boat and told Walker what had happened.
His first reaction was to load his ship's cannons and open fire on La Paz, which was again the capital of the new country he had founded.
Walker landed with 30 of his men after this and took to the fight to the enemy for 90 minutes or so.
The ambushing Mexican forces fled, and Walker wrote a glowing report of their victory to be shared in the newspapers back in California.
The enemy's loss was six or seven killed and several wounded.
Our men did not so much as receive a wound except from cacti while pursuing the enemy through the chaparral in the rear of town.
Thus ended the Battle of La Paz, crowning our efforts with victory, releasing lower California from the tyrannous yoke of declining Mexico and establishing a new republic.
Oh my God, man.
Yeah, he got into a gunfight over firewood, burned down a quarter of the town, and then called it the Battle of La Paz.
What a seat.
And this goes back to fucking grandpa, too, where you're like, yeah, that motherfucker, he's got a few stories, and then he's having to like self-mythologize when he writes back because he's like, well, I'm never going to do that.
Self-Mythologizing Battles00:03:40
So let me just really pump this story up so it sounds a lot way cooler.
Yeah.
And Miles, that's where the story is going to have to remain for the end of part one.
Okay.
And we're going to talk about what happens next with William Walker and his men in part two on Thursday.
Great.
You got some pluggables to drop in the P-zone here before we roll?
Maybe, you know, I do dailies.
I get to do it.
You want to colonize this podcast?
I want to put the flag deep into the fertile soil of behind the bastards right now.
I do want to shout out my new show, 420-day Fiancé, that I co-host with one of your other esteemed guests, Sophia Alexandra, where we just get high and talk about a 90-day fiancé.
It's like if you need a break from life, that's sort of like why we do it.
It's like we're talking about all kinds of serious shit.
I'm like, can we just talk about my favorite show, but like it faded before?
That sounds great.
And that's all I'll have no plugs to plug because I do nothing but this episode of this podcast, which is the entirety of my breadth of work.
So the episode is now done.
No, it's not, Robert.
Is it not?
No.
Do I do other things?
You do other things.
You are worst year ever.
Disappointing.
Oh, that's you?
With our good friends, Katie Stoll and Cody Johnston.
I guess so.
Yeah.
I guess so.
You can also find Robert on Twitter at IWriteOK.
And you can find us on the Twitch stagram at BastardsPod.
And we have a TeePublix store.
To be honest, I don't know about all that, but if Sophie says so, I guess I'm not going to argue.
Oh, my God.
Thank you so much.
That's so kind of you.
Now the episode is over.
Excellent.
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 hanging 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 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 Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
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.
Internet Detectives Find Truth00:00:37
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.
They 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.