William Walker, the "dumbest colonizer in history," attempted to conquer Mexico before seizing Nicaragua in 1856 by repealing anti-slavery bans and importing enslaved Africans. While some Americans celebrated him, his rule ended after a coalition led by Cornelius Vanderbilt defeated his forces, resulting in Granada's burning and Juan Santa Maria's sacrifice. Walker surrendered to the U.S. Navy in 1857 without consequence but was eventually executed by Honduras in 1860. Today, modern libertarians often sanitize his legacy, omitting his role in ethnic cleansing and slavery, leaving him infamous in Central America yet largely forgotten in the U.S. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:02:49
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I got you.
I got you.
I'm Lori Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
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Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Groban.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share stay with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Internet!
Shit.
I'm Robert Evans again.
Still badly introducing my podcast, Behind the Bastards, about bad people.
Terrible ones.
Miles, still my guest.
Yes.
Still, still ashamed to be here after that introduction.
How are you doing?
Oh, no, that intro gave me life.
Quite the opposite.
Oh, yeah.
It didn't look like it.
It looked like you died a little bit inside.
Oh, that's just because I got an email.
Santa.
Oh.
Sam, I owe money for car insurance or something.
Bad People Introduction00:11:47
Oh, man.
I have some good news about Geico, but I forget what it is.
Can he save me 15% or more?
I don't know.
Okay.
Well, I'll test that theory.
I'm going to go to the insurance provider and I'm going to enter codes bastards and see what I get.
Yeah, you just, you find someone who sells insurance and you paint or carve that into them and you'll get a discount on your insurance.
That's the way it works.
Fantastic.
Yeah.
You know, I'm sorry.
I'm a little bit distracted right now.
My friend Michael had a really rough night and I've just kind of been trying to text him through it.
Oh, Blue Balls.
Yeah.
You know, he's a nice guy.
Every now and then, he just kind of, you know, we all make bad choices.
Yeah.
And yeah, his was trying to buy an election.
I think there were just some women who maybe didn't like maybe a couple jokes I made.
It was my favorite line.
This is the night after the debate.
We'll try not to talk about it too much because we have an even more problematic man than Michael Bloomberg to discuss.
I want to talk about old Willie Walker here.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Bill Walker, Wilhelm Walker.
So, when we left off with our story, William Walker had just captured a new country by stealing a town from Mexico and then murdering several of its people when they dared to say, hey, we're maybe not okay with this.
Right.
And I gotta, like, you gotta have an element, maybe respect's the wrong word, but something for a guy who like captures a small town and is like, I got me a country now.
I have respect in the way that I would have like respect, like, if it were a script and it wasn't real and it was for the pure comedy, I would have respect for that character.
Yeah.
I'm like, this is great for the plot.
Yeah, there's like a fun Will Farrell movie in aspects of this if you trim out the racism in slavery and murder.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Will Farrell would be the right guy to play this dude.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, he's big.
He's a big guy.
I could see like Sam Rockwell, too.
Oh, Sam Rockwell would be fun.
That might be better.
Yeah.
Will Farrell, like, there's a, there's like a silent confidence to him.
Sam Rockwell, like, has the range to like tap into like a guy who is trying to prove his like hero grandpa wrong.
Yeah.
He's got that like nervous like energy thing.
Like that like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I think you're right.
Sam Rockwell's the Pauline Maddie.
Well, I'll watch full comedy.
I'd like to open part two this episode with a paragraph from the book Filibusters and Financiers, which is again a 1916 book that is kind of like bemusedly positive towards William Walker and the ideas of Manifest Destiny.
It includes a paragraph describing the general character of the American man during this period of time.
And I find this passage really insightful for trying to like get into the head of like what a lot of people, like the people back at home who thought what Walker was doing in Mexico was awesome.
Like what's what's kind of going on in their brains?
I think this is an interesting paragraph.
Okay.
So again, this is writing about the American man in general in the 1850s.
Quote, he was always sure that he was right.
The belief of the Americans in their own excellence was one of the things which most impressed and puzzled the foreign visitor.
Success in the struggle for existence in the new world had produced unbounded egotism and self-confidence.
Every vigorous boy passes through such a stage as he approaches adolescence.
To other members of his family and to his neighbors, he seems something of a bully.
In this period, other nations entertained a similar opinion of young America.
All the world regarded this country as a braggart and a bully, and the estimate was not entirely unjust.
It is consoling, however, to record that our faults, numerous as they were, were symptoms of youth and super abundant health rather than signs of senile degeneracy.
So we were giant dicks during this period of time, but like we were young.
We were whatever.
Yeah.
That's what happens.
You get, you get a get some genocidal colonizer thoughts and you act them out.
Okay.
Sorry.
Yeah, it's amazing.
I love that paragraph.
So depending on which source you read, you're going to get different takes in terms of like what William's attitudes towards slavery during this period of time.
Some sources paint him as kind of indifferent to it in his early life.
Like obviously his parents had slaves, but he wasn't a slaveholder.
His magazine was kind of for the time and place, kind of soft on abolition.
Like obviously they ran ads for slaves, but they weren't like, like a lot of papers in that period of time would have been like abolitionists should be murdered for sure.
So like they weren't on that into things.
Right, right.
So I guess less Fox News, more CNN.
Yeah, yeah.
I think he said MSNBC.
Whatever it is.
Yeah.
I take him away, really.
Yeah.
We'll take your money and we'll half call it out, but we'll take your money.
Yeah, I think we can all rest assured that both CNN and MSNBC in the 1850s would have been both sidesing the hell out of slavery.
Oh, yes, yes.
They're going to be like, hey, you know, it's like, who is it?
Was it Andrew Jackson?
He's like, hey, you got a wolf by the ears.
You know, what are you going to do?
Gonna let it go?
I don't know, man.
Maybe stop grabbing wolves.
Yeah.
Andrew?
Why are we grabbing wolves?
Hey, you sick fuck.
You need to grab a wolf by the ears and nothing's going to.
You know what?
No, let it go.
You deserve to be mauled to death.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's just like somebody fucking with a wolf and being like, there's no way to stop this wolf from being angry at me.
Well, hold on.
You're grabbing it by the fucking ears.
Wasn't that Andrew Jackson who said that?
I think so.
That sounds like a very Jackson-y kind of thing.
It definitely sounds Jackson-y.
So.
Whatever the case in terms of Williams' views on slavery, by the time he wound up in Sonora, he had transformed into a strict supporter of America's peculiar institution.
A write-up I found in the Pinn Gazette notes.
He may have had a change of heart or may simply have recognized the usefulness of pro-slavery sentiment and gaining support and recruits for his filibustering.
The most ardent advocates of Manifest Destiny were Southerners who viewed expansion and annexation as opportunities to establish new slave states, tipping the tenuous balance with the abolitionist North.
Most of Walker's enlistees on the Mexican adventure had been recruited from the slave states of Tennessee and Kentucky.
Once in control, Walker borrowed the laws of Louisiana for his new republic, making slavery legal by default.
So we're going to talk about that a little bit more later.
But yeah, well, actually right now, Scott Martel, Williams' best biographer and the author of William Walker's Wars, makes a point of noting that Walker could have just as easily stolen the laws and constitution of California because he'd worked as a lawyer in both states.
So he knew the laws just as well.
Right.
But California didn't allow slavery.
Right.
Which suggests that Walker was explicitly motivated to make a new slave state in northern Mexico.
And it's interesting because Walker himself never actually owned a slave.
So maybe this was all about trying to recruit more Southerners to come to his banner.
Oh, right.
Being like, hey, we're slave friendly.
Yeah, we're slave-friendly.
We're going to make another Texas underneath Texas.
And it's going to be even Texaser.
Oh, wow.
Could you imagine?
Yes.
Yeah, I guess I'm having trouble even processing that concept, but I'm going to trust you on that.
Yeah.
So he was not ideologically committed to slavery, at least in his writing.
In prior work, he'd supported slavery in slave states under the ages of democracy, which, you know, ignores the fact that the actual enslaved people couldn't vote.
And this kind of proved to be like this line of reasoning would prove to be regular behavior for Walker.
He justified his invasion of Mexico on humanitarian grounds, citing the raids by indigenous people and the unfair taxes taken by Mexico, without actually ever talking to those people or furnishing any evidence that he wanted them to free him or him to free them.
Yeah, in parsing out the actual motivations of William Walker personally, Martel cites historian Frank Soule, who wrote that Walker was, quote, a brave, highly educated, and able man, whatever may be thought of his discretion and true motives of conduct in the expedition.
He seems to have taken a high moral and political position in the affair, though his professions were peculiar and their propriety not readily admitted by downright sticklers for equity and natural law.
A few of his co-adjutors were also men of a keen sense of honor who forgot, or heeded not, in the excitement of the adventure, the opinions of mere honest men upon the subject.
But the vast majority of Walker's followers can only be viewed as desperate actors in a true filibustering or robbing speculation.
The good of the wretched and Apache oppressed Sonorians was not in their thoughts.
If they succeeded, they might lay the sheer foundations of fortunes.
If they failed, it was only time and perhaps life lost.
In either event, there was grand excitement in the game.
Yeah.
That could be...
I thought you were reading a description of like before the second Iraq war or something.
Holy shit.
Because nothing's ever changed.
Yeah.
It's like, yeah, look, here's the flowchart.
Does this country have something you want?
Yes.
Are they willing to let you take it?
Yes or no?
If it says no, okay, invade on the grounds of humanitarian crisis and it's justified.
Yeah, and you have a couple of guys in there who really do think they're doing the humanitarian thing, and you shove those dudes out front because it makes for a good look, but 90% of everybody's just like, I want to get what's fucking mine and take it out of this.
Wait, what do I got to say?
What do I got to say to get over there?
Yeah, yeah, fine, Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That, that.
Humanitarian, for sure.
It's interesting that Walker just stole all the laws and legal code of Louisiana because you might expect that as a former newspaper editor and a columnist, a man of letters, and a lawyer, that like he would have written something in the founding document of his new nation, like something at all, anything to like state out what its values or beliefs or goals were.
Right.
Something like the Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights.
And it says a lot that Walker ignored doing any of that and just was like, ah, we'll just be like Louisiana.
Yeah, I guess that's usually like a time for like an egomaniac to like really do a nice solo on yourself being like, oh yeah, step one of my constitution and my new country I'm doing where he's just kind of like, fuck it.
I'm just going to steal my, I'm not going to do my homework.
It's probably maybe, so I guess that's less about him really wanting to start his own country and more just the idea that he could.
Yeah, I think it was more just like he wanted to, I suspect his goal was to just try to conquer this chunk of Mexico and then give it to, like have it be annexed by the United States and get fucking rich as shit and be the founding father of a new state.
I really think that was kind of his end goal here.
He's like, oh, that fucking John C. Fremont ain't shit.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Like you can tell, like, there's a, I think it's probably a good idea to look at kind of John Brown as an example of another kind of deluded guy who had like dreams of setting up his own state with a tiny number of men.
And like the first thing Brown did before he even got militarily involved was write up like a constitution and a statement of values and all these things that like someone who actually believes something does when they embark on a plan like this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Walker does not believe in shit other than getting rich and famous.
Okay.
I think that's where I land on this.
So he really is the modern American.
I think we're starting to see this.
Like there's not even like the romance of it all like some of these other figures have.
It's purely like, no, man, this is lucrative.
And it's like weird to say, but he doesn't even have the kind of ethical commitment to love slavery.
Like he never owns a slave.
He doesn't care that much.
He's using that because he knows it'll get him recruits.
But like he doesn't even, he's not even committed to that.
He has his laser right on.
Yeah, it's like just his, it's weird.
Like it would honestly be a little bit, it would still, I mean, differently gross if he was like a committed slaveholder, but instead he's just sort of like using this really gross thing other people are committed to to further his own goals.
It's so weird.
Just total master manipulator.
Yeah.
Anyway, back to the story.
Colonizer Mentality00:09:39
So where we are when we left off is he they captured the town of La Paz, shot some people, captured the new governor who they found on a boat, and then sailed away from the city towards Cabo San Lucas.
Yeah, La Paz 2.0.
So they set up a camp outside of Cabo San Lucas and prepared to effect their invasion.
And unfortunately for them, the locals had heard all about what they were doing in La Paz and had organized a militia to resist.
Oh, hell yeah.
Yeah.
Now, Walker had been expecting a few volunteers to arrive from San Francisco to like show up his numbers, but they didn't get there in time.
And after a few days, he decided he had to move his new nation's capital for the third time in like two weeks.
He hadn't even conquered.
So did he even step foot or he just saw it like, oh, it's going to be hot.
He was like, yeah, they were like camped outside and he was like, oh, shit, there's like way more of them than us.
And they're actually ready now.
Like, I can't just stumble into the mayor's office and say I'm in charge.
Yeah, like wave a musk.
Who's in charge?
Yeah.
Nah, ah, me now.
So then he had to pack his shit up and look for Capital 3.0.
Looks for Capital 3.0.
And so you're in Baja, right?
You're in Baja.
You're looking for, you want it to be on the coast, obviously.
Like you're in Baja.
You got to be on the fucking coast.
Cabo is not working out.
Where do you, where do you, where do you go?
I don't know.
I mean, like, do you, it sounds like if you're smart, you're like, all right, I've made Mexico way too hot for me.
No, no, no.
He's still, he's still sticking with the Mexico.
This is a fucking idiot.
What?
I don't know.
And the reason this is hysterical.
Close.
The reason this is hysterical will make less sense to people who don't haven't lived in Southern California, but he rolls to fucking Ensenada, baby.
There he is.
Hell yeah.
Keep it moving.
The party really does stop.
Today, known for its beautiful beaches, pleasant weather, and dirt cheap drugstore tram and all, Ensenada was at that point the furthest northern settlement on the Baja Peninsula.
I love Insonata.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, everyone knows you go there, you better learn the generic name for prescription drugs when you're down there, or else you ain't going to be a good person.
You're damn right.
No.
So its proximity to San Diego would secure his flank and provide him with an easy route to accept new American volunteers.
His forces landed in Ensenada on November 30th, 1853, and seized the town without a fight because it was barely a town.
Shortly there, yeah, there was, yeah, shortly thereafter, he posted a message in the center of town explaining his intentions to his new citizens.
He sent a copy of this message to the San Diego Herald.
And I have to note that this message to his new citizens in Ensenada was written in English.
Of course.
You fucking asshole.
I mean, yes, of course.
Of course it is, you colonizer fuck.
You're like, yeah, I don't know what here.
This is what I'm telling you.
I mean, figure it out.
I don't know what they speak in Ensenada.
What is it?
French?
What is it?
Ensenadino.
Portuguese.
Ensenadan?
I don't know that one.
He argued in his letter that the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which had ended the Mexican-American War, had established a state of affairs whereby Mexico could not adequately care for its western provinces since they were like cut off from the rest of Mexico.
Furthermore, quote, the moral and social ties which bound it to Mexico have been even weaker and more dissolute than the physical.
Hence, to develop the resources of California and to effect a proper social organization therein, it was necessary to make it independent.
Independently.
Walker pointed out that Baja had many natural resources, which required good government by white people in order to truly exploit.
And then, Miles, then he got really racist.
Then he got really, no, no, he fucking dives into it now.
The territory under Mexican rule would forever remain wild, half savage, and uncultivated, covered with an indolent and half-civilized people, desirous of keeping all foreigners from entering the limits of the state.
When the people of a territory fail almost entirely to develop the resources nature has placed at their command, the interests of civilization require others to go in and possess the land.
They cannot, nor should they be allowed, to play the dog in the manger and keep others from possessing what they have failed to occupy and appropriate.
Oh my God.
That is some colonizer mentality there.
Fucking, I don't know if I'm like high because I'm so fucking like it's so cringy to hear it like that, or maybe I'm actually high, but I feel that caused a visceral since it's the real motivation behind all colonialism that some most colonized, particularly like most people who write positively about colonialism in like the 20th century cover it up a bit more.
Yeah, yeah.
Now, rather than like, oh, you guys are too dumb and arcane to fucking know what to do with this stuff.
Therefore, you need me to come in, exploit it, give you nothing.
And then when you ask for something, I'll, you know, I'll say you're a communist and then I'll send it, send some people to the School of Americas.
It's a little bit like when I was younger and very drunk, sometimes I would go into restaurants and steal food from other people's plates because I was too drunk to know that things like property rights existed and they weren't eating the food while I was taking it.
And so, William Walker, yeah, that's the justification Walker's using a drunk me.
You walk into a Chili's and you're just like, Man, sometimes it was way nicer than Chili's.
I got some stories about a fucking Buddha bar in fucking Kiev that are, yeah, anyway.
Wow.
Yeah.
So Walker argued that the Mexican government, which he had fled two cities already in order to avoid, had given up their claim to Baja by failing to protect it.
This is as he's fleeing from the Mexican military.
Okay.
Baja was, in his words, a waif on the waters, and Mexico cannot complain if others take it and make it valuable.
What?
Such a piece of shit.
Dude, the ball's on this fucking guy.
I know.
It's amazing.
Oh, well, if it mattered so much, you would have fought for it.
So stop playing game.
That's exactly what I yelled at those people when I stole the food from their plates.
Yeah.
That's like kind of like if like you, I was in a relationship where someone broke up with me to test if I would fight for the relationship.
Ooh, that's a healthy way to deal with a relationship right there.
I took it as I was respecting what their wishes were.
And I was like, oh, if that's how you feel, like, okay, then sorry.
And then her friend is like, she wanted you to fight for her.
And I was like, well, what the fuck?
I was told a different thing.
I'm sorry.
Okay.
But I guess the same thing with Mexico.
You didn't fight for her.
Okay.
So it's mine now.
Yes.
Yeah.
William Walker is the same as your ex-girlfriend.
I say that a lot.
Yeah, I know you do.
I'm glad we're able to get that in.
Yeah.
So in public dispatches, all this was framed in a mix of standard colonialist justifications like the ones above and the ever-present assertion that Walker and his men were protecting the local Mexican people from dastardly dangerous natives.
Now, there is no evidence that any of these people ever felt protected by him.
In fact, since he and his men stole food and other supplies whileever they traveled, it is unlikely that the people of Ensenada saw Walker's men as different from any other bandits.
Yeah.
The best you can say for Walker and his soldiers is that they mostly raided the ranches of wealthy property owners.
So, yeah.
Now, one of the people that they stole from these wealthy property owners in Ensenada was named Antonio Maria Malindres.
And he fled his ransacked home while Walker's men were there, stealing shit from it for the town of Santo Tomas and succeeded in raising a small militia to fight back against what he assumed was just a bunch of American horse thieves from San Diego.
Remember, like news doesn't travel at this period.
He just sees these Americans with guns.
He's like, oh, these must just be criminals who crawl, which is like not wrong, but he doesn't realize they're trying to make a nation.
He just thinks they're stealing shit randomly.
I think this is a thought many people in Baja California have had for centuries now.
They go, it's probably just a couple assholes from San Diego.
I have embodied aspects of William Walker's behavior in the same city, and I apologize and have apologized repeatedly to the people of Ensenada for it.
Oh, wow.
Well, you're a better man than he.
Look, if they weren't going to properly make use of the great resources of tramadol that nature put at their place.
They're just going to waste.
They will not.
I colonize the shit out of those 100 Mike pills, baby.
Yeah.
Speaking of 100 milligram Tramadol pills, you know what you cannot buy over the internet without attracting substantial risk?
It's time for an ad break.
We're not supported by tram at all, unfortunately, yet.
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.
Golden Rules for Men00:03:14
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.
Shari, 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 Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Mode.
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.
Drunk Mercenaries00:14:41
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 Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
Okay.
So, this guy, Antonio Melendres, he makes a militia to fight back against Walker's men, and they successfully ambush some of Walker's soldiers who were in the middle of robbing a house.
They kill one of them and capture or route the rest.
So, Melendres takes some of these prisoners and he interrogates them.
He learns that, like, these aren't just a bunch of random bandits.
These people are trying to conquer the entire Baja Peninsula.
So, that interrogation process must have been so weird.
You think they're horse-seeing, like, what the fuck's your deal?
What are you here for?
And they're like, We're here to fucking take over for everything.
And I'd be like, Oh shit.
Oh, wow, really?
Well, I have you at fucking bayonet point.
Um, so how's that looking for you right now?
Yeah, so that's kind of exactly what Melendres does: he's like, All right, well, we've got to step, we got to put a stop to this.
This isn't good.
Oh, you thought you were going to colonize this shit?
So, he puts together a force of about 60 men and he assaults Walker and his soldiers in Ensenada the next day.
And Walker's men were quickly surrounded inside a walled adobe compound they'd taken for their headquarters.
Um, but unfortunately for Melendres, they had cannons and they were very well set up inside this compound.
So, he's basically with an almost equal-sized force of men charging Walker inside a fortified position with artillery, and it does not go well.
Um, more than a dozen of Melendres's men are killed, um, several more are wounded, um, and only one of Walker's raiders is shot dead, although eight more are wounded.
So, Melendres pulls back, uh, and the situation devolves into a siege.
Now, at this point in time, the boat that Walker had chartered, the Caroline, had a great vantage point to watch all this unfold.
And its captain decided he had no interest in waiting around for the end and winding up in a Mexican prison.
And his captain, by the way, is the guy Walker appointed his secretary of the Navy.
So, the Secretary of the Navy goes to those two captive Mexican governors on board and he's like, I don't want any part of this anymore.
Like, yeah, I'm gonna work something out.
Yeah, and like generations of Americans after him, they sailed to Cabo San Lucas to chill out.
Oh, the irony of it all.
Wait, so that guy basically just gave him up and was like, release the captive governors to just he takes them back to Cabo and he's like, Yeah, I'm not a part of this anymore.
Yeah, oh, you, I, I, I wish we would see more people like that secretary of the navy in today's environment.
Yeah, you know, so I wish our secretary of the navy was like that secretary of the navy and gave up our navy to Mexico, it would just be interesting, yeah, or at least like prosecute like war criminals.
Yeah, well, that's a little much to hope for.
So, uh, William Walker did succeed in breaking the siege of Ensenada by launching a daring night attack after a series of rainstorms.
But most of his opponents, including Melendres, fled into the hinterlands around the city in order to raise more men to repulse the Americans.
And one of these guys, one of Melendres' soldiers, a guy named Negrete, actually traveled to San Diego and then San Francisco to like try to talk with U.S. authorities and determine whether or not the government was okay with what was happening.
Which basically went to the American government.
He's like, Are you guys, do you guys know what's happening down here?
Is this you guys co-sign this?
Yeah, this seems like a problem to me.
Wow.
So while all this was going on, Walker had several men in California recruiting a new wave of soldiers to reinforce the Republic's beleaguered 40-ish man army.
These guys succeeded in drawing together roughly 200 new soldiers and a new boat, the Anita.
It was not a wildly competent group.
Only the captain and first mate had any sailing experience, and the soldiers weren't much better at soldiering.
One recruit later recalled that, quote, almost all on board were more or less drunk on the trip over to Insonata.
Three of them died during the voyage over casualties of a minor storm.
So, what these are not the Navy SEALs riding into the rescue.
Why is it always a bunch of drunk dudes?
Because didn't he like panic leave?
Didn't he panic leave Cabo all drunk and shit?
What, I mean, what other type of man is going to pick up a gun and try to conquer a sovereign nation with like 40 other guys?
Yeah, that's true.
A sober man's not going to make that call.
Honestly, they'd be like, wait, I didn't really want to fight anymore.
Is there going to be all in Mexico?
I don't care.
Wait, hold on.
Is there cocaine there?
All right, I'll check it out.
I'll check it out.
Wow.
I mean, also, I like the idea.
You're so drunk that you died in a storm on a ship.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like, that's how bad.
That's how inept you are at sailing that three people.
Boat drunk, baby.
Boat drunk.
Now, the Anita made port at Ensenada on December 20th, a week after the end of the siege.
And the added men more than quadrupled the size of Walker's force.
They also supplied it with fresh cannon, guns, and powder.
But their arrival also meant that Walker had that many more mouths to feed, which could only be accomplished by shamelessly stealing food from the locals.
They were there to ostensibly protect from bandits.
Here we go.
Oh, boy, it's great.
So I'm going to quote again from William Walker's Wars.
Quote, Walker sent 65 men under Captain George R. Davidson to Governor Negrete's command center at Santo Tomas.
They found it undefended and seized it without a fight.
In his Bragfilled reports to the north, Samuel Ruland reported that the wealthy ranchero owners, frustrated with a lack of protection by the Mexican government, had fully embraced the new republic.
He claimed that the locals offered Walker and his men free food and other supplies, but that the self-proclaimed president had turned them down, his forces now having abundant supplies from the confiscated property of the outlaw Melendres.
Ruland wrote that Walker intended to pay for all supplies received from friendly inhabitants, and Walker issued a decree condemning to death all persons guilty of plundering the property of the friendly inhabitants.
In other words, ranch owners who opposed Walker would find their property pillaged, while those who acquiesced would be protected.
Now, that's the way it was supposed to work on paper.
Yeah.
But in reality, his men stole everything that wasn't nailed down, even from the people who agreed to be part of this new republic to not get robbed.
One landowner later wrote, houses were broken into, families were forced to do the bidding of the invaders, and horses and saddles were taken from passing civilians.
In short, the Marauders were behaving as though they were absolute masters of the country.
Heaven help anyone who resisted or in any way refused to do what they commanded.
For then the fury of the entire company was vented on him.
Oh, so they were just basically, yeah, stick up for yourself, and then we'll just beat the shit out of you slash kill you.
Was there like a massive body count at this point?
Like, or were they, or they made an example of a cut, but it's probably recorded that.
At least a few.
There's not like a direct count, but like you have to assume there were murders and obviously rapes.
Right.
I'm going to guess the majority of people learned to either hide from them or give up what, because they're like, you know, there's like, there's a bunch of guys with guns now.
Like, right.
I guess we give them what they want.
Yeah.
So new volunteers continued to trickle in from the United States, inspired by the stories published in California newspapers and the promise of looting for themselves.
By January of 1854, William Walker's army had expanded to 300 men.
He celebrated this by declaring yet another name change to his new country.
So this is the third name change.
The Republic of Lower California was now the Republic of Sonora.
It had two states, Sonora, where he held no land, and Lower California, where he controlled the town of Ensenada and two small outposts.
Reports of these momentous changes and great victories were spread throughout the yellow press of Southern California.
But things were not going well for Walker.
His men had succeeded in capturing mostly cows for food, and their all-beef diet had gotten quickly tiring.
They have enough food, but it's all beef, and it's like all boiled beef, and they are not happy with this.
They don't even have, no, not even local spices, huh?
No, no.
I mean, they're white.
Yeah, I know.
Yeah.
Even these white colonizers had linen.
I'm sure they must have smelled someone's cooking.
They're like, what do you call that?
Why is that so good?
Human?
Oh, man.
How do I get that?
Yeah.
So the president and his commanders, of course, got bread and vegetables, but everyone else had to make do with just boiled beef and the occasional bit of corn.
This frustrated the men enough that one of them destroyed the oven Walker's cook used to bake his bread.
Yeah, petty.
As the days and weeks rolled on, soldiers began to desert.
Others fell sick and died.
Arguments over the unequal distribution of stolen horses led some of the remaining men to the brink of mutiny.
When a group of them told the president colonel that they were leaving, he warned them that desertion was a capital offense.
When this did not dissuade anyone, he tried his hand at making a glorious speech to inspire his soldiers to stay.
He ended it by announcing that anyone who wished to leave could go, and anyone who wanted to stay would have to swear an oath through wheel and woe to stay with him until they had conquered all of western Mexico.
So this is a little bit, I'm guessing it's not said that this was the case.
I'm guessing this was sort of in an echo of, oh, I always forget this guy from my Texas history class, but one of the guys at the Alamo like drew a line in the sand and was literally like, at least so the story goes, you know, if you want to stay on this side and fight, you know, come on this side and whatever.
And it's like this big moment from Texas history where this guy like draws this line in the sand.
Powerful.
Yeah.
Very powerful moment.
Walker tries to do essentially the same thing and a quarter of his army leaves immediately.
I love it.
He's just like a shitty toxic boss who like...
He's so bad.
And does I love those moments?
I don't typically envision you, Robert, having traditional work history, but like have you ever worked in an office where there was like the toxic boss and there was the moment he realized the whole office was against him or her?
No, you know, I've been really lucky in my bosses, actually.
Oh, man.
Yeah.
Well, that's true.
Yeah.
And you follow your heart.
There have been times when I've worked like retail or other things and like there's a moment like, you guys going to let this happen?
And everyone's like, yeah, we are because we hate you.
And you're not saying the worst.
So welcome to this reality.
I mean, I did have that one moment when Jack O'Brien asked us to swear an oath to him while he was trying to conquer Ensenada.
But that was, yeah.
And you didn't take it seriously.
You thought he says that shit all the time.
He didn't have very many cannons.
Right.
So, yeah.
So in short order, just because of all these guys who leave and then others desert, like Walker's down to about 140 men.
And he decides that his numbers have fallen enough that he has to move yet again to the town of San Vincente.
But he was halted in doing this when two U.S. Navy ships filled with Marines set anchor just outside of Ensenada.
These were the U.S. government's belated response to his invasion.
Their job was to block any passage south of additional reinforcements for Walker's shrinking army.
So Walker decides to march south anyway, and once again, his forces easily capture the undefended town, this time San Vincente.
President Colonel Walker immediately demands the local tribes and citizens all swear personal fealty to him, which some of them did in order to avoid trouble.
But Walker's army was in full collapse at this point.
He left Ensenada with 140 men, but he had less than 100 left by the time he got to San Vincente.
So Walker grew furious with the constant desertions, and on February 28th, some of his men caught a group of volunteers planning to desert before they could actually get away.
He placed five of them, the ringleaders, under arrest.
Two were sentenced to lashing, and two were executed immediately.
The fifth was pardoned.
Yeah, so he's killing his own guys now.
It's really far.
It's falling apart now.
The fifth was pardoned because he was a good cattle driver and they needed, no one knew how to do anything.
Yeah.
So observing his men murdering their comrades, William Walker wrote that this was, quote, a good test of military discipline, since killing your fellow soldiers was the hardest thing a soldier could do.
And he added that on this occasion, the duty was more difficult because the number of Americans was small and was daily diminishing.
Holy shit.
I'm fucking.
This is.
I'm guessing we're starting to enter the third act of this disastrous man.
Not even.
Well, third act of Mexico.
Right, right, right.
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
Again, just the idea.
He's amazing.
Yeah, and he's really like in a like true people who have these like fixations on like dominating and conquering.
Like they absolutely live in their own mind.
Absolutely.
And despite all of the evidence and data that's in front of them, that would say like an intelligent person would be like, this is actually an abject failure.
And if I'm serious about this, I may need to rework it.
They just go, nah, fuck it.
Hit the accelerator and let's just go pedal the metal and see what happens.
Like if I got to kill some guys that are my own people, then this is what I'm going to do.
And then honestly, that's actually pretty chill because it's like a really sick test of like discipline.
So yeah, it's actually happening.
So yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So at this point, Walker split his forces, leaving 30 men back in Ensenada and taking 70 further east, intent on finally capturing some land in Sonora.
And this proved to be a bad call.
Melendres had raised another militia, which he used to assault and capture San Vincente without much of a fight.
He immediately executed a dozen of Walker's men, creating a sensation in California papers.
This left Walker and his remaining soldiers stuck in the middle of Baja California with no base of operations or support.
The whole mess collapsed in short order, and Walker eventually wound up fleeing for the U.S. border.
In the end, his army was reduced to just 33 men.
22 of his volunteers had died in Mexico.
Eight more had been grievously wounded.
They were all almost immediately arrested, and Walker was taken back to San Francisco for trial.
He was indicted by a grand jury on May 11, 1864, along with his secretaries of war and navy.
The charge was violation of the Neutrality Act, a crime they were obviously guilty of committing.
The presiding judge was Isaac Ogier, the first DA for Los Angeles, like the very first district attorney for Los Angeles.
Holy shit.
Yeah.
And his chief legal claim to fame was that in the past, he'd introduced a bill as state assemblyman to ban free black people from living in California.
So as you might expect, he and many of the potential juror pool in San Francisco were inclined to sympathize with William Walker.
From Soldier to President00:08:12
Yeah.
Holy shit.
Okay.
Yeah.
So Walker's chief defense was that he'd never intended to enter Mexico in a hostile manner.
His expedition had only turned into an invasion after they were attacked by violent locals.
Oh, you fucking asshole.
We were just on vacation with all of our guns and cannons.
Cannons.
What did you think?
Oh my, oh, you thought we were here to fucking colonize?
No.
Was it because of the cannons?
Jesus, you people.
See, I told you we should have painted him like a fun color.
Yeah.
They thought it was, they thought it was like for I mean, when I go on vacation with my cannons, I do paint them like a bright, happy, like teal.
Oh, yeah.
I find that that's a lot of fun.
I put like Hello Kitty stickers all over my anti-tank cannon, my anti-tank rounds and things like that.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
So Walker neglected to mention that this violent response from the locals of La Paz was a result of him capturing the governor and declaring himself president.
Walker's lawyer also argued that his client's motives had been pure, an attempt to drive back the savage Apaches to protect the people of Baja.
The government of the United States was, in their prosecution of Walker, the ally of the savage.
Ho, man, this is really the gray day racism.
Yeah, it is.
And again, it's timeless.
Like the same sort of flawed logic and reasoning and legal arguments.
We're hearing like variations of them today still.
And it's amazing.
Like, oh, well, actually, you're probably on their side then.
If that's, if, you know, America is probably a communist nation then.
If that's, if, if I'm being, if I'm in trouble for inciting violence or violating the neutral.
Okay, sure.
Okay.
Yeah.
He is the type of American that there has never not been in America.
Yeah.
Yeah, because that's what our country is.
Yeah, we just look, we got tired of other people telling us to give them their stuff.
And like, now we're going to do it our way.
Try it out our way.
So the case went to jury who deliberated for a grand total of eight minutes.
They declared William Walker and his men not guilty.
Oh my fuck, of course.
This fuck.
They'll never listen.
This piece of shit.
A local newspaper, the Daily Alta, reported, when the verdict was pronounced, which the foreman did in a very emphatic tone, there was an audible manifestation of applause outside the bar and many came up to shake Mr. Walker by the hand and congratulate him.
Good work on trying to conquer Mexico.
Sorry it didn't work out?
Hey, loved what you were going for.
Knew what you're going for.
Love the idea.
Big fan.
Big fan.
Love the enthusiasm.
Oh, yeah.
Just a new place for slavery to flourish.
Love that.
I mean, I don't know if you do it.
That doesn't really matter, but I love the perks.
Great.
Yeah.
Now a free man, Walker found employment as the editor of a newspaper in Sacramento.
He wrote a series of editorials complaining about extremists on both sides of the slavery versus abolition debate.
Yes.
He becomes MSNBC himself here.
But writing was not enough to capture his attention anymore.
Once you've tried to conquer a Central American nation, nothing else is going to hit the spot like trying to conquer another Central American nation.
Never.
Just doesn't hit right.
I've said it a thousand times.
Yeah.
Now, during this period, Nicaragua was enmeshed in a civil war between two opposing political parties, the Legitimists and the Liberals.
The Liberal Party had hired a number of American mercenaries, including a fellow named Cole, who'd worked with Walker on a newspaper called the Commercial Advertiser.
Once Cole got the lay of the land in Nicaragua, he had the Liberal Party send an invitation to his friend Walker.
The two started talking, and eventually Walker wound up in contact with representatives from the Liberal Party.
Next, according to a write-up in the Pinn Gazette, eager to exploit the nation whose shipping route could prove immensely valuable to himself and to the United States, Walker agreed.
This time, however, he made sure to circumvent neutrality laws by obtaining a contract to bring colonists to Nicaragua.
On May 3rd, 1855, Walker and 57 followers left San Francisco by boat.
Shortly after arriving and reinforced with local Democratic troops, they attacked the legitimist stronghold of Rivas.
They lost decisively, driven out of town after suffering significant casualties.
Though his military prowess was questionable, Walker became the leader of the Democrats by default.
When the chiefs of both the military and executive branch died, on October 13th, in what was considered to be the only truly adept maneuver of his military career, he commandeered a ferry and sailed to Granada, taking the legitimist forces by surprise.
At this point, he effectively gained control of Nicaragua, installing a puppet interim president in Patricio Rivas.
Soon after, he had himself elected president and was inaugurated on July 12th, 1856.
So he conquers Nicaragua.
He's the president.
Oh, my, you did it.
You son of a bitch.
He did it because he gets hired, and you'll see them written as the Liberal or the Democrat Party, depending on which source you find.
But this party hires him as a mercenary, and he leads a disastrous attack, and it gets everyone who's in charge of the party killed.
And so he just takes control by default.
Yeah, I don't know.
My bumbling got all my bosses killed.
So, hey, you know what that means?
Top of the.
This is particularly the part that would make a really good movie.
Oh, yeah.
I bet Eric Prince must have like this, like, has like bed sheets of this guy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Eric Prince like goes to sleep coming thinking of William Walker and how he could be like, I'll get him.
If only he'd had an Air Force.
If only they would just let me modify my plane into a fighter jet.
Yeah.
So in a matter of days, Walker went from hired mercenary to president of Nicaragua, presumably for the rest of his life.
I think that was the goal he had in mind.
I don't see a lot of future elections coming.
No, definitely not.
No primaries anytime soon.
No.
No one, least of all the American government, had ever considered this to be a realistic possibility.
But William Walker was very ready to run a country and he got right to work making proclamations.
English was declared the official language of Nicaragua.
I know.
That's his first move.
Well, we're getting rid of all this fucking Spanish.
First move.
First order of business.
All right, we're doing English.
Everybody.
These people are speaking Ensonadan.
It doesn't even make sense.
What the heck?
I thought it was just an Ensenada down here, too, huh?
Oh, boy.
No, we're getting rid of that straight away.
Yeah, it's amazing.
So, yeah, so property was confiscated from the defeated Legitimists and handed over to Williams American Volunteers.
He established a bilingual newspaper, El Nigeral Guinse, which was based on a local legend about a gray-eyed leader who would free Nicaragua from Spanish domination.
William Walker, who had gleefully taken on the nickname the gray-eyed man of destiny, had one of his pet journalists write an op-ed in the paper claiming, this traditional prophecy has been fulfilled to the letter.
The gray-eyed man has come.
Oh, that must have been.
You got to have a prophecy.
And now it's real?
Yeah, it's real now.
Yeah, absolutely.
No, but that prophecy actually predates it.
It may probably almost certainly not.
He claimed it was a local prophecy.
You motherfucker.
I know, I know.
Also, like, hijacking.
I mean, it's truly like that's what colonization is about.
You hijack the culture, you completely erase it, you rework it for your own gains, and then you gaslight the people in thinking, yeah, you wanted this, or at least I'm going to project that to the other people who don't know any better.
It's like what they would say about Native Americans using every part of the Buffalo.
William Walker colonizes every part of Nicaragua.
Yeah.
Holy shit.
The fucking gray-eyed.
Oh, please.
But Miles, you know what won't colonize Nicaragua and replace its native language with English?
The products and services that support this podcast.
Yeah, that's one of our very few lines is you cannot have attempted to conquer Nicaragua.
I won't have it.
I won't have it supporting my podcast.
I guess Crystal Geyser is out of the question.
Yes, yes, they are out of the question, as are a number of snack chip brands.
Let's roll the ads.
Every Part of Nicaragua00:03:33
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, it was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
Gaslighting the Nation00:15:06
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 Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
So President Walker had no intentions of actually freeing the Nicaraguan people from colonial domination.
In fact, his goal was literally the opposite.
On September 22nd, 1856, President Walker issued an edict repealing the 1838 decree that had banned slavery in Nicaragua, where he once had been something of a moderate on this issue.
By 1856, he'd swung all the way from pretty racist to so racist, Jefferson Davis would have been like, slow down, dude.
No.
He wrote.
Yeah, he's.
That sentence just made my soul wither.
He wrote that Nicaraguans were half-castes and fundamentally disorderly.
And black people, he thought, had been placed on earth by God for the use of white men.
He later wrote that Africa was, for more than 5,000 years, a mere waf on the waters of the world, fulfilling no part in its destinies and aiding in no manner the progress of general civilization.
He saw slavery as crucial to his new goal, which was to rid Nicaragua of actual Nicaraguans by importing slaves to handle the farming for white people.
This would stop the new white settlers Walker wanted from fraternizing, or God forbid, breeding with any actual Nicaraguan people.
So that's good.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, this is ethnic cleansing that he's getting himself lathered up to do some ethnic cleansing.
Everything's a waif, too.
I just like every, it's a waif on the forest.
That's his favorite.
Yeah, his favorite comparison to make.
He wrote that, quote, the introduction of Negro slavery into Nicaragua would furnish a supply of constant and reliable labor requisite for the cultivation of tropical products.
With the Negro slave as his companion, the white man would become fixed to the soil, and they together would destroy the power of the mixed race, which is the bane of the country.
Oh, my God.
Jesus Christ.
Fucking.
Yeah.
Whoa, wow, That really, yeah.
Jefferson Davis is like, bruh, that's...
Wow.
Okay.
Okay.
Hey, I guess if that's the tune you're singing.
Holy shit.
Okay.
Well, yeah.
He's got a vision.
The fact that Nicaragua was now effectively a slave state would also help to draw in more southern white volunteers to fill out Williams' new old country.
He had notices printed up and distributed in several southern American cities, including New Orleans.
The notices stated, The government of Nicaragua is desirous of having its land settled and cultivated by an industrious class of people and offer as an inducement to immigrants a donation of 250 acres of land for single person and 100 acres additional to persons of family.
Steamers leave New Orleans for San Juan on the 11th and 26th of each month.
The fare is now reduced to less than half of the former rates.
Wow.
Yeah, we're offering, the government of Nicaragua is making this offer.
More white people.
Come on.
Come on down, get your 250 acres.
You better not be race mixing, though.
Yeah.
And then you can work the land.
Also, just the romantic, the romanticism of his writing about like, the white man and the negro slave together will be bound to the earth.
Like friends forever.
So fucking dark.
Yeah, it's amazing.
You got to do that flowery shit so people will be like, oh, that sounds great.
Rather than like, oh, yeah, we're torturing people.
Everybody, one of the important things to understand, even about like the pro-slavery people is that like everyone wants to view themselves as the good guys.
Of course.
The pro-slavery folks did not like to think of themselves as like violently enforcing a nightmarish regime of racial apartheid.
They saw themselves as like, it's, no, this is us and our friends.
This is our friend who like needs a little bit of a bad thing.
We'll be whipped to death sometimes.
Yeah.
Oh, that would see.
I didn't do that.
The overseer did.
And that's the overseer did.
Yeah.
But we're still friends.
Yeah.
Back in the U.S., reactions to Walker's conquest varied largely by region.
Even in the abolitionist North, though, he had a lot of fans.
Plays were written about him and performed in places like Manhattan.
One 1856 playbill from the Purdy National Theater declared him the hope of freedom.
Another writer from Kentucky was inspired enough to write the Nicaraguan national song in Walker's honor.
Here's a few.
There were fucking plays, like theatrical performance.
In Manhattan.
Yeah, in the Purdy Theater.
Can you get your hands on that script?
I hope so.
I have not yet.
That would be love to read.
Behind the bastards table read to end them all.
We could really have some fun with that.
Oh, my God.
I can only imagine the horseshit in that fucking script.
Yeah.
A writer from Kentucky was inspired, like I said, to write the Nicaraguan national song.
I'm going to read a few bars from that, Miles.
It needs not a prophet or talker to tell you in prose or in verse the exploits of Patriot Walker, whom tyrants will long deem a curse.
A brave son of freedom is Walker, and nations his fame will rehearse.
Oh.
Son of freedom.
Freedom.
The freedom to own slaves.
Freedom to own slaves.
And there's going to be some haters who are going to act like he wasn't a good guy, but you're going to see, dude, they're going to be singing his praises.
There's some haters, but most people will love him.
Of course, he was also hated by the abolitionist press and by many people in free states.
A conspiracy theory was developed that Walker's conquest of Nicaragua was part of some convoluted scheme to get the country annexed by the U.S. and add another slave state to the Union.
People who knew Walker didn't find that likely, at least that it was like a grand scheme to support slavery.
One of his recruits later wrote, the real underlying purpose of Walker's going to Nicaragua, in my opinion, was empire in the tropics, with Walker as the central figure.
Of this, I never had any doubt.
So like that's the chief debate is like either Walker was a pro-slavery crusader and this was part of like a scheme to add more slave states, or he really just wanted his own empire in Central America.
Yeah, I think it's just one of those empire first.
They're both plausible.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's like, oh, slavery is just a byproduct, which I can live with.
My main goal is empire.
Or it really is hard to tell.
It is hard to tell because by the time he's in charge of Nicaragua, racism is definitely not just a thing he's using to get more troops, but like a motivating force behind him.
Like he's being like, there's a difference, you know, and how he was acted in Mexico and Nicaragua.
It's like tough, too, because even if he was like, nah, I'm not racist.
I was just doing that shit because I like empire.
It's like, well, it's wild, Mr. Walker, because you walk the walk and talk the fucking talk of a maniacal slave owner.
Yeah.
Something else.
So the one positive impact of Walker's time in power is that it did successfully unite the two warring factions of the Nicaraguan government.
The legitimist and liberal parties were able to come together to say fuck you to the white guy who'd conquered their country almost by accident.
Thank fuck.
Working with allies.
Yeah.
So they got together with some allies in Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador and put together an army of more than 6,000 men to oppose William Walker.
Now, by this point, Walker himself could draw on about 1,500 men.
They were well armed and motivated.
And in short order, the two sides settled into a vicious guerrilla war, burning homes and villages.
The Americans had the advantage of better weaponry and organization, but were hampered by the fact that they were often drunk as fuck and that William Walker was very bad at waging war.
Yeah, those are the two downsides.
I can only imagine, yeah, guerrilla warfare and you're drunk.
Yeah, it's not ideal.
What the fuck are you talking about?
It sounds like a disastrous combination.
It was.
After a series of tactical blunders, Walker decided that his base in the city of Granada was untenable.
Rather than just hand it to the enemy, he evacuated his wounded and ordered the 400 soldiers stationed there to destroy the entire town before leaving.
Burn it all down.
Wow.
Okay.
I mean, another thing we've seen, too.
We got to abandon the base, burn it all down so they can't get anything.
His filibuster army took to the task with glee, looting huge amounts of wine and getting wasted as shit as they forced hundreds of Nicaraguans out of their homes and then burned those homes to the ground.
But they grew so enthralled with this activity that they failed to notice an army of 1,500 men surrounding them.
Once the situation became clear, the troops tried to put up defensive fortifications, but they were way too drunk to actually do this.
What should have been an orderly retreat became a slaughter.
More than half of Walker's forces in Granada were killed or captured.
And all these deaths were utterly pointless, the result of Walker's cruel insistence that the city be destroyed.
Any sane person would consider this a war crime, as well as an act of supreme military idiocy.
But William Walker wrote this about his actions in the aftermath.
As to the justice of the act, few can question it, for its inhabitants owed life and property to the Americans in service of Nicaragua.
And yet they joined the enemies who strove to drive their protectors from Central America.
Why don't you love your protectors who are burning your homes down?
Can't you see we're protecting you?
I'm protecting you by hurting you.
Why can't you see this?
He is like trying to gaslight all of Nicaragua.
Truly.
And also, it's like, is it that?
Or it's also like the gaslighting is a byproduct of his inability to just be honest about anything going on.
Yeah.
Oh, I would have wanted to choose.
Like, turn their back on me.
Yeah.
It's amazing.
On February 26th, 1856, Costa Rica officially declared war on Walker's government in Nicaragua.
Their president issued a proclamation calling the great Central American family of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras together to fight Walker.
This was partly inspired by the fact that some of Walker's forces had occupied the Costa Rican town of Santa Rosa.
And Costa Rica was like, you guys are invading us now?
Yeah, what the fuck?
So Walker responds to this proclamation by issuing one of his own.
The natural law of individual protection obliges us, the Americans of Nicaragua, to declare eternal enmity to the servile party and servile governments of Central America.
The friendship that we have offered them has been rebuffed.
We are left with no option other than to make them recognize that our enmity can be as dangerous and destructive as our friendship is faithful and true.
I mean, friendship, by the way, meant invading Costa Rica and taking over Santa Rosa.
Yeah, friendship means, yeah, stealing your shit, abusing you, and then telling, and then telling you you're the problem.
Yeah, it's pretty, pretty remarkable.
It's very, very, again, a lot of these sentiments coming out of him are, so I'm like kind of amazed that I didn't know as much about him, considering how much of like his actions like are, you know, capture like an entire frame of mind for a certain era that extends to this day.
He is the platonic ideal of the Republican Party.
Right exactly on March 20th, the Costa Rican army reached Santa Rosa and forced Walker's forces out after a 14 minute firefight.
They then invaded the city of Rivas, pushing Walker's forces street by street until they were forced to hole up in a compound owned by a wealthy family.
From inside the compound, the white men had a commanding firing position, something that Costa Rican forces could not crack without great loss of life.
And to tell the story about what happened next, I'm going to turn to a write-up in the PENN Gazette quote.
A Costa Rican drummer boy named Juan Santa Maria volunteered to charge the house with his torch, as long as someone would take care of his mother in case of his death.
He managed to light the house on fire, drawing out the filibusters, but he was gunned down in doing so.
Juan Santa Maria is now Costa Rica's national hero.
The international airport is named for him, and every April 11th, the anniversary of the battle, the country celebrates Juan Santa Maria Day.
I right, that's the airport in San Jose yeah, Costa Rica.
Yeah, it's named after the guy who like, burned down this.
Yeah, I've been there.
I've been to that airport many Times and I just figured, I don't know, maybe I didn't realize it's a dude who's a torch this motherfucker.
Teenager, a teenager who was like, take care of my mom when I die.
I'm going to burn this house down.
We got to get these fucking dudes out of here.
What a fucking hero.
What a G.
Oh my God.
Straight G. Also, just sort of like, oh, you're down to do this?
I'm like, yeah, man, but make sure my mama's taken care of.
Make sure my mom is okay.
Fucking great dude.
And of course, that's a guy who gets a fucking holiday.
So is he like, he was like that?
I don't know if you remember Lord of the Rings, the two towers where the Urduard with the torch to blow up the wall.
I mean, talk about some like.
That was based on him, actually.
So Tolkien just lifted that from Costa Rican history.
Woke Tolkien.
Noke.
Wolkin.
Let's, yeah, let's not dig into that too.
JR Wokey.
So, yeah, and that's like part of what I was saying at the very top of this episode: is like, this guy's really well known in the places he fucked up.
We've just completely forgotten him in America.
Right.
They're like, they remember his ass in Costa Rica.
It's like, oh, yeah, he's a hero because he fucked up this whole guy's plan that you guys don't know about.
Wow.
Yeah.
The brave Central American soldiers, doggedly resisting the American imperialists, wound up finding a surprising ally in their fight, Cornelius Vanderbilt.
What?
Oh, my God.
New player has entered the game.
Yeah, Vanderbilt was one of the wealthiest men in history, and since 1849, his company had controlled transit lanes across Nicaragua.
Vanderbilt's men had actually helped Walker's efforts early on before he completely took over the country.
But once he took power, the American filibuster had revoked Vanderbilt's company charter and stolen all of its boats.
Bad call.
Don't fuss up the money, honey.
Vanderbilt clearly cared nothing for the sovereignty of Nicaragua, but he hated William Walker for fucking with his money.
In December of 1856, Sylvanus Spencer, one of Vanderbilt's employees, led 120 Costa Rican soldiers on a canoe raid of the port of Greytown, Nicaragua.
They met with President Mora and 800 more troops there, now armed with guns comparable to the American weapons, guns provided by Cornelius Vanderbilt.
They succeeded in cutting off Walker's forces and severing his lifeline to the United States, through which he received the reinforcements and supplies that made his occupation possible.
At the same time, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala had advanced on Walker's northern territories.
The situation degenerated until, on May 1st, 1857, Walker surrendered to the U.S. Navy and was taken back to New Orleans.
He was, of course, greeted as a hero by throngs of adoring fans.
An impromptu parade carried him to a fine hotel where he delivered a speech.
The New Orleans Delta, a local paper, recalled it thusly.
Heroic Arrival Speech00:09:11
In his calm, earnest manner, and with manly eloquence, he said it was a proud consolation after months and years of trial to experience the approbation that was given to the causes he advocated.
It was a triumph greater than arms could ever win.
With such manifestations, it was impossible that the cause of Nicaragua could fail, no matter who were its enemies, no matter how much they labored, no matter how much they willed.
The enemy, he said, would yet be put beneath our feet.
What a we still get a chance, guys.
The upward failure trajectory is unbelievable.
Truly.
And I like that also he's defining as the enemy the people of Nicaragua.
And of course, the American audience is like, yeah, fuck those guys.
Yeah, rather than being like, wait, hold on.
You went there and you fucked their whole shit up.
They didn't like it.
Okay, sure, William.
Hey, let's, you guys catching that five o'clock matinee of the William Walker Colonizer Fuck Fest play?
Oh, I bet that was a good play.
We got it.
We got to get that script.
It has to be like the Library of Congress.
Someone help us find.
It's got to be somewhere.
It's got to be somewhere.
Now, it's hard to say how many lives precisely the whole debacle cost.
Walker took in about 2,500 soldiers during his time in power.
40% of them died from either combat or illness.
And it's unknown how many Central American soldiers and civilians died, but the number has to be at least in the low thousands.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
Now, Walker barely seemed to notice any of this.
He still considered himself the president of Nicaragua, and he traveled quickly to Washington, D.C., where he met with President Buchanan.
He told the actual president that he intended to return to his country.
He also issued a formal complaint against the naval commander who'd arrested him.
He suffered no legal consequences for his actions and was allowed to travel across the country, raising money for a return to Nicaragua.
Oh, my God.
Pretty cool, right?
Wait, so he had another trial in New Orleans, I'm guessing?
Yeah, he was arrested.
And it went the same thing.
Yeah.
Hey, we love you, Billy.
Keep on keeping on, my man.
Yeah, same, essentially, the same thing happened.
Yeah.
I mean, actually, I don't think there's a trial in Nicaragua or in New Orleans, but like, yeah, he's a little bit more.
Oh, so they just arrested him.
He's like, hey, come on, knock it off.
You're coming home.
After that, yeah, he gets off scot-free.
Oh, okay.
So he was on timeout.
Yeah, so he traveled, not even timeout, because he immediately starts traveling around to raise money to like reinvade Nicaragua.
In 1860, he published a book, The War in Nicaragua, and named himself as General William Walker on the title page.
So he's been promoted to general.
Yeah, he went from colonel to general.
General.
Oh, wow.
G-E-N apostrophe L.
He, uh, yeah.
What the fuck is that?
He southernizes it.
It's like a, you know, like a colloquial version of rather than fully saying general.
Yeah, it seems, I feel like he thinks it seems a little bit less pompous.
Or, but, like, if he had actually spelled it out, would that have been like caused him trouble?
Because he's technically not a general?
No, no, you could, anyone could be any rank in the military they wanted at that point.
Oh, great.
It's just a matter of calling it yourself that.
So the book he dedicated to my comrades in Nicaragua to do justice to their acts and motives, to the living, with hope that we may soon meet again on the soil for which we have suffered more than the pangs of death, the reproaches of a people for whose welfare we stood ready to die, to the memory of those who perished in the struggle, with the vow that as long as life lasts, no peace shall remain with the foes who libel their names and strive to tear away the laurel which hangs over their graves.
Amazing.
Oh, I okay.
Yeah.
Miles gets better.
There's not often lessons in the lives of these bastards.
If there is, in fact, any lesson at all in the life of William Walker, it's that attempting to conquer Central American states with an army of drunken southerners is apparently addictive.
Shortly after publishing his stupid book, William Walker shacked up with a group of British settlers who planned to start a colony in Roatan, an island off the coast of Honduras.
Like the Nicaraguan Liberal Party, they asked for his help.
He agreed, but was captured immediately by the British Navy on his way to start a war with Honduras.
At the time, the British Empire controlled what's now Belize, and they considered William Walker this guy whose only ambition is starting a series of ill-conceived wars.
They decide he's a dangerous influence on the region.
And so rather than send him back to the USA, they make one of the only decisions the British Empire ever made that I fully endorse.
They hand him over to the Honduran government for justice.
Oh, fuck yeah.
Yeah, he is sentenced instantly to die.
And on September 12th, 1860, William Walker was executed by firing squad.
This Honduran firing squad is hell-bent on making sure the motherfucker is dead.
Yeah, that's like 700 people.
I want to read you a quote from the New York Times writing about his execution.
Three soldiers stepped forward to within 20 feet of him and discharged their muskets.
The balls entered his body and he leaned forward a little.
But it being observed that he was not dead, a fourth soldier mercifully advanced so close to the suffering man that the muzzle of the musket almost touched his forehead and being there discharged, scattered his brains and skull to the winds.
Thus ends the life of the gray-eyed man of destiny.
Oh, fuck.
Scattered his brains and skull to the wind.
Yeah, fucking blew his head off.
Wow.
I can only imagine how indignant he was to in the, like, what that trial was, or whatever, quote-unquote, trial, if he had anything to say.
Or if at the last minute, he's like, I'm trying to help.
Yeah.
Today, William Walker is an obscure figure in the United States.
I would be surprised if much more than like 10% of the audience had heard anything about this guy before the episode.
Like you said, you flew into that airport named after the kid who fucked up his plans for a bunch of times.
Yeah.
I only learned about this guy like a year ago when a fan from Central America suggested him as a bastard.
And he is still quite famous in the places he harmed.
They remember William Walker in Sonora, in Nicaragua, in Costa Rica, in Honduras.
But here in the US of A, the only folks who still know the gray-eyed man of destiny are history buffs and libertarians.
Oh, yeah, buddy.
We got a fun last act of this episode.
I want to end this by talking about a hilarious article I found on the Cato Foundation website.
About William Walker?
Oh, yeah, baby.
Yeah.
It's reviewing a book called Tycoon's War about Walker's career, and the fine folks at Cato really fucking like William Walker.
Here's how they describe the start of his war in Nicaragua.
With the same strict discipline he used in his Sonora campaign, Walker and 58 men sailed in May 1855 for Nicaragua and made their way to the revolutionary capital of Leon.
Walker's reputation had preceded him and he was well received.
He and his men captured Granada.
Their fighting abilities and Walker's leadership defeated numbers that were as much as 10 to 1.
Holy shit.
Oh, I'm not done, but let's just let that paragraph breathe.
The same strict discipline.
Is there even a book they could have read that would have even given them that idea?
Or are they completely like, how do we make this guy stand up?
I haven't read this book, Tycoon's War, but maybe it makes it out that way.
His own soldiers, when writing about it later, repeatedly referenced how drunk they were.
Holy shit.
The strict discipline.
Ah, of course.
Master tactical.
And his master tactical abilities that got all of the other guys in charge killed.
His story captured world attention.
He had brought an element of peace to the war-ravaged country and hoped the changes he enacted would help bring the entire Central American region under American control.
Changes like instituting slavery and making English the national language.
In the new revolutionary government that formed, he was made commander-in-chief of the Nicaraguan army.
As such, he controlled Nicaragua.
In 1858, minor breakdowns and uprisings led to the collapse of the government.
And in Walker's reestablishment of it, he was elected president.
Walker's government was recognized by the U.S. government under President Franklin Pierce, and friendly relations were established.
Walker was so popular, he was able to recruit thousands of Americans into his private army.
Oh, wow, bravo.
Reading modern libertarians write about this has convinced me that like, oh, no, there's still a lot of people who would like today, if an American tried to invade Nicaragua to make it part of America and reinstitute slavery, they'd be like, yeah, fuck you, why not?
100%.
Absolutely.
And they leave out the important lesson for colonizers gone wrong is it can end up with your brains and skull scattering into the wind.
Yeah, and it's frustrating because like, you know, you've got your, you've got your good libertarians and your evil libertarians embodied by the Cato Institute.
And like, as a libertarian, your attitude should be, this guy interfered directly with the liberty of an entire people and he got murdered for it.
Modern Libertarian Reaction00:06:37
This is a happy story.
Yeah, it makes sense.
Played out.
Yeah.
But it's, I don't know.
This whole good on the Cato Institute for keeping the memory of William Walker alive by lying about it.
Yeah.
I mean, people need heroes, you know?
So strict discipline.
Strict discipline.
Everyone's black the fuck out drunk fighting.
In a lot of ways, William Walker's strict discipline reminds me of my own strict discipline.
Yeah, just like, fuck it, man.
Play it like a video game.
See what happens.
Yeah.
Miles.
Yep.
How you feeling?
How you feeling at the end of this?
Oh, I'm glad.
I'm glad we get I'm on an episode where like there's justice.
Yeah.
Like typically it's been like, and they died in obscurity and natural death.
Or like to this day, Eric Prince is still trying to fucking, you know, act out his like army fantasy.
And they were rich and beloved forever.
Yeah.
Or like, you know, like when I, when we did Trump University, that's, that's, that chapter is still being written.
So yeah, it's nice to have a nice wrapped up version of this moment in history with a lesson for wannabe colonizers, and also great lesson now knowing the history of uh, was it once?
Uh, Juan Santa Maria?
Yeah, Juan Santa Maria yeah, fan.
Shout out to him man, and shout out to his mom.
Shout out to him, yeah, that kid's cool as hell.
So yes miles, you want to colonize the end of this episode with some um, some pluggables.
Oh man yeah, i'm gonna keep plugging.
420 Day, Fiancé.
It's a show with Sophia Alexandra, who's also been a guest on this podcast uh, where we talk about the absolute garbage nightmare reality show, 90 Day Fiancé.
But we smoke weed and we're just having a laugh, you know.
So check that one out.
And then, I don't know, check out the Daily Zeitgeist too.
That's every day.
Every day bro, like every day, every day bro, like team 10, uh and yeah, on uh social media at miles Of Gray g-r-a-y, and you can find me somewhere on the internet.
No one knows where, no one ever has known where and no one ever will know where.
It's a mystery and people still don't know that.
You are actually a disembodied voice truly, and you're just an Ai algorithm that we interact with.
I'm, I am, I am channeled by a mix of coding and dark Satanist magic and tramadol and tramadol, oh my god, I need I, I do need to go back to Ensenado.
Call it, call and I is.
Another couple of pharmaceas.
Yeah, i'm sure you can get a bunch of a wacky group of volunteers to go with you as well.
I, I bet I could get 45 heavily armed men to go get painkillers in Ensonada with me.
Yeah, and absolutely not needed.
But hey no, worth the story.
No, you don't they.
They, they sell them to you willingly, so there's no need for arms.
Yeah, that's just for the funsies.
Robert well, the episode's over what Robert also hosts at Worst Year Ever, which is at Worst Year Pod on the twinstagram.
We also have a twinstagram for our show at Bastards.
You can also follow Robert at IRideOK.
We have a TeaPublic store.
She is holding her forehead in just absolute disappointment just for you as a host.
I just want to communicate that to you.
It's not really as a host, as my child.
Oh, as your disappointed mom by someone tweeted earlier, Robert has finally succeeded in doing that thing men do where they forcibly make themselves so incompetent at something that a woman has to handle it.
Yeah.
And that exactly.
That's exactly what I did.
I remember how quickly that happens too, because I believe the last time I was on the show, you used to actually give out this information.
I did.
I did used to.
Yeah, Robert used to do his job.
Eventually, Sophie's just going to be doing the entire show, and I will still get paid.
And that is my retirement.
And then you have fully William Walker the fuck out of this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right, Robert, shut the fuck up.
The episode's over.
It is.
Wow.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
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You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
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I'm Ago Mode of my next guest.
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My dad gave me the best advice ever.
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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.
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