Robert Welch and the John Birch Society engineered modern conservatism by weaponizing anti-communist paranoia to dismantle the New Deal safety net during the Cold War. Through front organizations, radio propaganda, and $2,500 essay prizes for impeaching Supreme Court justices, Welch cultivated a grassroots machine that propelled Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential run on a platform of tactical nuclear threats and opposition to civil rights. Although the Society later declined due to internal crises like anti-Semitism, its tactics of generating outrage to mainstream fringe ideas directly influenced the Moral Majority, the Tea Party, and contemporary figures like Glenn Beck, proving that Welch's blueprint for feudal power remains the far-right's enduring strategy today. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|
Time
Text
Trust Your Girlfriends00:02:45
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that: trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I got you.
I got you.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budginista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Readers, Katie's finalists, publicists, we have an incredible new episode this week for you guys.
We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode.
They put on Lizzie McGuire 2 a.m. video on Demand This Guy's 2 a.m. 2 a.m., whatever time it is.
Lizzie McGuire and I'm like wild back to away.
It was like a first closet moment for me where I was like, they're like, I don't feel like she's hot like the rest of them.
No, no, no.
I was like, she's beautiful, but I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are.
I'm not like.
Listen to Las Culturalistas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast.
America's Dark Period00:09:45
That's it.
I've done my job.
We're introduced.
It's a podcast.
That's good work.
Thank you.
All right.
We're taking the day.
Everybody, take five.
All right.
Cool.
See you back next week.
Okay, no.
Let's talk about bad people.
Worst ones.
I'm just dreaming.
He's all that in our space right now, so we can't.
Well, I guess we might as well talk more about the John Birch Society.
With me again are Dan and Jordan or Dan and Jordan or Jordan.
Hosts of the Alex Jones focused podcast Knowledge Fight, which I will probably be listening to when I go on a run right after this.
Brag?
Hell yeah.
Hell yeah.
Someone has an iPod.
iPod Nano, motherfuckers.
Somebody is ambulatory.
Congratulations.
So we're talking about the JBS.
And there's a quote that opens the book on the John Birch Society that I've been using as one of the sources for this episode, The World of the John Birch Society.
And the quote that opens the book is by a guy named Don DeLilo.
A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not.
It was a good quote to open a book about the John Birch Society with because I've been thinking about it a lot, not just while writing this episode about the JBS, but in general while thinking about, you know, everything that the Birches wrought on American society.
Because what was actually happening during the period of the John Birch Society's rise to prominence was that a very fucked-up world order was establishing itself in the wake of all of that post-war promise.
You know, people were, broadly speaking, kind of optimistic in sort of the wake of the Second World War that like maybe mankind had turned a corner.
Sure, that's why they fucked and had all those babies that we have to deal with now.
Let's raise, yeah, we everyone decided to fucking raise the worst generation that ever existed.
Yeah, right?
Bunch of dicks.
Bunch of that would be my quote for the uh for if you were going to write a new John Birch Society book, you could use a quote from me, which is like bunch of dicks.
Yeah, that's what that's what I'll use to open my book about the John Birch Society and about the papa sucker.
So the era of the Birch Society's chief period of relevance was also the era in which the New Deal started being slowly picked apart, right?
So like, you know, we have an economic collapse.
We institute this very robust program of like a social safety net and protections for workers.
And then in the post-war era, all these rich guys, many of whom were John Birch Society donors and sympathizers, dedicate their lives to tearing it apart.
Now, this period of time was also the period in which the Cold War was at its most frightening.
You know, the height of the Vietnam War happens during sort of the peak of the John Birch Society's relevance.
Everything's kind of going wrong in America in this period.
And in this period, right after things had been going really well, at least by the perspective of white people.
And a lot of white people were like, what the hell happened?
And Bob Welch.
Yeah, exactly.
Bob Welch slides in and is like, communism.
Yeah, you got it.
While he's causing all of the things that are bad to happen, he blames it on communism.
Yeah.
It's fucking smart man.
So because of all this.
In a sense.
Yeah, in a sense.
Smart, yeah, I mean, being terrible is a skill.
Yeah.
You know, definitely.
It's true.
So the man who was turned times tables when he was four years old.
Prove it.
He's clever.
That's why, again, you got to slow down the smart kids.
You know, I'm not going to say smart children deserve head injuries, but you know.
Then don't.
Well, so stop just short of there.
Yeah, stop just sort of there.
No, no helmets for the smart kids, right?
Can I ask, are you saying that for periods of time you should deprive smart children of air?
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
That's a nice, not legally actionable way of describing it.
Make all children deep sea divers.
Yeah.
And have them deal with the Bens every now and again.
Yeah, don't forcibly restrict them from air, but make them do wreck diving and get nitrogen poisoning.
That's my that's how we fix society.
Yeah, if you think about it, back during this time, they only used to paddle the kids who weren't succeeding in school.
And now where are we?
If we reversed it around, what if they paddled kids for doing too well at school?
I think anybody would be ashamed of succeeding.
I don't know.
And that's how we should live.
Okay.
So, um, because of all this, I actually think that Bob Welch was actually a different sort of conspiracy theorist from most of his followers.
Uh, you know, the bulk of rank-and-file Birchers were conservative Americans who had been brainwashed into an irrational fear of communism and were willing to believe that it was the cause of all of their problems when it, in general, was not.
Bob Welch and his inner circle, the guys who got to read The Politician, were the kind of rich and powerful men who saw any refusal of the people of the world to bow to their whims as communism.
And when you think about it that way, Welch's hatred of Eisenhower makes sense because Ike wanted to live in a society and Bob Welch did not.
He wanted to be a feudal lord.
Yeah.
Right.
Like a lot of criticisms about Eisenhower, but Eisenhower wanted to live in a society that provided benefits for the people living inside of it.
And Bob Welch said, fuck that.
Yeah.
And meanwhile, the followers of the John Birch Society were more of the, why is our society suck so bad?
It must be the communists, not the people deliberately tearing it apart brick by brick.
Probably.
Like our leader.
That's good.
That would make sense.
Yeah, it's the difference between the like consumer and the producer of the theory.
Like that disconnect that isn't clear to the followers necessarily of like what you're being, what path you're actually being led down.
Yeah.
I think that's why Bill Gates has a podcast now so he can really clear things up to my coworker, Bill Gates, in the podcast field.
I am excited to have him on the episode about Peter Thiel.
That is going to be some spicy conversation.
See, now, if you could get him on the episode about him, that would be a huge get.
It would be fun to get Bill Gates on the podcast and then just scream at him about like Windows XP for an hour and a half.
Nothing about like any of the actual crimes he committed as the CEO of Migrant.
Just like really hammer him on XP.
This was not intuitive software, goddammit.
He's just crying by the end of it.
In 1960, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was elected president of the United States.
I shouldn't have said president was elected president.
You know what I mean.
JFK became the president in 1960.
Never heard of him.
Yeah, he wasn't that famous.
In the years before he was gunned down by Bernie Sanders, he enacted a broadly progressive agenda, except for all the saber rattling at communists and hard war, cold warrior shit.
Most reasonable people can look at JFK's legacy and acknowledge that he did some reckless, violent shit in the name of fighting communism.
One of those reckless violence things would be getting us into Vietnam, which didn't work out super well, some might say.
Rough with the smooth, as Dan likes to say, you know?
Robert Welch looked at JFK, who again brought us to the brink of nuclear war and got us into Vietnam in order to fight communism.
He looked at JFK, and because JFK was like, I guess we'll give the civil rights movement some of what they want.
Bob Welch was like, that motherfucker's a communist.
Big time.
That motherfucker is a communist.
So this is not to say, and in fairness to Bob Welch, he did not think that JFK's opponent, Richard Nixon, was any better.
To Welch, JFK was a stooge of Walter Reuther, the leader of the United Autoworkers Association, while Nixon was a stooge of Nelson Rockefeller, then the governor of New York.
Welch felt that the 1960 election was just a referendum on whether Reuther or Rockefeller would be the boss of the United States under a one-world international socialist government.
Man, that guy did not see Soros coming at all.
No.
Soros swinging in to steal both those guys.
Yeah, that's what Soros.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Soros saw an opening and he just, whoo!
Yeah, it's very funny.
It's very funny how scared people used to be of unions before they got destroyed.
So Welch had organized his society into revolutionary cells in order to fight that international socialist government he believed was taking over the United States.
Their primary weapon was the force of perceived public outrage, which they wielded in a variety of ways from the world of the John Birch Society.
Quote, Welch had in mind for how the John Birch Society might resist the depredations of the communist conspiracy while awakening the apathetic and brainwashed American people to what was actually going on around them, including the use of front organizations, little fronts, big fronts, temporary fronts, permanent fronts, all kinds of fronts, he wrote, as well as the deployment of petitions, massive letter-writing campaigns, and other methods of exposure.
It was time, Welch believed, for an organization which has the backbone and cohesiveness and strength and definiteness of direction to put its weight into the political scales of this country just as fast and as far as we could in order to reverse the gradual surrender of the United States to communism.
But because Welch always saw the Birch Society as an educational organization as much as a political one, he also wanted to establish a speakers bureau and a national network of reading rooms where the best anti-communist books, including his own, could be purchased or consulted and to expand the reach of conservative periodicals such as American Opinion, The Dan Smoot Report, and William F. Buckley Jr.'s National Review.
Until later.
Until later.
Creating Front Groups00:14:55
Yeah, until later.
Yeah, that stops.
He was also one of the first backers of conservative radio broadcasters, which in that period was a pair of guys named Fulton Lewis and Clarence Mannion.
But like, he's very much on the cutting edge of, like, you can see what Welch is actually doing here as the first organized start of what became the right-wing media sphere that's like now an entire galaxy unto itself.
Bob Burch is the first guy that says, number one, we need this and we need to be tying like radio broadcasters and conservative magazines and right-wing like books together.
We need to be building places where right-wing thinkers can gather and people can go and find their work.
Like this is an important part of actually taking over society and turning it.
He's described as turning it away from communism, but like he foresaw what needed to be done and he was really the first guy to proceed with doing it.
It's like you do all this stuff because you know that whatever you're doing wouldn't pass muster at like a regular place of publisher or whatever.
You have to create your own industries because what you're doing is ludicrous and you want to pass off this ludicrous shit.
Yeah.
And the right-wing always has an inherent advantage there whenever it comes to media because the idea is they want to consolidate thought into a single thing.
Whereas the left-wing media is ostensibly about, I guess, sharing ideas to see who can do well.
I don't know, but it's a way of creating a unified thought process for all of these right-wing people.
It's culture.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's good shit.
And he's, you know, he's a real.
It's good shit.
It's either good shit or cult shit.
One of the two.
Yeah, I said cult shit.
Oh, you said cult shit.
Oh, okay.
That's what I heard.
Home dude's a trailblazer.
You got to give him that.
You know, he blazes a trail, a bad trail.
It's a trail to like, it's a trail to like one of those, like somebody's septic tank has like flooded into a depression in the earth and created like a little lake of feces.
Like it's a trail to a shit lake, but it is a trail that he has blazed.
He had to machete his way through some underbrush to get to that poop lake.
One of the things I loved about that quote you just read was the idea that he's talking about how they have to create all these front groups.
And in particular, because I've read a bunch of John Birch materials and people who are associated with them.
And one of the hallmarks of their accusations is that everything is a front group for communism.
And they never prove any of it.
It's always just everything as a front group.
And I think a lot of that comes out of the awareness of, yeah, like this is the mentality that we have.
We have to create front groups so people don't associate this with us.
Yeah, it's a lot of great ideas whenever you're like, we can't let anybody know about these.
It's simultaneously a tactic and something that I think happens just.
It happens automatically when you're doing that.
Like, number one, it's a tactic because if you accuse people of what you're doing, it distracts and justifies your actions.
But also, if you're doing that sort of shit, you assume everyone else is because you don't want to have your are we the baddies moment.
No, no.
And also, you want to think it's a good idea.
So your enemy has to use the good idea.
They can't be doing something strategy.
Exactly.
The thing is, like, part of why I didn't push back, normally when I read about one of my bastards being a child prodigy, I push back because they're usually dumb as shit.
This is a good idea.
It works.
Yeah.
Like, it took a long time.
It didn't happen in Bob Welch's lifetime, but his plan worked very well.
That's true.
That's true.
Like, you have to be.
You also get the sense that you got to give it up to the Somali pirates every now and again.
You just got to give it up to the Somali pirates.
He didn't probably come up with a ton of all of this, though.
His brother did.
Yeah, no.
He's the figurehead of a lot of it.
But a lot of those early CEOs from the National Association of Manufacturers probably, I would suspect, had a bit more to do with some of the crafting of these ideas.
Yeah, I mean, it's hard to say, because these are obviously secret conversations between men plotting in secret.
None would dare call that a conspiracy.
None would dare call that a conspiracy.
But I do think, like, obviously, like, the fact that Welch, the fact that he got people together in a, he got right-wing moneyed interests together and said in a concerted way, we have to forcibly tilt this culture right.
And it's going to be a mix of tactics, including creating a propaganda empire.
That sounds oddly similar to some country I remember right around 1930.
Yeah, a country that Bob Welch probably would have been pretty happy in.
Pretty stoked if they had stayed the course, you know?
Yeah.
I don't know.
You know, it's hard to say how much because obviously you get the, like you look at Fred Koch, member of the John Birch Society.
Fred Koch's kids go on to do more effectively what Bob Welch tried to do his whole life.
Were they copying Bob Welch or were they copying their father, who was the guy who gave Bob Welch the idea?
I don't really know.
But also, Fred Koch didn't stay around for all that long with the Burton.
No, he made the best decision of his life and died.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I feel like he made the best decision of our lives.
I feel like I remembered something of him like trying to distance himself at some point.
I might be misremembering.
A number of, yeah, I believe he did when like it became, well, we'll talk about that.
Like the John Birch Society, you know, reaches its sell-by date, so to speak.
The campaign against Justice Earl Warren convinced many pundits and politicos that the John Birch Society was just as bad as the totalitarian communists they opposed.
An editorial in the Chicago Sun-Times described the content of many letters sent by their followers as evidence of brainwashing, which it was.
You know, they're flooding people with letters that all sound the same, that all include the same sound bites.
And it's not because they're being like a lot of people think like, oh my God, they must have centralized a letter writing campaign.
And I think it's more that all of these people are reading the same propaganda.
Now, because the United States has always been the United States, there were those who were willing to stand up in public and defend the John Birch Society.
South Carolina Democrat Mendel Rivers said they were justified because the Supreme Court's decision in Brown versus the Board of Education was effectively the death knell of the Constitution.
Nah, nah, nah.
I'm just a simple Southern Democrat, but I think slavery is a great idea.
If black people go to school, do we really have a country?
So, Welch was definitely a trailblazer in how to weaponize far-right rage.
And the moral majority and its successors, like the Tea Party, essentially used John Birch tactics in order to get off the ground.
You can see variants of these tactics in the far-right's use of social media today.
The idea behind it all remains the same.
You try to popularize a fringe idea by setting off a blizzard of generated outrage that has the effect of making your cause seem more popular than it is.
You know, in the 1960s, it's get thousands of John Birchers to write letters to the same handful of politicians.
Nowadays, it's flood comment sections and whatnot with like, you know, hot takes and shit.
It's it's swarm people on Twitter or whatever.
But it's the same idea.
Um, and if you just repeat something loud enough and often enough, enough people will believe it's true that you can move forward with it.
Yeah, it's the reason that human society is destined to go increasingly better places.
Yep.
So Welch was also a trailblazer when it came to infecting the minds of children with his nonsense.
In September of 1960, he started advising his followers to get elected to local PTA boards all around the country.
That way, they'd have a say in how their children were taught about history and politics.
And then give them candy.
Hey, kids, you want a papa sucker?
Get on over here.
You know who's trying to keep the papa suckers away from you?
Pommies.
Oh, Joe Stalin.
In August of 1961, Welch announced a John Birch Society essay contest open to undergraduate students around the nation.
The author of the best essay on why Earl Warren should be impeached would win $2,500 in prize money.
Oh, boy.
Yeah, you really can't.
And again, the fact that he hates Earl Warren more than he's hated anyone else in his life is just because of Brown versus the Board of Education.
There's a long chain and string and recurring theme that you'll always see throughout all this is like severe opposition to civil rights just being paraded around as against communism.
You can make an extremely strong case that the entire modern right wing was born out of a desire to stop black people from going to white schools because the moral majority's primary founding goal was to stop Oral Roberts University from having to take black students.
Like that was like the main reason that the moral majority started.
Like it's all comes back to why can't we just have white people in our rich kids' schools?
Good stuff.
So Bob Welch told the New York Times his goal was to, quote, stir up a great deal of interest among conservatives on the campuses of the dangers that face this country.
And you could see this as essentially a precursor to something like Turning Point USA, right?
He felt that U.S. colleges were filled with Marxists and he wanted to try and encourage conservative thinking among young college students.
So he started like giving people thousands of dollars to write essays about why Earl Warren is the devil.
So it's a racist to the bottom, if you will.
If only he hadn't got Frankfurter.
Everything could have been different if you just had a different professor that he didn't fight with.
Oh, man.
Another reason hot dogs make me feel sick.
All right.
Put it back.
Come on.
Come on now.
Come on.
Here we go.
So do you have a rim shot sound effect for Jordan's pun?
She won't even give me air horns anymore.
So, yeah, the good news about Welch's plan to infect the minds of college students is that back in the 1960s, at least a few things about America were actually better.
And he was met by stiff resistance from all sides for trying to infect the minds of impressionable children.
So that's nice.
Yeah.
He actually pushed back on.
That's, I presume, whenever they were like, well, we should not send our kids to colleges at all anymore, and we should homeschool them.
Yeah, I think a lot of that has its genesis in this, to be honest.
The president of the Bar Association condemned Robert Welch for the contest's personal vilification of one of the chief officers of our government.
Roscoe Drummond, a nationally syndicated columnist, called the society radical and reckless.
The early 1960s were also a period in which the mainstream media increasingly turned its eyes towards the John Birch Society.
Mabley's investigation had sort of opened the floodgates.
In early 1961, the Santa Barbara News Press published an investigation.
The reporter, Hans Eng, wrote that the group had started a cell in Santa Barbara the previous year, operating in semi-secret existence and creating several chapters.
Because most reporters have always been somewhat derivative, Ng's piece mostly focused on the politician and Welch's wacky theories about Eisenhower, because that was the stuff that was easiest to mock.
Meanwhile, the more insidious work the John Birch Society did drew little attention.
To his credit, Ng did report that in September of 1960, Welch had advised his members to take over local PTAs.
The Post News' editor, a guy named Thomas Stork, spent the next several months authoring a series of damning editorials about the society, stating that democracy suffers when fear of communism leads to irresponsible, unsubstantiated charges of treason or evil connivance against our political, religious, educational, or cultural leaders, and that traitors should be dealt with by the courts, not by vigilante groups.
So that's good.
Did he end that with, which we learned from 10 years ago when McCarthy did it?
We just did this, guys.
And we'll still be learning.
Exactly.
In 2020.
Yeah.
No, in 2020, we'll go, let's talk to John Birch Society members and let them loudly and lengthily explain their beliefs without any pushback.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Let's pretend we haven't done this already.
Put him on Rogan.
Yeah, at least at this point in time, journalists were like, you know, critical of fascists.
So, so, Mr. Welch, you like candy.
That's all you're known for, right, Candy?
Candy, you like candy?
Candy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So offer you a junior mint.
Time magazine wrote the most damning article about the society in the early 1960s, claiming that it operated under the hard-boiled dictatorial direction of one man and pointing out that due to the society's proven ability to organize its members and push them to concerted action, they could not simply be dismissed as some sort of comic opera joke.
Time magazine dubbed the politician Welch's Mein Kampf and noted with fear that its militant words and thoughts are barely a goose step away from the formation of goon squads.
Time used to be good.
Time magazine named Hitler man of the year.
So what come on, man?
I mean, he was the man of a couple of years.
Like, let's be fair here.
He was on the cover.
Time is basically Nazis.
Yeah.
So they should like the politician.
They should like to destroy the JBS.
Maybe they were saying this in a positive way.
Is the politician the man of the year back in this time?
Maybe they're saying that it's his mind.
He's a bestseller.
Finally, the new Mein Kampf.
While the campaign to impeach Earl Warren fizzled out without any sort of success around 1962, furor over the John Birch Society sparked calls in Congress for an investigation into the group.
Furrow!
Furor over the sound effect.
A little, little, little, little Furu joke there.
So this actually led several of like the fact that like all of this, you know, media comes out about the society forces several of its members who were highly placed in government to go public, basically to get ahead of news cycles revealing that they're secret John Birch Society members.
One of these guys is Representative Edgar Heistand, a Republican from California.
He identifies himself as a member of the society on March 30th, and he outs one of his fellow Californians, a Republican congressman named John Russolo as a member as well.
Both men say that they're like, because there's also calls to investigate the society in this period because a lot of people are freaked out and rightfully so.
And they're weird as hell.
Yeah, they're weird as hell.
And both of these guys are like, we would love to be investigated.
Please investigate us.
I think one of them actually jumped out of a window whenever he was caught at a 24-person communist orgy.
Investigating the Society00:04:12
I'm pretty sure that's, isn't that how that one went?
Topical.
That was a Hungarian member of parliament.
Get it in there.
Getting it in there, Dan.
Like, I would love this.
Like, there's, yeah, hey, we're fine.
Anybody can investigate us, but I should tell you that anybody who does is probably going to be called a communist.
Yeah, and it's fun because a lot of people are like, we should investigate these people.
And the John Burt Society is like, yes, please investigate us.
And then the Rabbinical Council of America is like, they should be investigated, but not publicly because all you're going to do is give them a big court platform to like grant to the country.
Nicely done.
They remembered, let's say they remembered some shit that had happened like 15 years ago.
It wasn't long ago, guys.
Hey, you know that thing that just finished happening?
Maybe not.
Maybe we shouldn't let that happen immediately again.
And thankfully, you know, there's not massive, like they don't get their gigantic national platform in the way that they'd kind of hope there.
So at that point, again, people were smarter about some things back then.
Now, throughout this whole period of time, the John Burt Society grew and grew, signing up thousands of new members each year.
All the sunlight of attention did not eradicate it, interestingly enough.
Not the best disinfectant after all.
I thought it was going to do that to Scientology, and here they still are, huh?
Turns out sunlight's actually not a very effective disinfectant.
You know, it's a good disinfectant.
Yeah.
409.
Machetes?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, machetes, too.
Is this podcast brought to you by 409?
I mean, you know, at the end of the day, right?
Hard day, long day, you're working hard, kind of stressed out.
You pour yourself a nice hot glass of 409, squeeze a little bit of lemon in there.
Really just cleans you out.
Anyway, we accept all legal responsibility for this advice.
Yeah, no.
I think Sophie's fine with this.
So as the society employed, I think we're going to get that big 409 endorsement, Sophie.
They're going to give us the big bucks because that's the thing.
I noticed the other day when I was in the grocery store, like four different aisles of beverages, like one different aisle of solvents.
So interesting.
Why don't you drink solvents and increase their profitability at least fourfold?
First of all, brag that your grocery store is actually stocked.
Oh, yeah.
Nobody lives up here.
And a lot less people live out here since they all started dying.
I have a 409 since 2019.
Oh, I got quite a stockpile.
I'll mail you some, but you got to drink some of it.
No.
It's good for you.
Cleans out your insides.
No, you're getting trumpy on me right now.
Oh, no, that's bleach.
Bleach is totally different from 409.
It doesn't stain your clothes when you vomited up.
Is gaslighting a regular segment on your show?
So much, you guys.
Is the 409 gaslighting bit a winner?
Is that one going to stick around?
Is that a recurring bit that's going to?
It's not a bit.
That's just life advice.
People enjoy lifestyle advice from podcasters.
Like, look, if a lot of people are willing to take a podcaster's advice on what pill you can take for your brains, why not?
What sort of solvents you should drink?
You're already, you know, like, it's interesting that we've evolved from machetes and onto The key with a nice cup of 409 is you want a hot glass and you pour room temp 409 into a hot glass, squeeze a little bit of lemon in.
We call that a 2020 high ball.
Also, Cures Ebola.
Yeah.
Robert Evans.
I will tell you, Ebola will not be on your mind as a concern once you drink your first 2020 high ball.
Robert Evans never found a hole that didn't need to be dug deeper.
Can we just go to an ad brick while we see all the podcasts?
Yeah, let's see what the fine people at Johnson Johnson have to say about what kind of solvents you can drink.
Never Mess With Two00:03:34
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.
Just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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.
Bob Dylan's Warning00:03:48
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.
Ah, we're back, and I just took a nice lukewarm sip of 409.
Stop this bitch!
So, back to the John Birch Society.
So, yeah, they, you know, blow up in the media in like the early 1960s.
They start getting all sorts of attention.
Congressmen come out saying they're with the John Birch Society, and suddenly they're kind of like on the verge of breaking into the mainstream.
And this is very exciting to the worst people on the right who suddenly have feel like they have an excuse to be even shittier.
And it's very frightening for people on the left.
One of those people is a little guy you might have heard of named Bob Dylan.
In May of 1963, he wrote a song about the John Birch Society titled Talking Bout John Birch Society Blues.
He planned to play the song on the Ed Sullivan Show, which was going to be his first televised appearance anywhere.
So, like, this is a big star.
He's known for it.
Yeah, he was going to be on, and he wanted this.
He decides, I'm going to play a song about how bad the John Birch Society is for my first moment on the show.
As soon as Nirvana raped me on SNL moment, yeah.
Yeah.
But CBS standards and practices worried that the song was controversial, and they told Bob Dylan, we don't want to offend the fascists.
Yeah, we don't want to offend the fascists.
These guys who were basically Nazis.
And I will say this for Bob Dylan.
In an act of actual courage, he refused to go on the Ed Sullivan show at all rather than be censored.
Oh, that's fun.
Yeah, he turns down his first TV appearance.
To be fair, they're not probably worried about insulting or offending the fascists as much as they're aware that these people are also the heads of industry.
Sure, sure.
Yeah.
Their boss is a member of the JAV.
Defending the fascists.
In a way.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
In a way.
So for years after this point, Bob Dylan would play the song every time he did a concert, just as like a now.
That's less, I don't think he does it anymore because most people be like, who the hell are you talking about, Bob?
And he's like, the people who are running things now, you morons.
Yeah.
I never liked the title of that song.
I thought it was a little clunky.
It is.
It's not a great song.
Like, look, Bob Dylan has had an arc to his career, and he was not as, you know, I'm not a giant Bob Dylan fan, to be honest.
But I would prefer a Gordon Lightfoot cover of the wreck of the John Birch Society.
The wreck of the John Birch Society.
I appreciate that one.
Legend Lives All.
That'd be a fun 11-minute interlude.
Just sink the entire of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
Instrumental breaks.
Well, the story begins in China, ladies.
As money and members flowed into the John Birch Society, Bob Welch continued to experiment with new ways to make use of the instrument he had so successfully built.
The letter-writing campaign hadn't achieved its goal, but it had proven to him that he could effectively mobilize his followers to real-world action.
Following in that vein, he decided to embark on his most ambitious project yet, a massive crowdsource list of every communist agent in the country.
He told readers of the bulletin.
The Wreck of Birch00:15:50
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Making lists of names is a great idea.
Crowdsourcing it too is really great.
Totally, yeah.
Real democracy shit right there.
You really don't want to vet any one of those names.
Well, it's, I mean, it's how you create the best list.
Yeah.
It is also echoes of Bill Cooper in this, you know, echoes of his like caddy or whatever he called it, the citizens and Kadgi, the citizens' intelligence, echoes of Alex Jones in this.
Yeah, Welch told readers in the bulletin: We wish to build up and have available for all future research needs the most complete and accurate files in America of the leading comm simps, communist sympathizers, socialists, and liberals on those who are trying to change the economic and political structure of this country so that it could be comfortably merged with Soviet Russia in a one-world socialist government.
And since we do not yet see any chance of putting a sufficiently sizable staff to work on this job, we have decided to make use of the energy, knowledge, libraries, pamphlet collections, determination, and dedication of our members instead.
That's so smart.
That's so smart with these right-wing conspiracies.
Like, you turn it into that augmented reality game.
Yeah, like you make it a game.
Yeah, before they had any idea, now we've got citizen sleuths dealing with the true crime podcasts, but it's fucking anti-communist liars.
Yeah, it's fucking awesome.
And he estimated there are about 300 to 500,000 actual communists in the country and another million dupes, allies, and sympathizers.
All right.
Those numbers were not at all made up.
He did not just pull them completely out of his asshole.
As 1964 came, the John Birch Society was at the apex of its power and influence.
It was still widely reviled and condemned by most mainstream Democrats and Republicans, as well as basically all of the media.
But its first six years of life had proved that there was a strong hunger for the outright fascist politics and violent anti-left rhetoric of Bob Welch.
And in the 1964 elections, the nascent far right was about to get its first viable presidential candidate, and a fella named Barry Goldwater.
Hey, he's a good dude.
Hey, hey, hey, hey, he's a good dude.
He is a good dude.
Well, I mean, what's wild is that he's basically a Democrat today, but we'll talk about that at the end.
I know, right?
Barry Goldwater.
No.
Barry Goldwater was an arch-conservative senator from Arizona.
He was elected for the first time in 1952.
And for an idea of the kind of spot he occupies in the conservative canon, Goldwater was directly succeeded in his job by John McCain, who praised Goldwater as the man who transformed the Republican Party from an Eastern elitist organization to the breeding ground for the election of Ronald Reagan.
I like that he uses credit to John McCain, calling it a breeding ground makes it sound as creepy and terrible as it is.
Like, I don't think he meant to use the right word there, but he did convey the right feelings.
I want to congratulate this man on creating a cesspool of the best people.
He really, he really made like a bacterial tide pool of filth that Ronald Reagan congealed out of and vomited his way into the national consciousness.
And I think that's great.
I'm John McCain.
I've crashed so many more planes than most people ever fly on.
And cheated on more wives.
All right.
Hey.
So, one thing that's important to keep in mind when we talk about the Republicans of the 1950s and 60s is that the Deep South used to be a Democratic stronghold.
It started to switch during LBJ's time in office, and one of the reasons why it switched was old Barry G. When he announced his campaign in January of 1964, Goldwater was literally in crutches from a recent bone spur operation.
He made headlines for being one of the first, if not the very first, modern presidential candidates to launch a campaign from his house.
The New York Times spent most of the page space of its article of this discussing how his wife had prepped for the big day.
To give you an idea of where Barry stood on the issues, on October 16th of that year, he gave a speech in the Midwest where he stated in his first major talk on civil rights: forced integration is just as wrong as forced segregation.
Hey, there we go.
Hey, all right.
What's really great is kind of lightly ignored segregation.
That's the sweet spot in the middle right there.
We have segregation, and removing it would be as bad as having it.
So let's just keep having it.
Yeah.
Don't throw the baby out with the racist bathwater.
Come on.
It's like showing up at the site of like a shooting while a paramedic is putting on a tourniquet and being like, hey, man, putting that tourniquet on is the same as shooting a man.
So from the New York Times, quote, he called the busing of school children and other measures to end de facto segregation morally wrong and said that busing was an example of doctrinaire and misguided equalitarianism.
I love the misguided, you know, misguided equalitarianism.
These people think that they want equality and they're just crazy about it.
They're just misguided fools.
Their hearts are in the right place.
They mean well.
Their hearts are in the right place, I swear.
Yeah, yeah.
Do you know how Barry Goldwater made a bunch of his money?
Candy?
No.
He invented underpants that had ants on them called Ants in My Pants.
And he's fucking me.
No, that isn't.
Yeah, I do know that.
I actually do know that.
I read that.
No, you did, but how can you think that that's true?
Yeah, he invented novelty underpants in his younger days and made a whole bunch of money on them.
And now we can't just say Trump is a psychopath because he's got a whole rule named after him.
That's amazing.
Yeah, the Goldwater, because you can't psychoanalyze someone because they all called him crazy, which he was not.
No.
He was just a piece of shit.
It's just all the things he believed were.
No, like, yeah, they're not, though.
If you're the kind of guy who got rich selling ants in your pants, the things like Barry Goldwater's country is going to make things better for you.
You know, that's fair.
It's just worse for everyone who didn't get rich selling ants pants.
God, that's so fucking.
I know.
All of the people who like are the most gung-ho about the free market are also the ones who have contributed the least impressive things to it, right?
But I mean, you got to think, it was a different time.
Novelty underpants back then might have been revolutionary.
That's possible.
That's actually why 1969 had so many protests and revolutions.
It was ants pants.
Mao never would have come to power without those underpants.
It was, I'm sorry, I just had to look this up just to be sure.
It was antsy pants, was the antsy pants.
Jesus fucking Christ.
Okay.
Aren't they cute?
As cute as Barry Goldwater, Sophie.
Oh, God.
I want visual.
No, I don't.
I hate all these people.
I immediately regretted it.
Immediately.
I want to see novelty underwear.
Wait, no, I don't think that's a good idea.
So I'm going to quote now from Politico.
Even though Welch understood racism and bigotry would hurt his cause, the John Birch Society's opposition to the civil rights movement attracted Americans sympathetic to racist paranoia.
For example, it consistently published reports accusing civil rights leaders of communist subversion and alleging that people of color were plotting to divide the country and control the world.
So, yeah, Goldwater, he has to like thread a little bit of a needle here because the John Birch Society is too controversial even among Republicans for him to embrace them, but they have created an incredibly organized and effective way of terrifying people on the right about communism and about civil rights.
And so he can't ignore them either.
You don't want to become their enemy and then be called a communist, but at the same time, you don't want people to think you're their champion.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You don't want to be Steve King.
Yeah.
You don't want to be, you don't want to go full Steve King, even at this point.
Yeah.
So Goldwater wrote a best-selling book called The Conscience of a Conservative, and it can be seen as basically the blueprint for Reagan-style conservatism, even Trumpism.
Oh, that'd be a great novelty book if it was just empty.
Yeah.
That'd be a great thing to give for a Christmas gift.
Yeah, I mean, it is, it is very vacant, the actual morality.
Like, for an example of the conscience that Barry Goldwater says, one of the reasons how Barry Goldwater, like one of the reasons why he explains that civil rights laws are immoral is because the government shouldn't infringe on the right of free association, which is the right to discriminate, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, yeah, so Goldwater publishes this book.
It's like a surprise bestseller.
Mainstream Republicans like start falling in love with this guy's rhetoric, which is basically just 10% calmed down John Birch society rhetoric.
And yes, globalists, we don't say the exactly.
And, you know, Goldwater is really kind of like the, he's kind of like the typhoid Mary of John Birch society philosophy.
He brings it into the mainstream, cloaked in, you know, ethical conservatism or whatever the fuck.
Sure, sure.
It's great.
And there were, in fairness to some of the Republicans at this time, there were Republicans in the period of time who like recognized what Goldwater was doing and condemned it openly.
The Republican governor of Pennsylvania described him as having a crazy quilt of dangerous positions, including the use of tactical nuclear weapons for basically any reason.
Why would anybody think that was crazy?
Yeah, he was a big, like, like Goldwater's big thing was that generals should be allowed to deploy nuclear weapons in the field.
Oh, sure.
Because if they can't, then everyone knows they can't make that decision.
Exactly.
And then where are you?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like, we should, he, like, Goldwater, like, one of the things he would say about nukes is that they're just another weapon.
Well, they are not, Barry.
I'm sorry.
Did you miss everything that happened the last 20 years?
No.
I've got this button that sets off every volcano in the world at the same time.
And that's just a normal everyday weapon.
It's like a handgun.
Yeah, you just have it right there if you need it.
It's like a stick.
Yeah.
Look, if the caveman could have exploded all the volcanoes on the planet at the same time, they would have done it.
Okay.
So like Trump, Goldwater, you know, comes in, like, like swings onto the political stage saying very, very fringe and extreme things and gets condemned by a bunch of Republicans and everybody who's not a Republican.
And also like Trump, none of this stops him from succeeding politically.
And he defeats all of his more traditional conservative rivals, including Nelson Rockefeller, and becomes the nominee in that year's Republican convention.
I put him on the like sort of the scale of like more successful than Ron Paul, but not as successful as Trump.
Yeah.
Not as successful as Trump, but definitely little space.
That's a great way of putting it.
And he's critical.
He's the key to both Trump and Reagan having space.
I think Bush, both Bushes probably would have been able to win an election either way because they're kind of more traditional conservatives, which isn't a compliment, but just kind of a fact about them both.
Goldwater is really a Reagan slash fucking Trump style politician.
And the reason he beat all of his more traditional conservative rivals is that he was able to build a coalition of working class people.
Most of his voters were Southerners, Midwesterners, and libertarians who felt left behind by the GOP.
He railed against Eastern elites, saying at one point, Sometimes I think this country would be better off if we could just saw off the eastern seaboard and let it float out to sea.
Which, you know, is the same thing you hear today.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They also add the west coast, too, though.
Yeah, they do.
They add the west coast.
And I would only say, do that to Florida.
And like Bugs Bunny.
Yeah.
Yeah.
With a little saw.
Just start on the east side and move west.
And one of the Carolinas, but we can let him fight it out.
One of you can stay.
I just feel like we only need one Carolina.
Oh, Raleigh is great.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, well, I know which side you're backing then.
No, I am not.
So, Barry Goldwater.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So Goldwater succeeds, you know, more than any other extreme right politician ever had up to that point in American political history.
And he was only able to succeed because the John Birch Society had paved the way.
He owed a lot of his early success in the fact that he won the party nomination to the machinery that the society had put in place.
Yeah, Rick Perlstein in a 2001 book on the Goldwater campaign explained that Goldwater would take the line that Robert Welch was a crazy extremist, but that the society itself was full of fine, upstanding citizens working hard and well for the cause of Americanism.
The Goldwater campaign made liberal use of the society's large pool of dedicated and disciplined manpower, which now numbered more than 90,000.
In effect, Robert Welch had spent years creating a nationwide grassroots movement for Barry Goldwater.
The society spent millions of dollars buttressing Goldwater's support and spreading his and their ideas to whole new segments of American society.
It worked to win Barry the nomination over men like Nelson Rockefeller, the Jeb Bush of his age.
From Politico, quote, In 1964, backing from the John Birch Society in Republican primaries, such as California, secured the right-wing-backed candidate Barry Goldwater's Republican presidential nomination.
All those little old ladies in tennis shoes that you called right-wing nuts and kooks, Goldwater's organizational head reportedly told him about the campaign volunteers who appeared to be Birch sympathizers.
They're the best political organization that's ever been put together.
So for a few years, I think Rockefeller actually lost it immediately whenever he came out with his new slogan, which was just rock with an exclamation point.
That was the one that got him.
Nelson.
So Goldwater was a sensation on the right.
His rallies drew unprecedented numbers of people.
His followers were more like fans than political supporters.
At one point, a supporter in Georgia famously created a soft drink based on the candidate, Goldwater, the right drink for the conservative tastes.
Barry, a very blunt man, drank it in front of a crowd at a rally and spit it out, saying, This tastes like piss.
All right.
Well, there's one thing that I like about him.
Yeah, that is pretty great.
That's pretty great.
That's pretty great.
Goldwater.
I don't know.
That's impolite.
This guy made a soft drink for you, Barry.
Just have the grace to be like, it's good.
Yeah.
Doesn't take like piss at all.
Ah, that's why they like him.
He tells it how it is, Dan.
Do you know how much work goes into making a soft drink?
Not a lot, it is.
Apparently, not that much.
He should have tried sugar.
Goldwater regularly packed in a dozen rallies per day, flying around the country in his Boeing 727.
He framed himself as a law and order candidate, telling supporters, something must be done and done immediately to swing away from this obsessive concern for the rights of the criminal defendant.
He told another audience that in order to defeat lawlessness, he would redress constitutional interpretation in favor of the public, presumably by appointing judges who didn't believe defendants had rights.
Sure.
One of Goldwater's more famous quotes can be seen as a precursor to both the kind of sociopathic libertarianism practiced by Charles Koch and the ideology of Ronald Reagan.
Quote, I have little interest in streamlining government or making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size.
I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I wish to extend freedom.
Oh, I was assuming that your quote was going to be something along the lines of like, the 13th Amendment didn't outlaw all slavery, guys.
Come on now.
I'm a north camera.
You know what that means.
You know what I'm saying?
Come on, guys.
Fascism in 201600:03:36
Slavery is really just an arrangement between an employer and an employee when you think about it.
And when the government doesn't allow that, that's the real slavery.
Yeah, that's what it is.
Yeah.
Because that makes the would-be slave and the would-be person who's enslaving both slaves.
They're both slaves.
Now they're both slaves.
Yeah.
Exactly.
So really strong.
Think about it.
So, you know, Goldwater didn't give Welch everything he wanted because he didn't like endorse that Eisenhower was a dirty communist, but he was basically the best candidate that the John Birch Society could have possibly had.
He even offered qualified support of their campaign to impeach Earl Warren.
And best of all, he was willing to nuke communists.
So, you know, really like a great, great dude.
Now, doesn't it seem like you should only need one policy if your entire philosophy is just anti-communism?
Shouldn't your one philosophy just be like, nuke communists, and then we'll, then we'll sort everything.
Well, I mean, literally and then metaphorically.
Yeah.
That's kind of what his policies were.
That's fair.
Yeah.
It's it's it's good stuff.
Um, yeah, so Goldwater energizes a new Republican base that had never particularly felt like it had a voice in politics before, which was not really a good thing.
And it terrified a lot of, you know, the more intelligent observers at the time.
One of the people who was fucking horrified watching the rise of Barry Goldwater was a young Hunter S. Thompson.
Hunter was there at the 1964 RNC on assignment as a stringer to gather quotes from Republican politicians.
He wasn't even like writing articles at this point.
It was like that early in his career.
He was just gathering quotes for his editors to use.
But Hunter had an old friend who'd gotten a temp job as a Pinkerton who was doing security for the convention.
And Hunter's buddy gave him security credentials.
So he was basically like hanging out in VIP rooms drinking Barry Goldwater's liquor.
He was hanging out with a warm glass of 409, glistening in McCarthy.
No, he was pounding Dexedrine at that point.
Hunter was terrified of Goldwater, who we saw as a fascist with a real chance of winning election and, you know, killing a lot of people.
Thompson was well versed in the John Birch Society's talking points, and he was one of a few people in the country to foresee the dark rightward lurch that the Republican Party was beginning to take.
He was also mainlining huge doses of speed every day, and so he was pretty paranoid, which is why he writes the next thing that he writes about this.
Yeah, so Thompson, you know, is there when Barry Goldwater gives his speech, and his speech in the 1964 RNC includes the quote, I would remind you that extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.
That's like the most famous Barry Goldwater quote.
And he just has this like pounding, unreal effect on the audience.
Thompson writes later, quote, that he was actually feeling afraid because I was the only person not clapping and shouting.
And I was thinking, God damn you, Nazi bastards.
I really hope you win it because letting your kind of human garbage flood the system is about the only real way to clean it out.
Another four years of Ike would have brought on national collapse, but one year of Goldwater would have produced a revolution.
Well, we've seen that that might not be the case.
No, I think he was optimistic.
Yeah, that might not do it.
That might not do it.
It might just turn out a lot of people are fine with fascism.
I remember a lot of people saying that in 2016 in the lead up to that election.
Yep.
Nope.
I think the sad story about all this is that Thompson was right about the danger of Barry Goldwater, but optimistic about Americans.
Yeah.
Optimistic About Collapse00:04:00
That's not something you usually hear about on a restaurant.
No.
Optimistic to a fault.
Yeah.
You know who isn't optimistic to a fault?
Do tell.
I'm so afraid.
For the good people who make 409, my new favorite happy time beverage.
409.
Grab a glass of relaxation.
Oh, boy.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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 and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
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.
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 and sells, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
Secret One-World Alliance00:15:33
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 at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
So, Hunter S. Thompson was not accurate about Americans, you know, getting horrified at a glimpse of fascism, but he was right about the fact that Goldwater was not an outlier.
Richard Nixon, the next Republican president, would turn out to be the most liberal Republican of the modern era.
Every other Republican president who followed him was cut out of Barry Goldwater's mold, which means they were, in fact, cut from the same mold as the John Birch Society.
Ronald Reagan, of course, gave a massively popular speech at the 1964 convention, providing a full-throated endorsement of Goldwater's foreign policy and his promise to shrink government.
During his own run for president in 1980, Reagan directly aped Goldwater by stating that the most terrifying words in the English language were, I'm from the government and I'm here to help.
As a write-up in History.com notes, quote, by the dawn of the new century, Tea Party members drew heavily on Goldwater's libertarian policies in shaping the GOP's platform, disparaging not only liberal elites, but any fellow Republicans who still believed in the kind of compassionate conservatism preached by George H.W. Bush.
The list of companies and industries that the government is crowding out and bailing out and taking over, it continues to grow.
The former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin told a 2010 gathering of Tea Party Republicans.
Historian Alan Nevins of Columbia University, a student of American politics and history and a two-time Pulitzer winner for his political biographies, saw the writing on the wall.
If Goldwater and his supporters stuck to their guns, there will be in effect a new conservative party.
And that's what happened.
Yep.
Yep.
Nails good stuff.
Right on, buddy.
I think you can take some smallness in getting a good I told you so in there before you're hung for being a leftist.
Yeah.
I think that's all right.
That's the one upside you get to being a leftist.
Yeah, yeah, that's what we get.
A little bit of smugness before you're shot down by the Gestapo.
We don't get any power, but we get a nice exit line at a firing line.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, man.
The best exit lines.
The only people who really have good responses to getting shot by a line of fascists are...
Yeah.
You know what I'm thinking about that's really interesting is that like in the earlier days, you know, like when the John Birch Society was all going and stuff, you'd have these, you'd have those elected representatives who would have to come out as members after they'd already been elected.
Whereas like during the Tea Party, they actually got people elected with full knowledge of like they are part of this.
Yeah.
Like people, those people may not have gotten elected had people known they were John Birch people back then.
Yeah, and now everyone's fighting over themselves to announce that they're a member of whatever the new most extreme sect of the Republican Party is.
Yep.
Yeah.
That doesn't indicate progress to me.
What tragic tragic optimist Hunter S. Thompson really got that one wrong.
So yeah, the John Birch Society gave birth to Barry Goldwater, who gave birth to a new Republican party, the party of Reagan, of George W. Bush, and eventually of Donald J. Trump.
But in 1964, the John Birch Society's politics were still a tad too fringe for mainstream success.
LBJ successfully painted Goldwater as something of a lunatic who would bring about nuclear apocalypse, which is part of why LBJ won that election.
It's a very famous Daisy ad.
You look it up, that's about like Goldwater's going to kill your children in nuclear hellfire.
He wasn't wrong, though.
It wasn't wrong.
He was wrong.
And LBJ did win that election and went on to do nothing problematic or violent himself.
LBJ?
Yeah.
Come on, Civil Rights Act.
The president of peace.
Nah, Civil Rights Act.
We forget everything else he did.
Come on.
That's Dick.
He nicknamed his dick Jumbo, though.
He did.
There is that.
And his famed slogan was: No child ever had their skin burned off because of LBJ.
You know what he'd put when he'd wake up in the morning, he'd put Jumbo in his Auntsie Pants.
Ah, nice.
Wrap it in there.
The John Birch Society began to fade in influence and bleed members after the 1964 elections.
In 1967, the Saturday Evening Post published an article entirely focused around the society's decline.
Its numbers, they said, had peaked in 1965 at 95,000, and by 67, it was down to 80,000 or so.
Several high-profile congressional members stepped back from their duties and resigned entirely.
The Post noted: The society has also been plagued with an internal crisis over anti-Semitism, and it has been shelled from other sectors on the political right as an embarrassment to the conservative cause.
Asked if the Birch Society weren't better than nothing as an anti-communist rallying point, National Review editor William Buckley said, No, it's worse than nothing.
See, William Buckley.
He turned.
Buckley was also like, Man, I hope they never invent something called the internet because that shit will come right back.
Yeah, well, and it's the kind of thing, it's funny because like Buckley is the good guy in this story because he realizes fairly early on that the John Birch Society are dangerous people and excommunicates them to the best of his ability.
Also, big backer of Rhodesia.
No, no, no, these John Birch people, these are very, very, very insane people.
But I do believe in white nations, yes, of course.
I think they're entirely white nations.
Yeah, the virtues on him had common cause on that because they believe that the Rhodesia fighting for the apartheid state there was defending the country against communism.
Yeah.
You know, that's what it was.
Yeah, yeah.
Thank God for that.
Otherwise, we would never have gotten Elon Musk here.
So, yeah.
Some of the society's earlier backers started to abandon it after the unsuccessful Goldwater campaign.
One supporter complained, Welch has turned what claimed to be a militant anti-communist movement into a bookselling operation.
His notion that the Birch Society is going to save America by getting people to read books is absurd.
So they read all the books.
What then?
There's no program.
With crises erupting all around the world, Welch talks on and on about the difference between a republic and a democracy.
I saw no future whatsoever for the Birch Society, and so I quit.
This take was, however, short-sighted.
Robert Welch was right to dedicate the majority of his efforts to writing fascist propaganda, and he was dedicated.
Welch wrote every word of the society's bulletin for years, which by 1967 meant more than a million published words.
The society spent tens of millions of dollars over the years putting out books and magazines filled with propaganda.
And of course, one young boy who grew up on those books was Alexander Emmerich Jones.
Glenn Beck, the most influential ideological founder of the Tea Party, was also raised on John Birch books.
In addition to speaking fondly of the society, he urged his millions of viewers to read the work of Cleon Skousen, an anti-communist ideologue who was a Bircher himself.
For a time.
Yeah, for a time.
He was not fully Birch.
As I read it, Birch-Pilled?
W. Cleon Skousen was too extreme for them at a certain point.
Yeah, he did.
Yeah, you get the feeling that they, you know, they had to walk so that he could leap off of a cliff.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, Skousen, like Jones and like Beck, preached of a secret alliance between capitalists and communists to install a one-world government under the guidance of David Rockefeller, which is not that far off from what fucking Robert Welch was saying.
It's a bit of a step forward, but not a wild leap.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it, right?
The John Birch Society is still alive today.
And according to some reports, it has grown in the Trump era.
One of their modern propaganda videos is called The Dangers of Democracy and defines democracy as mob rule, emphasizing that the United States is a republic, not a democracy.
The video ends on a quote attributed to Mao Zung: Democracies inevitably lead to collectivism, which leads to socialism, which leads to communism, which leads to totalitarianism, which proves that both Mousie Dung and Hunter S. Thompson are way too optimistic.
Yeah, no kidding.
Good work.
Jeez.
Wild-eyed optimists, Chairman Mao and Hunter Thompson.
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting how right he was.
Welch never lived to know it, but like you can see, like, even every little one of his reoccurring lines about like fucking we're a republic, not a democracy.
Now that shit gets like Senator Mike Lee of Utah repeated that line this year, like arguing why, you know, we shouldn't accept the results of the election.
It's just he's right in a sense.
Like, he's we are a republic and not a democracy.
I meant Goldwater with his strategies, or I'm sorry, Welch with his strategies.
Like he's, I don't think that it's like, I don't think you could look at what happened and say he's right in terms of like, this is a good way to make stable, competent political movement.
But he accidentally created like and stumbled onto a really good idea about how to break people's brains and really make grifts on the right really successful.
Like, yeah, he made that pattern really well.
It is, it is weird to think that there's a progenitor that's so recent.
It's like with L. Ron Hubbard, where you're like, you can't start a religion if you're, if I know you, if you're like a hundred years old, that's that's too close.
That's too close.
It's the same way with this horrifying Republican Party.
It should have been like thousands of years ago that we learned how evil these idiots are.
And here we are.
You know, one of the most bummers to me is that Andrew Breitbart was right about something important, which was his famous quote that politics flows downstream of culture.
And Bob Welch is absolutely evidence of that because at the time, a bunch of his initial back was like, this is a failure.
All you're doing is putting out books and propaganda.
And then we like our present Republican Party is so far beyond what Bob Welch could have ever hoped for because of that.
And so deeply inspired, whether they know it or not, by those works of propaganda that were put out by Welch and his dick hole friends.
Yeah.
Yeah, it sucks.
And we're not even going to get into like the Burt John Burch Society talked about the Illuminati a bunch.
Robert Welch was a big believer in the Illuminati.
There is a great speech that he gave sort of later in his career at Berkeley that you can find on YouTube that I would really suggest people look up because it's so funny.
These kids are just laughing at him.
Oh, yeah.
It's amazing.
He's trying to be very serious and they are just clowning on him.
Well, it's satisfying.
And there's still so like I found a fun politico article about the modern John Birch Society, and it talks about like a worksheet for one of the week's video lessons.
And so there's a multiple choice question on it that asks you to identify the Illuminati.
Is it A, a myth?
B, an alien race of shapeshifters, or C, a group founded in the late 1700s seeking world government.
One of those seems very specific, almost as though they want you to choose one of those.
Also, all of those are right, depending on who you're reading.
Depending on who's judging the test.
Yeah.
Bob Welch died in 1985, but in the decades since his death, his ideology has conquered the Republican Party.
The statements he was mocked for making in the 1950s and 60s are now so popular that elected Republicans dare not push back against them.
So that's good.
One of the great ironies of this is that the man who was most responsible for acting as a vector of Birchian ideology to the mainstream, Barry Goldwater, probably would have been horrified by what he helped bring into the world because near the end of his life in 1998, Barry Goldwater lobbied to allow homosexuals to serve openly in the military.
He was a loud and full-throated supporter of abortion rights, and he demanded legalization of medical marijuana.
By the standards Republicans now, Barry Goldwater was a fucking Democrat.
Barry Goldwater to the left of biting on Sanders.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Shit, we're fucked.
Yeah, it's really bad.
Like when you read, like, oh, Barry Goldwater died in American terms, a liberal.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oh, God.
That's not a super inspiring thing.
You either die a fascist or you live long enough to finally realize, oh, these are bad ideas.
Yeah, fuck it.
Let's smoke some weed.
Yeah.
I'm Barry Goldwater.
Much like a Coke brother.
Eventually, you just say, hey, whoops, my bad guys.
Thanks for that.
Coke.
Yeah.
Well, anybody got pluggables to this.
I'd like to plug it.
That does not sound accurate.
I'd like to plug my non-endorsement of drinking solvents.
Thank you.
Oh, what do you drink?
Win decks?
Are you pounding decks?
We have a podcast, Knowledge Fight.
We do.
It's Knowledge Fight.
You can find it if you search Knowledge Fight somewhere.
Yep.
And also, you have a book.
I have a book.
It's called The Quiet Part Loud.
You can't find it if you search The Quiet Part Loud.
It turns out somebody else wrote a little novella with similar titles.
That's a John Birch campaign.
It's on Amazon.
So I'm screwed.
And by the way, the quiet part is just Jews.
Yeah, I know.
Yes.
It'd be a very different name if I was a right-wing psychopath.
But yeah, you can find it at thequietpartlot.com.
It is free to download.
You can donate or whatever if you want to, or just read it.
And don't scream Jews like I did.
Don't do that.
I avoid it.
Do not avoid that at all costs.
Also, listen to my podcasts.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Are we supposed to plug for you?
Is that part of this show?
Did I forget?
No.
No, the episode's finished.
He can't plug.
I know.
I have.
I have Plugman's disease.
I know the feeling.
It's tough.
We're done.
Goodbye, America.
Go away.
Don't get dark.
Get off the internet.
No, no.
Pound some 409.
This seems like it's going to be an interesting editing challenge.
What was really fun is when you get a half pint of 409 and a half pint of Windex, and you do a 40 dex.
That's really, if you really want to get tight, you know, really burn off some of that end of the workday steam.
Crystal Florida.
We call that a glass ball.
Feel free.
Nope.
Nope.
All right.
We'll be hosting the show from now on, I think.
Drink insolvents, the unproblematic beverage.
Oh, boy.
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.
Roald Dahl's Secrets00:02:09
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I got you, I got you.
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 of life.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budginista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never, ever taught.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
You know the famous author Roald Dahl.
He thought up Willy Wonka and the BFG.
But did you know he was a spy?
Neither did I. You can hear all about his wildlife story in the podcast, The Secret World of Roald Dahl.
All episodes are out now.
Was this before he wrote his stories?
It must have been.
What?
Okay, I don't think that's true.
I'm telling you, I was a spy.
Binge all 10 episodes of The Secret World of Roald Dahl now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.