Robert Evans and Jason Petty dissect the February 6, 1934, French insurrection, tracing its roots to the Dreyfus affair and the Stavisky scandal which fueled anti-Semitic conspiracies akin to modern QAnon. They analyze how paramilitary leagues like the Croix-de-Feu attempted to storm the Chamber of Deputies, failing due to leadership hesitation but later collaborating to form Vichy France. The hosts draw explicit parallels between these historical tactics and contemporary American movements involving figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene and the Proud Boys, concluding that while police loyalty prevented a French coup, the underlying fascist ideology persisted, proving democracy's fragility against organized hatred. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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The Dreyfus Affair00:15:40
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What's parley-vu in my francaise?
I'm Robert Evans.
This is behind the bastards.
Well, it's behind the insurrections.
It's both.
It's like bourbon, right?
Bourbon is whiskey, but all whiskey is not bourbon.
Behind the insurrections is behind the bastards, but all behind the bastards episodes aren't behind the insurrections episodes.
So I dig that.
I mean, I think that's actually analogy.
And then you throw in the scotch thing, and then you're like, wait, isn't no.
Got it.
I try to compare as many things to bourbon as I can.
Speaking of bourbon, not speaking of bourbon, speaking of artists, my guest today, as with the previous, what, four episodes we've done on this, is Jason Petty, a.k.a. Prop.
What's up?
Let the lick read bourbon at night for breakfast for dinner.
Prop.
How do you feel about France?
Wow.
I feel carbs.
I just think garbage and bread.
They do love that.
Dude, I love French food.
French food's delightful.
Yeah.
I think Harlem Renaissance, that's pretty cool.
You know, my patron saint is James Baldwin, so his time out there.
Yeah.
But besides that, I also think y'all don't like Americans.
Yeah, which is hard to fault them for.
What I don't like the French for is appropriating Belgian French fries or Belgian fries and calling them French.
Also, they have a habit of having superfluous letters in their hands.
They do have too many way too.
Like at least a third of the letters in any French word are unnecessary.
This is, yeah, funny problem.
Yeah, we're taking France to task today, but we're not talking about how they use too many letters.
That'll be a six-parter we do at some point.
Today, we are talking about French fascism.
Yeah, because the French actually have a long history of fascism.
Although there's a weird number of French scholars who argue that France is uniquely immune to fascism, it's not.
And today we're talking about the day that fascists almost took over the French government, February 6th, 1934.
Now, all of the stories we've shared so far in this series have borne some similarities to what happened in the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2020, and the events that led up to it.
But what happened in France on February 6th, 1934 is by far the most direct comparison to what happened in the U.S. Capitol on the 6th.
I knew nothing about this before I started this series, but it's fascinating.
It's fucking wild.
Yeah, well, it failed, but also it is just the same damn thing, basically.
You know what's crazy is how much the 30s must have sucked.
No, they've trashed out.
A lot of this stuff happened in the 30s, man.
It sucked as much as I'm going to guess the 2020s are going to suck.
It's a sucky decade.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's great.
It's great how the same thing is happening again exactly a century later, pretty much.
Yeah.
So the story starts.
Our story today starts in many ways with something that happened in the late 1800s.
Have you ever heard of the Dreyfus affair?
No.
Oh, this is a very old.
I did, when I was before I dropped out of college, the only thing I ever was able to focus on for more than a semester as a major was Holocaust studies, right?
I wanted to, when I, the only degree I ever wanted was a degree in like Holocaust scholarship.
And every class on anti-Semitism and the history of the Holocaust is going to start or at least be front-loaded with the story of the Dreyfus affair.
And most Americans don't know about this, but it's very famous in France.
And it's where the French far right really comes out of.
In 1884, a French army captain named Alfred Dreyfus was accused of handing secret documents to the Imperial German military.
Now, this was a little over a decade since the Austro, the Franco-Prussian War, which is where France lost a bunch of territory to what became Germany.
So there's a lot of like panic over the Germans, right?
Yeah.
So suddenly it comes out that like someone has been handing documents over to the German military.
There's a spy in the French military.
And everybody focuses on Alfred Dreyfus.
He's the immediate suspected culprit because he's Jewish, you know?
Like.
Okay, this is starting to sound a little familiar now.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, this is a pretty famous moment.
Yeah, I feel like, okay, yeah, yeah.
I'm like you and celebrity names where I'm like, I think I know this.
Immediately, the story becomes not, you know, there's a traitor in the French military, but there's a treacherous Jew giving our military secrets to the Germans, right?
Yeah.
Now, as I'm sure most of you have guessed, just because this is the show that it is, Dreyfus was innocent.
The trial against him was racially motivated and flawed from the get-go.
And I found a good write-up on the trial from the open source educational website, eInternational Relations, which highlights just how fucked things were from the jump.
Quote.
On the morning of Monday, the 15th of October, 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus was summoned to present himself at the French Ministry of War.
The commander, Patty de Clam, along with three other inspectors, welcomed Dreyfus and proceeded in asking him to write a peculiar letter dictated by Patty de Clam.
This letter contains sentences from the infamous Bordereaux, which was a letter written by a French spy found in the dustbin of the German military attaché in Paris.
The French Ministry of War was searching for the spy and were testing various officers that could be suspected of treason.
As Dreyfus wrote the letter, he shivered, and the three men scrutinizing his every move noticed his trembling, thus deeming it as a sign of culpability.
Oh my god, he is cold, he shivers, an incontestable sign of his culpability.
Oh my god, yeah, he shivered, he's guilty, he's cold, he's guilty.
See that man?
Wow.
One constant throughout history is people whose job it is to determine whether or not folks are guilty of a crime are always bad at that job.
It's not possible.
Yes.
Dreyfus was immediately arrested for high treason and deported to the prison of, I'm not even going to try to pronounce it.
He was sent to prison.
On December 19th, he was court-martialed in front of a set of anti-Semitic juries who judged him guilty and sentenced him to a degradation and life sentence on the Devil's Isle in French Guyana.
Jesus.
So pretty much, you know, a show trial, right?
Yeah.
That, man, the anti-Semitism, man, all the way back from there, all the way to they build in lasers to shoot from space.
They build in lasers to shoot from space.
And this is a real theory.
It's a key because we'll talk about this later.
France did not have much of a history of anti-Semitism before.
Okay.
Not nearly as much as a lot of other European countries.
So about two years after Dreyfus is convicted, evidence comes out that a completely different non-Jewish French officer had been the spy.
And this is good evidence.
The guilty man, though, was immediately acquitted by a military court because Dreyfus was Jewish and thus must be the guilty party.
And Dreyfus was actually, when the guy who was guilty was acquitted, they sentenced Dreyfus for even more crimes that he hadn't committed.
Oh my God.
Oh my God.
It's really bad.
Oh my God.
Anybody watch that Ivan the Terrible docuseries on Netflix about the guy that was accused of being the Nazi?
Oh yeah, watch that.
Yeah.
The two trials.
Oh, Robert, it's up your alley.
It is, dude.
So yeah.
They're like, that's him.
I'll never forget his face.
And he's like, no, it's not.
Yeah.
People are bad at remembering things, which is a real problem with eyewitness accounts and stuff.
But there's not even that in this.
This is just racism that Dreyfus is being convicted over.
Like, it's not even someone thinks they see him doing something.
It's just like, well, he's a Jew and he's in the army.
So he's got to be the guy passing secrets to the Germans.
God, dog.
Now, obviously, not all French people felt this way.
Oh, sorry.
What's that problem?
I was going to say, man, this is going to be a very racist statement, but I mean it as a joke, which is even, I shouldn't have even prefaced it.
But I just still think that, like, dang, man, because I still go when I look at like European Jews, I'm just like, but y'all white people.
And I just, and it's, and it's so funny to me because I'm like, damn, y'all got the short end of the stick.
You got the worst lottery ever as a white dude that you don't even get to count as a white dude.
You have to, I think, accept that in this period of time in Europe, Jewish people aren't white.
They are excluded from the benefits of whiteness in the way that, like, in the late 1800s, Italians and Irish were in the United States, right?
Like, just the process of becoming white for a lot of these groups.
Yeah, it's so bizarre.
I know in the early, like, this is the longest script you've ever written, so I shouldn't be adding that.
Like, I know that, like, you know, stories of when America was founded, you know, only white people could own land.
So you had like Japanese immigrants standing in front of the Congress being like, nah, we white too.
You know what I'm saying?
And just this argument that, like, I am a part of that.
Dog, I just can't imagine as someone who's there is no way I could stand in front of any court and convince somebody I'm a white dude.
You know what I'm saying?
That like the idea, one, that that's possible and two, that like you actually are a white dude.
Yeah.
And then nobody's calling you a white dude.
You know what I'm saying?
Like that's at least the European Jew, obviously Ethiopian Jewish people are clearly not white dudes.
Yeah, I mean, and it's a factor of non-whiteness is a scale, right?
Like everyone who is considered non-white isn't considered the same.
Yes.
But it's a scale.
And in this period of time in a lot of Europe, and really not in France, this had not been the case, but in a lot of Europe, Jewish people are not really considered, like, there had been, within living memory at this point, severe restrictions on whether or not Jewish people could own property in parts of Europe.
It had not been legal, like up to the First World War, almost in like Germany, for Jewish people to be officers in the military.
Like there were very strong restrictions around it.
So it's really, it's hard to almost get your head around because of how significant it is in this period.
Yeah, that's the point I'm trying to make is like, I still can't, obviously you can't pull a, you know, a critical race theorist based on a society in the 21st century.
You can't yank that back to the 17th and think it's going to be the same.
Yeah.
But at the same time, it's still hard to like wrap my mind around the fact that they're like, but not him.
And I'm like, yeah, how do you know?
You know what I'm saying?
It's, I mean, it's, it's the whole, the, the, the whole process of a lot of, you know, it's, it's the same way as how most of the kind of colonial procedures that the British carried out in Africa in order to maintain dominance and split up different tribal groups and keep them fighting each other so that they could dominate and exploit them.
They, they beta tested that in Ireland with, with, with what were effectively tribes and group, tribal groups of Irish people.
Like that, that there are people, scholars who will argue that the Irish were the first people to be excluded from whiteness when they were, when the idea of whiteness was being invented, before the slave trade even really existed, because like it was, they're an early colonized people.
It's a, it's a, like I said, we'll do a history, a series about this at some point.
History of whiteness.
Yeah, there's a couple of really good books, including one titled The Invention of the White Race.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a great book.
Yeah.
Very interesting.
So anyway, everything, Dreyfus, you know, getting tried and then getting reconvicted when this new info comes up, it creates a massive culture war in France.
And two groups kind of rise up around this.
There's the anti-Dreyfusards, who are confusingly the ones who think Dreyfus is innocent.
Okay.
Yeah.
And then there's the Dreyfusards who are raging anti-Semites.
Like the Dreyfusards think that Dreyfus is guilty.
The anti-Dreyfussards think that he's the opposite of how you'd think it would be.
It's opposite day.
Okay, got it.
So Dreyfus is pardoned by the French president and released in 1903.
Eventually, just like, and in fairness to France, the weight of kind of cultural opinion is that Dreyfus is guilty.
People come around on this and realize that they've done him dirty.
So he's released in 1903.
And in 1906, a French court formally recognizes his innocence.
Now, the actual spy and the racist officers who conspired against Dreyfus were never punished.
And one of the saddest things about the story is how kind of incomprehensibly loyal to the state Alfred Dreyfus is.
Because after he gets out of years of being in prison as a spy, he rejoins the French army and fights in World War I.
Yeah.
He retires as a lieutenant colonel and dies in 1935.
He goes right back into the military.
John's team Dreyfus until then, boy.
Like, yo, time out, bro.
It is hard to get your head around.
These people don't love you, fam.
Well, I mean, in fairness to him, a lot of folks, there was a huge culture war in his defense in a lot of cases.
A lot of people being like, this is wrong.
Okay.
So all things considered, for what is effectively like a racist Attack on a Jewish man at multiple levels of the military, the Dreyfus affair works out about as well as you can expect for Dreyfus because he is vindicated in the end.
But because of how much, because of what kind of like evolves in France around believing Dreyfus is guilty and starting to believe that Jewish people are kind of inherently unloyal to the state, supercharges the radical right into France.
And it lays the foundations for French sympathy for the Nazis and a hatred of Jewish people that would claim tens of thousands of lives in World War II.
And I'm going to quote from that write-up in the international relations again.
Quote, before the affair, France had been one of the least anti-Semitic countries in Europe.
It, in fact, had been the country where the most Jews had sought political asylum during the pogroms that took place in Russia during the 1880s.
Russian Jews escaped the massacres ordered by the Tsar and flee towards the rest, predominantly France.
Another event attesting to France's non-anti-Semitic past was that there was no French delegation at any of the annual congresses of anti-Semitism that took place in Dresden.
Yes, there used to be yearly congresses based on anti-Semitism in Dresden that a bunch of European countries would send delegates to to talk about the dangers of you the amount of anti-Semitism like the Holocaust isn't a factor of the Nazis.
The Holocaust is a factor of centuries of most of European Christendom being like the Jews are dangerous.
Like that's where it comes from.
Yeah.
Just a slow-moving train that ended exactly where logically it would end.
Yeah, it was the result of for hundreds of years, lots of prominent people being like, we should murder these folks.
And then they did, you know, it's the least surprising thing in the world if you read anything about European history.
So, yeah, but in France, though, that's not really the case as much.
Colonial Troops and Genocide00:15:08
Obviously, there's anti-Semitism in France, as the Dreyfus affair shows, but it's not nearly what it was.
It was one of the best places in Europe to be Jewish.
And there were, as Dreyfus proves, a lot of very loyal to France, Jewish people.
So anti-Semitism really starts to grow into a serious force in France as a result of the Dreyfus affair.
The Dreyfus affair also leads to an explosion in the radical press.
For the first time in French history, left and right start launching a series of newspapers and magazines aimed at taking different sides in a violent culture war.
At the start, anti-Dreyfusard press outnumbered the Dreyfusard press by about 10 to 1 in terms of readership.
So the guys who think Dreyfus is innocent, that's the majority of the press at the beginning.
But that doesn't stop the Dreyfusard press, which are the ones who don't like Dreyfus, from publishing a constant stream of ever more lurid lies about a Jewish conspiracy to undermine the military.
Now, some will argue that the whole reason the Dreyfus affair became a thing was because the press flocked to it and that it might have disappeared if they hadn't written so much about it.
Scholar Jean-Denis Bredin wrote, The press became the power of opinion.
It amplified the political movements without creating them.
For the first time, the press disposed of a powerful influence on French politics, dramatizing, supporting, or denouncing the authorities.
Now, this is very familiar to everybody listening right now.
It's the same things that have happened with like QAnon, right?
This radical press, and when we talk about radical press, in this period, the people like mimeographing or whatever their own like little newsletters and stuff, it's the same as like memes and shit on Twitter and QAnon.
It's like 8-Chan.
That's what's happening here.
It's still, yeah, still just dank memes.
Okay.
And it's, by the way, this basic process is the same thing that radicalizes Hitler.
When he's like homeless living in Vienna, he starts picking up all of these crudely copied and written anti-Semitic tracts that were passed out en masse on the street.
That's what convinces him in a lot of ways about the danger of the Jewish menace.
It's a lot of the same shit you see on 8-Chan.
It's just now it happens online.
Then it was like zines you would pass out, basically.
Yeah.
I wonder if there's like some sort of psychological study or something that like lays out what that does to you mentally to see something that's like feels clandestine, if you will, because it's like these like mimeographed things, like the quality is terrible.
So it's so does something in you feel like, oh, this is a secret.
That's why it's not all polished and nice.
It's like, yeah.
So I wonder if there's something to that where it's like, I'm in, I'm in on something.
I know there's psychology about that where you feel like you're in on something everybody else isn't.
It hits a certain part of your brain.
You know what I'm saying?
But I wonder if there's something to do with like how sucky the quality of like these things are.
This is the same.
You know, I talk about this a lot.
There's this one of the guys behind the Lincoln Project is a fellow named Rick Wilson, who is like, I think objectively a bad person, but has been historically pretty good at creating certain types of propaganda.
He was the guy behind the Reverend Wright campaign ads during Obama's election.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, he's that guy.
And I interviewed him in 2016 talking about kind of his opinion on Hillary Clinton's campaign ads versus Donald Trump's because the first Trump campaign ads really felt like something some teenager had cobbled together on their laptop.
And Hillary's ads were like traditional campaign ads.
And everyone was, a lot of liberals were making fun of Trump's ads, but they were getting this incredible traction.
And the thing he told me was essentially like, the really polished slick campaign ads don't work nearly as well as the ones that look like they came out of somebody's basement because that feels real to people, right?
Like it feels more authentic.
And I, you know, like, again, he's a very bad person.
Yeah.
He's not bad at making propaganda.
I think about what he told me a lot.
Yeah.
And that's, I think, what we kind of what you're seeing here.
I think you're exactly right.
Yeah.
So the Dreyfus affair would prove and the radical press that kind of comes out of the Dreyfus affair would prove to be the seed of a new militant right wing in France, one that came with its own stabbed in the back myth, right?
We talk about how the stabbed in the back myth in Germany was crucial.
Now the right in France is like, we lost the Franco-Prussian war because the Jews, you know?
Damn it.
And it's worth noting that when the Nazis took over France, they actually had a problem, have serious problems logistically, because of how many French people were turning in their Jewish neighbors.
They couldn't deal with the sheer number of Jewish people being turned into them.
Yeah.
It was way more normal to give up your Jewish neighbors to the Nazis than it was to hide them in a lot of Europe, but in France too.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I know, like, I have, we talked about so many times, like, the, the parallels in like Syria and Iraq and Iran.
Like, and I have, you know, some of my homies out there, like, we're trying to explain like how a caliphate kind of grows.
And this is a lot of the thing too.
It's like this, these like heavily armed dudes pull up to the house and are like, are you a Christian?
And you're like, nah, but they are.
You know what I'm saying?
And it's like, you know, or you down for the caliphate, you down with us?
And it's like, well, they the ones down there said it's just like, I just don't want you to drag my daughter out of my house.
So yeah, them.
You know what I'm saying?
You just turn it down the dude down the street.
You know what I'm saying?
I don't know, but they are.
And it's like a lot of people that signed up didn't really sign up.
They just, you know what I'm saying?
It's just, I just don't want you to drag my grandma out of the street.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, that's a factor in it.
There's a, this is not necessarily talking about the, when we talk about the Holocaust, that's a complicated factor because a lot of people would claim in their defense later, like after during like the Nuremberg trial time, that they had been forced to carry.
And these are mainly German soldiers.
They had been forced to carry out acts of genocide.
And a significant amount of scholarship shows that like it's actually was unheard of for German soldiers to be punished for not engaging in acts of genocide.
It was, it was a lot of a lot of it was just a mix of like peer pressure and like legitimate radicalization, but that's a whole holocaust is a whole nother story.
Yeah, um, but this is a part of the story of the holocaust, though.
This is why part of why the the French people in who are taken by the Nazis are so willing to turn in Jewish neighbors, you know?
Yeah, um, and none of this should be seen as like kind of uh uh ignoring the fact that a lot of French people hid and protected their Jewish neighbors.
It actually makes them much more heroic, but that was not the norm, you know.
Okay, um, so again, the Dreyfus affair gives birth to the right wing in France.
Um, and it, it, it's, it's like it leads to this alternative media ecosystem that starts spreading propaganda at a huge rate.
Um, now, France, obviously, World War I comes around, and France is one of the co-co-belligerents in that war, and they suffered terribly as a result.
About 1.3 million French soldiers were killed, and another million were left permanently disabled, which makes which means that like in that war, France lost as many soldiers dead as the U.S. has lost, um, more than the U.S. has lost in all of its wars put together.
Um, damn, yeah, it's bad.
Um, yeah, 73% of French soldiers who mobilized for World War I were either killed or wounded.
Um, and this does not just include white Frenchmen, this includes a huge number of colonial troops who were brought onto the continent by the French government to make up for the fact that after a while, German machine guns had them running low on white dudes, you know.
Um, and one of the stories that's not talked about enough in World War I is how many people from India, people from chunks of Africa, from like all over the world, from the Middle East, were brought in to die on the Western front because like we own these places and we can make them, you know, yeah, beauty of colonialism.
You can just pull bodies from anywhere, pull them all from wherever.
Yeah, now, the days and months after World War I's close brought a wave of revolutions and insurrections across Europe.
Uh, in Germany and Russia, as we've talked about, all these trauma-mad young veterans were major instigators of unrest in what one scholar called the shatter zones of the empires that died as the war's conclusion, um, which I think is a neat term.
Yeah, now, you know, all these paramilitary organizations start becoming more common, and France is spared the worst of this in part because you know, they have their stab in the back from the war of 1870, but then they win World War One, which does kind of mean it reduces the avenues for radicalization, right?
People aren't as angry because the war was terrible, but they did win, you know?
Yeah, it's not as bad as it is in Germany, or you know, Italy won too, but they kind of got screwed in the victory, you know.
Yeah, so there's a lot more resentment in those countries.
Um, France does have some unrest, though.
There's waves of strikes in early 1919, but these didn't really disrupt the status quo.
They did, however, terrify French conservatives.
This was largely because those conservatives weren't seeing the reality of the strikes themselves, but were instead looking at the violence convulsing Russia as a result of its recent revolution and being like, that's what these people want to bring here, you know?
Yeah, so everybody's scared of whatever hell happened to Russia.
Everybody is.
Yeah, it's a huge factor here, you know?
Yeah.
And you have to acknowledge that, like, we talk a lot about how the people on the left are terrified about what they see happening in France and Germany.
People on the right are terrified about what they see happening in Russia.
And a lot of, again, 9 million people die in that war.
Yeah.
You have the Holodomor, which is 5 million Ukrainians being starved as a result of some very fucked up policies.
So like, they're not like when people are terrified as a result of what's happening in Russia, it's not like, you know, today people being scared of cultural Marxism because, you know, someone wants to talk about slavery, you know?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, basically.
Yeah, they have very different.
That's a legitimate fear.
Yeah, they have a leg to stand on, right?
Now, again, they usually still take it to like, well, now we have to just do fascism, which is like, well, bro, yeah.
But, but it's not quite the same.
So the fear of French conservatives were exacerbated by a pattern of progressive social changes that came in the war's wake.
The sheer number of men killed and rendered unable to work had to bring more women into the workplace, right?
You have a bunch of men who can't take part in capitalism anymore, so you got to bring in women.
This brings in expansions in women's rights and a broadening of what was considered acceptable behavior.
For the first time, large numbers of French women were both sexually and financially independent of men.
And obviously, this terrifies conservatives.
Oh, Christ, yeah.
Can't have women making decisions.
I mean, what's wrong with you?
No, they might decide not to make more French babies, which is actually exactly where this leads, because something called the birth rate movement pops up in this period of time.
These guys are scared at declining rates of French birth.
Now, they'd started whining in 1871 when Prussia beat France in that war, because the French right, before they started blaming Jewish people, blamed the fact that French people, women, weren't having enough babies.
Like, that's the thing.
Like, the right loses a war and they're like, they have to find a scapegoat.
So first it's the women.
You're not making enough babies for us to send into German guns.
Yeah, yeah.
Which is obviously like ridiculous.
I'll spoil an episode that we're going to drop soon.
The reason France loses that war is because they have brass cannons that are basically Napoleonic artillery and the Germans have modern steel cannons.
And that's why France loses in 1871.
That's the real reason.
It has nothing to do with birth rate.
Yeah, how would it?
I'm like, I'm even trying to follow your logic.
Yeah, there's not that many Germans.
Yeah, it's not that many of them.
What this toddler going to do?
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah, exactly.
But yeah, it does say something about the right wing that they're like, if we'd had more boys to send into their guns, we would have won.
Yeah.
Okay, got it.
And then, of course, like after they, you know, after a decade or so of blaming women, they start blaming Jewish people.
So the kind of the birth rate movement got even more, like, gained more traction after World War I because at this point, a lot of French dudes had died.
So they had a little bit more of a leg to stand on.
Like, we need to have more babies because look at how many of our boys got killed running into guns.
It's a better answer.
I'm just like, man, I wish these dudes, like, when I'm hearing them, just the stab in the back thing and then they had no birth rate.
I just wish these kids had like little league baseball at some point to just like teach you how to take a loss, man.
Just take the loss, bro.
You lost.
None of them.
That's the fucking thing.
And it's the same fucking thing for like the Hindenburg and Ludendorff in Germany, where it's like, well, we can't accept that we fucked up, right?
It has to be someone else's fault that we lost this war.
Just take the L, bro.
Like, sometimes, you know, hey, you had a bad day.
You know, you just, hey, buck up, champ.
Like, you just, you took the, you lost.
All right.
Take the L. Everybody takes L's.
Yeah, it's like the fact.
It's like, it's like the American right wing blaming the fact that we lost Vietnam on like teenagers protesting.
It's like, no, dude, like the fucking Vietnamese kicked your ass.
They were better.
We lost.
We just lost.
Like, that's just what happens.
Yeah.
Sometimes you lose.
Yeah.
Usually you lose when you do stupid shit.
You like invade Vietnam.
You know what I'm saying?
Or invade Afghanistan.
Should have been over anyway.
Yeah.
So obviously, a bunch of members of the birth rate movement get elected to government.
They push legislation to encourage childbirth, yada, yada.
In 1920, a conservative government is elected and immediately sets to pushing back against what they saw as a rising and sinister communist left.
They were opposed by the labor government, which had been swelled by the war's need for heavy industry.
During the first six months of conservative power, a series of strikes convulsed both French industry and public services.
Still, the start of the 20s was a good time to be a French conservative.
The stain of defeat in 1871 had been wiped out by victory over Germany.
The new right-wing government was seen as being largely composed of heroic veterans, even though this wasn't really true.
But the idea was that, like, these guys are all heroes.
They're not normal crooked politicians, right?
They're men of the trench generation.
They could be trusted to make hard decisions to make France great again.
Okay.
So, first on the right-wing's agenda was, of course, sticking it to the Germans.
This defeat, yeah, the defeated nation owed a lot of money to France in reparations.
And these were seen not only as spoils of war, but were necessary to revive the French economy because the French had gone badly into debt to the United States in order to continue fighting the war.
So they need German reparations to pay off the U.S., you know?
I need my money because I owe some money.
Yeah, I need my money because, yeah.
So when the Germans begged that they couldn't afford to like feed their people and pay reparations, the French right-wing assumed that they were lying.
And this newly formed network of right-wing newspapers and magazines starts spreading another conspiracy theory.
This one is that Germany actually hadn't been all that badly hurt in World War I.
They just faked a surrender so that they could rebuild their military and sneak attack Germany.
All of their complaints about economic collapse and inflation and starvation were lies meant to lull the French into a false sense of security, which, yeah, is not the case.
German Reparations Debates00:10:08
So the Germans stop paying reparations because they were literally on the verge of societal collapse.
And the French government sends in troops to occupy Germany's industrial heartland.
And of course, a big one of the things that happened in this period is a lot of the troops they send over are like black people from their colonial possessions, which really jumpstarts a lot of racism in Germany.
Because like, you know, nobody ever likes the occupying soldiers.
Yeah, nobody, yeah, nobody wants the messenger.
Yeah, exactly.
That's the one time I feel like in this age or in this era of history where I feel like I have a little more mercy for Germany when they're just like, dog, look, man, we ain't got it, dog.
Like, we just, I ain't got it.
Do you know what I'm saying?
It's like, it's your fault.
Yeah.
Don't get me wrong.
It's your fault, but you can't squeeze water out of a turnip, man.
Yeah, I mean, they're fucking like the thing that they're guilty of in World War I in that era.
And the reason that like France and Germany come down so hard on them is like they're primarily guilty of wanting to do what France and Germany had been doing for two or three centuries.
You know, they wanted an empire.
Yeah.
And they're like, well, everyone else gets to do it.
Why don't we get to do it?
And it's bad to want an empire, obviously, with the Germans do some really messed up stuff in Namibia, carry out a genocide themselves.
But also, up to World War I and including World War I, if you're looking at like the number of crimes against humanity committed by Germany versus France or England, not even close.
Not even fucking close.
Not even close.
In 1924, the French conservatives get their asses handed to them in a landslide election.
And the victors in this election are an alliance between socialists and radicals.
Now, again, because everything in France is backward, the socialists were the furthest electorally relevant left-wing party.
So the socialists are like as far left, like the Bernie Sanders.
There's as far left as you can be in French politics and still get elected.
Obviously, they're further left than Bernie, but like they're as far left as you can be in France and get elected.
The communists hate the socialists in a lot of cases because the communists are further left than that, and they're not really as relevant to the government as a result.
The radicals are the exact opposite of what they sound like.
The radicals have the same kind of position in France in this period as Democrats do.
They're the center left, right?
The majority left.
So the radicals are not radicals.
And the socialists are not communists, but they are far left for French politics.
Again, everything in France is backward.
So the radicals and socialists had worked together in the past.
They were allied in that they all kind of broadly supported human rights, democracy, and anti-clericalism, pushing against like the Catholic Church.
But they didn't get along on much else.
The radicals were the party of like the petite bourgeoisie, the lower middle class, small business owners and successful peasants.
They were big on individualism and self-reliance, and of course, property ownership as a method of social advancement.
The socialists are socialists.
Their partnerships were always awkward.
And for one thing, the socialist party had a standing rule that none of their deputies were allowed to accept ministerial posts in radical governments because they saw themselves as a Marxist revolutionary party.
And if they were seen as working within a liberal government, the communists would eat them alive and suck in their disaffected members.
So they get elected to what is effectively French parliament or Congress or whatever.
They have deputies, but they won't serve in the government of the radical majority because that would mean compromising the fact that they're Marxist revolutionaries and they'll lose members to the communists then.
And the communists hate the socialists because they're willing to get like elected at all, basically.
And they're willing to work with the radicals.
It's very, very complicated and dumb, but it's also like basically what happens between the left all the time, right?
You've got the left that wants to actually govern and you've got the left that's like, the system is so fucked up that governing means buying into the things that we're fighting against, you know?
Yeah.
So yeah, despite the fact that actual socialists like weren't taking, weren't willing to take up ministerial jobs and the fact that the left coalition didn't agree on much, the election of this new government, which is called the cartel, drives the right wing completely bug fuck.
And I'm sure Americans can understand what that looked like.
The conservative print media basically calls this stage one of a communist invasion.
The socialists, who the communists hated, were considered to be just the same as the communists, revolutionaries in sheep's clothing.
In 1926, the cartel really pisses off the right wing when they approved the Washington Accords, which guaranteed that France would keep repaying her war debt to the United States, even if Germany defaulted on their payments to France.
At the same time, the cartel brings the Germans into the League of Nations.
The cartel in France are like this liberal government.
They're trying to rehabilitate Germany because Germany is kind of socialist at this point.
So like, let's bring them back into the national community.
Like, we can't keep ostracizing them as a result of World War I.
And part of bringing Germany back in is they negotiate a more reasonable repayment arrangement with Germany that the right wing sees as the left selling out the country and its war dead, right?
God dug, man.
It's so dumb.
Yeah.
You just, oh man, yeah.
I'm getting, I feel like, I'm feeling itchy on my lower back, man.
You know, everyone knows where this is going.
Yes, bro.
Like, and then the thing is, this, it's like, in the same way that we call, that y'all call Bernie Sanders a radical leftist.
I'm like talking about Bernie Sanders talking about stuff that they do in Canada.
You know what I'm saying?
The communist bastion of Canada.
You know what I'm saying?
So like he ain't really radical.
He's not really that, you know what I'm saying?
He's lightweight.
And when I compare like a party to like, they're the Bidens or whatever.
I'm not saying their politics are like it.
It's like a comparative thing.
No, yeah, I get the scale.
I'm totally following the scale.
And I'm saying, yeah, in this scenario, it's like what they're suggesting is reasonable.
You're not going to get your money.
So you're not going to get your money if you kill the Germans.
Let's bring them back in and let them rebuild and we'll eventually get paid.
They won't always be like this if we never rehabilitate them.
It's the same thing with like with like prison reform.
Exactly, exactly.
Yeah.
It's just going to keep.
No, we have to do this.
This is reasonable.
We're not going to get the result that we both want.
So let me just...
And you're talking about I'm selling you out?
Okay, bro.
I'm getting itchy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So the years the cartel is in power are basically a constant stream of outrage porn for the now exploding right-wing media ecosystem.
Okay.
Newspapers like Action François, Candide, which means candid, Gringor, and Jesuit Partout, which means I am everywhere, reach hundreds of thousands and eventually more than a million conservative French readers.
The first of these was Candide, which had been established in 1865 and from the beginning was both anti-democratic and anti-Semitic.
When communism kind of went viral worldwide, it added a violently anti-communist to its repertoire.
Candide was followed by Gringor, which was named after a French journalist.
And Jesuit Partout was initially not anti-Semitic or right-wing, but throughout the 1920s, at the direction of its head editor, the paper got more and more extreme.
In the late 20s and early 30s, it goes all in for Mussolini and it starts to get progressively anti-Semitic until by the late 1930s, it was literally just a Nazi magazine.
So these are like the big, the big names in right-wing media.
The Candy Gringo.
Yeah.
Candy Gringo.
Anyway.
So in the early years of the cartel, well, the French left is like, I think objectively being pretty reasonable, the French right-wing is losing its entire damn mind.
Yeah.
And as will again sound familiar to everyone, the right wing reacts to the left having some success by forming a system of violent street fighting gangs so they could beat up their opponents in the streets.
This was, of course, part of a trend in Europe that exploded from 1919 to 1923 or so.
We've talked about this both in the case of Italy and Germany.
Now, again, in France, there's less unrest and there's less angry veterans who want to tear down the state because they and that state had won their war.
So it takes longer in France for a paramilitary culture to really kick off.
One of the most direct causes comes in 1924, as the study France and Fascism by Brian Jenkins notes.
The right suspicions about revolutionary and anti-national nature of the cartel were apparently confirmed in November 1924 when the government sanctioned the internment of the ashes of the socialist founding father Jean Jaré in the Pantheon.
While socialists and radicals led a cortage to the Temple of the Republic, the conservative press focused on a communist counter-demonstration held in protest at the parliamentary left's hijacking of Jarrett.
The presence of noisy communists in the streets with socialist and radical deputies suggested that the cartel had accepted Bolsheviks into its ranks.
In the Chamber of Deputies, right-wing deputy Pierre Tattinger denounced the revolutionary Saturnalia of the day, which he claimed he had witnessed a true outbreak of revolution from the international underworld that infects France.
Tattinger promised that if the government could not take matters into hand, the leagues of public safety are ready to defend and save our threatened society.
Now, the leagues are these militant organizations, these street organizations.
So what happens here is this socialist guy's ashes get brought back to France, this like founder of the French Socialist Party, and the socialists and the radicals is kind of a demonstration of left unity, have a ceremony for this dead socialist.
The communists, who hate everybody who's not a communist, have their own rally, and they're more extreme, but they're very tiny, and they obviously hate the rest of the left.
The conservative media looks at just the communist demonstration and says, that's all of them.
That's the whole left.
They're all like these guys.
Again, it's all the same, right?
It's all the same.
Nothing changes.
Yeah, nothing changes.
You know what?
This isn't going to change me asking you to take a nap.
Yep.
You know who won't radicalize the French right over anti-Semitism based on communist demonstrations taken out of context?
Yeah, man.
Jeffrey Hood's Secret00:04:14
Hopefully these other podcasts or whatever do that.
Yay.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
play stupid games you get stupid prizes and rule two never mess with her friends either we always say trust your girlfriends i'm anna sinfield and in this new season of the girlfriends oh my god this is the same man a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist i felt like i got hit by a truck i thought how could this happen to me the cops didn't seem to care so they take matters into their own hands They said,
oh hell no, I vowed I will be his last target.
He's gonna get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
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, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg 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.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did it.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Black Shirts and Leagues00:15:25
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
All right, we're back.
So this guy, I knew you were going to say that.
So you got me.
So this guy, Pierre Tattinger, who we'll talk about in a bit, is a big advocate of these leagues, these right-wing street fighting gangs.
And he keeps like for years afterwards, he will talk about November 1924, this like one communist rally, and use it as like the whole reason why the entire left needs to be defeated.
And a lot of like a huge chunk of Catholics and nationalists in France believe that like based on, again, this one demonstration, a communist revolution is like right about to happen.
Now, this was made worse by the fact that the mid-1920s saw France suffer an economic contraction that while not as severe as the one experienced by Germany, was pretty bad.
Now, you mix that in with the declining birth rate.
And as Brian Jenkins writes, quote, in comparison to the dynamic and youthful regimes abroad, such as Mussolini's Italian fascist state, the Republic did not seem fit for purpose.
Sections of the right thus looked for a solution beyond the institutions of the regime to violent extra-parliamentary groups known as leagues.
So France is having trouble here.
And the right, rather than like trying to take any accurate stock of things, looks at the propaganda coming out of the Italian fascist state, which is not accurate, and is like, see, everything's great in Italy.
Why don't we do that?
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
Oh, my God, dude.
It's great.
So the leagues are not quite like the black shirts or the Freikorps.
They're not heavily armed.
Most of them are veterans, but they don't have like machine guns generally and like mass.
Like they're not private armies.
They're groups of combat veterans generally who want to like drink and fight in the streets against the left.
One of the first leagues was founded by that Pierre Tattinger, and he called them the Jeunesse Patriots or the Young Patriots.
And they were initially the youth wing of the League of Patriots, which was a political organization.
God, it's about the same.
Yeah, the Young Republicans, right?
Turning point USA or whatever.
We're patriots.
Like, shut up, dog.
Okay.
They're all proud boys, you know?
Yeah.
They're all proud, proud boys.
Yeah.
So a lot of people on the left recognize the leagues as a threat.
And they are.
In 1925, one French leftist, Louvre, noted that since Mussolini's march on Rome, one could no longer so much as walk in the street without wearing a colored shirt.
You know, he's talking about like you've got the black shirts in Rome, the brown search in Germany, and now like all of our guys have their own shirts, their own colored shirts for each leagues.
And he warns that, Louvre warns that if these leagues were able to like stop fighting each other over petty bullshit and could unite under a single charismatic leader, the way would be open for what he called the rule of castor oil and the grenade.
There it is.
So he's like, basically, we've got all these fascists.
If they can unify behind one guy, we're in trouble, you know?
Yep.
There's the castor oil again.
Yeah, it's a real thing in this period.
Yeah.
So in this, the left-wing fear was, you know, accurate, reasonable, but perhaps a bit premature.
The French leagues regularly reprinted fascist propaganda and definitely admired the black shirts, but they were also French.
And if you know anything about France, it's that France kind of hates the idea of other people's cultures coming into France and gaining influence.
They are very proud of being French.
And even French proto-fascists, like their Spanish counterparts, were kind of didn't like would argue that they didn't want fascism because fascism is a foreign ideology, right?
We're extreme rightists, but we want our own French version of that.
We don't want to like steal from Italy.
We're France.
We're better than Italy.
I was like, that's pretty on-brand France.
Yeah, it's very on-brand for France.
That's very France.
Yeah.
So, one scholar named Dobry calls this the dilemma of the authoritarian nationalist, which is the fact that nationalists want to be authentically of their nation because fascism tends to gain power by reacting against purported foreign influence.
But at the same time, they want to imitate successful authoritarians abroad, and this creates a problem for a lot of fascists.
Again, we saw the same thing in France.
Now, the struggle within the French right over this continued through the mid-1920s while the leagues went through what Dobry calls an apprenticeship period to the fascist international.
So, the French are behind the German and Italian fascists.
They're not as quick.
They're kind of learning from them, right?
And they're slower on the uptake as a result.
Now, because a lot of a lot of French league members were veterans, the leagues benefited from what became known as the Veterans Mystique, which was a near worship in France of what were called the front generation.
People celebrated the trenchocracy, which is like the democracy of the trenches, right?
This is huge in Europe.
It's not just in France, because in Germany, Hitler makes a lot of hay out of the fact that he'd been a corporal in the trenches, not like an officer or a nobleman, but a normal soldier.
But I think Americans can understand how right-wing groups can use veneration of veterans as a way to push their own radical lens, you know?
Okay.
Yeah.
Brian Jenkins writes about how one right-wing firebrand named Vala used the idea of the pure trench warrior.
Quote: Vala warned veterans that the Republic had sabotaged the hard-won gains of the war.
Only the installation of a fascist and dictatorial combatant state would restore France to the politics of victory.
Likewise, the young patriots leader Tattinger extolled the virtue of the new elite born of war.
His group alleged that the cartel had sabotaged the fruits of the war and clipped the wings of victory.
These leagues were not attracted solely to the veterans' supposed moral quantities.
Only veterans were purported to join the young patriots, Iron Brigade, and the Legions, both elite paramilitary action squads.
Now, obviously, most veterans don't join the leagues, and a lot of them also join communist veterans' organizations.
But the worship of veterans and the idea that the sacrifices of 1918 had been betrayed by the leftist leaders of France becomes a popular right-wing rallying cry in the mid-20s.
Yeah.
Throughout this whole period, the right press continues to gin up a desire for the blood of their political opponents.
One right-wing journalist, politician, and street organizer named Charles Morris was jailed in 1925 for threatening to have the Minister of the Interior killed like a dog if police kept it harassing the league.
Oh, my lord.
Yeah.
There's a couple.
Marjorie Taylor Green or whatever her name is, the QAnon lady who's talking about that Jewish space later and probably helped carry out and incite and advise the people.
She's the Jew laser.
Yeah, that lady, there's like three of her in France in this period.
Wow.
Okay.
And Morris is kind of one of them.
Now, Morris is an interesting guy.
He was born a monarchist and is what we would probably call a Catholic fascist today.
His earliest political memory was the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, which seems to have fueled a lot of his anti-left hatred later in life.
He became an anti-democratic activist in the 1890s, and then came the Dreyfus affair.
And of course, Morris is a Dreyfus art.
He believes that Dreyfus is guilty because he's Jewish, and he grows increasingly anti-Semitic after the Dreyfus affair.
In 1899, he founds a newspaper, Action Francais, which literally means French action.
And yes, it does sound kind of like a porn.
His magazine becomes very influential among the French right wing, and Morris uses his influence to, among other things, convince a lot of conservatives that destroying democracy and going full monarchy is the right thing to do.
He writes an article in 1899 titled Dictator and King.
That's about how we should have a dictator king in France again.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know what France's problem is?
Not enough kings.
You know what?
Remember when we had serfdom?
Yeah.
Let's go back to that.
Let's go back to that.
That was amazing.
Ricketts.
In 1905, Morris starts writing articles about how swell it would be for the right wing to create extra-legal paramilitary organizations and have them do a coup d'etat.
When the leagues rose up, Morris was thrilled.
And soon, Action Francais or French Action has its own league.
When Morris goes to jail for threatening to murder a member of the government, his business partner at the newspaper says this to a gathering of their followers in 1926.
If Morris were wounded or hit, I would at once give orders to have the ministers of the Republic immediately assassinated.
So, like, the right wing isn't just like dog whistling violence.
They're like, we should kill them all.
We should kill everyone on the left.
Yes.
Like the American right now.
I mean, kill them.
So, what do you, so in what way do you mean, I mean, dead?
I mean, we shoot them today.
I mean, we kill them.
This is not a symbol.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's wild.
And it's the same as what's been what happened ahead of the sixth, you know.
Now, obviously, Morris and his business partner were not alone in their calls for violence against the left.
I'm going to quote from France and Fascism here.
Such calls to violence often went unheeded, and law and order were not threatened to the extent seen in Germany and Italy.
However, low-level physical violence was common.
Newspaper sellers from rival organizations regularly came to blows in the street, while political meetings were frequently the scene of violence.
Furthermore, despite their claims to stand for authority and order, the leagues could fight with the police too.
The French action created mayhem in the Latin Quarter and beyond, beating political opponents and reveling in confrontations with the police.
Meanwhile, a young Patriots leaguer died in March 1926 during fighting with police at a demonstration against the Minister of the Interior, Louis Malvy.
So these organizations are kind of recruiting and growing because they're fighting with the left and they're fighting with the cops, right?
Yeah.
Now, in most of France, the armed paramilitary start to decline in popularity after 1923.
And in France, they mostly faded into the background temporarily by 1926 after two years of regular street brawls.
They left behind them, in the words of some scholars, a culture of violent rhetoric, uniformed politics, and street fighting, right?
Which, again, very similar.
Violent rhetoric, uniformed politics, and street fighting.
The proud boys, you know, it's proud boys.
Yes, proud boys.
Now, this was not the end of violent unrest in France, just a pause, because in 1926, a new conservative government gets elected and the cartel comes to an end.
So that's why the leagues kind of fade after 26, as the conservatives get elected again.
It comes a home game again.
Okay.
Exactly.
You're not the UA team no more.
Okay.
Yep.
And the reason the right wins in 1926 is that the left has fractured again.
The communists launch a series of attacks against the socialists, who they call social fascists.
Infighting causes the left to temporarily dissolve as meaningful opposition.
And this meant the leagues also had a lot less of a reason to exist.
Big business had spent the previous four years pumping money into the far right, and they withdraw their financial support after 26, which causes the leagues to collapse.
So the leagues are floated by rich businessmen who then like, well, now conservatives are in power again.
We don't want street gangs anymore.
Yeah.
So the temporary fall of the leagues and the victory of the center right did not mean the fever swamps of far-right media ceased operation.
And no magazine or newspaper was more influential than French action.
From a write-up in, of all things, the Harvard Crimson, quote, it collected within itself the inheritors of a tradition of nationalist, monarchist, and reactionary thought extending back almost 100 years.
It was no mere cabal of amoral big businessmen, such as supported the so-called Committee France Alligmain and the ultra-conservative Grand Press, but a meeting place for distinguished and gifted intellectuals whose disdain for the Republic was wholly disinterested, the result of literary and philosophical predispositions, not any desire to safeguard financial investments.
So again, the far right in the period where the left is in control is funded by businessmen who are safeguarding their investments, right?
And that's why they want to fight socialists in the street.
But the guys propagandizing to the far right are true believers.
It's not about money for them.
It's about fascism.
It's about the thing.
Yeah.
So, and Morris, being a monarchist, is only marginally happier under a conservative government than a liberal one.
The king is still gone and he wants a fucking king.
So throughout the years of right-wing power in France, he continues to advocate for an armed coup as the only way to bring back the monarchy.
It would have been easy for people in the left to mistake he and his followers for isolated loons, and a lot of people in the center particularly did.
Then the global economy crashed, and in France, it crashes with the right-wing in power.
In May of 1932, the left wins again.
Their victory is, again, enabled by the fact that the radicals, who are the moderates, ally with the socialists again to avoid splitting the left-wing vote.
So left continuously wins in France and Spain and Germany when the left and the center left are willing to work together electorally, right?
And the right is obviously enraged and terrified by what was surely a prelude to full-on Stalinism.
Now, I just said that like the left consistently wins elections in Europe against the right in this period when they're all willing to work together.
The problem with the far left and the center left working together is the same thing that we're seeing now under Biden.
Liberals and the left can never get their shit together to agree on anything.
And in France, they can't put aside their differences to get a basic aid package together to help people with the depression, which again does not sound at all familiar.
Yeah.
There's my back tingle again.
Yeah.
So the socialists demand direct aid for the unemployed, while the radicals worry about the deficit and think that it's much more important to balance the budget.
Oh my God.
I know it's the same exact thing.
Oh my God.
Okay.
The radicals, who are centrists, their best idea is, of course, austerity, cuts in wages for public workers.
The intractable debate between the socialists and the radicals leads to a series of different liberal left governments.
Obviously, it's like a parliamentary system.
So you can have votes of no confidence.
You dissolve the government.
You bring in a new government, new ministers.
This happens a number of times, and none of these governments are able to actually help people.
And the French economy spirals downhill.
The right wing, correspondingly, surges, and it unifies behind the thing the right wing does best, picking up weapons and making death threats to people they disagree with.
The leagues that had remained functional after 1926, namely French Action and the Young Patriots, see a swell in their membership.
They're soon joined by new leagues.
In June of 1933, a perfume magnate and fascist named Coty forms his own paramilitary group, which he uses to spread anti-Republican authoritarian propaganda and pushes this through the newspaper that he owns as well.
By February of 1934, the Perfume Guys paramilitary gang slash newspaper is the most influential and largest fascist movement in France.
Are you saying perfume?
Yeah, he's a perfume guy.
Yeah.
Like France's most influential fascist gang leader is a perfume dude.
Like a guy that like fragrance.
Okay, I was big into the fragrance business.
Yeah.
Yeah, this is, again, pretty on brand.
Pretty on brand.
Yeah.
Cody's men wore blue shirts and lots of leather, and one has to assume smelled incredible.
They smelled incredible.
System-Loyal Fascists00:02:58
Yeah.
Sounded like they probably looked amazing too.
I'm sure they did.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, another fascist French guy named Marcel Bucard starts a league called the Francistes in September of 1933.
Bucard repeatedly praised foreign fascist governments, and he was famous for making long speeches about the almost sexual love he had for his revolver.
Oh my God.
Again, another Marjorie Taylor Greene, right?
Like, I'm going to take my Glock into Congress kind of guy.
It's the same fucking shit, just the worship of weapons and such.
And then, of course, there's the Cro de Few, which is like the cross of fire.
This is an organization that had been founded as a veterans association for men who had been decorated for bravery in combat.
So all of the cross-de-few, the cross of firemen, are like not just combat veterans, but men who have been particularly awarded for their courage under fire.
So it's not founded necessarily as a right-wing radical militant organization, but it becomes one very quickly.
Its leader is a guy named Colonel Laroque, and he holds military-style parades and is not afraid to use his men as a political cudgel.
And the way they're organized is actually pretty genius.
They have at their height about half a million officers and NCOs in their membership.
And the officers and NCOs are each put in charge of 10 guys, 10 other former soldiers who were of lower ranks.
And their job is to get help with those guys for those guys using the resources of the League and also control their votes.
So the half million or so officers and NCOs in the Cross of Fire control about 5 million votes.
They're very politically influential as a result.
So these guys are right-wing and kind of militant, but they're also very system-loyal, right?
They're not, we want to overthrow the government.
They're we want to organize as a political entity in order to dominate the government.
Yeah.
So Brian Jenkins writes, quote, in November of 1931, the colonel and his followers stormed the stage at a meeting on disarmament at Trocadero, bringing an end to the proceedings.
Meanwhile, the League's shock troopers, called Dispos, were employed to maintain security at meetings and fight the left in the street.
In October 1933, a new manifesto announced a more radically anti-parliamentary direction, while the group opened its ranks to non-veterans through its Volontaires National Auxiliary.
So they get, you know, start more system loyal, and they get kind of more closer and closer to fascism as time goes on.
As 1934 dawned, right-wing paramilitaries were as organized and as large as they had ever been in France.
The left was fighting too much within themselves between themselves to deliver any kind of meaningful aid that might have tamped down on unrest.
Meanwhile, the right blamed the global economic collapse on their own leftists, and of course, the Jews.
They also are able to look abroad at the propaganda that's being put out by Italy and now Germany and be like, look at how good things are going in the fascist countries, where I assume I have accurate information from.
We should do that.
What did they do that we're not doing?
Yeah, they're not, oh, we're not killing enough leftists.
Clearly.
Yeah.
Fake Bonds and Grifters00:03:32
And then, as everything in France is about as hot as it could get, what comes to be known as the Stavitsky affair bursts onto the front page of every rightist newspaper in France.
And I'm going to see how long it takes you to figure out what the most modern parallel to the Staviski affair is.
Sergey Alexander Staviski was born in Ukraine in 1886 to a Jewish family who'd immigrated to France in 1899.
His father was a dentist.
Staviski, however, was a born grifter.
While still a teenager, he established himself as a con man.
By the mid-1920s, he'd gotten good at it, making enough money to dress as a rich guy, even though he was constantly on the verge of losing everything.
Staviski used his charisma and his ability to trick gullible rich people to keep the cash flowing.
France and Fascism writes, quote, he left a trail of fake companies, counterfeit checks and bonds, and fraudulent share transactions.
And following his arrest in July 1926 for stealing and stolen securities, he spent 17 months in the Lesante prison while his case awaited trial.
Following his release on medical grounds, the hearing of the case against him was repeatedly deferred, 19 postponements in all, leaving Staviski free to launch a string of further dubious ventures under the alias Sergei Alexander.
In 1928, he embarked on a scheme which, though lucrative, would eventually prove his undoing, the fraudulent exploitation of municipal pawn shops.
In Orleans, he extracted 25 million francs from the pawn shop in exchange for fake gemstones, subsequently redeeming the stones with cash derived from the municipal pawn shop he had since launched in Bayonne.
This was a much bigger operation, and the credit was financed by issuing bonds well in excess of the value of the articles deposited.
Cash was then realized through the sale of these fake bonds to banks and insurance companies.
In the summer of 1933, having spent lavishly and gambled heavily, Staviski found himself unable to redeem the bonds, and his attempts to win backing for a new operation, which he hoped would bail him out yet again, were soon frustrated.
So that's the nature of his con.
Yeah, yeah.
At first, it sounded like, damn, that's a pretty good lick, man.
He's a good con man for a while.
Does work the system, yeah.
So in September of 1933, one of the businesses he conned, an insurance company, called for a judicial inquiry into his business.
On December 23rd, the director of a pawn shop Staviski owned broke down under questioning.
He did not just incriminate his boss, but also a local elected leader from the Radical Party.
Staviski immediately went on the run, fleeing Paris on Christmas Day.
And just as quickly, the right-wing press picks up the story.
French Action and other newspapers launch a massive campaign to allege that not just the one guy implicated, but a whole host of radical politicians, basically all of them, had been involved in a far-reaching financial conspiracy.
Since Staviski was Jewish, you can guess how this folded in with the fact that all of these papers also had huge hard-ons for Hitler and Mussolini.
One radical deputy resigned.
Another radical, the minister of the economy, was found to have encouraged people to purchase junk bonds from Staviski back in 1932.
So two radicals are implicated, like clearly.
So he resigns, and to the right, this proves that all of the other deputies they'd been accusing were guilty.
Two newspaper editors were also found to have been on Staviski's payroll, which encouraged people to buy junk bonds.
And then these guys are arrested, which feeds into the narrative that the liberal press is untrustworthy and part of the Jewish conspiracy.
As 1934 dawned, right-wing media could write about nothing else but the Staviski affair.
And then, on the 9th, with public interest at its height, Staviski himself is cornered by police at a house in Chemois.
He kills himself to avoid capture.
So as soon as he kills himself, both the communist and the far-right press leap on the story, alleging that Staviski had not committed suicide.
Epstein Connections Revealed00:04:53
He'd been murdered to cover up his connections to powerful leaders.
He's the fucking French Jeffrey Epstein.
He's Epstein.
Yeah.
He's Epstein.
It's the same thing.
It's the same thing.
Yeah.
He's Epstein.
He doesn't have like a network of child prostitutes, but he's a guy who's implicated with a bunch of powerful people in a series of crimes.
He goes to jail once.
He continues committing crime, implicates more powerful people, and then when he's cornered, kills himself.
Yeah.
You know?
Yeah.
It's the same thing.
It's like the exact same playbook.
Yeah.
And then the best part about the Epstein story is they said the camera glitched.
Yeah.
And there's shady stuff like that with this, right?
It's not cameras because it's whatever.
Yeah, it's the same thing.
But yeah, nah, this is.
And I have no idea.
That is a one-to-one, bro.
Yeah.
Just like with Epstein, it doesn't really matter if he killed himself or was murdered.
Same thing with this guy.
What matters is that everyone on the far left and the far right is sure that he was murdered in order to protect liberals, right?
In order to mainstream, I should say, center politicians.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's way too much at stake.
You know who won't murder Jeffrey?
Well, you can't because he already did.
Yeah, he's already dead.
So they definitely won't kill him.
Definitely won't get it.
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There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
If 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.
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What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place to come.
Look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
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, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
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Greg Gillespie and Michael Marincini.
My mind was blown.
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Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
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10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
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From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Prime Minister Deladier00:15:12
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey, what did it?
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon and I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
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So we're back.
So the radical president.
The conspiracy theory that he's still alive, though.
Like, I feel like your eyebrow is.
Can I actually prove that, Robert?
I am not, I'm not making any conclusions about Jeffrey Epstein on this podcast.
I'm just saying that, like Epstein, this guy Staviski is said to have killed himself, and nobody who's on the left or the right really believes.
Yeah, there's one definitive thing you could say about Jeffrey Epstein.
I don't care how many dollars you put in before and after his name, he is a pimp.
Yeah, Staviski's a different kind of pimp, but he's just a pimp.
Yeah.
And this guy is pimping.
Yes.
This is a different lick.
He's selling different products.
Same thing.
Anyway.
So the radical president, like the, or not president, but like prime minister of France, who's, again, a radical, does his best to ignore the scandal, arguing that it's not a big deal.
Like, yeah, the guys who were implicated already got arrested.
Like, it's not a big deal.
And it might have even been true that like the only people implicated had been caught, but that doesn't really matter because obviously this becomes a huge conspiracy.
And the prime minister refuses calls from both the right and from his socialist allies to call for a parliamentary inquiry into the whole situation.
This just makes everything worse, proving to many Frenchmen that there had been a conspiracy.
Brian Jenkins writes, What might be called the dialectics of conspiracy thus played a significant role in the escalation of crisis?
Staviski's death gave decisive impetus to conspiracy theories on the right and intensified the campaign both in the press and on the street.
Meanwhile, the perception on the left that the scandal was being orchestrated for sinister political purposes led the government to harden its position and refuse to make concessions.
This in turn gave the impression that the government was engaged in a cover-up and therefore must have something to hide, thereby further reinforcing the right's conspiracy theories.
However, in this competitive press environment, it was inevitable that the more radical and scurrilous newspapers that set the pace and tone for others to emulate, it was French action that crystallized public opinion around them and orchestrated the developing affair, each day adding fresh names to its dossier of suspects and decisively raising the temperature on 7th of January with the headline, Down with the Thebes, and an inflammatory appeal to the people of Paris.
Most of the conservative press simply followed their lead, albeit in less flamboyant language, which in turn helped legitimize the message.
Again, the truth doesn't matter.
What matters is the narratives that take off.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.
From January 9th on, and this is 1934, there were demonstrations and street violence almost every night in Paris.
Every week, the crowds grew larger.
On Saturday, January 27th, the situation was bad enough that the president resigned and the government dissolved, or the prime minister, whatever, resigned and the government dissolved.
This was seen as a big victory by the right, but nobody knew what came next.
The left are still the elected leaders, right?
You dissolve the government.
You don't kick out all the deputies who have been elected.
You just pick a new prime minister and new ministers, right?
That's what it means.
And the left is still like gets to decide who the new government is.
And they bring in a new liberal president, a guy named Deladier.
Now, while all this is happening, the socialists are the only part of the left coalition that has not been horribly tainted by the Stavisky affair.
It's radicals that are implicated.
The socialists are not.
The radicals need the socialists, both to keep the government from being dissolved and to avoid a deeper investigation into the matter.
So yeah, probably a bunch more radicals were guilty, you know?
They really don't want there to be an investigation.
So since they had the radicals over a barrel, the socialists decide to make a demand of their own.
Being good leftists, this demand is that the radicals fire the Paris chief of police, Jean Chiapa, because he was a piece of shit who sympathized with fascist paramilitary groups.
Of course, the far right loves Chiapa, and they see his sacking, and the radical promises that the police will be reformed.
So the radicals, in order to keep the government going and avoid an investigation, are like, we'll fire this guy and we'll completely reform the Paris police.
That's the socialists' demand.
And the right wing is like, this is like, this is clearly a precursor to a communist revolution.
They're trying to get rid of the police so they can take over the streets and take all of our money, right?
God dog, man.
So this starts a ticking clock on the right because they think that there's this commie plot being carried out and they have only days to act in order to avert it.
Laroc, Colonel Laroc, of the Cross of Fire, declares his paramilitaries to be defenders of public order.
One league, French Solidarity, declares civil war is imminent.
While the young patriots claim, the country is in danger.
A wholesale purge is being prepared.
Newspapers, right-wing newspapers, run articles about how communist revolutionaries are on the verge of seizing power.
Colonel Laroque warns his followers, a government whose sign is the red flag wants to reduce you to slavery.
We are threatened with sectarian dictatorship.
Nothing that sounds familiar.
Yeah.
Again, nothing that's ever happened again.
Nothing in any other country.
This is so frustrating.
I know.
It's terrible.
This is so bad.
Yes.
So elected leaders were also pushing these lines.
Philippe Henrio, a deputy from Bordeaux, was a Catholic militant who believed that the Stavisky affair was a Jewish Masonic conspiracy to destroy France.
On three occasions in January, he took to the rostrum of the Chamber of Deputies to demand right-wingers rise up and sweep the republic.
British journalist Alexander Wirth was in Paris at the time, and he wrote this in early February.
Already on Monday, Paris was full of wild rumors.
Troops, it was said, had been brought into Paris.
If the demonstrators were to cause trouble, the government would not hesitate to use tanks and machine guns.
The work would be entrusted to Moroccan and Senegalese soldiers who would have no compunction about shooting down their white fellow citizens.
And it is, by the way, one thing you kind of have to give the French in this period is they are kind of the first Western government to have a significant number of non-white citizens.
They do that.
Not that they treat them equally or anything, but like it is a thing that happens in like the 1700s, really.
God damn, man.
Of course, they use them for shock troops.
Of course.
I'm like, I feel like it was about time that one of us say something funny, but it's, I just, I got nothing because it's just so on the freaking nose.
Yeah.
It's exactly all.
It's exactly what's happened.
You know?
So this prop brings us to February 6th, 1934.
The French government assembles for a vote of confidence in Prime Minister Deladier.
So a vote on whether or not he's going to keep being the prime minister or they're going to dissolve the government again.
And I found a French history website, Herodotus, that describes how things started.
Quote, in all, hardly more than 30,000 demonstrators, a large majority of them who were ex-combatants, everyone is mobilized on the theme, down with thieves, and a demand for more civility and honesty in the government.
At the start, at the call of Lieutenant Colonel de la Rocque, the cross of fire quickly dispersed as soon as the first clashes with the Mobile Guard occurred.
Although it arrived at the end of the afternoon at the gates of the Palais Bourbon, Laroc and his veterans refused to occupy it.
Their dispersal makes any possibility of overthrowing the regime by force futile.
But on the other side of the sign, around the Palace of the Concord, the demonstration degenerates.
Thousands of activists try to march on the Palais Bourbon, the bourbon palace, I guess.
So what happens here is this crowd starts, like, and the cross of fire guys, or a huge chunk of it, starts marching on the gates of the capital.
And as soon as the police get engaged and the crowd starts fighting with the cops, Colonel Laroque calls his men back.
But thousands and thousands of other right-wing militants continue to surge ahead and keep fighting the cops.
And as night falls, the protests go from being just aggressive and violent to being an active attempt to storm the capital.
Protesters light buses on fire and destroy property, tearing down barricades and barriers as they attempt to breach the chamber of deputies, where parliament is in active session.
The police panic when the crowd starts to break through the barricades and they open fire.
Some in the crowd fire back.
And by the end of it all, as many as 26, we don't have an exact death toll.
Some will say 26 people were killed and more than 1,500 are injured.
Some will say it's more like, you know, five to 10 and 1,000 injured.
But it's everything that happened in the capital on the 6th, except they don't get inside the capital because the French order forces just start shooting, like firing into the crowd with rifles.
So the riots continue for days, marking what most liberals and leftists would come to see as a coup attempt by the far right.
This is probably fair, but it's also true that after the 9th, the communists start coming out in force in the streets and do a lot of rioting themselves.
And actually, like three or four days after the attempt to storm the capital, a lot of what's happening on the street is being done by the communists.
They didn't attempt to breach the chamber of deputies, though.
The whole affair terrifies everybody, and Prime Minister Deladier resigns on advice from the police and army to avoid further violence.
For the first time in the history of the Third Republic, street violence had brought down a French government.
The week of February 6th was, in fact, the most violent period of political unrest in France since the Commune of 1871.
Not everyone in the right is thrilled by this.
Morris, head of French action, seems to have panicked immediately.
From the Crimson, quote, Though he often considered the possibility of the coup in books and in the pages of his movement's newspaper, it is doubtful that he ever actually planned a revolution.
On the one occasion which fate presented to his grasp, the riots before Chamber on February 6th, 1934, he did nothing.
Professor Weber calls the 6th of February a victory lost.
Morris's hesitation at what seemed the very gates of power, though this impression was exaggerated, was, as Professor Weber says, the moment of truth which showed up the emptiness of almost everyone's position.
The parliamentary regime was shown to be a tottering, precarious structure.
The rightist rioters had made their point, but the right itself was exposed as well.
Exposed as a lot of theorists, sorely lacking in the capacity to carry out their dreams.
French action had organized publications, public meetings, a party structure that extended through France, but they lacked the will to power.
They were incapable of a Munich push, much less a 10-year conspiracy to capture parliamentary power.
At the moment of reaction's greatest political triumphs in Europe, French fascism collapsed.
Wow.
Again, it doesn't sound familiar at all.
Wow.
Yeah, no, I've never.
And again, fucking Morris here, he's like Alex Jones almost, right?
He's this guy who's telling everyone, overthrow the government.
And then when they start, because Alex Jones is there on the 6th in D.C., he fucking leaves as soon as people cross.
He's like, no, sir.
Oh, wait.
Yeah.
At first, I thought when you was talking about the other dude that ended up being Epstein, I thought it was Jones at first.
No, no, no.
Fucking Staviski's your Epstein.
Yeah, he's definitely Epstein.
But at first, when he first started talking, I was like, I sound like a little Alex Jones, but nah, that's Morris is your Alex Jones.
Morris is Alex Jones, right?
Just like, oh, wait, I'm not.
Oh, no, I just wanted to make money telling people to revolt and getting them like ginned up.
I didn't actually want that to happen.
That's scary as hell.
Yeah.
Oh, y'all actually pull triggers.
Oh, no.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And Kurt, you can see Colonel de Laroque kind of in the same light, although you could also argue that he was just very state loyal, right?
Like he wanted a new government.
He wanted less democracy, but he wasn't about to storm the capital.
So the main outcome of February 6th was that the elected right wing grows closer and closer to the insurrectionary far right.
It also unifies the left wing, inspiring a popular front in France that takes power after a brief period of conservative rule following Deladier's fall.
The 1936 French Popular Front was at its core an anti-fascist political union.
And domestically, it does a good job of stopping the French far right from capturing power.
And this has actually led to a theory in French historiography that France is itself immune to fascism in a unique way.
The story goes that a mix of France's long-standing democratic traditions and the fact that its right wing is split between its own native brands of extremism means the country can't fall into fascism.
This is nonsense.
I will tell you right now, I think this is fucking bullshit.
And there are a lot of scholars.
The book France and Fascism is a very long scholarly treatise on why this is bullshit.
But a lot of French scholars after World War II will argue this, that like France is immune to fascism.
The reality is that France came very close to falling to fascism on the 6th, and it did fall to fascism in 1940.
Now, this is by conquest, right?
Yeah.
The Nazis, the fascists don't gain power in France by elections.
The Nazis conquer France.
But when the Nazis take over, they needed to find a bunch of willing Frenchmen to run Vichy France.
And they find a ton of these guys, a huge and already radicalized group of French fascists who are ready to chip in and help out.
And most of these guys who run Vichy France when the Nazis take over are people who had been involved with the February 6th insurrection, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Like a ton of these fucking dudes.
It's crazy that it's the 6th, also.
Yeah, and it's the same, it's February 6th, right?
It's very haunting.
Wild.
When I started reading about this, I was so fucking shocked because I was thinking, like, well, you know, if you want to make find a good comparison to the January 6th, there's aspects of the Munich coup, there's aspects of the March on Rome, but like, oh, shit, no, it's Feb 6, 1934.
That's exactly what happens.
So a lot of French fascists who had been a part of, you know, what happened on the 6th wind up joining the Nazis.
Remember Philippe Henrio, or Henriot, whatever, the right-wing deputy who was basically the French QAnon Glock congressperson who was like, we need to overthrow the government while he's in the government.
Under occupation, this guy becomes the voice of Radio Vichy, broadcasting Nazi propaganda to millions of Frenchmen.
Pierre Tattinger, who founded one of the first paramilitary leagues, became the president of the Paris Municipal Council under the Nazis.
Jean Chiapa, the fascist cop, was made high commissioner of the Levant, but thankfully died in a plane crash pretty soon after that when he shot down over Lebanon by the Italians accidentally.
Lessons from Failed Insurrections00:06:25
Yeah.
Morris celebrated the Nazi victory as a divine surprise.
Now, he was not a Nazi because he fucking hated German people, but he hated Jewish people more.
And one of his chief complaints about the occupation is that it was too lenient on Jewish people.
When the Third Reich fell and France was liberated, Morris was arrested and indicted for complicity with the enemy based on the pro-Nazi articles he'd published at the start of the war.
He was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Upon his sentencing, Morris is said to have exclaimed, It's Dreyfus's revenge.
Oh, God.
He brought it all the way back.
It's perfect.
It's a perfect circle.
Oh, man.
And somebody screenshotted his tweets.
Yeah, he put him in prison.
Yeah, that's exactly what happens, more or less.
And that, prop, is the story of February 6th, 1934 in Paris.
All right.
Wow, wow.
Cool shit, right?
Great times.
Sheesh.
Haunting.
How's everybody feeling?
My one word, haunting.
Yeah.
I like, and as, yeah, because I didn't have, I didn't know much about this either.
So when I was joining the chorus of everybody who's fascinated with history going, guys, I'm telling you, like, this, we've seen this before.
I don't know.
I know there's no one-to-one, but we've seen something like this before.
This one, I'm like, oh, this is the cloak, this is the closest to, like you said in the beginning, I'm like, oh, damn, I wasn't even counting this one.
Yeah.
And it was, it was some, somebody sent me, and I honestly forget who it was, but somebody like somebody who I have texted with on Signal said, like, you should look into January 6th, 1934.
And I did.
And I'm like, oh, my God.
This is the same thing.
Dude, it's so wild.
So obviously it was a great, a great, you know, episode for Are the Fascists Who Fail part of this.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And there's a lot of lessons to take out of this.
One of this is that the right loses when the left and liberals work together electorally.
Another is that when the left and liberals work together electorally, they generally can't agree on enough to do anything that will actually stop the fascists from getting stronger.
That was one of my, that was one of the biggest lessons I'm learning from this one.
It's just like, oh, we're so progressive.
We're so, well, me and my wife call it, you're so open-minded, you're closed-minded.
You know what I'm saying?
So like, y'all just can't get it together because y'all not open-minded enough, you know?
Yeah, and it's, you know, I think a lot could argue that it's largely on the radicals because they have more power in the government and they kind of refuse to do any sort of meaningful aid that could actually have clamped down on the far right.
But also, like, I don't want to like negate, number one, like the media is a huge part of this, both in the United States and in France, right?
This alternate media ecosystem kind of means that like, maybe even if the radicals had agreed with the socialists and they put out an effective aid package, would that have been enough to overcome the propaganda?
And I don't know.
Nobody does.
Nobody knows.
But yeah, like I forget that there's a modern historian too.
It's like we went from the information age to the age of belief, to the belief age.
You know what I'm saying?
It's like we've actually switched ages.
It's not information.
It's belief.
And this media circus that we're all in of like, you know, the closed ecosystem of your, of your confirmation bias means that information don't matter.
Belief do.
So, but at the end of the day, like, like you said, like one could speculate.
I just feel like anyone, anyone votes for somebody that puts food on a table.
You know what I'm saying?
So like, it's about if you put if someone's not into the specificities of caring for others, you know what I'm saying?
Like the way that we think about government and the way that it processes, but just as simple as I need to be able to feed my kids and you're making this possible.
You know what I'm saying?
In a time that like I can't just go get it myself, you know, then why would I not vote for this?
You know what I'm saying?
Why would I not back this?
Like, you know, it cut me a check for two grand a month.
I think it's great, you know?
Yeah.
And that's one of the things De La Rock and this cross a fire group, like they actually do provide aid to other struggling veterans.
And that's a big part of their power and why they're able to all get together on stuff.
And it's like, yeah, you know, it's, it's, there's a lot in these lessons.
There's a lot in the stories of just like France and Spain, where like one of the things we see when you compare them to Germany, Italy is that when the police and the military are more on the side of at least the center and democracy than they are on the side of the right, the right can't gain power through an insurrection, right?
Yeah.
In Germany and Italy, the police and the military are on the side of the fascists.
And so the insurrections work, you know, eventually.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, in the Munich, insurrection is stopped by the police and stuff.
And like the reason the Spanish Civil War becomes a war is because most of the military and most of the police in Spain don't go with the fascists.
In France, it's kind of the same thing.
Yeah.
Which is a lesson, I think.
There's a lot of confusing lessons in all of this.
Another is that regardless of what the far left does, the far right will turn them into everyone who is left of center, right?
They'll turn him into the boogeyman.
Yeah.
Yeah, and even if they don't do anything, they'll lie.
It's like the kind of thing where you know, liberals during the election were like, look at the um, like, all what you know, these antifa kids breaking all these windows are going to lose us the election to Donald Trump.
And it's like, that's actually not what happened.
Um, because the right are so propagandized that no matter what Antifa did, it wouldn't have if they just marched peacefully in the streets, the propaganda would have would have made them seem like the coming of a communist revolution.
Yeah, um, what matters is that liberals not buy into it and and see what's working, and that's what I feel like we did where you were just like, Hey, the defund the police would have lost his election.
Look, man, don't shoot at us, Doc.
Like, yeah, look, it did listen, you know, it did it.
Number one, you know, I'm saying you like, and as much as we could, unfortunately, it's like, well, Trump fumbling corona is like really a big place the election, yeah, you know what I'm saying?
So, like, don't look, man, same team, bro.
FBI Infiltration Theories00:02:58
I'm just trying to tell you, this is a good idea, yeah, yeah, man.
Yeah, it's it, there's a lot, a lot to learn.
And in our next episode, our penultimate episode of Behind the Insurrections, we're going to talk about the business plot.
Um, so we're going to be coming back home to the old U.S. U.S. of A.
Yeah, that's going to be good.
That'll be Thursday.
Um, but for now, prop, you want to drop some pluggables up in this?
Yes, yes, this, yes, because I'm so excited because the pre-save link for my first single on the next record is now out.
So, excellent prop atpop.com.
Yes, and all my socials.
Also, there's a new coffee roast called The Culture, also available on the website.
Uh, pulled from Ethiopia and like tasted it myself, met the farmers.
This is real stuff.
Uh, and I will be on Hood Pop.
Dang, Anderson, Anderson, you want some coffee, dog?
All you got to do is DM me, homie.
Like, you ain't got to like yell like that.
And I'm telling the truth, like, you barking at me like I'm lying.
And hood politics with props shooting out, doing that's going cool.
You could get on all the podcast sections, and which was funny because, like, just now, one of the uh predictions, well, not just now, last week, one of the predictions came true.
Uh, and we kind of did a little funny little roast about that with a prediction of like the Proud Boys being infiltrated.
Oh, yeah, yeah, I told y'all they were infiltrated, guys.
Well, it's it's you know, it's one of the things that's frustrating to me about the Proud Boys is that like Enrique Terrio was an FBI informant.
Um, yeah, and this is being taken by a lot of the left to mean that, like, well, the F the Proud Boys were an FBI op from the beginning, and like, of course, that's not really how it like it's this, it's this thing you see, it's the thing that J. Edgar Hoover wrote about, where like one of his goals with COINTEL PRO was to make the FBI seem so powerful and omnipresent that people would think they were responsible for everything.
Yeah, um, and it's less that and more that like Enrique Tario is the kind of person who is immediately going to roll on everybody that he was involved with.
Um, yeah, yeah, yeah, that that that, yeah, that like goes back to me like in the left where I'm like, in the same way, I'll be looking at like a lot of the right-wing people, and I'm like, Yo, where's your antennas, man?
Like, discern this situation.
You like, that's not what's happening, you feel me?
And I feel like with this one, that's one of those situations too, where I'm just like, Yo, you say the whole thing is an FBI front?
Like, like, it's come on, man.
Where are your antennas, bro?
No, they got a guy, but of course, a bunch of them were talking to the feds, yeah.
They've got, like, yeah, yeah, they saw the same, they saw the same problems we saw, and they said, We better do something about this shit.
You know what I'm saying?
We don't want another gang that's like another gang, yeah, yeah.
We're the top gang, you know?
Trout Bait Shop Tweet00:04:00
Yes.
But it's hard to do.
People will believe what they believe.
It's like with Epstein and with Stavitsky, you know?
Yeah.
You know, maybe he killed himself.
Maybe he didn't.
You know, maybe he was murdered because he knew.
And it's like, you know, fucking A, with both Epstein and Stavitsky.
You look at the response of the people in power to it, and it's like, yeah, it's pretty fucking sus, you know?
Yeah, you don't want his, you do not want his passcode.
You don't want that.
If that fool's phone got hacked, broken into all the text messages on that, yeah, no, it's all bad.
Yeah, and I mean, it comes back to the fact that one of the reasons why conspiratorial thinking can be so influential and spread so quick and be so hard to fight is that there's a fuckload of actual conspiracies happening all the time.
That's the problem.
You know what I'm saying?
It's the same thing with like, like we talked about the anti-vaxxer thing, where it's like, it's not like the medical industry is helping.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah, it's not like all this shit.
It's like fucking Purdue Pharmaceuticals reputation helps people trust vaccine.
Thank you, shit.
You know what I'm saying?
The Sackler family and shit.
Like, y'all crooks.
Yeah.
I know you're crooks.
That said, I don't know nobody that got polio.
You know what I'm saying?
So yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway.
It's all great.
And our next episode will be great too.
Let's talk about how it also is great.
The history.
Robert's Twitter feed.
You go follow him at iRight.
Oh, I don't recommend that at all.
Stay the fuck off of Twitter.
I think it's great.
You've dropped some few gems recently.
As a matter of fact, I was waiting to this one to talk about the talk about the trout bait shop tweet.
That was brilliant.
I'm giving you.
What was it?
Fuck around and what was it?
What was the about the bait shop?
What was it?
It was fuck around and oh, find out.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Fuck around and find trout.
Fuck around and find trout.
I was like, let's go.
I like, to me, I was like, look, that's, you call that whatever you want.
That's a brilliant.
I think we could make a lot of money.
That's that's my that's my retirement plan is fuck around and find trout.
It's brilliant.
It's brilliant.
Let me tell you why because I went one time in my life to uh oh, we talked about this before when I ended up in Wyoming and Wontana fly fishing just on the most the most random thing.
I just got these friends in different places that allow me to do just white shit, right?
But it don't have to be white shit.
It don't have to be.
Like, what if I like fishing?
What if I think rainbow trout is beautiful?
It's just uncomfortable to walk into the trout store, the fish store, and look around and just be like, oh, I look like I don't belong here.
Like, you've made it very clear that I should not be in this place.
But if it's called fuck around and find trout, I'm like, oh, let's shop there, bro.
This fool is cool.
It's a radical intersectional bait and tackle shop.
Yes.
Rainbow trout's delicious.
And rainbow trout is just listening.
Oh, my gosh.
Yeah.
I'm like a B-minus pescatarian.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, I basically eat fish, except I live in Boyle Heights.
So the tacos are flawless.
So I break rules for the tacos.
But, bro, fuck around and find trout.
Let's go.
Fuck around and find trout.
I co-sign.
Have y'all made this t-shirt yet?
Oh, no.
No, we have not.
But now that it's been in an episode, we can.
It needs to be a t-shirt.
Anyway.
Anyways, that's the episode.
That's the episode.
Have a nice rest of your day.
Yeah.
Yeah.
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.
Mostly Human Returns00:01:48
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired.
City Hall building.
How could this ever happen in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie 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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Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
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You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Sherry stay with me each night, each morning.
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