François Duvalier ("Papa Doc") and his son Jean-Claude ("Baby Doc") rose to power in a nation destabilized by France's 1825 demand for $20 billion in reparations, which diverted half of Haiti's coffee revenue for nearly a century. Following the brutal U.S. occupation (1915–1934) that imported Jim Crow structures and killed thousands, Duvalier established the Tonton Macoute militia to enforce his "undiluted Africanism" ideology against mixed-race elites. This external manipulation of debt and political exclusion created the vacuum allowing the Duvaliers to rule through terror, proving Haiti's poverty stems from engineered colonial betrayals rather than internal failure. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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The One Drop Rule00:15:28
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that: trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots five, City Hall building.
How did this ever happen in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood.
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.
What's a dead man?
Donald Rumsfeld.
Ruby.
Jim Ruby gone.
The bastards, the podcast where Donald Rumpsfeld is a corpse.
It's so tight.
It's so tight.
It's not Jimmy Rump.
He died surrounded by his family, as opposed to surrounded by the families of his victims beating him with sticks.
But whatever.
He's dead.
That's as good as you get, I guess.
There's an amazing, amazing AP article out about him that describes him as a cunning leader who was undermined by the Iraq war.
Moman is amazing.
Momancy undermined.
You know how you're just going through life and the Iraq war comes and blindsides you.
Yeah.
After you spend years working to make it happen by repeating lying to the international community in the United States.
Come on.
It's fucking rules.
It's so good.
Just having the best time here, prop.
Prop.
Oh, yeah, props here, guys.
Prop is opposite Jason Petty, host of the Hood Politics Podcast, now on the iHeartRadio network, because we are slowly consuming all media and folding it into our overmind of content.
Overmind.
I'm just bringing you the best of the best.
Yeah, you know what I'm saying?
Like, like, you know, real, recognized, real.
You feel me?
It's magnetic.
I wish listeners could have seen one prop and I met in person the first time.
And we were just like, yeah, yeah, it was so crazy.
That was right before the motherfucking plague kicked off.
We were like, twins?
Same thing?
Yeah, I was like, my friend is the real one.
It was real.
I was like, I think she's a real one.
I'm pretty sure she's a real one.
And I was like, yeah, yeah, she's a real one.
This is crazy.
Prop.
You know what else is a real one?
Rumsfeld.
Well, yeah, he actually, I mean, yes, actually.
He was crazy.
He was a trigger.
He pulled triggers.
Let's not deny that man's gangster.
Do not deny that man gangster.
But another thing that's real is the island nation of Haiti.
No, no.
Jason, tell me that.
Are we going to talk?
Y'all, this is a natural, this is a real reaction.
We're going to talk about Haiti.
We're fixing to talk about Haiti.
Yes.
I wanted to do an episode because it's been required.
You know, there's two famous dictators of Haiti, the two longest-serving modern leaders of the country, Papa Doc and Baby Doc.
If you're going to like talk about Haitian dictators, you have to start with the actual bastard of Haiti, which is the entirety of Western civilization.
Yes.
The only effective slavery uprising.
But for us to get to that moment, there had to be a number of horrible things.
Fuckery after.
So one of those things you can't like.
And these are some pretty, pretty colorful dictators, but it would be, I think, grossly irresponsible to not talk about the various nations by which I mean the United States, France, and most of Europe that were heavily responsible for allowing a situation in which these guys could be in power.
Because it required, it takes a whole village to make a situation as fucked up as the present political situation in Haiti, which is the poorest nation in this hemisphere.
Yes.
And it was engineered to be that way.
Yes, which interestingly enough was part of Trump's shithole country statements.
Because he was like, well, look at Haiti.
It's ran by black people.
It's like, why are you?
Okay.
Let's dig into that a little bit.
Let's ask about that.
Okay.
You just throwing shit out.
Let's okay.
Let's think about it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So the island that both Haiti and the Dominican Republic share is called Hispaniola.
And it's the largest island in the Antilles chain next to Cuba.
So Cuba's, Cuba is bigger, but Hispaniola is kind of right.
Number two.
So Hispaniola first entered the annals of European history in 1492 when some asshole with the same name as the director of Home Alone sailed three boats from Spain and landed on their southern shore.
He named the island Hispaniola in honor of the Spanish crown.
So he was like, this is Spain's, basically.
That's what Hispaniola means.
This is Spain's island.
It's mine.
Well, it's Spain's.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because he was, as all bad people are, Italian.
Now, we just recorded with someone else an episode on Ethiopia and Italy's history, and we really got to throw out some anti-Italian hate.
It was good for the soul.
It was the good thing.
Shout out the birthplace.
Shout out the birthplace of coffee, Ethiopia.
Let's go.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
So, yeah, so he names the island Hispaniola.
He leaves the crew of the wrecked Santa Maria on Hispaniola when he goes back to Europe.
And Columbus's men form a settlement called La Navidad, which became patient zero for the European infestation of the new world.
The indigenous people of the island were the Arawak and the Taino.
They were pretty much immediately enslaved and forced to work themselves to near extinction mining for gold.
They were all but wiped out within a century.
Meanwhile, European settlement on the island expanded rapidly.
The occupation quickly turned into a plantation economy, and Spanish domination was replaced by French domination once the gold mines were exhausted.
Coffee, cotton, indigo, and other cash crops made Hispaniola a hub of the burgeoning global economy.
Now, of course, if you know anything about in that period of time farming cotton, coffee, indigo, and other cash crops, it was a fucking nightmare.
Super deadly, super unpleasant, grueling, backbreaking work.
And white people were not about to do that themselves.
Not at all.
In a tropical paradise, too?
Yeah.
Nah, you're not going to do that.
No, no, no.
By the 1500s, slaves were being imported onto the island in huge numbers.
Over several hundred years, African slaves grew to be the majority population of Haiti.
By the late 17th century, only about 5,000 African slaves had been brought to the island.
But by 1789, a century or so later, the island had half a million slaves, 32,000 Europeans, and about 24,000 of what were called Afranchis, which were free mulattoes or people of mixed African and European heritage.
And that's really key here because since it's French dominated, it's a different spin on racism than you got in the U.S. South.
So you actually have not, I mean, you have some free blacks, but you have a lot of free mixed race people.
And they form kind of a buffer like chunk of society between white people and enslaved black people.
It's like a thing in Haiti, and you have to really talk about it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's so interesting how every place that imported African slaves had to deal with their categories of race and how they decided to like work it out, you know, with us with like America having like Plessy versus Ferguson and like the one drop, you know, the one drop rule, you know what I'm saying?
And like, whereas like that don't exist nowhere else, you know, and like everyone else going, well, what do you mean?
You know, and how colorism sort of like ruled in Central and South and Latin America.
But, and, and then, and then places like this that figured out like, well, they're, there's something else.
You know, it's something else.
You know what I mean?
There's still a lot of racism against these people, but it is, and they have a lot more rights.
And like, yeah, we'll talk.
We're about to talk.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So the French transported more enslaved people to Saint-Domingue, their colony, than to any other part of the French Caribbean.
Now, again, as we were talking about, in slave-owning regions of the U.S., the racial caste system was very simple.
You've got the one-drop rule for a big chunk of that time.
You're either white or you're black.
And in many slave states, even if a black person was freed, it was illegal for them to continue to live in that state.
I think that was the case in Virginia, a number of other places.
French Haiti was different.
While the right status of black people changed over time, from an early point, free mulattoes were able to accrue significant wealth and power.
And we don't use the term mulatto here anymore, but it is, you can't really talk about Haiti without using it because it's a huge chunk of the history and the and the culture there.
So at the top of the hierarchy, you would have the big whites, which are your standard white plantation, rich white plantation owners.
And that is the same kind of dudes who we've got all throughout the U.S. South, right?
The guys who make a confederacy happen.
Then you have the little whites, which we'd call like working class white people.
They don't own plantations.
At most, maybe they have a small farm.
They probably don't own slaves.
If they do, it's a small number.
And they kind of vied with the mixed race people for second billing in the power hierarchy, which is obviously great for the big whites, right?
Because if you're the big whites, you're worried about the little whites because they want your shit.
And you've also got this other group of people who have accrued power.
So, if you can have those two groups who are kind of both, broadly speaking, we wouldn't call it middle class in the modern sense, but kind of within that, like are kind of like the middle of the middle caste, at least.
Yeah, middle caste.
If you've got them at each other's throats, you, the big whites, don't think you have to worry about as much.
Now, that doesn't work out in the long run for the big whites because they all get murdered.
Yes.
Which is rad.
It's one of the fun parts of the story.
There's so much about Haitian history where you're just like, Yeah, yeah, that happened.
Yeah.
But that is the idea, right?
You've got these two groups keeping at each other's throats.
And I'm simplifying all this significantly.
Totally.
There's a great podcast series called Revolutions by Mike Duncan, and he gives like a 30-episodes history of the Haitian revolutions because there's a bunch.
He goes into tremendous detail and does a much better job.
Obviously, we are like criminally simplifying things here, but like that's that's the broad, I think that's pretty accurate to the broad strokes of it.
Um, so the gist of how this story goes is that over the decades, the fact that the majority of the island's population were enslaved under brutal conditions led to a series of revolutions.
The enslaved blacks killed an awful lot of the big whites and the little whites, but they also went after mulatto property owners too, because they rightly saw these people as oppressors too.
Um, and there's other, like, there's like the kind of mixed race community has their own sort of movements and their own militia.
Like, there's this, it's a whole process and it occurs over a long period of time.
It started the kind of series of revolutions started when small numbers of slaves began escaping into the mountainous island interior, where they became known as maroons.
Like the term marooned, you know, that's, I think that's where it comes from.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, also as a side note, I don't know if you got it, if you, if, if this came up or it's going to come up later, but the concept of a zombie is from Haitian slaves.
Yeah.
We weren't going to get into that a lot, though.
Like, yeah, we do have to talk about voodoo a bit because it's a really significant chunk of yeah, we're about to get into that.
Yeah.
Um, now the maroons, these escaped slaves in the mountainous interior, develop their own self-sufficient society and they wage a slow guerrilla war against colonial militias.
There's a couple of big kind of outbursts of this.
From 1751 to 1757, Francois Macandal, who was the most famous Maroon leader, led a six-year-long insurgent war to try to overthrow the white slavers.
Alongside Maroon guerrillas, the most prominent form of black resistance in Haiti became voodoo, which was a slave religion whose practice was forbidden by law.
And there was a bunch of different like suicide, infanticide, arson, poison.
These are all aspects of the faith.
And I think in some cases, like denying your body to being exploded by slavers, and they also become elements of resistance to the regime.
And again, there's a lot of history there that we're not going to be giving a proper due, but it is fascinating.
But voodoo has this, it's rooted in resistance to this inhuman regime.
Yeah.
And a throwback to your African history and animus of like, I'm just, yeah, the act of resistance, I think, is super interesting.
And it's funny how even among sort of the black diaspora, like your American slave descendant versus your Caribbean, whether they're Jamaican or Haitian or Belizean, like even this like, you know, I'm doing this injustice too, but like they feel as though like in a lot of ways they're tied to that, to their animus faith and their not willingness to,
Revolutionaries vs Empire00:11:43
and their ability to overthrow their oppressors in some ways, like, you know, and the lowest debased versions of us made that community feel as though they were stronger than like American black people, you know what I'm saying?
Cause they threw their oppressors off and they didn't lose hold of their animist traditions.
Like they rebelled.
We didn't, you know what I'm saying?
And then in reverse, it's like black people from America, American descendants, looked at them as like, well, y'all are something else.
Like, y'all, well, yeah, y'all are something else.
You're, we're not the same rather than being like, nah, you just got off the boat earlier than us.
You know what I'm saying?
It's really interesting.
It's some of those like sort of like in-house sort of issues that like, hey, we got to be better and really understand the diaspora much better to be like, they just as black as we are.
They just, like I said, you just got off the boat earlier.
You know, and it's, it's, it's, you know, another area where this becomes, where specifically, voodoo becomes kind of an issue is these dictators we have to talk about today really use there's kind of, I think, debate over how actually into the practice of it they are, but they use it um, and it becomes kind of this.
It's used as fuel in like the media covering them as like oh, look at these, these dangerous third world lunatics and their and their and their creepy, you know uh, witchcraft and stuff.
And the reality is that these dictators are co-opting voodoo because it has this powerful tradition as a rel, as a resistance religion like you have to, you have to make it's it's.
It's not wildly different from like well, I mean, there are aspects of it that are similar from like politicians in the U.s South kind of co-opting aspects of like revolutionary history totally um, and trying to turn it towards their own political ends and getting a lot of it wrong.
But it's because it has this powerful hold on people's yeah um consciousness um, so voodoo is a huge aspect of religion or of resistance as well um, and yeah, at the same time, this is all going on.
You've got again you've got this mixed race community who actually has some political power and who has some wealth, and they're not they.
They are these, the the, the black slaves are not really connected to the rest of of the French empire because they're stuck on this island.
They have no rights.
But these mixed race people are a part of the larger empire and they get to go back to France.
Um, they get to do a number of things that are they are participating in this broader empire.
Several hundred of them joined the Royal French ARMY in 1779.
Haitian mixed race people travel to North America and fight in the American Revolutionary War.
They take part in the siege of Savannah, Georgia.
Um, and these guys, a lot of them, are very inspired by the American Revolution and these ideas of what democracy could be.
Um, at the same time as they're inspired by some of like the promise of the American Revolution, they're deeply frustrated by the racism they experience in the New United States and from their, their white French officers yeah um, and this kind of leads to, after the French Revolution because right, the French help us out with our revolution, then they have their own revolution.
Suddenly they've got these people's assemblies and a democracy, the guillotine stuff yada yada, yada.
Yeah, after this point after that point um, mixed race, you know.
Uh, people from Haiti start increasingly coming over to France and agitating for equal rights within the Parisian Citizens Assembly, because the the, the this part of the revolution was this idea that all men have equal rights.
Yeah, and so these people who are not white from French Possession start coming to Paris and being like well, all right yo, That's pretty cool, right?
Yeah, that's pretty cool what you guys said.
Remember, you guys said that?
And the history of this is complex because a number of these, you know, these mulatto guys also were like, well, but obviously these black slaves don't get rights because I own some of them.
In some cases, some of them are very much for complete.
Like, it's, it's again, this is like, there's a lot of really complex history here.
Yeah.
Um, I'm going to quote from a write-up by the University of Texas: The impact of the revolution reached Saint-Domingue, escalating tensions between Grands Blancs, big whites, the elites, plantation owners, and the like, Petit Blancs, the little whites, and the free people of color.
Big whites wanted local autonomy from France.
Mulatto saw their chance for citizenship and equality, and little whites were eager to protect their position in the color-based class system.
All of these groups were against freeing the slaves.
Amid all this infighting, the slaves, who outnumbered the free population more than 10 to 1, began to organize.
Why was liberty and equality not meant for them as well?
In August 1791, the rebellion began with a voodoo priest predicting that a revolt would free the slaves of San Domingue.
The slaves set about burning plantations and killing all of the whites they encountered.
San Domingue was an inferno for months.
The revolution had begun.
During the following two years, the attacks continued, and eventually France sent agents to try to quell the uprising.
In 1793, the remarkable Toissant Louvature, a former slave, rose to power.
Louvature battled French, Spanish, and British forces, and by 1801 had control of Santo Domingo, the current-day Dominican Republic, where he eradicated slavery.
Man, could you imagine?
I mean, thank God the phrase big whites didn't make it into America.
Yeah.
Oh, man.
Could you imagine if that was in our lexicon?
Just how just think about the last 20, just think about the last year in your time in Portland fighting these crazy.
When I, you know, when I hear the phrase big whites associated with the United States, one guy's picture pops into my fucking head, and it's Mark McCloskey, the guy with the AR-15 in his mansion in St. Louis.
That's an immediate like, oh, yeah, that's exactly that fucking that guy.
A version of that guy got burnt to death by Haitian revolutionaries.
You see that dude?
Did y'all see that dude's rally?
Yeah.
When 10 people showed up, he waving his gun.
That was the funniest thing I ever saw.
He's waving his gun, which, by the way, didn't have sights.
Oh, my God.
If you don't put modern ARs, usually don't come with sights on them because you can install a variety of optics and sights might get in the way of some more advanced optics.
You don't necessarily have iron sights, but you need some sort of sights.
Otherwise, you can't aim the gun, which means he essentially had like a blunderbus.
He had a weapon he could not have aimed.
That's a damn toy.
You flared around to your throngs of fans.
Yeah, you couldn't shoot someone attacking you, but you could fire bullets in their broad direction and hit a variety of other things.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, big whites, that dude.
Big whites.
That guy.
Yeah.
Yes.
So the Haitian Revolution, there were, you know, some of the inspiration was the ideas of liberty inequality proposed by revolutionaries in North America and France.
But a lot of these same revolutionaries, these white revolutionaries, are horrified by what happened in Haiti because they're all galloping racists, right?
The Haitian revolutionaries massacred a ton of white people, particularly plantation owners and their families, which good for them.
This bloodshed was often horrifying, but obviously, if you're enslaving people and making them heritable property, you can't be surprised if they murder you and your kids when they get the chance.
Yes.
I mean, Thomas Jefferson expressed that.
He was like, if they ever get guns.
Yeah, they are not going to treat us kindly.
They're not going to treat us kindly.
Yeah.
It's the same attitude like you have about the morality of, I don't know, the execution of the czars and their family in revolutionary russer, where it's like, on one hand, no, of course, children are always innocent and can't be held accountable for the crimes of their parents, even if their parent is the regent.
At the same time, if you grew up property of this family, and you can say that in a way, like all of the citizens of the czars were just it, I can't blame you for being like, well, we just got to get rid of all this shit.
You just got to wipe them all out.
Like, you can't, yeah, it's a cancer.
You can't.
It's not a good thing to do, but it's an understandable choice to make given the situation these people were put in, which is impossible.
The situation they were put in made a reasonable response of any kind impossible.
They had to do what they had to do.
Exactly.
Now, the reason why Toussaint fought basically every major European power, and this guy, we may talk about him for fucking a Christmas event.
He's an amazing man.
Again, yeah, I was going to say, like, his solutions.
This motherfucker is illiterate.
Like, he's born in.
He doesn't know how to read.
And he creates an army from nothing out of people who also had no formal education in many cases and who are basically just stealing weapons that they find and learning on the go how to be an army.
And he beats all of the major world powers.
Now, he is helped by the fact that it is really hard for white armies to function in Haiti because they don't have immunity to like malaria and shit.
Obviously, that helps.
But he's an impressive dude.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And the reason why all of these European powers get involved, because kind of everybody winds up rolling into Haiti during this period, is because in part because they see the Haitian Revolution as a threat to white domination.
Cautionary tale, man.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's very complicated because like the British are actually fighting France at this same time.
And they get involved in Haiti because they back the independence desires of the big whites.
Because the big whites are like, I don't like this whole idea about the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
That seems like it could lead to an end to slavery at some point, which is why I have money.
So the British, who will not much after this, end slavery in their own empire officially, are like, well, we'll support you guys because it'll hurt the French government.
And we'll let you keep your racial dominance over Haiti if we win this war.
So England basically sends an army into Hispaniola in the hope that it would defray the cost of losing their North American colonies by giving them access to the products that are being made in Haiti.
And of course, Toussaint massacres English soldiers as he had French and Spanish soldiers.
In 1798, the English commander-in-chief signed a treaty with General Toussaint and evacuated his soldiers in disgrace.
Four years later, Napoleon played it negotiating with Toussaint and the new Haitian government.
He kidnapped the revolutionary leader and sent him to a prison in this French Alps where Toussaint died.
On the eve of his death, he was said to have stated, In overthrowing me, you have cut down in Saint-Domingue only the trunk of the tree of liberty.
It will spring up again from the roots, for they are many and they are deep.
And he was not wrong about that.
They do not retake Haiti.
And I'm going to quote now from a book titled Haiti, the Duvaliers and Their Legacy by Elizabeth Abbott.
Toussaint's faith in the Haitian people's determination was justified when Napoleon sent his brother-in-law, General Leclerc, to fight a war of extermination, his words, against the Haitians.
Follow your instructions exactly, Napoleon wrote, and rid yourself of Toussaint, Christophe, Dessalines, and the principal brigands.
Napoleon instructed, rid us of these gilded Africans, and we have nothing more to wish.
They're gilded because they're putting themselves up as equal to white men, right?
That's what he means by gilded.
Against Toussaint's generals, including Dessalines and Christophe, Leclerc fought a hopeless campaign which lasted until November 18th, 1803, and cost the French 50,000 soldiers' lives, with countless more wounded.
We have, concluded Leclerc glumly, a false idea of the Negro.
Grossly underestimated.
Yeah, oh, we didn't think these people were as smart as us.
Turns out they are.
Turns out they're just humans.
Napoleon's Gilded Africans00:05:12
Yeah.
It's who knew later.
They might be better at war than us.
Yes.
At least war in this place they know very well.
You know, French are like, I think we discovered something that will later be called home court advantage.
Yeah.
Don't worry.
Napoleon's government would never again make the mistake of invading someone else on their home turf and getting rent.
This is the last time that happens to me.
Hey guys, Napoleon.
Yes.
Napoleon learned his oh, wait a minute.
I just I'm checking the record here.
I don't, maybe, maybe we're wrong.
It's funny.
You know who else never invades people's home countries?
Ah, you that's that's quite a you don't know that.
I you definitely do not know that.
Yeah, you're right.
You're right.
I'm fairly certain none of our sponsors have invaded Russia.
Yes.
Yeah, that seems fair.
That seems fair to say because we are not currently sponsored by Mercedes, right?
This is true.
Because if Mercedes throws in ads, then yes, they have absolutely invaded Russia.
Not that I'm aware of, but yeah.
Well, we'll put a pin in that.
Saab 2, I think.
I don't know.
Whatever.
BMW for sure.
Probably can't get any can't get any Hugo boss ads either if we're really not.
If we're going for hasn't invaded Russia in a sponsor.
Anyway, we'll figure it out.
Okay.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Shall we stay with me each night, each morning?
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Haiti's Independence Debt00:11:33
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 Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
Okay.
So January 1st, 1804, Saint-Domingue proclaims its independence from France.
They adopt as the name of their new country an ancient indigenous Arawak name, Haiti, which is where Haiti comes from.
So there's some acknowledgement there that like this belonged to some other people before.
Yeah.
But at the same time, they're not colonizers.
They got forced there, right?
It wasn't their choice to be in fucking Haiti.
Yeah.
So they adopt this and they adopt as their flag the revolutionary tricolor.
So the flag that France had had, but they take the white out of the French flag, basically, because it represents to them the white man, right?
They don't want that in their fucking flag.
So a guy who had been one of Toussaint's generals and who had helped beat Leclerc, General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, had himself declared emperor, just as Napoleon had.
And the history of Haiti, which was the world's first black republic, starts at this point as like a government.
So up to this point, not a bad direction, right?
Rough start with the slavery and the genocide, but in the end, the better guys beat the worst guys.
They liberate themselves.
And it's one of the great stories in global revolutionary history.
This is the only time in modern history where a slave population successfully rebels against their masters.
They even...
Are we going to get into like some of the economic developments too?
Like how they figured out how to, okay, cool.
How they figured out how to like subsidize income and like all this good stuff.
Oh, no, no, no.
We're going to talk about how French, the French fucked.
No, I don't know much about the actual.
I mean, I know that there's a lot of people will argue that like kind of the destruction of the plantations costs some economic issues.
There's a lot of complications here, but we're mostly going to talk about.
Okay, yeah.
So there were some moves.
Like I'm getting some of the names and dates wrong.
Yeah.
Because I haven't, I'd have to brush up on it.
But some of the moves that they made was like, okay, First of all, we already showed you that we could wipe you out, but we do now, since we burnt all our cash crops, we need to figure out if y'all gonna stay how we're gonna subsidize our income here.
So there was a couple economic incentives that after they overthrew them, after they overthrew their owners, they were like, okay, so, but we still need income and jobs.
So here's y'all's role.
Okay.
Here's our role.
You just don't get to own us.
And so, yeah, like I said, I'm getting some of the information wrong, but there was a few shrewd moves that this emperor does to like stabilize their income for or stabilize their economy for a while, and then it goes to shit.
Yeah, yeah.
And we're going to talk about like kind of what goes awry there.
But yeah, it's a promising start, right?
Some good moves, some good luck.
But, you know, obviously today, things are not great in Haiti.
One of the poorest nations on the planet, the infrastructure is pretty much in a constant state of free fall.
There are numerous endemic diseases and almost unimaginable corruption.
And it didn't just get that way by the natural, this was not the natural course of events.
It was heavily manipulated.
So let's start by talking about the USA's role and how we got here.
So as a republic built on slavery, our founding fathers were very frightened of Haiti, particularly the massacres of big whites in 1801 and 1802.
Now, at this point in time in the United States, the idea that a black slave might want to be free was seen as a mental illness.
There was even a diagnosis for it, drapedomania.
And they treated Haitian independence thusly.
They consider a desire for freedom from an enslaved person to be a mental illness.
They consider Haitian independence to be a kind of viral infection.
So they want to stop any contagion, any, they want to stop any possibility of it spreading, right?
That's what they see.
They don't see, oh, hey, another people has overthrown the chains of their colonial owners and become a republic.
They see, oh, this is a threat.
So when one Haitian veteran who had fought to liberate the United States from Great Britain at the Battle of Savannah attempted to return to the country he had helped fought to find and tried to land in Charleston, he was denied the right to set foot on the soil he fought for.
That's just one kind of example of how, yeah, no, you're dangerous.
Yes.
And of course he was, obviously.
Like this is a danger to them because it's a country built on the human bondage.
Yes.
Thomas Jefferson, the great philosopher of liberty slash rapist, child rapist, proposed that slaves convicted of crimes, and remember wanting to be free was a crime, should be exiled to Haiti.
And again, his goal here is he wants to quarantine the black desire for liberty.
That's kind of how Jefferson sees this.
The most positive moment in U.S.-Haitian relations came after Haiti's independence, but before Toussaint's capture, when Toussaint found his new government locked in a civil war with a mulatto general named Rigaud.
And Rigaud was a mulatto supremacist who wanted to massacre all the white people on the island and also re-enslave the black population.
That's at least how Toussaint framed the problem this guy posed in a letter he sent to U.S. President Adams requesting military aid.
He wrote, quote, Rigaud has assassinated many whites, and this is but the beginning of his heinous crimes.
His criminal and atrocious misdoings have left no alternative to the government agent but to brand him as a lawless rebel and to muster an army to punish his outrages.
Now, the massacre of white people justified the first U.S. military intervention on the island.
We sent over some ships, ammunition, and 2,000 muskets.
The aid played a meaningful role in allowing Toussaint's government to smash Rigaud's rebellion.
This would be the only broadly positive move the U.S. made towards Haiti.
After 1800, when the U.S. and France reconciled, because we're having a bit of a tiff when we send those rifles over, the official government policy towards Haiti grows more hostile.
And after the massacres of 1801, 1802, the United States refuses to recognize the Haitian government as independent.
This was justified by the United States and by everyone else, because this is broadly speaking how most of the West handles Haitian independence.
And it's justified by them because the French had refused to acknowledge Haitian independence.
Now, France was like one of the big world powers right then.
And they're like the military power.
So acknowledging Haiti as its own thing is a dicey thing diplomatically, right?
You see versions of the same thing today with the fucking Taiwan and stuff.
There's the constant like, do we recognize this country?
Yeah, you can't acknowledge a L. Like, hey, man, you know, you took a L.
It's like, no, we didn't.
No, that was different.
That one don't count.
Yeah.
The U.S. refuses to acknowledge like China, the Chinese government, for years as the legit, like after the civil war.
Like, we do this all the time is what I'm saying.
Yeah.
And we're not the only ones, obviously.
Yeah, yeah.
I love that, like, even just America being like, we've never lost the war.
Like, what about Vietnam?
That was different.
That wasn't our war.
See, that wasn't a war because you have to declare, you know, you got to go declare it.
It's only a war if it comes from the same.
Otherwise, it's just a sparkling conflict.
Yeah.
That's different.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So them being like, nah, I don't know.
I don't think, I don't think Haiti is a country.
Like, fam, yes, they are.
Okay.
Yeah.
So the U.S. fights another war against Great Britain in 1812, and we rely heavily on trade and aid from the French.
So obviously there's a lot of vested interest in not recognizing Haiti because we don't want to piss off France.
As a result, from independence, from its independence up to about 1825, Haiti is a pariah state.
This enables the first emperor of Haiti, Dessalines, to justify an increasingly repressive regime.
Haiti had nothing but enemies, and the entire effort of the state was devoted towards maintaining a huge army and a massive system of protective fortresses.
And Dessalines becomes basically a military dictator.
And this is, again, he's got a point, right?
Like, they want to fuck us up.
They want to take like us.
They want to take our liberty back.
They want to take this island back.
Like, we have to always be ready to fight.
The problem is that when you base your whole society around that, it's not the healthiest way under Paris society.
Yeah, you can't.
You can't.
That's not, it's not sustainable.
Yeah.
Now, Dessalines, again, like all of these kind of founding fathers, was illiterate and was a like, yeah, like he comes from, you know, a background where that was not education of much, any formal kind was not really an option.
And as a result of his influence, the military becomes dominated by black officers who were, like him, generally illiterate former slaves.
Meanwhile, the civil administration of the Haitian government becomes dominated by mulattoes, most of whom had benefited from a better education.
And this contributes to the, you've already got this really bloody racial divide and this long history of fighting.
And it just, after independence, that divide doesn't get erased.
And Dessalines leans into this divide.
He'd massacred tens of thousands of French civilians after independence.
And at the same time, he had massacred a lot of mulattoes, saying he couldn't tell the difference between them.
In 1804, he declared, I will go to my grave happy.
We have avenged our brothers.
Haiti has become a blood red spot on the face of the globe.
Now, of course, it was born in blood, right?
Haiti starts as an act of labor genocide and is repopulated by violent force.
Dessalines is not starting a process here.
It's just the natural continuation of that kind of violence.
Now, that said, later on in his reign, Dessalines takes an extra step towards, I think he saw it as kind of an attempt to destroy these racial barriers.
He declared a policy of bronzification, which was his goal to destroy all distinctions of color on the island by forced intermarriage of blacks and mulattoes.
Now, to start this process, he ordered a mulatto general, Alexandre Petillon, to marry his daughter, Selamine, who was unbeknownst to him already pregnant.
When he found out, he murdered her lover.
And Petion declined the marriage.
And shortly thereafter, Dessalines is assassinated by an unknown group of assailants.
It's still why he was killed, who exactly killed him is a mystery in Haiti today.
There's theories that he was murdered by unpaid soldiers, that it was General Petillon.
What matters more than the specifics of like who did the did the deed is that from the beginning, Haiti is burdened by a history of authoritarian leaders, which again starts with the white rulership of the colony and is burdened by a history of violent changes of power, right?
It's born in blood and that they don't break the cycle.
Power would swing wildly over the next years between mulatto and black generals, generally representing different geographic and racial chunks of the island.
The term, it's so funny.
It's like, well, not funny, but the word bronzification.
Dessalines' Messy Legacy00:02:10
Just if you just say it, you're like, actually, it sounds kind of rad.
Like, you know what I'm saying?
Like, if you just, just, just the idea of like, let's just get this like that beautiful brown on people.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, it's kind of dope, you know, but then it's still like, you're still addressing this like scourge of a racialized society that for multiple millennia, we didn't have, you know, and like in terms of a social construct where it's like, we just, you dated regionally, you dated tribally because this was like who was around, you know what I'm saying?
But once you started putting these like rules around, you know, the phrenology and the, you know, the eugenics of the shit that like created this like racial colorized cast that like has just become a scourge.
You just see how many attempts we've had to try to undo this curse across across the cultures.
And this was just one his thought was, well, well, if your kids is all, well, look, we'll find you somebody that's hot as that's fine, you know, and make a baby with them.
Like, you can't be mad at this little brown bait because the baby looked good, you know?
So you just, I, I, I, it's like you, you're following the logic.
And it's just, but it's like being able to step back and examine, like, damn, like, just the racialization of our world.
Like, fuck, man, we're still trying to solve this issue, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I did, like, it's, it's, it's super messy.
Uh, yeah.
It's one of those things, like, you'd be, you can talk about how it happened and like what the actual impact was, but it is kind of this, like, as much, as many fucked up things as like different players in this period carry out as guys like Dessalines do.
It's like, also, well, I don't know what would have worked better.
Right?
Yeah.
Like, you're coming in in a messy ass situation, right?
Hella messy.
So you're like, I got to start somewhere.
I can't, like, I can say, yeah, that didn't seem like it worked out great, but I can't be like, well, here's what would have worked better.
Paris Funds Sewer Sabotage00:09:07
Right, right, right.
Like a guy and yeah, like trying to do the hardest thing ever.
Right.
Y'all got some suggestions in the year 2020.
Yeah, I think shut the fuck up for you.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, yeah, you guys got your ideas.
Oh, three centuries later, you still haven't figured it out.
Yeah, stop looking back at me.
Yeah.
1800s, Haiti, air conditioning.
Probably would have solved some problems.
Why don't you, why don't you guys have air conditioning?
You could have some air conditioning.
Also, antibiotics, just throwing it out there.
I'm just saying, how about automation?
Yeah.
You have all these people.
There's a machine.
Hello.
We eventually invented the Ford truck, and that made a lot of money.
Could you guys have tried that in 1825?
Hey, why don't you try not slavery?
Yeah.
Could you try not being taken from your homeland and forced onto an island to farm cotton?
Maybe you could give that one a shot.
And then they were like, you know what?
Here's the idea.
We're going to try not being dark.
I mean, yeah, he does eventually kind of.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But yeah, there's no good.
There's no good options for any of these people in this period, which is not to like, also not to whitewash the fucked up stuff that all of these different Haitian leaders do, but like, what are you going to do?
Again, so Haiti is also, and the thing that really makes this difficult, right?
Because every new nation that's been born has different kinds of divisions and hurdles to overcome.
Haiti is additionally hobbled by something that makes it kind of impossible for them to thrive economically, which is the fact that they are completely locked out of the global market, which contributes to rampant poverty and misery.
In 1826, in order to gain diplomatic recognition and entrance into the world market, to be able to trade with people, right?
To be able to actually like make things and sell them and import goods, which you need to do in order to be a part of the modern world, right?
That's just the way it works.
They're not allowed to.
So they start negotiating with France in order to gain diplomatic recognition and entrance into the world market.
Now, by this point, the French had accepted that they were not going to regain military control of the island.
So they agreed to recognize Haiti as a sovereign nation if it paid reparations.
Oh my God.
Well, you stole yourselves from us.
So you owe us.
So you kind of, oh my God.
Real, real, real asshole move from France there.
I'm going to quote from a write-up by the Origins Project at Oklahoma State University.
The French government sent a team of accountants into Haiti in order to place a value on all lands and physical assets, including the 500,000 citizens who were formerly enslaved, and declared the value at 150 million gold francs, which in contemporary terms would equate to well over $20 billion.
Payments began immediately.
And although Haiti was able to officially buy its economic freedom and diplomatic recognition, the debt of 150 million francs was a massive burden from which Haitians have never been able to fully recover.
Although the official debt was later reduced, France forced Haiti to pay an annual fee for its national sovereignty for nearly 100 years, from 1825 to 1922.
Good lord.
For almost a century, then, Haiti endured French-imposed penury.
By 1915, and we'll talk about what happens in 1915.
Haiti still owed France 121 million francs.
So for nearly a century, they pay off their 120 million debt.
And in 1915, they owe 121 million.
Oh, my God.
Oh, my God.
France is a nation of fucking payday loan.
Yes.
Yes.
Just such a bit of fuckery right there.
So much of their resources as a nation went to paying off this debt.
For instance, 51% of Haiti's revenues from coffee went to service the exterior debt.
47% went to pay internal debts associated with building the nation's infrastructure, with only 2% available for all other expenses.
Why doesn't Haiti have a functional state?
Because they are forbidden by law from building one.
Otherwise, they won't be able to pay off the debt that guarantees their freedom.
Yeah, think about that for a second.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You're just, it's on purpose.
Yeah.
This suffocating debt more than any other single factor is why and how Haiti becomes the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.
That's it, right?
We can talk about fucked up things different leaders did.
We can talk about mistakes made by, and there's plenty of mistakes.
All leaders make mistakes.
Of course, Haiti is not allowed to build a public sector.
Yeah.
They're not allowed to.
They've got it.
That money is why France is so nice.
Part of it, right?
France steals from a lot of people.
Yeah.
If you want to know why Haiti is so fucked up, walk down the streets of Paris and look at the nice monuments and be like, oh, some of this was paid for by the reason Haiti doesn't have functioning sewers.
Damn.
That's why it's fucked up.
Damn.
Now, of course, the fact that Haiti agreed to bribe France for access to the world did not mean that the world accepted Haiti.
The United States continued to have a profoundly toxic opinion of the ailing republic, and most European powers were equally unwilling to do business with a nation whose founding was such a threat to their domestic and international order.
Again, all these powers are based on slavery or based on colonialism that verges on slavery.
So even if the Haitians themselves mostly just want hope and opportunity, right?
They're not saying like our goal as Haiti is to overthrow the global colonial system.
They just want to have food and shit, right?
Most people.
Their very existence, though, is dangerous to the myth of white supremacy that the European world order is based on.
Think about every time we talk about this in the Ethiopia episode, but think about like, you know, you and I talked about this when we talked about Spain in Algeria, right?
They get beaten by this by this African army and then they go in with France with chemical weapons to massacre these people because they can't stand the thought that they were defeated by a colonized people.
That's very much all of the West's attitude towards Haiti.
These people beat every Western army put against them.
That can't be allowed.
Yeah.
It unravels all of your origin stories, your creation myths, your formation of identity.
It unravels.
You're looking at evidence that you're full of crap.
Yeah.
And you can't let that can't exist in your world.
Yeah.
It's kind of crazy.
This is going to feel like a jump, but like, I mean it.
Like when I think of like that same sort of fear of the unraveling of your reality, I think a lot of ways it's that same sort of like germ that's in this like aversion towards like trans rights and like LGBTQ stuff.
Because it's like you have this universe that is ordered a certain way.
Yeah.
And these the existence of these people means you've ordered the universe incompletely.
You know what I'm saying?
So like, yeah, it has its genesis.
There's an element of like that idea of FOMO, right?
You hear about your friends going to a party that you're not going to and it makes you feel like you're missing out.
It's, it's this idea that like if things elsewhere or if things for other people are fundamentally different than they are for me, then maybe I'm not doing things the best way possible.
Maybe the way I live isn't the absolute best way someone could live.
And that makes me so angry that I will commit a genocide.
Totally.
Because it's not like, because it's not about, it's so true.
Because it's not about when you start listening to like people's arguments about rights, it's like, oh, you're not talking about rights.
You think they shouldn't exist.
Yeah.
You're like the reality of their difference.
Yes.
The reality of their existence is an affront to your universe.
So if I can take their rights, maybe they'll stop existing.
Is that your is that is that your logic?
Because that's what it sounds like.
Your logic is.
So when I think about, like you said, like, well, we won't trade with Haiti.
Well, we won't.
It's like, cause you don't want them to exist.
You don't think this should have happened, but it did.
And rather than saying, maybe I should rethink what I consider reality, I'd rather just say, no, we'll just make them pay forever.
Yeah, we'll just go out of our way to sabotage them forever.
Yes.
You know who else will go out of their way to sabotage forever?
Sabotage shit.
Money going into black community.
Yeah.
Boy, this is not a great way to do an ad plug.
Prop.
How do you feel about getting food delivered to your house?
Systemic Privilege Strikes00:03:53
I'm not going to lie to you, man.
It's one of those things that are clearly a privilege, but that's what that word means because it is great.
Well, there we go.
That's a nice better way to lead a dance.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of the girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Moda.
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.
Eighteen-Century Political Chaos00:15:44
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Yeah.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ah, so we're back.
Guess we are.
We're back.
That's the sound of you finding your place in the script, huh?
It is.
It is.
So Haitian politics doesn't grow more functional over the course of the 1800s for reasons we've discussed.
There's a bunch of revolts, right?
When people can't build any kind of functional civil society or when it's a lot harder and all of their money's going to other countries, it's difficult to, you know, have a happy civil.
Anyway, so the Republic had kicked off with an emperor, then reverted to a Republican government with presidents and stuff.
But in the 1840s, they go back to having emperors.
And also the 1840s, I think 1844 is when the Dominican Republic fights a war with Haiti and they separate.
So there's two different countries on the same island.
The Dominican Republic is definitely, it seems to be in a better position than Haiti has been lately.
Recently.
But they have constant, they're like always kind of at each other's throats.
Like there's a bunch of bunch of issues going on between them.
Anyway, that all happens.
And then in 1859, there's a military coup in Haiti, and that brings back a Republican government and presidents again.
So we go from emperor to president to emperor to president, right?
In 1861, the outbreak of the Civil War gives the people who didn't totally suck in U.S. politics an opportunity to recognize the Haitian government.
After a long congressional debate, President Lincoln enacts a law recognizing Haiti and appointing the first U.S. Haitian commissioner.
So that is, we recognize Haiti kind of as like a fuck you to the Confederacy.
Yeah.
That's when you really don't like somebody.
You're like, you know what?
Matter of fact, Haiti, I rock with y'all.
I'll take it.
Yeah, cool.
All right.
So the political situation, though, does not grow more stable in the late 1800s.
In 1896, President Hippolyte died of a stroke on his way to crush a rebellion in the Southwest.
He was replaced by President Tiresias Sam, who was nicknamed the incompetent for reasons that are probably pretty obvious, right?
Yes.
Not because he was so popular.
Under his aegis, the Haitian government grew more corrupt and less functional than ever.
The most egregious example of this was the finance minister, the president's cousin, Gilliam.
Gilliam Sam developed an extensive grift system whereby he would have the government order and pay for non-existent goods and then pocket the payment himself.
President Sam allowed dozens of his relatives in positions of power.
Together, they robbed the nation blind.
Well, blinder.
This compounded the economic misery created by the crushing debt to France.
Under Sam's reign, civil service salaries were cut by 20%.
Public works projects almost ceased entirely.
When Sam came to power, a tramway station had been under construction in Port-au-Prince, and the beginnings of a national railway station had been laid.
All of this died on the vine as the Sam family sucked Haiti dry.
In 1902, dogged by economic disaster and riotous discontent among the citizenry, Sam resigned.
He barely escaped with his loot ahead of a mob bent on murdering him and his family.
Foreign diplomats escorted him to the docks, and he eventually wound up in Europe with his fortune.
Again, the reason part of like he's he's not just stealing money, he's greasing palms in Europe because it, yeah, again, they're always all of these grifter dictators are very tied to the West and generally backed by them and often funded by them.
Um, in the wake of his disastrous regime came political chaos.
He was eventually succeeded by a very old man named Nord Alexis, who was overthrown himself a couple of years later by a revolt.
In the middle of all of this chaos, these just constant revolts, right?
No peaceful transfers of power.
And in the middle of all this chaos, on April 14th, 1907, François Duvalier is born to Duval and Eurytia Duvalier.
Now, this is, by the way, the subject of our episode.
François Duvalier is the guy better known as Papadoc.
Yeah, it would be an understatement to say that he did not grow up in a functional state, right?
This guy doesn't fuck Haiti up.
This guy is born into fucked and adopts it.
Yeah.
Ah, that's a great praise.
Oh, you caught me off guard with that one.
Okay, that's good.
So when Papadoc was a toddler, President Alexis is succeeded by Antoine Simone, who ruled for three years before another revolt forced him to flee to Jamaica.
The next president, Le Comte, came to power when Francois was about five.
He survived only a single year in office.
He was murdered by, again, unknown assassins.
His body was hidden.
To cover up their crime, the conspirators blew up the presidential palace on August 8th, 1912, leaving Haiti without a capitol building or a head of state.
Now, despite the, shall we say, tumultuous times, Francois's parents managed to make a decent living.
They were lower middle class, but upwardly mobile.
His father, Duvall, was a school teacher, and his mother, Eurytia, worked for a bakery.
Duval was politically active and aware.
He wanted a better life for his children, and he worked like a demon in order to scrape together the funds necessary to send his son to private schools.
In 19, which is something very few Haitians have.
The education system is not in good shape.
So he grows up very well educated.
Yeah.
In 1910, hold that thought because I would be doing you and the listeners a horrible disservice.
And if I didn't stop and acknowledge the name Papadoc.
Papadoc.
Yes.
In the here's a pop culture reference.
So he was a character in Eight Mile, the Eminem movie.
Oh, really?
I didn't know what happened.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I know what Eight Mile is, but I was like, I don't know how far down this rabbit hole I need to go.
Papa Doc was one of the main characters.
And it seemed like a strange name to choose as a rapper, unless you know who Papadoc is.
Yeah.
Haiti.
So there you go.
Connect your dots, guys.
That is interesting.
Yeah.
I was unaware of that part because all I know about the Eight Mile movie is that it's about Eminem.
Yeah, Mom Spaghetti.
Exactly.
Mom Spaghetti.
So in 1915, when Francois was eight, Haitian President Joseph Davilmar Theodore was ousted in yet another coup, this one of the military variety.
He was replaced by General Jean-Vilbrun Guillam Sam.
Now, the president of the United States in this period is a fellow named Woodrow Wilson, who is one of the most racist people who's ever been president of the United States, which is a high bar.
Yeah, I was like, which is a high bar.
So you are saying this, listeners of two people that y'all know on this pod, me and Robert, are bona fide history nerds.
We know what the hell we talk about.
When we tell you that Woodrow Wilson holds the crown, he's up there.
Yes.
He's competing with guys in like 1820 for race.
He compete with like Andrew Jackson where I'm like, who you could like, like they named the Trail of Tears after this man.
Y'all saying he's a real piece of shit.
Yes.
So like, let's pause for a second and appreciate really how racist Woodrow Wilson is.
He is a repeatedly praised the Ku Klux Klan and screened a movie about their founding in the White House level racist.
And Woodrow Wilson is particularly concerned.
He's concerned for a number of reasons.
Number one, he sees a black republic as a weak, is a weak link in the political structure of the Caribbean, which is really close to the United States.
So you know, he's also further concerned by, you know, in this period, World War I has just kicked off, right?
And Germany prior to World War I had developed strong economic interests on the island of Haiti.
German investor, well, on the island of Hispaniola, in the Haitian nation.
German investors had started to directly impact Haitian politics.
In 1892, Germany had been instrumental in defeating a reform movement within Haiti that would have hurt their economic design.
So this is a weak government.
It's a country that's in chaos.
Colonizers see the opportunity in this.
Germany doesn't colonize Haiti, but they come in and they help defeat a political movement that would have been bad for the interests of German corporations, right?
So in the months leading to the coup that brought General Sam to power, Wilson had been considering sending in U.S. troops to Haiti to replace the government with one that would be more friendly to U.S. interests and less friendly to German ones.
And again, the Germans are against positive reform in the Haitian government.
The U.S. doesn't support positive reform in the Haitian government.
We just want a government that's more friendly to our companies than to German ones, right?
Totally.
So the coup gave him the excuse that he needed, right?
And in short order, he sends the United States Marines, including frequent bastards pod side character Smedley Butler, into occupied Haiti.
Yeah.
Smedley does a bunch of counterinsurgency work there.
That's my dog, Smedley.
He's still a heel at this point in the world.
Right now, he has a heel turn.
He has a real good heel turn, which we've talked about, but he's still a heel at this period.
So from 1997, Smedley's in play.
So from 1915 to 1934, which is basically all of Francois Duvalier's childhood and early adulthood, the United States rules Haiti with an iron fist.
Protests that break out against the occupation are put down with machine gun fire.
In one protest alone, U.S. soldiers gunned down 2,000 Haitian protesters.
So 2,000.
Yeah, we're not talking like Kent State here.
We're talking Omritsar, you know?
Yeah, like, yeah.
Yeah.
From a write-up by the Origins Project, quote, for 19 years, the United States controlled customs in Haiti, collected taxes, and ran many governmental institutions, all of which benefited the United States.
In 1922, for example, the United States extended Haiti a debt consolidation loan that was designed to pay off its remaining debt to France.
But in many ways, Haiti simply exchanged one master for another.
Although Haiti was finally free of its debt to France, it now had a new creditor, the U.S. government and the U.S. banks who made a small fortune off the loan arrangement.
So U.S. is like, I can help you out with this France problem because like France, right, 1915 desperately needs U.S. help because they have gone broke fighting this stupid, stupid fucking war.
So, like, we can't really afford to do anything but barely hold off the Germans.
And the U.S. is like, well, we got a proposition for you.
Like, why don't we work this out?
We'll give you guys some money up front.
You cut down the loan, but also Haiti's going to owe us forever now.
Yo, this is why you never open your junk mail that says consolidate your debt.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm like, that's what just is what you're looking at right now.
They're going to hate it.
Yeah.
So although the U.S. finally withdrew troops from Haiti in 1934, the U.S. government still maintained fiscal control over the country until 1947.
Again, the U.S. has never had colonies.
We just maintained military control of Haiti for 19 years and then controlled their finance system until 1947 when they finally paid off their loan to us.
In order to pay off this loan, Haiti was forced to expend its entire gold reserves, pretty much, which left the company bereft of any kind of hard currency.
Perhaps more importantly, the removal of the U.S. military didn't mean the end of U.S. military influence in Haiti.
In 1916, we're going to talk about some shit that happened while the U.S. was in charge here.
In 1916, the all-white wives of U.S. Marine Corps officers joined their husbands on the island, right?
They were immediately, in the words of one source I found, squeamish about meeting or socializing with native Haitians.
You have to remember, these women are white women coming from the segregated United States, where many of them had probably never met a black person who wasn't a servant.
And going to it, then they went to an island where the black people were ostensibly in charge.
Obviously, the U.S. is in charge, but we like the fiction that we're letting them govern themselves.
They were disgusted by this.
They refused polite invitations to dance and snubbed even the Haitian elite.
As a result, U.S. occupiers formed essentially their own micro-society in Haiti.
This really pissed off the Haitian elite.
Of course.
Who, again, they're the elite.
They also suck, right?
Like, but they're also justly pissed off by how racist these white Americans who come over are my money ain't good enough for y'all.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And they're increasingly disgusted not only by the racism of these occupiers, but by how fucking drunk they get.
So at this point, Haitian culture was very conservative in regards to alcohol consumption.
Crowds of drunkenness.
Yeah, these guys are fucking, these guys are white people in 1916 drunk.
Which is, we still have not eclipsed those levels of drunk weight.
And let's say, don't nobody drink like white people, boy.
So to imagine the ancient white boy, oh, yeah, no, it's not a game.
Yeah.
Their nightcaps are just pints of liquor.
So how drunk these Americans get when they get time off, when it's like the weekend or whatever, this horrifies them.
And they're also shocked by the sear free, sheer frequency with which U.S. soldiers engaged in whoring.
Again, nobody's, I mean, nobody whores like soldiers.
Yeah, I'm not going to say the U.S. is particularly high.
No, that's just soldiers.
That's just soldiers.
Maybe smash it, dog.
But yeah, people, but it's at a level that they were not used to see.
In a few years, there are 147 new dance halls and saloons, most of which are barely disguised brothels.
Since Americans were, again, super racist, they had to import girls to work in these places, generally lighter-skinned women from the Dominican Republic, right?
So again, you never get over this racial caste system, even when it's like some drunk 19-year-old Texan boy.
Like it's still the fucking, you know, the divide between mixed race and black, yada, yada.
It keeps going.
U.S. domination brought Jim Crow hotels, segregated Catholic masses, and segregated white neighborhoods.
The U.S. remade Haiti in its own image, which meant instituting something that looked like democracy ift you squinted, but was really just a way to make sure no one wound up president who wasn't good for U.S. business interests.
Not all that different from our present system.
Yeah, I was like, good God.
In fairness, we do the same thing to ourselves in this regard.
Yeah.
This is important because the elections that take place during this period are the first ones François Duvalier would have been really cognizant of, right?
There's again, there's a lot of chaos in his childhood, but by the time he's eight, nine, 10 years old, old enough to like know shit and actually like think about what's happening, this is the kind of elections that are happening.
And this excerpt from the book, Haiti, the Duvaliers and Their Legacy, makes it clear that this was not a good thing.
Quote: Though the Americans insisted on the semblance of democracy, they refused even the slightest democratic substance.
Duvalier's Election Manipulation00:12:01
Nowhere was this more obvious than in American-sponsored Haitian presidential elections.
The State Department approved the first occupation of president, Philippe Soudre, not even going to try to pronounce that last name, sorry, after he agreed to surrender financial control and receivership of the customs, Haiti's sole source of revenue, asking in return only for Marine protection against assassins.
He was the sole candidate.
His rival, Dr. Rosalvo Bobo, had earlier disqualified himself with fits of peak and irascibility.
Allow election of president to take place whenever Haitians want, ordered Secretary of State Daniels.
The U.S. prefers the election of the guy that was the only real candidate.
And again, he's saying, I will give you all of our money if you make me the boss and give me Marines to stop me from being murdered, right?
That's the deal.
I want your jack boots to protect me.
I will give you all of my people's money in response.
As a result, Francois's early political understanding was heavily informed and influenced by completely understandable hatred of the United States.
As a young man, he wrote articles for the nationalist anti-occupation newsletter Action Nationale.
He used a pseudonym, Abdurahman, to avoid being arrested or murdered by U.S. occupiers.
In 1929, Francois and a black lawyer and mystic named Lorimore Denise, Lorimer Denise, founded the Haitian Negritude movement.
Now, the Negritude, yeah, have you heard of this?
No, great word.
It is a great word.
And it's in brief, it's a black nationalist movement that advocates black Haitians overthrowing or otherwise taking power both from the Americans who were, you know, colonizing, well, who were dominating, colonizing, whatever you want to call it, their nation, and from the mixed-race political elite who collaborated with European colonizers in the U.S. in this period, but who throughout, like, yeah.
Now, if you'll remember from earlier in the episode, voodoo had a long history as part of the black liberation struggle in Haiti, and voodoo becomes a major part of the Negritude movement, right?
Because it's authentically ours, right?
You know, it's not, it's not something you've got this kind of mixed-race-dominated political and economic elite who's working with the Americans, who's trying, who are trying to become more Western, right?
Who are adopting Western clothing, Western customs, and stuff, because that's where the money is in part and because it's just fashionable.
And Francois and others like him are like, no, what we need to do is actually, this is authentically ours.
Voodoo's ours.
It doesn't like fuck their shit.
We don't need their shit.
Very understandable motivations.
The Negritude movement continued to grow as Francois went to medical school in the early 1930s.
He graduated in 1934, which is the same year that the U.S. Marines finally left his country.
He started his medical career working in hospitals and clinics around Port-au-Prince.
In the late 1930s, he and Lorimer Denise founded a pro-voodoo, African-focused political organization called Le Griot, which means the Bards.
The Griot included an academic journal where Francois published articles laying out his thoughts on the Negritude movement.
He also wrote a book in which he urged black Haitians to take power from the mixed-race elite.
Despite his hatred of the U.S. government, he traveled to the mountainous interior of Haiti to work as part of a U.S.-supported effort to wipe out malaria and yaws, which is a horrible disease.
I don't know much about Yaws.
It's a bad disease.
This happens in the early 40s.
And you find, when you find write-ups about this guy, a lot of them portray it as like baffling or inconsistent.
This guy hates the U.S. Why is he doing?
Yeah, well, it's because he's a doctor and they're helping fight a disease.
Like, it doesn't mean they didn't do a bunch of other fucked up shit.
It means he's like, okay, I'll take your money to vaccinate people.
Yeah.
I don't think it's in any way inconsistent.
Yeah.
No, it's functional.
Yeah.
Francois seems to have been good at this work and eventually he becomes the head of a clinic.
In August of 1944, he briefly travels to the United States to attend Michigan State University to study public health.
He's not in there long, but if you went to Michigan State, what if you're Papa Doc?
Papa Doc went to Michigan State, man.
Man, famed Michigan State Grant.
Well, look at that.
He graduates, but yeah, he goes.
So he never finishes the program and he rather quickly goes back to Haiti to continue his work trying to eliminate yaws.
At the same time, he helps another doctor named Price Mars form the Bureau of Ethnology, an organization dedicated to studying and propagating indigenous Haitian customs, including voodoo.
Now, at this point, Francois Duvalier is pretty rad.
Unfortunately, in the mid-1940s, he makes the call to get into politics, which is not a thing that ever tends to go well for people.
And I'm going to quote now from a book published by the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress in 1999.
Francois Duvalier's first overly political act was to become general secretary of Danielle Fignole's Party of Young Professionals, the MOP.
In 1946, he became a pro what I'm sorry, there's so many like throwouts that are happening.
The MOP, as far as like the rap group from New York, which I never thought about.
You know what I'm saying?
And then when you said the Griot, I always thought that was a reference to the Griots.
You know, we're like the African storytellers.
But yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
It's G-R-I-O-T-S.
Yeah, the Griots.
Yeah.
Oh, okay, cool.
I was just pronouncing it probably wrong.
Oh, okay.
I thought it was something else.
I was like, no, Griots.
Yeah.
No, it means bards.
So yeah, it's like African storytellers.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay, cool.
Oh, man.
Okay.
Well, then, yeah, there it is.
Yeah.
So there's all these like these ties that like, I knew the Papa Doc one, but I didn't think about the MOP one.
You know what I'm saying?
That's dope.
Okay.
Anyway, I'll make it.
I hope MOP is referring to that.
Yeah, I honestly don't know.
But yeah, it's fucking, yeah, it's fascinating.
So he becomes the protege in 1946 of a guy named Dumar Sai Estime.
And then Mastime becomes like the MOP candidate.
Estime gets elected president and Duvalier enters his cabinet as the minister of labor.
But Estime gets ousted in a coup in 1950, right?
And Duvalier loses his job.
So when Estime, the guy who had made Duvalier a member, a minister of labor, gets forced out of power, a new guy, General Maglior, takes power, right?
So again, one of these things that keeps happening in Haitian history.
And Duvalier, because he was a member of the old government, finds himself a wanted man and he winds up hiding from the government.
He befriends a school teacher named Clement Barbeau, who becomes his trusted friend and helps him move from one hiding place to the next, often dressed as a woman.
For years, Duvalier hid and built a base of supporters in the mountains, biding his time until the end came for Maglior, which it did in 1956.
So he spends years kind of as like a guerrilla leader, right?
Doing the Castro thing, right?
Hiding in the mountains, building my support.
He's got support in the mountains already because he's this famous doctor who helped people with these horrible diseases.
So he's very well liked there.
And he starts building, yeah, he builds up a movement.
So in 1956, General Maglior gets kicked out and 10 months of chaos follows, in which six different governments attempt and fail to hold on to power.
While this was going on, Duvalier succeeded in appointing his followers to several public offices.
While all these different dudes are like trying to take power and failing, he's kind of quietly like making deals with whoever he has to to shotgun guys loyal to him into different political positions in order to.
And he uses these guys as beachheads to build support for a regime headed by him among civil servants, right?
What the kind of equivalent of the deep state.
That's what he's trying to do.
He's trying to set his guys up in positions that don't get overthrown because nobody wants to overthrow the guy keeping the sewers going or whatever.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But if that guy's loyal to you, and then the guy doing this, the guy doing that, the guy keeping power going right, that you gradually build up a base of support, makes it easy for you to take over.
He's very smart about this, is what I'm saying.
Very methodical about it.
He doesn't just take the easy first grab to get power because those motherfuckers are going to get kicked out by the other people.
He lets them fight among themselves a while.
In 1957, after again, six different governments try and fail to hold on to power.
Haiti has another election.
And Duvalier runs on a campaign of what one writer called undiluted Africanism.
And one of the things he advocates is the removal from public life of all mulattoes.
Well, I say that, but despite this rather hard line, a number of mulatto business owners, a lot of these rich mixed-race elite, support his run for president because he assures them in private that he didn't really mean what he was saying.
Okay.
Like, no, I'm just saying, man, we all make campaign promises.
Yeah, it's like I can sell a picture of like, we're going to remove all the light skin.
You know, we're not going to really remove all the light skins.
All the light skin got to go.
Drake, out of here.
Yeah.
It was his, it was his closing Guantanamo.
Yeah.
Well, I just threw Drake under the bus.
Yeah, well, I was about to say, what did Drake do to you, prop?
He just light-skinned.
You and him lights, shaving a heart into his head.
Like, just irrationally salty.
We, you know, we still beef with the mulattoes.
We need to really work this out.
We still, we need to really work this out with the mulatto.
I got no comment there.
No, don't.
Don't.
There's an in-house debate here, guys.
Yeah.
Matter of fact, one of the shows we did on the My Mama Told Me with Langston, that was my episode about like light-scared people are sensitive.
And if this is the case, I'm like, well, we did try to run y'all out of Haiti.
So maybe you got it honestly.
This is obviously, obviously, this is ridiculous.
I don't really think about this about light-scared people, but it was a very funny thing to point out.
Yo.
So from a write-up by the New York Times here about how Duvalier kind of comes to power, because it's not, you know, the election is a very flawed election.
And it's more a matter of who he's able to get in his corner before the quote-unquote vote happens.
Duvalier had the all-important support of the army, whose generals considered him a feckless puppet.
Even his campaign workers openly boasted that they could easily manipulate him, and some rewrote his campaign speeches without even consulting him.
Sheesh.
Haitian intellectuals who were later exiled have speculated that Duvalier, far from being a stupid pawn, cunningly stepped into a deceptive role as puppet and figurehead, playing various power blocks and interests against one another to divide and conquer.
And conquer he did with an overwhelming majority in the election of September 22nd, 1957.
He was inaugurated on October 22nd.
The two dates were felicitous ones from his point of view, as Papadoc had always considered 22 his lucky number.
He was to continue to hold it in superstitious reverence.
Francois came to power with the support of the army, who were again in a very dis like themselves in a pretty desperate situation in 57.
They were very unpopular, disorganized, not very well equipped or trained.
And Francois saw this as an opportunity.
He was a smart guy.
He lived through a lot of military coups, and he was not going to let that shit happen to him.
So one of his first acts when he becomes president, like two years after he takes office in 1959, is he starts building a civilian militia, which will be the Taunton Makut are kind of described alternatingly as a secret police and a militia and an imperial guard.
They're not really any of those, and they're kind of all of them.
It's an interesting organization.
How he makes this is he starts drawing in poor young men from capital city slums, and he arms them with antique guns that he found in the basement of the presidential palace, and he puts them under the command of his old friend Clement Barbeau, who had helped him hide out during the bad years.
This militia, he calls officially the Volunteers for National Security, or VSN, and they become better known as the Taunton Makut, whose name was taken from a myth about a Haitian uncle who kidnaps and punishes bad kids by trapping them in a gunnysack and then eating them for breakfast.
Sheesh.
Yeah, like they're not, they're called that because they're scary.
They're called that because people are terrified of them.
Arms for the Slums00:04:08
Okay.
Yeah.
From the New York Times, quote, within weeks, hundreds of Duvalier's political enemies were thrown into jail.
Others simply disappeared.
And within a year, according to the later claim of Mr. Barbeau, more than 300 persons had been killed by the Tauntons on Duvalier's personal orders.
And as we'll discuss in part two, Jason, things only get worse from there.
So that's part one.
Some Haitian history, some Papa Doc.
Papa Doc.
Good stuff.
Good stuff.
Man, Papa Doc, man.
Go back to just battle rapping, man.
When you were just spitting bars to be rabbit, you know, it was better then.
Yeah.
You got any plugs for us, Prop?
Man, hood politics with prop coming at you.
We're cranking.
The hood politics pod Instagram and Twitter is cranking.
We're doing silly takes on that.
You know, things that can't, you know, become a full episode.
So we're doing takes on that.
Prophiphop.com for the book and for the music and for the Instagram and the Twitters.
It's all prop hip hop.
Great.
Well, check out prop.
Check out Hood Politics.
And check out, I got a book.
You can find it at ATRBook.com.
You can find the podcast at Afterthe Revolution.
Check that shit out too.
Man, I'm caught up on it with Skullfucker on his mic.
Everybody loves Skullfucker.
Every time I hear the names on this, I'm like, I can totally picture Robert just giggling as he's making these names.
You should hear the outtakes.
Oh, my God.
Oh, no, you shouldn't.
I will never write a British person into a story again.
Oh, would you try to do the British?
Terrible, terrible mistake on a terrible mistake on me.
So, so unbelievably fun for me.
Oh, my God.
I hate it.
Yeah.
I hate it.
Well, I enjoy it.
I enjoy you attempting to do the British accent.
I love Trinity.
Robert.
Hey, by the way, he thought he's British, not Australian.
So you might want to redo that.
Hey, man.
Wrong island.
I am on record as saying British and Australian people are the same thing.
One could argue.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, if you think British and Australian people are different, hit me up on Twitter and argue with me, but I will not respond to you.
Episode's over.
Hey, everybody.
Initially, I was going to plug the GoFundMe for the sequel to my book, After the Revolution, which you can find at ATRBook.com.
But here in the Pacific Northwest, we're having an unprecedented heat wave, and it's causing disastrous conditions, life-threatening conditions for a lot of houseless people, a lot of people without air conditioning, particularly in the city of Salem.
Activists everywhere have been kind of gathering to try and mitigate, set up cooling stations, hand out cold drinks, do things to help people get their temperature down.
I want to try and raise funds for the Free Fridge of Salem, which are doing cooling stations in the capital of Oregon, Salem.
So if you go to Venmo at Free Fridge Salem, that's Venmo at FreeFridge Salem, and send them a couple of bucks.
They could really use it.
Local government has destroyed a number, like police particularly have destroyed a number of water and cooling stations they've set out.
It's, you know, we're not going to be in triple-digit heats for the next couple of days after I'm recording this on Monday, but it's still going to be very hot.
People still need this.
So please, Venmo at FreeFridge Salem if you have the wherewithal and the financial resources to do.
So one more time, the Venmo is at FreeFridge Salem.
Thanks.
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.
Forgotten City Hall Tragedy00:02:06
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Ray Gillespie and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.