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July 15, 2021 - Behind the Bastards
59:17
Part Two: Pappa Doc and Baby Doc: Dictators of Haiti

François Duvalier ("Papa Doc") and Jean-Claude Duvalier ("Baby Doc") orchestrated Haiti's descent into a kleptocracy, utilizing the Tonton Macoute secret police to purge rivals while securing U.S. aid despite human rights abuses. Papa Doc declared himself president for life in 1964, collapsing public services and executing clergy, before passing power to Baby Doc, who modernized the facade with "Jean-Claudism" while the family siphoned over two-thirds of the development budget. The regime's brutality, including blood plasma exports and cadaver sales, eventually triggered U.S. aid cuts under Jimmy Carter, forcing Baby Doc's 1986 flight to France after alleged voodoo curses, leaving Haiti devastated with a life expectancy of just 48 years. [Automatically generated summary]

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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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.
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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.
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10-10 shots five, City Hall building.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Overthrowing The Regime 00:15:55
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.
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Well, we never left in a lot of ways because I never leave you, my listeners, and neither does prop.
We're always there in your hearts, sometimes in your home, you know, waiting behind the mirrors, watching you.
But there's a lot to take me away from you.
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Or a men on Mars.
I don't know.
What's the lyric?
Men or more, right?
God bless the rain standing.
I don't know why I always thought if I just let y'all into my childhood, that's something that a hundred men on Mars could never do.
I don't know, Marchants.
Get me out of here.
You can't get me out this house, Martins.
Love it.
Love it.
You know what else I love, Jason Petty?
AKA prop, host of Hood Politics.
I love dictators.
And as we start this episode, our friend Papa Doc, Francois Duvalier, has made himself into a dictator, you know?
You know, the election that made him president was questionable, but not more questionable than the average election in Haiti.
But the whole forming your own secret military police force thing in order to murder your enemies.
That's dictator shit.
Yeah.
It's kind of the way to go.
You've gone full tater.
Yes.
So Duvalier knew that the only force, that the military was the only force in Haiti capable of overthrowing his regime.
So, as much as he dedicated the taunton to the taunton makut to purging his political rivals and journalists, he also set it towards investigating the top command of the army.
He was careful with this information.
Rather than use it to carry out public purges, he instead engaged in frequent shake-ups of the high command, prematurely retiring officers he thought might be willing to coup him.
At the same time, he gradually cut the military budget, trimming its numbers to make it something into something his Taunton Makut could deal with.
He also ordered all of the military's heavy armament stored on the grounds of the presidential palace where he could keep an eye on it, which is not a dumb move.
Like, yeah, we're going to keep all the big guns in my house.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, that's, yeah, I guess.
I mean, I would feel better if all of our military's big weapons were kept in my basement.
Because at least I know where they are.
I know where they are.
You know, I'm not going to use them for evil often, but I all the time.
All the time, not constantly.
I'm going to take vacation days and shit.
In 1958, before the Taunton Makut were formally organized, but obviously you've got Clement Barbeau.
He's starting to gear stuff up.
They haven't just haven't earned their name yet.
The new president used its predecessors to crack down on what he saw as the first threat to his reign, which was the labor union movement in Haiti.
He canceled that year's May Day rally.
He had the leader of the local union arrested and he started sending out his men to beat and torture labeler organizers.
When the Taunton Makut came into being, Duvalier set them after this task with gusto.
And by 1960, the Haitian labor union movement was completely dead.
Now, the men who were selected to join the Taunton Makut were people with no real other options for success in Haitian society.
As one write-up by Charles River editors noted, quote, ex-soldiers were recruited alongside criminals, street thugs, and sundry opportunists of every stripe.
And the entire contingent was then armed and occasionally paid and given license to extort.
Now, that last bit is crucial.
They usually weren't paid.
And when they were, they were not paid well.
That was not a downside.
That actually increased their loyalty because they, in addition to not paying them, they said, you're basically like, you can do anything.
Like, as like, we're not going to pay you, but you, you, you have the authority of the president.
You can break whatever fucking laws you want to break.
Yeah, that's, yeah, that's interesting.
The tie between that's interesting.
Yeah.
The tie between being like, well, if we paid you, then that would mean that we're kind of responsible for your choices.
If we don't pay you, it's like, well, I mean, we don't pay them.
They do what they want.
Yeah.
It also makes them more dependent on the regime because if the Tonton Makut are like a normal police agency, right?
And you have a salary, then they could support someone else taking power, right?
Like someone else could take power and then they're just like, oh, well, they were just cops doing their jobs and they can keep being cops doing their jobs under the new regime.
If they make their money by extorting people and taking bribes and like committing crimes, and they're only allowed to do that because the regime is friendly to them, then they have no legitimate place in society outside of the regime.
Yeah.
And they're also committing all these crimes.
So they know that if the regime loses power, people are going to come at me because they're pissed.
You know?
Yes.
Yeah.
So their comfort is entirely tied to the fact that the regime allows them to operate as a mafia.
These guys are basically a mafia, right?
They're a mafia/slash FBI, which is different from the regular FBI because their badges aren't as nice.
Now, the Taunton uniform, such as it was, consisted of dark sunglasses, straw hats, blue denim shirts, and in many cases, machetes.
They were allowed to disregard what passed for Haitian civil rights protections, but they were not accountable to any branch of law enforcement or anyone at all but Papa Doc.
By 1960, there were thousands of Taunton Makut.
Now, I think they topped at like 9,000.
There's a lot of these guys.
It takes a lot.
Yeah, it takes a lot.
Now, the problem with creating a secret police/slash militia force like this is that you're going to need someone to run them.
And the first pick is obviously Clement Barbeau.
The president trusts him.
He'd done a good job and he did a good job of setting up this regime of terror.
From the New York Times, quote, and his crackdown on potential troublemakers, notably those who had opposed his election or stood as a threat to any possible coup, many were granted asylum in foreign embassies.
His rivals in the election fled the country, but Taunton executioners, furious that one of the losing candidates, Clement Jumel, had escaped, tracked down two of his brothers and gunned them down as they surrendered, hands up.
Opposition newspapers were bombed by Taunton hooligans during the first year of Duvalier's revolution.
Editors and publishers of seven leading periodicals were jailed, and most of them were tortured.
Mrs. Yvonne Rampel, director of the anti-Duvalier Fortnightly L'Escale, was beaten unconscious before her children and taken by a dozen tauntons to the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, where they tortured and raped her and left her dying.
So pretty bad dudes.
Yeah, man.
Yeah.
God dog, man.
Now, I just, I just hate this so much.
Yeah, it's real bad.
It's real bad.
Now, if you've never orchestrated a repressive regime that murders huge numbers of people, yeah, you might be surprised to learn that this pisses people off.
People don't like it when you do that, actually.
It's historically unpopular call.
And a lot of these exiled politicians who like escape, but their families get killed, and a lot of citizens who like leave because they're like, oh, this isn't going to go anywhere.
Well, they don't want to just like leave Haiti and be like, well, I guess an asshole's in charge now.
Right.
Yeah.
They try to overthrow the regime.
And so they start raising these kind of exile militias that will periodically enter the country to try to take over.
And these guys aren't generally trying to do like, they're not like whole armies.
They're small groups that are trying to come in and like raise the people up.
And because it's not, there's not a lot of soldiers in the Haitian army.
You don't need to like make a whole war thing.
You know, you just have to take out the right people.
It's also a side note as an American how often governments get overthrown.
Yeah, by like tempted to be overthrown by 30 guys.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It happens all the time.
It happens all the time.
Yeah.
We're not in support of this coup, so it doesn't have to succeed.
The first of these exile militias attacks Haiti in 1959.
It's a group of 30 men.
They land on the Haitian north coast after setting sail from Cuba.
And obviously, these guys are backed by the Cuban government, right?
We do the same thing all throughout Latin America.
In this case, the Cuban government gives some guys heavy weapons.
And they see some initial success.
They take over an army post.
They start to recruit and hand out guns to nearby villagers.
And in pretty short order, 200 people have joined them.
Now, while this happens, like as these exiles are starting to form their military, Haitian exiles in Venezuela start broadcasting appeals to their countrymen, like sending out radio broadcasts that reach Haiti to aid the insurgents.
Now, 200 men, not a huge force, but after two years of Duvalierism, the army is extremely weak.
And the dictator was hesitant to give them the weapons they would need to turn back this invasion because then they might use the weapons on him.
So he's in a bad position, right?
200 guys, properly organized and equipped could actually fuck up his regime.
He's very worried about this.
And it actually, by some accounts, comes pretty close to taking him out.
But thankfully, prop, thankfully, Papadoc has a friend.
Oh, no.
And that friend is the United States government, particularly the United States Army.
We have a military mission in Haiti.
And we had a good relationship with Duvalier because he was anti-communist.
And he wasn't anti-communist because he cared about anything particularly.
He was anti-communist because that gets you U.S. support, right?
Now, Duvalier Basically, is like, hey, America, some mean guys are here.
And America's like, don't worry, buddy.
We've got the Marine Corps and planes.
And they kill all these rebels pretty quick.
Well, some of them flee, but yeah, they kill a bunch of dudes.
Now, the commander of the U.S. mission in Haiti was a colonel named Robert Heinel.
And he was well aware of how terrible the regime he was propping up was.
At one point, his 12-year-old son was arrested by the Taunton McCoot because he expressed sympathy for a group of starving peasants.
So the guy who's massacring these revolutionaries knows that he's helping the bad guys, but it's his job.
Heinel's orders from the State Department were very clear.
He later recalled what he was told by a State Department official when he took the gig.
Quote, Colonel, the most important way you can support our objectives in Haiti is to help keep Duvalier in power so he can serve out his full term in office and maybe a little longer than that if everything works out.
What?
Don't say that out loud, fam.
Okay.
Word.
Got it.
Got it.
You get the feeling Heinel feels bad about this later.
It didn't stop him from being the, you know, didn't stop Smedley, you know, at the same time.
Although, anyway, maybe a little bit longer.
Maybe a little bit longer than his term.
Fuck it.
We're the State Department.
We don't give a shit.
As far as Papadoc went, his regime weathers the rebellion, right?
It's a rough point for a while, but they get through with the help of the U.S.
But he has a lot of stress because people are trying to overthrow him.
And all of the stress causes him to have a heart attack, which he nearly dies from.
Thankfully, his good buddy, the United States of America, was there to help again.
We flew in teams, medical teams from Guantanamo Bay in Washington, D.C. to operate on the dictator's heart and save his life.
Why are we so bad at like Haiti, baby?
Consistently inconsistent.
Yeah.
We're going to overthrow a dictator.
Yeah.
We overthrow dictatorships.
Asterisk, go to the bottom.
This dictators we don't like.
That's the dip.
You know what I'm saying?
But there's some dictators that like, yo, he tatering kind of like I like his tattoo.
Why are we so extra for somebody?
Like, why effort somewhere that's needed, fam?
Like, America.
So pain.
Yep.
Good times.
They would argue we are working for America.
Is their argument?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I mean, they are, I guess.
I don't know.
Whatever.
So Duvalier survives this fucking heart attack.
And during his recovery, he's able to properly unable to, but like, so he's like fucked up for a while and he can't be a dictator when you're sick.
Well, no, because power falls to his number two man, Clement Barbeau.
Yeah, the guy who murdered people.
Like Clement Barbeau gets the nickname the muffler because of how good he is at silencing people.
Good God.
So he's not a nice guy.
Oh man, he is the muffler.
That nickname is so hard, but like horrible.
Like that is very hard.
Yeah, it is like a gangster.
I'd be wanting to be, I'd want to be called the muffler.
Yeah, you don't get that nickname unless you're like a scary son of, and this guy, we'll be talking about him more, is terrifying.
So by all accounts, Barbeau does a good job of holding onto power for Duvalier.
But the problem is that if your boss is a paranoid psychopath, they're not great at trust.
So Papadoc recovers and he takes back power, but he decides the chances are better than zero that his trusted aide had spent the time while he was fucked up plotting against him.
Because again, Duvalier grows up through like a dozen coups.
There's a million coups.
He doesn't even wait to see if that's the case.
He just immediately throws Barbeau in prison for 16 months.
You, Barbo, it's like, like, come on, bro.
Are you serious?
No.
Okay, of course I was plotting your murder, but he's like, at least prove it.
You know what I'm saying?
Now back in the saddle, Duvalier decided that his next job was to get rid of the pesky term limits that the Haitian Constitution, which he had written, called for.
His first term was set to end in 1963.
So he got together with his attorney general and had him put together a surprise early election.
François Duvalier was the only person allowed to run for president.
His party was the only party allowed to field candidates.
So Haitian voters basically got a slip of paper with Duvalier's name on it.
And whatever they might want to do, he was going to get re-elected, which he was by a margin of 13 million votes.
Again, he didn't get all those votes, but there also weren't other options.
Yeah.
They got a multiple choice.
Is the answer A?
That's it.
That's the test.
If you write anything but A, we are shooting you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So when he was told that he had won by such a totally legitimate margin, he is said to have declared, as a revolutionary, I have no right to disregard the voice of the people.
Well, if they won me that bad.
I'm just saying, that's what they said.
Ain't that right?
That's what y'all said.
That's what they said.
They voted for me.
What you want me to say?
Who am I?
I love it.
Now, this frustrated the United States, who preferred the strongmen that they backed to put in a little bit more effort into hiding their naked authoritarianism.
Earlier that year, we'd given Duvalier $50 million in economic and military aid to help prop the regime up because rampant corruption had hollowed out the government's ability to do any of the most basic tasks of governing.
And the U.S. was frustrated that Duvalier had taken $50 million and then made such a naked power grab.
Again, we had no problem with this guy staying in past his term limit, but we didn't like how blatant it was, right?
You should make it obvious, fam.
We were also frustrated that that same year, he took some of that $50 million and used it to make a utopia named after himself.
Duvalier's Black Dog 00:05:13
Oh my God.
He called it Duvalierville because dictators are not subtle people.
And it was a town built as a monument to himself.
Creative.
Yeah.
Yeah, not that creative either.
He selected an existing village named Cabaret as the location for his new project.
Construction started in 1961 and continued for several years.
To finance his model city, he instituted heavy taxes on sugar, rice, and cooking oil.
He docked the salaries of government workers and he forced them to buy bonds and lottery tickets.
Foreign businessmen were shaked down for contributions.
Construction included a water treatment plant, which never successfully treated any water.
It had a giant Greek-style theater.
From what I've been able to find, it was mostly used to store chickens.
I found a write-up about the village in 1986, which shows where the project was 24 years after the start of construction.
From the Chicago Tribune, quote, We don't have water, we don't have schools that we don't have to pay for, and we don't have a hospital, said Petit Fre Wilbert.
What we have are buildings with the name of the president's family.
As one enters Duvalierville, a town of 10,000 people, there is a large and now defaced neon sign with a light spelling out the name François Duvalier.
Just beyond the sign lie a few square blocks of one-story cinder block houses.
Chickens, goats, and the semi-clothed children wander amid the crumbling sidewalks that are the only paved streets in this town.
We have seven Sundays in Duvalierville, the 35-year-old Wilbert said, ruining the lack of jobs.
The main complaint from the desperately poor people here is about the lack of fresh water.
The nearest source is seven miles away, and the residents have to pay people to bring it to them in giant jugs.
The project is there.
It was going to treat the water from the river, said Father Vital Mitty, the parish priest, talking about a plant the elder Duvalier started to build and never finished, but it has never worked.
Father Mitty explained that work was begun in 1962, and that once the late president inaugurated his pet project, nothing more was done.
Dude, first of all, the phrase seven Sundays is brilliant.
Yeah, because we got no fucking jobs.
Yeah, we got seven Sundays.
Also, can you imagine somebody asking you, hey, so how's that city named after you?
Completely unlivable.
It is fucked.
Let me tell you.
It's completely unlivable.
Do not go there.
It's terrible.
Like, yeah, but how?
I built a city.
No, you didn't.
You didn't build a city.
Yeah, I just named it and then fucked it up.
Yeah.
So that same year, 1962, when construction's kicking off for Duvalierville, Clement Barbeau, who gets out of prison, you know, is now out of prison after 16 months, begins plotting to remove Duvalier from office.
If I wasn't the first, now I am.
Yeah.
Now, Barbeau was a frightening man, and he immediately launched a campaign of very effective terrorism against the regime.
In April of 1963, four of Duvalier's bodyguards were shot dead while escorting his children to school.
The kids were unharmed, but Barbeau sent Papa Doc a letter that made the meaning of this attack very clear.
Just target practice.
Basically, I was just preparing to fucking kill you people.
I just wanted to check out if my guns were working, so I killed the kids' bodyguards.
Hey, man.
Hey, I didn't miss.
I didn't miss.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Weeks later, Barbeau's men attacked a schoolhouse filled with Duvalier supporters who were waiting for their chance to come out and cheer the dictator on.
They'd been packed into the schoolhouse as part of like he was having a march through town, right?
Yeah.
They'd been forced in there.
And Barbeau decides to ruin this photo op and just machine guns the school, kill seven people.
And the knowledge that Duvalier's supporters could be, although again, these people didn't have the choice to support Duvalier, right?
Of course not.
Yeah.
The knowledge that his supporters could be massacred at a government rally shook the regime.
From Time magazine, quote: Duvalier sent militia patrols to comb Porta Prince's festering slums, but Barbeau laid clever ambushes.
In one fight alone, 30 loyal Duvalierists were reported killed.
While Duvalier's men were out chasing him, Barbeau raided their lightly guarded barracks for arms.
He even telephoned the palace one day, warning Duvalier not to drink his coffee.
It was poisoned, said Barbeau.
Hey, homie.
This guy is.
Yeah.
Hey, God, he's doing this in a psyop fan.
Like, hey, homie, hey, you shouldn't drink that coffee.
Like, what?
Because I fucking poisoned it.
I poisoned you.
Yeah.
Like, oh, you just going to tell me about it?
I mean, yeah, go ahead and sip it then.
Like, what a this guy.
He gags.
What are the only here's the thing?
Your only saving grace in being under a dictatorship like that is knowing that if you just support the dictator, you can't get touched.
What this dude is just ruined that security.
Yeah.
That, like, oh, no, you can still get touched.
He is fucking shit up.
And there's this amazing moment where he gets cornered in a building and they just machine gun the building he's in, blow it up and shit.
And a black dog runs out of the building.
Like he had escaped somehow, but there was a dog in there.
The dog runs out and it starts this myth that Barbeau can't be killed because he has the power to change himself.
He has the voodoo power to change himself into a black dog and escape at will.
So Duvalier, being the kind of dude he is, orders every black dog in Haiti shot on site.
Say a word.
Oh, he's a black dog.
Voodoo Power Escapes 00:03:36
Okay.
Got it.
Yeah.
Gangbang.
Now, you know who won't order dogs assassinated?
Well, I said won't.
I said won't.
Sophie won't.
Yeah, Sophie will not, and neither will the products and services that support this podcast.
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 that, 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.
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Trust me, babe.
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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 with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
CIA Arms Dissidents 00:14:02
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
Oh, boy, what a great, what a great ad break we just had.
As the whole ordering all of the dogs that looked wrong shot thing might have keen you went on, Papadoc's kind of paranoid in this period.
He's always been a paranoid guy, and his paranoia was ratcheted up because of the CIA.
So while this is all happening, Kennedy takes power in 1961.
Well, not whatever.
Kennedy's elected in 1961.
And that changes U.S. policy towards Haiti because Kennedy does not like Haiti.
And it becomes U.S. policy.
U.S. had supported Papadoc prior to this.
It becomes Kennedy's policy to force Papadoc out of power.
So he sets the CIA to this task.
The CIA, because they're never quite as smart as people like to think they are, the CIA decides that because he's superstitious, what they're going to do is they buy the rights to rewrite the horoscope predictions for his astrological sign in a French monthly magazine called Horoscope that Duvalier read.
That's the CIA's plan.
It's fucking as fucking.
I mean, they also try to arm dissidents and stuff.
But like they're going to rewrite his horoscope.
Yo, this is fuck him up.
Yeah, this is the time of the exploding cigar.
Like, okay, so I made, could you imagine being on the pitch team during this time?
Like, yo, fuck, what about horoscopes?
Yeah.
Okay, guys, hear me out.
Hear me out.
The man reads a horoscope every day.
What if we just, what if we just.
Yeah, dog.
Yeah.
No, what's a sign?
I got an idea.
Yeah.
Now, I have not come across details in what they wrote for his horoscopes, but this was not the only time the CIA dabbled in astrology.
In the 1950s, they created and distributed an astrological almanac in Vietnam in order to play on fears and superstitions that were common in northern Vietnam.
They also repeatedly threw in predictions about prosperity in southern Vietnam to try and make life there look more attractive.
You may notice that didn't work.
And I don't think it works here.
I have no way of knowing if this makes him more paranoid.
If like maybe it does, it's hard to tell with Papadoc.
I just thought that was funny.
Yeah, he should expire right before.
President wants to stay out of office.
What do we do?
Horoscopes?
Yeah.
I don't know.
That's a good day's work.
Yeah, at least nobody dies.
At least you don't have to go to Haiti.
You have to go there.
Yeah, we are so busy killing people in Guatemala.
Let's just try the horoscope thing with him.
Why not that?
Yeah.
So, I don't know.
We'll see.
My guess is they were probably trying to make him feel like death was coming for him and he should probably be in exile.
It doesn't work.
Anyway, back to Barbo.
In July of 1963, Barbo's luck runs out.
He had decided to gather all of his supporters and launch an attack on the dictator, but someone tipped the attack off to Duvalier and he sent a swarm of Tantan Makut to Barbeau's hiding place in a sugar cane field.
And they just light the whole field on fire.
When Barbeau and his men try to escape, they're machine gunned to death.
And famously, Papadoc has his head cut off, put on ice, and delivered to the palace.
Yeah.
Because he's that kind of dude.
Yeah.
Now, the regime kills at least 50 other people during the panic over Barbo.
Dozens more are picked up on suspicion of being anti-Duvalierist and are never heard from again.
By the time the whole sordid business is over, however, the regime found itself in a relatively solid position.
The greatest threat to Papadoc's reign was gone.
There were several more invasions by groups of exiles, most of which were launched from inside the Dominican Republic, Haiti's neighbor.
Again, they don't get along.
They still have to do.
Yeah.
And fucking, and Papadoc does a bunch of fucked up shit towards Haiti.
There's a lot of, like, yeah, like, I'm not putting it on the Dominican Republic.
And again, overthrowing Papadoc's, broadly speaking, a good thing to do because he sucks.
So in order to deal with all of these like cross-border attacks from the Dominican Republic and to stop his own citizens, more than that, to stop his own citizens from fleeing to the Dominican Republic, Duvalier burns a three-square-mile swath of forest around the border between the two countries, creating a no-man's land so his soldiers can gun down anyone trying to flee into or out of the country.
One threat to his regime came from a former army officer who was also a voodoo guy and who bragged that he was immune to death.
Duvalier had his men prove the officer wrong by cutting his head off, putting it in a bucket of ice and sending it to the presidential palace.
He did this a few times.
God dog, man.
In 1964, Duvalier ditched all pretense and made himself president for life.
He had a group of army officers circulate a petition demanding that he do this.
Then he had his legislature replace the constitution that he'd written years before with one that legalized lifelong presidency.
Then he had another referendum where he was again the sole candidate.
He was inaugurated president for life on June 22nd, 1964.
From that point on, a lot of professionals in Haiti, people with marketable skills like running a country, started to flee from literally anywhere else because they're like, this doesn't seem like it's headed in a good direction.
This guy's already lasted longer than any of the other previous leaders.
This shouldn't work.
This is not going to end anywhere.
Well, we should get the fuck out.
The fact that everyone who knows how to do anything leaves means that the healthcare and educational systems collapse entirely.
School just stops being a thing for a moment because there's not fucking teachers.
Duvalier confiscated peasant land holdings and increased taxes on the poor, siphoning off about $500 million in taxes and foreign aid to his personal fortune.
Malnutrition and famine became endemic.
His taunton makut grew larger and killed more people every year, beating and torturing not just dissidents, but any person individual tauntons took a dislike to.
Wow.
As the regime wore on, so did the repression.
From the New York Times, quote, After six teenagers painted a down with Duvalier sign on the Port-au-Prince wall and were executed without trial, President Duvalier ordered that all youth organizations, even the Boy Scouts, be disbanded.
He deported clergymen who criticized his rule, earning his own excommunication from the Roman Catholic Church.
He ignored Rome, however, and continued to attend mass, carrying a rifle and flanked by six to ten bodyguards.
How you gonna tell me what God I serve?
I'm going to church today.
You see these brothers with these weapons?
Yeah.
Tell the dude with the sticks back here that I can't have communion.
Yeah, send those Swiss motherfuckers with the Halberds into Haiti.
See how they do.
Send them down.
Come around the hood.
Hey, hey, hey, no, Hey, you, shut the fuck up.
All right, Pastor.
Pastor, go ahead.
Continue.
Continue.
Even Duvalier's strong-willed favorite daughter, Marie Denise, fell victim to his wrath when she insisted on marrying a Lieutenant Colonel Max Dominique, a handsome black.
Despite his public stance that Haiti belonged to the blacks, Papadoc had married a mulatto and made it no secret that he wanted his children to follow his example.
Of course.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Of course.
After their marriage in 1967, President Duvalier got them out of his sight by appointing Colonel Dominique ambassador to Spain.
Hours after the Dominiques had left, Papadoc rounded up 19 of their army officer friends and, after accusing them of plotting against him, personally led the firing squad that executed them.
Sheesh.
Yeah.
And that's why Y Claf John left and started the Fujis.
I'm just kidding.
Yeah, I think so.
That's exactly what happened.
That's how the Fuji started: him.
He was there in Haiti during this, and his mama was like, Yo, we got to go.
Yeah, this is not going to end well.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's where he met Lauren Hill, and that's why we have the Fujis.
Wow.
Incredible.
So something good came out of the regime.
Yeah.
We got, we got the Shakira song with Yclep.
Oh, baby.
We have to dance like this.
Yes.
We didn't get any good hip-hop acts out of Hitler.
Can we wait a second?
That was excellent.
Was that my, was that spot on?
You know, the trick for Shakira is you have to kind, she's kind of Kermit.
Yeah.
It's kind of Kermit the flow, but you have to do it on key.
Yeah.
And then you got Shakira's voice.
I just wanted to give that some shine because.
Okay, I appreciate that.
Thank you.
I don't know if I could do it again because it was so off the head.
Yeah.
Anyway.
All right.
So, Duvalier spent much of the mid to late 60s engaging in an escalating war with the Catholic Church.
Clergy he could not bribe or threaten would be arrested.
He exiled several bishops, a papal nuncio, and numerous priests.
He confiscated church property.
And in 1966, he succeeded in bringing the Vatican to the negotiating table.
The end result was an accord that allowed him to nationalize the Catholic Church of Haiti, effectively making him the head of Haitian Catholicism.
He was given the power to name bishops and archbishops, albeit with the approval of the Holy See.
So let me tell you something.
When you start traveling hoods and you like know like Haitian, like Haitian thugs, like Haitian gangsters, and just this, like these people are afraid of nothing.
And now like understanding the sort of the cultural mule you, where like even the dictator was like, okay, first of all, we overthrew our oppressors, then we overthrew every political or every colonial force.
And now we done told the Catholic Church what we're going to do.
You understand what I'm saying?
You think you're going to serve some cocaine on my block?
Like that, that this is making all that make sense.
Like some of them hoods in Miami would like these like way like the Haitians do out there.
Are you just like stayed?
There's some people that you like stay to hell out their way, you know, and it is known.
You just stay out the Haitians.
Just stay out their way.
Let them do what they're doing.
And I'm seeing now, even at the government level, you should just stay to hell out their way.
Yeah.
And it's, you know, it is a mark of the level of skill and how frightening this guy is that he's able to get, he gets the Catholic Church to like seed some of their sovereignty.
And the Catholic Church is like, yeah, you know, they're, there is, they're as hard as it gets pretty much with this.
I'm going to say this is a millennial long regime here.
They've kept this shit going a while.
And they're like, yeah, like we, we, we've got to, we've got to bow to you some.
Okay, we don't want no parts of this.
All right, y'all.
Go ahead.
Do what you want to do.
So, uh, yeah, now, unfortunately, uh, well, fortunately, I guess, uh, people die.
Uh, and yes, by the late 1960s, he's old, he's in bad health.
Um, he tries to kind of burnish his image at the end by putting out a bunch of propaganda about like how cool the Duvalierist revolution and he tries to actually tie himself to like Mao and other great revolutionaries, even though he'd spent his like life as an anti-communist.
It's weird.
Um, one of the things he does is he adapts the Lord's Prayer so that Haitians can pray to him.
Um, and the adaptation goes, Our doc who art in the national palace for life, hallowed be thy name by present and future generations.
That will be done at Port-au-Prince and in the provinces.
Give us this day our new Haiti and never forgive the trespasses of the anti-patriots who spit every day on our country.
Let them succumb to temptation and under the weight of their venom, deliver them not from evil.
He took the most wholesome part.
The most wholesome part, the most redeeming part of the whole thing.
It's like, oh man, you know what?
How, you know, your kingdom, give us this day our daily bread.
You know, forgive our debts as we forgive our debtors.
Like the one part you could say is like, this is pretty good.
You know, just this idea of radical forgiveness.
He's like, and don't you ever in your life forgive these people.
Dog.
Hard.
So Duvalier's propagandists put out a book, you know, but anyway, they do a bunch of trying to tie him, like make him into this great revolutionary leader.
That's kind of his last big flex.
In 1970, he suffers a horrible heart attack.
And like most men who suffer their second big heart attack after 13 years of suppressing rebellions, Papadoc starts thinking about his mortality.
He decides he wants to be succeeded by his only son, Jean-Claude, a 19-year-old giant who, up until that point, had mostly been a party kid.
Papadoc had his legislature change the constitution again, which sort of begs the question of why he bothered having a constitution in the first place.
Yeah.
The second constitution that he'd written in 64 had stipulated that the president for life had to be 40 years old.
He changed this.
He holds another referendum and asks people to vote yay or nay on this question.
Citizen Dr. François Duvalier has chosen citizen Jean-Claude Duvalier to succeed him to the presidency for life of the Republic.
Does this choice answer your aspirations and your desires?
Obviously.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Papadoc gets his way.
And two months later, in February 1971, Papadoc Duvalier dies.
An estimated 40,000 Haitians had died under his rule from a mix of starvation, malnutrition, and murder.
Jean-Claude Takes Power 00:03:57
Wow.
And we're going to give the story, the much shorter story of Jean-Claude Duvalier.
But first, you know who didn't kill 40,000 people?
The products and services that's right.
Hell yeah.
That's right.
That's right.
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, it was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share 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 and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
Baby Doc's Debt Crisis 00:12:26
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.
Just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
All right, we're back.
So Jean-Claude Duvalier did not really want to be president for life.
Prior to taking power, he'd spent most of his time living in the palace.
He never really left the Capitol.
He was not very smart.
He seems to have known this.
He was not very power hungry.
He suggested his sister, Marie Denise, take the job, but his father said no.
On the day he was sworn into office, Jean-Claude missed his own coronation because he was too high on Valium because he was stressed out.
I love it.
Yeah.
I love it.
He's like, man, I'm just rich.
I don't want to work.
I just want to be rich.
I'm just rich.
I don't want work.
Hey, you do it.
Yeah, man.
Look, my sister, she loves all this.
I'm not great at history, but I know enough to know that it's hard to be the president of Haiti.
What you going through is hard.
You stressed out all the time, killing everybody.
Dad seemed miserable.
He seemed miserable.
I don't want this.
Yeah.
So the one sign that he might have some steel in him had come in 1967 when John Claude was 15.
His father had flown into a rage at his mother and started hitting her, and John Claude had shoved Papa Doc into a room and locked him there for three hours.
That said, the story was not widely known, and most foreign pundits assumed he was going to lose power pretty quickly.
But of course, that's not how it went.
He surprised the people who thought that he was going to be out quickly.
He put on a friendlier mask to the international community while his family, mainly his sister and his mom, were the power behind the throne.
Meanwhile, like while they were continuing to do pretty brutal shit, he opens the palace to journalists.
He starts paying off the country's debts.
He modernizes.
He supports a quickie divorce law that makes Haiti a tourist mecca.
You can get divorced in 24 hours, so people start going there to divorce tourism.
And he gets good at cleaning up prisons like right before international observers visit.
So he starts to like make a play for, no, I'm going to modernize.
I'm going to fix a lot of the shit that's wrong.
We're going to fix this stuff.
We're going to clean up Haiti.
Duvalier also opened the country to foreign business, an economic liberalization he called Jean-Claudism.
This mostly meant giving U.S. businesses a lot of tax breaks and shit and letting them take advantage of cheap labor and letting them use the Taunton McCouts to crack down on any unions that tried to form.
Damn, Sean Claude.
Sorry.
So all of this makes the U.S. government really happy.
Oh, you're going to crack out on unions again.
You're going to let businesses in.
For the first couple of years of his rule, foreign aid increased to Haiti by more than 800%.
Now, obviously, as I said, his mom and his sister are the real power, and they're kind of at odds with each other.
His mom is a traditionalist.
She wants to do things the way that dad had done things.
His sister is more, actually does want to seem to want to modernize at least some things.
The two fight all the time.
Baby Doc mostly spends his time playing with fast cars and partying.
In 1975, another horrible famine hits the country.
Baby Doc begs the U.S. for aid.
The United States obliges, and all those cash and food shipments go directly into the hands of his powerful supporters.
This was discovered immediately.
Congressmen started yelling about Haitian corruption until Baby Doc arrested a handful of people.
But this did not stop the famine or make Haiti less corrupt.
And in 76, Haitian refugees start flooding into the United States.
A lot of these guys die.
It's a really horrible trip.
There's a lot of gruesome pictures of it, and people get outraged.
In 1976, Jimmy Carter takes office and he's like, we're going to change things.
You know, we're going to tie aid to you actually improving human rights conditions.
This creates a problem for Baby Doc.
So he has to push through a bunch of cosmetic reforms to try to trick Jimmy Carter.
Not the hardest things anyone's ever done.
No.
He arrests a few Taunton McCoot.
Very few international absorbers are truly fooled, but more aid is allowed to enter the country.
I think Carter's hope was that, okay, they did a couple of things.
We'll send in more aid.
Maybe they'll change more.
But before anything could really change, Ronald Reagan gets elected.
And he did not give a fuck about whether or not Haiti got more democratic.
Baby Doc is smart enough to know, okay, Ronald Reagan's in.
I'm going to start talking about how bad communism is.
He actually holds a champagne party when Reagan gets elected because he knows it's going to make shit easier.
Reagan's like, anti-communist, here's a fuckload of money.
Yeah.
And this is actually now, seriously speaking, this is actually the milieu that made the Fujis and why they're called the Fujis.
It's short for refugees, and it's because of this.
Yeah.
And by 1980, Haiti is completely dependent on foreign aid.
And the greatest recipient of foreign aid is the Duvalier family.
More than two-thirds of the country's development budget, which was about $81 million, came from foreign governments, namely the U.S., Canada, West Germany, and the United Kingdom.
And obviously, this is incredibly, incredibly corrupt.
He's channeling a bunch of IMF money into his accounts too.
There's constant issues and constant international anger over the fact that he's just stealing all of this aid money that he gets, but nothing is actually done about it.
The term kleptocracy is actually first coined by a Canadian government report on graft in the Duvalier regime.
That's where we get the word.
The whole government, including numerous state-owned companies, existed as an extension of the Duvalier family bank account.
Now, one of the chief movers of the Haitian economy was a guy named Luckner Cambrone, who was the lover of Baby Doc's mother, Simone.
He made a fortune exporting the literal blood of Haitian citizens, often gathered by force by the Taunton Makut.
The nation exported five tons of blood plasma per month under Luckner.
He bought it for $5 a pint and sold it for $35 to U.S. firms like Dow Chemical.
So, a bunch of U.S. companies profited off of the literal stolen blood of the Haitian people.
Sometimes they were paid.
Often people were just paid to make sure there was access to blood.
He also sold cadavers for medical research, literally selling the corpses of his people because they've been robbed so thoroughly.
As his time in office wore on, Papa or Baby Doc grew bolder.
He became more brutal.
He eventually kicks his mom out of power because he marries a woman named Michelle and she doesn't like his mom.
There's a whole thing.
Yeah, damn it, Michelle.
The new first lady hates that her husband's fat.
She puts him on a crash diet and threatens staff who feed him by saying that they'll wish they'd never been born.
You killed your mother-in-law.
Yeah.
And now you're body shaming.
Well, he doesn't kill her.
He just forces her out.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
And so by the start of Reagan's second term, Haiti was and had been for some time the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere.
The average life expectancy was 48 years old.
For every teacher on the government payroll, there were 189 soldiers.
For every secondary school, there were 35 prisons.
A majority of the population was food insecure.
Many were starving.
Clearing away the bodies of starved dead was a regular task for city employees in the capital.
Civil rest began to burble up in 1985, quickly growing into a significant movement.
The Catholic Church gets some credit for this because the Pope actually gives a brief speech where he critiques the government.
Liberation theology is a part of this, right?
We see this in a lot of the rest of Latin America.
So it's a number of things.
And a student revolt breaks out.
And students are initially shot dead by the Taunton Makut, but this leads to international condemnation and the U.S. cuts off aid, which is what kind of helps spell the end of the regime because they're totally dependent on aid.
On the night of February 5th, 1986, Baby Doc flees the country.
Before he leaves the palace, he orders one of his voodoo sorcerers to lay a spell on the presidential bed so that the next occupant would die there.
A perhaps legendary story goes that the sorcerer called for two unbaptized newborns to be sacrificed for the ritual.
The hospital charged $400 for the babies.
Again, whether or not this is true, it's definitely true.
What's definitely true is that two days after Baby Doc fled, they hitched a riot along with all of their cash, jewelry, antiques, and artwork from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, courtesy of a U.S. transport aircraft.
We help them flee to France, where they rent a villa near Cannes from the Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi.
So that's great.
Now, the bad news is, the really sad part of the story is that Michelle and Jean-Claude's marriage doesn't last.
The couple divorce in 1989.
He starts to run out of money by 2003.
And he was said to be living with a mistress in a one-bedroom apartment in Paris by 2003.
In 2011, he returns to Haiti, claiming he wants to help rebuild after an earthquake, but probably just trying to get around Swiss banking regulations designed to stop dictators from using money they'd stolen.
He gets arrested, but for whatever reason, he's kept in a hotel in the mountains above Port-au-Prince rather than actually going to prison, where he dies of a heart attack in 2014 at the age of 63.
So, Papa Doc and Baby Doc.
That's the tale.
That's not a girl.
Yeah.
That is harsh.
So harsh.
Yeah.
Wow.
Well, I have that feel, that feeling of dulling death that you always feel at the end of these pods.
Yeah, that's our goal.
That's the goal, the dulling death.
Yeah.
You can find me at prophiphop.com.
Support the hood politics pod.
Yes.
Also, get Prop's book.
It's a delightful and aesthetically beautiful book.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Get that terrible.
And I don't know.
Don't get a Haiti.
Enough people have taken Haiti.
Jesus, let them just try to do something all.
Yeah, I mean, give them, I don't know, fighting chance here.
Aid and shit, but yeah, whatever.
I don't know.
That didn't work out great either.
So whatever.
I don't know what to do.
Don't have fucked with Haiti for centuries.
Yeah.
Don't have fucked with Haiti for centuries.
Build a time machine and leave him alone.
Yeah.
Well, that's the end of the episode.
I have a book.
You can find it at ATRBook.com and a podcast form at After the Revolution.
And that's it.
That's the end of the episode.
Go home, kiss a cat.
Or don't.
If you're allergic to cats, whatever.
Kiss something.
I don't care.
Bye.
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, trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
Listen To The Girls 00:02:05
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 hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, 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 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.
I 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.
This is an iHeart podcast.
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