Reverend Fifield and the Committee to Proclaim Liberty orchestrated a massive 1950s campaign, backed by the National Association of Manufacturers and figures like J. Howard Pugh, to redefine the Fourth of July around "freedom under God." By soliciting 17,000 ministers and broadcasting sermons with Hollywood stars, they successfully equated liberty with poverty while opposing social safety nets. This strategy directly led to adding "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 and cemented an oligarchic alliance between conservative Christianity and free-market ideology that prioritizes corporate interests over welfare. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:02:53
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When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
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Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
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On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budginista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
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It must have been.
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Okay, I don't think that's true.
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Oh, yeah.
I hate when you open the episode like that.
I really do.
I love it, Sophie.
It makes me feel just like a bad thing.
I miss the autonomal shrieking, to be honest.
No, I like an almost sexual expression of satisfaction.
That's how you start a podcast, Sophie.
That's how you start a podcast.
And to be almost sexual with me, my guests today, Dan and Jordan of Knowledge Fight.
Dan and Jordan, on a scale of one to ten, how uncomfortable?
Oh, wow, wow.
You're just buying in.
The Spy in the Cereal00:15:27
Excellent.
I was doing Macho Man Randy Savage.
Yes, he was.
I was doing straight up.
That's what I sound like during sex.
Yeah.
That's going to be very polarizing among the audience.
Why?
You know, people will have opinions.
Why?
People will have opinions.
Why?
I'm not going to read those opinions.
Why?
For my own mental health, I don't do that very often.
Less polarizing, though, the gracefulness with which Randy Macho Man Savage would drop an elbow off the top of rope.
That's something everyone can appreciate.
Yes, on our next episode, we'll have me and the guests all slowly eat cereal in front of the mic.
So we'll see what people hate more.
The sex drugs or the cereal.
Cereal.
You could have them name the cereals.
People might collect.
Robert.
Guess the cereal that I'm eating.
Is this Cap and Crunch?
Is this Crunch Ben?
That is the end of the show, Sophie.
Guess the cereal.
That's the whole show.
Not enough money in the world to get me to sit through that, but there is enough cereal.
Chopper chopper, chopper.
Oh my god, we can do this.
Uh, so you know part two right uh, we should probably get back into the story.
So by by february of 1947 uh, Fifield has built this list of minister representatives right, that's what he calls the p, the members OF Spiritual Mobilization, because he's he's, it's specifically an organization for religious leaders and he calls these kind of you know, you might call them uh, foot soldiers or whatnot, in his war to make Christianity capitalism.
He calls them minister representatives.
Reprisals yeah, repristers.
And in night he starts doing this.
In 1944.
He has about 400 minister representatives in 44.
By 1947 there's more than 10 000 of them.
With NAM money behind him, he's able to get out his message and keep Spiritual Mobilization together, despite its meteoric rise.
He finds great success in arguing against the pagan statism of socialist politics rather than against a social safety net, and for the dignity of individual man as a child of god rather than against the responsibility of rich people to pay taxes.
Clergy begin to flood Fifield's Los Angeles office.
His phone rings off the hook for weird, like it's usually people like when people call um.
It's citizens who have like, come across his, his organization somewhere and they're they're writing him because they want to get sent political tracts.
Um, that's a big part of what Spiritual Mobilization does, is it sends out these right-wing zines uh, and books from authors like Garrett Garrett.
Um, and Garrett Garrett is G-a-r-e-t.
Is his first name and then his last name is spelled the right way.
Have you heard of this guy?
I don't know.
No no, I have not.
I've never heard of anyone being named Garrett twice.
Yeah twice, as many times as is the wrong number of times.
But but Robert, is it a typo or is it spelled, the first name spelled differently than the last name?
It is, it is the first name spelled differently.
Is it a key and peel bit?
I actually kind of I kind of like the different spellings.
Yeah, the first name that got me the first name has one r, one t.
The last name has two r's, two t's, two r's, two t's.
Is it or is it Garrett?
Yeah, I like it.
You're gonna give him that.
I have questions.
He is a, so he Garrett Garrett is like a, an Ayn Rand type figure.
Uh, like he's a libertarian fiction.
Awesome yes, I mean based as hell cool.
So he writes.
He writes some of the most insufferable sounding litter libertarian fiction i've ever heard of.
You can find all of his books today hosted online for free by the Mises Institute, if you, if you want to read Garrett Garrett Uh, he was big in the 20s and 30s and in, if the summaries i'm reading are anything to judge by like, it is some of the most insufferable shit ever.
One of his books is called Satan's bushel, and here's how the Mises Institute describes Satan's bushel.
What is Satan's bushel?
It is the last bushel that the farmer puts on the market that breaks the price, that is, reduces it to the point that wheat farming is no longer profitable.
The puzzle that afflicts the wheat farmers is that they sell their goods when the price is low and have no goods to sell when the price is high.
Withholding goods from the market is one answer.
But why should any farmer do that?
What is the answer to this problem?
Working from this premise, then, as implausible as it may sound, but the central figure in this book is the price of wheat.
It is the main source of drama.
The settings are the wheat pit at the Chicago Exchange in the Kansas wheat fields.
Yes, he wrote a book where the protagonist is the concept of wheat as a commodity.
I fucking love how bored Satan has to be all the time, where he's like, listen, guys, we've got nothing going on today.
I don't know.
Let's fuck with the price of wheat.
Yeah.
There's no more relatable protagonist than the price of wheat.
The price of wheat.
The hero's journey of wheat.
Wheat initially rejects the call to adventure, but then accepts it after finding a mentor.
And the resolution, of course, is subsidies.
Yes.
It all works out.
It's perfect.
It is also just.
The Wheat of Darkness was my favorite book.
Very telling because Garrett Garrett is huge.
He's one of the most popular authors that Fifield's distributing.
It's very telling of these guys' ideology that, like, you hear, hey, we gotten so good at farming wheat that it's basically free.
And instead of being like, oh, good, no one will ever not have bread again.
The dream of human beings for thousands of years finally realized.
It's, oh, my God, then we won't make money.
It's unfortunate the way that the system works.
A lot of drama in the book hinges upon someone who's apparently poisoning all of the wheat as a favor to the farmers, like poisoning the wheat to kill it so that it will make wheat more valuable to help the farmers.
Like this guy sounds like a wheat.
The name was Monsanto.
This is crazy.
This is the most amazing book I've ever heard of.
Predictive programming.
If I understand correctly, is the person who's poisoning the wheat a heroic character?
I think so.
I have that's kind of.
I'm going to be honest with you guys.
I didn't read this fucking book.
I absolutely did not read this fucking book.
I read a summary of the book by the Mises Institute, which, by the way, this is, y'all will enjoy this.
In its biography of Garrett Garrett, the Mises Institute notes that he was, quote, as noted for his critiques of the New Deal and U.S. involvement in the Second World War.
Now, right?
You hear that.
Hmm.
The only war for whom being against is inherently suspicious.
No, It's not that they're against World War II.
It's that they're against the concept of war.
If you are against World War II, I had better see a Quaker somewhere in your biography or I am making some dire assumptions.
You know, the Misa Institute is one of the most insufferable fucks I've ever run across.
Like they, they've come up in some of our stuff before.
And one of the things I note in particular is like they're like, they have a long argument on their website about why you don't have a positive obligation to feed your children.
That's the good shit.
That's the good shit.
That's the libertarian stuff I love right there.
Fucking when you've got like Fred Koch arguing about the fact that people should be able to sell themselves into slavery and fucking good shit.
If you can't, then do you really own yourself?
Yeah.
It's really funny, too.
Like it's shameful that you've got something as batshit wacko as that is like slavery is good because otherwise you don't own yourself.
And this guy decides to write a book about fucking wheat prices.
Like, come on, man.
There's so many cooler places to take this.
I mean, what's trading places about?
But orange prices?
It's the same.
Something central character.
No, no, no.
It's the main character, right?
I feel like I saw, also, there was a gorilla.
That's not okay.
Is this wheat book available on tape?
I don't know about that, but it is in the public domain.
Dan, you could do a free audiobook of the week.
Let me write this down.
I'm going to do this.
Satan's bushel.
Oh, man, that is an MST3K movie waiting to happen.
I had to note, we're going on a bit of a tangent with Garrett Garrett, but it is important to get some texture as to like the kind of material that spiritual mobilization is putting out.
And when I saw that Garrett Garrett had been an opponent of U.S. involvement in the Second World War, I did a little bit more digging.
And I found an article from Garrett Garrett titled War Has Lost Its Pockets from the Saturday Evening Post in 1940, where Garrett argues, he argues a lot in this article.
One of the things he says is that it wouldn't make sense for the Nazis to use forced labor because that's bad for business.
Sure.
Nazis, they wouldn't use forced labor.
That's not very efficient.
I'm going to be straight with you.
Indisputable.
Indisputable.
Great argument.
Free market.
Free market.
Nailed it, Garrett.
I've heard that same sort of like tone from libertarians about slavery in America as well.
People wouldn't mistreat their slaves.
That doesn't make economic sense.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Cool.
Okay, guys.
Anyways, my favorite book of the Bible is Exodus.
I don't know why.
So spiritual mobilization sells this guy's books like hotcakes.
Now flush with cash, Fifield decides to draw in new ministers by making the gospel of free enterprise profitable.
In October of 1947, he holds a national sermon competition with the perils to freedom as a theme, and he offers $5,000 in prize money.
More than 20,000 ministers submit entries, which is 15% of all clergymen in the nation.
So this is now, this isn't just I sent a letter to a bunch of people.
This is I have made a connection.
They are engaging directly with the and making propaganda of their own now, which is a really smart way to do this, right?
Can I ask a question?
Yeah.
Has part of that been like, because everything that we're talking about now is purely economic.
And currently in the present day, all of that is tied in with a real bloodthirst.
So in this time period, was that separate?
Was there still that undercurrent of like, and you're going to have to kill infidels?
Like that kind of thing?
Yeah, that's there.
I mean, these guys are very, we'll talk.
The Korean War comes into this a little bit.
You know, this is this immediate post-war period.
There's not quite as much of that just because everyone's kind of tired of fighting for a little bit.
Everyone's already fought out.
But once we started.
You know, several million died.
Whatever.
Once we start getting into these wars in Korea and Vietnam, yes, these guys get very pro-killing the communists.
And, you know, this is cool.
This gives birth to the chunks of the conservative movement that are pro-Rhodesia and all that still.
Yes.
So Pew and the NAM are so happy with this thing that Fifield carries out, getting all these ministers to engage with this propaganda, that they double his annual budget.
Pugh generally takes a lead here in soliciting donations from his rich friends.
He sees this as a success and he wants to, like, a crack has been made in this wall of leftism in the clergy in America, and he wants to shoot as much fucking water into that crack as possible to try to expand it.
So he tells his fellow rich guy friends, it is hot, that spiritual mobilization should be at the top of the list for all their donations, citing the polls that he paid for that showed ministers as the most influential molders of public opinion.
But as this experiment rolled forward, there were some on the left who could see the shape of what was starting to take form.
I'm going to quote now from Kevin Cruz's book, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America.
Quote, In February 1948, journalist Kerry McWilliams wrote an acidic cover story on it for the nation.
With save Christianity and the save Western capitalism chants becoming almost indistinguishable, a major battle for the minds of the clergy, particularly those of the Protestant persuasion, is now being waged in America, he began.
For the most part, the battle lines are honestly drawn and represent a sharp clash in ideologies.
But now and then, the reactionary side tries to fudge a bit by backing movements which mask their true character and real sponsors.
Such a movement is spiritual mobilization.
McWilliams explained to his readers the scope of its operations, noting that it now had nine organizers working in high-rent offices in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and had distributed hundreds of thousands of pamphlets by pro-business authors for free.
But no one knew who was funding the operation, McWilliams warned.
There had only been vague statements from Fifield that non-ministers who have a common stake in the America and Christian traditions cannot contribute service and that it was only natural that they give substance instead.
In McWilliams' withering account, Fifield came off as a charlatan who prostrated himself before the apostles of rugged individualism to secure his own fame and fortune and in return prostituted himself for their needs.
So, and this is how it's framed at the time because they don't have access to like the letters and stuff I've been reading.
They don't know that this is all funded by the NAM, right?
That's not super obvious to anyone writing it.
But he can tell from what Fifield's saying that like there is some shady business interest in spiritual mobilization.
Like he's speaking about it.
I always love more than anything whenever people use adjectives that are thoroughly inadequate for the job of like, you know, he's fudging things.
Like, no, there's a multi-million dollar campaign behind a lie.
Like, this is not fudging things.
He's not like, oh, it's not, it's not $50.
It's $100.
This motherfucker is killing everyone.
Yeah.
I mean, obviously at the time, too, like, McWilliams doesn't have all that data.
There's only so much you can say in an article without being sued.
But you can see he's like, he knows what's happening.
He just doesn't have the proof of it, right?
Like, he's trying to put that out as clearly as he can.
Something's rotten in Denmark.
Yeah.
And the Dutch East India Company.
Yeah.
This scares the hell out of the NAM, right?
That like this guy's kind of on to them and that he's attacking Fifield as like a charlatan.
So they mobilize a bunch of rich guys, including the president of the Republic Steel Corporation, to send out mass mailers to other business owners and executives defending Fifield.
And as a fun fact, the guy who sends out this mass letter is Charles White, the president of Republic Steel.
Charles White presided over the 1937 Memorial Day massacre when 10 Republic Steel union workers were gunned down by policemen for striking.
So that's the guy.
He sends out a letter to a bunch of rich guys calling Fifield one of my personal friends to solicit donations for him.
I was literally about to say, Republic Steel sounds like a dystopian future name for like the overarching.
And then the next thing you said, murdered 10 people.
I'm like, well, you know what?
Yeah, there we are.
I'm going to read a quote from this letter that White writes defending Fifield.
Our company has supported this crusade generously for some years, and we believe in it deeply.
The more so since I have read this irresponsible article and see how the opposition feels about spiritual mobilization.
White then went on to ask the people he'd written this letter to, why don't you send a check at once?
And in short order, more than $100,000 had been donated by business owners to spiritual mobilization in like a couple of days.
It's great.
Like he's doing the whole, they're trying to cancel us.
Creeping Socialism Threats00:08:44
Like the liberal media is trying to cancel us.
You need to send us money.
Very ahead of his time, you know?
Trailblazer.
Just such a like, you're getting money from people.
If you get $100,000 from people, it's people who do not give a shit about money.
You know, like in two days, that's crazy.
Yeah.
And again, that's like a million or two.
That's like a couple million bucks then.
Yeah.
So spiritual mobilization itself responded to this criticism in the nation in that time-honored tradition of smart shitheads.
It got bigger and louder.
In 1949, it launched the Freedom Story, a 15-minute radio program presented by Fifield.
And here's Cruz and Politico describing this.
In the original scripts, Fifield made direct attacks on democratic programs at home, but his lawyer warned him they would lose the public service designation that gave them free airtime if he were too plain spoken with partisan attacks.
Instead, he advised.
Buddy, you're going to go down the Mike Lindell route.
You got to stop.
You got to stop.
I can see the future.
You're going to become Mark Lindell.
No, that's not even what he's worried about.
He's fine with them becoming Mike Lindell.
He doesn't want him to have to pay for this ad by it being too political overhead.
So he advises instead that Fifield should basically instead of don't talk about democratic policies in the U.S. That's not allowed.
We'll have to pay for it then.
But if you talk about foreign examples of the minister escaping socialism, then that's not political.
Hey, why don't we own?
Why don't we own Venezuela?
Like, I mean, honestly, like, look into your heart.
Okay.
So anything outside the United States, not politics.
No.
Not politics.
Can't be politics.
Let's start the Crusades, baby.
Nonpartisan.
Exactly.
We just talked about how nonpartisan the Crusades were.
Yeah.
Ah, good times.
So since Fifield's named backers had lost a lot of friends and me or had a lot of friends and media, it was child's play to ensure that this freedom story got free airtime in over 500 stations.
So this thing, again, and they're like, you motherfuckers could pay for this, but, you know, it also sounds better if it's not political, right?
It doesn't sound like I'm a guy making a right-wing ad if I'm just talking about the history and the dangers of creeping socialism to freedom in these other countries.
You know, it's a smarter way to do it.
So this is a big hit, gets out to a lot of earbuds.
And Fifield's next big move is a four-day conference in 1950 with 25 of the most popular ministers in the United States and an assortment of big business leaders, including Crane and Pugh.
A pair of economists, Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mies, were also present.
Yeah, I bet they're great.
The Austrians are here.
Top him.
Yeah, so Miami Mies is back in the mix.
In between writing articles about how you don't have to feed your kids and how child labor is fine.
What are you doing feeding your kids?
You're wasting your time.
It shows up here.
Good for you.
Yeah, good for him.
He sits up.
Perhaps children should starve.
And rounds of applause come from the ministers and business leaders in the audience.
Dogs like freedom.
Hey, listen, when I went and took my dog, Jake, to basic dog training, the dog trainer was very specific.
She said, you have to work for your paycheck.
And now it makes perfect sense to me.
People are dogs is what I'm trying to say.
Yeah.
That's a big part of what's happening at this conference.
So Fifield describes the goal of this symposium as to, quote, define the conflicts in this critical period of civilization and to establish freedom's answers to these problems.
Tentatively, the agenda will cover such subjects as the relationship of liberty to Christianity, equality and morality, competition and cooperation, and the application of true Christian principles to present day problems.
So this is a big hit.
It gets the most popular preachers in the world or in the country together with all of the richest people in the country and a bunch of libertarian economists.
And they all start being buddies with each other and they start like spreading their ideas around.
And these ministers go back to their gigantic churches and like start talking about some of the things they've encountered.
Social mobilization launches a magazine called Faith and Freedom, which was billed as a place where ministers could write in and express their views freely, debating with one another over the issues of the day.
But almost all of those debates were really just screeds against social welfare, right?
There's not like a left-wing, right-wing debate.
It's like, how much should we stop feeding people?
And this is actually where we get into one of the precursors of the modern right-wing bugbear that Satanists are secretly behind socialism.
I think this is the start of that.
And I want to read a quote here.
This is from one of the ministers who wrote for faith and freedom in an essay he did called Pagan Origin of the Social Gospel, which in which he argues that pagan-influenced strands of Christianity, and he includes Unitarianism here.
Sure.
Had led to a quote, shift in faith from God to man, from eternity to time, from the individual to the group, from individual conversion to social coercion, and from the church to the state.
That like pagan origin of the social gospel, that like the idea of a social welfare state in any way, is he's not calling it Satanist, but it's not Christian.
It's fundamentally anti-Christian.
Don't swear that argument starts, I think.
It's a transition towards Satanism because it's God, then humans, then Satan's next.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.
You know, I feel for these people, right?
Because you used to be able to just call someone a witch and people would believe you.
Yeah.
But now you have to do this whole dog and pony show with all these lies.
You have to do all this pagan shit.
You can't just say people who like socialism are witches.
So let's kill them.
But to be fair, they did do empirical tests about whether or not people were witches.
Well, they were heavy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Or they were able to be crushed by rocks.
If they were certain cultures, like there were things you would feed them, and if they die, they're not a witch.
But if they survive, they're a witch.
Or vice versa.
It works both ways.
Get a job or have a giant rock tossed on you.
I feel like this is very simple.
So in 1950, the Republicans, you know, after this is after several years of NAM and Fifield working together, in 1950, the Republicans have a huge win at the midterm elections, right?
And this is taken by Pugh and the others in NAM as evidence that what they're doing is working, right?
Like this shit is paying big political dividends.
More funds poured into spiritual mobilization.
Fifield celebrated in a letter to the head of General Motors, writing, quote, we are having quite a deluge of letters from across the country indicating the feeling that spiritual mobilization has had some part in the awakening, which was evidenced by the elections.
Of course, we are a little proud and very happy for whatever good we have been able to do in waking people up to the peril of collectivism and the importance of freedom under God.
Meaning, now that the Nazis have been gone for a little while, fascism can totally be popular.
Let's move it back into fascism.
Back into it.
And call it freedom under God.
Because there's a tiny number of people owning everything.
And that's like, it's under God because that's what God wants, you know?
And also definitely not paying taxes.
That's true.
Well, for sure.
God does not want you paying taxes.
What's the point of having serfs if you have to pay taxes to help them live?
Let them die when they're too late to work.
I bet they have more than one.
That'll be twice.
We got there.
We did get there eventually.
Do you have a positive responsibility to help people who are dying?
Mises says no.
No, no, of course not.
And in fact, you have a responsibility to maximize your own profit by letting people die sometimes.
That's why I read an essay.
Yeah.
So now empowered and properly organized, Fifield decides to lead his most ambitious charge ever.
He's going to change the 4th of July forever.
And this is a thing people don't often get.
It didn't used to be like a big, big thing.
Like we didn't always, it wasn't always like the hugest deal in the world, the 4th of July.
It has become that in recent decades.
And a big part of why it is what it is, especially on the right, why it is like such almost a holy day, it is kind of a holy day to millions of Americans.
That really starts in this period.
But you know what's starting in this period right now?
Goods and services.
That's right.
That's right.
And it's never going to stop, baby.
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.
Woo, 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.
Murder at City Hall00:03:01
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that!
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged you a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
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.
Right-Wing Propaganda Origins00:15:10
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.
Mary, stay with me each night each morning.
Say you love me, you know.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ah, we're back, and I have just learned the news that Build-A-Bear Workshop launched an afterdark series of erotic teddy bears.
Oh, fuck-a-bear?
Love that place!
Fuck-a-bear.
Yeah, so great.
Yeah, this is my whole world now.
Sylvie, cancel our next 10 podcast recordings.
I have a new thing to do.
Oh, they seem to mostly just be Build-A-Bears and pajamas.
I wouldn't openly say that on the internet, Robert.
Too bad.
What?
What?
I have a new thing to do talking about fuck-a-bear.
The fuck bears.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, Dan and Jordan, you guys can bounce.
I got to deal with this bear situation.
That's fair.
That's a fair bear situation.
That's a more care bear than a fuck bear.
A fair bear situation.
Horny, horny teddy bears.
I want a teddy bear that's ready to Netflix and chill.
Well, see, this is just society maintaining balance.
The M ⁇ Ms become less sexy.
Yeah, Build-A-Bear.
So the Build-A-Bears have to get more fuckable.
Do you know what's crazy?
The Care Bear that had a Vulva on its stomach got cut real quick.
Yeah.
This is weird.
Oh, now I'm in trouble.
I mean, that would basically just be a fleshlight.
You know, Build-A-Bear could make some money with a fleshlight, Build-A-Bear.
Hey, I think Build-A-Bear's already made a bit of money.
Look, this is free cash we are leaving on the ground.
We need a more fuckable teddy bear.
Look.
Right.
This has been the problem since time immemorial.
The problem with this riff is that it hasn't gone long enough.
And once again, the furries have been on the cutting edge of fuckable teddy bears.
Always.
Well, are they a sponsor?
Yes.
Yeah, we are sponsored by the concept of having sex with anthropomorphized teddy bears.
Adamandeve.bear.com.
Yeah, that is really the primary reason this podcast exists.
Big fuck bear.
That's our sponsor.
Sophie, really staying quiet here.
So when we last left our actual episode, our buddy, Mr. Fifield, has decided he's going to change the 4th of July.
And to explain what his plan is, I'm going to quote from Kevin Cruz again.
To mark the 175th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, they proposed for the week surrounding the 4th of July a massive series of events devoted to the theme of freedom under God.
To that end, in June 1951, the leaders of spiritual mobilization announced the formation of a new committee to proclaim liberty, the CPL, to coordinate their 4th of July freedom under God celebrations.
Despite its apparent spiritual emphasis, the true goal of the committee was advancing political conservatisms.
Its two most prominent members had been brought low by Democratic administrations.
Hoover, driven from the White House two decades earlier by Franklin Roosevelt.
Driven from the white house.
Driven from the right house.
Driven from the white.
Why with stones and chains and whips?
Pennsylvania.
Kept Pennsylvania.
You want to guess who Hoover's partner was in this?
Who are you going to put up next to Herbert Hoover in this 4th of July event?
Jim Douglas MacArthur.
Get out.
Yeah, baby.
Why?
Because he had just gotten fired by Harry Truman for wanting to nuke all of China and Russia, basically.
I mean, sure.
During the Korean War, he was like, why don't we start a nuclear war that kills tens of millions of people in order to win in Korea?
And Truman was like, oh, God, you're out of your mind.
You should not be in charge of fighting men anymore.
And then MacArthur said, what about freedom?
Yeah.
That's what he spends the rest of his life doing.
In his defense, at the time, the military was just firing nuclear bombs into Arizona and forcing troops to walk through it in case it gave us a lot of money.
Yeah, why don't we nuke?
We should at least nuke the enemy as much as we're nuking ourselves, right?
Absolutely.
That's just fair.
That's Doug MacArthur's attitude.
So he had gotten fired two months ago when he gets put in this committee, right?
Like he has just gotten out of the Korean war business.
So he immediately goes into let's make Christianity capitalism by subverting the Fourth of July to our own purposes.
So these guys get joined by a bunch of different legal, like conservative right-wing media figures, entertainment industry figures who are like very right-wing.
Bing Crosby is a member of this committee, right?
Bingo.
James O'Keefe.
No, but Cecil O'Keefe.
Wait, wait, wait.
So every time I've watched White Christmas, I've supported a fucking Nazi.
God damn it.
Yeah, a little bit.
I mean, yeah.
Old Blue Eyes wasn't a good man.
I can't imagine you not just assuming that.
Cecil B. D. Mill is on the committee to proclaim liberty.
Well, yeah, but of course he is.
Walt Disney is on the committee to proclaim Independence.
Of course he is.
I just didn't know that Bing Crosby was a Nazi.
Yeah, he's pretty far right.
And of course, our buddy Ronald Reagan is on the committee.
Well, yeah.
And then you've got a bunch of big business types.
There's J. Howard Pugh, obviously.
Harvey Firestone, Conrad Hilton, James Hillcraft.
Yeah.
Harvey Firestein?
No, Firestone, the guy for the tires that exploded.
Very different.
Very different.
I was living in Independence Day.
I was like, oh, my God, how can we do this?
James Craft, Henry Hughes, Fred Maytag, and J.C. Penny.
All of these guys are part of the committee, are hanging out with Bingo, you know, trying to do a kill democracy.
Every time you learn the history of where you shop, if it's been around for longer than 50 years, you're like, why aren't I burning this down right now?
Why aren't I just lighting it on fire?
This is the question everyone briefly asked in 2020.
And there's zero reason.
There's zero reason for a hobby lobby to still be standing.
Zero reason.
Well, they got to house those stolen artifacts.
That is true.
And now we're back to Indiana Jones.
So you wouldn't think a group of luminaries and brands with that kind of star power, you got all the big, Bing Crosby and Walt Disney together finally with Douglas MacArthur.
It is a dream team of dudes who sucked.
But you wouldn't think like with that kind of, they're also dudes who are pretty good at being famous.
You wouldn't think they would have needed to advertise for this sort of thing.
But by God, they do.
Disney, Firestone, all of these big corporate like motherfuckers take out a series of full-page newspaper ads advertising all these events around the 4th of July, this like week of right-wing, you know, speeches and radio programs and whatnot.
Each of these full-page ads focuses primarily on the preamble to the Declaration of Independence.
A lot of them are just the preamble being printed.
Now, you might wonder, well, that doesn't sound super right-wing, right?
That's just like a historical thing about the United States printing.
There's nothing particularly right-wing about printing the Declaration of Independence.
No, no, no, Rob.
You have to read it for it not to be right-wing.
If you print it and you don't read it, it's right-wing.
It's a little that is essentially what they're doing because they want people to read the preamble.
They don't want people to read the Declaration of Independence.
You read the Declaration of Independence, a lot of it is very specific critiques about shortcomings of the British government, right?
Sure.
Their problem is a lack of good government.
They are, as you might guess by the fact that they made a government, they're not anti-government.
And again, evidence of this is that when the revolution was won, a lot of people who had signed that declaration went on to crush a libertarian uprising in their own country with cannons, you know?
Like, they were not.
Yeah, but I mean, you know, reasonably speaking, only two people have actually read the Declaration, and that's King George and Nick Cage.
And those are the only two.
To be fair, Nicholas Cage read the back of it.
He did read.
He did not, not even the front of it.
Yeah.
So quoting just the preamble of the Declaration of Independence allows these guys to turn the Declaration from what it is, which is a list of political grievances rooted in a specific place and time.
And the solution of those grievances was a kind of government.
It allows them to ignore that and just turn through the using only the preamble turn the Declaration into a manifesto of Christian libertarianism, where the only focus is in the founding fathers wanting to remove government, right?
That's not the Declaration isn't the Founding Fathers saying, we don't want to have government because free enterprise is best.
It's them saying, this government is shit and we want to do a better job, right?
You don't want that thought to go into people's head.
In his book, One Nation Under God, Cruz quotes one version of this ad paid for by the San Diego Gas and Electric Company.
It told its readers, quote, These words are the stones upon which man built history's greatest work, the United States of America.
Remember them well.
And the words of the preamble were accompanied by helpful analysis by the good people at the Committee to Preserve Liberty.
All men are created equal.
That means you are as important in the eyes of God as any man brought into this world.
You are made in his image and likeness.
There is no superior man anyway.
All right, so we're anywhere.
Stop right there.
Period.
Fine.
Fine.
We're all going to go home.
End of show.
That guy was great.
Let's get out of here.
They are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.
Here is your birthright.
The freedom to live, work, worship, and vote as you choose.
These are rights no government on earth may take from you, except for the government established by this declaration, which didn't let most people vote.
But like I would like more rights than those.
Thank you.
Yeah.
That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men.
Here is the reason for and the purpose of government.
Government is but a servant, not a master, not a giver of anything.
Right?
Now we get into the right-wing propaganda.
Deriving their just powers from the consent of the govern.
In America, the government may assume only the powers you allow it to have.
It may assume no others.
Right?
This is a subtle piece of propaganda, though.
This is very smart.
What they are doing here is recontextualizing and repurposing history into something very different than what it was in order to inculcate a specific political ideology in the population.
And this works pretty fucking good.
If you want to talk about how successful replacing the real look at the world today.
Exactly.
Look at what we're living in.
Yeah, what are you fucking talking about?
Oh, we need evidence.
Get the fuck out of here.
I am.
Do you know how obvious it is?
You used the word inculcate.
I did.
I want to quote to talk about how successful specifically the evidence that this worked is: both of us have podcasts.
Both of us have podcasts.
Yeah.
But also, it's interesting to me that the preamble remains a really common piece of right-wing propaganda in a lot of shit that's been happening very recently.
I'm going to quote from Jacqueline Keillor's book, Standoff, which is about the Bundy occupation of the Malher Wildlife Refuge.
Quote, On January 19th, 2016, Ryan Payne, a Malher occupier and founder of Operation Mutual Aid, a militia coalition based in Montana, read the preamble of the Declaration of Independence at a community meeting held at the refuge.
Political instruction in the philosophical beliefs that brought anti-government activists together in armed rebellion against the feds was common at both the refuge and during Clive and Bundy's standoff in Bunkerville, Nevada, two years earlier.
And this is interesting because it's not just the preamble.
A lot of these militiamen carry pocket constitutions, right?
That is a huge thing among chunks of the libertarian right.
And the specific pocket constitutions that everyone at fucking Malhair has are produced by the National Center for Constitutional Studies, which was founded by a Mormon elder named W. Cleon Skousen.
Yeah, baby.
Yeah, Skousen's in the housing.
Skousen was a founder of the John Birch Society who are directly talking with Fifield and with NAM.
They are working with NAM right now.
Welch is a member.
And Skousen got sort of, he had to remove himself from the Birch Society because he was too extreme.
This is the guy who was too shitty for the worst people ever.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But it is important to note that Skousen is very much copying Fifield and his organization in handing out these pocket constitutions.
This is where this idea comes from that we can repurpose pieces of American history for this specific end without like that that's like part a great thing for us is going to be taking these historical documents, adding our own context to them, adding essays to them, explaining them in a way that makes our ideology seem like the only possible American thing.
That starts here with the Committee to Preserve Liberty and their effort to recontextualize the Fourth of July.
And obviously, as we've talked about, it's been a tremendously successful thing.
Right, right, right, right.
So basically what you're saying is that we need a fucking time machine.
Look, if I had a time machine, I would get up to some shit.
Yeah, the present would be fucked up.
Yeah, there'd be a lot of folks just missing.
Oh, boy, howdy.
Starting.
No, that's not a good joke to tell.
Back to the 4th of July.
In the lead up to the day itself, Reverend Fifield gave a big radio service wherein he introduced the people of the United States to the Committee to Proclaim Liberty.
He told them its purpose was to, quote, revive a custom long forgotten in America, spiritual emphasis on the 4th of July.
They held another big essay contest soliciting sermons on the theme freedom under God.
Fifield encouraged ministers to read the sermons they wrote to their own congregations on Independent Sunday, July 1st.
Now, I want to hone in on this a bit because it's brilliant.
Spiritual Liberty Contests00:10:55
Earlier, Pew had criticized Fifield for not directly controlling what ministers wrote and said in their sermons, but data had told the NAM that handing out...
Sorry, that's just a sad, fucked up criticism.
It is fucked up.
It's just like, hey, listen, you're not controlling what everyone's saying, you pace.
Hey, bro, get your pastors on a leash.
Exactly, yeah.
But it's like, what the fuck?
At the same time, while like Pew is frustrated by this, NAM's data shows that the pre-written sermons and stuff that like that they're handing out don't work.
They sound too much like propaganda.
Yeah.
Right, right, right.
So Fifield gets a- And the Koch brothers are right fucking there, man.
Well, Fred Koch was founding member of the John Birch.
Exactly.
Yep.
Fifield gets 17,000 ministers to write their own sermons on a theme that he's chosen and like ties that to the Fourth of July, right?
Has all of these ministers, thousands of them around the country, giving variations of the same speech on a thing he's picked on the Fourth of July.
Yeah.
That'll put it in your own words kind of thing.
Yeah, exactly.
That's how you copy.
Yeah, it's like a high school essay content.
That's how you cheat.
Yeah, it's like the winner gets to go to fucking D.C.
Yeah, that guy.
Gets to help overthrow democracy and institute an oligarchic dictatorship.
Yeah.
I mean, you put it like that's a bad thing, but that is an accomplishment.
It is an accomplishment.
Look, I mean, you gotta be taking anything from these dudes.
They're good at what they're doing.
So I'm going to quote next from Kevin Cruz again.
These sermons were amplified by a program broadcast that same evening over CBS's national radio network.
Cecil B. DeMille worked with his old friend Fifield to plan the production, giving it a professional tone and attracting an impressive array of Hollywood stars.
Jimmy Stewart served as master of ceremonies, while Bing Crosby and Gloria Swanson offered short messages of their own.
The preamble to the Declaration was led by Lionel Barrymore, who had been aware of the.
Oh, I thought it was going to be Mickey Mouse.
This is what happens when you make a banker the protagonist of one of the most famous movies of all time.
That's entirely, it's all, I know you've got very good points about all of these people.
I mean, but I'm going to blame Jimmy Stewart alone.
It's, it's all him.
Not just a banker, but a banker who, to his credit, bombed, flew a bunch of bombing missions over Germany in World War II, and then to less of his credit, was an active general during the Korean War of the Air Force.
Don't get me started on Mickey's history.
And Mickey Mouse has killed a lot of people.
But you know what?
Mickey doesn't get up in the sky to do it.
Mickey uses a knife.
That's true.
Yeah, so Lionel Barrymore, Drew Barrymore, is either father or grandfather.
I forget right now.
What?
But yeah.
Stop it.
Yeah, there's 10 people alive.
I'm sick of this shit.
We need more characters in the human race.
You need to complain about that.
I complain about it.
He poses to help advertise this event where he's, you know, all these famous people are giving speeches and he's reading the preamble.
He poses holding a giant quill and looking at a piece of parchment with the words, freedom under God will save our country.
Again, we don't think about what under God means so much, but like this is a very specific political line because freedom under God, they have made mean a very specific thing, right?
That you have the freedom to be poor.
That's what it means.
Freedom under God to these guys is you have the freedom to be poor and you're not free if there aren't poor people.
I'm confused.
It sounds like you are not thankful for your freedom, sir.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, that's where all this gets started.
So the broadcast featured choral performances of the America as well as Heritage, an epic poem composed by a former leader of the U.S. Chamber of Congress, General Matthew Ridgway.
Whites are great.
Yeah.
Whites are great.
It's dope.
Everybody knows it's fun to be eight.
The guy who takes over commanding American forces in Korea.
Oh, Lionel Barrymore's great uncle to Drew Barrymore.
Thank you, Sophie.
Somewhere in there.
So Matthew Ridgway, who's the commander of American forces in Korea, the guy who replaces fucking famous right-wing shithead Douglas MacArthur, he's also a right-wing shithead.
And he gives a keynote address from Tokyo as part of this like big fucking Fourth of July brouhaha.
And he tells America that the founding fathers were motivated to do what they did by their Christianity.
You know, don't read Thomas Paine and the whole book he wrote about how he doesn't like Christianity.
They did it all for Jesus.
You know, that was the genesis of America.
So this is the kind of propaganda that sticks in people's hearts and souls and it becomes central to their being.
The genius here, and this is where Pew and the NAM come into it, was that wrangling beloved celebrities like Jimmy Stewart and Bing Crosby, like that's their, like Fifield doesn't have that kind of power on his own, but the NAM does.
They've got all these fucking inroads everywhere.
And this whole gigantic event solidifies the 4th of July as the most sacred day in the right-wing religious calendar, right?
And as a side benefit to the corporations who sponsored the show, the Christian libertarian ideology Fifield expands upon over the airwaves also gets to hitch a ride into people's souls.
It becomes part of the Fourth of July and part of the celebration of the Fourth of July and part of the lexicon we use to talk about freedom gets infected with this thing that he's invented.
One of the things that I absolutely despise most more than anything else is finding out some horrific tradition is only like, like my dad could have not dealt with it.
You know, like, every time I go to a baseball game and there's a flyby by shit, I'm like, the war's over, man.
Like, I want to start a war.
Like, it's that kind of fury at like, we're, we're past this, man.
Yeah.
Why are we still?
Why are we doing this?
Why are we doing this?
We didn't do this for a long time.
The information that you have just provided, Jordan, will make it so he can't watch the hot dog eating contest.
I will never watch that hot dog eating contest.
I will watch.
Yeah, I mean, I've never watched one and never will again, but certainly extra not now.
And you can tell Jamie Loftus I said that.
Sophie is sending her an email.
Oh, yeah, you better fucking do it.
Yeah.
Anyways, I will.
So the celebrations, all of this shit we've talked about as the days leading up to the 4th of July.
On the 4th itself, the Committee to Proclaim Liberty coordinates Americans in nearly every state to all ring their church bells simultaneously for 10 minutes.
I don't like that.
I don't like that.
No, it's great.
It's great.
In Los Angeles, the city government uses the air raid sirens to do this.
They join in with LA's air raids.
This is the first time Los Angeles's air raid sirens are used.
That would probably scare people who didn't know.
Yeah, why would you do this?
There's a cold war on.
What is wrong with you?
We are fighting in Korea.
Everyone has nukes now.
One newspaper.
That's one of the things that has changed so much from growing up in small town middle America is like when I was young, a large group of people chanting the same thing was good.
Now that we're where we are, if a large group of people chant the same thing, I'm running in the opposite direction.
I don't care if it's USA or like fucking Silvanesso is great.
I'm out of here because there's Nazis there.
Sophie also just muted me for a second.
I just want everyone to know she's trying to steal my voice and my free speech.
I'm being canceled by the radical left.
So one of so the fucking Los Angeles uses their air raid sirens to celebrate the 4th of July.
And a newspaper writer describes it as in the most fascist line I have ever heard in a newspaper, a scream as wild and proud as that of the American Eagle.
You love to hear it.
Daniel, can we get an air raid siren so everyone can hear a scream as loud and proud as the American Eagle?
Oh, that was a good air raid siren.
Not Daniel, Chris.
Sorry.
Beautiful.
Chris.
Just so the whole thing was a big hit.
The Committee to Proclaim Liberty organizers wrote in a later analysis that, quote, the very words freedom under God have added to the vocabulary of freedom a new term.
It is a significant phrase to people who know that everybody from Stalin on down is paying lip service to freedom until its root meaning is no longer apparent.
The term freedom under God provides a means of identifying and separating conditions which indicate pseudo-freedom or actual slavery from those of true freedom.
So if you think freedom is not having to worry about going broke because you can't pay for healthcare, or if you think freedom is not starving to death, you're a slave.
That's slavery.
That's a really good point that I hadn't thought of it in that way before.
But since you just said it, I'm convinced.
Yeah, I guess I'm gonna go on to vote for Ronald Reagan in a couple days.
It's really weird.
It's really weird how you convinced me of a point that you were in opposition to.
Yeah.
So things start to move very quickly after this point.
This is a huge hit.
So in 1953, the U.S. has its first ever national prayer breakfast.
We could talk a lot about the family here, but you know what the theme of the first prayer breakfast is?
Hot test.
Murder contest.
Almost.
Basically funnier.
Government under God.
There's that term under God again.
In 1954, the Pledge of Allegiance has the words under God added to it.
Congress adds In God We Trust to our stamps in 1954 and to paper money in 1955.
In 1956, In God We Trust becomes the first official motto of the United States.
All of this happens right after this 4th of July.
That's not fair.
I know.
It's really not fair.
That's fucked up.
Like, if my dad didn't have to say under God, I should retroactively not have to have said it when I said the president.
Page of Elijah.
And if someone suggests that you shouldn't have to say, your dad's going to be pissed.
I'm going to be furious.
You know who else is going to be pissed?
He will be furious.
The hot dog eating contest people?
Well, yeah, but they're always angry.
No, who's going to be pissed is the products and services that support this podcast because they're such good deals that they're losing money on every sale.
You know, they're really because of the deals that we're giving you.
It's really hurting them.
So they don't go broke.
They do have that freedom.
They have that freedom to be poor, you know?
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
Upcoming Talent Search00:03:59
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 to come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Stat on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired.
City hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did it.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
He related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
Billy Graham Ministry00:11:50
That's so funny.
Shari, stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And we're back.
We are.
You and I, me, us, all here together talking.
Hey, listen.
I just want to say, now that we're back, you're doing a great job.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Thank you, Jordan.
Thank you.
I'm sorry for all the mean things I said about you off air to your face.
That's okay.
I cried all through it.
Sophie says most of her great stuff to me every morning.
That's how I wake up every day.
And also, also, I'd like to apologize that I kept telling you that Hoover won Pennsylvania during the break.
You did say that about 130 times.
Jordan was just cursing at me in an unbroken stream.
I don't know what came over me, but yeah.
We're a good team.
It's good stuff.
We'll just make that be the ad break next time.
So Reverend James Fifield has accomplished something amazing here, right?
Like under God is fucking everywhere.
And now we all know the horrible, fucked up ideological reasons behind those words.
In his write-up on this whole fucking thing, Eckert Toy Jr. notes, quote, many of Fifield's letters both to Pugh and Crane ended with a request for funding.
Fifield continuously presented himself as selfless and living a simple life, even though both his church and his spiritual mobilization were perpetually in a state of need.
As Fifield asked for donations and monetary interventions to save himself financially, he and his staff directed very few funds or outreach initiatives to the poor.
They are spending it all.
We're very, we're very, we're the tip of the spear.
I just want to let you, but we need your money to continue fighting the good fight.
We're going to just need to be a little bit more.
He's pioneering it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But he's just talking directly to rich guys.
Now, Toy quotes from a letter an employee of spiritual mobilization sent to Crane of the NAM in 1953.
Quote: Basic to your thought in this area is the concept of vast majorities who cannot take care of themselves.
They are too foolish, too weak, too gullible.
You and a few others who really care feel the need to scurry around and get government to force somebody else to do something for these poor folk.
Tolstoy made an observation that bears directly on your little crusade.
He said, People will do everything for the poor except get off their backs.
This is the job for the government and libertarian thought to destroy parasitism by pulling people off their victims' back.
For this, we need a strong government, strong enough to do the job.
So you might say good stuff.
You might find that incoherent.
Like, we need a strong enough government to do the extra destroying the government.
Yeah.
Sir, sir, one more time.
A what?
It's very funny.
It's also funny because Fifield himself is absolutely a parasite on the rich.
Like he's just sucking money away from them.
Totally.
And they get a lot for it early on.
But it starts, it doesn't work as well after this big Fourth of July thing.
That's kind of like his high point.
You mean Fifields?
Yeah, Fifield's high point.
Well, he did his part.
He did his part, right?
And he's not necessary after that.
That's exactly right.
Oh, my God.
You are really getting to a tribe called Quest, aren't you?
Sure.
Fife.
Oh, Fife.
Come on now.
Come on.
I didn't catch that.
What am I a monster?
Am I a bad person?
It just wasn't a good joke.
I'm glad you said it, Dan.
Fair point.
Being a hero once again.
I have the freedom of expression.
Well, and you also have the freedom to go broke when you get cancer.
We have glorious freedom here, all of us.
So the Reverend Fifield, one of the funny things about him is that for all of his love of capitalism and shit, every time he tries to do a capitalism, he's terrible at it.
He launches a television show based on his, you know, ramblings that does not do well.
People do not like the Reverend Fifield hour.
Nobody's shoe line.
No, he doesn't try doing that, but he does like, he has like this land deal.
He has like a couple of different business deals that all fall through that he uses the money his foundation's getting from rich guys to try to fund right.
And they start to get angry because they're like, well, he's just using our money to try to get rich himself and he's bad at it.
And that's the real unforgivable sin to rich guys.
I was going to say, you do not have the freedom to be bad at getting rich.
Yeah, you can take our money and get rich.
You cannot take our money and not get rich.
Now, the good news is that spiritual mobilization had already done the one thing that it had meant to do, which is kick open the doors of religious politicization and tie Christianity to the free market and the hearts of millions of Americans.
Just a few years after that famous Fourth of July, his work had gone so far beyond him that he had been marginalized.
His final straw with the Pew brothers was a propaganda film, which they considered weak.
In 1957, Fifield quit spiritual mobilization altogether, and it drifted along on fumes for a few years before it died out.
The cause it had birthed, however, sailed right ahead.
Pugh and Crane found a new minister to invest in, one who was much better with money.
You want to guess what this guy's name was?
Creflo A Dollar.
Not quite yet.
Not quite.
Fucking Marjo.
Like, I don't know.
No, it's not quite.
I do love Marjo.
I kind of love Marjo.
He's very charming.
No, it's Billy Graham.
Oh, God.
Of course.
Yeah, it's Billy Graham, baby.
So we could have just gone back in time and just slapped that guy in the face and it would have all been fine.
We'd have to go back further.
There's actually three boats.
If I could go back in time with a chain gun, there's three boats I'm taking care of, you know?
Three boats.
That sounds like a Cohen brothers movie.
Yeah, three boats sunk in the middle of the ocean by a time traveler with a gatling gun.
Yeah.
So, yeah, Billy Graham, Pugh and Crane decide to back him next after they kind of abandon Fifield.
You know, he has to leave spiritual mobilization.
Yada yada yada.
Sad story for the asshole.
Here's Eckert Toy again.
The mission was to spread the free market conservative message through religion had only just begun, and in many ways, Graham further nuanced its delivery.
As Graham himself put it to J. Howard Pugh, God has given me the ear of millions.
He has given to you large sums of money.
It seems to me that if we can put these two gifts of God together, we could reach the world with the message of Christ.
Billy Graham's much smarter guy.
As a business proposition, supporting Graham was a win-win.
Graham's ministry would flourish.
Business interests would be advanced by a key opinion shaper.
And unlike Fifield, Graham would not continually pester Pugh about his dire financial situation and the need for more funds.
Graham was a public figure who ingratiated himself into the politics of America, promoting political involvement at his revival meetings.
He had preached from the steps of the U.S. Capitol in 1952, and he also had a close relationship with President Eisenhower.
So, much comment.
Yes, the famous communist agent, Eisenhower.
Be like Ike communism.
Well, that's also true, because early on, NAM, there's a lot of ties with the John Birch Society, but that's not the best way to get your message out to a lot of people.
Billy Graham's a much cuddlier figure.
A lot more people are going to like Billy Graham than fucking Welch, you know?
Well, and his stakes are more real to most people, like your eternal soul.
He's got T-bones.
He's got...
Sure.
Yeah.
So the first big collaboration between Pugh and Graham was a little publication you might have heard about, Jordan.
You might know about this.
Christianity Today.
Oh, I've heard of it.
This is how it starts.
My family was more focused on the family by the Dobsons, but it's a different magazine now, but it was originally, number one, it was originally just for ministers.
And it was founded by Graham and Pugh to solidify ties between the right-wing and organized Christianity.
Pugh explained, quote, Christianity today is a magazine, conservative in its theology and beamed directly to the ministerial mind.
Mind, those of us who have given years of study to this problem realize that it is just as important to have conservatism in theology as it is to have conservatism in economics and sociology if America is to remain great.
That was true.
That was true.
They just nailed it.
Sometimes a lot of people are like, ah, they're bad people, but I'm telling you, they nailed it.
And I'm not talking about that.
I'm talking about ministersonly.com, their dating website that they had underneath it.
That really nailed it.
Yeah, ministers.com and PriestFuck, which was its slightly, slightly trashier cousin.
That was their equivalent of the fuckabear workshop.
Yeah, the fuckabear workshop, the Catholic fuckabear workshop.
We don't need to get into that.
That's going to get unsettling quickly.
So from the beginning, both Graham and especially Pugh took pains to ensure they could not be tied too closely to the magazine.
They didn't want it to be seen as an overtly political look, even though it was.
Despite claiming a hands-off attitude, Pugh constantly complained about the editorial direction chosen by the man they picked to run the magazine, Dr. Bell.
In 1958, Pugh hired the Opinion Research Bureau to conduct one of the first Pew surveys, although it was not yet called a Pew survey.
Carried out on the readers of Christianity Today, it found that nearly 30% of ministers still described themselves as something besides fundamentalist or conservatives.
14% even called themselves liberal.
Now, this might be due to the fact that Christianity today was blatant right-wing propaganda, so only a few progressives read it.
Billy Graham probably knew this, but he was savvy enough to see how this data could be used to peer pressure more ministers into moving right.
He wrote, I believe this poll should be widely publicized.
So many of our liberal ministers are liberal only because they think it's the popular thing to be.
If they could understand that the vast majority of American clergy are conservative, it could swing hundreds of others over to the conservative position.
It would also probably have a great impact on our seminaries if properly distributed.
This isn't the point, but again, your character fell apart in the middle of that.
I know.
I'm not a bad person.
It started strong, but it just went just finally there.
I mean, I just kept thinking, like, what if the DARE program was more oriented around Christian nationalism?
Like, if all of these pastors had peer-pressured each other into doing drugs, I feel like we would have all had to be.
We would have been in an incredible place as a country.
Acid is being discovered around this time.
It would have blown everyone's mind.
Only Rogan was around back.
Only Rogan was.
Christianity today is literally just sheets of acid inside of a magazine.
And obviously, today it is a different thing.
In fact, Christianity Today is such a centrist magazine now that Donald Trump called it far left.
Sure.
Obviously, getting good data overall and where priests, ministers, and reverends are politically is complicated.
It's not an easy group to just certify, like survey all of them.
But it's worth noting that while roughly 18% of Americans are white evangelical Protestants, they make up more than 43% of what, yes, Pew Research calls staunch conservatives and 39% of so-called mainstream Republicans.
So there's a debate to be had as to like whether or not it's broadened or narrowed the electoral kind of possibilities of conservatives in America.
But as a result of everything we've talked about this week, the center of organized conservatism in the U.S. are white evangelical Protestants, the most reliable voting bloc, the most organized one.
And it all started here.
Good time.
No.
Refuse.
Rewriting Sad Stories00:05:26
Rewrite this story and make it less sad.
Make it fun.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If I get a time machine, I can do the fun version of this story.
That's, you know, that makes sense.
I mean, it is just a lot of people not wanting to.
I just hate that when stuff isn't old enough.
Oh, you know what I mean?
It's kind of from a relatable time.
Yeah.
I can't walk over to my grandfather and be like, hey, you remember when things weren't shit?
Like, that's not fair.
Like, I should have to go way further back in time.
Yeah, this thing that seems like so entrenched.
Yeah, but it's not like from 70% of the time.
I mean, the heartening thing about that is, is because it's not that old, we could do different stuff.
Like, we could make it be different as a country.
Sure, we have to.
But at a certain point in time, Christianity wasn't that old, and now it's fucking old.
You know what I mean?
But also, Robert, that's also what could happen.
Robert, to your point, though, too, like, you know, if your story has taught me anything, if we're going to shift this back, we need billionaires and we need charismatic preachers.
Those are things that I don't think we have access to.
I will accept being both at any time as long as everybody else takes care of it.
I know George Soros listens to the podcast.
Sure.
George, buddy, we got an idea.
We're going to recontextualize what's what holiday can we take over?
Arbor Day?
Yeah, we're going to make a takeover.
Arbor Day is not ours right.
We're going to make Memorial Day about finding.
Oh, I was going to say, well, that's what these guys would do.
We're going to talk about that.
Oh, okay.
Sorry.
I thought that was President's Day.
I thought we were branching out.
Well, what if we made Memorial Day the center of celebration, breaking into the house of Alex Azar, the former Health and Human Services Secretary, and taking all the ill-gotten gains he made from jacking up the price of insulin?
That could be the new memorial to the dead of the insulin crisis.
All we need is a couple hundred million dollars to really get this going.
And we can do a deep fake of Bing Crosby and Jimmy Stewart.
We can recontextualize that.
Listen, listen, Jimmy.
Both of us were kind of milquetoast before.
You say Bing Crosby, a man.
I was in on Hogarth.
I don't see why we shouldn't go to Alex Azar's house and take his cars and his nice golden things.
I'm James Stewart.
Yeah.
See, now that was a character you mentioned.
I did my best there.
I can't do it.
I can't do it.
Well, now I'm Bing Crosby, and I think you should go to Alex Azar's house and take his car.
Every time I think about doing a Bing Crosby, it transfers into Yogi Bear instantaneously.
Just that constant, like, hey, we're going to, hey, boo-boo.
Like, it's so fast.
There's not a lot of, not a lot of distance.
Of the Sackler family.
Toad into the middle of the ocean on a barge.
We can't.
And of course, a picnic basket.
Hey, boo-boo.
We got to take down the state.
Yeah.
Bing Crosby and fucking the bear.
Ah, goddammit.
I spaced on the name.
I ruined the joke.
Now it's over.
Well, now you're great.
You guys got any pluggables to plug?
Just, you know, we have our podcast, knowledgefight.com where that lives.
Yeah.
I just want to aggressively promote my book on this one.
It's called The Quiet Part Loud.
Sure.
You can download it for free at the Quiet Part Loud.
Anything you want.
Just read it or don't.
I really just put it out there and it was great.
Anyways, it's thequietpartloud.com.
It's a passive-aggressive plug.
Just want to aggressively promote my book.
There you go.
See, that's how you do it.
That's how you plug.
You're learning.
I'm trying.
You're learning.
Soon you'll be as good a pitch man as the reincarnated digital ghosts of Jimmy Stewart and Bing Crosby.
I'm just looking for that level of cells.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Which, by the way, soon, coming soon.
Anytime.
Lionel Barrymore comes back and tells people to rob Bank of America locations.
Mickey Mouse takes up arms.
Mickey Mouse and fighting in the mountains to make a Zapatista-like colony in Appalachia.
Many, I'll be back over after the war is finished.
We could do it, everybody.
We could do it.
All we need is a couple hundred million dollars.
So now I'm in my head reading Civil War letters in Mickey Mouse's voice.
And that would be the rest of the world.
We burnt a caravan bringing ammunition to the government troops.
Dear Sliza, my love for you burns every night.
All right.
Well, that should get us some fun fan art.
Okay.
That's the episode.
Have a good week, everybody.
Taking Control of Money00:02:25
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.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Bajanista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Earners, what's up?
Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth.
On each episode of the podcast, Earn Your Leisure, we break down the conversations you need to understand money, investing, and entrepreneurship.
From stocks and real estate to credit, business, and generational wealth, our goal is simple.
Make financial literacy accessible for everyone.
Because when you understand the system, you can start to build within it.
Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Earn Your Leisure, and listen now.
Readers, Katie's finalists, publicists, we have an incredible new episode this week for you guys.
We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode.
They put on Lizzie McGuire at 2 a.m. video on demand.
This guy's 2 a.m.
2 a.m.
Whatever time it is.
Lizzie McGuire and I'm Wildlife.
Wild, wild bats you were with.
It was like a first closet moment for me where I was like, you're like, I don't feel like she's hot like the rest of them.
No, no, no.
I was like, she's beautiful, but I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are.
I'm not like, but listen to Las Culturistas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.