Robert and Chelsea Weber Smith dissect the swastika's dual identity, tracing its banal 1920s American usage to Nazi co-option in 1933 and subsequent legal restrictions. They examine how Native tribes like the Navajo renounced the sacred "whirling log" for solidarity, while Hindu and Buddhist communities face discrimination despite the symbol's religious roots. Citing a 2022 AP News case where a physician received a cease-and-desist for Diwali decorations, they debate terminology, noting Nazis used "swastika" yet advocates prefer "Hakenkreuz." Ultimately, the episode concludes that no single solution exists, requiring local dialogue to balance Holocaust trauma against ancient spiritual significance. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:02:16
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I got you.
I got you.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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 Goespiece and Michael Manchini.
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 the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What Swazen, Mike!
No, Sophie.
Sophie.
I'm not.
I'm just trying.
I'm trying to recapture that what's boiling my pig anuses energy that old heads.
I still like the class.
What's cracking my peppers?
That's still one of my favorite ones you've ever done.
I know it's been like four years.
The Swastika Mountain Town00:15:31
I hope that's it.
Never use it again.
I hope.
Never again.
Fine.
Just going to make it more and more off-putting, you know?
Just drive people away more and more.
What's trafficking, my children?
That kind of stuff.
Just going to be a problem.
Yeah, we didn't need that.
Yeah.
Well, this is Behind the Bastards podcast.
Worst people.
Tell you all about them.
And today, getting behind, really behind the Nazis by getting behind the swastika with Chelsea Weber Smith.
Oh, this has been so interesting so far, and I just have no idea really where it's going.
So thanks for having me here and taking me on this journey.
Thank you for being here, Chelsea Weber Smith, whose podcast, American Hysteria, is pretty cool and people should check out.
Chelsea.
Yes.
You ready?
I'm ready.
Are you ready to and then a bunch of like swastikas play on the bottom?
Anyway, I don't know why.
I hate that.
I hate that that's who we are now.
Yeah, that's that's like so our uh uh uh well, I probably shouldn't tell that story, but um, I come across periodically old pieces of like Nazi paraphernalia.
It's a it's a hazard of the job.
And there's definitely been a few times when I've been like, oh, that would be an interesting, like that book would be interesting to have because of, you know, this person who signed it.
And then like, no, I don't need that in my house.
What am I, what am I doing?
You're, you're, you're, you, you, you, you don't, you don't want to have this, Robert.
This haunted ass book.
Yeah, this haunted ass Nazi book.
I was given through someone else a like family heirloom that was an old Hitler youth dagger and I had no idea what to do with it.
So I just kind of like put it in my trash pile out in the yard and it's just slowly decaying, which I think is the right thing to do with a Hitler youth dagger.
Was that the one that was mailed to the corporate office?
No, Yeah, we get all sorts of weird stuff.
So in the late 1920s and early 1930s, you might have heard about this.
The Nazis rise to power.
They solidify their grip on power.
And while sort of the, while the Nazis are kind of like moving up in their inevitable kind of like path towards taking control of the German government, there's all sorts of fighting in the street.
You know, you got your old-timey anti-fascists, both kind of social democrats and communists, you know, duking it out with the Nazis in the streets.
And these street fights, these big brawls, these murders and assassinations are kind of a regular cause of fascination in the world media, right?
Like they get a lot of attention in the American newspapers in particular.
And so they start sending over reporters to cover all of this unrest in Weimar Germany.
In 1927, an American journalist from Town and Country magazine traveled to Austria to report on fighting between local social democrats and Nazi-aligned fascists.
Being a dumb American, this person, she did not worry much about the fact that she had gone to Austria in 1927 with her girls' club ring, which bore a swastika on it.
So she's got this like...
She's like a girls' club.
Yeah, she's like showing up to like embed with these social democrat like street fighting gangs and she's got a swastika ring and like one of these guys has to take her aside and be like you can't be wearing that here.
Like I know you don't mean it, but you you gotta you gotta take that thing off.
Gosh, that is amazing.
That is so funny.
Oh, it's amazing.
Well, it's history.
History is so rich.
History is rich, but also there have always been, you know, as someone who's done conflict reporting, I know a lot of great journalists, a lot of people I respect a lot.
But the majority of journalists who do that kind of work are always like shitheads, right?
And like, it is a shitheaded thing to like go to travel to like report on the fighting between these Nazis and these other groups and not be like, should I bring my swastika ring?
Like, maybe I should leave this at home.
You didn't do that.
You did that much research.
Yeah, you didn't possess the very most basic knowledge that you would need to report for a newspaper on these events.
It is 1927.
You had some time.
Yes.
Sloppy sloppy.
Six years later in 1933, Hitler had been made chancellor of Germany.
This obviously supercharged international resistance to the regime, and American anti-fascists held a rally in New York City to protest the newly minted dictator.
One journalist with the New Yorker showed up to cover the event and realized very quickly that his pocket watch, which was engraved with a swastika, might be a bad thing to have out on the street with it, right?
Like, really?
Again, but it does kind of show, I'm making fun of these people, and I think they should be, but it does show you like how banal it was seen as, where like somebody might show up and be like, oh, fuck, I can't have this thing on me.
I didn't realize this would be a problem.
Yeah.
Starting in the early 30s, American use of the swastika began to decline.
And this was matched throughout much of the Western world for reasons I probably don't need to spend too much time on, right?
Not surprising that it does start to decline in its kind of anodyne usage.
In Nazi Germany, the new regime actually encouraged this.
At first, the ubiquity of the symbol had been good for them, right?
In the early years, when they're rising to power, it's free PR.
But now they're in power and hundreds of men have died fighting under the swastika.
So it has become this kind of holy symbol of sacrifice.
And once they're in power, the Nazis kind of find it horrifying that some company might use it to sell coffee.
In 1933, Joseph Goebbels announced the law for protection of national symbols.
Quote, If the symbol is used on an object or in connection with it, it may only be used if the object itself has an inner relation to the symbol.
The use of symbols for publicity purposes is in any case forbidden.
So basically, this law means you can't use a swastika to like sell a cigar or whatever, right?
Unless it's like you're doing a fundraiser for the Nazi Party, then you can probably get away with it.
For the Nazis, the swastika then had come full circle from a symbol that they co-opted to mainstream their image to a sacred object restricted from commercial use, unless that commercial use was Nazi in origin.
This created problems for a number of people, particularly people outside of Nazi Germany.
And some of those people were Canadians who lived in the quaint northern Ontario town of swastika.
Named after picking up the news one morning, like, you know, you're living out in the middle of nowhere.
Maybe you don't check in for a while.
And then like you see that like Hitler's taking power in Germany and you look at the banner behind him.
Like, oh, fuck.
Oh, my God.
This is going to be a problem for us, swastikers.
Now, swastika, Ontario.
Swastika, Ontario was named after the swastika gold mine staked in 1907.
The town name was inspired by the Sanskrit symbol, not the other thing.
Several mines soon came to dot the boom town, and all of them were kind of swastika themed.
There was the swastika mine.
There was also the Lucky Cross mine.
In 1940, as the war breaks out, members of swastika or citizens of swastika started to feel pressure to change the town name.
There are a couple of articles at the time where like people in town are like, we're not changing the name.
They don't get to take it from us.
Like this has been our name longer than they've been using it, you know?
But eventually the provincial government overrules them and they send like, I don't know, mounties or whatever to take the swastika sign outside of town and replace it with one that says Winston.
Winston.
Winston.
Doesn't have the same ring to it.
No, no, no, no.
These people should have owned like an NFL team with that energy.
Although it does make me think, what if Hitler had adopted as a symbol just a man named Winston?
Or maybe a carton of Winston cigarettes, you know?
It's a whole different World War II.
A lot of Americans and camels writing to Nuremberg or to fucking Normandy.
So yeah, they changed it.
The provincial government tries to change the town name to Winston.
And the swastikers are so adamant that like, we're not going to change our town name.
They tear down the Winston sign and they put up their own new sign for swastika telling reporters to hell with Hitler.
We came up with our name first.
Hey.
I appreciate the dedication, you know?
This is where things go.
Yeah.
I mean, you know.
They're not wrong, right?
Like, because it's not their fault, you know, like that.
It might not be the right hill to die on.
I wouldn't, this is not the hill I would pick to die on.
Just my little town in Ontario has the name.
But it makes me think.
So like the first big piece of like conflict reporting I did was after the Boticlon massacre in 2015 when ISIS murdered dozens and dozens of people in France at that like mass shooting type deal.
I did this article where I went through like eight or 900 pages of like ISIS propaganda and like wrote this thing about their weird magazine.
But like, I remember I spent like two or three days just kind of like stuck in my little office writing this thing.
And then I go out to like do laundry at the laundromat near my house, which was the ISIS laundromat.
So I just remember like looking up at it and being like, that's probably going to be a problem for you guys.
Oh man, in the similar vein, we have a dry cleaner that is just called Q. Q, yeah.
Man, that's too bad.
Yeah, I mean, it's not on you.
No, we did it first.
They haven't changed it.
There is another funny story about this of swastika mountain in southern Oregon.
Now, Oregon has a famously bad Nazi problem, so you might assume that swastika mountain is a combination of words, my friend.
Swastika Mountain.
In Oregon.
Yeah, in Oregon.
But no, it was, it was, again, it predates the use of that.
It was just somebody, some guy decided to call it swastika mountain.
It got renamed like a couple of years ago.
It was not all that long ago that the state was like, you probably shouldn't have this.
Like, what year are we talking?
Like a couple of years ago, like not all that long ago.
How did we not know?
Swastika Mountain got renamed.
Pacific Northwesterners.
It wasn't a big, it's not like a major mountain, right?
It's not like hood.
It's not one of your money mountains, you know?
I also, I can remember there's this farmhouse I used to spend a lot of time in, pretty old farmhouse outside of about an hour and a half outside of Reading in the middle of fucking nowhere, North Central California, that the original owner had burnt into the wooden roof all of the different cattle brands from different ranches in the area.
And one of them's a fucking swastika.
And it was one of the knowing the area, like, I actually knew a guy who had been in the Hitler youth as a kid out there, although he was not a Nazi anymore.
You know, the warranted when he was 14, it's not really on him.
But like, no, seeing that and being like, just knowing the history, this could just be a thing that people had way back in the day before the Nazis, or it could be a Nazi ranch, like rural California.
Either of those is equally likely.
I looked it up.
It's August 2022.
The Organ Geographic News Board confirmed that it would no longer be called swastika mountain.
We did it, guys.
2022.
We did it, guys.
Wow.
Almost died on that hill.
Yeah.
Yeah.
God bless Oregon.
Finally.
Yeah.
Making progress, everybody.
Really got that knocked out before the election.
But that's like, it's so fascinating that you can look at that now and actually truly not know.
I mean, you can obviously know if you have a dividing line of time, but with these certain like products, you don't have like such a definitive line that happens where you're like, this is not Nazi shit.
This is Nazi shit.
You know, and we can say that without any doubt.
It's just, I had no idea.
Yeah.
Pretty cool stuff.
So the use of the swastika as a fashion icon had started to fade, albeit unevenly, by the end of the 1930s, as this segment from a write-up in Slate makes clear.
One incident in 1936 made that clear.
Swastika motif receives cold reception, read a small headline in Women's Wear Daily in 1936.
Buttons crusted with swastikas shown by one couture house stirred up some comment among an audience of New York buyers, the editors wrote.
No sales of this particular model are reported.
Although no reason for this chilly response was given, it might be due to the fact that many important New York department stores were owned or founded by Jews, including B. Altman, Bloomingdale's, Bergdorf Goodman, Sacks Fifth Avenue, and Macy's.
Although the Women's Wear Daily article left the designer of these buttons anonymous, Vogue also reported on a fashion show featuring swastika buttons, identifying the designer as Marcel Rokas, a well-known French courtier.
Unlike Women's Wear Daily, Vogue found the use of the swastika to be amusing rather than disturbing.
Now, telling me it wasn't Coco Chanel.
There's a pretty, I mean, like Coco, there's a pretty good chance that Vogue had no problem with the swastika because the people running it were pretty fucking racist and kind of fans of the Nazis.
They, along with many other publications, were cautiously positive about Hitler in the lead up to the war years.
That same year, they ran a spread showing the home decor of Hitler and his mountain hideaway, including a prominent swastika cushion on his couch.
Slate says that this was an example of them humanizing Hitler and trying to reinforce the domestic feel of the symbol.
They did also include a profile on British Prime Minister Anthony Eden's house at the same time.
So I don't know.
The article goes on, as late as 1937, Good Housekeeping recommended creating a swastika out of cashews as a clever cake decoration.
I know that's what I'm doing my next birthday.
Cashew swastika, baby.
Wow.
You got a nut allergy.
That's a double problem right there.
Yeah.
I wonder if your local grocery store would go ahead and pop one in frosting.
I was just going through.
I'm just going through my 37 issues of good housekeeping.
And yeah, they recommended this.
Can you do this cake for me?
This is what I want.
But in 1940, the Boy Scouts finally decided they'd had enough of the Hook Cross.
At that year's Jamboree in Santiago, Chile, a vote was taken to abandon the swastika due to the fact that Boy Scouts and scout leaders had been heckled and pelted with shit while marching through streets with swastikas on their uniform.
And again, hard to blame anyone in 1940 for seeing a bunch of dudes in military style uniforms with white swastikas and going, I'm going to throw some stuff at those kits.
It's too late, boys.
You got to give up the symbol.
Might have to fuck up a Boy Scout over this.
The Boy Scout order of the white swastika was, of course, never sacred, and neither was really the town name of swastika, Ontario.
Heartbreaking Audio Cover00:12:56
But all of this does create a very serious problem for the Navajo, the Papago, the Apache, and the Hopi people, all of whom had used the swastika or the whirling log in various works of religious significance since time immemorial, right?
This is a religious symbol for them.
It is not as simple as just, oh, this weird decoration or name that we used is problematic.
Now we got to change it, right?
Like this is a thing that is a part of religious observances, you know?
But after the Nazi invasion of France, representatives from each of these tribes, the Navajo, the Popago, the Apache, and the Hopi, sign a proclamation on the whirling log symbol.
Because the above ornament, which has been a symbol of friendship among our forefathers for many centuries, has been desecrated recently by another nation of peoples, therefore it is resolved that henceforth from this date and forevermore, our tribes renounce the use of the emblem commonly known today as the swastika on our blankets, baskets, art objects, sand paintings, and clothing.
Now, I want you to really think about that, right?
Because they've done nothing wrong, and the whirling log has done nothing wrong.
They are choosing to give up a sacred symbol because of something a completely different group of people across the world have done with a version of that symbol as an act of solidarity with their victims.
And I want to be clear, I'm not saying like this is the right thing or not doing this would have been the wrong thing because I don't think it would have been wrong if they'd said, look, this is our religious symbol.
We're not going to change it because of these assholes, right?
I think that would have been fine too.
I'm just saying that's a really noteworthy decision to make.
Especially prior to, yeah.
I mean, I think that's like, it is, like you said, it seems like an act of solidarity.
You can't exactly know what was going through their heads or their conversations, but it does.
I mean, what else could it be except like we can no longer abide this, even if it's like a huge important story in our culture?
It's like what's more important is no longer allowing this symbol to have a power that we don't consent to, right?
It's like, no matter what now, I think it's obvious that this, this horrible superpower has basically usurped the use of this and it's just not going to, you know, it just can no longer mean what it means to outsiders.
And maybe that would have been fine if it were just like an internally used symbol.
But yeah, what it's just like heartbreaking.
It's really heartbreaking.
It's very severe.
Yeah.
I do have, there might be a darker reason, and I'm sure a number of things played into the decision that they made.
The darker part of my mind says, well, maybe they were concerned.
They see what is gearing up and they think like, well, if we go to war, you know, this is 40s, this is before the U.S. is in the war, but like, if the United States goes to war with the Germans, it might be dangerous for us to like have this on shit, right?
Like we might fucking, we might people, this might cause some of our people to get targeted, right?
That may have also been a factor.
I don't, that's certainly not like a thing that they write out here.
I do think it was probably more just like a solidarity and also like, yeah, just an acknowledgement of the, I mean, a lot of Navajo people, a lot of Hopi people, you know, a lot of Apache people are going to wind up fighting against the Nazis too.
So yeah, it's anyway, it's, it's a remarkable moment and kind of, I think, worth acknowledging.
So we all know the next part of the story, right?
You got your World War II, the Nazis, you know, they're doing some stuff, and then America, without anyone else's help, wins the war, right?
You know, that's, I think everyone's familiar with the gist of the story.
So during the war years, it becomes dangerous to be associated with the Nazis and the swastika.
Laura Ingalls, a pilot and a Nazi sympathizer, is put on trial in 1942, and her swastika bracelet is brought up as evidence of her fascist leadings.
Ingalls claims it was just an Indian symbol for good luck, but she is convicted of failing to register as an enemy agent, although her swastika bracelet apparently didn't factor into this, but it does get brought up in the trial.
The war ends.
The swastika gets, it falls, and as a political symbol, you know, it becomes profoundly toxic, particularly after knowledge of the Holocaust becomes more widespread.
This leads to its disappearance from like, you know, anodyne normal products that like a person would want to have in their house, but it does not lead to its disappearance from popular products.
It just causes a change in the kind of products that it shows up on.
Stephen Heller writes, quote, it was used increasingly on paperback book covers for spy and mystery yarns and on covers for men's pulp adventure magazines.
Even today, the most common sanctioned mainstream use of the mark is on jackets for fiction and nonfiction books with World War II themes.
In the late 40s and 50s, the male public's fascination with things Nazi was disturbingly fetishistic, and to an extent it still is.
Yet publishers knew what they were doing from a marketing standpoint.
The swastika was such an identifiable icon, a magnet, so to speak, that a browser could perceive content without ever reading the title.
It is indeed ironic that the swastika has evolved from benevolence signed a sinister national emblem to a veritable point of purchase display in only a few generations.
And he provides a really interesting example of this that Sophie's going to show you from the men's magazine, World of Men.
We got the girls, we got the men.
So you've got this.
Big two-thirds of it is this illustration of like a Nazi, he's sticking his bayonet into a woman's, a very blonde white woman's breast.
There's a big swastika very visible on his bicep.
There's another swastika on this train behind him that's full of Nazi soldiers.
There's a woman behind her who's got like a strapless shirt on that's like she looks like she's being taken into custody or something like that by these Nazis.
And then the title of the apparent story that these pictures are for is Lust Slaves of Hitler's Warsaw Butcher.
Oh, God.
Wow.
Saturday's mistress demands soft flesh.
I was going to say that's one of the other big stories.
There's a lot of great stories in this episode.
Now, Chelsea, I'm not a word cop, but I will say you never need to use the phrase lust slaves.
That's never a necessary term.
There's no need to ever use the phrase lust slave.
No, it should really be retired from sex-starved woman.
Yeah, it's another article in World of Scammer with a bayonet.
It led questions of Park Avenue call girl.
Yeah, yeah.
Revealed sincapers have turned on co-eds.
Man, bro.
World of men.
Yeah.
World of men.
America's bloody horror.
Yeah.
What an incredible magazine.
Now, the cover shows, yeah, so it's, it's great stuff.
Now, when I saw this incredible magazine, absolute work of historical art, I knew I had a sacred duty to try and find a copy.
And unfortunately, I couldn't.
But the Internet Archive does have a collection of men's magazines from the 50s and 60s.
And I will promise you all, we'll do a whole episode going through some of these in the future because they look incredible.
Here's one cover that I just want to talk about.
It has nothing to do with Nazis, but it's glorious, Chelsea.
Look at this.
Pop it up.
Let's see it.
I'm sorry, Chelsea.
Oh, no.
Exposed content I want.
Teen sororities, schools for free love, passion, and orgies.
Exposed.
Suburban sex cults, how they operate.
Exclusive, beware the world of lust without love.
And it's like a picture of a shake.
And there is a Nazi, actually.
The swastika is not fully visible, but there's like a shake and a Nazi tying a woman in a red dress to a palm tree.
Soft blondes for the reds shafts of steel.
And we actually have a soft blondes for the reds shafts of steel.
Oh.
There's also a real picture of a woman on this one up there.
There is a real picture of a woman.
She looks like she is topless.
I'm guessing these are kind of Playboy Eats.
She's great.
Yeah.
Yeah, she looks great.
She looks great.
Helpless brides of the lash in Satan's hell.
Absolutely.
That's what I want.
I want all that satanic panic content, all that early sex cult panic.
Yeah.
Look, these are, there's problematic aspects of this, but I think we can all agree the people who wrote these titles used the English language in a way that is unique and beautiful.
Hey, everyone.
Robert here.
As you've noticed, my audio just took a dive in quality.
That is because my Zoom recorder died forever, irrevocably, while we were recording this episode.
And I did not notice it because I was lost in the heat of the moment, which is also a pretty good song by the band Asia.
Anyway, I don't know why my Zoom died.
Perhaps it was the crypto fascists, you know, trying to stop this episode from airing.
Perhaps it was the Reds using the crypto fascists as cover in order to stop my investigation into their lust slave cartel.
We'll never know.
But I do apologize.
My audio for the rest of this episode will be the Zoom safety audio we used and is of slightly lower quality.
Yes, they definitely knew how to get attention.
Are you familiar with Jack Chick?
Oh, God, yes.
Absolutely.
Yeah, we just did a three-parter on Jack Chick.
The king, the goat.
Yeah.
It just reminds me a little bit.
You know, totally different like motivations, but very similar, pulpy, you know, extreme content.
Jack Chick is actually the primary sponsor of this podcast.
So if you're worried about going to hell because you've been reading men's magazines from the 1950s, you are.
Come on and help you out right after this.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place to come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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.
They 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 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.
Complex Nazi History in India00:08:19
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.
Ah, we're back.
Boy, my soul feels cleansed.
Oh, yeah.
not even thinking about helpless brides of the lash in Satan's hell anymore, Chelsea.
No, I've got a new Lord and Savior.
A new Lord and Savior.
I could look at these magazines for hours and we will soon.
Don't worry, folks.
I hope so.
While the use of the swastika in Western nations was confined to bad guys and entertainment media for decades, elsewhere in the world, it did have occasional resurgences.
And this brings us back to India.
Now, India, again, it's both pretty distant from Nazi aggression.
The Nazis aren't really a threat in the subcontinent.
And it's also a place where swastikas are a very popular religious symbol.
One of the weird things, I spent months living in Northeast India, primarily Delhi.
And one of the things that was always really, I mean, at first, at least for the week or two, it was weird and then it became kind of normal is like right in the front of like many houses, there's just a swastika.
Now, it's not the same, like it's reversed.
There's usually like a series of dots and stuff around it, but it's a very common decoration on the front of the houses.
Now, the fact that the swastika in Hindu culture particularly has a history that has nothing to do with the Nazis also has to coexist with the fact that there is a very complex modern history of the Nazis in India and their relation to particular like Hindu nationalist political parties.
Because the Nazis fought against the British Empire, a good number of Hindu nationalists were willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
This is compounded with the fact that popular Nazi spiritual philosopher Savitri Devi lived in India much of her life, organized with a lot of people who will be the political precursors to the party that is the current party of the prime minister of India, Narendra Modi, who is very far right.
And kind of even beyond this, the Nazis send researchers to parts of the subcontinent with a group called the Ananerbi, which is like a, it's the group doing a lot of like this occult research and stuff in sort of the pre-war Nazi era to kind of investigate the origin point of the Aryans in India, right?
So there's a lot of reasons why there's this kind of like complex history of the Nazis within India.
Well, and Hitler really admired India.
Yeah.
Like Eurasia sort of, you know, a complex history there.
And it's, it's problematic at times.
And part of what makes it problematic is like, because of distance, there's not really this sense of the immediacy of Hitler's crimes for a lot of folks in that part of the world.
And this will cause some complicated problems.
In the late 1960s, contemporaneous to American Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell, an Indian Nazi party formed in New Delhi using the German Hagenkroy as its symbol.
It promised that if elected to power, India would be the strongest power on the planet.
They failed to get any real support.
The Indian Nazi Party does not take off.
But actual Nazi imagery retains a sort of low-key popularity in the subcontinent Continent alongside the more traditional religious uses of the swastika.
And some of this contributed to the rise of a culture of admiration for Hitler as a business guru.
Within India, Hitler is one of the best known sort of business influencers, you might say.
What?
Wow.
This is a more complicated topic than we're going to talk about today, but it's because of this history, because you can find like management books that are like management lessons from Hitler and stuff.
If you Google around, as a result of all this, if you Google around, you'll run into variations of the same story, which is that some Indian business owner who's kind of mainly aware of like Hitler and the Nazis as a result of this weird kind of business influencer thing will open a store or a restaurant with very weird and specific Nazi branding.
It will get covered in a news article.
A lot of people will get angry.
And there will nearly always be a follow-up interviewing the owner of the store who kind of seems befuddled that anyone's pissed about this.
Here's one example from a 2006 New York Times article.
Punit Sablock, 23 years old and a novice restaurateur, says he wanted a catchy cafe name to sell his three to four dollar plates of Christini Tonno, pear, and ricotta salad in Panna Cotta.
So he went with Hitler's cross.
He put a swastika in the logo.
He named his restaurant Hitler, saying, Hitler is a catchy name.
Everyone knows Hitler.
Man, it's again, it's good marketing, I guess.
It draws eyes.
I guess I don't know that it makes him money, but it does draw eyes.
Yeah.
I probably don't need to explain that the local Jewish community was not thrilled with this.
Later in the article, Sablock is quoted as saying, I never wanted to promote Hitler.
I just wanted to promote my restaurant.
Well, you know what that reminds me of is not that far from where I live, there is a restaurant called the Soup Nazi Kitchen.
And, you know, it's obviously a reference to Seinfeld, but it's like, bro.
Yeah, I don't know, man.
Maybe we don't need to say that.
It says Nazi in your name.
It's so weird.
Part of why these stories tend to blow up is that India has a very large expat population of Israelis.
A lot of young Israeli kids also travel there.
In fact, when I was living in Delhi, one of my friends was this dude who had fled to India so he wouldn't get drafted by the IDF.
That same year, there was a big blowup because a guy in Mumbai opened a clothing boutique that was just named Hitler.
The pictures are pretty wild.
It's like a high-end mall fashion store with a big glowing Hitler logo.
And there's even a swastika and the dot on the eye.
And the owner of the shop, Rajesh Shah, expressed shock that people were angry, telling the AFP, I didn't know how much the name would disturb people.
It was only when the store opened I learned Hitler had killed six million people.
What?
Wow.
Yeah, that's a real, that's a real problem for you, huh?
Wow.
Wow.
It is, you know, very similarly, when I wanted to start this podcast, the first name that I wanted to launch it under was just Jeffrey Dahmer.
Sophie had to inform me that there was actually a problematic context with that name.
And what could that be?
You know, Sophie, actually, I forgot.
What's that?
Is there somebody with that name or something?
Robert's trying to do a bit here, but he's, this is literally a factual story.
I believe it.
The Jeffrey Dahmer cast.
Draw some eyes, you know?
And our sales team was like, oh, I don't know.
We do a lot of meal kit services.
I don't know how well that'll go.
An American horror story.
I mean, then we just get Dahmer in the TV show.
Look, I don't support his murders, but I am a big fan of the way in which they use different spices.
You know, look, you can divorce the man from the art.
This should be the end of the bit.
So let's go.
This is all very dumb.
No one should use Hitler as a brand ambassador or try to divorce his management secrets from his crimes.
For one thing, he was a bad manager.
They didn't win for good reason.
It's not the boss bitch you think.
It's not the boss bitch you think.
This is not a thing a person should have to say, right?
No.
But it's when we get back to the U.S., which has both a large Jewish population and a lot of folks who are descended from, you know, who are Indian, right?
Soviet Union Symbol Origins00:08:57
Who are Desi, who, you know, are Hindu or Buddhist.
It's when we get here that things get very messy.
Because in India, again, very normal to see swastikas.
It is not a problem, you know, if you've got that as a religious symbol, you know, in your house, you know, in your clothing and a decoration.
And obviously, I don't think no reasonable person would ask that a whole culture stop using a religious symbol because some assholes used a similar one.
But it's a little more complicated in the U.S., where you've got lots of Holocaust survivors and their descendants who are going to have a powerful gut reaction to seeing something like that.
My gut wants to say, look, the Hindu swastika is not the Hagenkroy.
It shouldn't be, we should be able to talk about this, but like, it's also not that simple, right?
And this is not, I hope, I don't want to come across, let's lead into here.
Neither side's wrong here.
I'm not going to come down like condemning either group.
This is like a really messy problem, but it isn't.
It is interesting to me.
And I don't think enough people know that this is a thing that is an issue.
So there have always been a significant chunk of Indian people, of Hindu people, I should say, because a lot of Indians are Muslim, who took umbrage at the thought that most of the world had kind of tossed the swastika aside because of the Nazis.
In 1979, a Sanskrit scholar, P. R. Sarkar, claimed that it was the symbol of permanent victory and that like any symbol, it had positive and negative meanings.
His argument was that the right-hand swastika was the symbol of Vishnu, while the left hand, which is kind of the one that the Nazis used, was the symbol of Kali.
Starting in the early 1990s with the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian far-right organizations and other fascist political groups in the former Warsaw Pact nations started to revive the swastika for different reasons.
Obviously, for whatever, for all of its, you know, the different things that were culturally problematic in the Soviet Union, one thing they're good about is you're not allowed to display swastikas in the Soviet Union, right?
Shouldn't have to explain why.
But once the Soviet Union falls, because it had been banned for so long and because the right had been, you know, in their eyes, suppressed for so long, it gets taken up as this symbol for all of these different right-wing national movements who are trying to revive it.
And Stephen Heller writes here, quote, the Soviet Union and Tsarist Russia before it was riddled with anti-Semitism.
Similarly, in the early 1990s, there emerged a virulent strain among ultra-right-wing groups calling for old-fashioned pogroms and new-styled ethnic cleansing.
While nestled on the fringe, this decidedly organized melange of monarchists, neo-fascist, and Pamyat, or memory organizations, openly hawked their ideologies on the street until Boris Yeltsin's October 1993 emergency decrees banned opposition media.
Polemical newspapers with the titles Russia Arise, the Russian New Order and People's Business, featuring realistic drawings of heroic-looking black-shirted Russian stormtroopers, scabrous anti-Semitic caricatures, and portraits of Adolf Hitler himself were unashamedly displayed at sidewalk tables throughout Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Various iterations of the swastika, sometimes combined with historic Russian folk iconography, were also in full view.
A visitor to Moscow reported that it was impossible to walk a block without running into at least one of these displays.
And this will feed into a lot of the issues that we have in Ukraine and in Russia right now with different Nazi organizations, right?
This is where a lot of that has its kind of origin point.
And while it is coming back into use in Eastern Europe, it is also starting to get revived in the 80s and 90s in the United States as a symbol for the right.
Now, the swastika has this really awkward position in U.S. counterculture since the end of the Second World War.
The first place, obviously, George Lincoln Rockwell attempts to bring it back with his American Nazi Party, but that's always decidedly fringe.
The first kind of place where you'll see it commonly is biker gangs.
And specifically, Hunter Thompson is actually the journalist who did some of the first good reporting on this in his book, Hells Angels.
But biker gangs in the post-World War II era form primarily out of like vets, guys who had never been able to integrate into post-war society.
And a lot of them had fought Nazis and they had medals and helmets and other booty taken from the Germans, some of which had swastikas, which they would wear on their like motorcycle gear, both to shock and to signal like, yeah, I'm an outsider.
I'm on the fringe, but I did my time for my country too.
So it's kind of a symbol of valor at the same time.
It's a comp, let's say it's a complicated symbol.
But that was part of the intention at least was like, not like, I am a Nazi, but I fought Nazis.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Part of the intention.
Some of them are Nazis.
And we're getting to that.
This means that a number of the first proto-punk types, because a lot of punk culture in the United States has come out of these biker gangs, wore swastikas and stall helms because they had fought Nazis.
But also a lot of these guys are violently anti-communist.
And so it becomes complicated.
Another group that wears the swastika commonly in the 1960s are surf bums, right?
Like surf bums have a lot of different swastika.
A lot of early surfing equipment shops have swastikas or variations of Nazi iconography in their logos.
It is not uncommon in the 60s.
And a lot of this kind of translates to some of the first punks in the 1970s, some of whom are Nazis and some of whom are just trying to like trigger people.
Like transgressive behavior.
Yeah.
Exactly.
In the book Subculture, the Meaning of Style, author Dick Hebridge relates that one female punk explained to him, punks just like to be hated.
Sure, for sure.
It's the quickest way to get hated.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so there's all these weird like surf brands and early skating brands that will use pieces of Nazi iconography and will claim they don't have far-right sympathies.
Some of them do and like become part of, you know, kind of, and some of them don't and are just kind of being edgelords.
You know, we didn't have that term at the time, but all of this is mixed.
And the people who are just kind of being edgelords do, it's fair to criticize, provide cover to the actual straight up Nazis.
You know, they provide sort of space for this to get accepted among people.
It allows some recruitment.
This is all happening alongside a surge in the late 80s, early 90s in actual Nazi organizing and the establishment of groups like White Aryan Resistance, who ape aspects of a punk aesthetic.
You might say pseudo-ironic use of the swastika gives cover to real Nazis.
Now, all of this makes the issue of Hindu people, of Buddhists, of Native Americans in the United States and elsewhere in the West trying to reclaim the swastika very complicated, right?
Because you get people who are Hindu or Buddhist being like, I should be able to utilize this symbol that is a religious symbol for me.
That's a cultural symbol that I saw as a kid.
And you do have members of different indigenous tribes who had used the swastika, some whom are saying like, well, maybe we should be able to go back to it now.
It has been like nearly 100 years.
Like we feel like we did our bit here.
And this is complex.
I'm going to quote from a 2022 AP News article here that sort of sets up the stakes.
She telled Dio was shocked when she got a letter from her Queen's Apartment building's co-op board calling her Diwali decoration offensive and demanding she take it down.
My decoration said happy Diwali and had a swastika on it, said Dio, a physician who was celebrating the Hindu Festival of Lights.
Dio believes she and people of other faiths should not have to sacrifice or apologize for a sacred symbol simply because it has often conflated with its tainted version.
To me, that's intolerable, she said.
And like, yeah, that's a fair point.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, they're fighting against 90s edge lords who are like spray painting it at the skate park to be like, oh, look at this.
Like, you know, this is complex.
Yeah.
And among the people who had issue with Dio's display for Diwali decoration was Shelly Wernick, who is the managing director of the Jewish Federation's Holocaust Survivor Care Wing.
And she points out that seeing a swastika at home or out and about can be re-traumatizing for elderly survivors, which is also a fair point.
But of course, seeing that in any context could really mess you up, you know?
I nobody's, I don't, I, I'm not, there's not like a, any, no one's in the wrong here, right?
I'm not like this is complicated.
Um, you know what else is complicated, Kelsey?
What is that?
The moral dimensions of advertising products and services in order to support a podcast.
You're telling me.
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
And that's why we just kind of ignore it.
Here's some ads.
Complicated Moral Dimensions00:03:03
What's up, everyone?
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My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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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, what did I?
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.
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A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon, and I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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The cops didn't seem to care.
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Sacred Symbols vs Mass Murder00:10:49
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Ah, we're back and feeling good.
Feeling good.
So one of the people quoted in that really quite fascinating AP News article is a New York-based Buddhist priest who was disturbed when he heard somebody at an interfaith conference call the swastika the universal symbol of evil.
And whatever your stance on the matter is, that simply can't be correct, right?
Like this is still, there's like a billion or more people for whom this is still a religious symbol.
Hitler doesn't have the power to make that a universal symbol of evil, right?
Like that is, I think, a bad way to phrase it.
Widely recognized as a symbol of evil is true because a lot of people do recognize it this way, you know?
Anyway, complicated.
This Buddhist, the Reverend T.K. Nakagaki, wrote a book in 2018 called The Buddhist Swastika and Hitler's Cross, Rescuing a Symbol of Peace from the Forces of Hate.
And one thing that he points out, because he's a big advocate of we should call the symbol that is sacred to all these different peoples the swastika, or presumably when you're talking about like the Navajo, you would use the term the whirling log.
But when we refer to the Nazi use of the symbol, we should call it the Hagenkroy, right?
And one thing he points out that I was unaware of is that in newspapers across the United States, the Nazi cross was referred to as the Hagenkroy until the early 1930s when they used the term swastika.
Now, I get his point here.
I don't think that that's like necessarily wrong, but it is worth noting that the Nazis call it a swastika a lot of the time too.
Like it is being used by them at that point in time.
And I, to be quite frank, at this point, I don't know how you get people to stop in the West to associate Hagenkroy with the Nazis, but not swastika.
That's impossible to ask.
Yeah.
Like you have an easier time with like whirling log, right?
Yeah, for sure.
Now, there are legitimate harms that all of this causes for members of faiths who have done nothing wrong.
In California, public display of the swastika has been criminalized.
There are exceptions for this, including the sacred swastika used by Hindus, but it does not call the illegal swastika a Hagenkroy and instead uses the term swastika, which could confuse law enforcement and might conceivably lead to problems.
Even the worry of this itself could cause a chilling effect on religious expression.
Quote, Pushpita Prasad, a spokesperson for the Hindu group, called it a victory, but said the legislation unfortunately labels both Hitler's symbol and the sacred one as swastikas.
This is not just an esoteric battle, Prasad said, but an issue with real-life consequences for immigrant communities whose members have resorted to self-censoring.
Vickus Jane, a Cleveland physician, said that he and his wife hid images containing the symbol when their children's friends visited because they wouldn't know the difference.
Jane says he stands in solidarity with the Jewish community, but is sad that he cannot freely practice his Jain faith because of this lack of understanding.
He noted that the global Jain symbol has a swastika in it, but in the United States, the Jain community has deliberately removed the swastika from its seal.
Jane wishes that people would differentiate between their symbol of peace and Hitler's swastika, just as they do with the hateful burning cross symbol in Christianity's sacred crucifix, which I think is a really good point.
That is a really good point.
Certain uses of the Christian cross are definitely offensive and frightening, but we don't say nobody should be wearing a crucifix, right?
Now, there's also a growing movement in some indigenous circles to end the years-long prohibition on their use of the swastika or the whirling log.
The consternation over this by some Jewish organizations is understandable, as is the desire of people to return to their use of the symbol.
Again, no one's wrong here.
You know, it's complicated.
And I'm going to continue with a quote from that AP article.
For the Navajo people, the symbol shaped like a swirl represents the universe and life, said Patricia Ann Davis, an elder at the Choctaw and Dina.
Dina is the term for the Navajo people that is actually used by them for themselves.
It was a spiritual esoteric symbol that was woven into the Navajo rugs until Hitler took something good and beautiful and made it twisted, she said.
And I think, again, I want to say here, I'm not saying either that like Jewish organizations have like a black and white necessarily view about this.
Again, there's a lot of appreciation on both sides about what a complex and thorny problem this is.
And I don't think anyone's really behaving unreasonably here.
Jeff Kelman, a New Hampshire Holocaust historian, often lectures to Jewish community organizations about the fundamental differences between the swastika and the Hagenkroy.
And he told the AP he feels like his message about the possibility of redeeming the symbol has gained recent ground among many Jewish survivors and descendants of survivors.
Quote, when they learn an Indian girl could be named swastika and she could be harassed in school, they understand how they should see these as two separate symbols, he said.
No one in the Jewish community wants to see Hitler's legacy continue to harm people.
One of the people quoted in that article is Greta Elbigan.
She's an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor whose grandmother and cousins died at Auschwitz, were murdered at Auschwitz.
And she says she was surprised to learn about the symbol's past.
Elbigen was born in 1938 when the Nazis forcibly annexed Austria.
She went into hiding with relatives in Hungary and immigrated to the U.S. in 1956 and became a social worker.
This new knowledge about the swastika, Elbigan said, feels liberating.
She no longer fears a symbol that was used to terrorize.
Hearing that the swastika is beautiful and sacred to so many people is a blessing, she said.
It's time to let go of the past and look into the future.
And I'm not saying that that's the only way to think about it either.
If you're on the side of this is like a person who is a descendant of Holocaust survivors going like, I don't feel comfortable with this.
That's perfectly reasonable too.
This is like, again, it's very complicated.
What all of this speaks to is like just the just the incredible power of symbols, right?
To the human race.
It's just so amazing that this same orb like a riff on a similar symbol can mean both good luck and this huge hero's journey and this powerful religious story.
Well, on the other hand, it's a symbol of actual mass murder and horror and deaths, but it's the same symbol.
It's just the power that we have as humans to project onto that whatever we need to or want to or believe and accept the symbols that are given to us by people in power who have an idea about what this symbol can mean and what it can do.
It's wild.
Yeah.
There's a lot going on here.
So I just wanted people to be aware of that, not to take, you know, one side or the other, or not that the sides I've presented are the only ways to feel about this.
This is a tremendously complicated thing to think about.
And but it is worth thinking about.
This is something you should, as a just as a person, not even as just like somebody who's Jane or somebody who's, you know, Navajo, somebody who's Jewish, that you should be thinking about, but just as like a human being, because this is one way or the other, regardless of where you land, this is everyone's symbol.
It is universal to the human race, more or less, right?
It appears everywhere, every place in the world.
And it always has experience of this, huh?
And it always has.
Yeah.
It always is so wild.
It was in Ohio.
It was in fucking Ohio.
It's all over.
It's in fucking China.
God, it's everywhere.
Mount Swastika.
I'm not over that.
Mount Swastika, Oregon.
Yeah.
Gosh, and it's so hard because you can't be in solidarity with everyone in this situation.
I mean, you can try to be by just solidarity for like, wow, this is messy.
Yeah.
And I'd say that's the best way to have solidarity is just to say, like, I actually can't say the answer.
I can't say I can respect everyone in this situation who's trying to like make a better world through either readopting a symbol or making it disappear.
It's like, I think it's probably the kind of thing where the only real solutions are ad hoc, you know?
Yeah.
If you've got a situation where members of, you know, a local Jewish community and are sitting down with members of like a Jain community or whatever, and they're, they're talking about how to allow, you know, how to have the symbol expressed in its original religious meaning in a way that's not going to make people uncomfortable.
That's fine.
If you've got, you know, somebody wants to display a Diwali thing in their apartment building and there's an elderly Holocaust survivor and they decide, well, I guess we won't put this outside because it might scare this elderly person.
And like, we don't want to do that.
I think that's also reasonable.
I think if another thing happens, there's not, I don't have, I don't have like a clear, there's the wrong or the right thing to do here.
This is just like one of the legacies of World War II, but also just a thing that human beings always have to deal with is the, yeah, I don't know.
It's complicated.
Very complicated.
People should be aware that it's a thing.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
I am so happy that this was the topic that I got because I just, I can't believe I didn't know this.
I'm absolutely just shocked and awed at all of this.
Yeah.
If you want a really good book on the subject, The Swastika Symbol Beyond Redemption, question mark by Stephen Heller.
Very readable.
Whenever this comes up, whenever there's an issue of like somebody displays a swastika for a religious reason and it causes like a conflict, Stephen usually gets interviewed by like the journalists writing about it because he's just like the guy who writes about this.
Very good book.
I do recommend it if you're interested in more detail.
Anyway, Chelsea, you got anything to plug?
Sure.
I mean, I'm just, you know what?
I will specifically plug an episode of my podcast, American Hysteria, called Astrology and the series we did because it deals with not only astrologers as they existed in the White House and advising for Sony, which is a, yes, yep, you know, you know, but it also goes into how the Nazis used astrologers as like secret agents as well to sort of push propaganda.
And that just seems like kind of in the same vein of this series here.
Plugging American Hysteria00:02:46
And yeah, American Hysteria, you can find it anywhere.
We study moral panics, urban legends, conspiracy theories, and how they've affected American history.
Hell yeah.
Yeah.
Well, you can find me right here.
You can find my novel After the Revolution wherever books are sold.
Just type After the Revolution into any book thing or again, screech it from the top of your lungs while waving some sort of carved war club at the guy who runs the Barnes ⁇ Noble, you know?
Or Applebee's.
Or Applebee.
Fuck him up.
Oh, sorry.
Yeah, or Applebee's, whatever.
That's the episode.
That's the episode.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
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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.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
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 the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.