G. Gordon Liddy emerges as a "bone-deep fascist" whose ideology stemmed from childhood Nazi indoctrination by his German housekeeper, Teresa, and exposure to the "Horst Wessel Song," clashing with his anti-Nazi lawyer father's influence. Farrell contrasts Liddy's committed extremism with modern grifters like Alex Jones, detailing Liddy's violent training, including butchering chickens and building a rifle, driven by a psychological need to conquer inadequacy. Ultimately, the episode reveals Watergate as the culmination of a lifelong obsession with violence and Hitler worship, exposing Liddy not as a mere opportunist but as a dangerously unstable figure whose self-mythologizing masked deep-seated fascist pathology. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:02:13
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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.
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Oh, well, see, I was doing it as you were doing it.
I could have done it.
I really would have done it for you.
I will do that.
Well, this is Behind the Bastards, a podcast where I will not do an impression of Sophie because I want to keep our working relationship healthy.
The Pattern Emerges00:15:07
No, please.
Please, please do it.
Please, dude, that's how you sound.
We are, wow, this is a podcast about the worst people in all of history.
Speaking of the worst people in all of history, Andrew T. I am the king.
No, not the worst person in all of history, but you're fighting some of the worst people in all of history on the front lines of the strike against those Hollywood motherfuckers.
It really is.
I guess I should be more specific, but yes.
Those other, those bad Hollywoods.
You are all the bad Hollywood motherfuckers.
Yeah, I'm on, I'm on strike.
I'm a member of the Writers Guild of America.
And also, I realized the other day I did a project for Writers Guild of Canada, which I don't really know how that all worked, but I did have to sign some paperwork.
So exciting.
Exciting.
Might have a union up north of the border also.
But yeah, it is like the clowns that run the studios.
It's shocking, like how if they were doing their jobs remotely correctly, no one reasonable would know their names.
No.
No.
Like, not one of them.
No, there's only fucking wild outside of the current crop of studio heads.
There is only one studio executive I can name, and it's my namesake, Robert Evans.
Not because of anything he did as a studio head, but because of his contributions to cocaine sciences, which I do respect.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's, I mean, there's like reasons one might know about them, but honestly, like I, a person who's worked in, you know, television for years now, prior to the strike, like, I guess I knew who Bob Iger was.
Yeah, that's Disney, but the Disney.
It.
Yeah.
I don't think any of us had any like, I don't know.
You'd hear their names, but it'd be one in one ear or the other.
Like they should be anonymous, rich shadows that everyone knows.
Cash checks for millions of dollars a year and had nobody know who they are or be angry at them.
But they wanted tens of millions of dollars a year.
And so they've decided to cause problems for themselves.
Like, I think, by the way, you're even that joke is off by an order of magnitude.
Yeah, you're right.
Like to baseline hundreds and try to get millions or billions.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's probably more accurate.
Speaking of corrupt motherfuckers.
Yeah.
Andrew.
What do you know about G. Gordon Liddy?
Less than I should.
Yeah, everyone does.
Now, we've, I don't think this violates any of the WGA stuff.
There were two big Watergate shows that launched recently, like all TV shows about historical moments.
Both of them are wrong in specific, interesting ways and accurate in other more minor ways.
Neither of them really get into, both of them feature G. Gordon Liddy.
Neither of them really accurately describe him as a person.
Like one of them kind of picks the, he was this absolute unhinged, like maniac fucking cartoon character.
And one of them like portrays him as like this violent psychopath.
And the reality is he was like, there were pieces of that in him.
And he is, he is a crazy, he's one of the craziest bastards to ever be involved in American politics.
But neither of them, neither of them quite get it.
I think what's most fascinating about this weirdo.
He is such a fucking weirdo.
And so, you know, there's plenty of Watergate podcasts.
Like you can, you can spend a whole week learning about Watergate, listening to like five different fucking shows on the matter.
I really just wanted to focus on G. Gordon Liddy, both because I grew up, he was definitely on the radio a lot when I was a kid.
So I have a lot of experience with Mr. Liddy, but also he is, he's the prototype of all of these fucking right-wing media freaks that we are deluged with today.
Think like, and they're all, they're all aping G. Gordon Liddy.
Stephen Crowder, you know, whenever he wears his fucking shoulder holster to go, you know, be a little fucking abusive prick on his, on his dumbass fucking political YouTube show or whatever.
I guess he's on Rumble now.
Alex Jones, when he like lies about all these hardcore violence he's done and how tough he is, how he could kill a man without blinking, you know, Enrique Tario talking about how like, you know, oh, I don't regret anything.
Ha ha ha.
Oh, please don't throw me in prison for 22 years, Mr. Jeff.
Like they are, they are all aping aspects of G. Gordon Liddy, but none of them, none of them have what Liddy had in the center.
None of them are, number one, none of them are actually as committed.
They're all grifters.
And Liddy had some grifter in him, but Liddy was a believer.
He was a believer in terrible things.
But he was, he was not like, he was not like all of those, the guys I just named are completely hollow in their center.
Liddy was not.
Now, the center of him was something like dark and evil and like unsettling and greasy, but there was, there was mass there, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, you're still, yeah, certain kinds of dark chocolate, but the darkest of chocolate.
I getcha.
Right.
That's the innovation is, or I guess, right?
That's what makes you the OG is like actually believing the shit as being like a clear shill.
Yeah, he's, he was not just a shill.
I mean, that was a part of him.
Um, and in fact, he's like one of, I think he might be the first of these guys to like really get into shilling gold.
So that's interesting.
He's, he's fascinating.
Again, there's, there's, there's both, there's some weight to him.
Um, there's a degree he's an he's an original too.
All of these guys are very much consciously aping G. Gordon Liddy.
And Liddy was an original figure, you know.
The other thing that's interesting about Liddy is that he wrote an autobiography.
And it is like, number one, most of the time when you get these guys who are at the center of like a massive political, you think about, think about the Trump administration, right?
How within like a month or two of him, honestly, like while he was still in office, there were fucking books coming out left and right.
As soon as one of these guys would get fired, right?
You know, somebody would get like $2 million and hooked up with a ghostwriter, bada bing, bada boom.
You've got, you know, fucking the mooch's memoir about his week in the Trump White House or whatever.
Yeah, the room where it happened starring some guy whose name I've already fucking forgotten.
Yeah.
From Twitter, from all these fucking weirdos.
But it was like, you know, these are cash grabs, right?
Most of these are cash grabs.
You know, again, you're, you're sort of stretching out someone who probably doesn't have that much that's interesting to say.
So you can get a couple of anecdotes that'll go viral in like a business insider article.
And you're just kind of hoping that like, yeah, the, the, the, the fame of the administration will make the book worth whatever they're paying for it.
Liddy's, there's a lot of that for Watergate, right?
All of these guys write books.
You know, John Dean's got his fucking book, you know, and Liddy writes a book after he gets out of prison.
Liddy writes his own book.
And it is, like, I, I, I read part of what I do is I like read anytime, you know, I'm covering one of these bastards and they've written a book about their life.
I'll get in there.
I have never read a crazier autobiography than G. Gordon Liddy's.
And it is, it is pure Liddy, right?
We're not talking about this is not like, you know, adulterated by some fucking publishing house trying to massage his image.
He's trying to massage his image, sharing points, but like it is, it is a, it's like that, you know, we did for about a year, you know, off and on, my friends Katie Cody and I would talk about Ben Shapiro's novel because like when once some somebody writes a novel, you can't not learn things about them, right?
From that process.
You get so much more with Liddy's autobiography.
So episode one is largely going to be us reading through his depiction of his early life and childhood.
And I will be fact checking it wherever I can.
There's a lot I can't fact check, right?
Because Liddy's talking about like what he was thinking and feeling as like an eight-year-old, right?
I can't, I don't have outside.
I'm not going to like refer to John Dean's memoir, you know.
But we will bring it out.
So, you know, I read Dean's memoir for this too.
I read a book called King Richard.
You know, we've got a bunch of other sort of a number of other sources on like the Watergate stuff and on his career before Watergate and is in the FBI.
But for this early part, we're just going to be Liddy, you know, that's going to be a significant amount of what we talk about.
So without further ado, I guess I should roll roll in with this.
Are you ready to learn about Let's Get Liddy?
Sorry.
About our best Republican.
Yeah.
That's the thing is G. Gordon Liddy would be such a great name for like a SoundCloud rapper that that's the real tragedy.
Yeah.
It is.
He was born too early.
Tragic.
Daniel, can you add just like a let's get Liddy?
And then can you add just like some really awesome sound effect here, please?
Sure.
Let's get Liddy.
I don't understand this, but I'm going to soldierly.
Dana will understand the reference because he's wanted me to soldier forward.
He never thought about what was happening either.
George Gordon Battle Liddy was born on November 30th, 1930 in Brooklyn, New York.
His father, Sylvester, was a lawyer and stockbroker.
He would eventually be one of the men responsible for bringing Volvo to the United States.
So we have G. Gordon Liddy's dad to thank for American Volvos, if you're a Volvo driver.
His mother, Maria.
That's not nothing.
His mother, Maria, was a homemaker.
Now, I just read his name, Gordon Battle Liddy.
Given the fact that he is a violent madman, or at least he puts on the image of a violent madman as an adult.
I'm going to guess everyone's wondering, like, what the fuck is the story behind that name?
But like, the fact is, as far as I can tell, his parents weren't like nuts, right?
And the story here is actually like pretty tame.
It's kind of interesting, but it's not like wild.
He's named, his namesake was a New York lawyer and Democratic politician named George Gordon Battle, which is a pretty cool guy or pretty cool name.
And he seemed to have been a pretty cool guy.
He was defense attorney for Earl Browder, who was the head of the U.S. Communist Party.
He helped raise money for a number of really good causes.
He was the chairman of the National Committee on Prison Labor Reform.
And he's one of the men who fought hard to stop Central Park from being developed, right?
From like it being replaced with like buildings and shit, right?
Oh, sure, sure.
He was childless, but he spent his entire working life fighting to add more public playgrounds to New York City.
If you grew up in New York City and spent time on a playground, Gordon Battle, George Battle has a lot to do with that.
And in the late 1920s, seeing what was going on in Europe, he became a tireless opponent of anti-Semitism for the last act of his life.
So yeah, like a pretty cool guy, as far as I can tell.
This might key you into the fact that G. Gordon Liddy's parents were not politically the kind of people you might expect to like raise a fascist political criminal, right?
Like they were not like, it's not one of these cases where you've got like, you know, super hard right family who's like really mentally abusive to their kid and you're just like, oh, I see why this dude grew up to be a piece of shit.
No, like, again, they're not perfect people.
Like, we'll cover some of that, but they seem to have not been the folks you might expect, right?
And the story of how they wound up raising this maniac anyway is fascinating.
So he grows up affluent.
His family is kind of upper middle class when he's a little kid and like rich by the time he's in his teens.
I think would be fair to say.
Despite the affluence, Liddy's early childhood was not pleasant.
This was not due specifically, primarily to his parents' actions, but rather to a quirk of his psychology.
He was terrified of everything.
Now, in his defense, his world was frightening.
The world of 1930 is a scary place to be a child.
And this was kind of exacerbated by the fact that the family home lay directly underneath the path of the Hindenburg Zeppelin.
So as a little kid, his earliest memory is this monster in the sky, just like barreling over his house, making this terrifying noise.
In his autobiography, he recalls being just absolutely piss horrified by the quote bloated shapes swelling and roaring with incredible power as it came on and on, trapping me in the bottom of the box and blotting out the sky.
The box in this instance is his backyard in Hoboken, um, where the family moved soon after his birth.
But, like, yeah, that's his earliest memory is like the Hindenburg terrifying him thinking there's like a dragon in the sky above him.
He was now, he may be lying about.
He was not yet two when this happened, and like, so I always kind of a little grain of salt when people talk about remembering shit that happens with their two, but it does people do remember from that time, so not impossible.
And I guess I don't know why he would lie about this.
Yeah, yeah, it's always like the world's most awful people are the world's most scared people in a way that it's like so you know, it would be cute if you didn't give these people half the, you know, any of the power they have.
This is this is why we need to be so careful about like not giving people power because yeah, you can't you never know what's going on.
You want you see like a kid at the playground, that kid could be brewing up some Hitler particles, right?
Like, you never know what's going on in their heads.
So, uh, I'm gonna read a quote from his autobiography here: I had been walking for six months, but due to the concern of my mother, I hadn't yet spoken an intelligible word.
I began, or to the concern of my mother, I hadn't yet spoken an intelligible word.
I began to speak immediately to articulate my first memory: absolute overwhelming fear.
So he starts speaking to try to express to his mom how scared he is of the Zeppelin.
Um, now his second memory uh comes in the spring of 1934 when he and his mother and sister had moved to DC temporarily.
Living in Fear of God00:14:09
Their grandfather was dying of terminal cancer, and Sylvester wanted to care for his father.
I think he didn't want the family to have to be there.
Maybe their grandpa didn't want like his grandkids to see him like that.
Um, but while he was there, he experienced like while you know, he's living with his mom in DC, there's like a fire drill at the building they're living, like a surprise fire drill.
And he's too young to really understand it.
So he recalls experiencing absolute overwhelming fear.
Quote, the early memories that follow are still fragmented, but the theme is common.
Lying on the floor as my paternal grandmother lashed me with a leather harness, shouting, bad, bad, fear.
My mother insisting I not use my left hand as she forced me into right-handedness, and my inability to understand why.
More fear.
Rounding the corner and coming upon a truck-mounted vacuum, a giant air host snaking across the sidewalk from a huge bag, suction engine roaring as it cleaned the flus of coal furnaces.
Running from the sound and the threat, no certainty that I would be sucked inside the monster bag.
Fear.
Soon, my every waking moment was ruled by that overriding emotion, fear.
So you've got this mix of like, yeah, understandable stuff.
Like, yeah, his grandma was, you know, very aggressive with her punishment of him.
I don't think uncommonly so for the era, but like that's a scary thing to deal with.
His mom didn't want him to be left-handed and like that scared him.
And then like just shit he encountered these like nightmare vacuums driving around cleaning out flus and shit.
You know, he's just scared of everything as a kid.
So wild.
That also, though, I will say, having said the last thing, I guess if he's taking all these pains to, I guess, I'm just so conditioned to assume he's like a lying lunatic that if he's trying to convince us how scared he was, now I'm thinking he simply wasn't.
I mean, maybe, right?
Like, that's the thing.
One way or the other, it does say a lot about him, but like, right, I don't know.
I don't know why he would lie about this in particular.
I guess, you know, because it builds to something later, but like, yeah, I don't find this unbelievable.
Like, when I was in elementary school, I had a teacher who like would harass me about using my left hand, right?
Like, that was not an uncommon thing back then, especially for Catholics, right?
And it's written to this is like post-jail, though.
I guess it's like, yeah, it's 1980, he writes.
Is like, this is how I'm trying to justify my the way I am.
That would be my only thought as to whether or not it's a lie, but the emphasis on this.
Yeah.
Because the other counterpoint is everything he described is very common.
Yeah.
A lot of people are afraid of those things.
I don't see how you're more afraid of those things.
A lot of kids grow.
I think what's interesting is sort of his reaction to the fear, but he has, as we'll talk about, he develops a, I don't think the fear that he has is abnormal because a lot of kids get scared of weird shit.
I think his, the, um, his obsession with like his fear as a failing, a moral failing for him is, is the thing that is look what I overcame.
Yeah, that is kind of where we're going here.
Um, so he's also a sickly kid.
Um, he has probably, I think it would be asthma.
Um, and so his, his treatment for this is that he would spend hours every day in a tent in his bedroom breathing medicated steam with a mustard plast, a mustard plast on his chest.
Uh, the goal there was to relieve mucus congestion to stop his persistent cough.
And it's here I should note something, which is that G. Gordon Liddy and I actually have a lot in common because I had the, I had the modern version of that.
When I was a kid, I had asthma and I would have to spend hours almost every night hooked up to this weird machine the size of a projector that like pumped albuterol mist into my lungs.
Like that was like a thing that I had to do as a little kid.
Um, which I was like reading that was weird because I was like, oh, yeah, I've been through that, you know?
And it's not, I think Liddy's certainly, that's Liddy's experience seems like it was more physically unpleasant, but even like mine was not painful, but it is this weird thing that kind of separates you from like other kids, from your brothers and sisters, from your family members and stuff.
Like the fact that you have to spend all this time like attached to this machine.
Like I'm sure it had sounds to do something, you know?
A sick.
Yeah.
In order to keep breathing, right?
Yeah.
My asthma was ever that bad, but I did have a trip where I came back.
And yeah, I had the, I think they had a manual version of this at the at the urgent care, which was just like, I don't know, a fucking fire extinguishers volume.
Albuterol.
Yeah.
What we need, I don't understand why these don't exist, Andrew, is albuterol cigarettes.
I would smoke those still, you know?
I just want to chain smoke for health, you know?
It's probably not impossible to get a little vape cartridge of albuterol, right?
Just vaping albuterol.
Like, you know, just blowing.
I'm staying healthy.
I don't know about you fuckers.
Blowing steroid clouds.
Steroid cotton.
This is a 50-50 mix of albuterol and tobacco.
Oh my God.
That would make my flavors.
That would burst my heart.
Yeah.
Seems healthy.
So yeah, he's got this experience that I think probably to a degree separates him from, and you have to, when you're doing this, Liddy is always a guy who lives inside his head to a significant extent.
He's, and that's part of why he's so unhinged is he's all he's thinking about like very strange things all the time.
His mind is like nonstop going in these kind of manic circles that is part of why he becomes like the plotter that he becomes.
And I think, you know, given that I went through something similar, I kind of might tie some of it back to that.
Like it's hard not to just sort of get stuck in your own head a lot when you have that as an early life experience.
His grandpa dies in 35 and the family moves back to Hoboken together.
You know, and he's, he, you know, is a is a weird little kid.
He recalls being, because he's kind of raised in the city and the suburbs, absolutely terrified of the natural world as a little kid.
Nature was so alien to him that, like, one of his earliest fears is the fact that moths would arrive at nighttime.
Quote, I had been frightened for the first time a moth fluttered against my bedroom window on a warm summer night.
The light threw a giant shadow on the opposite wall, terrifying me.
Frantic screams, then my mother explaining it was just a harmless moth, or perhaps a miller.
From that moment on, the night was filled with giant moth millers out to get me.
I knew it.
So my fear grew each to experience breeding more.
So he's by, at least if you believe his sort of recitation of events, he is just stacking up these like very normal experiences that are deeply traumatizing to him.
And like, yeah.
I guess it's like, I mean, right now, I am, I see what you're saying about like, why would he make this up in this detail and this like, yeah, I think some of this must be true.
Does he play it up?
Sure.
I mean, that's the kind of guy Liddy is, you know?
And I also think I'm certain the way, you know, this happens to all of us to some extent.
Over time, you know, your memories, you think on them, you change them, you tell stories, you know, maybe you, you jazz something up for a story you tell somebody and like that makes it into your memory, right?
So I think there's probably to some, obviously, as happens to most people.
Because I do think he probably believes a lot of this, whether or not it's all literally true.
Another one of his most searing, in a literal sense, early moments is later that same summer, you know, where he becomes terrified of moths.
His parents take him camping in the woods, maybe to try to get him over that fear.
And in the morning, he's like poking around their campfire spot and he picks up a coal that he doesn't realize is burning and it like hurts him.
It burns his hand.
Now, I think most kids have a version of that.
I burnt myself on a car lighter by accident when I was a kid.
We used to have those.
If you're a Gen Z kid, we used to have cigarette lighters built into every car.
If you want to know how much your grandparents smoked, that was just the world for a while.
Yeah, an electronic lighter.
Yeah.
Not a flame.
No, it's a hot coil.
I tried to pick up a spent sparkler moments after it had gone out.
Yeah.
Not wise.
Again, almost a, I'm going to guess very close to 100% of people listening, whether or not they remember it at a moment like this.
It's basically every kid, you know, touches something hot at some point and hurts themselves.
Liddy describes this as investing in him a pathological fear of both fire and pain.
And his suffering increased when his doctor prescribed him regular hypodermic injections for his respiratory.
I think these are allergy shots, which I also got as a kid.
So again, this becomes like this constant regular, because he's doing this every month.
This is just like this endless fucking train of horror for him where like he's just constantly dreading the next time he's going to go get the shot and deal with this pain.
Right.
At the same time, he develops, you know, what's going to be his worst childhood terror, which is a fear of God.
Again, very common.
His family is.
This poor kid is just miserable.
His family is super Catholic and he goes to a Catholic school that Liddy refers to exclusively as SS.
I believe the S's stand for it's the Peter and Paul Roman Catholic Church.
I think the two S's are St. Peter and St. Paul.
But he's also, he talks about the Nazi SS constantly in this book in moments where it has nothing to do with what he's like referencing.
Like he just, he loves bringing up the SS.
So I don't think anyone else called the school this.
I think he was just, he found another way he could write SS out.
And so he had to do it.
I mean, that's another thing the modern Rein loves to do is just remind you that they love Nazis.
Just a little bit.
Oh, Andrew, Hitler didn't love the Nazis as much as G. Gordon Liddy did.
Like this guy.
It's so funny.
Here's how he describes his religious upbringing.
Quote, God, we were informed, was omnipotent.
Unlimited power demanded and deserved the utmost reverence and deference and left no room for a sloppily performed sign of the cross.
An imprecise sign of the cross was an insult to God, punishable by a sudden crack on the head from monitoring nuns.
Such punishment was to be received gratefully.
Otherwise, retribution might come from God himself.
The retribution of Almighty God for a sloppily made sign of the cross was terrible.
Only last year, we were solemnly assured, a lazy, irreverent, careless boy had made a sloppy sign of the cross while saying his nightly prayers.
The good nuns, alas, were not present to crack him on the head.
And as God was not one to let such a sin go unpunished, the next morning, the little boy found his right arm withered, twisted, and paralyzed for life.
Oh, God, I love the Catholic shit.
That's just such, oh, so funny.
Oh, my God.
Just ruining children, just going off like a bomb in millions of childhoods around the world.
Yeah.
For making the gang sign lazily.
Yeah, fucking up the Catholic gang sign.
Like, what the fuck are you talking about, God?
You do this all the time.
What God has so much time?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Imagine like, it's so hard for me to get into the head of someone who is like, yes, God is constantly watching small children to see if they make like a minor mistake in the positioning of their hands and he will cripple them for life for doing so.
Like, it, because like, none of them ever frame it as like, yeah, you know, I'm a Catholic because God's fucking nuts.
Like, this is the only way to avoid his anger.
Like, fuck, fuck the guy, but I just don't want to definitely like, yeah, I'd like him a little bit more, you know, if people refer to him a little bit more like a mob boss.
Like, if you don't pay your protection, he's going to fuck you up.
What are you going to do?
It's God.
I guess there are some people who talk about him that way, but usually it's all dressed up.
And anyway, whatever.
Well, salvation.
Some people are the ones that are like, if there is a God, what's preventing you from raping and murdering?
And those are the people you have to look at the hardest because you're like, I mean, I can think of things that are a lot.
I don't really want to do those things.
I guess it's easy.
Yeah.
So whether or not he exaggerated his experience here, and I don't think he did.
I know some people, including my dad, who grew up Catholic in this, well, my dad was, you know, not this old, but like, I've known people who were kind of from, you know, around that period of time and raised in Catholic schools.
And like, you get stories like this from the nuns.
A lot of old Catholics have horror stories from the nuns.
And yeah, the fact that Liddy's like living in fucking constant fear of God is not like when I was a kid, I had a period of time I went through like that where like, I would just be terrified because I'd like killed a bug or something while playing.
I'm like, oh my God, have I like damned myself to hell for eternity?
You shouldn't tell kids about stuff like that, you know?
Well, it's the same as like dare too, because the first couple times, then you're like, oh, I guess none of this matters.
I'm going to murder all the bugs.
Fuck it.
You know, I'm the reason there aren't any fucking fireflies anymore.
I wiped them all out, you know, just to spite the Lord.
Horror Stories from the Nuns00:03:53
Got him.
Anyway, speaking of genocide, you know who else likes wiping out, you know, the natural world in order to true.
Doesn't have to be any genocide.
Every genocide.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Not every genocide, but some, you know, some genocides.
Yes.
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This is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
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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.
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A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
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So, so far, most of Liddy's experiences in the world have been terrifying and negative.
Ready to Embrace Hitler00:15:49
But he did have one shining, really, he had two shining things.
One of them is reading.
He becomes a reader from an early age.
He finds himself particularly in love with like a lot of this kind of colonial fiction, Ruyard Kipling and the like, you know, the stuff you would expect.
And then the other thing that he has, he viewed as kind of a wholly positive thing from his childhood was patriotism.
The nuns, he said, introduced him to authority, first God and then the flag.
After morning prayers, they would pledge allegiance to the flag.
And, you know, the nuns were as strict about this as anything else.
Here's how he writes about learning how to do the Pledge of Allegiance.
We stood at rigid attention, facing the flag in lines straight enough to rival those of the masked SS and Lenny Rievenstall's triumph of the will.
I pledge allegiance, we began.
At the words to the flag, we shot out our right arms in unison, palms down, straight as so many spears aimed directly at the flag.
It was the salute of Caesar's legions, recently popular in Germany, Italy, and Spain.
Is that not true?
Oh, yeah, no, you can find pictures of American schools.
It was not like universal, but it was not wildly uncommon for kids in some schools and some, you know, fucking, especially some private schools to do the fascist salute, you know, which was previously the Roman salute, right?
Or at least a variant of it.
Yeah.
So it's not like other kids have this experience, right?
There's no reason to think he's lying about this.
It is insane that he just like, he has, he's described, because he's describing it as like the SS, but he doesn't mean that in like a negative sense.
Like he has, there's at no point does he like think about, is it kind of fucked up to do that?
Is it bad?
If we look at like where the Nazis went, is it maybe bad to do this with kids?
Absolutely.
Not for a second does G. Gordon Liddy consider that.
He's also like, look how organized.
We were as organized as the SS.
My friends, my buddies, the SS.
Good lord.
What a maniac.
So this is where we should introduce his second mother, the family housekeeper, a German immigrant named Teresa.
Now, if you've had like rich or very upper middle class friends, you know, when you were a kid, you may have like known someone who had like a nanny, a full-time nanny, sometimes even a live-in nanny who like helped raise them as a kid.
I had a friend who grew up in a similar circumstance and expressed to me at one point that it was like really confusing to him as a little kid, because he kind of didn't know entirely whether this was his mom or his mom was his mom because like, the nanny did a lot more.
And i'm like oh, that was the like.
Yeah, that is kind of a weird thing to put a kid through, right.
Um, and there's this moment that kids like that tend to have where they like realize this person, who is kind of a mom to them, is an employee of their parents right, is there because they're being paid, is taking care of them because they're being paid, and like that can mess you up a bit.
Uh, in Gordon's case, this is going to mess him up a lot because Theresa is also a literal Nazi.
Uh, she is a German immigrant to the United States.
Um, she is absolutely obsessed with uh, with With The Nazis, with Hitler.
She tells him all of these wonderful stories of her homeland Germany, all of these different myths and legends.
And she talks to him constantly about this terrible war that Germany went through before he was born and how afterwards the country fell into chaos.
But now a hero has arisen and is in the process of saving the German nation.
Quote.
Great roads were being built.
And unlike in the United States, everyone in Germany now had a job.
My mother had won an Emerson shortwave radio in a raffle at SS Peter and Paul Parish.
And Teresa and I would listen to programs broadcast from her native land, the volumes swelling and receding in cycles.
Now, Liddy had listened to FDR on the radio, like most Americans in the Great Depression, and he had found some comfort in that saying, we have nothing to fear but fear itself as a scared little kid.
But nothing in his life up to that point had inspired or influenced him the way his first Hitler speech did.
This is the defining moment of his childhood.
Now, in his autobiography, Liddy claims to have had a memory like a tape recorder.
Given how bad he actually is as a spy, I think he's lying about this.
But he claims that he can replay audio perfectly in his head.
And like sometimes an involuntary switch will throw and he'll hear music that will like launch him into a certain emotional state.
I don't know the degree to which I think that he's telling the truth about this, but also I'm going to read you this paragraph.
I don't know fully why you would lie about this.
Oh my God.
The music that poured through the Emerson from Germany was martial and inspiring.
I lost myself in its strains.
It made me feel a strength inside I had never known before.
From playmates who were German, I learned some of the language.
One day, Teresa was excited.
He was going to be on the radio.
Just wait till I hear him speak.
Eagerly, I joined her at the Emerson.
First the music, the now familiar strains of a song that started, Die Fan Hoch, raise the banner.
It was a rousing, powerful anthem, the Horst Vessel song.
Now, Andrew, we've got to take a second here.
Do you know what the Horst Vessel light is?
No.
It's the Horst Vessel song.
Horst, so back during the rise of the Nazi party, before Hitler's in power, Joseph Goebbels, the future propaganda minister, ran the party's Berlin operations.
And a big part of his plan was to instigate a series of running fights and raids with communists and social democrats in order to spark media condemnation of chaos and disrupt the organizing of the party's enemies, right?
He's both trying to get like the media flipping out about like, ah, there's so much chaos.
We really need a law and order guy in office.
And also trying to like physically murder and hurt, you know, people.
Two for one.
So you do the violence and then you step in to solve the volume.
To solve the violence.
Now, one of Joe's top thugs is a guy named Horst Vessel.
And Horst is a construction worker.
He is a low-level gangster and a pimp.
He is running a prostitution racket out of his apartment, and his landlady, who's a widow of a Communist Party member, is scared that she will lose the apartment if the police catched Horst running an illegal business out of it.
Now, there is a debate about precisely what happened, but the generally accepted story is that Horst refused to pay his rent and threatened to beat his landlady.
She goes to a local communist bar to get some of her husband's old friends to help her evict him.
Horst was also an assault leader for Joseph Goebbels.
So, you know, he was known for running vicious raids on these very poor Berlin neighborhoods where he would beat people nearly to death.
The communists that his landlady goes to had been victimized by Horst before, and they knew about him.
So when she comes to them and is like, this guy is causing me problems, they're like, let's just fucking off this son of a bitch.
So they shoot the bastard in the head.
Joseph Goebbels, never one to let a murder go to waste, turns Horst into a martyred saint, and his death is used as evidence of communist evil.
The song that G. Gordon Liddy like is listens to and is like inspired by as a child was written in the honor of this like murderer and pimp and became the official anthem of the Nazi party.
So that's what he's listening to, right?
G. Gordon Liddy.
Yeah.
God.
He's like eight, right?
He's eight or nine, you know?
The thing that's so interesting about this is it really puts like paid to the and like this is obvious to anyone who's not a fucking idiot, but like, you know, people growing up, it's like, you know, I grew up in like Reagan times and it's like, oh, the sanitization of Reagan and like, oh, Republicans are like Republicans today are really bad, but they weren't always like this.
We used to be able to get along.
And like, not if you're alive today.
Not one person alive today has been party to a right wing that was, quote, reasonable.
No, no.
This is like goes back a very far time.
Like this is not why, I mean, honestly, if you lived in fucking Portland through 2020, we had a fucking right-wing gangster get killed here that like not an uncommon story to what happened with Horst.
But G. Gordon Liddy, as a small child, loves this song about a dead Nazi pimp, but he loves Hitler's voice even more.
He was, again, as this kid whose entire life is fear, who was absolutely overwhelmed by terror all day, according to him.
He is drawn by the pure confidence in Hitler's voice.
Here was the very antithesis of fear, sheer animal confidence and power of will.
He sent an electric current through my body.
And as the massive audience thundered its absolute support and determination, the hair on the back of my neck rose and I realized that I had stopped breathing.
And this is like the moment that teaches him.
He has this like powerful realization of like, you can conquer fear and like sets him on this course to like, you know, conquer, like, to become the master of his fear and his pain, just like Hitler.
That's so wild.
It's so wild that you would admit this shit like this.
It is.
It's way like again that you would put this in a book after fucking to launch your career as a talk show host.
This is the same, the same people that like respond to like Jordan Peterson.
Yes.
Oh my God.
He would have loved Jordan Peterson.
Yeah.
But it's like in the way that like, I feel like most Jordan Peterson fans you see now, like don't admit that this is what they're driven by.
It's so weird to hear it so baldly said like this.
That's the thing.
All of these modern guys, a lot of these like modern right-wing media people are basically Nazis, have friends who are literal Nazis, like will signpost shit.
You know, they'll do the Fuentes stuff, but even Fuentes, even Nick Fuentes doesn't write shit like this.
Yeah, yeah.
It's, it is like remarkable that you would just put this down.
It's fascinating.
Liddy never is going to shed this deep fascination with Hitler and the Nazis.
It's almost like a fucking, what's the word here?
It's almost like a fucking syndrome for him, right?
Like it's a reflex, like bringing up the Nazis.
Like he can't help it, you know?
And again, he would always claim, he never claims to be a Nazi, right?
He would say, obviously Hitler was a monster.
You know, I learned later they had gone far, you know, much too far and like, you know, had to be stopped.
And on most fascists who said this, I'd be like, oh, this is just a shallow attempt to allay suspicion.
Liddy's case is weirder because for one thing, he's admitting all of this when he doesn't need to.
He is absolutely, no doubt in my mind, a bone-deep fascist, right?
As died in the wool committed a fucking fascist as has ever existed.
You know, this ult, he is an ultimate follower.
He's like a born henchman in constant search for a few.
But I actually think he's not lying when he says he doesn't consider himself fully a Nazi.
And the reason why is very simple.
It's his dad, right?
He worshipped his father.
So Sylvester Liddy was his son's hero.
And in his autobiography, over and over again, he repeats this belief that like his dad is almost incapable of error.
And his dad hates Nazis.
And it's one of those things.
Liddy's definitely a fascist.
His dad's hatred of Nazi.
If you've seen that meme of like the Cheeto stuck in the place of like the lock.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Like that's the one thing keeping him from like just becoming a full-on neo-Nazi hatred of them.
I guess that is the thing that is translated to the modern right wing too, is like they espouse everything the Nazis believe.
They are friendly to neo-Nazis, but will also say shit like, well, like socialism is the real, you know, they love the national socialist part or like the Democrats are the real Nazis.
And you're like, I mean, they, they really just have it both ways.
They like recognize Nazi is a bad thing to be, but they don't recognize, or they recognize that the word Nazi is a bad thing to be called.
It's, I think, with Liddy, I think what interests me about him is that the conflict is a little different because like, number one, most of the guys that you're talking about would never admit to like having this much admiration of Hitler and the Nazis, right?
Because it would be giving away too much.
Right, right.
I don't know how to characterize the exact nature of his belief, but I do kind of think it's one of those like he, he was his entire life ready to fully embrace Hitler and the Nazis.
It was just his respect for his dad holding back like this tiny, this like creaking, broken down dam, holding back the flood of Nazi water.
And in fact, so when his, you know, Gordon hears his, his first Hitler speech and he like goes to his dad to be like, I've just heard the most incredible guy.
And when Sylvester is like, wait, are you talking about Hitler?
No, no, no.
No, fuck that dude.
He is a monster.
He's going to lead the world into a horrible, horrible war.
You are not allowed to listen to him anymore.
And I kind of wonder if his dad hadn't been this guy, does Liddy just become like a full-on Nazi?
Like, is he marching with like fucking George Lincoln Rockwell, like completely, you know, swastika mask off, you know, fucking doing shots with David Duke?
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
Probably, yes.
Maybe there's a good chance.
Similarly, that's like the type of thing that was like, again, quote unquote acceptable at the time.
Like, or it was like a, you know, at the time, it was a type of political expression that was like, yeah.
I don't know.
This is like the weird, like characterizing this exactly is the weirdest part to me here.
So, you know, so again, very young Liddy spends the end of the 1930s when he is like eight or nine, treating Hitler like a forbidden dessert, right?
Or like a hidden Playboy magazine, right?
He can't be caught listening to him, right?
And he will claim later, this isn't because I'm a, I loved Hitler's, you know, politics.
It's because I just found him magnetic.
It's like, well, you absolutely were in love with his politics.
You are a bone deep fat.
No one has ever been more of a fascist than Eugene Gordon Liddy.
It's really like, yeah, I like the, I like the fucking what, the confidence and the auditory style.
I don't know, man.
You can find other shit, bro.
There's other confident ass motherfuckers out there.
So Teresa is like a big influence on him in this because, you know, while he can't be caught in the open listening to his Hitler speeches, it becomes this like thing that they share, right?
That like when his dad's out and like no one else is around, they'll listen to some Hitler speeches, right?
They'll turn on the radio and like sneak it together.
And again, she is the primary female influence in his early childhood.
And like, I don't know, I think actually, honestly, reading this, I thought back to how when I was a little kid and my mom was out of town, my dad and I would watch like South Park, right?
Which I wasn't allowed to watch, but like my dad would kind of, you know, and that's a powerful thing as a kid, you know, whatever it is for you.
Like if you've got like an adult in your life who will be like, hey, you know, normally you're not allowed to watch, you know, horror movies, but let's put on Friday the 13th or whatever.
Fascists on Your Side00:03:14
You spend the rest of your life.
You love fucking, you know, horror movies or whatever.
Like for him, that's Hitler.
That's the experience he has.
This like woman who raises him, you know, let's get on the shortwave and see what they're talking about in Berlin.
Listen to Adolf Hitler.
Now, obviously, fascists are bad at estimating risk.
And Teresa was not careful enough with her attempts to propagandize this kid.
Eventually, Sylvester catches them.
Quote, it was bad enough that he would come home on warm days to the voice of Joseph Goebbels booming sonorously from the Emerson.
Worse when he found our address was on the German embassy mailing list for Nazi propaganda.
The Hindenburg, however, was the last straw.
The problem was that Teresa did not accept the official crash explanation that static electricity ignited hydrogen being vinted as part of the landing procedure.
She was certain the Hindenburg had been sabotaged by the United States.
Is it Hindenburg true there?
Okay, that's so new.
That's so wild about this is like, this is his autobiography.
Yes, yes, he's writing all of this out.
You could, if you wanted to, for instance, attempt to rehabilitate your image in the 1980s, simply just say, you know, I was a sickly child and I loved fucking the rate.
I love the radio, but then in college, you know, that could, all of everything that you've said so far could be two and a half sentences and starts wherever the shit that's relevant.
Yes.
Well, that's kind of why I believe a lot of this, right?
Because like, there's definitely, he lies a number of, especially when we get to Watergate.
There's like a lot of shit that he just like is bullshit that he brings up about like John Dean and stuff.
Like a lot of stuff that is not true in this that is like legacy making, myth making.
But like, I don't want the benefit of life.
How does this help you, G. Gordon Liddy?
Right.
Like the fascists are already on your side.
Yeah.
Like, so like, this may just be.
Yeah.
I thought this would be your, this is to try to like broaden the audience a little bit.
Get a little like, you know, some Reagan Democrats, whatever.
What the fuck is this?
This is something unique.
Something totally unique.
And you know what else is unique, Andrew T?
Sponsors of our podcast, none of whom were raised by a Nazi.
Well, probably.
Most of whom were not raised by Nazis.
Yeah.
There's some real A-list sponsors you could get that were definitely raised by that.
The Reagan coin people might have been raised by a Nazi.
Who's that?
Eddie Volkswagen, you know?
Yeah, buyer sponsoring this fucker.
Sure.
Hopefully Volvo pops in or something, you know?
10-10 shots five.
City hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
Murder at City Hall00:03:06
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 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.
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There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
If you play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
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.
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That's so funny.
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We're back.
Related to the Phantom00:07:54
So Sylvester, not a perfect dad, right?
But his reaction to all of this, everything that happens, does kind of make me think that he was trying to do the best he knew how.
Because when he like comes in, eventually he like comes in on like Teresa ranting about how the Hindenburg was an inside job or whatever.
And he fires, he fires her.
And he eventually, he brings in a new maid.
And he, I think because he's so concerned that his son is becoming a Nazi, the new maid he picks is a Jewish refugee named Sophie who had just escaped Nazi Germany.
And I think his goal here is both like, give this refugee a decent job and also like, well, maybe if my son meets this woman who has been victimized by Hitler's regime, it will de-radicalize him.
Cool.
I don't know.
Again, we can argue, was that the right call?
But I think he's trying.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
That's so tough.
That's like that's a wild situation to be in.
I see what you're trying to do here, but that could go so amazingly wrong.
And Liddy does not like her.
He claims later he came to like respect and have empathy for her, but he does not write about her very much.
So I don't know if that's true.
In Hitler, Liddy continued to see a totem of strength, an icon to emulate in purging his body and mind of fear and weakness that he felt characterized his childhood.
Now, while Liddy was falling in love with Hitler, he had a few other childhood heroes growing up.
Quote: Frequently ill, I was nursed patiently by my mother, who used the occasions to teach me the family history and various tales of personal courage and accomplishment against odds.
To keep from boring me by repetition, she would make up stories of high valor, usually about American Indians and their warriors' ability to resist the most horrible tortures without the slightest indication of discomfort.
Among her true stories was that of Glenn Cunningham, a farm boy whose legs were burned so badly he would never walk again, and who became our national champion in the mile.
Of family members, my mother's favorite was her older brother, Raymond.
He too was slightly built, but that hadn't stopped him from being the leader of all the boys in the neighborhood, from fighting off much larger boys who tried to force him from the prime street corner for selling magazines in Washington, D.C., from becoming an Eagle Scout, from putting himself through Georgetown University and its law school.
I learned how Uncle Ray had been there when John Dillinger was slain in Chicago, how he was wounded at the gun battle in which Ma Barker and her gang were shot or captured, and that he hadn't even noticed his wound until after the battle and had not bothered to report it.
His uncle Ray becomes an FBI agent, right?
And to be clear, there's not actually any evidence that Ray was nearby when John Dillinger was killed.
But this is probably family lore rather than Gordon lying.
I think he does grow up being taught this, right?
And I think Uncle Ray is a giant piece of shit and a fabulous too.
Also, a terrible influence.
But this is so these two things are critical to understand Liddy.
He grows up like afraid constantly and like, you know, just this like kid, he's like short, he's small, he feels like he's weak and he's always scared.
And his mom is constantly trying to build him up by telling him stories about his like great grandfather and his grandfather and like how good his dad was at boxing and his uncle Raymond is killing all these people.
And this like drives him crazy a little bit, right?
Like the fact that the fact that he feels like he has to become worthy of these men who are in his genetic line and he feels like he's so weak and scared all the time.
Like this, this like fucks him up as a kid, right?
Right, right, right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So he grows more and more ashamed of his perfectly natural reactions to the world.
Now, part of what incites this is that he had, by this point, read a book by America first leader Charles Lindbergh in which Lindbergh discussed that he had picked his wife based on her racial characteristics because he wanted them to breed genetically powerful children together.
So he has this sort of idea in his head that like, I come from a line of powerful, like genetically powerful men, and it's my responsibility to become worthy of the genes of my ancestors, right?
And right now I'm too weak.
I'll never be worthy of breeding with an Aryan princess if I don't conquer my fear.
Of the heroes in the world.
You know what?
To be fair, except for the Aryan part, listen, that's why you do half the shit you do, you know, to just impress the person you want to fuck.
Yeah, yeah, well, that's that's fair.
In his case, it's like a theoretical person, right?
Yeah.
And he has to become worthy of the semen that he's inherited from his dad and his uncle.
So of all the heroes in his childhood, his dad and his uncle Ray are the living ones he actually knew.
Ray, again, is a short guy, but he's dating a model.
And this model is much taller than him, which G. Gordon Liddy finds very attractive.
He's always got kind of a kick for that.
And he carried, Ray would always, you know, when he'd come over to see the family, he would like always be wearing a gun and he would brag about who he was carrying a 38 super automatic, the most powerful handgun in the world.
Liddy repeats it a bunch.
This is the most powerful handgun in the world.
My uncle has got the best gun in the whole planet.
That is a debatable claim, handgun-wise.
But I think he probably heard it from Ray and repeated it all his life.
Gordon grew obsessed with his uncle's sidearm.
And since this was the 1930s, gun safety was not a priority.
Quote: One day when I was five, I slipped into Ray's room and found it lodged in the lid of his suitcase.
This was a rarity.
Not only was it something I feared, so did everyone else.
My curiosity got the better of my fear, an uncommon occurrence.
Quietly, I withdrew the pistol and examined it, then managed to get the hammer back and the safety off.
Proud of this accomplishment, I walked into the room where the adults sat chatting to show them what I had found.
Uncle Ray spotted me immediately.
He knew the pistol was loaded.
Ray's rising, he placed himself directly in front of the muzzle, smiled warmly, then reached down and placed his finger between the hammer and the firing pin.
He grasped the piece and gently disarmed me.
This gun, he informed me quietly, was his.
He would get one for me.
Soon thereafter, he did.
A pistol replica of the colt.
So a couple of things there, Uncle Ray.
I think maybe the wrong thing to do is to give the kid who has just stolen your gun and pointed it at some adults an exact replica of that pistol.
There might be other lessons to teach first, is what I'm saying, right?
Like don't point guns at the people.
I mean, look, I guess I don't know the layout of this living room either, but I don't feel like Ray had to step right in front of the pistol to do this stuff.
I feel like he had other options.
Yeah.
Come from the side.
Maybe.
Don't leave a loaded and chambered 38 super in your fucking suitcase in your room with kids around, Ray.
You never know.
Yeah.
Everyone was so drunk back then, right?
Like, yeah, you never know when you're going to really want to win the argument.
No, exactly.
You might need that 38 super at any moment.
Yeah.
So from what I can, it's also very funny to me because like today, back then, you know, 38 Super was one of the more power, certainly one of the most powerful handgun rounds that was available to people.
Today, the thing it's most famous for is like cartel guys love getting 1911s plated in gold in 38 Super.
That's like the cartel pistol, right?
Like if you want to be, yeah, like it's like, yeah.
So that is kind of amusing to me.
Amazing.
All of this nonsense, this like worship of men in his family, his like Hitler shit, his constant fear.
He, he, it, it leads him to have this kind of like obsession with making a reality of my genetic potential.
That's the way he describes it, you know, right?
He's got to like, he's got to fix himself so that he can earn his genes.
Obsession with Genetic Potential00:12:01
So this starts with his first fear, the Hindenburg.
And in its last runs before the disaster, Liddy had made his parents take him to watch it so he could stand out underneath it and force himself not to run away.
His success in this thrilled him and it made him commit to conquering other fears.
Since he was scared of heights, he started hanging out with a boy he knew who ran around on the rooftops of nearby buildings, doing what you might call kind of early parkour shit.
That boy also took Liddy to the docks, which is this like forbidden place with all these scary foreigners in it.
And on one occasion, they're snooping around a boat and they get yelled at and they both run away.
And Liddy spends days beating himself up.
Like he's almost like mortifying his skin because he's so ashamed that he didn't like confront the guy or something instead of running away from this sailor when he was breaking onto a boat.
Now, in order to deal with this, he keeps going back to the boat.
And his goal is he just wants to hide on it near the sailors to prove that he's not scared of them.
He conquers this fear, but he earns a new one, which is that there's these giant wharf rats around.
And one of them like chases him off the boat and he kind of loses his mind in a panic.
And for a year or more, this tears at him.
The fact that he's like reacted with fear to these rats.
But then about a year later, when he's nine, the family cat brings a dead rat into the house.
And I don't really know what to do here other than read you what followed.
The carcass was still warm and remarkably undamaged.
To demonstrate to myself my lack of fear, instead of using a stick, I picked it up with my hands, then looked for a place to bury it.
As I walked towards the trees in the back, I saw some old bricks and got the idea for a test to destroy forever any dread I still might harbor for rats.
I put the rat down and, with the loose bricks, built a small enclosure in the gravel next to the garage.
I filled it with broken twigs, bark, and small branches and went into the kitchen for matches.
For the next hour, I roasted the dead rat.
Then I removed the burned carcass with a stick and let it cool.
With a scout knife, I skinned it, then cut off and ate the roasted haunches of the rat.
The meat was tasteless and stringy.
Finally, I dismantled the little fireplace and burned the rest of the carcass.
As I stamped down the earth over the remnants of my meal, I spotted the cat, Tommy.
I smiled as the thought occurred to me.
From now on, rats could fear me as they feared cats.
After all, I ate them too.
Oh my God.
Oh, God.
If your child has that experience, that's so far beyond serial killer shit.
Like, serial killer shit is like torturing an animal.
He's not doing that.
His animal's already dead.
But in some ways, it's more alien and weird.
Like, I must conquer.
The rats will fear me if I've eaten them.
Yeah.
Do you think that's how it works?
That's just so like also like totally cool to never tell anyone that story.
Yeah, that's a story you keep to yourself.
Andrew.
This is so wild to say this out loud.
This is the 30s.
Your parents are putting you in an institution if you tell them that story.
Yeah.
I guess you know that's right, but that's what happens in the 30s.
That's just early enough in the 20th century or close enough to the depression that like you might find one or two people that's like, been there, brother.
Yeah.
But not for that reason, right?
Yes, yes, yes.
Right.
So if you hear the whole thing, he will always be, you know, for the rest of his childhood obsessive with this need to conquer various fears and prove himself a man.
Now, the thing that he wants to ultimately do, the number one way, the really the only thing in his mind that's going to cure him forever of this sort of like inadequacy syndrome he has is to go to war, right?
That's the ultimate way to prove that you're a man and worthy of your genes is killing some people.
And luckily for him, World War II, you know, kicks off right around the time he's starting to become, you know, an adolescent.
Unfortunately for him, he's like 11 or 12 when the U.S. gets into it.
And there's at least like six years he's got to wait before he's going to be able to enlist.
His only meaningful feeling about the war then is not like horror at all the people dying, you know, fear that maybe his country will lose any of that.
He's terrified.
His greatest fear is that he won't have time to fight in it.
He won't get to go to war, right?
Like that's that's really what fucks him up.
So while he suffers through this torturous wait, he decides the rational thing to do is to prepare himself to be a soldier.
And to Gordon, that meant one thing, killing.
Now, later in life, he is going to be famous for just absolutely this guy.
There's never been a dude who fetishized guns more than G. Gordon Liddy or violence more than G. Gordon Liddy.
But Liddy is not, he's not naturally a violent person.
He's not someone to whom actually carrying out violence is like a thing he's immediately comfortable with, right?
And so he's going to have, he's, he's going to dedicate like his adolescent years to becoming comfortable with carrying out violence for no good reason, right?
Not like violence he needs to carry out because he's ashamed of the fact that he's like not comfortable killing things.
Now, the easiest way in his mind to become comfortable with violence is to get a gun and start shooting animals.
But again, Sylvester, his dad, understands who his boy is and is like, no, we're not getting you a gun.
We are, we are absolutely not buying you a gun.
You have to think he knew his boy and was like, the last thing this, the last thing my Hitler-loving child needs is a firearm.
I mean, there has to be some real concern when this kid really wants to go fight a World War II.
Yeah.
He's got to wind up.
Which side are you thinking of?
Yeah.
The closest Sylvester will get is buying his kid a daisy BB gun.
And this is also going to prove an error because Liddy's a little too smart for his own good.
So he looks up at the library the recipe for black powder and he starts making his own gunpowder.
He buys charcoal and sulfur and saltpeter from the pharmacy, claiming his mother needs it for canning.
You can use sulfur and saltpeter you can use for canning.
I think the charcoal was probably for the fire.
And then from a neighborhood kid, he says he buys a six-inch long section of gun barrel and 22 caliber that included a chamber, right?
Because you need the chamber in order to make a gun the work.
So he saws off the barrel of his daisy and he attaches the 22 barrel by friction fit.
And then he like, basically he builds this into a functioning .22 caliber rifle using like it's it's very janky, like it's got like a plunger fire, uh type situation here.
Like it sounds like a very dangerous and inaccurate firearm, but it does function.
It has no sight, like you cannot really aim it very well, but he claims he shoots and hits a squirrel with it right um, now this is pretty fucked up, because you shouldn't shoot an animal with a weapon that you can't be precise with right, because you may, for example, hit it in the guts and and it will die an agonizing death as opposed to dying quick, which is what happens.
He shoots the squirrel in the belly and he has to like kill it right, he has to like execute it at close range.
Um, and he, you know he doesn't eat the squirrel, he doesn't, which you can do.
He has like no use for the body, he's just killing it to kill it.
So he, he executes it and then he cuts off its tail to tie around his handlebars.
Now, this is definitely like serial killer, adjacent shit.
Liddy claims that he doesn't feel excited or happy after doing it.
In fact he, he's horrified by it, like like it haunts him and like his mom catches him doing it too.
So like that's probably part of you know why he feels bad and this, this is what really fucks him up.
Because the thing that fucks him up is not that he he hurts this squirrel or that he kills it, but that he feels bad about hurting the squirrel, And that fucks him up because he feels like now I'll never be able to be a soldier.
If, like, I can't kill a squirrel without feeling anything, how can I kill men?
Right?
That has its own internal logic.
There's a lot going on there, and none of it's any good.
How could I expect to be a soldier in the war?
I had to do something to free myself from this disabling emotionalism.
The widowist fascist here.
He is such a fucking like the deepest fascist.
There's more, like, fucking young Hitler has more like redeeming qualities as a kid than fucking G. Gordon Liddy.
Oh, God, it's fucked up.
So the thing he eventually lands on was volunteering to help with his neighbor's small chicken farm.
He offers to basically, yeah, he's got this neighbor with a chicken farm and he's like, look, I need to learn how to kill.
I'll like gut and kill all of the chickens that you need killed.
And, you know, if you've never done this, killing, butchering chickens and specifically like gutting and preparing them to be eaten is a very, it's a particularly unpleasant process.
Like chickens, in my opinion, in a lot of people's opinions, are like a less pleasant animal to like butcher than a lot of other animals.
So the guy who owns this farm is like, yeah, sure, Gordon, you could fucking kill all of my chickens.
And so that's like, again, bad adulting.
Also, this is if this kid comes to you being like, I need to kill something.
Can I kill you?
I have to learn how to kill efficiently and without emotion or thought, right?
That's how he phrases it.
So apparently he claims he learns how to kill without feeling that by murdering all of these chickens.
You know, I was satisfied when it came my turn to go to war.
I would be ready.
And like, I should note here, G. Gordon Liddy never killed anybody, right?
Not for lack of trying, but like, I honestly don't know if he ever was the kind of guy who would have been good at this.
So much of this is like, he's got this, it's like an image he wants to present.
He wants people to think of him as a badass, as a killer, as a dangerous man, right?
You know, as this guy who could do without thinking, like, I don't think killing chickens actually prepared him for murdering people, part of which is that like, I don't think he never kills anybody, right?
He's never in combat, he never experiences anything like this, you know?
Um, I mean, part of the part of the wannabe dispassionate killer issue is thinking that working in slaughterhouse might help you become a dispassionate killer.
Nope, absolutely not.
Um, is it like, yeah, there's there's a lot here, including the fact that like Adolf Hitler, uh, a fucking man with a lot of blood on his hands, never could have worked at a chicken slaughtering.
Like, like he was, he was too, like, again, the dude was a vegetarian, he was too like horrified by the suffering of animals, didn't care about people suffering, you know, um, but yeah, just a dangerous maniac, G. Gordon Liddy, one of the, one of the least, one of the least mentally uh uh healthy individuals, uh, one of the most dangerous brains ever to be born.
Yeah, yeah, to be given power, yeah, uh, of any kind, Jesus Christ.
This is a man who needed like dedicated care, right, of some sort.
He needed a lot of people focused on stopping him from being a danger to himself, mitigating his risk to others, yeah, if nothing else, and yeah, that that uh that never happened, so Jesus.
We are building to how he masterminds the Watergate break-in badly again.
This is a man who is bad at everything but being a media guy, right?
He's pretty effective at being like a right-wing media figure.
He's a terrible failure at every other aspect of his life, pretty much.
Masterminding Watergate00:03:33
Some people say he was a pretty good lawyer, you know.
So maybe I'll give him that.
We'll talk about that too.
So we'll find out.
Right now, Andrew, let's talk about how are you doing?
I'm, you know, I'm alive.
We're just, you know, still just striking and hanging out and podcasting.
It's great.
Love it.
I don't love it, but it's just a strike.
Yeah.
What are you going to do?
Excellent.
Well, support the strike, you know, help out.
Oh, yes.
I pulled up a link.
If you are listening to this and you are the Entertainment Community Fund, search for that.
I don't know, whatever.
Ask Chat GPT to find it for you.
Don't do that.
And yeah.
And I do a podcast called Yo Is This Racist.
We are, we're doing some picket line diaries just to do, you know, what the actual sandals on the ground of being on strike is like.
Excellent.
So yeah, that's it.
Yeah.
Check out those picket diaries.
And until next time, folks, remember, David Zaslav's home address is eventually bleeped there.
Not the first time we've had to brief that address.
Yeah.
Oh, good stuff.
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