G. Gordon Liddy emerges as a pathological liar whose fabricated Korean War exploits, including the false threat of a Smith Wesson revolver, reveal deep-seated insecurity driving his Watergate conspiracy. The hosts dissect his fascist rhetoric comparing the FBI to the SS and his delusional childhood trauma, contrasting his dangerous "honest lies" with modern figures like Ben Shapiro. Ultimately, this analysis exposes Liddy as an unreliable architect of chaos whose constructed persona of toughness masked a profound inability to handle genuine affection or truth. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:04:21
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that: trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg 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 Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Cool zone media.
Oh, it's behind the bastards.
I hated that so much.
Why'd you hate it, Sophie?
It was a jealous me up.
Say what you will.
It woke me the fuck up.
Some of us, Sophie, are broadcasting professionals, like G. Gordon Liddy, and thus have mastered the art of using our voice like an instrument.
You know, I'm like Rachmaninov, right?
But with my, instead of whatever Rachmaninov used, because I don't actually know what that guy did, I have my voice and a microphone, you know?
I'm not even going to dignify that with a response.
You know what I'm going to dignify with the response?
Andrew T. Andrew, what's up?
Strike's still going on.
Although I guess it's theoretically possible it's over by the time these episodes drop.
Tiny chance it has not.
But I, if I'm a betting man, and I very much am, all of my money is going on strike still going on.
Hey, everybody, Robert here.
Obviously, since we recorded this episode, the strike has ended more or less as of about like a week after we recorded this.
So Andrew has sent me all of his money.
He is now destitute and living in utter desperation.
He does have a GoFundMe, which you can donate to, but all of the money will go to me per the terms of this bet.
Never make a bet on a podcast, folks.
Deeply serious stuff.
If the strike is over by the time these episodes drop, we will just unbleep this plug.
Hey, everyone, Robert here.
Since the strike is over and we can plug things again, go watch the foundation on that Apple thing or torrented.
Torrented, ideally, you know, Apple's got enough money, but it's a real good show.
A lot of Lee Pace.
Also, speaking of Lee Pace, watch Halton Catch Fire.
Equally good show, which is the show I'm most looking forward to once TV comes back.
So speaking of shows I'm looking forward to, you know, Andrew, the last time we had a strike like this, a guy named Donald Trump sold a TV show, a reality show, because those are still allowed, and started his rise to power.
Super Soaker Film Plans00:02:11
And I'm kind of planning to do the same thing with my reality show, Super Soaker Full of Piss.
Now, the premise of the show, for those of you who are new listeners, is that I fill the reservoir of a classic super soaker, an S CS 3200.
Yeah.
Yeah.
High cap.
That's the one with the backpack, if you remember the one like the rich kid would have in shape.
Yeah.
Like it's the big one.
And I fill that all the way up to the top.
And I'm going to promise you all here right now, purely my urine, right?
Not a drop of anyone else's.
And then drive around Rodeo Drive.
The Robert promise is at, and not just bullshit, not like you're going to drink so much that the urine's going to be at a concentration that it's not that bad.
This is primo, like you know with urine urine.
Absolutely.
Nothing, nothing but red bull and Sapporo beer, you know, the two finest quantities that you can make this out of.
So once I've loaded this sucker up, we're going to go cruising on Rodeo Drive looking for anyone who seems famous.
That was the initial plan.
But then I came across a great article about filmmakers who never won the Academy Award for Best Director, Andrew.
Orson Welles never got the Academy.
Akira Kurosawa never got the Best Director Award.
Hitch surprising Kubrick, Sergio Leone, you know, Spike Lee, Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, a lot of greats.
And that made me think, if those guys can fail to get the Oscar for best director, maybe I can win it.
So now, Super Soaker full of piss, I'm planning on releasing as a film, you know, a major motion picture.
The goal here is that I'm going to track down Martin Scorsese and just blast him right in the mouth with a super soaker full of urine.
You know, I really think that's, that's the key to building myself a rep in Hollywood.
Yeah, the bad boys of documentary.
Super soaker full of piss.
Answering the question we all have, what happens if you blast Martin Scorsese in the mouth with lukewarm urine, you know?
We'll learn.
I promise you that.
Exploding Head Syndrome00:15:54
I promise you that he won't get away from us, folks.
And you're not doing any aftermarket mods on this MFR.
No, no, no, no.
This is a classic.
Stop.
No.
Cost me a lot of money.
Yeah.
So, Andrew, when last we left off, our hero, the G-Man, Gordon Liddy, he had just started in a very serial killer-like fashion, murdering small animals in order to prepare for war so that he could kill men without thinking.
This is almost honestly, like, it's worse to be like a serial, obviously, to like torture animals as a serial killer.
But there's something about what he's doing that's more unsettling.
And I think it's partly that it proceeds more with someone who's like a serial killer that's like, oh, there's some like, something's wrong, right?
Something's wrong with that person, you know?
Like that they, that they, because like people don't like, most people have like a gut reaction to that.
Yeah.
With Liddy, what he is doing, this awful thing he's doing, proceeds directly from a very socially reinforced impulse, right?
The, the, the, that like, there's nothing better in our society.
There's nothing more respected than being a soldier, right?
And that's, that's like why he wants to do this.
And so I guess that's why I find it like so off-putting.
Obviously, it's off-putting.
He's like killing animals in a fucked up way.
It's like serial killer shit, but it doesn't seem like a compulsion.
It just seems like, I guess his version of masculinity required him to do this.
And he is like analytically trying to turn himself into a serial killer.
Because that will make him like he imagines, you know, the military heroes in his family's past and like that he's, his mom is telling about.
He thinks it will turn him into one.
Right.
I guess that's what's unsettled.
That's what's most surprisingly unsettling to me in this is that like this comes out of his belief that these men he reveres already have this capability, right?
Because he's weak and broken.
He has to kill dozens of chickens in order to gain this capacity for himself that he thinks that like strong men are born with.
That's that's the thing that's off-putting.
Maybe that the other thing that's like upsetting is like, it's, you know, like, you know, he doesn't, but you almost feel like he could put it together that this is what's wrong with society.
Right.
Yeah.
Like, yeah.
You know, he almost could be like, the fact that I feel the need to do this means there's something wrong with who I idolize.
Yeah.
But no.
Yeah.
Like he has all the pieces.
He has all the pieces of, hey, maybe I can break this cycle.
And yet he's like, no, I have to force myself to be part of this.
Like he's, he's born a little more gentle than the generation before him.
And he, he sees this as such a failing that he has to soak himself in blood to overcome it and do even more irrational things, Andrew.
Let's get back into it.
I'm ready.
Speaking of things that scare G. Gordon Liddy, thunderstorms and electricity.
He develops kind of a phobia of electricity.
So in order to conquer this, he climbs to the top of a power line tower and then crawls out on the arm so that he can grasp the wire far enough that his like hair will stands on its end in reaction to the current.
Okay, do you know where he is?
He's like...
If like Unbreakable was like a comedy, just about the dumbest motherfucker who happens to be invincible and just like doesn't realize it and keeps on essentially committing suicide.
Yeah, there's so many little boys with the same thing going on who just got fried to a crisp atop a power tower.
This is actually not enough for him.
He feels like this is too tame.
So when he gets home, he strips the insulation from a lamp's power cord and then plugs it in and holds it, electrocuting himself.
God, again, this boy, like, seriously, we're joking, like, this boy did need medical help, right?
This is like a problem.
I don't know what you call this.
I'm not a diagnostician, but this is a thing that someone needs like treatment for.
This is a serious issue.
You know what?
Now that I, because you're, but like everything that is the antecedent of this, you're like, I see it so clearly from like the war generation and like how this sure.
I'm just like, you know, maybe he is clearly an outlier.
Now that we're seeing in many ways, he's clearly an outlier.
And maybe we were really just saved by a full generation of, you know, numerous United States fascists simply because physics works.
Yeah.
Yeah.
A lot of the other guys, like the reason they didn't quite have the critical mass to take over completely is that most of them didn't survive going through what Liddy did.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Having fascism brain, really, that's like Normandy, like landing at Normandy levels on survival odds.
So when he was an adolescent, his dad coached his little league team one season.
And Gordon was so obsessed with impressing him that when he gets hit with the he gets hit with the face and the ball during a game and he stops being able to see out of that eye for a while.
But instead of like being like, I have been injured and like he does, he pretends nothing has happened and he keeps playing.
Now, what's interesting to me is that in his autobiography, he does, he writes that he recognizes this later as like irrational and dangerous, right?
Quote, with a convert zeal, I became contemptuous of anyone who didn't want to play hurt.
Having found that fear can be defeated by head-on attack, it never occurred to me that the reluctance of others to play hurt might be based on common sense rather than fear.
So there is a little bit of like, oh, you know what?
That was actually kind of bad.
I brought shit in the beginning of that.
Okay, here's what I really want to know now.
And I guess this is like almost findable, but not, which is, what was the author's draft of this passage?
I would love to know.
I would love to know.
Was this like the editor be like, Liddy, you got to stick something in here so people don't think like I don't know.
I want to see the first draft of this book now.
I do.
I do want that.
I want that from his papers.
Yes.
Yeah.
So there is something like impressive about the tenacity and mania with which he pursued his goals of what he called self-improvement.
You will probably not be surprised to learn that G. Gordon Liddy was the weird kid at his school.
And like all weird kids, he had bullies.
As an adult, he wrote that he accepted being bullied as a natural and normal thing, quote, so long as it didn't get out of hand.
Now, I don't believe he's telling the truth here because of what he writes next.
I believe that being bullied bothered him more than he would ever admit, which is not, there's nothing wrong with that.
It's a lot of people like it's bad to get bullied.
It's a thing that's going to stick with you for a long time.
But he could not, because he's this, like, he becomes this right-wing media figure.
He can't admit that, like, yeah, I got bullied as a kid and like, fuck me up.
You know, he can't say that, right?
Because they, they, they have to be like, no, it's good for kids to get smacked around a little bit by the other kids, you know, makes them stronger, right?
They need that.
Yeah, yeah.
So he has to, because he's cooked up this persona with himself, he's got to, he has to include in his book that he's fine with being victimized to what he calls a reasonable level.
But the story he tells next makes it clear, like the story he tells next is not the story of a kid who was fine with being a reasonable amount of bullied.
And like, it is the story of a kid who is like pathologically victimized and snaps.
So the thing that provokes him into violent revenge, which is the story we're about to tell, is not targeted bullying, which I find interesting.
It is, he describes this as like, at my school, there's like a hazing tradition, right?
When it's a boy's birthday, another group of boys will like surround him and punch him.
Each one of them will like punch him in the bicep, right?
For each year of his age, right?
So he gets like punched a bunch in the arm, right?
And you get punched a bunch like that, you know, it hurts after a while, quite badly.
They call these punches like bunnies.
Each is delivered with a protruding knuckle under the bicep of the bull receiving it.
Oh, this is Filipino martial arts, some limb destructions.
It's like fucked up.
Yeah, it's like this is like, and I know it's a little fucked up.
It's like a pretty, I've heard of stuff like this.
You know, when I was in played football in fucking middle school, we had like some hazing stuff.
It's not wildly different from this.
Definitely an unpleasant thing to go through.
I think he was really scared of this, but he describes it as like a serious danger.
It was painful and paralyzing, making retaliation impossible.
And since he's short, he decides that like, I can't defend myself from this, but it's unacceptable.
So I have to turn my body into a trap.
Quote, I was approached in the locker room.
I removed my suit coat and feigned unawareness until they grabbed my arms.
Then I ripped my arms upward and away.
My would-be tormentors screamed as the flesh of their palms and fingers was lacerated.
That morning, I had taken lengths of adhesive tape and pressed thumb and carpet tacks alternatingly into the sticky side so that the sharp points stuck out the dry side.
The carpet tacks were longer and especially nasty, but they had narrower heads.
The thumb tacks with their broad heads added stability under lateral stress.
That done, I wrapped the tape around my arms carefully so I looked like a porcupine with short, very sharp quills.
I wore an old white shirt I could throw away and I packed a replacement in my school bag.
The device worked well, though there was less blood than I had anticipated.
Come on, I shouted after them.
Try it again.
Shocked and in pain, they would have none of it, backing away from me with incredulous stares.
Oh my God.
Oh, now, like, he's like a cartoon hedgehog.
Yeah, he is.
He is.
That is like cartoon.
And it's, it's also like, I'm not going to say it's a like bullying's obviously bad.
What he has described here is like hazing and not like extreme sounding hazing, right?
I do think it is a little bit wild to go with like, yeah, we have this hazing thing where on your birthday, you get punched in the arm, you know, once for every year.
We're like, okay, not the worst thing in the world.
I'm going to respond to that by taping pins by turning myself into a hedgehog.
It really, I mean, I guess it's also like the like trap of it.
Yeah.
It's so unsettling.
Yes.
The amount of like labor and forethought.
I don't know.
It's just like if he was a different guy, you could view this as kind of cool, especially if, and maybe this is a cooler story, right?
Maybe he did get bullied a lot as a kid and this was like an act of justified revenge, but he doesn't tell us that, right?
The way he describes this is like, I was not really bullied.
This was a thing that every kid went through and I responded like a maniac.
Again, he may be leaving out quite a lot here.
We just don't know because I run into other sources from his fucking junior high school or whatever.
So I realize we're like 10 pages into G. Gordon Liddy and not out of his childhood, which has never happened with a subject before.
I don't think we've ever spent this much time on a subject's childhood, but like there is so much shit in this autobiography.
We are going to leave quite a lot out.
So I'm going to try and summarize here some of the last few important facts.
So one of the things G. Gordon admits in this is that when he was an adult, his dad, Sylvester, came to him and was like, my dad never hugged me, right?
Which is why Sylvester made a serious effort to hug Gordon regularly.
This is kind of beautiful, actually, you know, like a guy recognizing, especially a guy who's born in the 1800s, right?
Probably recognizing like, oh, it was bad that my dad didn't hug me.
You know, it seems like this family is introspective.
Right.
And like weirdly self-aware.
It's just what they do in this man's reaction to like thinking about his own childhood and like, oh, you know what?
I wish my dad had hugged me.
That's a thing I'm missing.
I am going to make an effort to hug my son regularly, right?
Yeah.
Gordon's reaction to it is kind of peculiar.
Quote, it always seemed Seemed to me that that was just what he was doing, trying to hug me, wanting to, but not knowing how, as if having never been the object of a fatherly embrace himself, he could not pass on what he had never received.
In fairness to my father, I stressed that this was a subjective impression.
The fact of the matter is that he did hug me often.
And it may well have been that my self-loathing, born of contempt for my weakness in the face of fear, rendered me unable to recognize genuine fatherly affection and to receive it when offered.
And that's one of the things that makes this guy interesting and kind of unique because I can't imagine any of our modern, like right-wing media guys admitting to that kind of vulnerability.
Being like, I don't know if my dad didn't know how to hug me because he'd never been hugged or if I was unable to accept his love because I hated myself so deeply.
Right.
That's that's that's that's actually a pretty powerful like thing to grapple with, like for a human being.
That's like, like it makes you emotional reading it where you're like, well, that's some real shit, G. Gordon Liddy.
You're a dangerous maniac, but that is, that is a real thing that you've expressed.
Well, but because it is.
It's like all the pieces are there.
All the pieces for him to be like normal are there or like good are there.
It's just like, what happened, man?
Yeah, it is.
He is like, from a diagnostic standpoint, fascinating.
Yeah.
So the last critical moment in his journey to conquering fear and pain is what he describes as like a potentially divine migraine attack.
He claims that like he's scared of God, he's scared of pain.
And then one day he's walking around and he suddenly is just overwhelmed by agony.
The way he describes it, it sounds like a migraine, right?
And being the Catholic boy that he is at this period, he decides like, I will offer up by suffering to souls in purgatory, right?
Like since I'm already overwhelmed with suffering, I'll offer to take on their suffering if they need a break, right?
And hopefully they will put in a solid for me to God.
And he thinks this works because the pain is followed by rapturous pleasure and he like passes out, waking up later with no discomfort.
He claims, from that day forward, I feared nothing but God.
And there would come even a day when I did not fear God either.
Oh boy.
There has to be a medical explanation for what this is, right?
What the fuck is he has no idea?
I mean, like, there's stuff like migraine into rapturous pleasure to no longer fearing God.
I don't know.
Like, my best guess is migraine, just because I don't know what else it would be.
There's something called exploding head syndrome.
I do think that normally, number one, it doesn't quite sound like what that is.
And I think that normally occurs like kind of when you're on the edge of sleep, but I don't know.
It's, it's weird.
I don't know what it would be.
Yeah, but G. Gordon Liddy, you know who never experiences that is our sources.
Migraine to Rapturous Pleasure00:04:13
Oh, yeah.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Stepbrothers, 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 Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, city hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey, who did it?
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I 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.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one: never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And yes, we're back.
How you doing?
Sorry.
Yeah.
That was so wild.
What a way to go out to commercial break.
Holy shit.
What a beautiful way to go out to commercial break.
Yeah.
So we're talking G. Gordon, the lidster.
As he grew into young adulthood, G. Gordon Liddy became increasingly aware of a flaw in his otherwise perfect mental health.
He had an anger management problem.
Now, he first noticed this while he was out.
His uncle Ray, when he's a teen, buys him his first real gun.
Terrible mistake.
Oh my God.
So he goes out hunting with this gun.
And while he's out in the woods, someone shoots over his head, right?
Now, he describes this as close incoming fire.
G. Gordon Liddy's Flaw00:08:12
I am pretty sure he is exaggerating because that's the kind of guy that he is.
And this is the closest he ever gets to combat.
That said, you know, I can say a lot of the hunters that I know, especially out in the West, right?
This is maybe less common, but like a lot of hunters I know have either had shots come near them or had people shoot over their heads.
Sometimes it's a thing when you're really out in the boonies, you like wind up in somebody's spot and they may do it to try to scare you off.
I've also had family and stuff get like shot again, shots over their head in like Oklahoma when they cross into like a pot farm or something, right?
Stuff like this happens out in the backcountry.
So maybe this is a true story.
Maybe someone was actually shooting at him.
Maybe it was some kid who was just firing.
But he responds by randomly firing five rounds just in where he thinks the direction of the shot is.
And it horrifies him, right?
Because he believes he like, again, it's bat, you shouldn't shoot blindly in a direction because you don't know who you'll hit, right?
So he, he, he like, this is what concern he becomes like frightened that like he has an anger problem and that like it might lead him to doing something terrible someday.
And he doesn't want to do anything crazy, you know?
So he has like, and he admits to being horrified by this.
That's a, it's, if you react in that way, it's a bad way to react.
It's reasonable to be like, oh my gosh, I can't believe I did that.
I should really work on myself.
I should think about like what led me to reacting that way because I can't risk doing this again.
So reasonable for him to feel this way.
He follows that realization with this unhinged line.
It was no good wishing I had more German and fewer Italian genes.
I know perfectly well that with a powerful enough will, I could be as ice calt as any Tutan.
Now, always, always with the Nazis that cannot help himself.
Oh my God.
The word ice calt.
So I see that word in there and I'm like, I wonder, wonder if that's some Nazi shit, right?
Now, it's just a word.
It means ice cold in German, although it's often a colloquial term for cold-blooded, right?
It literally means like something's ice cold, but like you would describe a cold-blooded person as Ice cult.
It is, though, a pretty Nazi thing to say because I just typed that, I just typed Eiskalt and Hitler in, and boy howdy, immediately speeches start popping up, right?
Probably the most famous use of this term by Hitler was his 1939 address to the Reichstag on the anniversary of coming to power.
Quote, as regards National Socialist Germany, it is painfully aware of the destiny awaiting it.
Should fascist Italy be wrestled to the ground by an international agglomeration of forces, irrespective of pretenses, we know these consequences and we shall cold-bloodedly look them straight in the eye.
Hitler loved to use this term and he used the phrase like cold-blooded.
He liked to describe, you know, the ideal young German man as cold-blooded, as hard as steel, as unfeeling, right?
Because those are the people who commit genocide best, you know?
So Liddy, Liddy wound up getting some backblasts from that shit.
Oh my God.
He graduates high school.
World War II, the big dub-w dose is over by this point.
So tragically, he does not get to go fight.
He does note a preference to having been able to fight the Japanese.
So he gets admitted to Fordham University, which is a very pretty college in New York that was initially at least, I don't know if it still is, but it was run by the Jesuits at this point, right?
Now, the Jesuits are like an order within the Catholic Church that is like, you know, they're like the smart guys.
They do a lot of the teaching.
They do a lot of the school running and shit.
There was, you know, they've had a long history, some of which, you know, they had to be kind of like a secret society type deal.
He finds the Jesuits admirable for their intellectual rigor and quality as educators, which is fine.
He also finds them admirable because they remind him of the SS.
He describes them as the shock troops of the Catholic Church.
Notes that they were suppressed by the Nazis, but also writes, Heinrich Himmler used it as the model for his own core of Übermenschen, the Schutzstaffel, the dread blacked uniformed SS, whose hand-picked members swore a special oath of loyalty to the Führer, which is like, that's not wrong, but like, that's an ins that's like, why would you bring that up here?
That's not relevant.
Like, we don't, we don't need to rant about how cool the SS are when you're talking about your college.
Unnecessary, G. Gordon Liddy.
This will be, this will be a continuing pattern.
He cannot bring up the SS enough, like constantly.
He, he cannot stop specifically.
It's not just that he brings them up.
It's that whenever he becomes a like a member or associated with a new organization, he compares them positively to the SS.
So G. Gordon had missed the big dub-w dose, but by the time he got into college, the Korean War had started up, which is so yay.
Huzzah!
There's a war and they're not Germans, I get to kill a lot better for him.
Really lines up great.
Yeah.
Now, I brought this up on the show before, but my grandpa was in that war.
He was there basically the entire time it was happening and did not seem to enjoy it.
Horrible experience.
Terrible time.
Yeah.
And basically anyone who went through the Korean War will tell you, fucking nightmare.
Like, you don't want it.
You don't want to be in that war.
You don't want to be in most wars.
Yeah.
Liddy is desperate to see combat, though.
So he joins the ROTC at Fordham, which unfortunately, I mean, he wants to be in the infantry or he wants to be Marine or something.
He wants to do something that'll let him kill people.
But at Fordham, their ROTC is an anti-aircraft artillery unit.
So he doesn't like that because you don't get to actually like generally, you don't get to kill people close up with anti-aircraft artillery because it's kind of the point.
So he decides to do this because it'll at least like set him up to be an officer.
And his intent is that I'll transfer to infantry or armor later and then I'll get to go have my searing wartime experience that makes me into a man.
So when it came time for his formal training and service, Liddy had fallen for a young woman who met most of his weirdo requirements for a wife, but lacked.
He's like, she's almost perfect, but she lacks mathematical ability, right?
So he decides he wants his kids to be good at math.
So he decides not to ask her for her hand in marriage because she's bad at math and she's too short.
He writes that he wanted, quote, height and heavy bone structure so that my children would be physically as well as intellectually powerful.
Oh my God.
Again, he could have just become Robert Crumb.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like he just, it's, it's the tragedy for us and then him in that order is he's just gonna take it better paths so many times.
So many, nearly anything he would have done would have been better than becoming G. Gordon Liddy, right?
Right.
If he, if he had just become a card shark, it would have been a better person.
Oh my God.
He parts from this mystery woman in the hope that he will find someone he describes as a quote, tall, fair, powerfully built Teuton whose mind worked like the latest scientific wonder, the electronic computer.
I had worked long, hard, pain-filled years to transform myself to make a reality of my genetic potential.
Now I believed I had earned the right to seek my mate from among the finest genetic material available.
He really was just God's perfect fascist.
Like, God, the good Lord really made a brilliant Nazi with him.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And the answer to all that is like, if you heard him say any of this out loud, you'd be like, yeah, man.
And then just like kind of quietly take your beer to the other side of the board.
The Mystery Woman00:09:58
Yeah.
Yeah.
Sounds good, Gordon.
Then just walk away.
Either that or I gotta go, man.
Look, normally I wouldn't say this, but like, I don't believe we should have sex police.
But in this case, it would have been nice if like G. Gordon Liddy says this to you at a bar and you have someone you can call to be like, we got to make sure this guy doesn't like hook up with anyone ever.
Don't let this man have love.
Yeah.
He is not allowed.
Yeah.
He like actively should not have.
Yeah.
That should have been a social priority for all of us.
I don't know.
One of his kids goes on to help stop Trump from stealing the election.
So that's probably why you shouldn't have sex police.
But that's like, that's like the two sides.
It's like, yeah, but you know, just because one of his sons sort of became one of the end dominoes doesn't mean one of the first dominoes.
By my mathematic count, there's still like 80% of a Watergate that the Liddy descendants need to stop.
So yeah.
Anyway, he goes to Fort Bliss to train with a bunch of other second lieutenants as artillery forward observers.
Now, an artillery forward observer, your job is to be much closer.
Artillery obviously is pretty far back from the front line.
You know, that's what it's for.
A forward observer, your job is to be much closer to the fighting so that you can spot and call in targets and stuff to the people shooting the big guns.
This is obviously a dangerous job, very important job if you're doing a war.
Liddy, though, he has to, again, because this is what he almost does, he has to like breathlessly hype up the job and the danger.
So he tells us that like life expectancy for the men who do this job is just three minutes, which like, no, Gordon, there is not any job.
Now, in certain specific battles, right, you might be able to say like, you know, the life expectancy of a guy doing this one job in this very specific battle was this long because most of them die, right?
If that happens, you could, I guess, say that, but that is not a thing that you can say of this job in general.
It is fucking, there are people who do this for fucking years, right?
But these kind of claims happen a lot.
You'll hear that claims about like the same job in Vietnam that has like a 20-minute life expectancy.
No, that's not, it's not actually how war works.
Yeah.
Well, it's also like, yeah, I mean, I guess, like, yeah, I guess a guy could die real quick.
Yeah, yeah.
Sure, it happens, but like, no, not generally.
Like, absolutely.
It's also just not a job.
Like, if any of it's just too confusing.
If they die, if they just, if you're every three minutes, you're just throwing another new college graduate into the meat grinder for this.
All you do.
Basically, so that your three minutes is you get there, you pick up the notebook from the last guy, hand it to the next guy, and immediately die.
And again, there's like some specific battles where you could say the average life expectancy for a man, you know, manning a flamethrower or whatever in this specific engagement along like this two mile was this long, right?
Because most of the guys doing this job died.
That kind of shit has happened in war.
That's not what he's talking about.
He's just full of shit.
Yeah.
Being full of shit will be a pattern for him.
Right.
Again, he does not do anything at all interesting in the military.
He has a very boring time in service.
So he has to toss in anecdotes like this and other stories of almost seeing danger so that he could, because he can't like just be like, yeah, I didn't get to do anything cool.
Right.
He has to like lie and make it, make shit up.
And so you get some very funny stories because it's always super sad.
Like it is depressing the degree to which this guy wants to have been, I don't know, my grandpa, right?
Right.
So near the end of his training, he and some comrades are drinking and they decide, this is his claim.
They decide to have a sit-up contest, right?
Liddy insists that he wins, but he wakes up in horrible pain the next day and it becomes clear that he has blown up his appendix doing sit-ups.
And it's maybe there's a good chance he's lying about this.
Although if anyone could do like, if anyone could robotically do sit-ups in a friendly competition so much that they nearly kill themselves, it would be G. Gordon Liddy.
Right, right, right.
He has a mental capacity to fucking blow his own body up.
Yeah.
The way he describes this, everyone's very impressed by how good he is.
And the next day he wakes up in pain.
I kind of suspect like, you know, some other guys are drinking and like Liddy comes in and he like walks up to them and like, like, hey, Gordon, how you, how you doing, man?
And he's like, I'm so pumped up.
Can't wait to go die in Korea.
And they're like, yeah, man, you want to do like a sit-up contest?
You know, can't talk during a sit-up contest.
Why don't you see?
We all just did them.
Here's our numbers.
Why don't you see how many you can do?
Oh, shit.
I guess you win, man.
I guess we gotta go.
Yeah.
Yeah, we gotta bounce.
Hope your appendix is fine.
So he, because he's blown his appendix out doing sit-ups, he gets told his like superiors are like, well, yeah, you know, we have to go do surgery on you now.
So you can't finish your training.
He was about to do, you know, this, this like last bit of training that would have like cleared him for a coveted close combat assignment, right?
And so he is furious, right?
He's about to miss.
This was his shot to be a baroness and he's going to miss it.
So after he has his surgery, like his, his colleagues are doing their, their last course, which is like a nighttime close combat infiltration course.
So Liddy describes while he's still got this open surgical wound, he straps a bunch of belts around it to protect it, throws on his shirt, and then sneaks into the course in order to finish it, which is like crawling around in the mud and doing stuff you shouldn't do right after abdominal surgery.
This reminds me a lot like of Stephen Miller, like trying to race against the girls when he was at Santa Monica High or whatever.
He was like, yeah, men are superior to women.
Enter into the fucking like women's 400 meter or whatever the fuck he did.
Yeah.
God, that's funny.
God, that's funny.
So his COs, he like is like, look, guys, I did the, you know, I finished it.
You know, can I have my like certificate for finishing it?
And his commanding officers are like, dude, you're not supposed to be here.
Like, we told you not to do this because you just had surgery.
Like, absolutely not.
You are not getting like a certificate for this.
And like, this is also why he doesn't go to Korea, because if you're the kind of people whose job it is to like send people over to do a combat position and you're responsible in any way, shape or form, and you see this guy is like, oh, this dude endangers himself constantly and is incapable of following orders and has like nearly gotten himself killed at home in training because he's so irresponsible.
Absolutely, we are not putting this man in a combat situation.
Like, this is the last guy you want next to you in a trench.
He's a fucking maniac.
Yeah.
So Liddy gets back to New York and he serves in an urban anti-aircraft unit stationed in the city.
Now, as you might guess, being in an anti-aircraft unit in New York City is a do-nothing job for fuckers, right?
This is like not the job you give a guy who's like a great warrior.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, because like I again, like the idea is that, oh, if the Soviets, you know, attack, we'll need anti-aircraft.
But the reason why those guns are there is primarily so that civilians feel protected.
Because even at this point, everyone knows like, well, yeah, if we have a war with the Soviets, it's just the end of the world, right?
We all just die.
Yeah.
These guns are not going to happen.
These are not going to be a real factor in that conflict.
So Liddy spent the rest of his life ashamed of this.
And in his autobiography, he invents several very sad moments where he has to threaten people with a gun in order to feel like a big man.
And I don't know if I need to say this, but I will because it's crucial.
All of the men that he invents to threaten with a gun at this point in the book are black men.
Sure.
Yeah.
Soldiers, you know, yeah.
But yes, that is worth worth bringing up about one of the least surprising things about this so far.
Yeah.
Perhaps not shocking.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So the gist of the story is that in 1954, one of these integrated AA units, which is like, and by integrated, I mean there were black and white men serving together, right?
Which is starting to happen in this period of time.
Not kind of, I don't think comprehensively, it's starting to happen though.
One of these newly integrated units, the black enlisted soldiers mutiny against their white officers.
Liddy and another white officer, a captain, are sent in to take over.
And he's going to tell a story from this that is quite problematic.
But you know what's not problematic, Andrew?
Hit me.
Ads.
Ads would never make up stories about threatening your fellow soldiers with guns so that people don't think you're less of a man for failing to serve in Korea.
Oh my God.
Oh, God.
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.
Soldiers and Unloaded Guns00:13:26
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 Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, city hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did 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 chambers ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one: Never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my god, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Anyway, back to the story.
So here's Liddy telling the tale of he and this other officer, you know, going in to take over this unit with primarily black enlisted men.
I told the troops that military courtesy and discipline would be enforced impartially and that certain practices that we understood had been tolerated in the past would not be permitted in the future.
Specifically, I said that we had heard that certain individuals had brought liquor on the post and others had failed to show up for morning roll call formation when the weather was cold or wet.
There would, I said, be no privileged characters in the battery.
Finally, I tapped the leather holster under my left shoulder.
It held a personally owned caliber 38 special Smith Wesson revolver.
I stared at the assembled men and told them that the first man to raise a bayonet against me would be shot on the spot.
Now, there's a pretty good chance this is a lie.
Some officers and NCOs and combat units did, and I think maybe still do, get to carry their own sidearms.
Now, I should also note, sidearms are basically not, are very extremely rare for a handgun to be used in modern war, and even really in Korea, not all that common.
Um, because they're not good weapons, right?
A handgun is a good weapon if you need, if you're concealing it on your body and are attacked out in the world.
If you are in a battlefield, you would, you would prefer a rifle, right?
Like, that's why that's why they exist.
So, they're not super common for this to happen, and certainly not back home, right?
For one thing, a lot of units in situations like this, when you are in a city, when you're like you're most of the soldiers are not going to be issued firearms with live ammunition all the time, right?
You are, yeah, at all, right?
You want to be careful about that, right?
And in fact, he talks later about like one of his soldiers having a weapon that's unloaded because that was the norm, right?
So, I don't know that I believe he would have been allowed to carry a loaded 38 special to threaten men with like maybe it's not impossible, but it does seem unlikely based on what I know about like the standards of the time.
Um, and what was, you know, again, generally when like duty sidearms, when like officers were allowed to carry duty sidearms that were not issued to them, they were like higher ranking too than like a second lieutenant.
This seems like something he would have gotten in trouble for, is what I'm saying.
Another instance that Liddy relates during this time is this very large black soldier who gets arrested and has to be taken to a military jail.
Now, Liddy is ordered to put together a detail to like put this guy, you know, transfer him over to the facility, but the guy's very big and the other soldiers are scared of him.
And then like one point when they're trying to take him over, he like picks up an axe and threatens them.
So Liddy has to pull his gun to threaten this guy.
Like, you know, I'll put six bullets in the space of a dime in your chest, you know, like that kind of fucking deal.
Just so fucking sad, like absolutely a lie and deeply sad.
Yeah, it's all so pathetic.
Yeah.
Based on, again, I grew up not just talking to my grandpa, by the way, was a, was a, was a medic, right?
Like that was his job.
Like that was the thing he did.
He kind of later in the war wound up just running field hospitals because everyone who had been an officer ahead of him, he was a sergeant when the war started, died.
Like that was the shit he did.
But like, I read books because I wanted to understand what he'd done.
I read books about like the unit that he was with, the 5th RCT, regimental combat team and stuff.
And like based on just kind of that general knowledge I have, some stuff I've looked up and conversations with veterans in the modern era, here is how I would characterize Liddy's service.
He was an unreliable and kind of dangerously irresponsible person who hurt himself pointlessly in training.
His officers put him in a place where they thought he could not do any harm until his time in the military was up.
He reports in his book that like he learned later that one of the officers had said he'd never get a combat posting, right?
Which I don't doubt.
And because he was so ashamed of this, he made up a bunch of stories about threatening men with firearms so that people reading this book in 1980 would think he'd been a badass.
Yeah.
That's really sad.
That is a profoundly sad experience.
Yeah.
You know what he is?
He's basically like a Cobra commander.
Just like real sniveling.
Like a real sniveling fashion.
Like a sniveling little, like a worm, right?
Yeah.
Little grub of a man.
Oh, God.
It's so, it's so bleak.
Like this, this whole desire, this belief that like the only thing that makes you a man is like being in combat.
And then the fact that he's, he's completely failed in that one ambition.
And so he's just spent his life lying about being tough so that people would think he had he experienced something close to what he, what he imagines as this like sacred baptism of fire, which it's, it's not, right?
There's certain things that being in that situation teaches you, certain ways in which, you know, people who experience that obviously can be hardened in some ways.
It can make them tougher in some ways.
It also often makes people less capable of dealing with the world, less capable of surviving, right?
Like that is why there's so many suicides from guys.
Like, although a lot of suicides, anyway, complicated issue, but he's, he is, he has mythologized this so far past the point of rationality that it is basically a religion to him, right?
Like combat is heaven to G. Gordon Liddy.
And he's, he's permanently locked out of heaven, right?
Yeah.
He's just spent his entire life in limbo.
And that's, that's going to be really the driving impetus behind everything else he does behind Watergate, too, behind the way he presents himself, the reason why you, you know, the shit he would do, like sticking his hand over a candle until it burnt him to the fucking bone.
Like he did that kind of shit so that people would not, because he was so deeply insecure about his failure to go to war, right?
He's like, he's like if Ben Shapiro actually had a form of courage.
Right, right.
There is that little bit of it, right?
Where he is willing to damage it.
I mean, he's like, like, you know, for all his talk, Ben Shapiro isn't out there starting fights with people.
Yeah.
No, and, you know, at least, at least G. Gordon Liddy has, yeah, the courage of putting his like body on the line.
He has the courage of destroying his appendix in a sit-up contest.
So awesome.
Bursting his guts, doing sit-ups.
Yeah.
So at age 23, he's in this nowhere career in the army.
He's got no idea what to do with himself.
So he decides, you know, to try to figure out what's next for him.
He's going to go and he's going to get his IQ tested, right?
He's got to be one of these guys, right?
He claims that he gets measured several times and it's always between 137 to 142, which is a near genius analyt.
Now, we all know IQ is bullshit.
That said, given his, he's apparently a pretty competent lawyer for a while.
And given like what IQ measures, maybe he did test well.
You know, again, I don't particularly value that, but it's possible.
Yeah.
I think it's probably really likely he does well on an IQ test.
He's got like, he's got the kind of mind.
Again, as a kid, he's able to like make gunpowder and shit.
Like when he puts his mind to shit, I would not be surprised, especially if he studied for the IQ test.
Well, more importantly, yeah, he's got guy who thinks IQ tests matter.
Yeah, it's possible.
Doesn't really matter.
So, but he does, it does matter that he wants us to know this, right?
That does again.
It's another little piece of the Liddy puzzle.
Now, he had always planned to be a military man, but at this point, it's become clear the military does not want him.
So he is lost and he decides to take an aptitude test from the Johnson O'Connor Research Foundation's human engineering laboratory.
Johnson O'Connor was the founder of modern aptitude tests, or at least a top candidate for that.
He's one of the guys who invents this as a thing.
And the tests this company offers today cost like 600 bucks and they can last like three days.
I haven't found much info suggesting they're actually good for anything.
You get some people saying it was helpful.
You get, I have, I've run into a lot of modern complaints where they're like, yeah, I took the test and then they just, they asked me what I wanted to be and then gave me like high school guidance counselor advice on the thing that I had told them I wanted to be, which I knew I wanted to be anyway.
Yeah.
I'm not going to, I don't know enough about this field to like say this is definitely a con, but I, it does, yeah, I get that little like tingling on the back of my neck.
Maybe it's because I'm not an aptitude test guy.
But Liddy, if it is a con, if this was a con, Liddy was a willing mark because he's a gullible narcissist.
And if he can take a test that tells him he's amazing, he's going to, he's going to spend any amount of money.
Quote, after three days of testing, I was given an extensive report telling me such things as that I was cross-dominated, left-eyed, but right-handed, possessed the vocabulary of a vice president of General Motors and was very intelligent.
First off, that really says a lot about the difference in worlds because if someone today was like, you know, I've got the vocabulary of a VP at General Motors, I'd go, the guys make dog shit cars?
I don't know, man.
Like, come back to me when you've got the vocab of a Toyota VP.
But also any corporate vice president, like it's like, that's not impressive.
They don't use words much, right?
They're like.
Test makers, you're already lying.
Just tell them you're an English professor.
Who gives a shit?
Yeah, who gives a shit?
Like, why do we like, is that a, was that a thing that like vice presidents of companies were seen as being like great vocabulary havers?
Today they're the guys who are using chat GPT to send their emails because they can't fucking write.
Like, anyway, whatever.
So he gets advised by this test to become a lawyer.
And so he starts law school.
He's still like, I think he's in the reserves at this point.
Corporate Vice Presidents Lie00:15:12
So he transfers to the JAG core and he meets a young woman during this period, Francis, who is the same height as him.
And he finds this critical dimension, even taller and heels because he definitely has a kink here.
Quote: Far from being sensitive about it, I enjoyed having on my arm a woman six feet tall.
When I learned that Fran's job at IBM was to receive from brainstorming electronic engineers short written descriptions of theoretically possible new kinds of computers for which she would then create a mathematical language and that she did calculus problems for recreation the way I did crossword puzzles, I knew she was the woman I wanted to bear my children, a Teuton slash Celt of high intelligence, a mathematical mind, physical size, strength, and beauty.
She had it all.
Oh my God.
What a moon man way of talking about that.
Oh, God.
Yeah, it really is like, but it's also like so close.
You know what you like.
That's actually pretty admirable.
Yeah.
And he, I wonder how you feel about this.
So his, his, his, again, so they're kind of long distance.
He's still doing school.
He's still in the military a little bit.
So like there's this period of time where he's like really insecure that she's going to find someone else because he's not able to be around all the time.
So he spends all of his savings on a voice recorder and he sings a bunch of love songs into it and then he leaves it with her, making her promise to listen to it regularly.
Now we got a three-person team here.
Quorum, you know, do we uh is that sweet?
Is that creepy?
Where where are we landed on that one?
Um because I find it unsettling.
Yeah.
It's a no for me, dog.
That's that's a no.
That's a that's a big NWO, which is how I spell no, no woo.
So oh God.
Wild shit.
No, thank you.
I think that is one of those things where like if we liked him, we would find a reason to be like, that's kind of sweet.
Yeah, maybe, yeah.
I mean, again, it's also no, we wouldn't.
No, it's not that kind of show.
When you add it to everything else, like if he, if he, if, if this was a podcast about people who went on to become great blue singers and he was like, so I sent her a bunch of like songs that I'd recorded because I knew that would make her, you know, fall for me.
That was my best.
Like, oh, okay.
You know, that's kind of that makes sense for the kind of guy you are.
I'm just thinking of the scene from the Barbie movie where all the Kens sing to Barbie and all the Barbies look like they want to run away.
That's G. Gordon Liddy, baby.
He can make a Barbie run away.
Although it works on this lady.
So again, he clearly must have known his target, right?
Yeah.
They get married.
They're married 54 years.
Well, sorry.
Sometimes there's not lessons.
And look, we can make fun of this, but it does work, apparently.
For one guy, don't do this.
Oh, yes, yes, yes.
Don't do that.
I mean, today she'll be creeped out that you found like an old school voice recorder.
Like, would you buy it?
How much money did you spend on this tape recorder?
I'm going to break up after we do this episode and have DMs of people doing this.
If you do that, I will, I will know.
Dan, Dan, immediately know.
We will launch airstrikes.
We will send in beasts.
Robert Bretton said a lot.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We have, we're part of the nuclear triad now here at CoolZone Media.
Like, we'll do it.
I don't give a fuck.
So Liddy also promises that during this period, the military selected him to attend a clandestine activities training course.
And he was instructed there in quote techniques of surreptitious entry.
He goes through all he's like, yeah, they brought me in to do this secret training.
I don't know why, but it taught me how to like break into places and like be an expert on like spying on people.
And I did all of this, but I was told not to mention I'd done it.
And they didn't issue a certificate of completion.
So there's no record of me ever going to this class, but it definitely happened.
And that's how I learned all of my great Watergate skills.
And it's, it's, again, if like he was a famously, if he was a guy who'd like successfully done a bunch of like, you know, fuck job political shit and then gotten caught at the end after like this long career of like crazy escape.
I'd be like, I don't know, maybe.
Like there's at least a need to explain how you learned all this.
But like Watergate, as we'll talk about, you just were a dumbass.
Like there was a complete cock up.
Like at no point did you know what you were doing.
You should never have been in that position because you were deeply, deeply, deeply unqualified to be managing something like this.
I don't need this explanation as to how you learned this because you don't know anything.
I guess it's just when you're writing this book, it's just like, well, that's part of my brand.
I'm the D ⁇ E guy.
Yeah, I got to let people know the army gave me secret training that there's no, after, after learning I was a fuck up, they gave me secret break into buildings training.
Yeah, they did for G. Gordon.
It wasn't from comic books.
It wasn't from a Dick Tracy, a real good, real juicy Dick Tracy run.
I don't believe you at all.
So once his law school is done and Liddy's final obligations to the Army are through, he applies for and joins the FBI, probably with some help from his uncle Ray, right?
There's probably some nepotism going on here, right?
I don't think he gets in on merit, right?
So now, this is the first part of the narrative where we have outside information about Liddy's life.
So we are not as reliant upon like his fucking autobiography here.
So we are going to be weighing outside information as we go on pretty heavily against his questionable claims about his early professional life.
Now, Liddy's version of events is very exciting, right?
He's stationed as a field agent in Indiana and organized crime runs Indiana.
And he, he, he, the two of the guys in his, in his field officer, veteran gunfighters, they were Wild West sheriffs who the FBI brought in and made exceptions for because they needed gunfighting trainers.
These guys taught me how to be one of the best gunfighters in the world.
Again, G. Gordon Liddy, never in a gunfight.
Oh my God.
He's like a side character and justified.
He's just like a guy that like runs off a cliff into like a whole opening.
Just a self on accident doing a draw.
Now, he goes into one of the things that's funniest to me.
So there's a term, if you're, you know, regular listeners to Renault that I, I, I, uh, like shoot and am, you know, a firearms collector.
If you are someone who does this, there's a term within the gun community called like FUD.
And it's like from Elmer FUD.
And it's a term for like weirdos who buy old, obsolete firearms, in some cases, ones that are not safe, but often they're just like very bad guns to use to defend yourself.
And then we'll spend hours on the internet insisting that like these are the best guns in the world.
And they're, they're always maniacs.
They're always G. Gordon Liddy types, right?
And always fans of G. Gordon Liddy, I should add.
So he goes into these loving descriptions about how they like see his 38 that he threatened all of those soldiers with and are like, no, you got to get the most this.
And they showed me the most powerful gun on the planet, a 357 Magnum.
And, you know, they let me carry theirs for a while until my wife bought me one for Christmas.
And it was the best gun in the world, the most dangerous weapon ever recreated.
And I was like, dude, calm down, G. Gordon Liddy.
Calm down.
First off, one of the things that's funny about this is like not in like, I think the 70s, there's going to be a shooting the FBI is involved in that is a disaster, a famous disaster.
And part of why is that like most of the FBI agents are all packing fucking revolvers, which are very outdated in the fucking modern world in a gunfight.
So it's very funny to me that he's obsessed with these mighty revolvers and they're, yeah, anyway, very weird, weird dude.
Think wants you to be impressed that these old sheriffs taught him how to gunfight.
And again, there's no evidence he was good at any of this.
So by this point, he'd gotten married to a brilliant tall computer programmer wife, is his wife here.
And in one passage from his book, he drops casually that before they get married, like they've been dating, they're kind of engaged.
But once he gets hired to the FBI, he's like, well, you can't just marry someone once you're in the FBI.
So he illegally uses the FBI's file system to check up on her background and her family members before proposing.
He also does this for their neighbors before he buys a house.
I don't think this is legal, although he says everyone at the FBI does it.
And in fact, agents were expected to do this to avoid embarrassing the FBI by associating with disreputable people.
I actually think he might be telling the truth about that because this is the J. Edgar Hoover FBI.
And that is like, that is the kind of shit they pull.
So I will give him that.
Yeah.
I'll just say, yeah, I think this is like, I've known a couple of people who have had access to perform background checks and they do it pretty casually.
Now, we're going to roll to a stop here because you've got to go to a baseball game.
But I want to note that like, it's in this part of the book where he's talking about spying on his wife with the FBI's file system to see if she's good enough to be an FBI man's like wife.
And it's at this point that Liddy gives us yet another baffling reference to Hitler's SS.
As Adolf Hitler was referred to throughout the Third Reich as simply Der Führer, so J. Edgar Hoover was referred to throughout the FBI as the director.
There were only a few of us, 6,000 out of 180 million, to stand between our country and those who would destroy it.
I was truly convinced we were an elite core, America's protective echelon.
It's shutstoffle.
So he's like, we were like America's SS.
And it doesn't think for a second.
Is that maybe bad, Gordon?
Is that like, is that maybe a problem with the FBI that like, you're not wrong when you say, I think you were not the only guy in the FBI who saw them as America's SS, but like, is that maybe a problem, Gordon?
Like, and look, should we interrogate this further?
All I will just point out is that people today who chastise you because Republicans used to be reasonable people are talking about people that listened to all of this and thought, yes, the gut.
Again, the man writing this is the dude who came to Richard Millhouse Nixon with a plan to illegally spy on the Democratic Party.
And Nixon was like, yeah, all right, let's do it.
Yeah.
Hold him in.
Get this guy in there.
It didn't quite go that way.
We'll talk about that.
But like, basically, right?
Like, basically, I do love, he cannot stop making SS references.
And they're always positive.
They're always like, we were like the SS.
Isn't that great?
It's so, it's very like hilariously Dr. Strange love in a way that they're like, huh?
Guess this guy's eternal.
Guess this kind of dude always been around and maybe always will be.
Shit.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Endless, endless forever.
Yeah.
That is one of the like unsettling things is trying to be like, well, how did he become this way?
Because again, and you know, we're missing a lot.
He probably leaves out a lot.
Maybe his parents were like fucked up in ways that we don't get in this.
That's the crazy thing is even the part he put out is insane.
Yeah.
Well, it's just like, how?
How does how what is what made you?
I guess we know America made you, right?
Like all of this does make a degree of sense when you think about like this, the this degree of fetishization of the armed forces, this idea like there's something religiously sacred about the experience of combat.
It makes you a better man.
You know, all of this kind of like shit are our weird gun cult worship stuff, right?
All of this is G Gore.
So I don't know.
I don't know why I'm saying I don't get this.
He makes complete sense, right?
I'm an idiot.
He totally makes sense.
He makes sense, but it's still, you're just like, it can't be like this, really, can it?
Yeah.
And the answer is yes, but yes, yes, yes, for sure.
I think part of why we're like, there is this like confusion is he is so honestly the man.
Even guys who do suck, like Crowder and Ben Shapiro, they're pretending to be him.
Right.
Right, right, right.
You know, like when you see him smoking a cigar and you can tell they hate it, like they hold a gun like somebody who's never fired a gun before.
It's like, oh, this is like you're putting on G. Gordon Liddy.
What?
He was like, he was like lying and like making himself up into something, but like he was legitimately this kind of maniac, right?
Yes.
Like, I guess there's a degree of honesty.
There's a kind of honesty in his lies, even.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That modern ones don't have.
Like Ben Shapiro is like fake, like holding a bunch of two by fours from his truck at his truck bed that's never been used.
G. Gordon Liddy's has been used.
It's just been incompetently used.
Yeah.
To the point where the people around him were like, actually, gee, I got this.
I'll handle everybody.
He's also full of shit about like being dangerous and being a hard man.
But he's full of shit in such a way that you know he spends his nights weeping over the fact that he didn't make it to Korea.
Practicing.
Yeah, like really looking at it.
He spent, you know, that he did spend thousands of hours drawing that fucking cowboy gun, like to feel like a big man, you know, just feel like I could be, you know, if it just came, you know, the right things happened, I could really be a fucking old West sheriff.
Well, he did it the hard way.
Everything he did, you could tell he really worked.
Yeah.
Yeah, he worked at being, he didn't just buy the thing.
He like worked at being a maniac.
He was the thing.
Good for you, G. Gordon Liddy.
I guess for you.
And for us, and for us.
I don't know what else to say about you.
So I'm going to let you go, Andrew T. You got anything to plug first?
Oh, you know, podcast Joe's is racist.
We're still on strike almost certainly.
You never know, I suppose.
And so, yeah, come support us if you found this, my side of things, enjoyable.
Yeah.
So find that out.
Check that out.
Support the strike.
Support Super Soaker Full of Piss by, you know, peeing in a Super Soaker and just mail it somewhere.
I don't know where.
I don't care where.
Send, send a piss-loaded super soaker to a stranger.
Yeah.
You know, just send it to the, you know, Warner Brothers corporate offices.
Right.
That's fine.
It is what it is.
Yeah.
It is what it is.
Probably not illegal on our part.
Well, we'll check in with that.
Asterisk.
Check Local Laws00:02:15
Yeah.
Check your local laws.
Uh-huh.
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