G. Gordon Liddy, the convicted Watergate felon, leveraged a best-selling memoir and conservative campus tours to normalize fascist rhetoric, later partnering with Timothy Leary and appearing on Miami Vice. His post-9/11 transformation included promoting "great replacement" theories, disparaging Hispanics, and playing Nazi documentaries, while Joe Rogan's Celebrity Fear Factor erroneously validated his military claims during a bug shower challenge. Liddy survived to witness Donald Trump's rise and January 6th, dying in 2021 with a son facing child pornography charges, illustrating how media normalization enabled his dangerous ideology to permeate modern right-wing extremism despite his criminal history. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:01:59
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You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
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Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Cool zone media.
Oh, yeah.
It's Behind the Bastards, a podcast that I open with grunting noises that no one really likes.
No one's happy when I do this.
The Libertarian Debate Trap00:16:00
Really?
It's got a little like, we're doing this.
Yeah.
It reminds me of home.
It feels like a safe welcoming embrace every time I hear it when I open up Pro Tools.
It reminds me of home in a perilous way to me, but in a way that makes you not want to return.
Well, let's all hope the audience all agrees with Ian and we didn't just torpedo our careers by me making grunt noises, guttural grunts in order to, yeah, exactly.
Good stuff.
Good times.
Welcome back to the show.
We are finishing Liddy, what I promise will be our last episode on the G-Man.
Mixed feelings, you know, ready to move on to another bastard, but also we get to listen to a lot of fear factor today.
And that's something that should make everyone happy.
Now, much like the Catholics, and G. Gordon Liddy was raised as a Catholic.
He kind of becomes agnostic later on.
But the Catholics believe, as I understand it, that before getting to heaven, you generally go through a period in purgatory, right?
Maybe that's wrong, but let's all just pretend that the Catholics believe that, right?
In a similar fashion, before we get to the heaven that is watching a 2006 episode of Fear Factor starring G. Gordon Liddy, we have to go through the hell of listening to a bunch of clips from G. Gordon Liddy's incredibly racist radio show.
So, you know, buckle up, everybody.
Hopefully the Pope will help us out of this jam.
It's wild.
It's wild that there was a good, I guess the good period of Joe Rogan is unimpeachably news radio.
So whatever this means.
This is the purgatory of Joe Rogan.
This is right.
Before he goes to hell, he doesn't make it through the cut, right?
Yeah.
It's like going to med school and becoming a dentist.
Ooh, that's right.
Dentist burns, baby.
Sorry.
You know, a lot of people really enjoy it, but whatever.
It's fine, man.
It's fine.
It's fine.
So we ended last episode with him finishing his book, frightening his wife, singing a Nazi song.
He's back in full.
He's so back, right?
He's doing the full liddy.
So he is, however, in a pretty desperate financial situation when he gets out of prison and still owes about $300,000.
It's a mix of fines and legal fees.
He decides to take a spin at being a writer because what other paths are open to him?
And in 1979, he writes a fiction book called Out of Control.
It is a spy thriller.
The Google book summary of it does not make it sound like a particularly good one.
Richard Rand is a CIA rogue pulled back into the company for one last incredible mission.
Gregory Ballinger is the Soviet spy whose empire Rand is out to destroy.
But in a dance of deception from Washington to Switzerland and South America, the tables are suddenly turned.
Someone in Washington wants the KGB to win.
And Richard Rand dead now.
So pretty boring.
Certainly, I have not found any evidence that this was particularly good or that it had any new ideas.
Pretty, I think he's his idea was: I put out a very basic pot boiler fiction, and hopefully my fame as a Watergate conspirator makes it profit.
You know, not a bad idea.
No, and Howard Hunt had done that because he'd been an author before, like, he immediately started, and it had worked for him, kind of.
So I think he's kind of cribbing from Howard Hunt's worksheet here.
We may do a book episode on this at this point, some point, but I kind of doubt it.
He's not a bad enough writer that I think this will be very entertaining.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That said, his next idea is much better, which is to write his Watergate memoir, which he publishes the next year, 1980, and it sells like a million copies.
He makes a shitload of money off of this.
And once his book becomes a bestseller, Liddy finally finds himself more famous than he'd ever been.
And all these conservative student associations at colleges around the country start clamoring to pay him to come and speak at their universities.
Now, listeners will know I am of the opinion that college campus speaking tours are among the chief threats of our democracy and should be targeted via air power.
However, if anyone does want to pay me to speak at your school, I will be happy to do so.
So please, yeah, yeah, bring me over.
I've done it a couple of times.
It's always a good, good fun.
So the Washington Post reports on Liddy's comeback tour, and their reporter is bemused at the popularity that this convicted felon and fascist has with college students.
Here's their article from 1980.
It's incredible, gushes Donnie Epstein, Liddy's New York agent.
He goes to these college campuses and draws a full house.
They start by hissing and booing, and at the end, they give him a standing ovation.
He turns them completely around.
They love him.
During his speech, Liddy paces across the stage, coiling his microphone cord in one hand, unraveling it with the other.
Dressed in a gray suit, wearing spit-shined black boots.
He speaks in staccato style, interspersing his dialogue with Latin phrases and quotes from Julius Caesar.
Oh my God.
He's good at this.
The demand for Liddy is Titanic.
He gives 32 speeches in the first 42 days after his booking opens.
There are protests by student groups who are angry, in particular, that their tuition money is going to fucking G. Gordon Liddy.
One of the things that's interesting to me, the Washington Post spends like a paragraph mentioning the protests.
This barely merits a mention in 1980 when in 2017 and 18, anytime there were protests of college, there's every post in the New York Times, they were all these quote-unquote liberal papers falling over themselves to write articles about like, well, free speech is in danger because students aren't happy that they're paying these fascists to speak.
Nobody gave a shit in 1980.
Interesting.
So that whole article is a bleak but important read.
And I have trouble not hearing the siren song of the apocalypse in responses like this from dipshit college kids.
He's just so intelligent, said Jane Kopp, a sophomore at Creighton, a Jesuit-run school with 5,600 students.
Before I heard him, I figured he was a psycho, Amy Jersik, another Creighton sophomore said.
But he is really fascinating and he expresses himself so well.
He is just so pro-American, such a super patriot that you have to admire him, even if you disagree, Aaron DeWald, who was with Kop and Jersik interjected.
One Creighton student described Liddy as a modern John Wayne.
And look, I know all these kids are old people now, but listeners, if one of these former students is your relative, pie him in the face this November.
Don't even explain why.
Get him right in the fucking kisser with like a pecan pie.
Pecan is the most aggressive pie to get hit by.
Really, really bash him with it, you know?
That's that's what we're asking you all.
I mean, this is also clearly cherry-picked from the bozos coming out.
It's literally one group of free three friends, right?
The free shittiest people at the school.
Yeah, it's no, I mean, it's like, you know, every college has a fucking libertarian association.
Like it's, it's those fucking right-wing freaks.
Yeah.
And like, yeah.
And you could tell it's because they know what, quote, centrist or I'm not right or left.
I have an independent thinker thing to say.
But, you know, that is, of course, just code for a right-wing freak.
That is exactly right.
And that, that's, that's my take on it too, Andrew.
Yeah.
So the next major move Liddy makes is a pretty intelligent one.
He partners up with Timothy Leary to go on a series of debates at college campuses across the nation.
And Leary, you know, he's this kind of prophet of the acid age.
He becomes this figure who embodies left-wing rebellion during like the hippie period, the 60s.
He's in jail several times.
He's broken out once in the Who song, The Seeker.
You know, I'm the Seeker.
I've been searching low and high.
There's a line in there about like asking Timothy Leary for guidance and stuff.
Like, you know, he is very famous and very famous specifically for being this like left-wing iconoclast.
And, you know, he does, he, he is in jail in prison at the same time that Liddy is.
Yeah.
Leary, actually, they wind up in the same facility at one point.
And they're both these, they're both these like iconoclasts who are seen as embodying their respective sides of the political aisle, right?
Tim Leary is this embodiment of the 60s and early 70s left.
And Liddy is kind of the same thing for the right.
I don't want to know true Scotsman this, but it's also like, yeah, this is like starts to crack into the moral bankruptcy of the white hippies.
Like, get the fuck out of here.
Yes.
I don't like Tim Leary, right?
I'm not, I'm not a fan of the man, particularly.
So, you know, that's where I'm coming from here.
They, they, they have a lot in common in that they are both famous and both fame hounds, and they both understand partnering with each other will increase their appeal.
It's also worth noting that at this time, by the time Leary is partnering on the speaking tour, which is like the early 80s kind of, he is not really left-wing anymore.
He's more of a libertarian and kind of that early web.
Now, not that, not what libertarian often means today, which is like even worse than a normal Republican, but like that is, you know, you're pro-civil rights, you're, you're, you're pro, pro-legalizing drugs, anti-the state generally, but still also not anti-capitalist by any measure of the imagination.
Yeah, so it's taxes.
They spend way too much time talking about taxes.
Yeah.
It is wild how modern libertarians are mostly just known for trying to defend pedophilia, as far as I could tell.
It's like, give heroin to the child I'm dating seems to be the modern libertarian.
Giving heroin to the child I'm dating as opposed to what it ought to be about, which is arming drag queens so that they can carry out tactical strikes.
Yeah, exactly.
So I found a write-up of the tour they did on reason.com, which is a libertarian website.
And it's sympathetic to both people, right?
Reason is the kind of person who is going to see both Tim Leary and Gordon Liddy as like admirable people, potentially.
I think their description is interesting.
First off, they give it a pretty good summary, which is they describe it as evidence of quote, a disorienting moment in American history, a time after the convulsions of the 60s and 70s had ended, but while most of the giant figures of that faded age were still around, trying to find a place for themselves in a changed world.
And I do think that's actually a pretty apt description of what's going on here, right?
Quote, don't go, and there's a film that's made about this tour they go on that you can watch.
This is a summary of that film.
Don't go into this film expecting a conventional left versus right matchup.
By this point in his life, Timothy Leary was a full-fledged libertarian.
This becomes obvious a little more than 40 minutes into the movie when he stands on stage singing the praises of voluntary organizations.
I believe in bridge clubs.
I believe in families.
I believe in friends.
I believe in stock groups.
I believe in collectives.
I believe in corporations and damning the one form of organization which is involuntary, and that's the modern state.
He goes on to declare that every state in the world is a mafia, charging extortion fees called taxes.
But he allows that I love America.
America is the greatest mafia of them all.
At another point, after Liddy offers a lengthy denunciation of gun control, Leary doesn't reply with a liberal argument for restricting firearms.
He simply suggests that Liddy's arguments against gun laws work just as well against drug laws.
Now, there's a couple of things I would note here.
One is that, like, I agree with you.
All states are mafias.
The United States is the world's largest.
Totally agreed.
No disagreement.
Why are corporations not mafias?
Under what?
Like a hell, a fucking insurance company sticking you up with like not allowing you to fucking get cancer treatment unless you pay ruin and like mortgage your ass.
How is that different?
How is that better than a mob, right?
Yeah.
Like, fuck, fuck you for first off for not seeing that.
It's disgusting.
The degree of surveillance corporation, that's fucking vile, I think, of him.
It's better than a mob because any rich person can buy shares in it.
Whereas in a mob, only some rich people could buy shares.
Yeah.
This is like, like having a debate between like center right and hard right and claiming it to be like bipartisanship and like is yeah, truly like presages what the contemporary conversation and this is not all I know, you know I come from libertarians.
I like, I come like that.
Those were the people who pulled me away from being a Republican and I know a lot of the, a lot of republic of libertarians I know are like well, I believe in like markets and I believe in people's ability to like compete, but I think that like corporations are fundamentally the enemy of the free market.
Right, that like actually, what we need to do is break up monopolies and destroy the ability of and I don't have a problem with I I may not agree 100, but I think that's an intellectually consistent point being like The state is a mafia and corporations are.
That's, that's nonsense, Timothy Leary.
Absolute nonsense.
Also, nonsense is what he's saying about gun control here.
Obviously, I have a different stance on this, I think, from a lot of our particularly more liberal listeners.
But what I will say that doesn't make sense about this is that the ways in which gun control and restrictions of drugs harm people, or sorry, the ways in which the gun issue and harms that are done by guns and how gun control affects that is different.
Like it relates to the way in which like drug restrictions and the way in which that harms people, like they're totally different.
Firearms, a big part of the danger of firearms, the reason why we have mass shootings and stuff, the reasons why we have gun crime is that firearms are incredibly available.
If you care about reducing suicides by guns, mass shootings, gun violence in general, you have to deal with the fact that like the more firearms there are out there and the easier they are to acquire, the more people who are dangerous will acquire them, right?
Even if you are pro-gun, that is a very basic, inarguable fact that you have to deal with if you care at all about reducing the harm that guns do in society, right?
The issue with drugs is the complete opposite, which is that because of prohibition, drugs that are adulterated show up on the market and those kill people.
The other issue is that because it is an illegal business, the price of drugs is artificially inflated to many times what it ought to be.
And so when people become addicted, they are often forced into a position where in order to avoid withdrawal, the only way they can afford to get high is to steal shit.
Whereas if they could get their heroin for fucking two bucks a dose from a government facility, like they can in a couple of countries, they would not need to break into people's houses to afford their fucking fix, right?
These are completely opposite issues.
And like comparing them and saying, like, well, actually, the problem with, you know, gun control is bad in the same way.
No, they're completely different.
Even, even though I have like a lot of gun control laws objectively are not effective, which is not to say that all of them are ineffective.
A number of them do work, but it's a completely opposite issue.
The issue with drugs is that, is not that like there's too many drugs, it's that people don't know what they're buying and the price is inflated.
The issue with guns is that any fucking asshole can get one.
Like totally different problems.
Whatever.
Sorry.
It's it's the way they're consistent is when you're talking to the world's dumbest right-wing teenagers.
They're both freedom issues.
Yeah.
I anyway, it's it's whatever.
I'm I'm very frustrated by the, although I do have to say this is a debate occurring in the mid-80s.
A lot of these problems were not nearly like for one thing, mid-80s, mass shootings, very uncommon compared to what they would be.
So this is we and so, you know, fentanyl wasn't in the market.
Both of these problems are very different when these guys are arguing them.
So I do have to, I have to give them kind of that point.
Liddy's Prison Claims00:15:52
Anyway, quite simply has to hand it to G. Gordon listening.
There we go.
So I don't, yeah, I don't want to go on too much.
I'm done ranting about my opinions there.
I will make one more note, which is that while Leary, the guy who is famous as a hippie figure, is very much taking an individualist stance in these debates.
Liddy is the guy who is coming at this from more of, and this is something Reason notes.
Liddy is actually more of a collectivist, which is where, because he's talking about like, you know, because fascists have a degree of that in them, right?
Sure.
You know, like he, he talks a lot more about like the community and the people and stuff, whereas Leary is really more of a people should be able to like choose who they associate with.
Liddy does not really believe that.
But Liddy also critiques the prison industrial complex pointedly in a way that Leary doesn't really spend a lot of time on, which is interesting to me.
Yeah.
He's not consistent about this, but it's interesting.
Yeah.
G. Gordon Liddy has problems with the prison industrial complex.
Yeah.
Only because he was in prison.
Yeah.
And he's certainly never had it before.
He basically writes that in a column at one point, but we'll get there.
Liddy's newfound fame earned him constant appearances on news shows and the talk show circuit.
We're going to play you a clip of him on Letterman from 1982.
Letterman does not give this guy any pushback whatsoever.
He does not really question him in any meaningful way.
You can see he and the audience falling for Liddy's routine.
Liddy, during this appearance, discusses the time that he killed and ate that rat as a kid because, you know, people have read the book by this point and are fascinated by it.
He compares it to the experiences of like guys like POWs who have to eat rats to survive and other heroic survivor narratives.
When he's asked to give advice on life in prison, he goes into loving detail about all the weapons that he supposedly had.
And here, I'm going to have Ian play that clip now.
Did you have weapons inside prison?
Yes.
And how does a person get a weapon?
You can get anything you want inside a prison, anything, if you're willing to pay for it and have the assets to pay for it.
The way I got weapons, some I bought and some I stole and some I had made for me by friends.
Good heavens.
Were like firearms?
Actually, no, I had a steel bar with sharp edges with which I could break your legs.
I had a pickaxe handle with a jagged chunk of rusty steel on the end of it with which I could make you very unhappy.
And of course, I had a knife.
You always have a knife.
Shank as it's called.
Shank for you kids watching at home.
It's a shank.
So it's frustrating to me the degree to which Letterman and everyone, they're just like, yeah, welcome him back.
He's funny.
He's our everybody's favorite fascist.
You know, this is how this shit gets normalized.
Letterman, you were a part of that.
Liddy's book in touring went so well that Hollywood soon came a call-in.
In 1985, he was hired to play a CIA operative who'd become a heroin smuggler on an episode of Miami Vice.
He is actually a recurring character on the show Miami Vice.
There's a lot that's interesting about this appearance in particular, but I want to start with playing you a clip of Liddy on the show.
And this is from, yeah, an episode of Miami Vice.
You know, of course, that in most parts of the world, pain is a second language.
People understand it better than words because you can get right to the point.
But in this country, we don't really have very much pain.
So the second language is money.
Naturally, you'd expect to receive money for what you know instead of pain.
Like, he gets a lot of appearances in a number of TV shows.
And it's not just because, like, that's how he gets his foot in the door, but like, he keeps getting appearances because like he's not bad at that.
He's actually like a decent character actor.
Now, the only character he plays is G. Gordon Liddy.
But yeah.
Just so bizarre.
It is one of the, again, we keep talking about these modern-day fascist media, Ben Shapiro, Steven Crowder, Michael Knowles, these modern right-wing ghouls that are all propped up by petro dollars and the Wilkes brothers and shit, who are like spending all of their time advocating the fucking state suppression of transgender people, scum.
These guys are all aping Liddy to some extent, but they all have the opposite path where all of these dudes, fucking Michael Knowles was in a video we ran on cracked.
These dudes all started out by trying to break into acting and screenwriting, right?
They wanted to be Hollywood celebrities and they failed out of it because they had no talent.
Liddy, on the other hand, starts as a right-wing ghoul in politics, and then he wins his way into Hollywood by virtue of some degree of merit.
Like, well, it's like, yeah, it's so weird.
Almost all his other, yeah, his like what skills he has are so bizarrely misapplied at all times.
It's like maybe if he had started trying to go into politics, he'd be he'd be that guy.
You would know him as like, yeah, I don't know, the fucking Fed in the early Avengers movies or some shit.
He could have done it.
He also looked at all those guys are kind of like, you know, like your Eastwoods, like just kind of like right-wing bozos.
Yeah.
Like, as evil.
Yeah.
Like, we all more or less forgave Eastwood for that fucking weird chair speech, not because he deserves to be forgiven, but because like he's in some pretty good movies.
Yeah.
And it's like, he's also in some pretty racist movies, don't get me wrong.
Bozo, right?
You're like, he's a, he's a fucking idea.
Yeah.
Like, yeah, it's fun.
It's not like, whatever.
It's, we, we, we mostly ignore it because like if someone's good at being on camera, we'll forgive a lot about them.
Perhaps we shouldn't, but we do.
Yeah.
And yeah, Liddy's, you know, he's not like a fucking historic level talent, but he's not bad at this.
One fun fact about Liddy's second performance on Miami Vice is that the episode plot is like, yeah, that he's like, he's, he's funneling.
He's a drug dealer funneling, selling drugs to funnel money to Contras in Nicaragua, which is funny because like, that's what happened, right?
That's the Iran-Contra story.
But this episode airs a month before the first article exposing Iran-Contra drops this episode.
So that's fun.
And like shit like that, you know, it adds to the mystique of G. Gordon Liddy, obviously.
How could that not, right?
That's wild that that happened.
That's actually kind of crazy.
Of course, that would improve his kind of reputation as this shadowy figure of American politics and cultural life.
You know, it creates something out of a man who should have, by all right, spent the rest of his life living quietly in shame.
In 1987, his fame is close to at its peak, and Liddy has what would prove to be the only legitimate and verifiable violent encounter of his life.
He finally gets into a fight that we can prove happened.
It is not a good time for him.
And I'm going to quote from an article in the Washington City paper here.
The confrontation took place at Liddy's isolated Fort Washington home on Christmas Eve, 1987.
According to news reports, Liddy discovered a young couple sitting in a pickup truck on his property.
Armed with a billy club, he approached the vehicle and told the male driver to scram.
Words were exchanged, and the driver attempted to back over Liddy.
When that failed, the driver whipped the truck into a U-turn and came roaring towards Gordo.
Liddy stood his ground and was knocked 15 to 20 feet in the air.
He suffered a broken arm and rib, a ruptured kidney, and a torn knee ligament.
That is so funny.
Like he gets, he has one encounter.
These guys are just like making out fucking in a pickup truck and he charges at them with a stick thinking like, this will scare him.
I'm the dangerous G. Gordon Liddy with my billy club.
And they just run his ass down, nearly kill him.
Again, not a coward.
Yeah, not a coward.
Not good at violence.
Now, the article goes on to write, although he was not able to provide the police with either a tag number or description of his assailants, Liddy later began intimating in interviews that mafia friends from his prison days had identified the couple and would take care of them.
This never happened.
Liddy is ashamed that he got his ass handed to him in his only real fight and he had to be like, my powerful friends will take care of him.
No, they didn't.
You got run over by some teenagers.
Oh my God.
Somewhere out there is a hero.
Maybe they're dead by now.
It's been a while, but somewhere out there, I still, I hope, are two heroes who know, like, we hit G. Gordon Liddy with a truck.
Yeah.
That's right.
If you hit G. Gordon Liddy with a truck, reach out to us.
Sure.
Statute's over.
Yeah, exactly.
You got to be fine.
I'd argue it's self-defense.
You know, come out.
We'll put you on behind the bastards.
If you ran down G. Gordon Liddy with your truck and have any evidence to corroborate it.
Come on.
Come on.
Come on over, folks.
Love to talk to you.
Fascinating.
So, yeah.
It's interesting to me that the fact that, you know, this is kind of goes to show, despite all these claims he has about some of these fights he's in in prison and all these times where he has to intimidate and scare people down.
A lot of media people, basically everyone, even in the like liberal and left-wing media, takes this as read and assumes that he was to some extent a dangerous man.
Sure.
I don't think there's any evidence of this.
And again, we have this one actual piece of evidence of how he, how a fight went for him.
And it's a disaster.
He nearly dies because he tries to fight a truck with a stick, right?
That's the level, again, these fascists that can't threat model.
You don't, you don't even fight a truck with a gun if you can avoid it.
That's not an even fight.
You certainly don't fight it with a stick.
But G. Gordon Liddy fucking tries.
And all of the fact that he is a liar, the fact that he's so inconsistent, the fact that like he is exaggerating and puffing up his skills and abilities was all available and easy to prove to any journalist in the 1980s who'd had access with a library.
It was easier for me every time I fact-checked him.
It was easier for me to do it.
Obviously, I've got Google, I've got Wikipedia, all that shit.
Makes it a lot simpler.
But that wasn't an impossible dream for a fucking reporter back in that day.
They chose not to fact-check Liddy because he was popular and writing about his antics meant money.
Perhaps the most upsetting example of this was Connecticut magazine, which paid Liddy to write a column about his time in prison.
It actually starts okay.
Liddy acknowledges that he found out having been in prison that the liberals who had complained about the injustice of support and funding for criminal defense resources were right and that he'd been wrong for ignoring them.
But he spends most of the rest of the article specifically trying to argue against gun control by making up conversations murderers had with him where they're like, oh, I always vote for gun control.
I love gun control because I'm a murderer.
That's my favorite thing.
Which these conversations never fucking happen.
Yeah.
Quote, to quote one of the latter, this is Liddy.
To quote one of the latter who raised his right hand in the manner of one taking an oath as he spoke, on my mother, when I go on a piece of work, I don't look to nobody.
But God forbid, something goes wrong and I got to do what I got to do.
And the sucker's got a piece.
I mean, it ain't all cut and dried.
You know, he could end up whacking me out.
I hope they take away all them guns from all them legitimate schmucks.
Me, forget about it.
I'll always have a pistol when I need one.
Yeah.
No way anyone ever said that to you.
The client murderer says all them legitimate schmucks.
Get the fuck out of here.
Yeah.
What a, what a thing to say to put in the mouth of like your vision of a street club thug, the phrase legitimate schmucks.
Like whacking me out also.
Yeah.
What are you?
He is, he is weirdly mixing like racist people's idea of like what inner city like like diction is with like a mob movie from the 60s.
Like it's it's so strange.
Yeah.
Like if Martin Scorsese was a bigot, like that's how goodfellas would sound.
Liddy also argues that since criminality is inherent to some people, programs that rehabilitate or educate them are valueless.
And again, he puts words in the mouth of prisoners who's like, prisoners don't want to go to school.
They don't want to have any sort of like rehabilitation programs.
They just want to do their time and leave.
Great guy.
In 1991, Liddy got to have a conversation with Jack Anderson.
Now, Jack Anderson was during the period that Nixon was in office, an anti-establishment journalist who did some reporting very damaging to the Nixon administration and earned their ire.
Nixon's people authorized a number of dirty tricks against Anderson.
This is actually a really interesting story.
They like feed him some information to get him to write stories and stuff that'll hurt him.
And there's a lot of plotting about what more we could do to stop this guy.
Liddy and Hunt actually spend their early days as White House plumbers working up various assassination plots.
Like they are in the pay of the White House, plotting for ways to murder a U.S. journalist.
Now, there's a lot of debate as to how much they whether or not anyone else wanted them doing this.
One of the versions of events is that basically somebody jokes kind of like, yeah, it'd be good if we could whack, get rid of that guy.
And Liddy assumes, oh, that's a, that's an order from the White House for me to murder this man.
And when his bosses find out, they're like, what the fuck are you?
No, stop.
Like, we do not like, G. Gordon Liddy, do not assassinate a journalist on behalf of the Nixon White House.
That is not your job.
There's still a lot of argument as to whether or not there was any serious planning beyond him and Hunt being maniacs together.
I don't want to downplay this because this is the fact that there were people in the pay of the White House talking about this is a fucking serious thing, right?
Anyway, this is an issue.
Later, as a celebrity, Liddy talks to Jack Anderson and is like, oh, yeah, we were plotting to murder you.
And when Anderson is asked, how do you feel about the fact that G. Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt were plotting to kill you?
His response is great.
Given their record, I was in no danger.
The safest place to be is a person who G Gordon Liddy wants to kill.
You know, the other thing that is pretty clear from this is like he was like the precursor to it's okay.
These racist right-wing clowns are buffoons, so they're harmless.
Like, that's a you know, the whole Trump like thing.
And you're like, okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know that I think that's really what like Andrew, because I, what do you say to like, this guy's plotting to murder me?
Like, you're like, yeah, well, thank God he was a dip shit.
You know, I don't think that's a bad idea.
You don't think so?
I don't know.
I mean, not from the guy targeted, right?
Yeah, maybe.
I think it's bad that all these other people downplayed him and like wrote these positive articles about it.
If you're Anderson in this, just being like, yeah, well, he was a moron.
I don't know.
I don't think as the victim, I think that's not a bad response.
I get what you're saying.
I just don't want to like, I don't want to like put the broader media's complicity in Liddy on this dude who was like, oh, no, yeah, sorry.
I was trying to say the other way, which is, yeah, the media.
Downplaying the Bigot00:03:07
I mean, like, even the Letterman thing, right?
It's like, it's like the same as this Jimmy Fallon with Trump.
And ultimately, it's because it's like, yes, they're racist, like fat, they're racist fascists, but at least they're harmless.
Yeah.
No, I get what you're saying.
And that is something going on here, you know.
Speaking of the early 1990s, you know what really became much more of a problem starting in the early 1990s?
The presence of advertising.
Unrestricted ads.
Yeah, that really got a lot worse in the 90s.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
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, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
Federal Agents and Fears00:15:38
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marcini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ah, we're back.
Better than ever, I think.
So the early 90s are an era in which the power of talk radio really starts to make itself undeniable.
Rush Limbaugh, who we have discussed in detail in another series on this show, was the avatar of this new wave of media, right?
Rush is really like the big, he's not the first, obviously.
I mean, that guys like Father Coughlin in the 30s and shit were right-wing media radio figures.
Rush is the first really like guy to figure out in the modern sense, how is talk radio going to revitalize the far right.
It should not be surprising then that he played a crucial role in bringing G. Gordon Liddy to the airwaves.
From an article in the right-wing paper, Washington Examiner, quote, he was asked to fill in for a vacationing talk show host in the New York area.
On the first day, he arrived with a cold and his voice failed him.
Down the hall, conservative host Rush Limbaugh had just finished broadcasting his national show and heard the G-Man struggling over the nation's speakers.
He didn't know me from Adam, but he came in, sat down, and carried me for the rest of the program, Liddy says.
On the second day, media mogul Mel Carmazon was in his limo listening to competing radio stations in New York and was wowed by Liddy's blunt approach and told his Washington station, WJFK, to give the former Nixon Aid an audition, which quickly led to a job and a long career on the radio.
When Gordon started at WJFK in 1992, he tried an unusual approach.
He read news stories from the conservative press on air.
I just wanted to get the information out there and it worked, he said in amazement.
So that's, you know, a very anodyne way of describing his show and what he does.
My description would be that Liddy's show was one of the most hateful radio programs to ever hit the airwaves.
If you are a real head for extremist politics, you will note that in the early 1990s, when Liddy started, this is a period in which the militia program in this country was supercharged, first by Ruby Ridge, then by Waco.
All of this culminates in the Oklahoma City bombings.
Liddy leans into the violence of this era because it's anti-government and there's a and Democrats are the ones in office, right?
He makes jokes about like using drawings of the president and the first lady for target practice because he knows that's going to like cause a hubbub.
And then when it you know gets angry and the White House makes a statement, you know, he gets to respond to it.
It puts his name in the papers.
He is very much playing in the same way that like his, his, his predator or his, the people who follow him will play the same playbook.
When he gets questioned about it, he says, I thought it, he said, I thought it might improve my aim.
It didn't.
Having said that, I accept no responsibility for somebody shooting up the White House.
Very, very, very blatantly being that kind of guy.
Now, this inspires an angry response from the White House.
Clinton references Liddy when he complains about loud and angry voices spreading hate on the airwaves in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing.
While the president denied he was calling out Liddy in particular, the G-Man took it personally.
And he said this the next day on his show, as related by the Washington Post.
It's the president who lies and is deliberately misrepresenting facts, Liddy declared.
It was he, Liddy, who warned last summer about the increasing animosity towards the federal government for taking away our Second Amendment rights.
Now, Liddy denies that his frequent manic warnings that federal agents were coming to confiscate guns had any influence on the intellectual climate that culminated in the bombing of the Murray building in Oklahoma City.
I will say the arguments he makes in this period are more complicated than some of his later takes, because when he is attacking the ATF and the FBI, those agencies have a shitload of blood on their hands, right?
People should be angry about Waco.
They should be angry about Ruby Ridge, you know?
Like awful things were done by incompetent and like unaccountable federal agents in both of those cases and in a number of other cases.
And Liddy, I think part of how he builds his following is that like he's not totally wrong when he says stuff like what I'm about to read you.
If they smash in unannounced, screaming at you and assault you with lethal force, you have two choices, Liddy said.
You can die under their bullets or you can shoot back and try to defend your wife and family.
If they're wearing flak jackets, don't shoot them there.
Shoot them in the head.
So and this is, he also tells, if you're not good enough to shoot in the head, shoot them in the groin.
What's interesting here is that like, this is both like, I'm not, I'm not unsympathetic to the idea that if the feds are going to kill you, you know, you go down fighting, right?
Not always wrong.
This is also terrible advice from like a gun standpoint because a flak jacket doesn't stop rifle rounds, not in any way, shape, or form.
So this wouldn't really matter if you're anyway, whatever.
This is a guy that just thinks movie bulletproof vests exist because he's never been in combat.
He doesn't know anything.
Realistically, this is also isn't, this gets a lot of people get angry at him for this because they're like, he's telling people to shoot cops.
I think here's usable advice.
Like any untrained person, if you're like, hey, what should you do if you have to defend yourself against a guy who has armor?
Would they be like, well, I guess you try to shoot him in the head, right?
Duh.
Like, that's not, we're not talking about like, that's not, that's not secret operator information.
Only the SEALs know, right?
That's, that's pretty basic shit.
I think literally 100% of people could could could guess that, right?
Yeah.
He is not, he's not walking you through how to build a trip mine or set up closed circuit surveillance cameras on independent power so you can like see when the feds are coming and defend yourself.
He's being like, you shoot them in the head if they're wearing armor.
Well, fucking duh, you know?
Yeah.
Like, well, it's also like, like, this, I mean, yeah, the, the way the FBI like birthed this whole movement because they started doing the shit they've been doing to like people of color for years to white people.
And all of a sudden, the whole right way movement is like massively government now.
And it's this also like the fact that the media has this like outrage over him saying this feeds into his mystique, builds his fan base when like the reality is, is he inciting violence against federal agents?
I don't know, not more than the federal agents were when they did the shit at Waco.
And realistically, nothing he's telling anyone is creating additional danger.
I don't actually think in this case, he really now.
I think the fact that he is continuing to try to amp people up about, you know, the new world order is coming, your guns are getting stolen, you know, the government's going to put you all in camps.
To that extent, yes, he is contributing to a climate of violence that costs a lot of people their lives.
But I think that the way the media drills in on this specific statement about shooting cops in the head when they attack you is silly.
That's not the thing to be angry at here.
The thing to be angry at here is the broader climate of paranoia he's stoking.
Not the fact that he is, because whenever he, when he was talking about this, when he was saying, like, if the feds come for you, here's what you do.
He was citing real stories of federal agents busting into people's homes and like killing their pets and shit, which like you should be angry about.
Anyway, I think that part of the response to him and the fact that it never, it's always, it's the same thing with Alex Jones, right?
Alex will say something silly about like turning the fucking shit, turning the frogs gay, and that always gets a laugh.
Or he'll talk about cannibalism or he'll make some kind of violent threat and that'll get in the airwaves and it'll bring more people to him.
It'll, he does this very consciously now.
He knows if he says something crazy, it'll get covered by a bunch of very lazy media figures who will take it out of context and they will not report on the action.
And in fact, whenever he winds up in actual court, they usually try to give him the benefit of the doubt more than they ought to, as opposed to really understanding the contexts of the actual danger of the stuff he is inciting.
And the silly stuff is not really part of that.
It's just how he advertises himself and you're helping him advertise, right?
That's that's kind of how I feel about this shit with Liddy.
So because he's not completely in the wrong when he gets angry at the feds here, I want to move ahead, you know, to about 15 years to a period in which G. Gordon Liddy, there's no benefit of the doubt that you can give the man.
This is after 9-11.
And, you know, 9-11 didn't make anyone a better person, but G. Gordon Liddy becomes a full-fledged fucking bigot in public.
I think this has always been a part of him, obviously.
But the shit he says after 9-11 is pretty vile.
And here's one clip from 2010.
I've got a Jewish angle I wish to express this morning since you've decided to get this first segment of this program, Mr. Liddy.
Oh, I thought you were going to say I was being casual about your religion.
No, no, no, not at all.
I never think you're being casual about religion of any kind.
Even Islam, I don't think you're being terribly casual about.
No, I'm not casual at all about Islam.
I want to go over there and take them out.
So that's not, and this I grabbed these from Media Matters.
Thank you, Media Matters, for collecting this.
It's kind of hard with old radio broadcasts otherwise.
He's not talking there about like terrorists.
He's talking about Muslims, period, right?
He wants to murder Muslims, period.
Which, again, a lot of guys saying shit like this in the post-9-11 era, but it's important to, especially as goofy as he sounds, listen to what a fucking vile bigot he is when he has a platform of his own where he can say anything.
So I want to play you another clip.
Here is him talking with a listener in Texas about the border and all of the third worlders who are, in his view, repopulating the country.
And so now we have this huge population, but America is not being repopulated by Americans.
It's being repopulated by people who do not share our values.
Well, they don't share our values or our language or our culture or anything like that at all.
There was a book back then written called The Population Bomb.
And it's all supposed to starve to death because there are going to be so many people.
And what we're getting are vast numbers, people keep saying, well, Hispanics.
Well, all that means is Spanish speakers.
You know, the conquistadores who came over from Spain and to, you know, south of the border down there and conquered it, you know, they were tall, fair people, and there are still some of their descendants down there, but the vast majority of them are Indians.
Right.
They're short and they're squat and, you know, little Indians.
So that's great.
Yeah.
That's great.
That's great replacement shit, right?
You know, this is the stuff that is now very mainstream.
Liddy was one of the first guys who had real Republican Party connections, who was deliberately airing and repeatedly talking.
This is more than a decade ago, great replacement narratives on the radio in the post-9-11 era, right?
He is much more direct about this than even Limbaugh often was.
And that is very much important because that is like the chief Nazi talking point that guys like Stephen Miller have been very, very successful at putting into the mainstream conservatism in this point.
It's due to the fact that it is now a normal stance for them.
And yeah, Liddy is one of the guys who helped start that process.
So speaking of Liddy being a literal Nazi by now, here is him playing a fucking Nazi documentary about replacement theory on the air during his fucking show.
First, we're going to listen just to a chunk of that documentary.
Here's a special request.
In order for a culture to maintain itself for more than 25 years, there must be a fertility rate of 2.11 children per family.
With anything less, the culture will decline.
Historically, no culture has ever reversed a 1.9 fertility rate, a rate of 1.3, impossible to reverse.
Because it would take 80 to 100 years to correct itself.
And there is no economic model that can sustain a culture during that time.
I did my part.
I had five children.
Two sets of parents, each have one Christ.
There are half as many children as parents.
If those children have one child, then there are one-fourth as many grandchildren as grandparents.
If only a million babies are born in 2006, it's hard to have two million adults in a business force in 2026.
Again, this is all stuff that in part relies on you don't want anyone new coming in.
You want to keep everything white, right?
There's plenty of people, no shortage of people.
The fact that, like, yeah, anyway, this whole demographic decline thing, very much a fucking straight up Nazi argument based on I want everyone to look like white people that I remember growing up next to as a kid.
The idea, I mean, I know it's just like they're like shitty rhetoric, but they're like the like eliding culture and race is, you know, clumsy, but I know it works with these people.
So whatever.
It works with these dummies.
It's very bad.
This goes on.
That clip he's playing from that fucking literal just Nazi shit goes on for five more minutes.
And then Liddy comes back in and he's got, he's got something to say.
It's time to wake up.
Boy, what we need is Ridex, I guess.
Gee man.
Isn't there something you can sprinkle down and they take it back into their pole and the rest of the colony gets, you know, they eat it too.
You're referring to Ambro Antlock, Mr. Lynn.
So he's laughing in a grandfatherly fashion there about using animal poison to kill non-white people.
It's also like, listen, every time conservatives complain about like, oh, we never, like, the liberal media won't let our comedy shows be on the air.
It's also because this is as good as it, like, you know, gut field is the new version of this.
And it's like, yeah, the other reason there's never like sustained conservative comedy is because it's not funny.
Because your only joke is, what if we did what the Nazis did?
The Kenya Conspiracy Theory00:05:11
Ha ha ha, but I'm not a Nazi.
Ha ha ha.
But what if we did?
Like that is the whole joke.
That's the whole bit.
That's all they have.
So Liddy is predictably horrified by the campaign and presidency of Barack Obama.
Not a big surprise that that is also, it's not just 9-11.
That is also part of what makes him increasingly open about his just straight up Nazi shit.
He states on Twitter, quote, it's a dirty shame kids in Kenya were not taught how to throw a baseball like a man in a direct reference to the then-growing conspiracy theory about the former president's place of birth.
I should have looked up whether or not I didn't want to like fact check like is because you know a lot of countries weirdly are into baseball.
I don't know if Kenya is or not because I didn't want to feel like it was probably worse to just like lend that any sort of credence, but whatever.
Wasn't Kenya a British colony that'd be into cricket?
Yeah, they're probably more cricket, you know, but Japan was weirdly into baseball, which is why I say it, right?
And like the best baseball player in history now, like a Japanese guy.
That's that's right.
Yeah.
Japan's oxophilia.
Yeah.
You never know when a country's going to be weird.
I always, I found you, I feel like this happens a couple of times where you'd be like, oh, I wouldn't have picked them as being like super into baseball because it's our worst cultural export, right?
The most boring thing that America ever gave the world is fucking baseball.
Sorry, guys.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yes.
Great Britain till the 60s.
Till the 60s.
Yeah.
Oh, I mean, yeah, they did like a genocide there, the Mau Mau rebellion, put people in concentration camps right in the post would nightmare nightmare stuff.
Doesn't really tie in other than that.
I'm sure G. Gordon Liddy thinks it was awesome.
So, you know, what he's doing here by bringing this up, this is like a clear reference to the then-growing conspiracy theory that President Obama was secretly born in Kenya, right?
Liddy is a full backer of that, along with future President Donald Trump.
On an episode of the TV news show Hardball, he makes even more direct statements on this matter in 2009.
This one's something else.
This is all available, Gordon.
Here it is.
This is a picture of the actual birth certificate of the former president.
Well, I would like to check it out.
The preponderance of the evidence is as follows.
You've got a deposition, which is a sworn statement from the stepgrandmother who says, I was president and saw him born in Mombasa, Kenya.
You've got the certificate of live birth that they have here.
It's not a birth certificate.
It says right on it, certificate of live birth.
But you claim he was born in the Kenyan slums.
You say that as a fact.
No, no, hospital in Mombasa.
I didn't say Kenyan slum.
What's the difference?
Chris.
Chris.
I mean, which hospital, Mombasa?
I mean, I've been over there so many times.
Where is this?
All this happened.
You have a whole history of this fellow in Kenya.
Do we have any evidence it ever happened?
Whatever happened.
That he was born in Kenya.
Yeah, I've got the deposition of the stepgrandmother who said she witnessed it.
Okay.
You're witness.
You're witness.
Now, look, there's no deposition.
It doesn't exist.
He is lying about having it produced.
What he was really, what he like said later is that like, well, we're working on getting it, getting access to it, but I know it exists.
It was never real.
Like, it does not exist.
It's just lies.
He's just a liar.
In 2009, journalists Yuna Lee and Laura Ling were arrested by North Korean soldiers while filming a documentary on the China-North Korea border.
Both women were charged with illegal entry and sentenced to 12 years hard labor.
Now, it just so happens that Laura's sister, Lisa Ling, worked on the Oprah Winfrey show.
And understandably, she used every piece of clout that she had to try to get the U.S. government to take action on saving her sister.
After a weeks-long campaign, the government succeeded in negotiating with North Korea to get the women back.
Former President Clinton traveled to Pyongyang to do the handoff in August of 2009 after both women had been captive for 140 days.
This is something Clinton did before.
I think he actually goes in and helps with negotiations to free Americans from North Korea.
I think there's a couple of situations he does that.
And also stuff like this.
Former presidents in the modern era have often kind of done stuff like this, right?
You don't want to have the president do it, whatever, but like there's this understanding that they are kind of representative, that it is a way that the government cannot maybe directly deal with a country that we have a fraught relationship with, while also still, this is a figure of respect, you know, if that's important for your negotiations.
Not a really weird thing to do.
It also should be pretty apolitical.
These women, we're not doing anything wrong.
This should not reasonably be a thing that anyone has an issue with, right?
Someone's got to go get them.
Thank God, right?
Like that should be the end of it.
Golden Rules for Men00:04:14
G. Gordon Liddy, when he covers this, decides to spend his time discussing it, making a very racist joke.
And we're going to play that now.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, those two young girls who may or may not have strayed into North Korea got arrested.
I can't recall their name, something like Ling Ling, Wee Wee, or whatever their names are.
So, ha ha, people who aren't white have names I think are funny.
That's the bit.
Yeah.
It's, yeah, again.
Maybe conservative comedy would do better if they found another joke.
Yeah.
And I'm putting all this to you like rapid fire because I want to inoculate you against thinking G. Gordon Liddy is anything but scum.
Because you can, when you follow his kind of like sillier, funnier bits, you can forget that.
And this man is a fucking fascist.
Like he's a terrible person.
He should have never been let out of a dark hole in the ground.
Don't, let's not forget that.
That said, we are going to move on now and we are going to play a much more fun video because during, you know, G. Gordon Liddy, he's one of the pioneers of right-wing media.
And there is, you know, this is evident primarily in his commitment to reaching new levels of shadiness in advertising.
While he insulted the normal station sponsors as crass consumerism, he was happy to become a personal pitchman for a whole line of health supplements.
He's one of the first of these right-wing guys selling like weight loss and exercise supplements.
He really pioneers that.
And he is also a pioneer in selling gold.
Oh, yeah, guys.
Are you ready to watch a G. Gordon Liddy gold commercial?
I'm excited.
Ah, yeah.
Fuck yes.
Let's play it.
A home?
Wrong.
Gold.
Gold?
It's never too early or too late to secure your future with gold.
Gold is always valuable, liquid, and as smart a buy as you might ever make.
Who do you trust, son?
Roslyn Capital at who Roslyn Capital does more than just sell gold.
They give you expert advice on how to secure your future.
This is so creepy.
Come on today.
Your free guide to owning gold.
Ready?
Young man, what's the most important thing to remember?
To secure my future with gold through Rosalind Capital?
No.
To make sure Amy's back by 11.
Call Rosalind Capital and tell them Gordon Liddy sent you.
Wow.
Great.
Incredible.
Not to peel back the curtain, but the YouTube club then did transition into the contemporary version of that bullshit.
Yeah, newer gold ad?
Well, that's a colloidal silver app.
Oh, yeah, colloidal silver ad.
Same bullshit.
Yeah, but isn't it like you eat it or drink it or put it up your butt for health?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, something like that.
It's the same like supplement, like unusable.
I mean, it's not surprising that YouTube is also just the right-wing media, but Jesus Christ.
Yeah, it is.
Speaking of supplements.
It's so funny.
Probably do another ad break.
Speaking of supplements, help us supplement our income by buying these products and services.
We love you.
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.
Never Mess With Her Friends00:02:44
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.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Moda.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, And dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Yeah.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Olespi and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Leif Garrett and Airwolf00:13:21
I don't actually love them, guys.
Don't tell, oh my God, we've come back from break.
I didn't mean that.
I didn't mean that.
Oh, boy.
Oh, fuck.
Oh, fuck.
Okay.
Ian is going to take a hop off right now to research whether or not it's possible to edit audio.
While I guess, I guess, Andrew, you and I will just power through the rest of this here.
Fuck, fuck.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, yeah, good thing Evil Robert left because it was evil.
That's brilliant.
Brilliant.
Ian, remember that for next time.
Got it.
Got him out of the studio.
Finally.
Yeah, Evil Roberts left.
I would never say anything like that to you wonderful people.
So despite being an excrable human being, G. Gordon Liddy continued to be in demand among the Hollywood set, who were always willing to ignore his bigotry and calls for genocide because he was funny and always good for some buzz.
Liddy acted in a number of films.
He is, I think he's the villain in Camp Kukamanga.
He's in adventures and spying.
He makes appearances on MacGyver, Airwolf, Super Force, and Al Franken's Late Line, to name just a few.
He's in a lot of docs too, live documentaries.
Yeah.
This is like exhibit A on this bullshit that like the entertainment industry is quote liberal.
Like it's pluralistic because it's profitable, but they fucking, the people in charge of this industry at least love a fucking pigot.
Oh, absolutely.
Can't get enough of him.
Put him on Al Franken's show.
Wild.
Sad that he's an airwolf, although I take some comfort in knowing that the helicopter from Air Wolf was later bought by a pervert who had sex with it.
That makes me feel a lot better.
Yeah.
So none of this comes close to Liddy's crowning achievement in Hollywood, his 2006 appearance on Joe Rogan's Fear Factor.
To be specific, this is celebrity fear factor.
And Liddy makes his appearance here along a heavy serving of washed up celebrities from mostly like the 70s and 80s.
His chief competition on the episode is Leif Garrett.
Does anyone here remember Leif Garrett?
No.
No.
Yeah, that's fine because he's not.
He barely, I don't even know that I'd call him a celebrity.
He put out some albums in like the 70s.
Nobody alive remembers any of them now.
Visually, the most fascinating thing about this episode is that everyone else is like from like their 20s or so, 30s to 50.
And Liddy is 75 years old.
And looks, looks like, I mean, he doesn't aged badly.
He was always in pretty good shape, but like looks like he's an elderly man next to everybody, which is interesting.
Fascinating mix here.
So I'm going to play you his introduction from the start of this episode.
This is when they're all like, everybody's walking on set.
I've lived a pretty full competitive life.
Age has not prevented me from doing anything so far.
And you people put me through all kinds of medical tests before you let me on the show.
And I pass on the flying color.
So let's go.
Yeah.
The absolute cowardice of chiroting him with Watergate figure.
Watergate figure?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Which side of Watergate?
Who knows?
Could be anyone.
It's like if Hitler had survived and it's like World War II figure.
Yeah.
Notable person from a second World War conflict.
World War II veteran.
Yeah.
Well-known Nazi.
Yeah.
So the basics of this show are that people are paired up into teams, all of them celebrities in this instance, and they have to endure a set of physically unpleasant and at least faux dangerous challenges together.
The winner gets $50,000.
Liddy is paired up with the actress who played Vanessa Huxtable from the Cosby show.
It's just a wild, wild thing to have happened in the world.
Joe Rogan, a very young Joe Rogan, is clearly in awe of Liddy.
And he gives, it really tells you a lot about how much Joe Rogan understands about the world.
His, every, almost every word of his introduction is wrong.
He, he, he, he tells several lies about the man, and Liddy does not correct him, just smiles and nods.
So here we go.
Themis, you realize who you're partnered with?
He was second to J. Edgar Hoover.
This guy was in the Korean War.
This is the only cast member we've ever had that's in the encyclopedia.
Yes.
Do you used to like burn your hand with a candle to prove that you can endure pain?
Actually, it was a cigarette lighter.
I don't know where the candle is.
A cigarette lighter from, yeah.
Yeah, the candle's just an exaggeration.
The good part about him, him and me, we've both been in jail.
That's the good part about him.
I don't feel bad no more, buddy.
I was in jail a lot longer than him.
How long were you in jail for?
Five years.
Gee, Gordon, why don't you explain to everybody exactly that you go to jail for?
I got nine different felonies.
Let's see.
There's burglary, all related to Watergate.
All related to Watergate.
Yeah.
Everything related to Watergate.
Were you guilty?
Of course I was guilty.
I wasn't guilty enough.
I was in detention once.
Did you go to detachment?
See, I used to be in the FBI, so I know his rap sheet.
You know what they got him for?
Impersonating a human being?
She's making jokes, Joe.
This is T. Gordon Seinfeld.
Just everybody laughing.
Look at how funny this fucking monster is.
Also, everything Joe says there is fucking wrong.
He was never the second.
He was never that high in the FBI.
He was certainly not J. Edgar Hoover second.
And he did not participate in any way in the Korean War.
He is, he is like a, he is a Korean War era veteran in that he was around then.
But it would be like if you had an uncle who spent his two years or whatever in military service, like sitting at, like, like fucking cleaning and maintaining vehicles at a fucking truck pool in North Dakota.
But it was during the Vietnam War.
He's a Vietnam era veteran, but that's not...
Calling him a saying he's a nom vet would be like, well, no, no, he's not.
He didn't ever leave the country.
He did not do any Vietnam stuff.
J. Gordon Liddy was not part of the Korean War.
Classic right-wing shit.
You know, classic Joe Rogan's research shit.
He's a stoked Joe Rogan was.
He was like, he's so silently excited.
He's so...
We'll talk about why, because I think it's interesting why I believe Joe Rogan is so into this guy and what it says about Joe and what it says about that kind of dude who make up a significant chunk of the male population, unfortunately.
But like, you see how they fall for it, right?
Like instantly everyone's on board.
Liddy's a fairly charismatic guy.
He understands how to present himself around people.
He's good at this.
This is a skill, right?
That is kind of worth noting when we look at him.
I think this episode really does show how savvy Liddy had become by this stage in his life.
While the other male celebrities are boisterous and kind of chauvinistic, he is quiet.
He's reserved.
He feeds into his reputation by being quiet.
Saying less is more, and he understands that.
He's also supportive and kind of fatherly to his young female partner.
He's like very, very nice to her in a way that like a lot of the other men on the show are a lot cruder, which I do find interesting.
I think it just comes from the fact that he has these more old-fashioned ideas of like how you should behave paternalistically.
You're right.
When he wins, he wins the first challenge, which like is this weird bungee diving game into a pool where you have to grab objects.
And it seems to reinforce his reputation as some kind of Superman, considering how much older he is than everybody else.
The second challenge is where things get interesting.
His partner quits because everyone has to like sit in these tiny diving bell-like compartments that are pressurized.
And then first it's pumped full of foul-smelling, sulfurous odors.
So it's like you're trapped in a big ball of farts.
And then it's heated up to an uncomfortable level so that you're like sweating.
And then like they pour insects and stuff in.
So you have to like deal with being covered in maggots and shit.
It's all stuff that's like gross and unsettling.
It's not really a danger, right?
They do shock people with like little very light kind of cattle prod versions at one point.
Everyone else is miserable during this and complains constantly and is like horrified as things get gross.
Liddy just sits there quietly with like his legs folded and endures the whole thing with this almost beatific smile on his face.
Here's the segment where the bug shower begins.
Liddy's just sitting there.
It's not a magic.
I failed.
Please don't quit.
I know.
Hurry!
They're dead.
They're even bad.
Are you angry with her, John?
No, but I am angry.
She blames it on me.
I'm like, did I quit, Joe?
No, you didn't.
I'm not blaming it on you.
I'm not blaming it.
I just screamed because I told her I would scream.
Well, of course it's natural.
Didn't I say in the beginning?
I said I'm going to scream.
But I'm not going to quit.
Tracy, you know G. Gordon Liddy.
This is the only G. Gordon Liddy that I'll ever know.
We've done damn, unfortunately.
I know those are eliminated.
I knew I wasn't going to get it to the next channel.
The other three definitely advanced.
Now it's just to see who wins the choppers.
Take care, guys.
Bye.
There's two motorcycles for whoever wins this.
Yeah.
And Liddy wins them, by the way.
Shouldn't surprise you if you know anything about him.
This is another thing that he is definitely good at is endurance, right?
Absolutely built for this.
There's no skill that is.
He doesn't have to accomplish anything.
He doesn't have to think anything through.
He just has to sit and endure an experience that he knows is not really dangerous, right?
He's just lighting his hand on fire for fun.
Yeah.
And everybody already thinks he's a badass.
In his mind, the job is done.
Yeah.
And he's done real prison, right?
Like it's not hard to sit in a diving bell type thing for an hour or two, whatever, be around some bugs, like, especially when you've had that experience in her life.
At one point, Leif Garrett tries to see if he can talk Liddy out of staying in the pod.
And Liddy says one of the few honest things he was ever recorded saying.
Who gets the choppers?
Hey, G. You don't want this.
You don't want a chopper, do you?
Got nothing to do with the choppers.
I just don't quit.
Data boy.
Well, we'll see you at the end, my friend.
This was clearly going to be an endurance situation.
I can endure anything.
After spending 126 days in solitary confinement, being in a pod was not disturbing to me.
Been covered by thousands of cockroaches when I was in a filthy prison.
So a few maggots and just brushed them away.
Yeah.
I don't think he's lying there.
Obviously, he's not lying there.
He does well at this.
He wins two very ugly motorcycles.
I mean, I guess he sold them.
They're hideous.
The final stunt of the day is a driving test with a car on a stunt track.
There's the obstacles and stuff.
It's like, you know, there'll be some fire and shit.
Liddy is supposed to drive around and through the obstacles.
And he spends a lot of time bragging about his FBI training and action driving, like talking about like, well, I've got FBI training.
I think I know what I'm doing.
And then this is the truest G. Gordon Liddy.
He brags about his FBI driving skills and then gets in the truck and immediately crashes.
Just instantly drives it into a building.
And here's that clip.
Whoever breaks down the eight obstacles and completes the course the fastest wins in three, two, one, go.
He's on.
Let's see if that FBI 2 training helps.
Long time ago, man.
I think you were going faster than him, man.
Picking up the speed.
Oh, he's off court.
Oh, he crashed.
He lasts.
All of his vaunted FBI training allows him to stay on the stunt driving test half as long as Leif Garrett.
That's what G. Gordon Liddy's real skills bring to the table.
Half as good at driving as fucking Leif Garrett.
Oh, man.
Delightfully weird.
Holy shit.
It is very weird.
And this is the, you know, I don't know.
I debated whether or not to go on this little rant afterwards, but I kept thinking about what this means, what Joe's fascination with him means, and kind of the rest of what I know about Joe Rogan, what he sees as masculinity, as heroism.
I've been thinking about all these questions a lot as I've been going through these Liddy episodes.
Grandpa vs. Gordon Liddy00:09:34
And I keep coming back to, I keep being reminded of and thinking of my grandfather in this, because I think the difference between the two men as I knew them says a lot about the difference between particularly these kind of like mainstream conservative ideas about what it means to be a man, what it means to be brave.
And these are not just conservative.
These are deeply American ideas, deeply flawed ideas versus.
You could argue that that is all that's conservative.
Same diff, right?
Yeah.
And I think versus what I would describe as what actually is heroism and bravery, I think is really worth digging into.
So if you'll forgive me, I'm going to talk about my grandpa a little bit here.
You've all learned about G. Gordon Liddy.
My grandfather was, I think, about 10 years older than him.
Unlike Liddy, Liddy even talks about who he's very insulated from the Great Depression.
My grandfather was poor.
He came from a farming family.
He is able to get a job with the Civilian Conservation Corps, which is part of the New Deal.
FDR had established this organization to hire out-of-work men and have them do stuff like this is where a lot of our parks come from, right?
Is this these CCC guys build them and stuff, you know, all these young men who didn't have anything else?
It keeps these guys fed, keeps them from starving.
My grandpa does this for years.
And the money he gets, you know, every paycheck, he would buy a carton of cigarettes and he'd send every dime outside of that back to his family to help keep his brothers and his mom and dad fed.
1939 or so rolls around.
He becomes very aware of Hitler and what's happening in Europe.
He becomes convinced that the U.S. is going to get into the war.
He knows that his brothers will wind up fighting.
And as the oldest brother, he thinks that he should join first in order to hopefully try and spare them from some of that.
So he joins the military a year or so before the U.S. gets involved.
He's one of these guys who I think people kind of naturally wanted to follow.
And so he becomes a drill sergeant.
He spends most of World War II training other men for combat.
And repeatedly, he feels that he needs to fight, especially again, one of his brothers, his younger brother, the tallest of the family, winds up in a unit that's going to be seeing heavy combat.
He's going to be part of the Normandy landing.
So my grandfather pushes and pushes and gets assigned to a unit that's going to be part of the invasion.
He gets pulled out of it at the last minute.
And the story I was always told is that when they were at one of the disembarkation points, it was really chaotic.
My grandpa, being this kind of drill sergeant dude who feels this inherent responsibility towards other people, starts going around and like dressing everybody's lines, sorting out their gear, organizing things.
He was just kind of that man compulsively.
And one of the officers running, you know, the operation sees him doing this and is like, you're not going anywhere, Garland.
We need someone like you here.
So he is forced to stay back home while his brother and a lot of his friends go over.
And a lot of them don't come back.
His brother gets shot in the head outside of Bastog, survives, but is never really the same after this.
And, you know, he stays in the army after World War II.
He winds up fighting in Korea.
He's there.
He was actually, because the unit he was with was stationed normally in Hawaii.
He was on his way with my grandma and their kids to go live there.
They were moving there.
And he gets diverted as they're heading over.
My grandma's left alone to take care of the family.
He winds up spending however long, basically the extent of the Korean War in Korea.
And he starts off as he's a sergeant.
I think maybe a staff sergeant when the war begins.
And sergeants, you know, enlisted officers are two different things.
You don't go from enlisted to an officer normally because they're two fundamentally different career tracks.
My grandpa goes, starts the war as a sergeant and ends it as a major, which is like a higher up officer.
This normally doesn't happen.
What occurs during the war is that everyone above him dies so consistently that he winds up taking their jobs and he gets given temporary rank that is then later made confirmed as permanent because he's good at it.
And he is running field hospitals on the strength of an eighth grade education by the time the war ends.
He won, I think it was either bronze or a silver star.
The one thing I know that he really did specifically was this moment where there was a bunch of guys, I think 20 or so U.S. soldiers pinned down and injured underneath this bridge.
And they were trapped.
There were two machine gun nests that had direct lines of sight and were just firing directly into these guys who had very little cover.
They didn't have artillery support on the line.
They didn't have air cover.
There weren't really assets available in this area of the line of contact to get them out.
So my grandpa grabs one of his friends and they drive a Jeep through two machine guns firing at them.
The Jeep gets shot full of holes.
They both get injured.
And then while still under fire, load, he described it as stacking them like firewood, 20 men into the back of this Jeep and then drives them out while getting shot the entire time to rescue them.
Warrens, you know, he quits the military eventually and spends the rest of his career.
He runs all of the hospitals in Okinawa, Japan for 15 years or so.
And, you know, these are like triage units and stuff.
So a lot of people who are really messed up wind up going there.
And again, all of this on like the strength of an eighth grade education.
And the thing, you know, we got to, we got to know a couple of the dudes who had served with my grandpa, you know, again, later on when they were all old men.
There was one conversation that really stuck with me, which is one of my guy, my grandpa's, like the guys serving under him was like, you know, Garland, how did you, you know, the thing that was always interesting, that was always amazing to me is no matter how bad shit got, you were never scared.
And my grandpa's response was, oh, I was shit in my pants the whole time.
I just couldn't let any of you know how scared I was.
Right.
And I know that was a long digression.
I apologize, but the thing that makes me think of when I think about Liddy, G. Gordon Liddy's entire concept of courage was as an individual doing something dangerous to prove your manhood.
And he was psyched to get a chance to go to prison for Richard Nixon, no matter what it cost his family, because it meant he got to prove he wasn't in his mind a coward.
And I contrast that with what my grandpa's life experience tells me he viewed as the meaning of courage, of being a man.
And it was never taking a student, it was never throwing himself into danger.
It was care.
His entire life was an exercise in caring for the people around him, in the weight of responsibility, first to his brothers, to his family, to his country, to the world.
You know, when he joined for World War II, to the men around him throughout his period of service, he was never doing anything to be a hero.
He was acting consistently and no matter what it cost him to save lives, to protect people.
And I think that's the difference between what heroism means to someone who has been through some of the worst experiences you can see, what bravery means, what doing the right thing is, versus what these children, and I include Joe Rogan as a mental child, believe courage is.
Joe Rogan is so impressed.
Wow, look at him.
He's so tough.
He can have bugs poured on him and shit.
Fucking Joe wouldn't know courage if it jumped up and bit him in the fucking ass.
Courage is taking care of people, even when it means harm and sacrifice on your own behalf.
Courage is not sitting in a fucking sphere while people pour bugs on you.
And it's not sitting in a prison to protect Dick Nixon while your family suffers.
Anyway, that's my rant.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, it's not just that.
And he like doesn't, yeah, the whole concept of masculinity is like, it's so sad.
Like, we just, yeah.
Didn't need any of this to happen.
And it, it, the way it harms like its worst like perpetrators as well is so fucked up.
I'm just like, guys, none of this, none of this is necessary.
None of this has to be like this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway.
Yeah.
Right.
G. Gordon Liddy lived 15 years after Fear Factor.
He lives to be 90.
He dies in the spring of 2021 in his daughter's house after struggling for several years with Parkinson's, which is also what got my grandfather, by the way.
He lived long enough to see the rise of Donald Trump and January 6th, although by that point, he was mostly out of the spotlight.
He also lived, interestingly enough, long enough to see one son, Raymond Liddy, sentenced to five years probation for storing a cache of child pornography in his Coronado home.
So one of the sons he raced is a child porn aficionado.
His other son is better.
Tom Liddy has a more auspicious career as a lawyer where he represented Maricopa County during a 2020 lawsuit with the Trump campaign over what it claimed were falsified ballots.
Liddy succeeded in getting the case dismissed, which urred him to an avalanche of death threats from Trump people.
So the Liddies, the Liddies contain multitudes.
Yeah.
Although, you know what?
A Miserable Life00:02:20
The way that they don't is like, you know, the way that they don't.
There's just a world where like, that was my job.
That's the, and I, I don't think he's a great person.
I'm sure he's not a great.
I don't know them now.
Who knows?
Maybe he is.
Yeah.
Right.
I don't know specifically that he isn't either, I guess.
Yes.
Why am I casting aspersions?
Yeah.
Why, why am I shit talking?
Because he can't be, he can't be held responsible for his dad's sucking.
So yeah, that's me being a little bit of a dick.
I have no reason.
I know nothing about him other than this.
And that was not a bad thing to do.
So there you go.
Right.
Holy shit.
What a fucking.
I'm glad we got to finish the tale.
Yeah.
I think it was the right call.
Yeah.
What a life.
What a life.
What a weird, fucked up.
What a weird, fucked up, miserable life.
I know.
Yeah.
No, and I guess that's the thing.
It's like none of the lessons will ever be learned.
Like even this.
No one listening to this is not no one, but you know, they're not susceptible in the same way to whatever the fuck he has going on, he and Joe Rogan have going on.
Anyway, you got anything to plug, Andrew?
Yeah.
No, I mean, you know, Yo is this racist.
We're not as well researched, but we're just not as well researched.
Kind of the same vibe, though.
Yeah.
So there you go.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I'm tired.
We're done.
Thanks for having me.
We're all going to go lie down.
Thanks for being on.
We're all going to go get into our diving bells and just meditate for a couple of hours.
Yeah.
And just ponder.
Philip.
Yeah.
Just ponder.
Good stuff.
You know, interesting coda people might find when I just not long ago and, you know, when I was living in Portland in 2020 during the riots, big part of my support system was my, my land, technically my landlady.
You know, we just kind of lived in adjacent houses who was a Chinese citizen, about my age.
And we found out during like one of the early pandemic conversations when we were locked in together that her dad, who served in the Chinese military, probably was very close to where my grandpa was during several parts of the war.
Just Ponder00:02:33
One of the things she said was, like, well, I don't think he was a very good shot.
And I was like, well, I guess I'm lucky, right?
Neither of them got the other.
That would have been real bad.
But I don't know, something hopeful in that, right?
You know, that was a terrible war.
Lot to say about all of the awful things that were done in that war, but yeah.
We wound up hanging out during the COVID year and supporting each other.
That's nice.
Yeah.
So anyway, there's your moment of hope.
Nothing about politics makes sense.
Right.
Nothing about politics, anyway.
History.
It's all fucking sad.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Shit happens.
Anyway.
For real.
Yeah.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
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