Behind the Bastards - Part One: How Orange County Incubated American Fascism

Jan. 9, 2024 - Behind the Bastards

01:25:25

Part One: How Orange County Incubated American Fascism

# walter knott ronald reagan richard nixon aclu american conservatism anti communism better american foundation frederick schwartz john birch society john dvorman john wayne lapd mccarthyism northrop grumman orange county orange county history political polarization

Robert and Francesca Fiorentini dissect Orange County's 1960s transformation into an American fascism incubator, driven by defense industry wealth and Lyman Stewart's fundamentalist theology. They detail the 1961 "Orange County School of Anti-Communism," attended by 7,000 people including John Wayne and Ronald Reagan, which fostered a culture where figures like Frederick Schwartz weaponized paranoia against civil rights activists. The hosts analyze how McCarthyist tactics, exemplified by the recall of progressive school board member John DeVorman, unified suburban conservatives into a cohesive force that eventually split from the national Republican Party, suggesting modern political polarization stems from this isolated, prosperity-fueled petri dish. [Automatically generated summary]
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	You related to the Phantom at that point.
	Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
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	Shari stay with me each night, each morning.
	Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
	Cool Zone Media.
	Ah, that sound you just heard, listeners, was me opening up a can of whoop ass on your sense of emotional well-being because it's behind the bastards back for the first time in 2024, which is statistically going to be one of the worst years of all of our lives.
	So I hope everybody's excited, having a good time, feeling happy.
	Rehearse that?
	Did you like rehearse that in the mirror?
Matt Lieb Returns 00:02:34
	No, no, that all came.
	I had a totally different bit to do, Sophie.
	But then I realized I hadn't opened my can of Ourobora herbal sparkling water.
	This is cactus rose flavor.
	Sounds like soap, but go on.
	Ah, it's tasty.
	That's a great way to bleep out me sipping.
	The hellacious year that will be with your cactus rose water.
	Yeah.
	Robert, it'll be, it'll be fine.
	Everything's fine.
	It'll be fine.
	Yeah.
	Maybe it'll be content for you.
	Do you know how many bastards will be born?
	Bastards we don't even know about who are going to come around this year.
	Yeah.
	Hey, Robert.
	Sophie.
	Do you want to say something?
	Yes.
	Do you want to introduce our guest?
	No.
	Yes.
	Maybe.
	Perhaps.
	Perhaps I will introduce our guest, who is Francesca Fiorentini, returning beloved guest, host of the Bituation Room, and partner in life of Matt Lieb.
	That's right.
	Everyone's partner.
	I will be so stoked that you just said that, but does that hurt you at all, Francesca?
	Oh, no, no, no.
	I enjoy.
	Look, he's, I always live in his shadow, and it's fine.
	I'm glad I get some time for myself.
	No, of course.
	He, first of all, he's a thirsty MFer who is needy.
	And every time I get recognized for anything on the street, he will go to that person and go, what about me?
	You recognize me?
	I love getting some good Matt Lieb dirt here.
	So good.
	There's so much good Matt Lieb dirt.
	But yes, I love my baby, Matt Lieb, Fat Dweeb.
	And we have a baby together.
	I also love her.
	And it's so good to be here on the first of the year.
	I mean, not the first, but one of the, one of the first days of the year.
	It's our first 2024 bastard.
	It's several days into the actual year, but this is the first day that we're recording Behind the Bastards, which legally makes it the only day that's mattered so far this year.
	You know, those of you who had important days, I don't care.
	And I really don't think this year could be that bad because you have a live show coming up.
	Is that right, Francesca?
	That's such a great segue to tell you the hell yeah.
	Before we get started, everybody, if you don't know me, you know Matt Lieb.
	And so by association, you love me and the podcast Obituation Room, as Robert just mentioned.
	I'm going to be live in San Francisco at SF Sketchfest on Sunday, January 28th at 7 p.m. at the Gateway Theater.
	And I'm bringing the Daily Zeitgeist co-host, Miles Gray.
	So he's going to be there, people.
	It'll be so good.
Post-War Housing Boom 00:15:26
	Emma Viglund of the Majority Report also for like political heads.
	Damn.
	Yeah, it's going to be, it's going to be a good show.
	And Robert, of course, helped sell it out last year.
	It was so fun.
	Sadly, Robert's not going to be there again, but damn it.
	I don't know.
	Maybe in the future.
	But yeah, anyone who's in the bay, come through.
	Yeah.
	You're very familiar with our dear friend, Miles Gray.
	And if you would like more info on this, I'm linking in our episode description.
	Okay.
	Speaking of live performances, no, no, speaking of the worst year that any of us has ever had, maybe.
	Francesca, how do you feel about the Republican Party?
	Oh, it's like not really my thing.
	You know what I mean?
	Like I like.
	Not your thing.
	Yeah.
	No, just not into it.
	Like Lyme's.
	Not into it.
	You know, like I don't, I don't want anything to do with it.
	You know, I've never really tried it, but I don't want to.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I'm a pretty tolerant guy, but I've just, I've just gotten too many death threats from like Republican legislators to people I know.
	Yeah, it's, it's, it's not my thing either.
	But you know what is even worse than the Republican Party in 2024?
	Orange County, California in the 1960s.
	What do you know about the OC?
	Oh, God.
	Okay.
	The OC stands for Orange County.
	There you go.
	That's all I know.
	No, I feel a lot of like, obviously there was a show.
	It's pretty like rich white people, drama, a little bit of red state MAGA of California.
	Yeah.
	Growing Asian American voter population.
	I know that a lot of Asian Americans who vote Dem recently, they flipped the districts in the OC.
	Yep.
	But maybe I'm feeling like a first time since like the 60s.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I'm feeling some retired police officers.
	I'm feeling some KKK vibes.
	I'm feeling some, it's Klanzy over there.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	A little, it's, it, you know, to be fair, as you just, as you mentioned, the Orange County has has really turned around recently politically and is not nearly the kind of Republican stronghold it used to be, which is great.
	It is becoming like at least demographically more of a normal suburb than what it was during the period of time we're about to talk about, which is the uterus from which the Trump Republican Party gestures.
	It's not a uterus.
	Well, it's warm.
	It's got palm trees.
	No, I didn't pass biology in high school.
	It's a moldy gym towel in a men's spa where there's lots of boys talk, as Melania would say.
	It's like a mushroom growing on like that, a gym towel.
	Yeah, Ronald Reagan masturbated into a gym sock and left it in a hot shower floor in a boys' locker room.
	Yeah.
	For 30 years or so.
	Don't the uterus has nothing to do with this.
	Okay.
	Well, you know, people can describe it however they feel in their hearts, although I am now more on board team dirty gym.
	But yeah, Orange County, whatever, whatever, however you want to describe it to yourself, the Republican Party that is we're all dealing with right now, and the Republican Party that gave us Reagan and everything terrible that came with Reagan, you know, the birth of the anti-abortion movement, right?
	The birth of the religious right as a powerful political entity, and the fact that it has gotten increasingly acceptable for Republican candidates to talk about having their enemies purged.
	All of that, the story of all of that, starts in Orange County.
	And it heavily involves an Orange County local, a guy named John Schmitz, who was the kind of the first Trump.
	He was a dude who ran for president, you haven't heard of, but who was really the guy playing around with a lot of very early Trumpist politics, kind of taking the torch from Goldwater and handing it off.
	You know, he didn't actually like Reagan, but a lot of the crazier shit that came out of Reagan was at least partially people in the GOP who liked Schmitz or who at least saw a value in courting his electorate.
	So this is a really interesting story.
	And in order to really properly talk about the bastardry of John Schmitz, we have to start with the birth of Orange County, California itself, because there's a reason why so much of the modern right was born in Orange County.
	I'm so fascinated because it is a mystery to me that you can live in proximity to a beautiful beach and Disneyland and still be a miserable piece of shit.
	Yeah, it really has something to do with.
	We'll talk about what it's got something to do with, but you're right.
	It is like a lovely place to be a piece of shit at.
	Orange County includes about 40 miles of sunny beachland, starting at Seal Beach in the north and extending to San Clemente down south.
	If you're, you might think of Orange County as like, if you are from the DFW area like me, it's a little bit like the plano to Dallas, right?
	And both in terms of like kind of the, how long it takes to get there from the city.
	You know, although, yeah, both those cities have dog shit traffic, and in terms of how much more like conservative it is out there and also kind of how much less dense it is.
	You know, both places, and there's a lot of places like this in the United States, are kind of masses of suburbs now.
	There's not as I think it's a little bit better now, certainly than it was in the 60s, but like not a lot of shared community spaces like you have in any kind of city just by default, because that's the way like dense cities work.
	It's where people go to escape cities because they're like, there's crime.
	I need to live in a mansion.
	And then they don't talk to anyone for four straight months but rush limbaugh and they lose their minds.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	So around the turn of the century, this was all still farmland, right?
	It was just owned by a few people who had huge tracts of it and it had primarily been used for like grazing cattle before, right?
	They wind up finding a lot of natural gas and stuff in Orange County.
	So obviously the oil industry gets the fuck in there and there's some guys who make a bunch of money buying up land for that.
	And by the 1920s, kind of it was very clear to people who had money and knew how it worked that like, well, whatever we're going to be able to keep getting for this place as like ranch land is going to be a lot less money than we'll get if we parcel it up into little lots and sell it off to developers to build suburbs, right?
	And this is kind of ahead of the curve, right?
	This isn't the first place where suburbs start developing, but it's like one of the early places where you start to get the developments that are going to in kind of the post-war period become like the famous American suburban culture, right?
	The strip mall.
	Yeah, yeah, the strip, the giants, the endless series of strip malls.
	That's beautiful, truly.
	Yeah.
	It is like a breathtaking natural beast.
	Just like running by us on the Serengeti of our souls, reminding us all what the fucking concrete looks like and how many, yeah, I don't know.
	Yeah, yeah, just how, dude, Earth's earth, like this is such a corny thing.
	Do you think like the topsoil like tells the other layers of earth how fucking ugly humans made it up there?
	You know what I'm saying?
	Like where they're like, yo, you should see it up here.
	They got strip malls.
	It is.
	Yeah, bro.
	I was thinking of moving out.
	I was thinking of moving up.
	The mantle's kind of boring.
	No, man.
	You want to see?
	You don't want to get up here right now.
	There's definitely a dirty little group, Chat.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, there is.
	Give them like 30 more years.
	They'll get rid of all the buildings.
	Yeah, yeah, they'll all die off.
	We're coming through the cracks of that concrete.
	But okay, so right.
	Urban sprawl.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Well, I mean, it actually starts kind of separately from the urban sprawl, right?
	Because Los Angeles isn't nearly as big in the 20s.
	But yeah, you get these rich people who start with like beach homes on the coast.
	And then a little later, I think the 30s or so, or no, probably like the 50s, like the Irvine Company comes in.
	They see, you know, there's already, there's demand for this land.
	A bunch of rich people have houses on it already.
	There's a lot of space out here and it's kind of adjacent to Los Angeles.
	Let's start cutting this up into tracts and selling it to people, right?
	This opened up a lot of a huge amount of high-end homes, right?
	These are not the like super affordable, like low-wage, middle-wage, working class guys they're going for here.
	They're going for this big population of white war veterans who were educated and who were in industries that paid well.
	And largely, that's going to be the defense industry, right?
	Which is hugely, we'll talk about this a bit more later, but hugely focused in Southern California.
	So most of these guys, again, World War II is just in it.
	A lot of these guys were veterans and they would have been veterans who had like, in a lot of cases, maybe more technical jobs.
	But Southern California has and has had military bases for a while.
	A lot of training gets done out near San Diego and had, I think, in this point too.
	And so a bunch of these dudes who had passed through, they'd come from like bum fuck Iowa or something and wound up in Southern California and were like, well, this is so much better than nine feet of snow in the winter.
	This is where I want to go if I survive the Germans.
	Yeah.
	And then, yeah, that's that's kind of the start of it, right?
	It is crazy.
	I'm from Northern California and Southern California does have just like random warplanes overhead that you're like, it's the Rose Bowl.
	Why is there a warplane like doing very suspicious, weird, donutty alien shit things overhead and so loud.
	Yeah, that was weird moving out here.
	Yeah, right.
	I'm just like, what if I were in the actual war, you know?
	And I'm just like, that's, that's normal because that's what I grew up with.
	Yeah.
	I didn't even hear that shit growing up in Texas.
	Like the number of warplanes that I see, I saw overhead in California or like showing up at Seattle randomly and it's just all sailors on the street because it turns out there's a week for that.
	I didn't know these things were factors of life for other people because people don't come to the suburbs of Dallas.
	Did you kiss one?
	I mean, Fleet Week.
	I would have, but I never got around to it.
	An opportunity didn't present itself.
	I was too nervous.
	Yeah.
	Well, you know, there's still time.
	All those men in their terrible, terrible uniforms.
	God, the Navy uniforms look like shit.
	Okay, sorry.
	So you get these guys, these houses start getting built and whatnot.
	And kind of from the start of the OC's development into a community, power and land there is held almost entirely by this tiny consortium of 10 landowners, most of whom had more than 200,000 acres each.
	So, right, the whole community that exists there today starts off with like 10 guys who just bought up everything back when it was really cheap.
	It was like, Mr. Huntington Beach.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Johnny Huntington, Aaron Beach, yeah, they combined their palettes.
	Santa and Anna.
	Yeah, Santa and Anna, right?
	Yeah, their marriage was a big deal.
	And of course, Johnny Encino, the star of the biopic and Cino man.
	Yeah, we all remember that great film.
	These dudes are all, they're all businessmen.
	Some of them are in oil too.
	A lot of them are in oil too, or ranchers.
	It's a conservative demographic, right?
	And they make the decision, like, yeah, we'll make more money off these ranches by like kind of transferring them into real estate empires to really take advantage of the housing boom and, you know, this kind of explosion in suburban living after the war.
	And this boom in home buying is largely subsidized by the Department of Defense, right?
	There's a bet's a big part of it.
	If you're a veteran and damn near everybody is at this point, you get mortgage aid.
	And yeah, I want to quote here from the book Suburban Warriors by Lisa McGurr.
	Quote, by 1962, defense had become the nation's largest business.
	And from 1946 to 1965, 62% of the federal budget went to defense.
	These huge expenditures catalyzed the affluent society and directly and indirectly affected the lives of every American.
	While defense money drove national economic growth, the regions that profited most directly were the Sunbelt, South, and West.
	And the biggest beneficiary was Southern California.
	And yeah, I don't know.
	Again, California has this like kind of driven by a lot of conservative media reputation as being hippie land, but like it's where we make our killing instruments to a significant extent, right?
	It's where we train our soldiers.
	My question is, what about black veterans, right?
	Was this because like, why aren't there, I mean, there's a Latino and a black population in OC, but this sounds like Jerry White.
	Well, that's a great question.
	And there's no black veterans because they're not allowed to buy homes there.
	Oh, easy, simple.
	Yeah, because it's simply not allowed.
	There's going to be a bunch of cases where even like, you know, Korean American families, Vietnamese American families, there's this, because this region's so conservative, after the Vietnam War ends, a bunch of Vietnamese citizens who had been pro-U.S., right, we ship a bunch of those people back over here and give them citizenship.
	It's like one of the things that kind of happens at the end of the war.
	And when that happens, there's this big initial celebration.
	And so, and then they're like, well, you know, we fought against the communists.
	We'll move into the super anti-communist right-wing neighborhood.
	And all those guys are like, oh, but we don't want you here.
	No, absolutely not.
	And they, you know, they still like build a community for themselves there to a significant extent.
	It's just there's a, there's a great deal of opposition.
	Yeah.
	Not the nice bluffs.
	No, no, no.
	It's like a whole, it's a whole deal.
	So yeah, Southern California, broadly speaking, is going to get most of like the largest single chunk of the money in defense contracts that comes during like the entirety of the Cold War.
	Like that is a huge amount of what this country spends on defense in that period.
	Just all gets hoovered up by Southern California.
	And most of the people working in the companies that are doing the hoovering, a lot of them live in Southern California.
	So before the war had started, defense basically had not been an industry in Orange County.
	Whereas by 1950, there's about 31,000 workers in the defense industry who live just in Orange County.
	And this is not like, to be fair, that's not the only place in Southern California where there's a lot of defense money.
	There's a lot of these companies will have their headquarters in Los Angeles.
	LA gets like a like a lot of building in LA basically happens in order to serve the defense industry in the post-war period.
	And yeah, a lot of the most affluent of these guys, and many of them may work in LA because that's where the companies are headquartered, but they live in Orange County, are these defense industry contractors, and especially like the very well-educated ones, the guys making rockets and guidance systems and optics and stuff, the guys making like space weapons, right?
	That a lot of those dudes wind up living in and around Orange County because the houses are bigger and nicer and they can afford them.
	From 1940 to 1960, the county population grew by roughly 385%.
Moral Busybodies Rise 00:07:57
	So that's how quickly this place explodes just because of the end of World War II and the birth of the Cold War.
	And it's always been conservative here as long as there has been any kind of community or in Orange County.
	It's always been conservative.
	In the 1920s, when the second KKK kind of starts showing up in the United States, two of the largest.
	Yeah.
	Oh, yeah.
	No, you were very, very prescient on that.
	The two biggest counties in California for Klan membership are Anaheim and Fullerton, which, yeah.
	Yeah.
	I don't have trouble seeing that, I'm afraid.
	It's also a stronghold for the temperance movement.
	This is like the part of California that wants to ban drinking the most, which I get it.
	You wouldn't, that shit don't fly in Northern California.
	No.
	It's also, you know, do you know there's the John Wayne airport here, Robert, which is so perfect because we did that series on John Wayne.
	I was like, ah, I know a thing or two about that psycho a-hole deserter.
	I do prefer his airport to LAX, but yes.
	I don't know, dude.
	I was there and it was a zoo.
	I was like, yo, let me go out of like a smaller airport.
	It'll be chiller.
	No, no, no.
	It was fucking crazy.
	It's just less space.
	But anyway, I digress.
	Well, it's been a while since I've flown there.
	To be fair.
	See, I like LAX, but I'm the only one.
	Yeah, you are.
	Yeah, you are.
	Yes, indeed.
	I'm like, it's just me.
	Yeah.
	So again, one of the things you have to remember here is that in this post-war period, Southern California is not a cool place for hippies and like space cadets and left-wing type people, right?
	Like that's not what it's thought of at all.
	It's one of the most conservative regions in the country at the turn of the century.
	Huntington Beach in the 20s was advertised as a town where, quote, there are no saloons or drinking.
	And Lisa McGurr writes that there were also incredibly strong social norms in the region and laws against any kind of sexual behavior.
	Quote, in nearby Long Beach in the 20s, ordinances forbade caresses, hugging, fondling, embracing, kissing, or wrestling with any person or persons of the opposite sex in or upon or near any public park, avenue, court street, or any other public place, which I feel like that means you could embrace or fondle someone of the same sex.
	Yeah, I feel like a lot of Huntington Beach MAGA chuds really took that to heart and definitely wrestle and fondle one another on the beach and caress each other.
	But it's like, you know, no homo or whatever.
	Yeah.
	But yeah, that's what I know about Huntington Beach.
	It was just like when Trump won, was like, oh, wow, again, you can live in a beautiful place, have access to a beach, and still somehow think that immigrants are destroying the country.
	Yeah, yeah, just a bunch of angry men with faces as red as a California sunset.
	Awful.
	But if you're heavily invested in creatine like me, it's also like, at least you know, you're going to be able to retire, right?
	Off of all that sweet, sweet creatine money those guys are putting into the economy.
	So it's a part of the country with a lot of moral busybodies from a pretty earlier period.
	And in fact, this kind of Southern California in the area that's going to become known as Orange County, like, I mean, that it is the county, but that's going to become known in pop culture as Orange County, actually has one of the highest ratios of churches per capita of any place in the country.
	Like this is the most Jesusiest chunk of the country in that period of time, pretty much.
	There's not many places that beat it.
	And it's actually, I don't think a lot of people know this.
	It's the literal birthplace of fundamentalist Christianity because modern fundamentalist Christianity comes out of a series of essays titled The Fundamentals, A Testimony to the Truth, that had been published from 1910 to 1915 at the behest of a California oil company founder named Lyman Stewart, who lives in Orange County, right?
	Jesus Christ.
	I see what I'm saying.
	Like California, yeah, true, truly, NorCal, number one.
	And secondly, it's not a blue state.
	It's not like there aren't a bunch of liberals here.
	We have these parts.
	And I used to think it was just east of the five, you know, but it's west of the five too.
	Again, in these beautiful, beautiful areas.
	God damn it.
	Really?
	Okay.
	Okay.
	You often get this whole belief, yeah, that California has always kind of been this progressive part of the country.
	And it has.
	It's just there's the most people here.
	So it does the most of everything.
	And it is also one of the most conservative states in the country and always has.
	You guys know this used to be Mexico, but that's cool.
	No, no.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	There's like 40-something million people.
	You can do two things.
	It's true.
	It's true.
	Yeah.
	So these guys, these fundamentalists, you know, who are kind of basing a lot of their beliefs and kind of political organizing are the ideas in this series of essays are kind of characterized with there's this hatred of the Catholic Church, which used to be a real big thing in U.S. politics.
	There's this hatred of socialism, which is a much newer concept at the time, but they're very angry about it.
	Mormonism, they are very anti-Mormon.
	And they also were really pissed that people were teaching Darwinism, right?
	So you can see where, again, abortion's not that much of an issue for them yet, but you can see this hatred of evolution, of science, of socialism.
	That's all coming together and coming out of this period in like an organized way.
	Where did the hatred of Mormonism go?
	Like, where did that happen?
	I feel like everything else got its own little war, but like, what about the white-on-white war?
	Like, you know, like, when are we going to see that?
	Or Mormons are just too nice.
	You don't want to fight them.
	Yeah.
	I mean, they are generally very polite.
	I think it does, it is, there is somewhere what present.
	If you find, when you find like really hardcore Southern Baptists and stuff, like a lot of them have very nasty things to say about Mormons.
	I think it's just less of a thing because people who are like extreme Christians and conservative feel more under siege today.
	And they know that the Mormons are basically in agreement with them on things.
	So they may think those people are going to hell and in fact do, but they'll caucus with them.
	You know, it's kind of the range has always been better.
	They're not under siege.
	They just have a greater imagination now because somehow demographic demographic shifts blah, blah, blah.
	Yes, exactly.
	The woke Disney movies, which is in Orange County, all right?
	So take it up with, they're going to be, these are the descendants of these people are going to be protesting the new fact that like, what is it?
	The song of the South Ride was terminated at Disneyland.
	It's been replaced by the Princess and the Frog, which stars a black princess.
	Like these are the people who are going to be protesting the opening of that because it's gone woke.
	Yeah.
	I just, I'm thinking of how funny it would be if like you get all the you get these protests that that tend to be seen as more left-wing where people are doing stuff like having like a fake you know everyone lies down and pretends to be dead right to protest some horrible war crime happening in Gaza or something.
	I'm imagining those same tactics being used by guys who are angry that the song of the south right is gone.
	You've got a bunch of dudes doing a die-in in front of the princess and the frog, right?
	All of them in blackface.
	Absolutely.
	No, they.
	This is in honor of my favorite racist cartoon.
	They've got all their little like Disney mugs waiting for a refill.
	They're protesting the fact that like, wasn't one on the jungle cruise or whatever it was, like the that ride, like I guess one of the traitor Sam or one of the like, you know, voodoo traitors got also taken out.
	They're going to be dressed as them.
	It'll be, it'll be good.
Confused Young Nazis 00:04:33
	It's like your grandfather fought in a fucking war.
	This is, this is your shit.
	This is what you're doing now.
	But yes.
	I guess we'll see what they're doing in a couple of years.
	But during the Great Depression, World War II, OC voters, you know, they go for FDR like everybody else.
	There is this period of time where like things are really bad and a Democrat gets elected, but they vote for a Republican again in 1940 and they keep doing so for three quarters of a century afterwards, right?
	And, you know, a big part of this is that after 1940, which is when the region grows in that next 20 years, again, 385%, all of the new people coming in pretty much are wealthy, right?
	Or at least comparatively wealthy, right?
	To their predecessors moving into the area.
	They're these people who have gotten cushy jobs in the new tech industry, basically, which is very defense focused at this point.
	And they're all flooding these increasingly rapidly built homes.
	We start to get some real luminaries in the conservative movement out of Southern County, out of Orange County in an early era.
	One of your favorite guys, you were just talking about how much you miss him as president.
	Your Belinda presidential, future presidential candidate, Richard Nixon, who gets voted into office in 1946 into Congress by the good people of Orange County.
	He's from the OC?
	Yeah, he's from the OC.
	He's from your Belinda.
	Yeah.
	Oh, God.
	Yeah.
	That's Dick Nixon, baby.
	He's like a Southern California boy.
	He grows up when it's much more rural, rural, but yeah.
	God damn it.
	It's a little bit like the way that like Stephen Miller, although Stephen Miller's from like LA, like Stephen Miller makes sense.
	Yeah, I think he grew up in like Santa Monica or some shit.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Steve Miller does not make sense.
	But yeah, Nixon very much makes sense.
	Also just born with like that old Nixon face.
	Like he came out looking exactly like he does.
	What a hero.
	What a fucking hero.
	Yeah, yeah.
	So culturally, it's just also no experience with the outside world, especially because the outside world in every direction is just as conservative and white, but again, beautiful.
	But so it's, it's like, it's like too nice.
	You got to have an enemy.
	It is, it is like isolated.
	This is like the suburbs.
	There's not nearly the same kind of connectivity people have through technology.
	And a lot of these guys are people who they do their term of service.
	They're like, wow, the world's fucking scary.
	Let me go hide in that one pretty place and make missiles for the rest of my life.
	That's what's going to, that's what I'm going to do.
	You know, like that really is for a lot of these guys, more or less the path that they take.
	So yeah, Dick Nixon comes out of Orange County.
	He runs for Congress as an anti-communist, right?
	In 1950, Nixon, you know, pairs up with Joe McCarthy.
	And, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's good, good for him as a, as a candidate, right?
	It endears him to the voters.
	It starts to provide him with like a base of popularity and whatnot.
	You know, Nixon's going to build his career on attacking communists and his alignment with Joe McCarthy to a very significant extent.
	And it's too early for it to work in 1960, in part because he is Dick Nixon and he is running against John F. Kennedy.
	And that's just not going to work for him.
	Even though he's a Catholic.
	The Catholic.
	Even though he's a Catholic.
	Yeah, we vote one of those that really pisses off the Orange County people, right?
	Seriously.
	That we put a papist in.
	This is not part of our fundamentals.
	Yeah.
	Speaking of Papists, Francesca, how do you feel about papistry?
	Do you think we can trust the Papists?
	Do you think that Catholics are an inherent third column in our society waiting to sell us out to the Vatican?
	I mean, yes.
	I mean, the Biden crime family is very much in bed with the inner workings of the Vatican.
	I don't know.
	When you say papistry, though, I never say that word, but I have gotten pap smears.
	So my mind is like the papistry is like what happens when you get a pap smear.
	Like, I'm just taking in this beautiful papistry of your, you know, cervix is how I feel.
	Or like, if you're a really good gynecologist, you practice papistry.
	Yeah.
	I'm imagining some very like confused young Nazi both like listening to this podcast and reading a book about pap smears and then carrying out an attack that makes no sense to anybody afterwards.
	Don't wish that.
Papistry and Smears 00:02:56
	Like, hey, listeners, are you a young, confused Nazi?
	Listen to behind the bastards.
	Well, that's, I can't imagine a better thing to lead into ads with.
	Great.
	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.
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	I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
	This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
	I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
	From power to parenthood.
	Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
	This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
	From addiction to acceleration.
	The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
	You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
	And it's a multiplayer game.
	What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
	Find out on Mostly Human.
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	Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
	I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
	Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
	Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
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	Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
	He related to the Phantom at that point.
	Yeah, it was definitely the Phantom in that.
Local Communist Fears 00:15:58
	That's so funny.
	Shall we stay with me each night, each morning?
	Say you love me.
	You know I.
	So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
	We're back.
	Sophie's going to have fun editing that last throw to ads.
	I'm not doing it.
	I'm leaving it as is.
	I enjoyed it.
	Oh, wow.
	Okay.
	Well, perfect.
	No notes.
	Listeners, check out my LinkedIn.
	Yeah, the joy that it brought Francesca, the look on her face.
	I'm not cutting that shit.
	Okay.
	So Orange Countiers, they vote for Nixon in 46.
	They like McCarthy when he's doing his thing, but they're not really fans of Nixon by the time he runs for president against Kennedy, right?
	In part because, you know, Nixon is, he's come down as like our political boogeyman, right?
	And he was a terrible, terrible monster, but he like, Nixon is the guy later in his career who will like hang out and be friends with Mao, right?
	Because he recognizes the geopolitical benefit of the U.S. being aligned with China against the USSR, right?
	That's why he does it.
	I'm not saying he's doing this as a good person, but it's like a rational political move that he makes.
	Whereas these Orange County guys are saying like, no, we need to, all communists are working together to destroy capitalism and we should just keep building more missiles to kill them all rather than trying to build like economic and political agreements that include these states, right?
	It just makes me think of like when Trump met with Kim Jong-un with like no pretext, no promises, nothing, just because he's like, I'm a strong man.
	Like, no, you idiot.
	Like anyone could have done that.
	You got played and yet we're just not supposed to like, if it were anyone else who had done that, the right would have freaked the fuck out.
	This is what Orange County worked for.
	And you're throwing that all away.
	It is interesting that like you're able to get away with that if you're Trump because they just can't like hate the guy.
	And Trump's willing to do it just because he does not come out of conservatism as a movement, right?
	Exactly.
	Like he didn't really imbibe any of this propaganda.
	He was just looking for a place where he could fit and grow like a mold.
	Speaking of the gym rag or whatever it is, the socket.
	Speaking of Ronald Reagan's cum sock, yes.
	Yes.
	Sophie, can we talk to the merch people about that?
	I feel like that's a branded item.
	No.
	Okay.
	Well, Sophie, I bought a 50-gallon drum of Ronald Reagan's preserved semen, but I guess I'll have to find a different use for that.
	You know what?
	Yeah, it'll be fine.
	Yeah, let me know what you decide to use that for.
	Yeah, I'm just going to drive through Florida handing out those little cups you get at like a Sam's for me.
	We could retire.
	We could retire off this sperm.
	I like the idea that someone's doing, because you know, the IDF is doing that to soldiers who are killed now.
	What is it?
	The semen something, something.
	Some semen abstraction, something awful.
	But that that's, oh, God.
	Ooh, they're going to do that to Trump.
	Oh, I'm sorry, Robert, but they're going to do it to Trump.
	They're going to, do you know?
	Yes.
	What if they do it to Trump?
	Honestly, it would be kind of funny.
	So let's, I think it's, I think it's fine.
	I think it's fine.
	They would.
	Go ahead.
	Do it.
	Have his babies in the future.
	We'll trump that.
	Near the only thing he hasn't sold of his at one point or another.
	But how much is he come?
	That's the future for him.
	Yeah.
	So these guys in Orange County, you know, Nixon, they love him for a while and then they like feel betrayed by him because he just kind of does things that are rational and not purely based on reactionary hatred.
	And that really pisses them off.
	A bunch of these pissed off, insane business leaders in Orange County form the Better American Foundation.
	And this had actually been formed a bit earlier, but it kind of after the Cold War really gets started in earnest, they turn it into this like civilian spy agency where they're building these dossiers on every identified communist in the area.
	And when I say the area, I mean in Los Angeles, like, and it's down from like Hollywood actors and stuff who actually were members of the Communist Party or like writers to just like plumbers and shit that somebody thinks is a communist and sends these guys a letter being like, here's why I think this man, my neighbor's a communist.
	I saw him wearing a red shirt one time.
	So put him on your murder list.
	He had a red, you know, one of the commie tools.
	He had a sickle and a hammer.
	Yeah, he's the handyman, you dumbass.
	No, but there was a that's the communist sign.
	That is.
	And it is literally that dumb and like lazy, right?
	It's not a good database, but it's taken seriously by the major law enforcement agency in the area.
	The LAPD partners with these guys to use their records.
	And it's because one of the things these people are keeping track of legitimately is labor organizers.
	One of the reasons why is Orange County, there are a lot of farms in the area.
	Those farms are worked primarily by Mexican migrants.
	And a lot of folks, folks, would periodically come in and try to organize those workers, right?
	To get them into a union so that they were not exploited to the same extent.
	And that would get these guys on a list.
	And that one way or the other is going to get a sheriff's deputy or something on your ass.
	And then it's probably not going to end super well for you, right?
	Like there's the police kind of partner with these folks in this mutually beneficial, you know, they get busts and stuff and people to go fuck with.
	And, you know, these business leaders in Orange County get rid of some of their problems, right?
	And then they went to go pick their own grapes, obviously, just, you know, because they wanted to be ideologically, you know, insane.
	Never going to do that.
	Farming doesn't mean actually harvesting food.
	It just means sitting on your porch making a lot of money.
	The skulls of those who try to earn a living.
	Yeah, being incredibly angry at all times about the idea of Martin Luther King Jr.
	Just pissing yourself with rage.
	Now, we're talking about a lot of social conservatism here so far, but obviously, you know, a huge amount of this, especially the anti-communism, comes out of economic conservatism, which is why you get this really interesting early marriage in Southern California in the 50s of hardline libertarian economic theory, right?
	The stuff that's going to really get a lot more prominent and actually get a lot of time in the sun under Reagan and kind of ever since, one way or the other.
	You have that kind of merging with social conservatism for the first time, right?
	Because while you do have a huge number of churches here, you also have a lot of these like super tech-oriented engineers who may be like socially, may or may not be socially conservative, but are extremely, they're libertarians, right?
	And so they don't, you know, they'll partner with these religious wackos that they may not like, may think are ignorant, because they don't want to pay any money in taxes.
	They hate the idea that somebody might use a road that their tax dollars went towards.
	Sure.
	So that merger, which is absolutely a critical part of the Republican Party today and ever since, that merger starts in Orange County.
	And I'm going to quote from Suburban Warriors again by McGeer.
	Leonard Reed, who in 1945 would organize the Foundation for Economic Education, an institution devoted to promulgating the message of free market private property and the moral principles which underlie these concepts, converted to libertarianism during his tenure as the manager of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce in the 1930s and 40s.
	Reed had been influenced by William C. Mullendor, who was then vice president of the Southern California Edison Company and a board member of Spiritual Mobilization, a conservative group of Los Angeles businessmen and clergymen.
	And also in 1959 and 1960, he was one of 25 to 30 prominent businessmen invited by Robert Welch to organize the John Birch Society on the Pacific coast.
	Great.
	So that's a lot of heavy hitters.
	Like that, this is all coming out of Southern California.
	Huge amount of this.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I'm mad I even went to Disneyland.
	Yeah.
	Fuck it.
	Yeah.
	The next time I see a steamboat Willie costume, I'm just going to kick him right in the ass.
	Absolutely.
	That's what he deserves.
	That's my promise.
	Those churros are really good, though.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Your ass is public domain, motherfucker.
	No, honestly, whatever.
	I don't have to go off about Disneyland, but this is wild.
	So here's the question: Is it sort of a convergence of interests?
	Is it like, ooh, we can use fake, you know, religiosity and morals to cover for our blind greed and want like desire to like not pay anything in taxes like that.
	Or is it I'm religious and I also am wealthy and don't want to pay anything in taxes.
	Therefore, I'm going to add to my religion libertarianism as part of my religion.
	Like, like, or is it just kind of a chicken or the egg conversation where they both come at the same time?
	It's interesting.
	Again, this is another thing you've kind of predicted because it is, it is very much a factor of let me graft this weirdly, like, this weirdly libertarian capitalist economic theory onto my religion.
	Because another thing that is later going to come out of Southern California that's a product of Orange County in a lot of ways is prosperity, gospel, Christianity.
	What?
	I thought it was Florida's fault.
	Come on.
	Florida plays their role, but a huge amount of that shit comes out of Southern California.
	That's a that is a major center of like where kind of the prosperity gospel comes together as like a concept is uh the the OC.
	So we're rich because God wanted us to be rich.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And you can just pray for money, but also it helps if you send several thousand of it right here.
	Don't pay taxes.
	That's less money than you could send to my scam church that buys me a plane.
	Jesus actually didn't really help the poor.
	His first instinct was, ew, gross.
	Do you even go here?
	Yeah.
	But then he had to.
	Jesus sold the poor makeup that had a 700% markup that he bought on an installment plan.
	So now, again, while we're talking about all this and all this stuff that is very common on the right right now, that starts in Orange County.
	That is not the mainstream conservative movement at this period of time.
	And the best evidence for that is that a guy who has become hated in Orange County, Richard Nixon, wins the presidency.
	You know, that like that is a thing that is eventually going to happen, right?
	Not that far, much longer in here, right?
	In like the late 60s.
	And so while this stuff is starting to take off and take hold and is eventually going to spread, Orange County very much is kind of weird, right?
	On a national level.
	It's not the only place that's this conservative, but its character of conservatism is kind of unique.
	And that's also going to contribute to this sense of isolation that we're talking about, right?
	Where this is really, it's like a petri dish that you've added ingredients to and you're keeping it away from the rest and just seeing what grows there before you dump it into the tank.
	Which again, that moment is Ronald Reagan, right?
	So yeah, one of the things that's going to become an early hobgoblin of the Republican Party and the right-wing movement in Orange County is the ACLU.
	And this causes a problem on June 24th of 1960.
	There's this Anaheim resident, John Dvorman, who is kind of one of the rare progressives in the area.
	And he is a member of the ACLU and also an elected member of the school board, right?
	These guys do not like the ACLU.
	They think it is a communist organization.
	They think anyone in it is a communist.
	Civil liberties.
	Yeah.
	So these guys love McCarthyism.
	And one of the things that happens as a result of McCarthy and the House Committee on Un-American Activities is, you know, HUAC is you get a number of state committees on un-American activities.
	And California has one.
	It is beloved by these Orange County businessmen.
	They use it a lot in order to harass, again, like union organizers and stuff that they view as enemies.
	DeVorman, as a progressive, wants to abolish it.
	So he hosts a meeting at his house of the ACLU and a bunch of, you know, there's a gathering.
	People give speeches about why they need to remove this thing, about how to organize to do it.
	And it kind of becomes a local story that like this dude invited an ACLU meeting at his fucking house.
	These communists are holding meetings in our sanctuary of Orange County.
	And I'm going to quote from Suburban Warriors here.
	The response was swift and forceful.
	Angry neighbors denounced Vorman for importing communist ideas into their suburban enclave.
	Heeding their neighbor's call, citizens whose lives had previously revolved around work, church, and family became involved in a contentious legal battle.
	I mean, and this is all like a reaction, as you mentioned, the MLK thing.
	Like, this is just reactions to the civil rights movement.
	This is just like...
	Yeah, the civil rights movement is really kicking off.
	Yes.
	Exactly.
	This is let's flee people who want full, like, yes, to be treated equally, full citizenship, to not be barred from, yeah, their voting the ballot box, all that shit.
	That's just all this is.
	It's like, because you're like, where does this communism stuff come from?
	Oh, oh, it's just your reaction.
	It's just the white reaction to the black civil rights movement.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	That's all that this is here.
	And DeVoreman is unfortunately, he's the kind of dude who's like made in a lab to piss off right-wingers, right?
	He was born in New York.
	He went to Yale.
	He was a lifelong progressive and as a bonus, was also Jewish.
	So these guys, like, once they get a load of this guy, they are like, oh, fuck, this dude lives here.
	This dude's on the school board.
	Of course, it turns out he's been called up by the California Committee on Un-American Activities before.
	And he had, on principle, refused to say if he'd ever been a communist or not.
	So within days, there's like newsletters going around claiming this guy is a trained communist agent who has infiltrated Orange County.
	And he's on the school board.
	He's going to groom our kids.
	You know, like it's, it's, it's, this is not an unfamiliar thing today.
	Tale is old as fucking time.
	And it's the same sort of like...
	As old as this.
	Or as old as this.
	And it's the same sort of like, yeah, anti-Semitic, like true anti-Semitic trope of like, yeah, it's the Jews who are bringing in the migrants and giving black people rights.
	Same, same stuff.
	Same stuff.
	Yeah.
	And the story of how people find out that this guy has held an ACLU meeting at his house is really interesting.
	It all comes down to this dude named James Wallace, who is very, very conservative and is also a production engineer at Autonetics.
	You probably haven't heard of Autonetics, but they are the people who built all of the navigation systems for our ICBMs.
	Like if you want a nuke to go kill a specific city, you hired James Wallace to help make it happen, right?
	Like he's one of these guys.
	He's a production engineer at this company that like, that's what they do.
	So, and he has decides he's got some free time from planning for the apocalypse.
	And he blazes a trail that right-wing activists like James O'Keefe would follow for decades.
	He shows up and infiltrates the ACLU meeting, right?
	Like he does this, I'm this conservative, I'm sitting in there, I'm taking notes, right?
	And then he writes a letter to the local newspaper where he talks about what he saw and describes the ACLU rep as a traitor and writes, I wonder what we would have done in 1942 if Mr. De Vorman had a German-American boond meeting at his house.
Knott's Farm Threats 00:12:45
	And it's like, man, I know in 1942, I think I know where you would have been.
	Yeah, honestly.
	But that's the other thing.
	That bond meeting.
	Exactly.
	No.
	I don't know.
	It's wild to me that these descendants of, I guess, World War II vets and heroes are just echoing not like they're creating the basically American Nazi movement, right?
	Or a version of a white nationalist movement, which, you know, staple of it being anti-communist or saying you're anti-communist.
	It is extra messed up to like accuse a Jewish man of wanting to start a German-American boond meeting in the 1940s.
	All the time.
	Yeah.
	That is, ooh, that's dark.
	Yeah.
	So in short order, there's mobs showing up at school board meetings where Dvorman is going to be present, right?
	And they're just kind of shouting down anyone trying to accomplish anything.
	Like whenever they're trying to like actually do the school board shit, they're yelling at Dvorman being like, were you ever a member of the Communist Party?
	Were you ever a member of the Communist Party?
	Eventually, his colleagues are like, you're not allowed to be both an ACLU member and a school board member.
	And he was censured and forced into a recall.
	Jesus.
	Now, the head of the recall effort is another aerospace industry employee, an engineer named Dixon Miles.
	He worked at Northonyx.
	Now, I don't think you've, you probably haven't heard of Northronyx.
	No, what else?
	What other horrible machine of death did they create?
	I love all this.
	The name has changed a little over the years.
	You know them better today as Northrop Grumman.
	There we go.
	There we are.
	Yeah.
	So this is like a Northrop Grumman guy, right?
	He called the efforts to end a government committee that existed primarily to destroy lives, this Un-American Activities Committee.
	He calls the attempt to take it down a threat to our heritage, our beautiful heritage of holding committees to destroy people who vote differently.
	No, and then also, like, that's the other thing that's so fucking like the dissonance is so deafening in this story and this origin story of like the modern right because of the way that I mean, we should, I should have said this earlier, but like these are supposedly religious people who are creating weapons of like death every single day.
	And there's no, again, there is no contradiction in their minds.
	And yeah, and then again, the same shit where it's like, this guy's like, hey, we have this committee who is kind of terrorizing our community in different ways and interrogating us.
	We should probably have some sort of sovereignty.
	We shouldn't be subject to this kind of surveillance.
	And they're like, nah, you.
	Yeah.
	It's just, it's just the same fucking like projection.
	The ACLU is the one.
	Yeah.
	They're trying to take away our freedom to take away other people's freedom, which is what like it all comes down to.
	It's all comes down to.
	And this successful effort to force Dvorman off the school board is a catalyzing moment for Orange County conservatives who had always been dicks, right?
	These people had been shitty people for a spell, but they also had never felt like they were organized together into any like cohesive political whole, right?
	There's this attitude that like, well, you know, we're all pretty conservative here.
	None of us like communism.
	We don't accept it in our community.
	But now they realize how many of them there are who are that angry about the state of the world.
	And again, the civil rights movement is a big part of this.
	And it gives them this sense of power.
	You know, again, this is not a thing that's going to be alien to anyone who's been paying attention the last few years.
	So it turns out that as we've kind of been making the case for, the set of unique coincidences that formed Orange County in its early stages was basically tailor-made to create an explosion of paranoid people with no community connections beyond those geared towards expressing fear or anger at imagined political enemies, right?
	It's just a land of Karens.
	It's a rolling, rolling hills of Karens.
	It's mostly houses.
	Everything is like very far apart from any spaces where people are going to like gather, you know, outside of households regularly.
	There's basically all of the public space in the county has been chopped up and sold to developers at this point, which has been very clear.
	There's a good passage in Suburban Warriors about this.
	A segment of its middle class found a sense of community in the politics and social interaction preferred by local businessmen, right-wing ideologues, and conservative church leaders.
	Thus, one woman said of conservative activism, it became a social thing.
	Much of the county followed the planned sprawl model of development.
	This led to chaotic spatial arrangements with one tract developed after another.
	Streets were bisected by new housing tracts, increasing a perception of discontinuity and chaos.
	This form of growth created what one may term free enterprise cities with a strong emphasis on private development and growth and little regard for public or community spaces.
	By neglecting public space in favor of growth, such arrangements weakened the sense of community.
	In fact, even the existing central spaces of the old downtowns were undermined in favor of convenience, privacy, and shopping malls.
	The most extreme result of this pro-growth attitude was the eventual demolition of the old downtown city center in Anaheim to make room for development.
	So they just blast everything that isn't a single family dwelling, basically.
	They nuke it and pave it.
	And this is, by the way, this is where kind of a trail is blazes, like the first place where Americans are building developments and walling them off from each other in like an organized way.
	Like it happens in New York too, kind of in a contemporaneous period.
	You get pieces of that, but like you get this, it starts in Orange County with these old folks homes, right?
	Where you basically have this is a retirement community.
	They're not like old folks homes, like homes for retired people that are all part of a community that they like wall and gate off in order to like because these people are scared of everything.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	It's like, who, it's definitely, I've, the times I've been to the OC is like, who are you trying to keep out here?
	Because there's just other gated communities.
	Like, are you, are there, is this some kind of like, you know, warriors, like fight, you know, gang, gated community gang situation?
	Because that'd be tight.
	But like, I literally don't know who you're, who you're keeping out.
	Anyone who like, you can't even walk here.
	Like there are no sidewalks, you know?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Which is, I mean, that all of that is part of why it is the way it is there, right?
	These are the geography and the development makes these very isolating places.
	Also, nobody comes from here.
	Your whole family, like generations of it, doesn't live in Orange County, right?
	You moved here from somewhere else.
	Right.
	And by the same note, like, so as a result of that, kind of the only public spaces are churches.
	And the only organizations that people are likely to be members of other than their church is their political party.
	So when you have that and you add into it, there's suddenly this fight over perceived communism in the neighborhood.
	And everybody rallies together and they're all doing a thing together in the real world.
	And that's like addictive.
	And you're going to get, that's the origin of a lot of what's going to wind up infecting the rest of the Republican Party.
	It starts with this, right?
	It starts with this community-starved group of people who find a sense of like identity and just excitement and going to war with this dude who just wanted to host an ACLU meeting.
	That's a huge moment in the history of American conservatism.
	Yeah.
	So the real gift that Dvorman had gave these people was a threat to rally behind.
	And once they had felt that high, they didn't want to give it up.
	Local business leaders, who, as we've stated, have always been the engine of conservative politics in the area, saw opportunity.
	A group of them headed by Walter Knott, owner of Knottsbury Farm, organized it, which is like the first theme park in the U.S., I think.
	Yeah.
	So the Knottsbury Farm guy organizes a committee and sponsors what he calls the Orange County School of Anti-Communism.
	Oh, God.
	Oh, yeah.
	That just sounds like a great time.
	Over in Knottsbury Farm.
	You know why?
	At least Disney doesn't have like a shady past.
	Yeah.
	You know, or any kind of right-wing overlap or any kind of Nazi stone that I've heard of.
	Not they're woke as hell.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	They're super woke.
	DeSantis said it himself.
	Okay, so Knottsbury, yeah, okay.
	Another theme park's been ruined.
	Yeah, organizes the Orange County School of Anti-Communism.
	Now, initially, this is like a series of local community college classes, right?
	But they're so overattended.
	Like the community college is drowning in suburbanites who want to attend this anti-communism school.
	So Mr. Knott is like, all right, well, we got to do it bigger.
	And a month before the Bay of Pigs invasion in the spring of 1961, more than 7,000 students and parents, many of whom had skipped work or school, gathered in La Palma Park Stadium in Anaheim to attend a five-day Christian anti-communist school organized by Knott.
	And I'm going to quote from the LA Times to talk about, give you a little insight into how this thing goes.
	This is a speech by Herbert Philbrick, who's a former FBI agent.
	This is when he gives a crowd of people of like 7,000 on March 8th.
	Right now, we have a 50-50 chance of defeating the communist threat, but each day our chances grow less.
	And that's like, that's the tenor of this whole thing, right?
	Like the communists, it's going to be an uphill battle.
	I don't know if we can beat them, but if we, you know, we've got to turn things around now.
	Obviously, the event includes Birchers, who one of the things that happens at this meeting is they declare President Dwight D. Eisenhower to have been a communist tool.
	Now, it's not just Knott.
	He's not the only famous name here.
	John Wayne is in attendance.
	Oh, of course.
	And so that's good.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Everybody's favorite fucking goblin of a man.
	Yeah.
	It's a it's it's a big deal, right?
	This is a huge moment in American conservatism as well.
	You know, I always you always wonder, like, is their imagined threat still the same, right?
	They call it communism.
	They call it socialism.
	They call it woke.
	They're getting closer to just saying people of color with the word woke or anti-woke, but you're like, like at the time, was it just sort of, I guess I'm wondering, like when they said communism, they knew they just meant like Jewish people, black people, women having any kind of like equal rights.
	And it's always this threat.
	They're just afraid that they would have to give up their what beautiful, beautiful strip mall.
	Yeah, I mean, that is, that's a huge part of it.
	I will say it's not just people of color and women.
	They also have a particular hatred of college students, right?
	This is also starting to be these early stages of protests in the early 60s against not just in favor of civil rights, but against the Vietnam War.
	Right.
	And that's a huge, that's also a big bugbear for these people is college students.
	Right.
	So more than 16,000 Americans or Orange County ins, I guess, wind up attending the event.
	And Ronald Reagan is going to be the most popular speaker there.
	He's also in attendance.
	So you've got Reagan, you've got John Wayne, and you've got the Knottsbury Farm guy.
	And the event is such a hit.
	And the Ronald Reagan speech is particularly such a big deal that the Knottsberry Farm guy helps to organize, following this, a three-hour Hollywood bowl event called Hollywood's Answer to Communism, which is described by TV critic John Crosby as a monster three-hour concentration of pure venom on television in which patriots suggested again and again that the United States was largely peopled by traitors.
	So that sounds cool.
	Obviously, John Wayne by traitors.
	Yeah, that everyone who isn't one of these weird right-wingers is a traitor to the country.
	High up in the list of conservatives who hate it are the celebrities who attend this Hollywood Answers Communism, which include John Wayne, obviously, Roy Rogers.
	Not a surprising as well.
	This one's going to hurt people, though.
	Jimmy Stewart's a speaker.
	Oh, God.
	Yeah, that's a bummer.
	That's a bummer.
	Not shocking if you know that.
	I can't do it, Jimmy Stewart.
	Boy, I sure do hate it when people love civil rights.
	I don't know.
	It's not a good Jimmy Stewart.
	Well, now they want to be equal.
	And now they're getting off my something like that.
	So both events are organized by a famous piece of shit and Australian gift to conservatism, Frederick Schwartz.
	And he founds the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade and he moves his headquarters to Orange County in 1960.
	Schwartz's claim to fame is a book called You Can Trust the Communists to be Communists, which had a stunningly subtle sequel, You Can Still Trust the Communists to mean communist, socialists, and progressives too.
You Can Trust Communists 00:03:36
	So great titles, like really creative.
	Good work, man.
	Speaking of weird fascists, here's...
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	I vowed I will be his last target.
	He's going to get what he deserves.
	Listen to the girlfriends.
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	Ah, we're back.
	So both these events, you know, you've got Knotts kind of providing the funding, but the guy who is organizing them is Frederick Schwartz.
	He's this dude who founds the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, which moves to Orange County.
Anti-Communism Bottom Line 00:14:46
	He writes these two books with almost the same title about how communism is scary.
	Same communism is a communist.
	No, the communist populate the communism.
	You can't spell communist without con.
	Yeah, without like most of the words in con, right?
	Yeah.
	So his brand of propaganda, it's going to be different in some critical ways from mainstream far-right propaganda because he bases a lot of his pitch on the interests of specifically people in Southern California, right?
	His first book includes a lengthy passage where he complains that communists are graduating more engineers than the United States, which has given them an edge in making new weapons.
	And there's some wild lines in here.
	The question is, which system of education will win this universal war?
	I was visiting an American college.
	Before I'd been there 10 minutes, the president told me with great pride of a young man who had brought glory and honor to their school.
	Wherever I went on campus, I heard his praises sung.
	At last I met him, and a fine young man he was.
	His body was lithe and slender, and he stood some six feet two inches tall.
	He was their leading basketball player.
	His skill at the game was so great that he had been chosen to go to Melbourne, Australia to represent the United States in the Olympic Games in 1956.
	What an honor for the school.
	Frequently I asked, who's your leading science student?
	He looked up at me with wonder and amazement.
	He could not answer the question.
	So he says, we're teaching our kids basketball, but not how to make missiles.
	God.
	It's such a funny thing to like have be your primary concern.
	Like that anyone, anyone could have ever thought like the answer to the Cold War, like that we would not have enough missiles.
	That that was ever a thing the U.S., if you know anything about this country, no, as soon as missiles were a thing, we were going to have the most of them.
	That was always in the cards for this country.
	Like that is, that is truly a trick that, I don't know, the military industrial complex definitely pulled on everybody, but I guess including people and like I said, vets, the idea that you're victors.
	You won.
	Yeah.
	No one even pales in comparison to the kind of military you have.
	But yeah, I don't know.
	I think you can play some basketball.
	You know what I'm saying?
	Just like take a load off.
	Like chill out.
	Like you are geographically defended because of like the way North America is set up.
	You have so much more money and so many more guns than anybody else on the planet.
	And yet you're terrified because you saw a kid who was good at basketball, but the school didn't have any future missile designers.
	Like what the fuck, man?
	That's a nuts.
	So ridiculous.
	But you can see why this goes well, goes over well in Orange County, because not only are a lot of employees of Defense Country, but a lot of people who are like running these defense companies.
	And like this guy's saying, America's not graduating enough missile designers.
	And they're like, yeah, we need more missiles.
	I make money off of every one of those we fucking sign, right?
	Like Northrop Grumman is paying the fucking mortgage on a lot of these ranch-style houses, you know?
	And so the people who are, you know, financially invested in this, they like it that Schwartz is saying.
	There's no way to have peace.
	There's no way to ever decrease our defense spending.
	We only need to spend more and more and more.
	This is just, it's such a nightmare Venn diagram of the, like the OC is just this like nightmare fucking, what's the longitude and latitude, like nightmare coordinates of every single libertarianism, the Christian right, and the weapons industry, which of course they don't admit to at all now when they're like, we need to not send any more money to Ukraine or whatnot.
	And they're just like, no, all y'all love the weapons industry.
	You want to send more money and make more weapons.
	You want to send them so many more places than this.
	Yeah, you just want to do it.
	You want to do it for a good, yeah.
	Exactly.
	You just wouldn't be an asshole about it.
	Exactly.
	No, but it is like, you know, we're talking about like the attitude towards people who are like running these companies, but regular people don't want to feel like they're warmongers.
	And so part of what makes Schwartz interesting is he very interestingly creates this sort of image of like, Americans want peace, right?
	We actually value peace.
	And when we say peace, we mean an end to violence, right?
	Communists talk about peace a lot, but communists don't view peace as the same thing.
	In communism, peace doesn't mean ending violence.
	Peace means ending conservatives, right?
	That's basically what ending capitalists, right?
	Like that's, that's how they say it, right?
	And so like, when we say we want peace, we mean we don't want violence.
	But if that means if we actually advocate for peace, we're dooming ourselves because the only peace they'll accept is one in which we don't exist.
	Now, if you're rational at all, you can say that like, well, all you're saying is the only real peace is one in which the communists don't exist, right?
	There's no difference between what you're saying, they're saying, and what you are saying.
	Those are the same two things.
	But yeah, it works, right?
	This is popular with these guys.
	Conservatism is all premised on future tripping about a reality that has not come to bear and will not likely come to bear.
	They just, well, you know, it's projection.
	They're going to do it to us.
	They're trying to eliminate conservatism.
	So we need to eliminate them first.
	Yeah.
	They've said that they have to put an end to capitalism.
	So we have to put an end, you know, to communism.
	A thing we don't have, do not live under.
	But that doesn't make us bloodthirsty.
	We're still good Christians, right?
	Sure.
	Yeah.
	I mean, these are just, everyone finds ways of doing this.
	It's not an uncommon, like, this is not, this was not invented by this guy, but I find the way in which he's speaking to these Orange County voters to be kind of telling about how people in general like to look at themselves.
	Yeah.
	So yeah, as a side note, one of the things that's really interesting when you read a lot of Schwarz's writing is how frequently he praises the quality of communist literature.
	Like, I don't know any communists who use the word beautiful to describe like communist propaganda as much as this guy does.
	Like he fucking loves it.
	He writes about how like a wonderful book like Problems of Leninism by Joseph Stalin can be acquired for just a few cents in any bookstore in America.
	Like, why can't we do that with our propaganda?
	They're so much better at it than us.
	It's all these wood cuttings and it's great and they've got good mustaches.
	We need some good mustache.
	He writes about this Chinese communist magazine called Chinese Pictorial.
	And he's like, the color photography is beautiful.
	The moral tone is excellent.
	There's no violence, no crime, no nakedness, no sex, no alcohol.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	It's like, we need to do that, but for money, you know, like for us and our side.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, it is fun because he is saying a lot like, wow, the way these, the way that these Maoists portray their like fantasy future society looks great.
	There's none of the things I hate, right?
	It's like, okay, well, then why are these people your biggest enemy?
	Well, I don't know, whatever.
	It's, it's, it is funny to me.
	Like he writes, he, he clearly so enjoys it.
	It reminds me of Jordan Peterson, right?
	Keeping like communist propaganda all over his walls.
	He's like, that's kind of odd if you're, if you're not into it at all to just surround yourself with it all the time.
	That's very interesting to me.
	You got to keep the enemy close.
	Now, I think they would probably describe it as like, well, I want to understand the enemy so I can know how to fight them.
	Exactly.
	You know, okay.
	It's there.
	But yeah, it is, it is a weird obsession.
	But it's also just, again, I was at the California Republican Party like convention, California Republican convention in 2015, I guess it would be.
	And the best moment of that whole convention for all these Republicans was when they could see the protests happening outside of the building because Trump was speaking.
	It's when Trump had to like, you know, walk in like a the alley of the, or like the, the shoulder of a highway and whatnot because of, you know, protesters had closed the, um, stopped the, you know, entryway, whatever.
	And the faces of these Republicans were so excited.
	They loved watching themselves be hated and they loved seeing what the other side was doing.
	And so I do think there is sort of a weird fascination.
	They see, I think there's this a significant degree of like admiration for, well, these guys were a tiny, unpopular chunk of the country.
	And using a variety of methods, we're able to like build parties and organizations that allowed them to reach and radicalize a huge number of people and take power.
	And that's exactly what we want to do, but specifically so that we have to pay less taxes.
	Exactly.
	They have a lot of power, but they're not the only power, right?
	Because shit happens like the civil rights movement, right?
	And then, you know, you get a law that they hate that forces changes in society that they hate.
	You have, you know, prior to that government like, you know, the government doing like forcibly integrating schools.
	So they would say it as like, we're fighting for our lives here.
	And what we need to do is what those communists did, just like take total power, right?
	Like that's very much why they're kind of looking to this propaganda.
	And Schwartz has, again, he's very like positive towards communist propaganda.
	And he, in this very weird passage, he compares it to like a pedophile with a candy van, which is a really, I didn't realize that sort of like image went back this far to like the early 60s, but evidently it does.
	Yeah.
	So anti-communism is going to remain a central interest for Orange County conservatives who all start to see the Cold War as, you know, the acceleration of the Cold War is not simply like just for ideological reasons, but also as important for their bottom line, right?
	This is going to make us all rich.
	The Orange County Research Institute, which also did surveys in other parts of the U.S., noted in the early 60s that Orange County dwellers were likelier to either be interested in or have bomb shelters than people anywhere else.
	So I think that's funny.
	Like Midwesterners aren't buying bomb shelters.
	Exactly.
	This is like after 9-11, people, yeah, like in fucking, I don't know, think of a random ass like in just like, yeah, in the OC being like, they're coming for us.
	Like, no, they're not.
	They're not going to, I'm sorry.
	Yorba Linda.
	And everybody had to feel, we all want to feel like we're part of the noose, though, right?
	We all have to make it about ourselves.
	Yeah, exactly.
	They're going to come right for us.
	No, they're not.
	You wish they're coming.
	It's not, no one cares enough about Irvine for Al-Qaeda.
	I cannot spell your Belinda.
	I'm sorry.
	Like, you're okay.
	So in 1948, again, Dick Nixon's anti-communism had embodied the values of Orange County pretty well.
	But over the next decade and change, like it had radicalized to the point where he starts to be hated in the area, right?
	And this becomes particularly the case once he becomes the president, right?
	In the late 60s, you know, early 70s, when Nixon is in power, he becomes like a huge enemy of them for the fact that he's willing to talk with communists.
	He's willing to make deals with the Chinese government, right?
	He's kind of the first rhino, right?
	You know, that's a term that has a lot more cachet now politically.
	They weren't using it then.
	But the Bircher right-wing are the first people to really go after Nixon in that way.
	I think he first wound up on their shit list in 62 when he had run for governor of California.
	And the society had attacked him.
	The John Birch Society had gone against Nixon in 62.
	They backed the candidacy of this guy, Joe Shell, who was a local assemblyman.
	He was a high school football idol, turned independent oil producer.
	So he's just like the perfect man for them to all rally behind.
	Mad libs of right-wing identities.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Football.
	And there's this great quote.
	Farmer.
	There's this really good quote.
	Yeah, he's a football oil farmer.
	The LA Times gives a really good quote of the tenor of the election he has, like his competition with and its impact on Nixon.
	Piloting his own Beechcraft bonanza from one campaign stop to the next, Shell aimed his pitch squarely at fellow conservatives.
	I've gotten sick and tired of calling people liberals when they're basically socialists, he said.
	First elected to the Assembly in 1953, Shell was the minority leader when he decided to run for governor.
	One hallmark of his campaign, he repeatedly accused former Vice President Nixon of trying to use the California governorship as a stepping stone to the presidency.
	Although Nixon won the primary handily, Shell captured 35% of the vote.
	Nixon had been substantially weakened because the ultra-conservative Shell's challenge caused a split in the party, former Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger said in his 2001 memoir.
	So again, it's Orange County and particularly the John Birch Society there that really stops Nixon from winning the governorship because they kind of hobble his campaign.
	They create all this animosity, you know, because they back this fucking football oilman, Joe Shell.
	Yeah, God, that's funny.
	So Nixon irritates the John Birch Society again in 1964 when Barry Goldwater, who was then kind of in the early 60s, he's the craziest fascist in America.
	He's going to end his life in like the 90s as like pro-marijuana and pro-gay marriage, but he is like, he is the scariest fascist in public life.
	It's a weird, yeah, he winds up, I guess, being okay at the end of his life.
	I don't know what was going on.
	He's just a lib.
	He just dies a lib.
	Yeah, he kind of dies a lib, right?
	Yeah.
	Weed's cool.
	Love is love.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Talk about all that.
	It's interesting.
	He's got a fascinating arc.
	But he's the dude.
	His big famous quote is he declares at the Republican convention that year, extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.
	Oof.
	And yeah.
	So that's, you know, that's the guy who's kind of like the fucking big Republican in 64 or the big far-right Republican in 64.
	Obviously, Nixon's going to wind up being the guy who actually gets to become president in 68, right?
	Like eventually, it's not Goldwater, but Nixon.
	And that's another thing that pisses off these people, right?
	That Nixon becomes the standard bearer of the party.
	Barry Goldwater, the guy they fucking love, does not.
	And that has all set the stage, more or less, for the man who's going to make the first big crack in the dam between Orange County conservatism and the broader National Republican Party.
	The guy who's going to shatter that wall and lead, let all of that filth really spill into the rest of the country in a big way is a dude named John Schmitz.
	And we're going to talk about Jay Schmitz in part two.
	Yeah.
	So, Francesca, that's the end of the episode.
Nixon Standard Bearer 00:02:38
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Chapters

00:00:00 Trust Your Girlfriends
00:02:10 Matt Lieb Returns
00:04:45 Post-War Housing Boom
00:20:12 Moral Busybodies Rise
00:28:09 Confused Young Nazis
00:32:42 Papistry and Smears
00:35:39 Local Communist Fears
00:51:37 Knott's Farm Threats
01:04:23 You Can Trust Communists
01:08:00 Anti-Communism Bottom Line
01:22:46 Nixon Standard Bearer