Helmut Kintler and the German left's dark history of child abuse are exposed through the tragic case of Marco, a boy placed with pedophile Henkel under Kintler's "sexual liberation" program. Despite knowing Henkel abused Marco and his friend Sven, Kintler blocked investigations to protect Henkel, manipulating Marco into believing his parents abandoned him until he turned 18. While Marco eventually escaped and found stability, the episode reveals how political ideologies on both the left and right can be exploited by predators, demonstrating that state-sanctioned abuse often stems from dangerous conflation of ideology with child safety. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Greek Pedophiles and Revenge00:01:50
Cool zone media.
Oh, hold open me, Robert.
It's behind the bastard still.
Podcast, bad people, Margaret Killjoy.
Margaret, Helmut Kintler, bad guy.
You could call him a kind of like philosopher.
If he was Greek, his name would be Podopheles.
Robert.
See, that was bad.
It was just in my head.
You just got it.
You got to excise this stuff.
You just got to excise this stuff.
You just exist to make guests look bad.
I really trust.
Robert.
I don't know.
What else can you say?
Probably factual things and not bad jokes about Greek pedophiles.
Robert is your guest soon on Cool People Did Cool Stuff.
Yeah.
Start thinking of your revenge.
Oh, that's a good point.
Yeah.
As the producer of both podcasts, I will help you.
Well, just to give people a heads up, Robert did an episode about the Ukrainian anarchist Machno, but I'm going to come in and tell him about the women who also did all that stuff.
Yeah.
So that's the men can listen to in a couple of weeks.
I'm going to do a lot of that Borat My Wife joke, but in my best Ukrainian accent.
Oh, someone already, we had Matt on over.
Okay, so wow.
Yeah.
Well, damn it.
All right.
Let's get back to the pedophiles.
So it's important to understand the intellectual environment in the left in Germany in which all of this shit with Kintler's horrible experimentation happened because Kintler's pedophile foster program, he is focusing on these kids who are the most deprived and like marginalized people in all of German society, right?
Sexual Liberation Experiments00:04:29
These homeless children.
But those are not the only kids being victimized or at least experiencing elements of victimization as a result of this like pedophile infiltration of the German left and this kind of conflation of sexual liberation with like child sexual liberation.
Yeah.
So research on all of this is sketchy is not the right word, but it's like it's it's it's messy because it's problematically hard to fund any kind of research into pedophilia.
But the common answer you'll get is that somewhere around 1% of the population as like human population are pedophiles, right?
It's kind of probably the top, the high number.
In terms of their like sexual attraction pattern or whatever.
Yes, yes.
So that's, you know, a very small number of people, but a lot of Berliners and a lot of members of like the new left in Germany are in West Germany are playing a role in institutionalizing pedophilic practices into child care a lot more than that 1%.
And so these people, they're doing it not because they themselves are attracted to children, but because they have bought into a specific kind of sexual liberation ideology that guys like Kintler are pushing.
A good example of this is the case of Commune 2, a commune formed in the summer of 1967 by four men and three women in an apartment in a street in Berlin.
I am not going to try and discriminate.
Yeah, it's Geisbrückstrasse.
Maybe I did that okay.
There's a little funny B at the end.
That's all I know.
Yeah.
So these four men and three women form this commune with two children, a three-year-old girl and a four-year-old boy.
In 1971, a leftist magazine called Kurzbook published a full spread article about Commune 2, and particularly its experimentation in child sexual liberation.
In an article for Der Spiegel, Jan Fleischauer wrote, For the residents, the cohabitation experiment was an attempt to overcome all bourgeoisie constraints, which included everything from separate bank accounts and closed bathroom doors to fidelity within couples and the development of feelings of shame.
The two children were raised by the group, which often meant no one paid much attention to them.
Because the adults had made it their goal not just to tolerate, but in fact, affirm child sexuality, they were not satisfied to simply act as passive observers.
Kurzbook 17, that's the issue of the magazine, contained a series of poster-sized photos.
Under the headline, Love Play in the Children's Room, it depicted Nessim and Grisha, both naked.
The oversized images are of the sort that one would expect to see in a magazine for pedophiles today, certainly not in an influential publication of the leftist intelligentsia.
The caption reads, Grisha walks over to the mirror, looks at her body, bends forward several times, encircling her buttocks with her hands, and says, Look, my vagina.
So, what you're seeing here, this is not the same thing that Kintler's doing.
It's certainly not as problematic as straight-up saying we are handing poor kids to pedophiles because who else will love them.
But this is also deeply problematic, right?
Now, Fleischauer caught up with a former member of the commune who talked to her about how these kids had done.
This former member told her that Nassim, the boy, felt horror when asked about his time at the commune.
But both he and Grisha seem to have grown up into functional adults.
Neither of them really expressed an interest in talking about their childhood, which is their right.
I get the feeling they have a lot of anger, but not in the same way as the kids who were placed with pedophiles, probably because while the behavior the adults in the commune engaged in was unacceptable, I don't think it involved actual sex, right?
Oh, okay.
It is enough on that edge, and there are some people who argued for it.
It may have, I can't say for certain, right?
This is a lot of these different experiments flirt at the edge of that.
And the word flirt is unfortunately literally, it's really, it's messy and it will never know fully with all of this stuff, right?
Commune 2, though, was not an isolated experiment.
It was a pilot project, an anti-authoritarian living that was seen as so successful.
It was followed by other private kindergartens.
We talked about how all of these, a lot of them are people, a lot of whom are like educators and academics, are forming these like private kindergartens, which are basically like communal kindergarteners for groups of leftists with kids to like have their little kids in, right?
Talking to Kids About Real Issues00:02:30
And these are experiments in anti-authoritarian education.
These are designed to break the kind of patterns that Dr. Schreber and Harrow and like the Nazis had put that we talked about in the first two episodes of this, right?
And there are people who've done this really well.
They just don't sleep with the children.
And by the way, not all of these kinderladons are places where children are slept with, right?
I don't think most of them were, but this is not a tiny chunk of them either.
Not even slept with, where kids, where child sexual liberation is a topic of like focus for the parents, right?
Okay.
That's more accurate to say what we're talking about here.
This is not a case of they're talking like I'm just going to get into the story because this is this is really messy and complicated and there's a lot to discuss.
This is an iHeart podcast.
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Hello, gorgeous.
It's Lala Kent, host of Untraditional Ila.
My days of filling up cups at sir may be over, but I'm still loving life in the valley.
Life on the other side of the hill is giving grown-up vibes, but over here on my podcast, Untraditionally Lala, I'm still that Lala you either love or love to hate.
Listen to Untraditionally Lala on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Today's Financial Literacy Month, we are talking about the one investment most people ignore, building a business around the life you actually want.
It was just us making happen whatever he said was going to happen and then it happened.
On those amigos, entrepreneurs like Amira Kassam and Joe Hoff get real about money, taking risk, and while your dream might be the smartest move.
At the end of my life, what am I really going to care about?
And the conclusion I came to is what I did to make the world a better place in whatever way.
Listen to those amigos on the iHeyRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
And here's Heather with the weather.
Well, it's beautiful out there, sunny and 75, almost a little chilly in the shade.
Now, let's get a read on the inside of your car.
It is hot.
You've only been parked a short time and it's already 99 degrees in there.
Let's not leave children in the back seat while running errands.
It only takes a few minutes for their body temperatures to rise, and that could be fatal.
Cars get hot fast and can be deadly.
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A message from Nitza and the ad council.
Parents Abusing Their Own Children00:15:08
So these centers called kinderladens were essentially less extreme than the commune.
They involved groups of parents collaborating and creating a learning space for groups of kids.
These were not all the same, but in many cases, weird ideas about sex ed were mixed with reasonable ideas for experimental child care, attempts to break the notably problematic authoritarian patterns in parenting that had been a part of the Nazi era, right?
That had helped feed into it.
Parents, one of the things that people would do is like parents would take kids to protests.
They would engage children with political education not seen in normal schools.
The idea was you should be able to talk with kids about real issues in the world the way you would with an adult, not necessarily hiding this stuff from them, right?
Yeah.
The downside of that is that there was also this idea that, well, if we're going to treat kids like adults in one way, right?
Right.
Yeah.
Alexander Schuller, an influential figure in the kinderladen movement, claims that sex ed was the topic most discussed when parents would debate as to how they should make structure these things.
From Der Spiegel, quote, In 1969, Schuller, a sociologist, was one of the founders of a kinderladen in Berlin's Wilmersdorf neighborhood.
Like Schuller, the other parents were academics, journalists, or university employees, a decidedly upper-middle-class lot.
Schuller's two sons, four and five years old at the time, grew up without the customary rules and punishments of a government-run daycare facility.
But the adults were soon divided over the issue of sex.
Some were determined to encourage their children to show and touch their genitalia, while the others were horrified by the idea.
It was never addressed quite that directly, but it was clear that in the end, sex with two female teachers was considered, says Schuller.
I found it incredibly difficult to take a stance.
I felt that what we were trying to do was fundamentally correct, but when it came to this issue, I thought, this is crazy.
This just isn't right.
But then I felt ashamed of thinking that way.
I think many were in the same position.
It's that justification for it on a core level.
Yeah.
The main thing is just don't do that, don't abuse people.
Yes.
And then, yeah, especially children.
It's when you start centering ideology before centering how you treat people that not just this, but all problems start, right?
Yeah.
And it takes a full year of debate.
But thankfully, in this case, the parents who are like, of course they shouldn't sleep with the teachers did win.
There was no sex in this kinderladen.
I get the feeling that in this case, the parents who were talking about, like, who were suggesting effectively, like sexually assaulted, like that they were ideologically cooked, right?
That they felt like this was the most radical thing they could do and that that would make them better leftists.
I say this because it doesn't sound like from Schuller's recollections the teachers wanted to molest these kids, right?
Or that the parent who suggested it wanted to watch or participate.
They just felt kind of vaguely that the experience would help craft more anti-authoritarian youth.
It is madness, right?
Yeah.
And you're right about how it's like, it's been injected by pedophiles into this movement.
And then everyone's like, fuck, do we have to become pedophiles?
And then people are like, no, no, of course we don't.
And thankfully in Schuler's case, the people are like, no, of course not.
Do win, right?
Yeah.
And again, somewhere in the sheet, in that scene, in the broader kinderladen scene, there are real pedophiles consciously trying to craft a world where they can act with impunity.
An influential educational tool at the time was the Handbook for Positive Child Indoctrination, which is a bad title for a book.
This is a 1968 tract that claimed to help parents, quote, create a new person and argued children can learn to appreciate eroticism and sexual intercourse long before they are capable of understanding how a child is conceived.
It is valuable for children to cuddle with adults.
It is no less valuable for sexual intercourse to occur during cuddling.
And this is part of why I grounded these episodes by talking about how there was for generations this attitude that like, you do not make any contact with your children other than what is the minimal necessary to maintain their surviving, right?
And the reaction to that goes in an equally insane direction, right?
Like it's not just, well, of course, parents should like hold their kids and express physical affection, but like it's fine if sex occurs, right?
They, it's this, it's this rubber band effect.
If when you, when you go in that insane a direction, it's like you should lock children alone in a room for the first day of their life and never so much as like hug them.
When you break that, you're going to wind up in an equally damaging place.
And it just, one of the million reasons is so heartbreaking is that it's like, it destroys the safety.
Yeah.
The whole point of that affection from a parent.
Sorry, I mean, I'm trying to get super emotional about it.
The whole point of that emotion from the parent should be a non-sexual safety.
Yeah.
You know, and like showing what care and love are divorced, like separate and safe from that kind of it's so I know everyone listening knows it's evil, but it's just it's this vile conflation of like children should have adults with whom they have a safe kind of intimacy that allows them to explore the world.
And then twisting that into children should be exploring their bodies with adults, which they should not be.
Right.
Right.
Like it's this conflation.
No, no, no.
Children need to have like a healthy, intimate relationship with their parents or with the adults who are their caregivers, because that is how you have the security that allows you to go out into the world and meet it.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And obviously, I think there's no way that handbook wasn't written by a pedophile trying to provide cover for himself and others like him.
But a lot of these very dumb parents did not catch that.
And worse, awkwardly tried to live up to this supposedly revolutionary standard.
Some leftist thinkers, like Monica Seifert, a sociologist, were disturbed when the children in her kinderladen did not attempt to have sex with the adults.
She concluded the inhibitions and insecurities of the adults had likely forced those children to suppress their sexual curiosity.
She saw this as a failure.
And what's happening here is that you have in a lot of these kids.
This is why I say most of these people are not pedophiles who have bought into this cooked shit, because like you have these attitudes that like, well, these kids should feel confident sexually experimenting with adults.
And it doesn't happen because that's not natural, right?
Because the adults don't want it and neither do the kids.
And the most cooked of these intellectuals, like Seifert, are like, well, clearly we have failed.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
I am looking at the equation that someone wrote and it's not happening in real life.
Therefore, real life is wrong.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Like, this is not, it's not naturally, this is not a thing that happens between adults and children.
It is a thing that has to be forced, which is proven, in fact, by this reaction, by how disappointed a lot of these, these, these academics and intellectuals are.
Unfortunately, some of the parents were equally disappointed and took steps to stimulate their children.
Again, these are still most, these are not mostly pedophiles to this behavior.
They're not like actually abusing the kids physically, but instead they tell a lot of weird sex jokes and they make a point to use words like cock and vagina constantly in front of kids.
Schuller, who is like, this is kind of how Schuller's kinderladen, they were like, well, we won't have children molest students, but instead we'll use sexual terminology around them a lot and tell weird jokes that make them uncomfortable.
Schuller, looking back on this decades later, claims his kids like overall thought that kinderladen was a good experience, but quote, they thought the constant chatter about sex was horrible because that's a normal way for children to feel about adults talking about that this way.
Right.
No, and actually, and pointing out that everything else, like, it was injected into this otherwise really interesting and radical idea that was otherwise good with this.
There's a clear problem in pedagogy in our society.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it is interesting that like, yeah, the kids were like, well, the stuff about like, you know, going to protests, learning about politics, having kind of like non-authoritarian learning structure was great.
I wish there hadn't been so many weird dick jokes.
That was kind of bad.
And I think Schuller's, the experience of Schuller's kids does thankfully represent a majority of the kids exposed to this system, which is more, what the fuck were our parents thinking than like devastating trauma, right?
That is the norm.
It's like, boy, that was weird.
They were fucking cooked.
Something was fucked up in their heads.
Like, because most of these kids were not molested, right?
But between Schuller's kids and Ulrich, who was the boy who Kintler gave to a pedophile, there were a lot of children who still did suffer different degrees of abuse, right?
Not as severe as like a kid being fostered with a child molester, but on that spectrum, right?
Sophie Dannenberg was one of these children.
Her parents were members of the German Communist Party, and they sent her to a kinderladen in Gießen.
As an adult, she interviewed her mother and other people from the kinderladen and wrote about their experiences in a novel with the excellent title, The Pale Heart of the Revolution.
Fleischauer writes of this book, The material she used includes an account of a parent's evening where one of the mothers said that she stripped naked in front of her son so that he could inspect her.
In the process, the woman spread her legs to expose her private parts for his inspection.
The game ended when the boy stuck a pencil into his mother's vagina.
The parents also spent a long time discussing whether it was a good idea to have sex with their own children so as to demonstrate the naturalness of sexual intercourse.
Although the people Dannenberg interviewed did not recall any instances of physical advances, they did describe softer forms of sexual assault, such as pushy demands on children to show their naked bodies.
In the novel, which is based on Dannenberg's research, the eight-year-old character Simone is told to strip in front of several adults and other children.
Why do you want to hide yourself?
The mother says, to the amusement of people standing around when the child instinctively holds a pillow in front of her genitalia.
It's a beautiful thing you have there.
Show it to us.
And yeah, abuse is the closest apt term to describe this.
Totally.
It doesn't quite describe how weird it is, right?
But it's accurate enough.
One author who studied this period cited in Der Spiegel states that objectively speaking, this behavior was child abuse, but writes kind of confusingly, subjectively it wasn't.
And that's a weird statement.
One I don't really fully, one I don't really agree with, but I want to continue Fleischauer's quote describing it, right?
Okay.
As outlandish as it seems in retrospect, the parents apparently had the welfare of the children in mind, not their own.
For the adherence to the new movement, the child did not serve as a sex object to provide the adults with a means of satisfying their sexual urges.
This differentiates politically motivated abuse from pedophilia.
And that's an interesting concept: politically motivated child abuse, right?
It's also not as much behind closed doors.
Right.
And so we actually probably weirdly know more about it than like the Catholic Church sex abuse or the Mother Winter.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Which makes me angry because that's a good name for a weird old, you know, mother.
Yeah, it's very a lot of this.
Unfortunately, it's interesting to me kind of making that distinction that, like, well, because what you get with a lot of this is these parents who are abusing their kids don't like what they're doing, are personally uncomfortable with it, and feel bad that they don't feel better about doing it.
Yeah, because, and they, they're like, oh, it's because I'm bourgeois, but the next generation will be true.
They'll leave over this.
Yeah.
Fuck, cooked is the right word for cooked is the right.
Well, this is where this is a problem you get all over the fucking map when it comes to radical politics.
The Nazis were obviously trying to create a new kind of man, right?
They write about that constantly.
There was also this concept of the new Soviet man, right?
Yeah.
And there's often left and right in radical politics this idea that like in order to make the world that is possible the better world that's possible, we have to remake people.
And I kind of think you're always doomed and wrong if that's your goal, because people don't need to be remade.
You have to meet people where they are and make their lives and thus the world better.
And if you, if your goal is to like change what people, if you think that's what you're doing, there's so much evil that will be justified as part of that process, no matter how good your goals are, right?
Because it's a bad thing to want to do.
I know.
And it's like, it's still important to improve pedagogy.
It's still important to raise kids less authoritarianly and so that they're more inoculated against horrors.
But like, but yeah, not to it's like the guy who puts the wheat into the cold to be like, it'll become cold tolerant if we freeze all the seeds.
And it's, it's the difference between saying, wow, for generations, parents wouldn't even hug their kids and we wound up as Nazis.
We should probably like, we were abusing our kids for generations and we should find ways to raise them that are less abusive.
And instead, it's they may, we need to remake our children so that they can almost so that they can like remedy the sins of the past.
It's which are two different things.
Saying that like we should not abuse kids the way that we were is different from saying we need to make different people, right?
We need to be producing different kinds of people.
Like, no, that's actually really interesting because it's like, we're always, oh, Gen Z is going to save us.
And now it's already like, oh, Gen A, is that what's going on?
Finally, Gen Alpha.
Yeah, the Alphas have got it.
Charlotte Alpha.
You know, generation.
And it's a little bit like, let's get ourselves off the hook.
Yeah.
Like, I objectively have fewer years left ahead of me, probably, but then, you know, so like, maybe it's more on me than it is on the fucking youth.
Yeah.
You know?
Yeah.
And maybe it's on people to figure out how to make the world better and that that's a better place to start than making people better.
Yes.
Right.
Because if your goal is to make people better, you're usually going to do something terrible.
You're usually going to do something terrible.
If your goal is to make people better rather than help people, right?
That's the distinction.
I want to help people.
I want to make people better.
One of those is fine.
The other leads to this shit, you know?
So anyway.
When I think of politically motivated child abuse, I do think back to that book, To Train Up a Child.
And I wonder if it's a good idea.
No, which is that like, it's that.
Political Child Abuse Lens00:11:36
Yeah, when I think of politically motivated child abuse, I think of the Washington State Highway Patrol.
No, not quite yet.
But it is, I've always considered that book to train up a child, which is like, if you look to the Duggers, you know, the IBLP, these like hard right-wing Christian organizations, it's their textbook for how to beat your children to make them better.
Okay.
I do kind of wonder.
I always just saw that as simple child abuse.
Is it more accurate to describe that as politically motivated child abuse?
I don't know.
It's a bigger topic.
Oh, yeah.
Like, cause maybe they don't even because hitting your kid because you're angry or even hitting your kid because, oh, crap, my kid is about to run out into the street and I can't think of anything else to do.
This is all my only tool I have in my head.
Yeah.
Right.
So those are both motivated by something different.
But yeah, no, versus like, I am neglectful of my duty as a father unless I solemnly and sadly hit my child with a rod.
Oh, that's interesting.
And I know kids who were like Quiverfool who were raped in the religious right who is like, yeah, that's part of what broke us out is my parents didn't like doing that, didn't like the discipline.
And so I do think it's actually useful to look at a lot of the child abuse that does occur on the right through that.
This is politically motivated child abuse lens, right?
I actually think that might be really important.
It didn't really occur to me until I started reading about these weird German leftists and their ideas of like sex liberation.
But anyway, one of the most famous abusers within this system, this like kinderladin system, this sort of like shit that's coming out of the German left in this period was Daniel Cohn Bindit, a Green Party politician who was a student leader during a May of 1968 protest in France and was co-president of the European Greens European Free Alliance in the EU Parliament.
He was a critic of Stalinism and an advocate of libertarian socialism.
And part of why I'm bringing him up is we've talked about the communists who are cooked and it is not just the communists who are cooked.
I was so excited for it to just be the communists, but I wasn't surprised.
Plenty of anarchists have this kind of like fucking ideological cookedness to them.
In 1975, Daniel wrote an autobiographical book that described his experience as a kinderladin teacher.
On several occasions, he claimed children opened his fly and stroked his penis.
Quote, I was usually quite taken aback.
My reactions varied depending on the circumstances.
Now, I was not sure whether to classify him as, is this a politically motivated abuser or just a pedophile until I read this transcript of a recording that surfaced in 2013.
And this is Daniel talking.
At nine in the morning, I join my eight little toddlers between the ages of 16 months and two years.
I wash their butts.
I tickle them.
They tickle me And we cuddle.
You know, a child's sexuality is a fantastic thing.
You have to be honest and sincere.
With the very young kids, it isn't the same as it is with the four to six-year-old kids.
When a little five-year-old girl starts undressing, it's great because it's a game.
It's an incredibly erotic game.
Oh, my favorite.
That's a pedophile.
That's a pedophile.
That's just a pedophile.
Yeah, that's just a straight-up pedophile, right?
Yeah.
When this blew up, Daniel claimed that what he had been writing was just fiction meant to provoke people.
Okay.
Sure.
Okay.
This is all tied into like why the part of why it's not, I'm not going to say it's a major part, but it's not an insignificant part of like the rise of groups like AFD in Germany right now, because a lot of this shit came out very recently and has like blown up support for some of these left-wing parties.
Like this has done damage recently and provided ammunition to the right in Germany.
Recently.
Fair.
Because people are furious when they learned out that this was happening, right?
Yeah, it's fair.
Yeah.
Pedophiles who abuse children are predators, and predators inherently seek to escalate their behavior.
As the 70s turned into the 80s, some of these pedophiles who had been camouflaging themselves as child care reform activists decided to make a grand play for acceptance.
Following in the wake of the gay rights movements, organizations like the Indian Commune in Nuremberg sought to characterize pedophilia as a sexual orientation that deserved to be treated with respect.
Now, in true German fashion, the Indian Commune was both an act of cultural appropriation and mind-numbing abuse.
Germans, we've talked about this in our very first episodes on Carl May.
There's this weird obsession with Native Americans that is based entirely in almost entirely in the fiction of a guy who never went to America and just lied about Native Americans.
Yeah.
And it influenced the Nazis loved.
Like Hitler was a huge, like, like, was this kind of weird Native American stand where he was not actually standing any real history, just like what this German author, but he thought he was.
And there's still a lot of weirdness around Native Americans in German society today.
This is one example of it, right?
The Indian Commune is a group of adults and children who painted each other up like Native Americans or like their conception of Native Americans and showed up at that year's Green Party convention to argue in favor of free sex for adults and children.
Almost unbelievably, the Greens gave them a hearing.
More than that, in 1985, the Green State Organization in Westphalia argued that nonviolent sexual contact between adults and children should be decriminalized.
Another state Green Party published a position paper making the same argument until public protest forced them to remove it.
Again, we're in the 80s by now, so there's pushback to this.
This movement had a name, the pedosexual movement, and it succeeded for a while because a lot of non-pedophiles bought their bullshit.
But the driving force behind it was always highly placed, influential pederists.
In the Green Party, one of these pedophiles was Hermann Meir, a leader in the party who lived on a commune that openly advertised engaging in pedophilia.
One victim later told the magazine Dievelt that Meir abused him along with quote about 10 men, many of whom were visitors to the commune who seemed to have shown up for that purpose, right?
This is a place you can like, yeah, it's so vile.
Another pedophile leader of the pedosexual movement was Peter Schultz, an anarchist journalist who described himself as a pederist and was convicted of bringing a girl into his house to abuse in 1976.
Schultz denied the allegations and claimed that he was being punished for his sexuality and political organizing.
He attracted a great deal of support, and in 1977, he wrote an angry pamphlet attacking anarchists who hadn't supported him.
He described them as preaching anarchy while being offended at the sight of lived anarchy, in his words.
I am glad that there were enough anarchists who were mad at him that he had to write that.
That he had to write it.
That's the only thing I'm proud of at any of this story is that people were like, what the fuck?
It is.
It's one of those things where like Schultz denied the allegations that he had molested a girl in part because he was molesting boys.
And maybe those specific allegations were wrong.
But he talked because I was molesting boys.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like Kintler, Schultz defended his molestation of boys by claiming he was just helping runaways.
And here is what gay historian Hubert Kennedy wrote in Schultz's obituary.
Peter found and took home the homeless, or they found him.
In state institutions, his address was passed from one boy to another as a place where runaways could find temporary shelter.
His address was also well known to the authorities, whose authority the anarchist Peter refused to recognize.
And he was sent to prison numerous times on charges of drug possession and seducing minors.
A number of left-wing publications were unfortunately, woefully open to the arguments of pedosexual advocates.
Tagiseitung, an alt-weekly publication, published interviews with pedophiles where they discussed how wonderful their sex with little boys was.
When Jee De Hinsel, co-founder of the paper, argued that they should not be promoting pedophilia, she was described as being a prude and told, quote, there's no such thing as censorship in the Tagzeitung.
Like basically, we don't censor people from talking about molesting children.
This is a problem in American Left 2.
I'm not sure if you're going to get into this during the same time period, you know?
We're not enough.
Again, when we talked about Thornley, we did.
And we've talked on other shows about an influential anarchist.
Oh, God, what's his fucking name?
The Taz guy.
Peter Lamborn Wilson.
Peter Lamborn Wilson, Hakeem Bey, who was also may not have actually molested.
I don't know if he ever actually molested anyone, but argued in favor of it.
Yeah, I'm under the impression of him arguing in favor because it was, yeah, it was in vogue.
And it's interesting because it's during this like dead period of organizing.
I mean, there is some organizing happening, but like by and large, the anti-authoritarian left is like not doing a lot during the 70s and 80s because, well, it just was going through a slump, you know?
Yeah.
And so the only people around, I mean, they're not the only people around.
There are many people who were against this all along.
Yes.
And we're about to talk about those.
Great.
So there are leftists in Germany who speak out against this real big problem.
One of them is Gunter Ament, a social scientist who argued accurately, there is no equitable sexuality between children and adults.
Another person and adults.
It's inherently violent for an adult to rape a kid, right?
Alice Schwarzer, who founded a women's magazine, also lambasted acceptance of pedophilia on the left from Der Spiegel.
Quote, Amint recalls how he was disparaged as a reactionary in flyers and articles.
There was an outright campaign against Alice and me at the time, he says.
It wasn't until the mid-1990s that this horrific episode came to an end.
In 1994, the Pedo's appearing in Tagzeitung for the last time, and even that publication recognized that intercourse with little boys was no different than with little girls, who, thanks to the women's movement, have long been deemed worthy of protection.
And that's a worthwhile note on this, is that when we talk about these people supporting sexual contact with kids from adults, a lot of them, there's the, in the kinderlotten movement, it's this broader, like, well, we just need to be more open to kids' sexuality for both boys and girls.
When it comes to like pairing abused children with pedophiles, you know, both officially through the state, as happened with Kintler, and kind of unofficially like that anarchist we talked about did.
It's all little boys because there's a broader understanding that you like the feminist movement has already pushed through this understanding that that's not acceptable to do with little girls.
That it took later for boys, right?
And some of this is wrapped up in a lot of really complicated shit about the suppression of male homosexuals in Germany and throughout the West and how common relationships between much older and much younger men, you know, were.
Like this is a messy, messy topic, right?
Yeah.
But it is kind of worth noting that like part of what brings this to an end is when folks start arguing that like we already agree it is wrong to molest little girls.
Why are we treating boys differently, right?
It does come out of this like feminist movement, a lot of the backlash to this that finally succeeds in bringing an end to it.
Could you imagine that that's like you're a feminist during this time and that's what you have to waste?
Yeah.
Do I really have to argue this?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's, oh boy.
Speaking of arguing, Margaret, you know what I love to argue in favor of?
Commercial enterprise through that's right.
That's right.
In this case, it's a welcome relief from talking about leftist German politics.
Feminist Backlash Ends It00:02:30
I'm Iris Palmer and my new podcast is called Against All Odds.
And that's exactly what the show is about.
Doing whatever it takes to beat the odds.
Get ready to hear from some of your favorite entrepreneurs and entertainers as they share stories about defying expectations, overcoming barriers, and breaking generational patterns.
I'm talking to people like award-winning actress, producer, and director, Fiva Longoria.
I think I had like $200 in my savings account and my mom goes, what are you going to do?
And I was like, I'll figure it out.
We had a one-bedroom apartment for like $400 a month and we all could not afford.
Like, I was like, how am I going to make $100 a month?
I'm opening up like I've never before.
For those of you who think you know me from what you've seen on social media, get ready to see a whole new side of me.
Listen to Against All Odds with Iris Palmer as part of the Michael Tura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
If a baby is giggling in the back seat, they're probably happy.
If a baby is crying in the back seat, they're probably hungry.
But if a baby is sleeping in the back seat, will you remember they're even there?
When you're distracted, stressed, or not usually the one who drives them, the chances of forgetting them in the back seat are much higher.
It can happen to anyone.
Parked cars get hot fast and can be deadly.
So get in the habit of checking the back seat when you leave.
A message from NHTSA and the ad council.
If you are a founder or a freelancer or the friend who always says, hey, you know what?
What if I started that?
This is for you.
I'm telling you, I had nothing to my name.
I didn't know a single person in New York.
And somehow I'm dressed by Oscar DeLorenda walking down that red carpet.
This month, we sit down with entrepreneurs and creators who actually did it, who turned this scary leap into a business, a paycheck, and a life they are proud of.
Direct center of our happiness or our regrets is whether or not we're taking action on the things that matter to us.
They're not selfish.
They're so important.
They actually lead to our greatest contributions because when we're living fulfilled, we actually show up better everywhere.
We lead better.
We're better friends.
We're better relationships and collaborators and all those things because we have passion about the things we're doing.
If you're trying to build something of your own this year, join us in these conversations that will make you braver and smarter with your money.
Listen to Dos Amingos as part of the Michael Tura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
And we're back.
Caregivers Covering Up Abuse00:14:42
And speaking of back, let's get back to the story of Dr. Helmut Kintler and his plan to pair foster kids with pedophiles.
This continued all through the 1980s, even after the pedo-sexual movement faded in popularity thanks to belated resistance from within the left.
The best documented victim of Kintler's specific program was a boy named Marco.
In 1988, Marco was crossing the street alone when he was hit by a car.
This was a minor incident.
He was not severely injured, thankfully, but his injury, the fact that he was not attended, right, drew the attention of a local youth welfare office, which was also run by the Berlin government.
From the New Yorker, quote, Caseworkers at the office observed that Marco's mother seemed unable to give him the necessary emotional attention.
She worked at a sausage stand and was struggling to manage parenthood on her own.
Marco's father, a Palestinian refugee, had divorced her.
She sent Marco and his older brother to daycare in dirty clothes and left them there for 11 hours.
Caseworkers recommended that Marco be placed in a foster home with a family-like atmosphere.
One described him as an attractive boy who was wild but very easy to influence.
Hinkle, a 47-year-old single man who supplemented his income as a foster father by repairing jukeboxes and other electronics.
Marco was Hinkle's eighth foster son in 16 years.
When Hinkle began fostering children in 1973, a teacher noted that he was always looking for contact with boys, Hinkle specifically.
Now, again, this is part of, this is a result of the program that Kintler has instituted.
Kintler is in contact with Hinkel.
Marco has two parents.
Both of them are in his life.
They're separated, but his dad, the Palestinian refugee, is in his life and so is his mom.
They are both just poor.
And so as a result, they're scrambling to make enough money to get by, which means they are, there are times when this kid is not watched as much as would be ideal, right?
The state takes him away from them for that, probably in part because there's a lot of writing about how like once they see his dad, they're like, well, we have to keep him away from this dangerous Muslim, right?
Like this authoritarian influence, right?
It's really, really fucked up.
So people in the Senate and educational offices within the Berlin city government were well aware that Hinkle was a pedophile adopting boys, eight boys, by the time he fosters Marco, right?
They don't stop any of this.
Again, this is when I talk about guys like Kintler being like, well, some kids are in such desperate straits that being with a pedophile is best for them.
This is what they mean.
Well, this kid's mom and dad are separated and they're not people like us.
Yeah, we're not war.
So it must be better for him to be raped repeatedly, right?
That is, that is the calculation they're making.
Yeah.
In 1989, a caseworker wrote that Hinkle was in a, quote, homosexual relationship with one of his foster sons, possibly Marco.
A prosecutor, and again, this is not a relationship.
I'm not calling it.
That is what the caseworker calls it in 1989.
A prosecutor did call for an investigation, but Helmut Kintler, who described himself as Henkel's permanent advisor and also called Hinkle regularly to talk politics, intervened.
Kintler described himself to this prosecutor as the, quote, nation's chief authority on questions of sexual education.
And at this point, he was famous.
He is regularly interviewed in the news.
He is consulted by political leaders.
He is a prominent and respected academic.
He sends a letter on university letterhead to this prosecutor issuing an expert opinion on Henkel, saying, I've gotten to know this guy well through a research project we're both engaged in.
Hinkle is a wonderful parent, and he attacks the wild interpretations of this psychologist who had accused him of pederasty.
The threats of an investigation went away.
Fuck.
Several times a year, Hinkle would drive to see Kintler at the school where he taught.
Kintler would study the children and take notes.
He was happy enough with Hinkle that he kept a ready stream of boys heading into the pedophile's home.
After Marco had been there 18 months, he was joined by a kid named Sven, who had been found at age seven begging for money in a subway station.
The youth welfare office noted that since he'd likely never experienced a positive parent-child relationship, he was a good candidate for Kintler's program.
Because he's not going to get one now.
So the solutions to all both of these kids problems, to the extent that Marco had a problem, the solution was, well, yeah, there should have been some sort of social welfare net to ensure that his mom didn't have to work these long shifts at the sausage factory so that she had more time for her kids.
There should be like state-funded daycare and stuff, you know?
Yeah.
There should be programs.
The same thing with the, oh, there's a homeless kid begging for money.
You know what we should do?
Get him off the street and not into a pedophile's house, right?
Like these are not complex problems.
We're not talking about like intractable issues of geopolitics.
Anyway, I'm going to quote again from the New Yorker.
The two boys took on different roles in their new family.
Sven was the good son, docile and loving.
Marco was more defiant, but at night, when Henkel came into his room asking to cuddle or waiting for him while he brushed his teeth before bed, he had to comply.
I just accepted it out of loyalty because I didn't know anything else, Marco told me.
I didn't think what was happening was good, but I thought it was normal.
I thought of it a little bit like food.
People have different tastes in food, the way some people have different tastes in sexuality.
If Sven's bedroom door was open and he wasn't there, Marco knew what was happening, but the two boys never talked about what Henkel did to them.
It was an absolutely taboo subject, Marco said.
One day, Marco took a knife from the kitchen and slept with it under his pillow.
When Hinkle approached his bed and discovered the blade, he withdrew quickly and he called Helmut Kintler, and he then handed the phone to Marco.
Kintler asked him why he had brought the knife into his bed, and Marco said, There's a devil behind my wall.
Kintler had a calming, grandfatherly presence.
He assured Marco that there was no such thing as devils, and Marco agreed to surrender the knife.
Never give up your knife, kids.
Never ever give up your fucking knife.
Well, it's interesting because it compares to how we talked about demons in our head last week's episodes.
You know, like there's ways that people are going to conceptualize the abuse that they're suffering.
It's something almost so awful, you have to turn it into a metaphor because you exactly even like you can't even look at it directly, even though it's happening to you.
Yeah.
I got really excited for where that story could have gone.
I know, I know.
I, God, it's heartbreaking.
I, yeah, it would be great if this ended with a pedophile being stabbed to death, but it does not.
I know.
And then it's like, and also like most of the time, it's like, then you're like, you want that kid to have done that?
And then you're like, his life isn't going to get better.
This is maybe one.
Bad stuff.
I will say, this is a happy ending.
This is a legit.
Marco's story has a legitimately wonderful ending.
So that is good.
I want to promise you that now because we have some more bad stuff to get through.
Yeah.
Okay.
So Marco still has a family.
He has a mother and father.
They visit sometimes.
Again, they're separated, but like they visit both separately and together and they try to get him back.
But Henkel has all the power.
He would cancel visits at will minutes before they were set to begin, or he would end them early, often claiming that Marco's mother was disruptive to Marco's emotional state.
The stress and drama Henkel created around these visits caused Marco to wet his bed and fail to focus at school.
And Kintler used this as an excuse to end the visits entirely, telling the welfare office that Marco's educational successes are ruined by seeing his mom.
Marco's Palestinian father was not allowed to visit at all because Henkel told authorities that Marco said he'd been beaten by his father.
We have no, I think Marco has said that this was not true, but like he's he is backing up anything Hinkle says because Hinkle is his caregiver.
And as he states, I didn't know I could disagree with him about stuff, right?
Now, there are times that authorities saw through these lies.
One of the mandated child therapists that Marco saw described Henkel as holding the boy prisoner during their sessions.
Several different mandated therapists complained, but anytime stuff started to move in a way where, like, maybe the kids would be taken away from Henkel, Kintler would swoop in.
He told the youth welfare office they were not qualified to assess a child who was as damaged as Marco.
If an assessment was needed, only Kintler was established enough to do it.
Yeah.
The cops were not.
And he didn't assess themselves.
Right, right, exactly.
He acknowledged that Hinkle could appear harsh and hurtful, but this was not so.
Quote, I ask you to consider that a man who deals with such seriously damaged children is not a simple person.
What Mr. Hinkle needs from the authorities is trust and protection.
It is the cop argument.
What they're dealing with is so dangerous and vile that they have to use extreme measures.
And we can't, we're not qualified to question them, right?
It is anytime you hear that logic, it means someone is doing something terrible.
Yeah.
Marco's parents spent years trying to get him back.
This is not something he realizes as an adult.
Oh my God, I was not abandoned.
My parents fought for me.
These two poor people, one of whom is a Palestinian refugee, were basically ranged against the entire power of the city government of Berlin, which was being effectively wielded by this weird pedophile philosopher against them.
You know?
There is a court case.
Henkel coaches Marco to tell the judge that he wanted to stay with his foster father, who he called Papa.
Marco claims, I didn't really know what was going on.
I did not understand that my parents were fighting to have a connection to me.
I thought that they had basically abandoned me and I was scared of angering Henkel and also traumatized from the near-nightly abuse, right?
Yeah.
There was one bright spot in his childhood, which is that, and it's a weird one, it's that his, this, again, pedophile, who is fostering him, gets a third foster son.
This foster son is a disabled little boy named Marcel.
Now, the fact that Henkel, the pedophile, sought to take possession of a boy who could not walk or talk is horrifying in ways that I cannot describe and will not labor on.
But Marco and Sven came to love Marcel and treat him as their own blood.
They took care of this boy because he was their brother.
From The New Yorker, Marco and Sven became Kramer's caretakers, feeding him strawberry-flavored milk with a spoon and removing mucus from his lungs with a suction hose.
When they went to Hinkle's house in Brandenburg, west of Berlin, Marco pushed Kramer for hours in a tire swing.
Kramer was the first person in years for whom Marco had felt love.
Now, yeah, like the fact that these both of these kids being so profoundly abandoned and abused, when they see this disabled boy who is in desperate need of not just medical care, but attention, provide it, is a wonderful bit of light in this.
Right?
Yeah.
Marco struggles with school, obviously.
And part of this is because Hinkle is encouraging him to neglect his studies and misbehave, right?
Because the worse Marco does in school, the more they have an excuse.
They switch schools every year, which means that no adults get to spend enough time around Marco to realize what is going on.
Hinkle is a very effective and methodical abuser, and that's what's going on here.
His tactics work until Marco goes through puberty and starts lifting weights.
One night when Henkel came to molest him, Marco fought back, not even a lot, but that spelled the end of him being molested forever.
Hinkle, of course, still responds aggressively to this in his own way.
He would lock the kitchen at night.
He justified it to Kintler by claiming that Marco was greedy.
You know, he would fight back, but he did not keep molesting Marco.
Right, because he was afraid of him.
Because he was afraid of him now.
Now, here's where things get complicated.
When Marco turns 18, you might expect him to have gotten the hell out of the house, but he doesn't.
He lives with Henkel for three more years.
He says part of this is that he didn't even consider leaving to be possible.
Quote, it's very hard to describe, but I was never raised to think critically about anything.
I had an empty mind.
Those are his words.
He says this, but there is a very clear reason he stayed with Henkel, which is that his beloved adopted brother is living there too.
Marcel is there.
Marco willingly stays in the house of his abuser for three years so that he can continue to be a caregiver to his brother.
This only ends when Marcel dies after a 48-hour flu.
Marco says he always checked on his brother multiple times throughout the night to make sure he was breathing.
So he noticed very quickly that something was wrong.
He tried to get Henkel to call for an ambulance, but Henkel did not want any of the boys going to doctors.
And so Marcel died while Marco watched.
Quote, I was looking into his eyes when he died.
Now, this does not prompt an investigation into Henkel.
Marcel was an abandoned, disabled child and was thus of less than no value to the youth welfare office.
His file simply noted, call from Mr. Henkel, who said Marcel died unexpectedly last night.
Previously, there were no signs of an infection.
The following note says that Henkel, now 60, wanted to adopt another boy.
So, talking about how long this goes, Marcel dies in 2001.
Kintler's program experiment is still going into the 21st century.
Yeah, 2001 felt very...
Yep.
Yeah.
That's too recent.
Kintler is a respected figure at this moment.
This only starts to change when an academic Teresa Nintwig began researching and writing about Kintler for her thesis.
She had struggled to find good information on this pedophile foster program and noticed that most of the files were missing from the city archives because they had been deliberately removed.
Kintler died in 2008, but even after that point, he had loyal friends still in government and academia, and they fought back against her attempts to expose him.
Eventually, her university contract was canceled, and she blames this on the fact that she chose to research Kintler.
She eventually wrote a book on the man, which revealed that he was not just some wild-eyed academic who bought into bogus science.
He was also a pedophile.
Kintler, a single man, adopted three sons and fostered several more children.
Two of his foster sons have accused him of sexual abuse.
They initially went to Karen Deserat, an author and researcher who, quote, owed a lot to Kintler and thus referred the boys to another therapist rather than do anything when they came out to her.
Kintler's Collapsed Reputation00:08:41
She claims the boys themselves wanted the abuse kept quiet because they, quote, didn't want to lose the positives of Kintler's care, that they had enough to eat and that they were taken care of and things like that.
I'm going to read another quote from that New Yorker article about kind of the collapse of Kintler's reputation.
Gunter Schmidt, a former president of the International Academy of Sex Research, which attracts the field's leading researchers, was friends with Kintler for more than 20 years.
I honestly had respect for it, he told Nintwig of the experiment, because I thought, these are really young people who are in the worst situation.
They probably have a long history at home.
They had miserable childhoods and someone is looking after them.
And if Kintler is there, it'll be fine, he added.
And the Berlin Senate is also there.
When Kintler was 57, he wrote Schmidt a letter explaining why he was aging happily rather than becoming lonely and resigned.
He and his 26-year-old son were, quote, part of a very fulfilling love story that had lasted 13 years and still felt fresh.
To understand his state of mind, Kintler wrote, his friends should know his secret.
Kintler seems to have reappraised his belief that pedophiles were good caregivers to abandoned children in 1991 after that adopted son that he had bragged about having a good relationship with committed suicide.
Now, it's unclear to me if Kintler, and this is still a bit of a mystery to me, is he was he how much of this was like he's in this ideological space and how much of this is he was always a pedophile?
Don't know with Kintler.
Because he claims, he claims to have recognized that there was like, he had made errors in his beliefs around this stuff after his adopted son commit and abuse victim commits suicide.
He would later claim that during the 90s, he reads this essay by a Hungarian psychoanalyst, Sandor Farinsky, that changed his mind on pedophilia.
Farinsky wrote that sexual relationships between adults and children were always exploitative and dangerous for children.
After his son's suicide, Kintler cited this paper often, but never admitted to molesting his own adopted children.
He simply said that his child had been molested by his birth mother and committed suicide due to that.
And, you know, he's just avoiding responsibility.
That's how I interpret this.
Yeah.
And there's definitely a period after which he claims to have recognized that, you know, this was wrong, that he's still in contact with Henkel, right?
And still actively helping him to continue to abuse kids.
So I don't buy Kintler's story here.
No, this is not enough of a turn and around to any kind of redemption arc, you know?
No.
The happiest ending I can give you is to continue the story of Marco.
When he left Henkel's home at age 21, he had nothing and nowhere to live.
He spent nights homeless, sleeping on benches before a charity for homeless youth found him a subsidized apartment.
Henkel had done so little to educate him that Marco didn't know that people had to pay for electricity.
He stumbled through life for a while, picking up the basics of survival, but stuck in what he describes as a sort of hibernation.
After five years, he began to feel as if he were a monster due to his lack of empathy and destructive outbursts.
This culminated in a fight on a Berlin train when he noticed three men staring at him and just beat the shit out of them, sending one man to the ER.
Marko was horrified by himself.
And the way he interprets this is like, I am turning into Henkel who abused me.
And he made a commitment to change.
Not long after this, he was walking down the street when a woman, a photographer, complimented his appearance and asked, Do you want to do any modeling for me?
Right?
So he sat for some photos with her.
And this didn't lead to any like modeling work, but he becomes friends with this woman and he starts to meet other people through her and he gets a friend group, right?
He describes the experience of learning how to have friends as similar to learning a foreign language through immersion in another culture, right?
Yeah.
Eventually, Marco met a woman.
They got married, had children, and today he is a devoted father and family man.
His very life is proof that Kintler and the other experts in the child psychology of the era were wrong.
Abused children are not condemned to a life where the only people who might care for them are pedophiles, right?
People can recover from the most traumatic things imaginable if they are provided with the support and love necessary to enable healing.
And thankfully, Marco was.
He makes friends.
He develops relationships that are equal relationships with other adults.
And he heals himself, right?
Becomes a father.
And like, it's the best possible ending that this guy has.
And there's even this coda, he gets when all of this stuff starts to come out, like around 2018, Marco is contacted by a guy who works for Alternative for Deutschland, Germany's far-right party, as an advisor for education and cultural policy.
And this guy, Schweer, reads about Marco in a Der Spiegel article in 2018 about Kintler's experiment.
And he's like, you know, he starts basically offering help from the AFD.
He claimed it's not for political purposes, but like to really help him get justice from the parliament, right?
To like get some money out of them.
So that he could be a poster boy for the far right.
And that is what happened for a while, right?
The AFD holds stop Kintler's sex ed rallies to protest the way that sexuality is taught in German schools.
They argue that Kintler's criminal pedophile spirit lives on unbroken in today's sexual education.
While this is going on, Marco is, you know, taking this guy's help for a while.
And eventually the German Senate authorizes 50,000 Euro payouts to Marco and Sven, and I think to a couple of other abuse victims of Kintler's experiment.
This is like, it's not common for there to be compensation for damages in significant amounts in Germany in the same way it is in the U.S.
This is like a scene as a significant amount.
After the Senate makes this basically, and the Senate apologizes, right?
So not only do they give money, they're like, this was bad.
This was a fuck up.
Christopher Schweer, the AFD advisor, advises Marco and Sven to keep fighting at this point to like basically be posters for this movement where you're basically where you're arguing kind of everything about sex ed in Germany is based in Kintler and that's evil.
Marco is like, well, I don't understand why I would do that.
Like we've got our wishes.
There's no point in continuing to like fight the Senate.
They did the thing that we wanted them to do.
Quote from the New Yorker, but Schweer kept pushing him, Marco said.
Schweer denies this.
Then I slowly got suspicious.
That's Marco.
I asked myself, what else should I want?
That's when I got the feeling that the AFD just wants to use me to play me up.
And I said, I don't want to be a political tool.
I don't want to get pulled into an election campaign.
And it's just like, it's remarkable to me, like how fucking dope this guy is.
Like, how strong you have to be to like make yourself into the man he became given what was done to him.
It's, it's a really remarkable story.
Yeah.
So I guess this bastard's episode ended with a cool person who did cool stuff.
Yeah.
Congratulations, Marco.
Yeah.
I'm Iris Palmer and my new podcast is called Against All Odds.
And that's exactly what the show is about.
Doing whatever it takes to beat the odds.
Get ready to hear from some of your favorite entrepreneurs and entertainers as they share stories about defying expectations, overcoming barriers, and breaking generational patterns.
I'm talking to people like award-winning actress, producer, and director, Fiva Lingoria.
I think I had like $200 in my savings account and my mom goes, what are you going to do?
And I was like, I'll figure it out.
We had a one-bedroom apartment for like $400 a month and we all could not afford.
Like, I was like, how am I going to make $100 a month?
I'm opening up like I've never before.
For those of you who think you know me from what you've seen on social media, get ready to see a whole new side of me.
Listen to Against All Odds with Iris Palmer as part of the Michael Tura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
If you are a founder or a freelancer or the friend who always says, hey, you know what?
What if I started that?
This is for you.
I'm telling you, I had nothing to my name.
I didn't know a single person in New York.
And somehow I'm dressed by Oscar DeLorenza walking down that red carpet.
This month, we sit down with entrepreneurs and creators who actually did it, who turned this scary leap into a business, a paycheck, and a life they are proud of.
Direct center of our happiness or our regrets is whether or not we're taking action on the things that matter to us.
Slavery and Pedophilia Conflated00:12:42
They're not selfish.
They're so important.
They actually lead to our greatest contributions because when we're living fulfilled, we actually show up better everywhere.
We lead better.
We're better friends.
We're better relationships and collaborators and all those things because we have passion about the things we're doing.
If you're trying to build something of your own this year, join us in these conversations that will make you braver and smarter with your money.
Listen to Dos Amingos as part of the Michael Tura Podcast Network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
I actually drop better when I'm high.
It heightens my senses, calms me down.
If anything, I'm more careful.
Honestly, it just helps me focus.
That's probably what the driver who killed a four-year-old told himself.
And now he's in prison.
You see, no matter what you tell yourself, if you feel different, you drive different.
So if you're high, just don't drive.
Brought to you by Nitza and the Ad Council.
How are we feeling at the end of this all, Margaret?
I actually feel, okay, so I expect it to just feel absolutely awful.
And it's not just, it helps that you, I really appreciated you ending with something, something a little positive, but also I like learned a lot in terms of, you know, it's not just like, oh, there's some bad people and they do bad stuff, right?
Instead, this like, there's this thing that every ideology, like you're even in this, where you're talking about like the left and the liberal government are two different ideologies, right?
And both of these stories have had like pedophilia injected into them and then baked into an ideological structure.
And one of them is the ideological structure of the foster care system and the other is of the like kindergarten system of radicals or whatever.
And so it's just like every ideology across the board, if there's a way that pedophiles can try to interject their awful nightmare ideas into it, they like will and do.
And so I appreciate watching that stop.
I appreciate that like feminist discourse was able to interject and say, hey, this is actually bad.
And then like, and it's interesting because you mentioned the maybe Austrian or Czech or something, the guy who wrote the essay that was like, actually, you can't have any consensual relationships.
Who was that?
One sec.
Hungarian psychoanalyst, Sandor Ferensky.
And so.
Or forensy.
Yeah.
It's one of those things where it's like, you know, because I became an adult after that paper was written.
I sort of take it for granted that, well, don't we know that?
Yeah.
But I'm like, I guess have been obvious.
Yeah.
And I'm like, it somehow wasn't.
And I try not to always sit in judgment of the people of the past, but there's like some stuff where like slavery and pedophilia, where I'm like, sure.
No, you're bad.
Yeah.
And lots of people knew it.
You know, and actually slavery is like a weirdly comparable thing where like everyone's like every ideology came up with a way to make it okay.
And then people of every ideology were like, well, except certain ideologies that were just pro-slavery or whatever.
But like overall, people are like, I don't think you can like own a guy.
And people are like, the Bible says you can own a guy.
And other people will be like, well, the Bible says fight to stop evils and you're evil.
I'm going to pick these paragraphs and not those ones.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm going to pick the, I'm going to pick the theorists on the left who like, I'm going to pick the academic Teresa Nintwig who started recent, who like lost a position in academia because she wanted to expose Kintler and not Kintler, you know?
Yeah.
You, this is why, again, you're, you're rooting, if you're rooting everything in ideology to the point where you can't see anything else, it makes you vulnerable to this sort of thing.
There should be, you need like, you need like your own personal, like, you know, not, not to, I don't know, the U.S. government, the way we do things, obviously there's a lot of flaws, but one of the things that provides some protection is that we have a bill of rights.
And you kind of have to have a personal bill of like, what are my lines?
Politically, totally.
Like morally, what's not?
It's like how I have a personal line that if you're killing children, I don't care why you're justifying it.
I don't care if your political cause is righteous.
I don't care if they're the czarist kids.
You shouldn't kill kids.
That's the czar's kids were the people I thought of immediately.
Yeah, that's one of my lines.
Yeah.
Don't kill children.
And it like gets into this awkward thing where like, overall, I'm pretty pro-Nat Turner.
And then I'm like, well, there's this thing where I would have disagreed really strongly.
Yeah.
I think I would argue he was in a position where it was not possible for him to really take better actions because of what slavery does to people.
I think that's completely fair.
And I am not like, yeah, I'm not, I'm not coming out against Nat Turner, but I his desperation was like, they were not going to win.
And like, well, what do you do then?
You know, what do you do?
Do you stop that?
I don't know.
This is all these things are messy.
Morality is messy, but it's also easy to hold a line that says, I don't think it's okay to kill kids.
I don't think adults should be fucking kids.
These are not acceptable behaviors.
Like child rape is not acceptable.
Child murder is not acceptable.
My politics have to agree with my morals because those are removable.
Right.
Right.
And there's the difference between using an ideological label as your definition versus your description.
I have a set of things that I believe in and those things map closest for me to what I would call anarchism.
Right.
Yeah.
But it's not, I don't sit there at the end of the day and think, well, as an anarchist, what should I do?
I think as me and what I believe, what do I do?
And so if the label, the label doesn't, that's not what's important here.
I don't pick, you know, even as like a trans girl or whatever, I don't like wake up in the morning and be like, what does a trans girl do?
I'm like, no, I do what I do.
And then the closest gender label to what I do in my own head is trans girl.
And yeah, that is we get so caught up in it.
I think a root of when we talk about these, the kind of middle part of these very uncomfortable episodes were all of these like German parents who didn't were uncomfortable with sexualizing their children, but thought they had to for ideological reasons.
And when I, when I, when I read about people doing that, it's like, oh, well, you don't know who you are.
Yeah.
That's why you were, you had no idea who you were, right?
Totally.
You took on this ideology because it comfortingly gave you an identity, but you didn't, you hadn't figured out the person that you were.
You were using your ideology as an excuse to not do that.
And that is, again, that makes you vulnerable about to stuff like this, you know?
You do, even when you realize like, oh, how clearly like certain things politically are obvious, you know, are obviously right, you know, are obviously wrong.
That doesn't, that's not an excuse to not figure out who you are.
Yeah.
Well, and then the people who are against, like, cause right now in the U.S. discourse, the people who are so actively against and militantly against pedophilia, the people who are claiming that are often these like far-right people who are actually against like me existing and giving talks in public because I like wear a dress or something.
Right.
Yeah.
And that, and so in some ways, people are then becoming useful idiots because I listen to everything you're saying and I'm like, man, I, I sure wouldn't be sad if someone broke into that man's house and shot him to death.
No, that would have been dope.
Yeah.
But it's several, several men in this story should have been murdered.
Yeah, absolutely.
And yeah.
And what's hard is that, but you can also convince people that people need to get murdered as if they are the same as that thing.
Like this is like part of why it's so aggravating when they're like, oh, they conflated it with like the Green Party conflating it with homosexuality.
And so people are like, yeah, it's conflated.
So kill all the gays.
And like, no, stop pedophilia.
And if violence is necessary to stop it, I don't care.
You know, but like, oh, it's so, I don't know.
I think this is as we deal with, as we talked about at the end of this, like the kind, the really bad faith right wing sort of how they make use of this while ignoring their own complicity in child molestation, which is constant both in religious organizations and in stuff like Christian organizations lobbying for child marriage, right?
Which is the norm in the U.S. Fucking Ted Cruz is a big fan of children being able to get married and that's supporting a kind of pedophilia.
It is politically motivated abuse, you know, in the same way that these fucked up leftists are.
But the fact that the right does this and has in the current period, more political success doing this sort of thing doesn't mean we can ignore this history because like it's important, not just maybe we're maybe we will never again have influential pedophiles on the left, you know, pushing through this kind of politics into like actual action.
Maybe.
I don't know that I think that's like, but there will be and currently is, in fact, other things, right?
This is why you have to like have certain immovable moral beliefs about what's okay to do to people and why you also have to be willing to like like those academics we talked about who endured that harassment campaign when they were like, well, obviously it's wrong to rape children, right?
They had zines made about them being evil, you know?
Yeah.
You've got that fucking anarchist journalist being like, these other anarchists who don't like what I'm doing, they don't really believe in lived anarchy, you know?
Yeah.
Like, oh, you know what?
If that, if I thought that was true, if I thought anarchy meant that, I wouldn't be an anarchist anymore.
Absolutely not.
Yes, of course.
The important thing here isn't the label.
Yeah.
But to the people who, for whom the important thing is the label, hearing something like that can be a thought-terminating phrase, right?
You're not practicing lived anarchy.
Well, then you stop thinking about what the actual issue is with like, well, this guy's molesting homeless kids, right?
You start to think about like, well, ideologically, where am I on that?
No, no, no, no.
Just hit the guy.
Right.
You know, like, you're good.
Totally.
Yeah.
Like free knives for the homeless kids.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Free knives for homeless kids.
Yeah.
I'll tell you, I never met anyone who practiced stabbing more than my when I was a when I was a teenage street kid and one of my friends was a teenage sex working street kid.
That kid was stabby and he probably learned to be.
I hope he is alive and well.
Yep.
And I hope he still has a knife.
You know?
If you want to read about teenage, can I have an awful segue into my yes?
No, no, no.
Great.
Yeah.
If you want to read about teenagers learning to find themselves and using medieval weaponry, I have a when I say YA book, it's actually a crossover book.
It's a book that admits that its audience is also adults.
And it's called The Sapling Cage.
And it is coming out from feminist press in September, but it is being kickstarted in June.
And you can sign up now on the Kickstarter for more information about it.
And Robert read it.
And so therefore it has to be good.
It's fucking great.
It's good.
A lot of good spear talk in it, which I'm always a fan of.
We need to renormalize the use of spears as a personal defense weapon.
You know, the way in which some people in street demonstrations use long poles is a very similar thing.
Spears are very good at making space.
Yeah.
You need to be phalanx maxing with your friends and colleagues, right?
You know, you need to be protecting, covering each other with your shield arm, moving as a unit, learning how to wheel on command and preparing to face cavalry charges.
These are the kind of things that the kids need to be into these days.
All of those things happen.
All of these things.
I'm not joking.
Watch out for the Cossacks.
Watch out for the Cossacks.
They're still around and they're not the original Cossacks.
Those guys are actually fighting right now.
Yeah, those guys laugh.
Anyway, good stuff.
Protecting Your Friends Like Phalanx00:01:50
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