Michael Swaim and Sophie Lichterman dissect how liberal media enabled fascism, citing the New York Times' failure to report Jewish victims during the Holocaust despite owning Adolf Ochs and Arthur Sulzberger's biases. They contrast this silence with La Humanité's accurate coverage and Daniel Schneiderman's "activist journalism," arguing that false neutrality aided dictators like Hitler. The hosts connect historical complicity to modern failures, noting how the Times ignored police reports contradicting anti-Semitic narratives while prioritizing access over truth, ultimately suggesting that ethical reporting requires challenging power rather than maintaining a dangerous illusion of objectivity. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Never Again Podcast00:06:24
Cool zone media.
Hashtag never again will we do this podcast?
Hashtag never again.
We're never going to do this podcast.
That's where we're going with.
We're done.
We're done forever.
Anyway, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where I just carried out a cunning power play against my producer, Sophie Lichterman.
She was not ready for it at all.
It came down upon her like the tanks of Operation Barbarossa on an Michael Swam.
Great to be here, Robert.
How does it feel?
How does it feel, dude?
It feels, you know, this is my encirclement of Kiev, you know, perfect.
Beautiful, Michael.
I feel like a god.
Wow.
Great.
Unstoppable.
That's the goal.
I really, I really want to cut off the feed.
Yeah, you probably should.
I am now comparing myself to the Wehrmacht.
So that's not going to happen.
Daniel Malcolm, could you just shut him off or just replace me with an AI version asking Michael, Michael?
How are you doing today?
I hear you've got a novel.
Oh boy.
Oh, we're doing the plug right at the top.
That's great.
We're in the P-zone, Michael.
Do you remember when Prasad?
Robert, Robert.
Don't do it.
It's like a Calzone.
No.
Okay.
I've had long had a fantasy of founding the SoCal, Lo-Cal, Calzone Zone, but that's neither here nor there, Robert.
Thank you for the opportunity.
That is a great idea.
To push my novel, I really, really mean it from the bottom of my plug bag.
I released my debut novel.
It's a sci-fi fantasy magical realist memoir in the sense that you'll barely know that it's about my life because there's robots and spells and shit.
But it is.
So if you're interested in someone who knows you, there's a lot of robots and wizards around you in any game.
That's right.
Yeah.
But if you're interested in like alcoholism or my time at Crack, that's in there too, in a sense.
It's called The Climb.
There will be a free three-hour sample coming out, probably out by the time this drops on the Small Beans feed, which is my own podcast network.
You can find that just by pointing your podcast app at Small Beans and looking for The Climb, or you can get the whole thing over at patreon.com slash small beans slash shop, where you can find the audiobook version, which I imagine most people will want.
But there's also a PDF version and an e-reader version and all that good stuff.
Awesome.
Excellent.
Excellent stuff.
Check it out.
Michael, you and I worked at a website called cracked.com back in the day, and we had a couple of things.
I've never heard that word, and I don't know what you're talking about.
We worked with a guy named Tom Ryman who did a great video once about how in the movie Jaws, the shark is alcoholism, right?
There's no real shark.
Everything in that is explicable as a bunch of drunk people by the ocean get fucking up and destroying their own boat and whatnot.
I always liked that interpretation.
And I do now always watch movies with an eye for like, what, what thing in this could represent alcoholism?
Which has made the Star Wars series a lot more energy.
Just gotta say that episode also made me realize, which I don't think they touch upon, even the famous shark death.
It's like, yeah, you put a bottle in your mouth, you die.
It's alcoholism.
It's all alcoholism.
Anyway, you know what's not alcoholism, Michael, is the ad break already?
Really?
That is sometimes alcoholism.
God willing.
If we get that, the big Jim Bean sponsorship Sophie's been clamoring for.
Yes.
Yeah, it sounds like me.
Yeah.
What's like alcoholism is the addiction that the liberal owners of mainstream newspapers in the United States had with trying to normalize and support the growth of fascism in Europe.
That is a kind of addiction.
Oh, that.
Yeah.
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
That is the, that's the liquor of fools is thinking that you can make a deal with the fascists.
Speaking of fools, you're all fools for not knowing that this was the cold open.
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Readers, Katie's finalists, publicists.
We have an incredible new episode this week for you guys.
We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode.
They put on Lizzie McGuire at 2 a.m. video on demand.
This guy's 2 a.m.
2 a.m.
Whatever time it is.
Lizzie McGuire and I'm like wild bats you away.
It was like a first like closet moment for me where I was like, you're like, I don't feel like she's hot like the rest of them.
No, no, no.
I was like, she's beautiful, but I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are.
I'm not like, listen to Las Culturistas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
And it's the hot open.
We're back.
Mussolini Media Parallels00:11:39
Michael, are you toasty?
Are you burning up?
I'm offended by being called a fool, but I'll get over it in time.
I have a question.
How do you think those people that were supposed to go to space for eight days feel about being stuck there indefinitely?
I keep thinking.
I keep thinking about them.
I imagine if you get into space, it's because your whole life has been geared towards letting space.
Sweet.
I would say until it gets to like three, four months, I'd be sweet.
Bonus time and space.
Extra time is what it's all about.
Dope.
This has been what my whole life is for.
But I don't know these people.
Maybe they're miserable.
I don't care.
Wow.
You go to space.
You have to accept that you're going to space.
It's dangerous up there.
We're not supposed to be in space.
It's a bad place to be, and it's going to be unpleasant.
You know, that's space's whole thing.
Yeah.
If somebody offered you a trip to space, would you go?
Absolutely.
Oh, yeah.
Absolutely.
No question.
I'm a novelty seeker.
Yeah, of course.
But I would not enjoy it while I was there, right?
It would be a life-changing experience, but it's supposed to, I'm sure it's deeply uncomfortable and physically just a nightmare.
They were supposed to go for eight days and they're, they're saying it could be 2025.
Maybe.
Yeah, I mean, okay, that's what I'm saying.
That sounds, there's, you know, you know, the only thing less trustworthy than fascist governments in Europe in the 1930s is the Boeing corporation today.
So, oh, I thought you were going to say it was like, it's killing us.
Let's maybe try to do, you know, some podcasts about some bad guys.
Yeah, well, that too.
It never ended.
He'll never say that.
It never ended.
We're still here.
Fuck him.
So.
In some ways, the U.S. media responded to the rise of Hitler and Mussolini worse than the German or Italian media had done.
This was due in a degree to simple distance.
Fascism was seen by a lot of these guys, it's a foreign ideology.
So whatever they're saying about killing journalists and whatnot, that's not going to hurt us over here in the United States because we're not Europe, right?
Now, that wasn't the only reason why so much of the media was sympathetic to Hitler and Mussolini.
In a lot of cases, it was because the rich men who owned those media organs were fascists, or at least philo-fascists, right?
They liked the fascists.
Many of the wealthy men who owned large publishing houses saw communism as a rising threat and Italy as a bulwark against the USSR, which, if you just think about the military capabilities that Italy evinced during World War II, is extremely funny.
The idea of Italy trying to fight the Red Army is just, yeah, well, it lasted about 14 minutes.
Anyway, within days of the March on Rome, the Birmingham Age Herald, a major Alabama paper, described Mussolini as looking like a movie star.
Wow, he's really got a movie star.
Good looks, this fascist who's remade the government in his own image.
What a hot guy.
Hey, that Putin looks good with his top off, though.
You gotta hand it to him.
Yeah, they never stopped falling for it.
Much was made of the fact that actual movie stars found Mussolini magnetic.
In February of 1927, Motion Picture Magazine published a photo of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, both movie stars, doing a fascist salute in honor of their new friend Mussolini, who they met the year before.
Yeah.
Yeah, old Doug Fairbanks doing the Mussolini salute for his new friend Benito.
Rudolph Valentino, an Italian-born star-born star known as the great lover by Hollywood Press, was often compared positively to Ild Duce, right?
Like, wow, Valentino and the dictator of Italy are very similar, you know, good-looking guys.
I bet Mussolini fucks.
That's journalism.
I don't know if I ever needed to hear that sentence.
Oh, you know, Mussolini fucked Sophie.
You know, that's...
I don't need to hear it, though.
Look, that's what the U.S. media argued.
So that's the cold open.
And we go.
It's never a cold open with Mussolini.
Without Mussolini getting this tip.
Yeah.
The early obsession many Americans had for Mussolini, which transferred to Hitler in substantial degree, was due to several interlocking causes.
Katie Hull, a lecturer in American studies at the University of Amsterdam, argues that these reasons were the Italian corporate state's ability to project the image that they had solved the problems of democracy, combined with Mussolini's personal masculine magnetism and the belief that fascism offered a solution to the Great Depression.
We can see a lot of the same factors at work today in right-wing idolization of strongmen like Erdogan and support for profoundly anti-democratic solutions to problems, best embodied by the coup attempt on January 6th.
The reality was that Mussolini's government was incompetent, a fact that would soon be made evident with their disastrous invasion of Ethiopia and incompetent handling of World War II.
But many mainstream reporters in the U.S. took the fascist government's claims about its own success at face value.
They believe the trains ran on time because the fascists said we've got the trains working, even though the trains did not run on time.
That was not a real thing.
I love when history is the exact opposite.
Like I recently learned that Lizzie Borden almost certainly didn't kill her parents and the media just shat on her until that became the history.
So interesting.
Yeah, and as a result, you know, they really put a black mark on all of us who have killed people with axes.
And it's just not very fair, to be honest, you know?
Like, we're like axe murder is a legitimate American pastime.
And I just.
You're only a few steps away from criminalizing the Machete and then obviously it's wrong to cut people up into pieces because you're angry?
I just want to point out you've gifted me both those things, which is so funny.
I know.
Yeah, because I'm horny, whatever.
I'm a patriotic, red-blooded American, Sophie, and I think that everyone deserves the right to partake in this country's great traditions.
You know, that's where I am.
That's great acts.
The Saturday Evening Post published Mussolini's autobiography as a serial starting in 1928.
They described the fascisti movement as rough in its methods, but praised it for halting the radical left.
That's the Saturday Evening Post.
They're a little rough, but at least they dealt with those radical workers trying to get fair wages.
Similar tributes came in from the Chicago Tribune.
The New York Times credited fascism with bringing Italy back to a state of normalcy.
In his study, Mussolini and Fascism, The View from America, John Patrick Diggins notes that out of 150 articles that mentioned Mussolini in U.S. newspapers from 1925 to 1932, the majority had either a neutral or a bemused positive tone, right?
There was no sort of fear about this guy.
You know, he was just kind of exciting.
And look, he dealt with those mean old commies, right?
These evil anarchists.
One of the relatively few journalists to write objectively on Mussolini for American papers in this early portion of his reign was John Gunther, who profiled him for Harper's.
And his piece is an interesting historical document for its takes on Mussolini, but it's absolutely critical for its insights into the way the international press functioned around Mussolini, right?
Gunther, because he's a guy who gets to interview and profile Mussolini, is familiar with the process and he sees what happens to other journalists, the guys who are writing all of these fawning articles that are turning Mussolini into a celebrity back in the U.S. Quote, interviews, Mussolini knows, are the best of all possible forms of propaganda.
Thus, he is so lavish with them.
Most newspapermen and their editors cannot resist the flattery of conversation with a dictator or head of state.
Once they have been received by Mussolini or Hitler, they feel a sense of obligation, which warps their objectivity.
It is very difficult for the average correspondent to write unfavorably about a busy and important man who has just donated him a friendly hour of conversation.
I think it's a critical revelation, not just about how the media even up to today reports on dictators and fascists, but how they report on like guys like Peter Thiel, very wealthy billionaires, guys like Elon Musk, right?
They're so odd to be in the presence of a celebrity and a man of power who is dedicating time that makes them feel so important that they become warmer and less objective towards the subject of the interview.
And if you happen to form any kind of personal connection, like my own window into this is working for IGN and reviewing games and they're constantly accused of, and I think you have to be really rigorous with yourself to avoid being like, well, the game sucked, but they all seem so nice and they gave me access to their time and their work.
I can't just give them a four or whatever.
And that's just video game reviews.
So I can't imagine being like, I'm going to come out against the president, actually, after meeting him and shaking his hand and all that.
Yeah, it's a real problem, one that has not gotten to be any less of a problem.
I think that's somewhat propinquity.
Good word.
Yeah, that is a good word.
Speaking of propinquity, someone interested in drawing more modern parallels here might bring up the case of Maggie Haberman.
Her work for the New York Times reporting on the Trump White House was praised by many liberals, even though Trump's people saw her as providing positive PR.
Haberman was criticized back in 2022 when she finally published a much bellyhooed book about the Trump administration, which included a, she quoted the former president as promising not to leave office after his defeat in 2020.
Now, Haberman didn't report on this at the time.
And a lot of people were like, the fact that the president said in front of you that he would refuse to leave office after losing an election was probably something the American people immediately needed access to.
As a journalist, you had an ethical responsibility to tell them right away.
But Haberman, a lot of people will allege, wanted to withhold this information because if she put it out, she would have lost her access to Trump.
And she wanted to stick with him because she wanted to get more stuff to put in her books so that she would get more money for it, right?
The argument here, the criticism of Maggie, is that she held off on reporting crucial information about a threat to democracy for her own personal financial enrichment, right?
Now, Haberman's people, for their part, claim she shared this fact with her editors.
And her editors at the time were like, no, the fact that the president has refused to leave office is not newsworthy, which I do believe editors at the time would make that call, but that's a bad, unethical call, right?
Like, what do you like eventually?
They'll say it to a bunch of evangelicals on camera, so it'll be fine.
Yeah.
I just want to say that.
Problematic Judgments Explained00:03:13
Don't worry.
January is right around the corner.
Something's going to happen.
Yeah.
Back in the 30s, New York Times correspondents made equally problematic judgments in their coverage of our friend of the pod, Adolf Hitler.
Perhaps the most sinister example of this was the case of New York Times correspondent Frederick Birchel.
Prior to Nazism's final victory over Weimar Democracy, Birchell had followed Hans Schaefer in what was called the caged Hitler theory.
This was the idea that if Hitler got into power, decent conservatives in government would moderate his behavior.
And so letting Hitler win was not disastrous, right?
Like it was a brilliant plan to weigh the Nazi leader down with busy work that would stop him from doing any damage, right?
Perfect strategy.
Yeah, that's going to work great.
We're going to talk.
Thank God.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Thank God.
We've got the plan.
Speaking of plans, Michael, I have a plan to sell you some of these products and services.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my god, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day 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.
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.
Times Holocaust Reporting00:15:54
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.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
We're back.
Michael, I hope you have enjoyed purchasing.
I bought them all.
You bought them all.
Yeah.
I bought them all.
Purely to support the economy and therefore the state.
Yeah, you got LASIK for parts of your body that aren't even your eyes.
You just shoot lasers at you.
I said, how much laser can this buy me?
And slapped my wallet on the counter.
That's right.
That's right.
Yeah.
They just love lasering, you know?
Any god-fearing American does, really.
Anyway, back to a non-GOD-fearing American.
What is happening?
What are you talking about, Sophie?
I'm just talking about our man who thinks that he's going to stop Hitler by giving Hitler everything he wants.
Now, Birchall was one of a few New York Times Berlin Bureau correspondents who stayed on after the Nazis took power.
He had a major influence on how Americans perceived the coming regime.
And so it had an impact when he claimed in writing for the New York Times, there will be, quote, no extreme persecution of Nazi opponents under Hitler's regime.
And he said the Nazis aren't going to be mean to anybody who opposed them because, quote, there would be no advantage to the government in unsettling Germany's social structure.
Yeah, you really got the pulse of the Nazis there, Birchall.
What would they have to gain?
Yeah, killing all the Jews.
That would be crazy.
Meanwhile, he's doing speeches like, yeah, we must get everybody.
Yeah, no, like, maybe, okay, here's the deal: we let him win.
We feed, let him, you know, take more rope, more rope, bring him down from the earth, give him all the rope, hand the whole thing of rope over to him, and then leave.
You know, have you seen the wire?
This is a five-year process, minimum.
Yeah, yeah.
So, the Enabling Act of March 1933 brought the Nazis pretty much total power.
Many Americans did find this deeply unsettling.
And so, with the Times's consent, Birchall took to the airwaves on CBS radio.
He avoided any mention of the anti-Semitic violence that Nazis had already been engaging in since Hitler's ascension, and instead told millions of Americans there was, quote, no cause for general alarm.
He advised his audience to dismiss from their minds any thought that there would be in Germany any slaughter of the National Socialist government's enemies or racial oppression in any vital degree.
The wrongest a man has ever been.
Like powerful Jake Tapper energy out of this guy.
Just like the Nazis aren't going to kill anyone.
Why would you think that?
Calm down.
Everything's going to be fine.
Quote me on that.
It's almost like someone torturously trying to figure out an opposite day sentence.
Yeah.
Quickly.
The Nazis will spare all the Christians.
This dude's wrong or lying.
This is not coming together.
Yeah.
So while Birchall was optimistic about the Hitler regime in public, he knew that he couldn't actually like he knew that because he's reporting from Berlin.
He knows the Nazis are actively at the moment murdering Jews and communists, right?
He knew that what he was saying was indefensible, but he justified lying to make Hitler seem safe to his publisher, Arthur Solzberger, by informing Solzberger, I conceived of the notion of making the broadcast a bait for a real live interview with Hitler, one which I have been vainly seeking.
He was lying to the American people about Hitler not wanting to murder anyone so that he could get an interview with Hitler.
Yeah.
Great guy.
Presumably the interview is him going like, I want to murder everyone.
You know, it's just disseminating his view.
So what is, yeah.
It's like the most poisonous access journalism has ever been is this right here.
Yep.
And now this is officially the point in this two-episode story arc where I'm going, okay, I see where you're going with this in terms of modern day like Israeli coming to come not just that, honestly.
Like I wrote this before, you know, that had reached global fascism in general.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's like a lot of things.
You know, we've been seeing this.
This has been very evident and clear for a long time.
Although you are right, like that's part of why I felt the need to rejigger this article in light of what's been happening in Gaza, right?
Is that like, oh, I think there's actually a moral responsibility to draw that comparison and make it much clearer.
There was an immediate and a massive backlash to what Birchall was doing with the Times.
And it was led with particular fervor by a number of Jewish papers.
Now, none of these, because these are like small community papers, right?
Because this is still a period in which there are neighborhoods that are like, this is the Jewish neighborhood in this city or whatever.
And so they'll have like their paper.
None of these have the clout or the reach of the Times, though.
So none of them are able to speak to a national audience, really.
They are rightfully yelling about what Hitler's doing, but they just don't have the kind of mouthpiece that the Times is.
And for the next 10 years, the New York Times failed utterly to hire any men of serious skill to work its Berlin Bureau.
Much of this can be traced to the owner of the paper, Adolf Ochs, who wanted his reporters to conduct themselves like, quote, an order of monks.
One result of Ox's commitment to impartial journalism, as he saw it, was that most reports from Berlin during Hitler's rise and the early years of the regime were little more than a collection of quotes from various German newspapers.
This became a problem when the Nazis started banning opposition papers from taking control and taking control of Jewish-owned publishing houses like Olstein.
So the Nazis run the papers and Ox is like, we should just, most of our coverage should just be reporting on what kind of publications.
Yeah.
Right.
It's also amazing because isn't one of their stupid arguments for killing everyone that the Jews run the media.
It's like the projection thing.
It's like, no, you run the media.
Yeah.
Well, they've taken over now.
But like, what's interesting to me, Ox, this guy who's like, you know, we should mostly just be reporting what the German press is saying, not being critical to the Nazis.
It's transparency.
It's fair and balanced to just transparently pass things along.
Yeah.
Yes.
Yes.
And he is, he is, he is Jewish.
Ox is a Jewish man, right?
But he disliked the idea that the Times might be, he's so obsessed with objectivity.
His big fear is not we're going to let a genocide happen.
It's if we're seen as sympathetic to Jews in Germany, people might consider us an activist paper.
And there's nothing worse.
Or personal.
Have a personal stake.
And I'm above that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like these people are disgusted by the concept of activism, right?
Arthur Hayes Sulzberger, effectively Ox's heir as publisher of the Times, admitted privately that he didn't have any sympathy.
Again, Sulzberger is also Jewish.
He had no sympathy for Jews suffering under Nazism because, and he, this is literally what he writes, he was, quote, too fortunately born, right?
In other words, Sulzberger admitted, I just don't care about poor Jews suffering in Germany because I'm a rich urban Jewish man in the United States.
Why would I be sympathetic to poor, uneducated rural Jews fleeing from Eastern Europe, right?
Dude, he found.
He's got to Seinfeld on Bill Maher, smoking cigars, saying Trump is not, it's funny how Trump won't really affect me.
Yeah, no shit, dude.
Of course not.
Some awareness beyond that.
Yeah.
And it's just very clear.
Sulzberger found these people almost like these poor refugees from Eastern Europe who had run and flooded into Germany as a result of, you know, pogroms during the Russian Civil War.
He found them as gross as the Nazis did, right?
Because they're like poor and dirty.
You know, that's this guy's attitude, right?
I'm not saying that about them, but like that's clearly what Sulzberger thinks.
As early as the 1890s, Sulzberger and Ox had embarked on a quest to, in their words, again, their words, de-Jewify the New York Times.
The current publisher of the New York Times, by the way, is Arthur Gregg Sulzberger.
On a related note, here's a tweet from climate reporter Kendra Pierre-Louis about the conversation she had with a, quote, top New York Times editor.
I wonder who it was.
I think a lot about the top New York Times editor who I told that historians were warning, we're in a similar period to the ramp up to the Holocaust.
And maybe we could look back and see what the New York Times had done wrong to not repeat mistakes.
He shrugged.
The New York Times didn't really cover the Holocaust.
And that's true.
I don't know if she was talking to Solzberger, but whoever she was talking to at the times had the same attitude that Solzberger had to the Holocaust, which is that's not our business.
I don't know.
I haven't thought that far.
I don't care.
Is it good to cover genocide?
Impossible to say.
You have to be unbiased to do so.
Yeah.
Is it perhaps why Early Man created the concept of impartial journalism?
To know about genocides?
Yeah.
Hutus, Tootsies have different opinions on machetes.
Is it just that he's like, my family's owned this paper since like, I don't know, 1896 or whatever.
I'm not going to go against the family because I'm a rich guy and that's what we do.
I think it's, it's, they're so rich.
And so these people have are generations removed from any kind of normal life.
Right.
Right.
They can't feel fear, right?
The only fear they can feel is the fear that mean old socialists are going to take some of their money.
That is the only thing that stirs any sort of stirring.
Stirs in their hearts.
They're doll's eyes.
Dead eyes.
Yes.
That is how I would describe Solzberger.
Black eyes.
Dead eyes.
Like a doll's eyes.
Someone is coming for your money.
That's the only thing that can get her eyes out of him.
That's all these motherfuckers, right?
That's why newspapers should be a public good funded by taxes.
I don't know.
It's not perfect.
There's flaws with that, but it'll, you know, we've seen how our system works.
Very well.
Over the course of the Second World War, the Times did, in fact, cover the Holocaust, though it is fair to say, not well.
One thing that's often to defend the Times, people point out, they published around 1,200 articles about the mass murder of Jews and undesirable groups by the Nazis shape.
You know, that's state.
That's three or four a week leading up to the war years.
And that sounds good, right?
You know, given this, one might conclude that Kendra is being unfair, but I don't think she is.
And I'm going to read a quote from the History News Network to elucidate why.
At the end of the war and for decades afterward, Americans claimed they did not know about the Holocaust as it was happening.
How was it possible for so much information to be available in the mass media, yet simultaneously for the public to be ignorant?
The reason is that the American media in general and the New York Times in particular never treated the Holocaust as an important news story.
From the start of the war in Europe to its end nearly six years later, the story of the Holocaust made the Times front page only 26 times out of 24,000 front page stories.
And most of these stories referred to the victims as refugees or persecuted minorities.
And only six of those stories were Jews identified on page one as the primary victims.
While the Holocaust was happening, out of 24,000 front page stories during the period of the Holocaust, six times were there front page articles that identified the Jews as a victim of Nazi violence.
Wow.
One per million.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, about one per million.
Nor did the story lead the paper, appearing in the right-hand column reserved for the day's most important news, not even when the concentration camps were liberated at the end of the war.
In addition, the Times intermittently and timidly editorialized about the extermination of the Jews, and the paper rarely highlighted it in either the week in review or the magazine section.
Now, I'm focusing a lot on the Times here, and my focus on them is rooted in the fact that the Times was and is still today our nation's chief paper of record.
And as a result, we have a lot of detail as to how its journalists and editors saw the problem of rising Nazi power.
Now, I don't think that tells the whole story because there are a lot of, not only are there a lot of individual journalists at the Times who did care about reporting on the Holocaust, just as, by the way, the Times Visual Investigation Desk has done crucial reporting on what's been being done in Gaza, right?
You know, there are good people at the Times.
The editors and owners of the paper, well, the editors are a mixed bag and the ownership of the paper is fucking terrible, right?
That's my stance on the matter.
It's also worth noting that, again, many local U.S. papers, and particularly smaller Jewish papers, did a marvelous job of spreading detailed information about the first Nazi crimes.
Likewise, there were marvelous foreign correspondents in Germany who did dogged and courageous work exposing early Nazi atrocities.
The problem was that for years, influential papers like the Times refused to take their work seriously.
The fear was, as always, bias.
One of the best sources on early Nazi violence was the Jewish Telegraph Agency, which had been founded by an Austrian and provided early evidence of mass violence against German Jews.
The Times refused to report on its reporting, like they, like they were refused to do what they were doing with like German papers, right?
And cover like what the JTA was saying because it was not neutral, right?
It's a Jewish paper, so it can't neutrally report on violence against Jews.
So we're not going to cover that at all.
But as we talked about in the first episode, nothing is neutral.
That's impossible.
It never happened.
No one has ever been neutral.
Point of view over the other.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, they didn't actively, they didn't reject all stories from the JTA out of hand.
When the agency happened to interview a source the Times considered credible because they were famous, in this case, Albert Einstein, the Times was happy to carry a JTA wire story.
Now, Einstein is one of the most popular public intellectuals of the early 20th century.
When the JTA asked him for his thoughts on the 1930 German elections, he stated that the, quote, Hitler vote is only a symptom, not necessarily of anti-Jewish hatred, but of momentary resentment caused by economic misery and unemployment within the ranks of the German youth.
Einstein Nazi Opposition00:14:02
Now, Einstein was extremely wrong there, right?
The Hitler vote was absolutely a symptom of anti-Jewish hatred.
Emotionally driven.
Yeah.
Now, that said, I will note, Einstein was a consistent opponent of the Nazis, and you can find quotes from him that are much more direct and sensible in their opposition to Hitler.
So I think we can forgive the statement from Einstein as a single lapse of judgment, right?
Like I'm not trying to shit on the man's attitude towards the Nazis, but he was wrong in this.
And it's interesting, though, that this was the thing, the time that like the Times chose to take a JTA story, this time when Einstein is saying, don't be afraid, the Nazis aren't racist, you know?
Even as the war years began, the Times continued to avoid reportage on attacks by Nazi street gangs against Jewish Germans.
When the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising occurred, the story was buried on page 10.
Even coverage of the liberation of Auschwitz tended to avoid mentioning that the vast majority of victims were Jewish.
It's It's just in the leisure, in the leisure section, they're like, don't vacation there right now, but we won't say why.
Yeah, don't summer in Auschwitz this year.
Yeah.
Jesus.
This is where things get a little complicated because it is probably fair to say that non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust are forgotten or not sufficiently discussed, due in part to an understandable desire to compensate for the poor coverage Sulzberger and his colleagues put out during the genocide itself.
In his Cambridge Press study about the burying the Times did of the Holocaust, Laurel Left notes that the primary reason Solzberger refused to change his initial reaction towards reporting on Nazi violence against Jews was an unspoken fear that he would risk his own position in American society, often framed as part of a broader fear that Jewish assimilation in the U.S. would be harmed if too much attention was paid to the suffering of Eastern European Jews under fascism.
Daniel Johnson writes in an article for commentary.org: above all, he was wary of any new influx of European Jews into the United States.
Assimilation for Sulzberger was a prize for which he was prepared to let other Jews make any sacrifice.
That's good.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Just a nice little reminder of like what human evil is.
You know, it's not just these Nazis wanting to exterminate people.
It's this guy going, like, I could help maybe save lives, but, you know, that might endanger me being able to go to the best parties.
So let's just not do that.
Let's just not cover this, you know?
Yeah.
I think that maybe the most discouraging thing for your soul that you can witness is extreme.
It's like, okay, extreme violence and cruelty is bad enough, but spectators who laugh or treat it like it's fine and you're like, damn, the human being can really get dark.
Jesus.
Yeah.
Yeah.
When people just aren't concerned, don't care about what's happening, what's being done to people, right?
Like I, this has always been like my frustration talking to like some of my members, members of my family who supported the Iraq war about like stuff I saw in Iraq.
And like they, they, they're so bored of it, of, of being taught, of talking about the damage that they helped to do.
It just absolutely no interest in thinking about it and talking about it.
You know, that's what the Republican Party has tried to move on to being like, you know, fuck the Iraq war, like they weren't the ones who did it, right?
Right.
You know, not that they were the only ones who did it.
There's plenty of Democrats who voted for it, but like you guys, it was your thing.
Like you don't get to fucking escape it because you don't want to talk about it anymore.
Oh, and the smothering of the Arab world as far as those people are terrorists is a narrative that's still foundational to what's going on now.
Yeah.
And yeah, the way in which it's interesting to me, because like I think I do actually talk about terrorism in a way that's unbiased because like I'm very sympathetic to the aims of the PKK, which is a Kurdish terrorist organization, right?
The fact that they have, and I'm not supportive of terrorism, but I think that oftentimes in history, there are groups that find themselves resorting to that and their broad aims are still justified, right?
I feel the same way about the ANC, right?
Nelson Mandela was not just tarred as a terrorist because of a political campaign by the apartheid government.
Nelson Mandela went into hiding and established the armed wing of the ANC, which bombed civilians, right?
Like he was a terrorist, you know?
Like terrorism, you can objectively say all of these things are terrorism.
And that doesn't mean that like you support it when the cause is good.
It just means that you acknowledge there are terrorists sometimes whose overall cause is justified.
It's like looking at the IRA.
Do I think it was evil to like throw a bomb in a pub?
Yeah, that is evil.
It's bad to bomb a pub, but that doesn't mean the overall fight was evil, right?
Like you, it's just everyone, everyone agrees that terrorism is fine in certain circumstances.
I don't see any moral difference.
And they just don't talk terrorist.
They're like, this is the good kind.
So we picked a different word because this is the approved form of domestic terrorism we're okay with.
Yeah.
The bombing of Western Europe by the Allies during World War II was one of the largest acts of terrorism in history.
It was the deliberate targeting of civilians to frighten them and break their will.
There's no other way to describe it but terrorism.
That's what it fucking was, right?
And I would argue that like we, it actually didn't work.
You can't really bomb people's will to fight away.
But I don't think actually in World War II, we were wrong to have tried it for a period of time because the situation was fucking desperate.
And you're going to try everything at that point, right?
Like it's just how people react in situations like this.
Everyone does it.
Every side does it.
I think that's actually reporting on it objectively, you know?
Sure.
But the times are.
I remember you were very pro-Maquis and anti-Cardassian when that was.
I am extremely supportive of Maquis Ames.
That's good.
Do I like Chakote?
No.
As an actor, I dislike him.
Yeah.
Look, I support insurgent attacks against Cardassian infrastructure, and I always have.
Yeah.
They're filthy Cardys.
Yeah.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, Michael.
We don't got to get all Miles O'Brien in here.
That's right.
Yes, let's go down this tangent.
Speaking of Miles O'Brien, a lot of people would argue the Miles O'Brien of physics was Albert Einstein.
And Einstein reached out to Solzberger to try to help him, you know, kind of after this point.
He reaches out to Solzberger at one point because there's a Berlin theater critic named Alfred Kerr, who is obviously Kerr is a Jewish man, and the Nazis want him dead.
They have a real thing against critics.
So Einstein reaches out to Solzberger with like, hey, you have a lot of pull in power.
Can you help us get this guy out of Germany and into the United States so he doesn't get murdered?
And Sulzberger yells at Einstein.
He says, I am disassociated from any movement which springs from the oppression of Jews in Germany.
Only in this way can the unprejudiced and unbiased portion of the Times be understood.
What an insane thing to say.
I will refuse to pay attention to the oppression of Jews in Germany because that's the only way that we can be unbiased is if we pretend this isn't happening.
That's the neutral stance.
Pretend it's not happening, you know?
Wow.
So that statement is particularly ironic when we return again to how the Times has recently covered protests against the genocide in Gaza.
I read an article recently on dropsite news by Arvind Diloar, a freelance journalist who had worked for The Times reporting on an article about an anti-Zionist protest in New Jersey.
The precise focus of the protest was Israeli realtors holding an event to auction off illegally seized Palestinian land.
Arvind writes, quote, amid Israel's ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip, the Times article described the protest as contributing to escalating fear and tension in the otherwise peaceable T-Neck.
As a pivotal example of alleged anti-Semitic activity in the area, my co-author John Leland, a Times staff reporter, quoted township council member Hillary Goldberg, who claimed her home had been broken into as part of a string of abuse in response to her vocal support of Israel and her Jewish background.
I have been threatened.
I had a box truck with my picture on it and the words liar-liar driven around town.
My house has been broken into.
I have received anti-Semitic messages, Goldberg told Leland, adding, I have never felt so afraid to be Jewish as now.
And hey, look, if protests had been court were corresponding to surges in violence towards Jewish people, you know, that's worth reporting.
But in this case, the claim by Hillary is, so far as we can tell, untrue.
Arvind filed a records request, and the records he received from the police showed that police concluded no break-end was attempted at her property, right?
That no crime at all had been attempted against Goldberg.
They have found no evidence of it.
There were no signs of forced entry.
She calls them a dozen times for follow-up checks on her home, and at no point do the police find anything indicating her claims were true.
Arvind goes on to write, believing a correction to the Times story was in order, or at least an update to give readers a fuller picture, I shared the police reports with Leland, who told me he had already gotten them.
And despite the explicit contradictions, no correction would be issued.
When presented with the police reports, management at the times also declined to reconcile them with its coverage.
Instead, managing director of external communications, Charlie Statalander, said in a statement that the article was thoroughly reported, fact-checked, and edited, and we stand behind its publication.
Goldberg did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The cops are like, there was a trucker going around her house with her face that said truth teller, truth teller.
Everything's the opposite of what you're saying it is.
Yeah.
And look, again, I don't want to pretend, obviously, there has been a surge in anti-Semitism, and some of it is tied.
I don't blame the fact that people are protesting against a genocide for it, but those protests have provided cover for Nazis, right?
You can find evidence of that.
And there is evidence that aspects of like far-right anti-Jewish propaganda have been adopted by some folks.
Taking that opportunity, they're like anything to say anti-Jewish stuff.
Yeah, of course.
Yeah, exactly.
That is a thing that happens.
It's a thing you have to guard against happening, right?
It's a thing you have to be aware of.
But the Times is deliberately refusing to correct their reporting that makes the problem look much worse than it is.
And it's because their narrative that they want to portray about these protests is helped by that inaccurate reporting, right?
And that's to them neutrality.
Cool stuff.
Back to the 1930s.
Over in France, excellent work was done by La Humanity, the paper of the French Communist Party, which wrote unsparingly about Nazi violence towards Jews and other targeted groups.
This reporting was ignored by the American press because it was a communist paper.
Now, there's a great book about all this, Berlin 1933, written by French media critic Daniel Schneiderman.
I found an interview with Schneiderman in The New Yorker from back in 2019 that contains a fascinating quote on what he called activist journalism, which he argues was the only journalism that responded ethically to the rise of fascism.
Activist journalism, Schneiderman writes, journalism that subordinates the quest for truth to the quest for a truth that is useful to its cause, is the only journalism that today doesn't have to feel ashamed about what it produced.
Everything reasonable, scrupulous, balanced, in my opinion, contributed to lulling the crowd to sleep.
If I had been a reader at the time, though, I probably would have quickly stopped reading after a few days, dissuaded by the bludgeoning.
So, Schneiderman's saying, like, the only activist papers that had a clear anger angle are the ones who accurately describe the danger of the Nazis.
But I think if I had been reading them at the time, I wouldn't have paid much attention because it's just kind of exhausting to get that sort of ideological bludgeoning.
And I find this compelling.
I think it's actually kind of courageous that he admits that, right?
That's an evidence of an honest thinker who is like, I can see that these people were the only ones who did the right thing.
And I don't think I would have listened to them at the time.
I actually respect being able to say that about yourself quite a lot.
Yeah, it definitely bums me out, though, through the climate change lens because a similar analog would be, We're going to die.
We're all going to die.
We're all going to die.
And eventually you're like, Look, I know, but I'm sick of hearing it.
It's really depressing.
Tired of you guys, right?
We are, though.
Or did you not like this?
This really is that level of problem.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's, yeah, again, I like Schneiderman a lot because he's he's kind of able to acknowledge that about himself and about all of us.
Like, you know, like, no matter what you think, you do this about something.
You kind of have to to survive, right?
But that's part of where these guys, how these guys thrive, these monsters thrive.
Shakespeare Oatmeal Mystery00:03:42
Yeah.
Now, it is, you know, I find this all especially worth pointing out because the next period in Sophie, did we do a second ad break?
Nope.
You know what?
The next period for all of us, Michael, is going to be to cut to ads.
So have a little ad, you know, shovel some ads into your face.
You know, ads are, as a great writer, William Shakespeare, once said, the oatmeal of art.
So enjoy some oatmeal while we get ready to do more art.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one: never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me, you know.
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.
Weird Little Guys00:14:55
We're back.
Michael Maestro Swain.
Are your fingers ready to tap the ivories of talking about my keyboard as I dizzily Google William Shakespeare oatmeal and try to figure out what the fuck that was about?
Yeah.
I like to think he knew about oatmeal because as a British person at that period of time, he kind of had teeth.
Why not oatmeal?
Yeah.
Did he quit crocodile?
He did.
What a cool guy.
He's yeah.
Billy shakes.
I'm sure it's based on a Greek root or something, but I like to think that he's just saw one and he's like, yeah, that's a fucking crocodile.
Crocodile.
It is one of those, you know, there's some animals like you look at a fucking marmoset, right?
And like, it's not obviously a marmoset.
Other names could have worked for a marmoset.
You look at a crocodile and you're like, yeah, that's a fucking crocodile.
Right.
Where you're like, you are a Todd.
That is your name.
Totally.
Yeah.
For sure.
Every Todd I've seen has been a Todd.
Anyway, so the next period of American journalism regarding the fascists, you know, the one that occurred from the late 30s up to the start of the war, things got a little better, you know, quite a bit better by the end.
The rapid change in American attitudes towards isolationism in World War II is some evidence of this, but we also see it in the response of the populace and the mainstream media to domestic fascist groups like the Silver Shirts and the German-American Bund.
Here, at least, the outright sympathy of the Italian liberal press and the frightened tremulousness of the Weimar media were less present.
When the Bund famously rallied in Madison Square Garden in 1939, reporters on scene for Bund clashes with anti-fascists wrote articles with titles like Nazi Advocacy of Roosevelt's Death Charged and Seven Are Injured at Nazi Rally.
And that's like, you know, good.
In an article several days after the rally, even the Times argued that Bundists were, quote, determined to destroy our democracy.
The paper's editor later released a statement saying the Bund meant to set up an American Hitler.
In this, the Times was at least following in the footsteps of the American people, who by this point had started taking the warnings of reporters who were quite biased against Nazis seriously.
And I might argue that they only, you know, the Times only jumps on the bandwagon of doing that when it becomes clear that there are Nazis in the U.S. who might threaten them even more than being sympathetic to Jews in Germany would.
As U.S. entry to World War II grew closer, the most influential reporting on the Nazis came not from the unbiased monk-like reporters valued by aux, but from foreign correspondents like William Shirer and Dorothy Thompson.
Thompson's most influential article, and today this is one of the most influential things anyone will ever write about fascism, was published in August of 1941 for Harper's Magazine.
It had the evocative title, Who Goes Nazi?
And rather than purporting to be even handed journalism, it presents the reader with a series of fictional characters from various backgrounds, all conversing at a dinner party.
And it asks the reader to predict which ones might go Nazi.
I take some enjoyment in the fact that Thompson included a character in her article who was almost certainly based on Mr. Solzberger, right, on the head editor at the Times.
Quote: Mr. J over there is a Jew.
Mr. J is a very important man.
He is immensely rich.
He has made a fortune through a dozen directorates in various companies, through a fabulous marriage, through a speculative flair, and through a native gift for money and a native love of power.
He is intelligent and arrogant.
He seldom associates with Jews.
He deploys any mention of the Jewish question.
He believes that Hitler should not be judged from the standpoint of anti-Semitism.
He thinks that the Jews should be reserved on all political questions.
He considers Roosevelt an enemy of business.
He thinks it was a serious blow to the Jews that Frankfurter should have been appointed to the Supreme Court.
The saturnine Mr. C, the real Nazi in the room, engages him in a flatteringly attentive conversation.
Mr. J agrees with Mr. C wholly.
Mr. J is definitely attracted by Mr. C.
He goes out of his way to ask his name.
They have never met before.
A very intelligent man, he says.
And Thompson's article today still draws a lot of hatred from conservatives who find it very unfair and unbiased, and it was.
Dorothy understood that fairness and objectivity don't fight fascism.
There's a good chance her prose will make you feel uncomfortable, and it ought to.
But I promise if you read her article, you will at least feel something.
Now, I'm not half the writer Dorothy was, so rather than attempt to wrap this piece up myself, Michael, I'm going to leave you with one last quote from that essay.
It's fun, a macabre sort of fun, this parlor game of who goes Nazi, and it simplifies things, asking the question in regard to specific personalities.
Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi.
They may be the gentle philosopher whose name is in the blue book, or Bill from City College to whom democracy gave a chance to design airplanes.
You'll never make Nazis out of them.
But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success, they would all go Nazi in a crisis.
Believe me, nice people don't go Nazi.
Their race, color, creed, or social condition is not the criterion.
It is something in them.
Those who haven't anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don't, whether it is breeding or happiness or wisdom or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi.
It's an amusing game.
Try it at the next big party you go to.
Yeah, accuse everyone you disagree with of being a Nazi.
Yeah, I think it gets at the base of something that people are wielding to great effect right now, which is it's weird to hate people for no reason.
They're weird little guys.
Yes, yes.
And I think that recognition that, like, you become a Nazi when there's nothing inside you but the love of and need for wealth and power, right?
When that's the only thing you've got.
That's that, like, it's fundamentally a product of insecurity.
And so the way to fight these people, as we're starting to see with like Vance here, is to make them feel more insecure, right?
When you frame them, when you either talk of them as like, well, these are just common salt of the earth people with legitimate grievances, or when you do what I think a lot of liberals started to do with Trump, which is why you've got this weird chunk of people who like, don't think he could have been shot just like honestly as part of an assassination attempt.
You know, people treat them like almost a supernatural enemy, right?
Like they're, you know, they're this kind of like evil demonic force, as opposed to, no, these are sad, insecure, sick little weirdos, right?
And when you, when you shine that light on them, when you make that clear, however you do it, if you do it through just objective reporting, which you can do, or if you do it through satire, right?
Whatever you have to do, you have to find their points of insecurity and stick a thumb in them, right?
That is how you, that is how you fight these people without pulling out guns, right?
If you want to avoid that, and I sure do, that's how you do it.
That's how you get kicked out of tenacious D, though.
Yeah, yeah, that's a bummer.
That sucked.
It is.
That did suck.
It's such a, oh, bro code.
Come on, man.
Man.
Yeah.
No, but I don't know.
Who wouldn't sacrifice a 30-year friendship for the bliss that is getting to be in the, what's that fucking video game movie that Jack Black's about to be in?
Borderlands.
Borderlands.
That's considered fucking terrible.
There's already known.
Yeah.
No, no, no.
Nothing more valuable than getting to be in the Borderlands movie.
Because of an off-the-cuff joke that, no offense, literally everyone thought in their head, like there's no, it's whatever.
Anyway.
Yeah.
I think it speaks to what we were saying in terms of, yes, in a vacuum, violence is always shocking and feels unnatural in a way.
But remember that the one context where it kind of makes sense is like, yeah, but if someone's been beating the shit out of you for eight hours, like there's a point.
There's a point.
There's a point, right?
And that point was for us in the political sense of like getting dirty.
That point was like six years ago, like six to eight years ago.
You're right.
We've held ourselves back long enough.
Yeah.
Anyway, Michael, speaking of fighting back, you know what?
You can fight back against your boredom by reading Michael's novel.
That's right.
Which will make you entertained and happy.
It's true.
I plugged it at the top, but I'll mention again.
It's called The Climb.
You can get a free sample by checking out the Small Beans podcast feed or check out the Small Beans Patreon page and click the shop tab if you end up wanting the whole thing.
It's an audio book and a book book.
You can get either flavor.
Awesome.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway, thank you so much.
We got two things to plug at the end here, Robert.
Yeah.
Do it.
So I'll do the first one if you do the second one, Deal.
Okay.
He's clearly forgot the plugs over here.
No, I'll remember by the time we get there, I think.
The first one is we have a new podcast at Close On Media hosted by Molly Conger.
It's called Weird Little Guys.
And shows like that relate to episodes like this.
I still plugged it earlier.
I know I caught that and I was like, wow, Swain, really, really calling it back.
I'm loving it so far.
Oh, thank you.
Molly's amazing.
And the other thing, Robert, is what is the other thing, Sophie?
I don't know.
I'm looking into Robert and we go.
I'm looking at you.
Other people can look at you.
You know what?
Sophie, let me explain to you.
So about like 150 or so years ago, some, I'm guessing they were Frenchmen, figured out that if you like put a hole in a box and run light through it, you can kind of get images to print essentially onto pieces of paper, right?
This led to the creation of what were called photographs and cameras.
And eventually people recognized that if you take a lot of these still images and you run them in sequence, you can create the illusion of movement.
And now we at CoolZone have joined this glorious tradition by pivoting to video ourselves because that's never bad.
Never bad.
YouTube.com slash at behind the bastards.
Wow, masterfully stretched.
Thank you.
Thank you, Michael.
Thank you, Michael.
Thank you.
And thank you.
That's it.
That's the episode.
Bye.
Is it?
I mean, do you have anything else you'd like to add?
Michael, it's nice to talk to you.
Oh, me?
That was directed at me.
No, I was just saying it's nice to talk to you.
That's what I wanted to do.
Oh, yeah.
No, it's a blast.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Did you, did you, the recent news came out that Tim Walz is a Sega Dreamcast player.
I think this might be what cinches the election, you know?
Can we do another hour on that?
Perfect blue and now he's a monster.
Oh, okay.
We have different attitudes.
So good, dude.
I want to say crazy taxi was on the dreamcast.
One of the launch titles, I believe.
September 9th, 1999, Dreamcast Day.
It was really the first.
Forever and the precursor to that good GTA 3 energy.
Yeah, for real.
I was just thinking about Crazy Taxi as I often am.
And there was the Simpsons ripoff of Crazy Taxi.
It was pretty good, too.
Yeah, hit and run.
Yeah, hit and run.
Great game.
Anyway, think about The Simpsons now, folks.
Touch glass.
Wear sunscreen.
Uh-huh.
Be well.
Bye.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
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