Behind the Bastards - Part One: Lord Haw-Haw: Hitler's Favorite Anglo Propagandist
Aired: 2025-12-16
Duration: 01:05:18


=== Welcome to Behind the Bastards (05:33) ===

[00:00:05]  All right, everybody.
[00:00:06]  Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history.
[00:00:13]  And folks, on a normal week, basically every other week of the year, I read a story about a terrible person that I have researched and written and spent a lot of time on to one of our guests who is generally a comedian or an academic or somebody who we thought would be fun to horrify for roughly two to three hours.
[00:00:33]  This week, we're doing a little bit of a different thing.
[00:00:36]  For one thing, my producer Sophie is not here as she is currently engaged in moving, and that's a whole nightmarish hell.
[00:00:44]  And the other thing that's different, the biggest thing that's different, is that this is going to be a reverse behind the bastards, where a guest is going to read me a story that they have written based on research they've done from a piece of shit in history.
[00:00:56]  And I'd like to welcome a guest, well, the guest host to this episode, someone that you will have seen on It Could Happen here if you're a regular listener of that podcast.
[00:01:05]  Pedrick O'Rourke, welcome to the show.
[00:01:08]  Thank you so much for coming on and for doing the hard work of making an episode for me this week.
[00:01:13]  No problem.
[00:01:14]  Thanks for having me.
[00:01:15]  And Jesus, yeah, it took like just finding the time to write these things.
[00:01:19]  Like I think we discussed this idea first in like February, March, but I only just got it finished.
[00:01:24]  Yeah, you connect.
[00:01:26]  We were connected through our mutual friend Jay Canrahan, and you came on the show to talk about the Irish far right on It Could Happen Here, which was a great episode.
[00:01:33]  And yeah, you pitched around that same time this.
[00:01:36]  And it's obviously like, it's my whole job.
[00:01:39]  So I do, I can, if I find the time to do it every week, I have to.
[00:01:42]  When it's like a side thing you're doing, it takes a long time to write 10,000 words about a shitty person.
[00:01:48]  I still have to turn up to work for my government paymasters.
[00:01:51]  But yeah, there you go.
[00:01:53]  Yeah.
[00:01:53]  Yeah.
[00:01:54]  Well, who are we learning about this week?
[00:01:56]  Well, Robert, as you know, the original plan for this episode was to cover Andrew Windsor, or as he's now known, the alleged rapist formerly known as Prince.
[00:02:05]  Yes.
[00:02:06]  But seeing as how women who annoy the British monarchy occasionally die in suspicious traffic accidents, we would have been putting Sophie's life in danger, and that is why she has gone into hiding.
[00:02:16]  That's right.
[00:02:17]  Yes, to protect her from the British royal family.
[00:02:20]  And as we all know, there's nothing the British royal family and its armed forces love doing more than murdering Irishmen.
[00:02:29]  So my next was on the line too.
[00:02:31]  And I thought it would be safer if we covered a dead bastard instead of Andrew Saxe Coburg.
[00:02:38]  But you'll get around to Prince Andrew someday.
[00:02:43]  Anyway, Robert.
[00:02:43]  Yeah, he is on the list, especially with all this juicy new Epstein stuff that's leaked.
[00:02:48]  Oh, I totally believe him.
[00:02:50]  He's innocent of everything.
[00:02:52]  So, Robert, I know you've heard of this guy because you mentioned him before on a previous podcast.
[00:02:58]  But I was wondering how much do you know or can you recall about William Joyce?
[00:03:02]  Yeah, you're talking about Lord of Hawa, right?
[00:03:04]  That's his, the name he's probably better, certainly better known to Americans by.
[00:03:10]  I read about him for the first time in like one of the first World War II history books I read when I was in May.
[00:03:16]  I couldn't have been much further than fifth or sixth grade.
[00:03:18]  And there was a chapter that talked about him, and it talked about there was kind of a woman in Japan who was sort of the Japanese equivalent of these like radio, like pro-fascist radio stars who would tell Allied soldiers basically, you're all going to get killed over here, you know, disobey your orders or whatnot.
[00:03:37]  Like it's hopeless to try to fight us.
[00:03:39]  That sort of thing.
[00:03:40]  So that's, that's kind of my, it's a very surface level knowledge of the guy.
[00:03:43]  I'm aware that he was like the British equivalent of, and I'm spacing on the name of the, I think it, of the, the, the woman based in Tokyo who was doing the same thing over in the Pacific theater.
[00:03:53]  But yeah, that's, that's what I know about him.
[00:03:55]  That's, that's the guy.
[00:03:56]  Well, this guy has fascinating backstory, terrible personal life, and I think he's great Abbas material.
[00:04:06]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[00:04:08]  Guaranteed human.
[00:04:11]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[00:04:19]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:04:22]  He is not going to get away with this.
[00:04:24]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:04:26]  We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
[00:04:30]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:04:32]  Trust me, babe.
[00:04:33]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:04:42]  What's up, everyone?
[00:04:43]  I'm Ego Modern.
[00:04:44]  My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
[00:04:48]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:04:51]  He goes, just give it a shot.
[00:04:53]  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.
[00:05:00]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:05:02]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
[00:05:09]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:05:11]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:05:12]  There's a lot of life.
[00:05:14]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:05:21]  In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
[00:05:28]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[00:05:32]  I doctored the test once.
[00:05:34]  It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.

=== Joyce's Rebellion in Ireland (15:03) ===

[00:05:39]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[00:05:41]  Greg Gillespie and Michael Manchini.
[00:05:43]  My mind was blown.
[00:05:44]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[00:05:46]  This is Love Trapped.
[00:05:47]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[00:05:49]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[00:05:54]  Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:06:01]  10-10 shots fired in the city hall building.
[00:06:04]  How did this ever happen in City Hall?
[00:06:06]  Somebody tell me that.
[00:06:07]  A shocking public murder.
[00:06:09]  This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
[00:06:15]  They screamed, get down, get down.
[00:06:17]  Those are shots.
[00:06:19]  A tragedy that's now forgotten.
[00:06:22]  And a mystery that may or may not have been political.
[00:06:24]  That may have been about sex.
[00:06:26]  Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:06:38]  So look, we'll jump into it.
[00:06:40]  William Joyce was born.
[00:06:42]  Well, fuck Robert, we're off to a bad start here because no one knows for certain when or where this asshole.
[00:06:48]  I love those ones.
[00:06:50]  Yeah.
[00:06:50]  We do know who his parents were, though.
[00:06:52]  William Joyce was the eldest son of Michael Joyce from Mayo in the west of Ireland and an English woman named Gertrude Brooke, but who was better known as Queenie.
[00:07:04]  Michael Joyce, unlike most Irish immigrants to the USA in the late 1800s, was not a starving peasant.
[00:07:10]  He came from a wealthy farming family and he had gone to America to seek his fortune rather than evade starvation.
[00:07:17]  In the 1880s, he established a successful construction company in Brooklyn and he had enough money to make frequent trips back home to Ireland.
[00:07:26]  Oh, wow, yeah, that is a very rare situation.
[00:07:28]  Somebody who moves from Ireland to the US in the 1800s.
[00:07:31]  He's doing well.
[00:07:33]  So on one such trip to Galway, he meets and falls in love with Gertrude or Queenie.
[00:07:39]  So True Love blossomed, but there were two small problems, racism and religious bigotry.
[00:07:46]  Because back then, the Irish were still considered primeval savages by the English establishment.
[00:07:52]  James Frood, professor of history at Oxford, declared that the Irish were, quote, more like squalid apes than human beings.
[00:08:01]  Was good British.
[00:08:04]  I lived there for a while.
[00:08:05]  I could kind of do the upper class one and the working class, but nothing in between.
[00:08:10]  Anyway, another English academic, John Bedeau, held that the racial inferiority of the Irish made us genetically inclined to criminality, which was evident by studying the skulls and phrenology of Irish.
[00:08:24]  That sounds scientific.
[00:08:25]  Yeah.
[00:08:27]  Who had, quote, a Negro appearance.
[00:08:30]  Oh, boy.
[00:08:31]  Yeah.
[00:08:32]  Oh, wow.
[00:08:33]  Oh, yeah.
[00:08:33]  There's still institutions in Ireland where they have the heads of like Gaelic speakers, the skulls, and we've given back like the Pacific Islanders, but they're kind of like, no, we're holding on to the Irish ones.
[00:08:43]  So some of them have only just come back.
[00:08:45]  But anyway, further complicating matters for these star-crossed lovers, apart from the different nationalities, was the fact that Michael Joyce was a Catholic whilst his fiancée was Protestant.
[00:08:57]  Now, such mixed marriages were controversial at the time, though nobody in Ireland today, well, in Southern Ireland at least, gives a shit about it.
[00:09:05]  So Michael and Gertrude's engagement was so controversial that her parents refused to attend their 1905 New York wedding.
[00:09:14]  Instead, Queenie's parents sent her brother Gilbert, a lawyer, to the ceremony to, quote, see that the thing was done right.
[00:09:22]  Now, there have been many biographies of Joyce, but the best is probably by Colin Holmes, an English academic, who suggests that Joyce was born out of wedlock two years before the marriage.
[00:09:32]  And that is the reason why her family only sent one person to the wedding who was a lawyer.
[00:09:38]  Wow.
[00:09:39]  Wow, that's such a bitchy move.
[00:09:41]  Like, just sending your lawyer to their wife.
[00:09:47]  And he's a family member as well, so they don't even have to pay him.
[00:09:50]  Anyway, so throughout his life, Joyce repeatedly claimed to be born in different years and in different places, probably.
[00:09:57]  Ah, classic bastard.
[00:09:58]  Yeah.
[00:09:59]  Yeah.
[00:10:00]  So William Joyce was born sometime between 1903 and 1906 in either America or Ireland.
[00:10:07]  As a boy, he was baptized in his father's religion of Catholicism.
[00:10:12]  William Joyce's mother wanted to name him William Brooke Joyce, following in the Protestant Irish tradition of co-joining both parents' surnames.
[00:10:21]  But Joyce's Catholic father forbid it because, like his son, he was a gigantic asshole.
[00:10:27]  In 1913, Michael Joyce used his American wealth to buy a pub in his home place of Mayo.
[00:10:34]  But the business failed after Michael Joyce killed one of his best customers.
[00:10:39]  One of his regulars got really drunk one night and Michael, instead of looking after him, simply threw him out of the pub when he ran out of money.
[00:10:47]  This man's body was found lying against the pub wall the next morning.
[00:10:51]  Jesus.
[00:10:52]  Yeah, he had died of hypothermia whilst sheltering against the gable end of the building, trying to get shelter from the wind and the rain.
[00:11:00]  This resulted in all the locals successfully boycotting the bar and the Joyces were forced to sell it.
[00:11:07]  Yeah, that makes sense.
[00:11:08]  Yeah.
[00:11:09]  Like a really good barkeeper here today who knows their locals will like wait till the end of their shift and will actually drive them home, you know?
[00:11:16]  Yeah.
[00:11:17]  So, and I've seen that happen.
[00:11:18]  But anyway, so the family moved to Galway City, where Michael Joyce again invests in real estate.
[00:11:24]  Robert, have you ever been to Galway?
[00:11:26]  Yes, yes, I love it.
[00:11:27]  It's it's it's I mean, I think it's probably the prettiest city I've been to in Ireland.
[00:11:32]  It's my second favorite after I really like Dublin.
[00:11:36]  But yeah, I love Galway.
[00:11:37]  Galway is a great place.
[00:11:39]  It's an incredible party town.
[00:11:40]  And Steve Earl wrote a great song about it called Galway Girl.
[00:11:44]  He sure did.
[00:11:45]  Yeah, but don't listeners confuse it with the Ed Sheeran song of the same name, which is shit.
[00:11:50]  Oh, no, don't.
[00:11:52]  But do listen to Steve Earle.
[00:11:54]  Galway has long been famous as one of the last bastions of indigenous Gaelic Irish culture.
[00:12:00]  And that is exactly why young William Joyce hates Galway, because he hates everything Irish.
[00:12:08]  He wants nothing more throughout his whole life than to be British, which, as Madonna discovered, is very complicated if you're actually an American.
[00:12:18]  William Joyce was the eldest of four children.
[00:12:21]  He was six years older than his brother Quentin, who was the next eldest sibling.
[00:12:25]  So unsurprisingly, for many years, William was spoiled as a mama's boy.
[00:12:30]  Queenie always felt out of place in Irish-American enclaves in Brooklyn and later in Ireland.
[00:12:37]  And while her husband, Michael, was working, Queenie was left alone with baby William and doted on him, telling him, you are the sugar in my tea.
[00:12:46]  Without you, there is no British Empire.
[00:12:49]  And you will be a great man someday.
[00:12:53]  So, Robert, I've sent you a pic, if you can find it there, of we have a picture of Joyce at school.
[00:13:03]  What's the vibe off this kid, if you can bring it up?
[00:13:06]  He looks like a little shit.
[00:13:08]  Like, I'm going to be honest with you.
[00:13:09]  Like, he's got his arms crossed in a way children seldom do.
[00:13:13]  Yeah, and he's like, the only two other people in the group photo who have their arms crossed are the teacher and the teacher's kid who's sitting at his feet.
[00:13:21]  He looks very unpleasant.
[00:13:23]  He looks like he's judging you.
[00:13:25]  Like, he looks like, like, I want to say to him, like, you're not better than me, you little piece of shit.
[00:13:29]  You're just a kid.
[00:13:30]  Like, what the fuck are you looking at me for that?
[00:13:32]  Yeah.
[00:13:33]  That way.
[00:13:34]  Well, remember, without him, there will be no British Empire.
[00:13:36]  So there you go.
[00:13:38]  Well, that's another reason to fight this kid.
[00:13:41]  From an early age, Joyce was noted for being intelligent and precocious.
[00:13:46]  He was a keen chess player and boxer who showed a talent for languages, but he was also a loner.
[00:13:52]  So he came up with a plan to make friends.
[00:13:54]  His dad rented a property to the cops as a police station.
[00:13:58]  And William snuck in one day, stole a gun, and brought it to school.
[00:14:02]  Just a normal friend.
[00:14:02]  Oh, that'll make you friends.
[00:14:04]  Yep.
[00:14:04]  That'll make you friends.
[00:14:06]  So it's totally fine.
[00:14:08]  He doesn't shoot anybody.
[00:14:09]  All the other boys in school think the gun is super cool, but they still think that Joyce, who's brought it in, is a massive dork.
[00:14:17]  So Joyce's parents had enrolled him in a Catholic school.
[00:14:20]  And this may surprise listeners, but the Catholic Church in Ireland in the early 1900s was 100% supportive of British rule.
[00:14:28]  Since the time of the American Revolution, Catholic bishops had condemned every single Irish rebellion against the British.
[00:14:37]  So in return for their loyalty, the British government allowed the Catholic Church to run almost all of the elementary schools in Ireland.
[00:14:44]  This not only...
[00:14:45]  That ended well.
[00:14:46]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:14:48]  That's what we're doing.
[00:14:49]  This not only allowed Catholic priests to ensure the spiritual indoctrination and brainwashing of Irish children, it also gave Catholic priests political power and social status required to ensure a nationwide conveyor belt of children who they could rape and abuse without legal consequence.
[00:15:05]  In the early 20th century, the British government and the Catholic Church implemented a form of cultural genocide to try and destroy any sense of Irish identity their pupils had and to replace this with a sense of Britishness.
[00:15:18]  Children in Catholic-run Irish primary schools had to recite a poem each morning which ran, I thank the goodness and the grace which on my birth had smiled and made me in these Christian days a happy English child.
[00:15:35]  Each year, all elementary schools in Ireland celebrated Empire Day on the 24th of May, when pupils were taught that the British Empire is one big happy family of nations.
[00:15:48]  Like your own families, there is a father and a mother and children.
[00:15:53]  In Britain, the parents are the English and the children are the Scots, Irish and Welsh.
[00:15:59]  If the Scots, Irish or Welsh ever went their own way, then God will be very disappointed.
[00:16:06]  Now, see, that doesn't even make sense with families, because the whole point of a family is that eventually the children are adults and go their own way and get married on their own, right?
[00:16:15]  The whole point of a family isn't the kids are always underneath the parents' thumbs.
[00:16:19]  You know, that's just, that's not even how family really works back then.
[00:16:22]  The analogy also fails because families inevitably end up rowing with each other quite a lot.
[00:16:26]  Right, constantly, yes.
[00:16:28]  The worst fights are between family members.
[00:16:29]  Also, only one family member inherits at this point in time.
[00:16:32]  I don't know.
[00:16:34]  Which is the parents, which is not how it's supposed to work.
[00:16:36]  Anyway, children were then taught the slogan of Empire Day, which was one king, one flag, one fleet, one empire.
[00:16:45]  Remind you of anything, Robert?
[00:16:48]  Yeah, one people, one nation, one volk.
[00:16:50]  Yeah, Ein Volk, Einreich, Ein Fjör.
[00:16:52]  That's it.
[00:16:53]  Yeah, yeah, one Fjor.
[00:16:54]  Sorry.
[00:16:55]  So the Catholic priests running these schools, when they weren't busy abusing Irish children, loved nothing more than to beat the shit out of Irish kids who actually had the audacity to speak Gaelic, their native language.
[00:17:08]  So this is similar, Robert, to what happened to First Nations kids in Canada.
[00:17:14]  But it wasn't as extreme here because even though the English establishment considered us racially inferior, at least we were white.
[00:17:24]  So anyway, young William Joyce just fucking loves all the British imperialism that he is getting in school.
[00:17:32]  And he loves school and education until one day he asked the priest if his Protestant mother would go to heaven when she died.
[00:17:39]  And of course, the priest says, no, your mother is going straight to hell where she will burn in eternal torment forever with all the other Protestants, because that's just how the Catholic Church rolls.
[00:17:51]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:17:52]  It's funny.
[00:17:53]  I had a similar, I grew up Episcopalian and I had a similar talk with a youth group leader about that where I was asking him about like different figures, like Gandhi and stuff.
[00:18:04]  And he was like, oh, no, they're all, everyone else is going to hell.
[00:18:06]  Like everyone who was not the specific kind of Christian that we are is going straight to hell forever.
[00:18:11]  Yeah, at least the Mormons are nice enough to re-baptize the dead and try to get it.
[00:18:15]  Yeah, right.
[00:18:16]  You baptize Anne Frank decades after her death like a normal person.
[00:18:20]  Other things we could criticize the Mormons on, but at least I think they're well-intentioned.
[00:18:26]  Anyway.
[00:18:26]  It is, when you think about it, it's nicer than some of the other things.
[00:18:32]  So Joyce gets super pissed when the priest who's teaching him throws eternal shade on his Protestant mum.
[00:18:38]  So up to this point, he had been a model student, but from then on, he says, fuck homework, and he starts spending all his spare time on politics.
[00:18:45]  And it was an interesting time in Irish politics.
[00:18:48]  So at this time, all of Ireland's north and south was still part of the UK.
[00:18:53]  But after centuries of colonialism, ordinary Irish people were getting tired of being repeatedly fucked over and exploited by an English political elite.
[00:19:02]  So after the outbreak...
[00:19:03]  Yeah, that would get on your nerves.
[00:19:05]  Yeah, after the outbreak of World War I, a broad popular front of Irish Republicans, whose politics are very different to those of American Republicans, these Irish Republicans start planning a rebellion against the English king, who, of course, was then distracted from Irish affairs temporarily by throwing millions of British soldiers at German machine guns in the hope of defeating his cousin and bastard Pod's alumni, Kaiser Wilheim II.
[00:19:31]  Ah, yeah.
[00:19:33]  Yeah.
[00:19:35]  Who was horny for his mother's hands, if your research is correct?
[00:19:39]  Weird hand fetish.
[00:19:40]  Yeah.
[00:19:40]  Yeah.
[00:19:41]  So anyway, the rebellion is known here as the 1916 Rising.
[00:19:45]  It's largely confined to Dublin, but Galway, where William Joyce lived, was one of the few places outside the capital where there was fighting.
[00:19:53]  We don't need to go into all the details on the rebellion here.
[00:19:58]  Basically, the Irish rebels wanted to break free of Britain, establish an independent republic, launched the rebellion in April 1916, fought the British Army, managed to hold out for a week before being defeated.
[00:20:09]  And Margaret Killjoy did a whole series on this rebellion for cool people who did cool stuff.
[00:20:14]  So if you want to learn more about it, you can start there.
[00:20:18]  Yeah.
[00:20:19]  So anyway, this rebellion freaks young William Joyce out.
[00:20:23]  And the following year, when the Bolshevik Revolution happens in Russia, he goes way down the conspiracy rabbit hole.
[00:20:31]  And he's convinced that both the Russian Revolution and the rebellion in Ireland are part of a secret global Irish-German-Jewish Bolshevik plot to destroy the British Empire.

=== The Bolshevik Conspiracy Rabbit Hole (06:06) ===

[00:20:42]  Yeah, that makes sense.
[00:20:43]  Yeah.
[00:20:44]  So Joyce hits on a new plan to make himself popular at school.
[00:20:48]  Instead of bringing another gun to class, that didn't work too well the first time, he decides to tell his classmates about all his favorite new conspiracy theories.
[00:20:57]  Oh boy.
[00:20:58]  Yeah, one of his schoolmates, Owen Keenan, recalled, quote, he was a morose and lonely little fellow.
[00:21:04]  For all his brightness, there was something missing in young Willie.
[00:21:07]  He would give impromptu speeches in the playground, warning us about the growing dangers of Bolshevism.
[00:21:14]  But Robert, do you know who won't make impromptu speeches in the playground warning their playmates about Bolshevism?
[00:21:20]  Some of our sponsors might.
[00:21:21]  I'm not going to categorically say not.
[00:21:24]  But, you know, some of them are fine with it.
[00:21:28]  I was going to say the Irish Republican Army.
[00:21:31]  Yes, that's no.
[00:21:33]  Yeah, the good old IRA, because in 1917, the IRA, despite being almost entirely Catholic, were actually very supportive of Soviet Russia.
[00:21:42]  Robert, remember those 16 pounds of diamonds Zarina and her daughters had sewed into their bodices and they accidentally turned into bulletproof vests during the execution in the basement in E. Katrinenberg?
[00:21:56]  Well, when the Bolsheviks got the diamonds off the corpses, some of them ended up hidden in the chimney of a senior IRA leader in Dublin named Harry Boland after a secret financial, yeah, a secret financial deal between the Soviet Union and the IRA.
[00:22:10]  But that's a long story.
[00:22:11]  We don't have time to go into here.
[00:22:13]  No what we do have time for is ads.
[00:22:16]  That's right.
[00:22:23]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:22:27]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:22:30]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:22:33]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:22:36]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:22:40]  I'm Anna Sinfield.
[00:22:42]  And in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:22:46]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:22:51]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:22:53]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:22:54]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:22:57]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:22:59]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:23:01]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:23:04]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:23:08]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:23:10]  Trust me, babe.
[00:23:11]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:23:20]  What's up, everyone?
[00:23:21]  I'm Ego Modern.
[00:23:22]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
[00:23:30]  It's Will Farrell.
[00:23:33]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:23:37]  I went and had lunch with him one day and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
[00:23:42]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:23:44]  I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
[00:23:48]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[00:23:53]  Yeah.
[00:23:54]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:23:56]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:23:58]  He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[00:24:06]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:24:09]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:24:16]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:24:18]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:24:19]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:24:20]  Yeah.
[00:24:21]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:24:31]  10-10 shots fired.
[00:24:32]  City Hall building.
[00:24:34]  A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
[00:24:38]  From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
[00:24:44]  How could this have happened in City Hall?
[00:24:46]  Somebody tell me that.
[00:24:47]  Jeffrey Hood did.
[00:24:48]  July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
[00:24:55]  Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
[00:24:58]  And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
[00:25:06]  Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
[00:25:09]  A shocking public murder.
[00:25:11]  I scream, get down, get down.
[00:25:12]  Those are shots.
[00:25:13]  Those are shots.
[00:25:14]  Get down.
[00:25:15]  A charismatic politician.
[00:25:16]  You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
[00:25:18]  I still have a weapon and I could shoot you.
[00:25:24]  And an outsider with a secret.
[00:25:26]  He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
[00:25:29]  That may or may not have been political.
[00:25:30]  That may have been about sex.
[00:25:32]  Listening to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
[00:25:36]  Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:25:43]  I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:25:48]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:25:55]  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.
[00:26:02]  From power to parenthood.
[00:26:04]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[00:26:07]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:26:09]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:26:12]  The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop.
[00:26:14]  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.
[00:26:23]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:26:25]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:26:32]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[00:26:33]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:26:36]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

=== IRA Volunteers Target Joyce (14:50) ===

[00:26:49]  Coming back, I gotta say, you have to imagine that guy has to have on at least one occasion have had people over gotten a little bit too drunk and taken the diamonds out.
[00:26:57]  Right?
[00:26:58]  You're gonna be like, you gotta see this shit, man.
[00:27:00]  You gotta come on.
[00:27:01]  Come on.
[00:27:01]  Come on.
[00:27:01]  Have another shot and I gotta show you something fucking nuts.
[00:27:05]  He ended up being shot in 1922, so he didn't live long enough to enjoy the diamonds, but his family had them for years.
[00:27:12]  And then in like the 1950s, the Irish Prime Minister Eamon Devilera like quietly gave them back to Russia to see you guys.
[00:27:21]  All countries were like, maybe we shouldn't mention this.
[00:27:24]  These probably shouldn't be here.
[00:27:25]  Yeah.
[00:27:28]  So anyway, after World War I, there is general election in the UK, which Ireland was then still officially part of.
[00:27:37]  And Sinn Féin, the Irish Republican Rebel Party, won a majority of 73 of the 105 Irish seats in the British Parliament.
[00:27:47]  These 73 Irish Republican members of parliament decided to set up their own assembly in Dublin and at it declared independence from Britain.
[00:27:56]  The British, of course, immediately declared this democratically elected Irish government illegal and Britain's colonial police force in Ireland, the Royal Irish Constabulary or RIC, were mobilised to suppress Irish democracy.
[00:28:10]  The IRA in turn responded with a guerrilla campaign against them, resulting in the Irish War of Independence, which lasted from 1919 to 1921.
[00:28:20]  So in early 1920, conspiracy nerd William Joyce witnessed the British shooting dead an IRA volunteer as part of this conflict in Galway and it thrilled him.
[00:28:32]  And Joyce immediately volunteered to assist the British forces in any way he could.
[00:28:38]  Now, traditionally, British rule in Ireland had been maintained not by the British Army, but by this Irish police force or British police force in Ireland, the Royal Irish Constabulary or RIC.
[00:28:50]  It was largely staffed by Irishmen recruited to keep their fellow natives in line.
[00:28:56]  The RIC basically becomes the model for colonial policing across the British Empire, from India to Palestine to Kenya.
[00:29:04]  And Irishmen in the RIC were generally happy to keep oppressing their fellow Irishmen until the IRA began shooting them dead in large numbers, thus prompting hundreds of Irishmen to resign from the force.
[00:29:17]  Now, this poses a problem for the British government.
[00:29:20]  If they sent the British Army in as the main force fighting the Republicans, they would be admitting that the IRA were a real army and that there was a real war happening.
[00:29:31]  The British line, however, was that the IRA were just a small criminal gang having regular shootouts with the Irish cops.
[00:29:39]  So in response, the British government invented the black and tan.
[00:29:43]  Now, Robert, this will surprise some of your listeners, but the phrase black and tan can refer to several different things.
[00:29:51]  So listeners in LA will know they have a local uniform club for gay men called the Black and Tan Society.
[00:29:59]  Different thing.
[00:30:00]  Different thing.
[00:30:01]  Most Americans will know a cocktail of the same name they drink along with disgusting green beer on St Patrick's Day.
[00:30:08]  But in Ireland, the phrase has a different meaning.
[00:30:11]  If you ever walk into a real Irish bar in Ireland and order a black and tan or an Irish carbon for that matter, you are very likely, I have seen this happen, you are very likely to get the shit kicked out of you.
[00:30:24]  Yeah, not a good move.
[00:30:26]  Yeah, this is because the drink, the cocktail, the black and tan, is named after the largely English mercenaries recruited into the RIC during the War of Independence, who gained a fairly well-deserved reputation for committing war crimes against the Irish, including torture, murder, arson and rape.
[00:30:44]  So anyway, back to our bastard, William Joyce.
[00:30:47]  He sees the tans.
[00:30:48]  Pretty good song about fighting them.
[00:30:49]  Yeah.
[00:30:51]  Check out Steve Coogan's Alan Partridge version of that song.
[00:30:54]  It's brilliant.
[00:30:55]  Yeah, it is.
[00:30:56]  So anyway, back to our bastard, William Joyce.
[00:30:58]  He sees the Tans coming to Ireland in 1920 and he is cheering them on.
[00:31:03]  Now, some pro-British loyalists in Ireland, like Joyce, do join the Black and Tans.
[00:31:10]  But remember, this kid is something around 15 years old at the time, so he's too young to officially become a cop.
[00:31:17]  So instead, Joyce ingratiates himself with members of the RIC and the Black and Tans by volunteering to run errands for them, buying their cigarettes in shops at a time when Irish shopkeepers refused to serve British troops, that kind of thing, real low-level stuff.
[00:31:34]  Joyce also passed on whatever scraps of information about IRA activity that he could gather from loose talk around the town, and he would give this to his British pals.
[00:31:45]  He also volunteered as an identifier for RIC patrols, traveling in their motor convoys to point out the homes of IRA members and sympathisers, which were then raided.
[00:31:56]  They needed him because remember, a lot of the new RIC recruits were Englishmen who didn't have a clue where they were going or who they were looking for.
[00:32:05]  Some members of the RIC saw Joyce as their teenage mascot.
[00:32:08]  Others found Joyce a nuisance.
[00:32:10]  And one Irish RIC constable later recalled, quote, he was one of our greatest embarrassments.
[00:32:17]  His trouble was fanatical patriotism to England and a burning wish to fight the rebels.
[00:32:23]  He often tried to smuggle himself into our lorries.
[00:32:26]  We laughed at him, but if he was killed or wounded, it would have caused our patrol a lot of trouble.
[00:32:32]  According to Douglas, yeah, according to Douglas, yeah, it's just, it's a war zone.
[00:32:38]  I think I'll jump on this Humvee and take a ride around and point out the houses of the insurgents.
[00:32:43]  Let's see how that works.
[00:32:44]  That's not going to piss anybody off.
[00:32:46]  No.
[00:32:47]  According to Douglas V. Duff, an English black and tan from Dorchester, Joyce eventually became such an annoyance that when they found him stowed away one day on their patrol boat, they threw him into the middle of Galway Harbour and he had to swim back to shore.
[00:33:02]  That's a warm harbour.
[00:33:03]  Yeah, not a warm harbour.
[00:33:06]  It's mostly filled with bottles of Buckfast now, if you know Galway.
[00:33:09]  Anyway, Joyce overcame this setback to ingratiate himself with an even worse group of British paramilitary police, the Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary, more commonly known here in Ireland as the Oxys.
[00:33:26]  Now, the Ogsies were similar to the Tans or the Black and Tans, but instead of being recruited from ordinary low-ranking ex-British soldiers, they were only recruited from ex-officers.
[00:33:40]  So they're a bit like an elite kind of special forces unit.
[00:33:44]  The Oxys were a much more effective fighting force.
[00:33:48]  They were much more extreme in their methods, more ruthless, more violent and determined than the Tans.
[00:33:53]  To quote one of the IRA's most famous leaders of that era, Tom Barry, quote, there were good and bad men amongst the Tans, but the Ogsies were bastards to a man.
[00:34:05]  Short and sweet.
[00:34:06]  Yeah.
[00:34:08]  Not a man who mixed these words.
[00:34:09]  When D Company of the Ogsys arrived in Galway, Joyce immediately volunteered to help them with the same kind of low-level intelligence work that he had done for the Tans.
[00:34:20]  D Company were one of the worst Ogsy units.
[00:34:23]  In a notorious incident in November 1920, they shot dead Eileen Quinn, a 24-year-old woman who was seven months pregnant.
[00:34:31]  Quinn had been sitting on a wall outside her home, breastfeeding her nine-month-old child when the Ogsies drove up to the house and shot her dead at point-blank range without warning.
[00:34:43]  D Company specialised in abducting IRA members and sympathisers and torturing and murdering them before mutilating their bodies and burying them in bogs.
[00:34:52]  The same month that they shot Eileen Quinn dead, D Company captured brothers Harry and Patrick Lochnan, who were both members of the IRA.
[00:35:02]  The Loch Nan brothers were tied to the back of a British Army lorry and forced to run behind it as it travelled at speed.
[00:35:09]  When they inevitably fell, exhausted, the van continued to drive, dragging the men along the road surface until they were dead.
[00:35:17]  The Augsies then carved their unit insignia into the flesh of Patrick Lochnan's chest and cut off two of Harry's fingers to keep as souvenirs.
[00:35:25]  Eventually, they set fire to the body and dumped them in a leg.
[00:35:29]  So very reminiscent of kind of stuff that was done to the Viet Cong by US.
[00:35:34]  Viet Cong.
[00:35:35]  I mean, it's reminiscent of stuff you've seen in the American, like in Texas, where I come from, there was a very famous case of a young gay man who was killed by being dragged behind a car, stuff like that.
[00:35:47]  And you hear, I mean, like the, I'm thinking of the Berkut in Ukraine, which, you know, would do these.
[00:35:53]  It wasn't so much dragging people to death, but it was like throwing them naked into freezing snowbanks, activists and killing them that way.
[00:35:59]  Like, I think there's a lot of things that makes me think of.
[00:36:03]  Yeah, it's incredible what people are capable of.
[00:36:05]  But anyway, you and I, for some reason, find it fascinating to read about this.
[00:36:10]  D Company also abducted and murdered Michael Tolin, a physically disabled IRA intelligence officer, who they castrated and shot dead before burying his body in a bog.
[00:36:22]  D Company's best known victim was one of the few Catholic priests who actually supported the IRA, Father Michael Griffin.
[00:36:29]  Father Griffin was abducted from his home, shot dead and buried in the bog west of Galway City.
[00:36:35]  Now later rumors would claim, and you'll still find this online, that William Joyce, as a local young boy, had played a role in luring Father Griffin out of his home.
[00:36:45]  But there is no reliable historical evidence to support this.
[00:36:50]  But these murders will give you, the listener, an idea of the kind of people Joyce is now working for.
[00:36:57]  So as the war drags on into 1921, Joyce came to the attention of Captain William Keating, head of British Army Intelligence in Galway.
[00:37:06]  Now Keating probably knew Joyce personally as both of his sons attended the same school as Joyce.
[00:37:12]  Keating decided to recruit Joyce as a courier.
[00:37:15]  So by now he's not a British soldier.
[00:37:18]  He's not an official member of the British Army, but he is on their payroll and working for the army was seen as being more respectable than doing errands for a paramilitary police force.
[00:37:31]  So the Irish War of Independence ends on the 11th of July 1921.
[00:37:36]  About 2,300 people were killed in the conflict.
[00:37:40]  Now that may not seem like much, but remember Ireland is a very small country with a small population.
[00:37:47]  So to put that in perspective, think of what you know about the north of Ireland, Northern Ireland, and how vicious the conflict was there.
[00:37:55]  The Irish War of Independence saw 2,300 people killed in just three years, compared to 3,700 people dying in the troubles in the north over 30 years.
[00:38:06]  So it's a much more condensed version of the conflict.
[00:38:10]  Higher intensity conflict.
[00:38:12]  Whilst the ceasefire was holding, the IRA were still gathering intelligence.
[00:38:18]  Joyce was on their radar before this.
[00:38:20]  Now, they had known all along that he was a British loyalist, but he was by far, wasn't the only British loyalist who was around.
[00:38:28]  But they didn't know how involved he was in assisting the British forces until they intercepted a British cipher code being sent to him in the mail.
[00:38:38]  At this point, the IRA sanctioned Joyce's execution as an enemy agent, but they could not kill him because it would have been a breach of the ceasefire and it would have interfered with the political negotiations which were then ongoing.
[00:38:52]  Joyce discovered that the IRA were onto him, but for the moment, they couldn't lay a finger on him.
[00:38:58]  And he really revels in this.
[00:39:00]  He decides to rob the IRA's faces in it.
[00:39:03]  So he starts openly associating with the British forces in Galway, who are kind of like his, you know, protection unit.
[00:39:10]  There's going to be no more disguises or cloak and dagger shit.
[00:39:13]  He's just letting it all hang out in the open.
[00:39:16]  So one day, Michael Staines, who's a senior IRA leader and member of the rebel Irish government, was walking through Galway when he encountered William Joyce.
[00:39:25]  Quote, William Joyce was quite a young fellow, about 16 years of age.
[00:39:30]  I saw him with some members of the RIC Auxiliary Division, and as I went by, he passed some jeering remarks and actually spat at me.
[00:39:38]  There was an IRA volunteer with me who wanted to shoot Joyce there and then.
[00:39:43]  So he's got some balls, this kid.
[00:39:47]  Yeah.
[00:39:48]  Stains was one of the liaison officers between the IRA and the British military during the ceasefire.
[00:39:55]  And he was unsurprisingly super pissed about this.
[00:39:58]  And he marched straight into the office of British Divisional Commissioner Cruz, who was commanding that unit we talked about, D Company of the Oxies.
[00:40:07]  And Staines let him know in no uncertain terms that the IRA were onto Joyce and that he was fucked if the ceasefire did not hold.
[00:40:16]  Joyce knew the IRA could not do shit to him for as long as peace talks were ongoing and he basically thinks that it's all going to work out fine for him.
[00:40:25]  But in December of 1921, a section of the rebel Irish government reached a peace deal with the British.
[00:40:32]  Now, this is complex, but all you need to know is that the treaty they agreed on in late 1921, early 1922, divided Ireland into the two parts it's in now.
[00:40:44]  The north of Ireland or Northern Ireland, give it its official name, which would stay part of the UK, whilst the southern part of Ireland was going to get partial independence, kind of on the same basis that Canada had within the British Empire at the time, something called Dominion status.
[00:41:00]  So under this peace deal, which of course didn't deliver a lasting peace in Ireland, that's another story, the British pulled all their troops out of the south of Ireland and moved them either back to Britain or up to the north.
[00:41:13]  The first to withdraw were the units that William Joyce had been most closely associated with in the RIC.
[00:41:21]  So now Joyce is in trouble.
[00:41:22]  His RIC bodyguards are leaving Galway and the IRA will soon be in total control of the city once the British Army finishes its evacuation.
[00:41:32]  And at this point, William Joyce is forced to stop spitting at the leaders of the IRA and he goes into hiding.

=== British Troops Withdraw from South (06:07) ===

[00:41:39]  Yeah, not so cocky are you now, Joyce?
[00:41:44]  Just when it looks like Joyce is fucked, fate steps in and saves him.
[00:41:48]  And this, I think, is one of the interesting things about him.
[00:41:50]  This is going to happen a few times in his life where either a person or circumstances change at the last second to his benefit.
[00:41:58]  And in 1921, his saviour was Captain Keating, who had recruited Joyce as a courier for the British Army.
[00:42:05]  Keating arranged for Joyce to be enlisted in the Worcester Regiment and transferred to England, thus saving him from the otherwise certain fate of being assassinated by the IRA for being a British intelligence agent.
[00:42:19]  But Robert, do you know who won't assassinate British intelligence agents?
[00:42:25]  I mean, I would hope our podcast sponsors would be capable of doing that.
[00:42:31]  You know, that's certainly something we ask each of them.
[00:42:34]  Could you kill James Bond theoretically, like if he tried to interfere with your operations?
[00:42:39]  And they all say yes, but could they be lying to me?
[00:42:42]  It's possible.
[00:42:43]  Possibly, because I would have thought, would a British intelligence agent lie to you?
[00:42:47]  Never.
[00:42:47]  I would have thought that unlike the IRA, they all support King Sausage Fingers himself, Charles III of England, and his weird brother Andrew, who definitely has not done anything untoward in Geoffrey Epstein's company.
[00:43:00]  No, no, he's just stopping the prince for no reason.
[00:43:09]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:43:13]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:43:17]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:43:20]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:43:23]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:43:27]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
[00:43:31]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:43:33]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:43:38]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:43:39]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:43:41]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:43:43]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:43:46]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:43:48]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:43:50]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:43:55]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:43:56]  Trust me, babe.
[00:43:57]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:44:07]  What's up, everyone?
[00:44:08]  I'm Ego Modern.
[00:44:09]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
[00:44:20]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:44:23]  I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
[00:44:28]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:44:31]  I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place to come.
[00:44:34]  Look for up and coming talent.
[00:44:35]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[00:44:40]  Yeah.
[00:44:40]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:44:43]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:44:45]  He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[00:44:53]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:44:56]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:45:03]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:45:05]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:45:06]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:45:08]  Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:45:17]  10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
[00:45:20]  A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
[00:45:25]  From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
[00:45:31]  How could this have happened in City Hall?
[00:45:33]  Somebody tell me that!
[00:45:33]  Jeffrey Hood did it.
[00:45:35]  July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
[00:45:42]  Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
[00:45:45]  And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
[00:45:53]  Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
[00:45:56]  A shocking public murder.
[00:45:57]  I screamed, get down, get down.
[00:45:59]  Those are shots.
[00:46:00]  Those are shots.
[00:46:01]  Get down.
[00:46:01]  A charismatic politician.
[00:46:03]  You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
[00:46:05]  I still have a weapon.
[00:46:07]  And I could shoot you.
[00:46:11]  And an outsider with a secret.
[00:46:12]  He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
[00:46:15]  That may or may not have been political.
[00:46:17]  That may have been about sex.
[00:46:19]  Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
[00:46:23]  Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:46:29]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:46:35]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:46:40]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:46:45]  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.
[00:46:55]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:47:00]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:47:03]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:47:06]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:47:08]  That's so funny.
[00:47:09]  Share each day with me each night, each morning.
[00:47:18]  Say you love me.
[00:47:21]  You know I.
[00:47:22]  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.
[00:47:34]  And we're back.
[00:47:36]  So I wonder how Kuzon media's lawyers feel about that last ad pivot.
[00:47:41]  Anyway.
[00:47:42]  I feel like it's pretty safe these days.

=== Fascism and Far Right History (13:19) ===

[00:47:46]  I don't enjoy the First Amendment rights and legal terms you have, so I have to be more careful in Ireland.
[00:47:52]  Anyway, although I suspect Prince Andrew won't be leaving the jurisdiction of Britain anytime soon.
[00:47:58]  If we have one right in the United States, it's talking shit about the British royal family.
[00:48:06]  Kind of foundational.
[00:48:07]  Yeah.
[00:48:09]  So in early 1922, young William Joyce is safe from the IRA.
[00:48:13]  He's living in a British Army barracks in England, but by now the British, of course, have no real use for him.
[00:48:20]  He had a purpose when he was in Ireland, but now that the British have done a deal with a faction of the Irish rebels, their focus is on their other imperialist projects in Egypt, in India, in Palestine, where Joyce would, of course, have been useless.
[00:48:35]  So he was probably underage.
[00:48:37]  He was definitely physically unfit and he had never fired a gun in combat.
[00:48:41]  So within a few months, he gets kicked out of the British Army.
[00:48:45]  Now, William Joyce enrolled in Birkbeck College in London, where he joined the college branch of the British Conservative and Unionist Party, also known as the Tory Party.
[00:48:59]  And he was hoping that he would find his political soulmates there.
[00:49:03]  Instead, he was disappointed that they weren't supportive enough of the Irish loyalist cause.
[00:49:10]  And he was disappointed because they didn't express the same interest in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Irish affairs that he did.
[00:49:18]  That's a shame.
[00:49:19]  Political disappointments aside, he managed to graduate with a degree in English.
[00:49:24]  He toyed with the idea of studying for a master's in history, but never put the required effort into securing a place at university.
[00:49:32]  When asked about this failure later in life, he fabricated the excuse that, quote, some thieving Jew had stolen his research.
[00:49:40]  Next, he applied for a job in the British government's foreign office.
[00:49:43]  And when this application was rejected, he again used the excuse that the Jews were responsible.
[00:49:49]  Sure.
[00:49:50]  No, yeah.
[00:49:50]  Keep going back to that well, buddy.
[00:49:52]  Yeah.
[00:49:53]  Joyce eventually got a job as a high school teacher teaching English in England, a country where everybody already spoke the language.
[00:50:02]  I'm reminded of Ralph Wiggum in The Simpsons.
[00:50:05]  Me fail English?
[00:50:06]  That's impossible.
[00:50:10]  At the time that he was working as a teacher, his conservative anti-Semitic politics were becoming even more extreme.
[00:50:18]  And he kept ranting on about how a supposed Jewish communist cabal were responsible for the creation of the IRA and for all his misfortunes in Ireland.
[00:50:27]  But again, this was in England, where despite ruling us, very few of the people except for the most hardcore conservatives really knew or cared anything about Ireland, so he was largely ignored.
[00:50:39]  But things were soon to change for young Willie.
[00:50:42]  In late 1922, an Italian asshole named Mussolini put fascism on the world stage.
[00:50:47]  And in early 1923, these British fanboys formed England's first fascist group.
[00:50:54]  On the 6th of May 1923, Miss Rotha Linton Orman, the daughter of British Army war hero Major Charles Orman, decided to found the British Fascisti.
[00:51:07]  She had previously helped found the Girl Scouts and had been a suffragette and an ambulance driver during World War I.
[00:51:16]  Yeah, she placed a series of six adverts in the Duke of Northumberland's newspaper The Patriot, which was infamous for peddling conspiracy theories and xenophobia.
[00:51:26]  I've sent you a picture of her, Robert.
[00:51:28]  It's well worth looking up just to get an idea of her vibe and her energy.
[00:51:33]  Oh, yeah.
[00:51:34]  I mean, she definitely looks like...
[00:51:37]  She definitely looks like someone who would both be a suffragette and also a fascist activist.
[00:51:41]  Like she's put together in that way.
[00:51:45]  Yeah.
[00:51:47]  Yeah, it's worth googling other pictures of her and finding out more about her.
[00:51:51]  Fascinating person.
[00:51:52]  But anyway, the British Fascisti campaigned to protect Britain from communism, socialism, Irish republicanism, anarchism, trade unionism, atheism and free love.
[00:52:02]  So they probably weren't...
[00:52:04]  All the isms, geez.
[00:52:05]  All the isms.
[00:52:06]  Every one of them.
[00:52:07]  They probably weren't much fun at parties.
[00:52:10]  No.
[00:52:10]  Linton Orman claimed the moral, spiritual, and fundamental objects of British and Italian fascists are identical.
[00:52:19]  Those joining the British Fascisti were required to swear an oath to uphold His Majesty gracious King George, his heirs and successes, and to render every service in the struggle against all treacherous revolutionary movements now working for the destruction of the monarchy and the British Empire.
[00:52:41]  In the early years, there was a significant crossover membership between the British Fascisti and the British Conservative Party.
[00:52:48]  The group's primary activity was to act as bodyguards for conservative politicians and protect conservative meetings from interference by left-wing hecklers.
[00:53:00]  Joyce joined the British Fascisti in London shortly after their formation, and he was soon promoted to commander of I-Squad.
[00:53:10]  On the 24th of October 1924, Joyce led the members of his unit to the constituency of Lambeth North, where they had been tasked with acting as an honor guard for an election rally for the local conservative candidate.
[00:53:25]  The meeting was disrupted by a group of anti-fascist protesters, one of whom attacked Joyce, slashing his face from the right corner of his mouth to his right ear with a straight razor.
[00:53:36]  See, I can already see the problem, which is that, you know, great instincts, but if you just slash someone in the face, you're going to wind up making them look cool.
[00:53:44]  Like if you just give someone a facial scar, you're going to wind up making them look cooler.
[00:53:49]  Yeah, and you have, I sent you an image there or people can Google it.
[00:53:52]  You've probably seen it before, Robert.
[00:53:54]  That's a great series.
[00:53:56]  Ah, yeah.
[00:53:57]  No, that's the scar they all want to have.
[00:53:59]  Try it up to the ear.
[00:54:00]  Yeah, because this is the thing that like the SS and German military guys love fencing without masks and they want Disgramma, the scar, whereas Joyce is...
[00:54:09]  The dueling scar.
[00:54:11]  You couldn't buy a better scar than that.
[00:54:13]  No, if you went to a fancy dueling college.
[00:54:15]  It's like a fucking James Bond villain scar.
[00:54:18]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:54:19]  It's like a fake scar.
[00:54:22]  Anyway, Joyce is left with a prominent facial scar for the rest of his life.
[00:54:26]  And he claimed that a male Jewish communist had attacked him.
[00:54:30]  However, his first wife, Hazel, later told his biographer Colin Holmes, it wasn't the Jewish communist who disfigured him.
[00:54:37]  He was knifed by an Irish woman.
[00:54:39]  Now, unfortunately, we don't know who this hero Irish woman was.
[00:54:44]  I think it was probably Jake Hanrahan's great-grandmother.
[00:54:48]  Once again, Joyce was blaming Jews for all his problems.
[00:54:53]  But the anti-fascist protesters had mostly been Irish Republican sympathisers who according to press reports interrupted the meeting by singing Irish rebel songs and heckling before attempting to storm the platform and seize the British flag.
[00:55:07]  The protesters appear to have been aware of Joyce's presence and his previous work as a spy for the British in Ireland.
[00:55:14]  A reporter for the Lambeth Free Press described the scene.
[00:55:18]  The tumult was terrific and the speaker could not be heard.
[00:55:21]  A few young men began to sing come back to Aaron.
[00:55:24]  A couple of men apparently came to blows and the crowd surged forward.
[00:55:28]  The excitement was tremendous and from out of the crowd there suddenly emerged a young steward with blood streaming from a nasty gash in the cheek.
[00:55:36]  Mr William Joyce of Alison Grove Dalich was led to the rear and was supposedly taken to Lambeth Infirmary for treatment.
[00:55:43]  It is stated that he was slashed with a razor.
[00:55:47]  So Joyce's assailant was most likely a member of Cumin the Mon who were the IRA's female counterpart and whoever she was she was not the only Irish woman in the 20s to try and assassinate a fascist leader leaving them with a permanent scar.
[00:56:03]  The other was Violet Gibson who in April 1926 attempted to assassinate Mussolini by shooting him in the head at a public rally.
[00:56:11]  At the last microsecond Mussolini turned his head and survived minus a small part of the bridge of his nose which he succeeded in shooting off.
[00:56:19]  Mussolini appeared in public wearing a prominent bandage on his face for several weeks afterwards.
[00:56:24]  History does not repeat itself but it does tend to rhyme a lot.
[00:56:29]  Yeah that's oh boy.
[00:56:30]  Probably the less said about that the better.
[00:56:33]  Time is a flat circle Robert.
[00:56:35]  Anyway William Joyce was hospitalised for several weeks recovering from his facial wound but he was troubled by the possibility that he might miss the Armistice Day commemorations on the 11th of November which commemorated the British war dead of World War I.
[00:56:53]  From the 1920s this event had always been hugely popular with the British far right and today this tradition is still maintained by the neo-Nazi group the National Front which still holds a march to the Cenotaph in London every Remembrance Sunday.
[00:57:08]  On the 11th of November 1924 Joyce snuck out of hospital without being medically discharged so that he could attend the ceremony but he was still so weak from his injuries that the IRA had inflicted on him that he collapsed.
[00:57:21]  He was given first aid by a fellow fascist at the ceremony named Hazel Barr who was to become the future Mrs William Joyce.
[00:57:31]  Joyce got a job teaching at a school in Chelsea in London.
[00:57:34]  The pair married in 1927 and she soon became pregnant.
[00:57:38]  The same year he began an illicit sexual relationship with one of his pupils named Mary Ogilvy.
[00:57:45]  The age of consent in Britain at the time was 16 and the pair claimed that their relationship didn't begin until she turned 16 which I'm not entirely sure is true but I have no way of proving or disproving it completely.
[00:58:00]  At this time Joyce was between 21 and 25 years of age so I reckon it's borderline whether you can accurately call him a paedophile or not.
[00:58:10]  I say paedophile you say pedophile, potato, potato.
[00:58:15]  But look whether or not we can technically call Joyce a paedophile, the relationship is pretty creepy on Joyce's part.
[00:58:22]  He's barely back from his honeymoon.
[00:58:24]  He's cheating on his pregnant wife with a teenage schoolgirl who's probably a decade younger than him.
[00:58:30]  So at the very least it's an abuse of power from an authority figure of a vulnerable minor in their care.
[00:58:36]  Yeah.
[00:58:37]  So anyway Joyce's wife appears to have been unaware of the affair and she gave birth to their first daughter named after her mother Hazel and a few years later the couple had a second daughter.
[00:58:50]  The dismarital and domestic drama aside, Joyce was still an active member of the British fascistity into the late 1920s, but he drifted away when the movement began to flounder in the early 1930s.
[00:59:04]  The movement had always been bankrolled by Rotha Linton Ormond's wealthy mother, who immediately cut off finances for her daughter when she heard lurid rumors about her daughter's morphine habit and involvement in alcohol-fueled orgies at their country mansion.
[00:59:20]  Cut off financially, Ormond grew increasingly dependent on alcohol and drugs and died within a year, Santa Brigada under Canary Islands, just 40 years of age.
[00:59:31]  So for the second time in his life, Joyce was politically adrift, having been failed by his political messiah.
[00:59:39]  The first political leader to fail Joyce had been his childhood hero, Sir Edward Carson, the Irish loyalist leader who had led the pro-British movement against the IRA and any form of Irish independence.
[00:59:52]  Incidentally, Carson was also the barrister who led the prosecution of Oscar Wilde for sodomy.
[00:59:58]  Oh, good.
[00:59:58]  Yep, there you are.
[00:59:59]  He's ticking all the boxes.
[01:00:00]  However, Carson had failed Joyce when he signed up to an agreement with the British in the early 1920s.
[01:00:08]  And that saw Southern Ireland, as we mentioned, begin to break away from England and effectively abandoning pro-British families like the Joyces in the south of Ireland.
[01:00:18]  So now a decade later, he had been failed again by the founder, Linton Ormond, who had died in obscurity instead of delivering a fascist Britain.
[01:00:28]  So in the early 1930s, Joyce was once more politically adrift when a new political savior loomed into view.
[01:00:35]  And that is where we are going to end it for today.
[01:00:40]  What do you think so far, Robert?
[01:00:43]  Boy, packed a lot of bastardry into this episode already.
[01:00:48]  I'm excited to see where he goes from here.
[01:00:50]  This is just stuff people don't talk about.
[01:00:52]  Everyone rushes straight to World War II, but I think this is fascinating.
[01:00:56]  No, no, why this guy was a piece of shit, wasn't just a piece of shit for opportunistic reasons.
[01:01:01]  He was a dedicated piece of shit.
[01:01:02]  He worked at being a piece.
[01:01:04]  You can't take that away from him, you know?

=== A Dedicated Piece of Shit (04:12) ===

[01:01:06]  That's not fair.
[01:01:07]  He put in the hours to be a piece of shit.
[01:01:10]  He didn't just start late in his career.
[01:01:13]  I'm a believer in honoring hard work.
[01:01:15]  He's bringing guns to school and spitting at IRA leaders and his teens.
[01:01:20]  Like, yeah, he's a piece of work.
[01:01:22]  So, Ross.
[01:01:24]  Another thing that's a piece of work are your pluggables.
[01:01:26]  What do you have to plug?
[01:01:28]  Oh, you're asking my pluggables.
[01:01:29]  I mean, if you're here, you listen to my podcast.
[01:01:31]  So you know basically where to find me.
[01:01:34]  What about yours?
[01:01:35]  Well, I have a book out.
[01:01:37]  It is called Burn Them Out.
[01:01:40]  It is a history of fascism and the far right in Ireland.
[01:01:43]  That's the title.
[01:01:44]  And it is published by Bloomsbury Head of Zeus.
[01:01:48]  So if you just Google Burn Them Out Irish Fascism, it should come up.
[01:01:52]  And you can buy that online or in all good bookshops and some bad ones.
[01:01:57]  Excellent.
[01:01:58]  Well, find it at a good bookshop or a bad one.
[01:02:00]  You know, I'm assuming you get money either way.
[01:02:03]  Yeah, I'm not sure if I still get money if people shocklift it, but I assume I do.
[01:02:07]  No.
[01:02:07]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:02:08]  I mean, one way or the other, the book has moved.
[01:02:10]  Right?
[01:02:11]  The book has moved.
[01:02:12]  Somebody has read it.
[01:02:13]  Yeah.
[01:02:14]  All right, everybody.
[01:02:14]  This has been Behind the Bastards.
[01:02:16]  We will be back on Thursday with part two of this story.
[01:02:19]  Until then, have a nice time.
[01:02:25]  Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
[01:02:28]  For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Hapa Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:02:38]  Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube.
[01:02:40]  New episodes every Wednesday and Friday.
[01:02:43]  Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at behind the bastards.
[01:02:50]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[01:02:58]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[01:03:01]  He is not going to get away with this.
[01:03:03]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[01:03:05]  We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
[01:03:10]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[01:03:11]  Trust me, babe.
[01:03:12]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:03:21]  What's up, everyone?
[01:03:22]  I'm Ago Modern.
[01:03:24]  My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
[01:03:28]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[01:03:31]  He goes, just give it a shot.
[01:03:32]  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.
[01:03:39]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[01:03:41]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
[01:03:49]  Yeah, it would not be.
[01:03:51]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[01:03:52]  There's a lot of life.
[01:03:53]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:04:01]  In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
[01:04:08]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[01:04:11]  I doctored the test once.
[01:04:13]  It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
[01:04:18]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[01:04:20]  Ray Gillespie and Michael Mancini.
[01:04:22]  My mind was blown.
[01:04:24]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[01:04:25]  This is Love Trapped.
[01:04:27]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[01:04:29]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[01:04:33]  Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:04:40]  10-10 shots fired in the City Hall building.
[01:04:43]  How could this have happened in City Hall?
[01:04:45]  Somebody tell me that.
[01:04:47]  A shocking public murder.
[01:04:48]  This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
[01:04:55]  They screamed, get down, get down.
[01:04:57]  Those are shots.
[01:04:58]  A tragedy that's now forgotten.
[01:05:01]  And a mystery that may or may not have been political.
[01:05:04]  That may have been about sex.
[01:05:05]  Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:05:14]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[01:05:17]  Guaranteed human.