Speaker 1: Also media, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, part three
Speaker 1: of our series on hl Hunt this week.
Speaker 2: You are welcome, but you all should really thank Princess Weeks,
Speaker 2: our wonderful guest, for agreeing to sit in for a
Speaker 2: third episode in a marathon recording session. Thank you, Princess,
Speaker 2: you are braver than the troops.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 4: I love to learn, and I honestly just genuinely love
Speaker 4: hearing about this stuff.
Speaker 3: This is so fascinating, yeah and terrible.
Speaker 2: Well, I love telling you about it. Let's start by
Speaker 2: talking about our boy HL Hunt's second family, right because
Speaker 2: I discussed how they he eventually moves them up to
Speaker 2: New York and has a guy marry them. What I
Speaker 2: did not note because I went in and kind of
Speaker 2: added some stuff to the script once I realized that
Speaker 2: we're gonna wind up getting three parts, and I found
Speaker 2: something I'd forgotten to add that was in my notestock,
Speaker 2: which is that apparently Frannia, like when he marries her,
Speaker 2: she didn't even know his real first name, like he
Speaker 2: marries her under a fake name.
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 2: And one of the notes that Hinderschott has in her
Speaker 2: book is that he probably she probably first starts suspecting
Speaker 2: that something's weird when they have their first child, who
Speaker 2: is a girl, just like his first child with Leida,
Speaker 2: and he names her Harold Dina, which is not he's
Speaker 2: not telling her his first name is Harold, but he
Speaker 2: names her after himself, and he names her he tries
Speaker 2: to name her Harold Dina God, which is like crazy,
Speaker 2: but I'm not Harold, that's not my name. Why are
Speaker 2: you so? Why is that so important to you?
Speaker 4: Man?
Speaker 2: That's really weird, right, like be better? Yeah, no, that's
Speaker 2: just bizarre.
Speaker 3: What an odd guy.
Speaker 2: When she finds out, he tries to get her before
Speaker 2: he moves to New York. He tries to convince Frannia
Speaker 2: to move to Utah and come a Mormon so that
Speaker 2: they can legally quote unquote be big amous.
Speaker 3: The role book that changes. The role book never changes.
Speaker 3: He's like, listen, babe, we can get a farm Mormons
Speaker 3: latter day.
Speaker 2: Let's not go in. First off, your first wife wouldn't
Speaker 2: be in Utah. Second, you're not Mormon, but I could be.
Speaker 3: And that's what.
Speaker 2: Yes, it's when that stuff doesn't work that he like
Speaker 2: pays her to move to New York right and sets
Speaker 2: up trust for all the kids and finds someone to
Speaker 2: marry them and pretend to be the father. Now this
Speaker 2: is he's just going to get and have kids with
Speaker 2: a third woman after this. Uh, And I think he's
Speaker 2: I think actually this after light it dies that he
Speaker 2: has his third partner, but I'm not one hundred percent sure.
Speaker 2: But they wind up having several kids and he like
Speaker 2: lives with them later in life in Dallas. Uh. But
Speaker 2: he doesn't ever marry her, right because he's wow, you know,
Speaker 2: he take.
Speaker 3: His money, letting no broads take my money this.
Speaker 2: Day at least, I'm not going to be bigamously married again.
Speaker 2: I'm sure he winds out. I think he does actually
Speaker 2: give them a lot of money, but yeah, he doesn't
Speaker 2: want to. He's not going to get bigamously married again.
Speaker 2: So the need to seem fair and unbiased meant that Smoot,
Speaker 2: you know, on the facts for him, his former FBI
Speaker 2: man host has to act like he respects the liberal
Speaker 2: lion on things, but he's always visibly more interested in
Speaker 2: the conservative arguments. Another good example of that would come
Speaker 2: from one time Smoot gets asked, should we continue to
Speaker 2: handle Korea as a limited police action? You know this
Speaker 2: is right at the start of the Korean War, or
Speaker 2: should we, you know, put more troops into it right
Speaker 2: quote Smoot first dryly answered in the affirmative, quoting Adelaie Stevenson,
Speaker 2: Korea is the most remarkable effort the world has ever
Speaker 2: seen to make collective security work. In choosing to repel
Speaker 2: the first armed aggression of the communists, we chose to
Speaker 2: make bitter sacrifices today to save civilization tomorrow. On the
Speaker 2: negative side, Smoot drew a portrait of a hypothetical soldier
Speaker 2: named Joe. It's cold up here in the winter, sometimes
Speaker 2: thirty below zero. If a boy cries, his tears turned
Speaker 2: to ice. And then there is the enemy, always the enemy,
Speaker 2: and the kind of fight that man fought centuries ago.
Speaker 2: Knives and fists, fingers groping for eyes, and teeth seeking
Speaker 2: hot a soft spot in the neck. Maybe Joe will
Speaker 2: die in the slit trench, and maybe he will live,
Speaker 2: his hands sour and gummy with half digested rice gruel
Speaker 2: ripped out of the stomach of a bleeding bundle of
Speaker 2: rags and bones at his feet. So wild, wild, little
Speaker 2: rant to go on there.
Speaker 3: Man, I was just like, get it, screenwriter.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, In one of my favorite lines from her book,
Speaker 2: Heather Hindershot writes, quote, Smoot could somehow snarl a feminate
Speaker 2: egghead in such a way that it sounded infinitely worse
Speaker 2: than son of a bitch. So he's like that, you
Speaker 2: know that kind of broadcaster. Now, The Facts for Him
Speaker 2: made itself a nexus of support for Joseph McCarthy, as
Speaker 2: Hunt sought to convince regular Americans that communists needed to
Speaker 2: be rooted out. Joe guests on only one episode of
Speaker 2: the Facts for Him, but his researcher and future wife,
Speaker 2: Jeane Carer, worked the Facts for him as a staffer.
Speaker 2: Another early staffer was Robert e Lee. Not that Robert
Speaker 2: e Lee. Yeah, this Robert e Lee was a former
Speaker 2: FBI man who helped McCarthy compile his list of two
Speaker 2: hundred and five communists in the State Department. And there's
Speaker 2: so many FBI guys who work for the Facts Forum.
Speaker 2: But there's like a joke in the FBI that like,
Speaker 2: that's the retirement plan is working for this fucking right
Speaker 2: wing billionaire. So things are going well. He's using the
Speaker 2: Facts Forum to support his buddy Joe McCarthy, But then
Speaker 2: Tailed Gunner, Joe makes the mistake of picking on the
Speaker 2: army in the nineteen fifty four Army. McCarthy hearings are
Speaker 2: a disaster for the man and for the broader cause
Speaker 2: of being visibly crazy as an anti communist activist. The
Speaker 2: hearings were broadcast on television and will only ABC and
Speaker 2: the Dumont Network broadcast the hearings in full because they're
Speaker 2: thirty six days long. The bigger networks, CBS and NBC
Speaker 2: broadcast excerpts. And this actually the fact that these networks,
Speaker 2: because there's money in advertising now, they don't want to
Speaker 2: run just thirty six days of congressional hearings its way
Speaker 2: is a huge waste of money. But because they decide
Speaker 2: to take excerpts and just run clips from it, this
Speaker 2: is actually the way the media covers the McCarthy hearings.
Speaker 2: Is one of the first cases of SoundBite journalism right,
Speaker 2: and sound bite journalism in a positive way, where previously
Speaker 2: the reporting on this would have just been kind of
Speaker 2: dull articles about another series of hearings about communism in
Speaker 2: the US that most Americans wouldn't have known there was
Speaker 2: anything to be upset by. Because these guys journalists are
Speaker 2: looking for, like, well, what are the craziest things McCarthy's saying,
Speaker 2: What are the wildest moments from this? It makes it
Speaker 2: impossible to ignore, and they're playing this over and over
Speaker 2: again that like, no, this is actually a real problem, right,
Speaker 2: Like this guy's out of his mind and is just
Speaker 2: attacking people for no reason like that. Really, the fact
Speaker 2: how this gets reported really helps to make that case,
Speaker 2: because these networks are looking for, like the most embarrassing
Speaker 2: and shocking moments and clip them out and playing them
Speaker 2: over and over again. In What's Fair on the Air,
Speaker 2: Hindershot writes Joseph Welch's famous rhetorical question, have you no
Speaker 2: sense of decency? Sir at long Last, was not only
Speaker 2: televised live by both ABC and Dumont on Day thirty
Speaker 2: of the hearings, but also repeated dozens of times on
Speaker 2: radio and TV. That night. Following McCarthy's attack on General
Speaker 2: George C. Marshall, former President Harry S. Truman appeared on
Speaker 2: Edward R. Murrow's See It Now and expressed his own
Speaker 2: feelings about McCarthy. The man who made that attack isn't
Speaker 2: fit to shine General Marshall's shoes. Damn Yeah, it's a
Speaker 2: pretty it's a pretty sick burn, actually he meant it. No.
Speaker 4: That's interesting though, because it's like, I think when we
Speaker 4: were growing up and we learned about this air of
Speaker 4: mccarthy'sm but it seems so like inherently absurd and you're
Speaker 4: just thinking, like, how could that ever happen? Like isn't
Speaker 4: it just so obvious? And then you're here and you're like, well, yeah,
Speaker 4: people don't pay attention to the longer thing. They need
Speaker 4: the sound bites, sadly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they need the sound bites, right, and it like
Speaker 2: there's actually some benefits to that. It's not all downsides.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: One of the things this does, the fact that this
Speaker 2: is kind of destroys McCarthy. It makes Hunt furious, and
Speaker 2: it makes him furious because he becomes convinced this evidence
Speaker 2: of the liberal media and the pernicious left wing bias
Speaker 2: within the media. Right, it's a communist organist, you know.
Speaker 2: And this is kind of where the liberal media as
Speaker 2: a conservative bugbear starts, right, not just with Hunt, but
Speaker 2: it starts as a result in a big way, Like
Speaker 2: it's majorly supercharged by the reaction to the McCarthy hearings,
Speaker 2: and a Hunt is one of the people leading the
Speaker 2: charge and attacking the liberal media right and for HL.
Speaker 2: Hunt One of the things I think is really important
Speaker 2: to point out today if you listen to like what
Speaker 2: Barry Weiss and like the free fucking Press people say,
Speaker 2: they all talk about Edward R. Murrow too, is like
Speaker 2: we need to get back to a time when newsmen
Speaker 2: were political and you know, they just were telling people
Speaker 2: the truth and they were trusted. And in those days,
Speaker 2: you know, Americans knew that they could rely on their
Speaker 2: you know, the people giving them the news, to not
Speaker 2: just be in it for personal political gain. It wasn't
Speaker 2: just some like wokest bullshit. If Edward R. Murrow were
Speaker 2: reporting the day, they would call him woke. And I
Speaker 2: know that because they called him woke in the fifties
Speaker 2: like H. L. Hunting called him a woke leftist communist Infiltrader,
Speaker 2: And they called him it because he was deliberately and
Speaker 2: aggressively multicultural. Right to quote from Hinderschott's article, Murrow was
Speaker 2: fiercely patriotic. His America was an inclusive, democratic place in
Speaker 2: which citizens rationally discussed their problems. When Murrow took Sea
Speaker 2: it Now's cameras to Korea for Christmas, in nineteen fifty two,
Speaker 2: he celebrated the sacrifices of the troops. Murrow also made
Speaker 2: a point of picturing an integrated platoon that included not
Speaker 2: only whites and blacks, but also a Chinese American and
Speaker 2: a Korean American, a gesture that surely rubbed some viewers
Speaker 2: the wrong way. Right, and fucking they attack like the
Speaker 2: because the newsletter for Lifelines isn't subject to the fairness doctrine,
Speaker 2: they're able to be really political. And in that newsletter,
Speaker 2: Hunt calls him chow In Cronkite and calls Dan rather
Speaker 2: ho chi rather Right. Again, they are calling these guys
Speaker 2: fucking communists. Back then too, like Walter Cronkite was never
Speaker 2: seen as a totally unbiased and fair man by conservatives.
Speaker 2: They hated him. Just really want to make that point
Speaker 2: as clearly as I can.
Speaker 4: It's so exhausting because and they keep telling us that
Speaker 4: these are the people that we can reach.
Speaker 3: We just got to give them, just give them a
Speaker 3: little bit of more information.
Speaker 4: It's like they have the information, they don't like it,
Speaker 4: they don't want it.
Speaker 2: No, they thought Edward R. Murrow was a communist because
Speaker 2: he pointed out that there were fucking Chinese people in
Speaker 2: the US army, right, like, and.
Speaker 3: Had been so for ages.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Chinese asn't been here longer than some of these
Speaker 4: other than Trump's family.
Speaker 2: These people have always hated this kind of shit, right,
Speaker 2: always hated the idea that we're multicultural country and anyone
Speaker 2: who celebrates it, even if they're celebrating it in the
Speaker 2: context of supporting the Korean War. Right, he gets called
Speaker 2: a communist.
Speaker 3: And supporting the troops and like.
Speaker 2: Right, doesn't matter, no communism. So this the fact that
Speaker 2: fucking Hunt goes so crazy after Mureau and it gets
Speaker 2: so pissed about the reaction to the McCarthy hearings gets
Speaker 2: him in trouble. Democratic congressmans start being like, wait a second,
Speaker 2: he's getting like public funding basically for making non partisan media,
Speaker 2: and this is what they're calling non partisan congressman. When
Speaker 2: Congressman points out that Hunts tied to Joseph McCarthy, and
Speaker 2: there's complaints that the fact form is benefiting from its
Speaker 2: tax free status despite being very biased, and they start
Speaker 2: being investigations. Lee, his former staffer, was made FCC commissioner
Speaker 2: in nineteen fifty four, which further upset Democrats who are like, well,
Speaker 2: now his guy is controlling the FCC, so of course
Speaker 2: he won't get attacked. Now, what's weird is Lee's actually
Speaker 2: a really fair minded FCC commissioner. He does a lot
Speaker 2: of stuff that pisses off the right. He's actually like
Speaker 2: surprisingly good at the job, I think and Hindershott proposes
Speaker 2: that the whole brujaja does more to make Hunt famous
Speaker 2: as a right wing crank than it does to actually
Speaker 2: help his shows. Right that like the fact that he's
Speaker 2: tied to Lee and the fact that like he's like,
Speaker 2: there's this uproar about it, he becomes known as being
Speaker 2: like a crank. Like, it does not spread. He doesn't
Speaker 2: make his his ideas more popular. Now past this point
Speaker 2: because of how many people get pissed off about this,
Speaker 2: Hunt becomes increasingly famous, right, He's now someone who is
Speaker 2: known and talked about for his political activism. And he
Speaker 2: does not like this his stage fright right now because
Speaker 2: he's got stage fright right, putting himself out there right.
Speaker 2: In fact, like his as a young man, his stage
Speaker 2: fright is so bad that he wants swallows a bunch
Speaker 2: of ties to make himself sick to get out of
Speaker 2: giving a speech when he's like a younger businessman. So
Speaker 2: the fact that like the eyes of America are now
Speaker 2: on him and he's being accused of partisan instigation fucks
Speaker 2: hunt up. And in nineteen fifty six he shuts down
Speaker 2: the Facts Forum to avoid controversy, not because he thinks
Speaker 2: he's done anything wrong, because he just doesn't like being
Speaker 2: under the gun like that, right, Like he's just anxious.
Speaker 2: So yeah, he's a whiss. He does launch immediately another
Speaker 2: series called Answers for American This actually launched, I think
Speaker 2: a little before the Fact Form quits. It's a public
Speaker 2: service program that's broadcast on twenty two TV stations in
Speaker 2: three hundred and sixty radio stations broadcast live. This was
Speaker 2: a half hour panel discussion on ABC that featured a
Speaker 2: mix of liberals and conservatives. There's your liberal panel and
Speaker 2: your conservative panel. Repping the left was former Congressman George
Speaker 2: Combs and New York You professor Charles Hodges. Opposed to
Speaker 2: them were William F. Buckley and a rotating guest. If
Speaker 2: you don't know William F. Buckley, he is like the
Speaker 2: proto Ben Shapiro. He's an essayist and a public debater
Speaker 2: who gets really famous going on TV to debate politely
Speaker 2: liberals right about the issues of the day. Right, That's
Speaker 2: how he's known, and that he is still to this
Speaker 2: day like liberal, like centrist liberal democrats. Buckley is like
Speaker 2: the the ideal of the conservative intellectual. He's one of
Speaker 2: the good ones. Right, He's a he was not, but
Speaker 2: he's like respectable, Like this is how you should do it.
Speaker 2: Look at the respect he always showed the people he
Speaker 2: was debating alongside.
Speaker 3: Their nostalgia goggles.
Speaker 4: For him is always just like we used to be
Speaker 4: able to have these conversations in peace.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and when it like, by the way, his son
Speaker 2: is like a major pro degia activist, Like these are
Speaker 2: not polite ever, but yeah, like that's that's his space
Speaker 2: in the American mind. Right now, you can already see
Speaker 2: in the way the show is set up how some
Speaker 2: of the bias creeps in. This is supposed to be
Speaker 2: two liberals and two conservatives. Seems non biased. But why
Speaker 2: is one of the conservatives always a rotating Is it?
Speaker 2: Maybe because that makes the conservative seem more dynamic and
Speaker 2: the liberals seem like it's just these two old hokey
Speaker 2: college professor types. Right, Buckley also is a He's a
Speaker 2: great performer. William F. Buckley's one of the first media
Speaker 2: trained guys who exists. Right and the liberals that Hunt
Speaker 2: picks are not super charismatic figures. As hinders shot rights
Speaker 2: comes did not farewell into the harsh studio lights, and
Speaker 2: although most of the participants chain smoked, it was only
Speaker 2: Combs to whom the smoke seemed to cling in a
Speaker 2: thick film in his three piece suit with carnation. Butenaiir
Speaker 2: he affused a stereotypical East Coast liberal establishment PERSONA Professor
Speaker 2: Hodges was articulate, but often came across as a cartoonish
Speaker 2: liberal intellectual or worse, an old wind bag. Buckley spoke
Speaker 2: in easily digestible conservative soundbites such as we would rather
Speaker 2: die than be enslaved by communism. Right again, you can
Speaker 2: see the evolution how this is even a little more
Speaker 2: disguised as non biased while still pushing a very clear
Speaker 2: ideological line. And this is such a good idea. Fox
Speaker 2: News is going to rip this basic model off decades
Speaker 2: later for their hit show Handity and Colms. The same
Speaker 2: basic premise supplies the esthetic of debate, but with the
Speaker 2: certainty that one side is going to win and the
Speaker 2: enemy is always going to look like a big stupid dope.
Speaker 2: And you also make sure that the conservative looks, you know,
Speaker 2: like young and put together, while the liberal looks like,
Speaker 2: you know, like a nerd. Right, I'm going a photo
Speaker 2: of Hannity and Combs for the viewers, but like Sean Hannity,
Speaker 2: the start of that fullhead of hair, you know, younger
Speaker 2: guy Combs ball, you know, right. So, in the age
Speaker 2: of social media, this idea reached its final form with
Speaker 2: guys like Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk and I forget the
Speaker 2: name of the change my mind guy who would go
Speaker 2: on the college campuses with the you know whatever. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I forget a fucking yeah. They all got failed marriages
Speaker 2: except for well, no, I guess not. I guess they
Speaker 2: don't all have failed marriage. It's just that guy. I
Speaker 2: forget his name, but then I don't care to remember it.
Speaker 2: But yeah, and you and in this instead of like
Speaker 2: you don't even have like the boring hockey professors, now
Speaker 2: you have like the liberals and left are represented by
Speaker 2: like this carousel of college kids that you pick out
Speaker 2: because they clearly don't have media training and they're not
Speaker 2: like good at debating with a professional broadcaster on television, right, Like.
Speaker 4: It's like the more septem piercings, the better, speaking as
Speaker 4: the septum piercing.
Speaker 2: Ef ye, are they a little high?
Speaker 3: Good?
Speaker 2: Get him in here? Yeah? You know who else is
Speaker 2: a little high? The sponsors that support this podcast. You know,
Speaker 2: every single one thing we guarantee is that every advertiser
Speaker 2: on this show. Just the second I said, just just
Speaker 2: sparked up a fat blunt, every single one of them,
Speaker 2: especially the Washington State Highway Patrol. If you hear that
Speaker 2: ad you know, the whole Washington State Highway Patrol is
Speaker 2: blazing a bone right now, no notes, and we're back
Speaker 2: talking about the Facts Forum. Well that's dead. And anyway,
Speaker 2: two years after he kills the Facts for him, Hunt
Speaker 2: starts a new series, Lifeline. Now this is not He's
Speaker 2: not this time. He's not going to try to get
Speaker 2: the tax breaks by being balanced, right, he decides that's
Speaker 2: not worth, you know, the trouble. So I'm not going
Speaker 2: to claim that we're not. We don't have like a line. Instead,
Speaker 2: in order to avoid getting in trouble, I'm not going
Speaker 2: to reference political parties or political tendencies at all. I'm
Speaker 2: not going to say the Democrats or the left. I'm
Speaker 2: not going to say Republicans or the right or conservatism. Instead,
Speaker 2: I'm going to have I'm going to have this fucking
Speaker 2: preacher guy come up here, the Reverend Wayne Poucher, who
Speaker 2: was If you want to know who this guy's background,
Speaker 2: he was a former campaign manager for Strom Therman's successful
Speaker 2: nineteen fifty four campaign.
Speaker 3: Well he's conservative.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So Poucher's first just kind of less aggressive than
Speaker 2: Smooth was. Right, He's he speaks more and about religion
Speaker 2: and stuff. He's not talking about the left being evil. Instead,
Speaker 2: he talks about everyone instead of referring to them like
Speaker 2: by their political terms. He calls them the mistaken, and
Speaker 2: he calls the good guys the constructive people. Right, And
Speaker 2: so he gets away from these like fairness standards by
Speaker 2: not talking about the left and the right but talking
Speaker 2: about the mistaken and the constructive. And he speaks more
Speaker 2: like parables about like right and wrong. And it's very
Speaker 2: clear that he's talking about politics, but he's not using
Speaker 2: political terms, so it kind of slips by right and
Speaker 2: in nineteen Yeah, it's really annoying. Now Hunt does an
Speaker 2: interview with Playboy in nineteen sixty six where he talks
Speaker 2: about why he's not using why this new lifeline doesn't
Speaker 2: use the term conservative, and why he doesn't like using
Speaker 2: that as propaganda anymore, and he says conservative is an
Speaker 2: unfortunate word. It denotes mossback, reactionary and old fogyism, right,
Speaker 2: So I don't want to seem like an old fogy.
Speaker 2: So I'm just gonna talk about the mistaken and the
Speaker 2: constructive people right now. I think this is a mixed success.
Speaker 2: This this show is never very wildly popular for like
Speaker 2: legitimate reasons. A lot of people listen because sometimes it's
Speaker 2: the only thing on the air in a lot of areas, right,
Speaker 2: so it gets listeners from that. But it's kind of boring.
Speaker 2: It sounds much mine. It sounds a lot more boring.
Speaker 2: Smooth was at least exciting. He was aggressive, right, This dude,
Speaker 2: Poucher is like boring, and he mostly talks about God.
Speaker 2: And he ends every broadcast with don't forget to pray.
Speaker 2: He makes that, he makes that his his his tagline,
Speaker 2: because that means Hunt can claim an exemption on the
Speaker 2: basis of running a religious organization for text purposes. It's
Speaker 2: a good shit, good shit. By all accounts, Lifeline was
Speaker 2: just as conservative as The Facts Forum, but a lot
Speaker 2: more boring because Hunt is scared of pissing people off.
Speaker 2: Now he's also making a lot of other propaganda. He is,
Speaker 2: by dollar amount, the number one producer of right wing
Speaker 2: propaganda in like the fifties through the sixties. He is
Speaker 2: publishing newspapers too, and magazines, including the newspaper the magazine
Speaker 2: Human Events, which goes on to be pretty popular. He
Speaker 2: has a regular column in that he sells to a
Speaker 2: bunch of different newspapers that he writes called Hunt for Truth.
Speaker 2: Oh get it, you get it?
Speaker 3: I hate that. That's a good name. I mean, I
Speaker 3: wouldn't watch it, but I know someone's dad.
Speaker 1: Ye.
Speaker 2: So the Nation summarizes the state of his propaganda operation
Speaker 2: in nineteen sixty four this way, hl Hunt, in addition
Speaker 2: to being very probably the richest man in America, is
Speaker 2: very probably the country's most powerful propagandist for the extreme right.
Speaker 2: The main vehicle for his brand of conservatism today is Lifeline,
Speaker 2: a radio program originating in Washington, DC and daily reaching
Speaker 2: an estimated audience of five million persons in forty five states.
Speaker 2: It has heard over three hundred and thirty one stations,
Speaker 2: among which are twenty five percent of the nation's clear
Speaker 2: channel outlet. That's a lot just because again there's not
Speaker 2: much else to put on there, and this is something
Speaker 2: the conservatives will learn from. A lot of where we
Speaker 2: are right now politically is the result of the fact
Speaker 2: that for years, like twenty some years, liberals kind of
Speaker 2: ignored talk radio. For the most part. There were a
Speaker 2: couple attempts to get into it, but the it was
Speaker 2: and it was just assumed that like, well, the fact
Speaker 2: like more people listen and trust like the news and
Speaker 2: you know, magazines and newspapers and TV news and you know,
Speaker 2: all of that is more liberal than it is conservative.
Speaker 2: And like talk radio was out there being the only
Speaker 2: thing in tens of millions of Americans ears for hours
Speaker 2: as they're commuting driving all across the country. I grew up,
Speaker 2: I lost and listened so many hundreds hours of Michael
Speaker 2: Savage and Rustling them, all these guys, and it made
Speaker 2: a really solid core. People wonder like, why is there
Speaker 2: this core of like thirty percent of the country that
Speaker 2: will never reconsider supporting Trump. Oh, let's talk radio is
Speaker 2: a big part of why yeah, and Hunt isn't good.
Speaker 2: He doesn't figure quite out how to make it work
Speaker 2: that way, but he's the first guy who really realizes
Speaker 2: why talk radio is valuable and everything that comes after
Speaker 2: is at least influenced by that.
Speaker 4: And it also shows how the left is always really
Speaker 4: so supportive of institutions and like the power of institutions
Speaker 4: that they just won't even make a solid attempt because
Speaker 4: like it was how many years into yeah, yeah, yeah that,
Speaker 4: like liberals were like, oh, we should have a Joe
Speaker 4: Rogan thing. It's like a podcasting thing or YouTube and
Speaker 4: then Twitch it's like, oh, we should we should finally
Speaker 4: have someone in this space, and it's like, yeah, tell
Speaker 4: me you invested in such.
Speaker 2: You can influence people's politics by making them listen to
Speaker 2: a crazy guy for hours. Maybe you should have your
Speaker 2: own crazy asshole that people like to listen to.
Speaker 3: I don't know, or someone entering that work.
Speaker 2: I'm not a big we need a Joe Rogan of
Speaker 2: for fucking the Democratic Party. It just doesn't work that way.
Speaker 2: You're never going to succeed doing that. If you're just like,
Speaker 2: let's make our own Democratic Joe, you're always going to fail.
Speaker 2: If that's how you think about it. But what you
Speaker 2: do need is like fuck and people who are crazy
Speaker 2: popular that a lot of folks listen to, who are
Speaker 2: talking about politics in a way that is like usable
Speaker 2: to you. And when you see people like that, instead
Speaker 2: of discarding them and like hating them and running away
Speaker 2: from them, you should try to find ways, like the
Speaker 2: smart strategies to try to find ways to benefit from
Speaker 2: that and to like make them might make that useful
Speaker 2: to you, as opposed to pretending nobody cares about this
Speaker 2: stuff and they're just assholes talking on the internet. They
Speaker 2: are just assholes talking on the internet. But unfortunately it
Speaker 2: matters right exactly, I say, as an asshole talking on
Speaker 2: the internet, Hey I do it.
Speaker 3: That's my full time job on YouTube.
Speaker 4: It's like, I definitely think it's so frustrating because like
Speaker 4: the right, what it is able to do with having
Speaker 4: so much young talent is really have like a lot
Speaker 4: of hyper visibility in those spaces whereas like you know,
Speaker 4: you can only be academic for so long, and it's
Speaker 4: time period where like no one wants.
Speaker 2: To read right exactly now. The Lifeline Advisory board included
Speaker 2: the CEO of Sears, Robert Wood and John Wayne, but
Speaker 2: it also hosted several ministers. Yeah, John Wayne, baby, I'm
Speaker 2: helping helping to shape the future at top radio. The
Speaker 2: religious right was not a thing yet in an organized
Speaker 2: political way. That doesn't start until like the start of
Speaker 2: the seventies yet, I mean, yeah, that's not really a
Speaker 2: massive Again, Hunt is going to be one of the
Speaker 2: people who helps push that, even though he is not
Speaker 2: really religious and doesn't really care about that stuff. He
Speaker 2: is again one of the earlier conservatives to see, oh
Speaker 2: you know what if I marry my feelings on tax
Speaker 2: policy and like stopping people from voting with all of
Speaker 2: these like weird religious conservative like bug bears like abortion,
Speaker 2: I can make those people support my crazy tax shit
Speaker 2: and use that as a political weapon too. Right. So
Speaker 2: again Hunt foresees this. He tries to use Christianity to
Speaker 2: spread his own anti government message. His first wife, Lyda,
Speaker 2: dies in the fifties, and after he gets with his well,
Speaker 2: she's not really a wife, but he joins her Baptist church.
Speaker 2: His pastor, Reverend Chris Well, was a howling reactionary. In
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty, Hunt printed up an anti Catholic sermon chris
Speaker 2: Well had written and handed it out at the DNC
Speaker 2: because JFK is running for president. It included this line,
Speaker 2: the election of a Catholic as president would mean the
Speaker 2: end of religious liberty in America, like you know, the
Speaker 2: thing that happened. Hunt dedicated numerous columns to Kennedy, who
Speaker 2: he warned would sell the nation out to communists and
Speaker 2: or the Pope. His real issue was very funny to me,
Speaker 2: is that like Moor and Or, he doesn't hate JFK
Speaker 2: because like there, you know, JFK is more of like
Speaker 2: a liberal progressive and he's very conservative. He hates JFK specifically,
Speaker 2: and the Catholic stuff is like he's using that because
Speaker 2: he thinks it'll be useful getting other people to hate JFK.
Speaker 2: He hates JFK because JFK supports reviewing the oil depletion
Speaker 2: Allowance and changing it to end that loophole that lets
Speaker 2: oil men not pay taxes.
Speaker 4: Right, and there it is, you're gonna say, because it's
Speaker 4: so hot, and he was like, I can't have that.
Speaker 2: But then it's his only real political issue is the
Speaker 2: oil depletion allowance. Everything else, all the cultural stuff that
Speaker 2: he talks about. I mean, he does believe in the
Speaker 2: anti communism, but ninety percent of his propaganda is about
Speaker 2: keeping the oil depletion allowance. Everything else, like the working
Speaker 2: with the religious right, it's all to protect the oil
Speaker 2: depletion allowance because he loves that shit.
Speaker 4: He's like, I can excuse communism, but I draw the
Speaker 4: line at my oil allowance, me paying.
Speaker 2: Taxes per the nation. When Hunt talks of his country's troubles,
Speaker 2: he does not always sound funereal, But when he discusses
Speaker 2: the oil depletion allowance and possible legislative threats to it,
Speaker 2: his face takes on the stricken blankness of one who
Speaker 2: has just heard the last trump of depletion allowances for
Speaker 2: all natural resources. He said recently, but without the depletion
Speaker 2: allowance for oil, we are utterly ruined. Again, you're the
Speaker 2: richest man on earth. You would just have to pay taxes.
Speaker 2: He's got some support the roads and stuff. Yeah, he's
Speaker 2: got so many kids. This is why Hunt promptly had
Speaker 2: two hundred thousand reprints of Chris Wall's sermon made and
Speaker 2: mailed out, after which he sat back and hoped to
Speaker 2: watch a wave of aroused Protestantism wash Kennedy out of
Speaker 2: the running right like that's that's that's at least as
Speaker 2: far as the nation is concerned, Like that's what his
Speaker 2: goal is here. It doesn't work.
Speaker 3: Sadly Nixon was on the docket.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it really What happens is this just pisses people off.
Speaker 2: There's a bunch of editorials about like this guy's trying
Speaker 2: to force Kennedy out because he doesn't want to pay taxes,
Speaker 2: and it just kind of pisses every and and a
Speaker 2: lot of people get angry that like he's trying to
Speaker 2: make people hysteric about an anti Catholic. He's trying to
Speaker 2: use it. He's trying to like rustle up a bunch
Speaker 2: of anti Catholic bigotry, so who doesn't have to pay
Speaker 2: tax Like, people recognize this and call it out, and
Speaker 2: it pisses folks off. It draws the Senate's attention again too.
Speaker 2: They point out that like, hey, this flyer you distributed
Speaker 2: the DNC, it's actually a federal crime to distribute anonymous
Speaker 2: circulars after the start of a campaign, to influence a
Speaker 2: political campaign in this way, and you did not note
Speaker 2: at all who paid for this. You committed a crime.
Speaker 2: There's an uproar, there's a Senate Subcommittee investigation. Hunt just hides,
Speaker 2: like he panics, and he like basically goes on the
Speaker 2: lamb a little bit, and he just pretends he can't
Speaker 2: make the meeting. He's like hiding, So Chris Well has
Speaker 2: to take it on the chin in the Senate Subcommittee
Speaker 2: meeting and like actually talk to Congress, and Chris weall
Speaker 2: like pretends he doesn't know anything about Hunt's money and stuff.
Speaker 2: When Hunt finally surfaced again, he admits that he paid
Speaker 2: for the leaflet, but he's like, oh, I didn't do
Speaker 2: it to hurt JFK. I did it to help lbj's
Speaker 2: campaign because I'm really pro LBJ Texas.
Speaker 3: That's all.
Speaker 2: That's the only reason I did it. He also claimed
Speaker 2: that I didn't run away to have being investigated. I
Speaker 2: ran away because I had a book to write for
Speaker 2: the good of the nation. Like I come up with
Speaker 2: that idea of those book that's really going to change everything.
Speaker 2: So I was just like writing. I just didn't I
Speaker 2: couldn't make it to Congress. Sorry about that, guys. Now,
Speaker 2: he did write a.
Speaker 3: Book, the forty eight Laws of Power.
Speaker 2: Yeah, forty No, it's even weirder, it's even sillier. So
Speaker 2: In nineteen sixty, he publishes his first novel, Alpaca, which
Speaker 2: is a work of right wing utopian fiction. The book
Speaker 2: took place in an ideal society that followed Hunt's plan
Speaker 2: for a wealth based voting system Hindu Schott describes in
Speaker 2: his perfect World, political discussion could only take place via
Speaker 2: the printed word. Discussing politics on radio and TV, or
Speaker 2: speech making before an audience of more than two hundred
Speaker 2: people was outlawed as inflammatory. It was widely reported that
Speaker 2: Hunt had hired someone to write the romantic parts of Alpaca,
Speaker 2: as he was only interested in the politics. When the
Speaker 2: book breaks from political exegesis, we find our right wing
Speaker 2: lovers spouting inane dialogue such as I am putty in
Speaker 2: your hands. I needed to read this book one of
Speaker 2: these days, Oh my god. Yeah, And there's like a
Speaker 2: bunch of cool stuff in there. The book was published
Speaker 2: by H. L. Hunt Publishing, a company he had created
Speaker 2: to publish phone books. So just as like a side business,
Speaker 2: he has a phone book company that he has published
Speaker 2: his shitty novel. That writer for That Nation piece notes
Speaker 2: that by the mid sixties, a lot of Dallas newsmen
Speaker 2: had come to believe that Hunt had based the protagonist
Speaker 2: of his shitty novel on an idealized version of himself.
Speaker 2: And here's one relevant line from the novel, And this
Speaker 2: is about the protagonist. He had burning convictions, but there
Speaker 2: were few in al Paka. He told himself who could
Speaker 2: agree with him? Right? Like he's this iconic class genius rebel,
Speaker 2: and other people just don't see how brilliant he is.
Speaker 2: You know, it's very much Hunt thinking of about himself.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's like, I got to write someone who's so smart.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the smartest man alive. The article goes on to
Speaker 2: describe the model constitution that Hunt presents in his novel,
Speaker 2: quote a constitution that gives each person and a quota
Speaker 2: of votes based primarily on how much he pays in taxes.
Speaker 2: There are other ways of getting votes under the Hunt plan.
Speaker 2: If you are old enough to draw a retirement pay
Speaker 2: but refuse to accept it, you get two extra votes.
Speaker 2: If you are a government worker and refuse to accept
Speaker 2: more than fifty percent of your pay, you get one
Speaker 2: extra vote. On the other hand, anyone receiving welfare or
Speaker 2: sick pay from the government gets no vote at all.
Speaker 3: Oh, okay, no no one, no.
Speaker 2: No, just rich guys get a lot of votes.
Speaker 3: That's crazy.
Speaker 2: Now. A book reviewer interviewing Hunt says to him after
Speaker 2: reading his book, it's a kind of fascist democracy if
Speaker 2: you get what I mean, and Hunt later in the
Speaker 2: interview says, you're the only one who understood what I
Speaker 2: was getting at. I think it's in reference to another line,
Speaker 2: but it's it's very telling.
Speaker 3: He's like, yeah, i'd see me.
Speaker 2: So Hunt sends copies of his stupid book to every
Speaker 2: sitting congressman, along with a number of foreign heads of state,
Speaker 2: and quote many colleges. He brags that he has a
Speaker 2: sequel planned which would present an even better constitution, as
Speaker 2: long as you could just get a couple of weeks
Speaker 2: to finish it. And he never publishes this book, but
Speaker 2: the working title was your Topia.
Speaker 3: Not Outpacka.
Speaker 2: He does eventually do a sequel to Alpaka, but he
Speaker 2: doesn't publish your Topia. Great stuff, great, very sixties.
Speaker 4: You have your own publishing house and you still can't
Speaker 4: finish a second novel.
Speaker 2: Nah, No, man, it's hard. Look, hey, I'm morgan on
Speaker 2: that one myself. It's tough. You know what else is hard?
Speaker 2: It's hard for me when I see people not giving
Speaker 2: the proper amount of respect and love to the products
Speaker 2: and services that support this podcast. Why don't we all
Speaker 2: just think about them and how nice they are and
Speaker 2: also listen to their ads for a second. We're back.
Speaker 2: So one of Hunt's dearest beliefs is that letters to
Speaker 2: the editor are the part of the paper that people
Speaker 2: read most often, but like just skim over the other articles.
Speaker 2: They want to read letters to the editor because people
Speaker 2: have a natural curiosity over what other ordinary people have
Speaker 2: to say. That's hl Hunt's like most deeply held belief
Speaker 2: and he's not an ordinary person. But he also thinks
Speaker 2: that if you write a letter to the editor, people
Speaker 2: assume you are. And so for most of his public
Speaker 2: life he's writing like, sometimes more than a dozen letters
Speaker 2: to the editor per day, and he has a small
Speaker 2: army of secretaries who will mimiograph them and will mail
Speaker 2: them to hundreds of newspapers. So he just has like
Speaker 2: a rant about politics or fucking taxes or kids these days,
Speaker 2: and he'll write a letter to the editor and he'll
Speaker 2: send it to every newspaper he can think of, or
Speaker 2: his secretaries can think of to get it printed. Right.
Speaker 4: I'm sometimes I'm so glad I don't have money, because
Speaker 4: this is like, this is the impulses of like me
Speaker 4: writing to like teen volk be like, you don't understand
Speaker 4: the sexiest man in America is not Blake Shelton.
Speaker 2: Yeah, d're teen vogue. There are too many states, please
Speaker 2: eliminate three. I am not a crank, yeah.
Speaker 3: Exactly, Hunt, that guy, I'm a hip kid.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I'm cool. He thinks that like this will
Speaker 2: this will really get Americans, trick them into believing my politics.
Speaker 2: They'll just read all these letters to the editor and
Speaker 2: assume I'm a normal guy, and they won't be able
Speaker 2: to they won't be able to catch it. Now, this
Speaker 2: leads me to a very funny quote from Heather Hindershot's
Speaker 2: book quote respectable businessmen gave money to the causes in
Speaker 2: which they believed Hunt wouldn't even give to local Dallas charities,
Speaker 2: much less political campaigns. Asked to contribute to diabetes research,
Speaker 2: Hunt responded, as summarized in an FBI memo, that society
Speaker 2: would be better off if persons who were permanently disabled
Speaker 2: or physically incapacitated and unable to financially care for themselves
Speaker 2: were let to die rather than to be a burden
Speaker 2: on society what drink Okay, yeah he.
Speaker 3: Loved he loved Buck v.
Speaker 2: Bell.
Speaker 3: He was like he sure did.
Speaker 2: Uh yeah, yeah, he's he's like just a just the
Speaker 2: kind of piece of shit you would imagine like perfectly.
Speaker 2: So now I will say this is all frustrating, Like
Speaker 2: the fact that he's trying to brute force his horrible,
Speaker 2: genocidal politics into the world is disgusting. And there's like
Speaker 2: there's so many good quotes, like one of the Nation.
Speaker 2: He's like, I'm slow, but I'm the best writer I know.
Speaker 2: Like he's certain about that, even though again he's not
Speaker 2: he's not great, right, Like he's not a particularly good writer.
Speaker 2: And editors of these newspapers that he's trying to like
Speaker 2: get letters to kind of call him on his bullshit.
Speaker 2: One Texas editor told The Nation Hunt earns in one
Speaker 2: hour about twenty thousand to twelve thousand dollars. That's what
Speaker 2: I earn in a year. He probably spends an hour
Speaker 2: dictating each letter that comes in here. I like to
Speaker 2: cut them in half because that means I'm putting about
Speaker 2: five thousand dollars of Hunt money in the waste basket.
Speaker 3: Bars.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I love that, Yeah, I love it. That's funny. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So in nineteen fifty nine, Hunt started a health food
Speaker 2: and supplement business. Ah, you got it. If you're a
Speaker 2: right wing he's like the first of these though. You know,
Speaker 2: he really is.
Speaker 4: A trailblazer, Like all these bitches are his sons, Like truly.
Speaker 2: What's interesting is he invins I didn't realize this. He
Speaker 2: invents the Alex Jones strategy where he has his like
Speaker 2: right wing propaganda station and he invents a supplement in
Speaker 2: health food business and it's the only advertiser on his
Speaker 2: radio show and TV shows, so it exists to sell
Speaker 2: the products right, right, So the sole advertiser of Lifeline
Speaker 2: is his health products business, and his favorite product is
Speaker 2: gastro Magic, an anti gas pill that he was so
Speaker 2: proud of. His office is described by that the nation
Speaker 2: author is basically empty, but there's a plaque in it
Speaker 2: made with the letter from a happy customer being like,
Speaker 2: thank you for making these gas pills. That's like the
Speaker 2: only decoration he has.
Speaker 4: He's like, this is my true print and Joy, not
Speaker 4: one of my kids.
Speaker 2: True bride and Joy, not any of my fifteen kids,
Speaker 2: Fuck those kids.
Speaker 3: This is my only child.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's so fun I want to quote from Heather
Speaker 2: again because she's gonna line about this. One politician was
Speaker 2: lured to his office expecting a contribution, but left only
Speaker 2: with an ample supply of Hunt's gastro Magic indigestion pills. Another,
Speaker 2: George Herbert Walker Bush, met with Hunt in nineteen sixty
Speaker 2: two hoping for a contribution to his congressional campaign. His
Speaker 2: heart must have skipped a beat at the end of
Speaker 2: the meeting when Hunt discreetly gave him a bulging and envelope.
Speaker 2: It was filled with Lifeline pamphlets.
Speaker 3: That's funny.
Speaker 2: Oh, it's so funny.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, that's such a control.
Speaker 2: He's such a weird crank about his health food business,
Speaker 2: which again he's crazy rich from oil. This is not
Speaker 2: a meaningful amount of money, but it's clearly his passion.
Speaker 2: Like one of the things he's famous for. He drives
Speaker 2: himself to work even when he's the richest man alive,
Speaker 2: and he's covered his car in bumper stickers advertising Lifeline
Speaker 2: and like his gastro magic pills, like a crazy man.
Speaker 2: And he'll he's try because he's like this, will advertise it,
Speaker 2: People will buy it if they see it on my car.
Speaker 2: The Nation notes sometimes he circles the block an extra
Speaker 2: time before parking to let Dallas pedestrians have one more look.
Speaker 2: And he's like making his his his his employees put
Speaker 2: ship on their cars. He's like, no, you got to
Speaker 2: help the business.
Speaker 3: He's his own.
Speaker 2: He's he's active, like he's like a poor guy. He's
Speaker 2: so funny.
Speaker 3: It's giving.
Speaker 5: I'm selling my mixtape out of my trunk, Like what.
Speaker 2: Are God doing right? He's acting like a broke dude
Speaker 2: who gets to do an MLM. It's really funny. And
Speaker 2: he's the richest man alive.
Speaker 5: Like he look like he would be a modern day
Speaker 5: like Hagarly Yeah, m yeah.
Speaker 2: He's a Hunt in the feet.
Speaker 3: You're feeling a little ghasty right now. Don't worry, guys,
Speaker 3: I got you, I gotcha.
Speaker 5: I have this really great supplement. You would only have
Speaker 5: to subscribe, like, oh, I know, we haven't talked since
Speaker 5: high school.
Speaker 2: But literally, and he is he is always when he's
Speaker 2: meeting with people, weirdly who always want his money, he'll
Speaker 2: just start going on these rants about his different products.
Speaker 2: One attorney who worked with him, he says that like
Speaker 2: as soon as Hunt walks in the room, he runs
Speaker 2: up and shakes his hand and says very quickly, Hello,
Speaker 2: I am hl Hunt, the world's richest man. And these
Speaker 2: are gastro magic which I make, so they must be good.
Speaker 2: Try some. It's just like crazy person stuff, dude. So
Speaker 2: one of Hunt's kind of downfall moments is that, as
Speaker 2: I noted, he doesn't like Kennedy, right, he Lifeline attacks him.
Speaker 2: He attacks him in his column Hunt for the Truth,
Speaker 2: and he's like trying to drum up like religious hatred
Speaker 2: to attack him.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: He's also supporting Barry Goldwater, you know, that's he loves
Speaker 2: Barry Goldwater. But so unique, as you all know. On
Speaker 2: November twenty second, nineteen sixty three, Bernard Montgomery Sanders shot
Speaker 2: President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. Right, And this
Speaker 2: happens to happen like right after he'd run like a
Speaker 2: column and episodes of Lifeline talking about like the need
Speaker 2: of the Second Amendments so that like people could kill
Speaker 2: government leaders who try to oppress them. So he's just
Speaker 2: put this out and then Kennedy gets shot and the
Speaker 2: FBI questions him and members of his family. He's like,
Speaker 2: if you go into like there's a lot of conspiracies
Speaker 2: that put Hunt at the center of like the conspiracy
Speaker 2: to kill Kennedy. There's a couple of weird things in there.
Speaker 2: For one thing, the guy who kills Oswald, Jack Ruby,
Speaker 2: had Hunt's name and his address book. Although Ruby doesn't
Speaker 2: seem to have liked Hunt because Ruby was a real
Speaker 2: far right crank and a Hunt is like just in
Speaker 2: it for his own weird right wing beliefs. So I
Speaker 2: don't think like Ruby doesn't actually like him very much
Speaker 2: because he's not a team player basically. So there's a
Speaker 2: lot of allegations, but the family received so many death
Speaker 2: threats from these in fact that like the FBI gives
Speaker 2: them like a security detail at one point because people
Speaker 2: are so convinced he's involved. He gets weirder and crazier
Speaker 2: as he ages his Dallas I even mentioned this. His
Speaker 2: Dallas home. I think it's in white Rock Lake is
Speaker 2: a replica of George Washington's Mount Vernon estate that's five
Speaker 2: times as big. Like that's his house.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, no daddy issues up the butt.
Speaker 2: The mother of all daddy issues. And he's got this
Speaker 2: fucking huge, crazy rich man house with like a billboard
Speaker 2: that he puts on his front lawn for Lifeline, and
Speaker 2: he has this up in his fancy neighborhood until the
Speaker 2: neighbors can plain, and at which point he replaces it
Speaker 2: with a crude hand painted sign advertising Lifeline. Oh that's
Speaker 2: the strangest vibes.
Speaker 3: Like he's a like you selling lemonade.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Now. Despite putting more money into right wing media
Speaker 2: than anyone, Hunt's influence falls rapidly in the late sixties
Speaker 2: from its peak in the mid fifties, partly because he
Speaker 2: refuses to work or cooperate with anyone and has no
Speaker 2: interest in being part of the conservative movement. As such,
Speaker 2: he wants conservatives to agree with him because he tries
Speaker 2: to be a kingmaker. He fancies himself won and he
Speaker 2: becomes a major backer of Barry Goldwater, and when Goldwater
Speaker 2: is just that has the shit kicked out of him.
Speaker 2: In nineteen sixty four. One reason why, according to the media,
Speaker 2: because there's a bunch of articles about like why didn't
Speaker 2: Goldwater do better? And one reason that's posited by a
Speaker 2: lot of pundits is that hl Hunt kind of poisoned
Speaker 2: the campaign right, not just Hunt, because the John Birch
Speaker 2: Society is also behind Goldwater, and people don't like them.
Speaker 2: But it gets to the point where, according to Heather
Speaker 2: Hindershot quote, even the rumor of an association with Hunt
Speaker 2: could be damning for a candidate, especially after Hunt was
Speaker 2: investigated in connection with the Kennedy assassination. And yeah, like
Speaker 2: it's it's you know, good stuff. His sons are kind
Speaker 2: of involved in his downfall as a political influencer too.
Speaker 2: His son, Bunker Hunt, had financed a John Birch Society
Speaker 2: newsletter that had attacked Kennedy in really vicious terms and
Speaker 2: was made a lot of people suspicious, and then one
Speaker 2: of Jack Ruby's friends. The reason why Ruby had Hunt's
Speaker 2: name is that he had approached Lamar Hunt to try
Speaker 2: to get a job in a bowling alley that Hunt owned.
Speaker 2: So his fail sons are part of why he stops
Speaker 2: becoming as influential. His attempts to co opt Christianity for
Speaker 2: his own ends are also way too clumsy to work
Speaker 2: very well. His daughter June, who later becomes like an
Speaker 2: influential Christian media figure, even attacks him for his hypocrisy
Speaker 2: and constant cheating. As the story goes, Hunt kind of
Speaker 2: snaps back at her, I'm not Christian, I don't have
Speaker 2: to go by Christian ethics, and then he sends her
Speaker 2: ass to boarding school. When his other daughter, Swanee, makes
Speaker 2: similar complaints about his womanizing, he tells her King Solomon
Speaker 2: had seven hundred wives and that's in the Bible.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: So great guy, great parent, good job. As the seventies
Speaker 2: Dawn Hunts in his eighties. He continues to wear the
Speaker 2: same blue suit every day, but he only dry cleans
Speaker 2: the pants to save money, so eventually the top and
Speaker 2: bottom are totally different colors. Such a freak.
Speaker 4: He doesn't have to live like this, literally, Such an
Speaker 4: odd guy.
Speaker 2: So his son Hassey, who he talked about, never recovers
Speaker 2: from that mental break. He's ill and Hunt spends Hunt
Speaker 2: keeps his He's the only of his children that Hunt
Speaker 2: has a picture of in his office, I think, because
Speaker 2: he feels really bad about this, and he spends a
Speaker 2: lot of his life desperately but incompetently trying to help
Speaker 2: Passy to get better. The nation rights Hunted sought various
Speaker 2: magic cures for the boy. One day, the answer was valium,
Speaker 2: the next prostitutes. Finally, a lobotomy took the edge off
Speaker 2: of Hassie's violent fits, but just a bit so just
Speaker 2: a great dad, just so, just a great dad. Triple threat,
Speaker 2: triple threat father. He develops increasingly strange health beliefs as
Speaker 2: he aged and became an almost religious advocate of creeping.
Speaker 2: Svie's going to show you a picture of this, because
Speaker 2: anytime anyone asked him, he would get down to demonstrate
Speaker 2: this exercise technique that he's fallen in love with that's
Speaker 2: basically a crab walk. He gets down on his knees
Speaker 2: and his hands and knaves and just like walks across
Speaker 2: the ground. He fucking And there's like there's like a
Speaker 2: weird kind of like yoga component to it, Like he
Speaker 2: must have found this in some book or another. But
Speaker 2: he is obsessed with creeping. The New York Times quotes
Speaker 2: him as saying creeping is probably the second best exercise
Speaker 2: in the world, next to swimming. It's perfect.
Speaker 3: Oh all right, he's a creeper. He's a super creeper.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, fucking he loves creeping. He lives in his
Speaker 2: last years with his second family in that Mount Vernon
Speaker 2: home or third family I think actually, and he spends
Speaker 2: a lot of time promoting health foods. He's got like
Speaker 2: a vegetable garden, on his property and he eats mainly
Speaker 2: these along with he has like a very weird diet.
Speaker 2: He's a lot of just like bleon cubes, I think,
Speaker 2: just like straight like flavor. So he's a freak. He's
Speaker 2: a weirdo cool guy. Now, as I noted, his sons,
Speaker 2: especially Nelson Bunker Hunt, are real anti strong anti communist.
Speaker 2: Is Bunker is going to be a big George Wallace
Speaker 2: supporter and a fascist like he's a real hardcore segregation
Speaker 2: as fascist, giant piece of shit. Hunt also supports Governor
Speaker 2: Wallace's campaign, but he dies on November twenty ninth, nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy four. At the time of his death is as
Speaker 2: valued at two billion dollars, which is split between his
Speaker 2: two surviving ex wives, fifteen children, and many grandchildren. There
Speaker 2: are years of probate battles, I'm sure. As a note
Speaker 2: about his shitty ass sons, you should know one of
Speaker 2: his sons, Lamar Hunt, founds the AFL, the American Football League,
Speaker 2: and he's a major figure in professional tennis and soccer
Speaker 2: in the US. So that's where the AFL comes. And
Speaker 2: I want to quote from Hinderschot's article One last Time,
Speaker 2: Herbert and Bunker Hunt had been caught attempting to corner
Speaker 2: the world silver market. Could the crooks really have thought
Speaker 2: that no one would notice an ongoing attempt to purchase
Speaker 2: all the silver in the world. They were also entangled
Speaker 2: in a wire tapping caper. It's wire tapping over like
Speaker 2: their dad's. Like this is as a result of like
Speaker 2: the fight for over, like his will and probate. Wow,
Speaker 2: and yeah, Bunker is a hugely successful oil man. He's
Speaker 2: becomes a major John Birch donors with his oil money
Speaker 2: he helped, Like his company finds oil deposits in Libya
Speaker 2: and I think Pakistan. I think they're also involved in
Speaker 2: Saudi Rabied it like they are a lot of like
Speaker 2: Arab oil in Middle Eastern oil, like his company is
Speaker 2: involved in like getting the rights to and selling. He
Speaker 2: also gives a quarter of a million dollars in cash
Speaker 2: in a briefcase to George Wallace as a rainy day fund.
Speaker 2: And he tries to bribe Curtis LeMay to become Wallace's
Speaker 2: running mate, or he puts up like a trust fund
Speaker 2: to convince Lamay to become Wallace's running mate. So he
Speaker 2: just loves all of the worst fascist Bunker Hunt giant
Speaker 2: piece of shit. So yeah, that's the end of Hunt's life.
Speaker 2: One of his long he's probably his biggest ongoing contributions
Speaker 2: to popular culture is that Bunker Hunt is such a giant,
Speaker 2: famous piece of shit for all of his criminal activity
Speaker 2: and weird business activity and oil money that he inspires.
Speaker 2: The show Dallas. Dallas is based off of the Hunts. Yes, Jr.
Speaker 2: Is based off of Bunker Hunt. Oh damn Like heavily
Speaker 2: based off of Bunker Hunt, right, in part because he
Speaker 2: gets in trouble for committing a bunch of crimes. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: so at least we get to show Dallas.
Speaker 3: You know, I'll take it. Who'sha Jr. Was very big
Speaker 3: for our parents.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Bernie Sanders, by the way, did a lot of
Speaker 2: people don't know that anyway? Princess, how are you feeling
Speaker 2: at the end of these episodes?
Speaker 4: I feel a great There's nothing like knowing the origins
Speaker 4: of the war crimes that are being put out into
Speaker 4: the world every day.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's good. Yeah, war crimes, crimes against truth,
Speaker 2: all this good stuff.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for all of that amazing effort.
Speaker 3: This was a great three part thank you.
Speaker 2: Part of We're just happy to have you here, you know,
Speaker 2: happy to have you here talking about this real piece
Speaker 2: of shit and his strange beliefs about the.
Speaker 4: World at his strange pills and his strange fifteen children.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 5: Anything you want to plug at the end to your princess?
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, just if you want to see some other funyappers.
Speaker 3: I have a YouTube channel.
Speaker 4: I talk about poulp culture, history, all kinds of fun things.
Speaker 3: And just happy to be here. Thank you guys so
Speaker 3: much for having me.
Speaker 2: Excellent sweet thanks for coming along everybody. Yeah, all right, folks,
Speaker 2: we're done.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna go.
Speaker 1: Pet dogs, bye bye.
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