Speaker 1: Who Zone Media. Oh yeah, it's Behind the Bastards, a
Speaker 1: podcast that I open with the grunting noises that no
Speaker 1: one really likes, no one, No one's happy when I
Speaker 1: do this.
Speaker 2: Really, it's got, it's got a little like we're doing this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it reminds me of home.
Speaker 4: It feels like a safe when I open up pro tools.
Speaker 1: It reminds me of home in a perilous way to me,
Speaker 1: but in a way that makes you not want to return. Well,
Speaker 1: let's all hope the audience all agrees with Ian and
Speaker 1: we didn't. We didn't just torpedo our careers by me
Speaker 1: making grunt noises, guttural grunts in order to Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: good stuff, good times, welcome back to the show. We
Speaker 1: are finishing Liddy, what I promise will be our last
Speaker 1: episode on the g Man Mixed feelings, you know, ready
Speaker 1: to move on to another bastard. But also we get
Speaker 1: to listen to a lot of fear Factor today and
Speaker 1: that's something that should make everyone happy now. Much like
Speaker 1: the Catholics and g Gordon, Liddy was raised as a Catholic,
Speaker 1: he kind of becomes agnostic later on. But the Catholics believe,
Speaker 1: as I understand it that before getting to heaven, you
Speaker 1: generally go through a period in purgatory. Right, Maybe that's wrong,
Speaker 1: but let's all just pretend that the Catholics believe that right.
Speaker 1: In a similar fashion, before we get to the heaven.
Speaker 1: That is, watching a two thousand and six episode of
Speaker 1: Fear Factor starring g. Gordon Liddy, we have to go
Speaker 1: through the hell of listening to a bunch of clips
Speaker 1: from G. Gordon Liddy's incredibly racist radio show. So you know,
Speaker 1: buckle up, everybody. Hopefully the Pope will help us out
Speaker 1: of this jam.
Speaker 3: It's wild.
Speaker 2: It's wild that there was a good I guess the
Speaker 2: good period of Joe Rogan is unimpeachably news radio. So
Speaker 2: whatever this means, this is this is the purgatory of
Speaker 2: Joe Rogan.
Speaker 1: This is right before he goes to hell. He doesn't
Speaker 1: make it through the cut, right, Yeah, it's like going
Speaker 1: to med's school and becoming a dentist. Ooh that's right,
Speaker 1: dentist burns baby. Sorry, you know a lot of people
Speaker 1: really enjoy it.
Speaker 3: By whatever.
Speaker 1: It's fine, man, it's fine. It's fine. So we ended
Speaker 1: last episode with him finishing his book frightening his wife,
Speaker 1: singing a Nazi songs. He's back in full He's so
Speaker 1: back right, He's doing the full litty So he is, however,
Speaker 1: in a pretty desperate financial situation when he gets out
Speaker 1: of prison and it still owes about three hundred thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: It's a mix of fines and legal fees. He decides
Speaker 1: to take a spin at being a writer, because what
Speaker 1: other paths are open to him, and in nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: nine he writes a fiction book called Out of Control.
Speaker 1: It is a spy thriller. The Google book summary of
Speaker 1: it does not make it sound like a particularly good one.
Speaker 1: Richard Rand is a CIA rogue pulled back into the
Speaker 1: company for one last incredible mission. Gregory Ballinger is the
Speaker 1: Soviet spy whose empire Rand is out to destroy. But
Speaker 1: in a dance of deception from Washington to Switzerland and
Speaker 1: South America, the tables are suddenly turned. Someone in Washington
Speaker 1: wants the KG beat to wind and Richard Ran dead.
Speaker 1: Now so pretty boring, Certainly, I have not found any
Speaker 1: evidence that this was particularly good or that it had
Speaker 1: any new ideas. Pretty I think he's his idea was
Speaker 1: I put out a very basic pot boiler fiction and
Speaker 1: hopefully my fame as a Watergate conspirator makes a problem,
Speaker 1: you know, not a not a bad idea, No, And
Speaker 1: Howard Hunt had done that because he'd been an author before,
Speaker 1: like he immediately start and it had worked for him.
Speaker 1: Kind of, so I think he's kind of cribbing from
Speaker 1: Howard Hunt's worksheet here. We may do a book episode
Speaker 1: on this at so at this point at some point,
Speaker 1: but I kind of doubt it. He's He's not a
Speaker 1: bad enough writer that I think this will be very entertaining.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that said, his next idea is much better, which
Speaker 1: is to write his Watergate memoir, which he publishes the
Speaker 1: next year, nineteen eighty, and it sells like a million copies.
Speaker 1: He makes a shitload of money off of this, and
Speaker 1: once his book becomes a bestseller, Liddy finally finds himself
Speaker 1: more famous than he'd ever been, and all these conservative
Speaker 1: student associations at colleges around the country start clamoring to
Speaker 1: pay him to come and speak at their universities. Now
Speaker 1: listeners will know, I am of the opinion that college
Speaker 1: campus speaking tours are among the chief threats of our
Speaker 1: democracy and should be targeted via air power. However, if
Speaker 1: anyone does want to pay me to speak at your school.
Speaker 1: I will be happy to do so. So please, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: bring me over. I've done it a couple of times.
Speaker 1: It's always a good fun. So. The Washington Post reports
Speaker 1: on Liddy's comeback tour, and their reporter is bemused at
Speaker 1: the popularity that this convicted felon and fascist has with
Speaker 1: college students. Here's their article for nineteen eighty. It's incredible.
Speaker 1: Jush is Donnie Epstein, Lyddy's New York agent. He goes
Speaker 1: to these college campuses and draws a full house. They
Speaker 1: start by hissing and booing it. At the end they
Speaker 1: give him a standing ovation. He turns them completely around.
Speaker 1: They love him. During his speech, Lyddy paces across the stage,
Speaker 1: coiling his microphone cord in one hand, unraveling it with
Speaker 1: the other. Dressed in a gray suit, wearing spit shined
Speaker 1: black boots, he speaks in staccato style, interspersing his dialogue
Speaker 1: with Latin phrases and quotes from Julius Caesar. Oh my gosh,
Speaker 1: he's good at this. The demand for Lyddy is titanic.
Speaker 1: He gives thirty two speeches in the first forty two
Speaker 1: days after his booking opens. There are protests by student
Speaker 1: groups who are angry, in particularly that their tuition money
Speaker 1: is going to fucking g Gordon Liddy. One of the
Speaker 1: things that's interesting to me, the Washington Post spends like
Speaker 1: a paragraph mentioning the protests. This barely merits a mention
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty when in two thoson seventeen and eighteen,
Speaker 1: anytime there were protests of college, there's every the Post,
Speaker 1: in the New York Times, they were all all these
Speaker 1: quote unquote liberal papers falling over themselves to write articles
Speaker 1: about like, well, free speech isn't danger because students aren't
Speaker 1: happy that they're paying these fascists to speak. Nobody gave
Speaker 1: a shit in nineteen eighty interesting, So that whole article
Speaker 1: is a bleak but important read. And I have trouble
Speaker 1: not hearing the siren song of the apocalypse in responses
Speaker 1: like this from dipshit college kids. He's just so intelligent,
Speaker 1: said Jane Copp, a sophomore at Creighton, a Jesuit run
Speaker 1: school with fifty six hundred students. Before I heard him,
Speaker 1: I figured he was a psycho. Amy Jersik, another Creton sophomore, said,
Speaker 1: but he is really fascinating, and he expresses himself so well.
Speaker 1: He is just so pro American, such a super patriot,
Speaker 1: that you have to admire him even if you disagree.
Speaker 1: Aaron de Wald, who was with coppin Jersick, interjected. One
Speaker 1: Creighton student described that he as a modern John Wayne.
Speaker 1: And look, I know all these kids are old people now,
Speaker 1: but listeners, if one of these former students is your relative,
Speaker 1: pie him in the face this November, don't even explain.
Speaker 1: Why get him right in the fucking kiss with like
Speaker 1: a pecan pie. Pecan is the most aggressive pie to
Speaker 1: get hit by. Really really bash him with it. You know,
Speaker 1: That's that's what we're asking you all.
Speaker 2: I mean, this is also clearly cherry picked from the
Speaker 2: bozo's coming out.
Speaker 1: It's literally one group of free three friends, right, the free,
Speaker 1: shittiest people at the school.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's no, I mean it's like, you know, every
Speaker 2: college has a fucking libertarian association, Like it's it's those
Speaker 2: fucking right wing freaks. Yeah, and like yeah you could,
Speaker 2: and you can tell it's because they know what quote
Speaker 2: centrist or I'm not right or left of an independent
Speaker 2: thinker thing to say.
Speaker 1: But yeah, you know that is of course just code
Speaker 1: for right wing freak. That is exactly right, and that
Speaker 1: that's that's my take on it to Andrew. So the
Speaker 1: next major move Liddy makes is a pretty intelligent one.
Speaker 1: He partners up with Timothy Leary to go on a
Speaker 1: series of debates and college campuses across the nation. And Leary,
Speaker 1: you know, he's this kind of prophet of the acid age.
Speaker 1: He becomes this figure who embodies left wing rebellion during
Speaker 1: like the hippie period the sixties. He's in jail several
Speaker 1: He's broken out once. In the Who's song The Seeker,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm the Seeker. I've been searching low and high.
Speaker 1: There's a line in there about like asking Timothy Leary
Speaker 1: for guidance and stuff like. You know, he is very
Speaker 1: famous and very famous specifically for being this like left
Speaker 1: wing iconic last and you know he does. He is
Speaker 1: in jail, in prison at the same time that Lyddy
Speaker 1: is theory. Actually they wind up in the same facility
Speaker 1: at one point, and they're both these they're both these
Speaker 1: like iconic clasts who are seen as embodying their respective
Speaker 1: sides of the political aisle. Right, tim Leary is this
Speaker 1: embodiment of the sixties and early seventies left and Lyddy
Speaker 1: is kind of the same thing for the right.
Speaker 2: I don't want to know true scott'sman this, but it's
Speaker 2: also like, yeah, this is like starts to crack into
Speaker 2: the moral bankruptcy of the world.
Speaker 3: These like yes, out of here.
Speaker 1: Yes, I I don't like Tim Leary, right, I'm not.
Speaker 1: I'm not a fan of the man particularly, so you
Speaker 1: know That's where I'm coming from here. They they have
Speaker 1: a lot in common and that they are both famous
Speaker 1: and both fame hounds, and they both understand partnering with
Speaker 1: each other will increase the appeal. It's also worth noting
Speaker 1: that at this time, by the time Leary is partnering
Speaker 1: on the speaking too, which is like the early eighties
Speaker 1: kind of he is not really left wing anymore. He's
Speaker 1: more of a libertarian and kind of that that early web. No,
Speaker 1: not that not what libertarian often means today, which is
Speaker 1: like even worse than a normal republican. But like that
Speaker 1: that is you know, your your pro civil rights, your
Speaker 1: you're pro pro you know, legalizing drugs, anti the state generally,
Speaker 1: but still also not anti capitalists by any measure of
Speaker 1: the imagination.
Speaker 2: Yeah, still it's taxes. They spend way too much time
Speaker 2: talking about taxes, and yeah, it is wild heled.
Speaker 3: Modern libertarians are most we just known for try to
Speaker 3: defend pedophilia.
Speaker 2: As far as I could tell, it's like give terrrible
Speaker 2: heroin to the child I'm dating.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the modern libertarian.
Speaker 1: Giving heroin to the child I'm dating, as opposed to
Speaker 1: what it ought to be about, which is arming drag
Speaker 1: queens so that they can you know, carry out tactical strikes. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 5: So.
Speaker 1: I found a write up of the tour they did
Speaker 1: on reason dot com, which is a libertarian website, and
Speaker 1: it's it's sympathetic to both people, right. Reason is the
Speaker 1: kind of person who is going to see both tim
Speaker 1: Leary and Gebility as like admirable people. Potentially, I'm going
Speaker 1: to I think their description is interesting. First off, they
Speaker 1: give it a pretty good summary, which is they describe
Speaker 1: it as evidence of quote a disorienting moment in American history,
Speaker 1: a time after the convulsions of the sixties and seventies
Speaker 1: had ended, but while most of the giant figures of
Speaker 1: that faded age were still around trying to find a
Speaker 1: place for themselves in a changed world. And I do
Speaker 1: think that's actually a pretty apt description of what's going
Speaker 1: on here. Right quote, don't go in there's a film
Speaker 1: that's made about this tour they go on that you
Speaker 1: can watch. This is a summary of that film. Don't
Speaker 1: go into this film expecting a conventional left versus right matchup.
Speaker 1: By this point in his life, Timothy Leary was a
Speaker 1: full fledged libertarian. This becomes obvious a little more than
Speaker 1: forty minutes into the movie when he stands on stage
Speaker 1: singing the praises of voluntary organizations. I believe in bridge clubs,
Speaker 1: I believe in families, I believe in friends, I believe
Speaker 1: in stock groups, I believe in collectives, I believe in
Speaker 1: corporations and damning the one form of organization which is involuntary,
Speaker 1: and that's the modern state. He goes on to declare
Speaker 1: that every state in the world is a mafia, charging
Speaker 1: extortion fees called taxes, but he allows that I love America.
Speaker 1: America is the greatest mafia of the all. At another point,
Speaker 1: after Lyddy offers a lengthy denunciation of gun control, Leary
Speaker 1: doesn't reply with a liberal argument for restricting firearms. He
Speaker 1: simply suggests that Liddy's arguments against gun laws work just
Speaker 1: as well against drug laws. Now there's a couple things
Speaker 1: I would note here. What is that, Like, I agree
Speaker 1: with you all all states are mafius. The United States
Speaker 1: is the world's largest totally agreed, no disagreement. Why your
Speaker 1: corporation's not mafius under what like a hell a fucking
Speaker 1: insurance company sticking you up with like not allowing you
Speaker 1: to fucking get cancer treatment unless you pay ruin and
Speaker 1: like mortgage drafts. How is that? How was that better
Speaker 1: than a mob? Right?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Like, fuck fuck you for first off for not seeing
Speaker 1: that it's disgusting the degree of surveillance corporation. That's fucking vile.
Speaker 1: I think of him.
Speaker 2: It's better than a mob because any rich person could
Speaker 2: buy shares in it, where exactly in a mob. Yeah,
Speaker 2: at least some rich people could buy share. Yeah, this
Speaker 2: is like like having a debate between like center right
Speaker 2: and hard right and claiming it to be like bipartisanship,
Speaker 2: and like is truly like presages what the contemporary conversation?
Speaker 1: And this is not all I know? You know, I
Speaker 1: come from libertarians, like I come like that. Those were
Speaker 1: the people who pulled me away from being a republic
Speaker 1: looking and I know a lot of a lot of
Speaker 1: republic of libertarians I know are like, well, I believe
Speaker 1: in like markets, and I believe in people's ability to
Speaker 1: like compete. But I think that like corporations are fundamentally
Speaker 1: the enemy of the free market, right that like, actually
Speaker 1: what we need to do is break up monopolies and
Speaker 1: destroy the ability of And I don't have a problem
Speaker 1: with I may not agree one hundred percent, but I
Speaker 1: think that's an intellectually consistent point, being like, the state
Speaker 1: is a mafia and corporations are. That's nonsense, Timothy Leary,
Speaker 1: absolute nonsense. Also nonsense is what he's saying about gun
Speaker 1: control here. Obviously I have a different stance on this,
Speaker 1: I think from a lot of our particularly more liberal listeners.
Speaker 1: But what I will say that doesn't make sense about
Speaker 1: this is that the ways in which gun control and
Speaker 1: restrictions of drugs harm people, or sorry, the ways in
Speaker 1: which the gun issue and harms that are done by guns,
Speaker 1: and how gun control affects that is different, Like it
Speaker 1: relates to the way in which like drug restrictions and
Speaker 1: the way in which that harms people, Like, they're totally different.
Speaker 3: Arms.
Speaker 1: A big part of the danger of firearms. The reason
Speaker 1: why we have mass shootings and stuff, the reasons why
Speaker 1: we have gun crime, is that firearms are incredibly available.
Speaker 1: If you care about reducing suicides by guns, mass shootings,
Speaker 1: gun violence in general, you have to deal with the
Speaker 1: fact that like, the more and firearms there are out there,
Speaker 1: and the easier they are to acquire, the more people
Speaker 1: who are dangerous will acquire them. Right, even if you
Speaker 1: are pro gun, that is a very basic, inarguable fact
Speaker 1: that you have to deal with if you if you
Speaker 1: care at all about reducing the harm that guns do
Speaker 1: in society. Right. The issue with drugs is the complete opposite,
Speaker 1: which is that because of prohibition, drugs that are adulterated
Speaker 1: show up on the market, and those kill people. The
Speaker 1: other issue is that because it is an illegal business,
Speaker 1: the price of drugs is artificially inflated to many times
Speaker 1: what it ought to be, and so when people become addicted,
Speaker 1: they are often forced to do a position where in
Speaker 1: order to avoid withdrawal, the only way they can afford
Speaker 1: to get high is to steal shit. Whereas if they
Speaker 1: could get their heroin for fucking two bucks a dose
Speaker 1: from a government facility like they can in a couple
Speaker 1: of countries. They would not need to break into people's
Speaker 1: houses to afford their fucking fix. Right, These are completely
Speaker 1: opposite issues, and like comparing them and saying like, well,
Speaker 1: actually the problem with you know, gun control is bad
Speaker 1: in the same way. Don't know, they're completely different problem.
Speaker 1: Even though I have like a lot of gun control
Speaker 1: laws objectively are not effective, which is not to say
Speaker 1: that all of them are ineffective. A number of them
Speaker 1: do work, but it's a completely opposite issue. The issue
Speaker 1: with drugs is that is not that like there's too
Speaker 1: many drugs, it's that people don't know what they're buying
Speaker 1: and the price is inflated. The issue with guns is
Speaker 1: that any fucking asshole can get one. Like, totally different problems.
Speaker 1: What I mean, sorry, it's the way they're consistent.
Speaker 2: Is what you're talking to the world's dumbest right wing teenagers.
Speaker 3: They're both freedom issues.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I anyway, it's it's whatever. I'm I'm very frustrated
Speaker 1: by the Although I do have to say this is
Speaker 1: a debate occurring in the mid eighties, a lot of
Speaker 1: these problems were not nearly Like, for one thing, mid
Speaker 1: eighties mass shootings very uncommon compared to what they would be.
Speaker 1: So this is we and so you know, Finanel wasn't
Speaker 1: in the market. Both of these problems are very different
Speaker 1: when these guys are arguing. So I do have to
Speaker 1: I have to give them kind of that point.
Speaker 3: Anyway, quite simply has to hand it to g There
Speaker 3: we go, So.
Speaker 1: I don't Yeah, I don't want to go on too much.
Speaker 1: I'm done ranting about my opinions. There. I will make
Speaker 1: one more note, which is that while Leary, the guy
Speaker 1: who was famous as a hippie figure, is very much
Speaker 1: taking an individualist stance in these debates, Lyddy is the
Speaker 1: guy who is coming at this from more of This
Speaker 1: is something Reason notes Lyddy is actually more of a collectivist,
Speaker 1: which is where because he's talking about like, you know,
Speaker 1: because if fascists have a degree of that in them, right, sure,
Speaker 1: you know they're like He talks a lot more about
Speaker 1: like the community and the people and stuff, whereas Leary
Speaker 1: is is really more of a people should be able
Speaker 1: to like choose who they associate with. Liddy does not
Speaker 1: really believe that. But Lyddy also critiques the prison industrial
Speaker 1: complex pointedly in a way that Leary doesn't really spend
Speaker 1: a lot of time on, which is interesting to me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's not consistent about this, but it's interesting. Yeah.
Speaker 2: G Gordon Liddy has problems with the prison industrial complex. Yeah,
Speaker 2: only because he was in prison. Yeah, and he's certainly
Speaker 2: never had it before.
Speaker 1: He basically writes that in a column at one point.
Speaker 1: But we'll get there. Lyddy's newfound fame earned him constant
Speaker 1: appearances on new shows and the talk show circuit. We're
Speaker 1: going to play you a clip of him on Letterman
Speaker 1: from nineteen eighty two. Letterman does not give this guy
Speaker 1: any pushback whatsoever. He does not really question him in
Speaker 1: any meaningful way. You can see he and the audience
Speaker 1: falling for Lyddy's routine. Lyddy during this appearance discusses the
Speaker 1: time that he killed and ate that rat as a kid.
Speaker 1: Because you know, people have read the book by this
Speaker 1: point and are fascinated by it. He compares it to
Speaker 1: the experiences of like guys like POW's who have to
Speaker 1: eat rats to survive, and other heroic survivor narratives. When
Speaker 1: he's asked to give advice on life in prison, he
Speaker 1: goes into loving detail about all the weapons that he
Speaker 1: supposedly had. And here I'm gonna have I and play
Speaker 1: that clip. Now did you have did you have weapons
Speaker 1: inside prison? And how does a person get a weapon?
Speaker 6: You can get anything you want inside of prison, anything,
Speaker 6: if you're willing to pay for it and have the
Speaker 6: assets to pay for it. The way I got weapons
Speaker 6: were some I bought and some I stole, and some
Speaker 6: I had made for me by friends, good heavens, and
Speaker 6: we're like firearms or actual life. I had a steel
Speaker 6: bar with sharp edges with which I could break your legs.
Speaker 6: I had a pickaxe handle with a jagged punk of
Speaker 6: rusty steel on the end of it, with which I
Speaker 6: could make you very unhappy. And of course I had
Speaker 6: a knife. You always have a knife, shank as it's
Speaker 6: called me shank for.
Speaker 1: You kids watching at home, it's a shak. So it's
Speaker 1: frustrated to be the degree to which Letterman and everyone
Speaker 1: they're just like, yeah, welcome'm back. He's funny, he's our
Speaker 1: everybody's favorite fascist. You know this other shit gets normalized. Letterman,
Speaker 1: you were a part of that. Lyddy's book and touring
Speaker 1: went so well that Hollywood soon came a call in.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty five, he was hired to play a
Speaker 1: CIA operative who'd become a heroin Smuggler on an episode
Speaker 1: of Miami Vice. He is actually a recurring character on
Speaker 1: the show Miami Vice. There's a lot that's interesting about
Speaker 1: this appearance in particular, but I want to start with
Speaker 1: playing a clip of Liddy on the show, and this
Speaker 1: is from yeah, an episode of Miami Vice.
Speaker 6: You know, of course that in most parts of the world,
Speaker 6: pain is the second language. People understand it better than
Speaker 6: words because you can get right to the point. But
Speaker 6: in this country we don't really have very much pain,
Speaker 6: So the second language is money. Naturally, you'd expect to
Speaker 6: receive money for what, you know, that of pain?
Speaker 1: Oh ironic, you know that's not a that's not a
Speaker 1: badly delivered monologue. He's got some he's got Yeah, he's
Speaker 1: got stage presence. Like he gets a lot of appearances
Speaker 1: in a number of TV shows. And it's not just
Speaker 1: because like that's how he gets his foot in the door,
Speaker 1: but like he keeps getting appearances because like he's not
Speaker 1: bad at that. He's actually like a decent character. Not
Speaker 1: the only character he plays is g Gordon Lyddy.
Speaker 3: But yeah, just so bizarre.
Speaker 1: It is one of the again we keep talking about
Speaker 1: these modern day fascist media just beIN Shapiro, Stephen Crowder,
Speaker 1: Michael Knowles, these modern right wing ghouls that are all
Speaker 1: propped up by Petro dollars and the Wilkes brothers and shit,
Speaker 1: who are like spending all of their time advocating the
Speaker 1: fucking state suppression of transgender people. Scum. These guys are
Speaker 1: all Aping Liddy to some extent, but they all have
Speaker 1: the opposite path where all of these dudes fucking Michael
Speaker 1: Knowles was in a video we ran on Cracked. These
Speaker 1: dudes all started out by trying to break into acting
Speaker 1: and screenwriting, right They wanted to be Hollywood celebrities, and
Speaker 1: they failed out of it because they had no talent. Lyddy,
Speaker 1: on the other hand, starts as a right wing ghoul
Speaker 1: in politics and then he wins his way into Hollywood
Speaker 1: by virtue of some degree of merit.
Speaker 7: Like so we almost all his other Yeah, his like
Speaker 7: what skills he has are so bizarrely misapplied at all times.
Speaker 1: It's like maybe if he had started trying to go
Speaker 1: into politics, he'd be that guy. You would know him
Speaker 1: as like, yeah, I don't know the fucking fed in
Speaker 1: the early Avengers movies or some shit, he could have
Speaker 1: done it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all those guys are kind of like, you know,
Speaker 2: she liked your east Woods, like just kind of like
Speaker 2: right wing bozos.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like yeah as evil.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like we all more or less forgave Eastwood for
Speaker 1: that fucking weird chair speech, not because he knew serves
Speaker 1: to be forgiven, but because like he's in some pretty
Speaker 1: good movies, and it's like, and he's also in some
Speaker 1: pretty racist movies, don't get me wrong, but right, yeah,
Speaker 1: like yeah it's fun. It's not like whatever, it's We
Speaker 1: mostly ignore it because like, if someone's good at being
Speaker 1: on camera, we'll forgive a lot about them. Perhaps we shouldn't,
Speaker 1: but we do. Yeah, And yeah, Liddy's you know, he's
Speaker 1: not like a fucking historic level talent, but he's not
Speaker 1: bad at this. One fun fact about Liddy's second performance
Speaker 1: on Miami Vice is that the episode plot is like,
Speaker 1: yeah that he's like he's he's funneling. He's a drug dealer, funneling,
Speaker 1: selling drugs to funnel money to contras in Nicaragua, which
Speaker 1: is funny because like that's what happened, right, that's the
Speaker 1: Iran Contra story. But this episode airs a month before
Speaker 1: the first article exposing Iran Contra drops this episode.
Speaker 3: So that's fun.
Speaker 1: And like shit like that. You know, it adds to
Speaker 1: the mystique of g. Gordon Liddy. Obviously, how could that
Speaker 1: not right? That's wild that that happened. That's actually kind
Speaker 1: of crazy. Of course that would improve his kind of reputation.
Speaker 1: Is this shadowy figure of American politics and cultural life.
Speaker 1: You know, it creates something out of a man who
Speaker 1: should have buy all right, spent the rest of his
Speaker 1: life living quietly in shame. In nineteen eighty seven, his
Speaker 1: fame is close to it at its peak, and Lyddy
Speaker 1: has what would prove to be the only legitimate and
Speaker 1: verifiable violent encounter of his life. He finally gets into
Speaker 1: a fight that we can prove happened. It is not
Speaker 1: a good time for him. And I'm going to quote
Speaker 1: from an article in the Washington City Paper here. The
Speaker 1: confrontation took place at Lyddia's isolated Fort Washington home on
Speaker 1: Christmas Eve, nineteen eighty seven. According to news reports, Lyddia
Speaker 1: discovered a young couple sitting in a pickup truck on
Speaker 1: his property. Armed with a billy club, he approached the
Speaker 1: vehicle and told the mail driver to scram. Words were
Speaker 1: exchanged and the driver at tempted to back over Lyddy.
Speaker 1: When that failed, the driver whipped the truck into a
Speaker 1: U turn and came roaring towards Gordo. Liddy stood his
Speaker 1: ground and was knocked fifteen to twenty feet in the air.
Speaker 1: He suffered a broken arm and rib, a ruptured kidney,
Speaker 1: and a torn knee ligament. That is so funny, like
Speaker 1: he gets he has one encounter. These guys are just
Speaker 1: like making out fucking in a pickup truck, and he
Speaker 1: charges at them with a stick, thinking like this, scare
Speaker 1: him on the dangerous g Gorn Liddy with my billy
Speaker 1: club and it just run his ass down, nearly kill
Speaker 1: him again. Not a coward, Not a coward, not good
Speaker 1: at violence, O now. The article goes on to write,
Speaker 1: although he was not able to provide the police with
Speaker 1: either a tag number or description of his assailants, Liddy
Speaker 1: later began intimating in interviews that mafia friends from his
Speaker 1: prison days had identified the couple and would take care
Speaker 1: of of them. This never happened. Lyddy is ashamed that
Speaker 1: he got his ass handed to him and his only
Speaker 1: real fight, and he had to be like, my powerful
Speaker 1: friends will take care of him.
Speaker 3: They did.
Speaker 1: You got run over by some teenagers.
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 1: Somewhere out there is a hero. Maybe they're dead by now,
Speaker 1: it's been a while, but somewhere out there I still
Speaker 1: I hope are two heroes who know, like, we hit G.
Speaker 1: Gordon Lyddy with the truck. Yeah, right, if you hit G.
Speaker 1: Gordon Lyddy with the truck, reach out to US's over, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: You gotta be fine. I'd argue at self defense. You know,
Speaker 1: come out. We'll put you on behind the bastards. If
Speaker 1: you ran down G. Gordon Lyddy with your truck and
Speaker 1: have any evidence to corroborate it, come on, come on,
Speaker 1: come on over. Folks love to talk to you.
Speaker 6: So.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's interesting to me that the fact that you
Speaker 1: know this is kind of goes to show despite all
Speaker 1: these claims he has about some of these fights, he's
Speaker 1: in prison all these times we have to intimidate and
Speaker 1: scare people down. A lot of media, basically everyone, even
Speaker 1: in the liberal and left winging media, takes this as
Speaker 1: red and assumes that he was to some extent a
Speaker 1: dangerous man. Sure, I don't think there's any evidence of this.
Speaker 1: And again we have this one actual piece of evidence
Speaker 1: of how a fight went for him, and it's a disaster.
Speaker 1: He nearly dies because he tries to fight a truck
Speaker 1: with a stick. Right, that's the level again, these fascists
Speaker 1: that can't threat model. You don't even fight a truck
Speaker 1: with a gun if you can avoid it, that's not
Speaker 1: an even fight. You certainly don't fight it with a stick.
Speaker 1: But gee, Gordon Lyddy fucking tries, and all of the
Speaker 1: fact that he is a liar, the fact that he's
Speaker 1: so inconsistent, the fact that like he is, exaggerating and
Speaker 1: puffing up his skills and abilities was all available and
Speaker 1: easy to prove to any journalist in the nineteen eighties
Speaker 1: who had access with the library. It was easier for
Speaker 1: me every time I fact checked him. It was easier
Speaker 1: for me to do it. Obviously, I've got Google, I've
Speaker 1: got Wikipedia. All that shit makes it a lot simpler.
Speaker 1: But that wasn't an impossible dream for a fucking reporter
Speaker 1: back in that day. They chose not to fact check
Speaker 1: Liddy because he was popular and writing about his antics
Speaker 1: meant money. Perhaps the most upsetting example of this was
Speaker 1: Connecticut magazine, which paid Liddy to write a column about
Speaker 1: his time in prison. It actually starts, Okay, Liddy acknowledges
Speaker 1: that he found out having been in prison, that the
Speaker 1: liberals who had complained about the injustice of support and
Speaker 1: funding for criminal defense resources were right, and that he'd
Speaker 1: been wrong for ignoring them. But he spends most of
Speaker 1: the rest of the article specifically trying to argue against
Speaker 1: gun control by making up conversations murderers had with him,
Speaker 1: where they're like, oh, I always vote for gun control.
Speaker 1: I love gun control because I am a murderer. That's
Speaker 1: my favorite thing. Which these conversations never fucking happened. Yeah,
Speaker 1: quote to quote one of the latter. This is Liddy,
Speaker 1: to quote one of the latter, who raised his right
Speaker 1: hand in the manner of one taking an oath as
Speaker 1: he spoke on my mother. When I go on a
Speaker 1: piece of work, I don't look to nobody but God
Speaker 1: forget been. Something goes wrong and I gotta do what
Speaker 1: I gotta do, and the sucker's got a piece. I mean,
Speaker 1: it ain't all cut and dried. You know, he can
Speaker 1: end up whacking me out. I hope they take away
Speaker 1: all them guns from all them legitimate schmucks. Me forget
Speaker 1: about it. I'll always have a pistol when I need one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: no way, anyone ever said that to you, Like find
Speaker 1: murderer says, all them legitimate schmucks get the fuck out
Speaker 1: of here. Yeah, what a what a thing to set
Speaker 1: to put in the mouth of like your vision of
Speaker 1: a street thug. The phrase legitimate schmucks like whacking me out?
Speaker 1: Also like, yeah, what do you he is? He is
Speaker 1: weirdly mixing like racist people's idea of like what inner
Speaker 1: city like like diction is with like a mob movie
Speaker 1: from the sixties, Like it's it's so strange. Yeah, if
Speaker 1: Martin Scorsese was a bigot, Like that's how good Fellas
Speaker 1: would sound Lyddy also argues that since criminality is inherent
Speaker 1: to some people, programs that rehabilitate or educate them are valueless,
Speaker 1: and again he puts words in them out of prisoners,
Speaker 1: who's like, prisoners don't want to go to school, they
Speaker 1: don't want to have any sort of like rehabilitation programs.
Speaker 1: They just want to do their time.
Speaker 3: And leave.
Speaker 1: Great guy. In nineteen ninety one, Lyddy got to have
Speaker 1: a conversation with Jack Anderson. Now, Jack Anderson was, during
Speaker 1: the period that Nixon was in office, an anti establishment
Speaker 1: journalist who did some reporting very damaging to the Nixon
Speaker 1: administration and earned their ire. Nixon's people authorized a number
Speaker 1: of dirty tricks against Anderson. This is actually really interesting story.
Speaker 1: They like feed him some information to get him to
Speaker 1: write stories and stuff that will hurt him, and there's
Speaker 1: a lot of plotting about like what more we could
Speaker 1: do to stop this guy. Lyddy and Hunt actually spend
Speaker 1: their early days as White House plumbers working up vary
Speaker 1: assassination plots, like they are in the pay of the
Speaker 1: White House, plotting for ways to murder a US journalist.
Speaker 1: Now there's a lot of debate as to how much
Speaker 1: they whether or not anyone else wanted them doing this.
Speaker 1: One of the versions of events is that basically somebody
Speaker 1: jokes kind of like, yeh'd be good if we could
Speaker 1: get rid of that guy, and Lyddya assumes, oh, that's
Speaker 1: an order from the White House for me to murder
Speaker 1: this way, And when his bosses find out, they're like,
Speaker 1: what the fuck are you no, stop like we do
Speaker 1: not like g Gordon Liddy, do not assassinate a journalist
Speaker 1: on behalf of the Nixon white House. That is not
Speaker 1: your job. There's still a lot of argument as to
Speaker 1: whether or not there was any serious planning beyond him
Speaker 1: and Hunt being maniacs together. I don't want to downplay
Speaker 1: this because this is the fact that that there were
Speaker 1: people in the pay of the White House talking about
Speaker 1: this is a fucking serious thing, right anyway, this is
Speaker 1: an issue. Later as a celebrity, Liddy talks to Jack
Speaker 1: Anderson and is like, oh, yeah, we were plotting to
Speaker 1: murder you. And when when Anderson is asked, like, how
Speaker 1: do you feel about the fact that g. Gordon Lyddy
Speaker 1: and Howard Hunt we're plotting to kill you? His response
Speaker 1: is great given their record, I was in no danger.
Speaker 1: The safest place to be is a person who g.
Speaker 1: Gordon Letty wants to kill I know.
Speaker 2: The other thing that like is pretty clear from this
Speaker 2: is like he was like the precursor to It's okay,
Speaker 2: these racist right wing clowns are buffoons, so they're harmless,
Speaker 2: Like that's a you know, the whole Trump like thing,
Speaker 2: and they're like, oh, Okay, yeah, yeah, I.
Speaker 1: Don't know that. I think that's really what like Andrew,
Speaker 1: because what do you say to like, this guy's plotting
Speaker 1: to murder me, Like you're like, yeah, well, thank thank
Speaker 1: god he was a dipshit. You know, I don't think that's.
Speaker 3: A bad receeoning. Yeah you don't think so.
Speaker 1: I don't know, I mean not from the guy targeted, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe I think it's bad that all these other people
Speaker 1: downplayed him and like wrote these positive articles about it.
Speaker 1: If you're Anderson in this just being like, yeah, well
Speaker 1: he was moron, I don't know. I don't think as
Speaker 1: the victim, I think that it's not a bad response.
Speaker 1: I get what you're saying. I just don't want to, like,
Speaker 1: I don't want to like put the broader media's complicity
Speaker 1: in Liddy on this dude who was.
Speaker 2: Like oh is no, yeah, sorry, I was trying to
Speaker 2: say the other one, which is, yeah, the media, I mean,
Speaker 2: like even the Letterman thing. Right, It's like it's like
Speaker 2: the same as this Jimmy fallon with Trump, And ultimately
Speaker 2: it's because it's like, yes, they're racist, like fas, they're
Speaker 2: racist fascists, but at least they're harmless.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, No, I get what you're saying, and
Speaker 1: that is something going on here, you know, speaking of
Speaker 1: the early nineteen nineties. You know what really became much
Speaker 1: more of a problem starting in the early nineteen nineties
Speaker 1: the presence of advertising, unrestricted ads. Yeah, that that really
Speaker 1: really got a lot worse in the nineties. Ah, we're
Speaker 1: back better than ever, I think so the early nineties,
Speaker 1: and which the power of talk radio really starts to
Speaker 1: make itself undeniable. Rush Limbaugh, who we have discussed in
Speaker 1: detail in another series on this show, was the avatar
Speaker 1: of this new wave of media right. Rush is really
Speaker 1: like the big He's not the first, obviously mean that
Speaker 1: guys like father Kauflin in the thirties and shit were
Speaker 1: right wing media radio figures. Rush is the first, really
Speaker 1: like guy to figure out, in the modern sense, how
Speaker 1: is talk radio going to revitalize the far right. It
Speaker 1: should not be surprising, then, that he played a crucial
Speaker 1: role in bringing g. Gordon Lyddy to the airwaves. From
Speaker 1: an article in the right wing paper Washington Examiner quote,
Speaker 1: he was asked to fill in for a vacationing talk
Speaker 1: show host in the New York area on the first day,
Speaker 1: he arrived at with a cold and his voice failed him.
Speaker 1: Down the hall, Conservative host Rush Limbaugh had just finished
Speaker 1: broadcasting his national show and heard the g man struggling
Speaker 1: over the nation speakers. He didn't know me from Adam,
Speaker 1: but he came in, sat down and carried me for
Speaker 1: the rest of the program, that he says on the
Speaker 1: second day, media mobile Mel Karmezan was in his limo
Speaker 1: listening to competing radio stations in New York and was
Speaker 1: wowed by Liddy's blunt approach and told his Washington station, WJFK,
Speaker 1: to give the former Nicks and ad an audition, which
Speaker 1: quickly led to a job and a long career on
Speaker 1: the radio. When Gordon started at WJFK in nineteen ninety two,
Speaker 1: he tried an unusual approach. He read news stories from
Speaker 1: the conservative press on air. I just wanted to get
Speaker 1: the information out there, and it worked, he said in amazement.
Speaker 1: So that's a very anadyninge way of describing his show
Speaker 1: and what he does. My description would be that Lyddy's
Speaker 1: show was one of the most hateful radio programs to
Speaker 1: ever hit the airwaves. If you are a real head
Speaker 1: for extremist politics. You will note that in the early
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties when Liddy started, this is a period in
Speaker 1: which the militia program in this country was supercharged, first
Speaker 1: by Ruby Ridge than by Waco. All of this culminates
Speaker 1: in the Oklahoma City bombings. Lyddy leans into the violence
Speaker 1: of this era because it's anti government and there's a
Speaker 1: and Democrats are the ones in office. Right. He makes
Speaker 1: jokes about like using drawings of the President and the
Speaker 1: First Lady for target practice because he knows that's going
Speaker 1: to cause a hubbub. And then when it gets angry
Speaker 1: and the White House makes a statement, you know, he
Speaker 1: gets to respond to it. It puts his name in
Speaker 1: the papers. He is very much playing in the same
Speaker 1: way that like his predator or the people who follow
Speaker 1: him will play the same playbook. When he gets questioned
Speaker 1: about it, he says, I thought, he said, I thought
Speaker 1: it might improve my aim. It didn't. Having said that,
Speaker 1: I accept no responsibility for somebody shooting up the White House,
Speaker 1: very very very blatantly being that kind of guy. Now
Speaker 1: this inspires an angry response from the White House. Clinton
Speaker 1: references Liddy when he complains about loud and angry voices
Speaker 1: spreading hate on the airwaves in the wake of the
Speaker 1: Oklahoma City bombing. While the President denied he was calling
Speaker 1: out Lyddy in particular, the g man took it personally,
Speaker 1: and he said this the next day on his show,
Speaker 1: as related by The Washington Post, it's the president who
Speaker 1: lies and is deliberately misrepresenting facts. Liddy declared it was
Speaker 1: he Lyddy who or in last summer about the increasing
Speaker 1: animosity towards the federal government for taking away our Second
Speaker 1: Amendment rights. Now, Lyddy denies that his frequent manic warnings
Speaker 1: that federal agents were coming to confiscate guns had any
Speaker 1: influence on the intellectual climate that culminated in the bombing
Speaker 1: of the Mora Building in Oklahoma City. I will say
Speaker 1: the arguments he makes in this period are more complicated
Speaker 1: than some of his later takes, because when he is
Speaker 1: attacking the ATF and the FBI, those agencies have a
Speaker 1: shitload of blood on their hands. Right, people should be
Speaker 1: angry about Waco, They should be angry about Ruby Ridge.
Speaker 1: You know, like awful things were done by incompetent and
Speaker 1: like unaccountable federal agents. In both of those cases, and
Speaker 1: in a number of other cases. And Lyddy. I think
Speaker 1: part of how he builds his following is that, like,
Speaker 1: he's not totally wrong when he says stuff like what
Speaker 1: I'm about to read you. If they smash in un announced,
Speaker 1: screaming at you and assault you with leal methal force,
Speaker 1: you have two choices, Liddy said. You can die under
Speaker 1: their bullets, or you can shoot back and try to
Speaker 1: defend your wife and family. If there were ring flak jackets,
Speaker 1: don't shoot them there, shoot them in the head. So yeah,
Speaker 1: and this is he also tells if you're not good
Speaker 1: enough to shoot in the head, shoot him in the groin.
Speaker 1: What's interesting here is that like this is both like
Speaker 1: I'm not I'm not unsympathetic to the idea that if
Speaker 1: the Feds are going to kill you, you know you go
Speaker 1: down fighting, right, not always wrong. This is also terrible
Speaker 1: advice from like a gun standpoint, because a flak jacket
Speaker 1: doesn't stop rifle rounds, not in any way, shape or form.
Speaker 1: So this wouldn't really matter if you're anyway whatever.
Speaker 2: It's just this is a guy that just thinks movie
Speaker 2: bulletproof vests exist. Oh yeah, he's never bet in combat.
Speaker 1: He doesn't know anything realistically. This is also isn't This
Speaker 1: gets a lot of people get angry at him for
Speaker 1: this because they're like, he's telling people to shoot cops.
Speaker 1: I think here's usable advice. Like any untrained person if
Speaker 1: you're like, hey, what should you do if you have
Speaker 1: to defend yourself against a guy who has armor? Was
Speaker 1: he like, well, I guess you try to shoo him
Speaker 1: in the head, right, duh? Like that's not we're not
Speaker 1: talking about Like, that's not that's not secret operator information
Speaker 1: only the seals. No, Right, that's that's pretty basic shit.
Speaker 1: I think literally one hundred percent of people could could
Speaker 1: could guess that, right.
Speaker 3: Yea, he is not.
Speaker 1: He's not walking you through how to build a trip
Speaker 1: mine or set up close circuit surveillance cameras on independent
Speaker 1: power so you can like see when the FEDS are
Speaker 1: coming and defend yourself. He's being like, you shoot him
Speaker 1: in the hood if they're wearing armor. Well, fucking duh,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like well it's also like like this, I mean, yeah,
Speaker 2: the way the FBI like birthed this whole movement because
Speaker 2: they started doing the shit they've been doing to like
Speaker 2: people of color for years, to white people and all
Speaker 2: of a sudden, Yeah, the whole right Way movement is like, oh,
Speaker 2: massively government now.
Speaker 1: And it's this also, like the fact that the media
Speaker 1: has this like outrage over him saying this feeds into
Speaker 1: his mystique, builds his fan base, when like, the reality is,
Speaker 1: is he inciting violence against federal agents? I don't know,
Speaker 1: not more than the federal agents were when they did
Speaker 1: the shit at Waco. And realistically, nothing he's telling anyone
Speaker 1: is creating additional danger. I don't actually think in this
Speaker 1: case he really now. I think the fact that he
Speaker 1: is continuing to try to amp people up about you know,
Speaker 1: the new world orders coming, Your guns are getting stolen,
Speaker 1: you know, the government's going to put you all in camps.
Speaker 1: To that extent, yes, he is contributing to a climate
Speaker 1: of violence that costs a lot of people their lives.
Speaker 1: But I think that the way the media drills in
Speaker 1: on this specific statement about shooting cops in the head,
Speaker 1: oh sure when they attack you, is silly. That's not
Speaker 1: the thing to be angry at here. The thing to
Speaker 1: be angry at here is the broader climate of paranoia
Speaker 1: he's stoking, not the fact that he is. Because whenever
Speaker 1: he when he was talking about this when you're saying, like,
Speaker 1: if the Fed's come for you, here's what you do.
Speaker 1: He was citing real stories of federal agents busting into
Speaker 1: people's homes and like killing their pets and shit, which
Speaker 1: like you should be angry about anyway. I think that
Speaker 1: part of the response to him, and the fact that
Speaker 1: it never It's always the same thing with Alex Jones, right,
Speaker 1: Alex will say something silly about like turning the fucking shit,
Speaker 1: turning the frogs gay, and that always gets a laugh.
Speaker 1: Or he'll talk about cannibalism, or he'll make some kind
Speaker 1: of violent threat and that'll get in the airwaves and
Speaker 1: it'll bring more people to him. He does this very
Speaker 1: consciously now he knows if he says something crazy, it'll
Speaker 1: get covered by a bunch of very lazy media figures
Speaker 1: who will take it out of context and they will
Speaker 1: not report on the act. And in fact, whenever he
Speaker 1: winds up in actual court, they usually try to give
Speaker 1: him the benefit of the doubt more than they ought to,
Speaker 1: as opposed to really understanding the contexts of the actual
Speaker 1: danger of the stuff he is inciting. And the silly
Speaker 1: stuff is not really part of that. It's just how
Speaker 1: he advertises himself, and you're helping him advertise, right. That's
Speaker 1: that's kind of how I feel about this shit with Liddy,
Speaker 1: so because he's not completely in the wrong when he
Speaker 1: gets angry at the Feds. Here, I want to move ahead,
Speaker 1: you know about fifteen years to a period in which
Speaker 1: g Gordon there's no benefit of the doubt that you
Speaker 1: can give the man. This is after nine to eleven.
Speaker 1: And you know, nine to eleven didn't make anyone a
Speaker 1: better person, but G Gordon Liddy becomes a full fledged
Speaker 1: fucking bigot in public. I think this has always been
Speaker 1: a part of him, obviously, but the shit he says
Speaker 1: after nine to eleven is pretty vile. And here's one
Speaker 1: clip from twenty ten.
Speaker 8: I've got a Jewish angle I wish to express this morning,
Speaker 8: since you've decided to This is his co host the
Speaker 8: first segment of this program.
Speaker 3: Mister Liddy.
Speaker 9: No, I thought you're going to say I was being
Speaker 9: casual about your religion.
Speaker 3: No, no, no, not at all.
Speaker 5: I never think you're being casual about religion of any kind,
Speaker 5: even Islam.
Speaker 3: I don't think you're being terribly casual about.
Speaker 10: No, I'm not casual at all. About Islam. I'm I
Speaker 10: want to go over here and take that come out.
Speaker 1: So that's not and this I grab these from Media Matters.
Speaker 1: Thank you Media Matters for collecting this. It's kind of
Speaker 1: hard with old radio broadcasts. Otherwise he's not talking there
Speaker 1: about like terrorists. He's talking about Muslim's period. He wants
Speaker 1: to murder Muslims period. Which again, a lot of guys
Speaker 1: saying shit like this in the post nine to eleven era,
Speaker 1: but it's important to especially as Goofy as he sounds,
Speaker 1: listen to what a fucking vile bigoty is when he
Speaker 1: has a platform of his own where he can say
Speaker 1: any thing. So I want to play you another clip.
Speaker 1: Here's him talking with a listener in Texas about the
Speaker 1: border and all of the Third worlders who are, in
Speaker 1: his view, repopulating.
Speaker 5: The country and uh, and so now we have this
Speaker 5: huge population. But it's but the America is not being
Speaker 5: repopulated by Americans. It's being repopulated by people who do
Speaker 5: not share our values.
Speaker 11: Well, they don't share share our values or our language,
Speaker 11: or our culture or anything like that at all. The
Speaker 11: there was a book back then written called the Population Bomb.
Speaker 11: And oh you're also you know, we're all supposed to
Speaker 11: starve to death because there's going to be so many people, right,
Speaker 11: and uh, we're getting our vast numbers. You know, people
Speaker 11: see you saying, well Hispanics, Well, all that means is
Speaker 11: Spanish speakers. You know the Conquistadores who came over from Spain,
Speaker 11: uh into you know, the south of the border down
Speaker 11: there and conquered it. You know, they were tall, fair people,
Speaker 11: and there are still some of their descendants down there,
Speaker 11: but the vast majority of more Indians, right, the short
Speaker 11: squat and uh, you know, little Indians.
Speaker 1: So that's great, Yeah, that's great. That's great replacement ship.
Speaker 9: Right.
Speaker 1: You know, this is the stuff that is now very mainstream.
Speaker 1: Lyddy was one of the first guys who had real
Speaker 1: Republican Party connections who was deliberately airring and repeatedly talking
Speaker 1: this is more than a decade ago great placement narratives
Speaker 1: on the radio in the post nine to eleven era. Right.
Speaker 1: He is much more direct about this than even Limbaugh
Speaker 1: often was, and that is very much important because that
Speaker 1: is like the chief Nazi talking point that guys like
Speaker 1: Stephen Miller have been very very successful at putting into
Speaker 1: the mainstream conservatism in this point, it's to the fact
Speaker 1: that it is now a normal stance for them. And yeah,
Speaker 1: Lyddy is one of the guys who helped start that process.
Speaker 1: So speaking of Lyddy being a literal Nazi, by now
Speaker 1: here is him playing a fucking Nazi documentary about replacement
Speaker 1: theory on the air during his fucking show. First, we're
Speaker 1: going to listen just to a chunk of that documentary.
Speaker 9: Here's a special request research.
Speaker 8: In order for a culture to maintain itself for more
Speaker 8: than twenty five years, there must be a fertility rate
Speaker 8: of two point one point one children per vamily. With
Speaker 8: anything less, the culture will decline. Historically, no culture has
Speaker 8: ever reversed a one point nine fertility rate. A rate
Speaker 8: of one point three impossible to reverse because it would
Speaker 8: take eighty to one hundred years to correct itself, and
Speaker 8: there is no economic model that can sustain a culture
Speaker 8: during that time.
Speaker 9: Did my part? I had five.
Speaker 8: Children, sets of parents each had one christ there are
Speaker 8: half as many children as parents. If those children have
Speaker 8: one child, then there are one fourth as many grandchildren
Speaker 8: as grandparents. If only a million babies are born in
Speaker 8: two thousand and six, it's hard to have two million
Speaker 8: adults in out course in twenty twenty six.
Speaker 1: Again, this is all stuff that in part relies on
Speaker 1: you don't want anyone new coming in, you want to
Speaker 1: kick everything white, right, there's plenty of people, no shortage
Speaker 1: of people. The fact that like, yeah, anyway, this whole
Speaker 1: demographic decline thing very much a fucking straight up knot.
Speaker 1: The argument based on I want everyone to look like
Speaker 1: white people that I remember growing up next to as
Speaker 1: a kid.
Speaker 3: The the idea.
Speaker 2: I mean, I know, it's just like they're like shitty rhetoric,
Speaker 2: but they're like the like alighting culture and race is
Speaker 2: you know, clumsy, but I know it works with these people.
Speaker 1: So it works with these dummies. It's very bad. This
Speaker 1: goes on that clip he's playing from that fucking literal
Speaker 1: just Nazi shit goes on for five more minutes, and
Speaker 1: then Lyddy comes back in and he's got he's got
Speaker 1: something to say. It's time to wake up.
Speaker 9: Boy. What we need is redex I guess, g man.
Speaker 10: And then there's something you can sprinkle down and they
Speaker 10: take it back into their pole and the rest of
Speaker 10: the colony gets you know, they need it too. You're
Speaker 10: referring to ambro antlock mister.
Speaker 1: So he's laughing in a grandfatherly fashion there about using
Speaker 1: animal poison to kill non white people.
Speaker 2: It's also like, listen every time conservatives complain about like, oh,
Speaker 2: we never like the liberal media won't let our comedy
Speaker 2: shows be on the air, it's also because this is
Speaker 2: as good as it like, you know, gut Fieled is
Speaker 2: the new version of this, and it's like, yeah, the
Speaker 2: other reason there's never like sustained conservative comedy is because
Speaker 2: it's not funny, because.
Speaker 1: Your only joke is what if we did what the
Speaker 1: Nazis did?
Speaker 10: Ha ha ha.
Speaker 1: But I'm not a Nazi haha haa, but what if
Speaker 1: we did? Like that is the whole joke. That's the
Speaker 1: whole bit. That's all they have. So Lyddy is predictably
Speaker 1: horrified by the campaign and presidency of Barack Obama. Not
Speaker 1: a big surprise, but that that is also it's not
Speaker 1: just nine to eleven. That is also part of what
Speaker 1: makes him increasingly open about his just straight up Nazi shit.
Speaker 11: Uh.
Speaker 1: He states on Twitter quote it's a dirty shame kids
Speaker 1: in Kenya were not taught how to throw a baseball
Speaker 1: like a man in a direct reference to the then
Speaker 1: growing conspiracy theory about the former president's place of birth.
Speaker 1: I should have looked up whether or not. I didn't
Speaker 1: want to, like fact check like is, because you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of countries weirdly are into baseball. I don't
Speaker 1: know if Kenya is or not, because I didn't want
Speaker 1: to feel like it was probably worse to just like
Speaker 1: lend that any sort of credence.
Speaker 3: But whatever it wasn't Wasn't Kenya a British colony that'd
Speaker 3: be in a cricket.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're probably probably more cricket.
Speaker 11: You know.
Speaker 1: Japan was is weirdly into baseball, which is why I
Speaker 1: say it, right, and like the best baseball player in
Speaker 1: history now like a Japanese Yeah, guy, that's that's that's right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Japan's ox ox ophilia.
Speaker 1: Yeah. You never know when a country is gonna be weird.
Speaker 1: I always I found you. I feel like this happened
Speaker 1: a couple of times where you'd be like, oh, I
Speaker 1: wouldn't have picked them as being like super into baseball
Speaker 1: because it's our worst cultural export, right, The most boring
Speaker 1: thing that America ever gave the world is fucking baseball. Sorry, guys, Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yes, yes, Great Britain till the sixties.
Speaker 1: Till the sixties. Yeah, oh, I mean yeah, they did
Speaker 1: like a genocide there, the mau Maunt Rebellion, but people
Speaker 1: in concentration camps right in the post wood to Nightmare
Speaker 1: Nightmare stuff doesn't really tie in other than that, I'm
Speaker 1: sure g Gordon Lyddy thinks it was awesome. So you
Speaker 1: know what he's doing here by bringing this up. This
Speaker 1: is like a clear reference to the then growing conspiracy
Speaker 1: theory that President Obama was secretly born in Kenya. Right.
Speaker 1: Lyddy is a full backer of that, along with future
Speaker 1: President Donald Trump. On an episode of the TV news
Speaker 1: show Hardball, he makes even more direct statements on this matter.
Speaker 1: In two thousand and nine. This one's something else. This
Speaker 1: is all a available Gordon. Here it is He's this
Speaker 1: is a picture of the actual birth certificate of the
Speaker 1: former president.
Speaker 11: Well, I would like to check it out. The preponderance
Speaker 11: of the evidence is as follows. You've got a deposition,
Speaker 11: which is a sworn statement from the step grandmother who
Speaker 11: says I was present and saw him born in Mombasa, Kenya.
Speaker 11: You've got the certificate of live birth that they that
Speaker 11: they have here it's not a birth certificate, says right
Speaker 11: on a certificate of live birth.
Speaker 1: Would you claim he was born in the Kenyan slums?
Speaker 1: You say that as a fact on.
Speaker 9: The hospital in Mombasa. I didn't say Kenyan slum.
Speaker 1: What a difference, Chris, Chris, I mean in which hospital Mambasa?
Speaker 3: I mean I've been over.
Speaker 1: There's so many times. Where is this all this happened?
Speaker 11: If you have a whole history of this fell in Kenya,
Speaker 11: do you have any evidence that ever happened.
Speaker 9: Whatever that he was born in Kenyona? Yeah, I've got
Speaker 9: the deposition of the steph grandmother. He said she witnessed it.
Speaker 3: Okay, your witness, your witness.
Speaker 1: Now, look, there's no deposition. It doesn't exist. He is
Speaker 1: lying about having it produced. What he was really what
Speaker 1: he like said later is that like, well, we're working
Speaker 1: on getting it, getting access to it, but I know
Speaker 1: it exists. It was never real. Like it does not exist.
Speaker 1: It's just lies. He's just a liar. In two thousand
Speaker 1: and nine, journalists Una Lee and Laura Ling were arrested
Speaker 1: by North Korean soldiers while filming a documentary on the
Speaker 1: China North Korea border. Both women were charged with a
Speaker 1: legal entry and sentenced to twelve years hard labor. Now
Speaker 1: it just so happens that Laura's sister, Lisa Ling, worked
Speaker 1: on the Oprah Winfrey Show, and understandably she used every
Speaker 1: piece of cloud that she had to try to get
Speaker 1: the US government to take action on saving her sister.
Speaker 1: After a week's long campaign, the government succeeded in negotiating
Speaker 1: with No Korea to get the women back. Former President
Speaker 1: Clinton traveled to Pyongyang to do the handoff in August
Speaker 1: of two thousand and nine, after both women had been
Speaker 1: captive for one hundred and forty days. This is something
Speaker 1: Clinton did before. I think he actually goes in and
Speaker 1: helps with negotiations to free Americans North Crea. I think
Speaker 1: there's a couple of situations he does that, and also
Speaker 1: stuff like this. Former presidents in the modern era have
Speaker 1: often kind of done stuff like this, Right, you don't
Speaker 1: want to have the president to do it whatever, but
Speaker 1: like there's this understanding that they are kind of representative,
Speaker 1: that it is a way that the government cannot maybe
Speaker 1: directly deal with a country that we have a fraught
Speaker 1: relationship with, while also still this is a figure of respect,
Speaker 1: you know, if that's important for your negotiations. Not a
Speaker 1: really weird thing to do. It also should be pretty apolitical.
Speaker 1: These women were not doing anything wrong. This should not
Speaker 1: reasonably be a thing that anyone has an issue with. Right,
Speaker 1: Someone's got to go get them, thank God. Right, Like
Speaker 1: that should be the end of it. G Gordon Liddy,
Speaker 1: when he covers this, decide to spend his time discussing
Speaker 1: it making a very racist joke. And we're gonna play
Speaker 1: that now.
Speaker 10: All right, ladies and gentlemen, those u two young girls
Speaker 10: who may or may not have strayed into North Korea
Speaker 10: got arrested.
Speaker 9: I have something like ling Lay and wee Wie whatever
Speaker 9: their names are.
Speaker 1: So haha, people who aren't white have names I think
Speaker 1: are funny. That's the bay.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a it's yeah again. Maybe conservative comedy would
Speaker 2: do better if they found another joke.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And I'm putting all this to you like rapid
Speaker 1: fire because I want to. I want to inoculate you
Speaker 1: against thinking g Gordon Lyddy is anything but scum, because
Speaker 1: you can when you follow his kind of like sillier
Speaker 1: funnier bits, you can forget that. And this man is
Speaker 1: a fucking fascist, Like he's a terrible person. He should
Speaker 1: have never been let out of a dark hole in
Speaker 1: the ground. Don't let's not forget that. That said, we
Speaker 1: are going to move on now and we are going
Speaker 1: to play a much more fun video because during you know,
Speaker 1: g Gordon Liddy, he's one of the pioneers of right
Speaker 1: wing media and there is you know, this is evident
Speaker 1: primarily in his commitment to reaching new levels of shadiness
Speaker 1: and advertising. While he insulted the normal station sponsors as
Speaker 1: crafts consumerism, he was happy to become a personal pitchman
Speaker 1: for a whole line of health supplements. He's one of
Speaker 1: the first of these right wing guys sung like weight
Speaker 1: loss and exercise supplements. He really pioneers that. And he
Speaker 1: is also a pioneer in selling gold. Oh yeah, guys,
Speaker 1: are you ready to watch a G. Gordon Liddy gold commercial?
Speaker 3: I'm excited?
Speaker 1: Ah yeah, fuck yes, let's play it.
Speaker 10: You're to pick amy, she's still getting ready, come in.
Speaker 9: How do you plan on supporting my granddaughter? Young man?
Speaker 3: I'm only seventeen, sir.
Speaker 5: What can provide her with the brightest future home? Wrong?
Speaker 1: Gold gold.
Speaker 5: It's never too early or too late to secure your
Speaker 5: future with gold. Gold is always valuable liquid as smart
Speaker 5: by as you might ever make. Who do your trusts
Speaker 5: on Roslyn Capital?
Speaker 9: That'so. Roslyn Capital is more than just so cold.
Speaker 5: They give you expert advice on how to secure your.
Speaker 3: Face is so creepy.
Speaker 5: Yeah, old, where I buy mine? Rosslyn Capital to the
Speaker 5: your free guide to owning gold?
Speaker 12: Many young man, what's the most important thing to remember.
Speaker 3: To secure my future with gold through Rosin Capitol?
Speaker 12: No, to make sure Amy's back by eleven pll Roslin
Speaker 12: Capital and tell them Gordon Liddy sent.
Speaker 3: You incredible not to kill back the curtain.
Speaker 2: But uh, the YouTube clip that did treads should into
Speaker 2: the contemporary version of that bullshit? Yeah, newer go that
Speaker 2: that's a colloidal silver ap Oh yeah, silver at the
Speaker 2: same bullshit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but isn't it like you eat it or drink
Speaker 1: it or put it up your butt for Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's the same like supplement like unusable. I mean, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's not surprising that YouTube is also just the right
Speaker 2: wing media, but Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1: Yeah it is so funny.
Speaker 3: She'd probably do another break.
Speaker 1: Speaking of supplements, help help us supplement our income by
Speaker 1: buying these products and services. We love you. I don't
Speaker 1: actually love them. Guys, don't tell oh my god, we've
Speaker 1: come back from break. I didn't mean that. I didn't
Speaker 1: mean that. I didn't mean that. I didn't mean that.
Speaker 1: Oh boy, oh fuck, oh fuck. Okay. Ian is going
Speaker 1: to take a hop off right now to research whether
Speaker 1: or not it's possible to edit audio while I guess,
Speaker 1: I guess, Andrew you and I will just power through
Speaker 1: the rest of this year.
Speaker 2: Fuck yeah, yeah, yeah, well, yeah, good thing. Evil Robert
Speaker 2: left because yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was evil. That's brilliant, brilliant. Ian, remember that
Speaker 1: for next time. Got it?
Speaker 3: You got him out of the studio.
Speaker 1: Finally, Yeah, Evil Roberts left. I would never say anything
Speaker 1: like that to you wonderful people. So, despite being an
Speaker 1: execrable human being, g Gordon Liddy continued to be in
Speaker 1: demand among the Hollywood set, who were always willing to
Speaker 1: ignore his bigotry and calls for genocide because he was
Speaker 1: funny and always good for some buzz Lyddy acted in
Speaker 1: a number of films. He is I Think He's the
Speaker 1: villain in Camp Cuckamonga. He's in Adventures in Spying. He
Speaker 1: makes appearances on mcguiver, Airwolf, Super Wo Force, and Al
Speaker 1: Franken's late line to name just a few. He's in
Speaker 1: a lot of docs too, DoD documentaries.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is like exhibit A on this bullshit that,
Speaker 2: like the entertainment industry is quote liberal, like it's pluralistic
Speaker 2: because it's profitable. But they fucking people in charge of
Speaker 2: this industry at least love a fucking pigot.
Speaker 1: Oh absolutely can't get enough of them. Put him on
Speaker 1: Al Franken's show Wild Sad that he's an Airwolf, although
Speaker 1: I take some comfort in knowing that the helicopter from
Speaker 1: air Wolf was later bought by a pervert who had
Speaker 1: sex with it. Heah, that makes me feel a lot better. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So none of this comes close to Lyddy's crowning achievement
Speaker 1: in Hollywood, his two thousand and six appearance on Joe
Speaker 1: Rogan's Fear Factor. To be specific, this is celebrity Fear Factor,
Speaker 1: and Lyddia makes his appearance here along a heavy serving
Speaker 1: of washed up celebrities from mostly like the seventies and eighties.
Speaker 1: His chief competition on the episode is Leif Garrett. Does
Speaker 1: anyone here remember Leaf Garrett? Yeah, that's fine, because he's
Speaker 1: not he barely I don't even know that I'd call
Speaker 1: him a celebrity. He'd put out some albums in like
Speaker 1: the seventies, nobody alive remembers any of them now. Visually.
Speaker 1: The most fascinating thing about this episode is that everyone
Speaker 1: else is like from like their twenties or so thirties
Speaker 1: to fifty, and Lydia is seventy five years old and
Speaker 1: looks looks like I mean, he doesn't aged badly. He
Speaker 1: was always in pretty good shape, but like looks like
Speaker 1: he's an elderly man next to everybody, which is interesting,
Speaker 1: fascinating mix here. So I'm going to play you his
Speaker 1: introduction from the start of this episode is when they're
Speaker 1: all like, everybody's walking on set.
Speaker 9: I've lived a pretty full competitive life.
Speaker 10: Age has not prevented me from doing anything so far,
Speaker 10: and you people put me through all kinds of medical
Speaker 10: tests before you let me on the show, and I
Speaker 10: passed him with flying color. So that's a.
Speaker 1: Oda.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the absolute cowardice of chiroting him with Watergate figure.
Speaker 1: Watergate figure yeah, yeah from which side of Watergate?
Speaker 3: Who knows could be anyone.
Speaker 1: Looks like if Hitler had survived and it's like World
Speaker 1: War two figure. Yeah, notable person from a second World
Speaker 1: War conflict, World War two veteran, Yeah, well known Nazi.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the basics of this show are that people are
Speaker 1: paired up into teams, all of them celebrities in this instance,
Speaker 1: and they have to endure a set of physically unpleasant
Speaker 1: and at least faux dangerous challenges together. The winner gets
Speaker 1: fifty thousand dollars. Lyddy is paired up with the actress
Speaker 1: who played Vanessa Huxtable from The Cosby Show. It's just
Speaker 1: a wild, wild thing to have happened in the world.
Speaker 1: Joe Rogan, a very young Joe Rogan, is clearly in
Speaker 1: awe of Lyddy, and he gives it. Really tells you
Speaker 1: a lot about how much Joe Rogan understands about the world.
Speaker 1: His every almost every word of his introduction is wrong.
Speaker 1: He tells several lies about the man, and Lyddy does
Speaker 1: not correct him, just smiles and nods. So here we go, Temmis.
Speaker 13: You realize who you've partnered with. He was second to
Speaker 13: j Edgar Hoover. This guy was in the Korean War.
Speaker 13: This is the only castrom we've ever had that's in
Speaker 13: the encyclopedia. Yes, do you did like burn your hand
Speaker 13: with a candle to prove that you could endure pain.
Speaker 9: Actually it was a cigarette lighter. I don't know where
Speaker 9: the candle light from.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, the candle. A good part about him, him
Speaker 3: and me, we've both been in jail.
Speaker 9: He was very good part about I don't know, but
Speaker 9: you know I was. I was in jail a lot
Speaker 9: longer than him, in jail four five years.
Speaker 13: G Gordon, Once you explained everybody, did you go to
Speaker 13: jail four?
Speaker 10: I got nine different fellows.
Speaker 9: Let's see, there's.
Speaker 3: Burglary, all related to Watergate, related to the Watergate. Yeah, everything
Speaker 3: were guilty.
Speaker 9: Of course it was guilty.
Speaker 3: That wasn't guilty enough. I was in detention once.
Speaker 11: Did you go?
Speaker 9: She I used to be in the FBI, so I
Speaker 9: know his rep sheet.
Speaker 6: You know what they got him for impersonating a human being.
Speaker 3: She's making jokes, joke, This is g. Gordon Seinfeld.
Speaker 1: So to everybody laugh and look at how funny this
Speaker 1: fucking monster is. Also everything Joe says, there is fucking wrong.
Speaker 1: He was never the second, He was never that high
Speaker 1: in the FBI. He was certainly not Jay Edgar Hoover's second,
Speaker 1: and he did not participate in any way in the
Speaker 1: Korean War. He is he is like a he is
Speaker 1: a Korean War era veteran in that he was around then.
Speaker 1: But it would be like if you had an uncle
Speaker 1: who spent his two years or whatever in military service,
Speaker 1: like sitting at like like fucking cleaning and maintaining vehicles
Speaker 1: at a fucking truck pool in North Dakota. But it
Speaker 1: was during the Vietnam War. He's a Vietnam era veteran,
Speaker 1: but that's not calling him a Saying he's a nom
Speaker 1: vet would be like, well, no, no, he's not. He
Speaker 1: didn't never leave the country. He did not do any
Speaker 1: any Vietnam stuff. G. Gordon Liddy was not part of
Speaker 1: the Korean War.
Speaker 2: Classic right wing shit. You know, yeah, I said, Joe
Speaker 2: Rogan's research stoke.
Speaker 1: Joe Rogan was. He was like, he's so xightly excited.
Speaker 1: He's so we'll talk about why, because I think it's
Speaker 1: interesting why I believe Joe Rogan is so into this
Speaker 1: guy and what it says about Joe and what it
Speaker 1: says about that kind of dude who make up a
Speaker 1: significant chunk of the male population unfortunately, but like you
Speaker 1: see how they fall for it. Right, like instantly everyone's
Speaker 1: on board. Liddy's a fairly charismatic guy. He understands how
Speaker 1: to present himself around people. He's good at this. This
Speaker 1: is a skill, right that is kind of worth noting
Speaker 1: when we look at him. I think this episode really
Speaker 1: does show how savvy Liddy had become by this stage
Speaker 1: in his life. While the other male celebrities are boisterous
Speaker 1: and kind of chauvinistic, he is quiet. He's reserved. He
Speaker 1: feeds into his reputation by being quite saying less is more,
Speaker 1: and he understands that. He's also supportive and kind of
Speaker 1: fatherly to his young female partner. He's like very very
Speaker 1: nice to her in a way that like a lot
Speaker 1: of the they're in on the show or a lot cruder,
Speaker 1: which I do find interesting. And he just comes from
Speaker 1: the fact that he is. He has these He has
Speaker 1: these more old fashioned ideas of like how you should
Speaker 1: behave paternalistically when he wins. He wins the first challenge,
Speaker 1: which like is this weird bungee diving game into a
Speaker 1: pool where you have to grab objects, and it seems
Speaker 1: to reinforce his reputation as some kind of superman, considering
Speaker 1: how much older he is than everybody else. The second
Speaker 1: challenge is where things get interesting. His partner quits because
Speaker 1: everyone asks to like sit in these tiny diving bell
Speaker 1: like compartments that are pressurized, and then first it's pumped
Speaker 1: full of foul smelling, sulfurous odors, so it's like you're
Speaker 1: trapped in a big ball of arts. And then it's
Speaker 1: heated up to an uncomfortable level so that you're like sweating,
Speaker 1: and then like they pour insects and stuff in, so
Speaker 1: you have to deal with being covered in maggots and shit.
Speaker 1: It's all stuff that's like gross and unsettling. It's not
Speaker 1: really a danger, right. They do shock people with like little,
Speaker 1: very light kind of cattle prod versions at one point.
Speaker 1: Everyone else is miserable during this and complains constantly and
Speaker 1: is like horrified his things get gross. Lyddy just sits
Speaker 1: there quietly with like his legs folded and endures the
Speaker 1: whole thing with this almost beatific smile on his face.
Speaker 1: Here's the segment where the bug shower begins. Lyddy is
Speaker 1: just sitting there.
Speaker 3: No, not what please just it's John. Are you angry
Speaker 3: with her?
Speaker 11: John?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 3: But I am gus you blame it on me. I
Speaker 3: did I quit joke.
Speaker 4: I'm not blaming it on you.
Speaker 3: I'm not just because I told her I was scream
Speaker 3: It's natural.
Speaker 13: I say the beginning said I'm gonna scream, but I'm
Speaker 13: not gonna quit Tracy.
Speaker 3: You know, g go.
Speaker 4: This is the only that I'll ever know.
Speaker 3: We've done.
Speaker 11: Wow.
Speaker 13: Unfortunately, I know I knew I wasn't gonna get to
Speaker 13: the next chair.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's wee definitely advanced. Now it's just to see
Speaker 1: who wins the choppers.
Speaker 3: Take care, guys.
Speaker 1: There's two motorcycles for whoever wins this. Yeah, and Lyddy
Speaker 1: wins them. By the way, shouldn't surprise you if you
Speaker 1: know anything about him. This is another thing that he
Speaker 1: is definitely good at, is endurance.
Speaker 3: Right, absolutely built for this.
Speaker 1: There's no skill that is you don't. He doesn't have
Speaker 1: to accomplish anything. He doesn't have to like think anything through.
Speaker 1: He just has to sit and endure an experience that
Speaker 1: he knows is not really dangerous, right.
Speaker 4: Like lighting his hand on fire for fun. Yeah, and
Speaker 4: everybody already thinks he's a bad as in his mind,
Speaker 4: the job is done.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and he's done real prison, right, Like it's not
Speaker 1: hard to sit in a diving bell type thing for
Speaker 1: a few an hour or to whatever be around on
Speaker 1: some bugs like, especially when you've had that experience in
Speaker 1: her life. At one point, Leif Garrett tries to see
Speaker 1: if you can talk Lyddy out of staying in the pod,
Speaker 1: and Lyddy says one of the few wantest things he
Speaker 1: was ever recorded saying, who.
Speaker 3: Gets the choppers? Hey?
Speaker 14: Gee, you know what does you don't want a chopper?
Speaker 14: There got nothing to do with the choppers. I just
Speaker 14: don't for that a boy. Well, we'll see you at
Speaker 14: the end.
Speaker 9: My red. This was clearly going to be an endurance situation.
Speaker 3: I can endure anything.
Speaker 15: After spending one hundred and twenty six days in solitary confinement,
Speaker 15: being in a pod was not disturbing to me. Been
Speaker 15: covered by thousands of cockroaches when I was in a
Speaker 15: filthy prison. So a few maggots and just brushed them away.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't think he's lying there. Obviously he's not
Speaker 1: lying there. He does well at this. He wins two
Speaker 1: very ugly motorcycles. I'm going to guess he sold them.
Speaker 1: They're hideous.
Speaker 10: Uh.
Speaker 1: The final stunt of the day is a driving test
Speaker 1: with a car on a stunt track. There's they're obstacles
Speaker 1: and stuff. It's like you knows there will be some
Speaker 1: fire and shit. Lyddy is supposed to drive around and
Speaker 1: through the obstacles, and he he spends a lot of
Speaker 1: time bragging about his FBI training and action driving, like
Speaker 1: talking about like, well, I've got FBI training, and I
Speaker 1: think I know what I'm doing. And then this is
Speaker 1: the truest g Gordon Liddy. He brags about his FBI
Speaker 1: driving skills and then gets in the truck and immediately crashes,
Speaker 1: just just instantly drives it into a building. And here's
Speaker 1: that clip.
Speaker 5: Whoever breaks down?
Speaker 2: He hate obstacle golf and completes the cars the fastest lens.
Speaker 5: And pray, who what.
Speaker 10: He's on.
Speaker 3: I'll see if that training helps.
Speaker 14: A long time ago man, I think he was a
Speaker 14: faster than him.
Speaker 3: Man picking up his bead.
Speaker 1: He lasts. All of his vaunted FBI training allows him
Speaker 1: to stay on the stunt driving test half as long
Speaker 1: as Leaf Garrett. That's what g Gordon Letty's real skills
Speaker 1: bring to the table. Half as good at driving as
Speaker 1: fucking Leaf Garrett.
Speaker 3: Oh Man delightfully weird holy shit.
Speaker 1: It is very weird and this is the you know,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I debated whether or not to go
Speaker 1: on this little rant afterwards, but I kept thinking about
Speaker 1: what this means, what Joe's fascination with him means, and
Speaker 1: kind of the rest of what I know about Joe Rogan,
Speaker 1: what he sees his masculinity as heroism. I've been thinking
Speaker 1: about all these questions a lot as I've been going
Speaker 1: through these the episodes, and I keep coming back to
Speaker 1: I keep being reminded of and thinking of my grandfather
Speaker 1: in this, because I think the difference between the two
Speaker 1: men as I knew them says a lot about the
Speaker 1: difference between particularly these kind of like mainstream conservative ideas
Speaker 1: about what it means to be a man, what it
Speaker 1: means to be brave. And these are not just conservative,
Speaker 1: these are deeply American ideas, deeply flawed ideas versus.
Speaker 3: You could argue that that is that's concerned the same diff.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, And I think versus what I would describe
Speaker 1: as what actually is heroism and bravery, I think is
Speaker 1: really worth digging into. So if you'll forgive me, I'm
Speaker 1: going to talk about my grandpa a little bit here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you've all learned about g. Gordon Liddy. My grandfather was
Speaker 1: I think about ten years older than him. Unlike Lyddy.
Speaker 1: Lyddy even talks about who is very insulated from the
Speaker 1: Great Depression. My grandfather was poor. He came from a
Speaker 1: farming family. He is able to get a job with
Speaker 1: the Civilian Conservation Corps, which is part of the deal.
Speaker 1: FDR had established this organization to hire out of workmen
Speaker 1: and have them do stuff like this is where a
Speaker 1: lot of our parks come from, right is the CCC
Speaker 1: guys build them and stuff. You know, all these young
Speaker 1: men who didn't have anything else to keeps these guys fed,
Speaker 1: keeps them from starving. My grandpa does this for years,
Speaker 1: and the money he gets, you know, every paycheck he
Speaker 1: would buy a cart and of cigarettes and he'd send
Speaker 1: every dime outside of that back to his family to
Speaker 1: help keep his brothers and his mom and dad fed.
Speaker 1: Nineteen thirty nine or so rolls around. He becomes very
Speaker 1: aware of Hitler and what's happening in Europe. He becomes
Speaker 1: convinced that the US is going to get into the war.
Speaker 1: He knows that his brothers will wind up fighting, and
Speaker 1: as the oldest brother. He thinks that he should join
Speaker 1: first in order to hopefully try and spare them from
Speaker 1: some of that. So he joins the military a year
Speaker 1: or so before the US gets involved. He's one of
Speaker 1: these guys who I think people kind of naturally wanted
Speaker 1: to follow, and so he becomes a drill sergeant. He
Speaker 1: spends most of World War Two training other men for combat,
Speaker 1: and repeatedly he feels that he needs to fight, especially
Speaker 1: again one of his brothers, his younger brother, the tallest
Speaker 1: of the family, winds up in a unit that's going
Speaker 1: to be seeing heavy combat. He's going to be part
Speaker 1: of the Normandy landing. So my grandfather pushes and pushes
Speaker 1: and gets assigned to a unit that's going to be
Speaker 1: part of the invasion. He gets pulled out of it
Speaker 1: at the last minute. And the story I was always
Speaker 1: told is that when they were at one of the
Speaker 1: disembarkation points, it was really chaotic. My grandpa, being this
Speaker 1: kind of drill sergeant dude who feels this inherent responsibility
Speaker 1: towards other people, starts going around and like dressing everybody's lines,
Speaker 1: sorting out their gear, organizing things. He was just kind
Speaker 1: of that man. Compulsively, and one of the officers running
Speaker 1: the operation sees him doing this and is like, you're
Speaker 1: not going anywhere, Garland. We need someone like you here.
Speaker 1: So he is forced to stay back home while his
Speaker 1: brother and a lot of his friends go over and
Speaker 1: a lot of them don't come back. His brother gets
Speaker 1: shot in the head outside of Bastone, survives, but is
Speaker 1: never really the same after this, and you know, he
Speaker 1: stays in the army. After World War Two, he winds
Speaker 1: up fighting in Korea. He's there, he was actually because
Speaker 1: the unit he was with was stationed normally in Hawaii.
Speaker 1: He was on his way with my grandma and their
Speaker 1: kids to go live there. They were moving there, and
Speaker 1: he gets diverted as they're heading over. My grandma's left
Speaker 1: alone to take care of the family. He winds up
Speaker 1: spending however long basically the extent of the Korean War
Speaker 1: in Korea. And he starts off as he's a sergeant,
Speaker 1: I think maybe a staff sergeant when the war begins,
Speaker 1: and sergeants, you know, enlisted in officers are two different things.
Speaker 1: You don't go from enlisted to an officer normally because
Speaker 1: they're two fundamentally different career tracks. My Grandpa goes starts
Speaker 1: the war as a sergeant and ends it as a major,
Speaker 1: which is like a higher up officer. This normally doesn't happen.
Speaker 1: What occurs during the war is that everyone above him
Speaker 1: dies so consistently that he winds up taking their jobs,
Speaker 1: and he gets given temporary rank that is then later
Speaker 1: made confirmed as permanent because he's good at it, and
Speaker 1: he is running field hospitals on the strength of an
Speaker 1: eighth grade education. By the time the war ends, he won.
Speaker 1: I think it was either bronze or a silver star.
Speaker 1: The one thing I know that he really did specifically
Speaker 1: was this moment where there was a bunch of guys
Speaker 1: I think twenty or so US soldiers pinned down and
Speaker 1: injured underneath this bridge and they were trapped. There were
Speaker 1: two machine gun nests that had direct lines of sight
Speaker 1: and were just firing directly into these guys. We had
Speaker 1: very little cover. They didn't have artillery support on the line,
Speaker 1: they didn't have air cover. There weren't really assets available
Speaker 1: in this area of the line of contact to get
Speaker 1: them out. So my grandpa grabs one of his friends
Speaker 1: and they drive a jeep through two machine guns firing
Speaker 1: at them. The jeep gets shot full of holes, they
Speaker 1: both get injured, and then while still under fire ode
Speaker 1: He described it as stacking them like firewood, twenty men
Speaker 1: into the back of this jeep and then drives them
Speaker 1: out while getting shot the entire time to rescue them. Warrens,
Speaker 1: you know, he quits the military eventually and spends the
Speaker 1: rest of his career he runs all of the hospitals
Speaker 1: in Okinawa, Japan for fifteen years or so. And you know,
Speaker 1: these are like triosh units and stuff, so a lot
Speaker 1: of people who are really messed up wind up going there.
Speaker 1: And again all of this on like the strength of
Speaker 1: an eighth grade education. And the thing, you know, we
Speaker 1: got to know a couple of the dudes who had
Speaker 1: served with my grandpa, you know again later on when
Speaker 1: they were all old men. There was one conversation that's
Speaker 1: really stuck with me, which is one of my guys,
Speaker 1: my Grandpa's, like the guys serving under him, was like,
Speaker 1: you know, Garland, how did you you know? The thing
Speaker 1: that was always interested it was always amazing to me,
Speaker 1: is no matter how bad shit got, you were never scared.
Speaker 1: And my Grandpa's response was, oh, I was shitting my pants.
Speaker 1: The whole time. I just couldn't let any of you
Speaker 1: know how scared I was right. And I know that
Speaker 1: was long digression. I apologize. But the thing that makes
Speaker 1: me think of when I think about Lyddy.
Speaker 3: G.
Speaker 1: Gordon Liddy's entire concept of courage was as an individual
Speaker 1: doing something dangerous to prove your manhood. And he was
Speaker 1: psyched to get a chance to go to prison for
Speaker 1: Richard Nixon, no matter what it cost his family, because
Speaker 1: it meant he got to prove he wasn't, in his mind,
Speaker 1: a coward. And I contrast that with what my grandpa's
Speaker 1: life experience tells me. He viewed as the meaning of
Speaker 1: courage of being a man, and it was never taking
Speaker 1: a student, it was never throwing himself into danger. It
Speaker 1: was care. His entire life was an exercise in caring
Speaker 1: for the people around him and the weight of responsibility
Speaker 1: first to his brothers, to his family, to his country,
Speaker 1: to the world. You know, when he joined for World
Speaker 1: War Two, to the men around him. Throughout his period
Speaker 1: of service, he was never doing anything to be a hero.
Speaker 1: He was acting consistently and no matter what it cost him,
Speaker 1: to save lives, to protect people. And I think that's
Speaker 1: the difference between what heroism means to someone who has
Speaker 1: been through some of the worst experiences. You can see
Speaker 1: what bravery means, what doing the right thing is versus
Speaker 1: what these children, and I include Joe Rogan as a
Speaker 1: mental child, believe courage is. Joe Rogan is so impressed, Wow,
Speaker 1: looked at him, me so tough. He can have bugs
Speaker 1: poured on him, and shit, fucking Joe wouldn't know courage
Speaker 1: if it jumped up and bit him in the fucking ass.
Speaker 1: Courage is taking care of people, even when it means
Speaker 1: harm and sacrifice on your own behalf. Courage is not
Speaker 1: sitting in a fucking sphere while people pore bugs on you,
Speaker 1: and it's not sitting in a prison to protect Dick
Speaker 1: Nixon while you're family suffers. Anyway, that's my rant.
Speaker 3: Yeah, wells, yeah, it's not just that, and he like doesn't.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the whole concept of masculinity is like it's so sad,
Speaker 2: like we just yeah, did it need any of this
Speaker 2: to happen? And the way it harms like its worst
Speaker 2: like perpetrators as well, is so fucked up. We're just like, guys,
Speaker 2: none of this, none of this is necessary. None of
Speaker 2: this has to be like this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, anyway, yeah right. G Gordon Lyddy lived a
Speaker 1: fifteen years after fear Factor. He lives to be ninety.
Speaker 1: He dies in the spring of twenty twenty one in
Speaker 1: his daughter's house after struggling for several years with Parkinson's,
Speaker 1: which is also what got my grandfather. By the way,
Speaker 1: he lived long enough to see the rise of Donald
Speaker 1: Trump and January sixth, although by that point he was
Speaker 1: mostly out of the spotlight. He also lived, interestingly enough
Speaker 1: long enough to see one son, Raymond Liddy, sentenced to
Speaker 1: five years probation for storing a cash of child pornography
Speaker 1: in his Coronado home. So one of the suns he
Speaker 1: raised is a child porn Officionado. His other son is
Speaker 1: better Tom Liddy has a more auspicious career as a lawyer,
Speaker 1: where he represented Mericopa County during a twenty twenty lawsuit
Speaker 1: with the Trump campaign over what it claimed were falsified ballots.
Speaker 1: Liddy succeeded in getting the case dismissed, which earned him
Speaker 1: to an avalanche of death threats from Trump people. So
Speaker 1: the Lyddies, the Liddies contain multitudes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, although you know what the way that they don't
Speaker 2: is like, you know, don't there's just a world where
Speaker 2: like that was my job, that's.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I don't think he's a
Speaker 1: great perer. I'm sure he's not a great I don't know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe maybe he is, right, I don't know. I don't
Speaker 1: know specifically that he isn't either. I guess, Yes, why
Speaker 1: am I casting dispersions?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Why why am I shit talking? Because he can't be
Speaker 1: he can't be held responsible for his dance sucking. So yeah,
Speaker 1: that's me being a little bit of a dick. I
Speaker 1: have no reason. I know nothing about him other than this,
Speaker 1: and that was not a bad thing to do.
Speaker 3: So there, you know, right, holy shit, what fuck it.
Speaker 3: I'm glad we got to finish the take.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it was the right call. Yeah.
Speaker 3: What a life?
Speaker 1: What a life? What a weird fucked up what a weird,
Speaker 1: fucked up miserable less Yeah yeah.
Speaker 2: No, And I guess that's the thing. It's like none
Speaker 2: of the lessons will ever be learned, Like even this,
Speaker 2: no one listening to this is not no one, But
Speaker 2: you know, they're not susceptible in the same way to
Speaker 2: whatever the fuck he has going on. He and Joe
Speaker 2: Rogan have going on.
Speaker 1: Anyway, you need to plug Andrew?
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, I mean, you know, you know, is this racist?
Speaker 2: We're not as well researched, but we're just not as
Speaker 2: well researched.
Speaker 3: Kind of the same vibe though.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so uh there you go.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I uh, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I'm tired. We're done.
Speaker 2: We're all going to going on. We're all going to
Speaker 2: go get into our diving bells. I just meditate for
Speaker 2: a couple of hours.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and Phil, Yeah, just ponder good stuff, you know,
Speaker 1: interesting code of people might fight when I just not
Speaker 1: long ago, and you know, when I was living in
Speaker 1: Portland in twenty twenty during the riots, big part of
Speaker 1: my support system was my my technically my land lady,
Speaker 1: you know, we just kind of lived in adjacent houses,
Speaker 1: who was a Chinese citizen about my age, and we
Speaker 1: found out during like one of the early pandemic conversations
Speaker 1: when we were locked in together, that her dad, who
Speaker 1: served in the Chinese military, probably was very close to
Speaker 1: where my grandpa was during several parts of the war.
Speaker 1: One of the things she said was like, well, I
Speaker 1: don't think he was a very good shot, And I
Speaker 1: was like, well, I guess I'm buck.
Speaker 10: You're right.
Speaker 1: Neither of them got the other. That would have been
Speaker 1: real bad. But I don't know. Something hopeful on that, right.
Speaker 1: You know, that was a terrible war. A lot to
Speaker 1: say about all of the awful things that we're done
Speaker 1: in that war. But yeah, we wound up hanging out
Speaker 1: during the COVID year and supporting each other. That's nice. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So anyway, there's your moment of hope.
Speaker 2: Nothing about politics makes sense, right, nothing about politics, about history.
Speaker 1: It's all fucking yeah, yeah, yeah, shit happens anyway for real. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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