Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Oh goodness, Jiminy, Gracious Christmas. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards,
Speaker 2: a podcast about the very worst people in all of history,
Speaker 2: introduced by one of the very worst introducers in all
Speaker 2: of history. Your host me Robert Evans. This week I
Speaker 2: have a guest who's better at introducing things, Princess Weeks. Princess,
Speaker 2: why don't you introduce yourself because we've seen how I
Speaker 2: do it.
Speaker 3: You're fabulous. I disagree with you, that's all just with that.
Speaker 3: My name is Princess Weeks. I'm a writer, YouTuber, shit talker,
Speaker 3: and I love history, and especially when I get to
Speaker 3: listen to Robert tell me about bad people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I love bad people, especially when I get
Speaker 2: to inflict their badness on someone else.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: And this week we've got a guy who kind of
Speaker 2: made inflicting his opinions on other people on everyone else
Speaker 2: his like life mission and use the vast fortune he
Speaker 2: built to do it. We're covering a fella here. He's
Speaker 2: the former richest man in the world. This guy was
Speaker 2: an oil in his time. He was a millionaire. But
Speaker 2: if you you know, fix things to modern money, he
Speaker 2: was a billionaire from a fairly early point in like
Speaker 2: terms of modern money. And he was kind of the
Speaker 2: first of the right wing, like these ultra rich right
Speaker 2: wing guys to make pushing his own opinion in politics
Speaker 2: by taking control of like or building media organs deliberately
Speaker 2: to force his own opinion on public He was the
Speaker 2: first of these super rich guys to really do that,
Speaker 2: or he was part of the first wave of rich
Speaker 2: guys that did that. And he was the biggest, like
Speaker 2: of this first wave of generally like post New Deal
Speaker 2: super rich you know, multimillionaire billionaire oil guys who are
Speaker 2: are funding right wing politics. He was the guy who
Speaker 2: was kind of best at it. But he was also
Speaker 2: the guy who was only interested in forcing his own
Speaker 2: politics on people. Like he didn't want to talk to
Speaker 2: any other people on the right, He didn't want to
Speaker 2: make friends. He just wanted to create media organizations that
Speaker 2: would push his politics on other people. He's a very
Speaker 2: weird dude. And his name was H. L. Hunt. Also
Speaker 2: some people think he killed jfk hmm. So have you
Speaker 2: heard of this guy?
Speaker 3: No, I've never heard of him, but he sounds annoying
Speaker 3: and like the patrons say it of podcast bros.
Speaker 4: So like I'm writing sure about it.
Speaker 2: He's got a lot of that energy. He was kind
Speaker 2: of like the proto Elon Musk, like what Musk has
Speaker 2: done with turning X and Rock into this, like basically
Speaker 2: building these companies just to push his own opinions on
Speaker 2: everyone else. That's what Hunt was trying to do with
Speaker 2: like the radio in the fifties and sixties and television
Speaker 2: and stuff. So he's an interesting care character and like
Speaker 2: a freak in his own personal life, which is always
Speaker 2: fun when one of these guys is just the strangest,
Speaker 2: weirdest little guy.
Speaker 1: So does HL stand for great.
Speaker 2: Question, Sophie. That's what we're starting because he has like
Speaker 2: one of the most racist old white guy names you
Speaker 2: could possibly have, Haroldson Lafayette Hunt Junior. That's this fucker's
Speaker 2: full name, Haroldson and a Lafayette in there, Lafayette Junior.
Speaker 2: You know you're in for a good time when you've
Speaker 2: got all those names together, Hunts, Yeah, all those that's
Speaker 2: funny you mentioned that.
Speaker 1: That guy, I'm like, wow, would cover my drink?
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, definitely. Haroldson Lafayette Hunt Junior was
Speaker 2: born in Carson Township, Fayette County, Illinois, on February seventeenth,
Speaker 2: eighteen eighty nine. Most of the articles and bios you'll
Speaker 2: find on him kind of breeze right through his childhood
Speaker 2: bio on the oil industry friendly website Oklahoma Minerals, which
Speaker 2: depicts Hunt as a hero, so you know, kind of
Speaker 2: ideologically where this bio is coming from, simply says that
Speaker 2: he was quote the youngest of eight children in a
Speaker 2: farming family. His early years were marked by a lack
Speaker 2: of formal education, as he was homeschooled and never attended
Speaker 2: public or private schools. So we're off to a good
Speaker 2: start already, right, Like, this is a dude who and
Speaker 2: that's not a weird upbringing for the time, really, but
Speaker 2: it is kind of weird for him because his other
Speaker 2: like brothers and sisters aren't all private schooled. So Hunt
Speaker 2: was a pretty prolific writer of letters to the editor
Speaker 2: and of ads in the Yellow Pages. So we do
Speaker 2: get other bits of his history if you're willing to
Speaker 2: dig deeper, that go a little further than that. In
Speaker 2: the nineteen sixties, he wrote this in an ad published
Speaker 2: by the Tennessee And so this is him trying to
Speaker 2: connect with other members of his family. My grandfather was
Speaker 2: Waddie Thorpe Hunt, freeing his slaves long before the war began.
Speaker 2: Waddy Thorpe Punt migrated to Serchie County, Arkansas, stopping en
Speaker 2: route to make a crop near Lookout Mountain. He formed
Speaker 2: a company of Confederates in eighteen sixty which included his son.
Speaker 2: He was killed in eighteen sixty four by Cantrill's guerrillas.
Speaker 2: So that's him talking about like his grandfather, right, Like,
Speaker 2: that's the family patron. And I'll tell let you know
Speaker 2: right now, he's the only one who says this guy
Speaker 2: freed his slaves long before the war began.
Speaker 4: How was gonna ask?
Speaker 3: I was like, he made it sound like, yeah, my
Speaker 3: grandfother Freda's slaves before it was cool, before everyone had
Speaker 3: to do it.
Speaker 2: But that he started a volunteer Confederate militia for love
Speaker 2: of the game.
Speaker 4: You know it.
Speaker 2: Now, Waddy may not owned slaves, but that wasn't uncommon.
Speaker 2: Most people who fought in the Confederate Army didn't have
Speaker 2: enough money to like own slaves, right, like they but
Speaker 2: that's not entirely the point. Some people were racist without
Speaker 2: that right, and that seems to have been his grandfather's deal. Now,
Speaker 2: what's very funny to be about this ad, which is
Speaker 2: I'm like trying to connect with other relatives by talking
Speaker 2: about his confederate at grandpa. Is that right after being like, hey,
Speaker 2: does anyone know you know my grandpa wants anyone else
Speaker 2: related to whom I want to connect, he goes on
Speaker 2: to like say, I want to exchange you know, family
Speaker 2: history with relatives quote and present them with three of
Speaker 2: the HLH alo Vera Cosmetics that's his private cosmetic company,
Speaker 2: and a list of stores in the area carrying HLH Cosmetics.
Speaker 2: And the remainder of the ad is a plug for
Speaker 2: his cosmetics business and his right wing radio show, which
Speaker 2: I find I just found very funny that he's like,
Speaker 2: I want to connect with my family, but I also
Speaker 2: want to use this space in the newspaper to get
Speaker 2: people to buy my cosmetics right wing skincare company.
Speaker 4: Yeah right, but also.
Speaker 3: Always agree he said he's the youngest of eight of
Speaker 3: eight kids.
Speaker 4: How much more family connections does he need? I ring,
Speaker 4: that's the family.
Speaker 2: You gotta have, bro, right, Like, why do you care?
Speaker 2: It seems like you get your hands full there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you don't need any cousins when you have a
Speaker 3: basketball team, like, it's fine.
Speaker 2: So that's a good point.
Speaker 1: That was very fun. I fear it was your target audience.
Speaker 2: Damn near too, actually, So the Confederate connection was enough
Speaker 2: to convince me that, like, I needed to look more
Speaker 2: into this guy's family history, because I was like, well,
Speaker 2: there probably means there's something else interesting there. And I
Speaker 2: can only find one biography that was written about him,
Speaker 2: which was the book Kingdom, and it's actually it was
Speaker 2: published after he died, and it's actually a biography of
Speaker 2: his whole family written by this hardcore libertarian author named
Speaker 2: Jerome to Sill, and I think to Sill was a
Speaker 2: fan of Hunt. He certainly wrote a history that I
Speaker 2: would argue portrayed Hunt pretty close to how Hunt saw
Speaker 2: himself a lot of the time. Although he does he
Speaker 2: does include more of the warts than I think would have,
Speaker 2: but he clearly like has this degree of like awe
Speaker 2: in this man for being such a great businessman. It's
Speaker 2: hard for me to tell how like real this biography
Speaker 2: is because to Sill, again, he's like a guy with
Speaker 2: an ideological bent that he's trying to get across in
Speaker 2: his books. And his biography of Hunt includes all of
Speaker 2: these verbatim conversations about conversations that would have happened in
Speaker 2: like the eighteen hundreds, and this book was written in
Speaker 2: the like one hundred years later. And I'm like, who
Speaker 2: did you talk to to get the transcripts of these conversations?
Speaker 2: You must have just made that up or you listen
Speaker 2: to something that like these people's grandchildren said is how
Speaker 2: the conversation went. So you have to take a lot
Speaker 2: of this book with a grain of salt. Right, it's
Speaker 2: getting like.
Speaker 4: Real person fan fiction.
Speaker 3: Like he is like, yeah, I just put myself into
Speaker 3: the character, like what would what would my goats say?
Speaker 3: Like what would my heroes say? And he's just like,
Speaker 3: all right, I've got it, nailed it.
Speaker 2: I would say, think of it that way. This is
Speaker 2: real person fan fiction. That said, it's the only book
Speaker 2: we have about this guy's childhood, and it's clearly based
Speaker 2: on conversations he had with members of this dude's family,
Speaker 2: So you can't discard it because it's like our only source. Right,
Speaker 2: that said, I want to We're going to talk a
Speaker 2: little more about Tussil in this book too, because he's
Speaker 2: kind of a very funny guy. You should know in
Speaker 2: terms of evaluating how much can we trust this biography
Speaker 2: that he was an early hardcore libertarian activist, although not
Speaker 2: entirely the bad kind. He got like politically activated for
Speaker 2: the first time in his life because he was disgusted
Speaker 2: by the draft in the Vietnam War, and he staged
Speaker 2: a walkout protesting the war at the Young Americans for
Speaker 2: Freedom Convention in nineteen sixty nine, which is like good, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: In nineteen seventy one, he published his first book. It
Speaker 2: usually begins with iron Rand, A Libertarian Odyssey, which is
Speaker 2: a book about how he went from an angry, lapsed
Speaker 2: Catholic looking for a new religion to an objectivist libertarian.
Speaker 2: Although he also kind of makes fun of iron Rand
Speaker 2: in the book too, because she believed a lot of
Speaker 2: crazy shit about sex that he does not on board with. Right,
Speaker 2: so he's like some about her, but like makes fun
Speaker 2: of her too. He wrote of his feelings in the
Speaker 2: time for the moment, I considered myself uniq alone and
Speaker 2: courageous individual who had found the holy grail after years
Speaker 2: of floundering. That's how he reacts to reading iron Rand
Speaker 2: for the first time. A lot of guys like that, Unfortunately, like.
Speaker 3: That's like the first time, Like you taught to a
Speaker 3: guy who read Dune for the first time, He's like, I.
Speaker 4: Just had no idea.
Speaker 2: All my politics are now Dune, Dune exactly.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 2: That same year, nineteen seventy one, to Sell wrote an
Speaker 2: op ed for The New York Times and begged for
Speaker 2: conservatives who still care about such things as peace and
Speaker 2: justice and racial harmony to vote for candidates who really
Speaker 2: be in peace when they say peace, who understand and
Speaker 2: intend to promote the politics of decentralization of pollution, control
Speaker 2: of economic and judicial reform, and so on all the
Speaker 2: way down the line. So he's not like entirely bad.
Speaker 2: This is back when the libertarian movement was a little
Speaker 2: more complicated than it's going to become in the Trump years,
Speaker 2: So that's positive. In nineteen seventy four, to Sell ran
Speaker 2: for governor of New York on the Free Libertarian Party ticket.
Speaker 2: He only got like thirty thousand votes, and he needed
Speaker 2: fifty thousand to get the party a permanent place on
Speaker 2: the ballot. The Times notes of his election campaign. On
Speaker 2: the campaign trail, he's distributed to sell bills, fake dollar
Speaker 2: bills that he assured voters would be soon worth more
Speaker 2: than the real thing, given the country's ruinous economic policies.
Speaker 2: He arranged for a woman in a beige body stalking
Speaker 2: to ride through Central Park like Lady Godiva, on a
Speaker 2: horse named Taxpayer. So he would have loved creating. You
Speaker 2: would have loved like Jerome to Sill. You would have
Speaker 2: loved bitcoin to.
Speaker 3: Sell coin like and he's given you naked ladies too.
Speaker 3: He's like, listen, I'm giving you the taxpayers everything they
Speaker 3: could want.
Speaker 2: A horse named tax horse name this man would have
Speaker 2: had so many NFTs.
Speaker 4: Album can you imagine? Like there?
Speaker 2: And sorry this is in our episode about hl Hunt.
Speaker 2: But when I started reading about the guy who wrote
Speaker 2: his biography, I was like, this man's fascinating. So anyway,
Speaker 2: take quotes that I'm going to read you from the
Speaker 2: book Kingdom with a g of Salt. So Tousill's books
Speaker 2: has very doesn't mention Watty Hunt Hunt's grandfather freeing his slaves,
Speaker 2: so I suspect his grandson made all that up. But
Speaker 2: he does talk about the fact that Watty created a
Speaker 2: volunteer cavalry militia to support the Confederate cause, which should
Speaker 2: tell you all you need to know about the man's politics. However,
Speaker 2: there is an interesting discrepancy between what hl Hunt came
Speaker 2: to believe and what to Sill Rights. In his biography,
Speaker 2: to Still claims that Captain Hunt was quote shot to
Speaker 2: death near his farm by Northern Raiders, but in his letter,
Speaker 2: Hunt says he was killed by Cantrell's guerrilla fighters, and
Speaker 2: Cantrell's Raiders were a pro Confederate partisan group of bushwhackers
Speaker 2: that actually this is where Frank and Jesse James get
Speaker 2: their start, and Cantrell's Raiders, now it would they definitely
Speaker 2: killed a lot of Confederate farmers too, because kind of
Speaker 2: by the end of the war they were just raiding,
Speaker 2: you know, like they're.
Speaker 3: Like, we just like doing this now, like this is
Speaker 3: our new passion, Like we gotta get a skille out
Speaker 3: of this.
Speaker 2: When I got into this, it was for the racism,
Speaker 2: but now it's just the love of raiding.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: I just can't get over how much I like to raid.
Speaker 3: They're tapping into their Viking roots. They're like, this is
Speaker 3: what I was meant to do ancestry.
Speaker 2: It's it's like how the Oakland Raiders are ostensibly at
Speaker 2: like their fans are extensively there to support a football team,
Speaker 2: but it's really about the raiding for the Oakland Raiders
Speaker 2: fans too, you know, that's what makes that a great.
Speaker 1: Team, Las Vegas Raiders.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, Sophie, I don't accept that at all.
Speaker 3: That's like me with the net that like, oh, it's
Speaker 3: it's the Brooklyn Nets. I'm like that they're from New Jersey.
Speaker 3: It's okay. We don't have to make things up because
Speaker 3: says it doesn't mean it's not right.
Speaker 2: Yeah. No, I refuse to accept that. So when Captain
Speaker 2: Hunt gets murdered by whether it's by Northern Partisans or
Speaker 2: Cantrell's Raiders, his son H. L. Hunt, which is the
Speaker 2: same name as our HL Hunt, right, and it's his
Speaker 2: dad takes control of the family. Now HL goes by
Speaker 2: the nickname Hash for reasons lost to history, but are
Speaker 2: more like rooted in potatoes than marijuana. He's a fascinating
Speaker 2: figure because his life and his son's life kind of
Speaker 2: perfectly embody the evolution of American conservatism from the Civil
Speaker 2: War up to like the modern era, through like the
Speaker 2: political realignment of the mid twentieth century. Because you have
Speaker 2: like the Republican Party, which is this like radical progressive
Speaker 2: force in the country that then becomes like the Conservative
Speaker 2: Party over a period of time. Right and his family
Speaker 2: really embodies that very well. In eighteen sixty four, before
Speaker 2: the war was over, Hash took like, after his dad
Speaker 2: gets killed, he moves up north and he takes an
Speaker 2: oath of allegiance to the Union. Per the book Kingdom,
Speaker 2: up North was where the money was. Hash told his
Speaker 2: family the South as they had known at all their
Speaker 2: lives was finished. It would not rise again for fifty
Speaker 2: years at least. So you see, this is a family
Speaker 2: the number one never gives up on like the racist
Speaker 2: things that led them to support the Confederacy. But Hash
Speaker 2: is a very pragmatic guy. He's like, the Confederacy's not
Speaker 2: winning the and I want to be where the money is. Like,
Speaker 2: I'm not going down with the ship. Fuck that my
Speaker 2: dad did.
Speaker 3: That seems stupid, exactly, Like the slaves are gone. Let's
Speaker 3: go up to the industry and abuse the Irish.
Speaker 2: Right, abuse whoever we can. Because I'm still racist, don't
Speaker 2: get me wrong. We can divers So the family winds
Speaker 2: up in Illinois, which is where our Ahll Hunt is
Speaker 2: going to be born. In eighteen eighty nine, they start farming,
Speaker 2: and things are going pretty well for the Hunts for
Speaker 2: a while. Hash is a good businessman and a skilled farmer.
Speaker 2: In short order, he meets a girl, the daughter of
Speaker 2: an Army Union chaplain, and she's named Ella Henderson. This
Speaker 2: is going to be ahell hunt. Our Hunt's mom. Tusill's
Speaker 2: book claims that she quote was descended from an old
Speaker 2: Huguenot line, and she deported herself with a certain aristocratic air,
Speaker 2: not unworthy of her birth line. Now that's an interesting,
Speaker 2: weird use of the word deported by too soil there
Speaker 2: I've never heard. I think he meant to write comported,
Speaker 2: because I don't think deported actually works that way. But
Speaker 2: it made its way into the final copy of the book.
Speaker 2: So they're like, we're just.
Speaker 3: Not Hugoot enough to understand how sophisticated that is.
Speaker 2: You gotta be way more Huguenots to get that word right. Yeah. So,
Speaker 2: I don't know if she was had Huguenot blood in
Speaker 2: her veins or whatever, but this is very consistent with
Speaker 2: what hl Hunt's going to believe about his background and himself,
Speaker 2: because he thinks he's special, and part of why he
Speaker 2: thinks is special, he's special is because of his blood.
Speaker 2: From eighteen seventy three to eighteen eighty nine, the Hunts
Speaker 2: have eight children, the last of whom is our boy,
Speaker 2: Haroldson la Fayette. Given that he has the same name
Speaker 2: as his father, Hash, he was nicknamed Junior and the
Speaker 2: family soon took to calling him June or Juni. So
Speaker 2: as a boy, he goes by June or Juni because
Speaker 2: he's got the same name as his dad, who goes
Speaker 2: by Hash. Now, the Hunt's five hundred acre farm was
Speaker 2: productive and supports the family well, but how well it
Speaker 2: supports them is kind of hard for me to say
Speaker 2: to sell rights that they quote just managed to scrub
Speaker 2: out a meager living. But we also know that by
Speaker 2: the time Hash dies, he gives his all eight of
Speaker 2: his kids pretty significant inheritances. That suggests they're actually doing
Speaker 2: very well. Now, maybe I don't know how long it
Speaker 2: takes them to be doing very well, but certainly by
Speaker 2: later in his life they're like upper middle class, right,
Speaker 2: if not rich. It's a little hard for me to
Speaker 2: tell that.
Speaker 3: Do we know the breakdown of like the genders of
Speaker 3: the sibling was it like more girls than boys because
Speaker 3: you can outsource the girls they get they can go
Speaker 3: somewhere else.
Speaker 2: I think it's a pretty a pretty good split. But
Speaker 2: he's got at least a couple of sisters. Okay. That said,
Speaker 2: I think it's also Hunt kind of talks up his
Speaker 2: family having a harder time when he was a kid
Speaker 2: than they really did, because all conservatives who wind up
Speaker 2: crazy rich like to pretend they were poorer than they were. Yeah,
Speaker 2: at any rate. In eighteen ninety four, when JUNI was
Speaker 2: like five or so, his dad Hash gets elected sheriff
Speaker 2: of Fayette County. He ran as a Republican, which is
Speaker 2: a major shift for the son of a Confederate volunteer
Speaker 2: who'd fought against the Union himself. Hash becomes the first
Speaker 2: Republican sheriff of Fayette, although not the last. He settled
Speaker 2: into a pattern of spending a week or so in Vandalia,
Speaker 2: the county seat, and then heading home for a few
Speaker 2: days to tend his farm, which was now primarily maintained
Speaker 2: by his wife and older sons. If Tusill's book gives
Speaker 2: an accurate account, hl Hunt or Hash was not a
Speaker 2: pleasant man to have as your dad. Quote Hash Hunt
Speaker 2: would storm through the house sipping a bit of his
Speaker 2: own homemade corn whiskey from a jar and thundering to
Speaker 2: anyone with an earshot. His views on the world, on
Speaker 2: the hard times that had spread through the nation like
Speaker 2: a Pestilen's, on the politicians who had brought these conditions about,
Speaker 2: and on the bare living he was able to scratch
Speaker 2: out from his farm and his share of salary. So
Speaker 2: they've got kind of right wing talk radio in the
Speaker 2: form of their dad. He's just like a drunk rush
Speaker 2: Limbaugh complaining about how hard things are while he makes
Speaker 2: a lot of money.
Speaker 4: I'm so glad he has the authority to arrest people.
Speaker 3: Just drug like you. You there, do you know what
Speaker 3: you're doing to the actage?
Speaker 2: No law about how drunk you can be as a
Speaker 2: sheriff in Illinois in the eighteen hundreds, I feel confidence
Speaker 2: saying that, Thank God for that, Thank God for that.
Speaker 2: We used to be a proper country, Princess, we used
Speaker 2: to be a proper country. Exactly So, as I noted earlier,
Speaker 2: most casual bias of Hunt will point out that he
Speaker 2: was homeschooled. Now, depending on the source I've seen, arguments
Speaker 2: that his education was pretty minimal and lacking, and that
Speaker 2: his mom did a really good job. Whatever the case,
Speaker 2: he was brilliant from a young age. Hunt purportedly learned
Speaker 2: to read before he was three years old, and as
Speaker 2: one writer phrased, it, was clever with numbers from a
Speaker 2: very early age. Now I suspect these claims are a
Speaker 2: mix of the truth and some myth making. Hunt is,
Speaker 2: as an adult going to be an almost supernaturally gifted
Speaker 2: card counter. He is, legitimately, and there's enough evidence that
Speaker 2: we know this isn't myth making. When he sits down
Speaker 2: to play poker, he wins. Right, He's got like a superpower,
Speaker 2: like he's he's incredible at it. And he's also just
Speaker 2: His business career shows he's really good with money. He's
Speaker 2: good at like counting up sort of risk analyzing risk
Speaker 2: versus like the odds of profit and loss in his head,
Speaker 2: making snap decisions that wind up being very accurate. So
Speaker 2: I don't doubt that he's a math genius. I kind
Speaker 2: of doubt he was full on reading before the age
Speaker 2: of three, uh, but he probably was precocious. His sisters
Speaker 2: adored him, and in general, the women and his family
Speaker 2: paid close and doting attention to the boy. Hunt would
Speaker 2: later complain of his family's poverty in those years, but
Speaker 2: the Hunt family were an objectively better shape than their neighbors.
Speaker 2: The eighteen eighties played host to one of our nation's
Speaker 2: many regular back before the Great Depression and then afterwards,
Speaker 2: when they like changed the way the banking system worked
Speaker 2: in significant ways. We used to have depressions a lot
Speaker 2: more regularly. Right.
Speaker 3: It's it's like a diagnose of depression. It's like you're
Speaker 3: gonna have it every couple. You're gonna have a high
Speaker 3: low day.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The national economy was dysthymic. Yeah, exactly. They didn't have
Speaker 2: prozac yet to really regulate invented money prozac, which is
Speaker 2: the the FDI. See. I guess h, I guess.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So the eighteen eighties played host to one of our
Speaker 2: nations one of these depressions, and most of their neighbors
Speaker 2: lose everything or almost everything during this time. Now the
Speaker 2: Hunts don't, but Hash is still unhappy to still describes
Speaker 2: him as a man driven to rage by his failure
Speaker 2: to make more of a success of himself, and one
Speaker 2: who took his frustrations out on his wife and children.
Speaker 2: This creates a miserable situation for Ella, and she tries
Speaker 2: to distract herself by obsessively caring for her youngest son, Juni.
Speaker 2: Per the book Kingdom, Juny was her pet, her baby,
Speaker 2: and he looked to her for refuge against this strange,
Speaker 2: violent man who filled him with terror every time he
Speaker 2: entered the house.
Speaker 4: He was almost a serial killer. He was almost a killer.
Speaker 2: That was like, he's got he gets a few of
Speaker 2: those vibes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Now you know who else
Speaker 2: is constantly filled with a terrifying violent rage. Robert the
Speaker 2: sponsors of this podcast, and we're back talking about the
Speaker 2: uncontrollable anger that drives our beautiful sponsors. That's what makes
Speaker 2: them great. So things with his dad and the fact
Speaker 2: that his mom is kind of dealing with being in
Speaker 2: a terrible marriage by obsessing over her youngest son. This
Speaker 2: comes to a head with Junie, who again is the
Speaker 2: future richest man in the world, was seven years old.
Speaker 2: Hash came back early from a trip out sheriffing or something,
Speaker 2: and he stumbles on to what had become something of
Speaker 2: a secret between Juni, his mother, and the world. Quote.
Speaker 2: Standing on a milk box in front of her as
Speaker 2: she worked the dough, the seven year old Juni had
Speaker 2: his face upturned as he suckled her naked breast. Now,
Speaker 2: Hash had heard stories from James, the oldest boy still
Speaker 2: at home who was working the family farm, that Ella
Speaker 2: Rose was nursing juny longer than was natural. Hash dis
Speaker 2: missed those stories at the time, having preferred abolishing the
Speaker 2: thought to facing something that seems shameful and repugnant to him.
Speaker 2: So that's a bit odd. Seven's late, it's giving.
Speaker 3: It's like a bad kid from Game of Throws. It's
Speaker 3: like he gotta get off the kitty in that point.
Speaker 2: Seven's a bit much. I don't want to like shame
Speaker 2: people for nursing, but seven's a bit late. No, we
Speaker 2: can we can agree, swee Rob.
Speaker 4: And you gotta get off your mom's tit like that
Speaker 4: is diabolical.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So to say that Hash doesn't take finding this
Speaker 2: out well would be putting it mindly mildly. He starts screaming.
Speaker 2: He goes into a rage. The book doesn't say he's violent,
Speaker 2: so I hope he wasn't, but I don't know. But
Speaker 2: at the very least, he screams at his wife and
Speaker 2: demands that she explained what the hell is going on?
Speaker 2: And this is where we get one of the first
Speaker 2: instances of Dusill's book, presenting us with an incredibly detailed
Speaker 2: conversation from a moment he absolutely could not know about
Speaker 2: in any real detail.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is his head cannon. He's like.
Speaker 3: He's like, if I get put myself into the mind
Speaker 3: of my of my hero baby Hash, baby Judy, what
Speaker 3: is he thinking wiping the milk off his mouth listening
Speaker 3: to this conversation.
Speaker 2: This has to just be based on what Hunt remembered
Speaker 2: seventy years later and told his sons maybe about this happening. Uh,
Speaker 2: but yeah, he claims that. Ella begs her husband not
Speaker 2: to don't make more of this than it is. Hash
Speaker 2: and Hash starts yelling even more after this, to which
Speaker 2: she begs, not in front of Junie. Hash, Please, you'll
Speaker 2: regret your words later on. I'll regret nothing except not
Speaker 2: listening to my own instincts. I've been blind for years,
Speaker 2: too busy to put my foot down when it mattered most.
Speaker 2: Let this be the end of it, you hear, I'll
Speaker 2: listen to no pale excuses. This has to end at once.
Speaker 2: Hash's word was final. Ella Rose never exposed her bosom
Speaker 2: to her youngest son again, whether out of fear of
Speaker 2: her husband or out of her own shame was never
Speaker 2: explained to young June. The boy came to hate and
Speaker 2: resent his father all the more for taking from him
Speaker 2: what was the most important thing he had known so far,
Speaker 2: his intimacy with his mother. Hash tried to assume a
Speaker 2: more active role in family affairs from that day on,
Speaker 2: but the effort was a hollow one. His heart simply
Speaker 2: was not in it. So young Ahl is not going
Speaker 2: to pick up any good lessons about this. Number one,
Speaker 2: This is kind of like a weird intimacy that's probably
Speaker 2: bordering on unhealthy, if not has crossed the line into unhealthy.
Speaker 2: But the fact that his dad then screams at him
Speaker 2: and takes it away is even worse and makes like
Speaker 2: this guy is gonna have so much miny family related issues,
Speaker 2: and one thing he's going to learn is that families
Speaker 2: are better off without husbands.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's a Freudian dream like it's and it's full
Speaker 3: blown oedipal complex like you get.
Speaker 4: He gets caught like almost like cuckholding his own father,
Speaker 4: you know what I mean.
Speaker 2: That's obviously not how he sees it as a seven
Speaker 2: year old, but his dad sure sees it that way.
Speaker 4: Absolutely and I guess, And just.
Speaker 3: The visual of him needing to be on top of
Speaker 3: a crate to reach the bosom, it's like it's too much,
Speaker 3: Like I'm not I'm not team hash, but I.
Speaker 4: Definitely think you need to put the kebash on that,
Speaker 4: Like that is not okay.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's good stuff. So whenever I'm starting my
Speaker 2: research into a new bastard, I don't know a lot
Speaker 2: about going into the project. There's this period of anxiety
Speaker 2: where I'm like sinking research time into a guy, but
Speaker 2: I don't know if they're interesting enough to like work
Speaker 2: as an episode yet. And when I hit this story
Speaker 2: was the moment I stopped worrying about hl Hunt. I
Speaker 2: was like, oh, thank god, Okay, Okay, there's something to
Speaker 2: sink cartoon into with this motherfucker. We're gonna get You
Speaker 2: don't tend to see this story mentioned in most other
Speaker 2: articles on the Guy, with a notable exception of one
Speaker 2: of my major sources for this, which was a chapter
Speaker 2: from Heather Hindershot's great book What's Fair on the Air,
Speaker 2: which is about Cold War era right wing broadcasting. She
Speaker 2: devotes a chapter to Hunt, and she writes this that
Speaker 2: he had nursed at his mother's breast until the age
Speaker 2: of seven, was a point of pride, further evidence of
Speaker 2: his innate specialness. Normal rules didn't apply to him, he reasoned.
Speaker 2: So that's based on He would talk about this moment
Speaker 2: like journalists and to his kids, and he was proud
Speaker 2: of it because again he develops pride in being different
Speaker 2: from everybody else, right, not subject to the rules. That's
Speaker 2: also a very important I'm the eldest boy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, early, sweet boy, I can suck up my
Speaker 3: mom's hit as long as.
Speaker 2: I want, boy. Yeah. Now, yeah, there's a lot to
Speaker 2: say about, like how good because kids need to feel
Speaker 2: like they matter and like they're special, but not in
Speaker 2: certain ways. Also like you need to feel like you
Speaker 2: matter and you're special because everyone matters and a special
Speaker 2: which is like what mister Rogers tried to get across
Speaker 2: as opposed to No, no, I'm special as opposed to
Speaker 2: everyone else.
Speaker 4: And that's why they want to defund PBS everyone. They
Speaker 4: want you to be reliant to the breast milk.
Speaker 2: Only the breast milk. That's big breast milk is behind
Speaker 2: all of this, Princess. I've been saying that for years.
Speaker 4: That's true.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the breast milk industrial complex is what really runs
Speaker 2: this country, good lord. So the feeling of specialness and
Speaker 2: young h l Hunt was stoked by the way his
Speaker 2: sisters treated him. While his older brother James and his
Speaker 2: dad both bullied him, his mom and the girls mothered
Speaker 2: him with attention. In his biography, to Sill writes that
Speaker 2: June's sisters teased him often enough about being Ella Rose's favorite,
Speaker 2: but the teasing was good natured and playful, unlike James's
Speaker 2: sneering and resentful taunting. The girls regarded Junie as their
Speaker 2: own special pet as well as Ella Rose's. Right, so
Speaker 2: that's probably not bad. You know, your sister's kind of
Speaker 2: babying the youngest kid. But again, this is all going
Speaker 2: to sort of feed into his I am a special
Speaker 2: person complex, which isn't gonna be ideal for everyone. Hunt
Speaker 2: also enjoyed a close relationship with his older brother Leonard,
Speaker 2: who he idolized and who loved him back. Tusill is
Speaker 2: one of the people who will argue that this homes
Speaker 2: that his homeschooling education was quite good. Ella Rose teaches
Speaker 2: her youngest son Greek, Latin, French, and German, and when
Speaker 2: he starts reading at age three. It said that she
Speaker 2: gives him issues of the newspaper so that he could
Speaker 2: learn what was going on in the world. Now, again,
Speaker 2: some of this has got to be myth making, but
Speaker 2: to still claims that Hunt quote gained a reputation throughout
Speaker 2: the region as a child genius, despite the fact that
Speaker 2: he never attended the local school. Now what's odd about
Speaker 2: this to me is the fact that Tusylvin adds his
Speaker 2: entire education was received from his mother and from his
Speaker 2: sister's readers, which he devoured when they came home from school.
Speaker 2: So again, his sisters and brothers get to go to school. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and it sounds like he doesn't because he's too smart
Speaker 2: and his mom wants to homeschool him. Is at which
Speaker 2: is really weird and different and also is going to
Speaker 2: make him feel very special. I did look through Hunt's
Speaker 2: FBI report which claims that and that there's a reason
Speaker 2: why he's got an FBI report, and it includes claims
Speaker 2: that Hunt was known in the areas being able to
Speaker 2: memorize a page of pros in two readings by the
Speaker 2: time he was in the fifth grade, and that that
Speaker 2: was the end of his schooling. So that kind of
Speaker 2: suggests he does go to a public school for a while,
Speaker 2: but everyone else says he didn't. So I don't know
Speaker 2: what the truth is.
Speaker 1: Weird is the truth?
Speaker 2: Weird is the truth? I think there might be because
Speaker 2: a lot of the people who write about the end
Speaker 2: he never went to school, he was homeschooled are like
Speaker 2: weird right wing and libertaire sources because this guy becomes
Speaker 2: a weird right wing billionaire. That may be the because
Speaker 2: it doesn't sound as good to their kind of narrative
Speaker 2: of like, well, he went to school until he was
Speaker 2: in the fifth grade, at which point he was homeschooled
Speaker 2: the rest.
Speaker 3: Of the way, right right, or adding that he was
Speaker 3: homeschooled by his mother who continuously put her breast in
Speaker 3: his face, right right?
Speaker 2: Yes, good, it makes less of a good case for homeschooling.
Speaker 4: Yeah, not not the triadwife ideal. I'm sure that they
Speaker 4: want to promote.
Speaker 2: A mouth Yeah, home schooling. So the first way that
Speaker 2: June exhibited his intellect in a major way to the
Speaker 2: world was by getting really, really unbeatably good at card
Speaker 2: games and other games of chance. This is kind of
Speaker 2: the earliest happiness that he experiences and probably remembers which
Speaker 2: is beating the piss out of his sisters and brothers
Speaker 2: at various card games and being praised for it. So
Speaker 2: this is going to teach him an important lesson. He's
Speaker 2: never going to get over loving gambling. However, the fact
Speaker 2: that he's so smart is not without its downsides. Per
Speaker 2: the book, Kingdom, hash Hunt was not nearly so impressed
Speaker 2: with his names mental agility as others were, and right
Speaker 2: from the beginning, Young June had problems with James. You
Speaker 2: think you're better than the rest of us, don't you,
Speaker 2: James badgered him incessantly when they were alone. You think
Speaker 2: you're smarter than we are. Now again to still relates
Speaker 2: like a page long argument between him and his brother
Speaker 2: that sounds more like a cheesy screenplay dialogue than a
Speaker 2: real conversation. There's even a part where his big brother says,
Speaker 2: you're a mama's pet. That's all you'll ever be. Just
Speaker 2: like you just write that in you if you're a
Speaker 2: hack screenwriter, And then you transition immediately to him like
Speaker 2: as a young adult trying to get his foot in
Speaker 2: the door at his first business or something right right,
Speaker 2: It's like he.
Speaker 4: Would have loved young Sheldon.
Speaker 2: He would have loved young Sheldon. So as he grows
Speaker 2: up in this account, he does everything he can to
Speaker 2: be the opposite of a mama's boy. First off, he
Speaker 2: gets swollen. He starts working out. I mean mainly he's
Speaker 2: just doing like hard labor outdoors, but he gets really jacked.
Speaker 2: He's a big guy. He's tall, and he is like
Speaker 2: a bit large, muscular dude. Everyone seems to agree about that.
Speaker 2: He becomes a skilled or wrider, even bareback, and a
Speaker 2: skilled outdoorsman. He works with his brother in the family
Speaker 2: business on the farm, and he proves his worth by
Speaker 2: using his skill with numbers to benefit everybody and improve
Speaker 2: the family business. After summarizing all this, too, So gives
Speaker 2: us another absolutely made up claim. He was growing into
Speaker 2: a handsome young man, the best looking of all of
Speaker 2: his brothers. And he's still's gonna say a lot of
Speaker 2: weird stuff about how sexy this guy is. We'll talk
Speaker 2: about later. That's kind of a through line in his
Speaker 2: other biographies. I don't know why it's a stand. To me,
Speaker 2: he's a stand. He's the ultimate stan.
Speaker 1: He's like, he's so hot.
Speaker 4: Look at Yeah, this dude.
Speaker 2: Could have fucked.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 1: None of you have photos of this person.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, we've got some. You can look at some up,
Speaker 2: So if wy, don't you try to find us a
Speaker 2: younger one. I only found some. I should have included one.
Speaker 4: Yeah, let's see this.
Speaker 1: Hot I've only the photos. I've only seen her of
Speaker 1: him when he's older.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I only found older ones. But I didn't look
Speaker 2: as hard as I should have. I'll try to find Yeah.
Speaker 2: None of this work earns him his father's approval, and
Speaker 2: his older brother keeps hating him because once Juny proves himself,
Speaker 2: James resents him for being the better businessman. Eventually, June's
Speaker 2: constant frustration is alleviated by a miracle. The US declares
Speaker 2: war on Spain in eighteen ninety eight and Jameson lists,
Speaker 2: which gets his ass out of the home and gives
Speaker 2: June some breathing room for the first time in his
Speaker 2: young life. Well, the future richest man on Earth nears adolescence.
Speaker 2: His father uses the by now considerable wealth and clout
Speaker 2: that he'd amassed to start a small local bank, the
Speaker 2: People State Bank. Weirdly, his oldest son, Robert, who had
Speaker 2: moved out of the house by this point, starts a
Speaker 2: separate bank to compete with his dad's bank, which says
Speaker 2: a lot about the family dynamics that isn't spelled out
Speaker 2: in this book. But you don't do that if you
Speaker 2: have a good relationship with your dad, create a spite bank.
Speaker 2: A spite bank, a bank just despite your father.
Speaker 3: It's so Kendall roy coated. It's like I just giving
Speaker 3: a succession. I'm just kind of like he's like, I'm
Speaker 3: the eldest boy. I'm going to make my own bank. Dad.
Speaker 2: It's a really petty succession because the town these banks
Speaker 2: only serve the town they're in, and the town they're in,
Speaker 2: Ramsey has six hundred people, and every member counts and
Speaker 2: every way, Yeah, every member counts in the Spike bank. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's it's very funny to sell includes this quote. Hash
Speaker 2: haat Little appreciated this unique form of incestuous capitalism, but
Speaker 2: it was a great source of merriment among the neighbors.
Speaker 2: Everyone's laughing about the spiite bank that his oldest made.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: They're like, if you have a problem with one bank,
Speaker 4: just like and I will go over to yourself.
Speaker 2: To your brothers, your son's shitty bank. Yeah. So not
Speaker 2: long after this, his older brothers move out of the
Speaker 2: house too, and favorite brother Leonard, heads out to the
Speaker 2: Pacific Northwest to work as a logger. This seems to
Speaker 2: have ignited a wanderlust and young hl Hunt a desire
Speaker 2: to go out into the world and make something of himself. Previously,
Speaker 2: he'd been content living at home and being doted on
Speaker 2: by his sisters, But at age twelve, he runs away
Speaker 2: from home for the first time, and he doesn't go far,
Speaker 2: and the way that Tusil describes it, he's motivated less
Speaker 2: to escape forever than just he wants to get away
Speaker 2: for a couple of days and see a little bit
Speaker 2: of the world before he comes back. He just kind
Speaker 2: of wants to ramble. And you could kind of do
Speaker 2: that as a twelve There's not like a CPS going
Speaker 2: around to make sure everyone's twelve year olds aren't running
Speaker 2: around right in the rails, like nobody cares in the
Speaker 2: government at this point in time.
Speaker 3: And there's eight of them, so really you don't even
Speaker 3: like if you lose one, you got seven other.
Speaker 2: You lose one, you got plenty of kids left. Yeah,
Speaker 2: he's away a couple of nights, but he comes back
Speaker 2: changed and from this point on, over the next four years.
Speaker 2: He's going to leave home regularly every couple of months
Speaker 2: to explore, and he lives a very peter Pan style existence.
Speaker 2: In those days two Sill Rights, he had discovered that
Speaker 2: many other young vagabonds were on the road, boys and
Speaker 2: girls alike whose families were too poor to feed them
Speaker 2: properly at home. On occasion, he had hooked up with
Speaker 2: a gang of them and slept in teenage hobojungles around
Speaker 2: open campfires.
Speaker 4: That does sound kind of awesome. I would read about that.
Speaker 2: That sounds pretty cool and also kind of like a
Speaker 2: special hell. But you know, it could be either. I'm
Speaker 2: imagining it as being exactly like the movie Hook, though,
Speaker 2: I'll be honest with you, like right down to that
Speaker 2: brightly colored imaginary food stuff that they throw at each other.
Speaker 1: I have found a young a young hl image.
Speaker 2: Oh good, good, good. You think about that, I'm gonna
Speaker 2: think about Rufio getting stabbed.
Speaker 4: I was literally like, what if he looks like young
Speaker 4: Jacob ALRDI not as.
Speaker 2: Not as much, but yeah, he's a big guy. You
Speaker 2: could see he's like very broad shoulders. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 2: he's an eighth.
Speaker 4: The looks Maxers would approve of him.
Speaker 2: I think, h Yeah, he's a reasonably good looking guy. Yeah,
Speaker 2: certainly not a bad looking guy. Nice. Chan just kind
Speaker 2: of looks like a big white guy.
Speaker 1: Gotta be honest, he just looks like a guy.
Speaker 2: He looks like a big white guy. He's not like
Speaker 2: a movie star for sure, but he's real big.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: In those days, if you were huge, it just said like, wow,
Speaker 2: you're malnourished and dying. Let's make kids.
Speaker 4: You know. It's like George Washington, like, of course he
Speaker 4: was going to be president. He was six four.
Speaker 2: He was six four. Not a lot of people got
Speaker 2: to be that big back then. He had to be
Speaker 2: eating a lot of milk and meat when you were
Speaker 2: a kid. Yeah. So when he's sixteen, June leaves the
Speaker 2: house for good. He is six feet tall now, and
Speaker 2: as we just saw in the picture, pretty big. He's
Speaker 2: big enough nobody questions that he's like not old enough
Speaker 2: to be doing whatever he's doing. By the time he's sixteen,
Speaker 2: he looks enough like an adult that people treat him
Speaker 2: like one. He leaves in the spring of nineteen oh five,
Speaker 2: and he first hit Saint Louis, where he gets a
Speaker 2: job on a railroad. He takes odd jobs to get
Speaker 2: from Kansas to Colorado, and then he heads up towards Utah,
Speaker 2: where he gets a gig watching a car load of
Speaker 2: sheep on a train ride to California. As soon as
Speaker 2: he gets to California, he falls in love with it,
Speaker 2: like all sensible people do. Although being a libertarian, to
Speaker 2: still has to write this in the grossest way that
Speaker 2: he can. He found California much to his liking, especially
Speaker 2: the lust blonde beauties who appeared as plentiful as the
Speaker 2: succulent fruit that grew in this golden, sun soaked land.
Speaker 2: And no, I gotta tell you this is based on
Speaker 2: what Tusill thought of California in the eighties. In nineteen
Speaker 2: oh five, California isn't like the center of like a massive,
Speaker 2: world renowned entertainment industry. It's like a place some people
Speaker 2: live in are farming and stuff.
Speaker 3: Like.
Speaker 2: The weather's famously good, but it's not famous for its
Speaker 2: blonde beauties. It's just famous as there's when the dust
Speaker 2: bowl hits in a few decades, it doesn't get hurt
Speaker 2: as badly as everywhere else. Like people are thinking of
Speaker 2: California and nineteen oh five in those terms, that's that's
Speaker 2: that's some shit that Tusill is thinking about. Also, I
Speaker 2: got to read these next couple of sentences to you.
Speaker 2: This is this is too Sol describing Hunt after he
Speaker 2: gets to California.
Speaker 4: Spoiler alert, Oh gosh.
Speaker 2: With his good height and his hard solid body, his
Speaker 2: deep set blue eyes and rugged looks, he had little
Speaker 2: trouble in attracting more than his share of young females.
Speaker 2: His sexuality was strong and developing, and he exuded an
Speaker 2: aura of raw animal magnetism.
Speaker 1: Okay, with his good height in his hard solid body.
Speaker 2: Who told you that, Jerome to sil, who told you
Speaker 2: about his hard, hot body and his animal magnetism? Where'd
Speaker 2: you get that? Jerome is raw?
Speaker 4: Did you?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 4: It's the home is just like just just just blow it. Okay.
Speaker 2: He was dead by this point.
Speaker 4: So, but I mean, don't let that limit you.
Speaker 2: Clearly don't Wow, Wow, Princess Weeks. Don't let that limit you.
Speaker 4: That's a dream, dream big, dream.
Speaker 2: Big, dream big and weird. So I should probably say
Speaker 2: a little more about too Sill here in the late
Speaker 2: nineteen seventies, after writing that book about iron Rand and
Speaker 2: failing to become the mayor or the governor, I forget
Speaker 2: which he grew dissolute with libertarianism as a political tendency.
Speaker 2: He'd also long since broken with iron Rand over a
Speaker 2: number of things that he disagreed with her about. He
Speaker 2: gives up political rabble rousing and becomes a stockbroker and
Speaker 2: eventually a financial writer. In the nineteen eighties he started
Speaker 2: writing books on investing, and then he launched a series
Speaker 2: of biographies. Kingdom is one of them. Another, written in
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty five, was Trump, The Saga of America's most
Speaker 2: powerful real estate baron. This is the first published biography
Speaker 2: of our current president that track I didn't know that
Speaker 2: that makes sense heard of the New York I'm going
Speaker 2: to quote from the New York Times here denied access
Speaker 2: to his subject, members of his family, and most of
Speaker 2: his associates. Mister Tussill relied heavily on newspaper and magazine
Speaker 2: accounts to produce what Michael Stern, writing in The New
Speaker 2: York Times Book Review, called a g whizzard of a
Speaker 2: biography that points a key to mister Trump's career his
Speaker 2: ability to turn political friendships, tax abatements, and government loans
Speaker 2: into opportunities for profit, Which does sound like an accurate
Speaker 2: descriptive kind of how he made his money. But also
Speaker 2: it shows like that's kind of his sources. He found
Speaker 2: some newspapers and magazine accounts. Maybe he talked to a
Speaker 2: couple guys about Hunt who knew him. But a lot
Speaker 2: of this is just him kind of filling into blanks
Speaker 2: to make this exciting. And I know I'm spending way
Speaker 2: longer in these episodes about Hunt talking about his biographer
Speaker 2: than I should. But everything I find out about Jerome
Speaker 2: Tussol kind of drives me crazy. His other I look
Speaker 2: to do his bibliography and his other books. His most
Speaker 2: famous book, one of them is he wrote a history
Speaker 2: of black soldiers in the Spanish American War. That's like
Speaker 2: super anti Teddy Roosevelt, and it's apparently a pretty good book.
Speaker 2: He's not like a crypto fascist or anything. But when
Speaker 2: I saw that he made a Trump biography, I got this,
Speaker 2: like I decided to look into that a little bit,
Speaker 2: and I just started doing some word surges because I
Speaker 2: was like, does he is this weird? Him calling a
Speaker 2: Hunt hod a lot? Is that like a pattern in
Speaker 2: his books. I'm going to read you, yes, Yes, Princess,
Speaker 2: it is. Here's a paragraph from his book on Trump.
Speaker 2: Fred Trump was still tall, and that's our president's dad.
Speaker 2: Fred Trump was still tall and slim at sixty seven,
Speaker 2: with a full head of dark, graying hair, handsome in
Speaker 2: a nineteen forties movie star way, sporting a swept back
Speaker 2: pompadour and a dark, pencil thin mustache. Indeed, he looked
Speaker 2: as though he might have stepped out of an old
Speaker 2: movie starring Barbara Stanwicker Joan Crawford, the mysterious charmer, faintly dangerous.
Speaker 2: Donald as tall as Fred, both men standing a couple
Speaker 2: of inches over six feet, handsome, clean shaven, with only
Speaker 2: a hint of a poudy sneer crossing his lips.
Speaker 1: I've seen what this man looked like in many phases
Speaker 1: of his life.
Speaker 4: He is none of that.
Speaker 3: I know.
Speaker 2: He is not going to show you a picture of
Speaker 2: these two next to each other from this time. He's
Speaker 2: the t F. He's d F DTF Trump's dad, And
Speaker 2: here's Trump's dad in nineteen sixty nine. He does not
Speaker 2: look like a sexy movie star, but he does want.
Speaker 4: The Eiffel Tower. That Trump Tower guys.
Speaker 2: He dan it does, and he kind of he looks
Speaker 2: sort of like if Walt Disney had projeer Rha, like
Speaker 2: his face is not smooth, looking like, he's not handsome.
Speaker 2: It's weird way to describe Fred Trump. Yeah, a lot
Speaker 2: of forehead, forehead, a lot of forehead, very red.
Speaker 4: Very red.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he loves I think he just loves money so
Speaker 3: much that it makes whatever man around him like the
Speaker 3: hottest guy.
Speaker 1: Not that that is not what we call a Babraham Lincoln.
Speaker 3: That is.
Speaker 2: I have to read a lot of biographies, very and
Speaker 2: even autobiographies, you know, for these this this show I do.
Speaker 2: I've never run into a guy who talks about how
Speaker 2: hot his subjects are this often. It's really, it's really, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's truly.
Speaker 3: Now what that's Olivia Newsy's like in Spoboor She's like,
Speaker 3: that's the text.
Speaker 2: Yeah, she's there. It's great reference. So I did. I
Speaker 2: kept digging because I wanted to see how far down
Speaker 2: the rabbit hole this went. I found an archived copy
Speaker 2: of two Sells biography of Rupert Murdoch from nineteen eighty nine,
Speaker 2: because of course he wrote the Murdox biography that said,
Speaker 2: I didn't find any returns for handsome or any related terms.
Speaker 2: I didn't read through the book, so maybe he just
Speaker 2: used different words to talk about murder being hot anyway,
Speaker 2: This is a pointless diversion, but I had to do it.
Speaker 2: Sorry you.
Speaker 3: It's now I'm imagining like him doing biographies of like Elizabeth.
Speaker 4: Holmes, and.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of a lot of pages talking about
Speaker 2: how Turtleneck fed her Jerome. Do we need to edit
Speaker 2: maybe some of this down.
Speaker 4: That's what the people want. They're here, they're here for
Speaker 4: my thirst straps.
Speaker 2: You know who else has a crush on Elizabeth Holmes
Speaker 2: those products this podcast? Sorry, that's right, that's right, that's right.
Speaker 2: We're back. So let's talk about La hl Hunt.
Speaker 1: Some more about myself for that one.
Speaker 4: I'm so sorry.
Speaker 2: Yeah you should. Sorry, Sophie. I'm not happy. No one's happy.
Speaker 4: I'm sorry, No one's happy.
Speaker 2: Accept the subject of our episodes, hl Hunt, who is
Speaker 2: happy because he's moved to San Francisco by this point
Speaker 2: in the story of the early nineteen hundreds, and he
Speaker 2: falls into a happy life gambling with sailors and prostitutes
Speaker 2: and other assorted people living on the margins of the world.
Speaker 2: He finds out that he's really good at poker and
Speaker 2: that he can win money basically every time he plays
Speaker 2: to Sill chalks U up to his photographic memory. In essence,
Speaker 2: Hunt is someone whose brain just automatically starts card counting,
Speaker 2: like he doesn't even know what he's doing, right, but
Speaker 2: that's just how he his head works, and so he
Speaker 2: just always wins when he's playing poker. Hunt is able
Speaker 2: to live comfortably in a fleabag motel. Is a card shark.
Speaker 2: And you know, after some period of months of this,
Speaker 2: to Sill treats us to another deeply uncomfortable paragraph about Hunt,
Speaker 2: like he invites this prostitute into his room and he's
Speaker 2: so good at sex that she falls in love with him,
Speaker 2: Like he wins the heart of a prostitute for being
Speaker 2: really good at fucking.
Speaker 4: Lord, yeah, stop, it.
Speaker 2: Is great. According to this account, this prostitute that he's
Speaker 2: with finds out that the hotel he's staying in he
Speaker 2: tells her, and she's like, oh no, they drug young
Speaker 2: men there and like shanghai them to force them to
Speaker 2: work on boats somewhere, which is the thing that happened
Speaker 2: in that period of time. And he's like, and they're
Speaker 2: about to do it tomorrow night or something like that,
Speaker 2: so we have to flee town. And he winds up
Speaker 2: like leaving fucking San Francisco for Reno, and he tries
Speaker 2: out for a minor league baseball team but that doesn't
Speaker 2: pan out. But while he's away, there's a horrible quake
Speaker 2: in San Francisco and the hotel that he'd been staying
Speaker 2: and collapses. So June becomes convinced as a result of
Speaker 2: this that he's someone special and that the universe has
Speaker 2: marked him out for a purpose. All of this is
Speaker 2: just really reinforced that he is the special boy of history, right,
Speaker 2: That's how this man grows up feeling.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, like I said, he didn't have
Speaker 1: the making of a.
Speaker 2: Varsity ye, yeah, not have the makings of a varsity athlete.
Speaker 4: No, Princess and I are just.
Speaker 1: Referencing every single HBO show.
Speaker 4: Exactly or just like we're just throwing out there.
Speaker 1: It's good also, audience, Robert's never seen the Sopranos, and
Speaker 1: I'm very upset about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's not my Yeah, I don't know. The anti
Speaker 2: Italian discrimination, Sophie, that's my issue with the Sopranos. You know,
Speaker 2: my people didn't work a very very hard to become
Speaker 2: famous for making hand gestures and running buca to Beppo
Speaker 2: for you to bring us down by associating us with
Speaker 2: the mafia. And yes, I did have multiple family members
Speaker 2: who were involved in organized crime, but that's still a
Speaker 2: bad stereotype, even though a lot of Italians do have
Speaker 2: a family history in Baltimore.
Speaker 1: Wow, I think you would fucking love this.
Speaker 4: It's an amazing show.
Speaker 3: Like, Okay, the amount of racism that I have that,
Speaker 3: I'm like, but I love Tony Soprano.
Speaker 4: I was like, listen, I get it. It's fine. I
Speaker 4: forgive him because he wants.
Speaker 2: To fight the f Yeah, by the FBI. He wants
Speaker 2: to Hey, so so did one of my cousins. It
Speaker 2: didn't then well for him. The gun that killed him
Speaker 2: sold at auction a few years ago for like fifty
Speaker 2: grand or something. Nice. Yeah, yeah, I feel like I
Speaker 2: should own that. Actually kind of bumped me out.
Speaker 4: You're just.
Speaker 2: Killed my cousin.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I do too, But I wouldn't approve of you
Speaker 1: spending that much on a family heirloom.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, no, it's that's why I didn't you
Speaker 2: put it on the auction. But I was, I was like,
Speaker 2: it's fucked up for anyone else to own the gun
Speaker 2: that killed my cousin. It's fucked up to sell a
Speaker 2: gun and be like, this is the gun that killed
Speaker 2: this guy, but fifty is wild. Yeah, that's all happening
Speaker 2: at around this time. I forget how exactly how much
Speaker 2: it's sold for. It was a crazy amount. So anyway,
Speaker 2: I don't know how much credence to give the whole
Speaker 2: I was so good at sex that like a magical
Speaker 2: prostitute saved my life by helping me escape an earthquake.
Speaker 2: Thing that's not I can believe that, Like he left
Speaker 2: a hotel in San Francisco and not long after there
Speaker 2: was an earthquake, because that earthquake did happen, and a
Speaker 2: lot of stuff was destroyed by it, and a lot
Speaker 2: of people had the experience of a week or two earlier,
Speaker 2: I was in the hotel that collapsed. Tons of people
Speaker 2: would have had a story like that. So it's very possible.
Speaker 2: And it's just a thing that happened to hundreds and
Speaker 2: hundreds of people because that's how hotels work. And he
Speaker 2: takes from this, I am special and marked out for greatness. Right,
Speaker 2: So one of the other things that we see in Hunt,
Speaker 2: you know, in the early days, he has this growing
Speaker 2: belief that he's special, and he also has a fundamental
Speaker 2: distrust of his fellow man. Not long after all of
Speaker 2: this Brujaja with San Francisco and trying out for baseball
Speaker 2: and Reno, he's like, Gozies, I think he's in Arizona.
Speaker 2: He's in the Southwest. He's working like with a bunch
Speaker 2: of day laborers, and there's like white day laborers, and
Speaker 2: there's a group of Mexican day laborers and they have
Speaker 2: separate camps because it's the nineteen it's like nineteen o
Speaker 2: six or something that's a little seven. And he he
Speaker 2: goes over along with some of the other white workers
Speaker 2: to play cards with the Mexican laborers one night, and
Speaker 2: Hunt just wins everything. He takes all of these Mexican
Speaker 2: guys money, which winds up to like four grand everything
Speaker 2: they have in the world. And so the other white dudes.
Speaker 2: The longer he wins, they start leaving to go back
Speaker 2: to their camp because they're like, hey, hey man, or
Speaker 2: hey Hunt, maybe you want to go. You probably don't
Speaker 2: want to take all these guys' money. This seems like
Speaker 2: it could get dangerous, so they leave, but Hunt does it.
Speaker 2: He can't stop playing cards when he's playing cards, so
Speaker 2: he doesn't stop until he's taken all of their money,
Speaker 2: at which point he realizes all of his friends are
Speaker 2: gone and he gets like scared, and he basically takes
Speaker 2: the money and runs off into the bushes because he
Speaker 2: feels like he has to hide from the Mexicans, even
Speaker 2: though as far as we know, they never go after
Speaker 2: him or try to hurt him. All of the evidence
Speaker 2: suggests they took their loss fine and they didn't like
Speaker 2: threaten him. He just is sure that because they're Mexicans,
Speaker 2: they're going to try to kill him to get their
Speaker 2: money back, So he like hides in the bushes, and
Speaker 2: then he tries to, like, in the middle of the
Speaker 2: night hike back to the camp with his friends. But
Speaker 2: when he gets back there, he's like, wait a second,
Speaker 2: how well do I really know these guys. They're definitely
Speaker 2: going to rob me. They know I have all this money,
Speaker 2: they might kill me. So he has a panic attack
Speaker 2: and he like hides and camps out in the woods
Speaker 2: that night, and then like goes just leaves quits the
Speaker 2: job and hikes off into another town, basically because he
Speaker 2: doesn't want to be near where anyone knows that he's
Speaker 2: won this money. Quote from Tusill's book, how could he
Speaker 2: trust these brawny strangers who knew he had made a
Speaker 2: killing that night? What was to stop two or three
Speaker 2: of them from jumping him in his bunk, leaving him
Speaker 2: with a knife between his ribs, and slipping off with
Speaker 2: his winnings. So you've heard of being the most special boy, right,
Speaker 2: there's this deep distrust of other people that again, at
Speaker 2: no point, and he so just writes this like, of
Speaker 2: course he was reasonable to fear that these Mexicans were
Speaker 2: going to kill him, But at no point is there
Speaker 2: any evidence that they threaten his life at all. I
Speaker 2: do want to emphasize that this is all entirely something
Speaker 2: he decides. So he makes his way to South Dakota,
Speaker 2: where he meets who, to Sill's book, describes this as
Speaker 2: the best friend he's going to have in his entire life,
Speaker 2: A dude named Steve, no last name provided now to
Speaker 2: still insists that this is the best, the c closest.
Speaker 4: Man.
Speaker 1: We don't even need.
Speaker 2: Last day if we're that close.
Speaker 4: That is a cliche of like boy friendships of life?
Speaker 4: Was his last name?
Speaker 1: I don't know Steve one name he thinks he's fucking
Speaker 1: Zendaya or some shit.
Speaker 2: What's happening right, fucking Steve, see I kind of sink.
Speaker 2: Steve Hunt probably tells his kids later in life that
Speaker 2: this guy was his best friend ever, because I don't
Speaker 2: know otherwise why t still would insist it. But they
Speaker 2: only know each other for like a few days, maybe
Speaker 2: a few weeks, and the main thing, the only story
Speaker 2: we get about their marvelous friendship is that one night
Speaker 2: Hunt beats Steve at cards and takes all of his money,
Speaker 2: which is like two hundred and sixty bucks, and he
Speaker 2: feels bad about it, so he's like, hey, man, you
Speaker 2: don't have to pay me back, and Steve is like, no,
Speaker 2: you know, I made a promise. You know, this is
Speaker 2: a this is a bond I owe you, and I'm
Speaker 2: gonna pay you. You know, don't think anything about it.
Speaker 2: And then Steve sits down and has like the fucking
Speaker 2: ben Affleck conversation with his friend where he's like, you
Speaker 2: need to leave here. You got to go to college.
Speaker 2: You're too smart to keep you know, working like this, right,
Speaker 2: And so Hunt is like, you know what, You're right, Steve,
Speaker 2: and he leaves off to go to college. And they
Speaker 2: never see each other again. And that is the greatest
Speaker 2: friendship of his entire life.
Speaker 4: God, he invented a father figure just so he could
Speaker 4: go to school.
Speaker 2: A man insisted on paying him and then did a
Speaker 2: goodwill Hunting to him his best friend Steve. They knew
Speaker 2: each other for days, friend Steve never met again.
Speaker 1: Steve.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So now age seventeen, Steve or not Steve Hunt
Speaker 2: briefly attends college. Yeah, yeah, he's seventeen. He goes to Valpereiso,
Speaker 2: which is known as the poor Man's Harvard, and he
Speaker 2: robs his fellow students they're blind at card games, and
Speaker 2: then dips after like a s. He never gets a degree.
Speaker 2: He just kind of takes everyone's money and then leaves.
Speaker 2: He goes home. He's around eighteen now when he finally
Speaker 2: makes his way back home for the first time since
Speaker 2: he'd left, and he stays at home for a while,
Speaker 2: but then he sets out again with his brother Leonard.
Speaker 2: This time they go out to like work in the
Speaker 2: Northwest together and make money. But Lynyard gets sick with tuberculosis,
Speaker 2: you know, and pretty soon he can't friend of the
Speaker 2: pod tuberculosis and he can't keep up with his brother,
Speaker 2: and he has another. He still has another, like heartfelt car,
Speaker 2: you know, Leonard is liked his brother. Look, you got
Speaker 2: to go on without me. I'm too slow. Don't let
Speaker 2: me stop you from achieving greatness, basically, And so Hunt
Speaker 2: goes up to Canada, right, And he's working in Canada
Speaker 2: in nineteen ten when he gets a telegram that his
Speaker 2: brother is has just died. Lenyard has died, you know,
Speaker 2: of his tuberculosis. So Hunt heads home for the funeral,
Speaker 2: and he stays at home for a few months. And
Speaker 2: while he's there, his dad dies too. Right, So point
Speaker 2: hl Hunt is like eighteen nineteen, you know, he's no
Speaker 2: longer going by junior. And after his dad dies, he
Speaker 2: inherits five thousand dollars. He doesn't get the land. Someone
Speaker 2: else gets the land because he's not living at home.
Speaker 2: But he gets like a nest egg of money and
Speaker 2: he takes this and he adds it to the money
Speaker 2: that he's saved up it from working as a card shark,
Speaker 2: and he decides, I'm gonna stop wandering. I'm gonna make
Speaker 2: real money. And in order to do that, I need
Speaker 2: to like invest in something, and I want to start
Speaker 2: a farm. Right, His Dad had always talked about how
Speaker 2: much better the soil was down in the South, and
Speaker 2: how oh, if only we lived in Arkansas then we'd
Speaker 2: really be doing well, you know as farmers. So Hunt
Speaker 2: moves down south to Arkansas near the end of nineteen eleven,
Speaker 2: and he's gonna buy a farm and he's going to
Speaker 2: invest in, you know, the set next part of his life,
Speaker 2: and we will get to that and what happens later
Speaker 2: and how he becomes the richest man on earth in
Speaker 2: part two, Princess, how you feeling?
Speaker 3: I am excited to find out about this man whose
Speaker 3: family was like, let's move to the north.
Speaker 4: Oh wait, actually I regret that.
Speaker 2: Let's go back yep, Princess.
Speaker 1: Do you have anything you want to plug real quick? Oh?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I have a YouTube channel, Princess Weeks. I talk
Speaker 3: about pop culture, sci fi, all the good stuff. And yeah,
Speaker 3: I'm just happy to be here. This is really interesting.
Speaker 3: I love this really really hot millionaire in training.
Speaker 2: Yes, sexy millionaire narcissist. Yeah, so hot.
Speaker 4: His brother's like, no, you're just keep going, just keep going, don't.
Speaker 2: Keep going, keep going. You're too hot. Don't don't be
Speaker 2: slowed down by my my Conveniently narratively convenient. Yeah wow, uh.
Speaker 1: Will be back with part two.
Speaker 2: All right, everybody go to help. I love you, Bye bye.
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: From more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
Speaker 1: dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: Full video episodes that Behind the Bastards are now streaming
Speaker 1: on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Kit remind me
Speaker 1: of Netflix. You don't miss an episode. For clips in
Speaker 1: our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube
Speaker 1: channel YouTube dot com slash at Behind the Bastards. We
Speaker 1: love about forty percent of you, statistically speaking,