Speaker 1: M M. Yeah, that was terrible. Now, yeah, Sylvie, how
Speaker 1: do I how do I podcast? Uh? Hi, I'm Robert Evans.
Speaker 1: Then you're listening Behind the Bastard, the Boston podcast about
Speaker 1: the work people from history and today. Uh, that doesn't
Speaker 1: sound like something i'd say, my guess. But also host
Speaker 1: slash coup slash Garrison. Hi, it's me again on the podcast.
Speaker 1: It's another coup episode. Garrison's helping me out because I
Speaker 1: have once again taken on enough projects that I'm I'm
Speaker 1: terrified about my life. Um so yeah, we're we're doing
Speaker 1: another coup episode in honor of Trump's coup. In honor
Speaker 1: of Trump's coup. That's exactly what's amazing. Ago We keep
Speaker 1: recording these, and coups are still relevant each time we record. O.
Speaker 1: Cous are always relevant because never didn't you say Trump's
Speaker 1: is not technically a cup because no military? Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean so far, yes, but I do think we're splitting
Speaker 1: hairs a little bit. But either way, I love a
Speaker 1: good coup. Um, so we're gonna have us. We're gonna
Speaker 1: have us another pod coups podcast, Coup Cast and Robert,
Speaker 1: how do you feel about Nazis? Uh lukewarm. How do
Speaker 1: you feel about child Nazis? Also lukewarm? Okay, because we're
Speaker 1: gonna be talking about child Nazis. Oh man, I I was,
Speaker 1: I was holding back a little bit. My favorite kind
Speaker 1: of nazis your child not I mean, if they're if
Speaker 1: we're going to have them, which we should, but if
Speaker 1: we are, if they're a little, if they're a little
Speaker 1: baby teenagers, baby teenage Nazis, and it is kind of
Speaker 1: the funniest cute well like your Garrison brought over his
Speaker 1: little baby kitten and it's very cute, and I'm imagining
Speaker 1: the kitten with a swastick. It's like a little arm
Speaker 1: ball Nazi kitten. So to be so terriful, I know,
Speaker 1: I'm irony poison. I did not like that. But more more,
Speaker 1: are we talking like Jojo Rabbit, Like, what's the situation
Speaker 1: here for kind of kid? No? Okay, So today we're
Speaker 1: gonna we're gonna dive into one of the things that
Speaker 1: got younger Garrison to actually start to realize that fascism
Speaker 1: is like an ongoing and active problem and way more
Speaker 1: complicated than just weird people hating Jewish people. Um and uh,
Speaker 1: We're we're gonna be learning about and the thing that
Speaker 1: that I learned about a few years ago that you know,
Speaker 1: got me, you know, to learn more about fascism and
Speaker 1: kind of got me interested in the topic. UM is
Speaker 1: the accidental five day social experiment done on a group
Speaker 1: of teenagers in a California high school. Uh In. This
Speaker 1: experiment is referred to as the Third Wave. Some people
Speaker 1: may be familiar with this UM. If you're from Germany,
Speaker 1: you are because they forced you to learn about it.
Speaker 1: UM what with the dubious ethics aside? Looking at how
Speaker 1: a charismatic high school teacher got a small group of
Speaker 1: impressionable teenagers in the sixties to grow into a group
Speaker 1: of dedicated of two hundred like dedicated fascists the course
Speaker 1: of just five days. Something we can is something we
Speaker 1: can learn from, and you know, it's like still is
Speaker 1: still relevant even though this was an experiment done in
Speaker 1: the sixties. I mean it sounds like, first off, this
Speaker 1: is an incredibly a story of an incredibly ethical teacher. Yeah,
Speaker 1: nothing wrong. Yeah, like That's why I started this by
Speaker 1: saying ethics aside, because yeah, it kind of messed up
Speaker 1: a lot of kids. Sounds really fucked up. Some people
Speaker 1: didn't he a lot of Yeah. Like one of the
Speaker 1: people that um, the high school teacher became friends with
Speaker 1: is um Philip Zimbardwe Zimbardo, Zimbardo Zimbardo. He's the of
Speaker 1: the standard experiment a few years later. So yeah, they're
Speaker 1: buddies because they boasted highly on ethical experiments. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Philip Zimbardo is my favorite psychologist because he decided long
Speaker 1: ago that it was way more valuable to do things
Speaker 1: that were interesting rather than things that were morally defensible.
Speaker 1: And I think that's beautiful. Yeah, and I mean yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, the same thing kind of kind of happened here. Um,
Speaker 1: all right, well let's let's start this motherfucker garrison. You
Speaker 1: know when you do giant pores of liquid that it
Speaker 1: does show up. Yeah, Well, the audience wants me to
Speaker 1: have coffee, Sophie. I mean, I want you to coffee,
Speaker 1: because without coffee, you're just Evans, not Robert. I'm a
Speaker 1: Nazi Evans. Yea. Yeah. As soon as as soon as
Speaker 1: I get coffee in the morning, I stop understanding the
Speaker 1: benefits of national socialism. That's that's the thing that really
Speaker 1: gets to have the academic understand the best part of
Speaker 1: waking up is no longer believing that Nazism is morally defensible. Yeay, well,
Speaker 1: I mean we're gonna be learning a lot about that today,
Speaker 1: which is great. Speaking of Nazism, Yeah, when when when
Speaker 1: people first learn about like the rise of fascism and
Speaker 1: particularly the Nazis. Um. Usually one of the first questions
Speaker 1: I hear people you know talk about and ask is like,
Speaker 1: how could everyday Germans been so complicit? Why why did
Speaker 1: so many people just like let things happen? Um? And
Speaker 1: then you know, when you're learning about stuff, at least
Speaker 1: when I did, you know, the thought in your mind
Speaker 1: is like, oh, surely I would have done something to
Speaker 1: stop this from happening. Um. But I mean, if we
Speaker 1: look at the last American election, it's pretty clear that
Speaker 1: a lot of people, if not the majority, like, would
Speaker 1: not take direct action against a rising fascist power in
Speaker 1: this country. Um let alone, Let let it in other countries.
Speaker 1: I have a feeling, yeah, I have I have an inkling. Um.
Speaker 1: But with with that in mind, let's look back to
Speaker 1: the late nineteen sixties and the high school classroom of
Speaker 1: one Ron Jones and how he quite by accident, made
Speaker 1: two hundred child fascists. Um. First, a little background on
Speaker 1: Jones himself, since usually different types of fascism have unique
Speaker 1: elements drawn from their central leader. Um Ron Jones started
Speaker 1: teaching in nineteen sixty six, having recently graduated from Stanford
Speaker 1: University UM. He became a high school teacher in Couverly
Speaker 1: High School is right outside of San Francisco. Um Jones
Speaker 1: quickly became the favorite teacher due to his unique and
Speaker 1: unconventional teaching style. He was young, very charismatic, and attractive
Speaker 1: of um Jones did not just follow regular curriculums and
Speaker 1: just give lectures. He would he would often bring in guests.
Speaker 1: UM students recall him bringing in communists, klansmen, members of
Speaker 1: the American Nazi Party. Had he actually got on the
Speaker 1: phone with with them? With Chairman now in his class,
Speaker 1: how did he get on the phone with Could you
Speaker 1: just call chairman mau Did he just have like, I'm
Speaker 1: not sure that it seems like it would be a
Speaker 1: lot of work to get Chairman Aericans also got all
Speaker 1: these are great ideas, Like I don't think bringing a
Speaker 1: klansman into your classes, bringing a klansman or a Nazi
Speaker 1: and dear, I'm not seeing your class. I do think
Speaker 1: even I'm not as a rule, if you can get
Speaker 1: a world leader on the phone in your high school class,
Speaker 1: that's yes, kind of cool. But yeah, but like he
Speaker 1: run another like other like you know, Soviet Union stands
Speaker 1: from like from America. Yeah, I'm more fascinated by how
Speaker 1: the hell he got Chairman Mau on the phone. He
Speaker 1: just says he did. I cannot find any explanation. How
Speaker 1: see that. I feel like that it's a whole episode,
Speaker 1: like how do you Okay, Well, I'm very frustrated by
Speaker 1: this man because I want to know how he got
Speaker 1: Chairman chair him out on the phone for his class. Yeah, um, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean he was he was very He followed lots
Speaker 1: of unconventional teaching, um, you know with with the guests.
Speaker 1: He would do like historical like simulations in his class,
Speaker 1: like trying to replicate historical events as we see here,
Speaker 1: you know, with the Nazi thing. Um. A quote, a
Speaker 1: quote from Jones is if if you can feel something
Speaker 1: and work with it, that's better than just reading about it.
Speaker 1: So he likes a lot of like, Okay, he likes
Speaker 1: a lot of learning. That's not that's not you know,
Speaker 1: just reading in a book. He actually don't get people
Speaker 1: to feel stuff, which I mean successful on the Nazi experiment,
Speaker 1: he messed up a lot of kids. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: I I agree with the basics of what he's saying,
Speaker 1: which is that kids learn everyone learns best by doing,
Speaker 1: and if you can give people some sort of direct
Speaker 1: experience with the things that are learning about, that's good. Now,
Speaker 1: the problem him as that he's teaching them about Nazism,
Speaker 1: and I don't know of many ethical ways to give
Speaker 1: people experiences with Nazism. It's it's kind of a bad idea. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it seems like and Jones probably should have known better because, um,
Speaker 1: he was a left wing activist back in the sixties
Speaker 1: and you know still is now. Um, he was a
Speaker 1: member of the New Left Students for Democratic Society, saying
Speaker 1: back in the sixties he was in lots of people
Speaker 1: recall him being a very very supportive of the of
Speaker 1: the Black Panthers and was and participated a lot in
Speaker 1: the anti war movement in the sixties with venom going on.
Speaker 1: So like, he showed it kind of known better, But
Speaker 1: I think his intentions were good. But it's very quickly
Speaker 1: spiraled out of control with this um. But basically he
Speaker 1: was basically just the cool, new hip teacher, and students
Speaker 1: really really did trust him, and lots of students really
Speaker 1: did UM really did like him. UM. So at the
Speaker 1: like the last quarter of his first year of teaching UM,
Speaker 1: in a twenty five student sophomore world history class, Jones
Speaker 1: was talking about Nazi Germany. UM. He was They were
Speaker 1: coming to the end of their kind of history section
Speaker 1: on the Nazis UM and a student UM asked the
Speaker 1: question that most of us do at some point, which is,
Speaker 1: you know, how could every German has been complicit? Why
Speaker 1: did people do let things happen? UM, And Jones says
Speaker 1: he didn't really have a good answer, so he thought
Speaker 1: up a short experiment. UM. Now here. This is where
Speaker 1: kind of learning about the wave gets a little bit tricky.
Speaker 1: There is a lot of you can when you're trying
Speaker 1: to research this, there's kind of different accounts of what
Speaker 1: happened because no one really, UM was able to you know,
Speaker 1: document this as it was happening. Because the people that
Speaker 1: did all got beat up by the fascists of who
Speaker 1: are trying to you know, the people who were raced
Speaker 1: aft down all got kind of beat up. UM. And
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure that actually Jones tried this experiment in
Speaker 1: three classes at the same time. But usually when people
Speaker 1: talk about the wave, they focus on like the one
Speaker 1: first class UM, but there can be a lot of
Speaker 1: conflicting information when you talk to like students of this,
Speaker 1: So we're going to kind of treat it as just
Speaker 1: focusing on this one class. But there may have been
Speaker 1: two other classes doing this experiment um concurrently, but it's
Speaker 1: kind of unclear. So they were learning about nazis um.
Speaker 1: Students asked how the goodness happened. Jones didn't know. He
Speaker 1: thought of the experiment the next week, so like the
Speaker 1: Monday after because this experiment ran five days. When students
Speaker 1: came into the class um on this Monday, Jones had
Speaker 1: set up all the chairs and five by five rows,
Speaker 1: which is weird for Jones because he usually had a
Speaker 1: very loose set up because you know, he was like
Speaker 1: the new hip teacher who had you know, students in
Speaker 1: his circle or had people on the floor or whatever.
Speaker 1: But it's like coming into his class and seeing like
Speaker 1: five like five rows of chairs was kind of weird.
Speaker 1: UM music by Richard Wagner was playing uh German composer
Speaker 1: Wagner Garrison. It's important to pronounce things correct. Wagner, It's
Speaker 1: w Richard Wagner's of students were ordered to all sit
Speaker 1: in perfect posture with their hands hands hands by other
Speaker 1: side and on the chalkboard. Jones wrote, strength through discipline.
Speaker 1: So we can kind of see where this is going
Speaker 1: to be going. Yeah, he began to lecture the class
Speaker 1: on the values of strict discipline. Um speaking on the
Speaker 1: efficiency of of like a resimated system, um to quote
Speaker 1: to quote, Jones I lectured on the beauty discipline how
Speaker 1: an athlete feels, How an athlete feels having worked hard
Speaker 1: and regularly successful out of sport. How about how a
Speaker 1: ballet dancer or a painter works hard to perfect a movement,
Speaker 1: the dedicated patients of a scientist to pursue an idea.
Speaker 1: It's discipline, It's self training, control the power of will
Speaker 1: in exchange for physical hardships, for superior mental and physical facilities,
Speaker 1: the ultimate triumph. Now, this all the text time quoting
Speaker 1: Jones from has written from him himself, So all typos
Speaker 1: are his fault umberously fair enough, it's not my fault.
Speaker 1: He wrote this actually fixed some types. Don't blame me,
Speaker 1: blame the teacher who made the Nazis. Um pretty good,
Speaker 1: pretty good summary of Nazism without using any of the
Speaker 1: nazi is his Nazi terms like yeah, the strike three discipline,
Speaker 1: stuff like that's that's very much like a lot of
Speaker 1: Hitler Jugen like ship. Jones was very familiar with fascism
Speaker 1: as as we see, like he'll be talking, you know,
Speaker 1: he'll have sections later on when he take talks about fascism,
Speaker 1: it's like, yeah, he understands, he understands what it is
Speaker 1: like very well. Um, so what Jones was doing on
Speaker 1: the first day, he basically he changed his personality too.
Speaker 1: He made him to get He was way more open, playful.
Speaker 1: Oh no, no, Robert, look at my cat. Oh no,
Speaker 1: uh the cat now has a Nazi bandez band on
Speaker 1: my cat tied around its tour So so it's now
Speaker 1: a Nazi cat. How someone who someone who was in
Speaker 1: my mysteriously has given my my cat anaz which you
Speaker 1: mean my cat's name is My cat's name is chairman maow.
Speaker 1: And now it's moved to a different type of authoritarianism. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's either way. It's the responsible of deaths. Well, now
Speaker 1: it's a very cute little Nazi cat. God we would
Speaker 1: post pictures of this online, but we should not. Nope,
Speaker 1: don't do it. But not gonna happen. This is really
Speaker 1: great audio content, y'all. People are really going to enjoy
Speaker 1: this audio content. That there is now a Nazi cat
Speaker 1: in in the house walking with the leash, walking with
Speaker 1: a leash. It is a very cute kitten, Like, oh
Speaker 1: my god, this little kitten, y'all, you gotta you should
Speaker 1: see this kitten, I mean not you can see the
Speaker 1: kitten on my Twitter not wearing a Nazi not wearing Um,
Speaker 1: I'll take that. I'll take that off. That's so cute. Though, again,
Speaker 1: this is very good audio content. Doesn't know that it's
Speaker 1: wearing it doesn't know it's tied to millions of deaths. Millions. Yeah,
Speaker 1: hello body, No, it's just chilling out now now, it's
Speaker 1: just chilling the swastika. That's healthy. Yeah, okay, sorry Garrison.
Speaker 1: Um yeah, So basically, Jones adopted a very strict personality. Um.
Speaker 1: He told the class to only address him as Mr.
Speaker 1: Jones as opposed to Ron as I usually call him. Um.
Speaker 1: They were. He made rules about how many words you
Speaker 1: could use to answer like verbal questions. Um. He said
Speaker 1: that students should arrive five minutes before class, um, and
Speaker 1: wait in seated position. You know. In this like he
Speaker 1: he he talked a lot about like posture and how
Speaker 1: better posture leads to better learning, which is you know, dubious,
Speaker 1: but he like he knows that he was just you know,
Speaker 1: trying to make this like disciplined environment. Um he uh.
Speaker 1: Her Jones had his students line up outside the class
Speaker 1: and have them enter the class to get into perfect
Speaker 1: seating position. And they like drilled this over and over
Speaker 1: and over again with it with a timer, you know,
Speaker 1: having everyone go outside and everyone you know come back
Speaker 1: inside and trying to get into perfect seated position, you know,
Speaker 1: very quickly. Um. They drilled this until everyone was perfectly
Speaker 1: in sync and got in and sitting under five seconds. UM.
Speaker 1: So like he you know, he was trying to introduce
Speaker 1: this kind of this the rules of discipline and listening
Speaker 1: to authority and just doing things without really any reason
Speaker 1: but just listening. And then you know, in this discipline
Speaker 1: environment um. As all of Jones's experiments, grades were based
Speaker 1: on participation. If you wanted to opt out, you could
Speaker 1: just go to the library. Um. On the first day,
Speaker 1: everyone participated very very willingly. Um. No one seems to
Speaker 1: make a connection to the German history classes that the
Speaker 1: class had just completed. Um. The the idea was to
Speaker 1: give students a peak into what it was like to
Speaker 1: be a regular German under the Nazis by turning the
Speaker 1: world history class into just a one day fascist state. Um.
Speaker 1: And that's and that's all it was. It was supposed
Speaker 1: to just be a one day simulation, and that that
Speaker 1: was the next day. The plan was to have, um
Speaker 1: just like a discussion over you know what the what
Speaker 1: the experiment was. So that was that that was all
Speaker 1: Jones wanted to do, which just this one day kind
Speaker 1: of experiment into getting used to an environment of discipline
Speaker 1: and following a strict leader. That's kind of all it was. UM.
Speaker 1: So not not super harmful like first day kind of
Speaker 1: kind of all right, it's just a fun one day thing. Um.
Speaker 1: But as Jones entered class the next day, all the
Speaker 1: students were like waiting inside the class of five minutes early,
Speaker 1: and they were all sitting in perfect posture inside all
Speaker 1: of the rows in unison. They all chanted good morning,
Speaker 1: Mr Jones. And Jones began to wonder how far he
Speaker 1: could take this, and he walked over to the chalkboard
Speaker 1: and wrote down strength through Community. So this is so
Speaker 1: he saw everyone had Like he saw the students were
Speaker 1: very like into this, and it's like, huh, I wonder,
Speaker 1: I wonder how how much it could turn them into fascists.
Speaker 1: And he just decided to do it. And it was
Speaker 1: just like a spur of the moment decision because the
Speaker 1: experiment was over. They're just like, huh, but if it
Speaker 1: isn't over, And I see this doesn't speak well for
Speaker 1: him as a person, although I guess maybe it doesn't
Speaker 1: speak well for anyone as a person, because maybe the
Speaker 1: lesson here is that, um, that there's something intoxicating about
Speaker 1: fascism that we can draw anybody in. Jones talks about
Speaker 1: this later, how he actually got pulled into the experiment himself.
Speaker 1: UM don't like that. Yeah, that's very Simbardo him, which
Speaker 1: doesn't make it okay, which is why they're friends. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because they're both kind of not great people. Um. So
Speaker 1: Jones wrote strength through Community UM on the track board.
Speaker 1: Next strength through discipline. UM. To quote quote Jones here,
Speaker 1: while the class sat in stern silence, I began to
Speaker 1: talk lecture and ceremonized that's a weird word um about
Speaker 1: the value of community at this At this stage in
Speaker 1: the game, I was debating in my mind whether to
Speaker 1: stop the experiment or continue. I hadn't planned on such
Speaker 1: intensity or compliance. In fact, I was surprised to find
Speaker 1: that that the ideas of discipline were enacted at all.
Speaker 1: While debating whether to stop or go on with the experiment,
Speaker 1: I talked on and on about community. I made up
Speaker 1: stories from my experiences as an athlete, a coach, and historian.
Speaker 1: It was easy community being something bigger than oneself, something enjoyable.
Speaker 1: They really bought onto that argument. So students were like Jones,
Speaker 1: by all accounts, was a very good lecturer. Um. He
Speaker 1: is very, very, very engaging, both when he was more
Speaker 1: like relaxed and charismatic and both when he was, you know,
Speaker 1: putting on this more strict dictatorial character. Um. Jones had
Speaker 1: the class all chance together strength your discipline, strength through community,
Speaker 1: echoing between pairs of students, getting the whole class in unison,
Speaker 1: starting with one person and adding on another personage time,
Speaker 1: just a whole much, you know, like community drills of
Speaker 1: doing this, you know fashion chance, enjoy this at all
Speaker 1: Garrison and it doesn't know where it's going and it's
Speaker 1: just progressively getting sentence by sentence where it's it is
Speaker 1: kind of predictable. Um, yeah, this might be I don't
Speaker 1: want to be like radical here, but this might be
Speaker 1: why you shouldn't experiment on profressionable child. Yeah perhaps, I
Speaker 1: mean I've carried out some experiments on a child and
Speaker 1: it worked out pretty well. But it was a Garrison joke. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because I tear gas. I mean, look at look at
Speaker 1: me now reading about fascism with my cat with the
Speaker 1: slastika band. Yep, everything's going great plan from the start.
Speaker 1: You know what won't convert a kitten to national socialism.
Speaker 1: The fine folks who make those chips raytheon would never
Speaker 1: do that. Uh, and neither will the other sponsors of
Speaker 1: this podcast. And we're back, all right, Garrison. The Nazi
Speaker 1: arm band is off the kitten. Now that's good. The
Speaker 1: kitten has got it off himself. So's most podcasts don't
Speaker 1: even radicalize the kitten. So we're really very productive today.
Speaker 1: It's impossible to radicalize Anderson. No, Anderson is a committed
Speaker 1: anti fascist. He stands fast in. She's a free thinker,
Speaker 1: you know, speaking of committed fascism. Um, So after all
Speaker 1: of the chanting together in unison and stuff. Um, at
Speaker 1: the end of the class, Jones made a terrible decision,
Speaker 1: and that decision was to make a class members salute.
Speaker 1: Someone really should have talked to him. People did. He
Speaker 1: had like rabbis calling him throw this little experiment, and
Speaker 1: Jones is like, no, don't worry, it's just an experiment.
Speaker 1: They're like, okay, yeah, I don't like this. It's not great. Um.
Speaker 1: So the salute here, um Jones made. Students were commanded
Speaker 1: to give each other both in and out of class, Like,
Speaker 1: whatever two students met, they were supposed to salute each other. Um,
Speaker 1: both in school out of school, um Jones. Jones called it.
Speaker 1: And now the experiment was also called the third wave.
Speaker 1: Now he claims the third wave is not a reference
Speaker 1: to the third Reich. Um. He claims it has to
Speaker 1: do with like waves and beaches and how like the
Speaker 1: third wave is the strongest wave. But I don't I
Speaker 1: don't really buy that because it also sounds too much
Speaker 1: like a third position, Like there's a lot of there's
Speaker 1: a lot of third actually things that involve a third Yeah,
Speaker 1: whatever count to three? Never for fascists, two to four, right,
Speaker 1: to four if you're going to count if you don't
Speaker 1: want to, you know, enable nazism. Um to make the salute,
Speaker 1: you brought up your right hand towards your right shoulder
Speaker 1: in a curl position. Um. He called it the third
Speaker 1: wave or you know, just the wave because the hand
Speaker 1: resembled the wave over Like, I I do buy that
Speaker 1: part for calling it the wave, but the third part,
Speaker 1: I mean it is just you know, that's just come on,
Speaker 1: come on, come on, buddy. Um. But just like how
Speaker 1: my cat removed its fascist arm band as McNown anti
Speaker 1: Fascist Day two is where we also got to see
Speaker 1: the start of an anti fascist resistance forming within the school.
Speaker 1: It's like, the really cool thing about this experiment, even
Speaker 1: though it's highly ethical, is that we've got a really
Speaker 1: good microcosm of how fascism develops and how like anti
Speaker 1: fascism develops beside it. By the end of the second day,
Speaker 1: a student in the class got up and said, Mr Jones,
Speaker 1: why can't we just say what we wanted to think?
Speaker 1: Why can't we express our own opinions about what we
Speaker 1: think about the third wave and the periment um? And
Speaker 1: Jones very quickly said, you to the library for the
Speaker 1: rest of the semester. So this is the first time
Speaker 1: a student got banished from the class. I say first time,
Speaker 1: it's not it's not the last time. This student went
Speaker 1: to the library UM, and the librarian asked why why
Speaker 1: the student wasn't in class. Based on what Jones had
Speaker 1: told the students, the student thought that like the whole
Speaker 1: staff was in on the experiment, which they were not. UM.
Speaker 1: So the student was actually scared to tell the librarian
Speaker 1: what happened and why she was there. UM. Now it
Speaker 1: just so happened to be that the librarian was born
Speaker 1: and raised to Nazi Germany. Uh so when this this
Speaker 1: is actually good um. Like, when the student finally told
Speaker 1: the librarian what happened, the librarian was very alarmed and
Speaker 1: uh and very and very concerned. Um. The librarian told
Speaker 1: the student that she has to do something to kind
Speaker 1: of stop this um from you know, stop this from
Speaker 1: spreading to other students. And the librarian thought this was
Speaker 1: very dangerous. UM. So the student went home and talked
Speaker 1: to their parents. But what they should do the first time.
Speaker 1: Their first idea was to make posters. UM. So that night,
Speaker 1: the students father drove her back to the school UM.
Speaker 1: Because of how hot the area is around the school,
Speaker 1: like the town. All of the hallways are technically outside
Speaker 1: of the school, just with like a canopy. So the
Speaker 1: student was able to plaster all of the walls with
Speaker 1: anti third wave posters. UM. So they filled up the
Speaker 1: school with like anti third wave posters. UM. The next morning,
Speaker 1: within an hour of school starting, all the posters had
Speaker 1: been torn down. UM. And you know there was the
Speaker 1: students have admitted to like, you know, like we we
Speaker 1: tore down the posters because they were anti third wave.
Speaker 1: And then later later that night, it's like on day three,
Speaker 1: so we're kind of keeping ahead for here for this UM.
Speaker 1: The student returned with a ladder to put up the
Speaker 1: posters up where they couldn't be torn down. UM. And
Speaker 1: the student had titled their anti third wave resistance UM
Speaker 1: the Breakers, which is again in another another wave reference
Speaker 1: because the waves. Right, It's like it's all very silly,
Speaker 1: like this student is traumatized. And you can hear the
Speaker 1: student talk about this experiment later on, like they are
Speaker 1: very clearly traumatized by this experience. UM. You love to
Speaker 1: see it. Yeah. By day three, so this is this
Speaker 1: is Wednesday. So yes, the first day was strngingth to discipline.
Speaker 1: Second day was strength through community. Um. By day three,
Speaker 1: the class had gained twenty extra students who are interested
Speaker 1: in participating in the experiment. That's not how classes are
Speaker 1: supposed to work. Why was this allowed? It gives so
Speaker 1: much worse. Eventually people from other schools join the class.
Speaker 1: It's fad and no one's no one's The school administration
Speaker 1: is just like, yeah, he's recreating our campus. Did it happen?
Speaker 1: This is fine? So the class had gotten from It's
Speaker 1: just like America. Yeah, I mean yes, yeah. So the
Speaker 1: class had grown from students to about sixties students by
Speaker 1: day three. It's not how schools are supposed to work.
Speaker 1: It really isn't. When Jones went into class, the new
Speaker 1: phrase he wrote in the track board was strength through action. UM.
Speaker 1: So this this, this doesn't get any better. It doesn't
Speaker 1: sound like it does. Garrison Jones announced that he was
Speaker 1: issuing third wave membership cards, um, which were just were
Speaker 1: just they were just index cards he found in his
Speaker 1: desk because again he didn't plan this at all and
Speaker 1: it was just kind of like going with it. So
Speaker 1: he found these next cards and it's like, huh, I
Speaker 1: should give the membership cards and it's like without a
Speaker 1: second thought for how bad this is. Um So he
Speaker 1: gave everyone third Wave membership cards UM to every student
Speaker 1: who decided to continue the experiment. All students were still
Speaker 1: continuing at this point, UM three cards Jones secretly marked
Speaker 1: with a red X, which meant that these students were
Speaker 1: informants and were instructed to tell Jones if any students
Speaker 1: were not following the third Wave rules um or, as
Speaker 1: a student referred to them as in a in a
Speaker 1: document nary, the third Wave community values Jesus Christ. It's
Speaker 1: really bad. It doesn't seem good. So like you know,
Speaker 1: if if if students, if if like one of these
Speaker 1: informants saw someone, you know, like not not salute them
Speaker 1: in the hallway or you know, not to ext not
Speaker 1: do why they were you know, they were supposed to
Speaker 1: tell Jones um Es. Jones lectured the class on direct
Speaker 1: action and in Jones's own words, how discipline and community
Speaker 1: were meaningless without action, which is definitely not something Hitler
Speaker 1: would say. He then gave the class different direct action assignments,
Speaker 1: varying from passing out third Wave flyers and posters outreach
Speaker 1: other students and other schools and setting up info tables
Speaker 1: in the hallways. UM, it's sorry. I shouldn't be laughing,
Speaker 1: but it is. It is kind of terrible to quote Jones.
Speaker 1: To allow students to have the experience of direct action,
Speaker 1: I gave each individual a special verbal assignment. Quote. It's
Speaker 1: your task to design a third Wave banner. You are
Speaker 1: responsible for stopping any student that's not a Third Way
Speaker 1: member from entering the room. I want you to remember
Speaker 1: and be able to recite tomorrow the names of each
Speaker 1: member and addresses of each member. I want you to
Speaker 1: this is good. You're a side of the problem of
Speaker 1: training and training and convincing at least twenty children in
Speaker 1: the adjacent elementary school that are sitting posture is necessary
Speaker 1: for better learning. It's your job to read the pamphlet
Speaker 1: and report on its entire content to the class tomorrow.
Speaker 1: I want you to give me the name and address
Speaker 1: of one reliable friend that you think will want to
Speaker 1: join the Third Wave, etcetera, etcetera. BA see a list
Speaker 1: of all these terrible things you got students to do. UM.
Speaker 1: To conclude the session on direct action, I'm this is
Speaker 1: still quoting Jones here. UM. I instructed students in a
Speaker 1: simple procedure for initiating new members. It went like this,
Speaker 1: a new member had to be only recommended by an
Speaker 1: existing member and issued an I D Card by myself.
Speaker 1: Upon receiving his card, he's now a new member and
Speaker 1: had to demonstrate knowledge of our rules and pledge obedience
Speaker 1: to them. My announcement unleashed a fervor. Is how he
Speaker 1: ends that section when he talks about this UM. So
Speaker 1: students were very into it UM because these are like
Speaker 1: fifteen year olds in the sixties. UM, and we we're
Speaker 1: gonna talk more about why the experiment worked at the
Speaker 1: end and like why it works so well. But like
Speaker 1: you know, people people were very were people were very
Speaker 1: into this UM. The result to this call to action
Speaker 1: was recruiters at these infor tables were starting fistfights with
Speaker 1: people who didn't want to join UM. And great, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's like multiple just like brawls in the hallway over
Speaker 1: people like not wanting to join the third wave. UM.
Speaker 1: This is all making me wonder if maybe the original
Speaker 1: Nazism was a social experiment that just got out of hand.
Speaker 1: Hitler was like, I don't know, I guess I got
Speaker 1: to invade a couple of country ship he just had to.
Speaker 1: It was trying to keep up the act because everyone
Speaker 1: is so involved. UM. Even though only three people got
Speaker 1: the red X on their cards, way more than three
Speaker 1: people were turning in names of people breaking the rules.
Speaker 1: Jones recalls, though I formally appointed only three students to
Speaker 1: report a bad behavior, approximately twenty students came to me
Speaker 1: with reports about how Alan didn't salute, or Georgina wasn't
Speaker 1: wasn't into the experiment and talking critically about it. This
Speaker 1: instance of monitoring UH meant that half of the class
Speaker 1: members now considered it their duty to report and observe
Speaker 1: all other members of the class as a student. A
Speaker 1: student recalls, you never know who's gonna come in the
Speaker 1: next morning and turn you in. All lines of student
Speaker 1: communication were broken down because of this fear. What a
Speaker 1: good history class this was. But I find it really
Speaker 1: fascinating how even though you know it was such you know,
Speaker 1: the strength or community and whatever, how like they're all
Speaker 1: at the all out of the actual community, all broke
Speaker 1: down over fear of people turning each other in. UM,
Speaker 1: which is, you know, very accurate to what actually happened
Speaker 1: in Germany. UM sounds like a again, just a real
Speaker 1: good high school history class. Uh. Trials were held for
Speaker 1: members that were seen breaking rules. Yeah, that's because that's
Speaker 1: what like I you know, I remember my favorite part
Speaker 1: of high school was the trials that we would hold
Speaker 1: for each other after informing on each other and oh,
Speaker 1: I've got enough. Now the kitten, everybody for this great
Speaker 1: audio content now has a little antipha band around its back.
Speaker 1: So the kitten has been de radicalized and it now
Speaker 1: shows the fervor of a convert in fighting. It's it's
Speaker 1: old ideology. This has really been quite an arc for
Speaker 1: a very like like what a four month old kitten
Speaker 1: twelve weeks, twelve weeks, a little baby, very small. Oh
Speaker 1: you're so good, very very happy. You're so good. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So you didn't have trials in your high school because
Speaker 1: again I was homeschooled, and we we we had some
Speaker 1: show trials, you know, we we there were a couple
Speaker 1: of executions. It was over it was over football. I
Speaker 1: grew up in Texas, So okay, yeah that's the one
Speaker 1: with the with the with the never mind Okay, um yeah.
Speaker 1: Trials um uh. They were held for members scene breaking rules,
Speaker 1: members that were just joking about the third Wave or
Speaker 1: or being seen with quote known revolutionary Scott. Damn it,
Speaker 1: that's a good, good work teaching teacher guy Ron Jones.
Speaker 1: I can see again it makes so much sense that
Speaker 1: Philip Simbardo likes this guy because they are both monsters
Speaker 1: who view the brains of other human beings. Simbardo often
Speaker 1: brings Jones into his class to teach. See. I love
Speaker 1: Philip Simbardo because whenever he comes up in a story,
Speaker 1: you know things are about to get interesting. He's that
Speaker 1: kind of character. But also he shouldn't be allowed to teach.
Speaker 1: He shouldn't. He shouldn't be allowed to do anything. He's
Speaker 1: a terrible person. Now. Um so in these trials, basically,
Speaker 1: um Jones, or like a senior class member, would read
Speaker 1: aloud the alleged offense, the entire class would immediately chant
Speaker 1: of guilty. All in unison, or in the accused was
Speaker 1: banished to the library. Um I love that there's now
Speaker 1: banishments and again a high school history quest. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: like the library became a concentration camp. If you weren't
Speaker 1: catching on to where this was leading, I mean, as
Speaker 1: concentration camps go, that's not the worst, better than most
Speaker 1: concentration camps. Thank you for making ethical concentration camps. Um.
Speaker 1: Several students elected themselves like me saying ethical concentration camps there,
Speaker 1: grass fed. That's not a not a great buy local
Speaker 1: when you buy a concentration camp. So I mean Powell's
Speaker 1: Books was just one concentration camp. I wouldn't complain. They
Speaker 1: have coffee and books. It's exactly. Pell's Books is a
Speaker 1: large bookstore. When when the Proud Boys take over Portland
Speaker 1: and they sent me to the Powell's Books right now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: none of this is very good. Oh don't worry, I
Speaker 1: can I can make it much worse by reading my script. Good. Yes,
Speaker 1: please continue. Several students elected themselves to become bodyguards for Jones,
Speaker 1: and they made their own black out an ass, they
Speaker 1: made their own black art vents. Yeah, so he he
Speaker 1: has spontaneously his students developed an SS their own arm bits. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's great. Like parents were like questioning their kids about
Speaker 1: why they had armed bents, like no, no, no, it's
Speaker 1: it's it's too it's to protect Mr Jones. It's just
Speaker 1: part of the experiment. They called Jones very concerned, and
Speaker 1: Jon just like, no, don't worry, We're just we're just
Speaker 1: studying the German psyche, is what he told them. Yeah. See,
Speaker 1: I would have additional questions as a parent, not to
Speaker 1: backseat parents, because I I've never had a kid, but
Speaker 1: I think I would have questions at that point in
Speaker 1: the experiment, like what the fund is wrong with you?
Speaker 1: And why are you a teacher? Was very offended by
Speaker 1: the sentence you just said, yeah, my kid, you've never
Speaker 1: had a kid. I had a baby your leg, Therigen's
Speaker 1: eyes are closed. The Antifa kittens sleeping on my leg. Now,
Speaker 1: my cat is not going to be happy, but she'll
Speaker 1: learn because I want her to raise a kitten and
Speaker 1: teach it. All that chos um and because all of
Speaker 1: the quotes from Jones have just been amazing and full
Speaker 1: of typos um, but also you know, really really interesting
Speaker 1: and terrible. I'm gonna do another one, and this one
Speaker 1: is actually pretty long. Um. Many of the students were
Speaker 1: completely into being third Wave members. They demanded strict obedience
Speaker 1: of the rules from other students and believed those that
Speaker 1: took the experiment lightly others simply sunk into the activities
Speaker 1: and took on self assigned rules. I particularly remember my
Speaker 1: students Robert Um Robert was big for his age and
Speaker 1: displayed very few academic skills. Um. Oh, he he tried
Speaker 1: harder than anyone else to be successful. Remember this for later.
Speaker 1: It is actually very important. Um. But but he handled
Speaker 1: in the He handed in elaborate week weekly reports, copied
Speaker 1: word for word from from reference books to the libraries.
Speaker 1: But he just he just wasn't wasn't very academically skilled. Actually, um, Robert,
Speaker 1: like so many other kids in school, didn't excel or
Speaker 1: cause trouble. They aren't that bright. They can't make the
Speaker 1: athletic teams. They don't strike out for attention. They're lost invisible.
Speaker 1: And the only reason why I came to know Robert
Speaker 1: at all is that I often found him eating lunch
Speaker 1: in my classroom because he always ate alone. Um. Well,
Speaker 1: the third Wave gave Robert a place in the school.
Speaker 1: He was at last equal to everyone else. He could
Speaker 1: do something, be a part, be meaningful, and that's what
Speaker 1: Robert did. Late Wednesday afternoon, I found Robert following me
Speaker 1: and I asked. I asked him what, what in the
Speaker 1: world he was doing? He smiled and announced, Mr Jones,
Speaker 1: I'm your bodyguard. I'm afraid something will happen to you.
Speaker 1: He followed me everywhere in the faculty room, which was
Speaker 1: close to students. Um, he stood silently at attention as
Speaker 1: I gulped down coffee. When accosted by an English teacher
Speaker 1: for being, you know, for having a student in the
Speaker 1: in the in the teacher's room, he just smiled at
Speaker 1: her and informed her that he wasn't a student, he
Speaker 1: was a bodyguard. Yeah. Yeah, well more just like that's
Speaker 1: how the SS got started. It was initially Hitler's bodyguard,
Speaker 1: Like that's what it was, and then it turned into
Speaker 1: kind of a state within the state. Yeah, and so
Speaker 1: this spontaneously generated Heinrich Himbler. Yeah, so it started with
Speaker 1: Robert and then um, a group of a group of
Speaker 1: seniors from another one of Jones's classes who were interested
Speaker 1: in the experiment. And they were kind of they were
Speaker 1: part of like the car club quote unquote. They they
Speaker 1: all wear like leather jackets and worked on cars because
Speaker 1: they were cool. They all became the rest of his bodyguards,
Speaker 1: putting on the black arm bands. Um, and they like
Speaker 1: just they like just beat up random students. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they were not that cool at Um, they kind of sucked,
Speaker 1: but yeah, like well we'll we'll hear more over this
Speaker 1: at the end. But like Jones talked a lot about
Speaker 1: how like the people who really got into the wave
Speaker 1: were all the students in the middle, people who were
Speaker 1: not great at school, weren't terrible at school, all people
Speaker 1: who just kind of barely coasted by, and I like
Speaker 1: gave them something to be in and something something something
Speaker 1: to do. Um, you know, for people like this this
Speaker 1: Rubbert person who finally was able to you know, I
Speaker 1: feel like he had some kind of meaning in in school. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's like we talked about in the Little
Speaker 1: Nazis episode. It's the little men who was to whom
Speaker 1: Nazi appealed the most. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: we'll we'll talk a lot about this at the end. Actually,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of there's a lot of really interesting
Speaker 1: parallels there. Um. By the morning of day four, so again,
Speaker 1: we've we've already had strength through discipline, strength through community,
Speaker 1: strength through action. We've had fistfights and hallways, people trying
Speaker 1: to get kids from other elementary schools to join again,
Speaker 1: not even high schools, elementary schools. By the morning of
Speaker 1: day four, Jones started to realize that he kind of
Speaker 1: lost control of the experiment. Earlier that night, a father
Speaker 1: of a student who I whom I believe to actually
Speaker 1: be the first person kicked out of class and who
Speaker 1: the person who made like the third wave posters I believe.
Speaker 1: I think I'm pretty sure it was actually her father,
Speaker 1: UM broke into the classroom and ransacked it. Um to
Speaker 1: to to quote Jones, he was a retired Air Force
Speaker 1: colonel who spent a lot of time in a German
Speaker 1: prison war camp. UM, upon hearing of our activity, he
Speaker 1: simply lost control. Late into the evening, he broke into
Speaker 1: the classroom and tore it apart. I found him that morning,
Speaker 1: propped up against the classroom door. He told me about
Speaker 1: his friends that had been killed in Germany. He was
Speaker 1: holding on to me and shaking. He pleaded with me
Speaker 1: that I understand and I try to help him get home.
Speaker 1: I called his wife and with the help of a neighbor,
Speaker 1: walked him home. We spent hours later talking about why
Speaker 1: he why he did what he did, and what he
Speaker 1: was feeling at the time. Um. But from that moment
Speaker 1: on Thursday morning, I was very concerned. Umbo was about
Speaker 1: what might be happening in school. So you your your
Speaker 1: your self appointed should staffel are beating up kids in
Speaker 1: the school like you have informants and show trials, but
Speaker 1: you you weren't concerned. Then you finally get concerned when
Speaker 1: a Holocaust survivor tears up your classroom. Yeah, it's I
Speaker 1: don't know this is true or not, because this this
Speaker 1: is a thing only Jones talks about and he seems credible. Um,
Speaker 1: But on day three Jones claims how he got the
Speaker 1: extra bodyguards. Besides, Robert Um was like the members of
Speaker 1: his car club beat Jones up and threw him in
Speaker 1: a dumpster and demanded that they beat his bodyguards, and
Speaker 1: he said, yes, Now I have no way to very.
Speaker 1: I didn't put this in the script because I don't
Speaker 1: actually think it happened. That seems like, well, he doesn't
Speaker 1: seem like a credible person, but it may have happened,
Speaker 1: which I think is like, if that happened, that should
Speaker 1: have been this line that things were getting out of control.
Speaker 1: There are so many red flags here. He should have
Speaker 1: he should I mean, he never should have started this,
Speaker 1: but he's certainly like there were a lot of points
Speaker 1: it was clear that this was bad. Before the Holocaust
Speaker 1: survivor destroyed his classroom. Yeah. So at this point, this
Speaker 1: is like the morning of day four, Um, the third
Speaker 1: wave was nearing one active members, which isn't how school works.
Speaker 1: He shouldn't have a hundred student and senior class and
Speaker 1: armed part of your class. Um. And the experiment was
Speaker 1: also affecting Jones. Um. He reports feeling like relaxed in
Speaker 1: his dictatorial position. The character he was putting on was
Speaker 1: becoming his default personality. Even his wife had like it
Speaker 1: was like getting him to be like, hey, uh, you
Speaker 1: see you seem a little different at home. What's going on?
Speaker 1: It seems like you might have accidentally recreated Nazism. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the way you had taken over a students lives, um,
Speaker 1: and how the whole school kind of operated. Um. Jones
Speaker 1: decided he needed to end it, But he didn't want
Speaker 1: to just end the experiment all of a sudden. He
Speaker 1: wanted there to be a conclusion and closure for participants. Um.
Speaker 1: Jones wrote, if I stopped the experiment, a great number
Speaker 1: of students would be left hanging. They committed themselves in
Speaker 1: front of their peers to this radical behavior. Emotionally and psychologically.
Speaker 1: They had exposed themselves. If I suddenly jolted them back
Speaker 1: to the classroom. The reality that would face them would
Speaker 1: be um confusion over the whole student body that would
Speaker 1: remain for the rest of the year. It would be
Speaker 1: too painful and demeaning for someone like Robert and the
Speaker 1: students like him to be twisted back into into a
Speaker 1: seat and told it was just a game. They would
Speaker 1: be They would be ridiculed by the brighter students and
Speaker 1: for their for the participation. And I couldn't let people
Speaker 1: like Robert lose again. UM, which is I think not
Speaker 1: a terrible Yeah. I mean, once you have recreated fascism
Speaker 1: in your classroom and have people who have dedicated their
Speaker 1: lives to it, you do have to You can't just
Speaker 1: say we're done now, like yeah, yeah, but did you
Speaker 1: radicalize the students you radicalized, like we de radicalized this kitten.
Speaker 1: But jones solution to this, UM is very perplexing from
Speaker 1: a standpoint of trying to limit the psychological damage and
Speaker 1: whiplash coming from this extreme simulation back to the classroom. UM,
Speaker 1: because I think what he did actually made things way worse. UM.
Speaker 1: But it's very it's very fascinating what happened from fro
Speaker 1: an experimental standpoint, but it's again. I think this is
Speaker 1: way worse than just pulling the plug, uh Joan. In class,
Speaker 1: Jones announced that the Third Wave isn't just a school experiment.
Speaker 1: It's a new national political movement. In Jones's words, quote,
Speaker 1: across the country, teachers like myself have been recruiting and
Speaker 1: training a youth brigade capable of showing the nation a
Speaker 1: better society through discipline, community, pride, and action. If we
Speaker 1: can change the way a school is run, we can
Speaker 1: change the way that factories, stores, universities, and all other
Speaker 1: institutions are run. You are a selected group of young
Speaker 1: people chosen to help in this cause. If you will
Speaker 1: stand up and display what you have learned in the
Speaker 1: past four days, we can change the destiny of this nation.
Speaker 1: We can bring in a new sense of order, community pride,
Speaker 1: and action, a new purpose. Everything rests on you and
Speaker 1: your willingness to take a stand. This doesn't sound like
Speaker 1: the radicalversation, Garrison. So yeah, like, no, everything you talked
Speaker 1: about for trying to know East under the experiment, this
Speaker 1: is not doing it. But that's all Jones um then
Speaker 1: to quote malidify the seriousness of my words. Quote his words.
Speaker 1: Um ordered his bodyguards to escort um, three of them
Speaker 1: more intellectually astute students who had been dubious about the
Speaker 1: Third Wave. So his after he makes this big announcement
Speaker 1: and big lecture, he orders his guards to take three
Speaker 1: people to the library um um and was and was
Speaker 1: told the bodyguards to never let them re enter the class.
Speaker 1: Jones then further explained that the next day there was
Speaker 1: to be a special Third Wave members only rally. At noon,
Speaker 1: there was to be a nationwide broadcast um formally announcing
Speaker 1: the new political party and introducing a presidential candidate. Quoting
Speaker 1: Jones quote, Over one thousand youth groups from every part
Speaker 1: of the country would stand up and display their support
Speaker 1: for such a movement. There were to be students selected
Speaker 1: to represent their area. Um I questioned if they can
Speaker 1: make a good showing because press had been invited to
Speaker 1: record the event. No one laughed. There was not a
Speaker 1: murmur of resistance. Quite the contrary, A fever pitch of
Speaker 1: excitement swelled across the room. So I really don't know
Speaker 1: what why he thought this would calm things over. Yeah, No,
Speaker 1: that doesn't seem like an attempt to de radicalize. It's
Speaker 1: very I think I think Jones's plan here and what
Speaker 1: happened I think made everything much worse, made the trauma
Speaker 1: much worse. Um. And and to make things even more
Speaker 1: you know, unfortunate. Um, by pure happenstance, a student had
Speaker 1: a copy of the Time magazine from that month, um,
Speaker 1: and it had a full page ad for a lumber product.
Speaker 1: But the ad was just in big red, white and
Speaker 1: blue lettering the Third Wave is coming. So like there's
Speaker 1: this horriful coincidence that got them all to believe this
Speaker 1: is like all very legit. Um. With the class convinced,
Speaker 1: Jones set a time for this for this member members
Speaker 1: only rally. UM. It was gonna be Friday, so for
Speaker 1: them was tomorrow at noon. Members were told either ten
Speaker 1: minutes early, waiting for press, in proper seating position, and
Speaker 1: be there to quote display the discipline, community and pride
Speaker 1: that you have all learned. The class was instructed to
Speaker 1: not to tell any Third Way members about this. UM.
Speaker 1: So yeah, that was Jones's idea to de estate things
Speaker 1: to day before was to prepare kids for this national
Speaker 1: announcement and this big rally on the next day. UM.
Speaker 1: Oh god, not what I would have done. I think
Speaker 1: I wouldn't have. I wouldn't have let the experiment gets
Speaker 1: to this point anyway. No, but it seems like his
Speaker 1: attempt to de radicalize them was to convince them that
Speaker 1: they were part of a national movement, which questionable call.
Speaker 1: But you know what's not a questionable call, Garrison of
Speaker 1: buying all the dick pills, buying dick pills or whatever
Speaker 1: whatever else advertises on our show. Uh products are the
Speaker 1: only pathway to de radicalize Nazis. Services remarket, capitalism the
Speaker 1: only thing that gets Nazis to become no longer, not historically,
Speaker 1: that's true. Capitalism de radicalizes fasci Okay, well here's some ads. Alright,
Speaker 1: we're back. Okay, So he's he's he's he's told his
Speaker 1: he's gotten scared because he recreated fascism. Uh. And now
Speaker 1: there's a concentration camp in the library, and also his
Speaker 1: uh students are he's attempted to de radicalize them by
Speaker 1: telling them they're part of a nationwide movement to change
Speaker 1: the character of the country. No notes, Okay, now they're
Speaker 1: going to have a big meeting and he's going to
Speaker 1: tell them all to stop being fascist. Right, that's gonna
Speaker 1: happen now what happens? Yes, okay, Um, But throughout the week,
Speaker 1: a school reporter was trying to find out about the
Speaker 1: third Wave. UM. But whenever he asked questions about it,
Speaker 1: two people they just wouldn't talk. Um until he got
Speaker 1: ahold of the librarian. Um after the rally was announced. UM.
Speaker 1: So we basically you gotta lead of what was happening
Speaker 1: through the library because again all the students were banished
Speaker 1: were sent to the library. After the rally was announced. Um,
Speaker 1: two of the third Wave bodyguards went into the school
Speaker 1: journalism office and beat up the reporter. God damn it,
Speaker 1: he did a good job remaking Nazism, the people wearing
Speaker 1: the black arm bands. It definitely wasn't his job, but
Speaker 1: he did it. Um, telling telling After they beat about,
Speaker 1: they told him not to write about the Third Wave
Speaker 1: or the upcoming rally, which yet I guess learned a
Speaker 1: little bit about. UM. So yeah, that was the state
Speaker 1: of that. UM. If you're, you know, trying to keep
Speaker 1: a tally going on, how on how well the fashism
Speaker 1: is working? Um? So Day five, Friday morning, the final day,
Speaker 1: the school auditorium was plastered with Third Wave banners and posters,
Speaker 1: like everywhere UMNT third Way members began already arriving and
Speaker 1: filling up the seats. At noon, the auditorium held over
Speaker 1: two hundred Third Wave memberss SO again, this class started
Speaker 1: with twenty five people and it grew to an auditorium
Speaker 1: filled with two hundred Nazis um over over five days.
Speaker 1: Um SO. They were waiting to hear the national announcement
Speaker 1: of the new political party and their presidential nominee. UH
Speaker 1: Jones had several of his friends in the room posing
Speaker 1: as reporters taking pictures, and he also set up a
Speaker 1: TV in the middle of the room. As a clock
Speaker 1: struck twelve, the bodyguards closed all the doors and were
Speaker 1: stationed in front of all the exits. I don't know
Speaker 1: why this happened, but everyone reports that it did, so
Speaker 1: it probably happened, um Jones. Jones says quote. Uh says
Speaker 1: to the class before turning on the national press coverage,
Speaker 1: which begins in five minutes, I want to demonstrate to
Speaker 1: the press the extent of our training. He then moves
Speaker 1: his arm up to salute. Two hundred arms follow all
Speaker 1: the same time. Apparently, also, one student on day four
Speaker 1: suggested they all wore white shirts, which they did on
Speaker 1: this last day. So it's like, you know, very unite
Speaker 1: the right ish with two hundred people all wearing white
Speaker 1: shirts doing this Nazi salute. Yeah. Um. Jones says, strength
Speaker 1: through discipline, and the students all in unison repeat back.
Speaker 1: The phrase gets recited over and over, each time getting louder. Um.
Speaker 1: At twelve oh five, Jones orders lights turned off, walks
Speaker 1: over to the television set and turns it on. The
Speaker 1: white static illuminates their room just enough to see the
Speaker 1: faces of the students. UM. Robert, the bodyguard is standing
Speaker 1: beside Jones. Jones tells him to watch the watch the
Speaker 1: students faces closely. Minutes pass nothing, nothing happens, the TVs on.
Speaker 1: Minutes passed, there's nothing, you know, nothing's turning on. Um.
Speaker 1: The students are in a trance watching the television. Eventually,
Speaker 1: one student stands up in yells there is no party leader,
Speaker 1: is there. The class turns in shock to look at
Speaker 1: the student, and then looks back at the television. Um.
Speaker 1: The other d students were all silent um, some of them,
Speaker 1: but some of their posture was relaxing back to normal.
Speaker 1: Jones turns out it turns out the television and says
Speaker 1: to the students, there is no leader, there's no such
Speaker 1: thing as a national youth movement called the third Wave.
Speaker 1: Let me show you your future. Jones turns on a
Speaker 1: projector right beside the TV and on the wall images
Speaker 1: and a film flash on the wall of Hitler Nazi
Speaker 1: rally's Third Reich marching with with their trained discipline, people
Speaker 1: being put into train cars off to off to death camps.
Speaker 1: UM and so Jones begins lecturing, as as this as
Speaker 1: this UM film about the Nazis, UM plays, and the
Speaker 1: kids just like completely quiet just watching this UM. Some
Speaker 1: of them are. They're completely quiet right now. Eventually they
Speaker 1: all start breakdown and crying wonderful yeah, like nowhere like protests,
Speaker 1: like everyone's everyone's very kind of feeling bad. Um so UM.
Speaker 1: As Jones is like starting his lecture, the film UM
Speaker 1: finishes and Free System hold on a single written frame
Speaker 1: that says everyone must accept the blame. No one can
Speaker 1: claim they didn't in some way take part. Jones says
Speaker 1: to the class, you and I are no better or
Speaker 1: worse than the German Nazis that we've been studying. You
Speaker 1: thought you were better than those outside this room. You
Speaker 1: bargained away your freedom for the comfort of discipline and superiority.
Speaker 1: We will watch our neighbors be taken away and do nothing.
Speaker 1: We are just like those Germans. We would give up
Speaker 1: our freedom for the chance of being special. Um Jones.
Speaker 1: Then I think, as you should have expressed his remorse
Speaker 1: and apologized to the class for all the trauma that
Speaker 1: he had cost um. But he decides to give one
Speaker 1: kind of final lecture to kind of I know, trying
Speaker 1: to smooth things over to begin. This has already gone
Speaker 1: way too far and has made too many bad choices
Speaker 1: up to this point. But this is this is the
Speaker 1: last thing he does for this experiment. Um, here's a
Speaker 1: Here's a here's a paragraph. A paragraph from Jones. Here.
Speaker 1: Through the experiment last week, we've all tasted what it
Speaker 1: was like to live and act on or Nazi Germany.
Speaker 1: We learned what was like to create a disciplined social environment,
Speaker 1: to build a special society, pledge allegiance to that society,
Speaker 1: replaced reason with rules. Yes, we would have all made
Speaker 1: good Germans. We would have put on the uniform and
Speaker 1: turned our heads as friends and neighbors were cursed then persecuted.
Speaker 1: We all know, in a small way what it feels
Speaker 1: like to find a hero, to grab a quick solution,
Speaker 1: to feel strong and in control of destiny. We know
Speaker 1: the fear of being left out, the pleasure of doing
Speaker 1: something right and being rewarded, to be number one, to
Speaker 1: be right, to be taken taken to the extreme. As
Speaker 1: we've seen and perhaps felt what those actions will lead to,
Speaker 1: we each have witnessed something over the past week. We
Speaker 1: have seen that fascism is not just something that other
Speaker 1: people do. Know. It's right here in this room. It's
Speaker 1: in our own personal habits, and it's it's in our
Speaker 1: way of life. Scratch the surface, and it appears something
Speaker 1: in all of us. We carry it like a disease.
Speaker 1: The belief that human beings are basically evil and therefore
Speaker 1: unable to act well towards others. That's what fascism breeds on.
Speaker 1: It's the belief, a belief that demands a strong leader
Speaker 1: and discipline to preserve a social order which is is
Speaker 1: not not not a terrible No. I mean, he's right,
Speaker 1: but he shouldn't. Yeah, it's a weird thing to say
Speaker 1: after creating fascism, But he's not wrong about the thing
Speaker 1: that he created. Yeah yeah, um he he he he
Speaker 1: finishes up. Um this you know this this small talk
Speaker 1: the same way this all started. Um. He asked the class,
Speaker 1: if they, like the regular Germans, will claim ignorance and
Speaker 1: claim non involvement um quote. If our enactment of the
Speaker 1: fascist mentality is complete, not one of you will ever
Speaker 1: admit to being at this final third wave rally. Like
Speaker 1: the Germans, you will have trouble admitting to yourself that
Speaker 1: you've come this far. You will not allow your friends
Speaker 1: and parents to know that you were willing to give
Speaker 1: up individual freedom and power um for for the dictates
Speaker 1: of this social of the social order and unseen leaders.
Speaker 1: You can't admit to be manipulated, to being a follower um,
Speaker 1: to accepting the Third Way as your way of life.
Speaker 1: You won't admit to participating in this madness. And you'll
Speaker 1: probably keep this uh this day and this rally secret,
Speaker 1: a secret that I will share with you, which Jones
Speaker 1: was eventually wrong about. Um. Jones himself wrote about this
Speaker 1: in semi detail about like four years later, after meeting
Speaker 1: a student like while shopping who gave him a third
Speaker 1: wave of salute and they kind of got him upset.
Speaker 1: Then he wrote down like, oh yeah, he got upset
Speaker 1: about the fascism. Yeah. So then then he wrote an
Speaker 1: essay about it. Um. But students definitely do talk about it. Well,
Speaker 1: we'll actually we'll hear from some students in a in
Speaker 1: a bit. Um. But Jones turned off the projector um.
Speaker 1: That you know, it's it's that's still had. Everyone must
Speaker 1: accept the blame. No one can claim that they weren't involved,
Speaker 1: or no one can claimed that they didn't in some
Speaker 1: way take part. So he turn turns out the turns
Speaker 1: out the projector um. Then he then he sees Robert
Speaker 1: who was sobbing, um, as many others to were as well.
Speaker 1: Jones hugged Robert as he was crying, and slowly students
Speaker 1: left the auditorium. And that's the experiment. So that that
Speaker 1: was what happened. That was that was the five day
Speaker 1: That was the five days permanently damaged some kids, he did.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of yeah, a lot of kids now
Speaker 1: they're like adults in their fifties and sixties. Um, But yeah,
Speaker 1: they a lot of a lot of people think it
Speaker 1: was a good experiment experience for them as a kid.
Speaker 1: But a lot of people say, no, this did your
Speaker 1: reversible damage. Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting experiment and
Speaker 1: a useful one if you want to study fascism. But
Speaker 1: it's bad that he did it too small children, yes,
Speaker 1: to fifteen year olds mainly. Yeah. Um, so now we're
Speaker 1: left wondering why was the experiment kind of so effective,
Speaker 1: especially for being only five days. Um. Now, I do
Speaker 1: think Jones had a pretty solid understanding of fascism in
Speaker 1: some ways, and um, he actually explains a lot of it. Um. Well, um,
Speaker 1: this is this. This is a quote for Jones. This
Speaker 1: is a quote from Jones. You have to understand the
Speaker 1: times there was a radical no sorry, there was racial
Speaker 1: integration taking place in the high school for the first time. Um,
Speaker 1: and that through the school kind of upside down, and
Speaker 1: all of the young men were facing the draft when
Speaker 1: when they graduated, I was I was basically promising I
Speaker 1: can make you safe again. Um. This was written before
Speaker 1: Trump ran. So yeah, it's just you know, just a good,
Speaker 1: good thing to a good thing to think of. Was
Speaker 1: the whole I can make you safe again thing? Um?
Speaker 1: Multiple students yeah, yeah, Um. Multiple students bring up Vietnam
Speaker 1: as a heavy contributing factor for why they you know,
Speaker 1: fell into this, especially like bought into like the whole
Speaker 1: national movement thing. Um. And as well, of course Jones
Speaker 1: had a lot of natural charisma and strength as as
Speaker 1: a leader. Um, this is a quote from a student.
Speaker 1: A big reason I went along with it was my
Speaker 1: trust for Jones, and I was just beginning to feel
Speaker 1: better about Vietnam and the experiment seemed like we could
Speaker 1: change the government responsible for hurting us. There was a
Speaker 1: feeling that something really remarkable was going to happen of
Speaker 1: going on throughout the whole country, and the movement was
Speaker 1: going to change politics, change the structure of the school.
Speaker 1: The combination of everything just made it happen. And a
Speaker 1: lot of a lot of the men who talk about
Speaker 1: what it was like in the experiment bring up the
Speaker 1: fear of Vietnam being, you know, a pretty a pretty
Speaker 1: um heavy factor for why they you know, bottle bought
Speaker 1: into the growing up into a world that seems dangerous
Speaker 1: and unhealthy for you, and uh so you embrace a
Speaker 1: strong man and a hope that he can bring things
Speaker 1: back to an imagined past that you barely remember from
Speaker 1: your childhood. Yeah, yeah, that seems okay. Um. The other
Speaker 1: thing that Jones makes a note of is who really
Speaker 1: thrived under under the wave. And it's those people like
Speaker 1: Robert Um, the ones that neither excelled in school nor
Speaker 1: cause much trouble Um, quoting Jones, I was accustomed to
Speaker 1: very intelligent girls UM and the troublemakers in the back
Speaker 1: of the room. But what the wave generated was a
Speaker 1: major rule with a great majority UM who stayed quiet
Speaker 1: and got and barely got through school. I realized that
Speaker 1: as a teacher, I had probably ignored them for the
Speaker 1: most part, and all of a sudden, Um, this great,
Speaker 1: massive energy took place, and they were all brilliant in
Speaker 1: their own way. So it was the people that were
Speaker 1: never were neither really good at school nor terrible, just
Speaker 1: as people kind of barely like barely getting by Um.
Speaker 1: In another interview, Jones says it was the middle group
Speaker 1: that became energized. They became the winners for a brief moment,
Speaker 1: and that that that's the thing. That's also the thing
Speaker 1: that the two things that come up the most often
Speaker 1: when reading about this from students and teach other teachers,
Speaker 1: and the principle was one being Vietnam. Oh yes, also
Speaker 1: Jones being very charismatic UM. But the other one was
Speaker 1: like it gave this middle group that were kind of
Speaker 1: being ignored at the time released something to do, and
Speaker 1: that's what they really latched onto. Um. Yeah. And the
Speaker 1: next step I did, after doing all the research for
Speaker 1: the for like the third Wave stuff, was just doing
Speaker 1: you know, a brief a brief um re entry into
Speaker 1: you know, fascist studies to kind of see if I
Speaker 1: can pick up any other um similarities between what Jones
Speaker 1: did and what these people you know talk about as
Speaker 1: being the traits or passions of fascism. Um. So I
Speaker 1: was looking at Robert Paxton's um work for the underlying
Speaker 1: passions um Yeah, and author of Anatomy of Fascism, which
Speaker 1: is one of the best academic treatments of the subject. Yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: And almost every every passion he has usually maybe his
Speaker 1: theories that one of his theories is that passion fascism
Speaker 1: basically is caused by these you know, these feelings that
Speaker 1: we have in humans and then that causes us to
Speaker 1: do different actions. Um. And all the passions that he
Speaker 1: talks about that kind of cause passism to happen are
Speaker 1: all present in some degree. Um. For the third Wave. UM,
Speaker 1: we obviously had the supremacy of the group which is
Speaker 1: one of the one of the traits. Um. The Vietnam
Speaker 1: War was definitely the overwhelming crisis that traditional solutions couldn't
Speaker 1: fix for a to like the men at least there
Speaker 1: um for all, like the teenagers who were like facing
Speaker 1: the draft who didn't want to go. Um. There was
Speaker 1: a little bit of group victimization with the warring poster wars,
Speaker 1: but not as much. Um. We we definitely had an
Speaker 1: authority of the male leader, which was which was Jones. Um.
Speaker 1: We definitely had the superiority of the leader's words over
Speaker 1: abstract and universal reason. In his announcement of the Third
Speaker 1: Wave like rally and Jones even says during his final
Speaker 1: lecture that you know, in times of uncertainty, it's easy
Speaker 1: to replace reason with rules. So yeah, it's like this
Speaker 1: this this thing that you know, we replace our natural
Speaker 1: logical thought process with this undying devotion to this leader
Speaker 1: no matter what, no matter how crazy things they say.
Speaker 1: Is that you still believe it because they're offering you
Speaker 1: something in exchange, which of course we can also you know,
Speaker 1: tie it to the president and stuff. Um. In terms
Speaker 1: of the love of violence, the violence was minimal, but
Speaker 1: it was definitely there. I mean there were there were
Speaker 1: there there were fift pits on the halliway, is they
Speaker 1: beat up that school reporter? Well, I mean it could
Speaker 1: have been worse, I think, I mean it could have
Speaker 1: been what happened to Nazi Germany. Yes, there could have
Speaker 1: been genicided the perspective of this being a high school
Speaker 1: history class, I don't know how much worse it realistically
Speaker 1: could have been, right in terms of high school history
Speaker 1: class where five days there was a lot of violence. Um. Um.
Speaker 1: The other two passions that Paxton talks about our dread
Speaker 1: of the group's decline under corrosive effects of individualistic um uh,
Speaker 1: liberalism and the need for closer integration into a pure community. Um.
Speaker 1: And this is where things get a little bit more complicated, um.
Speaker 1: Because a defining aspect of fascism is that it's self
Speaker 1: contradictory and ideologically inconsistent. And the way that I often
Speaker 1: see that surface and fascism is that how fascism is
Speaker 1: both heavily individualistic and heavily group oriented and community driven
Speaker 1: as BC from like you know, the strength through community
Speaker 1: kind of chance and stuff. Um. But I think part
Speaker 1: of this, part of part part of how this works
Speaker 1: is that the idea of community um and the idea
Speaker 1: of being in this special group. It basically gives you
Speaker 1: the opportunity to pursue being an individual hero. It's like
Speaker 1: this weird is fake support system that lets you be
Speaker 1: this individual person. It's the same thing we're seeing. It's
Speaker 1: the same thing we see with like the Proud Boys
Speaker 1: and with these other sort of the same thing with police,
Speaker 1: Like the police if you look, if you look at
Speaker 1: like the warrior training they do. Yes, it's both like, no,
Speaker 1: you have to help out the officers within like a moment,
Speaker 1: you can't question them. It's part of this very community
Speaker 1: driven thing. But also they're training to be the individual
Speaker 1: warrior sitting on a rooftop with their cape flying in
Speaker 1: the wind. That it's it's both of those aspects. The
Speaker 1: good old fashioned cult of the hero that is uh
Speaker 1: kind of central to American culture because it's very easy
Speaker 1: to market because you can sell people body armor and
Speaker 1: guns and all the gear that they need to make
Speaker 1: themselves into a hero. But then they don't have anybody
Speaker 1: to fight and kill because that's what we say heroes do,
Speaker 1: So they start going out into the streets and finding
Speaker 1: people to do it too. Yeah, it's great, it's very
Speaker 1: good speaking of cult of the hero, which is um
Speaker 1: the other kind of main scholar of fascism, which um
Speaker 1: em Bert to echo, one of his fourteen traits of
Speaker 1: fascism is the cult of the hero Um. And then
Speaker 1: the so the next after I looked into Paxiston, Um,
Speaker 1: the other I looked over I brick, you know, browsed
Speaker 1: over Bert to Echos fourteen traits and tied a few
Speaker 1: of them pretty clearly. Some some of them don't fit
Speaker 1: as perfect because of how small and young the third
Speaker 1: wave was like. It didn't you know, a lot of
Speaker 1: a lot of Paxistan's trade and a lot of them
Speaker 1: Echoes traits are for like actual political parties, um, which
Speaker 1: they didn't quite get too. But you can definitely see
Speaker 1: the seeds being planted there. Um. Of course we have
Speaker 1: we have the cult of tradition, which with with the
Speaker 1: third waves emphasis on creating discipline and creating those traditions themselves, Um.
Speaker 1: Rejection of modernism and going back to the old strict
Speaker 1: teaching style and away from the loose modern style of
Speaker 1: the late sixties and started the style that like Jones
Speaker 1: was really into, which was you know, the very loose
Speaker 1: experimental thing um, the cult of action for action's sake,
Speaker 1: with basically the folks of the whole day, remember the
Speaker 1: whole strength through Action day, which so that that definitely happened. Um.
Speaker 1: Disagreement was absolutely treason, as people were banished to the
Speaker 1: library for just you know, questioning the experiment um. And
Speaker 1: as Jones mentions, there were appeals to social frustration with
Speaker 1: the new racial integration in the school um and the
Speaker 1: looming draft um Jones rights of fascism quote. Facism is
Speaker 1: always a possibility because it's so simple that people are frustrated,
Speaker 1: they lose their jobs, their dignity, their sense of worth,
Speaker 1: and someone comes along and says, hey, I've got this answer. Um.
Speaker 1: So the rest of the rest of Berdaco straits like
Speaker 1: the fear of difference, obsession with the plot enemy being
Speaker 1: strong and weak, contempt for the week life is warfare,
Speaker 1: which is mon wereponary, selective populism, and new speak. Again,
Speaker 1: those get into a little specifically. These get a little
Speaker 1: too specifically international politics um to make really easy comparisons
Speaker 1: to the Third Wave. But I can definitely see the
Speaker 1: seeds being planted there with the Jones talking about the
Speaker 1: third waves like National Party and stuff. Um, I think
Speaker 1: those would have absolutely developed very quickly. Especially I think
Speaker 1: you can even you know, Michi's mown referee to some degree,
Speaker 1: with like the whole car club becoming bodyguards themselves. Um,
Speaker 1: and there was there was definitely a little bit of
Speaker 1: new speed going on. Uh. Now Jones does regret doing
Speaker 1: the experiment, um as he's he says almost any every
Speaker 1: interview he talks, he you know, when he talks about it,
Speaker 1: saying it was way too dangerous and way way too damaging.
Speaker 1: Um yeah, yeah, yeah, um. But he still recommends people,
Speaker 1: you know, actually study and learn from it since like
Speaker 1: since since since it did happen, you may as well,
Speaker 1: you know, focus on it and like I learned about it.
Speaker 1: But he does, he doesn't, he doesn't regret doing it
Speaker 1: um um. In fact, reading a book on the waves
Speaker 1: actually required reading in Germany for like all schools, they're
Speaker 1: required to they're required to read a whole book about
Speaker 1: the wave because Germany actually cares about not fostering a
Speaker 1: culture of fashions him. Um yeah, just kind of just
Speaker 1: it's just it's just a fun little circle there from
Speaker 1: learning about Germany and their world history class to the
Speaker 1: learning about You fucked up so badly that Germany decided
Speaker 1: to make what you did a cautionary tale about the
Speaker 1: required thing for school. Yeah, that's good being a teacher. Congratulations.
Speaker 1: Many students look back on the experiment as a positive
Speaker 1: learning experience. Um. One student became who became a filmmaker,
Speaker 1: made a whole documentary on the topic and interviewed a
Speaker 1: lot of interviewed alat of students. Um. But there are many,
Speaker 1: many students and a lot of parents who are very
Speaker 1: upset at Jones for the experiment and thought it was
Speaker 1: way too damaging for their young pigs. Yeah some big shock. Um.
Speaker 1: Two years after the experiment um ended, Jones was denied
Speaker 1: tenure at the school and was fired. Um that but
Speaker 1: here's but but here is here's kind of the twist. Um.
Speaker 1: Jones was fired under pressure from the conservative parents, conservative
Speaker 1: school board, and the principal who accused Jones of indoctrinating
Speaker 1: students into radical leftism instead of just teaching them. Um.
Speaker 1: He was fired for being a socialist, and he was
Speaker 1: fired for his links to his anti war activism. Oh
Speaker 1: so not for he wasn't physic spermon. He was fired
Speaker 1: for being a political activist and quote unquote indoctrity students
Speaker 1: until being like leftists. Um, yeah, they were. Actually they
Speaker 1: were actually huge student protests when news broke that Jones
Speaker 1: Jones was being fired because he was still by far
Speaker 1: the most popular teacher in the school. Um, got, all
Speaker 1: of this is so bad, all of this bodes so
Speaker 1: ill for the human condition. Awesome, fantastic. I like the
Speaker 1: thing he should have gotten fired for it is the
Speaker 1: fascist experiments. Was was making a concentration camp in the library,
Speaker 1: or maybe when his bodyguards were beating people. He shouldn't
Speaker 1: have been fired for turning kids into commies, but like
Speaker 1: not by not by experiment. He should have been fired
Speaker 1: for like turning children into into anything really like you
Speaker 1: shouldn't be yes, but like ideologically brainwashing children either way.
Speaker 1: But the communism wasn't the problem, no, And he wasn't
Speaker 1: doing experiments to lead people into communism. He was just teaching.
Speaker 1: He was they big, he was just actually like he
Speaker 1: was fired for just teaching a history class and actually
Speaker 1: you know, learning about you know, the labor movement and
Speaker 1: stuff like that. And conservative parents didn't like that. Um,
Speaker 1: And the principal says, you know, the principle says he
Speaker 1: fired him because he was, you know, the way he
Speaker 1: was teaching students about you know, um like radical movements. UM.
Speaker 1: Students were becoming too sympathetic to these like you know,
Speaker 1: racial justice causes and like labor rights causes. UM. So
Speaker 1: that's why he was fired. UM. The Raves since been
Speaker 1: adapted into a few books in East TV film a
Speaker 1: focus of multiple documentaries, one of which being made by
Speaker 1: a student. UM. They made a whole German live action
Speaker 1: film on it UM and a German TV show because again,
Speaker 1: they care about this in Germany. And Jones also wrote.
Speaker 1: Jones wrote a musical based off the Third Wave, they
Speaker 1: Don't So and and since since Jones's since has since
Speaker 1: spent his time UM. After in the seventies he became
Speaker 1: like a very brief stint of being a punk rocker,
Speaker 1: which is just fun. And then he became just a
Speaker 1: go writer, written about thirty books, including some children's books.
Speaker 1: He's actually an award winning author UM. And he's currently
Speaker 1: a teacher for special needs adults in like UM in
Speaker 1: like in like disability schools. UM. And that's the third Wave. See,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't let that guy around kids anymore. No, he's
Speaker 1: not around kids. He's teaching adults with special needs. Okay,
Speaker 1: well all right at either Yeah, but by all means,
Speaker 1: he is a very good teacher when he's actually teaching.
Speaker 1: But as long as he doesn't turn all the adults
Speaker 1: with special needs into Nazis, then I don't know. It
Speaker 1: seems like he did that once and might again. So
Speaker 1: what's what's your kind of insights? Because like you read
Speaker 1: about fascism, it often scans like the terrifying thing here
Speaker 1: is how quickly it happens and how quickly how easy
Speaker 1: it is to get children on board something like that,
Speaker 1: because all you need to do, Like he's right, Like
Speaker 1: the thing that he observed is very obvious, which is
Speaker 1: that when you have when you create, like you go
Speaker 1: into a system that's that's kind of static. Like you've
Speaker 1: got this high school. Everybody has their places in it.
Speaker 1: Everybody has kind of their places in the social order.
Speaker 1: And there's a lot of people who aren't special, who
Speaker 1: don't do well in school, or athletics, who aren't popular,
Speaker 1: who are just sort of there, and you provide them
Speaker 1: with a way that they can be better than everyone. Um,
Speaker 1: And it's by in bracing this new movement. Like that's
Speaker 1: that's the thing that you do. It's the thing that
Speaker 1: Trump did is you had all these people who didn't
Speaker 1: really have any kind of like they they you know,
Speaker 1: our our society was has been increasingly stratified. There's an
Speaker 1: increasing gap between the rich and the poor. And there
Speaker 1: was a large chunk of people who didn't really have
Speaker 1: anything to feel good about. Like they were struggling at work,
Speaker 1: they didn't like their jobs, their education hadn't gotten them
Speaker 1: anywhere they were, they were bogged down with debt. And
Speaker 1: then Trump comes in and says, hey, I'm going to
Speaker 1: give you a chance. I'm going I'm going to like
Speaker 1: make a new thing that you can reinvent yourself as
Speaker 1: a part of. Like that's where all these proud boys
Speaker 1: came from. It's where a lot of these like uh,
Speaker 1: Patriot Coalition, Patriot prayer prayer types. They are these people
Speaker 1: who didn't really have anything to do, and suddenly fascism
Speaker 1: gave them a way to be special and a group
Speaker 1: of people to attack um, which is what you need
Speaker 1: and it's people. That's the thing that you know, separates
Speaker 1: that from like what Bernie Sanders did. Yeah, is that
Speaker 1: Trump's solution was regressive and going back to a fake history. Um.
Speaker 1: Whereas you know, movements on the left usually try to
Speaker 1: move forwards of now, when movements on left gain an
Speaker 1: authoritarian leader and move forwards, that still you know ends
Speaker 1: up bad because bism does. But fascism is so insidious
Speaker 1: in that, you know, it's way more comfortable to people
Speaker 1: because it's appealing to this past sense of society, and
Speaker 1: usually the past isn't as scary as like a new
Speaker 1: thing in the future. That is why a lot of
Speaker 1: people get hooked on it. Yeah, and you see what
Speaker 1: you saw in this experiment was like as soon as
Speaker 1: you get as soon as these kids realize, as soon
Speaker 1: as like the people who kind of embrace this like
Speaker 1: start to feel attached to it because it's given them
Speaker 1: a way to be special, it's given them a place,
Speaker 1: it's given them something to fight for. They will use
Speaker 1: without thought violence to protect it, um because they can't.
Speaker 1: They they are like horrified at the thought of going
Speaker 1: back to the old order in which they weren't special, um,
Speaker 1: in which they didn't have a place like that. That's
Speaker 1: that's the thing that also scares me about what's going
Speaker 1: to happen in one like as as we've been talking
Speaker 1: about this on Twitter, somebody posted a picture of like
Speaker 1: one of the people heading to d C this weekend
Speaker 1: for the big Trump rally, and it was like it
Speaker 1: was a guy who had like a spartan helmet that
Speaker 1: had Trumps in blue and red, and he had like
Speaker 1: a Trump Make Liberals Cry Again shirt and like board
Speaker 1: shorts that had Trump's face as Captain America on the
Speaker 1: right over the crotch, which was weird, and then a
Speaker 1: Trump flag that he was wearing as a cape. And
Speaker 1: it's like, yeah, the movement, the this fucking fascist movement
Speaker 1: that Trump created in the United States gave this guy
Speaker 1: something that he makes him feel special, that makes him
Speaker 1: feel like things can't be going all that well for
Speaker 1: that dude. Which is not to say that like only
Speaker 1: because obviously like Trump's voters tended to be higher income
Speaker 1: more often the lower income, but like he was not
Speaker 1: a he was not happy with things before Trump. Trump
Speaker 1: gave him something to feel like a part of and
Speaker 1: something to struggle against this vague idea of the left
Speaker 1: of liberals. Um so he has an enemy and he
Speaker 1: has a purpose and he's not going to just like
Speaker 1: you know, it's the thing that It's the problem that
Speaker 1: the teacher had with the wave is that like, well,
Speaker 1: now that you've built this thing, how do you just
Speaker 1: stop all of a sudden it's gonna fuck these people
Speaker 1: up and they're either going to wind up weeping, which
Speaker 1: is the best case scenario, or getting violent. I mean yeah,
Speaker 1: and you know the week after the wave happened, they
Speaker 1: basically sent in his class. The week later, it was
Speaker 1: basically just a week full of therapy. Yeah, that was
Speaker 1: what he did. He did not they didn't like just
Speaker 1: move on to Russia. It's like, no, like they spent
Speaker 1: a whole week basically doing therapy because they were all,
Speaker 1: you know, very messed up. Yeah, I mean, we could
Speaker 1: use some of that here, but it won't happen. Instead,
Speaker 1: they'll just buy more guns, which is why ammunition is
Speaker 1: sold out. But they could buy four thousand rounds of
Speaker 1: blanks by accident. There was that guy on four Chune
Speaker 1: rounds of five point four or five by thirty nine
Speaker 1: blanks and thought they were real bullets, and then it
Speaker 1: was very sad, which is quite funny. The best case scenario,
Speaker 1: he lost money and got useless bullets. Yeah, he got
Speaker 1: he lost money and got bullets that he can't use
Speaker 1: to kill people. Yea, unless it's Bruce Lee. Sorry, oh god.
Speaker 1: Um yeah, that's kind of all I have here on
Speaker 1: the topic. Um yeah, I'm trying. Yeah, that's that's kind
Speaker 1: of that kind of hits all of the boxes I
Speaker 1: wanted to talk about. Yep. Well, Garrison, thank you for
Speaker 1: bumming me out. Normally it's my job to bump other
Speaker 1: people out to that next week. I'm two for two
Speaker 1: on child abuse for my episodes. Oh, I mean that
Speaker 1: those are all the best episodes is where children get abused.
Speaker 1: That's what people come to the show for, is to
Speaker 1: watch kids be traumatized. Yeah, I mean. But also I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess I'm good for writing that because I am
Speaker 1: previously a child where you were a child unlike Sophie
Speaker 1: and I. Yeah, I thought they came for your sparkling personality, Robert.
Speaker 1: Uh No, they come for the child abuse. But I mean,
Speaker 1: as someone who was as someone who was like more
Speaker 1: um conservative, when I was like fifteen, the same age
Speaker 1: as all of these people, I can I can easily
Speaker 1: see if I was in this scenario, how I would
Speaker 1: have also absolutely followed suit, which is why when I
Speaker 1: read this book as a fifteen year old, I'm like,
Speaker 1: oh wait, oh no, there's some problems here, which eventually,
Speaker 1: you know, got me to not be a conservative anymore
Speaker 1: and learn more about passions. So I guess it's all.
Speaker 1: It's good then that he traumatized those kids. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: the weird thing about this, He's like, I read this
Speaker 1: book as part of a Christian homeschooling curriculum, and I
Speaker 1: don't know why they included it because everything else was
Speaker 1: kind of just opposite to this. So I'm not sure
Speaker 1: why they included this book. Um, but I mean thanks,
Speaker 1: I guess they included this book and one book on
Speaker 1: the history of labor in the twentieth century, and though
Speaker 1: and those are those are the books that got me.
Speaker 1: I mean I still had like hundreds of hundreds of
Speaker 1: other books that were just like conservative propaganda, but they
Speaker 1: included these. These were the only two books that had
Speaker 1: like a left bent and they and they kind of
Speaker 1: they got me. They're like, oh, wow, this was a
Speaker 1: new thing that's different from everything else I was reading
Speaker 1: and was kind of more interesting and made more sense. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't they if from their perspective they shouldn't include
Speaker 1: the book, but I'm very happy they did. Um so
Speaker 1: yeah great, Yeah, well Garrison, you got anything to plug
Speaker 1: before we roll out? I guess my Twitter if you
Speaker 1: want to see occasional street reporting, occasional probably stuff, oh
Speaker 1: and my kitten. Yeah and now also I'll be offering
Speaker 1: occasional kitten content um for those um obliged. Also soon
Speaker 1: ish I'll be releasing like a ten minute short documentary
Speaker 1: about Portland protests on my YouTube channel. But I've been
Speaker 1: putting off doing the anything on that for like a
Speaker 1: month because I'm busy and lazy. So eventually eventually that
Speaker 1: that will be out. So you can go go to
Speaker 1: my YouTube as well, but mainly Twitter. Yeah at at
Speaker 1: hungry Boat, I I guess I guess I should say it.
Speaker 1: I'd be useful or going to google my name because
Speaker 1: like that's all you need to do. Yeah, well, everybody,
Speaker 1: this has been a fun episode of the podcast. It hasn't,
Speaker 1: but I had I had a lot of laughs. I'm
Speaker 1: glad you had a lot of laughs. I'm bummed. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna go to the gym and cry uh and get
Speaker 1: covid um different from yester. Yeah, anyway, thanks for listening
Speaker 1: to the podcast. Everybody now go find a high school
Speaker 1: class to radicalize, and then haphazardly de radicalize UH for
Speaker 1: questionable academic benefit. Zoom bombed them and turn them all
Speaker 1: into fashions. Yeah, zoom bombed them in the Nazis. Or
Speaker 1: find a kitten and give it love. The kitten is
Speaker 1: asleep in my lap. My God, it goes so them.
Speaker 1: His little head's just hanging over my hand. Buddy, got
Speaker 1: the episode over. H