Speaker 1: Who media, Oh, it's behind the bastards?
Speaker 2: Why why do you hate it? Sobe? It was a
Speaker 2: jealousy say what you will and woke me the fuck up.
Speaker 3: Some of us, SOB are broadcasting professionals like g Gordon
Speaker 3: Liddy and thus have mastered the art of using our
Speaker 3: voice like an instrument. You know, I'm like, uh, like
Speaker 3: Rock Mononov, right, but with with my instead of whatever
Speaker 3: Rock Moninov used. Because I don't actually know what that
Speaker 3: guy did. I have my voice and a microphone.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm not even gonna dignify that with our response.
Speaker 3: You know what I'm gonna dignify with the response Andrew,
Speaker 3: what strikes still going on? Although I guess it's theoretically
Speaker 3: possible it's over by the time these episodes.
Speaker 2: Drop, tiny chance it has not. But if if I'm
Speaker 2: a betting man and I very much am, all of
Speaker 2: my money is going on, strikes still going on.
Speaker 3: Hey, everybody Robert here. Obviously since we recorded this episode,
Speaker 3: the strike has ended more or less as of about
Speaker 3: like a week after we recorded this, So Andrew has
Speaker 3: sent me all of his money. He is now destitute
Speaker 3: and living in utter desperation. He does have a GoFundMe,
Speaker 3: which you can donate to, but all of the money
Speaker 3: will go to me per the terms of this bet.
Speaker 3: Never make a bet on a podcast, folks, deeply serious stuff.
Speaker 3: If the strike is over by the time these episodes drop,
Speaker 3: we will just we will just unbleep this plug. Hey everyone,
Speaker 3: Robert here, since the strike is over and we can
Speaker 3: plug things again, go watch go watch the Foundation on
Speaker 3: that Apple thing or torrented torrented ideally, you know Apple's
Speaker 3: got enough money. But it's a real good show, a
Speaker 3: lot of lee Pace. Also, speaking of Lee Pace, watch
Speaker 3: Halt and catch Fire, equally good show, which is the
Speaker 3: show I'm most looking forward to once TV comes back. So,
Speaker 3: speaking of shows, I'm looking forward to, you know, Andrew.
Speaker 3: The last time we had a strike like this, a
Speaker 3: guy named Donald Trump sold a TV show, a reality
Speaker 3: show because those are still allowed, and started his rise
Speaker 3: to power. And I'm kind of planning to do the
Speaker 3: same thing with my reality show, super Soaker Full of Piss.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: The premise of the show, for those of you who
Speaker 3: are new listeners, is that I fill the reservoir of
Speaker 3: a classic super Soaker and a CS thirty two hundred
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, high that's the one with the backpack, if
Speaker 3: you remember the one like the rich kid would have. Yeah,
Speaker 3: like it's the big one, and I feel that all
Speaker 3: the way up to the top. And I'm going to
Speaker 3: promise you all here right now, purely my urine, right
Speaker 3: not a drop of anyone else's. Then drive around Rodeo Drive.
Speaker 2: The Robert promise is at at not just bullshit, not
Speaker 2: like you're gonna drink so much that the urine is
Speaker 2: going to be at a concentration that it's not that bad.
Speaker 2: This is primo, Like, you know.
Speaker 3: Urine, absolutely nothing, nothing but red Bull and Sapporo beer,
Speaker 3: you know, the two finest quantities that you can make
Speaker 3: this out. So once I've loaded this sucker up, we're
Speaker 3: gonna go cruising on Rodeo Drive looking for anyone who
Speaker 3: seems famous. That was the initial plan. But then I
Speaker 3: came across a great article about filmmakers who never won
Speaker 3: the Academy Award for Best Directory. Andrew Orson Wells never
Speaker 3: got the acade Kira Kurrasawa never got the Best Director Award,
Speaker 3: Hitch Surprising Kubrick, Sergio Leone, you know, Spike Lee, Tarantino,
Speaker 3: Paul Thomas Anderson, a lot of greats, and that made
Speaker 3: me think if those guys can fail to get the
Speaker 3: Oscar for Best direct, maybe I can can win it.
Speaker 3: So now, super Soaker full of Piss I'm planning on
Speaker 3: releasing as a fill, you know, a major motion picture.
Speaker 3: The goal here is that I'm going to track down
Speaker 3: Martin Scorsese and just blast him right in the mouth
Speaker 3: with a super soaker full of urine. You know, I
Speaker 3: really think that's that's the key to building myself a
Speaker 3: rep in Hollywood.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the bad boys of document true super.
Speaker 3: Answering, answering the question we all have. What happens if
Speaker 3: you blast Martin Scorsese in the mouth with with lukewarm urine?
Speaker 3: You know we'll learn Well, I promise you that, I
Speaker 3: promise you that he won't get away from us, folks.
Speaker 2: And you're not doing any aftermarket mods on this effort.
Speaker 3: No, no, no, no, this is a classic stop cost
Speaker 3: me a lot of money. Yeah, so, Andrew, when last
Speaker 3: we left off our hero, the g Man Gordon lyddy
Speaker 3: uh he it had just started in a very serial
Speaker 3: killer like fashion, murdering small animals in order to in
Speaker 3: order to prepare for war so that he could kill
Speaker 3: men without thinking this is almost honestly like it's worse
Speaker 3: to be like a serial obviously, to like torture animals
Speaker 3: as a serial killer. But there's something about what he's
Speaker 3: doing that's more unsettling, and I think it's pregnant that
Speaker 3: it proceeds more with it, like someone who's like a
Speaker 3: serial killer, that's like, oh, there's some like something's wrong, right,
Speaker 3: something's wrong with that person, you know, like that they
Speaker 3: that they because like people don't like most people love
Speaker 3: like a gut.
Speaker 2: Reaction to that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, with Lyddy, what he is doing, this awful thing
Speaker 3: he's doing, proceeds directly from a very socially reinforced impulse,
Speaker 3: right that, like there's nothing better in our society, there's
Speaker 3: nothing more respected than being a soldier, right, And that's
Speaker 3: that's like why he wants to do this, And so
Speaker 3: I guess that's why I find it like so off putting.
Speaker 3: Obviously it's off putting. He's like killing animals in a
Speaker 3: fucked up way.
Speaker 2: It's like serial killer shit. But it doesn't seem like
Speaker 2: a compulsion. It just seems like he's, like I guess
Speaker 2: his version of masculinity required him to do this and
Speaker 2: he is like analytically trying to turn himself into a
Speaker 2: serial killer.
Speaker 3: Because that will make him like he imagines, you know,
Speaker 3: the military heroes and his family's past and like that
Speaker 3: he's his mom is telling about. He thinks it will
Speaker 3: turn him into one. Right, I guess that's what'st That's
Speaker 3: what's most surprisingly unsettling to me, And this is that
Speaker 3: like this comes out of his belief that these men
Speaker 3: he revers already have this capability, right because he's weak
Speaker 3: and broken, he has to kill dozens of chickens, like
Speaker 3: in order to gain this capacity for himself. That he
Speaker 3: thinks that like strong men are born with. That's that's
Speaker 3: the thing that's off putting.
Speaker 2: Maybe that The other thing that's like upsetting is like
Speaker 2: it's you know, like you know he doesn't, but you
Speaker 2: almost feel like he could put it together, that this
Speaker 2: is what's wrong with society, Like, yeah, you know he
Speaker 2: almost could be Like the fact that I feel the
Speaker 2: need to do this means there's something wrong with who
Speaker 2: I idolize. Yeah, but no, yeah, like he has all
Speaker 2: the pieces, he has all the pieces of hey, maybe
Speaker 2: I can break this cycle, and yet he's like, no,
Speaker 2: I have to force myself to be part of this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like he's he's born a little more gentle than
Speaker 3: the generation before him, and he sees this as such
Speaker 3: a failing that he has to soak himself in blood
Speaker 3: to overcome it and do even more irrational things. Andrew,
Speaker 3: let's get back into it. So I'm ready speaking of
Speaker 3: things that scare g Gordon Liddy, thunderstorms and electricity. He
Speaker 3: develops kind of a phobia of electricity, so in order
Speaker 3: to cocker this, he climbs to the top of a
Speaker 3: power line tower and then crawls out on the arm
Speaker 3: so that he can grasp of a wire far enough
Speaker 3: that his like hair will stands on its.
Speaker 2: End in reaction to the current. Okay, do you know
Speaker 2: where he is? He's like if like Unbreakable was like
Speaker 2: a comedy, it's about the dumbest motherfucker who happens to
Speaker 2: be invincible and just like doesn't realize it and keeps
Speaker 2: on essentially commits suicide.
Speaker 3: Like oh yeah, there's so many little boys with the
Speaker 3: same thing going on who just got fried into a
Speaker 3: crisp atop of power tower. This is actually not enough
Speaker 3: for him. He feels like this is too tame. So
Speaker 3: when he gets home, he strips the insulation from a
Speaker 3: lamp's power cord and then plugs it in and holds
Speaker 3: it electrocuting himself.
Speaker 2: Again.
Speaker 3: This boy, Like, seriously, we're joking, Like this boy did
Speaker 3: need medical help, right, this is like a problem. I
Speaker 3: don't know what you call this. I'm not a diagnostician,
Speaker 3: but this is a thing that someone needs like treatment for.
Speaker 3: This is a serious issue.
Speaker 2: You know what now that because you're but like everything
Speaker 2: that is the antecedent of this, You're like, I see
Speaker 2: it so clearly from like the war generation, and like
Speaker 2: how they I'm just like, you know, maybe he is
Speaker 2: clearly an outlier now that I see in many ways,
Speaker 2: he's clearly an outlier, and maybe we were really just
Speaker 2: saved by a full generation of uh, you know, you
Speaker 2: know numerous United States fascists. Yeah, because physics works.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, a lot of the other guys. Like the
Speaker 3: reason they didn't quite have the critical mass to take
Speaker 3: over completely is that most of them didn't survive going
Speaker 3: through what Liddy did.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, having fascism brain. Really that's like like landing
Speaker 2: at Normandy level.
Speaker 3: So when he was an adolescent, his dad, his little
Speaker 3: league team one season, and Gordon was so obsessed with
Speaker 3: impressing him that when he gets hit with the he
Speaker 3: gets hit with the face in the ball during a game,
Speaker 3: and he stops being able to see out of that
Speaker 3: eye for a while. But instead of like being like
Speaker 3: I have been injured and like he he does he
Speaker 3: pretends nothing has happened and he keeps playing.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: What's interesting to me is that in his autobiography he
Speaker 3: does he writes that he recognizes this later as like
Speaker 3: irrational and dangerous, right quote with a convert zeal. I
Speaker 3: became contemptuous of anyone who didn't want to play hurt,
Speaker 3: having found that fear can be defeated by head on attack.
Speaker 3: It never occurred to me that the reluctance of others
Speaker 3: to play hurt might be based on common sense rather
Speaker 3: than fear. So there is a little bit of like, oh,
Speaker 3: you know what, that was actually kind of bad?
Speaker 2: Okay, here's what I really want to know now, And
Speaker 2: I guess this is like almost findable but not. Which
Speaker 2: is what was the author's draft of this passage? I
Speaker 2: would love to know.
Speaker 3: I would love to know was this like the editor
Speaker 3: be like, Lyddy, you got to stick something in here,
Speaker 3: so people don't think like.
Speaker 2: You're like, I don't see in the first draft of
Speaker 2: this book.
Speaker 3: Now I do I do want that. I want that
Speaker 3: from his papers. Yes, yeah, so there is something like
Speaker 3: impressive about the tenacity and mania with which he pursued
Speaker 3: his goals of what he called self improvement. Uh, you
Speaker 3: will probably not be surprised to learn that g. Gordon
Speaker 3: Lyddy was the weird kid at his school, and like
Speaker 3: all weird kids, he had bullies. As an adult, he
Speaker 3: wrote that he accepted being bullied as a natural and
Speaker 3: normal thing quote, so long as it didn't get out
Speaker 3: of hand. Now, I don't believe he's telling the truth
Speaker 3: here because of what he writes next. I believe that
Speaker 3: being bullied bothered him more than he would ever admit,
Speaker 3: which is not there's nothing wrong with that, and it's
Speaker 3: a lot of people like it's bad to get bullied.
Speaker 3: It's a thing that can stick with you for a
Speaker 3: long time. But he could not because he's this like
Speaker 3: he becomes this right wing media figure. He can't admit that, like, yeah,
Speaker 3: I got bullied is a kid and that like fuck
Speaker 3: me up. You know, he can't say that, right because
Speaker 3: they they have to be like, no, it's good for
Speaker 3: kids to get smacked around a little bit by the
Speaker 3: other kids, you know, makes them stronger, Right, they need that.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So he has to because he's cooked up this
Speaker 3: persona with himself. He's got to he has to include
Speaker 3: in his book that he's fine with being victimized to
Speaker 3: what he calls a reasonable level. But the story he
Speaker 3: tells next makes it clear, like the story he tells
Speaker 3: next is not the story of a kid who was
Speaker 3: fine with being a reasonable amount of bullied, and like
Speaker 3: it is the story of a kid who is like
Speaker 3: pathologically victimized and snaps. So the thing that provokes him
Speaker 3: into violent revenge, which is the story we're about to tell,
Speaker 3: is not targeted bullying, which I find interesting it is
Speaker 3: he describes this as like at my school, there's like
Speaker 3: a hazing tradition. Right when it's a boy's birthday, another
Speaker 3: group of boys will like surround him and punch him
Speaker 3: each well of them will like punch him in the
Speaker 3: bicep right for each year of his age. Right, so
Speaker 3: he get like punched a bunch in the arm, right,
Speaker 3: And you get punched a bunch like that, you know
Speaker 3: it hurts. After a while quite badly. They call these
Speaker 3: punches like bunnies. Each is delivered with a protruding knuckle
Speaker 3: under the bicep of the board receiving it.
Speaker 2: Oh, this is Filipino martial arts, some limbs instructions.
Speaker 3: It's a lot fucked up. Yeah, it's like this is
Speaker 3: like and I know it's a little fucked up. It's
Speaker 3: like a pretty I've heard of stuff like this, you know.
Speaker 3: When I was in played football in fucking middle school,
Speaker 3: we had like some hazing stuff that's not wildly different
Speaker 3: from this. Definitely an unpleasant thing.
Speaker 2: To go through.
Speaker 3: I think he was really scared of this, but he
Speaker 3: describes it as like a serious danger. It was painful
Speaker 3: and paralyzing, making retaliation impossible. And since he's short, he
Speaker 3: decides that, like, I can't defend myself from this, but
Speaker 3: it's unacceptable, so I have to turn my body into
Speaker 3: a trap.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 3: I was approached in the locker room. I removed my
Speaker 3: suit coat and feigned unawareness until they grabbed my arms.
Speaker 3: Then I ripped my arms up and away. My would
Speaker 3: be tormentors screamed as the flesh of their palms and
Speaker 3: fingers was lacerated. That morning, I had taken lenks of
Speaker 3: adhesive tape and pressed thumb and carpet tax alternatingly into
Speaker 3: the sticky side, so that the sharp points stuck out
Speaker 3: the dry side. The carpet tacks were longer and especially nasty,
Speaker 3: but they had narrower heads. The thumb tacks, with their
Speaker 3: broad heads, added stability under lateral stress. That done, I
Speaker 3: wrapped the tape around my arms carefully, so I looked
Speaker 3: like a porcupine with short, very sharp quills. I wore
Speaker 3: an old white shirt I could throw away, and I
Speaker 3: packed her replacement in my school bag. The device worked well,
Speaker 3: though there was less blood than I had anticipated. Come on,
Speaker 3: I shouted after them, try it again, shocked and in pain.
Speaker 3: They would have none of it, backing away from me
Speaker 3: with incredulous stairs.
Speaker 2: Oh my god. Oh, now, like he's like a cartoon hedgehog.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he is is like cartoon and it's also like,
Speaker 3: I'm not gonna say it's like bullyings obviously bad. What
Speaker 3: he has described here is like hazing, and not like
Speaker 3: extreme sounding hazing.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: I do think it is a little bit wild to
Speaker 3: go with, like, yeah, this hazing thing where on your
Speaker 3: birthday you get punched in the arm, you know, once
Speaker 3: for every year. I was like, Okay, not the worst
Speaker 3: thing in the world. I am going to respond to
Speaker 3: that by taping pootpins, by turning myself into a head
Speaker 3: shock it really, I guess it's.
Speaker 2: Also like the like trap of it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's so unsettling, yes Na, the amount of like
Speaker 3: labor and forethought.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 3: It's just like, if he was a different guy, you
Speaker 3: could view this as kind of cool, especially if and
Speaker 3: maybe maybe this is a cooler story, right, maybe he
Speaker 3: did get bullied a lot as a kid and this
Speaker 3: was like an act of justified revenge. But he doesn't
Speaker 3: tell us that right the way he describes this as
Speaker 3: like I was not really bullied, This was a thing
Speaker 3: that every kid went through, and I responded like a maniac. Again,
Speaker 3: he may be leaving out quite a lot here. We
Speaker 3: just don't know because I ever went into other sources
Speaker 3: from his fucking junior high school or whatever. So I
Speaker 3: realized we're like ten pages into g Gordon Liddy and
Speaker 3: not out of his childhood, which has never happened with
Speaker 3: a subject before. I don't think we've ever spent this
Speaker 3: much time on a subject's childhood. But like there was
Speaker 3: so much shit in this autobiography. We are going to
Speaker 3: leave quite a lot out, so I'm going to try
Speaker 3: and summarize here some of the last few important facts.
Speaker 3: So one of the things g Gordon admits in this
Speaker 3: is that when he was an adult, his dad, Sylvester,
Speaker 3: came to him and was like, my dad never hugged me, right,
Speaker 3: which is why Sylvester made a serious effort to hug
Speaker 3: Gordon regularly. This is kind of beautiful actually, you know,
Speaker 3: like a guy recognizing, especially a guy who was born
Speaker 3: in the eighteen hundreds, right, probably recognizing like, oh, it
Speaker 3: was bad that my dad.
Speaker 2: Didn't have me. You know. Well, it seems like this
Speaker 2: family is introspective, right, and like weirdly self aware. This
Speaker 2: is a doing.
Speaker 3: Man's reaction to like thinking about his own child and like, oh,
Speaker 3: you know what, I wish my dad had hugged me.
Speaker 3: That's a thing I'm missing. I am going to make
Speaker 3: an effort to hug my son regularly, right. Yeah, Gordon's
Speaker 3: reaction to it is kind of peculiar.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 3: It always seemed to me that that was just what
Speaker 3: he was doing, trying to hug me, wanting to but
Speaker 3: not knowing how as if, having never been the object
Speaker 3: of a fatherly embrace himself, he could not pass on
Speaker 3: what he had never received. In fairness to my father,
Speaker 3: I stressed that this was a subjective impression. The fact
Speaker 3: of the matter is that he did hug me often,
Speaker 3: and it may well have been that my self loathing
Speaker 3: born of contempt for my weakness in the face of fear,
Speaker 3: rendered me unable to recognize genuine fatherly affection and to
Speaker 3: receive it when offered. And that's one of the things
Speaker 3: that makes this guy interesting and kind of unique, because
Speaker 3: I can't imagine any of our modern like right wing
Speaker 3: media guys admitting to that kind of vulnerability, being like,
Speaker 3: I don't know if my dad didn't know how to
Speaker 3: hug me because he'd never and hugged or if I
Speaker 3: was unable to accept his love because I hated myself
Speaker 3: so deeply, right, That's that's that's that's actually a pretty
Speaker 3: powerful like thing to grapple with, like for a human being.
Speaker 3: That's like, yeah, like it makes you emotional reading it,
Speaker 3: where you're like, well, that's some real shit. Ge Gordon Letty,
Speaker 3: You're you're a dangerous maniac. But that is that is
Speaker 3: a real thing that you've expressed well, but because it is,
Speaker 3: it's like all the pieces are there, all the pieces.
Speaker 2: For him to be like normal are there? Or like
Speaker 2: good are there? Yes, just like what happened man, m m,
Speaker 2: yeah it is.
Speaker 3: He is like from a diagnostic standpoint, fascinating.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So the last critical moment in his journey to conquering
Speaker 3: fear and pain is what he describes as like a
Speaker 3: potentially divine migrain attack. He claims that like he's scared
Speaker 3: of God, he's scared of pain. And then what he's
Speaker 3: walking around and he suddenly is just overwhelmed by agony.
Speaker 3: The way he describes it, it sounds like a migraine, right,
Speaker 3: And being the Catholic boy that he is at this period,
Speaker 3: he decides, like, I will offer up by suffering to
Speaker 3: souls in purgatory, right, Like, since I'm already overwhelmed with suffering,
Speaker 3: I'll offer to take on their suffering if they need
Speaker 3: a break, right, and hopefully they will put in a
Speaker 3: solid for me to God. And he thinks this works
Speaker 3: because the pain is followed by rapturous pleasure and he
Speaker 3: like passes out, waking up later with no discomfort. He
Speaker 3: claims from that day forward, I feared nothing but God,
Speaker 3: and there would come even a day when I did
Speaker 3: not fear God either.
Speaker 2: Oh boy, there has to be a medical explanation for
Speaker 2: what this is, right, what the fuck is? I mean?
Speaker 2: Like there's stuff like grad into rapturous pleasure to no
Speaker 2: longer fearing God.
Speaker 3: I don't know, Like my best guess is migrain, just
Speaker 3: because I don't know what else it would be. There's
Speaker 3: something called excluding head syndrome. I do think that normally
Speaker 3: number one. It doesn't quite sound like what that is,
Speaker 3: and I think that normally occurs like kind of when
Speaker 3: you're on the edge of sleep. But I don't know,
Speaker 3: it's it's weird. I don't know what it would be. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but g Gordon Liddy, you know who, Yeah, never experiences
Speaker 3: that is our sources. Uh yeah, and yes we're back.
Speaker 2: How you do it? Sorry? Yeah, it's just that was
Speaker 2: so wild. What a lot of way to go out
Speaker 2: to commercial break?
Speaker 3: Holy shit, what a beautiful way to go out to
Speaker 3: commercial break. So we're talking g Gordon the Lidster. As
Speaker 3: he grew into young adulthood, g Gordon Liddy became increasingly
Speaker 3: aware of a flaw in his otherwise perfect mental health.
Speaker 3: He had an anger management problem. Now he first noticed
Speaker 3: this while he was out. His uncle Ray, when he's
Speaker 3: a teen, buys him his first real gun. Terrible mistake,
Speaker 3: Oh my god. So he goes out hunting with this gun,
Speaker 3: and while he's out in the woods, someone shoots over
Speaker 3: his head. Right now, he describes this as close incoming fire.
Speaker 3: I am pretty sure he is exaggerating, because that's the
Speaker 3: kind of guy that he is, and this is the
Speaker 3: closest he ever gets to combat. That said, you know,
Speaker 3: I can say a lot of the hunters that I know,
Speaker 3: especially out in the west, right this is maybe less common,
Speaker 3: but like a lot of hunters I know have either
Speaker 3: had shots come near them or had people shoot over
Speaker 3: their head. Sometimes it's a thing when you're really out
Speaker 3: in the boonies, you like wind up in somebody's spot
Speaker 3: and they may do it to try to scare you off.
Speaker 3: We've also had family and stuff get like shot up again,
Speaker 3: shots over their head, and like Oklahoma, when they cross
Speaker 3: into like a pot farm or something, right like this
Speaker 3: happens out in the back country. So maybe this is
Speaker 3: a true story. Maybe someone was actually shooting at him.
Speaker 3: Maybe it was some kid who was just firing. But
Speaker 3: he he responds by randomly firing five rounds just in
Speaker 3: where he thinks the direction of the shot is, and
Speaker 3: it horrifies him, right because he believed he like, again,
Speaker 3: it's bat you shouldn't shoot blindly in a direction like
Speaker 3: as you don't know who you're at. Right, so he
Speaker 3: he like, this is what concerned. He becomes like frightened,
Speaker 3: that like he has an anger problem, and that like
Speaker 3: it might lead him to doing something terrible someday, and
Speaker 3: he doesn't want to do anything crazy, you know, So
Speaker 3: he has like and he admits to being horrified by this.
Speaker 3: That's a it's if you react in that way, it's
Speaker 3: a bad way to react. It's reasonable to be like,
Speaker 3: oh my gosh, I can't believe I did that. I
Speaker 3: should really work on myself. I should think about, like
Speaker 3: what led me to reacting that way, because I can't
Speaker 3: risk doing this again. So reasonable for him to feel
Speaker 3: this way. He follows that realization with this unhinged line.
Speaker 3: It was no good wishing I had more German and
Speaker 3: fewer Italian genes. I know perfectly well that with a
Speaker 3: powerful enough will, I could be as ice cout as
Speaker 3: any tutan. Now always always with the Nazis. It cannot
Speaker 3: help himself. Oh my god, the word ice scout. So
Speaker 3: I see that word in there, and I'm like, I wonder,
Speaker 3: wonder if that's some Nazi shit right now, It's just
Speaker 3: a word. It means ice cold in German, although it's
Speaker 3: often a colloquial term for cold blooded. Right, It literally
Speaker 3: means like something's ice cold, but like you would describe
Speaker 3: a cold blooded person as ice cult. It is, though,
Speaker 3: a pretty Nazi thing to say, because I just typed,
Speaker 3: I just typed ice Colt and Hitler in, and boy howdy,
Speaker 3: immediately speeches start popping up right. Probably the most famous
Speaker 3: use of this term by Hitler was his nineteen thirty
Speaker 3: nine address to the Reichstag on the anniversary of coming
Speaker 3: to power quote, as regards National Socialist Germany, it is
Speaker 3: painfully aware of the destiny awaiting it should fascist Italy
Speaker 3: be wrestled to the ground by an international agglomeration of forces.
Speaker 3: Irrespective of pretenses. We know these consequences, and we shall
Speaker 3: cold bloodedly look them straight in the eye. Hitler loved
Speaker 3: to use this term, and he used the phrase like
Speaker 3: cold blooded. He liked to describe, you know, the ideal
Speaker 3: young German man, as cold blooded, as hard as steel,
Speaker 3: as unfeeling, right, because those are the people who commit
Speaker 3: genocide best, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so Letdy wound up getting some backblasts from that shit.
Speaker 2: Oh my god.
Speaker 3: He grad graduates, graduates high school. World War two, the
Speaker 3: big Dub dub dose is over by this point, so
Speaker 3: tragically he does not get to go fight. He does
Speaker 3: note a preference to having been able to fight the Japanese.
Speaker 3: So he gets admitted to Fordham University, which is a
Speaker 3: very pretty college in New York that was initially at
Speaker 3: least I don't know if it still is, but it
Speaker 3: was run by the Jesuits at this point. Right now,
Speaker 3: the Jesuits are like an order within the Catholic Church
Speaker 3: that is, like, you know, they're like the smart guys.
Speaker 3: They do a lot of the teaching, they do a
Speaker 3: lot of the school running, and shit, uh there was
Speaker 3: you know, they've had a long history, some of which
Speaker 3: you know, they had to be kind of like a
Speaker 3: secret society type deal. He finds the Jesuits admirable for
Speaker 3: their intellectual rigor and quality as educators, which is fine.
Speaker 3: He also finds them admirable because they remind him of
Speaker 3: the SSUH. He describes the the shock troops of the
Speaker 3: Catholic Church, notes that they were suppressed by the Nazis,
Speaker 3: but also writes Heinrich Himler used it as the model
Speaker 3: for his own core of Uber mentioned the shut Staffel,
Speaker 3: the dread blacked uniformed SS whose hand picked members swore
Speaker 3: a special oath of loyalty to the furor, which is like,
Speaker 3: that's not wrong, but like that's an that's why would
Speaker 3: you bring that up here? That's not relevant, Like, we
Speaker 3: don't need a rant about how cool the sets are when.
Speaker 2: You're talking about your college.
Speaker 3: Unnecessary. G Gordon Liddy, this will be a continuing pattern.
Speaker 3: He cannot bring up the ssn off like constantly, he
Speaker 3: cannot stop. Specifically, it's not just that he brings them up.
Speaker 3: It's that whenever he becomes a like a member or
Speaker 3: associated with a new organization, he compares them positively to
Speaker 3: the SS Like so g Gordon had missed the big
Speaker 3: dub dub dose, but by the time he got into college,
Speaker 3: the Korean War had started up, which is so yay, huzzah,
Speaker 3: there's a war and they're not Germans.
Speaker 2: I get to kill a lot a lot. Yeah, really
Speaker 2: lines up great. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Now I've brought this up on the show before, but
Speaker 3: my grandpa was in that war. He was there basically
Speaker 3: the entire time it was happening and did not seem
Speaker 3: to enjoy it.
Speaker 2: A horrible experience, terrible time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and basically anyone who went through the Korean War
Speaker 3: will tell you fucking nightmare, Like, you don't want it.
Speaker 3: You don't want to be in that war. You don't
Speaker 3: want to be in most wars.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Lyddy is desperate to see combat, though, so he joins
Speaker 3: the ROTC at Fordham, which unfortunately, he wants to be
Speaker 3: in the infantry or he wants to be marine or something.
Speaker 3: He wants to do something that will let him kill people.
Speaker 3: But at Fordham their ROTC is an anti aircraft artillery unit,
Speaker 3: so he doesn't like that because you don't get to actually,
Speaker 3: like generally you don't get to kill people close up
Speaker 3: with king anti aircraft artillery, because it's kind of the point.
Speaker 3: So he decides to do this because it'll at least
Speaker 3: like set him up to be an officer. And his
Speaker 3: intent is that I'll transfer to infantry or armor later
Speaker 3: and then I'll get to go have my seering wartime
Speaker 3: experience that makes me into a man. So when it
Speaker 3: came time for his formal training and service, Lyddy had
Speaker 3: fallen for a young woman who met most of his
Speaker 3: weirdo requirements for a wife but lacked right. He's like,
Speaker 3: she's almost perfect, but she lacks mathematical ability. Right, So
Speaker 3: he decides he wants his kids to be good at math.
Speaker 3: So he decides not to ask her for her hand
Speaker 3: in marriage because she's bad at math and she's too short.
Speaker 3: He writes that he wanted quote height and heavy bone
Speaker 3: structure so that my children would be physically as well
Speaker 3: as intellectually powerful.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, again a hint. She could have just
Speaker 2: become Robert Crumb. Yeah yeah, like he just it's it's
Speaker 2: the tragedy for us and then him in that order.
Speaker 2: Is she's just gotta take a better paths.
Speaker 3: So many times, so many nearly anything he would have
Speaker 3: done would have been better than becoming g Gordon Liddy,
Speaker 3: right if he if he had just become a card shock,
Speaker 3: it would have been a better person.
Speaker 2: Oh my god.
Speaker 3: He parts from this mystery woman in the hope that
Speaker 3: he will find someone he describes as a quote tall fair,
Speaker 3: powerfully built Teuton whose mind worked like the latest scientific wonder,
Speaker 3: the electronic computer. I had worked long, hard, pain filled
Speaker 3: years to transform myself to make a reality of my
Speaker 3: genetic potential. Now I believed I had earned the right
Speaker 3: to seek my mate from among the finest genetic material available.
Speaker 3: He really was just God's perfect fascist, like God, the
Speaker 3: Good Lord really made it brilliant Nazi with him.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah. And the answer to all that is, like,
Speaker 2: if you heard him say any of this out loud,
Speaker 2: you'd be like, yeah, man, and then just like kind
Speaker 2: of quietly take your beer to the other side of
Speaker 2: the Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah sounds good Gordon, then just walk away.
Speaker 2: I gotta go.
Speaker 3: Man. Look, normally I wouldn't say this, but like, I
Speaker 3: don't believe we should have sex police, but in this case,
Speaker 3: it would have been nice if, like, g Gordon Liddy
Speaker 3: says this to you at a bar and you have
Speaker 3: someone you can call to be like, we got to
Speaker 3: make sure this guy doesn't like hook up with anyone ever.
Speaker 2: Don't let this man have love. Yeah he is not allowed. Yeah,
Speaker 2: he like actively should not happen.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, yeah, that's that should have been a social
Speaker 3: priority for all of US, I don't know. One of
Speaker 3: his kids goes on to help stop Trump from stealing
Speaker 3: the elections. So yeah, that's probably why you shouldn't have
Speaker 3: sex police. But that's like, that's like the two sides.
Speaker 3: It's like, yeah, but you know, just because one of
Speaker 3: his sons sort of became one of the end Domino's, does.
Speaker 2: It mean does Watergate one of the first?
Speaker 3: Yeah, by my mathematic count, there's still like eighty percent
Speaker 3: of a Watergate that the Lyddy descendants need to stop.
Speaker 2: So yeah.
Speaker 3: Anyway, he goes to Ford Bliss to train with a
Speaker 3: bunch of other second lieutenants as artillery forward observers. Now,
Speaker 3: an artillery forward observer, your job is to be much closer.
Speaker 3: Artillery obviously is pretty far back from the front line. Yeah,
Speaker 3: that's why it's what it's for the forward observer. Your
Speaker 3: job to be much closer to the fighting, so that
Speaker 3: you can spot and call in targets and stuff to
Speaker 3: the people shooting the big guns. This is obviously a
Speaker 3: dangerous job, very important job if you're doing a war.
Speaker 3: Lyddy though, he has to again he had because this
Speaker 3: is what he almost does. He has to like breathlessly
Speaker 3: hype up the job and the danger. So he tells
Speaker 3: us that, like, life expectancy for the men who do
Speaker 3: this job is just three minutes, which like, no, Gordon,
Speaker 3: there is not any job now in certain specific battles, right,
Speaker 3: you might be able to say, like, you know, the
Speaker 3: life expectancy of a guy doing this one job and
Speaker 3: this very specific battle was this long because most of
Speaker 3: them die. Right, if that happens, you could, I guess
Speaker 3: say that. But that is not a thing that you
Speaker 3: can say of this job in general. It is fucking
Speaker 3: there are people who do this for fucking years. Right,
Speaker 3: But these kind of claims happen a lot. You'll hear
Speaker 3: that claims about like the same job in Vietnam then
Speaker 3: it has like a twenty minute life expectancy. No, that's
Speaker 3: not it's not actually how war work.
Speaker 2: Well it's also like, yeah, I mean I guess, like, yeah,
Speaker 2: I guess a guy could die real quick.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, sure it happens, but like no, not generally,
Speaker 3: like absolutely just not a job like if.
Speaker 2: Is just too confus if they.
Speaker 3: Die, if they just if you're every three minutes, you're
Speaker 3: just throwing another new college graduate into the meat grinder
Speaker 3: for this.
Speaker 2: How you do basically this o your three minutes is
Speaker 2: you get there, you pick up the notebook from the
Speaker 2: last guy, hand it to the next guy, and immediately die.
Speaker 3: And again there's like some specific battles where you can
Speaker 3: say the average life expectancy for a man, you know,
Speaker 3: manning a flamethrow or whatever in this specific engagement along
Speaker 3: like this two mile shit was this long, right, because
Speaker 3: most of the guys doing this job died.
Speaker 2: That's that kind of.
Speaker 3: Shit has happened in war. That's not what he's talking about.
Speaker 3: He's just full of shit. Yeah, being full of shit
Speaker 3: will be a pattern for him.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: Again, he does not do anything at all interesting in
Speaker 3: the military. He has a very boring time and service.
Speaker 3: So he has to toss in anecdotes like this and
Speaker 3: other stories of almost seeing danger so that he could
Speaker 3: because he can't like just be like, yeah, I didn't
Speaker 3: get to do anything cool, right, he has to like
Speaker 3: lie and make it, make shit up, and so you
Speaker 3: get some very funny stories because it's always super sad,
Speaker 3: like it is depressing the degree to which this guy
Speaker 3: wants to have been I don't know my grandpa right right. So,
Speaker 3: near the end of his training, he and some comrades
Speaker 3: are drinking and they decide this is his claim. They
Speaker 3: decide to have a sit up contest. Right Lyddy insists
Speaker 3: that he wins, but he wakes up in horrible pain
Speaker 3: the next day and it becomes clear that he has
Speaker 3: blown up his appendix doing sit ups, and it's maybe
Speaker 3: there's a good chance he's lying about this. Although if
Speaker 3: anyone could do, like, if anyone could robotically do sit
Speaker 3: ups in a friendly com petitions so much that they
Speaker 3: nearly kill themselves, it would be g Gordon Liddy.
Speaker 2: Right, right, right, he has a mental capacity to blow
Speaker 2: his own body up.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the way he describes this, everyone's very impressed by
Speaker 3: how good he is.
Speaker 2: And the next day he wakes up in pain.
Speaker 3: I kind of suspect, like, you know, some other guys
Speaker 3: are drinking and like Lyddy comes in and he like
Speaker 3: walks up to them and like like.
Speaker 2: Hey, Gordon, Hey, how you doing man?
Speaker 3: And he's like, I'm so pumped up, can't wait to
Speaker 3: go die in Korea. And they're like, yeah, man, you
Speaker 3: want to do like a sit up contest? You can't
Speaker 3: talk during a sit up contest. Why don't you see
Speaker 3: we all just did him here's our numbers.
Speaker 2: Don't you see how many you can do? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Ah shit, you I guess you win? Man go yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: we got to bounce. Hope your indix is fine. So
Speaker 3: he because he's blown his pindix out doing sit ups,
Speaker 3: he gets told his like superiors are like, well, yeah,
Speaker 3: you know, we have to go do surgery on you now,
Speaker 3: so you can't finish your training. He was about to do,
Speaker 3: you know this, this like last bit of training that
Speaker 3: would have like cleared him for a coveted close combat assignment, right,
Speaker 3: and so he is furious, Right, He's about to miss
Speaker 3: This was his shot to be a.
Speaker 2: Burass, and he's gonna miss it.
Speaker 3: So after he has his surgery, like his his colleagues
Speaker 3: are doing their their last course, which is like a
Speaker 3: nighttime close combat infiltration course. So Lenny describes, while he's
Speaker 3: still got this open surgical wound, he straps a bunch
Speaker 3: of belts around it to protect it shit, and then
Speaker 3: sneaks into the course in order to finish it, which
Speaker 3: is like crawling around in the mud and doing stuff
Speaker 3: you shouldn't do right after.
Speaker 2: This reminds me a lot like of Stephen Miller, like
Speaker 2: trying to race against the girls when he was at
Speaker 2: Santa Ronica High or whatever. He was like, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: better superior to women as enter into the fucking like
Speaker 2: women's four hundred meters or whatever the fuck he did. Yeah, God,
Speaker 2: that's funny. God, that's funny.
Speaker 3: So his CEOs he like is like, look, guys, I
Speaker 3: did the you know, I finished it. You know, can
Speaker 3: I have my like certificate for finishing it? And his
Speaker 3: commanding officers are like, dude, you're not supposed to be here,
Speaker 3: Like we told you not to do this because you
Speaker 3: just had surgery. Like absolutely not. You are not getting
Speaker 3: like a certificate for this, And like this is also
Speaker 3: why he doesn't go to Korea, because if you're the
Speaker 3: kind of people whose job it is to like send
Speaker 3: people over to do a combat position and you're responsible
Speaker 3: in any way, shape or form, and you see this
Speaker 3: guy as like, oh, this dude endangers himself constantly and
Speaker 3: is incapable of following orders and is like nearly gotten
Speaker 3: himself killed at home in training because he's so responsible. Absolutely,
Speaker 3: we are not putting this man in a combat situation,
Speaker 3: Like this is the last guy you went next to
Speaker 3: you in a trench.
Speaker 2: He's a fucking maniac. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So Lyddy gets back to New York and he serves
Speaker 3: in an urban anti aircraft unit stationed in the city. Now, because,
Speaker 3: as you might guess, being in an anti aircraft unit
Speaker 3: in New York City is a do nothing job for us, right,
Speaker 3: This is like not the job you give a guy
Speaker 3: who's like a great warrior. Yeah right, yeah, because like again,
Speaker 3: like the idea is that, oh, if the Soviets, you know, attack,
Speaker 3: will need anti aircraft. But the reason why those guns
Speaker 3: are there is primarily so that civilians feel protected. Because
Speaker 3: even at this point, everyone knows like we have we
Speaker 3: have a war with the Soviets. It's just the end
Speaker 3: of the world, right, we all just die.
Speaker 2: Yeah, these guns are not gonna these are not gonna
Speaker 2: be a real factor in that conflict.
Speaker 3: So Lyddy spent the rest of his life ashamed of this,
Speaker 3: and in his autobiography he invents several very sad moments
Speaker 3: where he has to threaten people with a gun in
Speaker 3: order to feel like a big man. And I don't
Speaker 3: know if I need to say this, but I will
Speaker 3: because it's crucial. All of the men that he invents
Speaker 3: to threaten with a gun at this point in the book.
Speaker 2: Are black men.
Speaker 3: Sure, yeah, soldiers, you know. Yeah, but yes, that is
Speaker 3: that's worth bringing up about one.
Speaker 2: Of the least surprising things about this so far. Yeah,
Speaker 2: perhaps not shocking. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: So the gist of the story is that in nineteen
Speaker 3: fifty four, one of these integrated AA units, which is like,
Speaker 3: and by integrated, I mean there were black and white
Speaker 3: men serving together, right, which is starting to happen in
Speaker 3: this period of time, not kind of, I don't think comprehensively.
Speaker 3: It's starting to happen though. One of these newly integrated units,
Speaker 3: the black enlisted soldiers mutanty against their white officers. Lyddy
Speaker 3: and another white officer, a captain are sent into takeover
Speaker 3: and he he's going to tell a story from this
Speaker 3: that is quite problematic. But you know what's not problematic, Andrew.
Speaker 1: Hit me.
Speaker 3: Ads Ads would never make up stories about threatening your
Speaker 3: fellow soldiers with guns so that people don't think you're
Speaker 3: less of a man for failing to serve in Korea.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, God.
Speaker 3: Anyway, back to the story. So here's Lyddy telling the
Speaker 3: tale of he and this other officer, you know, going
Speaker 3: into take over this this unit with primarily black enlisted men.
Speaker 3: I told the troops that military courtesy and discipline would
Speaker 3: be enforced in partially, and that certain practices that we
Speaker 3: understood had been tolerated in the past would not be
Speaker 3: permitted in the future. Specifically, I said that we had
Speaker 3: heard that certain individuals had brought liquor on the post,
Speaker 3: and others had failed to show up for morning roll
Speaker 3: call formation when the weather was cold or wet. There would,
Speaker 3: I said, be no privileged characters in the battery. Finally,
Speaker 3: I tapped the leather holster under my left shoulder. It
Speaker 3: held personally owned caliber thirty eight special Smith and Wesson revolver.
Speaker 3: I stared at the assembled men and told them that
Speaker 3: the first man to raise a bayonet against me would
Speaker 3: be shot on the spot. Now, there's a pretty good
Speaker 3: chance this is a lie. Some officers and in CEOs
Speaker 3: and combat units did, and I think maybe still do,
Speaker 3: get to carry their own side arms.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: I should also note side arms are basically not are
Speaker 3: very extremely rare for a handgun to be used in
Speaker 3: modern war, and even really in Korea, not all that
Speaker 3: common because they're not good weapons.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: A handgun is a good weapon if you need, if
Speaker 3: you're concealing it on your body and you're attacked out
Speaker 3: in the world, if you are in a battlefield, you
Speaker 3: would you would prefer a rifle, right, Like, That's why,
Speaker 3: that's why they exist. So they're not not super common
Speaker 3: for this to happen, and certainly not back home, right
Speaker 3: for one thing, A lot of units in situations like
Speaker 3: this when you are in a city, when you're like
Speaker 3: most of the soul's not going to be issued firearms
Speaker 3: with live ammunition all the time, Yeah right, you are, yeah,
Speaker 3: yeah at all, right, you want to be careful about that, right.
Speaker 3: And in fact, he talks later about like one of
Speaker 3: his soldiers having a weapon that's unloaded, because that's was
Speaker 3: the norm.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: So I don't know that I believe he would have
Speaker 3: been allowed to carry a loaded thirty eight Special to
Speaker 3: threaten men with. Maybe it's not impossible, but it does
Speaker 3: seem unlikely based on what I know about, like the
Speaker 3: standards of the time and what was you know, again,
Speaker 3: generally when like duty side arms, when like officers were
Speaker 3: allowed to carry duty side arms that were not issued
Speaker 3: to them, they were like higher ranking too than like
Speaker 3: a second lieutenant. This seems like something he would have
Speaker 3: gotten in trouble for, is what I'm saying. Another instance
Speaker 3: that Liddy relates during this time is this very large
Speaker 3: black soldier who gets arrested and has to be taken
Speaker 3: to a military jail. Now Liddy is ordered to put
Speaker 3: together a detail to like put this guy, you know,
Speaker 3: transfer him over to the facility. But the guy's very big,
Speaker 3: and the other soldiers scared of him. And then like
Speaker 3: one point, when they're trying to take him over here
Speaker 3: like picks up an axe and threatens them so Lydia
Speaker 3: has to pull his good to threaten this guy, like,
Speaker 3: you know, I'll put six bullets in the space of
Speaker 3: a dime and you chest, you know, like that kind
Speaker 3: of fucking deal.
Speaker 2: Just so fucking.
Speaker 3: Sad, Like absolutely a lie and deeply sad.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's all so pathetic.
Speaker 3: Yeah, based on again, I grew up not just talking
Speaker 3: to my my gat and my grandpa, by the way,
Speaker 3: was a medic, right, Like that was his job, Like
Speaker 3: that was the thing he did. He kind of later
Speaker 3: in the war wound up just running field hospitals because
Speaker 3: everyone who had been an officer ahead of him, he
Speaker 3: was a sergeant when the war started, died Like that
Speaker 3: was the shit he did. But like, I read books
Speaker 3: because I wanted to understand what he'd done. I read
Speaker 3: books about like the unit that he was with, the
Speaker 3: fifth RCT Regimental Combat Team and stuff, and like, based
Speaker 3: on just kind of that general knowledge, I have some
Speaker 3: stuff I've looked up and conversations with veterans in the
Speaker 3: modern era. Here is how I would characterize Lydie's service.
Speaker 3: He was an unreliable and kind of dangerously irresponsible person
Speaker 3: who hurt himself pointlessly in training. His officers put him
Speaker 3: in a place where they thought he could not do
Speaker 3: any harm until his time in the military was up.
Speaker 3: He reports in his book that, like he learned later
Speaker 3: that one of the officers had said he'd never get
Speaker 3: a combat posting, right, which I don't doubt. And because
Speaker 3: he was so ashamed of this, he made up a
Speaker 3: bunch of stories about threatening men with firearms so that
Speaker 3: people reading this book in nineteen eighty would think he'd
Speaker 3: been a badass. Yeah, that's really sad, and that is
Speaker 3: a profoundly sad experience. Yeah, yeah, you know what he is.
Speaker 3: He's basically like.
Speaker 2: A cobra commander, just like real sniveling, Like a real
Speaker 2: sniveling fast, like.
Speaker 3: A sniffling little like a worm, right yeah, little grub
Speaker 3: of a man. Oh god, it's so it's so bleak
Speaker 3: like this, this whole, this desire, this belief that like
Speaker 3: the only thing that makes you a man is like
Speaker 3: being in combat. And then the fact that he's he's
Speaker 3: completely failed in that one ambition, and so he's just
Speaker 3: spent his life lying about being tough so that people
Speaker 3: would think he had he experienced something close to what
Speaker 3: he would he imagines as this like sacred baptism of fire,
Speaker 3: which it's it's not right. There's certain things that being
Speaker 3: in that situation teaches you, certain ways in which you know,
Speaker 3: people who experience that obviously can be hardened in some ways.
Speaker 3: It can make them tougher in some ways. It also
Speaker 3: often makes people less capable of dealing with the world,
Speaker 3: less capable of surviving, right like that is why there's
Speaker 3: so many suicides from guys like although a lot of
Speaker 3: suicides anyway, complicated issue, But he's he is he has
Speaker 3: mythologized this so far past the point of rationality that
Speaker 3: it is basically a religion to him, right like combat
Speaker 3: is heaven to g Gordon Liddy, and he's he's permanently
Speaker 3: locked out of heaven, right, Yeah, he's just spent his
Speaker 3: entire life in limbo. And that's that's gonna be really
Speaker 3: the driving impetus behind everything else he does, behind Watergate too,
Speaker 3: behind the way he presents himself, the reason why you
Speaker 3: you know, the ship he would do like sticking his
Speaker 3: hand over a candle until it burnt him to the
Speaker 3: fucking bone, Like he did that kind of shit so
Speaker 3: that people would not because he was so deeply insecure
Speaker 3: about his failure.
Speaker 2: To right, He's like, he's like, if Ben Shapiro actually
Speaker 2: had a form of courage.
Speaker 3: Right right, there is that little bit of it right
Speaker 3: where he is willing to damage.
Speaker 2: I mean, he's like, like, you know, for all his talk,
Speaker 2: Ben Shapiro isn't out there starting fights with people. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you know, and you know, at least at least g
Speaker 2: Gordon Liddy has, yeah, the courage of putting his body
Speaker 2: on the line ship.
Speaker 3: Destroy his appendix in a situp contest.
Speaker 2: Bursting his guts doing sit ups. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So, at age twenty three, he's in this nowhere career
Speaker 3: in the army. He's got no idea what to do
Speaker 3: with himself. So he decides, you know, to try to
Speaker 3: figure out what's next for him. He's going to go
Speaker 3: when he's going to get his IQ tested, Right, he's
Speaker 3: got to be one of these guys, right. He claims
Speaker 3: that he gets measured several times and it's always between
Speaker 3: one hundred and thirty seven to one hundred and forty two,
Speaker 3: which is a.
Speaker 2: Near genius ane.
Speaker 3: Now we all know IQ's bullshit. That said, given his
Speaker 3: he's apparently a pretty competent lawyer for a while, and
Speaker 3: given like what IQ measures, maybe he did test well.
Speaker 3: You know, again, I don't particularly value that, but it's possible. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I think it's probably. It's probably really likely he does
Speaker 3: well on an IQ test. He's got like he's got
Speaker 3: the kind of mind again as a kid, he's able
Speaker 3: to like make gunpower are in shit, like when he
Speaker 3: puts his mind a shit. I would not be surprised,
Speaker 3: especially if he studied for the acute test.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, he's got guy who thinks IQ tests matter.
Speaker 3: Yeah, energy, Yeah, it's possible, doesn't really matter, so but
Speaker 3: he does. It doesn't matter that he wants us to
Speaker 3: know this, right, that doesn't get another another little piece
Speaker 3: of the Lidty puzzle. Now he had always planned to
Speaker 3: be a military man, but at this point has become
Speaker 3: clear the military does not want him. So he is lost,
Speaker 3: and he decides to take an aptitude test from the
Speaker 3: Johnson O'Connor Research Foundations Human Engineering Laboratory. Johnson O'Connor was
Speaker 3: the founder of modern aptitude tests, or at least a
Speaker 3: top candidate for that. He's one of the guys who
Speaker 3: convinced this as a thing. And the test this company
Speaker 3: offers today costs like six hundred bucks and they can
Speaker 3: last like three days. I haven't found much intrue info
Speaker 3: suggesting they're actually good for anything. You get some people
Speaker 3: saying it was helpful, you.
Speaker 2: Get I have.
Speaker 3: I've run into a lot of modern complaints where they're like, yeah,
Speaker 3: he took the test, and then they just they asked
Speaker 3: me what I wanted to be and then gave me
Speaker 3: like high scho guidance counselor advice on the thing that
Speaker 3: I had told them I wanted to be, which I
Speaker 3: knew I wanted to be. Anyway, Yeah, I'm not gonna
Speaker 3: I don't know enough about this field to like say
Speaker 3: this is definitely a con but it does I get
Speaker 3: that little like tingling on the back of my neck.
Speaker 3: Maybe it's because I'm not an aptitude test guy. But
Speaker 3: Lyddy if it is a con. If this was a con,
Speaker 3: Lyddy was a willing mark because he's a gullible narcissist
Speaker 3: and if he can take a test that tells him
Speaker 3: he's amazing, he's gonna spend any amount of money.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 3: After three days of testing, I was given an extensive
Speaker 3: report telling me such things as that I was cross dominated,
Speaker 3: left eye but right handed, possessed the vocabulary of a
Speaker 3: vice president of General Motors, and was very intelligent. That
Speaker 3: really says a lot about the difference in worlds, because
Speaker 3: if someone today was like, you know, I've got the
Speaker 3: vocabulary of a VP of General Motors, I'd go the
Speaker 3: guys make dogshit cars. I don't know, man, Like, come
Speaker 3: back to me when you've got the vocab of a
Speaker 3: Toyota VP.
Speaker 2: But also any corporate vice president Like yeah, right, Like
Speaker 2: it's like that's not impressive. They don't use words much, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: they're like test makers. You're already lying. Just tell them
Speaker 2: an English professor who gives a shit? Yeah, who gives
Speaker 2: a shit? Like why do we like? Was that a thing?
Speaker 3: That like vice presidents of companies were seen as being
Speaker 3: like great vocabulary haers. Today they're the guys who are
Speaker 3: using chat GPT to send their emails because they can't
Speaker 3: fucking write like anyway.
Speaker 2: Whatever.
Speaker 3: So he gets advised by this test to become a lawyer,
Speaker 3: and so he starts law school. He's still like, I
Speaker 3: think he's in the reserves at this point. So he
Speaker 3: transfers to the JAG Corps and he meets a young
Speaker 3: woman during this period, Francis, who was the same height
Speaker 3: as him, and he finds this critical to mention even taller,
Speaker 3: and heals because he definitely has a kink here quote
Speaker 3: from being sensitive about it. I enjoyed having on my
Speaker 3: arm a woman six feet tall. When I learned that
Speaker 3: Fran's job at IBM was to receive from brainstorming electronic
Speaker 3: engineers short written descriptions of theoretically possible new kinds of computers,
Speaker 3: for which she would then create a mathematical language, and
Speaker 3: that she did calculus problems for recreation the way I
Speaker 3: did crossword puzzles. I knew she was the woman I
Speaker 3: wanted to bear my children. A Tutan slash celt of
Speaker 3: high intelligence, a mathematical mind, physical size, strength, and beauty.
Speaker 2: She had it all. Oh my god, what a moon
Speaker 2: man way of talking about that. God, Yeah, it really
Speaker 2: is like but it's also like so close you know
Speaker 2: what you're like potentially pretty admirable.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and he I want to hear you feel about this.
Speaker 3: So his his his again. So they're kind of long distance.
Speaker 3: He's still doing school, he's still in the military a
Speaker 3: little bit. So like there's this period of time where
Speaker 3: he's like really insecure that she's going to find someone
Speaker 3: else because he's not able to be around all the time.
Speaker 3: So he spins all of his savings on a voice
Speaker 3: recorder and he sings a bunch of love songs into it,
Speaker 3: and then he leaves it with her, making her promise
Speaker 3: to listen to it regularly. Now we got a three
Speaker 3: person team here, quorum, you know, do we? Is that sweet?
Speaker 3: Is that creepy? Where are we landing on that one?
Speaker 2: Because I find it unsettling.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's it's it's it's a no for me. Dog.
Speaker 2: That's that's a no.
Speaker 3: That's a that's a big n w O, which is
Speaker 3: how I spell no no. So, oh God, wild Ship,
Speaker 3: I think I think.
Speaker 2: That is one of those things where like, if we
Speaker 2: liked him, we would find a reason to be like
Speaker 2: that's kind of sweet. Yeah maybe, yeah, I mean again,
Speaker 2: it's also no.
Speaker 1: We wouldn't.
Speaker 2: It's not that kind of show.
Speaker 3: When you add it to everything else, like if he
Speaker 3: if he if. This was a podcast about people who
Speaker 3: went on to become great blues singers, and he was like, so,
Speaker 3: I send you a bunch of like songs that I'd
Speaker 3: recorded because I knew that would make her, you know,
Speaker 3: fall for me. That was my best Like, oh, okay,
Speaker 3: you know that's because yeah, that makes sense for the kind.
Speaker 2: Of guy you are.
Speaker 1: I'm just thinking of that scene from the Barbie movie
Speaker 1: where all the Kens sing to Barbie and all the
Speaker 1: Barbies look like they want to run away.
Speaker 3: That's g Gordon letty baby, he can make a Barbie
Speaker 3: run away. Although it works on this lady. So again
Speaker 3: he clearly so he must have known his target, right, Yeah,
Speaker 3: they get married, they're married fifty four years. Well there's
Speaker 3: not lessons and look, we can make fun of this,
Speaker 3: but it does work apparently.
Speaker 2: For one guy.
Speaker 1: Don't don't don't don't do this, Yes, don't do this.
Speaker 3: I mean today she'll be creeped out that you found
Speaker 3: like an old school voice recorder, Like would you buy
Speaker 3: how much money you spend on this tape?
Speaker 1: Breakup after we do this episode and have dms of
Speaker 1: people doing this, If you do that, I will I
Speaker 1: will no, man immediately, No.
Speaker 3: We will will launch air strikes. We will send in
Speaker 3: by two. Yeah, yeah we have. We're part of the
Speaker 3: nuclear triad now here at cool Zone Media like, we'll
Speaker 3: do it.
Speaker 2: I don't give a fuck.
Speaker 3: So Lyddy also promises that during this period, the military
Speaker 3: selected him to attend a Clandesta in Activities training course
Speaker 3: and he was instructed there in quote techniques of surreptitious entry.
Speaker 3: He goes through all He's like, yeah, they brought me
Speaker 3: in to do the secret training. I don't know why,
Speaker 3: but it taught me how to like break into places
Speaker 3: and like be an expert on like spying on people.
Speaker 3: And I did all of this, but I was told
Speaker 3: not to mention i'd done it, and they didn't issue
Speaker 3: a certificate of completion, so there's no record of me
Speaker 3: ever going to this class, but it definitely happened, and
Speaker 3: that's how I learned all of my great Watergate skills.
Speaker 3: And it's it's again if like he was a famously,
Speaker 3: if he was a guy who had like successfully done
Speaker 3: a bunch of like you know, fuck j political shit
Speaker 3: and then gotten caught at the end after like this
Speaker 3: long career of like crazy ask if I'd be like,
Speaker 3: I don't know, maybe like there's at least a need
Speaker 3: to explain how you learned all this, But like Watergate,
Speaker 3: as we'll talk about, you just were a dumb ass.
Speaker 3: Like there was a complete cock up, Like at no
Speaker 3: point did you know what you were doing. You should
Speaker 3: never have been in that position because you were deeply, deeply,
Speaker 3: deeply unqualified to be managing something like this. I don't
Speaker 3: need this explanation as to how you learned this because
Speaker 3: you didn't.
Speaker 2: You don't know anything. I guess it's just writing this book.
Speaker 2: It's just like that's part of my brand. I'm the guy.
Speaker 3: So I got to let people know the Army gave
Speaker 3: me secret training that there's no after after learning I
Speaker 3: was a fuck up, they gave me secret break.
Speaker 2: In the buildings. Training wasn't from comic books, It wasn't
Speaker 2: from a Dick Tracy, a real good, real juicy Dick Tracy. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: I don't believe you at all.
Speaker 3: So once his last school's done and Lyddy's final obligations
Speaker 3: to the army are through, he applies for and joins
Speaker 3: the FBI, probably with some help from his uncle Ray. Right,
Speaker 3: there's probably some nepotism going on here, right. I don't
Speaker 3: think he gets in on merit.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: So, now this is the first part of the narrative
Speaker 3: where we have outside information about Liddy's life, so we
Speaker 3: are not as reliant upon like his fucking autobiography here.
Speaker 3: So we are going to be weighing outside information as
Speaker 3: we go on, pretty heavily against his questionable claims about
Speaker 3: his early professional life. Now, Lyddy's version of events is
Speaker 3: very exciting, right. He stationed as a field India agent
Speaker 3: in Indiana, an organized crime runs Indiana, and the two
Speaker 3: of the guys in his field officer veteran gunfighters. They
Speaker 3: were Wild West sheriffs who the FBI brought in and
Speaker 3: made exceptions for because they needed gunfighting trainers. These guys
Speaker 3: taught me how to be one of the best gunfighters
Speaker 3: in the world.
Speaker 2: Again, g Gordon Liddy never in a gunfight. Oh my god,
Speaker 2: He's like a side character and justified he's just like
Speaker 2: a guy that like runs off a cliff.
Speaker 3: Like self accident doing a draw. He goes into one
Speaker 3: of the things that's funniest to me. So there's a
Speaker 3: term if you're you know, regular listeners will know that
Speaker 3: I like shoot and am you know a firearms collector.
Speaker 3: If you are someone who does this, there's the term
Speaker 3: within the gun community called like fud and it's like
Speaker 3: from Elmer Fudd, and it's a term for like weirdos
Speaker 3: who buy old, obsolete firearms, in some cases ones that
Speaker 3: are not safe, but often that are just like very
Speaker 3: bad guns to use to defend yourself. And then we'll
Speaker 3: spend hours on the internet insisting that like these are
Speaker 3: the best guns in the world, and they're they're always maniacs.
Speaker 3: They're always g Gordon LYDTI types, right, and always fans
Speaker 3: of g Gordon Liddy, I should add. So he goes
Speaker 3: into these loving descriptions about how they like see is
Speaker 3: thirty eight that he's threatened all those soldiers with and
Speaker 3: are like, no, you got to get the most this
Speaker 3: and showed me the most powerful gun on the planet,
Speaker 3: a three fifty seven magnum and you know, they let
Speaker 3: me carry theirs for a while until my wife bought
Speaker 3: me one for Christmas and it was the best gun
Speaker 3: in the world, the most dangerous weapon ever we created.
Speaker 2: This dude, Calm down, Calm down.
Speaker 3: First off, one of the things that's funny about this
Speaker 3: is like, not in like I think the seventies, there's
Speaker 3: going to be a shooting the FBI is involved in.
Speaker 3: That is a disaster, a famous disaster. And part of
Speaker 3: why is that, like most of the FBI agents are
Speaker 3: all packing fucking revolvers, which are very outdated in the
Speaker 3: fucking modern world in a gunfight. So it's very funny
Speaker 3: to me that he's obsessed with these mighty revolvers and
Speaker 3: they're yeah, anyway, very weird. Weird dude, I think wants
Speaker 3: you to be impressed that these old sheriffs taught him
Speaker 3: how to gunfight. And again, oh, like, no evidence he
Speaker 3: was good at any of this. So by this point
Speaker 3: he'd gotten married to a brilliant tall computer programmer. Wife
Speaker 3: is his wife here, and in one passage from his book,
Speaker 3: he drops casually that before they get married, like they've
Speaker 3: been dating, they're kind of engaged, but once he gets
Speaker 3: hired to the FBI, he's like well, you can't just
Speaker 3: marry someone once you're in the FBI, so he illegally
Speaker 3: uses the FBI's file system to check up on her
Speaker 3: background and her family members before proposing. He also does
Speaker 3: this for their neighbors before he buys a house. I
Speaker 3: don't think this is legal, although he says everyone at
Speaker 3: the FBI does it, and in fact, agents were expected
Speaker 3: to do this to avoid embarrassing the FBI by associating
Speaker 3: with disreputable people. I actually think he might be telling
Speaker 3: the truth about that, because this is the ja Agar
Speaker 3: Hoover FBI and that I feel like that is the
Speaker 3: kind of shit they bull So I will give him that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'll just say, yeah, I think this is like
Speaker 2: I've known a couple of people who have had access
Speaker 2: to perform background checks and they do it pretty casually.
Speaker 3: Now we're going to roll to a stop here because
Speaker 3: you've got to go to a baseball game. But I
Speaker 3: want to note that, like it's in this part of
Speaker 3: the book where he's talking about spying on his wife
Speaker 3: with the FBI's file system to see if she's good
Speaker 3: enough to be an FBI man's brook like wife. And
Speaker 3: it's at this point that Liddy gives us yet another
Speaker 3: baffling reference to Hitler's SS. As Adolf Hitler was referred
Speaker 3: to throughout the Third Reich as simply dear Feurer, so
Speaker 3: j Edgar Hoover was referred to throughout the FBI as
Speaker 3: the director. There were only a few of US six
Speaker 3: thousand out of one hundred and eighty million to stand
Speaker 3: between our country and those who would destroy it. I
Speaker 3: was truly convinced we were an elite corps, America's protective echelon.
Speaker 2: It's shit, Stoffele.
Speaker 3: He's like, we were like America's ass and it doesn't
Speaker 3: think for a second, is that maybe bad?
Speaker 2: Gordon?
Speaker 3: Is that like, is that maybe a problem with the FBI?
Speaker 3: That Like, you're not wrong when you say I think
Speaker 3: you were not the only guy in the FBI you
Speaker 3: saw them as America's SS. But like, yeah, is that
Speaker 3: maybe a problem?
Speaker 2: Gordon? Like? And look, should should we interrogate this further?
Speaker 2: All I will just point out is that people today
Speaker 2: who chastise you because Republicans used to be reasonable people
Speaker 2: are talking about people that listen to all of this
Speaker 2: and thought, yes, the.
Speaker 3: Guy again, the man writing this is the dude who
Speaker 3: came to Richard Milhouse Nixon with a plan to illegally
Speaker 3: spy on the Democratic Party, and Nixon was like, yeah,
Speaker 3: all right.
Speaker 2: Let's do it.
Speaker 3: Yah, hold him and get this guy on there. It
Speaker 3: didn't quite go that way. We'll talk about that, but
Speaker 3: like basically, right, like basically I do love. He cannot
Speaker 3: stop making SS references, and they're always positive. They're always
Speaker 3: like we were like the SS isn't that great?
Speaker 2: It's so it's very like hilariously doctor strange love in
Speaker 2: a way that you're.
Speaker 3: Like, huh, guess this guy is eternal. Guess this kind
Speaker 3: of dude always been around and maybe always will be shit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, endless, endless forever. Yeah.
Speaker 3: That is one of the like unsettling things is trying
Speaker 3: to be like, well, how did he become this way?
Speaker 3: Because again, and you know, we're missing a lot. He
Speaker 3: probably leaves out a lot. Maybe his parents were like
Speaker 3: fucked up in ways that we don't get in this
Speaker 3: back like.
Speaker 2: The crazy thing is even the part he put out
Speaker 2: is insane.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, it's just like how how does how what
Speaker 3: is what made you?
Speaker 2: I guess we know America made you?
Speaker 3: Right, Like all of this does make a degree of
Speaker 3: sense when you think about like this, this degree of
Speaker 3: fetishization of the armed forces, this idea like there's something
Speaker 3: religiously sacred about the experience of combat. It makes you
Speaker 3: a better man, you know, all of this kind of
Speaker 3: like shit, are our weird gun cult worships? Right, all
Speaker 3: of this is g gorgon. So I don't know, I
Speaker 3: don't know why I'm saying I don't get this. He
Speaker 3: makes complete sense, right, I'm an idiot. He's totally makes sense.
Speaker 3: He makes sense. But it's still you're just like it
Speaker 3: can't be like this really, can it?
Speaker 2: Yeah? And the answer is yes, yes, yes, yes, for sure.
Speaker 3: I think part of why we're like there is this
Speaker 3: like confusion is he is so honestly the man. Even
Speaker 3: guys who do suck like Crowder and Ben Shapiro, they're
Speaker 3: pretending to be him, right, you know, like when you
Speaker 3: see him smoking a cigar and you can tell they
Speaker 3: hate it, Like they hold a gun like somebody who's
Speaker 3: never fired a gun before, and it's like, oh, this
Speaker 3: is like you're putting on Gordon Lyddy.
Speaker 2: He was like he was.
Speaker 3: Like lying and like making himself up into something, but
Speaker 3: like he was legitimately this kind of maniac, right, Yes, Like,
Speaker 3: I guess there's a degree of honesty. There's a kind
Speaker 3: of honesty in his lies. Even Yeah, modern.
Speaker 2: Don't have like Ben Shapiro is like fake, like holding
Speaker 2: a bunch of two by fours from his truck and
Speaker 2: his truck bed. That's never been used ge Gordon Liddy's
Speaker 2: has been used. It's just been incompetently used. Yeah, to
Speaker 2: the point where the people around him were like, actually, gee,
Speaker 2: I got this. I'll know everybody.
Speaker 3: He's also full of shit about like being dangerous and
Speaker 3: being in a hood man, but he's in such a
Speaker 3: way that you know, he spends his nights weeping over
Speaker 3: the fact that he didn't make it to correct practicing. Yeah,
Speaker 3: really was working at it. He spent you know that
Speaker 3: he did spend thousands of hours drawing that fucking cowboy gun.
Speaker 3: Like to feel like a big man, you know, just
Speaker 3: feel like I could be you know, if it just came,
Speaker 3: you know, the right things happened, I could really be
Speaker 3: a fucking old West sheriff.
Speaker 2: Well he did it the hard way. Everything he did
Speaker 2: you could tell he really worked.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Yeah, he worked at being He didn't just buy
Speaker 3: the thing. He like worked at being a maniac. He
Speaker 3: was the thing. Good for you, g Gordon lyddy you
Speaker 3: and yeah, and for us. I don't know what else
Speaker 3: to say about you. So I'm gonna let you go.
Speaker 3: Andrew T you got anything to plug first?
Speaker 2: Oh? You know podcast? You know, is this racist? We're
Speaker 2: still on strike almost certainly, you never know, I suppose,
Speaker 2: and so yeah, come come support us. If you found
Speaker 2: this my side of things enjoyable.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so find that out. Check that out, support the strike,
Speaker 3: Support super soaker full of piss by, you know, peeing
Speaker 3: in a super soaker and just mail it somewhere.
Speaker 2: I don't know where. I don't care where.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, send a pistloaded super soaker. He was stranger.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, just just send it, send it to
Speaker 2: the uh you know, Warner Brothers corporate offices. That's fine,
Speaker 2: it's what it is.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it is what it is. Probably not illegal on
Speaker 3: our part.
Speaker 2: Well we'll check in with that asterisk. Yeah, check your
Speaker 2: local laws.
Speaker 3: Uh huh.
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastard's the production of cool Zone Media. For
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