Part One: How Orange County Incubated American Fascism

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
Ah, that sound you just heard, listeners was me opening
up a can of whoop ass on your sense of
emotional well being because it's behind the bastard's back for
the first time in twenty twenty four, which is statistically
gonna be one of the worst years of all of
our lives. So I hope everybody's excited having a good

(00:29):
time feeling happy.

Speaker 1 (00:31):
Did you like rehearse that in the mirror?

Speaker 2 (00:33):
No, No, that all came. I had a totally different
bit to do, Sophie. But then I realized I hadn't
opened my can of Aura Bora herbal sparkling water. This
is cactus rose flavor.

Speaker 3 (00:43):
Mmmm. Sounds like soap, but go on, ah.

Speaker 2 (00:46):
It's tasty. That's a great way to enjoleep oout me
sipping the.

Speaker 3 (00:50):
Hillacious year that will be with your cactus rose water. Yeah, Robert,
it'll be it'll be fine.

Speaker 2 (00:57):
Everything's fine, It'll be fine. Yeah, be content for you
if you.

Speaker 3 (01:01):
How many bastards will be born? Bastards we don't even
know about who are going to come around this year?

Speaker 1 (01:06):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:08):
Hey, Robert, Sophie, Yes, do you want to.

Speaker 1 (01:11):
Introduce our guest?

Speaker 2 (01:12):
No? Yes, I'm maybe perhaps perhaps I will introduce our guest,
who is Francesca Fiorentini, returning beloved guest, host of Habituation
Room and partner in life of Matt Lieb.

Speaker 1 (01:30):
Everyone's partner that you just said that, But does that
hurt you at all?

Speaker 3 (01:36):
Oh? No, no, no, I enjoy Look he's I always
live in his shadow, and it's fine. I'm glad I
get some time from myself. No, of course he First
of all, he is a thirsty mf or who is needy.
And every time I get recognized for anything on the street,
he will go to that person and go, what about me?

Speaker 2 (01:56):
You recognize me?

Speaker 1 (01:59):
Love?

Speaker 2 (02:00):
I know so good matt leab Dirt.

Speaker 3 (02:01):
Here so good, there's so much good matt leab Dirt.
But yes, I love my baby matt Leeb fat Dueb,
and we have a baby together. I also love her.
And it's so good to be here on the first
of the year. I mean not the first, but one
of the first days of the year. It's our first
twenty four bastard.

Speaker 2 (02:21):
It's several days into the actual year, but this is
the first day that we're recording behind the Bastards, which
legally makes it the only day that's mattered so far
this year, you know, those of you who had important days,
I don't care.

Speaker 1 (02:35):
And I really don't think this year could be that
bad because you have a live show coming up. Is
that right, Francesca.

Speaker 3 (02:40):
That's such a great segue to tell you the hell yeah,
before we get started, Everybody, if you don't know me,
you know Matt leeb and so by association you love
me in the podcast The Situation Room, as Robert just mentioned,
I'm going to be live in San Francisco at SF
Sketch Fest on Sunday, January twenty eighth at seven pm
at the Gateway Theater, and I'm bringing the Daily Zeitgeist

(03:01):
co host Miles Gray.

Speaker 2 (03:03):
So, oh my.

Speaker 3 (03:04):
Gosh, he's gonna be there. People. It'll be so good,
Emma Bigland of the Majority Report. Also for the like
political heads. Damn yeah, it's gonna be It's gonna be
a good show. And Robert of course helps sell it out.
Last year was so fun. Sadly, Robert's not gonna be
there again, but what damn it. I don't know. Maybe uh,
maybe in the future, but yeah, anyone who's in the

(03:26):
Bay come through.

Speaker 1 (03:27):
Yeah, you're very familiar with our our dear friend Miles
Gray and if you would like poor info on this,
I'm linking in our episode descriptions.

Speaker 2 (03:36):
Speaking of live performances. No, no, speaking of the worst
year that any of us has ever had. Maybe, uh, Francesca,
how do you feel about the Republican Party? Oh?

Speaker 3 (03:50):
Like, not really my thing? You know what I mean?
Like I like, I no, just not into it, like
Lime's not doing you know, like I don't. I don't
want anything to do with it. You know, I've never
really tried it, but I don't want to.

Speaker 2 (04:03):
Yeah, yeah, I'm a pretty tolerant guy, but I've just
I've just gotten too many death threats from like Republican
legislators to people.

Speaker 3 (04:10):
I know.

Speaker 2 (04:11):
Yeah, it's it's it's not my thing either. But you
know what is even worse than the Republican Party in
twenty twenty four. Orange County, California in the nineteen sixties.
What do you know about the OC?

Speaker 1 (04:26):
Oh?

Speaker 3 (04:27):
God, Okay, the OC stands for Orange County. There you go,
That's all I know. No, I feel a lot of
like obviously, there was a show. It's pretty like rich
White People drama, a little bit of red State Maga
of California growing Asian American voter population. I know that

(04:51):
lot of a lot of Asian Americans who vote them. Recently,
they fliped the districts in the OC.

Speaker 2 (04:57):
YEP. But maybe I'm feeling like i'me since like this sixties.

Speaker 3 (05:00):
Yeah yeah, I'm feeling some retired police officers. I'm feeling
some cacake vibes. I'm feeling it's clansy over there.

Speaker 2 (05:08):
Yeah, yeah, a little. It's it, you know, to be
fair as you just as you mentioned, the Orange County
has has really turned around recently politically and is not
nearly the kind of Republican stronghold it used to be,
which is great. It is becoming, like, at least demographically,
more of a normal suburb than what it was during
the period of time we're about to talk about. Which

(05:30):
is the uterus from which the Trump Republican partyest. It's
not a US base. Well, it's it's warm, it's got
palm trees. No, it is a past biology in high school.

Speaker 3 (05:46):
It's a moldy gym towel in a men's spa where
there's lots of boys talk. As Milania would say, it's
like it's like a mushroom growing on like that a
gym towel.

Speaker 2 (06:00):
Yeah, Ronald Reagan masturbated it into a gym sawe and
left it in a hot shower floor in a boys
locker room. Yeah, thirty years or so has nothing to
do with this. Okay, Well, you know, people can describe
it however they feel in their hearts. Although I am
I am now more on board team dirty Gym, but yeah,

(06:23):
Orange County, whatever you however you want to describe it
to yourself. The Republican Party that is we're all dealing
with right now, and the Republican Party that gave us
Reagan and everything terrible that came with Reagan, you know,
the birth of the anti abortion movement, right, the birth
of the religious right as a as a powerful political entity,
and the fact that it has gotten increasingly acceptable for

(06:46):
Republican candidates to talk about having their enemies purged. All
of that. The story of all of that starts in
Orange County, and it heavily involves an Orange County local,
a guy named John Schmidts, who was the kind of
the first Trump. He was a dude who ran for
president you haven't heard of, but who was really the

(07:08):
guy playing around with a lot of very early Trumpist politics,
kind of taking the torch from Goldwater and handing it off.
You know, he didn't actually like Reagan, but a lot
of the crazier shit that came out of Reagan was
at least partially people in the GOP who liked Schmitz
or who at least saw a value in courting his electorate.
So this is a really interesting story. And in order

(07:30):
to really properly talk about the bastardury of John Schmitz,
we have to start with the birth of Orange County,
California itself, because there's a reason why so much of
the modern right was born in Orange County.

Speaker 3 (07:43):
I'm so fascinating because it is a mystery to me
that you can live in proximity to a beautiful beach
and Disneyland and still be a miserable piece of shit.

Speaker 2 (07:55):
Yeah, it really has something to do with we'll talk
about what it's got something to do with, but you're right,
it is like a lovely place to be a piece
of shit at. Orange County includes about forty miles of
sunny beachland, starting at Seal Beach in the north and
extending to San Clemente down south. If you're you might

(08:16):
think of Orange County as like, if you are from
the DFW area like me, it's a little bit like
the Plano to Dallas, right, and both in terms of
like kind of the how long it takes to get
there from the city, you know, although yeah, both those
cities have doug shit traffic, and in terms of how
much more like conservative it is out there, and also
kind of how much less dense it is, you know,

(08:37):
both places and there's a lot of places like this
in the United States are kind of masses of suburbs.
Now there's not as I think it's a little bit
better now certainly than it was in the sixties, but
like not a lot of shared community spaces like you
have in any kind of city, just by default, because
that's the way like dense cities work.

Speaker 3 (08:55):
It's where people go to escape cities because they're like,
there's crme, am, I need to live in a mansion.

Speaker 2 (09:02):
And then they don't talk to anyone for four straight months,
but rush Limbaugh and they lose their minds.

Speaker 3 (09:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (09:09):
Yeah. So around the turn of the century, this was
all still farmland, right. It was just owned by a
few people who had huge tracts of it, and it
had primarily been used for like grazing cattle before. Right,
they wind up finding a lot of natural gas and
stuff in Orange County, So obviously the oil industry gets
the fuck in there, and there's some guys who make
a bunch of money buying up land for that. And

(09:31):
by the nineteen twenties kind of it was very clear
to people who had money and knew how it worked
that like, well, whatever, we're going to be able to
keep getting for this place, because like ranchland is going
to be a lot less money than we'll get if
we parcel it up into little lots and sell it
off to developers to build suburbs. Right, and this is
kind of ahead of the curve, Right, This isn't the
first place where suburbs start developing, but it's like one

(09:53):
of the early places where you start to get the
developments that are going to and kind of the post
war period become like the fame miss American suburban culture. Right.
The strip mall, Yeah, yeah, the straight the Giants, the
endless series of strip malls.

Speaker 3 (10:07):
That's beautiful, truly, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (10:09):
Yeah, it is like a breathtaking natural beast, just like
running by us on the Serengetti of our souls making
reminding us all what the fucking concrete looks like and
how many.

Speaker 3 (10:22):
Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, just how dude, Earth's Earth? Like
this is such a corny thing. Do you think, like
like the top soil like tells the other layers of Earth?
How fucking ugly humans made it up there? You know
what I'm saying, Like they're like, you should see it
up here. They got strip malls it is.

Speaker 2 (10:44):
I was thinking of moving out mantles kind of boring. No, man,
you want to you don't want to get up here
right now?

Speaker 1 (10:50):
There's definitely a dirty little group.

Speaker 3 (10:54):
Yeah, there is.

Speaker 2 (10:56):
Thirty more years they'll get rid of all the buildings.

Speaker 3 (10:58):
Yeah yeah, they're all die off. Well we're coming through
the cracks of that concrete. But okay, so right, urban sprawl.

Speaker 2 (11:04):
Yeah yeah, well, I mean it actually starts kind of
separately from the urban sprawl, right, because Los Angeles isn't
nearly as big in the twenties. But yeah, you get
these rich people who start with like beach homes on
the coast, and then a little later in the thirties
or so. Oh no, yeah, probably like the fifties, like
the Irvine Company comes in, they see you know, there's

(11:25):
already there's demand for this land. A bunch of rich
people have houses on it already. There's a lot of
space out here, and it's kind of adjacent to Los Angeles.
Let's start cutting this up into tracts and selling it
to people. Right, This opened up a lot of a
huge amount of high end homes. Right. These are not
the like super affordable, like low wage, middle wage working

(11:46):
class guys they're going for here. They're going for this
big population of white war veterans who were educated and
who were in industries that paid well, and largely that's
going to be the defense industry, right, which is hugely
we'll talk about this a bit more later, but hugely
focused in southern California. So most of these guys, again,

(12:08):
World War two is just in it. A lot of
these guys were veterans, and they would have been veterans
who had, like in a lot of cases, maybe more
technical jobs. But Southern California has and has had military
basis for a while. A lot of training gets done
out near San Diego and had I think in this
point too, And so a bunch of these dudes who
had passed through, they'd gone they'd come from like Bumfuck,

(12:28):
Iowa or something and wound up in southern California and
we're like, well, this is so much better than nine
feet of snow in the winter. This is where I
want to go if I survived the Germans. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
that's that's kind of the start of it, right.

Speaker 3 (12:43):
It is crazy. I'm from northern California, and southern California
does have just like like such like random war planes
overhead that you're like, it's the Rose Bowl, Why is
there a war plane like doing very suspicious, weird donuty
alien shit things overhead and so loud.

Speaker 2 (13:02):
Yeah, that was weird moving out here.

Speaker 3 (13:04):
Yeah. Right, I'm just like, what if I were in
the actual war, you know.

Speaker 1 (13:07):
And I'm just like, that's normal.

Speaker 2 (13:10):
That's what I grew up. Yeah. I didn't even hear
that shit grown up in Texas. Like the number of
warplanes that I see I saw overhead in California, or
like showing up at Seattle randomly and it's just all
sailors on the street because it turns out there's a
week for that. I didn't know these things were factors
of life for other people, because people don't come to
the suburbs of Dallas.

Speaker 3 (13:30):
Did you kiss one? I mean Fleet Week.

Speaker 2 (13:33):
I would have, but I never got around to it.

Speaker 3 (13:37):
An opportunity didn't present it.

Speaker 2 (13:38):
So I was too nervous. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (13:40):
Well, you know there's still time.

Speaker 2 (13:41):
All those men in their terrible, terrible uniforms. God, the
Navy uniforms look like shit. Okay, sorry, So you get
these guys, these houses start getting built and whatnot, and
kind of from the start of the OC's development into
a community, power and land there is held almost entirely
by this tiny consortium of tin lands, most of whom
had more than two hundred thousand acres each. So right,

(14:04):
the whole community that exists there today starts off with
like ten guys who just bought up everything back when
it was really cheap.

Speaker 3 (14:11):
I was like, mister Huntington Beach.

Speaker 2 (14:13):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Johnny Huntington Iron Beach. Yeah. They
combined their palates Santa and Anna, Yes, Santa and Anna, right, yeah,
their marriage was a big deal. And of course Johnny
and Sino, the star of the biopic and Sino, yeah,
we all remember that great film. These dudes are all

(14:36):
they're all businessmen. Some of them are in oil too.
A lot of them are in oil to or ranchers.
That's a conservative demographic, right, and they make the decision like, yeah,
we'll make more money off these ranches by like kind
of transferring them into real estate. Empires to really take
advantage of the housing boom. And you know, this kind
of explosion in suburban living after the war, and this

(14:59):
boom and home buying is largely subsidized by the Department
of Defense. Right, there's a BET's a big part of it.
If you're a veteran, and damn near everybody is at
this point, you get mortgage aid and yeah, I want
to quote here from the book Suburban Warriors by Lisa McGirr. Quote.
By nineteen sixty two, defense had become the nation's largest business,
and from nineteen forty six to nineteen sixty five, sixty

(15:19):
two percent of the federal budget went to defense. These
huge expenditures catalyzed the affluent society and directly and indirectedly
affected the lives of every American.

Speaker 1 (15:29):
Well.

Speaker 2 (15:29):
Defense money drove national economic growth. The regions that profited
most directly were the Sun Belt, South and West, and
the biggest beneficiary was southern California. And yeah, I don't know. Again,
California has this like kind of driven by a lot
of conservative media reputations being hippie land, but like it's
where we make our killing instruments to a significant extent, right,

(15:50):
it's where we train our soldiers.

Speaker 3 (15:52):
My question is, what about black veterans? Right? Was this cause?
Like why aren't there I mean, there's a Latino in
a black bas population in oc but this sounds like
very white.

Speaker 2 (16:04):
Well that's a great question. And there's no black veterans
because they're not allowed to buy homes there.

Speaker 3 (16:08):
Oh easy, simple, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (16:11):
Because it's simply not allowed. There's gonna be a bunch
of cases where even like you know, Korean American fans
of Vietnamese American families, there's this because this region is
so conservative. After the Vietnam War, ins a bunch of
Vietnamese citizens who had been pro us, Right, we ship
a bunch of those people back over here and give
them citizenship. It's like one of the things that kind

(16:33):
of happens at the end of the war. And when
that happens, there's this big initial celebration and so and
then they're like, well, you know, we've fought against the communists,
we'll move into the super anti communist, right wing neighborhood,
and all those guys are like, oh, but we don't
want you here, No, absolutely not. And they you know,
they still like like build a community for themselves there

(16:54):
to a significant extent. It's just there's a there's a
great deal of opposition.

Speaker 3 (16:59):
Oh yeah, not the nice bluffs.

Speaker 2 (17:01):
No no, no, it's like a whole it's a whole deal.
So yeah, Southern California broadly speaking, is going to get
most of like the largest single chunk of the money
in defense contracts that comes during like the entirety of
the Cold War, Like that is a huge amount of
what this country spins on defense in that period just
all gets hoovered up by Southern California. And most of

(17:24):
the people working in the companies that are doing the hoovering,
a lot of them live in Southern California. So before
the war had started, defense basically had not been an
industry in Orange County, whereas by nineteen fifty there's about
thirty one thousand workers like in the defense industry who
live just in Orange County, you know, And this is not, like,

(17:45):
to be fair, that's not the only place in southern
California where there's a lot of defense money. There's a
lot of these companies will have their headquarters in Los Angeles.
LA gets like like like a lot of building in
LA basically happens in order to serve the defense industry
in the post war period. And yeah, a lot of
the most affluent of these guys, and many of them

(18:05):
may work in LA because that's where the companies are headquartered,
but they live in Orange County. Are are these defense
industry contractors, and especially like the very well educated ones,
the guys making rockets and guidance systems and optics and stuff,
the guys making like space weapons. Right that a lot
of those dudes wind up living in and around Orange
County because the houses are bigger and nicer and they

(18:27):
can afford them. From nineteen forty to nineteen sixty, the
county population grew by roughly three hundred and eighty five percent.
So that's how quickly this place explodes just because of
the end of World War II, in the birth of
the Cold War. And it's always been conservative here as
long as there has been any kind of community or
in Orange County, it's always been conservative. In the nineteen

(18:48):
twenties when the second KKK kind of starts showing up
in the United States, two of the largest Yeah, oh yeah, no,
you were very very prescient on that. The two biggest
counties in californ for clan membership are Anaheim and Fullerton,
which yeah, yeah, I don't have trouble seeing that. I'm

(19:09):
afraid it's also a stronghold for the temperance movement. This
is like the part of California that wants to ban
drinking the most, which I get it, you wouldn't that
shit don't fly in northern California.

Speaker 3 (19:20):
No, it's also you know, do you know there's the
John Wayne Airport here Robert, which is, yeah, so perfect
because we did that series on John Wayne, and I
was like, ah, yeah, I know a thing or two
about that psycho, a whole deserter.

Speaker 2 (19:36):
I do prefer his airport to lax.

Speaker 3 (19:38):
But yes, I don't know, dude. I was there and
it was a zoo. I was like, yet me, let
me go out of a like a smaller airport. It'll
be chiller. No, no, no, it was fucking crazy. It's just
less space. But anyway, I digress.

Speaker 2 (19:49):
Well, it's been a while since i've flown there.

Speaker 1 (19:51):
See, I like lax, but I'm the only one.

Speaker 2 (19:55):
Yeah, yeah you are, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (19:58):
Yes, indeed, I'm like it's just yeah.

Speaker 2 (20:00):
So again, one of the things you have to remember
here is that in this post war period, Southern California
is not a cool place for hippies and like space
cadets and left wing type people, right, Like, that's not
what it's thought of at all. It's one of the
most conservative regions in the country at the turn of
the century. Huntington Beach in the twenties was advertised as
a town where quote there are no saloons or drinking,

(20:24):
and Lisa mcger writes that there were also incredibly strong
social norms in the region and laws against any kind
of sexual behavior. Quote in nearby Long Beach in the twenties,
ordinances forbade caresses hugging, fondling, embracing, kissing, or wrestling with
any person or persons of the opposite sex in or
upon or near any public park, avenue, Court Street, or
any other public place, which I feel like that means

(20:48):
you could embrace or fondle someone of the same sex.

Speaker 3 (20:52):
Yeah, I feel like a lot of Huntington Beach magachuds
really took that to heart and definitely wrestle and fondle
one another on the beach and caress each other. But
it's like, you know, no homo or whatever. Yeah, but yeah,
that's what I know about Huntington Beach. It was just
like when Trump won, was like, oh wow, again, you
can live in a beautiful place, have access to a

(21:14):
beach and still somehow think that immigrants at destroying the country.

Speaker 2 (21:20):
Yeah. Yeah, just a bunch of bunch of angry men
with faces as red as a California sunset. Awful. But
if you're if you're heavily invested in creatine like me,
it's also like, at least you know you're going to
be able to retire right off all that sweet sweet
creatine money are putting it into the economy. So it's

(21:42):
a part of the country with a lot of moral
busy bodies from a pretty earlier period. And in fact,
this kind of southern California in the area that's going
to become known as Orange County, like I mean that
it is the county, but that it's going to become
known in pop culture is Orange County actually has one
of the highest ratios of churches or capita of any
place in the country, like this is the most Jesusist

(22:03):
chunk of the country in that period of time. Pretty much.
There's not many places that beat it. And it's actually,
I don't think a lot of people know this. It's
the literal birthplace of fundamentalist Christianity, because modern Fundamentalist Christianity
comes out of a series of essays titled The Fundamentals
A Testimony to the Truth that had been published from

(22:24):
nineteen ten to nineteen fifteen at the behest of a
California oil company founder named Lyman Stewart who lives in
Orange County.

Speaker 3 (22:32):
Nice, right, I see what I'm saying. Like California, Yeah, true, truly,
NorCal number one. And secondly, it's not a blue state.
It's not like there aren't a bunch of liberals here.
We have these parts and I used to think it
was just east of the Five, you know, but it's
west of the Five too. Again in these beautiful, beautiful areas.

(22:55):
God damn it. Really Okay, okay.

Speaker 2 (22:58):
You often get this whole belief, yeah, that that California
has always kind of been this progressive part of the country,
and it has. It's just there's the most people here,
so it does the most of everything, and it is
also one of the most conservative states in the country
and always has.

Speaker 3 (23:13):
You guys know this used to things. That's cool.

Speaker 2 (23:16):
No, no, yeah, yeah, there's like forty something million people.
You can do two things.

Speaker 3 (23:21):
It's true, it's true.

Speaker 2 (23:23):
Yeah. So these guys, these fundamentalists, you know, who are
kind of basing a lot of their their beliefs and
kind of political organizing, are the ideas in this These
series of essays are kind of characterized with it. There's
this hatred of the Catholic Church, which used to be
a real big thing in US politics. There's this hatred

(23:43):
of socialism, which is a much newer concept at the time,
but they're very angry about it. Mormonism. There are very
anti Mormon and they also were really pissed that people
were teaching Darwinism. Right, So you can see where again
abortion is not that much of an issue for them yet,
but you can see this hatred of evolution, of science,
of socialism that's all coming together and coming out of

(24:06):
this period in like an organized way.

Speaker 3 (24:08):
Where did the hatred of Mormonism go? Like, where did
that happen? Yeah? I feel like everything else got its
own little war, but like what about the white on
white war, Like you know, like when are we going
to see that? Or Mormons are just too nice you
don't want to fight them.

Speaker 2 (24:19):
Yeah, I mean they they are generally very polite. I
think it does. It is there, It is somewhere what
present if you find when you find like really hardcore
Southern Baptists and stuff, like a lot of them have
very nasty things to say about Mormons. I think it's
just less of a thing because people who are like

(24:40):
extreme Christians and conservative feel more under siege today and
they know that the Mormons are basically in agreement with
them on there, So then may think those people are
going to hell, and in fact do, but they'll caucus
with them. You know. It's kind of thea's always been better.

Speaker 3 (24:58):
They're not under siege. They just have a greater imagination
now because somehow demographic demographic shifts blah blah, Yes exactly
the woke Disney movies, which is in Orange County. All right,
so take it up with Yeah, they're going to be
these are the descendants of these people are going to
be protesting the new the fact that like, uh, what

(25:20):
is it the song of the South Ride was terminated
at Disneyland. It's been replaced by The Princess and the Frog,
which stars a black princess. Like these are the people
who are going to be protesting the opening of that
because it's gone woke.

Speaker 2 (25:34):
Yeah, I just I'm thinking of how funny it would
be if like you get all these you get these
these protests that that tend to be seen as more
left wing, where people are doing stuff like having like
like a fake you know, everyone lies down and pretends
to be dead right to protest so horrible war crime
happening in Gaza or something. I'm imagining those same tactics
being used by guys who are angry that the Song

(25:56):
of the South Ride has got You've got a bunch
of dudes in to die in in front of them.
They're all in black faces and the Frog ride all of.

Speaker 3 (26:04):
Them in black. Absolutely yeah, no.

Speaker 2 (26:07):
They this is in honor of my favorite racist cartoon.

Speaker 3 (26:11):
They've got all their little like Disney mugs waiting for
a refill. They're protesting the fact that like, yeah, wasn't
one of on the the Jungle Cruise or whatever it was,
like the the that ride, Like I guess one of
the trader Sam or one of the like you know,
voodoo traders got also taken out. They're gonna be dressed
as them. It'll be it'll be good. It's like your

(26:32):
grandfather foun a fucking war. This is this is your shit,
is what you're doing now.

Speaker 2 (26:36):
But yes, I guess we'll see what they're doing in
a couple of years. But during the Great Depression World
War two, OC voters, you know, they go for FDR
like everybody else. There is this period of time where
like things are really bad and a Democrat gets elected,
but they vote for a Republican again in nineteen forty,

(26:57):
and they keep doing so for three quarter of a
century afterwards, right, And you know a big part of
this is that after nineteen forty, which is when the
region grows in that next twenty years again three hundred
and eighty five percent, all of the new people coming
in pretty much are wealthy, right, or at least comparatively
wealthy right to their predecessors moving into the area. They're

(27:18):
these people who have gotten cushy jobs in the new
tech industry basically, which is very defense focused at this point,
and they're all flooding these these increasingly rapidly built homes.
We start to get some real luminaries and the conservative
movement out of southern out of Orange County in an
early era. One of your favorite guys, you were just
talking about how much you miss him as president, your

(27:42):
Belinda presidential future presidential candidate, Richard Nixon, who gets voted
into office in nineteen forty six into Congress by the
good people of Orange.

Speaker 3 (27:53):
County is from the OC.

Speaker 2 (27:55):
Yeah, he's from the OC. He's from your Belinda.

Speaker 3 (27:57):
Yeah, oh god.

Speaker 2 (27:58):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's Dick Nixon. Baby, he's like a
southern California boy. He grows up when it's much more
rule rural.

Speaker 3 (28:05):
But yeah, god damn it. It's a little bit like
the way that like Stephen Miller, although Steven Miller's from
like La, Like Steven Miller makes me sense.

Speaker 2 (28:12):
He grew up like Santa Monica or some shit.

Speaker 3 (28:14):
Yeah, yeah, Steve Miller does not make sense. But uh
but yeah, Nixon very much makes sense. Also, just born
with like that old Nixon face, Like he came out
looking exactly like he does.

Speaker 2 (28:27):
What a hero, What a fucking hero? Yeah yeah.

Speaker 3 (28:31):
So culturally it's just also no experience with the outside world,
especially because the outside world in every.

Speaker 2 (28:37):
Direction is very isolating, is just.

Speaker 3 (28:38):
As conservative and white but again beautiful. But so it's
it's like it's like two nice, you gotta have an enemy.

Speaker 2 (28:46):
It is. It is like isolated. It this is like
the suburbs. There's not nearly the same kind of connectivity
people have through technology. And a lot of these guys
are people who do they do their term of service.
They're like, Wow, the world's fucking scary. Let me go
hide and at one pretty place and make missiles for
the rest of my life. That's what's gonna That's what
I'm gonna do. You know, Like that really is for

(29:08):
a lot of these guys more or less the path
that they take. So, yeah, Dick Nixon comes out of
Orange County. He runs for Congress as an anti communist
right in nineteen fifty. Nixon, you know, pairs up with
Joe McCarthy and you know, it's good good for him
as a as a candidate, right and endears him to

(29:28):
the voters. It starts to provide him with like a
base of popularity and whatnot. You know, Nixon's going to
build his career on attacking communists and his alignment with
Joe McCarthy to a very significant extent, and it's too
early for it to work in nineteen sixty in part
because he is Dick Nixon and he is running against
John F. Kennedy and that's just not going.

Speaker 3 (29:50):
To work for him, even though he's a Catholic.

Speaker 2 (29:53):
Though he's a Catholic. Yeah, we vote one of those
that really pisses off the Orange County people, right, BAF.
So we put a papist in.

Speaker 3 (30:00):
This is not part of our fundamental.

Speaker 2 (30:02):
Yeah, speaking of papists, Francesca, how do you feel about papistry?
Do you think we can trust the papists? Do you
think that Catholics are an inherent third column in our
society waiting to sell us out to the Vatican?

Speaker 3 (30:18):
I mean yes, I mean the Biden crime family is
very much in bed with the inner workings of the Vatican.
I don't know when you say papistry though I never
say that word, but I have gotten past my mind
is like the papistry is like what happens when you
get a pap smear, Like I'm just taking in this

(30:39):
beautiful papistry of your you know, cervix is how I feel,
or like if you're a really good gynecologist. You practice papistry.

Speaker 2 (30:48):
Yeah, I'm imagining some very like confused young Nazi both
like listening to this podcast and reading a book about
pap smears and then carrying out attack that makes no
sense to anybody afterwards.

Speaker 3 (31:04):
Don't wish that? Like, Hey, listeners, are you a young
confused Nazi? Listen to Behind the Bastards?

Speaker 2 (31:11):
Well, that's I can't imagine a better thing to lead
into ADS with. Great, We're back. Sophie's gonna have fun
editing that last throw to ads.

Speaker 1 (31:29):
I'm not doing it. I'm leaving it as is.

Speaker 3 (31:31):
I enjoyed it.

Speaker 2 (31:32):
Oh oh wow, okay, well perfect, no notes, listeners, check
out my LinkedIn the joy that.

Speaker 3 (31:39):
It brought Francesca to look on her face.

Speaker 1 (31:42):
I'm not cutting that shit.

Speaker 2 (31:44):
Okay. So Orange Countiers they vote for Nixon in forty six.
They like McCarthy when he's doing his thing, but they're
not really fans of Nixon by the time he runs
for president against Kennedy, right, in part because you know,
Nixon is he's come down as like our political boogeyman, right,

(32:05):
and he was a terrible, terrible monster, but he, like Nixon,
is the guy later in his career who will like
hang out and be friends with Mao. Right, because he
recognizes the geopolitical benefit of the US being aligned with
China against the USSR right, That's why he does it.
I'm not saying he's doing this as a good person,
but it's like a rational political move that he makes,
whereas these Orange County guys are saying, like, no, we

(32:28):
need to all communists are working together to destroy capitalism,
and we should just keep building more missiles to kill
them all rather than trying to build like economic and
political agreements that include these states.

Speaker 1 (32:40):
Right.

Speaker 3 (32:41):
It just makes me think of like when Trump met
with Kim Jong un with like no pretext, no promises, nothing,
just because he's like I'm a strong man, Like you know,
you idiot, Like anyone could have done that. You got played,
and yet we're just not supposed to. Like if it
were anyone else would have done that, the right would
have freaked the fuck out. This is what Orange County

(33:02):
worked for, and you're throwing that all away.

Speaker 2 (33:06):
It is interesting that like you're able to get away
with that if you're Trump, because they just can't like
hate the guy, and Trump's willing to do it just
because he does not come out of Conservatism as a movement, right, Like,
he didn't really im bite any of this propaganda. He
was just looking for a place where he could fit
and grow like a mold.

Speaker 3 (33:23):
Speaking of the Yeah, the Jim rag or whatever it is.

Speaker 2 (33:26):
Speaking of Ronald Reagan's cum sock. Yes, yes, Sophie, can
we talk to the merch people about that? I feel
like that's a that's a branded that's a branded item. No, okay, Well, Sophie,
I bought a fifty gallon drum of Ronald Reagan's preserved seamen.
But I guess I'll have to find a different use

(33:47):
for that, you know what. I think it'll be fine.

Speaker 1 (33:50):
Yeah, let me know what you decided to use that for.

Speaker 2 (33:52):
Yeah, I'm just going to drive through Florida and out
those little cups you get it, like a Sam's ferm
me tire.

Speaker 3 (34:04):
We could retire off this sperm.

Speaker 2 (34:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (34:08):
I like. I like the idea that someone's doing because
you know, the IDF is doing that to soldiers who
are killed. Now the what is it? The semen something
something should seeman astraction, something awful, But that that's oh god,
oh they're gonna do that to Trump. Oh, I'm sorry, Robert,
but they're gonna do it to Trump. They're gonna you know, yes,

(34:30):
what if they do it to Trump?

Speaker 2 (34:33):
Honestly, it would be kind of funny. So let's I
think it's I think it's fine. I think it's fine.
Go ahead, do it.

Speaker 3 (34:39):
Have his babies in the future? Will Trump at Dad?

Speaker 2 (34:42):
You're the only thing he hasn't sold of his.

Speaker 3 (34:46):
But how much is it come? That's the future for him?

Speaker 2 (34:50):
Yeah. So these guys in Orange County, you know Nixon,
they love him for a while and then they like
feel betrayed by him because he just kind of does
things that are rational and not purely based on reactionary hatred,
and that really pisses them off. A bunch of these
pissed off, insane business leaders in Orange County formed the
Better American Foundation, And this had actually been formed a

(35:12):
bit earlier, but it kind of after, you know, the
Cold War really get started in earnest they turned it
into this like civilian spy agency where they're building these
dossiers on every identified Communist in the area. And when
I say the era, I mean in Los Angeles, like
and it's down from like Hollywood actors and stuff who

(35:33):
actually were members of the Communist Party or like writers
to just like like plumbers and shit that somebody thinks
is a communist and sends these guys a letter being like,
here's why I think this man, my neighbor's a communist.
I saw him wearing a red shirt one time. So
put him on your murder.

Speaker 3 (35:53):
You know one of the comics, he had a sickle
and a hammer. Yeah, he's the handyman, you dumb ass. No,
but there was a that's the communist sign.

Speaker 2 (36:02):
That is it is literally that dumb and like lazy. Right.
It's not a good database, but it's taken seriously by
the major law enforcement agency in the area. The LAPD
partners with these guys to use their records, and it's
because one of the things these people are keeping track
of legitimately is labor organizers. One of the reasons why

(36:24):
is Orange County. There are a lot of farms in
the area. Those farms are worked primarily by Mexican migrants
and a lot of folks. Folks would periodically come in
and try to organize those workers right to get them
into a union so that they were not exploited to
the same extent, and that would get these guys on
a list, and that one way or the other is
going to get sheriff's deputy or something on your ass,

(36:44):
and then it's probably not going to end super well
for you. Right, Like, there's the police kind of partner
with these folks in this mutually beneficial you know, they
get busts and stuff and people to go fuck with.
And you know, these business leaders in Orange County get
rid of some of their problem, right, and.

Speaker 3 (37:00):
Then they went to go pick their own grapes obviously,
just you know, because they wanted to be ideologically you know,
in sane we're going.

Speaker 2 (37:08):
To do that. Farming doesn't mean actually harvesting food. It
just means sitting on your porch making a lot of money.

Speaker 3 (37:15):
Skulls of those who try to earn a living.

Speaker 2 (37:17):
Yeah, being incredibly angry at all times about the idea
of Martin Luther King junior. Just pissing yourself with rage.
Now we're talking about a lot of social conservatism here
so far. But obviously, you know, a huge amount of this,
especially the anti communism, comes out of economic conservatism, which
is why you get this really interesting early marriage in

(37:40):
southern California in the fifties of hardline libertarian economic theory, right,
the stuff that's going to really get a lot more
prominent and actually get a lot of time in the
sun under Reagan. And kind of ever since, one way
or the other, you have that kind of merging with
social conservatism for the first time, right, because while you

(38:00):
do have a huge number of churches here, you also
have a lot of these like super tech oriented engineers
who may be like socially may or may not be
socially conservative, but are extremely their libertarians, right, And so
they don't, you know, they'll partner with these religious wackos
that they may not like, may think are ignorant because
they don't want to pay any money in taxes. They

(38:21):
hate the idea that somebody might use a road that
their tax dollars went towards. Sure, so that merger, which
is absolutely a critical part of their Republican Party today
and ever since, that merger starts in Orange County. And
I'm going to quote from Suburban Warriors again by mcghear
Leonard Reed, who in nineteen forty five would organize the
Foundation for Economic Education and Institution devoted to promulgating the

(38:43):
message of free market, private property, and the moral principles
which underlie these concepts. Converted to libertarianism during his tenure
as the manager of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce
in the nineteen thirties and forties. Reed had been influenced
by William C. Bulendor who was then vice president of
the Southern California Edison Company and a board member of
Spiritual Mobilization, a conservative group of Los Angeles businessmen and clergymen,

(39:05):
and also in nineteen fifty nine. In nineteen sixty was
one of twenty five to thirty prominent businessmen invited by
Robert Welch to organize the John Birch Society on the
Pacific Coast. Great, so that's a lot of heavy hitters
like that. This is all coming out of Southern California,
a huge amount of this. Yeah, yeah, I'm mad.

Speaker 3 (39:24):
I even went to Disneyland.

Speaker 2 (39:26):
Yeah fuck it. Yeah. The next time I see a
steamboat Willie costume, I'm just gonna kick him right in
the ass.

Speaker 3 (39:32):
Absolutely, that's what he deserves.

Speaker 2 (39:33):
That's my promise.

Speaker 1 (39:34):
Those tros are really good though. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (39:37):
Yeah, but you'r s is public domain, motherfucker.

Speaker 3 (39:40):
No, honestly, hmm, what I run on to go off
about Disneyland. But this is wild. So here's the question.
Is it it's sort of a convergence of interest. Is
it It's like, Ooh, we can use fake you know,
religiosity and morals to cover for our blind greed and
like desire to like not pay anything in taxes like that?

(40:03):
Or is it I'm religious and I also am wealthy
and don't want to pay anything in taxes. Therefore I'm
going to add to my religion libertarianism as part of
my religion, like or is it just kind of chicking
into the egg conversation where they both converted at the
same time.

Speaker 2 (40:19):
It's interesting again, this is another thing you've kind of
predicted because it is. It is very much a factor
of let me graft this weirdly like this weirdly libertarian
capitalist economic theory onto my religion. Because another thing that
is later going to come out of Southern California that's
a product of Orange County in a lot of ways
is prosperity gospel, Christianity.

Speaker 3 (40:40):
I thought it was a Florida will come.

Speaker 2 (40:43):
Florida plays their role, but a huge amount of that
shit comes out of southern California. That's a that is
a major center of like where kind of the prosperity
gospel comes together as like a concept is the OC.

Speaker 3 (40:57):
So we're rich because God wanted us to.

Speaker 2 (40:59):
Be, Yeah, exactly. And you can just pray for money,
but also it helps if you send several thousand of
it right here, don't pay taxes. That's less money than
you could send to my scam church that buys me
a plane.

Speaker 3 (41:11):
Jesus actually didn't really help the poor. His first instinct
was ill, gross, do you even go here? Yeah, but
then he had to.

Speaker 2 (41:19):
Jesus sold the poor makeup that had a seven hundred
percent markup that he bought on an installment plan. So now, again,
while we're talking about all this and all this stuff
that is very common, I'm on the right right now
that starts in Orange County. That is not the mainstream
conservative movement at this period of time. And the best
evidence for that is that a guy who has become

(41:41):
hated in Orange County, Richard Nixon, wins the presidency. You
know that, like that is a thing that is eventually
going to happen, right, and not that far much longer
in here, right in like the late sixties and so
while this stuff is starting to take off and take
holden is eventually going to spread County very much. Is
kind of weird. Right on a national level. It's not

(42:04):
the only place that's this conservative, but it's character of
conservatism is kind of unique. And that's also going to
contribute to this sense of isolation that we're talking about
right where this is. This is really it's like a
petri dish that you've added ingredients to and you're keeping
it away from the ret and just seeing what grows
there before you dump it into the tank. Which again,
that's that moment is is Ronald Reagan, Right, So yeah,

(42:28):
one of the things that's going to become an early
hobgoblin of the Republican Party. And you know, the right
wing movement in Orange County is the ACLU, and this
causes a problem. On June twenty fourth of nineteen sixty,
there's this Anaheim resident John Devorman, who is kind of
one of the rare progressives in the area, and he

(42:49):
is a member of the ACLU and also an elected
member of the school board. Right, so these guys do
not like the ACLU. They think it is a communist organization.
They think anyone in it is a communist civil liberties Yeah, yes,
Like so these guys love McCarthyism. And one of the
things that happens as a result of McCarthy and the

(43:10):
House Committee on American Activities is, you know huac is.
You get a number of state committees on un American activities,
and California has one. It is beloved by these Orange
County businessmen. They use it a lot in order to
harass again, like union organizers and stuff that they view
as enemies. Devorman, as a progressive, wants to abolish it.

(43:33):
So he hosts a meeting at his house of the ACLU,
and a bunch of you know, there's a gathering. People
give speeches about why they need to remove this thing,
about how to organize to do it, and it kind
of becomes a local story that like this dude invited
an acl you meeting at his fucking house. These communists,
you're holding meetings and are sanctuary of Orange County. And

(43:55):
I'm going to quote from suburban warriors here. The response
was swift and forceful. Angry neighbors denounced Worman for importing
communist ideas into their suburban enclave. Heeding their neighbor's call.
Citizens whose lives had previously revolved around work, church, and
family became involved in a contentious legal battle.

Speaker 3 (44:11):
I mean, and this is all like a reaction, as
you mentioned the MLK thing, Like, this is just reactions
to the civil rights movement.

Speaker 2 (44:17):
This is just like, yeah, the civil rights movement is
really kicking off.

Speaker 3 (44:21):
Yes, exactly, this is let's flee people who want full
like yes, to be treated equally, full citizenship, to not
be barred from Yeah, they're voting the ballot box all
that shit. That's just all this is. It's like because
you're like, where does this communism stuff come from? Oh,
it's just your reaction. It's just the white reaction to

(44:42):
the black civil rights movement.

Speaker 2 (44:43):
Yeah, yeah, that's all that this is here. And Devorman
is unfortunately, he's the kind of dude who's like made
in a lab to piss off right wingers. Right. He
was born in New York, he went to Yale. He
was a lifelong progressive and as a bonus, was also Jewish.
So these guys like, once they get a load of
this guy, they are like, oh, fuck, this dude lives here.

(45:04):
This dude's on the school board. Of course, it turns
out he's been called up by the California Committee on
un American Activities before, and he had on principle refused
to say if he'd ever been a communist or not.
So within days there's like newsletters going around claiming this
guy is a trained Communist agent who has infiltrated Orange
Counties and he's on the school board. He's gonna groom

(45:27):
our kids, you know, like it's it's it's this is
not an unfamiliar thing today.

Speaker 3 (45:31):
Tail is old as fucking time. And it's the same
sort of like this or as old as this, and
it's the same sort of like yeah, anti semitic, like
true anti semitic trope of like yeah, it's the Jews
who are bringing in the migrants and giving black people rights.
Same same stuff, same stuff.

Speaker 2 (45:50):
Yeah. And the story of how people find out that
this guy has held an ACLU meeting at his house
is really interesting. It all comes down to this dude
named James Wallace, who very very conservative and is also
a production engineer at Auto Netics. You probably haven't heard
of Auto Neetics, but they are the people who built
all of the navigation systems for our ICBMs, like if

(46:12):
you want a nuke to go kill a specific city,
you hired James Wallace to help make it happen, right,
Like he's one of these guys. He's a production engineer
at this company that like that's what they do. So
and he has decides he's got some free time from
planning for the apocalypse, and he blazes a trail that
right wing activists like James O'Keefe would follow for decades.

(46:34):
He blows up and infiltrates the ACLU meeting, right Like
he does this, so I'm this conservative sitting in there.
I'm taking notes, right, And then he writes a letter
to the local newspaper where he talks about what he
saw and describes the ACLU rep as a trader and writes,
I wonder what we would have done in nineteen forty
two if mister Devorman had a German American booned meeting

(46:56):
at his house. And it's like, man, I know in
nineteen forty two, I think I know where you would
have been.

Speaker 3 (47:02):
Yeah, honestly, but that's the other thing that booned meeting exactly. No,
I don't know. It's wild to meet that these descendants
of I guess world War two vets and heroes are
just echoing, not like they're creating them. Basically American Nazi movement, right,
or a version of a white nationalist movement, which you know,

(47:25):
staple of it being anti communist or saying you're anti communists.

Speaker 2 (47:29):
It is extra messed up to accuse a Jewish man
of wanting to start a German American booned meeting in
the nineteen forties.

Speaker 3 (47:36):
All the time.

Speaker 4 (47:38):
Yeah, that is ooh, that's dark. Yeah. So in short order,
there's mobs showing up at school board meetings where Devorman
is going to be present, right, and they're just kind
of shouting down anyone trying to accomplish anything, like whenever
they're trying to like actually do the school board shit,
they're yelling at Dorman being like, were you ever a
member of the Communist Party? Where you ever remember the

(48:00):
Communist Party? Eventually his colleagues are like, you're not allowed
to be both an ACO you.

Speaker 2 (48:06):
Member and a school board member. And he was censured
and forced into a recall.

Speaker 1 (48:10):
Gee.

Speaker 2 (48:12):
Now the head of the recall effort is another aerospace
industry employee, an engineer named Dixon Miles. He worked at
Northonyx now I don't think you've you probably haven't heard
of Northronics. Uh no, what else?

Speaker 3 (48:25):
What other horrible machine of death that they create? I
love all this.

Speaker 2 (48:29):
The name is changed a little over the years, you
know them better today is Northrop Grummen.

Speaker 3 (48:34):
There we go, there we are.

Speaker 2 (48:35):
Yeah, so this is like a Northrop Grumman guy.

Speaker 3 (48:38):
Right.

Speaker 2 (48:39):
He called the efforts to end a government committee that
existed primarily to destroy lives, this Unamerican Activities Committee. He
calls the attempt to take it down a threat to
our heritage, our beautiful heritage of holding committees to destroy
people who vote differently.

Speaker 3 (48:55):
No, And then also like that's the other thing that's
so fucking like the dissonance is so deafening in this
story and this origin story of like the modern right
because of the way they I mean, we should have
said this earlier. But like, these are supposedly religious people
who are creating weapons of like death every single day,

(49:15):
and there's no again, there is no contradiction in their minds.
And yeah, and then again the same shit where it's
like this guy's like, hey, we have this committee who
is kind of terrorizing our community in different ways and
interrogating us. We should probably have some sort of sovereignty,
we shouldn't be subject to this kind of surveillance. And
they're like, nah, you like, yeah, it's just it's just

(49:39):
the same fucking like projection, the acl use the one.

Speaker 2 (49:44):
Yeah, they're trying to take away our freedom to take
away other people's freedom, which is what it all comes
down to. It comes down and this successful effort to
force Vormen off the school board is a catalyzing moment
for Orange County conservatives who had always been dicks. Right,
These people had been shitty people for a spell, but
they also had never felt like they were organized together

(50:06):
into any like cohesive political whole. Right, there's this attitude
that like, well, you know, we're all pretty conservative here.
None of us like communism, we don't accept in our community.
But now they realize how many of them there are
who are that angry about the state of the world.
And again, the civil rights movement is a big part
of this, and it gives them this sense of power.
You know, again, this is not a thing that's going
to be alien to anyone who's been paying attention in

(50:27):
the last few years. So it turns out that as
we've kind of been making The case for the set
of unique coincidences that formed Orange County in its early
stages was basically tailor made to create explosion of paranoid
people with no community connections beyond those geared towards expressing
fear or anger at imagined political enemies.

Speaker 3 (50:46):
Right, it's just a land of Karens, a rolling, rolling
hills of Karens.

Speaker 2 (50:52):
It's mostly houses. Everything is like very far apart from
any spaces where people are going to like gather, you know,
outside of households regularly. Basically all of the public space
in the county has been shopped up and sold to
developers at this point, which has made very clear there's
a good passage in suburban warriors about this. A segment
of its middle class found a sense of community in

(51:12):
the politics and social interaction preferred by local businessmen, right
wing ideologues, and conservative church leaders. Thus, one woman said
of conservative activism, it became a social thing. Much of
the county followed the planned sprawl model of development. This
led to chaotic spatial arrangements, with one track developed after another.
Streets were bisected by new housing tracts, increasing a perception

(51:33):
of discontinuity and chaos. This form of growth created what
one may term free enterprise cities, with a strong emphasis
on private development and growth and little regard for public
or community spaces. By neglecting public space in favor of growth,
such arrangements weakened the sense of community. In fact, even
the existing central spaces of the old downtowns were undermined
in favor of convenience, privacy, and shopping malls. The most

(51:55):
extreme result of this pro growth attitude was the eventual
demolition of the old downtown city centre and Ana him
to make loom for development. So they just they just
blast everything that isn't a single family dwelling. Basically they
knew get and pave it. And this is by the way,
this is where kind of a trail is blazes, like
the first place where Americans are building developments and walling

(52:17):
them off from each other in like an organized way,
like it happens in New York too, kind of in
a contemporaneous period. You get pieces of that, but like
you get this, it starts in Orange County with these
old folks homes right where you basically have this is
a retirement community. They're not like old folks homes like
homes for retired people that are all part of a
community that they like wall and gate off in order

(52:39):
to like because these people are scared of everything.

Speaker 3 (52:42):
Yeah, yeah, it's like who it's definitely I've the times
I've been to the OC is like, who are you
trying to keep out here? Because there's just other gated communities?
Like are you are there? Is this some kind of
like you know warriors like fight you know, gang gated community,
gang situation because that'd be tight, But like, I literally

(53:03):
don't know who you're keeping out anyone who like you
can't even walk here, like there are no sidewalks.

Speaker 2 (53:10):
Yeah, yeah, which is I mean, all of that is
part of why it is the way it is there, Right,
These are the geography and the development makes these very
isolating places. Also, nobody comes from here. Your whole family,
like generations of it, doesn't live in Orange County, right,
you moved here from somewhere else. And by the same note, like,

(53:33):
so as a result of that kind of the only
public spaces are churches, and the only organizations that people
are likely to be members of other than their church
is their political party. So when you have that and
you add into it, there's suddenly this fight over perceived
communism in the neighborhood and everybody rallies together and they're
all doing a thing together in the real world, and

(53:55):
that's like addictive, and you're going to get that's the
origin of a lot of what's going to wind up
infecting the rest of the Republican Party. It starts with this, right,
It starts with this community starved group of people who
find a sense of like identity and just excitement and
going to war with this dude who just wanted to
host an say ACLU meeting. That's a huge moment in

(54:16):
the history of American conservatism. Yeah. So the real gift
that Vorman had gave these people was a threat to
rally behind, and once they had felt that high, they
didn't want to give it up. Local business leaders, who,
as we've stayed it have always been the engine of
conservative politics in the area, saw opportunity. A group of them,
headed by Walter Nott, owner of k Notsberry Farm, organized,

(54:37):
which is like the first theme park in the US,
I think. Yeah, so the nots Ery Farm guy organizes
a committee and sponsors what he calls the Orange County
School of Anti Communism. Oh god, Oh yeah, that just
sounds like a great.

Speaker 3 (54:50):
Time over a Notsbury farm. You know why. At least
Disney doesn't have like a shady past, yeah, you know,
or any kind of right wing over app or any
kind of Nazi.

Speaker 2 (55:02):
No, you know, none that I've heard of. Not they're
woke as hell.

Speaker 3 (55:06):
Hey, they're super woke. Desanta said it himself. Okay, Sonosbury, Yeah, okay,
another theme park's been ruined.

Speaker 2 (55:12):
Yeah, organizes the Orange County School of Anti Communism. Now,
initially this is like a series of local community college classes, right,
but they're so over attended, Like most the community college
is drowning in suburbanites who want to attend this anti
communism school. So mister Not is like, all right, well,
we got to do it bigger and a month before

(55:34):
the Bay of Pigs invasion in the spring of nineteen
sixty one, more than seven thousand students and parents, many
of whom had skipped Workers School, gathered in La Palma
Park Stadium in Anaheim to attend a five day Christian
anti communist school organized by Not. And I'm going to
quote from the La Times to talk about give you
a little insight into how this thing goes This is

(55:55):
a speech by Herbert Philbrick, who's a former FBI agent,
when he gives a crowd of people of like seven
thousand on March eighth. Right, now, we have a fifty
to fifty chance of defeating the communist threat, but each
day our chances grow less. And that's like that, that's
the tenor of this whole thing, right, Like the communists,
it's gonna be an uphill battle. I don't know if

(56:17):
we can beat them, but if we, you know, we've
got to turn things around. Now. Obviously the event includes
Birchers who one of the things that happens at this
meeting is they declare President Dwight D. Eisenhower to have
been a communist tool. Now it's not just not he's
not the only famous name here. John Wayne is in attendance,
and so that's good. Yeah, Yeah, everybody's favorite fucking goblin

(56:38):
of a man. Yeah, it's a it's it's a big deal.

Speaker 3 (56:42):
Right.

Speaker 2 (56:42):
This is a huge moment in American conservatism as well.

Speaker 3 (56:47):
You know, I always you always wonder, like is their
imagined threat still the same? Right, they call it communism,
they call it socialism, they call it woke. They're getting
closer to just saying people of color with the word
woke or anti woke. But you're like, at the time,
was it just sort of I guess I'm wondering, like

(57:08):
when they said communism, they knew they just meant like
Jewish people, black people, women having any kind of like
equal rights. And it's always this threat. They're just afraid
that they would have to give up their what beautiful,
beautiful strip mall.

Speaker 2 (57:25):
Yeah, I mean that is that's a huge part of it.
I will say, it's not just people of color and women.
They also have a particular hatred of college students. Right.
This is also starting to be the early stages of
protests in the early sixties against not just in favor
of civil rights, but against the Vietnam War, and that's

(57:46):
a huge these that's also a big bugbear for these
people is college students.

Speaker 3 (57:50):
Right.

Speaker 2 (57:51):
So, more than sixteen thousand Americans or Orange County ends,
I guess, wind up attending the event, and Ronald Reagan
is going to be the most popular speaker there. He's
also an attendance. You've got Reagan, You've got John Wayne,
and you've got the knots Berry farm guy. And the
event is such a hit, and that Ronald Reagan's speech
is particularly such a big deal that the knots Berry

(58:14):
Farm guy helps to organize. Following this a three hour
Hollywood Bowl event called Hollywood's Answer to Communism, which is
described by TV critic John Crosby as a monster three
hour concentration of pure venom on television, in which patriots
suggested again and again that the United States was largely
peopled by traders. So that sounds cool, obviously, John Wayne. Yeah,

(58:39):
that everyone who isn't one of these weird right wingers
is a trader to the country. High up in the
list of conservatives who hate it are the celebrities who
attend this Hollywood Answers Communism, which include John Wayne obviously,
Roy Rogers not a surprising as well. This one's going
to hurt people though. Jimmy Stewart's a speaker. Oh yeah,

(59:01):
that's a bummer. That's a bummer. Not shocking. If you
know the guy, you can't do it. Jimmy Stewart, Why,
I sure do hate it when people love civil rights.
I don't know. That's not a good Jimmy Stewart, Well.

Speaker 3 (59:12):
No, they want to be equal.

Speaker 2 (59:13):
Now they've gotten off something like that. So both events
are organized by a famous piece of shit and Australian
gift to conservatism, Frederick Schwartz, and he founds the Christian
Anti Communist Crusade, and he moves his headquarters to Orange
County in nineteen sixty. Schwartz's claim to fame is a
book called You Can Trust the Communists to Be Communists,

(59:36):
which had a stunningly subtle sequel You Can Still Trust
the Communists to mean Communist, Socialist and Progressives too, so
great titles like really creative, good work man, speaking of
weird fascists here's nope, shit ads ah, we're back. So

(01:00:04):
both these events, you know, you've got notts kind of
providing the funding. But the guy who is organizing them
is Frederick Schwarz. He's this dude who founds the Christian
Anti Communist Crusade, which which moves to Orange County. He
writes these two books with almost the same title about
how communism is scary and.

Speaker 3 (01:00:22):
Communism is a communists, no communists, popularly the communism You
can't spell communists without Khan.

Speaker 2 (01:00:30):
Yeah, without like most of the words in Cohn right, Yeah,
So his his brand of propaganda it's going to be
different in some critical ways from mainstream far right propaganda
because he bases a lot of his pitch on the
interests of specifically people in southern California right. His first
book includes a lengthy passage where he complains that communists

(01:00:51):
are graduating more engineers than the United States, which has
given them an edge in making new weapons. And there's
there's some wild life in here. The question is which
system of education will win this universal war. I was
visiting an American college. Before I had been there ten minutes,
the president told me with great pride of a young
man who had brought glory and honor to their school.
Wherever I went on campus, I heard his praise as sung.

(01:01:14):
At last I met him, and a fine young man
he was. His Boddy was lithe and slender, and he
stood some six feet two inches tall. He was their
leading basketball player. His skill at the game was so
great that he had been chosen to go to Melbourne,
Australia to represent the United States and the Olympic Games
in nineteen fifty six. What an honor for the school.
Frequently I asked, who's your leading science student? He looked
up at me with wonder and amazement. He could not

(01:01:36):
answer the question. So he says, we're teaching our kids basketball,
but not how to make missiles. God, it's such a
funny thing to like half the year primary concern like
that an anyone could have ever thought, like the answer
to the Cold War, like that we would not have
enough missiles. So that was ever a thing in the
US if you know anything about this country. No, as

(01:01:57):
soon as missiles were a thing, we were going to
have the most of them. That was always in the
cards for this country. Like that is that is.

Speaker 3 (01:02:03):
Truly a trick that I don't know. The you know,
military industrial complex definitely pulled on everybody, but I guess
including people. And like I said, vets the idea that
you're victors. You won. Yeah, no one even pails in
comparison to the kind of military you have. But yeah, yeah,
I don't know. I think you can play some basketball,

(01:02:25):
you know what I'm saying, Just like take a load off,
like chill out.

Speaker 2 (01:02:28):
Like you are geographically defended because of like the way
North America is set up. You have so much more
money and so many more guns than anybody else on
the planet, and yet you're terrified because you saw a
kid who was good at basketball, but the school didn't
have any future missile designers. Like what the fuck? Man,
that's a nuts.

Speaker 3 (01:02:50):
So so ridiculous.

Speaker 2 (01:02:52):
But you can see why this goes well, goes over
well in Orange County because not only are a lot
of employees of defense contract but a lot of people
who are like running these these defense companies. And like
this guy is saying America is not graduating enough missile
IT designers, and they're like, yeah, we need more missiles.
I make money off of every one of those. We
fucking sign right, Like Northrop Grumming is paying the fucking

(01:03:13):
mortgage on a lot of these ranch style houses, you know.
And so the people who are you know, financially invested
in this, they like it that Schwartz is saying there's
no way to have peace. There's no way to ever
decrease our defense spending. We only need to spend more
and more and more.

Speaker 3 (01:03:29):
This is just it's such a nightmare VENN diagram of
the like the OC is just this like nightmare fucking
what's the longitude and latitude like nightmare coordinates of every
single Yeah, like libertarianism, the Christian right, and the weapons industry,
which of course they don't admit to it all now
when they're like, well, we need to not send any

(01:03:50):
more money to Ukraine or whatnot, and they're just like, no,
all y'all love the weapons industry. You want to send
more money and make more worn of it.

Speaker 2 (01:03:58):
You would have send them so many more places than that. Yeah,
you just don't want to do it for a good
Yeah exactly, that's would it be an asshole about it? Yeah? No,
But it is like you know, we're talking about like
the attitude towards people who are like running these companies,
but regular people don't want to feel like they're warmongers.
And so part of what makes Schwartz interesting is he
very interestingly creates this sort of image of like Americans

(01:04:21):
want peace, right, we actually value peace, and when we
say peace, we mean an into violence.

Speaker 1 (01:04:25):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:04:26):
Communists talk about peace a lot, but communists don't view
peace as the same thing. In communism, peace doesn't mean
ending violence. Peace means ending conservatives, right. That's basically what
ending capitalists, right, Like, that's that's how they say it, right.
And so like when we say we want peace, we
mean we don't want violence. But if that means if

(01:04:48):
we actually advocate for peace, we're dooming ourselves because the
only piece they'll accept is one in which we don't exist. Now,
if you're rational at all, you can say that, like, well,
all you're saying is the only real piece is one
in which the communists don't exist, right, Yeah, there's no
difference between what you're saying. They're saying and what you
are saying. Those are the same two things. But yeah,

(01:05:08):
it works, right, This is popular with.

Speaker 3 (01:05:10):
These Conservatism is all premised on future tripping about a
reality that has not come to bear and will not
likely come to bear. They just well, you know, it's projection.
They're going to do it to us. They're trying to
eliminate conservatism, so we need to eliminate them first.

Speaker 2 (01:05:28):
Yeah, they've said that they have to put an end
to capitalism, so we have to put an end, you know,
to communism.

Speaker 3 (01:05:34):
A thing we don't have, do not live under it.

Speaker 2 (01:05:36):
But that doesn't make us bloodthirsty. We're still good Christians,
right sure, Yeah, I mean these are just everyone finds
ways of doing this. It's not an uncommon like this
is not that this was not invented by this guy.
But I find the way in which he's speaking to
these Orange County voters to be kind of telling about
how people in general like to look at themselves. Yeah

(01:05:58):
so yeah. As a side note, of the things that's
really interesting when you read a lot of Schwarz's writing
is how frequently he praises the quality of communist literature,
Like I don't know any communists who use the word
beautiful to describe like communist propaganda as much as this
guy does, Like he fucking loves it. He writes about
how like a wonderful book like Problems of Leninism by

(01:06:20):
Joseph Stalin can be acquired for just a few cents
in any bookstore in America, Like why can't we do
that with our propaganda. There's so much better at it
than us, all.

Speaker 3 (01:06:32):
These wood cuttings and it's great, and they've got good mustard.
We need some good must He.

Speaker 2 (01:06:37):
Writes about this this Chinese communist magazine called Chinese Pictorial,
and he's like, the color photography is beautiful, the moral
tone is excellent. There's no violence, no crime, no nakedness,
no sex, no alcohol.

Speaker 3 (01:06:51):
Yeah yeah, yeah, it's like we need to do that,
but for money, you know, like for us and our side.

Speaker 2 (01:06:57):
Yeah, yeah, it is fun because he is saying a
lot like wow, the way these the way that these
maoists portray they're like fantasy future society looks great. There's
none of the things I hate. Right, It's like, okay,
well then why are these people your biggest enemy? Well,
I don't know. Whatever it's it's it is funny to me,
like he writes, he clearly so enjoys. It reminds me

(01:07:19):
of Jordan Peterson, right, keeping like communist propaganda all over
his walls. He's like, that's kind of odd if you're
if you're not into it at all, to just surround
yourself with it all the time. That's very interesting to me.

Speaker 3 (01:07:32):
You got to keep the enemy cleos.

Speaker 2 (01:07:34):
Now, I think they would probably describe it as like, well,
I want to understand the enemy so I can know
how to fight them, which exactly you know, Okay, like.

Speaker 3 (01:07:41):
It's there, but yeah, it is. It is a weird obsession,
but it's also just again, I was at the California
Republican Party like convention, California Republican Convention in twenty fifteen.
I guess it would be and uh, the best moment
of that whole convention for all these Republicans was when

(01:08:02):
they could see the protests happening outside of the building
because Trump was speaking. It's when Trump had to like,
you know, walk in like the alley of the or
like the shoulder of a highway and whatnot because of
you know, protesters had closed the stop, the entryway, whatever.
And the faces of these Republicans were so excited. They

(01:08:23):
loved watching themselves be hated, and they loved seeing what
the other side was doing. And so I do think
there is sort of a weird fascination they see.

Speaker 2 (01:08:33):
I think there's this a significant degree of like admiration
for well, these guys were a tiny, unpopular chunk of
the country and using a variety of methods were able
to like build parties and organizations that allowed them to
reach and radicalize a huge number of people and take power.
And that's exactly what we want to do, but specifically

(01:08:54):
so that we have to pay less taxes.

Speaker 3 (01:08:56):
Exactly.

Speaker 2 (01:08:56):
They have a lot of power, but they're not the
only power, right, because shit happens like the civil rights movement, right,
and then you know, you get a law that they hate,
that forces changes in society that they hate. You have
you know, prior to the government, like you know, the
government doing like enforcibly integrating school. So they they would
say it is like we're fighting for our lives here,
and what we need to do is what those communists

(01:09:19):
did just like take total power, right, Like, that's very
much why they're kind of looking to this propaganda. And
Schwartz has again he's very like positive towards communist propaganda,
and he in this very weird passage compares it to
like a pedophile with a candy van, which is a
really I didn't realize that sort of like image went

(01:09:39):
back this far to like the early sixties, but evidently
it does. Yeah, so anti communism is going to remain
a central interest for Orange County conservatives who all start
to see the Cold War, as you know, the acceleration
of the Cold War is not simply like just for
ideological reasons, but also as important for their bottom line. Right,
this is going to make us all rich. The Orange

(01:10:00):
County Research Institute, which also did surveys in other parts
of the US, noted in the early sixties that Orange
County dwellers were likely or to either be interested in
or have bomb shelters than people anywhere else. So I
think that's funny, Like Midwesterners aren't buying bomb shelters exactly.

Speaker 3 (01:10:16):
This is like after nine to eleven people, Yeah, like
in fucking I don't know, think of a random ass
like in just like yeah in the OC being like
they're coming for us, Like, no, they're not, They're not gonna.
I'm sorry, yorba.

Speaker 2 (01:10:33):
Everybody had to feel we all want to feel like
we're part of the news though, right, we all have
to make it about ourselves.

Speaker 3 (01:10:39):
Yeah, exactly, they're gonna come right for us. Now they're not.
You wish they're coming.

Speaker 2 (01:10:43):
It's not.

Speaker 3 (01:10:44):
No one cares enough about Irvine.

Speaker 2 (01:10:45):
For just cannot spell your Belinda, I'm exactly like you're okay.
So in nineteen forty eight, again Dick Nixon's anti communism
had embodied the values of Orange County pretty well, but
over the next decade and change, like it had radicalized
to the point where he starts to be hated in
the area. Right, And this becomes particularly the case once

(01:11:09):
he becomes the president, right in late sixties, you know,
early seventies, when Nixon is in power, he becomes like
a huge enemy of them. For the fact that he's
willing to talk with communists, He's willing to make deals
with the Chinese government. Right, he's kind of the first rhino.

Speaker 3 (01:11:24):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:11:24):
You know, that's a term that has a lot more
cachet now politically. They weren't using it then, But the
Bircher right wing are the first people to really go
after Nixon in that way. I think he first wound
up on their shit list in sixty two when he
had run for governor of California and the society had
attacked him. The John Birch Society had gone against Nixon
in sixty two by they backed the candidacy of this guy,

(01:11:47):
Joe Schell, who was a local assemblyman. He was a
high school football idol turned independent oil producer. So he's
just like the perfect man for them to all rally behind.

Speaker 3 (01:11:58):
Yeah, libs of right wing identities.

Speaker 2 (01:12:02):
Yeah yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:12:03):
And there's this real quote farmer.

Speaker 2 (01:12:05):
There's this really good quote. Yeah, he's a football oil farmer.
The La Times gives a really good quote of the
tenor of the election. He has, like his competition with
and its impact on Nixon. Piloting his own Beechcraft bonanza
from one campaign stop to the next. Shell aimed his
pitch squarely at fellow conservatives. I've gotten sick and tired
of calling people liberals when they're basically socialists, he said.

(01:12:28):
First elected to the Assembly in nineteen fifty three, Shell
was the minority leader when he decided to run for governor.
One hallmark of his campaign he repeatedly accused former Vice
President Nixon of tried to use the California governorship as
a stepping stone to the presidency. Although Nixon won the
primary handily, Shell captured thirty five percent of the vote.
Nixon had been substantially weakened because the ultra conservative Shell's

(01:12:49):
challenge caused a split in the party. Former Defense Secretary
Casper Weinberger said in his two thousand and one memoir,
So again, it's its Orange County and particularly the John
Birts there that really stops Nixon from winning the governorship
because they they kind of hobble his campaign. They create
all this animosity, you know, because they back this fucking

(01:13:10):
football football oilman Joe Shell. Yeah, God, that's funny. So
Nixon irritates the John britseidy again. In nineteen sixty four,
when Barry Goldwater, who was then kind of in the
early sixties. He's the craziest fascist in America. He's going
to whine end his life in like the nineties as

(01:13:30):
like pro marijuana, in pro gay marriage. But he is, like,
he is the scariest fascist in public life in the
sixty It's a weird. Yeah, he winds up I guess
being okay at the end of his life, I don't
know what was going on.

Speaker 3 (01:13:43):
A lib. He just dies a LIB.

Speaker 2 (01:13:44):
Like, Yeah, he kind of dies a LIB.

Speaker 3 (01:13:46):
Right. Yeah, Weed's cool.

Speaker 2 (01:13:48):
Love is love, Yeah, Yeah, it's interesting. He's got a
fascinating arc. But he's the dude. His big famous quote
is he just he declares that the Republican can mention
that year extremism in defensive liberty is no vice. And yeah,
so that's you know, that's the guy who's kind of

(01:14:09):
like the fucking big Republican in sixty four or the
big far right Republican in sixty four. Obviously, Nixon's gonna
wind up being the guy who actually gets to become
president in sixty eight, right, Like, eventually it's not Goldwater
but Nixon. And that's another thing that pisses off these people,
right that Nixon becomes the standard bearer of the Party

(01:14:31):
Bury Goldwater, the guy they fucking love does not. And
that has all set the stage more or less for
the man who's going to make the first big crack
in the dam between Orange County Conservatism and the broader
National Republican Party. The guy who's going to shatter that
wall and lead let all of that filth really spill

(01:14:51):
into the rest of the country in a big way
is a dude named John Schmidtz. And we're going to
talk about Ja Schmitz in part two. Yeah, so, Francesca,
that's the end of the episode. Do you have anything
to plug before we roll out?

Speaker 3 (01:15:06):
Uh? You know the Situation Room podcast. We're going to
be live in San Francisco on January twenty eighth, which
is a Sunday, seven pm at the Gayway Theater. Miles
Gray of The Daily Zeitgeist will be there. But yeah,
listen to the situation pod Room, listen to the Bituation
Room podcast wherever your podcasts, you know, Queue it up.

Speaker 2 (01:15:23):
Baby, excellent, Yeah, queue it up, queue it out, and
also get a Cooler Zone Media subscription to listen to
this shit without the ads. Just give us Sophie, what
is it? Seventy thousand dollars a week. Yep, a bargain
at any price.

Speaker 3 (01:15:39):
That's deal.

Speaker 2 (01:15:40):
Uh huh, No, it's less than seventy thousand dollars. That's
the guarantee that we make.

Speaker 1 (01:15:50):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
Or more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part One: How Orange County Incubated American Fascism