Part Three: H.L. Hunt: The First Elon Musk

Robert concludes the story of H.L. Hunt with his involvement in the death of John F. Kennedy and downfall as a polical force.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, part three
of our series on hl Hunt this week.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
You are welcome, but you all should really thank Princess Weeks,
our wonderful guest, for agreeing to sit in for a
third episode in a marathon recording session. Thank you, Princess,
you are braver than the troops.

Speaker 3 (00:24):
Thank you.

Speaker 4 (00:25):
I love to learn, and I honestly just genuinely love
hearing about this stuff.

Speaker 3 (00:30):
This is so fascinating, yeah and terrible.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
Well, I love telling you about it. Let's start by
talking about our boy HL Hunt's second family, right because
I discussed how they he eventually moves them up to
New York and has a guy marry them. What I

(00:54):
did not note because I went in and kind of
added some stuff to the script once I realized that
we're gonna wind up getting three parts, and I found
something I'd forgotten to add that was in my notestock,
which is that apparently Frannia, like when he marries her,
she didn't even know his real first name, like he
marries her under a fake name.

Speaker 3 (01:12):
Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (01:14):
And one of the notes that Hinderschott has in her
book is that he probably she probably first starts suspecting
that something's weird when they have their first child, who
is a girl, just like his first child with Leida,
and he names her Harold Dina, which is not he's
not telling her his first name is Harold, but he
names her after himself, and he names her he tries
to name her Harold Dina God, which is like crazy,

(01:40):
but I'm not Harold, that's not my name. Why are
you so? Why is that so important to you?

Speaker 4 (01:45):
Man?

Speaker 2 (01:46):
That's really weird, right, like be better? Yeah, no, that's
just bizarre.

Speaker 3 (01:52):
What an odd guy.

Speaker 2 (01:54):
When she finds out, he tries to get her before
he moves to New York. He tries to convince Frannia
to move to Utah and come a Mormon so that
they can legally quote unquote be big amous.

Speaker 3 (02:04):
The role book that changes. The role book never changes.
He's like, listen, babe, we can get a farm Mormons
latter day.

Speaker 2 (02:14):
Let's not go in. First off, your first wife wouldn't
be in Utah. Second, you're not Mormon, but I could be.

Speaker 3 (02:22):
And that's what.

Speaker 2 (02:23):
Yes, it's when that stuff doesn't work that he like
pays her to move to New York right and sets
up trust for all the kids and finds someone to
marry them and pretend to be the father. Now this
is he's just going to get and have kids with
a third woman after this. Uh, And I think he's
I think actually this after light it dies that he
has his third partner, but I'm not one hundred percent sure.

(02:44):
But they wind up having several kids and he like
lives with them later in life in Dallas. Uh. But
he doesn't ever marry her, right because he's wow, you know,
he take.

Speaker 3 (02:56):
His money, letting no broads take my money this.

Speaker 2 (02:59):
Day at least, I'm not going to be bigamously married again.
I'm sure he winds out. I think he does actually
give them a lot of money, but yeah, he doesn't
want to. He's not going to get bigamously married again.
So the need to seem fair and unbiased meant that Smoot,
you know, on the facts for him, his former FBI
man host has to act like he respects the liberal

(03:20):
lion on things, but he's always visibly more interested in
the conservative arguments. Another good example of that would come
from one time Smoot gets asked, should we continue to
handle Korea as a limited police action? You know this
is right at the start of the Korean War, or
should we, you know, put more troops into it right
quote Smoot first dryly answered in the affirmative, quoting Adelaie Stevenson,

(03:41):
Korea is the most remarkable effort the world has ever
seen to make collective security work. In choosing to repel
the first armed aggression of the communists, we chose to
make bitter sacrifices today to save civilization tomorrow. On the
negative side, Smoot drew a portrait of a hypothetical soldier
named Joe. It's cold up here in the winter, sometimes
thirty below zero. If a boy cries, his tears turned
to ice. And then there is the enemy, always the enemy,

(04:04):
and the kind of fight that man fought centuries ago.
Knives and fists, fingers groping for eyes, and teeth seeking
hot a soft spot in the neck. Maybe Joe will
die in the slit trench, and maybe he will live,
his hands sour and gummy with half digested rice gruel
ripped out of the stomach of a bleeding bundle of
rags and bones at his feet. So wild, wild, little
rant to go on there.

Speaker 3 (04:24):
Man, I was just like, get it, screenwriter.

Speaker 2 (04:30):
Yeah, yeah, In one of my favorite lines from her book,
Heather Hindershot writes, quote, Smoot could somehow snarl a feminate
egghead in such a way that it sounded infinitely worse
than son of a bitch. So he's like that, you
know that kind of broadcaster. Now, The Facts for Him
made itself a nexus of support for Joseph McCarthy, as
Hunt sought to convince regular Americans that communists needed to

(04:51):
be rooted out. Joe guests on only one episode of
the Facts for Him, but his researcher and future wife,
Jeane Carer, worked the Facts for him as a staffer.
Another early staffer was Robert e Lee. Not that Robert
e Lee. Yeah, this Robert e Lee was a former
FBI man who helped McCarthy compile his list of two

(05:13):
hundred and five communists in the State Department. And there's
so many FBI guys who work for the Facts Forum.
But there's like a joke in the FBI that like,
that's the retirement plan is working for this fucking right
wing billionaire. So things are going well. He's using the
Facts Forum to support his buddy Joe McCarthy, But then
Tailed Gunner, Joe makes the mistake of picking on the

(05:35):
army in the nineteen fifty four Army. McCarthy hearings are
a disaster for the man and for the broader cause
of being visibly crazy as an anti communist activist. The
hearings were broadcast on television and will only ABC and
the Dumont Network broadcast the hearings in full because they're
thirty six days long. The bigger networks, CBS and NBC

(05:57):
broadcast excerpts. And this actually the fact that these networks,
because there's money in advertising now, they don't want to
run just thirty six days of congressional hearings its way
is a huge waste of money. But because they decide
to take excerpts and just run clips from it, this
is actually the way the media covers the McCarthy hearings.

(06:18):
Is one of the first cases of SoundBite journalism right,
and sound bite journalism in a positive way, where previously
the reporting on this would have just been kind of
dull articles about another series of hearings about communism in
the US that most Americans wouldn't have known there was
anything to be upset by. Because these guys journalists are
looking for, like, well, what are the craziest things McCarthy's saying,
What are the wildest moments from this? It makes it

(06:40):
impossible to ignore, and they're playing this over and over
again that like, no, this is actually a real problem, right,
Like this guy's out of his mind and is just
attacking people for no reason like that. Really, the fact
how this gets reported really helps to make that case,
because these networks are looking for, like the most embarrassing
and shocking moments and clip them out and playing them

(07:00):
over and over again. In What's Fair on the Air,
Hindershot writes Joseph Welch's famous rhetorical question, have you no
sense of decency? Sir at long Last, was not only
televised live by both ABC and Dumont on Day thirty
of the hearings, but also repeated dozens of times on
radio and TV. That night. Following McCarthy's attack on General
George C. Marshall, former President Harry S. Truman appeared on

(07:23):
Edward R. Murrow's See It Now and expressed his own
feelings about McCarthy. The man who made that attack isn't
fit to shine General Marshall's shoes. Damn Yeah, it's a
pretty it's a pretty sick burn, actually he meant it. No.

Speaker 4 (07:39):
That's interesting though, because it's like, I think when we
were growing up and we learned about this air of
mccarthy'sm but it seems so like inherently absurd and you're
just thinking, like, how could that ever happen? Like isn't
it just so obvious? And then you're here and you're like, well, yeah,
people don't pay attention to the longer thing. They need

(08:00):
the sound bites, sadly.

Speaker 2 (08:01):
Yeah, they need the sound bites, right, and it like
there's actually some benefits to that. It's not all downsides.

Speaker 3 (08:08):
Now.

Speaker 2 (08:09):
One of the things this does, the fact that this
is kind of destroys McCarthy. It makes Hunt furious, and
it makes him furious because he becomes convinced this evidence
of the liberal media and the pernicious left wing bias
within the media. Right, it's a communist organist, you know.
And this is kind of where the liberal media as

(08:30):
a conservative bugbear starts, right, not just with Hunt, but
it starts as a result in a big way, Like
it's majorly supercharged by the reaction to the McCarthy hearings,
and a Hunt is one of the people leading the
charge and attacking the liberal media right and for HL.
Hunt One of the things I think is really important
to point out today if you listen to like what

(08:51):
Barry Weiss and like the free fucking Press people say,
they all talk about Edward R. Murrow too, is like
we need to get back to a time when newsmen
were political and you know, they just were telling people
the truth and they were trusted. And in those days,
you know, Americans knew that they could rely on their
you know, the people giving them the news, to not
just be in it for personal political gain. It wasn't

(09:12):
just some like wokest bullshit. If Edward R. Murrow were
reporting the day, they would call him woke. And I
know that because they called him woke in the fifties
like H. L. Hunting called him a woke leftist communist Infiltrader,
And they called him it because he was deliberately and
aggressively multicultural. Right to quote from Hinderschott's article, Murrow was

(09:36):
fiercely patriotic. His America was an inclusive, democratic place in
which citizens rationally discussed their problems. When Murrow took Sea
it Now's cameras to Korea for Christmas, in nineteen fifty two,
he celebrated the sacrifices of the troops. Murrow also made
a point of picturing an integrated platoon that included not
only whites and blacks, but also a Chinese American and
a Korean American, a gesture that surely rubbed some viewers

(10:00):
the wrong way. Right, and fucking they attack like the
because the newsletter for Lifelines isn't subject to the fairness doctrine,
they're able to be really political. And in that newsletter,
Hunt calls him chow In Cronkite and calls Dan rather
ho chi rather Right. Again, they are calling these guys

(10:22):
fucking communists. Back then too, like Walter Cronkite was never
seen as a totally unbiased and fair man by conservatives.
They hated him. Just really want to make that point
as clearly as I can.

Speaker 4 (10:37):
It's so exhausting because and they keep telling us that
these are the people that we can reach.

Speaker 3 (10:41):
We just got to give them, just give them a
little bit of more information.

Speaker 4 (10:44):
It's like they have the information, they don't like it,
they don't want it.

Speaker 2 (10:48):
No, they thought Edward R. Murrow was a communist because
he pointed out that there were fucking Chinese people in
the US army, right, like, and.

Speaker 3 (10:56):
Had been so for ages.

Speaker 4 (10:58):
Yeah, Chinese asn't been here longer than some of these
other than Trump's family.

Speaker 2 (11:03):
These people have always hated this kind of shit, right,
always hated the idea that we're multicultural country and anyone
who celebrates it, even if they're celebrating it in the
context of supporting the Korean War. Right, he gets called
a communist.

Speaker 3 (11:16):
And supporting the troops and like.

Speaker 2 (11:19):
Right, doesn't matter, no communism. So this the fact that
fucking Hunt goes so crazy after Mureau and it gets
so pissed about the reaction to the McCarthy hearings gets
him in trouble. Democratic congressmans start being like, wait a second,
he's getting like public funding basically for making non partisan media,

(11:40):
and this is what they're calling non partisan congressman. When
Congressman points out that Hunts tied to Joseph McCarthy, and
there's complaints that the fact form is benefiting from its
tax free status despite being very biased, and they start
being investigations. Lee, his former staffer, was made FCC commissioner
in nineteen fifty four, which further upset Democrats who are like, well,
now his guy is controlling the FCC, so of course

(12:02):
he won't get attacked. Now, what's weird is Lee's actually
a really fair minded FCC commissioner. He does a lot
of stuff that pisses off the right. He's actually like
surprisingly good at the job, I think and Hindershott proposes
that the whole brujaja does more to make Hunt famous
as a right wing crank than it does to actually
help his shows. Right that like the fact that he's

(12:23):
tied to Lee and the fact that like he's like,
there's this uproar about it, he becomes known as being
like a crank. Like, it does not spread. He doesn't
make his his ideas more popular. Now past this point
because of how many people get pissed off about this,
Hunt becomes increasingly famous, right, He's now someone who is
known and talked about for his political activism. And he

(12:46):
does not like this his stage fright right now because
he's got stage fright right, putting himself out there right.
In fact, like his as a young man, his stage
fright is so bad that he wants swallows a bunch
of ties to make himself sick to get out of
giving a speech when he's like a younger businessman. So
the fact that like the eyes of America are now

(13:07):
on him and he's being accused of partisan instigation fucks
hunt up. And in nineteen fifty six he shuts down
the Facts Forum to avoid controversy, not because he thinks
he's done anything wrong, because he just doesn't like being
under the gun like that, right, Like he's just anxious.
So yeah, he's a whiss. He does launch immediately another

(13:29):
series called Answers for American This actually launched, I think
a little before the Fact Form quits. It's a public
service program that's broadcast on twenty two TV stations in
three hundred and sixty radio stations broadcast live. This was
a half hour panel discussion on ABC that featured a
mix of liberals and conservatives. There's your liberal panel and
your conservative panel. Repping the left was former Congressman George

(13:52):
Combs and New York You professor Charles Hodges. Opposed to
them were William F. Buckley and a rotating guest. If
you don't know William F. Buckley, he is like the
proto Ben Shapiro. He's an essayist and a public debater
who gets really famous going on TV to debate politely
liberals right about the issues of the day. Right, That's

(14:15):
how he's known, and that he is still to this
day like liberal, like centrist liberal democrats. Buckley is like
the the ideal of the conservative intellectual. He's one of
the good ones. Right, He's a he was not, but
he's like respectable, Like this is how you should do it.
Look at the respect he always showed the people he
was debating alongside.

Speaker 3 (14:32):
Their nostalgia goggles.

Speaker 4 (14:33):
For him is always just like we used to be
able to have these conversations in peace.

Speaker 2 (14:38):
Yeah, and when it like, by the way, his son
is like a major pro degia activist, Like these are
not polite ever, but yeah, like that's that's his space
in the American mind. Right now, you can already see
in the way the show is set up how some
of the bias creeps in. This is supposed to be
two liberals and two conservatives. Seems non biased. But why
is one of the conservatives always a rotating Is it?

(15:00):
Maybe because that makes the conservative seem more dynamic and
the liberals seem like it's just these two old hokey
college professor types. Right, Buckley also is a He's a
great performer. William F. Buckley's one of the first media
trained guys who exists. Right and the liberals that Hunt
picks are not super charismatic figures. As hinders shot rights

(15:24):
comes did not farewell into the harsh studio lights, and
although most of the participants chain smoked, it was only
Combs to whom the smoke seemed to cling in a
thick film in his three piece suit with carnation. Butenaiir
he affused a stereotypical East Coast liberal establishment PERSONA Professor
Hodges was articulate, but often came across as a cartoonish
liberal intellectual or worse, an old wind bag. Buckley spoke

(15:46):
in easily digestible conservative soundbites such as we would rather
die than be enslaved by communism. Right again, you can
see the evolution how this is even a little more
disguised as non biased while still pushing a very clear
ideological line. And this is such a good idea. Fox
News is going to rip this basic model off decades

(16:08):
later for their hit show Handity and Colms. The same
basic premise supplies the esthetic of debate, but with the
certainty that one side is going to win and the
enemy is always going to look like a big stupid dope.
And you also make sure that the conservative looks, you know,
like young and put together, while the liberal looks like,
you know, like a nerd. Right, I'm going a photo

(16:29):
of Hannity and Combs for the viewers, but like Sean Hannity,
the start of that fullhead of hair, you know, younger
guy Combs ball, you know, right. So, in the age
of social media, this idea reached its final form with
guys like Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk and I forget the

(16:50):
name of the change my mind guy who would go
on the college campuses with the you know whatever. Yeah,
I forget a fucking yeah. They all got failed marriages
except for well, no, I guess not. I guess they
don't all have failed marriage. It's just that guy. I
forget his name, but then I don't care to remember it.
But yeah, and you and in this instead of like
you don't even have like the boring hockey professors, now

(17:12):
you have like the liberals and left are represented by
like this carousel of college kids that you pick out
because they clearly don't have media training and they're not
like good at debating with a professional broadcaster on television, right, Like.

Speaker 4 (17:24):
It's like the more septem piercings, the better, speaking as
the septum piercing.

Speaker 2 (17:28):
Ef ye, are they a little high?

Speaker 3 (17:29):
Good?

Speaker 2 (17:30):
Get him in here? Yeah? You know who else is
a little high? The sponsors that support this podcast. You know,
every single one thing we guarantee is that every advertiser
on this show. Just the second I said, just just
sparked up a fat blunt, every single one of them,
especially the Washington State Highway Patrol. If you hear that

(17:51):
ad you know, the whole Washington State Highway Patrol is
blazing a bone right now, no notes, and we're back
talking about the Facts Forum. Well that's dead. And anyway,
two years after he kills the Facts for him, Hunt

(18:12):
starts a new series, Lifeline. Now this is not He's
not this time. He's not going to try to get
the tax breaks by being balanced, right, he decides that's
not worth, you know, the trouble. So I'm not going
to claim that we're not. We don't have like a line. Instead,
in order to avoid getting in trouble, I'm not going
to reference political parties or political tendencies at all. I'm

(18:34):
not going to say the Democrats or the left. I'm
not going to say Republicans or the right or conservatism. Instead,
I'm going to have I'm going to have this fucking
preacher guy come up here, the Reverend Wayne Poucher, who
was If you want to know who this guy's background,
he was a former campaign manager for Strom Therman's successful
nineteen fifty four campaign.

Speaker 3 (18:53):
Well he's conservative.

Speaker 2 (18:57):
Yeah, So Poucher's first just kind of less aggressive than
Smooth was. Right, He's he speaks more and about religion
and stuff. He's not talking about the left being evil. Instead,
he talks about everyone instead of referring to them like
by their political terms. He calls them the mistaken, and
he calls the good guys the constructive people. Right, And

(19:19):
so he gets away from these like fairness standards by
not talking about the left and the right but talking
about the mistaken and the constructive. And he speaks more
like parables about like right and wrong. And it's very
clear that he's talking about politics, but he's not using
political terms, so it kind of slips by right and
in nineteen Yeah, it's really annoying. Now Hunt does an

(19:40):
interview with Playboy in nineteen sixty six where he talks
about why he's not using why this new lifeline doesn't
use the term conservative, and why he doesn't like using
that as propaganda anymore, and he says conservative is an
unfortunate word. It denotes mossback, reactionary and old fogyism, right,
So I don't want to seem like an old fogy.
So I'm just gonna talk about the mistaken and the
constructive people right now. I think this is a mixed success.

(20:04):
This this show is never very wildly popular for like
legitimate reasons. A lot of people listen because sometimes it's
the only thing on the air in a lot of areas, right,
so it gets listeners from that. But it's kind of boring.
It sounds much mine. It sounds a lot more boring.
Smooth was at least exciting. He was aggressive, right, This dude,

(20:24):
Poucher is like boring, and he mostly talks about God.
And he ends every broadcast with don't forget to pray.
He makes that, he makes that his his his tagline,
because that means Hunt can claim an exemption on the
basis of running a religious organization for text purposes. It's
a good shit, good shit. By all accounts, Lifeline was

(20:45):
just as conservative as The Facts Forum, but a lot
more boring because Hunt is scared of pissing people off.
Now he's also making a lot of other propaganda. He is,
by dollar amount, the number one producer of right wing
propaganda in like the fifties through the sixties. He is
publishing newspapers too, and magazines, including the newspaper the magazine
Human Events, which goes on to be pretty popular. He

(21:07):
has a regular column in that he sells to a
bunch of different newspapers that he writes called Hunt for Truth.
Oh get it, you get it?

Speaker 3 (21:16):
I hate that. That's a good name. I mean, I
wouldn't watch it, but I know someone's dad.

Speaker 1 (21:20):
Ye.

Speaker 2 (21:22):
So the Nation summarizes the state of his propaganda operation
in nineteen sixty four this way, hl Hunt, in addition
to being very probably the richest man in America, is
very probably the country's most powerful propagandist for the extreme right.
The main vehicle for his brand of conservatism today is Lifeline,
a radio program originating in Washington, DC and daily reaching
an estimated audience of five million persons in forty five states.

(21:46):
It has heard over three hundred and thirty one stations,
among which are twenty five percent of the nation's clear
channel outlet. That's a lot just because again there's not
much else to put on there, and this is something
the conservatives will learn from. A lot of where we
are right now politically is the result of the fact
that for years, like twenty some years, liberals kind of

(22:07):
ignored talk radio. For the most part. There were a
couple attempts to get into it, but the it was
and it was just assumed that like, well, the fact
like more people listen and trust like the news and
you know, magazines and newspapers and TV news and you know,
all of that is more liberal than it is conservative.
And like talk radio was out there being the only

(22:27):
thing in tens of millions of Americans ears for hours
as they're commuting driving all across the country. I grew up,
I lost and listened so many hundreds hours of Michael
Savage and Rustling them, all these guys, and it made
a really solid core. People wonder like, why is there
this core of like thirty percent of the country that
will never reconsider supporting Trump. Oh, let's talk radio is

(22:49):
a big part of why yeah, and Hunt isn't good.
He doesn't figure quite out how to make it work
that way, but he's the first guy who really realizes
why talk radio is valuable and everything that comes after
is at least influenced by that.

Speaker 4 (23:05):
And it also shows how the left is always really
so supportive of institutions and like the power of institutions
that they just won't even make a solid attempt because
like it was how many years into yeah, yeah, yeah that,
like liberals were like, oh, we should have a Joe
Rogan thing. It's like a podcasting thing or YouTube and

(23:25):
then Twitch it's like, oh, we should we should finally
have someone in this space, and it's like, yeah, tell
me you invested in such.

Speaker 2 (23:33):
You can influence people's politics by making them listen to
a crazy guy for hours. Maybe you should have your
own crazy asshole that people like to listen to.

Speaker 3 (23:41):
I don't know, or someone entering that work.

Speaker 2 (23:45):
I'm not a big we need a Joe Rogan of
for fucking the Democratic Party. It just doesn't work that way.
You're never going to succeed doing that. If you're just like,
let's make our own Democratic Joe, you're always going to fail.
If that's how you think about it. But what you
do need is like fuck and people who are crazy
popular that a lot of folks listen to, who are
talking about politics in a way that is like usable

(24:09):
to you. And when you see people like that, instead
of discarding them and like hating them and running away
from them, you should try to find ways, like the
smart strategies to try to find ways to benefit from
that and to like make them might make that useful
to you, as opposed to pretending nobody cares about this
stuff and they're just assholes talking on the internet. They
are just assholes talking on the internet. But unfortunately it

(24:31):
matters right exactly, I say, as an asshole talking on
the internet, Hey I do it.

Speaker 3 (24:36):
That's my full time job on YouTube.

Speaker 4 (24:37):
It's like, I definitely think it's so frustrating because like
the right, what it is able to do with having
so much young talent is really have like a lot
of hyper visibility in those spaces whereas like you know,
you can only be academic for so long, and it's
time period where like no one wants.

Speaker 2 (24:56):
To read right exactly now. The Lifeline Advisory board included
the CEO of Sears, Robert Wood and John Wayne, but
it also hosted several ministers. Yeah, John Wayne, baby, I'm
helping helping to shape the future at top radio. The

(25:16):
religious right was not a thing yet in an organized
political way. That doesn't start until like the start of
the seventies yet, I mean, yeah, that's not really a
massive Again, Hunt is going to be one of the
people who helps push that, even though he is not
really religious and doesn't really care about that stuff. He
is again one of the earlier conservatives to see, oh
you know what if I marry my feelings on tax

(25:39):
policy and like stopping people from voting with all of
these like weird religious conservative like bug bears like abortion,
I can make those people support my crazy tax shit
and use that as a political weapon too. Right. So
again Hunt foresees this. He tries to use Christianity to
spread his own anti government message. His first wife, Lyda,

(26:03):
dies in the fifties, and after he gets with his well,
she's not really a wife, but he joins her Baptist church.
His pastor, Reverend Chris Well, was a howling reactionary. In
nineteen sixty, Hunt printed up an anti Catholic sermon chris
Well had written and handed it out at the DNC
because JFK is running for president. It included this line,

(26:25):
the election of a Catholic as president would mean the
end of religious liberty in America, like you know, the
thing that happened. Hunt dedicated numerous columns to Kennedy, who
he warned would sell the nation out to communists and
or the Pope. His real issue was very funny to me,
is that like Moor and Or, he doesn't hate JFK

(26:47):
because like there, you know, JFK is more of like
a liberal progressive and he's very conservative. He hates JFK specifically,
and the Catholic stuff is like he's using that because
he thinks it'll be useful getting other people to hate JFK.
He hates JFK because JFK supports reviewing the oil depletion
Allowance and changing it to end that loophole that lets

(27:08):
oil men not pay taxes.

Speaker 4 (27:11):
Right, and there it is, you're gonna say, because it's
so hot, and he was like, I can't have that.

Speaker 2 (27:16):
But then it's his only real political issue is the
oil depletion allowance. Everything else, all the cultural stuff that
he talks about. I mean, he does believe in the
anti communism, but ninety percent of his propaganda is about
keeping the oil depletion allowance. Everything else, like the working
with the religious right, it's all to protect the oil
depletion allowance because he loves that shit.

Speaker 4 (27:40):
He's like, I can excuse communism, but I draw the
line at my oil allowance, me paying.

Speaker 2 (27:44):
Taxes per the nation. When Hunt talks of his country's troubles,
he does not always sound funereal, But when he discusses
the oil depletion allowance and possible legislative threats to it,
his face takes on the stricken blankness of one who
has just heard the last trump of depletion allowances for
all natural resources. He said recently, but without the depletion
allowance for oil, we are utterly ruined. Again, you're the

(28:07):
richest man on earth. You would just have to pay taxes.
He's got some support the roads and stuff. Yeah, he's
got so many kids. This is why Hunt promptly had
two hundred thousand reprints of Chris Wall's sermon made and
mailed out, after which he sat back and hoped to
watch a wave of aroused Protestantism wash Kennedy out of
the running right like that's that's that's at least as

(28:30):
far as the nation is concerned, Like that's what his
goal is here. It doesn't work.

Speaker 3 (28:36):
Sadly Nixon was on the docket.

Speaker 2 (28:38):
Yeah, it really What happens is this just pisses people off.
There's a bunch of editorials about like this guy's trying
to force Kennedy out because he doesn't want to pay taxes,
and it just kind of pisses every and and a
lot of people get angry that like he's trying to
make people hysteric about an anti Catholic. He's trying to
use it. He's trying to like rustle up a bunch
of anti Catholic bigotry, so who doesn't have to pay

(28:59):
tax Like, people recognize this and call it out, and
it pisses folks off. It draws the Senate's attention again too.
They point out that like, hey, this flyer you distributed
the DNC, it's actually a federal crime to distribute anonymous
circulars after the start of a campaign, to influence a
political campaign in this way, and you did not note
at all who paid for this. You committed a crime.

(29:21):
There's an uproar, there's a Senate Subcommittee investigation. Hunt just hides,
like he panics, and he like basically goes on the
lamb a little bit, and he just pretends he can't
make the meeting. He's like hiding, So Chris Well has
to take it on the chin in the Senate Subcommittee
meeting and like actually talk to Congress, and Chris weall
like pretends he doesn't know anything about Hunt's money and stuff.

(29:43):
When Hunt finally surfaced again, he admits that he paid
for the leaflet, but he's like, oh, I didn't do
it to hurt JFK. I did it to help lbj's
campaign because I'm really pro LBJ Texas.

Speaker 3 (29:55):
That's all.

Speaker 2 (29:56):
That's the only reason I did it. He also claimed
that I didn't run away to have being investigated. I
ran away because I had a book to write for
the good of the nation. Like I come up with
that idea of those book that's really going to change everything.
So I was just like writing. I just didn't I
couldn't make it to Congress. Sorry about that, guys. Now,
he did write a.

Speaker 3 (30:14):
Book, the forty eight Laws of Power.

Speaker 2 (30:17):
Yeah, forty No, it's even weirder, it's even sillier. So
In nineteen sixty, he publishes his first novel, Alpaca, which
is a work of right wing utopian fiction. The book
took place in an ideal society that followed Hunt's plan
for a wealth based voting system Hindu Schott describes in
his perfect World, political discussion could only take place via

(30:37):
the printed word. Discussing politics on radio and TV, or
speech making before an audience of more than two hundred
people was outlawed as inflammatory. It was widely reported that
Hunt had hired someone to write the romantic parts of Alpaca,
as he was only interested in the politics. When the
book breaks from political exegesis, we find our right wing
lovers spouting inane dialogue such as I am putty in

(30:58):
your hands. I needed to read this book one of
these days, Oh my god. Yeah, And there's like a
bunch of cool stuff in there. The book was published
by H. L. Hunt Publishing, a company he had created
to publish phone books. So just as like a side business,
he has a phone book company that he has published
his shitty novel. That writer for That Nation piece notes

(31:22):
that by the mid sixties, a lot of Dallas newsmen
had come to believe that Hunt had based the protagonist
of his shitty novel on an idealized version of himself.
And here's one relevant line from the novel, And this
is about the protagonist. He had burning convictions, but there
were few in al Paka. He told himself who could
agree with him? Right? Like he's this iconic class genius rebel,

(31:42):
and other people just don't see how brilliant he is.
You know, it's very much Hunt thinking of about himself.

Speaker 3 (31:47):
Yeah, he's like, I got to write someone who's so smart.

Speaker 2 (31:50):
Yeah, the smartest man alive. The article goes on to
describe the model constitution that Hunt presents in his novel,
quote a constitution that gives each person and a quota
of votes based primarily on how much he pays in taxes.
There are other ways of getting votes under the Hunt plan.
If you are old enough to draw a retirement pay
but refuse to accept it, you get two extra votes.

(32:11):
If you are a government worker and refuse to accept
more than fifty percent of your pay, you get one
extra vote. On the other hand, anyone receiving welfare or
sick pay from the government gets no vote at all.

Speaker 3 (32:21):
Oh, okay, no no one, no.

Speaker 2 (32:26):
No, just rich guys get a lot of votes.

Speaker 3 (32:30):
That's crazy.

Speaker 2 (32:32):
Now. A book reviewer interviewing Hunt says to him after
reading his book, it's a kind of fascist democracy if
you get what I mean, and Hunt later in the
interview says, you're the only one who understood what I
was getting at. I think it's in reference to another line,
but it's it's very telling.

Speaker 3 (32:48):
He's like, yeah, i'd see me.

Speaker 2 (32:51):
So Hunt sends copies of his stupid book to every
sitting congressman, along with a number of foreign heads of state,
and quote many colleges. He brags that he has a
sequel planned which would present an even better constitution, as
long as you could just get a couple of weeks
to finish it. And he never publishes this book, but
the working title was your Topia.

Speaker 3 (33:12):
Not Outpacka.

Speaker 2 (33:14):
He does eventually do a sequel to Alpaka, but he
doesn't publish your Topia. Great stuff, great, very sixties.

Speaker 4 (33:23):
You have your own publishing house and you still can't
finish a second novel.

Speaker 2 (33:27):
Nah, No, man, it's hard. Look, hey, I'm morgan on
that one myself. It's tough. You know what else is hard?
It's hard for me when I see people not giving
the proper amount of respect and love to the products
and services that support this podcast. Why don't we all
just think about them and how nice they are and

(33:47):
also listen to their ads for a second. We're back.
So one of Hunt's dearest beliefs is that letters to
the editor are the part of the paper that people
read most often, but like just skim over the other articles.

(34:08):
They want to read letters to the editor because people
have a natural curiosity over what other ordinary people have
to say. That's hl Hunt's like most deeply held belief
and he's not an ordinary person. But he also thinks
that if you write a letter to the editor, people
assume you are. And so for most of his public
life he's writing like, sometimes more than a dozen letters

(34:29):
to the editor per day, and he has a small
army of secretaries who will mimiograph them and will mail
them to hundreds of newspapers. So he just has like
a rant about politics or fucking taxes or kids these days,
and he'll write a letter to the editor and he'll
send it to every newspaper he can think of, or
his secretaries can think of to get it printed. Right.

Speaker 4 (34:50):
I'm sometimes I'm so glad I don't have money, because
this is like, this is the impulses of like me
writing to like teen volk be like, you don't understand
the sexiest man in America is not Blake Shelton.

Speaker 2 (35:03):
Yeah, d're teen vogue. There are too many states, please
eliminate three. I am not a crank, yeah.

Speaker 3 (35:08):
Exactly, Hunt, that guy, I'm a hip kid.

Speaker 2 (35:11):
Yeah, yeah, I'm cool. He thinks that like this will
this will really get Americans, trick them into believing my politics.
They'll just read all these letters to the editor and
assume I'm a normal guy, and they won't be able
to they won't be able to catch it. Now, this
leads me to a very funny quote from Heather Hindershot's
book quote respectable businessmen gave money to the causes in

(35:32):
which they believed Hunt wouldn't even give to local Dallas charities,
much less political campaigns. Asked to contribute to diabetes research,
Hunt responded, as summarized in an FBI memo, that society
would be better off if persons who were permanently disabled
or physically incapacitated and unable to financially care for themselves
were let to die rather than to be a burden
on society what drink Okay, yeah he.

Speaker 3 (35:57):
Loved he loved Buck v.

Speaker 2 (35:58):
Bell.

Speaker 3 (35:59):
He was like he sure did.

Speaker 2 (36:02):
Uh yeah, yeah, he's he's like just a just the
kind of piece of shit you would imagine like perfectly.
So now I will say this is all frustrating, Like
the fact that he's trying to brute force his horrible,
genocidal politics into the world is disgusting. And there's like

(36:23):
there's so many good quotes, like one of the Nation.
He's like, I'm slow, but I'm the best writer I know.
Like he's certain about that, even though again he's not
he's not great, right, Like he's not a particularly good writer.
And editors of these newspapers that he's trying to like
get letters to kind of call him on his bullshit.

(36:43):
One Texas editor told The Nation Hunt earns in one
hour about twenty thousand to twelve thousand dollars. That's what
I earn in a year. He probably spends an hour
dictating each letter that comes in here. I like to
cut them in half because that means I'm putting about
five thousand dollars of Hunt money in the waste basket.

Speaker 3 (37:01):
Bars.

Speaker 2 (37:02):
Yeah. I love that, Yeah, I love it. That's funny. Yeah.
So in nineteen fifty nine, Hunt started a health food
and supplement business. Ah, you got it. If you're a
right wing he's like the first of these though. You know,
he really is.

Speaker 4 (37:18):
A trailblazer, Like all these bitches are his sons, Like truly.

Speaker 2 (37:22):
What's interesting is he invins I didn't realize this. He
invents the Alex Jones strategy where he has his like
right wing propaganda station and he invents a supplement in
health food business and it's the only advertiser on his
radio show and TV shows, so it exists to sell
the products right, right, So the sole advertiser of Lifeline

(37:45):
is his health products business, and his favorite product is
gastro Magic, an anti gas pill that he was so
proud of. His office is described by that the nation
author is basically empty, but there's a plaque in it
made with the letter from a happy customer being like,
thank you for making these gas pills. That's like the

(38:05):
only decoration he has.

Speaker 4 (38:07):
He's like, this is my true print and Joy, not
one of my kids.

Speaker 2 (38:10):
True bride and Joy, not any of my fifteen kids,
Fuck those kids.

Speaker 3 (38:15):
This is my only child.

Speaker 2 (38:16):
Yeah, it's so fun I want to quote from Heather
again because she's gonna line about this. One politician was
lured to his office expecting a contribution, but left only
with an ample supply of Hunt's gastro Magic indigestion pills. Another,
George Herbert Walker Bush, met with Hunt in nineteen sixty
two hoping for a contribution to his congressional campaign. His
heart must have skipped a beat at the end of
the meeting when Hunt discreetly gave him a bulging and envelope.

(38:39):
It was filled with Lifeline pamphlets.

Speaker 3 (38:42):
That's funny.

Speaker 2 (38:45):
Oh, it's so funny.

Speaker 3 (38:47):
Oh my god, that's such a control.

Speaker 2 (38:49):
He's such a weird crank about his health food business,
which again he's crazy rich from oil. This is not
a meaningful amount of money, but it's clearly his passion.
Like one of the things he's famous for. He drives
himself to work even when he's the richest man alive,
and he's covered his car in bumper stickers advertising Lifeline
and like his gastro magic pills, like a crazy man.

(39:11):
And he'll he's try because he's like this, will advertise it,
People will buy it if they see it on my car.
The Nation notes sometimes he circles the block an extra
time before parking to let Dallas pedestrians have one more look.
And he's like making his his his his employees put
ship on their cars. He's like, no, you got to

(39:31):
help the business.

Speaker 3 (39:32):
He's his own.

Speaker 2 (39:33):
He's he's active, like he's like a poor guy. He's
so funny.

Speaker 3 (39:42):
It's giving.

Speaker 5 (39:43):
I'm selling my mixtape out of my trunk, Like what.

Speaker 2 (39:46):
Are God doing right? He's acting like a broke dude
who gets to do an MLM. It's really funny. And
he's the richest man alive.

Speaker 5 (39:54):
Like he look like he would be a modern day
like Hagarly Yeah, m yeah.

Speaker 2 (40:01):
He's a Hunt in the feet.

Speaker 3 (40:02):
You're feeling a little ghasty right now. Don't worry, guys,
I got you, I gotcha.

Speaker 5 (40:08):
I have this really great supplement. You would only have
to subscribe, like, oh, I know, we haven't talked since
high school.

Speaker 2 (40:13):
But literally, and he is he is always when he's
meeting with people, weirdly who always want his money, he'll
just start going on these rants about his different products.
One attorney who worked with him, he says that like
as soon as Hunt walks in the room, he runs
up and shakes his hand and says very quickly, Hello,
I am hl Hunt, the world's richest man. And these
are gastro magic which I make, so they must be good.

(40:35):
Try some. It's just like crazy person stuff, dude. So
one of Hunt's kind of downfall moments is that, as
I noted, he doesn't like Kennedy, right, he Lifeline attacks him.
He attacks him in his column Hunt for the Truth,
and he's like trying to drum up like religious hatred

(40:56):
to attack him.

Speaker 4 (40:57):
Right.

Speaker 2 (40:57):
He's also supporting Barry Goldwater, you know, that's he loves
Barry Goldwater. But so unique, as you all know. On
November twenty second, nineteen sixty three, Bernard Montgomery Sanders shot
President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. Right, And this
happens to happen like right after he'd run like a

(41:19):
column and episodes of Lifeline talking about like the need
of the Second Amendments so that like people could kill
government leaders who try to oppress them. So he's just
put this out and then Kennedy gets shot and the
FBI questions him and members of his family. He's like,
if you go into like there's a lot of conspiracies

(41:39):
that put Hunt at the center of like the conspiracy
to kill Kennedy. There's a couple of weird things in there.
For one thing, the guy who kills Oswald, Jack Ruby,
had Hunt's name and his address book. Although Ruby doesn't
seem to have liked Hunt because Ruby was a real
far right crank and a Hunt is like just in

(42:00):
it for his own weird right wing beliefs. So I
don't think like Ruby doesn't actually like him very much
because he's not a team player basically. So there's a
lot of allegations, but the family received so many death
threats from these in fact that like the FBI gives
them like a security detail at one point because people
are so convinced he's involved. He gets weirder and crazier

(42:24):
as he ages his Dallas I even mentioned this. His
Dallas home. I think it's in white Rock Lake is
a replica of George Washington's Mount Vernon estate that's five
times as big. Like that's his house.

Speaker 3 (42:37):
Oh my god, no daddy issues up the butt.

Speaker 2 (42:42):
The mother of all daddy issues. And he's got this
fucking huge, crazy rich man house with like a billboard
that he puts on his front lawn for Lifeline, and
he has this up in his fancy neighborhood until the
neighbors can plain, and at which point he replaces it
with a crude hand painted sign advertising Lifeline. Oh that's

(43:02):
the strangest vibes.

Speaker 3 (43:04):
Like he's a like you selling lemonade.

Speaker 2 (43:07):
Yeah. Now. Despite putting more money into right wing media
than anyone, Hunt's influence falls rapidly in the late sixties
from its peak in the mid fifties, partly because he
refuses to work or cooperate with anyone and has no
interest in being part of the conservative movement. As such,
he wants conservatives to agree with him because he tries
to be a kingmaker. He fancies himself won and he

(43:29):
becomes a major backer of Barry Goldwater, and when Goldwater
is just that has the shit kicked out of him.
In nineteen sixty four. One reason why, according to the media,
because there's a bunch of articles about like why didn't
Goldwater do better? And one reason that's posited by a
lot of pundits is that hl Hunt kind of poisoned
the campaign right, not just Hunt, because the John Birch

(43:52):
Society is also behind Goldwater, and people don't like them.
But it gets to the point where, according to Heather
Hindershot quote, even the rumor of an association with Hunt
could be damning for a candidate, especially after Hunt was
investigated in connection with the Kennedy assassination. And yeah, like
it's it's you know, good stuff. His sons are kind

(44:13):
of involved in his downfall as a political influencer too.
His son, Bunker Hunt, had financed a John Birch Society
newsletter that had attacked Kennedy in really vicious terms and
was made a lot of people suspicious, and then one
of Jack Ruby's friends. The reason why Ruby had Hunt's
name is that he had approached Lamar Hunt to try

(44:34):
to get a job in a bowling alley that Hunt owned.
So his fail sons are part of why he stops
becoming as influential. His attempts to co opt Christianity for
his own ends are also way too clumsy to work
very well. His daughter June, who later becomes like an
influential Christian media figure, even attacks him for his hypocrisy

(44:57):
and constant cheating. As the story goes, Hunt kind of
snaps back at her, I'm not Christian, I don't have
to go by Christian ethics, and then he sends her
ass to boarding school. When his other daughter, Swanee, makes
similar complaints about his womanizing, he tells her King Solomon
had seven hundred wives and that's in the Bible.

Speaker 3 (45:16):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (45:17):
So great guy, great parent, good job. As the seventies
Dawn Hunts in his eighties. He continues to wear the
same blue suit every day, but he only dry cleans
the pants to save money, so eventually the top and
bottom are totally different colors. Such a freak.

Speaker 4 (45:35):
He doesn't have to live like this, literally, Such an
odd guy.

Speaker 2 (45:42):
So his son Hassey, who he talked about, never recovers
from that mental break. He's ill and Hunt spends Hunt
keeps his He's the only of his children that Hunt
has a picture of in his office, I think, because
he feels really bad about this, and he spends a
lot of his life desperately but incompetently trying to help
Passy to get better. The nation rights Hunted sought various

(46:02):
magic cures for the boy. One day, the answer was valium,
the next prostitutes. Finally, a lobotomy took the edge off
of Hassie's violent fits, but just a bit so just
a great dad, just so, just a great dad. Triple threat,
triple threat father. He develops increasingly strange health beliefs as
he aged and became an almost religious advocate of creeping.

(46:26):
Svie's going to show you a picture of this, because
anytime anyone asked him, he would get down to demonstrate
this exercise technique that he's fallen in love with that's
basically a crab walk. He gets down on his knees
and his hands and knaves and just like walks across
the ground. He fucking And there's like there's like a
weird kind of like yoga component to it, Like he

(46:47):
must have found this in some book or another. But
he is obsessed with creeping. The New York Times quotes
him as saying creeping is probably the second best exercise
in the world, next to swimming. It's perfect.

Speaker 3 (46:59):
Oh all right, he's a creeper. He's a super creeper.

Speaker 2 (47:03):
Yeah, yeah, fucking he loves creeping. He lives in his
last years with his second family in that Mount Vernon
home or third family I think actually, and he spends
a lot of time promoting health foods. He's got like
a vegetable garden, on his property and he eats mainly
these along with he has like a very weird diet.

(47:24):
He's a lot of just like bleon cubes, I think,
just like straight like flavor. So he's a freak. He's
a weirdo cool guy. Now, as I noted, his sons,
especially Nelson Bunker Hunt, are real anti strong anti communist.
Is Bunker is going to be a big George Wallace
supporter and a fascist like he's a real hardcore segregation

(47:48):
as fascist, giant piece of shit. Hunt also supports Governor
Wallace's campaign, but he dies on November twenty ninth, nineteen
seventy four. At the time of his death is as
valued at two billion dollars, which is split between his
two surviving ex wives, fifteen children, and many grandchildren. There
are years of probate battles, I'm sure. As a note

(48:12):
about his shitty ass sons, you should know one of
his sons, Lamar Hunt, founds the AFL, the American Football League,
and he's a major figure in professional tennis and soccer
in the US. So that's where the AFL comes. And
I want to quote from Hinderschot's article One last Time,
Herbert and Bunker Hunt had been caught attempting to corner
the world silver market. Could the crooks really have thought

(48:34):
that no one would notice an ongoing attempt to purchase
all the silver in the world. They were also entangled
in a wire tapping caper. It's wire tapping over like
their dad's. Like this is as a result of like
the fight for over, like his will and probate. Wow,
and yeah, Bunker is a hugely successful oil man. He's
becomes a major John Birch donors with his oil money

(48:58):
he helped, Like his company finds oil deposits in Libya
and I think Pakistan. I think they're also involved in
Saudi Rabied it like they are a lot of like
Arab oil in Middle Eastern oil, like his company is
involved in like getting the rights to and selling. He
also gives a quarter of a million dollars in cash
in a briefcase to George Wallace as a rainy day fund.

(49:21):
And he tries to bribe Curtis LeMay to become Wallace's
running mate, or he puts up like a trust fund
to convince Lamay to become Wallace's running mate. So he
just loves all of the worst fascist Bunker Hunt giant
piece of shit. So yeah, that's the end of Hunt's life.
One of his long he's probably his biggest ongoing contributions

(49:43):
to popular culture is that Bunker Hunt is such a giant,
famous piece of shit for all of his criminal activity
and weird business activity and oil money that he inspires.
The show Dallas. Dallas is based off of the Hunts. Yes, Jr.
Is based off of Bunker Hunt. Oh damn Like heavily

(50:05):
based off of Bunker Hunt, right, in part because he
gets in trouble for committing a bunch of crimes. Right, Yeah,
so at least we get to show Dallas.

Speaker 3 (50:13):
You know, I'll take it. Who'sha Jr. Was very big
for our parents.

Speaker 2 (50:17):
Yeah, Bernie Sanders, by the way, did a lot of
people don't know that anyway? Princess, how are you feeling
at the end of these episodes?

Speaker 4 (50:24):
I feel a great There's nothing like knowing the origins
of the war crimes that are being put out into
the world every day.

Speaker 2 (50:34):
Yeah, yeah, it's good. Yeah, war crimes, crimes against truth,
all this good stuff.

Speaker 3 (50:39):
Thank you so much for all of that amazing effort.
This was a great three part thank you.

Speaker 2 (50:43):
Part of We're just happy to have you here, you know,
happy to have you here talking about this real piece
of shit and his strange beliefs about the.

Speaker 4 (50:52):
World at his strange pills and his strange fifteen children.

Speaker 2 (50:56):
Wow.

Speaker 5 (50:58):
Anything you want to plug at the end to your princess?

Speaker 4 (51:00):
Oh yeah, just if you want to see some other funyappers.

Speaker 3 (51:05):
I have a YouTube channel.

Speaker 4 (51:06):
I talk about poulp culture, history, all kinds of fun things.

Speaker 3 (51:11):
And just happy to be here. Thank you guys so
much for having me.

Speaker 2 (51:15):
Excellent sweet thanks for coming along everybody. Yeah, all right, folks,
we're done.

Speaker 3 (51:21):
I'm gonna go.

Speaker 1 (51:22):
Pet dogs, bye bye.

Speaker 5 (51:28):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
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(51:49):
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