August 1, 2026 • 42 mins
Did you know you can become an honorary citizen of the United States? It's true -- but it isn't easy. Join the guys as they explore the life and times of the rare few who managed to become honorary citizens in the United States.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Fellow Ridiculous historians in the United States and abroad.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
We got to tell you. Sometimes we record an episode
that only becomes increasingly relevant as the years went on.
And I think in this one we were both surprised
that you can become an honorary citizen of the United States.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
M hm.
Speaker 3 (00:25):
And it ain't easy and it doesn't, at least in
the back in the day, just involve paying a bunch
of money for a gold credit card. Yeah, an honorary citizen,
much like getting an honorary degree from a university, definitely
was a thing that is part of ridiculous history. So
why don't we talk a little bit about the honorary
(00:46):
citizens of the United States.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome Ridiculous Historians.
(01:20):
Thanks for tuning in a little bit of background at
the top of the show. Today we have been gallivanting,
uh hither and yalling. Let's see. Uh No, where were
where were you recently?
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (01:33):
I was in Mauritania for a little while, and then
before that I went to Fraggle Rock, and then I
spent a little bit of time down at uh.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
In Little Australia.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Yeah, let's see I went to uh Texas, I pursued
some of my old SKA band dreams.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
What does that mean? Is Texas like Scott Central?
Speaker 1 (01:57):
No? No, this was after Texas. After Texas, I went
to Brussels, where my SKA band lives. It's a long story.
And then also, let's see between us, we've got Chicago,
Los Angeles, some other countries again, but we can't mention
those Fraggle Rock.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Was my far my favorite through Those little dozers are adorable.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
I think they're an authoritarian regime. I have serious problems
with their governments, that's fair, but they're still cut at buttons.
So so despite all of our travels, I gotta say,
it feels so good to be back in good old
Atlanta ga US. We are joined today by our guest producer,
(02:42):
Paul Mission Controlled decad. Let's give it up for him.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
In what we said, your name your nol I am
Even if we didn't, I still am.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
Okay, and I'm Ben.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Do we get that?
Speaker 2 (02:56):
You know, we don't need to have your name said
for you to have an identity.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
So that's true, that's true. But if you want to
be a citizen of the United States, there is some
paperwork involved, as well as some verbiage. If they're cited oath.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
Got to speak an oath, You gotta put your bloody
thumbprint on a document, sign your name and in blood.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
No, well, you know it's changed over time. You still
have to have interviews, you have to take citizenship tests.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Naturalization as what they call it, right mm hmm.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
And all three of us recording today and quite a
few of us listening today are citizens of the United States.
What's strange about this is that the United States is
one of the countries that gives you citizenship just for
being born here. Not every country is that way, but
(03:51):
if regardless of what your parents past is, et cetera,
if you were born on US soil typically for most
of history, that makes you a US citizen. However, you
and I started looking into a very a very strange story,
something about honorary citizenship. You know, this means that you're
(04:14):
allowing the US to kind of claim you. They're like,
all right, she or he is one of the good ones,
but they don't have to actually do anything, and you
don't have to do anything.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Getting an honorary degree, you know, just for being a
good guy.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
Like how a professor E. Meredith doesn't teach classes.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
Really, yeah, yeah, E Meredith just imply some sort of
like ephemeral kind of like honor, you know, or just
by virtue of being this luminary in the field, you
get to be this thing.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
Yes, exactly, and that sort of applies here as well.
I agree, I agree, and I think that's spot on,
because it would be cool to be an honorary citizen
of a country like I'd love to be an honorary
citizen of Baton or Vanuatu, which will show up in
a late episode. But in the case of the US,
we found out that is it is a real thing.
(05:06):
You can't have honorary citizenship if you don't want the
whole kit and kaboodle. The problem is that honorary citizenship
may be one of the most difficult things to achieve
in this country of ours.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
That's right. It is granted by an Act of Congress
and the President, and to this day, unless we're missing one,
only eight honorary citizenships have been bestowed the entire time.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Eight only eight. Here's what the State Department says about
honorary citizenship. Honorary citizenship does not carry with it the
rights and privileges of ordinary citizenship, and such status does
not confer any special entry, travel, or immigration benefits upon
the honorey or the honorees relatives and dependents.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
We're in Texas, weren't you, man.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
It also does not impose additional duties or responsibilities in
the United States or internationally on the honor read. It
is a strictly symbolic act and no oath is required.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
Aha, So it's not quite so it's literally just like
a wave of the hand and then it happens.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
Yeah, it's like a key to.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
This saying of the city. It's just like that, and
it's first of all you. Then they can give it
to you without your consent too, can't they.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
Yes, sort of the way that the Church of Louder
day Saints got in trouble for proxy baptisms.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Right, that's a whole can of worms there. But yeah,
that's the thing.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
None of these people are like asking for this as
as some sort of benefit or like it's going to
do something positive for their lives or they're going to
be able to use it in any functional way. It's
a strictly symbolic act that implies that this individual not
a citizen has done great things to aid our struggle
as a country. It's such an ada boy, And that's
why it's such a thin list, because it has to
(06:48):
be a lot like the burden of you know, do
goodery is quite high.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
That's true. That's true.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
So what we wanted to do today was explore the
stories of these eight honorary citizens, many of whom will
be familiar to you, some of whom may be deep cuts.
So let's get started with first and foremost, one of
the most pugnacious, uh, one of the most pugnacious aserbic
(07:17):
characters in modern European history, Winston Churchill, who is His
drunken escapades are worth an episode alone, I would say.
But Winston Churchill was the first foreign national to receive
honorary citizenship in the United States. Eight states this is
(07:39):
interesting had already granted him citizenship, just not the federal government,
which I didn't know was a thing that could happen.
You know, if you're I guess if you're the the
governor of New Mexico, or maybe you're the what's a
different state? What's the state? No one talks about? Delaware?
Fragile rock still not a state. Man, Well, that's legally
a territory telling you it's because they have tremendous not
(08:02):
human rights abuses, but fragle rights.
Speaker 3 (08:04):
You don't think they should get honorary statehood and just
for their contribution to popular culture?
Speaker 2 (08:09):
No, man, really, no, those war crimes are really bug
Have you.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
Read the UN report? No? O oh man, they're heavily redacted.
So yes they are, and they should be. I am
not a fan of puppet crime, which is why I
support Sesame Street.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
That's fair.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
But you can love them both, right, It's not a
pepsi coat thing. So yeah, I did not. I was
not aware that states could individually grant citizenship, but eight
states had already granted citizenship to Winston Churchill. His mother
was American, and this happened all before JFK and Congress
followed suit. So we have a quote from Kennedy in
(08:50):
his proclamation. Here's what he said about Winston Churchill.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
Yeah, this proclamation praised Churchill for his quote, bravery charity
in Valla both and WAW and peace have been a
flame of inspiration and freedom's darkestall is that? Okay, Kennedy?
Speaker 1 (09:08):
I mean, there's probably a Kennedy outside.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
There there's a little bit of Kennedy, Kennedy, and there
was like maybe ten percent Kennedy in Oh.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
We got it mixed up. Let's keep it interesting, right,
Like it's like potted meat. It's like potted meat now
with ten percent Kennedy exactly. I would I would buy
that at the grocery store. So Churchill is watching this.
He is despite the flagrant abuse he subjected his body
to over the decades, he is still alive. He is
eighty eight years old. He's watching a satellite relay of
(09:37):
this from his home in London, and his son Randolph,
accepts the honor on his behalf. One other interesting fact,
One other interesting fact about Churchill. He was also the
recipient of the nineteen fifty three Nobel Prize for Literature,
which a lot of people didn't know. But that's him.
(09:59):
That's that's an easy one. The famous rip roar in
Oh Okay. I can't keep saying Winston Churchill is a
rip roaring drunk unless I do at least one quotew.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
Rip and cigar smoking drunk.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
Here we go. Yeah, perfect, Let's let's just pull up
one of his weirdest, weirdest drunk quotes a real hum dinger,
a real hum dinger. So, once upon a time, Winston
Churchill is in a conversation with m P Bessie Braddock
or the Conservative Lady Astor, who is the first female MP,
(10:34):
and one of them accuses the Prime Minister of being
quote discostingly drunk, to which he responds, my dear, you
are ugly, and what's more, you are disgustingly ugly. But
tomorrow I shall be soba and you will still be
DISGUSTI leg oh man.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
Jeez, if that didn't get him a swift slap across
the jowls, I don't know what would.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Good gels that are hard to miss. Sure, So he
wasn't perfect, but he had tremendous influence on the course
of the world in which we live today. And he's
an honorary US citizen.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
Wasn't he also like weirdly eugenic or he did like
you had some you had some real weird, weird, deep
cut Churchill issues.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Probably.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
Yeah, he's not super cool. He's not a cool guy.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
But he was just very racist, that's what it was.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Yeah, against people who lived on the Indian subcontinent.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
Yea, Yeah, he was.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
Still very much a son of the Empire, as.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
In like the colonizer, kind of like mentality.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
Star Wars like evil Empire. Yes, yeah, most of most
of the prequel Star Wars films are actually based off
Winston Churchill.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
He even kind of sounds like the Emperor.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
He does.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
Ah, I Winston church the Emperor.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
At the last second. And this is the biggest controversy
about Star Wars. They actually cut out Winston Churchill's character
and replaced him with jar Jar Binks. So if you
look back next time you watch Star Wars, you remember
how much people disliked jar Jar Binks. Just imagine it
in its original form with Winston Churchill. Bw It's great,
(12:14):
it's a good, it's a good, it's a good piece
of cinema. So that that was the first one in
the era of JFK. But who was after that?
Speaker 2 (12:27):
It wasn't until nineteen eighty one, shockingly, which I guess
makes sense considering how few of these there are in
the grand scheme of things.
Speaker 3 (12:36):
But we have Raoul Wallenberger, who is a historical figure.
I was not aware of it, something of a of
a Oscar Schindler type figure.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
Yeah. Yeah, So Hungary fought alongside Germany during World War
Two and passed past anti Semitic discriminatory laws towards Jewish people,
but the Jewish population of Hungary was to a degree
spared the tragic, horrific genocide of the Holocaust. Once Hungary
(13:09):
waivered in the Axis Cause, Hitler ordered the country immediately
occupied and Jewish people living in Hungary were ordered to
be rounded up and deported, and within the space of
one year, a half million people were murdered by the
German regime. And this is where Raoul Wallenberg comes in
(13:33):
what makes him a shindleresque figure.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
So Wallenberg was a businessman who got sent to the
Swedish embassy in Hungary, and he was an issuer of passports.
He issued six hundred and fifty passports to Hungarian Jews
with ties to Sweden and that would offer them protection
from deportation. So when Wallenberg got into this post, he
(13:56):
looked at how massive this humanitarian crisis was and decided
he needed to really take charge and step up his game.
And so, with a little bit of creative paperwork, a
little bit of you know, kind of Maverick like diplomacy,
(14:17):
he was able to protect in the same way that
Schindler shielded Jews with jobs in his factory and kept
them from getting sent to the camps. He was able
to shield them with this paperwork and these passports.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
Yeah, and he didn't have the luxury of thinking in
a very long term way about this. This is a
crisis situation. He's just attempting to save innocent lives. The
fascists learn of Wallenberg's operation, they pick up the scent,
and so they immediately invalidate all the paperwork they can find.
(14:56):
They round up Jewish people who had escaped with his help,
and they force these people to walk to the Austrian border.
But Wallenberg is undeterred. So he is driving behind this
forced march and people are pointing guns at him and
he's ignoring it. He's feeding these people, he's bringing water,
(15:19):
he's attempting to do anything he can medicinally, and he
still keeps issuing these documents. So at this point there's
a good argument to make that he has defied death,
that he should have been shot. Right, So let's fast
forward to the Soviet Union. They occupy Hungary in January
(15:42):
of nineteen forty five, and they take Wallenberg into custody
and here is where we stumbled across a mystery. Raoul Wallenberg,
you see, was never seen in public again.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
Oh that's so, that's so anytime you say that statement,
shivers my friend. And they were never heard from again.
Speaker 3 (16:01):
Has to be a pregnant pause before again if he
just leave it as never never heard from And that's
sort of like it's very vague.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
It's kind of like, wait, don't mean that they didn't call.
You don't know how you don't call.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
They had a throat thing, they couldn't speak. Well, this
was you know, this was Cold War era, so information
was tightly controlled, and we do not know what happened
to Wallenberg. We know that the Soviet government said that
he died shortly after being taken into custody, that he
had a heart attack in a prison in Moscow in
(16:34):
nineteen forty seven, but still no official word, no confirmation,
And that is why in nineteen eighty one he was
declared an honorary US citizen, which makes you wonder, you
know how much of that was a propaganda move.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
Well, I mean this is clearly has a lot of
propaganda potential.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
Right there is the aim Uncle Sam at this point
on the record at least is. They said, you know,
we're going to make him an honorary citizen because this
will pressure the Soviets or the you know, the Reds
or whatever they called him at the time to disclose
information about Wallenberg.
Speaker 4 (17:16):
It did not work, now, definitely did not work. He
was never heard from again. Gain Gang, Gang, Paul. Can
we get a little a little distant, A ghostly.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
Wush felt that Christmas spine?
Speaker 1 (17:36):
All right?
Speaker 2 (17:36):
Ben? Here we got next? Only a scant two years later.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
A scant two years later, nineteen eighty four. Our third
honorary citizen is William Penn. So this story dates back
to the sixteen eighties. There was a guy named Charles
the Second. He was in charge of a place called Britain.
He owed the Penn family money like Lanister style, you
know what I mean. So he settled a debt with
(18:02):
them in sixteen eighty one by giving William Penn forty
five thousand square miles of land north of Maryland.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
He gave.
Speaker 1 (18:11):
He said, you know, I can't pay you the cash,
but here here's all this land. What they call it,
Penn Pennville, Penn Town, Pennyweight, no pennywise, Okay, I like
that I'm thinking it's something more familiar than we may
have heard it before. Although now that I'm thinking about it,
why why Sylvania? Where I want to know the origin
of a Pennsylvania. It's like Transylvania.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
You think that's what it is.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
Sylvan means forest.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
That's a good point. So a Sylvania is a Sylvan
region penn forest.
Speaker 1 (18:41):
Maybe.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
Yeah, this is what we call real time etymology to
just we just kind of spitball it out. Probably true,
possibly not true.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
This is this is what we call. That's what we
call speculative edibology, speculative etymology.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
I like that.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
I'm that's gonna be a It's gonna be my my
new title. I like the validation, gonna gonna get a certificate.
That decreased me to be a speculative etymologist.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
I think you deserve that, Ben, And more so, it's
true Penn's colony, which he dubbed Pennsylvania in honor of
his father, which you know also one could argue in
honor of himself. Hey, hey, now you know he is
his father's son. You know they share the name. But
it was a religious haven, which you guys do you
(19:26):
guys know about this? For for his fellow Quakers and
settlers of different faiths, and Penn was a huge proponent
of the rights of representative government and also religious freedom
and the ability to receive trial by jury, public education,
a lot of the important tenets of the US Constitution,
(19:49):
and our you know, wonderful country.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
Yeah, good looking out, dude. Thank you. On a personal level,
I enjoy all of the things that you are into.
If you can hear me from beyond the great So
the wheels of justice grind slow, but exceedingly fine. And
thus it comes to pass that more than three hundred
years after Penn first arrived in this colony, he received
(20:13):
honorary citizenship in a country that he never lived to
see established, because the US didn't become a thing until
after Penn's death.
Speaker 3 (20:23):
Which leads us to Hannah Callo Hill Penn, who also
received honorary citizenship in that very same year of nineteen
one hundred and eighty four. She lived in Pennsylvania for
only about two years, and she was Penn's second wife.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
Twenty four years younger than him.
Speaker 3 (20:42):
Okay, I'm okay with that. Now, that doesn't work. That
doesn't actually work out with the with the math. The
math Okay, dating math.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
Have you guys heard the Have you guys heard the
dating math? What is it? It's half your age plus
seven seven? Is that the every time I have heard that,
outside of outside of our our irreverent conversations, every time
I've heard somebody say that, seriously, it's a little bit
off putting, you know what I mean. It's like some
(21:10):
guy you don't really know, You're at a bar and
they're telling you about their life and then they refer
to the math capital T, capital.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
M exactly, which also, could you know?
Speaker 3 (21:19):
I mean, I would love to believe that that in
that context is some sort of acronym.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
That we have.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
There we go.
Speaker 2 (21:24):
We have yet to fully decode.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
The master age technical hierarchy.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
I like that? Or how about this the the master
age transgression? Shoot? I want to say grand book gradient.
There's no g inn that would be cool, the math
only only math with a G. What I want to
know is, where's the magic? We've got the math? Now,
where's the magic? Just wait?
Speaker 1 (21:49):
You will hear more about that, Yes, you wills episode
so or in one of these episodes. So she's only
lived two years in Pennsylvania, and you know we're joking
about the math or whatever. But you know, if people
are happy and they're not hurting anyone, and let them
be happy.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
Right.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
She didn't get honorary citizenship because because of her husband,
she in her own right was known to be an
activist and an advocate for espousing the same principles that
William Penn also evangelized for.
Speaker 3 (22:29):
Yeah, when William became sick in seventeen twelve, he had
a bunch of strokes. Actually I didn't really realize that,
and gradually became worse and worse and wasn't all there.
She was able to kind of take over it, hit
the business that he had started and carry on that
mantle and really manage the colony's affairs, and she was
(22:52):
sending letters to various officials within the colonial governorship. And
when William passed away seventeen eighteen, she became the essentially
the governor herself.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
But that's not what they called it. They called it
sort of an acting proprietor, which I guess is sort
of like being what do you call that when you're
interim governor, like a substitute Yeah, substitute landlord, which is yeah,
it's a little bit diminutive for sure, now it's a
lot of bit diminutive.
Speaker 3 (23:23):
And then she passed away in seventeen twenty six, and
she was the longest serving woman in control of a
British colony.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
A very important colony as well, Hannah Calo Hill Penn
that she is, I would say, one of the more
upstanding people on our list, speaking of speaking of controversy,
which I've foreshadowed just a bit here, fun we'll see.
Our next one is Mother Teresa. Her first name was Agnes,
(23:56):
but everybody called her mother Teresa. And if you grew
up around the time that Nola and I grew up,
then you have you heard about her as a kid.
She was hot, she was big, yeah yeah, and the scene. Yeah,
she was a real she was a real, guaranteed headline. Right,
you have a Mother Teresa headline. Boom papers are selling
(24:18):
out back when people used to read physical newspapers. Agnes
goncha bojaksu. Uh. That's g o n x h a
b o j x h.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
I U not gonna lie. We had to google that
one pronunciation, Yeah, yeah we did.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
Uh. She, like Churchill, was named an honorary citizen while
she was still alive. Get this, She and Winston Churchill
were the only people so far to be named honorary
citizens while they're still alive. It makes me think of currency,
you know, like here in the US, you don't get
(24:55):
your face on currency or coin until well after your death.
Speaker 2 (24:59):
So so mother Terresa was an Albanian, she was an
Albanian nun, and she'd already received tons of the highest
US accolades in terms of the Nobel Peace Prize, Presidential
Medal of Freedom. And the funny thing is is she
didn't really spend a whole lot of time in the
United States to begin with. She worked with soup kitchens
under the Missionaries of Charity that she founded in nineteen fifty,
(25:23):
had emergency shelters, nursing homes, after school programs. I almost said,
after school specials. That's something different, it would be great,
that's a little more fragile rock. Really it's very much so.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
And she, you know, she just founded all of these
really really important nonprofits essentially that were designed to help
and nurture the poor and the homeless and just the
less fortunate. And when she did receive that honor ray
citizenship when she was eighty six years old, the Ambassador
to India, which is the country where she first started
(25:54):
doing all of these good deeds good works, called her
quote a daughter of a man America, and she had
done a lot of work in Calcutta, which was known.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
For its poverty.
Speaker 3 (26:04):
And she actually went on to be canonized as well
and received sainthood in twenty sixteen. But this is a
really interesting story and the process that goes into canonizing
someone within the Catholic Church is fascinating to me, and
some things that I was not aware of.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
Right, for a long time, the Vatican had a step
in the canonization process that required someone literally deemed as
a devil's advocate, and their entire role was to argue
against beautification and canonization, to say this person doesn't qualify
as a saint for the following reasons. You know, there
(26:40):
were no snakes in Ireland to begin with, right, something
like that. It was abolished in the eighties, but the
Vatican still still flutzed around with the idea, and Christopher Hitchins,
the famously militant atheist, testified as her devil's advocate.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
How did he get involved in the proceedings if he's
not even a believer.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
I think he just likes to stir up that pot,
and I has to poke that bear. He likes to
bag that badger. I guess he said he represented the
devil pro bono. A little bit more on Mother Teresa. Yeah,
she was canonized on September fourth, twenty sixteen, and she
(27:26):
still had some controversy throughout throughout her life and afterwards
because certain people would would study her clinics and say, hey,
they received millions of dollars in donations, but they don't
have medical care, good diagnoses, systems, necessary nutrition and so on,
and three Canadian academics actually said that she was purposely
(27:54):
allowing people to suffer. Specifically, they said Mother Teresa believed
the sick must suffer like Christ on the Cross. And
then Christopher Hitchins was one of Mother Teresa's most outspoken
critics for for a long, long, long long time. He
(28:16):
he said she was not a friend to the poor,
that she saw poverty as a necessary gift of suffering
from God. So he had stake in the game. Next
we arrive at one of my favorite rappers, one of
(28:38):
my favorite recent rappers, I should say, Nellie No, the
Marquis de Lafayette.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
Ah. Yes, of course, he's from the Hamilton Musical.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
Played by Davy Diggs, who has a great who has
a great hip hop group. I want to say on
the West Coast, maybe they're called Clipping with a period
in front. They're great.
Speaker 3 (28:58):
He's also going to be blind Spotting, which is quiet good. Yes, Yes,
I believe he wrote that.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
I think he did. He co wrote it.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
He was on movie Crush with Chuck, him and his
co writer for that movie. We're on movie Crush talking
about I can't remember what their favorite movie was, but
you should check it out.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
Was it Police Academy for it.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Had to have been. That should be everyone's favorite movie,
because otherwise I'm cult classic.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
Otherwise, you know, Chuck and Air great friends. But I'm
not going to listen to it.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
That's fair. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (29:24):
So there's an article on mental mental flaws that goes
through eight of these honorary citizens and they make the
point that I think is completely valid that the United
States would not exist had it not been for the
Marquis de la Fayette.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (29:40):
I haven't seen them. I'm not going to do no spoilers.
I haven't seen the musical. I don't know really any
of the music.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
Oh just listen to the soundtrack.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
I should. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:47):
Yeah, it's pretty good. It's pretty good. It's pretty it's solid.
I would. I would say, you know, if you're like
folden laundry or something, it's good. Or you're on a
long walk, maybe a plane. I don't know, got it.
I do have a flight tomorrow. We'll check it out.
Speaker 3 (30:01):
But yeah, he was the French general who was in
charge of divisions in the Continental Army during the American Revolution.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
Yeah. Yeah, So a lot of the story you might
hear in Hamilton is true. This guy came in supporting
the ideas of liberty, equality and so on, and he
really didn't have to have a stake in this game.
But he is primarily the reason that France came to
(30:29):
aid the US colonies against Great Britain. And then later
when he went back to France, he introduced the Declaration
of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen before
the National Constituent Assembly, and he co wrote this with
Thomas Jefferson, you may remember from previous episodes, because no
(30:52):
one's heard of Thomas Jefferson until they listened to Ridiculous History.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
Right, I certainly hadn't been I certainly hadn't.
Speaker 4 (30:59):
You know.
Speaker 1 (30:59):
What's weird is the way the way statistics work. There's
probably someone named Thomas Jefferson right now, and they're probably
mad that their parents named them Thomas.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
I agree. Yeah, it's definitely like sort of that name
sort of been ruined. I mean, okay, one could argue
that name has been lifted up and elevated.
Speaker 1 (31:17):
It's taken.
Speaker 2 (31:18):
It's totally it's taken.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
It's like it's like Michael Bolton right right right, or
or you know, there are two Nick Caves. I remember
that always. That always astounded me. Well, there's the artist
Nick Cave. But but people typically think of Nick Cave
in the bad seats.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, but the artist Nick Cave is
equally awesome in his own right. It makes sound suits
and you know the he actually did a performance here
at the building where we.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
Did a documentary.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
They did very very cool.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
Paul, did you work on that documentary? Paul's given us
the nod. Michigan Control worked on it, so it's got
his stamp of approval. But uh, names aside, You're right,
there is a tremendous argument to be made aid that
this country would not exist without the efforts of lafa Atte,
(32:07):
And I would say he really earned this honorary citizenship.
When he died, the US House and Senate draped the
chambers in black. They knew we owed this guy. But
when did he When did he become an honorary citizen?
It was after his death, right.
Speaker 3 (32:23):
Two thousand and two, quite a bit after his death,
during a joint resolution.
Speaker 2 (32:28):
Yes, he was given that citizenship.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
But that was the federal citizenship because he was given
a citizenship via Maryland before then, right while he was
still alive.
Speaker 3 (32:41):
Oh, that's what we're talking about the top of the show,
This who Little the Many citizenship. Yeah, yeah, that seems
like a stretch, doesn't it. I mean, I would you
think of it this way?
Speaker 1 (32:50):
If one province of Canada gave you citizenship and you know,
you could travel there or something, but you were still
a were an entity in any of the other provinces.
That's weird, you know what I mean? Well, like, what
if Utah gave you honorary citizenship? Now you gotta get
into and out of Utah. It's tough.
Speaker 2 (33:12):
Seriously, I think it was gonna air drop you in there.
This didn't.
Speaker 3 (33:15):
Yeah, Well, anyway, it's it's obviously a symbolic act on
on all fronts here.
Speaker 2 (33:20):
But that's an interesting one to me. Uh so, what
do we have next?
Speaker 1 (33:23):
We have Kazimir Pulaski. So, Kazimir Pulaski also set sail
for North America to help the American side in the
War for Independence, right, he wanted to fight for the
continental cause. He did a bunch of stuff. Famously, during
(33:44):
the Battle of Brandywine, he led a cavalry charge that
saved the life of George Washington. He was promoted to
a general who organized mounted soldiers. He even wrote the
book on cavalry tactics. Literally, he wrote a book about it.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
Was that, like, that's like mounted attacks huh yeah, yeah, yeah,
it's all about formation, huh, formation, strategy, flanking, yeah, no
one when to hold him, when to fold him, yeah,
when to charge them, when to scold him, when to
scold him and say, hey, buddy, you're not riding that
horse very well. You're doing a bad job.
Speaker 1 (34:16):
And when to mold them.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
Get what it's all about, molding them. It's all an
excellent cavalryman, yes, yes, uh yeah. He's one of the
fathers of American cavalry.
Speaker 1 (34:24):
And for a century or so, his death has been
a holiday or a day of remembrance.
Speaker 2 (34:35):
Pulaski Day, Yeah, is that a thing?
Speaker 1 (34:37):
I guess so it's you and I must be a
horrible patriots, Paul, have you ever heard of Pulaski Day,
Casimir Pulaski.
Speaker 3 (34:45):
Paul is saying that it's a Sufi and Stephens song
and I, to which I replied, it is probably bigger
in Michigan. Okay, let's let's actually incorrect.
Speaker 2 (34:56):
It's it's in big in Chicago, which was the second
Sufi on Stevens State based album.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
There we Go.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
Feel the Illinoise come on, I feel.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
I hope he gets the other ones. I hope he
does it. One day. I keep thinking about that. That
bugs me. I stay up at night thinking about you
and your albums. Souf, I call him Souf uh So
Pulaski Day, which we have to celebrate in October eleventh.
Let's let's get up to Chicago. He's one of Illinois's
favorite sons. Here's some malort. Well, celebrate Pulaski Day. We'll
(35:29):
get a get a Chicago dog. We'll go see a
Cubs game in Wrigleyville. Drop by Second City, Oh man
see what they have going on Plascu. Wise, since that's
a big celebration. Uh yeah, yeah, so it is a holiday.
And he said he sounded like a superhero coming in.
(35:51):
So he's a Polish military officer. When he arrives in America,
he looks at Washington and he says, I came here
where freedom is being defended, to serve it and to
live or die for it.
Speaker 3 (36:02):
Hard as nails, really tough, tough guy, tough sounding dude,
like the cut of his gym.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
And so we come to the last, but not least,
honorary Citizen of the US.
Speaker 2 (36:16):
Bestowed in twenty fourteen to Bernardo de Galvez.
Speaker 1 (36:21):
In seventeen seventy seven, Colonel Bernardo of Galvez was made
the interim governor of Louisiana, and at the time Louisiana
was under Spanish control. Galvez hated the British, so he
helped smuggle supplies to the Continental forces through the port
city of New Orleans. He also orchestrated a campaign against
(36:43):
the Red Coats, defeating them in several battles, including Baltin Rouge.
And he became general like you do.
Speaker 3 (36:53):
Yeah, So that's when he won some pretty significant battles
in the Battle of Fort Charlotte, and he took mobile
away from the British.
Speaker 2 (37:02):
Finally, I know.
Speaker 3 (37:03):
You wonder back after all these years, loathed these many years,
And that's when Washington really praised Galvez as being a
deciding factor in the outcome of the Revolutionary War. And
then in twenty fourteen when this resolution was drafted that
made Galvez an honorary citizen, that was quoted and put
in the in the.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
Paperwork and the documentation.
Speaker 3 (37:26):
He's also you know, this is the most contemporary honorary
citizenship that we've got on the books.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
Who knows, Who knows what's next? Ben Who knows who
will come next?
Speaker 1 (37:35):
Maybe maybe someone listening today, It could be you.
Speaker 2 (37:38):
It could be you want to be a citizen of
the United States. You don't want to do the work.
Just become a key military lynchpin in some really important
conflict that changes everything, or or you know.
Speaker 1 (37:50):
Do something that people will appreciate two hundred years after.
Speaker 2 (37:53):
That's true.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
True. Interesting facts about Galvez. He is, although he's little
known today, he is the namesake of Galveston, Texas, which
I didn't know.
Speaker 2 (38:06):
I thought that sounded familiar.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
Rights it's weird because he played such an instrumental role
but is relatively little known, but.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
Didn't play any instruments the accordion.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
Perhaps I don't know accordions a lot to haul with you.
Maybe he Yeah, because he wasn't the father of Calvary.
He's no Pulaski. Pulaski being both from Poland and riding
on horses all the time. Surely he's my accordion pick
I like it. I don't want a pigeonhole or stereotype.
I just think he's more likely to have an accordion,
(38:39):
And I think about that a lot when we're doing
this show. I think which of these historical figures is
most likely to have an accordion.
Speaker 2 (38:46):
And to have accordion chops?
Speaker 1 (38:49):
So how did he die? Spoiler alert?
Speaker 2 (38:51):
He's dead. Yeah, he definitely died, and his remains are
lost to history.
Speaker 1 (38:59):
Yep, we're doing our own sound effects. But while his
bodily remains may be lost to history, his legacy is not.
The bar is very high when it comes to honorary citizenship,
and while many of these people on this list are
controversial for one action or another, the truth remains that
(39:21):
they did fundamentally huge things for the US and in
the case of Mother Teresa, for people who are suffering
in other parts of the world.
Speaker 3 (39:31):
That's right, So our hats off, our collective hats off
to all these folks because they really did make a
big impact, enough so that we were able to grant
them citizenship. In these days, the citizenship is becoming more
and more of a divisive thing, so it's sort of
like almost the highest honor that you can. You know,
it's not easy to get citizenship, and it's becoming even
(39:51):
more difficult to get citizenship and to become a naturalized citizen.
So hats off to all of these players players.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And we want to hear your deep cuts. Folks.
Who do you think is deserving of honorary citizenship today?
Speaker 2 (40:10):
And more importantly, who do you think you are? Let
us know. You can write to us at Ridiculous at
iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
Yeah, you know, that's a little confrontational. Hey man, you know,
are you punchy? Are you punching?
Speaker 2 (40:24):
I'm not punchy. I'm just punching. Okay, I'm punching. I'm
punching above my weight class, oh boy, and below the belt.
At the same time you can.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
You can find us on Instagram, you can find us
on Twitter. You can find our favorite part of the show,
your fellow listeners on our Facebook page or Ridiculous Historians,
and you can follow our own strange adventures. I am
at Ben Bollen on Instagram.
Speaker 2 (40:47):
I am at how Now Noel Brown on Instagram as well.
Speaker 1 (40:50):
Big, big, big thanks to Alex Williams, who composed the
track and recently appeared on an episode of Ridiculous History
with us. Do tune into that if you haven't checked
it out. Paul, Mission Control Decket, I'm making eye contact
with you outside the studio to thank you so much. Dude,
Casey is pursuing his double life.
Speaker 2 (41:09):
He is as LaBouche, as Lebouche and La France yes.
Speaker 1 (41:14):
Yes, where he wears a leather jacket, has a single
ear ring, single dangly cross earring, and we think he
has two secret families that don't know about each other.
Speaker 2 (41:24):
And lots of other secret stuff.
Speaker 1 (41:25):
Did we mention this on air?
Speaker 2 (41:27):
Yeah, totally, okay, I think we mentioned it at the
top of the show during the the Fmerald episode without great.
Speaker 1 (41:33):
Well, hats off to you, La Bouche. You are missed.
And thinks so as always, to Gabe, our research associate.
Thanks to you Ben.
Speaker 2 (41:42):
Thanks to you Pal, you really make it easy. We'll
see you next time.
Speaker 3 (42:08):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Fellow Ridiculous historians in the United States and abroad.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
We got to tell you. Sometimes we record an episode
that only becomes increasingly relevant as the years went on.
And I think in this one we were both surprised
that you can become an honorary citizen of the United States.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
M hm.
Speaker 3 (00:25):
And it ain't easy and it doesn't, at least in
the back in the day, just involve paying a bunch
of money for a gold credit card. Yeah, an honorary citizen,
much like getting an honorary degree from a university, definitely
was a thing that is part of ridiculous history. So
why don't we talk a little bit about the honorary
(00:46):
citizens of the United States.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome Ridiculous Historians.
(01:20):
Thanks for tuning in a little bit of background at
the top of the show. Today we have been gallivanting,
uh hither and yalling. Let's see. Uh No, where were
where were you recently?
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (01:33):
I was in Mauritania for a little while, and then
before that I went to Fraggle Rock, and then I
spent a little bit of time down at uh.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
In Little Australia.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Yeah, let's see I went to uh Texas, I pursued
some of my old SKA band dreams.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
What does that mean? Is Texas like Scott Central?
Speaker 1 (01:57):
No? No, this was after Texas. After Texas, I went
to Brussels, where my SKA band lives. It's a long story.
And then also, let's see between us, we've got Chicago,
Los Angeles, some other countries again, but we can't mention
those Fraggle Rock.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Was my far my favorite through Those little dozers are adorable.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
I think they're an authoritarian regime. I have serious problems
with their governments, that's fair, but they're still cut at buttons.
So so despite all of our travels, I gotta say,
it feels so good to be back in good old
Atlanta ga US. We are joined today by our guest producer,
(02:42):
Paul Mission Controlled decad. Let's give it up for him.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
In what we said, your name your nol I am
Even if we didn't, I still am.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
Okay, and I'm Ben.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Do we get that?
Speaker 2 (02:56):
You know, we don't need to have your name said
for you to have an identity.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
So that's true, that's true. But if you want to
be a citizen of the United States, there is some
paperwork involved, as well as some verbiage. If they're cited oath.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
Got to speak an oath, You gotta put your bloody
thumbprint on a document, sign your name and in blood.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
No, well, you know it's changed over time. You still
have to have interviews, you have to take citizenship tests.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Naturalization as what they call it, right mm hmm.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
And all three of us recording today and quite a
few of us listening today are citizens of the United States.
What's strange about this is that the United States is
one of the countries that gives you citizenship just for
being born here. Not every country is that way, but
(03:51):
if regardless of what your parents past is, et cetera,
if you were born on US soil typically for most
of history, that makes you a US citizen. However, you
and I started looking into a very a very strange story,
something about honorary citizenship. You know, this means that you're
(04:14):
allowing the US to kind of claim you. They're like,
all right, she or he is one of the good ones,
but they don't have to actually do anything, and you
don't have to do anything.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Getting an honorary degree, you know, just for being a
good guy.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
Like how a professor E. Meredith doesn't teach classes.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
Really, yeah, yeah, E Meredith just imply some sort of
like ephemeral kind of like honor, you know, or just
by virtue of being this luminary in the field, you
get to be this thing.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
Yes, exactly, and that sort of applies here as well.
I agree, I agree, and I think that's spot on,
because it would be cool to be an honorary citizen
of a country like I'd love to be an honorary
citizen of Baton or Vanuatu, which will show up in
a late episode. But in the case of the US,
we found out that is it is a real thing.
(05:06):
You can't have honorary citizenship if you don't want the
whole kit and kaboodle. The problem is that honorary citizenship
may be one of the most difficult things to achieve
in this country of ours.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
That's right. It is granted by an Act of Congress
and the President, and to this day, unless we're missing one,
only eight honorary citizenships have been bestowed the entire time.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Eight only eight. Here's what the State Department says about
honorary citizenship. Honorary citizenship does not carry with it the
rights and privileges of ordinary citizenship, and such status does
not confer any special entry, travel, or immigration benefits upon
the honorey or the honorees relatives and dependents.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
We're in Texas, weren't you, man.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
It also does not impose additional duties or responsibilities in
the United States or internationally on the honor read. It
is a strictly symbolic act and no oath is required.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
Aha, So it's not quite so it's literally just like
a wave of the hand and then it happens.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
Yeah, it's like a key to.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
This saying of the city. It's just like that, and
it's first of all you. Then they can give it
to you without your consent too, can't they.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
Yes, sort of the way that the Church of Louder
day Saints got in trouble for proxy baptisms.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Right, that's a whole can of worms there. But yeah,
that's the thing.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
None of these people are like asking for this as
as some sort of benefit or like it's going to
do something positive for their lives or they're going to
be able to use it in any functional way. It's
a strictly symbolic act that implies that this individual not
a citizen has done great things to aid our struggle
as a country. It's such an ada boy, And that's
why it's such a thin list, because it has to
(06:48):
be a lot like the burden of you know, do
goodery is quite high.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
That's true. That's true.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
So what we wanted to do today was explore the
stories of these eight honorary citizens, many of whom will
be familiar to you, some of whom may be deep cuts.
So let's get started with first and foremost, one of
the most pugnacious, uh, one of the most pugnacious aserbic
(07:17):
characters in modern European history, Winston Churchill, who is His
drunken escapades are worth an episode alone, I would say.
But Winston Churchill was the first foreign national to receive
honorary citizenship in the United States. Eight states this is
(07:39):
interesting had already granted him citizenship, just not the federal government,
which I didn't know was a thing that could happen.
You know, if you're I guess if you're the the
governor of New Mexico, or maybe you're the what's a
different state? What's the state? No one talks about? Delaware?
Fragile rock still not a state. Man, Well, that's legally
a territory telling you it's because they have tremendous not
(08:02):
human rights abuses, but fragle rights.
Speaker 3 (08:04):
You don't think they should get honorary statehood and just
for their contribution to popular culture?
Speaker 2 (08:09):
No, man, really, no, those war crimes are really bug
Have you.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
Read the UN report? No? O oh man, they're heavily redacted.
So yes they are, and they should be. I am
not a fan of puppet crime, which is why I
support Sesame Street.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
That's fair.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
But you can love them both, right, It's not a
pepsi coat thing. So yeah, I did not. I was
not aware that states could individually grant citizenship, but eight
states had already granted citizenship to Winston Churchill. His mother
was American, and this happened all before JFK and Congress
followed suit. So we have a quote from Kennedy in
(08:50):
his proclamation. Here's what he said about Winston Churchill.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
Yeah, this proclamation praised Churchill for his quote, bravery charity
in Valla both and WAW and peace have been a
flame of inspiration and freedom's darkestall is that? Okay, Kennedy?
Speaker 1 (09:08):
I mean, there's probably a Kennedy outside.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
There there's a little bit of Kennedy, Kennedy, and there
was like maybe ten percent Kennedy in Oh.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
We got it mixed up. Let's keep it interesting, right,
Like it's like potted meat. It's like potted meat now
with ten percent Kennedy exactly. I would I would buy
that at the grocery store. So Churchill is watching this.
He is despite the flagrant abuse he subjected his body
to over the decades, he is still alive. He is
eighty eight years old. He's watching a satellite relay of
(09:37):
this from his home in London, and his son Randolph,
accepts the honor on his behalf. One other interesting fact,
One other interesting fact about Churchill. He was also the
recipient of the nineteen fifty three Nobel Prize for Literature,
which a lot of people didn't know. But that's him.
(09:59):
That's that's an easy one. The famous rip roar in
Oh Okay. I can't keep saying Winston Churchill is a
rip roaring drunk unless I do at least one quotew.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
Rip and cigar smoking drunk.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
Here we go. Yeah, perfect, Let's let's just pull up
one of his weirdest, weirdest drunk quotes a real hum dinger,
a real hum dinger. So, once upon a time, Winston
Churchill is in a conversation with m P Bessie Braddock
or the Conservative Lady Astor, who is the first female MP,
(10:34):
and one of them accuses the Prime Minister of being
quote discostingly drunk, to which he responds, my dear, you
are ugly, and what's more, you are disgustingly ugly. But
tomorrow I shall be soba and you will still be
DISGUSTI leg oh man.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
Jeez, if that didn't get him a swift slap across
the jowls, I don't know what would.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Good gels that are hard to miss. Sure, So he
wasn't perfect, but he had tremendous influence on the course
of the world in which we live today. And he's
an honorary US citizen.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
Wasn't he also like weirdly eugenic or he did like
you had some you had some real weird, weird, deep
cut Churchill issues.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Probably.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
Yeah, he's not super cool. He's not a cool guy.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
But he was just very racist, that's what it was.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Yeah, against people who lived on the Indian subcontinent.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
Yea, Yeah, he was.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
Still very much a son of the Empire, as.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
In like the colonizer, kind of like mentality.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
Star Wars like evil Empire. Yes, yeah, most of most
of the prequel Star Wars films are actually based off
Winston Churchill.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
He even kind of sounds like the Emperor.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
He does.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
Ah, I Winston church the Emperor.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
At the last second. And this is the biggest controversy
about Star Wars. They actually cut out Winston Churchill's character
and replaced him with jar Jar Binks. So if you
look back next time you watch Star Wars, you remember
how much people disliked jar Jar Binks. Just imagine it
in its original form with Winston Churchill. Bw It's great,
(12:14):
it's a good, it's a good, it's a good piece
of cinema. So that that was the first one in
the era of JFK. But who was after that?
Speaker 2 (12:27):
It wasn't until nineteen eighty one, shockingly, which I guess
makes sense considering how few of these there are in
the grand scheme of things.
Speaker 3 (12:36):
But we have Raoul Wallenberger, who is a historical figure.
I was not aware of it, something of a of
a Oscar Schindler type figure.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
Yeah. Yeah, So Hungary fought alongside Germany during World War
Two and passed past anti Semitic discriminatory laws towards Jewish people,
but the Jewish population of Hungary was to a degree
spared the tragic, horrific genocide of the Holocaust. Once Hungary
(13:09):
waivered in the Axis Cause, Hitler ordered the country immediately
occupied and Jewish people living in Hungary were ordered to
be rounded up and deported, and within the space of
one year, a half million people were murdered by the
German regime. And this is where Raoul Wallenberg comes in
(13:33):
what makes him a shindleresque figure.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
So Wallenberg was a businessman who got sent to the
Swedish embassy in Hungary, and he was an issuer of passports.
He issued six hundred and fifty passports to Hungarian Jews
with ties to Sweden and that would offer them protection
from deportation. So when Wallenberg got into this post, he
(13:56):
looked at how massive this humanitarian crisis was and decided
he needed to really take charge and step up his game.
And so, with a little bit of creative paperwork, a
little bit of you know, kind of Maverick like diplomacy,
(14:17):
he was able to protect in the same way that
Schindler shielded Jews with jobs in his factory and kept
them from getting sent to the camps. He was able
to shield them with this paperwork and these passports.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
Yeah, and he didn't have the luxury of thinking in
a very long term way about this. This is a
crisis situation. He's just attempting to save innocent lives. The
fascists learn of Wallenberg's operation, they pick up the scent,
and so they immediately invalidate all the paperwork they can find.
(14:56):
They round up Jewish people who had escaped with his help,
and they force these people to walk to the Austrian border.
But Wallenberg is undeterred. So he is driving behind this
forced march and people are pointing guns at him and
he's ignoring it. He's feeding these people, he's bringing water,
(15:19):
he's attempting to do anything he can medicinally, and he
still keeps issuing these documents. So at this point there's
a good argument to make that he has defied death,
that he should have been shot. Right, So let's fast
forward to the Soviet Union. They occupy Hungary in January
(15:42):
of nineteen forty five, and they take Wallenberg into custody
and here is where we stumbled across a mystery. Raoul Wallenberg,
you see, was never seen in public again.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
Oh that's so, that's so anytime you say that statement,
shivers my friend. And they were never heard from again.
Speaker 3 (16:01):
Has to be a pregnant pause before again if he
just leave it as never never heard from And that's
sort of like it's very vague.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
It's kind of like, wait, don't mean that they didn't call.
You don't know how you don't call.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
They had a throat thing, they couldn't speak. Well, this
was you know, this was Cold War era, so information
was tightly controlled, and we do not know what happened
to Wallenberg. We know that the Soviet government said that
he died shortly after being taken into custody, that he
had a heart attack in a prison in Moscow in
(16:34):
nineteen forty seven, but still no official word, no confirmation,
And that is why in nineteen eighty one he was
declared an honorary US citizen, which makes you wonder, you
know how much of that was a propaganda move.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
Well, I mean this is clearly has a lot of
propaganda potential.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
Right there is the aim Uncle Sam at this point
on the record at least is. They said, you know,
we're going to make him an honorary citizen because this
will pressure the Soviets or the you know, the Reds
or whatever they called him at the time to disclose
information about Wallenberg.
Speaker 4 (17:16):
It did not work, now, definitely did not work. He
was never heard from again. Gain Gang, Gang, Paul. Can
we get a little a little distant, A ghostly.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
Wush felt that Christmas spine?
Speaker 1 (17:36):
All right?
Speaker 2 (17:36):
Ben? Here we got next? Only a scant two years later.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
A scant two years later, nineteen eighty four. Our third
honorary citizen is William Penn. So this story dates back
to the sixteen eighties. There was a guy named Charles
the Second. He was in charge of a place called Britain.
He owed the Penn family money like Lanister style, you
know what I mean. So he settled a debt with
(18:02):
them in sixteen eighty one by giving William Penn forty
five thousand square miles of land north of Maryland.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
He gave.
Speaker 1 (18:11):
He said, you know, I can't pay you the cash,
but here here's all this land. What they call it,
Penn Pennville, Penn Town, Pennyweight, no pennywise, Okay, I like
that I'm thinking it's something more familiar than we may
have heard it before. Although now that I'm thinking about it,
why why Sylvania? Where I want to know the origin
of a Pennsylvania. It's like Transylvania.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
You think that's what it is.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
Sylvan means forest.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
That's a good point. So a Sylvania is a Sylvan
region penn forest.
Speaker 1 (18:41):
Maybe.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
Yeah, this is what we call real time etymology to
just we just kind of spitball it out. Probably true,
possibly not true.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
This is this is what we call. That's what we
call speculative edibology, speculative etymology.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
I like that.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
I'm that's gonna be a It's gonna be my my
new title. I like the validation, gonna gonna get a certificate.
That decreased me to be a speculative etymologist.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
I think you deserve that, Ben, And more so, it's
true Penn's colony, which he dubbed Pennsylvania in honor of
his father, which you know also one could argue in
honor of himself. Hey, hey, now you know he is
his father's son. You know they share the name. But
it was a religious haven, which you guys do you
(19:26):
guys know about this? For for his fellow Quakers and
settlers of different faiths, and Penn was a huge proponent
of the rights of representative government and also religious freedom
and the ability to receive trial by jury, public education,
a lot of the important tenets of the US Constitution,
(19:49):
and our you know, wonderful country.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
Yeah, good looking out, dude. Thank you. On a personal level,
I enjoy all of the things that you are into.
If you can hear me from beyond the great So
the wheels of justice grind slow, but exceedingly fine. And
thus it comes to pass that more than three hundred
years after Penn first arrived in this colony, he received
(20:13):
honorary citizenship in a country that he never lived to
see established, because the US didn't become a thing until
after Penn's death.
Speaker 3 (20:23):
Which leads us to Hannah Callo Hill Penn, who also
received honorary citizenship in that very same year of nineteen
one hundred and eighty four. She lived in Pennsylvania for
only about two years, and she was Penn's second wife.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
Twenty four years younger than him.
Speaker 3 (20:42):
Okay, I'm okay with that. Now, that doesn't work. That
doesn't actually work out with the with the math. The
math Okay, dating math.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
Have you guys heard the Have you guys heard the
dating math? What is it? It's half your age plus
seven seven? Is that the every time I have heard that,
outside of outside of our our irreverent conversations, every time
I've heard somebody say that, seriously, it's a little bit
off putting, you know what I mean. It's like some
(21:10):
guy you don't really know, You're at a bar and
they're telling you about their life and then they refer
to the math capital T, capital.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
M exactly, which also, could you know?
Speaker 3 (21:19):
I mean, I would love to believe that that in
that context is some sort of acronym.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
That we have.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
There we go.
Speaker 2 (21:24):
We have yet to fully decode.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
The master age technical hierarchy.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
I like that? Or how about this the the master
age transgression? Shoot? I want to say grand book gradient.
There's no g inn that would be cool, the math
only only math with a G. What I want to
know is, where's the magic? We've got the math? Now,
where's the magic? Just wait?
Speaker 1 (21:49):
You will hear more about that, Yes, you wills episode
so or in one of these episodes. So she's only
lived two years in Pennsylvania, and you know we're joking
about the math or whatever. But you know, if people
are happy and they're not hurting anyone, and let them
be happy.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
Right.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
She didn't get honorary citizenship because because of her husband,
she in her own right was known to be an
activist and an advocate for espousing the same principles that
William Penn also evangelized for.
Speaker 3 (22:29):
Yeah, when William became sick in seventeen twelve, he had
a bunch of strokes. Actually I didn't really realize that,
and gradually became worse and worse and wasn't all there.
She was able to kind of take over it, hit
the business that he had started and carry on that
mantle and really manage the colony's affairs, and she was
(22:52):
sending letters to various officials within the colonial governorship. And
when William passed away seventeen eighteen, she became the essentially
the governor herself.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
But that's not what they called it. They called it
sort of an acting proprietor, which I guess is sort
of like being what do you call that when you're
interim governor, like a substitute Yeah, substitute landlord, which is yeah,
it's a little bit diminutive for sure, now it's a
lot of bit diminutive.
Speaker 3 (23:23):
And then she passed away in seventeen twenty six, and
she was the longest serving woman in control of a
British colony.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
A very important colony as well, Hannah Calo Hill Penn
that she is, I would say, one of the more
upstanding people on our list, speaking of speaking of controversy,
which I've foreshadowed just a bit here, fun we'll see.
Our next one is Mother Teresa. Her first name was Agnes,
(23:56):
but everybody called her mother Teresa. And if you grew
up around the time that Nola and I grew up,
then you have you heard about her as a kid.
She was hot, she was big, yeah yeah, and the scene. Yeah,
she was a real she was a real, guaranteed headline. Right,
you have a Mother Teresa headline. Boom papers are selling
(24:18):
out back when people used to read physical newspapers. Agnes
goncha bojaksu. Uh. That's g o n x h a
b o j x h.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
I U not gonna lie. We had to google that
one pronunciation, Yeah, yeah we did.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
Uh. She, like Churchill, was named an honorary citizen while
she was still alive. Get this, She and Winston Churchill
were the only people so far to be named honorary
citizens while they're still alive. It makes me think of currency,
you know, like here in the US, you don't get
(24:55):
your face on currency or coin until well after your death.
Speaker 2 (24:59):
So so mother Terresa was an Albanian, she was an
Albanian nun, and she'd already received tons of the highest
US accolades in terms of the Nobel Peace Prize, Presidential
Medal of Freedom. And the funny thing is is she
didn't really spend a whole lot of time in the
United States to begin with. She worked with soup kitchens
under the Missionaries of Charity that she founded in nineteen fifty,
(25:23):
had emergency shelters, nursing homes, after school programs. I almost said,
after school specials. That's something different, it would be great,
that's a little more fragile rock. Really it's very much so.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
And she, you know, she just founded all of these
really really important nonprofits essentially that were designed to help
and nurture the poor and the homeless and just the
less fortunate. And when she did receive that honor ray
citizenship when she was eighty six years old, the Ambassador
to India, which is the country where she first started
(25:54):
doing all of these good deeds good works, called her
quote a daughter of a man America, and she had
done a lot of work in Calcutta, which was known.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
For its poverty.
Speaker 3 (26:04):
And she actually went on to be canonized as well
and received sainthood in twenty sixteen. But this is a
really interesting story and the process that goes into canonizing
someone within the Catholic Church is fascinating to me, and
some things that I was not aware of.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
Right, for a long time, the Vatican had a step
in the canonization process that required someone literally deemed as
a devil's advocate, and their entire role was to argue
against beautification and canonization, to say this person doesn't qualify
as a saint for the following reasons. You know, there
(26:40):
were no snakes in Ireland to begin with, right, something
like that. It was abolished in the eighties, but the
Vatican still still flutzed around with the idea, and Christopher Hitchins,
the famously militant atheist, testified as her devil's advocate.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
How did he get involved in the proceedings if he's
not even a believer.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
I think he just likes to stir up that pot,
and I has to poke that bear. He likes to
bag that badger. I guess he said he represented the
devil pro bono. A little bit more on Mother Teresa. Yeah,
she was canonized on September fourth, twenty sixteen, and she
(27:26):
still had some controversy throughout throughout her life and afterwards
because certain people would would study her clinics and say, hey,
they received millions of dollars in donations, but they don't
have medical care, good diagnoses, systems, necessary nutrition and so on,
and three Canadian academics actually said that she was purposely
(27:54):
allowing people to suffer. Specifically, they said Mother Teresa believed
the sick must suffer like Christ on the Cross. And
then Christopher Hitchins was one of Mother Teresa's most outspoken
critics for for a long, long, long long time. He
(28:16):
he said she was not a friend to the poor,
that she saw poverty as a necessary gift of suffering
from God. So he had stake in the game. Next
we arrive at one of my favorite rappers, one of
(28:38):
my favorite recent rappers, I should say, Nellie No, the
Marquis de Lafayette.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
Ah. Yes, of course, he's from the Hamilton Musical.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
Played by Davy Diggs, who has a great who has
a great hip hop group. I want to say on
the West Coast, maybe they're called Clipping with a period
in front. They're great.
Speaker 3 (28:58):
He's also going to be blind Spotting, which is quiet good. Yes, Yes,
I believe he wrote that.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
I think he did. He co wrote it.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
He was on movie Crush with Chuck, him and his
co writer for that movie. We're on movie Crush talking
about I can't remember what their favorite movie was, but
you should check it out.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
Was it Police Academy for it.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Had to have been. That should be everyone's favorite movie,
because otherwise I'm cult classic.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
Otherwise, you know, Chuck and Air great friends. But I'm
not going to listen to it.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
That's fair. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (29:24):
So there's an article on mental mental flaws that goes
through eight of these honorary citizens and they make the
point that I think is completely valid that the United
States would not exist had it not been for the
Marquis de la Fayette.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (29:40):
I haven't seen them. I'm not going to do no spoilers.
I haven't seen the musical. I don't know really any
of the music.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
Oh just listen to the soundtrack.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
I should. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:47):
Yeah, it's pretty good. It's pretty good. It's pretty it's solid.
I would. I would say, you know, if you're like
folden laundry or something, it's good. Or you're on a
long walk, maybe a plane. I don't know, got it.
I do have a flight tomorrow. We'll check it out.
Speaker 3 (30:01):
But yeah, he was the French general who was in
charge of divisions in the Continental Army during the American Revolution.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
Yeah. Yeah, So a lot of the story you might
hear in Hamilton is true. This guy came in supporting
the ideas of liberty, equality and so on, and he
really didn't have to have a stake in this game.
But he is primarily the reason that France came to
(30:29):
aid the US colonies against Great Britain. And then later
when he went back to France, he introduced the Declaration
of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen before
the National Constituent Assembly, and he co wrote this with
Thomas Jefferson, you may remember from previous episodes, because no
(30:52):
one's heard of Thomas Jefferson until they listened to Ridiculous History.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
Right, I certainly hadn't been I certainly hadn't.
Speaker 4 (30:59):
You know.
Speaker 1 (30:59):
What's weird is the way the way statistics work. There's
probably someone named Thomas Jefferson right now, and they're probably
mad that their parents named them Thomas.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
I agree. Yeah, it's definitely like sort of that name
sort of been ruined. I mean, okay, one could argue
that name has been lifted up and elevated.
Speaker 1 (31:17):
It's taken.
Speaker 2 (31:18):
It's totally it's taken.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
It's like it's like Michael Bolton right right right, or
or you know, there are two Nick Caves. I remember
that always. That always astounded me. Well, there's the artist
Nick Cave. But but people typically think of Nick Cave
in the bad seats.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, but the artist Nick Cave is
equally awesome in his own right. It makes sound suits
and you know the he actually did a performance here
at the building where we.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
Did a documentary.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
They did very very cool.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
Paul, did you work on that documentary? Paul's given us
the nod. Michigan Control worked on it, so it's got
his stamp of approval. But uh, names aside, You're right,
there is a tremendous argument to be made aid that
this country would not exist without the efforts of lafa Atte,
(32:07):
And I would say he really earned this honorary citizenship.
When he died, the US House and Senate draped the
chambers in black. They knew we owed this guy. But
when did he When did he become an honorary citizen?
It was after his death, right.
Speaker 3 (32:23):
Two thousand and two, quite a bit after his death,
during a joint resolution.
Speaker 2 (32:28):
Yes, he was given that citizenship.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
But that was the federal citizenship because he was given
a citizenship via Maryland before then, right while he was
still alive.
Speaker 3 (32:41):
Oh, that's what we're talking about the top of the show,
This who Little the Many citizenship. Yeah, yeah, that seems
like a stretch, doesn't it. I mean, I would you
think of it this way?
Speaker 1 (32:50):
If one province of Canada gave you citizenship and you know,
you could travel there or something, but you were still
a were an entity in any of the other provinces.
That's weird, you know what I mean? Well, like, what
if Utah gave you honorary citizenship? Now you gotta get
into and out of Utah. It's tough.
Speaker 2 (33:12):
Seriously, I think it was gonna air drop you in there.
This didn't.
Speaker 3 (33:15):
Yeah, Well, anyway, it's it's obviously a symbolic act on
on all fronts here.
Speaker 2 (33:20):
But that's an interesting one to me. Uh so, what
do we have next?
Speaker 1 (33:23):
We have Kazimir Pulaski. So, Kazimir Pulaski also set sail
for North America to help the American side in the
War for Independence, right, he wanted to fight for the
continental cause. He did a bunch of stuff. Famously, during
(33:44):
the Battle of Brandywine, he led a cavalry charge that
saved the life of George Washington. He was promoted to
a general who organized mounted soldiers. He even wrote the
book on cavalry tactics. Literally, he wrote a book about it.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
Was that, like, that's like mounted attacks huh yeah, yeah, yeah,
it's all about formation, huh, formation, strategy, flanking, yeah, no
one when to hold him, when to fold him, yeah,
when to charge them, when to scold him, when to
scold him and say, hey, buddy, you're not riding that
horse very well. You're doing a bad job.
Speaker 1 (34:16):
And when to mold them.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
Get what it's all about, molding them. It's all an
excellent cavalryman, yes, yes, uh yeah. He's one of the
fathers of American cavalry.
Speaker 1 (34:24):
And for a century or so, his death has been
a holiday or a day of remembrance.
Speaker 2 (34:35):
Pulaski Day, Yeah, is that a thing?
Speaker 1 (34:37):
I guess so it's you and I must be a
horrible patriots, Paul, have you ever heard of Pulaski Day,
Casimir Pulaski.
Speaker 3 (34:45):
Paul is saying that it's a Sufi and Stephens song
and I, to which I replied, it is probably bigger
in Michigan. Okay, let's let's actually incorrect.
Speaker 2 (34:56):
It's it's in big in Chicago, which was the second
Sufi on Stevens State based album.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
There we Go.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
Feel the Illinoise come on, I feel.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
I hope he gets the other ones. I hope he
does it. One day. I keep thinking about that. That
bugs me. I stay up at night thinking about you
and your albums. Souf, I call him Souf uh So
Pulaski Day, which we have to celebrate in October eleventh.
Let's let's get up to Chicago. He's one of Illinois's
favorite sons. Here's some malort. Well, celebrate Pulaski Day. We'll
(35:29):
get a get a Chicago dog. We'll go see a
Cubs game in Wrigleyville. Drop by Second City, Oh man
see what they have going on Plascu. Wise, since that's
a big celebration. Uh yeah, yeah, so it is a holiday.
And he said he sounded like a superhero coming in.
(35:51):
So he's a Polish military officer. When he arrives in America,
he looks at Washington and he says, I came here
where freedom is being defended, to serve it and to
live or die for it.
Speaker 3 (36:02):
Hard as nails, really tough, tough guy, tough sounding dude,
like the cut of his gym.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
And so we come to the last, but not least,
honorary Citizen of the US.
Speaker 2 (36:16):
Bestowed in twenty fourteen to Bernardo de Galvez.
Speaker 1 (36:21):
In seventeen seventy seven, Colonel Bernardo of Galvez was made
the interim governor of Louisiana, and at the time Louisiana
was under Spanish control. Galvez hated the British, so he
helped smuggle supplies to the Continental forces through the port
city of New Orleans. He also orchestrated a campaign against
(36:43):
the Red Coats, defeating them in several battles, including Baltin Rouge.
And he became general like you do.
Speaker 3 (36:53):
Yeah, So that's when he won some pretty significant battles
in the Battle of Fort Charlotte, and he took mobile
away from the British.
Speaker 2 (37:02):
Finally, I know.
Speaker 3 (37:03):
You wonder back after all these years, loathed these many years,
And that's when Washington really praised Galvez as being a
deciding factor in the outcome of the Revolutionary War. And
then in twenty fourteen when this resolution was drafted that
made Galvez an honorary citizen, that was quoted and put
in the in the.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
Paperwork and the documentation.
Speaker 3 (37:26):
He's also you know, this is the most contemporary honorary
citizenship that we've got on the books.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
Who knows, Who knows what's next? Ben Who knows who
will come next?
Speaker 1 (37:35):
Maybe maybe someone listening today, It could be you.
Speaker 2 (37:38):
It could be you want to be a citizen of
the United States. You don't want to do the work.
Just become a key military lynchpin in some really important
conflict that changes everything, or or you know.
Speaker 1 (37:50):
Do something that people will appreciate two hundred years after.
Speaker 2 (37:53):
That's true.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
True. Interesting facts about Galvez. He is, although he's little
known today, he is the namesake of Galveston, Texas, which
I didn't know.
Speaker 2 (38:06):
I thought that sounded familiar.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
Rights it's weird because he played such an instrumental role
but is relatively little known, but.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
Didn't play any instruments the accordion.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
Perhaps I don't know accordions a lot to haul with you.
Maybe he Yeah, because he wasn't the father of Calvary.
He's no Pulaski. Pulaski being both from Poland and riding
on horses all the time. Surely he's my accordion pick
I like it. I don't want a pigeonhole or stereotype.
I just think he's more likely to have an accordion,
(38:39):
And I think about that a lot when we're doing
this show. I think which of these historical figures is
most likely to have an accordion.
Speaker 2 (38:46):
And to have accordion chops?
Speaker 1 (38:49):
So how did he die? Spoiler alert?
Speaker 2 (38:51):
He's dead. Yeah, he definitely died, and his remains are
lost to history.
Speaker 1 (38:59):
Yep, we're doing our own sound effects. But while his
bodily remains may be lost to history, his legacy is not.
The bar is very high when it comes to honorary citizenship,
and while many of these people on this list are
controversial for one action or another, the truth remains that
(39:21):
they did fundamentally huge things for the US and in
the case of Mother Teresa, for people who are suffering
in other parts of the world.
Speaker 3 (39:31):
That's right, So our hats off, our collective hats off
to all these folks because they really did make a
big impact, enough so that we were able to grant
them citizenship. In these days, the citizenship is becoming more
and more of a divisive thing, so it's sort of
like almost the highest honor that you can. You know,
it's not easy to get citizenship, and it's becoming even
(39:51):
more difficult to get citizenship and to become a naturalized citizen.
So hats off to all of these players players.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And we want to hear your deep cuts. Folks.
Who do you think is deserving of honorary citizenship today?
Speaker 2 (40:10):
And more importantly, who do you think you are? Let
us know. You can write to us at Ridiculous at
iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
Yeah, you know, that's a little confrontational. Hey man, you know,
are you punchy? Are you punching?
Speaker 2 (40:24):
I'm not punchy. I'm just punching. Okay, I'm punching. I'm
punching above my weight class, oh boy, and below the belt.
At the same time you can.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
You can find us on Instagram, you can find us
on Twitter. You can find our favorite part of the show,
your fellow listeners on our Facebook page or Ridiculous Historians,
and you can follow our own strange adventures. I am
at Ben Bollen on Instagram.
Speaker 2 (40:47):
I am at how Now Noel Brown on Instagram as well.
Speaker 1 (40:50):
Big, big, big thanks to Alex Williams, who composed the
track and recently appeared on an episode of Ridiculous History
with us. Do tune into that if you haven't checked
it out. Paul, Mission Control Decket, I'm making eye contact
with you outside the studio to thank you so much. Dude,
Casey is pursuing his double life.
Speaker 2 (41:09):
He is as LaBouche, as Lebouche and La France yes.
Speaker 1 (41:14):
Yes, where he wears a leather jacket, has a single
ear ring, single dangly cross earring, and we think he
has two secret families that don't know about each other.
Speaker 2 (41:24):
And lots of other secret stuff.
Speaker 1 (41:25):
Did we mention this on air?
Speaker 2 (41:27):
Yeah, totally, okay, I think we mentioned it at the
top of the show during the the Fmerald episode without great.
Speaker 1 (41:33):
Well, hats off to you, La Bouche. You are missed.
And thinks so as always, to Gabe, our research associate.
Thanks to you Ben.
Speaker 2 (41:42):
Thanks to you Pal, you really make it easy. We'll
see you next time.
Speaker 3 (42:08):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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