The (French) Capitol Insurrection

Episode Transcript
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AD Council. What's Parley Voo? And my fran says, I'm
Robert Bastards while it's behind the Insurrections, It's both. It's
like it's like, it's like Bourbon, right, Bourbon is whiskey,
but but all whiskey is not Bourbon behind the Insurrections
is behind the Bastards, but all Behind the Bastards episodes

(01:49):
aren't Behind the Insurrections episodes. So I dig that. Yeah,
I mean I think, I think that's actually that's a
great analogy and throwing this Scotch thing and then you're like, wait,
isn't No, I got it. I try to compare as
many things to Bourbon as I can speaking of Bourbon,
not speaking of Bourbon, speaking of artists. My guest today,

(02:13):
as with the previous what four episodes we've done on
this uh is Jason Petty a k A prop. What's
let the lick read Bourbon and night for Breakfast for dinner? Prop?
How do you feel about France? Uh? Wow, um, I
feel carbs. I just think carter and bread. They do

(02:36):
love that fresh food is delightful. Yes, I think. I
think Harlem Renaissance. That's pretty cool. You know. My patron
saint is is James Baldwin, so it's time out there. Yeah. Uh.
But besides that, I also think, Yah don't like Americans, Yeah,

(02:57):
which is hard to fault them for what I What
I don't like the French four is appropriating Belgian French
Fries or Belgian Fries and calling that they also they
have a habit of having superfluous letters and they have
too many way to like at least a third of
the letters in any French word are unnecessary. Yeah. Yeah,

(03:20):
we're taking France to task today, but we're not talking
about how they use too many letters. That that'll be
a six part we do at some point. Today we
are talking without French fascism. Um, yeah, because the French
actually have a long history of fascism. Although there's a
weird number of French scholars who will argue that France

(03:41):
is uniquely immune to fascism, it's not. And today we're
talking about the day that fascists almost took over the
French government February six, nineteen thirty four. Now, all of
the stories we've shared so far in this series have
borne some similarities to what happened in the US capital
on January six and the events that let up to it,
But what happened in France on February six, nineteen thirty

(04:04):
four is by far the most direct comparison to what
happened in the U s Capital on the six. I
knew nothing about this before I started this series, but
it's fascinating. It's wild. Yeah, well it failed, but also
it is just the same damn thing basically. You know
what's crazy is how much the thirties must have sucked
the trash. A lot of this stuff happened in the thirties. Man,

(04:27):
it sucked as much as I'm gonna guesses are going
to suck suck a decade. Yeah, um yeah, it's great.
It's great. How the same thing is happening again exactly
a century later. Pretty much. Um So the story starts,
our story today starts in many ways with something that
happened in the late eighteen hundreds. Prop have you ever

(04:48):
heard of the Dreyfus affair? No, this is I I
did when I was before I dropped out of college.
The only thing I ever was able to focus on
for more than a semester is a major was was
Holocaust studies, right I wanted to when I the the
only degree I ever wanted was a degree in like
Holocaust scholarship. And every class on anti Semitism in the

(05:09):
history of the Holocaust is going to start, or at
least be frontloaded with the story of the Dreyfuss affair.
And most Americans don't know about this, but it's very
famous in France and it's where the French far right
really comes out of. In eighteen eighty four, a French
army captain named Alfred Dreyfuss was accused of handing secret
documents to the Imperial German military. Now this was a

(05:30):
little over a decade since the Austro the Franco Prussian War,
which is where France lost a bunch of territory to
what became Germany. Um that one, so there's a lot
of like panic over the Germans, right, So suddenly it
comes out that like someone has been handing documents over
to the German military. There's a spy in the French military,
and everybody focuses on Alfred Dreyfuss. He's the immediate suspected

(05:53):
culprit because he's Jewish, you know, like, Okay, this is
starting to sound a little familiar. Now, yeah, yeah, this
is this is a pretty famous moment. Yeah, I feel
like okay, yeah, yeah, I'm like you and celebrity names
like I think I know this immediately and his story
becomes not you know, for there's a trader in the

(06:15):
French military, but there's a treacherous Jew giving our military
secrets to the Germans. Right. Um, Now, as I'm sure
most of you have guessed, just because this is the
show that it is, Dreyfus was innocent. The trial against
him was racially motivated and flawed from the get go,
and I found a good right up on the trial
from the open source educational website e International Relations, which

(06:35):
highlights just how fucked things were from the jump. On
the morning of Monday, the fifteenth of October, Captain Alfred
Dreyfuss was summoned to present himself at the French Ministry
of War. The Commander Patty to come, along with three
other inspectors, welcome Dryfus and proceeded in asking him to
write a peculiar letter dictated by Patty to clam that

(06:56):
this letter contains sentences from the infamous Borderreaux, which was
a letter written by a French spy found in the
dustbin of the German military attache in Paris. The French
Ministry of War was searching for the spy, and we're
testing various officers that could be suspected of treason. As
Dryfus wrote the letter, he shivered, and the three men
scrutinizing his every move noticed his trembling, thus deeming it

(07:16):
as a sign of culpability. He is cold, he shivers,
an incontestable sign of his culpability. The God he's shivered,
He's guilty, held guilty. N One. One constant throughout history
is people whose job it is to determine whether or
not folks are guilty of a crime. Are always bad
at that job. Not possible. Yes. Dreyfus was immediately arrested

(07:40):
for high treason and deported to the prison of I'm
I'm going to try to pronounce it. He was sent
to prison on December nineteenth. He was court martialed in
front of a set of anti Semitic juries who judged
him guilty and sentenced him to a degradation and life
sentence on the Devil's Aisle in French Guyana, so pretty
pretty much you know, a show trial, right. Uh. That

(08:00):
meant that the anti Semitism man all the way back
from there, all the way to they build in lasers
to shoot from space. They build in lasers to shoot
from space. And this is a real theory because we'll
talk about this later. France did not have much of
a history of anti Semitism before, not nearly as much
as a lot of other European countries. So about two

(08:22):
years after Dryfus is convicted, evidence comes out that a
completely different, non Jewish French officer had been the spy,
and this is good evidence. The guilty man, though, was
immediately acquitted by a military court because Dreyfus was Jewish
and thus must be the guilty party, and Dreyfus was.
Actually when the guy who was guilty was acquitted, they
sentenced to Dryfus for even more crimes that he hadn't

(08:44):
committed in the same Oh my god, it's really bad.
Oh my god. Anybody who watched that ivan, the terrible
docuseries on Netflix about the guy that was accused of
being the the not see Oh yeah, I watched that. Yeah,

(09:04):
oh Robert, it's up your alley. It is dude. So yeah,
they're like, that's him. I'll never forget his face. He's like, no,
it's not. Yeah, people are bad at remembering things, which
is the real problem. Like I witness accounts and stuff.
But there's not even that in this. This is just
racism that dry Us is being convicted over. Like it's

(09:25):
not even someone thinks they see him doing something. Um,
it's just like, well, he's a Jew and he's in
the army, so he's got to be the guy passing
secrets to the Germans. Obvious felt this way. Oh sorry,
what's that problem? Is gonna say? Man, uh, this is
gonna be a very racist statement, but I mean it
as a joke, which is even I shouldn't have even
prefaced it. But I just still think that, like, dang man,

(09:47):
because I still go when I look at like European Jews,
I'm just like but white people, and I just and
it's and it's so funny to because I'm like, damn,
y'all got the short end of the state. You got
the worst lottery ever as a white dude that you
don't even get to count as a white dude, you
have to, I think accept that in this period of
time in Europe, Jewish people aren't white. They are excluded

(10:10):
from the benefits of whiteness. And the way that like
in the late eighteen hundreds of Italians and Irish were
in the United States, right, Like just the process of
becoming white for a lot of these groups. Yeah, it's
so bizarre. I know in the early like this is
the longest script you've ever written, so I shouldn't be
at I know that, like you know stories of when

(10:31):
when America was founded, you know, only white people could
own land, so you had like Japanese immigrants standing in
front of the Congress being like, nah, we're white too,
you know what I'm saying, And just this argument that
like I am a part of that dog. I just
can't imagine as someone who's there is no way I
could stand in front of any court and convince somebody

(10:53):
I'm a white dude. You know what I'm saying that
like the idea one that that's possible, and to that,
like you actually are, ay dude. Yeah, and and nobody's
calling you a y dude, you know what I'm saying,
Like that's at least the the European jew obviously Ethiopian
Jewish people are clearly now why dudes, you know, yeah,
I mean, and it's it's a factor of non whiteness

(11:17):
is a scale, right, Like everyone who is considered non
white isn't considered the same um there, but it's it's
it's a it's a scale. And and in this period
of time and a lot of Europe, and really not
in France, this had not been the case. But in
a lot of Europe Jewish people are not really considered
like there had been there there had been within living
memory at this point, severe restrictions on whether or not

(11:40):
Jewish people could own property in parts of Europe. Um
it had not been legal like up to the First
World War, almost in like Germany, for Jewish people to
be officers in the military, like there were very strong
restrictions around it. So it's really it's hard to almost
get your head around because of how significant it is
in this period. That's the point I'm trying to make
is like I still can't obviously you can't, you can't

(12:03):
pull a you know, a critical race there is based
on a society in the in the twenty one century.
You can't yank that back to the seventeen and think
it's going to be the same. But at the same time,
it's still hard to like wrap my mind around the
fact that they're like but not him. And I'm like, yeah,
how do you know you know I'm saying it's um,

(12:25):
I mean, it's it's the whole the whole process of
a lot of you know, it's it's the same way
as how most of the kind of colonial procedures that
the British carried out in Africa in order to maintain
dominance and split up different tribal groups and keep them
fighting each other so that they could dominate and exploit them.
They beta tested that in Ireland with with with what

(12:46):
we're effectively tribes and group tribal groups of Irish people
like that that. There are people scholars who will argue
that the Irish were the first people to be excluded
from whiteness when they were when the idea of whiteness
was being invented, before the slave trade even really existed,
because like it was there an early colonized people. It's
a it's a like it will do a history series

(13:06):
about this at something History of whiteness. Yeah, there's a
couple of really good books, including one titled The Invention
of the White Race. That's yeah, it's a great book. Yeah,
very interesting. So anyway, everything that dry Us, you know,
getting tried and then getting reconvicted, when this new infro
comes up, it creates a massive culture war in France.
In two groups kind of rise up around this. There's

(13:29):
the anti dry Fusards, who are confusingly the ones who
think Dryfus is innocent. Okay, yeah uh, and then there's
the dry Fussard's who are raging anti semites um. Like,
the dry Fusards think that that dry Fus is guilty.
The anti dry Fussards think that he's yeah. Okay, So

(13:49):
it's the opposite of how you'd think it would be.
It's opposite day okay, got it. So dry Fuss is
pardoned by the French president and released in nineteen o three. Eventually,
just like and and in fairness to France, the weight
of kind of cultural opinion is that Dreyfus is guilty.
People come around on this and realize that they've done
him dirty. Um. So he's released in nineteen o three

(14:10):
and in nineteen oh six of French court formally recognizes
his innocence. Now, the actual spy and the racist officers
who conspired against Dreyfus were never punished. And one of
the saddest things about the story is how kind of
incomprehensibly loyal to the state Alfred Dreyfus is because after
he gets out of years of being in prison as
a spy, he rejoins the French army and fights in

(14:32):
World War One. Yeah, he retires as a lieutenant colonel
and dies at nineteen thirty five. He goes right back
into the military. Dry until boy, like, bro, it is
hard to get your head around these people don't love
you family well, so, I mean, in fairness to him,
a lot of folks there was a huge culture war
in his defense. In a lot of cases people this

(14:53):
is wrong. Um, so all things considered, for what is
effective lee like a racist attack on a Jewish man
at multiple levels of the military. The dry Fuss affair
works out about as well as you can expect for
drivers because he is he is vindicated in the end,
but because of how much because of what kind of

(15:16):
like evolves in France around believing dry Fuss is guilty
and starting to believe that Jewish people are kind of
inherently unloyal to the state. Uh supercharges the radical right
in France, and it lays the foundations for French sympathy
for the Nazis and a hatred of Jewish people that
would claim tens of thousands of lives in World War Two.
And I'm gonna quote from that right up in the
International Relations again quote. Before the affair, France had been

(15:40):
one of the least anti Semitic countries in Europe. It
in fact had been the country where the most Jews
had sought political asylum. During the pogroms that took place
in Russia during the eighteen eighties. Russian Jews escaped the
massacres ordered by the Czar and flee towards the rest,
predominantly France. Another event attesting to France's non anti Semitic
past was that there was no French delegation at any

(16:02):
of the annual congresses of anti Semitism that took place
in Dressden. Yes, there used to be yearly congress is
based on anti Semitism and Dressed that a bunch of
European countries would send delegates to to talk about the
danges you the the amount of anti like the Holocaust
isn't a factor of the Nazis. The Holocaust is a
factor of centuries of most of European christen of being

(16:23):
like the Jews are dangerous, Like that's where it comes from.
Just a slow moving train that ended exactly where logically
it would end. Yeah, it was the result of for
hundreds of years, lots of prominent people being like, we
should murder these folks, and then they did. You know,
it's the least surprising thing in the world if you
read anything about European history. Um so. Yeah. But in

(16:47):
France though, um that that's not really the case is much.
Obviously there's anti Semitism in France, as the drivers affair shows,
but it's not nearly what it was. It was one
of the best places in Europe to be Jewish, and
there were as dry This proves a lot of very
loyal to France Jewish people. Um So, the anti Semmatism
really starts to grow into a serious force in France

(17:07):
as a result of the Dry Fust affair. The Driver's
affair also leads to an explosion in the radical press
for the first time in French history. Left and right
start launching a series of newspapers and magazines aimed at
taking different sides in a violent culture war. At the start,
anti dry Fussard press outnumbered the dry Fusard press by
about ten to one in terms of readership. So the

(17:28):
guys who think dry fuss is innocent, that's the majority
of the press at the beginning. But that doesn't stop
the dry the dry Fusard press, which are the ones
who don't like drivers, from publishing a constant stream of
ever more lurid lies about a Jewish conspiracy to undermine
the military. Now, some will argue that the whole reason
the dry fust affair became a thing was because the
press flocked to it, and that it might have disappeared

(17:51):
um if they hadn't written so much about it. Scholar
Jen Dennis Brennan wrote, the press became the power of opinion.
It amplified the political movements without creating them. For the
first time, the press disposed of a powerful influence on
French politics, dramatizing supporting or denouncing the authorities. Now this
is very familiar to everybody listening right now. It's the
same thing that happened with like Q and on right,

(18:13):
this radical press, the the and wh when we talk
about radical press in this period, the people like mimeographing
or whatever their own like little newsletters and stuff. It's
the same as like memes and shipped on Twitter and
ke went on it's like eight chance, that's what's happening.
He's still ye still just dank memes, okay, And it's
it's by the way, this basic process is the same
thing that radicalize as Hitler when he's when he's like

(18:33):
homeless living in Vienna, he starts picking up all of
these crudely copied and written anti Semitic tracts that were
passed out in mass on the street. That's what convinces
him in a lot of ways about the danger of
the Jewish menace. It's a lot of the same ship
you see on h Chan. It's just now what happens online.
Then it was like like zines you would pass out basically.
I wonder if there's like some sort of psychological study

(18:57):
or something that like lays out what that does to
you mentally to see something that's like feels clandestined, if
you will, Because it's like these like mimiograph things like
the quality is terrible. So it's so does something in
you feel like, oh, this is a secret. That's why
it's not all polished and nice. It's like, does there

(19:19):
someone if there's something to that where it's like I'm
I'm in I'm in on something. I know. There's psychology
about that where you feel like you're in on something
everybody else isn't it. It hits a certain part of
your brain. It's man, But I wonder if there's something
to do with like, how sucky the quality of like
y are? This is the same? You know? I talk
about this a lot. There's this one of the guys

(19:39):
behind the Lincoln Project as a fellow named Rick Wilson,
who is, like I think, objectively a bad person, um,
but has been historically pretty good at creating certain types
of propaganda. He was the guy behind the Reverend Right
campaign ads during Obama's election. Um, yeah, he's that guy.
And I interviewed him in talking about kind of his

(20:00):
opinion on Hillary Clinton's campaign ads versus Donald Trump's because
the first Trump campaign ads really felt like something some
teenager had cobbled together on their laptop, and Hillary's ads
were like traditional campaign as and everyone was a lot
of liberals were making fun of Trump's ads, but they
were getting this incredible traction. And the thing he told
me was essentially like the really polished slip campaign ads

(20:22):
don't work nearly as well as the ones that look
like they came out of somebody's basement, because that feels
real to people, right, Like, it feels more authentic. And I,
you know, like, again he's a very bad person. Um,
he's not bad at making propagande. And I think about
what he told me a lot um and that's I think,
what kind of what you're seeing here? I think you're

(20:43):
exactly right. So the dry Fist affair would prove in
the radical press that kind of comes out of the
dryf this affair would prove to be the seed of
a new militant right wing in France, one that came
with its own stabbed in the back myth right. We
talked about how the stabbed in the back myth in
Germany was crucial now the right in Frances, like we
lost the Franco Prussian War because the Jews, you know,

(21:05):
um damn it. And it's it's worth noting that when
the Nazis took over France, they actually had a problem,
had serious problems logistically because of how many French people
were turning in their Jewish neighbors. They couldn't deal with
the sheer number of Jewish people being turned into them. Yeah,
it was way more normal to give up your Jewish
neighbors to the Nazis than it was to hide them

(21:26):
in a lot of Europe, but in France too. Yeah yeah,
I know, like I have, we talked about so many times,
like the parallels in the in like Syria and Iraq
and Iran, like and I have you know, some of
my homies out there, like we're trying to explain like
how a caliphate kind of grows and this is a
lot of the thing too. It's like this these like

(21:47):
heavily armed dudes pull up to the house and are
like are you a Christian? And you're like, uh nah,
but they are you know what I'm saying, And it's like,
you know, or you down for the Caliphate? You down
with us. It's like, uh, well, day's data ones down
there said it's just like I just don't want you
to drag my daughter out of my house. So yeah them,

(22:09):
you know what I'm saying. He just turned it down
a dude down the street. You know what I'm saying,
I don't know what they are, you know. And and
it's like a lot of people that signed up didn't
really sign up. They just you know, saying, it's just
I just don't want you to drag my grandma out
of the street, you know what I mean. Yeah, that's
a factor in it. There's a this is about the
when we talk about the Holocaust. That's a complicated factor

(22:30):
because a lot of people would claim in their defense later,
like after during the Nuremberg Trial time that they had
been forced to carry These are mainly German soldiers, they
had been forced to carry out acts of genocide, and
a significant amount of scholarship shows that, like it's actually
was unheard of for German soldiers to be punished for
not engaging in acts of genocide. Um, it was. It

(22:52):
was a lot of a lot of it was just
it was a mix of like peer pressure and like
legitimate radicalization. But that's a whole Holocaust is a whole
another story. Um. But this is a part of the
story of the Holocaust. Though. This is why part of
why the French people in who are taken by the
Nazis are so willing to turn in Jewish neighbors, you know. Um,

(23:12):
And none of this should be seen as like kind
of uh ignoring the fact that a lot of French
people hid and protected their Jewish neighbors actually makes them
much more heroic. But that was not the norm, you know. Um.
So again, the dry Fust affair gives birth to the
right wing in France. Um and it it's it's like

(23:33):
it leads to this alternative media ecosystem that starts spreading
propaganda at a at a huge rate. Um. Now, France, obviously,
World War one comes around and France is one of
the co co belligerents in that war, and they suffered,
you know, terribly as a result. At one point three
million French soldiers were killed and another million were left
permanently disabled. Which makes which means that like in that war,
France lost as many soldiers dead as the US has lost,

(23:56):
more than the US has lost in all of its
wars put together. Um. Damn. Yeah, it's bad. Um Yeah.
Seventy of French soldiers who mobilized for World War One
where either killed or wounded. Um. And this is not
just include white frenchmen. This includes a huge number of
colonial troops who were brought onto the continent by the
French government to make up for the fact that after

(24:17):
a while, German machine guns had them running low on
white dudes, you know. Um. And one of the stories
that's not talked about enough in World War One is
how many people from India, people from chunks of Africa,
from like all over the world, from the Middle East
were brought in to die on the Western Front because like,
we own these places and we can make them, you know,
beauty of colonialism, You can just yet pull bodies from anywhere,

(24:40):
pull them all from wherever. Now. The days and months
after World War One's closed brought a wave of revolutions
and insurrections across Europe. In Germany and Russia. As we've
talked about, all these trauma mad young veterans were major
instigators of unrest in what one scholar called the shatter
zones of the empires that died as the war's conclusion um,
which I think it's a neat term. Yeah, you know,

(25:01):
all these paramilitary organizations start becoming more common, and France
has spared the worst of this, in part because you know,
they have their stab in the back from the War
of eighteen seventy, but then they win World War One,
which does kind of mean it reduces the avenues for radicalization. Right,
people aren't as angry because the war was terrible, but
they did win. You know, it's not as bad as

(25:21):
it is in Germany or you know, Italy one too,
but they kind of got screwed in the victory, you know,
so there there's a lot more resentment in those countries. Um,
France does have some unrest though, there's waves of strikes
in early nineteen nineteen, but these didn't really disrupt the
status quo. They did, however, terrify French conservatives. This was
largely because those conservatives weren't seeing the reality of the

(25:42):
strikes themselves, but were instead looking at the violence convulsing
Russia as a result of its recent revolution and being like,
that's what these people want to bring here, you know. Yeah,
so everybody's scared of whatever hell happened to Russia. Everybody is, Yeah,
it's a huge factor here, you know, and you have
to acknowledge that. Like we talk a lot about how

(26:03):
the people on the left are terrified about what they
see happening in France and Germany. People on the right
are terrified about what they see happening in Russia and
a lot of again, nine million people die in that war. Yeah,
you have the holludomor, which is five million Ukrainians being
starved ares a result of some very fucked up policies.
So like, they're not like when people are terrified as
a result of what's happening in Russia. It's not like,

(26:24):
you know, today people being scared of cultural Marxism because
you know, someone wants to talk about slavery, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah,
basically they have very different that's a legitimate fear. Yeah,
there's they have a leg to stand on right now. Again,
they usually still take it to like, well now we
have to just do fascism, which is yeah, it's like
well bro, but but it's not quite the same. Um. So,

(26:48):
the fear of French conservatives were exacerbated by a pattern
of progressive social changes that came in the war's wake.
The sheer number of men killed and rendered unable to
work had to bring more women into the workplace. Right,
you have a bunch of men who can't take part
in capitalism anymore, so you got to bring in women.
This brings in expansions and women's rights and a broadening
of what was considered acceptable behavior. For the first time,

(27:09):
large numbers of French women were both sexually and financially
independent of men, and obviously this terrifies conservatives. Yeah, I
can't have women making decisions. Yeah, they might, they might
decide not to make more French babies, which is actually
exactly where this leads because something called the birthrate movement
pops up in this period of time. These guys are

(27:30):
scared at declining rates of French birth. Now, they started
whining in eighteen seventy one when Prussia beat France in
that war because the French, right before they started blaming
Jewish people, blame the fact that French people women weren't
having enough babies, Like that's the thing, Like the right
loses of war and they're like they have to find
a scapegoats. So first it's the women, you're not making
enough babies for us to send into German guns, which

(27:53):
is obviously like ridiculous. We'll spoil an episode that we're
going to drop soon. The reason France loses that war
is because they have brass cannons that are basically Napoleonic artillery,
and the Germans have modern steel cannons, and that's why
France loses an eight one. That's the real reason. It
has nothing to do with birthrate. Um yeah, how would
it like, I'm even trying to follow your logic, like,

(28:15):
there's not that many Germans. Yeah, it's not that many
of it. What does Toddler going to do? You say, exactly? Um?
But yeah, it does say something about the right wing
that they're like, if we'd had more boys to send
into their guns, we would have won. Yeah, okay. Um.
And then of course, like after they you know, after

(28:37):
a decade or so of blaming women, they start blaming
Jewish people. Uh So, the kind of the birthrate movement
got even more like gained more traction after World War
One because this point a lot of French dudes had died,
so they had a little bit more of a leg
to stand on, like, we need to have more babies
because look at how many of our boys got killed.
A better answer, I think I'm just like man, I

(28:58):
always these dudes like what I'm hearing them, just the
stabbing the back thing. And then then we had no
birth rate. I just wish these kids had like Little
League baseball at some point to just like teach you
how to take a loss, man, Just take the loss, bro.
You lost none of them. That's the fucking thing. And
it's the same fucking thing for like the Hindenberg and

(29:18):
Ludendorf in Germany, where it's like, well, we can't accept
that we fucked up, right, it has to be it
has to be someone else's fault that we lost this war.
Just take the l bro. Like sometimes you know, hey,
you had a bad day, you know you just hey,
buck up, champ, like you just you took your loss,
all right, take the hell everybody takes ls. Yeah, it's

(29:39):
like the fact. It's like it's like the American right
wing blaming the fact that we lost Vietnam on like
teenagers protesting. It's like, no, dude, like the Vietnamese kicked
your ass. They were better. We just better. Like this
is what happens. Sometimes you lose. Yeah, Usually you lose
when you do stupid shit like it evade Vietnam or

(30:03):
invade Afghanistan. Should away? Yeah. So anyway, obviously a bunch
of members of the birth rate movement get elected to government.
They pushed legislation to encourage childbirth YadA, YadA. In nineteen twenty,
a conservative government is elected and immediately sets to pushing
back against what they saw as a rising and sinister
communist left. They were opposed by the labor government, which

(30:26):
had been swelled by the war's need for heavy industry.
During the first six months of conservative power, a series
of strikes convulsed both French industry and public services. Still,
the start of the twenties was a good time to
be a French Conservative. The stain of defeat in eighteen
seventy one had been wiped out by victory over Germany.
The new right wing government was seen as being largely
composed of herobic veterans, even though this wasn't really true,

(30:48):
but the idea was that, like, these guys are all heroes.
They're not normal, crooked politicians right there. They're men of
the Trench generation. They could be trusted to make hard
decisions to make France great again. So first on the
wings agenda was of course, sticking it to the Germans.
Just defeat. The defeated nations did a lot of money
to France and reparations um and these were seen not
only as spoils of war but were necessary to revive

(31:10):
the French economy because the French had gone badly into
debt to the United States in order to continue fighting
the war. So they need German reparations to pay off
the US. You know, um, uh, my money because I
owe some money. Yeah, I need my money because yeah.
So when the Germans begged that they couldn't afford to
like feed their people and pay reparations, the French right

(31:32):
wing assumed that they were lying, and this newly formed
network of right wing newspapers and magazine starts spreading another
conspiracy theory. This one is that Germany actually hadn't been
all that badly hurt in World War One. They just
faked a surrender so that they could rebuild their military
and sneak attack Germany. All of their complaints about economic
collapse and inflation and starvation were lies meant to lull

(31:53):
the French into a false sense of security, which yeah,
is not the case. So the Germans stopped paying reparations
because they were literally on the verge of societal collapse,
and the French government sends in troops to occupy Germany's
industrial heartland, and of course, a big one of the
things that happened in this period is a lot of
the troops they send over are like black people from

(32:15):
their colonial possessions, which really jump starts a lot of
racism in Germany. Um because like you know, nobody ever
likes the occupying soldiers. Nobody, Yeah, nobody wants the messenger.
Yeah exactly. Um. Obviously, still one time I feel like
in this age or in this era of history where
I feel like I have a little more mercy for

(32:35):
Germany when they're just like Doug, we may look, man,
we ain't got it. Dog Like we just I ain't
got it, you know what I'm saying. It's like it's
your fault. Yeah, don't get me wrong, it's your fault.
But you can't squeeze water out of a turn up fan. Yeah.
I mean, they're fucking like the thing that they're guilty
of in World War One in that era, and the
reason that like France and Germany come down so hard

(32:58):
on them is like they're primarily guilty of one to
do what France and Germany had been doing for two,
two or three centuries. You know, they wanted an empire,
and they're like, well everyone else gets to do it,
why don't we get it's bad to want an empire. Obviously,
what the Germans do some really messed up stuff in
the Maybia carry out a gainside themselves like but also
up to World War One and including World War One,

(33:19):
if you're looking at like the number of crimes against
humanity committed by Germany versus France or England not even Yeah.
In nineteen twenty four, the French Conservatives get their asses
handed to them in a landslide election, and the victors
in this election are an alliance between socialists and radicals.
Now again because everything in Frances backwards, the Socialists were

(33:43):
the furthest electorally relevant left wing party. So the Socialists
are like as far less like the Bernie standers as
far left as you could be in French politics and
still get elected. Obviously they're further left in than Bernie,
but like they're as far left as you can be
in France and get elected. The Communists hate the Socialists
in a lot of case is because the Communists are
further left than that and they're not really as relevant
in the government as a result. The radicals are the

(34:05):
exact opposite of with the sound like the radicals have
the same kind of position in France. And this is
at this period as Democrats do. They're the center left right,
the majority left. Um. So the radicals are not radicals
and the Socialists are not communists, but they are far
left for French politics. Again, everything in Frances backward. Um.

(34:26):
So the radicals and socialists had worked together in the past.
Um they were allied, and that they all kind of
broadly supported human rights, democracy and anti clericalism, pushing against
like the Catholic Church. But they didn't get along on
much else. The Radicals were the party of like the
petite bourgeoisie, the lower middle class, small business owners and
successful peasants. They were big on individualism and self reliance

(34:49):
and of course property ownership as a method of social advancement.
The Socialists are socialists. Their partnerships were always awkward, and
for one thing, the Socialist Party had a standing that
none of their deputies were allowed to accept ministerial posts
and radical governments because they saw themselves as a Marxist
revolutionary party and if they were seen as working within
a liberal government, the Communists would eat them alive and

(35:12):
suck in their disaffected members. So they get elected to
what is effectively French Parliament or Congress or whatever. They
have deputies, but they won't serve in the government of
the radical majority because that would mean compromising the fact
that they're Marxist revolutionaries. And the lose members to the
communists then, and the communists hate the socialists because they're
willing to get like elected at all, basically, um, and

(35:33):
they're willing to work with the radicals. It's very very
complicated and domb but it's also like basically what happens
between the left all the time. Right, you've got the
left that wants to actually govern, and you've got the
left that's like the system is so fucked up that
governing means buying into the things that we're fighting against,
you know. Yeah. Yeah. Despite the fact that actual socialists

(35:58):
like weren't taking weren't only take up ministerial jobs, and
the fact that the left coalition didn't agree on much,
the election of this new government, which is called the cartel,
drives the right wing completely bug fuck and I'm sure
Americans can understand what that look like. The conservative print
media basically calls this stage one of a communist invasion.
The socialists, who the communists hated were considered to be

(36:20):
just the same as the communists, revolutionaries, and sheep's clothing.
In nineteen twenty six, the Cartel really pisses off the
right wing when they approved the Washington Accords, which guaranteed
that France would keep repaying her ward at to the
United States even if Germany defaulted on their payments to France.
At the same time, the Cartel brings the Germans into
the League of Nations. The Cartel in France are like

(36:42):
this liberal government, they're trying to rehabilitate Germany because Germany
is kind of socialist at this point. They're like, let's
bring them back into the national community, like we we
can't keep ostracizing them as a result of World War One,
and part of bringing Germany back in as they negotiate
a more reasonable repayment arrangement with Germany that the right
wing sees is the left selling out the country and

(37:03):
it's war dead. Right, So yeah, do you just oh man, yeah,
I'm getting I feel like I'm feeling itchy on my back. Man.
You know, everyone knows where this is going, yes, bro,
Like and then and then the thing is this, it's
like in the same way that we call that y'all
call Bernie Sanders a radical leftist. I'm like talking about

(37:25):
Bernie Sanders talking about stuff that they do in Canada.
You know what I'm saying, the communist bastion of Canada,
you know what I'm saying, So like he ain't really
radically not really that you know what I'm saying, lightweight,
you know, And what I compare like a party to
like they're the Bidens or whatever. I'm not saying They're
politics are like it, it's like a comparative thing, like, yeah,
I get the scale. I totally I'm totally following the scale,

(37:47):
and I'm saying, yeah, in this scenario, it's like what
they're suggesting is reasonable. They you're not gonna get your money. Yeah,
they're not gonna get your money if you kill the Germans.
Let's bring them back to let them rebuild and will
eventually get paid if they please be like this, if
we never rehabilitate them. It's the same thing with like
with like prison reform exactly this like it's just gonna

(38:11):
keep No, we have to do this, this is reasonable.
We're not going to get the result that we both want.
So let me just and you Tom I'm selling you out. Okay,
I'm getting itchy. Yeah yeah, So the years that Cartel
is in power are basically a constant stream of outrage
porn for the now exploding right wing media ecosystem. Okay.

(38:32):
Newspapers like Action, Francois, Candied which means candid, Gringore, and
Jesuit Part two which means I Am everywhere reach hundreds
of thousands and eventually more than a million conservative French readers.
The first of these was Candide, which had been established
in eighteen sixty five and from the beginning was both
anti democratic and anti Semitic. When Communism kind of went

(38:55):
viral worldwide, it added a violently anti Communists to its repertoire.
Candeed is followed by Gringar, which was named after a
French journalist, and just Suite Part two was initially not
anti semitic or right wing, but throughout the nineteen twenties,
at the direction of its head editor, the paper got
more and more extreme. In the late twenties and early thirties,
it goes all in from Mussolini and it starts to

(39:16):
get progressively anti semitic, until by the late nineteen thirties
it was literally just a Nazi magazine. So these are
like the big the big names and right wing media candy, yeah, candy, gringo. Anyway,
So in the early years of the cartel, well, the
French left is like I think, objectively, being pretty reasonable.
The French right wing is losing its entire damn mind.

(39:40):
And as will again sound familiar to everyone, the right
wing reacts to the left having some success by forming
a system of violent street fighting gangs so they could
beat up their opponents in the streets. Um This was
of course part of a trend in Europe that exploded
from nineteen nineteen to nineteen twenty three or so. We've
talked about this both in the case of Italy and Germany.
Now again in France, there's less unrest and there's less

(40:01):
angry veterans who want to tear down to the state
because they in that state had won their war. So
it takes longer in France for a paramilitary culture to
really kick off. One of the most direct causes comes
in nineteen twenty four, as the study France and Fascism
by Brian Jenkins notes, the right suspicions about revolutionary and
anti national nature of the Cartel were apparently confirmed in

(40:22):
November nineteen twenty four, when the government sanctioned the internment
of the ashes of the socialist founding father Jean Jaure
and the Pantheon. While socialists and radicals led a cortage
to the Temple of the Republic, the conservative press focused
on a communist counter demonstration held in protest at the
parliamentary left hijacking of Jarre. The presence of noisy communists

(40:43):
in the streets with socialist and radical deputy suggested that
the cartel had accepted Bolsheviks into its ranks, and the
Chamber of Deputies right wing deputy Pierre Tattinger denounced the
revolutionary saturnalia of the day, which he claimed he had
witnessed a true outbreak of revolution from the international underworld
that infects France. Tadinger promised that if the government could
not take matters into hand, the leagues of public safety

(41:06):
are ready to defend and save are threatened society. Now
the leagues are these these militant organizations, the street organizations.
So what happens here is this socialist guy's ashes get
brought back to France. It's like founder of the French
Socialist Party and the socialists and the radicals. Is kind
of a demonstration of left unity. Have a have a
ceremony for this this dead socialist. The communists who hate

(41:29):
everybody who's not a communist have their own rally, and
they're more extreme, but they're very tiny, and they obviously
hate the rest of the left. The conservative media looks
at just the communist demonstration says, that's all of them,
that's the whole left. They're all like these guys again,
it's the same, nothing changes, nothing changes, you know, isn't
going to change me asking you to take an yep,

(41:52):
you know who won't uh radicalize the French right over
anti semit has m based on communist demonstrations taken out
of context. Yeah, man, hopefully these uh, these other podcasts,
these other podcasts or whatever advertising to that. What grows

(42:21):
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So this guy, I know you're gonna say that, Yeah,
you get your own gay. So this guy, Pere Tattinger,

(44:30):
who will talk about in a bit, is a big
advocate of these leagues, these right wing street fighting gangs,
and he keeps like for years afterwards. He will talk
about in November ninet this like one communist rally as
and use it as like the whole reason why the
entire left needs to be defeated. Um and a lot
of like a huge chunk of Catholics and nationalists in

(44:51):
France believe that like, based on again this one demonstration,
a communist revolution is like right about to happen now,
so this was made worse by the fact that the
mid nineteen sufferance suffering economic contraction that, while not as
severe as the one experienced by Germany, was pretty bad.
Now you mix that in with the declining birth rate,
and as Brian Jenkins rights quote, in comparison to the

(45:14):
dynamic and youthful regimes abroad such as Mussolini's Italian Fascist State,
the Republic did not seem fit for purpose. Sections of
the right thus looked for a solution beyond the institutions
of the regime to violent extra parliamentary groups known as leagues.
So France is having trouble here, and the right, rather
than like trying to take any accurate stock of things,
looks at the propaganda coming out of the Italian Fascist State,

(45:36):
which is not accurate, and it's like, see, everything is
great in Italy. Why don't we do that? Oh my god, yeah,
oh my god, dude, it's great. Uh So, the leagues
are not quite like the black Shirts or the Free Corps.
They're not heavily armed. Most of them are veterans, but
they don't have like machine guns generally and like massive
Like they're not private armies. They're groups of combat veterans

(45:58):
generally who want to like drink and fight in the
streets against the left. One of the first leagues was
founded by that Pierre Tattinger, and he called them the
Juness Patriots or the Young Patriots, and they were initially
the youth wing of the League of Patriots, which was
a political organization the same it's it's yeah, the young Republicans, right,

(46:19):
turn the point USA or whatever. Patriots like, they're all
proud boys, you know, they're all proud, proud boys. So
a lot of people on the left recognize the League's
as a threat um and they are. One French leftist
Louver noted that since Mussolini's March on Rome, one could
no longer so much as walk in the street without

(46:41):
wearing a colored shirt. You know. He's talking about like
they've got you've got the black shirts in Rome, the
brown search in Germany, and now like all of our
guys have their own shirts, their own colored shirts for
each league's and he warns that. Louver warns that if
these leagues were able to like stop fighting each other
over petty bullshit and could unite under a single charismatic leader,
the way would be open for what he called the

(47:03):
rule of castor Oil and the grenade. So like, basically,
we've got all these fascists. If they could unify behind
one guy, we're in trouble. You know, there's the castor
oil again. Yeah, it's a real thing in this period.
So in this the left wing fear was you know, accurate, reasonable,
but perhaps a bit premature. The French leagues regularly reprinted

(47:24):
fascist brockpaganda and definitely admired the black Shirts, but they
were also French, and if you know anything about France,
it's that France kind of hates the idea of other
people's cultures coming into France and gaining influence. They are
very proud of being French, and even French proto fascists,
like their Spanish counterparts, were kind of didn't like, would
argue that they didn't want fascism because fascisms with foreign ideology, right,

(47:46):
we were extreme rightists, but we want our own French
version of that. We don't want to like steal from Italy.
We're France, We're better than that. I was like, that's pretty,
that's pretty on brand France. Yeah, it's very rand France,
very France. Yea, So one scholar named Dobris. Is this
the dilemma of the authoritarian nationalist, which is the fact
that nationalists want to be authentically of their nation because

(48:07):
fascism tends to gain power by reacting against purported foreign influence. Um.
But at the same time they want to imitate successful
authoritarians abroad, and this creates a problem for a lot
of fascists. We again, we saw the same thing in France.
Now the struggle within the French right over this continued
through the mid nineteen twenties while the Leagues went through
what Dobri calls an apprenticeship period to the Fascist International.

(48:28):
So the French Shire behind the German and Italian fascist
they're not as as quick. They're kind of learning from them, right,
and they're slower on the uptake as a result. Um. Now,
because a lot of awful lot of French League members
were veterans, the League's benefited from what became known as
the veterans mystique, which was a near worship in France
of what we're called the Front generation. People celebrated the

(48:50):
trench ocracy, which is like the democracy of the trenches. Right. Um,
this is huge in Europe. It's not just in France,
because in Germany, Hitler makes a lot of hay out
of the fact that he'd been a corporal in the trenches,
not like an officer or a nobleman, but a normal soldier. Um.
But I think Americans can understand how like right wing
groups can use veneration of veterans as a way to
push their own radical lens. You know. Um yeah. Brian

(49:16):
Jenkins writes about how one right wing fire brand named
The Law used the idea of the pure trench warrior. Quote.
The Law warned veterans that the Republic had sabotaged the
hard won gains of the war. Only the installation of
a fascist and dictatorial combatant state would restore France to
the politics of victory. Likewise, the Young Patriots leader Tatinger
extolled the virtue of the new elite born of war.

(49:39):
His group alleged that the cartel had sabotaged the fruits
of the war and clipped the wings of victory. These
leagues were not attracted solely to the veterans supposed moral quantities.
Only veterans were purported to join the Young Patriots, Iron
Brigade and the Legions, both elite paramilitary action squads. Now,
obviously most veterans don't join the League's uh, and a

(49:59):
lot of them also joined communist veterans organizations. But the
worship of veterans and the idea that the sacrifices of
nineteen eighteen had been betrayed by the leftist leaders of
France becomes a popular right wing rallying cry in the
mid twenties. Throughout this whole period, the right press continues
to gin up a desire for the blood of their
political opponents. One right wing journalist, politician, and street organizer

(50:21):
named Charles Morris was jailed in nineteen five for threatening
to have the Minister of the Interior killed like a
dog if police kept at harrassing the leads. O. Lord, Yeah,
there's a couple Marjorie Taylor Green or whatever her name is,
the Q and on lady who's talking about that Jewish
space later and probably helped carry out and incite and
advise that sees the jew laser. Yeah, that that that lady.

(50:46):
There's like three of her in France in this period, Okay,
and Mars is kind of one of them. Now, Mars
is an interesting guy. He was born a monarchist and
it is what we would probably call a Catholic fascist today.
His earliest politic call memory was the was the French
defeat in the Franco Prussian War, which seems to have
fueled a lot of his anti left hatred later in life.

(51:07):
He became an anti democratic activist in the eighteen nineties,
and then came the Dreyfus affair, and of course Maris
is a dry fuss Art. He believes that Dryfus is
guilty because he's Jewish, and he grows increasingly anti Semitic
after the Dryfus affair. In eighteen ninety nine, he founds
a newspaper uh Action France, which literally means French Action,
and yes it does sound kind of like a porn.

(51:28):
His magazine becomes very influential among the French right wing,
and Marius uses his influence to, among other things, convince
a lot of conservatives that destroying democracy and going full
monarchy is the right thing to do. He writes an
article in eighteen ninety nine titled Dictator and King that's
about how we should have a dictator king and Franciso yeah, yeah,

(51:49):
you know what France's problem is not enough kings, you know,
what remember, we has served him. Yeah, and peddle back
to that. Let's go back to that. That was amazing Ricketts.
In nineteen o five, Mars starts writing articles about how
swell it would be for the right wing to create
extra legal paramilitary organizations and have them do a coutaita.

(52:11):
When the league's rose up, Mars was thrilled, and soon
Action Francais or Front the French Action, has its own league.
When Mars goes to jail for threatening to murder a
member of the government, his business partner at the newspaper
says this to a gathering of their followers in nine
if Mars were wounded or hit, I would at once
give orders to have the ministers of the Republic immediately assassinated.

(52:33):
So like the right wing isn't just like dog whistling violence,
So like we should kill them all, we should kill
everyone on the left. Yes, it's like like the American
right now. So what do you so in what what
way do you mean? I mean, I mean we shoot
them today, we kill them, yeah, yeah, it's why. And

(52:56):
then it's the same as what's been had, what happened
ahead of the sixth you know, now obviously Marris and
his business partner were not alone in their calls for
violence against the left. I'm gonna quote from France and
fascism here. Such calls to violence often went unheeded, and
law and order were not threatened to the extent. Scene
in Germany and Italy, however, low level physical violence was common.
Newspaper sellers from rival organizations regularly came to blows in

(53:19):
the street, while political meetings were frequently the scene of violence. Furthermore,
despite their claims to stand for authority in order, the
leagues could fight with the police. To the French actions
created mayhem in the Latin Quarter and beyond beating political
opponents and reveling in confrontations with the police. Meanwhile, a
young Patriots leaguer died in March nineteen six during fighting
with police at a demonstration against the Minister of the Interior,

(53:42):
Louis Malvi. So they these organizations are kind of recruiting
and growing because they're fighting with the left and they're
fighting with the cops right now. In most of France,
the armed paramilitary start to decline in popularity after nineteen
and in France they mostly faded into the background, temporarily
by nineteen twenty six, after two years of regular street brawls,

(54:06):
they left behind them, in the words of some scholars,
a culture of violent rhetoric, uniformed politics, and street fighting
right which again very similar violent rhetoric, uniformed politics, and
street fighting. The proud Bols know it's proud um. Now,
this was not the end of violent unrest in France.
Just to pause, because in nineteen six a new Conservative

(54:26):
government gets elected and the cartel comes to an end.
So that's why the league's kind of fade after twenty
six is the Conservatives get elected again. It comes a
home game again, okay exactly yep. And the reason the
right wins in nineteen twenty six is that the left
has fractured again. The Communist launch a series of attacks
against the Socialists, who they call social fascists in fighting

(54:49):
causes the less to temporarily dissolve this meaningful opposition, and
this meant the League's also had a lot less of
a reason to exist. Big business that's spent the previous
four years pumping money into the far right, and they
withdraw their financial support after twenty six, which causes the
leagues to collapse. So the leagues are floated by rich
businessmen who then like, well, now conservatives are in power again,

(55:09):
we don't we don't want street games anymore. Yeah. So
the temporary fall of the League's and the victory of
the center right did not mean the fever swamps of
far right media ceased operation, and no magazine or newspaper
was more influential than French action from a right up
end of all things. The Harvard Crimson quote it collected
within itsels the inheritors of a tradition of nationalist, monarchist

(55:32):
and reactionary thought extending back almost a hundred years. It
was no mere cabal of a moral big businessman, such
as supported the so called Committee France alec Main and
the ultra conservative Grand Press, but a meeting place for
distinguished and gifted intellectuals whose disdain for the republic was
wholly disinterested, the result of literary and philosophical predispositions, not

(55:52):
any desire to safeguard financial investments. So again, the far
right in the in the period where the left is
in control, is did by businessmen who are safeguarding their investments. Right,
and that's why they want to fight socialists in the street.
But the guy's propagandizing to the far right are true believers.
It's not about money for them, It's about fascist you

(56:12):
know about the thing? Okay, yeah so, and Mars being
a monarchist is only marginally happier under a conservative government
than liberal one. The king is still gone and he
wants a fucking king. So throughout the years of right
wing power in France, he continues to advocate for an
armed coup is the only way to bring back the monarchy.
It would have been easy for people in the left
and mistake he and his followers for isolated loons, and

(56:35):
a lot of people in the center particularly did. Then
the global economy crashed, and in France it crashes with
the right wing and power. And May of nineteen thirty
two the left wins again. Their victory is again enabled
by the fact that the radicals who are the moderates,
ally with the socialists again to avoid splitting the left
wing vote. So left continuously wins in France and Spain,

(56:56):
uh and Germany when the left and the center left
are willing to like work together electorally right um and
the right is obviously enraged and terrified by what was
surely a prelude to full on Stalinism. Now, I just
said that, like the left consistently wins elections in Europe
against the right in this period when you know they're

(57:17):
all willing to work together. The problem with the far
left and the center left working together is the same
thing that we're seeing now under Biden. Liberals and the
left can never get their ship together to agree on anything,
and in France they can't put aside their differences to
get a basic aid package together to help people with
the depression, which again does not sound at all familiar. Yeah,
there's my back tingle again. Yeah. So the socialist demand

(57:40):
direct aid for the unemployed, while the radicals worry about
the deficit and think that it's much more important to
balance the budget exact thing, Okay, the radicals, who are centrists,
their best idea is, of course austerity cuts in wages
for public workers. The intractable debate between the socialists in
the radicals leads to a series of different liberal left governments. Obviously,

(58:03):
it's like a parliamentary system, so you can have votes
of no confidence, you dissolve the government, you bring in
a new government, new ministers. This happens a number of times,
and none of these governments are able to actually help people,
and the French economy spirals downhill. The right wing correspondingly
surges and it unifies behind the thing the right wing
does best, picking up weapons and making death threats to

(58:24):
people they disagree with. The leagues that had remained functional
after nineteen six, namely French Action and the Young Patriots
see a swell in their membership. They're soon joined by
new leagues. In June of nineteen thirty three, a perfume
magnate and fascist named Coti forms his own paramilitary group,
which he uses to spread anti Republican authoritarian propaganda and

(58:44):
pushes this through the newspaper that he owns as well.
By February of nineteen thirty four, the Perfume Guys paramilitary
gang slash newspaper is the most influential and largest fascist
movement in France. Are you saying perfume? Yeah, he's a
perfume guy. Like France's most influential fascist gang leader is
a perfume dude, the guy that like fragrance. Okay, I

(59:06):
was big into the fragrance business. Yeah, this is again
pretty on brand, pretty on brand. Cody's men wore blue
shirts and lots of leather, and one has to assume
smelled incredible. Yeah, it sound like they probably looked amazing too.
I'm sure they did. Yeah. Now, another fascist French guy
named Marcel Bouchard starts a league called the Francists in

(59:28):
the September of ninety three. Bouchard repeatedly praised foreign fascist governments,
and he was famous for making long speeches about the
almost sexual love he had for his revolver. Again, another
Marjorie Taylor Green right, like I'm gonna take my clock
into congress kind of guy. It's the same fucking ship.
Just the worship of weapons and such. And then of

(59:49):
course there's the Craw the Few, which is like the
cross of Fire. This is an organization that had been
founded as a veterans association for men who had been
decorated for bravery and combat. So all of the crawl,
if you, the Cossa firemen are like not just combat veterans,
but men who have been particularly awarded for their courage
under fire. So it's not founded necessarily as a right wing,

(01:00:11):
radical militant organization, but it becomes one very quickly. Its
leader is a guy named Colonel Laroq, and he holds
military style parades and is not afraid to use his
men as a political cudgel. And the way their organized
is actually pretty genius. They have at their height about
half a million officers and n c o s and
their membership, and the officers and n c o s
are each like put in charge of ten guys to

(01:00:32):
other former soldiers who were of lower ranks, and their
job is to get help with those guys for those
guys using the resources of the league, and also control
their votes. So the half million or so officers and
n c o s and the Cross of Fire control
about five million votes. They're very politically influential as a result.
So these guys are right wing and kind of militant,

(01:00:54):
but they're also very system loyal right there. Not we
want to overthrow the government there, We want to organize
as a political entity in order to dominate the government,
so Brian Jenkins rights quote. In November of nineteen thirty one,
the colonel and his followers stormed the stage at a
meeting on disarmament at Trucadero, bringing an end to the proceedings. Meanwhile,
the league's shock troopers called Dispose were employed to maintain

(01:01:16):
security at meetings and fight the left in the street.
In October nineteen thirty three, a new manifesto announced a
more radically anti parliamentary direction, while the group opened its
ranks to non veterans through its volunteers nationa auxiliary, so
they get, you know, start more system loyal, and they
get kind of more closer and closer to fascism as
time goes on. As nineteen thirty four dawned, right wing

(01:01:37):
paramilitaries were as organized and as large as they had
ever been in France. The left was too was fighting
too much within themselves to the with it between themselves
to deliver any kind of meaningful aid that might have
tamped down on unrest. Meanwhile, the right blamed the global
economic collapse on their own leftists and of course the Jews. Um.
They also are able to look abroad at the propic

(01:02:00):
and that's being put out by Italy and now Germany
and be like, look at how good things are going
in the fascist countries where I assume I have accurate
information from We should do that. What did they do
that we're not doing? Yeah, they're not We're we're not
killing enough leftists clearly yeah. And then, as everything in
France is about as hot as it could get, what

(01:02:20):
comes to be known as the Stavitsky affair bursts onto
the front page of every rightist newspaper in France, and
I'm gonna see how long it takes you to like
figure out what the most modern parallel to stay affair?
All right? Sergey Alexander Stavisky was born in Ukraine in
eighteen eighty six to a Jewish family who'd immigrated to
France in eighteen ninety nine. His father was a dentist.

(01:02:42):
To Stavisky, however, was a born grifter. While still a teenager,
he established himself as a con man. By the mid
nineteen twenties had gotten good at it, making enough money
to dress as a rich guy, even though he was
constantly on the ViRGE of losing everything. Stavisky used his
charisma and his ability to trick global rich people to
keep the cash flowing France and fascism, writes Quote, he
left a trail of fake companies, counterfeit checks and bonds,

(01:03:03):
and fraudulent share transactions, and following his arrest in July
nineteen twenty six for stealing and stolen securities. He spent
seventeen months in the Lessante prison while his case awaited trial.
Following his release on medical grounds, the hearing of the
case against him was repeatedly deferred nineteen postponements and all,
leaving Stavisky free to launch a string of further dubious
ventures under the alias Sergey Alexander. In ninety eight, he

(01:03:25):
embarked on a scheme which the lucrative would eventually prove
his undoing, the fraudulent exploitation of municipal pawn shops in Orleans.
He extracted twenty five million francs from the pawn shop
in exchange for fake gimstones, subsequently redeeming the stones with
cash derived from the municipal pawn shop he had since
launched in bay Own. This was a much bigger operation,
and the credit was financed by issuing bonds well in

(01:03:46):
excess of the value of the articles deposited. Cash was
then realized through the sale of these fake bonds to
banks and insurance companies. In the summer of nineteen thirty three,
having spent lavishly and gambled heavily, Stavisky found himself unable
to redeem the bonds and his attempts to win backing
for a new operation, which he hoped would bail him out,
yet again, were soon frustrated. That's the nature of his
con Yeah. First it sounded like an assets it's pretty

(01:04:09):
good lick man he is, he is it commn for
a while. Yeah. So in September nine three, one of
the businesses he can't, an insurance company, called for a
judicial inquiry into his business. On December twenty three, the
director of a pawn shop Stavisky owned broke down under
questioning he did not just incriminate his boss, but also
a local elected leader from the Radical Party. Stavisky immediately

(01:04:32):
went on the run, fleeing Paris on Christmas Day, and
just as quickly, the right wing press picks up the story.
French Action and other newspapers launched a massive campaign to
allege that not just the one guy implicated, but a
whole host of Radical politicians, basically all of them, had
been involved in a far reaching financial conspiracy. Since Stavisky
was Jewish, you can guess how this folded in with

(01:04:52):
all the fact that all of these papers also had
huge heart ons for Hitler and Mussolini. One Radical deputy resigned,
another radical, the Minis stir of the economy was found
to have encouraged people to purchase junk bonds from Stavisky
back in nineteen thirty two. So two radicals are implicated,
like clearly, so he resigns and to the right this
proves that all of the other deputies they've been accusing

(01:05:13):
were guilty. To newspaper editors were also found to have
been on Stavisky's payroll, which encouraged people to buy junk bonds.
And then these guys are arrested, which feeds into the
narrative that liberal presses on trustworthy and part of the
Jewish conspiracy. As nineteen thirty four dawned, right wing media
could write about nothing else but the Stavisky affair. And
then on the ninth, with public interest at its height,

(01:05:34):
Stavisky himself is cornered by police at a house in Chamois.
He kills himself to avoid capture. So as soon as
he kills himself, both the communist and the far right
press leap on the story, alleging that Stovinsky had not
committed suicide, he'd been murdered to cover up his connections
to powerful leaders. He's the fucking French Jeffrey Epstein's Yeah,

(01:05:57):
it's the same thing. It's the same thing. Yeah, he
doesn't have like a network of child prostitutes. But he's
a guy who's implicated with a bunch of powerful people
in a series of crimes. He goes to jail once
he continues committing crime, implicates more powerful people, and then
when he's cornered, kills himself. Yeah, you know, it's the
same thing. It's like the exact Yeah, and and and

(01:06:21):
and and the best part about the Epstein story they
said the camera glitched. Yeah, and there's there's shady stuff
like that with this right, it's not cameras because it's whatever.
It's the same thing. But yeah, no is a one
to one bro. Yeah he doesn't. Just like with Epstein,
it doesn't really matter if he killed himself or was murdered,
the same thing with this guy. What matters is that

(01:06:42):
everyone on the far left and the far right is
sure that he was murdered in order to protect liberals,
right center politicians. There's too much at stake, you know,
who won't murder Jeffrey. Ye you can't because he already did.
But yeah, he's already dead, so they definitely won't kill him.

(01:07:04):
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(01:07:47):
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(01:08:08):
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In every episode of New Girl, plus each week you'll
hear hilarious stories like this at the end when he
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like I pitched that joke. I believe that I feel
like I did. I'm not on a thousand percent. I

(01:08:28):
want to say that was I tossed that one out.
Listen to the Welcome to Our Show podcast on the
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(01:08:49):
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Just as lifting weights keeps our body strong as we age,
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Listen to Before Breakfast wherever you get your podcasts. So

(01:09:11):
we're back. So the radical president is that he's still
alive though, Like I feel like your oyebreak is yeah,
I mean, we're not going to actually prove that, Robert,
I am not. I'm not making any conclusions about Jeffrey
Epstein on this podcast. I'm just saying that, like Epstein,
this guy Stavisky is said to have killed himself, and

(01:09:32):
nobody who's on the left or the right really believes
there's Yeah, there's one definitive thing you could say about
Jeffrey Epstein is that, I don't care how many dollars
you put it before and after his name, he is
a pimp. Yeahs is a different kind of pimp, but
to pimp, and this guy's is pimp in yes, this
is a different lick. He's selling different products, same thing. Anyway.

(01:09:54):
So the radical president, like the or not president, but
like Prime Minister of France, who's again a article, does
his best to ignore the scandal, arguing that it's not
a big deal, like, yeah, the guys who were implicated
already got arrested, Like it's not a big deal. Um.
And it might have even been true that, like the
only people implicated had been caught, but that doesn't really matter, um,

(01:10:16):
because obviously this becomes a huge conspiracy, and the Prime
Minister refuses calls from both the right and from his
socialist allies to call for a parliamentary inquiry into the
whole situation. This just makes everything worse, proven to many
Frenchmen that there had been a conspiracy. Brian Jenkins Rights
what might be called the dialectics of conspiracy thus played
a significant role in the escalation of crisis. Stevitsky's death

(01:10:38):
gave decisive impetus to conspiracy theories on the right and
intensified the campaign both in the press and on the street. Meanwhile,
the perception on the left that the scandal was being
orchestrated for sinister political purposes led the government to harden
its opposite its position and refused to make concessions. This
in turn gave the impression that the government was engaged
in a cover up and therefore must have something to hide,
thereby further reinforcing the rights spiracy theories. However, in this

(01:11:02):
competitive press environment, it was inevitable that the more radical
and scrillious newspapers that set the pace and tone for
others to emulate. It was French action that crystallized public
opinion around them and orchestrated the developing affair each day,
adding fresh names to its dossier of suspects, and decisively
raising the temperature on seventh of January with the headline
down with the Thebes and an inflammatory appeal to the

(01:11:24):
people of Paris. Most of the conservative press simply follow
their lead, albeit in less flamboyant language, which in turn
helped legitimize the message. Again, the truth doesn't matter. What
matters is the narratives that take off. Yeah, yeah, totally.
From January nine on, and this is there were demonstrations
and street violence almost every night in Paris every week.

(01:11:46):
The crowds grew larger. On Saturday, January, the situation was
bad enough that the present resign and the government dissolved
or the prime minister whatever resigned in the government dissolved.
This was seen as a big victory by the right,
but nobody knew what came next. The left are still
the elected leaders. Right, you dissolve the government, you don't
kick out all the deputies who have been elected. You
just pick a new prime minister and new ministers. Right,

(01:12:09):
that's what it means. And the left is still like
gets to decide who the new government is and they
bring in a new liberal president, guy named Dlatier. Now,
while all this is happening, the socialists the only part
of the left coalition that has not been horribly tainted
by the Stavisky affair. It's radicals that are implicated. The
socialists are not. The radicals need the socialists both to
keep the government from being dissolved and to avoid a

(01:12:30):
deeper investigation into the matter. So yeah, probably a bunch
of more radicals were guilty. You know, they really don't
want there to be an investigation. So since they had
the radicals over a barrel, the socialists decided to make
a demand of their own. Being good leftists, this demand
is that the radicals fire the Paris Chief of Police,
John Chiappa, because he was a piece of ship who
sympathized with fascist paramilitary groups. Of course, the far right

(01:12:53):
loves Chiappa, and they see his sacking and the radical
promises that the police will be reformed. So the radicals,
in order to keep the government going and avoid an investigation, like,
we'll fire this guy and will completely reform the Paris police.
That's the socialist's demand, and the right wing is like
this is like, this is clearly the precursor to a
communist revolution. They're trying to get rid of the police

(01:13:14):
so they can take over the streets and take all
of our money. Right, yeah, dog man. So this starts
at ticking clock on the right because they think that
there's this comic plot being carried out and they've only
dazed to act in order to avert it. Laroc, Colonel
Laroc of the Cross of Fire, declares his paramilitaries to
be defenders of public order. One League French Solidarity declares

(01:13:36):
civil war is imminent, while the Young Patriots claim the
country is in danger. A wholesale purge is being prepared. Newspapers.
Right wing newspapers run articles about how communist revolutionaries are
on the verge of seizing power. Colonel Laroc warns his
followers a government who signs the red flag wants to
reduce you to slavery. We are threatened with sectarian dictatorship. Nothing,

(01:14:00):
it's familiar. Yeah again, nothing that's ever happened again in
any of this is so frustrating, I know, it's terrible. Yes,
So elected leaders were also pushing these lines. Philip Henrio,
a deputy from Bordeaux, was a Catholic militant who believed
that the Stavisky affair was a Jewish Masonic conspiracy to

(01:14:23):
destroy France. On three occasions in January, he took to
the rostrum of the Chamber of Deputies to demand right
wingers rise up and sweep the republic. British journalist Alexander
Worth was in Paris at the time, and he wrote
this in early February. Already on Monday, Paris was full
of wild rumors. Troops, it was said, had been brought
into Paris. If the demonstrators were to cause trouble, the

(01:14:44):
government would not hesitate to use tanks and machine guns.
The work would be entrusted to Moroccan and Senegalese soldiers
who would have no compunction about shooting down their white
fellow citizens. And it is, by the way, one thing
you kind of have to give the French in this
period is that they are kind of the first Western
government to have a significant number of non white citizens.

(01:15:04):
They do that, not that they treat them equally or anything,
but like it is a thing that happens in the
sevres really um. But why God damn man. Of course
they use them for shock troops. You know of course,
I'm like, I feel like it was about time that
one of us say something funny. But it's yeah, I can't.

(01:15:26):
I just got nothing because it's just so on the
freaking nose. It's exactly all. It's exactly what's happened, you know.
So this prop brings us to February six, nineteen thirty four.
The French government assembles for a vote of confidence and
Prime Minister Daladier so a vote on whether or not

(01:15:46):
he's going to keep being the prime minister or they're
going to dissolve the government again. Uh. And I found
a French history website herodoty that describes how things started,
quote and all hardly more than thirty thousand demonstrators, a
large majority of them who were ex combatants. Everyone is
mobilized on the theme down with thebes and a demand
for more civility and honesty in the government. At the start,

(01:16:07):
at the call of Lieutenant Colonel de la Roc. The
cross of fire quickly dispersed as soon as the first
clashes with the mobile guard occurred. Although it arrived at
the end of the afternoon at the gates of the
Palais Bourbon, Larent and his veterans refused to occupy it.
Their dispersal makes any possibility of overthrowing the regime by
force feudal. But on the other side of the sign
around the Palace of the Concorde, the demonstration degenerates. Thousands

(01:16:30):
of activists try to march on the Palais Bourbon, the
Bourbon Palace. I guess, so what happens here is this
crowd starts like and and the cross of fire. Guys
are a huge chunk of it, starts marching on the
gates of the capitol, and as soon as the police
get engaged in, the crowd starts fighting with the cops.
Colonel Laroc calls his men back, but thousands and thousands

(01:16:50):
of other right wing militants continue to surge ahead and
keep fighting the cops, And as night falls, the protests
go from being just aggressive and violent to being an
active attempt to storm the capital. Protesters light busses on
fire and destroy property, tearing down barricades and barriers as
they attempt to breach the Chamber of Deputies, where Parliament
is an active session. The police panic when the crowd

(01:17:12):
starts to break through the barricades and they open fire.
Some in the crowd fire back and by the end
of it all as many as twenty six, but we
don't have an exact death told. Some will say twenty
six people were killed and more than fifteen hundred are injured.
Some will say it's more like, you know, five to
ten and a thousand injured. But it's it's everything that
happened in the capital and the sixth except they don't

(01:17:33):
get intoside the capital because the French like order forces
just start shooting, like firing into the crowd with what
rifles um. So the riots continue for days, marking what
most liberals and leftists would come to see as a
coup attempt by the far right. This is probably fair,
but it's also true that after the ninth the communists
start coming out and force in the streets and do

(01:17:54):
a lot of rioting themselves, and actually, like three or
four days after the attempt to storm the capital, a
lot of what's happen in on the street is being
done by the communists. They didn't attempt to breach the
Chamber of Deputies, though the whole affair terrifies everybody, and
Prime Minister d Lattier resigns on advice from the police
and army to avoid further violence. For the first time
in the history of the Third Republic, street violence had

(01:18:15):
brought down a French government. The week of February sixth was,
in fact the most violent period of political unrest in
France since the Commune of eighteen seventy one. Not everyone
in the right is thrilled by this. Mars, head of
French action, seems to have panicked immediately from the Crimson quote.
Though he often considered the possibility of the coup in
books and in the pages of his movement's newspaper, it

(01:18:37):
is doubtful that he ever actually planned a revolution. On
the one occasion which fate presented to his grasp, the
riots before Chamber on February six ninety four, he did nothing.
Professor Webber calls the sixth of February a victory lost.
Maris's hesitation at what seemed the very gates of power,
though this impression was exaggerated, was, as Professor Weber says,
the moment of truth, which showed up the emptiness of

(01:18:59):
almost every one's position. The parliamentary regime was shown to
be a tottering, precarious structure. The rightest writers had made
their point, but the right itself was exposed as well,
exposed as a lot of theorists sorely lacking in the
capacity to carry out their dreams. French Action had organized publications,
public meetings, a party structure that extended through France, but

(01:19:20):
they lacked the will to power. They were incapable of
a Munich push, much less to ten year conspiracy to
capture parliamentary power. At the moment of reactions greatest political
triumphs in Europe, French fascism collapsed. Wow, it doesn't sound
familiar at all. Yeah, I've never and again, fucking um

(01:19:40):
Mars here he's like Alex Jones almost right. He's this
guy who's telling everyone overthrow the government. And then when
they start, because Alex Jones is there on the sixth
and d C, he fucking leaves as soon as people cross.
At first, I thought, when you saw about the other
dude that ended up being Epstein, I thought it was
Jones at first. No, no, no, no, Sisky's your Epstein. Yeah,

(01:20:01):
he's definitely Epstein. But at first, when we first started talking,
I was like, it's sound like a little Alex No,
but no, that's Mars is your Alex Jon He's just
like oh wait, oh no, I just wanted to make
money telling people to the volt and getting them like
jinned up. I didn't actually want that to happen. That's
scary as hell. Yeah, y'all, y'all actually pull triggers. Oh no, yeah,

(01:20:23):
yeah yeah. Um and current. You can see Colonel de
Laroc kind of in the same light, although you could
also argue that he was just very state loyal right
like he wanted a new government. He was, he wanted
less democracy, but he wasn't about to storm the capital. Um.
So the main outcome of February six was that the
elected right wing grows closer and closer to the insurrectionary
far right. It also unifies the left wing, inspiring a

(01:20:46):
popular Front in France that takes power after a brief
period of conservative rule falling Daladier's fall. The nineteen thirty
six French Popular Front was at its core an anti
fascist political union, and domestically it does a good job
of stopping the French are right from capturing power, and
this has actually led to a theory in French historiography
that France's itself immune to fascism in a unique way. Um.

(01:21:09):
The story goes that a mix of France's long standing
democratic traditions and the fact that it's right wing is
split between its own native brands of extremism means the
country can't fall into fascism. This is nonsense, I will
tell you right now. I think this is sucking bullshit. Um.
And there are a lot of scholars. The book France
and Fascism is a very long scholarly treatise on why
this is bullshit. Um. But a lot of French scholars

(01:21:32):
after World War Two will argue this that like France
is immune to fascism. Um. The reality is that France
came very close to falling too fascism on the sixth
and it did fall to fascism in now. This is
by conquest, right. The Nazis, the fascist out gain power
in France by elections. The Nazis conquer France. But when
the Nazis take over, they needed to find a bunch

(01:21:53):
of willing frenchmen to run v she France. And they
find a ton of these guys, a huge and already
radicalized group of French fascists who are ready to chip
in and help out. And most of these guys who
run v she France from the Nazis takeover. Are people
who had been involved with the February six insurrection, right, yeah, exactly,
like a ton of these day. Yeah, it's crazy that

(01:22:15):
it's the six also yeah, and it's and it's the same,
it's February six, right, it's very auntic. Like when I
started reading about this, I was so fucking shocked because
I was thinking, like, well, you know, if you want
to find a good comparison to the January six, there's
aspects of the Munich coup, there's aspects of of of
the of the March on Rome, but like, oh, ship, no,

(01:22:37):
it's it's it's feb six four, that's exactly what happens. Um.
So a lot of French fascists who had been a
part of, you know, what happened on the sixth wind
up joining the Nazis. Remember Philippe Henrio, the Henriotte whatever,
the right wing deputy who was basically the French q
and on Glock congress person who was like, we need
to overthrow the government. While he's in the government under occupation,

(01:23:00):
this guy becomes the voice of Radio Vishi, broadcasting Nazi
propaganda to millions of frenchmen. Pierre Tattinger, who founded one
of the first paramilitary leagues, became the president of the
Paris Municipal Council under the Nazis. Jean Chiapa, the fascist cop,
was made high Commissioner of the Lavant, but thankfully died
in a plane crash pretty soon after that, when he
shot down over Lebanon by the Italian's accidentally. Yeah, Mars

(01:23:26):
celebrated the Nazi victory as a divine surprise. Now, he
was not a Nazi because he fucking hated German people,
but he hated Jewish people more, and one of his
chief complaints about the occupation is that it was too
lenient on Jewish people. When the Third Reich fell and
France was liberated, Mars was arrested and indicted for complicity
with the enemy based on the pro Nazi articles he

(01:23:47):
published at the start of the war. He was sentenced
to life imprisonment. Upon his sentencing, Mars is said to
have exclaimed, it's Dreyfus's revenge. Oh God, you brought it
all the way back. It's perfect. It's a perfect circerfic
O man, and somebody screenshot at his tweets put him

(01:24:10):
in prison. Yeah, that's exactly what happens, more or less,
and that prop is the story of February six, nineteen
thirty four in Paris. All right, great time my one
word haunting? Yeah yeah, yeah, I like yeah, because I

(01:24:34):
didn't have I didn't know much about this either. So
when I was joining the chorus of everybody who's fascinated
with history, going guys, I'm telling you like this, we've
seen this before. I don't know, I know there's no
one to one, but we've seen something like this before
this one. I'm like, oh, this is the clothes. This

(01:24:54):
is the closest too. Like you said in the beginning,
I'm like, oh damn, I wasn't even counting this. Yeah
it was. It was some somebody sent me and I
honestly forget who it was, but somebody, like somebody who
I have texted with on signal text, said like you
should look into January six, nineteen thirty four, and I did,
and I'm like, oh my god, this is the same thing.

(01:25:18):
So obviously it was a great a great you know
episode for are the fascists who failed part of this? Yeah, yeah, yeah,
And there's a lot of lessons to take out of
this one of this is that the right loses when
the left and liberals work together electorally. And other is
that when the left and liberals work together electorally, they
generally can't agree on enough to do anything that will

(01:25:39):
actually stop the fascist from getting stronger. Um. That was
one of my that was one of the biggest lessons
I'm learning about this one is just like, oh, we're
so progressive, we're so well. Me and my wife call it.
You're so open minded, your clothes minded, you know what
I'm saying, So like you just can't get it together
because you're not open minded enough, you know. Yeah, And

(01:26:01):
it's you know, I think a lot could argue that
it's largely on the radicals because they have more power
in the government and they kind of refused to do
any sort of meaningful aid that could actually um have
have clamped down on the far right. But also, like
I don't want to like Negate number one, Like the
media is a huge part of this, both in the
United States and in France. Right, this alternate media ecosystem

(01:26:23):
kind of means that like maybe even if the radicals
had agreed with the socialists and they put out an
effective aid package, would that have been enough to overcome
the propaganda. And I don't know, nobody does. Nobody knows.
But yeah, like I forget that there's a modern historian too.
It's like we went from the information age to the
age of belief to the belief age. You know what
I'm saying. It's like we've actually switched ages. It's not information,

(01:26:45):
it's belief, you know. So like and this media circus
that we're all in of, like you know, the closed
ecosystem of your of your confirmation bias means that information
don't matter, belief do so. But at the end of
the day, like like you said, like one could speculate,
I just feel like anyone, anyone votes for somebody that
puts food on a table, you know what I'm saying. So,

(01:27:07):
like I said, if you put if someone's not into
the specificities of of caring for and others, you know
what I'm saying, Like like the way that we think
about government and the way that it processes. But just
as simple as I need to be able to feed
my kids, and you're making this possible, you know what

(01:27:27):
I'm saying, In a time that like I can't just
go get it myself, you know, then why would I
not vote for this? You know what I'm saying, Why
would I not back this? Like, you know it cut
me a check for two grand a month. I think
it's great, you know. Yeah, And that's one of the
things do lar Rock in this Cross the Fire group, like,
they actually do provide aid to other struggling veterans, and

(01:27:48):
that's a big part of their power and why they're
able to all get together on stuff. And it's like, yeah,
you know, it's it's there's a lot in these lessons.
There's a lot in the stories of just like France
and Spain were like one of the things we see
when you compare them to Germany, it is that when
the police and the military are more on the side
of at least the center and democracy than they are
on the side of the right, the right can't gain

(01:28:09):
power through an insurrection. Right in Germany and Italy, the
police and the military are on the side of the fascists,
and so the insurrections work, um, you know eventually yeah, yeah,
I mean in the Munich insurrection is stopped by the
police and stuff. And like the reason the Spanish Civil
War becomes a war is because most of the military
and most of the police in Spain don't go with

(01:28:29):
the fascists in France. It's kind of the same thing. Um,
which is a lesson. I think there's a great lesson,
confusing lessons in all of this. Yeah. Um. Another is
that regardless of what the far left does, the far
right will turn them into everyone who is left of center,

(01:28:50):
right yeah yeah, and even if they don't do anything,
they'll lie. It's like the kind of thing where you know,
liberals during the election, we're like, look at the like
all what you know, these anti for kids breaking all
these windows are gonna lose us the election to Donald Trump.
And it's like, that's actually not what happened because the
right are we're so propaganda. Is that no matter what

(01:29:11):
Antifa did, it wouldn't have if they just marched peacefully
in the streets, the propaganda would have would have made
them seem like the coming of a communist revolution. Um.
What matters is that liberals not buy into it. And
and that's that's what I feel like we did, where
you were just like, hey, the the fund the police
would have lost his election. Look, man, don't shoot at us.
Dog Like yeah, look it did, isn't you know? It

(01:29:33):
did hit number one. You know what I'm saying, you like,
and as much as we could, unfortunately it's like well
Trump fumbling Corona. Like it's like really yeah, but you
know what I'm saying, so like, don't look man, same
team bro. I'm just trying to tell you this is
a good idea. Yeah man, Yeah, yeah, it's There's a

(01:29:58):
lot a lot to next episode, our penultimate episode behind
the Insurrections. We're gonna talk about the business plot. Um,
so we're gonna be coming back home to the old
US us of A. Yeah, that's gonna be good. That'll
be Thursday. Um, But for now, prop, you wanna drop
some plug doubles? Yes, yes, this yes, because I'm so

(01:30:22):
excited because the pre save link for my first single
on the next record is now out excellent profit pop
dot com. Yes, and all my socials. Also, there's a
new coffee roast called The Culture also available on the website.
Uh pull it from Ethiopia and like tasted it myself,

(01:30:43):
met the farmers. This is real stuff. Uh, and I
will be on hood pot Dank Anderson Anderson you want
some coffee? Dog I gotta do? Is d M me
ho me like you ain't gotta like yell like that
and I'm telling the truth like you're barking at me
like online. Uh. And the politics were props, uh, shooting

(01:31:06):
out doing that's going cool. You could get on all
the all the all the podcast sections, and which was
funny because like just now, one of the predictions, we're
not just now. Last week, one of the predictions came true. Uh,
and we kind of did a little funny little roast
about that was the prediction of like the Proud Boys
being infiltrated. Oh yeah, I told you I was infiltrated. Guys. Well,

(01:31:30):
it's it's you know, it's one of the things that's
frustrating to be about the Proud Boys is that, like
Enrique Terrio was an FBI informant um. And this is
being taken by a lot of the left to mean that, like, well,
the f the Proud Boys were an FBI op from
the beginning, and like, of course that's not really how
it like, it's this it's this thing, you see, it's
the thing that j Edgar Hoover wrote about were like
one of his goals with co Intel pro was to

(01:31:52):
make the FBI seems so powerful and omnipresent that people
would think they were responsible for everything. Um, And it's
less that and more that like Enrique Tario is the
kind of person who is immediately going to roll on
everybody that he was involved with. UM yeah yeah yeah
that that that Yeah, that like goes back to me

(01:32:12):
like in the left where I'm like, in the same way,
I'll be looking at like a lot of the right
wing people and I'm like, yo, where's your antenna's man,
like discerned this situation? You Like, that's not what's happening.
You feel me? And I feel like with this one,
that's one of those situations to where I'm just like, yeah,
you said the whole thing is an FBI front, Like
like it's come on, man, we anten is bro. No,

(01:32:33):
they got a guy of course, a bunch of them
were talking to the FEDS. Yeah they got like yeah,
they saw the same they saw the same problem as
we saw, and they said, we better do something about
this ship. You know what I'm saying. We don't want
another gang that's like one another gang. Yeah, We're we're
the top gang, you know, yes. Um, but it's like
people will believe what they believe. It's like with Epstein

(01:32:54):
and with Stevitski, you know, yeah, you know, maybe he
killed himself, maybe he didn't, you know, he maybe was
murdered because he knew. And it's like, you know, fucking
a with both Epstein and Stevitsky, you look at the
response of the people in power to and it's like, yeah,
it's pretty fucking sus You know, you don't want his
you do not want his pass code, you don't want that.
If if that fool's phone got hacked, broken into all

(01:33:17):
the text messages on that, yeah, it's all bad. Yeah,
And I mean it comes back to the fact that
one of the reasons why conspiratorial thinking can be so
influential and spread so quick, can be so hard to fight,
is that there's a funk load of actual conspiracy is
happening all the time. You know what I'm saying. It's
the same thing with like, like like we talked about the
anti Baxter thing, where it's like, it's not like the
medical industry is helping you know what I'm saying, Like,

(01:33:39):
it's not it's not like perdue pharmaceuticals reputation helps people
trust vaccine. You know what I'm saying. A sackler family
and ship like, y'all crooks. I know you're crooks. That's said.
I don't know nobody that got polio. Mm hmm. You
know I'm saying, so yeah, ship, Yeah. Anyway, it's it's
it's all great and great. Our next episode will be

(01:34:02):
great too. Let's talk about how the history Robert's Twitter feed.
You can follow him that I write. I don't recommend
that at all. Stay the off of Twitter. I think
it's great. And you dropped some few gyms recently. As
a matter of fact, I was waiting at this when
to talk about the to talk about the Trout bait
shop tweet. That was brilliant. I'm giving you what was it?

(01:34:26):
Funk around and what was what was it about the
the bait shop? Was it? It was funk around and
I'll find out. Yeah, oh yeah, funk around and find
Trout around and find Trout. I was like, let's go
id Like to me, I was like, look, that's you
caught out. Whatever you want. That's a brilliant I think

(01:34:49):
we can make a lot of money. That's that's my
that's my retirement plan. It's funk around and find Trout.
It's brilliant. It's brilliant. Let me tell you why, because
I wait, one time in my life too. Uh oh,
we talked about before when I ended up in Wyoming
and wantanna fly fishing. Just on the most the most
random thing. I just got these friends in different places

(01:35:09):
that allow me to do just white ship right. But
it don't have to be white ship. It don't have
to be like what if I like fishing, what if
I think rainbow trout is beautiful. It's just uncomfortable to
walk into the trout store, the fish store, and look
around and just be like, oh, I look like a
don't belong here, Like you made it very clear that

(01:35:30):
I should not be in this place. But if it's
called around and find trout, I'm like, let's shop there. Bro,
this fool cool. It's it's a it's a radical intersectional
bait and tackle shop, delicious and rainbow trying. I'm I'm like,
I'm like a b minus pestytarian, you know what I'm saying.

(01:35:52):
Like I basically eat fish, except I live in boiled heights,
So the tacos are flawless, So break rules for the tacos.
But bro, tuck around and find trout. Let's go fuck
around and find trout Day y'all. Have y'all made the
C shirt yet? Oh no, no we have not, but
now that it's been in an episode, we can needs

(01:36:14):
to be a T shirt anyway. Anyways, that's that's the episode.
Have a nice rest of your day. Yeah Yeah. On
April four, Dr Martin Luther King was shot and killed
in Memphis. A petty criminal named James Earl Ray was arrested.

(01:36:36):
Case closed right. James Ylvy was upon for the official story.
Some of the evidence, as far as I was concerned,
did not match the circumstances. This is the MLK tapes.
The first episodes are available now. Listen on the I
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

(01:36:59):
Adoption of teen from foster care is a topic not
enough people know about, and we're here to change that.
I'm April Dinuity, host of the new podcast Navigating Adoption
presented by adopt us Kids. Each episode brings you compelling,
real life adoption stories told by the families that lived them,
with commentary from experts. Visit adopt us Kids dot org,
slash podcast, or subscribe to Navigating Adoption presented by adopt

(01:37:22):
us Kids, brought to you by the U. S Department
of Health, that Human Services, Administration for Children and Families,
and the ACT Council. Hello, and welcome to our show.
I'm Zoia de Chanelle and I'm so excited to be
joined by my friends and cast meates Hannah Simone and
Lamar and Morris to recap our hit television series, New Girl.
Join us every Monday on the Welcome to Our Show podcast,

(01:37:42):
where we'll share behind the scenes stories of your favorite
New Girl episodes. Each week, we answer all your burning
questions like is there really a bear in every episode
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that was one of years. Thanks you brought back from
Yeah all professional possible players. Yeah, a little seven ft hoop. Yeah.

(01:38:04):
Listen to the Welcome to Our Show podcast on the
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