Part One: Escape from the Magdalene Laundries: Surviving & Fighting Theocracy in Ireland

Margaret talks with writer and podcast host Sarah Marshall about the prisons for "fallen women" around the UK, US & Ireland, and the many people who fought against them, like Sinéad O'Connor.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to You're Wrong about the name of the podcast?

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Wow, oh my god. That was amazing.

Speaker 1 (00:11):
It's cool people did cool stuff. And my guest today
is Sarah Marshall from the podcast You're Wrong About Hello.

Speaker 3 (00:21):
I'm so happy. Does this mean I'm a cool people
or do I guess observe cool people?

Speaker 4 (00:26):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (00:26):
I don't think.

Speaker 1 (00:27):
I don't know whether any of us are actually cool.
We're just talking about cool people.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
I mean, all I can say is that intro. Margaret,
you are good?

Speaker 3 (00:34):
Well, thank you, thank you?

Speaker 2 (00:35):
Did you get my second? Did you get my second?

Speaker 4 (00:39):
Took so?

Speaker 3 (00:40):
I didn't get it at all. I'm not very sharp.
It's August. Everyone is just barely holding it together. That
was beautiful. Sophie, thank you so much. So you are
good now? That okay.

Speaker 1 (00:53):
So Sophie is the other voice. Sophie is the producer
of this show. If anyone's curious as to why I
introduce Sophie every single time, it's because sometimes I've listened
to another show that Sophie's on, and it took me
like six months to be like, why the fuck are
these men not introducing the woman on the show? And

(01:14):
I got so annoyed that because.

Speaker 3 (01:19):
In the machine.

Speaker 5 (01:21):
My presence is known. Why do I need introducing? Because
it could be anybody's first episode? You know, all so funny,
Sara Marshall, what's your podcast? I have a podcast called
You Wrong About, which is a title that people find
it remarkably hard to remember. I've heard of people's parents

(01:44):
calling it what is wrong with You, which is a
much more aggressive title than what I was going for,
But I do love it. And I have a podcast
called You Are Good and You're wrong About?

Speaker 3 (01:55):
Is about what You're good? That's why I made the joke.
But you know that I am good and I know
that you are good. Yeah, you are good? Is quote
a feelings podcast about movies. I host it with Alex
Deed and you should come on it, and we every
episode have a guest on and are like because you know,

(02:18):
there's like twenty billion podcasts and half of them are
about movies. But we try to distinguish ourselves by talking
about how does the wedding singer make us feel? We
haven't done the wedding singer yet, and like, how does
help us learn about codependency? Which I'm honestly sure it
could and that kind of thing, And you're wrong about

(02:39):
is about history and really about the human tendency to
love moral panics and how we can't remember anything. We
remember nothing that I feel like this show is about
that too.

Speaker 1 (02:53):
Well, then you're the perfect guest for this episode, because
well actually were, because I mean I picked you specifically
for this episode because I actually you covered something very
similar to what we're going to be talking about, and
I'm really excited your take on this today. Oh, I
forgot to do the rest of the introductions. We all

(03:14):
have to say hi to Ian.

Speaker 3 (03:15):
Who's Hi?

Speaker 4 (03:17):
Ian? Hi?

Speaker 1 (03:17):
Am Oh, Sarah, you would love Ian.

Speaker 2 (03:21):
You guys would get along so well.

Speaker 4 (03:23):
I Ian Ian's and Ian's in the state of California,
m h.

Speaker 1 (03:29):
And audience can create a parasocial relationship with Ian based
solely on his name, if you would like, because you
don't have other information about him. And our theme music
was written for us by unwoman. And today we're going
to talk about this one's going to be kind of

(03:50):
funny because it's gonna it's not a reverse cool people.
We are going to talk about some cool people, but
we're going to talk about a lot of bad ship today.
And I'm very sorry because you're talking about the theocracy
that took over Ireland after their sort of independence in
nineteen twenty two, and we're going to talk about some
of the people who fought against that theocracy. Because I

(04:11):
was thinking to myself, how do I talk about Shannado
O'Connor without just like doing an episode solely on Shnado O'Connor.
Since for that, I would recommend people check out this
great pop podcast called You're Wrong About It's pretty good. Yeah,
this is not an episode about Shnado O'Connor.

Speaker 3 (04:27):
She'll show up.

Speaker 1 (04:28):
It's a story about all the people who survived and
fought against and escaped the Magdalen Laundries. What do you
know about the Magdalen Laundries?

Speaker 3 (04:38):
I feel like I, like a lot of people mainly
know what I saw in I think the movie was
called The Magdalen Sisters came out like fifteen twenty years ago, yeah,
which is about girls being sent to basically be detained
by nuns because they looked at a boy or a

(04:59):
boy looked at them, or they were sexually assaulted, or
they had a baby, and then basically toil under abuse
of nuns in a prison like setting until they escape
or their family takes them out or they simply don't
make it.

Speaker 1 (05:18):
Yeah, that's a good short version of what we're going
to be talking about today.

Speaker 3 (05:22):
Hooray.

Speaker 1 (05:26):
They you know, these girls end up spending their entire
sometimes not always, but sometimes they end up spending their
entire life doing unpaid labor. Usually, as the name implies,
they are doing laundry. And these laundries ran for hundreds
of years. The last one closed its doors in fucking
nineteen ninety six. So the cool people we're talking about today,

(05:49):
a lot of them are just the survivors, because the
cool thing that people do sometimes is survive.

Speaker 3 (05:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (05:56):
These laundries are often considered the darkest, one of the
darkest parts of Iish history, and they deserve that reputation.
They're also talked about as one of the worst examples
of what the Catholic Church has done to the world,
and the Catholic Church deserves that reputation too. But the
Magdalene laundries they they start in England, they were started

(06:17):
by Protestants, and the relationship to religion and colonization is
more complicated than anyone talks about.

Speaker 3 (06:25):
Hmm, this is going to be very interesting.

Speaker 1 (06:28):
Yeah, I hope so I fell down a lot of
rabbit I guess every week. I'm like, I fell down
a lot of rabbit holes. But my job is to
be obsessed with something for approximately four or five days
and then when people messaged me about the details three
weeks from now, I have no idea what they're talking about.
Just absolutely no.

Speaker 2 (06:46):
It's called podcast.

Speaker 3 (06:48):
Space for a new one. Huh.

Speaker 4 (06:50):
It's called podcast brain. And once you say it, you
no longer remember it.

Speaker 3 (06:53):
It's okay. I had not That happens to me all
the time, and I didn't know there was a term
for it, but of course there is.

Speaker 2 (06:59):
It's so great podcast brain.

Speaker 1 (07:02):
I have heard Sarah Marshall talking about Shannad O'Connor more
recently than Sarah Marshall has heard Sarah Marshall talking about
Shnad O'Connor.

Speaker 3 (07:09):
Yeah, and I think there's a thing too. I don't
know if you guys agree with this, but like, because
there was I saw that there's this phenomenon where people
are going to the Aras tour and then can't remember
the concert because they're in such a heightened state of
emotion that it's like harder for them to form memories. Yeah,

(07:31):
So Taylor Swift is like breaking their brains and that
I feel like when you're concentrating, there's also something like
that where if you're kind of if I'm concentrating on
what to say next, then like like right now, or
like when I'm getting really you know, forty percent more
like zeroed in on something, then like I'm focusing so

(07:52):
hard on how to communicate what I'm thinking that like,
once I'm done, I'm just gonna like I'll have let
go of it completely. Does that resonate?

Speaker 1 (08:01):
Yeah, the night after I finished recording these, I'm on
the East Coast, so I'm like I record later than
most of my guests.

Speaker 2 (08:10):
Yeah, why do we always have dress coasters?

Speaker 3 (08:14):
I don't know podcasts coast East Coasters.

Speaker 2 (08:17):
Why don't you want to come on our show?

Speaker 1 (08:20):
Because people who get paid to do podcasts live on
the West Coast, which is foolish because it's so easy
to live off of this small amount of money that
is available to podcasters when you live.

Speaker 3 (08:34):
Places that are cheap, like yeah, the middle of nowhere.

Speaker 1 (08:38):
So the Magdalen Laundries, which are named after Mary Magdalene,
the sex worker that Jesus hangs out with like a
lot of the oppression of women. These started with the
oppression of sex workers. Also, like a lot of oppression
started in England. And like a lot of oppression, at

(09:00):
least some of the people who got involved in the
early days got involved with the best of intentions. Eighteenth
century Whitechapel, England. I always have to look up these places.
White Chapel is not its own city. It's part of London,
but they treat it like it's its own city. It's
in the East End. There's a bunch of richest fuck
dudes who wear powdered wigs and all the portraits of

(09:21):
themselves and they're all remembered as philanthropists. And they got
themselves together and I'm not even bother with their names.

Speaker 3 (09:27):
Fuck them.

Speaker 1 (09:28):
They got themselves together in seventeen fifty eight and they
opened the Magdalen Hospital for the reception of penitent prostitutes.
Oh my god, but you gotta be penitent.

Speaker 3 (09:38):
Yeah yeah. If you sprain an ankle and you're like,
I like sucking that dick, then they won't give you medicine.
Nobish people talk, Yes, it was perfect.

Speaker 2 (09:48):
I no not ites.

Speaker 4 (09:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (09:51):
They probably have a different word for every verb and noun.
In that sentence. But yeah, spot you, dick, mister. I
gotta make light of things while I can, because I
sensed that.

Speaker 3 (10:03):
That moment where the canoe the dark shadow. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (10:09):
And this was opened with the support from the queen
who was not the queen, Regent Reagan whatever wasn't ruling
m And this was a workhouse. It was a for
profit institution where quote unquote fallen women worked at various
jobs and were given a tiny portion of the money
they brought in, which actually makes it way better than
what we'll talk about later. It was also a tourist attraction,

(10:33):
come see the wild horrors in captivity.

Speaker 3 (10:35):
Yeah, of course we cannot romanticize the past, because, oh
my god, in heaven they.

Speaker 1 (10:42):
Speaking of you could buy a ticket to go to
mass led by not led by, but singing for you
in the choir are these fallen women. And they had
to sell tickets because there were so many people who
wanted to come pay that they were like, we have
to sell tickets ahead of time.

Speaker 3 (11:02):
Was this like, what was this market? It is like
a family attraction. Were you supposed to like take your
kids to see the fallen women to like scare them
or anything? Was it because for.

Speaker 1 (11:12):
Finally, I'm not sure it ties into this larger thing
where a bunch of the other institutions at the time,
including the Bethlam Royal Hospital aka the asylum so bad
that patient it's patient, It was so bad to its
patients that we have the word Bedlam as a result
of the Bethelm Royal Hospital. You could also go be
a tourist there if you wanted at this time.

Speaker 3 (11:34):
That kind of makes more sense to me in a
weird way, because you know, scared straight or whatever. Yeah,
because like anything can happen in Bedlam famously, whereas just
like going to church led by captive sex workers, like
they probably just sing hymns.

Speaker 1 (11:51):
Yeah, pretty much, and uh as as is the case
going to be the case throughout all of the hundreds
of years of this. Even though these are like laws
and stuff that are specifically around sex work, most of
the women in the Penitent Prostitute Asylum are not sex workers.

Speaker 3 (12:12):
Even at the beginning.

Speaker 1 (12:14):
I would argue that the same as like sis, women
are caught up in the trans panic for like looking
too masculine or whatever. Patriarchy oppresses with a very broad brush,
right right, And so the answer isn't to be like,
I'm not a sex worker, fuck you. The answer is
to be like, no one should be treated this way,
you know. So started off voluntary women applied for asylum.

(12:39):
Usually they weren't actually sex workers. They were maybe people
who are trying to avoid falling into survival sex work
because they'd been kicked out of their house for like
surviving sexual assault from within the home or having had
premarital sex. You know. And but even this version, the

(13:00):
voluntary version, it was profitable to the quote unquote charity
and on the wall all over the place, in every
word or whatever was written, tell your story to no one,
because women weren't supposed to talk to each other about
their experiences. Later this is going to turn into you
just literally can't talk to each other. You got to

(13:21):
spend your entire fucking day, slash life in silence. Most
women stayed for a couple of years and then were
discharged once their family was like, oh okay, I forgive
you for your heinous and of having been sexualized by
someone and took them back. This idea was very popular.
This spread all over the UK. By the late eighteen hundreds,

(13:43):
there's more than three hundred of these in the UK,
which in this case includes England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
They're really bad. They're for profit prisons. Most of them
are laundries, and there's like no due process. A lot
of women who get sent there because become less voluntary
very shortly. There's a lot of like blurriness. Each one
of these institutions actually did have a pretty different vibe,

(14:07):
so it's a little bit hard to paint with a broadbrush,
but that's what I'm going to do anyway. And girls
and women who were sent there, the average age of
these first ones was like mid twenties, late twenties, so
I think also it was a lot of like how
dare you not get married yet?

Speaker 4 (14:21):
Right?

Speaker 1 (14:21):
You haven't like left the home. We're gonna get fucking
rid of you, you know.

Speaker 3 (14:26):
And so even spinster Dum is like sexually dangerous and
an interesting way.

Speaker 1 (14:32):
Yeah, totally. The history of spinster Dum is something I
want to do so much work on because it's like
some of that's about lesbianism and some of it's not.
Some of it's about asexuality and some of it's not,
you know.

Speaker 3 (14:46):
Anyway, I was talking to a friend earlier and described
myself as a spinster, and she was like, well, that's
I wouldn't call you a spinster at this age. And
I was like, it's a vibe, it's a lifestyle.

Speaker 1 (14:57):
Oh at this point if you're like twenty five and
you're not. Actually, yes, medieval people got married way later
than modern people.

Speaker 2 (15:05):
So I accept your label as a spinster.

Speaker 3 (15:09):
Oh thank you you. Yeah, you know it, since I
have all the accessory you do. Pretend to be a cat, right,
it's all about bun placement. But wait, but do medieval
people get married later than people do today?

Speaker 1 (15:26):
Maybe not like today today, but like twenty years ago
when everyone get married young and gat. There's this whole
weird thing where like the medieval world isn't what we
think it is. The nobles and shit got married late young.
Sorry nobles and shit got married young because it's all
political or whatever, but like, actually peasants and stuff got married.

Speaker 3 (15:44):
This is not part of the topic at all. Oh
you know, but I do. I do love that fact though,
And it's as I think is depicted in Blackadder, where like, yeah,
of course you're going to marry people before they reach
sexual maturity. If you're just consolidating, you know, principal. But yeah,
if you have nothing to offer except some fabric, then

(16:05):
you're you know, going to wait until you're ready.

Speaker 2 (16:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (16:09):
Yeah, So in these laundries, a lot of women aren't
told how long they're going to be there. So it's
actually like in some ways some ways, you're like better
off in a prison, right because in a prison they're
like this is your sentence. Here you're just like, oh,
you're just here, you know.

Speaker 3 (16:22):
Yeah, it's the one flow over the cuckoo's nest style totally.

Speaker 1 (16:26):
Yeah, and there's I mean, they were called asylums for
and that was usually in their official name. They're remembered
as the Magdalen laundries, but some actually focused on rehabilitation
and didn't hold women too long. And some were run
by nuns. Okay now when I'm doing the conflation, actually
most of them weren't run by the Catholic Church at all.
But like nuns are like the famous image of it, right,

(16:46):
so some of the pep scarier than a nun, I know,
which is funny because the nun in my family was
like one of the most wonderful people in one of
the role models that I like carry to this day
about how you can be Catholic and not be a
terrible person.

Speaker 3 (16:59):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And every nune I've met has been
pretty action amazing humanitarian. But in fiction, no, yeah, totally.

Speaker 1 (17:06):
But at the same time, it was like, my dad
didn't send me to Catholic school because he got sent
to Catholic school and he didn't want that for any
of his kids, you know. So some of these nuns
actually or people looking after they actually looked after the
well being of their charges. This was the minority of cases,
as far as I can tell, and most of these
places were cruel, nightmare places where nuns or other caretakers

(17:29):
hit people with wind rosaries, kept them locked in their
cells at night. Changed their names against their will was
a big part of it. Sometimes they would change their
name to the name of the nun who imprisoned them.
I don't know if that was like a thing or
a coincidence that I read about. Sometimes they changed their
names to male names, and I think this was like
not a cool, fun like gender thing, but like well,

(17:50):
like I don't know, whatever, weird fucking thing. Sometimes they
would just be named with numbers like Penn four or whatever.
For penitence Good is obviously the origin of that famed
secret society in middle schools everywhere, the pen fifteen Club fifteen,
it's so historical, started by the fifteenth penitent one of

(18:13):
these laundries, and take the Freemasons, yeah, exactly. Many of
the penitents were sexually abused or kept like by the
institutions or kept enslaved for their entire lives and buried
nameless in unmarked graves. Many of the letters to their
families were never sent, which is awful and part because

(18:36):
like forgiveness from the families one of the main ways
you get out right. They were regularly denied visits. Religious
institutions were exempted from the UK's nineteen oh one Factory
Act that limited working hours for teenage girls to only
twelve hours a day, which is just ridiculous that that
was progress at that point. Magdalen's regularly worked fifteen hours,

(19:00):
six to seven days a week. These places are bad
enough that at one point Charles Dickens, who haven't done
enough research about to decide whether he's cool people or
not cool people. I don't fucking know. Someone's gonna whatever.
Charles Dickens got together with the richest woman in England
besides Queen Victoria, whose name was Angela Burdeck Coats. And
they were like, let's do what this is supposed to do,

(19:21):
but not evil. So they opened a non prison asylum
for survival sex workers where they could have a place
to stay and actually learn. And it was called Urania
Cottage and it was completely voluntary. You could leave at
any point you want. This model did not take off
because it wasn't profitable and it wasn't a weird tourist attraction.

(19:43):
So wow, once the original founders retired, this Urania Cottage
fell apart.

Speaker 3 (19:50):
Basically, Wow. Good for Charles Dickens though, and it really
goes to show that human rights are not profitable.

Speaker 1 (19:57):
Yeah, and if they suddenly are somehow profitable, you're probably
actually running a weird laundry enslavement.

Speaker 3 (20:06):
Thing where you know you're gonna get coney. I don't
know what that means. Oh the what was it?

Speaker 6 (20:14):
I understood it? So, yeah, what I saw, I assume
it was a thing that was free coney. But that's
not it. They wanted the opposite of that. Yeah, is
this about the gorilla that died?

Speaker 4 (20:25):
No?

Speaker 3 (20:25):
No, this was about this like extremely viral YouTube video
like ten years ago or something that was like long ago. Yeah,
so one hundred years ago. It was like, we have
to take down this African warlord and kind of in
a way that shocked the guy. I feel really guilty
about that. There's something else was.

Speaker 2 (20:44):
It was in twenty twelve. It was so long ago.

Speaker 4 (20:48):
There was like a documentary film thing it was.

Speaker 2 (20:53):
It was Cony twenty twelve.

Speaker 3 (20:55):
Coney twenty twelve, and it went like unbelievably viral. It
was like, yes, we can all band together and take
down this one terrible guy. But then the guy who
launched the campaign like the attention it was all too much,
and he ended up jerking off in the street. It's
a real it's a real media story for our time.

(21:16):
You're welcome. I don't know if we ever got some
how completely missed this. When it happened, it was all
I thought about that year. I think I was living
in a minivan. There's a limit to how many warlords
you can try to take down from a minivan, although
you can just run him over. I guess you were
in the best shape to do it.

Speaker 1 (21:37):
That's true. I like to think that I would have
been equipped to do such a thing and if you
want to become equipped to take down warlords. That is
why we are sponsored by medieval weaponry.

Speaker 3 (21:51):
Cool.

Speaker 1 (21:52):
We are sponsored by maces. We are sponsored by swords,
but like I mean, every whe sponsored by swords these days. True,
we're sponsored by flails, which may or may not have
been actually historically accurate weapons. You know, they like spiky
ball on a stick.

Speaker 3 (22:09):
Yeah, I never knew that was what they were called.
I always thought they were called spikey ball on a stick. Yeah,
they're called flavulus. And we are sponsored by what other
medieval weapons response, So I.

Speaker 2 (22:23):
Just want to point out all union made.

Speaker 1 (22:26):
That's true because anytime that scabs try and come in,
there's a peasant uprising and it murders all of them
because the peasants are very well armed when they work
in medieval weapon factories, which is weird because they they're
called medieval weapon factories even though they're made by medieval.

Speaker 3 (22:45):
Well they're from the medieval region of France, you know.
Otherwise they're guess carbonated weapons.

Speaker 1 (22:54):
And that's the only sponsors. If you hear any other sponsors,
then there's a mistake. And I need you to write
immediately to the director of iHeartRadio, who is on Twitter
at I write, okay, and.

Speaker 4 (23:09):
I feel like you're just accused my business partner of
crimes not legally actionably.

Speaker 2 (23:18):
Fair enough maybe.

Speaker 3 (23:24):
And we're back so let's see.

Speaker 1 (23:31):
Okay, these laundries they're in the US too, and people
are always like, oh, yeah, that backwards country Ireland, like
most of these weren't in Ireland. They were not in Ireland.

Speaker 3 (23:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (23:45):
The first Magdalene asylum, you know, that's their official name
or whatever, It was the Magdalen Society of Philadelphia, and
it was founded in eighteen hundred by a collection of
Protestant denominations, including the sometimes but not this time based Quakers, who,
by the way, invented the modern concept of prison. But
we'll talk about that some other time. The Philly Magdalene

(24:08):
School had as its vice presidents vice president the fucking.

Speaker 3 (24:13):
Mayor of Philly. Oh my god.

Speaker 1 (24:17):
Because they've always been a collusion of church and state.
Now Ireland pulled it off even better because they had
that deocracy thing.

Speaker 3 (24:24):
We'll get to that.

Speaker 1 (24:25):
Like most of the rest of these, it started off
voluntary survival. Sex workers could come and stay for a
couple of days, or weeks to get back on their
feet right soon it was a prison. A thirteen foot
wall was built around it to keep the inmates from
seeing anyone in the city. They weren't like, oh no,
this isn't We're not building a wall to imprison you.

(24:45):
It's so that you don't have like lustful thoughts looking
at those handsome men walking down the street.

Speaker 3 (24:52):
It's fascinating how much of history is about like the
fear of women's sexuality and like what will happen if
we have life ful thoughts. It's like I got and
it's so funny, especially because like the men making these laws,
no's know that, like they can get turned on by gourds,
you know, So why do they think anyone else is
so different?

Speaker 1 (25:12):
Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean because of the female sexuality
is a complete mystery to men.

Speaker 3 (25:19):
Yeah. Well, because the uterus wanders and that creates all
kinds of repercussions. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (25:27):
And so they built a thirteen foot wall around this
one in Philly. I don't know about this particular one,
but at least the Baltimore one and probably a bunch
of the other ones had broken glass mortared into the
top of the stone. Walls as an old timey barbed
wire to keep people from having lustful thoughts of course
about the people on the other side.

Speaker 3 (25:43):
History is just saw that's the thing.

Speaker 1 (25:47):
Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 3 (25:49):
That is.

Speaker 1 (25:49):
The more I read history, the more I'm like, they
never tortured someone the same way twice. They every culture.
I mean, like drawn and quartered is like one of
the most fucked up things you could possibly imagine happening,
and was like kind of normal.

Speaker 3 (26:06):
Right, Like that's kind of on the okay end of
what could happen to you if you compare it to
like I don't know and so and then you know,
there are accounts of torture that you're like, did this
happen or did your cousin's boyfriend's little sister tell you it?
But like, but I don't know something about I mean
you talking about the penitent penitent prison as a as

(26:31):
a tourist attraction. Like I always think about this with
stuff like public executions, where like we kind of lament
what people watch on TV today, but the fact is
that before we could watch it on TV, we would
just go out in the world and find it somewhere. Totally.

Speaker 1 (26:45):
That is a really good point, thank you and what
we watch on TV is like or what we going
and watching people get beheaded and cheering is like darker
than watching Saw, you know, because it's.

Speaker 3 (27:00):
Actually had a good time making Saw. Yeah, it's maybe
on a level with like some of the TLC reality shows,
but that's a whole other conversation. I don't mind.

Speaker 1 (27:14):
Okay, So since women weren't like choosing to get better,
they would be kept away from society to keep them
from doing evil and quickly. It's not just for people
doing sex work or accused of doing sex work, for
for any girl might be tempted or whatever. This particular laundry,
the Philly Laundry, lasted until nineteen eighteen. There were at
least thirty nine of these places in the US, that's

(27:35):
like the bare minimum number. Most of them ran until
the night. Many ran until the nineteen sixties. And we'll
talk about why they ended it. It's not humanitarian reasons.
We'll talk about that later. That's gonna be a little
thing dangle in front of people. Many worked with the
state to basically become the first all women US prisons.
There's this place in the Midwest that's like I think Indianapolis,

(27:56):
but they're like, we had the first all women's prison,
as if they should be proud, and like a bunch
of people did research and were like, actually, Indianapolis or
whatever the city had had exactly all women's prison that
meets all of the criteria of prison except to process
of law. But women convicted of moral crimes were sent

(28:17):
to these laundries, including by the state. Right, it wasn't
just people getting dropped off by their families or whatever,
and these moral crimes that would get you sent to
these no due process of law. Prisons was drunkenness, vagrancy,
and sex work. Girls as young as fourteen were regularly
convicted by US courts and sent to hellholes. Girls as
much younger than that were sent by their families. Well,

(28:40):
but this is a story about the Magdalen Laundries in Ireland.
They were at their worst in Ireland, not because the
Irish are like backwards or something, but because nearly a
millennia of colonization left the island particularly vulnerable to exploitation
by the Catholic Church and by English institutions like the
Magdalen Laundries. The first one was set up in Ireland

(29:05):
by the Church of Ireland so even in Ireland, those
first ones were not Catholic, not trying to get the
Catholics off the hook here, just spreading the blame and
laying it on as thickly as necessary. The first one
was set up by the Church of Ireland in seventeen
sixty seven. Church of Ireland is the Irish branch of
the Anglican Church. Once again, it was funded by a

(29:26):
quote unquote philanthropist, and it was originally this first one
was only open to Protestant girls. But then the Roman
Catholics and the Presbyterians soon got in on the act,
and the Catholic Church are going to take the gold here.
They are in the competition to see who can be
the most evil using the Magdalen laundry model. Why they're
taking home the gold in a pretty literal sense, because

(29:49):
it was all profit driven. The reason that the laundries
were particularly bad in Ireland is because after the independence
from Ireland, Ireland became a defect to theocracy. As often
as not, revolution provides a power vacuum that some other
evil institution steps into and out with England sort of.
You know, Irish independence is like not complete, but whatever

(30:13):
out with England in with the Catholic Church. Even before that,
seventy years or so before that, the Irish Famine aka
the England starved Ireland, committing a second genocide against the
Irish people. It destroyed much of the traditional infrastructure of Ireland,
and this allowed the Catholic Church to come in and
start like quote unquote modernizing and specifically romananizing, like making

(30:38):
Irish Catholics into Roman Catholics. Okay, a lot of places
you'd have these nominal Catholics who've been Catholic for like
a thousand years, right, but they didn't go to church.
They allowed divorce by women, They practiced all kinds of
terrible pagan things like believing in holy wells instead of
blood drinking.

Speaker 3 (30:58):
And having a big wicker man every so often.

Speaker 1 (31:02):
Yeah, to put cops into, but not too many. And
so the Catholic Church swept in in the eighteen fifties,
eighteen sixties, the second half of the nineteenth century, and
they increased church attendance and dependence upon the church hierarchy,
all while getting rid of the wily pagan ways of
the Irish Catholics. And they set themselves up as the

(31:25):
true opposition to England seventy years or so before. We've
talked about this in a couple other episodes. Protestants and
Catholics worked together until the Uprising of seventeen ninety eight
to try and oust England. Right, it wasn't like perfect
happy fun times.

Speaker 3 (31:42):
But whatever. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Speaker 1 (31:46):
Yeah, totally, and so now they set themselves up as
the true opposition to England. They managed to infuse Irish
anti colonial sentiment with a religious nationalism that paved the
way for their takeover in nineteen twenty two when Ireland
sort of gained its dependants. So this is the worst
place for the laundries because there's so much church and
state collusion. Judges sent girls to the church instead of

(32:09):
to prison. Survivors and their families and stuff. Say again
and again that no one outside knew how bad the
laundries were because the church was who had educated every
single person in Ireland, and so it wasn't really possible
to question it. All kinds of shit could get you
sent to the laundries. The big one wasn't sex work.

(32:29):
The big one was pre marital sex. If you're pregnant
and unmarried, off to the laundry.

Speaker 3 (32:34):
With you.

Speaker 1 (32:35):
You're sent by social workers or your family or the police, whatever.
But here's where it gets worse. Don't worry. If you're
pregnant and unmarried, the Catholic Church will steal your baby
and ship it off for adoption, selling it and not
giving you any of the money.

Speaker 3 (32:52):
Well, I guess they need all the babies they can get. Yes,
there may may be selfish of me to want to
keep my baby exactly when that baby's street value is
declining by the day.

Speaker 1 (33:06):
Yeah, I'm glad you understand. Yeah, I mean it is.
I don't you know.

Speaker 3 (33:15):
I think everybody listening to this knows this already, but
I don't know. To me, it's worth emphasizing that, like,
stealing someone's child is, like, truly, I think, one of
the most overtly dehumanizing things you can do to someone,
both in terms of its actual effect on them and
what it communicates about what you think of them.

Speaker 1 (33:36):
Absolutely, and so one of the many great crimes that
the Catholic Church is perpetrated on a massive scale involves
the Catholic adoption practices. So that's where we're gonna talk
about for a minute. The Catholic Church is probably the
single largest human trafficking organization in history. They're so good

(33:58):
at doing everything evil. They have the residential schools in Canada,
they have the laundries in Ireland, they have the child
abuse literally everywhere. And I didn't hear about the adoption
stuff until a friend of mine who's like more or
less a victim of this, started talking to me about it.
The theft and sale of babies. Not every instance of
Catholic adoption practices has been course of an evil, and

(34:18):
we're actually going to talk about a counter example in
a moment. But the short of it is that the
Catholic Church pressured on web mothers into giving up their
babies for adoption or often outrights, stole them, often by
like putting the mother under anesthesia during birth and then
being like your baby died in childbirth, oh God, and

(34:38):
then sold them off different prices different times. The only
price I've specifically seen was three thousand US dollars in
like nineteen fifties market value.

Speaker 3 (34:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (34:49):
All the while, of course, the Catholic Church is massively
campaigning against birth control and abortion, oh God, which helps
their bottom line and creates a steady stream of babies.
They've done this all across the world, and the abuses
of the system are well documented. Since I can tie
everything to the Spanish Civil War, anyone who's listening and

(35:10):
being like as NOI as bitch is going to tie
as the Spanish Civil War. But what you, thank you,
thank you, tuberculous is coming. Don't worry. The other thing
that ties together all history. One of the most prominent
places or that we have a lot of documentation about
this happening was in Spain after Franco took power, because

(35:32):
he was really fucking upfront about it, right, Franco took
over and Institute of National Catholicism, which was a fascist
regime that actually, in some ways, as we've talked about,
actually broke from some of the church hierarchy, from the pope.
But whatever, Republicans, Marxist anarchists, they all had their children
stolen since they were not morally competent to raise their kids.

(35:52):
Three hundred thousand babies in Spain alone between nineteen thirty
nine and the nineteen nineties were stolen, and this went
on after Franco died. Babies are stolen around the globe.

Speaker 3 (36:01):
This is the darkest fucking part of this.

Speaker 1 (36:03):
I feel like I'm doing it anyway anywhere the Catholic
Church was strong enough. I feel, okay, why I'm doing
all of this. I try not to like focus on
really bad shit, but I think it's necessary to draw
a certain attention of things. I think that, like, really
we need to understand why Sinad O'Connor in nineteen ninety
two ripped up a picture of the pope because it

(36:24):
was completely misunderstood at the time. And I think that
even before I started doing the research, I was like, well,
there's a lot, but it's like a lot, a lot,
a lot, you.

Speaker 3 (36:34):
Know, right, It's more than you can even begin to
grasp unless you like lower yourself into the well. Yeah, totally.

Speaker 1 (36:44):
Not all babies that were sold in this way were stolen.
Many of them were just the mothers are pressured. They
are pressured and pressured and pressured. They are pressured by
society around them, they are pressured by the Church, they
are pressured by their religion right that it is not
okay to be an unwed mother in the UK during
also just now we're going to get to the Protestants

(37:06):
doing it too. In the UK during the fifty sixties
and seventies, half a million Christian children were given up
for adoption. The Salvation Army and the Anglican Church were
in on it too, not just the Catholics, through a
combination of pressure and outright theft. I cannot say that
all of those are like bad adoption, right, but is
absolutely creating this institution that is doing all of these

(37:29):
absolutely evil things in Australia. On twenty eleven, the Catholic
Church apologized for the force adoption of fifteen hundred sorry,
one five zero, why do I know worse?

Speaker 3 (37:42):
Thank you? One hundred and fifty thousand.

Speaker 4 (37:45):
In twenty eleven, the Catholic Church apologized for the force
adoption of one hundred and fifty thousand babies.

Speaker 3 (37:51):
And that's how many they admitted to.

Speaker 2 (37:54):
Yeah, oh, I was just going to start reading the script.

Speaker 1 (37:56):
No great, no, yeah, Sophie, Yeah, go ahead, go ahead.
And that is so many fucking people. And that's just Australia, right,
And that is what the church it admits to, and
all this happens.

Speaker 3 (38:07):
It sounds like most of the people in Australia.

Speaker 4 (38:10):
I know. Yeah, I was gonna say, that's like Australia.

Speaker 1 (38:13):
I know, these are not big countries, right, Like it's
like funny because I'm reading all these numbers in a
country of like, what are we at like three hundred
and thirty million people or something in the US right now?

Speaker 3 (38:24):
Maybe it's more than that. I don't know.

Speaker 2 (38:26):
I believe the correct term is fuck ton.

Speaker 1 (38:28):
Yeah, there's a fuck ton of people in the US.
There's not a fuck ton of people in Ireland. Ireland
is still not back at the numbers that they had
before the famine. There's like as many people in Ireland
as like half of New York City or something like that.

Speaker 3 (38:40):
And that really puts things into perspective. That's absolutely horrifying. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (38:46):
Yeah, when you're like half of a New York City
is what's suffering this?

Speaker 3 (38:50):
And when like you've lost so much population that like
you never come back from what the eighteen fifties?

Speaker 1 (38:57):
Yeah right, right, Yeah, So all this happened in Ireland too. Unmarried,
pregnant women were shipped off to the laundry to begin
their new life as often a slave. Maybe not for
the rest of their lives, maybe for the rest of
their lives their baby is stolen and sold, often to
the US or that you were like, man, this can't

(39:17):
get darker.

Speaker 3 (39:20):
Again. I believe in you. Thank you, Thank you.

Speaker 1 (39:23):
This is like one of the only times I'm going
to make a content warning. I'm going to talk about
some babies that die for the next little bit, and
I'm sorry, and I will try not to be I
try not to focus on details about that kind of thing.

Speaker 3 (39:35):
It's funny because I'm on the horrible things happening to
babies beat via the Satanic panic. But these are all
imaginary babies, you know, So it's a very different world
out there.

Speaker 1 (39:45):
It's like the Satanists of her accuse of killing like
five babies in the Catholic church is like what we
do that shit every day.

Speaker 3 (39:56):
Right, They're just like, look, you get a system, you
do it kind of you got the government in on it,
like beat a screep, yeah, God's sake.

Speaker 1 (40:05):
So the town of Twam in County Galway, Ireland, we
are going to get in this story. There's a cool
person of the week. There's the woman who uncovered what
happened there.

Speaker 3 (40:15):
And we're going to talk about her. Thank Heavens.

Speaker 1 (40:18):
Saint Mary's Mother and Baby Home of Twam. It's not
quite one of the laundries. It's one of this larger
network of like place to show up if you're an
onwed mother, and it's a place for ONWB mothers to
give birth. And if you're a repeat customer, they'll send
you the laundries because you're not to be trusted. The
building first opened in eighteen forty six as a workhouse,

(40:40):
and then it became a place for the starving to
die during the famine. This place is just fucking cursed.
After the War of Independence ended in a treaty, it
became a barracks for the pro treaty side of the
Irish Civil War. So one morning six Republicans were shot
to death for dreaming of an actually free Ireland here
on the grounds, betrayed by their previous comrades. Then in

(41:02):
the theocratic model of Ireland, it was a state funded
but Catholic run place for disgraced women. If you got
knocked up you could try and get to England. Otherwise
you might wand up in twemb where if you misbehaved
there was one major threat you'd be sent to the laundries.
Behave well and once your kid is old enough to
steal from you and sell, they'll let you go. Your

(41:24):
baby goes off to England or more likely.

Speaker 3 (41:26):
To the US.

Speaker 1 (41:28):
Some mothers spent their entire lives tracking down their children,
or trying to. Sometimes they would find their children and
be unable to reclaim them. Some children who stayed unadopted
spent their lives trying to find their parents. The home
wasn't closed until nineteen sixty one. It was one of
thirteen such places in Ireland, the last one closed, and

(41:48):
I believe nineteen ninety eight one in seven kids who
was born in that in these places died there. This
is twice the mortality rate of Ireland at that time,
and the bodies in Twam weren't discovered until the early
twenty tens. Babies were sold to the US for three

(42:10):
thousand dollars apiece. The children were called home children and
they were like picked on by the community. The woman
who actually did all the investigation in it like has
an anecdote about how she like picked on a home
child as a kid and feels guilty about it ever since.
She gave one of the home children a like piece
of candy, like but it was just an empty wrapper,
and they like laughed when they could open. The fucking

(42:30):
children are awful and even if you're a shitty kid,
You can grow up to be amazing like this woman,
is what I'm trying to say. Yeah, these kids, the
home children. They were used as test subjects for at
least thirteen different medical experiments, mostly vaccines, but also formula
milk from nineteen thirty to nineteen seventy five. They were
medically neglected, died at astonishing rates, and when they died,

(42:54):
their bodies were thrown into unused septic systems or a
specific one. This was not a septic tank, a sort
of an unused sewer. Some of them were sold to
medical schools. That is okay, that is the worst thing
that I'm going to talk about all week and hopefully
for the next fucking several months.

Speaker 3 (43:10):
Yeah, so that's good to know. It's all smooth sailing.

Speaker 1 (43:14):
Yeah and okay, So the horrors were revealed by an
Irish historian named Catherine Corlis who grew up in twem
and once gave a kid an empty piece of candy.
And she's fucking cool. She's about seventy now. She's vegetarian
and sober and wears all black. So what I'm saying

(43:37):
is that vegan, straight edge goths have been doing cool
shit since forever.

Speaker 3 (43:41):
It's so true.

Speaker 1 (43:42):
I love running across like all of the Like before
there was like a culture around like veganism and straightedge
and all that shit. I'm not straightedge, but I am vegan.
I do are all black. I love that I keep
running across in history like all of these people who
do amazing shit, who are like, no, it's just like
the lady who wears all black and doesn't even meet,
does drink, you know.

Speaker 3 (43:59):
You know, just feel good.

Speaker 1 (44:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (44:00):
I don't have a word for it, but I guess
like it. Yeah, totally.

Speaker 1 (44:05):
So the way she found these the dead children, a
few bones had been found by kids. There's a story
about kids in the nineteen seventies like running around with
a skull on a stick that they found in a field,
and then their parents had to be like, that's not
a Halloween direct decoration. That's not plastic, you know.

Speaker 3 (44:20):
And then there's probably a dad who was like, bet
that'll save us a bit of money this Halloween. Let's
end it up in the yard exactly, And everyone would say, oh,
those are bodies of the famine victims, right, But it
didn't add up to Catherine. So she managed to track
down seven hundred and ninety six death certificates without burial records,

(44:42):
and since everyone in Ireland at the time is like
the same fucking name, They're all like John and James
and Margaret and shit, it's like hard to correlate all
this stuff. So she does an incredible amount of work
on this. So she sets to work finding the bodies.
She finds a modern map of Twam and an eighteen
ninety map, and she like traces over between the two.

(45:02):
She finds where the kids had found some bones. It
was on top of it an old Victorian era septic
system that had been discontinued in the nineteen thirties. So
she dug it up and there were the remains. She
self financed the whole thing, while everyone in town was like,
don't do this.

Speaker 1 (45:20):
You have to stop. Do not go digging up old issues.
We just want to like, let the past be the past.

Speaker 3 (45:26):
He's like that lady who found Richard the third under
a car park.

Speaker 1 (45:30):
Oh, Mike, I knew that. I knew that someone found him,
but I don't know anything about the story around it.

Speaker 3 (45:36):
Yeah, well it was just similarly I don't know the
story that well, but it was I remember from following
it at the time that it was I think an
independent historian who just like had done some research and
was like, I really think Richard the Third is under
this car park and we were like, all right, whatever,
and by god, she was right that rules.

Speaker 1 (45:55):
So yeah, she self financed the whole thing. It was
something of an open secret possibly that everyone was like,
don't go digging it into this, you know. She started
releasing articles about it in twenty twelve to like no fanfare,
but eventually in twenty fourteen it caught national attention and
she became like, this was like the biggest fucking deal, right,

(46:16):
and the rules that became a big deal. It's a
shame that it had to write for her work. She
was invited to a reception with Pope Francis when he
visited Ireland, like she was invited to the papal mass.
She turned it down and instead went to a vigil
outside for the dead children. She's received all kinds of
awards for her work, which she deserves, and the last

(46:39):
articles I could find on the matter because things like
drop out of the news cycle. Right. She was fighting
for the kids to be exhumed and properly buried, and
the Archbishop of the region did support that wasn't like, no,
you have to leave them there or whatever, you know.
And she's spent her time since helping survivors of the
home babies, like the home babies who survived, track their origins.

(47:00):
She helps them find their parents, and she also helps
parents find their children and shit. Most of the mothers
went to England to be away from shame and condemnation,
and the former Tasia, the Prime Minister of Ireland, Enda Kenny,
had an almost good speech about it during the official

(47:21):
acknowledgment by the Irish government, and I want to read
a chunk of it because actually I think it's really interesting.
No nuns broke into our homes to kidnap our children.
We gave them up to what we convinced ourselves was
the nuns care. We gave them up, maybe to spare
them the savagery of gossip, the wink in the elbow,
language of delight, in which the holier than thos were
particularly fluent. We gave them up because of our perverse,

(47:43):
in fact morbid relationship with what is called respectability. Indeed,
for a while it seems as if in Ireland our
women had the amazing capacity to self impregnate for their trouble,
we took their babies and gifted them, sold them, trafficked them,
starved them, neglected them, or denied them to the point
of their dis appearance from our hearts, our site, our country, and,
in the case of TWAM and possibly other places, from

(48:05):
life itself. Yeah, it's kind of funny because I cried
when I read that, and then I immediately read all
the critiques from feminists about the reason I say it
was an almost good speech is that it covers one
important part of it, the cultural part. Right, this like
respectability politics, but it doesn't talk about the fact that

(48:30):
women were often physically forced to enter these places, and
that the government itself has a lot of blame for this.
And I know you were thinking, you're thinking, surely all
of this story about adoption it doesn't tie into US racism.
But let me tell you no, never, nothing ever does

(48:52):
it does. But first, the other thing about the US
culture is that we're advertising supported. We haven't done a
second advert. I'm doing this correctly. Well, here's your second
ad break, brought to you by a pike, not the fish,
but the really really long spear.

Speaker 3 (49:16):
And we're back.

Speaker 1 (49:17):
There's another side of the Catholic adoption program. In some
places and times, the priests and nuns were trying their
hardest to provide for abandoned children and save them literally
from capitalist exploitation, because there's always wherever there's people doing things,
there's people doing it really good and really bad, you know.
And they ran up against us racism in the process,

(49:39):
because by the Catholic teaching, when people are doing it right,
racism is nonsensical. All Catholics are Catholic, and beyond that,
all humans are created by the Creator and are worthy
of salvation or whatever. Right. There was this thing going
on in New York City at the turn of the century,
well for about seventy years before the turn. It went
on for a really fucking long time. Again, lots of
people are doing evil shit. Private for profit Protestant charities

(50:03):
were literally snatching Irish kids off the street, using truancy
laws and ethnic anti Irish hatred to get away from it,
and then shipping them out west to be adopted by
people who wanted them for child labor.

Speaker 3 (50:16):
Well, it's just about, what are you supposed to do?
Pay for someone to work on the farm? Yeah?

Speaker 4 (50:22):
What? What?

Speaker 3 (50:23):
What?

Speaker 4 (50:23):
What?

Speaker 2 (50:24):
A horrible thing you just read.

Speaker 1 (50:26):
Yeah, that's where Dorothy came from. By one estimate, one
hundred and ten thousand Irish kids were stolen from the
streets of New York by these programs over the course
of about seventy years.

Speaker 3 (50:37):
Seventy years. Yeah, it's a very long standing program, I know.

Speaker 1 (50:42):
And it's it's kind of mushy because it's not like
one like what it was the Catholic Church can be.
Like Catholic Church had this thing, they called it this,
they did this, right, they would come and go. But
stealing kids is forever. H God, it's so funny too,
right because like in the modern coext like people use
fear of kidnapping to push all kinds of horrible agendas.

(51:07):
But this does this fucking happened, and this was seen
by the Catholics as an attempt at cultural genocide. You're
stealing all of our children and sending them away to
be raised by people outside of our religion. Now it
seem to have that effect. Of course, the Catholic Church
is also doing the exact same thing in like the
Canadian schools, where they're raising people to be Catholic and

(51:31):
stealing them away from indigenous practices and stuff, but it's
still really fucking not good. So the Catholic Church had
its own system going, and in this instance, at least
according to the articles I read, they tried to do
it just and well. They would set up these charities
where if you have an unwanted child, and of course

(51:51):
they've created the preconditions by which children could be unwanted
just for being bastards or whatever. Right, but if you
have an unwanted child, you can drop them off at
this charity and the charity will care for them for
three years, so they have a chance to come back
and get them if you want them, if you change
your mind, at which point after three years they are
shipped off for adoption. Wow, I do not believe that

(52:12):
the children at this particular one were sold because the
I'll get to it, and specifically they tried to send
them out to be adopted before they were old enough
to work, even by the standards of the time. Right,
so it's like mostly like three year olds and shit,
who it's just hard to make them do work. I'm
not even going to make a child labor joke. And

(52:36):
so a bunch of Irish priests and nuns traveled out
west to specifically vet families and towns where they could
take these children, and they traveled with the children to
drop them off. It wasn't just like see a later kid,
and they almost got killed for it because of racism.
And this wasn't anti Irish bigotry, right, it was anti

(52:56):
Mexican bigotry because most of the Catholics out west where
Mexican or Mexican American. The Church didn't care what color someone, right,
these are Catholic families. That is the continuation that they're
attempting to do, is that Catholic children are raised by
Catholic families. The point is the immortal soul of the kids,
not the color of their parents. So nineteen hundred they

(53:18):
showed up to a small mining town with a bunch
of children who needed families, and vetted each family and
gave them to the families. The reason I think that
they weren't selling these kids is because these families are poor.
Shit and actually, like this comes up in court against
the Catholics for having dared give kids to poor families.

(53:39):
These kids and the reason this is so interesting, this
is a kind of a This is a rabbit hole
I fell down during this episode. But I think it's
really interesting this story because these kids weren't quite white
in New York City. They were absolutely a step above
black and brown, but they were Irish until they got
on the train. As soon as they're taken out of
that context. To the wasps, skin color is all that mattered.

(54:04):
Happy white kids being raised by Mexican families was too
much for them. So with a monsoon raging, an armed
mob of Protestants went door to door and stole the children.
Oh my god, the Irish priest was run out of
town by a lynch mob of four hundred people, which
is more than half the white population of the town.

(54:26):
The nuns stayed behind, successfully guessing that their gender would
save them from the mob, which is brave as shit,
because that could have gone not at all the way
that it did, right, and they managed to rescue some
but not all, of the kids. And it was this
really fucking dark thing where basically the rich fox like

(54:46):
the mine over owner or whatever, would get their pick
of the kids in exchange for letting the rest go.
I cannot imagine having to make this call. Nineteen of
the kids stayed with kidnappers, twenty one were saved by
the nuns God. This was the biggest news story in
the region. All of the papers were against the Catholics.

(55:07):
They ran anti Catholic and anti Mexican slurs constantly. No
charges werever filed against the kidnappers, and the Arizona Supreme
Court ruled that the Irish priest had picked bad homes
because he hadn't taken racism into account, or rather that
he had gone against the cultural norms in how he
placed the kids.

Speaker 3 (55:28):
Yes, you got a factor in racism to your decision making.

Speaker 1 (55:33):
Yeah, what are you doing thinking about what are you
doing pod the immortal soul of the kids based on
the theological framework that you exist within.

Speaker 3 (55:43):
Just you know, it's also fascinating to be like, this
is a bridge too far. We sanctioned the kidnapping and
redistribution of children, but not to Mexicans.

Speaker 1 (55:55):
Yeah, I know, right, these kids can't even work.

Speaker 3 (55:57):
What are you doing.

Speaker 1 (56:01):
There's one story that might be apocryphal and might not be,
but exists in the town's history where one of the
orphans escaped her captors and moved in with her Mexican parents,
who then like ran into the storm, like out into
the storm, and then returned years later, which is like
mysteriously they have like a red haired teenage daughter. Hm,

(56:22):
and this is that's my Not all Catholics were bad
to kids aside, because it's an interesting story I ran across.
But now, well, soon we're gonna go back to the
Catholic Church for portraying unheard of evils in Ireland and
the people who fought them. Lots of stories of prison breaks,
and we'll tie it into Shenade O'Connor on Wednesday. Don

(56:43):
don dont Yeah.

Speaker 4 (56:44):
I thought you were winning for that or some other
cool sound effect that I'm qualified to make.

Speaker 1 (56:49):
Oh, thank you, Sarah, I think you did.

Speaker 2 (56:51):
Sarah Sarah. Do you have any pluggables for us?

Speaker 4 (56:56):
Oh?

Speaker 3 (56:58):
Oh, I should really have something ready. Will you accept
a book?

Speaker 2 (57:03):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (57:03):
Do I have to plug something that I'm doing?

Speaker 4 (57:05):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (57:05):
Sure, it's a random thing I like. Okay, besides like
children selling organizations.

Speaker 3 (57:12):
Oh yeah, No, I don't work for Wayfair anymore, so
cle I last week read Tina Brown's The Vanity Fair Diaries,
and it's like the book I've enjoyed most in quite
a while because it's her actual diaries from when she
was running Vanity Fair in the eighties and everyone is

(57:34):
in it. It's just like one of those murals in
a restaurant worth of like eighties New York people running
around and reading is fun when it's all gossip. That's
what I've realized.

Speaker 1 (57:46):
Yeah, that makes sense. I also want to just shout
out again the podcast you're wrong about. If you like
cool people did cool stuff, you will like. And I
don't have any you might like. You just will like
Sarah Marshalls.

Speaker 3 (57:58):
Your totally sister podcast. Yes, yeah, absolutely, yeah so at
Double Dip. Yeah, and I have a substack. I quit Twitter.
That's my big news. If you see me on Twitter,
I have gone against my own divine oath and what.

Speaker 2 (58:17):
Is this Twitter?

Speaker 4 (58:19):
Oh?

Speaker 3 (58:19):
Sorry, I quit X.

Speaker 1 (58:20):
I joined Twitter in two thousand and fucking nine, but
I never signed up for X, so fuck it.

Speaker 3 (58:27):
I'm out.

Speaker 1 (58:28):
And if you want to see me talk about the
things I talk about on you used to talk about
on Twitter when Twitter existed, like more context about history
stuff and also preparedness and politics and all that shit,
you can find me on substack. It's Marter Kiljoy dot
substack dot com. But you're not going to type that in.
You're going to type in Marder, Killjoy, Substack into into

(58:50):
Google and you can follow me there, and half of
my content is free, and then my more personal like
memoory type stuff is for paid subscribers, but there will
always be a lot of free content there. That's what
I have to plug, Sophie, hmmm, I don't want to
plug today your ears from hearing about bad things.

Speaker 2 (59:15):
I mean, yeah, that too.

Speaker 4 (59:17):
I would like to plug a podcast hosted by one
Prop called Hood Politics with Prop on this very network,
cool Zone Media, because it is really good.

Speaker 2 (59:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (59:29):
Prop has been putting out some amazing episodes lately, and
his editor Matt also makes custom music for every single episode.
And they are both insanely talented and we're lucky to
note them, and you're lucky to be able to listen
to them for free or listen to them add free

(59:50):
on cooler Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (59:53):
A Rah, Wow, that was so good. That was so
fucking good.

Speaker 4 (59:56):
Ian, please please please tell me offline and how good
that was.

Speaker 2 (01:00:01):
Thank you so much. Anyways, we'll be back next week.
Oh no, we'll be back Wednesday. Damn, I was doing
so well. We'll be back Wednesday with part two.

Speaker 1 (01:00:09):
Dun Dun, Dun, dun, dun.

Speaker 2 (01:00:13):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
visit our website.

Speaker 4 (01:00:20):
Coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple

Speaker 2 (01:00:24):
Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.