Behind the Bastards - Behind the Insurrections - The (French) Capitol Insurrection

Episode Date: February 2, 2021

The most direct precursor to January 6th, 2021 was a fascist assault on the French Capitol on February 6th 1934. Today we talk about that and, as a bonus, French Jeffrey Epstein. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's parle-vous in my Française? I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards. Well, it's behind the insurrections. It's like bourbon, right? Bourbon is whiskey, but all whiskey is not bourbon. Behind the insurrections is behind the bastards, but all behind the bastards episodes aren't behind the insurrections episodes. I think that's actually a great analogy.

And then you throw in the scotch thing, and then you're like, wait, isn't... No, 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, as with the previous, what, four episodes we've done on this, is Jason Petty, a.k.a. Prop. Well, so I'll let the lick read bourbon and night for breakfast for dinner. Prop. How do you feel about France? Wow. I feel carbs. I just think carbs are in bread. They do love that. I love French food. French food's delightful.

Yeah, I think Harlem Renaissance. That's pretty cool. You know, my patron saint is James Baldwin, so it's time out there. Yeah. But besides that, I also think yacht on like Americans. Yeah, which is hard to fault them for. What I don't like the French for is appropriating Belgian French fries or Belgian fries and calling them French fries. That sucks that they call them French fries. Also, I think that they have a habit of having superfluous letters in their words. Way too, like at least a third of the letters in any French word are unnecessary. This is, yeah.

Yeah, we're taking France to task today, but we're not talking about how they use too many letters. That'll be a six-parter we do at some point. Today, we are talking about French fascism. Yeah, because the French actually have a long history of fascism, although there's a weird number of French scholars who argue that France 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 6th, 1934. Now, all of the stories we've shared so far in this series have borne some similarities to what happened in the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2020, and the events that led up to it. But what happened in France on February 6th, 1934 is by far the most direct comparison to what happened in the U.S. Capitol on the 6th. I knew nothing about this before I started this series, but it's fascinating. It's fucking wild.

Yeah, well, it failed, but also it is just the same damn thing, basically. You know what's crazy is how much the 30s must have sucked. Oh, the trash decade. A lot of this stuff happened in the 30s, man. It sucked as much as, I'm going to guess, the 2020s are going to suck. Yeah, this is a sucky decade. Yeah, it's great. It's great how the same thing is happening again exactly a century later, pretty much. Yeah.

So the story starts, our story today starts in many ways with something that happened in the late 1800s. Prop, have you ever heard of the Dreyfus affair? No. This is a very important. 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 as a major was Holocaust studies, right? I wanted to, when I, the only degree I ever wanted was a degree in like Holocaust scholarship. And every class on anti-Semitism in the history of the Holocaust is going to start,

or at least be front loaded with the story of the Dreyfus 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 1884, a French army captain named Alfred Dreyfus was accused of handing secret documents to the imperial German military. Now, this was a little over a decade since the Austro, the Franco-Prussian war, which is where France lost a bunch of territory to what became Germany. I know that one. So there's a lot of like panic over the Germans, right?

Yeah. 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 Dreyfus. He's the immediate suspected culprit because he's Jewish, you know? Okay, this is starting to sound a little familiar now. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. This is a pretty famous moment. Yeah. I feel like, okay, yeah. Yeah. I'm like you and celebrity names where I'm like, I think I know this. Immediately. Anyway.

The story becomes not, you know, there's a traitor in the French military, but there's a treacherous Jew giving our military secrets to the Germans, right? Yeah. 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 write up on the trial from the open source educational website, E-International Relations, which highlights just how fucked things were from the jump.

Quote. On the morning of Monday, the 15th of October, 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus was summoned to present himself at the French Ministry of War. The commander, Patty Declam, along with three other inspectors, welcomed Dreyfus and proceeded in asking him to write a peculiar letter dictated by Patty Declam. This letter contains sentences from the infamous Bordero, which was a letter written by a French spy found in the dustbin of the German military attaché in Paris. The French Ministry of War was searching for the spy and were testing various officers

that could be suspected of treason. As Dreyfus wrote the letter, he shivered and the three men scrutinizing his every move noticed his trembling, thus deeming it as a sign of culpability. He is cold. He shivers. An incontestable sign of his culpability. Oh my God. He shivered.

He's guilty. He's cold. He guilty. See that man? Wow. 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. It's not possible.

Yes. Dreyfus was immediately arrested for high treason and deported to the prison of, I'm not even going to try to pronounce it, he was sent to prison. On December 19th, 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 Isle in French Guyana. Jeez. So, pretty much, you know, a show trial, right?

Yeah. That man, 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. That's a real theory. And this is key because we'll talk about this later. France did not have much of a history of anti-Semitism before this. Not nearly as much as a lot of other European countries.

So, about two years after Dreyfus 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 Dreyfus for even more crimes that he hadn't committed in the same trial. Oh, my God.

Oh, my God. It's really bad. Oh, my God. Anybody watch that Ivan the Terrible docu-series on Netflix about the guy that was accused of being the Nazi guy? Oh, yeah. Watch that. Yeah.

Watch that. The two trials. Oh, Robert, it's up your alley. It is, dude. So, they're like, that's him. I'll never forget his face. He's like, no, it's not. Yeah.

No, it's not. People are bad at remembering things, which is a real problem, like eyewitness accounts and stuff. But there's not even that in this. This is just racism that Dreyfus is being convicted over. Like, it's not even someone thinks they see him doing something. 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.

God, man. Now, obviously, not all French people felt this way. Oh, sorry. What's that problem? I was going to say, man, this is going to 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, because I still go when I look at like European Jews, I'm just like, but child white people.

And I just, and it's, and it's so funny to me because I'm like, damn, y'all got the short end of the stick, 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 from the benefits of whiteness. And the way that like in the late 1800s, Italians and Irish were in the United States, right? Yeah, that's just so...

Like it's a 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 ever written, so I shouldn't be adding stuff. I know that like, you know, stories of 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 white too.

You know what I'm saying? And just this argument that like, I am a part of that. Doug, I just can't imagine as someone who's... There is no way I could stand in front of any court and convince somebody I'm a white dude. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. That like the idea, one, that that's possible and two, that like you actually are a white dude.

Yeah. And nobody's calling you a white dude. You know what I'm saying? Like that's at least the European Jew, obviously Ethiopian Jewish people are clearly now white dudes. Yeah. I mean, it's a factor of non whiteness is a scale, right? Like everyone who is considered non white isn't considered the same.

But it's a scale. And in this period of time, in 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 had been within living memory at this point, severe restrictions on whether or not Jewish people could own property in parts of Europe. Yeah. 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 at this period. And that's the point I'm trying to make is like, I still can't, obviously you can't, you can't pull a, you know, a critical race theorist based on a society in the 21st century. You can't yank that back to the 17th 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, how do you know? You upset? It's, I mean, it's the whole process of a lot of, you know, 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 what were effectively tribes and tribal groups

of Irish people. But 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, they're an early colonized people. It's a, like, we'll do a history, a series about this at some point. The 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. Yeah. It's, you know, getting tried and then getting reconvicted when this new info comes up. It creates a massive culture war in France and two groups kind of rise up around this.

There's the anti-Dryfussards who are confusingly the ones who think Dreyfuss is innocent. Okay. Yeah. And then there's the Dreyfussards who are raging anti-Semites. Like the Dreyfussards think that, that Dreyfuss is guilty. The anti-Dreyfussards think that he's. Oh yeah. It's the opposite of how you'd think it would be.

It's opposite day. Okay. Got it. So Dreyfuss is pardoned by the French president and released in 1903 eventually just like, and in fairness to France, the weight of kind of cultural opinion is that Dreyfuss is guilty. People come around on this and realize that they've done him dirty. So he's released in 1903 and in 1906 a French court formally recognizes his innocence. Now the actual spy and the racist officers who conspired against Dreyfuss were never

punished. And one of the saddest things about the story is how kind of incomprehensibly loyal to the state Alfred Dreyfuss is. Because after he gets out of years of being in prison as a spy, he rejoins the French army and fights in World War One. Yeah. What? He retires as a lieutenant colonel and dies in 1935.

He goes right back into the military. Yo, all the team Dreyfuss until the end, boy. Like, yo, time out, bro. It is hard to get your head around that. These people don't love you, fam. Yeah. Well, I mean, in fairness to him, a lot of folks, there was a huge culture war in his defense in a lot of cases.

A lot of people were like, this is wrong. So all things considered for what is effectively like a racist attack on a Jewish man at multiple levels of the military, the Dreyfuss affair works out about as well as you can expect for Dreyfuss because he is vindicated in the end. But because of how much, because of what kind of like evolves in France around believing Dreyfuss is guilty and starting to believe that Jewish people are kind of inherently unloyal to the state, supercharges the radical right into 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 going to quote from that right up in the international relations again, quote, before the affair, France had been 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 1880s. Russian Jews escaped the massacres ordered by the Tsar 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 of the annual Congresses of anti-Semitism that took place in Dresden. Yes, there used to be yearly Congresses based on anti-Semitism in Dresden that a bunch of European countries would send delegates to to talk about the dangers. The amount of anti-Semitism, like the Holocaust isn't a factor of the Nazis. The Holocaust is a factor of centuries of most of European christen of being like the Jews are dangerous. Like that's where it comes from. Yeah.

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? Yeah. It's the least surprising thing in the world if you read anything about European history. So yeah, but in France though, that's not really the case as much. Obviously, there's anti-Semitism in France as the Dreyfus 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 Dreyfus proves a lot of very loyal to France Jewish people. So the anti-Semitism really starts to grow into a serious force in France as a result of the Dreyfus Affair. The Dreyfus 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-Dreyfus Ard Press outnumbered the Dreyfus Ard Press by about 10 to 1 in terms of readership. So the guys who think Dreyfus is innocent, that's the majority of the press at the beginning. But that doesn't stop the Dreyfus Ard Press, which are the ones who don't like Dreyfus, 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 Dreyfus Affair became a thing was because the press flocked to it and that it might have disappeared if they hadn't written so

much about it. Scholar Jean Dennis Bretton 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's happened with like QAnon, right? Yeah.

This radical press, and 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 shit on Twitter and QAnon, it's like eight chant, that's what's happening here. It's still just dank memes. Okay. And it's by the way, this basic process is the same thing that radicalizes Hitler. When he's like homeless living in Vienna, he starts picking up all of these crudely copied

and written anti-Semitic tracts that were passed out en masse 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 shit you see on eight chant. It's just now what happens online, then it was like zines you would pass out basically. I wonder if there's like some sort of psychological study or something that like lays out what that does to you mentally to see something that's like feels clandestine, if you will, because it's like these like mimeograph 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, yeah. There's a song. I wonder if there's something to that where it's like, 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 hits a certain party of brain, you know what I'm saying? But I wonder if there's something to do with like how sucky the quality of things are.

This is the same. I talk about this a lot. One of the guys behind the Lincoln Project is a fellow named Rick Wilson, who is like, I think objectively a bad person, 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. Oh, wow. Yeah.

He's that guy. And I interviewed him in 2016 talking about kind of his 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 ads 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 slick campaign ads 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 again, he's a very bad person. He's not bad at making propaganda, I think about what he told me a lot. And that's I think kind of what you're seeing here. I think you're exactly right. So the Dreyfus affair would prove and the radical press that kind of comes out of the Dreyfus 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 talk about how the stabbed in the back myth in Germany was crucial. Now the right in France is like we lost the Franco-Prussian war because the Jews, you know? God damn it. And 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. A lot of Europe, but in France too. I know like I have, we talked about so many times like the parallels in Syria and Iraq and Iran. 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 these like heavily armed dudes pull up to the house and are like, are you a Christian? And you're like, 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. And it's like, well, they the 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. You know what I'm saying? You just turn it down to do down the street. You know what I'm saying? I don't know, but they are, you know, and it's like a lot of people that signed up didn't really sign up. They just, you know, I'm 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 not necessarily what's going on. When we talk about the Holocaust, that's a complicated factor because a lot of people would claim in their defense later, like after, during like 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. It was, it 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, the fucking Holocaust is a whole nother story. But this is a part of the story of the Holocaust though.

This is why part of why the, the, the French people in who are taken by the Nazis are so willing to turn in Jewish neighbors, you know, yeah. And none of this should be seen as like kind of ignoring the fact that a lot of French people hid and protected their Jewish neighbors. It actually makes them much more heroic, but that was not the norm. You know? Okay. So again, the Dreyfus affair gives birth to the right wing in France.

And it, it, it's, it's like, it leads to this alternative media ecosystem that starts spreading propaganda at a, at a huge rate. Now France, obviously World War I comes around and France is one of the co co belligerence in that war and they suffered, you know, terribly as a result of 1.3 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 more than the US has lost in all of its wars put together. Damn.

Yeah. It's bad. Damn. Yeah. 73% of French soldiers who mobilized for World War I were either killed or wounded. 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 a while German machine guns had

them running low on white dudes, you know. And one of the stories that's not talked about enough in World War I 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. Yeah. Beauty of colonialism. You can just pull bodies from anywhere.

Pull them all from wherever. Yeah. Now, the days and months after World War I's close 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, which I think is a neat term. Yeah.

Yeah. 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 1870, but then they win World War I, 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. Yeah. It's not as bad as it is in Germany or, you know, Italy won too, but they kind of got

screwed in the victory, you know, so there's a lot more resentment in those countries. France does have some unrest, though. There's waves of strikes in early 1919, 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 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.

Everybody's scared of whatever hell happened to Russia. Everybody is. Yeah. It's a huge factor here, you know? Yeah. And you have to acknowledge that, like, we talk a lot about how 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

it. Again, 9 million people die in that war. Yeah. Yeah. You have the Holodormor, which is 5 million Ukrainians being starved as 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, you know, today people being scared of cultural Marxism because, you know, someone wants to talk about slavery, you know?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Basically. Yeah. It's very different. That's a legitimate fear. Yeah.

They have a leg to stand on, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 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, yeah.

But it's not quite the same. Yeah. The 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 in women's rights and a broadening of what was considered acceptable behavior. For the first time, large numbers of French women were both sexually and financially independent of men, and obviously this terrifies conservatives, right? Of course. Yeah. And they made decisions to overthrow them. Yeah.

They might decide not to make more French babies, which is actually exactly where this leads, because something called the birth rate movement pops up in this period of time. These guys are scared at declining rates of French birth. Now, they'd started whining in 1871 when Prussia beat France in that war, because the French right before they started blaming Jewish people blamed the fact that French people, women weren't having enough babies. Like, that's the thing, like the right loses a war and they're like, they have to find a scapegoat.

So first, it's the women. You're not making enough babies for us to send into German guns. Which is obviously, like ridiculous, I'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 in 1871. That's the real reason.

It has nothing to do with birth rate. Yeah. How would it? Yeah. I'm even trying to follow your logic. Yeah, there's not that many Germans. Yeah, it's not that many of them. What does toddler gonna do?

Mm-hmm. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. 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, got it. And then of course, like after this, you know, after a decade or so of blaming women,

they start blaming Jewish people. So the kind of the birth rate movement got even more like, gained more traction after World War One, because at 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 running into guns. Yeah, that's a better answer. If you think I'm just like, man, I wish these dudes like, when I'm hearing them, just the

stab in the back thing, and then they 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. Take the loss, bro. You lost. None of them. That's the fucking thing. And it's the same fucking thing for like the Hindenburg and Ludendorff in Germany, where

it's like, well, we can't accept that we fucked up, right? Yeah. It has to be someone else's fault that we lost this war. Yeah. 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 L.

Everybody takes Ls. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, it's like the American right wing blaming the fact that we lost Vietnam on like teenagers protesting and it's like, no dude, like the fucking Vietnamese kicked your ass. They were better than you. We lost, man.

We lost. We just lost. They're better at this than you. That's just what happens. Yeah. Sometimes you lose. Yeah. Usually you lose when you do stupid shit.

You shouldn't have been away anyway. Like invade Vietnam. You don't say, yeah. Or invade Afghanistan. Shouldn't have been over anyway. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Obviously a bunch of members of the birthrate movement get elected to government. They push legislation to encourage childbirth, yada yada. In 1920, 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 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 20s was a good time to be a French conservative. The stain of defeat in 1871 had been wiped out by victory over Germany. The new right-wing government was seen as being largely composed of heroic veterans, even though this wasn't really true. But the idea was that these guys are all heroes. They're not normal crooked politicians. They're men of the trench generation.

They could be trusted to make hard decisions to make France great again. Okay. So first on the right-wings agenda was, of course, sticking it to the Germans. The defeated nation owed a lot of money to France and reparations. These were seen not only as spoils of war, but were necessary to revive 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 U.S.

I need 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 feed their people and pay reparations, the French right-wing assumed that they were lying. And this newly formed network of right-wing newspapers and magazines starts spreading another conspiracy theory. This one is that Germany actually hadn't been all that badly hurt in World War I. 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 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, one of the things that happened in this period is a lot of the troops they send over are like black people from their colonial possessions, which really jump-starts

a lot of racism in Germany because nobody ever likes the occupying soldiers. Yeah, nobody wants the messenger. Yeah, exactly. That's the 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 Germany when they're just like, dog, look, man, we ain't got it, dog. Like we just, I ain't got it. Do you know what I'm saying?

It's your fault. Yeah. Don't get me wrong. It's your fault. But you can't squeeze water out of a turnip, man. Yeah. I mean, they're fucking like... The thing that they're guilty of in World War I in that era and the reason that France

and Germany come down so hard on them is they're primarily guilty of wanting to do what France and Germany had been doing for two or three centuries. They wanted an empire and they're like, well, everyone else gets to do it. Why don't we get to do it? It's bad to want an empire, obviously, with the Germans do some really messed up stuff in Namibia, carry out a genocide themselves. But also, up to World War I and including World War I, if you're looking at the number of crimes against humanity committed by Germany versus France or England, not even close.

Even fucking close. Not even close. Yeah. In 1924, 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 France is backward, the socialists were the furthest electorally relevant left-wing party. So the socialists are like the Bernie Sanders, as far left as you can be in French politics

and still get elected. Obviously, they're further left 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 cases, because the communists are further left than that and they're not really as relevant to the government as a result. The radicals are the exact opposite of what they sound like. The radicals have the same kind of position in France in this period as Democrats do. They're the center left, right?

The majority left. So the radicals are not radicals and the socialists are not communists, but they are far left for French politics. Again, everything in France is backward. So the radicals and socialists had worked together in the past. They were allied in 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 the petite bourgeoisie, the lower middle class, small business owners, and successful peasants. They were big on individualism and self-reliance 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 rule that none of their deputies were allowed to accept ministerial posts in 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 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 they'll lose members to the communists then. And the communists hate the socialists because they're willing to get elected at all, basically. And they're willing to work with the radicals.

It's very, very complicated and dumb, but it's also 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. Yeah. Wow. Yeah.

Yeah. Despite the fact that actual socialists weren't willing to 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 looked like. But the conservative print media basically calls this stage one of a communist invasion. The socialists who the communists hated were considered to be just the same as the communists, revolutionaries and sheeps clothing.

In 1926, the cartel really pisses off the right wing when they approved the Washington Accords, which guaranteed that France would keep repaying her war debt 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 this liberal government. They're trying to rehabilitate Germany because Germany is kind of socialist at this point. So like, let's bring them back into the national community. Like 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 as the left selling out the country and its war dead. Right? God dog, man. God dog. Yeah. Do you just, oh man, yeah, I'm getting, I feel like I'm feeling itchy on my lower back,

man. You know, everyone knows where this is going. Yes, bro. 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 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 radical.

He's not really that, you know what I'm saying? He lightweight. And when I compare like a party to like, they're the Bidens or whatever, I'm not saying their politics or like it, it's like a comparative thing. No, yeah, yeah, I get the scale. I totally, I'm totally following the scale and I'm saying in this scenario, it's like, what they're suggesting is reasonable. You not going to get your money.

So you're not going to get your money. If you kill the Germans, let's bring them back in and let them rebuild and we'll eventually get paid. It'll be slower. They will always be like this if we never rehabilitate them. It's the same thing with like, with like prison reform. Exactly. Exactly.

Yeah. It's like, it's just going to keep, no, we have to do this diff, this is reasonable. We're not going to get the result that we both want. So let me just, and you talking about I'm selling you out. Okay. That's why I was like, I'm getting itchy. Yeah. Yeah.

So the years the cartel is in power are basically a constant stream of outrage porn for the now exploding right wing media ecosystem. Okay. So the newspapers like Action François, Candide, which means candid, Gringoire and Jusuis Partout, 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 1865. And from the beginning was both anti-democratic and anti-Semitic.

When communism kind of went viral worldwide, it added a violently anti-communist to its repertoire. And Candide was followed by Gringoire, which was named after a French journalist. And Jusuis Partout was initially not anti-Semitic or right wing, but throughout the 1920s at the direction of its head editor, the paper got more and more extreme. In the late 20s and early 30s, it goes all in from Mussolini and it starts to get progressively anti-Semitic until by the late 1930s, it was literally just a Nazi magazine. So these are like the big names in right wing media.

The Candy Gringo. 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. 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. This was of course part of a trend in Europe that exploded from 1919 to 1923 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 angry veterans who want to tear down 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 1924. 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 November 1924 when the government sanctioned the internment of the ashes of the socialist founding father Jean Jaure in the Pantheon. While socialists and radicals led a courtage to the Temple of the Republic, the conservative press focused on a communist counter demonstration held in protest at the parliamentary left's hijacking of Jaure. The presence of noisy communists in the streets with socialist and radical deputies suggested that the cartel had accepted Bolsheviks into its ranks.

In 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. Tattinger promised that if the government could not take matters into hand, the leagues of public safety are ready to defend and save our threatened society. Now the leagues are 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 ceremony for this dead socialist. The communists who hate 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 and says, that's all of them. That's the whole left. They're all like these guys again. It's all the same.

It's all the same. Nothing changes. Yeah. You know what? This isn't going to change me asking you to take an ad break. Yep. You know who won't radicalize the French right over anti-Semitism based on communist demonstrations taken out of context?

Yeah, man. Hopefully these other podcasts. These other podcasts or whatever. We're advertising. Won't do that. Yay. Yay. Yay.

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Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Alright, we're back. So this guy... I knew you were going to say that. Yeah, you got me. So this guy, Pierre Tattinger, who we'll talk about in a bit, is a big advocate of these leagues,

these right-wing street fighting gangs. And he keeps, for years afterwards, he will talk about November 1924, this one communist rally, and use it as the whole reason why the entire left needs to be defeated. And a huge chunk of Catholics and nationalists in France believe that based on, again, this one demonstration, a communist revolution is like right about to happen.

Now, this was made worse by the fact that the mid-1920s sufferance, suffer an 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 writes, quote, in comparison to the 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 trying to take any accurate stock of things, looks at the propaganda coming out of the Italian fascist state, which is not accurate,

and is like, see, everything's great in Italy. Why don't we do that? Oh my god. Yeah. Oh my god, dude. It's great. So the leagues are not quite like the black shirts or the fry core.

They're not heavily armed. Most of them are veterans, but they don't have, like, machine guns, generally, and, like, mass. Like, they're not private armies. They're groups of combat veterans, 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 Junes Patriots, or the Young Patriots. And they were initially the youth wing of the League of Patriots, which was a political organization. God, it's all the same. Yeah, the Young Republicans, right? Turning Point USA or whatever.

What, Patriots? Like, shut up, duck. Okay. They're all proud boys, you know? Yes, at the end of the day. They're all proud, proud boys. Yeah. So a lot of people on the left

recognize the leagues as a threat, and they are. In 1925, one French leftist, Louvre, noted that since Mussolini's march on Rome, one could no longer so much as walk into the street without wearing a colored shirt. You know, he's talking about, like, you've got the black shirts in Rome,

the brown shirts in Germany, and now, like, all of our guys have their own shirts. Their own colored shirts for each leagues. Yeah. And he warns that, Louvre 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 rule of castor oil and the grenade. There it is. So basically, we've got all these fascists, if they can unify behind one guy, we're in trouble, you know? Yep. There's the castor oil again.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's a real thing in this period. Yeah. So in this, the left-wing fear was, you know, accurate, reasonable, but perhaps a bit premature. The French leagues regularly reprinted fascist propaganda 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 before in ideology, right? We're 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 Italy. I was like, that's pretty on brand France.

Yeah, it's very on brand for France. Yeah, that's very France. Yeah. So one scholar named Dobri calls this the dilemma of the authoritarian nationalist, which is the fact that nationalists want to be authentically of their nation because fascism tends to gain power

by reacting against purported foreign influence. Yeah. But at the same time, they want to imitate successful authoritarians abroad, and this creates a problem for a lot of fascists. Again, we saw the same thing in France. Yeah. Now, the struggle within the French right over this

continued through the mid-1920s, while the leagues went through what Dobri calls an apprenticeship period to the fascist international. So the French are behind the German and Italian fascists. They're not as quick. They're kind of learning from them, right? And they're slower on the uptake as a result.

Yeah. Now, because a lot of, a lot of French League members were veterans, the leagues benefited from what became known as the veterans mystique, which was a near worship in France of what were called the front generation. People celebrated the trenchocracy,

which is like the democracy of the trenches, right? 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. But I think Americans can understand how right-wing groups can use

veneration of veterans as a way to push their own radical lens, you know? Okay. Yeah. Brian Jenkins writes about how one right-wing firebrand named Valois used the idea of the pure trench warrior. Quote,

Valois 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, Tattinger, extolled the virtue of the new elite born of war. 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' opposed 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 leagues, and a lot of them also join communist veterans' organizations.

But the worship of veterans and the idea that the sacrifices of 1918 had been betrayed by the leftist leaders of France becomes a popular right-wing rallying cry in the mid-20s. 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 named Charles Morris was jailed in 1925 for threatening to have the minister of the interior killed like a dog if police kept it harassing the leagues. Oh, my lord. Yeah. There's a couple, Marjorie Taylor Greene or whatever her name is, the QAnon lady who's talking about that Jewish space later

and probably helped carry out and incite and advise the people to... Yeah, she's the Jew laser. Yeah, that lady, there's like three of her in France in this period, at least. Okay. And Morris is kind of one of them. Now, Morris is an interesting guy. He was born a monarchist and is what we would probably call

a Catholic fascist today. The earliest political memory was the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, which seems to have fueled a lot of his anti-left hatred later in life. He became an anti-democratic activist in the 1890s and then came the Dreyfus Affair. And of course, Morris is a Dreyfusard. He believes that Dreyfus is guilty because he's Jewish

and he grows increasingly anti-Semitic after the Dreyfus Affair. In 1899, he founds a newspaper, Action Française, which literally means French action. And yes, it does sound kind of like a porn. His magazine becomes very influential among the French right wing and Morris 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 1899 titled, Dictator and King. That's about how we should have a dictator king in France again. Yeah. Yeah. You know what France's problem is? Not enough kings. You know what?

You remember when we had Serfdom? Yeah. Let's go back to that. Let's go back to that. That was amazing. And Ricketts. In 1905, Morris starts writing articles about how swell it would be for the right wing to create extra-legal paramilitary organizations

and have them do a coup d'etat. When the leagues rose up, Morris was thrilled. And soon Action Française or French action has its own league. When Morris 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 1926. If Morris were wounded or hit, I would at once give orders to have the ministers of the Republic

immediately assassinated. So like the right wing isn't just like dog whistling violence. They're like, we should kill them all. We should kill everyone on the left. Yes. It's like the American right now. I mean, kill them. So in what way do you mean?

I mean, day it. I mean, we shoot them to death. I mean, we kill them. This is not a symbol. Yeah. It's wild. And it's the same as what's been what happened ahead of the sixth, you know. Now, obviously Morris and his business partner were not alone

in their calls for violence against the left. I'm going to quote from France and fascism here. Such calls to violence often went unheeded and law and order were not threatened to the extent seen in Germany and Italy. However, low level physical violence was common. Newspaper sellers from rival organizations regularly came to blows in the street while political meetings were frequently the scene of violence. Furthermore, despite their claims to stand for authority and order,

the leagues could fight with the police too. 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 League or died in March 1926 during fighting with police at a demonstration against the minister of the interior, 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? Yeah.

Now, in most of France, the armed paramilitary start to decline in popularity after 1923. And in France, they mostly faded into the background temporarily by 1926 after two years of regular street brawls. 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. Proud boys.

Yes, proud boys. Now, this was not the end of violent unrest in France just to pause because in 1926, a new conservative government gets elected and the cartel comes to an end. So that's why the leagues kind of fade after 26 as the conservatives get elected again. It comes a home game again. OK. Exactly. You're not the away team no more.

OK. Yep. And the reason the right wins in 1926 is that the left has fractured again. The communists launch a series of attacks against the socialists who they call social fascists. That's why fighting causes the left to temporarily dissolve as meaningful opposition. And this meant the leagues also had a lot less of a reason to exist. Big business had spent the previous four years pumping money into the far right and they withdraw their financial support after 26, which causes the leagues to collapse.

So the leagues are floated by rich businessmen who then like, well, now conservatives are in power again. We don't want street gangs anymore. So the temporary fall of the leagues 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 write up in Of All Things, the Harvard Crimson, quote, it collected within its cells the inheritors of a tradition of nationalist, monarchist

and reactionary thought extending back almost 100 years. It was no mere cabal of a moral big businessmen such as supported the so-called Committee, France, 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 any desire to safeguard financial investments. So again, the far right in the period where the left is in control is funded by businessmen who are safeguarding their investments, right?

And that's why they want to fight socialists in the street. But the guys propagandizing to the far right are true believers. It's not about money for them. It's about fascism. It's about the thing. OK. Yeah. So and Morris being a monarchist is only marginally happier under a conservative government than a 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 to mistake he and his followers for isolated loons. And 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 1932, 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 and Germany when the left and the center left are willing to like work together electorally, right? Yeah. 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 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 on the left can never get their shit 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 socialists demand direct aid for the unemployed while the radicals worry about the deficit

and think that it's much more important to balance the budget. I know it's the same exact thing. The radicals who are centrists, their best idea is, of course, austerity, cuts and wages for public workers. The debate between the socialists and the radicals leads to a series of different liberal left governments. Obviously, 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 people they disagree with. The leagues that had remained functional after 1926, namely French action and the young patriots, see a swell in their membership. They're soon joined by new leagues. In June of 1933, a perfume, magnate and fascist named Coty forms his own paramilitary group, which he uses to spread anti-Republican authoritarian propaganda and pushes this through the newspaper that he owns as well.

By February of 1934, the perfume guy's paramilitary gang slash newspaper is the most influential and largest fascist movement in France. Are you saying perfume? Yeah, he's a perfume guy. Yeah. Like France's most influential fascist gang leader is a perfume dude. Like fragrance. So French.

Big into the fragrance business, yeah. Yeah, this is again, pretty on brand. Pretty on brand. Yeah. Coty's men wore blue shirts and lots of leather and one has to assume smelled incredible. They smelled incredible. They sound like they probably looked amazing too. Yeah, I'm sure they did.

Yeah. Now, another fascist French guy named Marcel Bucard starts a league called the Francistes in September of 1933. Bucard repeatedly praised foreign fascist governments and he was famous for making long speeches about the almost sexual love he had for his revolver. Oh my God. Again, another Marjorie Taylor Greene, right? Like I'm going to take my Glock into Congress kind of guy.

It's the same fucking shit, just the worship of weapons and such. And then, of course, there's the Croix de Fieux, 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 Croix de Fieux, the Croix of 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 radical militant organization, but it becomes one very quickly.

Its leader is a guy named Colonel La Rock, and he holds military style parades and is not afraid to use his men as a political cudgel. And the way they're organized is actually pretty genius. They have at their height about half a million officers and NCOs in their membership. And the officers and NCOs are each put in charge of 10 guys, 10 other former soldiers who were of lower ranks. And their job is to get help for those guys using the resources of the league and also control their votes.

So the half million or so officers and NCOs in the Croix 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, but they're also very system loyal, right? They're 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 writes, quote, In November of 1931, the Colonel and his followers stormed the stage at a meeting on disarmament at Trocadero, bringing an end to the proceedings.

Meanwhile, the league's shock troopers, called Dispose, were employed to maintain security at meetings and fight the left in the street. In October 1933, a new manifesto announced a more radically anti-parliamentary direction, while the group opened its ranks to non-veterans through its volunteer's national 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 1934 dawned, right wing paramilitaries were as organized and as large as they had ever been in France. The left was fighting too much within themselves, 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. They also are able to look abroad at the propaganda 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. Totally, what did they do that we're not doing? Yeah, they're not, we're not killing enough leftists. Clearly. Yeah.

And then, as everything in France is about as hot as it could get, what comes to be known as the Stavitsky Affair, bursts onto the front page of every rightist newspaper in France. And I'm going to see how long it takes you to figure out what the most modern parallel to the Stavitsky Affair is. From my back to itch again. Sir J. Alexander Stavitsky was born in Ukraine in 1886 to a Jewish family who'd immigrated to France in 1899. His father was a dentist. Stavitsky, however, was a born grifter.

While still a teenager, he established himself as a con man. By the mid-1920s, he'd gotten good at it, making enough money to dress as a rich guy, even though he was constantly on the verge of losing everything. Stavitsky used his charisma and his ability to trick gullible rich people to keep the cash flowing. France and fascism writes, quote, he left a trail of fake companies, counterfeit checks and bonds and fraudulent share transactions, and following his arrest in July 1926 for stealing and stolen securities, he spent 17 months in the La Santé prison while his case awaited trial.

Following his release on medical grounds, the hearing of the case against him was repeatedly deferred, 19 postponements and all, leaving Stavitsky free to launch a string of further dubious ventures under the alias Sergei Alexander. In 1928, he embarked on a scheme which, though lucrative, would eventually prove his undoing, the fraudulent exploitation of municipal pawn shops. In Orleans, he extracted 25 million francs from the pawn shop in exchange for fake gemstones, subsequently redeeming the stones with cash derived from the municipal pawn shop he had since launched in Bayonne. This was a much bigger operation, and the credit was financed by issuing bonds

well in 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 1933, having spent lavishly and gambled heavily, Stavitsky 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. So that's the nature of his con. Yeah, at first it sounded like ass, pretty good lick, man. He's a good con man for a while.

That's worked the system, yeah. So in September of 1933, one of the businesses he conned, an insurance company, called for a judicial inquiry into his business. On December 23rd, the director of a pawn shop Stavitsky owned broke down under questioning. He did not just incriminate his boss, but also a local elected leader from the radical party. Stavitsky immediately 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 launch 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 Stavitsky was Jewish, you can guess how this folded in with all the fact that all of these papers also had huge hard-ons for Hitler and Mussolini. One radical deputy resigned. Another radical, the minister of the economy, was found to have encouraged people to purchase junk bonds from Stavitsky back in 1932. So two radicals are implicated, like clearly.

So he resigns, and to the right, this proves that all of the other deputies they'd been accused were guilty. Two newspaper editors were also found to have been on Stavitsky's payroll, which encouraged people to buy junk bonds, and then these guys are arrested, which feeds into the narrative that liberal press is untrustworthy and part of the Jewish conspiracy. As 1934 dawned, right-wing media could write about nothing else but the Stavitsky affair. And then, on the 9th, with public interest at its height, Stavitsky himself is cornered by police at a house in Chinois. 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 Stavitsky had not committed suicide, he'd been murdered to cover up his connections to powerful leaders. He's the fucking French Jeffrey Epstein. He's Epstein. Yeah, he's Epstein. It's the same thing. It's the same thing. Yeah, he's Epstein.

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, you know? It's the same thing. It's like the exact same playbook. Yeah, and the best part about the Epstein story is they said the camera glitched. Yeah.

And there's shady stuff like that with this, right? It's not cameras because it's whatever. Yeah, it's the same thing, but yeah, not. Yeah, and I have no idea. That is a one-to-one, bro. Yeah, it doesn't. Just like with Epstein, it doesn't really matter if he killed himself or was murdered. Same thing with this guy.

What matters is that everyone on the far left and the far right is sure that he was murdered in order to protect liberals, right? In order to protect mainstream, I should say, center politicians, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's way too much at stake. Yeah. You know who won't murder Jeffrey Epstein? Well, you can't because he already did. Yeah, he's already dead, so they definitely won't kill him.

Definitely won't get Epstein. They have products and services that support this podcast. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good, bad-ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

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I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

So, we're back. So, the radical president... What about the conspiracy theory that he's still alive, though? Like, I feel like your outbreak is... Yeah, I mean, we're not... You can't actually prove that, Robert. I am not making any conclusions about Jeffrey Epstein on this podcast. We're just saying that, like Epstein, this guy, Stavisky, is said to have killed himself, and nobody who's on the left or the right really believes it, right? Yeah, there's one definitive thing you could say about Jeffrey Epstein, is that, I don't care how many dollars you put in before and after his name, he is a pimp.

Yeah, Stavisky is a different kind of pimp. Yeah, and this guy is pamping. He's just a different lick. He's selling different products, same thing anyway. So, the radical president, like the... Or not president, but like prime minister of France, who's, again, a radical, 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. And it might have even been true that, like, the only people implicated had been caught, but that doesn't really matter, 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, proving to many Frenchmen that there had been a conspiracy.

Brian Jenkins writes, 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 right's conspiracy theories. However, in this competitive press environment, it was inevitable that the more radical and scurrilous newspapers that set the pace in 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 7th of January with the headline, Down with the Thebes and an inflammatory appeal to the people of Paris. Most of the conservative press simply followed 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, totally.

From January 9th on, and this is 1934, there were demonstrations in street violence almost every night in Paris. Every week, the crowds grew larger. On Saturday, January 27th, the situation was bad enough that the president resigned and the government dissolved. Or the prime minister, whatever, resigned and 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? 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, a guy named de la die. Now, while all this is happening, the socialist, 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 deeper investigation into the matter. So, yeah, probably a bunch 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 decide to make a demand of their own. Being good leftists, this demand is that the radicals fire the Paris chief of police, Jean Chiappa, because he was a piece of shit who sympathized with fascist paramilitary groups. Of course, the far right 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, are like, we'll fire this guy and we'll completely reform the Paris police. That's the socialists' demand. And the right wing is like, this is like, this is clearly a precursor to a communist revolution. They're trying to get rid of the police so they can take over the streets and take all of our money, right?

God. God, dog, man. So, this starts a ticking clock on the right because they think that there's this Kami plot being carried out and they've only days to act in order to avert it. Le Rock, Colonel Le Rock of the Cross of Fire, declares his paramilitaries to be defenders of public order. One League, French Solidarity, declares 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 Le Rock warns his followers, a government whose sign is the red flag wants to reduce you to slavery. We are threatened with sectarian dictatorship.

Nothing that sounds familiar. The defenders of public order. Yeah. Again, nothing that's ever happened again. Nothing is dead. In any other country. Wow. This is so frustrating. I know. It's terrible.

This is so frustrating. Yes. So, elected leaders were also pushing these lines. Philippe Henry, a deputy from Bordeaux, was a Catholic militant who believed that the Stavisky Affair was a Jewish Masonic conspiracy to 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 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. And they do that, not that they treat them equally or anything, but like it is a thing that happens in like the 1700s, really. But yeah. Of course, they use them for shock troops, you know. Of course. Yeah.

I'm like, I feel like it was about time that one of us say something funny, but it's like, I can't, I just, I got nothing because it's just so on the freaking nose. Exactly, it's exactly what's happened, you know. So this prop brings us to February 6th, 1934. The French government assembles for a vote of confidence in Prime Minister de la Die. So a vote on whether or not he's going to keep being the prime minister or they're going to dissolve the government again. And I found a French history website, Herodotie, that describes how things started. In all, hardly more than 30,000 demonstrators, a large majority of them who were ex-combatants. Everyone has mobilized on the theme, down with thieves!

And a demand for more civility and honesty in the government. At the start at the call of Lieutenant Colonel de la Rock, 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 Bourbonne, La Roque and its veterans refused to occupy it. Their dispersal makes any possibility of overthrowing the regime by force futile. But on the other side of the sign, around the Palace of the Concorde, the demonstration degenerates. Thousands of activists try to march on the Palais Bourbonne. The Bourbonne Palace, I guess.

So what happens here is this crowd starts, like in the cross of fire guys, or a huge chunk of it, starts marching on the gates of the capital. And as soon as the police get engaged and the crowd starts fighting with the cops, Colonel La Roque calls his men back. But thousands and thousands 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 buses 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 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 26, we don't have an exact death toll.

Some will say 26 people were killed and more than 1,500 are injured. Some will say it's more like, you know, 5 to 10 and 1,000 injured. But it's everything that happened in the capital on the 6th, except they don't get into side the capital. Because the French, like, order forces just start shooting, like firing into the crowd with rifles. 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 9th, the communists start coming out in force in the streets and do a lot of rioting themselves. And actually, like, three or four days after the attempt to storm the capital, a lot of what's happening 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 de Laudier 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 brought down a French government. The week of February 6th was, in fact, the most violent period of political unrest in France since the commune of 1871. Not everyone in the right is thrilled by this. Morris, 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 is doubtful that he ever actually planned a revolution. As he calls the 6th of February, a victory lost. Morris'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 almost everyone's position.

The parliamentary regime was shown to be a tottering precarious structure. The rightist rioters 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 they lacked the will to power. They were incapable of a Munich push, much less to 10-year conspiracy to capture parliamentary power. At the moment of reaction's greatest political triumphs in Europe, French fascism collapsed. Wow. Again, doesn't sound familiar at all.

Wow. Yeah, I've never. And again, fucking Morris 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 6th in D.C., he fucking leaves as soon as people cross. He's like, no, sir. At first I thought when you were talking about the other dude that ended up being Epstein, I thought it was Jones at first. No, no, no, no. Fucking Stavisky's your Epstein. Yeah, he's definitely Epstein.

But at first, when he first started talking, I was like, it's not like a little Alex Jones. Yeah, that's, yeah. Morris is your Alex Jones type thing, right? Morris is more Alex Jones than he's just like, oh, wait, I'm not. Oh, no, I just wanted to make money telling people to revolt and getting them, like, ginned up. I didn't actually want that to happen. That's scary as hell. Yeah, y'all, oh, y'all actually pull triggers. Oh, no. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And current, you can see Colonel De La Rock 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 wanted less democracy, but he wasn't about to storm the capital. So the main outcome of February 6th was that the elected right wing grows closer and closer to the insurrectionary far right. It also unifies the left wing, inspiring a popular front in France that takes power after a brief period of conservative rule falling to La Diez Fall. The 1936 French popular front was at its core, an anti-fascist political union. And domestically, it does a good job of stopping the French far right from capturing power. And this has actually led to a theory in French historiography that France is itself immune to fascism in a unique way. The story goes that a mix of France's longstanding democratic traditions and the fact that its 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 fucking bullshit. And there are a lot of scholars. The book France and Fascism is a very long scholarly treatise on why this is bullshit. But a lot of French scholars after World War II will argue this, that like France is immune to fascism. The reality is that France came very close to falling to fascism on the 6th. And it did fall to fascism in 1940. Now, this is by conquest, right? The Nazis, the fascists don't gain power in France by elections. The Nazis conquer France.

But when the Nazis take over, they needed to find a bunch of willing Frenchmen to run Vichy 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 Vichy France and the Nazis take over are people who had been involved with the February 6th insurrection, right? Yeah, exactly. Like a ton of these fucking dudes. It's easy. It's crazy that it's the 6th also. Yeah, and it's February 6th, right? It's very ontic. When I started reading about this, I was so fucking shocked because I was thinking like,

well, you know, if you want to make, find a good comparison to the January 6th, there's aspects of the Munich coup. There's aspects of the March on Rome, but like, oh shit, no, it's Feb 6, 1934. That's exactly what happens. So a lot of French fascists who had been a part of, you know, what happened on the 6th, wind up joining the Nazis. Remember Philippe Henriot, whatever, the right wing deputy who was basically the French QAnon Glock congressperson who was like, we need to overthrow the government while he's in the government. Under occupation, this guy becomes the voice of Radio Vichy, 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 Levant, but thankfully died in a plane crash pretty soon after that, when he shot down over Lebanon by the Italians accidentally. Yeah. Morris 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, Morris was arrested and indicted for complicity with the enemy based on the pro-Nazi articles he'd published at the start of the war.

He was sentenced to life imprisonment. Upon his sentencing, Morris is said to have exclaimed, it's Dreyfus's Revenge! Oh, God. That was the day he brought it all the way back. It's good. It's perfect. It's a perfect circle. Perfect. Oh, man. Somebody screen shot at his tweets. They put him in prison. Yeah. That's exactly what happens, more or less.

And that prop is the story of February 6th, 1934 in Paris. All right. Oh, shit, right? 1934 in Paris. Great time. Sheesh. Haunting. How's everybody feeling?

My one word, haunting. Yeah. Yeah. I'm like, yeah, because 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, 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 closest to, like you said in the beginning,

I'm like, oh, damn, I wasn't even counting this one. Yeah. And it was, somebody sent me, and I honestly forget who it was, but somebody who I have texted with on signal, said like, you should look into January 6th, 1934. And I did. And I'm like, oh, my God. Yeah.

This is the same thing. I do. It's so wild. So obviously it was a great episode for our The Fascists Who Fail 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 the other is that when the left and liberals work together electorally,

they generally can't agree on enough to do anything that will actually stop the fascists from getting stronger. Yo, that was one of my, that was one of the biggest lessons I'm learning from this one. It's just like, oh, we're so progressive. We're so, well, me and my wife call it, you're so open-minded, you're close-minded. You know what I'm saying? It's so like, y'all just can't get it together because y'all not open-minded enough, you know?

Yeah. And it's, you know, I think. And it's something a lot could argue that it's largely on the radicals because they have more power in the government and they kind of refuse to do any sort of meaningful aid that could actually 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?

The media ecosystem kind of means that like, maybe even if the radicals had agreed with the socialists and they'd 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, it's belief, you know? So like, in this media circus that we're all in of like, you know, the closed ecosystem of your confirmation bias means that information don't matter, belief do. So, but at the end of the day, 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 like, if you put, if someone's not into the specificities of caring for others, you know what I'm saying?

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 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 Dila Rock and this cross a fire group, like they actually do provide aid to other struggling veterans. And that's a big part of their power and why they're able to all get together on stuff. And it's like, 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 where like one of the things we see when you compare them to Germany, Italy 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 power through an insurrection, right? Yeah. And in Germany and Italy, the police and the military are on the side of the fascists. And so the insurrections work. Yeah. You know, eventually. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, in the Munich insurrection is stopped by the police and stuff. And like the reason the Spanish of the war becomes a war is because most of the military and most of the police in Spain don't go with the fascists. Yeah. In France, it's kind of the same thing. Yeah. Which is a lesson, I think there's a lot of great lesson.

Confusing lessons in all of this. Yeah. Another is that regardless of what the far left does, the far right will turn them into everyone who is left of center, right? They'll turn them into the boogeyman. 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 were like, look at the like all, you know, these Antifa kids breaking all these windows are going to lose us the election to Donald Trump. And it's like, that's actually not what happened. Yeah. Because the right were so propagandized that no matter what Antifa did, it wouldn't have, if they just marched peacefully in the streets, the propaganda would have made them seem like the coming of a communist revolution.

Yeah. What matters is that liberals not buy into it and sit and work together. Yeah. And that's what I feel like we did, where you were just like, hey, the fund, the police would have lost this election. Look, man, don't shoot at us, Doug. Yeah. Yeah.

Look. It did. Listen. You know? And as much as we could, unfortunately, it's like, well, Trump fumbling Corona, like it's like really a big point is the election. Yeah. You know what I'm saying?

So like, look, man, same team, bro, I'm just trying to tell you this is a good idea. Yeah. Yeah, man. Yeah. Yeah. It's it. There's a lot, a lot to learn and in our next episode, our penultimate episode of behind the insurrections.

We're going to talk about the business plot. So we're going to be coming back home to the old US. The US of A. Yeah. That's going to be good. That'll be Thursday. But for now, Prop, you want to drop some plugables up in this? Yes.

Yes. Yes. Because I'm so excited because the pre-save link for my first single on the next record is now out. Excellent. So that's at propitpop.com. Yes. And all my socials also, there's a new coffee rose called The Culture, also available on

the website, pulled from Ethiopia and like tasted it myself, met the farmers. This is real stuff. And I will be on Hoodpot. Dang. Anderson. Anderson. You want some coffee, dog? All you got to do is DM me, homie.

Like, you ain't got to like yell like that. And I'm telling the truth. Like you barking at me like I'm lying. And Hood Politics with Prop's shooting out, doing, that's going cool. You could get on 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. And we kind of did a little funny little roast about that, what the prediction of like the proud voice being infiltrated.

Oh yeah. Yeah. Like infiltrated guys. Yeah. Well, 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. And this is being taken by a lot of the left to mean that like, well, the 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 where like one of his goals with Cointel Pro was to make the FBI seem so powerful and omnipresent that people would think they were responsible for everything. And it's less that and more that like Enrique Terrio is the kind of person who is immediately going to roll on everybody that he was involved with. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. That, that, yeah, that like goes back to me, like in the left room, 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 antennas, man? Like the certainness 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 too, where I'm just like, yo, you, you take the whole thing as a FBI front, like, like it's, come on, man, where

are your antennas, bro? No, they got a guy in. But of course a bunch of them were talking to the feds. Yeah, they've got like, yeah. They saw the same, they saw the same problems we saw and they said, we better do something about this shit. Do you understand? We don't want another gang that's like, we want another gang.

Yeah. Yeah. We're the top gang, you know? Yes. But it's like people will believe what they believe. It's like with Epstein and with Stavitsky, you know? Yeah. You know?

Maybe he killed himself. Maybe he didn't. You know? Maybe he was murdered because he knew, and it's like, you know, fucking A with both Epstein and Stavitsky. You look at the response of the people in power to it and it's like, yeah, it's pretty fucking sus, you know? Yeah, you don't want his, you do not want his passcode.

You don't want that if that fool's phone got hacked, broken into all the text messages on that. Yeah. I saw that. And then it comes back to the fact that one of the reasons why conspiratorial thinking can be so influential and spread so quick and be so hard to fight is that there's a fuckload of actual conspiracies happening all the time. That's the problem.

You know? You know what I'm saying? It's the same thing with like, like we talked about the anti-vaxxer thing where it's like, it's not like the medical industry is helping. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Yeah. It's not like all this shit.

It's not like fucking Purdue Pharmaceuticals reputation helps people trust vaccines. Thank you. You know what I'm saying? A Sackler family and shit. Like y'all crooks. Yeah. I know you're crooks. You know what I'm saying?

I don't know nobody to go polio. Mm-hmm. You know what I'm saying? So yeah. It's good shit. Yeah. Anyway. It's, it's, it's all great.

And it's great. Our next episode will be great too. Let's talk about how. You know what else is great? The history. Robert's Twitter feed. You can follow him at iRide. Oh, I don't recommend that at all.

Stay the fuck off of Twitter. I think it's great. And you've dropped some few gems recently as a matter of fact, I was waiting to this one to talk about the, uh, the talk about the, the, the trout bait shop tweet. That was brilliant. I'm giving you, what was it? Fuck around. And what was, what was it about the, the bait shop?

Who was it? It was fuck around and. Oh, find out. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Fuck around and find trout. Fuck around and find trout. I was like, let's go.

I like, to me, I was like, look, that's, you caught out whatever you want. That's a brilliant. I think we could make a lot of money. That's, that's my, that's my retirement plan is fuck around and find trout. It's brilliant. It's brilliant. Let me tell you why. Because I went one time in my life to, uh, oh, we talked about this before when I ended

up in Wyoming and Montana, fly fishing, just on the most, the most random thing. I just got these friends in different places that allow me to do just white shit, right? But it don't have to be white shit. 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 I don't belong here. Like you made it very clear that I should not be in this place.

But if it's called fuck around and find trout, I'm like, oh, let's, let's shop there, bro. This is cool. You know what I'm saying? It's a, it's a radical intersectional bait and tackle shop. And rainbow trout is delicious. And rainbow trout is just, listen. Oh my gosh. Yeah.

I'm, I'm like a, I'm like a B minus pescatarian. You know what I'm saying? Like I basically eat fish except I live in Boyle Heights. So the tacos are flawless. So I break rules for the tacos, but bro, fuck around and find trout. Let's go. Fuck around and find trout. I cosine.

That's it. Y'all, have y'all made the t-shirt yet? Oh no. No, we have not. But now that it's been in an episode, we can. It needs to be a t-shirt. Anyway. Anyways, that's, that's the episode.

That's the episode. Everybody have a nice rest of your day. Yeah. Yeah. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns.

But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space?

Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass, and I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based

on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.