Behind the Bastards - Part One: Ragnar Redbeard: The Patron Saint of Toxic Masculinity

Episode Date: October 8, 2019

In episode 88, Robert is joined by Jamie Loftus to discuss Ragnar Redbeard, the socialist turned Proto-Nazi who inspired a mass shooting.FOOTNOTES:1. Festival shooter Santino Legan wore tactical gear, sunglasses and a ballcap. He 'seemed confident in his use of the gun.'2. Desmond, Arthur (1859–1926)3. Ragnar Redbeard’s Might Is Right or the Survival of the Fittest4. Babylon the Great5. Anton Lavey's Satanic Philosophy6. "Trouble Makers" - Anarchism and Syndicalism.The early years of the Libertarian Movement in Aotearoa / New Zealand7. Radical: the story of Arthur Desmond8. Story: Desmond, Arthur9. Arthur Desmond - Ragnar Redbeard and "Might Is Right"10. 'Labor Song' or 'Hear Tigers Snarl'11. Might is Right or the Survival of the Fittest Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. 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. 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 strung my out? I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Vasterds. I was up too late last night ingesting narcotics, and today's going to be a shit show. Thankfully, to help me get through it, I have my co-host, Jamie Loftus. Hi, Robert. What's going on? You two literally, it was just, you just got home and you just started doing whippets. You know what I did last night?

I did. Well, we can edit out if you don't want to get specific, but- We can just bleep the drug of choice this time out. Which would honestly make it sound way cooler than what you actually did. Let's leave plausible deniability that it might have been legal. Yeah, so I did something that was legal, but very sad. I did that thing where you get the little four pack of tiny sutter homes were on sale. Oh, that is deeply sad, Jamie. And then I drank all four. It's sad. It's sad to drink all- It's not sad. It comes out to like two-thirds of a bottle of wine, which is actually, now that I'm saying it out loud, also sad. But drinking four tiny bottles is, it's tough. It's tough. What's sad is that when you're in that space, you want wine,

but you don't have your shit together enough to open a bottle, to like pull a cork out. Like, that's when you drink those sutter home bottles. They're twist tops, and they were, they were heavily discounted at my CVS. God knows why. Maybe something was tape on them. I don't know. I drank all four of them. Like, the mood that you are in when you drink that is like, I have the wherewithal. I have no, like the most that I can handle right now is opening a soda, but I want it to be wine. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I just, I don't know. I got, I'm going to cut myself slack on it. I'm not going to do any self-searching about why I drank the four tiny wines. I had, I was fine. I had a fine day. I don't have, I don't have a problem right now. No, you see,

this ties actually into the theme of the episode, Jamie, because this is behind the bastards, the show where we talk about the worst people in all of history. I'm sorry. And a lot of the worst people in all of history spend way too much time analyzing themselves, rather than just not thinking about things too hard. And that is where we get terrible, terrible people like the person we're talking about today. Love it. Yeah. That was a good intro. I pulled it out in the end. Who is it? No one, no one ever tells me anything anymore. I asked to know and then I was handily rejected. Well, you will not know this person by their name. Have you ever heard of Arthur Desmond? No, he sounds like a sexy cartoon prince. He is not. Have you heard Google images?

Have you heard of Ragnar Redbeard? Yes. Why have I heard of that? Is that a metal band, Robert? Well, actually, yes, but that's not what it is originally. Okay. You remember the Gilroy garlic festival mass shooting? Yes, I do. Well, yeah, on July 28th, 2019, Santino Laganne cut a hole in the fence surrounding that festival, snuck inside and started shooting at people with an AR-15. Yes. He killed three. He wounded 17. His youngest victim was six years old. And of course, as we always do now after a mass shooting, a bunch of researchers and law enforcement started like going through that guy's online presence to try to figure out, all right, what was this one? Was this guy like a white nationalist? Was this an ISIS guy? Was this just like just a

dude shooting people for no reason? Sure. And we found an Instagram post that the shooter had made a couple of days before the shooting, and he attached an image of like Smokey the Bear with a sign that said fire danger high today. And then he posted read might is right by Ragnar Redbeard. Why overcrowd towns and pave more open space to make room for hordes of mestizos and Silicon Valley white twats was his post. So might is right is a very famous book. It's not the most prominent piece of white nationalist literature, but it's up there. And the guy who wrote it used a pseudonym because no one has ever been named Ragnar Redbeard like Vikings would have been like, dude, that's that's a little bit much, huh? Right? Like, yeah, a little silly. It's a bit over the

time. It does sound like a like a steampunky kind of like a D&D kind of name. I really one of the untold stories of history is how many mass shootings Dungeons and Dragons has helped us to avoid by giving people with too much imagination and outlet rather than somewhere to go. Yeah, not mass shootings, but like shitty books. I shouldn't say mass shooting. It's stopped a lot of shitty books from happening because the tale of Arthur Desmond is the tale of a guy who if he'd gotten together with friends and been able to play barbarian for like four hours every Sunday. What's barbarian? He wouldn't have written this book. It's a class in Dungeons and Dragons. Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. Jesus Christ, Jamie. Okay. Sorry, King. This is getting screamed at by a man

in a kimono. Not paid to be here, Robert. You're just screaming at me in a kimono. Well, I do like the kimono. I like the pattern of it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. This kimono is, I don't know, I don't know the joke about the kimono. The last time I was here, it was, we were just still at the, well, what is the big hooked knife? The fluffy, what? Oh, the machete? The machete. That's what I was trying to say. I have a lot of machetes. I have a lot of machetes around. But where is the kimono? What happened? Like, what's the story with the kimono? Oh, much. My parents lived in Japan for most of their lives or a huge chunk of their lives. And so, I would get kimonos as gifts on a regular basis and they're comfortable. Okay. Well, I like that.

Yeah. Yeah. They're nice. It's a nice thing to put on when you're hungover in the morning and you have to do your podcast with your good friend, Jamie Loftus. I can't say it enough. It is not the morning. It is well after 2 p.m. But I have been up for less than a half hour. That's true. It was fun to watch in real time. Yeah. Yeah. If my shit is not together, like, when I'm, well, shit's not together, I start comparing people who play Dungeons and Dragons to mass shooters, which is wildly unfair and not the point I was trying to make. But, but, and yet we had to cancel you. And yeah, this is how I get, oh, please cancel me. Oh my god. I could go back to sleep. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Great. There is, I forget who, I don't know who

tweeted this, but there was a tweet that was like, I hope when I get canceled, I'm surrounded by my closest family and friends and I feel the same way. We'll all be canceled one day and then we will go to the happy hunting grounds where we can all get on open mics and shout racial slurs, which is like, like, what was that guy? Seinfeld. It's Seinfeld heaven. What? The guy. Jerry Seinfeld? No, no, no, Kramer. Oh, oh, Michael Richards. That's the joke I was, Michael Richards heaven would just be. Oh, I thought you were like, I want to hear Jerry Seinfeld scream slurs. I'm like, why would you want that, Robert? It's this one poorly constructed joke after another. You're waking up. I can see you're drinking coffee. You can see the

pieces of the joke. Everything. I can see the ingredients and, but you just threw them in the bowl. That's actually how I cooked breakfast this morning. Just oats without water, drinking coffee, just dry oats. Oh, that's so nasty. I had the breakfast place I go to. They finally told me that they think what I do to my breakfast is gross, which is what do you do to your breakfast? I get a bagel with cream cheese and a tomato on top. And then I put so much salt on top of the tomato and the bagel. And then I dip the whole thing in five packets of ketchup. Now you see, Jamie, I was actually going like, I was planning before you gave that out to like make fun of you for whatever it was you were doing, because like you said, the precedent that that was okay,

but that does sound good. They were like, it's too much ketchup. It's too much salt. You're going to die. And I hope I do. Yeah, we all will. Yeah. Hopefully we get canceled first. So we have some time to sleep. You can really have a time to panic. Yeah. It's time to talk about a man who was never canceled and definitely should have been. Uh, Arthur Desmond, who is almost certainly, yeah, yeah, yeah. So this guy, Ragnar Redbeard, who wrote this book, might as right. Obviously, it was a pseudonym and we don't 100% know who wrote might is right. But we're about 90% sure it was Arthur Desmond. There are some people who will say it was Jack London, but he would have been like a teenager when the book came out. And also Jack London was not that racist. Well, that's pretty

racist. Yeah, but not that racist. So Arthur Desmond, in addition to being Ragnar Redbeard, is probably or because he's Ragnar Redbeard is widely considered to be the most internationally influential political thinker in New Zealand's history. Now, there are only about 14 people in New Zealand. So this is an easier, like if you're going to pick a country to be the most influential international political thinker from, it's one of the easier ones. But unfortunately for New Zealand, he was a gigantic piece of shit. Yeah, this is actually I'm excited to talk about this one with you because this is a guy who's more complicated than you'd expect from a dude who wrote a book called might is right and use the name Ragnar Redbeard. Yeah, he actually started

out kind of awesome. So this is like a this is like a fucking godfather like story of like a dude who seemed like he was kind of on a pretty great path and then basically became a Nazi. So it's I mean, it's a it's a common thread. There's it's relatable for many people in the country. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, unfortunately, yes, about 30%. Now, okay, I believe you, we don't know precisely when Arthur Desmond was born or exactly where, nor do we know anything about his parents. Mark Derby, who's a historian who wrote a book about Arthur said in an interview, I'm not certain that Arthur Desmond is his real given name, it probably isn't. If you dig into this guy as much as possible using the internet,

you'll run into speculation that he was probably born around 1842, certainly in the early 1840s. He was of English and Irish descent, and he probably grew up somewhere around Hawkes Bay in New Zealand. Nice. And that's Hawkes Hawkes with an E. Yeah, it's a cool name. Now, one side, I found New Zealand. He had a New Zealand accent. Oh, yeah, for sure. Okay. This guy was gonna inform my my opinion of him in his favor. Just just imagine the guy like just pick a random cast member from what we do in the shadows and assume that's how this guy sounded. Whichever one you want. Okay, so it's Brett. Yeah, good choice. Got it. Now, one site I found makes the claim that Arthur Desmond's quote background and date of birth has never been confirmed because throughout

his life he made a point of covering his tracks, which is always a sign that somebody was up to a lot of good. Now, whatever the reality of his mysterious origins, 1884 is the year in which Arthur Desmond first emerges solidly into the historical record. He was, you know, somewhere between like 20 and 40 when he stepped forward to declare his candidacy for parliament. The editor of the Hawkes Bay Herald wrote, quote, we only know that Mr. Desmond is a cattle drover and that he is of radical tendencies. Desmond ran. Yeah, yeah, he's a political radical in a way that's good for the time. Right. He ran as a representative of the small settler and the working man. And he convinced about 190 people to vote for his platform, which was mainly based around what he

called a single tax. This was a very revolutionary plan to eliminate all taxes within the colony and replace them with a single tax on land ownership. So he's anti aristocracy, anti elite. He just wants the rich people to deal with the burden of taxes to like free up the common man in the laboring classes and whatnot, which seems pretty progressive for the air. Pretty progressive for this area to be honest. He's on a good track. Yeah. He's on a good track. Now between. I'm sorry. I'm stuck on between 20 and 40. Yeah, I don't know. Some sources say that he was like born in 1842 and, you know, the 1880s is when he got started into politics. But other sources say he was like 25 when he got started into politics. I really have no idea. Again,

we don't know when this fucker was born. Damn. You know, it was also the mid 1800s. Nobody kept records. People just like dropped babies into fields and then off you went. We should just start describing ourselves this way. We're like, yeah, sometime between ages 20 and 40. I would love that to be on my driver's license. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, between 20 and 50. Yeah, somewhere in there. So yeah, he was a radical politician. You would call him like a radical left wing pro labor guy. I'm going to quote now from one of his speeches during this period, where he's talking about sort of the working classes and their plight. I have seen men living in a hut where no fire was allowed going to bed on a wet cold day to keep

themselves warm. I have seen the wind and the rain coming in through the cracked roof and the winter storm whistling through the rafters as it does through the rigging of a ship. And I've also known of the owners of these colonial farms gallivanting in some London ballroom upon the profits of these slaves labor. So pretty, pretty low guy. Yeah, seems fine. He was also an outspoken defender of Maori rights to their own ancestral land. Oh, that's great. Yeah, he was anti white people stealing native land. So that's cool. What's the twist with this motherfucker? It's less of a twist and more of like a gradual turn that eventually leads to him going in the complete opposite direction. But it's, yeah, we'll see if we can pinpoint where this happens.

All right. So, you know, obviously, this guy's a left winger, the press at the time instantly started mocking him and his wild beliefs about landowners paying taxes and indigenous people existing. Arthur wrote back to his detractors and he accused the entire elected government of New Zealand of being a pack of thieves. He was promptly banned from being published in the Hawks Bay Weekly Courier. Nice. Three, yeah, three years. Yeah, he was like writing, writing fiery letters to the editor. I like it. Now, three years later in 1887, Desmond ran for parliament again. He claimed that his radical politics had prompted the landowners he relied on for work to blacklist him. Unable to find work, he'd had to travel far from home in order to get hired by people who hadn't

heard of him. In spite of this, Desmond doubled down on his stances, excoriating landlords, bankers, monopolists and capitalists in general in his speeches. He also introduced a new policy. Now, rather than just taxing landholders, he also wanted to nationalize all largest states and effectively take land away from the very wealthy. Okay. He was, yeah, it's pretty cool. I mean, by my opinion here, he was more successful in this campaign and actually obtained a majority of the votes in Taradale, which was the second largest town in the district. Many Kiwis cheered when he called banked directors, scoundrels and landlords, bloodsucking leeches. Yes. And the press, yeah, yeah, yeah, right. You're on board with Arthur Desmond so far. Yeah. When

the press attacked his radical politics, he called them hirelings of monopoly, which was almost certainly fair. Nice. Good band name. Good band name. You hirelings of monopoly. Yeah, that's like a ska band that advises people to pay their rent. Yeah, dad's got pay rent on time. Like there's somehow always hemline in New Hampshire. Yeah. Despite his substantial progress, Arthur Desmond still lost the election by some 400 votes. Now, a more patient Bernie Sanders like radical might have kept on building his base of support after all he'd tripled his number of voters between 1884 and 1887. And that's pretty good for a radical politician. It's entirely possible he'd have won a seat in parliament after another

couple of years of base building and preaching his cause to the masses. But he never got that chance. Some of this may be due to the fact that he was an impatient cussed son of a bitch, but mostly it was because he'd failed to actually pay back any of the debts incurred by his campaign, leaving his supporters holding the bag. By some accounts, he was quite literally run out of town. So that's cool. Okay. Wow. Okay. That's maybe a little bit of a scoundrel. Oh, good. I love when someone says the right things and then his secretly. Okay. So he's just like a, he seemed like he was a force of good. And then it turned out he was maybe just a regular politician. He's still more complicated than that. We've got a lot to go before he heel turns. And

it's, I don't really know what to make of this guy. This is one of the more confusing figures I've dealt with. And there's a lot of aspects of what he believed. Like he was, I'll say this, from the beginning he was anti-Semitic, but also it at the start, it doesn't seem like he was more anti-Semitic than anybody else. Like everybody was shitty towards Jewish people in fucking 1850s New Zealand or wherever you happen to be. Cause that was just, that was just life, you know, or 1880s. It was just everyone was racist as hell. So Desmond next moved to a place with the very upbeat name of Poverty Bay, which why would you name it that? It really seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Like most people pick like upbeat in a Greenland. We call it like, like optimistic or Tejas, which means friendship. And the New Zealand's like, everyone here is just going to be fucking poor. That's what we're calling this place. Listen, we can aspire for more, but why bother? Yeah. It is what it is. Poverty Bay. You know, to some extent that's kind of comforting because you set the bar low. Nobody's going to feel like they're a failure in Poverty Bay. That's very true. So Desmond found work in a timber mill and on a series of small farms. The money was not good. The labor was backbreaking and the strain of working all day for someone else's profit clearly wore on his soul. Years later, Desmond would write about this period,

quote, many a time when lying on my back in a bushware or a tent after a day of grinding toil, have I resolved that if I ever had the chance to sweep away such a brutal system, it would not be neglected. Okay. This sounds like a, yeah, this is like a first act of the movie kind of declaration. Yeah. Okay. Now, during his time out in the bush working at farms, he spent a lot of time with Maori people. And at some point he met a fellow named Te Kuti. Now, Te Kuti was a Maori warrior and a former guerrilla leader. He'd basically been a terrorist. Like this guy had been kind of like a New Zealand equivalent of a dude. Like he'd been a viewed a lot at least like a guy like Ben Laden. I don't think he was that bad, but he killed a

lot of people. And then as an older man, he reformed and he built a church and he became more of like a peaceful activist and was very, very popular. So this is a guy who like, and like in fairness, if you're a Maori in New Zealand at this point and you like decide to murder a bunch of white people, you have some good reason to do that. Yeah. I mean, there's usually really good reasons. Yeah. In general. Jamie lost his pro-terrorism. So wait, he was like, I was going to make a terrible, but I, every time someone was like, and then they kind of liked him at the end of his life. I'm like, oh, it's like when people gave Saddam Hussein like Doritos. Yeah. I mean, he seems like he was a charming guy, Saddam Hussein. We all, we've all given him Doritos. He got his Doritos.

That's all I know. He did get his Doritos. I think Te Kuti was a better person than Saddam Hussein, but that is a low bar. Wow. Really coming in hot for Te Kuti. Yeah. Now Desmond had initially started hanging out with Te Kuti's followers as part of an effort to learn some of their songs and rituals. It seems to have been like an anthropological thing to him. He was just interested in Maori culture. Okay. And so, you know, at some point in like the late 1880s, Te Kuti decides that he's going to head back to Gisborne, which is the town of his birth and do like, like visit there with some of his followers. And this is hugely controversial among the white people who live in the area because obviously this guy had been a terrorist for a long time.

And they like formed an armed militia and a lot of people are like, if he comes here, you know, we're going to fuck him up. And Arthur Desmond is the only white voter in the area. The only white dude because like obviously like nobody else is fucking voting. I don't think he's like the only voter in the district with any sympathy for Te Kuti or the Maori in general. And when the town held a meeting about whether to let Te Kuti show up, Desmond was the only person who spoke in his defense. Okay. I'm going to quote now from Takver, which is a website about radical Australian politics that's very sympathetic to Desmond. Cool. 500 people packed into a school room at Makarata and there was talk of bloodshed and massacres. They decided to arm themselves and

stop Te Kuti. Desmond spoke on behalf of Te Kuti. He told the meeting that he was acquainted with many of Te Kuti's followers and that Te Kuti meant them no harm. All he wished was to visit the place of his birth. The meeting ended in an uproar and he was thrown out. So this point, pretty cool dude standing up for a native guy. Yeah. Yeah. That sounds like he's using his privilege responsibly. And you know how our listeners can use their privilege responsibly, Jamie. Oh, here it fucking comes. Yeah, this is an ad pivot. What, you know, no, roll with it. I'm sorry to let me interrupt you. Well, if you have privilege, why not spend it on the fine products and services that support this program? Yeah, you're right. You're right. Yeah,

exactly. Yeah. The best way to flex your privilege is to participate in capitalism. I think that we can all agree on that. I think every radical philosopher can agree with that very simple point. Yes. Yes. Arthur Desmond certainly would. Listen, I pay three dollars for a very salty bagel every day. And four dollars for fucking twist top bottles of wine. Well, it was 350 yesterday. Jesus Christ. Therefore, I must buy them. That's 75 cents per tiny bottle of wine. You're basically spending money to not buy wine at those prices. And they are just juice. I don't even think they're alcoholic beverages. It was just like I drank four Kool-Aid pouches and fell asleep, which also sounds nice. Well, if you want to spend your money sensibly like Jamie did,

buy these products. Products. 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 and bad ass way. It'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? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put

forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. And we're back. So when we left off, Arthur Desmond has just gotten kicked out of a first meeting where he's argued on behalf of this former guerrilla leader, current religious leader, Takuti. He's still pretty cool at this point. Now, the colonists mostly hated Takuti because

he'd been a violent insurgent at one point. And of course they were racist, but they primarily were scared because they thought he was going to disrupt the upcoming sale of a bunch of Maori land to white people. So their big worry is that he's going to organize the local Maori's to stop this transaction. So I'm going to quote from Tak for again. A few days later on the 21st of February, another large meeting took place this time in Gisborne. 800 people attended and passed a resolution to stop Takuti by any means necessary. Again, Desmond spoke in favor of Takuti's visit. He told the assembly that he had a message from the Maori leaders at Tekaraka and informed them that they had no right to interfere in what was to be a peaceful visit. Again, the settlers wouldn't

listen and a fight broke out. Desmond, slightly outnumbered, had to be escorted from the meeting by the police. He was described as the Pakeha emissary from the Hauhaus, which is like the Pakeha is like a word for white guy, the Hauhaus or Takuti's, you know, church in the New Zealand Herald. And according to the paper was luckily to get out of the meeting alive. By this stage, Poverty Bay was in a panic. The government stepped in and arrested Takuti and his 70 followers, many of them women and children at Waiotahi. Takuti was charged with unlawful assembly and dispatched to the Mount Eden Jail. So that's cool. All right. Yeah, this is it's taking him a suspiciously long time to become someone who's unsympathetic. That's part of what's interesting about this

guy to me is his journey. I think I kind of get why he turned into an asshole. But that's the story we're building to. Okay. So I think one of the problems when you have a guy who ends up where Arthur Desmond ends up, which is basically a Nazi, is it's easy to like work backwards and sort of attribute like the worst attributes that he wound up believing to like his prior actions. Got it. So guys like Mark Derby, who is Desmond's biographer and probably knows more about the guy than I do, suspects that he mainly supported Takuti because he admired the Maori leaders like violent past and his ruthlessness. I don't know how much I agree with that. And again, Derby has done more research than I have, but I did read a lot of Desmond's writings on Takuti.

And I can't help but feel that there was more going on than just his appreciation of the former insurgents like ability to do violence. Like that's certainly a part of it. He does respect strength and like this guy's the fact that like, unlike the working classes of his time, this guy like stood up with a rifle and like, you know, right acted out what he believed in. But I yeah, I think there was more going on here. He wrote a poem about Takuti, which was the first of many poems from Arthur Desmond because he was actually a, in my opinion, a pretty good poet. And I'm going to read an excerpt from that poem. It's not like a crush poem. No, it's actually pretty good. It's kind of like Kipling and style, but at least from an early age, less racist. And then it gets way

more racist than Kipling. So yeah, cool. They tried to enslave us to trample us down like the millions that serve them in field and town, but the sapling that's bended when freed will rebound exult for Takuti Yoho. He plundered their rum stores. He ate up their priests. He robbed the rich squatters to furnish him feasts. What fair have so fine is their clover fed beasts exult for Takuti Yoho. In the wild midnight foray, whose footsteps trod lighter in the flash of the rifle whose eyeballs gleamed brighter. What man with our hero could clinch as a fighter exult for Takuti Yoho. They say it was murder, but what then is war when they slotted our kin in the flames of the paw? Oh, darker their deeds and more merciless by far exult for Takuti Yoho.

So he's like, he uses a lot of Yoho's there. Yoho a lot. I did. This is the most Yoho-ing I have ever done in this. So you're like, that poem is awesome. Yeah. You can see, you can see, you can see his appreciation for the guy's violence, but you can also see that it comes from like his recognition that these people have been oppressed by colonial power. And he's like, look, you can call this guy brutal, but like the whole colonial system is a thousand times more brutal than whatever violence this insurgent dealt. And that's the real crime. See what I was seeing was an AAAB rhyming pattern and the B is always Yoho. Hey, hey, look, it's his first poem. Okay. Oh, that was a fun fourth greatest sign. I am, I am going to read a lot more poems before this

episode is out. There are, there are, this is the most poems we're going to have in an episode. Does he ever go slam? Does he ever go off the rhyme scheme? I think in a modern era, this guy would be a white rapper and would probably take like a violent right wing turn. He'd be like one of those flat earth rappers who like rants about like Talmudic Jews. They're like, I'm going on a tour across the flat earth. Yeah. Look out for your boy may fall off the edge. Yeah. Yeah. That he would be that guy a thousand percent. Amazing. Okay. So after the end of his political career, Arthur Desmond moved to Auckland. He got a job as what's called a gum digger, which I did not look up because I just want to imagine that as like literally a harvesting like chewing gum

from the, the world. I know it's got to do with trees. I understand what it really is, but I'm going to pretend that it's, he's digging up like, like bubble yum. He became a, he became a member of the timber workers union, which was a fairly new thing at that point. Unions were just starting to take off all over the world in the late 1800s. And this was part of a global socialist trend, workers of the world uniting in order to strike and bargain together for a larger share of the wealth they created for their capitalist masters. Things started to look up for Desmond. He was appointed to represent the timber union at the Auckland trades council. And finally, he saw his fellow laboring people realize how badly their bosses and landlords were

fucking them over. His firebrand instincts and poets heart made him an inspiring voice for labor. During a maritime strike, he started publishing a newspaper, Tribune. It took off among laborers and helped make Desmond a major leader inside the strike. So he was just like, he's just like marching around New Zealand, being like, yo ho, y'all, we got a, there's probably a lot of yo hoes. You're, you're landlord's an asshole, yo ho. Look, you couldn't get out of bed in the 1890s without a yo ho or three. Like, let's be fair here. Yeah, that's true. All right. So this is cool. Yeah. Yeah. And one issue of Tribune, he wrote, quote, how can we expect just legislation and equal laws when those who control private plundering

concerns are legislators? Which is a fair, fair question. Yeah. For the first time in his life, things seem to be going very well for Arthur Desmond. Thanks to the Tribune, he was finally making a living as a writer, his dearest ambition. And he had a prominent role stirring up the working class against the capitalist pig dogs, his other dearest ambition. For a brief, shining moment, he tasted the sweet liquor of success. Those of us lucky enough to have drank it know it tastes exactly like Chasticola. Arthur Desmond's major target, what? That does. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I was, I was just appreciating that turn of phrase. Thank you. Arthur Desmond's major target during this period was the Bank of New Zealand, which he saw as the

oppressive heart of the capitalist regime. And it sort of was, definitely was, absolutely it was. The Bank of New Zealand was incredibly corrupt and existed primarily to make the rich richer, something that has been true of no other bank in history. On a regular basis, Desmond excoriated them from his secret office hidden inside the headquarters of the Auckland Employers Association. So he, he sets up an office in this big building and starts printing like this, like far left anti-capitalist magazine without anyone there, like knowing it and without paying rent or anything like that. And he gets away with it for about three weeks. Yeah, that's about all you could do that for. Very stressful three weeks. Yeah. There's this weird unshowered guy printing

off pages of, of newsletters. Should we do something about that? Someone comes up to him is like, Hey, you get out of here. And he's a giant redheaded man. Like he's, he's not, he's hard to miss. Yeah. So he's a giant, like redheaded guy from New Zealand who will eventually take on the rap name Ragnar Redbeard. I would, if you told me Ragnar Redbeard was a current, like white SoundCloud rapper, I wouldn't blink. I would, I suspect there are some, there's definitely like metal artists who use that name and variations of it. Yeah, it does sound good. And there's like metal albums titled might is right. He's inspired a lot of Nazi metal. Good. Well, yes. So unfortunately, yeah, after about three weeks, the people who ran the association

realized what was going on. They told Desmond to clear his shit out. And as revenge, Arthur Desmond forged a confidential letter from a cabinet minister to the association, basically accusing them of kicking him out on the orders of a crooked politician. He used this falsified information to accuse the association of conspiracy. Now this did not sit well with the cabinet minister that Desmond had implicated in a fake crime. He sued Desmond for criminal libel, which Arthur Desmond was absolutely guilty of committing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So he kind of oversteps here. And things get worse. I'm going to quote next from Tierra, an online New Zealand focused encyclopedia, quote, his opponents retaliated with accusations that his article,

Christ as a social reformer, first published in the literary magazine Zealandia in June 1890, and reprinted as a pamphlet with an introduction by George Gray had been plagiarized from an American magazine. Desmond claimed that the American article had been stolen from his own and dismissed the accusation as an electioneering dodge. His attackers included the leaders of the single tax movement in Auckland, with whom he had also fallen out. Desmond next appeared in Wellington, where in early 1891, he endeavored to interest the Wellington trades and labor council in supporting a new labor paper. He lectured on the Wellington waterfront on Sunday afternoons. A young man, Irish, eloquent, poetic, hard up, red haired and red bearded is how he was described.

Okay. So he gets, he gets canceled for plagiarizing and he has to move to Wellington. That's right. I like, I like this whole like old timey narrative of when you get canceled, you move. You just go somewhere else and wait to get canceled there. Yeah. There was a time in which going from LA to San Diego was like landing on the fucking moon. Right. Right. You just have a new name. They're like, Oh yeah. By the way, I did look up a Ragnar red bearded sound cloud and there is a result of an Austrian man. He hasn't uploaded for six years, but he has nine, he has nine followers and some of his songs are called love isn't everything Tuesday again. Destroy with love. None of this sounds like

our Ragnar red beard. No, I mean, but it does. No, but all of, all of his album art is pictures of his abs, but not his head. I mean, are, are his abs fire, Jamie? His, yeah, they're good. They're good. He's wearing a leather jacket and then it's just his abs. Yeah. Well, okay. So that's just a good plug. Yeah. Listen to this defunct sound cloud rapper or at least look at his sweet, sweet abs. Sweet washboard abs. Hey, different. Good for him. It's weird that we call them washboard abs because I feel like the period of time in which people figured out how to have really nice abs was not the period of time in which anyone used washboards to wash clothing. And I also don't think a lot of people can like call to mind the image of a washboard

very quickly. No, it's one of those things I just learned recently that uppercase and lowercase letters referred to like back when people used printing presses, you kept all the capital letters in one case, like a literal case and the lower case like there was an upper and a lower case in the box where you kept the letters. This is not the right place to say this, but history is so stupid. It's really dumb. It's so dumb. Wow. Well, we've got, yeah, we've got stuff like that, like there's the fucking icon of a floppy disk in the top left hand corner of like a Word document or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess washboard abs is like that. Washboard abs. Yeah. Arthur Desmond probably had washboard abs at this point because he rarely got enough money

to eat properly, uh, because he was a poor intermittent fasting, which is what happens when you get canceled for plagiarism and wind up working on the docs. You fast a lot and get really sexy. Oh, I'm sure he was hot as fuck at this point. Cool. So Desmond did not stay in Wellington long rather than battle the lawsuits over defamation and plagiarism. Arthur took the route of all great conmen and fled his home country for a less law bound land. In his case, it was Australia. And in Desmond's defense, all Australians are criminals. So it's a solid place to run after being caught committing numerous crimes. Wow. He went there. He did. He did. And I will go there. I am firm about Australians being criminals. Don't let them behind you if

you keep your wallet in your back pocket. Now Desmond landed in Sydney and immediately got back to the thing he did best, rabble rousing. Arthur befriended the leading men in Australia's labor movement, including two guys who would go on to become Australian prime ministers. He started writing articles and poems again. And by 1889 was known as the poet of revolution. In my opinion, he was pretty good. I'm going to read one piece he published in Reynolds newspaper. I think he gets better at this point. So we'll see how you think, Jamie. We'll see. We'll see. I kind of like some of them. You're like, I yo ho, bitch. It's good. Okay, go ahead. So here's a poem he wrote. Yeah. I don't need, I don't need your shit, Sylvie. I'm going to read a poem.

I'm going to read a goddamn poem. Go read a poem. Express yourself. As you were my son. Some sleigh with sword and some sleigh with sword and some with words. Some have no battle plan. Some stab with venom, subtle word. Each does the best he can. And each man gets what he can win. Great wealth, great love or fame. The conqueror gets his just reward. The conquered gets his shame. And weak ones wear a crown of thorns or bleed in living hell. The strong man crowns himself with gold and all the world as well. And each man gains what others lose. No use to reason why. Each plants his heel on fallen foes by love or law or lie. It's all a little poem. Kind of dark. That's really good. It's interesting. You can see where his, you can see his, his, his ideology

has started to move on from like, uh, this sort of like habitual, um, support of the working class and like anti elite to like this, um, the strong get what they can take. And that's sort of normal. Like he's starting to like, he's, he's gotten jaded at this point. Um, so he's in his like moody poetry period. Yeah. Yeah. He's, he's, he's, he's gotten, he's, he's turning emo a little bit. The Yoho's are gone. He's on that wave now. And okay. Okay. He does change up his rhyme scheme. He does. Yeah. He, he took poetry too. And he's like, oh, there's the, he's taken poetry three in a minute here. It's uncool to rhyme Yoho with Yoho. Hey, hey, this podcast is pro rhyming Yoho with Yoho. That's fair. Now Desmond starts another newspaper at this point named hard cash. Uh,

Tecfer describes it as a journal of finance and politics published in Sydney. Desmond was clever as an accountant and his articles on how money rules the world were well watched by businessmen. Now Desmond's like hard cash was filled with like tips about which banks were going to go up and like where you should pull your money out of which companies were going to take downturns. And he developed a reputation of being incredibly accurate. So he starts making a lot of money off of this because both like working class people will buy it to know like how to protect their money or what banks to pull it out of. But also like the capitalist class starts buying it because he's just, he's always, he's pretty much always right about these things. And the police wind up

on his tail because they're like, number one, how the fuck does this guy know all this stuff? And number two, he's like causing runs on banks by telling people to pull their money out of banks and stuff. And he's also kind of making himself very comfortable by selling this journal. So he's gone from like a labor organizer fighting for the rights of the indigenous people to like advising people on how to make a killing in the stock market essentially. Like that would be the modern comparison. But he seems to be doing it with an eye towards fucking up the economy. So he's still kind of an anti-capitalist guy, but he's also profiting heavily off of his anti-capitalism. That's kind of how I translate it. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So we're not, I'm not totally lost yet.

Okay. Not totally lost yet. But you're also trouble on the horizon. Trouble on the horizon. He's getting more, more cynical and kind of profiteering off of his, off of his activism. Yeah. Which, you know, you could look at it, he always was sort of doing that. It's a little hard to tell because we don't have huge amounts of information about his earlier life. It honestly sounds like he just wants to be a poet, but is like, oh, I guess I have to do this other stuff to, you know, like keep my poetry career moving. Yeah. Yeah. He's got to, he's, he's got to start the Wall Street Journal in order to get his poems published. Yeah. That's kind of what's going on here. Okay. Now, as an illegal magazine, hard cash was printed on a secret printing press

hidden inside a cave at a place called West's Bush in Paddington because Australia is a ridiculous place. The Australian Justice Department tried to shut it down. They weren't able to track down Arthur Desmond because at this point he was pretty good at avoiding the law. However, they succeeded in arresting several other organizers who wrote for hard cash. And these people like stuck with Desmond, they wouldn't give him up to the police, but Desmond kind of abandons them immediately. Like he's just, he's just fucking in the wind. So his conspirators get six month sentences and get charged with libeling the prime minister and Desmond flees from the law and keeps writing revolutionary articles. Right. In the early 1890s,

he joined up with the active service brigade, which was, and by some accounts, he actually created the active service brigade. And this is an anarchist political action group. Now, I've read two different sort of descriptions of what this was. The pro radical politics description is that like conservative politicians were infiltrating labor groups and left wing groups with like hidden, you know, paid informants and stuff. And the active service brigade would go in there and like beat the shit out of those people and protect labor organizing meetings to ensure free speech. And the other description of what happened is that he started a group of people who would beat the fuck out of anyone they disagreed with who tried to run for political

office and like break up conservative political rallies. I have no idea which is the actual case. Okay. Probably a lot of both, to be honest. Yeah, it doesn't sound like either like scenario is entirely likely a little bit of a he said she said nature to that. Yeah, I'm going to guess the conservatives are like fucking around and trying to infiltrate left wing political groups and the active service brigade ferrets those guys out. And I'm also going to guess they beat the shit out of a lot of people who just disagree with them because Arthur Desmond's kind of a dick. Yeah, kind of. I mean, he only becomes a famous Nazi. Yeah, he does become a famous Nazi. I can't say which version of events is true, but probably both, right? That's usually

the case with situations like this. Yeah. Now on paper, the ideals of the active service brigade were high. They claimed to stand for free speech and attempted to quote change the present competitive system into a cooperative social system. Those lofty goals stood in contrast to the deep economic depression that was then sweeping through Australia. Banks were collapsing in part due to the work that Arthur Desmond had carried out as the editor of hard cash swish. And yeah, Desmond finally was arrested, you know, in the early 1890s, not for running an illegal newsletter, but for writing going bunk and chalk on the wall of a bank, which seems to have been like part of an yeah, he was like writing that a bank was about to run out of money, basically. So he's trying to create

a run on the bank by putting the graffiti up. And he gets busted for that. He got busted for a Banksy crime. Yeah, he did. He did. I mean, like it's definitely more radical than Banksy. He was actually trying to destroy a bank by doing this. Yeah, this is the 1890s. Everything was easier. No, that's hardcore. I mean, I'm back. Yeah. Yeah, like if it is an easier era, when you could like fuck a bank up by writing, it's out of money on the side and chalk and people just be like, Oh, no, the people just learned to read. They won't believe it. Oh, wow. Okay. So he did. He did a little bit of graffiti. He did a little bit of graffiti. Nice. Yeah. Now the government obviously hated Desmond's anarchist group as all the governments hate all anarchists doing anything.

Desmond was repeatedly accused of sundry dynamite plots. And it's anyone's advice as to whether or not he actually tried to blow anything up with dynamite. To be honest, probably. Yeah, I mean, he sounds like that guy that he does sound like that guy dynamite plan. And there was a lot of an are all over the world at this point late 1890s early 1900s. There's a lot of anarchists blowing a lot of things up with a lot of dynamite. Like when dynamite first gets made, they didn't think that like there's this interesting period in history when like they know how to make really effective explosives that anyone can use, but there also aren't laws against anything. So it's like dynamite gets made. And they're like, well, I guess we should just sell

this to everybody. And it leads to some problems. Yeah. Just a little. Yeah. Geez. Okay. So now he's a dive. I believe 100% that he's a dynamite guy. There's a really good chance he's a dynamite guy for sure. Yeah. For sure. I have no trouble believing that. No. Now, throughout all this, Desmond continued to fight to convince the laboring class to rebel against their capitalist masters. In 1893, he wrote another poem titled Labor Song for the hilariously named Waga Worker, which I assume makes more sense if you understand Australia. Waga Worker. Okay. The Waga Worker. It's cute, right? It's like a baby. It's like a baby trying to say MAGA. Yeah. This is definitely the opposite of MAGA though. Well, that's, well, Robert, turn the M upside down. What do you have?

Waga. Exactly. You could tell where he's headed. Wait, are we going to read another poem? Oh, you bet your ass we're going to read another poem, Jamie Loftus. So this was published along with a short one sentence editorial that just said, if you vote for the government, you vote for your own coffin political. So now here I'm going to read Labor Song. Above the Senate's brawl, the maddening roar for gain. Do you hear the Christmas carol, the felons clanking chains? Beyond yon prison walls, your leg ironed comrade slaves, while here in marble walls are harlots, knights and knaves. Your comrades rot in jail, the hungry cry for bread. Your wives are thin and pale, their hearts are filled with dread. And earth resounds with praise and holy heavenly tones,

while tigers prowl the land to crush your children's bones. Ho, men of New South Wales, hark, hear the fetters clink. Are you but eunuch churls that only scream and slink? If you were virile men, you'd raise your strong right arm. Beard tigers in their den to guard your mates from harm. You live the life of dogs, you tug and scat and strain. You back the slaver flogs while raking in his gain. You see your sisters starve, you see them on the marts. You hear the tigers snarl while rending out their hearts. O men of New South Wales, behold your ruffian horde, who spurn you with their hoof and bash you with the sword. Behold the butcher band that shear and tan your hide. Have you not grit to stand and tame their wolfish pride? You rise to voice your

wrongs, they club you for your pains. Wheel out their murderous guns to scatter, splash your brains, they steal your public lands, they steal the cash you earn. Ho, cringe to their commands, your only dogs not men. In glattering halls they feast, harlots, knights and knaves, while inside prison walls your leg-ironed comrade slaves. Ho, men of New South Wales, hark, hear the fetters clink. Are ye but eunuch slaves that only scream and slink? I liked that one. That was a better poem, right? He's gotten good. I was, I was trying to, but no, that one slaps. That's a good one. All right. That's a good poem. And you can see where he's, he's like, he's still a labor guy. He's still on the side of like the working man, but he's like pissed off. He's like, why won't people fucking

rebel? Like this shit's been fucked up for so long. He just keeps calling people dickless. He's just like you, you fucking eunuchs. If you were, you dickless laborers. Yeah. Yeah. You had some fucking, he's definitely like a misogynist at this point, but it's the fucking 1880s. What do you want? What year is it? Yeah. It's the 1880s. Right. Okay. So everyone's a misogynist and that's normal and good. And we love that. It's not normal. Like in fairness, like people like Emma Goldman, like there's a lot of anarchists who are actually like kind of radical about gender equality at this point, but Arthur Desmond is not one of them. But he's not. I genuinely, I liked that one. Yeah. It was a good poem. I liked the part where I was like, I don't know. I don't know. And then

it said crush a child's bones. And I was like, all right, I like it. Fuck yeah. Yeah. No, it's, you can, you can, there's something like that's kind of understandable there. If you like, like most of us, I think have like looked out at the world recently and been like, why the fuck are we letting this shit happen? Like that's, that's an understandable impulse to be like frustrated by that after so many years. Yeah. No, I like it. Yeah. You know what I like, Jamie? What? Tell me, tell me, I know products and services. Yeah. You know what, you know what, won't crush your children's bones. Or depending on what you're in the market for. Yeah, they might crush your bones. They might crush your bones. You got to be careful. The dick,

the dick pills will give you a bone to crush. Well, there, that could just be a service too. Oh, I wish we advertised for dominatrixes, but not the ones that crush children's bones, just adult bones. I was thinking recently, I wish that a taxidermist would sign on with our show. Oh, wouldn't that be cool? It'd be really nice if there was like a punk rock, uh, taxidermist that was willing to, yeah, put in Bechtelkast and 15% off your taxidermied Cocker Spaniel. I'm interested in like the ads you'd read for that. Do you have too many animal corpses in your freezer? That honestly, I wanted to get my hamster taxidermied and then I forgot that she was in my freezer, and then I just kind of flung her out the window. Solid. Really solid. I dug a small hole, but I

didn't put in the effort I was planning. Yeah, we all dig a lot of small holes in our lives, which is why we all need the products and services that support this show. Gorgeous pivot. Thank you. Products! 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 were like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not on the gun badass 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 podcast. 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

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In the summer of 1999, a young woman in South Carolina disappeared in the middle of the night. Her name was Brooke Henson. Seven years passed. She was presumed dead. And then a tip came in that would turn the entire investigation on its head. He said, I think I found your girl. And she's alive. She's in New York. And I said, really? According to this tip, Brooke was now a student at Columbia University. But the small town detective on the case in South Carolina, he didn't believe it. So he kept poking around. I said, I'm calling about a girl you might know named Brooke Henson. And he said, I wondered when you were going to call. When my son brought her home, I knew she was troubled. The detective ultimately became convinced

that she was a master of deception, a spy. But who was this woman really? Listen to deep cover on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. Yes. So by this point in time, Arthur Desmond has written his first poem that appeals to Jamie Loftus. So I'm glad we finally got there. I finally stand. You finally stand, Arthur Desmond. So as you can see by that poem, he was pretty well on his way to being very disenchanted with left-wing politics. You can hear the frustration and rage at the broader masses of the working class and their failure to rise up in revolution. The labor government in Australia's mild reforms had taken much of the wind out of the left sales. And after

1893, Desmond's writings grew more defamatory towards elected leaders and markedly more anti-semitic. His authoritarian tendencies also grew more and more pronounced. And it's here that we're going to get into some real fun left-wing political theory discussion. Do you love political theory, Jamie? Love it. Yeah. Now, Desmond was definitely like in the anarchist sort of strain of thought by this point in time. But obviously that body of political theory is pretty wide. There's a lot of different types of anarchists. And the particular variety Desmond seemed to be most sympathetic to is called egoism. Now, the simple, partly accurate summary of egoism is the idea that self-interest should be the foundation of morality. And the more positive way to translate

that is that systems that force people to act against their own self-interest, like capitalism forcing a laborer to work in a deadly mine in order to make ends meet, that's fundamentally unethical because it forces people to act against their self-interest. There's got to be a better name for it. An egoism. It needs work. Yeah. It needs work. You've got some notes on this fringe political theory. Yeah. Now, lefty politics is a complex galaxy of frustratingly different belief systems, most of which sound like nonsense to anyone who hasn't read a bunch of books by deadmen. My definition of egoism isn't even super accurate to the egoism practiced by most egoists today because there's roughly as many different branches of that theory as there are

egoists, which is to say about 50. Is there like egoist Twitter? Yeah, there sure is. Yeah, they fucking love. There's this guy, Max Sterner, who's like probably the most well-known egoist philosopher. There's a big chunk of people on Twitter who fucking love his shit, which I don't understand and will not attempt to analyze, but he was a big influence on Arthur Desmond. Okay. Sterner wrote a book called The Ego and His Own, and again, I don't really understand Sterner's writings. They seem kind of like, I don't know, like nonsense to me, but I did find a summary of it by a group of hardcore libertarians with the American Institute for Economic Research. Scary. Max Sterner's individualist anarchism is a way to overcome the horrors of

the modern state. He envisions a union of rational egoists in a society that does not need a ruler. The community of rational egoists is a universal commercial society. In fact, the more a society is based on voluntary exchange, the less right it is and thus less effective the force. Individualist anarchism carries its purpose in itself and does not serve a higher end. The rational egoist will respect the rights of others because he respects himself. He will not be violent because he does not want to be attacked. This attitude of the individual anarchist stands in sharp contrast to the destructive role of the collectivist entities. Individual egoism is the answer to the egoism of the collectives. Sterner wrote, my cause is neither the divine nor the human. It is not

the true, the good, the right, the free, et cetera, but only mine and it is not universal, but it is unique like me as I am only I. Nothing goes beyond me and myself. I know, right? I don't like him. No, I don't like him either. I don't like him. He doesn't seem like he would be. I don't agree with him and I don't think he'd be fun to be around. Well, and it's the way that Sterner writes is kind of so broad that there's like a right wing and a left wing interpretation of the same book that come to really different conclusions because there's a lot of Sternerist egoists who are not at all the pro-capitalism interpretation and who take a totally different message from it. Again, I've tried to read the book and I just decided to go read about the Syrian civil war

more because that's more uplifting. It's just, it's frustrating to me. I don't like political theory. I kind of doubt that Desmond subscribed to the libertarian interpretation of Sterner's ideas because of his hatred of capitalism and also he was not at all an advocate of non-violence. And in fact, in the early 1890s, he increasingly became an advocate for extreme violence. He started to write lovingly of man as the fighting, roving, pillaging, lusting cannibalistic animal par excellence. So he definitely takes a lot of these egoist ideas in, but he is not the pacifist kind. He's not the, oh, if I don't hurt anyone, they won't hurt me. He's the kill and rape and Conan the Barbarian kind of fucking egoist. So that's, that's, that's where this guy starts turning

as his frustration against the failure of the labor movement to rise up like builds. Right. Okay. Yeah. During his last months in Australia, Arthur Desmond started to publish a 25 page tract, The Survival of the Fittest, which outlines some of his new ideas. In it, he wrote about man's desire to destroy as the thing that makes him the absolute monarch of the world. Now Desmond was not the progressive sort of lefty either. He viewed women as frail beings at the best of times and wrote for the welfare of the breeds and the security of descent, they must be held through subjection. He promised disaster would follow if, quote, ever these lovable creatures should break loose from master ship and become the rulers or equals

of man. Was he single? For most of his life. Yeah. He did marry a girl that was like 20 something years younger than him when he was an old man. And then she left very quickly after that. Jesus. And she died in a sanitarium. He does sound absolutely unlovable. I will say that. Yeah. He sounds hard to get along with. Yeah. You get that feeling from the guy. Yeah. Okay. So he's single and he doesn't like it. He's single and he does not. Yeah, there's actually a lot of incel stuff coming. Yeah. She's frail and I actually don't even fucking care, but I'm just saying it because it needs to be said. One of the things that's interesting about might is right, which we're going to cover the book in a lot of detail in

part two. He kind of predicted 30% of the internet and not the good 30%. You know what 30% he predicted. That's impressive, but not good. He's ahead of his time, but not in a positive sense of that phrase. He's ahead of his time in the same way that the guys in the 1890s who imagined the mass bombing campaigns that would be the future of warfare were ahead of their time. Like they were right, but not in a good way. But not in an incredible way. And also, I mean, good for you for predicting something terrible that people were powerless to. Yeah. Yeah. So Desmond had other influences besides Stirner. And again, I don't want to like leave people with the impression that Max Stirner would have necessarily supported Desmond's

conclusions about women and all of this stuff. I don't know enough about Stirner to say that, but that is what Desmond takes out of the writing. Yeah. Desmond's opinions on women seem more like a him thing. Yeah. That was going on way before he started identifying as an egoist too. There's a lot of male poets who feel that way. No. Misogynist male poets. You would be shocked. I'm not even thinking of anyone. Oh, I am thinking of someone. Okay, never mind. Go ahead. I'm going to keep standing my woke King, Reared Kipling, who I think is fair to describe as the least racist man in history. Oh, there you go. Yeah. Let's not fact check that at all. Yeah, let's not fact check that in any way, shape or form. No. Desmond had other influences

besides Stirner. Charles Darwin's writings on natural selection impressed upon him an almost religious belief in the importance of survival of the fittest, which is never a good set of thoughts to head too far down. He also devoured Nietzsche, particularly the anti-Semitic bits of Nietzsche's theory. All this combined with his increasingly rabid disdain for the placid working class, turned Desmond from a labor organizer into a man who believed, quote, it is natural for men of power to rule feeble men. Okay. And yeah. In 1894, the police finally got close enough to catching Arthur that he was forced to flee to Britain. We don't know precisely what he did during this period. There are stories that he traveled to Manchuria and South Africa,

getting up to God knows what. By the time he landed in North America in 1895, he had made the full transition from Union man to leftist revolutionary to nihilistic egoist. He settled in Chicago and almost immediately published a book, The Survival of the Fittest in 1896. We actually have one of the newspaper ads for this tome and boy is it something. So this is actually for a later version of the book when he changed the title to might is right, but it's still a good note to end on. So I'm going to read. I want, I want Sophie to show you that ad and I'm going to read it out. So it says in big capital letters, might is right. The only book of its kind ever printed. If you don't like this book, don't keep it. Send it back at once and I will refund

your money and pay postage both ways. Might is right or survival of the fittest by Ragnar Redbeard. This is an historical and scientific revindication of the grand old Anglo-Saxon war philosophy. They can take who have the power and they can keep who can. In rugged boldness of style and volcanic energy of thought, this epic marking volume is without doubt the most remarkable pronouncement that has appeared in Christendom for 15 centuries. Ragnar Redbeard, taking up the threat of Darwinism where Spencer and fear and trembling had laid it down, points out that the higher type of organism is the warrior and that battle is the process ordained by nature for dividing the born subordinates and cowards from born nobles and proprietors. Then war for life

and land and love for women, power and gold. This earth and all its treasures vast is booty for the bold. Booty for the bold? Booty for the bold, okay. And there's a picture of a cowboy. Yeah, the cartoon of the cowboy on his horse. This is just a throbbing penis of an advertisement who's like, hey! He could have just published a picture of his dick in the paper and it would have worked out the same way. Booty for the bold. Booty for the bold. In the opening of the ad, he also gets defensive for no reason. He's like, yeah, this book fucking rules. If you don't like it, you can return it. Like, what is it about? You can return it, bitch. I don't know if I'll like it. He's like, no, it's like he's anticipating rejection. How could you not like it? Look at the

fucking cowboy. And he's like, and I would be fucking remiss if I didn't include a little bit of a poem. Yeah, yeah. And you can see the cowboy drawing clearly has a big beard. Yeah, I think, I think that's him as a cowboy. Branding. Yeah. God. So you love it. You love it, Jamie. Oh, you're going to be, you're going to be so frustrated next episode. We're going to read a lot from Mightis right next episode. And you are going to be beside yourself. Can't believe it. This is like the, this is like the fucking founding father of incels and like the fucking worst parts of the alt-right. Like how could I not read this to you, Jamie? It's true. It's, it does upset me the most. Yeah. Well, you know, he had a good run there for a little while,

but now he had a good run there for a little while. And then he became the patron saint of men who have a pile of cum socks beside their bed next to their rifle. Just like, yeah, just like a gun next to a petrified sock. Just one that doesn't flop if you pick it up. The sock is the best case scenario. The worst case scenario is it's one of those anime pillows. Oh no. Yeah. If he'd been born in modern times, Desmond would have definitely fucked a pillow with a Japanese waifu girl on it. He would have. Yeah. He would have gotten one of the pillows with the holes in it. He would have had one of it. Yeah. Well, you know, Arthur Desmond confirmed for pillow fucking. Yeah. And I'm not saying pillow fucking is a bad thing. I'm just saying he fits the bill.

He fits the bill. Now, Jamie, in our next episode, we're going to go into detail about what exactly Arthur laid out in his manifesto, how it was received and how it continues to influence people today. But that's all going to come on Thursday. For now, Jamie Loftus, it's time for you to deliver your manifesto in the form of plug in yo plugables. Okay. Plugables. I wanted to plug right now. Red Beards. Soundcloud, of course. Everyone. I haven't listened to it yet, but I look forward to hearing your thoughts. Please hit my mentions. I will forget that I said this, and I will be confused. I'm on Twitter at Jamie Loftus help. And you can listen to me on the Bechtel cast every Thursday at, oh, wait, not every Thursday. Period. Yeah. Yeah. That's

it. And if you're in New York or LA, I'm doing my one person show that is basically Elizabeth Holmes in October. So you can come. Elizabeth Holmes would have really appreciated the wisdom and might as right. She seems about just delusional enough to be into it. Oh, brother. You cannot find me on Soundcloud. Although once I get canceled, I do plan to start a second career as a Soundcloud rapper. That would be a great place for you to retreat to. Yeah. You can find me on Twitter when I get unbanned. Yeah. What is going on? Well, Jamie, I posted a link to an article that I wrote about a terrorist attack. Oh, they hate that. Twitter banned me for that. Yeah. Yeah. They hate it when you. They hate when you report the truth. That's bad. When you write.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it's, it's fun. But you can find me presumably by the time this airs hopefully on Twitter at I write. Okay. You can find this podcast on Twitter at behind the back or at Bastards pod. Jesus Christ. You can find us on the internet at behind the bastards.com along with the sources for this article. You can buy t-shirts. You can buy cups. I got to buy branded branded tasers, tear gas grenades, whips and chains, everything you need to make might write in your life off of tpublic.com. Just look up behind the bastards. Terrifying. Terrifying. Well. What else, Robert? What is there? Something else, Sovi? Yeah. Don't you have another podcast with Katie Stoll and Cody Johnson? Those names aren't familiar to me. What's happening?

Whom? Baby, does a horn pump, horn cream mean anything to you, sir? Now that, that now you're speaking my language. I also have a podcast with Cody Johnson and Katie Stoll about the 2020 election called worst year ever because it will be the worst year ever. So you can get started this year with some, some useful information to help arm you with knowledge for next year. So that you don't have to arm yourself with sticks and spears in 2021. So that's the end of the fucking episode. Next episode, we'll have more poems. Oh, good. Yo ho. Yo ho. Ambition treason and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to let's start a coup on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you find your

favorite shows. 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 to 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 I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.