Behind the Bastards - Part Three: John Wayne: A Dude Who Sucked

Episode Date: May 3, 2022

Robert is joined by Francesca Fiorentini for the final part our three part series on John Wayne.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Okay, wow. Shattering my pelvis, my 13-pound baby. Ganggasing my con. Yeah, what's irradiating my racist movie about Genghis Khan starring a white man? A white man is Genghis Khan? That is the funniest thing. In terms of ways John Wayne could have died nuked while playing Genghis Khan in a movie. It's pretty funny.

That's pretty good. How are you doing? Francesca? I'm here. Francesca Fiorentini, our guest returning for part three of three. I have to find out how this ends. I mean, I feel like he becomes even more bastardly towards the end of his life, but I'm excited. Yes, actually he becomes Kris Katan.

Real curveball for the story there. What is love? That makes as much sense as anything else. Kris Katan, great career. Not over. Is it not? Are we still doing Kris Katan? I don't have anything against Kris Katan in particular, but are we?

I mean, there could be a night at the Roxbury reboot. Oh, there could be. Or we could even do like an Avengers in-game where night at the Roxbury meets the Blues Brothers. It's another one of those Lorne Michaels movies. Superstar, I don't know. Superstar, sure. Throw that in there. Throw in the David Cross one where he plays a hillbilly.

Make it all happen. But everyone's jacked. Basically everybody coomailed on Johnny's themselves. Yeah, exactly. Get everybody pumped with HGH, destroy their hearts, get them just... Like David Cross has like 16 inch biceps. Hell yeah. And then nuke them on set.

And then we nuke them. And then we nuke them on set. That's right. Finally, that's how we end Lorne Michaels' career with that film. Shouldn't a broad baton night at the Roxbury. So yeah, he's like the center of this idea of like white conservative masculinity and has been for decades at this point. By the time we hit like the mid to late 1960s, all of these people who are like 18, 19, 20 and old enough to start going over to Vietnam have never known a world in which John Wayne wasn't like the biggest action star in there.

Like he's like, you know, there's not really anyone to compare him to now. I guess your closest would be someone like the Rock. But even then like we don't really have the media is so much bigger now. So like you have like a million different kinds of action stars for everyone in this period of time. John Wayne is like it. Yeah. So though not publicly a man of particular religious vigor, he embodied what muscular Christianity enthusiasts respected. While also speaking to the more secular arch capitalist right wingers who sought a more muscular U.S.

willing to throw down for the free market. All of this swirled together to make him an irresistible front man for Republican politicians. Christine Cobbs Dumez writes in 1968 he gave a rousing patriotic address at the Republican National Convention. When Nixon wanted to explain his own views on law and order, he pointed to Wayne's chism, which is one of his movies as a model, a bloody tale of frontier justice in which Wayne achieved order and revenge through violence. So in 68 like at the RNC, Nixon is specifically pointing to John Wayne movies as like this is this is how law and order is supposed to be. This cowboy movie by a draft Dodger. You know who could take care of these dirty hippies who want to stop seeing their friends slaughtered.

The Duke John Wayne. These hippies. Why can't it be more like that? Remember when the good guys were good guys and the bad guys were the brown people? Let's do that. Let's do that again. It is also very funny. He spent so much time shitting on anti-war protesters.

A lot of whom are veterans who didn't dodge the draft like he did, but whatever. So Wayne himself was flabbergasted at the resistance among many Americans towards continuing to escalate the war in Vietnam. Iman's biography tells a particularly lurid story about Wayne seeing a one armed veteran walking across a campus during a protest. And this group of protesters like approaches this veteran. They're heckling this brave man who lost his arm in combat. And John Wayne has to like walk up and say, now don't you like you can speak your piece, but you're not going to yell at this man. And you don't get to say this to a hero and yada, yada, yada. It sounds like an email.

And then he last wrote them all together. Yeah, exactly. And then everyone clapped. Yeah. There's no evidence this ever happened. There's a lot of fake stories about stuff like soldiers getting spit on from this period. And John Wayne being a liar, I don't have any trouble believing made this up. Oh yeah.

He needed one for himself. The spit soldier story was getting way too much play. He said, let me invent one. He needed a John Wayne version one. Now, I don't think that particular story is true, Francesca. But we do have audio of John Wayne addressing a group of students. I think they're like ROTC kids, cadets at like a military academy or something. What matters most is that he's obviously fucking hammered.

It's so funny. He is, he is housed. He is just completely fucking still drinking after all these years. It's so funny. Here's how he says hello to these kids. My name is William Wayne. Wait, wait, wait, wait. First of all, it's Marion.

It is Marion. Suddenly, you're William Wayne. William Wayne. John is short for William. What am I saying? It's so funny. This is unimportant. Wait, wait.

Oh my God. It does not get wildly more coherent from there, but the audience is very much on board. And honestly, if I had been a college student and a drunk movie star had come to give my comments, like that would have been super funny. I would have been all, I think most kids would, right? Oh yeah.

The audience, I mean, this is also a more right wing militant audience. So they're on board here. Now I'm gonna play another clip and for context, here he's talking about how different things were when he's talking about like protests in college and how different things were when he was in college. Remember, this is a period where students

are taking over faculty buildings and whatnot. They're trashing the offices of certain professors. Like there's all these protests against the war by students. We talk about some of this in the Kissinger episodes. So John Wayne is talking about how different things were when he was in college. Let me explain something to you. When I went there, I went there.

When there was a fella in control of a college, I mean, I mean, he was a, a boss man. If anybody had walked into his office. They're all good one, got the office. And torn down a picture and did excrement in his... Power through, buddy. You got it. You stick the landing. No, in his waste paper basket.

Yeah, that's what it is. Or had written lewd words on his, the pictures of his family. We as members of the college would have kicked the goddamn hell out of this organization. I can't. It's very funny. He's so drunk. Does he nod off because that's where it feels like we're at.

You kind of feel like you might have, like he was sort of, he was sort of graying out there for a little while. Call it when you go to the, what's the word for the... Having a little brown out, drifting off into the land of vodka and fantasies. Classroom, right? That's what a classroom, I never stepped foot in a classroom.

Just a drunk old man heckling teens. So from this point, he continues to his main argument, which is that he thinks these kids he's talking to should beat the hell out of left-wing protesters who dissent from the view that war is good and the US can do no wrong. Well, a lot of the speech is very funny. It's mostly very funny.

The last bit does kind of get a little terrifying because in it, John Wayne calls for the establishment of the sort of violent right-wing street organizations that we are currently swimming in as a nation. For you guys, you better start thinking. It's, it's getting to be regod damn decadeless. If you guys don't start thinking as men, we're gonna have a lousy country.

Jesus, I, I have had the chance to be with guys who are with things and against things. And you know Christ, you try as a, as I try as a human being to listen to both sides of everything, but there's no both sides anymore. They're just trying to wreck our god damn country.

It's time for you younger guys to take over. I don't know what the hell to do. Awesome. That was brilliant. And, and you know what? It very much is a speech that fits into the year 2022. It does, it does. That's, that's a Giuliani speech right there.

That's a. Right down to the drunkenness. Right down to the barely being able to stand. Yes, exactly. He was so ahead of his time. But it's so, he's, he's also, it's funny because he is also, while the hero of every single film, just kind of like interpersonally and incredibly,

like he's lazy and drunk half the time. Like, and his only work ethic, like the hardest thing he did was I think, well, I don't know, did he learn to lasso or there was the hardest thing, just like bringing a 17 from Mexico. I mean, he's, most people will note, and I think this alters a little bit at the end of his career,

but he's like, he's generally, most people will agree pretty good on set. He's good at like what he does. He's got this kind of background in props. So he's, he's, he knows how things should look. He's an active member of like the, of the crew beyond just sort of like standing and hitting his lines.

That's generally agreed upon. But you do hear, you hear really different stories. So you hear all these stories about, you know, John Wayne seeing something a director is doing and realizing that one looked good on camera and like fixing the scene and being like very much a team player. And then you hear these stories about like, well, they couldn't shoot the film before noon

cause that's when he woke up and they had to wait for him to take a giant shit first. So they couldn't start until he did a shit. Like- That I respect, that I definitely respect. So I don't know. Like you do hear like a lot of rumors on both sides. It's probably fair to say

he would not have gotten as far as he did if he was not really good at certain aspects of being a movie star. So I'll give him credit for that. But it's also like, John Wayne, you were never willing to like go do anything for your country overseas. Where are you now saying that groups of teenagers

should beat the shit out of people protesting a war that you can't even like, you have no, he's, there's no elucidation there in that speech. And the other ones he gives about like why they should be willing to do violence on behalf of this war, right? Cause that's not what's important. What's important is something vague about America.

And that's the thing that seems most familiar where it's like, well, you're not really elucidating anything that they should be fighting for other than the vague idea of America. And that's really enough to rile people up for violence. I mean, again, it's just super fitting. It's like America isn't a country that protests the bludgeoning and killing of civilians

and the death of like young men coming home in body bags to their parents. America is the country that does those things with not a sound. Without, why would you, why would you make a sound? That's just gonna be loud, you know? You're gonna wake up John Wayne and he's gonna be hung over.

Absolutely, before noon. Yeah, no way. Without the poo. Yeah. So kids these days, it's very much just a kids these days speech. Yeah, it is. And then at the end it's fun because instead of him being like, and that's why I'm gonna start a blah, blah, blah,

or whatever, or I'm gonna start a militia, which Gladdy didn't, but instead of that, it's just like, anyway, you figure it out. Yeah, you can figure it out. I don't know what to do. Drunk ass John Wayne, very funny. Except for, you know, the fact that he holds this position in our cultural memory that makes the fact

that he was a drunken warmonger, much more influential. But let's continue. So we should talk again about these kind of rumors about the Duke that you'll hear. Cause you get this like, Iman very much presents this picture of him as this incredibly diligent with quotes

from people who worked with him, including guys like Ford that he was this, he had really, he was really sharp. He was always willing to put in the extra effort. He'd do multiple jobs, even though he was supposed to be the star just to make sure the film got made. And then you'll hear these stories about like,

his scenes needed to be finished shooting before noon every day. Cause he was going to be too drunk after that. But he couldn't film in the morning until he'd taken his first hungover shit. And like- So he's got like half an hour. He's got like a good hour in there.

That's why I, those can't be true comprehensively. Like they may have been true on certain films or in certain times, right? I'm sure there were times when people were like, well, you can't shoot, you can't, you got to, if you shoot too late in the day, he's got to be drunk. Cause we know he got drunk at an impacted shooting at times.

But he made way too many movies for them to, for things to have been that ridiculous, you can't shoot a movie with an hour a day from the star. Right? No, but who knows how the radiation impacted his gastrointestinal situation. Can't have been good. And I'm sure the older he got to,

the more it was like a, you know, his lifestyle took a toll on him and that altered the way he was on set, but. Like drinking, I mean, obviously that's like the sign of an alcoholic, but like being like a young kid, like on set and like drinking and then waking up the next day and hell yeah. Like obviously we all remember what it was like to be 19.

Bless that moment. But like hangovers in your fifties, come on. Hangovers in your fifties as a guy who has been just basically inhaling cigarettes and nothing else since he was like 12. Like that's, I mean, I do want to note, like I'm sure aspects of this were true. And I'm also sure aspects of what I'm in reports

in terms of his like diligence on set were really true. It's worth noting that two of his very best performances in his career were filmed really late in it when he's an old guy, the shootest and true grit, true grit being maybe the most, the one that's most famous today, probably that he was in, you know, Rooster Cockburn, great film, really good performance.

He was not a bad actor. There were some moments, I forget which film it was, but like because most of his early roles he had not had to act, he's in a movie that John Ford sees and Ford is like, oh hell if I'd had known he could act, I would have done some stuff differently. But he has in some better performances,

The Shootest, which is his very last film, is a really good movie in a lot of ways. That's interesting too, because it's, we'll talk about The Shootest a little at the end. It's kind of a strange one for him. But I don't think either of those movies- Honestly, it's very, like it's a little bit of his character,

like true grit. A drunken hard nose US Marshall and Texas Ranger helps a stubborn teenager track down her father's murder. There you go, like, drunken hard nose US Marshall. He is drunken and hard nose, yeah. Never served his country, so that's a lot when you gotta fake it a little bit.

So it's interesting, because it's one of those things, I don't think he's as these anti-John Wayne anecdotes about how drunk he was. I don't think he was as unfunctional as those anecdotes imply, but we might have been better off if he had been, because another movie John Wayne cared a lot about making

and put a lot of work into later in his career was The Green Berets. And this is a film that would go on to have pretty disastrous consequences for a number of members of a generation. So you're not necessarily a bastard as an action movie star if your films like reinforce attitudes about violence and masculinity that lead young men

to make some like dumb decisions such as joining the army. But John Wayne knew that his films could do that and actively sought to use them to convince people to go and fight in Vietnam, right? He understood that he had influenced a generation's idea of manhood, and he decided to use that influence to try to get more young men to volunteer

to go fight in Southeast Asia. Now, before we get into that a little more, I wanna read a quote from this writeup I found in salon.com that gives a good overview on the broad strokes of kind of what it meant in 1968 to be what some people called a John Wayne man. John Wayne, yeah. John Wayne stands simply as the most persuasive

and overwhelming embodiment of our ambivalence about American manhood. His persona gathers in one place the allure of violence, the call away from the frontier, the tortured ambivalence toward women and the home, the dark pleasure of sourd romanticism, all those things that reside unspoken at the center of our sense of what it means

to be a man in America. Dark ambivalence toward the home, just say domestic abuser. Just say kind of it's women. Yeah, the man who strikes his wife. Well, it's this thing that you have, because you know early in his career, they're like, we want him to look like a guy

who doesn't have a lot of experience with women because he spends all of his time in the frontier. So he kind of is uncomfortable around women. And that's kind of part of, I think, why that expands to even more of a thing in a Hollywood is you have this mix of the male lead, number one has to be very clearly not gay. So you've got to show a woman is being interested in him, right?

Which not necessarily a sign that they're not gay. For sure. But you know, we're talking 1960s Hollywood logic. You got to show him with a woman, but also like sex and stuff, that's gonna get you in trouble. So you don't ever want him to get too close to him necessarily.

And so you wind up with a lot of these heroes who are like magnetic to women, but also kind of pushing them away. These sort of like, yeah, and also just like these ideas about masculinity, you don't want to have a guy who's like vulnerable with a woman. It's the kind of James Bond thing, right?

Where he's gonna, you know, he'll sleep with a woman, but he doesn't have relationships or whatever. I think that's kind of why. Sure, he'll show up in the shower unannounced and they'll just start having sex and you're like, I guess that was consent, but like. John Wayne won't even do that, right? Because James Bond is a more advanced

in his attitudes towards female liberation than John Wayne characters tend to be, you know. She can carry a gun. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, that is really, it explains so much and also to recruit, use your film to recruit young American men into a war, which is already gonna give him PTSD

and then come home and like the manly thing to do, don't talk about it. Don't address it, bottle it up, stoicism. Like I think there's a stoicism that John Wayne really instilled about American masculinity. Yes, and it's like, it's also kind of, I think an impotent stoicism. It's not the kind of, there's a good stoicism

where you're not letting yourself get and beaten down by the world. You're not like showing your weakness in situations where that's bad, but John Wayne's stoicism is like, don't show vulnerability in situations where that might make you stronger. But anyway, that's,

we're getting into a little bit of a deeper topic, but so, you know, Vietnam 1968 has become like a thing, you know, it's clear that it's a real problem and Americans really don't seem to be liking this thing that we're doing. And so John Wayne decides, I gotta do whatever I can to convince more young boys to throw themselves into this meat grinder.

And he decides the best way to do this is by making a movie about the special forces. Now, at this point, that's a pretty new concept. The very first kind of modern special forces teams were in World War II. Some people will say that like the German Falschmann Jäger, some of which were like their paratroopers, they had some units that were kind of

the first modern spec ops units. And you have, you know, some British and some American units that are kind of experimenting with some of this shit. Vietnam is really where the modern special forces kind of comes together as a distinct thing for the first time in a modern way. It's where we get the first Green Beret teams, right?

That's kind of the first popular concept of special forces comes from these teams which are initially called A teams, which is why the A team was called the A team, that President Kennedy sends into Vietnam in 1961. And they gradually like, that's what becomes the idea of Green Berets, is these A teams become the Green Berets.

When's the Mr. T episode, huh? Mr. T's never done anything wrong, so we're not gonna be doing that episode. Look, he gave up his chains after Hurricane Katrina, okay? What? Yeah, Mr. T gave up, because he went to help in the relief efforts and he was horrified by the privation and poverty he saw

and decided it would be obscene for him to continue wearing gold. Damn, this is a story, what we, yeah. I didn't know that whole story. I got nothing to say bad about Mr. T. Yeah, and the cereal was good? What? He's also super vocal about like vaccinations and stuff.

He thinks it's good to be vaccinated, yes. God damn it, we need strong men like Mr. T. I pity the fool who cannot appreciate Mr. T. Legitimately pity the fool. So this idea of like specially trained super soldiers that you drop behind enemy lines and they fight under incredible odds, this is like Hollywood fodder,

like as soon as we start having these special forces guys in Vietnam, Hollywood's like, oh shit, this is all we're gonna make movies about for forever, right? Like this is the only thing we wanna turn into a movie. Now, enter Robin Moore. Robin Moore is a World War II veteran and a journalist who because of his connections to,

I think it was Ted Kennedy, got to go through special forces school as a civilian. He's, I don't know if he's the only, but he's the first civilian to ever do this. And he embeds with the Green Berets in Vietnam and he's technically a journalist, but he's also like fighting alongside them, which is ethically kind of blurring the lines of journalism.

He's a real interesting character to study, Robin Moore. Even being embedded is like a little sauce. You're always like, yeah, it compromises objectivity anytime you're embedded. Sure. But shooting people is a real violation of any kind of- He burned a few huts. He may have burned some huts,

a little bit of hut burning. And he's fun because he'll get conned by a dude named Jack Adema during the war in Afghanistan, but that's a lot later when he's an old man. So he writes, he spends much time with these Green Berets. He writes this book, The Green Berets, which is like, it's like on the best seller list for more than a year.

It's a huge hit. People will fucking, and he has to- During the height of the war, like in 68 and 69? Yeah, it's like 65 or six, I think that it was published. Yeah, it's like something, I think it must have been like 65. So pretty early on, and he publishes this book as a fiction book because he has to do that in order to pretend

he's not giving away operational secrets. The government considers prosecuting him because he's writing about a bunch of shit he shouldn't be writing about. It's a weird call to just let this guy hang out with your special forces, but then he writes a book that pisses them off a lot. And the reason, one of the reasons apparently

that they don't go through prosecuting him is that John Wayne buys the film rights from Robin Moore in order to make a movie. And so, yeah, he- Well, now that Wayne is attached. Well, what happens is he sends a letter to President Lyndon Baines Johnson to try to get his cooperation

because he basically says, I wanna make the first pro-war movie about the Vietnam War to try and build public support for this thing. He writes, quote, we want to show such scenes as the little village that has erected its own Statue of Liberty to the American people. We want to bring out that if we abandon these people,

there will be a bloodbath of over two million souls. We want to show the professional soldier carrying out his duty of death, but also his extracurricular activities, helping small communities, giving them medical supplies, toys for their children, and little things like soap. So that's the movie, like John Wayne sends this letter. Soap, AKA napalm.

Napalm cleans things? Yeah, you know, eventually. There's no bacteria in the wake of a napalm strike. Absolutely. It's all been sanitized. You want to get rid of giardia? Napalm knocks it right out. A write-up from history net continues, quote, John Wayne took his first step towards production

of the picture in 1965, buying the film rights from the author Moore. The path was cleared in early 1966 when President Johnson's advisor, Jack Valenti, convinced LBJ to give Wayne permission to make the film. Valenti observed, Wayne's politics are wrong, but in so far as Vietnam is concerned, his views are right. If he made the picture, he would be saying

the things we once said. So... I mean, he's doing, he's offering it for free. I mean, this is before the U.S. military would bankroll things, like Black Hawk Down or like fucking even Transformers. They put money behind Transformers and shit. It's fun you say that, because this is how that starts.

Oh, cute, cute, cute, cute. Oh my God, origin story. But you know what else is starting right now, Francesca? What? The products and services that support this podcast. Their ads are starting right now. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI

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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. 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 happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys 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,

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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.

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Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, we're back. Well, I don't know about you, Francesca, but those ads convinced me to become a green beret. Wow. I'm going to go fight in Vietnam. Was it a zip recruiter ad? It was, it was, it was.

And it has convinced me to take up the fight. I keep calling the recruiters and they keep saying there's no war in Vietnam. You can't just travel to Vietnam and start fighting people. Like, you'll go to prison forever. But I'm going to do it. I'm going to give it a shot. We need a social media manager.

You're like, green beret. Green beret. That's what I'm going to do. Oh my god. So really foreshadowing of the US military funding this? Well, not funding it. It's not quite there yet. But this, we'll get into it.

So John Wayne makes his son Michael, the film's producer, because nepotism. And in February of 1966, he hires James Lee Beret, who's a former Marine and a screenwriter, to draft a screenplay. And the screenplay has very little to do with Robin Moore's book. That's, again, some people will allege part of the agreement

he made with the government. We're like, I'll adapt this into a movie. But I won't include anything from the book, really, because the book is full of a bunch of secrets you didn't want getting out. And that's part of why the LBJ administration is like, well, this can help us kind of launder away some of the shit we didn't want people to know that's in that book.

So the two Waynes and Beret visit the Defense Department in Fort Bragg in order to get approval from the government to see where special forces train and to do research and whatnot. And the production receives, and this is one of the first times this has happened, a substantial amount of help from the armed forces. They did pay fees to use DoD property and for some

of the equipment leased to them. But a lot of stuff was made free for them as props, which did substantially defray costs. Some biographers, like Jensen, dispute this. And John Wayne would go on to claim that they paid for everything. This does not seem to have been entirely accurate. It does seem like they got a good amount of stuff

at least subsidized that would have cost more or just not been available if the DoD hadn't played ball. And evidence for this can be seen in the fact that the studio allowed the Pentagon to retain script control, right? Wow. So you had, in like 48, you had some kind of like partnerships with Hollywood, or not in the 40s,

for like World War II, you had some partnerships with Hollywood and the DoD. This is the first time that you have like an independent movie that a studio is making on its own, that they kind of make a deal with the government in exchange for stuff to give the Pentagon script control, right? And the DoD does request extensive rewrites

and detailed changes to the plot and dialogue and those changes are made. This is the first modern movie co-written by the Pentagon in exchange for access to gear and military infrastructure. It is not to the same extent that it will later be, right? They're not getting nearly as much shit free. They are paying for more shit, but this is the start of that process.

Yeah. I just think it's incredible that at this time, you could turn on the television and just watch, yeah, kids coming home in body bags, children with napalm burns on them. Like the Me-Lie Massacre was very much publicized. I should go open that a bit, don't worry. But just, and you're like,

well, this one movie, this is gonna do it. Silver bullet, like, yeah. Gonna turn it around, baby. I mean, arguably, right? That was the lesson of Vietnam was like, oh, just do the propaganda movies. Don't show what's actually happening on the ground. Well, and it is this, you can never do it for everybody,

but with the right movies at the right time, you can change what happens in a war for a select population, like the movie American Sniper for a certain chunk of Americans has changed the thing they primed, like, because of how big that movie was in certain chunks of the population, a lot of people, when they think of the Iraq war, don't think about the government light

a shitload to get us in there that are primary, many of our goals were not achieved, that there were not weapons of mass destruction, that the Iraqi people suffered tremendously, that the rebuilding process was corrupted and efficient. They think big, strong guy, sniper, he shoot people good, look at him, he's American sniper, I got him on a hat, I'm gonna wear it.

That's Bradley Cooper, right? Yeah, it's Bradley Cooper. Yeah, exactly, that's why when the Hurt Locker, I'm like, man, like I support women directors, but why does it gotta be Catherine Bigelow doing the Hurt Locker, like really that's the story that she gets on stage and thanks the firefighters? I'm sorry, I'm showing my prejudice against.

You can't, you can't actually have a movie about the Iraq war, because it would be, I mean, there's issues with the movie Vice, but that's an actual movie about the Iraq war to an extent where it's about like the people and kind of the venal and corrupt attitudes that lead us in there. You can't have a movie about

what the Iraq war is actually about, but you can make a bunch of movies about likable dudes in the Iraq war that will make people feel more fondly towards the military and the military industrial complex as opposed to just be like, all of these wars are disasters and clearly the people running our defense department are incompetent because look at how these get handled

every time, look at how badly these wars were prosecuted. That's not like, you're not gonna get that out of Hollywood. God forbid from the perspective of an Iraqi either. I mean, every now and then, I will say this, the movie Mosul, which was directed by, it was Carnahan, but it was produced by the Russo brothers, that is a really good movie that does it. There's not like an American in that movie really.

It's all like Iraqis, all of the characters. They think they're pretty much a good, a buddy of mine, Sengar was actually like the local consultant on the cultural consultant on the film. And it does, as someone who was there in Mosul, it was a really good job. I know some of the dudes, it was based on here. So you do actually get some really good,

like it doesn't not happen, right? Like stuff like this, but most people probably haven't seen Mosul and everybody knows about the movie American Sniper, you know? This doesn't have Bradley. This doesn't have Bradley. And again, like just, this is happening in Vietnam too. The Green Berets becomes the only,

I think definitely the first and I think the only pro Vietnam movie about Vietnam that comes out during the war. What's his name makes Platoon specifically because he hates the Green Berets so much. Like the movie Platoon is a reaction to how, what a piece of propaganda that Green Berets is. Is that Oliver Stoner or am I? I think it's Stone.

I think it's Stone. Yes, Stone. And he gets like pissed off by what a piece of bullshit this film becomes and he makes Platoon. I need to see Green Berets because I've never, like I've never seen a positive spin on the Vietnam war. It's pretty fun. I watched it as a kid.

My parents wanted me to see it. They thought it was a great movie. One of my uncles was a Green Beret. So like, yeah. And it's, as a kid. What did your uncle think of it? I mean, he abandoned, anyway, we don't need to get into my uncle.

Okay, okay. We lead our uncle. We don't need to talk about that uncle in particular. I never knew him super well, but like his service was a regular topic of discussion. I think that's part of why my mom wanted me to see the Green Berets, is to know that what my uncle Jim had done

in the Green Berets. But I don't think this is a particularly accurate movie about what the Green Berets did. And it's certainly like, it's filmed in Fort Bragg. It's very obviously not Vietnam. It's like pine tree forests all over the place. It could not look less like Vietnam. So this film though, would start to prove to be kind of

the start of what is to date, a decades long collaboration between Hollywood and the DoD. You know, it's a proof of concept. The film is utterly panned by reviewers. And it actually sparked anti-war protests in New York, Los Angeles and other cities that because they protest, it makes conservatives love the film even more, right? Like you hear there's this movie about our brave soldiers

and they're protesting to get in LA. Like that's not gonna do anything, but make you love it more. Absolutely, suddenly it's become a martyr of the right. They love that stuff. Roger Ebert called it cowboy and Indian idiotic. Renata Adler of the New York Times called it vile and insane. None of this stopped it from being a huge commercial success,

earning $12 million, which is all of the money in the world. In 1968 dollars. And giving John Wayne an excuse to call the bad reviews, quote, ridiculously one-sided, blind, stupid criticism of our picture that made real people more conscious of just how honest we were. Anti-American, I do say myself. They tried to cancel us, but can't cancel America.

This is like what the Daily Wire is gonna try to remake. They're gonna like remake the Green Berets and Shapiro's gonna fund it. Now, here's the thing, John Wayne was talented. So we are, I am a little less worried about Ben Shapiro. Cause John Wayne had things he was good at. There was, there's the other Quigley sister. It's like Margaret Quigley and then there's the,

and you've got James Woods. James Woods. Yeah, there's one other washed up right wing celebrity and you've got like Kirk Cameron, get them all together and get your A-team together. Do a new A-team reboot with just like disgraced conservative actors. Oh my God.

Oh man. I need to see that, yeah. Have the, have your like Bosley be Kelsey Grammer? Yeah. Introducing Kyle Rittenhouse. Turns out that cry was fake. Kyle Rittenhouse and James Woods in a fucking action shoot them up.

Yeah. Do it, do it. We dare you. We want to see this. But yeah, so it's interesting. I do legitimately want to see that movie. It'll happen. It will happen.

Something like that will happen. Kyle Rittenhouse will get cast in an action movie within the next couple of years for sure. It is just interesting that like even though he was a good actor, like this sucked. And it was like 68, 69, like 69 it came out. Well, I think it sucked. I think you would probably think it sucked.

Most reviewers think it sucked. A lot of people don't. A lot of people like, and they're not like, when I say it's successful, they're not like just blindly buying it to own the libs. They enjoy it. It's a movie that's got some cool action sequences and shit. Like it's not a good movie about the Vietnam War,

but as a movie, it succeeds in making the audience happy. Got it. So, you know. So it like mission accomplished. Yeah, absolutely accomplished. And Wayne makes a big deal in like the ads for this, or in the PR campaign for this movie, the fact that he visited Vietnam

and like spent time with soldiers on his own without handlers. He was like adjacent to combat. He's on like chunks of the line where there is shooting. And he gets really popular with a lot of soldiers he meets there because they're like, oh, hey, this guy who I saw in movies as a kid who like influenced my conception of manhood is like here, standing on the line.

That's great. So, you know, some of them think this is cool. There's obviously a lot of Vietnam veterans, perhaps even significantly more Vietnam veterans who have been in combat and see this movie and are like, well, this is just rank gross propaganda, but it's not like one-sided. There are a lot of Vietnam veterans

who like the fact that he does this. But it also must have been like the death of a hero for a lot of the kids. When they realized, well, yeah. Who were actually there and saw their friends die and got injured and maimed and for what? Like it's kind of that moment where you're like your hero you realize is like a vicious right-winger.

It's this moment a lot of people have and a lot of British kids have in World War I when they realized that all of these poems they had been told, read about like the glory of war and all of these lurid paintings of colonial victories are like, no, here's what it's really like to get shot at by a machine gun. There's nothing glorious or manly about it.

And that there are a bunch of people who have it and a bunch of kids who like had joined and volunteered for Vietnam in part because of the things that John Wayne had led them to believe about masculinity. In Jesus and John Wayne, Dumas writes, as one working class Vietnam veteran later recalled, he went to Vietnam to kill a commie for Jesus Christ and John Wayne.

It was sands of Iwo Jima that inspired Ron Kovic to volunteer for the Marines during the Vietnam War, a war that would cost him the use of his legs and lead to a disenchantment with war that he chronicled in his memoir, born on the 4th of July. Offscreen too, Wayne worked to recruit young men to the war effort, ridiculing as soft

those who didn't enlist. One critic labeled Wayne the most important man in America, given the role his films played in driving American engagement in Vietnam. Kovic's would later say, on his previously, John and Wayne inspired ideas about war and manhood, I gave my dead dick for John Wayne. Oh my God.

And he made a necklace out of them, just a bunch of dead American- John Wayne, just a bunch of kids' dicks on his neck. Kids' dicks adorning him like a headdress. Like this is- He does get a bracelet from the Montignards, but yeah. This is still his unfulfilled World War II. Yes.

Yes. Like whatever, fantasy or shame, really, that he's like, well, I'm gonna send other people to die now. That is what a lot of people who knew him suggest, is that he never got over his shame for failing to serve in World War II. So he decided, like, this is how I'm gonna overcome it, is by getting all these kids to serve in my place

in this other war, you know? I didn't come through then, but I'm gonna come through now for America by getting all these kids to die in a jungle for nothing. I mean, what's crazy is that, like, today you would see John Wayne and this career path and be like, oh, he's an op. Like, he was created by the CIA.

Like, he's been a DOD, like, op, from the beginning. And he's not. Like, he just did this stuff voluntarily. They benefit from it, sure. But he's motivated by his own shame because he realizes that being the guy he is, he should have fucking done something in World War II. Yeah.

And he did not. What I mean is he just seems like he was created in the lab of, like, all of America's lies, just, like, sewn together in some, you know, evil scarecrow. He's all of our lies sewn together in a package that, unfortunately, is really good at a specific kind of acting, and it allows him to, yeah, just, like,

stand in front of men and get them to sign up to go fight in Vietnam and ridicule people as soft for refusing to do it. If John Wayne slapped someone at the Oscars. Well, we're building to that, Francesca. So the ballot or the Green Berets launched six months after the Tet Offensive put a lie to the idea that the US

was particularly close to a victory in Vietnam. Within months of its release, the first rumors of the Mai Lai Massacre had begun to percolate out into the culture. So right after this movie, we find out that American soldiers have killed hundreds of civilians brutally in the sacking of this village.

So the Green Berets had shown US soldiers spending most of their time helping adorable kids and, like, building up villages and infrastructure projects. The reality was that, very often, US troops killed those same kids and blew those villages to bits. John Wayne portrayed war crimes as purely the purview of the Viet Cong.

While reality proved him wrong over and over again, large numbers of conservatives tucked their heads into the comforting lie he had offered them. John Wayne referred to the Mai Lai Massacre as the so-called Mai Lai Massacre and redirected any questions about it to lurid claims about atrocities

committed against our people by the Viet Cong. It's, again, this, like, what aboutism. Or it's, like, yeah, it's a war. You can always find bad things that every side has done in a war. But he's pretending that, like, oh, Americans are just there handing out clean water and these mean old Viet Cong are killing them

for some reason, for no reason at all. Yeah, so much was... So-called Mai Lai. Yeah, so it's not even a village. He would be like, look, there's so much going on in Vietnam that there's no good reason, quote, one little incident in the United States Army should make a fuss.

The reality, the sad reality, I mean, the sad reality is I feel like there are way more Mai Lies that we just don't know about. There's a number we do know about. There were quite a few times shit like that happened. Yeah, yeah, exactly. We remember this one,

but there were many, many, many others we don't have at the tip of our tongue. The images of which were not particularly even, you know, they weren't captured. The journalist wasn't there on the ground at the right moment at the right time. Or, I mean, the reason Mai Lai becomes what it is is because one of the officers who sees it,

like, threatens to machine gun everybody if they don't stop and then reports it, like... Landed his helicopter in between civilians and was like, fucking stop. A cool dude, a way cooler dude than John Wayne. Indeed. Yeah. So other far right figures rushed in to assure John Wayne that he was right on the money.

And he is, you know, still to this day, popular with a segment of Vietnam veterans who wanna believe that they were there for a reason or that their kids were there for a reason, fighting a fight that needed to be fought. No less a fascist luminary than Douglas MacArthur told John Wayne that he represented, quote, the American serviceman

better than the American serviceman himself. There it is. Here's what's funny about that. There it is. General Douglas MacArthur fired from his job prosecuting the Korean War for, number one, not being great at it. And number two, wanting, asking for permission to nuke China and Russia repeatedly.

Douglas MacArthur, please, please, please, please. Douglas MacArthur, famous for his, you know, command of US forces in the Philippines. Also the dude, like he's saying that John Wayne represents the American serviceman better than the American serviceman. During the bonus army marches, which is when a bunch of US World War I veterans

were like marching during the Great Depression to get the money that they were promised by the government. Douglas MacArthur led the forces that gunned them down with tanks and machine guns as they marched out DC. So I really wanna hear who Douglas MacArthur thinks represents the American serviceman best. He seems like a good source on that. Douglas MacArthur would never do the American serviceman

wrong by say killing many of them for protesting because they're not getting paid. I love you, fucking Douglas MacArthur. The amount of times I was told that piece of shit was a hero as a kid makes me wanna light some things on fucking fire. And by the way, Patton was there with him. So fuck them all.

Damn. Well that is, I mean, sadly, this is, this is the American military and it always has been, right? We like the myth better than the actual soldier. Fuck the soldier. Fuck the soldier. We want them, we want the John Wayne. I mean, it's the same thing.

Soldiers are inconvenient as hell. A lot of them have experiences that are really hard to monetize. I know, they're never posing, they don't know what to do with the props ever. Some of them are sad. They're always just attached to home life. Anyway, but it is, this sounds like the crassness

and I hate to bring it to to now because I'm just like, fuck, we've always been this way. But you hear that crassness. You know, I'm not going to defend John McCain but saying that like he was like a loser because he was captured. You hear that you have, and then you've got like fucking Trump leaning over,

you know, World War I and II soldiers being like, what was this, why did they die? Losers, only losers die. And like that is totally. Within the context of this episode, at least McCain as like a rich kid who didn't have to, Winton got fucked up. Right.

There's a lot more respect for John Kerry because he wasn't bombing people and also got fucked up. But, you know, at least they, both of them, unlike John Wayne, put skin in the game, you know, John Wayne didn't even have like that. I guess it's one of those things. I guess it's morally better to advocate for an unjust war and serve in it than it is to advocate for an unjust war

and refuse to serve in it. I think that's fair to say. I feel like that does sound weird, but at least it's evident. It's like with fucking, what's his name? The star who like testified, who like went against his studio to go like, talk at the fucking, to name names and shit.

At least he was putting his skin in the game, I guess. It's not, I don't know, better and worse are useless terms for this, but at least like it points to the fact that well, this person did believe in the shitty thing they were doing. You're just not a hypocrite. You're not just a total fucking empty hypocrite.

Right. Yeah. I don't know. It's weird. I don't want to be like trying to mark any of this down as moral lessons because it's bad to bomb people, John McCain. Don't mark things down, kids.

I just, at least like, I don't know. I'm more, there's something more unsettling about a person who like is so empty that all of these things are just posturing for them. And I don't know how much that is true for, because some of it may be that John Wayne really did believe he should have served in World War II and kind of hated himself.

And that's what's driving him to do this. I don't know. There's a lot of complicated shit going on and that has a lot to say about masculinity. This podcast isn't going to say all of it, but it's definitely stuff I think about a bunch. Yeah. I don't like emotionally unavailable men.

That's like your first boyfriend, you know what I mean? Yeah. But then you move on and you're like, yeah, I need it. I mean, I've been that boyfriend for a lot of people, but yeah. Yeah, I need it. Yeah. I wasn't going to say anything, Robert, but, you know,

you just learned how to learn to open up. So, you know, he's pretty happy after the Green Berets. This really cements him in the right wing as this kind of like militant archon of masculinity. It wipes away this sort of shame of his failure to serve in World War II. It gets him, you know, it kind of helps him settle into his new role as an elder conservative icon.

Ronald Reagan actually reaches out to him and is like, hey, bro, you know what you ought to do is become governor of California. Like we could put your ass in the White House one day and thank God, he says no. He's not in great health, you know? Thank God he would have won, for sure would have won. He definitely would have won with our history.

I can't imagine a series of events in which John Wayne runs for governor of California and loses, I can't conceive of it. No, we are trash here in this state. We've, I mean, look at how many times we've done it. Arnold won and he's a way better person than John Wayne. Yeah, no, it's very true. Not a good person, but better.

Yeah, dude, what does Arnold do for American masculinity? I honestly, I think he was probably a better, I think as the fucking terminator, he was a healthier symbol of American masculinity than John Wayne. Cause a big thing the terminator stands for is like putting yourself before, or putting your child, a kid before yourself

and like making the success and happiness of that child, the entire like motive force of your life, right? Like there's actually some nice things in that movie, nice dad stuff in that movie about a killer cyborg. Exactly, when he says I'll be back, he actually will be back. He's not like John Wayne, he's gonna go start another fucking family. No, he's gonna be back in some increasingly hard

to follow sequels that we don't need to talk about. Whatever, broadly speaking, the cyborg killer bot from the future is a better symbol of emotionally available manhood than any John Wayne character. Yes, that is very funny. Die like that. So yeah, John Wayne chose not to get into politics

in an electoral capacity, but he did spend the rest of his life bloviating about politics readily as this passage from the book Jesus and John Wayne makes clear in a 1971 interview in Playboy, Wayne was particularly harsh in his assessment of the blacks or colored or whatever they might want to call themselves. They certainly aren't Caucasian with a lot of blacks. There's quite a lot of resentment along with their descent

and possibly rightly so possibly rightly so, but we can't all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the blacks. I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don't believe in giving authority in positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people. As far as African-American representation

in his own films, Wayne asserted that he'd given the blacks their proper position. He had a black slave in the Alamo and he had a correct number of blacks in the Green Berets. His views on Native Americans were no more enlightened. I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from the Native Americans. Our so-called stealing of this country from them

was just a matter of survival. People needed land and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves. Outstanding shit, John Wayne, incredibly boomer. Oh, buddy, keep telling yourself that and finish the bottle. That is, I just, it's sometimes kind of, I feel like I'm looking at racism in a terrarium.

Like it's so crystallized and perfect. Like, I don't hate them. They're just, you know, second-class citizens and they're not responsible and they're idiots. And it's a very specific kind of racist in that I don't think today, John Wayne would have, if he was around today, he would never call himself a white supremacist

in an interview. Not to say he wouldn't have believed the same things. Back then, if you admit said you were, you believed in white supremacy, you know, until they're educated or whatever, that's not controversial. That's not a fringe right-wing thing. That does not identify you

as part of a dangerous political sect in 1971. And part of the evidence for that is that like, the only people who get angry when he says this are like black publication. There's like no impact on the mainstream because John Wayne says this. Right, liberals are like, no, he's got a point. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. The leaders are crazy. They're more just like, oh, well, you know, that's just John Wayne, you know, that's just how certain people think. Sure. And like, it's not the same as calling yourself a white supremacist in 2022 would be.

Like, he's not identifying himself with a fringe of the political spectrum here. It sort of reminds me of, oh, God, I hate doing the show and bringing up like a present day examples, but it reminds me of Joe Arpaio going in front of that like fringe CPAC group. Yes. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Whatever it was. Yeah, and really. And being like, some people say I'm a racist. And everyone's like, yeah. Cheering, and he's like, well, wait, I was supposed to, the point was that I'm not. Why are you cheering? Yeah.

It's not a good thing. And they're like, no, we've changed. We love racists. Yeah, I could see John Wayne getting like, tricked by something like that. And he probably would have like backpedaled. Again, not because he's not racist, but because he would not be the kind of guy

who would want to like look bad. Like he doesn't. John Wayne would not have wanted to completely alienate himself from like his liberal friends or from like the academy and shit. He was not, he was not that kind of political figure, you know? Sure, Hollywood number one.

Yeah, yeah. So he would have, I think he would have, he would have choose, he would have said the same thing in different words if he was interviewed today, you know? Yeah, yeah. A slightly more careful words. Unless he was really drunk, then he would have said the same thing

and it would have been a problem for him. But not that big a problem. He would have been okay. But still even without white supremacy in there, which is, yeah, jarring, it is a perfect distillation of a lot of white American thinking. Yes.

At the time and sometimes currently. Again, he's not like fringe in any way. This is all very mainstream stuff. Yeah, yeah. You know what else is mainstream? What? The products and services that support this podcast. Like racism, they're all deeply woven

into the fabric of American society. How's that Sophie? Is that good? I think you, you crushed it, my friend. Is that good? That gonna make him happy? All right. Loved it.

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We're back. We're happy. Everybody's smiling. Everybody's laughing. This has a Hollywood ending, right? It does have an ending. And that ending occurs probably in Hollywood. So, John Wayne, well,

I think he probably would have been more careful today than he was in 1971. I should note that he also blew his cover as a giant racist on several occasions. And one of those would have been the 1973 Oscars. This is the most recent reason John Wayne went viral in the wake of Will Smith lightly slapping a dude. And let's say moderately slapping a dude.

I was waiting for the Evan Steak on this. It's fine, who gives a shit? No, I think it was a really good film slap, right? Like, it read on camera really well. But yeah, so people brought up, I'm frustrated, it's weeks later and there's still think pieces coming out about this. Yeah, I know.

One of the things people said. Time got a forthcoming one. Oh, good, oh, good. There was this fucking stuff about like, Will Smith getting canceled and like, but nothing happened to John Wayne when, and then they would talk about this story that we're about to talk about.

So the gist of the story. This is 73 and you're like, yeah, okay. This is a good one. So, Marlon Brando, right? Famously not a problematic dude, star of the Isle of Dr. Moreau and probably a couple of other movies, got nominated for best actor for his role in The Godfather,

which is not nearly as good a movie as The Isle of Dr. Moreau, but whatever. So Brando had struck up what seems to be a really legitimate and honest friendship with an indigenous American activist named Sachin Littlefeather. She was of Apache and Yaqui descent and was angry at Hollywood

for a wide variety of understandable reasons. And Brando agreed with her about the things she was angry about. So he decides he's gonna turn down the Oscar if he wins it. So she's hanging out with him the night that he's supposed to like go to the Oscars and he's typing out this eight page speech in case he wins. And this speech, he wanted to use his podium

to protest the wrongs that had been done to Native Americans by Hollywood, right? So the unjust and racist portrayal of indigenous people in decades of cowboy movies, including a bunch of John Wayne movies. And he's also specifically, he and Littlefeather are specifically angry about wounded knee. So this is a battle, which is a bunch of,

just a horrible, horrible battle. And at this moment in 73, it's the site of a standoff between Native activists and the feds over the murder of a Lakota man, right? So that's going on while the Oscars are about to happen. And so Brando decides he's gonna turn, if he wins the best actor, he's gonna turn that into a place to talk about them.

So Littlefeather helps him put together this speech. And then kind of at the last moment, he's like, well, what if you deliver it, right? I shouldn't deliver it. Like why don't you go, don't even touch the Oscar, don't take it, just deliver the speech in my stead, right? If you want to, and she wants to. So he gives her the speech he's written,

but when she arrives, the presenters, number one, see that like, oh shit, Brando's sent this person here. She wants to give a speech. You can't have more than 60 seconds. You can't read that eight page thing that Marlon Brando gave you. So she has to come up with something kind of on the fly.

And here's what she comes up with. Hello, my name is Sashin Littlefeather. I'm Apache and I'm president of the National Native American Affirmative Image Committee. I'm representing Marlon Brando this evening. And he has asked me to tell you in a very long speech, which I cannot share with you presently because of time, but I will be glad to share with the press afterwards

that he very regretfully cannot accept this very generous award. And the reasons for this being are the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry. Excuse me. And on television in movie reruns. And also with recent happenings at Wounded Knee. I beg at this time that I have not intruded

upon this evening and that we will in the future, our hearts and our understandings will meet with love and generosity. Thank you on behalf of Marlon Brando. So that's lovely, yeah. It's like so much more cordial than any account. Extremely polite. Yes, that any account you will read of what happened

and how it happened. She is like insanely soft spoken, but firm and like apologetic. I hope I didn't ruin your night and like. We're so appreciative of the award, but we just can't take it because of like, yeah. She's very, very mild. And it's incredible that Hollywood stopped

with any kind of racist portrayals of Native Americans from that point. Never again happened, never again happened. I'm gonna Google Johnny Depp real quick. No reason, absolutely no reason why I am doing this. Just typing it into Google. So yeah, she gets a lot of support that night. You hear a lot of clapping, a lot of cheers.

You do hear some booze though, not an insignificant amount. Now, I think we both are in agreement. You would have to be a crazy asshole to take any offense at that whatsoever. It's a pretty polite and very, very mild statement of conviction. That is not how John Wayne takes it.

And I'm gonna read another quote from The Guardian here. And this starts with little feather talking. She's interviewed for this piece. During my presentation, he was coming towards me to forcibly take me off the stage. And he had to be restrained by six security men to prevent him from doing so. Presenting best pictures soon after.

Also for the godfather, Clint Eastwood quipped, I don't know if I should present this award on behalf of all the Cowboys shot and all the John Ford Westerns over the years. When little feather got backstage, she says, there were people making stereotypical Native American war cries at her and miming chopping with a Tomahawk. After talking to the press, she went straight back

to Brando's house where they sat together and watched the reactions to the event on television. Was John Wayne just there like, get my movies out your fucking mouth? Yeah, he would have hit her probably if he could have. He was ready to. Six men. Get my movies. Six men and she's like, tiny.

Doesn't look like a big person, no. Of course, sandwiched by, oh God, just John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. Clint Eastwood's still mad about that. What would have been amazing is if Brando had done it and the security guards hadn't been there and we'd gotten to see a fist fight between fat aging Marlon Brando

and fat aging drunken John Wayne at the Oscars. That would have been amazing. That would have been incredible. Oh my God, what a moment that would have been. I do feel like that. I mean, look, the ratings were good this last Oscars and I do think that we should have all drunk washed up actors

wrestling each other on stage. I want to see Brando bottle John Wayne with some fucking wine, just nail him in the skull. I mean, you know, Orson Welles also has one of the most memorable on-screen drunk moments where he's trying to do the ad for that wine. Ah, the French. Throw Orson up there.

Yeah, have them all fight, fuck it. So Sashine is the primary source we have on this but I don't have any particular trouble believing it. John Wayne had a history of hitting women sometimes in public and to reinforce that we should talk a bit here about how his marriage to his second wife Chata ended. How's that going?

Yeah, well, this actually happens back in 1946. I'm sorry for jumping around. This just seemed like the natural place to put this. That was so soon. Yeah, it's right. They are not together long. It's Buzzfeed summing up the details. The problem was that the current Latin American wife

wasn't fulfilling her domestic duties, which is why they were divorcing, and why Chata, infuriated and bitter, was alleging horrible things about the Duke in court, that he'd blackened her eye, pulled her from bed and beat her, given her multiple bruises, called her obscene names, and was manhandling her in front of guests. He went someplace where there were strip teasers,

call girls, prostitutes, or whatever you want to call them, she testified. He came home the next morning very drunk and with a big black bite on his neck. It was a human being bite. Wayne's lawyer countered that Chata was a drunk who stayed out all night and returned with grass stains on her clothes, and during their estrangement

entertained a male guest at their residence while Wayne was on set. The divorce drama threatened to become a huge scandal, but Wayne forked over a substantial amount of alimony. The two settled, and his image remained unscathed, in part because allegations of domestic abuse weren't yet taken seriously, but also because Wayne's alleged actions

were not out of line with his on-screen image, which had him regularly verbally abusing women, not giving them black eyes, then manhandling, throwing them over shoulders, and generally putting them in their place when necessary. So, you know, Johnny Wayne. I really, I just was so invested in this one.

I felt like, you know. It was gonna be the one. This is gonna be it. I like in that quote, was alleging horrible things about the Duke. All right, Marion. The Duke married his third wife in 1954. The Duke.

The two did eventually divorce. They stayed in each other's lives to some extent. She's interviewed after his death and still speaks very highly of him. So, again, these are not to the extent that he was abusive. Everyone he was with in the past doesn't speak negatively of him. His kids all seem to speak positively of him.

They claim publicly he was a good father. He was in general a charming man and a good friend to a number of people. More than that, he seems to have just been kind of a magnetically charismatic person and it's easy to forgive certain things of people like that. We do it as a society pretty much constantly. Also tall.

Can we... Also tall. That's a tall privilege. Does not hurt. In 1977, when he turned 70, an article in the right-wing journal, Human Events, tried to explain Wayne Zellure

as the fact that he represented a basic American breed, the tall kelp of pioneer Scots, Irish and English descent. The book Jesus and John Wayne Continues. All of Wayne's greatest hits involved valiant white men battling and usually subduing non-white populations, the Japanese, Native Americans, or Mexicans.

Like Teddy Roosevelt, Wayne's rugged masculinity was realized through violence and it was a distinctly white male ideal. Yeah. Yep. I feel like... like groups today, like those sort... Yeah, just like neo-Nazi groups

full of, you know, sort of, virgins. Like they probably all get together and watch old John Wayne movies and are like, ha! Like, unironically. Some of them.

Love that stuff. It's more that just put his face on things because modern action movies are a lot better at keeping your attention. And if you were to watch his latest movie, like, what's funny, the last movie he does, The Shootest,

like the basic plot of The Shootest is there's this old gunfighter who's dying of cancer, like Wayne was kind of at the time. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. And he wants to engineer a last gunfight to kill himself.

So he wants to, like, set up a situation whereby he can have a last gunfight and die because he otherwise cancer's gonna get him. And instead he gets shot in the back and killed, which is like a weirdly... suggests a weird amount

of self-knowledge for John Wayne that, like, that's how... that's the movie he goes out in this movie about this, like, manly archon of, like, badassness in his aging years, who's trying to get in, like,

who's trying to set up one last fight so he can die with dignity and get shot in the back instead. It's interesting that he... Yeah. That's the last thing he does. Yeah. Right.

Because cancer, you know, it's just like... It's not a great way to go out. No. It's a pretty shitty way to go out. Um... So, yeah, in his declining years,

when he filmed, again, some of his best movies, Wayne upped the ante on his conservative rhetoric, reaching at cowards who spit in the faces of the police and judicial sob sisters. Human events wrote that,

as a man, he is loathed and demeaned by sanctimonious liberals and a whole mess of bug out on America hypocrites. But Wayne was top shelf with freedom fans who thrilled to the big guy's charge. John Wayne...

Judicial sisters? What's... What is that a reference to? People who are angry that the criminal justice system imprisons and murders innocent people. Oh. It's just like one of those...

Sob sisters, yeah. Those pumpkin lilies? Yeah, pumpkin lilies. That's right. That's exactly it. Judicial pumpkin lily. So, John Wayne dies on June 11, 1979, of ass cancer.

He never lived to see the entirety of the world he'd built come to fruition. But by 1979, the electoral power of the left had been solidly broken. Not long after his death, Ronald Reagan, his old buddy,

would be elected president. He would be followed by George H.W. Bush, and then the next liberal president to follow would be considerably further right than most Democrats had been in John Wayne's day. There are numerous reasons for these shifts, which we've discussed in many podcasts,

but the seductive, intoxicating vision of manhood, which stuck in the heads of millions of men who are still alive and voting today, played a strong role. As Kristin Cobbs-Dumez writes, John Wayne became an icon of rugged American manhood for generations of conservatives. Pat Buchanan paraded Wayne in his presidential bid,

Newt Gingrich called Wayne's Sands of Iwo Jima the formative movie of my life, and all of her north echoed slogans from that film in his 1994 Senate campaign. In time, Wayne would also emerge as an icon of Christian masculinity. Evangelicals admired and still admire him for his toughness and his swagger.

He protected the weak, and he wouldn't let anything get in the way of his pursuit of justice and order. Wayne was not an evangelical Christian, despite rumors to this effect regularly circulated by evangelicals themselves. He did not live a moral life by the standards of traditional Christian virtue.

Yet for many evangelicals, Wayne would come to symbolize a different set of virtues, a nostalgic yearning for a mythical Christian America, a return to traditional gender roles, and the reassertion of white patriarchal authority. Mmm. Yes. So, mmm.

Just back on the ranch, none of these just sissy jobs, office jobs, punk and lily content creators, TikTok dancers. Casting pods in their basements. Fucking weak shit. Mmm-hmm. When can we conquer some shit?

Let's deconquer so we can reconquer the West. Mmm-hmm. That's what I say. Decolonize to recolonize. Who's with me? Decolonize America, Recolonize England. I just, we need, like,

this is why the show that I don't watch, Westworld, but that's why, like, that made sense, because you're like, you need a simulation for men who feel inferior to get their rocks off in a safe place. Obviously, then the robots are sent shit. That's bad. They don't want them to feel. Yeah, I only watched the first season of that,

which I did like, but I'm not, I understand it goes some places. Apparently, you know, it's fine. But yeah, like, you need Disneyland for adults. Yeah. Yeah, and that John Wayne is a big help. He does a lot of work to create this cultural Disneyland, this like mental vacation space we have for white men

to imagine that there was a time in which, if I'd only been born then, I would have been a real big man on the range, you know. I would have been carving out a new America, and I would have had a woman who loved me and didn't have a career of her own, and everything would have been perfect. Absolutely.

And then, but it was just a few more years before, like, you know, Grunge came around. Thank God. Yeah, that did wonders for angsty white men. Hell yeah. And then, you know, suddenly, well, that's not cool anymore. Nope.

Now, masculinity is just, it's all willy-nilly, and we've got, you know, Disney groomers, or whatever we're doing. Yeah, everything's gotten dumber since. I, yeah, I, it's, I'm fascinated by that because I don't, like, I don't respond. I'm trying to think of, like, action heroes that, like, I respond to, like, where I get, like, ting,

where, like, Spidey, like, oh, hell yeah, I want to be that. I don't have that. Like, was that John Claude for you? Was it Stallone? Is it Schwarzenegger? For me, it was, it was Bruce Willis in Die Hard, right? That was the movie I saw as a kid that was, well, and, and actually, I'm honestly, like,

much more than that, it was Indiana Jones, right? I think for a lot of men in my, like, that was the Harrison Ford at his peak. That's a leading man right there. Totally. And he's, but he's kind of funny, right? He's got a little, he's got, like, a sense of humor. Yeah, he's, he's incredibly charming.

Cheeky, super charming. Chale, every time he crashes a plane into a golf course. Nobody can get angry. Nobody can stay angry at Harrison Ford. No, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Ford makes sense. Also old, also kind of older.

Yeah, for a lot of his movies, he's, he's got, I mean, you know, he's pretty, he's pretty young and swole in them Indiana Jones movies, but not the later. Not the most recent one. It's very funny. Cause if you watch the behind the scenes for the second Indiana Jones movie,

there's a ton about like how intense his workout schedule was to get him that jacked. And he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like the guy you would cast as like a skinny office worker in a modern movie. But we didn't know how to get people jacked back then. We weren't as good at it. Modern jacked technology just didn't exist.

Nope. That HGH just wasn't flowing that bad. We didn't have as much HGH as we were going to have. I wonder what, what, what, uh, who are we talking about? John Wayne. John Wayne would think about that Bruce Wayne. Oh Lord.

I mean, but you also did have this period because like Indiana Jones is kind of like right before you start to have this like all of these super jacked action stars. That's when like Arnold and Stallone and Dan and then they all give way to Bruce Willis

and Die Hard where it's like now we're going to have like the every man badass and then 9-11 happens. Now we have the soldier badass. And now they're super jacked again. Yeah. Who got people through the 80s?

That was like the Stallone's and the Schwartz's names. Yeah. Late 70s? Early 80s. Late 70s you've got your Indiana Jones and you've got Dirty Harry, right? You got Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry. Like a skinny, wiry dude, right?

Clint. Can't plan out Clint Eastwood, yeah. Nope. There's plenty of chairs that need a stern talking to. Look, masculinity is complex. Is it? No, not really.

Honestly, not very much at all. That's why it's so easy for Hollywood to market to. Now Robert, when you watch like John Wayne movies or is there part of you that's like I get it, you know? You're like, I could see how this would be appealing. I think some of his movies are really good.

Yeah. Like fucking true grits, a solid film in a lot of ways. I do really like actually the remake with the dude in it. But you know, yeah, like as a kid I watched a bunch of John Wayne movies.

They're really well shot. I've always preferred more about the old Westerns, the way they're shot, the way the music is directed. Kind of like the sense of rather than any of the specific dialogue or characters is like the kind of tone that they have. The vibe.

There's vibes that are very appealing in those movies in part because just a lot of really talented people were making some very beautifully shot Westerns. Beautifully shot propaganda but hey, but still. Sure, all artists propaganda as Orwell would tell us.

Now, did he have 50 pounds of meat in his intestine upon death? Uh, I don't know. Probably. I don't think there's any evidence of that. God damn it. Maybe.

Maybe. Let the meat in John... Exume the body. Let the meat stuck in John Wayne's corpse be the Santa Claus of your beliefs about... Karma? The message would be if there is a lot of meat

that was stuck in his body. Be the gerbil in Richard Gears asshole. That's all. I think that's a good line to end on everyone. Go out there. Be the gerbil you want to see in Richard Gears asshole. You know? God, that's an old Hollywood

rumor. Four people are going to remember that. Such an old rumor. I think the lesson is you don't need to subjugate people of color or Japanese

or Native Americans in order to feel masculine and strong. Powerful. You might need to serve your country. That might help. I don't know if it's the one war where that's a good idea.

If it's the one war where it's good. Yeah. And yeah. This all ended in Brokeback Mountain. Brokeback Mountain really just that was it. It was like, oh yeah, we can't be stoic anymore because Ennis.

I don't know. I think that's very stoic. That's a stoic ass movie. It is a stoic ass movie, but I'm saying the idea that you're that bottled up emotionally you're like, man, I think maybe maybe there's more going on here. Maybe you're not fishing

up by the river. Maybe this is why I'm so excited about Pedro Pascal as a male lead. A lot of exciting new visions of manhood that Pedro Pascal is. It is neat. I think actually there is something to be said about the fact that and you can say this probably maybe does

start with some of James Cameron's early stuff where you're kind of idolizing a slightly more nurturing attitude towards a male action star. I think that's one of the things that's interesting about the Mandalorian which has been a big hit is there is like that is a big emphasis. You've got this badass gunslinger, but who's also

defined in large part due to his desire to nurture a child which is not a negative change. Total daddy. No, and there's an emotional journey and that is a space western. It's a pretty fun space. I enjoy that

series quite a lot. I guess when I really think John Wayne's legacy died is probably Lil Nas X Old Town Road, assless chaps openly gay, proud as hell and crushing it. Hell yeah. Well

yeah, so until next time, dig up the corpse of John Wayne and mail his bones to Lil Nas X. That's, I love this. This is a good project. And again, Lil Nas X loves to trigger the right, so I bet

he will remake one of these films. Dressed in the bones of John Wayne, wearing his rib cage like a corset. Francesca, you have any plugs for us at the end here after that? It's amazing. Oh my god, everyone check out the Bituation Room podcast.

It's a weekly podcast with comedians and myself and activist experts. It's a good time. And yeah, listen. Yeah. All right, again go defile the grave of John Wayne. Where is

that grave? Oh, that's a great question. Where is John Wayne's grave? I want the address. Pacific View Memorial Park in Newport Beach. That's on brand. That is on brand. I was about

to say, of course, it's Newport Beach. Yeah, it's definitely Newport Beach. Hell yeah, a little slice of red over in this southern California blue, I guess. Oh my goodness. Yeah, I'm sure we are not the only ones to

have located where he is buried. No, in order to steal his bones and give them to Lil Nas X so he can turn them into a corset. Yes. I like that he's dead. Good riddance. May we never have someone who plagues

the American consciousness so horribly to the point where we're still, we're just waiting for the John Wayne generations to die off. Yeah, thank God. Well. Thank you. This is great.

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 were 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. Did you know Lance Bass is a

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that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.