Behind the Bastards - Part Two: The Darkest Episode We Will Ever Do

Episode Date: May 16, 2024

Robert and Margaret conclude the story of Helmut Kentler's pedophile foster program, and discuss how the German left was infiltrated and co-opted by pedophile activists to disastrous ends.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Oh, hold open me Robert. It's behind the bastard still podcast bad people. Margaret Killjoy Margaret Helmut Kintler bad guy. You could you could call him a kind of like philosopher if he was Greek. His name would be pedophiles. Robert. See, that was that was bad. It was just in my head. If he was Greek, his name would be Pedophiles. Robert. See, that was bad.

It was just in my head. You just gotta excise this stuff. You just gotta excise this stuff. You just exist to make guests look bad. I really impressed. Oh my God. Robert. I don't know, what else can you say? Probably factual things and not bad jokes about Greek pedophiles.

Robert is your guest soon on Cool People Did Cool Stuff. Yeah. Start thinking of your revenge. Oh, that's a good point. Yeah. As the producer of both podcasts, I will help you. Well, just to give people a heads up, Robert did an episode about the Ukrainian anarchist Makhno,

but I'm gonna come in and tell him about the women who also did all that stuff. Yeah, so That's the yeah, that's what you can listen to In a couple weeks. I'm gonna do a lot of that that Borat my wife joke, but in my best Ukrainian accent Oh, oh someone already that we had Matt on Wow or at my wife joke, but in my best Ukrainian accent. Oh, someone already, we had Matt on. Oh, okay, well. Matt, yeah. Well, damn it.

All right, let's get back to the pedophiles. So it's important to understand the intellectual environment in the left in Germany, in which all of this shit with Kintler's horrible experimentation happened, because Kintler's pedophile foster program, he is focusing on these kids who are the most deprived and like marginalized people in all of German society, right? These homeless children,

but those are not the only kids being victimized or at least experiencing elements of victimization as a result of this like pedophile infiltration of the German left and this kind of conflation of sexual liberation with like child sexual liberation. Yeah. So research on all of this is sketchy is not the right word, but it's like, it's, it's, it's messy because it's problematically hard to fund any kind of research into pedophilia.

But the common answer you'll get is that somewhere around 1% of the population as like human population are pedophiles, right? It's kind of probably the top, the high number. In terms of their like sexual attraction pattern or whatever. Yes. Yes. So that's, you know, a very small number of people, but a lot of Berliners and a lot of members of the new left in West Germany are playing a role in institutionalizing pedophilic practices into

childcare a lot more than that 1%. These people are doing it not because they themselves are attracted to children, but because they have bought into a specific kind of sexual liberation ideology that guys like Kintler are pushing. A good example of this is the case of Commune 2, a commune formed in the summer of 1967 by four men and three women in an apartment in a street in Berlin. I am not going to try and pronounce. Something Strassa. Yeah, it's Geisbruch Strassa. Maybe I did that okay.

There's a little funny B at the end, that's all I know. Yeah, yeah. So these four men and three women formed this commune with two children, a three-year-old girl and a four-year-old boy. In 1971, a leftist magazine called Kursbok published a full spread article about commune two, and particularly its experimentation

in child sexual liberation. In an argument, in an article for Der Spiegel, published a full spread article about Commune 2, and particularly its experimentation in child sexual liberation. In an article for Der Spiegel, Jan Fleischauer wrote, quote, for the residents, the cohabitation experiment was an attempt to overcome all bourgeoisie constraints, which included everything from separate bank accounts and closed bathroom doors to fidelity within couples and the development of feelings of shame. The two children were raised by the group, which often meant no one paid much attention to them.

Because the adults had made it their goal not just to tolerate, but in fact affirm child sexuality, they were not satisfied to simply act as passive observers. Kurzbuch 17, the issue of the magazine, contained a series of poster-sized photos. Under the headline, Love Play in the children's room. It depicted Nessim and Grisha both naked. The oversized images are of the sort that one would expect to see in a magazine for pedophiles today. Certainly not in an influential publication of the leftist intelligentsia.

The caption reads Grisha walks over to the mirror, looks at her body, bends forward several times and circling her buttocks with her hands and says, look, my vagina. So what you're seeing here, this is not the same thing that Kintler's doing. It's certainly not as problematic as straight up saying we are handing poor kids to pedophiles because who else will love them. But this is also deeply problematic, right? Now, Fleishauer caught up with a former member of the commune who talked to her about how these kids had done.

This former member told her that Nassim, the boy, felt horror when asked about his time at the commune. But both he and Grishash seemed to have grown up into functional adults. Neither of them really expressed an interest in talking about their childhood, which is their right. I get the feeling they have a lot of anger, but not in the same way as the kids who were placed with pedophiles.

Probably because while the behavior the adults in the commune engaged in was unacceptable, I don't think it involved actual sex, right? Oh, okay. It is enough on that edge, and there are some people who argued for it. It may have, I can't say for certain, right? This is, a lot of these different experiments

flirt at the edge of that. The word flirt is unfortunately literally, it's really, it's messy and it will never know fully with all of this stuff, right? Commune Two though was not an isolated experiment. It was a pilot project, an anti-authoritarian living that was seen as so successful, it was followed by other private kindergartens.

We talked about how a lot of them are people, a lot of whom are educators and academics, are forming these private kindergartens, which are basically communal kindergartners for groups of leftists with kids to have their little kids in. These are experiments in anti-authoritarian education. These are designed to break the kind of patterns that Dr. Schreber and Hauer and like the Nazis had put, that we talked about in the first two episodes of this, right? And there are people who've done this really well.

They just don't sleep with the children. And by the way, not all of these kinderladens are places where children are slept with, right? I don't think most of them were, but this is not a tiny chunk of them either, not even slept with, where kids, where child sexual liberation is a topic of like focus for the parents, right?

That's more accurate to say what we're talking about here. This is not a case of they're talking, like I'm just gonna get into the story. Because this is really messy and complicated and there's a lot to discuss. I'm Scott Weinberger, journalist and former deputy sheriff. In my new podcast series, Cold-Blooded, I'm embedded in the cold case investigation

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on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So these centers called kinderlottens were essentially less extreme than the commune. They involve groups of parents collaborating and creating a learning space for groups of kids. These were not all the same, but in many cases, weird ideas about sex ed were mixed with reasonable ideas for experimental childcare. It attempts to break the notably problematic authoritarian patterns in parenting that had

been a part of the Nazi era, right? That it helped feed into it. Parents, one of the things that people do is like, parents would take kids to protests. They would engage children with political education not seen in normal schools. The idea was you should be able to talk with kids about real issues in the world the way you would with an adult, not necessarily hiding this stuff from them, right? The downside of that is that there was also this idea that, well, if we're going to treat kids like adults in one way, right?

Right. Yeah. Alexander Shuler, an influential figure in the Kinderladen movement, claims that sex ed was the topic most discussed when parents would debate as to how they should structure these things. From Der Spiegel, quote, In 1969, Schuller, a sociologist, was one of the founders of a Kinderladen in Berlin's Wilmersdorf neighborhood. Like Schuller, the other parents were academics, journalists, or university employees, a decidedly

upper middle class lot. Shuler's two sons, four and five years old at the time, grew up without the customary rules and punishments of a government-run daycare facility. But the adults were soon divided over the issue of sex. Some were determined to encourage their children to show and touch their genitalia, while the others were horrified by the idea. It was never addressed quite that directly, but it was clear that in the end, sex with two female teachers was considered," says Schuler.

I found it incredibly difficult to take a stance. I felt that what we were trying to do was fundamentally correct, but when it came to this issue I thought, this is crazy, this just isn't right. But then I felt ashamed of thinking that way. I think many were in the same position. It's that justification for it on a core level. Yeah. The main thing is just don't do that. Don't abuse people. Yes. And then yeah. Especially children. It's when you start centering ideology. Yeah. Before centering how you treat people that not just this but all problems start, right? Yeah. And it takes a full year of debate,

but thankfully in this case, the parents who are like, of course they shouldn't sleep with the teachers did win. There was no sex in this kinderladen. I get the feeling that in this case, the parents who were talking about, like who were suggesting effectively, like sexually assaulted, like that they were ideologically cooked, right?

That they felt like this was the most radical thing they could do and that that would make them better leftists. I say this because it doesn't sound like from Schuler's recollections, the teachers wanted to molest these kids, right? Or that the parent who suggested it wanted to watch or participate. They just felt kind of vaguely that the experience

would help craft more anti-authoritarian youth. It is madness, right? Yeah. And you're right about how it's been injected by pedophiles into this movement, and then everyone's like, fuck, do we have to become pedophiles? And then people are like, no.

No, of course we don't. And thankfully in Schiller's case, the people are like, no, of course not. Do win, right? Yeah. And again, somewhere in that scene,, the people are like, no, of course not, do win, right? Yeah. And again, somewhere in that scene, in the broader Kinderladen scene, there are real pedophiles consciously trying to craft a world

where they can act with impunity. An influential educational tool at the time was the Handbook for Positive Child Endoctrination, which is a bad title for a book. This is a 1968 tract that claimed to help parents quote, create a new person and argued, children can learn to appreciate eroticism and sexual intercourse long before they are capable of understanding how a child is conceived. It is valuable for children to cuddle with adults. It is no less valuable for sexual intercourse to occur during

cuddling. And this is part of why I grounded these episodes by talking about how there was for generations this attitude that like, you do not make any contact with your children other than what is the minimal necessary to maintain their surviving. And the reaction to that goes in an equally insane direction. Like, it's not just, well, of course parents should like hold their kids and express physical affection, but like it's fine if sex occurs, right? It's this rubber band effect.

If when you go in that's insane a direction, it's like you should lock children alone in a room for the first day of their life and never so much as like hug them. When you break that, you're going to wind up in an equally damaging place. And it just, one of the million reasons is so heartbreaking is that it's like, it destroys the safety. Yeah.

The whole point of that affection from a parent. Sorry, I'm trying to get super emotional about it. The whole point of that emotion from the parent, sorry, I'm trying to get super emotional about it. The whole point of that emotion from the parent should be a non-sexual safety. Yeah. You know, and like showing what care and love are, like separate and safe from that kind of, it's so, I know everyone listening knows it's evil, but it just.

Yeah, it's this vile conflation of like, children should have adults with whom they have a safe kind of intimacy that allows them to explore the world. And then twisting that into children should be exploring their bodies with adults, which they should not be, right? Like it's this conflation, no, no, no. Children need to have like a healthy,

intimate relationship with their parents or with the adults who are their caregivers, because that is how you have the security that allows you to go out into the world and meet it, right? Yeah. Yeah. And obviously I think there's no way that handbook wasn't written by a pedophile trying to provide cover for himself and others like him.

But a lot of these very dumb parents did not catch that and worse, awkwardly tried to live up to the supposedly revolutionary standard. Some leftist thinkers like Monica Seifert, a sociologist, were disturbed when the children in her kinderladen did not attempt to have sex with the adults. She concluded the inhibitions and insecurities of the adults had likely forced those children to suppress their sexual curiosity. She saw this as a failure. And what's happening here is that you have in a lot of these kids, this is why I say

most of these people are not pedophiles who have bought into this cooked shit because like you have these attitudes that like well these kids should feel confident Sexually experimented with adults and it doesn't happen because that's not natural Right because the adults don't want it and neither do the kids and the most cooked of these Intellectuals like Seifert are like well clearly we have failed. Yeah Yeah, yeah I'm looking at the equation that someone wrote and it's not happening in real life. Therefore real life is wrong Yeah, exactly. Exactly like this is not it's not naturally

This is not a thing that happens between adults and children It is a thing that has to be forced which is proven in fact by this reaction by how disappointed a lot of these these academics and intellectuals are Unfortunately, some of the parents were equally disappointed and took steps to stimulate their children. Again, these are not mostly pedophiles. This behavior, they're not actually abusing the kids physically, but instead they tell a lot of weird sex jokes and they make a point to use words like cock and vagina constantly

in front of kids. Schuller, who is like, this is kind of how Schuller's kinderladen, they were like, well, and they make a point to use words like cock and vagina constantly in front of kids. Shuler who is like, this is kind of how Shuler's kinder-laden, they were like, well, we won't have children molest students, but instead we'll use sexual terminology around them a lot and tell weird jokes that make them uncomfortable. Shuler looking back on this decades later claims his kids

like overall thought the kinder-laden was a good experience, but quote, they thought the constant chatter about sex was horrible because that's a normal way for children to feel about adults talking about that. Yeah. Right. And actually in pointing out that everything else like, yeah, it was injected into this otherwise really interesting and radical idea that was otherwise good with this. There's a clear problem in pedagogy in our society. Yeah Yeah, yeah, and it is interesting that like yeah, the kids were like well the stuff about like, you know Go into protests learning about politics having kind of like non authoritarian learning structure was great I wish there hadn't been so many weird dick jokes. That was kind of bad

And I think Schuller's the experience of of Schuler's kids does thankfully represent a majority of the kids exposed to this system, which is more what the fuck were our parents thinking than like devastating trauma, right? That is the norm. It's like, boy, that was weird. They were fucking cooked. Something was fucked up in their heads.

Because most of these kids were not molested, right? But between Schuler's kids and Ulrich, who was the boy who Kintler gave to a pedophile, there were a lot of children who still did suffer different degrees of abuse, right? Not as severe as like a kid being fostered with a child molester. But on that spectrum, right? Sophie Dannenberg was one of these children. Her parents were members of the German Communist Party and they sent her to a Kinderladen in Gießen.

As an adult, she interviewed her mother and other people from the Kinderladen and wrote about their experiences in a novel with the excellent title, The Pale Heart of the Revolution. Fleishauer writes of this book, the material she used includes an account of a parent's evening where one of the mothers said that she stripped naked in front of her son so that he could inspect her. In the process, the woman spread her legs to expose her private parts for his inspection. The game ended when the boy stuck a pencil into his mother's vagina. The parents also spent a long time discussing whether it was a good idea to have sex with their own children so as to demonstrate the naturalness of sexual intercourse.

Although the people Dannenberg interviewed did not recall any instances of physical advances, they did describe softer forms of sexual assault, such as pushy demands on children to show their naked bodies. In the novel, which is based on Dannenberg's research, the eight-year-old character Simone is told to strip in front of several adults and other children. Why do you want to hide yourself, the mother says, to the amusement of people standing around when the child instinctively holds a pillow in front of her genitalia? It's a beautiful thing you have there. Show it to us." And yeah, abuse is the closest apt term to describe this.

Totally. It doesn't quite describe how weird it is, right? But it's accurate enough. One author who studied this period cited in Der Spiegel states that objectively speaking, this behavior was child abuse, but writes kind of confusingly, subjectively it wasn't. And that's a weird statement. One I don't really fully, one I don't really agree with, but I want to continue Fleishauer's quote describing it, right?

As outlandish as it seems describing it, right? Okay. As outlandish as it seems in retrospect, the parents apparently had the welfare of the children in mind, not their own. For the adherence to the new movement, the child did not serve as a sex object to provide the adults with a means of satisfying their sexual urges. This differentiates politically motivated abuse from pedophilia. And that's an interesting concept, politically motivated child abuse, right?

It's also not as much behind closed doors. Right. And so we actually probably weirdly know more about it than like the Catholic church sex abuse or the Mother Winter. Yeah, yeah. Which makes me angry because that's a good name for a weird old, you know. Mother Yeah, yeah. Which makes me angry because that's a good name for a weird old, you know.

Mother Winter, yeah, it's very, a lot of this is unfortunate. It's interesting to me kind of making that distinction that like, well, because what you get with a lot of this is these parents who are abusing their kids don't like what they're doing, are personally uncomfortable with it and feel bad that they don't feel better about doing it.

Yeah, and they're like, oh, it's because I'm bourgeois, but the next generation will be truly liberated. They'll be over this, yeah. Fuck, cooked is the right word for it. Cooked is the right word. This is where, this is a problem you get all over the fucking map when it comes to radical politics. The Nazis were obviously trying to create

a new kind of man, right? They write about that constantly. There was also this concept of the new Soviet man, right? And there's often left and right in radical politics, this idea that like, in order to make the world that is possible, the better world that's possible, we have to remake people. And I kind of think you're always doomed and wrong

if that's your goal. Because people don't need to be remade. You have to meet people where they are and make their lives and thus the world better. And if your goal is to like change what people, if you think that's what you're doing, there's so much evil that will be justified as part of that process, no matter how good your goals are.

Because it's a bad thing to wanna do. I know, and it's still important to improve pedagogy. It's still important to raise kids less authoritarianly, and so that they're more inoculated against horrors, but like but yeah, not to Put the wheat into the cold to be like it'll become cold tolerant right he's on the seeds You know, it's it's the difference between saying wow for generations parents wouldn't even hug their kids and we wound up as Nazis We should probably, we were abusing our kids for generations and we should find ways to raise them that are less abusive.

Instead it's, we need to remake our children so that they can, almost so that they can remedy the sins of the past. Which are two different things. Saying that we should not abuse kids the way that we were is different from saying we need to make different people, right? We need to be producing different kinds of people. No, that's actually really interesting

because it's like we're always, oh, Gen Z is gonna save us. And now it's already like, oh, Gen A, is that what's next? Gen Alpha, yeah, the Alphas have got it You know generation and it's a little bit like Let's getting ourselves off the hook. Yeah, like yeah, I objectively have fewer years left ahead of me Probably but then you know, so like maybe it's more on me than it is on the fucking youth

Yeah, yeah And maybe it's on people to figure out how to make the world better and that that's a better place to start than making people better, right? Because if your goal is to make people better, you're usually gonna do something terrible. You're usually gonna do something terrible. If your goal is to make people better

rather than help people, right? That's the distinction. I wanna help people, I wanna make people better. One of those is fine, the other. Totally help people. I want to make people better. One of those is fine The other leads to this shit, you know So anyway when I think of politically motivated child abuse, I do think back to that book to train up a child No, which is that like it's that yeah, what I think of politically motivated child abuse I think of the Washington State Highway Patrol No, not quite yet. But it is, I've always considered that book

to train up a child, which is like, if you look to the Duggars, you know, the IBLP, these like hard right-wing Christian organizations, it's their textbook for how to beat your children to make them better. Okay. I do kind of wonder, I always just saw that as simple child abuse. Is it more accurate to describe that

as politically motivated child abuse? I don't know, it's a bigger topic. Oh yeah, like, cause maybe they don't even, cause hitting your kid cause you're angry, or even hitting your kid cause, oh crap, my kid is about to run out into the street and I can't think of anything else to do. This is all my, the only tool I have in my head, yeah.

Right, so those are both motivated by something different. But yeah, no, versus like, I am neglectful of my duty as a father unless I solemnly and sadly hit my child with a rod. Oh, that's interesting. And I know kids who were like quiver fool who were raised in the religious right, who is like, yeah, that's part of what broke us out

is my parents didn't like doing that, didn't like the discipline. And so I do think it's actually useful to look at a lot of the child abuse that does occur on the right through that this is politically motivated child abuse lens, right? I actually think that might be really important. It didn't really occur to me until I started reading

about these weird German leftists and their ideas of like sex liberation. But anyway, one of the most famous abusers within this system, this like Kinderladen system, this sort of like shit that's coming out of the German left in this period, was Daniel Cohn Bendit, a Green Party politician who was a student leader during a May of 1968 protest in France and was co-president of the European Greens, European

Free Alliance and the EU Parliament. He was a critic of Stalinism and an advocate of libertarian socialism. And part of why I'm bringing him up is we've talked about the communists who are cooked and it is not just the communists who are cooked. It is so not. I was so excited for it to just be the communists, but I wasn't surprised. Plenty of anarchists have this kind of like fucking ideological cookedness to them.

Absolutely. In 1975, Daniel wrote an autobiographical book that described his experience as a kinder-laden teacher. On several occasions, he claimed children opened his fly and stroked his penis. Quote, I was usually quite taken aback. My reactions varied depending on the circumstances. Now, I was not sure whether to classify him as is this a politically motivated abuser or just a pedophile until I read this transcript of a recording that surfaced in 2013.

And this is Daniel talking. At nine in the morning, I joined my eight little toddlers between the ages of 16 months and two years. I wash their butts, I tickle them. They tickle me and we cuddle. You know, a child's sexuality is a fantastic thing. You have to be honest and sincere. With the very young kids, it isn't the same as it is

with the four to six year old kids. When a little five year old girl starts und undressing it's great because it's a game it's an incredibly erotic game oh my that's a pedophile that's a pedophile that's just a pedophile yeah that's just a straight-up pedophile right yeah when this blew up Daniel claimed that what he had been writing was just fiction meant to provoke people okay Okay. Okay. Sure. Okay. This is all tied into like why the part of why it's not,

I'm not gonna say it's a major part, but it's not an insignificant part of like the rise of groups like AFD in Germany right now. Cause a lot of their shit came out very recently and has like blown up support for some of these left wing parties. Like this has done damage recently and provided ammunition to the right in Germany.

Recently. Fair. Because people are furious when they learn out that this was happening, right? Yeah, that's fair. Pedophiles who abuse children are predators, and predators inherently seek to escalate their behavior. As the 70s turned into the 80s, some of these pedophiles who had been camouflaging themselves as childcare reform activists decided to make a grand play for acceptance.

Following in the wake of the gay rights movements, organizations like the Indian Commune in Nuremberg sought to characterize pedophilia as a sexual orientation that deserved to be treated with respect. Now, in true German fashion, the Indian Commune was both an act of cultural appropriation and mind-numbing abuse. Germans, we've talked about this in our very first episodes on Carl May, there's this weird obsession with Native Americans that is based entirely in, almost entirely in the fiction of a guy who never went to America and just lied about Native Americans. Yeah. And it influenced the Nazis loved. Like Hitler was a huge,

like was this kind of weird Native American stand where he was not actually standing any real history just like what this German, but he thought he was. And there's still a lot of weirdness around Native Americans in German society today. This is one example of it, right? The Indian commune is a group of adults and children

who painted each other up like Native Americans or like their conception of Native Americans and showed up at that year's Green Party convention to argue in favor of free sex for adults and children. Almost unbelievably, the Greens gave them a hearing. More than that, in 1985, the Green State Organization in Westphalia argued that nonviolent sexual contact between adults and children should be decriminalized. Another state green party published a position paper making the same argument until public protest forced them to remove it. Again, we're in the 80s by now, so there's pushback to this.

This movement had a name, the pedosexual movement, and it succeeded for a while because a lot of non-pedophiles bought their bullshit. But the driving force behind it was always highly placed influential pederists. In the Green Party, one of these pedophiles was Herman Meir, a leader in the party who lived on a commune that openly advertised engaging in pedophilia. One victim later told the magazine Die Welt that Meir abused him along with quote about 10 men, many of whom were visitors to the commune who seem to have shown up for that purpose. Right? This is a place you can like, yeah, it's so, so vile.

Another pedophile leader of the pedosexual movement was Peter Schult, an anarchist journalist who described himself as a pederast and was convicted of bringing a girl into his house to abuse in 1976. Schult denied the allegations and claimed that he was being punished for his sexuality and political organizing. He attracted a great deal of support and in 1977 he wrote an angry pamphlet attacking anarchists who hadn't supported him. He described them as preaching anarchy while being offended at the sight of lived anarchy, in his words.

I am glad that there were enough anarchists who were mad at him that he had to write that. That he had to write a paper. That's the only thing I'm proud of in any of this story is that people were like, what the fuck? It is, it's one of those things where like, Shult denied the allegations that he had molested a girl,

in part because he was molesting boys. And maybe those specific allegations were wrong, but he talks about molesting boys. Yeah. Yeah. Fuck. Like Kintler, Shult defended his molestation of boys by claiming he was just helping runaways.

And here is what gay historian Hubert Kennedy wrote in Shult's obituary. Peter found and took home the homeless, or they found him. In state institutions, his address was passed from one boy to another as a place where runaways could find temporary shelter. His address was also well known to the authorities, whose authority the anarchist Peter refused to recognize. And he was sent to prison numerous times on charges of drug possession and seducing minors. A number of left-wing publications were, unfortunately, woefully open to the arguments of pedosexual

advocates. Taggeseitung, an alt-weekly publication, published interviews with pedophiles where they discussed how wonderful their sex with little boys was. When G.D. Hintzel, co-founder of the paper, argued that they should not be promoting pedophilia, she was described as being a prude and told, quote, there's no such thing as censorship in the Tagsaitung. Like basically, we don't censor people from talking about molesting children. This is a problem in American left too. I'm not sure if you're going to get into this

during the same time period, you know? We're not in enough. Again, when we talked about Thornley, we did. And we've talked on other shows about an influential anarchist, oh God, what's his fucking name? The Taz guy. Peter Lambert Wilson. Peter Lambert Wilson, Hakeem Bey, who was also,

may not have actually, I don't know if he ever actually molested anyone, but argued in favor of it. Yeah, I'm under the impression of him arguing in favor. Cause it was, yeah, it was in vogue. And it's interesting because it's during this dead period of organizing, I mean, there is some organizing happening, but by and large, the anti-thoracarian left is not doing a lot during the 70s and 80s

because, well, it just was going through a slump. And so the only people around, I mean, not the only people around, there are many people who are against this all along. Yes, and we're about to talk about those. So there are leftists in Germany who speak out against this real big problem. One of them is Gunter Amendt, a social scientist

who argued accurately there is no equitable sexuality between children and adults. Another person on the right side of this- There's no non-violent sexuality between children and adults. Yeah. Another person on the right side of this. There's no non-violent sexuality between children and adults. Right, right. It's inherently violent for an adult to rape a kid, right? Yeah. Alice Schwarzer, who founded a women's magazine,

also lambasted acceptance of pedophilia on the left. From Der Spiegel, quote, Amant recalls how he was disparaged as a reactionary in flyers and articles. There was an outright campaign against Alice and me at the time, he says. It wasn't until the mid 1990s that this horrific episode came to an end. In 1994, the pitos appearing in Tagsaitung for the last time, and even that publication recognized that intercourse with little boys was no different than with little girls, who

thanks to the women's movement have long been deemed worthy of protection. And that's a worthwhile note on this is that when we talk about these people supporting sexual contact with kids from adults, a lot of them, there's the, in the Kinderland movement, it's this broader like, well, we just need to be more open to kids' sexuality for both boys and girls. When it comes to like pairing abused children with pedophiles, you know, both officially through the state as happened with Kintler and kind of unofficially like that anarchist

we talked about did, it's all little boys because there's a broader understanding that you should, like the feminist movement has already pushed through this understanding that that's not acceptable to do with little girls. And it took later for boys, right? And some of this is wrapped up in a lot of really complicated shit

about the suppression of male homosexuals in Germany and throughout the West and how common relationships between much older and much younger men were. Like this is a messy, messy topic. But it is kind of worth noting that like, part of what brings this to an end is when folks start arguing that like, we already agree it is wrong to molest little girls,

why are we treating boys differently? It does come out of this like feminist movement, a lot of the backlash to this that finally succeeds in bringing an end to it. Could you imagine that that's like, you're a feminist during this time and that's what you have to waste? Yeah, do I really have to argue this?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's, oh boy. Speaking of arguing, Margaret, you know what I love to argue in favor of? Commercial enterprise through advertisement? That's right, that's right.'s right in this case it's a welcome relief I'm talking about you know this German pilot cleanser hey girlfriends it's me Carol Fisher I'm so excited to tell you about the brand new

series of the girlfriends in season one we told you about the murder of Gail Katz at the hands of my ex-boyfriend Bob. At one point, a woman's torso washed up on Staten Island and was misidentified as Gail. She spent nine years in Gail's grave and then she just disappeared. It's almost like it's become this moral obligation to find her.

And that's what we're going to do. Find this missing girlfriend and tell her story. With the help of some of your favorite girlfriends from season one, like my producer Anna. Oh my god. My friend Dr. Mindy Shapiro. Hi it's Dr. Shapiro and I'd like to speak with the deputy medical examiner. And of course, Gail's sister, Elaine Katz. Having no closure, it kills you. Join us as we try to solve a 35-year-old cold case. It's not going to be easy, but it's going to be one hell of a ride. What?

I can't believe this. Listen to season two of The Girlfriends, Our Lost Sister on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Scott Weinberger, journalist and former deputy sheriff. In my new podcast series, Cold-Blooded, The Apollo Gym Mur murders, I'm embedded in the cold case investigation into the death of firefighter Billy Halpert. It's just a little shame, you know, that they took him for a month. Experience this investigation in a truly unique way, knocking on doors, uncovering new evidence, including the DNA of a potential killer.

My name is Danny Smith. I'm a detective with the Myanmar Police Department. This is Scott Weinberger. We're actually reopening an old case and your name came up. Untangling secrets that may reveal the answers to not only one murder, but almost a dozen. I thought they were going to kill me, so I kept my mouth shut and I didn't say anything all these years. I didn't say anything all these years. I didn't say listen to cold

blooded the Apollo Jim murders on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Neil Strauss host of the tender for TV true crime podcast to live and die in La. I'm here to tell you about the new podcast. I've been undercover investigating the last year and a half. It's to live and die in LA. I'm here to tell you about the new podcast I've been undercover investigating for the last year and a half. It's called To Die For. Here's a clip. All these girls were sent out into the world and they were told, try to meet important

men, try to attach yourself to important men. The voice you're hearing is a Russian model agent telling me about spies sent out to seduce men with political power. The war in Ukraine is also being fought by all these girls that are all over important cities. For the first time, a military-trained seduction spy reveals how the Russian government turned sex and love into a deadly weapon. If you want to kill your target, it's easy. You just seduce him, take him somewhere, start having sex, and then he's very vulnerable

so you can kill him easily. To Die For is available now. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. And speaking of back, let's get back to the story of Dr. Helmut Kintler and his plan to pair foster kids with pedophiles. This continued all through the 1980s, even after the pedosexual movement faded in popularity thanks to belated resistance from within the left.

The best documented victim of Kentler's specific program was a boy named Marco. In 1988, Marco was crossing the street alone when he was hit by a car. This was a minor incident. He was not severely injured, thankfully, but his injury, the fact that he was not attended, right, drew the attention of a local youth welfare office, which was also run by the Berlin government from the New Yorker. Caseworkers at the office observed that Marco's mother seemed unable to give him the necessary emotional attention.

She worked at a sausage stand and was struggling to manage parenthood on her own. Marco's father, a Palestinian refugee, had divorced her. She sent Marco and his older brother to daycare in dirty clothes and left them there for 11 hours. Caseworkers recommended that Marco be placed in a foster home with a family-like atmosphere. One described him as an attractive boy who was wild, but very easy to influence. Hinkel, a 47-year-old single man who supplemented his income as a foster father by repairing jukeboxes and other electronics.

Marco was Hinkle's eighth foster son in 16 years. When Hinkle began fostering children in 1973, a teacher noted that he was always looking for contact with boys, Hinkle specifically. Now again, this is part of, this is a result of the program that Kintler has instituted. Kintler is in contact with Hinkel. Marco has two parents. Both of them are in his life. They're separated, but his dad, the Palestinian refugee, is in his life and so is his mom.

They are both just poor. And so as a result, they're scrambling to make enough money to get by, which means there are times when this kid is not watched as much as would be ideal. The state takes him away from them for that, probably in part because there's a lot of writing about how once they see his dad, they're like, well, we have to keep him away from this dangerous Muslim, this authoritarian influence. It's really, really fucked up. So people in the Senate and educational offices

within the Berlin city government were well aware that Hinkel was a pedophile adopting boys, eight boys by the time he fosters Marco, right? They don't stop any of this. Again, this is when I talk about guys like Kintler being like, well, some kids are in such desperate straits that being with a pedophile is best for them. This is what they mean.

Well, this kid's mom and dad are separated and they're not people like us. Yeah, one of them's Muslim. So it must be better for him to be raped repeatedly, right? That is the calculation they're making. Yeah. In 1989, a caseworker wrote that Hinkle was in a quote, homosexual relationship with one of his foster sons, possibly Marco.

A prosecutor, and again, this is not a relationship. I'm not calling it. That is what the caseworker calls it in 1989. A prosecutor did call for an investigation, but Helmut Kintler, who described himself as Hinkel's permanent advisor and also called Hinkel regularly to talk politics, intervened. Kintler described himself to this prosecutor as the, quote, nation's chief authority on questions of sexual education. And at this point, he was famous. He is regularly interviewed in the news.

He is consulted by political leaders. He is a prominent and respected academic. He sends a letter on University Letterhead to this prosecutor issuing an expert opinion on Henkel saying, I've gotten to know this guy. Well, through a research project we're both engaged in. Henkel is a wonderful parent and he attacks the wild interpretations of this psychologist who had accused him of pederasty. The threats of an investigation went away.

Several times a year, Hinkle would drive to see Kintler at the school where he'd taught. Kintler would study the children and take notes. He was happy enough with Hinkle that he kept a ready stream of boys heading into the pedophile's home. After Marco had been there 18 months, he was joined by a kid named Sven, who had been found at age seven begging for money in a subway station. The youth welfare office noted that since he'd likely never experienced a positive parent-child relationship, he was a good candidate for Kintler's program.

Because he's not going to get one now, so. The solutions to all, both of these kids' problems, to the extent that Marco had a problem, the solution was, well yeah, there should have been some sort of social welfare net to ensure that his mom didn't have to work these long shifts at the sausage factory so that she had more time for her kids. There should be like state funded daycare and stuff.

You know, there should be programs, the same thing with the, oh, there's a homeless kid begging for money. You know what we should do? Get him off the street and not into a pedophile's house. Right? Like these are not complex problems. We're not talking about like intractable issues What we should do, get him off the street and not into a pedophile's house, right? These are not complex problems.

We're not talking about intractable issues of geopolitics. Anyway, I'm going to quote again from The New Yorker. The two boys took on different roles in their new family. Sven was the good son, docile and loving. Marco was more defiant. But at night, when Henkel came into his room asking to cuddle or waiting for him while he brushed his teeth before bed, he had to comply. I just accepted it out of loyalty because I didn't know anything else, Marco told

me. I didn't think what was happening was good, but I thought it was normal. I thought of it a little bit like food. People have different tastes in food, the way some people have different tastes in sexuality." If Sven's bedroom door was open and he wasn't there, Marco knew what was happening, but the two boys never talked about what Henkel did to them. It was an absolutely taboo subject, Marco said. One day, Marco took a knife from the kitchen and slept with it under his pillow.

When Henkel approached his bed and discovered the blade, he withdrew quickly, and he called Helmut Kintler, and he then handed the phone to Marco. Kintler asked him why he had brought the knife into his bed and Marco said, there's a devil behind my wall. Kintler had a calming, grandfatherly presence. He assured Marco that there was no such thing as devils and Marco agreed to surrender the knife.

Never give up your knife, kids. Never ever give up your fucking knife. Well, it's interesting because it compares to how we talked about demons in our head last week's episode, you know? There's ways that people are going to conceptualize the abuse that they're suffering. It's something almost so awful you have to turn it into a metaphor

because you can't even, like you can't even look at it directly even though it's happening to you. Yeah. I got really excited for where that story could go. I know, I know. I got it, it's happening to you. Yeah. I got really excited for where that story could have gone. I know, I know. I got it, it's heartbreaking. I, it would be great if this ended

with a pedophile being stabbed to death, but it does not. I know, and then it's like, and also like most of the time, it's like, then you're like, you want that kid to have to have done that. And then you're like, I will say- Like, kid's life isn't gonna get better, maybe. This is bad stuff.

I will say, this is a happy ending. This is a legit, Marco's story has a legitimately wonderful ending. So that is good. I wanna promise you that now. No, I'm excited. Because we have some more bad stuff to get through. Yeah, okay.

So Marco still has a family. He has a mother and father. They visit sometimes. Again, they're separated, but like they visit both separately and together and they try to get him back. But Henkel has all the power.

He would cancel visits at will minutes before they were set to begin, or he would end them early, often claiming that Marco's mother was disruptive to Marco's emotional state. The stress and drama Henkel created around these visits caused Marco to wet his bed and fail to focus at school. And Kintler used this as an excuse to end the visits entirely, telling the welfare office that Marco's educational successes are ruined by seeing his mom. Marco's Palestinian father was not allowed to visit at all because Henkel told authorities that Marco said he'd been beaten by his father.

I think Marco has said that this was not true, but like he is backing up anything Hinkle says because Hinkle is his caregiver. And as he states, I didn't know I could disagree with him about stuff, right? Now there are times that authorities saw through these lies. One of the mandated child therapists that Marco saw described Hinkle as holding the boy prisoner

during their sessions. Several different mandated therapists complained, but anytime stuff started to move in a way where like maybe the kids would be taken away from Henkel, Kintler would swoop in. He told the youth welfare office they were not qualified to assess a child who was as damaged as Marco. If an assessment was needed, only Kintler was established enough to do it. Yeah. The cops can investigate themselves. Right, right, exactly. He acknowledged that Hinkle could appear harsh and hurtful, but this was not so. Quote, I ask you to consider that a man who deals with such seriously damaged children is not a simple person. What Mr. Hinkle needs from the authorities is trust

and protection. It is the cop argument. What they. Henkel needs from the authorities is trust and protection. It is the cop argument. What they're dealing with is so dangerous and vile, but they have to use extreme measures. And we can't, we're not qualified to question them, right? It is, anytime you hear that logic, it means someone is doing something terrible. Yeah.

Marco's parents spent years trying to get him back. This is not something, he realizes as an adult, oh my God, I was not abandoned. My parents fought for me. These two poor people, one of whom is a Palestinian refugee were basically ranged against the entire power of the city government of Berlin, which was being effectively wielded

by this weird pedophile philosopher against them. You know? Yeah. There is a court case. Henkel coaches Marco to tell the judge that he wanted to stay with his foster father, who he called Papa. Marco claims, I didn't really know what was going on. I did not understand that my parents were fighting

to have a connection to me. I thought that they had basically abandoned me and I was scared of angering Henkel and also traumatized from the near nightly abuse. Right? Yeah. There was one bright spot in his childhood, which is that, and it's a weird one, is that his, again, pedophile who is fostering him gets a third foster son. This foster son is a disabled little boy named Marcel.

Now, the fact that Henkel, the pedophile, sought to take possession of a boy who could not walk or talk is horrifying in ways that I cannot describe and will not labor on. But Marco and Sven came to love Marcel and treat him as their own blood. They took care of this boy because he was their brother. From The New Yorker, Marco and Sven became Kramer's caretakers, feeding him strawberry-flavored milk with a spoon and removing mucus from his lungs with a suction hose. When they went to Hinkel's house in Brandenburg, west of Berlin, Marco pushed Kramer for hours on a tire swing.

Kramer was the first person in years for whom Marco had felt love." The fact that both of these kids being so profoundly abandoned and abused when they see this disabled boy who is in desperate need of not just medical care, but attention provided is a wonderful bit of light in this. Marco struggles with school, obviously. Part of this is because Hinkle is encouraging him to neglect his studies and misbehave, right? Because the worst Marco does in school, the more they have an excuse, they switch schools

every year, which means that no adults get to spend enough time around Marco to realize what is going on. Hinkle is a very effective and methodical abuser, and that's what's going on here. His tactics work until Marco goes through puberty and starts lifting weights. One night when Henkel came to molest him, Marco fought back, not even a lot, but that spelled the end of him being molested forever. Henkel, of course, still responds aggressively to this in his own way. He would lock the kitchen at night. He justified it to Kintler by claiming that Marco was greedy. He would fight back, but he did not keep molesting Marco. Right, because he was afraid of him.

Because he was afraid of him now. Now, here's where things get complicated. When Marco turns 18, you might expect him to have gotten the hell out of the house, but he doesn't. He lives with Henkel for three more years. He says part of this is that he didn't even consider leaving to be possible. Quote, it's very hard to describe, but I was never raised to think critically about anything. I had an empty mind. Those are his words.

He says this, but there is a very clear reason he stayed with Henkel, which is that his beloved adopted brother is living there too. Marcel is there. Marco willingly stays in the house of his abuser for three years so that he can continue to be a caregiver to his brother. This only ends when Marcel dies after a 48-hour flu. Marco says he always checked on his brother multiple times throughout the night to make sure he was breathing. So he noticed very quickly that something was wrong. He tried to get Henkel to call for an ambulance, but Henkel did not want any of the boys going

to doctors. And so Marcel died while Marco watched. Quote, I was looking into his eyes when he died. Now this does not prompt an investigation into Henkel. Marcel was an abandoned disabled child and was thus of less than no value to the youth welfare office. His file simply noted call from Mr. Hen, who said Marcel died unexpectedly last night. Previously, there were no signs of an infection.

The following note says that Hankel, now 60, wanted to adopt another boy. So talking about how long this goes, Marcel dies in 2001. Kentler's program experiment is still going into the 21st century. Yeah, 2001 felt very, yep. That's too recent. Kentler is a respected figure at this moment. This only starts to change when an academic, Theresa Nintwig, began researching and writing about Kentler for her thesis.

She had struggled to find good information on this pedophile foster program and noticed that most of the files were missing from the city archives because they had been deliberately removed. Kentler died in 2008, but even after that point, he had loyal friends still in government and academia and they fought back against her attempts to expose him. Eventually, her university contract was canceled and she blames this on the fact that she chose to research Kintler. She eventually wrote a book on the man, which revealed that he was not just some wild-eyed

academic who bought into bogus science. He was also a pedophile. Kintler, a single man, adopted three sons and fostered several more children. Two of his foster sons have accused him of sexual abuse. They initially went to Karen Deserat, an author and researcher who quote, owed a lot to Kintler and thus referred the boys to another therapist rather than do anything when they came out to her. She claims the boys themselves wanted the abuse kept quiet because they quote, didn't

want to lose the positives of Kintler's care, that they had enough to eat and that they were taken care of in things like that. I'm going to read another quote from that New Yorker article about kind of the collapse of Kentler's reputation. Gunter Schmidt, a former president of the International Academy of Sex Research, which attracts the field's leading researchers, was friends with Kentler for more than 20 years. I honestly had respect for it, he told Nantwig of the experiment, because I thought, these are really young people who are in the worst situation.

They probably have a long history at home. They had miserable childhoods and someone is looking after them. And if Kintler is there, it'll be fine," he added. And the Berlin Senate is also there. When Kintler was 57, he wrote Schmidt a letter explaining why he was aging happily rather than becoming lonely and resigned. He and his 26-year-old son were, quote, part of a very fulfilling love story that had lasted 13 years and still felt fresh.

To understand his state of mind, Kintler wrote, his friends should know his secret. Kintler seems to have reappraised his belief that pedophiles were good caregivers to abandoned children in 1991 after that adopted son that he had bragged about having a good relationship with, committed suicide. Now, it's unclear to me if Kintler, and this is still a bit of a mystery to me, is he, how much of this was like he's in this ideological space and how much of this is he was always a pedophile?

I really don't know with Kintler. Because he claims to have recognized that there was like, he had made errors in his beliefs around this stuff after his adopted son commit, and abuse victim commits suicide. He would later claim that during the 90s he reads this essay by a Hungarian psychoanalyst, Sandor Farinsky, that changed his mind on pedophilia. Farinsky wrote that sexual relationships between adults and children were always exploitative and dangerous for children. After his son's suicide, Kentler cited this paper often, but never admitted

to molesting his own adopted children. He simply said that his child had been molested by his birth mother and committed suicide due to that. And you know. So he's just avoiding responsibility. That's how I interpret this. Yeah. And there's definitely a period after which he claims to have recognized that, you know, this was wrong, that he's still in contact with Henkel, right? And still actively helping him to continue to abuse kids. So I don't buy Kintler's story here. No, this is not enough of a turning around to any kind of redemption arc.

No. The happiest ending I can give you is to continue the story of Marco. When he left Henkel's home at age 21, he had nothing and nowhere to live. He spent nights homeless, sleeping on benches before a charity for homeless youth found him a subsidized apartment. Hankel had done so little to educate him that Marco didn't know that people had to pay for electricity. He stumbled through life for a while, picking up

the basics of survival but stuck in what he describes as a sort of hibernation. After five years, he began to feel as if he were a monster due to his lack of empathy and destructive outbursts. This culminated in a fight on a Berlin train when he noticed three men staring at him and just beat the shit out of them, sending one man to the ER. Marco was horrified by himself. The way he interprets this is like, I am turning into Henkel who abused me. He made a commitment to change. Not long after this, he was walking down the street when a woman, a photographer, complimented

his appearance and asked, do you want to do any modeling for me? So he sat for some photos with her and this didn't lead to any modeling work, but he becomes friends with this woman and he starts to meet other people through her and he gets a friend group. Right? Yeah. He describes the experience of learning how to have friends as similar to learning a foreign language through immersion in another culture, right?

Eventually, Marco met a woman. They got married, had children, and today he is a devoted father and family man. His very life is proof that Kentler and the other experts in the child psychology of the era were wrong. Abused children are not condemned to a life where the only people who might care for them are pedophiles, right? People can recover from the most traumatic things imaginable

if they are provided with the support and love necessary to enable healing. And thankfully, Marco was. He makes friends, he develops relationships that are equal relationships with other adults, and he heals himself, right? Becomes a father and like, it's the best possible ending that this guy has.

And there's even this coda, he gets when all of this stuff starts to come out, like around 2018, Marco is contacted by a guy who works for Alternative for Deutschland, Germany's far right party as an advisor for education and cultural policy. And this guy, Schwerer, reads about Marco in a Der Spiegel article in 2018

about Kintler's experiment. And he's like, you know, he starts basically offering help from the AFD. He claimed it's not for political purposes, but like to really help him get justice from the parliament, right, to like get some money out of them. So that he could be a poster boy for the far right. And that is what happened for a while, right?

The AFD holds stop Kentler's sex ed rallies to protest the way that sexuality is taught in German schools. They argue that Kentler's criminal pedophile spirit lives on unbroken in today's sexual education. While this is going on, Marco is, you know, taking this guy's help for a while and eventually the German Senate authorizes 50,000 euro payouts to Marco and Sven and I think to a couple

of other abuse victims of Kintler's experiment. It's not common for there to be compensation for damages and significant amounts in Germany in the same way it is in the US. This is like seen as a significant amount. After the Senate makes this basically, and the Senate apologizes, right? So not only do they give them money, they're like, this was bad, this was a fuck up. Christopher Schwer, the AFD advisor advises Marco and Sven

to keep fighting at this point, to like basically be posters for this movement where you're basically, where you're arguing kind of everything about sex ed in Germany is based in Kintler and that's evil. Marco is like, well, I don't understand why I would do that. Like we've got our wishes. There's no point in continuing to like fight the Senate. They did the thing that we wanted them to do.

Quote from the New Yorker, but Schwerer kept pushing him, Marco said. Schwerer denies this then I slowly got suspicious That's Marco. I asked myself. What else should I want? That's when I got the feeling that the AFD just wants to use me to play me up and I said I don't want to Be a political tool. I don't want to get pulled into an election campaign But it's just like it's remarkable to me like How fucking dope this guy is.

Like, how strong you have to be to, like, make yourself into the man he became, given what was done to him. It's a really remarkable story. Yeah. So I guess this bastard's episode ended with a cool person who did cool stuff. Yeah. Congratulations, Marco. Yeah. Hey, girlfriends, it's me, Carol Fisher.

I'm so excited to tell you about the brand new series of The Girlfriends. In season one, we told you about the murder of Gail Katz at the hands of my ex-boyfriend Bob. At one point, a woman's torso washed up on Staten Island and was misidentified as Gail. She spent nine years in Gail's grave, and then she just disappeared. It's almost like it's become this moral obligation to find her. And that's what we're going to do. Find this missing

girlfriend and tell her story with the help of some of your favorite girlfriends from season one like my producer Anna. Oh my god. My friend Dr. Mindy Shapiro. Hi it's Dr. Shapiro and I'd like to speak with the deputy medical examiner. And of course Gailail's sister, Elaine Katz. Having no closure, it kills you. Join us as we try to solve a 35-year-old cold case. It's not gonna be easy, but it's going to be one hell of a ride.

What? I can't believe this. Listen to season two of The Girlfriends, Our Lost Sister on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Scott Weinberger, journalist and former deputy sheriff. In my new podcast series, Cold-Blooded, The Apologim Murders, I'm embedded in the cold case investigation into the death

of firefighter Billy Halpern. It's just a little shame, you know, that they took him from us. Experience this investigation in a truly unique way, knocking on doors, uncovering new evidence, including the DNA of a potential killer. My name is Danny Smith. I'm a detective. There are police department. This is Scott Weinberger. We're actually reopening an old case and your name came up

untangling secrets that may reveal the answers to not only one murder, but almost a dozen. But they were going to kill me so I kept my mouth shut. I didn't say anything all these years. I didn't say listen to cold-blooded the, The Apologizer Murders on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Neil Strauss, host of the Tenderfoot TV True Crime podcast, To Live and Die in LA.

I'm here to tell you about the new podcast I've been undercover investigating for the last year and a half. It's called To Die For. Here's a clip. All these girls were sent out into the world and they were told, try to meet important men, try to attach yourself to important men. The voice you're hearing is a Russian model agent telling me about spies sent out to seduce men with political power.

The war in Ukraine is also being fought by all these girls that are all over important cities. For the first time, a military-trained seduction spy reveals how the Russian government turned sex and love into a deadly weapon. If you want to kill your target, it's easy. You just seduce him, take him somewhere, start having sex, and then he's very vulnerable, so you can kill him easily. To Die For is available now. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

How are we feeling at the end of this all, Margaret? I actually feel OK, so I expected to just feel absolutely awful. And it's not just it helps that you I really appreciated you ending with something something positive a little positive. But also I like learned a lot in terms of, you know, so just like, oh, there's some bad people and they do bad stuff. Right? Instead this like, there's this thing that every ideology, like you're even in this where you're talking about like the left and the liberal government are two different ideologies.

Right? talking about like the left and the liberal government are two different ideologies, right? And both of these stories have had like pedophilia injected into them and then baked into an ideological structure. And one of them is the ideological structure of the foster care system and the other is of the like kindergarten system of radicals or whatever. And so it's just like every ideology across the board, if there's a way that pedophiles can try to interject their awful nightmare ideas into it, they like will and do. And so I appreciate watching that stop. I appreciate that like feminist discourse

was able to interject and say, hey, this is actually bad. And then like, and it's interesting cause you mentioned the, the maybe Austrian or Czech or something, the guy who wrote the essay that was like, actually you can't have any consensual relations between. Who was that?

One sec. Hungarian psychoanalyst Sandor Ferencsy. And so. Or. Yes, yes, yes. Who is that? One sec. Hungarian psychoanalyst Sandor Forensky. And so. Or Forenzy. Yeah. Forenzy? It's one of those things where it's like, you know, because I became an adult after

that paper was written. I sort of take it for granted that, well, don't we know that? Yeah. But I'm like, I guess. Shouldn't this have been obvious? Yeah. And I'm like, somehow wasn't. And I try not to always sit in judgment of the people of the past

But there's like some stuff or like slavery and pedophilia where I'm like sure no Yeah, that was people and bad. Yeah, and lots of people knew it You know and actually slavery is like a weirdly comparable thing where like everyone's like every ideology came up with a way to make it Okay, and then people of every ideology were like Well, except certain ideologies that were just pro-slavery or whatever. But like yeah Overall people are like I don't think you can like own a guy and people like the Bible says you could own a guy and other People be like well the Bible says fight to stop evil evil. I'm gonna pick these paragraphs and not those ones, right? Yeah, I'm gonna pick the I'm gonna pick the

Theorists on the left to like I'm gonna pick the academic Teresa Nintwig who started Reese who like lost a position in Academia because she wanted to expose Kintler And not Kintler, you know You this is why again? And not Kintler, you know? This is why, again, if you're rooting everything in ideology to the point where you can't see anything else, it makes you vulnerable to this sort of thing. There should be... You need your own personal...

Not to... I don't know, the US government, the way we do things, obviously there's a lot of flaws, but one of the things that provides some protection is that we have a bill of rights. And you kind of have to have a personal bill of like, what are my lines politically? Totally. Like morally? What's not? It's like how I have a personal line that if you're killing children, I don't care why

you're justifying it. I don't care if your political cause is righteous. I don't care if they're justifying it. Yeah, I don't care if your political cause is righteous I don't care if they're the czar's kids. You shouldn't kill kids. That's as ours kids were the people I thought of immediately Yeah, that's one of my lines. Yeah, don't get children And it gets into this awkward thing where like overall I'm pretty pro Nat Turner and then I'm like, well There's this thing where I would have disagreed real strongly. Yeah I think I would argue he was in a position where it was not possible for him to really take Better actions because of what what slavery does to people?

Yeah, I think that's completely fair and I am not like yeah, I'm not I'm not coming out against that So I his desperation was like they were not going to win and like well, what do you do then? You know, what do you do? Do you stop that? I don't know. This is all these things are messy Morality is messy, but it's also easy to hold a line that says I don't think it's okay to kill kids I don't think adults should be fucking kids These are not acceptable behaviors like child rape is not acceptable child murder is not acceptable My politics have to agree with my morals because those are removable, right?

Right. And there's the difference between using an ideological label as your definition versus your description. I have a set of things that I believe in and those things map closest for me to what I would call anarchism, right? Yeah. But it's not, I don't sit there at the end of the day and think, well, as an anarchist, what should I do?

I think as me and what I believe, what do I do? And so if, if the label, the label doesn't, that's not what's important here. I don't pick, you know, even as like a, like a trans girl or whatever, I don't like wake up in the morning and be like, what does a trans girl do? I'm like, no, I do what I do. And then the closest gender label to what I do in my own head is trans girl. And yeah, we get so caught up in it. I think a root of when we talk about these, the middle part of these very uncomfortable

episodes where all of these German parents parents who didn't work were uncomfortable with sexualizing their children, but thought they had to for ideological reasons. And when I read about people doing that, it's like, oh, well, you don't know who you are. Yeah, totally. That's why you were, you had no idea who you were, right? Totally.

You took on this ideology because it comfortingly gave you an identity, but you didn't, you hadn't figured out the person that you were. You were using your ideology as an excuse to not do that. And that is, again, that makes you vulnerable about to stuff like this. You do, even when you realize like,

oh, how clearly like certain things politically are obvious, are obviously right, are obviously wrong, you know, are obviously wrong. That doesn't, that's not an excuse to not figure out who you are. Yeah. One, and then the people who are against, like, cause right now in the US discourse, the people who are so actively against

and militantly against pedophilia, the people who are claiming that are often these like far right people who are actually against like me existing and giving talks in public Because I like wear a dress or something right? Yeah, and that and so in some ways people are then becoming useful idiots because I listen to everything you're saying and I'm like man I I Sure wouldn't be sad if someone broke into that man's house and shot him to death. No, that would have been dope Several men in this story should have been murdered. Yeah, absolutely and yeah, and What's hard is that?

But you can also convince people That people need to get murdered as if they are the same as that thing like this is a part of why it's so aggravating I'm like, oh they conflated it with like the Green Party conflating it with homosexuality And so people are like, yeah, it's conflated. So kill all the gays. And like, no, stop pedophilia. And if violence is necessary to stop it, I don't care. You know? But like, it's so, oh.

I think this is, as we deal with, as we talked about the end of this, like the really bad faith right wing, sort of how they make use of this while ignoring their own complicity in child molestation, which is constant both in religious organizations and stuff like Christian organizations lobbying for child marriage, right?

Which is the norm in the US. Fucking Ted Cruz is a big fan of children being able to get married. And that's supporting a kind of pedophilia. It is. Yes, absolutely. Politically motivated abuse, you know? In the same way that these fucked up leftists are. married and that's supporting a kind of pedophilia. It is. Yes. Absolutely. Politically motivated abuse, you know, in the same way that these fucked up leftists are.

But the fact that the right does this and has in the current period more political success doing this sort of thing doesn't mean we can ignore this history because like it's important, not just maybe we're, maybe we will never again have influential pedophiles on the left, you know, pushing through this kind of politics into like actual action. Maybe, I don't know that I think that's like, but there will be, and currently is in fact, other things, right? This is why you have to like have certain immovable

moral beliefs about what's okay to do to people and why you also have to be willing to, like those academics we talked about who endured that harassment campaign, when they were like, well obviously it's wrong to rape children, right? They had zines made about them being evil, you know? You've got that fucking anarchist journalist

being like, these other anarchists who don't like what I'm doing, they don't really believe in lived anarchy, you know? Yeah. Like, oh, you know what? If that, if I thought that was true, if I thought anarchy meant that I wouldn't be an anarchist anymore and I would fight them. Absolutely not. Yes, of course.

The important thing here isn't the label. Yeah. But to the people who, for whom the important thing is the label, hearing something like that can be a thought terminating phrase, right? You're not practicing lived anarchy. Well, then you stop thinking about what the actual issues was like, well, this guy's molesting homeless kids, right? You start to think about like, well, ideologically,

where am I on that? No, no, no, no, just hit the guy. Right. You know, like you're good. Totally, yeah. Like free knives for the homeless kids. Yeah, yeah, free knives for homeless kids. Yeah.

Oh. Homeless kids. Yeah. Yeah, three knives were homeless kids I tell you I never met anyone who practiced stabbing more than my When I was a when I was a teenage street kid and one of my friends was a teenage sex-working street kid That that kid was stabby and he probably learned to be. I hope he is alive and well. Mm-hmm. Yep. And I hope he still has a knife, you know? If you want to read about teenage- can I have an awful segue into my- Mm-hmm.

Yes. No, no, no. Great. Yeah. Yeah. If you want to read about teenagers learning to find themselves and using medieval weaponry, I have a- when I say YA book, it's actually a crossover book. It's a book that admits that its audience is also adults. And it's called The Sapling Cage and it is coming out from

Feminist Press in September, but it has been kickstarted in June and you can sign up now on the Kickstarter for more information about it and Robert read it and so therefore it has to be good. I love it. It's a fucking great book. Because Robert only reads good books. A lot of good spear talk in it, which I'm always a fan of. We need to re-normalize the use of spears as a personal defense weapon.

You know, the way in which some people in street demonstrations use long poles is a very similar thing. Spears are very good at making space. Yeah, you need to be phalanx maxing with your friends and colleagues, right? You need to be protecting, covering each other with your shield arm, moving as a unit, learning how to wheel on command

and preparing to face cavalry charges. These are the kinds of things that the kids need to be into these days. All of those things happen in 2024 America. Yeah. Watch out for the Cossacks. Watch out for the Cossacks. They're still around and they're not the original Cossacks.

Those guys are actually fighting. I know. Yeah, those guys. Yeah. Anyway, good stuff. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com,

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