Behind the Bastards - Part Two: The Goat Testicle Implanting Doctor Who Invented Talk Radio

Episode Date: June 13, 2019

Robert is joined again by Caitlin Durante to continue discussing John Brinkley. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's being surgically inserted, my glands? I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards. This is part two of our epic episodes on John Brinkley, the man who put goat balls into people. Caitlin Durante, how are you doing? I'm so good. Happy to be here. Happy to be here and about goat balls? Here and hearing about goat balls.

Now, would you say that by this point in the series, you have now heard the phrase goat balls and variations thereof more than you had in the entire rest of your life put together? With 100% certainty, yes. You know, that was actually the original founding goal of this podcast, was to achieve that. And it took us a year in change, but I'm very proud. Yeah. I mean, you accomplished that goal, so congratulations and so happy to be a part of it. We did it, Sophie. Let's break it down. Podcast over, everybody.

This whole episode is just to celebrate that milestone. Yay. All right, no, I'm going to talk more about John Brinkley. In fall of 1923, as John and many Brinkley were on their way back from their Asian adventure, an undercover investigative journalist named Harry Thompson published a bombshell expose on Diploma Mills. The first article did not mention Dr. Brinkley at all, but when he heard about the article, he knew it represented a mortal threat to his practice. Because Harry Thompson was reporting on exactly the sort of fake diploma operations

that had given him a fake diploma back in 1915. Now, roughly 25,000 practicing doctors in the United States at this period were in reality fake doctors. That's a lot of fake doctors. Now, many had received their credentials from Diploma Mills like Brinkley, but others had just bought the diplomas of dead doctors from their widows and paid for the answers to medical exams. All of this was very common. Yeah, yeah.

Now, fake degrees from Diploma Mills were by far the easiest kind of doctor fraud to expose, and before long, John Brinkley was revealed as the fraud that he was. When he arrived back in Milford to his newly completed radio station, doctor, not a doctor, Brinkley started his radio career by haranguing journalists for being, he didn't use the term fake news, but that was the idea. He accused them of being shamefully in league with the sinister AMA, which he called a monopoly against the public interest, because they wanted doctors to have medical licenses. How dare they?

How dare they? By July of 1924, a grand jury had convened to hand out indictments to people who had been handed out fake medical degrees and to people who had received fake medical degrees and practiced with them. Brinkley was one of the men indicted, but the governor of Kansas refused to extradite him to San Francisco to stand trial. He said, We in Kansas get fat on his medicine. We're going to keep him here so long as he lives. Now, did this governor have goat balls inside of him?

And is that maybe why? Probably right. Yeah. Probably right. I'm going to guess that governor had some goat testicles shoved up inside him. Maybe even a couple of pairs. Yeah. I mean, did anyone get more than one operation?

Like are there some people with like 14 goat balls inside them? They're probably right. I'm going to guess there's some rich guys who were like, One set of goat testicles is good. I won't fucking give me four. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

That's my guess too. Now, Brinkley responded to his victory by telling his audience that the persecution he had faced had been, No more justified than the persecution of Christ. He loved comparing himself to Jesus. By this point, Brinkley's radio presence probably had as much to do with his continued freedom as his million dollar goat gland operation. I'd like to quote from the book Border Radio, which describes Dr. Brinkley's early radio offerings.

Quote, Methodist and Episcopal Church Services, Masonic Lectures, Light Music from the 9th Cavalry US Army Orchestra, French Lessons from Kansas State Colleges College of the Air, These and other uplifting and inspiring performances went forth from the broadcasting tower of KFKB at 1050 kilo cycles on the radio dial. Dr. himself gave the medical lectures over the station three times a day, telling of his success in the field of goat gland research.

He urged those disgusted with becoming below par to listen to his broadcasts, and he became a warm and well-trusted radio personality, as he described the symptoms of nephritis, arteriosclerosis, and paralysis agintons. Dr. Brinkley spoke conversationally with a well-oiled country accent, blending flat Midwestern intonation at a smoky mountain drawl, building on the faith and sympathy of his largely rural audience. The radio physician combined earthly country language with just enough Latin medical terminology to impress and confuse most anyone.

According to one listener, his voice would just wound you. The New York Times described him as having a soothsayers mysterious voice, and listeners from all over the Midwest agreed with the fan who said, There's something about Dr. Brinkley that gets close to your heart. So he had a great voice! Was it the goat testicles that are getting close to people's hearts? No, he's probably not putting them in that area. No, he's putting those in their regular testicles.

No, I think he's just one of these guys that has a really well-suited voice for radio. Just like me! Yeah, just like all of us here. And it mixed well with his surgery, because people are always going to trust someone that they feel like they know better than some stodgy old doctor with evidence. And if Dr. Brinkley is in your ear six hours a day, you feel like you know him in the same way people feel like they know their favorite podcast toasts. This is one of the things that concerns me a little bit about podcasts,

because the fandom that you build is so much more enthusiastic than anything I experienced as a writer. And I think it was sort of the same thing with early radio people, where no one had ever been in people's ears five hours a day. That just wasn't a thing. Now we've got a billion different people like Joe Rogan, who have been doing that for years. But Dr. Brinkley was the first, and so he really developed this cult following before anyone else had one. The original podcaster! Yeah, he was the original podcaster, and he was fucking selling medical advice.

Yeah. He was essentially a mix of Alex Jones and Dr. Oz in an age that had never seen or heard anything like either of them. And like both of those men, he used the implied emotional intimacy of radio, the weird sort of bond that forms when someone is stuck inside your ear for hours a day, to sell people on his quack remedies. Brinkley would say things like, A red bird on his mate are building their nest just outside my bedroom window. Will you, for your health's sake, be with us this May?

And, Note the difference between the stallion and the gelding. The former stands erect, neck arched, main flowing, chomping the bit, stamping the ground, seeking the female, while the gelding stands around half asleep, cowardly, listless. Men, don't let this happen to you. Now, Some effective advertising. Effective telling men their dicks won't work if they don't get goat balls.

These carefully crafted harangs worked. Brinkley's practice expanded, as did the popularity of gland surgery nationwide. Soon hundreds of doctors and companies across the nation were offering their own variations of Dr. Brinkley's bogus surgery. One thing that made Dr. John Brinkley unique was his willingness to talk frankly and openly about the sexual needs of women. This was actually unprecedented. Feminist icon, you were right. Feminist icon, John Brinkley. He would say things like,

Don't get the impression that women are icebergs and content with impotent husbands. I know of more families where the devil is to pay in fusses and temperamental sprees are all due to the husband not being able to function properly. Many and many times wives come to me and say, My husband is no good. Wow. Okay. So he's advocating for women, horny women who are like, My husband's dick doesn't work.

Please help me. I need to, I need to come. But he's also saying in an era where you just didn't talk about this. He's saying sex is a normal part of life. Women deserve to fuck. And if you can't fuck your wife, you're not a good husband. So you need my goat balls. Like the fact that he's saying, so you need my goat balls makes it not nearly as woke.

But like the fact that he's being like, Sex is a normal part of a relationship and you need to be able to please your partner and stuff. And that's important. No one else is saying that at this time. Sure. Which is weird. Yeah. It's, it's different.

Now I should note that he also promised that any women who came to his clinic with their husband could also quote, Avail themselves to my years of study and practice and have their clitoris improved upon. Oh, I would love to know how he thinks that would happen. I'm very curious as to what improvements he wants to add. Does he putting goat balls into women's clitoris? Do goats have clitoris? Is he putting goat clits into humans? I think he might be putting goat clitoris.

Yeah. Extending a human clitoris by just sticking a little goat clitoris on there. Oh, I want to die. Just at the thought of that. If there's one thing we know about Dr. Brinkley, it's that he'll take any part of one animal's genitals and he'll put it on another's animal's genitals. That's, that's his practice. That's what Dr. Brinkley does.

Is he adds genitals to genitals. I mean, and he was so impressed by the, what was the word? Lubosity or something. Lubricity. Lubricity of female goats. I mean, yeah, he, he, this is a long time coming for him to be a feminist icon. I would argue that he only was talking about that like female women's sexuality because that was just an unyet explored avenue by which he can sell his goat ball surgery.

Absolutely. He only brought it up to get men in for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's absolutely true. Although it does lead to something ironic a little bit later.

Okay. As his radio show went on, Dr. Brinkley learned to diversify his offerings to keep his audience interested. He would always be on multiple hours a day, but he was savvy enough to know that people needed more than just his voice. According to the book, charlatan, his offerings included quote, French lessons, astrologers, gospel quartets, the tell me a story lady, and Hawaiian songs of farewell, country music too. As it happened, John Brinkley wound up becoming one of the founding fathers of country music and of modern radio. He was the first person to do this. He spread country music outside of like this thing that just like some people would play songs for each other to like a nationwide thing.

Like he was the first guy spreading country music on a widespread basis by just having these people play because it was what he liked. And also the people wouldn't get tired of him talking about his goat ball surgery. Yeah. Yeah. Country music was launched as a genre to sell goat testicle surgery. That wouldn't. Wow. Yeah.

I'm going to go home and think about that. Think about that a lot. Think about that. I want to like yell that to Toby Keith at some point. Yeah. Do you know the history of your music? You're just selling goat balls, man. All right.

Okay. Yeah. So John Brinkley, you know, became a radio pioneer, became a country music pioneer, was a goat testicle replacement pioneer. And then 80 years before Alex Jones would have the same idea, John Brinkley had what probably would be the most single innovative idea of his entire life. He was going to start selling medicine over the radio. Wow. Now this idea was born out of a practical problem. KFKB was so popular that it received more than 3,000 letters a day, far too many for the local post office or Dr. Brinkley's office to possibly handle. He launched a new program in 1928, Medical Question Box.

It was devised as a more efficient way to answer his mail while also making a huge amount of money. Here's the book border radio. During the broadcast, he read letters from his listeners and prescribed medicine for their ailments, medicine that they could get from one of the more than 1,500 pharmacists who belong to the Brinkley Pharmaceutical Association. After giving news of his current patients over the air, O.O. Rob has been sitting up all day. Alfred Nash sends greetings home. Dr. opened the question box. Sunflower State from Dresden, Kansas. Probably he has gallstones.

No, I don't mean that. I mean kidney stones. My advice to you is to put him on prescription numbers 80 and 50 for men, also 64. I think that he will be a whole lot better. Also, drink a lot of water. To another supplicant, Dr. responded. For three months, take Dr. Brinkley's treatment for childless homes. Of course, doctors say it is vulgar for me to tell you about this, but we are taking a chance and we don't think it's obscene down here.

If this lady will take numbers 50 and 61 and that good old standby of mine, number 67, for about three months and see if it isn't a great big change taking place. To a person with exactly the opposite problem, the doctor counseled. I suggest that you have your husband's sterile. Too many children? Yeah. I suggest that you have your husband's sterilized and then you will be safe from having more children provided you don't get out in anybody else's cow pasture and get in with some other bull. Okay. He starts diagnosing people over the radio and prescribing them over the radio.

Responsible. And gets 1,500 pharmacies to get on to the plan. And one of the things they do is he's not just prescribing them normal medicine. He launches a whole line of medicine that's not known by what it actually is, but just by a number. 54, number 67. So it's his medicine. It all costs six times the market price for medicine of the type. And he gets a dollar for every bottle that's sold, which means a lot more money than he would, you know, it's a shit load of money.

And of course, the people who are taking medicine based on his over the air diagnoses aren't just people who he's reading their letters on air. Someone who hears someone describe a complaint that they have will then drive out to the pharmacy and go get whatever medication he suggested for that person. So he's just selling. Yeah. And then he's making a dollar off of every bottle and these people are just like, well, that kind of sounds like what I'm going through. Better get this medicine that's not real medicine. Better get this medicine. Well, part of the problem is that it was real medicine.

So it's actually more irresponsible than what Alex Jones does where he just sells nonsense pills and vaguely claims that they help your brain. These were actual drugs. And so people would like hear him talk to someone on the radio and be like, oh, that sounds like what I've got. And then they'd go get medicine that might be terrible for them because you shouldn't just take medicine randomly because of what you hear on the radio. Dr. H.W. Gilley of Ottawa, Kansas, wound up treating a mailman who took Dr. Brinkley's on air advice and got medication based on it. Quote, I found the patient profoundly collapsed, his countenance ghastly, icy cold, pulseless and apparently dying from some great shock. Upon my question as to what happened, he whispered, I took some of Brinkley's medicine. Now that medicine was Brinkley's number 50, a liver medication that cost 350 despite being only worth about 75 cents.

It was real medication, obviously, but its price was wildly inflated. Unfortunately, it was also exactly the wrong medication for the patient. Dr. Gilley reported that its effects had, quote, been so drastic upon the patient as to produce enormous cholera-like gippings and actions and vomiting, causing a tearing open of an old ulcer and a violent hemorrhage. The vomiting and intense pain continuing. X-ray pictures were taken showing the pyloric orifice about 1.5 inches to be nearly closed. And it will be imperative to make a new opening by attaching the bowel to the lower margin of the stomach. So he has to perform bowel surgery on this guy because he took radio pills.

Jesus. Okay. Now, I don't like to diagnose people over podcasts, Caitlin, but you know what I do like to diagnose. Why not? It seems like it works so well. It did work so well. And so that's why I am going to diagnose that whatever problems you have at home listener, they can be helped by the fine products and services that we're about to advertise on this show. Just don't take Dr. Brinkley's number 50. It's only if you have liver problems.

Was that a good ad plug, Sophie? Wonderful. Okay. Products! During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not 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 heaven.

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, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match. And when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! Caitlin, how you feeling about this guy so far? I'm feeling like I need some of his medicine because he's making me sick.

Well, the medical question box soon netted Dr. Brinkley around $14,000 a month, which was roughly $6.5 million a year in modern money. He makes so much money. Now, the longer his grift went on, the more victims turned up. One such victim was a middle-aged man named Whitbeck. Like many of Dr. Brinkley's clients, Whitbeck felt beaten down by his difficult life of labor. He saw Brinkley's gland operation as his only hope for regaining the vitality of his youth, so he and his wife mortgaged their home to afford the surgery. Now, that only brought in about $550, which was $200 short of what they needed.

But Whitbeck and his wife were sure that the kind old Dr. Brinkley they heard preaching on the radio would give them a break when he heard about their situation. Next, according to the book, Charlotton, quote, Brinkley was not that kind of Christian. When Andy got there with only $550, Brinkley wouldn't touch him. He'd have to raise $750 or go home without an operation. I never felt so sorry for anyone in all my life as I did for Andy as he stood there weeping like a child. One friend of the guy recalled, he wanted that operation so bad so he could go home into his old job. Then many Brinkley, who liked to describe her role at the clinic as counseling, collecting, and goodwill, stepped in. She told him he'd just have to raise the other $200, and they worked on his fears,

made him think the goat glands were the only thing that could save him and make him young and strong again, and Andy didn't know where to turn for money. With tears in his eyes, he begged Brinkley to take the note for $200 and he'd pay it little by little out of his wages as he earned them. Many Brinkley refused, but did agree to write his employer and get them to agree to garnish his wages until the $200 was paid. Whitbeck got the surgery, which obviously didn't work, and he wound up sicker than he had been before and was now completely destitute and mortgaged. That's cool. So everything I said about John Brinkley being any sort of philanthropist, I was not right. Yeah, he was definitely not a philanthropist. Oh, man, eat the rich, right?

Eat this rich guy for sure. Now another victim was Alexander Ekblon and his wife Rose. She was dying of colon cancer, and actual doctors had told Alexander that his wife's case was terminal. He later recalled, So Ekblon managed to pull together barely enough money for an operation. Rose went under the knife and died the very next day. Dr. Brinkley still demanded payment. There are dozens and dozens of documented cases like this, and probably hundreds of cases that were never documented.

The wheels of truth and something that vaguely resembled justice gradually turned though, thanks largely to the efforts of one Dr. Morris Fishbean, who by the late 1920s had become the chief nemesis of John Brinkley. The editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association went from state to state, confronting their medical boards with evidence of Brinkley's butchery. One by one, Brinkley's ability to practice medicine was revoked. But Brinkley still had his radio station, and on it he attacked Morris Fishbean as fishy fishbean and slammed the AMA as smirking oligarchs, promising, I'll grind their heads off under my heel like I would a snake. I mean, he's got a way with words, you gotta give him that. He's got a way with words, that's why he's a great radio personality.

And I will say, as someone who does essentially the same job, I love grinding snakes' heads off under my heels. Same, that's how you get fish oil, I've heard. That's how you get, that's how you get snake oil. Or yeah, what did I say, fish oil. Yeah, fish oil, no. You grind fish under your heel for that, you gotta strangle a lot of fish to get fish oil. Right, right, right, right. Yes, I don't have a way with words, which is why I'm a terrible podcaster.

Well, I don't know, Caitlin, I believe if you were to start selling pills based on random radio diagnoses, you could make six million dollars a year. Thank you so much for your vote of confidence, and I would also just like to say that I would not do that, because I'm not a horrible person. Well, I'm happy to do it, but I need to ink a deal with Walgreens before I start prescribing anything. Sure. As 1930 dawned, the Kansas City Star began to publish a series of exposés on Dr. Brinkley. They spread the story of Cora Maddox, a 15-year-old appendicitis patient who claimed Brinkley had held her at gunpoint and demanded an extra hundred dollars for the operation he'd just performed on her. Quote, I lay at the point of death while Brinkley, drunk, straddled the doorway with a revolver in his hand and threatened to shoot my two brothers if they did not pay him. Yikes.

Yes, he loves threatening people while drunk, which that's the most likable thing about the guy to me. Sure. Waving a gun around while drunk, threatening a surgery patient. That's just good old-fashioned American fun. That's right, gotta admire him. That's why I spend every Friday night at the hospital. Now, the star also did the hard grunt work of putting together a clear list of patients who had died under Dr. Brinkley's ministrations. He insisted, I will not accept any patient who cannot be cured or may die under treatment.

No patient of mine has ever died here. If we should have a man die here, the doctors who are fighting me would all publish it over the country, so I must be careful. Other doctors may kill him off, but I dare not. The next day, the star published a list of five people who had died at Brinkley's hospital in the last two years. He had even signed their death certificates. John Brinkley next hired Pinkerton detectives to harass, threaten, and bribe his unhappy former patients to keep them quiet. But soon, the state of Kansas got involved. Their investigation uncovered even more shadiness, and on June 13th, his license to broadcast radio was canceled by a three-to-two vote.

Now, Caitlin, I bet you're thinking that this was canceled because of all the people that he got sick and that he killed with his hack medicine and random prescriptions and bad surgery. You're thinking that's why he lost his radio license? I would imagine so, but... No, no, you're wrong. The reason they wound up cancelling his license is because he used the words erection and climax on the air. Oh, so it's all about censorship. Yeah, that's what it took to get him off the air. They were fine with all the people he killed, but he was talking about climaxes, and that can't have that in 1920s fucking radio.

You cannot talk about a hard penis on the radio. Let alone talking about, like he talked about women's orgasms, which obviously was not allowed. Feminist icon, John Prinkley. Now, also, I didn't even mention this because there's so much to go over, his wife was a fake doctor too. She had a fake diploma from the same fake school he did, so he really was a paragon of women's equality. Wow. Because you said that she was practicing midwifery. She did that for a while. Once he started putting testicles in people, she got into the whole cutting open people and shoving balls inside of them too.

Oh, so she was doing the same thing. Yeah, she was very much a full partner in his enterprise. Interesting. They seem to have really, really been a match made in heaven. Wow. I mean, John and Minnie. John and Minnie just shoving balls into balls and lying on the radio. Six weeks after losing, yeah, it is. It's a tale as old as time, a song as old as rhyme, beauty, and the guy who shoves balls into balls. Six weeks after losing his radio license, the Kansas Board of Medical Examiners convened to discuss revoking John Prinkley's medical license.

The trial was something of a circus side show. Happy goat gland recipients were paid to do handstands outside of the court for the press in order to prove something, I guess. Meanwhile, in the courtroom, prosecutors brought in a steady stream of horribly injured patients. Here's the book's charlatan again. Charles Eganharth, 60, said that instead of stitching him up properly after a prostate operation, Prinkley had plugged the bleeding wound with a piece of rubber boot heel and sent him on his way. He didn't. The caretaker of a state park had come in on the same bush as John's honor. He too got the works after which he could barely move. When he later wrote to complain, Prinkley replied with a note describing the hunting trip he had just returned from, ending with, Your condition is your own fault. Wishing you a merry Christmas. There was testimony from Robert Carroll, brother of Coromatics, whose vivid account of Prinkley's gunplay at the clinic had already run on the star. I smelled whiskey on his breath, Carroll said. He opened a desk drawer, took out a revolver and told me my sister would not come out of that hospital except over his dead body unless he was paid $100 more.

Carroll and his brother had returned with guns of their own and rescued her Wild West style from the building, which that's a movie right there. He's making so much money. The fact that he is like, but I need that extra $100. I mean, that is not the worst part of it, but that's a pretty bad part of this. Like this lady's already sick. She's already paid for surgery that you did probably poorly and you're threatening her drunk at gunpoint. Amazing doctor. Amazing doctor. So good. The trial ended with John Prinkley inviting the board to his Milford hospital to watch him perform a gland operation so he could prove that he was in fact a real doctor. They agreed and the horrifying spectacle of him cutting into somebody convinced them to finally revoke his medical license. Now, not a Dr. Brinkley realized that the only way to get his medical license back was to become governor of the state of Kansas. Wait, what?

Yeah, that's where his mind went next. They took away his license, so he was like, well, I guess I'll be the fucking governor. Okay. So he ran what would become one of the most successful write-in campaigns in all of American history. His platform is that he was being persecuted by the AMA and Fat Cat politicians, and it went over like gangbusters with the uneducated masses, as did his promise to fill the countryside with free clinics and cure everyone's illnesses with goat testicles. Both the Republican and Democratic parties had to work together to stop his candidacy. They only succeeded by instituting a strict rule that votes for John Brinkley could only be counted if his name was spelled a certain way, J.R. Brinkley. J. period, R. period, Brinkley, to be exact. Votes for John Brinkley, or just J.R. Brinkley, would not be counted. John Brinkley came in third place in the election. The number of ballots that were discarded for him properly spelling his name would have been more than enough to win him the election. It was so close that the Republican candidate, who lost to the Democrat by only 200 votes, refused to contest the election or even ask for a recount, because every politician in the country was so fucking terrified about what would happen if John Brinkley were to win the governorship. Wow. That is wild.

He was so bad he got the Republican and Democratic party to work together. Yes. Now, by this point, most men would have probably retired to enjoy their millions of dollars, but John Brinkley was not a quitter. In 1931, he moved to the border town of Del Rio, Texas, and got a license from the Mexican government to build a radio station on their side of the border. Under the radio station named XER, he continued to campaign for governor of Kansas. In 1932, he came in third place again, still the best showing by an independent candidate in gubernatorial history. He tried once more in 1934, but by that point he'd been gone from Kansas long enough that his star had faded. But Brinkley found himself liking living on the Texas border anyway. He was able to practice medicine in Del Rio, because then, as now, there were no rules in southern Texas. He was also able to upgrade his radio station in 1935. Now under the name XERA, or ZARA, he upgraded his broadcasting station to an absolutely fucking insane 1 million watts by far the most powerful radio transmitter on the fucking planet. For comparison, the most powerful modern AM radio transmitters in the modern United States are 50,000 watts. People in Canada were able to tune in and clearly listen to John Brinkley's hours of broadcasts.

Okay. Yeah. Pretty great. How does he have time for everything he's doing? He's doing these radio shows, he's building radio stations, he's practicing medicine, he's getting drunk apparently all the time. He's campaigning for governor. He's not inventing, but he is helping to make country music, spread it to the masses. 80% of what he's doing is just talking on the radio, and he loves hearing himself talk. So all he's really doing is spending nine hours a day talking on the radio. Wow. And that's enough to accomplish most of his goals. Okay. Well, gotta give it to him. Gotta give it to him. You don't. No, we shouldn't do that at all. He already got an awful lot given to him. Yes. Now, Caitlin, I know what you're thinking right now. I think you're thinking the only thing that goes better than thoughts of Mexican radio stations are podcasts ads. That one was not a good transition. I knew it had gotten away from me when I started it, but that's the time it is. It's time for an ad break. Nothing, Caitlin? Oh, I'm so sorry. Lift me up here. Come on. I completely agree that it's time for an ad break, and I think your transition is actually really flawless. Thank you. Thank you for saying the truth about my flawless transition. You're welcome. Product!

During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you've got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good-bad-ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match. And when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. Now, Caitlin, a million watts, I think sounds like a lot because it is a lot.

But I want people at home to understand how ridiculously powerful John Brinkley's radio transmitter was. So I'm going to read another quote from the book Border Blaster. People living near the station did not even need a radio to enjoy the great healer's messages. Ranchers were startled to find their fences electrified by the high powered broadcasts of hillbilly performers and fortune tellers. Some residents said they even picked up the station in the fillings of their teeth or received vibrations of it on their hot water heaters. At 840 kilo cycles, powerful, Zira brushed aside the signals of WWL in New Orleans and KOA in Denver as if they were 98 watt weaklings. A Variety reporter in New York said that he could hear XERA regularly, and a Philadelphia resident said that he had trouble getting anything but Dr. Brinkley's station on his family's radio set. Wow.

That's why they don't do million watt radio stations so much. Great. So he had the most powerful one with the widest range? How did he get that, or did he build it himself? He just spent a lot of money? Yeah, he hired really good engineers and spent a shitload of money. Because he wanted fucking everybody to be able to hear him. God. The people with the most money are the people who should not have any money. I think a lot of it comes down to Dick's, Caitlyn. He got rich by selling people a cure-all for their Dick problems, which he said was goat testicles. But for him, his Dick was having the most powerful radio tower in the world, and that's what he needed to feel virile. And that makes sense. I mean a radio tower, I don't know exactly what that looks like, but I imagine it as being pretty phallic.

Yeah, you'd have to, it's a tower, right? Yeah. Now, John Brinkley used his unprecedented soapbox to harangue the AMA and sling snake oil. As he got older and goat gland operations fell from favor, he moved on to $1,000 vasectomies, and increasingly he waited into politics. You see, John Brinkley hated him some Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He also found himself increasingly enamored with a little-known German politician by the name of Adolf Hitler. Uh-oh. Yeah, yeah, he went to Germany for the 36 Olympics and loved it, loved seeing what Hitler had done to Germany, thought it was a pretty cool place, pretty neat place. He hosted some other people who have been on this podcast on his radio show. Father Coughlin was a guest, American Führer and head of the German-American Boond Fritz Kuhn was a guest,

William Pelley, founder of the Silver Shirts, all of these people were guests on XERA. Brinkley even donated $5,000 to the Silver Shirts, which were an American fascist movement. Now, a lot of this had to do with Brinkley's increasingly virulent, empty scimitism, much of which had grown from the fact that his nemesis, Dr. Fishbein, was a Jewish man. But a lot of it also came from his hatred of communism. So, you know, this is a mix of both. He doesn't like Jewish people, he doesn't like communism. Maybe he thinks they're both the same thing, like most Nazis did. Right. I mean, I guess if that's your stance, fascism looks pretty good. Yeah, he said stuff like, war is the communist delight. He mixes its bitter broth for the sweet lips of your boy. I would deport every radical who preferred the gleam of warlike Mars to the soft amber light of the Bethlehem orb.

He should have been a poet with his... Don't put goat balls in people, write down your beautiful words. John Brinkley, in the late 30s, added swastikas to the tile of his swimming pool and became a prominent advocate of isolationism. In 1941, he ran for the Texas Senate. Unfortunately for him, this was the same year he lost a libel suit against the AMA, faced investigation from the State Department and the IRS, and was charged by the post office with mail fraud. There was some worry that even with all this, he might still win. A writer for the Emporia Gazette wrote about this about his Senate run. He will appeal to the hillbilly mind as it has never been lured before. He is irresistible to the moron mind, and Texas has plenty of such. Perhaps that is unfair. Very likely Texas has no more morons than Kansas.

So, while pointing with pride to the fact that Kansas escaped the doctor's clutches, we view with alarm for the United States the danger which impends in Texas. If this republic ever totters to its fall, it will be because the moron minority shall sometime, somewhere, somehow gain a party majority by unscrupulous leadership. I mean, that has to explain why he got so successful in the first place, right? Just, you know, uneducated people being like, I want my dick to work better. Don't want my dick to work better, and I like the way he talks. And then despite all of the stories of him, you know, being a drunken disaster and killing people with the surgeries he's performing, everyone's just like, well, I mean, I'm going to still give him, you know, what was it, $750 for this? $750? Well, I want those goat balls. Yeah. Oh, that's discouraging. Well, luckily for America this time, the Mexican government got fed up with Brinkley, and in 1941 they made an agreement with the U.S. government to cut out renegade stations like XERA, denying Brinkley his main platform just as the government came crashing down on his head.

By May of 1942, he was poor, sick, and dying. He developed a blood clot and had several heart attacks and had to have his leg amputated. He died on May 26, 1942, almost penniless. His last words were reported to have been, if Dr. Fishbean goes to heaven, I want to go the other way. Now. Wait, hang on. Did he, when he was his health was failing, did he put goat balls in himself? He did not, shockingly. You know, you really would think that he would have tried that obvious cure-all. Right. Yeah, but he did not.

I mean, goes to show that it would, I mean, a doctor that won't do his own procedure on himself, you can't trust that guy. That's exactly right. If you're going to put goat balls in me, you'd better be putting goat balls in you. I've said that for years, so he can back me up. That's long been my catchphrase. Now, Dr. Brinkley's influence would live on in bad and good ways. The bad is very obvious. He horribly injured and killed hundreds of patients, maybe more. He claimed to have carried out more than 16,000 goat gland operations, so God only knows like the total health impact of his work. And then all those poor goats. And all those poor goats. I can't stop thinking about the goats.

At least 60,000 goats, 16,000 goats. He also single-handedly created the idea of selling sham medicine to sick people over the radio, a terrible business that continues to this day. But John Brinkley also helped launch country music as a genre. His million-watt station broadcast that music to impressionable young minds across the entire nation for years, helping to spread it out of the fairly niche areas it had occupied prior to Brinkley's advent. Some of his early listeners included, according to the book, Charlotten, quote, Chet Atkins, a teenager in Columbus, Georgia, who turned into XERA on a battery-powered radio he built from mail-order parts. Tom Hall, future songwriter and balladier in Oliveville, Kentucky.

Johnny Cash in DS, Arkansas, who first heard his future bride, June Carter, then aged 10, singing over Brinkley's airwaves. Wow. So, it wasn't all bad. So, he's actually a pretty good guy. So, I mean, yeah, thousands and thousands of people horribly, horribly injured and hobbled for life and killed from bad operations and medical treatments going to arrive and the spreading of fascism over the airwaves. But, Johnny Cash. But Johnny Cash.

But Johnny Cash. Small price to pay. And Waylon Jennings. Yeah, small price to pay. I mean, for Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash, and I'm not a big fan of Tom Hall or Chet Atkins, but other people like him. I don't know any of those people except for Johnny Cash. Everybody knows Johnny Cash. Everybody knows Johnny Cash.

Yeah. So, that's the story. That's John fucking Brinkley. Well, I feel enlightened. I feel like, I mean, I feel like I've just had some goat balls put into my gonad areas. Good, that's how you're supposed to feel. Which is to say that I feel great. Wow, I mean, very ambitious guy as you said at the beginning.

And I mean, I hate that I'm like impressed with all these horrible people, but they accomplish a lot. I'm not impressed. I'm horrified. But, I mean, I don't know what I'm trying to say. I just, you know what, here's what I'm trying to say. Fuck John Brinkley, the end. Yeah, fuck John Brinkley, the end. If you're feeling sick, though, maybe do grind up a bunch of goat testicles and shoot them up your ass with a syringe.

Yeah, you can't forget about that rectal syringe. Can't forget about that rectal syringe. I'm so glad that modern medicine is what it is today, and that's not to say that our medical industry isn't very broken, because it is. But, you know, I'm just glad that there, you know, goat ball insertion isn't a thing anymore, to my knowledge. I never thought I'd felt myself saying, I'm glad that when Alex Jones sells people medicine over the radio, it's just a little bit of lead and sugar powder in pill form. At least it's not ground up goat nuts. Or like real medicine that you're giving to the wrong people so that they have horrible physical reactions to it. Right, and marked up at an insane price.

Yeah, and when you're the guy who makes me look at Alex Jones and be like, well, compared to that, he's pretty ethical. You know, you've got a real bastard on your hands. Yeah, you know, you've got a real piece of shit on your hands, and John Brinkley was a real piece of shit. Yes, indeed. Caitlin, you got some pluggables to plug? You bet you can follow my radio station in which I, you know, spread feminist iconary and not the bad stuff that John Brinkley was spreading. And that's all to say, listen to my podcast, The Bechtelcast, that I co-host with Jamie Loftus, and we talk about the representation of women in movies. And then you can, and that's spelled B-E-C-H-D-E-L, just in case you didn't know.

You can follow me personally on Instagram and Twitter at Caitlyn Durante, C-A-I-T-L-I-N. The Gram and the Twits? That's right. And yeah, check out my website, CaitlynDurante.com. There's some, you know, show dates and stuff like that. But yeah, that's it. Check out Caitlyn Durante. Check out Caitlyn Durante, me on Twitter at I write okay.

Do you like that, Caitlin? Is that working for you? I loved it. Excellent. You can check out this podcast on the web at BehindTheBastards.com, where we'll have the sources for this episode, including the fantastic book, Charlotteton. And we sell shirts to public.com. We have another podcast. It could happen here about the Civil War, bad stuff.

That's it. Until next week, I'm Robert Evans. Don't inject goat glands into your asshole. Don't do it. Don't do it. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.