Behind the Bastards - The Terrible Secret of Sea Monkeys (Live Show)

Episode Date: November 26, 2019

In Episode 98, Robert is joined live in Portland by Billy Wayne Davis for an episode about sea monkeys.FOOTNOTES: The Shocking True Tale Of The Mad Genius Who Invented Sea-Monkeys A Petri Dish For Racism Supremacists’ Message Spreading Through Nation, Butler Says The Sea Monkeys and the White Supremacist CONTRASTS OF A PRIVATE PERSONA From brine to online: Sea-Monkeys for your PC HITLER AND THE SEA-MONKEYS Monkey Business To their adoring legions of fans, Sea-Monkeys are the ultimate in Kitsch. The Battle Over the Sea-Monkey Fortune The Bizarre Story of Anti-Jewish Jew Harold von Braunhut Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. You're so new to, you don't leak, look at this, just, you just left this in front of, this is such an amateur live performance move. I didn't, I didn't do it right. That's why I'm here. The first thing you do is move the fucking microphone stand. I don't, I don't, I don't know how to do, there's only two things I know how to do.

One of them is read scripts about bad people, and the other is poorly introduced my show. So I would like to say to my first live audience, what's cracking my peppers? Good. Thank you. I'm learning. That was good. Slowly. We're getting used to the microphone still.

I think. Am I doing something? I don't know. It's ideally like a wireless mic is not, it's just the rule that if it's going to go wrong, a wireless mic will go wrong. Well, I can shout, but only for a limited period of time. Yeah. And we told you guys when we, this is going to go terrible. It's going to be a disaster.

It's really going to give you an idea of what a disaster it's going to be. I bought a bag full of machetes. I forgot to bring all of the recording equipment necessary to record my podcast. I brought some recording equipment. He brought the recording equipment. Isn't that fucking stupid? Yeah. I don't know how to, like, I just handed it to Tori, the nice sound lady, and she was like,

what? I was like, dude? Yeah. Big ups to Tori. And she did it. Yeah. We had to make some phone calls. We did it.

We had to call Danil. But yeah, we, I think we got it. Man, that's, it's going to be interesting how this sounds after. It really is. Like other people, if we release it, you go, they'll be like, the sound was not good when they released it. And you guys can be like, it wasn't good there either. All on me. Like this is a hundred percent on me.

Very accurate how they recorded it was how it sounded. Billy. Do you want to trade? It's a, before we, before we get into the show today, I feel like I should introduce our, our co-stars on this table. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Now they're gonna say, who the fuck's going to be here? That's a toasted bagel. We got some Thomas everything bagels. I usually use Sarah Lee. I'm not sure of the ballistics on these, but I'm excited. I'm excited. It's only going to record the bad sounds I make. She's going to sound like, it's really frustrated.

It's going to skip just the right words to make you sound racist. I don't know if you've heard my accent, but that's any word. It's not hard to do. Like, hey, do you hear that guy? Oh, the racist guy. What do you say? We didn't have to listen. So next up, we've got some Fran, Fran's original premium bagels.

These are from New York. Maybe. Is that what that means? Well, it says they're from New York. Franz. Franz. Let's see where they're really from. Oh, I knew.

I thought it was some local thing, and you guys are like fucking Portland. God damn it. And then we've got some more friends. More friends. Yeah, we got some more friends. I had some pumpkin spice bagels. Oh, here they are. Brought by a friend of ours in the audience.

Pumpkin spice premium bagels. The taste of autumn is here. Now, we got this script, which who needs that shit? So we got little knife. We got machete. You take this one, Billy. This one's for bandits. It does look like.

Yeah. This is not for... It's not for... No, it's awesome. Don't get me wrong, but it's like, this is criminals. This is my oldest machete. Are you calling me a criminal? I would say your instincts are criminals.

Yeah, that is fair. But you see this here, and I have to have this. You're also being like, you cheer for the wrong people in the movie. And then we got the backup just in case. This one's real rusty and dull, so we don't want to use it on the bagels. First of all... This is haunted. Yeah, this is the ghost knife.

This is the ghost knife. This is me and them. No, it's just a little buoy. You're getting real loose with the machete. That's just a big-ass knife. That's really all the machete is, yeah. So we're going to play a little bit of what we like to call bagel tennis here. Which is exactly what it sounds like, although neither of us know how to play tennis.

We know the word love plays into it, but don't tell us what it means. We're just going to say it a lot as we knock bagels around. This is the splash zone. Hopefully bagel splashes. Most of the machetes don't have a way to strap them to your hand, so fingers crossed. I'm just... Oh, it's working. I feel like if I think something terrible and make it think that that's what I'm about to say, it'll work. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like, it feels like it's out to get me. Don't talk like a Nazi, but think like a Nazi and then say normal stuff. Ah! Try to think something terrible. Like, now I'm going to say this. It's like if you're at Thanksgiving, you're just talking to your grandma, and then she walks off, then you're talking to your cousin. Yeah, that's fine.

Now, people in the back... Hello! That's the point of the microphone. You can tell somebody something's in the building. Yeah, okay. Well, that's good. That's a start. That's a start. That's vaguely threatening. That is vaguely threatening. You can't tell where the bad neighborhood is in Portland because of the same thing.

It's all of them times. You guys keep a bad element in every... I like that. Yeah, keeps everybody on their toes. So, I mean, I think we should just pray to the gods of microphones and get into this, son of a bitch, because these people paid to learn about somebody terrible. And then the recording might be just the worst.

No, this is going to be a unique experience for the audience. Billy Wayne Davis. Yes. When you were a lad, a wee, a wee child, did you ever have sea monkeys? No, I didn't. No, you didn't. No, you didn't. I remember seeing them. You saw the ads?

Yeah. You ever see ads for X-ray specs? Fuck yeah. Yeah, okay, okay. You ever wondered about who made those? I'll be honest, I never did. You ever wonder what they believed about, I don't know, races? No.

I mean, that probably did play into it at some point. The 1930s, what, six Olympics, but yeah, yeah, yeah. We're going to talk about the guy who made those both and some other things you've heard about today. We're going to talk about what that dude was into when he wasn't coming up with sea monkeys. It's going to be a happier story than some, but yeah. There's no dead babies.

If your business is sea monkeys, your hobby is going to be pretty interesting. It's going to be bad. I do want to see, I want to show of hands, who here as a kid had them or their parents spend money on sea monkeys or X-ray specs? That's a good number you. That's fun. Remember these hands in the air. Yeah.

He's a solid ghost dealer. The object recording this event, he bought off of a ghost detective? Yes. That's not a joke. That's a thing. That just happened. I went to a checkmark in Orange County and bought a zoom recorder from a guy that was recording ghosts. That recorder I had is too good for ghosts.

If this recording works out, there is a decent chance we will get to hear the ghost of Saddam Hussein react to this podcast, which I'm very excited about. I would take you probably hanging in Portland. Yeah, no, that's exactly where he would end up. Yeah, you would hope. There are other Doritos in this town. Well, I'm just going to roll into it. Howard, or sorry, Harold, we're off to a fucking great start.

These are the things that Sophie normally protects the audience from. Protects me from my incompetence. She is not here right now, which means someone is going to get badly injured and I am going to fuck up even more than usual. Here's what happens up. Harold Nathan Brownhood was born on March 31, 1926 in New York City, the city where these bagels are not from. His parents, Jeanette Cohen and Edward Brownhood were Jewish. This will become very important later on. They had moved to Manhattan from Memphis, Jeanette's family was in the toy business and his father ran a printing shop.

Herman Brown. They went from Memphis to Manhattan. Yeah, yeah. That makes sense. You could afford to do that back in the day. Well, you could. Yeah. If I was Jewish and lived in Memphis, I would leave.

I can't think of many reasons I wouldn't leave Memphis, but, you know, I'm a little biased. It's that pyramid. Memphis is the one with the pyramid, right? Also, it's very dangerous. Yeah, yeah. I just don't trust any town with a pyramid. So, Herman Brownhood, Harold's first cousin, recalled the family as fairly normal for the area, saying, quote, They were as religious as most other Jews.

I know they went to synagogue during the Jewish holidays. I believe he was Bar Mitzvahd. I probably was there. Again, this will be very relevant later on in the story. Very Jewish answer then. My wife is Jewish. That is how Jews talk. I don't know.

This is fucking Jewish shit. I'm sure he did the thing we all do. Yeah. As a child, Herman recalled that Harold was always fooling around with different kinds of gadgets. He had an inventor's soul and a natural understanding of mechanics. He graduated high school during the height of World War II and attended business school in 1945 and 1946. At the time, he lived in Brighton Beach, a heavily Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. Are you guys catching the foreshadowing here?

Where this is going to head? Yeah, it's not a good place. Once he was out of college, Harold bounced around an almost dizzying variety of careers. He served for a brief time in the Merchant Marine. Then he became a motorcycle racer working under the name the Green Hornet. And I think this is before that. What do you mean that's not a job? You can't just tell your parents, like, I race motorcycles.

I mean, why not? I just feel like there's some, I mean... Bruce Springsteen did. And look at him, he's doing great. Look at the leap he took from job to job. Yeah, it is a little weird. I'm going to help sell stuff on boats. I'm a motorcycle racer.

They're historically speaking from our stories. Did he hit his head? I mean, you know, he was in the Merchant Marine. So there's a lot of swinging, like, ropes with hooks on them. Yeah, there's a good chance. Yeah, because it sounds like you go from being on a boat to being like, I'm just going to race this motorcycle for a living. He definitely picked up a couple of head injuries in the motorcycle racing.

Yeah, I don't know people who commute with motorcycles and don't grab a couple. Now, yeah, I don't have any more about that period in his life. I wish I could find, like, a picture of him as the Green Hornet. I want to know what the costume was. Yeah, he doesn't either. So, Harold also worked as a stage magician. Strong reaction to the word magician. How do you feel about magicians, Billy Wayne?

I don't like it. I understand it's art or whatever. I don't know. I don't know that art is the term I'd use, yeah. It is, it is whatever, yeah. It's whatever, yeah. But can you imagine, like, he specified stage magician. Stage magician, yeah. No tricky U.S. I didn't even get to his name.

The Great Telepo. I think that means he teleported, but again, I have no details on this. But that's the name he worked on. He finished for the Green Hornet. Immediately. Terrible. This one seems to be doing well. Without your microphone bringing down the whole experience, yeah, it's been great.

This one's doing great now. Your microphone was the enabler, and this guy's sobered up now that it's... I have friends like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, we're in business. I mean, I'm always the same. You guys don't turn the microphones on in the studio anyway. No, Sophie's gonna let me say the things that can't ever go out on the air first.

That is smart. The stuff that's bleeped out about what you should do to Jeff Bezos' house. Like, ah, shit, fuck, okay. We're gonna have to get that shit in post. He heard you say that. Yeah, he did. There's an echo in the fucking room. Yeah, he heard you. He's listening. That's an Amazon machete.

If you're low on toilet paper, it'll order it for you. I did get the studio machete off Amazon. And it's a beautiful machete. So Bezos has got a supply of machetes. He has more than I do, yeah. So, back to Harold now that we're fully operational. Harold, the stage magician. Harold, the stage magician.

Magician. Magician? That was bad. Harold segwayed rather naturally from racing and magicianing towards working as a talent agent for other performers. Actually, this does make sense. That's the first natural. That's the first natural. That's the only one that he's done that makes sense. He's like, you know what, I'm tired of doing all the bullshit.

I'm just gonna sell the guys who do the bullshit. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good, it's a good call. Not a bad kid. His prize, his prize catch was Henry Lamor, one of the first magicians on television. Lamor's claim to fame was a yearly stunt where he would dive from New York's Flatiron building 40 feet down

into a pool of water just 12 inches deep. He won a Guinness. You not impressed by that? I think I'd want to see it before I gave it my proper reaction. I mean, the people, the fine people at Guinness who we know cannot be bought, certified this as a world record. It is.

It is. He's like, he got this many people to believe in. So, it would be fair to say among a couple of other things that Harold Brownhut so far seemed to have a passion for performance. But in 1957, when he was 31, his father died. This spurred him to make a change in his life. Starting in the late 1950s, Brownhut started inventing, filing patent after patent for a variety of kitschy toys,

products like amazing hair-raising monsters, which were basically a cross between a troll doll and a chia pet. He had a peculiar preference for selling live animals to children through the mail, which is... Here's the thing. You don't get to see the result. And that's why you do something like that. Yeah.

You don't mail a pig to a kid without wanting to see that kid open that pig. Also, can you imagine being like, I bought you a horse. Mailman will be here in four days with it. It says there's a 40% chance it shows up alive. There's holes in the packages. Well, he didn't sell anything as cool as horses.

One of his inventions was crazy crabs, which were just normal, terrified hermit crabs. Mail to your door in a cardboard box. Holy shit. He's funny. Yeah, he's good. I think he's kind of funny, if I'm being honest. He seems like a good time.

So far, nothing to hate. Here's my business. You knock on somebody's door and you run, and they're like, who's there? You get them? What if we left a crab there? How do we make money? I gotta go.

So what made Crazy Crabs special and sellable was the ad copy Harold wrote for the comic books and kids magazines like Boys Life, where he sold his gimmicks. Here's the description he wrote for his crazy crabs. As gentle as a pussycat, it lives on land instead of water. Does not bite unless mishandled. It loves to be touched in bed.

Unless you touch it. No, you touch it. It's gonna fuck you up. If you don't get near it, it won't bother you at all. If you just leave it in the box, let it die on the porch? Yeah, you'll be fine. Don't look at it. Oh, shit, that's fucking.

It loves to be touched and petted and enjoys running from hand to hand. He's awesome. I love this guy. So far, hard to handle. Not a bastard. Real good time, this guy. He said it's swinging from your fingers

or just cuddling your shoulder like an adorable tame parrot. Like a parrot. Comic crabs. Oh, man. I want that parrot that can bite you. Yeah. Does it talk? No.

I want a parrot with vices for hands. Yeah. That can't think. Yeah. Pure, pure nature. I just want... That's the toy for a small child. Just either fear or eating.

That's all it thinks. From the beginning of his career as a toy designer, Harold Brownhood knew that lying to children... He's so loose with the terms of what he's doing. He's amazing. He's amazing. Like... He said, you wanted a toy and he'd just hand you a hermit crab.

First of all, that's an uncle thing to do. That's his whole target audience. He's like, just half lit uncles. Late for a birthday party. When would you get... I got you a legal turtle. 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. Because the FBI sometimes, you gotta 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 goods. He's a shark. And not in the good-bad-ass way. And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

And when I was there, 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. He's left off 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 in 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. So, yeah, Harold was aware very early on that the key to making money was lying to children. Yes. Still is. Still is. Yeah.

Now, hermit crabs were a good proof of concept, but, you know, only so many kids want crabs, right? Like, if crab is in the name, you got to limit it. I know adult porn crabs. So, Harold had another, more ambitious dream. He wanted to mail children packets of brine shrimp and pretend that they were aquatic apes.

What's a specific dream? Very specific dream. Now, the inspiration for this unique vision came in 1957 when he was in a pet store and saw a bucket of brine mushrooms. He was chewing his fucking teeth. I want to go in his pet store.

I need a business idea. So, he's in this pet store. He sees a bucket of brine shrimp, and he's being sold as fish food, not as pets, because they're not pets. And he's, yeah, for the record, brine shrimp are very tiny. They're almost invisible to the naked eye.

When magnified, they look like a weird cross between a centipede and a seahorse. They do not look anything like a... Just beautiful. ...modestic creature. No rational person would consider them interesting by the standards of most pets, but Harold thought brine shrimp

were the perfect animal to sell and moss to children around the country. You know who's dumb as hell. Fucking kids. Those little people. You can make those sons of bitches do buy anything. Well, I don't know anything. You see how well Laundard's did?

Fucking dumb. He would later tell an interviewer, I was always interested in wildlife, and I was looking for something that would interest, and I was looking for something that would interest other people in it. What do you even say to that? Even if you're the journalist,

you're just like, man, what are you doing? You are full of shit. God, I gotta print this. So he started research later that year, in between working on games like Baldur Dash and patenting bulletproof clothing. For three years, he experimented... He was a busy fucker.

For three years... You don't have to prove the patent works. No. No. You just gotta sell it. You just gotta be like, yeah. It's a shirt. Yeah, there's no internet back then, so nobody's gonna come on Amazon and be like, there's a problem with this bulletproof shirt.

Yeah. I just killed my friend. So for three years, he experimented with Brian Shrimp, trying to figure out ways to essentially freeze dry their eggs so they could be safely shipped. How long was he working on this? Three years. Three years.

It's hard. Okay. I'll give it to him. It's not easy. There's a level of, like, just sticking to it. Yeah. Yeah. No. He's not a lazy man. Because... Three years is a long time.

Look, man... To be like, how am I gonna freeze this fish food? All the history is built by men and women with visions. Because kids are stupid, but they're not that stupid. Yeah. This is... This was a quest of love for him.

He loved the idea of selling Brian Shrimp to children. And he eventually figured it out. Now, in 1960, his mom died of a car crash, and later that year, he revealed the first iteration of what would prove to be his greatest innovation. Instant life. Essentially, a packet of dried Brian Shrimp eggs he sold for 49 cents.

Now, at this stage, the product did not work well. Harold later recalled, keeping them alive was a terrible struggle. So, he makes them, but they're still dying, like, all the time. Jesus. Well, I mean, they're Brian Shrimp. I mean, I understand, but still,

it's like the way he talks about it's kind of just like... Ah, just... They die so fast. Can you hear them? It's terrible. They're real screamers. They're like, hey, I'm alive! I'm alive!

My experiments didn't make them live longer, but it made them real yelling. Yeah, it's just... You freeze them and make them loud. Now, Harold promised instant happiness to the children who purchased his Brian Shrimp, but his sales were less than impressive. Even the kids are like, fuck off.

Fuck off. Yeah, I don't want your fucking Brian Shrimp. There's no instant happy. You don't got Coke out. That would be the first Amazon review to do it, yeah. There were two problems. The first was that the name Brian Shrimp did not inspire wonder in the hearts of children. Brian is a bad marketing word, as a rule.

The second was that all the Brian Shrimp he sold kept dying. It was considered incredibly lucky for just two of the little critters to survive for 30 days. Not content to let nature be... Lucky. Yeah, lucky. If you got a puppy and it lived for 30 days, you're like, that's pretty lucky.

I mean, that's when they're at their cutest. Yeah. Like, how long do you need them after that? I like this... I was pretending, you guys. There's no dead puppy. There's no real dead puppy. Now, Billy, we're like maybe 10 years off from a service where they mail 30-day puppies to your house,

and then you get a new puppy 30 days later, when that one just sort of, you know... Oh, I wish that's so... Amazon Genetics is working on it right now. It's a $30 service. No one's laughing because they know it's true. No, this is coming. This is going to happen. That's what's happening right now. Everyone's like,

ah, stop talking about the future. Yeah. We're trying to be funny, and you guys are like, it's gonna happen. Jeff Bezos was at Christmas pretending to be a human for one brief night when a friend of his said, I wish my puppy could stay this way forever. And he was like...

I'll be right back. I know I had to fucking monetize this shit. Yeah. That's how he sounds when he walks away. Yeah. So, like all great heroes in history, Harold was not content to let nature beat him. So, Mr. Brown teamed up with a marine biologist,

Anthony Diagnostino, a microcrestation expert. They started claiming they'd invented a hybrid species, Artemia nios, especially bred to be sold over the mail to children. Brian Shrimp already have eggs that essentially go dormant in the right circumstances. Brownhood and Di Agostino claimed their hybrid was even more survivable,

able to spend weeks in a state of suspended animation. Brownhood also invented a mixture of what he called magic crystals. Yeah. These help... Because you know it's good science when the word magic's involved. These apparently helped keep the Brian Shrimp eggs alive.

Now, it's still rather unclear to me if all this talk of hybrids was complete BS or not, almost certainly, but the Brian Shrimp sold by Brownhood and Di Agostino from this point forward showed a markedly greater tolerance for shipping, and nobody really knows how they did it. Now, making the Brian Shrimp more survivable

was only one part of the plan. Harold also had to invent a unique lie to sell children on the idea. He started packaging his Brian Shrimp in two little packets. The first was labeled a water purifier, although it was actually just Brian Shrimp eggs. Harold's instructions were to pour this into the water first

and then let it sit for a few days. During this time, unbeknownst to the child, the Brian Shrimp would hatch... Sorry, just the way you word it, that was funny. No, it's good. Unbeknownst to them, he'd sneak in their house. So they'd dance wrong in their mouth. They'd hatch and they would grow.

Now, the second packet, which supposedly contained Brian Shrimp eggs, was actually nothing more than dye, which stained the now-grown Brian Shrimp and made it look like they were appearing instantly. It was a pretty fucking smart con. That's a good idea. What a waste of fucking energy.

What? No, you gotta impress the kids. They're not gonna stay impressed. I mean, he used to take it this far. Do you think his friends are like, are you still doing the thing? I mean, I hate to say it, but he did make millions of dollars. There is one friend who's like the whole time,

like, I told you you could do it. You gonna go to water park again? We're going to Maui this weekend, right? Let's go. I love it. So, Harold's next and probably greatest innovation was to create a bald face but beautiful lie about what his Brian Shrimp were. He hit upon the name Sea Monkeys

and hired a future Marvel artist to draw colorful depictions of humanoid-looking aquatic creatures for his comic book ads. He's a future Marvel artist. Yeah, future, future. So, he used that to get his Marvel job. Yeah, I think so. You want to describe those Sea Monkeys to the audience? I mean, they look like you split the cone head's head open.

And then... I mean, they have like human features, which is very strange. Very unsettling. They're also like lizard-like. There's no monkey to them, really. They look vaguely ape-like. Like a human does. Sea apes. Yeah.

But, I mean, they have a... The dad's doing well. They have an underground castle. Family looks happy. He's got a castle. That's good. He definitely has a fucking castle. It looks like they got a gardener because the plants are very nice around. Couple kids.

Yeah, you can see the idea. Like, buy these brine shrimp and you'll have a kingdom of little humans. If I worked at Marvel, I'd be like, you're fucking hard. Because that's what he used as a resume. Like, what have you done? You're like, seen this shit? Seen this shit? Everybody has these fucking monkeys. Yeah. So, I'm going to read a little bit from the ad copy,

which was written by Harold Brownhood and himself. So eager to please, they can even be trained. Always clowning around. These troublesome pet... Oh, sorry. Trollixm, which is not a word. Pet swim, stunt and play games with each other. Because they are so full of tricks, you'll never tire of watching them.

And raising sea monkeys is so easy, even a six-year-old can do it without help. Sea monkeys eat very little and they keep their water so clean, they require only a minimum care. Although they love attention. Anyone who enjoys the company of pets will adore sea monkeys. Best of all, we even show you how to teach them to obey your commands like a pack of friendly trained seals.

Yes. He's having fun. He's having a great time. Up to this point, I'm totally on board with... I'm not mad at him. I wouldn't hang out with him a lot. Billy, what's the best lie you've told a child? Not my children.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But we did convince my younger sister that we found her under a rock. And then we found out years later, she wasn't even upset, she just considered herself very lucky. Because we probably left one year at Christmas or something. I remember when you convinced you that you lived under a rock and we found you and she was like,

yeah, I just thought, God, I'm lucky they found me. See, you could have monetized that impulse, Billy. I guess I didn't realize. You could have been a rich fucking guy. So, Harold also hit upon the idea of selling his sea monkeys with a two-year life insurance policy because there's nothing kids love more than life insurance.

Oh, my God. Do we pay it every month? Yeah. Every month. Now, this all worked. Sea monkeys took off like gangbusters of millions of little children, including like about a third of the audience, it seems,

harangued their parents for the 125 or however much it was in your day, it would take to build their own marvelous underwater civilization. Most of those kids were profoundly disappointed by the tiny, gross-looking little monsters that grew from the kids, but enough became obsessed with Brian Shrimp that there are still fan sites for sea monkeys today.

This is a thing people are into. Although Roy Orbison and Kling Grant said that the audience was like, what? Someone in the audience when you said there's still people that do it today, just went, what? You know what the internet is. It's Nazis and weird shit like this.

Like... Sea monkeys were an enormous success. Hundreds of thousands of kids were sent out netting millions of dollars for Harold Brownhut and the Transience Corporation, his partners in the venture. After his belt, Harold began to put out other hit products. He invented X-ray specs,

which he claimed were glasses that imparted X-ray vision to the wearer. Ads for the specs inevitably showed, see, this is how fucking incompetent I am without the fucking paper. I'm useless. I don't have the talent that this guy has. I just got paper.

You know what, Billy? It's all in here. We are on page four, and if I know one thing about the number four, I should hit some bagels with some machines. I think that's what that means. I didn't... Robert sent me a text today.

He was like, did you get permission to do the machete and bagel stuff? And I was like, I just figured it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission on that stuff. I'll just know from the past when you're like, can I bring a machete? They always say no. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Now, Billy, the dangerous thing about serving the bagels, because we have a mic in one hand, is that you've got to serve with your machete hand, which means there's a chance the machete is going to go flying. Now, they're rusty. Awesome. But that's not a plus. Oh, Tennis feels good.

Yeah, yeah. A little bit of lock jaw. So I'm just going to whack it down. I'm going to whack it this way. Love serving on zero, eleven? Sure. Tennis! Okay. God.

You hit it, though? Yeah, I think just enough to piss it off. There's nothing more dangerous than pissed off throwing bagels. Oh, you're doing it the responsible way, because you care about the audience. I know. I'm going to throw it like this, so you get a good rate.

No, don't. I'm also going to do it like this. All right, all right. There. Oh, yeah. There's so much... I feel like I'm probably more relaxed than you as a person. That's probably true.

Yeah, I feel okay about that. Yeah, I mean, I'm out of cider, but... Oh, we've got plenty. We have so many, you guys. Oh, shit. Thank you. I assume this is a collective manifestation of will from the audience.

I was in Alaska one time. Okay. Speaking of grifters. Yeah. I'm in Alaska a bunch. It's awesome. They've got a good spirit up there. I've put a beer down. This is the back when I used to drink.

I put a beer down and... three minutes later, four beers showed up on stage. Because people in the... Like, four different people, as soon as I was done with my beer, I'd get him another one. He could die. And I was like, Alaska is awesome.

It's great. It's great because it's one of the states that's testing vaguely what UBI could be. And I had a discussion online with some people about Andrew Yang's plan for universal basic income. And one thing I said is that if you get a problem with how many AR-15s there are,

wait until how many more there are when people are getting $1,000 a month from the government. And somebody from Alaska chimed in and said, we get like 4,000 bucks from the government every year, and yet people spend it all on guns. Yes. Yes. Everyone's hammered

and armed in Alaska. Hammered and armed in Alaska. It's awesome. It's great. It is awesome. Now, we should probably get back to this whole... I know. I just want to go to Alaska now. You know what? We could just...

We should do a show there. They don't even care what we're doing. They're just happy when people show up. Oh, man. We could get bear guns. You got to have a bear gun in Alaska. You do. It's safety.

It's like a seatbelt for bears. And also people. It doesn't look like a seat belt. What do we do again? I know. neat. This group... I've watched Brule

You're all right. You can stay down here. It was a wild time. As long as you're not gay. No, then you get your ass kicked right out. You will get out of here. No, no. Now, obviously, in reality, they were not x-ray specs.

That would also be horribly dangerous. There would be so much more cancer if they were really x-ray glasses. They were just a gimmick that basically created a double vision illusion that made it look sort of like you could see into your own hand. It was like a bunch of slits into the plastic and stuff. I don't want to bore you with this bullshit.

If it's a bunch of slits, sounds like it worked. They did not let you see through women's clothing, but the specs. So nasty, I'm sorry. I'm trying to just talk right today. I watched the Mighty Jimstones the other time. Yeah, the specs sold very well nonetheless. As did Brunhut's most brilliant invention.

You're going to like this one, Pepe. This is his most brilliant one yet. The invisible goldfish. I have some for sale tonight. Get your money out. He was basically just shipping fish food and an empty glass bottle of chocolate. That's amazing.

I do have a friend early on, and just with people messing around with the internet when we were figuring out what it was, he got kicked off of eBay because he was trying to sell a ghost in the jar. I laugh for like two fucking days straight. That guy should have gotten a fucking TV show. Well, no, and he had a good job.

He wouldn't quit it to do comedy. I was so mad at him. I was like, you're one of the funniest people I've ever fucking heard. He's like, I'm in charge of people. I was like, you need to be out there doing stuff. The world needs you. God, he's so fucking funny.

Yeah, yeah, it was really good. Also, the invisible goldfish came with a 100% guarantee that you would not see the fish, which was really easy to like. I told you. Yeah, I told you and saw fucking goldfish in those things. Invisible. He said that you can't even feel him sometimes. Now, at this point, we've all had fun with Harold Brannott's

story, but the worst thing you could say about him is that his products were a little bit of a scam, playing on the reality distortion field generated by comic books and the desire of small children to believe in wonderful things. But of course, this is not just the story of a man who scammed some kids out of their allowance money. You see?

Yay. Harold Brannott lived a second life outside of the bustling world of shitty comic book scam toys. And he funneled the profits from sea monkeys and x-ray specs and invisible goldfish towards a very specific political end. Now, I want to get a show of hands who spent money on any of these products. Come on, get them back up.

Get them back up. Get them back up. All right, keep them in the air. That specific political end was national socialism. Yeah, he's a fucking Nazi. Thanks a lot, you guys. Thanks a lot. A lot of people just learned they helped fund the Aryan

nations tonight. Jesus Christ, what is this thing that, what are you going to do with your millions? I got some plans. Oh, he said he did. Because the way he sold stuff is the way that preachers work. Yeah, yeah. It's like, it's like at the end of a comic book, which is like,

oh, it's a crazy fucking story, and I worked up. And at the end, you're like, hey, here's some shit for $3. Got me. Yeah, fuck it. And then, Nazism. And then, yeah. And then he's like, you know what, the Jews. Of which he was, yeah.

Now, starting at some point after the 1960s, he changed his name from Harold Brownhood to Harold Vaughn Brownhood. Ah. There we go. Subtle Germanism. Yeah. Now, the Vaughn suggested he came from German noble blood

and was thus a true Aryan rather than a working class Jewish kid from Manhattan. This is 15 years after the stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In the 60s, this is like right when they're taking off, actually. OK. Yeah, yeah.

This is the height of Sea Monkeys. 60s, 70s, yeah. He's doing well. And he's a, OK. Yeah, he's a Nazi, yeah. But he was before. Yeah. Now, I'm not really sure why Harold changed his name.

And I'm not really sure at what point he became enthralled with national socialism. I would guess after you make a crazy amount of money from selling dumb shit to kids, you start buying into your own bullshit a little bit. So you're like, I'm Vaughn, man. Yeah. And you know who else was good at selling bullshit to kids?

Hitler. Hitler. The king, yeah. Now, what we do know is that Harold was not particularly shy about his infatuation with fascism. He lined his personal study with a poster autographed by Hermann Gehring and an inscribed picture of Benito Mussolini.

Yeah. Does that mean he won't eat the bread? He had a Mussolini, like. Look at that. Pretty cool, right? That's the worst of the fascists, if you want to know how much I like fascism. He was bad.

That's the fucking carrot top of fascism. And I've got him on my wall. I got it. That's my guy. Pretty cool, right? He spent some of his sea monkey money on a rare print of a World War II Luftwaffe aircraft signed by four top Nazi ace pilots.

Where do you even get gun shows? You get you buy that at a gun show. I know exactly. You buy that at a gun show in Dallas, Texas. I've seen that on sale. Yeah. Or it was just some dude's barn. Or at Grant's Pass, to be honest, like.

Hey. I like that was a great reaction to be like, yeah, that's sad. We all know Josephine, yeah. That was very accurate. I don't like how accurate that is. Yeah. In short, he had the kind of office that only a Nazi or a very specific kind of podcast

host would have. I do have a garing original, but it's a tasteful nude. Yeah. He does the same thing. Look at it. I don't like him. I don't like him for the bombing of Britain. I like him for his opiate addiction.

He was a real artist when it came to being addicted to painkillers, one of the best, one of the best, you know. You've got to separate the art from the artist. That's all I'm going to say. It seemed to have affected him a little bit. It seemed to have affected London, too. Yeah. He let it get to his head.

Yeah. Now, it's possible that Harold's growing Nazism was responsible for his divorce from his first wife in 1966. Maybe. Why do you want to divorce your husband? He's a Nazi. You know what? We're not even going to deal with the paperwork.

Yeah. Don't. Maybe the X-Race back money. He keeps the C-Monkey money. They had one child together, a boy who she took. Now, some journalists who reported on him later in life did manage to get in touch with his first wife. She claimed to be, quote, unaware of his other activities

despite their occasional contact, which may have been true, may have been not true. She got out, so I'm not going to labor too long on that. We'll talk about a second wife in a little bit. Now, what's the 1970s rolled around? Those other activities that Harold was involved in included membership in the Aryan nations. Now, if you haven't heard about these dudes,

the Aryan nations are based up in Hayden Lake in the, great may not be the right word, in the state of Idaho. Um, it's pretty. I've been in jail there. Yeah. You and a lot of members of the Aryan nations, actually. They weren't there that night.

They were not there. There was just one scared kid. And just me going, we may not can't smoke. They're like, you can't smoke in jail. You can smoke in prison. I was like, well, let's go to fucking prison. I was like, what's the secret? They thought it was pretty funny.

And I knew I was going to get out in the morning, so I could be a little bit of a smart ass, you know what I mean? During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series,

Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me

from a little band called InSync. 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. Now, the Aryan nations had started off as a single church in the Christian identity tradition. For those of you who don't know what that means, Christian identity beliefs focus around

a couple of core concepts. Number one, white people are the real Israelites. Number two, Jewish people are faking it. And number three, their dad is Satan. That's funny. You guys are faking. You guys are faking, weirdy Israelites, your dad's Satan. Yeah.

That's it in a nutshell. That was a weird speech. Yeah, yeah. Can you show your work? How did we come to these conclusions? You know, they can, Billy, but it's just going to be a pamphlet of why the courts aren't real, because they're trying you under a flag of admiralty.

That is, you're just like, well, I can't argue that. That sounds right. I don't even know what it means. Now, in 1957, the same Yerabur Herald came up with his famous cell-mummified brine shrimp eggs to children plan. The founder of the church, a dude named Wesley Swift, settled on a name, Church of Jesus Christ, Christian,

because fascists are not very creative people. Now, in the late 1970s, yeah, that's a good name. Church of Jesus Christ, Christian. It's strange. Like, you have, you could call it anything. Yeah. And you're just like, Jesus Christ, Christian. I mean, it's like, it's either we

go to the Church of Jesus Christ, Christian, up in Hayden Lake, or we drive five and a half hours to the movie theater. We're in the middle of Idaho. That's true. Yeah. That's true. I guess we're Nazis. I'm a Nazi, man.

Because I didn't have enough money for gas. Yeah. Now, in the late 1970s, a guy named Richard Butler took over. And he moved the church to a big compound in the woods, the Aryan nations. Yeah, yeah, you do. Yeah, I mean, look, we're not against, we're all fans of compounds in the woods here.

That's why we do most of what men do. Yeah, to get a compound in the woods. One day, I'll have it in the woods. That's why I'm moving towards my career goal of becoming a freelance cult leader. Tax situations better. Freelance. You don't want to be full-time.

Y'all need a leader? I'm pretty free for two more months. I can do it 29 hours a week. I only do weird sex ones, though. That's the only one. Well, of course, yeah. Yeah, I ain't into murder cults. I don't do that.

The Aryan nations would be a central location in virtually every act of white supremacist terrorism that occurred from the end of the 1970s up until 2001. Butler himself is an interesting guy, and we're definitely going to be talking about Richard Butler in a future episode. But for now, what's most important is that you know his middle name was Gert,

which I think is objectively Gert. Like nobody's fucking G-I-R-N-T. That's fucking stupid. It explains the anger. Yeah, I would be pissed. Yeah, he's mad. Yeah. Also, if you're going to start, like, a white supremacy

thing like that, you need to do it in the woods. You got to do it in the woods, yeah. Because they don't need to see any other people. I guess we are the bet there's nobody else with them four hours, yeah. It's just us. We're the best. So it's on that movie theater.

I don't know. I turned on ESPN the other day. I don't think we're the best. He just shoots the TV. Yeah. So old Gert Butler grew up in Los Angeles, California. He majored in aeronautical engineering. In his youth, he was a member of the Silver Shirts,

an American fascist organization that were basically the proud boys of the 1930s. He had a successful career as an engineer, and he moved to Idaho in the mid-50s in order to become the human center of American fascism. Like Harold, he was an inventor. Butler held the American and Canadian patents for quick repair tubeless tires.

So that's neat. To what? Quick repair tubeless tires. That's pretty cool. Yeah, it's pretty. It's a weird thing to be into. So I guess you've got tires. You're fun in the Nazis, too.

I don't know. I don't know how tires work. Maybe we moved on. Yeah. Now, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, was a time of growing activity and extremism from the fascist right. In 1979, the KKK attempted to kick a bunch of Vietnamese

refugees out of the town of Sea Drift on the grounds that they were too good at crab fishing. Hundreds of Klansmen from around the country rallied in Sea Drift. Boats, you got a problem with that, Billy? That's the reason they gave? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You guys are too good at fishing?

It turns out they were not fans of the free market. But could you understand how insane that complaint is? Like, we're the superior race. You guys are too good at this thing. You're like, OK, I don't even know where to start. We're just going to go keep crab fishing, OK? So hundreds of Klansmen from around the country rallied in Sea Drift.

Boats were burned. People were attacked. Uniformed KKK members patrolled the coast with rifles. All this came a matter of weeks after the Greensboro Massacre, in which Klansmen murdered five communist activists in North Carolina and got off, essentially, scot-free. That same year, Harold Vaughn-Brownhut, inventor of sea monkeys, was arrested on an illegal weapons

charge in LaGuardia Airport. The cause of the arrest was a device he had patented earlier that year, a spring whip defense mechanism he marketed as the Kyoga Agent M5. It was essentially a telescoping baton for beating people with. Now, the ads for the Kyoga Agent. I invented it.

I thought about hitting people with a stick, but it wasn't a stick at first. It was as hard, and it was like, shawam. And now I'm made it. I do live in the woods. Why? Now, the ads for the Kyoga Agent M5 started with this text, when your capital letters,

worst nightmare, becomes capital letters, real. And suddenly, you are face-to-face with a mugger, capital letters, you don't need a gun, no self-defense device that you can get without a license. It can make you safer or give you more protection, strike down any attacker, regardless of size or strength, with capital letters, Kyoga, the steel Cobra. Hell, yeah.

He knew his audience. Yeah, yeah. I'm not mad at him for that. Billy Wayne, I got it. People that want a Cobra want a magic stick like that. I'm going to show you the ad for the kit. Why don't you describe to me what that is? It's, I mean, it just looks like a B-movie cover

from the 70s. It's like a Richard Branson, not Richard Bronson. I would say the guy in the center looks a little bit like Ringo, but, yeah, maybe Bronson's a better pick. Yeah, I mean, I think that's who they're trying to go, but it does, yeah, it does look like a beetle version of him. There's a, and then there's like a mummy.

And then there's a guy, there's like a woman, like a sexy woman, just about to knock the shit out of a dude. And then there's like a nerd. All the people with sticks are conspicuously white, and all of the muggers are indeterminate. They have been in the sun longer. Well, just very, yeah, it is very clear. There was a no risk, though, 90 day free trial.

And the big text on the ad just walk around and whack some people, and if you don't like it, send it back. Like a quarter of the page is just the all caps high font words. You don't need a gun, which I can think of very few things that are good that start that way. You don't need a gun. You don't need a gun.

We got this party. But under here, it's so effective. It's almost too good to be true. A thunderbolt of life-saving power at your command. Fucking awesome. It's remarkable. It's remarkable. I mean, just advertisers today are just lazy.

You guys, give your shit together. They're just garbage. There's some links at the bottom. You don't need a gun, Disney World. All right, hold on. Go on. Now, the Keoga agent telescoping beat stick was a product almost tailor made for American neo-Nazis, many

of whom had pre-existing criminal records and were unable to legally purchase firearms. The actual ad advised the weapon as a purchase for people who might need a gun, but can't get a license. Are you too much of a criminal for a pistol? Did the government find out what a piece of shit you are? We'll sell you a stick. I got you something in my trunk right now.

Jesus Christ. It's not dumb. It's just evil, is what it is. No, it is. Now, the Keoga M5 was sold, among other places, in Spotlight Magazine, a Holocaust denial publication started by Willis Carto, founder of the Liberty Lobby, and basically our great nation's first Richard Spencer.

We'll come back to this in a little bit. So police at LaGuardia arrested Von Brownhut for carrying six Keogas through the airport. In court, his lawyer successfully defended him by arguing that this telescoping baton was, quote, not a bludgeon, and thus did not meet the definition of a banned weapon. The actual ad promised its hornet's nest of piano wire

steel springs inflicted, excruciating agony, but apparently that did not qualify it as a bludgeon. He didn't say bludgeon. What? He didn't say bludgeon. I didn't say that. What agony could be anything? Heartbreak can cause you agony.

Yeah, you lose this thing, you're so sad. Now, Harold may have actually been saved by his complete incompetence as an inventor. During the court case, his lawyer staged a demonstration where they hit somebody with the baton to prove that it was actually a really shitty weapon. So part of his defense was literally, I did such a bad job that this doesn't count as a weapon.

Hit me. Hit me. You know what, hit him with it. He's like that guy who promised to drink the, what was it, that round up fertilizer or something. Oh, no, no, it was the, yeah, it was, huh? Someone had the name. Glyco phosphate, that's the fucking thing,

but with a little bit more follow through, not much more, a little bit more. I'll do it. Yeah, I'll do it. I'll have him do it. I'll have this guy on my lawyer hired do it. Do it. Now, in September of 1983, a white supremacist terror

group called the Order was formed during a meeting of the Aryan nations in Hayden Lake. This group would go on to commit several murders and rob more than $4 million, some of which was spent on heavy weaponry for the KKK and neo-nazi groups around the country. Where are they at, $4 million? Armored cars and shit.

Oh, sea monkeys. They got Mr. Sea Monkey. I think that's what funded them before the armored car robberies, yeah. Now, in September of 1984, when the order was rolling right along, the Aryan nations hosted another conference. The pamphlets from that time listed a number of outstanding Aryan nationalist leaders for praise.

One of them was Harold von Braunhut, inventor of sea monkeys. Since the Aryan nations was a gathering of different fascist groups and all the different leaders singled out where listed as belonging to separate organizations, Harold was noted as the leader of the imperial order of the black eagle. I mean, yeah, my son makes up a lot of weird names too. That's what it is.

Also, was this like a group of neo-nazi people? Thank you, John. So this is like a meeting of different ones? Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's like a bunch of different ones. So they're all kind of the same. I mean, they're, oh, I understand that. But do you think at one point during that meeting, they're like, are you the sea monkey?

Yeah. Yes, most of them are like, man, no, he did sea monkeys. Hell, yeah. You know, because they're not, they're those type of dudes. You know, there's like a lot of like backwards dudes like, he's a millionaire, he made sea monkeys pussy with his fucking eyes. Just that kind of conversation went on.

Do you know what I mean? You know what, though, to recognize them, these guys would have had to have read a comic book. Well. Touche. Touche. Now, the imperial order of the Black Eagle met in New York City in the early 1980s in a place

called the Estonian House in Manhattan. Speakers they hired included Robert Miles, a Christian identity theologist who in 1971 was convicted of a bomb plot to stop the integration of public schools in Michigan, 1971. In the early 1980s, Miles became the chief patron of a philosophy known as the Northwest Imperative, which is the idea that since the Pacific Northwest is

the whitest part of America, Nazis ought to just move there in mass and take it over. Now, an imperial order newsletter written by Von Brownhood described Robert Miles as a famous opponent of the communist Zionist conspiracy, who is nationally known in rightist political movements that reflect the highest aims and ideals of the white race. He was a big, big fan of Robert Miles.

Now, in February 1985, shortly after the order dissolved in a series of gunfights and betrayals, Harold Von Brownhood spoke on behalf of Reverend Butler at an area nations meeting at a Washington Sheridan. That's where you want to do that fucking meeting as a Sheridan. There's like one family on vacation at that Sheridan. They're like, this is a weird Sheridan. Hey, honey, you notice how many guys

with weird haircuts that are around here? I don't remember Nazis existing anymore. But this whole Sheridan has a lot of Nazis. One of them hit me with a stick, but it didn't really hurt all that much. It didn't hurt at all. Not sure if I should. And he just ran off and he said, the agony.

Hey. That's my favorite part of some of this antiquity, like the way they think, and they're like, and then we'll go to the Sheridan. I like it. It's nice. It's nice. You know that what they do is they do a good job

of getting the coffee at on time. I like that. And then the sheets yourself in a way that I also appreciate. They're good for stealing in my other group I'm a part of. Now, the cause of the day at the Sheridan meeting was the repeal of the 14th Amendment, which made black people equal citizens with equal protection under the law.

At the meeting, one white supremacist attendee recalled Bonn-Brownhut as a guy who didn't want too much exposure. He was kind of a mysterious guy. He made his statement in favor of the separation of races, and he got out. Keep my power. I gotta go.

Later in 1985, Bonn-Brownhut wound up in legal proceedings again, this time as part of the indictment of an Ohio Klansman, Grand Dragon Paul R. Roych, who was charged with violating federal gun laws. Bonn-Brownhut was not actually charged in this for reasons I can't explain, but he was accused of giving Roych $11,954 of sea monkey money,

which Roych used to purchase 83 semi-automatic pistols and rifles. I like that he probably shipped them the same way he did the crabs. He just knocked on a door and ran. And he said, four pistols is what it says on. According to the Washington Post, quote, Assistant US Attorney Thomas M. Bauer, who

prosecuted Roych, said the defendant and Bonn-Brownhut were friends. He said Bonn-Brownhut was prepared to testify at the trial that he had lent Roych the money for the purchase and then took possession of the guns to secure the loan. The trial was called off after Roych pleaded guilty to one count of illegally transporting firearms across state lines.

Bonn-Brownhut was very cooperative and pleasant with us, Bauer said. He brought some of his toys along, including the sea monkeys. Why wouldn't he? He said, check them out. This guy bought $12,000 in guns for a Nazi. But look at these little guys. They'll dance if you poke them.

Amazing. You will see ladies panting. Again, that was the Assistant US Attorney. By 1988, Harold Bonn-Brownhut was well the fuck into his support of the American fascist movements. 1988? 1988? Still going.

Still going strong, man. Now that year, his homie, Richard Butler, wound up dealing with a lawsuit as a result of the fact that he headed up a violent hate movement that murdered people. The sea monkey inventor decided to help his friend by dedicating a chunk of the profits from the sale of his Keoga agent M5 telescoping baton to Butler's legal defense.

In a newspaper to his followers, Butler noted that, the manufacturer has made a pledge of $25 to my defense fund for each one sold to area nation supporters. He advises people to write A.N. in small letters in the order form in order to ensure the funds were properly located. So that's good, right?

That's nice, helping a buddy out. Hey, man. Hey. You know I don't like asking for favors. But you know how I'm trying to start a race war? People are riled up at me about that. Government. Government.

Could I have some of that money you have? The beaten money. And the monkey money. I'll take some. I ain't above taking the monkey money. I'll be honest. In the brochure, Butler called the Keoga a fine article for self-protection.

And all whites are going to need all the protection they can get in the near future. Yeah, they are. That same year, Harold von Braunhood conducted an interview with the Seattle Times, where I guess to his credit, he spoke honestly about his racist beliefs. He described his hatred of inscrutable slanty Korean

eyes and said, you know what side I'm on. I don't make any bones about it. It fucking didn't. He did not make any bones. He didn't make any goddamn bones about it. You can't sell bones. Can't sell bones to children. They won't buy them.

You sell them pre-bones. You can sell them bones it'll grow. Now, as you might expect, the fact the inventor of X-ray specs and sea monkeys was buying arms and fundraising for literal neo-Nazis did not escape the notice of the mainstream press. The Washington Post, who in that day cared a little bit more about cantering fascism,

put together an utterly damning article about the toy inventor's Nazi connections. But that was not the most damning aspect of their coverage of Harold's life. To his eternal shame, the Post revealed, for the very first time, that Harold von Braunhood was Jewish. Yeah. Isn't that fucked up?

Yeah, it's fucking wild, right? Now, there are a wide variety of things you would not want to be as a Nazi. But Jewish is probably top of the list. Yeah, hard to pick a one above that. It is tough. I was trying to think of that. I can't really think of anything.

Now, the Washington Post's coverage first revealed the truth behind Harold's parentage and ethnicity. It also included an interview with Erwin Swahl, a director for the Anti-Defamation League, who said, we've long been monitoring Harold von Braunhood. He's linked to some of the most extreme racist and anti-Semitic organizations in the country.

He has a reputation of being a generous contributor. So that's cool. And we're going to talk about it. He was a generous contributor because he feels guilty. He's like, oh, you guys, why don't you find out something? You're going to be so mad at me. I think he was buying this way into the cool kids club. You're going to sear some money.

Oh, man, when this comes out, you guys are, you're going to hate me, really. I know for a fact you're going to hate me. Remember me for the weapons I bought and not for the religion of my parents. Don't. You're going to hear something. Think about it.

Now, we're going to hear how this all shook out once the news broke. But you know what we've got to shake right now? We're going to hit some fucking bagels with some fucking knives. What if I just pulled my dick out? No, you're wrong. It's about to get weird as hell. It's Portland.

Everybody's just like, finally. And they just take their clothes off. I thought this was an orgy. They've been talking for two hours. This stage is normally dicks from left to right. Yeah. No, you don't tell us how to live. That's obscene.

That is obscene. You throw packaged bagels like a decent Christian. Yes. OK. All right, all right. These are the pumpkin spice ones. Well, no, but how are you going to serve back if you don't have machete in your hand?

What if I do it well? You're not going to know. We've done this enough. I know what's going to happen. Yeah, nobody's good at this game. No, this is not it. Yeah. Oh, see, that one went into the crowd.

Grab another, or I'll grab another. OK, yeah. You can keep those. I don't want them. I don't like that pumpkin spice. OK, here we go. And Shannon, the way you throw it a little. He's not a pitcher.

He's not a pitcher. There's equipment. Also, it looks sturdy, but, you know, stuff. Well, I mean, someone's got to be angry at me every time we do this. And since Sophie's not here, it's your job to be frustrated. It is. It comes naturally, you have a.

Thank you. Thank you. Is that a stool? No. I don't know where the fuck they went, too. I don't know either. Like, I don't think about where things go. Oh, there's a hole under there.

OK, thank you. Or hit them. You're a roadie. You came out of nowhere. That was awesome. All right. He's wearing a black shirt. He's just like, here, here, here.

Do this, like, what's a baseball guy? Mickey Mammal. What's a baseball guy? I'm going to Mickey Mammal. Just say Jose Canseco. You've done more drugs than him. That's a fit. Barely.

Oh, wow. Yes. That was cool. I got to say, that is by far the best that's ever done. Yeah, that was cool. We've hit a lot of bagels on this podcast. It's never that cool. It's never worked that well.

It's always like, oh, that's a letdown. That time, it was like, we did it. Like, 80% of the shtick is that it's never very good. Like, it's always a big bummer that we build up for hours. That was actually cool. So that was cool, yeah. Glad that happened on the live show. I bet it didn't get recorded.

No, under no way. No way, no way, no. This is a beautiful memory that no one else will share. So back to the Nazis. Well, the Kyoga Baton fundraiser is what first drew mainstream attention to Harold. The reality is that he was almost certainly funneling tens of thousands of dollars,

if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, if his sea monkey profits into the Aryan nations for years. This continued throughout the 1980s, and up until at least 1995, if you paid for sea monkeys or any of Harold's other inventions up to this point, you may have contributed to the growth of the Aryan nations. Isn't the world cool? Or other KKK groups.

You might have bought those $12,000 of Klan guns. There's no way to know. Isn't the world awesome? It's great. Nobody would have guessed that. If everyone's thinking of, yeah, well, yeah, exactly. But that, you guess, you guess that. You're like, oh, yeah, I'm paying for bombs

to be dropped on random people. You never guessed the money I spent on those sea monkeys bought Nazi machine guns like that. Nobody calls that shit. Yeah. Where'd you get that toy? Oh, that's Nazi toys. Out in the woods somewhere, there's

some hippy guy who is just like, all I'm buying is X-ray specs and sea monkeys. And that's going to keep me pure, poor son of a bitch. Now, the only two things I really believe in in this world. Now, when Richard Butler, head of the Aryan nations, was questioned about one of his major backers being potentially Jewish and thus a direct descendant of the devil according to his theology.

Now, we have a question. Mr. Butler, how do you feel inside? He cited Vaughn Brownhut as a close friend and a member of the Aryan race who has supported us quite a few years. So that's interesting. Yeah. And then he said something dumb, like something crazy,

like, and if he was Jewish, I could have smelled it. We've basically wind up there at the end. That's why it's always something. Yeah, where it's always something like, I could see his horns if he, you know, you're just like, what? So the lesson here is that you can kind of buy your way into being a Nazi. Yeah, yeah, it works, apparently.

Yeah, they're not good people. They're not ideologically consistent people. They're not as consistent as they would have you believe. So I guess say what you will about the tenets of national socialism. It's not always an ethos. Like, when enough money comes onto the table, people make a fucking, yeah.

It's just more, I just want to hit stuff. So now, in that article on Harold von Brownhut, the Washington Post pointed out that he was far from the only Jewish man to ever go full Nazi. Quote, in 1965, the New York Times closed. That's a tough spot to be in. It's a rough one, man.

That's a tough one. This is like, hear me out. I ain't the first motherfucker to do this. This has been going on. You're like, ah, you don't want to be in that position, I don't think. In 1965, the New York Times disclosed the Jewish identity of Daniel Burros, a high-ranking Klansman

and former American Nazi party member who then shot himself to death. In 1978, Chicago Nazis rallied under the leadership of Frank Collins, the son of a Jewish concentration camp survivor. His family name had been cone. I know, fucking wild, right? Like, what do you even say to that shit?

It's fucking crazy. Yeah, but my dad was the dick when I was a teenager. Sometimes I had to be home at 1030, and I was like, fuck this guy. I rebelled. Yeah, it's probably worth noting here. You could have just. Probably worth noting here.

You could have tried to fight him or something. You took it so far, dude. It's worth mentioning that Milo Yiannopoulos, a prominent fascist who is a lengthy, documented history of conspiring with neo-Nazis to push propaganda, often defends himself from allegations of being a Nazi by pointing out that he is gay and Jewish. And as confusing as this seems, neither of those factors

precludes one from being a Nazi. Anyone can be a Nazi. That's the beauty. Beauty's the wrong word. But that's Nazism. You just have to have Nazi in your heart. You got it in your heart? Yeah.

Are you hateful for no reason? When you wake up in the morning, there's a lot of hate in here. We got a spot for you. Are you pissed and like flags? We got a thing for you to beat. Come on down to the flea market. Now, in 1983, Harold von Braunhood became ordained on the advice of a friend in what he called

a small ancient church without a local congregation. He described himself as a priest at large. Yeah, there's a lot of those. There's a lot of those. Still just that large right now. I don't know what kind of church this was. I'm guessing either some weird Christian identity congregation, or maybe some weird Nazi Norse pagan thing.

Like, it's hard to say. Ancient, right? Ancient church is like they found a building in the woods like this was an ancient church. And I am the preacher here. What we do know for sure is that years before the Washington Post article, the Anti-Defamation League had cut

wind of rumors about von Braunhood's Jewish ancestry. It had been a topic of discussion and suspicion among the far right largely due to his prominent nose. But according to that's the Nazis talking. That's the Nazis talking. Robert. According to a representative of the ADL, they felt he was a solid, dependable, extreme right

winger, regardless, that he was one of them and can be trusted. Because all the money he's made. Well, he gives us money. He gives us money. We need guns. None of us can work jobs. Because of the swastikas in the face.

He says the felonies, but I have a feeling it's all the face swastikas is what's getting us not hard. Now, it does seem to be true that whatever his ancestry, Harold von Braunhood was a committed Nazi. As committed a Nazi as any whoever goose stepped across the pages of history. And he had continued to attend the Aryan Nations gatherings on at least a yearly basis throughout the 1980s

and into the 1990s. He was a featured speaker on several occasions, more than once. The inventor of sea monkeys lit the burning cross that signified the height of festivities. Floyd Cochran, an Aryan nation spokesman until he reformed in the early 90s, described Braunhood as having, he said he had a big nose,

and that this is the fun part. He'd give long speeches about numerology, and he'd make references to the pyramids. It just didn't play very well. So it was not his personality that made him popular with the Nazis. He's weird. He does have pyramids all the time.

Even the woods people were like, ah, I got it. I mean, I mean, he was from Memphis. He gave us money, but he's weird. He's always talking about, like, 33. Have you seen that? Have you seen that Jim Carrey, maybe 23? Now, Harold also started a racist think tank, the National Anti-Zionist Institute.

That's just, it sounds like an oxymoron. It does. It's like a racist think tank. What do you think? Hate. Yeah. Thinking mad right now, that's what I'm thinking. You want to get them?

That's what I'm thinking. Get them. So he started the National Anti-Zionist Institute in the late 1980s. There he authored a regular newsletter under the pseudonym Hendrick von Braun, which was barely a pseudonym. Like, not even really a pseudonym.

It's like me calling myself Rob Evans and being like, nobody's going to fucking put this caper together. Yeah. There's so many machetes here. And you call me the Biden name? Is my, are my eyes filled with blood? Because my dentures are in. I can feel that part.

Now, I'm going to quote the Washington Post again, writing about Hendrick von Braun. Great pseudonym. In the world of jewels and precious metals, only that which is pure, rare, and unalloyed is of the highest value begins a newsletter dated 1993. For a full two pages, readers are urged

to unite against wogs and mud people, even if that means giving up their own lives. No one, except Jesus Christ himself, has ever managed to live forever, von Braun writes. Even if you could, what a bore it would be to hang around for a few hundred years, not doing much of anything, except watching the racial slur, make basketballs and sneakers

out of racial slur for Jewish people's skins. Now, this is super fucking racist. That's the sea monkeys guy. He's amped it up. Yeah. He's amped up the, he's amped it up. The address, the address for this newsletter was P.O. Box 809, Bryan's Road, Maryland.

And if any of you sent off for sea monkeys, that's the same address you mapped your money to. Hey, hey, hey, you don't, you don't keep a bunch of money, opening a bunch of P.O. Boxes everywhere. No, you pick one. You pick one and you keep it. For the Nazi stuff. I keep it ready.

And the Liar Shrimp. So at this point, you're getting confused. I said that kid is swastika flag. Oh, God. And some kid had just ordered it himself and his dad got it and it's addressed to him. And son, did you buy a luker? Did you, did you buy a swastika flag?

Put it in water. It's supposed to turn into a monkey. Holy shit. That's amazing. This is a world we all live in. All of us. It's crazy. We live in this world.

Now at this point, I'll wonder what some of you are wondering at least. Did being exposed as a Nazi harm Harold's career as a toy salesman in any way? The answer is slightly. But not all that much. Not as much as you'd think. Not as much as you'd think for buying arms for terrorists.

In 1994, Von Braunhut sold the marketing rights to Seamonkeys to a new company, Basic Fun, ISIS. By the way, that's that's the Hobby Lobby podcast. And that's going to be a good one, too. So the president of Basic Fun, Alan Dorfman, questioned Von Braunhut about the rumors of his Nazi past. Harold assured him these were all lies made up by a neighbor with whom he was fighting a property dispute.

Well, God, he's great. I mean, he's a terrible human being, obviously. But also, like, some of his lies are pretty fun. We're just fighting over boundary lines. Like, that's a funny lie. Like, look, there's an apple tree we're fighting over. So he told a bunch of neo-Nazis I was with you. And I was like, dude, not cool.

But we're letting a judge decide about the tree. Shortly after the sale of Seamonkeys to Basic Fun, Harold attended the July 1995 Aryan Nations Congress as a featured speaker. He went on stage right after Richard Butler called Jewish people the bacillus of decomposition in our society. Also speaking that day was Louis Beam, a KKK leader, the inventor of the term leaderless resistance

and one of the top minds behind white supremacist terrorism in the last half century. Piece of shit. That's what top minds of Aryan nation means. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Katja Lane was in attendance as well. She's the wife of jailed order member David Lane, the man who coined the 14 words, which

you'll see tattooed on some hands if you point up at a protest in this town. Cool town, you guys. Cool town. Where'd he go? Why doesn't Fred Armisen do sketches about that part? They missed that aspect, though. Portland's adorable, like some of it.

They could have added that to the put a bird on it sketch, but it's one of those Nazi evils on a guy's back. That's so good. Yeah. Someone just like, I have the needle thread. I have it. I have the skills. I'm in the co-op.

Now, Dorfman found out about this, his visit to the Aryan nations, and being Jewish himself, Dorfman immediately ended the professional relationship between Vaughn Brownhut and Basic Fun. But this was not the end of Seamonkeys. A new generation of parents who'd grown up with Seamonkey kids in the 70s were now raising young children. There was money to be made in rebranding the living animal

male order toy sensation and cashing in on nostalgia. Before long, Harold found another company to market his monkeys, one that did not care about his Nazi past and present. In November 1995, he signed a new contract with Educational Insights. Their plan was to rebrand Seamonkeys to capture the attention of 90s kids.

Rather than portraying them as chubby, chimpanzee-looking sea critters, Educational Insights hired illustrators to draw muscular, superhero-looking Seamonkeys that could appeal to the extreme kids of the mid-1990s. My Seamonkeys, fuck. They're not starting families, they're just fucking. But they only fuck within their race.

That's fun to keep the Seamonkeys. They're not havens. Now, the most significant change was that Seamonkeys would no longer be illustrated as naked. As one company executive told the LA Times, I'm fucking, you got to hear this. Having been involved in the marketing to kids, you don't want to introduce that as an area of controversy.

Well, fun Nazism, but not nudism. But don't show them penises. Don't show them penises. They have those. They don't need to see them. No, they already have. Oh, he's buying arms for the Klan? Well, that's his private business.

That is. But if there's a nipple on one of those fake monkeys. That really is America in a goddamn nutshell. He's like, hey, hey. Move that naked lady and give him a gun. Give him a gun. Put a swastika right on that pectoral, right over the nipple. Now, one month after inking a deal with Educational Insights,

Harold von Braunhut officiated the funeral of Betty Butler, Richard Butler's wife, a reporter with the Los Angeles Times actually spends a significant amount of time digging into this story. I'm going to quote from him now. The specter of Seamonkey dollars funding hate groups is to be less controversial. When I broached this topic with Fine and Atamian, two

of the guys who worked at Educational Insights, Atamian confirms that all the higher ups at Educational Insights know about von Braunhut's past. He says that everyone in the toy industry knows about him, that people had sent them the articles, but that the Seamonkey shouldn't be tainted by their inventor. Is this any different from the US government having normal

relations with Germany three, four, five, six years after World War II? Yes, it is. Yeah, it's just really different. It is, because they made laws about it. Because they killed those guys, yeah. And then they said, hey, we're not going to do that anymore. And then we were like, OK, cool.

That's cool that you guys realized that was bad. I hate to say this, though. Hey, you guys have some guys in your country that are doing what we used to do. The quote goes on. We're doing business with him on a business basis with a wonderful product called Seamonkeys. And we don't see where it's relevant.

I've never seen evidence of his alleged past behavior. Says, fine. This has absolutely nothing to do with Harold as a person. It's more to do with who Seamonkeys are and what they can mean in terms of fun and fantasy for kids and adults of all ages. Oh, cool. So I'm just talking about sociopath.

OK, I got to go. Another member of the Educational Insights team agreed this was great. Do you listen to Wagner? The Israelis wouldn't listen to his music for all those years. But now they do. If you're always the closing. Yeah, if your response to a question about funding Nazi

hate groups starts with, do you listen to Wagner? You're going in the wrong direction. Hear me out. Now, that's all I got. The article I just quoted from was written in 2000. For most of the rest of his life, Harold would 2,000. 2,000.

Come on. Yeah. For the most of the rest of his life, Harold would be like, Andy's here tonight. We're bringing him out. He's going to throw one out Seamonkeys. He's like, ah, you got to have fun. Now, there are only 9.95 each, and there

is a truck full of Klansmen who need guns. So please, give generous. This is a sad Klansmen. Now, for the rest of his life, after 2,000, Harold von Braunhood would clam up and refuse to answer when pressed about his Nazi connections. And the undefined, but significant amount of money he poured into funding American fascism.

He told the LA Times, I don't have to defend myself to you. Or anyone else. I'm hanging up. In an earlier interview with the Seattle Times, You don't have to tell people you're hanging up. Yeah, you just do it. You just do it. They got it.

In an earlier interview with the Seattle Times, he gave a longer answer. I love the United States. I support the Constitution. I'm a very viable individual. I'm not sinister at all. That's fucking awesome. You're in a good spot in your life when you're like,

I'm not sinister at all. You're like, yeah. What'd you do? Nothing. I'm hanging up now. I mean, we're all laughing at that, but our president ended a letter yesterday with, I'll call you later.

I'll call you later is what that motherfucker said. What's wild is that in 300 years, when kids are like reading the condensed textbooks of this period, which will still suck like textbooks today, they're going to read about that. Apples taste like oranges, and we took a bad turn. They're going to read about that letter. Three paragraphs down from when they read about Congress

talking about boofing. Like, that's going to be the same fucking page, like fucking wild. And at the end, it'll say, and Putin died of laughing. And then the teacher will say, put up your books. It's time to boof. That's how we learn in the future. Now, Harold Von Braunhood spent his last years running

a wildlife conservatory on his own land in Maryland. He had a great love of animals. And reporters who visited him during this time reported that he was very careful. Just Albano ones, though. Yeah, very specific animals. Just the white ones. He's just like white tigers and white squirrels.

He liked cats, but not most of them. Reporters who visited him during this time reported that he was very careful to make sure he did not feed his geese any bread that might contain mold. He really cared. He's a nice guy. He's a nice guy.

When the Maryland Independent interviewed him and asked about his past, he told them, I'm not burning any crosses on my front lawn. I'm not holding any secret black eagle meetings or racial meetings or KKK rallies. I'm not bringing any ideology to the area. That's fine. That's fine.

Guy wanted to move on. We all want to move on. I have stuff I want to move on from. Let's move on from that. Now, Harold's last bout of public activism was in opposing the Riviera Development Project, which was a project to develop a Riviera near him. Obviously, I assume.

On the grounds that it would harm wildlife and the natural environment in his adopted home, he became the committee spokesman of SWORD, which is an acronym that stands for Save Wildlife Opposed Riviera Development. Not a bad acronym. You've got to give it. This is a good one.

Fine. It's fine. He's good with words. Yeah, he's good with words. He sold those sea monkeys. Yeah. Instant life. Now, even in this ostensibly decent endeavor,

he found ways to inject racism. Peppering local newspaper ads for SWORD with references to the Judas Goat Business Experts responsible for the project. Subtle. Yeah. He's subtle. He's subtle.

And asking his neighbors to join our struggle for God, country, and our American heritage of self-determination. Yeah, nice. Now, I found a fun article near the end of researching this on a little website called National Vanguard, which do I need to say it's a Nazi website? It's a fucking Nazi website. I thought they reviewed independent music.

What do you listen to, Billy? OK, there's a side story to this. I opened for Sturgill Simpson a couple of years ago. And we went through Spokane and about, I didn't know. And I lived in Seattle for six years. So I just like ripped Seattle and the Northwest apart about like, you know, like, oh, we're so progressive. I'm like, well, where the fuck is all the black people?

And then you go to Tacoma and you're like, oh, there they are. You guys can't do that anymore. You can't just be like, no, no, no, you can't. You can't. So I was doing that stuff. And then like a month later, Sturgill sent me this thing that his people, its enemies, like, look at this review.

And it was from like a white nationalist website. And the guy was a huge fan of Sturgill's. But when I came out and started doing my jokes, at first he was like, this is my guy. Because I've got blonde hair and blue eyes. And I have this accent. So he was like, oh, he's been chosen to come here. And then I start saying the shit I say.

And the guy was like, what the fuck is this? And he went back and had to re-listen to Sturgill. And he's like, well, that motherfucker ain't who I thought he was either. This made me laugh so hard. This is the best review I've ever gotten. There was a barrage of blasphemy and anti-whiteness. And I was like, he got what I was doing.

I'll tweet that review out soon. I am excited to read that. So good. It's well-written. He's not it. Oh, that's good. He's educated. He's just misguided.

We're about to read a not well-written piece in Nazi literature here. So as I said, I found a fun article on National Vanguard about Harold. And it gives us some idea of how he was viewed by the neo-Nazis that he didn't give tens of thousands of dollars to. That article cites a quote from a little guy you all might have heard of, Tom Metzger.

Leader, yeah. Tom has a history in this town, and it's not a good one. Leader of a group called White Aryan Resistance, aka war, essentially a murderer, but with a couple of extra steps. Do you think they ever had some war? Good God. And they're like, hey, we can't sing that.

We can't sing that. Yeah. That is not going to go down well with this conference. Damn it. But it goes with our things. Oh, good. So here's what Tom Metzger had to say about Harold Vaughn Brownhut.

Harold Vaughn Brownhut, a self-made multi-millionaire from Maryland, has been an Aryan nation-scrung tributary for years. I met the man at a meeting at Robert Miles's in Michigan. He was wearing a priest's collar when I first met him. He was a small man with decidedly Semitic features. I commented to several people at the time that this individual was a long way from an Aryan.

Then a Washington Post story broke a few years later, saying that Vaughn Brownhut was a bar mitzvah Jew. It was also said that he was the state leader for Aryan nations. This, of course, puzzled me greatly, especially the way Christian identity people- This made my top thing go hurt. I made my findings known to the Aryan nations,

but received, I think, his findings where he read the Washington Post article, but received no answer. I then repeated the findings on this update a few years ago. Still no change. It seems Vaughn Brownhut was some kind of self-hating Jew, but a steady contributor to A.N. Oh, well, I had belled the cat.

But I heard nothing about it from the identity camp. Today I received an article that was printed in the Los Angeles Times, a thorough and complete history of the activities of Mr. Vaughn Brownhut. The thing that appalled me through and through was one comment made by the writer that Vaughn Brownhut officiated at the funeral of Miss Betty Butler, the devoted wife of Richard Butler.

That is very hard to swallow. So that's nice. It bummed out Tom Metzger. Like, what, what do you want? You want a happy ending of this podcast? Tom Metzger's sad. That's as good as it's going to get. Woo!

Woo! Woo! Now- Come on, baby! Well, he looked like a Jew, and ain't no paper saying he's a Jew, but ehh! Speaking of happy- I'm sad.

Harold Vaughn Brownhut stroked out and died in 2003. Yeah! There we go! Fuck him! He's a piece of shit! Yeah. Your clactor just funded more Nazis. He's good.

Now the most his fellow fascists at the National Vanguard were willing to say about him was, apparently, Brownhut's racial beliefs were sincere, and I noticed they didn't give him the Vaughn. That's interesting to me. Now, Harold's longtime wife Yolanda sold the rights to sea monkeys after his death to a company called Big Time Toys for several million dollars.

They apparently screwed her out of quite a lot of this money, and she sued them in 2013. I'm not going to get into the details of the lawsuit, but it was still ongoing as of 2016. The New York Times wrote an article about the story, and pressed Yolanda gently on her husband's years of fascist activism. She insisted that she and her husband never talked about politics. Listen, he had so much sea monkey money,

and he had so much knowledge about sea monkeys. We just didn't have time to talk about anything. That was all that was going on. And most of the time, I was just trying to get him to take those glasses off, because it's like, come on, man, don't... Not all the time. Now, Billy Wayne, normally, round about here, the end of the podcast, we would plug our plugables.

And I suppose we can still do that. But first... I'll be in Portland, October 17th. There you go. That's near today. That is soon. That is very soon. Very close to now.

Sold out. Too late. I feel like, before we go, there's two intact bags of bagels, and we should attempt, well, one intact and one... You did good. Partly intact. We should at least try to un-intact that one of bagels. Okay.

All right, let's do it. Before... Thank you all for coming, by the way. This is... Thank you all for coming. Please, this is... Thank you all for coming. A last-minute idea.

All right, I wanted people to comment. You guys are like, yeah, we'll be there. Now, what I... And even today, I was like, I don't think they're coming. What I really appreciate about a Portland audience is that y'all are willing to let two strangers brandish large knives at you for two hours. And you're all used to it, because this is Portland. And oddly enough, the only illegal thing about all these machetes I brought in here

is that I kept them in a bag. If I'd been waving them drunkenly around the street, that's fine. It's Oregon, baby. It's a great thing. What's a weird rule? It's like you can't hide them. You're like, oh, what if we hit them and you can't find them? Okay.

All right. Now, you know what, Billy? I should throw it first. I got to hit them. Okay. I'll get that. Okay. I saw a guy wearing your hat today, Zorro.

That's machete pocket. That's what a robe's made for. Yes, what a robe's made for. All right, Billy. Here we go. Are you ready? A robe's serving love, probably. Yeah!

All right. All right. All right. All right. It feels better to hit it. It does. All right. You did some damage.

I'm going to do it one more time. I want to see. Do it one more time. You know what, Billy? Try it. Try the real chopper. Okay. This is the sum, bitch.

This is the CRKT or CKR. This is one you use to chop deep into wood. It does. It's shitty steel, but it's got a real deep edge. Yeah. It's good for batoning and bagels. Okay. Yeah!

That was amazing. Yeah! That was amazing. I'm so important. Like, this is just a piece of bread. I was like, there's a joint in there. I was like, that's so awesome. Oh, it's just bread.

Now, we didn't do any ad plugs for this, but Columbia River Knife Company or whatever CRKT is, they make a fine bagel slice. Yeah, they do. That's not, they haven't given me a dime. You all saw it work. That was aggressive, the way he said it. Billy Wayne. Yes.

You got some pluggables to plug? You should do that. Yeah, just by my record, it's, just if you Google my name, all that shit comes up. You'll find it. I don't. Like, you don't know who I am because I'm so bad at, like, I'm good at the comedy part, but the rest of them are like, I don't give a fuck. I like making people laugh and people are like, you should tell people when you're doing it.

I'm like, I know, but I don't care. But if you go, I do tell people now because I have kids and they're like, we want to eat. So, help Billy's greedy kids. I wish that was a joke. And that's how that wasn't what motivated me to market myself. But it really, like for a long time, I was like, I just like doing comedy. It's fun. And I have kids.

I'm like, I should tell people I'm doing it. So just Google Billy Wayne Davis. Google Billy Wayne. I'm still pretty lazy about it. You know what? Google bomb Billy Wayne Davis Illuminati and just see what happens. See what happens a year or two from now when that percolates. Just Google the shit out of that over and over again.

I want to get invited to an Illuminati party. They're like, hey, people keep thinking you're part of this because we saw Google sends us stuff. Anyway, come to a meeting and I'm like, can I bring a machete? Jeff Bezos is going to be there. He's got tons of them. They wouldn't let me in. Because I would tell. Yeah.

Like, I would leave him like, you wouldn't believe who's in it. It's not who you think. Carrot Top. He's so much smarter than people give him credit for. Carrot Top did not live. I heard just like, what do you think? Don't repeat what I say. It was dumb.

But I'll be in Salem tomorrow night doing stand up. Yeah. And then Eugene on Saturday, and then I'm coming back up. I'll be in Seattle the November 1st and 2nd on Capitol Hill. I'm going in there and getting the fuck out as fast as I can. This is a negative fucking place up there. People are just saying, meh. So see Billy Wayne Davis in most of those places, but if you venture up into Seattle, come on.

If you hate Seattle, you should come to my shows because I just rip it fucking apart. Yeah. Bring your fucking bolt cutters. You are going to need them to get through those streets. I'm just laying here. I think as though you need them. We didn't talk about how to end this. No, this has been the podcast.

Oh, I should plug. I have a podcast called Behind the Bastards. If you want to listen to it, you might enjoy it. You, the guy in the Raul Wallenberg shirt, you might be interested. Yeah, have that bagel. What's that? Oh, that's a joint. Oh, shit.

Yeah. Portland fucking holds it down. That's a bagel. All right. Yeah. All right. All right. This is the fucking episode.

Yes. Thank you. I'm going to have a suitcase just sitting up with my first CD. I just have like a bunch left and I'm just going to give them away. Yeah. So it's my first record. There's a lot of good jokes. There's no holes that I don't care for, but whatever you guys are.

I'm really proud of that. I listened to it a couple of weeks ago and I was like, this isn't bad at all. So it's, and I'm also like 30, 40 pounds heavier than I am now. So you're like, who's this fat fucker? He was fun. That guy was fun as fuck. I got one last thing to say. There's a fellow in the audience named Alan who built the website for the war on everyone.com

and who without his help that would have taken like fucking a month and a half more to produce and I would never have accomplished it as competently because the only thing I can do is write 11 pages on shitty people and then drunkenly read them to comedians. So thank you very much. That's a fucking podcast. We're done. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse.

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

Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.