Doomed to Fail - Ep 48: A 3-act story: The Lavender Scare

Episode Date: September 13, 2023

Next, Farz takes us on a journey through the fight for LGBTQ+ rights - people who have always existed but not always been able to tell their truth publically. Unsurprisingly, American prude Senator Joseph McCarthy, and his team were behind this 'purple herring' where they pushed people out of government for being 'unfit.'We wish we could say things are 100% fixed since then, but alas, we still have work to do. Photos via Public Domain & #midjourney #AIInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail]  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

In the matter of the people of the state of California, first is Hortonthal James Simpson, case number B.A. 019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. And we are moving over to the true crime side of, it's not even true crime. My topic today's going to be weird, Taylor. I think you're going to have a lot of the things about the topic today. Because, like, I went a little bit out of my element, and I think I did an okay job. but i don't know so let me let me start by saying welcome to do to fail the podcast about relationships or things that we're doing to fail and today we're covering i guess kind of a

historical thing slash like almost true crime more so public intrigue i don't know how really i love it let's get i like that we're getting weird with that that's what i what i like about what i like about us is we're getting weird we're getting a little bit this one's going be a little bit weird okay so great are you ready i'm ready i'm excited okay okay so today's story is going to have three acts o act one will be the topic we're covering itself act two will be the public backlash the thing that we're covering and act three will be the doomed to fail part of the story nice interesting right i'm taking my i'm taking my cues from you really doing all interesting things like seven parts two is like i need to be more creative it was really pushing the envelope here um

okay so if you're ready we're going to go ahead and draw the curtain on act one so okay i'm going to start today's story by covering one of the most shameful parts of american history and one that is much less well known than it's crimson counterpart the lavender scare do you know what this is okay No. It's about gays. Yes, but you can say differently. Yes, it is. I apologize. Cut that out. No.

No, I don't know. Tell me. Okay. We're going to get into it. So I will say also, as as Taylor has mentioned in the past, like we are not queer historians. I am sure that I'm going to leave stuff out and that's someone much smarter than me, me could do a better job and a more carpentive job of covering today's topic. But I went down a rabbit hole and got too far before realizing I really just didn't have enough time to pick a different topic. So here we are. And we're going to move forward. So as most people are aware in Oppenheimer, the movie basically bored everybody to death about, the Red Scare was

a period of American history where accusations of being a communist or having communist sympathies basically resulted in people losing their livelihoods and their careers and reputations in American U.S. government agencies. The same thing ended up happening with the House on American Committee, which was the equivalent for the entertainment industry. But what we're focused on is the government agency set of things today. What is less known is that in parallel to the red scare was the lavender scare, which was the name attributed to the same kind of marginalizing and abuse that went into outing purported homosexuals from government agencies. So this story reminded me, which I shouldn't probably need a reminder of this,

but it didn't remind me of how important institutions are and kind of driving the public zeitgeist. So Stonewall, the uprising, didn't happen until almost 1970. The Lavender Scare started in 1947 and kind of set the national mood for how people would think of and treat homosexuals basically the genesis of setting that mood was the state department setting security protocols for the types of people who were ill-suited to serving the u.s government and the criteria for that protocol was and this is a quote communists their associates those guilty of espionage persons known for habitual drunkenness sexual perversion moral turpitude financial responsibility or criminal records so the key

there was the term sexual perversion. And I went, did a little side quest here and started digging into the DSM. The DSM is the acronym that stands for diagnostic and statistical manual for mental disorders, which is basically the book of all psychological disorders, essentially. So I went as far back as the DSM one, which is the very first edition of the DSM. And that was published a little bit after this time so the red lavender scare started around 1947 the dsm one was published in nineteen fifty two before then it was actually worse definition wise there was another diagnostic book on this but this the dsm was the first time they kind of codified it in the dsm homosexuality was listed and categorized under sexual deviations on the same level as pedophilia

like that's what it was considered at the time and that that was the term being used for it was sexual perversion so when the state department includes that term that's what they're talking about specifically so it was only in 1974 with the publication of the dsm 2 in the organizing effort of gay right activists the medical community finally decided to consider homosexuality as a slightly better thing which was then known as a sexual orientation disturbance which still sounds awful it was still considered a mental disorder but it was still better than the other classification of the it's also worth noting that as of today which we are now at the dsm 5 there is literally no category for homosexuality like it's not considered a mental disorder obviously and so yeah progress we made it

somehow so are you following yes that is super interesting and it's so weird to like right why would you write that down which one you know like the whole thing like why would you have to write down like that it's a disorder you know it's just weird to me Yeah, well, so that was basically the medical consensus for all of time. It's funny, this took me down so many different sidetracks. The entire year rights movement started in like Germany in the 1880s because like that was the first time anybody tried to stand up for for the cause and it's always been considered like some sort of a mental like defect.

It's only as of like the late 1990s or so that it started becoming mostly accepted. society but even then it wasn't like great so yeah it's it's it was a wild wild turn of events it sounds like the 1940s and 50s and 60s were incredibly incredibly difficult um but luckily the middle community made the change made the switch so um so the point being that the medical community itself classified homosexuality in this way which of course is how the federal government followed as well also i want to note that i'm only referring to the time period in this story known as a lavender scare because that was the most aggressive and overt attempt by the federal government to otherize people it's not like the time before this was any better but it just

wasn't like a um it wasn't like a national thing it wasn't like the you know it's like when 9-11 happened and like the entire country is just focused on that thing that's what was going on here and so before that it was like okay you went into the thing something happens you know you get caught for some like i forgot what the term was they used but you got caught like licidious whatever contact or lewd behavior and it's like okay you know bill over there got cop or something whatever a year or two he's over and we're moving on with our lives but this was different this was like the entire nation's kind of staring at this one topic which made it a lot lot worse because it's not like being outed just meant that you it wasn't a quiet thing

it meant you lost your life right it means you lost your career your future your social network your family it was everything was gone it was a huge huge deal so in 1950 as joseph McCarthy was picking up steam in his prosecution of purported communist the undersecretary of state a guy who's name i will have a hard time pronouncing called john purifoy announced that the state department had rooted out and fired about 91 gay people the government consensus was that one that is a shockingly large number and two it means president Truman was not taking this threat seriously part of this was driven by the Ferber McCarthy himself was spinning up because it was seen as being weak or immoral to not be outraged that gay people were in the government and if you weren't being super super aggressive and agro about it then you were you were part of the problem you're gay yeah exactly oh but that's so stupid yeah a part of was like just self-preservation like this coward or something like I'd better call C-Val because if I don't call C-Vout see might call me out you know know right totally and it was fun of course there's tons of gay people in the government

of course there's always been gay people we talked about this a lot of course go to dc like it's it's a great city like it's a fun city like yeah but also the other other part was like what people would do at this time was they would introduce themselves and say things like hi i'm steve i've been married to julie for five years we have six children literally they would like be over the top right it's like a part of who you are yeah they would put that part of identity first and foremost because that's how scared people were like that because you didn't have to actually actually by the way we don't know if these people were actually gay right exactly that's not the point either that's not the point at all yeah exactly exactly so in 1953 Truman's second term was

done he did not aggressively pursue this like he was just like this is crazy like he's not he wasn't in that headspace um he actually could have run for a third time because he was grandfathered in as um an incumbent president but he decided against it and eisenhower became president one of the first things he does as president is sign executive order 10450 which happened only two months after assuming office this executive order made it illegal to hire or allowed the employment of gay federal workers five thousand such workers were fired for suspicion of homosexuality and they again like they weren't just being fired they're being publicly outed like there was was a roster people could look at um and wow he also he also put in god we trust on everything

so here's the thing here's the thing about eisenhower that if you go deeper into this executive order and his relation with mccarthy and mccarthyism is that he was also under this when when when the election happened the 52 election happened a part of the fervor in America was this anti-communist anti-gay sentiment and part of the reason why Eisenhower ended up winning was because Republicans were seen to be stronger on this topic than Democrats and the public site guys was going towards that and so I'll get this later on well actually I won't get to it later on because I didn't write it down but eventually when McCarthyism kind of wanes and goes away it was obvious at that time that Eisenhower was like

great, fuck this guy, never wanted to be this way anyways. Like, I'm done with this bullshit. Like, it was like, sure, like, he probably wasn't great, but it seems like he did this is also part of like self-preservation. I agree. And I also, I mean, I think the, I think the God stuff fuck us up because people think that that was always there. But I don't, I do like him.

I did, I do like the way he ended his presidency, you know, with a military industrial complex. Like, everyone calmed and fuck down. And then I also, I like that he was a general. And I like that in the book, I read a biography about him. And in that biography, specifically about McCarthy, I'm remembering that he kind of let McCarthy like do his stuff on TV because he was like, this guy's fucking crazy. Everyone's going to see it. And they kind of did.

And it was kind of embarrassing for McCarthy. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Part of his plan. There's also something I learned in the middle of all this that has to do with the term called presentism, which is the sentiment that you see now a lot, which is like if, If you didn't think the way a modern person would think today about social issues, then you're the problem like a thousand years ago, which is like an unfair perspective to take

it and really came in perspective when I was researching this because you want to think that like marginalized communities have each other's backs in some ways. And one thing I learned was like, that is a thousand percent was not the case in the gay community. Like there was there was gradients to this. There was the white male gays and then there was like the socioeconomic ladder of gays. There was like the minorities. There was the transgender.

was one guy who became like a huge figure one of the first people to get fired from the um he's he's an astronomer working for the army he ended up getting fired he ended up never working again because of the lavender scare but you read like his comments about race in the 1960s and you're like uh you're like man i want to support you like i do i do support like you got railroaded but like why are you going that direction with this like there's no one yes and so anyways that led me down a different rabbit hole but presentism like look into it like it is generally shitty to like judge people in the past for like what current social wars are but it's also odd it can be gross the way it was gross when I was reading this guy talking about race anyways sidetrack um

no 100 percent no you're saying so yeah so okay so this executive border you're passed and just remind people of how recent this history is that we're talking about the Eisenhower executive order that made it illegal to have hire or retain somebody gay in the federal government or federal agency that was partially rescinded when bill clinton signed as don't ask don't tell policy for the u.s military in 1995 but that was only for the u.s military that was not for civilian leave how reason that wasn't how shitty it was Yeah. So it was interesting because I read this other footnotes like this is a hilarious side thing that ended up happening because of Eisenhower, which was when the Vietnam draft happened, all these people came out and saying that they're gay when they got drafted. So like, fuck it is I'm not going to Vietnam. And then it would be in the last three days of the Obama presidency in 2017, that executive order 13988 would be signed to outright prevent discrimination in the civilian or the military. branch to the U.S. government on the basis of sexual orientation. That was 2017. January 7th,

2017, three days before Trump took presidency. Crazy. So the persecution of homosexuals and state and federal government agencies continued on throughout the 1990s. Again, like it was only in 2017 when the federal government actually apologized for the damage it caused in this era. But all that being said, I'm going to leave the lavender scare here for a beat. So we can head into Act 2 of the story today, called the Resistance. You ready? All right. Yeah, I'm ready.

So I don't know, Taylor, I think like given our backgrounds, like our work history and stuff, like I think we both have like a pretty good understanding, like the power of organizing. And that's where this story kind of starts with the gay rights movement. So I'm going to touch on what movement building really looks like, and you'll see how it plays out in this situation. There's no set way to build a movement, but in broad strokes, it requires four things as defined by an organization I found called JAS, which is short for Justice Associates, which is a grassroots movement building advocacy organization that's focused towards female empowerment.

And they put together this framework, which if you were to look this up, there's like 20 different frameworks for this. Like there is no set way of doing this, but generally speaking, this breakdown made the most sense me given like again like our background and movements and organizing and stuff like that the four pieces of it were number one rising up which is finding like-minded individuals number two building up which is what we would consider consider traditional organizing sharing your message and spreading it to mobilize others the third is standing up which is direct action or something close to it you know some people don't have to go all the way to direct action but they could and the fourth is shaking up which is combating

that thing you're fighting for with policy. So, now that we have that framework, I'm going to bring up my second favorite podcast ever, which is called You're Wrong About, because I'm going to be inheriting part of what the host commentary on the gay rights movement was as it related to their episode on the Stonewall Rights. Again, I'm just going off, like, I'm not in this community. Like, I'm going off of what I'm hearing from others that aren't in the community say. So like, your beef was with them, if you don't like what I'm going with this. But unlike, I know, I know, nice disclaimer, right?

Unlike other diaspora in the U.S., gayness isn't limited to race, religion, education, socioeconomic status, geography. It's not limited to anything, really. It's just as one unique characteristic that anybody can share with others, right? In that sense, the fact that the gay rights movement was. able to form the resistance that we're going to be discussing here is actually super impressive because how do you bring together, for example, and this is like directly from like I'm parroting the host from you're wrong about, Michael Hobbs, how do you bring together, let's say like

a 35 year old gay Manhattan lawyer making like 300,000 a year living in a penthouse in a 20 year old like gay street punk who's living in the subway stations, right? Like the only thread between them is sexual orientation. really their lived experiences are vastly different and so there there's not like obvious places where like those things collide like I would argue that okay let's say like it's the 1960s and you're like a black like accountant versus like you're it's a 1960s and you're like a black I don't know like store clerk or something like your lived experience is going to still look very similar like the day to day when you go to the grocery store it's going to look very similar it's

going to look very similar to like you know talk to certain police or whatever but these two this part of the diaspora is like vastly different than that and so it makes it super challenging on the first two part of a movement building which is rising and building up together to kind of put those pieces together essentially so one group that initially took the plunge and started what would have been basically career in social suicide was this organization called the madison society have you heard of this Okay, so the history and origin of the Madison Society is kind of all the place and some of it is kind of problematic, mostly because it really coincidentally, not like, not deliberately, it happened to tie communism and homosexuality together because of the origins of its founder and the original members. And it went through like a huge upheaval, because then the lavender scare happened and the red scare happened.

Like, guys, we can't be tied to this. Like, it's bad enough. And we don't need communism as a part of the mix, right? And so anyways, there's a lot of upheaval there. And so the main thing that the National Society basically did was it created the opportunity for gay people to kind of come together and mostly an anonymous way and just kind of discuss their lived experiences. But the more critical part of this was that it kind of spun off into its own thing. It turned into a non-centralized movement where every city would have its own match of society. And all of a sudden, it started the rising up part of movement building started to kind of realize itself.

The third step, so sorry, the rising up part was basically the initial knowing that you could come together. And then as it's distributing across, you know, then it's building up. That's actual traditional organizing. thing. The third step, the standing up part, came in the biggest way in 1969 with the ride of the Stonewall Inn. Obviously, I'm sure you've been, you've been to Stonewall Inn, right? I haven't. Um, no. Okay. I know, I know, I know where it is. Cool. Yeah. So the Stonewall Inn was at the time, kind of like a hitting gay club, which was run by the mafia in New York.

By all accounts, it was a complete shithole, but it was like super fun. It was the one place, gay people around the Greenwich Village area could kind of come together for a night on the town and because running you know a gay establishment was illegal at the time everything was kind of done underground and because of this the mafia saw an opening and took it upon themselves to open the stonewall in obviously they did not hold their patrons in the highest you know right they were like whatever yeah i like i go right sorry um i was in charlotte north Carolina and there was like a stonewall street And I was like, wow, that's so progressive. And then I was like, oh, no, they mean Stonewall Jackson. Yeah, yeah, different. Different. Right, right, right, right, right. And he was killed by friendly fire, BT Dubs.

It was just, I was just like, I was like, right. Yeah, I don't know why this, why they, I shouldn't research why they called the Stonewall Inn, but, um, but, um, but stories I've heard. I think it's literally by like a stone wall of like old New York or something. I don't know that may not be true, but I think it's something like that. Oh, yeah. Yeah, of course, because stonewall is its own work. right and like stonewall jacks was named that because he was like an immovable object okay yeah it makes sense his name wasn't stonewall okay um so yeah i read stories about this which that's good but put that

your list for your future children stonewall so in like a just a stone wall way like not referencing anything like no this kid's tough i know it's like it could go either direction though you're kind of pigeonholing your child into super masculinity or or not but um maybe so yeah like again like this was run by the mafia and so as a result of that one thing i read was like there was no like running water and so people just decided like piss in buckets and throw the it was not a well-run facility it was all underground bullshit right and so um the the additional layer of this was that there was basically like a tacit understanding between the stone wall its patrons and the police where police would regularly rate it and they would

usually rated earlier in the night like call like nine 10 o'clock when it wasn't super packed it wasn't super busy they would you know put a padlock on the door to get everybody out they would steal the cigar box that contained there was basically their makeshift register full of money and be like well that's your punishment they probably take one or two people that work there and say we're got to throw you in jail but it was like this to understand like okay like this are one haven but we're going to get fucked with every now and then right right that kind of changed on June 28th of 1969 when because it they decided to break into this place and shut it down at 1.20 a.m. So people were like they thought they were safe. They were having a good time.

Police show up past that time way past that time. It was basically my understanding of it is that the police broke this task of understanding between the patrons of stonewall and the morals police of in New York. And so people were upset and as they were getting upset, one woman which I'm not even going to refer to her what they refer to her she has she has a name that would be probably like derogatory charm now and so I'm not going to refer to her with that but um she uh she ends she ends up getting arrested in there doing it pretty aggressively and she ends up fighting back against the police and so as she was fighting back against the police people saw they're like oh wait we we can fight back against

them by all accounts was somewhere around like 500 or so people had gathered outside the stonewall in when this was going on maybe like a tenth of the number of cops and they're like oh we outnumber these people dramatically let's go ahead and do something and so at that point all hell kind of breaks loose and one of the details I loved about us was that the um the police call in the swat team and like there's like a conga line forming where they would like throw rocks and like the police and they run behind them and through the alleyway and then do like a conga line and making fun of them and then run back around and throw rocks it was it was just mayhem was absolute mayhem but

But I will say to the credit of the chief of police at that time, he did tell his men to like not use deadly force, which is restraint that I don't even know what police would have today, much less back then. 100% no. Yeah. So that's great. So this riot is basically considered the birth of the gay private men. It was the flip from let's be in secret so nobody knows who we are to how, how.

the way we're being treated as bullshit to fuck you we're not taking this anymore like it is it follows the pattern of movement building in like a long tail way from the from the days of the 1940s of the maddiction society to like that distribution of the mass society across different cities to let's have these local haunts to let's rebel let's let's fight back because at this time again it was illegal to even have these establishments like like it was like it was completely criminalized and so this was a very overt way to kind of fight back against that the riot was the genesis of the actual first super public gay rights organization like literally it was like right after the stonewall riot this happened it was called the gay

liberation front they're closer to like a direct action organization as opposed to what madison society really was which is like let's just like know that we have camaraderie amongst each other they took it again you cut off you cut out a little bit oh sorry so they were they were more of a direct action organization as opposed to madison society which was more of a let's just get together and talk about things and know that we have a safe space with each other so i mean one thing i read was that the gay liberation front thought that maddian society was just like an old-timer thing and was like these guys are way too chill about this and we need to get out there and crack heads they also did something fun which was they formed like internal caucuses so for example like the

lesbian members would have their caucus the trans members would have theirs the drag queens would have theirs and they would openly protest at city hall on street corners they would publish periodicals on issues that were affecting the community in those individual caucuses like they were very out and loud about it which was frankly because everything was illegal but literally existing was illegal at that point So good for them on that front. On the fourth element of movement building, the last piece of it was shaking up. And that had to do with implementing policy.

So today, they're all 11 openly gay members of the U.S. House and sorry, yeah, yeah, of the U.S. House and two in the U.S. Senate. So by percentage, the Pew Research Foundation found that 7.4% of Americans identify as LGBT. by comparison the makeup of Congress is 2.4% between the House and the Senate combined. And so, you know, it's not quite direct representation. But like, that is huge, like from, from like. It's huge. But like being like. And also like.

Mm-hmm. Go ahead. Sorry. No, I was going to say also just like being able to say it out loud, you know, I'm sure that we're gay members of Congress in the 50s. And I'm sure there's more. I'm sure. There's got to be way more closeted ones out there. But I'm saying like in 2017 is the first time there was an actual repeal of the law that Eisenhower. That was 2017. And I mean, it's, yeah, it's it's wild to think about. But with that said, we can actually pivot now to act three, which is the doomed to felt part of all this. Amazing. So. So. It's so much work for this. I'm so proud of you. Aw, thank you.

So well, so well, we start to keep going. Once you go down, once you start going down it, it's just like, oh, my God. It's interesting because it is, it's like, it's almost like a diorama of like a movement. Like, you look at like, you know, black, right organizations or racial equality movements and stuff like that. There's history that goes backwards, like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. and there's so many different like milestones and it's so slow in terms of how it happened the fact that this went from like something that we kind of know what's going on but we're not really going to look at to we're going to prosecute to we're going to revolt it's like it's like 15

years you actually get like a beautiful picture of like what a movement should look like just looking at like the gay rights movement because it happened within a very finite window of time and it happened dramatically I mean and in the middle of it you have HIV because that was huge yeah yeah they had to do so much I mean there's still so much

that like didn't happen in the 80s that should have happened that is terrible you know they were like primed to be able to help each other because yeah they were at least able to talk about it yeah at least but that's the thing at least they were able to have a community

that they could rely on each other Like, again, going back to the Madison Society concept, there's so many other ones. There's the women of Belytus, the girls of Blytus, which is like the lesbian version of Madison. There's like this, we could have done like 17 weeks on this. But like, you know, I'm giving you the highlights here. But, um, okay. So act three, the doomed to fell part. So the principal architects of the red and lavender scare were to complete another piece of shit named Joseph McCarthy and his chief counsel Roy Cohn.

Um, spoiler alert, Roy was gay. Of course he was. Of course he was. Even as he was actively outing in publicly having people fired for these allegations, people even then assumed he was gay. Like there was one moment. We see that now. We see that now.

That still happens. Yeah. You know, find a politician on Grindr. Larry Craig. Remember Larry Craig? Yeah. Yes, exactly. There you go.

So there was a moment during a hearing of the Labrador scare where someone he was questioning basically called him a fairy. Not basically, he called him a fairy. And Roy never actually admitted to being gay, but it was like pretty well known. So one of his assistants, his name was Russell Eldridge, who was gay, and then he died of AIDS. Yes. Yeah.

And then he also had a partner who lived with who also died of AIDS in 1986. And then Roy himself died of AIDS. And like, he, it was known. It was just like some, it was like Rock Hudson. You couldn't say it, but it was like there. It was out there. Right. It's also worth noting, like the reason Roy's such a piece of shit is he was also like

Donald Trump's main attorney when he was basically evicting a bunch of minorities out of like public housing so he could buy property and turn into luxury condos. So there's that as well. And he also defended John Gotti and basically. I think it was like two other mafia bosses in New York. Like he was, he was a huge. No regime equality is that guy. Before he died, he was formally disbarred.

Like he literally could not practice law anymore. So that was, that was his contribution to society. As for Roy's boss, Joseph McCarthy, again, huge, huge piece of ship. There was also speculation that he was gay. And this one's a bit harder to verify. So Joseph was married. He did have a kid. But there was rumors that were spread around Washington of, like, him attending, him frequenting a bar, a gay bar in Milwaukee.

He was a senator from Wisconsin. And so Milwaukee, there was rumors that he was there. There's rumors that somebody said that he tried to pick him up and, you know, do all that. There, some of the speculations of these accusations were, if they weren't true, then the reason they probably came out was because jade grew hoover who ran the fbi and allan dillis who ran the cia fucking hated him they thought he was a total beat of shit and so they were like yeah let's just like put all these rumors out there let's find people to say this shit and and try to like soil his reputation that way it didn't really work in the end um but there is some assumption

that that was what was going on the red and lavender scare and mccarthyism and his reputation all kind of came to an end when he held a hearing into the armed forces and how some hundred and thirty alleged communists were employed there one thing to note and i didn't write this down is that roy cone part of the other allegation on him being gazed that there was this guy whose name i can remember but he he was with the army and roy cone hired him to work in mccarthy's office And Roy was apparently, like, completely in love with this dude. And the army took him and sent him overseas. And Roy would constantly have these back in force with the army around how he should be treated,

how he should have better, you know, place to sleep and food. Like, he should be treated a certain way. And if he wasn't, then he was going to, like, try and burn the entire army down to the ground. that's what led to this hearing it was literally the fact that roy wasn't getting the guy he was like in love with the kind of treatment he thought he deserved and the army wasn't acquiescing to him they're not fucking scared of him they're like fuck you we're not going to do what you want so then they drag the army into a hearing on communists and and that's what fundamentally destroys roy cone and McCarthy's reputation so i'm going to tell you what happened so they drag

the chief counsel for the army into into this special hearing the guy's name is Joseph Nye Welsh and they basically say there's a hundred and thirty people who are communists in the army at one point so Joseph is he's chief counsel for the army so he also runs a law firm as well and there was a individual named Fred something again didn't write this down but he was apparently a part of this thing called the Lawyers Guild of America which again you don't need a lot of information to know that like any association of people was assumed to be like some sort of a communist thing and so because of his association with this

guild which was basically an association of other lawyers on national tv mccarthy accused this guy fred who was like a junior associate at um at welsh's law firm of being a communist and welsh lost it was like fuck this guy and that's what we all remember is the famous saying he goes this is a quote he goes have you no sense of decency sir at long last have you left no sense of decency but there was a build-up to that like he was cutting mccarthy down over and over and over again and then he kept bringing up this guy fred's association with this guild and what welsh was saying was like you are you have no information you're trying to out my junior associate who is like a harvard log rat as a communist in front of the entire country like fuck you you have no right to do that

And so, and that was, that was basically the moment. That was like the pivotal turn when Welsh said that. They kind of changed the public perception. This is all national television. Apparently the entire, I didn't see the video, but the entire audience in the hearing chamber started applauding Welsh. And it was right after that that the, the U.S. Senate decided to censure McCarthy back when centering a senator was actually kind of a big deal.

And it was, it was their way of saying that you brought ill repute upon the U.S. Senate. he would basically die a few years later at the age of 48 from what is now like it was referred to as like a way of committing suicide because apparently he just fucking was drunk constantly he just drank himself at death now it is considered that he died yeah it is now considered that he um died of cirrhosis of the liver but people will say that like from this day when welsh called him out until his death like he basically just lived with a bottle like it was it was almost a way of preventing suicide so what um wow he's only 48 yeah yeah it's 48 that's a lot he did a lot of bad things another 40 years in in the senate if he'd wanted

yeah he did a lot of bad shit preserved it though wow so um that is my three-act story of that's so interesting it's it really it's like once you start and it's not and it's not over you know like it's still like there's you know all you can't teach diversity equity and inclusion in colleges and in texas and florida anymore you know like it's not gone yeah there's there's there's the history is gonna again you got to look at things within a framework of like what it meant for for for being being alive to be for like living your life to be illegal to 30 years later like it's just crazy it was 74 it was 74 until law started being repealed at the federal level on outlawing in making criminal like gay behavior that's not that long ago that's not that long ago

And they've always been gay people. So like, yeah, yeah. And so I don't know, I mean, Taylor, you're about to catch a flight. Like I, you should, it's worth listening to that you're wrong about episode about Stonewall. I thought that, because that's what I listened to when I was like, man, that's, that was 1969. Like that, a lot of shit, a lot of good should happen between, like, between such a, like, a not that long period of time. And so, I don't know. If it's up your alley, if it's a topic you're interested in, then I definitely work.

Ben, you're wrong about episode on Stonewall because they cover it very, very comprehensively. Yeah. Yeah. So super, super interesting. Anyway, so I know you got to run. You got to get to the airport. Go to your thing. I will text you later with ideas on where to go. What time are you thinking maybe seven or eight? Yeah, let's try eight because I'm going to land at like 545. Okay. Yeah, you need some time to rest. Okay. Nice. Well, until I get there. Also, oh, I have one. more listener mail. Yes. We have a friend on Instagram named September, which is a dope

name. And she's been sending me, like, stories of like, you know, like that woman who wrote a book that was like, how to kill your husband. Then she killed her husband. Yes. Yes. And then there was like, the other woman who like killed her husband and she was like, wrote a book about like grieving. You're like, what? And then there was, there was another one recently where, I can't read. I don't know what it was, but some judge show, not judge Judy, but a different one. There was a guy who was like, talking about being married and then he was like talking to the security guard and the security guard was like you know trying to be very like very serious and he's like oh that guy looks married and and they're like he's married but he's very happy and everyone laughed and then he killed and then he

killed his wife yeah i remember that one that was a good one anyway anyway don't say on tv that you love your wife because you might kill her yeah it's uniformly true never never We'll discuss things like that. Awesome. Well, thank you far as we're at Doom to FailPod at Gmail on Instagram, on YouTube and TikTok, and literally everywhere. We also have a substack where you can sign it for emails, if that's an easier way for you to see what we're doing each week. We'd love you to do that as well. And please share it with your friends because we need to share it.

And I don't know how to do that. We need to be famous. We need to be famous. You guys can all bless. Awesome. Thanks. I'm looking forward to seeing you later. Have a safe trip.

Thanks. Thanks. Are you going to start it off or we're going to say goodbye? Yes. Okay. Okay. We'll do faces. Cool.