Doomed to Fail - Ep 8: Traitors and Terrorists - maybe? - The Rosenbergs & The DC Sniper

Episode Date: February 20, 2023

Happy Presidents’ Day! We are not covering Presidents, but we can probably swing it to be a Presidents’ day episode because we are talking the DC Sniper and the espionage case of Julias and Ethel Rosenberg.Are we all going to die? Yes. Could it be a random shot at the gas station or a nuclear war? Also yes.Great! Join us, we’re freaking out. Follow us on Instagram & Facebook!  @doomedtofailpodhttps://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpodSome sources:Civics 101 - Federal Courts: Espionage and the RosenbergsHeir to an Execution: A Granddaughter's Story (2004) - IMDbWhich is VERY biased and before some information was brought to light in 2005. Basically, nobody wants their grandparents to be Soviet spiesWikipediaChat GPT for some more help The Rosenbergs American Justice Rosenberg photos via the Creative CommonsLee Boyd Malvo via the NYTMildred looking awesome via UTHSCJohn Allen Muhammad via Wikipedia John & Lee via Boston University 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 a 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. Ask what you can do for your country. Welcome to Doom to Fail, the podcast where I reveal a new issue I have every single week. I'm Fars. I'm joined here by my co-hosts Taylor. Hi, Taylor. How are you? i'm doing well how are you you don't sound well yeah i'm not i think i have that respiratory virus rsv thing um and it's um every week there's there's something going on every single week two weeks ago no electricity a week ago in florida this week rsv um next week i'll probably get hit by a truck we'll see but yeah good time no don't things come in threes if a year over

it maybe that's it maybe that is it yeah that's a really good point yeah it's all it's all uphill from here i think you're fine yeah um so yeah on on that note uh i will say my drink for today is tea and honey because yes i need it that's a good one that's good for you you do need that apologize i'm sniffling a little bit too so apologies for all the sniffles mine are allergy related i think but um we're going to sniffle a lot during this episode i imagine so far as I know you're going to go first, but just to get us prepped, my drink is, once again, circling back to our episode one, we're going to go straight vodka because we're going to talk about some Russians. So we will get to it when we get to it, but I'll let you go first.

Lovely. And I'm going to start out. I think I can start out by saying congratulations to our good friends, Beth and Jay. I just saw that yesterday. Who are engaged. It seems like it's, it seems like it's, I mean, it's been a week. So it feels like it's public enough now to where we can actually say, stuff so congratulations guys oh congratulations we love you guys so much so cool that is going to be a fun fun wedding oh my god i can't wait yeah um so hold on one sec taylor okay far as is pausing to cough and go yell at his dog that's what's happening right now i'm looking at far as office he has a white chair which is a very very brave he's back and i'm back great

Okay. I narrated while you were gone. What'd you say? You'll find out when you listen to it. Okay. So today's kind of a special episode on the true crime front because it's kind of a double whammy. I'm going to be discussing two different types of relationships that were doomed to fail. One is a romantic relationship between our main antagonist of the story.

And the other is a father-son type relationship that was also doomed to fail. Ooh. I know. Double whammy day. I don't like it. But wait. So sorry. I interrupt you, Fars, but I forgot to tell you that I have a note for you.

I know I'm personally not taking notes, but I have a note for me. Just kidding. From my husband wanted to hear more of the gross stuff. He said, I want to hear the gross stuff. Well, unfortunately, this one doesn't, well, tell them to stay tuned next week. I have a pretty good one for next week. This one's going to be pretty like slap-dash robbery style stuff going on. So that one, me and you are aligned there.

Okay, cool. So the key denominator of both of these failed relationships is a singular asshole named John Allen Muhammad. Taylor, does that name ring a bell? No. Okay. Maybe later. Not yet. You may also know them, him, them.

by their media branded name either the beltway sniper or the DC sniper you okay yes yeah this is this is not that doesn't sound like slapdash robbery it sounds like horrible I know but I know but I didn't know how to like say it without giving away okay great you're great so this one's like this one's like a super meaty topic. There's so many moving pieces to it. I could have probably researched this for like a solid week and still not have gotten to everything that was going on here. There's so many details. A lot of things going on. People are moving between different states, different countries, different people coming in out of everybody's lives. I'm really doing like the top

level version of this. I'm going to reference a podcast that was a part of my sources for this later on. It's called You're Wrong About. And I don't know if they're still active really. because I know that there was like the team kind of stopped doing the shows together like I highly recommend checking them out especially for their episodes on the DC Stiper case because they did it in I think it was four parts probably some around 8 to 10 hours worth of content just on this I'm going to wrap this up in 30 minutes so obviously there's a lot that I'm going to be leaving it out so yeah I think I listened to an entire series called the DC sniper yeah yeah on you're wrong about no a different one like a book the podcast was like a called DC sniper it was like deep dive

into it yeah so much so many details yeah exactly um so the other party to this crime was i'm just going to go ahead and call him a child his name is lee boyd malvo and i'll start at the top by addressing one part of this that based on how this was framed in the media so this was always framed in the media as terrorism i looked at the actual formal definition of terrorism and the definition of it is the intentional use of violence and fear to achieve political or ideological aims. The events we're discussing started five months after September 11th. So at that point, nearly everything was called terrorism. If you remember Taylor, like this was around the time the anthrax thing was going on too.

Yep. Everyone was scared. I mean, obviously, you know, I feel like that. And then I had it, I mean, I was in New York on 9-11. in, but I was in a bubble. I was in college and I, like, didn't know anything about the world, really. And I hadn't even really, like, defined terrorism at all, you know, like, I wasn't aware of everything that was going out in the world until then, you know, so, and then I was scared.

Yeah. Yeah. So I feel like, I feel like people were, like, telling me that, like, my guy friends were going to be drafted, you know, like, we were, who knew, there's all these rumors and, like, weird shit going on. So, yeah, everything was terrorism then. I remember we talked about the, what. you being in New York on 9-11, you seem to have gotten exposure that me being in Texas definitely did not get.

Yes. So that's awful in its own way. But I bring up the terrorism thing, because I'm going to put an alternate point on this and say that it was not terrorism, because this actually was not ideological or politically motivated in any way. We actually know why John in particular did what he did. frame this as John doing it because this is very Charles Mansonie where he like he controlled I mean he was controlling a child so like he was the antagonist in all of this I'm going to get into his motives at the end actually because they're so stupid it'll it'll blow you away I'm going to go through all this and then you'll get to the motive and you'll say that was it

that was the plan and just like all these people died for this it's going to be kind of shitty to say the other part of the whole terrorism piece was a it made better headlines and also they kind of had to call a terrorism because they really really really wanted to put john to death when they caught him and they did spoiler alert so i mean it's been like 12 10 12 years so if you don't know by now john all mom was put at death that well also never mind you i want to come back to it but like you you keep going that that's a that's a that's a that has a link between our being put to death is a link between our stories today so continue yes um so i'm going to start with john and i'm going to say that like when as i was learning about this

guy and reading about him he really reminded me of donald trump like in the sense that if he's not right or if he is challenged in any way he doesn't understand how to deal or cope with that like he just goes a mega ton on whatever is in his way like like taking a sharpie and changing the way path of a hurricane i was just talking about that last week when i was at that conference in florida and i was like that was my favorite moment of the trump presidency like what are you talking about you don't know everything oh my god so but yeah totally i can't imagine having someone like that like as your dad or as your husband like you'd just be like yeah um and And yeah, like he goes, he goes a megaton in any situation.

And there's a specific reason why he goes megaton in this situation in the, in the D.C. Belway area. This all goes over a span about eight months. It actually doesn't even start in D.C. We'll get into like where it actually begins. It culminates in D.C. And that's where we kind of, we kind of referenced it that way. But much like every morning I cover, like I mentioned, the motivations on why he does what he does turn out to be ultimately incredibly stupid and don't actually.

he doesn't achieve his goals which good he shouldn't right i'm not going to go much into the john's early life other than some details that will become relevant later on john was actually born with the last name williams he changed his last name after joining the nation of islam i should know and i don't know if you know this taylor but the nation of islam is listed on the southern poverty laws website with a hate group designation huh there's a lot of the material that i read out there that comes up later on in john's life as he becomes more and more indoctrinated that has to do with ethno purism i don't know what you'd call it just like like anti race it was it's all bad like it's none of it's like not it's like not it's like a mind that is like full of butterflies and

you know rainbows like it cultivates a mind of like everybody's the enemy fuck everybody that's not me and i have a question that i feel like i don't want to make sound wrong, but did he, did that happen in prison? I feel like it didn't. Okay, because I feel people convert to Islam in prison and get radicalized. No, no. This came about because of the second point I'm going to bring up, which is his second wife, Mildred, who seems to be a great woman and she ran across the nation of Islam and really like the clean living aspect of it, less the ideological components of it and brought John into it as a result of all to that. Okay, cool. So yeah, the second point is that he's been married and divorced twice

and Mildred is the biggest focal point of this story. That's the second wife. Okay. And the last point that it's that John was in the military for a very long time and he was actually given multiple awards as an expert marksman. Oh. Yeah, not great for DC. Come in handy. Yeah, we'll see. So let's go ahead and circle back to wife number two. So let's look, talk about a tortured woman. Again, you're married to essentially Donald Trump, but like without the money. It's not. It's worth noting that most of what we know about John comes from Mildred.

Like he's not very loquacious as it comes to discussing his own life. So we mostly know about her or him through her. In 1983, Mildre was living in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. she was 23 years old and working and just going to church by all accounts she's kind of a simple person doesn't have much in the way of romantic relationship experience and it's at this time she beats john at a grocery store and john asks her out and when i was when i was single for like five minutes of my life my friend told me to go to the grocery store and staying in the vegetable aisle to meet me men he was like you'll know that they're responsible and that they care about themselves and

that's the best place to find guys is that where you met one it's not but i don't think that's a terrible idea it's weird standing there how long you stand there i didn't do it i'm just saying that's not weird i'm gonna look at i'm gonna look at a picture of mildred mildred okay continue i see her so at this point john teased this up with her as wanting to jump straight into a relationship it kind of reminds me of like an old-timey courting thing where this was a date to marry thing and john basically tees us up that way from Mildred as well. She's not very experiencing relationships. He kind of said, let's just get serious. So they get serious. From what John did tell Mildred over the course of their time

together, he didn't have an easy childhood. His mom died when he was young and he went off to live with a grandfather who was apparently a piece of work. He's a closed book from here on out. He doesn't like revisiting his past. But given what we learned about his character later on, all this kind of tracks shitty childhood there's a lot of details there but we'll just leave it at that okay so red flight number one as the relationship gets serious mildred learns that john is already married to someone named carol boo he has two sons i don't get this i don't maybe maybe i just don't have as much time as other people but carrying on one relationship is hard enough carrying a relationship with children is harder carrying a relationship with children and then a

side relationship is how do you have the mental maybe i'm lazy that's what it is yeah no you need to really commit to it i think is part of it yeah and is there like a what okay nowadays just for our listeners is there a way to check if someone's married i guess i feel like are people not telling people they're married like can't do a full background check on someone when they pick you up with the grocery store I mean I would there's got to be other signs right is there an indentation on their wedding ring finger or Mildred yeah seriously yeah she learned all this through a friend she confronts John who explains the marriage was falling apart she buys it and the relationship carries on there's so many

details between these two facts, all of which make Mildred sound like a saint and John like he should be very grateful to be with her. But whatever, she gets back with John. A lot of interesting things happen here. And then ultimately, Mildred breaks up with John. This is before they're married. Oh, so they get married. So they get back together. Exactly. Yeah, later he convinced her to get back together. And then in 1988, they get married. So. Is he get divorced yeah yeah the car the carol relationship ended okay however it ended okay so they're married now mildred is pregnant with john's child and learns that john is cheating on her with a 19 year old old is john at this point john would be in his mid 30s yeah uh he's been apparently

seeing her for six months again i don't understand how like god i'm just i don't am i like i'm doing things like how do you have the strength and the energy to do this and like and like planning a wedding in the middle of that it's also hard yeah doing a prenatal care it's a 19 year old so you know that it's probably not just like dinners every now and then you probably got to go to some shows like i don't get i don't get it but Mildred learns about this and invites Danielle over to the house to confront John. There's a lot of details I'm glossing over. She doesn't invite her over.

She goes and picks Daniel up. She goes over to the house, picks her up, brings her back to her house to confront John. Oh, my God, I love Mildred. I'm looking at her picture this whole time, and she just looks awesome. So I'm just like imagining her being mad and she just looks so cool. She has like a beautiful headscarf on and all of her photos. She looks, she just looks like a boss. She turns out okay, I think, at the end of the story.

from these pictures of her. And so I'm just like, good on you, Mildreda. Yeah, it's hilarious. So like, John comes home, Daniel is in the kitchen. Mildred is like, what, you know, John's like, what's for dinner? So go in the kitchen, you'll find out.

You go to the kitchen and sees Daniel. This is incredible. So also in the middle of all this, one of John's friends, James, apparently he was supposed to go pick up lotto tickets for James. And so James came over to the house in the middle of all.

this to pick up his lotto tickets he's sitting in the living room like i just keep picturing this guy james like what's going on like what the hell does walk into yeah he probably thought he come over and gets like leftover dinner um anyways they hash us out john says i'm over it with daniel sorry daniel we have to break up because here's my six-month pregnant wife that i have to stick with um And then apparently James drives Danielle home. What a day for James. Did he win the lottery? Is he doing okay?

We don't know. I did think I was like, this could actually be kind of a me cute if James had capitalized on it, but I guess he did. So funny. Anyways, they end up having a kid. His name is Little John.

Little. I know. Not little. They later have a second child, a daughter named, Selena. And in general, it just seems like John mostly ignore the responsibilities of being a good husband and Mildred kind of was on our own to raise the kids in mine in the house. Because also throughout all this, it seems like implicit that John is also just cheating on Mildred constantly.

Is it a job? So sort of, sort of. They start a business together where John's apparently really good with cars and he would just go around and fix cars. But like, that's also how he would end up being with women. Yeah. I mean, that's how you do. it's not that he's super human you just ignore your responsibilities and then during the workday while you're stopping by at multiple women's houses yeah there's also like just kind of hilarious but like weird side stories going on here about john's behavior so one time apparently he went to the salvation army and just brought home some random dude he befriended there and said that this guy's going to be living with him like weird it's it's sound i wrote down

this sounds like something homer simpson would do it kind of is though like he just shows up with some right um and so obviously it's kind of implicit at this point that john is in some capacity emotionally abusing mildred he seems like someone who just can't handle any lack of control but it's a weird kind of abuse it's not like physical beatings it's not like just constantly screaming at her it's just it's abuse done by henpecking the shit out of her it was also like i said before like it's also clear like she's also where there's cheating going on to this time like he's doing everything to make her feel like a second class citizen in her own home talks about everything the food how she raised the kids pretty much anything that would come up

you'd find a reason to just critique her about it john suggests that they divorce at this point, which by all accounts, devastates Mildreda. She's invested a lot in this. Yeah. And she thinks about it and then ultimately decides, yeah, okay, that's probably a good move. We should probably should do this. He didn't expect that. He wanted her to say, of course, we're not going to do. Like, I love you. You're so great. Like, again, psychological BS. Yeah. Right. Uh, doesn't work. So he, they do some couples counseling and ultimately it's just decided that like this isn't milder milner puts her foot down at this point is like i'm not doing this anymore we're 100% done he does a bunch of shit because he lacks control he does a bunch of shit

to make the divorce as bad as possible for her not providing enough support for the kids and they also don't have a formal child custody arrangement in place so they would just swap the kids back and forth and there was a story here that john came to the house one day and saw the cupboards were full of food and this might have been what set him off because he thought that she was sleeping with somebody else and that guy was providing for them because he wasn't. Because money that he was providing wasn't enough

to fill the covers full of food. That was what happened. One of her friends came over to the house and saw the mildred had lost a bunch of weight and was like, we're handling this right now and went to the store and bought her whatever she needed. That's what ended up happening.

The idea is that the thought process was that he thought he lost that other element of control over her, which is like, I can control how you can actually eat, which is an insane way to think about humans. And that's kind of what set him off. So around this time, she lets him have the kids for the regularly scheduled custody thing. And he keeps them. And at the same time, empties their joint bank accounts completely.

Oh, no. Yeah. I watched a recent unsolved mysteries, I think, about kids who are kidnapped by a parent. And it was really sad. you know like one parent just like takes the kids and leaves the country or just disappears and the other parent you know never finds them or knows where they are but can't go because it's dangerous and things like that so super sad and scary yeah apparently that's the most common way kids get kidnapped i didn't know that i was i found out researching this

so there's a lot that goes on here around like john calling and harassing mildred and yada yada yada mildred ultimately whatever i'm not going to go to the details of it ultimately Milder decides that she has to go live in a woman's shelter. A, she has no money. And B. She feels threatened by John in his existence. She ends up living under an assumed name and going to live in this shelter. All this is going on in Washington State. Okay. So at this, around this time, Mildred's mother gets a house in Maryland, which for those that aren't familiar with the geography of the area, D.C., Maryland, Virginia, it's all one thing like people who work in dc live in maryland they live in virginia they

bounce from back and forth like it's basically like one giant metro area and it's just it's intentionally designed that way so that's a little bit of foreshadowing of what's going to come going back to john and the kids when john got custody that day he almost immediately put them on a plane to antigua this will become relevant again shortly but the simplest version of what was going on here is that he put the kids on this plane they go to antigua and then he basically makes a living forging documents for jamaican immigrants who are trying to immigrate to the u.s and that's basically his life he just goes around forging documents taking care of the kids and that's kind of it for the time being okay so let's go ahead and segue to the other main character of the story enter

lee boy malvo so lee that name is awesome by the way it is right i feel like melvo is it's a word melvo in harry potter somehow i feel like it's like someone's name or it's like drako melfoy moved around or it's like tom riddle or whatever just it feels very like a very harry potter name it does i'm gonna i went down a rabbit all my mind of who that could have been um no he sounds like he designs very very nice like gator shoes you know yeah okay it's very cool name so lee was born in 1995 in Jamaica to a woman named Una. Una was, I mean, I'm not going to go into a lot of details. She sounds pretty shitty. She sounds like a terrible mom. She just beat the hell out of this kid and just abandon him constantly. You look at pictures of Lee, which I would encourage you to try that.

To me, he just constantly has the eyes of like a scared kid, like an unloved scared child. There's a lot of bounce around that happens here. Una moves to St. Martin leaving Lee at home. with neighbor like he's just abandoned constantly i mean she's doing it to make money and support the family but like don't just leave your kid with random strangers there's there's weird stories that happen it's i mean i don't know i'll do this for one because he wants to know the gross stuff at one point lee like befriends a cat who comes over to the house and una makes him beat the cat because like he can't have a cat and then like he beats the cat until it's bloody and then the cat finally goes away and then anytime they cat came over he had to beat him like just why do this

like what is that's terrible yeah um so long story short is that eventually between jamaica saint martin so on and so forth un and lee end up in antigua did you find a picture of lee i did yes what did you think he he just looks he looks like i mean so many of the pictures he's just like when i guess when the trial was it's just a kid you know and he just he looks very sad it just looks like a sad kid yeah i know he does bad things but he does look very sad he looks he makes me sad yeah same yeah so like i said they ended up in antigua and all because of you know his job one make money there um yeah i wrote here that if this was like a movie or story about animals written by disney lee would just be like a bastard how nobody

would adopt at the shelter. Like, he's just, he just wants, I don't know, it's, it sucks. So, Fortune's Clyde and Antigua, because Una decides that she wants to immigrate to the U.S. and given John's side hustle or only hustle foraging documents, she takes Lee to see John. That's where the two come together for the very first time. For whatever reason, Lee starts going over to John's to hang out and, you know, it seems like it's a pretty tight-knit immigrant community there.

then it tells Lee at one point that she basically left she left for Florida doesn't tell me this is a pattern like she'll pick up the phone call him he doesn't see her for a couple of days and then she's like i'm in another state in another country yeah john figures out what's going on and i don't know it seems like it's almost out of like altruism that he goes over there and tells lee to pack his things and come stay with him so he finally gives him the thing that he wants that father figure so their dynamic is one where lee kind of takes care of the house and the kids while john does whatever it is that he does. So he kind of takes on like a housewife, like approach to this, like as an

10 year old or 12 year old. No, he's more old. He would be only 13, 14, I think. But John being a military guy, he just has this military mindset of you have to be stern, strict, and discipline. I only bring it up because when you're an aimless kid, I can see why that personality type would be alluring. Yeah.

You would want someone who takes charge, gives you comfort and safety when your whole life has been abused and cast aside by. everyone who should have loved you right yeah totally so ultimately john is arrested for forging documents john gets out of jail by some accounts he literally just walks out because it's easy to live in antigua and then john the kids and lee all get on a plane with forged documents and head to the u.s so john takes the kids to bellingham washington and lee goes to florida be with una because una again and left to go to florida i've actually been to bellingham it is stunning it is one of it is so beautiful it is i don't what's this show something about

oh my god andy griffin whatever that show yeah what's that show isn't it's just the indy griffiths show yeah it's very small-towny it's very small town and pretty lots of breweries um the pacific west loves their breweries so john moves into a homeless shelter with the kids, which is noted as odd by anybody who observes this, because for better or worse, homeless shelters don't really see a large influx of single men showing up with, like, a brood of children.

Like, that's kind of red flaggy right there. Yeah. Mildred had obviously reportedly, the kids missing. And so when John applies for food stamps, the system flags this. They become aware of, like, be on the lookout for a single guy with three kids. Yeah. Investigators start digging into

this. They interview the kids, and they end up giving their real names, and the jig is up and mildred is reunited with the kids finally oh good yeah so at this point i promise i'm not going to go into legal procedure this time an emergency hearing is held for the custody of the kids which to me is the pivotal moment for everything that happens hereafter the judge give mildred custody of the kids good yes john is pissed what did he expect for a guy who for a guy who needs control this was a massive massive breaking point yeah this moment is basically what leads to everything that comes

next people who knew john would talk about how this moment is the moment that changed like he just stay up crying all night and like he just couldn't handle what was happening what the fuck did he think was going to happen oh you said a great dad i mean who just kidnapped your children he also thought he was a great husband despite him picking his wife to death so he didn't have the best logic no so yeah because at this point he viewed mildred as the one who made him kind of lose everything which like okay but what were her alternatives not to fight for her kids not to try to get them back safely yeah at this point john goes back to the homeless shelter and he calls lee because he's lost everything and he's just grappling trying to grasp for whatever he can he calls lee and tells him

to come up to washington this happens in october of 2001 are you okay yeah yeah I'm just thinking, continue. What are you thinking? Were they making a weird face? When you, what? Why, why do you ask me? I'm fine. I was just thinking about this.

I was just thinking about, you know, that John, like, calling Lee for, like, helping you like, this is a grown-ass man, you know, who's, like, going through an emotional thing calling a teenager. It's fucking weird. It's weird. And, like, I just was thinking about that because I was like, that's, like, something that you teach your kids is, like, grown-ups don't need kids. for help you know like if a grownup should never ask you for directions like they're trying

to kidnap you grownups don't need kids for help like they can they they can talk to other adults you know like they shouldn't have to be touched with kids so yeah yeah yeah you can identify it lee would later mention that the pain he heard in john's voice about talking about his kids being taken away from him just kind of hit him a certain way like like in a way that was like man I wish somebody cared about me that much right that kind of a thing So Lee looked at his situation and his mom and the abuse he faced with her. And then John, who had never been mean to him, and he made really the rational decision to leave his mom to go be with Lee in Bellingham.

Yeah. The story is basically Lee called John to wire him money for a bus ticket, which John did, to get him up to Washington from Florida. Yeah. So one thing I mentioned that podcast, you're wrong about, that I thought was really good was they mentioned how sometimes a person can make an extremely bad decision for reasons that make perfect sense and that's yeah so this I totally get why he did what he did absolutely his mom was not nice to him he doesn't have anything like solid in his life

except this man who who was nice to him so Taylor I'm gonna sidetrack here I've been in situations before where I knew that if I let something play out the way it seemed like it was going to play out, there would be dire consequences. But for anybody else to care, the dire consequences would have to be realized. As opposed to how do you take action before the thing you see playing out in your mind happens? I mean, I'm not going to go into details about it here, but like I've definitely done things where it's like I knew that outcome was going to happen if I didn't take action but I had no legal way of taking action so I'm like whatever I'm just going to do whatever I got to do to make this thing not happen and yeah and that I thought about school shootings and how you know it's like oh well my 18 year old son who's a senior in high schools he's legally it's his property right to have a bunch of guns and it's just like there's times when you can see the outcome in your mind and

And it is okay to be like, fuck the law and what that guy's property rights are or what they're like any rights are. Like, you know what's going to end up happening if you don't do something. But like, you don't, in a lot of cases, most people think they don't have a choice. They got to wait until the horrible, horrible thing happens. Then everybody else. Right, right. That's what reminded me of this. I'm like, there's so many people that came in and out of Lee's life who could have, like, I don't care that she's your mom.

Like, fuck her. rental rights like she's a horrible horrible mom who keeps abandoning you and you're clearly a shattered shell of a child like just i'm gonna i'll just take the kid like i don't i don't know i don't know yeah that sucks i mean it feels like he well it feels like lee didn't have much of a chance because of that for sure and i don't know like i do know that i mean sometimes like even with like child custody things like you end up with a parent who's abusive or because they have you know more money or whatever in a better lawyer or something like that i mean it sounds like the best thing that happened for for john's kids is that they that milder got custody of them even though that is the thing that like sparked john kind of going over the

edge i think it's still like good for the kids that they don't have to be with him anymore because he kidnapped them and imagine like who knows what he was telling them also like about their mother and about the government you know like who knows what he was telling them also like about their mother and about the government you know like who knows what he was like what he could have molded his kids to be yeah that was probably the same idea yeah well i bring it up here because going to the next part he's on his way to wash him this is kind of game over because this next section i headline brainwashing because at this point it's kind of like done like the the the cast has been died is that the word? No, the dye has been cast. Thank you. You got to have your cake and eat it too. Eat your

cake and have it too. You know, whatever. Cause, Kosinski. Kaczynski. Yeah. Okay. So I think under any circumstance, a healthy human probably isn't wired to kill a person unprovoked. There's a ton of brainwashing that starts happening here between John and Lee like Lee or John brainwashing Lee there's also another part of this that struck me about how how much time matters depending on the age that you're at like I remember when I was in elementary school and thinking a year was the longest time I could possibly conceive of yeah you look at this situation like this is only like a year to a year and a half of Lee's life but that's like a that means he's like a fairly significant chunk like his

relation with John is like a fairly significant chunk of his life so he listens to him so again like I hate to you know excuse find excuses for bad behavior but obviously I feel for Lee given his background his impressionability is youth and the fact that he's just getting brainwashed by a psychopath essentially yeah 100% so during this time you know like I said John indoctrinates Lee on nation of Islam stuff like not like anything positive like it's all like the negative stuff around like supremacy and whatnot um they go to gun ranges and train his marksmanship quite a bit one detail that i that i read that was amazing was that john would put up uh targets that had lee's own face on them that he had to shoot yeah that it's fucked up yeah yeah they start

form this kind of father son bomb but it feels like kind of like an abusive father son bond of like you have to listen unequivocally to what I tell you to do like there is no middle ground and he gets that like that's exactly what what Lee becomes to him so let's get started with the crimes so like I said the shootings didn't actually start in DC they escalated to they escalated from murders in Washington which is where Lee and John are this time so back when Washington State yeah exactly not DC so back when John was married to Mildred. Mildred had a friend who stepped in and helped them with understanding basically like general accounting principles for businesses. I have had a crash course on this

and can tell you that it's not fun. But several things that I'll intuit from this experience, having done it myself, was it is a, it's like being explained like a toddler how basic finance works from somebody who actually understands it. And I can imagine John having a woman step in and explain this stuff to him was emasculating in. capacity yeah totally and then later when the separation and custody battle was taking place this woman took mildred's side so john had multiple reasons to like he it sounds like you really similar on how much he hated this woman her name isa i keep saying this woman her name's iceland okay so in february of 2002 lee was told to go to this woman's house and shoot her in the head

unfortunately for everyone ice's niece kina was at the house and opened the door lee shot her in the face and killed her she was 21 years old yeah oh no yeah again there's so many of these i'm kind of just kind of just kind of list them off because it's just someone shows up gets shot in the face someone shows like it's just that over and over and over again

a month later they go to tucson arizona a six year old man named jerry taylor was shot at long range on the golf course. We don't know for sure who did this. But the reason it comes up is because Lee and John were in Tucson at the time. And John's sister lived near this golf course. And so the idea was it had to be these guys. In August, a man named John Gaeta was changing a tire that had been slashed by Lee in a parking lot in Louisiana.

Lee came up from behind and shot him in the neck. The guy plays dead. Lee steals us a shit, and then the guy runs to seek help, and he ultimately survives. September was a super busy month for them. The following is just bullet points. It all happened in September. They shot a guy named Paul LaRufa, who was a pizzeria owner six times. He survived an employee at a liquor store named Benny was shot, but survived.

Another liquor store employee named Muhammad was shot and survived. A 41-year-old employee of another liquor store was shot. This one was actually killed. they shot and killed someone named Hong M. Ballinger in Louisiana they're just going on a spree, right? This is just their berserker spree mode. So this

leads us from September into October which is when they enter the D.C. Metro area. Again, all this is going to tie back to a motive and it's all going to sound really stupid. At the start of October, a 55-year-old man named James Martin was shot and killed in a parking lot of a grocery store in Maryland.

The next day, four people were shot and killed within a two-hour window of time in one Maryland neighborhood and another was killed in D.C. proper. All these shootings were done at distance with a high-powered rifle. At this point, John and Lee had moved into Virginia. They moved into that territory in that region. They shot a woman named Carolyn Sewell, who survived the shot to the chest somehow. They shot a 13-year-old on his way to middle school.

They shot a man named Dean Harold Meyer while he was pumping gas. they shot a businessman and Kenneth Bridges and killed him while he was also pumping gas and they shot and killed an FBI analyst named Linda Franklin

at a Home Depot parking lot it's just spree I think I like read some or saw something about this where more like a woman who was at the gas station

and one of the guys was shot and she was like it's so confusing because you're like what the hell is going on you know it's like in in the job

jerk when he's like, it's cancer exploding. Do you remember that? Oh, yes. Yes. Because I was trying to shoot him because you're like, well, where is coming from? And then the woman that the story that's like, I feel maybe one of those guys that was shot at the gas station, she was like, she ran out to help him. And she was like, someone come help me. And everybody in the store was like, no, because we know that and the police were like, we're not coming because we know that like someone is shooting randomly. And they've already shot this place. So they like didn't want to come. But she was like trying to do it. You're like, So if someone gets shot in front of you, just pumping gas, you're like, it takes you to like a different reality. You're like, what is happening, you know?

And you can just like be standing somewhere and get shot. That's crazy. Yeah. It's like anytime something happens that like breaks the matrix, you're like, yes, yes. Like what's going on? Yeah. So it took five days for them to take action again, like for them to start doing this again. And on October 19, they shot a guy named Jeffrey Hooper in a parking lot of a steakhouse.

Then two days later, a bus driver was shot whilst just. basically standing outside of the bus depot yeah yeah they're on a i mean but like i hate to put it this way like you're broke you have no money you live out of a car i mean this was probably the most exciting and interesting thing they could do all day is just go around finding people to shoot like it's a horrible way to think about it but like totally i mean i'm they probably i don't know i'll get to the motive but i feel like they probably felt like they were doing like something right it was incredibly stupid i'm never going to lay off that so you'll notice that obviously they're bouncing around quite a bit and obviously a bus wasn't going to keep working for them to get from

place to place right at this point um it's worth discussing the blue caprice there's actually a movie about the shootings called just blue caprice that's a car yeah that's the car it's a chevalay it's a big old-timey clunky piece of shit it was a 1990s model um or do you know what these look like i'm gonna look at it yeah yeah it's i don't know why but for some reason the car feels medicine to me it's almost like christine oh yeah oh i see it well i'm looking i obviously see this blue christ it does look like yeah i get it yeah i don't know that's an odd color i feel you don't see cars like that right so fun fact it used to be an undercover police car oh yeah before they bought it so it was actually a strategically good

buy for them because for one it was obviously cheap I mean look at you can tell it was cheap for another one it was a huge vehicle yeah like I said like because they had no money they were living inside the car and then they would also just shoot people through a modified trunk that had a hole cut in it to allow a gun barrel to protrude oh how would you ever find them like I'm yeah that that is like it's so it is so random that you're like there there is no there's no rhyme or reason yeah yeah and look i i hate to give kudos for this but this was actually like a pretty smart move it means a bullet bullet casings never get lost right like you shoot it stays in the car you're always hidden and you can make an incredibly quick getaway

yeah the fact that it was a blue caprice was also kind of a problem for a while because when they shot that guy the home depot the parking lot someone stupidly lied about what they saw. They said they saw a white van flee the scene. So police were on the lookout for a white van, which that's like one out of every five vehicles on the highway. Absolutely.

Yeah, that's, I mean, don't get into one. We've already covered that. But like, but yeah, but that's wildly different than a blue caprice. If you're looking for a white van, you're not at all in my direction. Yeah, yeah. There's a sad story about how like at one point, the police

found two guys in a white van. like we got the guys we got the guys it turned out to be like two immigrants were illegal and they end up getting deported like some people just want to be a part of a story like they're such losers they want to be like close to a story so I saw something it's like you didn't see shit so let's get into the arrest so five days after that last shooting on october 24th the two were asleep in the car at a truck stop when police were tipped off by people who were at that stop i'm gonna i label this part INS side quest because there is an INS component of this that

comes in handy. I didn't mention this before, but at one point while John and Lee were at the homeless shelter in Bellingham, Lee got picked up by the INS for being an illegal immigrant. Okay. And because of this, he had his fingerprints taken. Ooh. And one of the crime scenes early on when they weren't using the rifle

or using like a handgun, he'd used a handgun, like a pistol, to shoot someone in a partial print was found on the shell casing. Okay. They matched that against the INS database to Lee so police go to his last known whereabouts which is where he got picked up which is in Bellingham at this homeless shelter and the guy who runs the shelter tells them all about John so they look him up and realize he had a vehicle registration in his name

because those other part that was stupid was like he'd had all this forged documentation but he registered the name yeah like even i know not to do that right if you if you don't have a Word of documentation, move for yourself at least. Yeah, yeah. So it all matched this blue caprice, which is the only way they kind of came off of the white van narrative. This info, along with the car's license plate number, is immediately disseminated throughout the D.C. metro area.

So D.C., Maryland, Virginia, all these folks had this information. And it's obviously picked up on scanners by the media outlet. And that's how people were able to identify this car in the license plate. It was because the media just spread this everywhere. But do they think that they do they know? that they're the snipers or they just trying to pick up lee because of immigration no no they this is all tied to the sniping case they're like they're like there's some some correlation between these disparate murders i also didn't get into this but they sort of like doing this like btk thing

of like leaving like you know tarot cards and like just they're trying to do the like like tying it all together like the wet bandits we know every house you guys hit because you have the you left water out on every house yeah that's exactly what they were they're going for so they get they're arrested without incident and i can only imagine when the interior of this car smelled like the trial began in 2003 john was found guilty and sentenced to death lee was also found guilty but sentenced to life other states he's a child well other states were seeking the death penalty for lee but around this time the supreme court had ruled in a case called roper versus Simmons that it was against the 18th amendment or the eighth amendment to execute someone for crimes

they committed when they were under the age of 18 that took death off the table for lee so john was ultimately executed on november 10th of 2009 he made no final statement and that was basically the end of his garbage life one thing to note is that actually does appear as though lee did most if not all the murders hmm that's why i said earlier this is kind of like a charles manson situation like john is the bad guy for sure but like you didn't actually do the thing interesting yeah it's weird yeah totally totally the 18th amendment is prohibition i just look at that this was the eighth amendment okay wait what's the eighth amendment cruel and unusual ah okay thank you no yeah i get exactly exactly what you're saying like he was the bastarded kind of grooming this

young man who obviously should you know killed a shit ton of people so yeah should be in jail but yeah exactly so lee lee is still in prison he is now 37 years old he has reached out to multiple family members of his victims and apologize for his behavior in 2020 he got married and he's been continued you yeah don't ladies there's plenty of non incarcerated people to marry go to the produce section and find one to the grocery store find yourself a man and have one don't i mean regardless of his grooming or in his apologies like don't marry me in prison don't send less to serial killers i don't know what the appeal is but yeah it goes out saying he's been denied parole continuously and realistically he's probably just going to stay in jail forever

so I kept teasing the motive Taylor what do you think the motive was I don't know fame guns to get his kids back was my guesses the motive was he wanted to kill Mildred

but he knew that if he went to kill Mildred they would know it was him oh so he was killing other people so it would seem like a random thing yeah oh my gosh it's so dumb Like he killed all these people or had them killed So that he could circle back to Mildred and kill her eventually Oh my God, and Mildred is fine, she's thriving

She's thriving, yeah That is so dumb, those poor people Yeah So that's the story, like I said, look I think that on Mildred's front Learning that he's married after you've been dating Like it was all a foregone conclusion that I thought I think it was a foregone conclusion this was

he was a psycho, but I was saying that naturally you got to be a psycho to be able to carry on that kind of narcissistic behavior. And I think Lee was kind of just doomed from the jump. Yeah, definitely. Anyways, that's my story. Hopefully my voice doesn't sound too You sound great. I don't think you do, but that's super sad. Yeah. I'm glad I could, I'm glad I get to you. Mom, bomp. So what do you have for us today, Taylor? Okay, well, I mentioned that our red between our two is being executed and for crimes.

So we will talk about that. And I wanted to ask you a question, Fars, in the world right now, what are you afraid of? So I have three things that are part of this story that are sort of evergreen existential threats that people are afraid of. I have a new one that I'm afraid of. But right now, is there anything like globally that you're afraid of? Globally that I'm afraid of. Mm-hmm. Global awfulness. What could ruin the whole world? I mean, okay, like obviously like a nuclear bomb going off. That's it. That's the correct answer. Okay. Well, there you go.

So today we're talking about three things that you should be afraid of. One is communism, but not really, because communism is just a red herring for other things. Two is nuclear war, which I am very scared of. And three is electric chairs. So, like, you're not probably going to die on an electric chair, but we'll talk about it and how awful it is. Those are three things that are scary. I'm also currently afraid of AI, just in general. I'm kind of afraid of everything.

So I just wanted to put that out there. So, Taylor, do you think that if we were to go to war, that they would use, like, the other country would use nukes on Joshua Tree? I don't. Well, okay, I'll, we'll talk about that in a second. I don't think I'm far, I'm, I think I'm close enough that, yes, I think I'm fucked, but we'll talk about that in a second. Okay. So today we're going to talk about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who are two American citizens who were killed in the electric chair for selling nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. I don't know if selling is it the right word. They gave them to the Soviet Union. So some of our red flags for this couple, they seem like a pretty normal couple. Like they, loved each other. They had two kids. They were pretty like, you know, innocent-looking, innocent seeming. But the red flags are, you know, they're communists, card-carrying communists in America in the 40s and 50s, which is not like a great thing to be because it is McCarthyism. People are mad at communists.

And they went further than just, you know, attending rallies and wanting like a more socialist equal society like a lot of young communists did because the actual red flag is they were spies. So being a spy. is not good for your family, especially in this case. Some of the sources that I use, I listen to a podcast called Civics 101 about espionage and the Rosenbergs. I watched half of a documentary that their granddaughter made. She made it in the early 2000s, called Air to an Execution. And I only watched half of it because she was very much like, they're innocent.

I can't believe all this happened. And like, they're not innocent. Like, I know that, like, nobody wants their grandparents to be Soviet spies, but they were. It's a way cooler story than they're innocent. Like I would, yeah, it's like, who cares? It has no impact on you to, in today's like it's over. I mean, yeah, I think it's kind of cool rather than being like, let's exonerate them, being like, yeah, there were spies. They did all this cool spy shit.

It was bad, but yes. And then also watch an American justice show on the Rosenbergs and then Wikipedia and chat GBT for some filler. So that's, those are my sources. But let's talk about who they were. So Julius and Ethel, they were, you know, a couple in New York City. Julius was born on May 12th in 1918. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia pre-World War I. And they ended up living on the Lower East Side, which is an awesome neighborhood where I lived as well.

It definitely has ups and downs. So this is like a downtime for New York City. It's, you know, depression time. It's not great. But Julius went to City College of New York. He got a degree in electrical engineering. And he began to get involved into left-wing politics while he was in college. And mostly like labor activism, protests against the rise of fascism.

So all stuff that we're seeing now, you know, people try to unionize and not be fascist. So similar times repeating itself. Ethel was born Ethel Greenglass in 1915. She was also interested in the arts. She wanted to be an opera singer. By all accounts, she was really good at it, wanted to be like an actor or a singer but ended up being a secretary and she started to get interested in labor relations and she met Julius when she joined the young communist league where he was a leader in like so is this

not the point in time when it's dangerous to join the communists yeah so they knew they were doing they were agitators yeah yes yes so we're coming up to the time when you know senator McCarthy is doing the like the the red scare on like a federal level and this is like in new york city so they don't cross paths with him but he definitely you know tainted the water for for being a communist being like a bad thing and there's like some some stock footage i think in the documentary that i watched where you know there's like a communist parade and they're like join the communist party and people are like jeering at them so it's like a thing um it's also wait actually this is actually kind of what I'm going to come up next is so julius and ethel were married in 1939 she was 24 he was

21 and it was a hard depression time crazy poverty you see people on breadlines like nobody has a job so there's a lot of radicalizing for a lot of people and communism was attractive because it has the ideas of like an ideal society where everybody you know shares what they have so there's no more starving people on the street And yeah. Can I side truck you real quick? Of course. What do you think about communism?

I think it's a good idea, but I don't think, I think you shouldn't have someone in charge who takes all the money, which is like what we're doing now with capitalism. But I do think that you should take care of each other. So I think, I mean, I feel like I would say more like democratic socialism is more sense in practice. But I like the idea of not letting people starve and not having billionaires. Okay. What do you think? I think that it's a great concept if you completely negate human decision-making and will and desire out of the equations. Yeah, because I was going to be someone who wants more or whatever.

I do too. I don't want to, you know, yeah, but I do like the idea of not letting people starve. If we were, if we were better, it would be a great concept. Yeah, exactly, exactly. People can't handle it. I think it's a good thing to say. Yeah. And so actually I have a quote from Jay Edgar Hoover about communism. And he said communism is in reality is not a political party. It is a way of life, an evil and malignant way of life. It reveals a condition akin to disease that spreads like an epidemic. And like an epidemic, a quarantine is necessary to keep it from infecting this nation. So, which made me laugh also because quarantine is a good metaphor when it's on your side. But then the. also, like, people don't want to quarantine when it was actually an epidemic. So I made me laugh a little bit. So they're in this place where they're idealizing young communists, dreaming of a socialist country, and they believed that the Soviet Union was the answer to this problem.

So they really are like, they think it's perfect over there, and either they don't know or they don't see the bad things. So either they, like, didn't see all of the starving, like, millions of people starved to death during the war, or they didn't see all the people. poverty and the things that are happening under under communism over there so they just really think it's it's perfect and you know in theory i wrote you know in theory it makes sense but doesn't work because people are awful what we just talked about and so they get married at the beginning of world war two and almost right away you know the crime part of their story starts so their case became a symbol for fear and paranoia around the cold war around communism And, you know, people,

many of their supporters said that the Rosenbergs were kind of set up for political witch hunt. It's been kind of a controversial case, you know, since it happened. And we'll talk about exactly what that means. But there are, you know, despite all of the ongoing debate, I'll just say this now. So, like, there's some stuff that was released in the mid-2000s. So despite all the back and forth since their case for like 50 years or so, the stuff that's released pretty much proves that they did do it. They were Soviet spies.

he um julius he definitely was involved in passing nuclear secrets to the soviet union and it confirmed that he had a central role on this espionage so they definitely did the thing they were accused of and then the question is like what about the zeitgeist around their story you need you get into how they had access this material right yeah okay yeah so here's what were they accused of doing and how do they do it? So it involves like their whole lives, all the people that they know. And they were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage and passing atomic secrets. They're part of aspiring that included Americans and some Soviet citizens who shared military secrets and nuclear weapons. During World War II, Julius worked in the Army of Signal Corps

laboratory in New Jersey, where he had access to classified documents. So that's where he kind gets it from and she ended up being a secretary there as well and so she well her one of her like big things is typing up all these notes and typing up and copying everything it's sent to the soviet union immediately he starts passing information to the to the soviet union via his wife and other members of the spiring and now world war two is over and it's the cold war so the cold war lasted from 1945 do you know when the Cold War ended ours if I had a guess it had to be like the 70 or no 80 it would have been Reagan era so like 84 is 91 oh wow yeah which feels late that like that feels late for me because I was like alive during the Cold War I feel like I've seen

something that was a lot such a long time ago but just like a little bit of time line so world war one was the end of the Russian Empire and then towards the end of World were one, there was a Russian civil war that went from 1917 to 1920. And then 1922, it became the Soviet Union, which was the USSR. And then after it dissolved in 1991, it became 15 separate countries. And that's where we still have Russia now. So there's more to that. But that's kind of what we're looking at. And Fars, what do you know about the Cold War? What do you feel like when did I say Cold War? I feel like it was an incredibly tense time that required a lot of people to like have, cool heads and yeah um i i've seen a so my one of my favorite movies my favorite like historical movies that's kind of stupid to say that way is 13 days which uh has Kevin Costa in it so you know it's going to be good but it's about it's about the 13 days of the um Cuban missile crisis and how so many pieces were moving and so many people had to just not respond in anger or

irrationally and it's kind of a miracle we're not we didn't self-destruct at that time oh totally totally yeah i wrote things i know like the bay of pigs so nuclear weapons being real close to america sputnik so people were kind of freaking out because you know the russians were the first to um put a satellite into space and people like went outside and it's not they could see it they were just like you know it was the first one it was really scary um it was a race to the moon there was all this stuff in cuba so yeah exactly a lot of of fear about nuclear war, a lot of like hiding under desks and like at school and trying to figure like what happened if it happened. So I also feel this is what I'm saying about living in

Joshua Tree. So I feel like very scared of nuclear war right now, maybe irrationally, but also maybe rationally. And sometimes I live next to a military base. So one of like the biggest military bases in the country is like next door. So all the time I hear bombs going off. So it'll shake my house and sometimes at night they'll do like a ton of military training and there'll be tons of bombs in a row and it'll be really loud and shaky and I can hear it so it definitely like makes it a target and then also because I'm kind of crazy and over and a little bit of paranoid like whenever the internet goes out or like the the power goes out I'm like this is it and I look to the to the northwest and I look for the for the cloud over LA because I'm like this is it I'll see the cloud

from my house I probably would see the cloud from my house I would definitely see the flash when LA gets nuked. So, um, yeah, you've really, you've really done the math on this. I did. I mean, I let's say it up last night, but I already think about it anyway. So it's very tense. And I feel tense right now thinking about it. And it's like mostly just me.

It's not like everywhere over the media like it was during the Cold War. People were like really, really afraid of this. So, so you think you're in New York. It's a very, very tense time. It's the Cold War. Things are scary. The World War, World War II just. but it didn't like end everything and so julius and ethel during this time they're just living

their lives they have two sons if you saw them like out on the town you wouldn't think twice about them and a lot of it is still speculation like what they did but again like I said they did it they were spies I watched the dot in the dock with a granddaughter you know she was like I wish that they could be exonerated but they're not so Julius becomes involved in the communist party it's believed that in 1942 so they've been married for a couple of years is when he made contact with Soviet intelligence agents and started

to pass secrets. Some of the things that he is accused of doing sharing secrets with spies and one cool thing that they did is they would be like okay you have to meet your like the spy bars you know in this place. So

they would take a jello box and cut it in half in like a weird way and then you would take half of it and then they would to give the other half to the person you're supposed to meet, and you would know it was them when your jello boxes matched up. So you got to just keep going up to people with jello boxes and, like, tap the jellot box and see. Yes, yes. That seems a little bit suspicious, but.

That's how you know you're talking to the right person, like the right person on the other end. He shared thousands of documents about jet fighters, missiles, like all those things. So during this time, like right after World War II especially, we were still, and during World War II, we were still allies with the Soviet Union, but we weren't. sharing secrets. So, like, during World War II, you know, we were, you know, we were friends, but also like after World War II ends, then the Soviet Union stops being an ally. And as a child of the 80s, you know, which is the Cold War, apparently, I just learned now. I always pictured, you know, Stalin and the Russians as the bad guys. And so I was, I was surprised when, you know,

to see the pictures of him and FDR and Churchill together, you know. I think this was one of those, the enemy of my enemy I don't think that they actually wanted to be on friendly terms I think it was like we had to defeat Germany so let's just get it together yes there are some fun stories of like Churchill and FDR

going to Russia to or like the USSR to meet with Stalin and when they get there Stalin's like come and stay in our nicest castle and it was like awful and Churchill's like freezing and like in his underwear trying to find vodka you know just like that That sounds delightful.

That would be fun. That sounds like it could be a little movie comedy show. Yes. I think that, I mean, for better or worse, I would like a comedy of Churchill just like running around in his underwear because he did that a lot. I think that could be delightful to watch. So now, when he starts actually passing this stuff, we're actually in the Cold War with the Russians. So they're definitely like the enemies at this point. And another big part of this story.

is that Ethel's brother was actually working on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos. So he was like in it with like the creation of the nuclear bombs. So in 1947, the FBI begins investigating them and other card carrying communists for suspected espionage. They were arrested in 1950 and charged with conspiracy to commit espionage. David Greenglass, who's Ethel's brother who worked at the Manhattan Project, is arrested first and then just rats out everybody. And David Greenglass lives for a long time. He dies in 2004. So he definitely sold out his fellow spies so that he would get a lighter sentence. And in 1951, the Rosenbergs are tried and found guilty of espionage. So when they go through their things and find all the

things that they shared with the Soviets, they do find a cross section of the fat man bomb, which is a bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. And then also in the documentary, the granddaughter, She's like, she sees that picture in the National Archives, and she's like, oh, my gosh, like, there's no way that the Soviets could have made a thing from this is one little picture, you know, and you're like, no, I feel like any nuclear secrets sharing is bad. Yeah, there's not a gray line. Yeah, there's no, there's no, like, oh, this isn't seem like a big deal. Like, no, it's a big deal that they even have that connection at all. Yeah. Like, it's a big deal.

So the sentence to death, and it's a big cultural moment because actually the Rosenbergs are the only. people to be executed for espionage during technically peacetime and so it was like it was a cold war but it wasn't like an actual like during the world war where people were executed like you know kind of a lot so it's a big cultural moment some people are really really mad at them for sharing these secrets and i'm at you like i get it some people think they're innocent and some people is like how mad are we that we need martyrs is the punishment equal to the crime was there a crime did the brother them under the bus so they look so nice so there's so many things that people are you know going back and forth upon but you know they did it and they were guilty so it also comes up do you ever read the

bell jar by sylvia plath no so it's like a book about like a woman who's depressed very there's a lot more to it sure but she also thinks about the Rosenbergs a lot and so during in the beginning of the book she's like reading the paper and she sees that they've been they've been executed and it kind of brings up this feeling of isolation and it could have happen to anyone. So that is kind of like the cultural feeling is like, well, anyone could be convicted of being a spy. It could be anyone. It could be your neighbor, you know, kind of like making people more suspicious of each other as well. I don't know. Just look at your W2. Does it say Los Alamos nuclear bunker on it? Like if it doesn't, then you're probably not likely.

Totally. I was wondering Taylor is any like given the time period that we're in, was there any hints of like maybe anti-Semitism played into the severity of their punishment? You know what? I didn't look that up, but possibly because it's definitely that also like another form of like being the other, you know. I was going to say, there's so many otherisms here. Like you're communist, that's otherism. You're Jewish, that's otherism. Like. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Totally. Yeah. You know, I, I would imagine probably, but I don't, but I don't, didn't like read that specifically. But it's a good call out and a good question. So in 1953 They're executed in the electric chair At Sing Sing Prison in New York

Do you know what happens when you're executed via the electric chair? So your heart stops I'm not sure what the mechanics and physiology of that are But I think that that's how you ultimately are killed Yeah Did you ever see or read the Green Mile? Yes So remember how he like doesn't do the sponge

on the guy's head and then it's like catches on fire so like a wet sponge needs to be involved so the electric chair was first used in the United States in the late 19th century so it involves strapping a person into a chair electrodes attached to their heads and legs and then administering a powerful electric shock so the wet sponge stops it from catching on fire which is crazy and so there's usually two shocks when the first switch is flipped and electric current goes through your body which causes the muscles to contract and then you pass out. So it just like shocks you and you pass out. And then the second switch is the one that like kills all your organs. It kills your heart, kills all your organs and then you die. It can also, you know, sometimes people, you'll get

like severe burns and other injuries like while it's happening. Like it's not, it's not a not it's a very cruel way to die and julius's went fine as far electric electric electric electric electrocution goes but ethels did not so she actually had to be shocked four times before she died and people saw smoke coming out of her head so it was pretty awful the first jolt jolt didn't render her unconscious it took a couple more to end her life they were not the electrodes were not properly properly placed so the electricity rather than going to her vital organs went to her head It's an awful way to go. And so it was publicized that it was botched execution, which definitely made it, made the debate even stronger as to be like, why are we executing these people?

Why are you even doing capital punishment, all of that? So after their death was a big thing. And the questions are like, what did they share? Do we kill spies this publicly? I'm sure we do, but, you know, maybe it's not always in the news. It seemed so normal, did they do it? So it's not all 100% and it's not very clear everything they did do, which makes sense because you don't want to put the spy secrets out, but it's just like these people were spies.

So in around 2005, the National Archives and Records Administration released a portion of the grand jury testimony. So it shed some new light on the case and gave us some more details. So it did confirm that Ethel knew what she was doing when she typed up the documents. So when she typed up and copied the secrets that. that Julius was stealing from work and her brother was stealing from Los Alamos. She knew what she was doing. It confirmed that Julius was a big part of aspiring. Their code names were found in Soviet cables. And the key witness was Ethel's brother. So he's the one that threw everybody under the bus and like told him, got them executed.

So that makes it all true. And then some of the questions that like I kind of want to end with is like, so the red flags are like, they were spies and they were sending secrets to the Soviet Union, which was bad. But they believed they were doing a good thing because they believed in this utopian idea of like socialism and communism and they thought that that was happening. So were they just like people who believed in a perfect society? Were they traitors? Were they scapegoats for, you know, this Cold War era thing? And in the end, I think you kind of believe what you want to believe.

I think they were kids when they started. They believed in a perfect society, but obviously crossed the line when they shared secrets. And a question that I had, like, late last night thinking about this, is, you know, what is okay spying? If you want a better world and you're spying for a better world, like, is that justifiable? But once you open the door to nuclear secrets,

then I'm like, then that's a hard note, because I don't want anyone to know anything about nuclear secrets. I don't want anyone to do it at all. I wish that there was never any nuclear. anything. So that's where I think, like, for me, I'm like, okay, well, I don't know if the public execution essentially was, you know, the right thing to do, but also I'm like, they definitely did, you know, a bad thing, whether they knew they were doing it or not. You know what I mean? Yeah. I, what I was thinking of was that in a lot of situations, the outcomes are very directly

tied to the actions. So for example, like with Leboid Malbo or with John Muhammad getting executed, it's like that was directly tied to you did a really, really bad thing. Maybe he'll die because of it. In this case, it's so far removed. Think of all the things

that have to happen for the bad outcomes to actually be realized. Like you have to deal the material, you have to copy it, you have to translate it, you have to send it, you have to tie jello cups together. Hand it off. They have to go out and backwards engineer it, develop it. And then all of a sudden, then the bad outcome can be realized

but the outcome is so the gravitas of that outcome is so heavy that it kind of justifies the result. Yeah, totally. Exactly. So the things that you're doing aren't,

you're not shooting someone from the back of a car. You know, like you're not like doing things like that, but what you're doing is directly going to affect no matter how long it takes, the possibility of like global annihilation. Yeah. you know and like this and then that obviously like then we have this tense cold war for 40 years

and we have today when there's like i just like hit my microphone we have today when there's like balloons and you know you know whatever all this stuff means but it's it's pretty scary and i and i think the rosenbergs had like a direct um effect on getting getting those secrets and getting that stuff over to to the to the Soviet Union so um it's a scary thing that they did and then whether or not they like realized the global implications. I think that yeah, you're right. Like they did a bad thing. Yeah, I am.

So I for, again, I don't, me and Taylor don't talk about what we research ahead of time. Like I had long ago looked on the spy rabbit hole. And I remember thinking this same thought about this guy named Robert Hanson. I don't know if you've ever heard of him before, but he was an FBI intelligence analyst. And he did the same thing. He passed on. I don't know what it was a long time ago. I don't remember what exactly he passed on.

But I remember reading about his punishment. I was like, at first I was like, damn, that's heavy. He got, he was put in ADX Supermax in Florence, which I don't know if you know much about that, but it's a terrifying place. It sounds like that's where the 9-11 people ended up. That's where Timothy McVeigh, Ted Kaczynski, El Chapo, like, it is, you're a dead human walking. yeah like it is the worst of the worst punishments and yeah the time i was like it's like that's so heavy extreme yeah but then you look at like again the downstream impact of the decisions that

guy made and it's like kind of makes sense yeah kind of makes sense and like maybe he didn't even know that imagine that that was going to be the outcome yeah but like those little things and like they the snowball into potentially being a really, really, really bad thing. Yeah. Yeah. So hopefully this, this episode gets published tomorrow and we're not annihilated by nuclear war. But we'll see. It could be today.

Wait. Why I'm sitting under my desk. How are they, how were they doomed to fail? I think because they started to, they started with this idealistic view of the world and being better, but they didn't have all the details. So maybe the doom to fell is not knowing all the details because they thought that the Soviet Union was this perfect place when it wasn't, which we know. And they were very idealistic. And so they just went down this path of trying to get somewhere that was impossible.

It was impossible to, you know, have a perfect communist country. And it's impossible to, you know, have a better world with having nuclear secrets shared, you know, like, keeping nuclear secrets hostage and like kind of glooming that above everybody I think is is not a way to peace but I think that they were doomed and like they they really wanted a peaceful world and they thought the way to do it was to kind of equalize this threat and once they kind of did that there was no turning back yeah you know and they you know they died on the same day their their poor kids ended up in like homes and they're you know just they're like like my mom was a normal mom you know but you're like well she wasn't she wasn't yeah yeah kids

if you think your ideology is worth to be anything for chill out a little bit for real that's a 100% yes it'll all be okay like the pendulum always swings i know that everything seems like the biggest possible yes it always always swings yes and if someone starts to recruit you to doing things that are like secret then like you're probably going to be in trouble yeah and you should calm down yeah yeah so enjoy your glass of vodka oh i know i need i do need some vodka i'll buy some for when i do see that mushroom cloud it's 9.31 a.m. over there isn't it uh yeah it is i don't have any vodka but i can go buy some good good good Well, thank you, Taylor, for your story.

Thank you, Farras. I think those tied together. I think we're talking about, you know, the big things and why people do go off the edge. Maybe we should talk about what we're going to, we should discuss our topics before we do them. We could do that. I mean, yeah, but like I don't want to change our topic because I just can't research two things in a week. Yeah, that's fair. We'll figure it out.

But thanks to everyone for listening. and thank you for your feedback and thank you for your reviews on on apple podcasts please do that if you haven't already please tell people i'm trying to tell everyone that i know but please tell more people email us at dune to fail pod at gmail.com if you have any ideas follow on social media at doom to fail pod thanks taylor thanks farce i hope we feel better i hope so too i'm going to go ahead and kill the recording Okay, great.