Fourth Reich Archaeology - Jerryworld 5: Love / Machine, Pt. 2

Episode Date: October 4, 2024

We're back with Part 2 of Love / Machine! After a quick recap of Part 1, we link up with our hero circa 1948. Jerry's in Grand Rapids practicing law at the firm of Butterfield, Keeney & Amberg, where Harvard-trained OG superlawyer Julius Amberg takes Jerry under his wing.We dig into Amberg's background, yielding rich results. Amberg is the scion of Grand Rapids's first well-established Jewish family. And wouldn't you believe it, Amberg's grandfather even once held the same Congressional seat Gerald Ford eventually occupied!It is in no small part thanks to Amberg's support and guidance that Gerald Ford is able to launch his underdog, outsider campaign to primary Grand Rapids's incumbent conservative representative - Bartel J. "Barney" Jonkman. According to Ford, he was motivated to run (besides having dreamt of a political career since his boyhood dreams of playing a role in some Arthurian legend) by Jonkman's outdated, out-of-touch commitment to isolationism in foreign policy, expressed among other positions through Jonkman's vocal opposition to the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe.The alternative to isolationism - championed by both Gerald Ford and his political godfather, Senator Arthur Vandenberg (whom we also dig into) - was known as "internationalism." We spend some time situating this liberal, anti-communist brand of "internationalism" within the 20th-century trajectory of the Fourth Reich's development, distinguishing it from proletarian internationalism and checking in on the fruits it has borne in our present times. This leads us into a full treatment of the '48 primary, which Jerry wins in an unlikely landslide thanks to his signature grindset. Once Jerry has made a home out of the House (of Representatives), he's ready to join a lodge. On September 30, 1949, just over 75 years to the day before this episode's publication, Jerry and his two half-brothers are inducted into the Grand Rapids Malta Lodge. We dig lightly into the history of freemasonry in Grand Rapids, Ford's deep involvement in freemasonry and its offshoots (including the notorious Royal Order of Jesters), and hear Ford's own words about his relationship with the old fraternal order.

Colonialism or imperialism as the slave system of the West is called is not something that's just confined to England or France or the United States. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. So it's one huge complex or combine. Either you are with us. You are with us or you are with the terrorists. And this international power structure is used to suppress the masses of dark-skinned people all over the world and exploit them of their natural resources.

We found no evidence of a conspiracy, foreign or domestic, the Warren Commission of science. I'll never apologize for the United States of America, ever. I don't care what the facts are. In 1945, we began to require information, which showed that there were two wars going on. His job, he said, was to protect the Western way of life. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders the more easy victims of a big lie than a small law. For example, we're the CIA.

Now, he has a mile. See, there's so long as I'm afraid of we'd never be secure. It usually takes a national. crisis. Freedom can never be secure. Pearl Harbor. A lot of killers. We've got a lot of killers. Why you think our country's so innocent? This is not more than the CIA.

This is a world. I'm Dick. And I'm Dick. And I'm Don. Welcome back for part two of our fifth entry in the Jerry World saga. We're calling this one love slash machine. You'll recall that part one focused primarily on the love of Jerry's life, Betty Blumer Ford. And we discovered the similarities in the upbringing of Jerry versus Betty, right? So they both had biological fathers who were drunks and suffered from personal deep. demons. The difference being that Jerry's mother, Dorothy, escaped the bad situation,

whereas Betty's mother, Hortense, stuck around. There were also similarities between Dorothy and Hortense. They were socialites or sought themselves to be socialites in the Grand Rapids community. They both had that keen class awareness and that desire for upward social mobility, both for themselves and especially in the next generation. That's right and they both had a controlling approach to motherhood and just as Dorothy was this strong matriarch of the Ford household, Hortense was likewise very demanding of her daughter Betty. But there were also some differences, right? Betty was known as a rebel iconoclast. She was wearing pants at a time where women didn't do that. She smoked. She drank at a young age. She had a lot of dates. She had a lot of dates, right.

So there were differences, but ultimately the similarities outnumber those differences. Because just as Jerry had an obsession to football, Betty threw herself into a study and practice of the body, namely dance, modern dance, first in Grand Rapids and then all the way in New York City under the tutelage of Martha Graham. And with Martha Graham, we took a little detour in part one of this episode into the cultural Cold War. It turns out that Betty's Dance Mentor was one of the CIA's favorite champions of American modernism, and she was the recipient of a number of these funneled covert grants that were seated into the cultural sphere during the Cold War

to promote the American way of life and to shape a culture with universal pretences, or should I say pretences of universality, which really bears the hallmarks of Americanism. And I think that they really succeeded in that endeavor over the course of the cultural Cold War because anywhere you go today, cultural development or what passes for cultural advancement is really a tendency towards Americanization in the aesthetic realm. So in the last episode, we talked a little bit about how this all got to. started across the full spectrum, the old mighty Whirlitzer of Frank Wisner, right? This was effective in sort of dulling the critical faculties of the masses while empowering the elites

to say whatever they want and pretty much get away with it. And we discussed how this ties into our media landscape today. We always have those talking heads there to tell us what we're seeing, what to make of it, and what to think about it. But for now, we are still in Jerry world. So, Dick, why don't you tell us, where do we leave off with Jerry? You know, recall that Betty was dancing in New York City. She comes back to Grand Rapids. Jerry's friend, actually his friend's wife, sets them up in late 1947. There was a series of clandestine meetings. And by late 1947, Betty's divorce is final.

By early 1948, Jerry has proposed to Betty. And you'll remember that when he proposed, Jerry told Betty that their wedding would have to wait till sometime in the fall. That's the fall of 1948. But he wouldn't tell her why. Well, it was because he planned to run for office. That's right. He was getting ready to primary

the incumbent conservative congressman Bartel Junkman. This is the moment Jerry sets his sight for the political establishment. He wants to run for Congress for Michigan's fifth district. The question that we ask is, is he now looking at it? And is he looking to join it to become a member of the political elite?

Or is he looking to join it to take it on? And that's what we'll dig into today. We'll first take a look at Jerry's entry into Congress. And right on the heels of that, we'll look at his initiation into the fraternal order of Freemasons. Now, without any further ado, let's get digging. I thought we ought to have a new Congress who represent a younger generation with new ideals about U.S. foreign policy. A younger generation

with new ideas about U.S. foreign policy. All right, so in order to start off, it might make sense for us to backtrack a little and get to how Jerry Ford got into private practice when he came back from the war. So his then partner, Phil Buchan, you'll recall, stayed behind in light of his disease he had been diagnosed with polio as a boy, and so he didn't have to serve. So Buchan stayed behind in Grand Rapids and got a job with the Butterfield firm, which was the preeminent law firm in Grand Rapids at the time. But this is the best part. Bukin took the job on the condition that the firm would promise that when the war was over, they would also hire Jerry. I got to love that loyalty. I mean, my man looking out for Jerry.

That's a ride or die right there. Hell yeah. And so it's like Jerry was guaranteed a job. And I got to think, like, you know, he had a reputation for his personality or, you know, people knew who Jerry Ford was. At times, I think maybe Jerry was the original personality hire. So, you know, when the war's over, Jerry comes back to Grand Rapids and he just gets the job. And this is where he links up with his newest mentor.

Remember, throughout his life, Jerry had this capacity to find people to take him under their wing and sort of show him the ropes. It happened in the Navy. It happened at Yale. It happened in Michigan. And it happened growing up in South High. So when Jerry enters private practice, he finds his newest mentor, a high-powered lawyer by the name of Julius Amber. Now, Amberg was a Harvard-educated lawyer who was, he was always the smartest guy in the room.

And he was impatient with people who he felt. were not his intellectual equals. Jerry himself would describe Amberg as the most brilliant legal mind he had ever known. Yeah, and interestingly, Julius Amberg was Jewish. And that was in no way really an impediment to his success in Grand Rapids. I found that to be a little bit surprising

given the time period and given the demographic makeup of Grand Rapids, which we discussed at length in episode two of Jerry World. But nevertheless, it turns out that if you dig a little bit into Julius Amberg's background, it's easy to see why. Julius H. Amberg's maternal grandfather, Julius Hausman, by the way, the H. and Julius H. Amberg's name stands for House. That's his middle name. So Julius Hausman, this is Amberg's grandfather, was a German Jewish immigrant and was recognized as the first known Jewish settler of Grand Rapids, arriving there way back in 1852.

When he arrived in the United States, he changed the spelling of his name, as was common, from the German Hausmann, you know, H-A-U-S, to Hausman, H-O-U-S-E, and really became a pillar of the community right away, you know, right from the jump. So, you know, obviously he was not fleeing extreme poverty in Europe. He came with a education. He came with formation as a professional. He joined the Free Masonic Lodge in Grand Rapids soon after arriving there in 1854. He also joined another esoteric secret society, the Odd Fellows, as well as the global Jewish fraternal organization B'nai Barith. And Houseman parlayed his sort of community activism into a political career. So first, he was elected to the Michigan State Legislature. Then he was elected

mayor of Grand Rapids, and he served two terms as the city's mayor. And Julius Hausman was elected to represent Michigan's fifth congressional district, the same one that Gerald Ford would later go on to occupy. And he only served one term there. And interestingly, he was the Democrat in caucus, but he was not affiliated with either party. And he ran as a fusion candidate, which basically means that he was kind of representing both parties in some respects. But he was not, he didn't run for office as a Democrat or as a Republican. But once he got in, I guess it's kind of like, it's like a Jimmy Carter move. Yeah, yeah. Or I was going to say Bernie Sanders. But we'll call him a Democrat.

Let's just call him a Democrat. Leave it at that. So in any event, Julius Houseman really establishes a name for himself, for his family. His daughter actually married Mr. David Amberg, Julius Amberg's father, who was the son of one of his sort of right-hand men, right? So Houseman kind of was the boss and one of his junior executives in his. business and political operations in Grand Rapids was David Amberg's father. So it's kind of the employee's son marries the boss's daughter and they have young Julius Amberg, a very intelligent child, always at the top of his class. As you mentioned, goes off to Harvard Law School.

and Julius Amberg had a very interesting career that bears some elucidation here. So in World War I, right after graduating Harvard in 1915, he briefly, briefly returns to Grand Rapids, joins the firm of Butterfield and Keeney, and soon after that is off to Washington to join the war department in the lead-up to the U.S. involvement in World War I. when the U.S. does actually start sending troops, Julius Amberg enlists in the Navy for a spell, but he's in the Navy for less than a year of active duty before being discharged in December of 1918. It comes back to Grand Rapids, and given his sort of clout that rubs off from his service in Washington, he gets his name added to the letterhead of the firm just three years after starting his legal

career, which is pretty impressive. So as of 1919, the firm becomes known from then on as Butterfield, Keeney, and Amberg. And Amberg is just the guy in Grand Rapids. He's kind of a conduit of the city to Washington, he's once again called to Washington around World War II. And, uh, listener, you're going to love this because why don't you take a wild guess at who Julius Amberg goes to work for in Washington during World War II. Dick, you want to drop that name for him? Are you talking about the one and only? Only Henry Stimson.

The one and only. That's right. The godfather of the Black Eagle Trust himself, Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of War, and takes Amberg under his wing just like he took another Grand Rapids native, namely Harvey Bundy under his wing. And Amberg works under Stimson throughout the war. Now, I did a little digging.

I couldn't find any connection directly between Amberg and Harvey Bundy. However, in the pursuit of such a connection, I did find some correspondence between Amberg and another horseman of the Fourth Reich, one who... I love when that happens. You know what? These horsemen, they just be circling. They're everywhere. I mean, as we said, it's a small, small world when you're a Nazi. And unfortunately for Julius Amberg, I don't think that he would have suspected it at the time.

Who knows? But he was corresponding during the war with John J. McCloy. And John J. McCloy will become a more prominent character in Cherry, world when Jerry gets onto the Warren Commission, because McCloy was a member of that commission. McCloy, I'll just give his biggest claim to fame as a fourth Reichsman, if not his membership on the Warren Commission, but that was as high commissioner for Germany after the war, in which capacity, John McCloy offered the sweet, sweet forgiveness that the American Wasp, or rather, in his case, Catholic heart could bestow unto Nazi war criminals. And he freed several, several Nazis from

the dock in his capacity as High Commissioner, including, and those of our original listeners who remember episode one will have a bell rung by the name of yalmar shacht so amberg is working in these high circles and once again like the great cincinnatus he returns back to grand rapids after the war and he gets back into the groove at the law firm now Amberg was a great lawyer. His reputation as a lawyer is excellent, and by all accounts, he really was quite a sharp guy. And he was more than that, and this is something that I think we'll talk a little bit more about later on, but he was really a power broker in the community. He was a real man about town. So in Grand Rapids, and it's a lengthy list, but he was a director on boards of directors

for various Grand Rapids businesses, the Imperial Furniture Company, the Grand Rapids Chair Company, Wurtsburg's Dry Goods Company, which will come up later. He was a trustee of the Butterworth Hospital, named, of course, for the senior partner in his firm. He was a trustee. He was a trustee of the Butterworth Hospital, a member of the board of directors of the Grand Rapids Community Chest, which I always thought was just something that Mattel made up for monopoly, but apparently it's a real thing that used to distribute charity. He was on foundations, galore, and like his grandfather, Julius Hausman, he was also an initiate of the Masonic Blue Lodge number 34. in Grand Rapids.

I wish I was an octopus. A fucking octopus. Eight loving arms in all those seconds. You know what I mean? So Julius was a real good person to have on your side. If you are a young attorney with political ambitions, to put it mildly. So if Julius Amberg is the gatekeeper, he throws the gate wide open when Gerald Ford walks in to his office.

Come in here, dear boy, have a cigar you're going to go far. You're going to fly. You're never going to die. You're going to make it if you'll try back all of you. Yeah, and as you were speaking, the image of like the prototypical private practice regional powerhouse law firm lawyer comes to mind. And it's this guy, as you say, who is a wheeler and dealer. He's more than just a paper pusher, right? He's going to the show on Friday nights.

He's going to the opera or he's attending the sophisticated, elitist dinner parties and gales and the benefits all those functions that hortense bloomer was hosting he's making himself seen and i don't know if you've ever seen the hbo series angels in america but the portrayal of roy cone by alpichino there's that scene where the the young lawyer comes in and is trying to sort of get a job with this power broker How would you like to go to Washington? Work for the Justice Department. All I'm going to do is pick up the phone, talk to Ed. You're in.

In what, exactly? Something nice with clout. Ed. Mays, Attorney General. All I got to do is pick up the phone. I have to think. Okay. Great time to be in Washington, Joe. Oh, Roy.

That's incredibly exciting. You mean something to me, too, you understand? You know, I don't think it's exactly how it worked out with Jerry Ford, but Jerry sort of comes to Amber to become. Or as Amberg says, like, I'll make you a great lawyer. But there's something else going on, of course. As always, is the case. Mm-hmm.

And did we tell you the name of a gay boy? We call it rioting raven-grave-draving train. So, Joe, what are you think? It's, uh, well, it's a crisis live. Chaotic. Yeah, God bless chaos, don't know. So Jerry joins the Butterfield Farm, and he gets on that grind set. And he is very visible in that he, you know, he shows up early.

He's the first one in, last one out, that sort of deal. He willingly does the grunt work, right? For a lawyer that's like the research and sort of the tedium that it's not very glamorous, you know, document investigation, things like that. And he's also out on the street, too, right? He's out there hustling clients around the courthouse, picking up cases, I think, not always getting paid for those cases. Right. But an interesting thing happens.

Somewhere along the way, Amberg and I guess like even Bukin and his other colleagues sort of recognize that Jerry's gifts, they would best be served in another arena. Jerry's a, you know, he's a good lawyer, but he could really serve our ends in a different way. And of course we've talked about how Jerry from a very young age had this itch to run for political office. His father's relationship, his stepfather's relationship with Vandenberg and what he saw as a young boy how power could really be used and how people responded to power. Remember, as early, I think it's like the 7th or 8th grade, Jerry would say he wanted to be a lawyer. And so the desire was there. At this point, he's come back from the war, and he's spending a lot of time under Amberg's wing,

walking into these rooms with the elite of Grand Rapids, the board rooms, and the event, that lawyers get to go to because of their network. And surely that it sort of accelerated his desire, and he's sort of looking around saying, okay, well, war's over. I'm now, what, 34? It's time to do this thing. I think this is sort of the last stop.

Right. And remember that he's participating with Amberg in sort of the social upper milieu of Grand Rapids in a non-partisan context, but he's also participating at this time in parallel in the Republican Homefront Organization, and in fact is the leader of that organization which his father, his stepfather, Gerald Sr. had held while he was away at war. And so he's come back, he's working with these kind of anti-McCay Republicans. And Amberg, meanwhile, was actually a Democrat, but was down with Jerry Ford, right?

He did not have, I think he did not see things through a strictly partisan lens, especially in a place like Grand Rapids, where the electorate was Republican-le- meaning or had been for a long time. So it was in Amberg's interest, you know, if he couldn't have a Democrat in office whom he could influence, the next best thing for him would be to have a Republican like Jerry Ford, whose ear he had and whose politics were actually not that different than what Amberg would have liked to see. Right. The relationship was, there was nothing inappropriate about it.

because at the end of day, he's a sort of a professional mentor, protege relationship, right? So it's like, no one's really going to think too hard about it because it's like, yeah, at the end of the day, this guy's my associate, and I'm trying to do my duty as a partner of this firm or whatever. So, you know, along the way, what happens is Jerry gets to spend more and more time away from his desk and engage in all sorts of sort of civic activities and community activities we've talked about before how he volunteered with the Red Cross we talked about his membership in various VFW and other organizations veterans organizations and sort of did that systematically and strategically right like he became part of a VFW that was largely pro Jankman

right it's like a polish community in grand rapids that at the time they were veterans but they were very much with the conservative junkman train so for like a year or so into the you know working at the firm which he also didn't work at the butterfield firm very very long at all but he was spending a lot of time outside of that firm and sort of building his network and gearing up for the 1948 election right i don't know exactly when he makes the decision that he's going to run but needless to say he is laying that groundwork and surely amberg would have been one of the few people that was in the know about it along with of course the republican home front guys uh but he was keeping it kind of

close to his chest for a while. So I decided to run, but there were some prospective other candidates. Jerry would go around to all of the other sort of Republican known quantities in Grand Rapids. People more senior to me, probably better known than I. As he was gearing up to make a decision whether to run and kind of give everybody else the right of first refusal. I went to the one-on-one, and I said, And like he would say, hey, I think we ought to have a new congressman. You are rumored to have a desire to run.

I'm curious, are you going to? You know, are you planning to run? Look, if you want to run, please be my guess, go for it. Three of them said no. They said, oh, you can't beat Mr. Yonkman. And if not, you know, I might be willing to step in, but we got to get rid of this. We got to take on Jankman. And a couple of them said, well, if you're so.

eager, why don't you try it? So all three of them decided not to run. It ended up just a race between Yankman and Ford, which was perfect. Yeah. Kind of like how he handled the Betty situation, honestly. Yeah. With those guys outside of the apartment and just sort of was very straight up with them. So you can't knock that hustle, right? He was like, all right, let's just be real. Who's going to do this? And I think I, you know, I can do it. And, But to just get us back on track, right, so now he's got Amberg, who is his new mentor, but remember, time is a flat circle, and all these people come around and around in Jerry's life. And so he's looking at his dad's friend, Senator Vandenberg. Arthur Vandenberg started his career as a newspaper editor for his hometown paper, the Grand Rapids Herald.

Seeking to make the news rather than report it, Vandenberg served in the Senate for 23 years. You know, we can't forget that Vanderberg, who had been in the Senate since 1928, hits her four terms. And by the 40s, he was chair of the Foreign Relations Committee and President Pro Tempore of the Senate. And he was even contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 1940 and 1948. So this is like, he's a pretty heavy hitter. Yeah, no less a figure than Harry Truman had this to say about him. That's Arthur Vandenberg. He was the senior senator from Michigan, and one of the finest men I ever came in contact with.

Remember, Vandenberg, as a sitting senator, and there's this relationship with Jankman, who is the sitting congressman for the 5th District. A lot of the mentorship and the assistance, Jerry, would get would have to be under the cover of darkness, so to speak, right? It would be cloak and dagger shit. Cloak and dagger shit from Vanderbork. But Vandenberg did prove to be a very useful ally because he, despite being sort of an old-timer, he saw this shift along with Jerry. And so they were sort of on the same track, this idea of moving away from isolationism and towards internationalism. Vandenberg began as a committed isolationist, arguing that the protection of American interests depended on insulating ourselves from global common. competition, but Pearl Harbor was a key lesson for the Senator, that our oceans have ceased

to be moats that automatically protect our ramparts. And so, like, America first at the start of 1940, the idea of, you know, the Republican Party, Republicans, especially the young sort of future of the Republican Party starting an isolationist movement in the halls of these elite universities, just a decade later there's this fundamental shift. Yes. And honestly, like by the time you're at 47, 48, it's sort of like, if you're an isolationist, you're kind of a fossil, right? Like, the war's over, bro. The train has left the station. Totally. Right. Like those VFW guys, to take it back to the sort of interactional,

interpersonal way that politics works at this time, right? The VFW Polish vets that are hanging out in Grand Rapids, you could see how those guys might not be too eager, you know, in 1939 to see U.S. troops get sent into another European war zone. But by 1945, when this idea of America as kind of the savior of the world and the guardian of global security and beneficiary of a world order at which it's at the top of the pyramid, right? There's a renewed sense of national pride and a sense of national responsibility, honestly, which it's no longer consistent with an isolationist framework. And you have a new big bad, right? You have the red menace, and it's now very much of, you're gearing up for this bipolar world. Right. Let's hear it from

Vandenberg himself. Pending Western European Recovery Act seeks peace and stability by economic rather than military means. If it can succeed, it will help stop World War III before it starts. It will prevent America's isolation in a communist world. It is a plan for peace, stability, and freedom. As such, it involves the clear self-interest of our own United States. It's kind of hard for an isolationist at this point, right?

Because it's like, you know, we just experienced this global war and we know that there is this other power now that has come out of it that is ideologically on the other side. And, you know, I mean, this is what it's all about, right? This is what we're sort of getting into the crux of our, what we're exploring here. Right. And that, and all that Dutch Calvinist dogma that once again, we discuss this a lot in episode two,

but this predestination idea that applies at the individual level in this Calvinist worldview, it jives with kind of zooming that out to the global level, right? It's not the virtuous individual who is predestined to reap the rewards of his virtue. It's the virtuous nation, America, that is predestined to reap the rewards of pursuing its

interest on the world stage. Bandenberg was the chief legislative architect for the Truman doctrine, the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the United Nations. Yeah, and so the ideology of isolationism had really come out of style by the late 1940s. Now, listener, let's be clear about the legacy of Arthur Vandenberg and of this political shift from isolationism to so-called internationalism. The internationalism we've been discussing, as espoused by Arthur Vandenberg and Gerald Ford, for that matter, is not proletarian internationalism. nationalism, right? This is not about uniting the workers of the world to throw off the chains of

their exploitation by the ruling class. Now, certainly American post-war liberal internationalism cloaked itself in the language of solidarity, and certainly many of its adherents sincerely believed that American-style liberal internationalism or might call it anti-communist internationalism by the same token, its adherence might have believed that it was about bringing people together to resolve differences peacefully, to work together for mutual gain, to compete in the marketplace of the economy and the marketplace of ideas, rather than on the battlefield, all that bullshit. But as would become clear as America's Cold War myths were laid bare as the propaganda that they always were, this brand of American internationalism was really

just a euphemism for imperialism. And the person of Arthur Vandenberg is once again a microcosm for this sort of euphemistic treatment, just like his protege Jerry Ford. Funnily enough, when I was doing research into this episode, I stumbled upon a non-profit organization called the Vandenberg Coalition. According to its website, it describes itself as, quote, a non-partisan network of foreign policy scholars and practitioners who believe in the power of American leadership to protect American national security. And if you take a few minutes to scroll the rest of their website, it's exactly the type of neocon talking points that you'd expect. It's almost too perfect an encapsulation of Fourth

Reich foreign policy. So, for example, the Vandenberg Coalition is concerned with countering the influence of the Chinese Communist Party on the global stage. It concerns itself with confronting the Iran threat, certainly something that is relevant as once again the U.S. seems eager to kick off another regional, if not a global war in Iran. And the Vandenberg Coalition even published a really disgusting genocidal colonial planning document that, I mean, it looks like something out of the archives of the British Raj entitled, quote, the day after a plan for Gaza. And that plan was co-authored by literal criminal ghouls, the likes of Elliot Abrams and Scooter Libby, among several others.

Actually, as a matter of fact, this is the group that published that mini-explainer video on Arthur Vandenberg that we've been cribbing from throughout this discussion. And the conclusion of that video speaks volume, so I'll let it speak for itself. Whether on the left or the right, American presidents and secretaries of state embodied these values for decades, bearing witness to Vandenberg's mantra that politics must stop at the water. edge and securing America's standing as a superpower for over half a century. Today, the forces aligned against democracy are once again powerful and dangerous. Senator Vandenberg's patriotism, conviction that U.S. interests must guide foreign policy,

willingness to work across the aisle and ability to put country over politics, are what our country needs to defeat them. Yeah, so this is what Fourth Reich archaeology is all about. We identify the products, or the artifacts, if you will, of our current fascist state of affairs, and we try to contextualize them in a way that explains their genesis with an American history and American liberal ideology, while also exposing the imperialist puppet masters, like Frank Wisner, Alan Dulles, Jim Angleton, at all who mold that history and that ideology, like so much clay, into an artifice, a myth, dare I say, a sort of wasp

gallum. Let's get back into that context now, back in 1948. when the bipartisan consensus on American imperialism was just coming into its own. But ideology like culture, it takes some time to seep in to Middle America. And by and large, like Grand Rapidians in 1948 were still a very conservative community and unwilling to change a mentality that was entrenched in their dogma and their Dutch Calvinist, Though the tides were changing, it was, you know, culturally a conservative place and socially and economically. They very much were with the structure that they were living under. And just as like any other community, you know, the political elite was also entrenched in their old ways.

And this, I guess, brings us to the sitting congressman in Michigan's 5th District at the time. Bartel J. Jankman a.k. A.k.a. Barney. Barney is a dinosaur from our imagination. And when he's tall, he's what we call

a dinosaur sensation. And we've covered this in the last episode, but, you know, Johnkman, as the name suggests, he's a Dutch boy. And he's catering to that Dutch Calvinist dogma. Jankman also brings us back, full circle,

to America first. So John Kman was first elected in 1940, and he was elected by championing these isolationists at times xenophobic, you know, at times anti-Semitic ideology. By 1940, Jerry was like out of America First, right? Jerry was getting off that train when John Kman was still staying on right around that time. That's right. I had gone to war. I saw the importance of friends on a global basis. So when I came back to Grand Rapids, I was an equally ardent internationalist. And our incumbent congressman, Bartel Youngman, was a very dedicated isolationist. But his seat stayed safe because he had the backing of Frank McKay. Exactly. And like in this respect, too, by late 1940s, It's like true to Junkman form.

Like, he is not only entrenched on his, you know, ideological views of isolationism, but he's also sticking with McKay and the guy just would not get with the times. Even though, by all accounts, McKay's clout, his network, his empire, had been substantially weakened. He's sort of, you know, yesterday's man at this point.

I say, past the duchy pan in left and side. It's a go bon. Give me the music. I'm a jump from from. It's a go done. Right. But I know we have a lot of international listeners,

and our American listeners may already know this. But to be yesterday's man in the year, United States Congress is by no means disqualifying, right? I mean, even to this day, the place is full of stinky old fucking moth-eaten morons that buttered the right guy's bread once upon a time and just held on to incumbency for a generation. It's why the average age in Congress is in the 70s and why the average net worth is in the millions. It's because it's full of these decrepit, old, rich, useless pieces of shit that just get that seat and keep it warm unless and until somebody comes along to take

it away from them like Jerry Ford did. Yeah, and so this like tradition of having politicians just, rotting in their congressional, you know, seats, basically just serving as vessels to the establishment capital of the region or whatever, right? Like the district that they're serving. I guess basically, like, the idea is, like, don't rock the boat and to the best you're able, bring us money. Give us some of that federal suite federal money.

And otherwise, like, yeah, just fucking whatever, you know. basically go there and die. So, like, yeah, Jankman was, like, doing the crazy shit, right? Like, he was not only, like, against going to, you know, going to the war, funding the war, all these popular initiatives and these pieces of legislation, right? Like, he was against Lendon Lees,

and he was, you know, by the time the war's over, he's, like, against the Marshall Plan. He very much espoused, like, the Dutch Calvinist, you know work your way we'll figure it out figure it out on your own don't ask for handouts right

he even opposed those handouts to veterans I think yeah exactly exactly and this is you got to think like

when Jerry's in these circles with these veterans and folks in Grand Rapids you got to think he's talking about that right like, you know, I'm sure he's doing it, his own Jerry way of, like, showing some respect to Johnkman, but saying, like, maybe he needs to understand better what the experience of the veterans are, because, of course, Johnkman didn't serve, right? Yeah, and Johnkman did not really have much by way of constituent services either, right?

he did not really appear before his public. He refused to debate Jerry, despite Jerry wanting to debate him. I think the only real constituent services that he had, other than trying to secure whatever sort of pork barrel projects he could, which I don't think he was even very successful at that, was he would get printed up the farmer's almanac. And so he would get a bunch of copies of those and then distribute them to farmers come election season. And that was that was the extent of his constituent services. Yeah, sort of like the polar opposite to Jerry and we'll see and we're going to talk about in a bit here.

So like Jerry at this point, it's like winter of 1947 and Jerry sees his mark, right? Like he, this is, he's thinking this is the guy I can take. I got a good army. I got a good team of people in Grand Rapids that I can rely on. I've cleared the way of any other potential competitors. And I figured this guy's game out, right? Like, he knows Junkman is a dinosaur that is stuck in this America First stuff.

And he knows America First. He decides to take his shot. but it's not it wouldn't be easy he knew it wouldn't be easy like we said grand rapids very conservative town very sort of stuck in their ways not knocking on grand rapids at all of course i love the people of grand rapids i think you're wonderful people and produce a fine stock but at the time right we're talking about in the context of moving forward as and is often the case right they're not willing to stray from the incumbent and so So when Jerry, you know, sort of is shopping this idea around, he goes to Phil Bukin, his friend Phil Bukin.

And he's like, hey, Phil, I'm thinking about running against Junkman. And Bukin's like, yeah, you're probably not going to win. Yeah. And Bukin, remember, his dad had been a state senator in Wisconsin. So he grew up around political campaigns. I'm sure that that background was helpful. to Jerry, who, you know, had some exposure to the Wilkie campaign. But Jerry's real political experience up to that point was getting kicked out of the room, right?

Remember when he approached Boss McKay in 1940 to get a seat at the table in Michigan Republican politics, McKay sent him packing. And so he was going to have to do things. things a little differently. I mean, just like your classic storyteller of the battered hero, right? Like, he goes up against McKay and asks for that endorsement. And essentially, McKay beats the shit out of his ego, right? Not physically beats him up, but it's just like, fuck you, you piece of shit.

You're a nothing person. Get out of here. And then so what does Jerry do? He goes on the hero's journey and develops the credentials that he needs to develop to come back. Get no doubt Right on And take on

You know The elder sort of Now the bad guy Maybe he's a little bit battered himself But nonetheless still Like a very A fearsome

adversary Because it's hard to get Away from what's entrenched It's hard to take that down Right But just like Just like AOC would have all those years later. Jerry had youth. He had good looks and he had energy to organize.

Yeah, he had hustle. It was hard work, right? So from the get-go it was in a lot, in a lot of ways, he's doing this shit. He was doing his whole life, right? He was going out there and mingling and all day, every day, he would say how he knew that he couldn't outspend Junkman, so you just have to outwork him, right? Like, this is your classic hustle, your classic tale of, like, the politician who hustles from the outside to get the spot. And it says something actually really good, I think, about the people of Grand Rapids electing Jerry Ford in the primary against Junkman, that there's a level of responsiveness

there where you do have this young upstart and it's kind of like it gives a little credence to this myth of democracy which I think we've commented has kind of run its course and no longer can be said to apply or at least the evidence is dwindling for it but he got out there he shook the hands. He explained what was better about him than about his opponent. And, you know, the meritorious candidate won the day. It's kind of a inspirational story. Yeah. But there's also like this other story too, right? Because there were hurdles that Jerry was, he knew full well that there were going to be things that he would have to get over. One of which was the Dutch Calvinist base, right?

Grand Rapids is a Dutch town, and if you want to win, you're going to have to sort of get the support of that constituency. And Jerry, of course, is not Dutch, right? But he sure does look it. Right? I mean, he could pass as a Dutch guy, and, you know, this story that,

And I completely agree with you, right? Like, it does speak on Grand Rapids and their ability to back Jerry, but it also very much speaks on Jerry's ability to sort of move and shake and sell himself, right? And connect with these people that, in all respects, don't really share any sort of heritage with him, right? He's a guy whose family just moved to town one generation. Right. I was going to say, at least he was blonde. At least he was blonde. It's remarkable.

He's our man, right? Like this is the kind of stuff I love to talk about when we're talking about Jerry because he really does embody that grind set, that idea that anyone can do anything if they just work at it. Right. And it's the beginning of any great tragic fall as well, right? In the case of Jerry Ford, not so much a fall from grace and good reputation, but I think at least in our view as we find. follow his career, right, this sort of...

All too common recurrent sort of thing that happens to, you know, politicians or people of power, right? They end up serving, for lack of a better way of putting it, sort of selling the people down the river, right? Selling his constituency, selling the American people down the river to further enable the powers of the... Right, exactly. It goes back to this framing question that, we posed at the outset of the episode, he's going into the political establishment. Is he going in to take it on or to simply join it and ride that wave as high as it will take him? And in 1948, there certainly is not a clear answer one way or the other. And I want

to flesh out a little bit the grindset mentality that Jerry's campaign embodied. This is a guy who's getting up every day at 5 o'clock in the morning to go farm to farm and milk cows alongside the farmers. He's an Eagle Scout, so he knows his way around nature, but he's not a farmer, and he's got to cater to that constituency and does so, sparing no energy, sparing no effort whatsoever. Yeah, and there are the accounts of the farmers, right, that are like, what is this guy even doing here on, like, terrible rainy days where Jerry is getting up and going to meet these guys? they're like very much taken aback by his devotion to the people. Yeah, you think Junkman ever milked a fucking cow to get a vote? Hell no.

But Dick, sorry, I may have interrupted you, but you were saying there was two main risk factors. The other one, which I don't think you got to, is his relationship with divorcee, Betty Blumer Warren. Right. Remember at the end of the last episode, we talked about how Jerry proposed to Betty with the caveat that we can't get married until sometime in the fall of 1948. Why would that be, Don? Well, he didn't want to give John Kman the ammunition to paint him as a moral.

reprobate, essentially, right? Junkman was already throwing lobs that this is a young buck, that this is a guy with no temperament, with no experience. And he would also call himself the family man candidate, right? Like he would take jabs at Jerry in the negative sense, where he would just refer to himself as the family man insinuating that, you know, the other guy isn't. And so there were definitely, it was a slug fest of, not. Dirty tricks, but they were getting in the mud, right? It was getting down and dirty. And remember, Junkman's the establishment, and Jerry is the outsider.

So he's scrappy, and he's got to think about, you know, what he could do to get at Junkman. And there is the story of the Wersberg Department store parking lot. The famous Kwanset. Yeah. So why don't you tell the story? I'll just tell the listener. So we're going to be talking about a Quonset hut, which is something that I certainly had no idea what that was. Yeah.

So I would think of like a big top tent type deal. So that was what I thought at first, but you look up a picture and it's actually like these are structures used in wartime as like a quick makeshift shelter. and they're usually made out of corrugated steel. So, you know, those like wavy sheets of steel that you might see them on like the roof of a warehouse or something, that material. And it's usually like a kind of semi-cylinder horizontal. So it looks like a half a tube, basically, on the ground.

That is just one piece of steel kind of arched over the ground. uh like a half a tube that you can walk into and and take shelter under but so what happens is he he has this hangar essentially right in the department store parking lot and um emblazoned on the side is like jerry for junior for uh you know for congress um and i can't remember like how why mackay sort of decides to step in here? Is it that? Yeah, basically what, I think it was just, I don't know if it was next to the Junkman headquarters,

but I think it was, it was just in this very visible place in Grand Rapids, where it was really catching a lot of eyes and it was painted in this bright, red, white, and blue. And Junkman called up McKay because McKay was like, he's the boss of the town, right? Right. And he's definitely got Wersberg's ear. Totally. Right. Yeah.

So it's outside of Wurzberg's. Remember, Amberg sat on the board of directors of Wurtzberg. Wirtzberg was a major firm client of Butterfield, Kini, and Amberg. And so that was how Jerry was able to finagle his way onto that real estate in the first place. And Wurzberg is sort of in McKay's. debt as just a local business, you know, to the local patron, the local political mobbed-up boss. And so Wurzberg does ask Julius Amberg and Jerry Ford if they'll take it down. And they refuse.

Right. Worsberg did have a contract with Jerry, right? Like, they did agree to have him on there. And so he wasn't. trespassing or anything like that. I guess it just ruffled the feathers, John Kman's feathers, as you say. And that makes sense, right? It's like sort of an odd thing now that I know what a Kwan set is. But it would be an odd thing to have, right? It would real attention-grabbing thing to have. And also probably inexpensive,

comparatively in terms of advertisement that Jerry was doing. So real like guerrilla warfare shit. But yeah, so then, you know, mafioso, McKay comes in and gets worse. And Wersberg's ear and Wersberg goes to Amberg and then Amberg goes to Jerry and like I think this is the best part, right? Like Jerry does the decision tree optionality with with Amberg and it's like, look like either I remove this voluntarily, which I'm not going to do or Worsberg's going to have to take us to court because I got a contract. And Amberg's like, yeah, okay, I'll tell them that. And he does, right? And he doesn't move, and the Kwan set remains. And this, I think, is probably the moment where you see, like, the McKay machine has no more power, right?

It's great for Jerry because the rumor mill starts to spread the word of this confrontation about the Kwan set that, you know, that McKay tried to get it removed. that Jerry Ford refused to back down and that there stood the quonset after all was said and done. And so you have word of mouth in Grand Rapids really singing the tale, like a Greek chorus of Jerry Ford's bravery before the big bad boss, Frank McKay. And it's hard to say what exact factor was decisive, but I want to say one more real weapon that Jerry used to propel his campaign. And that was what was known as his Army of Women, right? Oh, I'm glad you said it, man Because I was about to say We can't forget his army of women canvassing on his behalf

My man Jerry's got the ladies out there walking them streets Yeah, and not just any ladies These are the entire cast of models from Purple Shimer's department store who were Betty's colleagues And this is why like So we said the whole thing about they have to wait to get married He couldn't tell her at the time of the proposal

But Betty was very much much involved in the campaign. I mean, after the proposal, she obviously was let in on the secret and was right there at Jerry's side. She was organizing women to write letters for Jerry, to knock doors for Jerry. I think they had some fundraiser fashion shows even with their best Herpelsheimer's merchandise. Absolutely. Yeah. So, but, you know, to put it short, like Jerry's ground game was impeccable. He went after Junkman relentlessly. I mean, he, this is your, the question, right? Like, people often say

Jerry was a decent man and they use it sort of as a pejorative. And the question is, like, whether that term, like saying he was decent meant he was simple and that he didn't really understand the strategy of it all, but Ford took shots at Johnkman for being too isolationists and early on for voting for policy that made America unprepared for war and didn't do enough to get America prepared for war. And he's making these statements, of course, as the veteran lieutenant commander Gerald Ford, but he just totally disregards. It completely hides the fact that, like, yeah, in 1938, Jerry was right there espousing those same sort of ideals. And the identity of the big, bad enemy is again important, right?

Because the Nazi threat is obviously disappeared by this point, but the isolationist paradigm, it doesn't work. And this goes back to the Fourth Reich archaeology perspective, right? isolationism could gain immense popularity when the big bad enemy that we're deciding not to fight against are Nazis who are anti-communist who are fighting battles in Europe right and who may or may not share the values of Americans white Americans with kind of a racist outlook On the other hand, when the big bad enemy is the Soviet Union, and there's nobody left in Europe to fight against them, right? If Europe is going to have any fighting force at all after World War II, it's going to be on American tax dollars through Marshall funds, et cetera.

It just doesn't resonate the same way to say, oh, you know what, let's let European battles be fought in Europe. Let's keep our battles over here because when you are dealing with a cold war mentality of this hyped up threat of global Soviet imperial expansion, whether that threat was real or not, there's simply no space in the political discourse to walk away and shrink from that fight if you are in the mainstream of American politics. Right. And at this point, you're also seeing sort of the fruits of the war from an economic perspective come to bear. And the enterprising American is certainly looking at Europe as a investment in this zero-sum game where it's like, or, you know, if we don't take it, the Soviets will. And they're thinking, you know, well, there's quite a bit of money to be made here. not only are hot wars a celebration of markets but cold wars are as well exactly right um but back to our battle and i'd like to say it was a battle of the ages for the ages but i'm you know it really probably wasn't right like uh jankman was not very present jerry was out there incredibly present and in the end he clinches it he went 62% of the vote winning the Republican primary, which effectively meant that he was going to Congress.

I'll just close out our discussion of the election with one last little anecdote that is so Jerry, which is on their, his wedding day, to Betty, right? during his campaign he had made a promise to a farmer that if he won the election that he would be there to milk the cows

with the farmer to celebrate his victory and so he went and it just so happened that he went on the day of his wedding and it caused him to show up late to the ceremony did you show up late for your wedding

there's this legend I showed up on time with dust all over his shoes walked in however with a one black shoe and one brown shoe because that morning very early it was dark and I didn't have time or didn't make the effort to see what shoes I was putting on so I had I mixed them up a little and that would portend the degree to which Jerry would continue to put politics ahead of family much to Betty's detriment, I think. And that's something that will keep an eye on going forward.

But at least on their wedding day, it makes for a nice little lighthearted anecdote about Jerry's commitment to the game. Exactly. And not to just not to get too into it, but like indirect conflict with the Jerry Ford mythos of family man, you know, be at home on time for dinner. This guy, as we'll see, this guy was essentially never home. Yeah. But in any event, Jerry's headed to Congress.

Right. His home became the house. Right. Exactly. Well, you've got the house. You've got your home. And then you've got your lodge. And for Gerald Ford, that lodge was the Malta Lodge number 465.

That is the free Masonic chapter into which he was initiated in Grand Rapids. Come let us prepare, we brothers that are here met on this happy occasion. We'll plop and we'll sing, be he peasant or king. Here's a health to an accepted mason. Remember a listener that Jerry's family had multifarious connections to Freemasonry, right? His both biological paternal family in Omaha was involved in Freemasonry. Remember Charles Henry King where his sphere of influence in Omaha. Omaha overlapped with the Masonic offshoot Knights of Ex-Sarbon.

Omaha's Masonic community also overlapped with that other Masonic offshoot, the Ku Klux Klan. And even George Ford, Gerald Ford Sr.'s father had been a Freemason. Gerald Ford Sr. followed suit. He was a Freemason. And so it was kind of. in the water, so to speak. It was in the ambiance of the westward expanding sort of settler milieu that we spent so much time fleshing out in the first couple of episodes of Jerry World, right? Yeah. I mean, the Masonic connections run deep. And even when Jerry wasn't,

a member or affiliated with the Malta Lodge. He had exposure to the ways of the mason. The world tries in vain our secrets to gain and still let them wonder and guess on they ne'er can define a word or a sign of a free and an accepted mason. In college she was during an all-star college game It was like this exhibition game for supporting awareness of the Shriners Hospital that he played.

The Shriners, listener, I don't know how prominent they are nowadays when I was a kid. I think they were involved in the circus parades and stuff like that. The Shriners are those guys that wear the Fez hats and kind of adopt an orientalist, weird sort of quasi-Islamic aesthetic, right? they also run charitable activities and so this was one of them right they have a football game raises money for this hospital children's hospital that they sponsor and at least according to jerry that was like the first event that drew him to the shriners and to freemasonry No order can boast, so noble a toast, as a free and an accepted mason. Right, he saw what they were doing for the community, and he liked it, and he wanted to be on board.

And it's in an era where, like, joining these societies, these, you know, being a freemason, it was a much bigger deal. The people, the elite in the community, the men that were sort of masters of the industry for their town were, I would say, usually a member of one or the other of these societies. Yeah, this is, it's kind of a resurgent peak of free masonry, really. We're not going to do a full kind of history of free masonry in America. I'd again refer listeners to the series that programmed to chill that Jimmy did with Monty on there about free masonry. I'd caution listeners that there's a ton of bullshit about free masonry, some of which we'll talk about here. But I think our understanding, like Dick was saying, is it's essentially

like a fraternity, as it refers to itself, and it's a way for the upper members of the community, the upper male members of the community, the elites, to get together to discuss issues among themselves. And the way that they sell it is that they work towards the individual betterment of each member. And that their rituals and initiations at the various levels are all designed to encourage the man to grow out of his adolescence and to adopt a responsible outlook on his role in the community and in the world, right? Yep, and it is a widespread order, and Grand Rapids is no different, right? the Masonic Temple in Grand Rapids was established in 1915. It made the news, there's a

massive spread in the Grand Rapids Herald about the corner stone laying ceremony. The Grand Rapids Herald reported, At high 12th, Thursday, January 14th, 1915 was the event of laying the cornerstone for the new Grand Rapids Masonic Temple, where three thousand. 400 persons claim membership in different Masonic bodies. The ceremony was headed by Grandmaster William E. Parrott of Detroit, head of the Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Mason's, Michigan. Some of the special VIPs that were present for the event and celebrations after the laying of the corner stone

were the current Michigan governor, Woodbridge Nathan Ferris. who is a master mason, the former Michigan Governor Chase S. Osborne, United States Senator from Michigan, William Holden Smith, Sir Knight in a 33rd degree, Grand Rapids Media, George E. Ellis, a past grand patron of the Grand Chapter of the OES of Michigan. There's also the right eminent Grand Commander, Gordon R. Campbell, of the Knights Templar of Michigan, John J. Carton, deputy for Michigan Supreme Council, 33rd degree, ancient and accepted Scottish right. John I. McCallum, the most illustrious Grandmaster Royal and Select Masons of Michigan.

At High 12, when the flag that had been draped, block of cornerstone, granite, then Michigan Governor Woodbridge N. Ferris, kind remarks about the great impulse of the industrial world and man's constructive power. The governor drew a parallel with these things in this new Masonic temple, which illustrated that genius of construction impulse, which demonstrated the masons in Grand Rapids to give to coming generations and the community a building that would exemplify the true principles of masonry. And by this illustration showed that it was this constructive element that built communities, built states, and built nations. He stated, the head and heart.

I congratulate you because your purpose and impulse has been exemplified in the beautiful structure. It is a glorious thing to look upon. It is not simply for you, but for the whole country. community, an exemplification of the brotherhood and the principles in which you glory. So, as with any other town in the U.S. at the time, the Masonic identity was there in Grand Rapids. And Jerry, now 1949, and a congressman decides to join. And it's odd, right? he does it it's jerry and his three half brothers tom dick and jim are initiated to malta lodge number

four six five on the same day september 30th nineteen forty nine i don't know how common that would be right like to do it altogether like that but it says something to me yeah i mean remember they were different ages if anything it's kind of curious that jerry wouldn't have joined sooner although it kind of makes sense given that, you know, he was in Ann Arbor and then he was out at war. And so he wasn't really around with roots down on the ground in Grand Rapids for a while in his adulthood. But yeah, it is, it is interesting. And I mean, certainly you could imagine that Gerald Ford, Sr., who himself was very involved in the Masonic community. He was a guy. He was a guy. He was a guy who would extol to young Jerry Jr., the virtues of Freemasonry, the benefits of membership,

et cetera, how he would want to see all of his sons initiated together. And it's a way kind of to level the playing field as well in the Ford family, because Jerry, remember, he bears Jerry Sr.'s name. even though he's not Jerry Senior's biological son. By this point in time, everybody knows, right? The secret is out that Jerry is not afford by blood. And so I think it was maybe a nice thing that would have more aligned to Jerry senior's desires.

Yeah. Yeah. When you said level of playing field, I thought, well, hell yeah, you got a level of the playing field. Jerry, our boy Jerry's got a gift, right? you know once he joins he is going to rise to the top right this is like his environment he can socialize he can network he can mingle and he does all those things and he is an active mason right oh yeah oh yeah it literally opens doors for him like if you even to this day if you walk by a masonic temple or a masonic lodge you'll see

at the door, you know, open to Freemasons only. Well, those doors swung wide open to Jerry Ford, not only in Michigan, right, but back in D.C. And so he parlayes once again his initiation in Michigan's Malta Lodge to get his way into the Columbia Lodge number three in the district of Columbia. And that is where, so in free masonry, right, there are three sort of initial phases of initiation. There's the first initiation where you become sort of an apprentice mason, then you take the second degree, and then you become a master mason.

And so Jerry's second degree, remember, it was September 30th, 1949 that he was first initiated in Grand Rapids. It's all right, we know where you're been. April 20th, 1951 is when he's elevated to the second degree. and he takes that ceremony in Washington, D.C. at the Columbia Lodge. Less than a month after that, which begs the question of whether this is already sort of a fete accompli of, you know, given like less than a month, right? What could he have possibly done in less than a month that would have earned him the next step up the letter? But needless to say, he does step into the master mason. degree on May 18th, 1951 at the same Columbia Lodge number three in Washington, D.C.

But he wasn't only a Mason. I mean, he took on all these other titles besides Master Mason. Dick, you want to list off some of the many additional honorifics that Jerry accumulated? oh yeah for sure so we talked about how he so he joined the shriners the one that i like to talk about is how he joined the royal order of jesters uh you know that these guys are known as sort of the uh the party animal subset of you can't be a jester unless you're a shriner i think is how it goes gesture by invite and the jesters are like you know I don't want to take stuff that's going on today but like they're the puff daddy freakoff type of type of Mason right like these guys are I mean as the name sort of suggests they're out

there trying to have a good time there are some like really actually like credible, dastardly things that the jesters have done, that by no means are we saying Jerry has anything to do with that. But in more recent years, we've seen the jesters' name being thrown around in certain respects. Yeah, for a while now. I mean, the gestures have kind of taken a bad reputation, it seems like that's probably deserved. We've looked for it and did not see any evidence connecting Jerry to any jester-related deviance. We did you dream. We did, given this kind of hot reputation of the jesters as being this kind of nasty group of purves, we did confirm that Jerry was certainly a member. There are some materials in his White House papers that are published

by the Gerald Ford Presidential Library Archive Online that say, you know, you've been invited to join the Royal Order of the Jester's, and he marks up on their, you know, I'm already a member. So in his own admission, he is a member of the jesters, but it's unclear exactly what the meaning is other than we could certainly say that it reflects his very rotund personal investment in Freemasonry, not only in the order, but also in its offshoots. Right.

And for listeners, you should definitely check out the program to Chill episode with Monty. about the jesters and all the messed up shit they got into. Jerry also joined the Scottish Rite and, you know, other Masonic organization, and he was awarded a number of distinctions and honors. For example, on October 24, 1959, Jerry became a noble Saladin Shriner in Kentwood, Michigan. He is ultimately elevated to the 33rd degree. on September 26, 1962. About a year before being named to the Warren Commission.

And made a honorary Grandmaster of the Order of DeMole in April 1975. Yeah, and all of those titles and elevations, you know, obviously the 1975 one, you can clock it up to the fact that he, by this point, was president of the United States, right? And that does put him into community with a number of other United States presidents, too, right? Maybe it's overstated in some circles, especially in conspiracy-oriented circles, the extent to which U.S. presidents have been Freemasons. I don't really think that there's a bunch of, like, secret Freemason presidents who were not

identified as Freemasons, but we're secretly practicing Freemasonry just because the actual membership in a Masonic lodge is itself not that secretive. Right. The record of who is in and who is not is pretty much, like, public, right? Like, certainly if someone becomes more of a public figure, it becomes known pretty easily, because there is a record, right? Right. Maybe there are some secret, secret societies still operational out there,

but I think that the Epstein revelations and now the Diddy revelations are pretty good proof that you don't need free masonry in order for elite men to do dastardly evil shit. But it was a very different picture in 1949. And for Jerry Ford's purpose, you know, I'm sure that it was not lost on him that by joining Freemasonry as a nascent politician, he was entering into the company of the likes of George Washington, Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk. I won't list them all. Right. Roosevelt, McKinley. Yeah, especially, I think, yeah, both Roosevelt's would have been influential to his consideration.

Harry S. Truman, right, was a huge Mason. And another kind of Midwestern guy, too, right? Harry S. Truman being from Missouri and taking the Masonic thing real seriously, also rising to the 33rd degree, ascending to the presidency from the VP. P slot as well. And so Jerry Ford, you know, it had a lot of meaning to him. And he spoke to that shortly after his being bestowed the Grandmaster of DeMole honor, he was invited to address the George Washington Masonic Center in Alexandria, Virginia. You know, it's this big sort of obelisk on top of a ziggurat.

sort of pyramidal structure across the Potomac from Washington, D.C. I think maybe in post I'll read some of this into the record in Jerry accent. When I took my obligation as a master Mason, incidentally with my three younger brothers, I recalled the value my own father attached to that order, but I had no idea that I would ever be added to the company of the father of our country and 12 other members of the order who also served as presidents of the United States. Masonic principles internal, not external, and our order's vision of duty to country and acceptance of,

of God is supreme being and his guiding light have sustained me during my years of government service. Today especially, the guidelines by which I strive to become an upright man and masonry give me great personal strength. Masonic precepts can help America retain our inspiring aspirations while adapting to a new age. It is apparent to me that the supreme architect has set out the duties each of us has to perform, and I have trusted in his will with the knowledge that my trust is well founded. Let us today rededicate ourselves to new efforts as masons and as Americans. Let us demonstrate our confidence in our beloved nation, and a future that will flow from the glory of the past.

When I think of the things right about America, I think of this sarder, with its sense of duty to country, its esteem for brotherhood and traditional values, its spiritual high principles, and its humble acceptance of God as the supreme being. So you'll see that here too with his enlisting in the Masonic order, Jerry again is using his skills that he's learned all along the way of networking and working hard and really that hustle to get to elevate his position. Join us next week as we really dig deep in the next chapter. of Jerry's life is the start to his epic journey in the political realm.

For now, I'm Dick. And I'm Don. Saying farewell. And keep digging. The wars of gods and men. I condemn them who believes in ancient fallacies and the heresy of thieves. Spurn the unholy and your filthy religion. Paganism and the prism of three-dimensional prison.

I walk through the liquid of the seven rib. and delivers rhyme schemes that cut like verbal scissors or arrows. The sacred science of the pharaohs. Millennial prophecies of taros. Murder cattle. Discover near the crowd circles of the land. While we fight wars or political whores like Mary Magdalene, the holograph plants his incision.

Apparition of the Tibetan black magicians. My composition will turn men into slaves. Holographic aspects of particles and waves. Propel the spacecraft and the Pallades dwell on the abysal in the epistle plains like the hordes of Hades. The wheel of infinity, the chamber of the trinity, Levitate is a fifth level magician of divinity. Like a pentadron, I set your dome into the Florida of Ibilis,

like the wilderness of time, the verbal hologram, the verbal hologram. My perception of a radical injection and ejaculation, the emaculate conception, my perception of a medical injection in ejaculation, the emaculate conception, My perception of wheretical injection is ejaculation, The emaculate conception My perception of a whetectual injection is ejaclation The emaculate concedon

The higher arc modrons It carpets my soul in a beam like proton I am boldron With helmeted head and lotus flower incantations, wind walking teleportation I'm dwell in the body that can't be slain The fertile flame The atomic spark of pain

So I drain the energy from your chakra system watch me glisten like the sun the chosen one the cyborg relation my shit is crazy like freemasons meeting a camp crystal lake with jason complex wind city of screaming metal in the vatican i shatter him who walks on the plains of hell the sacrifice el yone l yon a dark fall for all who battle the mystic meditation space decapitation and material contamination by the spiritual deviation translation of ancient civilization None at a time.