Fourth Reich Archaeology - Propaganda Madness w/ Matt Farwell (@HuntClancy)

Episode Date: April 5, 2025

It's Fourth Reich Archaeology's first interview, and it's with the great Clancy-hunter himself, Matt Farwell. Matt and Don grab their shovels and break a little ground on Propaganda. We talk about super-spook Frank Wisner, into whose life and archives Matt has been plunging, and the way Wisner played the press like a "Mighty Wurlitzer" before losing his mind, first figuratively, then literally. We connect the dots from CIA to the media, the newspapers, and the major publishing houses, and - of course - tracing it all back to the Nazis and Perfidious Albion. Continuity strikes again.Don takes a detour to Paris 1919 (with a little John Cale, of course) to recount the tale of Three Young Fellas - John Foster Dulles, his brother Allen, and a publicist named Edward Bernays - who lucked out on front-row seats to the peace conference that set the stage for war (yay, markets!). That British voice you hear is Adam Curtis, in "Century of the Self" - speaking of limited hangouts...And Matt brings us forward in time, to that glorious period about which Dr. Strangelove is truly a documentary, giving us an aural tour of the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia, and its midcentury Führerbunker  built to house Congress in the event of a nuclear blast or other Continuity-of-Government type situation. Follow Matt Farwell @HuntClancySubscribe at https://thehuntfortomclancy.substack.com/Buy book at https://www.amazon.com/American-Cipher-Bergdahl-Tragedy-Afghanistan/dp/0735221049Enjoy!!

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 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 conspiracy, foreign or domestic, the Warren Commission, the science. I'll never apologize for the United States of America.

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. 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 one. For example, we're in the CIA. See, there's so long as a night, 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. You get a lot of killers. Why you think our country is so innocent? This is a day. I have a national blow. This is forthraish is coming.

This is Fourth Reich Archaeology. This is Fourth Reich. I'm Don. Dick is off this week. Today, we're taking another break from Jerry World and shaking things up a little bit to keep things fresh for you, our much-loved and very much-appreciated listening audience. As a reminder, please follow us on Twitter and Instagram at Fourth Reich Pod, and do hit us up via email at forthright-Rikepod at gmail.com. I'll also plug once again our Patreon. We've got a few exclusive bonus features in the works for you all, which we'll be posting

soon. But meanwhile, if you want to support our work, please we invite you once again to get right in on the ground floor. Today's episode will be our first ever interview with our first ever guest, and let me tell you, it is an auspicious guest at that. Our guest today is the great Matt Farwell. Matt is author of the 2019 book, American Cipher, Bo Bergdahl and the U.S. tragedy in Afghanistan. He's also written for numerous publications. and appeared on numerous comrade podcasts.

And he currently publishes his work on Substack at The Hunt for Tom Clancy. That's also his Twitter handle. Hopefully, our listeners will already be familiar with him on there at Hunt Clancy. If you're not already, you should definitely give Matt a follow, and more importantly, subscribe to his substack and support his work because he's out here on these streets doing the real thing. Hopefully, this won't be our last visit with Matt, but it is our first,

and we've picked a topic that is sure to stimulate. Today, we're going to be talking about propaganda and madness. We'll be talking about mass marketing slash mass psychosis. Before we dig into my conversation with Matt, I'd like to situate this discussion within the broader context of the Fourth Reich Archaeology Project. Now, from the very first episode of Fourth Reich Archaeology, we've focused a great deal on the cognitive dissonance between so-called American values, freedom, democracy, etc., and the actual conduct of the American Empire.

We surmised that in order to bridge that cognitive dissonance, we Americans walk around our daily lives in a sort of mass psychosis, accepting as fundamental assumptions, facts, and inferences that we know to be false. Of relevance to today's guest, for example, we assume that the war in Afghanistan was launched in order to find, and get the bad guys who did 9-11, and to make sure that Afghanistan would never again be ruled by an Islamist government that would give shelter to radical freedom-hating terrorists. I just know if Dick were here, this is the point in time when he'd say, that sounds like some bullshit. In various episodes in our Jerry World series, we've examined the process,

by which reality is transformed into myth and how those myths then go on to become our shared consensus reality. We've also talked about the power of spectacle and how various forces from corporations to the CIA have sought to harness the power of the spectacle. The tapestry of untested beliefs and assumptions that we carry around with us every day, is vast, and part of our mission here is to help you, the listener, unpack that heavy kit in order to better cope with a reality that contradicts and undermines those assumptions continuously. We've also touched on how the process of changing one's reality can be accelerated, and intensified on a smaller scale.

It's not just mass marketing, it's also micro-targeting. For example, with Candy Jones, we discussed, with a little help from our friend Dave Emery, how exploiting her underlying mental fragility and dissociative tendencies enabled her CIA-M-K-Ultra handlers to hypno-program her

into an effective courier of super secret information. So, on the one hand, we see the gradual formation and preservation of mass psychosis among American subjects through ordinary processes of propaganda. While, on the other hand, we see the acute formation or instrumentalization of psychosis by the quasi-medical, quasi-alchemical work of mind control professionals. So how does Matt's work tie in to this overall context? Well, Matt's work has likewise focused on the process of propagandistic world building, and he's currently digging deep on Frank Wisner.

Wisner was another founding father of the CIA, along with Dick Bissell, Alan Dulles, and others that we've talked about on the pod. And Wisner was, like Dickie Bissell, famous for playing quarterback to Coupes de Taa, as well as running other dirty tricks all over the world. Wisner also claims fame for playing the press like a mighty Whirlitzer under the propaganda umbrella of Operation Mockingbird. Both Dick and I have been fans and followers of Matt's work for a long time. Matt's approach to deciphering the American century through the life and works of Tom Clancy,

another insurance man, by the way, is a real forerner of how Dick and I developed an obsessive ability to find clues to understanding the world through the story of Gerald Ford. He's got a fascinating perspective, a razor-sharp wit, and is just a hell of a nice guy. One final note before we roll the tape. This being our first interview and our first go with remote recording, the audio quality on the interview is a little subpar. That's on me, and I apologize. But I'm nevertheless confident that the content will be engaging enough, that you won't even notice after a spell.

We may not have fancy recording equipment here on Fourth Reich Archaeology, and we certainly don't have a professional producer. Hell, I'm just a country lawyer. But we do have a terrific listening audience, and I just know you'll cut us some slack and trust that we'll only keep getting better. So without any further ado, let's get into it. In the afternoon

Heidi a spoon She will be soon With your fork Wades a night Speeps a joke She stops your life She stops your life In the afternoon

Having a spoon She will be soon With your fork She slows you alive She slows you alive So today, Matt and I are going to talk about to talk about propaganda really and approach it from a few different angles, all under the old Fourth Reich archaeology umbrella.

before we get into that, Matt, maybe you could just say a little bit about yourself, introduce yourself. I'm sure that a lot of our listeners will have heard you on Program to Chill or on Truenon, but maybe you could just give the short version of your intro and then kind of tell us how you got into covering the propaganda beat having come out of Army Infantry into a professional. as a writer. Sure. So my name's Matt Farwell. I'm a, I'm a writer. I have done a lot of national security journalism over the last 10 years. Before that, I was in the U.S. Army as an infantryman. I spent 16 months in Afghanistan from 2006 to 2007 with the 10th Mountain Division, and then got back, got out of the Army in 2010, and I've been writing and kind of recovering from the war ever since. um so part of how i got into all this was after serving on the line and being like kind of a

you know just regular grunt infantry guy i got picked to go be the driver for like a high-ranking guy at the army's um training and doctrine command headquarters so that the both intellectual and the like training center of the army so they run fort leavenors um which has like the man to general staff college and the school of advanced military studies and kind of all the all the armies like hoity-toity you know uh big brain shit and also like all the basic training stuff and you know i actually like it sounds bad to say this but i kind of like the war you know i afghanistan was i grew up i'm a military brat and so i grew up partially in turkey when i was very little and we go out to rural areas.

And so, I don't know, the part of Afghanistan I was in looked a lot like where I'm born in Utah, my family's from Idaho, and I went to this weird Illimani boarding school in New Mexico that we'll get into later's that I was on full scholarship for, by the way. but um the so the landscape really looked similar you know and all that was fine uh i got back though and went to work around a bunch of generals and very quickly was like nobody knows what the hell they're doing um and this was this was 2006 2007 so that's a time frame where if so uh and i worked for the uh training and doctrine command headquarters from 2007 to 2000 So this is a time frame where you've got to project yourself back a little bit, but if I had any critique of the Army or foreign policy or what we were doing overseas, like that was incredibly suspect to almost every American that I would tell because that wasn't a picture that they were getting on their screens, right? At that time, it was more television screens and magazines. But, you know, so it's kind of a discreet.

locating experience when you get back from something that you know it was fucked up even though you kind of had fun doing it and then people ask you how it was and you tell them honestly and they look at you like you're a liar and so based on that and based on you know some of the work I was doing which involved the euphemism strategic communications um I got really interested in how people form their opinions and their attitudes on things that they can't see that they have no direct relationship with.

I grew up in a military family. I know tons of military people. Most Americans do not, right? Like, it's a separate society. Like, they know as many military people as they might know, like, Catholic priests if they're not Catholic, right? It's that sort of thing.

Actually, probably no more Catholic Greece, honestly. I grew up in weird, like I said, I was moving all over the place, and I have an older brother who is, he has read more than anyone I know. And I'm in a graduate English program, and, like, my brother knocks everyone out of the water, including most of the professors. And so he had me reading, like, Jacques-Loo. I don't know if I'm saying that right, but the guy that wrote, technological society and propaganda.

I was reading that shit in like eighth grade, right? So I already had a little bit of kind of a foundation for, you know, how this stuff kind of comes about. But then I started working in, you know, doing national security journalism. And I started out by working with a guy named Michael Hastings, which if you're a little bit older, if you were around 10 or 15 years ago, you would remember as the Rolling Stone reporter who got General Stanley McChrystal fired

and he was one of their marquee riders for a little while until he was killed the car crash in L.A. And we were working together. And a very unusual car crash. I just encourage listeners to look into the death of Michael Hastings as a very tragic, obviously, and also a very, I think, suspicious. Well, as someone close to the situation, too, don't, if you do, like, wind up going down a rabbit hole like that, there's a lot of bullshit out there.

And please remember that one of the early people spreading bullshit about Michael Hastings' death was a man named Joe Biggs, who later got big in the Proud Boys movement and is now in federal prison after, like, doing the storming the Capitol thing. So from day one after his death, bullshit starting to fly. And it's not really like, you know, my place to put anyone in their place on any of this stuff. But, you know, don't believe everything you read on it. And I think that's a very good framing to start the conversation we're about to have because, you know, part of what complicates research into any of these issues, including. propaganda itself is just the amount of bullshit that's pumped into the system. Deliberately, too. Absolutely.

You know, and so, but based on, you know, working on that, and then I worked on this Bo Bergdahl book, and that consumed, I mean, I, Michael Hastings and I did a story on Bow for Rolling Stone in 2012 that got both of us. investigated by the fdi i believe um still in kind of an open-ended way uh yeah so that it's always fun um but you know that was something we found out by a foyer after michael's death um but doing the bird doll book too i started to see uh and the reason i got kind of attached to the bird doll story was while i was still on active duty bird doll walks off his base i know where his base is because I was there two years prior.

I know it's a place you don't walk off of. At the same time, like, that happens on June 30th, 2009. On July 4th, 2009, I am in Moolga, Alabama, burying my best friend from the war, who has died of a heroin overdose. And so I think I kind of, you know, sublimated the grief over my friend Michael Critier's death, into trying to like figure out this bird doll thing and you know i just i sort of inserted myself

into the story um and you know i don't think i don't wind up or i don't regret it in this point because i think i wound up with an american hostage being brought home uh who was going to be ignored otherwise um grove you know i'm happy that i did what i did and it's good that bow birddall got back home. But it also was one of those experiences where you really see inside the machine. And I mean, I'm talking both like in my research for, you know, writing the book. And then in dealing with the publishers themselves. And my book came out with a publisher called Penguin Press. They're a marquee press. You know, it was like one of those things where if I tell writers or, you know, anybody if they're like, oh, who are you right for, you know, who's written for?

I had a book by Penguin Press. Like, people were like, oh, shit, right? Yeah, man. Here's the thing, though. Household name. The household name. Good name, you know. And, uh, they published Hamilton, right? That was, uh, that was part of the reason they're flush with cash. Um, but the, uh, the other thing is they're owned by a company called Bertelsman, which is a German conglomerate. that owns 90% of American publishing, except for... Yeah, I was just about to say. That sounds German, doesn't it?

And interestingly enough, they've been continuously publishing since I believe the 1800s, and during the 1930s and 40s, well, let's just say they weren't anti-Nazi. Right? And then, but then post-war, they managed to convince the... allied occupation authority who my guy Frank Wisner would have been in charge of but in fact they're good boys

and they can be trusted and so they get they're able to start being a publishing company under allied occupation and then boy do they do well and it's a family

owned company privately held no kind of disclosures no kind of like you know um so in dealing yeah these are the types of questions too that on you know my co-host dick and i as lawyers were always very keen to point out the subtle nuances that people don't necessarily think about like what a difference it makes if a company is privately held versus being publicly owned by shareholders right these these types of

of things may appear on the surface to not carry that much weight. But I think as you're discussing, right, that private ownership, that closely held status permits such a great deal of concealment of a corporation's activities that people don't don't really pay it the attention that it's due. So I'm glad that you mentioned that. And they're intent, right? Like, you don't, with a publicly held company. company, whatever else, like, they have to publish it for their shareholders to see what

they're thinking of doing in the next, like, three or four years, what kind of their guiding corporate philosophy is. And obviously, it can be, like, a total lie. Like, Google's guiding philosophy is not dopey evil, right? Yeah, but if it's too much of a lie, then they have to pay a bunch of lawyers a little cash to settle lawsuits with their shareholders or whatever. Right. So there's some accountability and some restraint built in there.

Whereas, you know, getting this book published was a big pain in my ass. It sucked. You know, it's part of the reason I, you know, tried to pitch another book with The Hunt for Tom Clancy. That was unsuccessful because I hadn't properly considered the fact that proposing to major publishers that one of the most successful writers of the last like century was in effect the CIA and Pentagon

plant. You know, it doesn't really reflect well on anybody. It's like going into like, who's that weirdo out of, Chris Angel. It's like going into a Chris Angel show at the Luxor Pyramid, you know, and being like, hey guys, this is how he does all his shit, right? Like, no one actually wants

to know that at a certain point. So I got had like 12 or 13 people saying, you know, editors saying, hey, this is wonderful, this is really cool, good concept, we think it would sell. You know, we're excited to read it. It's not for us, but like, we're excited to read

it when one of our colleagues publishes it, as we're sure they will. And it just becomes a circular firing squad like that. And you can say? Yes, there you have it. So then I brought it over to SubSAC, and I've been, like, actually pleasantly surprised

with one how much I like kind of writing there without, and full disclosure to anyone who subscribes to my subsect, you're going to see basically my first drafts of things and first drafts of ideas and first drafts of essays. There will be typos. There will be like misspellings in partial places. But not to shoot my own horn either, but my first drafts are better than most people cite seventh drafts. So it's worth your time. I think the most important thing is you're not making shit up on there. It's all very well woven into your perspective from where you're looking at things and you know, you reference

conversations that you've had with people. You're a real shoe leather writer in that respect of going out there and doing things. And I think a way that's become, if not obsolete, at least marginalized in the Internet generation where people will just read a bunch of Wikipedia articles and you're out there, you know, having Roger Stone put his hands around your neck to tie a bowtie. It's, you know, I put myself on the line for you, dear reader.

But it's true, actually. Like, I live in Charlottesville, Virginia right now, and I live not that far from where Heather Heyer was killed during the neo-Nazi march and rally here. And what I found interesting coming back to Charlottesville after that and walking around the area, because that's a big thing for me is any place or person I write about, I want to go to where they were and walk around and feel it. see what it's like, see what I can see, and see what the incongruities are. And I can tell that just about every journalist that wrote about that was not there and was writing about it based on the YouTube video they had seen or, like, something they had seen on social media, because if I had been there, and I'm not saying that, like, I'm, you know, better, like, anything than any of the people that were there, they were doing their

jobs but right in the front of where Messiah was killed was a jewelry store and the name of the and it's no longer there closed but it had been there since the 80s and the name of the jewelry store was race jewelers me as a writer I would have put that detailing right the person's last name was race that's how it winds up being there but you know it's something that kind of says something about the whole, right? And the fact that no one wrote that up, you know, and kind of just parrots and adds to one or two people that kind of do the thing first, I don't think has served us very well because we wind up building kind of these castles on a cloud that don't actually have any foundation

in reality right and and it just how much like you can memorize of the you know whatever like whatever the common consensus is if you can pair it that and like maybe twist it just a little bit then you can be very successful in this industry um but it doesn't actually produce anything that i think is useful to people yep and that's it exactly why you are the perfect guest to dig in to the subject matter that we're going to talk about today. With that said, Matt, you mentioned how you focused for a book-length exegesis on the world built by Tom Clancy. I'd recommend that listeners check out your other interviews you've done on that, but most importantly, to subscribe to your substack and read that for themselves. and they'll also find some recent essays on your more recent turn,

the project that, I don't know if it brought you to Charlottesville in the first place, but it certainly is enriched by your presence in Charlottesville. And that is a look into the life and times of Frank Wisner. when no one cries. Crying at all is not allowed. Not in my castle on a cloud. Yeah. So, first of all, why don't you just tell us,

and I actually don't know this, of what was it that drew you to Wisner in the first place? And then we can talk a little bit about, you know, Wisner himself. his outlook, and the broad umbrella Operation Mockingbird under which a lot of the CIA and other intelligence agencies' interventions into popular consciousness have been made over the last, now coming up on 75, 80 years. been almost a generation so yeah sorry for coughing there so Frank Wisner was a

early he was in the OSS the Office of Strategic Services during World War II and then after that he was he kind of rapidly rose through the ranks and after that he was the first director of what was called the Office of Policy Coordination, which was a covert, for lack of a better word, dirty tricks

division. And they eventually merged in with CIA in the early 50s and became one of the two action arms of the Directorate of Operations. So they did mostly political propaganda, covert training of like indigenous armies and and to be clear by indigenous armies there you mean pro-Nazi stay behind in Europe pro-Nazi stay behind absolutely but it's all over you know and so it's basically whoever will work with us and whoever they can be sure won't work for the communists. And because they're amoral, and the war with the Nazis is over, the former Nazis are great people for them to recruit.

And so that's, that is like out of, you know, out of Eastern Europe, out of even like Germany, that's, that's totally the case. But you got to remember this guy's portfolio was in worldwide. And so we're also talking. about, say, the Chinese nationalists who didn't go with Chiang Kai Shek to Formosa, which then became Taiwan. He, you know, we're talking, what the hell was his name? We're the general that went into Burma and started up, uh, the, it took- Thai Lee?

Yes. Yes, thank you. I can't believe I forgot that. Because, uh, Wisner is early on, um, he's the guy that started. it's up Air America. Mm-hmm. Using the lawyer for that case is a former NKVD spy named Duncan Lee, who they knew was was spying for the Russians.

He was Donovan's assistant at the OSS, and yet he never got tried, never got convicted, and in fact wound up helping the CIA, or the OPC, which became part of the CIA, set up a covert airline in Southeast Asia called Civil Air Transport at the time so you know it gets it gets weird and then Wisner has a string of you know from his perspective

successes with what he's doing he's dropping bangers he's dropping bangers he's overthrowing they get really really really high on how they overthrew the government of Guatemala and it only cost one life

right they see this It's kind of, like, it's an interesting way to view the world where skullduggery, deception, blackmail, coercion, all becomes a positive thing because you're preventing, again, I'm using their logic, but you're preventing a wider war, which is the ultimate, like, sin, right? So all these minor sins are fine, as long as they're in. service of preventing the major sin. And that lets you, that lets somebody which, you know, you got to remember too, a lot of these early CIA guys,

they have kind of weird bifurcated personalities. So they're attending mass regularly or they're going to the Episcopal services regularly and like taking it seriously. But then they're also like into the office and being like,

so we need to like get Sukarno do we don't even parno people that might be able like like Getsu Karno so it you know so this lets like this logic

which continues on to this day because you know there's a big portion of the intelligence community that are very religious whether it's Mormon whether it's Catholic right whether it's Southern Baptist or Jewish or Muslim

but like very religious and part of the reason very religious people are good for intelligence agencies is they're kind of used to saying like

I don't need to ask why I just need to like accept and do there's a higher authority higher authority so Wizner knocks over Guatemala then he gives Kermit Roosevelt some money and Kermit Roosevelt's able to knock over Iran. So they've had like a string of successors.

Even in Syria, I think in 1949 they overthrew through a very controlled generals coup type of an operation in Syria that often goes on some. Greece, same story, Italy, similar story, although like that involves, you know, more control of different areas and we can get him that later but suitcases of cash suitcase of cash and trade unionists baby um

let's get it going uh the uh and uh when you're gonna do something about the marxist professors um that was part of a whole big memo i read on the italian thing anyways the um then 56 comes and 56 is super important for two reasons one there's the hungarian revolution and in which like anti-Stalinist communists sees control of Hungary for a brief period of time and then

Khrushchev sends in the tanks and they lose right? And it's at the point where it's at this point that Wisner is on a tour of Europe and he has he's basically like started this right? He's

through radio free Europe, he's encouraged rebellion. He's sent in many of the people we were talking talking about before so fascist Hungarian guys that fled were trained and then were sent back in to like kind of start shit up in their hometowns right yeah all of these guys were working under the auspices of the Galen organization right which was basically the intact eastern intelligence unit of the Nazis right yeah it would have been it would have been the can Aris organization had Canaris not been hanged by Hitler in 45.

Yeah, well, you know, you fuck around, you find out. I suppose. The, um, which actually has gotten, uh, interesting with like some of my other research, because I'm doing, you know, some literary theory stuff. And, uh, so one of the big literary theorists you read is a man named at Eric Auerbach. And he was living in Istanbul during the war. and so it was Wisner for a brief period of time

so I got curious and I was like well let me like so I run Hourbach's name through CIA's Crest database boom I get a hit back and apparently the OSS had distributed that Hourbach was working for the Abbeware

for Admiral Canaris while he was in Istanbul which is interesting because then he comes to the United States to Penn State in 1947 goes from Penn State to Princeton's Institute of Advanced Studies and then onto Yale, which if you're properly paranoid, you recognize that is an interesting pattern that probably means Auerbach was bought up with the rest of the Gaelan organization, right? And I got to like look more and blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, concretize this stuff more. but that's an interesting point.

The second thing is getting back to Hungary, the other block of people that were very active in this Hungarian Revolution were college students, university students. And, weirdly enough, one of the literary theorists, one of the Marxist literary theorists

you'll read if you're doing American like English literature stuff is a man named Lukat. Well, Lukat. was a cabinet official in the N-A-G-Y government, N-A-G-Y, I don't know how to pronounce it, I'm sorry. Yeah. But, you know, that's interesting to me because Lukach doesn't really experience a resurgence in the American and British academies until after 1968, when there was a wave of student, like, protests throughout Europe and the Americas. And he was translated by a guy who was in the OSS during World War II, and the first book was issued by MIT University Press.

So I would submit that probably Lukach is also being used as a tool of the intelligence agencies. Got both sides working for him. Why is they're not Stalinists, right? That's, and I think that's what people forget about the way, or just don't know about the way that CIA operates is they will use anyone against the people that they're trying to get, right? Oh, yeah. So it doesn't, it doesn't matter as long as they can be what they call assets, right? they will use those assets and so

you know which is why some of the more implausible sound and and also it's their spies and so they want to keep all this stuff secret so one of the best ways to keep something secret is to make it so obvious that no one would believe

it which is why you might have say a popular musician or a popular author like Com Clancy or someone who is working direct like taking direction from an agency handler and doing things that are in the CIA's opinion useful to national security but also you're like that doesn't make any sense like why would that be the case I don't understand and that's part of the point It's baked into the deception plan to have you doubt yourself on it.

Yes. And that gives a certain credence to the people that come out of the woodwork whenever some aspersions are cast on the official motivations or on some of these deep political events that we see to those people who come out and say, well, come on, who benefits from this? you know, how does the deep state benefit from, say, taking a shot at Donald Trump? You know, I mean, whatever the case may be. Whatever, whatever scenario you want to envision, but you're dealing with, like, essentially, when people ask kind of what I do or, like, what I'm doing, I study how power it looks when it comes right down to it. Um, and how it actually works, not how it says it works, right? Um, yeah. Which are two different things, right?

And you, and that, yes. You learn this pretty quickly in the military, too. There's like, there's the regulations and there's the book and there's the, like, the formal channels through which things get done. And then there are actually, like, the ways things get done and the way you do things. and oftentimes they're you know not diametrically opposed but they're different and sometimes it's even and correct me if you disagree but i think it's sometimes it's even you'll have multiple projects moving forward towards the same goal that are completely independent of one another well and competitive with each other because you got to remember that this was actually baked into wizers organizational strategy he was a white shoe lawyer, right? Like his first job out of law school was with Carter Ledyard,

who's most famous alum is a man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt who would go on to be a four-term president of the United States. But like, big white shoe law firm. And at law firms, lawyers are assigned clients, and they're assigned cases, and they're judged on how many hours they work. And I mean, you can correct me if I'm wrong on this, but they're judged on like how many hours they work, how effective their caseload is, how much money they bring in, you know, and they're kind of incompetent. The associates are in competition with one another

to get to partner because you can't move up the big pyramid. Like everyone can't go from the base of the pyramid up to the capstone. Right. And not all paths look the same. Right. Some associates will get on that partnership track solely by dint of their family background and their connections right and through those connections they're able to either get recommendations or get some clients through word of mouth or whatever the case may be whilst others who maybe come from a humbler background have to get on the grind set crank the hours you know produce quality analysis or writing or whatever, and it's the same end goal, but you develop a different set of skills pursuing that goal. And that's kind of another microcosm of how propaganda works from the perspective of

the U.S. Empire, right? Right. I think that's an important point. And so you can, but by fostering this sense of competition, you can both kind of pick who you want to advance further and work on other operations, and you double, triple, quadruple your chances, right? Like, you assign four guys to the cast of killing Fidel Castro. Maybe one of them gets lucky, right? That actually didn't happen, we think. Although they might have given them cancer. We don't know. The slowest successful assassination attempt in history. Chavez was worrying about that.

Yeah, but his was like the Jack Ruby cancer, that fast acting shit. He got, he got, he got, he got, but the, so, so in 56, Wizard is handling this, like, a Hungarian thing, and he's in Europe and he's screaming, like, literally screaming, he doesn't sleep for a week, you know, he's pounding his fists on a table, he's setting up, like, a cable room, just jamming out cables, driving his assistant nuts, you know, the whole thing, trying, being like borderline insubordinate with Alan Dulles and the rest of the people of the National Security Council, because he really wants U.S. intervention. Meanwhile, like, Eisenhower is looking at this, being like,

I didn't know you guys were doing this, and I'm not going to start a wider war in Europe because of it. You know, much, it's actually kind of a preview to what's going to happen during the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis with a different president. But this is the first indication that Frank Wisner's abilities might also be part and parcel with his manic depression, because, again, he doesn't sleep for, Like, doesn't sleep, does it eat for a week? He's writing cables. And one of them are more, like, heartbreaking things. Because the other thing I do as a writer is I try and like, like, Frank Wizard did many monstrous things, right?

But to me, he's also a human being that did many monstrous things. And I want to understand that human being. So I have to approach it from kind of a position of sympathy and empathy, right? And... This is the Fourth Reich Archaeology way. And so he finally gets brought to Tracy Barnes's house in Weisbaden. And Tracy Barnes is the CIA station chief for Germany. And, you know, he looks haggard, he looks like shit.

And the assistant asked Barnes, he's like, hey, sir, do you have any model trains in that house? And Barnes is like, what? And he's like, do you have any model trains? and he's like, yeah, the kid has one up in his room, you know? And so the assistant is like, great, I'm going to send the boss up there to play with like model trains and you relax. And so I just like, there's, you know,

I'm a kid that remembers the Simpsons and there's one where, like, Reverend Lovejoy is in his basement playing with his model trains and kind of like doing the saddest man of all time thing. And I just, you know, I just, This picture, Wisner up there, like, with his little train conductor hat on, watching the model trains go around until he finally, like, passes out. Passengers will look to the right, you will see a sad man. That is all. And he hangs on for about another two years until, oh, and concurrently with this, I'm sorry, at the same time that the Hungarian Revolution is happening, the Suez Crisis is happening, in which the British are like, basically,

week, fuck it, we're going to take this part of Egypt again, you know, like we're going to be an empire again. And it doesn't really, does really work out for him, right? Wisner was trained by the British, right? All the OSS guys were, like, initially trained by the Brits. Wisner trained up at a camp called Camp X in Canada. He was very close with his British colleagues. He's an Anglophile. He was very close with Kim Filby, although he's also one of the first to him, Bill Harvey,

are two of the first to, like, develop suspicions of Kim Filby. Philby, which was hard for that group to do because of who Kim Filby's father was, which was Kim Filby's father was kind of the parallel Lawrence of Arabia, except he was in with King Fod, right? But they were celebrated similarly, so it's, it's hard to, it would like be believing that, I don't know, I don't know that we've had any real heroes over the last, like, 25 years, but like that one of their sons was bad, right? You know, who could believe that, like, President Biden or President Trump's sons were bagged, right? No one.

That's crazy. But 60 years from now, maybe that will be the common conventional wisdom. Right. There was these unfair smears on presidential sons. Just angry. So anyways, Wizard doesn't get, the bricks keep this shit secret from the Americans, right? because they're still really playing power politics with us, and we're kind of like the dumb, big kid on the playground

that just, like, thinks anyone that is friendly to us is our friend. And Britain is not, right? Like, I want this to be very clear. Like, the English are not our friends. They're bad people. We kick him out once in 1776. We should do it again. But get rid of that Anglo influence.

It's terrible. Anyways, the... Perfidious Albion. Perfidious Albion, you know, the king is not my king. He's illegitimate. I went through a school that was set up by him, though. So, um...

But, uh... Yeah, him and fucking army... Built by his sausage hands. And armand hammer. Oh, man, what a collab. You know, that was a great place. The, uh, based on a philosophy by Lord Luce Mountbatten. Anyways, the, uh, Wizzner is, like, really fucking hurt.

and betrayed by the fact that the Brits would initiate this operation without telling him, right? So he's got, like, kind of his double whammy. Then in 58, like, he's finally committed to a mental hospital. His wife and some CIA guys get together, and they're like, Frank is out of control. And he winds up in the Shepard Pratt Institute in Baltimore for six months, getting electorate shock and exploring woodworking. Perfect. Then he gets out.

He's the station chief in London until he calls a British minister at 2 a.m. to, like, yell at him about something. Then he gets pulled back home. He becomes a consultant to CIA doing, you know, kind of, actually still doing some interesting work for him. And then in 1965, he, like Ernest Hemingway before him and Phil Graham before him, kills himself with a shotgun in his farmhouse in Maryland. And that's the Frank Wisner story.

One of his sons goes on to be like a big wig in the State Department. He's the guy that flies over to Egypt in 2012 to tell President Morsi that it's time to step down, which like, I don't know that if the president was like, hey, Matt, I need you to go to Cairo and tell the leader of Egypt that like it's time for him to go. I might be intimidated by that, right? Because, like, Egypt's been around for a long time. You know, they've got pyramids. That's a...

So does the Muslim Brotherhood, honestly. Well, it's true. That's true. They don't have as good of pyramids, though. No, no. But they, again, I think that there's some evidence in the historical record, probably in dispute, not a consensus view, but there were Western. intelligence involvement

in various ways in the formation of the Muslim Brotherhood back in the 20th century we have in America too especially in post 9-11 America this weird thing like oh the Middle East is new to America

oh we don't know anything about it that's fucking bullshit though like our first treaty was with Morocco we've had diplomats in smearment since Thomas Jefferson, or since John Adams Day, actually. In Smyrna is now Izmir. It's Port City in Turkey.

I live there as a kid. The Burberry pirates? The Barbary pirates, you know, the Marine Corps saw the hymn from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli. The reason that Thomas Jefferson sent Marines to dispose of the Barbary pirates, who were kind of like the Ottoman Empire's black ones, is because American ships were going, and I get into this in the Hunt for Tom Clancy

in the Without Remorse essay, if you want to read more. But, or dispatch, the American ships from Baltimore were going to Smyrnaf, picking up loads of opium, and then going around the Horn of Africa, you know, a long way, but going around the Horn of Africa and into China. because Britain was blockaded in the opium wars, but Americans were not. And you got to remember, too, post-revolution in America, all of the land that was granted to, like, granted to the lords and dukes and whatever else by the king, that's all null and void. And most of the land goes to people who were revolutionary officers in George Washington's army.

Right? So there's been an massive land redistribution, but not all of the Tory families flee to Canada, right? Like they should have, but they didn't. Some of them stayed in Boston, some of them stay in Baltimore, some of them stay in Charleston, you know, like wherever. If you're a political leader at this time and you're trying to like build a new country, you have to give these people something or they're going to start an insurgency, right? Like that's how it works. These are people with pride. But no money. Who won't remember once having money. So you've got to give them the ability to make money or they're going to make trouble for you. So a bunch of like prominent Boston Brahman families, you know, prominent families in America got their start covertly running opium. Or got their restart, I should say. Yeah. And to bring this back to the propaganda subject at hand, all of these themes and these.

these historical events that you're talking about here are all kind of swept under the rug, right? The idea that the early 19th century American post-revolutionary government was involved in drug wars and smuggling opium and, you know, all of this proxy war activity on the other side of the world is way off the radar screen, I think, of most even critical students and observers of the American

M. And it's an incredible testament to the power of the propaganda apparatus, the way in which what's too hard to explain, let's just forget about it. And what can be spun, well, let's take those facts and let's weave them together into a coherent narrative. And I'll pass it back to you, but I wanted to talk, you know, to kind of bring it looping back around towards Frank Wisner and Operation Mockingbird from the World War I angle a little bit.

So I'm a real Versailles head. I think most people drastically, drastically, underestimate the vast importance of the experience of the Versailles Treaty on the both U.S. position as it entered World War II and the post-war formation of the American national identity. So at the Versailles Treaty, I never miss an opportunity. to point out that among the attendees were three young fellas, young professionals, each one of them, two years apart from the other. The eldest was a guy called John Foster Dulles.

The middle was a guy called Edward Bernays. Then, to my surprise, they asked me to go over with Woodrow Wilson to the priest conference. And at the age of 1926, I was in parish for the entire time of the peace conference that was held in a suburb of Paris. And we worked to make the world safe for democracy. That was a big slogan. And the junior of the group was a young Alan Dulles, who probably had the, the most active sexual experience on his trip to the Versailles conference, but all three of them had a front row seat, and in Bernay's case, really a massively influential front row seat to the

way in which the U.S. propaganda machine was able to spin essentially an extraordinary waste of human life and resources that was World War I, at least from the perspective of human beings that do not own massive amounts of stock in military contractors. As a part of the war effort, the U.S. government set up a committee of on public information. And Bernays was employed to promote America's war aims in the press. And to spin that just utter despair. I mean, think about the paintings and poetry of World War I.

And to spin that nadir of the human soul into a crusade for democracy. The president, Woodrow Wilson, had announced that the United States would fight not to restore the old empires, but to bring democracy to all of Europe. Bernays proved extremely skillful in promoting this idea, both at home and abroad. And that, I think, had such a huge impact on what came later, you know, whether it's the sort of Wilsonian liberal vision for the world stage and the liberal world order embodied by the 14 points, the League of Nations, all that bullshit.

Wilson's reception in Paris astounded Bernays and the other American propagandists. Their propaganda had portrayed Wilson as a liberator of the people, a man who would create a new world in which the individual would be free. They had made him a hero of the masses. And as he watched the crowd surge around Wilson, Bernays began to wonder whether it would be possible to do the same type of mass persuasion, but in peacetime.

Or the subtle way in which colonialism and the white supremacist imperialist world order was preserved at Versailles. Remember, Wilson's Secretary of State, the uncle of the Dulles brothers who invited them, on that junket to Versailles was a guy called Robert Lansing. And Robert Lansing, among other things, was a tremendous racist who oversaw the U.S. invasion and occupation of Haiti during the Wilson administration, who said that black people were unfit for self-government, a guy who, uh, really, we sadly still feel his legacy today in the grotesque racism that we're seeing around Haitian immigrants. And that petri dish, the petri dish of Versailles, grew the American propaganda apparatus at the

industrial scale that later on a Frank Wisner was able to tap into in such an effective way. I just wanted to kind of agree with what you said and say that it's also in how we remember things and how many times we ask the question kind of why. From here on it's got to be a simple case of them or me. If they're alive then I am dead, pray God and eat your daily bread. Take your time. How did that work? And because even with something that is sort of closer to us, right, say the post-world

virtue, the Wisner period, we've been, I'm 40 years old. And so I, in the 90s, I grew up looking at those greatest generation books that were at Barnes & Noble and watching movies like saving Private Ryan and, you know, things like that It really celebrated this mythos of, you know, these hard men who went off to Europe and did a hard thing, came back, shut the fuck up about it, were just chill, worked really hard and created a great America. What we don't hear is the rates of alcoholism, the rates of spousal abuse, the rates of child abuse, or, hey, like, how was it? Who founded the Hells Angels? Where did those? Oh, those were all disaffected, like, former paratroopers.

They came back to America and were like, this is bullshit. We're just going to go be fucking motorcycle pirates. It's a lot more fun. Right? Like, and so once you start, like, kind of chipping away at, you know, that the narrative that you've absorbed through, you know, you're reading your education, the movies you take in, whatever else, how much of that narrative is true, but omitting certain things. I find that's the most effective propaganda

and the most effective method of propaganda is telling 98% of the truth. You're just fucking leaving out that two percent. Oh, yeah. The modified limited hangout. Yeah. Yeah. A favorite. And so this gets us back to Frank Wizard and the mockingbird operation, which is fascinating.

And, you know, walking around Georgetown, you can start to see. see how this, like, again, this is why any budding writers out there, investigators, whatever, walk around places and just spend time in places. Because in Georgetown, you can start to see the formation of the modern day, I don't know, what do we call like the propaganda machine now? It's almost impossible to name, right? I remember in the, global war on terror days, we'd talk about the military, industrial infotainment complex. But even that kind of left out the entire internet part of the equation, which now, I don't know what a good name is, but I think I'll go with, I'll go with Chief Bromden from

one floor of the kooker's desk and you just call it the combine. The combine, perfect. So the way the combine starts out, is with dinner parties in Georgetown, where Joe Alsop, who was a popular columnist, like, kind of like a Tim Russert type, but only in print, right? Because remember, this is, the television is just barely starting. And a childhood friend slash playground rival of Dickie Bissell from their days at Groton Academy. And we talked about Dickie Bissell as one of Gerald Ford's mentors later on at Yale.

But to give the listener his essence. And like one of the most efficient operators of the U.S. Youngman has ever seen. He's like the Dick Cheney of his day. Wouldn't you agree? Dick Cheney and Woodward and Bernstein and Seymour Hirsch all rolled into one. And so, and then the other, the third person that would, oh, and Joe's, Joe Alsop's brother was Stuart Alsup, who served in the OSS during World War II and who Wisner asked to come on and be the deputy director of the Office of Policy Coordination, and Stu was like, nah, I'm going to go work with Joe on this column, right? So, and then the third person is Donald Graham, who is publisher of the Washington Post, and then later acquires the News Magazine Newsweek.

Phil Graham, though, right? Or Phil Graham, I'm sorry, shit. Don Graham's the kid, right? Catherine's kid. Sorry, Phil Graham. And so the Grams, the Wisner's, and also would all host these dinner parties. And on Sunday night, they were alcohol-fueled affairs where policy questions would be debated and kind of you got the sense that people were going in the office on Monday and doing the work for that week,

according to what the consensus at the dinner parties had been. And they were raucous affairs. I think Dick this one got, like, thrown out of, um, or no, it's Chip Boland. Chip Boland got, like, thrown out of Joe Alsop's house once, you know, like, they would, they would get like, you know, these were heated affairs, but it was kind of like family dinners where everyone comes back every Sunday. They might argue, but they come back. And it's through this network of people that, um, a young senator named,

Kennedy is first brought to national prominence. Because Kennedy's invited to some of the dinner parties. And indeed, after Kennedy's inauguration, he leaves Jackie at the White House, and he goes and shows up at Joe Alsop's house until I thank everybody. That's how important this shit was, right? It sounds dumb, but it's really fucking important. And so... Yeah.

And the cast of characters, I mean, the rotating cast of characters, is not limited to these couples, right? It's everybody. Like, Nixon's there, you know, there's, like, other writers that come through, you know, people, prominence, foreigners, foreign diplomats. Angleton's around there. Well, Angleton actually keeps to the other side of the river. and Engleton is one run down in the, like, social pecking order and the social hierarchy. So he's on the other side of the river hanging out mostly with, like, poets and diplomats and things like that. But he's not, he's in all the important meetings at CIA, but he's not in these important meetings, except for the fact that Engleton wire caps all.

these for Alan Dolbys to make sure people aren't blabbing secrets and at one of these I think it was um after one of these parties too like they walked downstairs and find like uh I think it was Donald Burgess and uh Kim Philby in bed together you know I mean it's a it's a weird scene in Georgetown oh yeah oh yeah lots of weird scenes. And to bring it back to Mockingbird, right, I think that the point that you're emphasizing is that there's this informal sort of extra-governmental aspect of it, which takes place outside of the paper trail and which is arranged among people who have a trust among themselves, who know secrets of one another and who use those secrets to cement their relationships and also to

control each other. And so what we see in the paper trail is only an incomplete picture, but is one that also, you know, both behind the scenes, but also on paper where we see the intersections between Operation Mockingbird and it's sort of media-focused operational aspect on the one hand and it's sort of social science public opinion research aspect on the other hand which i'm not sure was even under officially the umbrella of mockingbird which involve social science research and the at trying to dig into how to influence people's opinions, beliefs, and behavior on both the micro scale and the macro scale.

And that, I think, ties together or braids together with the media control aspect of Operation Mockingbird and Wisner's Mighty Wurlitzer. Maybe, Matt, you could give your take on, you know, how to define that mighty Wurlitzer that Wisner was fond of referring to. So, and for anyone that doesn't know, a warlitzer is a giant organ. And not, I don't mean it that way. I mean, like, a pipe organ that you play.

And so, like, the... Wisner said that his propaganda apparatus was, like, his mighty Whirlitzer that he could use to play any tune he wanted from, like, a sad dirge to a happy, you know, like, to a military march. I'm butering the quote, but I think, you know, at the height of his powers, and you start to see this diminish, you know, especially near the end of his life,

his ability to like manipulate things. But man, when he was on, he was on. And the interesting thing, I think, is his ability to be bi-directional with it. And what I mean by that is he knew his audience wasn't. just, it wasn't, he didn't just need to convince the American public or something, right? He also needed to convince certain policymakers and certain people in the government of things, and then he could get things done, right? And so, a Joe also story might be aimed at middle America, right? It might be aimed at the average, like, corn and peoria in changing his

opinion. But it might be as narrowly targeted as knowing that, like, President Kennedy reads this and so does Robert McNamara, or, you know, if you want to go back to Eisenhower, Gordon Gray reads this. And so it might be that, like, narrowly targeted. And I think that's an important thing to remember, too, about, like, the way propaganda functions is oftentimes it can not be for you, right? Which is sometimes when we look at things, we're like, why is that, like, where are they saying?

That's so stupid and so obviously false. Well, yeah, you're not like the intended recipient of the message. Somebody else gets it and they're like, holy fucking shit. Wait, what? And that's who they're going for. And I think, I think

Wisner's ability to kind of alter the tone and tenor of the mess he was trying to, because his overarching goal was he basically saw himself as like America's King Arthur slaying the dragon of communism. And in the service of that goal, he could do just about anything. Yeah, and I think that that's a very apt way of putting it that, you know, there are sort of the micro-targeting.

that's something that, you know, we discussed offline that it's come such a long way to where now the technological capacity to micro-target propaganda at someone is astounding and really terrifying if you think too much about it. I kind of almost try not to think too much about it just because of how insanely minute it really is. But at the same time, if you zoom it out, there's messages and sort of shared assumptions, foundational assumptions to how people form their worldviews, which are broadcast on a mass scale. And that's something that, yeah, go ahead.

No, and I think I'll, I'm going to have to run here in a couple of minutes, but I think I'll build on that point and kind of clears it out by discussing a different, a non-Wisner project that is the same time frame as Wisner that illustrates this, which is the Congressional Dunes Day bunker at the Greenbara Hotel in White Sulfur Springs, which I also, in addition to the Hortown Clancy, write for a publication called County Highway, which is a magazine in the form of the newspaper that is about a year old and, you know, I would say worth reading because I read it and it is worth reading. So anyways, if you have the chance, go out and get an issue of County Highway and

has a full page spread where I went to this Gucci, Couchy Hotel just over the border from Virginia and West Virginia that has a bunker underneath it. It was built in the 1950s for Congress to be safe in the event of the nuclear stipe. At the bottom of some of our deeper mine shafts, radioactivity would never penetrate a mine some thousands of feet deep. And in a matter of weeks, solutions, improvements in dwelling space could easily be provided. And, you know, I went there, again, because I wanted to walk around and see what it was like. And what I didn't expect from being there was how pissed off I would get.

Because I don't, like, I was a military guy, right? I understand bunkers. Like, I understand, like, people got to, you know, people got to be safe. And I understand we live in a country with the government and for that government to function. Those people have to be alive, right? So that's fine. You mean people could actually stay down there for a hundred years? It would not be difficult, my fear.

Nuclear reactors could... I'm sorry, Mr. President. Nuclear reactors could provide power almost indefinitely. Greenhouses could maintain plant life. Animals could be bred and slaughtered. What pissed me off is they're at like one of the nicest hotels in the country at the time. And it seemed a little bit like... Marie Antoinette, you know?

They're doing like Silicon Valley Preperism, 1950s edition. 1950s edition and also doing it kind of right out in the open where nobody suspects it. You know, like they build the bunker by building another wing onto the hotel that's going to host conferences. And in fact, conferences are hosted inside of the bunker. People just don't know that they're inside of a bunker because the big blast door is concealed behind like a false panel on the wall.

It's really weird. I would hate to have to decide who stays up and who goes down. Well, that would not be necessary, Mr. President. Could easily be accomplished with a computer. And the computer could be set and programmed to accept factors from youth, health, sexual fertility, intelligence, and a cross-section of necessary skills. Of course it would be absolutely vital that our top government and military men be included to foster and in parts the required principles of leadership and tradition.

And in the hotel all the like pet support dudes are secretly government agents who in the event of a disaster would like go grab shotguns from the armory and go room to room. kicking out guests and then go to take up, like, perimeter to, like, shoot locals that tried to come and get to safety. Sorry, guests. So that, yeah, so that Congress. You may be vaporized. Yeah, like.

It's like part of the terms of service when you sign the reservation. Yeah, we know. In the event of a nuclear disaster, you may be forcibly vaporized. Well, and actually, that's how it went, because in the event, all it took was a phone call and a secret clause in, the Greenbrier's like contract with the government was activated and the whole property would be leased to the government so technically like those people that had been guests up until the moment before the phone call were now trespassers on a government installation. When they go down into the mine everyone will still be alive there will be no shocking

memories and the prevailing motion will be one of nostalgia for those left behind combined with a spirit of Bold curiosity for the adventure hit! And also a drunk place, even now, as I was there, I kept seeing swastikas, like very obvious swastikas woven right into like the carpeting patterns. I can vouch, listener. I have seen the pictures, and these are runic designs of which the immediate visual

assimilation of the swastika is unmistakable. Yeah, it's like, you step into the elevator, and there's like a ring of roses in the carpeting, and then like kind of a swastika in the center of it. And it's checkerboarded out a little bit, so there's some wiggle room for the designer, I imagine. But you don't even have to be looking for it. And this was a famous designer, right? I hadn't heard of her before I read your article, but Dorothy Draper was, like, a big deal in the mid-century modern aesthetic that we think about today. Like, she's got books on decoration and influential.

And you would recognize her style if you walked in there. And I think, and I don't think we're going to have, I'll have to come back on another time to talk about Mad Men when I have her. Yeah, I was going to say, I really wanted to talk about Mad Men, but I'm going to watch the rest of the rest of it. I think we should both watch the rest of it and then like come back on and compare notes. Definitely. Definitely. And I also want to talk about that. Right. Like that was my first thought. Yeah. Yeah. A real contributor to the aesthetic tapestry of American visual life. Both Don Draper, the Madman guy, and Dorothy Draper, the real person designer. And if you're

Curious about the aesthetics of American Dooms Day, don't worry. Among the more than 70 dispatches that you can read in the Hunt for Tom Clancy archives, here's what goes. Actually, they would breed prodigiously, eh? There would be much time and little to do. But with the proper breeding techniques and the ratio of, say, 10 females to each male, I would guess that they could then work their way back to the present gross national product within say 20 years. So you were, I don't know if you got to the grain of what pissed you off so much.

Maybe you want to just put a finer point on it and maybe mention the fact that this hotel was also the backdrop to a lot of elbow rubbing among the sort of American royal families or American pseudo aristocrat. right yeah and i think that was what pissed me off about it was you walk around the place and it's like um if you've ever gone into like an office where some like corporate dude has an i love me wall you know and there's photos of him with like senators and shit um there was that equivalent like there was a hotel i love me wall where i mean a lot of people of prominence like go and stay at that hotel so what what pissed me off was look There's a lot of military installations around, and there's a lot of bunkers. Like, shit, there are bunkers within, you know, pretty close to me right here in Charlottesville.

But they're not comfortable enough. They're not, like, good enough for a senator, right? Or a congressman. And the idea of, you know, I drove around White Sulphur Springs quite a bit, too, and the rest of that part of West Virginia, man, I like it down there, and I like the people down there. And those people get continually fucked. And this would have, like, fucked them again, you know? And that's like their home.

That's where they live. Yeah. And I think that's what really, you know, pissed me off, was just seeing the extreme decadence, which are leaders at the time that we, in the popular, like, conception kind of are nostalgic for it a lot of ways right the 50s and like when people knew what they were doing and families were together and blah blah blah you

know all this bullshit um no like people are gonna go stay at their fucking one of the nicest hotels in the country while everyone else burnt 10 women to each man wouldn't that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual religious I mean, as far as men were concerned. Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human rights. I hasten to add that since each man will be required

to do prodigious service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature. I think just in the context of how much since, say, January 6th, I've had to hear about, you know, what a traumatic and terrible event that was for people that work in safety in D.C. and send other people off to die and kill. I had a pretty traumatizing event happened to me. And I do not know if I can even disclose the full details of that event. due to security concerns, but I can tell you that I had a very close encounter where I thought I was going to die.

Just left kind of a bad day's in my mouth. No doubt, no doubt. And there's so many layers of symbolic significance, too, not only the sort of facade of democracy and of the people's representatives setting themselves up for. luxury Nazi orgy parties underground in West Virginia, but even the fact that this life of luxury is built on white sulfur springs, which you mentioned in the article, you know, if it rains and the sulfur gets out of the groundwater or whatever, it smells like shit all around you.

Yeah. And the propaganda that puts a rational gloss over this. rise of American imperialism over the 20th century that is wrapped in this cloak of rationality and dignity and dignity and it's something that's being woven by people who in like the case of Frank Wisner are the polar opposite of rationality and who are whether on the personal level or whip themselves up into this frenzy due to their political beliefs. beliefs and conduct are the sort of height of irrationality and madness. And we're still living in the world that they created today.

You know, we're still living with the after effects of 1,020 nuclear tests in Nevada, one in Rifle, Colorado, one in near Dulcey, New Mexico, one, there's another one in Colorado. There was one in Mississippi. These are people that, like, will plant the fears of Iraq having weapons of mass destruction. But like, how are the cancer rates near Al-Migordo or the Nevada test site? Like, we've been nuked by our own government in the British more than we ever have by anyone else. A hundred percent. And I hope we will pick this conversation up another time. It's been a lot of fun. It has. Thank you so much for having me on. I appreciate it. Thank you for coming on. And one last time, I know we've mentioned it a lot, but, you know,

besides the substack and everything, where can our listeners find you and your work? I have a book called American Cipher, Bo Bergd-Dill, and the War in Afghanistan. I've also been published in The New Republic, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Playboy. I know I'm missing some, but like Rolling Stone, other places, so you can Google my name. However, if you do that, there's a rapist. Not the same guy. In Massachusetts, it's not me. He has my same first and last name.

We have different middle names, and clearly, I don't care for him. I don't know him, by the way, but he will fuck up by Google search results, just like he fucked up, like, a lot of kids' lives. Yeah. On that happy note. On that happy note, well, well, I'm that happy note, well, I'm, I'm Don, and on behalf of Dick and on behalf of Dick in absentia. And our wonderful first podcast guest, Matt Farwell, farewell, and keep digging.

the magic men, but I'm quite content they're all the same as me. Thank you.