Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 249 - How the US Almost Annexed the Dominican Republic

Episode Date: February 27, 2023

Once upon a time the United States came shockingly close to annexing the Dominican Republic. support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Sources: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2717114 https://journals.openedition.org/nuevomundo/61771?lang=en https://news.yahoo.com/1871-us-almost-acquired-dominican-135435379.html https://www.insider.com/annexation-of-santo-domingo-act-ulysses-grant-dominican-republic-2022-7 CORRECTION: Samuel Doe was murdered by Prince Johnson, an ally of Charles Taylor, but not Charles Taylor himself.

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. If you enjoy what we do here on the show and you think it's worth your hard-earned money, you can support the show via Patreon. Just a $1 donation gets you access to bonus episodes, our Discord, and regular episodes before everybody else. If you donate at an elevated level, you get even more bonus content. A digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, and a sticker from our Teespring store. Our show will always be ad-free and is totally supporter-driven. We use that money to pay our bills, buy research materials that make this show possible, and support charities like the Kurdish Red Crescent, the Flint Water Fund, and the Halo Trust. Consider joining the

Legion of the Old Crow today. And now back to the show. Hello and welcome to the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. I am Joe. And as per usual, lately with me is Nate. How are you doing, Nate? I'm doing really well. It's about 7.06am in lovely Lawrence County, Indiana, where I'm visiting my parents. I don't know if just going basically to hell and back on jet lag the last time that I traveled by air, which was touring Australia with the Trash Future podcast and then visiting New Zealand and then flying all the way back from New Zealand to the UK. Somehow did something to my brain where I just developed

some sort of better coping strategies for jet lag. Because I stayed up till almost 11pm last night and I woke up at 6pm and I was fine. I have no idea what the fuck's going on. Normally with jet lag, I'm like, oh, I'm so tired. And I fall asleep at like 8.30pm and I wake up at 2pm, completely awake. Yeah, in the same way. That didn't happen this time. I have no idea what's going on.

But yeah, I feel like I'm kind of beasting jet lag. So your guess is as good as mine. Last time I made the flight from when I was living in Hawaii to Armenia, when I came to Armenia, I had no jet lag at all. And when I flew back to Hawaii, it was like getting hit in the face of the fucking baseball bat. I was jet lagged for like a week and a half. It was really bad. But I don't have to worry about that one anymore. Yeah, man. I don't know what the difference... It's typically worse going back to Europe from America than coming to America from Europe in my experience. And part of that is I wonder if just like... I took the... If you take

the morning flight, you'll be... You have to get up early. And then you get in and it's only like three or four hours later than when you left. So you have to make it through that day. And then you're pretty tired. And so you fall asleep, you wake up, you're kind of back to normal. Or in my case, I took a flight. I left Gatwick at 3pm and I got to New York at 6pm. Hilariously, it didn't take very long at all to get through customs, unlike my last experience. But it took like 40 minutes for the plane to taxi to the gate. I have no idea why. And then got through customs, got my bag, got to my friend's place probably about 8 o'clock on the dot, and stayed up till, I don't know, 10.30, 10.45, something like that, and then went to sleep. And yeah, I don't know. I woke up pretty good. But every time I go to Europe, it's like you either take a balls early

flight from America, and then you get in, and it's late. And so you're just exhausted because you're already kind of tired by the time you get in, but it's night, and you're going to deal with stuff. It's dark. And then you somehow fall asleep, and you get four hours of sleep, and your body thinks you're done. Or you take a red eye,

which just sucks for me because I can't sleep on planes. Me either. And your mission is either well no you can't you're like six three dude what the fuck unless you're in first class like i don't know how you would sleep um i'm not springing if i had the money for first class i still don't think i would spend the money in first class i would just fucking suffer expensive now it's so expensive now like i know it's been okay it's always been expensive but like just out of curiosity, I looked when we were planning the Trash Future Tour, what it would cost even on a cheap airliner to get business class tickets. And it's just like, it's insane. It's absolutely... Yeah.

There's just... It was the difference between you make a small profit on the tour by selling all the venues out. Or you literally... You are already going to be in an enormous amount of debt from the airfare alone. And maybe selling tickets will fucking claw you out of a little bit of it. Jesus Christ. And it's like, all right, do I really want the business class tickets on Royal Air Brunei or whatever the fuck it is? It's like the Sharia airline where no alcohol is allowed. No, I think I'm good. The last time i flew uh i was flying from the uk back to armenia and i was flying an airline so cheap that first class wasn't a thing

um like whiz air fly one uh but i did have the magnificent uh experience of seeing a man go full like a berserker mode in the Moldovan airport and just start swinging on cops. And he was being drug away by these two Moldovan cops. And I don't speak Russian or Moldovan, but I did fully understand.

He was saying like, fuck you, bitch, in Russian. And it got more and more quiet and distant as he got drug down this nondescript, unlit hallway. So he's like, Sukabliat! Sukabliat! Sukabliat! Yeah, I felt really bad. I was at security at JFK yesterday,

or rather at LaGuardia, and I totally forgot to take my Kindle out of my bag. So of course my bag got fucking flagged for examination. And while I was waiting, this old lady was getting her bag or whatever. She was waiting on them to examine it because she had fucked something up with her bags. And she just fainted. Jesus. And just hit the ground.

And so there were some people right by her who were helping. In situations like that, I often am like... I kind of size it up and I'm like, am I going to help at all to intervene? And I could tell that she had woken up and she was talking and I was just like, I'm just going to let the TSA people handle this. And if they have paramedics, that's their job. I don't think the TSA have paramedics, to be completely honest. I'll be honest with you. It's very funny. They called... One of the people called for security and said there was a medical emergency. And then nothing happened. And then five minutes later like a bunch of tsa guys

just kind of milled over like non-playable characters in a video game just kind of walked around like there's like there was just like a gang of 10 of them just standing there just kind of not doing anything just watching and it's just like she was fine she fainted yeah she had fainted she just had to get up and um you know but like it was one of those things where i was like i want to make my flight and i don't really think i'm going to be helpful and i you know but like it was one of those things where i was like i want to make my flight and i don't really think i'm going to be helpful and i don't think going full like uh are you know army what was it uh what are they what are they what was the school this combat lifesaver course combat lifesaver course shit was gonna help like i i still have the acronym you know for uh

responsiveness breathing bleeding like i'm gonna say as a guy who used to teach that class no you would have not admitted yeah yeah yeah fucking fucking uh what's it called uh rub both balls for better head that was the fucking acronym they taught us responsiveness breathing bleeding uh fractures uh head the problems with combat lifesaver courses and teach you anything about like diseases or yeah like syncope just simply passing out things like that. Yeah.

I was thinking about it too like the thing with it. Yeah because it's like the responsiveness like maybe we should stop teaching every soldier to stick someone with a saline IV because in a combat situation like they freak out and just stick guys with IVs over and over again and just flood the reason why is like that's not necessarily a bad thing and if this is going way too far off the rails Tom it's on you to cut this out but it was always so like traumatizing to the people in these courses because you know you'd have to give IVs to

one another and the army's full of fucking idiots so it would hurt they'd blow each other's veins whatever whatever so it would like stick in the back of their minds like since that was the worst day in class that must be the most important thing rather than like just just a simple tourniquet yeah exactly it's like you're getting you're sticking a guy who's got like a traumatic amputation with just like iv after iv after iv but you're not doing anything about the amputation site hey he's giving giving him more fluid to lose, you know? We've invented centripetal power of someone's insides. Yeah, exactly.

It's spicy water. It actually just heals things. Yeah. I have no good segue for this. Well, I was thinking we're talking about military shit. We're talking about dumb things that soldiers do. Well, I was thinking we're talking about military shit. We're talking about dumb things that soldiers do. And what better place to use the half-assed military medical training that someone just fucking decided that you were obligated to get but didn't actually follow up on than getting deployed to a combat zone in the Caribbean, a.k.a. the Dominican Republic.

Yeah. Thanks, Nate. That's actually a solid save. Obviously, the U.S. has a long and storied history of fucking with the Dominican Republic, and we can't possibly go into all of that today. And occasionally... It's on the island of Hispaniola. There's two countries on the island of Hispaniola. One is Haiti. One is the DR. And America has fucked with both to an immense degree. America hasn't fucked with Haiti more than France, but it still has fucked with Haiti an immense degree. To be fair, it's because France had a head start.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And France decided to play the long game, aka fucking them until the 1990s on debt repayment. And invading them. And credit where credit's due. Napoleon sent an entire army to die there of disease. Malaria. Yeah, basically.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Toussaint Louverture was just like, well, we are going to fight these guys, but also we're just going to make them fight the weather, and they just died of malaria and yellow fever. We're deploying our quick reaction force, which is thousands upon thousands of mosquitoes in tiny uniforms. Hell yeah, exactly.

Toussaint's bravest soldiers. I mean, if you wanted Haiti that bad, you should have adapted. You know what? That's just the rule. That's how it works. His shooters were good. But the Dominican Republic, oh boy.

So we're talking about the one in the 20th century, in the 1960s, I believe. But it's been... The US has just... We've been involved a long ass time. Yeah. And we're going to talk about how exactly that started and why. Because obviously, if you go into the modern times, it's much easier to explain, which is just normal imperialism mixed with capitalism and extraction and anti-communist bullshit.

However, back in the day, it was a lot more grim than that. And the reason why is today's topic is not how we fucked with elections, we put strongmen in power or whatever. It's how the US came within a couple of votes from annexing the Dominican Republic and with a path towards fucking statehood after the civil war um now we brought this up a

little bit for all of two seconds back when we talked about the spanish-american war in the three-part series a long time ago um but this is uh this is kind of more so it should come as no surprise to anybody that the end of the american War, there were a lot of people, white people specifically, standing around and beginning to wonder, what are we going to do with all these black people? Because their answers were not good. And to be clear here, there were people who posited the obvious answer here, which is, let's all just live together as equals. However, I cannot stress enough how few and far between those people were, and as far away from any levers of power that they were in every way possible. Virtually everyone we're talking about during this podcast is a fucking monster

who thought very simply that black and white people could not coexist. that black and white people could not coexist. At best, they thought slavery was bad and black people were human beings. However, they were not the same kind of human beings as white people. That's the most progressive thought process we're talking about in today's episode. So it's a grim time in American history. Well well the thing that i would say too is just that i i don't like the really kind of facile comparisons that you'll get sometimes and i think when this stuff is portrayed in film uh when this stuff is portrayed in in popular media like modern popular media it's often very heavy-handed but so this might be the one time you hear me endorse anything by Steven Spielberg on this podcast.

No, fuck. It's the 13th. God damn. Yeah, it's the 13th. One of the things that I will actually say that the movie Lincoln did pretty well is demonstrate that in order to get the 13th Amendment passed, they basically had to kind of pretend... The people who are abolitionists had to more or less pretend that they didn't actually think there was any real equality possible between black and white people. But that obviously, it was just a matter of legal principle. And I think that's actually kind of sanitized compared to how vulgar and cruel this stuff was throughout American history. how vulgar and cruel this stuff was throughout American history. But there definitely was... The conundrum for the American racist post-Civil War and post the passage of the 13th and 14th Amendments was that you had a population of Black people who were American citizens. And it's like, legally speaking, they were the same as anyone else in terms of their citizenship.

And there were a lot of these half-cocked weirdo schemes to try to either encourage or force them to emigrate elsewhere. Oh, we're going to talk about those. Yeah. We're going to talk about those. A little bit of Liberia. That was even before this. And good God, if there's ever an example of, Dad, I learned it from you, it is Liberia. Oh, fuck God. Liberia is really bad. There was definitely some back-to-Africa schemes. And there were also,

like you said, some crackpot white people schemes. The same kind of people who were trying to annex Nicaragua to be a slave state in the 1850s were planning on doing the same thing. Some good old freebooting. Yeah. Some filibusters to create a dumping ground where they could ethnically cleanse Black Americans from America. I will say that that is virtually what this entire

thing is about. So it's imperative before... If you don't know anything about the Dominican Republic, it is imperative for you to understand that the Dominican Republic is a country where most people have some mixed race ancestry, and a number of people are mixed race, Black and Native, what we call Native American. I mean, that term doesn't really apply in the Caribbean, but like Taino Indian or Spanish European, like some mixture thereof. That will become very important later on as to how the story ends. But the point I'm trying to make here is that even Dominicans who are like, no, I'm Spanish, you look at them and you're like, bro, have you been to Spain? Y'all are mixed race. And however, the Dominican Republic is also an insanely anti-black country.

The modern Dominican Republic, I obviously didn't go there in the 1800s. I've been there in the 2000s or the 2010s. The Dominican Republic is a country with a legacy of some really intense, very, very bad racial politics.

I guess it's just how you have to understand this, that if you don't know anything about it, that it's... And I don't want to be hand-waved broad brush here. My impression is the Dominican Republic is a country of mostly black people that hates black people. I'll be honest with you. Oh, that's going to make the rest of the story interesting. Go ahead. Let's get it. Now, this kind of belief that slavery is bad, whether that be through legalese methods, there's a lot of people who got to that point from religion. Whatever way they got to that

point, they still generally believe that black people and white people were not equal. And this is not a belief that was only relegated to after the Civil War. Even before Abe Lincoln won the Civil War and got his skull ventilated, it was something of what was considered a very serious policy discussion about what to do about the post-Confederacy and really what the new reformed union would look like. And a huge part of that question was like, what do we do with all the free slaves? And it should be pointed out that one of the first things he thought of was not in fact, let's just have them be free citizens of the United States. He settled on creating slave colonies overseas. This is a process known as recolonization. And most people are aware that this is not even the first time America did this as Liberia had been a thing since 1816. And technically, that worked as long as A, 16. And technically, that kind of worked as long as A, you're a bad person and B,

you didn't look too hard at what happened to Liberia's native people who are already living there when it was quote unquote, recolonized, which is one of those things is like, Dad, we learned it from you. I think one of the first native Liberians to actually be in charge of Liberia was Samuel Doe, which is the guy that Charles Taylor murdered. So it's very, very recently. Samuel Doe also, sorry to interrupt you, took power in basically an NCO's coup in the 1970s. So had Samuel Doe not basically couped himself into power, he would never have been allowed near the reins of power in Liberia. I wonder how that turned out.

Let me take a nice sip of my coffee. Oh, yeah. It was great. Oh, no problems. Jesus Christ. Murdered on camera, you say? Yeah. They literally, literally murdered, knifed to death on camera in the presidential office

while people were watching and drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. Yes. I believe they were drinking Budweiser too out of cans. And I think he was partially cannibalized because it's Charles Taylor we're talking about. Yeah. Charles Taylor and his people were kind of into that. Yeah. Oh, man.

What a fuck. What a... Yeah. That's a whole... That's one of those stories. Liberia is another one of those stories where you want to do it justice and you want to not exoticize or go over the top with it. But it's hard because it will sound made up and people will think that you're making fun of it and being an asshole about it. But it genuinely is that bad.

And I think the thing that I'll say about the DR, because I know we're going to get into Raphaael trujillo like similarly that's that's too it's too that's too uh recent but ah okay never mind all right so that's a different annexation of the dr kind of story yeah yeah so rafael trujillo the dictator of the dominican republic from i believe like the 20s maybe the 40s until until the early 60s um had a basically like likevalier-style, Tauntaun-Macoute-style secret police, but mostly for abducting people's hot daughters so he could fuck them. The man was relentless in...

And I mean, here's the thing, right? This is coercion. This is rape. This is not consensual sex. But it was understood in the DR, if you lived in Santo Domingo, find a place for... If you have an attractive daughter, you should absolutely make sure that she leaves the country because Trujillo

was that fucking relentless. So that's one of those things where it sounds like you're making it up. And it sounds like it could be the fodder for jokes, but it's also really, really not funny. Yeah, of course. You know what I mean? It's the same kind of thing with fucking Liberia. It's like... We covered Liberia very briefly a while ago, but it was way back in our first year. And honestly, I need to do it justice again. Because it's a fucking wild story.

Yeah, like, you know, just stuff that... The Vice Guide to Liberia is both not good and good in the sense that it's the classic Vice story of incredible access, incredible opportunities to interview people. And then to ask them like, whoa, did people in Liberia smoke weed? With a guy who looks like Steve from Blue's Clues. Yeah, exactly.

But what made me... In the Vice Guide to Liberia, they meet and spend time with General Butt Naked. Yes, they do. He's a preacher. He's now a preacher. And who tells the story about post-war sleeping in graveyards because he was homeless, and that people were robbing graves to cannibalize bodies. And he was like, I had to make sure. It was a crime what they were doing. It's an absolute sin to eat human flesh. But I had to make sure. So I tasted some of their jerky. And when I tasted that sweet flesh again, I knew it was cannibalism. I was just like, bro, you got to hide the fact

that you enjoyed it. You got to go to your local methadone clinic, but for human flesh. Oh my God. Yeah. So anyway, like I said, big derail here. But once again, the overarching point I'm making here is that oftentimes this stuff, it's so absurd that it's laughable. But then you also realize that it's like it's it's deadly serious too i mean that's kind of like we're not gonna be like school because like yeah the story sounds like it's gonna get fucking ridiculous i mean it's it's very ridiculous how close america got to actually doing this the reasons that it was wanted to do it and more particularly the reasons why it didn't and like they're all patently hilarious because we're talking about 1800s brain but it's also horribly fucking tragic

because this is the reality like post-civil war where a lot of people like to think that the worst of american history was generally over um and it uh it is not yeah and then you look at then you look at redemption post-reconstruction and you're like, ah, no, it's not. Jesus Christ. It's all bad. It's a downward staircase. It doesn't get better. Now, some historians argue that Lincoln eventually dropped this idea of recolonization. However, he had asked for a constitutional amendment to make this legal and possible as well as secured funding from congress for a for an entire year before his emancipation proclamation in 1863 so it was at least at one point not only like a thing that could happen

but it was a lincoln priority post-war right? Lincoln had also signed a contract, the legal owner of an island off the coast of Haiti through an intermediary named Bernard Koch. I just really like saying his name. He did that the day before the proclamation. And Lincoln was talking to Koch about moving 5,000 people there, something of a test drive. So he was going to send these people to Cock Island? I mean, many of us have narrowly escaped the fate of being deported to Cock Island. But it's funny. It's just weird because the first thing that comes to mind when I think about the

aborted plan for the Nazis to deport all of Europe's Jews to Madagascar... That wasn't really much of a real plan though like that was more of like a sketching on a bar room napkin of course no it's it's so i mean it's it's obviously like both logistically and physically impossible so they never took over madagascar yeah it was a french colony like they didn't own it yeah yeah and also like like uh i don't think that that i i know for a fact that like malagasy people would have fucking fought back against the nazis like that would have like that would have been the nazis basically creating like a like an indian ocean eastern front like yeah it's which they loved doing they

loved having eastern fronts but like at the end of the day here that's the thing that comes to mind it's like and it's just funny because when you talk about that stuff as regards to nazis it's always kind of like this is like a tinge of exoticism like oh they're so fucking insane with like their weird pagan rune shit and they're like oh we're just gonna you know build a floating island like 10 000 feet above the pacific and we're gonna put all the jews there or some shit but then you realize like no that's basically what america was doing it's just like imagine the sort of like weird book of mormon buried golden plates version of that shit and that's all the american 19th century and what's what's just like, imagine the sort of weird Book of Mormon buried golden plates version of that shit, and that's all the American 19th century. All of it.

What's truly fucked up is the US didn't get closer than the Nazis. We actually did it. There was a test run done on Cock Island. Meanwhile, the Nazis were... The Madagascar thing is something people like David Irving really like to latch on to. See, there wasn't...

They weren't planning on killing everybody. They were just everybody to madagascar like it wasn't really a plan um like this what this this proposal by cock about moving 5 000 people and i will keep calling him cock uh this wasn't the first proposal that lincoln had received about the same idea though this is this one had the benefit of having the Haitian government on board. This is because they were going to make a lot of money from this whole deal. They were going to get kickbacks and stuff, so they're like, sure, move into this random fucking

desolate island that we don't want. But rumors began to spread quite quickly that Koch was going to sell the freedmen into Confederate slavery, which, wouldn't you know it, derailed the project somewhat. And to be fair, I have no proof

that he was planning on doing that, but I will say, listen to what happens to them when they actually get to the island, and I'm going to say that that sounds like something he would do. Yeah, I mean, I don't know.

It's just, it's so fucking grim. Like, I'm just... The fact that, like you said, that we got this close to it, and grim. Like, I'm just, the fact that, like you said, that we got this close to it, and the fact that, you know, 5,000 people, like... Oh, we're going to get closer, Nate. People will move to this island. Have you ever seen the Japanese film Battle Royale?

I have not, but I know the plot of it, yes. Okay, it's kind of like that, but with cotton. Oh, for fuck's sake. Now, eventually the deal was settled that 500 people would be sent to Cock Island as a trial run before the 5,000 would go. Now, once there, Cock turned into a despotic lunatic ruling over the island that was virtually just a cotton plantation. And no, he did not tell the government about this. This is because Cock had not built any housing, any medical treatments, any schools, nothing.

It was literally just a cotton plantation and the tools to export cotton. He had recreated a southern plantation on a Haitian island. Now, also remember that these are American-born freedmen moving to a Caribbean island with no kind of disease resistance whatsoever. So you can guess what happens next. Oh no, fuck's sake. In the case that the government or any investors into the project wanted to swing by and take a look at,

you know, Cock Island, he banned any and all travel to the colony that was not previously approved by him. And he approved exactly none of it. He also came up with his own currency and a company store so yeah we got we got company script at the uh at the the the cock island and cotton plantation now that the government paid for mind you oh my god that's insane this whole thing lasted two months before cock was forced to flee his island when it came clear that the

500 or so people were planning on killing him. Cock was removed from the project and the colony was eventually just completely abandoned. The federal government, namely Abe Lincoln, had to get involved because he realized we have to get these fucking people off that island and bring them back to the United States.

Of the original 453 people who set sail to the island because some died before they actually left, 292 made it back to the US. There was a whole lot of smallpox, a lot of starvation, and a fuckload of malaria involved. But some of the people that did not return did not die. 73 said, fuck this, I'm moving to Haiti. So good on them. You know, it's one of those things where i don't necessarily want to like make like a joke about or do a podcast riff about it because it's just like the first of many things

it's like you know the u.s just simply loves to make it clear uh that i don't know that it sees black citizens as a problem to be solved you You know what I mean? And that was more blatant back then. But it's also a problem now. That legacy continues. We are... America is... I mean, I was thinking about this being back in Southern Indiana with my parents, because my parents aren't from here, but this is where they retired to. Is that this place is super Bible-thumpy. And I was like, yeah, reading about John Brown, him spending his young adulthood in upstate New York, but then also around Ohio, in Indiana, places like this, the degree to which insane evangelical Christianity was the norm then. That's what every... This is actually the mild version of what it in America. It's the literal DNA of America.

Yeah. And people love to deny that shit. But you have to really fully contort yourself into a pretzel made of challah to be able to convince yourself that it's not just... Anybody who says that it's not a building block... One of the main foundational building blocks of the United States is just simply lying to themselves or they're just... It's not even a foundational building block. It's every cornerstone and also every brick is stamped racism. Well, the bricks are made by racism, depending on how far back you go.

Exactly. It's one of the things that's kind of obnoxious to me. It's whenever, you know, obviously this doesn't happen too much because people who listen to the show generally obviously don't think that way. But occasionally someone will come through and be like, oh, this show was just telling you about how everything back in the day was racist. Like, yeah, especially if I'm talking about fucking Western Europe and North America. Like, what the fuck do you think I'm going to be talking or Russia? europe and north america like like what the fuck do you think i'm going to be talking or russia you know like most of history is it's a long streak of blood uh led off by various imperial powers and if that happens to be the country that you're from whether it be the united states the uk belgium russia like you get literally nothing from pushing back on that other than

denying people their own history and it's fucking it's it's soullessly stupid and it's mostly all based in nationalism which is why those people are fucking brain dead um and yeah i mean you don't like being from one these places doesn't necessarily make you bad because this place like because you're this is a part of your nation's history. You had nothing to do with it. But the least you can... Well, unless you did. But the least you can do is at least acknowledge it. That literally takes nothing.

Well, that puts me in an interesting position because I'm kind of a rarity. Most people with my last name are black. And the reason is that my dad's family, all the way back, were slave owners in the North Carolina, South Carolina area. They were Huguenot on my dad's side and came over in the 1600s and farmed indigo and cotton and had slaves. And after emancipation, people took the last name Bethea because that's who their owner was.

And white Bethees love to lie to themselves about it. Be like, oh, there was one. One Bethea was a really good doctor and every baby he delivered took the last day but like man shut the fuck up do you think that actually happened there's no way they believe that oh my god that's what they say dude they fucking because they're like oh no we didn't own slaves it's like yes you fucking did like the simplest answer is the most obvious one and like in this case why is there a margin of like a hundred to 1 that everyone with the last name Bethesda is black? What other proportions where it was 100 to 1 black to white in the American South

do you think there might have been? Do a little bit of critical thinking here. I'm glad that the joys of being born of an immigrant family is that you don't really have to worry about early American history. What's that, Joe? Your grandfather was the french foreign legion fought in algeria shut up uh right it's like it's like it's like i could be like oh i'm only half responsible for the slavery side of shit because my mom was born in england uh huh my great grandfather grandfather in the british army in india in palestine mandate hmm uh i wonder what they did like come on if we all have to pay for the sins of our family then we're all fucking guilty nobody out there is innocent and I don't really think that like like that's one of the things that's really interesting is that um is

being married to a black woman is that like it's not really talking about this stuff it's not that people have to like do penance it's just more to acknowledge and be aware of it yeah of course and like there it's like when you talk about reparations, like, you know, one of the strongest arguments for reparations was made by Todd Ossey Coates talking about redlining up until like the 1970s

in Chicago. Like, it wasn't, it's not just slavery reparations. It's like reparations for Jim Crow and the fact that the biggest generator of American wealth

is all of like the post-war benefits, things like the VA and VA loans and the GI Bill. And black people were excluded from all of that. I mean, arguably, everything that's happened post-Civil War has impacted significantly more people than slavery did, because obviously the population now is much larger, but they continue

to be impacted by systemic racism much more than they would have been before because they weren't born yet. So people always like to think that reparations has anything to do with slavery, which of course it does. But we're also talking about things that are literally within immediate lived history. And even then, slavery, not that far out of lived history. There's people whose parents and grandparents were fucking slaves. This is not ancient. We're not talking about ancient Greece here.

This shit was not that long ago my my my grandmother is 91 and she grew up in the mississippi delta and when she was alive there were people who were still alive who were the children of slaves my mom and dad and i were talking about this last night they went to segregated schools in mississippi when they were kids yeah of course my parents are not they're not even 70 years old yet and they when they were in grade school, schools were still segregated. My stepdad remembers America being segregated. It's not that long ago.

No, it's not that long ago. And so I know we've derailed this a little bit, but moving back to the stuff about the DR, I feel like the point to be made here is that so much of America's psychopolitics around its neighbors in Latin America and in the Caribbean were either to do with this pretensions of empire, fears of later on fears of like another Cuba or just like opportunism, an idea that if we didn't do it, the Europeans would, or a fixation on the racial balance of America. I am not exaggerating. And I mean, I did quite a bit of reading about William Walker, the filibuster who tried to recapture, to capture Nicaragua to make it a slave state. And guys like that were a dime a dozen in the 1850s, in the middle 19th century, in the sense of their fixation on racial inequality being

sort of put in place by God. And those attitudes didn't go away. And in this period of real unabashed adventurism in the Caribbean, you get the stuff you're talking about. Yeah. Unfortunately, this shit gets a lot dumber. But I do have something fun. All right. Let's hear it. Bernard Koch is not that important to the story. I think we've all understood that I just like saying the word Koch because I'm a child. But while searching him and looking him up, I did find a website that is run by his family that attempts to defend him while also saying quote history has been brutally unkind to bernard cock my third my third great grandfather historians use all kind

of pejoratives that describe him swindler scoundrel opportunist and perhaps with good reason so even while defending him they have to be he's kind of a piece of shit oh and even though his last name is cock someone in this family married someone with the last name Boner. So they're the Boner Cocks. Yes, that's exact. See, that's the thing. It's like, you know, long has history looked down upon the humble Bernard Cock. But we, the Boner branch of the Koch family, are going to redeem it.

You know, it's very funny that there's a... This always makes me laugh. There was a British, I think, politician named Bonar Law. B-O-N-A-R. But yeah, Bonar Law. And there's a Bonar Road very close to where I live. And I'm just like, guys, surely at this point, we can acknowledge that this is just... Someone's stealing that sign.

Oh, 100%. And it, and it's not even the weirdest British place name, but that's a whole episode in and of itself. I personally only dabble in boner law myself. Yeah, exactly. But you know what? You know what? The august scholars of American legal history and the boner cock

family fucking... The boner spur of the cock family are going to be able to elucidate more of this. I swear I didn't make that up either. I'll put it at the show notes. Now, this small Haitian island was not obviously the only target because if you notice 5,000 people is not a lot when you consider that there's an estimated 4 million slaves in the country as well as about a half million freedmen, according to a census sometime made in the 1860s. There was plans for Belize and Panama, which would have moved upwards of 50,000 people. However, that little fuck up in Haiti that killed like 200 people

was something of hot news topic in the black community back in the United States. People heard about it. So when the next volunteer drive went around to, hey, who wants to go on this recolonization effort? Lincoln didn't exactly get the thousands of people to volunteer and sign up for that he wanted for the next smallpox jamboree. In an attempt to get people on board again, he invited a group of black ministers to the White House, where he tried to effectively turn them into pitchmen for his idea. He told them that, yes, slavery is bad.

The only way to make sure the US doesn't continue to experience race-based violence or war is for y'all to get the fuck out. And wouldn't you know it, this was not very popular amongst these groups. One of these guys is Frederick Douglass, who publicly called Abraham Lincoln a, quote, itinerant colonial preacher who has made himself look ridiculous. Now, this pushback, along with no volunteers and the idea of like, oh, like the logistics of deporting millions of people is just something that we can't do, made Lincoln pull funding away from these projects after the Emancipation Proclamation was given, effectively letting them die. However, recolonization would not die with this effort. After Lincoln got shot, his vice president, Andrew Johnson, became president. Johnson was something of an anti-post-war reconstruction guy. And without going into Johnson too much, he fucking

sucks. and he effectively killed the entire process before it could be complete or really even take hold uh now a small side note here just so we can have some levity in this episode johnson was apparently so blackout drunk when he was sworn in as vice president it was so embarrassing to lincoln that the two only met one time between inauguration and l's assassination, because he fucking hated him. If I remember correctly, he was kind of the compromise candidate to placate the South. He definitely was. Obviously, they still seceded when Lincoln was... I believe... I mean, my dates are kind

of fucked up here, but as I remember... Well, Lincoln won re-election during the war as well. Right. The's like, like they, they, the Southern states seceded. They began the secession process when Lincoln was in the process of being inaugurated.

Um, and yeah, that, that, that, you know, kicked everything off. But yeah,

so he basically was like, uh, he's a former general. Uh, his name is escaping me at the moment. Uh, yeah. McLennan,

uh, who wanted to make peace with the South. And he was not unpopular, but Lincoln won. And that's when Johnson was his vice president. But Johnson was something of a piece of shit. He was a massive piece of shit. He was something of a peace offering towards the more southern friendly parts of government,

which Lincoln absolutely was not. If Lincoln was not assassinated, I think the United States would look a lot fucking different right now because Reconstruction would have come in hard and not gone away. Yeah, I mean, because the military occupation of the South kind of enforcing the

Freedmen's Laws ended because the sort of Bitcoin of the 1870s caused a huge economic crash around the world in 1873. And so one thing that you'll find interesting in American history, this is very particularly relevant in American adventurism, for example, in the Caribbean in the 1930s, rather, is that when America really suffers economic downturns, it tends to wind in its expeditionary forces a little bit. But then when an opportunity strikes, they'd always go back. So America has left Haiti. It's left places like Nicaragua numerous times when the economy was sucking and they had to appropriate funds for the military. But they never gave up on the opportunity to go back. And so, yeah, sadly, one of the ways in which they wound in the expeditionary forces was withdrawing federal troops from the South, I believe, post-1873. I'm not 100% hot on the date. And that led to... Then he put all the same people back in power all over again, and then led to the Black Laws and the Black Code. Yeah, we're about to get into that as well. Yeah. Yeah. Some good stuff that definitely hasn't gone away, that definitely isn't still fully in effect in just roundabout, wink, wink, nudge, nudge ways.

I had this comment too with my parents that I thought was interesting was that the military is one of the only things in America... We're not saying join the military. The military sucks. But the military was actually legally mandated to take desegregation seriously. And it actually desegregated in a way that it's basically one of the only institutions in America that's fully desegregated. It was also the first organization that paid black and white people the exact same. Now, Johnson fucked up Reconstruction something bad. This is mostly... I mean, he didn't fuck it up. He did it on purpose. You can't fuck it up if you do it with intent. This is mostly based on the very flawed opinion that since the government

did not recognize the Confederacy as a legal entity, the South never actually left the Union, meaning full state power should be reintroduced as fast as possible, and that the federal government had no grounds to regulate what states did when it came to virtually anything. Thankfully, that attitude doesn't exist anymore, right? Not at all. Does not lead. Yeah, exactly. It is 100% normal. Federalism, bad. Now, virtually the only thing that he made the Southern states do kind of was uphold the 13th Amendment. And in reality, they didn't do that.

As immediately, this led to the Black Code laws. Johnson killed Reconstruction so hard, he was impeached for it, amongst other things. This isn't an exhaustive history of Reconstruction. There's quite a bit of, you know, of fighting back against Johnson from the so-called radical Republicans, a name that meant the exact opposite of what that means today. It's kind of funny that the radical Republicans of 1860s would be more

progressive than radical Republicans in 2023. Yeah. I mean, well, that's a whole sleight of hand thing about the Republican party. Of course. It's just funny because they have virtually the same name. But you can thank Johnson for the reason that nobody outside about three people were ever charged criminally for that whole Confederacy thing. Yeah. And even then, it was really hot.

It was almost virtually pointless. After falling out with his party, he tried to switch sides with the Democrats due to how popular he was in the South and lost the primary, which is admittedly pretty goddamn funny. Ulysses S. Grant won the presidential election and took over a shitstorm that had been left behind by Johnson. Now, I'm not saying that makes Grant an innocent guy of any stretch of the imagination. By the time Grant took office, Reconstruction was not only failing, but deeply unpopular. And since Grant's time in office was a firing squad of various different scandals, it was just another failure laid at his feet that made him very, very personally unpopular.

And I'm not saying he didn't deserve it. Grant comparatively, at least, and we're talking about a low bar here, when it comes to black people, he was not that racist. When it comes to virtually everybody else, Native Americans, Jews, good goddamn, was he fucking bigoted as hell. He did one of the very few literal pogroms against Jewish people in American history. Oh, Jesus. Yeah.

He straight up green-lighted a genocide against Native Americans, but when it came to black people, he was fine. And that has to do mostly with his service during the Civil War. Because he did own slaves. I think he owned singular slave because he was very, very poor before the Civil War. And he freed them. He was strangely progressive when it came to slaves and black people in his day.

And then virtually nothing else. so i guess there's that yeah there's there's always those weird outliers isn't it where it's like oh good on one thing terrible on basically everything else but uh however not being a racist for his day also meant that he was fine deporting as many black people as he could which i cannot stress enough was still not the worst thing some people had in mind in the 1800s. However, his reasoning for it was much different than Lincoln's. But in the end, it doesn't really matter. It's the same thing. While Lincoln thought that there'd be violence in general in America, therefore black people had to go, Grant was more pointed, noting that the massive amount of anti-black hate crimes tearing through the South was evidence that black people would never be safe in the U.S. In a memo supporting this, he writes, quote,

The present difficulty in bringing all parts of the United States to a happy unity and love of country grows out of the prejudice of color. The prejudice is a senseless one, but it exists. Again, I don't agree with what Grant is saying here, but the idea of recolonization is deeply fucked. But his rationale was much better than others. But when that gets you to the same end goal, I don't know if you can hand it to him. Grant was again looking at Panama or even Brazil as a place to move people to. However, Brazil was disregarded as an option. Someone pointed out that, hey, Mr. President, slavery had slavery still legal there and it would be until 1888 yeah i was gonna say brazil was the

like the last western colonial country to get rid of slavery and it lets a whole story in and of itself also but yeah brazil still had slavery until the late 1880s. And it was a lot of slaves. I don't think people realize this. Another thing is that America obviously was... Our history is massively shaped by the Atlantic slave trade. But in terms of numbers, Brazil got far more

slaves than America did. It's just that also so many more of them died from terrible conditions, disease, etc. So I think that the lion's share, if not the outright majority of slaves trafficked from Africa to the New World went to Brazil. Obviously, the Caribbean is a huge example of this too, you know the the populations of of countries like uh barbados and jamaica and uh haiti and you know the bahamas like these were all these were all uh plantation colonies run by the the ones i named by the british with the exception of haiti being run by the french

but um brazil god was like We talked about that a little bit during the War of the Triple Alliance of how it was 100% propped up by slaves. And one of the reasons they actually kept that war going on for so long is they weren't sure what to do with all the slaves that they had deployed to the war when they came back home.

So they just kept them campaigning for two extra years. Oh my God. Yeah like it's just once again i feel like that's very very funny that ulysses s grant was like set him to brazil that's a normal country and they did talk about annexing brazil which they then realized would be fucking impossible they talked about panama which was not a willing partner as they saw like this is just american colonialism via freed slaves um and that's this is where the dominican republic finally comes into play uh they'd become independent from spain in 1844 at least for a little while the new republic was a bit shaky

due to being surrounded by various imperial influence like the spanish the americans and even the haitians who wanted to take over all of the island of Hispaniola. And, you know, don't forget France and England as well. After 13 years of independence, something called the July Revolution took place, and the president, Bonaventura Baez, was overthrown, replaced by a guy named Pedro Santana, who was a Spanish loyalist who demanded that Spain re-annex the country, and they did. This led to all around terrible shit, despite saying they wouldn't Spain immediately reintroduce the safe slave-based

extractionary colonial policies they had founded the colony on, because it's Spain. They also imposed huge tariffs, forced people to give back their livestock to the military, and all around made Baez, the asshole who bankrupted the government beforehand and led to the revolution,

seemed like a pretty good guy in comparison. This led to the Restoration War in 1863, and then by 1865, the Spanish crown backed down, annulling the previous annexation and the creation of the Second Dominican Republic was official. And after a few little shakeups and the occasional coup, Benaventura Baez is once again president before being kicked out and again becoming president again. Seriously, this happens like four times. Yeah, I've never been able to really nail down

that I know that there's at least one political science paper that's argued this, that study has shown that every system, every system of government in Latin America, that's modeled on the American kind of like a Republican system of, you know, by camera legislature and strong executive is just constantly doing this shit. It's like really,

really unstable. And I definitely think that, that pretty much every country in the Americas, to include the United States that has it, is an example of that. Yeah. I mean, it's not that surprising. So we are now... The Dominican Republic is looking right for the picking for recolonization. Oh, God. So it all goes through Baez. By the time Baez came to power the third time, it was no secret that the US was creeping around looking to expand and find a place to pack as many free slaves as possible within their borders. Grant, who was looking for exactly that, was also a hardcore expansionist. And if you remember from

our Spanish-American War series, he had his eyes set on Cuba for quite some time until it became obvious that this would just lead to a war with Spain, which he didn't want so soon after the Civil War, but would come in the future anyway. Baez heard Americans talking about sending black people to his country, which led him to look around and notice that the last two wars that left his country, mostly a smoking ruin that was bankrupt. And most of that was his fault, but let's not look too far into that. He was looking for a way out of this, and the same imperial powers had wanted to take them over before were still hanging around. So he leaned over the ocean and was like, hey, Grant, US, my man, fucking annex us. And this actually wasn't the first time this happened.

Previously, during the Johnson administration, Baez, again, while threatened with invasion by Haiti, asked the US to annex them for protection and was told to go kick rocks. And that had mostly to do with Johnson himself not really caring. This wasn't even their second or third time trying to join another country for protection or otherwise. And it was all Baez. Previously, they wanted to join the proposed nation of Gran Colombia, only for Haiti to stop them. Previous to that, President Baez also tried to give the country to France. It's very funny to be a president for life who fucking hates his job.

Right. And it's just like desperate for someone to come and do his homework for him. Yeah, like, I mean, he wanted to stay in power, but he didn't want any of the problems of being in power. Yeah. Grant loved this idea. And while working on it, he had to work on getting it tabled to a vote to make it official.

Of course, he sent some ships from the Navy to hang out off the coast to deter anyone else from taking it over in the meantime. So they're like, Grant meant this. Of course, Baez is probably assuming he'd remain in place and get to do whatever the hell he wanted.

Should the annexation go through? This would give the country, colony, state, or whatever in this situation protection, and he believed that the force of American arms would keep him in power, and he was probably right. Then, as if to sweeten the deal, Baez held a referendum within the Dominican Republic, so he allowed the people to vote on the possibility of annexation. Of course, this vote was crooked as shit. Abiyah's thugs chased away anybody from the poll who so much even looked like they might vote wrong. And in the end, only 30% of the able population voted.

But miraculously, the measure passed with 99% approval, with only 11 people voting against it. Hooray! Saddam Hussein re-elected president from the Ba'ath Party. Democracy works! Now, again, Grant was like, see? Look! This all works! It fit with his administration's needs perfectly. The country is rich in resources as well,

and would stop the colonization of the West by European powers, which he needed in order to maintain the Monroe Doctrine. Grant openly hoped that the entire black and mixed race population of the United States would want to and be able to move there,

which at the time was equal to or greater than the entire population of the Dominican Republic. I don't think he thought that went through very much. So just double the population overnight now you would assume possibly uh that the expansion of american power beyond its borders and especially into the caribbean would at least within the political caste of dc even back then

be universally popular like remember how popular the spanish-american war would be in a few years you would be wrong, however, and for uniquely and increasingly weird and racist reasons why this became unpopular. Huh. Now, the- This seems like double jeopardy racism canceling out racism because you've got, you're basically saying that forcible repatriation and or ethnic cleansing of black Americans was unpopular, but for also racist reasons? Yes.

I'm intrigued. I'm going to say you're not actually going to be that surprised, and I'll tell you why. Because you have the same mindset as I do. You probably already kind of know where this is going. Now, the charge against annexation was led by Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, who is probably most famous for being beaten half to death with a cane on the Senate floor by opposing slavery by Preston Brooks of South Carolina. Now, this is from an insider article I'm going to read off his reasoning, and I'm willing to bet at first, everybody listening will agree. All right.

That includes me when I read it, and it will probably include you, Nate. All right. Quote, much of the opposition to the bill led by Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, who was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and who arguably had more influence of the Republican Party than Grant did. Grant spent months trying to get Sumner on board, but Sumner had one main sticking point. Sumner did not believe that the United States should acquire any territories in the Caribbean or Latin America. He also believed that the pro-anne acquire any territories in the Caribbean or Latin America.

He also believed that the pro-annexation camp would eventually want to take over the entire island, which included Haiti. He thought Baez was corrupt and couldn't be trusted, and correctly pointed out that he was just using the United States to stay in power. He also seemed to support the freedom and independence of Caribbean nations against any idea of expanding American empire into the area. Good idea, right? Good opinion. He's not wrong. That's solid, right? Maybe you don't take over more people. Is the reason because he doesn't want to have to grant citizenship to a bunch of non-white people? Actually, significantly dumber, but there is someone that does believe that. Now, in the same article, Nicholas Guyot, a professor professor at Cambridge said the reason why he thought that is because Sumner was under the belief that

any warm climate area belonged to black people due to them being fundamentally and biologically different Joe I realize this episode is going long and derailing but I don't know if you know this but that's the reason why black people weren't allowed legally weren't allowed to emigrate to Canada.

What? Even for... I'm dead fucking serious that the Canadians genuinely blocked immigration of black freed Americans to Canada because they said they can't take advantage of our homesteading stuff because it's too cold and they physically can't handle the climate. I'm dead serious. setting stuff because it's too cold and they physically can't handle the climate. I'm dead serious. If you go back and you're looking at Canada in the latter half of the 19th century, I'm dead serious. The same argument was made. They're like, nope, this country is too cold. We need white people. Black people can't handle it.

Actually, the same thing happened during the Spanish-American War when they flexed out a lot of the soldiers because they were dying of horrible illnesses. And someone said, black people don't get sick that bad, right? Let them and they're like that's not how biology works all these guys are born in the united states like like yeah i mean like oh yeah we're simply biologically different and it of course it did not work um so yeah yikes sumner the main driving force rallied to decide the worst fucking people you could imagine. That's right, the entire South. Now, much like you were saying, the former Confederate states were staunchly opposed to the annexation of the Dominican Republic. And let's guess why. You said it's because, obviously, bringing thousands of

non-white people into the United States, which which in my opinion, would probably still not pass the Senate vote today. But there's another reason, and it's the opposite reason. The pro-annexation movement was very pro-statehood. Even though the goal of annexation was to find a dumping ground for America's black population, they were worried about the possible influx of black and mixed race people back into the country. Now, going off of Sumner's worry that pro-annexation crowd wouldn't stop and eventually take over Haiti terrified the South, as Haiti had a proud history of shooting people like them for quite a long time. But a bigger worry for the Southern states, despite their intense racism, they needed their black populations to stay where

they were, because their entire economy completely depended on them using for cheap exploitable labor in a situation as close to slavery as humanly possible so if they created a pipeline to get rid of america's black population the south would once again collapse i mean you know what's funny is that that's also something that was a huge factor during the first great migration which is the fact that, you know, what's funny is that that's also something that was a huge factor during the first great migration, which is the fact that, you know, northern factories were sending people down to recruit black workers because they could, you know, they could pay them less, but they could still pay them more in the north than they could than they'd get paid in the south. And this was like American capitalism at work, but the Southern governments went really, really hell for leather trying to block and obstruct and fight this stuff because they didn't want sharecroppers leaving. They're like, no, you are our peasants.

They need the situation to remain the exact same. Your job is to be peasants and be miserable and make money for us. Yeah, it's shocking. Also, I looked it up and I wasn't wrong. It was Wilfrid Laurier, famous fucking Canadian prime minister. Wilfrid Laurier formalized it in 1911 that black people can't emigrate to Canada because it's too cold. We love weather-based eugenics. Yes. But I've been like, Canadians may not know this because Canadians love... Canada is a country. What if the New York Times comment section finally got to run its own country? And my God,

they do not like knowing this stuff. But yes, this is very true. Oh, God. Now, the most normal people against the annexation point out that, guys, this Baez dude is probably full of shit since he keeps getting kicked out of power and he keeps trying to give the country away to anybody who'll take it off his hands. If the US absorbed this place, he would be our problem to deal with. That's the best excuse that's non-rac be our problem to deal with like that's like the best excuse that's like non-racist non-whatever it's like i think this guy might be shysty you know yeah weirdly around the same time one supporter of this plan was frederick douglas really this seemed to be because he supported the vote bias had held rather than like he believed that like if we don't annex it this way

we'll simply invade it however regardless one Frederick Douglass biographer says quote it was not Frederick Douglass's finest hour and I have to agree with him yeah I mean hey you can't be right all the time occasionally you accidentally

like it's like W.E.B. Dubois being in support of the japanese empire like whoops like i mean that is that is the thing that actually happened like so ever i didn't realize that every once in a while like whoops now in the end on june 30th, 1870, the Senate sat down and voted. You want to guess what the vote was? I mean, obviously it didn't win because the Dominica is not a state, but do you want to guess what the vote was? It's closer than you think. 48-52.

It was a tie. 28-28. 13 didn't vote. Yeah, I'm stupid. There weren't 50 states back then. But 13 people simply refused to vote. Wow. Every single Democrat voted against,

while Sumner was able to swing enough Republican votes to kill it, and with a tie, as Grant needed two-thirds majority. So that is how fucking close this came to being a thing, is because if Charles Sumner, I don't know, maybe that caning fucked his brain up a little bit and made him believe that we can't take over the Caribbean. That's too hot for white people or whatever. Like if that didn't happen, or maybe... Because Sumner also had personal beef against Grant as well. So maybe if that didn't happen, this was 100% going to occur. Now, would Dominica still

be part of the United States? Who knows? But it was a tie vote. It almost happened. Now, Grant didn't bother trying again because his own party very clearly turned against him. And he couldn't do much to get back at the people who had ruined his plans and then fire Sumner's friend, who's the ambassador to Britain, which to me is just a favor. And he eventually got Sumner fired from his role leading the committee he was on. and he eventually got Sumner fired from his role leading the committee he was on. However, Grant had so broken his own party by doing shit like this that by the time of the 1872 presidential election, the Republicans split in half with one side nominating Grant

and the other calling themselves the liberal Republicans nominated Horace Greenlee, who was then endorsed by the Democrats, meaning the Republicans effectively ran against themselves even weirder than that a supreme court justice was next down on the line for the liberal liberal republican ballot which to be honest i did not know his supreme court justice could run for president i mean neither and and one of the greatest stories of like uh of a fraudulent voting ever, two states had all of their votes thrown out, Arkansas and Louisiana, on account of fraud,

before they could even be counted. Then Horace Greedly fucking died. And then so Grant won. Though Greedly did win 66 electoral votes, which stands to this day as the most ever won by a dead guy. So, yeah yeah that's how that ends um way to go america that's okay i didn't realize that this caught i mean would you say that this this just general fucking meltdown we're just describing was because of what happened

with the fake the the aborted dominican republic annexation not on its own, no. I mean, Grant was a scandal machine. I mean, we know a lot about him now. Like, for instance, everybody's like, oh yeah, Grant was a famous alcoholic. When he really wasn't, like that was a really successful bit of propaganda. Like he was an alcoholic early in his military career. And then also when he was a general for a little bit.

But then like, so was most of the people around him um but uh his own party fucking hated him for this reason all the scandals he was involved in he was famously like people have always argued that maybe it wasn't him that was corrupt but he was just so bad at controlling his own office that everyone around him was. He just wasn't a good president. So by the time this election came around, he had pissed off his own party enough that they were willing to fucking torpedo themselves. And the Democrats were happy enough to help.

He didn't almost lose to Greeley, but again, Greeley fucking died. So maybe if Greeley didn't fucking die, he would have won? I don don't know it's hard to tell isn't that like kind of like the John Ashcroft thing like didn't John Ashcroft the Bush Attorney General lost to a dead guy yeah he lost to a dead guy yeah yeah exactly

we call that around here the greater unifying theory of fuck that guy we're like everybody's like no we don't like this either like could you imagine a situation like today where an entire political party is like, no, we're going to help you fuck yourself over. And not like a local or congressional race, but like for the president of the United States.

Like the Democrats being like, yeah, we totally support Donald Trump to run against fucking DeSantis or whatever it's going to be. I don't have to imagine. That's literally what happened in 2019 with the labor party like the basically like the the the right wing of the labor party which is basically all of it was like no please destroy rid us of this meddlesome priest fucking destroy our party we deserve to lose this election we are like if you vote for our party you're an anti-semite like

yeah which my position on this is that's complete fucking horse shit, but that is 100% what happened. So yeah, I can totally imagine it. But I can't imagine... I guess Ulysses S. Grant, war hero, fucking massive alcoholic, being a dumbass. In a way, it's good to get a perspective on that because I'll be honest with you. I don't know that much about Grant. I know Grant's buried in New York City, randomly. Grant's tomb is near Columbia University. I knew he was president. I knew he was general in the Civil War, but I did not realize that he basically... He January 6th his own party. I will say, every once in a while, there's a guy that while he's a general... I mean, of course, all generals fucking suck. but when it comes to someone like grant he's very very good during the civil war

outside of a few isolated cases right and that's where his career probably should have ended and it really sounds like he kind of like so he should run for president you should run for president he's like all right i suppose i will because like i really like being because i'm fucking drunk as shit up until he became a general in the Civil War, his entire life was a string of failures. One after another, he was fucking bankrupt. He was working at a local fucking store after he left the military the first time.

If the Civil War never would have happened, he dies like a homeless alcoholic. He's basically like vet bro of his era. Yeah. I would say comparing him to modern day vet bros is like almost disrespectful to him. But also, no, you're correct. Because he's still a fucking asshole. I think that the spirit lives eternal.

I not too long ago read a book about the troubles in Northern Ireland. And there was a story about one of the provisional IRAs, sort of like civilian auxiliaries. And she really struggled to readjust to life after the war and was constantly yelling at her professor and doing Marine bros? Like, vet bro is a fucking... It's an ecumenical term that encompasses all genders, all sexualities, all races, and all wars. I wonder what's going on with the ISIS vet bros now. I was like, within you is the capacity to generate a black rifle coffee company for your specific conflict. Now, Nate, that was the story of the time that the u.s almost annexed the dominican republic um and we do have this thing on the show called questions from the legion if you'd like to ask us a question the legion donate to the show ask us via patreon discord um put it in a bottle and throw it into the ocean and if it gets the uk nate will answer it. If it makes it to me, you have... You've got problems.

You've split the atom somehow. Today's question from Legion says, you guys are content creators. Thanks. I hate that term. What are some non-podcast content creators that you enjoy? Well, I mean, it really depends on how you want to define content creators. really depends on how you want to define content creators. I am

a huge fan of the band Flasher. They're an American band making new music completely new. Their first album came out in 2018. Is a band... Is music considered content creation now? My friend Dan,

who was a podcaster with Riley from Trash Future, they recently ended their show because they didn't have time. But Dan is a professional musician, has been in a ton of bands. He's currently in Arcade Fire. He put his band on Patreon and they put out new songs, demos, stuff like Q&As with fans via Patreon. So in a way, I think you can be. If you're specifically being content creators in internet content... All things... I mean, everything is content, right? I write books. Books are content. Yeah. Books are content. Yeah. If you wanted to, you could do a Charles

Dickens-style serialized novel on Patreon. It's not like anybody has ever accused us of being influencers, which is not a job that is real. No. Yeah. That's a whole different thing. I would say... if you're specifically saying it's got to be stuff that's available via internet, social media, things along those lines... I'd say internet-based could be... Anything that you can access via the internet could be content in this context. I would say then I periodically like watching um what's it called uh the youtube channel not just bikes it's just a guy who talks about shitty public infrastructure roads

like how stuff is inaccessible to anybody but car drivers uh yeah he's like he's canadian dude who lives in the netherlands and he basically was like fuck cars i hate this shit and he the canadian netherlands friendship treaty to And he moved to the Canadian-Netherlands Friendship Treaty to move his family to the Netherlands. And he just learned Dutch. So a bit of an extreme guy, but I think his videos are very well put together and explained and stuff. And I just... I mean, as a guy who has spent... I haven't owned a car. I mean, I can obviously have a driver's license. I can drive. But I haven't owned a car since 2014. I don't have a driver's license in this country. So I'm out. My American driver's license has actually since 2014. I don't have a driver's license in this country, so I'm out.

My American driver's license has actually since expired. Oh, look at you. You've gone the full insane developing world expat experience. All your ideas expired. I would have renewed it as just like, what if I go back to the US? Because then you need to drive a car where I'm from. You sure do. I have to the u.s and i because then you need to drive a car where i'm from like even if you even if just i have to drive today even just to visit my my parents but it's like i have no way to renew this mailing anything from here to the u.s is like roll the fucking dice if you get it back so it's like i might as well just wait until i go back and hopefully i can just renew it at the dmv if if i go back anytime soon you know my brother was able to renew his license in Indiana after having not lived in...

In fact, he was able to get his license in Florida by having Indiana facts stuffed down and his license had been expired for a long time. So I definitely know... I can't imagine Michigan's that much more screwed. That's one of my problems is actually the last state that I lived in where I bothered to get my driver's license

is Washington, a state which I have no intention of moving back. I'm fucked. It's fine. I don't plan on moving back to the US anyway. Washington might actually have a functioning state government that takes it seriously. I don't know. They fucking probably would too, because I remember having to renew it there and it was a pain in the ass. So Joe, what's your favorite content creator? So I go in like... I have a lot of things i watch on youtube mostly just for background noise uh when i'm writing because i can't work in complete silence it drives me nuts um whether

i'm writing for the podcast or writing a novel or whatever i have to have something going on and i don't own a tv anymore so like i mostly just youtube it unless i'm watching netflix or something but one youtube creator that i actually don't listen to for background noise and I always pay attention to is this guy that goes by the name of Super Eyepatch Wolf. Don't ask me why he has that name. And he's this Irish guy who talks about anything from horror films, professional wrestling, how weird fake martial arts are funny.

And he's like, I think a lot of it has to do with his, like, you know, sometimes some people's voices are just soothing to you. Like, yeah, I think his voice just like hits that and his videos can be anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours long. And even it's about something I absolutely do not give a single shit about.

I'll watch the entire thing. Like for instance, he put out a video about like how influencers are fucking with how content creators see themselves on the Internet. And like how incredibly stressful it can be from someone trying to make a living doing this. And I never thought about some of the things that he had said until like because he makes his living making youtube videos uh is something like millions of subscribers or whatever and i and like i never realized that some of these like weird anxious habits that he has i also have and they're incredibly unhealthy until like he said that and it really actually it really did help me like constantly staring at metrics like you're my producer you've gotten these texts before uh and like i realized how insanely unhealthy that is um and like stuff like that but it is very very good content creator uh and some people on the patreon might know that

i'm a huge fan of his because before i knew what how to like use patreon i subscribed to his patreon and i didn't know if you have Patreon subscribers of your own and you don't have this turned off, it alerts everybody that you're a subscriber to his Patreon.

So like, however 4,000 people were patrons of Lines Led by Donkeys got an alert that I had subscribed to his. That's amazing. That's amazing. Yeah, yeah.

I know that stuff. Yeah, I'll check him out i've actually never heard of this before so i'll definitely check it out it's very very good yeah i cannot recommend it enough no i don't know him i would love to get him on this show but he is way too famous for me instead uh nate has to put up with my shit uh yeah i mean um the only thing i can say that i i i appreciate periodically is uh um god there was the guy who makes YouTube, what's it called? Is it Maxor, the guy who does the YouTube videos

where he does what they call incorrect summaries of certain video games. And it's long video essays, but it's just making fun of it. And they're actually very, very, very funny. If you ever saw that thing about, why don't you back it up with a source? And the guy my sources and i made it the fuck up yes that's that's him doing a parody basically overdub of metal gear solid yeah i was wondering where that fucking came from

oh god even if you've never played the game just watch i'll send you i'll link it to you it's so incredibly funny like it's it's genuinely i'm not really into gaming. So it's hard to get excited about games. But because I did play the Metal Gear Solid franchise a lot when I was a young teenager into high school, I just am familiar enough with how ridiculous Hideo Kojima games are that I just really appreciate the guy riffing on it. So you watch that stuff and you're like, this is why people make hundreds of thousands of dollars on YouTube. People who do this stuff well, it's really entertaining. And this is just both no studio, whatever green light that's for TV and also for licensing reasons they could never do.

Of course. It can only exist on YouTube. So I do think that the medium can be really impressive. So I'll check out this Super Eyepatch Wolf. Yeah, he rules. Nate, thank you so much for joining me again. It's been a joy having you on this many times. And I look forward to having you on more in the future. You can use this area to plug the shows that I'm sure nobody here has ever heard of. Yeah, thank you.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity. I am the producer and co-host of this show. And What a Hell of a Way to Die and Trash Future. And I'm the producer of kill james bond so if you want to hear uh you want to hear the three funniest trans people on the planet talk about bond movies and euro spy movies and action movies uh from a feminist perspective or at least from a critical perspective listen to kill james bond if you want to hear about uh all of the weird creatures and creations of the zero interest economy in the tech industry listen to trash future and then if you want to hear two veteran dads basically talking about

how to not be an angry veteran, listen to What a Hell of a Way to Die. Yeah. And if you like this show, consider supporting us on Patreon. This episode is a little bit different. It was much looser. I feel like we've been tackling some pretty serious stuff here. We're coming off the Troubles series. So I think it's good to occasionally just kind of go nuts with a more chill episode. So I hope everybody liked it. But consider supporting us on Patreon. You get episodes like this

early. You get other bonus episodes that are only available to supporters of the show. You get access to our Discord, which is a lovely community full of weirdos that I love very much, where we play video games together and just hang out. You get books, stickers, and all sorts of other stuff. Or just leave us a review on wherever you listen to your podcast. That's how we were recently given an award for the Best History

Podcast is because you guys give us so many reviews. So thank you so much for that. And until next time, don't take over the Dominican Republic, I guess.