Part Six: G. Gordon Liddy: The Fascist Behind Watergate

to move on to another bastard. But also we get to listen to a lot of fear Factor today and that's something that should make everyone happy now. Much like the Catholics and g Gordon, Liddy was raised as a Catholic, he kind of becomes agnostic later on. But the Catholics believe, as I understand it that before getting to heaven, you generally go through a period in purgatory. Right, Maybe that's wrong, but let's all just pretend that the Catholics believe that right.

In a similar fashion, before we get to the heaven. That is, watching a two thousand and six episode of Fear Factor starring g. Gordon Liddy, we have to go through the hell of listening to a bunch of clips from G. Gordon Liddy's incredibly racist radio show. So you know, buckle up, everybody. Hopefully the Pope will help us out of this jam.

It's a mix of fines and legal fees. He decides to take a spin at being a writer, because what other paths are open to him, and in nineteen seventy nine he writes a fiction book called Out of Control. It is a spy thriller. The Google book summary of it does not make it sound like a particularly good one. Richard Rand is a CIA rogue pulled back into the company for one last incredible mission. Gregory Ballinger is the

Soviet spy whose empire Rand is out to destroy. But in a dance of deception from Washington to Switzerland and South America, the tables are suddenly turned. Someone in Washington wants the KG beat to wind and Richard Ran dead. Now so pretty boring, Certainly, I have not found any evidence that this was particularly good or that it had

any new ideas. Pretty I think he's his idea was I put out a very basic pot boiler fiction and hopefully my fame as a Watergate conspirator makes a problem, you know, not a not a bad idea, No, And Howard Hunt had done that because he'd been an author before, like he immediately start and it had worked for him. Kind of, so I think he's kind of cribbing from Howard Hunt's worksheet here. We may do a book episode on this at so at this point at some point,

but I kind of doubt it. He's He's not a bad enough writer that I think this will be very entertaining.

pay him to come and speak at their universities. Now listeners will know, I am of the opinion that college campus speaking tours are among the chief threats of our democracy and should be targeted via air power. However, if anyone does want to pay me to speak at your school. I will be happy to do so. So please, Yeah, yeah, bring me over. I've done it a couple of times.

It's always a good fun. So. The Washington Post reports on Liddy's comeback tour, and their reporter is bemused at the popularity that this convicted felon and fascist has with college students. Here's their article for nineteen eighty. It's incredible. Jush is Donnie Epstein, Lyddy's New York agent. He goes to these college campuses and draws a full house. They start by hissing and booing it. At the end they give him a standing ovation. He turns them completely around.

They love him. During his speech, Lyddy paces across the stage, coiling his microphone cord in one hand, unraveling it with the other. Dressed in a gray suit, wearing spit shined black boots, he speaks in staccato style, interspersing his dialogue with Latin phrases and quotes from Julius Caesar. Oh my gosh, he's good at this. The demand for Lyddy is titanic. He gives thirty two speeches in the first forty two

days after his booking opens. There are protests by student groups who are angry, in particularly that their tuition money is going to fucking g Gordon Liddy. One of the things that's interesting to me, the Washington Post spends like

a paragraph mentioning the protests. This barely merits a mention in nineteen eighty when in two thoson seventeen and eighteen, anytime there were protests of college, there's every the Post, in the New York Times, they were all all these quote unquote liberal papers falling over themselves to write articles about like, well, free speech isn't danger because students aren't happy that they're paying these fascists to speak. Nobody gave a shit in nineteen eighty interesting, So that whole article

is a bleak but important read. And I have trouble not hearing the siren song of the apocalypse in responses like this from dipshit college kids. He's just so intelligent, said Jane Copp, a sophomore at Creighton, a Jesuit run school with fifty six hundred students. Before I heard him, I figured he was a psycho. Amy Jersik, another Creton sophomore, said, but he is really fascinating, and he expresses himself so well.

He is just so pro American, such a super patriot, that you have to admire him even if you disagree. Aaron de Wald, who was with coppin Jersick, interjected. One Creighton student described that he as a modern John Wayne. And look, I know all these kids are old people now, but listeners, if one of these former students is your relative, pie him in the face this November, don't even explain. Why get him right in the fucking kiss with like a pecan pie. Pecan is the most aggressive pie to

get hit by. Really really bash him with it. You know, That's that's what we're asking you all.

He's broken out once. In the Who's song The Seeker, you know, I'm the Seeker. I've been searching low and high. There's a line in there about like asking Timothy Leary for guidance and stuff like. You know, he is very famous and very famous specifically for being this like left wing iconic last and you know he does. He is in jail, in prison at the same time that Lyddy

is theory. Actually they wind up in the same facility at one point, and they're both these they're both these like iconic clasts who are seen as embodying their respective sides of the political aisle. Right, tim Leary is this embodiment of the sixties and early seventies left and Lyddy is kind of the same thing for the right.

more of a libertarian and kind of that that early web. No, not that not what libertarian often means today, which is like even worse than a normal republican. But like that that is you know, your your pro civil rights, your you're pro pro you know, legalizing drugs, anti the state generally, but still also not anti capitalists by any measure of the imagination.

to I think their description is interesting. First off, they give it a pretty good summary, which is they describe it as evidence of quote a disorienting moment in American history, a time after the convulsions of the sixties and seventies had ended, but while most of the giant figures of that faded age were still around trying to find a place for themselves in a changed world. And I do think that's actually a pretty apt description of what's going

on here. Right quote, don't go in there's a film that's made about this tour they go on that you can watch. This is a summary of that film. Don't go into this film expecting a conventional left versus right matchup. By this point in his life, Timothy Leary was a full fledged libertarian. This becomes obvious a little more than forty minutes into the movie when he stands on stage

singing the praises of voluntary organizations. I believe in bridge clubs, I believe in families, I believe in friends, I believe in stock groups, I believe in collectives, I believe in corporations and damning the one form of organization which is involuntary, and that's the modern state. He goes on to declare that every state in the world is a mafia, charging extortion fees called taxes, but he allows that I love America.

America is the greatest mafia of the all. At another point, after Lyddy offers a lengthy denunciation of gun control, Leary doesn't reply with a liberal argument for restricting firearms. He simply suggests that Liddy's arguments against gun laws work just as well against drug laws. Now there's a couple things I would note here. What is that, Like, I agree with you all all states are mafius. The United States

is the world's largest totally agreed, no disagreement. Why your corporation's not mafius under what like a hell a fucking insurance company sticking you up with like not allowing you to fucking get cancer treatment unless you pay ruin and like mortgage drafts. How is that? How was that better than a mob? Right?

like compete. But I think that like corporations are fundamentally the enemy of the free market, right that like, actually what we need to do is break up monopolies and destroy the ability of And I don't have a problem with I may not agree one hundred percent, but I think that's an intellectually consistent point, being like, the state is a mafia and corporations are. That's nonsense, Timothy Leary, absolute nonsense. Also nonsense is what he's saying about gun

control here. Obviously I have a different stance on this, I think from a lot of our particularly more liberal listeners.

But what I will say that doesn't make sense about this is that the ways in which gun control and restrictions of drugs harm people, or sorry, the ways in which the gun issue and harms that are done by guns, and how gun control affects that is different, Like it relates to the way in which like drug restrictions and the way in which that harms people, Like, they're totally different.

who are dangerous will acquire them. Right, even if you are pro gun, that is a very basic, inarguable fact that you have to deal with if you if you care at all about reducing the harm that guns do in society. Right. The issue with drugs is the complete opposite, which is that because of prohibition, drugs that are adulterated

show up on the market, and those kill people. The other issue is that because it is an illegal business, the price of drugs is artificially inflated to many times what it ought to be, and so when people become addicted, they are often forced to do a position where in order to avoid withdrawal, the only way they can afford to get high is to steal shit. Whereas if they could get their heroin for fucking two bucks a dose from a government facility like they can in a couple

of countries. They would not need to break into people's houses to afford their fucking fix. Right, These are completely opposite issues, and like comparing them and saying like, well, actually the problem with you know, gun control is bad in the same way. Don't know, they're completely different problem. Even though I have like a lot of gun control laws objectively are not effective, which is not to say that all of them are ineffective. A number of them

do work, but it's a completely opposite issue. The issue with drugs is that is not that like there's too many drugs, it's that people don't know what they're buying and the price is inflated. The issue with guns is that any fucking asshole can get one. Like, totally different problems. What I mean, sorry, it's the way they're consistent.

I'm done ranting about my opinions. There. I will make one more note, which is that while Leary, the guy who was famous as a hippie figure, is very much taking an individualist stance in these debates, Lyddy is the guy who is coming at this from more of This is something Reason notes Lyddy is actually more of a collectivist, which is where because he's talking about like, you know, because if fascists have a degree of that in them, right, sure, you know they're like He talks a lot more about

like the community and the people and stuff, whereas Leary is is really more of a people should be able to like choose who they associate with. Liddy does not really believe that. But Lyddy also critiques the prison industrial complex pointedly in a way that Leary doesn't really spend a lot of time on, which is interesting to me. Yeah, he's not consistent about this, but it's interesting. Yeah.

falling for Lyddy's routine. Lyddy during this appearance discusses the time that he killed and ate that rat as a kid. Because you know, people have read the book by this point and are fascinated by it. He compares it to the experiences of like guys like POW's who have to eat rats to survive, and other heroic survivor narratives. When he's asked to give advice on life in prison, he goes into loving detail about all the weapons that he supposedly had. And here I'm gonna have I and play

that clip. Now did you have did you have weapons inside prison? And how does a person get a weapon?

a knife. You always have a knife, shank as it's called me shank for.

of Miami Vice. He is actually a recurring character on the show Miami Vice. There's a lot that's interesting about this appearance in particular, but I want to start with playing a clip of Liddy on the show, and this is from yeah, an episode of Miami Vice.

Knowles was in a video we ran on Cracked. These dudes all started out by trying to break into acting and screenwriting, right They wanted to be Hollywood celebrities, and they failed out of it because they had no talent. Lyddy, on the other hand, starts as a right wing ghoul in politics and then he wins his way into Hollywood by virtue of some degree of merit.

but we do. Yeah, And yeah, Liddy's you know, he's not like a fucking historic level talent, but he's not bad at this. One fun fact about Liddy's second performance on Miami Vice is that the episode plot is like, yeah that he's like he's he's funneling. He's a drug dealer, funneling, selling drugs to funnel money to contras in Nicaragua, which is funny because like that's what happened, right, that's the

Iran Contra story. But this episode airs a month before the first article exposing Iran Contra drops this episode.

life living quietly in shame. In nineteen eighty seven, his fame is close to it at its peak, and Lyddy has what would prove to be the only legitimate and verifiable violent encounter of his life. He finally gets into a fight that we can prove happened. It is not a good time for him. And I'm going to quote from an article in the Washington City Paper here. The confrontation took place at Lyddia's isolated Fort Washington home on

Christmas Eve, nineteen eighty seven. According to news reports, Lyddia discovered a young couple sitting in a pickup truck on his property. Armed with a billy club, he approached the vehicle and told the mail driver to scram. Words were exchanged and the driver at tempted to back over Lyddy. When that failed, the driver whipped the truck into a U turn and came roaring towards Gordo. Liddy stood his ground and was knocked fifteen to twenty feet in the air.

He suffered a broken arm and rib, a ruptured kidney, and a torn knee ligament. That is so funny, like he gets he has one encounter. These guys are just like making out fucking in a pickup truck, and he charges at them with a stick, thinking like this, scare him on the dangerous g Gorn Liddy with my billy club and it just run his ass down, nearly kill him again. Not a coward, Not a coward, not good

at violence, O now. The article goes on to write, although he was not able to provide the police with either a tag number or description of his assailants, Liddy later began intimating in interviews that mafia friends from his prison days had identified the couple and would take care of of them. This never happened. Lyddy is ashamed that he got his ass handed to him and his only real fight, and he had to be like, my powerful friends will take care of him.

come on over. Folks love to talk to you.

And again we have this one actual piece of evidence of how a fight went for him, and it's a disaster. He nearly dies because he tries to fight a truck with a stick. Right, that's the level again, these fascists that can't threat model. You don't even fight a truck with a gun if you can avoid it, that's not an even fight. You certainly don't fight it with a stick.

But gee, Gordon Lyddy fucking tries, and all of the fact that he is a liar, the fact that he's so inconsistent, the fact that like he is, exaggerating and puffing up his skills and abilities was all available and easy to prove to any journalist in the nineteen eighties who had access with the library. It was easier for me every time I fact checked him. It was easier for me to do it. Obviously, I've got Google, I've got Wikipedia. All that shit makes it a lot simpler.

But that wasn't an impossible dream for a fucking reporter back in that day. They chose not to fact check Liddy because he was popular and writing about his antics meant money. Perhaps the most upsetting example of this was Connecticut magazine, which paid Liddy to write a column about

his time in prison. It actually starts, Okay, Liddy acknowledges that he found out having been in prison, that the liberals who had complained about the injustice of support and funding for criminal defense resources were right, and that he'd been wrong for ignoring them. But he spends most of the rest of the article specifically trying to argue against gun control by making up conversations murderers had with him, where they're like, oh, I always vote for gun control.

I love gun control because I am a murderer. That's my favorite thing. Which these conversations never fucking happened. Yeah, quote to quote one of the latter. This is Liddy, to quote one of the latter, who raised his right hand in the manner of one taking an oath as he spoke on my mother. When I go on a piece of work, I don't look to nobody but God forget been. Something goes wrong and I gotta do what I gotta do, and the sucker's got a piece. I mean, it ain't all cut and dried. You know, he can

end up whacking me out. I hope they take away all them guns from all them legitimate schmucks. Me forget about it. I'll always have a pistol when I need one. Yeah, no way, anyone ever said that to you, Like find murderer says, all them legitimate schmucks get the fuck out of here. Yeah, what a what a thing to set to put in the mouth of like your vision of a street thug. The phrase legitimate schmucks like whacking me out?

Also like, yeah, what do you he is? He is weirdly mixing like racist people's idea of like what inner city like like diction is with like a mob movie

from the sixties, Like it's it's so strange. Yeah, if Martin Scorsese was a bigot, Like that's how good Fellas would sound Lyddy also argues that since criminality is inherent to some people, programs that rehabilitate or educate them are valueless, and again he puts words in them out of prisoners, who's like, prisoners don't want to go to school, they don't want to have any sort of like rehabilitation programs. They just want to do their time.

They like feed him some information to get him to write stories and stuff that will hurt him, and there's a lot of plotting about like what more we could do to stop this guy. Lyddy and Hunt actually spend their early days as White House plumbers working up vary assassination plots, like they are in the pay of the White House, plotting for ways to murder a US journalist. Now there's a lot of debate as to how much they whether or not anyone else wanted them doing this.

One of the versions of events is that basically somebody jokes kind of like, yeh'd be good if we could get rid of that guy, and Lyddya assumes, oh, that's an order from the White House for me to murder this way, And when his bosses find out, they're like, what the fuck are you no, stop like we do not like g Gordon Liddy, do not assassinate a journalist on behalf of the Nixon white House. That is not

your job. There's still a lot of argument as to whether or not there was any serious planning beyond him and Hunt being maniacs together. I don't want to downplay this because this is the fact that that there were people in the pay of the White House talking about this is a fucking serious thing, right anyway, this is an issue. Later as a celebrity, Liddy talks to Jack Anderson and is like, oh, yeah, we were plotting to

murder you. And when when Anderson is asked, like, how do you feel about the fact that g. Gordon Lyddy and Howard Hunt we're plotting to kill you? His response is great given their record, I was in no danger. The safest place to be is a person who g. Gordon Letty wants to kill I know.

make itself undeniable. Rush Limbaugh, who we have discussed in detail in another series on this show, was the avatar of this new wave of media right. Rush is really like the big He's not the first, obviously mean that guys like father Kauflin in the thirties and shit were right wing media radio figures. Rush is the first, really like guy to figure out, in the modern sense, how is talk radio going to revitalize the far right. It should not be surprising, then, that he played a crucial

role in bringing g. Gordon Lyddy to the airwaves. From an article in the right wing paper Washington Examiner quote, he was asked to fill in for a vacationing talk show host in the New York area on the first day, he arrived at with a cold and his voice failed him. Down the hall, Conservative host Rush Limbaugh had just finished broadcasting his national show and heard the g man struggling

over the nation speakers. He didn't know me from Adam, but he came in, sat down and carried me for the rest of the program, that he says on the second day, media mobile Mel Karmezan was in his limo listening to competing radio stations in New York and was wowed by Liddy's blunt approach and told his Washington station, WJFK, to give the former Nicks and ad an audition, which quickly led to a job and a long career on the radio. When Gordon started at WJFK in nineteen ninety two,

he tried an unusual approach. He read news stories from the conservative press on air. I just wanted to get the information out there, and it worked, he said in amazement. So that's a very anadyninge way of describing his show and what he does. My description would be that Lyddy's show was one of the most hateful radio programs to ever hit the airwaves. If you are a real head

for extremist politics. You will note that in the early nineteen nineties when Liddy started, this is a period in which the militia program in this country was supercharged, first by Ruby Ridge than by Waco. All of this culminates in the Oklahoma City bombings. Lyddy leans into the violence of this era because it's anti government and there's a

and Democrats are the ones in office. Right. He makes jokes about like using drawings of the President and the First Lady for target practice because he knows that's going to cause a hubbub. And then when it gets angry and the White House makes a statement, you know, he gets to respond to it. It puts his name in the papers. He is very much playing in the same way that like his predator or the people who follow

him will play the same playbook. When he gets questioned about it, he says, I thought, he said, I thought it might improve my aim. It didn't. Having said that, I accept no responsibility for somebody shooting up the White House, very very very blatantly being that kind of guy. Now this inspires an angry response from the White House. Clinton references Liddy when he complains about loud and angry voices spreading hate on the airwaves in the wake of the

Oklahoma City bombing. While the President denied he was calling out Lyddy in particular, the g man took it personally, and he said this the next day on his show, as related by The Washington Post, it's the president who lies and is deliberately misrepresenting facts. Liddy declared it was he Lyddy who or in last summer about the increasing animosity towards the federal government for taking away our Second

Amendment rights. Now, Lyddy denies that his frequent manic warnings that federal agents were coming to confiscate guns had any influence on the intellectual climate that culminated in the bombing of the Mora Building in Oklahoma City. I will say the arguments he makes in this period are more complicated than some of his later takes, because when he is attacking the ATF and the FBI, those agencies have a

shitload of blood on their hands. Right, people should be angry about Waco, They should be angry about Ruby Ridge. You know, like awful things were done by incompetent and like unaccountable federal agents. In both of those cases, and in a number of other cases. And Lyddy. I think part of how he builds his following is that, like, he's not totally wrong when he says stuff like what I'm about to read you. If they smash in un announced, screaming at you and assault you with leal methal force,

you have two choices, Liddy said. You can die under their bullets, or you can shoot back and try to defend your wife and family. If there were ring flak jackets, don't shoot them there, shoot them in the head. So yeah, and this is he also tells if you're not good enough to shoot in the head, shoot him in the groin. What's interesting here is that like this is both like I'm not I'm not unsympathetic to the idea that if the Feds are going to kill you, you know you go

down fighting, right, not always wrong. This is also terrible advice from like a gun standpoint, because a flak jacket doesn't stop rifle rounds, not in any way, shape or form. So this wouldn't really matter if you're anyway whatever.

only the seals. No, Right, that's that's pretty basic shit. I think literally one hundred percent of people could could could guess that, right.

case he really now. I think the fact that he is continuing to try to amp people up about you know, the new world orders coming, Your guns are getting stolen, you know, the government's going to put you all in camps. To that extent, yes, he is contributing to a climate of violence that costs a lot of people their lives. But I think that the way the media drills in on this specific statement about shooting cops in the head, oh sure when they attack you, is silly. That's not

the thing to be angry at here. The thing to be angry at here is the broader climate of paranoia he's stoking, not the fact that he is. Because whenever he when he was talking about this when you're saying, like, if the Fed's come for you, here's what you do. He was citing real stories of federal agents busting into people's homes and like killing their pets and shit, which

like you should be angry about anyway. I think that part of the response to him, and the fact that it never It's always the same thing with Alex Jones, right, Alex will say something silly about like turning the fucking shit, turning the frogs gay, and that always gets a laugh. Or he'll talk about cannibalism, or he'll make some kind of violent threat and that'll get in the airwaves and

it'll bring more people to him. He does this very consciously now he knows if he says something crazy, it'll get covered by a bunch of very lazy media figures who will take it out of context and they will not report on the act. And in fact, whenever he winds up in actual court, they usually try to give him the benefit of the doubt more than they ought to, as opposed to really understanding the contexts of the actual danger of the stuff he is inciting. And the silly

stuff is not really part of that. It's just how he advertises himself, and you're helping him advertise, right. That's that's kind of how I feel about this shit with Liddy, so because he's not completely in the wrong when he gets angry at the Feds. Here, I want to move ahead, you know about fifteen years to a period in which g Gordon there's no benefit of the doubt that you can give the man. This is after nine to eleven.

And you know, nine to eleven didn't make anyone a better person, but G Gordon Liddy becomes a full fledged fucking bigot in public. I think this has always been a part of him, obviously, but the shit he says after nine to eleven is pretty vile. And here's one clip from twenty ten.

any thing. So I want to play you another clip. Here's him talking with a listener in Texas about the border and all of the Third worlders who are, in his view, repopulating.

Spanish speakers. You know the Conquistadores who came over from Spain, uh into you know, the south of the border down there and conquered it. You know, they were tall, fair people, and there are still some of their descendants down there, but the vast majority of more Indians, right, the short squat and uh, you know, little Indians.

He is much more direct about this than even Limbaugh often was, and that is very much important because that is like the chief Nazi talking point that guys like Stephen Miller have been very very successful at putting into the mainstream conservatism in this point, it's to the fact that it is now a normal stance for them. And yeah, Lyddy is one of the guys who helped start that process.

So speaking of Lyddy being a literal Nazi, by now here is him playing a fucking Nazi documentary about replacement theory on the air during his fucking show. First, we're going to listen just to a chunk of that documentary.

President Donald Trump. On an episode of the TV news show Hardball, he makes even more direct statements on this matter. In two thousand and nine. This one's something else. This is all a available Gordon. Here it is He's this is a picture of the actual birth certificate of the former president.

legal entry and sentenced to twelve years hard labor. Now it just so happens that Laura's sister, Lisa Ling, worked on the Oprah Winfrey Show, and understandably she used every piece of cloud that she had to try to get the US government to take action on saving her sister. After a week's long campaign, the government succeeded in negotiating

with No Korea to get the women back. Former President Clinton traveled to Pyongyang to do the handoff in August of two thousand and nine, after both women had been captive for one hundred and forty days. This is something Clinton did before. I think he actually goes in and helps with negotiations to free Americans North Crea. I think there's a couple of situations he does that, and also

stuff like this. Former presidents in the modern era have often kind of done stuff like this, Right, you don't want to have the president to do it whatever, but like there's this understanding that they are kind of representative, that it is a way that the government cannot maybe directly deal with a country that we have a fraught relationship with, while also still this is a figure of respect, you know, if that's important for your negotiations. Not a

really weird thing to do. It also should be pretty apolitical. These women were not doing anything wrong. This should not reasonably be a thing that anyone has an issue with. Right, Someone's got to go get them, thank God. Right, Like that should be the end of it. G Gordon Liddy, when he covers this, decide to spend his time discussing it making a very racist joke. And we're gonna play that now.

the ground. Don't let's not forget that. That said, we are going to move on now and we are going to play a much more fun video because during you know, g Gordon Liddy, he's one of the pioneers of right wing media and there is you know, this is evident primarily in his commitment to reaching new levels of shadiness and advertising. While he insulted the normal station sponsors as crafts consumerism, he was happy to become a personal pitchman

for a whole line of health supplements. He's one of the first of these right wing guys sung like weight loss and exercise supplements. He really pioneers that. And he is also a pioneer in selling gold. Oh yeah, guys, are you ready to watch a G. Gordon Liddy gold commercial?

villain in Camp Cuckamonga. He's in Adventures in Spying. He makes appearances on mcguiver, Airwolf, Super Wo Force, and Al Franken's late line to name just a few. He's in a lot of docs too, DoD documentaries.

Rogan's Fear Factor. To be specific, this is celebrity Fear Factor, and Lyddia makes his appearance here along a heavy serving of washed up celebrities from mostly like the seventies and eighties. His chief competition on the episode is Leif Garrett. Does anyone here remember Leaf Garrett? Yeah, that's fine, because he's not he barely I don't even know that I'd call him a celebrity. He'd put out some albums in like the seventies, nobody alive remembers any of them now. Visually.

The most fascinating thing about this episode is that everyone else is like from like their twenties or so thirties to fifty, and Lydia is seventy five years old and looks looks like I mean, he doesn't aged badly. He was always in pretty good shape, but like looks like he's an elderly man next to everybody, which is interesting, fascinating mix here. So I'm going to play you his introduction from the start of this episode is when they're all like, everybody's walking on set.

awe of Lyddy, and he gives it. Really tells you a lot about how much Joe Rogan understands about the world. His every almost every word of his introduction is wrong. He tells several lies about the man, and Lyddy does not correct him, just smiles and nods. So here we go, Temmis.

But it would be like if you had an uncle who spent his two years or whatever in military service, like sitting at like like fucking cleaning and maintaining vehicles at a fucking truck pool in North Dakota. But it was during the Vietnam War. He's a Vietnam era veteran, but that's not calling him a Saying he's a nom vet would be like, well, no, no, he's not. He didn't never leave the country. He did not do any any Vietnam stuff. G. Gordon Liddy was not part of the Korean War.

to present himself around people. He's good at this. This is a skill, right that is kind of worth noting when we look at him. I think this episode really does show how savvy Liddy had become by this stage in his life. While the other male celebrities are boisterous and kind of chauvinistic, he is quiet. He's reserved. He feeds into his reputation by being quite saying less is more, and he understands that. He's also supportive and kind of

fatherly to his young female partner. He's like very very nice to her in a way that like a lot of the they're in on the show or a lot cruder, which I do find interesting. And he just comes from the fact that he is. He has these He has these more old fashioned ideas of like how you should

behave paternalistically when he wins. He wins the first challenge, which like is this weird bungee diving game into a pool where you have to grab objects, and it seems to reinforce his reputation as some kind of superman, considering how much older he is than everybody else. The second

challenge is where things get interesting. His partner quits because everyone asks to like sit in these tiny diving bell like compartments that are pressurized, and then first it's pumped full of foul smelling, sulfurous odors, so it's like you're trapped in a big ball of arts. And then it's heated up to an uncomfortable level so that you're like sweating, and then like they pour insects and stuff in, so you have to deal with being covered in maggots and shit.

It's all stuff that's like gross and unsettling. It's not really a danger, right. They do shock people with like little, very light kind of cattle prod versions at one point. Everyone else is miserable during this and complains constantly and is like horrified his things get gross. Lyddy just sits there quietly with like his legs folded and endures the whole thing with this almost beatific smile on his face. Here's the segment where the bug shower begins. Lyddy is just sitting there.

the truest g Gordon Liddy. He brags about his FBI driving skills and then gets in the truck and immediately crashes, just just instantly drives it into a building. And here's that clip.

what he sees his masculinity as heroism. I've been thinking about all these questions a lot as I've been going through these the episodes, and I keep coming back to I keep being reminded of and thinking of my grandfather in this, because I think the difference between the two men as I knew them says a lot about the difference between particularly these kind of like mainstream conservative ideas about what it means to be a man, what it

means to be brave. And these are not just conservative, these are deeply American ideas, deeply flawed ideas versus.

farming family. He is able to get a job with the Civilian Conservation Corps, which is part of the deal. FDR had established this organization to hire out of workmen and have them do stuff like this is where a lot of our parks come from, right is the CCC guys build them and stuff. You know, all these young men who didn't have anything else to keeps these guys fed,

keeps them from starving. My grandpa does this for years, and the money he gets, you know, every paycheck he would buy a cart and of cigarettes and he'd send every dime outside of that back to his family to help keep his brothers and his mom and dad fed. Nineteen thirty nine or so rolls around. He becomes very aware of Hitler and what's happening in Europe. He becomes convinced that the US is going to get into the war. He knows that his brothers will wind up fighting, and

as the oldest brother. He thinks that he should join first in order to hopefully try and spare them from some of that. So he joins the military a year or so before the US gets involved. He's one of these guys who I think people kind of naturally wanted

to follow, and so he becomes a drill sergeant. He spends most of World War Two training other men for combat, and repeatedly he feels that he needs to fight, especially again one of his brothers, his younger brother, the tallest of the family, winds up in a unit that's going to be seeing heavy combat. He's going to be part of the Normandy landing. So my grandfather pushes and pushes and gets assigned to a unit that's going to be part of the invasion. He gets pulled out of it

at the last minute. And the story I was always told is that when they were at one of the disembarkation points, it was really chaotic. My grandpa, being this kind of drill sergeant dude who feels this inherent responsibility towards other people, starts going around and like dressing everybody's lines, sorting out their gear, organizing things. He was just kind of that man. Compulsively, and one of the officers running the operation sees him doing this and is like, you're

not going anywhere, Garland. We need someone like you here. So he is forced to stay back home while his brother and a lot of his friends go over and a lot of them don't come back. His brother gets shot in the head outside of Bastone, survives, but is never really the same after this, and you know, he stays in the army. After World War Two, he winds up fighting in Korea. He's there, he was actually because the unit he was with was stationed normally in Hawaii.

He was on his way with my grandma and their kids to go live there. They were moving there, and he gets diverted as they're heading over. My grandma's left alone to take care of the family. He winds up spending however long basically the extent of the Korean War in Korea. And he starts off as he's a sergeant, I think maybe a staff sergeant when the war begins, and sergeants, you know, enlisted in officers are two different things. You don't go from enlisted to an officer normally because

they're two fundamentally different career tracks. My Grandpa goes starts the war as a sergeant and ends it as a major, which is like a higher up officer. This normally doesn't happen. What occurs during the war is that everyone above him dies so consistently that he winds up taking their jobs, and he gets given temporary rank that is then later made confirmed as permanent because he's good at it, and he is running field hospitals on the strength of an

eighth grade education. By the time the war ends, he won. I think it was either bronze or a silver star. The one thing I know that he really did specifically was this moment where there was a bunch of guys I think twenty or so US soldiers pinned down and injured underneath this bridge and they were trapped. There were two machine gun nests that had direct lines of sight and were just firing directly into these guys. We had very little cover. They didn't have artillery support on the line,

they didn't have air cover. There weren't really assets available in this area of the line of contact to get them out. So my grandpa grabs one of his friends and they drive a jeep through two machine guns firing at them. The jeep gets shot full of holes, they both get injured, and then while still under fire ode He described it as stacking them like firewood, twenty men into the back of this jeep and then drives them

out while getting shot the entire time to rescue them. Warrens, you know, he quits the military eventually and spends the rest of his career he runs all of the hospitals in Okinawa, Japan for fifteen years or so. And you know, these are like triosh units and stuff, so a lot of people who are really messed up wind up going there. And again all of this on like the strength of

an eighth grade education. And the thing, you know, we got to know a couple of the dudes who had served with my grandpa, you know again later on when they were all old men. There was one conversation that's really stuck with me, which is one of my guys, my Grandpa's, like the guys serving under him, was like, you know, Garland, how did you you know? The thing that was always interested it was always amazing to me, is no matter how bad shit got, you were never scared.

And my Grandpa's response was, oh, I was shitting my pants. The whole time. I just couldn't let any of you know how scared I was right. And I know that was long digression. I apologize. But the thing that makes me think of when I think about Lyddy.

was care. His entire life was an exercise in caring for the people around him and the weight of responsibility first to his brothers, to his family, to his country, to the world. You know, when he joined for World War Two, to the men around him. Throughout his period of service, he was never doing anything to be a hero. He was acting consistently and no matter what it cost him, to save lives, to protect people. And I think that's the difference between what heroism means to someone who has

been through some of the worst experiences. You can see what bravery means, what doing the right thing is versus what these children, and I include Joe Rogan as a mental child, believe courage is. Joe Rogan is so impressed, Wow, looked at him, me so tough. He can have bugs poured on him, and shit, fucking Joe wouldn't know courage if it jumped up and bit him in the fucking ass. Courage is taking care of people, even when it means

harm and sacrifice on your own behalf. Courage is not sitting in a fucking sphere while people pore bugs on you, and it's not sitting in a prison to protect Dick Nixon while you're family suffers. Anyway, that's my rant.

mostly out of the spotlight. He also lived, interestingly enough long enough to see one son, Raymond Liddy, sentenced to five years probation for storing a cash of child pornography in his Coronado home. So one of the suns he raised is a child porn Officionado. His other son is better Tom Liddy has a more auspicious career as a lawyer, where he represented Mericopa County during a twenty twenty lawsuit with the Trump campaign over what it claimed were falsified ballots.

Liddy succeeded in getting the case dismissed, which earned him to an avalanche of death threats from Trump people. So the Lyddies, the Liddies contain multitudes.

served in the Chinese military, probably was very close to where my grandpa was during several parts of the war. One of the things she said was like, well, I don't think he was a very good shot, And I was like, well, I guess I'm buck.