Also media, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, part three of our series on hl Hunt this week.
You are welcome, but you all should really thank Princess Weeks, our wonderful guest, for agreeing to sit in for a third episode in a marathon recording session. Thank you, Princess, you are braver than the troops.
Thank you.
I love to learn, and I honestly just genuinely love hearing about this stuff.
This is so fascinating, yeah and terrible.
Well, I love telling you about it. Let's start by talking about our boy HL Hunt's second family, right because I discussed how they he eventually moves them up to
New York and has a guy marry them. What I did not note because I went in and kind of added some stuff to the script once I realized that we're gonna wind up getting three parts, and I found something I'd forgotten to add that was in my notestock, which is that apparently Frannia, like when he marries her, she didn't even know his real first name, like he marries her under a fake name.
Oh my god.
And one of the notes that Hinderschott has in her book is that he probably she probably first starts suspecting that something's weird when they have their first child, who is a girl, just like his first child with Leida, and he names her Harold Dina, which is not he's not telling her his first name is Harold, but he names her after himself, and he names her he tries to name her Harold Dina God, which is like crazy, but I'm not Harold, that's not my name. Why are
you so? Why is that so important to you?
Man?
That's really weird, right, like be better? Yeah, no, that's just bizarre.
What an odd guy.
When she finds out, he tries to get her before he moves to New York. He tries to convince Frannia to move to Utah and come a Mormon so that they can legally quote unquote be big amous.
The role book that changes. The role book never changes. He's like, listen, babe, we can get a farm Mormons latter day.
Let's not go in. First off, your first wife wouldn't be in Utah. Second, you're not Mormon, but I could be.
And that's what.
Yes, it's when that stuff doesn't work that he like pays her to move to New York right and sets up trust for all the kids and finds someone to marry them and pretend to be the father. Now this is he's just going to get and have kids with a third woman after this. Uh, And I think he's I think actually this after light it dies that he has his third partner, but I'm not one hundred percent sure. But they wind up having several kids and he like
lives with them later in life in Dallas. Uh. But he doesn't ever marry her, right because he's wow, you know, he take.
His money, letting no broads take my money this.
Day at least, I'm not going to be bigamously married again. I'm sure he winds out. I think he does actually give them a lot of money, but yeah, he doesn't want to. He's not going to get bigamously married again. So the need to seem fair and unbiased meant that Smoot, you know, on the facts for him, his former FBI man host has to act like he respects the liberal lion on things, but he's always visibly more interested in
the conservative arguments. Another good example of that would come from one time Smoot gets asked, should we continue to handle Korea as a limited police action? You know this is right at the start of the Korean War, or should we, you know, put more troops into it right quote Smoot first dryly answered in the affirmative, quoting Adelaie Stevenson, Korea is the most remarkable effort the world has ever
seen to make collective security work. In choosing to repel the first armed aggression of the communists, we chose to make bitter sacrifices today to save civilization tomorrow. On the negative side, Smoot drew a portrait of a hypothetical soldier named Joe. It's cold up here in the winter, sometimes thirty below zero. If a boy cries, his tears turned to ice. And then there is the enemy, always the enemy, and the kind of fight that man fought centuries ago.
Knives and fists, fingers groping for eyes, and teeth seeking hot a soft spot in the neck. Maybe Joe will die in the slit trench, and maybe he will live, his hands sour and gummy with half digested rice gruel ripped out of the stomach of a bleeding bundle of rags and bones at his feet. So wild, wild, little rant to go on there.
Man, I was just like, get it, screenwriter.
Yeah, yeah, In one of my favorite lines from her book, Heather Hindershot writes, quote, Smoot could somehow snarl a feminate egghead in such a way that it sounded infinitely worse than son of a bitch. So he's like that, you know that kind of broadcaster. Now, The Facts for Him made itself a nexus of support for Joseph McCarthy, as Hunt sought to convince regular Americans that communists needed to
be rooted out. Joe guests on only one episode of the Facts for Him, but his researcher and future wife, Jeane Carer, worked the Facts for him as a staffer. Another early staffer was Robert e Lee. Not that Robert e Lee. Yeah, this Robert e Lee was a former FBI man who helped McCarthy compile his list of two hundred and five communists in the State Department. And there's so many FBI guys who work for the Facts Forum.
But there's like a joke in the FBI that like, that's the retirement plan is working for this fucking right wing billionaire. So things are going well. He's using the Facts Forum to support his buddy Joe McCarthy, But then Tailed Gunner, Joe makes the mistake of picking on the army in the nineteen fifty four Army. McCarthy hearings are a disaster for the man and for the broader cause
of being visibly crazy as an anti communist activist. The hearings were broadcast on television and will only ABC and the Dumont Network broadcast the hearings in full because they're thirty six days long. The bigger networks, CBS and NBC broadcast excerpts. And this actually the fact that these networks, because there's money in advertising now, they don't want to run just thirty six days of congressional hearings its way
is a huge waste of money. But because they decide to take excerpts and just run clips from it, this is actually the way the media covers the McCarthy hearings. Is one of the first cases of SoundBite journalism right, and sound bite journalism in a positive way, where previously the reporting on this would have just been kind of dull articles about another series of hearings about communism in the US that most Americans wouldn't have known there was
anything to be upset by. Because these guys journalists are looking for, like, well, what are the craziest things McCarthy's saying, What are the wildest moments from this? It makes it impossible to ignore, and they're playing this over and over again that like, no, this is actually a real problem, right, Like this guy's out of his mind and is just
attacking people for no reason like that. Really, the fact how this gets reported really helps to make that case, because these networks are looking for, like the most embarrassing and shocking moments and clip them out and playing them over and over again. In What's Fair on the Air, Hindershot writes Joseph Welch's famous rhetorical question, have you no
sense of decency? Sir at long Last, was not only televised live by both ABC and Dumont on Day thirty of the hearings, but also repeated dozens of times on radio and TV. That night. Following McCarthy's attack on General George C. Marshall, former President Harry S. Truman appeared on Edward R. Murrow's See It Now and expressed his own feelings about McCarthy. The man who made that attack isn't fit to shine General Marshall's shoes. Damn Yeah, it's a
pretty it's a pretty sick burn, actually he meant it. No.
That's interesting though, because it's like, I think when we were growing up and we learned about this air of mccarthy'sm but it seems so like inherently absurd and you're just thinking, like, how could that ever happen? Like isn't it just so obvious? And then you're here and you're like, well, yeah, people don't pay attention to the longer thing. They need the sound bites, sadly.
Yeah, they need the sound bites, right, and it like there's actually some benefits to that. It's not all downsides.
Now.
One of the things this does, the fact that this is kind of destroys McCarthy. It makes Hunt furious, and it makes him furious because he becomes convinced this evidence of the liberal media and the pernicious left wing bias within the media. Right, it's a communist organist, you know.
And this is kind of where the liberal media as a conservative bugbear starts, right, not just with Hunt, but it starts as a result in a big way, Like it's majorly supercharged by the reaction to the McCarthy hearings, and a Hunt is one of the people leading the charge and attacking the liberal media right and for HL.
Hunt One of the things I think is really important to point out today if you listen to like what Barry Weiss and like the free fucking Press people say, they all talk about Edward R. Murrow too, is like we need to get back to a time when newsmen were political and you know, they just were telling people the truth and they were trusted. And in those days, you know, Americans knew that they could rely on their you know, the people giving them the news, to not
just be in it for personal political gain. It wasn't just some like wokest bullshit. If Edward R. Murrow were reporting the day, they would call him woke. And I know that because they called him woke in the fifties like H. L. Hunting called him a woke leftist communist Infiltrader, And they called him it because he was deliberately and aggressively multicultural. Right to quote from Hinderschott's article, Murrow was fiercely patriotic. His America was an inclusive, democratic place in
which citizens rationally discussed their problems. When Murrow took Sea it Now's cameras to Korea for Christmas, in nineteen fifty two, he celebrated the sacrifices of the troops. Murrow also made a point of picturing an integrated platoon that included not only whites and blacks, but also a Chinese American and a Korean American, a gesture that surely rubbed some viewers
the wrong way. Right, and fucking they attack like the because the newsletter for Lifelines isn't subject to the fairness doctrine, they're able to be really political. And in that newsletter, Hunt calls him chow In Cronkite and calls Dan rather ho chi rather Right. Again, they are calling these guys fucking communists. Back then too, like Walter Cronkite was never seen as a totally unbiased and fair man by conservatives. They hated him. Just really want to make that point as clearly as I can.
It's so exhausting because and they keep telling us that these are the people that we can reach.
We just got to give them, just give them a little bit of more information.
It's like they have the information, they don't like it, they don't want it.
No, they thought Edward R. Murrow was a communist because he pointed out that there were fucking Chinese people in the US army, right, like, and.
Had been so for ages.
Yeah, Chinese asn't been here longer than some of these other than Trump's family.
These people have always hated this kind of shit, right, always hated the idea that we're multicultural country and anyone who celebrates it, even if they're celebrating it in the context of supporting the Korean War. Right, he gets called a communist.
And supporting the troops and like.
Right, doesn't matter, no communism. So this the fact that fucking Hunt goes so crazy after Mureau and it gets so pissed about the reaction to the McCarthy hearings gets him in trouble. Democratic congressmans start being like, wait a second, he's getting like public funding basically for making non partisan media,
and this is what they're calling non partisan congressman. When Congressman points out that Hunts tied to Joseph McCarthy, and there's complaints that the fact form is benefiting from its tax free status despite being very biased, and they start being investigations. Lee, his former staffer, was made FCC commissioner in nineteen fifty four, which further upset Democrats who are like, well, now his guy is controlling the FCC, so of course he won't get attacked. Now, what's weird is Lee's actually
a really fair minded FCC commissioner. He does a lot of stuff that pisses off the right. He's actually like surprisingly good at the job, I think and Hindershott proposes that the whole brujaja does more to make Hunt famous as a right wing crank than it does to actually help his shows. Right that like the fact that he's tied to Lee and the fact that like he's like, there's this uproar about it, he becomes known as being like a crank. Like, it does not spread. He doesn't
make his his ideas more popular. Now past this point because of how many people get pissed off about this, Hunt becomes increasingly famous, right, He's now someone who is known and talked about for his political activism. And he does not like this his stage fright right now because he's got stage fright right, putting himself out there right. In fact, like his as a young man, his stage fright is so bad that he wants swallows a bunch of ties to make himself sick to get out of
giving a speech when he's like a younger businessman. So the fact that like the eyes of America are now on him and he's being accused of partisan instigation fucks hunt up. And in nineteen fifty six he shuts down the Facts Forum to avoid controversy, not because he thinks he's done anything wrong, because he just doesn't like being under the gun like that, right, Like he's just anxious.
So yeah, he's a whiss. He does launch immediately another series called Answers for American This actually launched, I think a little before the Fact Form quits. It's a public service program that's broadcast on twenty two TV stations in three hundred and sixty radio stations broadcast live. This was a half hour panel discussion on ABC that featured a mix of liberals and conservatives. There's your liberal panel and your conservative panel. Repping the left was former Congressman George
Combs and New York You professor Charles Hodges. Opposed to them were William F. Buckley and a rotating guest. If you don't know William F. Buckley, he is like the proto Ben Shapiro. He's an essayist and a public debater who gets really famous going on TV to debate politely liberals right about the issues of the day. Right, That's how he's known, and that he is still to this day like liberal, like centrist liberal democrats. Buckley is like
the the ideal of the conservative intellectual. He's one of the good ones. Right, He's a he was not, but he's like respectable, Like this is how you should do it. Look at the respect he always showed the people he was debating alongside.
Their nostalgia goggles.
For him is always just like we used to be able to have these conversations in peace.
Yeah, and when it like, by the way, his son is like a major pro degia activist, Like these are not polite ever, but yeah, like that's that's his space in the American mind. Right now, you can already see in the way the show is set up how some of the bias creeps in. This is supposed to be two liberals and two conservatives. Seems non biased. But why is one of the conservatives always a rotating Is it?
Maybe because that makes the conservative seem more dynamic and the liberals seem like it's just these two old hokey college professor types. Right, Buckley also is a He's a great performer. William F. Buckley's one of the first media trained guys who exists. Right and the liberals that Hunt
picks are not super charismatic figures. As hinders shot rights comes did not farewell into the harsh studio lights, and although most of the participants chain smoked, it was only Combs to whom the smoke seemed to cling in a thick film in his three piece suit with carnation. Butenaiir he affused a stereotypical East Coast liberal establishment PERSONA Professor Hodges was articulate, but often came across as a cartoonish
liberal intellectual or worse, an old wind bag. Buckley spoke in easily digestible conservative soundbites such as we would rather die than be enslaved by communism. Right again, you can see the evolution how this is even a little more disguised as non biased while still pushing a very clear ideological line. And this is such a good idea. Fox News is going to rip this basic model off decades
later for their hit show Handity and Colms. The same basic premise supplies the esthetic of debate, but with the certainty that one side is going to win and the enemy is always going to look like a big stupid dope. And you also make sure that the conservative looks, you know, like young and put together, while the liberal looks like, you know, like a nerd. Right, I'm going a photo of Hannity and Combs for the viewers, but like Sean Hannity, the start of that fullhead of hair, you know, younger
guy Combs ball, you know, right. So, in the age of social media, this idea reached its final form with guys like Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk and I forget the name of the change my mind guy who would go on the college campuses with the you know whatever. Yeah, I forget a fucking yeah. They all got failed marriages except for well, no, I guess not. I guess they don't all have failed marriage. It's just that guy. I forget his name, but then I don't care to remember it.
But yeah, and you and in this instead of like you don't even have like the boring hockey professors, now you have like the liberals and left are represented by like this carousel of college kids that you pick out because they clearly don't have media training and they're not like good at debating with a professional broadcaster on television, right, Like.
It's like the more septem piercings, the better, speaking as the septum piercing.
Ef ye, are they a little high?
Good?
Get him in here? Yeah? You know who else is a little high? The sponsors that support this podcast. You know, every single one thing we guarantee is that every advertiser on this show. Just the second I said, just just sparked up a fat blunt, every single one of them, especially the Washington State Highway Patrol. If you hear that ad you know, the whole Washington State Highway Patrol is blazing a bone right now, no notes, and we're back
talking about the Facts Forum. Well that's dead. And anyway, two years after he kills the Facts for him, Hunt starts a new series, Lifeline. Now this is not He's not this time. He's not going to try to get the tax breaks by being balanced, right, he decides that's not worth, you know, the trouble. So I'm not going to claim that we're not. We don't have like a line. Instead, in order to avoid getting in trouble, I'm not going to reference political parties or political tendencies at all. I'm
not going to say the Democrats or the left. I'm not going to say Republicans or the right or conservatism. Instead, I'm going to have I'm going to have this fucking preacher guy come up here, the Reverend Wayne Poucher, who was If you want to know who this guy's background, he was a former campaign manager for Strom Therman's successful nineteen fifty four campaign.
Well he's conservative.
Yeah, So Poucher's first just kind of less aggressive than Smooth was. Right, He's he speaks more and about religion and stuff. He's not talking about the left being evil. Instead, he talks about everyone instead of referring to them like by their political terms. He calls them the mistaken, and he calls the good guys the constructive people. Right, And so he gets away from these like fairness standards by not talking about the left and the right but talking
about the mistaken and the constructive. And he speaks more like parables about like right and wrong. And it's very clear that he's talking about politics, but he's not using political terms, so it kind of slips by right and
in nineteen Yeah, it's really annoying. Now Hunt does an interview with Playboy in nineteen sixty six where he talks about why he's not using why this new lifeline doesn't use the term conservative, and why he doesn't like using that as propaganda anymore, and he says conservative is an unfortunate word. It denotes mossback, reactionary and old fogyism, right, So I don't want to seem like an old fogy. So I'm just gonna talk about the mistaken and the
constructive people right now. I think this is a mixed success. This this show is never very wildly popular for like legitimate reasons. A lot of people listen because sometimes it's the only thing on the air in a lot of areas, right, so it gets listeners from that. But it's kind of boring. It sounds much mine. It sounds a lot more boring. Smooth was at least exciting. He was aggressive, right, This dude, Poucher is like boring, and he mostly talks about God.
And he ends every broadcast with don't forget to pray. He makes that, he makes that his his his tagline, because that means Hunt can claim an exemption on the basis of running a religious organization for text purposes. It's a good shit, good shit. By all accounts, Lifeline was just as conservative as The Facts Forum, but a lot more boring because Hunt is scared of pissing people off. Now he's also making a lot of other propaganda. He is, by dollar amount, the number one producer of right wing
propaganda in like the fifties through the sixties. He is publishing newspapers too, and magazines, including the newspaper the magazine Human Events, which goes on to be pretty popular. He has a regular column in that he sells to a bunch of different newspapers that he writes called Hunt for Truth. Oh get it, you get it?
I hate that. That's a good name. I mean, I wouldn't watch it, but I know someone's dad.
Ye.
So the Nation summarizes the state of his propaganda operation in nineteen sixty four this way, hl Hunt, in addition to being very probably the richest man in America, is very probably the country's most powerful propagandist for the extreme right. The main vehicle for his brand of conservatism today is Lifeline, a radio program originating in Washington, DC and daily reaching an estimated audience of five million persons in forty five states.
It has heard over three hundred and thirty one stations, among which are twenty five percent of the nation's clear channel outlet. That's a lot just because again there's not much else to put on there, and this is something the conservatives will learn from. A lot of where we are right now politically is the result of the fact that for years, like twenty some years, liberals kind of
ignored talk radio. For the most part. There were a couple attempts to get into it, but the it was and it was just assumed that like, well, the fact like more people listen and trust like the news and you know, magazines and newspapers and TV news and you know, all of that is more liberal than it is conservative. And like talk radio was out there being the only thing in tens of millions of Americans ears for hours
as they're commuting driving all across the country. I grew up, I lost and listened so many hundreds hours of Michael Savage and Rustling them, all these guys, and it made a really solid core. People wonder like, why is there this core of like thirty percent of the country that will never reconsider supporting Trump. Oh, let's talk radio is a big part of why yeah, and Hunt isn't good.
He doesn't figure quite out how to make it work that way, but he's the first guy who really realizes why talk radio is valuable and everything that comes after is at least influenced by that.
And it also shows how the left is always really so supportive of institutions and like the power of institutions that they just won't even make a solid attempt because like it was how many years into yeah, yeah, yeah that, like liberals were like, oh, we should have a Joe Rogan thing. It's like a podcasting thing or YouTube and then Twitch it's like, oh, we should we should finally have someone in this space, and it's like, yeah, tell me you invested in such.
You can influence people's politics by making them listen to a crazy guy for hours. Maybe you should have your own crazy asshole that people like to listen to.
I don't know, or someone entering that work.
I'm not a big we need a Joe Rogan of for fucking the Democratic Party. It just doesn't work that way. You're never going to succeed doing that. If you're just like, let's make our own Democratic Joe, you're always going to fail. If that's how you think about it. But what you do need is like fuck and people who are crazy popular that a lot of folks listen to, who are talking about politics in a way that is like usable
to you. And when you see people like that, instead of discarding them and like hating them and running away from them, you should try to find ways, like the smart strategies to try to find ways to benefit from that and to like make them might make that useful to you, as opposed to pretending nobody cares about this stuff and they're just assholes talking on the internet. They
are just assholes talking on the internet. But unfortunately it matters right exactly, I say, as an asshole talking on the internet, Hey I do it.
That's my full time job on YouTube.
It's like, I definitely think it's so frustrating because like the right, what it is able to do with having so much young talent is really have like a lot of hyper visibility in those spaces whereas like you know, you can only be academic for so long, and it's time period where like no one wants.
To read right exactly now. The Lifeline Advisory board included the CEO of Sears, Robert Wood and John Wayne, but it also hosted several ministers. Yeah, John Wayne, baby, I'm helping helping to shape the future at top radio. The religious right was not a thing yet in an organized political way. That doesn't start until like the start of the seventies yet, I mean, yeah, that's not really a massive Again, Hunt is going to be one of the people who helps push that, even though he is not
really religious and doesn't really care about that stuff. He is again one of the earlier conservatives to see, oh you know what if I marry my feelings on tax policy and like stopping people from voting with all of these like weird religious conservative like bug bears like abortion, I can make those people support my crazy tax shit and use that as a political weapon too. Right. So again Hunt foresees this. He tries to use Christianity to
spread his own anti government message. His first wife, Lyda, dies in the fifties, and after he gets with his well, she's not really a wife, but he joins her Baptist church. His pastor, Reverend Chris Well, was a howling reactionary. In nineteen sixty, Hunt printed up an anti Catholic sermon chris Well had written and handed it out at the DNC
because JFK is running for president. It included this line, the election of a Catholic as president would mean the end of religious liberty in America, like you know, the thing that happened. Hunt dedicated numerous columns to Kennedy, who he warned would sell the nation out to communists and or the Pope. His real issue was very funny to me, is that like Moor and Or, he doesn't hate JFK because like there, you know, JFK is more of like
a liberal progressive and he's very conservative. He hates JFK specifically, and the Catholic stuff is like he's using that because he thinks it'll be useful getting other people to hate JFK. He hates JFK because JFK supports reviewing the oil depletion Allowance and changing it to end that loophole that lets oil men not pay taxes.
Right, and there it is, you're gonna say, because it's so hot, and he was like, I can't have that.
But then it's his only real political issue is the oil depletion allowance. Everything else, all the cultural stuff that he talks about. I mean, he does believe in the anti communism, but ninety percent of his propaganda is about keeping the oil depletion allowance. Everything else, like the working with the religious right, it's all to protect the oil depletion allowance because he loves that shit.
He's like, I can excuse communism, but I draw the line at my oil allowance, me paying.
Taxes per the nation. When Hunt talks of his country's troubles, he does not always sound funereal, But when he discusses the oil depletion allowance and possible legislative threats to it, his face takes on the stricken blankness of one who has just heard the last trump of depletion allowances for all natural resources. He said recently, but without the depletion allowance for oil, we are utterly ruined. Again, you're the richest man on earth. You would just have to pay taxes.
He's got some support the roads and stuff. Yeah, he's got so many kids. This is why Hunt promptly had two hundred thousand reprints of Chris Wall's sermon made and mailed out, after which he sat back and hoped to watch a wave of aroused Protestantism wash Kennedy out of the running right like that's that's that's at least as far as the nation is concerned, Like that's what his goal is here. It doesn't work.
Sadly Nixon was on the docket.
Yeah, it really What happens is this just pisses people off. There's a bunch of editorials about like this guy's trying to force Kennedy out because he doesn't want to pay taxes, and it just kind of pisses every and and a lot of people get angry that like he's trying to make people hysteric about an anti Catholic. He's trying to use it. He's trying to like rustle up a bunch of anti Catholic bigotry, so who doesn't have to pay tax Like, people recognize this and call it out, and
it pisses folks off. It draws the Senate's attention again too. They point out that like, hey, this flyer you distributed the DNC, it's actually a federal crime to distribute anonymous circulars after the start of a campaign, to influence a political campaign in this way, and you did not note at all who paid for this. You committed a crime.
There's an uproar, there's a Senate Subcommittee investigation. Hunt just hides, like he panics, and he like basically goes on the lamb a little bit, and he just pretends he can't make the meeting. He's like hiding, So Chris Well has to take it on the chin in the Senate Subcommittee meeting and like actually talk to Congress, and Chris weall like pretends he doesn't know anything about Hunt's money and stuff.
When Hunt finally surfaced again, he admits that he paid for the leaflet, but he's like, oh, I didn't do it to hurt JFK. I did it to help lbj's campaign because I'm really pro LBJ Texas.
That's all.
That's the only reason I did it. He also claimed that I didn't run away to have being investigated. I ran away because I had a book to write for the good of the nation. Like I come up with that idea of those book that's really going to change everything. So I was just like writing. I just didn't I couldn't make it to Congress. Sorry about that, guys. Now, he did write a.
Book, the forty eight Laws of Power.
Yeah, forty No, it's even weirder, it's even sillier. So In nineteen sixty, he publishes his first novel, Alpaca, which is a work of right wing utopian fiction. The book took place in an ideal society that followed Hunt's plan for a wealth based voting system Hindu Schott describes in his perfect World, political discussion could only take place via the printed word. Discussing politics on radio and TV, or speech making before an audience of more than two hundred
people was outlawed as inflammatory. It was widely reported that Hunt had hired someone to write the romantic parts of Alpaca, as he was only interested in the politics. When the book breaks from political exegesis, we find our right wing lovers spouting inane dialogue such as I am putty in your hands. I needed to read this book one of these days, Oh my god. Yeah, And there's like a bunch of cool stuff in there. The book was published by H. L. Hunt Publishing, a company he had created
to publish phone books. So just as like a side business, he has a phone book company that he has published his shitty novel. That writer for That Nation piece notes that by the mid sixties, a lot of Dallas newsmen had come to believe that Hunt had based the protagonist of his shitty novel on an idealized version of himself. And here's one relevant line from the novel, And this is about the protagonist. He had burning convictions, but there were few in al Paka. He told himself who could
agree with him? Right? Like he's this iconic class genius rebel, and other people just don't see how brilliant he is. You know, it's very much Hunt thinking of about himself.
Yeah, he's like, I got to write someone who's so smart.
Yeah, the smartest man alive. The article goes on to describe the model constitution that Hunt presents in his novel, quote a constitution that gives each person and a quota of votes based primarily on how much he pays in taxes. There are other ways of getting votes under the Hunt plan. If you are old enough to draw a retirement pay but refuse to accept it, you get two extra votes. If you are a government worker and refuse to accept more than fifty percent of your pay, you get one
extra vote. On the other hand, anyone receiving welfare or sick pay from the government gets no vote at all.
Oh, okay, no no one, no.
No, just rich guys get a lot of votes.
That's crazy.
Now. A book reviewer interviewing Hunt says to him after reading his book, it's a kind of fascist democracy if you get what I mean, and Hunt later in the interview says, you're the only one who understood what I was getting at. I think it's in reference to another line, but it's it's very telling.
He's like, yeah, i'd see me.
So Hunt sends copies of his stupid book to every sitting congressman, along with a number of foreign heads of state, and quote many colleges. He brags that he has a sequel planned which would present an even better constitution, as long as you could just get a couple of weeks to finish it. And he never publishes this book, but the working title was your Topia.
Not Outpacka.
He does eventually do a sequel to Alpaka, but he doesn't publish your Topia. Great stuff, great, very sixties.
You have your own publishing house and you still can't finish a second novel.
Nah, No, man, it's hard. Look, hey, I'm morgan on that one myself. It's tough. You know what else is hard? It's hard for me when I see people not giving the proper amount of respect and love to the products and services that support this podcast. Why don't we all just think about them and how nice they are and also listen to their ads for a second. We're back.
So one of Hunt's dearest beliefs is that letters to the editor are the part of the paper that people read most often, but like just skim over the other articles. They want to read letters to the editor because people have a natural curiosity over what other ordinary people have to say. That's hl Hunt's like most deeply held belief and he's not an ordinary person. But he also thinks that if you write a letter to the editor, people
assume you are. And so for most of his public life he's writing like, sometimes more than a dozen letters to the editor per day, and he has a small army of secretaries who will mimiograph them and will mail them to hundreds of newspapers. So he just has like a rant about politics or fucking taxes or kids these days, and he'll write a letter to the editor and he'll send it to every newspaper he can think of, or his secretaries can think of to get it printed. Right.
I'm sometimes I'm so glad I don't have money, because this is like, this is the impulses of like me writing to like teen volk be like, you don't understand the sexiest man in America is not Blake Shelton.
Yeah, d're teen vogue. There are too many states, please eliminate three. I am not a crank, yeah.
Exactly, Hunt, that guy, I'm a hip kid.
Yeah, yeah, I'm cool. He thinks that like this will this will really get Americans, trick them into believing my politics. They'll just read all these letters to the editor and assume I'm a normal guy, and they won't be able to they won't be able to catch it. Now, this leads me to a very funny quote from Heather Hindershot's book quote respectable businessmen gave money to the causes in which they believed Hunt wouldn't even give to local Dallas charities,
much less political campaigns. Asked to contribute to diabetes research, Hunt responded, as summarized in an FBI memo, that society would be better off if persons who were permanently disabled or physically incapacitated and unable to financially care for themselves were let to die rather than to be a burden on society what drink Okay, yeah he.
Loved he loved Buck v.
Bell.
He was like he sure did.
Uh yeah, yeah, he's he's like just a just the kind of piece of shit you would imagine like perfectly. So now I will say this is all frustrating, Like the fact that he's trying to brute force his horrible, genocidal politics into the world is disgusting. And there's like there's so many good quotes, like one of the Nation. He's like, I'm slow, but I'm the best writer I know. Like he's certain about that, even though again he's not he's not great, right, Like he's not a particularly good writer.
And editors of these newspapers that he's trying to like get letters to kind of call him on his bullshit. One Texas editor told The Nation Hunt earns in one hour about twenty thousand to twelve thousand dollars. That's what I earn in a year. He probably spends an hour dictating each letter that comes in here. I like to cut them in half because that means I'm putting about five thousand dollars of Hunt money in the waste basket.
Bars.
Yeah. I love that, Yeah, I love it. That's funny. Yeah. So in nineteen fifty nine, Hunt started a health food and supplement business. Ah, you got it. If you're a right wing he's like the first of these though. You know, he really is.
A trailblazer, Like all these bitches are his sons, Like truly.
What's interesting is he invins I didn't realize this. He invents the Alex Jones strategy where he has his like right wing propaganda station and he invents a supplement in health food business and it's the only advertiser on his radio show and TV shows, so it exists to sell the products right, right, So the sole advertiser of Lifeline is his health products business, and his favorite product is gastro Magic, an anti gas pill that he was so
proud of. His office is described by that the nation author is basically empty, but there's a plaque in it made with the letter from a happy customer being like, thank you for making these gas pills. That's like the only decoration he has.
He's like, this is my true print and Joy, not one of my kids.
True bride and Joy, not any of my fifteen kids, Fuck those kids.
This is my only child.
Yeah, it's so fun I want to quote from Heather again because she's gonna line about this. One politician was lured to his office expecting a contribution, but left only with an ample supply of Hunt's gastro Magic indigestion pills. Another, George Herbert Walker Bush, met with Hunt in nineteen sixty two hoping for a contribution to his congressional campaign. His heart must have skipped a beat at the end of the meeting when Hunt discreetly gave him a bulging and envelope.
It was filled with Lifeline pamphlets.
That's funny.
Oh, it's so funny.
Oh my god, that's such a control.
He's such a weird crank about his health food business, which again he's crazy rich from oil. This is not a meaningful amount of money, but it's clearly his passion. Like one of the things he's famous for. He drives himself to work even when he's the richest man alive, and he's covered his car in bumper stickers advertising Lifeline and like his gastro magic pills, like a crazy man. And he'll he's try because he's like this, will advertise it, People will buy it if they see it on my car.
The Nation notes sometimes he circles the block an extra time before parking to let Dallas pedestrians have one more look. And he's like making his his his his employees put ship on their cars. He's like, no, you got to help the business.
He's his own.
He's he's active, like he's like a poor guy. He's so funny.
It's giving.
I'm selling my mixtape out of my trunk, Like what.
Are God doing right? He's acting like a broke dude who gets to do an MLM. It's really funny. And he's the richest man alive.
Like he look like he would be a modern day like Hagarly Yeah, m yeah.
He's a Hunt in the feet.
You're feeling a little ghasty right now. Don't worry, guys, I got you, I gotcha.
I have this really great supplement. You would only have to subscribe, like, oh, I know, we haven't talked since high school.
But literally, and he is he is always when he's meeting with people, weirdly who always want his money, he'll just start going on these rants about his different products. One attorney who worked with him, he says that like as soon as Hunt walks in the room, he runs up and shakes his hand and says very quickly, Hello, I am hl Hunt, the world's richest man. And these are gastro magic which I make, so they must be good.
Try some. It's just like crazy person stuff, dude. So one of Hunt's kind of downfall moments is that, as I noted, he doesn't like Kennedy, right, he Lifeline attacks him. He attacks him in his column Hunt for the Truth, and he's like trying to drum up like religious hatred to attack him.
Right.
He's also supporting Barry Goldwater, you know, that's he loves Barry Goldwater. But so unique, as you all know. On November twenty second, nineteen sixty three, Bernard Montgomery Sanders shot President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. Right, And this happens to happen like right after he'd run like a column and episodes of Lifeline talking about like the need of the Second Amendments so that like people could kill
government leaders who try to oppress them. So he's just put this out and then Kennedy gets shot and the FBI questions him and members of his family. He's like, if you go into like there's a lot of conspiracies that put Hunt at the center of like the conspiracy to kill Kennedy. There's a couple of weird things in there. For one thing, the guy who kills Oswald, Jack Ruby,
had Hunt's name and his address book. Although Ruby doesn't seem to have liked Hunt because Ruby was a real far right crank and a Hunt is like just in it for his own weird right wing beliefs. So I don't think like Ruby doesn't actually like him very much because he's not a team player basically. So there's a lot of allegations, but the family received so many death threats from these in fact that like the FBI gives them like a security detail at one point because people
are so convinced he's involved. He gets weirder and crazier as he ages his Dallas I even mentioned this. His Dallas home. I think it's in white Rock Lake is a replica of George Washington's Mount Vernon estate that's five times as big. Like that's his house.
Oh my god, no daddy issues up the butt.
The mother of all daddy issues. And he's got this fucking huge, crazy rich man house with like a billboard that he puts on his front lawn for Lifeline, and he has this up in his fancy neighborhood until the neighbors can plain, and at which point he replaces it with a crude hand painted sign advertising Lifeline. Oh that's the strangest vibes.
Like he's a like you selling lemonade.
Yeah. Now. Despite putting more money into right wing media than anyone, Hunt's influence falls rapidly in the late sixties from its peak in the mid fifties, partly because he refuses to work or cooperate with anyone and has no interest in being part of the conservative movement. As such, he wants conservatives to agree with him because he tries
to be a kingmaker. He fancies himself won and he becomes a major backer of Barry Goldwater, and when Goldwater is just that has the shit kicked out of him. In nineteen sixty four. One reason why, according to the media, because there's a bunch of articles about like why didn't
Goldwater do better? And one reason that's posited by a lot of pundits is that hl Hunt kind of poisoned the campaign right, not just Hunt, because the John Birch Society is also behind Goldwater, and people don't like them. But it gets to the point where, according to Heather Hindershot quote, even the rumor of an association with Hunt could be damning for a candidate, especially after Hunt was investigated in connection with the Kennedy assassination. And yeah, like
it's it's you know, good stuff. His sons are kind of involved in his downfall as a political influencer too. His son, Bunker Hunt, had financed a John Birch Society newsletter that had attacked Kennedy in really vicious terms and was made a lot of people suspicious, and then one of Jack Ruby's friends. The reason why Ruby had Hunt's name is that he had approached Lamar Hunt to try to get a job in a bowling alley that Hunt owned. So his fail sons are part of why he stops
becoming as influential. His attempts to co opt Christianity for his own ends are also way too clumsy to work very well. His daughter June, who later becomes like an influential Christian media figure, even attacks him for his hypocrisy and constant cheating. As the story goes, Hunt kind of snaps back at her, I'm not Christian, I don't have to go by Christian ethics, and then he sends her
ass to boarding school. When his other daughter, Swanee, makes similar complaints about his womanizing, he tells her King Solomon had seven hundred wives and that's in the Bible.
Wow.
So great guy, great parent, good job. As the seventies Dawn Hunts in his eighties. He continues to wear the same blue suit every day, but he only dry cleans the pants to save money, so eventually the top and bottom are totally different colors. Such a freak.
He doesn't have to live like this, literally, Such an odd guy.
So his son Hassey, who he talked about, never recovers from that mental break. He's ill and Hunt spends Hunt keeps his He's the only of his children that Hunt has a picture of in his office, I think, because he feels really bad about this, and he spends a lot of his life desperately but incompetently trying to help Passy to get better. The nation rights Hunted sought various magic cures for the boy. One day, the answer was valium,
the next prostitutes. Finally, a lobotomy took the edge off of Hassie's violent fits, but just a bit so just a great dad, just so, just a great dad. Triple threat, triple threat father. He develops increasingly strange health beliefs as he aged and became an almost religious advocate of creeping. Svie's going to show you a picture of this, because anytime anyone asked him, he would get down to demonstrate this exercise technique that he's fallen in love with that's
basically a crab walk. He gets down on his knees and his hands and knaves and just like walks across the ground. He fucking And there's like there's like a weird kind of like yoga component to it, Like he must have found this in some book or another. But he is obsessed with creeping. The New York Times quotes him as saying creeping is probably the second best exercise in the world, next to swimming. It's perfect.
Oh all right, he's a creeper. He's a super creeper.
Yeah, yeah, fucking he loves creeping. He lives in his last years with his second family in that Mount Vernon home or third family I think actually, and he spends a lot of time promoting health foods. He's got like a vegetable garden, on his property and he eats mainly these along with he has like a very weird diet. He's a lot of just like bleon cubes, I think, just like straight like flavor. So he's a freak. He's
a weirdo cool guy. Now, as I noted, his sons, especially Nelson Bunker Hunt, are real anti strong anti communist. Is Bunker is going to be a big George Wallace supporter and a fascist like he's a real hardcore segregation as fascist, giant piece of shit. Hunt also supports Governor Wallace's campaign, but he dies on November twenty ninth, nineteen seventy four. At the time of his death is as valued at two billion dollars, which is split between his
two surviving ex wives, fifteen children, and many grandchildren. There are years of probate battles, I'm sure. As a note about his shitty ass sons, you should know one of his sons, Lamar Hunt, founds the AFL, the American Football League, and he's a major figure in professional tennis and soccer in the US. So that's where the AFL comes. And I want to quote from Hinderschot's article One last Time, Herbert and Bunker Hunt had been caught attempting to corner
the world silver market. Could the crooks really have thought that no one would notice an ongoing attempt to purchase all the silver in the world. They were also entangled in a wire tapping caper. It's wire tapping over like their dad's. Like this is as a result of like the fight for over, like his will and probate. Wow, and yeah, Bunker is a hugely successful oil man. He's becomes a major John Birch donors with his oil money he helped, Like his company finds oil deposits in Libya
and I think Pakistan. I think they're also involved in Saudi Rabied it like they are a lot of like Arab oil in Middle Eastern oil, like his company is involved in like getting the rights to and selling. He also gives a quarter of a million dollars in cash in a briefcase to George Wallace as a rainy day fund. And he tries to bribe Curtis LeMay to become Wallace's running mate, or he puts up like a trust fund
to convince Lamay to become Wallace's running mate. So he just loves all of the worst fascist Bunker Hunt giant piece of shit. So yeah, that's the end of Hunt's life. One of his long he's probably his biggest ongoing contributions to popular culture is that Bunker Hunt is such a giant, famous piece of shit for all of his criminal activity and weird business activity and oil money that he inspires. The show Dallas. Dallas is based off of the Hunts. Yes, Jr.
Is based off of Bunker Hunt. Oh damn Like heavily based off of Bunker Hunt, right, in part because he gets in trouble for committing a bunch of crimes. Right, Yeah, so at least we get to show Dallas.
You know, I'll take it. Who'sha Jr. Was very big for our parents.
Yeah, Bernie Sanders, by the way, did a lot of people don't know that anyway? Princess, how are you feeling at the end of these episodes?
I feel a great There's nothing like knowing the origins of the war crimes that are being put out into the world every day.
Yeah, yeah, it's good. Yeah, war crimes, crimes against truth, all this good stuff.
Thank you so much for all of that amazing effort. This was a great three part thank you.
Part of We're just happy to have you here, you know, happy to have you here talking about this real piece of shit and his strange beliefs about the.
World at his strange pills and his strange fifteen children.
Wow.
Anything you want to plug at the end to your princess?
Oh yeah, just if you want to see some other funyappers.
I have a YouTube channel.
I talk about poulp culture, history, all kinds of fun things.
And just happy to be here. Thank you guys so much for having me.
Excellent sweet thanks for coming along everybody. Yeah, all right, folks, we're done.
I'm gonna go.
Pet dogs, bye bye.
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