Who media, Oh, it's behind the bastards?
Why why do you hate it? Sobe? It was a jealousy say what you will and woke me the fuck up.
Some of us, SOB are broadcasting professionals like g Gordon Liddy and thus have mastered the art of using our voice like an instrument. You know, I'm like, uh, like Rock Mononov, right, but with with my instead of whatever Rock Moninov used. Because I don't actually know what that guy did. I have my voice and a microphone.
You know, I'm not even gonna dignify that with our response.
You know what I'm gonna dignify with the response Andrew, what strikes still going on? Although I guess it's theoretically possible it's over by the time these episodes.
Drop, tiny chance it has not. But if if I'm a betting man and I very much am, all of my money is going on, strikes still going on.
Hey, everybody Robert here. Obviously since we recorded this episode, the strike has ended more or less as of about like a week after we recorded this, So Andrew has sent me all of his money. He is now destitute and living in utter desperation. He does have a GoFundMe, which you can donate to, but all of the money will go to me per the terms of this bet. Never make a bet on a podcast, folks, deeply serious stuff. If the strike is over by the time these episodes drop,
we will just we will just unbleep this plug. Hey everyone, Robert here, since the strike is over and we can plug things again, go watch go watch the Foundation on that Apple thing or torrented torrented ideally, you know Apple's got enough money. But it's a real good show, a lot of lee Pace. Also, speaking of Lee Pace, watch Halt and catch Fire, equally good show, which is the show I'm most looking forward to once TV comes back. So, speaking of shows, I'm looking forward to, you know, Andrew.
The last time we had a strike like this, a guy named Donald Trump sold a TV show, a reality show because those are still allowed, and started his rise to power. And I'm kind of planning to do the same thing with my reality show, super Soaker Full of Piss.
Now.
The premise of the show, for those of you who are new listeners, is that I fill the reservoir of a classic super Soaker and a CS thirty two hundred Yeah yeah, high that's the one with the backpack, if you remember the one like the rich kid would have. Yeah, like it's the big one, and I feel that all the way up to the top. And I'm going to promise you all here right now, purely my urine, right not a drop of anyone else's. Then drive around Rodeo Drive.
The Robert promise is at at not just bullshit, not like you're gonna drink so much that the urine is going to be at a concentration that it's not that bad. This is primo, Like, you know.
Urine, absolutely nothing, nothing but red Bull and Sapporo beer, you know, the two finest quantities that you can make this out. So once I've loaded this sucker up, we're gonna go cruising on Rodeo Drive looking for anyone who seems famous. That was the initial plan. But then I came across a great article about filmmakers who never won
the Academy Award for Best Directory. Andrew Orson Wells never got the acade Kira Kurrasawa never got the Best Director Award, Hitch Surprising Kubrick, Sergio Leone, you know, Spike Lee, Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, a lot of greats, and that made me think if those guys can fail to get the Oscar for Best direct, maybe I can can win it. So now, super Soaker full of Piss I'm planning on releasing as a fill, you know, a major motion picture.
The goal here is that I'm going to track down Martin Scorsese and just blast him right in the mouth with a super soaker full of urine. You know, I really think that's that's the key to building myself a rep in Hollywood.
Yeah, the bad boys of document true super.
Answering, answering the question we all have. What happens if you blast Martin Scorsese in the mouth with with lukewarm urine? You know we'll learn Well, I promise you that, I promise you that he won't get away from us, folks.
And you're not doing any aftermarket mods on this effort.
No, no, no, no, this is a classic stop cost me a lot of money. Yeah, so, Andrew, when last we left off our hero, the g Man Gordon lyddy uh he it had just started in a very serial killer like fashion, murdering small animals in order to in order to prepare for war so that he could kill men without thinking this is almost honestly like it's worse to be like a serial obviously, to like torture animals
as a serial killer. But there's something about what he's doing that's more unsettling, and I think it's pregnant that it proceeds more with it, like someone who's like a serial killer, that's like, oh, there's some like something's wrong, right, something's wrong with that person, you know, like that they that they because like people don't like most people love like a gut.
Reaction to that.
Yeah, with Lyddy, what he is doing, this awful thing he's doing, proceeds directly from a very socially reinforced impulse, right that, like there's nothing better in our society, there's nothing more respected than being a soldier, right, And that's that's like why he wants to do this, And so I guess that's why I find it like so off putting. Obviously it's off putting. He's like killing animals in a fucked up way.
It's like serial killer shit. But it doesn't seem like a compulsion. It just seems like he's, like I guess his version of masculinity required him to do this and he is like analytically trying to turn himself into a serial killer.
Because that will make him like he imagines, you know, the military heroes and his family's past and like that he's his mom is telling about. He thinks it will turn him into one. Right, I guess that's what'st That's what's most surprisingly unsettling to me, And this is that like this comes out of his belief that these men he revers already have this capability, right because he's weak and broken, he has to kill dozens of chickens, like in order to gain this capacity for himself. That he
thinks that like strong men are born with. That's that's the thing that's off putting.
Maybe that The other thing that's like upsetting is like it's you know, like you know he doesn't, but you almost feel like he could put it together, that this is what's wrong with society, Like, yeah, you know he almost could be Like the fact that I feel the need to do this means there's something wrong with who I idolize. Yeah, but no, yeah, like he has all the pieces, he has all the pieces of hey, maybe I can break this cycle, and yet he's like, no, I have to force myself to be part of this.
Yeah, like he's he's born a little more gentle than the generation before him, and he sees this as such a failing that he has to soak himself in blood to overcome it and do even more irrational things. Andrew, let's get back into it. So I'm ready speaking of
things that scare g Gordon Liddy, thunderstorms and electricity. He develops kind of a phobia of electricity, so in order to cocker this, he climbs to the top of a power line tower and then crawls out on the arm so that he can grasp of a wire far enough that his like hair will stands on its.
End in reaction to the current. Okay, do you know where he is? He's like if like Unbreakable was like a comedy, it's about the dumbest motherfucker who happens to be invincible and just like doesn't realize it and keeps on essentially commits suicide.
Like oh yeah, there's so many little boys with the same thing going on who just got fried into a crisp atop of power tower. This is actually not enough for him. He feels like this is too tame. So when he gets home, he strips the insulation from a lamp's power cord and then plugs it in and holds it electrocuting himself.
Again.
This boy, Like, seriously, we're joking, Like this boy did need medical help, right, this is like a problem. I don't know what you call this. I'm not a diagnostician, but this is a thing that someone needs like treatment for. This is a serious issue.
You know what now that because you're but like everything that is the antecedent of this, You're like, I see it so clearly from like the war generation, and like how they I'm just like, you know, maybe he is clearly an outlier now that I see in many ways, he's clearly an outlier, and maybe we were really just saved by a full generation of uh, you know, you know numerous United States fascists. Yeah, because physics works.
Yeah, yeah, a lot of the other guys. Like the reason they didn't quite have the critical mass to take over completely is that most of them didn't survive going through what Liddy did.
Yeah, yeah, having fascism brain. Really that's like like landing at Normandy level.
So when he was an adolescent, his dad, his little league team one season, and Gordon was so obsessed with impressing him that when he gets hit with the he gets hit with the face in the ball during a game, and he stops being able to see out of that eye for a while. But instead of like being like I have been injured and like he he does he pretends nothing has happened and he keeps playing.
Now.
What's interesting to me is that in his autobiography he does he writes that he recognizes this later as like irrational and dangerous, right quote with a convert zeal. I became contemptuous of anyone who didn't want to play hurt, having found that fear can be defeated by head on attack. It never occurred to me that the reluctance of others to play hurt might be based on common sense rather than fear. So there is a little bit of like, oh, you know what, that was actually kind of bad?
Okay, here's what I really want to know now, And I guess this is like almost findable but not. Which is what was the author's draft of this passage? I would love to know.
I would love to know was this like the editor be like, Lyddy, you got to stick something in here, so people don't think like.
You're like, I don't see in the first draft of this book.
Now I do I do want that. I want that from his papers. Yes, yeah, so there is something like impressive about the tenacity and mania with which he pursued his goals of what he called self improvement. Uh, you will probably not be surprised to learn that g. Gordon Lyddy was the weird kid at his school, and like all weird kids, he had bullies. As an adult, he wrote that he accepted being bullied as a natural and normal thing quote, so long as it didn't get out
of hand. Now, I don't believe he's telling the truth here because of what he writes next. I believe that being bullied bothered him more than he would ever admit, which is not there's nothing wrong with that, and it's a lot of people like it's bad to get bullied. It's a thing that can stick with you for a long time. But he could not because he's this like he becomes this right wing media figure. He can't admit that, like, yeah, I got bullied is a kid and that like fuck
me up. You know, he can't say that, right because they they have to be like, no, it's good for kids to get smacked around a little bit by the other kids, you know, makes them stronger, Right, they need that.
Yeah.
Yeah, So he has to because he's cooked up this persona with himself. He's got to he has to include in his book that he's fine with being victimized to what he calls a reasonable level. But the story he tells next makes it clear, like the story he tells next is not the story of a kid who was fine with being a reasonable amount of bullied, and like it is the story of a kid who is like
pathologically victimized and snaps. So the thing that provokes him into violent revenge, which is the story we're about to tell, is not targeted bullying, which I find interesting it is he describes this as like at my school, there's like a hazing tradition. Right when it's a boy's birthday, another group of boys will like surround him and punch him each well of them will like punch him in the
bicep right for each year of his age. Right, so he get like punched a bunch in the arm, right, And you get punched a bunch like that, you know it hurts. After a while quite badly. They call these punches like bunnies. Each is delivered with a protruding knuckle under the bicep of the board receiving it.
Oh, this is Filipino martial arts, some limbs instructions.
It's a lot fucked up. Yeah, it's like this is like and I know it's a little fucked up. It's like a pretty I've heard of stuff like this, you know. When I was in played football in fucking middle school, we had like some hazing stuff that's not wildly different from this. Definitely an unpleasant thing.
To go through.
I think he was really scared of this, but he describes it as like a serious danger. It was painful and paralyzing, making retaliation impossible. And since he's short, he decides that, like, I can't defend myself from this, but it's unacceptable, so I have to turn my body into a trap.
Quote.
I was approached in the locker room. I removed my suit coat and feigned unawareness until they grabbed my arms. Then I ripped my arms up and away. My would be tormentors screamed as the flesh of their palms and fingers was lacerated. That morning, I had taken lenks of adhesive tape and pressed thumb and carpet tax alternatingly into the sticky side, so that the sharp points stuck out the dry side. The carpet tacks were longer and especially nasty,
but they had narrower heads. The thumb tacks, with their broad heads, added stability under lateral stress. That done, I wrapped the tape around my arms carefully, so I looked like a porcupine with short, very sharp quills. I wore an old white shirt I could throw away, and I packed her replacement in my school bag. The device worked well, though there was less blood than I had anticipated. Come on, I shouted after them, try it again, shocked and in pain.
They would have none of it, backing away from me with incredulous stairs.
Oh my god. Oh, now, like he's like a cartoon hedgehog.
Yeah, he is is like cartoon and it's also like, I'm not gonna say it's like bullyings obviously bad. What he has described here is like hazing, and not like extreme sounding hazing.
Right.
I do think it is a little bit wild to go with, like, yeah, this hazing thing where on your birthday you get punched in the arm, you know, once for every year. I was like, Okay, not the worst thing in the world. I am going to respond to that by taping pootpins, by turning myself into a head shock it really, I guess it's.
Also like the like trap of it.
Yeah, it's so unsettling, yes Na, the amount of like labor and forethought.
I don't know.
It's just like, if he was a different guy, you could view this as kind of cool, especially if and maybe maybe this is a cooler story, right, maybe he did get bullied a lot as a kid and this was like an act of justified revenge. But he doesn't tell us that right the way he describes this as like I was not really bullied, This was a thing that every kid went through, and I responded like a maniac. Again,
he may be leaving out quite a lot here. We just don't know because I ever went into other sources from his fucking junior high school or whatever. So I realized we're like ten pages into g Gordon Liddy and not out of his childhood, which has never happened with a subject before. I don't think we've ever spent this much time on a subject's childhood. But like there was
so much shit in this autobiography. We are going to leave quite a lot out, so I'm going to try and summarize here some of the last few important facts. So one of the things g Gordon admits in this is that when he was an adult, his dad, Sylvester, came to him and was like, my dad never hugged me, right, which is why Sylvester made a serious effort to hug
Gordon regularly. This is kind of beautiful actually, you know, like a guy recognizing, especially a guy who was born in the eighteen hundreds, right, probably recognizing like, oh, it was bad that my dad.
Didn't have me. You know. Well, it seems like this family is introspective, right, and like weirdly self aware. This is a doing.
Man's reaction to like thinking about his own child and like, oh, you know what, I wish my dad had hugged me. That's a thing I'm missing. I am going to make an effort to hug my son regularly, right. Yeah, Gordon's reaction to it is kind of peculiar.
Quote.
It always seemed to me that that was just what he was doing, trying to hug me, wanting to but not knowing how as if, having never been the object of a fatherly embrace himself, he could not pass on what he had never received. In fairness to my father,
I stressed that this was a subjective impression. The fact of the matter is that he did hug me often, and it may well have been that my self loathing born of contempt for my weakness in the face of fear, rendered me unable to recognize genuine fatherly affection and to
receive it when offered. And that's one of the things that makes this guy interesting and kind of unique, because I can't imagine any of our modern like right wing media guys admitting to that kind of vulnerability, being like, I don't know if my dad didn't know how to hug me because he'd never and hugged or if I was unable to accept his love because I hated myself so deeply, right, That's that's that's that's actually a pretty powerful like thing to grapple with, like for a human being.
That's like, yeah, like it makes you emotional reading it, where you're like, well, that's some real shit. Ge Gordon Letty, You're you're a dangerous maniac. But that is that is a real thing that you've expressed well, but because it is, it's like all the pieces are there, all the pieces.
For him to be like normal are there? Or like good are there? Yes, just like what happened man, m m, yeah it is.
He is like from a diagnostic standpoint, fascinating.
Yeah.
So the last critical moment in his journey to conquering fear and pain is what he describes as like a potentially divine migrain attack. He claims that like he's scared of God, he's scared of pain. And then what he's walking around and he suddenly is just overwhelmed by agony.
The way he describes it, it sounds like a migraine, right, And being the Catholic boy that he is at this period, he decides, like, I will offer up by suffering to souls in purgatory, right, Like, since I'm already overwhelmed with suffering, I'll offer to take on their suffering if they need a break, right, and hopefully they will put in a solid for me to God. And he thinks this works because the pain is followed by rapturous pleasure and he
like passes out, waking up later with no discomfort. He claims from that day forward, I feared nothing but God, and there would come even a day when I did not fear God either.
Oh boy, there has to be a medical explanation for what this is, right, what the fuck is? I mean? Like there's stuff like grad into rapturous pleasure to no longer fearing God.
I don't know, Like my best guess is migrain, just because I don't know what else it would be. There's something called excluding head syndrome. I do think that normally number one. It doesn't quite sound like what that is, and I think that normally occurs like kind of when you're on the edge of sleep. But I don't know, it's it's weird. I don't know what it would be. Yeah, but g Gordon Liddy, you know who, Yeah, never experiences that is our sources. Uh yeah, and yes we're back.
How you do it? Sorry? Yeah, it's just that was so wild. What a lot of way to go out to commercial break?
Holy shit, what a beautiful way to go out to commercial break. So we're talking g Gordon the Lidster. As he grew into young adulthood, g Gordon Liddy became increasingly aware of a flaw in his otherwise perfect mental health. He had an anger management problem. Now he first noticed this while he was out. His uncle Ray, when he's a teen, buys him his first real gun. Terrible mistake, Oh my god. So he goes out hunting with this gun, and while he's out in the woods, someone shoots over
his head. Right now, he describes this as close incoming fire. I am pretty sure he is exaggerating, because that's the kind of guy that he is, and this is the closest he ever gets to combat. That said, you know, I can say a lot of the hunters that I know, especially out in the west, right this is maybe less common, but like a lot of hunters I know have either had shots come near them or had people shoot over
their head. Sometimes it's a thing when you're really out in the boonies, you like wind up in somebody's spot and they may do it to try to scare you off. We've also had family and stuff get like shot up again, shots over their head, and like Oklahoma, when they cross into like a pot farm or something, right like this happens out in the back country. So maybe this is a true story. Maybe someone was actually shooting at him.
Maybe it was some kid who was just firing. But he he responds by randomly firing five rounds just in where he thinks the direction of the shot is, and it horrifies him, right because he believed he like, again, it's bat you shouldn't shoot blindly in a direction like as you don't know who you're at. Right, so he
he like, this is what concerned. He becomes like frightened, that like he has an anger problem, and that like it might lead him to doing something terrible someday, and he doesn't want to do anything crazy, you know, So he has like and he admits to being horrified by this. That's a it's if you react in that way, it's a bad way to react. It's reasonable to be like, oh my gosh, I can't believe I did that. I
should really work on myself. I should think about, like what led me to reacting that way, because I can't risk doing this again. So reasonable for him to feel this way. He follows that realization with this unhinged line. It was no good wishing I had more German and fewer Italian genes. I know perfectly well that with a powerful enough will, I could be as ice cout as any tutan. Now always always with the Nazis. It cannot
help himself. Oh my god, the word ice scout. So I see that word in there, and I'm like, I wonder, wonder if that's some Nazi shit right now, It's just a word. It means ice cold in German, although it's often a colloquial term for cold blooded. Right, It literally means like something's ice cold, but like you would describe a cold blooded person as ice cult. It is, though, a pretty Nazi thing to say, because I just typed, I just typed ice Colt and Hitler in, and boy howdy,
immediately speeches start popping up right. Probably the most famous use of this term by Hitler was his nineteen thirty nine address to the Reichstag on the anniversary of coming to power quote, as regards National Socialist Germany, it is painfully aware of the destiny awaiting it should fascist Italy be wrestled to the ground by an international agglomeration of forces. Irrespective of pretenses. We know these consequences, and we shall
cold bloodedly look them straight in the eye. Hitler loved to use this term, and he used the phrase like cold blooded. He liked to describe, you know, the ideal young German man, as cold blooded, as hard as steel, as unfeeling, right, because those are the people who commit genocide best, you know.
Yeah, so Letdy wound up getting some backblasts from that shit. Oh my god.
He grad graduates, graduates high school. World War two, the big Dub dub dose is over by this point, so tragically he does not get to go fight. He does note a preference to having been able to fight the Japanese. So he gets admitted to Fordham University, which is a very pretty college in New York that was initially at least I don't know if it still is, but it
was run by the Jesuits at this point. Right now, the Jesuits are like an order within the Catholic Church that is, like, you know, they're like the smart guys. They do a lot of the teaching, they do a lot of the school running, and shit, uh there was you know, they've had a long history, some of which you know, they had to be kind of like a secret society type deal. He finds the Jesuits admirable for their intellectual rigor and quality as educators, which is fine.
He also finds them admirable because they remind him of the SSUH. He describes the the shock troops of the Catholic Church, notes that they were suppressed by the Nazis, but also writes Heinrich Himler used it as the model for his own core of Uber mentioned the shut Staffel, the dread blacked uniformed SS whose hand picked members swore a special oath of loyalty to the furor, which is like, that's not wrong, but like that's an that's why would
you bring that up here? That's not relevant, Like, we don't need a rant about how cool the sets are when.
You're talking about your college.
Unnecessary. G Gordon Liddy, this will be a continuing pattern. He cannot bring up the ssn off like constantly, he cannot stop. Specifically, it's not just that he brings them up. It's that whenever he becomes a like a member or associated with a new organization, he compares them positively to the SS Like so g Gordon had missed the big dub dub dose, but by the time he got into college, the Korean War had started up, which is so yay, huzzah, there's a war and they're not Germans.
I get to kill a lot a lot. Yeah, really lines up great. Yeah.
Now I've brought this up on the show before, but my grandpa was in that war. He was there basically the entire time it was happening and did not seem to enjoy it.
A horrible experience, terrible time.
Yeah, and basically anyone who went through the Korean War will tell you fucking nightmare, Like, you don't want it. You don't want to be in that war. You don't want to be in most wars.
Yeah.
Lyddy is desperate to see combat, though, so he joins the ROTC at Fordham, which unfortunately, he wants to be in the infantry or he wants to be marine or something. He wants to do something that will let him kill people. But at Fordham their ROTC is an anti aircraft artillery unit, so he doesn't like that because you don't get to actually, like generally you don't get to kill people close up with king anti aircraft artillery, because it's kind of the point.
So he decides to do this because it'll at least like set him up to be an officer. And his intent is that I'll transfer to infantry or armor later and then I'll get to go have my seering wartime experience that makes me into a man. So when it came time for his formal training and service, Lyddy had fallen for a young woman who met most of his weirdo requirements for a wife but lacked right. He's like,
she's almost perfect, but she lacks mathematical ability. Right, So he decides he wants his kids to be good at math. So he decides not to ask her for her hand in marriage because she's bad at math and she's too short. He writes that he wanted quote height and heavy bone structure so that my children would be physically as well as intellectually powerful.
Oh my god, again a hint. She could have just become Robert Crumb. Yeah yeah, like he just it's it's the tragedy for us and then him in that order. Is she's just gotta take a better paths.
So many times, so many nearly anything he would have done would have been better than becoming g Gordon Liddy, right if he if he had just become a card shock, it would have been a better person.
Oh my god.
He parts from this mystery woman in the hope that he will find someone he describes as a quote tall fair, powerfully built Teuton whose mind worked like the latest scientific wonder, the electronic computer. I had worked long, hard, pain filled years to transform myself to make a reality of my genetic potential. Now I believed I had earned the right to seek my mate from among the finest genetic material available.
He really was just God's perfect fascist, like God, the Good Lord really made it brilliant Nazi with him.
Yeah yeah. And the answer to all that is, like, if you heard him say any of this out loud, you'd be like, yeah, man, and then just like kind of quietly take your beer to the other side of the Yeah.
Yeah, yeah sounds good Gordon, then just walk away.
I gotta go.
Man. Look, normally I wouldn't say this, but like, I don't believe we should have sex police, but in this case, it would have been nice if, like, g Gordon Liddy says this to you at a bar and you have someone you can call to be like, we got to make sure this guy doesn't like hook up with anyone ever.
Don't let this man have love. Yeah he is not allowed. Yeah, he like actively should not happen.
Yeah yeah, yeah, that's that should have been a social priority for all of US, I don't know. One of his kids goes on to help stop Trump from stealing the elections. So yeah, that's probably why you shouldn't have sex police. But that's like, that's like the two sides. It's like, yeah, but you know, just because one of his sons sort of became one of the end Domino's, does.
It mean does Watergate one of the first?
Yeah, by my mathematic count, there's still like eighty percent of a Watergate that the Lyddy descendants need to stop.
So yeah.
Anyway, he goes to Ford Bliss to train with a bunch of other second lieutenants as artillery forward observers. Now, an artillery forward observer, your job is to be much closer. Artillery obviously is pretty far back from the front line. Yeah, that's why it's what it's for the forward observer. Your job to be much closer to the fighting, so that you can spot and call in targets and stuff to
the people shooting the big guns. This is obviously a dangerous job, very important job if you're doing a war. Lyddy though, he has to again he had because this is what he almost does. He has to like breathlessly
hype up the job and the danger. So he tells us that, like, life expectancy for the men who do this job is just three minutes, which like, no, Gordon, there is not any job now in certain specific battles, right, you might be able to say, like, you know, the life expectancy of a guy doing this one job and this very specific battle was this long because most of them die. Right, if that happens, you could, I guess say that. But that is not a thing that you
can say of this job in general. It is fucking there are people who do this for fucking years. Right, But these kind of claims happen a lot. You'll hear that claims about like the same job in Vietnam then it has like a twenty minute life expectancy. No, that's not it's not actually how war work.
Well it's also like, yeah, I mean I guess, like, yeah, I guess a guy could die real quick.
Yeah, yeah, sure it happens, but like no, not generally, like absolutely just not a job like if.
Is just too confus if they.
Die, if they just if you're every three minutes, you're just throwing another new college graduate into the meat grinder for this.
How you do basically this o your three minutes is you get there, you pick up the notebook from the last guy, hand it to the next guy, and immediately die.
And again there's like some specific battles where you can say the average life expectancy for a man, you know, manning a flamethrow or whatever in this specific engagement along like this two mile shit was this long, right, because most of the guys doing this job died.
That's that kind of.
Shit has happened in war. That's not what he's talking about. He's just full of shit. Yeah, being full of shit will be a pattern for him.
Right.
Again, he does not do anything at all interesting in the military. He has a very boring time and service. So he has to toss in anecdotes like this and other stories of almost seeing danger so that he could because he can't like just be like, yeah, I didn't get to do anything cool, right, he has to like lie and make it, make shit up, and so you get some very funny stories because it's always super sad, like it is depressing the degree to which this guy
wants to have been I don't know my grandpa right right. So, near the end of his training, he and some comrades are drinking and they decide this is his claim. They decide to have a sit up contest. Right Lyddy insists that he wins, but he wakes up in horrible pain the next day and it becomes clear that he has blown up his appendix doing sit ups, and it's maybe
there's a good chance he's lying about this. Although if anyone could do, like, if anyone could robotically do sit ups in a friendly com petitions so much that they nearly kill themselves, it would be g Gordon Liddy.
Right, right, right, he has a mental capacity to blow his own body up.
Yeah, the way he describes this, everyone's very impressed by how good he is.
And the next day he wakes up in pain.
I kind of suspect, like, you know, some other guys are drinking and like Lyddy comes in and he like walks up to them and like like.
Hey, Gordon, Hey, how you doing man?
And he's like, I'm so pumped up, can't wait to go die in Korea. And they're like, yeah, man, you want to do like a sit up contest? You can't talk during a sit up contest. Why don't you see we all just did him here's our numbers.
Don't you see how many you can do? Yeah?
Ah shit, you I guess you win? Man go yeah, yeah, we got to bounce. Hope your indix is fine. So he because he's blown his pindix out doing sit ups, he gets told his like superiors are like, well, yeah, you know, we have to go do surgery on you now,
so you can't finish your training. He was about to do, you know this, this like last bit of training that would have like cleared him for a coveted close combat assignment, right, and so he is furious, Right, He's about to miss This was his shot to be a.
Burass, and he's gonna miss it.
So after he has his surgery, like his his colleagues are doing their their last course, which is like a nighttime close combat infiltration course. So Lenny describes, while he's still got this open surgical wound, he straps a bunch of belts around it to protect it shit, and then sneaks into the course in order to finish it, which is like crawling around in the mud and doing stuff you shouldn't do right after.
This reminds me a lot like of Stephen Miller, like trying to race against the girls when he was at Santa Ronica High or whatever. He was like, yeah, yeah, better superior to women as enter into the fucking like women's four hundred meters or whatever the fuck he did. Yeah, God, that's funny. God, that's funny.
So his CEOs he like is like, look, guys, I did the you know, I finished it. You know, can I have my like certificate for finishing it? And his commanding officers are like, dude, you're not supposed to be here, Like we told you not to do this because you
just had surgery. Like absolutely not. You are not getting like a certificate for this, And like this is also why he doesn't go to Korea, because if you're the kind of people whose job it is to like send people over to do a combat position and you're responsible in any way, shape or form, and you see this guy as like, oh, this dude endangers himself constantly and is incapable of following orders and is like nearly gotten
himself killed at home in training because he's so responsible. Absolutely, we are not putting this man in a combat situation, Like this is the last guy you went next to you in a trench.
He's a fucking maniac. Yeah.
So Lyddy gets back to New York and he serves in an urban anti aircraft unit stationed in the city. Now, because, as you might guess, being in an anti aircraft unit in New York City is a do nothing job for us, right, This is like not the job you give a guy who's like a great warrior. Yeah right, yeah, because like again, like the idea is that, oh, if the Soviets, you know, attack, will need anti aircraft. But the reason why those guns
are there is primarily so that civilians feel protected. Because even at this point, everyone knows like we have we have a war with the Soviets. It's just the end of the world, right, we all just die.
Yeah, these guns are not gonna these are not gonna be a real factor in that conflict.
So Lyddy spent the rest of his life ashamed of this, and in his autobiography he invents several very sad moments where he has to threaten people with a gun in order to feel like a big man. And I don't know if I need to say this, but I will because it's crucial. All of the men that he invents to threaten with a gun at this point in the book.
Are black men.
Sure, yeah, soldiers, you know. Yeah, but yes, that is that's worth bringing up about one.
Of the least surprising things about this so far. Yeah, perhaps not shocking. Yeah, yeah.
So the gist of the story is that in nineteen fifty four, one of these integrated AA units, which is like, and by integrated, I mean there were black and white men serving together, right, which is starting to happen in this period of time, not kind of, I don't think comprehensively. It's starting to happen though. One of these newly integrated units,
the black enlisted soldiers mutanty against their white officers. Lyddy and another white officer, a captain are sent into takeover and he he's going to tell a story from this that is quite problematic. But you know what's not problematic, Andrew.
Hit me.
Ads Ads would never make up stories about threatening your fellow soldiers with guns so that people don't think you're less of a man for failing to serve in Korea.
Oh my god, God.
Anyway, back to the story. So here's Lyddy telling the tale of he and this other officer, you know, going into take over this this unit with primarily black enlisted men. I told the troops that military courtesy and discipline would be enforced in partially, and that certain practices that we understood had been tolerated in the past would not be
permitted in the future. Specifically, I said that we had heard that certain individuals had brought liquor on the post, and others had failed to show up for morning roll call formation when the weather was cold or wet. There would, I said, be no privileged characters in the battery. Finally, I tapped the leather holster under my left shoulder. It held personally owned caliber thirty eight special Smith and Wesson revolver.
I stared at the assembled men and told them that the first man to raise a bayonet against me would be shot on the spot. Now, there's a pretty good chance this is a lie. Some officers and in CEOs and combat units did, and I think maybe still do, get to carry their own side arms.
Now.
I should also note side arms are basically not are very extremely rare for a handgun to be used in modern war, and even really in Korea, not all that common because they're not good weapons.
Right.
A handgun is a good weapon if you need, if you're concealing it on your body and you're attacked out in the world, if you are in a battlefield, you would you would prefer a rifle, right, Like, That's why,
that's why they exist. So they're not not super common for this to happen, and certainly not back home, right for one thing, A lot of units in situations like this when you are in a city, when you're like most of the soul's not going to be issued firearms with live ammunition all the time, Yeah right, you are, yeah, yeah at all, right, you want to be careful about that, right. And in fact, he talks later about like one of his soldiers having a weapon that's unloaded, because that's was the norm.
Right.
So I don't know that I believe he would have been allowed to carry a loaded thirty eight Special to threaten men with. Maybe it's not impossible, but it does seem unlikely based on what I know about, like the standards of the time and what was you know, again, generally when like duty side arms, when like officers were allowed to carry duty side arms that were not issued to them, they were like higher ranking too than like a second lieutenant. This seems like something he would have
gotten in trouble for, is what I'm saying. Another instance that Liddy relates during this time is this very large black soldier who gets arrested and has to be taken to a military jail. Now Liddy is ordered to put together a detail to like put this guy, you know, transfer him over to the facility. But the guy's very big,
and the other soldiers scared of him. And then like one point, when they're trying to take him over here like picks up an axe and threatens them so Lydia has to pull his good to threaten this guy, like, you know, I'll put six bullets in the space of a dime and you chest, you know, like that kind of fucking deal.
Just so fucking.
Sad, Like absolutely a lie and deeply sad.
Yeah, it's all so pathetic.
Yeah, based on again, I grew up not just talking to my my gat and my grandpa, by the way, was a medic, right, Like that was his job, Like that was the thing he did. He kind of later in the war wound up just running field hospitals because everyone who had been an officer ahead of him, he was a sergeant when the war started, died Like that was the shit he did. But like, I read books
because I wanted to understand what he'd done. I read books about like the unit that he was with, the fifth RCT Regimental Combat Team and stuff, and like, based on just kind of that general knowledge, I have some stuff I've looked up and conversations with veterans in the modern era. Here is how I would characterize Lydie's service. He was an unreliable and kind of dangerously irresponsible person
who hurt himself pointlessly in training. His officers put him in a place where they thought he could not do any harm until his time in the military was up. He reports in his book that, like he learned later that one of the officers had said he'd never get a combat posting, right, which I don't doubt. And because he was so ashamed of this, he made up a bunch of stories about threatening men with firearms so that people reading this book in nineteen eighty would think he'd
been a badass. Yeah, that's really sad, and that is a profoundly sad experience. Yeah, yeah, you know what he is. He's basically like.
A cobra commander, just like real sniveling, Like a real sniveling fast, like.
A sniffling little like a worm, right yeah, little grub of a man. Oh god, it's so it's so bleak like this, this whole, this desire, this belief that like the only thing that makes you a man is like being in combat. And then the fact that he's he's completely failed in that one ambition, and so he's just spent his life lying about being tough so that people would think he had he experienced something close to what he would he imagines as this like sacred baptism of fire,
which it's it's not right. There's certain things that being in that situation teaches you, certain ways in which you know, people who experience that obviously can be hardened in some ways.
It can make them tougher in some ways. It also often makes people less capable of dealing with the world, less capable of surviving, right like that is why there's so many suicides from guys like although a lot of suicides anyway, complicated issue, But he's he is he has mythologized this so far past the point of rationality that it is basically a religion to him, right like combat is heaven to g Gordon Liddy, and he's he's permanently locked out of heaven, right, Yeah, he's just spent his
entire life in limbo. And that's that's gonna be really the driving impetus behind everything else he does, behind Watergate too, behind the way he presents himself, the reason why you you know, the ship he would do like sticking his hand over a candle until it burnt him to the fucking bone, Like he did that kind of shit so that people would not because he was so deeply insecure about his failure.
To right, He's like, he's like, if Ben Shapiro actually had a form of courage.
Right right, there is that little bit of it right where he is willing to damage.
I mean, he's like, like, you know, for all his talk, Ben Shapiro isn't out there starting fights with people. Yeah, you know, and you know, at least at least g Gordon Liddy has, yeah, the courage of putting his body on the line ship.
Destroy his appendix in a situp contest.
Bursting his guts doing sit ups. Yeah.
So, at age twenty three, he's in this nowhere career in the army. He's got no idea what to do with himself. So he decides, you know, to try to figure out what's next for him. He's going to go when he's going to get his IQ tested, Right, he's got to be one of these guys, right. He claims that he gets measured several times and it's always between one hundred and thirty seven to one hundred and forty two, which is a.
Near genius ane.
Now we all know IQ's bullshit. That said, given his he's apparently a pretty competent lawyer for a while, and given like what IQ measures, maybe he did test well. You know, again, I don't particularly value that, but it's possible. Yeah, I think it's probably. It's probably really likely he does well on an IQ test. He's got like he's got the kind of mind again as a kid, he's able to like make gunpower are in shit, like when he
puts his mind a shit. I would not be surprised, especially if he studied for the acute test.
Well, yeah, he's got guy who thinks IQ tests matter.
Yeah, energy, Yeah, it's possible, doesn't really matter, so but he does. It doesn't matter that he wants us to know this, right, that doesn't get another another little piece of the Lidty puzzle. Now he had always planned to be a military man, but at this point has become clear the military does not want him. So he is lost, and he decides to take an aptitude test from the
Johnson O'Connor Research Foundations Human Engineering Laboratory. Johnson O'Connor was the founder of modern aptitude tests, or at least a top candidate for that. He's one of the guys who convinced this as a thing. And the test this company offers today costs like six hundred bucks and they can last like three days. I haven't found much intrue info suggesting they're actually good for anything. You get some people saying it was helpful, you.
Get I have.
I've run into a lot of modern complaints where they're like, yeah, he took the test, and then they just they asked me what I wanted to be and then gave me like high scho guidance counselor advice on the thing that I had told them I wanted to be, which I knew I wanted to be. Anyway, Yeah, I'm not gonna I don't know enough about this field to like say this is definitely a con but it does I get that little like tingling on the back of my neck. Maybe it's because I'm not an aptitude test guy. But
Lyddy if it is a con. If this was a con, Lyddy was a willing mark because he's a gullible narcissist and if he can take a test that tells him he's amazing, he's gonna spend any amount of money.
Quote.
After three days of testing, I was given an extensive report telling me such things as that I was cross dominated, left eye but right handed, possessed the vocabulary of a vice president of General Motors, and was very intelligent. That really says a lot about the difference in worlds, because if someone today was like, you know, I've got the vocabulary of a VP of General Motors, I'd go the guys make dogshit cars. I don't know, man, Like, come back to me when you've got the vocab of a Toyota VP.
But also any corporate vice president Like yeah, right, Like it's like that's not impressive. They don't use words much, right, Yeah, they're like test makers. You're already lying. Just tell them an English professor who gives a shit? Yeah, who gives a shit? Like why do we like? Was that a thing?
That like vice presidents of companies were seen as being like great vocabulary haers. Today they're the guys who are using chat GPT to send their emails because they can't fucking write like anyway.
Whatever.
So he gets advised by this test to become a lawyer, and so he starts law school. He's still like, I think he's in the reserves at this point. So he transfers to the JAG Corps and he meets a young woman during this period, Francis, who was the same height as him, and he finds this critical to mention even taller, and heals because he definitely has a kink here quote from being sensitive about it. I enjoyed having on my
arm a woman six feet tall. When I learned that Fran's job at IBM was to receive from brainstorming electronic engineers short written descriptions of theoretically possible new kinds of computers, for which she would then create a mathematical language, and that she did calculus problems for recreation the way I did crossword puzzles. I knew she was the woman I wanted to bear my children. A Tutan slash celt of high intelligence, a mathematical mind, physical size, strength, and beauty.
She had it all. Oh my god, what a moon man way of talking about that. God, Yeah, it really is like but it's also like so close you know what you're like potentially pretty admirable.
Yeah, and he I want to hear you feel about this. So his his his again. So they're kind of long distance. He's still doing school, he's still in the military a little bit. So like there's this period of time where he's like really insecure that she's going to find someone else because he's not able to be around all the time. So he spins all of his savings on a voice recorder and he sings a bunch of love songs into it, and then he leaves it with her, making her promise
to listen to it regularly. Now we got a three person team here, quorum, you know, do we? Is that sweet? Is that creepy? Where are we landing on that one?
Because I find it unsettling.
Yeah, it's it's it's it's it's a no for me. Dog.
That's that's a no.
That's a that's a big n w O, which is how I spell no no. So, oh God, wild Ship, I think I think.
That is one of those things where like, if we liked him, we would find a reason to be like that's kind of sweet. Yeah maybe, yeah, I mean again, it's also no.
We wouldn't.
It's not that kind of show.
When you add it to everything else, like if he if he if. This was a podcast about people who went on to become great blues singers, and he was like, so, I send you a bunch of like songs that I'd recorded because I knew that would make her, you know, fall for me. That was my best Like, oh, okay, you know that's because yeah, that makes sense for the kind.
Of guy you are.
I'm just thinking of that scene from the Barbie movie where all the Kens sing to Barbie and all the Barbies look like they want to run away.
That's g Gordon letty baby, he can make a Barbie run away. Although it works on this lady. So again he clearly so he must have known his target, right, Yeah, they get married, they're married fifty four years. Well there's not lessons and look, we can make fun of this, but it does work apparently.
For one guy.
Don't don't don't don't do this, Yes, don't do this.
I mean today she'll be creeped out that you found like an old school voice recorder, Like would you buy how much money you spend on this tape?
Breakup after we do this episode and have dms of people doing this, If you do that, I will I will no, man immediately, No.
We will will launch air strikes. We will send in by two. Yeah, yeah we have. We're part of the nuclear triad now here at cool Zone Media like, we'll do it.
I don't give a fuck.
So Lyddy also promises that during this period, the military selected him to attend a Clandesta in Activities training course and he was instructed there in quote techniques of surreptitious entry. He goes through all He's like, yeah, they brought me in to do the secret training. I don't know why, but it taught me how to like break into places and like be an expert on like spying on people.
And I did all of this, but I was told not to mention i'd done it, and they didn't issue a certificate of completion, so there's no record of me ever going to this class, but it definitely happened, and that's how I learned all of my great Watergate skills.
And it's it's again if like he was a famously, if he was a guy who had like successfully done a bunch of like you know, fuck j political shit and then gotten caught at the end after like this long career of like crazy ask if I'd be like, I don't know, maybe like there's at least a need to explain how you learned all this, But like Watergate, as we'll talk about, you just were a dumb ass. Like there was a complete cock up, Like at no
point did you know what you were doing. You should never have been in that position because you were deeply, deeply, deeply unqualified to be managing something like this. I don't need this explanation as to how you learned this because you didn't.
You don't know anything. I guess it's just writing this book. It's just like that's part of my brand. I'm the guy.
So I got to let people know the Army gave me secret training that there's no after after learning I was a fuck up, they gave me secret break.
In the buildings. Training wasn't from comic books, It wasn't from a Dick Tracy, a real good, real juicy Dick Tracy. Right, Yeah, I don't believe you at all.
So once his last school's done and Lyddy's final obligations to the army are through, he applies for and joins the FBI, probably with some help from his uncle Ray. Right, there's probably some nepotism going on here, right. I don't think he gets in on merit.
Right.
So, now this is the first part of the narrative where we have outside information about Liddy's life, so we are not as reliant upon like his fucking autobiography here. So we are going to be weighing outside information as we go on, pretty heavily against his questionable claims about his early professional life. Now, Lyddy's version of events is very exciting, right. He stationed as a field India agent in Indiana, an organized crime runs Indiana, and the two
of the guys in his field officer veteran gunfighters. They were Wild West sheriffs who the FBI brought in and made exceptions for because they needed gunfighting trainers. These guys taught me how to be one of the best gunfighters in the world.
Again, g Gordon Liddy never in a gunfight. Oh my god, He's like a side character and justified he's just like a guy that like runs off a cliff.
Like self accident doing a draw. He goes into one of the things that's funniest to me. So there's a term if you're you know, regular listeners will know that I like shoot and am you know a firearms collector. If you are someone who does this, there's the term within the gun community called like fud and it's like from Elmer Fudd, and it's a term for like weirdos who buy old, obsolete firearms, in some cases ones that are not safe, but often that are just like very
bad guns to use to defend yourself. And then we'll spend hours on the internet insisting that like these are the best guns in the world, and they're they're always maniacs. They're always g Gordon LYDTI types, right, and always fans
of g Gordon Liddy, I should add. So he goes into these loving descriptions about how they like see is thirty eight that he's threatened all those soldiers with and are like, no, you got to get the most this and showed me the most powerful gun on the planet, a three fifty seven magnum and you know, they let me carry theirs for a while until my wife bought me one for Christmas and it was the best gun in the world, the most dangerous weapon ever we created.
This dude, Calm down, Calm down.
First off, one of the things that's funny about this is like, not in like I think the seventies, there's going to be a shooting the FBI is involved in. That is a disaster, a famous disaster. And part of why is that, like most of the FBI agents are all packing fucking revolvers, which are very outdated in the fucking modern world in a gunfight. So it's very funny to me that he's obsessed with these mighty revolvers and
they're yeah, anyway, very weird. Weird dude, I think wants you to be impressed that these old sheriffs taught him how to gunfight. And again, oh, like, no evidence he was good at any of this. So by this point
he'd gotten married to a brilliant tall computer programmer. Wife is his wife here, and in one passage from his book, he drops casually that before they get married, like they've been dating, they're kind of engaged, but once he gets hired to the FBI, he's like well, you can't just marry someone once you're in the FBI, so he illegally uses the FBI's file system to check up on her background and her family members before proposing. He also does
this for their neighbors before he buys a house. I don't think this is legal, although he says everyone at the FBI does it, and in fact, agents were expected to do this to avoid embarrassing the FBI by associating with disreputable people. I actually think he might be telling the truth about that, because this is the ja Agar Hoover FBI and that I feel like that is the kind of shit they bull So I will give him that.
Yeah, I'll just say, yeah, I think this is like I've known a couple of people who have had access to perform background checks and they do it pretty casually.
Now we're going to roll to a stop here because you've got to go to a baseball game. But I want to note that, like it's in this part of the book where he's talking about spying on his wife with the FBI's file system to see if she's good enough to be an FBI man's brook like wife. And it's at this point that Liddy gives us yet another
baffling reference to Hitler's SS. As Adolf Hitler was referred to throughout the Third Reich as simply dear Feurer, so j Edgar Hoover was referred to throughout the FBI as the director. There were only a few of US six thousand out of one hundred and eighty million to stand between our country and those who would destroy it. I was truly convinced we were an elite corps, America's protective echelon.
It's shit, Stoffele.
He's like, we were like America's ass and it doesn't think for a second, is that maybe bad?
Gordon?
Is that like, is that maybe a problem with the FBI? That Like, you're not wrong when you say I think you were not the only guy in the FBI you saw them as America's SS. But like, yeah, is that maybe a problem?
Gordon? Like? And look, should should we interrogate this further? All I will just point out is that people today who chastise you because Republicans used to be reasonable people are talking about people that listen to all of this and thought, yes, the.
Guy again, the man writing this is the dude who came to Richard Milhouse Nixon with a plan to illegally spy on the Democratic Party, and Nixon was like, yeah, all right.
Let's do it.
Yah, hold him and get this guy on there. It didn't quite go that way. We'll talk about that, but like basically, right, like basically I do love. He cannot stop making SS references, and they're always positive. They're always like we were like the SS isn't that great?
It's so it's very like hilariously doctor strange love in a way that you're.
Like, huh, guess this guy is eternal. Guess this kind of dude always been around and maybe always will be shit.
Yeah, yeah, endless, endless forever. Yeah.
That is one of the like unsettling things is trying to be like, well, how did he become this way? Because again, and you know, we're missing a lot. He probably leaves out a lot. Maybe his parents were like fucked up in ways that we don't get in this back like.
The crazy thing is even the part he put out is insane.
Yeah, well, it's just like how how does how what is what made you?
I guess we know America made you?
Right, Like all of this does make a degree of sense when you think about like this, this degree of fetishization of the armed forces, this idea like there's something religiously sacred about the experience of combat. It makes you a better man, you know, all of this kind of like shit, are our weird gun cult worships? Right, all of this is g gorgon. So I don't know, I don't know why I'm saying I don't get this. He makes complete sense, right, I'm an idiot. He's totally makes sense.
He makes sense. But it's still you're just like it can't be like this really, can it?
Yeah? And the answer is yes, yes, yes, yes, for sure.
I think part of why we're like there is this like confusion is he is so honestly the man. Even guys who do suck like Crowder and Ben Shapiro, they're pretending to be him, right, you know, like when you see him smoking a cigar and you can tell they hate it, Like they hold a gun like somebody who's never fired a gun before, and it's like, oh, this is like you're putting on Gordon Lyddy.
He was like he was.
Like lying and like making himself up into something, but like he was legitimately this kind of maniac, right, Yes, Like, I guess there's a degree of honesty. There's a kind of honesty in his lies. Even Yeah, modern.
Don't have like Ben Shapiro is like fake, like holding a bunch of two by fours from his truck and his truck bed. That's never been used ge Gordon Liddy's has been used. It's just been incompetently used. Yeah, to the point where the people around him were like, actually, gee, I got this. I'll know everybody.
He's also full of shit about like being dangerous and being in a hood man, but he's in such a way that you know, he spends his nights weeping over the fact that he didn't make it to correct practicing. Yeah, really was working at it. He spent you know that he did spend thousands of hours drawing that fucking cowboy gun. Like to feel like a big man, you know, just feel like I could be you know, if it just came, you know, the right things happened, I could really be a fucking old West sheriff.
Well he did it the hard way. Everything he did you could tell he really worked.
Yeah, Yeah, he worked at being He didn't just buy the thing. He like worked at being a maniac. He was the thing. Good for you, g Gordon lyddy you and yeah, and for us. I don't know what else to say about you. So I'm gonna let you go. Andrew T you got anything to plug first?
Oh? You know podcast? You know, is this racist? We're still on strike almost certainly, you never know, I suppose, and so yeah, come come support us. If you found this my side of things enjoyable.
Yeah, so find that out. Check that out, support the strike, Support super soaker full of piss by, you know, peeing in a super soaker and just mail it somewhere.
I don't know where. I don't care where.
Oh yeah, send a pistloaded super soaker. He was stranger.
Yeah, you know, just just send it, send it to the uh you know, Warner Brothers corporate offices. That's fine, it's what it is.
Yeah, it is what it is. Probably not illegal on our part.
Well we'll check in with that asterisk. Yeah, check your local laws.
Uh huh.
Behind the Bastard's the production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website fool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts,