Part Two: How Conservatism Won | BEHIND THE BASTARDS

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Part Two: How Conservatism Won | BEHIND THE BASTARDS
Robert and Dave conclude our episode about think tanks.
Original Air Date: April 4, 2024
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There’s a reason the History Channel has produced hundreds of documentaries about Hitler but only a few about Dwight D. Eisenhower. Bad guys (and gals) are eternally fascinating. Behind the Bastards dives in past the Cliffs Notes of the worst humans in history and exposes the bizarre realities of their lives. Listeners will learn about the young adult novels that helped Hitler form his monstrous ideology, the founder of Blackwater’s insane quest to build his own Air Force, the bizarre lives of the sons and daughters of dictators and Saddam Hussein’s side career as a trashy romance novelist.
New episodes twice a week on iHeartRadio.
#BehindtheBastards #BehindtheBastardsPodcast #RobertEvansBehindtheBastards #BehindtheBastardsMerch #BehindtheBastardsJohnLandis #BehindTheBastardsHost #BehindtheBastardsIvermectin #BestBehindtheBastardsEpisodes #BehindtheBastardsBestEpisodes

[@thecountalucard666]

There’s a whole Twitter account where they do is just show a graph of historical data and then mark Reagan on it. Really worth a look.

[@petebondurant58]

@thecountalucard666 Is Ronald Reagan responsible for your toenail fungus too?

[@js500y9]

What’s it called?

[@hellbreakfast1590]

When were my grandparents going to tell me that there used to be free colleges? I'm sitting here, my credit destroyed by not being able to pay my student loans for years, after going to a school specifically because I was promised up and down that they would help me get into my industry. That they had contacts and contracts. The school has been sued because of that lie, but I'm never going to get a settlement out of it. This lie that works, because having a way to make a living is so goddamned thin on the ground, because of desperation. And that desperation didn't have to exist. It never needed to exist. There isn't a word for the feeling in my chest right now. What comes to mind is the soliloquy of AM in I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. Every cell in my body is furious.

[@petebondurant58]

You should've become a plumber.

[@matthiasnagorski8411]

​@@petebondurant58telling everyone that they should have become trade workers ignores the problem. It's literally a pointless deflection. All you're doing is changing the job market. Employee over-saturation would still be a massive issue and wages wouldn't be able to sustain the majority of laborers. Ignore the problem and pretend you were clever for becoming a trade laborer over an accountant.

[@adamdales2626]

False scarcity is a must have. Even more important to us than sleep. Think tank child stars are still heterodoxical thinking leeeeeaaaaaders, madman.

[@petebondurant58]

You are the problem. Learn to plumb.

[@matthiasnagorski8411]

@@petebondurant58 🤣

[@shmehfleh3115]

If you were born in the 40s, attended college in the 60s, got a career in the 70s and retired in the early 2000s, you lived a charmed fuckin life compared to everyone else who came before or since.

[@fkrkf]

Not if you were giving birth in the 60s

[@kwak916]

And it was their kids who ruined things by being so stupid

[@harmoniousrex]

It's so cool how our society doesn't select out sociopaths but actively rewards them

[@SgtKaneGunlock]

Hierarchy tends to reward the person whos ambitious and Ghoulish enough in equal measure

[@petebondurant58]

@harmoniousrex Yeah, they all work for human resources now.

[@grmpEqweer]

That's why a permanent hierarchy with unaccountable people, is bad. ...As in anti-democratic. Wealth accumulation beyond a certain point corrodes democracy, because the very rich can buy power.

[@harmoniousrex]

@@grmpEqweer I mean, 🔥

[@kvdrr]

Certain men. Always. Get their way

[@howwitty]

The idea that public welfare is burdened by parasites is totally untenable, because society is not an organism and welfare is custom designed for the singular purpose of supplementing personal finance. The same applies to public education. "Parasite" is a mischaracterization.

[@josh-oo]

The real parasites are the rich assholes who exploit loopholes to pay effectively zero taxes, and then exploit loopholes to claim zero profits so that they qualify for a massive tax rebate every year.

[@liger04]

Going with the biology metaphor, it's really mutualism. People who need money are still expected to pay for things one day, and having more people paying for stuff is pretty much the definition of an improving economy. So we give now, knowing that we're going to receive later. This is also the reason behind the phrase "mutual aid". A billionaire failson insisting that they deserve to siphon free income from the market despite already having more than they can feasibly spend, on the other hand, is even worse than a parasite. Parasites steal what they need to *live*. These guys just do it for pride.

[@howwitty]

@@liger04 The biology metaphor is overused and problematic. I don't think of a mutualism between species either because a level of specification is unclear. This all comes down to how people have historically associated breeding with motivation to continue living, which is stupid and destructive to apply to an individual person in an epigenetic way. We should try to use a metaphor for purposes other than breeding humans.

[@warmwestwind]

Also parasites are an important part of the ecosystem.

[@Grizabeebles]

On the cellular level, a human being is a civilization. Our bodies are composed of trillions of cooperating cells. Less than half those cells are human cells descended from the original fertilized egg. Every person on the planet is mostly made of immigrants!

[@mndrew1]

The late, great author Joel Rosenburg once wrote: "There is nothing morally wrong with taking a bribe; so long as you do not change your intended course of action because of it." I will happily accept a bribe to do practically anything; and then I won't do it. Sue me.

[@Don-md6wn]

That pretends the reciprocity principle doesn't exist. For those of us who aren't sociopaths, when we take somebody's money we feel an obligation to do something in return for it.

[@mike_stevens]

If someone is unethical enough to offer you a bribe, they probably got no qualms breaking your legs if you don't hold up your end of the bargain.

[@SgtKaneGunlock]

@@mike_stevens its not hard to scam these people the trick is not getting caught if they think your providing them a service they will pay out the ass for you to provide it this has gone wrong so im not gunna pretend anyone should actually do it more for their own safety than giving a shit about the thing stolen or scammed

[@Can_I_Live_]

Yeah I was thinking that, too. Shady bilionaires have this strange thing happen to them where all their enemies end up committing suicide. So weird.

[@jizburg]

But if you do that you wont get the next bribe

[@kennethmoore7770]

Im not letting any damn cat in my house unless it has a warrant

[@tiraXpyrrha]

You will if you don't want the Feline Bureau of Investigation to take.. unnecessary action. You wouldn't want, say dead birds on your doorstep.

[@Braindeaddefault]

I don’t think the DEI ship claims are about knowing the facts, its about floating lies on a topic and seeing if it sticks.

[@leenonymous5592]

right up there with the fairly recent mass shooter whom the right insisted was trans because they had an alias name of the opposite sex because they also engaged in other fraud under different names. the truth no longer matters with conservatism. They're balls deep in doublethink, their ministry of truth is hard at work

[@petebondurant58]

@@leenonymous5592 I remember plenty of leftists insisting that Kyle Rittenhouse shot people of color, and that Michael Brown was on his knees with his hands in the air. Conservatives don't have a monopoly on doublethink.

[@Melggart]

About car seatbelts, there are some people that are very, very against using it. It is something I never understood. Specially people that say "only the driver need it". Dude, the passagers need it much more, when you are driving you brace yourself when you need it, it is very easy for passengers be caugh unaware and break their face on the panel.

[@Don-md6wn]

I'm old enough to remember when seat belts became mandatory, and there were anti seat belt zealots who brought the same kind of scientific rigor to their arguments as anti-vaxxers did during Covid.

[@bfish89ryuhayabusa]

Definitely made me think of the Pratchett quote "A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on." Also, I think that many of the people forwarding this stuff now have grown up with it around them as truth, so they actually think they're fighting for something.

[@fkrkf]

That's actually from Mark Twain

[@Cubehead27]

Cool personal connection - William Baroody (Sr.) was my great-grandfather, and his son (William Jr., who founded and ran the Office of Public Liaison in the Ford White House and later took over the presidency of AEI from his father) was my grandfather, although he was already dead when I was born. Utterly fascinating guys, for sure, but with abysmal politics and a lot of terrible shit to answer for. Their descendents are socialists now. Or some of their descendents anyway - Bill Baroody Jr. had nine kids so there are quite a lot of us in my generation of the family - but all three in my branch are committed leftists and I like to think he'd be horrified.

[@petebondurant58]

So, the conservatives haven't won at all.

[@Don-md6wn]

The Nancy Reagan reference as "throat GOAT" sent me down an internet rabbit hole, and I thank you for it.

[@SgtKaneGunlock]

Nancy "Notoriously gives great head" Reagan

[@FTZPLTC]

It is genuinely bizarre that someone can run on a presidential platform that amounts to "this specific school in California is bad". Like... I could understand maybe running on that platform in California, but I don't get how you convince so many voters who'll never even set foot in California to believe that this is their problem and that solving it is more important than anything else. But then I look at Trump, and how he prattles on about problems in specific cities, even when he's talking to people in some barn halfway across the country. And I guess there are a lot of people who like to put all of their problems in a box somewhere over there and then cheer for whoever says that they'll take a shit in that box.

[@chrisball3778]

That was his campaign for Governor of California, not president at that point. It's still very weird, but slightly less insane than if it had been his Presidential run.

[@FTZPLTC]

@@chrisball3778- Ah, that does make a little more sense then.

[@grmpEqweer]

A lot of country people really resent city people. I note that 90% of the jobs added in the U.S. over the last ten years or so have been in cities. The rural areas, in some cases, are treated like internal colonies, wealth is stripped out of them by predatory businesses, and social services are thin on the ground.

[@chrisball3778]

@@grmpEqweer A lot of that's happening everywhere- not just in rural areas and not just in the US. The drain from rural areas to cities is often a result of the ongoing consolidation of corporate power. There's less demand for local businesses supplying local needs if those businesses are undercut by large corporations supplying them remotely over the internet.

[@BlindErephon]

I like it when Dave is on things. Dave is a chill guy, and a good writer.

[@CynthiaMcG]

I heard about the Powell Memoranda back in 1986. I don't think the person who warned me about this long-term conservative plan mentioned it by name, but she was very concerned about the details. That's why none of this takeover shocked me.

[@keyofpop]

Maersk will never see any repercussions for this cause they contracted the ship. Like with most things independently contracted companies protect the big SSL from any responsibilities in any issues (although Maersk has nothing to do with this) I would like to see the monopoly SSL companies have just DESTROYED. 5 Companies shit 50% of the world markets goods its WILD

[@ruimvdd]

18:00 as a librarian i half-jokingly endorse this (it would just end up as a horizontally-minded weaponry library or sth)

[@SgtKaneGunlock]

i could get behind Book Bounty Hunters

[@r.w.bottorff7735]

These episodes are very enlightening, great work.

[@iyaramonk]

Not gonna lie, I could probably be bought for 200k a year for life too.

[@kae5717]

As a librarian, I deeply enjoyed that particular tangent

[@petebondurant58]

@kae5717 It is unfortunate that public libraries are now filled with psychotic drug addicted bums, instead of with children reading books.

[@jeepspeedracer]

People don't care much about pearl harbor now like they do 9/11, It is already kinda the same with kids graduating high-school now.

[@dylanrodrigues]

Arguably, people didn’t care about 9/11 even 10 years after it happened

[@eugenegubbard4017]

In these troubling times, just keep in your mind, these few words of comfort and wisdom That she was the pride of the American side, coming back from some mill in Wisconsin

[@StrongStyleShiny]

Robert forgot about my favorite time a bunch of people sailed to an island to avoid taxes. It became America.

[@gurusmurf5921]

DEI is the new Woke is the new CRT is the new "But Black People!" How long will this BS go on? How much is enough already?

[@Don-md6wn]

The far right is in the business of manufacturing news to keep its target audience outraged and engaged. In a few months it will be time for Fox News anchors in camo gear and Ray Bans to sit at the border and talk about the massive caravans approaching from central America. And of course they will continue to scour the country for any violent crime committed by an immigrant they can use to avoid talking about the fact that crime rates are dropping.

[@brenatevi]

And before But Black People it was super-predators and before that was welfare queens. It goes back to the days of slavery and the worries of slave revolts. They never stopped worrying about Black People because they have always treated them badly.

[@petebondurant58]

@@Don-md6wn The far-right hate Fox News. Man, are you out of touch. The far-right is as devoted to Fox, as the far-left is to MSNBC, which is...not at all. Crime rates aren't dropping. Cops are just not arresting people in places like New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco, where mass theft has been legalized.

[@fkrkf]

It's been a thing for 500yrs already

[@grmpEqweer]

It's a really disgusting way to divide the working class against itself. That means it's highly useful if you're an oligarch.

[@metalinside]

All the arguments that you have used to illustrate how absurd is not to give cash to the homeless, I’ve heard aloud, in seriousness, more than one time, except for the antibiotics one. It’s heartwarming that Robert still has innocence.

[@indy2867]

Why is this episode unavailable on I heart radio?

[@Grizabeebles]

I once read an interview with a guy who worked for a company like McKinsey who explained that his job as a management consultant was never to find the best way forward for a company but to provide the step-by-step plan for what the owner/board to do what they already wanted to do. He explained that when he dived into a company's financials and operating costs, he would often find other strategies that were more effective than what his customer wanted, but that they almost always had already been considered and rejected. What's more, he'd often be accused of wasting billable hours by his customer or team lead and his alternative plan would be treated with hostility a good percentage of the time unless he laundered it through the correct third party. This somwtimes had the side effect of reopening the whole problem all over again from first principles and nothing would get done.

[@EmmaBonn96]

It’s wild to hear Dave here because I came back to listening to BTB after watching the Some More News episode on the capitalists taking over christianity

[@dagashithellama]

You can't spell asbestos without "best"! Also formerly the name of a Québecois town.

[@zoushaomenohu]

As funny as the joke about arming librarians was, librarians already have the overdue books stuff handled via *going fine free*! Seriously, they've found that eliminating late fees makes people MUCH more likely to return books regardless of how long they've been on. And to folks who worry about libraries losing the revenue from fines, don't worry! The amount of money libraries get from fines isn't a big enough portion of their overall budget to cause problems, AND they save money on replacing books because more books get returned! Win-win! Should probably still arm librarians, though, they'd definitely make better use of the firearms than the cops would!

[@PaulK365]

I lived in DC during the Reagan era, and after Reagan lots of asbestos removal because a very big thing in DC, because so many building where full of it.

[@dstrctd]

Robert says repeatedly in this episode and the previous one that the Chamber of Commerce is a government organisation. It isn’t, it’s a private lobbying organisation created by the capitalist class, so that’s why they are the political organisation behind the Heritage Foundation and friends.

[@kingofsting19]

If I ever got to the point where I assumed that any given homeless person is just a worthless bum who doesn't deserve help, my overall outlook on the world would be too bleak to go on. Not having feelings must be a blast.

[@TwentyNineJP]

Negative twelfth!

[@WitchOracle]

Okay I can respect the joke (and the engagement)

[@bengarver8155]

My lead add is "Support President Trump."

[@redjirachi1]

As someone not from the US I get confused and kind of tired of respectful and reasonable channels like this basically saying "conservatism is evil"

[@uncleobscurenobody8861]

55:28 "Oppose Book Worship"

[@play-dohsallegory3368]

The people’s park situation today is more complicated than cops getting rid of homeless people. The university is trying to build desperately needed student housing on the park and the facility they’re building also includes permanent housing “more than 100 unhoused and extremely low-income persons.” The plan also preserves 60% of the park to remain a public park.

[@CynthiaMcG]

Decades before, such plans weren't on the table. I was living in the Bay Area during the 1990s and frequently traveled to Berkeley on BART. I'm glad they finally decided to include low income housing units.

[@Chubbz969]

Yup. I remember when public health officials wanted to clean up rat infestations. A bunch of people flipped out, calling the move an act of war on homeless people. It wasn't. There was a serious public health issue that needed to be addressed. People's Park is a symbol of a bygone era. People cling to that symbol to hold on to the past. The reality now is Berkeley has had a housing crisis for over a decade and the university needs to be able to build and provide adequate housing for students. The Berkeley Student Cooperative can only do so much. Other co-op housing situations only go so far. The symbol that is People's Park has only been a hurdle. That being said, RIP Caffe Mediterraneum. I met a lot of interesting people there. Some housed, some unhoused.

[@ericz1254]

go bears

[@timstadlmueller58]

1:30:00 was based 😎

[@PhantomAlucard]

Bad guys won. The tide of stupid conservatism has created is too strong. I can't begin to imagine how to fix this.😊

[@ValerieEnriquez]

1:05 I thought Al Franken was canceled for being a sex pest. So much for cancel culture lol.

[@thomasjackson173]

The whole thing was such bullshit, one of the examples of they go low we go high from the democrats where they ineffectually hold their own to higher standards than republicans do. Franken did not deserve cancelling

[@TheCaptainSlappy]

He was booted for being a sex malaprop. The fact that he is a pinko commie is purely secondary. Like with Bernie Scamders. Remember the formula- America Bad. Christians Bad. Christians are Americans that are Hitlers and are bad. Cops are bad, laws are bad, government bad, corporations bad. Any intelligence agency monitoring commies in domestic operations are bad. Do not mention other religions, especially a very specific one. There is no such thing as communist infiltrators, and there never were. If there were, they were purely innocent victims of racist circumstance. Even when caught working & being paid by Russia or China, always claim instead the individuals are always somehow racist fascists, never traitor commies. Under no circumstance, are you to tell your marks they can, and should, run their own local and state governments, they should only have fake outrage on the internet chasing shadows and purchase merchandise from you. Tell me if I missed something. I highly doubt I did, but it's the script for most of youtube "content creators" and "podcasters". Significant chunks of history are ignored because...reasons.

[@dac314]

That controversy was astroturf, he wasn't a sex pest, the conservatives just wanted their gotcha moment and the rest of the Dems were too cowardly to defend Al.

[@petebondurant58]

@@thomasjackson173 It's always bullshit when it's one of yours.

[@petebondurant58]

@@dac314 Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) was the entity who spearheaded the ouster of Franken, as she saw him as a threat to her (eventually non-existent) presidential run.

[@laurenjames7399]

Has Dave tried to harass a librarian?

[@mrchoochoohead9033]

ACAFBI

[@1300hannah]

I don’t think you’re “slandering” nancy reagan, i just don’t think rape is funny even when it happens to someone who turns out to be a horrible person

[@fkrkf]

What slander? She wasn't raped, she was an enthusiastic and talented performer of blow jobs and spread her talent around. Robert and Dave would never say rape is funny. Calm your t its.

[@WanderingIdiot81]

Is this guys still pushing war with Syria?