Behind the Bastards

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Part Two: Charles Koch: The Luke Skywalker of Rich People

Part Two: Charles Koch: The Luke Skywalker of Rich People

Thu, 16 Aug 2018 10:00

Robert is joined again by comedian Ever Mainard and they continue to discuss Charles Koch, the notorious face behind the Koch Brothers empire.

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My name is Alex Fumero and I host the new podcast more than a movie, American Me, a film directed by and starring Edward James Olmos. I'll be diving into the behind the scenes controversy, including an alleged backlash from the Mexican mafia. Several people who worked on the movie have been murdered. I don't want to speak about why would people be murdered for being in a movie. Listen to more than a movie, American me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her social discoveries on chimpanzees. So four whole months, the chimps ran away from me. I mean, they take one look at this peculiar white ape and disappear into the vegetation. Bing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Danny Shapiro, host of family secrets. I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season of family secrets. With over 25 million downloads, the importance of both telling and hearing secrets is apparent, and I am so excited to share 10 astonishing news stories with you. This is our best season yet. Listen and subscribe to family secrets on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Hello dear friends. I'm Robert Evans and this is behind the ******** to show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. Now this is part two of our epic two-part episode on Charles Koch, and with me as within the first episode is ever Maynard Star of the Fields on Netflix kickbox expert. Yeah, you can say that. Yeah. MMA commenter. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Big YouTube commenter. I love tube. Yeah, Reddit, Yelp, any, any platform where I can make a comment, I'm gonna comment. You know what I love about the Internet is tell me it lets you. It lets you anonymously threaten people. Oh, it's never anonymous. Yes, bold print. Fight me. So last episode, how would you sum up what we learned about Charles Koch last episode? No joke. My tummy started rumbling and I thought I was going to have to run out to the bathroom because I was filled with a lot of sorrow. And then how many lives were destroyed even through like cancer and that like lineage of, of that one story of like, you know, like his family is ******. But then you know, at one point it's like, what a blessing is a job. Stability. But then that thing ended up being the snake. That bit him. Yeah, yeah. You know, and that's, I mean, we don't even know about in a way that's him being like, hey. Like what it what was it like? You can pay to be a slave or get. Yeah, the the Freedom School, which Charles Koch funded early on in his life. In a way, it's sort of like that without them realizing it. Yeah, that's what's going on. Yeah. If you won't sell yourself into slavery, I will show you as little human concern as I would show for a slave. And then just trust that most of you won't realize how badly you got ****** over and sue me. No. Yeah, because like Daniel Carlson, that guy sued. But I'm going to guess there's a lot of people who didn't sue. Who got ****** over and just didn't connect the dots well enough? You know, got leukemia and assumed it was their cigarette smoking rather than being bathed in benzene all day long? Hmm. Anyway, let's yeah, I want to open this up by repeating a quote Charles Koch wrote in that 1978 Libertarian reader article where he sort of argued that business owners should fight against government regulation at all cost. Do not cooperate voluntarily. Instead, resist wherever and to whatever extent you legally. Can and do so in the name of justice. So let's start today by talking about some more of the **** Charles Koch and his company did in the name of justice. I'm going to quote from the book Dark Money here. Carnell Green was a pipeline technician and gas meter serviceman for Coke Industries when he ran afoul of the management. He had to work for the company from 1976 until 1996, during which time he said he was told to sweep Mercury spills from the 36 gas meters he monitored out on the door and onto the ground. He said that he was also told to dispose of the old meters, which contained about a quart of mercury each in dumpsters, and to pour additional containers of mercury down the sink as he witnessed his supervisor doing. You're lying, green said. The mercury was so pervasive when he got home, balls of it would roll off of his clothes and out off his shoes. No. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's not right. That's not good. Not supposed to pour mercury down the sink. On the wider tables, bad. Wow. Yeah, I don't think Charles Cook drinks a lot of tap water. So when Green made a fuss about the rampant mercury exposure, he was approached by FBI Special Agent Mormon who told him that he was lying about this and he'd better shut up if he knew it was good for him. Green Supervisor gave him a statement to sign to confirm that he hadn't seen any mercury and coke buildings, so he got the FBI involved. OK, when Green FBI was not the FBI was an episode in Riverdale where? OK, OK. Where this guy's like, I'm an FBI agent or she's like, I don't know what to do. And he's like, I need you to be a mall. And then it turned out, oh, Ding Dong. It was that dude's dad. Yeah. Guy pretending to be an FBI agent. Now I see where the writers got it. It happens a **** load in the coke story. This is the only time we're bringing it up here. But in dark money and in other reports, there's a ton of times where coke secure. Like, by the way we're at. We're with the FBI. And then they bullied them. Wow. OK. Didn't mean interrupt, but continue. No, no, it's fine. So green, the guy who was not comfortable with all of the mercury poisoning he was seeing, filed a complaint with OSHA anyway and was fired for making false statements. It later turned out that Special agent Mormon was a Coke Security employee and not an FBI agent. As you guessed. That's got to feel really good for that. All parties involved? That fake FBI agent? The manager? Wow. It's fun. So there is a long history, as you might have guessed, of regulatory ******* by coke industries. Thanks to a tangled web of NDA's, hush payments, and law nonsense, it's often hard to pin down the exact consequences. Nonsense. It's a good name for a TV show, yeah. It's hard for us though to get like exact numbers. This is how many people were hospitalized or made sick or whatever. But there are some crystal clear examples we get of times. Charles Koch's corporate philosophy got people killed in 1996, a man in Kemp, TX. Noticed an odd gassy smell all around his neighborhood. We're both Texans listening, in case you didn't catch this from the first one. Yeah, I get it. Koch brothers really ****** around a lot in Texas. Yeah, a lot of open space. Yeah. So a man in Kemp noticed an odd gassy smell around his neighborhood. He sent his daughter Danielle Smalley and her friend Jason Stone to go report it. The 217 year olds got into their car and turned it on, and a spark from the ignition lit the gas and caused a gigantic explosion that killed them both instantly. Here is a quote from South Coast. The day newspaper reporting on it at the time quote flames reaching dozens of feet high in a column of black smoke could be seen from miles and firefighters from 6 communities were called in. While I was sitting there it ignited, said resident Rick Burgett. The Flames came almost up to the front door of my house. It was probably about 150 degrees on my porch. The culprit was found to be an 8 inch wide gas pipeline stretching from the Medford stretching from Medford OK to Mount Bellevue, Texas and operated by Koch Industries calls to company headquarters. From Wichita, KS Saturday night were not answered, so when the Fed started examining the pipeline they found severe corrosion and mechanical damage so extensive it was described as, quote, Swiss cheese. Coke Industries had actually stopped using the pipeline in 1992, but in 1995 they realized they could start making a few $1,000,000 extra a year if they got it back into service. So they did the minimum amount of necessary repair work. I'm going to quote now from a Rolling Stone article inside the Koch Brothers Toxic Empire when Coke decided to start it up again. In 1995, a water pressure test had blown the pipe open, and inspection of just a few dozen miles of pipe near the Smalley home found 538 corrosion defects. The industry's term of art for a pipeline in this condition is Swiss cheese, according to the testimony of an expert witness. Essentially, the pipeline is gone. So this is what a witness says at the time. Like, the pipeline almost doesn't exist. It's so full of holes. So Coke Industries repaired 80 of the 538 defects, just, yeah, just enough that it could pass a pressure test again, and they started flowing. Highly explosive **** through it. Now, one month after they started running fluid again, Coke employees found that one of the anti corrosion systems they had installed had malfunctioned. They just didn't fix it. The pipeline repair efforts had occurred during a time when Charles Koch had told his managers he wanted costs cut so that they could increase profits by 550 million per year. That April he'd sent out a message that demanded expense cuts of 10% quote through the elimination of waste. I'm sure there is much more than that of course the getting this pipeline back an option and not putting in. Proper. Like not properly repairing it was part of this cost cutting thing. And it led to two deaths and a huge amount of property damage. I think it led to a lot more than two deaths. Yeah. It led to two deaths that are very easy to trace to. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, who knows from the poisoning? What? Yeah, exactly. Because gas is leaking out everywhere. Can't be good for people or the water, soil and crops growing. Exactly what we're eating. Yeah. There was a trial, of course, and it did not go well for Coke Industries. Here's the Rolling Stone again, a former coke manager, Kenneth Wittstein. Wittstein wittstein? Yeah, who cares? It's also look at how this ******* name spelled. Look at how this name is spelled. Everything is spelled wrong. Kanoff. A former coach manager Kanoff White Stein. So get off. Get over here. A former Coke manager, Kenneth White Stein, testified to indictments or to incidents in which Koch Industries Place profits over public safety. As one supervisor had told him, regulatory fines, quote, usually didn't amount to much, and besides, the company had, quote, a stable full of lawyers in Wichita that handled those situations. When Wittstein told another manager he was concerned that unsafe pipelines could cause a deadly accident, this manager said that it was more profitable for the company to risk litigation than to repair faulty equipment, a lot like life insurance. Fire insurance, insurance companies in general. Weird that all of these people are terrible in the same way the company could quote, pay off a lawsuit from an incident and still be money ahead, he said, describing the principles of market based management to a tee. Yeah, so. Cannot. No. Kenneth is the guy who tried to report some of the unsafe stuff and did. Yeah, we should. But just Kenneth. Katie? No. TH it's Kenneth. We all know the name. Know it's Kenneth. I'm judgmental and angry. Talk about a Wichita lineman and yeah, so yeah, Rolling Stone draws a direct connection between these deaths and what was done with that pipeline and market based management because under market based management again the whole company, all these business units are competing, but it also sort of encourages people to look at fines. You know a fine is supposed to be. It's supposed to be a punishment for doing something wrong, for causing damage. But in coke companies it wasn't. They weren't seen it. They were. They were seen as essentially a cheaper alternative to their repairs. The fines cost this much. The repairs cost this much. Oh, it's much more sound to to pay for the pay for the fines if we incur them. So Coke Industries was ordered to pay $296 million to Danielle's father. At that point in time, it was the largest wrongful death suit in US legal history. They settled out of court for an undisclosed amount. But it was probably a significant amount of money, and this judgment actually hurt. It wasn't the only one, either. As Koch Industries got in increasing hot water over the 1990s, they paid out more and more in legal fees and in fines. Charles Koch was even forced to acknowledge this, sort of in his 2007 self-help book, The Science of Success. Excuse me. It was more of like a business book, but, you know, wow, it was one of those books people who want to start businesses read. Have you guys, while we're talking about him, OK. It's there's a documentary on Netflix. It's about this wine guy that fooled everybody. Have you heard about this? He's like a fake wine dude. And I think they are fake Somalia. Yeah. But he's like selling people all these, like wines or like, you know, see that I support, I think that he they interview one of the Koch brothers. Koch brothers. I hope you tricked him. I hope you tricked me. I hope you made him buy a lot of ****** line. They're always getting swindled. OK. Anyways, he wrote a self help book. Yeah, he wrote himself. Well he wrote, yeah, he wrote this book, the science of Success, where he sort of acknowledged all of. Yeah, this is what he wrote at the time. While business was booming, it was becoming increasingly regulated. We kept thinking and acting as if we lived in a pure market economy. The reality was far different. So this is what he boils it down to, is, oh, we just were acting like it was a pure market economy. And in a pure market economy you can flow explosive gas through. A pipeline that's not even functioning as a pipeline and runs directly under the homes of human beings. Because that's fine. The market says it's fine. So whatever you're doing is OK. It's all about it's all about the market. The markets is *******. That's his child. That's his child. That's the force to Charles Koch and he's again, Luke Skywalker of rich people. I don't know, maybe I shouldn't be keep trying to draw it back to Star Wars, but OK, yeah, that's what I'm doing and you can't knowing it stop me. It's already been a theme running through the show. So. So the increasing regulatory costs and whatnot had a number of effects on Charles Koch and his businesses. One of these effects seems to be that his company started to obey more regulations and commit fewer blatant environmental crimes. In the late 90s and early 2000s, Charles viewed this as a temporary setback. The laws were just reflection of the culture and he had a plan to change both. In 1976, Charles Koch helped to launch via 10s of thousands of dollars in funding the Center for Libertarian Studies in New York City. Now, libertarianism wasn't as it wasn't much of a force in society. At this point, Charles wanted to change that, and he knew he had to start by incubating a new generation or in 1976. Did I say 96? I I'm gonna read this again. Sorry. In 1976, Charles Koch had helped to launch, via 10s of thousands of dollars, the Center for Libertarian Studies in New York City. Now, libertarianism wasn't much of a force in society at this point, and Charles wanted to change that. He knew he had to start by incubating a new generation of political pundits who could help sell his ideology to the nation at large. Here's a quote from Charles. The development of talent is, or should be the major point of all these efforts. By talent, I mean those rare, exceptionally capable scholars or communicators willing to dedicate. Their lives to the cause of individual liberty. Charles's actual political goals were terrifying. The most Americans, even most conservatives. He supported an indie Social Security to all forms of public wear, welfare to most of the military. One libertarian writer who interviewed him said his goal was to destroy government. Quote at the root. Now there are a number of theories as to why this was Charles's mission in life. Clayton Coppin, that researcher who worked for Bill, and Charles Koch and wrote a book about him, basically thinks the latter's hatred of the government came out of the harsh discipline of his childhood quote. Only the governments and the courts remained the sources of authority, so coke had to destroy them too. That's this guy's theory and it seems credible. By 1980, Charles Koch decided he'd had just about enough of sitting in the shadows, funding libertarian think tanks and ignoring life saving regulations. It was time to get political. Or rather, it was time for his brother. David to get political because Charles was really, really into being the whole guy pulling strings from the shadows. So since the Koch brothers were by this point billionaires and then sort of their own right, they decided that jumping into state level politics or even running for Congress was too small means for them. Since they were already supporting the Libertarian Party presidential candidate Ed Clark and the 1980 election, they decided to just make David as running mate. This allowed them to conveniently ignore all limits on campaign contributions. Since David was running, he could spend all the money he wanted, which he did, providing 60% of libertarian parties. Election budget that year. During the election, Clark told the nation, that magazine the nation that libertarians planned quote a very big tea party because America was, quote, sick to death of taxes. The Clark Coke campaign advocated for, among other things, the repeal of the minimum wage, the repeal of all child labor laws, the end of all forms of public assistance, and the destruction of the FDA. Yeah, yeah, that that. That famous enemy of liberty, the FDA. You know what I hate is when people tell me I can't sell expired food to kids. Really ****** me off. Really gets my really gets me going. They have the freedom to eat expired food. They they should have them. They should make that decision themselves. Umm, yeah, exactly. You get it. Yeah, I understand. You guys get it. Yeah, these guys understand freedom. Freedom is. Lying about the age of. Yeah. Uh. Shockingly, most Americans did not get on board with the coke platform of let children work and sell people poison. The Libertarian Party was probably received less of the vote that year than perennial write in candidate Batman I showed you, told you Batman showed up in this. Yeah, it was a heavy blow to Charles, but being a heroic soul, he was not about to let the ******** grind him down. He refined his strategies, and in 1996, he finally got it right. During that election cycle, he and his brother found a way to funnel millions of dollars, probably more than they've ever spent on an election. Codes of variety of right wing candidates. We know that through their company they spent $320,800 on congressional candidates that year. But the Senate campaign finance investigators suspect they spent millions and just funneled it through a variety of dark money groups. One of these groups was a company called Triad Management. Triad spent a huge amount of money running vicious attack ads and several very close races. One of these was the race between Sam Brownback, a Republican, and Jill Docking, a Democrat in Kansas. Shortly before the election, thousands of voters received this phone call. Quote we think it's important for people to know that Jill docking is Jewish. Please vote for Sam Brownback. That's the whole message. I think it's important to note. Talking this Jewish, she didn't make a point of this in her campaign, so we'll let you know. Yeah. Now, this had a major impact on the election, which we'll get to in a minute, but it was noticed at the time the blowback from all of this dark money and, you know, rampant anti-Semitism led to a Senate investigation on illegal fundraising, America being America. The Republicans in the Senate focused on investigating whether Clinton whether the Clinton reelection campaign had illegally accepted money from China, while the Democrats focused on determining whether or not the Koch brothers and their fellow rich people had violated campaign finance law in order to support the Republican Party. To be perfectly fair. They're absolutely seems to have been some shadiness between the Clintons or at least their campaign and Chinese donors. The LA Times actually broke that story. We're not going to go into detail here, but I don't want anyone to think that the Democrats are blameless in the dark money game. That said, the Senate investigation into the 1996 election seems to have gotten so consumed with whataboutism that very little was actually done to stop the problems that had led to both scandals. The Democratic minority report in the investigation stated quote, the facts suggest that these individuals spent millions of dollars to affect over two dozen. Federal elections despite operating completely outside of federal election laws. Now we know that Triad spent $3 million on 26 House and Senate races in 1996, and we know that the Economic Education Trust funded by the Koch brothers paid for more than half of this. Democratic investigators found that most of the purchase ads were like that famous Brownback Jew ad focused towards assaulting specific candidates rather than promoting anything. Most of the candidates targeted were in districts where the Koch brothers had large business interests, the money that was put into Triad. Has been poured out via two different nonprofits, citizens for reform and citizens for the Republic, neither of which had any offices or desks in both of which seem to exist as just a way for triad to further obfuscate their operations. Now, like I said, the other half of this investigation was into improprieties between China and the Clinton campaign. Republicans called for 320 subpoenas to investigate this, and they got 315. Democrats, meanwhile, called for 200 subpoenas to investigate all this coke shadiness and received 89. Excuse me. Yeah, it doesn't seem fair, right? Seems a little messed up. Whatever. The subpoenas that were issued revealed, among other things, 1,000,000 in spending on 4 congressional races in Kansas, including 420,000 on television ads in the race between Sam Brownback and Jill Docking. Brownback yeah, and Jill docking. Who I don't know if you caught on this was is she was very important. In 2002 the Federal Election Commission sued the owner of Triad Management for failing to register as a political organization. The owner, a lady named Malik, was forced to pay a fine and submit donor receipts to the FEC. She refused to do this, she said, quote, the bottom line is you can't buy your honor or integrity back. My word was my bond. She filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2006, but still stands by her work in the 1990s. She's claimed that Triad's business model was ahead of its time, which is hard to argue with. Really? ****. It's crazy how these guys really are The Pioneers and how much history is repeating. They are the Christopher Columbus of campaign finance slaughtering. Yeah, in a couple of ways. Yeah, in every way. You could be the Columbus of this. Yeah. Disgusting. Terrible. You know, it's not disgusting. And products and services that support this podcast, I 100% agree with you. What are those products? Just you wait and see. 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Get premium wireless service from just $15.00 a month and no one expected plot twists at mintmobile.com/behind. That's mintmobile.com/behind. Seriously, you'll make your wallet very happy at Mint Mobile. Com slash behind. So by now we imagine that you've seen the theories on tick tock. You maybe even heard the rumors from your friends and loved ones. But are any of the stories about government conspiracies and cover ups actually true? The answer is surprisingly or unsurprisingly, yes. For more than a decade, we here at stuff they don't want you to know have been seeking answers to these questions, sometimes their answers that people would rather us not explore. Now we're sharing this research with you for the first time ever in a book format, you can pre-order stuff they don't want you to know now. It's the new book from us, the creators of the podcast and video series. You can turn back now or read the stuff they don't want you to know. Available for pre-order now, it's stuff you should read books.com or wherever you find your favorite books. Hey, it's Roy Wood, junior, host of The Daily Show podcast beyond the scenes, and we are back for season 2. Beyond the scenes is the podcast where we go even deeper into segments and topics we covered on the show, but they're topics that deserve a little more time, a little more finessing details, you know? So this season, we're bringing on more Daily Show writers, producers and correspondents. We're bringing on more experts to drop knowledge on all sorts of topics. You're going to get some knowledge that you can't get anywhere else. You're breaking it down the season 2. We talking gentrification. We talking gun laws, book bannings Black Trail Blazers in fashion, all the trash ways that people treat flight attendants as well. And shout out to the flight attendants how you keeping us safe and still got time to give me a biscoff cookie respect. Listen to beyond the scenes on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. It don't matter where you get it, baby. Just find us. And we're back. We just got finished talking about the 1996 elections in which the Koch brothers pioneered what we would now just describe as the way that election ads are funded. They they sort of invented that in the 1990s. And yeah, funneling dark money around through a bunch of different groups that. But when you say dark money, it sounds almost exotic. So we gotta change that dark money? Yeah, it's like dark chocolate. Get money. I'm involved with some shady things, but don't worry, it's just dark money. I would love to like. Go out, like with a friend to a restaurant and then tip the waitress or waiter in dark money and be like, you know what? Because this was so good, I'm not going to pay you in regular money. Here's some dark money. Thanks, canal. You spin that on something dark. I feel sad. Yeah. I feel very sad. After I felt when I came into this podcast, I felt great. I really did. I like meditated for two hours today and then now I'm just like, well. Like I'm gonna go home and cry. Probably almost cried a minute ago. Well, that's our goal with behind the ********. You know, I hope that when people listen to the show in their morning commute or during their workout, they're just a little bit more furious the rest of the day. Yeah. Perfect workout juice. You know what else is great? Workout juice? Celsius. Thought you were going to do it? I'll do it. Doritos at. They're also great for workouts because they're high in protein compared to nothing. Hmm. Some amount of protein? Yeah, delightful. I'm always down for some amount of protein. That's the right amount. All right, let's get back into the tail now. The money that the Cokes threw directly at elections during the late 90s and early 2000s was more of a stopgap than anything. From what I can tell, it was targeted at races that would directly impact coke industries business. So most of what they're spending in this. Like the late 90s is towards races where there was a would be a direct impact based on who won, on their, on their their business interests, kind of what's going on right now and always it's always going on, always going on. Charles Koch. Does a step about that because he's not just for a lot of companies, I think, funding races that are going to, you know, where if a certain person wins, that benefits the company. That's kind of the end of their thinking. Coke is playing a very long game here. He's not just trying to, he's trying to change American culture. I bet he's really hard right now seeing what's going on. You might be surprised. So, Umm. In from the late 1970s into the early 2000s, the Koch brothers, namely Charles, seeded a **** load of institutions and think tanks with their money. This was Charles Koch's long con in 1978. He had written that quote ideas do not spread by themselves, they spread only through people, which means we need a movement. Only with a movement can we build an effective force for social change. So for decades he'd embarked on a strategy of funding academics and pundits, people like Lefev and his freedom School, but also more mainstream libertarian groups like the Heritage Foundation or the Cato Institute. You mean keto? As in the diet? No, OK. His goal with all this was to achieve something deeper than the short-term anger or racy campaign ad could spark. Charles believe that by promoting enough voice voices who'd repeat his ideas throughout the culture, he could change that culture. Now, according to Charles, Young people were, quote the only group that is open to a radically different social philosophy. So they were the groupie focused most of his resources on. In order to accomplish this, he and his fellow travelers looked to. When you say travelers, I think of like a merry band. I was not a merry band. No, no. Are you going to guess who they look to for advice on recruiting children? Ohh, tell me it's the Nazis. They're lying. No, it's the Nazis. OK, I'm gonna quote from dark money here, please. In support of building their own youth movement. Another speaker, the libertarian historian Leonard Liggio, cited the success of the Nazi model in his paper titled National Socialist Political Strategy. Social change in a modern industrial society with an authoritarian tradition. Liggio, who was affiliated with a Coke funded Institute for Humane Studies. From 1974 until 1998 described the Nazi successful creation of a youth movement is key to their capture of the state. Like the Nazis, he suggested libertarians should organize university students to create group identity. Now, some people might say that if you ever find yourself saying, like the Nazis, we should do X, you're on the wrong side, right. That's, that's my thinking. That's don't don't do what the Nazis did. Right. Ever. Yes. Yeah. This is not how Charles Koch felt. He was like, efficiency the Nazis. That's where our money comes from. It's important to note she's Jewish. Yeah. When you really tie together all of the little strands, it doesn't. Yeah. He he looks. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. So George Pearson, a former John Birch Society member who later worked for Charles, was the first person to suggest to him directly that a great way to recruit the young would be to found scholarly institutes inside universities. Now the coach said for a while been giving money to universities. But when you give them money, when you give money to a school that can spend it on anything, including on paying researchers and academics who might believe in things you don't agree with or might do research that counteracts your own opinions, yeah, you don't want that now if you find a found a scholarly institute. Within a college, however, you have control over how that money is spent. UM, so you can directly control new generations of thinkers and directly influence the client minds of their students. This brings us to the Mercatus Center, which the Chronicle of Higher Education describes as a quote, libertarian style think tank within George Mason University. From 2011 to 2014 alone, the Charles Koch Foundation put $50 million into the Marcaida Center. Now, Mercatus was founded by Richard Fink, a professor at the college who'd also been an executive vice president and member of the Board of directors for Koch Industries. Here's the chronicle. Mr. Williams politics are no secret. On his bookshelves rest a bust of Adam Smith, the patron St of unimpeded capitalism, and a copy of the libertarian reader. But Mr. Williams says that he is careful not to bring his opinions, hardened as they are, into the classroom. He scoffed at any suggestion that George Mason's economics department indoctrinate students with anti regulatory free market messages. He does, however, hope his pupils will come to see the world just as he does. I would like my students to share my subjective opinions, Mr. Williams said. If they become hard minded thinkers, they will adopt many of my opinions. Now, George Mason is a public university in Virginia, and not everyone who works there was a sanguine about the impact the Mercatus Center had on the freedom of dialogue within the university. Here's Carrie Meyer, an associate economics professor who describes herself as somewhat left of center quote. Looking back on her career, Miss Meyer said she had held back in her scholarship at George Mason, gravitating towards vanilla topics such as a book based on the Diaries of her family's farm. She did not want to rock the boat quote. I carefully chose my research so it wouldn't be objectionable to them, she said. Mr Miss Meyer, described by her colleagues as Miss Meyer, described her colleagues as smart economists, but said they collectively provide graduate students with a narrow view of the discipline. I would tell people that it's better to go to a place where they would get a broader education, she said, she said. See, the Mercatus Center was an independent body within the university, so it's true that they had no formal power to influence the kind of research people published, but many professors at the school relied on the Center for extra income. Mercatus paid out over $400,000 a year to two dozen faculty members, people who then had a vested financial interest in not publishing any research that might disagree with Charles Koch's beliefs, Charles Koch himself said in an interview quote. If we're going to give a lot of money, we'll make darn sure they spend it in a way that goes along with our intent. And if they make a wrong turn and start doing things we don't agree with, we withdraw funding. So. This is how you change a university. Using 10s of millions of dollars of dark money. Yeah, it's horrifying, right? This is not the only school he does this to. This is just the clearest example. Yeah. Hope your listeners at the gym are getting jacked right now. Pump, pump real hard. Yeah, now there are other academic institutes that have received coke money. It's hard to say how many researchers and professors and writers are in the US have found themselves in a position of having to avoid disagreeing with Charles Koch and their work. But in 2013, the Center for Media and Democracy, which Politico describes as a quote Liberal group, published research into the state policy network. Now the state policy network operates in all 50 States and claims to be, quote, dedicated solely to improving the practical. Effectiveness of independent, nonprofit, market oriented, state focused think tanks. I'm sorry, but that's a long sentence. The Center for Media and Democracy basically says that the state policy network is a vehicle for pouring dark money into right wing think tanks around the country. Here's Politico. According to the reports analysis of IRS filings, the state policy network and its think tanks combined revenue in 2011 topped $83 million, in large part with funding from conservative dark money groups like the Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, which receive large donations from groups tied to the Koch brothers. And other prominent conservatives. But yeah, so there there's a lot of different buckets they're putting money into, and we will never know the extent of funding, but it is in the hundreds of 1,000,000, probably more than that, they're putting into just educational institutes. So with all this money spent to change academia, Charles Koch was essentially gambling that he profit more by building a small but utterly dedicated core of radical libertarian ideologists than he would by trying to publicize his extreme beliefs to the masses. His thinking here was entirely in line with what we know about the way the human brain deals with. Stream ideas in 2011, scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic published a bunch of research into how ideas and human society tip from being the minority to the majority opinion. The scariest thing they found, or the most optimistic depending on your angle, is that this happens very quickly once an idea reaches a certain level of saturation. Here's bolus losses manski a distinguished professor at Rensselaer. When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10%, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority. Once that number grows above 10%, the idea spreads like flame. Yeah, here's a quote from a fizz org write up on the research. In general, people do not like to have an unpopular opinion and are always seeking to try locally to come to a consensus. We set up this dynamic in each of our models, says one of the paper's authors. To accomplish this, each of the individuals in the models. Quote talked to each other about their opinion. If the listener held the same opinions as the speaker, it reinforced the listener's belief. If the opinion was different, the listener considered it and moved on to another person. If that person also held this new belief, the listener then adopted that belief. So this was sort of a a model that they set up in order to sort of represent how ideas might spread throughout a culture. And it's wise not to read too much into this, because it's a study based on models of human behavior rather than actual people. And the study's authors specifically note that this model was not designed to replicate a polarized. Society with a bunch of different radical ideas in it. That said, if you spend a lot of time reading about revolutions and protest movements, you can't deny that this all sounds somewhat congruous with observable reality, that there is a point of saturation. Once you hit a certain number of people pushing an extreme ideology, it can spread very, very rapidly. I mean, yeah, so that study came out in 2011, a year in which revolution and unrest spread across the Arab world like wildfire. The city's authors were admittedly more concerned with explaining that than anything else. You know, they were trying to ask, like. How can a guy like Gaddafi be in charge for 40 years and almost overnight, you know, there's this movement builds up steam to to put him out or whatever. What was it overnight? Nothing. You think it was overnight? I think if you listen to, if you talk to a lot of people who were involved in it, they would say that they were angry for years but that they did not believe it was possible until somebody was like, yeah, exactly. There is a point at which the feeling that something like that is possible. Tips? And it seems like that's sort of what Charles is trying to inculcate. If you can get just enough people that are real true believers and doesn't take a lot they can, you can start seeing the an idea that's pretty extreme, spread like wildfire. What is that? Is it Bad Religion that song true believers? What is that? I don't know. I'm not good at. Let's edit that out. Keeping it all in. Goodness. Yeah. Alright. Hit me, Daddy, with some more facts. All right, all right, all right, all right. So the study's authors, like I said, we're more interested in explaining the Arab Spring than anything else. But by that point in 2011, Charles Koch was two years into fighting a revolution of his own to destroy a man he viewed as a living death star. Barack Obama. Despite the regulatory concerns, the 1990s and early 2000s has been a great time for the Koch brothers. They diversified from fuel refining to every imaginable kind of Petro product. If it needed oil to produce. The Koch brothers were into that ****. They maintained an 84% ownership stake in their company and put 90% of their profits right back into the business. By 2006, Coke Industries made 90 billion per year in profit compared to 70 million in 1960. So they are great businessman, great businessman. I love to pick up their books. Looks like it's probably full of great stuff that you can generalize to your whole life without becoming a terrible parent monster. Yeah, so the Bush years were good for them. Big surprise. Although they were super anti Iraq war. That is one thing you can say for Charles Coke has been consistently anti war, anti US intervention. So that is a pretty consistent with libertarian ideology. You know? You shouldn't be ******* around. It's too expensive. It's not like he didn't do it for like more care about that. Yeah, but human being? Yeah. He just thought it was a waste of money. And I'm like a spark of hope. OK? No, no, no, no, no. Just the money. The, the lives mean nothing. Yeah. So the sorry the Bush years were good for them, but they've gotten a lot of what they wanted regulation wise during his eight years in power, which may have had something to do with the 2008 crash. But now we're digressing. Pick up on that dress. I did hear it. Didn't he say that there's going to be another crash coming up in like 2021 or 22? I mean it. We're lucky if it takes that long, right? Like. Somebody was, I was working a job this past weekend and like, one of the camera, I only got to, like, talk to him for a part of it. But he was saying that one of the brothers was like, yeah, there's gonna be a crash coming up. Yeah. And it's like, Oh yeah, you're gonna cause this crash for some. Well, they're not. They're not much into real estate speculation that might honestly just be them honestly looking at the market because a lot of people are saying the housing market is due for another big crash. Like, I don't want to be fair to these guys because they're ******** but that may just be him looking at the writing, just being like, hey, he's coming. You're trying to save up my money. Look, dude, I got like a couple 100 bucks. I'm trying to get myself a down payment, you know? Hey, that's more than 80% of Americans keeping savings. I think it's like 70% of the country has less than $1000 in savings. I believe it. Yep. Yeah, it's gonna be great when the economy collapses and we eat these people. You know what's crazy is when the economy collapses the first time, I'll get back on subject. I see your little fingers. I was just a barista, so it didn't affect me at all. I was like, why is everybody so stressed? I'm still making minimum wage. Nothing's changed for me, yeah. Ohh boy. Yeah, during the Bush years, yeah, they got a lot of what they wanted regulation wise, but they didn't like the Iraq war. Throughout this. They also did support to their credit sentence reduction for nonviolent drug offenders because they're not pro drug war guys. So again, it's not all bad with the **** the Koch brothers funds, but it's a lot bad. In fact, David Koch, who retired from political life recently, has shown gasps of being a human being over the last few years and in 2003, speech to alumni at his prep school after he received a lifetime. Rusty status for a $25 million donation. David said this. You might ask, how does David Koch happen to have the wealth to be so generous? Well, let me tell you a story. It all started when I was a little boy. One day my father gave me an apple. I soon sold it for $5 and bought 2 apples and sold them for 10. Then I bought 4 apples and sold them for 20. Well, this went on day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year until my father died and left me $300 million. Which is. This is a little bit, yeah, but that's David Koch. Charles Koch. Has not joked about inherited wealth because he doesn't think a state taxes should be a thing anyway. The election of Barack Obama was a big watershed moment for Charles Koch. He claimed that the 2008 election would lead America to quote its greatest loss of liberty and prosperity since the 1930s. Which didn't didn't happen. I mean, maybe I missed it. Maybe I missed us losing all of our wealth and prosperity. But yeah, I didn't notice that in his inaugural address, President Obama said. Quote, without a watchful eye, the economy can spin out of control, a clear reference to what had just happened in the 2008 financial crisis crash. This was heresy to Charles Koch, the man who urged resistance at all costs in the face of regulation. Never mind the fact that back in September of 2008, the Koch political organization, Americans for Prosperity, had reversed their opinion on bailouts. When the Dow dropped 777 points in the stock market crashed. Then they'd supported $700 billion worth of government intervention. But now that Obama was in the White House and talking about regulating Wall Street to avoid another crash, resistance to tyrants was the only option that remained for Charles. Now, since 2003, Charles had been assembling a yearly meeting of major Republican donors, most of whom were billionaires or multimillionaires who had inherited their fortunes. The first coat group meeting after Obama's election is best described as a war council. Here's dark money. Participants at the summits, for instance, were routinely admonished to destroy all copies of any paperwork. Be mindful of the security and confidentiality of your meeting notes and materials, the invitation to one gathering warned guests were told to say nothing to the news media and post nothing about the meetings online. Elaborate security steps were taken to keep both the names of the participants and the meetings agendas from public scrutiny. When signing up to 1/10, the conferences participants were warned to make all the arrangements through the coach staff, rather than trusting the employees at the resort, whose backgrounds were nonetheless. Investigated by the Koch security detail in an effort to detect intruders and impostors, nametags were required at all. Functions and smartphones, iPads, cameras, and other recording gear were confiscated prior to sessions in order to foil eavesdroppers. During one such gathering, audio technicians planted white noise emitting loud speakers around the perimeters, aimed outward towards any uninvited press in public. Yeah, they're treating it like a rebellion, like they're like they're like running an underground revolutionary organization, which is what's happening. It's just that the people who were revolutionaries in this are the richest people in the country. Yeah, yeah. I feel sick. Yeah. Super gross. We're gonna get into something. Not gross. Ads. I love ads. Oh, they're so good. They're so good. Boy, howdy, let's hear what they have to say about how you can support this show by spending money on other things. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. 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You maybe even heard the rumors from your friends and loved ones. But are any of the stories about government conspiracies and cover ups actually true? The answer is surprisingly or unsurprisingly, yes. For more than a decade, we here at stuff they don't want you to know have been seeking answers to these questions, sometimes their answers that people would rather us not explore. Now we're sharing this research with you for the first time ever in a book format, you can pre-order stuff they don't want you to know now. It's the new book from us, the creators of the podcast and video series. You can turn back now or read the stuff they don't want you to know. Available for pre-order now, it's stuff you should read books.com or wherever you find your favorite books. Hey, it's Roy Wood, junior, host of The Daily Show podcast beyond the scenes, and we are back for season 2. Beyond the scenes is the podcast where we go even deeper into segments and topics we covered on the show. But there are topics that deserve a little more time, a little more finessing details, you know? So this season, we're bringing on more Daily Show writers, producers and correspondents. We're bringing on more experts to drop knowledge on all sorts of topics. You're going to get some knowledge that you can't get anywhere else. You're breaking it down the season 2. We're talking gentrification. We talking gun laws, book bannings, Black Trail Blazers in fashion, all the trash ways that people treat flight attendants as well. And shout out to the flight attendants how you keeping us safe and still got time to give me a biscoff cookie respect. Listen to beyond the scenes on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It don't matter where you get it, baby. Just find us. OK, so we've just gotten to the point where Charles Koch goes into fallen rebellion mode. He's like white noise machine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's he's doing all the spy stuff. He's portraying himself to at least other rich guys as, like, the leader of this rebellion. Now, there are two possibilities as I see them here. Number one, he really is ideologically committed to his course, and all this secrecy and the extreme language he uses is totally honest and based on his heartfelt beliefs about the world. Or. He just wants more money in his pocket, and he donates what he has to donate because donation is better than paying taxes. His principled stand that businessman should resist all regulation is more of an attempt to get other people to donate to his cause, since he's clearly willing to compromise with the government for his own interests. You can come to your own conclusion about whether or not Charles Koch's ideology is just a. A scam, essentially. Or if he really believes this, he's he's in his 80s now. Hmm, yeah. Hard to say. Or maybe he's changed overtime. Whatever the case, after Obama's election, the Koch brothers, mainly Charles, poured astronomic amounts of money into fighting the Obama administration. 18 other billionaires joined them during the president's first term. Together, they pooled money and resources to support politicians sympathetic to all of their interests. In essence, they formed a trade union for people who were born rich. Yeah, they'd held that big secret meeting during the month Obama was sworn in and it had involved a debate between two Republican senators. Because when you're rich, you can just have senators debate. Yeah, the train. What is it that not the train union or maybe, yeah senator bought the. Anyways, my, I have some family members that work. They're train conductors and the. It's not the train union maybe it is, but they bought a senator who who changed all these rules and it's like, Oh yeah, when you have money you can just buy, you just buy it, you can just buy these guys. So they had these rich guys had during that big meeting, two Republican senators, John Cornyn and Jim Demint, argue in front of them to basically determine what course the Republican Party. To take after McCain's big defeat by Obama. So Cornyn basically argued that the 2008 election proved the Republican Party needed to get more moderate, make a bigger tent and accommodate more people so that they could win elections honestly again. Jim de Mint, on the other hand, said **** that noise, we should only go further and further to the right. Compromises for cowards. Can you guess which side of the argument Charles Koch backed? Yeah, compromises for cowards. So the Koch brothers became a major force behind the foundation of the Tea Party movement, one Republican campaign consultant was quoted. And The New Yorker is saying of the Tea Party, the Koch brothers gave the money that founded it. It's like they put the seeds in the ground. Then the rainstorm comes and the frogs come out of the mud and there are candidates, which that's not how seeds or frogs no work. But. He's in politics, not in farming or knowledge. Yeah, knowledge. General knowledge about biology. Dogs from the mud. Classic mud frogs? No. Came out of seeds like frogs do. 2010 New York Times article broke it down this way or broke down the funding of the Tea Party movement. This break it down for me. The other major sponsor of the Tea Party movement is **** Armey's Freedom Works, which, like Americans for Prosperity. **** armey. **** armey. Yeah. He's a real guy. Yeah. OK. Sorry. Go ahead. Yeah. No, I mean, we should. It's it's fine. It's fine to marinate in the enjoyment of. His name is **** Armey. Yeah, it's good. Yeah, the the other major sponsor of the Tea Party movement is **** Armey's Freedom Works, which, like Americans for Prosperity, is promoting events in Washington this weekend under its original name, citizens for a sound economy, Freedom Works received 12 million, $12 million of its funding from Koch family donations. Using tax records, Mayor found that coke controlled foundations gave out 196 million from 1998 to 2008, much of it to conservative causes and institutions. That figure doesn't include the 50 million in coke industries lobbying and 4.8 million in campaign contributions by its political action committee. Putting it first among energy company peers like Exxon Mobil and Chevron since tax law permits anonymous personal donations to nonprofit political groups. These figures may understate the case. The Coke surely matched the in kind donations. the Tea Party receives in free promotion 24, 7 from Murdoch 's Fox News where Beck and Palin are on the payroll so Charles Koch and David have denied any part in the astroturfing of the Tea Party movement. But investigative reporting by Taki Oldham, director of Astro Turf Wars, which is a documentary found very direct. Evidence that this was ******** here's a quote from the Guardian. Oldham infiltrated some of the movements key organizing events, including the 2009 defending the American Dream Summit. Convened by a group called Americans for Prosperity, the film shows David Koch addressing the summit five years ago, he explains. My brother Charles and I provided the funds to start Americans for Prosperity. It's beyond my wildest dreams how AFP has grown into this enormous organization. The convener tells the crowd how AFP mobilized opposition to Barack Obama's health care reforms. Quote, we hit the button. And we started doing the twittering and Facebook and the phone calls and the emails, and you turned up. Then a series of AFP organizers tell Mr Koch how they have set up dozens of tea Party events in their home states. He nods and beams from the podium, like a chief executive receiving Rosie reports from his regional sales directors. Afterwards, the delegates crowd into AFP workshops where they are told to run how to run further tea Party events. So the word that these guys want as the tea parties totally original movement that started on its own and whatnot, but the evidence suggests that they funded. Indirectly planned how it was going to be carried. And if you remember back in 1980 when David Koch ran to be Vice president of the Libertarian Party, his running mate had said that that election would be the ignition of, quote, a new tea party. So their thinking has been in this long before the election of Barack Obama played it provided the political impetus. He was just. Flame to the fuel. Exactly. And and also the time hadn't been right in the 80s because they spent the time, the decades since then pumping money into education and propaganda. Subliminally, it's it's been there. Has it been in the people's back of their minds? And I think it's more there because of their effort. You know what I mean? Yeah, I think. I think in my mind, I'm trying to say something else that my mouth is saying. I mean, is it the racism was a major factor? Because I I don't disagree with you there either, but I think that, like, I think it wasn't ready in the 80s. But yeah, for sure people were like, Oh yeah, that sounds familiar. You know, like, oh, wait a second. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. OK. Anyways, anyways, anyways, anyways, yeah. The timing hadn't been right then for a variety of reasons. But by 2010, the timing was right. And that's why the 2010 midterms did not go well for the Democratic Party. Or for Barack Obama. Now. In 2012, the Koch brothers spent a record-breaking $412 million on the election, more than what the top 10 unions in the United States had donated a combined. So they are essentially working as a union for rich people. But there's a lot more money than that than any trade union. Clearly all that money wasn't enough to stop Barack Obama from winning reelection. But overall, the Koch efforts were wildly successful, as Jane Mayer summarized. Dark money. Thanks in no small part to huge quantities of targeted money spent by the Cokes and their allied donors, the Democratic Party lost both houses of Congress, 14 governorships and 30 state legislatures, compromising more than 900 seats during Obama's presidency. So their efforts are successful. This money does not go to nothing. But if the last 20 years have seen Charles Koch's grand scheme come close to fruition, it is beginning to look like he may have reached the limits of what money can buy. During the 2016 election, the Koch brothers and their network of political organizations had collectively a larger payroll than the Republican Party. The Kochs employed 1600 staffers in 35 states, which gave them three times the manpower of the Republican Party. Cooks originally planned to spend close to a billion dollars on the 2016 election, but the rise of Donald Trump took them as much by surprise as it took everyone else. See, the Kochs actually love immigration, illegal or otherwise. They love free trade and trade deals like NAFTA and the Pacific Partnership because those things make **** loads of money for business owners. Donald Trump was exactly the kind of conservative they did not want to see win election. So they cut their election spending by hundreds of millions of dollars and put a huge chunk of what they were going to still spend into state races instead. The current CIA director, for example. Michael Pompeo received more funding than any other Congressional candidate from the Kochs. Dark money suggests that what happened between 2010 and 2016 is that essentially the rabbit, anti government, anti regulation, anti left sentiment that Charles and David Koch's been hundreds of millions of dollars to inculcate finally grew beyond them. They helped create the movement that morphed into Trumpism, but during its evolution they lost control of it. One former Co employee said this during the 2016 election quote we are partly responsible. We invested a lot in training and arming a grassroots. For me that was not controllable. So conflicts have continued between the Cokes and now President Trump. Most recently the Koch network refused to support a Republican and a tight race in North Dakota because his of his Trumpist views on trade. After that news broke Donald Trump tweeted quote. The globalist Koch brothers, who have become a total joke in real Republican circles, are against strong borders and powerful trade. I never sought their support because I don't need their money or bad ideas. They love my tax and regulation cuts, judicial picks and more. I made them richer. Their network is highly overrated. I have beaten them at every turn. They want to protect their companies. Outside the US from being taxed. I'm for America first and the American worker a puppet for NO12. Nice guys with bad ideas make America great again. No? Yeah. I half agree with the President there. The coaches do have bad ideas. I do not agree about there being nice guys. 2 nice guys. Bad ideas though. These guys over here. Nice guys, but nice, nice guys. I really like what they're doing with pipelines filled with holes blowing up neighborhoods. That's nice guy move. Classic. Nice guy move. Bad ideas, though. Bad ideas. In 1990, when their mother died, Charles Koch basically hid information about the funeral from his brothers Frederick and Bill. Frederick missed his mom's funeral, and bill had to charter a private plane to get there on time. Not nice guys. Charles grew up to be just as much of a terrible parent as his own dad had been when he saw his son chase play what dark money. Describes as a half hearted tennis match. Charles ordered him sent to work in a filthy feed lot 7 days a week, 12 hours a day until he got better at tennis, presumably. Meanwhile, Charles's daughter Elizabeth had this to say about coming home to see her father during the summer while she was at college. Quote, as soon as we arrived, I felt an overwhelming urge to prostate myself on the floor and eat dirt in order to illustrate how grateful I am for everything they've done for me, that I'm not the spoiled monster they warned me I'd become if I wasn't careful. She described trying to earn her father's approval as. Staring down that dark well of nothing you do will ever be good enough, you privileged waste of flesh. This is how Charles's daughter describes how she feels in her dad's presence. It's impossible to say right now whether Chase or Elizabeth will also concoct a decades long conspiracy to influence American political thought. What I will say is that it seems like the unique mix of obscene wealth and insane, abusive pettiness that made Charles Koch the man he is today, will at least have a chance with another generation of born billionaires. Boy howdy, isn't inherited wealth grand? Wow, you're speechless. Yeah. What else is there to say? I feel my heart breaks in a sad way for these kids. Generations, huh? Yeah, cause like. Charles Koch didn't have to be the ******* he is, but there was. The way he was raised made it very low odds that he was going to turn out to be this very compassionate guy, for sure. I hope his kids are compassionate. I hope his kids are better than him. I hope they've looked at the life their dads led and realized he doesn't. I doubt he's a happy man. No, because I don't think he's capable of having close relationships with people. Yeah, he's probably blinded by his ideas. Yeah. Who can say what's really in another person's heart? Yeah. Yeah. And maybe, maybe I'm just being hopeful that he's miserable because he's done miserable things and he's just the happiest clam and the clam factor. No, he's probably a miserable person, but he's unaware that he's a miserable person. Yeah, because he doesn't know what it can be to, like, have a father who cares about you and and kids that you feel warmly towards and are proud of those that are alien to him. Yeah, he lost that boxing once, you know. Yeah, he did lose a box that boxing once. And it. Yeah, protesters, if you wind up protesting a coke thing in the future, really hit dry, really drive home that he's bad at boxing. That seems to be a short sore pot. Sort of what? Probably die. Probably put a hit on you. Yeah. I'm really enjoyed this. Thank you. Thank you. Glad you enjoyed this terrible story of a terrible person. Yeah. I mean, it's definitely. I've definitely been thinking a lot and got sad for a little while and got happy again. And then I got sad a lot. And then I was just like, wow, yeah, I'm going to go get in my car. Do laundry out my day. So at the end of this, are you more or less optimistic? Ohh, less. Oh, for sure, less, but also a little bit more. It's nice to hear that his kids are like, aware enough to be like, oh, when I come home, this is how I feel, and this is not how I want to feel. And maybe they'll change. Maybe they can be like, hey, actually, we can make a difference. But yeah, you know, he probably has it all lined up with the industry that somebody else just like him's going to take over. And it's hard to imagine, yeah, someone good taking over. It is kind of heartening to me, even though Trump is the result, that they did lose control of this movement that they built. Because it does mean that there are limits to what wealth can buy, even though I don't like what it ran out of control and turned into foreshadowing of things to come anyways. Yeah, well, we'll see. I feel like America is on a good road right now. And you know what I love to have on those good Rd trips? Doritos. Hey, we brought it back around. Well, well, I eat the rest of this bag of Doritos like a like a some sort of cheese goblin. Please save some for me. Will do. Why don't you plug your plug cables first? Great. You can catch me on the Internet at ever mainard.com MAINARD and ever like the word Twitter Instagram at ever Maynard. I'm doing shows all around LA. Maybe in a place near you soon, who knows? And then I'm on Netflix in a movie called the Feels. Watch it and you know, yeah, watch it again. Watch it. Tweet at me. Ohh no haters please. Sensitive soul. But also I like I said, I love to comment and I do so aggressively. Yelp, Reddit, any any place. Sometimes I'll just go to Yahoo comment, Yahoo comment. I love answering things wrong on Yahoo answers. I didn't know I could do that, but I will be aggressively commenting on Yahoo answers. Yeah, I really stuff like that. Quora I really like. Was sabotaging it OK, giving people bad advice on how to treat first aid injuries and stuff? Hey, that's not OK. Ohh, I'm just you're not kidding. We all try to seed the world in our own way, so let those mud frogs come up. You plant the seeds and then the frogs come out. And then what did I tell you about those mud frogs? Alright, you can find this mud frog on Twitter at I write. OK, you can find this podcast on the Internet at behindthebastards.com, where we'll have all of the many, many sources for this episode listed. And you can also find us at at ******** Pot on Twitter and Instagram, where we will be tweeting and Instagramming things. Hurray. Yeah. So until. Next week we will be talking about some other terrible person or group of people. I'm Robert Evans and you know I love about 40% of you statistically. My name is Alex Fumero and I host the new podcast more than a movie, American Me, a film directed by and starring Edward James Olmos. I'll be diving into the behind the scenes controversy, including an alleged backlash from the Mexican mafia. Several people who worked on the movie have been murdered. I don't want to speak about why would people be murdered for being in a movie? Listen to more than a movie American me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Lauren Ober, and in addition to being a charming podcast host, I am also a newly diagnosed autistic person. My new show, the loudest girl in the world, is all about my weird, winding path to diagnosis, my decision at age 42 to finally get evaluated for autism. Listen to the loudest. In the world on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Danny Shapiro, host of family secrets. I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season of family secrets. With over 25 million downloads, the importance of both telling and hearing secrets is apparent, and I am so excited to share 10 astonishing news stories with you. This is our best season yet. Listen and subscribe to family secrets on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.