Part Three: H.L. Hunt: The First Elon Musk

Welcome back to Behind the Bastards Part 3 of our series on HL Hunt This Week. You are welcome, but you all should really thank Princess Weeks, our wonderful guest for agreeing

to sit in for a third episode in a marathon recording session. Thank you, Princess.

“You are braver than the troops. Thank you. I love to learn and I honestly just genuinely love”

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“Let's start by talking about our boy H.L. Hunts second family, right?”

Because I discussed how they eventually moves them up to New York and has a guy married them. What I did not note, because I went in and kind of added some stuff to the script, what's I realized that we're going to wind up getting three parts. And I found some of the guy had forgotten to add that was in my note stock, which is that apparently, Frania, like when he marries her, she didn't even know his real first name. Like he marries her

under a fake name. And one of the notes that Hinder Shot has in her book is that he probably, she probably first start suspecting that something's weird when they have their first child who is a girl just like his first child with with Lida. And he names her Harold Dina, which is not, he's not telling her his first name is Harold, but he names her after himself. And he named her, he tries to name her Harold Dina.

God, which is like crazy. But I'm not Harold. That's not my name. Why are you so? Why is that so important to you, man? That's really weird. Right. Like be better. Yeah. No risk. That's just bizarre. What an odd guy. When she finds out, he tries to get her before he moves to New York. He tries to convince Frania to move to Utah and become a Mormon so that they can legally quote unquote be big of us.

The rule book never changes. The rule book never changes. He's like, listen, they we can get a

farm at New York's Mormons. Later day, let's go. First off, your first wife wouldn't be in Utah. Second, you're not Mormon. But I could be in that sort of mess. And yes, it's when that stuff doesn't work that he like pays her to move to New York. Right. And that's up trust for all the kids and find someone to marry them for tend to be the father. Now, this is, he's just going to get and have kids with a third woman after this. And I think he's, I think actually this

after lighted eyes that he has his third partner, but I'm not 100% sure, but they might have having several kids. And he likes lives with them later in life in Dallas, but he doesn't ever

my money this time. At least I'm not going to be big and missely married again. I'm sure he

“wants it. I think he does actually give them a lot of money. But yeah, he doesn't want to, he's not”

going to get big and missely married again. So the need to seem fair and unbiased meant that smooth, you know, on his, the facts for him is his former FBI man host has to act like he respects

the liberal lion on things. But he always visibly more interested in the conservative arguments.

Another good example of that would come from one time, smooth gets asked, should we continue to handle Korea as a limited police action? You know, this is right at the start of the Korean War or should we, you know, put more troops into it, right? Quote, smooth first, dryly answered in the affirmative, quoting Adelaide Stephenson. Korea is the most remarkable effort the world has ever seen to make collective security work in choosing to repel the first armed aggression of the

communist. We chose to make bitter sacrifices today to save civilization tomorrow. On the negative side, smooth drew a portrait of a hypothetical soldier named Joe. It's cold up here in the winter.

“Sometimes 30 below zero, if a boy cries, his tears turn to ice, and then there is the enemy,”

always the enemy, and the kind of fight that man fought centuries ago, knives and fists,

fingers, cropping for eyes, and teeth seeking a soft spot in the neck. Maybe Joe will die in the slit trench, and maybe he will live his hands sour and gummy, with half digested rice rule ripped out of the stomach of a bleeding bundle of rags and bones of it at his feet. So wild, wild little rant to go on there, man. Yeah. I was just like, right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And one of my favorite lines from her book,

Heather Hendershot writes, quote, "Smooth could somehow snarl a feminine egghead in such a way that it sounded infinitely worse than son of a bitch." So he's like that kind of, you know, that kind of broadcaster. Now the facts for a made itself a nexus of support for Joseph McCarthy, as Hunt sought to convince regular Americans that communists needed to be rooted out. Joe guests only won episode of the facts for him, but his researcher in future wife, Jean Care,

worked for the facts for him as a staffer. Another early staffer was Robert E. Lee, not that Robert E. Lee. I was just saying, yeah. This Robert E. Lee was a former FBI man who helped come up McCarthy compile his list of 205 communists in the state department. And there's so many FBI guys who work for the facts for him, but there's like a joke in the FBI that like that's the retirement plan is working for this fucking right-wing billionaire. So things are going well,

he's using the facts for him to support his buddy, Joe McCarthy, but then tailed under Joe makes the mistake of picking on the army. In the 1954 army McCarthy hearings are a disaster for the man, and for the broader cause of being visibly crazy as an anti-communist activist. The hearings were broadcast on television, and we'll only ABC in the Dumont network broadcast the hearings in full, because they're 36 days long, the bigger networks CBS and NBC broadcast excerpts. And this actually,

the fact that these networks, because there's money and advertising now, they don't want to run just 36 days of congressional hearings. It's it's way, it's a huge waste of money, but because they decide to take excerpts and just run clips from it, this is actually the way

then the media covers the McCarthy hearings as one of the first cases of sound bite journalism,

right? And sound bite journalism, a positive way, where previously the reporting on this would have just been kind of dull articles about another series of hearings about Communism in the U.S., that most Americans wouldn't have known there was anything to be upset by, because these got journalists are looking for like, well, what are the craziest things McCarthy saying? What are the wildest moments from this? It makes it impossible to ignore and they're playing this over and over again,

like, no, this is actually a real problem, right? Like, this guy is out of his mind and is just attacking people for no reason. Like, that really, the how this gets reported really helps to make that case, because these networks are looking for like the most embarrassing and shocking moments and clipping them out and playing them over and over again. And what's fair on the air, hinder shot rights? Joseph Welch's famous rhetorical question, have you no sense of decency, sir?

At long last, was not only televised live by both ABC and Dumont on day 30 of the hearings, but also repeated dozens of times on radio and TV that night. Following McCarthy's attack on General George C. Marshall, former President Harry S. Truman, appeared on Edward R. Murrow's "See It Now" and expressed his own feelings about McCarthy. The man who made that attack isn't fit to shine General Marshall's shoes. Damn. Yeah, it's a pretty sick burn, actually. He meant it.

“No, that's the only thing, though, because it's like, I think, when we were going up and we learned”

about this air of McCarthyism, it seems so inherently absurd and you're just like, how could that ever happen? Like, isn't it just so obvious? And then you're here and you're like, well,

Yeah, they need the sound by it's right. And there's actually some benefits to that. It's not all

downsides. Yeah. Now, one of the things this does, the fact that this is kind of destroys McCarthy, it makes hunt furious. And it makes him furious because he becomes convinced this evidence of the liberal media and the pernicious left wing bias within the media, right? It's a communist organ, you know? And this is kind of where the liberal media is a conservative bugbear starts, right? Not just with hunt, but it starts as a result in a big way. It's majorly supercharged by

the reaction to the McCarthy hearings and hunt is one of the people leading the charge and attacking

“the liberal media, right? And for H.L. Hunt, one of the things I think is really important to point out.”

Today, if you listen to like what Barry Weiss and like the free fucking press, we'll say, they all talk about Edward Armero too. It was like, we need to get back to a time when newsmen weren't political. And you know, they just were telling people the truth and they were trusted and in those days, you know, Americans knew that they could rely on their, you know, the people giving them the news to not just be in it for personal political gain. It wasn't just some like woken bullshit.

If Edward Armero were reporting the day, they would call him woke. And I know that because they called him woke in the 50s. Like H.L. Hunt and he called him a woke leftist communist infiltrator. And they called him it because he was deliberately and aggressively multicultural, right? To quote from H.L. Schott's article, Murrow was fiercely patriotic. His America was an

“inclusive democratic place in which citizens rationally discussed their problems. When Murrow took”

see it now's cameras to Korea for Christmas in 1952, he celebrated the sacrifices of the troops. Murrow also made a point of picture and integrated platoon that included not only whites and blacks, but also a Chinese American and a Korean American, a gesture that surely rub some viewers the wrong way. And fucking they attack like the, because the newsletter for lifelines isn't subject to the fairness doctrine, they're able to be really political. And in that newsletter, hunt calls him

Chau in Kronkite and calls Dan Rather Ho Chi, rather, right? Again, they are calling these guys

fucking communists back then, too. Like Walter Kronkite was never seen as a totally unbiased and

fair man by conservatives. They hated him. Just really want to make that point as clearly as I can. All right. It's so exhausting because and they keep telling us that these are the people that we can reach. We just got to give them a, just give them a little bit of more information. It's like they have the information. They don't like it. They don't want it. No, they thought Edward R. Murrow was a communist because he pointed out that there were fucking Chinese people in the

U.S. Army, right? Like, and it's been so for ages. Like, yeah, so Chinese families have been here longer than some of these other, the Trump's family. These people have always hated this kind of

shit, right? Always hated the idea that we're multi-cultural country and anyone who celebrates it

even if they're celebrating it in the context of supporting the Korean War, right? He gets called a communist. And supporting the troops and like, and supporting the troops, right? Don't matter. No, communism. So this, the fact that fucking hunt goes so crazy after Murrow and he gets so pissed about the reaction to the McCarthy hearings gets him in trouble. Democratic congressman start being like, wait a second, he's getting like public funding basically for making non-partisan

media. And this is what they're calling non-partisan congressman, one congressman points out that hunts tied to Joseph McCarthy, and there's complaints that the facts form has been offending from its tax-free status, despite being very biased. And there's start being investigations. Lee, his former staffer, was made FCC commissioner in 1954, which further upset Democrats who are like, well, now his guys controlling the FCC, so of course he won't get attacked. Now what's weird

is Lee's actually a really fair-minded FCC commissioner. He does a lot of stuff that pisses off

“the right. He's actually surprisingly good at the job, I think. And hinder shot proposes that the”

whole Bruhah does more to make hunt famous as a right-wing crank than it does to actually help his shows, right? That like, the fact that he's tied to Lee and the fact that like he's like, there's this uproar about it. He becomes known as being like a crank. Like it does not spread, it doesn't make his ideas more popular. Now pass this point because of how many people get pissed off about this hunt becomes increasingly famous, right? He's now someone who is known and talked about

for his political activism, and he does not like this. He does right, right? Because he's got stage right, right? He's putting himself out there, right? In fact, like his as a young man, his stage

giving a speech when he's like a younger businessman. So the fact that like the eyes of America are now on him and he's being accused of partisan instigation, fucks hunt up. And in 1956, he shuts down the facts form to avoid controversy. Not because he thinks he's done anything wrong because he just doesn't like being under the gun like that, right? Like he's just anxious. So yeah, he's he's a was. He does launch immediately another series called Answers for American. This actually

launched, I think, a little before the facts form quits. It's a public service program that's broadcast on 22 TV stations in 360 radio stations. Broadcast live, this was a half hour panel discussion on ABC that featured a mix of liberals and conservatives. There's your liberal panel and your conservative panel. Repping the left was former congressman George Combs and New York you professor Charles Hodges, opposed to them were William F. Buckley and a rotating guest.

Now, if you don't know William F. Buckley, he is like the Proto Ben Shapiro. He's an essayist and a public debateer who gets really famous going on TV to debate politely liberals, right, about the

“issues of the day, right? That's how he's known and he is still to this day, like liberal like”

centrist liberal Democrats. Buckley is like the the ideal of the conservative intellectual. He's one of the good ones, right? He's a he was not, but he's like respectable. Like this is how you should do it.

Look at the respect he always showed the people he was debating alongside. There's nostalgia

goggles for him is always just like we used to be able to have these conversations in peace. Yeah, and one at like, by the way, his son is like a major prorodysia activist like these, this is not polite ever, but yeah, like that's that's his, his space in the American mind, right? Now, you can already see in the way the show is set up, how some of the bias creeps in. This is supposed to be two liberals and two conservative, seems non-biased, but why is one of the

conservatives always a rotating guest? Is it maybe because that makes the conservative seem more dynamic and the liberals seem like it's just these two old hokey college professor types, right? Right. Um, Buckley also is a he's a great performer. William F. Buckley is one of the first media trained guys who exists, right? And the liberals that hunt picks are not super charismatic figures as hendershot rights. Homes did not fare well into the harsh studio lights, and although most

of the participants chain smoked, it was only comes to whom the smokes seem to cling in a thick film. In his three-piece suit with carnation butiner, he affused a stereotypical East Coast liberal establishment persona. Professor Hodges was articulate, but often came across as a cartoonish liberal intellectual or worse an old windbag. Buckley spoke an easily digestible conservative soundbites, such as we would rather die than be enslaved by communism. Right. So again, you can see the evolution,

how this is even a little more disguised as non-biased while still pushing a very clear ideological line. And this is such a good idea, Fox News is going to rip this basic model off decades later for their hit show, Hannity and Holmes. The same basic premise applies. The aesthetic

of debate, but with the certainty that one side is going to win, and the enemy is always going to

look like a big stupid dope. And you also make sure that the conservative looks, you know,

“like young and put together while the liberal looks like, you know, like a nerd, right?”

I've got a photo of Hannity and Holmes for the viewers, but like Sean Hannity, the start of that photo right here. You know, young and put in Holmes, he looks like a nerd. He looks like a nerd. Right. So in the age of social media, this idea reached its final form with guys like Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk, and I forget the name of the change my mind, Guy, who'd going to college campuses with the, you know, whatever. Oh, what the film is. Yeah, I forget his fuck. Yeah, but they all got failed

marriages except for us. Well, I guess not. I guess they don't all have failed marriages, just that guy. I forget his name, but then I don't care to remember it. Um, but yeah, and you, and in this, instead of like, you don't even have like the boring hokey professors now, you have like the liberals and left are represented by like this carousel of college kids that you pick out because they clearly don't have media training, and they're not like good at debating with the professional

broadcaster on television, right? Like, it's like the more septum piercings the better, speaking

“as septum piercings the better. Yeah, are they a little high? Good. Get him in here. Yeah, you know, who else is a little high?”

The sponsors that support this podcast, you know, every single one thing we guarantee is that

every advertiser on this show just the second I said just just sparked up a fat blunt, every single

one of them, especially the, the Washington State Highway Patrol. If you hear that ad, you know, the whole Washington State Highway Patrol is blazing a bone right now. No, no, no. Another podcast from some SNL, late night comedy guide, not quite on humor me with Robert

funnier this week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Side L, helped an Occupella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes, those people are starving for banter. Listen, a humor me with Robert Smigle and Friends on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's us to Jonas Brothers and guess what? We have some big news. What's the news, the news? We created our own podcast.

Oh, hey, Jonas, we invented a podcast. Well, we didn't invent it. We just contributed to first people

to do podcasts. Pretty, yeah, pretty wide range of podcasts. But this one's extra special.

“So how do we, how do we actually come up with a name, hey, Jonas, guys? I honestly don't remember.”

I think it was on a call about what we should call it. And, oh, we were thinking, I'm originally calling it one of the early names of our band before Jonas Brothers. Well, this is how you guys remember going down. Yes, I have a very different memory of this. We were talking about a thing, a bit for the podcast. We put the call in and say, hey, Jonas, and then I rubbed down on my little note pad. Hey, Jonas, and offered it up as a potential title. Oh, the podcast. But thanks.

But thanks for remembering that, guys. Listen to hey, Jonas, on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Just listen. We don't care where you hear it. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal, but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games, and with the athletes for a full year.

Within probably 10 days, I put on 10 pounds. I was having troubles stopping the muscle growth. Listen to superhuman on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Jacob Kingston grew up in an isolated polygamous sect. We were God's chosen Kingdom on Earth. He felt destined for greatness. So when a swaggering Armenian businessman had a pulse shake up into an extraordinary world, he doesn't look back. For Ari's Lamborghini's private jets meeting

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“The largest tax investigation in American history. You need to tell me what you know is somebody”

coming after me. Jacob told Levant, you're ruining my life. Listen to Kingdom of Fraud on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back talking about the facts forum. Well, that's dead. And anyway, two years after he kills the facts forum, Hunt starts a new series, Lifeline. Now this is not, he's not, this time he's not going to try to get the tax breaks by being balanced, right? He decides that's not worth,

you know, the trouble. So I'm not going to claim that we're not, uh, we don't have like a line. Instead, in order to avoid getting in trouble, I'm not going to reference political parties or political tendencies at all. I'm not going to say the Democrats or the left. I'm not going to say Republicans or the right or conservatism. Instead, I'm going to have, I'm going to have this

“fucking preacher guy come up here. The Reverend Wayne Poucher, uh, who was, if you want to know”

who this guy's background, he was the former campaign manager for Strom Thurman's successful like 254 campaign. Well, he's on the show. Yeah. So Poucher's first just kind of less aggressive than smooth was right. He's, he's, he speaks more and about religion and stuff. He's not talking about the, the left being evil. Instead, he talks about every, instead of referring to them, like, by their political terms, he calls them the mistaken. And he calls the good guys

the constructive people, right? And so he gets away from these like, fair and a standards by not talking about the left and the right, but I talked about the mistaken and the constructive. And he speaks more than like parable. So about like right and wrong. And it's very clear that he's talking about politics, but he's not using political term. So it kind of slips by, right? Uh, no. And in 19, yeah, it's really annoying. Now, hunt doesn't interview with playboy

in 1966 where he talks about why he's not using why this new lifeline doesn't use the term conservative and why he doesn't like using that in his propaganda anymore. And he says conservative is an unfortunate word. It denotes Mossback reactionary and old phogeism, right? So I don't want to seem like it old phogeist. So I'm just going to talk about the mistaken and the constructive

people, right? Now, I don't, I think this is a mixed success. This, this show is never a very wildly

on the air in a lot of areas, right? Um, so it gets listeners from that, but it's kind of boring.

“It sounds boring. It sounds a lot more boring. The space is exciting. He was aggressive, right?”

This dude, Poucher is like boring and he mostly talks about God and he ends every broadcast with don't forget to pray. He makes that his, his, his tagline because that means hunt can claim an exemption on the basis of running a religious organization for tax purposes. Right? That, uh, it's good shit. Good shit. By all accounts, lifeline was just as conservative as the facts form, but a lot more boring because hunt is scared of pissing people off. Now, he's also

making a lot of other propaganda. He is by dollar amount, the number one producer of right wing propaganda in like the 50s through the 60s. Um, he is publishing newspapers too and magazines including the newspaper, the magazine Human Events, which goes on to be pretty popular. He has a regular column in that he sells to a bunch of different newspapers that he writes called hunt for truth.

“Oh. You get it. You get it. I hate that that's a good name. I mean, I wouldn't want you, but I”

know someone's dad. Yeah. Yeah. So the nation summarizes the state of his propaganda operation in 1964 this way. H. L. Hunt in addition to being very probably the richest man in America

is very probably the country's most powerful propagandaist for the extreme right. The main vehicle

for his brand of conservatism today is lifeline, a radio program originating in Washington, D.C. and daily reaching an estimated audience of 5 million persons in 45 states. It is heard over 330 one stations, among which are 25% of the nation's clear channel outlet. That's a lot, just because again, there's not much else to put on there. And this is something the conservatives will learn from a lot of where we are right now politically is the result of the fact that for years, like 20

some years, liberals kind of ignored talk radio for the most part. There were a couple of attempts to get into it, but it was, and it was just assumed that like, well, the fact like more people listen and trust like the news and, you know, magazines and newspapers and TV news and, you know, all of that is more liberal than it is conservative and like talk radio was out there being the only thing in tens and millions of Americans years for hours as they're commuting driving all across

the country. I grew up, I listened so many hundreds hours of Michael Savage and wrestling them all these guys, and it made a really solid core. People wonder, like, why is there this core of like

30% of the country that will never reconsider supporting Trump? Talk radio is a big part of why.

Yeah, and Hunt isn't good. He doesn't figure quite out how to make it work that way, but he's the first guy who really realizes why talk radio is valuable and everything that comes after is at least influenced by that. And it also shows how the left is always really so supportive of institutions and like the power of institutions that they just won't even make a solid attempt because like it was how many years into Joe Robins. Yeah, yeah, that like um liberals were like, oh,

we should have a Joe Rogan thing. It's like a podcasting thing or YouTube and then Twitch. It's like, oh, we should we could finally have someone in this space and it's like, yeah, you invested in stuff. Yeah, you can influence people's politics by making them listen to a crazy guy for hours.

“Maybe you should have your own crazy asshole that people like to listen to. I don't know.”

Or if there's someone answering that guy's word, I'm not a big we need a Joe Rogan of

of for fucking the Democratic party. It just doesn't work that way. You're never going to succeed

doing that. If you're just like, let's make our own Democratic Joe, you're always going to fail if that's how you think about it. But what you do need is like fucking people who are crazy popular that a lot of folks listen to who are talking about politics in a way that is like usable to you. And when you see people like that instead of discarding them and like hating them and running away from them, you should try to find ways like the smart strategies to try to find

ways to benefit from that and to like make them make that useful to you as opposed to pretending nobody cares about this stuff and they're just assholes talking on the internet. They are just assholes talking on the internet, but unfortunately it matters, right? Exactly. I say as an asshole talking on the internet. Hey, I do like that's my full-time job on YouTube. It's like I definitely think it's so frustrating because like the right what it is able to do with having so much

young talent is really have like a lot of high-profisibility in those spaces where it's like, you know, you can only be academic for so long and it's I'm period where like no one wants to read. Right, exactly. So the lifeline advisory board included the CEO of Sears, Robert Wood, and John Wayne, but it also hosted several ministers. Yeah, John Wayne, baby. I'm if I help him to help him

way that isn't starting to like the start of the 70s. No abortion yet. I mean, yeah, that's not

“really a massive it. Again, Hunt is going to be one of the people who just helped push that even though”

he is not really religious and doesn't really care about that stuff. He is again, one of the earlier conservatives to see, oh, you know what? If I marry my feelings on tax policy and like stop and people from voting with all of these like weird religious conservative like bug bears like abortion, I can make those people support my crazy tax shit and use that as a political weapon, too. Right. So again, Hunt foresees this. He tries to use Christianity to spread his own

anti-government message. His first wife light a dies in the 50s and after he gets with his,

well, she's not really a wife, but he joins her Baptist Church. His pastor, Reverend Chris Well, was a howling reactionary in 1960, Hunt printed up an anti-Catholic sermon, Chris Well had written and handed it out at the DNC because JFK is running for president. It included this line. The election of a Catholic as president would mean the end of religious liberty in America.

“Like, you know, the thing that happened. Hunt dedicated numerous columns to Kennedy, who he warned”

would sell the nation out to communists and/or the pope. His real issue, what's very funny to me. And more and/or he doesn't hate JFK because of like their, you know, JFK is more of like a liberal progressive and he's very conservative. He hates JFK specifically and the Catholic stuff is like he's using that because he thinks it'll be useful in getting other people to hate JFK. He hates JFK because JFK supports reviewing the oil depletion allowance and changing it

to in that loophole that let's oil, men not pay taxes, right? And there it is. And then you're gonna say because it's so hot and he was like, I can't have that. But that oil, they make your sense. It's his only real political issue is the oil depletion allowance. Everything else, all the cultural stuff that he talks about. I mean, he does believe in the anti-communism, but 90% of his propaganda is about keeping the oil depletion allowance. Everything else,

“like the work with the religious right, it's all to protect the oil depletion allowance because”

he fucking loves that shit. He's like, I can excuse communism, but I draw the line at my oil allowed. Let me pay taxes. Uh, per the nation, when Hunt talks of his country's troubles,

he does not always sound funeral. But when he discusses the oil depletion allowance and possible

legislative threats to it, his face takes on the stricken blankness of one who has just heard the last Trump. I'm in favor of depletion allowances for all natural resources, he said recently. But without the depletion allowance for oil, we are utterly ruined. Again, you're the richest man on earth. You would just have to pay taxes. And like support the roads and stuff. Yeah, he's got so many kids. Uh, this is why Hunt promptly had 200,000 reprints of Christmas

sermon made and mailed out after which he sat back and hoped to watch a wave of aroused Protestantism wash Kennedy out of the running. Right. Like that's at least as far as the nation is concerned. Like that's what his goal is here. It doesn't work. Sadly, Nixon was on the dock. It really what happens is this just pisses people off. There's a bunch of editorial about like this guy's trying to force Kennedy out because he doesn't want to pay taxes. And it just kind of pisses every and a lot of

people get angry that like he's trying to make people hysteric about an anti Catholic. He's trying to use he's trying to like rustle the bunch of anti Catholic bigotry so it doesn't have to pay taxes. Like people recognize this and call it out. And it pisses folks off. It draws the Senate's attention again too. They point out that like, hey, this flyer, you distributed the DNC, it's actually a federal crime to distribute anonymous circulars after the start of a campaign

to influence a political campaign on this way. And you did not know it at all who paid for this. You committed a crime. There's an uproar. There's Senate Subcommittee Investigation,

Hunt just hides. Like he panics and he like basically goes on the glam a little bit.

And he just can't pretend he can't make the meeting. Yeah, he's like hiding. So Chris Well has to take it on the chin and the Senate Subcommittee meeting and like actually talk to Congress. And Chris Well, like pretends he doesn't know anything about Hunt's money and stuff. When Hunt finally surfaced again, he admits that he paid for the leaflet. But he's like, I didn't do it to her at LBJFK. I did it to help LBJ's campaign because I'm really

pro LBJ. That's the only reason I did it. He also claimed that I didn't run away to avoid being investigated. I ran away because I had a book to write for the good of the nation. Like I come up with an idea of those books that's really going to change everything. So I was just like writing. I just didn't. I couldn't make it to Congress. Sorry about that guys. Now, he did

he publishes his first novel, Alpaca, which is a work of right wing utopian fiction. The book

“took place in an ideal society that followed Hunt's plan for a wealth-based voting system.”

Hender shot describes, and his perfect world political discussion could only take place via the printed word. Discussing politics on radio and TV or speechmaking before an audience of more than 200 people was outlawed as inflammatory. It was widely reported that Hunt had hired someone to write the romantic parts of Alpaca, as he was only interested in the politics. When the book breaks from political exegesis, we find our right wing lovers spouting a name dialogue, such as,

"I am putty in your hands." I need to read this book one of these days. Oh my god. Yeah, and there's like a bunch of cool stuff in there. The book was published by H. L. Hunt Publishing, a company that created a published phone books. So just as like a side business, he has a phone book company that he has published his shitty novel. That writer for that nation piece notes that by the mid-60s, a lot of Dallas newsmen had come to believe that Hunt had based the protagonist of his shitty

novel on an idealized version of himself. And here's one relevant line from the novel. Huge. And this is about the protagonist. He had burning convictions, but there were few in Alpaca he told himself who could agree with him. Right? Like he's this, he's this iconoclast, genius rebel, and other people just don't see how brilliant he is. You know, it's very much hunt thinking of about himself. Yeah. He's like, "I want to write someone who's so smart."

Yeah. The smartest man alive. The article goes on to describe the model constitution that Hunt presents in his novel. Quote, a constitution that gives each person a quota of votes based primarily on how much he pays in taxes. There are other ways of getting votes under the hunt plan. If you were old enough to draw retirement play, but refuse to accept it, you get two extra votes. If you were a government worker and refuse to accept more than 50

percent of your pay, you get one extra vote. On the other hand, anyone receiving welfare or sick pay from the government gets no vote at all. Oh, okay. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. Just rich guys go a lot of votes. That's crazy. Now a book reviewer interviewing Hunt says to him after reading his book, it's kind of fascist democracy if you get what I mean. And Hunt later in the interview says,

“"You're the only one in order to do what I was getting at." I think it's in reference to another”

line, but it's, it's very dull. He's like, yeah, I see me. So Hunt sends copies of his stupid book to every sitting congressman, along with a number of foreign heads of state and quote, "many colleges." He brags that he has a sequel plan, which would present an even better constitution,

as long as he could just get a couple of weeks to finish it. And he never publishes this book,

but the working title was "Your Topia." Not Alpa, didn't you? He does eventually do a sequel to Alpaqa, but he doesn't publish "Your Topia." Hmm, terrible. Great stuff, great, very 60s of your own, you have your own publishing house, and you still can't finish it second novel. No, no, man, it's hard. Look, hey, how I'm working on that one myself, it's tough. You know what else is hard? It's hard for me,

when I see people not giving the proper amount of respect and love to the products and services that support this podcast. Why don't we all just think about them, and how nice they are,

and also listen to their ads for a second.

We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Wasn't a humor me with Robert's Michael and friends on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's us, the Jonas Brothers, and guess what? We have some big news. What's the news, the news? We created our own podcast. Oh, hey, Jonas, we invented a podcast. Well, we didn't invent it. We just contributed to it. First people to do podcast. Pretty,

yeah, pretty wide range of podcasts, right there. But this one's extra special. So how do we,

“how do we actually come up with a name, hey, Jonas, guys? I honestly don't remember. I think it was”

on a call about what we should call it. And oh, we were thinking, I'm originally calling it one of the early names of our band before Jonas Brothers. Well, this is how you guys remember going down. Yes, I have a very different memory of this. We were talking about a thing, a bit for the podcast. We put the call in and say, Hey, Jonas, and then I broke down on my little note pad. Hey, Jonas, and offered it up as a potential title. Oh, the podcast. But thanks.

But thanks for remembering that, guys. Listen to Hey, Jonas on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal, but encouraged. It's the enhanced

“games. Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way,”

the podcast's superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games, and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I put on 10 pounds. I was having troubles stopping the muscle growth. Listen to superhuman on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Jacob Kingston grew up in an isolated polygamous sect. We were God's chosen kingdom on earth. He felt destined for greatness. So when a swaggering Armenian businessman had a pulse Jacob into

an extraordinary world, he doesn't look back. For Ari's Lamborghinis, private jets, meeting the president of Turkey, our Michal McFeed, and this is one of the most shocking criminal conspiracy's

eye that ever come across. When Jacob met Levant, this went to a billion dollar fraud.

But with two kings from entirely different worlds, just how long can their empire survive?

“The largest tax investigation in American history. You need to tell me what you know is somebody”

coming after me. Jacob told Levant, you're ruining my life. Listen to kingdom of fraud on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We are back. So one of Hunts' dearest beliefs is that letters to the editor are the part of the paper that people read most often. Like people just skim over the articles. They want to read letters to the editor. Because people have a natural curiosity over what other ordinary people have to say.

That's H.L. Hunts like most deeply held belief, and he's not an ordinary person. But he also thinks that if you write a letter to the editor, people assume you are. And so for most of his public life, he's writing like, sometimes more than a dozen letters to the editor per day. And he has a small army of secretaries who will mimic a graph them and will mail them to hundreds of newspapers. So he just has like a rant about politics or fucking taxes or kids these days and he'll write

a letter to the editor and he'll send it to every newspaper he can think of or his secretaries can think of to get it printed, right? I'm sometimes I'm so why I don't have money because this is like this is like the impulses of like me writing to like teen folk. Be like you don't understand the sexiest man in America is not a blank sheldon. Yeah. The air teen folk. There are too many states. Please eliminate three. I am not a crank. Yeah. Exactly. I'm a hip kid. Yeah. Yeah. I'm cool.

He thinks that like this will this will really get Americans trick him into believing my politics. They'll just read all these letters to the editor and assume I'm a normal guy and they won't be able to catch it. Now, this leads me to a very funny quote from Heather Henderson's book quote, "respectable businessmen gave money to the causes in which they believed hunt wouldn't even give to local Dallas charities, much less political campaigns, asked to contribute to diabetes research

hunt responded as summarized in an FBI memo that society would be better off if persons who are permanently disabled or physically incapacitated and unable to financially care for themselves were let to die rather than to be a burden on society." What? Great. Okay. Yeah. He loved Bugsby Bell. He was like, how many doors? He sure did. Yeah. He's like, just the kind of piece of shit you would imagine. Perfectly so. Now, one, I will say, this is all frustrating. The fact that

he's trying to brute force his horrible genocidal politics into the world is disgusting. And there's like, there's so many good quotes. Like, I have one of the nation. He's like, I'm slow, but I'm the best writer. I know. Like, he's certain about bad. Even though he's not, he's not great, right? Like, he's not a particularly good writer. And editors of these newspapers that he's trying to like get letters to kind of call him on his bullshit. One Texas editor told the

“nation, hunt earns in one hour about 20,000 to $12,000. That's what I earn in a year. He probably”

spins an hour dictating each letter that comes in here. I like to cut them in half because that means I'm putting about $5,000 of hunt money in the waste basket. Bars. Yeah, I love that. Yeah, love it. That's funny. Yeah. Um, so in 1959, hunt started a health

food and supplement business. Ah, you got it. If you were right, he's like the first of these, though.

You know, he really is a trailblazer. Like, all these bitches are his sons. Like, truly what's

Where he has his like right wing propaganda station. And he invents a supplement and health

“food business. And it's the only advertiser on his radio show and TV shows. So it's exists to sell”

the products, right? Right. So the sole advertiser of lifeline is his, his health products business. And his favorite product is gastro magic. An anti gas pill that he was so proud of. His, his office

is described by that the nation offers author is basically empty. But there's a plaque in it made

with the letter from a happy customer being like, thank you for making these gas pills. It's like the only decoration he has. He's like, this is my true pride and joy. Not one of my sweet kids. It's true pride and joy. Not any of my 15 kids. Fuck those kids. This is my only child. Yeah. It's, it's so, I, I want to quote from Heather again because she's get a line about this. One politician was lured to his office expecting a contribution, but left only with an

ample supply of hunts gastro magic and digestion pills. Another George Herbert Walker Bush met

“with hunts in 1962 hoping for a contribution to his congressional campaign. His heart must have”

skipped a beat at the end of the meeting when Hunt discreetly gave him a bulging and envelope. It was filled with lifeline pamphlets. That's funny. Oh, that's so funny. Oh, god. That's a good troll. He's such a weird crank about his health food business, which again, he's crazy rich from oil. This is not a meaningful amount of money, but it's clearly his passion. Like, one of the things he's famous for, he drives himself to work, even when he's the richest man

alive and he's covered his car in bumper stickers advertising lifeline and like his gastro magic pills, like a crazy man. And he'll hit his truck because he's like this will advertise it. People will buy it if they see it on my car. Yeah. The nation notes, sometimes he circles the block an extra time before parking to let Dallas pedestrians have one more look. Oh, my god. And he's like making his his employees put shit on their cars. He's like, oh, you got to help the business. He's his own

best in a rich guy. He's like, he's like a poor guy. He's so funny. It's giving him selling my mix tape out of my trunk. Like, what am I doing? Right. He's actually like a broke dude who gets to do an MLM. It's really funny. And he's the richest man alive. Like, he would be a modern day, like, hey, girly, sending you a DM. Yeah. He's a hun in the feed. I'm feeling a little gas. He's right now. Don't worry, guys. I got you. I got you. I'm sorry. I have this really great supplement. You

would only have to subscribe. Like, oh, I know we haven't talked to him in high school, but literally.

And he is, he is always when he's meeting with people weirdly, who didn't always want his money.

He'll just start going on these rants about his different products. One attorney who worked with him, he says that like, as soon as Hunt walks in the room, he runs up and shakes his hand and says very quickly, hello, I am H. L. Hunt, the world's richest man. And these are gastromagnetic, which I make, so they must be good. Try some. It's just like crazy person stuff. Um, so one of Hunt's kind of downfall moments is that as I noted, he doesn't like Kennedy,

right? He's lifeline attacks him. He attacks him in his column hunt for the truth. And he's like trying to drum up like religious hatred to attack him, right? He's also supporting Barry Goldwater, you know, that's he loves Barry Goldwater. But as you all know, on November 22nd, 1963,

“Bernard Montgomery, Sanders, shot President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, right?”

And this happens to happen like right after he'd run like a column and episodes of

lifeline talking about like the need of the second amendment, so that like people could kill

government leaders who try to oppress them. So he's just put this out and then Kennedy gets shot, and the FBI questions him. And members of his family, he's like, if you go into like, there's a lot of conspiracies that put Hunt at the center of like the, the conspiracy to kill Kennedy. There's a couple of weird things in there for one thing, the guy who kills Oswald, Jack Ruby, had Hunt's name in his address book, although Ruby doesn't seem to have liked Hunt because Ruby

was a real far-right crank, and Hunt is like, just in it for his own weird right wing beliefs. So I don't think Ruby doesn't actually like him very much because he's not a team player basically. So there's a lot of allegations, but the family received so many death threats from these, in fact, that like the FBI gives them like a security detail at one point because people are so convinced he's involved. He gets weirder and crazier as he ages. His Dallas, I even mentioned this,

Vernon estate that's five times as big. That's his house. The mother of all daddy issues,

“and he's got this fucking huge crazy rich man house with like a billboard that he puts on his front”

lawn for lifeline. And he has this up in his fancy neighborhood until the neighbor's complaint, at which point he replaces it with a crude hand painted sign, advertising lifeline. Oh, that's the strangest vibes. Like he's a lazily lemonade. Yeah. Now, despite putting more money into right wing media than anyone, Hunts influence falls rapidly in the late 60s from its peak in the mid 50s, partly because he refuses to work or cooperate with anyone. And as no

interest in being part of the conservative movement as such, he wants conservatives to agree with him. Because he tries to be a kingmaker. He fancies himself one and he becomes a major backer of very gold water. And when gold water is just that has the shit kicked out of him, in 1964, one reason why, according to the media, because there's a bunch of articles about

“like why didn't gold water do better. And one reason that's posited by a lot of pundits is that”

HL Hunt kind of poisoned to the campaign, right? Not just Hunt, because the John Burch Society is also behind gold water and people don't like them. But it gets to the point where according to Heather Hendershot quote, even the rumor of an association with Hunt could be damning for a candidate, especially after Hunt was investigated in connection with the Kennedy assassination. And yeah, like it's, it's, you know, good stuff. His sons are kind of involved in his downfall

as a political influence or two. His son Bunker Hunt had financed a John Burch Society newsletter that had attacked Kennedy in really vicious terms and was made a lot of people suspicious. Um, and then one of Jack Ruby's friends, the reason why Ruby had Hunt's name is that he had approached Lamar Hunt to try to get a job in a bowling alley. Um, that Hunt owned. So his, his fail sons are part of why he stops becoming his influential. Um, his attempts to co-opt Christianity

for his own ins are also way too clumsy to work very well. His daughter, June, who later becomes like an influential Christian media figure, even attacks him for his hypocrisy and constant cheating. As the story goes, Hunt kind of snaps back at her. I'm not Christian. I don't have to go by Christian ethics. And then he sends her as to boarding school. When his other daughter swan a makes similar complaints about his womanizing, he tells her King Solomon had 700 wives. And that's

in the Bible. Wow. So great guy. Great parent. Good job. As the 70s dawn, Hunt's in his 80s. Yeah, he continues to wear the same blue suit every day, but he only dry cleans the pants to save money. So eventually the top and bottom of totally different colors. Such a brief. He doesn't have to live like this literal name. You don't have your real name. Such an odd guy. So he's

unhassy. Who we talked about never recovers from that mental break. He's ill and Hunt spins.

Hunt keeps his piece. The only of his children that Hunt has a picture of in his office.

“I think because he feels really bad about this. And he spends a lot of his life”

desperately, but incompetently trying to help Hassie to get better. The nation writes, Hunt had sought various magic cures for the boy. One day, the answer was valium. The next prostitutes. Finally, a lobotomy took the edge off of Hassie's violent fits. But just a bit. So, just a great dad. Just so good. Just a great dad. Triple threat. Triple threat, father. He develops increasingly strange health beliefs as he aged and became an almost religious advocate

of creeping. So he's going to show you a picture of this because anytime anyone asked him, he would get down to demonstrate this exercise technique that he's fallen in love with.

It's basically a crab walk. He gets down on his knees and his hands and knees and just like

walks across the ground. And there's a weird kind of like yogic component to it. He must have found this in some book or another, but he is obsessed with creeping. The New York Times quotes him as saying creeping is probably the second best exercise in the world next to swimming. It's perfect. Oh, okay. He's a creeper. He's a super creeper. Yeah. Yeah. Not surprisingly. He loves creeping. He lives in his last years with his second family in that Mount Vernon home or third family I

think actually and he spends a lot of time promoting health foods. He's got like a vegetable garden on his property and he eats mainly these along with he has like a very weird diet. He's a lot of just like bullion cubes, I think, just like straight like flavor. So he's a freak. He's a weirdo. Cool guy.

Bunker is going to be a big George Wallace supporter and a fascist. Like he's a real hardcore segregationist fascist. Giant piece of shit. Hunt also supports Governor Wallace's campaign,

but he dies on November 29th, 1974. At the time of his death, his estate is valued at $2 billion,

which is split between his two surviving ex-wives, 15 children and many grandchildren. There are

“years of pro-bait battles, right? I'm sure. As a note about his shitty ass sons, you should know,”

one of his sons, Lamar Hunt, found the AFL, the American Football League and he's a major figure in professional tennis and soccer in the US. So that's where the AFL comes. And I want to quote from Hendershot article one last time. Herbert and Bunker Hunt had been caught attempting to corner the world silver market. Could the crooks really have thought that no one would notice and ongoing attempt to purchase all the silver in the world? They were also entangled in a wire tapping paper.

It's wire tapping over like their dads. Like this is as a result of like the fight for hit over like his will in pro-bait. And yeah, Bunker is a hugely successful oilman. He's becomes a major John Birch donors with his oil money. He helped like his company finds oil deposits in

“Libya. And I think Pakistan, I think they're also involved in Saudi Arabia. Like they are a lot of like”

Arab oil in Middle Eastern oil. Like his company is involved in like getting the rights to and selling.

He also gives a quarter of a million dollars in cash in a briefcase to George Wallace as a rainy

day fund. And he tries to bribe Curtis Limay to become Wallace's running mate. Or he puts up like a trust fund to convince Limay to become Wallace's running mate. So he just loves all of the worst fascists. Bunker Hunt, giant piece of shit. Wow. So yeah, that's the end of Hunt's life. One of his long, his probably is biggest ongoing contributions to popular culture is that Bunker Hunt is such a giant famous piece of shit for all of his criminal activity and

weird business activity and oil money that his, he inspires the show Dallas. Ooh, Dallas is based off of the hunts. Yes. JR is based off of Bunker Hunt. Oh damn. Like heavily based off of Bunker Hunt, right? And part because he gets in trouble for community a bunch of crimes, right? Yeah. So at least we get to show Dallas. You know? I'll take it. Who's so JR was very big for our parents? Yeah. Bernie Sanders, by the way, did a lot of people don't know that.

Anyway, Princess, how you feeling at the end of these episodes? I feel great. There's nothing like knowing the origins of the war crimes that are being put out into the world everyday. Yeah, it's good. Yeah. We're crimes. Crimes against truth. All this good stuff. Thank you so much for

all of that amazing effort. This was a great, three part. Thank you. Hard of. We're just happy to have

you here. You know? Happy to have you here talking about this real piece of shit and his strange beliefs about the world. Uh, his strange pills and his strange 15 children. Wow. Anything you

“want to plug at the end to your princess? Oh, yeah. Um, just if you want to see some other fun”

yappers, I have a YouTube channel. I talked about pub culture, history, all kinds of fun things, and um, just happy to be here. Thank you guys so much for having me. Excellent. Sweet. Thanks for coming along, everybody. Yeah. All right, folks. We're done. I'm going to go pet dogs. Bye. Bye. Behind the bastards is a production of cool zone media. For more from cool zone media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Our check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit remind me of Netflix. You don't miss an episode. For clips and our older episode catalog continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com/atbehindabastard. We love about 40% of you statistically speaking. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guide, not quite on humor me with Robert

Smigle and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Oden Kirk to David Letterman help make you funnier this week. My guests SNL's Mikey Day and Headwriters Streeter Side L helped an Occupella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigle and friends on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

A Mormon polygamist and an Armenian businessman. Multi-million dollar house for our isn't Lamborghini's

“private jets a billion dollar fraud. But how long can this alliance last? Tell me what you know.”

Is somebody coming after me? Listen to Kingdom of fraud on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Winning on clay is not. The rallies are relentless.

“And, at the French Open, only the toughest survive. I know, I competed there for decades.”

Join me, Renee Stubbs, on the Renee Stubbs tennis podcast for no non-sense breakdowns

of the biggest matches. The toughest players and the moment set to find Roland Garros.

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Lerner Rebarkina is arguably the best player in the world right now. And actually, we're not any surface. Listen to the Renee Stubbs tennis podcast on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by capital one, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports. This is an iHeart podcast. Garen T. Human.