The Nazi Lies Podcast

3.1 (16)
HISTORY

Nazis lie. A lot. And the things they lie about are often too niche or too technical to find the truth. The Nazi Lies Podcast talks experts in subject areas nazis lie about to find the truth about nazi lies.

05/30/2023

The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 22: The Lying Press

Mike Isaacson: Lügenpresse! [Theme song] Nazi SS UFOs Lizards wearing human clothes Hinduism’s secret codes These are nazi lies Race and IQ are in genes Warfare keeps the nation clean Whiteness is an AIDS vaccine These are nazi lies Hollow earth, white genocide Muslim’s rampant femicide Shooting suspects named Sam Hyde Hiter lived and no Jews died Army, navy, and the cops Secret service, special ops They protect us, not sweatshops These are nazi lies Mike: Welcome to another episode of The Nazi Lies Podcast. Today, we're talking about the lying press with Jonathan Hardy, professor of communications and media at the University of Arts, London. His most recent book, Branded Content: The Fateful Merging of Media and Marketing, explores the world of branded content, particularly native advertising or sponsored content–longform marketing copy made to look like news items. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Hardy. Jonathan Hardy: Thank you, Mike. It's a pleasure to be here. Mike: It's great to have you. So I'm really excited to talk about marketing with you because that's the industry I'm in now, and I do have some ethical issues with some of the techniques that we use. Now I write in the B2B space, selling services to business owners and officers, so I don’t super have a problem with what I do–you know, manipulating business owners into buying things. So reading your book, what comes up again and again is that most of these marketing techniques aren’t new, but the digital age has made them more invasive and persistent. Can you talk a bit about how digitization has changed the advertising world? Jonathan: Sure. Well, it's done so definitely in a great many ways but I'll talk about some key ones that really relate to the work I've been doing on branded content. In the 20th century, through most of the 20th century, we had a model that I call advertising integration with separation, which means that the advertising appeared in the same vehicles as media. When you looked at a magazine or a newspaper, you turned the page and it’s editorial, you turn the page, it's advertising. Or the adverts that appeared between programs on television and radio. So we had integration, but often some quite strict rules and strict practices that kept advertising and media separate. So what we're seeing in the digital age is an intensification of two tendencies which face in opposite directions. One is towards integration, so advertising getting baked into media content and integrated with it; product placement all the way through to influencer marketing, branding content and so on. But the other trend is disaggregation, advertising getting decoupled from media. Because essentially in the digital age, advertisers didn't need–as some of them put it–to pay the premium prices to put their ads in media content. They could track users around the internet. So these are trends going in opposite directions obviously, right? One is about integration, the other one is about disaggregation. But I argue that they have one really common power, which is that they indicate the growing strength of marketers over media. Media that rely on advertising revenue are having to become more and more dependent, satisfying advertisers who want to integrate their content so that people will engage with it. And they're also desperate because of these other trends of losing ad revenue coming from disaggregation to kind of, again, appeal as much as they can. So what we're seeing is a strengthening of marketer power in the digital age. Mike: So my intention with this episode was to give a deep dive into how things like the Cambridge Analytica scandal could have happened. To start, let’s get some technical details. We’re talking mostly about inbound marketing today. So before we get into advertising techniques and stuff, what is the difference between inbound and outbound marketing? Jonathan: Sure. Well, I'll talk about that, Mike. But we should acknowledge there's some confusion here, because these terms are not always used to talk about the same things. I think one really valuable aspect is this idea of push and pull, right? If you're pushing out messages, this is known as outbound marketing. You're sort of pushing your message out to reach people. If you on the other hand create great content that people come to you for to engage with, that's pulling. And that's known as inbound. So, so far, so good. That makes sense to me. But this is used in other ways too, and I think that illustrates actually a broader point which is that marketers, not surprisingly, are often in a competitive struggle to be on the side of the new and the innovative, and not the old and the tired. So some versions of inbound and outbound marketing I think get a bit problematic here. Because outbound in some versions is kind of associated with scattergun marketing. Right? The opposite of inbound as highly targeted aiming at particular people. And I don't really buy that. You know, marketers sometimes talk about spray and pray, for instance, you know? Chucking out messages. But quite honestly, most of the time modern marketers don't do that because they can't afford to do that. So I don't really buy the argument that outbound is untargeted. I think that's misleading. What's a bit more helpful from all of this, and actually quite a crucial issue, is if you like the challenges for a thing called push marketing. The challenge is when people are not engaging with traditional advertising forms and pushing them out, and the need to come up with more engaging content; either because it's more entertaining or it's more informative. And I think that aspect of inbound is important. Mike: So when it comes to inbound marketing, it’s all about the buyer journey or the marketing funnel. Can you talk a bit about the theory behind the marketing funnel? Jonathan: Yeah, sure. I often test this out on students, but if you were studying advertising in the 20th century, you might have come across a model called AIDA, which was a mnemonic, helps you remember some important fundamentals. AIDA stands for Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action. And it kind of summed up this idea of what's called in modern terms, a marketing funnel or a customer journey. Sort of how if you're a brand, people start off with awareness and then become more interested and motivated all the way up to purchase. That's essentially what the marketing funnel means. Just to relate it to branded content for a moment, it was often argued in the past that brands branded content, which means content that's produced or funded by brands, was particularly associated with that early stage–building brand awareness. But if you speak to people in the industry, they say it's not really true. Branded content is the content that serves people right across the customer journey. So if you think someone becomes more interested and they want to find more information about the product, for example, I think they're right and I think that's– We're often thinking about a new world where brands are involved in kind of thinking, "What are the information needs? What are the communication needs of consumers at every point?" And engaging with it. And amongst other things, that's breaking down some old divisions between what we might call advertising and customer services. And as an academic, I'm really interested. I'm critical of a lot of what's going on, but I'm interested in how that speaks to a changing world and convergence across communications. Mike: Where I work, we definitely use branded content across the buyer journey and we use different kinds of content for different points along the journey. So for instance, we do more informative content for when you're in the awareness stage. Whereas when you're in the purchasing stage, we hit you more with salesy content. Because that's the point where you're trying to just hear about the benefits and decide upon a final product. Jonathan: Yeah exactly. Mike: Can you talk a little bit about the software that's used to track customers? Because that's something that I don't think most people are aware about, the CRM software. Jonathan: Yeah. CRM means customer relations management software. Some of your listeners might be aware of software like Salesforce, which tracks relations between a company and its clients, or including its prospects. So yeah, customer relations management is a huge area. One of the things I looked at interestingly was the annual reports of what are called the holding companies. These are the really big groups that own advertising agencies and PR agencies. And they've been in a battle for survival and for their presence in companies, and they're often fighting alongside companies like Accenture who are offering companies all sorts of other data services. So it's a kind of interesting world in which the traditional advertisers are maneuvering to cover more ground because that ground’s becoming more and more important to companies. And definitely, all the data around customers and other people in the chain is a really important battleground for these firms. Mike: Okay, and we'll talk a bit about what gets fed into the CRM in a bit. So the company I work for, we do exclusively owned media and digital ads, pretty much all inbound with an occasional email campaign here or there. But there’s other forms of digital advertising, too. Let’s start by talking about what owned media is. What do advertisers mean when they talk about owned media? Jonathan: Okay. This is content that's produced and published by the brand or the marketer themselves. It's got a really long history. In the United States at the end of the 19th century, the farm implements company John Deere had a magazine called The Furrow, for example. So what we now call contract publishing by a br

1h 11m
11/08/2022

The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 21: Just Like the Fall of Rome

Mike Isaacson: Rome gets sacked ONE TIME, and that’s all these people can talk about! [Theme song] Nazi SS UFOs Lizards wearing human clothes Hinduism’s secret codes These are nazi lies Race and IQ are in genes Warfare keeps the nation clean Whiteness is an AIDS vaccine These are nazi lies Hollow earth, white genocide Muslim’s rampant femicide Shooting suspects named Sam Hyde Hiter lived and no Jews died Army, navy, and the cops Secret service, special ops They protect us, not sweatshops These are nazi lies Mike: Welcome to another episode of The Nazi Lies Podcast. Today we’re talking with Edward Watts, professor of history and Alkaviadis Vassiliadis Endowed Chair in Byzantine Greek History at the University of California San Diego. He’s here to talk to us about his book, The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome: The History of a Dangerous Idea. The book is an extraordinary scholarly endeavor that managed to give a detailed and engaging history of 1700 years of Roman history in under 300 pages. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Watts. Edward Watts: Thanks so much for having me. It's exciting to be here. Mike: All right. Now, you are one of the rare guests on our show whose book was actually directed at debunking Nazi lies. Tell us what you had in mind when you were writing this book. Edward: So the thing that prompted me to write this book was a recognition that the history of Rome, and in particular the legacy of Rome as it relates to the end of Roman history, was something that was being repeatedly misused across thousands of years to justify doing all sorts of violence and horrible things to people who really in the Roman context had very little to do with the decline of Rome, and in a post-Roman context, had nothing really to do with the challenges that people using the legacy of Rome wanted to try to address. And in particular, what prompted this was the recognition after 2016 of how stories about the classical past and the Roman past were being used on the far right and the sort of fascist fringe as a way of pointing to where they saw to be challenging dynamics and changes, critical changes, in the way that society was functioning. What was happening was people were doing things like using the story of the Gothic migrations in the 4th century AD to talk about the need to do radical things in our society related to immigration. And the discussions were just misusing the Roman past in really aggressive ways as kind of proof for radical ideas that didn't really relate to anything that happened in the past and I think are generally not things that people would be willing to accept in the present. And Rome provides a kind of argument when it's misunderstood,when Roman history is misunderstood, it provides a kind of argument that people are not familiar enough with to be able to refute, that might get people who think that a certain policy is aggressive or inhumane or unnecessary to think twice about whether that policy is something that is a response to a problem that people need to consider. And that's just wrong. It's a wrong way to use Roman history. It's a wrong way to use history altogether. And it's a rhetoric that really needs to be highlighted and pointed to so that people can see how insidious these kinds of comparisons can be. Mike: Okay, so your book discusses the idea of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, which you say started before any such decline or fall in the late Republic. What was politics like in the Roman Empire before the myth of Rome's decline popped up? Edward: So this is an interesting question because the story of Roman decline actually shows up in some of the very earliest Roman literature that we have. So the very first sort of intact Latin texts that we have from the Roman period are things like the plays of Plautus. In one of the earlier plays of Plautus, he is already making fun of people for saying that Rome is in decline. And he's saying this at a time right after the Roman victory over Hannibal when there is no evidence that Rome is in decline at all. And yet we know that there are politicians who are pushing this idea that the victory over Hannibal has unleashed a kind of moral decline in Rome that is leading to the degeneration of Roman morals and Roman behaviors and Roman social structures in such a fashion that will disrupt the ability of Rome to continue. This is just not something that most people recognized to be true, but what we see when politicians in the third century and second century BC are saying things like this, they aren't particularly interested in describing an objective reality. What they're looking to do is insert ideas into popular discourse, so that people in the context of their society begin to think it might be possible that decline exists. So I think that when we look at Roman history before Roman literature, or before these pieces of Roman literature exist, we really are looking at much later reconstructions. But I think that it's fair to say that even in those reconstructions of stories about things like say, the sixth king of Rome, those stories too focus on how that particular regime was inducing a decline from the proper behaviors of Romans. So I think we could say that there is no before decline. Rome seems always to have been talking about these ideas of decline and worrying about the fact that their society was in decline, even when objectively you would look around and say there is no reason whatsoever that you should be thinking this. Mike: Okay. Now your book argues that this political framing helped politicians shape the politics of the Roman Empire in particular ways. So how did those who pushed this declensionist narrative change the Roman republic? Edward: So in the Roman republic, there are a few things that this narrative is used to do. In the second century, early second century BC, this narrative is used to attack opponents of a politician named Cato. What Cato tried to do was single out people who had been getting particularly wealthy because of the aftermath of Rome's victory in the Second Punic War over Hannibal and then its victories in the eastern Mediterranean against the Greek King, Philip V. And what Cato saw was that this wealth was something that profoundly destabilized society because now there were winners who were doing well economically in a way that the old money establishment couldn't match. And so what he's looking to do is to say that when you look around and you see prosperity of that level in the Roman state, this is a sign that things are actually bad. It's not a sign of things are good. It's a sign that things are deteriorating, and we need to take radical steps to prevent this. And the radical steps that Cato takes, and that he initially gets support for, involves very onerous taxes directed specifically against groups of people that he opposed. He also serves as the person who decides who gets to be in the Roman Senate, and he uses that position to kick out a lot of people on the basis simply of him deciding that they embody some kind of negative trajectory of the Roman State. And there's a reaction to this and Cato eventually is forced to kind of back away from this. As you move later in the second century, the narrative of decline becomes something that first is used to again justify financial policies, and then later, actual violence against officials who are seen as pushing too radical an agenda. And so this becomes a narrative that you can use to destabilize things. It doesn't matter if you're coming from what we would say is the right or the left, the kind of equal opportunity narrative that can be used to get people to question whether the structures in their society are legitimately in keeping with the way the society is supposed to function. Mike: Okay. So a lot of people have this misconception that Rome kind of snapped from being a republic to being governed by an emperor, but that's not really so. What was the imperial administration like and how did it change? Edward: The Roman republic was in many ways a very strong constitutional system that had a lot of things built into it to prevent one individual from taking over. Not only did it have a structure that was based on a kind of balance of power–and the description of that structure was something that influenced the Founding Fathers in the US to create the balances of power that we have–but in Rome, the administrative office that correlated to the presidency actually was a paired magistracy. So there were two consuls who governed together and could in theory check one another. What the decline narrative happened or allows to happen is that these structures begin to be questioned as illegitimate. And you get, starting in the later part of the second century and going all the way through the murder of Julius Caesar in 44 BC, a long set of discussions about how the Constitution is not functioning as it's supposed to, how the interests of everybody are not being represented by the representatives in the Senate and by the sorts of laws that are being put forward in assemblies. And you have a greater sense that there's an emergency, and an emergency that requires people to assent to an individual exercising more power than the structure really permits. And so this idea of decline heightens this sense of emergency and you have cycles every generation or so, where the sense of emergency gets greater and another constitutional structure snaps. Until eventually what you have is an individual in Julius Caesar, who is able to exercise complete and effective control over the direction of politics in the state. Mike: Okay. So for whatever reason, the assassination of Julius Caesar sticks strong in our cultural psyche, but reading your book it seems like assassinating emperors was kind of commonplace? Edward: It depends on the period. Yeah, there are definitely periods where the violent overthrow of emperors are

37 min
10/29/2022

The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 20: Castrate Them

Mike Isaacson: Reproductive rights are inmates’ rights apparently. [Theme song] Nazi SS UFOs Lizards wearing human clothes Hinduism’s secret codes These are nazi lies Race and IQ are in genes Warfare keeps the nation clean Whiteness is an AIDS vaccine These are nazi lies Hollow earth, white genocide Muslim’s rampant femicide Shooting suspects named Sam Hyde Hiter lived and no Jews died Army, navy, and the cops Secret service, special ops They protect us, not sweatshops These are nazi lies Mike: Welcome to another episode of The Nazi Lies Podcast. I’m joined today by Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education and Dean of Undergraduate Studies at Michigan State University, Mark Largent, who is with us today to talk about his book Breeding Contempt: The History of Coerced Sterilization in the United States. This slim volume tells the story of the historical enthusiasm for depriving certain classes of people the ability to reproduce and the efforts towards making that a reality. Really happy to get to read this book a second time for this podcast. Welcome to the show Dr. Largent. Mark Largent: Thank you for the invitation and for your kind words. Mike: So I want to start today by talking about what you start the book talking about, which is a discussion of your historical method of storytelling, your historiography. So you make a very deliberate choice of vocabulary that really does have a powerful effect in exposing, kind of, the grittiness of the whole issue. Can you talk about that and what effect you intended to have? Mark: So I was trying very hard to work in an anti-presentist mode. Presentist mode is most commonly what's used in exploring issues like eugenics, things that have become recognized as problematic for a variety of reasons. What often happens when you take a presentistic view like that is you fail to understand how something that seems so obviously problematic to you could have been acceptable to large numbers of people in the past. The danger, of course, is that you fall into the trap of becoming an apologist. So it's a fine line to walk between being a presentist and being an apologist when you're dealing with issues like this. You don't want to explain away past people's beliefs and assumptions and actions as merely products of their time because that doesn't treat them fairly; it doesn't treat them as equals; it sort of lets them off merely because they lived before you. On the other hand, you need to understand the world as it was understood by them. So I think in graduate school is where I first heard the term “doing violence to the historical subject”. That is if you view them through your own eyes, you are doing violence to them. If you view them in such a way as to not hold them to any real standards simply because they came before you and therefore operated in a space of naivete relative to what you think you know, you're doing violence to them. You're treating them as somehow less than you and your present day colleagues. So to walk that line really requires that you use their language and you try to understand and discuss the world the way that they may have understood and discussed it. Now, the problem, of course, when you're dealing with something like this is that many of the things that they held true, many of the assumptions on which their work is based, are deeply problematic to us today, or we at least on the surface claim that they're deeply problematic. Because one of the real dangers of presentism is that it allows you to imagine that you're somehow better than the historical subjects were, that you're above whatever it was that they were dealing with, when in fact, you may simply rationalize some of the very same problematic assumptions that they held differently, holding them in a different way. So as a historian, I feel like it's my responsibility to treat the historical subjects fairly, and that means holding them to the same standards that I hold present-day people to, but also respecting the fact that their contexts were different in some ways. Mike: Right. So one of the interesting things that you do is you also use the terminology that they were using at the time, and I think it gives a really good sense, not only of, I guess, how distasteful it is today, but also it gives a good sense of the logic that they're working with. Mark: Yeah, their language matters. I mean, I really do think words matter, and unpacking words so that you understand what is within them is critically important. And one of the big ones, I address it right from the very start, is the concept of eugenics itself. Eugenics to us is by and large a slur, that if you call a person a eugenicist, you are by and large disparaging them in some way. And that was not held to be true by the subjects that I look at, which the story runs from about 1850 to about 1950, with the most intense period being in the first 25 years of the 20th century or about 1900 to about 1925. And the idea here is that they didn't have a slur in mind when they said eugenics. In fact, eugenics as a slur didn't really even emerge until about the 1960s, I tried to show in the book. Mike: Okay. So let's get a little into the terminology and the procedures involved. What kind of sterilizing interventions were physicians making, and what were they called at the time? Mark: So at the beginning of the story, so from about 1850 to about the 1880s, they were what they would've called “desexing.” They were performing castrations or orchidectomies [Mike’s note: they’re actually called orchiectomies] as they came to be called. For men, a complete removal of the s*****m and testicles. So, neutering would be the closest concept that we have. These were not widespread, it wasn't common. It was sufficiently brutal that it was considered problematic. But by the time you get into the 1880s and 1890s, a progressive new surgery, the vasectomy, had emerged. Vasectomization had first developed as a rejuvenating activity, a notion that you could rejuvenate a person by eliminating the pathways for sperm to leave the body, so by tying off or cutting the vas deferens. But it was seen from its original holders, and these were by and large the heads of psychiatric hospitals, as a way of managing a couple of complex problems. One of them was what they called chronic masturbation. They thought that the vasectomy would somehow reduce the urge of the men in their charge to masturbate. There was also the notion that it would somehow calm them and be a management tactic. But there'd been a broader effort both before the vasectomy and after it to cut off the inherited characteristics from one generation to another so as not to pass along what were largely seen as problematic traits that followed family lines. So all the way back to the 1850s, you have physicians, the first one that I can identify is in the 1850s Gideon Lincecum in Texas, who brings out in public conversation something that he said physicians widely discussed. And that was that there were families that were just no good, and that they produced children who themselves were no good who would grow up and have children who were no good. And so this notion of good breeding was well aligned with notions of artificial selection and plant and animal breeding. So this is pre-Darwin or pre-Darwin's Origin of the Species, which is published in 1859–this notion that you could artificially select for different traits in plants and animals being applied to the reproduction of human beings. And so what Gideon Lincecum, and other physicians like him, began talking openly about first castration and then by the end of the century vasectomies was intended to sort of stop these problematic lines of parenthood and then eliminate the problematic social behaviors and poverty that they believed were somehow rooted in the very biology of who procreates. At near about the same time near the end of the 19th century in the 1880s, the operation of hysterectomy came into being and then vogue. The idea is that you could, by removing a woman's ovaries or fallopian tube or uterus or all of it, control reproduction with potentially a positive therapeutic effect to women themselves by removing these usually described as diseased organs, the women themselves would be healthier, happier for it. But more importantly or at least equally importantly, you could prevent the passage of these deleterious social traits from parent to child, they believed, by preventing the parent from having children. So you're sort of removing from a community whatever deleterious social traits they believed were associated with the very biology of the parents who would otherwise have children. Mike: Okay. So I tried to get Daniel Kevles to talk about this a bit when we had him on, but he didn't seem familiar too much with the pre-eugenic history. So your story of coerced sterilization doesn't start with the eugenics movement, and you briefly mentioned that. So talk a bit about the origins of the movement for sterilization in the United States. Mark: Well, it really was focused on this analogy to plant and animal breeding which really did preceed both Darwin in 1859 and the emergence of the eugenics movement, which is a progressive era movement shortly after the turn of the 20th century. People generally associate coerced sterilization with the eugenics movement, and they certainly were closely aligned. The eugenics movement began in the very late 19th or early 20th century depending upon which historians you're looking at. But the movement for coerced sterilization had begun much earlier. And in fact, there were even common calls to it being pressed all the way back to Aristotle and his discussion about how certain traits seem to follow in family lines. And so by the mid-19th century when there was widespread interest in artificial plant and animal breeding, the application of it to human traits became

51 min
09/10/2022

The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 19: The Earth Is Flat

Mike Isaacson: The earth isn’t flat. Everything is going downhill. [Theme song] Nazi SS UFOs Lizards wearing human clothes Hinduism’s secret codes These are nazi lies Race and IQ are in genes Warfare keeps the nation clean Whiteness is an AIDS vaccine These are nazi lies Hollow earth, white genocide Muslim’s rampant femicide Shooting suspects named Sam Hyde Hiter lived and no Jews died Army, navy, and the cops Secret service, special ops They protect us, not sweatshops These are nazi lies Mike: Welcome to another episode of The Nazi Lies Podcast. Today I am joined by Kelly Weill, reporter at The Daily Beast on the fringe ideology beat and author of the book Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything. Ms. Weill, thanks so much for coming on the show. Kelly Weill: Hey, thank you so much for having me. Mike: So now when I finished the book, I DM’d you to tell you that you're absolutely brilliant. And the reason why is your intentional approach when it comes to being a conduit of misinformation. You're very careful in how you reference your source material so as not to lead readers to it. Can you talk a little bit about your methodology a bit and how you dealt with your sources? Kelly: Yeah, absolutely. It's weird dealing with somebody like flat earth, which is objectively wrong, right? When you're talking about that subject, you already kind of risk platforming that conspiracy theory as if there's any validity to it. So one thing that I tried to do throughout the course of my reporting and then to replicate as I was writing this book, was not to really engage with flat Earth as though it were a legitimate theory. And I kind of had it easy there. If I were doing something like medical misinformation, I would have probably had to get in the weeds a little bit more. But as far as flat earth goes, I would go to these conferences and when I was interviewing people, I'd be really straightforward. I'd be like, "Hey yo, I'm not I'm not a flat earther. I'm a reporter; I believe in the globe. But let's talk about why you believe this thing." And for me, that was a bit more interesting than the details of what exactly they believed because flat earth is wrong, but I wanted to come to why they bought into a theory that's so wrong. And when we had those conversations about their pathways to belief, that turned out to be a lot more interesting to me than just the zaniness of this theory. Mike: Okay, and we'll get into that soon. I want to talk about some things I learned. So the first thing I learned from your book is that flat earth theory is actually not that old? Like, there were cultures that believed in a flat earth, but there wasn’t the sort of pseudoscientific theory to justify it. So, when does the story of the flat earth movement start? Kelly: Yeah, totally. This is a bit of a misconception actually. I know when I was a kid I thought that there was, you know, Columbus thought he might have been sailing off the edge of the world. That's not true at all. We've known for thousands of years that earth was round because you can prove it with some pretty basic math. It's something that we've been able to do long before we could physically observe the shape of the Earth. But where flat earth theory actually comes back in is in England in around 1840. And that's when we have a guy named Samuel Rowbotham. He's a really interesting guy. He was a failed leader of a socialist commune; he had his hands on all kinds of short-lived fringe movements. I had a great time going through, you know, pre-Marxist socialist newspapers to find out what he was up to. But one of his career trajectories that didn't fail had to do with misinformation. He sold fake miracle cures, sort of a proto-Alex Jones. And he started shelling this idea that maybe earth was flat. And that idea was really alluring to certain people in that moment because, around mid-1800s, we're talking about a time when the natural sciences are taking on more and more of a role in the discourse and the importance of things like religion are taking more of a backseat. So when a theory like flat Earth comes out, it allows people to discard huge swathes of science and say, "Oh, I knew it was wrong all along. Oh, the scientists are all in league with each other to keep us in the dark." So as baffling and unscientific as flat earth was, even back then, it really did allow people to affirm their priors, to cast out information they didn't want to believe in, and sort of reshape their beliefs around this new and creative and just wholly counterfactual idea. Mike: It just blew me away that Rowbotham had no predecessors whatsoever, he just kind of built this out of whole cloth, just him in the Bible. So how did flat Earth stick around? Kelly: It stuck around because he had cronies just like any conspiracy influencer we have today. You know, I've just a couple of minutes ago compared Rowbotham to Alex Jones. He had his entourage, the people who might be like Owen Shroyers of the movement, who were even louder and a bit more virulent in their dissemination of these theories. These were the people who– He had a follower named John Hampden who just reminds me so much of one of these guys who goes on YouTube and is like, "Debate me. Debate me." And he would lure actual scientific professionals into these stupid, pointless debates over established science about the shape of the world. But because he was just so tenacious and he wouldn't admit that he had lost a bet about a scientific wager and he would go to jail because he was harassing people about the shape of the world, you know, that emotional appeal, it continued to resonate with people throughout the years. And even though flat earth has ebbed and flowed a little bit in popularity, just the wildness of it, I think ,has always had an appeal for certain people who are looking for it. Mike: So, one thing I was surprised about was that the flat earth movement was rather a latecomer, as far as conspiracy theories go, to the internet. So, what brought the flat earth online? How was it received? Kelly: Yeah, that was really interesting to me, too. Because while I was researching this, I was kind of trawling through OG conspiracy pages online. What's interesting to me actually if I might take a step back here is that conspiracy theories have always been early adopters of a lot of technology. You know, Rowbotham had a friend who was running a printing press, and he was getting his flat earth zines out. There was a flat earth commune in the early 20th century, and they had one of the earliest powerful radio programs that they could broadcast along the way. So when I was looking at early internet conspiracy theories, I did find that conspiracy theorists were some of the first voices online who were really putting out weird information. So I was deep in the trenches looking at Y2K influencers and all that. But there actually, to your point, was sort of a lack of flat earth theory early on in the internet. And I can think of a few reasons for that. For a while, flat earth theory was very tied to the Flat Earth Society, which was shepherded until 2001 by this very elderly couple. They were super literally off the grid. They lived in the desert, and they just were not the type of people to get online. And a lot of their archives actually burned in a house fire. So flat Earth really kind of took a nosedive with their deaths. It came back online when some archivalist started going through those older records of this Flat Earth Society couple. And these people relaunched the Flat Earth Society online as a forum, a discussion place where people could talk. It's interesting to me. I am not completely sold on the idea that the people who relaunched the Flat Earth Society online were genuine. I think there's a reasonable chance that they're kind of fucking around like they thought it was funny. But they did resurface this huge archive of decades and decades of flat earth writings and they put them online. And that became, I think, the basis for a lot of more genuine believers to start going through the back catalog and seeing what flat earthers had been saying for the past 150 years. And eventually, it went from this sort of more moderate discussion on forums to things that could go a lot more viral with the advent of sites like YouTube. Mike: Okay so let’s talk about the algorithm. How did flat earth wind up profiting from the YouTube recommendation algorithm? Kelly: Yeah, this was huge. And throughout this book, I wanted to be careful about ascribing flat earth's resurgence to any one thing, you know, any one website or any one algorithm. That said, YouTube has a lot of blood on its hands as far as flat earth goes. Basically, for quite a long time YouTube's algorithm would promote videos that it thought people would want to watch. It actually still does this, but they've done tweaks that hamper flat earth, I'll get to that in a minute. But basically, what people really want to watch, what people really want to click on at two in the morning, is not necessarily factual information. It's not really the “Eat Your Vegetables” kind of video. It's the weird scintillating stuff. If you see a video in your sidebar, a recommended video on YouTube and it says, "Is earth really flat?" Yeah, you're gonna click on that because it's just so weird you have to find out what that video is about. Because those videos performed so well, because they tapped into this curiosity and this weird factor, they started overperforming in the algorithm, and they appear to have been promoted overwhelmingly. So conspiracy YouTubers would realize that, "Hey, I can get a lot of views by having a title that references flat earth.” So from a confluence of people making flat earth videos because they're being cynical, because they knew it would get a lot of views, and people who are actually start

31 min
08/06/2022

The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 18: Human Biodiversity

Mike Isaacson: Encouraging inbreeding won’t get you very far. [Theme song] Nazi SS UFOs Lizards wearing human clothes Hinduism’s secret codes These are nazi lies Race and IQ are in genes Warfare keeps the nation clean Whiteness is an AIDS vaccine These are nazi lies Hollow earth, white genocide Muslim’s rampant femicide Shooting suspects named Sam Hyde Hiter lived and no Jews died Army, navy, and the cops Secret service, special ops They protect us, not sweatshops These are nazi lies Mike: Welcome to another episode of The Nazi Lies Podcast. I am joined by Uppsala University professor of animal conservation biology, Jacob Höglund. He is literally the perfect person to talk to about today’s Nazi lie: human biodiversity. He has a book from Oxford University Press called Evolutionary Conservation Genetics, which is the thing that Nazis obsess about. The book is great because it doesn’t get lost in the weeds with too much theory, it has tons of examples, and totally unintentionally, it absolutely demolishes the Nazi case for racial segregation and ethnic cleansing. I’m sure this is not at all where you expected to be interviewed for this book. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Höglund. Jacob Höglund: Thank you very much. I'm glad to be here. Mike: All right. So obviously, you were not intending to write a book to dispel Nazi lies writing a book about the genetics of extinction and conservation. So talk a little about what inspired you to write this book and what you learned along the way. Jacob: Yeah, you're right. It's a completely different context, but the background is basically that the earth is facing a major biodiversity crisis. Biodiversity is defined as three basic levels; ecosystems, species, and genes. And I focus on genetic diversity. I'm concerned about loss of genetic diversity, and that's why I wrote the book. Mike: Alright. By page two, you’re already undermining the core of Nazi racial theory by asserting that diversity, both genetic and demographic, is important for avoiding extinction. Before we get into why that is, talk a little about what diversity means in this context, because the human biodiversity crowd might be like, “Well, I believe we need diversity too.” But what they mean is a humanity segregated by race. So, what do we mean by that diversity here? Jacob: Actually, in biology it means completely opposite. It's a bit complicated, but fragmentation-- So basically biodiversity loss or habitat loss, leads to smaller populations that become separated in a sense. Imagine that you have a large population which is connected, and then human action causes land loss and changing land use and all that sort of stuff. So populations that once were big and connected now become small and fragmented. And these small and fragmented populations tend to lose genetic variation through a process called genetic drift. Genetic drift is basically the random loss of genetic variants. This is what conservation genetics is trying to understand and to counteract. Mike: Okay. You talk a bit about segregation and its evolutionary consequences in your book. Obviously, you don’t mean to refer to race here, but for practical purposes the effect of segregation would be genetically the same for humans. Talk about what happens to species with segregated populations. Jacob: Yeah. We biologists don't talk about segregated populations; we talk about fragmented populations. So it's a small distinction, right? But as I tried to explain before, when you have fragmentation because of this process called genetic drift, you lose genetic diversity. Genetic diversity is sometimes also called heterozygosity when geneticists talk to one another. Mike: What does heterozygosity mean exactly? How is it defined? Jacob: It's again, a bit technical and complicated. But many organisms like plants and animals, the ones we are most familiar with, they are what we call diploid. And what a diploid is, it means that basically, these organisms have one genome from mom and one genome from dad. So it means that on every position in the genome, there would be one variant inherited from mom and one from dad. And when they are different, the two positions are different. That's called an heterozygous site. And when they're the same, so when Mom and Dad had the same variant, that's called a homozygous site. And the more sites that are heterozygous, the more diverse the genome is. Mike: Right. So it's kind of like having enough genes in the gene pool to make sure that– Okay, so now let's talk about why genetic diversity is important. Why do we want heterozygosity? Jacob: We want diversity in the populations because if we have– One way I can explain this is that, you know, in our homes many people keep good-to-have boxes; you save nuts and bolts and nails and whatever-- you put them in this box that you find is good to have in the future. Because if you face a problem in your home and you want to repair something, it's good to have different kinds of nuts and bolts and nails and whatever tools. And the more tools you have, the more problems in the future you can solve. So it's the same with a biological population, if there are lots of variants in the population it means that this population will be able to adapt to future changes in the environment. And if the population has lost most of genetic variation, it means that they're sort of stuck to the circumstances that they're facing right now. Do you follow the analogy? Diversity is good because then you have more options to change when the circumstances change. And one thing that we know for sure is that life on earth is always evolving, it's always changing. Nothing stays the same. So having a lot of variance means that a species or population can adapt to future changes. Mike: Alright. So now, one thing that I think is pertinent in this discussion is the notion of inbreeding, which you talk about in your book. First, how is inbreeding defined by evolutionary biologists? Jacob: Inbreeding is caused by something that we call the non-random mating, for example between close relatives. Mating between close relatives leads to increased homozygosity, that is the loss of genetic diversity. That's why in this context that it's good to have lots of genetic variation, inbreeding is bad because it leads to exaggerated loss of genetic variation and genetic variants. That's why we want to avoid inbreeding. But there's also another problem and that is that inbreeding might also lead to fixation of bad genetic variants. Because we had this diploid thing that, you know, you had genetic variants inherited from mom and dad. And if you have inbreeding, it might be that both mom and dad have a bad variant at the zygous site. And such site might become fixed in offspring, so the offspring ends up with a bad variant at the zygous site. And that leads to something called inbreeding depression. I think, Mike, that's your next question. That's what you're leading to. Mike: Yeah let’s talk about inbreeding depression. Jacob: Yeah. So, inbreeding depression is the loss of fitness or what we call viability due to expression of these deleterious variants. That might lead to the organism being less able to cope. It might lead to disease, genetic diseases might be expressed, or it might lead to other malfunctions in the organism. Mike: And how does genetic mutation play a role in this story? Jacob: It's because most mutations, the vast majority of mutations, mutations induce changes to the genome, and a set of new variants that pops up because of the biochemical changes in the DNA structure, basically. And most of these variants, the vast majority of them are actually bad for the organism. There are a few that are what we call neutral, they don't make a change so they might stay in the population. And a small minority might actually even be good, and they are sort of favored in the population. But most mutations are selected against and lost from the population. But they might-- because we have this fact that most organisms are diploid–some of these bad mutations might linger in the population because they are masked by a good variant at the zygous site. Mike: How does that mutation story fit into the inbreeding story? Jacob: If you have bad mutations, both inherited from both mom and dad, then these bad mutations may become expressed at the phenotypic level. If you're heterozygous at such site, it might suffice to have one good unit variant that would mask the phenotypic effects of the bad one. But if you have inbreeding, these bad mutations become expressed because there's no masking effect. Do you follow? Mike: Yeah. Basically, the idea is that because you're breeding with the same small pool, basically those variants don't end up breeding themselves out through evolutionary adaptation. Right? Jacob: Yeah. Yeah. It's sort of related to what we've discussed previously that, in small populations, these bad alleles might become fixed. And that leads to poor effects. That's why conservation biologists are concerned about inbreeding and the inbreeding depression. Mike: One thing you include at the tail end of the inbreeding chapter is a short section on rescue effects, so measures taken to rescue subpopulations on the path to extinction due to inbreeding depression. So, what do those measures look like? And how effective are they? Jacob: Yeah, what conservation biologists are aiming at is to try to counteract this fragmentation process that I talked about by creating corridors between fragmented populations to increase gene flow between populations. And in some cases when making corridors and promoting natural dispersal, it might actually be-- well, I shouldn't say possible, but sometimes it might be necessary to translocate individuals between populations to increase the gene flow over the migration between populations to keep up the genetic variation in these fragmente

27 min
06/25/2022

The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 16: The Free Speech Crisis

Mike Isaacson: If your free speech requires an audience, might I suggest a therapist? [Theme song] Nazi SS UFOs Lizards wearing human clothes Hinduism’s secret codes These are nazi lies Race and IQ are in genes Warfare keeps the nation clean Whiteness is an AIDS vaccine These are nazi lies Hollow earth, white genocide Muslim’s rampant femicide Shooting suspects named Sam Hyde Hiter lived and no Jews died Army, navy, and the cops Secret service, special ops They protect us, not sweatshops These are nazi lies Mike: Welcome once again to The Nazi Lies Podcast. I am joined by two historians today. With us is Evan Smith, lecturer at Flinders University in Adelaide, and David Renton, who taught at a number of universities in the UK and South Africa before leaving the academy to practice law, though he still finds time to research and write. Each of them has a book about today’s topic: the free speech crisis. Dr. Smith’s book, No Platform: A History of Anti-Fascism, Universities and the Limits of Free Speech, chronicles the No Platform policy of the National Union of Students in the UK from its foundation in 1974 to the present day. Dr. Renton’s book, No Free Speech for Fascists: Exploring ‘No Platform’ in History, Law and Politics, tells a much longer story of the interplay of radical leftist groups, organized fascists, and the state in shaping the UK’s speech landscape and their significance in politics and law. Both are out from Routledge. I have absolutely no idea how we’ve managed to make the time zones work between the three of us, but welcome both of you to the podcast. Evan Smith: Thank you. David Renton: Thanks, Mike. Mike: So David, I want to start with you because your book goes all the way back to the 1640s to tell its history. So what made you start your story in the 1640s, and what did contention over speech look like before Fascism? David: Well, I wanted to start all that time back more than 300 years ago, because this is the moment when you first start to see something like the modern left and right emerge. You have in Britain, a party of order that supports the state and the king, but you also have a party which stands for more democracy and a more equal distribution of wealth. And essentially, from this point onwards in British, European, American politics, you see those same sites recreating themselves. And what happens again, and again, and again from that point onwards for hundreds of years until certainly say 50 years ago, you have essentially the people who are calling for free speech, whether that's the levellers in 1640s, Tom Paine 100 years later, J.S. Mill in the 19th Century. The left is always the people in favor of free speech. In terms of the right, if you want a kind of the first philosopher of conservatism, someone like Edmund Burke, he's not involved in the 1640s. He’s a bit later, about a century and a half later. But you know, he supports conservatism. So what's his attitude towards free speech? It's really simple. He says, people who disagree with him should be jailed. There should be laws made to make it harder for them to have defenses. And more and more of them should be put in jail without even having a trial. That's the conservative position on free speech for centuries. And then what we get starting to happen in the late 20th century, something completely different which is a kind of overturning of what's been this huge, long history where it's always the left that’s in favor of free speech, and it's always the right that's against it. Mike: Okay. Now, your contention is that before the appearance of Fascism, socialist radicals were solidly in favor of free speech for all. Fascism changed that, and Evan, maybe you can jump in here since this is where your book starts. What was new about Fascism that made socialists rethink their position on speech? Evan: So fascism was essentially anti-democratic and it was believed that nothing could be reasoned with because it was beyond the realms of reasonable, democratic politics. It was a violence, and the subjugation of its opponents was at the very core of fascism. And that the socialist left thought that fascism was a deeply violent movement that moved beyond the traditional realm of political discourse. So, there was no reasoning with fascists, you could only defeat them. Mike: So, let's start with David first, but I want to get both of you on this. What was the response to Fascism like before the end of World War II? David: Well, what you do is you get the left speaking out against fascism, hold demonstrations against fascism, and having to articulate a rationale of why they're against fascism. One of the things I quote in my book is a kind of famous exchange that takes place in 1937 when a poet named Nancy Cunard collected together the writers, intellectuals, and philosophers who she saw as the great inspiration to– the most important writers and so on that day. And she asked them what side they were taking on fascism. What's really interesting if you read their accounts, whether it's people like the poet W.H. Auden, novelist Gerald Bullitt, the philosopher C.E.M Joad, they all say they're against fascism, but they all put their arguments against fascism in terms of increased speech. So C.E.M Joad writes, "Fascism suppresses truth. That's why we're against fascism." Or the novelist Owen Jameson talks about fascism as a doctrine which exalts violence and uses incendiary bombs to fight ideas. So you get this thing within the left where people grasp that in order to fight off this violence and vicious enemy, they have to be opposed to it. And that means, for example, even to some extent making an exception to what's been for centuries this uniform left-wing notion: you have to protect everyone's free speech. Well people start grasping, we can't protect the fascist free speech, they're gonna use it to suppress us. So the Left makes an exception to what's been its absolute defense of free speech, but it makes this exception for the sake of protecting speech for everybody. Mike: Okay. Evan, do you want to add anything to the history of socialists and fascists before the end of World War Two? Evan: Yeah. So just kind of setting up a few things which will become important later on, and particularly because David and I are both historians of antifascism in Britain, is that there's several different ways in which antifascism emerges in the interwar period and several different tactics. One tactic is preventing fascists from marching from having a presence in public. So things like the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 is a very famous incident where the socialists and other protesters stopped the fascists from marching. There's also heckling and disrupting of fascist meetings. So this was big meetings like Olympia in June 1934, but then also smaller ones like individual fascist meetings around the country were disrupted by antifascists. There was also some that are on the left who also called for greater state intervention, usually in the form of labor councils not allowing fascists to congregate in public halls and stuff like that. So these kinds of arguments that fascism needs to be confronted, disrupted, obfuscated, starts to be developed in the 1930s. And it's where those kinds of free speech arguments emerge in the later period. Mike: Now immediately after the Second World War, fascist movements were shells of their former selves. They had almost no street presence and their organizations usually couldn’t pull very many members. Still, the response to fascism when it did pop up was equally as vehement as when they organized into paramilitary formations with membership in the thousands. Something had qualitatively changed in the mind of the public regarding fascism. What did the immediate postwar response to public fascist speech look like, and what was the justification? Evan, let's start with you and then David you can add anything he misses. Evan: David probably could tell the story in a lot more detail. In the immediate post-war period in Britain, Oswald Mosley tries to revive the fascist movement under the title The Union Movement, but before that there's several kind of pro-fascist reading groups that emerge. And in response to this is kind of a disgust that fascists who had recently been imprisoned in Britain and their fellow travellers in the Nazis and the Italian Fascists and the continental fascists had been, you know, it ended in the Holocaust. There was this disgust that fascists could be organizing again in public in Britain, and that's where it mobilizes a new kind of generation of antifascists who are inspired by the 1930s to say "Never again, this won't happen on our streets." And the most important group and this is The 43 Group, which was a mixture of Jewish and communist radicals, which probably David can tell you a little bit about. David: I'd be happy to but I think before we get to 43 Group, it's kind of worth just pausing because the point Mike's left is kind of around the end of the Second World War. One thing which happens during the Second World War is of course Britain's at war with Germany. So what you start to get is Evan talked about how in the 1930s, you already have this argument like, “Should stopping fascism be something that's done by mass movements, or should it be done by the state?” In the Second World War the state has to confront that question, too, because it's got in fascism a homegrown enemy, and the British state looks at how all over Europe these states were toppled really quickly following fascist advance, and very often a pro-fascist powerful section of the ruling class had been the means by which an invading fascism then found some local ally that's enabled it to take over the state and hold the state. So the British state in 1940 actually takes a decision to intern Oswald Mosley and 800 or so of Britain's leading fascists who g

1h 28m
06/11/2022

The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 15: Judeo-Bolshevism

Mike: Common-ism [Theme song] Nazi SS UFOs Lizards wearing human clothes Hinduism’s secret codes These are nazi lies Race and IQ are in genes Warfare keeps the nation clean Whiteness is an AIDS vaccine These are nazi lies Hollow earth, white genocide Muslim’s rampant femicide Shooting suspects named Sam Hyde Hiter lived and no Jews died Army, navy, and the cops Secret service, special ops They protect us, not sweatshops These are nazi lies Mike: Welcome to another episode of the Nazi Lies podcast. I'm happy to be joined by Rutgers History Professor, Paul Hanebrink, author of the really easy to read book, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism. The book charts the development of the belief that communism or certain forms of it are instruments of Jewish power and control, from its pre-history and medieval antisemitism and Red Scare propaganda, through his development among proto-fascist and ultimately a Nazi Party, and the legacy of fascist campaigns against Judeo-Bolshevism in former fascist states. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Hanebrink. Paul Hanebrink: Thanks very much for having me, it's a pleasure to be here. Mike: So before I opened your book, I was expecting to hear a story of the fascist myth of Judeo-Bolshevism as told primarily by fascists through to the present day, but that's not the story you tell. Instead, you tell more of a people's history of believing that Judaism and communism in whole or in part are linked and tied to bad things generally. Besides the fact that this is your area of expertise, why did you decide to tell this history? Paul: I'm glad that you picked up on that. I am very much interested in how this myth or this conspiracy theory connects to a whole host of other issues. And I came to it actually when I was in Hungary in the 1990s. I'm a historian of Hungary by training, and I was doing my research for my dissertation, and my dissertation was on Hungarian nationalism and its relationship to Christianity in the 1920s and '30s and '40s. I was really struck by how so many of the different phrases and ideas and, sort of, thinking about Jews and communism which I was reading in my archival sources during the day, were reflected in journalism and in sort of public discussion about the recently vanished communist regime and what that had meant for Hungary and for the Hungarian national society. And I knew also that this was not just a particularly Hungarian issue, that this same kind of conversation, the same kind of debates about the relationship of Jews to communism was going on in other countries across the former Soviet bloc, especially in Poland, especially in Romania. And I knew that it had also been a major factor in Nazi ideology and an issue that kept coming back in strange ways even in German society. So I wanted to try to think about why this idea had such legs, as it were, why it seemed to endure across so many different kinds of regimes, and also try to figure out why it was so ubiquitous if you will, why it could be appearing in so many different places and so many different societies simultaneously. And so the book is an attempt to try to paint a broad canvas in which I could explore the different things that it meant to different people at different times. Mike: Okay. One thing I brought up in book club was that the book almost feels like a military history in the way you tell it, very event- and people-heavy and diachronic across the chapters, but told geographically within the chapters. So talk a little bit about your choice of historiography, because it definitely feels like a careful choice you made in how consistent your style remains throughout. Paul: Yeah. Well, I mean, as I said, one of the things I wanted to do was I wanted to capture the sense that this was a conspiracy theory that was powerful in a lot of places at the same time, and that it didn't radiate out from one place to another, but that it sort of sprang up like mushrooms in a lot of different places in different periods throughout the 20th century. I wanted a broad geographical canvas, and I didn't want to just simply focus on one country or do a kind of comparison between two countries or something like that. So I wanted to sort of figure out a way to tell this as a European story, and to be able to track the different ways in which this conspiracy theory circulated across borders and from one political formation or political group to another and also over time. The other thing that I wanted to focus on with this book in addition to the broad geographical canvas was also the notion that I didn't want a book that was just going to be a lot of different antisemitic texts one after the other, and so I just kind of piled them up in a big heap and kind of read them closely and pulled out all the different symbolisms. I wanted instead, to try to show using carefully chosen examples of people or groups or political parties or moments in history or events to really show how this ideological substance, this conspiracy myth, became something that had meaning and had power for people that shaped the way in which they saw and interpreted what they were doing and what others were doing. And so for that reason, I think, very carefully throughout each chapter, I try to find actors in a way that I could hang the narrative on and that I could sort of develop the analysis by leading with specific kind of concrete, more vivid examples. And that may be perhaps what you picked up on when you were reading it. Mike: Okay, so let's get into it. A lot of people know kind of the rudiments of old-school antisemitism and anti-communism, but not how they co-evolved into the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism. So, how did antisemitism and anti-communism become modern? Paul: Yeah, it's an interesting question. What I wanted to try to think about in the book–and I explore this I think most carefully in the first chapter–is the way in which very old ideas about Jews, specifically about the ways in which Jews, have been used to symbolize in a sense a world turned upside down or illegitimate power or some kind of dystopia. And you can see this particular set of ideas throughout a number of centuries going back into the Middle Ages. So I begin with this, this idea that Jewish power is somehow illegitimate power. And then I look very carefully at the accusations that were circulating in Europe during World War I about Jews in a sense gathering power on the homefront while the true members of the nation were away on the front fighting. And so there was a real concern across Europe about Jewish loyalty and about Jews as being potential subversives or traitors or spies. And that feeds very easily into Jews as revolutionaries. So you have these two things that come together in that sort of end of World War I moment where also the Bolshevik revolution breaks out, and that there's this very old language that is familiar and comfortable to so many people thinking about Jews as eager to sort of accumulate illegitimate power, that's the very old story that reaches back to the Middle Ages, but tied to this very particular moment in European history in which there's concern about Jewish responsibility for the collapse, for example, of empires from Russia to the Austro-Hungarian empire, and the role that they're playing in revolutionary movements and revolutionary politics in so many different places across the European continent at that time. And I think it's the crucible of those two in that moment that really creates the Judeo-Bolshevik myth as a particular form of Jewish conspiracy theory. I'm not saying it's different. I'm saying that there are many different faces and iterations of the myth of a Jewish conspiracy, but that this is a particular one or particular version. And that it does particular ideological things, particular political things for people during the 20th century. Mike: Okay, so if modern anti-Semites and modern anti-communists largely belong to the right, their ideas coalesced into this conspiracy theory of Judeo-Bolshevism. Now you honestly don't spend a large amount of space in the book describing the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism, and there's two things going on in your book. On the one hand, you have the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism which is this theory that there is a secret cabal of Jews who control the world through joint efforts of banking finance and world communist movements that operate to destabilize Western civilization through financial panics and revolutions, so there's that. Then on the other hand there's what you spend more time on, which is the perception that communism or at least its excesses in actual existing communism, is Jewish in origin and operation. Like, it's not necessarily a belief in a conspiracy necessarily so much as a dislike of Jews and the belief that they're inordinately involved in communism. So when antisemitism and anti-communism became modern and intertwined, the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism, this totalizing conspiracy theory started to form. Who were the major players in that and what kinds of influence do they have? Paul: Yeah. I guess there are two things I want to pick up on in your question. The first is that I think you're right that I'm more interested in approaching the question in a particular way. And that is that, you know, a lot of the kind of antisemitic rhetoric and antisemitic ideology from the 20th century, there was this real insistence that you could somehow count the number of Jews who were in communist parties, and you could determine that this was a high number and that therefore Jews were somehow responsible for communism. And so much of the politics around trying to resist that was around kind of factually disproving that. I find it much more interesting to sort of not get drawn into the trap of saying, "Well, it's partly right or partly wrong," but to look instead at the way in which this conspiracy gained momentum, and that it cam

38 min
03/19/2022

The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 14: Women Aren't Funny

Mike Isaacson: That’s it! That’s the joke! [Theme song] Nazi SS UFOs Lizards wearing human clothes Hinduism’s secret codes These are nazi lies Race and IQ are in genes Warfare keeps the nation clean Whiteness is an AIDS vaccine These are nazi lies Hollow earth, white genocide Muslim’s rampant femicide Shooting suspects named Sam Hyde Hiter lived and no Jews died Army, navy, and the cops Secret service, special ops They protect us, not sweatshops These are nazi lies Mike: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Nazi Lies Podcast. Join our book club on Discord by subscribing to our Patreon. If you weren’t on the Discord at the beginning of the month, you missed our next guest giving standup comedy lessons. Elsa Eli Waithe is a stand up comedian and educator living in Brooklyn. She’s been in the New York comedy scene for ten years and was recently featured on BET’s new show On the Ropes. She is the founder of the GOLD Comedy School for Girls which teaches primarily teenage girls the craft of comedy. Elsa’s here for Women’s History Month to talk about women in comedy. Welcome to the podcast, Elsa. Elsa Eli Waithe: Hello, thank you for having me Mike. It's good to talk to you. Mike: Hey, how are you doing? Elsa: Doing good. Oh man, comedy’s coming back. There's a little thing like a pandemic or something that happened? Little something-something like that threw everybody off, but I think we're turning the corner, and comedy is coming back. I'm ready to be funny again. Mike: Good. So before we get into the craft of comedy, how did you come to stand-up comedy? Elsa: How did I come to stand-up comedy? Oh, my God. So many things in my life, I think, were pointing itself already to stand-up comedy. Of course, I grew up in school as the class clown or whatever. In fact, by the time I started doing stand-up comedy, folks were like, "Oh, wow. I didn't know you weren't already doing that. You were always so funny in school or whatever." And then also, a lot of my jobs were sales jobs, and sales is kind of like a presentation, you know? And it helps to be funny and have a couple of lines that you say all the time. Everything was sort of just pointing towards comedy and stage and the things like that and I just sort of did it a bit on a dare almost. Somebody was just like, "You gotta want to do something else with your life, you should try comedy." And I just sort of tried it and I was just sort of naturally good at it. I did an open mic and I didn't quite know what I was doing, it's just like, "I'm just gonna go talk to this microphone." And then like people laughed. So I was like, "Okay, let's just keep doing it." And then here we go fast forward 10 plus years later, and I'm still doing it. Mike: Right on. So give us a little behind the scenes. What's the comedy scene like in New York City? How does an aspiring comedian get started, and what should they watch out for? Elsa: Oh! The comedy scene in New York City is a zoo. But it's my zoo. It's a fun zoo, and you're gonna learn a lot more doing comedy here in one month than you would like a year pretty much anywhere else because there's so many different venues. There's so many different avenues for comedy-- stand-up, sketch, improv, experimental, alt-style comedy-- that you could literally be in three places in one night in New York City. Do stand-up three times in one day. I think one of the early bits of information or advice I would give somebody starting off comedy in New York is get as much of it as you can without overdosing, right? Like, you get here and you want to do it all because you can do it all and there's all these opportunities and avenues and things. Do as much as you can, but also don't burn yourself out. Because it's easy to spread yourself too thin. So, don't spread yourself too thin. And then when you find your niche, you kind of find your spot, dig into it. Of course, don't be afraid to spread out, but really dig into the thing that really is grabbing you. It's really easy to spread yourself really thin in New York. I think that's what I'm trying to say is try it all but don't spread yourself thin. Mike: Now you are a woman in comedy. How has the scene treated you and other women compared to men? Elsa: Oh. Well, we live in a patriarchal society so experiences are going to be different for men and women in every area. It's no different in comedy. I mean, I'm a queer, Black woman, so I got those two things too. But, you know, when I first started doing comedy I was in the South. I was in Virginia. And very frequently I'd be the only woman, the only Black person, or the only queer, or damn, the only combination. Like, "Hey, you're the diversity hire. You check three boxes, get out there." And then I'd be on the line with all White men, all straight White men or all White men or whatever. It didn't bother me too much down in the South but when I came to New York for that sometimes to still be the case here, I was just like, "Oh, wow!" That was very interesting to see that comedy shows can still be booked in that way, even in the melting pot. So for me, the whole trick was to just be undeniably funny. That like, "Yes, I want your show to be booked diverse or whatever." But men, the gatekeepers or so in comedy, are often hiring you because you check a diversity box. They're booking you because you check a diversity box. I want to check that diversity box, but I also want to be really funny as well. And just be undeniably funny. I think that's like the extra mission, right? You hear it from Black folks or for women, you know, for gay people, "We got to be two or three times as funny as the next." You know? I want to be just regular as funny as the next and you hire me because that's just the right fucking thing to do. But also, I'm hilarious. [laughs] Mike: Okay. So regardless of the scene, the craft of stand-up comedy itself is pretty equal opportunity. And as part of your GOLD Comedy school curriculum, you've actually broken comedy down into sort of a science almost. I was definitely taking notes during the book club sessions you gave. Elsa: Thank you. Mike: So, what are elements of a good joke? Elsa: The elements of a good joke? Yeah, when I tell people, when they take my class, it's like I'm gonna break comedy down in a boring way for a second, right? And break it down into some like formulas, and then we'll build it back up, and it'll be funny again. But yeah, I think the elements of a good joke is premise, setup, punch. Right? You need the-- what is this joke about? Which direction are you about to take me in? And then the punch, the twist. What direction do we wind up in? Right? There's sort of like a little formula for that. So the elements of a good joke I think it's got to have– rooted in realism. This could be a real thing. Even if it's not a real thing, this could be a real thing, it's rooted in something real. And then the exaggeration and the surprise, then we take it to zany heights, you know? Things like that. So it's got to be rooted in something real. You got to show me where we're going and then you got to surprise me and take me in an unexpected direction. So yeah, that's really what I think are the elements of a good joke. Mike: Now doing standup is more than just having well-crafted jokes. Unless you’re like Mitch Hedberg, you need a routine to tie the jokes together. How do you build a good standup set? Elsa: You know, for me, there's lots of different ways people do it. Of course, obviously, comedy is an art form so everyone's got their way. My way, for me, is over the years over time I've written what I like to call a stack of jokes for different topics. I got weed jokes. I got gay jokes. I got going-to-the-beach jokes, or whatever. And what I typically do is when I'm building a set, before I go on stage, earlier that day or the day before, what three things do I want to talk about? Do I want to talk about this pop culture thing that's currently happening? I'm gonna talk about this pop culture thing that's currently happening, I want to do some weed material, and then I want to end with this thing my mom did, you know? How I sort of weave or blend those things together sometimes just sort of comes across while I'm on stage. But I just sort of go in my head with the couple of topics I want to talk about, and will then pick out the couple of jokes I really want to try out on those topics. And then if I got five minutes/ten minutes, I talk until I feel like I'm done joking about this one thing and then we move on. I just sort of feel it out on stage as best I can. But I go in with a little bit of a game plan, you know? Do I know everything exactly down to the letter what I'm going to say? No. But I go in with a little bit of a blueprint or a little bit of a game plan and allow spontaneity. You don't know what the audience is going to do, you don't know what is going to happen in the room, so I go in with my game plan and leave room to be spontaneous or to see what the audience is giving me. Mike: Alright, so with your experience and the framework you've built, I’m sure you’ve witnessed some comedy that’s made you cringe. What do comedians need to stop doing in their sets? Elsa: One pet peeve I have– This is like a new comic pet peeve, so if I see you doing this, I can almost guarantee you haven't been doing comedy a full year yet. When you take the mic out of the mic stand, move the mic stand. Move the mic stand away from the front of the– Take the mic out of the mic stand and then place the mic stand off to the side or behind you. Oh dear God, why would you take the mic off the mic stand, and then leave the mic stand right there, and then like walk around it? Oh that's one thing that it's a tiny little pet peeve that makes all the difference. It's a rookie move, I don't like that. Um, I don't like when– I think sometimes people write comedy to be edgy or to be c

21 min

See All (22)

3.1

out of 5

16 Ratings

Great podcast

06/25/2022

cmssep

This podcast is great. You get information that is very important.
Episode 3: listen to find out how VILE the Talmud is for yourself

Oct 2

keikokomikokoi

Listening to episode 3 regarding the Talmud. So painful to hear how the guest tries to justify the Talmud. It’s vile. It’s disgusting. It’s demonic. I would have respected the podcaster had he just expressed some critical thinking instead of telling the guest: “yes, that makes makes sense”. I need to google that guest. It was literally painful. Every word is high pitched (lying), articulated, nervous laughter. Disgusting yet hilarious.

Creator

The Nazi Lies Podcast
Years Active

2021 - 2023
Episodes

22
Rating

Clean
Show Website

The Nazi Lies Podcast

Society & Culture

Society & Culture

Updated 7 hr. ago
Comedy

Comedy

Updated Semiweekly

The Nazi Lies Podcast

The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 22: The Lying Press

The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 21: Just Like the Fall of Rome

The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 20: Castrate Them

The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 19: The Earth Is Flat

The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 18: Human Biodiversity

The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 16: The Free Speech Crisis

The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 15: Judeo-Bolshevism

The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 14: Women Aren't Funny

Great podcast

Episode 3: listen to find out how VILE the Talmud is for yourself

About

Information

You Might Also Like

The Nazi Lies Podcast

Episodes

The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 22: The Lying Press

The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 21: Just Like the Fall of Rome

The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 20: Castrate Them

The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 19: The Earth Is Flat

The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 18: Human Biodiversity

The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 16: The Free Speech Crisis

The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 15: Judeo-Bolshevism

The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 14: Women Aren't Funny

Ratings & Reviews

Great podcast

Episode 3: listen to find out how VILE the Talmud is for yourself

About

Information

You Might Also Like