Part One: John Wayne: A Dude Who Sucked

Robert is joined by Francesca Fiorentini to discuss John Wayne. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Uh, it is, once again, behind the Bastards, the only podcast,
which is why you're listening. You have no other choice. Um.
All other podcasts have been banned by the new regime,
which is why I'm here to talk with my guest today,
Francesca Fiorentini. Francesco, how are we doing? Um, I'm good,

(00:28):
I'm very very good. There is another podcast, Robert. Oh,
it's the only other one that is allowed by the
new regime, and that is mine. That's right, that's right.
I remember that coming in the bulletin from the State
Security Service. Yeah, yeah, you want you want to plug
your podcast even though there's only two. Yeah, but they're yeah.
I mean, you know, once you get tired of b

(00:48):
t B you go over to t b R the
Bituation Room podcast and uh yeah, Situation Room. What what
blessings that the regime has showered upon us that we
get a podcast like the Bituation Room to choose to
watch or listen to, because you can watch it too.
It's not just an audio podcast, No, it is a

(01:09):
great blessing upon YouTube and twitch. Now, Francesco, how are
you doing today? I don't know. I'm scared, already scared
because we got a three partner and you said, oh
my god, is this going to be about like Hitler
or someone And no, Francesco, we're talking about someone much
worse than Hitler. Much today are bastard is John Wayne.

(01:37):
I was like going to go with Attila the Han.
But hell yeah, Wayne, I think that's fair to say
John Wayne was responsible for more Vietnamese deaths than Attila
the Hun or Hitler. That that's probably fair to say
less deaths elsewhere. Like, but you know, so what do
you know? What do you know about Mr J Dubs,

(01:59):
John Lane, Francesca Um Spaghetti Westerns or whatever those are, right,
he was definitely a lot of why I'm not an
expert enough on western because those were the ones that
were like filled in filmed in Italy, right, we keep
coming back to Italy. I think that's why they're spaghetti, yes,
which is racist, by the way, super racist. I mean

(02:19):
now that, yeah, we have other foods exactly, why can't
it be a ravioli Western Western? Why not a one
of those with the fish dishes that they cook on
the coast. You know, we got stuff. To be totally
honest with you, I've never seen a single John Wayne
film However, the thing that I know about him, and

(02:41):
the thing that I repeat on some sort of snoopes
whatever bs that I'm on or like, is is that
he when he died, had something like fifty pounds of
meat removed from his gut. That there was like an
undigested amount of beef in his bottles, probably because the

(03:04):
man ate a tremendous quantity of meat. But but I
think that's that's more of a uh an apocryphal tale.
But like, the thing about John Wayne that's interesting is
that he's whether or not you've seen any of his movies,
and I think today a lot of most people probably
haven't or at least haven't seen many. Maybe you've caught, like, um,
True Grit, the Original True Grit, or something like The Shootiest,

(03:28):
So there's a couple of movies that are still in circulation.
For the most part, He's just like a meme that
has implanted itself in the background of our cultural consciousness.
He is this kind of like ideal of hyper masculinity,
of like white Christian masculinity that's still very pervasive in
US culture. Um, And that's kind of who John Wayne is,

(03:49):
and that matters more at this point than what he
actually did in any of his films because and it's
interesting because we have a lot of there's a lot
of other stars in that era, like Gary Cooper or
whatever that we're huge in their day, and now a
lot of most people on the street aren't. Couldn't really
think of anything about them. You know, maybe you've heard
the name Gary Cooper, but could you pick him out

(04:09):
of a lineup? Not unless you're really into old films.
But if you see John Wayne's face somewhere, most people
are gonna be like, oh, yeah, that's that's sucking John
Wayne right, Like he's just he's just an icon of
American manhood. You know. He also has like sort of
a he's got a classic asshole face, like just very

(04:30):
punchable and or you're gonna get punched when you see
that face. Yeah, he's got this. He was this. He
was this kind of stereoty, not even stereotypically, because the
stereotype exists because of him. But he will talk about
this later. He didn't really get famous until he was
like a middle aged, surly looking motherfucker um and a
lot of his fame came from that. You know that

(04:52):
that's part of why he remains so popular with like
dads and grandpa's for forever is he was this this
kind of ARCon of the old guy who will beat
your ass, which they all want to believe they are. Um,
you know, he's just like us. Yeah, it's like you know,
nowadays we get our movies like you know, the Equalizer
from a few years back with Denzel You always want

(05:12):
every couple of years have a movie with like a
sixty year old man who beats the ship out of
a bunch of twenty year olds. Um. Clinton Eastwood used
to do these. John Wayne was like the motherfucking the
Jesus Christ of that and and all later middle aged
actors who beat up twenty year olds or his apostles.
But you know, we're getting ahead of ourselves here. Um.

(05:33):
The thing that he had a very long career, and
it was primarily, as you said, cowboy movies that made
him famous and in fact, as Charles Silver of the
Museum of Modern Art observed, Wayne made westerns for twice
as long as it took to fight the Indian Wars.
He made westerns for about as long as it actually
took to settle the continent west of the Missouri so
for an idea like this period, He's part of why

(05:55):
this Western period is still so like central to the
American ideals or I like idea, particularly the right wing
idea of how this country was quote unquote founded. And
it's because he was in movies romanticizing that period for
longer than it was ever real, which is neat yes, um,

(06:15):
but always showed like the Native American perspective, right, Oh
for sure. No, that was one of the things they
were famous of. That's why one of his chief co
stars ironized Cody was absolutely a real Indigenous person and
not an Italian pretending to be Native American. Hey, I'll
have none of that in this three part no anti
Italian slander. M hmm. Whatever roles we want, that's right,

(06:41):
I mean we sure did, We absolutely did. I will
I will say that there's there's gonna be a couple
of cases of white dudes playing whatever the fuck roles
they want in these episodes. So this is the thing
that sort of indoctrinated our parents into the idea that
like you know, manifest destiny and that bullshit idea was

(07:04):
always right, always justified. Because like for us, I feel
like when I grew up it was more just like
you watched Schoolhouse Rocks and there was a song called
elbow Room, which was basically this explanation of like the
like the settling of the West and the colonization of
the West. That was just like we just needed more
room albow room, And I was like, what the fuck?

(07:25):
Still again, very very very rose colored glasses. Yeah, that's
like the sanitized version of the story that John Wayne
told UM. And and that like was kind of being
told through his body, Um, which is a big part
of the role he has here. So this is gonna
be an interesting bastard. Now. That said, when we're talking
about the things that are terrible that resulted from John Wayne,

(07:47):
we are talking big picture stuff like how what his
image has done. But as a person, don't worry. He
was really unpleasant. So we'll get plenty of stories of
a dude being shitty and old timey hall e would
and I you know, no one was ever quite as
good at being shitty as dudes in old timey Hollywood.
It was really like it was like the renaissance for

(08:09):
being an asshole in America. Like you you, you just
can't hit those heights anymore. Um, as much as Harvey tried. Ye.
As much as Harvey tried, he was never but a
pale imitation of his of his ancestors. Um. So Yeah,
one of the things that's interesting about John Wayne is that,

(08:32):
you know, he's he's the image of manhood that he
crafted in his films has proved to be so durable that, like,
if you go to gun shows and kind of like
big right wing events today, you'll see his face all
over ships still, um, because that ideal hasn't really changed
in any way since his death. Now, the story of
John Wayne is more than anything, the story of American
Christian masculinity, which he embodied. So for the first I'm

(08:55):
gonna talk a little bit about that history. For the
first hundred and thirty or so years of the United
States as a nation, Uh, most men in the country
made their living one way or the other through hard
physical labor. We're talking, of course, about men who were free,
although men who were enslaved also made their existed through
hard physical labor. Pretty Much everybody was like working physically,

(09:15):
like doing something that was difficult. Either they're farming, or
they're in a factory, or they're shooting people who were
standing where they wanted to build a farm or a factory, um,
and so masculinity, like you didn't have to be super
performative about your masculinity. Then it was pretty simple. You
worked hard. Ideally you made enough money to start a
small business. That was kind of like the goal for

(09:36):
every man wanting to take care of his family. Broadly speaking,
if you were white, if you were a white dude,
if you were not a white dude, then you you
just worked without pay for that guy, and you were
like in masculine Like the other side of my relatives
were Chinese, so you know, building the railroads, like what
a feminine activity. Well, yeah, that's exactly that's exactly right.

(09:57):
And again we are talking because John Wayne is the
the avatar of white Christian manhood, right, we're not we're
talking about masculinity in a narrow context, but in the
one that is sort of societally dominant in the United
States because you know, I've heard of this white Christian masculinity. Yeah, yeah,
he helped invent it. So by the turn of the

(10:17):
twentieth century, things had started to change rapidly. For one thing,
the frontier didn't exist anymore. You know, white people had
made it all the way across. There was no longer
these kind of open spaces on the map, so to speak.
The economy was increasingly dominated by consumer goods, and now
most people were working jobs that didn't require them to

(10:38):
go out and farm in the middle of nowhere or
cut down trees or you know, get into gunfights. They
were living in cities, they were working in offices. Uh,
toughness didn't really matter as much as like being able
to sit in an office for the right amount of
hours while you slowly went mad from syphilis. So this
creates kind of like a a psychological uh, what's the word,

(11:00):
I'm looking for emergency for American white men, right, like
the fact that all this change is suddenly they're like, well,
what am I? How? What am I supposed to be doing?
This doesn't feel right? And I'm man still yeah, And
and rather than being like, maybe we are in the
process of building a system that is like an anti
human nightmare that forces people to labor in little boxes

(11:23):
for like pitdling, and like everything everything that we have
been working towards is horribly wrong, and we need to
go back to a much earlier period in our development
of what a society should be in your lifestyle an
easier lifestyle, Robert, it is. It's a lot lazier for
for at least, well, I mean in some ways. But
like also rather than you know, as many people kind

(11:46):
of living a rural life and working on farms, a
lot of them are like in coal mines choking to death,
which is worse than farming. True. True, A lot of
these guys are trying to figure out, like what does
it mean to be a man anymore? Now that you know,
we're in the modern era. Um. And while white men
are kind of feeling increasingly domesticated by this office workship,

(12:09):
immigration from Eastern Europe is starting to search. And so
also there's all this racism against like you know, Italians
and Slabs and and folks who were like not yet
quite white, um in the eyes of the people who
are at the time definitely quite white. So all of
this stuff is making men feel like edged in. You know,

(12:31):
we've got these immigrants coming in to take our jobs.
Our jobs aren't that great anyway. Uh. And then suddenly
women start asking for a lot of wild things, like
the right to vote in bicycles. Bicycles, it's gonna only
if you ride them. Side saddle. The moral panic over
bicycles is still one of my favorite little history Jim's

(12:52):
they were so scared of bicycles, we should bring that back, well,
you know, because it breaks the hymen. Yeah, I mean
we kind of half that America has never gotten over
its hatred of bicycles. Now we just build trucks big
enough to crush them. You know, when you I was like,
you know, when you're like twelve, you do you are like, yeah,
but like riding a bike could like break your time.
And there's a lot of weird Like I read it

(13:13):
in Cosmo or like Why I Am, which was an
old girl's magazine. Um about like the sanctity of anyway.
We don't have to get into it. I mean I
don't know because that was not a part of my education.
On the bicycle, well, suffice to say, I still don't
know how to ride a bicycle, so oh it's I

(13:34):
don't trust Well, Um, I think people were meant to
travel on two feet or four wheels and nothing in between,
so you're not missing anything. Devil machines. Yeah, I'm I'm
on board with white people in the early nineteen hundreds,
with the hatred of bicycles. Mine's just not a hatred
of bicycles for sexist reasons. I just don't think they're natural. Okay,

(13:57):
So basically the walls are when of the walls not
been closing in on the perception of white Christian masculinity
like basically forever and let me just a quick check
in with a with a white man um, although not
in that time. But Robert, are you okay? Are you

(14:18):
guys honestly? Well, actually no, because everything is bad, but
not for that reason. Everything's bad because of these people
and their continual needs to preserve their power relations relative
to everyone else. Like this idea of like white whiteness, uh,
and this this patriarchal kind of white Christian society. People

(14:41):
come up with it over the course of a century
or two and then have this kind of brief golden
era where they feel like it's not at threat for
like five years, and then up until the present day
are actively trying to kill the entire planet in order
to maintain it, even though they've been winning for so
for forever. Um. Basically, it's safe to say that this

(15:05):
is a moment like if you were to actually pinpoint
when America was quote unquote great in the minds of
a lot of these Trumpers. Is that the John Wayne era. Yeah,
that's I mean, that's a little later than where we
are right now. But yeah, it's like the nineteen thirties
through the nineteen like sixties, early sixties before like the

(15:25):
Vietnam protest ship really got out of hand, and then
we're in a hippie spitt and rambos face. That's right,
that's right. Um so, yeah, and again like that that's
the golden era that are white Christian nationalists look back to.
The white Christian nationalists in like nineteen hundred, the eighteen nineties,
nineteen hundred, they're looking back at like thirty years earlier too,

(15:46):
or fifty years earlier too, for a period that barely
ever existed. Um So, white Christian men are feeling emasculated
by modernity and they start grappling for a new totem
of manhood, like someone to kind of hang their images
of masculinity on. And they find Teddy Roosevelt. Now not

(16:07):
a bad pick, although kind of a surprising one given
his background. In the book Jesus and John Wayne, Kristen
Cobbs Dumez writes, as a young man Roosevelt had been
ridiculed for his high voice, tight pants, and fancy clothing,
and to write it as a weakling and a punkin lily.
But Roosevelt wanted power. Determined to reinvent himself, he went West,
rechristening himself the Cowboy of the Dakotas it was on

(16:29):
the frontier that a new masculinity would be forged, a
place where white men brought order to savagery, where men
served as armed protectors and providers, where violence achieved a
greater good. If the Wild West could mold the exquisite Mr.
Roosevelt into a rugged masculine specimen, perhaps it could do
the same for American manhood generally. So the think he
went or just shave your mustache, bro, No, they're never

(16:51):
gonna do that. That's that mustache is how they keep
you know, the Mexicans away or whatever. Can we just
go back to punk in lily? Right, there's a pumpkin lily.
It's not just a pup old West insult, Like what
happens a lily grows on top of a pumpkin? As
when you gotta cut that pumpkin down before it grows

(17:12):
a lily? Yeah, you don't want to grow. That's why
we don't have pumpkins, because then we have lilies, which
came first a pumpkin of the lily. Think it's just
because it's fragile and pretty, and he was a fragile,
pretty boy by the standards of the time. So even
as Roosevelt is kind of like out in the Dakota's
doing outdoor ship and getting getting big and strong, uh,

(17:34):
the fact that they're like the idea of a West
at all is like starting to end um And so again,
like this is he Roosevelt who kind of comes into
prominence as this modern era is beginning, is a product
of the era before, and everything that's kind of held
up as an ideal about him as masculine is the
thing that's no longer possible for a lot of men

(17:55):
to do. So one of the things Roosevelt's trying to
figure out as he starts to become a prominent figure,
and one of the things a lot of white dudes
are trying to figure out is where are we going
to make more hard white men you know? Next? Yeah, well, yeah, exactly,
that's exactly what they're talking about. And Teddy decides, you know,
who would be good to have a war with Spain. Um.

(18:17):
And in fairness, it's a pretty good time to have
a war with Spain. They don't do good in this war, Uh,
it doesn't. It does not go well for Spain as
wars go. That the U. S has gotten involved in
pretty pretty easy fight, not for like a lot of
people in the Philippines, but for the US as a nation.
It goes a lot better than for example, Vietnam. Um.
So Teddy when the war happens, and he's like a

(18:40):
huge backer. We're we'll talk about the Spanish American more
and more and more detail one of these days. But
he's a part of why we get into it. And
he volunteers to lead a cavalry union when it starts,
and he actually fights in Cuba. He does a bunch
of he has his charge up San Juan Hill. He
gets in all of the newspapers. He's this big national hero,
Teddy Roosevelt, the brave Imperial war leader, and all of

(19:01):
these kind of soldiers who fight with him and become
construct their own masculinity on the battlefields of Cuba, you know. Um,
and under the guise of like, hey, we want to
pillage that island over there. Well, and they blew up
our boat. They blew up our boat. We got a
pillage that island and also several others got it. Yeah,

(19:24):
I forgot about that boat. Yeah, there's that boat that
blows up. Um. Sometimes it's you know, with the nine
eleven of the late eighteen hundreds, that one boat exploded.
I've I have forgotten as we will nine eleven one day.
So Teddy Roosevelt, Uh, you know we this goes good

(19:44):
for everybody. And uh, it's so popular going to war
with Spain. Teddy Roosevelt's partner that in nineteen o one
he gets selected president. Um, and he's he's an interesting
guy as president. Obviously a big part of him there's
an element that's very Trumpian because he has to show
himself as this ultra potent and tough man and and

(20:06):
he's gotta like kind of he's he's constantly sort of
showing himself as this like outdoorsy, rough writing son of
a bitch. But also a lot of that's true about
Teddy Roosevelt, to his like credit, Unlike Trump, the potency
stuff isn't entirely constructed. He is a dude who spends
a lot of time outdoors. He famously gets shot once

(20:26):
while giving a speech and just like keeps right on
doing the thing. Um, So he's not you can see
why people latch onto this dude, um. And some of
the ship he does as president is pretty dope. He
establishes the National park system, um, although that's also tied
into white supremacy, because a big part of the idea
of national parks, in this idea of the wilderness that

(20:47):
Roosevelt establishes, is these very white attitudes towards wildlife recreation,
which are rooted in somewhat mythic ideas of wild and
untamed lance, which, of course we're not wild or untamed
and had been in most case is heavily heavily influenced
and basically gardened by indigenous people who have to be
excised from the topic because these lands can't have indigenous

(21:08):
people on them, they have to stay empty so white
folks can hike in them, right, right, So there's problematic aspects,
even though there's also positive aspects of the National Park System,
which is that we didn't turn all of those parks
and the factors. Yeah, I mean, I I just love
the images from Yellowstone from like the fifties when it's
just like families feeding entire picnic baskets, like actual picnic

(21:31):
baskets too. They're feeding picnic baskets to bears and they're like,
I wonder why the bears are getting so up etty
and crazy. Yeah, because you're feeding them twinkies straight up.
I think that's something we I think one of the
big places we went wrong in this country, Francesca is
we got rid of all the apex predators. I think
we should never have made it legal to hunt them um,

(21:54):
and we should always have fed them random food so
they associated humans with food, and then we'd be getting
cold regularly by wolves and bears in the like. It
would be a better like if every week killed cold
yeah yeah, yeah, if like every week in Santa Monica
family got eaten by a bobcat, you know. Yeah yeah.

(22:14):
I think about how much lower rent would be. It
would be like I got a great deal on an
apartment because this big cat broke in a native family.
I mean, remember Hank the Tank and exactly I think
it was. It was just a couple of weeks ago, Yeah,
Hank the Tank, you know, rummaging through people's trash, and
like terrorizing people was like hell, yeah, stay stay in line.

(22:35):
Then a fox was in the Capitol building or around
it was nipping the heels of concords. Were they euthanized
it anyway? M hmm, it's a tragedy. What we should
have done is released more foxes into the halls of
Congress with more rabies, a lot more rabies, I mean
the filibuster people immediately. It would a lot of things

(22:56):
would end, A lot of things would end that needed
to end, and maybe would get to see Mitch McConnell
tried to tear out the throat of Ted Cruz as
he's mad with rabies, which would have been pretty funny.
Vince that senators, Republican senators don't already have rabies. Yeah,
that's probably fair, although kind of unfair to rabies. What
did it ever due to you, Francesca and save democracy?

(23:21):
That's right. Rabies came to save us and we we
spurned it. Um. So, by the early nineteen hundreds, Christian dudes,
white Christian dudes in the United States had become enamored
with a sort of performative masculinity um, which is the
kind of like as as as many of the things
that Roosevelt did as he did, he was also very

(23:42):
much like a performer, right, Um, he's a he's a
dude who was very like media trained. He's a dude
who's consciously manipulating his image. And so that becomes that
kind of performative masculinity becomes dominant in the United States,
and it probably would have looked pretty weird to the
actual guys they were imitating, the dudes on the frontier, who,
more than anything, probably would have been like, boy, it

(24:04):
would be nice to have a desk job rather than
freezing to death in the middle of Iowa alone, Like, yeah,
just get back there for everyone's dick sake. Yeah. Um.
So yeah, this is these earlier kind of Victorian attitudes
towards Christianity that had been dominant in that period start

(24:24):
to feel a feminate um to a lot of men
in this period. There's derision at the womanly virtues they
felt had dominated their religion. There's this idea that the
dominant image of Christ was like feminine because he wanted
to feed people and like help them and heal them,
and that's like girl shit, rather than like going out
and kicking in heads and and punching people like, that's

(24:45):
the Jesus that people want, that white dudes want't this period,
it's like a lepers some pumpkin lily bullshit. That is
some pumpkin lily bullshit. You need to get yourself a
six gun Jesus Christ. So Kristen Dumaz argues that to
do this, in order to like remake Christianity in a
militant warlike image, they had to revive old pre war

(25:09):
Southern ideals about what white Christian masculinity represented. And so
they kind of go back to the South pre Civil
War to this idea that the man's jobs that have
sanctified aggression in order to maintain order. So men in
the pre war South existed to protect white men, existed
to protect white women and children from the danger of
slave uprisings, which they did with guns. Right. That's the

(25:32):
idea that gets kind of reincorporated into the American mainstream
in the early nineteen hundreds, and this new kind of
much more aggressive strain of Christian masculinity becomes known as
muscular Christianity. It's Jesus on H G H. Basically, you know, yeah,
Joe Rogan up that christ a little bit you know,
which is like not the hot Jesus that we all

(25:55):
know and love. You know, Jesus is hot because he's
just like hipster you know, who took off his skinny
jeans and you're like, oh my god, you should eat more.
But he only can afford Roman because he's you know,
just as a podcast or whatever. Oh Jesus would absolutely
have a podcast today and it would be this one.
Oh no, okay a little bit. So as this is

(26:20):
where I announced to the listeners that I am the
son of God. It's a three parter about how Robert
is Jesus. Yeah, that's that's that's Sophie's just not even listening.
So we're going to get away with a lot here,
Francesco um So as this is all happening, there's all
been a lot of scenes setting um in winter set, Iowa.
On nineteen o seven, Mary and Clyde Morrison had a baby.

(26:44):
They named this baby Marian Robert Morrison. And this is
the kid that's going to grow up to be John
Wayne Maran Mary And oh yeah, wow, you think that's
going to go good for him? In in in elementary school.
I'm not a very masculine name, not a very masculine name. Look,

(27:05):
you go into first grade as a boy with the
first name Mary in today, you're gonna take some ship.
Right in nineteen oh seven, you're gonna take a lot more.
It's gonna be a lot rougher. Um this is that
is part of the story that we're building to. Um. So,
Marian Morrison is born in a house in Winterset, Iowa.

(27:26):
The house is a museum today, although we don't know
that it was the house he was actually born in.
Our entire source that it was is like an old
dude who told a biography or he remembered hearing about
a baby being born there. Um so maybe not around
here anyway, that'll be fifty Yeah. That that's like a
lot of John Wayne's legacy where they're like, look, it

(27:46):
might have been this house. So we're gonna put a
museum up here with pictures of Trump and it too.
Fuck you, it's winter Set, Iowa. We have done nothing else,
you know. Huh. Um. Now we do know he was
born in winter Set, so at least there's that. We
have a birth announcement from the local paper which read
a thirteen pound son arrived at the Homely Morrison Monday. Yeah,

(28:10):
that's a that's two babies. That is two babies and
one baby. You must have ripped. I'm sorry, that's my
mind like perennium. Yeah, me too, girl, that's that's that's yeah,
that's that couldn't have been easy. That's way too big
for a baby. That's a massive baby, massive by seven

(28:34):
eat two other babies as much. She might have eaten
a couple of babies in there. They were triplets. And
he ate that's such a big baby. And he will
he will grow up. He's a huge guy. Like he
as an adult, he's about he's six three, so he's
like six three and half an inch or something like that,

(28:56):
So he's about my height. But he's also like really
really broad. I think he weighs probably like two fifties
something like that. As a girl, like, he's just a
huge motherfucker's Yeah, he's a door and he he comes
out as a certified chowed you know, um, just just
hardcore Brandon, Yeah, right on that shoulder. So winter Set

(29:18):
was a small city of less than three thousand people.
In many ways, it would have resembled at the time
Marian was born, the current right wing vision of like
Paradise soda pop cost fifteen cents. The only religions represented
in town where Methodist, Catholic, and Baptist. Basically everybody was white.
There were two black citizens who had names and we're
on the city country or the city rolls. There was

(29:41):
a third black man who lived in the city, but
everyone just called him Inward John, only they did not
use Inward, they used the you know, uh, he lived
in a shack and was not included in the town census.
So that is that is the kind of town that
John Wayne is born into. Christ Uh existence of that man,

(30:03):
oh boy, Yeah, I don't know what was going on
with that dude, but it can't have been easy, Like
how do you not avoid dying every single day as
the only black man in that town? Yeah, I mean
I have you have to assume living kind of on
the outskirts of town, but not being represented in the census,
he had some role he played that was like picking
up scrap or something, where as long as he's stuck

(30:25):
to his area, it was you know that that would
be my assumption. But I don't probably found him from
another town, brought him there to just make them feel superior,
to have somebody to do a slurezze. Someone who looked
down there knows that, yeah, it's it's it can't be
a good story, right, whatever the truth is, it cannot
possibly be good. We need that John's story later on.

(30:47):
But anyway, this is about Marian. So yeah, that dude
earned the name John. At least that has to have
been his name. Um. So, one pretty good BuzzFeed article
that I found on John Wayne describes Marian's parents as
quote an implacable woman married to a sweet ne'er do well.
Now that's a little bit too friendly, and that that's

(31:07):
broadly in line. So biographer Scott i'man kind of describes her. Similarly,
Biographer Richard Douglas Jensen describes Marian's mother is straight up abusive. Um,
probably physically abusive and definitely mentally abusive. That does seem
to be pretty accurate. Both Morrison's were part of what
biographer Scott i'man describes as a nervous middle class of

(31:28):
early early twentieth century America. These are the people we
were talking about earlier on in the episode. These like
folks who they're now doing these kind of more emasculating jobs.
They're they're potentially having more like kind of wealth than
Americans had before. But also there's this endless series of
recessions and great depressions and ship that occurs in the
late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds. So this sort

(31:52):
of prosperity and this kind of easier life is married
to the fact that, like everything can fall out from
under you at any time because there's a run on
the bank or whatever. So they're they're nervous right there
there on paper, doing better than their ancestors, but they
feel no sense of actual security. So she's they're just
kind of like whittling her husband down to a little
nub about like, how come you ain't got no more

(32:15):
callouses on your hands? Huh, Yes, that's exactly what's happening, Pumpkin,
Lily pussy like that. Yeah, yeah, I think you've got
her voice exactly. I mean, I liked I just like
blaming the woman in this case. No, but it's look,
we need some female villains, and for every male villain,
you know, there's some of them have a lot of
mom issues, and I think those moms deserve credit. What's

(32:38):
very progressive about this story, Francesca is that normally when
we have a bastard and you go into their upbringing,
it's like mom was super sweet and supportive, but then
she like dies suddenly, and like their dad's beating the
shit out of him, or like Hitler's dad, where he
beats the ship out of him, but then he dies
and it throws the family in the chaos. Here Clyde,
he's kind of an alcoholic, but he's a sweet dude.

(32:58):
Nobody ever says anything bad about Clyde. He's a nice guy.
Mama is a terrible person. It sounds like we're building
to what a bad mom she is. Yes, maybe she
was just angry at how big he was. Um, she
can't poop right, I mean absolutely not, never the same,

(33:22):
never the same, never the same. It's time for the
first You know who else can't poop? Right, Francesco, I
was hoping you would do that one. The products and
services that support this podcast, not not a single one
of them, all horrible, horrible stomach problems, potentially fatal. That's everyone.
We let's sponsor our podcasts. Are you actively dying? If not,

(33:45):
you can't sponsor this show. That's that's the rule. That way,
If you don't like an advertiser on the show. You'll
know they're not long for this world. And that's the behind.
The bastards guarantee got us the boredom out. That's what
you got. You gotta buy now, you gotta buy now,
you gotta give all Right, here's ads. We're back. So

(34:13):
we're talking about Clyde Morrison, John Wayne's dad, although John
Wayne is just merrying at this point. So Clyde fucking Clyde. Uh,
you know, born too late to conquer the frontier. He's
got a series of shitty desk jobs. He'd attended college
on a football scholarship, but he didn't do great and
he wound up getting a job as a pharmacist. Um.

(34:34):
He's a really nice guy. He's known as like people
will say, if he had four bits in his pocket,
he'd buy a beer with one and give the rest
to you so that you could like sit and talk.
Um this guy, he's a nice guy. Um. He's also
kind of a pushover and his wife is very ambitious
and hard charging. She was if not straight out abusive

(34:55):
as Jensen claims, then everyone seems to agree pretty casually.
Kind of crue when his when Marion's younger brother was born,
she decided, and his younger brother's named Robert. He's born
when Marrion's about three. She decides she likes his younger
brother better, and she gives him Marion's name. Because Marion's
middle name had initially been Robert, so she takes his

(35:17):
his name, and she gives it to his younger brother,
and she gives him a new middle name, Mitchell Um.
In the book John Wayne The Life and Legend, Scott
i'man explains all of this sloppy switching happened in earl Ham,
where the family moved to nineteen ten, and where Marion's
younger brother, Robert, was born in December nineteen eleven. Using
a child's name is the p and and now you
see it, now you don't. Shell game was only the

(35:38):
beginning of Marion's ragged childhood. What probably happened is that
his mother, a formidably strong willed, read borderline unpleasant woman
born Mary Brown in eighteen eighty five and Lincoln, Nebraska,
simply appropriated the older boys middle name for the preferred
new arrival. So she takes his name because she likes
his little brother better, like which is Rother the most
redeeming part of his name. Robert, thank you for saying that. Yeah,

(36:03):
gives it. Mitchell, what a ship name. You're never gonna
be nothing but an eminem's Mary and Mitchell, Mary and Mitchell.
Get down here, Mary and Mitchell Morrison. That's what it
stands for. Now, Robert, you can come over here. You
don't got to do chores today. Yeah, that's more or

(36:25):
less what goes on. So Molly Morrison was famed for
her frequent rages, where again Clyde's pretty retiring. So as
he grows up, Marian comes to vastly prefer hanging out
with his dad while his brother Robert becomes a mama's boy,
which suited Mama just fine because she only likes her
little boy. So winter Set, Iowa, to this day has
not really gotten over John Wayne, but he gets over

(36:47):
his hometown basically immediately right the family moves to Nebraska
when he's like three or four, and he later tells
an interviewer, just about all I remember about winter Set
is riding horses, playing football, and the time I thought
I discovered electricity. And there's more to that quote, but
I'm not going to read it because it's funnier if
I don't. So Marian's really need to know more about
when he thought he discovered it's it's not as funny.

(37:10):
He's just letting your imagination go. He's like, when I
actively tried to kill myself because my mom was driving
me nuts. Yeah, I mean essentially, yes, And I stood
out in a storm. Yeah, I mean you you have
literally grasped it. Yes, Okay, Okay, I like it. I
like the interview something out. Yeah, it's cute kids stuff. Right,

(37:34):
He's just a kid at this point. So his early
life is very unstable. The family moves constantly. They've moved
like a bunch of times by the time he's seven
or eight, which is not super common for this period. Right.
You know my early life, we moved a bunch, but
like you had cars, you know, it wasn't hard. Right. Um,
So he's moving in a period of time where that's

(37:55):
a real trauma. Uh. Clyde is bad with money. He
declares bankruptcy, he loses his pharmacy. Um, he's like moving
around taking up ship jobs. Uh. This pattern repeats itself
a couple of times until in nineteen thirteen, when Marian
is six, the family moves to des Moines with Molly's
fit to live with Molly's family while Clyde tries to

(38:15):
get back on his feet. So they're living in des Moines.
Nineteen fourteen comes around, World War One kicks off, you
know over in Europa stand yes, make more men, Make
more men. Oh yeah, well that's gonna have an impact
on the story. But if initially the US hasn't involved
in World War One, although guys like Teddy Roosevelt Shure
want us to be. And while this is all kind

(38:36):
of building up, Clyde's father, uh, you know, Marian's grandpa
buys a parcel of land in California and asks if
his son wouldn't mind like working it. Um like, hey,
you guys, wanna nothing else has worked? Want to try
farming in California? Uh? So Clyde has no experience doing this,
he's not particularly apt for farm life, but he's like, sure,

(38:57):
we'll give it a shot. So the family moves across
the country to live with their grandparents and try to
make it go with a farm. So here's the problem, Francesca.
The place where Clyde Sr. Purchases eighty acres is Palmdale, California.
You ever been to Palmdale, I don't think so. No.
So it is right next to the Mojave. It gets
about four inches of rain in a good year, which

(39:19):
is slightly more than Portland's got the day before I
wrote this episode. So most things do not grow well
in palm Dale. If you are able to divert tremendous
water resources from elsewhere in the state, you can make
a pretty good go of avocado farming there right now.
That was not really happening at this point, and it's not.

(39:41):
It's not a good place for agriculture. And the specific
thing they try to grow there initially is corn, which
does not do well in a climate like this. No. Yeah,
Palmdale's where I'm I'm looking at it. All the poppies
are people, you know, there's definitely unsers go and take
photos of themselves on the poppies. It's beautiful. It's a

(40:01):
lovely part of the part of the state. Grow there. Yeah,
I think you could grow opium there if you wanted to,
but um, you know, it's not a great place to
be a farmer unless you're being a very specific kind
of farmer. And they decided to grow corn, and again,
like Ukraine, is one of the countries in the world
that grows the most corn. Think of the climate of
Ukraine versus a town right on the edge of the Mojave.

(40:25):
You know. Um, So the Morrisons start trying to grow
ship and their whole plot is kind of a land scam.
There was some rules with the government where if they
could develop all eighty acres, the government would give them
another five hundred something acres. So it's they're they're trying
to like game the government to to to make it rich.
But they are going to have to be better at
farming than they wind up being to do that. So

(40:48):
the only house on the property is what John Wayne
later later called a glorified shack. It was unpowered, unheeded,
and it had no running water. Uh yeah. Marian later
called the terrain as barren deserted country. Um. But he
and his dad set to work trying to make the
desert bloom. So while they're struggling to farm, Muscular Christianity

(41:10):
in the United States is reaching its apex. When World
War One kicks off, Teddy Roosevelt himself repeatedly urged the
US to get involved, right like, we're just being a
bunch of a bunch of girls. If we don't get
involved in this war and feed our sons to machine guns.
Um and Woodrow Wilson, who gets to be the president,
campaigns on not doing that. He's like, it seems like

(41:31):
a bad idea World War One. Maybe we should stay
out of that. Obviously, he's not going to stick to
his guns. Um So, Teddy Roosevelt and him are kind
of having this big public spat over whether or not
the US should get involved. Um and and and Teddy
is not the only one really pushing the United States
for involvement. There's a whole culture that grows up on
the right wing urging intervention in World War One. And

(41:53):
I'm gonna read another quote from Jesus and John Wayne here.
Former professional baseball player Billy Sunday preached this new muscular
Christianity with unrivaled zeal Wanting nothing to do with the
sissy lily livered piety, Sunday preferred to pack his old
muscle loading gospel gun with ipocac, buttermilk, rough on, rats, rock, salt,
and whatever else came in handy and let it fly.

(42:14):
In the spring of nineteen seventeen, with America's injury into
the First World War, Sunday's militancy went beyond metaphor. He
had no time for pacifists or draft dodgers, God forsaken months,
or apparently for nuance of any kind. And these days
all our patriots or traitors to your country and the
cause of Jesus Christ. An evangelist for war, Sunday was
known to leap atop his pulpit waiving the American flag.

(42:35):
Now I read that quote because this is a guy
who's prominence in the US right way. When John Wayne
is a kid. Later on, our boy Marion is going
to grow up to become this man. You know, essentially,
this is what he does during Vietnam. Um causes the
problem when you conflate nation building with like Jesus and religion.

(42:56):
This is the problem when you when you have like
ch shin settler colonialism is when you've stopped settling, when
you've stopped killing one set of people, you are existentially
like in a crossroads, your bankrupt. You're like, who I am?
You know anything to do? If we're not killing people? Yeah? Right?
And then you think and then you think that Jesus

(43:18):
and your God just wants you to kill more people
and that will then prove yourself. Yeah. It's like it's
like you know, you you, you know, you have these
guys who like work their whole life at some sort
of horrible financial industry job and they're able to retire,
which a lot of people don't get to do anymore.
But then once they retire, one of two things happens.
They either die immediately because they don't have anything to do,

(43:40):
or they get real into cryptocurrency. Um, and we're in
America's like cryptocurrency phase, our first one right here, right
that that's what World War one is is like board
apes for for the United States. It's the other way
for us to chase those highs. Yeah, it's like our
midlife crisis. Yeah. So um yeah, our boy marian Um

(44:04):
at this point, he's a little kid with a girl's
first name, which causes him a lot of problems. So
he goes to a public school. Uh, there are no
busses back then, so he has to ride a horse
miles every day to and from class. And today this
would make you the toughest son of a bit in
second grade. But this is rural California in nineteen fourteen,
so it's not an uncommon thing to be doing. Um,

(44:26):
but he does get mocked constantly because again his name
is Marian. Other kids asked him why his mom didn't
send him to school in skirts biographer Scott i'man rights.
Not surprisingly, in later years he didn't particularly like to
talk about his childhood. His last wife said that the
stories came out only in fragments during their twenty years together.
Mainly he felt unloved by his mother and was quietly

(44:47):
distressed by his father's ineffectuality. So kind of a sympathetic
kid at this point. A little bit yeah, a little
bit of um, you know, making of a mass shooter. Yeah, yeah,
you can see a few places this to go right.
So a lot of negative left wing coverage of John
Wayne will note his upbringing in suburban Glendale, which is

(45:07):
where he winds up after this, and that he's like
a surf bomb as a young man, to kind of
make the case that his cowboy mystique was all a lie.
I don't really think that's fair, because again, he does
spend years on a farm in the middle of nowhere
in a pretty rugged terrain, like riding a horse to
and from school every day. One of his jobs on
the farm is to stand in the field with a
rifle looking for snakes while his dad works the field,

(45:29):
because like, if his dad gets bitten by a snake
out in the middle of the desert, he's going to die.
So this is actually like the source of a lot
of trauma for John Wayne because he's he's standing out
there with a gun trying to shoot spot and shoot
snakes in time to stop his dad from getting bitten.
And he just constantly has these fucking nightmares when he
goes to sleep at night of like being too late

(45:49):
and his dad getting bitten by a snake. Um, that's
a lot to put on like a seven year old kid.
His mom would never let him live that one down.
But like I'm also imagining a kid who's all so
bored to tears standing there absolutely and then just imagining
like you know, you know, hordes of Indians on the plane,
you know, just coming over the mountain, and like just

(46:11):
very in his imagination. He definitely is, And he spends
when he's like riding his horse to and from school
and ship, he spends a lot of time imagining cowboy
fights and being attacked by bandits and ship which you
get very normal ship for a seven year old or
whatever in this situation. Um, And he notes that like
even though he has all these nightmares, he he never
talks about it, Like he's he's constantly dreaming about like

(46:32):
thousands of snakes coming to attack him and his dad. Um.
But he he doesn't feel like he can say anything,
like you're not allowed to talk about being afraid of
things as a young man in this period, so he
just kind of keeps it bottled up inside. Now being
a kid. Um. Yeah, like I said, he's he's got
all these different fantasies and stuff, and it seems like
some of the happier moments in his childhood at this

(46:53):
period are the time he spends on a horse kind
of lost in fantasies, riding to and from school. And
at least according to Scott, i'man he loves this horse. Uh.
Jinny is her name, um, and she's his, she's his, his, his,
his buddy out there. But she's also got some sort
of chronic stomach illness that makes it impossible for her
to put on weight. So no matter how well the

(47:15):
Morrison's feed her, she looks like she's starving. Now, if
you know California Francesca, you know, it's full of people
who are bad at minding their own damn business. And
a neighbor calls the Humane Society to claim that Marian
is abusing this horse. Wow, that's like the next door
of the early ninety it's just like a skinny horse.

(47:36):
This little kid in this little horse. I feel like
he's not feeding it enough. Yeah, so Scott, i'man rights
Marian stoutly insisted he was always feeding his horse, that
he carried oats for the horse, even on their daily
commute to and from school. His teacher and his parents
stood up for him. The county vet examined the horse
and diagnosed the wasting disease, but a sense of outrage
over being falsely accused never left him. I learned you

(47:59):
can't always judge up her Sonora situation by the way
it appears on the surface. He remembered, you have to
look deeply into things before you're in a position to
make a proper decision. So they tried to cancel him.
Try to cancel him. Cancel culture came for John Wayne
because of his ragged ass horse of some nosy lib
was like, that horse needs more food. Shut the funk. Up,

(48:22):
and he does have his he has his old yellow
moment because this horse never gets better and they have
to shoot it. Yeah, you know, it's what happened to
horse that I do not know. Possibly, although I kind
of I would. I think maybe his dad would be
the kind of dude to not put that on his kids.
I don't really know. Um, horse, Maryan, you're shooting your horse.

(48:47):
You're shooting your best friend, Jenny. Shoot your best friend Jenny.
Then we're eating her because we're poorous shit. So, despite
trying very hard, Clyde and Marian are terrible at farming
um and the hundred and eighteen degree summers very quickly
forced Clyde's ailing parents to flee for the cooler climates
of Los Angeles. When they leave, they tell their son like, hey,

(49:07):
we made a bad call with this farm. You guys
should probably get the funk out of here too, write like,
doesn't seem like Palm Dale going anywhere good? Maybe move
to l A. It's it seems like it'll always be
affordable and a good place to live. Citrus trees at
this point, but citrus trees at this point. Yeah, there's
like forty people there, So Clyde tries for a little
while more to farm this this plot of land. But

(49:30):
when the horse dies, Marian has to walk or hitch
my hike like an eight mile round trip to school
every day. Um. It's just a brutal way for a
kid to live, Like, he's got to get up hours
before he starts this hike to do his chores because
you know it's a farm. Um. But he's also he
does really well in school. Still, he's a good student,
and he distracts himself self from the realities of his

(49:52):
life by obsessively reading and rereading catalogs, particularly Sears catalogs,
and just like underlining all the things he's going to
buy one day when he somehow gets money. Um. Classic
poor kids shit. Uh, pretty pretty normal behavior. So after
about two years, his parents can barely stand to be
in the same room as each other. Farming kind of

(50:13):
destroys the marriage and they have no money. All of
their crops keep getting eaten by jack rabbits, so like
a lot of Meanwhile, what's Robert doing, Rombers just like
sitting there and like fucking useless pieces of ship. Robert Morrison, motherfucker. Yeah,
maybe we should call him John Lame. Um. So they

(50:33):
decide farming is not gonna work, and like a whole
bunch of Armenians are going to do a few years
from this point, the Morrison's leave home and they move
to Glendale, California. Um, now, well, yeah, I like we
got the brand mall over there. You've got you. You
have the pets coffee that sells one in every other

(50:56):
city is the tantalizing Turkish coffee blend. But in Glenda
Dale they call it, uh something else without the word.
I think that's just the tantalizing blend because you you
don't want to have Turkish in the name of a
coffee that you're selling in little Armenia. Not really a
good call Armenia. It's it is, it is. It is
verging on the size of regular Armenia. Now it's a big,

(51:18):
big place. I love Lyndale. Actually it's very pretty, very
nice town. Um, and today it is like a sizeable
Like it's not a small city. I mean, obviously, like
all of Los Angeles is a bunch of separate cities,
but also kind of one big gas city. Um, that's
not really the case. When the Morrison's moved to Glendale,
it is kind of like it's separate little town on
the outskirts of Los Angeles. I think it's like eight

(51:41):
thousand people, um, which is way it's kind of like
like Octopole in population. In a couple of years after
they moved there, like it, it blows up big time, right, Um.
But at this point it's kind of a sleepy suburb. Um.
So Marian is nine when they moved to the Los
Angeles burbs. Uh. And you know, at this point he

(52:02):
has finally made it more or less to the city
that's going to make him famous. Uh. So they move in,
they get used to l a life. They get a dog,
an Airdale they named Big Duke. Um. The name of
this dog is borrowed from the movie Dog of a
fake cowboy named Tom Mix, who is like one of
the most popular cowboys of the day we'll be talking

(52:23):
about in a bit. And maryan he's like Marian's idol. So,
like you know, obviously, as a little kid in this period,
he's watching cowboy movies every chance he gets. And Tom
mixes the big cowboy. Um. And so his Tom Mix
and then Duke was the name of the big dog
of the dog in the Cowboy movie. And then Duke
becomes John Wayne's nickname. That's right, that's how this is

(52:44):
how this happens. So his dog, Big Duke, has a
habit of chasing fire engines. Incredibly stereotypical upbringing this kid has,
so Marian winds up chasing after his dog a lot,
and often to the fire station. And so local firefighters
start to know this kid and his dog and they
kind of adopt them. They realize like his family super poor,
so they'll give him milk and they'll say like, oh, hey,

(53:06):
this is for like your cat at home, but really
it's for the family because they're too poor to buy milk. Um.
Very nice firefighters, and they'll they'll hang out with Marian
and because his dogs Big Duke, and is apparently quite
a personality as a dog, they just start calling both
of them Duke and eventually start calling Mary and little
Duke um. And that's how he gets his nickname. That's
how he became becomes the Duke is These firefighters start

(53:29):
nicknaming him based on his dog manly Men. Yeah, renamed
the Manliest Man. They did from Maryan and he he
as soon as these firefighters give him a nickname, he
stops going by Marian and starts going by Duke and
he will all his life. That's what his friends call
him is thank God. Yeah, I mean absolutely you would

(53:49):
pick Duke over Mary It. Yeah, it's like, oh, you
can just pick a name. You could just have a name,
like you can make it anything you want. Huh. Yeah,
welcome to Hollywood, kid. I was kind of surprised because,
you know, you hear his nickname is the Duke, and
you figure it's generally when someone has a nickname that's
hyper masculine, you assume there's a very sad story about

(54:10):
how they picked it for themselves. And no, this is
actually kind of a sweet story. He got adopted by firefighters.
That's nice. Yeah, no, and it's actually cute. I mean,
the real Duke was the dog. But the real Duke
was the dog. He is nickname. He is like Indiana
Jones named for the dog, little Duke, Little Duke. So

(54:30):
you know, the Morrison's bounced around a handful of small
homes in their early years in l A. Clyde is
never able to keep a job well enough to build up,
you know, the kind of savings necessary to stay in
a place for long. He keeps on giving people with
him and drinking. I don't want to go home to
my wife. Yeah, that is a big part of it.

(54:50):
Um so. And yeah, he's from a pretty young age,
Like the time he's nine, his dad can't afford to
buy him clothes, so he has to get jobs in
order to like keep himself in clothing. Um. Again, not
an easy childhood, although not out of step with a
lot of kids in this period. Again, these are not
like he's not like the only kid with this upbringing
in the neighborhood. Right, everybody's trying to fucking poor, you know.

(55:14):
Um So, he's tinned. By the time the United States
makes the decision to get into w W one. Um.
Obviously Roosevelt big advocate of World War One being a
thing for the US to get involved in. Um, everyone's
very excited. The muscular Christianity side crowd is super into
the war when it starts, But it does not go
the way Americans had hoped, as europe had already learned.

(55:36):
Modern warfare is a pretty nasty thing. Old West style
heroism gets you mowed down in rows by machine gun fire.
A hundred and sixteen thousand Americans will die in the
war in just like a year's time. Uh. And one
of these Americans is Quentin Roosevelt, the President's son, which
really fucks him up forever. Um might have been a

(55:56):
bad call, Teddy, damn back then when presidents actually say
their kids to war. Three of his sons, I think
will fight in World War One. He was. He was not.
He was a lot of things, but he was not
about this at least he was not a hypocrite like
and he actually tries desperately to to fight himself. He
attempts to like raise a volunteer regiment and go fight

(56:18):
in World War One. But the president at the President
Wilson is like, Teddy, you are a former US president.
You're not going to go fight in World War One. Like,
absolutely not. I'm not going to let you do that.
That's that's nuts. We'll send your kids, Yeah, we'll send
you kids. Um. And the fact that World War One
is this it just kind of ends as this horrible
meat grinder um as it began, does a lot of

(56:40):
damage to the concepts of muscular Christianity, just kind of like,
you know, there's versions of this going on in Europe
that get torn apart in the fields of Flanders and whatnot.
Christin Cobbs Dumez rites. When the war came to a close,
no amount of patriotism could obscure the fact that it
had been fought at great cost and with little apparent gain.
Roosevelt model of masculinity had been found Wanting the war,

(57:02):
it seemed, had presented Americans with the horror of having
myths about blood and fire and mutilation and blindness come true.
For liberal Protestant internationalists, the disillusionment was especially Keen. Sherwood Eddie,
a leading Liberal Protestant proponent of the war, expressed dismay
at his pro war activism. I believed it was a
war to end war, to protect womanhood, to destroy militarism

(57:23):
and autocracy, and to make a new world fit for
heroes to live in. He confessed, the carnage and horrors
of warfare put an end to all that. So one
of the things that happens here, this muscular Christian movement
that gets us into World War one splinters because a
chunk of the US folks who want to get into
World War one are liberals who are like, maybe if
we do this war, it will put an end to

(57:44):
like these autocratic dictatorships that have been doing all this
horrible ship around the world for years and engaging in
constant brinksmanship with each other, and the other chunk of
it is just dudes who are like masculinity is all
about fighting, and they kind of split at this point,
and one of those chunks is going to become the
conservatives we know and are actively preparing to fight today.

(58:06):
You know. Um good times. No, I was just gonna say,
I mean, it's like, yeah, that's the part of going
to war is the death part. Like that's the part
of the muscular We must always be fighting. God is
on our side, Like oh maybe maybe God's not ours,
So maybe maybe he's not on any side. It's not real.

(58:27):
Um yeah, I know. But it's just like what did
you think was going to happen? Um, I mean, it's
it's a hard lesson. We never really learned the lesson.
I guess it was learned for a while and then
there was like deep isolationism in the in the country,
and um, World War two obviously it installed our intervention there. Um,
we never learned any of the right lessons, which is like,

(58:49):
don't don't trust anyone who tells you any of the
who don't trust anyone who makes violence seem like a
way to learn anything. Um, it's it's it's a it's
an occasionally necessary thing, but it doesn't make you into
anything other than a traumatized person. Yeah, You're dick will
not grow. Your dick does not grow. Um, but it

(59:11):
might get blown off by shrapnel. Um, like in the
classic anti war song the Wang pre Bang, which is
about us involvement in LAO. Pretty good song anyway. Uh
so you know what else? Will blow your testicles off?
Oh wait, Sophie, are we is that good? Should we do? That?
Is that how we leave into an ad break? Sumping

(59:33):
was one thing, but blowing testicles off if you want
to get gelded by white hot shrapnel. Um, listen to
these ads. God, I hope it's a fucking Washington stap,
So do I, Sophie, God hear it? Uh we're back.

(59:58):
So you know all this this this kind of collapse
of one of the things that happens. We've talked about
how kind of the Christian muscular Christianity splinters after World
War One, the one chunk of it kind of turns
into super capitalist and business oriented, right being ra rai
imperialism in war didn't really work out for us. What
if we make Jesus into a businessman, you know, like

(01:00:21):
a like a two fisted businessman. And we've talked about
this in a couple of episodes, including Our two Partner
and how they're all the rich eight Christianity. Um. And
while this is worth noting because of what comes next,
I don't know that any of this really this is
all happening in the background when Marian as a kid.
I don't know that he. I think he certainly must
be taking some of this in through osmosis, especially a

(01:00:42):
lot of these more militant attitudes towards Christianity, which are
reflected in the movies he's watching. Um, because he he
loves himself some cowboy movies. UM. And he does grow
up kind of obsessed with the nascent film industry in
Los Angeles. There's only a couple of studios in Glendale,
but they're shooting a bunch of cowboy movie is where
he lives, because it's kind of the outskirts of town

(01:01:02):
at this point. So he spent a lot of watching
that ship. Yeah, exactly. He's way into this stuff. Um.
He's also super into sports, pretty normal stuff. His parents
marriage gets worse and worse. His mother increasingly attacks and
at least mentally abuses both him and his dad. Biographer
Richard Jensen writes in When the Legend Became Fact The
True Life of John Wayne Quote, Marion's dysfunctional parents filled

(01:01:25):
the Morrison home with strife. Marian became a neurotic kid,
unable to sleep normally without nightmares. Like all children growing
up in a household filled with abuse, he internalized the
strain of the abuse and blamed himself for their unhappiness.
The movies where his respite from reality. Marian dreamed of
being a cowboy, of being a sword wielding pirate, of
being a movie star. So it all feels fairly I mean,

(01:01:49):
is is hard, but fairly normal, fairly normal, not an
uncommon tale, right, Um No, it's not like he's he's
very much much embodies. I think there's some degrees to
which it's abnormal. I think like the kind of scale.
Like one of the things that's weird is shortly after this,
his parents divorce, which is abnormal, and his his mom
takes Robert and he stays with his dad. Um, and

(01:02:12):
that is god. Robert was not kid out of here
Molly is coming back around in the third installation, Mark
my words, people, Robert knows, but I don't Molly's gonna
come crawling back asking for money. You just wait, I

(01:02:33):
mean probably right, Um, definitely when when John Wayne gets rich. Right,
remember how good I was to you. I only dropped
you a few times on purpose. I gave you that
whole new name. So Mitchell Marian spends as much time
away from his house as he possibly can, because it
sucks there, Jensen continues. Duke was a rambunctious kid, athletic

(01:02:56):
and imaginative. He was also restless. He stayed away from
home as much as possible. He learned to be rough
and tumbled. He learned to smoke cigarettes and taste alcohol.
Years later, when Duke was diagnosed with lung cancer, he
admitted to his family he'd smoked since I was just
a kid. So it's like a chain smoking ten year
old in Glendale, California. You know, story as old as time. Um,

(01:03:16):
watching the movie sets, just just just pulling on a
Marlborough watching people shoot at Cowboy Flick downtown. I'm just
the Duke, my trusty dog. So once it's probably his
dog's got a cigarette too, you have to assume. Um. Now.
Once he hits high school, Marion develops an interest in
theater and drama, but his chief obsession is sports of

(01:03:37):
all kinds. The broad gist of his next few years
is that he gets a football scholarship to play for
the University of Southern California. Most Wayne bios will claim
that he was a star player who enjoyed body surfing
in his spare time. Um, he gets into surfing, but
like poor people surfing where you're just kind of like
throwing yourself into a wave and getting pushed to shore.

(01:03:58):
Good old body surfing. Yeah, bodies serving, which sounds fun. Uh,
he's real into the ladies. Uh. Since he was very tall,
he grows up again to be huge, and he's muscular
and athletic. As a young man, he's considered very handsome. Um.
This is also the period, you know, the time when
he is a teenager and a young man is when
like you got your flapper era, women are starting to

(01:04:19):
get liberated. There's a lot more girls are willing to
like go out on dates, and casual sex starts to
become a thing in mainstream American culture in a way
it really hadn't been for a while. Um, and he
comes of age during that period of time. He also
becomes an alcoholic pretty early on. He's famous for drinking
until he passes out at parties. Uh. He develops a

(01:04:40):
passion for drag racing, and for the rest of his
life he would drive so fast it frightened everyone in
the car with him. Um. And was usually drunk while driving. Um. Yeah,
that's forever He's getting up to be like just an
average college douche bag, just a normal dude in the twenties. Yeah,
just drunk, driving, puke and at parties hitting on girls

(01:05:02):
body surfing um. Which. Tragically, he has a body serving
accident that injures his shoulder and that cuts his football
career short. That's at least the traditional narrative of why
his football career fails. It may not be entirely true. Um.
There are some prominent people who doubt that he failed
at football because he heard himself, and one of them

(01:05:22):
was would He Strode Wood. He was the first black
action movie star in US film history. He was also
a former professional football player with the Rams, which are
a Los Angeles team at this point. Uh. And it
was his opinion that Duke was always bad at football.
He was not a good runner, and he probably wouldn't
have succeeded at football. Now there's some debate about whether

(01:05:42):
or not Strode is accurate in this assessment, because wood
he Strode fucking hated John Wayne, and he had a
good reason to hate John Wayne. The two starred in
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valets together in nineteen sixty one.
Uh and Strode was apparently shocked by how much of
a bully John Wayne was to the cast and crew.
He claims that Wayne Wayne like made a particular show

(01:06:04):
of mocking Woody in front of everyone else for not
being athletic. And again, Woody is a professional athlete. Um
like John Way, it's very funny that he would choose
to do this blade for the ramps. So yeah, so
it's clearly his own insecurity. Insecurity, yeah, or like maybe
he just ran funny, Maybe he did run. He did
run Funny. Jensen, his biographer, analyzes his running a bunch

(01:06:26):
and it's like he did kind of run funny. I mean, yeah,
you're you were meant for a horse kid. Yeah. And
part of it is like one of the things that
this shoulder injury he has, he kind of winds up,
always stooped a little bit forward to one side, which
gives him this kind of this awkward uneven gate. But
that's part of what makes him so iconic. Yeah, yeah,
this like gangster sort of lean and he kind of

(01:06:48):
strides into these gunfights. It's it's a very distinctive walk.
Um somebody surfing accident, Yeah, it's It's worth noting probably
a lot of racism is also involved, because think John
Wayne is insecure about the fact that Woody Strode is
a real athlete and also is just a white supremacist
um and apparently on the man who shot Liberty Valance. Um.

(01:07:11):
Wayne's taunting of Strode is bad enough that Jimmy Stewart
has to take him aside and be like, dude, you
gotta fucking cool off here, or Strode is going to
beat your ass. Like this isn't okay. My money is
on Strode on the big fellaw cut that out. He's
a real football player. You know, we're not in Palm

(01:07:31):
Dale anymore, oh, Jimmy. But like and and also he
must have been older, because this is I don't know
when it was like, yeah, he's like shot something. Yeah,
that is kind of like the height of his career.
But yeah, um exactly, come on, John Wayne anyway, So
whatever the truth is about why he gives up on
his hoop dreams, that's what you call wanting to play football, right,

(01:07:54):
So she's saying yes. So Marian decides to look for
work in the film industry, which is splouting in the
nineteen twenties. He gets a job with Fox Film working
as a prop man, and this was the site of
his first clearly documented example of being a huge dick. Right,
this is where we have our heel turn for John Wayne.
And he's firmly a band in the on the props team,

(01:08:16):
on the prop team. So he gets his first gig
in the film industry because of that famous cowboy actor
Tom Mix. Uh. Now Tom is at this point in
time in the late twenties, Tom is like the biggest
star in the country. He is making as a cowboy
movie star. He is making seventeen thousand dollars a week.

(01:08:37):
So that's like pretty damn good money today. You know,
like you're pretty rich if you're making that today. This
is like nineteen fucking twenties something like he is crazy.
That is all of the money in the United States.
Tom Mix is getting for baby very handsome time. He
was a good looking guy. He was a real ass cowboy.
Tom Mix had been not just like that. He had

(01:08:57):
farmed and ship. He had been as a younger man,
was a marshal in the Old West who got into gunfights. Um,
so he was not like it was not acting for
Tom Mix. He had done some stuff. Um. Yeah, and
he's Maryan's like obviously Marian idolizes this dude. Um. So
the two meet, like they contrive a meeting and they
hang out briefly while Duke is in college. Um, and

(01:09:21):
Mix is impressed by marrying enough that he calls George Marshall,
a film director, and he gets Mary in that first
prop job on his first movie. How doubt did he
manufacture that meeting? That's so hard. It's not like it
is like today celebrities there's this wall between them and
the rest of the world. For a bunch of back
in those days, it was not uncommon like they just
be walking around town filming like celebrity. M Yeah, I

(01:09:45):
just walked up to him and ship, you know, Um,
it wasn't his heart. He might have seen him on
set at this point. Yeah, And he's, he's, he's. They're
kind of in and around the same areas, and yeah,
they wind up talking and mix does him a real So, like,
that's a pretty cool thing to do for a kid,
is just to be like, you got some potential kid,
Why I'll get you a prop job. Maybe that'll help

(01:10:05):
you move into the industry. Um. Now, most sources you
will find, like casual sources will say, like, this is
a job that didn't pay well, it was menial, shitty work.
That is not true. Biographer Scott i'man will point out
that this was crucial and why he was successful later
because he's a very diligent and skilled prop man. Working
in props teaches him how things look on screen. He

(01:10:26):
learns how to like like because he thinks a lot
about how does this not just like does this look right?
But will this look right on camera? Um, which is
an important thing for an actor to be thinking about.
If you're going to be a successful actor, you always
need to be thinking about how does shi it look
when it's filmed as opposed to you know, how does
it just like look in the real world. Um. And
because of the skills he builds as a prop man,

(01:10:48):
he's going to be a lot more successful as an
actor and eventually a director in the future. And Jensen,
his other biographer, points out that he was really well paid.
He's getting thirty five dollars a week at a time
when a lot of people didn't make that in a
month um as a college gig. So this is a
really good job that Tom Mix had set him up with.
Most people would consider this a huge solid but for
the rest of his life, Duke would claim that Tom

(01:11:11):
Mixed promised him an on screen job as a cowboy
and then screwed him with the prop job. This is
an obvious lie. For one thing, Tom Mix had a
group of actual cowboys that he had with him on
the set at any given time to do stunts and
ship people that like, knew how to ride and knew
how to rope, and we're real good at all the
cowboys stuff. He was not known for just hiring random

(01:11:33):
people to his crew, because he had folks he was.
He was the top of the game. He didn't just
pick up college kids. You know, Marion watched snakes, Robert, Okay,
that's real world experience. He didn't know how to lasso,
you know, ship at it um that is that is
something people will point out he sucked at lasso It
so um, he sucked at one of the main things,

(01:11:55):
that one of the big right, And that's part of
why Jensen will be like, there's no way Tom Mix
wanted to give this kid a job as a major
on screen cowboy. He didn't know how to do any
of that ship and Tom Mix had a crew of
people he'd been working with for years. It seems like
entitlement and like also sort of like ego of a
movie star in development. Yes, it seems like what has

(01:12:18):
happened is that Tom Mix did this kid an incredible
solid and got him a good paying industry job, and
then Duke spent the rest of his life hating his
hero for it. Why Here's what Jen Synthora rises. The
story is interesting because it is the first glimpse into
Duke's little known narcissistic streak and propensity for viewing himself
as the victim. It is the first time we see

(01:12:39):
Duke's propensity for viewing his glasses half empty rather than
half full, his penchant for thinking himself as lucky, perhaps
as unlucky. Perhaps Duke believed after spending an entire year
among the sons of privilege in college that he was
entitled to special treatment. Perhaps it is a tale born
of public relations. When Duke was cast in his first
starring role in The Big Trail, he told every reporter

(01:13:00):
who would listen that he'd beaten out Tom Mix for
the role. Now this was again a lie, right, Uh.
Mix wasn't even working with the same studio. And it
said that when John, like when Maryan got his first
like on camera gigs, he winds up on set with
Tom Mix and he like confronts him about the fact
that Mix screwed him out of a job, and Mix,

(01:13:21):
being an actual cowboy quote, stared at the ungrateful young
duke with a glare so cold that the chill was palpable.
It's just like the funk are you saying? Like yeah,
best response the two never talk against. That's what you
did to your hero, This dude who does like that's
like imagine that happening to anyone today. I still getting

(01:13:43):
you a gig in the industry just because of a
casual conversation like but also like a little bit of respect,
like like I would I am such a like sort
of like grateful, sick of fan I'd be like, oh, yes,
give me and I'll take anything. I would never stop
saying nice shit about mix, you know, but not John Wayne. Um.

(01:14:04):
So he starts working as a prop boy and he
serves as an extra like for side, Cash and Ship,
just because the film needs it and because he wants
to get on screen. His first role on screen is
probably an anonymous Yale football player. There's some debate about this. Uh,
He's uncredited and at least thirteen more roles over the
next few years. Uh. During this period of time, while
he's propping it up, um, he gets married to a

(01:14:26):
young woman named Josephine Sands s A E. N Z.
She's the daughter of a Spanish diplomat. All of his
wives are going to be Hispanic or Latin American. Um
Marian describes this as love at first sight, but he
also slept around on her from the beginning. His justification
before Christianity kind of well, it's even it's shadier than that,

(01:14:51):
is that like, she's Catholic, right, and she can't fuck
until marriage. So he he decides it's okay for me
to sleep around prior to marriage because she can't have
sex with me prior to marriage. Obviously, I need to
have sex, so this is fine. That's why he dated
like Catholic like Latina's Well I don't know about that. Um. Yeah,

(01:15:14):
so he uh, he does this, Uh, he cheats around
on her constantly. Um. And then when they get married,
it turns out she doesn't have much of a sex
drive his words, right, we don't know anything about her
attitude towards this, but he decides that because she doesn't
have much of a sex drive, it's again okay for
him to cheat on her constantly, even while he makes
four children with her. Um. So John Wayne, you know,

(01:15:37):
just John wayning it up. Although he's not John Wayne yet.
He's about to become that though, because in nine Duke
Morrison meets John Ford, the man who is going to
make his career now. Ford was and still is a
legendary director. A lot of most film nerds will agree
he was a genius, like just one of these guys
who helps invent the language of cinema in a lot

(01:15:58):
of ways. Um. And Ford is also a hard son
of a bitch. His dad had been a rum runner
and a saloon owner. He was a proud Irish Catholic
and a violent profoundly abusive man. John Wayne worked as
his first worked as his prop man on a movie
called Mother McCree, and his primary job to was to
wrangle geese. During one particularly difficult scene, Ford decided to

(01:16:20):
break the tension by mocking his newest employee, Duke. He
asked this new kid if it was true he'd played
football at USC. Marian says yes, and then Ford asks
him to show the crew his technique. So Marian crouches
down into position and for kicks his hands out from
under him, so he falls forward on his face. Wow,
that's just like the ship that goes down on a

(01:16:40):
John Ford set. And Marian just you know, toxic Hollywood
very much so. And so you know, Marian, this is
actually a very John Wayne moment, gets back in position
and tells the director, why don't you try that again? Uh?
And then when Ford tries it again, John Wayne kicks
his austin the chest and knocks him down. Um. And

(01:17:02):
this is apparently what starts their friendship. Now, oh, this
may not be true, um. Jensen, his biographer, doubts this
story is at least entirely true. For one thing, Ford
and Wayne are the only people who ever told this
story despite there being other folks on the set. Um,
it's more likely that like Ford hit Wayne uh and

(01:17:23):
maybe like you know, something happened there. But but this
is just a little bit too perfectly masculine of a
Hollywood story to be real. Um. I imagine him just
like covered with like geese ship to trying to not
fun wrangling. But they had to create it. If Ford
is any good at creating stars, Yeah, you have to

(01:17:44):
build this kind of myth of these of these guys
and their relationship, whatever the truth is. Shortly after this point,
John Ford, who's a pretty powerful director at this point,
brings unknown prop boy Duke Morrison into his inner circle.
Now he doesn't put him in pictures, we'll talk about
that in a second, but he brings him in socially.
And if the picture Jensen paints is accurate, this group

(01:18:04):
that Duke starts hanging out with are quite quite a
bunch of fellows. Quote. Duke insisted that he reveled in
the masculine company affords drinking buddies. They formed a group
called the Young Men's Purity, Total Abstinence and Yachting Association,
whose goal was, in their words, the promuligation of the
cause of alcoholism. They succeeded in their stated goal. Every
member became a confirmed alcoholic of monumental proportions. The men

(01:18:28):
often sailed on men's only cruises on Ford's yacht, the
Rainer to mazat Land and stayed in the Belmar Hotel,
a brothel. The owner had a pet python, and whenever
someone passed out from drink, the python was placed on
the supine drunkard's chest. Henry Fonda once passed out on
the floor and awoke screaming in terror as he realized
the snake at him in his clutches. So they're like

(01:18:49):
sail into Mexico getting snake drunk, Like I like, I
love this for them, Like everyone around them handed the
ship it out of them. This is just must have
been insufferable all the me too stories like these guys
show up at the brothel and everyone's like shit, like yesh, shit,

(01:19:10):
oh they're already drunk. They might not make it to sure.
Fuck well, I mean that's I guess that's an easy
job though, if they're already drunk and they're just kind
of like you know, I mean, you know, what are
you gonna do? Arrive? Limptic with a python. You're like, Okay,
they'll pay me anyway. Their Hollywood stars. Yeah, you just
tell them you did it when they wake back up
and they'll feel yeah it was great. Wow you were incredible.

(01:19:32):
Yeah you lasted forever. Oh my god. This is so
Also it's like very and this is this is later
but like it's very Kavanaugh. It's very like little Bretty
Kavanaugh in his day. Yeah, this is like, this is
what all of these guys want to be because you know,
we're talking about the first era here. You know, with

(01:19:55):
these we're rotting Alcoholics Club, they're on yachts, they're out acoholics,
all of them become famous. You know, this is like
the toxic masculine dream. And I hate all of these people, like, yeah,
they're all they're all not not nice people. Marino movie
that I feel like Quentin Tarantino should have made in
terms of needs to still be a movie. Um Marino. Harra,

(01:20:21):
who was Ford's number one leading lady at this point.
Very Famous Star, claims that John Ford probably adopted Duke
because he was hot and Ford was super bisexual. Um.
It is unclear if this was true. Also, the term
bisexual gets used a lot by Jensen because his biography
is pretty old and he's not up on his terms.

(01:20:41):
Some people would just say that Ford was gay. It's
really unclear what the truth is. Ford was married and
he beat the ship out of his wife constantly and
in public. Um, that doesn't necessarily mean one thing or
the other about his sexuality. You can abuse your wife
and be bisexual. But it's worth noting that he pretty
much exclusively hung out with hot dudes. Um, who knows

(01:21:03):
what's going on there. Probably a few things are going
on there, you know. Now, this definitely has to be
a movie, and like you know, of course anyone can
beat there. No, obviously that doesn't say anything about sexuality,
but the performativeness of hitting a woman in public, there's
just a level of misogyny, which like, who is this

(01:21:23):
for for? For the idea of how abusive Ford is.
Men in the twenties are like that dude hits women
a lot. That dude hits women a lot, and like
it is the twenties, you know, Um, it would not
be accurate to call John Ford a good friend to
to marry in the duke in this period. Jensen argues

(01:21:44):
that he quote continuously held duke back for years. Rather
than casting him in any of his many films, He
let Wayne struggle on as an extra and prop boy
for almost a decade, and it's alleged that he also
slandered marry into other directors when they considered casting him.
Interest so super controlling, very controlling, very much like I
want you around me, but I don't want to let

(01:22:06):
you get successful enough that you can leave me, you know, right,
good stuff, cool dude. So, after years of struggle, uh,
Marian Duke Morrison gets cast as a major character in
his first movie for the first time. Now. This is
called Words in Music in nineteen thirty nine. It's a
campus musical. It is not a good movie. Fox buries

(01:22:28):
it with a one day opening run in New York alone.
Very wisely, Uh. He goes by Marian, goes by his
nickname Duke in Hollywood, like his his screen name is
Duke Morrison rather than Marian Um. Certainly a good call.
The film makes no impact, but afterwards he gets another
prop job on another forward film, Born Reckless, and this

(01:22:49):
is where he comes under the eye of Rool Walsh,
who was in the process of casting for a western.
He had a clear idea of the kind of cowboy
actor he wanted. Quote a true replica of the pioneer type,
somewhat diffident with women, being unused to them, but a
bear cat among the men of the planes. So this
is like it's important for him to be big and tough,
but also awkward around women. Like that's what you want

(01:23:11):
in a male, Yeah, you don't want The masculine ideal
at this point is not a guy who's a player.
It's a guy who's like attractive to women but kind
of uncomfortable around them because he spend so much time
in the woods, you know, doing manly stuff right, impenetrable, yes, um,
and a little bit you know that, a little bit unavailable,

(01:23:31):
you know, because that's hot. Uh. So, oddly enough, this
fits Mary into a t He's a big guy, he's
clearly physically competent. He can at least portray the image
of hard one life experience, but he is awkward around women. Uh.
John Wayne would claim later that he never chased women.
This is a lie, but biographer Scott I am A
notes that his friends agree. Quote pushy Dame's really scared him, um,

(01:23:55):
which I think means like women who knew what they wanted. Yes,
he tends to go for inexperienced women. This is gonna
eventually lead to him marrying a teenager, so heads up
to where things are headed. But you know who won't
well pity women slash women my age? Yeah, yeah, you

(01:24:15):
don't wanna. You don't wanna marry people who can stand
up for themselves because they're as old as you and
have an understanding of what it means to an adult. Um.
I wouldn't want to get in on this. So all right,
you know that's probably a good point to end in
part one. We got a couple more to go. Francesco,

(01:24:36):
what do you what do you? What do you? What
do you got to plug here? Ah? Um? Yeah, everybody
check out the Bituation Room podcast um on where we
get your podcasts and we stream on YouTube and Twitch
and it's you know, news, comedy, all the things. Um,
not a lot of John Wayne. So if you need

(01:24:57):
a break from one of the two podcasts A Loud
under the biden Um Administration one of the two currently
legal podcasts, um so yeah, enjoy our new glorious Bidenist regime.

(01:25:17):
Uh and remember, folks, if you hear about a podcast
other than this one, or the bituation Room, call the
FBI immediately, immediately. And if people don't want to listen
to a podcast that can always read your book, Robert, Oh, no,
not under the new junta. That's very very They can't

(01:25:38):
pre order it from a k Press, none of that. No,
they cannot. They can listen to these two podcasts, or
they can watch reruns of Frasier. Everything else is illegal.
Cheers is not legal, absolutely not No, No, Frasier still legal.
Cheers very much banned. All right, God, I don't want

(01:26:01):
to live in this world. Biden hates Woody Harrelson. Behind
the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For
more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone
media dot com, or check us out on the I

(01:26:22):
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.