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

Robert concludes the story of H. L. Hunt with his involvement in the death of John F. Kennedy and downfall as a polical force. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Robert Evans?

  Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, part three of our series on H.L. Hunt this week. You are welcome, but you all should really thank Princess Weeks, our wonderful guest, for agreeing to sit in for a third episode in a marathon recording session. Thank you, Princess. You are braver than the troops.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  Thank you. I love to learn and I honestly just genuinely love hearing about this stuff. This is so fascinating.

• 0:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  And terrible.

• 0:33Robert Evans?

  Well, I love telling you about it.

• 0:39Robert Evans?

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• 1:15Speaker 02

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• 1:49Robert Evans?

  Let's start by talking about our boy, H.L. Hunt's second family, right? Because I discussed how he eventually moves them up to New York and has a guy marry them. What I did not note, because I went in and kind of added some stuff to the script once I realized that we were going to wind up getting three parts. And I found something I'd forgotten to add that was in my notes doc, which is that, apparently, Frania, like, when he marries her, she didn't even know his real first name. Like, he marries her under a fake name.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 2:20Robert Evans?

  And one of the notes that Hinder shot has in her book is that he probably, she probably first starts suspecting that something's weird when they have their first child, who is a girl, just like his first child with, with Lyda. And he names her Haroldina, which is not, he's not telling her his first name is Harold, but he names her after himself and he names her, he tries to name her Haroldina. Um, which is like crazy. But I'm not Harold. That's not my name.

• 2:49Robert Evans?

  Why are you so, why is that so important to you, man? That's really weird.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  Right? Like, be better. No risk.

• 2:56Robert Evans?

  That's just bizarre.

• 2:57Speaker 03

  What an odd guy.

• 2:59Robert Evans?

  When she finds out, he tries to get her before he moves to New York, he tries to convince Frania to move to Utah and become a Mormon so that they can legally, quote unquote, be bigamous?

• 3:10Speaker 01

  The rulebook never changes. The rulebook never changes. He's like, listen, babe, we can get a farm. It's gonna be good.

• 3:16Robert Evans?

  What if we're just Mormons?

• 3:17Speaker 01

  What if we're just Mormons? Latter day, let's go.

• 3:20Robert Evans?

  Not illegal then. First off, your first wife wouldn't be in Utah. Second, you're not Mormon.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  But I could be. And that's what matters.

• 3:28Robert Evans?

  And yes, it's when that stuff doesn't work that he like pays her to move to New York, right? And sets up trust for all the kids and finds someone to marry them, pretend to be the father. Um, now this is, he's just going to get and have kids with a third woman after this. And I think he's, I think actually this is after Lyda dies that he has his third partner, but I'm not a hundred percent sure. But they wind up having several kids and he like lives with them later in life in Dallas. Uh, but he doesn't ever marry her, right? Because he's, you know, he learned his lesson.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  Take his money. Yeah. Not letting no broads take my money this time.

• 4:06Robert Evans?

  At least I'm not going to be bigamously married again. I'm sure he winds up, I think he does actually give them a lot of money. Um, but yeah, he doesn't wanna, he's not gonna get bigamously married again. So the need to seem fair and unbiased meant that Smoot, you know, on his, the facts forum, his, his F, former FBI man host, has to act like he respects the liberal line on things. But he's always visibly more interested in the conservative art. Arguments. Another good example of that would come from one time Smoot gets asked, "Should we continue to handle Korea as a limited police action?" You know, this is right at the start of the Korean War, "Or should we, you know, put more troops into it?" Right? Quote, "Smoot first dryly answered in the affirmative, quoting Adel A. Stevenson, 'Korea is the most remarkable effort the world has ever seen to make collective security

• 4:51Robert Evans?

  work. In choosing to repel the first armed aggression of the communists, we chose to make bitter sacrifices today to save civilization tomorrow.'" On the negative side, Smoot drew a portrait of a hypothetical soldier named Joe. "It's cold up here in the winter, sometimes 30 below zero. If a boy cries, his tears turn to ice. And then there is the enemy, always the enemy, and the kind of fight that man fought centuries ago, knives and fists, fingers groping for eyes, and teeth seeking a hot, a soft spot in the neck. Maybe Joe will die in the slit trench, and maybe he will live, his hands sour and gummy, with half-digested rice gruel ripped out of the stomach of a bleeding bundle of rags and bones of it at his feet."

• 5:26Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 5:27Robert Evans?

  So wild, wild little rant to go on there, man.

• 5:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was just like, bro.

• 5:32Robert Evans?

  Okay, man.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  Get it, get it. You wanted to be a screenwriter.

• 5:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. In one of my favorite lines from her book, Heather Hendershot writes, quote, "Smoot could somehow snarl 'effeminate egghead' in such a way that it sounded infinitely worse than 'son of a bitch.'" So he's like, that kind of, you know, that kind of broadcaster. Now, the Facts Forum made itself a nexus of support for Joseph McCarthy. As Hunt sought to convince regular Americans that communists needed to be rooted out, Joe guessed on only one episode of the Facts Forum, but his researcher and future wife, Jean Kerr, worked for the Facts Forum as a staffer. Another early staffer was Robert E. Lee. Not that Robert E. Lee.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  I was gonna say.

• 6:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah. This Robert E. Lee was a former FBI man who helped McCarthy compile his list of 205 communists in the State Department. And there's so many FBI guys who work for the Facts Forum, but there's like a joke in the FBI that like, that's the retirement plan is working for this fucking right-wing billionaire?

• 6:33Robert Evans?

  So things are going well. He's using the facts for him to support his buddy Joe McCarthy, but then Tailgunner Joe makes the mistake of picking on the Army. And the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings are a disaster for the man and for the broader cause of being visibly crazy as an anti-communist activist. The hearings were broadcast on television, and while only ABC and the Dumont Network broadcast the hearings in full, because they're 36 days long, the bigger networks CBS and NBC broadcast excerpts. And this actually, the fact that these networks, because there's money in advertising now, they don't want to run just 36 days of congressional hearings. It's way, it's a huge waste of money, but because they decide to take excerpts and just

• 7:18Robert Evans?

  run clips from it, this is actually the way then the media covers the McCarthy hearings is one of the first cases of soundbite journalism, right? And soundbite journalism in a positive way, where previously the reporting on this would have just been kind of dull articles about another series of hearings about communism in the US that most Americans wouldn't have known there was anything to be upset by. Because these journalists are looking for like, well, what are the craziest things McCarthy's saying? What are the wildest moments from this? It makes it impossible to ignore, and they're playing this over and over again that like, no, this is actually a real problem, right? Like, this guy is out of his mind and is just attacking people for no reason. Like, that really, the fact, how this gets reported really helps to make that case.

• 8:01Robert Evans?

  Because these networks are looking for like, the most embarrassing and shocking moments and clipping them out and playing them over and over again. In What's Fair on the Air, Hendershot writes, "Joseph Welch's famous rhetorical question, 'Have you no sense of decency, sir?'" at long last, was not only televised live by both ABC and Dumont on day 30 of the hearings, but also repeated dozens of times on radio and TV that night. Following McCarthy's attack on General George C. Marshall, former President Harry S. Truman appeared on Edward R. Murrow's See It Now and expressed his own feelings about McCarthy. The man who made that attack isn't fit to shine General Marshall's shoes.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  Damn.

• 8:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's a pretty, it's a pretty sick burn, actually.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. He meant it. No, that's so interesting, though, because it's like, I think.

• 8:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  When we, when, when we were growing up and we learned about this era of McCarthyism, it seems so like inherently absurd. And you're just thinking like, how could that ever happen? Like, isn't it just so obvious? And then you're here and you're like, well.

• 9:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  People don't pay attention to the longer thing. They need the sound bites, sadly.

• 9:07Robert Evans?

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

• 9:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:14Robert Evans?

  Now, one of the things this does, the fact that this is kind of destroys McCarthy, it makes Hunt furious. And it makes him furious because he becomes convinced this evidence of the liberal media and the pernicious left wing bias within the media, right? It's a communist organization, you know? And this is kind of where the liberal media as a conservative bugbear starts, right? Not just with Hunt, but it starts as a result in a big way, like it's majorly supercharged by the reaction to the McCarthy hearings. And Hunt is one of the people leading the charge in attacking the liberal media, right? And for H L Hunt, one of the things I, I think is really important to point out.

• 9:55Robert Evans?

  Today, if you listen to like what Barry Weiss and like the free fucking press people say, they all talk about Edward R. Murrow too. It's like, we need to get back to a time when newsmen weren't political. And, you know, they just were telling people the truth and they were trusted. And in those days, you know, Americans knew that they could rely on their, you know, the people giving them the news to not just be in it for personal political gain. It wasn't just some like wokest bullshit. If Edward R. Murrow were reporting the day, they would call him woke. And I know that because they called him woke in the 50s. Like, H L Hunt called him a woke leftist communist infiltrator. And they called him it because he was deliberately and aggressively multicultural, right?

• 10:40Robert Evans?

  To quote from Hindershott's article, Murrow was fiercely patriotic. His America was an inclusive democratic place in which citizens rationally discussed their problems. When Murrow took See It Now's cameras to Korea for Christmas in 1952, he celebrated the sacrifices of the troops. Murrow also made a point of picturing an integrated platoon that included not only whites and blacks, but also a Chinese American and a Korean American, a gesture that surely rubbed some viewers the wrong way. Right? And fucking, they attack like the, because the newsletter for lifelines isn't subject to the fairness doctrine, they're able to be really political. And in that newsletter, Hunt calls him Chow in Cronkite and calls Dan Rather Ho Chi Rather, right?

• 11:25Robert Evans?

  Again, they are calling these guys fucking communists back then too. Like Walter Cronkite was never seen as a totally unbiased and fair man by conservatives. They hated him. Just really want to make that point as clearly as I can.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  It's so exhausting because and they keep telling us that these are the people that we can reach. We just got to give them, just give them a little bit of more information. It's like they have the information, they don't like it, they don't want it.

• 11:53Robert Evans?

  No, they thought Edward R. Murrow was a communist because he pointed out that there were fucking Chinese people in the US Army. Right? Like.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  And had been so for ages. Like, some Chinese families have been here longer than some of these, than Trump's family.

• 12:09Robert Evans?

  These people have always hated this kind of shit, right? Always hated the idea that we're multicultural country and anyone who celebrates it, even if they're celebrating it in the context of supporting the Korean War, right? He gets called a communist.

• 12:22Speaker 01

  And supporting the troops and like, it doesn't matter.

• 12:25Robert Evans?

  Right. Doesn't matter. No communism. So this, the fact that fucking Hunt goes so crazy after Murrow and gets so pissed about the reaction to the McCarthy hearings, gets him in trouble. Democratic congressmen start being like, wait a second, he's getting like, public funding basically for making non-partisan media? And this is what they're calling non-partisan? Congressman, one congressman points out that Hunt's tied to Joseph McCarthy, and there's complaints that the Facts Forum is benefiting from its tax-free status despite being very biased, and there start being investigations. Lee, his former staffer, was made FCC Commissioner in 1954, which further upset Democrats, who were like, "Well, now his guy is controlling the FCC, so of course he won't get attacked."

• 13:09Robert Evans?

  Now, what's weird is, Lee's actually a really fair-minded FCC Commissioner. He does a lot of stuff that pisses off the right. He's actually surprisingly good at the job, I think. And Hindershot proposes that the whole brouhaha does more to make Hunt famous as a right-wing crank than it does to actually help his shows, right? That, like, the fact that he's tied to Lee and the fact that, like, he's, like, there's this uproar about it, he becomes known as being like a crank. Like, it does not spread, it doesn't make his ideas more popular. Now, past this point, because of how many people get pissed off about this, Hunt becomes increasingly famous, right? He's now someone who is known and talked about for his political activism, and he does not like this. Oh, he doesn't?

• 13:54Robert Evans?

  His stage fright, right, because he's got stage fright, right? Oh, right, right, yeah, yeah. He hates putting himself out there, right? In fact, like, as a young man, his stage fright is so bad that he once swallows a bunch of tobacco to make himself sick to get out of giving a speech when he's like a younger businessman. So the fact that, like, the eyes of America are now on him, and he's being accused of partisan instigation fucks Hunt up. And in 1956, he shuts down the Facts Forum to avoid controversy. Not because he thinks he's done anything wrong, because he just doesn't like being under the gun like that, right? Like, he's just anxious. What a pussy. So, yeah, he's a wuss. He does launch immediately another series called Answers for America.

• 14:37Robert Evans?

  This actually launched, I think, a little before the Facts Forum quits. It's a public service program that's broadcast on 22 TV stations and 360 radio stations. Broadcast live, this was a half-hour panel discussion on ABC that featured a mix of liberals and conservatives. There's your liberal panel and your conservative panel. Repping the left was former Congressman George Combs and New York You Professor Charles Hodges. Opposed to them were William F Buckley and a rotating guest. Now, if you don't know William F Buckley, he is like the proto Ben Shapiro. He's an essayist and a public debater who gets really famous going on TV to debate politely liberals, right, about the issues of the day, right?

• 15:20Robert Evans?

  That's how he's known and he is still to this day like liberal, like centrist liberal Democrats. Buckley is like the the ideal of the conservative intellectual. He's one of the good ones, right? He's a, he was not, but he's like respectable. Like, this is how you should do it. Look at the respect he always showed the people he was debating alongside.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  Their nostalgia goggles for him is always just like, we used to be able to have these conversations in peace.

• 15:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And when it like, by the way, his son is like a major pro-odysia activist, like these, this not polite ever. But yeah, like that's, that's his, his space in the American mind, right? Now you can already see in the way the show is set up, how some of the bias creeps in. This is supposed to be two liberals and two conservatives, seems non-biased. But why is one of the conservatives always a rotating guest? Is it maybe because that makes the conservatives seem more dynamic? And the liberals seem like it's just these two old hokey college professor types, right?

• 16:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:15Robert Evans?

  Um, Buckley also is a, he's a great performer. William F Buckley is one of the first media trained guys who exists, right? And the liberals that Hunt picks are not super charismatic figures, as Hendershot writes. Combs did not fare well under the harsh studio lights. And although most of the participants chain smoked, it was only Combs to whom the smoke seemed to cling in a thick film. In his three-piece suit with carnation boutonniere, he effused a stereotypical east coast liberal establishment persona. Professor Hodges was articulate, but often came across as a cartoonish liberal intellectual, or worse, an old windbag. Buckley spoke in easily digestible conservative soundbites, such as, "We would rather die than be enslaved by communism."

• 16:58Robert Evans?

  Right. Again, you can see the evolution, how this is even a little more disguised as non-biased while still pushing a very clear ideological line. And this is such a good idea, Fox News is gonna rip this basic model off decades later for their hit show Hannity in Combs. Oh, yeah. The same basic premise applies, the aesthetic of debate, but with the certainty that one side is gonna win and the enemy's always gonna look like a big stupid dope. And you also make sure that the conservative looks, you know, like, young and put together while the liberal looks like, you know, like a nerd, right? I've got a photo of Hannity in combs for the viewers, but like, Sean Hannity, the start of that, full head of hair, you know, younger guy, combs, balding, you know?

• 17:43Robert Evans?

  He looks like George Costanza there. Got glasses, right? Wow. So, in the age of social media, this idea reached its final form with guys like Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk, and I forget the name of the change my mind guy who'd go on the college campuses with the, you know, whatever change my mind thing became a name. Yeah, I forget his fuck, yeah, but they all got failed marriages except for, well, no, I guess not, I guess they don't all have failed marriages, just that guy. I forget his name, but then I don't care to remember it. Nope. But, yeah, and you, and in this, instead of like, you don't even have like, the boring hokey professors now, you have like, the liberals and left are represented by like, this carousel of college kids that you pick out because they clearly don't have media

• 18:24Robert Evans?

  training and they're not like, good at debating with a professional broadcaster on television, right? It's like, the more septum piercings, the better, speaking as a septum piercing ever. Yeah, are they a little high? Good, get them in here, yeah. You know who else is a little high? The sponsors that support this podcast, you know? Every single, one thing we guarantee, is that every advertiser on this show, just, the second I said just, just sparked up a fat blunt. Every single one of them, especially the, the Washington State Highway Patrol. Facts. If you hear that ad, you know the whole Washington State Highway Patrol is blazing a bone right now. No notes.

• 19:06Robert Evans?

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• 19:51Robert Evans?

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• 20:10Speaker 04

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• 20:44Robert Evans?

  And we're back, talking about the Facts Forum. Well, that's dead. And anyway, two years after he kills the Facts Forum, Hunt starts a new series, Lifeline. Now, this is not, he's not, this time, he's not going to try to get the tax breaks by being balanced, right? He decides that's not worth, you know, the trouble. So I'm not going to claim that we're not, we don't have like a line. Instead, in order to avoid getting in trouble, I'm not going to reference political parties or political tendencies at all. I'm not going to say- Say the Democrats or the left, I'm not going to say Republicans or the right or conservatism. Instead, I'm going to have, I'm going to have this fucking preacher guy come up here, the Reverend Wayne Poucher.

• 21:26Robert Evans?

  Who was, if you want to know who this guy's background, he was the former campaign manager for Strom Thurmond's successful 1954 campaign.

• 21:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So Poucher is first just kind of less aggressive than Smoot was, right? He's, he's a, and he speaks more on about religion and stuff. He's not talking about the, the left being evil. Instead, he talks about every, instead of referring to them like by their political terms, he calls them the mistaken. And he calls the good guys, the constructive people, right? And so he gets away from these like fairness standards by not talking about the left and the right, but talking about the mistaken and the constructive. And he speaks more in like parables about like right and wrong. And it's very clear that he's talking about politics, but he's not using political terms. So it kind of slips by, right? So annoying.

• 22:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's really annoying. Now Hunt does an interview with Playboy in 1966 where he talks about why he's not using, why this lifeline doesn't use the term conservative and why he doesn't like using that as propaganda anymore. And he says, conservative is an unfortunate word. It denotes mossback, reactionary and old fogeyism, right? So I don't want to seem like an old fogey, so I'm just going to talk about the mistaken and the constructive people, right? Now, I know, I think this is a mixed success. This, this show is never wildly popular for like legitimate reasons. A lot of people listen because sometimes it's the only thing on the air in a lot of areas, right? So it gets listeners from that, but it's kind of boring. It sounds boring. It sounds a lot more boring. The mistaken.

• 23:01Robert Evans?

  Smoot was at least exciting. He was aggressive, right? This dude Poucher is like boring and he mostly talks about God and he ends every broadcast with, don't forget to pray. He makes that his, he makes that his, his, uh, his tagline. Because that means Hunt can claim an exemption on the basis of running a religious organization for tax purposes, right? That'll, that'll no good. Good shit. Good shit. Accounts Lifeline was just as conservative as the facts forum, but a lot more boring because Hunt is scared of pissing people off. Now, he's also making a lot of other propaganda. He is by dollar amount, the number one producer of right wing propaganda in like the 50s through the 60s.

• 23:40Robert Evans?

  He is publishing newspapers too and magazines, including the newspaper, the magazine, Human Events, which goes on to be pretty popular. He has a regular column in that he sells to a bunch of different newspapers that he writes called Hunt for Truth.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 23:55Robert Evans?

  You get it? You get it?

• 23:57Speaker 01

  I hate that that's a good name. I mean, I wouldn't watch it, but I know someone's dad would.

• 24:02Robert Evans?

  So the nation summarizes the state of his propaganda operation in 1964 this way. H L Hunt, in addition to being very probably the richest man in America, is very probably the country's most powerful propagandist for the extreme right. The main vehicle for his brand of conservatism today is Lifeline, a radio program originating in Washington DC and daily reaching an estimated audience of 5 million persons in 45 states. It has heard over 331 stations, among which are 25% of the nation's clear channel outlet. That's a lot, just because again, there's not much else to put on there. And this is something the conservatives will learn from. A lot of where we are right now politically is the result of the fact that for years, like 20 some years,

• 24:47Robert Evans?

  liberals kind of ignored talk radio for the most part. There were a couple of attempts to get into it, but the it was and it was just assumed that like, well, the fact like more people listen and trust like the news and, you know, magazines and newspapers and TV news and, you know, all of that is more liberal than it is conservative and like talk radio was out there being the only thing in tens of millions of Americans' ears for hours as they're commuting, driving all across the country. I grew up, I lost, listened to so many hundreds hours of Michael Savage and Rush Limbaugh, all these guys. And it made a really solid core. People wonder like, why is there this core of like 30% of the country that will never reconsider supporting Trump? Talk radio is a big part of why.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:30Robert Evans?

  And. Hunt isn't good. He doesn't figure quite out how to make it work that way. But he's the first guy who really realizes why talk radio is valuable.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:42Robert Evans?

  And everything that comes after is at least influenced by that.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  And it also shows how the left is always really so supportive of institutions and like the power of institutions that they just won't even make a solid attempt because like it was how many years into Joe Rogan?

• 25:58Robert Evans?

  Liberals at least, yeah.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that like liberals were like, oh, we should have a Joe Rogan thing. It's like a podcasting thing or YouTube and then Twitch. It's like, oh, we should, we should finally have someone in this space. And it's like, yeah, if only you invested in stuff.

• 26:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah. You can influence people's politics by making them listen to a crazy guy for hours. Maybe you should have your own crazy asshole that people like to listen to. I don't know. The other thing, not having that guy didn't work. I'm not a big, we need a Joe Rogan of, for fucking the Democratic Party.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:30Robert Evans?

  It just doesn't work that way. You're never going to succeed doing that. If you're just like, let's make our own Democratic Joe. You're always gonna fail if that's how you think about it. But what you do need is like fucking people who are crazy popular that a lot of folks listen to, who are talking about politics in a way that is like usable to you.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:50Robert Evans?

  And when you see people like that, instead of discarding them and like hating them and running away from them, you should try to find ways, like the smart strategies, to try to find ways to benefit from that and to like make them, make that useful to you as opposed to pretending nobody cares about this stuff and they're just assholes talking on the internet. They are just assholes talking on the internet, but unfortunately it matters, right?

• 27:12Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 27:13Robert Evans?

  I say as an asshole talking on the internet.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  Hey, I do it. That's my full-time job on YouTube. It's like, I definitely think it's so frustrating because like the right, what it is able to do with having so much young talent is really have like a lot of hyper visibility in those spaces.

• 27:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  Whereas like, you know, you can only be academic for so long in a time period where like no one wants to read.

• 27:37Robert Evans?

  Right, exactly. Um, so the Lifeline Advisory Board included the CEO of Sears, Robert Wood, and John Wayne, but it also hosted several ministers. Yeah. John Wayne, baby. I'm helping to, helping to shape the future of talk radio.

• 27:56Robert Evans?

  Uh, the religious right was not a thing yet in an organized political way. That doesn't start until like the start of the seventies.

• 28:03Speaker 01

  No abortion yet.

• 28:05Robert Evans?

  I mean, yeah, that's not really a massive, again, Hunt is going to be one of the people who helps push that, even though he is not really religious and doesn't really care about that stuff. He is, again, one of the earlier conservatives to see, oh, you know what? If I marry my feelings on tax policy and like stopping people from voting with all of these like weird religious conservative like bugbears like abortion, I can make those people support my crazy tax shit and use that as a political weapon too, right?

• 28:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:36Robert Evans?

  So again, Hunt foresees this. He tries to use Christianity to spread his own anti-government message. His first wife, Lita, dies in the 50s and after he gets with his, well, she's not really a wife, but he joins her Baptist church. His pastor, Reverend Chris Well, was a howling reactionary. In 1960, Hunt printed up an anti-Catholic sermon Chris Well had written and handed it out at the DNC because JFK is running for president. It included this line, "The election of a Catholic as president would mean the end of religious liberty in America." Like, you know, the thing that happened.

• 29:14Robert Evans?

  Hunt dedicated numerous columns to Kennedy, who he warned would sell the nation out to communists and/or the Pope. His real issue, what's very funny to me is that like-

• 29:23Speaker 01

  And/or.

• 29:24Robert Evans?

  And/or. He doesn't hate JFK because of like their, you know, JFK is more of like a liberal progressive and he's very conservative. He hates JFK specifically. And the Catholic stuff is like, he's using that because he thinks it'll be useful in getting other people to hate JFK. He hates JFK because JFK supports reviewing the oil depletion allowance and changing it to end that loophole that lets oil men not pay taxes, right?

• 29:52Speaker 01

  And there it is. I thought you were gonna say because he's so hot and he was like, I can't have that. But the oil thing makes more sense.

• 29:59Robert Evans?

  It's his only real political issue is the oil depletion allowance. Everything else, all the cultural stuff- That he talks about, I mean, he does believe in the anti communism. But 90% of his propaganda is about keeping the oil depletion allowance. Everything else, like the working with the religious right, it's all to protect the oil depletion allowance. Cause he fucking loves that shit.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  He's like, I can excuse communism, but I draw the line at my oil allowance.

• 30:24Robert Evans?

  Me paying taxes?

• 30:27Robert Evans?

  Per The Nation, when Hunt talks of his country's troubles, he does not always sound funereal. But when he discusses the oil depletion allowance and possible legislative threats to it, his face takes on the stricken blankness of one who has just heard the last Trump. "I'm in favor of depletion allowances for all natural resources," he said recently. "But without the depletion allowance for oil, we are utterly ruined." Again, you're the richest man on earth. You would just have to pay taxes.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  But he's got so many kids.

• 30:52Robert Evans?

  Roads and stuff. Yeah, he's got so many kids. This is why Hunt promptly had 200,000 reprints of Chris Well's sermon made and mailed out, after which he sat back and hoped to watch a wave of aroused Protestantism wash Kennedy out of the running. Right? Like, that's, that's, that's at least as far as, um, uh, The Nation is concerned. Like, that's what his goal is here. It doesn't work.

• 31:16Speaker 01

  Sadly, Nixon was on the docket.

• 31:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It really, what happens is this just pisses people off. There's a bunch of editorials about like, this guy's trying to force Kennedy out because he doesn't want to pay taxes. And it just kind of pisses every, and a lot of people get angry that like, he's trying to make people hysterical about an anti Catholic. He's trying to use, he's trying to like rustle up a bunch of anti Catholic bigotry so he doesn't have to pay taxes. Like, people recognize this and call it out, and it pisses folks off. It draws the Senate's attention again, too. They point out that like, hey, this flyer you distributed to the DNC, it's actually a federal crime to distribute anonymous circulars after the start of a campaign to influence a political campaign in this way. And you did not note at all who paid for this. You committed a crime.

• 32:01Robert Evans?

  There's an uproar, there's a Senate Subcommittee investigation. Hunt just hides. Like, he panics and he like, basically goes on the lamb a little bit. And he just pretends he can't make the meeting. Yeah, he's like hiding. So Chris Well has To take it on the chin in a Senate Subcommittee meeting and like actually talk to Congress. And Chris Wall like pretends he doesn't know anything about Hunt's money and stuff. When Hunt finally surfaced again, he admits that he paid for the leaflet, but he's like, oh, I didn't do it to hurt LBJ, JFK. I did it to help LBJ's campaign because I'm really pro LBJ.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  Texas, baby.

• 32:36Robert Evans?

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

• 32:55Speaker 01

  The 48 Laws of Power.

• 32:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah, 48. No, it's even weirder. It's even sillier. So in 1960, he publishes his first novel, Alpaca, which is a work of right wing utopian fiction. The book took place in an ideal society that followed Hunt's plan for a wealth based voting system. Hendershot describes, "In his perfect world, political discussion could only take place via the printed word. Discussing politics on radio and TV or speech making before an audience of more than 200 people was outlawed as inflammatory. It was widely reported that Hunt had hired someone to write the romantic parts of Alpaca, as he was only interested in the politics. When the book breaks from political exegesis, we find our right wing lovers spouting inane dialogue such as, I am putty in your hands." I need to read this book one of these days.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 33:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and there's like a bunch of cool stuff in there. The book was published by H.L. Hunt Publishing, a company he created to publish phone books. So just as like a side business, he has a phone book company that he has published his shitty novel.

• 34:00Robert Evans?

  That writer for that Nation piece notes that by the mid 60s, a lot of Dallas newsmen had come to believe that Hunt had based the protagonist of his shitty novel on an idealized version of himself. And here's one relevant line from the novel.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  Huge penis.

• 34:12Robert Evans?

  And this is about the protagonist. "He had burning convictions, but there were few in Alpaca," he told himself, "who could agree with him." Right? Like he's this, he's this iconoclast genius rebel and other people just don't see how brilliant he is, you know? It's very much Hunt thinking of about himself.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's like, I'm gonna write someone who's so smart.

• 34:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah, the smartest man alive.

• 34:32Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 34:33Robert Evans?

  Um, the article goes on to describe the model constitution that Hunt presents in his novel. Quote, "A constitution that gives each person a quota of votes based primarily on how much he pays in taxes. There are other ways of getting votes under the Hunt Plan. If you are old enough to draw retirement pay but refuse to accept it, you get two extra votes. If you are a government worker and refuse to accept more than 50% of your pay, you get one extra vote. On the other hand, anyone receiving welfare or sick pay from the government gets no vote at all."

• 35:01Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 35:03Robert Evans?

  Uh huh.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  No blacks, no pores, no, no.

• 35:06Robert Evans?

  No, no, just rich guys get a lot of votes.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. That's crazy.

• 35:12Robert Evans?

  Now, a book reviewer interviewing Hunt says to him after reading his book, "It's a kind of fascist democracy, if you get what I mean." And Hunt later in the interview says, "You're the only one who understood what I was getting at." I think it's in reference to another line, but it's, it's very telling.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  He's like, "You see me."

• 35:31Robert Evans?

  So Hunt sends copies of his stupid book to every sitting congressman, uh, along with a number of foreign heads of state and quote, "Many colleges." He brags that he has a sequel planned, which would present an even better constitution, as long as he could just get a couple of weeks to finish it. And he never publishes this book, but the working title was Yortopia.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  Hmm, not Alpaca 2?

• 35:54Robert Evans?

  He does eventually do a sequel to Alpaca, but he doesn't publish Yortopia.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  Hmm. Terrible.

• 36:01Robert Evans?

  Great stuff, great, very 60s book title.

• 36:03Speaker 01

  You have your own publishing house and you still can't finish a second novel?

• 36:07Robert Evans?

  Nah, nah, man, it's hard. Look, ah, hey, I'm working on that one myself. It's tough. Um, you know what else is hard? It's hard for me when I see people not giving the proper amount of respect and love to the products and services that support this podcast.

• 36:23Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 36:24Robert Evans?

  Why don't we all just think about them and how nice they are and also listen to their ads for a second?

• 36:32Robert Evans?

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• 37:17Robert Evans?

  how OnlyFans is reshaping adult content, and so much more. So if you're feeling curious, maybe a little bold, consider this your official invitation to push play. Listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions now on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Tuesday. Sponsored by Healthy Sexual from Gilead Sciences.

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• 38:10Robert Evans?

  We're back. So, one of Hunt's dearest beliefs is that letters to the editor are the part of the paper that people read most often. That like, people just skim over the articles. They want to read letters to the editor. Because people have a natural curiosity over what other ordinary people have to say. That's H.L. Hunt's, like, most deeply held belief. And he's not an ordinary person. But he also thinks that if you write a letter to the editor, people assume you are. And so for most of his Life, he's writing like sometimes more than a dozen letters to the editor per day. And he has a small army of secretaries who will mimeograph them and will mail them to hundreds of newspapers.

• 38:51Robert Evans?

  So he just has like a rant about politics or fucking taxes or kids these days. And he'll write a letter to the editor and he'll send it to every newspaper he can think of, or his secretaries can think of to get it printed, right?

• 39:04Speaker 01

  I I'm sometimes I'm so glad I don't have money because this is like, this is like the impulses of like me writing to like Teen Vogue be like, you don't understand the sexiest man in America is not Blake Sheldon. It is.

• 39:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Dear Teen Vogue, there are too many states, please eliminate three. I am not a crank.

• 39:23Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 39:24Robert Evans?

  Hunt is that guy.

• 39:25Speaker 01

  I'm a hip kid.

• 39:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah, I'm cool. He thinks that like this will, this will really get Americans trick them into believing my politics. They'll just read all these letters to the editor and assume I'm a normal guy and they won't be able to, they won't be able to catch it. Now, this, this leads me to a very funny quote from Heather Hendershot's book. Quote respectable businessmen gave money to the causes in which they believed. Hunt wouldn't even give to local Dallas charities, much less political campaigns. Asked to contribute to diabetes research, Hunt responded, as summarized in an FBI memo, that society would be better off if persons who were permanently disabled or physically incapacitated and unable to financially care for themselves were let to die rather than to be a burden on society.

• 40:09Robert Evans?

  Great.

• 40:10Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 40:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 40:12Speaker 01

  He loved, he loved Buck V. Bell. He was like, I'm gonna endorse that.

• 40:15Robert Evans?

  Sure did. Uh, yeah. Yeah, he's, he's like, like, just a, just the kind of piece of shit you would imagine, like perfectly so. Now, when I will say, this is all frustrating, like the fact that he's trying to brute force his horrible genocidal politics into the world is disgusting.

• 40:36Robert Evans?

  And there's like, there's so many good quotes. Like one of the nation, he was like, I'm slow, but I'm the best writer I know. Like he's certain about that. Even though, again, he's not, he's not great, right? Like, he's not a particularly good writer. And editors of these newspapers that he's trying to like, get letters to, kind of call him on his bullshit. One Texas editor told the nation, Hunt earns in one hour about 20,000 to 12,000 dollars. That's what I earn in a year. He probably spends an hour dictating each letter that comes in here. I like to cut them in half because that means I'm putting about $5,000 of Hunt money in the wastebasket.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  Bars.

• 41:17Robert Evans?

  I love that.

• 41:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. Loving it.

• 41:19Robert Evans?

  That's funny. Yeah.

• 41:23Robert Evans?

  So, in 1959, Hunt started a health, food and supplement business. Ah, you got it. If you're a right wing, he's like the first of these, though, you know?

• 41:32Speaker 01

  He really is a trailblazer. Like, all these bitches are his sons. Like, truly.

• 41:37Robert Evans?

  What's interesting is he invents, I didn't realize this, he invents the Alex Jones strategy. Where he has his like, right wing propaganda station, and he invents a supplement and health food business. And it's the only advertiser on his radio show and TV shows. So it exists to sell the products, right?

• 41:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:57Robert Evans?

  So, the sole advertiser of Lifeline is his, his health products business. And his favorite product is Gastromagic, an anti-gas pill that he was so proud of. His, his office is described by that, the nation author is basically empty. But there's a plaque in it made with the letter from a happy customer being like, thank you for making these gas pills. It's like the only decoration he has.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  He's like, this is my true pride and joy, not one of my 15 kids.

• 42:25Robert Evans?

  Pride and joy, not any of my 15 kids. Fuck those kids.

• 42:29Speaker 01

  This is my only child.

• 42:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It's, it's so, I want to quote from Heather again, because she's got a line about this. "One politician was lured to his office expecting a contribution, but left only with an ample supply of Hunt's Gastromagic and digestion pills." Another, George Herbert Walker Bush, met with Hunt in 1962, hoping for a contribution to his congressional campaign. "His heart must have skipped a beat at the end of the meeting when Hunt discreetly gave him a bulging envelope. It was filled with Lifeline pamphlets."

• 42:56Speaker 01

  That's funny.

• 42:58Speaker 03

  Incredible.

• 43:00Robert Evans?

  Oh, it's so funny.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  Oh, my God, that's such a good troll.

• 43:04Robert Evans?

  He's such a weird crank about his health food business, which, again, he's crazy rich from oil. This is not a meaningful amount of money, but it's clearly his passion. Like, one of the things he's famous for is he drives himself to work, even when he's the richest man alive. And he's covered his car in bumper stickers advertising Lifeline and like his gastro magic pills, like a crazy man. And he'll, he's trying, because he's like, this'll advertise it. People will buy it if they see it on my car.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:32Robert Evans?

  The Nation notes, "Sometimes he circles the block in extra time before parking to let Dallas pedestrians have one more look."

• 43:39Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 43:41Robert Evans?

  And he's like making his, his, his employees put shit on their cars. He's like, yo, you gotta help the business.

• 43:47Speaker 01

  He's his own best marketing.

• 43:50Speaker 03

  He's acting like he isn't a rich guy.

• 43:52Robert Evans?

  He's so funny.

• 43:53Speaker 03

  He's like hustling like.

• 43:54Robert Evans?

  Like a poor guy.

• 43:55Speaker 03

  He's acting.

• 43:56Robert Evans?

  It's so funny.

• 43:56Speaker 03

  It's giving, I'm selling my mixtape out of my trunk. Like, what are we doing, babe?

• 44:02Robert Evans?

  Right. He's acting like a broke dude who gets to do an MLM. It's really funny. And he's the richest man alive.

• 44:09Speaker 03

  Like, he, like, he would be a modern day, like, hey, girlie.

• 44:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:14Speaker 03

  Sending you a DM.

• 44:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he's a hun in the.

• 44:17Speaker 03

  Are you feeling a little gassy right now? Don't worry, guys, I got you.

• 44:21Robert Evans?

  I got you.

• 44:22Speaker 03

  I have this really great supplement. You would only have to subscribe, like, oh, I know we haven't talked since high school, but, literally.

• 44:29Robert Evans?

  And he is, he is always, when he's meeting with people weirdly who always want his money, he'll just start going on these rants about his different products. One attorney who worked with him, he says that, like, as soon as Hunt walks in the room, he runs up and shakes his hand and says very quickly, "Hello, I am H.L. Hunt, the world's richest man, and these are gastro magic, which I make, so they must be good. Try some." It's just like crazy person stuff.

• 44:54Speaker 03

  Dude.

• 44:54Robert Evans?

  Um.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  Too many kids.

• 44:57Robert Evans?

  One of Hunt's kind of downfall moments is that, as I noted, he doesn't like Kennedy, right? He, Lifeline attacks him, he attacks him in his column, Hunt for the Truth. And he's like trying to drum up, like, religious hatred to attack him, right? He's also supporting Barry Goldwater, you know, that's, he loves Barry Goldwater.

• 45:16Speaker 03

  It's just so strange.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  So unique.

• 45:19Robert Evans?

  As you all know, on November 22nd, 1963, Bernard Montgomery Sanders shot President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Dallas, Texas.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:28Robert Evans?

  And this happens to happen like right after he'd run like a column and episodes of Lifeline talking about like the need of the Second Amendment. So that like people could kill government leaders who tried to oppress them. So he's just put this out and then Kennedy gets shot and the FBI questions him and members of his family. He's like, if you go into like, there's a lot of conspiracies that put Hunt at the center of like the conspiracy to kill Kennedy.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 45:59Robert Evans?

  There's a couple of weird things in there. For one thing, the guy who kills Oswald, Jack Ruby, had Hunt's name in his address book.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 46:08Robert Evans?

  Although Ruby doesn't seem to have liked Hunt because Ruby was a real far right crank and Hunt is like just in it for his own weird right wing beliefs.

• 46:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:17Robert Evans?

  So I think Ruby doesn't actually like him very much because he's not a team player, basically. So there's a lot of allegations, but the family received so many death threats from these, in fact, that like the FBI gives them like a security detail at one point. Because people are so convinced he's involved.

• 46:37Robert Evans?

  He gets weirder and crazier as he ages. His Dallas, I even mentioned this, his Dallas home, I think it's in White Rock Lake, is a replica of George Washington's Mount Vernon estate. That's five times as big. Like, that's his house.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  Oh, my God, bro. Daddy issues up the butt.

• 46:56Robert Evans?

  The mother of all daddy issues. And he's got this fucking huge crazy rich man house with like a billboard that he puts on his front lawn for Lifeline.

• 47:08Robert Evans?

  And he has this up in his fancy neighborhood until the neighbors complain, at which point he replaces it with a crude hand painted sign advertising Lifeline.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  Oh, that's...

• 47:17Robert Evans?

  The strangest vibes.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  Like he's selling lemonade.

• 47:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Now, despite putting more money into right-wing media than anyone, Hunt's influence falls rapidly in the late 60s from its peak in the mid 50s. Partly because he refuses to work or cooperate with anyone and has no interest in being part of the conservative movement as such. He wants conservatives to agree with him. Because he tries to be a kingmaker, he fancies himself one, and he becomes a major backer of Barry Goldwater. And when Goldwater is just the, has the shit kicked out of him in 1964, one reason why, according to the media, because there's a bunch of articles about like, why didn't Goldwater do better? And one reason that's posited by a lot of pundits is that H.L. Hunt kind of poisoned the campaign, right? Not just Hunt, because the John Birch

• 48:06Robert Evans?

  Society is also behind Goldwater, and people don't like them. But it gets to the point where, according to Heather Hendershot, quote, "Even the rumor of an association with Hunt could be damning for a candidate, especially after Hunt was investigated in connection with the Kennedy assassination." And yeah, like, it's, it's, you know, good stuff. His sons are kind of involved in his downfall as a political influencer, too. His son, Bunker Hunt, had financed a John Birch Society newsletter that had attacked Kennedy in really vicious terms and was, made a lot of people suspicious. And then, one of Jack Ruby's friends, the reason why Ruby had Hunt's name is that he had approached Lamar Hunt to try to get a job in a bowling

• 48:50Robert Evans?

  alley that Hunt owned. So, his, his failed sons are part of why he stops becoming as influential. His attempts to co-opt Christianity for his own ends are also way too clumsy to work very well. His daughter, June, who later becomes like an influential Christian media figure, even attacks him for his hypocrisy and constant cheating. As the story goes, Hunt kind of snaps back at her, "I'm not Christian. I don't have to go by Christian ethics." And then he sends her ass to boarding school. When his other daughter, Swanee, makes similar complaints about his womanizing, he tells her, "King Solomon had 700 wives, and that's in the Bible."

• 49:31Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 49:32Robert Evans?

  So, great guy, great parent.

• 49:34Speaker 01

  Good job.

• 49:35Robert Evans?

  As the 70s dawn, Hunt's in his 80s. Yeah, he continues to wear the same blue suit every day, but he only dry cleans the pants to save money. So eventually, the top and bottom are totally different colors.

• 49:46Speaker 03

  What? What?

• 49:48Robert Evans?

  Such a freak.

• 49:49Speaker 01

  He doesn't have to live like this, literally.

• 49:51Robert Evans?

  No, man.

• 49:52Speaker 01

  You don't have to do this.

• 49:54Speaker 03

  Such an odd guy.

• 49:56Robert Evans?

  So his son, Hassy, who we talked about, never recovers from that mental break. He's ill and Hunt spends, Hunt keeps his, he's the only of his children that Hunt has a picture of in his office. Uh, I think because he feels really bad about this and he spends a lot of his life desperately, but incompetently trying to help Hassy to get better. The Nation writes, Hunt had sought various magic cures for the boy. One day, the answer was Valium. The next prostitutes. Finally, a lobotomy took the edge off of Hassy's violent fits, but just a bit. So, just a great dad.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  Just so good.

• 50:30Robert Evans?

  Just a great dad.

• 50:31Speaker 01

  That's triple threat.

• 50:32Robert Evans?

  Triple threat father. Um, he develops increasingly strange health beliefs as he aged and became an almost religious advocate of creeping. Sophie's gonna show you a picture of this because anytime anyone asked him, he would get down to demonstrate this exercise technique that he's fallen in love with. It's basically a crab walk. He gets down on his knees and his hands and knees and just like walks across the ground.

• 50:54Speaker 03

  What?

• 50:55Robert Evans?

  He fucking, and there's like, there's like a weird kind of like yogurt component to it. Like, he must have found this in some book or another, but he is obsessed with creeping. The New York Times quotes him as saying, creeping is probably the second best exercise in the world next to swimming. It's perfect.

• 51:13Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 51:15Speaker 01

  All right, he's a creeper. He's a super creeper.

• 51:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  Not surprising.

• 51:19Robert Evans?

  Fucking, he loves creeping. He lives in his last years with his second family, uh, in that Mount Vernon home, or third family, I think, actually. And he spends a lot of time promoting health foods. He's got like a vegetable garden on his property and he eats mainly these along with, he has like a very weird diet. He eats a lot of just like Blyon cubes, I think, just like straight, like flavor.

• 51:43Speaker 03

  He's so weird.

• 51:45Robert Evans?

  Freak, he's a weirdo, um, cool guy. Now, as I noted, his sons, especially Nelson Bunker Hunt, uh, are real anti, strong anti-communists. Bunker is gonna be a big George Wallace supporter and Oh, God. A fascist, like, he's a real hardcore segregationist fascist, giant piece of shit. Um, Hunt also supports Governor Wallace's campaign, but he dies on November 29th, 1974. At the time of his death, his estate is valued at $2 billion, which is split between his two surviving ex-wives, 15 children, and many grandchildren. There are years of probate battles, right? Sure there were.

• 52:24Speaker 03

  I'm sure.

• 52:26Robert Evans?

  As a note about his shitty-ass sons, you should know, one of his sons, Lamar Hunt, founds the AFL, the American Football League, and he's a major figure in professional tennis and soccer in the US. So, that's where the AFL comes, and I want to quote from Hendershot's article one last time. Herbert and Bunker Hunt had been caught attempting to corner the world's silver market. Could the crooks really have thought that no one would notice an ongoing attempt to purchase all the silver in the world? They were also entangled in a wiretapping caper. It's wiretapping over like their dad's, like, th- this is as a result of like the fight for, over like his will in probate. Wow.

• 53:05Robert Evans?

  And yeah, Bunker is a hugely successful oil man. He's, becomes a major John Birch donor with his oil money. Classic. He helped, like, his company finds oil deposits in Libya and I think Pakistan. I think they're also involved in Saudi Arabia. Like, they are a lot of like Arab oil and Middle Eastern oil, like, his company is, uh, involved in like getting the rights to and selling. Um, he also gives a quarter of a million dollars in cash in a briefcase to George Wallace, uh, as a rainy day fund. Um, and he, he tries to bribe Curtis LeMay to become Wallace's running mate, or he puts up like a, a trust fund to convince LeMay to become Wallace's running mate. So he just loves all of the worst fascists. Bunker Hunt, giant piece of shit. Wow.

• 53:51Robert Evans?

  So yeah, that's the end of Hunt's life. One of his long, his probably his biggest ongoing contributions to popular culture is that Bunker Hunt is such a giant famous piece of shit for all of his criminal activity and weird business activity and oil money, that his, he inspires the show Dallas.

• 54:10Speaker 01

  Ooh, I love Dallas.

• 54:12Robert Evans?

  Dallas is based off of the Hunts, yes. JR is based off of Bunker Hunt.

• 54:17Speaker 01

  Oh, damn.

• 54:19Robert Evans?

  Like heavily based off of Bunker Hunt, right? In part because he gets in trouble for committing a bunch of crimes, right? Yeah. So at least we get to show Dallas, you know?

• 54:28Speaker 01

  I'll take it. Husha JR was very big for our parents.

• 54:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah, Bernie Sanders, by the way, did. A lot of people don't know that. Anyway, Princess, how you feeling at the end of these episodes?

• 54:39Speaker 01

  I feel great. There's nothing like knowing the origins of the war crimes that are being put out into the world every day.

• 54:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, it's good. War crimes, crimes against truth, all this good stuff.

• 54:53Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for all of that amazing effort. This was a great three-part interview.

• 54:57Robert Evans?

  Thank you. Part of. We're just happy to have you here, you know? Happy to have you here talking about this real piece of shit and his strange beliefs about the world.

• 55:07Speaker 01

  And his strange pills and his strange 15 children. Wow.

• 55:11Speaker 03

  Anything you want to plug at the end here, Princess?

• 55:14Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, just if you want to see some other fun yappers, I have a YouTube channel where I talk about pop culture, history, all kinds of fun things. And I'm just happy to be here. Thank you guys so much for having me.

• 55:29Robert Evans?

  Excellent.

• 55:30Speaker 01

  Sweet.

• 55:31Robert Evans?

  Thanks for coming along, everybody.

• 55:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:34Robert Evans?

  All right, folks, we're done.

• 55:36Speaker 01

  I'm gonna go pet dogs. Bye. Bye.

• 55:43Speaker 03

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit "Remind Me" on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips in our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com/AtBehindTheBastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.

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