Part Two: Carl Schmitt: The Mind Behind Modern Fascism

In this episode we follow Carl Schmitt through the disillusionment of WW1, and breaking up with his con artist wife, to his creation of the Death Star of liberal democracy. 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.

• 0:04Robert Evans?

  Welcome back to Behind the Bastards podcast hosted by who I assume is the new Pope based on reading the first two thirds of an article title that showed up in my phone the other day.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  How long is this bit gonna go on, is my question?

• 0:21Robert Evans?

  Exactly one more episode, Sophie. I have slightly, I have slightly more bit to do here.

• 0:25Speaker 02

  I think it's for life, right?

• 0:27Robert Evans?

  Well, yeah, that is, that is how it tends to, well, now that one guy got to quit. The Nazi.

• 0:34Robert Evans?

  Nazis, famous quitters.

• 0:39Robert Evans?

  So we are joined once again by Sophie Ray Lickdorman and Blake Westler, our guest for today. Blake, how you doing?

• 0:49Speaker 02

  I'm doing great. I can't wait to hear more about this guy.

• 0:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, well, I can't wait to figure out my Pope name, you know, I've been, I've been thinking about it, right? What am I gonna do? You know, what am I gonna, what is, who am I going to be as Pope? Because every Pope gets to pick a name.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  You're gonna be, you're gonna be Pope Sophie.

• 1:07Robert Evans?

  No, no, no, I think I figured it out, Sophie. I think I'm gonna have a lot more fun if, if my Pope name is just the whole script to B-movie. Just gonna really take that bit to its ultimate extent. Just destroy the computing systems at the Vatican. The entire Catholic Church is like, online infrastructure falls apart. Priests with Chromebooks just lighting on fire in rectories. It's gonna be beautiful.

• 1:33Speaker 02

  B-movie, 90% improvised, though, so I don't know how long the script is. Seinfeld did a lot of improv in that.

• 1:41Robert Evans?

  I do know how long the script is because it's been printed on a number of T-shirts at this point.

• 1:45Speaker 02

  Oh, my God, that's amazing.

• 1:47Robert Evans?

  It's an older meme, but it checks out.

• 1:52Speaker 03

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• 1:56Robert Evans?

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• 3:00Robert Evans?

  We're back and we're talking about the life of Carl Schmidt, arch-theoretician of Nazism, well, of Fascism in general, too. We left things off on the eve of World War I. Our boy Carl is in love with a con artist, but his academic career is slowly starting to pick up steam. The way academic life works at this point is that he's basically locked in a series of unpaid internships and thus constantly begging his uncle and his rich friends, like the parents of his rich friends, for money. The Isler family is his most reliable source of support. His whole goal, he says this often in his diary and when talking to Kari, he wants to get rich, right? He wants to be wealthy.

• 3:41Robert Evans?

  And the way to do that, then, as a public intellectual, just like it is now, is to write a book, right? Now, today, you have to write the worst book ever, which gets harder every year because so many, so many terrible, terrible books are written by public intellectuals every year. Back at this period of time, your book had to be, have a little more depth. To it. And the first, his first stab at this is a work called Word of the State. And this is, that's the English translation. The German phrase that means word of the state is a reference to a concept in like German law of the state in which the government and its rulers are constrained in what they can do to people by the law, right?

• 4:22Robert Evans?

  That, that's the, the title of his book. And the purpose of this book is to try to figure out what makes a state legitimate, right? And its laws legitimate. Carl comes to define a legitimate state as a state with a constitution. Not a state that does this or that, or that treats people a certain way, but a state that has like a set of listed rules that institutionalizes the relationship between power and right, right? So how individuals are treated, whether they have rights, that doesn't matter. What matters is that the state spells out what it can and will do when and where, somewhere, right? That's the, the important thing. He includes a line in this work that I find fundamentally chilling.

• 5:03Robert Evans?

  Quote, "Whatever it is that makes a person is determined by the legal system itself." And that's, that's, that's bad. It's gonna lead you some dark places, Carl. It's gonna lead us all some very dark places, right? But it makes sense if you're coming to this idea that like, yeah, the law determines ethics and reality, and thus the law determines what is a person, right? And can unperson people, which is sort of the, he's not writing about that at this point, but it's kind of the inevitable conclusion. It's like, well, if the law makes a person, the law can stop you from being a person. And what's, when I say that I think he's, there's a degree of brilliance here.

• 5:45Robert Evans?

  It's not that this is a good way to think about things, but this is accurate to the way states work already. As soon as, as long as there have been states, this is how states have functioned. Whether you like it or not, even our state, right? All this bullshit that we have about natural rights and that there's inherent rights. No, you should know right now by watching the news, none of that means anything. The state and the people with guns within it determine- What is treated as a person by the state, right? That's what Carl's recognizing, right? And that's what Carl was laying out. And that is accurate, whether or not you like it, right? Individuals, he argues, only gain significance by working for and supporting the state.

• 6:26Robert Evans?

  So again, while he's sort of, there's a degree to which even as an anarchist, you could be like, oh, this guy's right in a lot of ways. But where he differs is he's like, and that's great. It's good that it works this way. It's cool. It's cool that the state arbitrarily decides what makes a person, right? And he argues that this is good because individuals only gain significance when working for and supporting the state. In other words, you mean nothing outside of your place within the state and its power structure. He also argues the law is not based on power. Power is based on law. And he seems to believe, again, there's this almost spiritual natural order that the law naturally moves to better represent, right? Which is weird.

• 7:12Robert Evans?

  Now, not long after this, Schmidt gets married, or at least he thinks he does. They have like a wedding, but Kari loses her passport and so they can't get it certified. It's these documents. It's these fucking documents. These damn pieces of paper. And again, it is weirdly like this, like proof that he's, there's, there's something fundamentally accurate about his conception of the state because like much as he, he's like, no, Kari's my wife. The state's like, no, she's not. That's on us to decide and we've decided no, because she doesn't have a passport. So she has to, they're like heading back to their house to finally be together and like their marital home. And she has to suddenly, when like this clerk comes in and is like, wait, wait, wait. The passports, like she doesn't have a passport.

• 7:57Robert Evans?

  I can't do this. They have to bundle her off to live with his mom so that they don't live in sin. Oh, my God. Unlike what's supposed to be their wedding day. And Carl starts having panic attacks about the fact that Kari is now living with his family. Quote, "She is in the company of my hateful, mean and vicious mother and my spoiled little sister Anna. Only father makes life easy for her. I don't know what will become of me." She's like, she's gonna leave me because my family sucks and she has to live with them now?

• 8:30Speaker 02

  I don't know what will become of it. It all comes back to him too.

• 8:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's always about him.

• 8:34Speaker 02

  He wasn't talking about what is going to become of me.

• 8:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah, what's going to become of my wife? Right?

• 8:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:39Robert Evans?

  I also do love that, like, yeah, it's good. Like, the state determines what a person is. And like, this is good. And our only value comes from the role that we play within the state. And also, oh, the thing that I want more than anything isn't possible because the state has decided my wife isn't a real person.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  I obviously don't know exactly how. I mean, I have an idea of how the story ends, obviously. Like, that's been established. But it is interesting that it seems like he turns on the people closest to him, where, yeah, obviously, because of how his ideologies was adopted by Nazis, his best friend, who is a Jew, that doesn't end well. And then also, a lot of his friends. No, not, no, it doesn't. That a lot of his friends were these artists. And artists do not work for the state. It's the complete opposite. So they don't matter, essentially. So it's interesting that he keeps doing this.

• 9:26Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. And it really is like, uh, yeah. So through the end of 1913, he's having constant panic attacks. And we can surmise his parents. This is like a family trait, right? Because when he, he describes them in his diary in a way that like a modern reader is like, oh, that motherfucker's having a panic attack, right? But he calls them Schmidt effects, right? As in like, this is like a Schmidt family characteristic that we have these freakouts? And it's like, oh, yeah, okay. So your, your parents are, are like, also have this problem, right? And they passed it on to you. And you think it's just you and your family, that you're the only people who have ever felt, of course you do in this period. It's 1913. Where would you have read about panic attacks?

• 10:11Speaker 02

  No, we just have heart attacks all the time. When we get nervous, we all have heart attacks. It's a Schmidt thing. We have high cholesterol.

• 10:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we're the only ones who do this. So he writes about this in his diaries and Mering notes that in the wake of these, he expresses the bulk of his antisemitic opinions, right? That while he's kind of like dealing with this, uh, this really stressful period of I can't marry this woman that I love, this, the state doesn't consider her legitimate. Mering notes that in the wake of these, he, he writes, quote, "Saw the two Jews, Jacobson and Lessing, bickering and was glad I no longer have anything to do with Rosenbaum, who's another Jewish friend of his. I don't want contact with Isler anymore either." So he like sees these two Jewish guys he knows arguing and he's like, ah, it's just like, it's just what those kind of people do. I'm never going to have any contact with them again. Now, this is not going to be a permanent state.

• 11:03Robert Evans?

  So it shows that bigotry is this thing that he comes back to and discards and comes back to, but it's not a stable state for him at this point because he and Isler are going to be dear friends again. And, and for a considerable, like, he will continue to talk about him well and other, have other Jewish friends after this period. The point is that his racism is erratic and it's correlated both with stressful times in his life and also these flights of fantasy, right? Well, he'll, he'll write out this antisemitic screed and then he'll declare to his diary, "I'm going to get into politics and become a powerful man." And then the next day he'll write about how he and Kari are going to have a son named Johann and he's going to grow up to be a cardinal. And then like a couple of days later, he's going to be like, "I'm still too broke. I can't marry my wife.

• 11:48Robert Evans?

  This is never, we're never going to have our kid." And he's so fucking Catholic that when he becomes convinced he's not going to be able to have a kid with this woman for financial reasons and because of her like legal issues, he writes in his diary, "I am a murderer. I am destroyed, have turned into nothing and have murdered the soul of a child. Where should I seek refuge? In the Catholic church? But I can't. I might as well go to the great Dalai Lama of Tibet or some Mexican god." And first off, bro, like even in this period, most Mexicans are Catholic too. Like just as a heads up, like it's the same, most of them, it's the same god you're worshiping, right? Maybe you haven't read those books.

• 12:27Speaker 02

  This guy's so conservative.

• 12:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  That he believes the life begins before you have sex with the person.

• 12:35Robert Evans?

  Life begins when you and your-

• 12:37Speaker 02

  Before documentation.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  Just anything but going to therapy. And I know it's a sign of the times, but my god.

• 12:43Robert Evans?

  My god, sir. When you and your con artist wife-

• 12:46Speaker 01

  I am a murderer.

• 12:47Robert Evans?

  That you're gonna have a son who becomes a cardinal.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  I am destroyed.

• 12:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah. We killed this boy.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  This boy, Johan, little Johan.

• 12:56Robert Evans?

  Little Johan's dead now. This is essentially an abortion. I guess I am kind of impressed that he knows who the Dalai Lama is in this period of time. So I don't know, you know?

• 13:06Speaker 01

  Fair enough.

• 13:07Robert Evans?

  We contain more. Well, on some things, again, he also thinks Mexican people don't, aren't Catholic in large part. Obviously, like, there's religions in that part of the world that have existed before Catholicism, but at this period of time, that's the dominant religion is the same as his. Anyway, he comes to see himself as a gnostic after this point. In other words, someone who believes that there's this like malicious god that created the world, right? I think it's, he's basically believes like the demiurge is what other people worship as god. And like what these other folks, what I was raised to believe is god is actually this evil being that just wants to fuck with us, right?

• 13:45Robert Evans?

  Now, the fact that he comes around to this belief, this heretical belief is entirely centered upon his own financial and career frustrations. Right before the war breaks out, his wife gets caught shoplifting. Again, this lady, she's always stealing stuff.

• 14:00Speaker 02

  She's the best.

• 14:00Robert Evans?

  She's the best. She gets caught stealing shit and it causes like a year with the problems for him because he can't afford to pay the co- And like, he's just trying to keep her out of jail. So it's this whole constant like stressful issue on him, the fact that his wife got caught shoplifting, his con artist wife.

• 14:16Speaker 02

  What was that horrible phrase? Tingle tangle? What was it like?

• 14:19Robert Evans?

  Tangle girl, yes.

• 14:20Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 14:21Robert Evans?

  Yes, his wife, the burlesque dancing con artist, is caught shoplifting and it just fucks him up.

• 14:28Robert Evans?

  And then, while he's trying to deal with all of this, Archduke Franz Ferdinand gets shot in Sarajevo and World War I- Starts winding up. Karl is 26 at the time that it becomes inevitable that Germany's going to, you know, make some really bad decisions, along with everyone else, to be fair. Germany's bad decisions aren't unique in this period. Um, now, this is another massive moment for most future German fascists, but not for Karl. Karl is not a German patriot. Hitler is like, Hitler is the strong, he's there when the Kaiser announces the start of the war in Berlin. He's part of, there's pictures of him, you can find him in the crowd, and he's like enraptured. He describes this like religious experience. He's so overjoyed to be going to war on behalf

• 15:12Robert Evans?

  of the fatherland. And Karl's like, fuck this illegal war. This is Prussian bullshit. The Prussians orchestrated all of this. The rest of us Germans want nothing to do with this. I certainly, go to war with the French. My family's half French. Fuck these people. Fuck all of this. This is illegal as hell. Right? So he is not at all, and in fact, he writes in his diary, I hope the French win. And he'll be doing that throughout the war. Like, if the, I just hope the, I just want the enemy to win, so this is done. This is not a patriot, right? Absolutely not at all. So it's interesting, because he's going to be so influential to the fascist movement, he has the opposite reaction of basically

• 15:52Robert Evans?

  all of these other guys. Now, that said, he knows the war is wrong and dumb, but he doesn't protest it. And he's not a conscientious objector. He just doesn't really care about it. One gets the feeling he thinks that like the whole conflict is something that less intelligent people should care about, like, not him. He has a lot of thinking about what law is to do, right? Um, he doesn't volunteer immediately, like a lot of people do, like a lot of his friends do. And he seems to be hoping like, maybe the war will end quickly, and I just will get to miss out on this, right? Now, you can contrast this to his best friend, Isler, right? Again, Isler is a Hungarian national who desperately wants to be German. He's othered both because he's Hungarian and because he's Jewish. And he had tried

• 16:37Robert Evans?

  repeatedly before the war to become a naturalized German citizen. And every time he does it, the authorities are like, nah, we don't need you. And he Wants this in part because he's getting his doctorate and he can't actually get confirmed as a PhD or work in law unless he's a naturalized German citizen. He wants to, he wants to work in the German government, right? He wants to be a part of the court system and he has to be a citizen. And the chief of police before the war, the chief of police in Hamburg denies Eisler's citizenship petition by writing, quote, "Due to the Hungarian Jewish descent of the applicant and his father's criminal record that he couldn't approve the application. His dad had done some petty crimes as a younger man." So when the war breaks out, Eisler applies again.

• 17:21Robert Evans?

  And this time, the German government is, number one, the authorities who had been like turning him down are in the military now. So it's like people who are younger and maybe a little less bigoted who are, you know, making that call. And they're like, all right, you want to join the army? We'll let you do that and we'll make you a citizen, but you have to sign a paper promising you'll never work for the government, right? You'll never go after a government career or try to take the state exam to be like considered a doctor in Germany, right? If you do those things, we'll make you a citizen and you can join the army. And Eisler agrees. That's how badly this kid wants to be a German patriot, which is such a bummer, given not

• 18:03Robert Evans?

  only what Germany's gonna do to Jewish people not all that far from now, but given what's going to happen to him. Cause all this kid wants is to be accepted as German. And he feels like, ah, the military, they can't, they can't other me if I'm in the military, right? They have to respect me as a, as a, as a, as a patriotic German citizen if I serve and combat. So despite the fact that Schmidt had pretty recently written a lot of racist shit about Eisler, he writes at the time of having great worry for his friend when Eisler joins the army and notes, "If only he is not killed in action, the dear old fellow." Unfortunately, Fritz Eisler joins a field artillery unit and he is deployed immediately after the outbreak of hostilities.

• 18:47Robert Evans?

  He is killed by shrapnel almost immediately. Um, you know, his battery is firing, allied counter battery fire hits nearby and he gets like gutted by a piece of metal. Mering writes, Schmidt was moved by his untimely death. As a last favor to his friend, he edited one of Eisler's posthumous papers. And he like goes to Eisler's family to express his concerns, to help them deal with his dead friends, like, you know, stuff. Uh, and he get, he becomes almost immediately very good friends with Fritz's brother, George. And the two will remain friends until 1932. Like, he kind of switches his best friendship to George Eisler and it will stay that way almost until Hitler rises to power.

• 19:30Robert Evans?

  And he gets actually much closer with the Eislers after Fritz dies. He stays over at their house and he writes that he's like surprised, wow, these Jews are like a normal German family. I didn't think that that was the case with Jewish people. And at the end of this, George's father is like, hey, man, how much money do you need to keep, continue until you're able to like get to the money-making part of your career? And writes him a check. So again, even up to this point, this family is treating him like a son. Like Carl Schmidt probably doesn't have an academic career without the Eislers backing him up. Like, they really do take him in. Um, now, he has to join the military not long after this because he's a young German man and they don't have enough of those.

• 20:13Robert Evans?

  Very quickly, Germany has a lot of young German men in 19, late 1914, and then a couple of months after August, a lot less German young men. So, so they're, they're really-

• 20:23Speaker 02

  Where do they keep going? Where do these German men keep going?

• 20:26Robert Evans?

  They're just kind of feeding them into, into French machine guns. Now, the French are doing the same thing, right? Everybody's, how fast can we get rid of our young men? Turns out, very. Um, so he joins a reserve infantry unit, right? Which, the fact that he does this suggests he's trying to keep himself out of combat, again, in the hope that the war might end quickly. Now, most of the reserve units in 1914- Find up on the front line because it's just that kind of war. But he's gonna try in other ways to delay his service. Balakrishnan writes, while he was in basic training, he claimed to have sustained a back injury. And the way Balakrishnan writes it suggests that he doesn't really think this is a real injury or that like Schmidt plays it up to delay things.

• 21:10Robert Evans?

  But once again, luck is on his side. Schmidt's first mentor, Van Kalker, because he's like a high, a respected gentleman, he joins the army and they're like, well, you're a major. And obviously he had spent time in the military before because everyone does. Basically, he had done like his period of national service. So when he joins the full-time army, he's made a major by virtue of the fact that he is a very, very respected professor. And because he's got this position, he's able to get Schmidt a place in the prince's personal regiment. Now, this is not safe, actually. If you're in like the prince's regiment in the German army, you're going to see heavy combat because the prince wants glory and he's going to send boys to die to do it. A lot of his colleagues get killed.

• 21:54Robert Evans?

  But Van Kalker is like, no, no, no. Karl Schmidt is not someone we want to feed to machine guns. This guy is smart. He's going to be somebody. And he gets him a job in the headquarters section, basically shuffling paperwork around, helping to like handle organizational tasks. And as a result, for the entirety of the war, Schmidt is never particularly close to like direct fire. I don't even think he's very close to indirect. He's never in serious danger, right? You know, like elevated from his civilian life, but he is not fighting, right? And he's not fighting because this mentor, again, comes in and probably saves his life, right? To be like, no, no, no, this guy, we don't want this guy up at the front. It's just a waste. A mentor he turns on. Yeah, well, he doesn't, he just stop, he just kind of abandons him at a certain point. Yeah.

• 22:40Robert Evans?

  Now, after training, but before he deploys, Carl takes one last stab at Mary and Kari. And this time, the whole system works differently because there's a war on. The officials who'd held up on naturalizing her were either deployed or had decided like, "Look, this boy's probably gonna die like everybody. Give him a chance to get this girl pregnant and continue the family line." Right? Like, that's, that's the idea. They're really, they're rubber stamping a lot of marriages at this stage.

• 23:07Speaker 02

  We're gonna send these babies to the front line. These men are getting younger.

• 23:11Robert Evans?

  We're gonna need more German boys very soon.

• 23:15Robert Evans?

  Now, her birth certificate's obviously fake. And she's got pending shoplifting charges. But they managed to like brute force this through and the two finally get married legally. Carl is immediately deployed and he fucking hates it. He hates the army. For the first time and only time in his life, because of how much he hates being in the army, he radically revises his entire legal and philosophical theory about how the world works. He describes life in barracks as a hell where he was forced to endure the stink of plebes. Because he had, and you know, he had previously, he had been like, "Well, human value depends upon how you are serving the state." And now that he is serving the state as effectively its property, he's like,

• 23:58Robert Evans?

  "Oh, but that's awful. That sucks ass. No, this can't be how things work. Fuck."

• 24:03Speaker 02

  This is what serving the state's like? This isn't valuable at all?

• 24:06Robert Evans?

  I hate the state. But no, he writes that he hated, quote, "The god of this world, the law, for its destruction of the individual." Interesting, interesting. This is, he's not gonna stay consistent to this. But it is very funny to me that like the moment he's made to live with his beliefs, he's like, "Oh, well, obviously this is a terrible idea."

• 24:30Robert Evans?

  Now, he began even to dislike his mentor, Van Kalker, in this time. This is kind of when the break with him begins, because Van Kalker is a smart man. He was not an advocate for war, but he serves and he serves enthusiastically and without great disgust. And he even tell, they have an argument at one point, and Van Kalker's like, "Look, if the state has to break, commit some minor illegality in order to win the war, that's okay." And Carl's like, "What the fuck? That's not what you taught me at all. Like, this isn't how it's supposed to work." And he writes, "He has become unfaithful to himself." And it's interesting, Schmidt's private musings during this period read almost like protest literature. Quote, "I was mad

• 25:12Robert Evans?

  with anger about the Prussians, about militarism. I felt like committing the most ostentatious insubordinations." So he's like, "I really wanted to rebel." But he doesn't, obviously. He's not that guy. As part of his early service, he goes to Dachau, which at that point, we know what Dachau is going to be later. It's a munitions plant at this stage. And he writes, and he's talking about like, looking at the conditions in these arms factories. And he says, "How ghastly for an individual to be sitting in such a prison." And it's interesting to me that like, that's his attitude about Dachau when it's like an arms facility. But he is going to be one of the early, you know, people who helps to fill up concentration camps. Yeah. Interesting.

• 25:55Speaker 02

  And that means that he had the skill set to do that.

• 25:58Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 25:58Speaker 02

  And the, yeah, the personality to do it.

• 26:01Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  Wild.

• 26:02Robert Evans?

  But also the ability to understand that something considerably less awful than Dachau, the concentration camp, is still bad. So theoretically, the ability to understand, like, what he was doing and putting, helping to put people in Dachau was wrong. Anyway, speaking of constant, nope.

• 26:20Speaker 01

  Nope.

• 26:20Robert Evans?

  Ads.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  Jesus Christ.

• 26:22Robert Evans?

  We're not doing good with the ad transition today, people.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  It's kind of hard on a subject like this.

• 26:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 26:29Speaker 02

  This is my favorite producer on-air host dynamic, by the way, I've ever seen.

• 26:35Robert Evans?

  Just bummed.

• 26:38Speaker 01

  It's just us in real life.

• 26:41Speaker 02

  Anyway, enough about concentration camps. Here's a word from the gap. Are you wearing? From Baby Gap.

• 26:48Robert Evans?

  Ah, the gap.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  I do wish it was the gap.

• 26:51Speaker 02

  How funny would that be?

• 26:52Speaker 01

  I do wish it was the gap, but it's gonna be something so much worse that we're not even aware of.

• 26:57Robert Evans?

  I don't know. Is there anything worse than the gap? Yes, probably. All the things we're about to talk about.

• 27:04Robert Evans?

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• 27:28Speaker 05

  It is unknown if Devoto is safe and effective if you have HIV and hepatitis B. If you have Hep B, don't stop Devoto without talking to your doctor, as it may get worse or harder to treat. Don't take Devoto if you're allergic to its ingredients or taking Dofetolide due to serious or life-threatening side effects. If you have a rash or allergic reaction symptoms, stop Devoto and get medical help right away. Other serious or life-threatening side effects include severe liver problems and lactic acid buildup. If you're female or obese, you may be more at risk. Tell your doctor about your medicines or supplements, medical conditions, liver or kidney problems, pregnancy, breastfeeding, or planned pregnancy.

• 28:04Robert Evans?

  Do ask your doctor about fewer medicines. Visit devoto.com or call 1-877-844-8872.

• 28:11Speaker 06

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• 28:44Robert Evans?

  So the war ends in 1918 and Schmidt's relief is tempered by what appeared to be like the dissolution of the German state. Germany is falling apart as soon as there's like a peace happens. And this whole order, the legal order that his whole life had been based on, looks like it's just going to crumble. Like, the legal code is going to be gone, the government, the Kaiser's already gone. What the fuck's gonna be left? And part of what's happening is that there is a socialist revolution, right after peace, that like, comes pretty close to succeeding in some areas. Units of demobilized soldiers, the Freikorps, crack down and start massacring leftist intellectuals with the direct endorsement of the right, and the tacit support of social democratic politicians who are like, "Yeah,

• 29:28Robert Evans?

  it's ugly, but we, otherwise, we won't get to have our democratic state if we don't let, you know, if we don't let the right murder all of these leftists." Schmidt is lecturing at a university by this point, and during the late war years, he'd begun to receive pay for his work as an academic. His office was broken into by what Balakrishnan describes as a band of revolutionaries, who were just like, "Yeah, a bunch of young people who are trying to like, overthrow the local government." And while he's at a café, an officer sitting next to him at a table gets assassinated. And he reacts by growing terrified of disorder. It's not just that he's horrified by these revolutionary moments that are so chaotic and scary. He also recognizes, "Oh, when

• 30:10Robert Evans?

  things fall apart, you have the chance to dramatically remake society, including the chance to remake the law and the concept of order, maybe in a way that makes more sense." And that's what he's thinking at the time. And so, it's also noteworthy that even though he doesn't like the leftist, you know, kind of uprisings that are happening, they scare him, he's not an obsessive anti-Marxist at this point either. And in fact, Balakrishnan notes that it's, there's not really any anti-Marxism in his writings from this period, which he describes as quite simply puzzling. It's like, really weird, that given how he felt about this, he didn't like, go on any rants about Marxism. It's just kind of an odd fact here. And it may- It may have something to do with the fact that he sees this as more a structural

• 30:55Robert Evans?

  thing of like, well, yeah, it's the left doing it right now. But when things collapse, opportunity is made for people of radical beliefs. And so it's the factor, the really, the reality of collapse is more to blame for than anything. And he's more interested than like ranting about the left. He's more interested in figuring out how to take advantage of those moments. Right? Now, this period of chaos would inspire his first great and truly influential book, Political Romanticism, published in 1919. This is a pre-fascist work, because again, fascism isn't really off the ground all the way yet, of what we would call fascist polemics. He's basically listing all of the ideologies that exist in

• 31:38Robert Evans?

  the world at the time, from socialism and monarchism to like liberalism, as flawed. He calls them dead romanticism, right? Like, these are, and he calls conservatism that, right? Conservatism is just this dead romantic idea, right? He, in fact, expresses nothing but contempt for conservative reactionaries, who in that period sought the Kaiser's return. So he's like, you're just looking back on a period that was never very good, and you're not serious thinkers, right? But he's also looking at the liberals in Weimar and being like, well, you're idolizing this democracy that number one was birthed in blood and number two, isn't going to succeed in fixing anything. Now, the core of Schmidt's rage

• 32:20Robert Evans?

  is reserved not for the political class, but for the kind of bohemian artists and creatives who'd made up his pre-war friend and social circle. We might see this as an early attack on the same sort of like shallow Hollywood liberal elites that would become such a hallmark of conservative politics in our era. And I want to quote from an article on the power of Carl Schmidt by Richard Cohen. Schmidt reduced and attacked all contemporary political alternatives to fascism, especially liberalism, but also socialism as mere romanticism because of their attachment to free speech, discussion, and hence parliamentarism, which Schmidt, owing to his decisionism, dismissed as empty chatter masking a deeper inability to decide. He labeled such politics romantic for the same reason, because the romantics are essentially

• 33:04Robert Evans?

  indecisive estites, fluttering from one fashion to another, always stimulated and excited, but never committed and engaged. So that's kind of interesting to me that he is, he's rejecting all of these different belief systems as based in sorts of fantasies about how things should be and not a real understanding of how people are, right? That's the conclusion he's come to at this point.

• 33:30Speaker 02

  He is a fantasizer himself. It's so interesting where like how prone he, I don't, he's not the first fascist who's prone to fantasy. And no, it is interesting, the contradictions with him of, oh, like, everything has to be rule of law, you know, like you are not a productive member of society unless you're serving the state. Also, you know, like, my wife is a, you know, like, she's not, she's Croatian, but she's, yeah, she's a countess, she's a countess, countess is, yeah.

• 33:59Robert Evans?

  It's also interesting. He has this experience of like, ah, all that matters is what you do as part of the state. And then it's like, oh, wait, that sucks ass. And it's like, yeah, because you had a romantic view of what that meant that was proven wrong. And he's still attacking his enemies for being like romantics, but unable to see that strain in himself.

• 34:16Speaker 02

  And he's like a professor, like, that's not, yeah, he's not serving the state either, you know, like, so, yeah, it's interesting.

• 34:22Robert Evans?

  No, but again, he is always looking at people, he always, he's always seeing real problems, like among this class of like artists and celebrities in Berlin, he sees how kind of hollow their, their signaling at these democratic values are and concludes, "The most important source of political vitality is the belief in justice and an indignation over injustice." He notes that what's important is not like how either of them are defined, but that they have a definition and stick to it. Like Schmidt, he's kind of got this Walter Sobchak from the Big Lebowski attitude of like, you gotta have an ethos. It doesn't matter what it is, as long as you spell it out, right?

• 35:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just write it down. As long as it's written down, it can be whatever the hell you want.

• 35:04Robert Evans?

  As long as it's written down, right?

• 35:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:06Robert Evans?

  "This book marks the last time in his career that Schmidt centered ethics in any way. For the remainder of his decades as a jurist and legal philosopher, he is interested only in power. And as the post-war years become the 20s, Mussolini marches on Rome and fascism becomes the name on every tongue. Europe begins its slow drive to the brink, and Schmidt is initially distracted by the collapse of his marriage to an extremely obvious con woman." And, you know, things sour and Karl kind of finds out that Carrie's, Carrie's been lying to him the whole time. It takes 10 years, but in 1922, he files for an annulment on the grounds of willful deceit.

• 35:42Speaker 01

  It took 10 years?

• 35:44Speaker 02

  10 years.

• 35:45Robert Evans?

  Takes 10 years to realize that he's been had.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  Carl.

• 35:48Speaker 02

  She's the hero of this, by the way.

• 35:49Robert Evans?

  She is.

• 35:50Speaker 02

  She's amazing. Yeah, she's the best.

• 35:53Robert Evans?

  I hope she has a good life after this.

• 35:55Speaker 02

  Me too.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  Carl, 10 years, my guy.

• 35:57Robert Evans?

  10 years, yeah.

• 35:59Speaker 02

  Carl, sweetheart.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  Sweetheart.

• 36:01Robert Evans?

  Oh, boy.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  Carl, babe, what's going on?

• 36:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah, my love, Carl. 10 years of like, ah, sorry, I left my real passport in my other skirt or whatever.

• 36:11Robert Evans?

  So the Catholic Church is not thrilled with his annulment. Um, and Carl proves his fundamental messiness when-

• 36:17Speaker 01

  The Catholic Church.

• 36:18Robert Evans?

  While, while he's getting annulled, while they're doing, like, having like divorce proceedings in court, he meets this 19-year-old Serbian girl named Duska, who's like the translator, who's like translating for his wife in court.

• 36:32Speaker 02

  This classic story.

• 36:34Robert Evans?

  He starts dating her.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  Oh, is this an episode of Sex in the City? Come on, Carl.

• 36:40Speaker 02

  Heard this before.

• 36:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Maring describes Carl as living in a, quote, erotic state of exception during which he continued to cheat with his second wife on multiple women, right? Like, he's, he's writing about the law, he's writing about like the importance of, you know, spelling out who you are and what you do and not deviating from it. And he is cheating on his second wife and he keeps a diary. Again, this is another thing that Fascists Today all do. He keeps a diary of every time he comes. Like, he's, he's like, he's charting his ejaculations.

• 37:14Robert Evans?

  This motherfucker would have been no fap so fucking hard. Or like, I don't know, what is it, their Speaker of the House who like talks about when he comes and doesn't with his son? Like, he's, they're all this guy.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  Don't do that. Don't do that.

• 37:28Robert Evans?

  You don't need that data.

• 37:30Speaker 02

  No.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  Maybe, maybe if you were busy or paying attention to what was going on, Carl, it wouldn't have taken you 10 years. God, stop, just, I'm gonna-

• 37:40Robert Evans?

  Stop. Just stop.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was gonna go, I was gonna go on a longer rant, but I remembered stop is a complete sentence.

• 37:46Speaker 02

  You can stop.

• 37:48Robert Evans?

  So he, he's gotten his marriage annulled to the con artist. He's dating a teenager. He's writing in a journal every time he comes. He's just living his best life.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  Jesus Christ.

• 37:58Speaker 02

  That journal may have sold better than that satire magazine.

• 38:03Robert Evans?

  It's gotta be in his letters. I mean, because it gets referenced by Mering, I am, I really wish he just included an extensive like quotation from it.

• 38:12Speaker 02

  Here's an excerpt.

• 38:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 38:13Speaker 01

  As someone who washes their hands a lot, I hope he did, because ew.

• 38:17Robert Evans?

  Nah, they didn't believe in that back then.

• 38:19Speaker 02

  I have terrible news. I guarantee you, he didn't.

• 38:21Speaker 01

  That journal is, ugh.

• 38:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah, sticky pages.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was my, unfortunately, that was my first thought.

• 38:29Robert Evans?

  No, so Schmidt, while this is all happening, after he gets divorced, he's watching the early days of the Nazi party, right? 22 is when he gets divorced, 23 is the Beer Hall putsch, which fails, and a lot of people think, well, that's it for them Nazis. And Carl is not initially interested in joining or supporting the movement. He's like, these people seem like yahoos. What he does do is increasingly analyze and start to pick out the obvious flaws in the democratic system of Weimar. And he begins to lay out in a book, a theory for exactly why liberal democracy is doomed, and how the right can take advantage of these fundamental holes in liberal democracy to smash liberalism, gain power, and destroy

• 39:12Robert Evans?

  democracy. In 1923, the year of that putsch, Schmidt writes this about the post-war Wilsonian order imposed on Europe. "The history of political and state theory in the 19th century could be summarized with a single phrase, the triumphal march of democracy. No state in the Western European cultural world withstood the extension of democratic ideals and institutions." And he writes this in like a mournful way, right? That it's almost like you can't stop it. And, you know, you've got Mussolini by this point in Italy, but Hitler is seen as like an upstart weirdo discontent. And there's this, there is this attitude that like democracy is obviously on the march. And Schmidt, he picks out, he's like looking at this the way fucking the rebels

• 39:53Robert Evans?

  are looking at the Death Star plans, and he finds a vulnerability in liberal democracy that's easy to exploit. And he writes his next book about it. That book is called The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. And it comes out alongside economic and social chaos that's gripping Weimar, right? And I'm going to quote from Richard The new crisis of democracy, he argued, stemmed precisely from its victory over monarchy. During that struggle, democracy and liberalism were basically coextensive. To believe in popular sovereignty was to believe in the necessity of the replacement of absolute monarchy with a regime characterized by elections, free public debate, and legal rights. But in Schmidt's mind, this connection is far more historical happenstance than conceptual

• 40:35Robert Evans?

  necessity, and that democracy, properly construed, cannot be seen as requiring rights and even universal suffrage in the way that liberals understand them. A government is democratic, Schmidt argues, if it bases its legitimacy on support from the people's will. But this depends on how you define the people and choose to assess their will. Every democracy depends on excluding some people, most notably foreigners, from participating in the selection of its leaders. That means, by definition, no democracy rests on universal human equality before the law. Instead, the idea of equality in democracy really means equality amongst the people in a political community that shares a certain identity and core agreements.

• 41:17Robert Evans?

  "There has never been a democracy that did not recognize the concept foreign and that could have realized the equality of all men," he wrote in a 1926 preface to the second edition of his book. "Every actual democracy rests on the principle that not only are equals equal, but unequals will not be treated equally. Democracy requires, therefore, first homogeneity, and second, if the need arises, elimination and eradication of heterogeneity." Do you see what he's saying here? Son of a bitch. Yeah, right? Son of a bitch. Right? Couple of things are fascinating to me. Number one, with the exception of the fact that he endorses this, this is essentially how anarchists talk about borders, right?

• 42:00Robert Evans?

  The maintenance of every border implies violence. And this is both physical borders, like the border between us and Mexico, and like what you're seeing right now with the attempt to legislate, like, what counts as a woman with all these anti-trans things? Both of those borders are maintained by men with guns, with violence. There's the threat of violence behind building every one of those borders. If you cross this border, or at least cross- Cross it in the wrong way, force will be used against you. Every democracy does this. And it does this not just in terms of who can enter the country, but who gets to vote. And so even if you have, you're saying nice things in your constitution about these are universal rights of men. These are rights that extend to everyone. These aren't just rights that extend to people who are citizens in the country. These are universal rights that our society universally recognizes.

• 42:45Robert Evans?

  That doesn't necessarily mean squat. Because what you do as the reactionary is you find that border, wherever it exists, and you start pushing inward. And as you start pushing inward from that border, you will start fracturing the democratic consensus that exists until you can destroy democracy. And that's how you gain power as a reactionary movement within a liberal. That's how you destroy liberalism. You find the border that they placed and you start pushing inwards. Right? That's what Carl realizes and that's what he lays out. And it works today as well as it did back then.

• 43:26Speaker 02

  She's got the chills. Jesus. Yeah. Oh, boy. Oh, boy.

• 43:32Robert Evans?

  It's great.

• 43:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's wonderful. It's. It's right. It's correct. I mean.

• 43:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah, no, he has accurately identified the flaw in the system and how to exploit it. He writes, quote, "Democracy and liberalism could be allied to each other for a time, but as soon as it achieves power, liberal democracy must decide between its elements. The crisis of the modern state arises from the fact that no state can realize a mass democracy, a democracy of mankind." Maybe he'll prove right about that in the future. Maybe he won't, but we've never tried. Right? Ultimately, we haven't.

• 44:09Robert Evans?

  The most potent part of Cohen's essay, he describes Schmidt's academic work in the late 1920s as creating a blueprint, quote, "Adaptable virtually anywhere for using reactionary politics to gain control of and destroy democracy from the inside while pretending to be in service of that democracy." Now, elements of this had been discussed by several thinkers, particularly in the context of the US during the era of slavery. But Schmidt's big, one of his big contributions is that he recognizes race and religion can be used to push that border in, but they don't matter. That's not the only way to delineate the enemy. You, all that matters is that you are delineating an enemy, right? And pulling them out of being considered part of the body politic.

• 44:52Robert Evans?

  They can be Jews, they can be black, they could be trans, they can be whoever. But what matters ultimately is that you're picking an enemy and you are identifying them as not a part of us, right? And that's, that's the ballgame, right? And less than, or And less than conniving, you know? And a danger to us, right? Yes, right. So Schmidt argued, you know, not only that this is how you manipulate democracy, because unlike what liberals say, exclusion is at the core of democratic politics. He writes this in 1932 in a book considered to be perhaps the most important intellectual work of fascism's birth era, The Concept of the Political.

• 45:34Robert Evans?

  Quote, "Every religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis transforms into a political one if it is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively according to friend and enemy." So he has first this recognition of that, like liberalism inherently, liberal democracy always draws a border, you start pushing in from that border. And then he, he refines this to the idea that like all politics is about defining friend and enemy, right? And that's how you gain power. And that's how you enshrine your power, right? And once you have, once you have identified a group of citizens as the enemy and you gain power, you exclude them from the franchise. You turn them into a domestic enemy, which you can then purge and destroy, and that's

• 46:18Robert Evans?

  how you maintain power. Per an article in The New Statesman by Samuel Earl, "The specific distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy," Schmidt declared. His fellow anti-democratic and decorated soldier Ernst Younger described what followed as "a mind that silently explodes." For Schmidt, the friend-enemy antithesis was integral for politics in three senses. The enemy needed to be something different and alien. Opposing such an enemy was the essence of identity. And in the implicit combat that followed, these enemies posed an existential threat. The friend-enemy and combat concepts received their real meaning precisely because they referred to the real possibility of physical killing, Schmidt wrote. War was therefore an ever-present possibility.

• 47:04Robert Evans?

  And again, the Nazis are doing a lot of this before he writes about it. But number one, his initial work on sort of this strategy of how to push it on the border influences how the Nazis proceed. But also, he is, he is explaining what they're doing in an intellectual way that is accurate and, and doing so in a way that's also not ideological in that he's explaining and describing an ideology, but he's not doing it as a Nazi propagandist. He's doing it as an academic, right? And he's doing it in a way that provides a blueprint for other people.

• 47:39Speaker 02

  That's such an interesting distinction between him and Goebbels, or I feel like that would be, you know, like kind of the, I don't want to say lazy, because this is my, I'm making the comparison, but like my lazy comparison where it's, like Goebbels, obviously, all right, let's, it's propaganda, you know, like there's more quote unquote spice on it, where this with Schmidt is just, this is how it works. This is why it works.

• 48:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 48:02Speaker 02

  And this is why it will work.

• 48:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And you do get kind of at the end of this book, he does give, you get a hint of his developing ideology. And part of it, why, why he hates liberalism is that liberalism is an onslaught against the political. It seeks to replace conflict, which he views as natural, with economic competition and quote perpetual discussion. And that this doesn't end in a better society, but like kind of a destruction of something important at the soul of humanity, right? Which is this crusade against an enemy, right? That we almost, we need this as people. We need to have enemies, which is a fundamental part of fascism, right? We need enemies in order to be fully human, like an enemy to fight, to destroy, to rally against. Now Schmidt was not an early Nazi.

• 48:48Robert Evans?

  He was not a particular admirer of Hitler. In the early 1920s, he described Hitler as a hysterical. In 1932, the same year he published the concept of the political, he argued that the Weimar government could and should use the military to destroy Nazism. But as the Nazis began taking power, he changed his tune quickly from a mix of, you know, he wants to protect himself, but most importantly, because high ranking Nazis start to take him. Seriously, as a thinker. And he had been doing okay, his books had been doing better. But he really starts to become famous because there's some high up Nazis who like what he has to say. And his particular backer, the guy who's going to make him, give him the opportunity to be the rich intellectual.

• 49:30Robert Evans?

  He's always wanted to be, right? Who's going to make his life possible is Herman Gering, right? Now, Gering is about to be, he's this World War One pilot, like fighter pilot hero. He literally takes over like the Red Baron squadron after he gets like shot down. That's what Gering does in the war. He gets fucked up and horribly injured during the Munich Beer Hall putsch and addicted to painkillers, relatable. There it is. But when Hitler takes power, he's the Reich's marshal, right? He's going to lose favor throughout the Third Reich, but he is on paper, the guy who if Hitler dies is supposed to take over. Right? So that's the degree to which like Gering is held in esteem at the start of the Reich. And he takes a liking to Schmidt's work. He's like, this guy, I, I, this guy gets it.

• 50:14Robert Evans?

  This guy, and we need to bring this guy in and have him be like our court philosopher, right? He's kind of become, because Nazi intelligentsia had been following him for a while. He's a little bit of like a Curtis Yarvin figure, right? Where he doesn't really have as clear a goal as Yarvin does. But there are a lot of these guys who become Nazi intelligentsia who are following him for a while and, and respect him for a while. For his part, Karl's part, once it becomes clear that the Nazis are going to win. He's like, well, if some of these guys like me, I can get rich and powerful. That's what I've always wanted. So he starts sucking up and he writes that Gering was the right type for these times. As he becomes a darling for the far right, Schmidt continues to live a life well out of line

• 50:58Robert Evans?

  with the stated morals of the movement for which he is becoming the chief intellectual theoretician. Per the Claremont Review of Books. Guilt and eros combined for Schmidt in Karl Theodor Dreher's silent movie, The Passion of Joan of Arc. With an almost sadistic use of close ups, Dreher depicts the doomed heroine, a daughter of God, charged with being a child of the devil as she pleads that she has only fought for God and country. In 1928, Schmidt watched the film a dozen times. Mering reports that on several occasions in both Berlin and Rome, he picked up a prostitute to watch it with him. It seems that his longing for redemption from his own psychic turmoil fueled a need for a higher absolute obligation, which could only come from a commitment to the law promulgated by God or by the state. So there's this, this attitude that maybe it's because he's got this kind of compulsive

• 51:43Robert Evans?

  sexuality that he can't just be like, eh, people just fuck, you know? He has to, he has to like condemn himself and find absolution in this idea of law or the state as God as representing some higher natural truth in order to gain absolution. It's also just funny that he's constantly watching this Joan of Arc movie while picking up prostitutes. Like, you wanna go watch Joan of Arc?

• 52:11Robert Evans?

  Speaking of watching silent films, here's-

• 52:16Speaker 01

  Makes no sense. That made no sense.

• 52:17Robert Evans?

  I got nothing. I got nothing. I don't know how to do a fucking ad transition in these episodes. Look, go to Rome, uh, meet somebody nice, watch a movie about a French lady getting tortured, you know? Have fun.

• 52:29Speaker 01

  You become fake pope once and you no longer know how to do an ad transition.

• 52:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, the popes, popes don't need ads because they have all that gold buried under the Vatican, Sophie. That's right.

• 52:44Robert Evans?

  This ad is brought to you by ViiV Healthcare, the makers of Devoto Dolutigrevir Lamivudine. If you're living with HIV, do learn about Devoto. Devoto is a complete HIV treatment by prescription only for some people 12 and older. Your doctor will determine if Devoto was right for you. Most HIV pills contain three or four medicines. Devoto is as effective with just two. No other complete HIV pill contains fewer medicines than Devoto.

• 53:07Speaker 05

  It is unknown if Devoto is safe and effective if you have HIV and hepatitis B. If you have Hep B, don't stop Devoto without talking to your doctor, as it may get worse or harder to treat. Don't take Devoto if you're allergic to its ingredients, or taking Dofetilide due to serious or life-threatening side effects. If you have a rash or allergic reaction symptoms, stop Devoto and get medical help right away. Other serious or life-threatening side effects include severe liver problems and lactic acid buildup. If you're female or obese, you may be more at risk. Tell your doctor about your medicines or supplements, medical conditions, liver or kidney problems, pregnancy, breastfeeding, or planned pregnancy.

• 53:43Robert Evans?

  Do ask your doctor about fewer medicines. Visit devoto.com or call 1-877-844-8872.

• 53:50Speaker 04

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 54:23Robert Evans?

  We're back. Man, I wonder, they gotta have a lot of gold buried under there, right? Like a crazy amount, like-

• 54:29Speaker 02

  Oh, in the Vatican?

• 54:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah, like enough to ruin the, like, the price of gold worldwide if they ever put it onto the market. Yeah.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  I don't think so, because there were so many different things where, like, things were getting stolen. I think they would have, there's probably secret gold, but I don't, I don't think it's-

• 54:43Robert Evans?

  There's gotta be secret gold.

• 54:44Speaker 01

  -as obvious as there.

• 54:47Robert Evans?

  Well-

• 54:47Speaker 02

  What, what do they use for all the lawsuits? Like, it has to be-

• 54:50Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. They had a lot lying around for that.

• 54:55Robert Evans?

  What if we all Naruto run into the Vatican archives and just try to, like, see what we can get?

• 55:01Speaker 01

  I would have so much fun going to the Vatican archives.

• 55:04Robert Evans?

  Find the secret sequel to the New Testament where Palpatine returns? Uh, I'm excited. I think we can, I think we can make this happen.

• 55:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, use your new power as fake Pope.

• 55:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's right. That's right. I'll tell the Swiss Guard to stand down.

• 55:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:20Speaker 02

  Their goofy outfits.

• 55:22Robert Evans?

  Stupid ass outfits.

• 55:23Speaker 01

  I'll be right behind you as you do that.

• 55:28Robert Evans?

  In April of 1933, Schmidt joined the Nazi Party officially. In May, he published an article that is generally considered to be the blueprint for the legal expulsion of German intellectuals who had unacceptable political or racial characteristics. Quote, "Germany has spat them out for all time," he said. And he's talking specifically about Albert Einstein, right? Schmidt authors the blueprint for kicking Einstein and other thinkers permanently out of the Reich, right? And in describing them as enemies, right? And for him, this is a political term. And this is about, this is one year after he breaks off his friendship with Eisler. But he does write, "You as an individual can be friends with someone who is a political enemy." Because again, that's a political state.

• 56:12Robert Evans?

  You have to treat them as an enemy when doing politics, but it doesn't mean you can't like them personally.

• 56:17Speaker 02

  Like socially.

• 56:18Robert Evans?

  But you're also accepting that it means killing them at a stage. So maybe you can't. I don't know, man.

• 56:23Speaker 02

  Killing them politically.

• 56:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 56:25Speaker 02

  Not, not as friends. Yeah.

• 56:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So.

• 56:30Speaker 02

  The logic that check out?

• 56:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. I mean, as much as anything this fucker says does. So through most of the 20s, liberals and liberalism were the center of most of Schmidt's rhetorical ire. But Jews grew more central as time went on. Now, we've already covered that he certainly imbibed the racial antisemitism of the era. And he had occasional flings of bigotry during times of stress and depression. But he also spoke glowingly of several Jews in his life. Most crucially, he was completely dependent economically upon the kindness of a Jewish family who treated him as a second son. Right? Like, that's a big deal in this period of time, is that like, there's these, this family that keeps him alive. But now that he was a prominent Nazi academic, whose writings were not just cited, but were being used to make law under the Third Reich.

• 57:16Robert Evans?

  He starts being critiqued by like Jewish academics. I mean, but this happens before the Third Reich is established. And this is part of like what radicalizes him is that in the late 20s, when it becomes clear that he's like writing in favor of elements of fascism. There's several different Jewish academics critique his book, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. And he goes on a rant and complains, "Four Jews against one Christian. They attack me in all the journals and no one notices what's going on." So that's a big part, if you're wondering like, what's the missing piece here between him like dumping his Jewish friends and going full Nazi? Well, it's because some Jewish professors say mean things about this book he writes. Later that year, a Jewish professor was being considered for hiring by his university.

• 58:01Robert Evans?

  And Schmidt wrote in to call his would be colleague a disgusting, craven dilettante Jew. So by the mid 20s, he's very consistently racist, but he's still friends with Isler, right? Up until the 30s, and he's still able to make exceptions in his head. Unlike most Nazis, the justification he gives for his animus is not racial, right? He is someone who is like, if I think his belief initially at least is that like, well, Jews can convert and stuff, and then I don't have to treat them that way. But his issue with them is that they tend to be liberal, right? And so he interprets the battle that he is, he's laying out the alliance, how you win a battle against liberal democracy, and he describes it as a battle against the Jewish

• 58:44Robert Evans?

  spirit. Per an article by Benjamin Ballant for the Claremont Review of Books, "His friend-enemy distinction now fed into the contrast he drew between the homogeneous German Volk and the alien Jew. He hastily severed his friendships and associations with Jews, including his longtime publisher Ludwig Fugtwanger and the young scholar of Hobbes and Spinoza, Leo Strauss, whom he had recommended to the Rockefeller Foundation for a fellowship that allowed Strauss to leave Germany a year before. By the early 30s, as he moved from scholarship to polemics, Schmidt no longer directed his counter-revolutionary fervor against Weimar anarchism." And by anarchism, he means the fact that the state doesn't work very well. So he cuts off all of these academic friends, including, have you heard of Leo Strauss?

• 59:27Robert Evans?

  I know the, yeah, I've heard of the name, yeah. Very influential. All of the people behind George W. Bush were Strausians. And when I say that, I'm talking about guys like Bill Kristol, who's now like anti-Trump. Bill Kristol is a Straussian. The Strausians are the neo-cons. Strauss is initially very close with Schmidt, and Schmidt influences Strauss, and Strauss influences Schmidt. Schmidt is basically his mentor for a while, right? He helps him get this scholarship, right? And then Strauss comes to the United States and he becomes a core intellectual mind behind neoconservatism, right? So again, the way in which this guy, even though like, obviously, there's no love lost between them once Schmidt goes full Nazi, because Strauss

• 1:00:08Robert Evans?

  is Jewish, right? So, once the Third Reich gets into power and Schmidt has the chance to actually be making laws- He warps his personal politics in order to fit, you know, the regime that's now in place. No longer does he talk about the state working towards some sort of natural law. Instead, he begins to argue that political sovereignty is constituted in the will of the leader, or dictator, who was sovereign and who had no kind of check and could abide no kind of check on his power. Per an article on the power of Carl Schmidt by Richard Cohen, "The dictator's will is arbitrary and must be arbitrary. This is not a fault for the fascist, but the highest virtue.

• 1:00:50Robert Evans?

  The dictator's will is a pure will, unchecked and unregulated by any exterior consideration beyond itself, like a god, like the god. Only as such is it a truly sovereign will. The dictator can never be challenged, in other words, because there are no grounds upon which to challenge him. Thus, any challenge, any criticism, no matter how rational, realistic, or good-willed, is by definition betrayal. From the standpoint of all allegedly legitimizing authorities, whether ethical, populist, hereditary, religious, aesthetic, utilitarian, economic, or what have you, the dictator's decision is beyond reproach. Force, power, and might are the dictator's first and final resort, and submission is the only appropriate response. Rule, call it law or not, is to dictate order and command.

• 1:01:35Robert Evans?

  Thus, the ubiquitous military trappings of fascism, however ludicrous, the dictator wearing battle fatigues or dressed uniforms adorned with medals, the pomp and ceremony, the military parades, and the displays of weapons in times of quiet as well as war. Without criteria or standards, the dictator is sovereignty itself, no matter what he says or does, or the reverse, precisely in what he says and does, as he says and does it, always at the moment of his willing." So he's gone from "the only legitimate states have a constitution that lays out what the rules are, and they follow that constitution, and law is always working towards some sort of natural law," to "the law is whatever the leader says it is," right? Human will creates law, right?

• 1:02:20Robert Evans?

  The will of a specific human, put in charge of a people, creates law, right? That's where Schmidt has ended, you know? Now that democracy has been destroyed, now that Hitler's in power, and he's working backwards to a degree at this point from the fact that Hitler has taken power, right? But- This is again, like, he's, he's, he's kind of describing what's happening to some extent after the fact, but he's also, he comes to understand and justify sovereignty as the permanent state of emergency or a state of exception, right? Fascism is like the normalization legalization of arbitrary power. So we even do see some of like his early thinking on like how judges work and the

• 1:03:03Robert Evans?

  kind of arbitrariness at the center of the legal system. Like, this is where he winds up, right? That this is kind of the ultimate political system. It's great.

• 1:03:14Speaker 02

  It is interesting, too, where he would talk about how like democracy was, you know, it's, it only works because of the eventual force that can be applied, you know? Where there it's eventual with a dictator just wearing fatigues, dressed like a general, you know, with the military parades. It's not implied, it's not eventual, it's immediate.

• 1:03:36Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 1:03:37Speaker 02

  You know?

• 1:03:37Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 1:03:37Speaker 02

  It's a very, yeah, the imagery really drives it home.

• 1:03:40Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 1:03:41Speaker 02

  More so, right?

• 1:03:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And thanks to Göring's influence, he gets made president of the Union of National Socialist Jurists. In 1934, after the Night of Long Knives, Schmidt plays a role in justifying and legitimating what had happened. You know, this looks like and is an illegal series of murders committed, you know, to settle political scores. But Schmidt argues this is actually perfectly legal, right? He publishes an article called "The Führer Protects the Law," which argues that what Hitler had done was the highest justice available, right? Quote, "The Führer protects the law against the worst forms of abuse, when in the moment of danger, he immediately creates law by force of his character as Führer as the supreme legal authority."

• 1:04:27Robert Evans?

  And again, I think we have to look at maybe where we're headed with some of these courts questioning the decisions being made by Trump by dictat. This is already what Trump's people believe. Trump creates law by force of his character, right? And, you know, Schmidt has provided a justification for purging people in situations like this, right? Because the Führer has to protect the law by carrying out illegal acts of violence, because he then creates a new law. And so the concept of law fundamentally is protected by the Führer doing this.

• 1:05:06Speaker 02

  So there is no lawlessness.

• 1:05:08Robert Evans?

  There's no law.

• 1:05:08Speaker 02

  There's never, there's never a gap. It's the new dictator's law.

• 1:05:12Robert Evans?

  There's lawlessness if there's a conflict, right?

• 1:05:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:05:16Robert Evans?

  Between the Fuhrer and power. That's lawlessness, right? And that's what Hitler was fighting against, right? That's why he was protecting the law by doing what he did.

• 1:05:26Robert Evans?

  He celebrates, like when the Nuremberg laws come in, he describes it as proof that the National Socialist state is a just state. And then in 1936, he helps convene a conference on how to get rid of Jewish influence in German law. He gives a speech where he blames the Jews for hollowing out the German, healthy, volkish, German way of thinking of the state. And he calls for a purification of libraries that includes a separate system of citations for Jewish authors, right? So there, he is explicitly endorsing book bannings, the purging of books written by friends and colleagues of his, a separate way of classifying them because obviously Jewish law is a danger to good Germans, right?

• 1:06:08Speaker 02

  Well, and they made fun of him. They made, they hurt his feelings.

• 1:06:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and they made fun of him. They talk shit about his, his book.

• 1:06:13Speaker 02

  His awful writing, right?

• 1:06:14Robert Evans?

  So he is deeply complicit in the early Third Reich and in the purging of intellectuals and people getting put, he's incredibly complicit in all of this. Now, unfortunately for Schmidt, this in 1936, this, this speech he gives is going to be like the high watermark of his power in the Third Reich. Because once the Nazis are running everything, they're like, we don't really need an academic with a mind of his own, right?

• 1:06:38Speaker 02

  We got it.

• 1:06:38Robert Evans?

  We've got it now. We're done thinking, you know? And this guy, he's not really loyal to Hitler, right? So in December of 36, the SS newspaper publishes a hit piece on him, accusing him of being a Hegelian, which is basically true, and a false anti Semite, which really isn't. He talked to friends about like fleeing Germany. He was like, maybe I need to leave. Maybe this is dangerous. But it's not something he ever seriously considered. And he does have some defenders who will be like, well, look, he thought about leaving. And like, I don't know if that counts to me.

• 1:07:13Robert Evans?

  Hannah Arendt would later write about Schmidt's ouster from the Nazi party as "a fairly standard move: the replacing of sympathetic but skilled people with toadies who are utterly loyal to the system even if they're not very good at anything." Quote from Arendt, and this is, I think, an important one, especially for right now. "Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty." Nothing familiar there?

• 1:07:45Speaker 02

  No, I'm not picking up on it.

• 1:07:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:48Speaker 02

  What an old idea.

• 1:07:49Robert Evans?

  Any common themes, yes. What an ancient idea Hannah had.

• 1:07:52Speaker 02

  That's so dated.

• 1:07:54Robert Evans?

  Now, he was never, Schmidt is never hounded by the regime or punished. He's never in serious danger. He's out of the, any kind of inner circle here. He's on, on the kind of the outskirts, looking in again. But he maintains his position. He keeps being employed at the university. He's a prominent academic. And he lives well up and through most of the war years. But by the time the war ends and the Allies begin to occupy the ruins of the Third Reich, his last public identity had been as a Nazi intellectual who was participating in the purging of intellectuals. And so, he gets arrested by the Americans in September of 1945. He's locked up for like a month or so. And, you know, he's, he's trying to put a brave face on it.

• 1:08:38Robert Evans?

  He tells his wife, like, "I'm not gonna collapse like some of these other guys who killed themselves or whatever. Like, I'm, I'm gonna hold up, you know? They'll, they'll realize I'm not guilty of anything." And unfortunately, he's kinda right, you know? He gets released. He gets arrested again in March and April of 1947. And he's brought to Nuremberg, where he gets interrogated by the US Chief Counsel at Nuremberg, Robert Kempner, four times over the course of about a month or so, five weeks. And, you know, he's basically, Kempner's trying to figure out, is there anything we can go after this guy for? Like, how much is he responsible for? How many crimes did he directly commit? And Schmidt is like, "Look, I wasn't trying to support all the horrible things the Nazis do, you know? I'm not a Nazi."

• 1:09:22Robert Evans?

  Nazi ever, really. I'm an intellectual adventurer. That's how he describes himself is like, look, I was just asking questions. Yeah, he's such a piece of shit. We should have shot this guy in the fucking face.

• 1:09:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, immediately.

• 1:09:35Robert Evans?

  I want to read a little transcript of his interview with Kempner that makes for fascinating reading because this is Kempner being like, what the fuck do you mean by intellectual adventurer? I wanted to give the term national socialism my own meaning, Schmidt said. Kempner, Hitler had a national socialism and you had a national socialism. Schmidt, I felt superior. Kempner, you felt superior to Adolf Hitler. Schmidt, intellectually, of course. He was to me so uninteresting that I do not want to talk about that at all. When did you renounce the devil? Kempner asked. 1936. And I believe that he didn't like Hitler, right? Because he doesn't, he's never an intellectual respecter of Hitler particularly, but this is bullshit,

• 1:10:18Robert Evans?

  right? Like, you participated in purging your colleagues. You were so psyched that people were listening to you. That's all that matters. You only renounced the devil because the SS got angry at you and you lost your influence, right? Like, this man never had a change of heart.

• 1:10:35Speaker 02

  I'm thinking of who Schmidt, I might be getting ahead of ourselves, of who he would favor out of a Hitler and then you have a Trump. Like, who was the ideal? I think it might be Putin might be the ideal one for him.

• 1:10:48Robert Evans?

  Fascinating that you bring that up.

• 1:10:52Robert Evans?

  This brief after-war period marked the last time Schmidt would discuss his support of the Nazis directly. He returned to Plattenburg and continued to write, although he was fired from his professorship. He found no trouble getting published, though. And once around 20 years had passed, his name starts getting tossed around by conservative intellectuals around the world. First in whispered tones, but then in an increasingly brazen manner. Schmidt dies in 1985, and he lives to see the beginning of his second rise to prominence. And one of them, you've heard of Marine Le Pen over in France, she just got incarcerated for a bunch of shit, but she's like the leader of their fascist party. Her father founded the party. Her father is a Schmidt acolyte.

• 1:11:35Robert Evans?

  Her father, the whole blueprint of the French far right is directly taken from Schmidt. That's why it's so centered on immigrants and immigration, right? Like, they are very consciously, the French, I think it's the national party that Le Pen leads, is, their whole blueprint is Schmidt. Schmidt is the guy, like, they are openly citing and quoting his writings at the very start of that party. Now, more to the point, there's another fella who becomes one of his acolytes, who, like, finds Schmidt's writing and is like, "Oh, this is a really good blueprint for how to get in power as a reactionary movement and destroy a nascent liberal democracy." And that guy is named Alexander Dugin.

• 1:12:17Robert Evans?

  Now, Dugin is an ultra-nationalist who is seen as the primary political philosopher of the Russian New Right, and he's often called Putin's court philosopher, right? These ideas are also a major backbone of how Putin gets into power, of like, the strategy he uses, and how a lot of his adherents in the New, Russian New Right see what they're doing. There's, he's, he's in the French far right, he's in the Russian far right that kind of coalesces around Putin. And in the US, the main vehicle for Schmidt's ideas getting into the halls of power is through the work of a thinker who had once been his colleague, Leo Strauss. Strauss, a Jewish scientist, fled to France when Hitler took power on a Rockefeller scholarship, and Karl Schmidt had been his advisor.

• 1:13:00Robert Evans?

  There's a very good piece in the website Libmod that traces out the connections here. There are very close ties between the conservative political scientist Patrick Deenin, Catholic University of Notre Dame, Indiana, Strauss adept and winner of the Leo Strauss Award for Best Dissertation, and Vice President J.D. Vance. And he provides a couple of quotes from Schmidt and from Vance. One is, this is a Schmidt quote from 1922, "Authority proves that it does not need to be right in order to be right." And J.D. Vance saying, "Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power." And you might even add in some of those statements that Vance made about, like, Haitian, like, literal lies about Haitian refugees, where it's like, it doesn't matter what's true, you make it true by having power, right?

• 1:13:43Robert Evans?

  There's another quote here from Schmidt in 32, "The rule of law means nothing other than the legitimization of a certain status quo." And these are all very, you could hear basically these fucking quotes being trumpeted, you know, among Trumpists, among these like unitary executive theory guys. And that's kind of, it's both, Schmidt's thinking first starts to influence the American right in a major way with like the neo-cons who are kind of influenced by him partly through Strauss. Guys like Bill Kristol, right? And David Brooks, right? These guys who are very influenced by Strauss. But by the time Trump comes around and things have gotten too extreme for them, the, like people like Curtis Yarvin will just quote Carl Schmidt.

• 1:14:27Robert Evans?

  He's a huge fan of Schmidt. Like he brings him up constantly. J.D. Vance is fans of a Strauss scholar who himself is influenced by Schmidt. Like Schmidt's thinking is all throughout the entire right-wing project worldwide, you know, from France to Russia to the United States. There's pieces of him everywhere, even though most people are not taking his work directly, but they're influenced by thinkers who were influenced by Schmidt and who adopted some of his ideas for their own. And most importantly, the basic strategy that Schmidt laid out, I mean, unfortunately still works quite well. Yeah.

• 1:15:03Speaker 02

  Crazy.

• 1:15:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:05Speaker 02

  Crazy.

• 1:15:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Great. Anyway.

• 1:15:09Speaker 02

  Anyway.

• 1:15:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:11Speaker 02

  Anyway, I'm sure that'll go away soon. I'm sure we have nothing to worry about.

• 1:15:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I think we've got it. I think we'll knock it out. You know.

• 1:15:21Speaker 02

  So this J.D. Vance guy, he's not high up in the government or anything, right?

• 1:15:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah, no, no, no. I haven't heard of him in years.

• 1:15:26Speaker 02

  No, me neither.

• 1:15:27Robert Evans?

  Haven't heard of him in years.

• 1:15:28Speaker 02

  By the way, you should read his jizz book.

• 1:15:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah. His cum diary?

• 1:15:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's fantastic.

• 1:15:35Robert Evans?

  Oh, man. Yeah, the J.D. Vance cum diary is a real, quite a publication.

• 1:15:40Speaker 02

  It is. It is.

• 1:15:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Well, I don't know. How are you feeling at the end of this, Blake?

• 1:15:47Speaker 02

  Well, I've, um, I mean, bad, but I do also feel like I learned a lot. It does explain. It is very interesting to learn how we got to where we are today.

• 1:15:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:58Speaker 02

  And the, the scariest part is, or one of the many scary parts is that people, it's not hidden anymore. You know?

• 1:16:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:09Speaker 02

  The, and even with J D Vance, you don't have to go on a long sleuthing trip to figure out that he is a Schmidt guy. It's

• 1:16:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:18Speaker 02

  Two, two, one degree of separation.

• 1:16:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah, one degree of two. Yeah, maybe.

• 1:16:22Speaker 02

  Strauss degree. And some people are, like you said, just outright quoting him.

• 1:16:27Robert Evans?

  Schmidt, like Yarvin, who's also connected to Vance. And yet it is interesting that like in an earlier era, these neo cons who now, in a lot of cases have aligned themselves with anti-Trump stuff are still, they're, they're the guys who are first pushing unitary executive theory, which is like what leads to the president's basically a king. Right? Like that's the end result. And they're, Strauss is a big influence on them there. Right? And then we get to this point where you can, you don't have to just quote Strauss. You don't have to water it down at all. You can just go pure Schmidt, baby.

• 1:16:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Right to the source. I, I wonder, my, I guess my question for you is, I wonder how much Schmidt would value an outwardly intelligent dictator? And if he would even necessarily see value in that where, you know, Hitler was like incredibly charismatic, obviously. No one would say that he was a fucking genie. I mean, Schmidt wouldn't say that he was a genius. Trump is obviously not, is, is outwardly stupid, but very charismatic, obviously, and can speak very well.

• 1:17:30Robert Evans?

  He's got a kind of cunning that's very effective for what he needs to do. Yeah.

• 1:17:34Speaker 02

  Yes. I, I wonder, you know, like you have Saddam, who is his, like, he had the dress, you know, like he looked the part like, I, I do wonder if Putin, uh, do you know of any like outwardly, you know, even like faux intellectual, you know, like, oh, actually, I mean, we were talking about earlier, Schmidt is a very smart guy. He's just horrendously evil. So can you think of any dictators who were like learned dictators?

• 1:18:02Robert Evans?

  I, it depends on what you. You mean by learned, right? Cause like, you know, Stalin makes a lot of hideous mistakes that cost a lot of people their lives, particularly in the early stages of the fighting with the Nazis. But like, is an educated man who like has read extensively and, you know, like, he's not like a, he's not like a rube, right? You know, Tito was, I don't, I know, don't know nearly as much about his actual education, was clearly an incredibly intelligent person, right? Just the degree of success he had, both as a dictator and as an insurgent leader proves him. Like Fidel Castro, right? That's a smart man, right?

• 1:18:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a good point.

• 1:18:43Robert Evans?

  It's a man who has a great degree of cunning, you know, and understanding. And I do think there are very smart people around, I don't think Peter Thiel's dumb. I think he's nuts and I think he has some blind spots and a freak, but he understands how to do certain things very well. There's kinds of intelligence that he has. I think Trump has kinds of intelligence. He's been working at this for 20 something years. So I, I don't know, like learned, I think they, I think, I guess the answer is they tend to learn the things they need to learn to get where they want to go, right?

• 1:19:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, they have expertise.

• 1:19:19Robert Evans?

  Right. Does Donald Trump, is he, does he have like a great knowledge of all of the things that, you know, you and I might respect being informed of? No, but he knew enough to figure out how to dismantle democracy and how to get people around him who knew more about it, right? And so I guess I'd say dictators tend to be learned in the things they need to be learned in to become dictators.

• 1:19:40Speaker 02

  Right. No, I think that's perfectly put. Yeah.

• 1:19:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:42Speaker 02

  I agree with that.

• 1:19:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Anyway.

• 1:19:46Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:19:47Speaker 02

  Is this how all these episodes?

• 1:19:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:19:51Speaker 02

  Jesus Christ, just us mumbling to ourselves.

• 1:19:54Robert Evans?

  Fuck.

• 1:19:54Speaker 02

  I don't know what the fuck to do. Yeah. Like, where do I even move?

• 1:19:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:59Speaker 02

  Canada's an option.

• 1:20:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:02Speaker 02

  Is it Portugal? Do I become a Portuguese windbag? Is that my next?

• 1:20:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah, become your, get, become a Portuguese windbag.

• 1:20:07Speaker 01

  You guys, it's fine. Robert will let us into the Vatican.

• 1:20:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. The Vatican, that's where we're all gonna hide.

• 1:20:15Speaker 01

  With all the gold.

• 1:20:16Robert Evans?

  Uh, okay. So I don't know. I tend to think what you should do is

• 1:20:28Robert Evans?

  Right. Um, yeah, and you can find a lot of the blueprints you'll need on the internet. Anyway, uh, episode is over. Blake, uh, you want to plug anything before we go?

• 1:20:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would. Uh, I have a jizz book of my own. No, I would like to promote, um, August 1st, I'm going to be doing stand-up in Philadelphia. Also, uh, at Blake Wexler on all social media. Um, if you could follow me there, I would love that. And I'm doing a bike ride to raise money for autism research, autism awareness. Um, and that, uh, if you can spare anything, it's, times are tough right now, but, um, any donation, if you can do it, would be great. It's, uh, that link is in my bio. And I have a stand-up comedy special called Daddy Long Legs, which is available for free on YouTube. And this was a blast. I, I have so much respect for both of you. This is, this is, I don't, I don't know if I've ever said this sentence. This is a great pod. Like, this is a great show.

• 1:21:21Speaker 02

  This is a fantastic show.

• 1:21:23Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:21:23Speaker 02

  And, um, no one, no one does what you do. So, yeah, I appreciate being a part of it.

• 1:21:27Robert Evans?

  A couple will do.

• 1:21:28Speaker 01

  We have the Pope. We have the new Pope.

• 1:21:30Robert Evans?

  We have the Pope. You do have the new Pope.

• 1:21:32Speaker 02

  And that's how you got elected by your fellow colleagues Cardinals. Yeah.

• 1:21:35Robert Evans?

  Uh, if you are a...

• 1:21:37Speaker 01

  Oh my God, there needs to be a podcast conclave. Oh my God. Oh my God.

• 1:21:43Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah. You have to see who the podcasting Pope is.

• 1:21:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. And just like the...

• 1:21:47Speaker 02

  A Popecast.

• 1:21:48Robert Evans?

  It better not be one of the Pod Save guys, or I'm doing a schism.

• 1:21:51Speaker 01

  I mean, we would, thinking about it, it would have to be in that, that guy Sean, Sean Malin, who just, who has the Podcast Pantheon book coming out later this year. That we're, we're in that book, so we get to be in the conclave.

• 1:22:03Robert Evans?

  If there's a, if it doesn't go my way, I'm moving to Avignon and I'm going to create like a, a counter conclave. And we're gonna have us an anti-podcast Pope.

• 1:22:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. The fuckery we can get. Oh my God, Robert. We have, it has to happen. It has to happen.

• 1:22:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. Pope Save America.

• 1:22:21Speaker 01

  We could do, we could do so much fuckery. Oh, I'm plotting, I'm plotting. Okay. Anyways, Blake, Blake, thank you so much for being here. This was so lovely. Robert.

• 1:22:30Speaker 02

  Oh, I loved it.

• 1:22:30Speaker 01

  Robert, that was horrifying. Did we do it? Did we do the podcast?

• 1:22:33Robert Evans?

  We did the podcast. Let's go away.

• 1:22:35Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:22:38Speaker 07

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedi.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com/behindthebastards.

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