Pod Insights Behind the Bastards Part One: Elizabeth Dilling: The Original Candace Owens About this episode Robert sits down with the magnanimous Katy Stoll to discuss the predecessor of Phyllis Schlafly, Candace Owens and Alex Jones: Elizabeth Dilling
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Transcript 11,809 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Speaker 00 Cool Zone Media.
0:05 Robert Evans? Welcome back to Behind the Bastards. This is not the first episode of the podcast we've done this year during the official summer, but it's basically the official legal Christian summer, right, guys? Team? Isn't it? It feels hot as hell outside today.
0:18 Speaker 00 It's gonna, it's, but, but, but it only for the next couple of days and then it's gonna be in the 60s.
0:23 Robert Evans? Oh, is it?
0:24 Speaker 00 Yeah.
0:24 Robert Evans? Well, then.
0:25 Speaker 00 And then, and then, and then Mother Nature will water my garden and I'm thrilled.
0:29 Robert Evans? Great. I'm glad that Oregon won't burn down yet. Yes, yes, please, Katie.
0:33 Speaker 02 Katie Stole's here, legend. Hey, everybody!
0:36 Robert Evans? How hot and/or on fire is it where you are?
0:39 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah. Oh, ah, both of those things. I am in the mountains, but it is an unpleasant, well, it's 85. It's 85.
0:47 Robert Evans? It's not too bad.
0:48 Speaker 00 Um, it could be worse.
0:49 Speaker 02 We had some 90-degree days last week, but I moved to the mountains thinking it would be cooler and, boy, was I wrong.
0:55 Robert Evans? Yeah, it gets hot. It gets hot.
0:57 Speaker 02 Lots of burnable brush all around me as well, so.
1:00 Robert Evans? Yeah. Everything catches on fire out there. That's the beauty of living out in the country.
1:04 Speaker 02 Yeah. And they defunded one of my, um, they closed one of our fire stations. Anyway.
1:09 Speaker 00 Oh, that's always reassuring.
1:11 Robert Evans? Oh, good. It's not like California needs a lot of those.
1:15 Speaker 02 Wild time.
1:15 Robert Evans? I'm, I'm only bringing up the summer because I had my first, every, every year when it gets hot again, I remember, okay, I gotta put out sunscreen before I go run this time. And then 15 or so minutes into that first run of the year with sunscreen, I remember, oh, yeah, when you sweat with sunscreen, it burns your eyes like a son of a bitch. So if my eyes look like red and puffy, it's because I just finished a run in a shower and my entire face was on fire from sunscreen.
1:39 Speaker 00 I actually thought it was because you were crying.
1:41 Robert Evans? No, no, Sophie.
1:43 Speaker 02 Oh, you've been touched.
1:44 Robert Evans? I would tell you if I was crying, but I, I, this is simply self-inflicted friendly fire.
1:49 Speaker 02 Self-inflicted friendly fire. Another piece, why are you wearing a sweater, man? It's so hot.
1:55 Robert Evans? It's cold in my basement.
1:56 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's because he records in his basement.
1:58 Robert Evans? It's because my AC works.
2:01 Speaker 02 We're talking about summer and you're all bundled up.
2:03 Robert Evans? I am wearing my, my hoodie or my, my sweater, yes.
2:07 Speaker 00 Meanwhile, Katie and I are Lucy Goosey.
2:10 Robert Evans? Yeah.
2:10 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
2:10 Speaker 00 I got my Lakers Luka Doncic shirt on. Shout out to my haters.
2:15 Speaker 02 Okay. Anyways, Robert, did the job. Should we do it?
2:20 Robert Evans? Yeah. Shall we do the job? Katie, Stole, how are you doing today? Podcasting wise?
2:26 Speaker 02 Pretty good. I'm sitting here with my old pals whom I've missed.
2:31 Robert Evans? I have missed you too, and I have missed talking to you about shitty people. So I wanted to give you a special shitty person today. You know, we, we talk a lot about old timey, far-right influencers on this podcast, you know, the, the first, the guys around the twenties and thirties and forties, the OG American fascists. But we haven't talked a lot about like, the history of women in the, early history of women in the American fascist movement and, and the crucial role different like, female influencers have played in the American far-right. And so today, we're going to talk about a woman who you could call the first Candace Owens, or the first Laura Loomer. You can make a case, she's got bits of both of those, both Candace and Laura. Oh, a little bit to this lady
3:13 Robert Evans? we're going to talk about this week, Elizabeth Dilling. Have you heard that name before?
3:17 Speaker 02 Elizabeth Dilling.
3:18 Speaker 00 Do you see why I was like, we need Katie for this episode?
3:22 Robert Evans? Yeah.
3:23 Speaker 02 Okay, I'm excited. I do not know anything about Elizabeth Dilling.
3:26 Robert Evans? She's not super famous. Yeah. She is the B-side to a more famous fascist that I think you will recognize from later on, but like, again, because I guess of misogyny, she never quite got as famous as her, her male fascist counterpart. It's, it's really-
3:41 Speaker 02 Fuck the patriarchy.
3:42 Robert Evans? Yeah.
3:42 Speaker 02 Am I allowed to say fuck on Netflix?
3:44 Speaker 00 Yeah, you can say whatever the fuck you want on Netflix.
3:46 Speaker 02 There's no rules here.
3:48 Robert Evans? If you, you've watched Netflix, they don't give a shit.
3:51 Speaker 02 Yeah, you're right.
3:51 Robert Evans? They barely know what's on their own network. Um, thanks Netflix.
3:55 Speaker 02 Thanks for the money.
3:59 Speaker 03 This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.
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5:39 Robert Evans? Elizabeth Aloys Kirkpatrick was born on April 19, 1894, in Chicago. Now, if 1894 and Chicago sound familiar to you, that's because that is the same year and city as the Pullman Strike, which is a legendary moment in labor history. It began as a local Chicago strike that became a national boycott and changed U.S. labor law forever in the process. And that strike itself was heavily inspired by the trials of the 1893 economic panic that fractured the U.S. economy and helped fuel Eugene V. Debs's creation of the American Railway Union, right? So, Chicago, at the time Elizabeth is born, is a real hotbed for labor, for this burgeoning and really exploding American left, which is growing into what some might argue,
6:24 Robert Evans? and probably still to this day would count as its most influential period in American history, is kind of coming up as a result of the things that are sort of happening right around the time Elizabeth is born. So, it's kind of going to be important a little that she's never going to adopt any of these kind of politics, but they are happening around her and very much in the environment that she's growing up in. Like, her family is against a lot of these changes, but she's going to grow up hearing about them because they're right outside her door, you know?
6:50 Speaker 02 Sure, yeah.
6:51 Robert Evans? Yeah. So little Elizabeth comes into the world in a time and a place that was hugely significant in the history of American labor and the struggles of the working man against his bosses. And so it's appropriate for the person she would become that even as an infant, she was entirely separate and protected from the normal world of working class people. This is happening outside her mansion gates, basically.
7:12 Speaker 02 Yeah.
7:12 Robert Evans? Her father, Dr. Leat Kirkpatrick, was a famous surgeon and her mother, Elizabeth Harding, was a homemaker, but both came from very prominent families, right? So both of their families have some degree of like financial comfort and her dad, at least initially, is this like famous doctor. The Kirkpatrick's, her dad's family, had been wealthy landowners in Ireland, but had fled near the end of the 1800s and settled in Virginia. Liz would later describe her father as coming from Scots-Irish stock. And some Googling around has given me cause to think that her family, basically, if you've ever heard of like the Irish land wars, this period of time in which like there's a lot of conflict in Ireland over like who gets to own what land, there's a lot of conflict
7:54 Robert Evans? as a result of these like absentee landlords that piss off a lot of people. Well, her ancestors are some of the absentee landlords.
8:01 Speaker 02 I was gonna say, they're the absentee ones?
8:03 Robert Evans? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
8:04 Speaker 02 Okay.
8:04 Robert Evans? Because they're like a Scottish family who winds up owning a lot of land in Ireland, you know?
8:09 Speaker 02 Yeah.
8:10 Robert Evans? And I don't know that the Kirkpatrick's had to flee their family estate because they were brutal landlords, but my research does make that seem likely.
8:17 Speaker 02 Sure, yeah.
8:18 Robert Evans? And it's always a good, yeah, yeah. We don't talk enough about Ireland's land wars.
8:22 Speaker 02 It sounds like we're setting up for a family that does not learn from those lessons, perhaps. Perhaps they're here also resenting the different classes around them. I don't know.
8:34 Robert Evans? Doesn't learn from their lessons and has like a long time grudge against anyone trying to like fix things because they just see that as like you're fucking with my vig, you know? Like that's the people that she comes from. So let's talk a little about the Irish land wars because people don't often enough and it's a fun bit of history. Only about 5% of the land in Ireland from the late 1700s to the end of the 1800s was owned by Irish Catholics, despite the fact that Irish Catholics were most of Ireland. People got very angry about this and it led to successive waves of protests and even violent insurgent direct action. It is very possible that that their crew Patrick's had to flee because they wound up on either side of this dispute.
9:14 Robert Evans? But the fact that they had a family estate and came to the US with money makes me suspect that they weren't fighting for the freedom of poor men. Right. These are probably on one specific side of the land wars.
9:23 Speaker 02 Pretty good guess. Pretty solid guess.
9:26 Robert Evans? Uh, meanwhile, the Harding family, Elizabeth's mother's people, came from a long line of Anglican bishops, which also makes it likelier that her dad's people were foreign landlords at some point. Anyway, she grows up fairly well off. Um, in a 2002 article for the Journal of American Studies, writer Christine Erickson describes her family as financially comfortable, upper middle class. Right. That's, that's, that's where they're coming from. Her parents have enough money that even though these are pretty rough times, they're able to travel fairly regularly. But they're not able to send the kids abroad with them. So Liz grows up not traveling much herself, but her mom and her aunts are always visiting Europe, spending their inheritance. And so she grows up hearing about that.
10:05 Speaker 02 Sure. Okay. Yeah. Uh huh. I mean, for the parents, anyway.
10:10 Robert Evans? Sounds fun. Yeah. Who wants to bring your kid?
10:12 Speaker 02 Sorry, kids. You had to stay. Mom and dad are off for a bit.
10:16 Robert Evans? Mom and dad are off for a bit, but also in this period of time, mom and dad are off for a bit.
10:19 Speaker 02 For a long time.
10:20 Robert Evans? Months because yeah, it takes a while to sail. You're going to be raised by some lady we hired. Bye. See you when you're nine.
10:30 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly. Be back in a year, baby.
10:33 Robert Evans? Yeah, be back in a year, maybe. Her father died when she was relatively young and this was, he, he dies a sudden and surprising death. And this leaves her mother in charge of the family, but it says a lot about their overall financial state that even though her father dies pretty early on, this never affects them financially as far as we can see, right? They, they remain comfortable, which means they're very well off. So she's going to grow up with extremely conservative values and politics, but she's also going to grow up because her mom is the only one running things after a while. She's going to run up very, grow up very used to seeing a woman call the shots, right? And this is going to have a conflicting effect on her, right?
11:12 Robert Evans? Cause she both comes to believe that like traditional values are best and also she's used to women being in charge in her own life.
11:19 Speaker 02 Yeah. That's, that's kind of tough to square at that point in time, I guess.
11:23 Speaker 00 I was gonna say, I was gonna say, as are you, Robert.
11:27 Robert Evans? Yeah, yeah, my mom remind like is very reminiscent of this where like she was a very conservative person and also did not understand why men should be doing anything. Like those were, those were two ideas that coexisted within her.
11:38 Speaker 02 Yeah.
11:39 Robert Evans? Uh, as Amy Die wrote of Elizabeth in her graduate thesis for East Tennessee universities, uh, for East Tennessee State University, quote, "If her father had not died, she would not have been exposed to such a strong independent woman as her mother. Before Dr. Lafayette Kirkpatrick's death, he strongly believed the woman belonged in the home and away from both politics and business. In contrast, her brother Lafayette was encouraged to pursue a business career and at the age of 23 had acquired financial security through land development in Hawaii. He subsequently traveled around the world for three years with Baron von Zeppelin and continued to lead a privileged life until his death at 1948. Again, for an idea of the family, of the money she comes from, her brother is best friends and traveling buddies with Baron von Zeppelin."
12:20 Robert Evans? It doesn't get much older money than that, than Baron von Zeppelin and having a road trip with the Zeppelin guy. Um, so yeah, they're doing fine even with dad out of the picture. Little Elizabeth would be described during her childhood as, quote, "highly emotional and an eager girl with a dramatically sculptured face, enormous brown eyes and a quick giddy laugh, somewhat lonely and casting about in search of a career." Which is also interesting. She's a very, she will always espouse very traditional values. She's always looking for a job for herself. She never is interested in just being a homemaker, not, you know, did, no problem with that, but she is never interested in just sitting at home and raising kids. She wants to do something out in the world that people are aware of.
13:05 Speaker 02 It's actually a very fascinating.
13:07 Robert Evans? Yeah.
13:08 Speaker 02 Uh, dynamic for somebody. I mean, we're seeing it still to this day. Yes, your mother, I guess, was this way, but this is this big push in the conservative party for traditional values and yet they're going to be advocating for their own careers. It seems counterintuitive, but, um, interesting for this woman.
13:26 Robert Evans? Yeah, I mean, it's it's the Phyllis Schlafly thing, right? Of like, I don't think women should be doing any of this stuff. Also, as a woman, I really like to have a big career.
13:34 Speaker 00 And also, like, modern times, that's very Erica Kirk.
13:38 Robert Evans? Yeah.
13:38 Speaker 00 Very Erica Kirk. That is exactly what I was thinking.
13:40 Robert Evans? Yeah.
13:41 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, if either of you have seen any of like the interview clips from TPUSA's like first big like women's event that Erica Kirk led, it's all when people are interviewed, it's all like this where they're they're like all over the map on if they're like, well, women can have it all, but they have to do this. But women could have it all, but not those women. It's really interesting coverage, um, just to like, yeah, get an insight into that ideological thinking.
14:08 Speaker 02 It's fascinating.
14:09 Robert Evans? Anytime you have to be, you have that much cognitive dissonance in your belief system, it always winds up being fascinating on some level.
14:16 Speaker 00 And like, in a way, like, I just, there's no way there would be an Erica Kirk without a Liz Dilling, without a Phyllis Schlafly, without a, you know? It's all.
14:26 Robert Evans? She had to crawl so that Erica Kirk could.
14:28 Speaker 00 That's right.
14:29 Robert Evans? I don't know. I don't know who's doing the whatever.
14:31 Speaker 00 So Erica Kirk could come out with a fire booming.
14:33 Robert Evans? Fireworks, yeah, behind her. So Elizabeth attends grammar school in a secondary school. She's going to nice schools. Her parents pay money to get her a quality education. She studies the concert harp at a Catholic academy. And she graduates from a girl's school and is noted as having an almost photographic memory. Her early interests were, and this is not a normal, like, her education's weird because I can't graph it directly onto a normal one because she is both doing like normal primary school, secondary school, and also Catholic academy, women's preparatory finishing school. Like, she spends years in schools that are just to like teach you how to behave as a woman. Like, that's part of, part of her schooling. Because she's like an upper-class lady, right? It takes a lot. You gotta know where all the forks go and stuff.
15:18 Robert Evans? I imagine there's more to it than forks, but forks seem like they're pretty key.
15:22 Speaker 02 How to stand up straight, how to smile politely.
15:24 Robert Evans? Straight, that's right. How to ride, side saddle? There's, I know there's a certain, there's a way you're supposed to ride as a lady that's the polite way, and there's the rude way. Maybe side saddle's the rude way. I don't know much about horses.
15:34 Speaker 02 Really feel like side saddle should be reserved. For men anatomically speaking, but I digress.
15:40 Robert Evans? Look, the horse girls can can correct us because I don't know much about riding horses. I know there's a way you're supposed to ride and there's a way that you're not supposed to ride as an old timey woman. But I don't know. I don't know which is which. Anyway, she she goes to all these different weird schools. She learns how to be a lady and a good Catholic. She's interested primarily in both classical music and the French language. I don't actually know if she ever gets what you'd call a normal college degree. But during her time in Catholic school, she was made to study the Bible. And so this is kind of like knowledge and faith are always weirdly wrapped up with her. But also knowledge and like the performance of societal roles are always directly locked together. She never just gets an education that's an education on its own.
16:25 Robert Evans? It's always an education partly in how to exist in a certain social hierarchy, if that makes sense.
16:30 Speaker 02 It does make sense.
16:32 Robert Evans? As Amy Die writes in 1917, as the first US forces are getting their boots dirty in World War I, Elizabeth meets a man described as a young army officer from Arizona, who quote, "introduced her to a completely new way of thinking." This is her first fascist boyfriend. So she meets this mystery army officer who starts saying, oh, you got to read these books, right? And so he starts giving her Cott and Nietzsche and Hegel. And next, quote, "After introducing Elizabeth to these forward thinkers, he contradicted himself by saying, women did not count as human beings." So he's like, you need to read this Nietzsche, but you're a woman, so you can't read it. You're not a person, but here you should have some Hegel.
17:11 Speaker 02 But here, read it.
17:12 Robert Evans? But you're not really a person.
17:13 Speaker 02 A woman. And you're not going to, you're too, you're too dumb. You're not going to get it, but here, God is dead.
17:18 Robert Evans? I get the, she doesn't say this, but I get the feeling he's like intermittently flirting with her and yelling at her like it's one of those kind of weird guys. And she's totally into it.
17:27 Speaker 02 If you had ever been flirted with by a fascist soldier from Arizona, you would know that that's part of the game.
17:34 Robert Evans? That's part of the day. That's how it works.
17:36 Speaker 02 Yeah.
17:37 Robert Evans? Well, she gets that beautiful experience and you can tell it completely awakens her, right? This is where she becomes an ideological thinker for the first time. And the fact that her ideological awakening comes courtesy of a man who does not consider her human is very telling and very bleak, but what else are you gonna say?
17:57 Speaker 02 Not saying I have empathy because I have a feeling she's not gonna be someone I like.
18:01 Robert Evans? No, it's just a holy shit.
18:03 Speaker 02 It's pretty fucked up.
18:05 Robert Evans? Yeah, you guys could check out, just imagine like trying to tell your like, your other lady friends like, yeah, this wonderful guy, he introduced me to all these great books. I'm really thinking in new ways about like, what makes a person a person? I don't think I'm one, according to him. Anyway, he seems nice.
18:22 Speaker 02 Does he? He's really dreamy.
18:26 Robert Evans? At any rate, this does not last. I really wish I knew what happened with this guy. Maybe he was just too much of an incel, or maybe he goes out and dies in World War I. We can only hope he dies in World War I.
18:38 Speaker 02 My guess.
18:39 Robert Evans? I'm hoping the old Dub Dub Uno did us a solid on that one. At any rate, not long after whatever happens with this guy ends, she continues reading philosophy and she starts thinking really hard about the underlying order of society. And as she's thinking about this, Elizabeth meets her future husband, Albert Walwick Dilling. Now, I don't think Albert Walwick Dilling is the kind of guy who's gonna tell her she's not a person. He's the guy, I get the feeling he's very ideologically malleable. I think he's naturally more conservative, so he's comfortable with her ideology, but I also think he goes along with her a lot, you know?
19:14 Speaker 02 Yeah, okay.
19:15 Robert Evans? And I think he gets, one of the things he gets from her is that he gets to pretend and feel like, and she will reinforce that he is in charge, while also being in charge of a lot. And so he doesn't have to be in charge of as much. That's the feeling I get.
19:28 Speaker 02 I know exactly what you mean.
19:29 Robert Evans? You've seen these kinds of relationships, right?
19:31 Speaker 02 100%. She's like, I defer to my man, but she's the one that's telling him.
19:38 Robert Evans? Yeah. I defer to my man. God help him if he has an idea of his own.
19:43 Speaker 02 I defer to my man as long as it's, he goes with what I said.
19:46 Robert Evans? Exactly. So at the time, he was a lawyer. He had trained as an engineer originally. He had been born in Salt Lake City back in 1892. By the time he was ready for college, and I don't think he was Mormon. I think it probably would have mentioned that. She certainly is not. And I don't think she would have been cool with a practicing Mormon, given her beliefs, but I'm not really sure. By the time he's ready for college, he'd migrated to the Chicago area and he took the Illinois bar in 1917. Now Elizabeth already refused one marriage proposal by the time she met Albert. But for some reason, this guy sweeps her off her feet. And after nine months, the two are married in the romantic city of LaPorte, Indiana. This would have been May of 1918. Yes, yes, the city of love itself.
20:29 Robert Evans? The city of unbridled fucking. That's what we call LaPorte, Indiana. That's the city motto, actually. LaPorte, Indiana. It's illegal to buy condoms here, you know? Just so you know, LaPorte, everybody. Catch the fever and something else, because again, condoms are illegal.
20:46 Robert Evans? After this point, Elizabeth Kirkpatrick, though, is now Elizabeth Dilling. And this is the name that she's going to be famous under, right? Everyone knows her as Elizabeth Dilling. That's how she becomes Elizabeth Dilling. She marries this Albert Dilling guy. She's 24 years old in 1918, and after a brief honeymoon, she and Albert moved to the, to a suburb of Chicago, Wilmette, where they borrow money and buy a home. Albert claims that when they got married, he had, quote, "nothing to offer but a good education, bright prospects, good help, and some sizable debts." But Liz had family money of her own. In just two years, Albert was made chief engineer of the Chicago sanitary district, and his career would continue to rise over the coming years. While he was making a career for himself as a high level engineer for one of the largest cities on earth,
21:30 Robert Evans? he would eventually become the city engineer for Union Station Development and the engineer assistant to the Commission for Public Works. Liz was inheriting the money that would ensure she never needed to utilize public works herself. Her husband helps make sure that like the city's public like transit works and Elizabeth inherits enough money that she doesn't have to use it.
21:48 Speaker 02 Yeah.
21:49 Robert Evans? Great stuff.
21:49 Speaker 02 I can only imagine they're, they're like 2026 dating bro. Profiles.
21:53 Robert Evans? Oh, my God. These two in 2026 are definitely the weird natalist freaks who wind up on the news every six months, talking about like their 11 kids that they're having to change the world with Elon Musk.
22:05 Speaker 02 Yeah, Liz Dilling definitely like puts her credit score on her dating profile.
22:09 Robert Evans? Yeah, I can see her having an interview with Vanity Fair where she slaps her child at a fucking diner.
22:15 Speaker 02 Yeah.
22:17 Robert Evans? So she receives enormous inheritances from two aunts and then in the mid 1930s from her mother. So she's very comfortably off, even though her husband is not making a lot of money immediately. But her husband, you know, is making comfortable, middle-class incomes. You have inherits a lot of money and a good income. They're doing quite well and they're doing well enough that in short order, before either of them is, you know, particularly old, they're going to have enough money to do what wealthy people do in this period of time in particular, which is go on really long and elaborate vacations all the time. So from 1923 to 1939, the Dillings travel overseas 10 times. And these are all multi-week or multi-month excursions.
22:57 Robert Evans? We're talking like Orient Express type shit where you're on trains and in fancy boats. You've got sleeper car like the, these are not like casual vacations. You can't just jaunt somewhere quickly, right?
23:09 Speaker 02 Yeah, no, this is, this is, yeah, like her mother, months long. Also famously a bad time for the world financially to have the means to just travel like this.
23:20 Robert Evans? To be that comfortable. I mean, they're mostly traveling, although they are through all the 30s too, you know? So, yeah, like a lot of it is during a really rough time. Yeah.
23:29 Speaker 02 It's not the main takeaway here, but I'm like, yeah, they're doing certainly fine. It says a lot about what they're doing while the rest of the world is burning.
23:37 Robert Evans? Yeah, while, while the rest of the world is falling to fascism, they're going on like long elaborate vacations. Right? They're doing very, they're very comfortable. Their first trip overseas, they get to tour England, the Low Countries, France, and then Italy, at which point they enter the Vatican City and have a private audience with the Pope. So they have like Pope money, like that's how comfortable she is. Amy Dai writes that the Dillings had booked this trip in part to get a firsthand. Account of the aftermath of the First World War, right? Like, that's a big, that's at least what Elizabeth wants her friends to believe that like, we're not just doing this as a vacation. We're doing this to like, get an eye on how Europe's handled, you know, after the war, right? Like, that's the way that she frames this.
24:16 Speaker 02 Making my eyes roll back in my head a little bit like, okay, here's, we're just gonna go study the effects of the war.
24:24 Robert Evans? I can tell you from experience, if you're in like, an active war zone, there are often a lot of people who are eager to talk about what's happening to them right now, in part because they hope that like, maybe international attention will like, help their situation. And like, it's happening right now, and they want people to know about the horrible stuff. When you go to a place that has just been at war, like, a couple of years ago, they don't usually want to talk about it. They're kind of trying to forget it. So again, this is just like a dumb idea for a vacation. People, it's like 1919, people wandering around, like, don't want to talk too much of America's, be like, so yeah, what was the war like here in Verdun? You know, was it fun? Did you enjoy it? Like, people would not have a good time and don't want her shit.
25:06 Speaker 02 Completely devastated, trying to recover from, uh, yeah, no, bad timing, babe.
25:11 Robert Evans? Yeah, how did you, how do you think it was, Liz? Bad.
25:16 Robert Evans? And this seems to be what the Dillings encountered. People are not super eager to talk to them. As Dai's account says, quote, "Dilling became frustrated by the anti-American attitudes that she had encountered amongst the British and the French. The former allies often gave the United States no credit for helping win the First World War, and often complained that the United States had not entered the war sooner." So yeah, I think people didn't really want to talk about the war, and like, folks who'd lost all their money and like, their kids, didn't want to talk about how great America was for eventually getting involved. Like, some fucking British family who lost everything doesn't want to be like, "Yeah, thanks, guys. Really glad you got here in 1917, right on the dot, huh?"
25:55 Speaker 02 Yeah.
25:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, not surprising. Not surprising.
26:00 Robert Evans? She takes this personally. She takes this as an insult to herself. On the steamship home, an English traveler sees a member of her party who's wearing like a sailor outfit with US Navy printed on it. And he just like starts shit talking like them. It's like, ah, your Navy's a joke, you Americans. And Liz responds, I don't know if it's such a joke. It's been able to lick Great Britain twice, and I think it could do it again. And first off, Liz, the last time it beat Great Britain was 1912, like, or 1812, like, I don't know. I don't know if we should be bragging about that in 1918. It just seems a little ahead of the eight ball.
26:38 Robert Evans? It's not been, it's been a while since we fought the British Navy. I don't know, Liz. The, and also, it's just like, what a ridiculous reaction to someone saying that who's clearly frustrated that you're walking around talking about what hot shit your military is when you just kind of soldered in the last minute of like a devastating war. I get why the Europeans are pissed at her.
26:58 Speaker 02 Absolutely. This woman has no self-awareness.
27:01 Robert Evans? No. And this situation, this whole encounter with this rude person on the boat, causes her to make a vow then and there that if another war ever came to Europe, she will work herself to the bone to keep the United States out of it. Because of these ungrateful Europeans, I'll make sure we never enter another war to support Europe again. You know, that's Liz's encounter here.
27:23 Robert Evans? It's really sad.
27:24 Speaker 02 I'm not surprising. I mean,
27:26 Robert Evans? No.
27:27 Speaker 02 I'm always, whenever I'm here, it's impossible to not draw parallels to modern day. I've already done it several times, but it's like, it's just so pathetic. How easily some people get offended and vow to make that their idea of an entire place for the rest of their life, anyway.
27:47 Robert Evans? Yep, yep. Like, I think they didn't even have anything to do with, honestly. But, anyway, you know what else is sad? Not listening to ads.
27:58 Speaker 02 Oh, heartbreaking. You know what? You're right. It is such a heartbreak. I love ads.
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29:05 Speaker 04 I'm Melissa Jelton, and in my new podcast, What Happened to Her? I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide.
29:17 Speaker 02 She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety.
29:24 Speaker 04 Stories of survival. The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck, because by all rights, I should be dead. Cases that everyone else called closed. They can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence. These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that. And we were babies.
29:51 Speaker 03 She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it, and he got a year.
29:58 Speaker 04 You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform. Listen to What Happened to Her on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If there's a million times more digital intelligence than there is biological. It's hard to imagine humans being in control in that scenario. I'm Walter Isaacson, host of the new podcast, The Builders. Right now, we're living through an AI arms race. So I went directly to the people shaping that future. Elon Musk, Dario Aminé, Alex Carr, Fei-Fei Li, Palmer Lucky, because I wanted to understand what the most consequential builders believe, what they fear, and where they think this is all headed.
30:43 Speaker 05 Silicon Valley is always saying the cliche thing about the way to predict the future is to create it. Well, yeah, it's up to us.
30:52 Speaker 04 But when you say us, who's us? Is it 400 people that you know in Silicon Valley? Is it me down here in New Orleans? They're brilliant, controversial, and they're already shaping the future. The question is, whose imagination do we want to live in? This is going to determine the fate of nations and economies and the future of humanity. Listen to The Builders on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
31:26 Robert Evans? We're back and we're talking about how we never skip the ads on podcasts.
31:30 Speaker 02 Never. What does that mean?
31:31 Robert Evans? Sometimes I listen to extra ads, you know? Sometimes I listen to ads that aren't even for podcasts. Sometimes I just fall asleep directly in front of a billboard, you know, so I can worship it.
31:41 Speaker 02 Do you have an ad playlist too for bedtime?
31:44 Robert Evans? Yes, it's only an ad playlist for bedtime, to be fair. All right, so let's get back to Liz Dilling. So yeah, Liz has just had this experience heading home from Europe where these ungrateful Europeans were not deferent enough to the US Navy. So she decides to stop the US from ever helping Europe in a war again. I don't know if I believe that actually happened, in part because Liz is going to be like anti-war during World War II because she's a fascist. And I think maybe she invents this story because it's like a more palatable truth, as opposed to like, I don't want the US to get involved in World War II because I like the Nazis. She could be like, no, they're so ungrateful. After all the rudeness they showed us last time, why would we risk our lives again for
32:28 Robert Evans? them? You know, I kind of think maybe she just makes this up after the fact. But it's possible that this actually happens. Like, I don't know one way or the other. Despite their frustrations with Europeans, the Dillings continue to book regular trips abroad throughout the 20s and the 30s. And at first, this seems to have been mainly for the sake of hedonism. But I think Elizabeth's strong Catholic upbringing makes her feel guilty for just traveling to have fun. I think this is why for most of these trips, there's always a second purpose, like, oh, we wanted to explore how World War I affected them, or we wanna, she's going to explore communist countries in the, at a certain point in the future. And I think part of it is that she feels bad about just spending her money on vacations, because she's a Ca-, she's fundamentally a Catholic in her soul. I mean, she's an Episcopalian
33:10 Robert Evans? as an adult, but she was raised Catholic. You never get over that shit. I, I think there's an element of that, of like, this trip has to be more than just a trip. Otherwise, I'm not being a good person. Right?
33:21 Speaker 02 Mm-hmm.
33:22 Robert Evans? Whatever the reason.
33:22 Speaker 02 She's not being a good person anyway, but.
33:24 Robert Evans? She's not being a good person anyway, but she's, this is important to her. Uh, so she starts convincing her husband to let her book trips, like their yearly vacations to the communist countries, which have just started to be a thing, right? The communist revolution, you know, has just swept over what had been Imperial Russia, and it's starting to take other places, too. So this is like the first time in which you could have gone to a communist country, right? Kind of in the 1930s, 1920s and 30s. And so she starts convincing her husband to start booking trips for these different, for like Soviet Russia, right? Because she wants to study the impact of communism and eventually write books about it. So in the summer of 1931, her husband helps the, or books trips to Moscow and Leningrad.
34:06 Robert Evans? Now Elizabeth is later going to write a book about what she saw in the Soviet Union, and she will express her horror at the nightmare she saw there, at the, quote, atheism, sex degeneracy, broken homes, and class hatred that she witnessed in the post-revolutionary USSR. And indeed, the Soviet Union at the start of the 30s was a nation that had recently endured great horrors, a horrific civil war, and was currently enduring horrors, the horrors of the Stalinist era, right? It would very soon endure even worse horrors, the horrors of the Nazi invasion. So, you know, it's a tough time, Russia in the 30s. There are plenty of things that Dilling could have seen in Russia in 1931 that are horrific, right? Things that would have actually reflected badly on the Soviet government.
34:49 Robert Evans? However, it's important I let you know that her hatred of the Soviet Union is not based on any of those things. When you think about the actual bad things that were occurring in the USSR in 1931, Elizabeth isn't allowed to see any of them. She's on a vacation that she's booked through the Soviet government. They have minders. She's not traveling freely. She's only visiting the areas they're allowed to visit. And so she's not being horrified because she's like snuck through and seen some evidence of a of a fuck up that the government was covering up of Starve. She's angry because she's seeing like churches that have been turned into like art museums. And she's like, ah.
35:28 Speaker 02 She's angry at the beautiful parts.
35:29 Robert Evans? Her mind, she's losing her mind at it. Right. And she's, she's pissed about like, oh, the people here aren't as well fed as Americans. And like, were they under the czar? Is that the Soviet Union's fault? Or is that just the fact that like, it's Russia in 1931? Like, again, I'm not one to minimize the faults of the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union particularly. But you can't just be like, wow, people aren't as big in Russia in 1931. That's just communism. No, Liz, that that goes back further. I'm sorry, hon. Like, that's a.
36:01 Speaker 02 Yeah. The laziest possible takeaway from from what she presumably saw, but okay.
36:08 Robert Evans? Yeah.
36:09 Speaker 02 Yes.
36:09 Robert Evans? And again, the Soviet Union is very well aware that Western countries are have arts are spying on them constantly. They are looking for people like Liz Dilling in these trips. So again, I don't think there's any chance Liz would have seen any actual like bad things. Right? She's just making this up based on like shit she sees that's like uncomfortable to her. And the primary things that she sees over there that are uncomfortable to her is that she doesn't know, there aren't rich people in the Soviet Union that she sees. Right? She notices none of the people of my class are here. Right? There's no fancy places to go. There's no high end hotels. Right? And the society is openly atheistic, and that's what she is reacting to. Christine Erickson summarizes Dilling, how Dilling would later describe her trip.
36:53 Robert Evans? She noted with concern the idle crap. And abandoned children roaming the streets bordered by rundown buildings in desperate need of repair. She described in vivid detail the poor miserable workers' stores where the proletariat was forced to shop. What little food stocked the shelves was overpriced and fly infested. The site of Christian churches being converted into anti-religious museums and the shock of seeing nude bathers swim in a river under the shadow of one Moscow church, an event Dilling captured on film, clearly signaled to her that communism bred atheism and encouraged immorality. So whatever bad things are actually happening in the Soviet Union, remember when Dilling talks about the horrors of communism, she's talking about nude bathers.
37:31 Speaker 02 Right.
37:32 Robert Evans? Near a church. That's what scares her.
37:34 Speaker 02 That's what scares her, not anything else, not the government, not like...
37:41 Robert Evans? Not Stalin, you know, not the NKVD.
37:45 Speaker 02 Offended by poverty and atheism.
37:48 Robert Evans? Yeah.
37:49 Speaker 02 So I love the abandoned children.
37:51 Robert Evans? They're naked?
37:52 Speaker 02 Yeah.
37:53 Robert Evans? She was abandoned. I'm sure there are abandoned children in Moscow in 1931 because they've just had a civil war that killed millions of people. Millions and millions of people. That was vastly exacerbated by Western involvement, by the way. You know, like, you can't, again, you can't look at any of the stuff she's seeing and just be like, well, this is all the fault of communism. That's just silliness, right? And so ironically, while Liz is going to spend the rest of her life talking about the nightmare world that she saw, the things she's scared about are like any effort to reduce inequality and any effort to reduce the power of the church. That's what actually upsets her. She would also complain later in her writing that Soviet men seemed to have no interest in her at all. They didn't find her hot.
38:38 Robert Evans? The bedbugs in the Grand Hotel in Moscow were wild about me, the listless waiters not at all, which Ericson suggests is Elizabeth trying to display, quote, "an unsettling image of communism's power to emasculate. How could any man ignore Dilling? These men aren't even straight if they don't like me." Like, again, her big issues with Stalinist Russia are nude bathers, I'm not hot.
39:02 Speaker 00 Just honestly, babe, it just does not sound like the place for you to vacation.
39:06 Robert Evans? I don't think, I think you picked the wrong place to vacation. I don't think Moscow in 1931 was for you.
39:12 Speaker 00 Yeah, again, your timing is all off.
39:15 Robert Evans? Your timing's really bad. If you'd gotten to Moscow in 1917, things might have been a lot more interesting, Liz.
39:22 Speaker 00 Definitely.
39:22 Robert Evans? At least from my perspective. So her call to action came during a tour of the Moscow Museum of the Revolution, where a party guide told her tour group that the world revolution, which had started in Russia, had now expanded to China and would end in the United States. He then showed them an exhibit that featured a fictional map of the future world, where a communist US had renamed all of its cities. And, you know, this is obvious propaganda, right? Like, this isn't an evidence of the actual capabilities, as we all know, of the Soviet Union's ability to infiltrate the United States. But this works perfectly on Liz. She, and this is everything she needed, too, in terms of like, a useful thing she could carry home for her propaganda. So when she gets home, she is eager to preach the bad word.
40:06 Robert Evans? Elizabeth claims that when she tried to tell her friends, her suburbanite intellectual friends, and my own Episcopal minister, about what she'd seen over there, they expressed bitter opposition to her telling the truth about Russia. Now, I don't know how much I believe that. I can't imagine people who are better informed than her saying, "Hey, Liz, like, there's obvious issues going on over there and with that government, but it doesn't seem like you actually know anything about those issues. It seems like you're just angry that there aren't any, like, luxury stores and they don't believe in God. And maybe that's dumb. Like, I wonder if maybe that's what her friends were saying, is like, "Liz, it doesn't seem like you actually know anything about the problems over there. It seems like you're angry the hotels weren't nice."
40:47 Speaker 00 Yeah, they're like, "Hey Liz, are you a elitist snob, maybe? Is that my happening here? Do you suck?" Oh, okay.
40:58 Robert Evans? Is it possible? You just suck.
40:59 Speaker 00 Liz, is it possible that you're kind of an asshole? Wow.
41:05 Speaker 02 I am imagining her friends always being relieved when she goes on one of the big journeys. And then they're like, fuck.
41:12 Robert Evans? Oh, thank God she's out for a couple of months.
41:14 Speaker 02 She's gonna bring out the photo album again.
41:16 Robert Evans? She's gonna wanna tell us about it. I don't know. Just pretend you're horrified or whatever. Like, I do wonder how much of this is them having an issue just because they know she's full of shit. And I suspect even more, it's just like, oh shit, I don't want to see Liz's vacation pictures. Do you want to see that video of nude people swimming in Moscow? I don't really care. Like, who wants to watch this shit again?
41:37 Speaker 02 I went swimming, but then they didn't have caviar for me afterwards. It was a hardship.
41:42 Robert Evans? It was hell, hell. And Liz sees the fact that her friends do not find these stories entertaining, evidence of their own suicidal blinkered blindness, the kind that would lead her very class to march to its own extermination if it wasn't careful. So she became a woman on a mission to ensure her fellow citizens understood the extent of the communist menace, and particularly the infiltration of leftist agents at every level of American society and government. In one of her early pieces, Elizabeth expressed her belief that good Christian women did not have the right to sit at home and avoid conflict as "a fire burns in the nation's basement and radical political subversives fill the platforms with their dirt and anti-American ideas." So she's very pissed at her fellow rich friends for
42:27 Robert Evans? not, you know, doing more to stop this, to stop the spread of communism.
42:31 Speaker 02 She sounds like a joy, a joy to have at a dinner party.
42:34 Robert Evans? She sounds like so much fun. Just a hoot. Yeah. Again, if she'd had Twitter, she would be non- she would have left all of her friends and family behind to tweet nonstop. Like, you know this person today. We've seen her.
42:46 Speaker 02 1,000%. We know several of them.
42:50 Robert Evans? So initially, Elizabeth wrote letters to newspapers and spoke up at local meetings, but she found little purchase for her ideas until she befriended Iris McCord. Iris is a teacher at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. Now, MBI, as it is also known, is a private evangelical college that had been founded by a wealthy businessman turned evangelist named Dwight Moody in 1886. Moody seems to have actually mostly been an okay guy. He was a sided with the Union during the Civil War, which, you know, so he gets some ups there. His whole big thing was that in the wake of the Civil War, he decided that like evangelical Christianity needed to train what he called gap men, right? These were men who would stand between the laity and the ministers.
43:30 Robert Evans? So people who aren't like just normal civilians, but they aren't like professional men of faith either, who are trained to do like city mission work, who can like go and reach people in the cities and stuff. So that's Moody's idea, and that's where the Bible college comes from, right? Okay. And it's important, you know, MBI starts as a college before Christianity is political in the United States. That's not entirely accurate. There are left and right wing politicians who use Christianity, but no one would say Christianity is definitely a more a left wing or a right wing thing. Okay. In this area. You couldn't clearly say that yet. The religious right is not a thing at this point in time, really. Right. That's a more modern thing. Right.
44:12 Robert Evans? But there are religious conservatives and religious hardliners, right, who are conservative, and Iris is one of them, and so is Elizabeth Dilling. And the fact that Iris taught there and loved Dilling's reactionary rants says something about where many of Moody's staff sat politically, even in those days. So Iris used her connections to get Elizabeth invited to speak at numerous local churches about the communist threat to the American way of life. And this helps put Elizabeth's ideas in front of a bunch of different women, some of whom are pretty influential, who have like spots in the DAR, you know, and these other groups, you know, the Daughters of the American Revolution and the like. And so she, for the next couple of years, she starts making an okay side living, scaring her rich friends, right? And she becomes, she really is, she's actually really good at public speaking.
44:57 Robert Evans? She's got the gift of like... Entertaining and capturing an audience. She is an electrifying speaker in person. She's able to get a lot of these people to be just as scared and crazy about communism as she is. And her success earns her enough attention that she begins getting invitations all across the United States. Not just from churches, but from civic organizations now, and the DAR starts inviting her to speak at a bunch of its local chapters. The American Legion starts inviting her to speak at different local, you know, events. And she's soon making enough money doing this to support her efforts and ensure she doesn't have to mooch off of her husband or her inheritance to have a career, a thing she didn't believe good women ought to have anyway.
45:37 Speaker 02 Must be really hard for her to square those things. It's gotta be filled with guilt. Okay.
45:43 Robert Evans? To just to go from dilettante to a professional like media rabble rouser in a year or so. Yeah.
45:49 Speaker 02 How shameful.
45:50 Robert Evans? Must be hard for her. So yeah, the rapidity with which Elizabeth had gone from penning her little essays to addressing crowds around the country clearly went to her head. So she decided to write a book, The Red Revolution. Do we want it here? In this book, she railed against parlor pinks who were broad minded, but didn't judge people based on their political tendency. These weak people, she argued, let communist agents infiltrate society and corrupt children with their ideals. Right? It's these broad minded parlor pinks who aren't like hostile enough to socialism. That's how they sneak in. That's how they get your society.
46:26 Speaker 02 Oh, okay. Okay.
46:27 Robert Evans? Yeah. And you know who's gonna destroy our society?
46:32 Speaker 02 I, Donald Trump.
46:34 Robert Evans? Maybe, maybe, but perhaps it will be the products and services that support this podcast. We should, we can all hope, we can all hope, you know? That's my dream.
46:42 Speaker 02 Fingers crossed.
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47:44 Speaker 04 I'm Melissa Jelton, and in my new podcast, What Happened to Her?, I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide. She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety. Stories of survival.
48:04 Speaker 07 The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck, because by all rights, I should be dead.
48:10 Speaker 04 Cases that everyone else called closed. They can't convict her, right?
48:15 Speaker 05 Like, she has so much evidence.
48:17 Speaker 04 These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that. And we were babies.
48:29 Speaker 03 She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it, and he got a year. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise.
48:39 Speaker 04 Sometimes it's a police uniform. Listen to What Happened to Her? on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If there's a million times more digital intelligence than there is biological intelligence, it's hard to imagine humans being in control in that scenario. I'm Walter Isaacson, host of the new podcast, The Builders. Right now, we're living through an AI arms race. So I went directly to the people shaping that future. Elon Musk, Dario Hamad, Alex Carr, Fei-Fei Li, Palmer Lucky. Because I wanted to understand what the most consequential builders believe, what they fear, and where they think this is all headed.
49:21 Speaker 05 Silicon Valley is always saying the cliche thing about the way to predict the future is to create it. Well, yeah, it's up to us. But when you say us, who's us? Is it?
49:33 Speaker 04 400 people that you know in Silicon Valley? Is it me down here in New Orleans? They're brilliant, controversial, and they're already shaping the future. The question is, whose imagination do we want to live in? This is going to determine the fate of nations and economies and the future of humanity. Listen to The Builders on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
50:04 Robert Evans? So, we're back. The daughters of the American Revolution in particular loved her work. And if you're not an American, or you just don't know, the DAR is like one of the oldest groups of like rich ladies in America, rich white ladies.
50:16 Speaker 02 Okay.
50:16 Speaker 00 If you've watched-
50:17 Speaker 02 If you're not an American, you just have to watch Gilmore Girls.
50:20 Speaker 00 More Girls, that's exactly what I was gonna say.
50:22 Speaker 02 Gilmore Girls, every time you say it.
50:23 Speaker 00 Huge plot point.
50:24 Speaker 02 Emily Gilmore is a daughter of the American Revolution.
50:27 Robert Evans? It means your relatives date back as far as they can in the history of the United States, while not being like indigenous, obviously.
50:34 Speaker 00 Remember, there's that fantastic episode of Gilmore Girls, Katie?
50:37 Robert Evans? I don't.
50:38 Speaker 00 Where it's Rory's 21st birthday, and she's become friends with all of her grandmother's friends from the DAR. And Luke goes up to them and they keep saying, "Oh, we know Rory from the DAR." And he goes, "What's the DAR?" And they all laugh in his face.
50:52 Speaker 02 I remember.
50:54 Speaker 00 It's great. It's great.
50:55 Speaker 02 It's great.
50:55 Speaker 00 And for the listeners that also get that, you're really enjoying the story. If you're Robert and have no idea what you're talking, what I'm talking about, you seem very baffled and confused.
51:05 Robert Evans? I didn't watch the Gilmore Girls, but I-
51:08 Speaker 00 You should.
51:08 Robert Evans? Also, yeah, I don't think I will, but I will talk more about the DAR.
51:12 Speaker 02 Oh, Robert, you will love it. It was written for you. Okay.
51:16 Robert Evans? I don't think that's accurate. So the DAR in particular loved Elizabeth's work, and they purchased 10,000 copies of The Red Revolution: Do We Want It Here? and distribute it to their local chapters. Elizabeth became a major name in the world of reactionary agitation, and she became increasingly well-known among blue bloods, like the ladies of the DAR. This was a scene she considered herself basically part of, because these are the ladies she wants to be friends with. She really- Really wants to be a DAR lady, but her family, again, they're pretty recent immigrants. I think on both sides.
51:48 Speaker 02 Gotta killer that they came so recently.
51:50 Robert Evans? It's death, it's death to her. She hates it.
51:53 Speaker 02 She'll never be a DAR.
51:55 Robert Evans? She'll never be that good. They don't, they'll never gonna like you. Your family hasn't been here that long and they're snooty assholes who don't have souls. Like they're dead already. Uh, but so are you, Liz.
52:05 Speaker 02 I'm gonna guess that that doesn't radicalize her to have empathy with people that have less than her.
52:11 Robert Evans? No, no, no, no. She just desperately wants these rich ladies who are even richer than her to like her.
52:15 Speaker 02 Fit in.
52:15 Robert Evans? Right? Cause her, she doesn't have any famous enough ancestors.
52:18 Speaker 02 Right.
52:20 Robert Evans? For a time, getting asked to speak at DAR events and having them reprint her work seemed like it was at least her getting her foot in the door, but Liz is always gonna be an outsider to this crowd. However, she's now an outsider who's making a full-time living trying to scare people about communists. She started telling anyone who would listen that her cause kept her working until midnight, seven days a week. She's always talking about how hard she works. So she's never, she's a little bit Alex Jones there, where she's constantly lying about, I'm up to my, my, my neck in stacks of papers, documents that prove this extent of the communist menace. I never rest, right? Uh, and although with her, it might, she might be telling the truth, cause I do think she's like a compulsive workaholic.
52:58 Speaker 02 It, it, or at least, um, obsessed with this, like looking for the right word, just feeling like she has to do this, that she has to.
53:10 Robert Evans? She's completely empty as a person. There's nothing else to her besides this. She's given up.
53:14 Speaker 02 I would posit that she also was bored when she became.
53:19 Robert Evans? Yes.
53:19 Speaker 02 And, you know, caught up in this, like.
53:21 Robert Evans? She was bored and empty when she found this. And this is the only thing that's ever made her feel full. Yeah.
53:27 Speaker 02 Yeah.
53:28 Robert Evans? Yeah. It's, it's healthy. So, uh, she starts preparing for an even more influential book that she wants to publish. And I'm gonna quote from Amy Dye's thesis again here. Dilling began collecting over a hundred file cards. Each note card contained the name of a person with pro-communist affiliations. These file cards sparked her to purchase a large library of books about politics, history, law, philosophy, Jews, communism, organized labor, economics, revolution, and foreign policy. Hey, uh, hey Liz, I get why you're interested in like books of history and law and about like organized labor and co- why are Jews? Hey, hey, hey Liz? Why, why are they in there?
54:04 Speaker 02 Why are they?
54:04 Robert Evans? Hey Liz?
54:07 Robert Evans? We know.
54:08 Speaker 02 Care to explain that a little bit more?
54:10 Robert Evans? We know, we know why Jews are in there. I think we do.
54:12 Speaker 02 We do. We know why.
54:14 Robert Evans? Liz also does. Yeah, yeah.
54:17 Speaker 02 Okay, I Googled her and I saw an image that I won't reference right now because I want to see where this is going.
54:23 Robert Evans? Oh, fun. I'm interested in what that image is. So Liz also did a lot of gumshoe work infiltrating local communist organizations in Chicago by convincing them she wanted to join and asking for exclusive inside information. Now, in reality, she was just getting essays and notices about upcoming meetings, but she always treated this as if she was receiving highly dangerous military intel because that makes her sound cooler. Her inspiration in a lot of this work was a guy named Harry Young, who was the director of the American Vigilant Federation. Now, there's not a lot that remains about Harry, but I found an entry for him on Fasciopedia, which describes the Vigilant Intelligence Federation as, quote, "an attempt to track radicalism among labor union members. After three decades of monitoring radicals
55:06 Robert Evans? and their organizations in America, it has been said his files exceeded a million names." So yeah, he's keeping track of anyone who's in the labor movement, right? He's keeping a death list ready, just in case anyone wants to go kill these people. Young is also one of the first Americans to distribute the protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion in the United States, and it's said that he received his copy from three white Russians fleeing their failed counter-revolution. So he is one of the first people to spread anti-Semitic propaganda in an organized way in the United States. That's her direct inspiration.
55:37 Speaker 02 Perfect.
55:38 Robert Evans? Yeah. Young is the guy who turns the protocols into a movie for the first time, which helps to create a groundbreaking work of anti-Semitic propaganda that's referenced by Nazis to this day. Elizabeth knew this about him when they met. In fact, it's why she was excited to work with Young. As Amy Dai writes, "Young agreed to help Dilling by letting her look at any of his files that she deemed important to fight the communistic threat. Later, both Young's films and research came into the hands of the federal government. The Department of Justice deemed Young's work as un-American, as it featured several racial prejudices that offend most American citizens."
56:12 Robert Evans? So that's her like model. That's the guy that she loves. Yeah.
56:16 Speaker 02 Yeah. Okay. Good work, Liz.
56:18 Robert Evans? Good judgment, Liz. Yeah, you have great judgment in people. We can certainly say that about you. In the early 1930s, Dilling also helped to found an organization, the Paul Revere's, which she claimed was a patriotic organization to uphold Americanism in opposition to all other isms, such as socialism and communism. Interesting, fascism isn't spelled out there. She lists several isms, not fascism.
56:42 Speaker 02 It's not.
56:43 Robert Evans? Yeah.
56:44 Speaker 02 She conveniently forgot that ism.
56:46 Robert Evans? Yeah, I'm sure if you pressed her, she said, oh, yeah, that too, of course. But she didn't want to bring it up unless you did. Now, the only restriction the Paul Revere's had for new members, you want to guess the only kind of person who couldn't join her organization, the Paul Revere's of patriotic Americans, what kind of person would she exclude, do you think?
57:03 Speaker 02 Jews or black people?
57:04 Robert Evans? It's Jews. No, it's actually not. I I bet black people weren't allowed, actually, but that's not what my sources say.
57:13 Robert Evans? They weren't explicitly banned the way Jewish people were, although we have to assume they weren't welcome, right?
57:20 Speaker 02 I I do. I absolutely assume that.
57:23 Robert Evans? Yeah. But I can also see them only stating outright that Jews are not allowed, in part because they maybe just wouldn't have assumed any black people would ever try to join. They may have just been like, really?
57:32 Speaker 02 Yeah.
57:32 Robert Evans? Like, you might have been able to join the Paul Revere's as a black person as sort of a like, like an airbud situation where it's like, well, no one put this in the rules. Like, we clearly don't want this.
57:44 Speaker 02 They might not have even considered that they are people.
57:47 Robert Evans? Not conceive of this as a possibility.
57:50 Speaker 02 Yeah. Yeah.
57:51 Robert Evans? Yeah. Too racist to have a race-based entry requirement. Yeah. So in 1934, Liz published what would have become her most influential book, The Red Network: A Who's Who and Handbook of Radicalism for Patriots. This beautiful book, which you'll be seeing on your screen now, it's gorgeous, red cover, embossed, you know, nice, very, very basic font, but effective. The Red Network: A Who's Who and Handbook of Radicalism for Patriots. This collected all of Elizabeth's research, all of these note cards about these individual people that she's declared communists. This is like almost part of it's like a, almost like a, like a phone book of leftist radicals. Again, it's kind of a kill list, right?
58:34 Speaker 02 Like McCarthyism, pre-McCarthyism, McCarthyism.
58:38 Robert Evans? You've you've anticipated one of this book's biggest fans.
58:41 Speaker 02 Okay.
58:42 Robert Evans? Tailgater Joe loves this fucking book. This will make it into the McCarthy hearings as it happens. Yeah.
58:48 Speaker 02 Oh, wow.
58:48 Robert Evans? Good stuff. So we'll we'll be hearing a lot more from this book and hearing a lot more from and about Liz. But that's all for part one. Katie, you got any pluggables to plug at the end here? Yeah.
58:59 Speaker 02 Oh, sure. I got pluggables to plug. You can find me over at Some More News with Cody Johnston. Uh, we got some more news. We've got even more news. They're both on the same channel. Got a Patreon.
59:15 Robert Evans? Excellent. All right, everybody. Check their Patreon out. Check their channel out.
59:19 Speaker 02 Yeah.
59:20 Robert Evans? And check us out in like a day or so when we return with the rest of the story about Elizabeth Dillay.
59:28 Speaker 02 Yay. I'll be in this spot for the next two days. Waiting.
59:31 Robert Evans? Perfect. Beautiful.
59:32 Speaker 02 Impatiently.
59:34 Robert Evans? Glorious.
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Previous It Could Happen Here Weekly 238 Next Part Two: Elizabeth Dilling: The Original Candace Owens Page updated October 29, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
