Pod Only Knows

In the wake of the 2020 election, one meme, which had originated in the spring of 2019, flooded the most ardently MAGA corners of the internet. It featured an image of Soviet Dictator Joseph Stalin and the following quote.

"The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything."

To the MAGA world, Stalin’s words echoed eerily into the present. Like Stalin, the imposter president Joe Biden was, naturally, a Marxist bent on reconstituting America as a Communist hellscape in which Christianity was illegal and worship of the state was mandatory. But the problem with the meme is that the quote is fabricated. Stalin never said it.

In part three, our final episode of the first half of season 2, we look at how Stalin would use deception to take control of the Soviet Union and how his use of disinformation helped him tighten his group, reshape Russian foreign policy, and infect the American imagination for decades to come.

John is on Twitter @ProbablyRealJB

Mike on Twitter @the_mikestir

Jess on Twitter @jayarekay_

Sources for this episode include:

The outro music is a cover of Ruled by Secrecy by Muse, performed by Lena Hall.

103 years ago this week, the last of the Romanovs - Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra, and their 4 children, Olga, Tatianna, Maria, Anastasia, and Alexei – were murdered in a basement in the House of Special Purpose in Yekaterinberg.

So much of what we believe about history depends on whose voices we are allowed to hear telling us the story, and for decades the voices of the Romanovs remained suppressed - just like the true location of their final resting place.

This week, John welcomes authors and translators Helen Azar and George Hawkins, both of whom have been instrumental in bringing those voices back and, in so doing, correcting and further illuminating our understanding of 20th century Russia history.

Together they wrote and translated Maria Romanov: Third Daughter of the Last Tsar, Diaries and Letters, 1908–1918, published in August of 2020.

More about Helen's work can be found on her website, The Romanov Family - Their history in their own words

The belief in urban legends plays an enormous role in shaping our culture - even if we hate to admit it. But you'd have a hard time finding someone who doesn't believe in at least one part of a famous urban legend, whether they fear the Slender Man or just refuse to eat unwrapped Halloween candy.

Video game culture of the 1980s and 1990s, given it was born in dark video arcades and suburban basements, presented a perfect breeding ground for interesting and new urban legends and straight-up hoaxes, and the greatest of all is the legend of Polybius - the mysterious rare game that came and went in a month in 1981 and turned out to be a weird government mind control experiment which turned out to be a total hoax that never existed...or possibly existed in an unauthorized timeline and now entertains the God of Mischief at the end of time.

Tyler Birth joins to talk about the fascinating elements that brought the Polybius urban legend to vivid life.

Tyler's on twitter @OhThatTyler

Recently, the groups American Atheists and Mississippi Humanist Association filed a lawsuit against the state of Mississippi over it “In God We Trust” license plate. The lawsuit accuses the state of violating the first amendment right of freedom of speech and religion by in effect forcing them to invoke God on their personal property.

On a related note, there’s a chance you’ve noticed that, over the last decade or so, the religious right has developed a very public preoccupation with what they call “religious liberty”.

But keep in mind, these are not the same causes.

The secular, Constitutional concept of religious freedom has little if anything to do with religious fundamentalism at the heart of the term “religious liberty”, but the obfuscation of these two things is, for the “religious liberty” people, the point.

Civil rights attorney and Episcopal priest the Rev. Dr. Marcia Ledford joins John to discuss the state of religious freedom and the Christian Left in the time of Trumpism.

Even for the most dedicated "traditional" Shakespeare scholar, the fact of the Bard's use (or rather plagiarism) of previous sources is beyond controversy. One universally agreed-upon source is the work of the Elizabethan intellectual Thomas North, whose translation of Plutarch has long been identified as the basis for much of Shakespeare's so-called "Roman" work.

But what if North's involvement in creating the Shakespearian canon goes much, much further? That's the question one unlikely investigator, Dennis McCarthy, has been asking for over a decade.

McCarthy's quest to illuminate the full extent of North's role in giving us "Shakespeare" - as well as his conviction that North was a playwright and that Shakespeare's plays contain biographical elements of North's life - is chronicled by journalist Michael Blanding in his new book, North by Shakespeare.

Blanding joined John to talk about his love of a good story, the allure of his subjects, North and McCarthy, and whether or not he regrets treading into the murky and often infuriating world of the Shakespeare Authorship Question.

You can find Michael on Twitter @michaelblanding

You can find Dennis McCarthy on Twitter @4threvolt

You can visit Michael's website and learn more about his work here: http://www.michaelblanding.com/

You can learn more about the Thomas North/Shakespeare connection and explore McCarthy's work on his website: https://sirthomasnorth.com/

If you put the word "clown" in Google image search - the unfailing barometer of our societal trends - long before you encounter a single image of kid's jack-in-the-box or even a whimsical circus performer, you'll be bombarded with grotesque images of snarling, horrific killers in white and red makeup.

Just how, when, and why did clowns become synonymous with fear and horror?

Chelsey Weber-Smith is the creator and host of the brilliant podcast American Hysteria. They are also a really big fan of the 1990 version of Stephen King's It. Both of which makes them uniquely qualified to explain the roots of our (irrational and, indeed, hysterical) fear of clowns.

Check out Chelsey's website here.

Chelsey/American Hysteria is on Twitter @AmerHysteria

Look, it's been a heavy string of Hard to Believe episodes, and as fun as it is to talk about conspiracy cults and death and Shakespeare, it requires a lot of research and prep and, to be honest, John was exhausted.

And it's summertime, and summer is for fun.

So John invited 2 Fast 2 Forever's Joey Lewandowski and frequent guest Teddy Smith for the dumbest, weirdest, and most fun story we've ever covered: that time Nicolas Cage tried to find the Holy Grail. 

Check out Joey's new book club podcast, how to win the lottery.

Check out Teddy's car show, A Valiant Effert.

If you don't know who Nicolas Cage is I can't help you.

Octavia Butler is inarguably one of the greatest science fiction authors of all time, and she may well also be the most important one of our time. She was taken from this world far too early in 2006, but her work continues to speak to and for a beleaguered world, and has found an emerging and increasingly devout audience in social justice circles and among marginalized groups to whom her work has always spoken in profound and hopeful ways.

In this episode, John is joined by Anand Kalra, founding director of Uncaged Librarian Arts & Information. He has worked in K-12 public schools, early childhood education, academic libraries, LGBT advocacy, and public health policy. He is the producer, director, and lyricist from Octavia of Earth, a documusical about the live of Octavia Butler, which is now being developed into a feature film.

You can learn more about Octavia of Earth here: http://www.octaviaofearth.org/

You can learn more about Uncaged Librarian Productions here: https://uncagedlibrarianmusic.com/

In the 1990s, Fred Grewe's best friend died of AIDS. AIDS took a lot of lives in the 1990s, and at some point even became the source of a kind of moral panic about looming premature death that was used to scare teenagers in surburbia (like John) away from behaviors typically frowned upon my conservative white America. It also factored into John's long-standing aversion to talking about death.

But the loss of Grewe's friend only furthered his own drive to minister to and care for the dying, and that experience has offered him a lot of lessons about what it is to be alive, and so John stepped out of his comfort zone to talk to Grewe about his spiritual journey, his philosophy of life, and what working with the dying has taught him about living.