The Martyr Made Substack

Darold Stagner asks: I am curious what you think of assertions that the David Irving defamation trial actually proved Irving correct in that only few and minor errors were identified in his Hitlers War. I will understand if you don’t answer, or simply answer through the program. The “I” word is inflammatory on its own, unfortunately.

Who’s David Irving?

I kid, I kid… It’s hard to discuss the man, his work, and the Lipstadt defamation trial because people have a tendency to turn it into a referendum on Hitler, the Third Reich, and the war. When Irving brought the defamation case against Lipstadt, her lawyers very consciously used this framing device as their primary defense strategy - essentially shifting the question (in both the courtroom and the media coverage) from whether Lipstadt had defamed Irving to whether or not the Holocaust happened. Not to impugn the honor of a judge, but it’s hard to imagine anyone stepping up to take Irving’s side on the case, regardless of the evidence.

For those unfamiliar with the case, the important thing to know is that it was not brought against Irving for anything he said or wrote, but was brought by Irving against the author Deborah Lipstadt, who, according to Irving, knowingly defamed him as a Holocaust denier among other things. The narrow focus of the trial ought to have been whether Lipstadt’s statements had knowingly smeared Irving, but such a focus would have made Lipstadt’s defense all but untenable. For example, Irving presented proof that Lipstadt had privately admitted on at least two occasions that he was did not deny the atrocities collectively known as the Holocaust. In handwritten lecture notes, Lipstadt stated, “Irving denies that Hitler was responsible for the murder of European Jewry. Rather, he claims that Himmler was responsible. But he does not deny its occurrence.” Also entered into evidence was a research proposal submitted by Lipstadt, which drew a distinction between Holocaust deniers and “those such as David Irving who do not deny that the Holocaust took place but seek to shift the blame to others.” I am not a lawyer, but I think most people would expect that accusing someone of something that you privately admitted was false would meet the criteria for defamation.

Irving’s position (at least at the time) was that approximately 3 million Jews were deliberately murdered by German forces, but that the operations were carried out under the fog of war under the direction of Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler. In books and speeches, Irving has often said that 3 million is his best estimate, but that it may have been higher, and may have even been 6 million. He points out that there is no documentary proof that the mass killing was ordered as a systematic, top-down operation by Hitler, and says that the single piece of evidence for it - minutes from a meeting of second-level functionaries based on a secretary’s shorthand notes - is too shaky a foundation on which to base such a fundamental assertion. Nevertheless, Irving says Hitler learned about the extent of the mass killing by 1943 at the latest, but took no action to stop it, and that, as head of state, Hitler bears ultimate responsibility for any crimes committed by his subordinates. Finally, Irving believes (or at least believed that the time, I’m not sure if he has revised his position) that gas chambers were not a primary method of killing, and most of those murdered at Auschwitz and other eastern camps were dispatched by shootings and other methods.

Grayson Jones asks: “Do you have any insight/opinions on the Mike Waltz, Pete Hegseth signal gate saga and the reassignment of Waltz to the UN on allegations that he is an asset for Israel? Do you think Trump will detach from Israel and recognize a Palestinian state?”

Answer: I don’t have any special insight on Signal-gate saga. People I know who work at the Pentagon have told me that things have been pretty chaotic since the new administration took over, but I’m not sure how much of that is just the bias of people who don’t like the changes. One person I know, who works in a high enough position to know what the bosses are thinking, is a two-time Trump voter, though, and that person has said things have been pretty disorganized. Hopefully it’s just transition growing pains.

No, I don’t think any US President will detach from Israel, and recognizing a Palestinian state would be tantamount to doing so. It is not impossible, however, that the US could stop using its Security Council veto on Israel’s behalf, and then let events take their course. I’ve been told by people who’d know that Trump changed after he got shot. He knows he doesn’t have much time left on this earth, and is very concerned with leaving behind a legacy that will, in time, drown out all the bad press and cement his family name in American history. Short-term political considerations, like pissing off Netanyahu or the Israel lobby, might be less of a factor than they would have been when he was worried about what the New York Times writes about him. But who knows? I talk to people who talk to Trump fairly regularly, and as much as he’s a heart-on-the-sleeve kind of guy, even they don’t always feel like they have a good read on him.

I think it is important for Trump, and the US & European governments in general, to recognize that the Likud Party under Benjamin Netanyahu has devolved into an extremist movement obsessed with revising the regional order by violent means. Netanyahu’s Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Givir, is the leader of the Jewish Power, has called mass murderer Baruch Goldstein, who killed 29 people and wounded 100 more in 1994, his “hero.” Just imagine if the US Secretary of Defense was the leader of the White Power Party, and went on TV to call Dylan Roof or Robert Gregory Bowers (perpetrator of the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue massacre) his hero. Epithets like “extremist” get thrown around a lot these days, and it has made many people unable to recognize the real thing when they see it. We have no business even associating with a government that includes men like Ben-Gvir in such high positions, let alone giving them our unconditional backing.

It seems as if Trump is beginning to understand that Benjamin Netanyahu and his party do not actually want peace. They want to keep the conflict at a low boil as cover for them to expand Israel’s borders and colonize more Arab land. This has been very clear for a long time, and Netanyahu & others have often said as much on the record, but hopefully Trump is starting to see that Israel is the single biggest obstacle to his hope of leaving a legacy of peace in the Middle East.

I want to be clear, because I know people are sensitive about this and have very strong opinions on all sides. As many of you know, I have spent a lot of time in Israel (12-15 trips for a combined 6-8 months or so over 12 years, all in my capacity as a DoD civilian). I have Israeli friends, most of whom were IDF officers or civilian employees of the Ministry of Defense when I met them on the job. I have always liked Israelis - in fact, they tend to be more realistic and tolerant of my views on this subject than non-Israeli Zionists (Jewish and non-Jewish) here in America. When this conflict was in its opening months and it became clear that the Israelis were going to wreak unprecedented destruction on Gaza, I stated that I couldn’t blame Israelis for wanting revenge and a dramatic result was both inevitable and (by Hamas) intended (though I think they probably got a lot more than they bargained for). The Israelis and their overseas boosters shot themselves in the foot by lying about certain atrocities supposed to have been committed (babies baked in ovens, 40 beheaded babies, etc.), but I know people who have seen some of the videos that were taken - people I know well, some of whom are harsh critics of Israel and who are not making things up - and the atrocities that really did happen were monstrous. It would have been unreasonable to expect the Israelis to behave rationally in the aftermath of October 7. That’s why it ought to have been incumbent on the United States, as Israel’s ally and sponsor, to be the sober party and hold them back from the abyss. As I said at the time, “I look at Israel as the drunk friend throwing bricks at a row of Harleys outside a bar full of Hell’s Angels, and I’m trying to calm him down and get him to safety before he gets himself killed.” It’s as if your friend’s child was murdered, and you see him loading his shotgun before heading to the courtroom to watch the trial. The killer deserves it, and the father deserves his revenge, but a real friend would hide his shotgun shells and remind him that he has a wife and two other kids who don’t need their dad to be imprisoned or killed by police. After 9/11, a critical mass of Americans would have signed off on any just about any act of violence, and I think, looking back, we all wish there was some country, or some combination of countries, with the power and influence to hold us back from making some of our worst mistakes. We had the ability to play that role for Israel, but instead we loaded the shotgun and drove them to the courthouse.

James Guzman asks: “What are your thoughts about the American justice system and how felons and illegal immigrants seem to fill the role of modern day slaves. And how the poor seem to be directly affected by the lawfair of the present day?”

Hi everyone. Thanks for indulging my brief hiatus. I overbooked my spring travel schedule, and spring is already a busy season around here. Oh, I got food poisoning for the first time, and it is every bit as bad as people have told me. Holy cow, knocked me flat for almost three days and I still feel like a sack of smashed assholes. But enough excuses - I’m back and I’m ready to go. For those of you who are new around here, don’t worry, this output schedule is not the norm, and I appreciate your patience. Truly, I don’t deserve you.

Here’s a quick update on some loose ends. The Peculiar Institution, the essay series I was working on before Enemy: The Germans’ War took over my life, has four more chapters to go. I’ve decided to write all four of them, then edit the whole series for release as an eBook and audiobook, both of which will be free to all Substack subscribers. I’ve been bearing down on the end of the next World War 2 episode. As usual when I near the end of a history episode, I’ve cut back my reading so I can obsess over story structure, factual detail, what to include and what to cut, etc., and it leaves little bandwidth for writing new material here. If I were a true professional at this, I would spend a few hours each morning working on something different for the Substack, but unfortunately when I’m this close I wake up thinking about World War 2, go through the day thinking about it, fall asleep thinking about it, and then dream about it until I wake up and start all over. I will be done soon, and we will be back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Since I’m buried in World War 2 minutiae, why don’t you guys ask some questions to give me some writing prompts? Ask me anything - politics, religion, history, advice, myself, anything. It’s been hard to pull my head out of my, uh… my books, and I’d be very glad to have a list of questions to answer. Anyway, leave them in the comments below and start punching out answers tomorrow!

In 1783, just a few months after the British were compelled to sign the Treaty of Paris recognizing her former American colonies as a newly-independent country, King George III dismissed Parliament’s ruling coalition, and appointed William Pitt (the Younger) Prime Minister of Great Britain. He was only twenty-four years old. Despite initial resistance from Parliamentary leaders who felt passed over, Pitt’s administration would steer Great Britain through two tumultuous decades following American independence - years which brought the French Revolution and the First Napoleonic War. How was it that a usually taciturn twenty-four year old could be appointed to the Premiership, and then successfully run a Parliament full of much older, better connected, and more accomplished men with their own dreams of being Prime Minister? Sure, Pitt wasn’t some nobody. After all, his father had been Prime Minister, but that was as likely to generate whispers of nepotism and name privilege as it was to bolster his legitimacy.

The answer is simple, really, and we don’t have to look further than the first speech he made as a Member of Parliament in 1780 (when he was only 21-years-old!). When he finished speaking, there was a brief moment of silence followed by thunderous applause. MP Sir John Sinclair wrote that Pitt’s speech was met with “utter astonishment… by an audience accustomed to the most splendid efforts at eloquence,” and that he never saw it surpassed, and only rarely rivaled, by any other MP. Haters, I’m sure, continued to hate, but the fact was that when William Pitt the Younger opened his mouth to speak, everyone knew the boss had arrived, age be damned.

Pitt’s ascension inaugurated Great Britain’s golden age, with the victory over Napoleon at one end, and the Victorian “empire on which the sun never sets” at the other. One of the reasons, I think, that Great Britain was so successful during this period is that her institutions were developed enough to enable efficient management of an empire, while still leaving room for superior people like Pitt to be elevated to positions of command. It’s hard to imagine something similar happening under our hypertrophied regime (even leaving aside minimum age regulations). In a developed country like the US or UK today, the system” has matured to the point that its rules and regulations challenge the authority of statutory, and even Constitutional law. Not that many years ago, for example, you would’ve been laughed out of any court in the land for suggesting that the President does not have the authority to fire, transfer, or reassign employees of the Executive Branch agencies under his command. The President’s Article 2 power over the Executive Branch of government is absolute: the agencies and offices only exist because the President can’t clone himself to perform the thousands of daily tasks required of his office. The State Department is not tasked with managing US foreign policy, but with carrying out the President’s foreign policy. The Defense Department exists to enact his military policy, the Department of Justice to implement his priorities with regard to criminal justice. These agencies are an extension of his will, and, by extension, the will of the people who elected him. They have no power of their own, but derive their power from the Office of the President of the United States. The idea that the President cannot make personnel decisions in the Executive Branch simply would not have been taken seriously in years past. But today, well, you see, there are labor contracts, tenure agreements, equal opportunity clauses, interagency consensuses - none of which carry the force of law, or, at least, not enough force to override the President’s clear Constitutional authority to manage the affairs of organizations he was democratically elected to run. Of course, power takes no account of our theories when deciding where to make its residence, and during Trump’s first term we got a real-life demonstration of this principle. Mass media organizations, global corporations, Ivy League college boards, the CIA - none of these have any political authority, but they all have power. When they (and the hundred other people and organizations I left out) are all in alignment, their power is considerable, often superseding genuine political authority to the point that elected officials feel helpless to oppose them even when doing so would put them on the side of most people.

It is impossible to understand politics without first grasping this difference between real and theoretical power. It’s like Roddy Piper’s sunglasses in They Live, allowing you to look past appearances to see what’s actually happening.

Hey everybody. Many of you will have already heard my take on the Book of Job, but I wanted to put it all together and expand on it this Easter. I hope you all had a blessed day, I mean it.

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Gather ‘round, young ‘uns, and hear tell of the days of yore. When I tell younger people that I didn’t start using the internet until I was out of high school (c. 1999), I’m usually met with the look they reserve for great grandpa’s story about trading in his horse-drawn cart for a rootin’ tootin’ Henry Ford Model T. The internet was a different place back then. Most people were still offline, and the early adopters were not exactly a neutral cross-section of the world’s English-speaking peoples. The user base skewed young and male compared to the general population. Social media didn’t exist yet, so the vast majority of users were set to read-only. They didn’t blog, post, comment, or DM, they read articles, looked up information, occasionally bought something, and that was about it. The users who were creating content - posting in message boards and comment sections, blogging, creating their own personal websites, etc. - skewed young and male even compared to the already young and male overall user base. The libertarian, even anarchist, idea of the internet as an unassailable bastion of free expression still held over from the hippie days of Silicone Valley, and it was taken for granted that, short of explicitly illegal activity, there were no rules. People who tried to impose rules were identified and eliminated.

I cut my internet teeth on MMA (mixed martial arts, or “ultimate fighting” for the uninitiated) message boards c. 1999-2002 - the UG, Sherdog’s Off-Topic forum, Ironlife after the crew got mass-banned from Sherdog, and our own board, Upstanding F*cking Citizens (UFC, get it?), after we all got banned from Ironlife. We were a bunch of guys who loved fighting and were fanatical about MMA back when John McCain was still calling it “human cockfighting” and the sport was still banned in 49 states. There was a time when MMA was also known as NHB (no-holds barred), and smaller fight organizations typically had names with “Extreme,” “Blood,” and “Gladiator” in them. The music was “Let the Bodies Hit the Floor”-style heavy and nu metal (the UFC still uses a riff that sounds straight off an early KoRn album), roided out fans attended fights “dressed up” in Ed Hardy or Affliction t-shirts, and there were often more fights in the stands and parking lot than there were in the cage or ring. The UFC’s original tagline was: “There Are No Rules!” So, if internet users were already heavily weighted toward the young, anarchic (some might even say antisocial), and male, MMA message board users were the distilled essence of that demographic. We were cruel to each other without any of us ever feeling like the object of anyone’s cruelty. For the last twenty years, I have made fun of my best friend because his mom is deaf; he invariably responds by throwing shade on my dead father. Neither of us has ever felt insulted even though they are objectively outrageous things to say to another person.

MMA fans and online content creators1 saw the lack of rules almost as an end in itself. The cardinal sin was to take oneself too seriously; it was not to offend, but to be offended. Five minutes clicking through threads on the first page of the Off Topic section of any message board would expose the average person to more racism, sexism, antisemitism, homophobia, body shaming, support for Nazis, communists, terrorists, serial killers, mass shooters, and war criminals than they had seen in their lives up to that point. It was enough to scare 99% of lurkers away, and that was the point. If you passed through that initial filter, you were in for weeks, even months, of an uninterrupted stream of contempt, abuse, hate, and trolling. The swastika and goatse pic were like the “No Girls Allowed” sign boys put on the door of their treehouse. The rare woman who found their way onto a late ‘90s-early 2000s message board was welcomed with a barrage of propositions, questions about her sexual history, misogynistic jokes, and “tits or gtfo.” None of us, or very few, took any of it seriously, and everyone understood it was an effective means of gatekeeping. The terms and conditions of the early internet were simple: you had to prove you could take it2 without losing emotional control over some words on a screen. On a gut level, everyone understood that the presence of just a few schoolmarms tsk tsk’ing the boys would ruin the loose, anything goes environment we all cherished.

Then, one day, everyone’s moms, grandmas, sisters, girlfriends, and wives logged on and found out what the boys had been up to all this time. Almost overnight, our closed-off little world where the only rule was that there were no rules, and the only sin was taking offense, was flooded with millions of new users who never got that memo. Our society has been trying to contain the consequences of this encounter ever since. With the advent of social media, troglodytes like me often had trouble adjusting to the reality that our posts were no longer confined to the intimacy of a self-selected members-only message board where the humor consisted largely of antics meant to shock, horrify, and drive away all but a narrow and specific audience. Suddenly broadcasting to the whole world, on corporate platforms concerned with making every human with a heartbeat feel welcome, and our humor was a bannable offense.

Jocko once told me how, during a wild firefight on the streets of Ramadi, he or one of his guys would kick in the nearest door and take cover inside. Bullets whizzing, grenades exploding, people screaming… and then he looks around the room he just barged into and there’s a mom and dad and two kids hiding under a table. That is similar to how those of us weaned on old school message boards and dorm room Counterstrike servers felt when we moved, with everyone else, to social media platforms. A lot of poor schmucks got themselves a permanent place on the SPLC’s Hatewatch website before they were able to make the necessary adjustments.

The upshot of this overlong introduction is that different people have different reactions to the chaos they encounter on the internet. I am one of the generation trained by hard experience to be shocked, appalled, and offended by… absolutely nothing. Even when we see something that triggers those vestigial reflexes, we pretend to hardly notice while mocking all the n00bs for throwing a fit. I don’t say any of this with pride, and think G.K. Chesterton was probably right when he wrote: “Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which you are accustomed to seeing or hearing without being shocked…It may be that your grandmother was an extremely lively and vital animal and that you are a paralytic.” Nevertheless, this is the world to which my generation was forced to adapt, and by the time the habitat changed we had already achieved our final form and it was too late.

So much for the trip down Memory Lane. Something was happening beneath the surface that escaped the notice of most of us OG trolls. It turned out that there was more than one way to miss the joke and take things too seriously. Type 1 was easy to spot since it was the prey evolution had prepared us to hunt. Type 2, though, was almost custom-made to evade our detection because, at a glance, it resembled one of us.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. Three Jews walk into a bar, and, before they even order a drink an OG troll in the far corner shouts, “Three oven-dodgers in one place? How did Adolf drop the ball so badly?” One of the newcomers wants to fight, and is promptly thrown out by the bouncer. The second huffed and puffed with tears in his eyes before fleeing the place. But, without missing a beat, the third Jew says, “Because Adolf was too busy screwing your grandma before he shot himself like a little bitch.” Some OG like me says, “Ha! Buy this man a drink! Sorry, this bar doesn’t carry the blood of Christian infants.” And the awesome Jew says something like, “That’s OK, you guys have been aborting so many of your babies we’ve had to find alternatives anyway.” I just made this guy up, but I already love him. This is how things worked back in the day.

But then, with furrowed brow, another regular, a younger guy, says, “Don’t buy that Jew a drink!”

“Har har har. He passed your test, leave him be. Don’t be an asshole.”

“Fuck that Jew, and fuck you too if you defend him.”

I say this asshole is a regular because we’ve seen him around, but he actually showed up relatively recently. I look around the bar for support, but I’m met with blank or hostile stares. A lot of my old friends from the bar have moved on. A few told me they left because the younger crowd coming in was hateful and dangerous, so naturally I called them pussies and told them to take a hike. Come to think of it, I don’t recognize most of the faces any more. Anyway, I tell them to give it a rest, he’s cool, but they are not having it. They’re not joking, and things are getting uncomfortable, and so I - and this is the point I’ve come to in real life - I shake the dust from my feet and leave my favorite watering hole for good.

If you’re a follower of this Substack, you already know I don’t need to be lectured on the history of Israeli atrocities, the abuses of the Israel lobby and other Jewish organizations, or the preponderance of Jews in subversive cultural and political movements. I don’t think the Israelis killed JFK or pulled off 9/11, but I don’t run away screaming when someone tells me they do. I get the arguments - I don’t agree, but I get it. I know about Weimar Germany, and the Soviet secret police, and Jeffrey Epstein. I know that you were viciously attacked for asking simple, obvious questions after October 7th, and I know you watched people you thought were intelligent and humane transform before your eyes into bloodthirsty lunatics baying for Palestinian blood. I got myself denounced by the White House and banned from several European countries for making what I thought was a mild and qualified criticism of the usual World War 2 narrative, so I know, and I get it.

For all these reasons and more, it’s easy to get caught up in the “Jew thing.” I’ve seen it happen a hundred times, and one of the things you notice is that you almost never meet a moderate antisemite. You know, someone who goes about their day like anyone else, almost never thinking about the Jews, except when he’s looking for an accountant he filters out all the the Steins, Bergs, Golds, Silvers, Silversteins, and Goldbergs. If that guy exists, I’ve never met him. The antisemites I know - I know plenty, and to the chagrin of my critics I do not denounce them… in fact, I count many of them as friends - seem to be unable to think or speak of anything else, especially in the early stages when the fever first grips them. I have some theories about why that is, but we’ll save them for another time. This post is a simple announcement that I’m shaking the dust from my feet and finding another bar where people still get the joke. I’ve blocked over 15,000 people on X by now, and I would say that 70% of them were due to vulgar antisemitism. I don’t block people for saying Jews run the media, or that we live under a Zionist Occupied Government, or that Jews have split loyalties, so those 15,000 are just the nakedly hateful, the-Holocaust-isn’t-real-but-I-wish-it-was people.

Hatred will ruin our souls whether or not our target has it coming. That is not to say that Jews deserve your hatred, only that you shouldn’t indulge it even if you think they do. Even if you’re right, it won’t save you, and it won’t make a difference to the real people in your life who need a spouse, parent, sibling, or friend who isn’t seething with anger and resentment over an abstract issue involving people you’ll never meet.

“Mommy, why is daddy angry?”

“Because the Jews are at it again, sweetie.”

This kind of thing happens, and you don’t want to be that person. Your excuses for it are like when Jenny’s boyfriend in Forrest Gump blames his temper tantrum on LBJ. There are ways to be critical of organized Jewish power without letting it consume you. Any voice encouraging you to hate is the voice of Satan. It is your enemy. You’d think that a basic familiarity with the Christian message would make that obvious, but Satan keeps using the same trick because it almost always works.

The story of the Good Samaritan is often lost on modern audiences because most of us don’t have a contemporary equivalent to the deep contempt Judeans had for Samaritans. If the story was written today in Israel, it would be called The Good Palestinian, or, if it was written in Gaza, it would be called The Good Israeli. And if you’ve been sucked into the vortex of antisemitic obsession, the story written to you would be The Good Jew. If that causes bile to pool beneath your esophagus, then you know how Jesus’ audience felt when he told the story the first time.

I’m really tired of talking about this stuff, and this post is meant to be an explanation of why I’m going to try to talk about it less. If it you pick up a whiff of sanctimony, it’s unintentional and I’m self-conscious about sounding like that. This is a speech I give myself on a regular basis, because I’m as prone to mob up and look for scapegoats as anyone else. I know what it’s like to walk around consumed with anger, and it’s never worth it.

I imagine I’m talking to a few different audiences here, so I’ll close by address each of you directly.

If you have started “noticing,” and felt yourself being pulled into the cycle of conflict, just take a step back. No one ever looked back on his life pleased with the fact that he spent so much of it carrying around anger and hatred over things that had nothing to do with his immediate circumstances.

If you’re thinking “somebody got to Cooper,” or “he’s controlled opposition,” or some other phrase you once saw someone tweet, or if you’re getting angry that I’m trying to dissuade people from following you into the muck, leave or keep it to yourself. I’m happy to discuss this with anyone, especially hardened antisemites, if they’re willing to engage in good faith, but I’m done indulging or ignoring low-IQ vulgar antisemitism. The goal of these people is to conscript everyone else into their conflict, and they won’t be using me or my platform to do it.

If you don’t have any strong feelings about this, God bless you. You’re doing it right, and I love and envy you.

Thanks for reading.

I’m using this term to mean anyone who posted, commented, blogged, uploaded or otherwise added to the store of online content, rather than simply consuming it. By this definition, virtually everyone is a “content creator” today.

What’s “it”? Anything.

Hey everyone. I’m trying to finish the next day today, but in the meantime I fulfilled a life goal of appearing on one of my favorite podcasts with one of my favorite people, Duncan Trussell.

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Hey everyone. We’ve had a lot of new subscribers sign up lately, and some of you have reached asking where to find Martyr Made content. I thought I’d create this guide to help.

Here are links to the podcast feed for iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube. Individual series & episodes are listed down below. Later, when I have time (ha!) I will start, bit by bit, adding some reading recommendations for each one.

Martyr Made on iTunes

Martyr Made on Spotify

Martyr Made on YouTube

Please support the podcast by becoming a paid subscriber to the Martyr Made Substack, where you’ll get access to a ton of essays, podcasts, and other exclusive content for just $5 p/month or $50 p/year. This is a 100% listener-supported podcast. If I had funded this show by running advertisements, I would have been canceled overnight after last year’s Tucker Carlson interview. Fortunately, I don’t work for them, or anyone else except you, and that’s the way it will always stay.

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I will keep expanding this post a bit at a time to include all Substack content, book and other media recommendations, my appearances on other podcasts, etc, but I’m going to post it now to help new subscribers find their way.

Fear & Loathing in the New Jerusalem (6 episodes)

The series that started it all. The conflict between Israel and Palestine can often seem like a permanent feature of the global order. The wars, intifadas, refugees camps, suicide vests, UN resolutions, and peace talks have been painfully burned into our collective consciousness. But how could this have happened? Was it always this way? That’s what we’ll seek to find out in Fear & Loathing in the New Jerusalem, a multi-part series exploring the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (Trailer is age restricted due to a few grisly images, so you have to click and go to YouTube to watch).

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God’s Socialist - The Rise and Fall of Peoples’ Temple (7 episodes)

When the 1960s began, Dwight Eisenhower was President, Frankie Avalon was at the top of the charts, and few Americans had heard of Vietnam. By the end of the decade, the country had been politically and culturally transformed by war, the civil rights movement, and a youth rebellion unprecedented in American history. The rise and fall of notorious cult leader Jim Jones and his Peoples’ Temple movement provides a microcosmic portrait of a revolutionary era whose battle lines remain as social and political fractures to this day.

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Whose America? (3 episodes + 2 more still to come)

In the mid-19th century, a typical American miner, longshoremen, factory worker, or other laborer could expect a life that was “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Workers’ rights were virtually non-existent. They were paid just enough to fend off starvation and exposure, and workers’ rights were virtually non-existent. Great masses of the labor force were made up of immigrants, who saw their work not only as a means to feed their families, but to carve out their own space in the American polity. This series tells some of the stories of the great men and women who fought, bled, and died on the picket lines for the basic rights enjoyed by all of us today.

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Enemy: The Germans’ War (1 episode + many more to come)

The Second World War was the greatest catastrophe in human history. Sixty million people dead. Entire nations destroyed. All sides engaged in the wholesale slaughter of enemy civilian populations. And the nuclear demon unleashed upon the world. It was the war in which the United States and our allies conquered the world, and eighty years after Germany's defeat, the story of the war remains our civilization's most important load-bearing myth. Myths are stories told by the winners to legitimize their victory, but in real history the losers have their own story to tell. This series will explore the deep history of the Second World War through the eyes of the Enemy.

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The Anti-Humans (1 episode)

History is replete with examples of leaders, nations, and empires who left a trail of blood behind them. But with the Bolshevik takeover of Russia after the First World War, something new crawled from the depths of the earth onto the surface of the world. Never before had a government shown such uninhibited savagery toward its own people, during peacetime, as a matter of policy and in the name of scientific management. After Nazi Germany was defeated in the Second World War, Stalin’s Soviet Union unleashed hell on the devastated nations of Eastern Europe, leaving behind an unmatched record of sadism and brutality. Listener discretion is strongly advised.

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The Complete Jeffrey Epstein Series (3-episodes-in-1)

Imagine that you’ve been invited by a billionaire to fly on his plane to his private island. Upon boarding the plane, you’re seated and made by a stewardess in skimpy clothes. Soon, three more friendly young girls appear, offering food, drinks, massages, and anything else you might desire. None of the girls is related to your billionaire host, and none of them looks older than about 14. You, I, and everyone we know would either flee the plane before takeoff or else physically assault the billionaire, but countless Western elites stayed on that plane, went to that island, and maintained their friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. What was really going on here? Who was he working for? And why was he able to move so freely and openly among the people running our governments and corporations?

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Blacks and Jews (6-episodes-in-1)

Long before the recent hullabaloo surrounding Kanye West’s self-immolation on the steps of the Anti-Defamation League’s headquarters, much ink had been spilled over the complicated relationship between American blacks and Jews - though, not much recently. When, every so often, a black celebrity hits the news for saying something that causes Jews to feel threatened or offended, the press treats each story as hermetically sealed off from the others. In truth, Kanye was just the most recent eruption of an old volcano, and the complicated history of the so-called “Black-Jewish Alliance” goes back over a century.

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The Underground Spirit (1 episode)

There’s a quote always attributed to Winston Churchill – falsely, I think? – that goes something like, “If you’re not a liberal at 20, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by 30, you have no brain.” I’ve got a different version that I like a lot better, and it goes, “If you’re not reading Nietzsche at 20, you have no heart. But if you haven’t transitioned to Dostoevsky by 30…” In this episode, I look through the lives and work of the two 19th century existentialist authors, who have a great deal in common, but who, in the end, couldn’t be more different. This episode is outside the usual Martyr Made wheelhouse, but many people say it is their favorite. It was probably my favorite one to make.

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Anything That Moves: The My Lai Massacre

This is an episode I did in conjunction with my friend ’s episode about the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864. The massacre of over 500 innocent, unarmed Vietnamese civilians at My Lai provides a lesson on how ordinary men become monsters.

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Human Sacrifice and Cannibalism

These episodes were done in parallel with Daniele Bolelli’s History On Fire series on the Spanish conquest of Mexico. They are a bit light-hearted and – wait, light-hearted is definitely not the right word for these episodes on human sacrifice and cannibalism. Let’s just say I had some fun with the topics, and they are not intended as thorough investigations of each topic. I really like #8, How to Serve Man, but all three were fun to research and make. I failed to provide much on the Aztecs, though, which means I owe you guys an episode or two in the future.

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The Madame Butterfly Effect (1 episode)

This is the story of the time a group of Japanese terrorists murdered a bunch of Puerto Rican Christians to help Palestinian communists fight Zionist Jews. Ah, the fruits of globalization!

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Hey everyone. Here is the audio version of my recent post on the Social and Economic Philosophy of the Third Reich.

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I was recently contacted by NYT writer Joe Bernstein. He informed me that he was writing a profile about me for The Times, and hoped I would talk to him. Most of you know I do not like this kind of attention, but he said the profile would be published whether I spoke to him or not. He was kind enough to agree to my request for a set of written questions - I’ve gotten myself in enough trouble with poorly worded and incomplete verbal interview answers lately - and, I want to stress, he’s been kind and forthright all along. However, having been the victim of more press smears than any other podcaster in recent years, I decided to publish my answers here and provide him with the link, just so that there is no confusion about what I said or didn’t say.

Joe, I hope you don’t mind, or, if you do mind, I hope you understand. I’ve had to calm my grandmother after she read major publications saying terrible things about me, and it’s made me more than a little shy around reporters.

1. Can you give a brief biographical sketch? I know you've lived in California, Montana, and Idaho, but like, where are you from? How did you grow up? When we talked, Tucker said that you grew up pretty poor. Did you do college? Did you study any history? That kind of stuff.

I was born in Stockton, CA, but moved around a lot over the years. My father wasn’t around, and my mom shacked up where she could to keep a roof over our heads. I was surrounded by a lot of bad influences, but I had two little sisters looking up to me so I mostly stayed out of trouble - that is, I never cut class, cheated in school, used drugs or alcohol, or bullied kids, but I fought a lot. Usually I didn’t have a choice. I attended between 30-40 schools during K-12, sometimes moving every few months. We were poor, and I spent most of my childhood in the poorer neighborhoods of the cities we lived in. I was a bookworm as far back as I can remember, and reading became my way of maintaining some consistency as we moved from place to place. I didn’t bother getting to know anyone at many of the schools I attended, and could usually be found spending my lunch hour reading a book in the library. Every time I started at a new school, I would be placed in the honors or advanced classes - sometimes because they tested me, other times because the teachers figured out I was ahead of the other students, but sometimes I think it was because I was one of the only white kids in a gang-infested gladiator academy. Either way, I was only an average student. I would win spelling bees, math competitions, and essay contests, and ace classes when our grade depended on essays, tests, and quizzes, but I did almost no homework in twelve years of school. My home environment was too chaotic and stressful - an obstacle that can be overcome with dedicated and serious parenting, but alas… I think I got C’s in pretty much every math class I ever took, acing every quiz and test, but never doing a single homework assignment. I’d get a C- or C+ depending on whether the teacher liked me. When I was close to graduating in 1999, I was called in to a meeting with the school counselors. I had aced my ACT test, and they wanted to know how that was possible when I was graduating with a 2.something GPA. They lectured me about discipline, and properly applying myself, and asked about my college plans. It was a conversation I’d had with dozens of school officials over the years.

1. Why did you decide to enlist in the Navy? What did you do in the Navy?

My grandfather was a retired Chief Petty Officer in the Navy, and I had always planned on joining after I was finished with school. I went to college, but I still didn’t really know which direction I ought to go after three semesters, so I cut it short and joined the Navy in January 2001. A fateful decision, because there’s no question that if I’d still been a civilian on September 11, 2001, I would have joined the Army or Marine Corps and my life would have taken a radically different course.

Hi everyone. Here’s the audio version of my recent post But I Thought We Were Friends.

Thanks again to all of you paid subscribers. For anyone who is not yet a paid subscriber, why not try it out now and get full access to all essays & podcasts? It’s just $5 p/month or $50 p/year. I really appreciate your support.