Behind the Bastards - CZM Rewind: Part One: Savitri Devi The Woman Who Turned Nazism into a Religion
Episode Date: April 30, 2024...
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I used to have so many men.
How this beguiling woman in her 50s.
She looked like a million bucks.
Scams a bunch of famous athletes out of untold fortunes.
Nearly $10 million was all gone.
It's just unbelievable.
Hide your money in your old Richmond
because she is on the prowl.
Listen to Queen of the Con, Season 5, The Athlete Whisperer
on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's esoteric, my Hitlerisms?
Shit, that is two Hitler starts in a row.
Ah, fuck it. Jesus, Robert.
Well, it fits with this episode.
This is Behind the Bastards,
podcast about the worst people in all of history.
I'm Robert Evans, I'm the host,
and my guest today is Jamie.
Hi, I just go by one name now.
I'm the Beyonce of, no, Billy Wayne's the Beyonce
of Behind the Bastards.
Yeah, you are the podcaster formerly known as the Beyonce of Behind the Bastards. Yeah.
You are the podcaster formerly known as the Beyonce of Behind the Bastards.
Yeah.
You're the Beyonce of my heart.
Thank you.
Yeah, there we go.
Thank you.
There we go.
Jamie, how are you doing today?
I'm good.
I'm good.
I think that that's true.
I'm good.
I have to add-
Yeah, you're probably good.
I have to add a bag to my Spirit airlines flight, but that's about as as challenging as it's getting today
Speaking of monsters that is the greatest monster of all pay to breathe on my interface
Yeah, you have to like swipe your credit card if you sneeze on a spirit airlines
I uh, I have this friend, his name is Lenny,
and he listens to the podcast, so he may hear this. And Lenny is one of the most experienced travelers I know.
And at one point I was taking a flight with him
in Eastern Europe to Ukraine through Wizz Air,
which is one of the worst airlines on the planet.
Oh, I've heard of Wizz Air.
Yeah, they're terrible.
Never had the pleasure. There was a moment where they started hassling us about our bags and it became clear that
we weren't going to be able to like fit everything, like that we were going to have to take stuff
out.
And the line from him that I'll never forget was, I guess, well, I guess I'm wearing all
my pants today.
I've worn multiple pairs of pants on.
How, if you're not going onto a Spirit Airlines flight
wearing five jackets, like what are you even,
you're robbing yourself.
You're, I've been on a Spirit Airlines red eye
next to like an actively drunk person multiple times.
Well, no, that's just normal.
I know, but it's like, yeah, you're right.
If you haven't wept,
if you haven't wept and thrown things away
while waiting to get in line at Spirit Airlines,
have you even flown?
We've gotten off topic.
Very off topic.
Jamie. Yes.
Have you ever heard of Savitri Devi?
No.
Oh good.
Oh boy, Jamie, you are in for a motherfucking treat.
Ooh, I love when you don't tell me in advance.
Okay, okay.
Yeah.
This is one I'm gonna guess almost nobody
listening to has heard of,
but she's one of the most important people
for understanding where we are right now in the year 2020.
Like the most recent headline that ties directly to her is you remember when the FBI arrested all those members of the base?
That neo-Nazi group that's planning to start a second civil war by randomly firing into a crowd in Virginia that was full of armed people?
Yes.
That whole hullabaloo?
Yes.
Yeah.
Well, she's kind of behind all that although she died decades before it happened. So that's today's story nice
Let's do it
So now Jamie we're gonna start like we start every good day by talking about our little buddy
Shouldn't call him a buddy Adolf Hitler. Okay, it's weird because I can call Stalin a buddy
But I feel like calling Hitler a buddy is a bridge too far.
I don't know, on this show I feel like there are just rules
that are different.
Yeah, they're old friends at this point.
So Hitler was at his core.
Who was he?
He was a secular ruler, Jamie.
He was not a, I think there's a lot of misconceptions
about kind of the nature of, of his power
and like his regime because of all of these,
like history channel documentaries
and this industry of books on Nazi occult history
and like Nazi magic and the Hellboy movies.
But like-
Oh, love to hear it.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, they're great movies.
At least one of them is, but like this idea that like-
Haven't seen them.
The Nazis were like full of, full of full of magic right and that Hitler like believed all
sorts of like weird
Kooky occult stuff about like raising the dead and and aliens and shit, and it's just not true
There were some funky occult ties to National Socialism, but they were to be phrase. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah
cult ties Yeah, baby Oh, love that phrase. Oh yeah, yeah, oh yeah. Funky. Funky occult ties.
Yeah, baby.
Yeah, but they weren't to Hitler.
They were to like kind of like side figures,
like the B list of the Nazis.
A lot of those guys were kind of into the occult,
but like your A listers really were pretty secular guys.
The Beyonce's, the Nazi Beyonce's,
as opposed to, I'm trying to think of like, the Halls.
The Nazi Jeremy Renners.
The Halls. Oh, how dare you speak his name in this forum. I thought we made a pact to never speak of him again.
We never signed that contract.
We never.
But you did.
It was under negotiation for a long time.
Yeah.
It is still in arbitration.
negotiation for a long time. Yeah. It is still in arbitration. Now the Tula society, spelled fool society, like the top racks on people's jeeps, was it, well, Subaru's,
people's Subaru's. The Tula society was a German occult group in the early 20th
century in Germany and it provided some of the early funding and leadership for
the Nazi Party. Heinrich Himmler some of the early funding and leadership for the Nazi party.
Heinrich Himmler held bizarre quasi magical beliefs for his whole time in power.
And he was kind of into some weird, he thought he was like a reincarnated
prince and some shit.
Sure.
Hitler himself was not at all into a cult stuff.
Um, and the only guy really close to him who was, was Rudolf Hess, who was his
deputy and for a long time, his best friend.
This is the guy he like co-wrote Mein Kampf with,
like Hess and Hitler are like fucking tight
before Hitler comes to power.
Is that like his ghostwriter?
Yeah, kind of, like more like his muse.
Yeah, and also the guy who was a competent typist.
Both of those things.
I mean, you got, if your muse is also a competent typist, who says the perfect
person doesn't exist?
Yeah, Rudolf Hess.
That's what people say about Rudolf Hess, is he was the perfect person.
So he was also the deputy Fuhrer for a while.
Oh, sick, sick, sick, sick, sick.
Yeah, he was a cool dude.
But he wasn't really in the picture for very long.
He got increasingly marginalized
after Hitler came to power in 33.
And in 1941, he kind of went bug fuck
and got on a plane and flew to Great Britain
while the two countries were at war.
Sorry, sorry, sorry.
How would you define bug fuck?
I would define bug fuck as like independently hopping in your private plane and flying to
a country that your country is actively bombing to try to parachute down and negotiate for
peace between your two nations without anyone asking you to.
I would describe that as pretty bug fuck.
Yeah, that's not.
This is like a new term for me,
and now this is the only reference point I have for it,
so I'm not gonna know how to define bug fuck moving forward.
Okay, so bug fuck is when the world is falling apart,
and you're like, fuck it, and you go the fuck off,
and then you, is that it?
Kind of, yeah. It was the kind of where like there was no chance of it ever working
He did not have the authority to to sign a peace treaty for Germany
And Britain did not have any interest in talking with him or making peace with Germany at this point sick
So he basically just flew and crash landed in England and got arrested and spent the
rest of his life in prison.
Very bad.
And it was a huge embarrassment for Hitler.
Because this is like his right hand man who in the middle of the war flies to his enemy's
country to try to negotiate without Hitler's approval.
It was very weird.
And because Hess was like this occult dude into astrology and all this shit,
and like this weird, he was actually kind of like a Buddhist,
like he's a weird dude.
Sick.
But because he held all these weird beliefs
and he pissed off Hitler so badly,
Hitler bans like all of this weird occult shit
that had cropped up around the Nazi party in 1941.
Okay.
So, yeah.
So after 41, like really most of that stuff
is illegal.
Heinrich Himmler gets up to a little bit of it with the SS
because he's got a castle and he's just a weird dude.
We'll get into some of that in the later episode.
The important thing to understand is that like, yeah,
Hitler was like a distinctly not wooey guy.
Like he's not a new age sort of dude.
He's like a guy if you mention your, like if I, he's like the guys on Reddit who
like, if you mention you so much as mention your zodiac sign, they're like,
she's not credible.
She's fine.
She's a, she's lost it.
Like, I love that type of person.
And I feel confident saying that a hundred percent of Hitler's biographers
agree he would have been
extremely on Reddit.
More on Reddit than anyone has ever been on Reddit.
Sure, yeah.
No, he would be the most reddity guy of all of them and we have to admit that that is very, what's his sign?
That's very his sign of him, wouldn't you say?
I don't know.
He's such a Taurus.
But he's such a Taurus.
Sure.
Okay, continue.
I assume you're referring to the maker of really shoddy handguns, which I think they're Brazilian.
Terrible guns.
Taurus?
Oh, okay. No, I'm just're Brazilian, terrible guns. Toro.
Oh, okay.
No, I'm just trying to get canceled on the behind the bastards board.
No, never, never, never advocating the Taurus sign or the Taurus firearms
brand is not going to go well for you.
Okay.
Fair.
Um, yeah, so now Hitler, so he's not into the occult at all. He's not a big fan of Christianity either.
He felt it was fundamentally Jewish because Jesus was Jewish, which is, you know, not an irrational
point of view within the logic of being a Nazi. And he worried it weakened the German people,
but he also respected Christianity for its ability to inculcate good values in the German people.
And the primary good value it inculcated
was making lots of babies,
because most Germans were Catholic,
and Catholics aren't big fans of condoms.
I'm not sure if you're aware of that.
No, I know.
I wouldn't have aunts if it weren't for this attitude.
None of us would.
Now, Hitler himself was a baptized Roman Catholic all his life. He
probably didn't really believe much of anything other than that Hitler was a cool dude, but
he felt it was important to maintain this image. Now, there were some among his followers
that it was Nazism's destiny to become the new great German religion, but Hitler himself
pushed back against this, insisting in Mein Kampf that national socialism, quote, is not
a religious reform, but a political reorganization of the German
people. He believed, quote, it is criminal to try to destroy the accepted faith of
the people as long as there is nothing to replace it. And it is possible that
given enough time Hitler would have tried to replace Christianity with
something else, but he never attempted to do so, and as far as we know the
supernatural, as it's generally
known, played very little role in the Nazi regime.
But, and here's where the real episode starts.
In the decades since Hitler shot himself in that bunker in 1945, Nazism has changed quite
a lot.
The actual political and historic beliefs of the original Nazis and of Hitler himself
have been twisted and shifted into something even weirder.
It would be too much to say that this new form of Nazism is more dangerous than the original,
given the tens of millions of people who died from the original Nazism.
But it's probably accurate to say that the fact that Nazism has mutated into what we call esoteric
Hitlerism has made it better able to survive in the era of the Internet.
Now, esoteric Hitlerism is a term used to refer to a number of different strains of
post-war Nazi thought that put a bizarre religious and occult spin on Nazi racial theories
and on Hitler himself, often seeing the man as essentially the avatar of a god.
4chan and 8chan are in the modern age two of the most prolific vectors for the spread
of this brand of nonsense.
Sure. There are strains of it in Brinton Terrence Manifesto and in Anders Breivik's Manifesto.
Sure. And today, we're talking about the woman who invented all of this. The single person who became
the living link between the Nazism that tried and failed to conquer Europe and the modern Nazi
movement that spawns mass shootings and attempted mass shootings on a monthly basis today. Her name was Savitri Devi and she was a huge piece of shit.
This is someone's feminism somewhere.
Yeah.
This is some piece of shit's feminism.
She is a feminist icon.
She's a feminist icon.
Feminism is the law now.
Mm hmm.
This is a woman who spent her whole life living alone with a pile of cats
and changing Nazism forever.
Okay, well, what if she just did the first half, you know?
She was not willing to do just the first half.
She was like, okay, so I'm in a pile of cats. That's great. What else could I do? And that
was her second idea. That's embarrassing. That was her second idea was Nazism.
Hater.
It does, she does start first focused on the cats and then move straight to
Nazism though, it's, it's remarkable.
Yeah.
So she was born, uh, Maximeani Portas, uh, on September 30th, 1905 in Lyon, France.
Her mother, Julia came from Cornwall, the town with the
36th dumbest name in all of England.
Her father's ancestry was a melange
of various Mediterranean peoples without access to birth control. He was mostly Italian and Greek,
although young Maximiani was born a French citizen, she latched onto her father's Greek
ancestry from the very beginning. Some of this had to do with the fact that Leon had a large and
active Greek expat community and her dad was a prominent member of it. She also nursed an early fascination with Roman history.
Her name, Maximian, was actually just the female form of Maximian, the proper first
name of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius.
So she's a big old nerd.
I really have to emphasize what a nerd she is.
I feel like I've met versions of this girl in like sophomore English classes and they're
like, actually
something, something, and you're like, stop it, stop it. Please just like
finish reading their eyes. We're watching God. Let's move on.
– I was the male version of this for a while. I mean, I took three years of Latin because I was
such a Roman history nerd. – Okay, Robert, some of us took five years of Latin and do we remember
a fucking thing? Of course not. – No, no, no. – Of course not. – Not a mystery nerd. Okay, Robert, some of us took five years of Latin and do we remember a fucking thing?
Of course not. No, no, no.
Of course not. Not a goddamn word.
I liked it, like when I was in high school,
like in junior high and high school,
if you were like in the quote unquote advanced classes,
they would be like, let's teach them a language
they can't use.
I'm so stupid. Yeah.
God damn it. Totally useless term.
Did you have to use that? I mean, it's one of those.
Wait, did you have to use that textbook
that was about the Romani family? Did you do E use that? I mean, it's one of those. Wait, did you have to use that textbook that was about the Romani family?
Did you do Eke Romani?
Oh, no, no, man.
I was like fucking Chicilius and Quintus.
I remember those names.
They were like the fucking, it was like a bunch of Pompeii people who all died at the
end of the book.
Everyone died at the end of our textbook.
That's the, wait, was it like the, we had the, we had the Cornelia family.
It was like Cornelia and her brother Marcus.
And then they had a friend named Sextus who was a pest.
They sound like fucking losers.
They weren't, they were, well they actually were.
It was fucking paecilius for me.
They're, your family sounds way better
because our family, there was like three books in total
and the whole second book, so like all of eighth and ninth grade, they're just stuck in a ditch. They're like in a ditch,
their carriage is in a ditch, they can't get out, they're staying at an inn, the innkeeper's
yelling at them, they're stuck in a ditch, they're stuck in a ditch for a whole month
and then they go to Rome and everything is fine.
That sounds like a nightmare.
Well, yeah.
Nightmare.
Yeah, it was horrible. So, Maximiani would have gotten a lot, well, no, she wouldn't
have. She would have been the most annoying person in our Latin class.
Ugh. Yeah. I don't like when people are in the Latin class and they're also like into
it. I'm like, hmm, we should be learning a real language.
I like that because you didn't have to learn to pronounce anything.
You never had to speak it because there was no practical
reason to speak it.
Well, no one knows either.
Like you've got ecclesiastical Latin,
but there's no way to know if it was exactly the same
as what the Romans spoke.
So we just didn't give a shit.
It was great.
Yeah, my teacher, Ms. Cook, would come and she would,
what was the thing she would say?
She was like,
okay, discipuli et discipuli. Like she'd be like she was like, um, okay, discipule at this
discipule. Like she'd be like, hello students, let's learn
Julius Caesar. And then we would just talk about how the family
was stuck in the ditch all day. All day.
Horrible.
Yeah.
Well, Maxime Onni spent her young life stuck in that ditch.
And that ditch was called being a huge nerd for Mediterranean
classical civilizations. Um, she was a strong-willed child which here is the synonym for
unspeakably arrogant and a giant pain in the ass. She felt strongly about just
about everything. That is how they describe annoying children. Yeah, strong-willed.
She was known to be utterly immovable once she'd latched onto an idea.
One strong opinion she developed early was that British people were terrible, which is
not inaccurate.
She hated her mother's English friends and the way they prattled on about illnesses and
their dying families.
Harsh.
Oh my God.
That's so harsh.
They're like, I wish my family wasn't dying.
She's like, shut up.
Jesus Christ.
Yeah. We get it. She's like, I wish my family wasn't dying. She's like, shut up. Jesus Christ, yeah.
We get it.
She didn't like French people very much either.
And the particular cause for her hatred of the French
was the French Revolution.
She read about it as a little girl in school
and was instantly furious.
The Republican ideals of equality, liberty,
and fraternity disgusted her.
She was punished at school for making an obscene gesture at a plaque of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. And again, she's like eight or nine. Yeah,
she's like a fucking little kid at this point. That is so funny. Yeah. The Declaration of the
Rights of Man, which small child Savitri Devi flipped off, includes such controversial takes as
people are innocent until proven guilty.
People have the right to liberty, property, security,
and resistance to oppression.
And people should be able to speak and write with freedom.
Wow, some real hot takes being thrown out there.
Jeez, okay, so she was like, born to be harmful.
She was born to be a fascist.
As a small child she's like,
people aren't equal, what is this bullshit?
That's so, the little flipping off to human rights,
you do feel like we should have known.
We should have known.
I mean, I love flipping off old documents too,
but to me it's the Magna Carta,
and the Magna Carta knows why.
The Magna Carta knows what she did.
Oh yeah.
The Magna Carta shakes in her boots
whenever you come walking by.
The Magna Carta is a messy bitch,
and I have no time for it.
Okay Robert, gee, I can't believe you just called
a female document a bitch.
A messy.
You're setting a bad example.
Robert, feminism is law now.
Is this document misogyny?
She's literally shaking right now.
She's here.
Oh no.
She's in the room with me.
You didn't tell me the Magna Carta was in the room today, Sophie.
She drove me here.
Horrible.
Well, I don't have a driver's license.
I don't know a driver's license.
I don't know what you want.
I don't know how much further to take this bitch.
So I'm just gonna.
Later in life in 1978, Savitri Devi told an interviewer,
a beautiful girl is not equal to an ugly girl.
So she remained pretty consistent about her belief
in the fundamental inequality of human beings.
Like her whole life basically.
And she's getting really granular about it, too
Yeah, yeah, okay. She's granular about fucking everything. Oh now no chief motivating factor in her childhood
I have to say it was completely understandable
She felt a deep powerful sense of rage at the abuse of animals by human beings
Okay, starting at age five. Yeah starting at age five. She began expressing to her parents' concern at the abuse of
animals she witnessed in a daily basis.
She was horrified by circuses, the fur trade, and the eating of meat.
While still in elementary school, she became a committed vegetarian and eventually a vegan.
Maximianni Portos was particularly disgusted by the abuse of cats by peasants on the French
countryside.
Her only real biographer, Nicholas Goodrick
Clark claims this, quote, disgusted her and turned her against mankind. And since most
people listening probably don't know anything about the history of cat torture in Europe,
I didn't know anything about the history of cat torture in Europe. I'm going to have to
talk about that now for a little while. It's like a thing, Jamie.
Oh no. Okay. So like specific to this region, cat torture?
All of Europe, really, but like, yeah, specifically to this region cat torture all of Europe really but like yeah specifically to France like the French
Hate cats. Okay. All right. I'm listening. They are
assholes about cats. Okay. Yeah
Today we rightly revere cats as our moral and intellectual superiors and we have organized our society around pleasing them
This is right and good but cats have not always been beloved in the West.
While they are considered basically holy in Islam, they're like ritually clean,
like you can have them in mosques and stuff all over the place,
you don't have to wash your hands after touching them if you're going to go pray.
There's a long Christian tradition of seeing cats as demonic entities.
And to be fair, Islam is kind of shitty on the subject of dogs.
So I guess whatever of the big religions you pick,
you're gonna be terrible to one of the good animals.
I don't know why.
Yeah, it's weird.
Now in the 15th century, Edward, Duke of York,
announced that if the devil inhabited any living animal,
it was the cat.
And for centuries, all around Europe,
good Christians tortured and murdered cats
for almost no reason.
In Ypres, Belgium, they held an event called Kattenstot, the festival of cats, which sounds
awesome but actually just involved drunken townsfolk throwing cats from the top of the
church onto hard cobblestones and then lighting them on fire.
No!
Kattenstot, yeah, yep.
I hate, okay, it's always really frustrating when you hear a story about the underclass
and it's like you're playing to stereotypes
about the underclass.
Yeah.
Don't throw cats on the pavement.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I'm gonna be honest,
I bet the rich people got to go up first
and throw the nicest cats.
Just to set a good, yeah, and then,
and then they would privately be throwing cats
at hard marble floors as well.
Yeah. My God.
It's horrible.
And Cat & Stout still takes place in Ypres every May,
but they use stuffed animals now, which just stop.
Just stop.
It's not a good tradition.
It would be so easy to not do it.
It would be so easy.
Do they eat the cat?
Or is it just, we're just killing the cats?
Not that that makes it better.
Oh no, no, they're just murdering cats for no good reason. Okay, that's it's fun
That is worse and people are horrible. But Jamie, you know who doesn't randomly torture cats in Belgium
Your sponsors you know that exactly right?
Sophie vets every sponsor to make sure they do not torture cats in Belgium. Yes.
Is that, that's true?
That's Robert is a lie.
Robert. I, okay.
Okay.
It is a small country, so the vetting is pretty easy.
Like you'll notice I did not say, for example, Canada.
No, you certainly didn't.
True bastard.
No, I did not.
Canada.
Wow.
Canada just got canceled before our very eyes.
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We're back.
All right. Yeah. Those were good ads.
Good ads.
Jamie!
Good products.
After all those good ads, are you ready to hear more about the systematic torture of
cats by generations of Europeans?
I just got a cat, Robert.
This is not fair.
I love cats.
Oh my god, shout out Flea!
Shout out to Flea, my cat.
He's got a big neck.
When I say about my cat, he's got a big neck. Freaks mea. Shout out to Flea, my cat. He's got a big neck.
When I say about my cat, he's got a big neck.
He frees me out.
Shout out to Roach, one of the side characters
in the first version of the movie with Keanu Reeves,
where some of the people are bank robbers,
but they're also surfers.
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, you're talking about the Keanu Reeves surfing movie with, um, with
what's his name?
We've covered it on the Bechdel cast.
What is it called?
Yes.
Roach is the one who bleeds out in a plane.
Point Break?
He's a good character.
We're talking about Point Break?
Yes, Point Break.
That's the movie.
A classic.
Yes.
Now, uh, in France, there was a centuries old tradition of burning hundreds of cats to death in gigantic bonfires.
Louis XVI even famously lit Paris's cat fire in 1648.
Brulère Leschatz.
The king set the cat fire?
Yeah, of course, who else, Jamie?
Who else?
This is just all news to me.
Just, I just need a second.
Yes, it was news to me too.
Okay, I'm glad that this wasn't like common knowledge.
I would be horrified if I just didn't know
even burning cats, okay.
It doesn't surprise, obviously like you have to assume
earlier times people are more callous to cats and dogs
because them being like what they are now
is kind of a more recent development
because we have all these extra resources.
But I didn't realize it was this like cruel.
This is a lot.
Yeah.
The king is sending the catfire.
That's like bad writing.
Yeah.
So the king would, yeah.
So brûlé les chats, which I am not going to pronounce more correctly than that
because it's a horrible thing and fuck fuck france
As it was called
Varied in a number of different ways. Sometimes it was just massive bonfires where living cats were tied
Together in like huge pyres sometimes living cats were tied above small fires on like a spit and then roasted to death
Sometimes cats were set in wooden cages and burnt to death
to death. Sometimes cats were set in wooden cages and burnt to death. In some towns, people known as cormods, cat chasers, would soak cats in fuel, light them on fire, and chase
them through town to the amusement of citizens.
People wonder why cats are so upset all the time.
I know, right?
They have, they're an oppressed species.
Yes they are.
Yeah, I would be pissed.
You should be.
I'm pissed.
I am.
The charred remains of these tortured cats were taken home as good luck charms by people.
In 1730, as revolutionary sentiment simmered and bubbled throughout French society, two
Parisian apprentice printers got fed up with their masters and abducted their cats.
They staged a massive public trial, the Great Cat Massacre, as it's become known to history.
Now, this was tied more towards issues of class hatred
than hatred of cats, but the cats wound up actually like,
taking the brunt of the damage.
But they end up being the scape cats
for the whole situation. Exactly, exactly.
And that's also the worst way to die
as a symbol for something that has nothing to do with you.
Yeah, those cats have no understanding of class theory.
It's like if someone like murdered me
and then they're like, well, this has something to do
with like my opinion on the new Taylor Swift record.
It has nothing to do with Jamie,
but I killed her to send a message.
It would be like if one group of aliens came to earth
and murdered you for something they knew human beings
were going to do 100 years in the future.
Something you're completely incapable of understanding
or knowing about.
Like just, yeah, it's just wild.
But these apprentices felt their masters treated
the family cats better than their workers.
And because they couldn't quite murder their bosses,
they got a crowd together and they captured
a bunch of rich people's cats. And then they put them on trial and sent them to be hung until dead and they hung just a fuckload of cats to death.
They made like the owners of the cats watch it was super fucked up.
I don't know what to do right now.
Well I'm having a panic attack. Well, I think what you can do right now is you can get a little bit into the head of
a sensitive young soul like Maximiliani Portas, because a lot of this stuff was still going
on in France.
It wasn't at its worst, but like cat torture and burning was still happening in the countryside.
And she sees this as a little girl and is like, this is part of why she hates those
like, you know, French revolutionary values of freedom and equality is she's like, well, clearly this is all bullshit.
Look at what they're doing to these animals.
Like where's their, you know, equality and freedom and like, like, like she, that's kind
of like where she comes at this from, right?
Yeah.
Um, yeah.
So she's deeply sympathetic to animals and particularly cats and basically incapable of
being sympathetic to human beings.
Um, and yeah, it's an interesting story. cats and basically incapable of being sympathetic to human beings.
And yeah, it's an interesting story.
I'm going to be interested in how she galaxy brains being sympathetic towards the plight of, of, of brutally murdered cats to becoming a fascist.
But you know, I think it's a pretty common thing for fascists to be honest.
It's common for all of us to fascism.
Well, you know, not committing cat murders, but like,
hating people because of how garbage they are and thinking fascism is the only way
to fix things because people just can't be allowed to live on their own.
OK, I knew that. I thought you were saying cat specific reasons.
I'm like, well, this is a true education.
Yeah.
Now, Maxime Yanni was very good in school.
She was a bright student.
She read and wrote constantly.
And her very favorite writer was a 19th century
French poet named Charles Leconte de Lyle.
And here's how Cevitri's biographer describes
Leconte de Lyle's work in the book, Hitler's Priestess, which is really the only decent biography of Savitri Devi.
Interesting.
Quote,
Leconte de Lisle's own tragic view of the universe,
his romantic colors were always tinged with somber pessimism, strongly appealed to Maximiani.
He regarded all religious symbols as fragments of the divine truth,
but the profusion of faiths over time convinced him of the relative value and ultimate vanity of every doctrine.
Beset by a sense of cosmic futility, Leconte de Lisle rejected Christianity and evoked the
stoical heroism of barbarian and exotic peoples in his famous poem, Psycho Poems Barberes. He was
also powerfully attracted to Hinduism. Following the translation of its sacred texts in the 1840s,
Maximiliani felt a profound sympathy with Leconte de Lisle's view of life's fragility,
the vanity of existence, and the illusion of the world.
His romantic poems about the ancient Egyptians, the Scandinavians, the Celts, and Hindus,
their proud paganism and heroic action, yet final resignation in the face of death and
oblivion confirmed her own aversion to Christianity and helped her form her own fatalistic worldview.
So Goths didn't exist in the early 20th century, but Maxime
Ani is clearly that.
Yeah.
She is a proto-Goth. It's again, it's just like if there had been a hot topic for her
to, you know, be an assistant manager at, a lot could have been avoided. Imagine how
many hot topic employees were saved by that business. Yeah, a lot of them. Imagine how many fascists we avoided by, for example, the existence
of Kylo Ren fan fiction.
Honestly, honestly, wow, that actually hit for me. Wow, that hit that-
People need an outlet, you know? And if you don't, this is what happens.
Right. You're just like, if you can make it horny and palatable you're going to prevent something bad for this was a a young girl who
Desperately needed to be distracted and nothing distracted her and that right is a problem
Lays out a pretty clear track for you to really I mean I just yeah
Send me back in time with a Jack Skellington hoodie for this woman.
Oh my God, that would have solved so many problems.
I want to do it. Created some others.
I mean, she still would have been a deeply annoying person,
but like, I had a Jack Skellington hoodie,
but also I had never seen the movie.
I was a total poser.
Oh boy, that's going to get you canceled
harder than anything else today.
And then I saw the movie and guess what? I didn't like it very much.
I watched it. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. Well, actually I don't, I think it's maybe not so good.
Beautiful animation though. Anyways. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You got to judge it for its time.
Do I? Anyways.
It was no, for example, the little toaster. I don't know. I do. I do I? Anyways. No. It was no, for example, The Little Toaster.
I don't know.
I do prefer the trick.
No, Brave Little Toaster, ugh.
Brave Little Toaster Hive come out.
It didn't fuck kids up.
No, no it didn't fuck kids up.
I loved The Brave Little Toaster.
Brave Little Toaster damaged me forever.
Really?
That's why he throws bagels.
Oh my God.
But he was so brave, Robert.
He was so brave. That movie fucked me up. That's why you throw bagels, a brave rubber. He was so brave movie fucked me
That's why you throw bagels right Robert. I don't know. It's why I'm scared of fucking radiators
We're gonna do some exposure therapy for you
With now brave little toaster. That's why he doesn't toast his bagels
He only throws them. That's embarrassing.
I mean, that's like tragic.
Imagine the path we could have avoided.
I know.
Maximilliani Portis was very political as a young girl.
When World War I started in 1914, she, at nine years old, knew very clearly that she
did not trust the Entente powers.
So like England,
France, you know, Russia. Some of this likely came from the fact that Greece's King Constantine
was very pro-German and refused to get into the war on the side of either the Entente
or the central powers. But the King of Greece's Prime Minister, a guy named Venizelos, which
I'm probably mispronouncing, disagreed with the king. He was very pro-British and supported
Greece getting into the war. The two fought over this for years until in 1916 a group of pro-Venezuelan
army officers staged a coup against the king. There were rumors that the Entente had backed this,
and those rumors seemed credible in light of the fact that French and British troops landed in
Salonika and Athens in 1915 and 16 to force Greek compliance in their
demands for military access to the Macedonian front so they could better fight Austria-Hungary.
That's a lot of history there, but basically she's very pro-Greece and wants Greece to stay out of
the war because she also likes Germany, hates the English, hates the French. And she's pissed off
because England and France back this prime minister who wants Greece
to get into the war and they also fuck with
Greek sovereignty and stuff.
So she gets really angry over all this.
And how old is she at this point?
Like where are we?
Nine, 10, 11 years old.
Wow.
By 1916 when the war happens.
Imagine, did you know what was going on in the world
when you were nine or 10 years old?
Like how aware were you? I was pretty aware.
I mean, 9-11 happened when I was like 12
and that was definitely like the start of me getting political.
I guess, yeah, I was eight, so that makes sense.
And World War I, yeah.
You know, World War I's that level of thing, right?
Where like even a little kid is gonna like,
you're gonna pay attention to that shit.
It's kind of a big deal.
You won't have a fully formed opinion,
but you'll know what's going on. You'll know what's going on. I guess I'm just like, it's kind of a big deal. You won't have a fully formed opinion, but you'll know what's going on.
You'll know what's going on.
I guess I'm just like, it would be so bizarre to me if someone was like, Jamie's beliefs
at eight years old was 9-11 was, school got out early that day.
And this is where I should note that this is going to be an imperfect episode in terms
of that sort of thing, because our main source on this is Hitler's Priestess, which is a biography that's fairly decent,
but also flawed because it's mainly based
on Savitri Devi's own biographical writings
of her recollections of her own life.
Like there's just not a lot of information.
There's not a lot, it weren't a lot of people
to go back to and like talk to about her
and as a child and stuff,
who were still alive when she became relevant.
Like the book was written in 98.
Yeah.
If I could write about like what I thought, I thought at eight years old, I'd
be like, Jamie was a brilliant genius who had strong opinions on foreign policy.
Exactly.
Okay, got it.
Well, but that said, given the, I don't think we shouldn't discard all of this
because if you look at the thrust of her life, she does live the life of someone who's always been very political.
I mean, she's tuned into Latin class.
I don't think that's entirely made up.
Sure.
Yeah, exactly.
That's a vibe.
So, yeah, Venizelos and his men took over part of Greece with the backing of Britain
and France, and those two countries were happy to recognize his government while they carried
out a brutal 10-month blockade of the Greek provinces that stayed loyal to the king.
And young Maximianii watched all this as she grew into an adolescent girl.
Some of her earliest memories were news reports of protests from Athens of royalist crowds
railing against the Entente, and Maximianii sided with them and considered the Entente's
treatment of Greece to be basically criminal.
Her disgust was reinforced after the war.
In the wake of the central powers
defeat, the Ottoman Empire was broken up, and Greece was given control in the Versailles
Treaty of a city called Smyrna. Now, Smyrna is a city on the Aegean coast of Anatolia,
which is modern day Turkey. It was the center of a nearly 3000 year old Greek community
that lived on the coast of Anatolia. Greece, with some justification, thought that a lot of Anatolia
ought to be part of Greece because it was culturally and historically Greece, and the newly
created nation of Turkey did not agree. So with the backing of the Versailles Treaty,
Greece invaded Smyrna in 1919 to make good on the promises that, you know, had been made to them by
the Entente, and the fighting was a disaster from the beginning. The Ottoman Empire had been defeated in the war technically,
but on the ground and actual battles,
their soldiers had performed pretty well.
They'd fought off a big invasion at Gallipoli.
The birth of the Turkish nation
after the fall of the Ottoman Empire
was met with the swelling of nationalist fervor
and Anatolia, and this helped to spawn
a powerful insurgent Turkish movement
dedicated to defeating the Greek invasion.
So a truce was
reached in 1920, but like many recent truces in Turkish military history, it
was not a real truce. And around the same time, King Constantine was restored to
the Greek throne. This turned the remaining great powers of Europe against
Greece, and even though they'd promised Greece Smyrna and the Versailles Treaty, in
1921 they basically like, were like, fuck that shit and pulled all of their support.
Do we know where the Greeks at this time stood on cats?
You know, they're closer to the Middle East,
so I'm gonna guess more pro-cat.
More pro-cat, okay.
Okay, so now it's, so, okay.
That tracks. Yeah, I think that tracks.
Yeah, the further in that direction you get, more pro-cat, less pro-dog. You know, I think that tracks. Yeah, the further in that direction you get,
more pro-cat, less pro-dog.
I think that's generally fair.
So it just says Western freaks.
Yeah, they've got a lot of dogs.
Yeah, I mean, everyone should be pro-cat and dog.
Maybe they just lit cats and dogs on fire.
I don't know.
I did not do that research.
Okay, these are the questions I have, Robert.
Take them or leave them.
So the French and Italian governments like betray Greece first and they sign agreements
with the Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal and to ignore the promises they'd made in the Versailles
Treaty to Greece. Britain held out the longest but when Greece launched an offensive in Anatolia in
March of 1921, all of the Allies suddenly adopted a policy of neutrality.
Britain banned further arms sales to Greece, while France was happy to allow its weapons
makers to sell straight to Turkey.
The whole effort to incorporate the Greek regions of Anatolia into the Greek nation
ended in disaster and military defeat in 1922.
Greek forces fled Asia Minor and the Turkish army conducted a campaign of extermination
and ethnic cleansing on their Aegean coast. They massacred some 30,000 Christians, a mix
of Greeks, Armenians, and Franks, in order to ensure no Greek independence movement would
ever crop up on their coast again.
Awesome.
The Smyrna debacle, yeah, this is why there's no real Greek community in Anatolia anymore,
not like there was for 3,000 years prior. This is like what wipes out that community.
Okay.
Yeah.
So you can see why a Greek nationalist,
like Maximiany Portas, who is like 15, 16 years old then
and like really actually starting to like understand the world
is furious about all this.
And it breeds in her a powerful hatred of the Entente powers, particularly of France and of
England.
And she basically felt that like all these fancy words they had about liberty and democracy were bullshit when they couldn't even hold the basic
promises and protect the lives of tens of thousands of innocent Greek civilians.
Of course. That's a fair point. Very valid. Yes.
Yeah, yeah. Now, I'm not trying to like ignore the Turkish point of view in this too.
Like Greece is not in the right here as a country either.
Like everybody's in the wrong, although Turkey massacres 30,000 people.
So I'm going to say maybe they're more in the wrong, but this is complicated.
But this is sort of how Maximiliani is very much on the side of Greece is fucked over
and this is an entirely like a crime committed by the, the Entente powers against, against Greece.
And it sets up the rest of her life in a lot of ways.
Okay.
Um, so, uh, other influences on her developing mind were the site of French
crowds in Leon, cheering uproariously at the brutal terms of the treaty of
Versailles when they were announced.
She was horrified, uh, when the French government stationed black Senegalese
troops to occupy the Ruhr, Germany's industrial heartland.
Now this is one of those moves by France that engendered a whole shitload of racism in central Europe.
It was a big influence on a lot of early Nazi thinkers too.
And obviously black soldiers aren't any worse than white ones,
but as civilians living under military occupation, you're going to hate
whatever foreign soldiers occupy your country. And if those soldiers are the only black people
you've ever met, it wasn't a great move on France's behalf.
Jesus Christ.
Yeah. So I'm trying to set up all of like, this is like the shit that like is forming.
She's 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 is all this is going on. Like formative fucking years.
Yeah. Yeah, so she hates it France
She hates England. She hates black people. She hates Turkish people. She's
She loves a lot more hate. She loves cats. This is the consistent one. Yeah
Yeah
in
1923 a freshly graduated Max Miani portis left France to attend college in Greece.
She was just on the edge of 18
and furious with the status quo in Europe
without any real clear idea
of how she thought things ought to be instead.
She did however know that she was obsessed with Hellenism,
which is like ancient Greek culture.
Well, of course, she's a dork, yeah.
She's a big fucking dork.
She's a dork.
She's like, wait, Helen of. Yeah, she's a big fucking door. She loves her She's like wait Helen of Troy. Absolutely. Oh my god
Uh-huh would not shut up about the Iliad. She was a fucking you know, I've read multiple translations and you're like, can you not?
Okay, she has strong and profoundly thirsty opinions on it
She's like ranked gods and goddesses hot to nut.
If she'd seen the actual movie Troy that came out like a decade ago, she would have been
furious because there's no way Brad Pitt was as hot as the Achilles in her mind.
Beautiful.
Yeah.
She believed the old Greeks had been, quote, a civilization of iron rooted in truth, a
civilization with all the virtues of the ancient world
None of its weaknesses and all the technical achievements of the modern age without modern hypocrisy
Pettiness and moral squalor now. This is of course wildly inaccurate the ancient Greeks were like
Unbelievably fucked up. They also did a lot of bullshit obviously like every other ancient
Yeah, that's all ancient people do a lot of cool shit.
Aztecs, amazing shit, horribly fucked up.
Ancient Romans, amazing shit.
Han Chinese, amazing shit, horribly fucked, everybody, yeah.
In the Greek specific case,
they fucked a bunch of little kids.
They repeatedly put narcissistic idiots
in charge of their city-states.
They made numerous blunders that ensured their period
of military and economic might was short-lived, and they also created some of
the most influential philosophy and fiction and art that has ever been made in the history
of the human race.
Complicated people.
Maximilliani does not get a complex picture of ancient Greece.
It's just the good shit.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Good lord.
So, you might say, like, I don't know, like I want to say here, understanding
of Greek history was not deep.
It was certainly incomplete.
Um, that said pretty much only like the only thing Europeans would write about
the ancient Greeks in that period was wildly positive.
You weren't going to get like critical.
Like commentary on, for example, pedederasty in ancient Greece in fucking 1920.
Like you're just not gonna read that.
Yeah.
So her love of Greece was mostly focused
on obsessing over their incredible art
and fantasizing about the idealized culture
that she believed had existed there.
Right.
I mean, we as children all read revisionist history
about horrifying cultures. I was obsessed with ancient Rome as a kid read revisionist history about horrifying cultures.
I was obsessed with ancient Rome as a kid
for a lot of the same reasons.
Of course, because you're just like,
oh, it seems like they only did dope stuff
and wore cool outfits.
Well, I will say I was kind of a fucked up kid.
So when I learned about like all of the fucking
crucifixions and shit, I was kind of like, hell yeah.
Wow, Robert, you're so metal.
I mean, it is pretty fucking metal.
You're so fucking metal.
We'll talk about what they did to Spartacus
and his friends one of these days,
but it's fucking one of like the biggest mic drop moments
in the history of torturing people to death with wood.
I think that's fair to say.
Thrilled to have such a hyper specific.
So she moves to Greece.
She's super happy for a while.
Obviously best place in the world for this girl is fucking Greece at this point in
time. Um, and the time she spent discovering the wonders of Athens, which rules,
um, coincided with some very important goings on in Germany.
And I'm going to quote again from the book Hitler's Priestess. Quote, years later, she would recall that she spent
such a sunlit afternoon upon the Acropolis
on 9th October, 1923, the fateful day of Hitler's putsch
when he and his followers had attempted a coup
against the Bavarian government and staged a march
to the Feldherren Hall in the center of Munich.
The police successfully broke up the march
and 16 martyrs of the early Nazi movement
fell beneath the hail of bullets.
When details of the incident were published in the world press the following day, there
was some discussion over lunch at the International Home Hostel, which is where she was crashing
at the time.
Maximiani admits that she did not yet connect Hitler with her own dream of a new racial
order based on her view of classical Greek antiquity.
However, she strongly sympathized with him as an enemy of the allies on account
of his contempt for the Versailles treaty and saw a parallel between his nationalist
idea of one state for all Germans and the Magali idea among the Greeks, which is
the idea that like Greece should recoup its ancient like power and like take over
the places that it controlled back in the day.
Seems a little idealistic.
She engaged in the heated argument in defense of Hitler with the French manageress of the
hostel.
Oh, God.
So we've lost her.
Arguing about Hitler with the hostel.
No, we lost her with the cat thing, I think.
I mean, she's been gone for a while.
Yeah.
Good Lord.
But you know who won't argue in support of Hitler with the French hostel owner in Athens?
Who, Robert?
The products and services that support this podcast.
Products and services would never ever hurt us
or do something wrong.
I've been saying it for years.
I have agreed for years.
Let's fingers crossed for a dick pill ad right after this.
Yeah.
What a great transition both of you.
Just wonderful work.
Thank you.
So talented.
Thank you.
Who hasn't heard names like Achilles or Odysseus, Cassandra, Medusa?
But how much do you know about them from the ancient world?
Let's talk about Myths, Baby is the podcast bringing the ancient sources to life.
Greek myth and history is timeless and unless you've been living under a rock, you have
seen just how true that is today.
But there is so much more to these characters and stories than what pop culture can do justice.
I'm Liv Albert, the host of Let's Talk About Myths, baby, and every week I bring
you stories from the ancient world, both mythological and historical, to breathe new life into these
thousands of years old stories.
I'm also regularly joined by some of the most brilliant names in the field of archaeology oracle to breathe new life into these thousands of years old stories.
I'm also regularly joined by some of the most brilliant names in the field of archaeology
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Join me as I dive into the wild world of the ancient Greeks and their stories.
Listen to Let's Talk About Myths, Baby, on the iHeart radio app, Apple
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I used to have so many men.
How this beguiling woman in her fifties.
She looked like a million bucks.
With zero qualifications.
She had a Harvard plaque.
Tricks her way past a wall of lawyers and agents.
She's got all of these Maseratis and Bentleys all in the driveway.
Is it like a mansion?
Yes, it's a mansion.
That this queen of the con uses to scam some of the biggest names in professional sports out of untold fortunes.
About six million.
Approximately 11 million dollars.
Nearly 10 million dollars was all gone.
Employing whatever means necessary to bleed her victims dry.
She would probably have sex with one of her clients.
Hide your money in your old rich men because she is on the prowl.
Listen to Queen of the Con, Season 5, The Athlete Whisperer on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back!
So it was during this first visit to Greece that Maximianni Portis would have seen the
symbol for the first time that would come to define her life and legacy.
I am talking, of course, about the swastika.
Odds are good she would have encountered it for
the first time in the National Museum of Athens, which hosted a huge amount of what were believed
to be Trojan artifacts, which had been uncovered by the pioneering and controversial archaeologist
Heinrich Schliemann. Now Schliemann was not a professional archaeologist, which is not weird
for the time. Most of like the archaeologists of this period are like gentlemen adventurers who get our nerds basically. The people in like the mummy movies
who are just wearing khakis and have money. Exactly. The people in Tarzan. That was the most
accurate thing about the mummy movie other than the way mummies react to shotguns. They're all
named Clayton. Yeah. Yeah. So Schliemann, yeah, throughout the mid-1800s
had been a very successful German arms merchant, trading raw materials for the ingredients to make
ammunition. And he'd nursed a deep obsession with the Iliad his entire life. In his late middle age,
he decided to take his fortune to the Aegean and try to uncover the true location of the ancient
city of Troy. Unlike
pretty much any traditional archaeologist, Schliemann used the Iliad as a guide. He thought
this book was basically, essentially accurate. And he followed the poem as if it had been
a work of serious historical scholarship. And shockingly enough, this kind of worked.
In 1871, after three years of searching, Schlleeman found what was very likely to have been the site of ancient Troy.
His methods of digging it up were brutal. He used crowbars and battering rams and destroyed countless thousands of artifacts,
including, ironically, what a lot of archaeologists now believe was the actual physical evidence of Troy.
He dug too far down, basically, because he fucked up and probably destroyed what actual Trojan relics there were but he doesn't mind what a lot of people think was the
sight of Troy it's just other shit was built there and he dug up the wrong shit
anyway it's fucked up yes yes so his research or his digging despite all the
shit destroyed produced hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of artifacts
which people at the time believed to be Trojan. And many of those artifacts, more than 1800 of them, were
emblazoned with various types of swastika. And I'm going to quote next from Scientific
American.
He would go on to see the swastika everywhere, from Tibet to Paraguay to the Gold Coast of
Africa. And as Schliemann's exploits grew more famous and archaeological discoveries
became a way of creating a narrative of national identity, the swastika grew more
prominent.
It exploded in popularity as a symbol of good fortune, appearing on Coca-Cola products,
Boy Scouts and Girls Club materials, and even American military uniforms.
"'The antiquities unearthed by Dr. Schliemann at Troy acquire for us a double interest,'
wrote British linguist Archibald Sace in 1896.
They carry us back to the later stone ages
of the Aryan race.
Oh dear.
On Coca-Cola products?
Robert, what if that was just a product
or service advertised?
But it wasn't a Nazi.
I spent some time living in India.
I understand, yeah.
And it's fucking, there's swastikas all over the day.
And it is weird, it takes, you never really get used to it
because of like what it means to the West.
It's always like, there's so many swastikas around here.
That is, I mean, and that is fascinating to like track
the history of a symbol and like how it affects different
areas of the world differently.
That sounds extremely jarring.
I actually, I have some like tapestries
that I picked up in India
that have little swastikas on them in parts.
And it's one of those things where it's like
every now and then, like they're not the same
as the Nazi swastikas, but they're close enough
that people will be like, what's up?
Oh no, hi Robert.
I need to leave your home right now.
Yeah, I mean, yeah.
You're like, oh no, the swastikas are pretty small.
It's Indian.
So most people aren't getting close enough
to the blanket.
They're not Nazi swastikas.
Oh my.
They're not Nazi swastikas.
See, Robert, if I was over your house and you said that,
I would be like, I actually, my Uber is here.
You know, like if you're like,
they're not Nazi swastikas, so calm down.
Yeah, it's like that a-
And they offer me a Miller light.
They're not Nazi swastikas, would you like a Miller light?
No!
That's exactly my standard greeting to people.
That's how you greet all your guests.
That's specifically how I say hello to the officers who pull me over for speeding.
No, no. I would be interested in, I know I've gone down that Wikipedia hole at one point of just like tracking the symbology of the swastikas.
It goes back so far.
There's criticism to Schliemann honestly for his methods, but he's not in any way a Nazi.
Like he's just a guy who finds a bunch of swastikas buried underground and finds them
all over the world.
He's just an unqualified archaeologist using his money in a weird way.
He's very controversial still.
There are aspects of what he did that a lot of people praise, because he got a lot of
shit right, but he also destroyed a huge amount of cultural antiquities.
He's an interesting person.
You should read about Schliemann if you're interested in archaeology.
Okay.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
God damn.
I mean, it seems like a lot of those gentlemen explorers really delighted and, you know,
like destroying and selling off pieces of ancient history that had nothing to do with
them.
All of them are problematic.
Yeah.
Love that for them.
I will say Schliemann is one who comes from like a purer place
of just being really into this history.
But yeah, you know, they're all problematic.
So.
Hashtag problematic.
Yeah.
Now the swastikas he found increasingly all over the world
played directly into a shared delusion
that was spreading like a disease
among many of the era's white people, the myth of the ancient Aryan. Now in actual
historical terms, Aryan is a term used to refer to the Indo-Aryan language group.
It was never a racial classification. The term started being used because early
linguists noticed strange similarities between languages like German, Romani,
Punjabi, Hindu, Urdu, and
Sanskrit. While the term Aryan was initially applied to speakers of various
Indo-Iranian languages, the understanding of the word became corrupted in the late
1800s. This occurred along the same time that colonialism started to reach its
absolute zenith, and there were a lot of white folks looking for reasons to
justify the fact that they were basically plundering and enslaving the
entire world.
There were also a lot of white folks looking at their increasingly multiracial societies,
which at that point, like Italians and Slavs breed with Germans and British people.
And we're getting concerned about this fact.
And I'm going to refer back to Smithsonian magazine again.
Quote, the rising interest in eugenics and racial hygiene, however, led some to corrupt
Aryan into a descriptor for an ancient master racial identity with a clear through line
to contemporary Germany.
As the Washington Post reported in a story about the rise of Nazism several years before
the start of World War II, Aryanism was an intellectual dispute between bewiskered scholars
as to the existence of a pure and undefiled Aryan race at one stage of Earth's history.
In the 19th century, French aristocrat Arthur de Gaubigneaux and others made the connection
between the mythical Aryans and the Germans, who were the superior descendants of the early
people, now destined to lead the world to greater advancement by conquering their neighbors.
The findings of Schliemann's dig in Turkey, then, suddenly had a deeper ideological meaning.
For the nationalists, the purely Aryan symbol Schliemann uncovered was no longer an archaeological mystery. It was a stand-in for their superiority. German
nationalist groups like the Reichshammerbund, a 1912 anti-Semitic
group, and the Bavarian Freikorps, paramilitary, basically the proud boys of
the era, used the swastika to reflect their newly discovered identity as the
master race. Now the reality is that swastikas appear damn near everywhere in human history.
It's a common design and a striking one
and a bunch of different groups of people
have independently figured it out over time.
And people should stop talking to you about your blanket
and actually just relax, they're pretty small.
If you're, nowadays the swastika is the swastika.
Like it's a Nazi thing, unless you're in India,
because the world's big. But back in these days, like it's a Nazi thing, unless you're in India, because the world's big.
But back in these days, like if you're looking
at like ancient history, it's best to kind of look
at the swastika, like you remember that weird S doodle
we all put on our trapper keepers back in the 90s?
100%, yes.
Like no one invented that, it just showed up everywhere.
That's the fucking swastika in prehistory.
It's just all over the damn place.
I would get that blanket.
But of course, yeah, Oh, I have that blanket.
It was not seen as this though, by a lot of people.
And anthropologist Gwendolyn Lake notes, quote, when Heinrich Schleman discovered
swastika like decorations on pottery, flag, and all archeological levels at
Troy, it was seen as evidence for a racial continuity and proof that the inhabitants of the site
had been Aryan all along.
The link between the Swastika and Indo-European origin
once forged was impossible to discard.
It allowed the projection of nationalist feelings
and associations onto a universal symbol,
which hence served as a distinguishing boundary marker
between non-Aryan, or rather non-German,
and German identity. 06.30
That's fascinating. I mean, because you can understand the logic, but it also is kind of
absurd to assume that like, oh, this symbol is always surely must mean the exact same thing
thousands of years ago as it does to me today now.
06.40
The people then were as dumb as the people who planted the Iowa caucuses.
Wow.
And that's why all this happened.
Robert, my dog worked on the shadow app, so really watch your mouth.
Your dog was the smartest person involved with that app.
Sunny invested in the shadow app.
I have to say it's bad dog.
This math adds up.
Yeah, I mean, of course he kept,
he was talking about Shadow App for,
and I'm like, that can't be real.
And then it turns out it was real.
He probably thought it was the dog from,
what was that movie with the dogs and cat,
the talk and they find their family.
I'm so bad at the names of things today.
Oh, that sounds terrible.
I don't know what that movie.
It's a good movie, Homeward Bound.
Homeward, oh, I haven't seen Homeward Bound.
Sonny definitely just wanted to harm people
and he wanted to harm the discourse
and that's why he invested in Shadow App.
Word. That's fair.
That's fair.
You could call him the Hitler of the Iowa Caucasus,
which a lot of people do.
No.
I mean, many have, but it makes me uncomfortable.
So.
Sitting in Athens, reading the news
of Hitler's movement in Germany, and staring at ancient
swastikas on beloved Greek artifacts, things started to come together in Maximilliani
Portas' mind. She moved to Greece permanently in 1928, after finishing college and renouncing
her French citizenship. The very next year, 1929, she went with her mother and aunt on
a trip to the Holy Land that wound up having just as deep an impact on her developing mind as the swastika. Now, Maximiani had never been very religious. Her
mother and aunt were, though, and while they failed to inculcate a love of Christ in Maximiani,
they did succeed in making her hate Jewish people.
Yay!
Which is not the part of Christianity to transfer, if you're going to pick one.
Of all, I mean, there's so many different horrible things to take away from Christianity
and that is, that is the worst of all that's bad.
Yeah.
Jesus.
She got none of the good stuff, just the anti-Semitism.
Okay.
Yeah, she, yeah, it's not great.
It's not great.
I'm starting to think this lady maybe not so nice.
Not heading in a great direction. Yeah. Now, a lot of this was tied to the fact that Maximiani was
so in love with Greek culture. And she was really pissed off because she was like, particularly in
love with like ancient Greek pagan culture, like the old Greek gods and their myths and stuff.
And none of that stuff was very relevant other than this, like an academic thing by this point
in history. And Christianity and Judaism were obviously very relevant other than this like an academic thing by this point in history and
Christianity and Judaism were obviously hugely relevant in Europe and she hated this and she blamed the Jews for the fact that nobody
Other people weren't as into Greek history as she was like this is like the core of it for her
She's in love with like Zeus and shit and she's like why don't people like this as much as I do it's the Jews
She's become a chaos nerd.
No!
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, God.
It's not great.
Yeah, that's really bad.
So her trip to the Holy Land with her mom and aunt
was a bit of a weird one.
No!
Okay, I mean, okay, I'm listening.
Yeah.
She was revolted by the obeisance they played
to Judeo-Christian holy sites,
and as she touristed her way through old Jerusalem,
she felt, in her biographers' words,
overwhelmed and repelled by the exotic nature of the Jews, their attire, their customs,
observances, and festivals, the strange dark men in broad brimmed hats and long black coats hastening to prayers at the wailing wall.
Okay.
It's interesting that Goodwin Clark, Portis's biographer, mentions
this specifically, seeing these Jewish people and being horrified by the way they look in
their coats and in hair locks and long black coats. It's possible that precise moment never
happened, but it's worth noting that this moment bears a striking resemblance to a tale
Adolf Hitler told regularly about the supposed moment that he specifically gained his hatred of
Jewish people. And here's how he wrote about that moment in Mein Kampf. This is
takes place in Linz, no sorry in Austria. Maybe his boy wrote this part, we don't know.
Vienna. Once as I was strolling through the inner city I suddenly encountered an
apparition in a black caftan and black hair locks. Is this a Jew? Was my first thought. For to be sure, they had not looked like that
in Linz where he grew up. I observed the man furtively and cautiously, but the longer I
stared at this foreign face, scrutinizing feature for feature, the more my first question
assumed a new form. Is this a German?
So it's like a huge moment in like Hitler lore. It's possible that the reason that Portis writes her own
thing, like her own story this way, is that she's harkening
to Mein Kampf, because again, she writes about this later.
It's also possible they just were similar people
and had a similar moment.
Well, if she's the primary resource for herself,
and seems to have like a fair grasp on storytelling.
It makes sense that she would pull from these.
It does make sense.
She's like, oh, this is the end of Act One.
Where's my inciting?
She needs, she wrote her own inciting incident if it didn't.
Yeah.
I'll take a leaf out of, you know, it's like, uh, you know, George Lucas, uh,
stole from, from great Japanese cinema, uh cinema to make Star Wars.
And in a very similar fashion,
Savitri Devi stole from Adolf Hitler,
the Kurosawa of Nazism.
True artist steal, Robert.
It's what they've been saying for generations.
Yeah, that is funny.
I mean, I feel like that same logic of like,
you have to have a story to go with your hatred.
They have that same logic on like, Iron Chef, you know, like, they have to be like, there has to be
a story that goes with this dish. And sometimes you're like, sometimes it just is. Sometimes it
just is. Sometimes you just cook some fucking food, asshole. Sometimes you just make some food and
it's bad. And it's terrible. Yeah. So, uh, Maxime
Oni would go on to claim that after this visit to the Holy land, uh, she decided that Hitler's
campaign of hate against Jewish people was not just a matter of German concern. It was
an international crusade. She came to believe that all of the formerly pagan nations of
Europe had to throw off their Judeo-Christian heritage and like reconnect with their pagan
roots. And this is the first time she realizes that she's a national socialist. And she,
the way she described it, she realizes she's always been a national socialist. And so she
falls fully in love with Hitler at this point. And she's not a German Nazi though. And initially the way she decides to like act on this new found Nazism is to basically try to revive Greek nationalism and pagan beliefs kind of with the structure of national socialism over them.
And so she returns to Athens and she sets to work trying to cobble together her own Greek version of Nazism, but focused around a religious component that involved a return to worshiping the ancient Greek pantheon. I mean, always with this woman.
Yeah. Now, by this point, the ancient Greeks had become sort of the ubermensch in her own mind,
and this conception was nursed by the bits of Hitler speeches that made their way over into
the press and her part of the world. By 1930, she finally read Mein Kampf for the very first time,
which introduced Maximiani to Hitler's theories
about the Aryan race.
His ideas about the superior race,
consistently undermined by the evil Jews,
gelled remarkably well with Maximiani's own beliefs
about the ancient Greeks and the Jews.
She became increasingly obsessed with the Aryans
and in part the idea of seeking out the remaining evidence
of their existence. And at the time, it was generally understood that India had
been conquered and ruled by the Aryans. Many among the weirder Nazi set saw Hinduism as
an example of a pure Aryan pagan tradition, uncorrupted by Judaism. They found the Hindu
caste system deeply intriguing as well for reasons that should be obvious, and enshrined
a small number of superior beings and power over a vast number of less valuable individuals.
In 1932, Max Miani's father died, and she decided to take this as an opportunity to
travel to India to seek out the truth of the ancient Aryans. It's like a Nazi version of
Eat Pray Love.
I was going to say, this is like, this is is in another world, this is a very cute movie
and she just took every wrong cue from it.
It is the same beats.
It's, you remember that horrible Cameron Crowe movie,
Elizabeth Towne, where Orlando Bloom
drives across the country with his dad's ashes
and is like, I'm glad we had this talk.
You're like, what the fuck are you doing?
That sounds like 40 different movies, Jamie.
It's, no, it's the same. It's the same.
All my Elizabeth Townheads will know it's the same.
Polly Deen's in that movie.
Cursed.
Oh God. Cursed.
Speaking of Nazis.
Cursed.
Now, so Savitri decides she's gonna go to fucking India.
And she's not the only person with this idea
of going to India to seek out the Aryans. In in 1935 Heinrich Himmler's SS founded the Ananerbe a
Scientific think tank dedicated to finding evidence of the ancient Aryans and they actually sent multiple expeditions into India and Tibet
Maximiliani went to India to find evidence of the Aryans too
But she also went there to see firsthand evidence of a civilization founded upon what she believed was a natural racial hierarchy. She felt that Indian society looked how
the world would appear in the year 8,000 after 6,000 years of Nazi rule.
Very specific woman.
8,000! The Jonas Brothers didn't even think that far.
No, but they're huge. The Nazi Jonas Brothers are huge in the year 8,000.
Robert, shut up, enjoy this moment.
That was, that was, that was, that one was for so fun.
I do not get that joke.
The Jonas Brothers' first single in 2006 or maybe seven
was a song called Year 3000.
They said, not much has changed, but we live underwater.
That's all they knew about.
That's a lot to change, Jamie.
Well, they'd say right before we live underwater
that not much has changed.
They couch it.
It's a year 3000, not much has changed.
I've been two, three, 3000.
No, I can't do anything else.
I don't know the world.
We live underwater.
It's a weird lyric.
It makes no sense.
Okay, sorry, Robert, continue your podcast.
But she's thinking to your 8,000.
8,000.
I refuse to think further than Kevin Jonas already has.
You have to give her credit.
She is eight times as ambitious as Hitler.
Dear God.
Yeah.
So upon her arrival in the country, her beliefs were seemingly confirmed when she watched a parade celebrating Rama, a deified Aryan hero.
The parade featured huge numbers of dark-skinned Indians bowing and worshipping a lighter-skinned statue of Rama.
And Rama is most assuredly not white, although he is often depicted as lighter-skinned, but he is definitely Indian.
But it was not uncommon for Europeans who were attracted to India in this period to
decide that a number of ancient Hindu heroes and gods were in fact white.
This was like a common thing.
And in fact, Maxime Ianni's favorite poet, who we talked about earlier, Lacanthe de Lisle,
had actually written a poem about Rama that referred to him as, Thou whose blood is pure,
Thou whose body is white, and a subdurer of all the profane races." So, yeah, everyone's
a little bit of a Nazi in colonialism. That's kind of the deal.
That's kind of their thing. It's kind of, I mean, yeah, not shocking.
And if you're interested in the story of Rama, one thing I would recommend that's super accessible,
there's a movie online by Nina Paley, who's a female graphic artist who's amazing called Sita Sings the Blues.
If you just Google that, it's the whole movie is free. It's one of those beautiful pieces
of animation. It's why I went to India in the first place. It's an incredible movie.
Oh, wow.
And one of the things it does really well is it has all these scenes where like individual
like myths from like Hindu mythology are explained by like groups
of people arguing about them, which if you actually go to India is how you learn about
myths. Like if you talk about the myth of Sita and Rama to like a family, everyone in
the family, you like it like multiple different versions of the story and people will argue
with each other. Like it's not like Christian orthodoxy or whatever. Like it's very, very complicated stuff, but fascinating.
So yeah, Maxime Yanni is convinced
that this guy's white though.
And she falls in love with India
and eventually finds her way to an ashram in Bengal
where she's able to live cheap and learn Hindi
and study Hindu religious traditions.
She gets a job outside of Delhi
teaching English and Indian history.
And she grew more and more taken with Hinduism until in 1936, she adopted a Hindu name, Savitri
Devi, taken from a Hindu solar goddess.
This woman is obsessed with sun gods and goddesses.
She loves gods and goddesses so much.
She's such a dork.
Yeah, it's specifically sun gods and goddesses.
She's fucking obsessed with Akhenaten too, it's weird.
There was a girl in my middle school who was like,
call me Artemis, and we were like, okay.
No, no.
No, we did, we did!
And I was also a dork, but not that kind of dork, my God.
No, no, no, no.
I was just a normal, bright-eyes loving dork.
I'm a big believer in calling people by whatever name
they prefer to be referred to,
unless it's the name of a god or goddess.
Then I just start, I just get furious.
Yeah.
I'm not gonna push that behavior.
Well, she was Artemis for all of eighth grade,
and then she went back to just Alex for the rest of,
as far as I know
her life.
That's fine.
Yeah.
Yeah. Any other name really. Now, early on in her time in India, Savitri had hiked to
the top of a hill and seen a beautiful Indian fortress, one of many such colossal ancient
relics that dot the country. She was taken by its beauty and equally horrified by a more
modern Jesuit hospital that had been constructed nearby.
This was powerfully symbolic to her and she claimed that it cemented in her a deep need
to protect Hindu India from being infected by Judeo-Christian taint.
Starting in 1937, she began working as an anti-Christian preacher for Swami Satyananda's
Hindu mission in Calcutta.
For two years, she crisscrossed the country, meeting with various tribal elders and arranging public debates with Christian missionaries. And I'd like
to quote now from an article by Conrad Elst, an Indiologist who's analyzed this history.
Quote, thoroughly familiar with the mentality and methods of her adversary, she could destroy
the credit of the imported religion in the minds of the villagers, and prevent or undo
many conversions. There was a sharp contradiction between her own racist and anti-egalitarian convictions and the reformist and egalitarian program of the Hindu
mission. To the Hindu mission, Hinduism was a value in itself. To Savitri Devi, it was but an
instrument of her imagined Aryan race. In her years as a preacher, she kept her non-Hindu
preoccupations to herself, but in her memoirs She declared that she conceived of her reconversion mission as an exercise in deception from the racist Aryan viewpoint
It was necessary to give the most backward and degenerate aborigines a false Hindu consciousness. She wrote
This is one of the major areas where you'll run into disputes about Savitri Devi
the common view on her legacy is spoiler that she
proposed a synthesis between Hinduism and Nazism, and
aspects of this are true, but it would be more accurate to say that she found Hinduism
a useful tool for advancing Nazism. And I'm going to quote again from Else's essay.
In contrast with the Hindu nationalists, but in tune with Indian Marxists and casteists,
she believed that the concept nation and a program of nationalism could not apply to
India. In 1938, she used the slogan, make every Hindu an Indian nationalist and every Indian nationalist a
Hindu. Now this seems to be something she did not legitimately believe. Yeah. And she didn't really
believe it. In her autobiography years later, she expressed the belief that nationalism could only
exist within members of the same race. And she thought that all the different castes in India
were different races.
And we're getting into the weeds here too much.
But it's important to understand for what comes next
that Savitri Devi advocated for Hindu nationalism,
but not because she believed strongly in it,
because she saw it as a useful tool
for harming the British Empire and advancing Nazism.
That was her main goal.
So she's merely co-opting it for her own sinister purposes.
It's a little more complicated than that
because she also loves it.
Like she takes on a lot of Hindu beliefs.
This is a weird story
and there's no like super simple answer to it.
But it's not as simple as she just becomes Hindu
and also Nazi.
Like it's weirder than that too.
No one edit this out.
I need people to know what, what I've been forced to endure.
You just like literally did that into the microphone.
It was hard.
I had to.
I'm sorry.
I can see Robert right now and he wiped his nose on the mic and he was like,
licked it. You licked Robert Evans.
He licked it.
All of this gets edited out.
Now,
many Hindu nationalists were very bullish about the Nazis
because Great Britain owned India
and ruled it as a brutal colonial oppressor.
And they figured, you know, the enemy and my enemy, right?
Yeah.
Not all of them felt this way. There were a lot of Hindu nationalists who were against
the Nazis because they were like, well, but they're Nazis. So again, I'm going to paint
everybody with the same brush. Yeah. But Savitri got along very well with the set of Hindu
nationalists who were like, yeah, the Nazis seem good. Um, and she was particularly taken with Dr. Asit Krishna Mukherjee, one of India's few
actual committed Nazis.
In 1937 and 38 Mukherjee started to publish a bi-monthly pro-Nazi magazine, The New Mercury.
Savitri met him in early 1938 and they didn't instantly fall in love.
Um, but she fell in love with his mind.
She was probably bisexual, but certainly wasn't interested
in Mukherjee in any way, but she falls in love with
this guy's Nazism, basically.
They're that kind of attached.
So they're in, God, that's so, I mean.
Yeah, it's not great.
Yeah, that's bleak, because it's like,
I mean, if you're gonna marry a Nazi,
and you're not even attracted to them, no excuse.
No excuse either way, but you know what I mean.
She has a little bit of an excuse, but we're getting to it.
So, she loves- You are cutting this lady
all kinds of slack, Robert.
I'm just explaining her.
Do you have a crush?
Now, so she doesn't, they don't get together right away.
She loves his understanding of Nazi ideology and particularly his emphasis on the myths of the old
Aryans. And Mukherjee was like obsessed with the Thule society, the Thule society, and it acquired
a lot of their occult writing. So he's like that kind of nerd. And Mukherjee seems to like
genuinely appreciate Savitri's ideas and the fact that she was just as much of a nerd for Nazism as he was.
But he was baffled by her insistence on staying in India while Nazi Germany like rose to the heights of its power.
In early 1939, he asked her,
What have you been doing in India all these years with your ideas and your potentialities?
Wasting your time and energy. Go back to Europe where duty calls you. Go and help the rebirth of Aryan heathen,
where there are still Aryans strong and wide awake.
Go to him who is truly life and resurrection,
the leader of the third Reich.
Go at once, next year will be too late."
And he was kind of right about that.
But Savitri was convinced that she could do, yeah, yeah.
I'm like, well, historically, okay.
Yeah.
Savitri though was convinced that she could do more for the cause of
Nazism in India than in Germany.
She'd become close with members of the Rashtriya Swayam Savik Sangh or RSS,
an Indi, a Hindu nationalist movement that were very similar to the Nazis.
The founder or one of the founders, K.B.
Hedgwar formed the group to defend Hindu society from
daily onslaughts by outsiders, and he included Muslim Indians as members of that group.
Like all fascist organizations, the RSS had a uniform, khaki shorts, a white shirt,
and a black cap. RSS members met daily to train with bamboo beatsticks called lathis,
and to learn about Hindutva, Hindu nationalism. In 1939, Savitri wrote a warning to the Hindus.
The book's foreword was written by G.D.
Savarkar, brother to one of the co-founders of the RSS.
And according to an article by South Asian affairs analyst, Peter Friedrich, quote,
Devi advanced V.D.
Savarkar's thesis of Hindutva, that India is a Hindu nation of Hindu people and only for Hindu people.
She claimed that Hindu society is India itself, called Hinduism the national religion of India,
and suggested that Hindus should tell non-Hindus, we represent India, not you.
Therefore, India is ours, not yours.
She urged Hindus to recover along with their national consciousness, their military virtues of old,
to re-become a military race. The method,
she said, should be the organization of the young men and pledge-bound military-like batches
with Hindu nationalism as their only ideal. And here's where I pause to note that the
current Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, is a member of the RSS. A warning to
Hindus is still considered to be a deeply influential text within the Hindu nationalist
movement and the RSS. Modi probably read it as a child influential text within the Hindu nationalist movement and the RSS.
Modi probably read it as a child.
And a list of his crimes and the thousands of murders
and mosque bombings and beatings carried out
by Hindu nationalists against Indian Muslims
would go beyond the scope of this episode.
But it is worth noting that the current authoritarian lurch
by India, the world's largest democracy,
owes at least a decent amount to the work of Savitri Devi.
So that's cool.
You're in love with her, Robert.
Oh my God.
I mean, it is a sign of where this is going
that I kind of glossed over the fact that she played a role
in the establishment of what's starting to become
a fascist dictatorship in India.
We just have so much extra ground to cover.
We have so much to cover.
We don't have time for the fascist dictatorship today.
We have some time, but yeah.
Okay, okay, well, we'll make time.
We'll make time for the fascist dictatorship.
In 1940, Britain and Germany went to war.
Savitri's extremist beliefs were well known at this point,
and she was forced to marry Mukherji
in order to stay in the country.
So that's why they get married.
It's basically a green card thing, yeah.
Got it. She described it as a seculous marriage, primarily to allow her to stay in the country. So that's why they get married. It's a green card thing. Yeah.
She described it as a sexless marriage, primarily to allow her to stay in the country. And she
did what she could for Nazism while in India, spying on British military positions for the
access and facilitating communication between Subhas Chandra Bose, leader of the national
Indian army, a pro axis group and the Japanese government. In a different world, these contributions
might've played a role in a Japanese invasion of India. But World War II went the way it did, and Hitler eventually
shot himself in a bunker to avoid capture. I'm familiar with this. Savitri learned of his death
through an overheard conversation from two Muslim men on the Maribar coast. She was inconsolable for
days over the death of her hero and the end of the belief system she had dedicated her life to
championing. But Mukherjee told her not to worry. This was merely part of the cycle of her hero and the end of the belief system she had dedicated her life to championing. But Mukherji told her not to worry. This was merely part of the cycle of ages,
and the dark age brought on by Hitler's defeat would someday end. And likewise, Jamie, part one
of this episode must now end. But this dark age will continue on Thursday with part two of the story of Savitri Devi. No, okay.
How you doing, Jamie?
I'm okay. I'm just unclenching.
That's important.
For the next two minutes, and then we can talk about it again.
I gotta pee.
ABK, always be clenching. Yeah, go, plug your pluggables first.
Oh, right. Leave that in.
I want people to know that I had to pee.
Transparency.
I had to pee.
And also leave in Robert blowing his nose on the mic and licking it off.
Yeah, Chris, leave that in.
No, that's going to be horrible.
Chris, you can edit out the part where Robert is like yum delicious after licking his own
snot off the mic, but everything else should probably stay in.
I feel like this is legally abuse.
You could probably report me to HR. Could be fun. Could be fun. My Twitter is
jamiloftushelp and my Instagram is at jamichristsuperstar and I'm touring for the better part of February.
You can go to my website, jamieloftesisinnocent.com to find out where.
Yay.
Yeah.
And you can find Sophie on Twitter by finding her at y underscore Sophie underscore y.
And that's it.
That's all you can find of us online.
Which are on behind the bastards.com,
including the full free text of Hitler's priestess. If you want to read this book, the episodes over go stop the French from murdering cats.
Yes. Great. Danielle Moody here, host of the Woke F Daily podcast.
We've been with iHeart for a year and what a year it has been.
As we head deeper into 2024 and yet another life changing election cycle, Woke F Daily
is here to keep you sane and woke.
Make Woke AF Daily your podcast destination
for 2024 election news and analysis.
Listen to Woke AF Daily season five
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
I used to have so many men.
How this beguiling woman in her 50s.
She looked like a million bucks.
Scams a bunch of famous athletes out of untold fortunes.
Nearly $10 million was all gone.
It's just unbelievable.
Hide your money in your old Richmond because she is on the prowl.
Listen to Queen of the Con, Season 5, The Athlet the athlete whisperer on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Oh, hi, I'm Rachel Zoe, and my podcast,
Climbing in Heels, is back and better than ever.
You might know me from the Rachel Zoe project,
or perhaps from my work as a celebrity stylist.
And guess what?
I'm still just as obsessed with all things fashion,
beauty, and business.
Climbing in Heels is all about celebrating the stories of extraordinary women, and this
season is here to bring you a weekly dose of glamour, inspiration, and fun.
Listen to Climbing in Heels every Friday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts.