The Martyr Made Podcast

Hi everyone. This is my response to the nationwide firestorm I ignited this week. Some of you will have read or listened to this on the Substack, but I wanted to put it on the main feed for people who haven't. And for you Substack listeners, there's a little treat at the end of the intro for you as well.

Hi everybody. This is a short Easter message I put together a year or two ago. It's been up on the Martyr Made Substack - which you should all go subscribe to at your earliest convenience - but I thought I'd release it here for everyone. I hope everyone had a blessed week, and that you have a blessed day. Happy Easter.

Hi everyone. Here is a talk I gave about Nietzsche and Dostoevsky at the first inaugural Novitate Conference in Washington, DC. Novitate was created by Luke Burgis to explore and celebrate the work of French scholar René Girard. Luke is the author of Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life.Please support the podcast by subscribing to the Martyr Made Substack for just $5 p/month, or $50 p/year. For that, you get access to tons of exclusive essays (w/audio versions for those who prefer to listen), podcasts, interviews, and AMAs, as well as a discount on all MartyrMade gear. This is a 100% listener-supported operation, and I'm only able to do this because of you guys.Link to the Martyr Made Substack: https://martyrmade.substack.com/

Hi everybody. This is the audio version of a six-part essay series called Blacks and Jews. I wrote it for my Substack a while back, so if it sounds like I’m reading instead of speaking naturally, it’s because in this case I am. I decided to release this to everyone on the main feed because, in light of the recent uproar and brewing Democratic Party civil war over the Israel-Palestine conflict, it’s suddenly become quite timely. Black and Jewish Americans were uniquely united until the late 1960s, when the civil rights movement was subsumed by a Third Worldist outlook that caused the Black Panthers and other activists to turn on the State of Israel, and then on American Jews. It precipitated a split in the so-called Black-Jewish alliance which had been the backbone of the civil rights movement during its glory years, and led to some of the worst outbursts of public antisemitism in American history. The intra-left wing conflict over the current conflict in Gaza is not a new story, and in fact is an example of scabs being torn off old wounds that had barely begun to heal. I wrote this series as I was preparing the most recent episode of Whose America, Inner City Blues, so those of you who’ve heard that will be familiar with some of the material, but there’s also a lot of material that wasn’t in that episode.As I said, this was previously released on my Substack, so if you enjoy this kind of content maybe you’ll show a little holiday cheer and help support the podcast by becoming a subscriber for just $5 p/month or $50 p/year. This is a 100% listener-funded show, I don’t have sponsors or any other kind of funding except what you guys contribute, so your generosity is greatly appreciated.

I’m re-uploading all the podcasts from a new hosting service, so I thought I’d go ahead and put the full Epstein series up while I was at it. This series deals with some very dark material. It is not for listening with kids in the car or where other people can hear it at work. If you appreciate this podcast, please consider helping to support it by subscribing to the MartyrMade Substack for $5 p/month or $50 p/year. The Substack includes subscribers-only essays, and a subscribers-only podcast feed w/exclusive episodes and audio versions of all Substack essays. This is a 100% listener-funded show, so your support is greatly appreciated. It’s available on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. *Correction* A few people have informed me that my description of how a hedge fund manager calculates his cut is off in Part 1. I meant to correct it in the show, but I forgot. The general point remains, however: there is no way Jeffrey Epstein made the kind of money he was showing by managing one guy’s account over the years.

This episode will cover the period from 1948 – the year of Israeli independence and the Palestinian Nakba – to the Lebanon War of 1982. It is not meant to be a thorough history of that period, as Fear & Loathing was of the pre-1948 period – to do that justice would require another ten episodes, not just one. This one has a narrower focus. The story we’re gonna hear today is not about every figure, and event, and motivation relevant to the conflict, but is specifically about how the level of savagery escalated over the years, the steps by which those escalations occurred, to bring us up to the where we are now, with virtually unrestrained violence completely normalized on both sides. It’s not a pretty story, and several sections of this podcast are not going to be for the faint of heart. Please consider subscribing to the MartyrMade Substack page. The show is 100% listener supported, and Substack subscribers is the only way I’m able to keep doing this. Thanks for everything.

The Great Migration of 1915-1960 saw over six million African Americans move from the rural South to the big cities of the North and West. It was one of the largest mass migrations in human history, and one whose consequences defined American domestic politics throughout the 20th century. But it wasn’t the first time the industrial cities of America had experienced massive demographic transformation, and the black migrants would run smack into the immigrants of previous generations. In the 1960s, frustration and anger turned to conflict, as race riots drove what was left of the white ethnics out of the inner cities. Today we tell the story of the battle for control of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school district in New York City – a topic which might sound a bit dull, but was one of the most intense periods of racial conflict in recent American history. The conflict captured the attention of the country for months, and led to a split in the alliance between American blacks and American Jews that had powered the civil rights movement until the late 1960s.SUPPORT THE SHOW!I don’t use sponsors for this show. I work for you guys. If you’d like to help out, become a subscriber to the MartyrMade Substack. It’s just $5 p/month or $50 p/year, and you’ll have access to subscribers-only podcasts, essays (w/audio versions), interviews, and more. New subscribers will have some catching up to do. If anyone would like to be a subscriber, but can’t swing it right now, just shoot me an email and we’ll get you hooked up. I appreciate you guys letting me do this show.

In August 1921, 10,000-20,000 armed coal miners marched on Mingo County, West Virginia to lift the martial law imposed there, free their jailed brethren, and avenge the assassination of one of their local heroes. At least 20,000 more wives, young boys and other civilians followed the army providing medical, logistical and other services. Before it was over, they would storm a mountainside under fire from entrenched machine guns, and while being bombed from the air. It was the largest and most serious armed insurrection in US history since the Civil War. This episode is going to discuss the West Virginia Coal Mine Wars, and The Battle of Blair Mountain.These episodes are out a week or two early on the Substack feed. If you enjoy this content or want more essays and podcasts not available here, please consider becoming a subscriber over at Substack, it’s how I manage to be able to do this at all.Here’s the link to Jocko’s company, Origin, that I mention in the intro. Go there and check out the high-end clothing, boots, jiu jitsu gis, hunting gear and more, all hand-made in the United States.Here’s the link to Daniele Bolelli’s History on Fire podcast (also available wherever you get your podcasts).

Hi everyone. Here is the first episode – well, the prologue – for a brand new Martyr Made series called Whose America?, on the American labor wars. This is a series I’ve been working on for a while, and a story very close to my heart.I appreciate the patience and support you guys have shown me. I have a habit of over-burdening myself until work grinds to a crawl, then I panic and work myself nearly insane to catch up. Well, the good news is that I only decided to do this prologue at the last minute to set the tone and get the ball rolling, when the *actual* first episode of this series, on the largest insurrection in American history before or since the Civil War, was already almost done. I’ve got another two books to read before I’m ready to release it into the wild, but it won’t be too long.This episode has already been available to Substack subcribers for a week. I will be doing that from now on, so you can add that to the list of benefits available to subscribers for just $5 p/month or $50 p/year. If you enjoy this episode, or even if you don’t but just want to keep my cats from starving, please consider supporting the podcast by becoming a paid subscriber to the MartyrMade Substack.Thanks for listening!

Hey everyone. After the recent Thoughts On Ukraine episode, I thought it would be a good idea to bring someone on the show who has a different perspective. Kristaps Andrejsons is a Latvian journalist,

Hey everybody. Many of you have asked for my thoughts on the crisis in Ukraine, so here they are. I re-recorded it because the audio was trash the first time around. Sorry about that.This is the kind of content I usually put on the Substack subscribers-only feed, so if you like this and can spare $5, please consider supporting the podcast by subscribing at martyrmade.substack.com.Here are some links I mention in the show:The Snipers Massacre On MaidanHow the West Sowed the Seeds of War in Ukraine, by Pedro GonzalezMy Twitter thread on the Rand Corporation’s strategy white paperScott Horton’s recent speech on the Ukraine crisisThanks for listening.

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.Support the show by subscribing to the MartyrMade Substack.

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.Support the show by subscribing to the MartyrMade Substack.

This is a short piece I did for Daniele's History on Fire podcast. Many of you may have already heard it, but I thought I'd put it on the main feed just in case. It was a fun break from Jim Jones, and nice to be a little less serious for once. Hope you enjoy.More short episodes like this will be available to subscribers only at the MartyrMade Substack.

Jim Jones and Peoples Temple follow the remnants of the 1970s radical left into the fire.WARNING: Extreme language and disturbing content.Thank you to www.campuspress.com for sponsoring this series.Support the show by subscribing to the MartyrMade Substack.Huge thanks to the folks behind the Alternative Considerations of Jonestown Project. This podcast wouldn't have been possible without their indispensable hard work recording, organizing, and transcribing the Peoples Temple tapes and other source materials. For further information about Jonestown, you can't do better than their website. I did my best to tell the story here as I understand it, but if you ask me the work they're doing will lead to a fundamental future reassessment of what happened.

This was originally intended to be part of the previous episode, but I decided to break them up.Warning: EXTREME LANGUAGE AND GRAPHIC CONTENTThe student movement is dead. The Black Panther Party is torn apart by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. Activism devolves into struggle sessions and terrorism, as the movement for civil rights and social justice is left to "drunks, hypes, freaks, and madmen." Treason drives Jim Jones off a cliff.Support the show by subscribing to the MartyrMade Substack.This series brought to you by the kind folks at CampusPress.

This episode begins where the '60s end, when the radicalism of that decade crash headlong into the diminishing expectations of 1970s America. The Weather Underground veers off toward its explosive climax. As the idealism of the student movement is shunted into self-help fads and therapy sessions, what remaining energy of the radical left is drained into increasingly bizarre and violent channels.I broke this episode up into two parts, so it ends a bit abruptly. The second segment will be available a few hours after this is released.Support the show by subscribing to the MartyrMade Substack.This series brought to you by the good folks at CampusPress.

This episode discusses the beginning of Peoples' Temple's slide into radicalism after Jim Jones leads his people to California. We also talk about the development of 1960s radical political movements, and Jonestown conspiracy theories.I had to record this episode in a hotel bathroom while on travel for work. The audio quality has some issues at various points. Hopefully, it's not too bad.Support the show by subscribing to the MartyrMade Substack.

In this episode I trace the trajectory of the civil rights movement through the 1960s, and the gradual shift in emphasis and leadership from the stoic southern marchers following Martin Luther King, Jr to the militant Black Power soldiers of the northern ghettos.Support the show by subscribing to the MartyrMade Substack.

This is part 2 of a podcast series on Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple movement. An eccentric loner as a child, Jim Jones finds purpose in the fight for racial and economic justice.

This is the first episode of a series exploring Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple. This episode is only a prologue, a few stories and ideas to serve as a backdrop for everything to come. The next episode will be along in the next few weeks.

This is part 2 of a series I’ve been working on with Daniele Bolelli. In part 1, he covered the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre carried out by the US Army. I was working on my next major series when Daniele asked me to do a companion episode on My Lai, and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity. From his description:“Because I felt like I was ordered to do it, and it seemed like that, at the time I felt like I was doing the right thing.” —Private First Class Paul Meadlo explaining his role in the My Lai Massacre.“How do you shoot babies?” Meadlo was then asked. His reply… “I don’t know. It’s just one of them things.”“I felt then and I still do that I acted as I was directed, and I carried out the order that I was given and I do not feel wrong in doing so.” — Lieutenant William Calley Jr. addressing his own leadership during the action.“Every Day/ On our fellow man we prey/ Dog eat Dog/ To Get by/ Hope you like my genocide” — The Offspring“Hello darkness, my old friend…” — Simon and Garfunkel“I believe now it is but the commencement of war with this tribe, which must result in their extermination.” — Major Jacob Downing“Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians! … I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God’s heaven to kill Indians. … Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice.” — Quote attributed to Colonel John Chivington“They were so honorable and so strong, but I felt like they were alone and sometimes when you want to do the right thing, the people that want to do the right thing suffer… even today.” —Lorraine Waters about Silas Soule and Joseph Cramer“It was hard to see little children on their knees… having their brains beat out by men professing to be civilized.” — Silas SouleI’m not going to lie. This is one of the darkest episodes of History on Fire. But there are reasons for this journey into the heart of darkness. The stories of Sand Creek and My Lai offer an opportunity to explore human agency, the choices separating good and evil, and how some individuals can choose to become sources of light even in the most horrible circumstances. In part B, I hand the microphone to my friend and master podcaster Darryl Cooper (from The Martyrmade Podcast.) Darryl explores the context of the Cold War in order to come to terms with what happened at My Lai, in Vietnam, in 1968. Horror abounds, but if you are looking for heroes in the midst of the horror, you can do a lot worse than hear about the story of Hugh Thompson.

“Mexica ‘beliefs’ have been discussed confidently enough, but academics being natural theologians, usually at an unnaturally abstract pitch. My interest is not in belief at this formal level, but in sensibility: the emotional, moral, and aesthetic nexus through which thought comes to be expressed in action, and so made public, visible, and accessible to our observation.”-Inga Clenninden | Aztecs: An InterpretationHuman sacrifice is not a human universal. The institution emerges at a specific stage of human sociopolitical development, and recedes when the transition is complete. Rarely found among nomadic hunter-gatherers, ritual homicide is also nearly absent in archaic civilizations (except for a few residual instances such as royal burials). But human beings didn’t make the leap from nomadic foragers to pyramid builders overnight. Nestled between was a transitional stage, when newly-settled people faced the monumental task of ditching the ancient kinship system, sacrificing their freedom to kings, and reorganizing themselves into the first states. This fraught transition was imposed by violence, as primitive egalitarianism was replaced by class oppression, and human sacrifice was employed to define social boundaries and to stave off panic with brutal acts of self-assertion. Kings gloried in their total freedom, the less fortunate were terrorized into submission, and the gods looked on with dripping fangs and growling stomachs.If you would like to donate to help put some kibble in my bowl, you can do it at Patreon, or PayPal (email: martyrmade at gmail.com). Thank you to those of you who have donated, I really don’t know what to say other than that. Thank you.

Who’s hungry?Listen on iTunes!Listen on Stitcher! (seems to be some issue here… will try to fix)Visit MartyrMade Facebook page!

In which I take a break from banging out my human sacrifice episode to check in with my patient listeners.I’m working on a series of companion episodes to go along with Daniele Bolelli’s History on Fire series on the Spanish conquest of Mexico. If you haven’t heard the first episode of his series (available on iTunes and everything else) and the bonus episode he put out (available on his website), you really need to listen to them before you get into what I’m doing here. Cheers, everyone.

Modern Zionism began in the late 19th century with idealistic calls for spiritual renewal; by 1939, it had transformed into a desperate play for bare survival. Young revolutionaries do combat with Zionist elder statesmen for the soul of the movement. Hitler’s German Reich and Stalin’s Soviet Union do battle for Europe while everything between them is ground into the mud. Victims become victimizers, and the wider world gets an introduction to the dispute that has been confounding the British Empire for 20 years. Our episode begins with desperate Jews in Nazi Europe, it ends with the realization of the Zionist dream, for the first time in 2,000 years, a sovereign state of Israel.

Riots. Massacres. The end of the world and everything in it. Palestinian Arabs finally find a voice in the wake of the 1929 massacres. Unable and unwilling to find a place for the Jews, Europe’s autoimmune disorder begins to tear the host apart. Desperate European Jews seek escape from Nazi persecution just as Palestinian resistance stiffens and the British become skeptical of the Zionist project.

Hi everyone. Been a long time. My day job has been downright abusive the last 2-3 months, but we’re back with Episode 4 of Fear & Loathing in the New Jerusalem. As the Middle Eastern regional order is hammered into place by the Entente powers, Zionism goes underground. Prosperity abroad and security in Palestine make the 1920s a relatively quiet period in this story. It’s been chaos behind us and nothing but chaos in front, but we’re in the eye of the storm. The British try a more inclusive approach toward the Arabs, but as the real effects of the Zionist project begin to be felt, tensions rise until the decade ends as it began… in violence.

We’re halfway through Fear & Loathing in the New Jerusalem, the history of Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (If you haven’t listened to the first two episodes, you might want to do that for background, but this episode is an exploratory aside that can stand on its own as well.) I decided to throw something together to answer a few questions and get down in the weeds to talk about Arab tribal dynamics, honor culture, religion, and the mutual incomprehension that helped construct the Middle Eastern mousetrap a century ago, and remains an obstacle to progress in the region today.

The Arabs and the Zionists in Palestine struggle to get their bearings in a ruined world. The smell of gunsmoke still lays thick over the landscape, and the ink is still wet on the Balfour Declaration and the several new international agreements. The First World War is over, and people around the world are demanding their independence in the new world order. But building a national identity takes more than just drawing lines on a map or running a rag up a flagpole.

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 this three-part series on the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.In Episode #1, nations are rallying to throw off the yoke of the Great Powers, and demanding the sovereign right to rule their homelands. A group calling themselves Zionists puts out a call to awaken the oppressed Jews of Europe from their thousand-year slumber. The time had come, after two thousand years of homeless wandering, to return to Palestine, the land longed for in so many psalms and lamentations. But there was a problem. While the Jews were in exile, another people had moved into the land, and they had been living there for 1300 years.Thanks for listening. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section or via e-mail. Part Two of this series will be along shortly, and I encourage you to subscribe so you’ll be the first to know. Enjoy!