Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Man Who Ruined New York

Episode Date: July 5, 2022

Robert and Bridgett Todd sit down to talk about Robert Moses, a man who loved racism almost as much as he hated public transit.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh boy, podcasts. Which one is this, Robert? Now Sophie, scholars have debated for years how to tell what podcast you're introducing when you're introducing your podcast. And I think I hold with Robert Sapolsky of Stanford University when he said, it is impossible to know the name or the hour of the podcast that you host.

Sophie. This is behind the bastards. Oh is it? Our guest today is the lovely Bridget Todd. Hi Bridget. Hello, I'm so happy to be here with y'all. I'm happy to have you here. How are you doing today Bridget? I am doing well. I am in DC where it is hot as balls.

It is hot as balls. It's like still winter here basically, so it's like 60 and rainy, which is dope. But I remember you and I met in DC when it was hot as balls. That's right, the swamp, as they say. It's hot as balls in Los Angeles today too. Yeah, it's hot as balls everywhere, but where I am. And now Bridget, you're an East Coast girl. That's right, born in bread. How do you like the big apple, the new of York's?

Oh, I love New York. I lived there for two years. I loved it. I'm an East Coast girl. Sassy mouth, you know, yelling in traffic, et cetera. Yeah, yeah, I'm walking here, that kind of stuff. Say it every day. The most famous thing about New York culture is that scene where, what's his name? I want to say Dustin Hoffman. Dustin Hoffman from Midnight Cowboy, right?

Where he's like walking across the street with the other guy and that dude nearly hits him. He's like, I'm walking here. Well, that's a famous New York moment. It's the thing everybody jokes about when they pretend to be a New Yorker. And of course, it is a moment, what's depicted in that scene is a man having an aggressive interaction with someone in a car, right? Because New York has famously heinous traffic problems. Not quite Los Angeles bad, although the parking is worse than it is in LA. But pretty bad traffic.

And today we're going to talk about the guy who's responsible for that. Bridget, have you ever heard of Robert Moses? I have not. Oh, Bobby Mose. Yeah, this guy's important if you've never been to New York. His, the lingering impacts of the things that he did are like almost incomprehensibly titanic. But he is also known as the man who built New York City. Like all a huge number of the landmarks that are most famous about that town were the result of this guy's direct work and spoilers.

He was a gigantic racist with a weird car fetish. Oh, yeah. I guess it wouldn't be bastards if it was like, oh, he was a really nice guy. He was a cool dude. He liked to cook like salads for people and hand them out. This is just a podcast about a guy who made salads for free. Bridget, I feel like they were all right. Bridget, we should have done this before we did cool people who did cool stuff with Margaret Kildrey.

So you could have the proper cleanse. What's interesting is for a long time, people called this guy a cool person who had done cool stuff. And notably the folks who did were rich white people. I guess he was a cool person, depending on who you ask. Cool for some, perhaps. He was cool in that way that if you have a movie and you have the bad guy who's this figure in government who's incredibly good at wielding power and carrying out. You could have made a good House of Cards Netflix series about how good this guy was at like pulling the levers of government. I guess he's cool in that regard, but he is part of the reason why we're all going to choke to death on exhaust fumes.

So that part, I would say, is probably bad, Bridget. How do you feel about choking to death on exhaust fumes? I don't love it. Not pro choking. I keep a little tally by the desk of people who want to choke to death on exhaust fumes. So I'm going to mark you a no, which is the first big disagreement you and Jamie Loftus have had. Oh, she's a yes? Oh, she's a huge fan of choking on exhaust fumes.

That's why she spent so much time in Florida recently. The Ghost Church podcast was just a cover. Listen to Ghost Church now on the iHeartRadio network. Okay, we should talk about Robert Moses. What, Sophie? Come on. If you're going to plug in it, please plug the network it's on, which is ours, which is called Pool Zone Media. Yeah, that doesn't sound like us.

Really? That doesn't sound like us. So Bridget, Bobby Moses, Robert Moses, Armos, Rob Mose, was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on December 18th, 1888. His father, Emmanuel, was descended from Spanish Jewish immigrants. His mother, Isabella, was German Jewish. And her father, Bernard Cohen, was a wealthy New York businessman. For nine years, he and his parents lived in Connecticut just a couple of blocks from Yale. And based on the fact that they lived next door to Yale, you will not be surprised to hear they were comfortable and quite affluent, right?

Like, not a lot of poor kids grow up in the shadow of Yale University. Yeah, I mean, the Yale is a dead giveaway that you've got some money. Yeah, Noah's a rough neighborhood, skull and bones guys, robbed us every night, beat us with diplomas. Yeah, so he grows up next to Yale. And his dad, the family business that his dad is into, his dad owns a department store and is also a real estate speculator in Connecticut. And he was successful enough at these endeavors that in 1897 he sold his business, he sold his real estate holdings, and he retired. He retired like pretty young. He's like kind of early middle age when he does this.

And the reason he retires is that his wife's father, Robert Moses' grandpa Bernard, had died that year. And he had willed his daughter and her family his mansion in New York City. So Robert Moses' dad retires because their grandpa died and left them a mansion. So they're like, well, we have all this cash and now we have a mansion. Why are we, we don't need to really do anything else, you know? So they moved to the mansion in New York City and they become fancy New York socialite people, right? So pretty easy run of it, you would say at this stage. Yeah, just being given mansions sounds pretty sweet.

He has the upbringing of a teenage girl in like a Hallmark original movie where it's like, oh, we have this surprise family mansion. Now we're going to live in New York and be sudden socialites. Yeah, that's very much his background. Yeah, it's giving like what's that Adam Sandler movie where he becomes wealthy? Oh, Mr. Deeds. Yeah, it's like a little bit of a Mr. Deeds. It's a Mr. Deeds, but we all wish it was a Billy Madison. Exactly.

So here his mom, like, well, now that they're in New York, they're fancy socialite people, you know, they're living it up, drinking tea with like all of their fingers extended, all that fancy shit. His mom gets involved in what's called the settlement house movement. Now, again, they are rich, but they are the kind of descendants of some of the first Jewish people to come to the United States. And given like, again, because they have money like a lot of their ancestors are some of the first Jewish folks who immigrate out of Europe and into the Northeast. Their ancestors are doing pretty well. But obviously by the 1890s, most of the Jews who are coming to the United States are not people with money, right? If you remember your history and you think about why a lot of Jewish people are fleeing to New York in the 1890s, think back to our episodes on the czars.

They are having trouble, right? So these are mainly immigrants from like Eastern Europe, from Slavic countries. And they're seen by so the kind of established Jewish community in New York at this time is primarily German Jewish. And a lot of them are kind of upper class. And so they have deep sympathy for their Eastern European co-religionists, but they also are kind of bigoted against them, right? Because number one, slobs are again, this is the attitude of like rich Germans kind of unkempt and like dirty and stuff, right? Like they're poor, you know, and they come from this like less civilized part of Europe and the attitudes of these people. And also a lot of them are dangerously socialist, right?

A lot of like Jewish refugees in the 1890s have left wing leanings. And again, these the established Jewish community in New York, like a lot of them have money, right? Like Robert Moses' family and their mansion are not socialists, you know? Sure. I would be very surprised if they were. So there's this mix of things and some of it's self-preservation, right? Because people like Bella Moses, who's Robert's mom and other kind of wealthy diaspora Jews in the United States, both are like, well, we don't like this socialism and we're not really fans of a lot of these peoples like Slavic customs. Also, it's potentially dangerous if Jewish people in the United States develop a reputation for being like left wing radicals,

because that shit has been very dangerous for Jewish people in Europe, right? So there's this decision among kind of the great and good in the Jewish community that like, we need to Americanize these folks fucking ASAP, right? So settlement houses provide new immigrants with a place to live where they can learn English and like American customs, like not talking about socialism or unionizing in your workplace, right? So these settlement houses are in a lot of ways very positive things. These people are desperate refugees coming to the United States. They need shelter, they need food, they need job opportunities, clothing, all that kind of stuff. And the settlement houses provide that.

But they're also deeply paternalistic as this quote from a write-up by Virginia Commonwealth University makes clear, quote, underneath the giving of money and time was an assumption that the givers knew what was best for the recipients. The recipients did not always appear grateful. Some had been leaders in their own Jewish communities, some were educated, some were professionals, and some had been political activists, but almost everyone had pride and consents when they were being patronized. So you get what's kind of like, there's some, yeah, this is what Bob Moses' family is involved in. They're the ones doing the patronizing. Yeah, it's interesting that, so that bit that you just read, also shout out to VCU, my parents both taught there.

Yeah, it's interesting to me that they know when they're being patronized. I feel like we often pathologize people of like, oh, they don't really know what's going on. You can just say whatever. But I really like that point that they knew what time it was. They knew what the vibe was and how they were being treated. Yeah, they're aware of what's going on. But it's also like, what are you going to do? Turn down the free food and the place to stay.

It's hard landing in America with nothing but the clothes on your back. You need something. And so this is the community, the people who are, again, doing the patronizing. That's where young Bob Moses grows up as this rich kid watching his mom. And she's fundraising. She's setting up these facilities where rich people plot out life paths for poor people. And he and his brother Paul attend several fancy private schools and a military school. They have kind of the most privileged upbringing you can within this community.

And in 1905, at age 17, Robert Moses starts classes at Yale. So again, doing great. How do you think he got in? You think he used his whole strings? No, no, his test scores were just like, good as hell. No. No, I think it was Aunt Becky from Full House. Oh, no.

Yeah. I mean, no, these people, I think these guys have the money that you don't need to Aunt Becky it, right? You've got the family. Now that said, we are going to talk about it. It's actually not, there's a little bit, because again, he is Jewish, right? Which is a, you are not really white as a Jewish person in fucking 1905, you know? Like that has not come around yet. So he's moderately athletic.

He's a good competitor. He's a runner. He's a swimmer. And he also, from an early age, takes on his mom's activism bent. But of course, since he's a Yale kid, his activism is like rich kid activism. So like the first thing he organizes is a fight to take some of the money budgeted for the school's football program and divert it to what were called minor sports, which in the U.S. was everything but football. So that's like his first piece of like community organizing.

Oh my God. I feel like I know so much about him just having that information that that was his foray into organizing of like, we need to be funding La Crosse and Squash and other sports too. He's the kind of guy where if you'd like met him a couple of decades later at a party and been like, oh yeah, I've been organizing a food bank. He'd be like, oh yes, I have community organizing experience too. Let me tell you about the Squash team we funded. He did not have a British accent, but I can't like, if you're doing posh, you just have to go English.

So yeah, he's a good student. He wins awards for his performance in Latin mathematics, public speaking. He writes for the current, which is their newspaper. He edits the volume of poetry. Now, obviously he's doing just fine. Right. This is not a kid who is struggling tremendously in his early life. But again, he's he is Jewish in this period, which means he's not insulated entirely from how fucking racist upper class society is.

One of my sources for his early life is an article in the Atlantic from 1939. It extremely tactfully notes because it's not it's 1939. The Atlantic doesn't view racism as bad. It notes, quote, a non fraternity man could hardly get further at Yale. So it's basically saying like he did as good as a man with and not in a fraternity could do in Yale. And you may be wondering, why wasn't he a fraternity man? Because he's again, very wealthy. Well, because he's Jewish and Jewish men in 1905 were not allowed to be in fraternities at Yale.

Right. You could attend, but you could not. It's the same way that like up until pretty recently, there were quite a few. There's probably still are like country clubs and golf courses that like wouldn't let Jewish people in, you know. Right. So while there had been Jewish people at Yale since the 1700s, they kept an official cap on Jewish admission to the school. Like they had a maximum number of Jewish people who are allowed to attend. And I want to quote now from a New York Times article written in 1986.

Not until the early 1960s did Yale at university end an informal admissions policy that restricted Jewish enrollment to about 10%. I did not know that. Yeah, the 1960s. I mean, and obviously there's their racist in other ways. Jewish people are not the most discriminated group of folks at Yale, but like they kept that shit going until the 60s. I was much later than I would have assumed. Like officially on the books, right? Like it's an in for like they don't have a law by law.

But there was a book published by the Yale University Press being like, yeah, we found based on like letters between people running the school that like, yeah, they didn't allow more than 10% of the classes to be Jewish for up until the 60s. It's pretty pretty cool. I found a book joining the club, which began as a sophomore term paper by a guy named Dan A. Orrin, who's a 1979 Yale grad that documents anti-Semitism reaching from fraternity brothers to board trustees at Yale. A lot of the research is based on university documents. And quote here from again, from that write up in the New York Times. One document, a folder now in the university archives labeled Jewish problems contains a memo from the admissions chairman of 1922 urging limits on the alien and unwashed element.

The next year, the admissions commission enacted the limitation of numbers policy and informal quota. Jewish enrollment was held to about 10% for four decades. So part of what's happening here, he's allowed in again, because he is not seen as he's not seen as like a fully a white person, but he's not seen as because he's rich, fully Jewish, right? The thing they're trying to keep out is Jewish people from Eastern Europe is like slobs, right? And that's like the alien and unwashed element. Again, 1922, that's how Yale is describing these kids. Also, I love that the text is called Jewish problems. Oh, yes.

Like just be real explicit, real clear. At least they didn't call it the Jewish question. Right? But not that far off, right? So that's the world our boy Robbie comes up in. He's simultaneously on the very top of the social hierarchy in New York City, right? You don't get a lot more privileged than he is. And he and his family, you could almost look at them as kind of like feudal lords in respect to a lot of poor immigrant Jews, right?

Who are kind of dependent on their largesse. And so he's able to exist in the rarefied levels of white Christian society, but he's also permanently othered from it, right? He's not fully accepted in it either. This is an interesting way to grow up. And you might think because he couldn't not be aware of the injustices of the era that he would be extra sympathetic to other people struggling against bigotry. That is not what happens. You might think that. You might think that.

That's not how it goes down. But we're building to that. So after Yale, he goes to Oxford where the Atlantic recalls this occurrence in his early background. A terrific outspokenness with never counts the odds against him appeared in one Oxford experience when he was selected to represent his college at a World Congress on racial problems. His frankness so infuriated some of the intense nationalist groups that once he had to free from the platform and escape through a rear exit. One of the delegates and an assistant to the Kediv of Egypt was so impressed that he offered Moses a position as secretary to the Kediv. Moses declined, but later he and a classmate visited Egypt to study what was being done under Kitchener and developed a profound admiration for British colonial administration. So that carries a shitload of ground, right?

He's going to this like Congress thing at Oxford and talking about racism. Probably you have to assume racism against like Jewish people because it's the period of time that it is. And he gets chased away by by fascists, right? He gets chased off states by fascists for talking about how racism is bad. And then he impresses the government of Egypt, which at this point is like the British Empire. And he goes and he's like, boy, these British sure know how to govern a multiracial society fairly. Like that's an incredible degree of like shit to cover, right? Wow. I mean, it really is so interesting how like if I didn't know where this was going, I would think like this is going to turn out to be somebody who like is this like great leftist person who understands why being actively anti-racist is a good thing.

And it's so interesting how it's like no hard pivot actually. It is a hard and it's interesting because he clearly sees the problems of nationalism and racism. But also we're going to talk about this more in a second. He looks at the government of Egypt under the British and he's like, this is how you run a multiracial society. He's only looking at it. He's looking at the problems of race and is able to see them as far as they affect people like him who are like upper class but kept out of the highest level of the upper class because of an accident of birth. But he's not able to see it anywhere below that level, right? That's going to be the guy Bobby Moses grows up into. But first, Bridget, you know who does see the problems of racism? Who?

The products and services that support this podcast. That's why on Island where you can hunt children, they don't see race. They don't see race at all. They kidnap kids from every continent, from every financial group. If you're a child, you might wind up child hunting Island and it doesn't matter what your background is. That's the beauty of Bridget. This is a masterful ad-pivot. Thank you.

Sophie says that all the time, but I appreciate the additional support. She loves it. I hate it so much. She's so on board. Is it because you have **** and you love it? No, it's because I have to make edit notes for editor to bleep the name. It's very funny. And people keep being like...

People think he's being real. They sure do. It's so funny. I'm never going to stop. Anyway, here's ****. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys.

As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad-ass way. He's a nasty shark.

He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman.

Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match. And when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, we're back. Now, Bridget, if you were going to eat a kid, right?

Oh my God. The ribs, right? Like, that's where the softest meat's going to be. I would say, so I just finished watching that show on Netflix alone, and it turned into a conversation of, if I had to eat somebody, how would I go about it? I think ribs, I think some kind of fatty cut of meat, so like thighs, butt area, because you're going to want to have a lot of fattiness on you. You'd want to slow cook it. I kind of ate people once. I ate a fish that had just been eating human corpses, and it was pretty good, but that's as close as I've gotten.

I haven't just had it straight. What, Sophie, how are we doing? I don't know. How are you doing, buddy? I'm kind of worried about you today. I'm feeling fine. I'm feeling fine. I'm feeling fine.

You just had some wild shit today. Everyone's having a good time on the old internet.com. So we're at an interesting point in Bob Moses' background here, Robbie Moses, because we've seen him both get chased off the stage by fascists for their bigotry, and also he goes to Egypt and he develops this deep appreciation for what is an extremely racist caste system, imposed by the British in their colonial project in North Africa. Now, we should talk a little bit about what's going on here. So the Ottoman Empire still exists. This is prior to World War I, and if you're not aware, the Ottoman Empire, they're the ones who kind of end the Eastern Roman Empire very powerful for a few hundred years, and then like the sick man of Europe is the term used for them for like 500 years, right, because they're just kind of like this failing empire, but they govern basically the whole modern Middle East, right?

And they technically are in charge in North Africa, but they're bad at projecting power, and so the British kind of come in and are running Egypt in a chunk of it. The whole history here is more complicated, but technically this area is under the government of the Ottoman Empire, but the British are like helping them maintain control through force of arms, and it's effectively a British colonial project, right? And the guy who is responsible in this period for imposing colonial rule by the British on North Africa is a dude named Lord Kitchener. The reason Kitchener is in charge is he had, there had been this, we'll talk about this one day, it's a fascinating piece of history. And here's this guy in the late 1800s, early 1900s, who calls himself the Mahdi, right? And Mahdi is an Islamic term, it means a messianic messiah basically, right? So like the Mahdi is like supposed to be the Islamic messiah, and there's this dude who claims to be the Mahdi,

and he creates, it's kind of like the Islamic state, right, an early version of it. He creates like this, we're going to finally go back to true Islam, and he wins a bunch of battles against the colonial forces. He massacres several British armies, it's a really fascinating piece of history. We've talked about this a bit when we talk about the Maxim gun and some other stuff, but so this Mahdi has this big uprising in Sudan, and there's this vicious war, and Kitchener crushes the war brutally in this battle called Omderman, where Winston Churchill shows up and shoots a bunch of people too. So this is like an important piece of like colonial history. Kitchener is also the guy who by this point had orchestrated the war against the Boers in Africa,

where he had pioneered the military use of concentration camps. He was really the first guy since like the Spanish to use them in a really modern way. So that's who Kitchener is, right? He's this guy who crushes the modest uprising, he's this guy who puts concentration camps in South Africa. He's a pretty fucked up dude, we'll talk about him more at some point in the future. What's relevant now is that after he takes over, after like he crushes the modest, he's in charge in North Africa for a while, he's like running things for the Brits, and he helps them establish a framework for governing Egypt that because again,

they don't on paper control Egypt the way they do India, right? Like India is like a possession of the crown, right? That's not entirely what's going on. So they have to have this illusion of native rule, but they don't want, like obviously, they're not going to let fucking Egyptians run Egypt. Like that's not going to think, of course not, Africans in charge in Africa. It is the early 1900s, that shit's not happening. Self-determination, what?

Yeah, no, no, no. So Kitchener creates something called the condominium, and under this, he basically carves out an Arabic Empire run by the British from the hindquarters of the dying Ottoman Empire. And I'm going to read a quote from the book, A Peace to End All Peace, that describes how this functioned in practice. The cabinet, which is like the governing agency of the condominium, in this instance, allowed Kitchener's agency to establish the prototype of the form of rule

that the Field Marshal and his staff eventually wanted Britain to exercise throughout the Arabic-speaking world. It was not to be direct rule, such as was practiced in parts of India, in Kitchener's Egypt, a hereditary prince and native cabinet members and governors went through the motions of governing. They promulgated under their own name, decisions recommended to them by the British advisors attached to their respective offices. That was the form of protectorate government favored by the Kitchener group.

So they built like a fake shadow government that is supposed to on paper exercise all the power, and kind of extra legally, it's white people pulling all the strings and actually running everything, you know? Always. So this is what Bob Moses looks at as a young man. He goes to Egypt, he sees the way this is set up, and he's like, this is the ideal way to run a multi-racial society. This is how you do it, right? This is a good call, you know?

The British have built a perfect society free of racial conflict in Northern Africa. It's so stunning how, I think it's exactly what you said, where like the ability to sort of like understand and contend with racism really does stop, insofar as it like no longer directly centers him. In this situation, he's just like, oh, this is great, like we need to like build on this model, what a great system. Yeah, and it's obviously the tour as this like upper-class kid who gets like recognized by the Kadeev for his courage at the speaking engagement,

the tour he's getting of Egypt, he's not like backpacking around and talking to the common people, he's visiting like the folks who are running, he's visiting like the Arabs who are working with the British Empire and living very well as a result, and they're telling him like, oh no, our people like, people love living this way, like this whole, everyone's very happy, like you have this perfect division and nobody wants anything to change. This is an idea, it's that kind of vision of the Middle East.

This is that period like when you watch shit like a lot of the media that comes out pre-World War I or kind of inter-World War I and World War II, where it's like white people vacationing or traveling around like the Middle East and Northern Africa, and it's this very like, this like colonial kind of porn, basically. Totally. You get bits of that in the Kenneth Branagh Poirot series, although I do think, I mean, it's not primarily focused on that, but like there's pieces of that in it, like this is forever the period

that like a certain kind of white person will look back on and be like, oh, it was so much nicer back then. Oh yeah, and even today people still romanticize that shit, and like I've seen some pretty atrocious, you know, rightly panned, like theme weddings where like, oh, the theme is essentially colonialism, pretty gross thing to romanticize. Yeah, and Bobby Moses is like romanticizing it while it's happening. So he comes back from Egypt.

You know, he's studied law at Yale and Oxford. He does a postgraduate course on political science at Columbia when he gets back, and he gets his first job in government in 1913. He's 25 years old. He'll receive his doctorate in political science a year later, and this initial gig is with the New York City Municipal Research Bureau, which at the time is focused on reforming the city's civil service. Now, if you remember your American history, right, Tammany Hall and shit is big in this period.

New York is like one big cesspit of graft and corruption. You know, everybody is bribing everybody. The police are just like hired goons for different like elected leaders who are basically gangsters. So it's the same as it is today, but we use different terms to describe it. I mean, you're not wrong. You're joking, but you're really not. I'm not really joking. I'll say it's probably in terms of the actual political corruption.

It's broadly speaking worse than it is now, although it is different. Like I guess at this point, one of the big differences is the police are literally just hired goons, as opposed to now the police are a power block in their own right that controls the city with like an iron grip. It is different right at this period of time. That does not has not like the NYPD is not like a massive power in its own right, you know. Wow. So in a lot of ways, it kind of sounds like it's worse. Yeah, it might be like that's really going to be a matter of opinion. But elections and stuff like it's all basically decided by, you know,

you have these bosses who like wrangle votes together based on like the different things that they're able to hand out. And like that's what determines who gets elected on the local level and it's not really democratic in any meaningful way. And this has started to change in the early 1900s. American cities are kind of starting to embrace the idea that local government should be slightly different from a mafia. And Robert Moses is kind of one of these big reformers in terms of the way the civil service works. And the specific thing he pushes is a massive reform of the hiring system. He thinks that people should be picked for jobs in civil service because of personal merit and their qualifications, not because their uncle runs a numbers racket and owns a bunch of police officers, right?

That's his attitude, which is like fine. So he pushes this like let's hire people who know how to do the jobs we want them to do thing. And this doesn't go well because Tammany Hall is still quite powerful in this period. And the people who don't want this patronage system to change and want to keep handing out jobs like candy, they fight back and they win and Moses quits his first gig in government. But the fact that he'd suggested such a bold reimagining of civil service earns him attention from Bell Moskowitz. And Bell is a reform advocate who advised a politician named Alfred Smith. Now, in 1918, four years into Robert's government career, Smith is elected governor of New York state.

So Bob starts like advising him and whatnot on reform and Smith campaigns and becomes governor of the entire state. Ms. Moskowitz, who'd gotten him the job, like basically helps bring him further and further into the halls of Democratic Party power as like Alfred Smith starts his career actually running the state. And Robert Moses, he kind of gravitates towards the park system. So he's, again, this is all very much how rich people take and you could say also not Democratic because nobody ever lex Bob Moses. But like some rich lady who's advising the guy who becomes governor likes him, brings him in. He starts going to parties with these people and talking about his ideas on government and they start giving him jobs, right? And because he's really interested, he's fascinated by the park system, which at that point New York doesn't have a park system.

There's like this chaotic mess of wildlife preservation areas and like parks that rich people had donated and local projects like a neighborhood put together. Park system, right? And like in broad for the state or for the city of New York. And he feels like that should be changed, right? We need like to centralize it. We need to have like a more efficient way of managing and taking care of our parks. And he talks the governor Smith into doing this, right? And again, none of this is different. Nobody elects this. They don't like go for a plebiscite. He's just like, hey, I think this is a good idea. And Smith is like, you're right, that is a good idea. And he creates the Long Island Commission on Parks and the State Council on Parks.

And these positions are invented by Bob Moses with Smith's backing and he's just put in charge of them. So he doesn't necessarily have any background in this, just an interest. No, he has like his PhD and stuff. Like he's like interested in public service, but he's not. He has no like parks. Now that to be fair, nobody really does because there's not like a parks department. Like this is like the era in which we start to have an idea that there should be a park system. Like nationally, there's not like this is all coming together in the early 1900s. You know, Teddy Roosevelt's hiking with John Muir in the West and shit. So this is all pretty new. So to be fair to him, there's not really like no one has much experience.

But he is like as this guy fighting against corruption and like patronage and people just like getting handed jobs. He's just handed this job because he's like friends with the governor, you know, like that's why he and he's he's going to be the he's going to be the chairman of the Long Island Commission on Parks and the State Council on Parks in New York State for 40 years. Yeah. Yeah. For 40 years, he will be in charge of both of these things. And this is like, you know, the 1920s when he gets these positions, the early 20s. So up into through the 60s, he's going to be running the whole state park system. He never gets elected. So Smith, who's again, the governor comes to know Robert Moses as the absolute best bill drafter in politics. That's the thing that like really gets him popular among other people in power is that he's able to like write these bills for things that should be

to basically basically to craft what's going to be the administrative state of the of the state of New York up until the present day. Like he is the one building the legal basis of everything that exists in New York today really by putting out these bills saying, hey, we should be in charge of this. Hey, the government should be regulating this. Hey, we should be building this kind of thing. Hey, we should be in like over time building again. What is New York's probably like one of the most centralized state governments in the United States right now. Bob Moses builds it with Albert Smith. And together they create what is certainly at the time the most centralized government in the United States. In 1927, Smith makes Moses the secretary of state for New York. Now, this doesn't last for long. Franklin Roosevelt gets elected governor the next year to meet defeating Smith.

And as he leaves Smith makes one request of FDR, which is keep Bob Moses as secretary of state. And Roosevelt actually declines. And this is due to the fact that this is not due to any good reason on Roosevelt's part. Bob Moses had refused to hire Roosevelt's secretary, Lois Howe, to a position in the council of parks. So FDR is like, fuck that guy. So he loses his he's not secretary of state for very long, but Moses continues to be the chairman of basically the whole parks department. And FDR, when he comes in, sees how effective and powerful this this is centralized political machine that Bob Moses and Smith have created is. And he kind of he falls in love with it. And the government of the state of New York becomes the model of the New Deal government that that FDR is going to build when he becomes president, right?

He's very consciously using the state government of New York that Moses and Smith build as like this. This is how to centralize and exercise power as an executive because it it works really well for that kind of thing, right? There's as we're going to talk about a lot of criticisms from it. But it's very easy for an executive to exercise power in the government that Moses and Smith build. And that's what I mean, you know, FDR, right? Like that's what he does, you know? Yeah, it is it is fascinating to me that this guy could sort of just luck his way into these positions by being wealthy and well connected. And then have these this decades long impact on these on a city like New York.

Like it's just that is so that is so fascinating to me that like that's how power is amassed and the influence that it has. I mean, that's still to a significant extent how it's amassed, right? At the highest levels, you know, it is about like who you know and who your friends are. It's why you get these. It's why you get Joe Biden saying that like, hey, you know what? I've talked a lot. I've known Mitch McConnell for years. He's an honest man.

He means what it like, right? It's because they're like they're friendly, you know, right? Even though I mean, I don't know that Mitch McConnell is capable of friendship. But that's like how everything works. And Moses is the thing that he's good at. We're going to talk about his many shortcomings in a bit. He's really good at centralizing power and building an apparatus through which the state can exercise power over geography, right? He's very good at that.

Like this is not a thing where he's like incompetent. He knows what that's why FDR is like we should we should take this model and expand it across the country. And Moses, again, he gets kind of pushed out of potentially what might have been more of a political career, but nobody ever stops him from being chairman of the Park Commission. And he grows more and more comfortable over time exercising power in this unelected position. He realizes early on that people like him, right? Because he's building parks, you know, and being seen as the champion of people who like parks, who want green spaces, who want like nice areas where they can go like walk around and like sit and stuff.

He realizes that like being the guy who's building that gives him this tremendous amount of soft power that can allow him to exercise actually a lot of control over New York, even though he's unelected. And I'm going to quote now from Robert Caro's The Power Broker, which is a book about Bob Moses. Quote, this lesson Moses would often recite to associates. He would put it this way, as long as you're fighting for parks, you can be sure of having public opinion on your side. And as long as you have public opinion on your side, you're safe. As long as you're on the side of parks, he would say, you're on the side of the angels. You can't lose. Oh my gosh. That is also so interesting because I think it's still true today that, you know,

there are some things that do give you this element of soft power where people are always going to sort of be on your side. And I think it's interesting that like we know that like, you know, green spaces and conservation, like all those things are great, but they can also historically have been used to sort of usher in like a little bit of racism or like a little bit of, you know. They're used to wall people off, as we're going to talk about. And they're used to, there's just an article that like people, I think it might have been, I don't think it was the Times, but it was about in here in California, or not here in California, but down in California. And the Bay Area, this woman who like described herself as a nimby and who'd been a community activist for 40 years

to like stop new housing from being built. And she's like, look, I just think people need to think before they build new housing, you know, ecology is important. We have to like care about the environment. I don't want this hill near my house to like be covered in like developments because that and it's like, yeah, nobody wants green spaces to be replaced with like condos, but also because of the way you have fought this and weaponized the value of green spaces, you've actually like done tremendous harm to the state and made it impossible for people to afford living there and like ratchet it up and like forced people out. And actually, if you just built bigger denser urban areas with more housing, less in total of the state

maybe would be being used and you would have a much more efficient use of the land that exists. And overall, it could even be significantly friendlier on the environment. But because you've fought to keep like these sprawling suburban developments be the only way people can live, nobody can afford to live there and these sprawling suburban developments keep pushing further and further and further out every year anyway. So, yeah, it's it's that like that's that's how that's Bob Moses is like the start of that. He's the first guy who's going to figure this out. And yeah, he's going to use it for racism. So one of his tactics in order to like, again, this is part of how he exercises power.

He can't he can't like force people to fund him, but he can ask for funding for a public works project like a park. He can ask for much less money than he actually needs to build it, right? That's one of the things he always does because it's easy to get people to agree to pay for like a park or something for barely any money. And once the government has agreed to start funding the construction of this park, this playground, the swimming pool, they kind of have to continue funding it even if it turns out he's like, oh, by the way, it's going to cost three times as much. Like I need a lot more money now, but we've already started. What do you not want us to finish this thing? Oh, that's a good tactic.

I'm going to quote again from Keros, the power broker. Once they had authorized that small initial expenditure and you would spend it, they would not be able to avoid giving you the rest when you asked for it. How could they? If they refused to give you the rest of the money, what they had given you would be wasted. And that would make them look bad in the eyes of the public. And if they said you had misled them, well, they were not supposed to be misled. If they had been misled, that would mean they hadn't investigated the projects thoroughly and had therefore been derelict in their own duty.

The possibilities for a polite but effective form of political blackmail were endless. Once the legislature gave you money to start a project, it would be virtually forced to give you the money to finish it. The stakes you drove should be thin pointed, wedge shaped, in fact, on the end. Once you got to the end of the wedge for a project into the public treasury, it would be easy to hammer in the rest. It's like a polite shakedown. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is like an upper class white people shakedown, right? Yes.

Like, okay, so you like this, you like this little parkway, but well, unfortunately, it's going to take another like $6 million to finish it. But you're good for that, right? Like, you don't want to just leave this unfinished, right? That's kind of an eyesore in the middle of this neighborhood, you know? That's how he's able to like, again, he's able to exercise power over state spending as an unelected leader by doing shit like this, right? Even though he doesn't actually have the power to like, you know, commission taxes or take money out of like the government treasury. He's able to make the situation wire by the people who are elected will look bad and maybe not get reelected if they don't agree with him because he's smart. Diabolical.

Yeah. And this is more or less the way that Robert Moses, unelected chairman of a parks board, is able to exercise power over generations of elected leaders. Now, before we discuss what he did with that power, we should probably talk about the New York subway system in this period. And I'm going to quote from a write up and curbed. On March 24th, 1900, New York Mayor Robert A. Van Wyck broke ground on the city's first subway line, which today corresponds to the four, five and six lines. It traveled from City Hall in Lower Manhattan to West 145th Street in Harlem, and construction took four years, six months and 23 days. A timeline that is inconceivable today, the newest subway extension, the Second Avenue line opened nearly a decade after its most recent official groundbreaking. Though construction on subsequent rail lines would rarely move that quickly, the city had a very specific attitude towards rail development in the four decades following that groundbreaking.

To never stop building, as Joe Raskin, author of The Route's Not Taken, puts it, the idea was to allow the subway system to expand and let the city go around it, he says. And so subway lines stretched quickly, by today's standards anyway, into undeveloped areas of Manhattan and the outer boroughs, with the assumption that housing and commercial development would follow. Despite setbacks, financial shortfalls, the clashing agendas of mayors and borough presidents, and battles with local community groups, it's how New York City got the expansive, complex rail infrastructure that's now seen on modern subway maps. This period of major growth lasted until the late 1940s, when annual rideships steadily increased year over year and hit its peak in 1948 with just over two billion passengers. So, that's all good, right? Yeah, I mean, I, so I've lived in many big cities, and I will say, I will sing the praises of New York subway system all day long. When I lived in New York, I lived on the L, the Montrose Stop, it, it, I feel like no other city I've ever lived in can compete. So, they definitely did something right there, in my book.

They did a lot, right? It's, it's fucked up in a lot of ways now, as they kind of pointed out, you, to add like a mile is going to cost billions of dollars and take 10 years, right? Where they built most of it in like this very rapid period, right? And like, we're going to talk about why it's so hard to expand the subway and why it's so hard to maintain it, right? Because this is another complaint people have today, is that like, yeah, we built this great subway system and we're not properly maintaining it, right? Yeah, that's definitely a thing. That is the story. What I just read is the story of like, how New York subway got to be such an impressive piece of public works, and now we're going to talk about how it got fucked over. But first, you know who else got fucked over, Bridget? Tell me.

The products and services that support this podcast. Sophie seems fine with this. Okay, we're going. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse was like a lot of goods. He's a shark, and not in the good and bad-ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match. And when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, boy. How you doing, Bridget? I'm doing well. You're doing well? I'm doing well. Let's talk about the subway.

So the period in which the subway is growing at its fastest rate is also the period. This is like the 30s and the early to mid 40s in which Bob Moses is centralizing power around him within the increasingly influential parks department. And the chief triumphs that he carries out in this period are well known to anyone who lives in or is even visited New York City today, particularly the well-loved Jones Beach State Park. He's the guy who builds that shit. Oh. But here's the thing. I spent many a fun evening there. It's a lovely park. Here's the thing.

Bob Moses hated the subway system and he hates public transit in general. He doesn't like buses either. He never learned to drive himself. But since he's again, he's rich. He always has like a driver and that's how he prefers to get around and he doesn't really think people should have public transportation. He doesn't think it's a great idea. So when he starts work on Jones Beach in the late 1920s, it opens in 1929. Subway and this is that period again in which subway and public transit access is massively expanding in New York.

But inside Jones's plan or Moses's plans for Jones Park is contained a major strike against the idea that poor citizens should have access to the same parts of the state as wealthy ones. And I want to quote now from a write up in the Yale Law Journal. Moses set forth specifications for bridge overpasses on Long Island, which were designed to hang low so that the 12 foot tall buses in use at the time could not fit under them. One consequence was to limit the access of racial minorities and low income groups who often use public transit to Jones Beach. Moses has widely acclaimed public park. Moses made doubly sure of his result by vetoing a proposed extension of the Long Island Railroad to Jones Beach. Moses biographer suggests that his decision to favor upper and middle class white people who owned cars at the expense of the poor and African Americans was due to his social class bias and racial prejudice. So he built this park and then makes it very difficult for black people to get there.

Well, it's exactly like what you were saying how like land use and public parks sound really great and everybody can get behind them. But they are also so effectively weaponized to, you know, further racism and classism and all those other isms that we all hate. Like it's such a good, it's such an effective way of, you know, consolidating power and keeping people out. And it's also, you can see how smart what he's doing is because he's like, I'm not banning people from the park, right? This is not a segregated, it's New York, you know, you're not kind of, it's not segregated here. Like this is not a park in which black people are not allowed, nor is it a park that poor people are not allowed. But it is a park that I'm going to veto train access to and I'm going to make it physically impossible for buses to reach it. And thus as a result, it becomes a park that only middle class and upper class people can get to because they have the cars, you know.

And that's smart. That way you get to be like, well, here in New York, we're not like, we're not like they are in, in, in, in Atlanta or Dallas or anything like segregated racist Southern states. And people in the North, people in New York love to say that shit, like, oh, like the South, they're so racist, they're not here in New York. No, and every now and then you're going to get like, you know, some, a black family who does well and has a car and it's like, look, they could go to Jones Beach. Of course they can go to Jones Beach, you know, it's like, so there's no problem here. Yeah. Yeah, it's cool. So instead of garnering support to pass a law banning poor people or people of color from the places where he did not want them. Moses used his powers and architect to make it difficult for individuals to reach the places that he desired to exclude them from. In his creation of Jones Beach Park, Robert Moses becomes the founder of a discipline that is today called exclusionary architecture. The basic idea is this, if the government cannot legally stop people from being somewhere, city planners can accomplish that same goal by designing communities in such a way that it inherently excludes undesirable people.

So in Portland right now, there's a couple of parks that like homeless people have been camping in and after the cops beat them up and cleared them out. Rich people in the neighborhood have illegally been putting out like planters and stuff and filling them with like gravel and dirt in areas where like otherwise it would be possible to lay down. To claim to like, no, we're just trying to beautify our neighborhood by putting in like plants and stuff. And it's like, no, no, no, you guys are illegally adding a bunch of infrastructure to the park in order to make it more difficult. It's like putting in a bench and then like illegally or like adding in like those things in the middle of it to stop people from sleeping on it or some shit. Here in DC, they have this thing they do where they install sprinklers, but there's not really green space. It'll be like on concrete plazas where unhoused people just happen to gather. And it's like, no, no, we're just watering the concrete sidewalk constantly. Nothing to see here.

It's just a normal sprinkler not on grass. And it's obviously exclusionary architecture. Who knows, like it's impossible to say like where the first people who ever did it. I'm sure you could find examples of this in many societies throughout history. But Robert Moses is the one who kind of like turns it into an art form, you know, because he's good at this shit. This is not, this is not putting out a planter. This isn't crude. This is like artful designing of a city in such a way that you both expand its green spaces and like beautify it while also locking certain people into areas where you want to keep the poor, you know. He's very good at this thing that he's going to do.

Now, I should note here that Moses's biographer Robert Caro is the first person who starts making these claims about Moses. He writes this massive books like 1400 pages called The Power Broker, which is like after Moses's retirement kind of blows a hole in the guy's legacy because he had been seen as like the man who built New York. And then Caro writes this book. He wins a Pulitzer for it. It's a pretty groundbreaking piece of reporting. And if you have the time to go through 1300 pages about like this guy's life, it's pretty interesting read. Now, in recent years, some individuals have sought to rehabilitate Robert Moses and critique and because Caro again wins a Pulitzer, there's very little that they can kind of criticize. So they'll kind of poke around the edges of his research to claim that like he's exaggerating the degree to which this guy was like, to which this guy, you can't argue that he wasn't racist, but you can like be like, well, actually the consequences of his racism weren't as bad as Caro claims. And one claim that these folks will make trying to defend Robert Moses today is that Moses's bridges were not too low for buses to pass underneath.

And it is true that a number of the bridges on the route to Jones Beach Park are tall enough for 12 foot tall buses to pass underneath. But Thomas J. Campanella, a Cornell University historian of city planning, wrote an article for Bloomberg in 2017 where he tests all these theories once and for all. He studied 20 bridges, viaducts and overpasses on other parkways built elsewhere in New York State at the time and compared them to the 20 original bridges and overpasses that Moses built for the Southern State Parkway, which is kind of on the way to the Jones Beach Park. And he finds that the clearances on all of the bridges Moses had built in the Southern State Parkway are way lower. Quote, the parkways I looked at were built in roughly the same era as the Southern State, especially Sawmill and Hutch. In fact, the Westchester Parkway set most of the standards for parkway design for years in the United States. The lower overpasses on the Southern State Parkway are a substantial deviation from precedent. So he's like, if you actually look at these, like the bridges he builds in the specific area are notably lower.

Now, the Washington Post quotes a guy named Bern Ward, George's, a German sociology professor, arguing back against this. And George's initially had claimed like this, this Washington Post article is funny because it's talking about the guys who are defending Moses and then like the people who have repeatedly proved that no, no, no, he did do this in an exclusionary way. And like, first, the post quotes him as saying that like, Moses didn't build any bridges lower than his colleagues did at the time. Like, that's a lie. He built the same size bridges as everyone. They were just shorter back then. And then when the Washington Post brings up Campanella's research and was like, no, like this guy studied them and his bridges are way shorter. When they tell George is that, he responds, quote, OK, true, the bridges were low, but each had to be built low differently. Moses took great care that each and every bridge was individually fitted into its natural context. Standardized unicity, as it were, was part of an artfully laid out nature.

One can show more generally that when it came to parkway building, bridge building culture was connected to a specific politics of nature. So first, he's like, his bridges weren't any lower than anyone else's. That's a myth. And then when people are like, well, they were though, he's like, well, he had to because it was pretty, right? Like he had to because it looked good. Oh, and I think I mean, like you're talking about how, I mean, the word artful is the only word I could really use to describe it. But, you know, I think it was, I can't remember who it was, but some shitty right wing politician was like, oh, they're saying that the highways are racist. And the plausible deniability here of what he's doing of like, you know, you don't have to come out and outright say, I am trying to keep poor people and black people and brown people out.

But because of the way that it's done, even now people deny that the reality of what's going on, it's so easy to deny. I think it really is an art form. Yeah, he's very good at it. And again, like when you actually challenge people and like do the reason, like again, you can show, yes, he obviously like these were built with racism in mind. And they just keep moving the goalposts like they do forever. And like the argument of these like bigots always comes down. And again, not all of them are racially bigoted. Some of them just hate the poor.

But the argument always comes down to like, well, it's prettier this way, right? It's prettier if we keep certain people out. And don't we deserve, we've spent so much money on our homes. We deserve to have our home values increase. We deserve to live this way. We deserve to have it be prettier. And maybe that means other people can't afford houses. Maybe it means the homeless crisis expands.

Maybe it means that like folks are like forced into certain neighborhoods where they lack access to grocery stores and other kind of like necessities. But don't we deserve to have pretty things, you know, and it's not pretty if they're here. It's not pretty if they have housing they can afford. It's not, you know, like that's the thing. Anyway, Bridget, you got any plugables to plug? That's part one. Oh, yeah, I guess I should plug my podcast. There are no girls on the internet.

You can check it out on my heart radio. Yeah, you can follow me on social media at Bridget Marie in DC or at Bridget Marie on Twitter. Well, you can follow her and you can check out her podcasts. And eventually you're going to be able to hear Bridget in a new podcast. That's right. We are bound by sacred oaths to keep that silent until now. The CIA has a gun to my head. I'm not allowed to say anything else, but the CIA being Sophie.

The face that Sophie just made. I knew it was coming. That's why I was like, uh-huh. That's right. Somehow this is my fault. Got it. Yeah. Like all powerful men, behind me is a woman that I'm blaming for things for no reason.

How are we doing, Sophie? I'm going to need like three weeks of therapy to process that comment. Yeah. No, I know. That was a lot. That was a lot. Well, thank you for coming on, Bridget. I'm excited to tell you more about Bobby Moe's S in part two.

But thank you all for listening. I have a novel after the revolution. You can find it on AK Press. If you go to their website, you can find it on Amazon. Just Google after the revolution novel and you'll be able to buy it some fucking where. Anyway, go to hell. Shit, sorry. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure, he was trying

to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about

a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.